A weekend with Newton in Lincolnshire

We've been spending most of our weekends outside of London in the last few months, which has been rather lovely, particularly since many of these weekends have involved trips to various parts of England which I've never visited before. While I do love travelling to strange and distant lands, there's something very pleasant about hopping on the train on Friday evening and arriving somewhere a few hours later - and with such little fuss! - only to wake the next morning surrounded by great natural beauty. It's all too easy to forget, especially living in London, that England is full of so many beautiful and fascinating places.

This past weekend we headed up to Lincolnshire to investigate Compass, new contemporary art commissions at Woolsthorpe Manor, Grimsthorpe Castle and Ayscoughfee Hall produced by arts-organisation Beacon. Beacon had organised a bus to take us, and a large group of other art enthusiasts, from Lincoln around to each of the various sites and works. We had a grand old time and covered a lot of Lincolnshire ground to boot. We spent a wonderful evening with the directors of Beacon - John and Nicola - who left London 13 years ago to buy up and convert an old Methodist church in a little village outside of Lincoln and some of their friends, who also left London (some five years ago) to buy up and convert an old Methodist church in a different little village outside of Lincoln. Apparently there are a lot of unloved Methodist churches to be had in Lincolnshire.

Even though I'd seen pictures of Newton's house many times before, I somehow didn't quite make the connection in my head between hearing the name Woolsthorpe Manor and Newton's home until we were walking into the grounds of the house. It seems silly to be so excited simply by virtue of being in the same house where Newton was born and then came back to work during the plague years of 1666-7, but the history of a place like that makes me feel absolutely electric. We even ate an apple off a tree in the garden, though why they have one particular apple tree fenced off, as if it were irrefutably the apple tree from which Newton's apple of gravity fell, I have no idea. History as tourist attraction. 

We went also to visit the John Vanbrugh-designed Grimsthorpe Castle, (Vanbrugh was commissioned in 1715, though there has been a house on the site since 1516) though we we unable to go inside, the exterior of the house and its gardens were lovely enough to keep our eyes entertained for the 30 minutes or so we were there. Finally, our tour took us to Spalding and the utterly bizarre Ayscoughfee Hall. The original building dates to 1451 and, in terms of the building's central structure, remains much unchanged. In terms of decoration, the building has changed superficially as much as one might expect in a building more than 560 years old. There's a Gothic-looking Victorian front facade and, excepting the dark, Victorian library, most of the interior rooms resemble a series of enormous Georgain fondant fancies. Heritage Lottery funded a three-year "sympathetic restoration" project which completed in 2006, but I haven't been able to find out much about what the building looked like pre-restoration on the internet. A conservator's report, which indicates that the restoration was carried out under the aim of bringing the building back to how it might have looked when the Johnson family lived in it at the end of the seventeenth century, reminded me of Robert Pollidori's photographs of Versailles. History by its nature is not fixed, but restoration demands history stand still at a precise point of reference - it's like putting a blue plaque on a building and denying the memory of all others who lived there. How would one go about restoring a house or a building so that each of it's previous histories, previous lives, live together in harmony? I have not the slightest idea how one would begin or even what the end result might look like, but I do know that it wouldn't look like Ayscoughfee Hall.

Introducing: Wignall and Moore

Like so many good things, I found out about Bradley Moore and James Wignall through Twitter.  Someone tweeted me a link to their King and Minotaur project - an art and architecture installation in a vacant space behind St Pancras Station - and I thought, ah ha, here are kindred spirits.  Along I went to the opening where I was impressed by the project, of course, but also by the convivial and relaxed atmosphere - no Vyner Street art hipsters questing endlessly for free beers, but an enthusiastic and inquisitive bunch who actually looked at the works and seemed happy to be there. Sure, there was Sipsmith gin a plenty but I assure you I was in no way biased by the spirits.

I'd never heard of Wignall and Moore before, but I was intrigued by their installation and I wanted to know more about their work. I got in touch and they very kindly agreed to meet up. We chatted about the King and Minotaur project and the experiences they've had entering (and winning!) competitions, as well as their plans for future projects. And if anyone reading has a spare £3,000, I know an excellent way you might spend it.

