OSA Magazine Volume 1 Issue 3 | May 2015 sample

Page 1

FETISH


EDITED BY Robert Dutton Lauren Kehoe Louisa Preece

with lots of help from

Victoria Adegoke, Anthony Andrews, Jonathan Bown, Lewis Clarke, Ellie Collins, Adrian Alexandrescu, Dafydd Davies, Sophia Edwards, Nadhira Halim, David Kay, Kristina Line, Iara Silva, Jennifer Steel, Nimrod Wong

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Matt Gaskin - Head of the School of Architecture Harriet Harriss - Principle Lecturer, School of Architecture Regner Ramos - Editor, LOBBY Hugh McEwan & Catrina Stewart - Unit F Tutors Jesen Tanadi & Athanasiou Geolas - Editors, The Draftery Patrick Myles - Art Director of RIBA Journal & Blueprint Liza Clothier - Development & Alumni Office Ronnie MacLellan - Senior Lecturer, School of Architecture Paul Inman - Dean of Faculty of Technology, Design & Environment Janet Beer - Vice Chancellor, Oxford Brookes University Beth & Deborah - Oxford Greenprint And the many others who have helped us make this magazine

WITH MANY THANKS TO


FF s s t t F F s s t t 07 08 10 17 18 20 22 24 28 32 34 40 46 50 56 58 63

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e e h h i i e e h h i i

tt F F s s tt F F s s

ii e e h h ii e e h h

Editorial Aphorism in the Age of Voyeurism Disease and Efficiency Mac Mad Public Nuisance Constant Connections Formal Fetishes My Fetish: Watching Old Men on Youtube Architectural Seduction What’s your Fetish? Astronomers Retreat Architecture of the Skin We Love to Draw Exploration / Exploitation Soundbites Intimarch The Next Generation


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Let’s begin with that most cliched element of architectural writing: the etymology.* Fetish, Wikipedia tells us, is derived from Feitico, Portuguese for ‘little charm’. Does that make OSA a fetish? We certainly hope it’s charming. We continue down the rabbit hole, exploring if our magazine is itself a little fetish. Much googling later brings us to the notion that a fetish is created at the point of transference of power to an object which thereafter attains an irreducible symbolic status. The magazine certainly has a form of power over us - the hundreds of hours put into each issue are given for neither payment or reward by neither editors nor contributors - are we seduced by the opportunity? What is it that we find within these pages? If a fetish is an ‘irrational relation to objects’, then do archizines count? Why has a group of students come together to curate a magazine that attempts to reflect all that is happening within a school of architecture, when it means that the workload is only increased? So does that make this issue of OSA a fetish which contains fetishes? And what a group of fetishes it is! We’ve got old men on youtube and young men on buildings; critical fetishes and pedagogical fetishes and critical pedagogical fetishes; fetishes for materials and fetishes for forms; fetishes for representations and criticisms of fetishes. And well done to (nearly) everyone for avoiding the crude

approach to the subject, we’ve been very impressed with the maturity of (most) of the submissions. So maybe this explains our irrational relationship with and enthusiasm for this magazine. Every time we set the theme we’re always delighted and surprised by the breadth and depth of the contributions and the ways in which people are able to engage with the topic. Over the course of this year we’ve received submissions from from undergraduates and PhD researchers, from students and graduates, from alumni of OSA and from architects and students from all over the world. It’s been a real pleasure reading every submission - and we have to admit, there’s a definite thrill in taking a red pen to your tutors work and criticising their spelling and grammar for a change. This is our final issue of OSA as editors. When we set up the magazine last summer we very much intended the publication to be of it’s time & place. We’re all graduating, so it’s only right that we hand over the reins to current students so that the magazine will evolve with the school. Thank-you to everyone who’s supported (enabled?) us in developing our fetish this year - we hope you’ve developed one too. The Editors Rob Dutton Lauren Kehoe Louisa Preece

* If we were feeling particularly aesthetically inclined, we might even include the phoenetic spelling.

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Aphorism in the age of voyeurism Daniel Stillwell on his reasons for being a fetishist of the critical.

