H\Blog
September 2007

Am I reading too much into this? Date added 25.09.07 by Darryl Chen Publication Monthly mag for the city's homeless, The Pavement, is running a campaign of self-information for London's rough sleepers. It asks for a mobilization of perhaps the city's most mobile demographic group to implement an easily updatable signage system. A kind of user-content noticeboard 2.0 that puts its hopes in the power of collective intelligence. Makes sense - who really knows the streets better on a day-to-day basis? It is the stuff of a young Tschumi's dreams. An alternate reading of urban space and a corresponding notation that sits just below the radar of middle class commuting. A new psychogeography leaping from the boards of student diploma projects to be inscribed 1:1 scale on/in the physical space of the city. Just join the dots and photograph in grainy black and white. What's more, the form this 'city guide' campaign takes is itself a sardonic jab at urban tourism where the very idea of city-ness has been fetishized for a moneyed elite through HipHotels and Wallpaper pamphlets - a reminder that the global city contains both what we used to call the 'first' and 'third' worlds; but also that forms of occupation and communication across classes are uncomfortably intertwined.

Thirties Glamour Date added 25.09.07 by Nicky Rutt Publication I visited the Daily Express Building on Fleet Street during the Open House weekend. Designed by Owen "concrete" Williams and completed in 1932 this was London's first experiment in curtain walling. The glossy black glass and vitriolite exterior contrasts with the sumptuous art deco interior designed by Robert Atkinson - well worth a visit.

Bottoms Up Date added 17.09.07 by Michael Macleod Publication ...the most dramatic building I've seen in London recently won't last long, looming over the city like a floating cube of pure 60's modernism, 122 Leadenhall is currently being demolished from the bottom up. Completed by Gollins Melvin Ward and Partners in 1969, the top 10 storeys of 122 Leadenhall were hung from massive trusses at roof level. This has allowed the demolition contractor (McGee Group) to take out the basement and the first five above ground floors, leaving 7 floors of prime 60's office space balanced on the central concrete core like giant modernist mushroom. Apparently this is the most sensible way of taking down this kind of building (and allows them to already start work on the new Rogers' 'cheesegrater' that will soon take its place) but the result is an almost artistic intervention - a sledgehammer version of Matta-Clark's surgical cuts. Have a look before it disappears...

Pile em high Date added 13.09.07 by David Bickle Publication A sneaky peek at SANAA’s new New Museum of Contemporary Art, Bowery NYC which opens December 1st 2007. Notice the water tower which looks to be disguised by the buildings parapet (see Rachel Whiteread’s water tower at MOMA for the icily polar opposite) www.newmuseum.org/ www.youtube.com/newmuseum/

In the words of Helvetica… Date added 13.09.07 by Anna Motture Publication 50 opportunities. 50 years to describe. 50 leading artists/designers. 50 50cm x 50cm canvases. 50 prints. £50 each. One type-face. Happy 50th Birthday Helvetica. Sum up each year in an art form, prose or sound. You will instinctively go to a year that is memorable to you – and be excited by what emotions feelings come flooding back. Set a brief whereby the Swiss sans serif typeface Helvetica is the source of telling the tale – you might expect emotions to be limited, fashion to dominate and a general sense of ‘sameness’ to overwelm. A great surprise then that Helvetica seemed almost transparent in the 50 works of art displayed in the Design Museum Café this rainy “summer.” Transparent or perhaps compassionately modest? These 50 artworks depict an emotional tale of the last the fifty years, of which Helvetica has played a crucial but modest role. Its now too late to go to the Helvetica exhibition at the Design Museum London – however it’s not too late to buy a print of one the artworks describing the last 50 years “in the words of Helvetica” or at least have a sneaky peak at what the typeface is capable of……. www.blanka.co.uk/ …..or indeed allow Helvetica to become centre stage by watching the film: www.helveticafilm.com/

A Round and About Date added 07.09.07 by David Bickle Publication There are some buildings that you know intimately and can recall instantly, where you can describe every nook and cranny, every sexy subtlety, the way the floor has built up a patina by shuffling feet, the gently abrasive wear on a door handle, even its own beautiful BO (building odour). These specific memories of detail are so often locked into the building that they can’t escape from the whole. I thought that I knew the Guggenheim Museum in New York in this way until I visited it again this summer with my kids (they hadn’t seen it before) I described it to them as a ‘Mr Whippy’ of a building, a confection of curves crafted from cream (actually I spun my finger around in the air in a crude approximation of the buildings form). What we found was altogether different, midway through renovation it was wrapped in scaffolding, its Raphaelite curves cloaked in a rectilinear hording, its smooth white foundation removed to reveal its cold grey flesh beneath. Without the wow of ‘white on white’ we had to look elsewhere for clues of the buildings identity, what we found is clumsily brought together here and these are the beautiful things that I couldn’t recall or remember about the building from when I first visited it. Circles of terrazzo beneath the spiralling ramp and circular oculus, steel rimmed discs of concrete embedded in the sidewalk and a curtain of plastic lenses draped in a window. Poetry in circular motion.