Kosmograd

Jan Grothklags: Concrete Dreams

Photographer Jan Grothklags has created a book, Concrete Dreams, documenting the construction of the Phaeno Centre in Wolfsburg, Germany, by Zaha Hadid. It might not have won the Stirling Prize, but it looks a damn fine building, and Grothklags images bear witness to a fascinating construction process.

Concrete Dreams won Grothklags an honorable mention in the Digital Photography category of the 2006 Adobe Design Achievement Awards.

You can also see the pages of the book on Grothklags' website

Post-Occupancy

Recently published is a special issue of Domus magazine, called Domus d'Autore where the magazine is given over to a guest Editor-Architect, in this instance Rem Koolhaas and his OMA-AMO practice.

The theme Koolhaas has decided to explore with this special issue is "Post-Occupancy" and a chance to critically re-evaluate as AMO 4 recently completed built projects by OMA: The Dutch Embassy in Berlin, the Seattle Public Library, the McCormick-Tribune Campus Center on the campus of IIT in Chicago, and the Casa de Musica in Porto:

"With this issue we try to (re)present four recent buildings in a fresh, more complex way. We don't insist on the buildings' qualities, but monitored their effects on their respective hosts and users. There are no 'critics' - usually, best friends in drag - no intimidation. We have assembled myriad anonymous voices and collected snapshots. We documented how (our) buildings take place in a primordial sea of influences and predecesors on which their existence depends and to whose existence they try to contribute. We looked through the eyes of tourists and artists, trusted others to record. Away from the triumphalist or miserabilist glare of media, we wanted to see what happens in the absence of the author, to represent the realities we were complicit in creating, post-occupancy, as facts, not feats."

As well as the sequence of drawings and photographs as you would expect, there are interviews and vox-pops with users, discussions on the role of image making and photography in architecture, dense hypertextual concentrations of the 4 buildings press coverage, and a lyrical meditation by Koolhaas on Berlin and his debt to OM Ungers.

Through the projects described in this edition, it's fascinating to see evolving the theories explored by Koolhaas from the Delirious New York days, such as the analysis of a skyscraper. The skyscraper's multiplicity of functions, stacked behind a uniform facade, and the vertical circulation, explored by OMA through the brilliant unbuilt projects of the Tres Grande Bibliotheque in Paris, the ZKM in Karlsruhe, the library at Jussieu in France, is further explored with these built projects. With each new project the thinking evolves. Now the functions are not just stacked vertically but offset, creating dynamic compositions and interstitial spaces. The urban field is brought inside, often through a continuous linear route winding upwards through the building in a series of ramps.

This magazine, beautifully constructed, is a fascinating insight into the programmatic approach to the design of the four projects, and comparing and contrasting them shows how these projects related to each other as part of a brilliantly conceived ouevre while at the same time for the most part satisfying the requirements of their users.

When in doubt quote Ballard

Great stuff over at Balllardian.com, where Tim Chapman interviews Iain Sinclair about JG Ballard.

Amongst the tit-bits are mention of a new Iain Sinclair book CIty of Disappearances, and discussion of the latest JG Ballard book, Kingdom Come.

Ballard and Sinclair have been intertwined for a while now, both capturing a certain sensibility of the modern urban condition, though with different approaches. Whilst Sinclair wrote an introduction to the BFI monograph on Crash!, and has pastiched Ballard in novels such as Landor's Tower, Ballard returns the compliment in Kingdom Come:

[Tim Champman, Ballardian] "With Kingdom Come, as you say, you were given this assignment to destroy Bluewater. Did you fail him? Does he have to do it himself?"

[

Iain Sinclair] "I did my best — I gave it a good kicking in the book. Bluewater I thought was one of the most de-energising places on the face of the earth. It’s down in this chalk quarry, which makes it different from any other huge mall. Essentially it’s just a car park — the convenience is that it’s somewhere you can put your car. Shopping is completely separate from it."

Ballard is as usual tacking contentious stuff by advocating terrorism in these end days, perhaps continuing the theme of middle-class revolt from Millennium People, this time from the viewpoint of a suburban town called Brooklands on the outskirts of London, along the M25. It starts with a great opening paragraph:

"The suburbs dream of violence. Asleep in their drowsy villas, sheltered by benevolent shopping malls, they wait patiently for the nightmares that will wake them into a more passionate world."

Great stuff. And there's more great lines within:

"People in London can't grasp that this is the real England. Parliament, the West End, Bloomsbury, Notting Hill, Hampstead - they're heritage London, held together by a dinner party culture. Here, around the M25, is where it's really happening. This is today's England, but people are bored. They're out on the edge, waiting for something big and strange to come along."

However, as a whole the book doesn't seem to hold together too well, it lacks the sheen of veracity that makes Millennium People so great . As with most Ballard books, there's not much characterisation, and everyone essentially speaks with Ballard's voice, and are prone to pompous speechifying.

Most of the ideas in Kingdom Come are repeated in Balllard's recent diary entry in the New Statesman - A Fascists Guide to the Premiership. - a brilliant title that could have done with a more considered content.

According to the Blackwells site, JG Ballard is supposed to be talking at the Institute of Education on the 14th September, but as the interview makes clear, he doesn't get out much, so whether he'll show up or not remains to be seen.

Recently, Sinclair was interviewed by Koolhaas at the Serpentine Gallery 24-hour interview-athon, which prompts further cross-over influence/inspiration:

[Tim Chapman] It’s interesting you mention Koolhaas. At the architecture exhibition here at the Barbican, Future City: Experiment and Utopia in Architecture [1956-2006], there’s an installation of a theoretical work by Koolhaas, Exodus [1972], which is about placing a great strip of ultra-luxury accommodation across London so it divides it in two, and seeing what’ll happen. I thought that’s an unwritten Ballard story.

Sinclair also mentions doing a version of London Orbital based in Bejing, following the 7 orbital motorways around the Chinese capital.