final submission

Will (William) Alsop an British Architect whom was born on 12 December 1947,in Northampton. Alsop's buildings are usually described as bright and bold colored and unusual forms. He attended the architecture school AA [Architectural association] and also attended the British school of Rome in 1972. Within his work you can see his roots from AA, the place 'pluralism' was born. With in a lot of his work you sense the feeling that he sees the possibility in every object he sees in every day life. 'Chips' Residence in Manchester, as you can see the name of the project, the idea originated from a midnight snack he had with his colleges.He has designed cities, high-rise architecture , residential buildings, university campus buildings, sizable urban town planning TO the interiors of a little pub in the corners of Farringdon.

But over all Alsop's work is bold colored, funky, odd shaped and full of imagination. Although you can't categorise his work as just avant-garde because in his project for 'Victoria house', 'North Greenwich Station(1998)' and 'Stratford DLR' there is this heavy smell of cyber and designs that are before its time.

Going through Alsop's projects and references, he has developed different tastes and style. Looking at the devices and projects he has done in the AA its highly sexual related or the idea of doing the impossible or the un-attempted. But now within his designs its about people and how to create architecture that people will love and like to be.

The reason I admire Will Alsop is of his unusual approach to designing architecture. He describes himself as using painting to visualise his designs. And mostly he beliefs that architecture exists along side to art.

The Sofa, the living room, the place to relax and socialise, the place where one can sit and have a drink and have a place to rest there drink. This is Will Alsop's living room, an open plan dining room and living room.
Comparing to his work, this is far from exotic. Alsop described that he and his partner bought most of their furniture in this space from the Conran shop.
This illuminated arch separates the dining room from the living room. A key piece to lighten up the space. Standing under the arch with such lighting also removes all imperfection on anyone's face. You can sense the sense of homeliness and cosy.
The dining and reading area. The pieces of the left is one of Alsop's work and one of his friend's.
Alsop's kitchen, the large breakfast table in the middle of the room insinuates that the kitchen is very much used every day. An open planed kitchen is always the core of a house. A place where most family members spend their time in. Also there is a door leading to the back garden.
There was a rumor to say the inspiration for Alsop's Peckham library came from his garden. Alsop states that he enjoys having a garden in the summer as you can find a spot in the corner of the garden and relax with a glass of gin and tonic.

The conclusion, in the brief it states the project is about what an architect at his/her own home. How would they do it? Without the desire and needs of their clients. In Alsop's case he has to concor with his wife (Sheila Alsop) about their space. The result is comfort, family orientated space. Therefore I belief in Will Alsop's works it is the place where he can fully express his mind and design. Although to truly allow Will Alsop to express and release his ideas and design the one true place where we can see is through his paintings and sculptures. The one place where the laws of Physics, budget and client would not be the burden on his design.

Will Alsop - 's Employer of 4 yrs

Cedric Price was one of Alsop's first emloyers after his gradution from university, He himself was a visionary architect and has inspired alot of architect and artist, I figured looking into his profile and work could allow me to understand Will Alsop a little but more.

Below information:
http://designmuseum.org/design/cedric-price

CEDRIC PRICE (1934-2003) was one of the most visionary architects of the late 20th century. Although he built very little, his lateral approach to architecture and to time-based urban interventions, has ensured that his work has an enduring influence on contemporary architects and artists, from Richard Rogers and Rem Koolhaas, to Rachel Whiteread.

Taking the view that architecture should be enabling, liberating and life-enhancing, Cedric Price’s approach was all-embracing. From landmark projects such as the 1960-61 Fun Palace, to designs for Christmas tree lights on London’s Oxford Street, his projects were governed by the belief that architecture must “enable people to think the unthinkable”.

Through projects, drawings and teaching, Cedric Price (1934-2003) overturned the notion of what architecture is by suggesting radical ideas of what it might be. He saw the role of an architect as that of asking the right questions, as Reyner Banham has commented: “…the basic approach is certainly one that appeals to me, a way of really not saying, ‘What kind of building do you want?’, but almost of asking first of all, ‘Do you really need a building?’”

Price – or CP, as he was called – was born at Stone in Staffordshire in 1934 to an architect father, AJ Price, who worked for the firm which built the Odeon cinema chain. CP completed an undergraduate degree in architecture from Cambridge University in 1955 and a diploma from the Architectural Association in 1957. After teaching at the AA and working for the architects Maxwell Fry and Denys Lasdun, he founded his own practice in 1960 beginning with the Aviary for London Zoo, designed in 1961 with Lord Snowdon and Frank Newby. Employing the most advanced technology of the time, they used aluminium castings, stainless steel forgings, welded aluminium mesh and tension cables to create a light weight structure giving maximum flying space for the birds.

Price’s reputation is chiefly based on the radicalism of his un-built ideas. His 1960-61 project, The Fun Palace, established him as one of the UK’s most innovative and thought-provoking architects. Initiated with Joan Littlewood, the theatre director and founder of the innovative Theatre Workshop in east London, the idea was to build a ‘laboratory of fun’ with facilities for dancing, music, drama and fireworks. Central to Price’s practice was the belief that through the correct use of new technology the public could have unprecedented control over their environment, resulting in a building which could be responsive to visitors’ needs and the many activities intended to take place there.

As the marketing material suggested, there was a wide choice of activities: “Choose what you want to do – or watch someone else doing it. Learn how to handle tools, paint, babies, machinery, or just listen to your favourite tune. Dance, talk or be lifted up to where you can see how other people make things work. Sit out over space with a drink and tune in to what’s happening elsewhere in the city. Try starting a riot or beginning a painting – or just lie back and stare at the sky.”