We meet up. I've got an old school dictaphone. We talk. A lot. The two are easy conversationalists and by the time we've finished talking - some two hours later - I feel as if I've known them for ages. Maybe it's because we're near in age or because we seem to have a similar ethos, but it later transpires that their friendliness can be entirely accounted for by the fact that they're from Yorkshire. When I ask them how it is working together, the ensuing conversation goes a little something like this:

Bradley: We've got quite different skill sets, but also being from Yorkshire we understand what each other are saying. Like we can just get agitated about something and go like this *crazy hand waving* and the other one understands.

James: It's a Yorkshire thing, primarily.

Bradley: The Yorkshire connection helps.

Despite the "Yorkshire connection", the two met at Nottingham where they both did architecture before Bradley moved on to engineering and James to the RCA for his Part 2.  After the engineering degree, Bradley then "went and built things for a year."  When I ask him what that means, he replies as if it's the most natural thing for a recent grad to do, "I built a house just to see how to do it. It's fun". A friend bought a building site in Brixton and the two designed and built a house there which they lived in briefly before selling.  I'm impressed and say so - most architecture students never get anywhere near a building site, let alone build a house from the ground up. James chips in, "it's a really rare thing to do that for anyone who's trained as an architect. Part of the problem with architecture is that you never get to build anything. People don't even know how to put up shelves if they go to architecture school." 

After experiments with house building, the two came back together to work on a commission for the Royal Albert Hall as part of its Close Encounters Festival last summer. At the project's outset a group of RCA students worked to design an installation, but other commitments meant that by the end of the project only Bradley and James remained.  In a frustrating experience all too regular to most artists and architects, the installation was commissioned but never paid for. The two worked for two months developing the installation, a sculpture created from Ferrofluid - a liquid that has properties of a metal. "It's attracted and repelled by magnetic fields," James explains, "so you can have a pool of this stuff that looks like oil and you put a magnet near it and it move, making these incredible and weird kinetic sculptures." Ever the salesman, Bradley cuts in, "the project was so resolved. I mean we had a cutting list. If we got the budget now, it's all ready to go. So if you know anyone that wants a moving spaceship..."


Room for London competition entry


So they lost out on the RAH commission and spent two months working for free on a project that never came to fruition, but they realised that they enjoyed working together and Wignall and Moore was born.  Both are occupied two days a week with other work: James teaches at Nottingham and Bradley does set design and prop making (he's recently had his first BBC credit with a documentary about particle physics, "Everything and Nothing"). But they did what most young architecture studios do and started entering competitions. They had me in stitches recounting the tales of their unintentional ambition: the first competition they entered was an ideas competition to entirely rethink the Brussels Courthouse. They didn't win, but they took their first site visit as a studio to Brussels and got a taste for the strange and peculiar world of architecture competitions. They also entered the Room for London competition, submitting designs for a four-poster bed in a room that unfolds like an over sized flower. When I ask whether entering these competitions has been worth their while, they emphatically reply yes, absolutely, for it turns out they won one of the three comps they entered - not bad odds - and are currently designing a series of projects to be built by kids at uber summer camp Beam in New Hampshire. 

Inside the King and Minotaur

photo by James Read

photo by Jamie Leme

As for the King and Minotaur project, that emerged from a desire to get back to actually making things instead of drawing up ideas for comps.  They were both very interested in the idea of reusing a vacant space and got lucky when it transpired that their studio landlord had an empty property next door. The two spent a month thinking and planning and then six weeks designing and making before opening to the public. The resulting project is an art gallery where the gallery is as interesting as the art, "in a gallery it's very much all you're looking at is what's in it, and we wanted to do something very different so you're almost as interested in the wall as what's hung on it?", Bradley explains.  Most of the artists - and there are fine artists as well as musicians, dancers, actors, even Oxford fencers - have come from RCA connections or through the London Contemporary Dance School. But James also spoke of something that resonated with me in that they both have active interests in life outside of architecture.  James told of trips to the Edinburgh Festival where he made contact with performers he thought were interesting, some of these people made it into the King and Minotaur roster.  They also put out an open call for artists and performers through the Uni networks. "The nice thing about architecture," James again, "is that you can't do it by yourself." Bradley agrees, "this project has been so nice because we've met so many interesting people. Everyone's been really enthusiastic and everyone we speak to about the project really wants to be involved."


