bluntie

runs from paddington, in a great arc north of central london, east past victoria gardens, before meeting the southern flow of the lea valley navigation and entering the thames at limehouse basin. the towpath might be london’s most valuable footpath; green cycle-way, houseboat mooring, weekend walk, fisherman perch, coolant for the cables of the national grid…
the canal cuts through picturesque and leafy parts of islington and camden, but in the part i know best the landscape is, or was once, utilitarian. like a now calmed back-of-house. a character made sweeter by the absence of handrails.
in winter the canal ices over, in summer the garbage floats on the surface, in its reflections the evening sky has more mood.

^ warm streets

^home-made-lemonade-double-vodka-n-bitters

^and too sunny to sit on his car roof.
the litle boy here:
“he’s deaf. the cats’s deaf.”
“is he your cat?”
“no, but i know his name. Ginger.”

at the Saatchi gallery:
Pianist by Matt Johnson. using that most unorthodox and surprising of materials; a tarp. the life-size origami masterpiece is made from a single 50 foot piece of tarp.
and
Jangdockdae by Yi HwanKwan. can’t really describe in a photo how disquieting these were, they made eyes hurt too much to look long enough to work out the oddness. maybe some familiarity with the skull in Hans Holbein’s Ambassadors, it seemed that by learning how to look in a particular way the strangely squashed people would reveal themselves to be normal.

there is a show on tv at the moment called I’m Running Sainsbury’s, where selected small-store managers (sainsbury’s opens a local store every week atm) are thrust into managing a large store where their ‘fresh ideas’ can fly. of course the sickening reality is a downward spiral, with the guidance of a mentor, into a web of awful terrible words; ‘the standards you set are the standards you get’.
the store workers’ relentless commitment to the meaningless, and their utter focus on turning the cheese label side UP (else customer will not buy the cheese), makes one gasp at the desperate terror of supermarket business. then the same patterns of micro-management, detail over big picture, catch phrases repeated too often, emerge in other, more creative, industries. the percentage of rubbish in my current projects today was approximately 90%.
feel like a sheep on a beach eating trash.

to discover an ‘art park‘ in the lea valley, just london-side of the M25.
pagan donnie darko is suitably suicidal as realisation of ‘the flood-prone’ registers.

only happen once in a while, but the pleasure fades very slowly.
the first is WhiteCat, for once not on his car-roof, but interrupted during morning stretches at the door. unlike john howard’s morning power-walk, which became a cruel parody of his less-than-agile doggedness, the morning stretch is an elegant expression of healthyliving for any leader, and particularly the supreme.

second, polski security cat attends to the signing in of visitors to disused buildings. he has a clipboard. no one can get past polski cat. i know, i tried. calls had to be made in order to grant access.

perfection of public face. nothing embarrassing in tomorrow’s news.

one of the 5 spines of the east london green grid, a long thin waterway which trickles from the countryside north of london right to the mouth of the thames, connecting industry, green space, marshlands, sewerage, the location of the 2012 olympics, the poorest and richest of inner london neighbourhoods, a chain of left-overs, cheap land and true countryside. at once industrial belt and green lung; dual essentials for the functioning of london.
the site for my current project is at the mid point of the lea, and one part involves the instertion of new and dense buildings of the affordable family housing variety, into a small pocket within a stretch of the industrial.

these 1983 photos of around the site are by peter marshall who has a collection of photos of london’s recent industrial history, lots of shots of wapping, greenwich, bermondsey. remind me of a book gen gave nic called basic forms of industrial buildings, which i wish was here and not in underwood.
it would be wrong if the res had flying platforms, cylinders, sawtooth roofs, inefficient floorplates, cantilevers.
people would rather live in houses that looked like houses.
and, apologies, homes other than 3-storey townhouses are non-viable.

^ Richard Wilson oil room at the Saatchi Gallery.
haven’t seen, but have heard, and can understand that oil is solid, floor is ceiling, darkness luminous.

^ Fred Sandback wool installations at Dia Beacon NY.
simple strands of wool arranged in such disconcertingly vivid mirages of glass panels. best work for the best space.

won’t make happy people, obviously.
and the most interesting and memorable places don’t follow good planning (except those intuitions so natural that only the most dastardly wicked of the last half-a-century have had the insanity to disregard).

urban design principles make me anxious. for every HRH-Charles-endorsed principle there are places and buildings which contradict.
most principles clamour for legibility; legibility of circulation, scale, access, function.
but as urban design divorces itself from a history of diagram-building and arrow-drawing, and moves towards responsive evolution and non-linear delivery, boringly obvious principles, i hope, will drop off the top of the list of tick-boxes.

interventions should also include mystery, trickery and surprise.

3 examples of delightfully illegible movement, scale and program:

^ the secondary, tertiary, multiple, lanes, alleys, goat trails of the medieval quarter of a european town.

^  Stephen Holl’s student housing is actually only 7 storeys high.

^  sparsely civic and super-scaled part of east berlin, and the delight of a rave venue in the building on the left

will one day be a jungle to protect our modesties from the upper deck of the bus.