..GOING TO THE END OF THE LINE......

....Well it's alright , we're going to the end of the line.............

........and following on from the last posting on the theme of techincal drawings , a quick thanks to Network Rail for uploading their historical archives onto the web ......a unique collection of drawings illustrating the development of the railway system and its infrastructure throughout the uk................bridges , tunnels , stations , its all here.

......a wondeful set of drawings -check out the full archives at www.networkrail.co.uk/virtualarchive/

..I'M LEARNING TO FLY.......

       I'm learning to fly , but I ain't got wings.....
       Coming down is the hardest thing .

..........and as part of the Strategies Of Thought lectures on the MA course , we were introduced to the works of Wittgenstein . What I hadn't realised was that his education had started in Manchester , where he had enrolled to study aeronautics at the University......and ended up flying Cody kites off Glossop Moor , where he lodged in the Grouse pub , well known to anyone who goes walking up there.

And flying , or rather the lack of ability to do so , reminded me of a book that I had come across sometime ago , with the most wonderful illustrations........

.......The  ' Teach Your Chicken To Fly Training Manual ' - superb hand drawn anatomically correct plans and sections of chickens set out as faux technical drawings , all bolted onto a text written in the style of a training manual . Bizarre , and totally within its own little world . I have no idea what size the original artworks were , but I am guessing A2 . Wonderful.

....and maybe one day I will get to this standard.

..VALENTINE - WON'T YOU BE MY VALENTINE ?

....Kitsch , saccharine ,  overblown sentimentality of the worse kind , all set to swamp the entire western world on a rising tide of excessive commercialism , squeezing the last drop of faux romanticism out of the rabid enthusing public .........

Yes , courtesy of Hallmark and countless others it's that glorious proto-religious festival looming known as Valentines day , the day when restaurants charge twice as much for food twice as bad as usual , entire forests are consumed by paper mills for the worst kind of cards , garages sell out of flowers and chocolates , bars sell cheap fizz at champagne prices and undying love forever is proclaimed , at least until the morning after.

......and then occasionally - Very occasionally - ok , Once In A Fucking Lifetime , someone cuts through all the bullshit and the crap .............

 Willie Nelson nails it - this is all that needs to be said. This one's for you, Mary.

..WHEN YOU WALK IN THE ROOM......

......and so , continuing on from the last posting and the designs for the installation , we have travelled past the Learning Agreement , through the Methods of Enquiry and the Strategies of Thought texts , on past the Learning Record text and have arrived at the Four Rooms ........

The main focus and purpose of the MA course being to investigate through the medium of architectural drawing the possible futures for four buildings , it seems logical at this early stage of the process to try and capture the essence of the four through each having its own room as the climax of the installation.

 These are just quick preliminary sketches to try and get the feeling for each building within one room.......so the room for The House Of The Book Lover may well have the room lined with books (all with jackets of off-white paper ) , the more dangerous ones behind a grille . Plans and sections may be in evidence , possibly in a large folio format on the centre table ; the floor may well be a map of the buildings location in Manchester together with literary associations. Exit - via the Bookshop of course - might be via a door concealed as a hinged bookcase , much as the door to the hidden apartment in Anne Frank's house........

...........and at the entrance to each room would be The Narrator ; in this instance the Book Lover , played by a student in literature from the university.......

And so , on to the House Of The Dominatrix , subdivided into a series of small areas around a central photo on the floor of life size steps leading down - a reference to the film ' Maitresse ' , where the Dominatrix's space is entered from the flat above. The rear of the room is compartmented off with drapes - do you enter ?

The Narrator , The Dominatrix , is in this instance played by herself.

The third of these sketches is for the room of The House of The Music Lover ....it seemed obvious to me that this should be about sound , so the focus of the room is a juke box loaded with Manchester music - the idea of juke-box as altar is re-inforced by the plan layout of a church laid out on the floor. Bench seating line the walls , which display the names of all the musicians and bands to have come out of the Manchester area : quite a few.

The Narrator in this instance - The Music Lover - is played by a student from the Royal Northern College of Music....

.....and so to the last room , the Room of the Art Lover .......not yet fully realised as a design , toying with the idea of perspective lines and grids laid up into a cube . Visual content reflects the art lover's like for the works of Allen Jones , and after all he does live next to the House of the Dominatrix.

The Narrator is played by a curator at the Whitworth Gallery and enjoys cross-dressing.

So all I have to do now is to tidy this lot up , write three essays and then work out the presentation method in detail.................................

....PICTURES AT AN EXHIBITION .......

........and so to my M.A ....the starting premise was to re-visit four buildings that I have worked on in the centre of Manchester with a view to exploring / investigating the possibilities of re-modeling them through the medium of drawing ;  ' architecture as drawn ' exists as a different discipline to ' architecture as built '.

Essentially I have spent the first term - this is a two year / part-time course - deconstructing my usual working methods , and reading a lot - an awful lot. The first main assessment point looms in May , for which I have to produce three essays  ( approx 4500 words ) together with evidence of work in progress , all presented ' in a style which reflects your topic '........    Hhmmm . I am essentially on a graphics lead course , and looking at previous students' submissions most have presented in the style of magazines , pamphlets and - in the case of Jonathan of Artistic Type - a beautifully presented and bound hard-back book. My back-ground is not text and type-setting , it's the built environment......so lets have a think about this .

