BlaBlaBlarchitecture. Talking Building.

179prs_ZAHA HADID AGREES: ITS A ROLE PLAYING GAME!

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WHAT_architecture 19-Oct-2015
Category: 179prs_practice based research | WHAT_projects
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179prs_TALKING HEADS START MAKING SENSE!

In the age of the jet-setting architect, one cannot possibly be in two places at once. So don’t even bother, rent a talking head! Rem Koolhaas introduces WHAT_architecture at the University of Westminster whilst, simultaneously, we introduce ourselves on the other side of town: at the Design Museum…

blablablarchitecture is talking architecture. This is speech as a design tool. From the Godfather himself.

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WHAT_architecture 19-Oct-2015
Category: 179prs_practice based research | WHAT_projects
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179prs_GAME OF ARCHITECTURE Barcelona: NOVEMBER 2015

The Game of Architecture is to be played in Estudio Mariscal’s Palo Alto in Barcelona on 15h00 Friday 27th November 2015. Screen Shot 2015-10-14 at 11.19.28

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WHAT_architecture 14-Oct-2015
Category: 179prs_practice based research
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264mar_EXTRACTED LANDSCAPE AS ARCHITECTURE

The quarry is the perfect example of landscape as architecture. This is building not as a presence but as a void, where land is removed one block at a time. The photographer Edward Burtynsky likens dimensional quarries to ‘inverted pyramids’. This rock cut landscape as architecture is evident in the oldest buildings on earth: the temples at Petra, the caves of Cappodocia… In the episode Par Condicio of the hit tv series Il Commissario Montalbano, the Inspector arranges a forum between two warring families in the subterranean cut-marble chamber (around 1h19’30”).

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WHAT_architecture 13-Oct-2015
Category: 264mar_MARBLE RESEARCH | WHAT_projects
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179prs_Game of Housing: a Japanese TV Show

超級全能住宅改造王 (Super Housing Changer) is an extremely popular television show in Japan and Taiwan. It sets the architect a challenge. In the following episode (number 103), the architect has to transform an existing dwelling to accommodate 7 people on 19.8sqm site footprint.The programme always commences with the interview of the occupants, and this ‘lived in’ experience is somewhat amiss in affordable housing design in the UK. Let’s cut to the Japanese English translation to get a flavour: “Japanese housing renovation variety show, the TV station from the majority of the selection of the transformation of family registration renovation, commissioned by talented designers (mostly primary architect) will distress transformed into livable and comfortable living environment with the economy the way dilapidated old house. Powerful storage features, reasonable moving line setting reasonable range planning, the sunshine and wind flow, warm humane care, there is always a little move you from Japan’s top architectural design experts for all kinds of family housing renovation needs performed amazing makeover, again turned into beautiful, impeccable top housing. Your home and living space is not a depravity transformation part? Please Do not miss the set in a renovated experts essence of “all-round residential renovation king.” It has a comfortable and warm to live in the house, the whole family can offer a variety of lifestyle activities required space, is the dream of every human heart. The reality of the living environment, it is inevitable that people feel satisfied, but perhaps because of economic factors, perhaps based on the perfunctory attitude, people are always endure day after day, living in unsatisfactory environment, or the period looking forward to one day be able to move out here looking for a better place. In fact, patience and flee are unnecessary producer “Almighty King House Renovation” program with its production of the program up to three years, as the number of transformation of the experience of more than 100 presented his proposal: “Any house will have its The problem, instead of converting place to go to escape the face of new challenges, as the status quo on issues point to be improved …. “

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WHAT_architecture 05-Oct-2015
Category: 179prs_practice based research | WHAT_projects
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179prs_GAME OF HOUSING: A SPATIAL PUZZLE

The Game of Housing is a spatial puzzle that requires the resolution of various topological constraints between 1. the house as a container of objects and 2. between the containers themselves. As such relative spatial positions between ‘inside / outside’ and ‘close / far’ needs resolving. In Cartesian space, it is fairly obvious that a single object can only exist in one space at a time and no two objects can reside in the same space simultaneously. That an innovative resolution to the contested field of housing is by no means straight forward can be seen in the classical mathematical puzzle known as the “Gas, Water, Electricity problem”: cube_01_bw

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WHAT_architecture 02-Oct-2015
Category: 179prs_practice based research
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179prs_Game of Housing: mapping the playing field.

