Jean Tschumi, Bernard Tschumi & DOCOMOMO

On Wednesday evening I attended a party at Vitra celebrating the publication of a long overdue monograph on architect Jean Tschumi, written by Jacques Gubler and published by Skira. Jean Tschumi: Architecture at Full Scale documents the brief career of the Swiss architect who eschewed his Beaux Arts training in favor of "the polemical field of modernity and its technological expression." In the US, the name Tschumi is more well known prefaced by Bernard, rather than Jean, who died in 1962 at the age of 57, when his son was only 18 years old. His early death may have cut his architectural career short, but the quality of the architecture that he produced is evidenced in the pages of this monograph and in the Archizoom exhibition last year, curated also by Gubler.



I'm especially taken by the image on the party invitation of the Aula de Cèdres, a conference center and auditorium at HEP Lausanne:



On Wednesday Gubler spoke of Tschumi's architecture relative to color (embraced by the architect, but rarely captured in documentation of buildings) and scale, referring to the book's subtitle and the architect's consideration of design from furniture to the city. The book offers an in-depth exploration of Tschumi's career, which includes a number of office headquarters, for Nestlé, La Mutuelle Vaudoise, and the World Health Organization. (This blog post at New Switzerland gives a decent overview of the qualities of Jean's architecture.)

One is tempted to break down how the father's architecture influenced Bernard Tschumi's, though if an influence on the latter is evident, it is in the year's since his father's passing. Some brief words on Wednesday by the architect of the new Acropolis Museum pointed to little discussion between the two regarding architecture. In fact Bernard admits that he didn't decide to pursue architecture until a trip to Chicago, only a few weeks before his father died. But with time to study his father's buildings, and a role in Architecture at Full Scale, it would be difficult not to find Jean's influence on his son.


[new Acropolis Museum | image source]

Looking at the two buildings shown above, I would say the influence of Jean on Bernard happens primarily with thinking about site. The above clearly illustrates how the new Acropolis Museum's top relates to the distant Parthenon, while the lower floor contends with the ruins preserved below. In between, the museum is all about movement and the clarity of the exhibition, but it can be seen as the byproduct of contending with the site below and distant. The elder Tschumi's HEP building skillfully addresses the site's topography (as can be seen here) and adjacent buildings, standing out formally but fitting into the multi-faceted landscape.



In the Wednesday-night party's introduction by Nina Rappaport, Chair of DOCOMOMO-New York/Tristate, the preservation of Jean Tschumi's architecture in Switzerland was commended, an unspoken difference between an appreciation of Modernism's gems and the demolition of the same in part or in full an ocean away. The US chapter of DOCOMOMO (international working party for DOcumentation and COnservation of building sites and neighborhoods of the MOdern MOvement) includes ten regional chapters (all tolled the international DOCOMOMO is 53 chapters strong), but fights for preservation seem to be lost more often than won.

While this fact points to a limited appreciation in this country for architecture produced in the middle of last century, I can't help but wonder if this situation is more about ideology than taste. Modernism was predicated on progress and responses to the changes sweeping across the developed world from industrialization and world wars, so the preservation of the movement's buildings seems anithetical to their origin. That people equate modern architecture with the tabula rasa clearing of neighborhoods, towards the erection of towers in the park in that time does not help matters.

A couple issues further complicate matters: how many modern buildings were not built with the longevity of buildings centuries before; the open plans and platonic forms of modernism did not turn out to be as flexible as envisioned. These point to the necessity of preservation less than 75 years after many buildings of the era were completed and the creativity needed by architects to propose and carry out the adaptive reuse of modernist structures. I think the latter is key in efforts to preserve modern architecture, especially when faced with opponents arguing that demolition and new construction is cheaper and therefore better. The fact that many modern buildings are ingrained and important elements in their neighborhoods (ironically, like the older buildings many modern structures replaced) is perhaps the strongest argument for DOCOMOMO's continued relevance today.

New Local Worlds in Section

[Image: "Moravian Mount" from New Local Zlín by Margaret Bursa].

In a recent post I included an image from Margaret Bursa's project New Local NY, which she produced while a student at the Bartlett School of Architecture. Bursa's tutors for that project were Mark Smout and Laura Allen, of Smout Allen; and I should right away that I'm consistently amazed at the quality of work coming out of Smout Allen's studios.

I thought, then, that I should take the occasion to share more images from Bursa's projects. You can check out her website here.

