THROUGH THE PEEPHOLE:THE CITY OF LONDON UNBUILT

AA SUMMER SCHOOL 2014UNBUILT LONDON - UNIT 6

UNBUILDING LONDONThe City of London remains after two millennia at the very heart of London, vital to the apparent prosperity of UK. Yet the Potemkinism of gleaming towers, financial power, and control hides a rich, complex, and dense history. A city constructed of ingenuity, skill and determination is fragile and fragmented – a tinder box that is equally susceptible to fire as it is to the volatility of the economic markets. The Square Mile of layered histories and multiple pasts is a site of innovative housing and diverse cultures that masks deep rooted economic and social disparities. This unit aims to interrogate the strange and volatile piece of the urban fabric that sits between the nostalgia of the past and the promise of an improbable future. By unbuilding The City Of London, the unit proposes to materialise, through direct contact and observation, its many hidden layers, and speculate on a more dynamic and visceral model of social construction at the very centre of London.

THE CITY OF LONDON - A MATERIAL HISTORIOGRAPHY AND A MANUAL OF INSTRUCTION

THE IMAGE AND THE MODEL

Étant donnés: 1. La chute d’eau, 2. Le gaz d’éclairage (Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas)

In 1966 Marcel Duchamp shocked the art world by revealing that he had not quit art twenty years earlier as many had suspected. On the contrary, he been secretly constructing a bewildering and complex work: ‘Étant donnés.

Approaching the work, the viewer is confronted by a heavy wooden door with two small holes. By peering through the holes, the viewer sees a woman lying prone in a thicket of twigs, a gas lantern in hand. Off in the distance a waterfall spills into a bucolic landscape; the scene lit with the warm glow of the lamp. Strange, comical and disturbing the image continues to confound and confuse. The work is not a two-dimensional image but rather a large three-dimensional diorama constructed of a dense and elaborate assemblage of materials and artefacts, including layers of brick, steel, glass, plywood, screws, cotton, hair, paint, foam, rubber, cork, paper and putty. Twenty years of cutting, casting, nailing, and gluing, of assembling and deconstructing, of making and remaking are embodied in the physical work and the resultant image.

THE MANUAL

Following Duchamp’s death in 1969, Étant donnés was willed to the Philadelphia Museum of Art and was transported from his tiny studio in New York to the institution for permanent installation. The disassembly of the sculpture necessitated and utilized a “Manual of Instructions” that Duchamp had prepared for the very purpose before his death. An elaborate ring binder of Polaroids, sketches and annotations, the manual describes the sequence of breaking down and subsequently reassembling the work, exposing the hidden details of its construction and organization. Arguably as fascinating as the artwork itself, the manual exposes the strange details, order, logic and sequence of its assembly and gives clues to and questions the construction of the image itself: an apparently complete image composed of disparate, abstract, incomplete parts. The image mirrors the manual: no single technique could construct the image, and in turn no single mode of representation could adequately describe its assembly.

THE CITY OF LONDON - A MATERIAL HISTORIOGRAPHY

In the same manner, our preconceptions of London and its potential can be interrogated, and the details and layers of the city’s composition exposed. By turning Étant donnés on its head, the unit will firstly construct a manual to read and then re-read London. This compendium will become a resource to make and build details – a material reality – that can then be used to form images of an alternative Square Mile.

Looking beyond the image, through a direct investigation of the fabric of London, we will expose and distil the city's many pasts and futures into an alternative manual of instructions as a means to learn from and speculate upon its condition. From this book, details and materials will be abstracted and combined to make a series of physical three dimensional pages. These models will be the foundation and resource to construct and assemble pieces of an alt-modern city, where the pernicious and pervasive notions of past and future will be interrogated to speculate on a more provocative present.

The process aims to make compelling speculations of London, which challenge the notions of old and new, permanent and temporal. The project will consider manuals – in the broadest terms – as the conceptual framework to develop the means and methods for reading, understanding, and representing the spatial and material history of the City of London. The work of the unit intends to go beyond the canonical and develop a multifaceted and engaging approach to representing the City in its most compelling form. Critically, the unit will re-examine and question the relationship between established and emerging processes of analysing, making, and representing space. Subsequently by unbuilding London and rethinking the tools we use, the familiar will become unfamiliar, and opinions and ambitions will emerge.

