On the Villa Le Lac website the historic photographs of this house are really photos of his parents at the house, rather than in the tradition of architectural photos devoid of human life.

There was a previous house built for his parents in Le Chaux-de-Fonds, in which he worked from 1915 to 1919 – Villa Jeanneret-Perret, also known as Maison Blanche, his first independent project. He was 25. It is said that Villa Jenneret-Perret broke from the prevalent art nouveau styles of the region — a fluid nature-based movement nearing the end of its era. Le Corbusier as a student of Auguste Perret in Paris (classicism in concrete) and Peter Behrens in Berlin (Werkbund industrial processes) brought these more robust qualities to the Maison Blanche.

In 1919, while Le Corbusier was still Charles-Édouard Jeanneret and working from and sharing Maison Blanche with his parents, he and Amédée Ozenfant produced the Manifesto of Purism, a critique of Cubism which they felt was too decorative. In painting, Purist objects were elementary forms without detail, clear assemblages of shapes: industrial parts (viz. Ferdinand Léger, a Purist companion of Jeanneret and Ozenfant), bottles, planes, objects without shadows or narrative. These plain, undecorated qualities were what Le Corbusier brought to his postwar architecture, starting with three houses built in 1923.

One of the consequences of the removal of decoration and detail in architecture was the removal of the clutter of furniture in favour of built in cupboards, shelves, appliances and tables. Paintings were either frameless or absent, replaced by full painted walls. No curtains, these were eventually replaced by Le Corbusier’s famous exterior brise-soleils. No layers of window frames, moulding and hardware, just sheets of glass set in fine metal channels. It was revolutionary, getting rid of everything extraneous for the freedom of a life lived in open spaces without reference to the conflicted past.

Ken Frampton in almost every one of his lectures pointed out that the Frankfurt School was a reaction to the industrialisation of war, specifically WWII and its mass destruction in Europe: an atrophying civilisation had brought the world to such a pass. But this might have been a continuation of earlier reactions to the carnage of WWI. Jeanneret, Ozenfant and Léger’s manifesto was just one of many others – anti-hierarchical, anti-historical, showing pre-war conventions to be both lethally trivial and toothless. An architecture of simplicity, egalitarianism and modern building technology was called for.

The 1923 Maisons La Roche et Jeanneret are said, according to the worldheritage.org site, to be the first expression of Purism in architecture. These are two houses, semi-detached, one for the wealthy bachelor art collector M. La Roche, the other for a couple with three children. Similar houses, but the gallerist has a bow-front gallery attached at right angles to the basic long 3-storey 2-unit block, visually controlling the sideyard. These slightly pre-date Villa Savoye, but with a more humanistic programme – a basic housing unit to accommodate all needs and desires, infinitely replicable on narrow plots in urban settings.

While I’m sure that these early villas are discussed from many angles in many Le Corbusier studies, my main sources for basic descriptions and images of these early villas come from the Fondation Le Corbusier, and World Heritage. The Association Villa ‘Le Lac’ Le Corbusier maintains the villa, and develops programs and events at Le Lac, including the exhibition by Renate Buser, which led me to this rather lovely house. The contrary thing that led me here is an angry new book which takes, among other things, Villa Savoye to task. At this hundred-year remove from Le Corbusier’s earliest projects, when he was very young, writing manifestos, building houses for his family, living in a circle of exciting avant-garde artists, I find a freshness that has been eclipsed by his subsequent career. And yet critics and theorists retroactively visit Le Corbusier’s later megalomania on all his work; Villa Savoye’s particular diagrammatic rigour seems to be a touchpaper for critical wrath.

Looking at the photos of Villa Le Lac, I see a happy old couple, perhaps still close to their son, who built them a house considerably less bombastic than the pre-WWI Maison Blanche.

Villa Le Lac at 64m2 was a narrow house (4 x 16m) with a single bay, a prototype for the minimum living space for its occupants. It demonstrated the mainstays of Vers un Architecture published in 1923 (another manifesto): an open floor plan, roof garden and an 11m-long horizontal ribbon window.

Renate Buser, Objets-types. photographs printed on folded aluminum plates. Installed at Villa Le Lac, Corseaux, Switzerland, at Fondation Le Corbusier 29/06/2024 to 27/10/2024.

Renate Buser’s statement about this project:

Part of the process involves taking photos on site. I came several times, in different seasons, at different times of day. It’s very important to discover a space by photographing it. An important phase of the process is returning a second time to find the right spot for each object—where it will work best. What I find interesting here are the constraints imposed by the space. Hanging the pieces is very demanding, and having to use the existing holes in the walls helped define the size of the objects. These constraints proved to be very stimulating and creative.

The reason I chose black and white is because it allows you to tell a story or convey an abstraction, whereas colour is better suited to showing an atmosphere. I often work in black and white: it reveals light well and is more sculptural than colour. Besides, I think it would be counterproductive to work in colour here, given the prominent role of colour in the Villa. With black and white, I create a kind of image transformation – that’s what I find important. I’ve often done large installations (several times in Vevey, in fact) and I’m known for creating gigantic pieces on the facades of buildings and monuments – that’s why I find it interesting to work on a different scale. It’s also an opportunity to talk about grandeur in a different way: you don’t need gigantism to express the magnificent. The formats of the standard objects are adapted to the Villa Le Lac, which is only 64 square metres; and here, we are indeed dealing with something truly magnificent. There’s a concentration of genius in this house; it’s extraordinary. For me, it’s a masterpiece!

Buser’s Objets-types are photographic images on aluminum, interrupted by printed aluminum blades that project out from the surface creating shallow three dimensional spaces lined with images that complicate the planes of the original walls, windows, screens of Villa Le Lac.

As the house is no longer lived in, the artist becomes our informant about how modulations in the open plan are done by opening a window, or the door of a closet, or painting a wall indigo, or ochre. I’m guessing of course, but it is interesting how Buser went small, investigating small disturbances in the air of Villa Le Lac. She seems to have discovered its intimacy, not a word normally associated with Le Corbusier.

The entire exhibition is here: Renate Buser, Objets-types, 2024. It describes Villa Le Lac in great visual detail. Can’t recommend it too highly as I’ve never actually seen the kind of inventive exquisite detail Le Corbusier brought to his work. This is probably as close as I’ll get. It is beautiful.

So why, when I was showing someone my grandfather’s fiddle found in the basement and that I am learning to play (never having had a music lesson in my life before) he wished me good luck with my new hobby, was I shocked? A hobby? no, I don’t see it as a hobby. I’m learning to play the violin. Given that all serious violinists started as very young children, is it because I’m older than seven that it must be a hobby as it can’t possibly be a serious pursuit leading to a professional career in an orchestra? I’m rubbish at the violin, with no ambitions to play in public; it is all purely for pleasure without even the necessary satisfaction.

One damning definition of having is a hobby is to be a tinkerer. This includes tinkering with clocks, as I do, simply to get them to keep time and not gain 30 minutes in 12 hours, as my little 1850s Japy Frères barrel clock was doing after getting it back from a ‘professional’ clock cleaning, for which I paid rather a lot of money. Not going back there, it took 6 months for it to come back with the movement crooked in the case which appears to have been dropped as it is now scarred with serious gouges and is missing a chunk of veneer on the back.

I don’t think what I’m doing is exactly hobby stuff; I’m fixing something, trying to make something right. But the process is so interesting (adult learning, another hobby evidently). Loosening the screws that hold the movement in the case, one is supposed to be able to rotate the whole innards so that 9 and 3 are perfectly level. I was shimming the case up with little stacks of coins until the right side was propped up a fat 1/4” to level the movement so that the tick was even. Vision and hearing are so accurate in measuring fractions of degrees of alignment. A good clockmaker can hear the difference between the tick and the tock and know exactly how out of plumb the pendulum mechanism is.

Anyway, couldn’t move the inside at all, so picked a new (to me) clock repair place and hurtled down MacLeod Trail to a diamonds and watch shop in a very obscure shopping centre where I found a kind and elderly man who comes in to help his son by doing clock and watch repairs. He asked how much I was propping up the right side, unloosened the screws, grasped the front of the clock by its edges, and holding onto the case slowly and with great strength shifted the clock so marginally I didn’t even see it moving. But suddenly the tick was perfect. He had learned watch and clock repair from his grandfather in Tanzania, and when he was still in his teens was chosen to study watchmaking at Longines in Switzerland. Longines arranged for him to come to Canada, and set him up as their representative. He’s 79, has spent his entire life working with beautiful miniscule brass wheels and cogs and tiny springs, and has ended up in Calgary.

Brought the newly levelled clock home found it running very fast. There is an pendulum length adjustment, a Brocot mechanism, that one can access from the front without having to open the back, take the bell out, adjust the pendulum by a nanometer (which is almost impossible – one should never, ever, adjust the pendulum bob itself, something I found out too late), and put it all back in. The Brocot mechanism is adjusted by a horizontal cogged wheel that somehow, this all gets a bit hazy in my mind here, moves the length of the pendulum microscopically. As I’d been doing this adjustment the past few days with no results, spent a chunk of the morning learning all about Brocot springs and such on watch and facebook forums. Now learning what that key was doing, watched to see if my horizontal wheel was actually connected to the Brocot spring. It is! It turned. So in turning it wildly back and forth just to see it move, realised I had no idea where it should be set. So, here, you start again, just seeing how fast or slow the pendulum is, so one can adjust it. Magically, and this truly magic, I’ve run the clock now for two hours and it has only gained a minute. It was totally random where I stopped whizzing the adjustment wheel back and forth, but it seems to have been almost near the right place.

Is this my hobby? I don’t think so. I don’t know enough to even be a tinkerer. I wouldn’t say this event was a pleasure as it is underlaid with fear, but it did give a bit of satisfaction. As a boy, my father looked after all the Victorian clocks in his family, sort of like Thomas in Downton Abbey. Was this a hobby? No, but neither was it a chore, as he liked doing it. It was what he did.

Perhaps this is what has made me think about hobbies. I do not think I have hobbies, I just do things. Is writing a journal a hobby? Evidently it is, according to someone in the wikipedia hobby section flagged as needing additional citations for verification. Is being a wikipedia editor a hobby? Clearly to some of them: one said that knitting was hobby because you could make cosy things like scarves. To a knitter this is simply weird. I knit to get the Margaret Howell sweaters I’d like without paying $900 for them.