Using an unenclosed steel structure, fully serviced by travelling gantry cranes the building comprised a ‘kit of parts’: pre-fabricated walls, platforms, floors, stairs, and ceiling modules that could be moved and assembled by the cranes. Virtually every part of the structure was variable. “Its form and structure, resembling a large shipyard in which enclosures such as theatres, cinemas, restaurants, workshops, rally areas, can be assembled, moved, re-arranged and scrapped continuously,” promised Price. Although never built, The Fun Palace was one of his most influential projects and inspired Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano’s early 1970s project, Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.

Price eventually put these ideas into practice in a reduced scale at the 1971 Inter-Action Centre in the Kentish Town area of north London. The building constitutes an open framework into which modular, pre-fabricated elements can be inserted and removed as required according to need. Central to his thesis that a building should only last as long as it was useful, the centre was designed on condition that it had a twenty year life span and was accompanied by a manual detailing how it should be dismantled. For Price, time was the fourth spatial dimension: length, width and height being the other three.

In 1964, Price critiqued the traditional university system in his Potteries Think Belt project. Radically rethinking the basic concept of a university, his proposal provided a mobile learning resource for 20,000 students utilising the infrastructure of a declining industrial zone. Largely in response to the rash of university campuses being built during the 1960s, Price’s proposal transformed the derelict Staffordshire potteries into a realm of higher education, mainly on railway tracks, creating a widespread community of learning while also promoting economic growth. His proposal “took advantage of local unemployment, a stagnant local housing programme, a redundant rail network, vast areas of unused, unstable land, consisting mainly of old coal-working and clay pits, and a national need for scientists and engineers”. It offered a solution to the need for educational facilities whilst also offering to do something about the economic and social collapse of the Potteries. “Further education and re-education must be viewed as a major industrial undertaking and not as a service run by gentlemen for the few,” opined Price.

This flexible approach extended to all aspects of his work. Finding ingenious and elegant solutions for everyday problems he championed ‘anticipatory architecture’, firmly believing in impermanent architecture designed for continual change. Price redefined the role of the architect as an agent of change, whose main responsibility was to anticipate that, and offer new possibilities for society as a whole. Constantly challenging and questioning the accepted mores of architecture, his approach was witty and irreverent; he famously suggested that the man hoping to transform his life with a new house might be better off getting a divorce.

Price’s desire for ‘Doubt, Delight and Change’ was clearly demonstrated in his 1984 proposal for the redevelopment of London’s South Bank. Here he anticipated the London Eye by suggesting that a giant ferris wheel should be set in a public space extending out onto the River Thames. Price went on to develop the Magnet series of short-life structures installed in existing sites that he believed to be misused or underused. For example, he proposed that an impermanent bridge could offer better access to a railway station and turn the space into public advantage only to be removed when no longer necessary.

Every aspect of each idea was meticulously researched: as if each idea was to be built. By engaging with existing economic, political and structural networks, Price explored architecture’s potential to nurture change, intellectual growth and social development. To Cedric Price architecture was not about the finished building but more about an ability to enable and facilitate change in a changing world and to “allow us to think the unimaginable”.

© Design Museum

BIOGRAPHY

1934 Born in Stone, Staffordshire.

1955 Graduates in architecture from Cambridge University and enrols at the Architectural Association in London to study for a diploma.

1956 Invited by Erno Goldfinger to assist – together with Victor Pasmore and Helen Philips – to construct the Group 7 installation in the This is Tomorrow exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London. There, he meets Frank Newby, a member of Team Ten, as well as Alison and Peter Smithson. Attends lectures at the Institute of Contemporary Arts and befriends Reyner Banham.

1958 Becomes a part-time teacher at the Architectural Association, where he will teach for six years. Also employed by Maxwell Fry and Denys Lasdun

1959 Meets and befriends the visionary US architect R. Buckminster Fuller.

1960 Founds Cedric Price Architects and starts to develop The Fun Palace with Joan Littlewood.

1961 Collaborates with Frank Newby and Lord Snowdon on the Aviary at London Zoo.

1962 Joins the ICA Exhibitions Committee and teaches part time at the Council of Industrial Design as well as at the AA. Collaborates with Buckminster Fuller on the Claverton Dome and designs an art gallery for Robert Fraser in London.

1964 Unveils his radical vision of a modern university as a catalyst for economic regeneration in the Potteries Think Belt.

1969 Publishes Non-plan, a radical rethinking of planning orthodoxy, with the planner Sir Peter Hall, the critic Reyner Banham and Paul Barker, editor of New Society magazine.

1971 Completes one of his few finished buildings – the Inter-Action Centre in Kentish Town, London.

1971 Founds Polyark – Architectural Schools Network.

1984 Presages the London Eye by proposing to construct a giant ferris wheel on the River Thames opposite the Houses of Parliament.

1997 Presents the Magnet scheme of ten reusable structures.

2003 Cedric Prices dies in London.

2005 The Design Museum presents a retrospective of Cedric Price's work in collaboration with the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal.

