Masterplanning

For people like me who believe the housing question was pretty much solved by 1959 with the house we live in (above) and that the rest ever since has merely been a question of political contingency and commercial squalor, mucking around over student masterplans all day can bring some irritation. The thing is, you either let the students make all the terrible mistakes they have got it in them to make and hope that they will never do it again - ie be liberal with their liberalism, or you rather categorically tell them to stop their nonsense and learn to do it properly. Certainly in the first place you'd need a heightened sense of humour/irony/absurdity and in the second large tear ducts.

It is possible that Liberalism+Liberalism=Disaster, in short it brings around a kind of torpid lack of faith in anything, political malaise and eventual fascism and gas chambers. That's at least what happened to Germany in the twenties and if I read the signs correctly it's pretty much what's happening here today. Goebbels biography provides a straightforward lesson. The guy was a HOPELESS ADOLESCENT, positively marinated in malaise. And look what happened!

I also begged the question how many students had been good at maths at school. To study at my architecture school back in the seventies you had to have maths A level. Yesterday I understood why for the first time in thirty years. Being barely proficient at maths might be an indication that you could apply logic. I suspect the principals at the (otherwise godawful) Bristol University understood this at least and put it in as a rather useful caveat to the admissions procedure to avoid faffing about over portfolios and suchlike at all.

Such nouse is in short supply.

Lessons of History

Just watched The Professionals again, I prefer it with the sound off, gives you a better chance to read the context of the mid seventies. What I see is often a historical wonderment. Today we had middle class terrorists in farm buildings, always with a dominant female, plotting and shooting pumpkins.We had the counter terrorism forces running about a lot both up and down a thousand escape stairs in the city and up and down in helicopters in the country, or all chasing each other around in Ford Cortina's (gold with black vinyl roof) Capri's (similar) or Granada's and even the occasional Triumph Toledo (!) in abandoned railway termini (Manchester?). What does this mean?

Well we no longer tread, police wise, 'Softly Softly', we have terrorists like the Baader Meinhoff Group, and they are 'lead' by a WOMAN! Next we have loads of old warehouses with escape stairs due to INDUSTRIAL DECLINE (we students would move in next- see Metropolitan Wharf- I woz there, alongside early pioneers of U2 videos god help me- and then have to move out again pretty quick for the loft livers), we have helicopters for the police because we have some notion of ACTION MAN. We have pumpkins from FREDERICK FORSYTH from The Day of the Jackal. We have cream leatherette suitcases full of money because YOU STILL HAD TO CARRY IT ABOUT and PLASTIC (but not credit cards). And you still had to wind on your Pentax and the women were suddenly NOT TO BE TRUSTED (feminism). Amazing what you can learn.

Drawing

I've been drawing, good old fashioned drawing with a clutch pencil scale rule erasing shield set square and so on, on a space the size of a postage stamp on my desk, I feel very artisanal indeed and I also, once finished of a two hour session, ache like hell.

I'm drawing the revisions to our kitchen which are not very grand at all, in fact the amount of time I've spent drawing them, if I counted the cost, would double the contract, but it has made me think about drawing once again, realizing that it is in this case at least this is my architectural insurance policy, that if I can draw it, and draw it enough times at enough scales, then Scott must be able to build it ever so easily. I'm sure also that this is not going to be the case but I must keep the faith by drawing those cupboards with those particular dimensions and that door that just won't hit the boiler when you open it (and will feature a fabulous 18inch by 5ft poster of a 1960's Reno Cocktail waitress on the door- any ideas on how to fix that to that?) and getting it simpler and simpler so it will in theory get easier and easier. If only this will be the case, instead I know I'll be roosting in the Ramada Inn somewhere in Docklands for £60 per night while Scott destroys the place staring blankly over the landscape when the phone will ring and Scott will say something like 'You know that rail thing you've made into a conduit....that's not going to happen.'

What a curious business, but I will admit to enjoying the satisfaction of drawing skirting boards and so on in axonometric once again and contemplating the use of coloured pencils. I always hated drawing in ink, far too accurate, but I'm very drawn to a emotional fudge of the clutch pencil. 'Always draw wood with a pencil' the old moderns used to say; they were idealistic see.

Easy to Slip

It's so easy to slip, that's good Little Feat song from Sailin' Shoes, and I felt it today alright, three months on from hospitalization to the day and now bouncing down the Shoreditch High St, lecture course on the whole history of architecture over, browsing paint for our kitchen works and contemplating not so much jazz, but the undoubtedly interesting later modern abstract screen prints that Rocket Gallery have on sale and that Risom chair I promised to buy, sitting presently in their bargain basement. In the old days, my enthusiasm would have dragged me first in to the White Horse, for calmness and thought before venturing in to the land of modern classics, but no, I went straight in and bought the bloody chair and a print by some lovely old modern who finished his days staring out of a window in Jutland. Bugger. I hadn't even had a drink. So then to the White horse and Lily's all for saying I'm too thin and I'm feeling pretty bloody good and.....this is how you slip. But, slippin's OK I think, if you rescue yourself, so I did and bought bread and fish from the Conran shop in punishment and away home for tea and the last of Julie's fabulous homemade biscuits. Phew.

Curious Postcard

This is Goethe's study. Curious photograph. A very interesting wastebasket for a man writing in the eighteenth century, when of course, this photograph couldn't have been taken. Note the blinds.

Nice Postcard

Lenin, Mao, Goebbels

Last night Amazon asked me if I wanted to twitter the fact that I'd bought 'Joseph Goebbels: Life and Death'....

I don't. But if I did, should I add my other purchases I wondered? Or was it just the mention of Goebbels (incidentally one of the three most important figures of the twentieth century alongside Mao and Lenin) that had stirred the beast? Of course, the point is Goebbels himself would have very much approved of this little mechanism. The other day Julie googled herself and Reno and up came my blog I'd written precisely nine hours earlier - where Reno isn't even mentioned! The machine knows! Ooooh Errrrrr.

In case anybodies interested I'll admit to a sabatier kitchen knife, four sets of miniature photo postcards (Alpine), antique postcard of Goethe's study featuring interesting waste basket, antique postcard of a cable car (Alpine - See Above) and an antique miniature carved Alpine hut disguised as a moneybox from Antwerp (guess we'll all soon need one of those) and confess to total madness.

Whether it be Ebay or Amazon, it is clear they know everything. Any minor fixation urges my pushers to 'recommend especially for me!' And they do this on an almost hourly basis. If I didn't check in a couple of times a day they would assume I was dead and probably tell everybody.