MALAWI MOMENTS

 

This was the last project I took from inception to completion while I was based in Zimbabwe. I left Zimbabwe because the economy was collapsing under the burden of corruption and foolishness. For the same reason, this project was located in Blantyre, Malawi. There was precious little work to be found nearer to home than that. It’s the headquarters of a privately owned local bank, testimony to entrepreneurial spirit of the Indian community all across Eastern & Central Africa.

 

The bulk of the work is done in AutoCAD, my software of choice at the time. I was aware of Archicad and had dabbled with a pirated copy, but it didn’t seem to cut it for working drawings at that stage. Plus I didn’t have a licence. I did build basic 3d shells using AutoCAD, and brought them into Sketchup to generate perspective views with shadows etc. That had become a standard workflow for me. I had also heard of Revit but didn’t know much about it. Again, no chance of getting a licence.

 

The timeline of this job from concept to completion was about two years, perhaps a little more. During the construction phase we had a “friend of the practice” looking after day-to-day supervision and I would fly up once a month from Harare. Those were great days, staying at the Mount Soche Hotel, and sitting in with a small Jazz Trio that plaid in the dining room. I had met them in the lift when we were working on a revamp of the hotel interiors.

 

My contribution was in an up-tempo blues mode, contrasting style but lots of fun playing together. The (guitarist who lent me his instrument for a few number) played all those rapidly shifting jazz chords that are a complete mystery to me. My style was totally based on tone and feel, bending the strings, hammering on, etc. He was fascinated and asked me to explain what I was doing.

More than one way to string a (jazz) cat.

 

This building is headquarters of a private bank. The client wanted a “Dubai Look” which didn’t mean much to me at the time. Strange irony that I would move to Dubai just as the building was nearing completion. This is probably the peak of my multi-tasking method, using 4 or 5 computer programmes in parallel to do the work. It requires considerable concentration, and it was a big relief to get my hands on Revit a couple of years later. Sadly, Revit never quite took over the early concept design phase. I always felt that the sheet layout tools could have been developed more to handle A3 concept booklets. All water under the bridge now.

 

Looking back, I think I was just starting to come into my own as a “designer” when Zimbabwe pulled the rug out from beneath me. Moving to Dubai, I was seen as a “production” guy, working up designs be others and running teams, then later being the BIM strategist

Building sites in Malawi were something else. Many of the workers came in bare feet, torn shorts and battered tee-shirt. Quite possibly the only clothes they owned. Somehow or other they were organised by a couple of layers of management and my design emerged from the mud. I’m so grateful for those experiences which enriched my life. I do believe that all people are of equal value, in the abstract at least. But to believe that you can open the doors of your house to people from (say) the slums of Blantyre and expect them to adapt to your way of life in a few months (with the help of a couple of leaflets and a mobile phone). Sheer madness, and insulting to everyone concerned.

By all means be magnanimous, but don’t saw off the branch you are sitting on.

 

WATERLOO WINTER-SET

 

Waterloo, from my recent visit to London. This is King's College, an excellent example of the Stripped Classicism that was preferred in England between the wars, rather than Corb-style Modernism.

It was later seen as a timid cop-out. Hopefully many can see it now as a serious attempt to meet the demands of industrial production while maintaining some continuity with the past.

I'm not suggesting that this example is of any great architectural merit, but it's part of the nuanced and continuous evolution of building design in modern Britain.

Flemish Bond by the way.

 

Two versions of the same image: a portion of brickwork which is typical of Basingstoke's Victorian/Edwardian housing stock. Flemish Bond. Polychrome. Nine inch (one brick) external walls. The first image is a photo, the second an AI watercolour. I find that these watercolours add both clarity and confusion. You never know quite where the balance will fall. If this instance didn't hallucinate blue bricks where they shouldn't be it would be fine.

 

 

It did help me to spot the small 3/4 which really should have been worked out in the joints across the width of the dwelling, instead of violating the logic of Flemish Bond in the three courses below the decorative band. Quite unnecessary. The bricklayers should have paused to dry-bond the first course over that long stone lintel, then mark the positions of the joints with a stick of chalk, and widen the cross joints slightly to maintain the bond.

Easy for me to say 🙄

 

 

View from my living room. The transition to cold and wet seems quite abrupt. I'm keeping up my daily walks pretty well so far, but you have to take the opportunities promptly when they arise.

I do love the chimney stacks. Such a poignant reminder of the fossil fuel revolution that ushered in the modern world. Without coal and all that followed (oil, gas, electricity) we would most of us still be farm labourers. Healthier perhaps in some ways, but with shorter lives.

It's great to be back in a country where the buildings still remember that history.

 

 

 

EUSTON ON FIRE

 

North Gower Street. Some confusion by the AI here. The "Festival of Britain style" building is by an unknown architect, not Maxwell Fry, who was responsible for the block to the South of the entrance to Tolmers Square, dated to 1940.

To complicate things further it seems that Fry did build in a less-than fully modernist way, and he used a version of that curvy entrance canopy in his work in Nigeria. So there are two interesting examples of British Modern here which may both be hostels for young women. Bear in mind that UCL was one of the first colleges to offer degrees to female students.

 

One version of the Modernist myth holds that it was necessary to make a clean break with the past. English culture on the other hand is well known for its ability to use compromise to ward off the violence of outright revolution.

So it's possible to trace a path from the chaos of Victorian Revivals, via the Arts and Crafts movement, stripped Classicism, the homely compromises of the Festival of Britain style, to the genuine modernists like Fry.

 

Continuing with Maxwell Fry / Jane Drew. An early project in the classical mode in the seaside town of Margate. So many of the early modernists had a thorough grounding in classicism, to their benefit. Sadly, when I started at UCL , classicism was barely mentioned, but to be fair, I have only warmed to the idea of acquiring a deep knowledge of the Classical Orders in the last couple of decades.

There is that wiggly canopy again. Who introduced that into the modern canon? Perhaps that is obscure. Ramsay Hall was quite close to UCL. I'm pretty sure I knew someone who lived there at some stage. Not a building I have ever been fond of. Difficult to judge the crematorium from this one picture.

I guess the main message coming across to me is that, whether you take Fry's career, or the trajectory of modernism in the UK from say 1920 to 1970 when I was an earnest young Architecture student, There is a beginning in Stripped Classicism followed be a gradual transition to the Modernism of Corb, Mies et al.

 

I have always liked Euston Fire Station. Arts and Crafts ideas expressed over a six or seven storey building. The extremely tall chimneys and oriel windows are definitely Arts and Crafts in feeling. The ground floor drifts more towards classical.

Whatever. I love the balanced asymmetry, the use of materials, the unity with variety. What's more it's a local authority job. You. Might have expected something safer, more boring. Great to see it being kept in good condition.

 

 

Is the plumbing original I wonder, and under the control of the architect? I certainly enjoy the "pipework as sculpture" As a student in say 1970 I really had little idea how plumbing worked, but the networks of cast-iron pipes at the back of London buildings spoke to my artistic sensibilities. I always wanted to do a series of paintings based on these aerial roots of the institutional bathrooms and toilets within.