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rchitecture is everything. A seemingly empty statement, yet one that is full and heated with meanings the world over. Architects draw from the social, cultural, ecological, economical and political, constructing spaces, places, legacies and communities in-between. We breathe heavier and heavier for it like we’re all clasping at the last molecules of air in the atmosphere. The Architect used to be the chief builder, the top totem, the Meta creator/constructor, now sunk to a life partly shackled to a desk. Where did it all go wrong? The Architect was the all-inclusive. They encompassed as mind that would attempt to try all things in search for that elusive prize‌perfection,

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the divine dream and utopia. Fast forward to now, the mess, the mass and the amassed 21st century, junk-space, lack of space and the waste of space. Schools of Architecture are laboratories of experimentation, activism and a healthy mix of risk and wit‌ or at least they all should and try to be revolutionary. In the making, we are bestowed with preconceptions of riches, heavily clad in black turtle necked jumpers and thick rimmed spectacles, yet what stops us from reaching these prophecies left by the thrills of Post Modernism and what Parametricism? The translation from learning to yearning is quick, euphoric and leaves us lusting for something more tangible


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disease and efficiency Architectural Researcher and Tutor at The University of Hong Kong Daniel James Wilkinson presents a contemporary Baroque that engages with unknown truths in ways which current architectural styles cannot.

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with the hiddenness of our unknown natural condition? Although commonly disregarded as the whims of exuberance, the Baroque, in its initial diagnosis by Heinrich Wölfflin, was outlined as an oppositional style which willingly corrupted the misgivings of the traits it opposed. Wölfflin’s work led to Spanish philosopher Eugenio d’Ors (1881 – 1954) conceptualising the Baroque as both a cyclical, and corrupting, political force. Eugenio believed he could identify 22 previous Baroques - including a Macedonian, a Nordic, and a Buddhist - where in all cases, a self-maintaining social order had been usurped both politically and stylistically. Importantly, d’Ors expected a 23rd irruption against the ‘reasonable’ expectations of the

modern age. The Baroque, for d’Ors, is an event of force unified through the “canonisation of movement, as opposed to the parallel tendency towards stasis that characterises the rational”, d’Ors referred to the objective situation of any socio-political order, and its norms, by stating that “human reason is always looking through bars”1. Through engaging with tectonic obscuration and partial figurations, rather than celebrating the immediate legibility and the demands of reason, could a style begin to engage with the very idea that the more we look, the less we know? And could such an architecture, drowning in its own fixations, begin to illustrate our actual condition beyond the bars of reason?

Twitter: @dansapien AHRC funded PhD candidate at the Bartlett, UCL and Architectural Researcher and Tutor at The University of Hong Kong.

1. Zamora L and Kaup M. (eds.) Baroque New Worlds. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.

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The Usurped Plane, from the Courthouse of the XXIII Baroque. 2014.


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mac maD Sandra McGrath reflects on her year as an editor of MAC Mag.

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his is MacMag’s second day off after sending the magazine to print….and we are already back in our office. What the hell?! We can confidently say that we are obsessed! The reason behind this obsession remains unknown even to ourselves. This year MacMag celebrates its 40th birthday and we guess that was a major push for us to go a little further than the previous editors. A great justification as to why we were always in the office. By the time we uploaded the magazine to the printing company we had lost all track of our daily routines – which had been reduced to waking up, leaving our homes and then ‘macmagging’ for the rest of the day until bedtime. When that loading bar reached 100% we couldn’t have been happier. 16

There is no logical reason to why we spent so much time on the publication. And there would be no way to describe or justify it to a person that had never studied architecture. Architecture makes you fetishise work in general – no matter what it is. When you work within design, your only limitation is time and we, as designers, use that to its absolute limits. We push ourselves and our work to the best that it can be, and our macmagging obsession will definitely not end with the magazine. It will be with us for the rest of our lives as designers. Now that MacMag has been published, we are exploring what ‘free-time’ is... until we find our next design project anyway. The 40th edition of MacMag will be released this June in Glasgow.


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connection is a Human Right (Special Rapporteur report 2011). It is only a matter of time before our relationship to the internet will become one of an essential basic need; this will usher in the era of emergency response internet connections for disaster relief zones. The ‘freedom’ that is supposedly provided by having constant access to the world wide web, is actually a large farce. Internet service providers and global giants such as Google and Microsoft, restrict and filter our searches and accessibility to websites

for our ‘benefit’. Have you ever noticed the removal of search entries, restricted access to websites, and false identification of viruses to websites or files that you know aren’t harmful? This is your Big Brother, an Orwellian society, taking over. Our fetish and desire for this online connection is just helping to feed the accumulation and increase in the profiles and power of these companies, governments and individuals. Our desire and obsession for the internet is forming digital clones of ourselves that can be exploited without us ever knowing.