There is also the thinking that hobbies are slightly childish, like model airplanes used to be. Born in 1940, my cousin had made so many airplane models that they hung from the ceiling of his bedroom like his own personal Battle of Britain. I once bought a model kit for a Bristol Beaufighter that my father had flown in RAF Coastal Command over Burma in 1943-4. As with that whole generation of boys going off to WWII, he rarely spoke about anything he had seen or done, unless directly asked. I thought we could put this Beaufighter into shape; Dad would have been in his mid-eighties, so I did the kit and he talked about it. It was hilarious; it needed a 13-year old boy with perfect eyesight and tiny fingers to do all the gluing of tiny parts, one of which was a hatch cover behind the cockpit. On one run Dad took a man who had come from London in full Whitehall fig: black frock coat, waistcoat, striped pants, bowler and briefcase, and who stood white-knuckled on the hatch cover clutching the back of the pilot’s seat as they flew from India to the high hill country in Burma to meet with leaders of the hill tribes that Britain wanted to enlist. Dad thought the briefcase was probably full of money; it had happened before. He quibbled with the colour scheme the kit provided: the rondels were okay, they were decals, but the enamels were too bright. I had to make them muddier. I had to give the pilot dark hair and a khaki shirt. He was very funny. This is where a little run at hobby things will take you.

In the middle of the night a couple of days ago, between World Service segments, the CBC overnight programmer played Roger Waters’ Is this the life we really want, from 2017, a long passionate and poetic rant against the new regime that 2016 ushered in. New to me, I looked it up and found the rest of the album which has this cover:

Waters and Columbia Records were sued by Emilio Isgrò, an Italian conceptual artist who has worked with deletions since the mid-1960s, from books, maps, newspapers, bibles, constitutions:

Isgrò is a visual artist, so the works are fairly beautiful as visual patterns, something which co-exists with the un-beautiful, sometimes questionable narratives they attack.

At the other extreme of textual removals are those now done by AI and photoshop (which in the early days of the Epstein files reveal, had unexpectedly had been saved unflattened, allowing the redaction layers to be removed and hidden text revealed). No sight of the human hand, or even human intelligence, just an algorithmic instruction to mechanically block certain words and letters, names and acts. These pages are quite ugly, nothing relieves the fact that words, actions, attestations, codes, jokes, avowals, have been disappeared.

But unlike Chilean poets thrown from airplanes into the sea, redacted files only appear to have been disappeared. All we are seeing are copies blacked out. The originals still exist in supposedly high security cloisters accessible only according to law, or lack of law; we are, after all, still in the age of mechanical reproduction where authenticity of a work seems to be a fact at some level, but not the level at which we operate. We trust photocopies. We trust high-resolution images of original works. Their mere appearance is enough.

The act of redaction is performative, a paper form of knocking down Saddam’s statue. What is being assailed is not the object, but the information the object inadvertently carries. Redaction disturbs because it is clear we are being told an edited narrative. Reporters have always held that they are unaligned, they report the facts. Increasingly they are fact-checkers of a barrage of narratives and lies.

American environmental artist, Mel Chin, in the 1990s looked at American paper money, which visually narrates a story of American progress. He erased most of the elements of this story leaving things that are minor, near invisible pieces of the powerful historical narrative that is the USA.

Last September, 2025, Banksy sprayed a mural protesting the UK government’s ban of Palestine Action by listing it as a terrorist group. Banksy’s authentication factor is an image posted on Instagram; the mural is composed of paint soaking into its substrate, in this case the limestone of the Royal Courts of Justice. The mural was promptly removed, leaving a stain of the original much more frightening — the stuff of nightmares. The redaction reveals more than the original did.

This is how we must view redaction, as by its very nature revealing truths hidden away on original documents. Redactions do not give any details, but reveal the shape of the crime. Imagination takes over.

Jenny Holzer has a large body of redaction paintings from the 2000s that examine redacted government documents from the War on Terror. Joshua Craze, a one-time On Site review contributor, wrote (not for us) about how Holzer’s work on these documents reveals the ‘negative equation’ between state power and the processes that sustain that power. These processes are concrete, material, embodied practices that produce, literally, tons of paper: typeset, typed, hand-written, crossed out, stamped, okayed, dated, scribbled over, folded, torn and filed.

Another Zelensky, another time: Isaac Zelensky, a loyal Bolshevik apparatchik in Uzbekistan, was shot in 1938 and subsequently, forcefully erased from all pictures. Alexander Rodchenko, artist, photographer, poet, complied with a messy blob of black paint, less disturbing perhaps than the total erasure of Nikolai Yezhov, People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs in 1939, from all pictures of him.

David King, in his 2014 book The Commissar Vanishes: the falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin’s Russia, quotes Hannah Arendt on the vulnerability of factual truth, using the example of ‘the role during the Russian Revolution of Leon Trotsky, who appears in none of the Soviet Russian history books’. In the famous 1919 photograph of Lenin leaning into the headwinds on the second anniversary of the October Revolution, Trotsky was standing just in front of Lenin. By 1967 when the photograph was published, Trotsky had been airbrushed away, disappeared.

This is redaction in action, the narration of alternative truths.

Had always thought fondly of Rodchenko, who made this photograph of the famously beautiful writer, Lily Brik, lover of Vladimir Mayakovsky, wife of Osip Brik and central participant of the Russian avant-garde which existed roughly from 1910-1930. Passion and commitment inspires such fear in power that it has to be disappeared. It is an old story.

The first architectural job I had as a student was with a small firm of three AA graduates with very good connections. I spent one summer with Charles Lawrence measuring, triangulating walls and corners, and drawing up two Georgian buildings, Grices 1798 wharf and granary in Rotherhithe, way before the area became unrecognisably redeveloped. This was 1974; Rotherhithe was full of working warehouses, artists, pubs and guerilla theatre companies, with an improbable 1950s small 3-storey council estate down the road. I rode my bike there every morning from Chelsea to industrial East London along the river, past spice warehouses, mechanics yards, schools and street markets. The wharf was not a dock, but a three-storey building that went straight into the Thames. New bylaws had stipulated that any windows within a minimum distance above high tide had to be 12inch-thick glass. Glass as masonry. Everything I measured was stone and brick, cast iron and very old timber, much from ships.

The granary and wharf were officially derelict; the buildings needed to be made sound, up to code, services installed; that was our part. The film producer, whose project this was, would do all the rest. Sand’s Films, a small very prolific production company moved into the granary with costume stores, library, a small theatre, labs and workshops, and is there still.

I don’t remember much of it now, but I do remember the open wood shutters, sun slanting in through golden dusty air, the sweet smell of the empty granary. The streets outside were dark, sooted, the road very narrow, overhead gangways connected warehouses to wharves. In the early 1970s it was an old, quiet, dirty part of London: something quite marvellous. I loved being there, I loved the mathematics of surveying a non-orthogonal building, nothing ever quite square, locating the windows and corners with exacting triangulation, getting the survey drawings to work out.

This was a conservation project: the conserving of the material and formal qualities of the building. This is its description as a Grade II listed building: ‘original internal structure divided by brick party walls into 3 units. Timber floors and posts, reinforced on ground floor with timber hanging knees. Queen post roof. ‘

I’ve been reading Fred Scott’s On Altering Architecture, published in 2007, but worked on a long time. He once showed a memorable photo of an auto mechanic’s bay in Italy, cars on hoists in a beautiful, grubby, vaulted, frescoed bit of building whose original function had long been superseded. This example of the occupation of previous architectures was part of a longer study of restoration, reconstruction and renovation of buildings.

Sometimes buildings must be altered simply to preserve them; sometimes preservation leads to restoration. Scott, whose interest is in alteration rather than restoration gives these rough definitions: alteration is a kind of low vernacular, needs must. Restoration is a fundamentally intellectual undertaking — the original in all its detail, even if absent, must be researched and rebuilt. It produces an image of the original building, which through the very processes of restoration is no longer original. Preservation conserves original materials as they stand — a guarantee of authenticity, and that when made evident allows further renovation with a clear conscience. Scott’s proposal is that there is an esprit to an original building that provides, tout court, the direction for alteration, even if the original is completely overwhelmed. Any changes respond directly to the original, positively or negatively, for better or worse, for political opportunity or as a bulwark against change.

And then came news in early January of the opening to the public of the restored Bromley house in which David Bowie, then Davy Jones, lived from 1955 to 1968. This is a curated restoration by conservation architects Julian Harrap to an exact version of 1963, when David Bowie was 16, removing a lot of later renovations and filling it with era-correct kitchen fittings, furniture, wallpaper and posters of Little Richard. His bedroom, 9’ x 10’, ‘will offer an immersive experience for visitors’ writes Laura Snapes in a review. Well, not a review, more of a report, in The Guardian. This falls absolutely into Fred Scott’s description of restoration — an intrinsically intellectual undertaking, materially and temporally correct: a state which may never have existed. Ruskin would have called this the destruction, with false description of the thing destroyed, in this case by ‘incorrect’ 1970s vernacular alterations practical at the time, as vandalism.

There is something very odd about this project which presents the material and architectural facts of a boy’s life in the 1960s as the key to his subsequent fame, This project has a £500,000 grant and has started a public fundraising campaign. Why so much money? Conservation architect Julian Harrap who previously worked on Sir John Soane’s House and Pitshanger Manor will restore the house. Marsh, the curator of this project says, ‘One’s got to be really careful because there may be evidence of things like the wallpaper and paint colours buried under the modern decorations. Before any stripping out starts, there’s going to be an investigation looking at all that.’

Yes, okay. It will be exact as can be. Ruskin felt that the closer the copy, the greater the deception. Again, why do this? Marsh states, ‘The house will host creative and skills workshops for young people, inspired by Bowie’s Beckenham branch of the Arts Lab movement and run by the trust’s Proud Places scheme, which has involved more than 10,000 young Londoners in local heritage projects. ‘It’s not just aimed at being a memorial to David’s extraordinary creativity.’

I would say that Bowie’s extraordinary creativity is being vandalised by this project. A radically different spirit — the spirit of 2025, quite patronising — makes it a new building which has little to do with the Bowie of Dark Star, or with his support of the Arts Lab. As expensive as it will be, it seems intellectually and emotionally cheap.

The restoration of culturally significant buildings is very dependent on cultural politics: no longer palaces or stately homes, in 2025 it is a humble council house on an anonymous street that happened to have a star shoot through it in 1963. Subsequent alterations were, in retrospect, heresy. Full material and structural restoration is called for. Time must stop. We could be heroes just for one day.

I’m not through reading Fred Scott, it is dense and interesting and gives me lots to think about. He has an interesting analysis of Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye from the late 1950s, derelict, grey and overgrown, to its restoration where it became white and pristine and bare.

