more identity

Yves St Laurent. Fingerprint necklace, 2011.

Well, what have we got here? 
Issues of identity are in the air. 

architecture and identity

T E Lawrence. Cloud's Hill, from a BBC Documentary, One Foot in the Past. 1997

Identity is the theme of the current issue of On Site review – very slippery, very mutable, it starts with a question: do you fit where you live?

A couple of days ago I mentioned T E Lawrence's house in Dorset, Cloud's Hill.  Here is a clip from a BBC program, quite a while ago if Ralph Fiennes' lovely youthfulness is anything to go by.  It isn't embedded, as that has been disabled, but the image is linked to the video. 

Cloud's Hill was, to Lawrence, part of himself: it was him.  It was like him, he made it, it corresponded directly with his values and his identity.  It is not often that can be said of where we live. 

rooms with a view

Virginia Woolf's writing lodge, Monk's House, Sussex, 1921-1941Virginia Woolf's writing room at Monk's House in Sussex.  Originally a tool shed, evidently it was full of garden distractions in the summer, cold and damp in the winter.  But it was hers.  And her £500 a year income was inherited from her aunt.

She wrote in A Room of One's Own, 'Intellectual freedom depends on material things. Poetry depends on intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time'.

Like the vote, we have so many of the material things that people around the world are dying to achieve. and we do so little with them.

Cloud's Hill, Dorset

Cloud's Hill, T E Lawrence's cottage, photographed after his death in 1935

Thinking about T E Lawrence, buried in Moreton, Dorset, about the great European carve-up of the Middle East that he and Gertrude Bell were part of in the 1920s, and his cottage, near Bovington Camp, that he renovated while serving out his last few years in the RAF in the early-1930s.  He had finally got it right, installing a porthole from HMS Tiger in what he called a slip of a roomlet, not having a bedroom, when he was killed, in 1935, in a hit and run motorcycle accident.

Interiors did a photo-essay of Cloud's Hill years ago – it is a National Trust Property and open to visitors.  I remember that the cottage did not have a kitchen, just a wood counter with three beautiful glass cheese bells in a row.  In 1933 he wrote to a friend,  'I have lavished money these last . . . months upon the cottage, adding a water-supply, a bath, a boiler, bookshelves, a bathing pool (a tiny one, but splashable into): all the luxuries of the earth. Also I have thrown out of it the bed, the cooking range: and ignored the lack of drains. Give me the luxuries and I will do without the essentials.'

This seems about right I think.

It was quite small, this cottage: two rooms up and two down, upstairs was opened into one room, the book room, lined with bookshelves.  The downstairs was the music room. He was delighted by its austerity and self -sufficiency: '...books and gramophone records and tools for ever and ever. No food, no bed, no kitchen, no drains, no light or power. Just a two-roomed cottage and five acres of rhododendron scrub. Perfection, I fancy, of its sort.'

Perfection, but also a kind of punishment, but perhaps he had lived too much and needed something elemental out of life and house.  It is curious, one's house should not be one's life, yet it inevitably is.

Ceal Floyer 2

Ceal Floyer. Overhead Projection, 2006. Incandescent light bulb and overhead projector

the Jompy

David Osborne. The Jompy water heater.This was one of the entries into the Shell World Challenge last year.  It is very clever: a flat coil of hardened aluminum alloy, like a flat skillet, that sits between the fire and the cooking pot.  What looks like a handle is attached to water, cold or contaminated which circulates through the coil, is heated and comes out of the other end of the coil hot and boiled. 

Although in use in South Africa, Kenya and India, in theory it is the same as the hot water on demand burners which are slowly replacing the elephantine hot water tank that lurks in most basements.  The Jompy is much more minimal however, and consequently more adaptable to different conditions and uses. 
David Osborne, a plumber and gas fitter from Troon in Scotland was on his honeymoon in a water-challenged part of Africa and figured out this inexpensive way of boiling water with fire already doing some other task such as cooking food. 

The website, celsiussolar.com is a bit cumbersome, but all the information is there, plus various videos, including the World Challenge introduction. 

David Osborne. The Jompy in demonstration in Kenya by Celsius Solar's enthusiastic representative, Kalfan Okoth, just reminding everyone that this is a Scottish product.