Inverted Urbanism, James' RCA final project, which won a commendation in the RIBA silver medal awards.

And so what's next for these two? They've still got the summer school project to finish off and both plan to keep to their day jobs. They'd like to do another vacant space project and also have their eyes on the Forgotten Spaces competition. They've also got plans for a fantastic Olympic project, but it's all top secret and I'm not allowed to divulge any details. So keep an eye out for these two bright sparks: great things are just around the corner.

Down the Rabbit Hole

One of my favourite things that I do at the Architects' Journal is manage and edit the Small Projects Awards and issues. Typically, in our mag, we push plush new office buildings or grand University schemes. If we do feature new houses or smaller projects, they tend to be by big-name architects on equally lavish budgets.

But the Small Projects Awards is a chance for smaller practices to show off what they can do on more modest budgets (£250k or less). Sure, we get sent hundreds of house extensions, but for every twenty bread and butter backyard extensions, we receive one incredible tree house or a stunning self-build hideaway in the hills. 

Given that we get sent upwards of 200 entries for a shortlist of only 24 projects, there's always one or two projects I've got a soft spot for that don't make the cut. One of my favourite projects this year that just didn't make it was Neil Boyd's 'Down the Rabbit Hole'. 

Neil submitted this project as part of his final masters exhibition at Strathclyde University and I wanted to give it some love because - contrary to most of the client-driven projects we received - Neil's was one of the few projects where an individual saw an opportunity to create a little something and then just got on with making it. The rabbit hole took two weeks to build using reclaimed OSB and timber left over from the end of year diploma exhibition. As expected, health and safety issues soon got in the way of fun and the structure had to be removed after only one month.

I love that it's imaginative and a little bit silly - a project that transformed an ugly corridor into a mysterious and whimsical escape from the Uni's architecture department. His visuals perfectly reflect the project: they're deceptively simple, captivating and just a little bit magical.

Derrida, deconstruction, and discontent

Sometimes literary theory just really pisses me off. I love pure philosophy and cultural theory is often intriguing, but the thought of applying Marxism or feminism or some other "ism" to historical events or literary texts (as so often the fashion in academic circles these days) makes me want to slit my wrists. Sure, I can see why it might be interesting to look at the Oedipus myth in conjunction with Freud's oeuvre, but a Freudian reading of Aeschylus (to take but one example) completely baffles.

I've been trying to read Derrida's Limited Inc, but it's slow going. Partly because I feel I need a few uninterrupted hours to blitz through the essays in one go, but also because I feel my brain boiling over with, not quite rage, but certainly annoyance.  Admittedly, it's not entirely Jacky D's fault for I find Speech Act Theory on the whole completely ludicrous. How much more ridiculous, then, am I bound to find a deconstructive (destructive?) reaction to an underwhelming theory.  Having said that, I feel I ought to finish reading the thing and do quite a lot of thinking before I go mad-dog rabid. After these messages...

A far more instructive and stimulating experience was to be found at last night's Rip it Up lecture, part of a series at London Met organised by my old boss and now Evening Standard architecture critic, Kieran Long.  Paul Domela, the programme director of the Liverpool Biennial, gave the lecture, which focused on the role of public art in urban regeneration and community development in Liverpool and beyond.  I've never actually been to Liverpool so I found the talk interesting, not only for what Paul had to say about public art, but also for what he had to say about the nature and history of the city itself.

It's difficult to get a good grasp of the situation simply from one brief lecture but I was completely taken aback by photographs of residential streets with every single house boarded up, and big department stores in the city centre left empty and abandoned.  Paul talked us through a variety of projects - from the Carins Street market started by local residents to Ron Haselden's wonderful work creating neon lights out of local schoolchildren's drawings - all of which are grounded in ideas of community engagement and the beautification of depressed and dilapidated areas.