Then he moves to Les Quartiers Modernes Fruges, Pessac, near Bordeaux, 1926, building out the promise of modernity — that simple rules, common materials and mass production were the basis for progress and beauty.

Scott writes: The houses at Pessac were Le Corbusier’s first chance to try out the implication of mass-producing elements of the house, ‘derived from the purification of standard forms’. ‘The basic component in Pessac which was determined by the standardised design was a cell measuring 5 x 5 metres, which could be broken down into smaller units of 5 x 2.50 metres. The whole estate was built on this basis. Each house accommodates 6, 8, 9 or 10 cells, depending on its size.’ In fact the walls were made in situ but they were designed as a prototype for factory production, […] a simulation or play.

The sense at the time was that these were ‘gifts of genius to the people to do as they wish with them’. The debate about this experiment was that the architectural impulse itself would preclude any colloquial adaptations or changes. Of course, within these stringent rules, residents were going to make them livable, homey, friendly and the alterations that did happen were considered heretical. Scott says that time itself is the architect, that the anonymous continuity of alterations is folkloric, vernacular, something beyond the reach of the critic, even if it results in a diminution of the original architecture.

I like this very much, this thinking (so far, I’m only on chapter 2, (had to stop to finish On site 48: building materials). Alterations are a response to exigency, rather than to sentiment; there is little heroic in their ambitions which is not to say they cannot be exciting, revolutionary or significant. There is a democracy of space and materials, form and control which puts the original architectural impulse into a specific time and place, which inevitably evolves.

How odd it is coming across a word never seen before, looking it up and thinking you’d never use it, when occasions to use it suddenly pop up everywhere. One could certainly apply it to a lot of people in the news right now. However, I found this fairly vertiginous painting in my files for colours and thought immediately of the decadence of the Gilded Age which some in America are now busily re-constructing.

Reluctant to start with Repose, but want to get it out of the way. One might say J W Alexander was an epigone to James McNeil Whistler, and a comparison of these two paintings shows perhaps why I feel this way. J W Alexander was born the year Whistler painted Symphony in White No.3, below, so was in the post-Whistler generation of American impressionists. The rather lascivious woman in Repose is desire in a white dress that looks like bedding; all lines tilt to the centre of such desire. Being a woman is irrelevant, the model herself is irrelevant; this is about the painter’s fantasy of seduction and access. It is one of a long history of Odalisques.

I don’t get this feeling with Whistler perhaps because he was the better painter. Newly bohemian, he painted the girl he eventually did not marry, Joanna Hiffernan, on the left. There are three Symphony in Whites, still Joannas standing simply, or as here, lying around on a very hot day. The lines refuse to centre, arms lead away and land calmly, without import. The two diagonals, the arm propping up a head, and the arm resting on a bent leg, enclose the space between the two figures, a very still void. This is a pair of girls and a painting at rest.

The next generation on from J W Alexander is John Singer Sargent: again, a girl lying in a heap on a hot day. This is his niece, Rose-Marie Ormond, in a fast watercolour sketch. While all lines of the skirt rush up to her waist and are picked up by the trim on the bodice up to her face, it is her face that stops all action, all thought. The pose is inviting, the face is not. It is very hot out.

J W Anderson’s white dress is a fortress to be breached. Whistler’s white dresses were elements in an abstract composition. Sargent’s white dress was, I suspect, a sketch of light and shadows on white. The women are the vehicles for something else.

The same year that Sargent painted Rose-Marie Ormond in a field of flowers with a parasol and a charming hat, other women also dressed in white with beautiful hats and bunches of flowers at their waists, were marching in protest during the coronation of King George V. The photograph above is not a painting, not constructed for or by the male gaze whatever its motives; this documents what women born in the nineteenth century actually looked like. The white dress is the great leveller, worn by women of all classes at the time: it could be washed, bleached, starched and ironed; it was a summertime garment of linen or cotton; it was clean and tidy. Did it stand for purity as is often claimed? or did it present a refusal, something much more silent, more powerful: a declaration of women’s latent solidarity.

What is it about white paintings? They have an extremely limited range, really just light and shadow and sometimes accidental marks. The two here, by Alison Watt who details at a huge scale the seductive folds of rumpled clothing, and Rosalie Gasgoine who collected abandoned road signs and scraps of boxes as her painting material, are both working with white surfaces that withhold easy engagement.

We could, I suppose, call these works of the female gaze, but I’m not sure that women, of which I am one, gaze. Rather they seem to inspect, to register, to look at materials at hand, even colour, not as simulacra of desire, but as material.

I’m not being definitive here, or making a thesis from a handful of images, but on this day these images have made me consider how much has been imputed to innocuous white fibre, how much opprobrium has been heaped upon it, how its very opacity allows it to be coloured with desire and sensuality, and at the same time to be tarred with racism. Once, in a University of Texas graduate seminar in American Studies, in the 1990s a hegemonic discipline if there ever was one, one of the other students after I’d probably said something unforgivably naïve, scoffed “huh, even your name is white”. I found this very confusing as, being literal and Canadian, thought well yes, my name is White. It sort of hadn’t occurred to me before. I’ve never really known what he meant. Perhaps he thought it clever and had stored it up to use. Making his mark.

Following a word and an image has taken me quite far away into unexpected and once-beautiful places now underlaid with unease. They seem, but are not, unrelated* to the epigones papering the white house. Ha! A new and useful word.

* That is a litote, a double negative to reinforce a positive. I learned this from Linda Just when we were editing her beautiful essay on books for On Site review 40: the architect’s library. My education in such things is so woeful.

1 paratactic writing: rapid fire syllables and thoughts, the style of Gertrude Stein. Paratactic sounds rather like war, which is perhaps what all writing is.

2 In Josephine Quinn’s review in LRB 14 August 2025 of Paul J Kosmin’s The Ancient Shore published in November 2024, I discovered the phrase ‘blue humanities’, the human relationship with oceans, rivers, lakes and seas which is now recognised as one of the important foundations of civilisation. Much of Kosmin’s book discusses the ancients, from Alexander’s exploration and conquest of the known world from the Aegean east to India, followed by what is known as the Seleucid Era and the conquest of Babylon. With my woefully under-detailed Canadian education and marginally professional training which pushed us to be random autodidacts, I know almost nothing about any of this. But it is there in Homer, in Ovid, in the Ptolemaic empires of the Red Sea, explorations histories of land and conquest and occupation.

In Pat Barker’s trilogy, The Silence of the Girls, 2018, The Women of Troy, 2021 and The Voyage Home, 2024, the women of Achilles’ army retell their parts of The Illiad. Theirs is a claustrophobic existence in ships and army camps on the beaches, where women, especially royal women (the others are slaves) are traded and given as gifts to the hero of the day. They live in tents and stone buildings, wooden huts for seemingly years; never secure, nothing their own, yet forming a substrata of alliance and influence, defiance and manipulation, much of which takes place in dark passages, hot rooms, banquet tables wrecked by warriorly drunkenness. These spaces do not cohere; they are fragmentary and elusive.

I thought of this while reading about The Ancient Shore as possibly one of the aspects of the infrastructure of the shoreline as a site of war and trade. And then thought of the human relationship to oceans, rivers, lakes and seas as particular to that interstitial condition, commanded by weather, by hinterlands, by tides and maritime vessels. Boats and ships sail, and dock, somewhere. The dock, the pier, the container port, the sandy beach: these are all constructions that mediate between water and land, war and trade. Migratory routes transcend borders, only registering at frontiers: a border crossing is a metaphorical landing site. It can be open or policed, marked by reefs, by walls, by surveillance as humans cross from one state to another, from land to sea; sea to land. These borders are marked by mangrove swamps, seaweed and kelps, reefs of coral and shipwrecks, by crumbling cliffs, by beach encampments. Spaces that do not always cohere; under many kinds of threat, they are as fragmentary and elusive, as the camps of Achilles.

3

In an essay by Edwin F Ackerman in NLR Sidecar, 05 Dec 2025, I learned that Claudia Sheinbaum’s Moreno government has committed to the construction of 1.1 million homes over six years, many built through the Institute of the National Housing Fund for Workers, previously primarily a mortgage lender’ [rather like Canada’s CMHC], predicting ‘600,000 construction jobs annually’. This is a commitment, not yet a fait accompli. Even better, ‘homes cost between $35,000-$60,000, with zero-interest loans available to workers earning up to twice the minimum wage, and priority access given to underserved populations’. This is happening without significant economic growth and not fuelled by debt — instead it is a budget restructuring and increased tax collection; a reformulation of the relationship between state and market, ‘freeing Mexico’s economy from its subordinate status in transnational circuits of capital without abandoning global markets tout court.’

As Ackerman describes it,

‘with government as market creator rather than passive regulator, the idea is that the state will actively shape Mexico’s economic direction through mission-oriented targets while deploying ‘patient capital’ in strategic sectors. Rather than merely correcting market failures, the aim is for the Mexican state to establish new markets through public procurement guarantees and infrastructure investments that will ‘crowd in’ private capital.’

Is this not also the thinking behind Mark Carney’s list of nation building projects? And is not the mistrusted MOU with the Alberta government over a northern route from the oil sands to Pacific tidewater one possibly disastrous consequence of advertising public infrastructure investments to entice private capital?

But back to the 1.1million dwelling units costing $35,000-60,000, in six years . These are not Canadian numbers. It seems astounding. Does it have something to do with Canadian cultural over-expectation of what a sufficient dwelling unit is? If we refer back to Elemental, a miscellanea post of a couple of years ago, would this work here? Habitat for Humanity insists on sweat equity from the future occupants of their houses. Is this a housing model that balances government procurement, personal investment and a possible crowding in of private capital as three equivalent domains?

In 1947 the National Housing Association, the precursor to Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, published Homes for Canadians, 67 house plans ‘designed especially for Canadian requirements, including prize winners of the Canadian Small House Competition’. (this link takes you to a pdf of the booklet, including all the plans) Most of the houses were around 700 square feet, small, but thousands and thousands were built during the postwar housing crisis. Where I live, a house cannot be smaller than 1000ft2, by bylaw.

4 captious: an ill-natured inclination to find fault; often expressing criticisms about matters that are not important; tending to find fault or raise petty objections.

There is much captious behaviour around these days.

