make it right houses

Ginger. Make it Right house. New Orleans. deep fried kudzu, November 19, 2010

Deep Fried Kudzu is a website about southern life. Ginger, whose site it is, lives in Alabama and has an intense interest in folk art, material culture, cemeteries, food, architecture and craft. Her site is always delightful.  This week she posted a photo-report on the post-Katrina houses built by Make it Right, a charity headed by Brad Pitt. 

There is a house by Morphosis, by David Adjaye, and no doubt a number of other names.  They average $150,000 each.  If these photos are representative, these houses are making a very strange environment.   Some float, some collect rainwater, they are cubic and bright generally.  The New Orleans housing vernacular is nowhere to be seen. They are exhibition houses and most take a good photograph. 

Their logic is impeccable, staircases for people to sit and watch the sidewalk, expendable ground floors for the next flood, sleeping porches and such, but the language is Corbusier x trailer punk.  Each house is exceptional.
Not sure this is how one builds a community. 
Anyway, have a look here and see what you think. 

The house above I quite like for its sagging roof.  I wondered at first if it really was part of the project but then I found it on the Make it Right website.  For the life of me I cannot find anything about the architects of these houses on this very extensive site, so I don't know who did this.  Are the architects not important unless they are Morphosis?

Nicole Dextras's frozen ephermera

Nicole Dextras. Iceworks.An appropriate image for today.  The other side of ice and snow, here, in Nicole Dextras's work, garments frozen in ice and photographed.  They acquire both an extreme romanticism – the sense of abandoned movement in the garments themselves, and also a kind of forensic tragedy. 

Aires Mateus 2

Aires Mateus. Casa Areia, 2010oh, just another Aires Mateus house idea, done for the 2010 Venice Biennale.  Casa Areia.  What a life.  

Aires Mateus. Casa Areia, 2010

Aires Mateus

Aires Mateus Architects. Casa em Leiria, Portugal, 2010We get sent portfolios of photographs by Fernando Guerro for use in publications.  The one that came in yesterday is a house in Leiria, Portugal, by Aires Mateus Architects of Lisbon. 

One would think, from these portfolios, that Portugal is a splendid oasis of minimalism, and indeed, many of the projects photographed by Guerro are startling in their purity. 

It is quite hard to find information about the projects: their visual presence is often all I can get.  This one is a courtyard house, uncompromised by any acknowledgement of context.  There is a square pool outside the limits of the house, and a flat spill of paving stones at the entrance.  The interior has been photographed empty: just acres of blonde wood and white plaster.   This is a white world for a temperate country.  I look out the window at a -31° winter white here in a blonde wood and white plaster house that never gets really warm, and think about heat.

Aires Mateus. Case em Leiria, stairwell.

Jamelie Hassan: Poppy Cover

Jamelie Hassan. Poppy Cover. LOLAfest, London Ontario, 2010Poppy Cover was installed during London Ontario Live Arts' LOLAfest, September 16-19, 2010. 
Two thousand poppies were attached to a large camo net which then covered a Sherman Tank that sits permanently in Victoria Park, London.  The WWII tank was dedicated to the park in 1950 by the 1st Hussars of the Canadian Forces, based in London.  It was the only tank of the 6th Canadian Armoured Regiment to complete the entire European campaign from D-Day to the end of the war.

Jamelie Hassan's Poppy Cover restores this WWII history (the tank mostly provides an ad hoc climbing frame for children outside Remembrance Day services) and adds the current Afghan conflict to it.  The poppies reference the WWI Flanders field poppies, the Canadian Legion poppy tradition for Remembrance Day and the poppy fields of Afghanistan which flood the world with opium and heroin. 

As with all Hassan's work, objects have deep histories and consequently multiple readings.  History is not simple, it is striated; monuments are not fixed and stable, they are ongoing and mutable.  

Henryk Górecki

Henryk Górecki (6 December 1933 - 12 November 2010)

Henryk Górecki.  Syphony of Sorrowful Songs.  Second part of the 3rd Movement - Lento e largo—Tranquillissimo

Populous. The Stadium, London 2012 Olympics. photo: Alex Sturrock

Stadium as a 21st century pantheon: it all seems so light, so far.  Delicate structures, cabled, stretched fabric, pale and luminous, strangely intimate give these buildings' sizes. 

The crumpled distressed logo is at odds with the grace of some of the architecture.  

Populous/Cook/Happold/McAlpine

Populous. The Stadium, London 2010 Olympics. seating in place November 2010. photo: Alix SturrockThe stadium has been designed by Populous, formerly HOK Sport, and Peter Cook, with Buro Happold as engineers and built by Robert McAlpine.  It is meant to be completely wrapped in a graphic skin which seems to have encountered a number of problems.  The most recent solution is a wrapping of digitally active fabric. 