[Images: From New Local NY by Margaret Bursa].

New Local NY features "a ‘landscape of movement’," Bursa writes. It "takes the form of a condensed urban playground on the west side of Manhattan, overhanging onto the River Hudson," and it was at least partially inspired "by the ongoing relocation of immigrants and cultures to America, in particular Sokol, a Czech mass-exercise movement, promoting togetherness, flocking, fresh air and cultural pride."

The result is an intensely colorful, wind-powered megastructure, sitting comfortably astride the worlds of home craft and experimental architecture.

[Image: From New Local NY by Margaret Bursa].

Here are some amazing sectional sketches:

[Images: From New Local NY by Margaret Bursa; larger version one and two].

Then there is New Local Zlín, an earlier companion piece to New Local NY.

Zlín, Bursa explains, is the fading capital of the Bata shoe-making empire:

The Czech town of Zlín is the site of a social, industrial and architectural experiment begun by Tomas Bata in 1894. However, his shoe-making factories that were once the town’s driving force no longer operate and so the social and commercial structure of the town and its suburbs are in decline. Responding to the New Local Manifesto, a layer of facilities is laid over and interwoven into the residential neighborhoods where seven housing typologies are afforded dual functions of work and domestic life such the House of Drink, where both production and consumption are combined.

The images, again, are drenched in color and extraordinarily detailed.

[Images: "House of Drink," "Greenhouse," and town plan from New Local Zlín by Margaret Bursa].

The next project is a kind of tube-diorama: you look into the miniature landscape and see autumn trees, a ruined Greek temple, and a many-windowed architectural section standing in silhouette.

The project seems to come with the implication that, when you look inside a telescope, perhaps it's possible that you might simply be seeing a world inside the telescope—that is, an optical device that, instead of revealing new worlds from afar, actually contains local worlds within it.

[Image: From Layered Landscapes by Margaret Bursa].

Called Layered Landscapes, the project is a "compositional map," Bursa writes, and it comes complete with hardcover book and poster.

[Images: From Layered Landscapes by Margaret Bursa].

Finally, I have a weird affinity for sketches of archways, and so I'd be remiss if I didn't include this short series of brick studies—called, unsurprisingly, Brickscape.

[Images: From Brickscape by Margaret Bursa].

In any case, there's some great work in there. Check out Bursa's site for a bit more.

Megan Fox Shops For Furniture In LA

The poor-mans Angelina Jolie, heart throb Megan Fox was shopping for furniture recently. First at Indigos (pictured here) and next to high-end Cisco Brothers in LA. I thought the story of the founder was inspiring.

Cisco Pinedo has become well known in the furniture industry as a leading designer of high quality upholstered furniture and unique casegoods.This is the story behind the man and his company, Cisco Brothers Corporation.

Born in a small rural town in Jalisco, Mexico, his family decided to leave the country in search of a better life. In the mid-seventies, Cisco found himself in South Central Los Angeles with the challenge of learning a new language and trying to fit in a new culture. He was only 13 years old.

In high school, Cisco discovered his passion for upholstery while working part-time in a small shop in Huntington Park. His job was to disassemble sofas, but Cisco quickly became fascinated by how each piece was put together.

His drive for knowledge helped Cisco find a job for an upholstery manufacturer. With his typical hard work and perseverance he soon learned how to run a business first hand. In his early twenties, he began making custom furniture for neighbors out of his garage in his South Central home. As his small enterprise began to grow, he and his wife, Alba recruited the help of their family members to help him run their thriving business. Cisco Brothers Corporation was born.

In a highly competitive, design-driven industry, Cisco Pinedo developed his furniture with superior craftsmanship, cutting-edge style, and unparalleled value. The closely-knit family atmosphere of the company nurtured uncommon client loyalty. After the 1992 Los Angeles riots, Cisco decided to remain in the heart of South Central. It was a risky business decision, but Cisco saw the need to revitalize his ailing childhood neighborhood. The move proved to be timely as the company continued to expand.

The success of Cisco Brothers has been a critical component in the redevelopment of the entire area surrounding the business while at the same time providing training programs and secure employment for many families in the vicinity. In 2006, Cisco developed the Inside Green™ method of construction and became the first designer to create 100% FSC Pure sustainable upholstered furniture. The company moved exclusively to FSC Pure certified woods on upholstered furniture, using reclaimed hardwoods for a collection of stunning case goods and the use of water based glues and environmentally friendly detergents to wash all fabrics.

