Young Person's Guide to Religion

A Young Person’s Guide to Religion is a project organised by Rowan Arts that brought together 40 young people aged 11-25 to tell the story of four religions in Islington (Christianity, Hinduism, Islam and Judaism) and the heritage of other faiths and of humanism. As part of the project, over one weekend in May 2013, I conducted two architectural tours around Islington’s religious buildings, traversing the capital from the West End to the City, and talking with people of faith to find out how their religious buildings served them and their community. You can read and hear my commentaries during the walks via this link: http://www.guidetoreligion.com/walks/

The playful city

The London Festival of Architecture reviewed for Domus, July 2012
http://www.domusweb.it/en/architecture/the-playful-city--/

Ottoman villa 2

This is an elevation and section I did, using a combination of CAD and hand drawing, of a summer house on the Asian side of Istanbul, in Altunizade. Today there are few such buildings left in the city. Originally it was in open countryside. Now it is near to major roads but thankfully trees block much of their impact. The building was named the Mazlum Aga Kosku when it was documented by Sedad Eldem and it was built in the second half of the 19th century. It is now the home of the Turkish Music School.
A beautiful but imposing villa.

Review of "New Arcadians" by Lucy Bullivant, Domus magazine, June 2012

Lucy Bullivant's new book provides plenty of evidence that the most progressive architecture is produced during times of economic and political crisis. My review for Domus can be read at:

http://www.domusweb.it/en/book-review/new-arcadians-emerging-uk-architects/

Salt, art institution Istanbul-style

IT’S A perennial question: how to adapt old buildings to modern purposes while preserving our architectural heritage. And it’s coming up more and more often in a city such as Istanbul, with its large collection of Ottoman-era buildings that, slowly but surely, are being brought back into use.

GAD’s Borusan Culture and Arts Centre is a recent example, which kept the shell of a 19^th century apartment block but inserted a steel diagrid box to create unusual layerings of the old and new, and the latest contribution to the genre is Salt, a combination of art gallery, archive and research body, which has just opened its new headquarters in two fine examples of the classical-oriental style that flourished on the European side of Istanbul in the mid to late 19^th century.                                                      

One, renamed Salt Galata, opened in December and was formerly the home of the Ottoman bank; the tunnel that was used to bring gold and other reserves from the nearby Golden Horn still exists apparently. The other, hundreds of metres away, which had the classic typology of shop on the ground floor and apartments above, is now named Salt Beyoğlu and opened in April.

The facades of both buildings make for an unexpected introduction to Turkey’s most experimental art institution, but Aga Khan award-winning architect Han Tümertekin decided early on to restore their original volumes and quality of light, removing the 20^th century additions, including a floor at Salt Galata that, inexplicably, was blocking the skylight and a lift blocking the view of the main staircase.

Those qualities are emphasised further by a type of sleight of hand. In the Salt Galata foyer, for example, few of the sources of light are visible; they are hidden behind cornices and banisters, or in white beams held up on thin wires. The colour scheme doesn’t depart much from the white and grey of the original’s ubiquitous marble. The transition to the new extension further back, containing the bookshop and cafe, is signalled merely by the extra shine of the new tiles, which are direct copies of the old.

At his office, a stone’s throw from the Bosphorous, Tümertekin told me:  “The project taught me to control myself. I was free to enlarge my interventions but I detected the architectural qualities of the buildings, whether the details, the volumes, the light. By seeing these qualities you learn a lot. I had a chance to rethink the clichés about 19^th century classical architecture.”

There is an irony here. Le Corbusier and his disciples worshipped those concepts of volume and light, but they would have had no hesitation in consigning the bank, built in 1892 by the École des Beaux-Arts-trained Alexandre Vallaury in a rich decorative style, to the wrecking ball.

Salt’s directors commissioned other designers to work on the project to showcase top new talent in the country. The decision could have led to conflict, with Tümertekin keen to give prominence to the original qualities of the buildings.

However, it is precisely the unlikely combination of their different approaches—his wish to rediscover those qualities and the other practices’ determination to introduce state-of-the-art technology and a vitality, almost playfulness sometimes, to the brief—that gives the Salt HQ its unique character.

At Salt Galata, the extensive library, by Şanal Architecture Planning, the hub of the building, still houses the original bank safe, by Chatwood’s of Newgate Street, London, now a store for books. Users are able to watch films, conduct meetings and do presentations – it is not intended that silence should reign supreme. Glass panels, 20 metres above the library, move constantly, creating disco-like effects on Vallaury’s original tiled floor, columns and walls.

Similar glass panels have been installed above the foyer at Salt Beyoğlu: it is one of the “common references” that Tümertekin thought were essential to be able to view the two buildings as part of one organisation.