One of the finalists in the Biennial Internacional de Paisatge Barcelona Rosa Barba Prize 2025 is michele&miquel’s Dark Line which rearranges no topography, plants no species, instead provides a 3km walking and cycling platform from which to view the caves, tunnels and walls of a disused railway line that once ran through the Keelung River gorge in Taiwan. The architects’ statement reads ‘we take a clear option: to conserve the post-industrial landscape in all its historical and ecological depth. The fact that a structure that required so much investment has been abandoned to vegetation and bats, its mouth full of silt and rock, expresses the power of changing times.’ The aim here isn’t to improve, or to repair, or to restore an ecology to a pre-industrial state of nature, but to recognise, and value, the original investment in industrial structures now left derelict. Reclaiming that investment with a new program of leisure has, in this case, produced a minimalist structure that touches the earth so lightly that it becomes self-effacing if it weren’t for the quite astounding 3km of construction grade rebar that provides a road surface, seating, walls and signs in a continuous steel ribbon.

This is rebar in its most basic qualities: it bends, it is cheap as steel goes, it can be welded, and when given antioxidant treatment appears to withstand rain.

As reported on various global steel resources sites, Taiwan’s steel sector (13th in the world for export) is challenged by global over-capacity and the instability of trade policies where Taiwan is caught between USA and China, the two competing industrial hegemons. At this time, construction grade rebar, almost certainly recycled steel, is perhaps a domestic resource available in quantity for more innovative uses than burying it in concrete.

There are various construction strategies along the line: this, above, is in the tunnels, where once railway tracks ran on sleepers at ground level, footings have been placed for new rails hovering over the ground that allow a moveable rebar panel-lifting shuttle to run along them, placing the grates as it goes.

It is difficult to see from the images, but the rebar seems to be a consistent guage throughout, with shifts in spacing between each bar depending on function. The deck, for walking and cycling, appears to have a 1:1 spacing giving it a near transparency from some angles, a flat surface from others.

There is such a conceptual simplicity to this project: rebar, land, path. Plus an old railway line fallen into disrepair. It approaches sculpture in its minimalism except that this project has a function as a nature trail. I found just one actual review (not counting this project’s many appearances on design webpages which present the project without commentary) on a bucket list sort of travel site where the only entry said that it doesn’t actually go anywhere, which is not quite true. It is an alternative path between two train stations, and seems to be very popular locally, there being a fitness and nature-loving ethos in Taiwan.

This is why I think this project was quite different from the other finalists in the Rosa Barba Prize shortlist. Its ambitions are different. The past is the armature for the present in a very straightforward way. The project is explained by its designers on their own website and on the Rosa Barba entry in much more detail than I have here. One can see it is a different conversation than the other entry I really liked, the Parco dello Pace, sited on a former airport site. While both re-use defunct industrial installations, Parco della Pace invents new uses and diversions to create a new landscape. Dark Line reveals old uses in an old landscape.

However, I’d like any of the parks chosen for this prize, all models of how to proceed with large tracts of land of little discernable function. Such lands are taken out of circulation; there will be no further exploitation, no more development or financial optimisation.

What other remnants of industrial occupation do we have to repair? — shuttered factories, capped but leaking oil wells, shopping centre parking lots. And what ruderal flora and fauna might spring up, such as the bats in the original Sandiaoling tunnels blasted through the gorge, unlikely to have thrived in the diesel fumes of the railway line, but who discovered the tunnels themselves and are now one of the environmental features of the Dark Line.

The eight finalists for the Rosa Barba Prize 2025 range from a 12.6 ha ‘urban balcony’ in China that connects four residential blocks on a complex and inhospitable site of construction waste landfill, highway and drainage canal, to a 300 acre museum and sculpture park outside Washington DC. My selection of representative images here is unfair; these are large, wonderful projects, every one. I have linked both the text and the images to the full presentations on the COAC site which include drawings, details, process, community consultation and beautiful images. Each one has much to reveal to us.

Xi’an, above, is a city of 13 million, a near incomprehensible scale, to me at least. Urban Balcony Embracing Rewilded Nature brings the scale of an apartment and balcony to a whole district: four apartment blocks with one collective 12.6 hectare balcony. The scale of this is astounding, as with everything to do with China, although it is a much smaller plot of land than the project below. It has the intensity of a scroll drawing where moving through a terrain is not just a spatial experience but also a temporal one. We had an article by about Chinese landscape traditions in On Site review 46, by Vincent Yu-Xin Qiu, where he points out the influence of these traditions on the eighteenth century English Landscape Movement — Repton, Capability Brown and the like, which we often continue to approximate today.

At the other end of the scale, in many senses, is Glenstone’s 122 hectare museum and sculpture park, whose aim is to establish ‘the ability of designed landscapes to engage the public along both cultural and environmental lines'. The landscape design achieves these goals through ‘significant reshaping of the topography, integrating walking paths, bridges, native meadows and restored woodlands’. This description could apply directly to the Urban Balcony which also reshapes the land, has a variety of paths and plazas, meadows and forests. However, the urban balcony is a safety valve in a dense urban situation, Glenstone is a demonstration of a site without pressure.

A project with a very different starting point is the former private estate belonging to Enver Hoxha on Lake Ohrid, Albania, which has been returned to public access and rejoins its larger and public natural context, from wetlands to agriculture. As a private property, it blocked many of the larger environmental systems in its greater environment — river systems, lake access, agricultural management. Increasing public use in what has become a 171 hectare waterscape, Drilon Park, meant that many previously degraded or ignored systems had to be addressed, such as, below, degraded and blocked water and irrigation systems.

In all the projects restoration figures largely: Vicenza (former airport site), Copenhagen (former grass desert in the middle of a 1950s social housing project), Cali (previous scramble through a barrio linked to narcotraffic and a women’s prison): all work to restore community, wildlife systems and social health in degraded urban spaces.

Parco della Pace is a 65 ha. conversion of the former Vicenza airport, adjacent to a military base. Its aspiration is ‘to become a model for future urban parks, capable of actively managing and mitigating the impacts of climate change through nature-based solutions’. Yes, yes, they all say that. This project is also flood mitigation infrastructure: a large detention basin, capable of temporarily storing and slowly releasing up to 100,000 cubic metres of water; a resilient response to 50-year flood events. There is something visually unsentimental here that stands up to its ambition. It takes its visual cues from the industrial history of the site and the defence-scale need for climate-related mitigation, rather than the bucolic precedents of public parks based on the grand private estates of history.

The 20 ha. Grønningen-Bispeparken in Copenhagen, below, is also an urban balcony, although that is not how it is described. It too is a flood mitigation project; its stated ambition is ‘not a romantic promenade park but a paradigm shift in Copenhagen’s urban development: where form follows nature, and landscape architecture’s highest purpose is to create places for life – all life’. This remaking of a classical landscape of perfectly placed trees in a park has become intensely urban, a series of small, precious events — vest-pocket parks where there is no overall identity, but a series of moments with the capacity to become very personal.

The 57,745 hectare Integral Corridor in the foothills of Cali has much in common with Grønningen-Bispeparken in that it is a project deeply engaged with the community that surrounds it. It wants to illustrate a new way to make a city through restored ecosystems and a resignification of the no-man’s land between urban and natural systems. Respectful and sustainable, this project educates, connects and transforms. It is difficult to query any of these ambitions, in any of the projects, as they all use the same vocabulary of sustainability, climate change awareness, community, eco-complexity and restoration. All these projects work very hard to solve problems whether they be social, environmental or topographic. They are more than just good ideas, they are ideas put into practice and into place. The drawings and photographs are real: working drawings, aerial drone shots, real people in the real parks.

The smallest project in the shortlist, Bridgefoot Street Park in Dublin, below, does not restore or recover some past natural elysium, it actually makes a one hectare urban park out of construction waste, or as they call it, secondary raw material substrates, which were colonised by wildflowers and grasses even during construction. The project creates the conditions that release the potential of the soil and seeds, weather and wind to self-create a garden. This is perhaps the most humble, the least expensive and resource-consuming project of the lot. It re-uses and re-signifies waste, and in the process discovered the resilience and longevity of natural systems. It is ad hoc and chaotic, and in a way like Grønningen-Bispeparken, collects small movements and corners into a larger whole that does not depend on overly defined coherence. Its coherence is existential.

With any reconstruction, the era to which one is restoring a conflicted present is a question most often faced with buildings with multiple additions and changes done over hundreds of years. Does one go back to the first iteration, or to the era of greatest triumph, or to the date that historians feel the most consequential, or does one take the conflicted present as given and simply try to increase its sustainability, its authenticity as a site with an ongoing presence/present. This is what all these COAC landscape projects are grappling with. There is no magical date in the past when everything was perfect: evolution is an intensely hybrid process full of opportunism and migration. We have it in our minds that nature and the environment must be in harmony, and that harmony in itself is somehow at rest. This might not be so.

One descriptor that keeps cropping up in the essays in On Site review 47 is the word ruderal: a plant that is the first to colonise disturbed land, whether disturbed by natural processes such as avalanches, forest fires and floods, or by man-made industrial events such as oil spills, water pollution, acid rain or impermeable surfaces. Ruderal species are the front line heroes of land reclamation, fundamentally changing our idea of what is natural. In our present-day panic, we increasingly feel that all environmental change is man-made (which it probably is) and catastrophic (which does not help us cope with it).

The sub-text of the essays in On Site review 47 is that coping requires study and observation; slow, meditative observation which might reveal a different way to evaluate change. It is this methodology that underpins the 2025 shortlisted COAC projects that restore waterways, animal and insect life, marshes and hillocks and puts a path through these restored environments so that people can watch and learn. The COAC projects are not just ideas, they are projects in place, from around the world, and this is what is so inspiring.

There is one project not yet covered as I’ve reached my length limit, which I’ll do separately and next. The Dark Line in Taiwan is an outlier, nowhere near an urban condition and suggests a different set of values.

Now, I have such a fountain of a white rose, a Double blanc de Coubert about 12’ high and uncontrollable. I have unkempt grass with yellow irises in it. This is a June garden. Years ago I saw this painting and thought, I could do this, I could live this sort of life.

This is what my garden life actually consists of. The fork: very useful. Not the hay fork, the sturdier one. The thin one is for turning the compost, an ongoing and generally failing 10-years and counting project.

My favourite drawing of a garden, ever. I’ve been to Kew. It wasn’t this magical, rather found it overwhelmingly busy. Mary Newcomb made this part of it magical, delicate, tender. Her obituary outlines a long and intensely rich life as an artist. She died in 2008 at 86. Ian Collins who wrote her obituary made her life also magical, tender and fierce – a small masterpiece in itself.

