Recently the diagram of London’s central underground network, as displayed inside the trains, changed to include the East End of London. The area shown was enlarged to introduce all stations from Notting Hill to Stratford—an endeavor that not only conformed to London’s geographic reality but also the socio-cultural significance of the East End—the area east of the medieval walled-city of London. As a visual depiction of central London, the small map displayed in the tube long excluded East London and solely represented its center, the West End and West London. Indeed this change precedes the political ambitions of the London’s Olympics and the regeneration of the Hackney Marshes.

Although a minor detail for most commuters, this new mapping of central London highlights the shifting geography of London’s center, Eastward. From the traditional center of Charing Cross, the new map appears to position the area around St. Paul’s as its new geographical center.

Unlike London, New York’s topography clearly defines the rigid geography of the city with the island of Manhattan as a center, which is surrounded by peripheral neighborhoods. Similarly, Paris’ Boulevard Périphérique and the former site of the Thiers Wall, on which it is built, have both historically contained the city and clearly defines its boundary. London, as opposed to its metropolitan counterparts, does not accept a definite geography and its perceived center is indicated by the most common representation: the map of the underground. Thus, it is likely to change.

Popular images of London often depict scenes from the city center and the West End. Despite an absence of tourist buses, the East is a colorful part of the city, with a unique identity, which is often overlooked.

Part of what makes London successful and diverse can be attributed to the East, however this area lacks representation due to a history of poverty. The East is notable for, amongst other things, its high number of housing estates which provide relatively low rents. Bargain seekers may also fare well at many of the weekly markets that sell a range of goods from obscure copies of Playboy to vegetables. East London is also home to a large Bangladeshi population, many of whom run numerous local businesses and worship at the East London Mosque, a building with a call to prayer that can be heard throughout Whitechapel. Countless architecture firms, fashion designers, product designers, artists and musicians live and work in this part of the city. Additionally, the East offers many unique culinary experiences such as jellied eels at F. Cooke’s Pie and Mash, English breakfast at E. Pellicci’s, curries from Tayyabs and an endless selection of organic treats from The Grocery. Famous figures such as Shakespeare, Jack the Ripper, Joseph Merrick, Alfred Hitchcock, the Kray Brothers, Alexander McQueen, M.I.A., and so on, have all left their mark or have been marked by this region. Despite its vibrancy and rich character the East is rarely exposed to outsiders.

One place where images of East London are getting exposure is as backdrops for fashion shoots… more

Perimeter is the boundary of controlled ownership. In fashion it is a negotiable boundary. Victorian dresses of the 19th century functioned as a personal architecture, defining the space and status of the wearer, while simultaneously attracting the attention of the viewer (both parties are necessary for perimeter to have any meaning). By putting on the dress, the wearer amplified their narcissistic claim to personal space, beyond what everyday attire of the time allowed. This artificial perimeter obscured the body while expanding it in space.

The practice of oversized Victorian costume began with the layering of petticoats and starched fabrics to communicate social standing. Over time, the multilayered status-imbuing fabrics became too unwieldy to perform as clothing. To overcome the practical limitations of textiles, in 1856, W.S. Thompson patented the cage crinoline, a hollow metal cage that replaced the solid, stratified petticoat volume. As the cage crinoline evolved, it grew in scale and ornamentation, forcing its form to shift to accommodate its surroundings. In order to allow passage through the narrow door frames and hallways, typical of the time, the cage crinolines were flattened in profile, resulting in a silhouette that only revealed its full spatial dominance when viewed from the front. These points in the evolution of the Victorian dress depict a negotiation in the definition of perimeter from a personal volume to an objectified form.

…’the city in its circular fever repeats and repeats’.

—Octavio Paz, A Draft of Shadows

A city’s edges are in a state of perpetual redefinition. Roman walls give way to medieval walls, which ultimately give way to un-walled urban expansion. Fortified perimeters that once defined and protected entire settlements become porous thresholds between the older and newer districts of a single city. Cities themselves become nodes within greater metropolitan regions—networked conurbations with limits that are often difficult to plot. Even at the scale of the continent, the clear definition of an edge becomes tenuous, as transcontinental cities stitch nearly distinct land masses together.

The ring roads that surround contemporary cities are perhaps the clearest perimeter form at our disposal today, but a ring road is not a wall. Rather than containing place and bluntly delineating the extents of a city, ring roads invite horizontal expansion (as the growing number of cities with several concentric ring roads will testify). To save itself from itself, the contemporary city may need to reinvent the wall.