© Design Museum

FURTHER READING

Cedric Price: Works II, Architectural Association, 1984 republished as Cedric Price: The Square Book, Wiley-Academy, 2003

Cedric Price: Opera, edited by Samantha Hardingham, Wiley-Academy, 2003

Re:CP, by Cedric Price with Arata Isozaki, Patrick Keiller and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Birkhauser Verlag AG, 2003

A Critic Writes: Essays by Reyner Banham, Centennial, 1999
Addition, Andrew Holmes + Cedric Price, Architectural Association, 1986

An Alternative View of Kew, Cedric Price, Architectural Association, 1982

For more information on British design and architecture go to Design in Britain, the online archive run as a collaboration between the Design Museum and British Council, at designmuseum.org/designinbritain

© Design Museum

Will Alsop Timeline

Over the period of the Christmas Holidays I have read and seen a lot of essays and videos documenting on, interviewing about Will Alsop.

My idea about his work and person have changed throughout the course of this research.

Although, reading so much information confusion is growing within the project and confused with all the data i have. Therefore i'm going to create a time line of information, dates, thoughts, images of Will Alsop alongside with the thoughts i have.

Im questioning whether to do a stop frame animation of my working progress. Although needing another laptop connecting to my camera.

ATM Progress on Essay video part:
I have downloaded alot of interviews of Will Alsop
and has customised them to be used in my video.
Original Youtube video


My Edited Version:

Will Alsop - Interview on RMJM

Will Alsop's interview on joinging RMJM below are the selected sections, for the full article:
http://archinect.com/news/article.php?id=92479_0_24_15_M78


Alsop said of his new role: “Over recent years, I have come to admire RMJM’s vision and the way it has embraced the current economic climate by expanding into new and emerging markets and strengthening its offering through the creation of global studios comprising dedicated experts in key growth sectors.

working with U.S. colleagues who have such an enviable reputation for high quality and sustainable design.”

“I’m looking forward to working with the new management team on taking the design credentials of the London office to the next exciting phase. The value of RMJM’s international pool of experts and the fact that it has licences to operate in key overseas markets cannot be underestimated. I’m thrilled to be working once again in a truly international capacity.”

RMJM has been expanding into new territories overseas in recent months, including new operations in Istanbul, Bahrain and Doha. This renewed investment in the London studio aims to reinforce the firm’s presence in its domestic market, in particular in the City of London, as well as continuing to win and deliver outstanding projects internationally.
- alexander walter on Oct 01, 09 | 9:02 am

Will Alsop - Related Video Searches

Response - In this video the creator focused on the building materials, sections of building

Will Alsop Times Interview + Annotations

Will Alsop OBE, the maverick architect and member of the Royal Academy (he is one of the selectors of this year’s Summer Exhibition), has won many awards over his 61 years. There is one, however, that has so far eluded him: best front garden of the year in Sheringham, north Norfolk, where he and his wife, Sheila, 62, have had a holiday home for more than 25 years. “It would mean more to me than the Stirling prize,” he has said.

Alsop is best known for modernist buildings such as Peckham library, in south London, where the upper floors are supported on spindly legs that look like skewwhiff knitting needles — for which he bagged the said Stirling prize in 2000. One of his most high-profile works in progress is Chips, a residential building in Manchester that resembles a neatly stacked pile of pommes frites.

So, it is something of a surprise to walk down the stone-set path of the long front garden in Norfolk, under the shade of a Giverny-style arbour, and arrive at a late-Victorian red-brick house filled with comfortable sofas, books, antique china and paintings. Where are the contemporary building materials, the modernist furniture, the wacky colours?

“It is not just my house, it is Sheila’s as well. I concur with her taste,” says the man sometimes known as Mr Blobby — surely for the splashes of colour on his buildings, rather than his cheerfully unkempt appearance, which comes wreathed in a fug of cigarette smoke. “This is not a great art; the house has nothing to do with great design. Using a word that most architects don’t use, it is ‘cosy’, and I am comfortable with that. Actually, as I get older, I try to incorporate that in my other work.”

We sit in the glass- and aluminium-walled dining room that Alsop added to the back of the house with materials left over from a project in France. The room, which replaced a conservatory and small terrace, is contemporary in feel, but hardly pushes the frontiers of design.(Seems that there is more benefits of being an architect besides fame, building spontaneous things with left over freebies. I wonder if he had build the dinning room because he had the extra materials, or was it just by chance. I often find when things were build/created/happens spontaneously i often like them better. Would it be, when working with an material that was chosen for you, one would consider the properties of that material what it can offer and could be. But when choosing a material for a certain purpose, one is left with an extra job of decide on the material that fits. Does that make sense?)

Beneath, in a series of terraces, is a narrow jungle of a garden, planted with tree ferns, phormiums, palms and large pots of hostas and hydrangeas. You can just see the sea through the trees and over the top of the boundary wall. Goldfish swim in the small pond beneath the window. (During foundation year there was an lecture held by Will Alsop himself at the CSM cochraine theatre. After the lecture running 30minuets behind schedule, the lights dimmed and the spot light struck the lecture speech stand. Will Alsop himself strolled in the room holding a pint of beer. I hadn't researched any work or bio of Mr Alsop, but in my mind i stereotype architects as people whom should be immaculate, well presented, skinny-suited-glasses type. Although Will Alsop surprisingly had long wavy dark brown hair, very 'full', very 'cosy' clothings and his love for alcohol and cigarettes was obvious. He started off greeting the audience by insinuating that he is recovering form an hangover and is fighting it off by drinking more, and is desperate to fall asleep.