Like Peter’s imperfect garden above, I too have an imperfect garden from almost 90 years of various ideas, plantings following some unknown logic. It is also existentially imperfect as the climate changes and we now get droughts that can last from May to late September, things shrivelling in the bleazing. When I was a kid, grass always went into pale slippery straw: to me, that is an August lawn, dry and smooth underfoot. Now this starts to happen in June, except in the shade under the apple trees. Much of my garden is imperfect [because gardens are always imperfect] because it gets too hot. Making more shade is too tedious to describe but gives me much pleasure.

Do I have time to paint it? Of course not. Peter’s Imperfect Garden, seems happily without much order, if order is what is meant by perfection, but it takes a painter’s eye, which I don’t think I have, to give it the coherence it has in real life, simply because any garden is a series of commissions – between plants, people, dogs, birds, bees – that just doesn’t register in a photograph. This is what painters do for us.

I spend quite a bit of time wondering how a painter would paint my rather complex back garden.

The wikipedia entry for Ivon Hitchens tells us that after being bombed out of his house in London in 1940, he acquired a small woodlot in Lavington Common near Petworth in Sussex and put a caravan on it. Thirty-six prolific painting years later he painted this. That it is a fragment of a garden rather than just a landscape is the horizontal band holding back a crop of tall green something: long views are horizontal, trees are close enough to be vertical, this is a horizontal in the foreground which is puts all the stasis of a landscape into tension. Perhaps this is what makes a garden.

A tiny garden in miniature, like an imagist poem. Ada Hill Walker (1879-1955) was a scientific illustrator, studied at the Glasgow School of Art and painted in and around St Andrews. While it is a painting of cut crocus in life-giving water in a blue tinged glass on a white tablecloth against a pale ochre wall, it is also a way to think about a moment in a garden: lavender full of black and white bees next to all the golden yellow flowers of artemisia and helichrysum that float above the pallid white-green of their leaves. It works briefly, as brief as the life of a crocus in a blue glass. And it fleets by just once a year.

Richard Wentworth has photographed tiny interventions in the inadequate way our urban world works since 1973. A boot holds a door open, a small dog is tied to a heavy shopping bag: one cannot leave without the other – that sort of thing. This photo of intercessionary bricks on a set of concrete steps makes four steps into eight shallower ones; slightly easier to run a wheelbarrow up or down them. The publisher’s description of Wentworth’s 2015 book, Making Do and Getting By, says his photographs ‘document[s] an excess - a creativity beyond necessary functionality, something transformative that lurks below the surface intention in acts of ordering and repair’.

This is the kind of condition that delighted Nathan Silver, whose book he wrote with Charles Jencks in 1972, Adhocism: the case for improvisation, is all about the anarchic adjustments people make to their environments to make life easier or more pleasing. It was re-issued with new essays by MIT Press in 2013 into an era so utterly unlike the early 1970s that the MIT Press schizophrenic description of both its cult status and continuing relevance seems odd.

I was thinking of Nate Silver and his impact after reading his obituary in the Guardian on June 14, 2025, and then the very next day there was Leon Krier’s obituary. This is so strange, two hugely influential figures, diametrically opposed in their thinking, their work, their sensibilities, both publishing and both at the AA in the early 1970s, both leaving us at exactly the same time.

These two streams of thought, Silver and Jencks’ adhocism and Krier’s classic urbanism, have footprints all over the present; as theses or concepts they weren’t as complete and circumscribed as they appeared at the time.

Craig Martin in 'Adhocism: Open Materiality and Localised Solutions' – a think-piece in Theory Culture & Society, 22/10/2014, wrote about a research trip to the Isle of Lewis where ad hoc practices abound, usually methods for tieing down buildings and objects in relentless north Atlantic storms. The concept of the ad hoc use of materials at hand for new purposes was also present in a session at a Royal Geographic Society conference in 2014 on 'Ad Hoc Geographies'. The re-emergence of the term ad hoc coincided with the re-issue of Silver and Jencks' Adhocism: the Case for Improvisation, in 2013 which was revised to include the ad hoc self-organisation of the Arab Spring, open source design, consumer empowerment. Sounds a bit wishful this, ten years later.

The gist of ad hoc practices – 'creation relying particularly on resources which are already at hand' is at the root of On Site review's current call for articles 'Stand Still and Fix Things', a direct antithesis to ‘Move Fast and Break Things’ which is happening all around us with breathtaking speed.

Why does this seem so urgent right now? Much has to do with the difference between coping and hoping some system will cope for you. As such systems, generally known as government agencies are being cut or disappeared, I am hopeful that different strategies for coping will emerge. Re-thinking, re-purposing, revising, renovating are necessarily ad hoc if they truly step outside conventional norms. Soon all we will have is what is at hand, just waiting to for us to re-focus on how to re-deploy it. (This re- thing is infectious)

On the other hand, we have Leon Krier:

Krier had little time for serendipitous repair, but much time for order. Utterly Eurocentric, his diagrams and prescriptions for urban order hit North American schools in the 1980s like a bomb. This, plus Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter’s 1983 Collage City, displaced New York as the American urban model (despite Rem Koolhaas’s Delirious New York of 1978) with Rome. It was all so seductive. It was all so pre-International Style. New Urbanism cast as contrarian postmodernism.

Krier was very interested in Albert Speer, whose book The Spandau Diaries came out in 1975 and which we all read. Krier’s obituary reminds us that ‘he always insisted that architecture could be separated from the ideology of the regime it serves’. Robert Harris (he of Conclave fame), wrote in his 2020 novel V2 about Wernher von Braun, the designer of both the V2 rockets and their mass production, and for whom rockets were less instruments of death and destruction than devices that could get to the moon. As WWII was ending he avoided custody by offering to continue his work with the then-new US Space Agency. There seem to be certain ambitions that transcend ideology, consequences, history and social responsibility.

At the time Krier’s obsession with classicism was seen as a reaction to the orthodoxies of twentieth century modern architecture – that rupture with the historic continuities of the grand traditions of architecture. One might say that Krier’s quest was to make architecture great again. Eerie echoes such as this to our present day means that Krier’s work might be reviewed not for its breaking with modernism’s supposed social but sloppy egalitarianism, but more for its authoritarian coherence.

I once saw Krier present a proposal for a King Leopold Square as an example of how new urbanism might correct the anomie of the modern European city. Can’t find anything about this now, it seems to be erased from the list of his significant projects, and also can’t remember when I saw this lecture, so this might all be meaningless, but at the time I thought – King Leopold of Belgium? Leopold’s vicious colonial regime lasted from 1902 until independence in 1960; his army in the Belgian Congo was so brutal that cutting off people’s limbs was standard punishment. And then later I read that this was precisely the method learned and used by Hutu militias against the Tutsi in the Rwandan War of 1993. Leopold was outstanding for his colonial violence in a violent era. To separate such a ruler and his legacy from an elegant square to be named after him requires a willing amnesia or else a bloodless belief that the classical rules of architecture and urbanism are more important than — what? Anything I guess.

This was the dark side of postmodernism, it wasn’t all twee cupolas and pink stucco. By the 1990s theoretically it had been supplanted by deconstruction, a fragmentary and less popular architectural movement, and a real and ongoing interest in hybridity. Orthodoxies started to fall apart, but postmodern classicism soldiered on in shopping malls and plazas, at Seaside and Poundbury. Will we ever be free of it? It is almost old enough to be due a revival.

It is said that Leon Krier’s 1983 Res Publica Res Economica Civitas is the foundational diagram for New Urbanism: real towns and cities are made up of two distinct realms — public and private. What of the private realm? In Krier’s diagrams it is represented by street-wall blocks as one finds in Berlin and Paris. Its Anglo-American versions are generally pretty houses in newly built Victorian/Colonial villages.

The unconstructed private realm is where Nathan Silver looked for all the lessons on how individuals contribute to the richness of daily life, where there are no hard and fast rules because it is personal. This thinking is allied with a number of artists and architects in the 1960s and 70s including Wentworth, and John Turner who found in Latin American barriadas and other informal settlements a social architecture and urbanism based on individual creativity. I wrote about John Turner in a 2023 post and since have learned of many housing NGOs across the non-West which take all their cues from informal housing and urban organisation. Perhaps it is ad hoc, which implies a kind of urgent expedience; perhaps it is a form of political democracy, both in form and material.

This chair was on the cover of the original Adhocism book; on the right is the case for improvisation. This chair was a design manifesto: the chair looked like itself; it was not part of the tradition of chairs, but an amalgam of handy re-purposed, pre-existing things taken from other realms. Jencks theorised it; Silver built it, and it is the material thesis that remains provocative. The case for improvisation: Everyman the designer.

Material, form and process: these things are ideological, something we ought to keep in mind during this present rise in the outlines of authoritarianism.

Lina Ghotmeh — Architecture has just been awarded the renovation of the west flank (mysteriously called the Western Range) of the British Museum, and so is deservedly much in the news right now. However, she has done other really beautiful projects such as an Hermès leather goods workshop in Normandy, a small factory that makes saddles, bridles and other equine things, mostly by hand.

There are a number of really lovely principles set up for this project: artisanal bricks use local clay and are made nearby. The building is a single storey 90m by 90m that rhymes with the 90cm carré silk scarf which leads the fashion arm of Hermès (all is explained in the above video). The spacing of the arches that define the outer brick walls is taken from a Muybridge film of a galloping horse whose hoofs hit the ground in a spatial sequence that is regular, but not metronomic. The layout of the workshops devolves into a collection of squares, fractals of the building at large. Each interior square corresponds to some stage in the making of the products: their identity is both spatial and functional. The exterior brick arched walls act as a huge loggia providing exterior zones for both view and congregation. The roof plane is the source of daylight and energy.

At this point, having watched the Hermès video above and read about the project on Lina Ghotmeh — Architecture’s website, I had to go to IKEA for two lightbulbs for two tempermental IKEA wall lights that required special bayonet bulbs, which now I find can be bought anywhere. The difference between a humanistic artisanal architecture and an architecture designed purely for consumer distraction is the difference between Hermès as a building and the visual and pathfinding chaos of any IKEA box store. Yes, one is for making and one is for selling, but the sheer number of global visitors to IKEA are being taught a kind of spatial expectation – that besides all household products being white, grey, greige or charcoal, they, as people, are alone, directed to follow the paths of a maze, not for contemplation but to be placed in front of products that one might, but usually do not, need. Everyone jostles along, losing focus and unable to go directly to the checkout without zig-zagging through another half-dozen departments. This essentially architectural experience crushes the individuality of each shopper, or shopping couple, or family: their sole identity is as a consumer.

