CONTINUITY IN ARCHITECTURE

Superimposed red line marking the axis between the Thiepval arch (east) and the River Ancre (west) in the Somme region.

Note the persistent marks of trench systems below the cultivation.

Early evening in late August 2009 and the sun is almost coinciding with the east/west axis. The light glances off surfaces and catches exposed corners.

The Thiepval Arch, The Memorial to the Missing of the Somme. Inscribed with the names of 73,357 British soldiers of the Somme campaign whose remains were not identified. Unveiled August 1932. Architect: Edwin Lutyens.

More pictures of Thiepval in August: Photoset

Get the full picture at Iconic Photos 

The avant garde absolutely gushes: TimesOnline 

Via The Footnotes of Mad Men, glimpses of the Casa Malaparte in Le Mepris

The B.Arch. studio presentations are being held on 22 September 2009. If you would like a preview/reminder of the CiA studio proposal go to THIS LINK

Sally Stone and Eamonn Canniffe are currently participating in a joint architecture/archaeology workshop with schools of architecture from IUAV, Barcelona and Palermo. If you are interested in their architectural and gastronomic adventures, you can follow their Twitter feeds:

Sally Stone Eamonn Canniffe

Three Mirage 2000 jets of L’armée de l’air fly north towards the Franche Comte/Lorraine border in this odd postcard from Ronchamp*. The aerial view is not particularly flattering to a building that was designed to be approached from the slopes below. The previous chapel on the site was bombed by the Luftwaffe during the Second World War and the remains were used as building materials in the new building. I suppose the chapel is being protected rather than threatened by the jets but what is the meaning of the title on the postcard back: flagrant delit?**

Mirage fighters were a feature of motorway travel in France in the ‘seventies and, flying in formation above the Autoroute near Dijon, evoked the over-dubbed delights of The Aeronauts*** a Saturday morning TV programme shown alongside Robinson Crusoe and The Flashing Blade.

*bought in the early ‘nineties and found in ‘the bottom drawer’
** in flagrante delicto
*** Les Chevaliers du Ciel in France (link)

Preston Bus Station is one of those modernist structures that condemned the pedestrian to the bridge or subway giving the surrounding ground plane or ‘apron’ to vehicles i.e. buses. The people of Preston are characterised by their disdain for motorised traffic and inevitably a number of people have been killed in the past forty years crossing the apron as buses reversed out of one of the eighty (yes eighty!) bus stands. The building has been neglected and unsecured throughout it’s existence and the bus drivers have resorted to improvisation in dealing with various antisocial problems. It is a routine procedure to position a double-decker bus to break the fall of a determined jumper (or attention seeker, see picture below).

Suddenly a revolution. For some unknown reason (perhaps prompted by threats under safety or DDA legislation?) the council have installed substantial, simple and useful temporary crossing points allowing pedestrians an easy route from the bus to the markets. Buses stop at zebra crossings, families amble across in the summer sunshine.

The alterations bode well for the continued survival of the building, due for demolition to make way for the always delayed Tithebarn town centre redevelopment (our Liverpool One). Listing has been refused once by EH but I believe the C20 Society are trying again. The temporary interventions, introducing discipline and civility to the environs of the building provide a simple vision of the ground plane reclaimed and the possibility of a rethinking of the building based on it’s relationship to public space.

Preston Bus Station under construction 

Analogue & Digital 

Immagini e memoria: Rome in the photographs of Father Peter Paul Mackey 1890-01

Sir John Soane’s Museum is hosting an exhibition from the photographic archive of the British School at Rome of the work of Fr. Peter Paul Mackey O.P., which presents a record of thecity undergoing rapid modernisation at the end of the nineteenth century. The expansion of the city and its new infrastructure horrified romantic artists in pursuit of a very late Grand Tour, but yielded vast amounts of new material for increasingly professionalised archaeologists. The tension between these two worlds, the simultaneous need to record and the desire to compose, are evident in many of the photographs, the ancient monuments seen against modern factories and before the maturing of present-day urban planting.

In his excellent catalogue essay Dr. Robert Coates-Stephens (Cary Fellow at the BSR) places the Dominican scholar Mackey’s images in their historical context of ‘Roma Capitale’, and the social context of the expatriate community of clerics, archaeologists and aesthetes, a society in which the word amateur still had its original meaning. The atmospherically staged exhibition continues at the Soane Museum until 12 September.

At present CiA staffer Eamonn Canniffe is researching a similar complementary collection of material, that of Captain J. Douglas Kennedy, held at the John Rylands Library in Manchester. The collection presents a haphazard but enthusiastic account of the same dilettante milieu.

CiA staffer Sally Stone has successfully obtained Erasmus Intensive Programme funding for a student project studying the relationship between architecture and archaeology in north-east Italy. The experimental workshop, run in partnership with IUAV (Venice) and ETSAB (Barcelona), will focus upon the protection of key archaeological sites in the territories of the Veneto and Trentino.

The project will kick-off the CiA BArch programme for the autumn term at Manchester School of Architecture and will result in proposals for shelters, buildings and other interventions that relate directly to the sites of archaeological interest. Staff and students will be on site in Italy for two weeks in late September.

Sally Stone coordinated the Manchester School of Architecture application collaborating with Margherita Vanore from IUAV and Pilar Cos from ETSAB for the Erasmus Intensive Programme funding. Sally and Pilar have previously worked together on the Interventions Project, an international project for students from Manchester and Barcelona.

Illustration from ‘Venice for Modern Man’ published by Italia Nostra

The successful proposal for the LSE’s student centre has been announced. O’Donnell & Tuomey’s winning presentation boards as pdfs at this link.

CiA staffer Eamonn Canniffe’s 2007 book ‘Modern Architecture through Case Studies 1945 - 1990′ (with Peter Blundell Jones) has been published in Japanese Chinese. This new edition is available here.

Small black and white prints found in the plan chest. I believe these show new buildings for Gresham’s School in Holt, Norfolk designed by Grenfell Baines & Hargreaves of Preston (later renamed Building Design Partnership) and photographed soon after completion (1959-1960?). Simple roof forms, minimal porches, panels of rustic materials and a festive lantern with weathercock.

George Grenfell Baines, founder of BDP.

More from the bottom drawer.