But surprisingly i find him a cunning and charming man. It was a 2 hour lecture, i was fascinated by the way he presents about his work. And from then on decided that if Norman Foster was the 'Big Mac meal', Will Alsop would be the 'Happy Meal' + Toy)

There’s a lunchtime bottle of red on the long maple table, which Alsop designed. He points to a sofa at the end of the room that catches the evening light. “If you really analyse both the house and garden, it is all about different places to sit,” he says. “I like a bit of sitting. That’s the gin-and-tonic sofa.”

Another favourite G&T spot is an outdoor bench by the front door that benefits from the warmth captured by the red-brick wall behind it. Similar seats are dotted around the jungly garden for different parts of the day. There is even one by the barbecue, though, he says, “we try not to have barbecues — dangerous things. They are the quickest way to arguments”. His role is to light the thing and eat the results: “If I cook, it is always burnt.”

The couple bought the five-bedroom house in 1982. They wanted somewhere out of London for weekends and holidays (these come less frequently nowadays, as Alsop is often abroad on business; he has offices in Shanghai, Beijing, Toronto and Singapore, and is a professor of architecture in Vienna), and Sheila’s parents lived nearby.

It is also a six-minute walk from the station, which was convenient, as Sheila didn’t drive at the time. When their children, Oliver, now 31, Nancy, 29, and Piers, 24, were growing up, friends could be easily collected from the station.

Queen Victoria’s visits to the nearby Sandringham estate, which she bought in 1863, popularised the area, but Sheringham is now a rather down-at-heel, old-fashioned kind of seaside resort. Although Alsop lives in Kensington, west London, he has no desire to join those neighbours from the capital who decamp in clannish clumps to smarter towns such as Burnham Market and Wells-next-the-Sea, to the west.

The town has several run-down hotels, a legacy from its Victorian glory days. “If someone wanted to invest, you could do something fantastic with these hotels, but they don’t, so that is the end of it,” says Alsop. His own house was once the stables for such a hotel; in the second world war, it was used by the military for maintaining motor vehicles. A local builder converted it in 1951, and it was pretty much unchanged when the Alsops bought it 30 years later from the estate of an old lady who had died. “The house had been empty for six or nine months. Houses show that; you feel it when you go into them.”

Just as he was unpacking the furniture, Alsop got a phone call. “This is really peculiar. It was North Norfolk district council, wanting me to build a swimming pool in Sheringham. I thought it was my business partner playing a joke on me. In the end, I said, ‘F*** off, John’, but then I realised it was a genuine inquiry.” Alsop’s unorthodox response to his first stand-alone commission didn’t deter the council, and the pool, finished in 1987 and opened by Princess Diana, still exists. “Except that they have ruined it,” he laments. “They have painted the outside blue and yellow to cheer it up. It is supposed to be stained timber.”

The project was a good way to spend time in the town and get to know it. “I started to fiddle with the house, a bit here, a bit there; it just evolved.” As did the garden, which grew over the years from a narrow strip at the back of the house to encompass two extra areas bought from neighbours around the corner — visitors liken it to a Tardis.

“I would plant a few things, then come back, and suddenly they were in flower. You get this delayed joy; that is terrific. From that, I became more and more serious, and started to think about what I would like it to be.”

At the far end is Alsop’s studio, next to a paved patio with yet more seating. On the table is a thick pile of his paintings. He has one in the Royal Academy’s summer show of some flower-like shapes. Its title? I Wish My Garden Was Really Like This. In fact, the garden at the back of the house is more about greenery and strong shapes than a riot of floral abundance. He and Sheila “don’t go for lots of colour”.

Thanks to the mild seaside climate, they have pines, figs, a tamarisk, South African restios, potted shrubs and ivy-clad walls. Although the beach is only 10 minutes away — Alsop starts taking dips in the sea when it has warmed up in early July — it is not a place to sunbathe. A canopy of high branches covers much of the space in dappled shade. “It’s a high umbrella and a garden full of telegraph poles,” he jokes. Perhaps his garden is where he got his inspiration for Peckham library.

The front garden is more formal, with a series of parallel lines created by the path, a long rectangular pond (or “short canal”, as Sheila calls it) and a row of agaves in long-tom pots. Extending down the garden is a box parterre, in which olive trees are planted. They were pruned recently by Wayne Nolan, the gardener, who comes in once a week, and are looking rather the worse for wear. “He didn’t have a clue — and why would he? — how to prune them, and it isn’t like that,” says Alsop. “I learnt that in France last week.”

There is also an Indian chestnut tree near the street. Alsop had hoped its black nuts would be his secret weapon in the annual office conker championships. “They are not. They are pathetic.”

Away from the front garden’s formal structure, things are left pretty much to themselves. At this time of year, self-seeded hollyhocks and campanulas are happily flowering beneath the tunnel and in the gravel beside it. “An over-designed garden feels dead,” says Alsop.

His approach to his outdoor space is much the same as to his architecture — letting the other elements, whether they are plants, clients or local communities, play their part, and not being too precious about allowing their contributions. “In your twenties, you think reading the philosophers and indulging in theory is going to help,” he explains. “I can assure you that it doesn’t. By the time you get to your thirties, you downgrade it all to ‘concept’. At 40, that becomes, ‘Well, maybe the idea is all right.’ At 50, it’s ‘a notion’. At 60, ‘Not a f***ing clue’.