Sarajevo Survival Tools

Isak Albahrij's Oven, 1992.The Sarajevo survival tools project is both an exhibition and a virtual archive of the tools, implements and re-inventions from the Sarajevo siege of 1992-1996. 

Seige, whether by war as in the 3-year seige of Leningrad or by sanctions as in the last forty years for Cuba or by environmental disaster as is now unfolding in Japan, means a lack of everything: food, water, medicine, fuel.  It shouldn't be that total deprivation makes people creative, but it does. 

Sarajevo survival tools run from the watering can made out of a cooking oil tin delivered as humanitarian aid,  to a sat phone left behind by fleeing UN workers and quickly appropriated.  There is a double-barrelled rifle, minimal in the extreme, and a hand crank flashlight made out of a bicycle lamp.  This isn't a return to primitive technology, many of the materials are taken from electronic equipment and re-engineered with considerable sophistication.  However, even making an oven out of an aluminum drum results in an object that sustains life and therefore is necessarily beautiful.

Isak Albahrij's Oven, 1992.

I wouldn't mind if we had more signs, fewer abstract diagrams and numbers.  This sign makes much more sense to me than a miniature yellow sign on the bridge itself saying 2.0m, as the one on the CPR bridge by my house says and which often has crumpled city buses under it.

Venus of the hydrants

Nanaimo, 2011

Never let it be said that city utilities workers don't have a finely honed sense of humour 
Mme Vionnet 
bondage 
surrealism
the erotic.

Andrew Piper on lists

Dimitri Nabokov, note included in The Original of Laura (Knopf 2008)Andrew Piper's essay 'Media and Metamorphosis: on notes and books' in the new everyday, a media commons project  talks about the notes made by writers as they organise a novel, or a poem cycle – anything complex that moves from idea to what is eventually published.  The fact that marginalia is a genre, that the notes themselves are a significant narrative, changes the way one thinks of the book.  It isn't just the narrative between two covers, but a book is just one piece of a much larger story that occurs in many forms, not least the act of writing itself.

Nabokov's list, above, of synonyms for removing something has one phrase completely scribbled out as if it offended him.  This isn't a list of possibles, a to-do list, rather it is a list of rejections.  Above all, it takes the words that moil around in the brain and makes them visual.  And once they are visual, they can be considered.

Goethe's list of keywords, the framework for Novella, is a map, with each country crossed off as he passed through it.

Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv, collection number 25, signature W 1990

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? 

Mags Harries, Asaroton (Unswept Floor), 1976

Mags Harries. Asaraton (Unswept Floor), 1976. Boston, MassachussettsAsaroton was a public art project by Mags Harries for Massachussetts' bicentennial in the Haymarket in Boston.  Market debris has been cast in bronze and embedded in a crosswalk, part of Boston's Freedom Trail.  'Asaroton' describes Roman scraps of food, long since fossilised.  And then in the title comes (Unswept Floor) with its guilty domesticity.  This piece marks the market and the detritus left on the streets and in the gutters when the market closes.  It valorises the everyday: a crushed cardboard box in bronze becomes a beautiful, abstract thing, without monumentality, something difficult to achieve at the scale of a public art project. 

We have so much monumentality, so much at the large scale, so many broad strokes in our cities.  The public realm, or the fairly meaningless descriptions 'public space' or even worse, 'green space' is not developed from the small detail, the scale of the foot or the hand, but is constructed at the scale of the crane, the flatbed truck, the swipe of brick paving texture on the plan.

One does wonder if civic public art programs which take a percentage of the cost of new developments for sculpture on the street, or on the plaza, or on the plinth are necessary compensations for the lack of the small-scale intimate detail in the modern city.  It isn't about supporting art, as is claimed, but is a deep desire to achieve beauty that in other eras was a component of ordinary civic engineering. 

Historic 18th century Boston is stuffed with beauty; perhaps this is why it understood a project that is so essentially humble and tender. 

Mags Harries. Asaraton (Unswept Floor), 1976. Boston, Massachussets

more sidewalk details

Joseph Clement. New York sidewalk details. Spacing, September 6, 2007Joseph Clement had a great piece in Spacing a couple of years ago on New York's sidewalks.  I found it when I was looking about for the glass block inserts.  He makes the point that when the sidewalk takes the place of a back alley for loading and services it makes for very wide pavements: clearly this proportional difference makes a better ground for pedestrian life.  The flâneur simply couldn't flan on niggardly strips of concrete pressed up against parked cars or downtown traffic. 

