Ramblings on air

My review of this year’s Serpentine Pavilion is now...

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 20:27:00 +0100

My review of this year’s Serpentine Pavilion is now viewable online on Blueprint Magazine’s new website. The pavilion is by the Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto, whose work I have been following for some years now. I was very happy to do this for the magazine, as I interviewed the architect in 2008 for their special Japan issue. I hope you enjoy the review. I have tried to give readers more of a sense of who Fujimoto is and what his work is about…

My take on the latest revamp proposal for the Southbank Centre

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 22:17:00 +0000

Douglas Murphy is critical of Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios’ plan for the revamp of Southbank Centre. You can read his article here; Rowan Moore has more of a measured response to it. In his article, he writes that they “fulfil their original intentions better than ever” but “architectural intelligence of the project” may be compromised by time & money. I feel very strongly that the Southbank Centre should have been listed in the first place. The original intention of the LCC architects was that the Southbank Centre could be further developed or expanded but the revamp needs to be carefully handled. It needs to be a gradual process, rather than a big jump, such as this one. Read my essay about its original spirit in here and make up your own mind about it.

Walking the Hills on the South Bank

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 16:35:00 +0000

High Hopes…

Here you will find a short version of an essay I wrote sometime ago about the high-rise walkways at the South Bank in London. As you will see, I do hugely admire the ambitious 1960s’ project, which to me signifies the kind of “high-minded” (not to be confused with ‘arrogant’ or ‘aloof’) hybrid approach worthy of praise. The High Line Linear Park Project in Manhattan, which opened in 2011, is a lovechild of such an approach.

I believe we need to be able to pull ourselves back a little to see a bigger picture before we can actually bring benefits to the local/regional level. I’m not blindly promoting globalism per se, the blandness of which is obvious, but if we cannot see a bigger picture every now and then, we cannot be bold and pull ourselves forward. Certain amount of heroism is needed, realistic idealism. A hybrid of global and regional.

I read in the March issue of Blueprint magazine that similar projects using defunct highways, railways and river ways are beginning to appear in other cities of the world, such as Seul, Rotterdam, Madrid and Birmingham, and I thought that it might be interesting to revisit the high-rise walkways at the South Bank. It was an onset of something new…Read on!

It’s all too easy to dismiss the development at the South Bank as a high-minded creation of an elite group of architects at LCC (London County Council) from 1960s slightly out of touch with reality. When the South Bank, or more precisely, the Southbank Centre – the area encompassing the Queen Elizabeth Hall and Hayward Gallery – first opened in 1968, their idealistic concrete ‘mould’ received damning reviews. The Architects’ Journal labeled the Hayward Gallery as “secretive and repelling.” Comparing it to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the article bemoaned the lack of a café or water fountains or indeed the “serenity” found at its American counterpart. Michael Levery wrote in Architectural Design that the area had “faint associations of a set for King Lear, abandoned perhaps before ever being completed…” The Italian magazine Casabella remarked that it was “a sad collection of Second World War bunkers.”

It is clear from a number of publications that the area wasn’t working well for a long time after it opened; it needed a policy change in 1983 to revive its spirit, as Charlotte Mullins makes it clear in Festival on the River: The Story of Southbank Centre:

Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s the buildings looked in on themselves, embracing neither their riverside location nor their proximity to each other. Only with the Greater London Council’s ambitious open foyer programme of 1983 did Southbank Centre start to come alive. The Royal Festival Hall’s foyers began to open during the day, with live music presented in the bar and exhibitions on the ballroom floor.

Despite the gloom and doom it attracted, there were some fervent supporters who could see its potential to do good for the people of London from very early on. In the article entitled “Adhocism on the South Bank,” written for Architectural Review, the architectural critic Charles Jencks described the raised pedestrian walkways at Southbank Centre as if he were a young boy again having fun on a boy-scouts mission:

One is slightly stirred to find out what’s hiding behind the parapets – storm the walls, leap the moats, cross the forecourt, jump the crossbridge, dodge the columns and burst through those fifteen inches of solid concrete to find out what needs so much protection and sanctity in the middle of the twentieth century. A concert hall and art gallery.

Jencks branded the buildings at the Southbank Centre as “pugnacious,” and his portrayal of the incredibly complex airway system that the engineers have devised for the QEH (tucked away inside a massive concrete box atop the Purcell Room) reads almost like an allegory of the experience one has at the place, but he was essentially approving of the way the new design celebrated our freedom to explore the city in an adhoc, playful manner.