“It’s sort of liberating. I have become suspicious, whether it is a garden or whatever, when people start talking about the justification for their design. I don’t believe in the word ‘inspiration’. You just have to do it.”

http://property.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/property/gardens/article6538838.ece?token=null&offset=12&page=2

Will Alsop - comments on home

It maddens me when I'm accused of living a country idyll on the east coast. We have a cosy home in the centre of a Norfolk town, but I also live in this unfussy Kensington flat. I'm much more at home here. In fact, I can't stand the countryside – who wants to have to get in a car to go and buy a pint of milk? (Likes convenience to obtain every day needs, "cosy")

Sheila and I moved here in 2002. It's a typical Edwardian mansion block. I like it because our friends are nearby, as is Holland Park, and I can walk to the museums, even Harrods if I had to. This area of London is home. (Area close to friends, and places to go to)

We hardly moved anything from our old London place – we had an instinct to buy new and to make life simple. There's a sense of impermanence in the pace of London life, and it feels in rhythm to travel light. We're lazy shoppers though, so most of the furniture in the sitting and dining rooms came from The Conran Shop. Then Sheila discovered the Petersham Nurseries in Richmond, and quirkier odds and ends began to creep in: an old chandelier here, a wooden tea tray there.(convenience in living or easy way and possibly the as he quotes lazy shopping, furniture appear some what by chance. Even such a prestigious architect is only human. )

Sheila insisted we bought a flat with a garden. I wanted to be higher up, but now I realise she was right. In summer I sit out with the plants that have survived winter, and those I freshly plant each May – the mad monkey puzzle and these wild grasses. It's the perfect spot to have a gin and tonic and a cigarette and read the newspaper in peace.

The flat is scattered with the work of artists I know and love: Bruce McLean, who is a very good friend of mine; the late Terry Frost, a good old northern painter who works well next to the Australian artist Annie Grace.

The coloured blocks in the hallway are by Kate Dineen, an artist I commissioned to do a large piece at Palestra, an office building I designed in Blackfriars. Kate grinds down marble and reconstitutes it into these various blocks – they're fabulous and remind me how much I like her.

It upsets me that in other people's homes you're given a drink and there's nowhere to put it. The floor is simply not a table. For the sitting room, I designed these sofa-side metal tables to get around the problem – one is for your drink and one is to have somewhere to flick your ash. I wanted to make a third to hold a book or magazine at a good angle for reading. Annoyingly, the design didn't quite work.

On the living room wall there are two simple paintings of mine. They feature four of the things my wife loves most about our Norfolk house: a teapot, a poppy, a bread crock and a native Norfolk plant. It links the two homes and I like that.

The dining table was the first I designed. The spotlights beneath its glass top cast this wonderful dull light when it's dressed with a tablecloth. It flatters guests. The dining chairs are office chairs with wheels. Once people have sat down I don't want them to get up, and they rarely do.

One of my favourite items in the kitchen is a bar-standard wine-bottle opener, a gift from my wife. Whisky is my winter drink, and gin and tonic is for summer, but I'm faithful to red wine above everything. It's so satisfying to tug the lever down that sometimes I simply have to open another bottle immediately.

Souvenirs that are merely dust-catchers irritate me, but I understand them if they have a use. My youngest son bought me a painted bowl from a recent trip to Mexico with his wife-to-be, that also has pride of place in the kitchen. I noticed he bought another for himself that was much nicer, but I like this because it's so uncompromisingly tasteless.

At the moment, both my grown-up sons are having their flats done up, so they're back here – which I love. My daughter lives nearby and often stays the night too if she feels like it. I'm intrigued by how long my sons manage to spend in the bathroom. Sheila and I are in and out of the bathroom, so it's a simple space. I've never understood the notion of relaxing in the bath with scented candles.

Homes have their own life, and I think this flat is a friendly animal. The kitchen is the centre of life, but I like it when the guests have gone and the air still has the faint after-glow of happiness and laughter. Then I'm relaxed sitting here with my sketchbook: writing a little, drawing a little.

When I was younger I dreamt of designing my own home and did the odd sketch to boot, but now I'm keenly aware of my shifting tastes. I'm much more inclined towards the rustic as I age. Also, style goes out of date, despite the nonsense the modernists say about classic design.

Some architects do their houses up as an extravagant showcase of their work and it's often assumed my home will be the same. I wonder how they can possibly live like that, though. Supposing they changed their minds?

SMC Alsop, the architecture firm of Will Alsop, is one of the UK's most successful practices. His designs – from North Greenwich Tube station to Hamburg Ferry Terminal – are often praised for their use of bright colour and iconoclastic form. He's now 60 and lives in London and Norfolk with his wife Sheila.

History and theory lecture 2/12/09

Jacquard Loom, invented by joseph Louis Jacquard (1752-1834)
invented or perfected this device for automating textile weaving.
complex patterns could be “programmed” via punch cards.
(image of machine jacquard Loom)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquard_loom
Duplicated, reproducing, not really generating ideas. Mechanical devices which make complex brain operations, mathematical complexes. A line to the development of industrialisation and commodities development .
Lyon = important silk city
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyon

Beginning of complex movements by mechanically.

Charles Babbage, the Difference Engine (1822) was an automatic, mechanical calculator designed to tabulate polynomial functions. Both logarithmic and trigonometric functions can be approximated by polynomials, so a difference engine can compute many useful sets of numbers. the analytical machines, able to perform complex mathematical tasks, using punch cards.
Compute and fast solutions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Difference_engine

Lay cathedral of culture : Gehry's Guggenheim museum, Bilboa.
At the time it signify a new departure; to have new buildings layed down with meanings, religion which at the time is more devissive than buildings and communities.
"Normal/traditional" buildings were nice and neutral and appeals to every body. New art buildings not the fusty british museum type, something that says that culture and art is very much part of our worlds, higher status for architects, Guggenheim was an iconic pattern breaker.

