NYC DOT

I spent the 4th of July walking around Brooklyn, gaining my bearings, sketching, sound recording and adjusting to the heat before celebrating at a block party.

The 5th thus, began in earnest scholarship mode with a visit to the Department of Transportation in Lower Manhattan; a tall Manhattan-esqe building complete with vast foyer, bag scanning, marble finishes and banks of elevators.

I was there to meet Andrew Ronan of DOT to discuss the NYC Plaza Program; a framework for community organisations to partner with the DOT in order to transform underused streets into neighbourhood public spaces.

Note taking furiously for an hour I learned how the Program came into being, what work goes into making an active plaza, some of the spaces that have been created, how the application process works, the practicalities of the partnership and its current ambitions given it is nearly a decade old.

Originating in the Bloomberg administration’s 2007 PlaNYC economic and sustainability plan - which included the ambition that all New Yorkers live within a 10 minute walking vicinity of quality open space - the Program was launched just a year later and continues in place under the current Mayor, Bill de Blasio. Since then, 73 new plazas have been or are in the process of being created (52 are open to the public) with priority weighted towards neighbourhoods that lack open space.

 

 
Plaza priority areas in the 5 boroughs - Source NYC DOT

In order to enter the competitive application process, a community organisation needs to be formalised within certain criteria - a necessary measure since they will be committed to managing, maintaining and programming the space for 9 years in exchange for DOT closing a segment of the street then funding the design and construction of the space. Such groups will generally have already expressed an interest in creating a neighbourhood amenity, and might be steered toward the Plazas Program such that, as Andrew explained, the receipt of their application is anticipated.

Beyond the contractual obligation, the community group becomes the face of that intervention which can be crucial in avoiding the pernicious charge of city sponsored gentrification (the new plazas are identifiable across NYC by their bonded gravel, granite bollards and coloured chairs). To that end, all projects within the Program begin with a minimum of 2 public consultations, one of which might form a kind of 1 day representation of what the plaza could be.

It is an excellent scheme that seems to work well as a kind of mediator between top down and bottom up with tangible results. It was heartening to learn that in many cases a group might go on to champion other local causes as they galvanise their core, gain in confidence and learn more about how to access relevant municipal assistance. I’m looking forward to visiting some of the completed plazas across the city.

J'arrive

I'm embarking on the first leg of my Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Travel Fellowship - studying community driven public realm in dense cities - in NYC.

And what better day to arrive than the 4th of July

ROMP

Taking its cue from the music zines I bought by the dozen as a teenager in the suburbs, I have finally, painstakingly put together issue one of ROMP.

ROMP is an architectural publication that references culture more broadly - more akin to those DIY zines - than the regular architectural press, presenting the field with a little more irreverence, humour and politics.

ROMP #1 is available now for FREE, either in person or via Royal Mail
- message me your address and I'll drop in it the post.

Palace

Over the past year or so I've been hand developing black and white prints at community darkroom Photo Chats at Chats Palace.  In a pleasing circularity, the images, which are portraits of the local area, will be exhibited in the autumn within the building itself. There's even one of Chats' (in the words of Pevsner) sober stone faced portico with Doric columns.

One of these did not make the cut..

So I spent a couple of hours at Chats Palace today with Peter from the darkroom, editing the set down, pairing them this way and that and deciding on a hanging order. They seem to work together, and lift each other, as a good family should.

Civic-ness

Exactly a year ago I set out on a bright spring morning with the idea of taking pinhole photos of GLC fire stations in Hackney and Tower Hamlets.

How did I get here?

Almost a year before that I’d worked on a proposal for a new technical college on Parnell Road in East London, on the site of Bow Fire Station, which had been closed by Boris Johnson in 2013. I hadn’t known any of this before, and I wasn’t familiar with Parnell Road, but I felt a twinge of sadness when I saw the site photos, the fire station was a twin of Homerton Fire Station near my home, a handsome late 60s low block building, with orderly openings trimmed in black and those distinctive red doors. That fire station lends an unmistakable civic character to the High Street it sits on, enhanced of course by the public library of a similar era a little further along. 
I thought how different the High Street would feel without those buildings, and of the way in which the reduction of public services reduces the civic nature of cities, the backdrop to our lives. Do we become less civic as a consequence?

Homerton High Street: The fire station and adjacent library

I wondered what the loss of the fire station on Parnell Road would do to the character of this - mostly residential - neighbourhood. And then I learned the 60s fire station on Kingsland Road had also been closed and slated for demolition. I wanted to record them before they were gone.

And the pinhole cameras? I hadn’t used them for years, but I had just joined the local community darkroom and thought I’d set myself project. The last images I’d made with them were of the Moorfields Highwalk, which has now been demolished for Crossrail, so they seemed apt as a form.

I made a journey that took me from Homerton High Street, to Stoke Newington High Street, to Kingsland Road, Bethnal Green Road and finally Parnell Road, five humble well proportioned buildings, not exactly the same, but all of a close family. All ascribed to no specific architect but simply GLC Architects; I like that.