Today, Cisco Home has six retail showrooms including a gallery at ABC Home Furnishings in NYC and the acclaimed LA Design Center in South Central Los Angeles.

Bev & Mike
Landfair Furniture + Design Gallery
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Mine / Stack / Vertigo

[Image: Michael Light, Bingham Pit photograph mounted and on display].

A beautiful new book of photographs by Guggenheim Fellow Michael Light has been released. Called Michael Light: Bingham Mine/Garfield Stack, and released by Radius Books, it includes an essay by "experimental geographer" Trevor Paglen.

[Image: Two photos from Michael Light: Bingham Mine/Garfield Stack].

Light, well known for, among other things, his aerial photographs of the American west, "pursuing themes of mapping, vertigo, human impact on the land, and various aspects of geologic time and the sublime," as Radius Books describes it, has put together a collection of 22 images from his surveys of the Bingham Pit and the Garfield smelter stack.

The sheer scale of each site—one a void excavated into the surface of the earth, the other one of the tallest structures in the United States—is mind-blowing:

Located at 8,000 feet in the Oquirrh Mountains—20 miles southwest of Salt Lake City—the Bingham Canyon copper mine is the largest man-made excavation on the planet. Its hole reaches more than half a mile deep and its rim is nearly three miles in width. It has produced more copper than any mine in history.

[Image: Michael Light, "Garfield Stack, Oquirrh Mountains and Ancient Beach of Great Salt Lake" (2006)].

Meanwhile:

The mine’s Garfield smelter stack, situated at the edge of the Great Salt Lake about 10 miles away, is the tallest free-standing structure west of the Mississippi River, and is only 35 feet shorter than the Empire State Building.

In a nearly 9-page interview with Afterimage, Light comments:

I work with big subjects and grand issues, and I am fascinated about that point where humans begin to become inconsequential and realize their smallness in relation to the vastness that is out there. In my archival work I also enjoy inserting a certain kind of revisionist politics into big iconic subjects that are owned by the world, where I can tell a story through my particular prism, in a way that hopefully offers a fresh perspective.

This is part of his ongoing interest in taking apart "the fundamental building blocks of landscape perception and representation."

The book is available through Radius.

Steven Holl ::: The Hamsun Centre

Dutch Profiles: 2012 Architects

Stanley Part of Coastal Living Idea House

More than 20 pieces of furniture from a variety of Stanley Furniture collections were used to furnish the Idea House.

Stirling Shortlist: Maggie's Centre

Maggie's Centre by architects Rogers, Stirk, Harbour + Partners

Hard Graft

Some overkill: two pieces about T Dan Smith, one (short) for BD, one (long) for 3:AM.

Also: the interviews I refer to are being uploaded onto Side TV, and make very interesting viewing....

on the boards: Akureyri Urban Plan

Located on the northern coast of Iceland, Akureyri is a historic fishing town and the largest outside of Reykjavik with 16,000 inhabitants. Graeme Massie Architects were awarded first place in a 2005 design competition with their plan envisioning the town centre as a vibrant mixed-use area.

Today's archidose #365

Here are a couple recent buildings in London photographed by z.z.


[10 Hills Place by by Amanda Levete Architects, 2009]



[Reiss HQ by Squire and Partners, 2008]

To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just:

:: Join and add photos to the archidose pool, and/or
:: Tag your photos archidose

Suburban Sketch Two

Family history corner. My Dad is from Perivale, a suburban area of West London built around the Western Avenue, one of the arterial roads that burst out of London in the '30s, and the setting for much of J.G Ballard's Crash, as this is what the Westway transforms into before getting to Northolt Aerodrome. Despite having lived in London for over 10 years, I had never been to Perivale, and after long talking about visiting 'the ancestral home', we finally got round to it last weekend. The tube train emerges from the depths at Park Royal, and ploughs through acres of factories and shiny new (or not-so-new - the post industrial is old hat by now after all) business parks, and eventually comes here, next to the untamed parkland of Horsenden Hill, to a Charles Holden-esque station designed by Brian Lewis, opened in 1947. Here you can see Holden's style going austere, with none of the Piccadilly Line's Cathedral-like spaces, but the welcoming curve and expanse of glass still have more than a shadow of that style.