Frank Gehry doodles and draws, he talks people through it and makes lots of paper models. Frank Gehry pioneered the use of digital fabrication in the 1990s

His primary inspiration is sculptures. Richard Serra . translate complex drawings .
Frank Gehry, concept sketch and finished walt disney concert hall, LA, 1988-1999 (IMG)
transforming application from one to another. (auto CAD)

Lewis Residence, 1995. ink on paper. gehry partners, LLP
structural properties built in to the equation + computer.

Peter B. Lewis Design Process Models, 1992 Mixed media (plaster, wood, metal screen, paper)
A reaction of visualisation of the mechanical calculation

Lewis Residence: Final Design model, 1995. Milled paper, basswood, acrylic, museum board.

'we must use the new instruments to address old architectural problems; not to create new problems.'

Programme, plan and floor are based on movement each time, while perception only comes into place later, when walls and partition are being designed. human activities, the continuity of habits and routines, experience: these are what should influence the whole geometry of the building. Perception and movement are one; experience and programme
NOX architects, water exhibition centre 1997

Collect data of what the inhibition of a particular area, what were reacting and thinking.. etc
meant to visualize water, it would be a experience of being inside a fish.

D-tower, built in Doetinchem 2004 the Netherlands, is a sculpture where the intensive (feelings, qualia) ad the extensive space quantities exchange roles, where human action, color, money, value, feelings all become networked entities

designed by NOX architectures, the tower is connected to a website in 2 different ways.

1. The websites is a visualization of the responses of the 45,000 inhabitants of Doetinchem to a questionnaire which deals with emotions like hate, love, happiness and fear.

2.the four emotions are represented by four colours, green red and yellow
architecture between communication and information
oosterhuis. nl, Noord-Holland pavilion for the florida 2002 exhibition
the free unfurling of the function that, from an industrial of view, represented the idea of an expanding machine now increasingly tends to be replaced by a logic based on the space between, there is a tendency to work in between also because we are forced to do so by the presence of existing buildings, the idea of efficient building structures and frameworks is replaced by the formula 'engineering is the art of the possible'
Antonino Saggio


“Gehry is shape-driven ” says Shop partner Gregg Pasquarelli

“we're more process driven. we would never build an elaborate frame work to support a curve. we'd let the curve be determined by information from our materials suppliers or by the parameters of the fabrication techniques.”

290 mulberry , NYC ship architects
molded by nature, but in-fact was molded all by computer calculation

The obsession with organic shapes, ability of the new computers to algorithms.
fascination with organic forms, because it is possible to calculate. to make it look it was a result of some tectonic pressure

the Yas hotel, Abu-Dabi , uae 2007-2009 by Asymptote: Hani Rashid + Lise Anne couture


Glass tower. La Cienega and Jefferson, LA
completion: proposed
Architect: Eric Owen Moss Architects
parametric design
http://aedesign.wordpress.com

http://morphopedia.com/projects/pharestower
morphosis, Phare tower project, Paris

Morphosis Giant Group Campus
the giant campus is a compact village that accommodates divers programmatic function i a flexible frame work of architectural forms that move into and out of a sculpted landscape.

michael Hanseyer:2004
portfolio.com/L_Systems/ls7.html
Lindenmayer systems in architecture nature's growth processes as generators of architectural design: turtle graphics with branching
Replication through software + graphics = fancy stuff

Fly through animation for Guange Zou, Zha hadid 2005
(animation)

Fly through is something that works within a computer generated space. super man vision.

David Ling "Labyrinth"

The annual Art and Structure Exhibits, founded by artist Joan Sherman, involve collaboration between esteemed artists, architects and designers. These exhibits explore the boundaries that define their fields of expression, challenging the artificial separation of artistic pursuits. Each installation relates conceptually to the experience of people involved with The Family Center. Established in 1994, The Family Center is a non-profit organization providing legal and social services to parents who are seriously ill.

The theme of this year’s exhibit was “Light and Illusion.” The architects and designers participating in “Light and Illusion” created installations that investigate the ability of art to reveal truth or create illusion. Architect David Ling and sculptor Norman Mooney designed a luminous labyrinth of cast glass and rough-hewn stones representing the various paths families take in life. Fred Schwartz collaborated with Domingo Gonzalez to construct a canopy of cascading lights recalling tiny spring blossoms, symbolizing hope and renewal. Juergen Riehm and Bill Schwinghammer installed a massive, glowing box that appeared to defy gravity, connecting viewers with the tenuous nature of life. And Samuel Botero and Pablo Molgora included mothers and children of The Family Center in the creation of their piece.

David Ling

David Ling
You know when i moved in, and made this leap of faith in 2000 and bought this place. And it is of over-whelming of volume, this huge building for me, at the time i was actually confronted by actually, what am i actually going to do with this place. It was actually a challenge because it meant its exposing your personality, because its almost an autobiographical spatial story, and there were tweaks, i froze the first winter because i didn't like the look of the radiators, after turning blue i decided to turn the radiators back. So its a kind of weird functional kind of compromises to straight to be able to live.