Of course this is our consumer capitalistic society; such strategies operate more or less from grocery stores to road systems to streaming websites. However, the spatial thinking spills over into art galleries, museums, universities, schools and libraries —typologies that ought to be free from cattle-prod consumer programs whose contents visitors are forced to ‘discover’, even when they know what they want.

To compare a large leather workshop with a box store is not about apples and oranges, but about our access to beautiful clear architectural space for any kind of programme. My takeaway from learning about Lina Ghotmeh’s Hermès building, is that we lose our individual identity and the possibility of community through our unavoidable and insistent experience of commercial consumer architecture.

I will never see the Hermès factory, neither to visit or to work in, but I’m pleased to know about it, and all Ghotmeh’s projects which are, essentially, simple in concept, rich in their programming, and executed with absolute precision. The more common condition that I see this all around me is complicated concepts executed with a minimum of special attention. The parameters for the making of architecture are so different.

Gotmeh’s 2006-2016 Estonian National Museum is one enormous flat roof, a visual extension of a runway from a former Soviet Union base, with the museum halls, galleries and archives beneath it. How does one display a national identity which survived the long twentieth-century soviet assault on the Baltic states? Ghotmeh prefaces this collection, this community that has resisted its sovereign erosion, with the sense that there is shelter here. Near-invisible in the landscape, the rich cultural heritage is embedded in the land.

The sense that the land is a source of identity and shelter is very powerful one, whether geology or view. Ghotmeh’s architecture affirms this power frequently; bricks made from the clay of Normandy for Hermès is just the most recent. The 2010-2020 Stone Garden Housing in Beirut addresses land in a different way. For a housing project in much-bombed Beirut, her city, the landscape is not the grassy fields of Normandy, or a park or a forest, but an urban landscape of ruin. When we see photographs of families who have returned to north Gaza during the ceasefire and have set up their households on the floors of their old apartments, walls mostly missing, we are seeing landscapes of both possession and de-materialisation. Ghotmeh writes of Beirut: ‘Violence had always left its mark on the city’s buildings’ skins, hollowing these, and leaving nature to invade every left out concrete skeleton. In Beirut, you are invited to change your understanding of what a façade opening might mean. The boundary between an articulated window, the memory of a violent event is constantly blurred …’. This was her childhood during the Lebanese War. The site for Stone Garden Housing is where Pierre El Khoury had his office, the previous site of Darwish Haddad, the first concrete company in the Middle East. There are layers of architectural history here of which we, in the west, can barely conceive.

Many of Lina Ghotmeh’s projects originated in competitions, including the west flank of the British Museum. The brief is here. And here are the five shortlisted entries: https://colander.co.uk/journal/british-museum each with models and a short video presentation. These are very interesting; especially the difference between OMA’s enthusiastic embrace of digital technology proposing that this section of the museum be almost a virtual reality experience using screens and transparencies to de-materialise the chunky stone nineteenth century museum’s architecture.

In abstracts every word counts. OMA’s first line: ‘OMA – and the team we’ve assembled to help modernize the British Museum – is equally obsessed with the past and the future’. Ghotmeh’s first line: ‘We are a diverse, multidisciplinary team enriched by voices from the cultures represented in the British Museum’s collections’. She goes on to say ‘We see the future of the British Museum as an ecosystem of artefacts and collections, people and places, nature and culture.’ And here might be the difference between an ecosystem and a spectacle.

A museum is like a factory, and Ghotmeh treats both with the same rigorous clarity. Above all, whether someone is making a saddle or someone is restoring a textile in a conservation lab, they are doing it within a solid architecture that holds them together.

Well, the sky is much bigger than we are. We occupy a thin mineral surface on an iron planet which weather sweeps across, disinterested in our little lives. However, we are very interested in it. That weather has a malevolent intent, especially in the winter, is a pathetic fallacy. As artists make clear, weather, registered by clouds, is simply ever-changing and ever beautiful.

Helen Frankenthaler’s 1992 painting Barometer, above, is just what the sky is: a barometer as accurate as my 1930s Taylor’s Stormguide which always gives me notice a day or two before of what is coming my way. There is a facebook group, the Cloud Appreciation Society, which posts amazing displays in the sky; cloud-spotters name all the effects and their causes; one tires a bit of the spectacular nature of the photographs, all drama and vivid colour taken with cellphone cameras. They never post a dark, dour, unremittingly leaden sky which means we are stuck in some sort of low.

Anselm Kiefer’s 2008 painting, Am Anfang, looks to be literally painted with lead. According to Mark Durden’s review of an exhibition of Keifer’s use of photographs, they are surfaces which he paints over, corrodes and contaminates, attaches to lead sheet by electrolysis. Keifer is dark, engaged in a life long excavation of German fascism where the surface of the earth is as scored and torn as the surface of his photographs. Iconography is complex and personal: how can any of this desperate melancholy be healed? Durden points out Keifer’s ‘de-innocenting of romantic landscape tradition’.

Constable, Turner, Reinagle, deeply embedded each in their own ways in the romantic landscape traditon, filled notebooks with cloud studies, sketches done so quickly that there isn’t time to attach questions of meaning and import to them. Their much more worked-over paintings that included sky conditions, whether clouds or pollution, also include small scale figures, buildings, things on that thin surface of the earth and of history, forcing themselves back into importance.

Tacita Dean writes indistinctly over her chalk cloud drawings. Sunset has a line from Lord of the Flies: ‘fading knowledge of the world’, fading because of the fragility of chalk itself. The chalk is a synecdoche of the thought. The cloud and the chalk are, correctly, fleeting.

And Andy Goldsworthy, Joan Eardley and Kate Downie? Theirs are Scottish skies.

The Wilton Diptych is a magical mysterious pair of paintings, just 21 x 15" each, hinged, gold-framed, a personal and portable altarpiece for Richard II, painted near the end of his reign. He was born in 1367 and became king at ten in 1377; he was deposed in 1399 and died at 33 a year later of starvation, the imprisoned last of the Plantagenets.

The diptych, as an object and an event, is utterly compelling. On the left panel, the boy king kneels, flanked by his patron saints Edward the Confessor and Edmund the Martyr, both once kings of England, and John the Baptist carrying the lamb of God. Richard kneels on stoney ground.
On the right panel is a phalanx of angels, all wearing Richard's emblem, a white hart lying on the ground. They, and Mary, stand in a field of flowers, their blue robes are the blue of lapis lazuli, the blue of heaven and as deep as the ocean. Their crowns are English roses, their powerful wings a fractal of feathers, a phalanx of protective shields.
Richard's earthly life is being sanctioned by something on a completely different scale. Kings, saints and martyrs, although well-gilded, are a thin assembly, unprotected in a stony wilderness, worried. They are appealing to a powerful world that is so visually coherent that one longs to be in it, even now.

All this is caught in a small object that radiates an overwhelming intensity. I used to visit it when I lived in London. It was transporting; it has never left my memory.

History, iconography, restoration, dendrology, gilding and tempera techniques, infra-red discoveries, its three-dimensional surface and internal organisation, are all laid out in a wonderfully long page at the National Gallery website. Didn’t know any of this until this week. This in-depth knowledge of the diptych doesn’t change its impact, which somehow hits the heart.

Domain variable: a set of values produced from a decision variable which is known as its domain which has a lower and an upper boundary. The domain of the variable contains the values from the lower bound to the upper bound.

A decision is made to follow certain rules: a variable, which comes with the boundaries of that decision.

1.

As an artist, some of Dorothea Rockburne’s decisions were made fairly early: paper, charcoal, industrial paints, oils and greases, sheet plastic, plus a fascination with mathematics, plus all the ordinary tools of the artist: chisels, printing presses, brushes.

Rockburne, born in 1932 and with a very long active, interdisciplinary and experimental career, is still with us. Domain of the Variable (Y), (X), 2024 has recently opened at the Bernheim Gallery in London. The original Domain of the Variable (Y), (X) was made in 1972, then revised for the Dia Foundation in 2018.

As I understand it, many of the original pieces, and probably the contemporary ones, are unstable: acidic oils on paper, on plastic which shrinks, industrial skins on metal which part and peel. Each work follows an individual developmental track, collectively they make up the domain.

The individual pieces themselves are material explorations of some mathematical base: vectors, tangents, geometries, set theory, which are subjected to considerable violence: two sheets of chipboard are glued together then separated, imperfectly, each chipboard surface giving chunks of itself to the other. Part of the long red piece is paper nailed to the wall, painted with a red lube oil which gradually fades to ochre.

The particular 1972 lube oil is no longer made, but clearly the red colour was important to Rockburne, as the present revision is, again, red, and again will fade. So there are interventions in the conceptual, process-driven variables. Entropy, as a material condition is accounted for.

Now, all this aside, and there are many reviews of Domain of the Variable, what interests me is the datum line that organises the domain. From the images it appears to be perhaps a metre high. When Domain of the Variable (Y), (X) was installed at Dia, the line was chiselled into the wall — a v-shaped incision which locates work either above or below it, divides some pieces literally, cutting them in two, and provides a register for the collection of such disparate variables.

The installation at Bernheim in London is not an incision, instead it is a charcoal line drawn on the gallery walls. Adrian Searle describes it as ‘fine charcoal powder and fixative … regular, unvarying and relentless, it sometimes leaves a breathy residue on the wall or a build-up of fine graphite dust in the corners and crevices of a window frame as it passes.’ This version of the datum line is a conceptual and a material participant in the placement of each individual piece within the specific architecture of the gallery. It is a temporal and spatial artwork in its own right. I’m an architect. I find this very moving.

2.

In the early 1960s, Poland mandated that studios be included in the construction of new housing blocks; its Artists Association assigned the studios to practising artists. One such established artist was the constructivist artist and writer Henryk Stażewski (considered a critical member of the Polish postwar avant-garde), who was given a Warsaw 120m2 studio in 1962. From 1968 this studio was shared with Edward Krasiński, and when Stażewski died in 1988, Krasiński, blue-taped a 130cm high datum line throughout it. The studio was exhibited in 1989 and the management of the apartment since Krasiński’s death in 2004 has been by the Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw. Must say I find Henryk Stażewski’s work much more compelling than that of Krasiński, who although mentored early in his career by Stażewski, considered himself a surrealist first, something that in hindsight does not have the passionate political fervour of interwar constructivism and abstraction.

Krasiński seems to have engaged with a trompe-l’oeil surrealism for most of his career: tricks of the eye that lead one to question the visual space and surface of the gallery wall. Rather than the optical space that traditionally opens up behind the surface of a painting, Krasiński’s axonometric projections thrust themselves into the front of the surface. Because the datum line, always painters’ blue masking tape, is bent, and we trust it because it is a datum line, flat lines on flat canvases leap into three dimensions. The Z variable.