Not surprisingly, the modernist architect Neave Brown was also seduced. What Brown liked about the Southbank Centre, he wrote in 2008, was the physical and mental challenges it imposed on visitors: “It had built-in limitations, which you had to outflank and outwit, but these imposed positive patterns of thinking. You had to work with the constraints, and every now and then you had to burst out of it - with the mezzanine, the terraces. […] its presence and difficulties add to London.”

Ian Tuckett, Executive Director of the nearby Coin Street Community Centre, contrasted the open aesthetic of the South Bank against the closed, corporate aesthetic of the tall Shell Building behind the Southbank Centre: “…the area [at the time the Shell Building was developed] was not considered to be very desirable, so it was built effectively to keep people inside; therefore it has its own catering, swimming pools, and shops. As a result, there is no need to go out. Even though there are more people working in this area than in Covent Garden, there isn’t the street life that makes the area attractive; thus shops and other forms of small business are not encouraged to open up.”

The plan for the Southbank Centre was approved in 1961. Previously, the area had been heavily industrialized, with private businesses owning exclusive rights to the access of the river. The idea of vertically segregating pedestrians and traffic had been in vogue for sometime among the architects and town planners in the UK before the war. Concerned with such issues as our access to natural light, clean air, and road safety, the modernist architects who designed the Southbank Centre privileged the pedestrian experience of the city, the joy of which was deemed as being eroded through the rapid motorization of our cities and towns.

One of the earliest images of the high-level walkways was created by German architect Ludwig Hilberseimer, who taught at Bauhaus but left for the USA in 1938 to work for Mies van der Rohe. Hilberseimer’s idea was published in a book called City Plan in 1927. Le Corbusier subsequently derided Hilberseimer’s model, calling it “anti-reason.” In Radiant City, which was published in 1933, he ridiculed Hiberseimer’s proposal: “Is man to spend his life from now on gesticulating up in the air on a series of (inevitably) narrow platforms, climbing up and down stairways – a monkey up in the tree tops! … it is madenss. Madness, madness, madness.”

Le Corbusier flipped Hiberseimer’s plan, confining people instead to the ground level and promoting cars up on the high-rise expressways. Jane Jacobs, who wrote the seminal book on urban planning, The Death and Life of great American Cities, criticized both le Corbusier’s vertical garden city idea, as well as his precedent Ebenezer Howard’s idea for horizontal garden city, claiming that they both killed off our street life, therefore destroyed the essence of our cities. Jacobs accuses Le Corbusier of being essentially anti-urban: “…like the garden city planners he [Le Corbusier] kept the pedestrians off the streets and in the parks.”

Le Corbusier’s vertical garden city, nevertheless, has had a wide repercussion in the post-war architectural world. Chamberlin, Power and Bon, the architects responsible for the Barbican in the City of London, took the City’s newly formed Barbican Committee on a study visit to the Hotorget district in central Stockholm in 1958 to show “a garden city which is at the same time truly urban.” The Barbican, completed shortly before the South Bank, however, does not have the same openness, mainly due to the fact that flats in the towers are now almost all privately owned, with 24-hour security guards exuding air of exclusivity. Its lack of openness is also due to the flaws in the planning that looks inward rather than outward. The towers at the Barbican now function much like the isolated ‘islands’ that Jacobs used to describe some of the garden city towns, with its high-rise walkways as barren as the rest of the City on Sundays.

In 1956, Alison and Peter Smithson wrote an article entitled as “An Alternative to the Garden City Idea” for Architectural Design. They were the ones who developed the concept of “streets in the air” in early 1950s but in this case, the alternative they were proposing was “an abolition of planning as we know it.” The article has a series of diagrams, indicating ‘mobility,’ ‘cluster,’ ‘growth,’ ‘re-assessment,’ and so forth. They wrote: “…municipal pre-planning cannot create the form of a new community. Form is generated, in part, by response to existing form, and in part, by response to the Zeitgeist of the time – which cannot be pre-planned.” You can see why Jencks, advocating adhocism, liked Smithsons’ work.