The wood-lined auditorium, by Zoom TPU, is used for talks, films and performance; the inner part of the ear was the inspiration here. The main office, by Superpool, is designed as a “parliament”, with a central area hosting presentations and discussions. The reception areas, by Autoban, continue the love affair the building has with marble: slabs of the material in a “semi-finished” state form the reception desks and corridor walls.

The creation of “promenades architecturales” helped to provide the public character that was needed, and another common reference. At Salt Galata, the promenade goes from the main staircase to the multi-level galleries that serve the exhibition rooms, workshops and offices. The new lifts are made of glass and positioned in such a way that one can take in the different spaces, including the rooftop restaurant, with its views of the famous Istanbul skyline, sketched so lovingly by Le Corbusier in 1911 during his ideas-forming “Journey to the east”.

At Salt Beyoğlu, the stone-paved ground floor is designed as a continuation of Istiklal Caddesi, Istanbul’s busiest pedestrian street, which teems with people day and night, attracted by the numerous shops, restaurants and, increasingly now, cultural attractions – Borusan, for example, is nearby.

It includes a cinema that has no doors or walls separating it from the rest of the reception area. Two lines of original iron columns lead you to the entrance proper, a steel staircase, which rises to an interior square with bookshop and bistro and the first of the exhibition rooms. From here, the original staircase further back provides access to other exhibition rooms, and, on the roof, a garden where food will be produced.

As Tümertekin says, “There are new interventions but with something continuing with history.”

Both buildings are free to enter and have signage and exhibition information in Turkish and English, offering a civic amenity where people can while away half an hour during a lunch break or undertake serious research in some beautiful spaces. Tümertekin told me, “It is rare to find such public spaces. It is not common in the city – we do not have that kind of architectural heritage. We have some but it is not easily accessible.” For all its attractions, Istanbul has lacked such a facility for too long, and providing it has been the first of what Salt hopes will be many major contributions to the cultural life of the city.

Letter from Turkey, Wallpaper magazine, October 2011

We are all aware of Turkey's stunning architectural heritage, but what of the current scene? I search out and review the best, most exciting buildings to appear in Turkey recently.

http://www.wallpaper.com/architecture/architecture-news:-letter-from-turkey/5459

Koebberling and Kaltwasser, Jellyfish Theatre, Mark magazine, March 2011

K and K's ground-breaking Jellyfish Theatre in Southwark, London, won this year's AJ Small Project Award. I review the building and interview Martin Kaltwasser on this and the practice's other work.

Consumerism is increasingly seen as a panacea for neglect and deterioration in our towns and cities. The belief is that, the more shoppers frequent areas that need regeneration, the more those public spaces will benefit. And sometimes it can work – the windswept, grimy central avenue of Patrick Hodgkinson’s 1960s megastructure, the Brunswick Centre in London, has been transformed by a lick of paint and the simple expedient of putting a large supermarket at the far end and lining the sides with new shops and cafes.

Whether that is the best way to improve the urban environment is open to question, however. For one thing, it adds to the voracious appetite to consume goods, which has consequences for our climate. Also, it often involves, with the aid of CCTV and security patrols, the exclusion of “less desirable” groups, who are deemed to bring an area down and to put off shoppers, and who are therefore pushed out of sight and out of mind.

Some architects—Raumlabor, Carmody Groarke and Sanjeev Shankar to name but a few—are challenging that policy, which they view as limited, short-sighted, and even dangerous given the urgency of the climate change issue. Perhaps the most radical among them is Berlin-based practice Köbberling and Kaltwasser, whose approach to public space, by contrast, is marked by real public participation—volunteers help to shape and to build the work—and the use predominantly of materials that would otherwise be thrown away. Their ideas offer a “back to basics” alternative to the official planning policies that now dominate cities such as Berlin and London.  

Köbberling and Kaltwasser’s most ambitious building to date is the Jellyfish Theatre, which was erected on a school playground in Southwark, just south of the River Thames, with the towering Shard and Elephant and Castle developments in the distance. Martin Kaltwasser first discussed the project with playwrights and commissioning theatre group Red Room; and the building then went up over the summer with the help of about 100 volunteers. He provided experience as an architect and a rough vision of the design, and they developed that together. Martin comments, “The volunteers brought their skills, humour and men and women power. We invited literally everyone to take a hammer, it was so basic. We needed everyone because we did not have electricity and a lot of things on the construction side.” A “unique and special atmosphere” resulted. As usual with Köbberling and Kaltwasser’s work, the process was an important part of the message.

Simplicity and flexibility were key. Through the use of brackets, wooden pallets were attached to the steel pole structural frame. On the pallets were nailed and screwed, in a seemingly haphazard fashion, the cladding elements: unwanted doors, wood offcuts, parts of cupboards, MDF and insulation sheets. The approach is a world away from the close attention to junction details that characterises most architecture projects. However, the building had to be weather-proof and to meet building regulations—even the front, the tentacles of the Jellyfish, which looked like it had frozen in mid-collapse.  

