Introducing The Building Code of Australia. Vol 2. Part 3.8.1 Wet Areas.

Or as we like to call her: Miss March.

She’s statutory.

Measuring up is one of my least favourite tasks in the whole architecturething. It is not something that I have to get up to too often these days but when I was working at a smaller firm where alts & adds made up a great deal of our workload, we seemed to do a lot of measuring up.

Several elements are conspiring against my enjoyement of measuring the distance, in a straight line, between two walls. First amongst these is time. It takes a long time to measure up a house as houses are big. Not as big as planets, granted, but big enough. Secondly, I hate measuring sill heights. And the list continues in this fashion: I NEVER know whether or not to measure the clear opening of a door, the outside of the skirting or the mysterious and hidden structural opening. I feel uncomfortable rooting around in other people’s bedrooms, reaching over their beds to measure whatever it is that needs to be measured. It makes me uncomfortable to be followed around the house by the client having to pretend to know what that crack in the paint means.

Having finished measuring up things only get worse. Drawing it all up is an excruciating process. There is always a crucial measurement missed and rooms gain a plastic quality as they grow and shrink under the forces inherent in inconsistent dimensions.

The only bit that I do find some pleasure in is measuring ceiling heights. It is quite enjoyable to send the tape-measure to the unfathomable height of say 2.7 or even 3 metres, holding the end of the tape against the base of the wall with your foot and snaking the rest of the tape up against a wall so that it doesn’t collapse under its own weight. Squinting to see the little inscribed lines that will reveal the distance between decades old carpet and peeling ceiling. Riveting, heart in mouth stuff.

This is an age of digitisation and ease and I have often thought/complained that measuring up is a useless hangover from analogue times. A laser-pointer-measuring-device is a step in the right direction but it still requires the whole tiresome note taking and redrawing process. What I have been arguing for, and Jeremy will back me up on this, is what I term a 3D Digitising Bomb. It would be a ball-like object, roughly the size of a cricket ball or fritelle, that you would place in the centre of the room. It would have several glowing buttons, the green one of which you would push to set off the timer. Upon pressing the green button you must get the fuck out of the room because thirty seconds later the ‘bomb’ will go off and capture 3D data of the room, saving it in the file format of your choice, ready to plonked straight into your CAD program.

In the future future the bomb would transmit the data straight back to your computer via a wireless connection and the 3D model would be waiting for you upon your return to the atelier. But that is the future so don’t get too excited.

It turns out though that someone has been listening and that help is on its way. The Instant Scene Modeller produced by MD robotics does pretty much what I described above. It has been developed for use in crime scenes to accurately model a room without the need to touch or disturb any potential evidence. Handy when dealing with forensic data, essential when measuring up somebody else’s bathroom.

Its controller is not as awesome as my rolling ball with glowing buttons however it does have the advantage of being real and not the idle fantasy of a bored architect…

Shortly after being awarded the Pritzker Prize for 2005, Thom Mayne director of LA firm Morphosis, exploded into a great many pieces sources report. Mayne had been awarded architecture’s most prized accolade for a lifetime’s work when he spontaneously fractured into a series of tectonic elements. Reminsiscent of Morphosis’ earlier work on restaurant fitouts and pedestrian bridges he is now comprised of blade elements, a steel truss and circular arcs of a large diameter.

Speculation has centred on why Mayne broke into this dated formal language rather than the more organic computer driven work the firm concentrates on today. Perhaps it was a message to Michael Rotondi; co-founder of Morphosis, who left the band partnership in the nineties to go his own way. Pehaps it is a cry for help.

Rotondi was quoted as saying that he had no issues with copyright and/or moral rights over Mayne assuming a formal language that he had helped create in the late eighties early nineties West Coast scene. “Thom and I go way back and I see it as a kind of nostalgia for our carefree youth that he has heamorraged into this form” said, finishing up by stating “I wish him the best of luck in his deconstructed state” before walking off into the sunset.

