bottom drawer

An amazing London cabbie moment on Saturday evening. I was surprised when he knew exactly where my street is and about the church (St Matthews) that's around the corner. But then he started talking about Arnold Wesker 's plays, and before I knew it, he was onto Ibsen, Chekhov, Voltaire, Pushkin, Solzhenitsyn, Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Hesse, Thomas Mann. He had Lermontov's 'A Hero of Our Time' in the glove compartment. Not only did he reel off the names, he talked about them with absolute understanding and intelligence. I read all these books and then promptly forget most of their contents. But this cab driver should have been lecturing at university. Lermontov being compared with Camus, the virtues of Gogol and Gorky's relationship with Stalin. We asked him when he did all this reading. Well, he answered, I like to read in the morning with a cup of tea and a slice of toast. Often I have another slice of toast and I read for an hour and a half. And I always have ...

We're swamped with work here at General Public Agency . We need new full-time and part-time/freelance people to work with us and we are also looking for interns, who we may be able to support financially a little bit. We don't have much money but we do have a fantastically varied, interesting and ambitious range of work on and offer an environment that's unique for anyone interested in being involved with cutting-edge projects in the built environment, artistic practice, urban development and issues of social and environmental citizenship. General person spec: Energetic, confident, self-motivated and able to work independently with a minimum of supervision. Able to quickly grasp complex briefs and issues, and produce work very fast. Imagination, lateral thinking and ambition are also required. We need: Freelance researchers with a background and interest in any of the following: regeneration and urbanism policy, land use, planning, public art, artist projects, new fields of...

It amazes me that, several years on from the emergence of Google as the pre-eminent way of finding out any information, some people still have no idea how to use the results it throws up. Every week at the office, we get one or two phone calls asking us if we are the Thurrock Urban Development Corporation. This is because if you google 'Thurrock Development Corporation' our project is the first item that comes up. Go to the site and find the 'contact' section and you get us. But how is it not possible for these people to realise that our project has quite clearly nothing to do with the workings of the actual UDC , who were neither our client nor have ever endorsed or funded our work (much to our frustration and that of our 'real' clients). It is the sad fact that no government quango would ever have such a beautiful, clear, informative and creative website as that of our project - but you would expect that even if the viewer did not think of this, every literat...

Its hit really cold here, suddenly. Beautiful and crisp, with the slanting sun seemingly permanently shining into your eyes, but so freezing that this weekend, wandering around the city with a visiting friend from abroad, we had to stop every hour for a pint or a cup of tea. Apologies for not yet blogging about the London Met conference that was last week - very interesting, but I need to set aside an hour to write it up - and everything else. Having visitors tends to do that to one, it being generally more interesting to talk to someone who you never normally see than to sit in front of a computer for a couple of hours. In the mean time, here was our weekend: Wonderful exhibition installation by Francis Alys in Portman Square (if you missed it, tough...it ended yesterday) including the now-famous video of a fox running wild in the National Portrait Gallery, and the amazing piece 'Guards', where 64 Coldstream Guards march around the City of London in a strange and suspenseful ...

Not enough time to blog about the stuff that I've been up to. But here are some things I've been reading that maybe y'all might enjoy in the mean time. I love this tale of a floating island in, of all places, Massachusetts. Mysterious, provoking rather wonderful dreams of a world of more such eccentric yet possible things. Vito Acconci and Robert Smithson , you have nothing against the strage fantasies of nature. This American island seems to be somewhere between a whale-island with a mind of its own and the mysterious shifting swamps of the Louisiana bayou. This project - Herve Biele's innovative re-use of old Communist pre-fab concrete panels - is all over the archi-blogs today after being featured in the Guardian. Did no-one clock it in the Biennale last year or this year at the V&A ? This article about the response of ordinary Pakistanis to the earthquake reminds me a lot of the response of Americans to Katrina - everyone driving down south to try and hel...

In response to Robie's comment to my post yesterday , its all very well to talk about the radical-ness of a means of representation in theory but it is a lot more tricky when dealing with a real client (in this case a local council) with a very low level of visual literacy (or should that be, a level of literacy that most non-architects have?) We are producing documents that are being asked to do the impossible: be all things to all people, not to produce architectural representation for architects to fawn over. Archigram's images were certainly representing their ideas extremely well, but they were also doing the design, whereas we are in the position of trying to produce design guidance to forestall the worst tendencies of commercial development, and prod them into having to be more creative and characterful. We are not advocating a single aesthetic. We are also working in a time-frame that makes a more interesting process of experimentation about how exactly we do represent ...

"I seem to be a dangerous commodity in certain circles and receiving such awards is a relatively novel experience for me," said Prince Charles when he received a Scully Award (previous winners: Jane Jacobs and the Aga Khan) the other day. I also have found myself defending our prince rather a lot over the last few days, much to my surprise. I guess I feel rather sorry for him. Bless him for trying to raise a debate and he's not all nonsense and Poundbury horror - his heart is definitely in the right place. It must be so tough being surrounded by sycophants all the time. I just wish the damn New Urbanists hadn't got their teeth into him - now there's not the slightest chance of weaning him back from the dark side, alas. [Speaking of which I found this scary thread on Cyburbia. How can people express such admiration without irony?] More strange things: A Christian evangelist theme park is going to be built in Israel. What strange post-post-modernism is this? It...

