Contraptions 2

After yesterdays fanciful trip into the world of mad inventors and contraptions I've been getting back into architectural devices...some of these things are so sweet!

Contraptions

I’ve always enjoyed mad and totally pointless inventions that involve a chain of events that finally culminate in the achievement of some simple task. One such invention was featured in the Metro “newspaper” this morning and I was delighted to see that the inventor was reported to have said,

“this will be the first in a series of eco-machines, which perform simple, energy-saving tasks in complex ways. I’m trying to make it as absurd and useless as possible.”

One has to admire a man who puts such effort into something which he himself acknowledges as totally futile. Camus would be going wild!

W. Heath Robinson

Rube Goldberg

John Madin's Visualisations

My interest in John Madin led to several occasions when I was able to meet people who had worked in his offices and look through some of the archive materials they had kept from those days. What follows are some photos I took of various visuals that were produced by the office for schemes, some of which went on to be built and others which remained on the drawing board.

Corby Town Centre

West Bromwich Town Centre

Paradise Circus

Various slabs and towers

RIP John Madin

As any student of architecture in Birmingham I have been exposed to the work of John Madin, a visionary architect with huge ambition whose work has been much maligned by various groups in Birmingham. I don't want to be sycophantic and I acknowledge that some of his work may not be incredibly exciting or even that good, but some of the stuff is just so powerful and was part of such grand ideas of what the new motorised city in the post-war world should be that he has to rank as one of my favourite architects. Wes Jones says in "El Segundo" that

"the architect should approach each work as evidence of a particular understanding of the world, as evidence of the architect's belief that this understanding is the most appropriate...work [architecture] should be offered as an example of the way things should be, not as proof of its own uniqueness. The architect should stand behind the work...and any signature that the work develops through its own consistency should be emblematic of its goodness proven in each example, rather than simply its difference, or its designers fame."

Madin's work displays his understanding of the Birmingham in which he operated, Britain's Motor-City. His buildings are often composed of simple but powerful geometric forms and are, for all their brutalism, fairly modest buildings that don't exhibit the attributes of the shout out "look at me" architecture that is currently par for the course in Birmingham. Madin has attracted a bad reputation amongst some who either don't like the brutal forms of his work or don't like what his architecture represents; Birmingham's post-war concrete redevelopment. But others love Madin's buildings and as one by one they are demolished there is a growing concern that Birmingham will eradicate that past like it has done before, a past which was striving to to create a new utopia. No matter how misguided those intentions and actions might have been atleast it was an applaudable occupation and a life well spent.

Glenn Howells paid this tribute to him in the Birmingham Post

"Glenn Howells, of Birmingham-based Glenn Howells Architects, said Mr Madin was to be admired as much for his output as his architectural prowess. He said: “He was probably the most important mid-20th century architect that the city had in that he brought international examples and experience to bear in the city. "He is probably best known for the major buildings he left behind, but some of the most interesting work he did was in residential development, like the Calthorpe Estate buildings. “He was quite prolific. His output was huge over many decades.”

An e-book portfolio of his work can be found here

http://www.john-madin.info/downloads/John_Madin_Architect_Planner_ebook.pdf  

A classic film showing John at the height of his career abd demonstrating the bold ambition of a post-war architect

and here is a video of John in his later years talking about his library and the threat of demolision

Cards

A selection of cards I've made for Katie over the last few years:



Bradford Street

A short while back Lee emailed me a link to a short film competition. The brief was to make a film not exceeding three minutes that in some way addressed issues of urbanity. We spent a couple of weeks emailing one another films we had seen that we liked as precedence and ideas for films and eventually realised that the shots we both enjoyed involved tracking or panning giving the sense of some sort of journey being undertaken that was being followed by the camera. We planned to make a film of a person walking along some area of Birmingham, perhaps stopping to interact with buildings or other people every now and again. We intended to start the film fairly compact, as though the viewer was wearing blinkers, so the shot might have focused on the feet of the journeyman or their face and wouldn’t reveal much about the city, offering a fairly ubiquitous street scene. Slowly over the course of the film it could get more expansive and reveal the city skyline or a landmark building and the journeyman would reach a destination ie. the film would resolve itself.  

The night before we met up to discuss the plan but got side tracked talking about Sheeler and Becher and Becher. We decided on the basis of that conversation to change the nature of our film. We had always had reservations about how successful our panning/tracking shots could be and so instead of risking getting frustrated at our technical inabilities we decided to use them as the parameters of what we could do. Our film still is about a journey along Bradford Street in Digbeth but now the distraction of the protagonist is removed, the focus is put squarely on the street. The film is just a sequence of shots of buildings along Bradford Street from the same sort of frontal perspective that Becher and Becher used so powerfully in their images. The edits happen at the moment that a vehicle or passer by moves past the camera. This implies the business of Bradford Street as one of the main thorough fairs into the city. The lack of any real human engagement along the street, accentuated by the absence of a protagonist, hints at the atmosphere we felt along the road. It certainly wasn’t intimidating, but neither was it inviting. Nothing actually happened on Bradford Street except for people passing through. The repetitive imagery begins to express the nature of the environment along Bradford Street; images showing rolled down shutter doors that long look out of use, brownfields sites, bus stops, abandoned warehouses and offices. At the end of the film a shot which suddenly jumps to the top of the multi-storey carpark at the top of Bradford Street begins to pan and at last the viewer hopes that the film will find some resolution or that it will reveal the location of the film but the shot turns to black before the pan is completed leaving the end open and ambiguous. Like Bradford Street, the film couldn’t care less whether people knew where it was or what its purpose is.