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

It’s Modern, it’s Classic, it’s basically a crazy kind of Massic. Something old, something new… as a fenestration strategy, Massic offers something for the (w)hole family. Blablablarchitecture LLP is participating not only in the digital but also in the physical world; with our partner Mark Stephenson (Wall or Space) we are looking for real-world / real-time outputs: in Shoreditch!

www.blabl The Tudor Revival architecture of the 20th century was commonly called ‘mock tudor’ in Britain and first manifest itself in domestic architecture. In New Zealand, the architect Francis Petre adapted the ‘mock tudor’ for the local climate… and Tudor became Modern. Here in London the housing market is over-heated and micro-developer projects in non-contested fields, such as those not in Conservation Areas, are an alternative to housing stock contribution other than through ‘volume house builders’/ Incidentally this is a House of No Style. that we embrace suburban stylistic tendancies through strategies such as ‘Mod Tudor’ should be seen by planners as empowering and non-threatening in scale of development. Style? Well as a Public Image refrain it ‘could be black, it could be white’… it’s irrelevant given the affordability crisis.  

What if… Clandon House was a speculative project at the UCL Institute of Archeology? Where students can propose levels of intervention ranging from Lord Onslow’s strategy of ‘do nothing, spend the money elsewhere’ through to a simulacra strategy of ‘total reinstatement’. In between, there are halfway strategies that would include retention of the impressive ruinous voids which the drone impressively captures as well as reconstruction of some of the more notable rooms. Architecture as future archeology proposes new  uses through evidencing the past.

An existing tree stump is used to buttress the site hoardings: a structural memorial in an 8-bit Peckham style.

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?

Lord Rupert Onslow offers these thoughts in relation to the 2015 fire which destroyed Clandon House. “Despite seeing centuries of family and national history burned to the ground, the 8th Earl of Onslow has said he does not want to see his ancestral home Clandon Park rebuilt. Rupert Onslow, a hereditary peer and insurance broker said that he would prefer for the insurance payout, which he estimates will be about £65 million, be spent on another National Trust property, instead of restoring his 18th century family home to a ‘mock-Georgian footballers’ wives house’. ‘Clandon is lost. It’s a ruin now. It decayed instantly. This sad site should be left in peace and tranquillity.’ ‘The last thing we want now is a replica. If the National Trust wants a replica, let them build it somewhere else.’ the earl told The Times. Eighty fire fighters were unable to save the house when it was ravaged by flames in April 2015.”

There are sooo many awards today that the value of a design award can be measured in seconds. In the preface to a recent award ‘The Power of Now’ by Eckhart Tolle was cited as it supposedly legitimises the idea that true liberation is only be found by living in the instant, in the now! By living in the present only, the past and future cease to exist: atopic architecture doesn’t require any understanding of historic context. There’s no ‘know’ in ‘now’: without previous experience, the ‘now’ becomes the endless pursuit of the ‘new’. Architecture Today, ‘Towards a Now Architecture’ etc etc. The need for speed has been overtaken by the ‘need for now’ yet ‘nowness’ jars with the concept of repetition, of labour, of ‘practice makes perfect’. In The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance, Anders Ericsson, introduced the concept of ‘10,000-hours’. The paper highlighted the work of a group of psychologists in Berlin, who had studied the practice habits of violin students in childhood, adolescence and adulthood. All had begun playing at roughly five years of age with similar practice times. However, at age eight, practice times began to diverge. By age 20, the elite performers had averaged more than 10,000 hours of practice each, while the less able performers had only done 4,000 hours of practice. The psychologists didn’t see any naturally gifted performers emerge and this surprised them. If natural talent had played a role it wouldn’t have been unreasonable to expect gifted performers to emerge after, say, 5,000 hours. Anders Ericsson concluded that “many characteristics once believed to reflect innate talent are actually the result of intense practice extended for a minimum of 10 years”. The 10,000 hours rule-of-thumb could be the guide for the length of study for an architect as 10,000 hours equals 1,250 days or approximately 5 years of study. Image taken from Wonderland’s Manual for Emerging Architects. Whilst Europe has disparate minimum study periods for an architecture, by using hours rather than years students could responsively adjust learning speed.

Shoreditch awaits the arrival of a new wall in 2016, a collaboration by  Mr G. vs WHAT_architecture. The wall will contain the Motitian cray twins, Graham and Aubrey, a potential maori homage to East London’s notorious Kray twins, Ronnie and Reggie.