But it becomes obvious very quickly that public transport is not what this place is all about. This is Starvin Marvin's, a (possibly reconstructed, like the one in Canning Town, possibly newly built) 1950s American diner. It's the once-terrifying future as a benign, nostalgic joke, and next to it is a building which shows how English car culture was rather less exciting than the American - a shopping parade built by my great-grandfather. Shabby, mostly derelict shops, brown aggregate, sort-of-vaguely neo-Georgian. He put his family up in the flats above, although my grandmother was the only one who didn't get to own her bit, perhaps because she'd married a manual worker with Commie tendencies.

Dad says that there were a huge amount of deaths on this road when he lived here in the 1960s, people just walking into it, without realising that cars would zoom at them doing 80mph. The motorway bridge takes a strange route - rather than a simple a-to-b it curves around from the shopping parade to the road with the tube station on, feeling out of kilter with the road's relentless straightness.

Family Hatherley lived here on the ground floor, with a Turkish family living upstairs. A sign on the house says '1913'. I assume this place was another result of my great-grandfather's spec building activities, although it's a shame he didn't invest in a half-decent architect. A path from here leads you to a weather-boarded medieval church, and an achingly pretty, verdant pathway which leads to a tennis court and a boarded-up toilet. Apparently, the last time Dad was here, the green below was a park.

Fantasies of Falling Down-style anti-golf revenge come later. There is a Western Avenue in Los Angeles.

In the churchyard this gravestone proves Egon Schiele was influenced by the typography of late 19th century Perivale.

The most famous thing about Perivale is the Hoover Factory, designed by Wallis Gilbert between 1932 and 1938. Due to its 'jazz ornament', it was described by Pevsner as a 'monstrosity'. Monstrosities are usually very interesting. This is the canteen block, designed in 1938 when Wallis had added proper Corbusian Modernism to his Americanist neo-Egyptian cake mix, hence the expansive, sheer glass, grafted into the symmetries. I was hoping it would still be where the cafe is, but no such luck.

Every little detail here was designed and thought about, in a crazed capitalistic evil twin to the more Fabian total design projects of the London Underground (although Wallis designed the more sober Victoria Coach Station for Frank Pick soon after). It's all equally extravagant, from the gateposts to the tiles to the screens to the signs to the fences to the security gates. It tells you that the manufacture of vacuum cleaners is a rather dynastic business, something which involves opulence, slave armies and the mummification of the dead emperors, but without all the sand and putrefaction that tended to go along with ancient Egypt.

The later-to-be Nancy Hatherley worked on the production lines of the Hoover Factory during World War Two, when it was turned over to electrical components for airplanes and tanks. Her sister, my late great-aunt and fervent Conservative Party supporter Ruth Silwood (the annual argument at Christmas was always the highlight as far as I was concerned), was a factory supervisor, and after the war she bought a garage in Southall, then a hotel on the isle of Wight. By hook and crook she managed to get the entire family to move with her to the south coast, where my grandparents, one of whom died around a decade before I was born, lived in a Fareham bungalow. Nancy eventually went to the Isle of Wight too, to a first-floor flat that is still the first place that comes to my mind when I'm in any cafe, restaurant or boutique designed between 1950 and 1980.

The Hoover Factory is now Tesco (of course it is), and as you can see, the new additions are very much in keeping. I go inside, to use the loo and to see if the cafe is also in neo-deco style, but it's a Costa Coffee the same as every other Costa Coffee, with the snow-white concrete and the lurid reds and greens replaced by self-effacing earth tones.

All photos by Frances Hatherley

Promotional

Should you be so inclined, you can listen to me pontificating about nostalgia at Frieze, recorded a couple of weeks ago, minus illustrative material. I end up concentrating on the eugh-austerity-nostalgia side rather than the hmmm-resentment-plus-historical-materialism-plus-nostalgia-may-be-interesting side of a perhaps overcomplicated position - or one which has become so since I was savaged by a dead sheep a little while ago.

Also! There are more Zero Books out or on the way - Dominic Fox's Cold World, which you should know about already, Nina Power's One Dimensional Woman and Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism, both of which are excellent and carrying on in the Qualified Abstract Noun vein, and I suspect there will be more plugging of them nearer their release. There is also The Resistible Demise Of Michael Jackson, which is amongst other things a fantastic collection of writing on pop, and within which I have an expanded version of my post on the King of Pop's Stalinist tendencies. On which subject, watch the video above if you doubt my assertion.

were they ever, your people, leonine?