Immediately after the ceremonies had concluded, Mayne was rushed to hospital for testing and diagramming. It is unclear if he will revert to his primitive state, but regardless, authorities have confirmed Mayne is settling into his new form well. With complete control over his index finger and thumb, operating a mouse is reportedly possible although using the scroll wheel function still provides difficulties.

“It is difficult to zoom in and out, but I guess I’ll get the hang of it.” an excited Mayne, 61, told reporters finding it difficult to operate his newly elongated and distorted vocal chords.

It is unclear what actually caused the sudden and inexplicable fracturing and dislocation. Cynics and scientists handy onsite are thought to believe that the biometric transfiguration may have been in response to the choice of venue which many have felt was a slap in the face. After recent pritzker prize ceremonies including Glenn Murcut’s at Michelangelo’s Campidoglio in Rome and Zaha’s at the Hermitage in St Petersburg, the Pritzker Bandstand at Millenium Park, Chicago must surely have come as a shock to the system. “What is this anyway? A winery? A Ferry Terminal? A Museum of Tolerance?” a group of passersby were overheard saying. Whether or not such a shock could render arm as beam, nose as exploded billboard is yet to be confirmed.

We will keep you posted. Or not.

I know that there are 27 years separating these two works and the comparison may be unfair, but is this:

truly the natural progression from this?

I have enormous respect for Libeskind and his early work, however it is a crying shame to see him on US TV with his Stars and Stripes pin and when his diagrams become the ‘house style’ and get plastered across the facade of an apartment building purely for branding purposes, I get just a little cynical.

So yeah, went to the Chipperfield talk the other night. He pretty much ran through half the El Croquis that has just been published and called it a night. Every project was prefaced with a description of how truly awful, how exceptionally ugly the site was. Let me just say; if you own a block of land on the Spanish coastline in a little fishing village overlooking the sea and neighboured on one side by a charming black and white checkerboard facade and if in fact you are not a Spanish fisherman but are an English architect who happens to own a weekender with marble benches on the roof, please don’t come to Sydney and lecture us on how ugly the site is/was. Seriously, we are not going to be sympathetic.

Judging by the houselights that turned on towards the end of the talk, time was a limiting factor on the talk and so rather than focus on fewer projects in more depth, we got all of them at lightspeed - the Reader’s Digest version. All delivered in a matter of fact English drone. Luckily the drone was droning on about some exceptional buildings but as I said earlier, we have seen all of this gear before. A deeper examination on design process and methodology and themes and ideas would have provided a more illuminating evening.

That or he could have employed the following three methods to spice up his onstage performance:

• 01 - Describe and demonstrate how bananas divide into three equal wedges.
• 02 - Show Nick Knight’s timelapse photography of one of his houses in London. Or. Of course, skin a horse while a live lion prances about with models wearing Gaultier and Dior.
• 03 - Read out spam

In Sydney, apartment building are often about the balconies. The balcony is the pattern stuck to the facade; it gives the facade interest you see. Concrete folds and contorts and is stuck to the slab, painted {usually white but can be in bright primaries if it is to be a feature balcony} and then photographed. If you have a view of water then the balcony is made of glass; frameless and cantilevered if you can afford it and with chunky patch fitting if you cannot. It is a system that works quite well,

As far as I am concerned the balcony as decorative device reached its nadir in Sydney with Seidler’s Horizon buidling in Darlinghurst. Baroque, ephemeral and useless at the higher floors. Sublime.

Playing ridiculous to Seidler’s sublime are ARM whose apartment/commercial development at King Street Wharf is about five years late with its little one-liner. To be fair, the winning entrant in an invited competition, the development at King Street Wharf is not just one one-liner but about five or six. A little joke for each facade. A kind of shopping mall mentality where a bog standard, commercially cynical floorplate has a bit of decoration tacked to the exterior to keep the punters and the easily fooled happy.

