....HOUSE OF CARDS........

    Oh the rain is falling and the wild wind roars ,
    It will shake your windows, and rattle your doors ..........

Following on from a previous posting and the introduction to my MA course , I should perhaps expand on the intended content and my ideas a bit more . Essentially I had decided to revisit three or four buildings in Manchester that I had worked on and knew reasonably well - I think all of them had been warehouses of some sort , and were all of the same construction - cast iron columns and beams , and really thick - 70mm or so - mill floors. Choosing the buildings was easy , but then how to form a narrative , and an alternate reality , around them ?  Inspired in some ways by Chris Ware's ' House ' series , I realised that the concept of ' house ' would allow each building to be developed in its own way ; each one could tell its own story .

.......And this got me thinking a bit about houses - private spaces , unlike most other other spaces that are built for specific purposes ; house are personal , individual spaces , secret spaces behind doors shutting off the outside world , places of refuge , of sanctuary , places for realising hidden desires , secret fantasies.....places steeped in memory.

' The more a house becomes enlightened , the more its walls ooze ghosts '      Primo Levi.

The Anne Frank house in Amsterdam is one of the most visited tourist attractions in the world , certainly in Europe , and more than most houses as attractions , I suppose , its walls resonate with its more immediate history , its memories . A paradox , a house acting as both sanctuary and prison. The house is well documented on the internet , both from an architectural point of view and a forensic , the later calling into question the moral dilemmas faced when curating such a site.

One of the better sites for cross-relating the story to the buildings plan layout is www.annefrankdiaryreference.org/annexe.htm , which even directs you to a live web cam feed from across the garden ; I am not entirely convinced that this modern intervention adds much to the sense of history , but there you go. The conservation of Anne Frank's room is dealt with in great detail at www.annefrank.org/en/Worldwide/Collecties/The-conservation-of-Anne-Franks-room/ , which - from a conservation point of view -   has interesting parrallels with the conservation of Francis Bacon's studio that I commented on some twelve months or so ago.

Finally , one of the more bizarre sites I happened on was ' Anne Frank - The hiding place in 3D ' , which allows you to wander around the furnished spaces yourself . A place of memory and reflection reduced to the level and feel of navigating Laura Croft around Amsterdam whilst avoiding the Germans. Maybe the medium IS the message............for those interested , the link is www.annefrank.org/en/Subsites/Home/ , .....a clue - the secret annexe is concealed behind the bookcase.....

THE

House as sanctuary , house as prison - or as in the case of this second house , a house both representing freedom - of a kind - and despair . The house - or at least the privacy once the front door was closed - represented a freedom for Fred West ( whose house in Gloucester this last illustration is of ) from the usual patterns of accepted behaviour within society and became a killing ground ; the key indicates , amongst hidden doors and rooms , the final location of nine of his victime bodies. A site of death as much as the Anne Frank House is , this house has been demolished , the site turned into a memorial garden.

House as sanctuary , house as prison........................................................................................

They're washing the streets with the blood of your kind

Ah look over your shoulder they are right behind

Oh blow down this house of cards

....TEA FOR TWO.............

Some while ago now - in fact almost a year ago as it was posted on 24 / 11 / 2010 - I wrote a blog about a couple of jobs we were doing in Manchester together with an early notice on my ( then upcoming ) MA course  , so it's probably time for an update..............but firstly , time for tea .............

The sketch here was for a tea room we were doing at Richmond House , Bloom street in the centre of Manchester  , and my comments at the time were ...." a nice brief and a quick sketch , all good fun ....whether it will be built like this I don't know, but we can hope........" 

........Well , you can now see for yourself that Nick and Andrew did a really fine job on it , and the afternoon tea is one of the best in Manchester as well  - go on, treat yourself...............All I really did was the initial sketch , and then dropped in to see how they were getting on. 



.....I WALK THE LINE.....