UNIT AGENDA & SCHEDULE

The unit's approach will mirror that of the context of its investigation where an extensive network of architects, theorists, and former students will present projects, working processes, and critical stances while assisting the unit to assemble a set of skills, techniques, and opinions.

This pedagogical approach will take the form of three overlapping but distinct phases, each involving additional collaborators who will provide additional input, knowledge, and critique. Each phase includes a series of workshops/seminars and objectives, working from the scale of the collective unit to the individual. London itself will be the units primary resource where the level of engagement with the physical and cultural makeup of the city will determine the quality of the group's output.

WEEK 1: MANUAL OF INSTRUCTIONS

To begin to interrogate the City of London, we will take extended walks and tours, trawl archives, critique film and photography, and gather assorted ephemera to compile an extensive body of knowledge that will be recomposed to form a manual that will present an alternative interpretation of London.

As a point of departure, the unit will look at various models and methods of looking at the City with a particular interest in photography and film. Together with architecture's own modes of investigation and representation, these alternative perspectives will provide a cata-lyst to go beyond the conventional and articulate a more critical and engaging approach to understanding the City.

Seminars & Discussions:London: Modes Of InvestigationLondon: Cinema & the CityParadise Lost: Photographing the City

Workshops: Printing & Publishing

Scale: UnitOutput: Manual

WEEK 2: MODEL PAGES

The second objective of the unit will be to turn initial observations and impressions into compelling material artefacts and details. To do this we will utilise the various workshops of the AA to make compelling large scale ‘pages’ – tectonic objects – extracted and manipulated from the manual that give presence and a material reality to the findings of the manual.

Seminars & Discussions:London: Cinema & the CityAssemblage & mixed media portfoliosAA Archives: London Projects

Workshops: Materials, modelling & the city

Scale: Groups of three/fourOutput: Large scale ‘Pages’ comprising material objects and details

WEEK 3: IMAGES

To present both the findings of the unit and the individual members' opinions and architectural ambitions, the manual and material details will be reworked and interrogated to create a model and scene and an image that presents a speculative but critical proposal suggesting an alternative mode of construction in the City of London. The final work of the unit will then be presented and critiqued as part of the larger summer school.

Workshop: Objects to Images

Scale: IndividualOutput: Dioramas/Images

REFERENCE MATERIAL:

The unit will take an interest in film, photography and literature that offer alternative views of the city while precedents set by a variety of artists and architects will provide inspiration and a critical lens. London writers including Patrick Wright and Iain Sinclair, photographers Eugene Atget and Joel Sternfeld, and filmmakers including Patrick Keiller will give a perspective for viewing the city. The work of writers and historians Svetlana Boym and EH Carr will provide the means to question alternative forms of history. While Duchamp provides us with a key precedent, the work of Kurt Schwitters and Cornelia Parker will help examine the process and art of assembly and disassembly.

BIOS:

Scrap Marshall completed his diploma at the Architectural Association in London in 2012 following a career in the music and film industry. Working as a engineer for Abbey Road Recording Studios and the BBC World Service. He was awarded The Sir Henry Holloway Prize twice, The Dennis Sharp Writing Prize, the Ralph Knotts Memorial Prize and was a prizewinner in the 2012 RIBA President’s Medals. He co-founded the Public Occasion Agency in 2010 and ran a research program at UCLA AUD during 2012 and 2013. His work has been presented, published and exhibited in both Europe and the US. He teaches a AA visiting school in Oregon and currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

Dr. Pasquale Iannone is a Film Lecturer, Writer and Broadcaster. He holds a PhD from the University of Edinburgh where he teaches a variety of Film Studies courses. His research interests include Film Aesthetics (especially sound and music), the history and theory of European cinema, landscape and film and adaptation studies. Pasquale is a regular contributor to Sight & Sound and Senses of Cinema as well as various BBC Radio programmes such as Radio 4’s The Film Programme and Radio Scotland’s The Culture Studio. His film curation work includes seasons at BFI Southbank, Glasgow Film Theatre and Edinburgh’s Filmhouse.

Further workshop tutors: forthcoming.