Midnight thoughts

 

What I need at the moment is to specify a place of research, concentrate on one of the differing areas in Victoria. 

Clarify what differs in the space- maybe that will help to answer questions why spaces makes me feel (un)comfortable. Colours, shapes, structure, social context.

Finally- find a system of indentifying spaces. A clue is already in vertical and horizontal patterns within the buildings. I need to find the system of my own that would identify and clarify spaces. And only then I can set the borders, junctions, juxtapositions. Only when I am able to have a structured analysis of the space; either existing and visible one, or analysis with my own set of rules.

Genadii Berezkin collages

Atelier Olschinsky- deconstructed chaos

Borrowed studio's name seen on Mashiho's blog- hope you don't mind :).

Atelier Olschinsky is a small independent multi-disciplinary design studio situated in the center of vienna, offering design solutions for all types of media: graphic design, product design, web sites, 3d, illustration, animation and photography.

 All work taken from http://www.olschinsky.at/

Beautiful and extremely inspiring work. Photomontages, collages, detailed illustrations creates fantasy worlds, defragmented, deconstructed futuristic landscapes. What I can use out of this research I think this experimentation with materials in terms of making, doing collages and experimentation with primary research- it could be a good source of example how to illustrate a good and bad sides of the city just by experimenting with materials and playing with imagination.

Nils Ole Lund collages

Trafiknettet. Collage. 1979, revideret 1993. 

 

 

Nils Ole Lund, Collage City, 1980 

Nils Ole Lund, The Best of Architecture, 1984 

 A great set of visual decompositions and collages from postmodernism. Proposals, imaginary spaces, cities, buildings- demolished, deconstructed, defragmented- all of it was about being provocative, radical and speculative about architecture. 

Architecture that breaks the rules and involves imagination.

Speed architecture

Overall I thought the whole idea of presenting your work in very short amount of time was a good excercise, especially knowing that soon we will be doing that again in order to find some jobs for ourselves. Not only that you have to time what you say, you need to be selective about your keywords, about what pieces of work you want to show and need to be confident and knowledgable about the subject you're interested in in order to answer the questions that may arise. It was a good excercise to challenge yourself to be able to select ideas from feedbacks that fits into what you want to do and the ones not so as well as being able to adapt the advise into what you could do next.
My key ideas and advises on project from tutors were:

-Boundaries between postal areas and post code gangs- wars rising just for the sake of living in different postal areas.
-Channeling users through optional areas- tourist areas, shortest from A to B and so on.
-If channeling people, need to make a clear point why? Why I would channel people through rough areas? If they had an option, why would they want to go through rough areas if they had a choice? (**And if they didn't? how would it change the social level?**)
-Beauty of void- Christo example- covering the monuments with fabric and revealing what is unseen.
-Get a clearer idea of experience in good and bad areas - through models, photographs, drawings. Be more sensible to specific places. Have a more specified area to look at and investigate it in details. Investigate places that clashes with one another.
-Victorian housing- vertical liniar pattern- council housing- horizontal liniar pattern.
-If concept is about "what if", have many "ifs" and different concepts to each of them. Perhaps, to have an understanding of scenarios and what would happen. If I'm channeling people- understand different concepts that could arise if I would change the route slightly.
-Breaking borders to create new borders.
-Paul Klee, Tim Ingold, Francis Aylis.
-Experimentation with society. One of the tutors said that it is scary thinking about how we are manipulated by our environment without any acknowledgement and how easily we could become an experimentation of someone. I was pleased to see that the concept does turn into critical design and already brings up some fears that we didn't realise as much before. 
-Last point- it was a good experience to understand that you won't please everyone and it shouldn't let your work down. Be confident in what you say, in what you do, and disagreement of someone else should set a challenge rather bring your work down.