Pamphlet Architecture 13: Edge of a City showcases six projects by Steven Holl… more

I no longer have a ‘television’, that big black box that sat awkwardly in the living room and burst into technicolor light at the touch of a button. Now I receive my moving images on a portable laptop via the internet—sometimes inclined in bed, ancient Greek style, sometimes sitting at the kitchen table, which I consider to be more formal than the latter. On extra special occasions I place my laptop in the living room in the empty space where the television used to sit, thus watching it at a distance, from the couch—a memorial service rather than a comfortable viewing experience. Domestic spaces, such as the kitchen, living room and bedroom, have lost their post-war hierarchy with the death of the television as an object. The new hierarchy prioritizes spaces of comfort—my personal favorite is the bedroom, where I can watch Gossip Girl under blankets with legs stretched out, the computer humming softly from its perch on my gut.

Arguably, the quintessential public experience of the suburbs occurs at the mall. However, the space of the mall is not a backdrop for public engagement alone, it is a space where public and private encounters vie for dominance: mallgoers are confronted with individuality, families, private enterprise, shared experience etc. Legally speaking, the space of the mall is private property located in the economic sphere, rather than being actual civic space. Accordingly, it is beginning to reflect its private nature by dressing more and more like a domestic space, rather than an overtly economic one.

When Erin Mills Town Centre opened in 1989, to much fanfare, it had the world’s largest screens assembled from a collection of individual televisions. These screens were visible throughout the mall and thus, a favorite pastime of the private sphere was made public… more

While there is architecture of celebration—churches, monuments, civic structures—meaningful festivities more often occur in the realm of the mundane: the living room birthday party, the post game street parade, the Christmas dinner in front of the TV. In order to make these ordinary spaces extraordinary, we blow up balloons, suspend streamers, shower confetti and bolt lights to any surface that will support them; all of this to great success. Recognizing the temporal nature of the celebration, an entire industry exists solely to satiate our need for such disposable space jewelry (Party City in tonier neighborhoods, or Party Fair if you happen to live in Bushwick). A full transformation rarely requires more than a twenty dollar bill. This stands in stark contrast to the millions of dollars that are invested into more permanent forms of celebratory infrastructure, such as the Chinese pavilion at the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai. The Oriental Crown is estimated to have cost around 1,500,000,000 CNY, or 219,702,645 USD, whereas a pack of twenty-five latex balloons can be purchased for two dollars (they can probably be purchased for much less when bought in bulk from within China). At a conservative eight cents per balloon the Chinese government could have purchased an estimated 2,746,283,075 balloons (twice the population of China), for the same cost as the pavilion: In my view, a much more entertaining and memorable… more

Banqueting centers are ubiquitous in the Greater Toronto Area as a result of a lack of suitable spaces for celebration. They often conform to a rough set of standards which makes them an identifiable genre. Regularly located near a highway exit, these buildings are relatively minuscule islands in a vast sea of parked cars. They have showy facades that make them easy to spot from a moving vehicle. With numerous simultaneous celebrations happening at a given center, the spaces are commonly planned as a series of large rooms, which may be subdivided with partitions for flexibility to maximize profit. At times these partitions are identical to those used in many a local school gymnasium. While these partitions provide the hall with options, their flimsiness allows one to hear the neighboring celebration. In addition to aural mixing of parties and the merging which takes place in the parking lot, people from different celebrations mingle further in the hallways and bathrooms. Total privacy is a luxury that is rarely granted. The exteriors of the banquet centers are often rendered in stucco with wallpapered interiors that incorporate many neo-classical or Mughal plaster details. Top all of these parameters off with the tasteless overcooked food that is regularly served and these spaces for celebration become spaces which are simply not worth celebrating. How did it become part of our cultural ideal to host a party in a big box celebration multiplex?

From 2005 to 2009, New Yorkers complained of a maple syrup smell, periodically wafting through the neighborhoods of Manhattan’s west side. Conspiracy theories ensued, including olfactory terrorism and even UFOs. It took four years, and hundreds of calls to 311 for the city to finally pinpoint the source of the smell: Frutarom, a company in New Jersey that processes fenugreek seeds.