.....On the outskirts of our small town in the Bearn in South West France there are a couple of roadside crosses ; these are of no specific religious significance other than the fact that they mark a line - a very important line in its day............and this got me thinking about lines..................

I suppose my starting point for the drawn line was seeing Saul Steinberg's The Line for the first time , reproduced recently in the Observer newspaper............taking a line for a walk............

Lines seem to have been an important part of my life , from a love of Ordnance Survey maps and the exercise of having to describe a landscape through the interpretation of contour lines , through my initial training as a prospective architect and onwards into a fulfilling career as an interior designer , spending at least half my time at a drawing board - and as a designer a line takes on its own existence . I draw a line 100mm long and it exists as a 100mm line - but if I then WRITE alongside it ' 1: 50 ' the same line now represents 5000mm . From this I can then construct room layouts, plans, elevations all in drawn form , and
eventually enough information to construct an entire building...........hhmmm. Powerful stuff.

Ok , now lets increase the scale , maybe up to ' 1:50,000 '...........and now I can even map continents. And
continental maps are fascinating. Lets look at a couple..........................

The US of A...........a map familiar to all , this one showing state boundaries. The boundaries of the earliest settled colonies in the north east would seem to follow logical geophysical outlines  - ie be determined by existing physical conditions and a result of land surveys . Predetermined by a reflection of what is existing - and to a large extent this holds up to the line of the Mississippi / Missouri . West of the Mississippi something

else happens altogether - the  state lines are mostly now square lines gridded out , mostly right-angled corners , pretty much none of then reflecting underlying physical conditions . In other words , the map divisions now come first , set out on a table / drawing board / whatever , and then transposed onto the rel-time landscape out there . One a response to territorial conditions , one an imposed construct.

This may well be an over simplification - but lets now look at a map of Australia................

.........and apart from the Victoria / New South Wales border , everything here is gridded up ; straight lines , right-angles , an exercise that looks as if it took no more than five minutes on a drawing board - no relationship to underlying physical conditions. So these lines now represent political boundaries , predetermined and then imposed onto the terrain . The power of the line . An initial response to existing reality now becomes a discipline to which reality is subjugated .

And so , back to the road side crosses in the Bearn . The crosses do indeed represent a line - the lines indicating the political division of France following the Armistice in 1940 , the line dividing Occupied France and Vichy France passing along the edge of our town. A line indicating a political reality , transposed onto the terrain and commemorated via the crosses.

,

 A political line , but a line that had undoubted significance in its day and still resonates in the memory of the town and its inhabitants...........and once identified on paper , marked with a cross on the ground.



...WELCOME TO THE HOUSE OF FUN.......

.....and at long last I have now started on my post-grad course , studying for an MA in Art and Design Direction at Manchester Metropolitan University . This was born out of - amongst other reasons - a degree of frustration arising from my career as a designer working in the Leisure Industry and the sheer amount of design work and information that never gets to see the light of day through circumstances entirely out of my control - there must be SOME way to release this energy , surely. So lets see.....................

I suppose that this is the work that started it all and got me thinking.................the site is 28 Oldham Street ,

Manchester and the location of Dry Bar for those of you who know the area - and know your history , The current owner had instructed us to work on converting the entire building ( the upper floors are currently derelict ) to a boutique hotel , 30 odd rooms or so , and themed around the music scene in Manchester , both past and present. Lots of scope , then .............so off we go , full of enthusiasm.

Except that some eighteen months down the road the clients throws all of his bricks out of the pram , aborts the scheme and refuses to pay us - in all probability because he hadn't realise what it was going to cost to build , although he had been told.........and so all the works sits in a drawer ........so much stored energy.

Working within the built environment , so many factors are entirely out of my control - the client / site / finance / bureaucracy - as in planning , building regs , fire officers , health and safety etc - and it occurred to me that I could investigate these sites in purely 2D / drawn form , and on my own terms. The proposal therefore would be to re-visit some of the sites that I have worked on in Manchester over the years ; outside of the real world parameters dictated by practicality , commerciality and the wherewithal or otherwise of clients, an alternative reality would then be constructed for these sites , investigated through the dynamics of architectural representation but with the opportunity to overlay texts , narrative , artworks and illustration to create the experience of an alternative reality.