Homerton Fire Station

Stoke Newington Fire Station

Kingsland Fire Station

Bethnal Green Fire Station

Bow Fire Station

Some are well remembered, some are not

Another Saturday and another afternoon with my Lady Architects; we were visiting the former West London residence and studio of sculptor Kenneth Armitage (1916-2002).

Now held in trust by the Kenneth Armitage Foundation, occupancy of the house and studio is offered as a two-year residency to a selected sculptor, an act of generosity that bestows freedom to produce and exhibit a substantial body of work. We were shown around the building by the current resident David Murphy who spoke of receiving a mystery unsolicited phone call from the proverbial dark informing him he’d been selected for the fellowship. What an amazing phone call that must have been.

Purpose built as an artist’s house, the building was subsequently split vertically through the middle leaving a slightly eccentric tall narrow house connected by a winding stair with distinctly nautical vibes.

The current house and studio represent an even slice of the original building

Narrow winding stair

This trim circulation enhances the expansive feel of the living space at first floor level with its high ceiling and mezzanine study, and huge studio at ground level. Both these main spaces are characterised by those large north light windows so typical of Victorian purpose built studios.

View of the mezzanine in the living space

View from the mezzanine

I was taken by David's suggestion that the building relates an idea about falling out of history. At one time, Armitage had been a lauded British sculptor, a renowned contemporary of Henry Moore. I had, admittedly never heard of him, though it seems he is in general less well known than his fellow Leeds College of Art contemporaries and despite winning best international sculpture at the Venice Biennale in 1958, somehow his name has slipped out of time.

Armitage in his studio

The studio now

A theme it seems, the building itself was designed by Art and Crafts pioneer James MacLaren, at one time a great influence on Charles Rennie Mackintosh but it seems the student outshone the master in the end - while Mackintosh’s eminent name is synonymous with a whole school (the burning of that school designed by him in 2014 a national tragedy) just one book of MacLaren’s work is in circulation.

The whims of time I suppose, well, I enjoyed learning about both.

Revisionist Margin

I was so happy for my teaching colleague E to wise me up to Errata Editions – publisher of out of print photography books – an amazing resource for our students, and for me.

Of the examples shared, I kept returning to Keld Helmer-Petersen’s ‘122 Colour Photographs’, a bold collection of bright and banal. Content aside, the layout is striking jumping as it does in size and position across the double spread in a manner I couldn’t have imagined I'd countenance as a slightly fascistic formatter. But it works.

Keld Helmer-Petersen’s ‘122 Colour Photographs’ 136 p, 9.5 x 7.5'', 75 Colour illustrations

Layouts from six spreads

Maybe I’ll learn to relax my rigid margins a little.

Post Narrative

And to another book launch at the AA; Claire Jamieson's treatment of the architectural group NATØ, a fitting venue given its beginnings 30 years ago in Bedford Square - although it is a notorious fact that the group were failed as a whole by the school...

Like the book, the brief speeches set the context and the room was busy with a crowd split roughly by those had been there, and those taught by them, myself included.

Thatcher’s Britain; a city in decline. For brevity I enjoyed Robert Mull’s comparison of then and now:

A city decimated by deprivation.
A city decimated by corpulence.

Dead End

Out of the city and down to Dungeness, the place that in the words of Jonathan Glancey ‘broods at the very edge of the map of England. It is a natural dead end.’ 

Dungeness catches the imagination like few coastal settlements. 
It is not exactly a village, and certainly not a town. 
It is neither a resort nor a place many people will feel particularly comfortable with. 
It has no pier, no amusement arcades, little or nothing in the way of rock, saucy postcards or kiss-me-quick hats. 
It has no hotel. 
It is very much its own place, a kind of willful stage set on the very south-easterly tip of England. 

I last came here over a decade ago when we were staying at Butlins up the road in Rye; we came out across the shingle and drove as far as we could into the entrance of the power station.
And Hannah took photos and made a little video through the window of Laurie’s knackered car. 

‘…the presence of the power stations has created a hybrid landscape, one that is harsh and bleak but within which a raw and undeniable beauty continues to surface’ David Chandler  

It was all almost exactly as I remembered it – bleak terrain, moody sky - though the beautiful Shingle House, where I stayed this time is a subtle addition to the sparse scattering of structures.

I walked during the day, during the black black night and in the early morning. I took lots of photos. I collected shells and stones and I made some drawings.

Night: The power station (L), the Shingle House

Sunrise

 Sunset

Stop // Frame // Spider

What a pleasure it was to see William Firebrace this week at the launch of his beautiful new book at the AA.

A decade ago, William was my undergrad tutor at the Bartlett where he encouraged us to make stop frame animations of our study site, Hastings. 

A tutor myself now, I’d been reminded of one of these recently by delicate string and plaster casts resembling wonky spiders in the undergrad studios at London Met...so I thought I'd dust them off:

Spider from alpa depani on Vimeo.

Bag from alpa depani on Vimeo.