How to present three essays in a style that reflects my practise ? 

An architectural drawing ? but how about the text ?..............so then I thought ' How about doing it as a walk-through installation , an exhibition ? ' ..........all the text , then , the essays could be laid out as text on the exhibition walls , and the whole of the written work - the essays - will be presented for the assessment as part of a full set of A3 working drawings for the proposed installation . A built form including text that will exist as a set of drawings.

                  
This is the initial plan layout that I did , just mapping out a progressive route through an installation picking up the salient points.

I then started blocking it out as a 3D birds eye view - entering at the bottom the route takes you through the ' Learning Agreement ' ( the initial statement of intent for the course ) , past the ' Methods of Inquiry ' and the ' Strategies of Thought ' walls ( both 1500 word texts ) , past a mapping model showing the locations in Manchester , past the ' Learning Record ' wall and on to the Four Rooms..........

The texts , the essays , when laid up on the walls should then look roughly like this....................on , then , past the Four Rooms , which form the central context of the exhibition and of which more in the next posting , and to the Bibliography - all essays should have a good bibliography . This being an installation / exhibition , though , one should of course Exit Through the Bookshop ..........all the books / references nicely displayed........

Hhhmmm................I could then of course follow up with a model  , but first of all I ought to write those essays..........

.......REMAKE / REMODEL........

......One of the nice things about living out in France for five weeks or so at a time is that you realise that you can live independently of the t.v / papers / radio and can avoid being drip fed what is mostly background noise........On the downside , however , sometimes more important stuff can pass you by......... 

What I hadn't realised , until I was reading one of those ' Who Have Passed On This Year ' lists beloved of newspapers around this time , was that Richard Hamilton had died last September.

I had first come across his work when I went to Art College in the mid-sixties , so his iconic work ' Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different , So Appealing ? ' would only have been ten years or so old at that time and still cutting edge, at a time when a lot of ' Pop Art ' was still being painted , still being produced . His work was profoundly influential , particularly at that time when he was head of Fine Art at Newcastle . I can certainly remember visiting the Robert Fraser Gallery in 65/66 when his suite of works based on the Guggenheim Museum in NY was on display , and I think what stood out then - and has always stood out - is that he always refused to be pigeon-holed , categorised , into any one style.

Within the system , be it educational or the big wide world , there is always a suggestion that you as a practising designer should ' find your style ' . Richard Hamilton refused to - all his works are quite different , yet there is always something resolutely / recognisably ' Richard Hamilton ' about them.

 

In 1966 Hamilton curated the Marcel Duchamp at the Tate Gallery , and painstakingly recreated Duchamp's  ' Large Glass ' for the exhibition  - assisted as legend would have it by Brian Ferry , who was studying at that time under Hamilton at Newcastle and whose later works would include ' Remake / Remodel ' with Roxy Music and his own album ' The Bride Stripped Bare '.......again , I visited the exhibition and was more than intrigued by the ' Large Glass ' , a work I had first encountered in ' The Bride and The Batchelors ' by Calvin Tomkins.

For a full appreciation of his life and his work check out his obituary at

www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/sep/13/richard-hamilton-artist-dies

...........and have a good look at some of his work - it's worth it......' Towards A Definitve Statement On The Coming Trends In Mens' Wear And Accessories ' for example...

 

..CRAWLING FROM THE WRECKAGE.......

' I regard my work as diaristic ; the city can be read as a palimpsest, of layers of erasure and overwriting . The need to document the transient and ephemeral nature of the city is becoming increasingly urgent as the process of enclosure and privatisation continues apace. ' 

   Laura Oldfield Ford



A book review in the Observer last December introduced me to the work of Laura Oldfield Ford and ' Savage Messiah ' , a catalogue of urban rambles , pamphlets , now collected together in one large tome . The low-tech cut and paste approach sets the tone ; the pencil sketches capture the feral nature of the project based around the decaying edges of London , recording ' no false promises of a brighter , better , more sanitised tomorrow....instead she focuses on areas haunted by an urban dispossessed , which regeneration seeks to concrete over; city wastelands where fortress-like old tower-blocks rise , with their Escher-like walkways and their ' recreational ' open spaces...............

The Encyclopedia Britannica defines palimpsest as ' scraped again ', a term referring to any inscribed surface from which one text has been removed so that the space can be used again for another - and , as Rodolfo Machado notes , some architectural drawings could be regarded as the equivalent of a palimpsest.

As I get deeper into my MA course , of which I must post more on,- I am beginning to understand that my initial premise of investigating and proposing alternative realities for three or four buildings in the centre of Manchester is requiring a lot more thought - and reading - than I initially had envisaged , calling into question the whole concept of 'remodelling' , the understanding of 'memory ' and place . 

Savage Messiah records a different East London , a different Lea Valley to that currently being transformed by the parachuting in of a brand new / shrink wrapped / security patrolled urban experience , a pre-packed landscape for the ' Olympic Experience ' that has no grounding in the area , no sense of memory or place , no sense of belonging , no relationship .........a landscape devoid of content .

The book review is at www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/dec/22/savage-messiah-laura-oldfield-ford-review

and is by Iain Sinclair , himself an investigator of the city in the gaps , the areas that fall through the cracks in the structure and who writes with far greater clarity and insight than I can ..........and the sketches are good, too.