I enjoy the sort of live work aspect of it because its the kind of aspect i work any ways. because there isn't much separation from the way i live and the way i work. the way i see my life is through my design career, the people i meet and the friends i make. so i see this lift a kind of lab of sorts. its things i would do to myself that i would be hesitant to do to my client.



in this particular house which was a old dental factory built in the 1880, i wanted to keep the original shells as a raw as possible. i was educated in a Europe and had a lot of chances to see a lot of castles and medieval buildings in German and Italy. And was inspired by the rustication and rawness of the stone work.
I retained the masonry openings, god rid of windows and crammed glass, so you can see the guts of the building. The contrast overlay of old and new and the layering of history is in the ceiling area, where i have this sheet rock ceiling and 19th century exposed beams . i enjoy the layering of history and contrast.

I'm interested in juxtaposing 'wholer' differences in every really the materiality the rough versus the smooth, the cold versus the warm, curve versus straight. In the contrast and the tension between these opposites. I get a kick out of intervals that age and acquire. I freak out when there is a first crack of paint or the first paint peels off, but then it acquire a life of itself. and its kind of challenged to accept change and accident, love this space and i cant see myself moving out of it. i could evolve the space as my needs change. think a space should be able to do that. I still think this is pretty much home. i want to keep producing my work and say things that have never been said before in a timeless way.

Informed by a multi-cultural background, nurtured in the US, formed in Europe and with an umbilical cord still attached to china, David Ling founded David Ling Architects in 1992. After training as an associate with Richard Meler, I.m. Pei, and Emillo Ambasz, Ling established an international practice in the U.S., Europe and Asia. Composed of exhibition spaces, creative offices, high-end retail, high end residences and institutional spaces Ling's work has received numerous international awards such as the Interior Magazine's Future Furniture Awards and Kitchen and Bath Designer Leader Award, Municipal Arts Society's National Design Award, architectural Bienal Miami + Beach Gold and Silver medals, Benjamin Moore;s Hue Awards for Best Residential Interiors, London's Design Partnership Award for Best Retail Design and Best in Show ICFF and London's Grosvernor House Antiques Fair. Ling's international press includes the New York Tines, Interior Design, Interiors, House and Garden, Elle Decor, Metropolitan Home, Dwell Wallpaper, Arte, Dwell Video, Casa da Abitare, Interni, Architektur und Wohnen, Frankfuter....etc

Ling's Clients list includes Alberta Ferretti, Stece Wynn, Aaliyah, Blue Man Group, Sade's Band leader, Janet....etc

Ling has held teaching positions at Parson School of Design and University of Nuremburg and has served on design juries at Interiors Magazine, Harvard Graduate School of Design, Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania.

The Essence of Ling's Architecture is the artistic intergration of space, form, light and function enriched by materiality. As all projects are treated as unique, so too is Ling's creative vocabulary, tailored to diverse clients, sites, budgets and programmes. Ling's approach is a sculpted choreography of opposites, forming a dialogue of interlocking spaces and forms articulated in a crafted use of materials, ennobling space and form through materiality and light.

David Ling's ultimate goal is to create something never said before, in a timeless manner.

Zaha Hadid

From The Sunday Times
March 9, 2008
Zaha Hadid: the Clerkenwell home of a superstar architect
One of the world’s most innovative architects, Zaha Hadid is far too busy to do up her London flat

You can’t help approaching the home of Zaha Hadid with excitement. This architectural superstar creates buildings that shoot off at extraordinary angles, defy gravity, take your breath away and win awards. What on earth will her own place be like? Will she have an “urban carpet”, with the ground slowly rising to form the back wall, as at the contemporary-art centre she masterminded in Cincinnati? Or enormous windows like veined leaves, as in her design for a concert venue in Abu Dhabi? Will the interior be kitted out with craters and subterranean caverns, like her Phaeno science centre, in Wolfsburg, Germany?

As you leave the lift at the top floor of an unprepossessing block in Clerkenwell, central London, the answers to those questions emerge as an Amy Winehouse-esque “no, no, no”. We are in a large, white, rectangular open-plan living room. It is a blank space, defined by common-or-garden right angles, that appears to have been designed by a navvy with a spirit level, rather than a genius who has won the Pritzker, the Nobel prize of architecture.

Hadid, 57, adamantly points out that this flat is not her own work. She moved here 2½ years ago, when she needed somewhere to live after a domestic emergency. She had been living in a flat in Kensington, west London, when it suddenly turned into a disaster zone. One Sunday night, when the globe-trotting architect was away in China, water gushed in from an upper-floor flat.

“I had a fountain from upstairs,” she recalls. “For a whole night, water was pouring in like a waterfall. It was a nightmare. I got back to find the whole place and my furniture damaged.” An attempt to fix the problem failed. “It started leaking again. That’s why I left that flat and moved here.”

Hadid wanted to be nearer to the office of her 28-year-old architectural practice, which is just around the corner.

“Driving back and forth between Kensington and Clerkenwell all the time was too much,” she says. “It was 45 minutes each way.” She had looked at other flats in Clerkenwell, but they all needed work, and she wanted somewhere she could move into immediately. So she was pleased to find this ready-made minimalist top-floor flat, with about 2,500 sq ft of floor space. It cost “less than £2m, I think”.

It is a cloudy day, but light is flooding into the living room from a four-pane roof light. “One thing that’s nice about this flat is that it’s very bright, even on a dull day,” she says. “And there’s nobody above me to cause problems or make a noise.”

The place isn’t perfect, however, and when you have 40 other building projects under way, from an office tower in Dubai to an opera house in China, you can’t always find the time to complete your own home improvements. “I was supposed to renovate this place, but I haven’t,” she admits.

