Perspectives

garden/walls/staircase

Collage City

I'm messing about a bit with Photoshop to try and create atmospheric collages of the architectural characters/signifiers in our project, and this is an early draft of the first attempt, focusing on the walled garden.

More Berlin Masque

"I cannot do a building without building a new repertoire of character of stories of language and all its parallel. It's not just building per se. It's building worlds. It's building worlds."
John Hejduk

"Hejduk's wall focuses on that involuntary memory - the vaporous memory of architecture's own history - in the present instance of embodied vision. The corporeal - temporal dimensions of the plane of encounter keeps what might otherwise freeze into a final refined image from ever fixing itself. Its mnemonics are emergent rather than residual, and any memories produced must constantly be renegotiated."
A and U March 2010

expressive walls

Following on from a much earlier discussion about Muf's wall in Barking, I have come across some more examples of walls that, while blind (or almost blind) in respect of opes, can make generous contributions to the particular sense of the street.

The London-based designer and artist Gitta Gschwendtner built a 50 m long wall filled with 1000 bird houses to surround a new apartment complex in Cardiff, an idea that is reminiscent of the accidental function of the middle wall of our site at the moment.

In the Can Framis museum in Barcelona, BAAS architects restored two preexisting factory buildings while creating a new one to link them, coinciding with the site of another former warehouse which forms a courtyard in between, paved with stones recovered from the former factory.

Muf's Barking town square

http://www.bdonline.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=3153931

Muf's brick wall in Barking town square establishes a dialogue between the user and the memory of the site, while also playing on established notions of time and history. The wall is a contemporary intervention made to resemble, in a most superficial sense, a Roman construction, while, upon closer inspection it is so formally playful as to almost be mannerist. It reflects the rich history of Barking, while also questioning ideas of truth and rejecting received ideas of a singular 'history'.