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formal fetishes MArchD student Adrian Alexandrescu on the subconscious relationships of forms

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lthough it is mostly associated with the world of sex, sexual activities and kink, we are all victims of this feeling on a day to day basis. I say victims because it is something that comes in a subconscious way, it attacks our ideas and the way we go about our life. As individuals we are attracted to things, objects, concepts, which to anyone else could seem trivial, but for us they have a strong psychological effect. Evidently I am talking about our deepest, dirtiest and most twisted fetishes. As students of architecture and architects we might confuse those feelings with passion or we might even call it our style. How many times 22

have you got into bed … this is getting interesting right? … but been unable to sleep because the glass that you chose for a façade didn’t feel right? And how many times did you try to include a particular element in your design even though you know that it does not fit well with the concept? The concept of fetish however should not be something scary. It is a normal part of who we are and like it or not, as creative, we will be showing it to the public quite a lot. Although being rooted in a deeper concept, the idea of fetish will be portrayed in a primordial sense in this article, in order to see how far a strong idea can take us. As the movie Inception describes it; an idea is the most dangerous thing,


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click for more old

men..

My Fetish: Watching old men on youtube (Experimental) Zone 5 tutor Toby Shew meanders through an evening with his fetish alongside illustrations from OSA Editor Louisa Preece

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spent a few minutes going through my fetishes – as anyone might when confronted by this theme. I realised that a [hu]man can turn almost anything into a fetish; any action, any piece of clothing, any smell, any material. I guess this is in line with the postmodern condition as discussed by Jean-François Lyotard – we are able to enjoy a profusion of small narratives and this leads to a plural of fetishes. Or maybe we just have too much time and 24

media on our hands? I found myself YouTubing “JeanFrançois Lyotard” and started to watch him discuss La postmodernité with Luc Ferry in 1989 (in French, a language I only partially understand). I realised that this was my fetish, or at least the one I am willing to discuss here! Or maybe more accurately, I like to watch men-of-old on YouTube – although in most cases, both titles fit the bill. I find myself sitting and watching


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his ability to set out logical arguments and respond to them seem a lost art today. Hitchens’ discussion with Tom Metzger and his son is a sight to behold; Hitchens barely conceals his vitriol for these white supremacists - yet the debate is fascinating and the discussion is one that exposes the racism in a way that doesn’t seem to happen today. I might see in the side-bar a video with William F Buckley – a conservative thinker and commentator who speaks with a slow drawl about his relationship with Ayn Rand, and about how his publication reviewed Atlas Shrugged and as a result, she would never be in the same space as him again. His views are contrary to the majority of the others I’ve discussed in this piece, but his delivery, poise and clarity of thought are extremely enjoyable to listen to.

I often search for Hunter S Thompson – a man that found the world so changed, he left it. Videos with him range from drunken, drug-fuelled rants to razor sharp insight and critique. He sees the world differently to anyone I have met in the present day. This portal back into his mind is more visceral than reading any of his books (although I suggest you read them all!). His meetup with Skip Workman is both funny, shocking and shows an age and a man that has passed. I might also mention Noam Chomsky, Jon Berger, Michel Foucault and many others – but I often end up finishing off a YouTube session fixated on Marshal McLuhan, who is able to explain the most complex of ideas, the most simple of ideas and the most important of ideas with such lucidity and urge. There is no dumbing down, no simplification, no

Hitchens barely conceals his vitriol

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The seductive is always appealing, but usually not in our best interests. Perhaps that what makes it so enticing… If you have ever looked around a studio pin up day, many of you will probably have found this happening to yourselves too. After spending 3 days trying to coax a workable movement strategy out of your design, you will find yourself drawn to colourfully rendered castles in the sky which have skirted around real life issues entirely - and you may look back to your own work, and say ‘why did i even bother??’. The question I find myself wondering is, does the school of architecture promote and unjustly reward graphic flare over architectural considerations of programme, spatial qualities and resolution of building issues? It is often the students with skills of graphic seduction that will have the best chance of achieving success, but should this be the case?*