This is a brilliant team: Populous, aka HOK Sport keeps it on time and on budget probably, Buro Happold makes it possible, Peter Cook thinks of things such as vast broadcasting screens, and Robert McAlpine builds it.  Evidently the seats have already been installed, almost two years in advance of the event. 

Hopkins and Partners in construction

Hopkins and Partners. Velodrome, London 2012 Olympics. photo: Alex Sturrock

The velodrome, by Hopkins and Partners, is a hyperbolic paraboloid, the same roof shape as the Saddledome.  This one is flatter and the supporting walls are wood panels that fit between the cables.  The wood is meant to echo the wood cycle track, but it gives it a lightness that floats slightly above the ground.  It is this lightness that perhaps concentrates the activitiy within: a suspension of time and belief at the performances that happen at Olympics. 

Zaha Hadid in construction

Zaha Hadid. Aquatic Centre, London 1012 Olympics, 2010. photographer David Goddard/Getty

just some lovely pictures this week of the new buildings for the London Olympics 2012.

Zaha Hadid's aquatic centre construction site.
It looks like a skate rippling along, fluttering into that messy, complex and beautiful seabed that is a construction site.

do remember this

10 Course RCAF July 7th 1944.  Nicosia, Cyprus

Vic Seaton   Frank Buck X   Alex MacDonald   Tut White   Bill Wilkes X   Don Downing
Shearer   Eric Von Bock X   Les Corney X   Jack Fitzpatrick X   Monty M Brown   Bill Wilson
Eric Watts   Robert Thomas   Neil Moss    Vic Treasure   Frank Purnell X

6/17 killed: 35%

46,998 Canadian military killed in the Second World War.
Canada's population in 1939: 11.25 million
Enlistment: 1.3 million, 41% of all men between 19 and 25.

• Royal Canadian Air Force deaths: 17,974
• Royal Canadian Navy: 4,154 
• Canadian Merchant Navy: 1,146
• Canadian Army: 24,870 

Dick Averns

Dick Averns. Duff, 2009In our mortal lives, the gods assign a proper time for each thing upon the good earth - Homer

Operation Calumet is Canada’s contribution to the Multinational Force and Observers (MFO), a little known international peacekeeping organization (not connected to the UN) comprising 11 countries and almost 2,000 troops. Their job is to monitor the 1979 peace treaty between Israel and Egypt: observe, report, verify.

Dick Averns was attached to the MFO through the Canadian Forces Artists Program in 2009. 

smsteele

Cottonwoods at Lone Hand Ranch

June 2008, no summer in Penticton yet;
the rain last week more like March or November.
Last night it hailed, then poured for six wet hours.

In Summerland, the apricots froze.
This is the coldest June on record this centennial year;
and at LH Ranch all the trees are down,
all the cottonwoods have been cut, dumpstered and removed.

And east of Zhari two dogs whimper,
Await their master who is not there;
and at the airport in Kandahar a soldier is ramped home.
His photo on the ‘National’;
his life, beauty, presence removed by chance
like cottonwoods at Lone Hand Ranch.

DBJ Snyder
June 2008

— smsteele



This war?  Afghanistan.  smsteele's chartilng of it: warpoet.ca

TVO has mapped where the 152 Canadian soldiers killed in Afghanistan come from.  Overwhelmingly they are from rural Canada.

TVO. The rural/urban divide, 2010

Bosnia

William MacDonnell

William MacDonnell. The Wall, 1994. Canadian War Museum AN19970054-001A week of thinking about wars.  This one, the Bosnian conflict in the former Yugoslavia 1992-95.  MacDonnell was in Croatia with the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry of the Canadian Forces. 

He is quoted in Legion, “What struck me was the fact that the worst aspects of the war seemed to be based on the destruction of each other’s culture. It was always churches, schools, libraries and monasteries that were being destroyed, sites that were hundreds or even thousands of years old with no military advantage. When you understand that it’s a cultural war, the whole thing seems to make some kind of horrible sense. You begin to understand the fear and how it works….”

fences

44 Great Ormond Street, London. 1740Fearsome thickets of iron railings protected houses in the London squares: a precise division between the private and public, the anarchy of the public domain and the owned.  Most of these were taken down in World War II in a drive to collect scrap metal to build tanks.  There is much discussion on WWII forums about whether the railings were ever used: they had a high carbon and sulphur content evidently, and so not that suitable for re-use.  The urban consequences were significant, all those taut blank Georgian façades without their delicate filigreed bases appear quite obdurate.  The six-foot transition between public and private that was negotiated by the railings, now takes place, abruptly, at the door itself.

Typical prairie city streets, even in the early 1980s, were completely fenced.  There was the street, then the boulevard, then the sidewalk, then the fence, then the front yard, then the door.  Calgary pickets in the 1920s and 30s when my fence was built came from the Sarcee Reserve, a three township block of land that runs from southwest Calgary 18 miles deep into the foothills, heavily forested.  Now known as the Tsuu T'ina First Nation they do other things, such as casinos and golf courses.  But earlier they supplied the whole city with firewood and fence pickets. 