The new cartographers of London are seemingly mapping the housing crisis. By tube station. The ‘London Underground Rent Map’ by thrillest.com suffers the same fault as Savills ‘Average Property Prices Within 500m of Tube Stations’: both evaluate London by tube only. By way of example, Hackney had, until recently, no tube stations yet this didn’t thwart Hackney from ‘achieving(!?)’ the greatest property value increases in a London Borough over the past decade. Time to look beyond tube stations to other (Crossrail) links… perhaps we could map ‘London House Prices vs Boris bike docking station’. Evening Standard_In The Zone_edit

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WHAT_architecture 29-Sep-2015
Category: 179prs_practice based research
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262fun_Fun Palace

In the early 1960s, Joan Littlewood and architect Cedric Price conceived the Fun Palace as a ‘laboratory of fun’ and ‘a university of the streets’. It was to be a temporary and movable home to the arts and sciences, open and welcoming to all. For all sorts of reasons, wasn’t possible in 1961 and the Fun Palace never came to fruition as a building. The idea however, of a space welcoming and open to all, bringing arts and sciences together, where everyone is an artist and everyone a scientist, remains a GREAT idea. So… “StOp-hit – Sport & Opera against domestic abuse” is part of the Fun Palaces movement today, brought to you by the community, for the community. A Fun Palaces event created by the GAFA ARTS Collective GAC London, their aim is to create events that are free, local, innovative, transformative and engaging. StOp-hit will be a free afternoon of action packed fun and learning, from opera recitals, music workshops and skills building exercises on the sports field to having specialists from the worlds of (WHAT_) Architecture, Sports science, theatre and domestic violence on hand to talk about their relevant subjects. As part of this exciting event there will also be traditional cultural performances from the Pacific Islands – here you will have the opportunity to learn and participate in the grace and elegance of dances such as the Samoan siva or the fierce display of pride and strength that is the Maori Haka. www.blablablarchitecture.com

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WHAT_architecture 29-Sep-2015
Category: WHAT_projects
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SOUNDBITE 1: TALKING BUILDING: ARCHI-SPEAK

blablablarchitecture is talking buildings. In Soundbite 1, we listen to the strange language of architects talking architecture. As Ike Ijeh reported in BD, the insular language architects deploy is utterly unintelligible to the uninitiated layperson and even to the fellow professionals. This issue appears to be widespread among the avant-garde and within academic echelons. Ijeh cites that with the fall of modernism, architecture lost the rather prosaic discourse say evident in Le Corbusier’s Vers Une Architecture. The supplanting of the singular grand narrative of modernism with the multiplicit textural layers of post-modernisms created a context of divergent discourse, which at its worse became a pseudo-intellectualism of misappropriated literary reference. Peter Eisenman’s wholesale appropriation of the work of Jacque’s Derrida as a means to legitimise his own projects comes to mind. The result was a culture of aesthetic complexity: opaque prose accompanied by hieroglyphic representational systems to lend integrity to ideas that had been discredited in the real world.

On the other Zaha Hadid’s straight-talking response to the BBC’s Sarah Montague provides an aural counterpoint: https://soundcloud.com/spectator1828/dame-zaha-hadid-walks-out-of

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WHAT_architecture 21-Sep-2015
Category: Uncategorized
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SOUNDBITE 2: TALKING BUILDING: JOE PUBLIC

blablablarchitecture is talking buildings. In Soundbite 2, we listen to the general public talking about a building. Joe Public talking building is the polar opposite of ‘arch speak’: it is plain english casual conversations about architecture but not by architects. As part of the planning application for 127sho_Shoreditch Station, WHAT_archirecture sent Victor Wu out onto the streets of Shoreditch to ask and record the public. We wanted to formally test the Conservation perception that the existing modest single storey brick building was identifiably a railway station. Talkback ‘soundings’ is thus a valid form of public consultation/

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WHAT_architecture 21-Sep-2015
Category: Uncategorized
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