The original idea was for the tentacles to be bigger than the rest of the theatre, but the project ran out of time to realise that aim. In the end, the most eye-catching part of the structure, which lends it its alien-type character, was completed in just two days. It’s amazing that some passing school pupil did not decide to test its strength with a Tarzan-like swing or two. Martin puts it down to an increasing feature of our schools:  the banning of climbing frames from playgrounds: “The spirit of fear in England has got into the children. They are not doing these things anymore.”

Apart from the main steel pole structure, a late addition that proved necessary for practical reasons, and that doubled as a corridor for the actors’ stage exits, everything was made from donated or salvaged materials: even the seating, cafe and box office, although to minimise waste no tickets were handed out. A wide central aisle served as the performance space, with the audience seated on both sides.

The apparent obstacle of a lack of electric tools contributed to the individuality of the design. “We tried to reduce cutting to a minimum, “ says Martin. “We used over-lapping. I was fascinated how funny it is to build without cutting as it promoted the imagination, it creates another spirit, another aesthetic. It was defining our own aesthetics and the volunteers could identify that. It was like a jazz concert, with a theme of some escapes.”

On the press night for one of the plays that was staged, Protozoa by Kay Adshead , theatre-goers had their cameras out, seemingly intrigued that something as large and functional as a theatre could be built mostly from materials that were destined for the skip. I think that part of its charm stemmed from the fact that it harked back to when buildings were erected by hand and the community came together and used locally sourced materials.  Strangely, though, the resulting patchwork recalled an icon of Modernist architecture, the Eames house of 1949—also a collection of ordinary components that make up something unique.

After the staging of two plays on themes of climate change in September, the building was dismantled by volunteers, including me, in October, and the materials were again sorted for recycling. The total budget was £17,000, which included about £12,000 for fees and renting and £5,000 for building materials. “You can say it’s a no budget project,” says Martin: £100,000 is the average budget for a small architecture project.

Köbberling and Kaltwasser’s book Hold It! serves as a summary of their work so far. In it they stress that their role is different from the traditional one of the architect: it is to offer “examples of empowerment and the temporary popular appropriation of urban space…Architects could help to convey how to do things yourself, how to experiment, and how to harness potential.”  So bicycles are built from the spare parts of a Peugeot 205; a disused bus shelter becomes a forum for community life in Linz; small shanty-type booths offer an escape from CCTV surveillance in Nottingham; a pavilion near the stock exchange in Zürich becomes a meeting place, a lecture hall and then a soup kitchen; and a family house is erected overnight on a disused meadow by the Gropiusstadt housing estate in Berlin.

Residents’ reactions on waking up to find a new house on the estate are viewable on Youtube. Martin explains their enthusiasm: “It’s a basic thing in our European culture: the idea in most people’s minds that the fulfilment and success of life is given if he or she builds their own house. The single house building is still the icon of a fulfilled life. We built the house in Gropiusstadt as an ironic statement on that thinking.

“There is a deep wish of people in high rises for individuality, a place of their own. There are lots of immigrants. They remembered their childhood. It was moving, what they said.”  

A two-week visit to Istanbul to see the informal building techniques that are still practised in the southern hemisphere has had a strong influence on Köbberling and Kaltwasser’s work. Another influence has been Berlin at the time of the fall of the wall, when there was an unparalleled opportunity for architects such as Köbberling and Kaltwasser and Raumlabor, who are close friends, to rethink the city. “It had lots of unidentified space, it was the highest peak of freedom you can imagine. Whole quarters had no clear form of possession. Everyone went in and changed the locks!

“In the 1990s we feared the Berlin Senate would turn Berlin into a more commercial city. We wanted to show the potential of non-defined space. Berlin had to redefine itself completely after the fall of the wall. We felt it was a unique chance to be respected, to be an important part of redefining the city.” Later the projects built by Köbberling and Kaltwasser, Raumlabor and others in the city were replaced by the neo-classical architecture that dominates now.

Köbberling and Kaltwasser have just returned from a one-year residency in Los Angeles. Unusually, while there, they used only bikes and public transport. “Everything was so slow, Californians are not used to being confronted by bikes, so everyone stopped when they saw a bike. We were like kings!” One wonders what influence the city of quartz will have on their work. Their structures, set among heavy traffic and high-rise office and retail developments, often look fragile and hopelessly overwhelmed, a David among the Goliaths. However, the renewal of interest in localism and the “big society” suggests that their time has come and that their ideas will be increasingly taken up by communities and town hall decision makers who want to bring a more inclusive dynamic to our public spaces.

