Furnicatecture.

Until recently (when?), 60% (TBC) of housing in the UK was council facts. Today, this is just 10%. Yet council flats have immense value, commercially and aesthetically. Commercially, council flats are one of the remaining bastions of London affordability. Aesthetically, according to David Cameron and Mayoral hopeful Zac Goldsmith council flats are threatening and vulgar. .. TBC

There’s an option on Matthew Shelley’s camera (Nikon D5100) to shoot in a mode called ‘Colour Sketch’. He thought this setting worked well with the Cranbrook Estate because it has so much comic book-style detail. What do you think?

The elevator as a crime space. The elevator has long been aestheticised by architecture. As in the Louis Malle film ‘L’ascenseur pour l’échafaud’ scored by Miles Davis. This aesthetic is however a long way from the aesthetic of lifts in social housing, which are less jazzy soundtrack and more piss bouquet, and so are typically an uneasy compressed social encounters due to the diaspooric nature of the building occupants to which the lifts serve. 

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_.

Forget Paris Metro tiles… long live the white hexagonal mosaic as imbedded into our Lubetkin flat refurbishment: 056mod! And subsequently promoted by the band St Vincent in their video: