If you know me you will know I love quotations and sayings: so expect to see regular “unusual quotations” – I just cant resist sharing it when I see a meaningful one!
Some recent essays that I thought I may share with my readers:
Photography Essay - the 99 cent store
Photography Essay - graffiti
Photography Essay – first person accounts of crack addicts
The interactive floor plan – House 205
The World Cup in South Africa next year promises to be quite an event. As one of the World’s top global events, the others comprising The Olympics and The Superbowl, it can always guarantee us entertainment in abundance. For followers of particular nations, add to this rich, emotional drama, and more often that not, overwhelming disappointment.
Put the actual sport aside, however, and we are also guaranteed entertainment of another sort, this time more so than usual. As many post-modern writers (including Paul Virilio and Steve Redhead) have argued, football is fast becoming a stay-at-home spectator sport. Gone are the days of the ardent Saturday afternoon football fan. Up until the advent of The Premiership, working class supporters would save their wages to afford a season ticket to their local, beloved team, whom they would travel to watch live each week. Fast forward a decade or two and we are in an era where a Sky subscription negates this cultural event, to a point where stadia across the country are failing to sell out, even in football’s top tier.
Redhead and co. discuss the need for the “live” supporters, as they provide a backdrop, a sort of reality and way of making sense of what is occurring on our 24 inch wide screen television sets. Watch any sporting event with the TV muted, and suddenly the whole thing seems strange. Sometimes, we almost need the cheers or jeers of the crowds to validate our own views on what is going on. A fantastic goal is scored, a last minute three-pointer bagged, or a home run is struck, but without the affirmation that those present also revelled in its skill audacity, we find it hard to believe or make sense of what this means. Without the soundtrack of the fans inside the stadium, the whole thing just seems a bit dull.
And this is why World Cup South Africa promises to be anything but dull. We saw in Japan and South Korea in 2002 how, even though sometimes the sporting entertainment was one-paced and low-scoring, fanatic crowds enriched the whole experience. Video clips and sound bites of ecstatic Japanese supporters getting a glimpse of David Beckham can sum the experience up nicely. If we look at Manchester United’s recent triumphant World Club Championship matches against Gamba Osaka and LDU Quito, again the crowds were frenetic in their support of the English team and its players, club icon Wayne Rooney in particular.
These people are fans of football for not only sporting reasons, but because of the whole package. They revel in the media hype created by individual personalities like Beckham and Rooney. They adore the focus such an event gives their country, and they deliver when it comes to displaying their nation in the best possible light. The opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics underlines this. It may have not been to everybody’s taste in the Western World, but there is no doubting one thing: it was spectacular. Such precision on such a large scale was almost military-like, and if England achieves one hundredth of its effect in 2012 they will have performed out of their skin.
Fans worldwide love superstars like David Beckham. Courtesy of Daily Star.
So, to return from this tangent, spectators can truly add to sporting events, both for those physically present and those tuning in all around the world. And, to reach the point of this article, the World Cup should provide such spectacle as has never been seen to such a scale. Any viewers of The African Cup of Nations will have seen glorious images, both still and moving, of colourful, joyous crowds, cheering on not only their nation but the game as a whole. These vibrant spectators are a far cry from the English football supporter, whose attitude varies by the minute depending on their team’s performance. The Africans enjoy the whole experience, and, if their team wins, this is a bonus.
This attitude is obviously born out of low expectations, as the African nations are, on the whole, not expected to get past the group stages of major tournaments. However, the celebratory style and carnival-like scenes at these events are also a reflection of their way of life. Just like the Carnival in Rio and crowds inside (and outside) South American stadia, they dress up in an array of costumes, they bring musical accompaniment and are generally there to live in the present and enjoy the game.
Even the actual football design of the World Cup is a microcosm of the host nation’s society. Japan and Korea in 2002 chose a sleek, stylish gold design, containing a shuriken-looking shape with a martial arts feel. 2006 was Germany’s turn, and they delivered with a neat, structured, mainly black and white ball, which is usually depicted straight on, to emphasise its perfect symmetry. 2010 is a variation of the 2006 ball, but it is practically unrecognisable. The red, yellow, green and black sphere almost makes a mockery of traditional images of the football; the old, English brown laced monstrosity or the black and white hexagon design seem like boorish nonentities compared with this extravaganza. It can only add to the feel of the tournament.
This festival attitude towards football seems alien to us in the UK. But this does not make it any less appealing. I, for one, hope to enjoy the World Cup next year, regardless of – most probably in spite of England’s individual performances. The European Championship in 2008 was a cultural phenomenon many of us an unfamiliar with: a football tournament sans England and their riotous fans. And it was quite nice. We were able to watch the football and soak up the culture at a different angle than usual. It was as if we were watching a parallel universe, where the results were quite inconsequential and what really mattered was the football on show. I hope this attitude can continue when England are (surely!) back in the fray in 2020. And I believe with the crowds in South Africa, it could just do so.