President's Medals Exhibition, RIBA, London, Metropolis magazine, January 2011

The best student work in the UK and beyond, reviewed and illustrated.
http://www.metropolismag.com/pov/author/tony-minichiello

Steve McCurry, Last Roll of Kodachrome, Istanbul Modern art gallery, September 2011

Mama’s Taken My Kodachrome Away!

The end of a photographic institution raises questions about the cost of the digital revolution

A PHOTOGRAPHER once summed up the importance of the film he used by saying, and I paraphrase, “If you put rubbish in, you get rubbish out.” What you got from Kodachrome, the first successful colour film, a favourite among amateurs and photojournalists alike for over 70 years, and the subject of a hit Paul Simon song, was a striking richness of colour and sharpness of detail that was hard to match. It was also robust enough to withstand the extreme climates in which the photojournalists sometimes worked.

That did not save it from the digital revolution, however, and Kodak’s announcement that it would cease production of Kodachrome in 2009 led photographers to stock up on the film in large numbers. Its decision has cast doubt on whether photographic film itself will survive for much longer.

The final 36 frames to come off the production line were bequeathed to Kodachrome’s biggest fan, Steve McCurry, revered Magnum photographer, who has an archive of over 800,000 pictures taken with the film.  His picture in 1984 of an Afghan girl in a refugee camp made the cover of National Geographic and became world-famous. His pictures using the last roll of Kodachrome were the subject of a bittersweet exhibition this summer at Istanbul Modern, Turkey’s premier art gallery, and can also be viewed in their entirety on his website.

McCurry spent nine months planning what to do with the precious 36. He set off first to photograph Brooklyn bridge and other iconic buildings in New York, but found it difficult to get the ball rolling, partly because of the cloudy weather. Portraits would give him more control of the images, so he contacted Paul Simon, whose 1973 tribute to Kodachrome includes the lines: “You give us those nice bright colors, You give us the greens of summers, Makes you think all the world's a sunny day/Mama, don’t take my Kodachrome away”. The song played constantly in the background at the exhibition – in fact, by the end of my visit, I was half hoping that it would be consigned to the history books as well. Simon declined to pose, and later Robert De Niro was contacted. He gave McCurry 30 minutes and the session got the photographer going.

McCurry then went to India, where he photographed Bollywood film stars and members of a tribe whose traditions are going the way of Kodachrome. He took digital photos first to test the light and composition before going for it with his tripod-mounted Nikon F6 and hoping that his subject would not blink. He stopped off in Istanbul to take a picture of Ara Güler, the “eye of Istanbul”, whose eyes we look into for a change – McCurry’s subjects often stare unnervingly right into the lens of the camera. Then he returned to New York and took a photo of fellow Magnum photographer Elliott Erwitt posing with a yellow lampshade on his head and a red t-shirt — Kodak’s colours, which turn up regularly in different images. McCurry’s tired feet are featured in another pic. The final shot is in Parsons cemetery, Kansas, of a statue looking forward to another world. Parsons is the home of Dwayne's Photo, the last lab in the world that could develop the film.

So Kodachrome is gone and it looks like photographic film will follow the way of the Daguerreotype and the Talbotype, photographic processes that produced beautiful images, but were passed over for more efficient techniques. Are we still mourning them 100 years on? No, and perhaps we won’t be mourning the loss of film in 100 years’ time, but the once universal medium is under threat of extinction and perhaps it is time to think about the implications.

In McCurry’s first frame, De Niro’s face is made up of hundreds of tiny brown, yellow and pink dots, a grainy textural quality that is often ironed out in the digital process. There are also white patches and strips in the background  – random imperfections, in contrast to digital photography, where every pixel can be adjusted by the artist.

At least with McCurry’s images, you can be sure that he met and engaged with his sitters in creating his collection and saying something about their lives. You do not have that confidence when looking at digital images, and although digital has opened a seemingly endless series of possibilities in image making, the rituals that we associate with the dark room or the local photo lab are being lost. A film that has been made of McCurry’s odyssey shows his excitement as he waits for the photos to come out at Dwayne’s. That sense of anticipation is lacking in the digital process. However, I am sure he could have done without the machine jamming temporarily as the film went through. A swift whack, and it started working again. There are some things about the analogue world that we won’t miss.

The film also shows De Niro’s incredulity that this is the very last Kodachrome film to come off the production line. The change seems to have happened without our noticing it. McCurry’s pictures make us reflect on that development and ask whether the gains of the digital revolution are worth the losses.

Steve McCurry’s photos can be viewed at http://www.stevemccurry.com/main.php. Click on Galleries and then scroll down to Last Roll.

Details of the Istanbul Modern exhibition “The Last Roll of Kodachrome” can be found at http://www.istanbulmodern.org/en/f_index.html