Matsukaze

Recently, I was able to participate in designing the set for a theatrical production. A great experience indeed.

Details to follow.

Photo by Andrew Woolner

It is not about the instrument.

Narratives

A good friend, giving a talk to students about narrative in design, asked me to contribute to his presentation. What follows is a note based on a lesson we attended together during studies.

How’s it, cousin? Happy to do this for you, though, here I am scraping the precipice of the void created by deadlines! I’m claiming time-zones as the reason. But you just woke up?

Teach your listeners to anticipate deadlines. Real talk.

This will take the form of an open-ended question, really.

Narrative can only, generally, be perceived and taken on board if people can create a link to it themselves. The same is true for education, but that’s another topic. The ‘story’ of a building is one of the great challenges in architecture.

I think back to my own time in university, when, with the head up in the clouds, the games of narrative and representation in architecture were in full swing. Getting into it with a lecturer at that time; how do you really perceive the story of a disaster, say, through built architecture? In this particular dialogue, this I was made to understand it could be boiled down to two modes: put a person in tight space to tell of the experience of being in a tight space, or, put a 10-foot-tall image of a disaster in front of the viewer’s face.

Which is more intelligible? Which will the building user take onboard? An arbitrary question, that is probably informed by the tendencies of the loudest generation.

…Please just be sure to include a ‘no photography’ sticker in your building signage package. We do not need another photo in a photo (in a photo) …well, until we do.

Taken another way, the importance and effect of the visual arts, graphics, lettering, and sure, signs, is very much up to the conviction of the hands that include them. Elsewhere, that fire extinguisher sign you don’t want to think about might save a life, or ten. These are functional items that aid navigation. Please let it be known that ‘forgetting’ about life safety is the same as rude and harmful dismissiveness. Make no mistake, there is a tremendous amount of responsibility involved in being a competent architect.

…

Once upon a time in China, I had befriended the manager-barista at the corner coffee shop. She was looking for a phrase to include along with their new interior design, to put on the wall. Something catchy, coffee-related, or fun, or romantic. Something with some meaning. What a great notion I thought, and quickly cut up some paper to write down several small ideas. I reviewed them with those around me, a straightforward American, and another South African, who loved this coffee shop very much, and we three eventually settled on two:

‘I’ll meet you at the corner, in the coffee shop.” Simple sounding, absolutely, corny, sure, but the qualifier was that the corner, or corner shop, is something universally understood, and, with the right colours around it, well… the prospect of a meeting – there’s a hint of romance.

The second was more conceptual. And again, I should thank the lecturer mentioned above for this. He once said, “You students want to design the greatest international centre for peace or whatever, but if you really want to do that – make the world’s best coffee shop! Do you understand?”

I wrote an abbreviated version of this down. I later heard from the manager-barista that this resonated with the coffee shop team. I have included a photo here of what eventually went on the wall for you to view.

It is probably long-gone by now, things change extremely quickly for small businesses such as these, but I like to think that these words on a wall successfully carried an idea across. Maybe only meaning for one life, or ten, but then, isn’t that enough?

Did we successfully aid the narrative of the archetypal coffee shop? Well, that probably depends on the person buying coffee, but we gave it every chance.

I mean, the sign was right before your eyes.

_

Credits:

Garth Francis for the opportunity to participate in his online presentation, and

Mr. Andrew Palframan, HOD - Architecture, Nelson Mandela University, for teaching us well.

SENSE MATE

A friend recently told me about a writing exercise that could be used to develop one's senses. "Apparently we tend to favour the visual." I feel this is absolutely true. We as humans, at the time of writing, almost exclusively give priority to things that are visually striking. (A related story for another time would be, have you noticed that the brighter the phone screen, the greyer the cityscape?)

And while some of the ocular sense preference is no doubt based on ideas of beauty or impact of colour, senses like smell and hearing remain no less mighty. The link to meaning is just easily dismissed in our current age of convenience. But to establish meaning there are only two requirements; either imagination, or a memory.

