....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.