We're working on rather a lot of 'design guidance' at the moment in the office. Documents that will be given to evil (and not-so-evil) developers and their architects to encourage and inspire them to produce pieces of urbanism that work in their context and that meet the desires and needs of the client and the community. It's the kind of thing that is crucially important to get right but really easy to get wrong, even when you are intelligent, radical and progressive like us(!) We're not talking watercolours of neo-Georgian crap here - we're talking contemporary design that is nevertheless sensitive and thoughtful without losing its character and becoming another bland glass-and-render-with-a-bit-of wood apartment block. One knows good design when one sees it, but how the hell does one represent such a thing on paper? I've had this struggle so many times. Precedent images - well, fine, but you don't always really know what you're looking at, its diff...

Housepainting (walls) Lunch Football (live) Dinner (in, with friends) Bed Housepainting (floor) Lunch Football (TV) Dinner (out, without friends) Bed

After Friday afternoon filing and emails, finally I have half an hour to write, more fully, about my time in India last week. General impressions: I expected India to be huge, chaotic and poor, but it was vastly more of all of these than I had imagined. I couldn't really believe how the country manages to function as one of the world's largest economies. Somehow, perhaps, all the news that features here about the IT industry, call-centres, Bollywood stars and new luxury resorts on the beach had made me imagine that there was beginning to be a semblance of order and organisation about the country, and a growing middle-class. I'm sure these things are happening, but the appearance of everything we saw, from the headquarters of a major fabric mill making all Levi's jeans, through to the Delhi Secretariat, was exactly as you might imagine from the mid 1960s - terribly shabby offices, erratic electricity, extraordinary flunkeys, whirring overhead fans and broken lifts being ...

Last night we went to see the latest Michael Clark show at the Barbican. The first half was classic Clark punk-rock, booming Iggy Pop and graphic black-and-white costumes. Clark himself danced a few short sections, as always absolutely mesmerising in the way he moves - controlled yet loose and lithe. As so many times with his (and some others') pieces to music like this, I always wonder whether I really want to be in a theatre to watch them. I'd rather be in the 333 perhaps, beer in hand and grimy black wall behind me, hearing Iggy blast out of the sound system over the noise of the crowd and watching the precisely controlled, haughty yet intimate movements like a vision of perfection above the Hoxton hipsters. The second half, the much-discussed new version of Stravinsky's Apollo, was extraordinary. Thrilling, spine-tinglingly wonderful. It had a lightness of touch and an absolute boldness in being so simple and so direct in its classicism - unafraid to be pure and uncom...

Another announcement: this fantastic conference being held by the architecture dept at London Metropolitan University in a couple of weeks. It's featuring a whole host of great speakers from international universities that are running live projects through outreach programmes ('projects offices') - whether design-build architecture, community/urban planning, humanitarian design in developing nations, and so on. Speakers include people from the Rural Studio, the Technical University of Berlin, Hong Kong, Russia, Parsons and the Pratt Institute in New York, and so on. If you are either a student wanting to know more about how they might be able to get involved with live projects through their studies, or an educator wanting to know how to set up a projects office in their institution, or a community group/local government group wanting to know how to collaborate with universities to help with their planning or design issues, the conference should be fantastic! It's over ...

I'd just like to draw your attention to the Sheila McKechnie Foundation's recently announced call for applications for their fantastic new awards scheme. For those of you who might not know, the SMF was set up to help the next generation of campaigners get their voices heard and create real change. It's based on a belief in the importance of active campaigners like McKechnie to our society, to fight against injustice and for progressive thinking, action and tangible change. The award winners will get an amazing package of support including the opportunity for one-on-one mentoring, the shadowing of people in positions of influence and networking. The charity's patron is Gordon Brown and there are several equally high-profile people involved so the winners will really be able to access an amazing network of political power and lobbying opportunities. So get the word out and apply!

Last night I had the inestimable honour of sitting in the front row of the directors' box at Highbury watching the mighty Arsenal thoroughly trounce Sparta Prague. Despite my jetlag and a rather late bout of Delhi belly meaning that my consumption of the buffet dinner and drinks in the boardroom was rather limited, it was a rather ridiculously exciting experience. One enters the stadium through the crowd control barriers at the point marked 'VIPs only'! Walking in the marble halls and up the stairs to the oak-panelled boardroom, past amazing pieces of memorabilia, including an extraordinary photograph of the first flood-lit match at the ground in 1951, when of course the whole ground was still terraces (holding at least twice as many spectators as now) and the lights reveal this mass of North London humanity in moody, misty black and white, like some kind of political rally. Then up, past rather classically obsequious cockney stewards (alright, guv!) in their old-school un...