What would, however, Jane Jacobs have said of Smithsons’ idea? I doubt very much that she would have approved the abolition of planning, for the same reason that Anna Minton is weary today of the non-plan enthusiasts, because, as Minton writes, “[no plan] gives reign to market forces.” Yet what Smithsons were suggesting through this article - taking into account the specificities of the situations at hand, as well as taking care not to destroy the existing communities, being mindful of the new, emergent communities, etcetera - was not, dare I say it, so dissimilar to what Jacobs was alluding to in her book: Smithsons had put the street life at the forefront of the city life, which was in sharp contrast to what Le Corbusier proposed: “Death of the Street” (This is what he had put as a title of one of the chapters in his book Radiant City).

In practical terms, the high-level walkways were very difficult to implement. Large-scale restructuring of towns and cities was financially not viable. It also presented problems where original streets were still thriving. No one liked their familiar streets bulldozed senselessly no matter how noble the plans were. The project in the City was soon abandoned. And because of their piecemeal state, the high level walkways in the City were never properly used: most led nowhere and those that did lead somewhere were shunned by pedestrians if there were other, easier alternatives.

Elsewhere, Jane Jacobs discusses the “disneyfication of our neighbourhoods.” Our neighbourhoods have become sterilized, homogenized, and devoid of vitality, Jacobs writes. We are increasingly in less control of our cities. How does the South Bank fare in this context? Does it still possess the feel of what Smithsons were aiming for in their schemes such as Sheffield University and Berlin Haubstadt, namely, “the open aesthetic for open society,” both of which have been credited as the major influence over the design of the South Bank? Is it now so hopelessly commercialized that the original goodwill has all but evaporated?

We must not forget what the area was like before the Southbank Centre came into being. The new design opened the riverside up to the public, although the access to it was not simply ‘given’ to us. We were encouraged to discover it in our own adhoc ways. Unfortunately, some of this ‘openness’ has been eroded in more recent years. If you visit the Southbank Centre website, it tells you that “the stretch of land along the South Bank is privately owned,” and consequently, “photography and filming using tripods are not allowed on the premise without prior permission.”

Cities are the place of discovery and transformation. It’s where people - young and old, urban and suburban, domestic and foreign – migrate to, hoping to make something of themselves. Openness, diversity, conviviality and safety are the essential qualities that pertain to the vitality of our cities. Small, incremental ‘interventions’ of the recent years at the South Bank certainly have helped to keep those qualities intact. The most effective ones, such as the skateboard park underneath the QEH, have been spontaneous, owning much to the ‘looseness’ - or in Jencks’ word, the ‘adhoc-ness’ - of its original design.

What the South Bank displays is a struggle for a better future. We must cherish and nourish it because the essence of a great city is embodied in it. On the Archigram’s archival website, there is a newspaper clipping, which one of the members (N.B. the younger members of the architects responsible for the Southbank Centre had joined Archigram) must have kept, with a quote about the Southbank Centre enthusiastically marked in red pen. It reads: “We would like to see flats and cinemas on the South Bank too, so that it becomes alive; a place where people live and enjoy themselves in different ways, rather than just a cultural centre.” Let’s hope that the Southbank Centre can keep its doors open through whatever transformation it may face in the future.

Bibliography:

Bradley, Simon. “Walking in the Air” in Pevsner Architectural Guides. London: Twentieth Century Society, 2001.

Brown, Neave. “40 years of the Hayward - Relishing the challenge” in Building Design 1817. London: 02 May 2008.

Designing the future of the South Bank. London: Academy Editions, 1994.

Finch, Robert. “Wonders and blunders” in The Guardian. London: 24 May 2004.

Greater London Council. South Bank Arts Centre, GLC : Royal Festival Hall, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Hayward Gallery. London : Greater London Council, 1976.

Gunn, Simon. “The Buchanan Report, Environment and the Problem of Traffic in 1960s Britain” in 20th Century British History Vol. 22 Issue 4. Oxford: Oxford University Press, December 2011.

Hebbert, Michael. “The City of London Walkway Experiement” in Journal of the American Planning Association Vol 59, No. 4. Chicago, IL: Autumn 1993.

Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. London: Pimlico, 2000.

Jencks, Charles. “Adhocism on the South Bank” in Architectural Review Vol. 144. London: July 1968.

Landau, Royston. New Directions in British Architecture. London: Studio Vista, 1968.

Le Corbusier. The Radiant City. London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1967.

Minton, Anna. Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the Twenty-first Century City. London: Penguin Books, 2009.

Moor, Rowan. “The London River Park: place for the people or a private playground?” in The Observer. London: 13 November 2011.