You would expect Hadid’s kitchen, at least, to be state-of-the-art. She recently worked with DuPont to create the Z Island, surely the most advanced kitchen design on the planet. It has two curvaceous Corian work stations offering everything a master chef could want and more – including light, music, the internet and “aromatic scent dispensers” that pump out appealing fragrances.

The Z Island is not in its creator’s home, though – at least, not yet. Instead, near the edge of the main living room stands a grotesque, blocky kitchen unit containing hobs and a sink. It was there when Hadid arrived.

“It was a mistake on my part not to demolish it straightaway. Of course, once you move in, it becomes more difficult.” There is also a tiny kitchen off the main room. “It’s more like a pantry. And it’s an impractical situation. I don’t cook here often, but if I do, and if I have something in the oven and something on the stove as well, one of them will burn.”

Hadid would also like a storage room, “for papers and whatnot”, and wants to bring her library of architectural books over from the office. So, she is considering a vertical extension: a new floor on the roof, to use as a bedroom or living room, thereby freeing up space below, and is in negotiations with the freeholder about this. If it goes ahead, she says the extension might employ the sinuous glass forms seen in the cable railway stations she designed at Inns-bruck, in the Austrian Alps, which opened last year to great acclaim. “I’d really like to do a project like that for myself. Or I could make it in fibreglass.”

The renovation plans are still fluid, and she is thinking out loud: “I think this flat is tame, compared with all the stuff we do in the office. I would like it wilder.” She dislikes the existing lighting – “Downlighting is not very attractive” – and says she could transform it with some chandeliers. She doesn’t mean old-fashioned crystal confections, but her Vortexx chandeliers, the curly fibreglass ribbons of light she designed in 2005 for the stylish home-furnishing company Sawaya & Moroni.

The flat contains some prime examples of Hadid’s own furniture designs, which are every bit as fluid and decon-structivist as her buildings, and sell for six-figure sums. There’s her Iceberg sofa, also for Sawaya & Moroni – it looks much more like an iceberg than any sofa I have ever seen. And there’s her Aqua table, for Established & Sons (run by Alasdhair Willis, husband of Stella McCartney), which has a translucent silica-gel surface and appears to stand on three inverted shark fins.

Curious smaller shapes clutter surfaces: architectural models, her collection of Murano glass and two shiny silver, Hadid-designed tea and coffee sets that double as interlocking table sculptures. The monotony of the white walls is relieved by five dramatic architectural paintings by Hadid herself. Throughout her career, sketching and painting have been key processes in the genesis of her designs.

No cushions, curtains or upholstery can be seen in the home of this chintz-phobic designer. “I don’t like soft furnishings. I can’t even sit on them,” she says, almost shuddering at the thought.

There are some tall, sculptural lilies in a vase in the living room, and, on the terrace, reached through a row of modern french windows, are planters nurturing a long screen of bamboo, but that’s it as far as botanical ornamentation is concerned. If she had more “plantation”, she would need people to water it, and she does enough delegating as it is: “It’s bad enough in the office.” Hadid lives alone, but it’s hard to imagine her being lonely for long, with her life a constant whirl of international collaboration and insatiable creativity.

Hadid likes to sit outside in summer, “but when the weather’s hot, it’s too hot there. I need a pool”. She would certainly be qualified to create a fine body of water: she is the architect of the London Aquatics Centre, a typically eye-catching creation to be used for the 2012 Olympic Games.

She has happy memories of growing up in Baghdad, in her parents’ 1930s house. “It had really beautiful 1950s Italian furniture,” she recalls. “My mother changed the furniture in the house all the time. She had a good eye. The dining room and my parents’ bedroom were art-deco rooms, almost Hollywood modern. My parents were interested in modernity. We used to get Life magazine at home, and I remember to this day seeing an image in Life of a modern building – it may have been in Chicago or New York.” It was, she says, one of the defining moments that turned her into an architect.

When she came to London in the early 1970s, to study at the Architectural Association, she lived on the King’s Road, “which a lot of people thought was very bourgeois. It was a friend’s flat, and I was paying £10 rent”. Later, she moved to “a really fabulous tiny house” in a mews off Gloucester Road. It was so small that furnishings required resourceful improvisation: “I did some great paintings there. I would do a painting, then I would turn it round and make it into a dining table.”

She has since turned her imagination to making extraordinary homes for other people. She has created a highly distinctive series of odd-angled flats over a protected viaduct by the Danube canal, in Austria, and her design for the 785ft Lilium Tower, in Warsaw, to be finished in 2012, will provide luxury low-energy flats and an apartment hotel.

“I’d like to do more houses,” she says. “That could be fun. I think it would be interesting to do some really state-of-the-art social housing. There haven’t been any radical ideas about affordable housing for a long time.”

Hadid likes Clerkenwell, enjoys its cosmopolitan air, but is sad that the Italian community, with its churches and Sunday-opening delis, is fast disappearing. From her flat, she often hears the sounds of frolicking children at a nearby primary school, but at the weekend, she says, it’s quiet: “It’s like being in a resort. I often have the feeling of being in a hotel somewhere else in the world.”

The thoughts of the world’s foremost female architect occasionally stray back to Kensington. She still owns that water-damaged flat. It is unoccupied, and there is unfinished business. “I want to fix it and decide what to do with it,” she sighs. “Apparently, the problem’s still there.”