Avalanche

When complex systems fail it's probably bad news, so you have to build in other complex systems to accommodate. Human systems are by comparison rather primitive I suppose, but they are still complex,  since we respond to such myriad subtle stimuli to work out whether we are in a good situation or not, whether to fight or run. By comparison e-mail as a means of communication is the equivalent of a clump hammer.
People imagine that working is a university is a rather comfortable life; well it probably was and it probably could be, but there are a series of intractables within the management of that complex system within the management of another; the wider economy which have turned universities in to businesses, which are making life harder and harder. It's now a war between a culture of culture and a culture of management.
If we forgot every previous human catastrophe (I wonder at the tone of Hitler or Stalin's e-mails if they'd been able to send them) it would seem to be better to rely on human systems rather than electronic clump hammers, it is certainly the case that if there is a sudden problem in the human system, it has be be worked out with negotiation (simply because we are all so damn difficult/complex), power in electronic systems means that a tiny snow ball very rapidly becomes an avalanche, partly because a series of distant individuals suddenly are made aware of a problem but can't get to the problem and fix it, OR, they all try and do so at the same time, creating confusion and cancelling each other out.
these days, everytime I hear that 'ping' for incoming mail, I quake in my boots. There you have it, in the modern world, you're PARANOID by definition.

The Plan Is (Still) the Generator

More often than not architectural students confuse renderings with drawings and pictures with plans. There is no doubt it is a fascination with the laborious nature and potential verisimilitude of computer renderings that diverts attention, and it is completely understandable in the student, but it has become a distraction to the extent that tutors can now find themselves thinking that some projects suffer from over rendering; all the lights on with nobody home. Certain types of rendering seem to drive work in to outer space, and it's now a compliment when conversely, you hardly notice the rendering package at all.
This is the time of year when I have to look at a lot of projects and it's a complex business. When running a design studio, there was always the aura of combat, but now, as more of an observer, I like to think, rather corny though this might sound, that the Sweeney has finally made the shift to Morse. I can enjoy it a good deal more for sure, as well as being able to leave the fray after a reasonable time and the others to carry on slugging it out as they invariably do (even though you wont find me returning home to listen to Wagner).
The plan, over these agonising assessments, still strikes me as the generator. Excessive rendering distracts from the plan, and good planning is still the essence of a good project in every sense. There are other architectural components too; the distribution of structure, the integration of servicing and fabric, use of precedent and so on and guess what; these are all compromised by rendering as well! Whilst I have pondered for many years the possibility that these things don't matter anymore (Las Vegas casinos come to mind) now the bloody things have come back to haunt me. Even this I can put down to my desire to find an alternative to the dreary formalism the computer has brought to that other area, shape making and fabrication- because I don't draw on a computer!
It is also a myth that computers bring accuracy and accuracy is the be all and end all. Well if you are building a space station it will be, but while we still have building sites here on earth, while we still use wheelbarrows and boots sink in mud, it certainly isn't. It is extraordinary how we, so called intelligent men and women piloting the course of architectural development, have collectively extinguished such considerations from our appreciation of the architectural project. Perhaps this is because we have been too busy fighting with each other. In the process we have perhaps been as destructive as the multinationals destroying the rainforests.
I think back to those boffins who were inventing CAD whilst I was an undergraduate at Bristol University in the eighties and realise some things don't change; I didn't trust them then and I don't trust them now.

Our Trike

It's not finished yet (this is just the bare mating of bike with car) but it is wonderfully not a heap of parts in the back of a garage. Craftsmanship, thank god it still exists.

Robert Crumb

Immoderate Greatness

If you want to cheer yourself up read this book, no I'm not joking; you will laugh your way through the afternoon in sure knowledge we are all doomed. For me those lovely flowers in the previous post suddenly became, as they turn gracefully white, melancholic talismans of our inner and irredeemable tragedy. And when I went out to get the perfect modest lunch (a shish kebab) I felt a certain euphoria as I passed all the ladies with their push-chairs outside nostalgia orientated cafe's. It really is quite wonderful to know that the second law of thermodynamics is so stacked against us that it could be rack and ruin any day now. As Ophus quotes (on page 40): '...empires behave like all complex adaptive systems. They function in apparent equilibrium for some unknowable period. And then, quite abruptly, they collapse...(T)he shift from consummation to destruction and then to desolation is not cyclical.It is sudden.'
Am I running to the whisky bottle? Well I'd be excused I suppose, but no, I'm running instead to a practice seminar on the late work of the great Corbu, and I can feel nothing but energy for it.

Life at Home

A friend suggested this was 'a bit David Lynch' on Facebook, but hell, nice peonies!

The Carnival Club Soho

When you go looking for pictures of old Soho they come amazingly pejorative. Scanning through Getty Images I was struck by pictures of young men buying knives and another showing a street scene with a caption 'prowling the streets...'. It was like something out of Winogrand or Weegee. Lots of us are nostalgic for old Soho, whichever old Soho befits your generation of course, but I don't remember it like that at all. By the eighties perhaps only Chief Constable James Anderton (the Manchester cop whose anti-sleaze campaign famously netted the Sun's Page Three Annual ) might have described me as 'a prowler'. For instance when I first arrived in London I discovered my History and Theory lecturer worked in a sex shop and I was soon friends with a girl from Newcastle, a barmaid in the Intrepid Fox, who found life better in a clip joint. Neither were at all 'menacing'. And when I think about it further, a rather large percentage of my friends might respond to this surreptitiously taken image (not taken by me) and at least twenty years old, which passed in to my no doubt (in the archaic Anderton's language) 'sweaty' hand yesterday. It was taken inside a tiny but somehow secure cavern; the long lost Carnival strip joint which sat just along from the Pollo Bar on Old Compton Street, and the reason we might smile is that we shared (independently of course) many pleasurable afternoons there.
It was a most peculiar not to say fascinating place. For instance, the (I assume regular) clientele made a great fuss of distributing chocolates on to the stage. There must be a very complex psychology behind wanting to do this, but I certainly wouldn't call whatever that mechanism was 'prowling'.
Even further, remembering Michel Foucault's adventures in San Fransciso or discovering that Professor Richard Feynman, world changing quantum phsysicist, declared his topless local his 'office away from the office', and affirmed in court it was 'a public need' really makes us think about the way we describe things and what it means.
My next beef will of course be on the subject of 'hard working families'.