Makes sense ? .....to me it does . Its a part-time course , over two years , so plenty of time to develop some interesting ideas .................so watch this space.

And a belated congratulation to Jonathan at http://www.artistictype.co.uk/ on finally getting his MA , checking out with a distinction . No pressure there , then..............

.....AND YOU CAN KEEP YOUR HAT ON........

.........Well , given their troubled start to the season it's nice to see Arsenal winning something at last , even if it is just a hat job..........or a least a court case for ' infringement of commercial rights ' against a small ladies hat shop in Seville .

Yeah , right...................

........Personally I am not convinced that the lady in question sort to gain any sort of commercial advantage by aligning herself with the might of North London , but given the obscene amounts of money sloshing around in football these days , these clubs get very touchy and protective of their rights.

Working in the Leisure Industry I see enough of branding consultants and re-branding as it is , and most of it to me is money down the drain - the ' Branding Industry ' has seem to become the one-stop fail-safe  port-of-call for any operation that is seen to be falling short of expectations .  Mind you , some clients don't help themselves .....working on a ' Spanish ' bar in Castlefields in Manchester called Barca  ( ! ) some twelve years or so ago , the client showed me a file some 500mm thick of correspondence from Barcelona Football Club threatening to sue .....Surprise.............and then there was the client who was opening a new bar , again in Manchester and decided to call it ' Prada ' on the somewhat dubious reasoning that ' Victoria Beckham says she can't find Prada in Manchester............." Oh, ok - you have checked it out and got clearance on the name, then , Robert ......? ".................." Sure , it's ok , its not registered "...........fair enough it wasn't , as a bar.  On the day of opening the clients got tucked up with a writ quoting ' infringement of commercial rights ' , had to immediately dump all signage , menus , crockery etc and were out of pocket to the tune of 50k . The bar closed shortly afterwards.

.......And some clients see it as an ego-massaging thing - with three or four units under their belt they go to the ' City ' for re-financing..........and then the financier's arm goes around their shoulder ....." Hey guys , now you are big-time , let me introduce you to the Branding Agency that we also own here in town ".... " Well of course , we need to dump all the design work and designers that got us this far , now that we are important " ............yeah , right.............. thanks guys.

......Anyway , it's good to know that at least these two have settled their differences..........

.........although given that one was a world-wide logo for cutting edge creativity and the other one is the logo of some star-up computer geek from the West Coast or somewhere I don't see much room for confusion there....................

...................Maybe it's a generational thing.....................

........and as this blog is posted , lawyers are arguing over the copyright of the ' In Memory ' logo - its all about the angle of the head or something..............

...MY OH MY SWEET ANGEL .......

....................and following the thread of the last two or three postings on The Way of the Pilgrim we finally got to London to see the last days of a couple of exhibitions , one at the British Museum and one at the National.

The one at the  British Museum , ' Treasures of Heaven ' was an interesting exposition of ' saints , relics and devotion in medieval Europe ' , putting them into both a social and religious context , The early section covered the ' pilgrimage ' , which , quite apart from relics providing both a pretext and and an objective for the pilgrim to journey to a place , a location empowered by a physical remnant of a holy figure , gave rise to the obtaining of the ' token ' , the proof that one had indeed made the pilgrimage - and thus begat the ' souvenir ' . The relics themselves became increasingly venerated in their own right , becoming more and more embellished ; what I had not realised was that Saint Chapelle in Paris , perhaps the finest piece of ' stained-glass architecture ' was essentially constructed as a shrine , an enclosure , for the ' Crown of Thorns '.

