Mr. Schumacher has certainly never received so much public support as following his article “Slamming British Architectural Education”. Though what is perhaps most shocking is how long it has taken someone to publicly admit to what so many of us think — that academic projects are increasingly using “improbable narratives” as entries into superficial and “ironic allegories”. The accusation of avoiding reality is both blatantly true, and painful to accept. Privately, we all die a little when confronted with yet another monochromatic “atmospheric” render, incomplete without the obligatory flock of birds.

Nonetheless, I can’t support Schumacher unequivocally. Using his own distinctions (marked out in Autopoiesis Vol. 1) of “mainstream” and “avant-garde”, there seems to be some confusion over the role that RIBA prizes occupy in the dichotomy. If we are to believe what he says about avant-garde schools — that they are the Petri dishes and experimental laboratories where architecture evolves to better meet society’s needs — then they are inherently incompatible with the aims of the Royal Institute, which can only be understood as the cornerstone of the “mainstream” profession. By this reasoning, “avant-garde” schools — like the AA, Bartlett or Westminster — have no place at RIBA. Rather, they should be the least accepted.
Schumacher can’t have it both ways, decrying experimental projects as “naïve (if not pompous)” while also telling us that architects in general are “neither legitimised nor competent to argue for a different politics”. This statement is indicative of the apolitical projects that Parametricism has thus far produced, and is also typical of the late-neoliberal ideologies that transformed the architect into an agent of a deeply flawed and ethically dubious economic model (which has now spectacularly imploded). The result of excusing architects from public political discourse has been to create a whole generation of meek and apathetic students. In any case, if we accept that architecture is a social sub-genre (sui generis), even Plato tells us that all citizens have the right to speak as equals about politics and philosophy.
I think, and quite correctly, Mr. Schumacher underlined the prevalence of students’ insincerity (or lack of sophistication) when attempting to tackle political aspects of their projects. However, I should hope he is not suggesting we should abandon the idea that architecture can make change through political or polemic statements. As the late director of the AA, Alvin Boyarksy, once said: “Rise above your situation… look at the scene around you, the context in which architecture is made, and introduce a political note to your work.”
Sincerely,

Jack Self
LONDON 16/2/12.

The process of formatting a book for kindle is not at all straightforward – in fact, its more in the nature of coding a web page from 1996 than it is like true typesetting. This is because a kindle ebook (.mobi) is basically a paired back .html file with a sub-folder for images attached. It is extremely difficult to kern, pad or change very much about the line-heights and spacing of specific parts of text – you have to let it flow like a web page and can only apply css styles to whole paragraphs. Custom fonts are equally impossible to execute. Images are only 16 colours deep… its a lot like designing a

In this respect not only was it an unusual job because of the two clients, but an unusual job because of the two formats (a mash of html and graphic design). The book itself is already available from Amazon, and the ebook will be available in the coming months.

Download free PDF (4.84 MB)

From the influence of Aalto on the architecture of the British Library to how funding cuts will affect the building’s role as a national record of knowledge, this short text describes the problematic design period of the BL and grapples with the impacts of the recession on the UK’s public spaces. It was printed as a folded A3 sheet on cream stock in a run of 50 copies.

Little Printer’s deployment of existing technologies (I presume a cash-register heat printer is at its heart) is really only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what a digital design studio with architectural backgrounds (BERG) might envision for the cloud, and I will be following this project with interest. Perhaps what I would like to see most is the hybridisation of Computer-Aided Design / Computer-Aided Manufacture (CAD-CAM) with Web 2.0 bidirectional information generation (and all its associated technologies: 3G, 4G, wireless, etc).

Read more on the Little Printer at Domus.

I won’t comment on this, other than to say that I try to challenge the format of architectural projects as much as anyone (see Scatterbrain, my “architectural novella”), but I nonetheless feel there must be some limit — that is, for a project to remain architectural it must put the built environment at the fore, and employ unusual technique or narrative only to drive the ideas at the projects’ core.

It is questionable whether this is the case for Robots of Brixton, which as a kind of techno-allegory for social conflict resolution seems to feature architectural proposals only incidentally. Star Wars has some great speculative architecture, but it is not an architectural project, for the reason I have mentioned. My general comment would be that, whatever you think the architectural status of a film about robot race riots might be, at least RIBA is challenging mind-numbingly conservative ideas about the limit and scope of architecture. Actually, I don’t want to criticise RIBA too much, they have had quite a good track record of late in choosing progressive proposals (viz this, this and this).

However, it’s really the Bronze Medal (best Part 1 project) that I want to talk about, which went to the AA’s Basmah Kaki for her project An Acoustic Lyrical Mechanism. The student statement says:

“Located on the outskirts of the high-tech city Bangalore, the Silicon Valley of India, the mine employees [sic] a migrating caste – among them women and children – whose hearing is progressively damaged by the noise pollution endemic to their working conditions. An Acoustic Lyrical Mechanism creates a long-term strategy where sound and religious spaces offer relief, treatment and hope for the community of workers.

Crafted with the detail typically afforded to the manufacture of musical instruments, its internal spaces sit in contrast to its rough external setting. Like an Aeolian harp, the building is played by the wind, acoustically transforming the abrasive sounds of quarrying.”

In a nutshell, this project from one of the world’s most privileged schools (I should know, I study there) has decided to engage with one of the world’s poorest and most disadvantaged communities by proposing a musical temple to “acoustically transform the abrasive sounds of quarrying.” It’s a bit like tackling the Global Financial Crisis by proposing a janitors canteen in the City of London.

It demonstrates neither awareness of the economic, social and political contexts that caused this situation, nor is it critical of them. In short, there is a real poverty of aspiration in this project – made only the clearer for its juxtaposition next to the hyper-political Silver winner. In a hypothetical scenario the only limit on scale of intervention is the imagination and will of the student – here the scheme is obviously driven by whimsical imagery and the production of vague and atmospheric forms.

Click the link to go to Fulcrum’s site.