As an artist, a curator, and a critic, I find these projects inspiring and exciting but in the Q and A, Professor Robert Mull, head of the faculty of Architecture at London Met, asked a provocative question that really got me thinking.  His question to Paul was that, given the history of civil disturbance in the city (particularly the Toxteth riots), wasn't it possible to offer a reading of these pleasant, feel-good community arts projects as a kind of social and cultural lobotomy: art in place of political action.  I don't entirely agree with his assessment, given that the nature, even definition, of community is so ephemeral and changeable.  I'm also rather committed to the idea of art as a force for good, for positive social change.  But I'd never really thought about art as a substitute for active political action, as if projects that bettered urban areas were a kind of passive non-interaction when contrasted with more direct and active participation of strikes, riots, or protests.  Typically, when I'm inclined to make such juxtapositions it's in a Chomsky-esque fashion: sport or television as a substitute for direct political engagement.  But I suppose that's what makes a great talk so important - it forces you to check your prejudices and assumptions, to reassess previously held beliefs. 

If you have any interest in architecture or urbanism or just in thinking a little bit differently about the cities we live in, do make an effort to attend. Next week's lecture is about Belfast and promises to be just as engrossing, engaging, and essential.

The series continues until 13 January, every Thursday at 6.30pm.

London Metropolitan University School of Architecture and Spatial Design

Spring House

40-44 Holloway Road

London N7 8JL

visual inspiration: griffith observatory

photos by: Floyd B. Bariscale, seany, Goodnight London, and prayitno

While Los Angeles certainly doesn’t hit my city sweet spot, it does have its own peculiar charm.  It’s one of the most superficial cities I’ve ever lived in, yet it has a colourful and interesting history of cultural philanthropy.  LA’s museums might not be as plentiful or as show stopping as her New York City counterparts, and yet, for all the sky-scraping towers in Manhattan, there’s no place quite so wonderful for star gazing as LA’s Griffith Observatory.

As a child, I found everything about the Observatory completely spellbinding: the long, winding drive up the hill; the art-deco curve of the central rotunda; the Foucault’s pendulum swinging underneath; Hugo Ballin’s wall murals depicting the history of astronomy; and especially, the view over the city at night. 

But I think the thing that captivated me then, as now, was the set apartness of the place; the feeling that when you finally arrived at the top of the hill you weren't in LA anymore.  That once you passed through the Observatory's doors you weren't just entering a building, but another world.  As a child, you never felt that this alchemy resulted from the technical capabilities of the telescopes or the transporting trickery of the planetarium, but that the place itself was somehow closer to the Milky Way. Who cared about the celebrities on Sunset Boulevard when the glitter at Griffith was so much more spectacular.  And despite the fact that I’ve visited rather a lot of beautiful buildings since my first trip, this sense of mystery and otherness has remained. I find the Observatory just as beautiful now as I did then.

the filling station

Been wanting to flag this up for a while. Can't believe it was a month ago! Tempus fugit and all that...

Along with my amiga, Nicola Read of 815 Agency, we put on a smashing party (if I do say so myself) to close out this year's London Festival of Architecture.  I'd had my eye on the vacant petrol station for well over a year - I live around the corner and pass by nearly once a day - and it took the better part of a few months of solidly pestering the developers before they agreed to let us use the site.

Once we had the site, we had to figure what to do with it.  After doing some research into the history of Clerkenwell, we settled on the idea of a large feast with food sourced from local restaurants.  After that, it was just a matter of getting everyone on board - thankfully Clerkenwell's restaurants are awesome and everyone was happy to chip in. A huge, huge thanks to Caravan, The Modern Pantry, St John, Hix Oyster and Chop House, Bea's of Bloomsbury, The Ginger Pig, Bompas and Parr, and Chapel Down Wines for their generosity and assistance with the event. Also, an enormous thank you to all of our friends who chipped in (or were dragged, rather) and helped out. Seriously, we couldn't have done it without you.

I'm really pleased with how the whole event turned out, but especially with the table we built - a 10-metre long monster, constructed from 300+ polystyrene boxes (generously sponsored by the British Plastics Federation) - 'twas a thing of beauty.

Though I didn't see it for myself, as I was running around like a frazzled bride on her wedding day, a friend later told me that people were stopping their cars on Clerkenwell Road to take pictures.  I don't know about you, but for me, that constitutes a result indeed.

We're already plotting our next event, to be bigger and better, of course.  It's all going to kick off in January 2011. Stay tuned, kids.

Full set of images here.