Krasiński’s blue taping of Stażewski’s studio is quite emotional. A layer of perception is added that connects disparate objects from walls to curtains, to photographs. Rockburne’s datum line connects as it divides; division is not active in Krasiński, rather it establishes a horizon of things. Krasiński’s 130cm high datum, he said, was at the level of the human heart, more or less. This statement alone allows us to depart from the process and its rules to something else.

Ed Ruscha, he of the 26 Gasoline Stations book and many subsequent drawings and paintings of the powerful iconography of the 1950s service station, said ‘Route 66, I’ve had a great affection for that road because of its connection between the places I’ve been and worked. It was like a continuous ribbon, it was like a real magical formula for keeping my life going. I thought it was great.’

This continuous ribbon presented a link between word and form, object and space over four decades when, in the 1980s he did a series of silhouette paintings, of which Road Tested, above, is one. There is a road, there is what might be an Oldsmobile 88. There is night driving, there are the visuals of Hollywood murky film noir, there is the blurring of detail in favour of a dark, shadowy world.

This is a 13-foot wide silhouette of the San Bernardino and San Gabriel mountain ranges. Two small notes: on the left, THE HILL ABOVE INDUSTRIAL VILLAGE, on the right, INDUSTRIAL VILLAGE. The detail is not found in the drawing, it is in the words. Ruscha said about this, ‘…with the width of the canvas, I’m able to miniaturise things so that there’s almost thousands of miles between the left side of the canvas and the right side of the canvas. The lettering also brings you down to the miniature aspect of it. That’s why the letters are no larger than they are … It has to do with the fact that our eyes run in a horizontal line. There is a big difference between vertical movement and horizontal movement. I seem to be on horizontal movement, and I’ve been here for years.’ [Phillips catalogue entry: Edward Ruscha, quoted in Richard Marshall, Ed Ruscha, New York 2003, p. 181]

That is the road: horizontal movement. His initial teenage drive from Oklahoma City to Los Angeles in 1956 underpinned his work for the rest of his life. The Phillips auction house essay, written when this painting was listed, quotes the New Yorker’s art critic Peter Schejdahl: ‘Not the idea of landscape but something like the experience of an actual landscape is induced in the viewer, who seizes on the internal captions 'industrial village' and 'hill' to stave off vertigo.’ For Schejdahl this landscape is a vertical movement, for that is what vertigo is. The words rescue him.

Perhaps travel does shock because it is the collision of the horizontal and the vertical; each is a revelation when forced together. The horizontal is temporal, the vertical is not. It is materially set on site, an obstacle to the free flow of horizontal movement. One senses this in Ruscha’s work where those material presences become words that float above a horizon of earthly concerns.

Gas stations, billboards, highway signs, road construction, all catch the eye and divert one’s attention from directional movement; they stop thought as much as does the broken pencil. Which is why, I would posit, you don’t think while travelling. You worry, you anticipate, you eat, you listen to the radio if there is a signal, you stop for the dog, but thinking, abstract thinking work, is impossible.

What does happen is that you see. The earth unfurls; it rains - the road is black, it snows, the sun comes out, the distant peak is pink, the trees are black. The distant peak is in a cloud, there is a green bridge across a rocky river, the sun disappears, the sky is luminous. There is an eclipse of the moon which is rusty red. Headlights make a cone of light to drive in, the car never reaches that front edge.

Elemental, the Chilean architectural practice of Alejandro Aravena, developed a housing model in the early 2000s where, using government funds, the expensive parts of site development and of a house are built first: site services, then in each house, bathrooms, kitchen, stairs, party walls and roof.  This is the first half.  The second half is eventually built into the space between these cores.  In the Santa Catarina project above, there are 70 units on .6ha; the area is middle class, not a slum, and half the project was intended to be self-built according to means, opportunity and needs.
 
Similar Elemental projects have been built in Chile, with less money and for poorer people.  It is a case of putting whatever funds are available where they are most useful, and leaving the rest to individuals who have some building skills and often innovative ways of occupying space, but not the wherewithal to build a safe structure, a kitchen and bathroom, and then to connect them to a utilities infrastructure.  Elemental SA was, perhaps still is, in a partnership with COPEC, a Chilean Oil Company, to design projects with social impact through 'the development of complex initiatives'.  To get projects such as these in place requires more than a brilliant idea, it requires partners at all levels of urban development.  The city is their workshop.  

Formally built social housing all over the world is a landscape of regimentation; informal barrios and slums all over the world are landscapes of desperate invention.  In theory, Elemental's model allows the best from both: safe building standards and people's participation in their own dwellings. 

However, in 2016 Aravena was given the Pritzker prize for Elemental’s work. A sort of critical hell broke loose.

Aravena’s crime it seems was to be photogenic with interesting hair, and allegedly to aspire to starchitect status, that stupid moniker conferred by receiving a Pritzker for a certain kind of new millenium architect. Some said it was the Pritzker getting a social conscience, others that it was a reward for a particular kind of neo-liberalism that did not change the inequities within society, but rather confirmed them.

As I understand Elemental the state, however that is construed, assumes responsibility for infrastructural development: site acquisition, preparation and servicing. Either the state or a city, or a developer, or a consortium, avails itself of available housing grants and subsidies and builds precisely what that amount of money/unit will cover. In Iquique, it is half a three-storey house. The other half of the house, the void beside the half a house, can be built into over time, adding additional rooms, porches and extended services. It isn’t clear whether the units can be bought, or are rented, or leased; subsidised or market-valued, but as Elemental projects have covered a range of economic brackets from an alternative to barrios to middle-income environmentally displaced communities to company towns, the acquisition of units must be conditional on who actually has developed the project and if it is a benign relationship.

The critics of this plan say it encourages neo-liberal accumulation and commodification of housing. It isn’t the provision of housing as a basic human right, but rather promotes acquisition of property within a subsidised market model. Thus goes the argument; doesn’t make a lot of sense as architectural critique to me, unless we extend the scope of architecture to include ownership of production.

Aravena takes a much older form of housing based on aggregation of resources, rooms and provisional structures that become permanent over time, essentially the barrio model, and exploits the desire of cities, of resource extraction companies and states to demonstrate their twenty-first century humanitarian ambitions. Unregulated housing, identified with barrios, ghettos and gangs, is uncontrolled and from which revenue cannot be extracted. If an accretive model is adopted by corporate entities, value, eventually, will rebound upon them.

Elemental project working drawings are published, full scale, on its website, downloadable at high resolution, for free:

Almost twenty years on, and with a severe lack of affordable housing in the affluent first world, such schemes are undoubtedly attractive. Developed in and for what was once considered the third world, they run into a major stumbling block in societies where house type and social identity are deeply interlinked. Our North American cities are full of apartment blocks and row housing, neither of which express individuality at the unit level. It is the desire to project one’s individual presence that consigns apartments and condo units to mere stepping stones in the acquisition of the single family house on a single lot, zoned R-1, where one is, supposedly, free to repaint, to change, to rebuild, make additions, to be oneself. The psychology of housing and class cannot be addressed by either logic or economical arguments as to efficiency of resources. Exceptional cities such as New York, or Montreal, have generations of apartment buildings housing generations of families who have never aspired to an R-1 lot. And there are perhaps instances of such verticality in all our cities, but they are often limited. The perception is that a monocultural life in an apartment block is a short-term life for the cash-strapped, the elderly, young singles and people without children or pets.

Somehow this is the hurdle that must be overcome first: that small, hyper-efficient, inexpensive pre-fabricated housing is not a negative, not the architectural equivalent of a cardboard box, but can actually be affordable and permanent and have opportunities: a serviced site, whether on the ground or in a larger building, that one can make one’s own. Architects are stylists for political, social, cultural and economic movements. We don’t change society, we make change both palatable and desirable. We design enabling systems, which is what Alejandro Aravena did with his Elemental works.

The hand is the last thing one can speak with after the voice has gone, after its writing has been banned; a fist can still be formed, until it too is cut off.

Resistance – the closed fist held up, palm out, is a withholding of the hand and its contribution to the status quo.  It is passive, sullen, unyielding: it isn't a horizontal punch, it is a flag held up in a massive objection to whatever it finds itself in.  

Adam Shatz’s 2024 The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon, discusses Fanon’s complex construction of anti-colonialism and his positional role within it. Sam Klug’s review of this book in the Boston Review, March 27, 2024: ‘Who’s Afraid of Franz Fanon’, begins by mentioning ‘a long tradition of Fanon fearmongering among American conservatives and liberals alike. For decades, Fanon has been invoked as a bogeyman in debates about Israel-Palestine, Black activism in the United States, and even the politics of higher education.’

Fanon’s hope was for an existential condition of global equality, not only through the process of decolonisation, but also ‘wresting from the West monopolistic stewardship of the human condition in its concrete instance as the modern project.’

What I find interesting and what I’m groping for here, inadequately I know, is how this wresting invites resistance to the project of equality, and how the far-right in the hegemonic West is appropriating the vocabulary and symbols of decolonisation to support its perception of its own persecution — Replacement Theory. Native becomes nativism. Migrants become occupiers. Indigeneity means white. One can read anything selectively, and Fanon’s statements about processes of violence visited on the colonised and and which rebound on the coloniser are often selected without the deeper psychological and necessary theory in which they are embedded.

Locked into the broad strokes of power, a dialectic of oppressor/oppressed, the tools by which freedom might be achieved – solidarity, resistance, the formation of social movements – tools traditionally of the liberal left, fluid and progressive (the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice) – have been appropriated by the angry, adamantine, resistant right who increasingly see themselves as an ignored indigenous minority. In a Manichaean world, justice, equality, opportunity for all is impossible: there must be winners and losers.

The twentieth-century clenched fist presents solidarity in resistance to ongoing injustice, accompanied by parallel social movements. The twenty-first century MAGA fist presents the grievance of displacement, accompanied by militias. Deterrence does not underly this fist; simmering violence does.

A wall of ships, the British ships sail toward it planning to cut the line in three, taking out the flagship first, i.e. no signals.  Not being a naval historian, and reading a brief summary, it appears that part of the English fleet was at Gibraltar, weakening the total Navy, and so the French and Spanish thought they could defend Cadiz by forming a long line in front of it.  However, weather will intervene.  Little wind and contradictory orders to the French and Spanish to turn resulted in an extremely slow reformation leaving clumps of ships over a loose five-mile line.  In come two tight arrow-like British lines.  As they all were no doubt luffing around in the same calm weather, the battle must have seemed a bit like slow-motion.  However, outnumbered, outgunned and out-shipped, the British won, Nelson was shot and died, and storms that blew up the next day sank several of the wounded ships of the day before.  