Pickets aren't that available anymore.  It is easier to cut them yourself, but not as efficient.  And impossible to get some of the more elegant shapes, curved, punched and notched – doilies for the front edge of the property.  

picket fence culture. 11th Avenue, Southeast Calgary.

another measure of extinction

Anti-body snatching railings, 19th century England.

Evidently, iron railings around graves, one of which I found in a small Nicola Valley cemetery last summer, come from the era of 19th century body-snatchers and grave robbers in England.  Freshly buried bodies were regularly dug up to sell to medical schools for dissection.  Relatives would watch over the grave at night until the body had deteriorated to the point it was not worth digging up –two to three weeks. 

This is all on the Jane Austen website, 19th century social practice arcana.  So many traditions migrated to Canada leaving their particular histories behind: we are left with inexplicable material objects.  In terms of fenced graves, it was the wealthy that could afford such a fiercely protective display.  Where this occurred in the little Nicola Valley cemetery, there were two grand iron-fenced graves and then half a dozen less grand graves surrounded by wood picket fences.

The body-snatchers weren't in evidence here, but wealth was.   Granite gravestones are shockingly expensive, if you've ever had to get one.  They probably always were.  Added to cast iron fencing, it was quite a display.   I'm not sure that the dead are concerned with display, however the precision of a picket fence gives the dead some privacy and some propriety: a defence against obliteration.

St Michael's Cemetery, Nicola Valley, BC

Fionn Byrne. A memorial to the extinction of a species

Fionn Byrne. A Monument to the Extinction of a Species.This is a new submission to On Site's digital exhibition of war memorials.  Byrne opens with this statement: 'the alarming rate of species extinction would not normally be classified as a war, but perhaps this ongoing extreme loss of life should be reconsidered in the context of an organized conflict.'

Yes, it should. 

garbage cans

It occured to me that we needed a context for Duende's urban fire fountains.  Existing Paris garbage cans clearly discourage fires.

Matthew Blackett wrote a good piece in Spacing about the replacement of the heavy concrete and ceramic tile garbage cans in the Toronto Metro with a similar, transparent solution.  He says it is an anti-terrorism measure: one can see a bomb, whereas before they were hidden.  If they were there. 

Matthew Blackett. Spadina station, Toronto.

Then I found Artemy Lebedev's site: a two-year study of rubbish bins in the public domain, mostly in Russia and eastern Europe.  He writes with that lovely irony of someone who lives in cynical times.  'The function of a trash can is the timely collection of litter that is carelessly thrown in its direction.'

Artemy Lebedev. Movable trash can. MoscowArtemy Lebedev. A trash can that never got scrubbed, Moscow

We have just had enormous black bins with wheels delivered for our household garbage with helpful hints of what to do with our old garbage cans, such as storing sports equipment in them.  I have an aversion to throwing raw rubbish into my new, clean, very shiny garbage bin. It seems somehow slovenly not to have it tidily contained in a black plastic bag.  I would quite like to have that blue Moscow urn as my garbage can: a thing of beauty on the alley.  It just needs a lid.

winter street furniture

Duende Studio and François Bauchet. Fire Fountain, 2010

Duende, a design studio that regularly sends notices of very chic French industrial design, sent this elegant garbage can today.  Acknowledging that people on the street light fires in metal barrels, and often set themselves alight, this is a safe version.  It also aestheticises a social condition that is not always beautiful.

François Bauchet calls it a public fireplace, the winter version of Paris's fountains, an idea first floated by Yves Klein.  I doubt Klein, who died in 1962 at 34, had the homeless in mind, but he had made a conceptual shift from dancing fountains in the public domain to a winter version: both water and fire are elemental, fugitive, ephemeral.  So yes, one can see how Kleinian this lovely garbage can might be.

It is also in the tradition of the Art Nouveau Paris Metro entrances: cast iron and romantic, not a utilitarian atom in their sinuous, gratuitous decorativeness.  Well, other than holding up a sign. 
Should gratuitous beauty be put into service?  Is the issue here safety or the propriety of the street?  The poor are always with us, but at least we can make them look good?
Is it overly presbyterian Canadian of me to think that winter fire fountains casting a sweet wood-smoke pall over the city are a cosmetic device?  Yes, it is, and this is no doubt why our Canadian city streets are so bleak, so unlovely, so un-made up, so un-Parisian.

This is another example of a small thing, like the lipsticks given out during the relief of Belsen, that make a hard life bearable.  Of course we should be solving poverty at a structural level, but we don't seem to be capable of doing that.  In the meantime, might we not acknowledge that the sidewalks are our common ground where all levels of society meet the same amenities?