Sometimes buildings contain a surplus, rather than a deficit, of ideas. The design crime against concept clarity is over-production.                        

Following on the success of Hot Tub Cinema, a Hot Tub is merely a metaphor for an acquatic viewing experience transferrable to any spectacle: from cinema to opera to football…

The Spotted Dog; it could be new housing in Newham. A spotted dog raises a cocked leg. Cranked terrace housing/

Does this painting look familiar? The chances that you have seen it before are pretty high. The chances you also know that its name is “Tina” are a bit lower. The chances that you know anything about the artist who created it are close to zero. J.H. Lynch was an artist that for many years left nothing but his paintings and his signature. As Mario Klingemann writes on his website dedicated to the artist: “I am not talking about someone who lived 400 years ago or some local hobby artisan. No, I am talking about a persona whose works were sold worldwide in amounts of hundred thousands if not even millions.” And even though this happened only some 30 years ago there are almost no traces left. When I started this site two years ago I knew three of his paintings and didn’t know anything else about this artist, I had many questions like: Who is J.H. Lynch? Is he still alive? Is he maybe a woman? Where did he come from? Are there more paintings?” Joseph Henry Lynch was a British artist who died on January 16th 1989 at the age of 78. At the end of his live he destroyed many of his paintings or gave them away to charity – probably, thinks Klingemann, because he was frustrated that during his lifetime he never received the recognition that he would have deserved. Tina subsequently appeared in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, Edwyn Collin’s single A Girl Like You and in the WHAT_architecture project 056mod_.

London Mayor Boris Johnson has stated that his proposal for an island airport in the Thames estuary is not dead, despite the Airports Commission rejecting the idea. WHAT_architecture starts to imagine the possibility of stacked runways… TBC (In the meantime here’s Racing Beats)

WHAT_architecture believes, thanks to the practice-based research being undertaken with the RMiT, it has developed a management model that operates less like an architectural practice and more like a football club. It’s one of player rotation, controlled injury-free deadlines and performance based metrics where the goal comes not from client patrimony but self-build projects. This requires a lot of movement: practice makes perfect! This week included one Transfer Deadline Day: 1st September. This is a football term representing a “transfer window, the period during the year in which a football club can transfer players from other countries into their playing staff'”according to Wiki. In 2014, the biggest news of TDD / the transfer window was the transfer of Radamel Falcao from Monaco to Manchester United. For £6m. Now £6m is a lot of money. In architecture, £6m will buy you the built 127sho_Shoreditch Station which would consist of 7 flats and 4 commercial spaces in the heart of Shoreditch. With Ace finishing, this represents a fantastic project. In footballing terms, £6m will buy you a 2-bedroom-East-London-flat type-of-player: sexy, promising but a long way from the end game. Manchester also paid in the transfer window £60M for Angel Di Maria. Okay so Falcao was a Loan (from Monaco) and Di Maria was a Purchase (from Madrid). Nonetheless the purchase needs to out-perform the loan 10x to qualify the expenditure. In architecture if the annual rent paid for anything (a flat, an office, a car? Well let’s see) was just 1/6 of the purchase we would never rent, but always seek to buy. This undoubtedly priorities lending. In football, a loan player apparently has less value (culturally, commercially) than a bought player>>> Unedited / memo TBC…. 8:{])