The POOL project.

I never used the old Riverside Leisure centre in Stafford that much but the few times I did I thought it was fine and the pool facilities with the diving pool and learning pool as well as the 25m pool were great. Whilst the new facilities are very nice, modern and clean I can’t see any real gain from having the new centre. I wonder whether the money would have been better spent tricking up the old one. Whatever though, because the council built a new one, pulled down the old one to unlock the potential in the valuable land only for the site to become a surface carpark, effectively replacing the old multi-storey that has closed down right next to it. I’m not being sentimental about the old one, it has certainly made quite a nice vista from the footbridge over the River Sow down to the town centre where before all you could see was fat middle aged women wearing leotards right up their cracks doing yoga in a class box gym...one of the most horrifying sites in Stafford...until you go into the Litten Tree that is (Guinness only £2.09 though, you can’t argue with that)

Buildings shouldn’t be preserved past their useful lifetime just for preservation sake. But buildings that are still fine don’t need to be replaced unless its being replaced by something far better and buildings that have exceeded their useful life for one activity aren’t instantly unsuitable for a different activity, they can be adapted. A feature in last weeks news caught my eye.

It was of an old 70’s swimming pool in Dagenham condemned for demolition to become a carpark for the new leisure centre that the council has just built. Remarkable parallel, no? The council offered up the site for one month to Nike to convert it into a BMX nirvana. In the four weeks it was open 4000 came from all over the world to ride at THE POOL, including the worlds best who turned up for a showcase event on the opening night. The POOL project wasn’t just ramps and grind rails, it included facilities to teach people how to maintain their bikes and bikes were even loaned to new comers to the sport with experts on hand to give some guidance and tuition. The local youth and hoodlums during half term turned up in their hoards, around 300 a day. Despite this fine example of how the building could be re-used, given a new lease of life and attract a whole new group of people to the Leisure Centre the council decided to go ahead and demolish the POOL which will inevitable give it a mythical status, old men will tell their grandkids they rode a BMX bike at the Dagenham Pool to which the grandkid will reply, “what’s a bike granddad” while floating through the air on a hoverboard. Whatever man, no need for sentimentality, as architects and designers we should look for the month long opportunity to do something cool that people can really appreciate rather than building a temple. Dross...make use of the waste, not live under the pretence of design without waste.

JUST DO IT!

BSA Pub in the HUB

Construction Workshop - BSA/Construction

It was when we got to the workshops that the fun really began. We knew that this is where we would learn the most simply by actually doing something tangible and real, something where you could see the consequences of the design in the way Sergison Bates were talking about. Unfortunately at this point the number of people who were involved in the workshop took a dramatic downturn as final portfolio submissions were readied and then term time was over. Lee and I were joined by two Year1’s who got really engaged and helped us to design and build the bar. Without them many mistakes would have been made, as a Gang of Four we really complimented each other, shared ideas and prevented any Damaged Goods.

The technicians were really good to us in the workshops. We had a great laugh with Spurge who, when we asked where the other half of our 200m of 2”x2” timber was accused of getting through the first 100m faster than Usain Bolt. I had the Test on my little LongWave radio which Spurge was most impressed about and we kept each other updated on the proceedings, Spurge almost breaking down from laughing so hard when Strauss got out for his duck.

Construction Workshop - BSA/Design + Working Drawings

After the initial investigation period we discussed as a group how the individual findings could be used as a catalyst for design. This was a really positive and productive session with everyone fully engaging in the collaborative nature of the workshop. Some really good ideas were put forward but when we then asked the students, most of whom were first years, to transform those ideas discussed into a design for the bar the workshop began to stall for a bit. That initial leap into the unknown was perhaps a bit daunting at the early stage of their degrees. Never the less the work that the studio began to produce was encouraging. Lee and I leant a hand when it became apparent that time was getting tight and collectively we began to formalise an idea of the layout whilst simultaneously working out how the design would be constructed. Over the next week we produced working drawings, figured out the quantity of materials needed and placed an order for them. The drawings were traced over and over as people noticed a potential problem, solution or alternative way of constructing the bar until slowly the design was refined to a point where we were confident we knew what we were doing...this confidence lasted until we had been in the workshops handling the materials for about half an hour.

Here are a couple of photos of the intermediate working drawings:

Construction Workshop - BSA/Investigation

In the first few days following our presentation to the first and second years we ran a number of trips to local pubs of worthy architectural note in the area included the Wharf in Walsall by Sergison Bates, The Anchor and The White Swan in Digbeth by Lister Lee, The Victoria in Birmingham city centre and the Posada in Wolverhampton. As well as these trips we encouraged students to spend as much time in their local as possible and soak up not only the drinks but also the atmosphere of the place, to measure out certain elements, to notice how people behaved in different areas of the pub.

 

After becoming interested in a certain element we then encouraged the students to really interrogate what was happening at that point in the pub and produce an A2 drawing and a model of what was being investigated. We stipulated that the drawing shouldn’t just show the dimensions, although we wanted that also, but should show why that dimension is important, what the effect of it is, how we could use it and what would happen if we changed it. We also tried to instil an ambition within the students to try and produce a drawing in a way they never had before, so if they were used to CAD to draw by hand etc. As there were no marks being attributed to this we tried to get the students to see it as a chance to experiment with different media. Luckily the group had a diverse range of skills and as we ran it as a studio project lots of expertise was shared so that proficient CAD users showed those less literate certain ways of doing things. For a week a really studio culture was established.