This is by no means an issue confined just to students. Buildings which are designed to draw us in, yet do not function for their intended purpose, or are simply un-fulfilling on arrival are prevalent in most areas. I won’t spend time here listing names of offending architects and projects - it would be like shooting fish in a barrel. (However speaking of fish, perhaps it’s worth taking a sideways glance at the creator of Bilbao’s Guggenheim museum… A building which could be considered archetypal of the ‘seductive building’ type, acting as a sculptural siren which has attracted countless beguiled tourists despite failing in its supposed primary function as an art gallery…). This practice can also be found within architectural writings . Made up words abound.. tektologicy? What does that even mean?? (Nobody knows what it means… It’s provocative, it gets the people goin’!). But perhaps this look at the real

often we find ourselves selling dreams

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the seductive is not always in our best interests

world provide us with some clues yes, architectural education does have a large emphasis on seduction. But if this is a skill required to win a client in the real world, or make a best-selling manifesto, perhaps this is a skill we SHOULD be learning? The superficially attractive has always had an advantage in all walks of life. Consider why so many actors and models are prevalent in our media as opposed to great thinkers, writers or poets. So if we can give our projects the best start in life with an enticing pout, why shouldn’t we lavish our time on some cosmetic surgery and hide its unresolved edges? Could it be true that sometimes it is more important to make something which feels right, and conveys the mood of our intention, rather than resolves the height of a flight of stairs? (We can always sort that out later once we have the clients on board..). Often we will find ourselves selling dreams. These are the ultimate

embodiment of ‘seductive’ – we are completely taken in by dreams despite the flaws in their logic and substance, and whilst they can never be more than ‘ideas’ they may embody our truest desires and provide the purest distilled form of an idea. It is ‘dreams’ which clients will often want, and the process of creating idealised visions may be the best stepping stone in fledging out a new idea, or garnering interest in those who might not otherwise be interested. This is an issue with no obvious right or wrong answer – but what is clear is seduction is a tool which should not be overlooked in the architect’s arsenal, and certainly one with real life application after university. We are studying in a dual mode to meet dual purposes – both that of architect as salesmen of dreams, and that of facilitators for the creation of new realities. I hope I get to do a bit of both in my career…

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the fetish f

To find your architectural fetish begin here

David Greene

Peter Zu

MATE [run your fing shuttered con

invisible

Pick up your pen and draw a line... is it:

curvy

the exp

straight-ish

Bernard Tschumi

Le Corbusier

Yeah...but its an expression of the movement of language...

Do you make a model then click ‘explode’

glorious

the colour White is...

Frank Gehry

i make my minions do it

you prefer scrunching paper to making models i prefer ducks

Robert Venturi 32

and the user

beca withou it wou wo

nope

booring!

when you desig is on

Do you draw th over and ov

for the inside

hell

I LOVE L [and duct work, Gawsh no!

Renzo


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flowchart

umthor

Zaha Hadid

ERIALS gers along that ncrete..mmm]

gn your focus n...

golly no, large oil paintings are more my thing

the form

perience

r is great...

they are the designers

Hide it away!

o Piano

Future Systems

collaboration is

a gorgeous norm

MUF

FUN

err...

...and it moves about a bit?

hither & thither

Cedric Price

sort of...

Richard Rogers

sometimes

l no!

LAMP , and pipes...]

maybe...

nope

ause ut them uldn’t ork

he same thing ver again?

Do you draw around tea stains in your sketch book?

oooh yeh

it can expand and contract...? of course!

Archigram

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astronomers retreat Nimrod Wongs’s first project in Unit J explored how character obsessions influence space, and spatial conditions; through physical and digital modelling techniques.

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1997 Butterfly House by Rural Studio

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1996 Dominous Winery by Herzog and de Meuron, photo from Mollie Taylor


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1927, ADOLF LOOS, MOLLER HOUSE’

1969, ALDO ROSSI, GALLARATESE HOUSING BLOCK

1914 Glass Pavilion by Bruno Taut, photo by Gina Dahl

2004, HERZOG AND DE MUERUON, BEIJING NATIONAL STADIUM

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we love to draw? MArchD students Ellie Collins and Louisa Preece discuss the value placed on drawing

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he value of a drawing after months of careful research can be easily undervalued. A constant battle between the thorny and obtuse architectural language and the loose sketches resigned to sketchbooks. We absorb so much research, gather the thoughts in our heads and attempt to push them out. Sketches produced without much concentration or planning leave us bewildered - what is their value? We didn’t theorise, we just drew, doodled. So we question what we have done, if it wasn’t considered, measured and predicted then surely this

outpouring of emotion and thought is not as valuable as a spoken or written language? The following is a short reflection of an on-going informal conversation held each Tuesday, by two post-grad students from Zone 5, exploring the condensation of ideas into a drawing. Leaning upon Lebbeus Woods belief that “there are ideas and feelings that can only be expressed in drawn form.”1 The exchange has enabled them to better understand the act of drawing and why it really is an important communication skill and ought to be much fetishised.