Memories befall us, but imagination is a muscle.

Upon visiting the Sagawa Art Museum beside Lake Biwa in Japan, I was reminded of my friend's considerations. Impossible to photograph, one is taken to a space inside a semi-submerged tea house.

There was once a keen space inside a sunken tea house, that made use of multiple factors and effects in order to make one aware of the passing of the day.

The Japanese possessing a sometimes dire relationship with time.

After taking a series of steps and perpendicular turns, passing over railway sleepers, each producing a distinct resonant step, then by a single flower - a flower from very far away…

One enters a very dark space. A sharp and intent reflection greets you on black water, but only upon your own inspection. Very easily missed.

In a volume to the left of this, hangs a series of paper screens, some loose like open scrolls, some taut and fixed in position - all revealing their structure and woven assembly. Here, one is held fast by this paper on three sides. The remaining side is a horizontal stroke window, stark and spotless; one's head is now level with the water outside.

And as the sun sets out west, as it always does, its rays will find the paper encircling you.

But not before passing through summer's longest, greenest grass.

You are now standing in sunlight's green water, surrounding you on three sides.

But this is only now, for in the dark you are in the dark, and in the heat of the day, you see only paper.  

In Autumn, orange and gold ripple over your hand,

And in winter, paper wears white music bands.

 Can you see it?

He XiangNing Art Museum - Forecourt Proposal, Shenzhen

A comprehensive external renovation project that seeks to create a more inviting forecourt, by staggering the sharp vertical of the street-side retaining wall - through a vantage point terrace and picnic mound.

Secondary features include an LED Tower, to be constructed in conjunction with a local LED company, and mobile, collapsible vending carts. The tower draws on street gym furniture present throughout all Chinese cities - inviting passers-by to switch dials to change the colours of the light tubes. The carts draw inspiration from the Sānlúnchē - a three-wheeled cart very much part of the Chinese street scene.

For BWPI, Shenzhen

This fascination with the Sānlúnchē would eventually lead to a simple coding exercise and interactive sequence made on the MIT coding platform, Scratch. It is very buggy, but please try it here: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/94360333

I Want To Hold Your Hand

Having fun with The Beatles.

Notes: Vimeo unfortunately had to take down the first video, due to a request form the Universal Music Group, but they moved very politely throughout the process. Real professionalism is something to aspire to, and the folks at Vimeo get very close.

The Flower Market at Suzhou Creek

I think a lot can be said for gentler incisions into city fabric, especially when said fabric is draped about a river that is so important to Shanghai - sure, one that was perhaps more important then than now, but with no less gravity about it. That's for certain.

Renovations present building types with the option of flexibility. If so, then perhaps there is no building better primed for a renovation than a factory. They exist after all as big sheds that house... things happening. Anything, really. 

A wise friend recently asked me to draw a series of things, in a loose composition, in order to tell me of my mind. One of these objects was a well. 

What if the river and the factory could once again share a water-front(ed) relationship? Not the historical factory-dock-boat relationship, but something lighter, something that remembers all that, and forms a variation on the trace of things. 

Can a river be a well?

河流可以变成井吗？

A Music Festival in China

‘Whatever space and time mean, place and occasion mean more.’

Then the music festival is the spatiotemporal masterpiece!

For in the openness of area you are not only exposed to the transition of day, but you face this transition set upon patterns of notes.

That’s at least two layers of life – one could argue.

Especially happy when clouds form the boundary to this soundwave core.

The Lighthouse

What could a super-scale lighthouse become, if tasked with holding many, many different people?

A Sculpture Conspired...

...To overwhelm.

'If I lean over a little.'

Shack upon shack, would dream of the hills.

But hills would dream only dreams that were still.

Bushbuckridge Library

Community architecture: Crossroad site.

Community architecture: Faceless building.