It was fitting that the smell was ultimately traced to New Jersey, as the state has a long history with scent. The Meadowlands, across the river from Manhattan, have been used as a dumping ground as long as the area has been settled—there was no other practical use for the swampy geography. The area was also at the epicenter of the industrial revolution, its watersheds converted into polluted mires, as they were located downriver from two of the largest industrial powerhouses in the world. Additionally, at the beginning of the 1900′s, New Jersey, and Secaucus specifically, housed a substantial number of pig farms (it is estimated that there were as many as 250,000 pigs on fifty-five farms in Secaucus)… more

Smells, can be locators, which may orient one spatially through psychological or physical means. Physically speaking, smells can affect how an individual moves through a space. They might incite a range of emotional responses such as repulsion and seduction which may turn one away or draw one near. Smells are also known to trigger memory, as so elegantly demonstrated at Alexander McQueen’s Spring 2007 show where he paid tribute to the late Isabella Blow by filling the room with the scent of her favorite perfume, Fracas. Similarly, the smell of incense or popcorn can serve as ritualistic reminders of religious spaces or movie theaters, respectively. Capitalizing on this knowledge, companies such as Comme des Garçons are branding their retail spaces through the creation of unique scents as a means of further cementing their identity. Beyond the realm of smells which are applied to a space, there are then those which are inherent in building materials and processes and may serve as an integral part of a design’s sensuality. Despite all of its atmospheric potential, smell is one avenue of spatial manipulation that is rarely, if ever, intentionally exploited by architects.

In the parkland, there is a space which holds, hovers, shifts, disappears. It is not contained by a line or an edge; it is not a void. It is space set in motion by two undulating planes: ground and roof. The drawings in plan suggest a pavilion, in which we see the architects coercing, rather than inventing, space.

This plan does not rattle through staircases or corridors. Nor does it confine, or lock up space in a collection of boxes. This plan belongs to the space within it, which, enamoured by its reflection above, bleeds, flickers, curls.

It is a plan for ambiguous wandering; it is a plan for smoke.

When I visited the pavilion and crossed into the field of the plan, in parallel I was walking at the bottom of the ocean. The space felt like being submerged in a liquid, which filled every crevice of my skin. I stopped and looked up into the mirrored ceiling, and I saw myself coalesce with the earth and sky.

Hans Ulrich Obrist: “Can you tell us about your idea of the Pavilion as a content machine?”

Ryue Nishizawa (SANAA): “A machine sounds very different from what we imagine. For us it is a cloud…”

Perhaps it was the insufficiency of planning, through the period of economic growth, that accounts for architecture’s contribution (or lack thereof) to the current financial downturn.

The modernist period was obsessed with the future of cities and the fate of communities. With the rise of neo-liberalism however, the focus shifted away from communities towards the individual. Architectural agendas no longer seemed to reflect the interests of the many, they were instead overwhelmingly centered on the individual, and the iconic building. During the economic boom, there seemed to be an emphasis on private developments, with little interest in the maintenance and development of infrastructure and other public projects.

Without a budget to explore individual interests many architects are back to considering the group. This shift in focus is demonstrated in the recent movement from private developments to public infrastructure. While many construction projects in Dubai have come to a halt, the governing bodies are investing billions in their metro in addition to roads and airports. Similarly, in China, more than thirty cities have begun construction on, or have submitted proposals for, new rapid transit systems. The five cities with existing systems are expanding them. This is all part of a larger investment frenzy in railways… more

The least democratic of geometries is the line. As the shortest distance between two points, the line sacrifices choice for efficiency. The only moments of importance for the line are the points of departure and arrival, of which there are only ever one of each. The bulk of the line, that is the in-between (the veritable line itself), is nothing but fluff, filler, excess, which bridges these two points.

Despite its no nonsense rigidity, the line has inspired civilizations across the ages. The line is responsible for the discovery of the Americas, as it was thought that crossing the Atlantic would provide a shortcut to India. The line is responsible for the invention of flight, the most efficient means of global travel. The line is responsible for religion, offering humanity a means of understanding the formation of the cosmos—’I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End’ (Revelation 22:13). Time itself obliges to the line, forever leading us towards an end point that remains out of sight—death, judgment day, or worse (let us just hope that the Mayans were wrong about 2012). Luckily for us, the excesses of the time-line—seconds minutes and… more

While modernism was taking hold, Hermann Finsterlin was turning his back on arc segments and lines drawn at ninety degree angles, claiming to the world that you “cannot lock a bird of paradise in a chicken coop”.

