Sometimes buildings contain a surplus, rather than a deficit, of ideas. The design crime against concept clarity is over-production.                        

London Mayor Boris Johnson has stated that his proposal for an island airport in the Thames estuary is not dead, despite the Airports Commission rejecting the idea. WHAT_architecture starts to imagine the possibility of stacked runways… TBC (In the meantime here’s Racing Beats)

WHAT_architecture believes, thanks to the practice-based research being undertaken with the RMiT, it has developed a management model that operates less like an architectural practice and more like a football club. It’s one of player rotation, controlled injury-free deadlines and performance based metrics where the goal comes not from client patrimony but self-build projects. This requires a lot of movement: practice makes perfect! This week included one Transfer Deadline Day: 1st September. This is a football term representing a “transfer window, the period during the year in which a football club can transfer players from other countries into their playing staff'”according to Wiki. In 2014, the biggest news of TDD / the transfer window was the transfer of Radamel Falcao from Monaco to Manchester United. For £6m. Now £6m is a lot of money. In architecture, £6m will buy you the built 127sho_Shoreditch Station which would consist of 7 flats and 4 commercial spaces in the heart of Shoreditch. With Ace finishing, this represents a fantastic project. In footballing terms, £6m will buy you a 2-bedroom-East-London-flat type-of-player: sexy, promising but a long way from the end game. Manchester also paid in the transfer window £60M for Angel Di Maria. Okay so Falcao was a Loan (from Monaco) and Di Maria was a Purchase (from Madrid). Nonetheless the purchase needs to out-perform the loan 10x to qualify the expenditure. In architecture if the annual rent paid for anything (a flat, an office, a car? Well let’s see) was just 1/6 of the purchase we would never rent, but always seek to buy. This undoubtedly priorities lending. In football, a loan player apparently has less value (culturally, commercially) than a bought player>>> Unedited / memo TBC…. 8:{])

Nick Delaney, photographer: cut, copy, paste, rotate, scale…

     

German mid-field dominance continues with the conversion of FC Union Berlin’s stadium into a gigantic living room.

Chiba, a Japanese Akita rescue dog and a roving ‘barkitect’ sniffs out spaces of interest in Shoreditch… \,,,,> Another dog in Shoreditch!? For three years, George has sat every day with John Dolan on Shoreditch High Street. Sitting on the street every day and watching the world go by, George and John became part of the community, barking to passers by about his life, his experiences, his drawings. For George sat for John who began to draw the buildings on the street, elevating the old, decrepit buildings that are so often ignored and under appreciated…”    

Chiba, a Japanese Akita rescue dog and a roving ‘barkitect’ sniffs out spaces of interest… \,,,,> What are the dogs of Shoreditch? “The Gentle Author”, aka Dan Cruickshank, consulted his copy of Thomas Bewick’s General History of Quadrupeds 1824 to see what breeds were familiar two hundred years ago and discovered the major difference is that many breeds which were working dogs then are domestic dogs today.” So a husky in Hackney indeed has history (which partially explains the appearance of one on Shoreditch Station). Local resident and art critic John Berger (who’s seminal text ‘Ways of Seeing‘ and subsequent serialisation on  TV became one of the most influential art programmes) recently collaborated on ‘TAŞKAFA – Stories of the Street’, a film about urbanism and belonging and observed relations between street dogs and humans.    

Chiba, a Japanese Akita rescue dog and a roving ‘barkitect’ sniffs out spaces of interest… \,,,,> I walk with my nose close to the pavement. I was surprised to smell a live hen coming from a shop. Except this shop is a gallery with a show called Chicken Museum. Imagery from the web typical of that which saturates our everyday lives is placed next to real live chickens in a bizarre artistic ‘pen’ which is at once a ‘museum’ and a living environment. Offsetting this artistic juxtaposition of art and animal is the garish trash aesthetic of everyday fast food consumption.