According to the London Mayor, YES. He laid in on its lack of cleaning strategy, un open able windows, empty staircases and just about anything about the building which was originally promoted as the buildings passive energy credential gadgets.
Mayor Boris Johnson attacked his workplace, the 2002 Greater London Authority (GLA) building, as one of the worst in London shortly before handing its developer a planning award. read Bori’s comments here
image: City Hall
From the outside you wouldn’t tell that the working conditions in the building are as terrible as the Mayor puts it. The building surely does its part of attracting photo snaping tourists. It is an unmisatkable London landmark but it is really good to hear how this popular-from-outside building fares with people that work inside it everday.
The CCJS (Centre for Crime and Justice Studies) is running a Photography competition that ends on the 31st March 2009.
The CCJS’ mission is to promote just and effective responses to crime and related harms by informing and educating through critical analysis, research and public debate.
The What is crime? project aims to stimulate debate about what crime is, what it isn’t and who gets to decide.
To find out more about CCJS click here
For more about the Photography competition click here
Download the flyer from here or poster from here
image: Kim Buckley and Richard Baxter via:travelblog
Addressing a conference at St James’s Palace organised by his Foundation for the Built Environment, the Prince is quoted in the Guardian as saying:
The Mumbai shanty town featured in the film Slumdog Millionaire offers a better model than does western architecture for ways to house a booming urban population in the developing world, Prince Charles said yesterday…. Dharavi, a Mumbai slum where 600,000 residents are crammed into 520 acres, contains the attributes for environmentally and socially sustainable settlements for the world’s increasingly urban population, he said. read full story here.
Prince Charles has lately been attracting news for different reasons regarding community relations but he has once again waded deep into architecture with a lecture to designers and planners on how to ‘house soaring urban populations’ Mumbai style. He goes on to say:
“I strongly believe that the west has much to learn from societies and places which, while sometimes poorer in material terms are infinitely richer in the ways in which they live and organise themselves as communities,” he told planners, charity workers and government officials.’
Funny thing is that he really takes this seriously to think that people living in this slums and poor ghettos of Mumbai and alike are there by virtue of choice. He suggests that Western developers can learn from these overpopulated settlements where people have health hazards and no hygienic amenities and where ‘organising’ one self is an act of survival.
As a designer myself I do not see anything that I can learn from these shanty towns, where people have little choice but to survival, that I can relatively apply to western communities where people have the choice to not choose. The settlement in ghettos and shanty towns of the ‘developing world’, as I see it, is a tragic struggle of human beings trying to survive by any means necessary. It is beyond patronizing for someone, especially of Royalty status who can not comprehend what it must be like to live next to open sewers and scrap rubbish for survival to lecture designers to learn from these.
If anything western developers who get to make proposals for slums housings need to learn the needs of local people and design to address those needs. More often people in slum areas resist resettlements to brand new western style apartments because they usually come as a burden. They are often beyond their means of income, need financial maintenance and end up digging them deeper in poverty. It’s crucial to understand and not confuse the pride of having a roof over ones head, albeit a slum shark, as in no way meaning that people are ‘happy’ with their conditions.
The notion that people living in a ghetto use ‘local material’ is just baseless. People in slums do not recycle by choice. They use old rotten tyres, used leaking corrugated roofing and all sorts of junk, not because they somehow are very green and have a choice! They do so because of necessity rather than choice. Maybe he also needs to see those who could not find junk to recycle, who live in half finished sharks and leaking roofs with young babies and then talk about this so called ‘local materials’. Old discarded car doors, hazardous car tyres, discarded roofing can not possibly be classified as ‘local material’ for urban ghettos.
image: courtesy of rural studio
just check out what this kids do for their experiments!
Just got back from Thanksgiving break and we have about two weeks left before the Fall semester is done. Today we started working on a guest pod behind Spencer House that needs a little work…
This week we’ve been working on soil tests for the park and marking out the mound locations for our HUGE dirt move which starts tomorrow at 7:30 AM…..
Yesterday Rusty Smith and Xavier Vendrell came once again to talk with us about where we are and where we are going. Our next big investigation is taking two trees, splitting them down the middle, strapping the pairs opposite of each other and then bending them to form an arch…..
…and there is more
Of all the architectural exhibitions and trade fairs I go to I would say this is one of the better ones – not for galleries, art installations, and conceptual design – but for real, down to earth, “heads screwed on” design.
This is one exhibition where you can find out about anything and everything. All the stalls have lots of literature that they eagerly try to give away, many have free material samples too.
Come to this exhibition with a project in mind and you will be sure to leave with realistic ideas about how to meet your targets. If you are lucky you will probably be carting home a wheelbarrow full of free goodies such as branded mugs, rulers and pens too!
It’s free to visit Ecobuild and all its attractions, seminars and conference sessions, plus all the events in the UKGBC Arena and Futurebuild.
Opening Times:
Tuesday 03 March 10.00 – 17.00
Wednesday 04 March 10.00 – 18.00
Thursday 05 March 10.00 – 16.00
Ecobuild is at Earls Court
Click here to download a high resolution, 300dpi jpg of the map.
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