Anyone who is not doing so should be following Dominic Fox's ongoing attempt to revise Percy Bysshe Shelley's The Mask Of Anarchy.

Suburban Sketch One

(first part of an entirely non-rigorous prospective series in response to a creeping revalourisation of suburbia that I may, or may not, be partly imagining)

Today I went back to Bluewater. I had two appointments at the M25's delightful Darent Valley Hospital, one in the early morning, one late afternoon, and I decided that it might be a more interesting means of spending an extended lunchbreak than sitting in the hospital branch of Upper Crust and reading Eric Hobsbawm. The first time I went there, with I.T, who combined pics with quotes from Ballard's underrated last novel, and from whom I have swiped these images without asking, I was a little underwhelmed - having spent much of my childhood and youth in Malls (like 90% or so of those born since the 1970s) it felt like a familiar but expanded version of something I already knew very well indeed - the only novelty seemed to be the extraordinary setting, a gigantic Firing Squad-friendly bowl carved out of a chalk pit, perfect for dealing with us when we start to get off our fucking knees. This time I explored it in a bit more depth, and its complexities and contradictions became more apparent, without necessarily making it a more pleasant place.

I hadn't realised, given the hospital's hilltop encampment-like position, that I was so close to Bluewater in my twice-a-month-at-least appointments. I was walking distance, in fact, or rather I would be if there were any means of walking there. What infuriates anyone used to enjoying the city through walking its short-cuts, walkways, underpasses, parks and general non-routes is that the place is so obsessively channelled, to an extent that makes most modernist housing projects look like models of extreme libertarianism. As the crow flies, or in a post-apocalyptic, car-free scenario, I could walk about 5 minutes from the outpatients to the back-end of Bluewater, counting in some tricksy negotiation of the chalk cliffs. Pedestrians are necessarily bus-riders, as there is literally NO WAY of just turning up and walking into Bluewater, something which I'm sure Americans are rather used to, but for us is still relatively shocking. Eric Kuhne, the architect whose firm CivicArts designed Bluewater, opines in a rather fascinating interview that Bluewater is a city rather than a retail destination. In terms of its size and population, this is true (plus you could count its appendage, Ebbsfleet new town, which I have yet to visit), so we need to evaluate exactly what sort of a city this is - a city with one ceremonial entrance, which can only be entered in a vehicle, where nothing is produced but where many things are consumed. The only sort of regime that could set up such a controlled, channelled city is a dictatorship or oligarchy. Neatly enough, Kuhne explicitly praises 'benevolent despotism' and critiques the very notion of democratic city planning in the above interview, with admirable frankness. Yet following Patrick Keiller's account of finding 'a small, intense man reading Walter Benjamin' in Brent Cross ('Robinson embraced the man and they talked for hours...yet the number he gave him was that of a telephone box in Cricklewood'), it's clear that Bluewater is one of the many possible termini of the 19th century Arcades that bore through the solidity of the baroque city, their iron and glass construction the 'unconscious' of architecture, an oneiric, ethereal harbinger of the future amidst the ostentatiously solid architecture of imperialism - the place where the 'dreaming collective' spend their time. As the bus winds through a series of roundabouts on its way from the hospital to the mall that is yards away, you see the elevations that are the (basically irrelevant) 'face' of the building - a series of spiked glass domes, over a long, bulbous metal roof, which shimmers in the exurban autumn sunshine.

Inside, the first impression - this is half-term, after all - is of everything happening at once. The city of Bluewater soon reveals itself to be docile, unsurprisingly considering the draconian code of conduct, and there's only the slightest hint of menace - but the entrance is chaos. First you go past the standard-issue Blair-era retail architecture of a Marks and Spencers, and then you hit something odd - four glass prisms, seemingly at random, part of the glazed part of the building that ushers you in. This might just be ineptitude, but presumably the designers know what they're doing here, given the (as we shall see) heavily didactic elements of the interior, but exactly what is unclear. They're 'toys', these, as Charles Jencks used to write about postmodernist architecture's little devices, they're purist solids straight out of L'Espirit Nouveau, they're the building's 'logo' - but if so, a remarkably asymmetrical and unmemorable one. Then, you come up to a series of tall pillars, and two overhead walkways crossing each other, a suspended ceiling imprinted with a seemingly endless leaf motif, with the glare of the glazed entrance intensifying the effect - the shopping mall sublime, exacerbated by the thousands of people browsing/watching/buying/eating/expelling their waste (this is a city where these are the only acts that are permitted to occur), and it's thrilling in its way, although the pale stone-ish substance with which almost everything is clad always softens the effect, stops it from ever becoming really jarring and strange - that way lies the Tricorn and a bankrupt Alec Coleman. Walking around inside, you find a large quantity of public art, and a surprisingly large amount of seating - is this, then, a version of the Urban Task Force, with its mixed use and its encouragement of sociality? Kuhne talks of 'special meeting places' that 'dignify the heroic routine of everyday life that drives you to produce a better world for yourself and your kids'. It could be Richard Rogers, this stuff, except that unlike the Plazas of the Urban Task Forces, people are actually using it, and in droves - apart from one closed noodle bar, you'd have to look damn hard here to find even the slightest hint that we're in the middle of the longest recession in British economic history (though the sorting depot nearby tells a different story). Unnervingly, it supports the idea of the financial crash as a kind of Phony War, which will intensify only later, but will be truly horrendous when it does.