The photo above shows the care with which water is conducted away from seams between metal and paving.  Whenever the manhole cover was installed, or the glass lens panel laid, someone was thinking about longevity and the details needed to keep rain water from pooling, from splashing.  Again it is like the design of the cat's eyes where two glass marbles are set in a heavy rubber block which compresses if a car tire runs over it.  In front of the marbles is a small well to collect water, so when the rubber compresses the water rinses the front of the glass marbles keeping them clean.  There is tremendous attention to detail here that goes beyond the ease of installation and is more about imagining the post-installation working life of the product.  What a quaint idea.   

small investments

Unilever India. Lifebuoy soap There was a thing on the radio this morning: BBCs Global Business, talking about a campaign to get everyone in the world to wash their hands after using the toilet.  Diarrhoea kills a million children each year, preventable by simple hand-washing with soap.  So Unilever, Proctor & Gamble – all the big corporations that make soap were approached and a strategy to provide both soap and initiative launched.

One of the most interesting things was to do with the size of the bar of soap.  The standard 500g bar is too expensive for the world's poor: it isn't that the soap is too expensive, but the investment in a large bar is impossible if one's income comes in daily and is spent daily.  By experimenting with 100g and 50g bars, it was found the the 100g bar of soap was both affordable and purchased.

This is an example of C K Prahalad's theory that there are vast markets at the bottom on the economic scale: sell millions of small things cheaply for much the same return as selling a couple of large expensive products.  Two loaded Ferraris or 2000 Tatas.

Prahalad felt that the poorest of the poor, who have ambitions and aspirations, make deliberate choices about where they put what money they have.  Their capital may be small, but it is capital nonetheless.  Discounting it because it is small and erratic, denies the poor access to many of the products that could improve their lives in terms of nutrition and health – the poor are denied any agency that their small incomes might give them.  Prahalad's view of capitalism from the bottom was tied to the issue of human rights.  He died a couple of months ago; he was only  68.

Bill Burns

Bill Burns. Safety Gear for Small Animals. Respirator, 10 x 11 x 6 cm, 1994/1999Bill Burns is originally from Saskatchewan, studied at Goldsmiths, now lives in Toronto, has work in major collections here and abroad.  He is best known for his series Safety Gear for Small Animals, 1996-2000, a collection of tiny helmets, gas masks, life jackets, hazmat suits and goggles for rats and gophers and other tiny neighbours.
 
Curiously the effect does not anthropomorphise the animals, the little life jackets simply remind us that we don't look after animals at all.  If not actively trying to exterminate them, we ignore them, so busy are we looking after ourselves as we elbow our way into the lifeboat, first leaving everyone else to go down with the ship. 

Safety Gear for Small Animals led to the more recent project, Boiler Suits for Primates, 2006 which is a suitcase of miniature versions of all the things given to people incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay: orange jumpsuits, rubber thongs, towels, a bucket, toothpaste.  These are considered the bleak essentials of life it seems, and by putting them into the context of Safety Gear for Small Animals, the parallel to zoos is undeniable.  Detainees are stripped of their humanity, but still given toothpaste.

The ambiguity between mankind and animalkind is the subject of Burns' work.  It is a similar project to that of Yann Martel who uses animals as eloquent voices of the blindly fumbling human condition.  George Orwell was another.  Somehow when the rather selfish ambitions of human beings are made to come out clear and pure from the mouths of animals who, if we think about them at all, we consider innocents, we are shocked.

last week

How easy it is to break a routine and how hard to get back to it.
 
Last week drove 1100 km from from summer back into winter, from one culture to another, much the same as driving from Paris to Madrid or in distance, from St Petersburg to Moscow and back again.
 
Last week got On Site 23: small things to the printer.  They have bought a new Heidelburg press, an enormous thing the size and appearance of a locomotive engine.  Everything that was in the space it now occupies has been shuffled about – lots of untaped drywall everywhere, z-shaped corridors – but that's okay, there is this new princess in the building that everything defers to.