The difference between a bird of paradise (Finsterlin) and a chicken (everybody else) is centered on the former’s exoticism and thereby perceived rarity. While Finsterlin’s language was not completely without precedent as the Baroque period introduced heavy undulations and Gaudi and Art Nouveau explored the potential of organicism, his predecessors were often working within the established geometric parameters of ellipses, parabolas, and classical symmetry, respectively. Finsterlin did not subscribe to any such constraints, thereby he liberated his uniquely expressionistic lines, allowing them to conjure an animated landscape of ‘colorful buds, phallic shapes, sea urchins and coral formations, shells, tentacled underwater creatures and erotic couplings from which emerge, bizarre thorns, zig zags and rays‘. Through his globally transforming lines, Finsterlin communicated an eccentricity, which was innate in their construction.

This past Wednesday, Robert Scarano Jr. was barred from filing building permits in the city of New York, as it was decided that he had intentionally misled the Department of Buildings in order to gain approvals for often grossly over-scaled housing projects. This fraud was achieved through the production and certification of phonies: architectural plans that appeared to follow the rule of the law on paper, but which took advantage of ambiguities in the building code to increase building floor areas.

Scarano achieved the phony by utilizing common architectural elements in uncommon ways. In the past, mezzanines were not counted towards the floor area ratio of a building, as long as they were labeled as storage spaces. It was easy enough for Scarano to convince developers that a storage mezzanine, in plan, could function as a living room in practice, when it resulted in a substantial increase in the gross built area of a building lot, and profits. As a result, Scarano’s buildings are often much larger in scale than the urban fabric that surrounds them. The deception that is so easy to conceal on paper becomes impossible in the skyline: the buildings given a voice, confess to their own crimes.

A Swedish writer named Frederik Colting, who goes by the pen name J. D. California, wrote and published the book 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye. The Colting book acquaints readers with a 76-year-old character named ‘Mr. C’., who is presumed to be an elderly version of Salinger’s iconic character Holden Caulfield. Salinger sued Colting for plagiarism in 2009, and succeeded in getting a court order which indefinitely bans the publication, advertising or distribution of the book in the United States.

In an article published on TMN, responding to the lawsuit against David Childs and SOM’s Freedom Tower, the author Clay Risen investigates the difference between some of the more common cases of plagiarism, like Salinger’s from the literary world, and the more difficult cases involving architecture. According to Risen:

A paragraph in a biography of George Washington, for example, that reads the same word for word as a paragraph from a previous biography of the first president is solid evidence of theft. A book’s value is decided in large part by the accumulated… more

 

Suspend me in a deep freeze, and do not wake me until the year 2036. Outside, the air will be cleaner, exotic new flora will carpet the landscape and the once gray island of Manhattan will have transformed into a tropical paradise. Moving sidewalks will have replaced moving cars; never again will one have to enter into the dark subterranean world of subways, rats and mildew. Skyscrapers that once hugged the ground will instead hug the sky, piercing the clouds on their way up to the cosmos. A robotic workforce will perform the most menial of tasks, leaving humanity to leisurely stroll the verdant landscape. Diseases will exist only in history books, made extinct by improved human hygiene and etiquette (instead of toilet paper we will use shells, and sex will be performed through a virtual reality interface). There will be no more violence, no more crime, no more jails, and no more need for police (apologies, Sandra Bullock).

Awaking in this future, my unwashed body will seem all the more pungent, my words all the more unsophisticated, my desires all the more grotesque. But, despite this, just one kiss of my cracked lips, the slightest transfer of bodily fluids from mouth to mouth and this perfect future will come crashing down.

Can architecture generate significance in an era where the meaning of form is unstable and difficult (or impossible) to communicate? A recent book titled The Wrong House by Steven Jacobs explores the role that architecture plays in the films of Alfred Hitchcock a.k.a. The Master of Suspense. Jacobs identifies the staircase as a critical architectural element in Hitchcock’s cultivation of suspense. While staircases are not specifically symbols of suspense, Hitchcock develops a method for manipulating them into performing. Jacobs writes:

Dynamic and spatially fragmented structures, staircases are often places of crisis and their pespectival effects seem to isolate and confine characters. A central spine of domestic space, the staircase presents itself as an arena for psychological tensions. Furthermore, in Hitchcock’s films, staircases lead to trouble since they accompany the cognitive hubris of the characters. Inquisitiveness drives characters upstairs or downstairs. In addition, Hitchcock integrates his staircases perfectly into his technique of suspense: each step advances but also delays the denouement.

 

Last but not least… more