Mullins, Charlotte. A festival on the river : the story of Southbank Centre. London: Penguin, 2007.

Powers, Alan. “40 years of the Hayward - Relishing the challenge” in Building Design 1817. London: 02 May 2008.

Saints, Andrew. “Obituaries: Sir Hubert Bennett” in The Guardian. London: 23 December 2000.

Smithson, A. and P. Smithson. “An Alternative to the Garden City Idea” in Architectural Design. London: July 1956.

The Architects’ Journal Information Library. London: 10 July 1968.

At night, On this day… I suppose you don’t get many...

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 22:38:00 +0000

At night, On this day…

I suppose you don’t get many poems here on tumblr.

I like writing poems every now and then. I like the feeling of completeness. Couldn’t be simpler.

I thought I share the latest ones with you. Poems for Friday - hey, why not?

The two poems I present here are not really related to one another but I wrote them on the same day. I also think that poems about day and night kind of belong to each other.

Enjoy!

This is a rambling on what it means to have style. The world is...

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 22:50:00 +0000

This is a rambling on what it means to have style.

The world is divided into two halves: those who have style and those who haven’t. It’s black and white for me. There is no fuzzy bit in the middle. The division goes across class, religion, gender, nationality and age. In another word, you can be filthy rich and have no style, or you can be poor but have style. You can be male and have style or be female and have no style. You can also be Japanese and still have no style!

It’s also important to remember that no one is born with style. You must acquire it. This is the critical difference with other types of divisions, such as class, religion, nationality, which unfortunately are all given at birth. Moreover, style is not inherited. So even if your parents had style, you yourself may not necessarily possess it. Not yet, I should say, because you may, one day. It is more a matter of choice.

Children naturally do not have style. They can’t. They are too young. Teenagers, very rarely, indeed. Style comes with a certain maturity, it requires both emotional and intellectual integrity. You can’t just copy someone else’ style. It’s about knowing yourself, knowing what suits you, what tickles you most, and making a statement about that. That knowing takes time.

In fact, it is not dissimilar to fine wine. It needs ripening, a rupture of some kind, a struggle even. A designer with style spends a long time thinking about what he/she designs. A fashion student with style spends a long time thinking about what he/she wears. Having financial security does help because that means you can free up some head space to think about such things, but time is more important. Neither a commercial success nor celebrity status will bring style, in fact, they may actually hinder it. Whether or not you are a famous architect or a senior designer, if you do not have the kind of maturity that goes with fine wine, you may still very much lack style.

Having style is not at all about having a large ego. That is the interesting thing about people with style. You cannot be self-obsessed and have style, because you have to think about others. You need audience. What kind of statement are you making? You must be able to de-clutter the junk in your head before you can have a clarity of vision that goes with style.

See the picture above, for example. That bag with a zip at the bottom of it was what got me started thinking about what it means to have style…Why would a person design such a bag? And why would a person buy such a bag? What annoys me is the mindlessness that went into the production & the possession of it…I felt strongly that I needed to write about this.

Am i being harsh? I tell you, the world would be a much better place if we had more people with style…

I made a contribution to a new online magazine called...

Mon, 07 Nov 2011 22:11:00 +0000

I made a contribution to a new online magazine called Architecture in Development. This website is “a new architecture platform and a community to share information, knowledge and creativity about architecture and sustainable development.” I tweaked my original text on Takasugi-an by Terunobu Fujimori for this website and put some images up. I hope to add a bit more to this page (about the city itself, for example). Check it out…

Air as Architecture Lecture - Discussion

Sun, 23 Oct 2011 10:13:00 +0100

“where a journey - physical or spiritual - is fraught with protocol and ritual, overlaid and constrained by social standing. This is the inconsistency I was trying to indicate…”

I think your alluding to a dialectical perception of freedom. As Zygmunt Bauman argues, freedom does not exist as a universal condition but as a relational condition within a social structure. Following that all societies and cultures have necessitated restrictive practices to allow for varying degrees of freedom.

But I think it is more a question of attitude(s) found in aspects of Japanese culture rather than anything overly comprehensive.

In the 1983 film Sans Soleil there is some beautiful commentary describing a ceremony held at Ueno Zoo in memory of animals that had died during the year.

“I’ve heard this sentence: “The partition that separates life from death does not appear so thick to us as it does to a Westerner.” What I have read most often in the eyes of people about to die is surprise. What I read right now in the eyes of Japanese children is curiosity, as if they were trying—in order to understand the death of an animal—to stare through the partition.”