Getting an issue to the printer is a horrible marathon of moving commas, getting names spelled right, aligning images.  It goes on and on for days ending only when I force the layout onto a cd and deliver it, otherwise I would shoot myself.
 
Last week I unpacked, in a manner of speaking: I took things out of small packages whereupon they exploded all over and I can't find anywhere for them to go.  It would be nice to throw everything away.  Clearly I have too much stuff.  As a corrective I shall look at Jens Thiel's  monobloc site again:

Hannes Geiseler. Plastic chair repair, India, 2009

the Eames chair

Charles Eames. Patent Drawing, 1951. Library of CongressWe have an article about the Eames chair in the next issue of On Site: small things.  Melissa Jacques writes about its iconicity and its marketing, sixty years after its invention.  While looking for an image for the article, I came across one of the patent drawings submitted by Charles Eames in 1942.  It shows that originally the moulded bucket had material taken out of its stress points.  It somehow seems more plastic this way: one can see the original sheet material and how it is bent, a quality completely lost in the fibreglas shells that quickly followed, although I remember fibreglas chairs with an oval hole cut out at the lower back.  I thought they were for ventilation maybe, not thinking much about it at all.  It is interesting that something can be made stronger with the removal of material, rather than building it up to a state of rigidity.

Much of this moulded plywood technology was developed for wartime applications: airplanes, which are still very flexible, and famously in the Eames' case, for limb splints — both applications lightweight and shapely.  The plywood Eames Chair really is the hallmark of 1950s furniture whether it be Danish or American Modern.  Soon supplanted by fibreglas and wire mesh, and most masking of all, upholstery, all this thin, lightweight industrially processed furniture lost its wartime connections very quickly.  Jacques says that it still has its original über-cool quality however, and I wonder if this is something inherent in the way the form was made that we still  intuitively understand, rather than any amount of marketing. 
Charles and Ray Eames. Moulded Plywood Chair. Library of Congress

pocket books

Victorian books were often very small, soft-covered and portable.  The original pocket books, for the pocket.  I once read that Leslie Stephen sometimes walked 40 miles in a day, books in his pockets, reading while he walked.  I had a grandfather who would walk out with gun, dog and book across the prairie from the last street in Calgary, 18A SW, where he lived.  He was born in 1875, came to Canada in 1908 bringing with him his violin, his patent-leather dance slippers, his school blazer and his Hardy fishing rod.  Things were different then.

Books were one's companions in one's solitary pursuits.  Books of poetry were high on the list, perhaps because poems then often had a walking rhythm, were episodic, compressed, gave one lots to think about.  Wilfred Owen took his Keats to the Front in WWI.

We resist, today, being left alone with our thoughts – there is certainly a lot of stuff that rushes into the void, sort of as if we don't have any thoughts of our own really.   Maybe we don't, but if my head is an empty desert I would prefer it be filled with Yeats or Heaney or Hughes.  personally.  Unfortunately I hardly have the time to stroll about, book in hand.

the lower case reading room

the lower case reading room. 3934 Main Street, Vancouver BCThe Regional Assembly of Text is a stationery story in Vancouver with a one-person at a time zine library and reading room in the back. 

We have an article about it by Grey Hernandez for the next issue of On Site: small things.  In his proposal he said: The 'smallness' is not just the space itself, is also the relationship between zine culture and the emphasis on the individual.  Making zines, reading them, distributing them, blogging about them and now housing them are all done at the scale of the single person. 

the lower case reading room is run by Brandy Fedoruk and Rebecca Dolen, Emily Car graduates who used the 3 square metre space previously as an art gallery.  If one considers reading, looking at art, being human as an individual act, then small spaces are completely logical.  If one considers reading as a group activity (can't image who does this), looking at art as a social event, being human as a collectivity, then yes, we would need large spaces for everything, which is what we have. 

Perhaps we have a surfeit of space that forces everyone into group activities.  Spaces too small to contain 60 diners used to be considered too small to make a viable restaurant: was that based on some sort of profit margin worked out in an economist's office somewhere?  Where one finds such small venues, such cabines, is increasingly in the marginal spaces of gentrifying areas where preciousness is a commodity.  It doesn't last for long, this attachment to small things, this relationship between having little money but large ideas, this desire to colonise the uninhabitable with something interesting. 

Quality of life is not dependent on money, it is dependent on being creative.