  Perhaps the most poignant moving section of the exhibition for me , however , was the final room : having moved through room after room of dark theatrical spaces , the lights glinting off gold , silver and jewel-encrusted works you finally entered into an austere plain white room sans any decorative elements - the world of English Protestantism and iconoclasm , wood prints clearly illustrating this world of Henry V111 with paintings , sculptures , altarpieces , entire buildings being torn down , removed , destroyed , and leaving you wondering just how much of England's medieval artistic/architectural heritage was lost to the whim of a king wanting a divorce.

From here , then , to the National Gallery to see ' Devotion by Design ' , a detailed exhibition of Italian altarpieces prior to 1500 - their design , construction and in some cases their deconstruction and subsequent history as relics cut adrift from their original conception. Detailed forensic analysis allowed the curators the opportunity to investigate three or four altarpieces in depth , describing both the visual organisation and physical design of essentially ' multiple ' works of devotional art , artistic and stylistic changes to accord with changing tastes , and in some cases the wholesale breaking up and dispersal of works when they were deemed to no longer represent the prevailing artistic milieu . The setting was particularly atmospheric , the altarpieces being set in darkened rooms , abstract church settings , lit by candlelight , the altarpiece in its formal setting above an altar , suitably accompanied by cross and chalice , the altarpiece formally constructed to house a relic.

The relics and crosses from the ' Treasures Of Heaven ' exhibition could now be understood and appreciated in their proper liturgical context .

....I'M A BELIEVER...................

' BERNADETTE , people are searchin' for....... '

......and I suppose after the recent postings on pilgrims and the Camino ( and with a minor diversion for the King of the Road ) I should post a blog on Lourdes whilst we are still in the south-west of France.........although for various reasons Lourdes is not on any of the pilgrim routes through to Spain .

The pilgrim routes through France have been travelled now for well over one thousand years - Lourdes as a place of pilgrimage has existed for not much more than 150 years or so , and once you are through Lourdes then there is no path over the Pyrenees into Spain at this point . Further , its arrival as a pilgrimage destination in the 1860s / 1870s coincided with the advent of the railway system providing an easily accessible means of mass transport , so as a pilgrimage destination it grew rapidly without the culture of having to walk to it. Finally , of course , Lourdes exists as a destination for the poor , the sick , the lame , the infirm , all looking for healing - 40 days or so walking along the Camino tests even the fittest.

Lourdes is a small market town nestling in the foothills of the Pyrenees with a population of around 15,000 - with 270 or so hotels and an annual pilgrimage population of some 5,000,000 through the year. Given that the first visitations occurred in 1858 , there are  really no earlier pilgrimage buildings other than the shrine and the basilica - and to my mind the basilica captures the worst excesses of late 19th century French Decorative style . The whole structure , together with the esplanade in front of it , looks like something from the studios of Disney should they choose to do ' ShrineWorld '.............ghastly .............and anything and everything that can be sold IS sold , complete with the ' Lourdes ' brand logo .

The whole place , to me , exhibits the worst excesses of rampant commercialism , with certainly no redeeming  features of note either in its architectural styling or in its religious iconography . Visually quite appalling , the extremes of ' kitsch ' styling triumph over any underlying attempt at harmony and order.. No peace and quite here , no contemplative silence.

And yet .........and yet...........the atmosphere of emotion , of hope and belief is almost visceral in its intensity . Hope is in the air ?......hhhhmmmm.............a Japanese scientist - a Dr Masaru Emoto - has discovered that crystals formed in frozen water reveal changes when specific , concentrated thoughts are directed towards them . He found that water from clear springs and water that had been exposed to loving words shows brilliant, complex and colourful snowflake patterns . In contrast polluted water or water exposed to negative thoughts forms incomplete , asymmetrical patterns with dull colours. The water in Lourdes is spring water and constantly exposed to positive , loving words through prayer ; tens of thousands visit the spring each day and most likely energise the water with their prayers......................

......And so what if...............? ..........maybe the power of belief does work............and maybe some things should remain mysterious , miraculous.............

Maybe love IS all you need .