Of course, the joke gathering the most attention is the north facade where the balconies are cutout to represent the Max Dupain photo, Bondi. The delight of this photograph is not that it shows two majestic bronzed bathers at Bondi, it is that one of them is pulling their togs out from her arse crack.

ARM ignore this detail in their interpretation mistaking the photo as another postcard image of the bronzed Aussie. They miss the humour that lies in the scene and when you are attempting a joke -facade that is a fairly critical aspect to pass over.

The fact is, without the detail of the wedgie, it is just another photo of some attractive folk on the beach. This may a novelty in Melbourne, sure, but in its immediate context the image of two people at the beach seems to be stating the obvious. If I want to see some attractive folk in their speedos I am more likely to go to Bondi than Darling Harbour. We don’t need images of people at the beach, we have the real thing.

It is hard not to see the whole gambit as bait from the Melbourne architects. A delicious morsel {wriggling perhaps? yes, wriggling} at the end of an eight pound line. A weightless little idea ready to snag the unsuspecting jury and one that will result in a building in the near future.

I wonder if it is going to be laugh-out-loud-funny or more the smirk-knowingly funny. Let’s just hope they get to take their photos before the site next door gets sold off by Bob Carr and the this precious north facade is blocked by the inevitable office building across the road…

Warning. This is going to stray a fair distance off-topic…

You see, I used to read a lot of comics. It is an addiction which I have let lapse in recent years as it is expensive and accumulates mass at an aggregate rate that my tiny apartment would struggle to sustain.

Of the titles I used to collect, easily at the top of the heap was the Sin City series, written and drawn by Frank Miller. They are a series of interconnecting graphic novels set in the titular Basin City. A city indebted to film noir where the characters are good or evil, drunks or prostitutes, the art is stark black and white and the cars are in a constant state of mid jump.

After more than ten years the art from the first book still ranks as my favourite comic book illustration with the sequence depicting Marv in the rain a defining moment.

Now they have a made a film. Normally this would be cause for alarm; Daredevil, Catwoman, Batman Forever et al have shown us that comic book adaptations are fraught, fraught, with danger. In this case, hover, things look up. Robert Rodriguez is co-directing with Frank Miller and they have set about bringing all of the Sin City books into one film frame by frame. Looking at the trailer for the film, every scene, every pose, every line of dialogue comes directly from the comics. The film matches the stark high contrast black and white imagery of the books and rescues it from pure film noir homage with the splashes of colour that characterised the later books.

A while back, in the begining, I mentioned that we had t-shirts. I was referring to an endeavour by Jeremy and myself to gain unwordly riches through the screenprinting of wearable fashion items. We called this endeavour and we continue to call this endeavour - functional jones. Back then I even went so far as to say that they would be on sale some day time in July. It is now March a year later. However this time I can gaurantee that we will be selling our t-shirts this sunday {06.03.05} at the Bondi Markets.

All of our t-shirts are handprinted and due to our slap-dash approach to quality control, each one is different. We have t-shirts with bees on them, t-shirts with roses and bees, some with a seagull and one or two with the guy from excite-a-bike.

Of particular interest to readers of this site would be this one:

Dedicated to Our Harry and quoting Bruce Springsteen, the front says “NO RETREAT BABY, NO SURRENDER”. The back depicts a subtle metaphor for Harry’s tireless and unflinching dedication to getting kickass buildings built.

Also fun for architects is a t-shirt based on some previous gravestmor propaganda - the KO! t.

We will be there all day, so you should drop by, keep us company, buy our gear.

I found this guy at the Trevi Fountain in Rome. There were about four hundred million other people there as well, so its not as though this is an exclusive however I feel it warrants a mention.

He was carrying an inkjet printer and a digital camera around his neck. Passersby could get their photo taken, downloaded and printed out for the meager sum of 5€. I think he may have needed to replace one of his ink cartridges though as the prints he was churning out were fairly faded and streaky affairs.

I am not sure how he powers the thing though as I am fairly certain that the Trevi Fountain does not have a cable tray running along its perimeter or sub-floor services for that matter.