A really good lecture tonight from Koning and Eizenberg who are here for a visit and to give us all a kick up the ass with our projects. Great stuff, great bolshy attitude, I like. Made me excited about architecture again.
A couple of mini rants
This campaign to stop architects working on prison designs (via Design Observer ) seems rather inconsistent to me. OK, so prison might not work very well and for sure there are too many people locked up. But I would bet a lot of money that the kind of architects that would sign up to this boycott have never been asked to design a prison in their lives, and I am sure there will be no shortage of people willing to sign off drawings for new prisons, given that I can't see clients starting to boycott architects who design prisons. Hell, there are probably architects who only design prisons. Surely we should be actually looking for better prison designs. Will Alsop has, I have seen, being working on precisely that, with prisoners themselves. Isn't this a more intelligent and clever way to turn the prison paradigm around into something positive, using the power of good design to make an environment that allows prisoners to see some hope, experience some creativity and be stimulated ...
Comments
I'll tell you about the film when I understand more about it.It's vaguely kabbalistic,therefore shrouded in mystery.I don't even know if I'm getting paid,it's so mystical-or is that normal?Anyway,it involves me opening the kiln at around 900 degrees [do computers have a degree sign somewhere?],which might cause my kiln to collapse-just as well I'm planning a new one.Enough for now-off to the match!