Rayton Apartment

I wish my school had had an art loft

This is the plan of a design for a school I worked on as part of the UK Building Schools for the Future programme at Make Architects. The school had a visual arts specialism, and we worked with the teaching staff to develop the best educational environment in which to deliver their ambitious arts syllabus. The highlighted pink area is the 'Art loft' , which is a vaulted space over looking the large general purpose assembly, social and teaching space at the the centre of the school. The art loft is divisible in a number of ways, and arranged to accommodate the entire spectrum of artistic medium, from painting to pottery, 3d computer modeling  and electronics. 

Ludic Urbanism

Those were the days...Mayhem in Cardboard!

Guangzhou Dragons

We both took loads of photos of intersections in Guangzhou in 2003. They are still pretty cool and inspiring now.

Some text we wrote at the time:
The elevated intersections in Guangzhou have a unique spatial, material and scalar quality in the city. The intersections are of the ground; they are grounded. They sinuously push and pull the surface of the earth, spread-out along its crust and interlaced into the city’s fabric. In some examples they have become the city, with buildings swallowed at first floor level, markets gathered around their feet, and advertising hung from their bellies.

The spatial complexities of each intersection have an almost loose or playful quality. Slipways curve and inflect around adjacent buildings, elevated motorways bifurcate and join, and intersections offer potential continuations of a road user’s journey than seem to be possible or necessary. Some seem impossibly knotted, others are flayed out in the city. Some arch 7 stories into the sky, others hug the ground leaving only the barest of headroom for speeding delivery cycles. They all resolve the same distinct problem of maintaining traffic flow and easing congestion, by the most diverse and seemingly playful means. It is as if the city has become the playground of these, the most pragmatic of infrastructural devices, and in turn, each intersection has become the playground for the whims of their creators.

We ‘read’ the intersections as an embryonic nursery – a culture of self similar dragons in early growth, grafted into the course urban fabric. The creatures writhe and twitch, like slain beasts, inscribing inflected lines in the air and earth. Their flayed remains spill back into the ruptured earth upon which their fate was sealed. Each, like a brooding reptile, leaves the ground scarred. The scratch marks of a forgotten beast, now returned to the bowels of the earth.

Their scale can be understood as massive by proximity, or as microscopic when understood in the context of the city. We enjoy this scalar shift in comparison to the colonies and cities of the insect world. The intersections are constructed from insitu concrete and concrete frames. The material power, robustness, and weight of each structure is overwhelming. The concrete is cast and finished in a number of ways, affecting the play of light, dirt, and sound across its surfaces. In some their cranked columns appear to cower with fear, and in other their smooth legs stand tall, with the spatial dignity of a nave.

The monster on the hill

This building is painfully good. I felt both inspirational exhilaration and overwhelming inadequacy! 

Looking for Blackspace

"Looking for blackspace" was something we wrote in China. We first used the term Blackspace as part of a group project whist students at Edinburgh University. In the project, it was our intention to reveal spatial potentials inherent in the fabric of the city. We made a series of recordings or maps which were then playfully manipulated to see what happended. Both processes used the creases and cracks within the recorded surfaces of the city as the instructions to try and unfold (and reveal) the city.

But Cities do not necessarily unfold! In order to physically achieve a flattening of the complex and continuous matrix of a city’s surface, an additional conceptual ingredient was necessary. Blackspace represented the non-mechanical, or smooth, matter required to realise this relatively crude and abstract unfolding operation. In the project, Blackspace was interesting for being the surplus physical product of the sequence of mappings performed on representations of the site. Blackspace was the generated difference, holding the potential for architecture and built form.

In subsequent projects, our understanding of Blackspace has developed to no longer rely simply on mechanical techniques and operational processes to reveal itself as physical matter. Blackspace has matured to encompass an aura of illumination, spilling light onto a previously concealed set of possibilities. Blackspace now holds a conceptual value as the space of creative generation. It is understood as the territory of the imagination, available through both observational and operational generative processes; mappings, readings, writings and interpretations. These interpretations remain free, exploratory, intuitive, nonlinear, and ultimately, playful. Blackspace is the unspecific realm of experimentation drawn from the observed conditions of architectural contexts, problems and projects.

Looking for Blackspace is conceptually tied to the pleasure of roaming within the strangeness of the real: the differences, seams, edges, scars, intensities, and tensions present in the quagmire of banality that is so often the fabric of the contemporary city. Blackspace is thus re-understood as the potential drawn from cloaking the everyday in a new guise. We revel in the beauty and potential of reading the peculiar and accidental events, forms, and spaces of the everyday. The collection of work held within these pages studies the beauty that exists within the accidents of the city.
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