*Above comment has been submitted by bauhauswives

Air as Architecture Lecture - Discussion This is a new section I...

Sat, 22 Oct 2011 11:03:00 +0100

Air as Architecture Lecture - Discussion

This is a new section I have created in the hope of sparking off a pubic discourse about Japanese architecture. I am starting here with what Robert Torday has to say about the question he raised after my lecture regarding the contradiction or the “inconsistency” found in Japanese architecture. He raises an important point. Read on:

So - I think my point was this - your fascinating talk touched on the theme of an essentially ‘porous’ architectural ethos intended to be transformative and inherent in traditional Japanese society, stretching back over the centuries. Physical boundaries were deliberately blurred, or absent, perhaps to imbue in the traveller a sense of life as essentially transient, ethereal - the empty rooms at the long temple/shrine you used an illustration being a case in point. While I admire and am intrigued by this notion of absent architecture, I find the idea somewhat at odds with my perhaps misinformed perception of traditional Japanese society/culture, which to the outsider, despite the ad hoc espousal of Western values, seems intrinsically hierarchical and formal. Have you read de Waal’s ‘Hare with the Amber Eyes’? The essence of the book being a collection of netsuke, patiently fashioned over years by craftsmen with exquisite skill and taste, emblematic objects that although small and fragile are also strong, assuming a beauty through their considered detail and practical application. Emblematic in that they seem to capture a more general ethos of private, immutable study and contemplation that runs through all Japanese thought and society, with its compartmentalised perspectives, where a journey - physical or spiritual - is fraught with protocol and ritual, overlaid and constrained by social standing. This is the inconsistency I was trying to indicate, rather clumsily perhaps, on the night of your talk.

In other words, is the ethereal / airy nature of traditional Japanese architecture a conspiracy - a piece of subtle trickery to lull the pilgrim or explorer into a false sense of fluid movement or progress, when in fact real life was specifically designed to impede mobility through an impenetrable maze of social proprieties - from the Imperial family downward?

In a few days, I would like to put my response up. But please feel free to post your comments here…

Photo credit: Ayako Iseki

Great lecture tonight! Very entertaining.

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 10:27:38 +0100

Thanks for coming!

Lecture: Air as Architecture Considering that my lecture clashed...

Sun, 16 Oct 2011 22:11:00 +0100

Lecture: Air as Architecture

Considering that my lecture clashed with Rem Koolhaas’ book launch taking place at the same building in the same evening (sorry, Rem, for not making your do!), as well as that my lecture room was tucked away on the 4th floor, where only two of the four main lifts could get up to (why?), we had a fantastic turnout of people last Monday.

For those of you who came to my lecture, thank you for coming. For others, I will give your a taster here. This is one of the photos I showed that evening - it’s a view out of Okoshikake or “Waiting Bench,” one of several garden huts found in the famous garden of Katsura Imperial Villa. Notice how the stepping stones that lead up to it do not stop at its threshold but continue on right through it and out. …These stones, in other words, whip us into motion.

This is just one example amongst many in which architecture is used to keep us moving in Japan, by circulating air through it, and ultimately transforming us, the users, in the process. One question was raised after my lecture, however, asking whether or not there was an inherent contradiction in Japanese architecture, as there was a move to keep it open and porous, whilst, at the same time, all the more efforts were made to try contain it and keep it locked away. I don’t think I managed to sufficiently explain then, but what I can say is this: the transformation that is expected to take place through the traditional Japanese spatial rendition - the journey through space as well as time - is still very much a prescribed one and I don’t see them as being necessarily contradictory; both are ways to exert and maintain some kind of control on our bodies and minds. In the modern era, we see all together different trends emerging but we should still consider what kind of control is being exerted and maintained.

…I think I could do a whole course on this - anyone interested in developing it with me?

Photo credit: Yoshiharu Matsumura

In less than a month’s time, I will be giving a lecture at...

Tue, 20 Sep 2011 14:36:00 +0100

In less than a month’s time, I will be giving a lecture at the Barbican on history of Japanese architecture from the perspective of…well, air. I’m hoping that it would be an entertaining evening, nothing too academic, as I flip the Japanese architect Junya Ishigami’s idea of “Architecture as Air,” which is currently on show at the Curve, and explore, instead, “Air as Architecture.”