Back to London

First of all I thought of London as a whole- how much boundaries it has within itself. London as a whole separating from suburbs, with its own mapped zones within the cities. Then there is boroughs. In boroughs there is postal areas. Each of those areas usually serve only depenting on their post code or county. Depending on borough or your postal area, border markers, street markers, even rubbish bins is in different colour. Although very slight, there is a borders and you can feel them, when it comes to practicality.
Now in terms of cities' differences. As an example, if you want to rent a flat, first you chose your area of search. You chose between boroughs, then between cities. Even then you create mental borders between good and bad. If you got a choice of Peckham and Waterloo at similar price but very small room in comparison to a big one in Peckham- probably you still would chose the tiny room in Waterloo and miss a great place in Pecham just because of stereotypes of the area. Maybe a little over the top example but I really believe this is happening very slowly, where high social and economical level areas is slowly overtaken by people migrating from lower areas.

Inspired by Rem Koolhaas work and reasons why there was wall built in Berlin, it still makes me wonder what would happen if there would be physical walls as a boundaries preventing migration between cities? 

Here I tried to deconstruct map into obvious borders dividing the city.

I thought of areas that I would like to consider looking at. My target is to find highly diferring cities in the same borough or areas that clashes with each other. Greenwich+ Deptford? Heritage areas + council housing areas and similar?

B/ordering Space/ extracts from Martin Schroth's theory work

The conceptual evolution of “borderline” to transitional zone
is connected to the idea of interaction between immanently diverse spaces. Ethnic
conflicts, resulting in or perhaps caused by the construction of physical and nonphysical
borders illustrates the logic of separation.
Borders produce effects not only with their physical setup—they also
give information about the social content of the aims, which are expressed through the
medium of representation. Therefore borders are objects of mediation.
Security and national geopolitics through the organization of space and the
redistribution of its population show, that architecture is never a political innocent
activity. Much further, Keller Easterling‘s work Enduring Innocence show spatial
products of segregation and the deep play of politics and power, which shape global
connected urban landscapes.
In Architecture borders exist at all levels and at different scales of our
experience. Different from the carefully designed building envelope, spatial production
reduces logistics and management of space onto consideration of location, geometry,
or enclosure.
The border could be defined as a system of complex relationships,
which consist of physical infrastructure, institutional practice and social meaning. This
means that the concept of the “border” is incredibly rich.
Border have now become a set of non-related lines and points situated within
each country. As Paul Andreu points out that national borders have ceased being
continuous lines on the earth’s surface.4 Aeroplanes have triggered a need for more
complexity in mapping of territory with the integration of the vertical axis into the
thrird-dimension. With the disappearance of their symbolic value and the new
complexity in spatial relation, new possible crossing points are emerging.
The history of territorial lines is always linked to the logic of separation. This
means a clear division of interior and exterior, private and public, legal and illegal. The
effects of borders result in the production of closed spaces. Gated communities or a
camp organization —a means of isolation —are founding fixed categorical identities and
thereby stabilizing the dynamism between them.
Further, borderlines define the limits of a field or class and therefore distinctions
between categories. This is not meant as clear separation but a definition of the limit
where the influence stops. It is therefore also a zone, which marks out two distinct
areas of qualitive difference. Therefore the boundary-as-interface includes the potential
for change and frames the experience of temporal disposition. The zone establishes
identity and distinction through varying degrees of closure. The development of spatial
relationship in the degree of connectivity for example marks the shift from line to
border zone condition.
Every social space in a stage of separation and orientation implies a
superimposition of certain relations upon network of named positions. He then
categorizes the various kinds of space: “accessible space for use — by established rules
and practical procedures, boundaries and forbidden territories — neighbor and enemies,
places of abode—permanent or temporary, junction and friction points.”
B/ordering space entails a general shift from borderline to boundary
condition, which is a complex device of controlling flow.

Theorywork, theStädelschulArchitectureClass
Martin Schroth, Frankfurt am Main, Apr i l 2006
http://www.martinschroth.de/Download/ThesisMartinSchroth.pdf