I'm trying to look at Bluewater with equanimity, but I don't like this place. I feel ill at ease here. As with so much else, it's a place in which I would have felt completely at home when I was 12 years old, but education, relocation and (ahem) ambition have led me to the point where I go to a place like this and think (and I'm not proud of this) 'there but for the grace of God go I'. I know full well that poncing around here dressed like Lord Alfred Douglas, with my bourgeoisified vowels and cotton wool stuck over the place where the catheter was 10 minutes ago, I'm committing an offence against the dreaming collective, by attempting to be different from it (or at least outside of the acceptable frame of twentysomething male difference: sporty/straight/indie kid/hipster/emo/chav/hiphop). Yet nobody is bothered. This might be the burbs, but in a place like this in Southampton I'd be getting dirty looks and be at risk of worse. This, presumably, is a result of the city being administered as a police state, and maybe the thugs are all at Lakeside. I think sometimes I might like to be comfortable here, but it's not the same as actually being comfortable. I'll persist with second-hand bookshops and charity shops, although will try not to delude myself they're morally superior. Regardless, everyone else has something better to do, and activity is constant. This is ironic enough, as the interior decorating of Bluewater has some interesting things to say about activity.

For something which is supposedly The Authentic Expression Of Our Real Uncomplicated Desires (as per countless suburbia-loving libertarians since the 50s, most of whom seem to live in the nicer bits of inner cities), Bluewater is extremely didactic in its design. It's trying to make various points to its clientele, something which very few seem to have noticed, whether critics or shoppers. So there are little torn-out-of-context fragments from Vita Sackville-West, Laurie Lee and Robert Bridges, all of them on the glories of the countryside, its products and pleasures - well, there is agriculture nearby, of a heavily mechanised sort, although the M25 is the more obvious land usage. It's there to establish continuity, to convince you that the city of Bluewater is a faintly rustic experience, without relinquishing one iota the imperatives of steel and glass - no urban-regen wood panelling here, no Scando. One of the raised Arcades here is illuminated by the partly glazed ceilings, borrowed from Soane, according to Hugh Pearman, combined with the obligatory reference to long-dead local industry - in this case, the pointy tops of oatings - has a series of inset relief sculptures. These immortalise all the jobs that once existed here, an accounting of the professions of the workshop of the world. Fishermen, Goldsmiths, Tanners, whatever, the list is practically endless, all these people who used to make stuff, while beneath them are those taking time off from intellectual labour in services financial, administrative and such. It's a quasi-religious thing, this - an attempt at appeasing the Gods of industry as they are replaced by the newer Gods of consumption (both equally implacable and brutal deities, which only seem opposed via a complicated geopolitical subterfuge). What makes Bluewater's didacticism interesting is that through its poems, its fibre-glass leaves and its statues of ironmongers, it comes out and proclaims its transcendence of nature and labour, precisely by memorialising it. When just-in-time production and distribution seizes up and we can actually walk to it, we can look at Bluewater's sentimental memorials and try and remember exactly what it was we used to do.

Portland Monthly Magazine: Jessica Helgerson

Portland Monthly Magazine / Home & Garden / Home & Garden Articles / Detail

Chic Revival

Bringing back traditional glamour

By Amara Holstein

The article features Portland interior designer Jessica Helgerson

Posted using ShareThis

on the boards: Great George Street

Alison Brooks Architects have recently revealed images of an urban housing development proposal for Great George Street in Liverpool.