1. L. Woods, ‘Line’, in Lebbeus Woods, 05/05/2008, viewed on 18/05/2015: https://lebbeuswoods.wordpress. com/2008/05/05/line/

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Louisa: Our conversation really began as we started our design projects and we were confused as to the act of just drawing and drawing until something happened. I think Ellie especially regarded working this way with concern as to the value of the drawing. Could the process of drawing really be converting all our ideas and research into a design? [or were we just post-rationalising?]

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Ellie: Yea, I remember starting the design process desperately searching for a concept to research to gain a programme and therefore a project. In my mind I had a set of instructions almost; a formula that I felt was (or would be) my design process, and would ‘generate’ my project. I never really considered producing a drawing straight from mind to paper - it had to be justified, right?


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L:

Yeah, we struggled to accept that drawing is more than a doodle, that it is a methodology that can generate and become a design. There was this step of letting go and channelling these ideas. We would come to tutorials and show each other work and “post-rationalise” but we started to question this. Maybe we weren’t post-rationalising, maybe we were actually explaining the drawing! Just because we weren’t following predetermined ideas doesn’t mean it wasn’t thought through...

L:

E: Exactly! After all, the doodle/drawing was from our mind, so how could it not be ‘thought’? It was the act of letting go that kick-started our projects - the drawing became a catalyst, integrating design and research almost subconsciously. Not one determining the other - more a simultaneous collaboration. I remember Toby [our tutor] saying “you don’t have to have the answer before the drawing.”

Wise wise words! E:

L: I think this is relevant, as drawing can be seen as a compromise in architecture, we fetishise the drawing too much perhaps and this can underestimate the value that the drawing holds. There is this conundrum that if we aim to create pretty images does this reduce the substance because it’s pretty, or is that the skill of the architect to create something beautiful with substance?

We had a great a chat one Tuesday, where I think we both came to the realisation that it was ok to produce images with the sole aim of beauty. We were discussing the common criticism of architectural education - the fetishised ‘pretty image’ and its supposed lack of substance … E: That’s a good point - beauty and substance in architecture is a massive conundrum, and one worthy of a longer conversation than this article can hold, I think! Though my friend in undergraduate once said to me “if they are looking at the measurements of your stairs, you’ve done something wrong”.

<< Join in our conversation @ellie_cf or @tashberryhill #lovetodraw? >> 49


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Exploration/ Exploitation Are the ruins of our cities being exploited by thrill-seekers for Instagram followers? Nathan Young questions the values of urban exploration in this extract from his BA Hons dissertation.

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he engagement with off-limit spaces within the city has an appeal to daring members of an un-prohibited activity identified as Urban Exploration. Their agendas of accessing locations are complex, as the activity attracts a diverse group of individuals that each hold a different motive for their involvement. For some, the allure of transgressing off-limit sites is explained through their narcissistic and self-aggrandising attitudes within 50

these covert spaces. Other Urban Explorers find attraction to such spaces for the cultural and historical resonance, which is often present in decayed and abandoned architecture. The pursuit of narcissistic pleasure is also mirrored in the values of Urban Explorers who venture through the world’s most clandestine, subterranean passageways. Underground catacombs, sewer and storm drains, railway tunnels and mines are commonly entered by


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knowledge. Urban Climbers however, are seduced into performing illegal climbing by performance of exhilaration, social media, photography and purely for the thrill of doing so... By altering intentions and thus attitudes towards Urban Exploration there is the possibility that Urban Exploration can be productive in the same way ancient exploration was. While agendas of Urban Climbers orientate around transgressing boundaries for self-gratification which fails to provide outcomes of any benefit, Dr. Bradley L Garrett portrays himself as an example of what Urban Exploration could become when approached with purposeful, academic roles. Academic research within Urban Exploration provides an opportunity for the practice to become more advantageous than infiltration motivated by selffulfilment. The proposition of research within hidden architecture creates an opportunity to discover information that would remain inaccessible without infiltration. In this respect, research presents a method in which the illicit nature of Urban Exploration can become more justified. Unsavoury intentions within Urban Exploration are troubling, considering the sensitivity of the practice. The attitudes of Makhorov and Raskalov reflect a wider community’s narcissistic relationship with unseen space, which signal a necessity for reform. While Garrett’s response provides an alternative approach to the utilisation of Urban Exploration, his research lacks significant value. The inconsistencies 52