If there is anything that endears one to Nelson's 'England expects that every man will do his duty' spelled out in signal flags flying from his own flagship, it is this scrap of a battle plan on the back of what looks like a bit of blotting paper.  One must never be seen to be trying too hard, but duty is done nonetheless.

Does this kind of thinking exist any more?  I only come across it in British espionage novels, those thrilling, complicated, but allegedly deeply conservative tales that pass these days as my escape reading.  Ex-SAS men gone rogue sort of stuff.  Not really rogue, in the end one finds they are on the side of right and duty.  Of course.

Anyway, beautiful little drawing.  It moves me to tears for some reason.

Nelson's enigmatic little sketch formalised into a historic account: mathematical, geometric, correctly military; theory rather than practice.  This is, perhaps, the danger in all writing after the fact. The narrative is clarified, made correct.  It is a design exercise, making a coherent object out of a melée on the sea with cannonballs breaking ships into splinters, people being killed, drowned, wounded.  In this allegedly 'popular' print, the sea is like the table tops of battles between lead soldiers.  By this time, seven years after Trafalgar, the battle had become mythic, as had Nelson.

From History of the Great War - Naval Operations.  Diagrams and minute-by-minute text. God this is exciting reading.  The first drawing above shows the movement of all the battle cruisers in this engagement from 2:45 to 3:00 pm. The next from 3:15 to 3:30, and the third from 3:40 to 4pm.  The speed is evident.  How quickly things moved.

Trafalgar was set up along Army lines: two opposing forces arrayed facing each other except that Nelson changed his line to two perpendicular arrows.  By the Battle of Jutland in the North Sea, May 31, 1916, opposing forces appear to operate parallel to each other, in feints and parries.  These were battle cruisers, weather not an issue but speed, torpedoes and range were.  It looks like a deadly dance chart.

Quite difficult to find contemporary WWII maps of sea battles. This one was published 13 years after the fact. Perhaps original material is still under security embargo: the Atlantic still exists, war still exists, ships still exist, information probably still relevant for some future conflict. WWII had battling air forces as precarious as earlier naval battles — the primary goal of the convoys was not seaborne battle itself but rather the delivery of troops, provisions and arms from North America to Britain, protected by armed escort ships but attacked by u-boats which were invisible, opportunistic and deadly. The North Atlantic was like a highway lined with mines and IEDs.

Quite easy to find are charts of landings where sea meets land:

Which actually looked like this:

and was technically, hydrographically, this:

This chart shows how close to the shore vessels could get, the sea full of hidden dangers, shoals and mines. Suddenly the land appears as a table.

Now, different war, different sea, different technology, same unpredictability:

March 10, 2024: The U.S. Army has dispatched a logistics support vessel carrying equipment to establish a temporary pier to deliver vital humanitarian supplies to Gaza. Expected to be operable by May, it will be a floating dock, rather than a permanent installation.

Culled from the BBC report above: To avoid US boots on the ground, the floating pier must be assembled in the water. It is composed of a large floating dock and a 550m two-lane causeway composed of interconnected 12m steel units attached to the shore. Deliveries arrive at the dock, are offloaded to barges and small boats and taken to a pier attached to the causeway. There trucks will be loaded and driven onto land.

This amphibious building project has been used by the US military in Kuwait, Somalia, Haiti and Central America for disaster relief missions. Earlier versions were used as far back as World War II following the invasion of Normandy on D-Day.

The assumption being that the trucks will be allowed to drive off the causeway onto the Gaza shore.

April 2, 2024: What is the point of a long two-month military mobilisation to build a dock, pier and causeway to avoid the geo-strategic problem of keeping US boots off Israeli-occupied Gaza, when World Central Kitchen trucks drive off an existing pier (which appears to be similar to the one at Khan Younis, above) and are promptly bombed by one of the most sophisticated, high-tech militaries in the world? Alleviating a famine is not a technological or a military problem to be solved, it is a moral issue of negotiation – something that seems impossible with the present, primitive politics of revenge and retribution.

Giovanni Anselmo died in November 2023, and this image was used in his obituary — slabs of different kinds of stone tied, fairly flimsily, to the concrete posts of the gallery. He worked with the weight of stone, its inertia subject only to gravity which, in the end, will prevail. He is considered an arte povera artist, that group that loosely formed in 1960s Italy and named in 1967 by Germano Celant who defined it as a rejection of art as the preserve of wealth: expensive materials, exclusive galleries, patronage, traditions. Instead, artists in an era where Europeans were still living in post-WWII poverty, made a virtue of such conditions: neo-realism in Italian film, la nouvelle vague in France, arte povera, street theatre, political posters in Poland, samizdat throughout eastern Europe/western Warsaw Pact. It was acceptable that art be cheap, inflammatory and materially accessible. Sculptures in wood, not bronze. Paintings on walls, not canvas. Installations made of found materials, raw materials, materials without value.

This is a strain of postwar art that has never gone away. It can be found in Phyllida Barlow’s 2014 dock :

The influential Phyllida Barlow, who died in March 2023, called her work ‘unmonumental’. In dock, at Tate Britain in 2014, riotous spills of debris shot through the doorways and halls of the neo-classical Duveen Galleries. The installation was complex and extended, ringing of bomb sites and redevelopment clearance, poverty and an obsessive love of materials, no matter what their status.  Like all her work over a long career, it was energetic and messy, the utter antithesis to, for example, Jeff Koons sending a shiny stainless steel and diamond sculpture in a plastic box to the moon via Odysseus, a SpaceX rocket. Koon’s Moon Phases has a different kind of complexity, but it is expensive, inaccessible, possibly politically vain.

Ruth Oldham in conversation with Emelie Queney in On Site review 44: architecture and play, mentioned Sarah Wrigglesworth’s Stock Orchard Street, a house that Wrigglesworth and Jeremy Till built in 2000 as a test of materials, concepts about living, energy use and construction. It might be considered architettura povera — not the direct translation of povera as poverty, but as impoverished materials, materials that are close to raw such as straw bales, or discarded such as gabions of concrete rubble, or common such as construction plywood, corrugated polycarbonate porch roofing, or sandbags of concrete usually used in land stabilisation but in Stock Orchard Street used as a soundproof wall next to a railway track.

A highly sophisticated and much awarded architect, Wrigglesworth is not poverty-stricken, rather she works with the most basic of building and material components, here and in subsequent work. Impoverished is perhaps simply the opposite of highly refined and elaborated materials.

Folke Köbberling and Martin Kaltwasser did the 2010 Jellyfish Theatre in London, meant to stand for just a few months. A basic steel frame was sheathed in found and discarded pallets, plywood and general building detritus.

Berlin-based architects at the time, Köbberling and Kaltwasser worked alongside volunteers to build a fully-functioning theatre from recycled and reclaimed materials, focused on energy-efficiency, co-operation and human-scale construction. There is an extensive designboom study of this project, showing drawings and step by step construction stages.

What is the greater lesson here: that we waste a lot of embedded energy and carbon every time we buy or replace with something new? or that buildings can look like a bonfire waiting to be lit. Or that building outside the architectural-industrial complex can effectively challenge the envelope that architecture has imposed on itself.

This takes us back to the activist underpinnings of arte povera where it is the materials that are in play, not the will of the artist or the architect. Stefano Corbo, writing in On Site review 43: time, sees the temporary, or the ephemeral, or even the mendable in architecture, as a political vector slicing through capitalism and architecture as a mass-consumption, disposable, a-critical spectacle. Clearly there is an intellectual line from arte povera to the several very beautiful European architectural projects he describes where architects find some post-industrial ruin and move in, such as Brandlhuber+Emde, Burlon’s Antivilla:

In 2006, Theaster Gates began the Dorchester Projects, buying up abandoned houses and storefronts in the Dorchester neighbourhood of Chicago, re-purposing them for community use. Archive House was one such project:

It contains the archives of Dr Wax Records, the Johnson Publishing Company, Ebony and Jet magazines — all significant Chicago African-American cultural institutions, at the time in demise. Despite the street-front propriety of the house in 2009, it was abandoned, unused and, consequently under Gates, re-configured. Useability is not just cosmetic: the hierarchy of spaces in the prairie four-square house was without utility.  Of course anything can occupy and make do with any kind of space if it has to, but the project here is not just to move into an old house because it is all you can afford, but to make that old house unfold spatially into the community.  The slide room is itself, not a previous bedroom: the present bears no relationship to the past.  This is a re-purposing, not a renovation. Gates bought a structure and stripped away everything that did not apply to his project of community building, replacing it with salvaged materials that come with no evidential history.  

A small detail to put beside the sink in the Antivilla earlier: this sink, properly plumbed-in but without a cheap vanity from Home Depot holding it up.

Given the pre-processed and over-manufactured rubbish that appears in building dumpsters, no doubt a cheap or even a good vanity could have been found, but the vanity comes with so many bourgeois associations of propriety where the facts of plumbing have to be hidden, that it becomes a negative force in the house.  This assemblage of beams, frames and trims to get the sink to a useful height has no references: the material was free, it fulfills a need.  This isn't art, although it is arty enough, this is identity politics.

Fall 1984, first teaching position, in the States, lived in a tent with my dog and cat in a state park under an enormous Army Corps of Engineers dam until my first paycheck at which point I rented a very small house with no furniture. Built my oft-repeated, edited-down Victor Papanek slat bed, and this table. And a bench to sit on. The top was two red Colorado stone paving slabs, the supports some tentest, some fibreboard, 2 x6 leftover ends from the bed, some other bits of wood — can’t quite remember now.

This really was poverty, didn’t have a bean.

Much later when asked to contribute to a 1990 show of contemporary furniture at the Glenbow Museum, I re-constructed a similar table using local black shale, more broken tentest and more bits of wood. It sat among all the colourful postmodern Memphis-influenced enamelled mdf pieces like something found by the highway, which it had been, more or less. This was not about drawing a desirable object and then replicating the drawing in subservient materials, it was about finding materials and making something from them. A salient difference

To go back to Giovanni Anselmo’s slabs of stone tied to the tops of concrete columns, safe only because of the doubtful strength of the ties, my table was two slabs of stone, safe only because of the assemblage of flimsy bits of wood holding them up. It was safe because I understood the materials. It wasn’t by chance, it wasn’t a dare. It was evidence of itself.