My article on Tadao Ando’s House in Sri Lanka is published...

Tue, 20 Sep 2011 14:15:00 +0100

My article on Tadao Ando’s House in Sri Lanka is published on Dezeen. The text has been replenished with lots of unpublished anecdotes that you might enjoy reading about. I was fortunate enough to actually visit it. (BTW you have to scroll down quite a bit to get to the beginning of my text.)

I am one of the eleven participants from MA Architectural...

Wed, 07 Sep 2011 21:54:00 +0100

I am one of the eleven participants from MA Architectural History course to be in this year’s MArch + MA Exhibition 2011 at the UCL Bartlett. We have made a cool pamphlet that you can take home and read the bits from our essays and reports. Here is a little taster for you. Lots of great stuff to titillate your neurons, perfect for bed-time reading!

I am uploading here a section of what Professor Iain Borden had to say about our texts in the afterword of our pamphlet:

These texts by the graduates of the MA Architectural History programme cover an extraordinary range of subjects, ranging from buildings, construction elements and materials to discourses, representations and ideas. […] And while focusing their historical lens primarily on the last two centuries, they go back much further whenever necessary […] What we end up with, therefore, is not so much a set of answers – although there is of course much of value to be learned here – but a set of interpretations, speculations and challenges as to the way we understand architecture, produce architecture and experience architecture today. These graduates ask not only “how was it in the past?” but also “how might it be in the present (and future)?”

If any of you are coming to the opening party on 27th September (starting at 6PM), be sure to tap me on the shoulder and say hello!

MArch + MA Exhibition 2011

Tuesday 27th September - Saturday 1st October 2011
Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, Wates House, 22 Gordon Street, London, WC1H 0QB

MArch Urban Design
MArch Architectural Design
MA Architectural History

Opening Party Tuesday September 27th at 18:00 at Wates House

Opening Times:
Tuesday 18:00 - 21:00
Wednesday - Friday 10:00 - 18:00
Saturday 10:00 - 16:00

My Article on Tadao Ando’s House in Sri Lanka for the...

Fri, 29 Jul 2011 16:52:00 +0100

My Article on Tadao Ando’s House in Sri Lanka for the Sunday Telegraph’s supplement magazine, Stella. I hardly recognized my own text, as it has been through the editorial mill. Still, I’m putting it up on my blog. (dezeen has published a version that is more faithful to my original text)

My article on The Cat House by Key Operation Inc. is published...

Thu, 23 Jun 2011 13:39:00 +0100

My article on The Cat House by Key Operation Inc. is published on Dezeen. Akira Koyama of Key Operation and I met working years ago at David Chipperfield Architects. Here our paths cross again, virtually.

I’m working backwards in time…here is the link to...

Tue, 21 Jun 2011 11:34:00 +0100

I’m working backwards in time…here is the link to the talk / symposium I participated with the Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto and others in 2010. It was organised by Architecture Foundation in relation to the Future Beauty exhibition at the Barbican. One of the most interesting comments made during the evening was by Fujimoto who said that Issey Miyake incorporated air into design, which possibly made his work very Japanese. I found a detailed review of the evening here.

Sophie Hicks (who is sitting next to me) and I actually made quite a contrast that evening because I was wearing a Mina Perhonen’s dress, which was black, thin & transparent, while Sophie’s Comme des Garçons gown from the 80s was white, very thick and well padded!

Here is my review of the talk Kazuyo Sejima, one half of SANAA,...

Fri, 17 Jun 2011 19:01:00 +0100

Here is my review of the talk Kazuyo Sejima, one half of SANAA, gave at the Royal Institution, which took place last year. I had never met her before this but having spotted her cuffing away her fag outside the building before the lecture, I went up to her and introduced myself. Sejima said she was nervous about giving a lecture in English. To me, part of the charm of that evening was her broken English!

My review of Tadao Ando’s lecture at the Royal Institution...

Wed, 08 Jun 2011 10:25:00 +0100

My review of Tadao Ando’s lecture at the Royal Institution last week. After the lecture, I heard an elderly couple (I wonder who they were…) discussing how they were impressed with Ando’s sense of humour. I realised then that the general perception of Ando has been that he is a moody architect, with ferocious tantrums. I find him rather amusing, especially with his Osaka dialect. At 70, he appears incredibly youthful. Perhaps you lot (by that, I mean, ‘young’ architects) should take up some boxing to keep up with him?