The WHAT_architecture players pay homage to former 10CC members Godley and Creme’s Cry…’phacial’ (photoshop facials) morphed by Stefanos (who photoshops well).    

Every now and then something rumbles out of the WHAT_radio office PA which literally strikes a (sonic) chord. We Are Shining’s Hot Love features Adwoa Aboah sulking and dancing through the streets of East London. The moody video matches the blues-tinged and slightly hip-hop inspired psychedelica of the track. Before that there was “Killing” which reminded me of Santa Sangre (“Holy Blood”), the 1989 Mexican-Italian avant-garde horror film directed and written by Alejandro Jodorowsky. Divided into both a flashback and a flash-forward, the film, set in Mexico, tells the story of Fenix, a boy who grew up in a circus, and his life through both adolescence and early adulthood. Whilst I am not entirely sure how this all lends itself to the design process I recall a recent comment by the councillor for the Forest Gate ward, in last week’s Newham Development Committee Members’ Design Review, that the “architects must demonstrate more love for their project”. So Hot Love is the current musical score to 221dog_ reminding us all to love architecture. Just in time for Halloween…

The work of high-viz man-about-Shoreditch-town Thierry Noir has been spotted seen both in our office and on the cover of the U2 album, Achtung Baby. Thanks to Howard Griffin Gallery, he’s now off to LAX.

Flashback! It’s 2003…

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

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:{])

Nick Delaney, photographer: cut, copy, paste, rotate, scale…

     

German mid-field dominance continues with the conversion of FC Union Berlin’s stadium into a gigantic living room.