in the descriptions of his research demonstrate how in actuality, his ethnographic studies are only a justification for unsatisfactory motives of self-gratification. Explorers such as Ken Fager utilise trespass as a way to access architecture in ruination that perform as natural archives of history. Photography in this approach of Urban Exploration plays a critical role in its operation. It captures the contents and remains of architecture, which proclaims activity that once existed within the space. The significance of documenting, recording and experiencing the history of architecture through Urban Exploration lies within its ability to access hidden space that would otherwise remain withheld from society. Through this approach to Urban Exploration, the process of documenting the history of ruination and decay demonstrates how the activity can be utilised to benefit a wider knowledge, thus constructing a greater understanding of the city. Although risks take a different form, trespassing within abandonments must remain productive to justify encountering the dangers of collapsing floors, hazardous substances and the disturbance of dilapidated architecture. Haikyo, a form of Urban Exploration in Japan, provides many examples of how a productive approach to documenting history can be achieved. Its popularity thrives from Japan’s abundance of sublime abandonments predominantly located in rural areas outside the metropolis of inner cities such as Tokyo and Osaka.


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Shanghai Tower, climbed by Vadim Makhorov and Vitaly Raskalov

way of documenting the history of the architecture. Instead of heedlessly photographing everything that can be seen, he uses it to compliment an analysis of its history. His subsequent explorations are recorded and shared on his blog, acting as a form of historical archive of forgotten architecture. His blog is however diametrically opposed to the forums of Urban Climbers who post photography of their exploits out a narcissistic motivation: the reward of online notoriety. By combining the more justifiable approaches to trespass evident in Haikyo with a greater in depth historical analysis demonstrated by Fager, Urban Exploration could become a more productive way to conduct urban, archaeological, and architectural

research of spaces that would not be normally accessible in traditional fieldwork. It may never meet a state where futile agendas are effectively eliminated from the practice as Urban Exploration is ultimately an ungoverned body of practice that lacks structure; Its constituent members can effectively approach the activity in any way they choose. Despite this, an enhanced understanding of the complex ideologies creates a platform for researchers to pursue credible values that evidently exist within Urban Exploration. Through their work, Urban Exploration could be considered less of a forbidden activity and more a practice to be embraced and celebrated for its ability to provide a greater understanding of the hidden spaces of the city.

The full text is available at http://bit.ly/NathanYoungDiss

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Soundbites DrDrHarriet HarrietHarris HarrisPrincipal Lecturer at Oxford Brookes, comments on the Fetishisation of Design Studio, and how its time to adapt

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t was a marketing strategist – and not an architect – that first fetishised Design Studio as a model pedagogic learning environment for architectural practice. The person is question was Donald Schon who put forward the idea that Design Studio simulated real professional action1 and should therefore be celebrated as a paradigm for all professional education2. Design Studio perpetuates an historic social contract where the tutors ‘expert’ knowledge is fetishised through a process of mimicry by the student. Tutors instruct, students implement. But much like other forms of fetishised ritual, this is a simulated reality, which means the real conditions of practice are selectively sourced, often distorted and even crudely faked. This generates an abnormality in how students perceive everyday practice conditions, exacerbating the drop in transmission between the anticipated and the real. This abnormality can frustrate and disappoint both students and the employing practice in turn. But if students’ ability to succeed 56

with Design Studio is judged by their ability to simulate, how can they truly innovate, and go on to lead the architectural profession forward in the 21st Century? Traditionally, Design Studio has acted as the principal learning environment through which architectural expertise is dispensed and acquired. The tutorexpert, student-learner dichotomy perpetuates the misapprehension that students are simply knowledge consumers and not creators. This is despite the fact that they are young adults – in possession of years of life experience and at least some work experience – who are more than capable of making a meaningful contribution to the world around them. Whilst Design Studio seems to largely ignore this latent student expertise, each summer, practices cherry pick the brightest and best graduates from a phenomenal confection of end-ofyear shows, in the hope that these ‘consumers’ will flip into inspirer’s and enrich their architecture practices. And yet for some reason, students’ contribution to the reinvigoration and


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Aphorism in the Age of Voyerism Architectural Seduction Architecture of the Skin Astronomers Retreat Constant Connections Disease and Efficiency Exploration / Exploitation Formal Fetishes Intimarch Mac Mad My Fetish: Watching Old Men on Youtube Public Nusience Soundbites We Love to Draw What’s your Fetish?


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