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

The Shock of le Nouvel, September 2010

Jean Nouvel's first forays in the UK show us all what we have been missing

 YOU WAIT NEARLY 40 years to see one of his buildings in the United Kingdom, and then two come along at the same time: the Serpentine Pavilion in the swards of Hyde Park and One New Change in the City of London. Jean Nouvel, black-clad rebelle-philosophe, has finally arrived.

Nouvel’s huge eight-floor retail and office development, covering 90,000 square metres of floor space — his description of it as a “stealth bomber” is unlikely to stick — is not due to open for several months, but judging from the exterior, the City of London has never seen the like of it before — and is unlikely to see the like of it again, if critics who have already voiced their displeasure have anything to do with it. However, the developers will be more interested in how successful OneNC is in transforming this part of the City into a shopping and coffee-drinking destination in its own right.

At OneNC, a huge gash between two blocks (and a public roof terrace) will open up previously unseen views of St. Paul’s. And most of the glazing panels – there are 4,500 of them — have undergone a technique called fritting as Nouvel attempts to transform his inspirations, usually to be found outside the world of architecture, into a successful building. The extent of the use of the technique has led some commentators to say that this is a pioneering building. A couple of miles away, AHMM have used the same technique for their commercial Angel building, but it is not used as experimentally as at OneNC.

Coloured patterns of varying density are screen-printed onto the exterior of the glass. Twenty-one different colours are used, which are all supposed to be related to the colours of the brick and stone in this part of the City. The glazing panels are supported by a steel and concrete structure, and form a double skin on the upper floors. It all adds up to an incredibly smooth facade with pencil-thin joints and junctions.

As well as, of course, controlling reflection, one of the concerns of the City planners, and mitigating the effects of glare and solar gain, this fritted palette leads to myriad subtle, and less subtle, effects, enhanced by the angles that Nouvel introduces in plan and in section. For example, in the morning, a red filter seems to hang across the top floor. Later in the day, the red haze has covered most of the Cheapside façade, in contrast to the smudged beige of the other glazing panels. On Bread Street, the panels take on a greyish tinge and rise to form a massive screen that recalls Nouvel’s ground-breaking Cartier Foundation in Paris.  

The reflection of an overhead aeroplane travels across the Watling Street façade  and, rather disconcertingly, suddenly disappears. The dome of St. Paul’s is reflected not once, not twice but somehow three times on the New Change façade, and Wren’s sturdy columns tip alarmingly and bulge.  Parts of structural elements can be seen through some panels but, unexpectedly, not through others that seem identical. And this is during just a few hours on a sunny autumn day. Who knows what visual surprises the building will afford us at night and in winter? Even Nouvel probably doesn’t know, although he would see this as an advantage: buildings with few surprises lack a certain mystery.

In this way, Nouvel readdresses with ardour themes of his earlier work: an architecture of illusion and dematerialisation, creating something seductive from the all too solid elements of building. The longer it takes you to get a handle on his buildings, the better Nouvel believes he has done his job.

That OneNC is unlike the sober, Portland stone-addicted buildings that surround it, and the other macho megaplexes that will transform the City skyline – the Shard et al – is mainly to do with the fact that it has a different purpose: to bring the weekend to the City, and perhaps forever to end that haven of urban tranquility that we have enjoyed for years. It is hoped that OneNC’s galleries, which reference London’s Leadenhall Market and the Burlington Arcade, will suck tourists from Tate Modern and the Millennium Bridge to the retail and eating opportunities within.  If Nouvel chooses to do so by avoiding the dull, repetitive facades of countless City buildings and by responding to the context in surprising ways, OneNC is all the better for it.

The red-fixated Serpentine Pavilion displays further visual tricks up the Nouvel sleeve. Beams seem to continue into the distance when they do no such thing.  Rotating panels appear to be made of the same material, but either reflect the surroundings, or filter views of the park beyond. A column is reflective on one face but just painted red on another. From one standpoint, the pavilion looks like a temple in the Forbidden City, but walk a few paces to the side and you see that it is for the most part a series of simple steel supports for the awnings, sunshine through which gives the slightest tinge of red to everyone’s skin.

Nouvel is surely the only architect of worldwide reputation who can – or wants – to achieve such felicities. “I like English parks,” he said. “Is it necessary to add something? Perhaps not. But we could add one optimistic note, one more reason to come.” He certainly has provided that, as hammock lovers, and ping pong and chess players will attest, after more serious-minded pavilions by the likes of Zaha Hadid and Daniel Libeskind.

Whether OneNC will last longer than its predecessor, a bland post-war office block with public spaces that were marked by the lack of people who ever used them, is open to question.  Like the designers of the refurbished Brunswick Centre, OneNC’s planners hope that a lifeless, dispirited public space will be transformed by the seemingly insatiable desire to consume the latest products and to eat and drink in the latest restaurants fashioned by the global chains.

I am not sure either that hard-pressed City workers will have the time or inclination to savour OneNC’s cerebral delights. They certainly won’t miss its bulk, and it will offer shelter from the weather during rainy lunch hours. However, it finally introduces Nouvel’s unique voice to the national architectural discourse, which in the City at least has been over-dominated recently by Foster, Rogers and Grimshaw.

A massive edifice, in a historically sensitive site, OneNC vies against its own weight and presence by introducing the visual allusions that have become Nouvel’s trademark. In this way, he has added some much needed French spice to the national dish. His influence in architecture schools up and down the land is not in doubt, but his influence on what has been actually built is. OneNC is his attempt to change all that, and we should applaud that attempt. 

Images viewable on http://www.jeannouvel.com/english/preloader.html