The workshop began producing some really diverse work, some people being interested in movement through the whole pub, some people being interested only in the height and positioning of the footrest, some being more interested in the lighting/lines of sight and the paradox between the privitisation of a public space.

Construction Workshop - BSA/Intro

Along with the quote from Sergison Bates about the value of phenomenological learning another quote that was really important to our initial ideas for how the workshop could be run was a quote from Venturi and Scott Brown’s “Learning From Las Vagas”

“Pop Artists used unusual juxtapositions of everyday objects in tense and vivid plays between old and new associations to flout the everyday interdependence of context and meaning, giving us a new interpretation of twentieth century cultural artifacts. The familiar that is a little off has a strange and revealing power.”

The cultural artifact we identified was the pub, something that everyone is familiar with and has many unwritten rules built into its fabric which tell us how to behave. The first stage of the workshop was set up as a week long investigation into the public house typology. The idea of the investigation was so that what the workshop would ultimately produce would be more than the table that a bar essentially is. We hoped we would be able to subvert the generic measurements we discovered so that people might leave the show with a heightened realisation of how the spaces and furniture within the public house effects their behaviour.

Thus the workshops name became THE PUB IN THE HUB. These are the posters we produced to try and excite people to join the workshop and to inform them of the schedule.

The architectural precedent we discussed with the students for taking the familiar and putting it slightly out of balance was the OMA pavilion for the Milan Triennial in 1985. The project reassembled the pieces that remained of Mies’ original Barcelona Pavilion from all over Europe and reconstructed them within the site parameters. With the site being curved this instantly put the familiar lines of Mies’ masterpiece into a totally unfamiliar yet still highly recognisable new configuration. The visitor was not only able to interrogate what was infront of them but also had to reinterpret everything they thought they knew about the original which was and wasn’t infront of them. As well as all this theoretical whiff-whaff the project was just cool from what photos I have seen, with large solid state TV’s scattered round the floor and all sorts of interesting stuff.



Construction Workshop - BSA

Lee and I have been running a workshop at Birmingham School of Architecture for the past couple of weeks to design and build a bar for the end of year exhibition. We were initially approached to run a competition for the design of a bar but became more interested in running it as a workshop. As a workshop event the design and build has become a collaborative project and everyone has had an input into the design at some point along the way. Our stance was that you won’t learn until you do but the doing shouldn’t just be on an ad hoc basis, it should be treated like an architectural project. With this is in mind the workshop has followed four distinct stages which I will elaborate upon in due course on this blog which are :

1.       Investigation

2.       Design

3.       Preparation of Working Drawings

4.       Construction

A passage from Papers2 by Sergison Bates architects has been key in our preparation and proposal of the workshop.

“A model is only an abstract intention, like a sketch, or the written description of a building. Nothing can substitute the experience of a completed project and the lessons it holds in its finished form. As first-year tutors at the Architectural Association, we recognised this deficiency in architectural education – the gap between students’ intentions and the real consequences of what they were proposing. We asked our students to design and construct a full size room so that they could learn through the experience of building their designs.”

Here are the posters with which we initially advertised the workshops to the first and second year students...more to follow, watch this space.

Eden: Technology + Nature

 

 

Orwellian Milkmaid Tech-Chip

I concluded my Performance Enhancing Body Modification blog a few days ago with a quote from Querzola taken from a passage within the Diller and Scofidio book FLESH. It was an ironic counter-argument to a stance which this blog post will address by looking at two of the coolest videos on Youtube. Prepare to be evoked!

From Flesh: “As for attempts to redesign the body, we need only recall cases of electronic transmitter implants which monitor bodies on supervised discharge. Surveillance, hygienics, health-any number of microrobots are waiting to invade our bodies...cause for concern, or even anger? One subject not mentioned in an ostensibly neutral scientific article in the New York Times is the use of such devices by psychiatric hospitals. What about mental compliance achieved through ‘psychotropes’ and drugs? New technologies are certainly providing the means of exercising total control over body and soul, through immense population-surveillance networks exercising bio-medical powers, ultimately more despotic than the most fearsome dictatorships...”

The installation of surveillance/monitoring chips and advanced body modification can be seen from two sides...the Orwell dystopian nightmare as depicted in 1984 or the more utopian Huxley school of thought from Brave New World. Why shouldn’t we be able to program our body, download its operating specifications and maintain a perfect bodily age of 30 until our death? Why should the installation of chips instantly become a state/corporate spyware threat? As the passage from Flesh ends:

“Donna Haraway maintains that “the cyborg is not subject to Foucault’s biopolitics; the cyborg simulates politics, a much more potent field of operations.”

The video shows cows being milked in an uber-high-tech way. The cows have a chip in their tags that activates the doors, feedbags etc.

Is this video terrifying or inspiring? Should we view it as somehow unnatural, a programming and ordering of nature to a perverted fascist extreme? Or should we see it as highly efficient system that is far more hygienic for both the cows and the humans? In this system the health of the individual cow can be monitored, treatments administered, production levels recorded in a clean and safe environment free from the shit/slurry and disease of the traditional farm. The cow has never know any other life, and like an Epsilon specimen in Brave New World is perhaps grateful that it doesn’t have to exert itself any further than what it has been programmed to understand. One thing’s for sure though, this is a sterile environment compared to the highly chaotic erotically charged milking sessions of days gone by.