The erstwhile gravestmor correspondent, Nath, has kindly sent in a markup of last week’s Quality assured Christmas.

The price of Quality Management, it seems, is Eternal Revision.

Download fullsize PDF.

Movement will likely be slow here over the next few weeks, as eating, drinking, opening and squealing is followed by driving, lounging, eating, drinking, lounging, swimming, barracking and some more swimming. See you all next year, fatter and doper.

Back when we were in Tokyo, Antoinette and I were lucky enough to see the first retrospective of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s work at the Mori Gallery in Roppongi Hills.

Sugimoto’s photography goes beyond the documentation aspect of most photography and explores the limits and methods inherent in the photographic process. In his series “Theaters”, for example, the shutter is opened at the beginning of the film and closed at when it is over. The resulting image is of a bright white square in the centre of the frame, a feature length film captured in one frame.

In the “Dioramas” sequence, the simple fact that a photograph uses a single viewpoint for a lense - unlike us humans that have two eyes - is used to bring an eerie sense of reality to the dioramas at American Museum of Natural History.

The most powerful set of photographs in the exhibition was the “Conceptual Forms” photographs of plaster models of mathematical algorithms. Simply framed and lit, they reveal the beauty and complexity of the trigonometric equations.

“Helicoid: Minimal surface”

These stereometric models are made by pre-computer age machines, originating in Germany in the late 19th/early 20th Century and their restrained elegance pleases me far more than the latest computational explorations.

“Kuen’s surface: a surface with constant negative curvature”

Sugimoto:

“The mathematical models are sculptural renderings of trigonmetric functions; the mechanical models were teaching aids for showing the dynamics of Industrial Revolution-age Machinery. Art resides even in things with no artistic intentions.”

“Diagonal Clebish surface, cubic with 27 lines”

Sydney’s beaches were under marshall law this weekend. Police roadblocks were set so that anyone wishing to travel to Cronulla, Maroubra, Coogee, Bondi etc were subject to indiscriminate searches. If you drove to the beach on Sunday, you were under suspicion.

For those not completely up to speed with current Australian news, this is all due to to the recent happenings at Cronulla beach where a group of 5000 ‘anglo’ Australians decided to rid their beach of the ‘lebs’ as well as anyone that looked like they might be Lebanese. There were many disgusting scenes played out in the nations media which continued on through the week with continued violence and reprisals from both camps. A full rundown can be found at wikipedia.

On the surface, this appears clearly to be a dispute centred around race and indeed the escalation of violence through the week has been fuelled by militant racist groups. However it did not begin as a race war but rather, a turf war. And the territory being fought over - Australia’s sacred ground - The Beach.

Bereft of successful public spaces, town squares or campi, our place of public gathering and promenade is the beach; the long stretch of unbroken sand, horizon and surf.

It is the antithesis of the European model of public space where the square acts as a respite from the tight medieval grain of the city yet is still hemmed in on all sides by dense built form. The European square is a civic space, centred around trade, veneration of religious buildings and the occasional fiesta. The last thing Australians need is a respite from density, our markets are located in giant shopping malls and we do not have fiestas so much as a general disposition to lazing about in the sun.

Thus the beach is a public space devoted to the pleasures of the flesh and the sun. The beach has, in the double-speak of today’s groovy workplace agendas, a flat, non-heirachical structure - open and egalatarian. Sure, the ’surf’ may be a different story - where there is a constant power struggle between board riders, life guards, body bashers, goat boaters and body boarders - but on the sand the world is free to do as it chooses.

Its problem, in comparison with the European model and highlighted by the recent hostilities, is that it occupies the fringe rather than the centre. It may be open to all, but in a city like Sydney with a mammoth sprawl westwards, it is certainly geographically closer to the few. This separation of iconic public space from the centre of the cities population breeds a resentment in those physically separated from it and fierce protectionism in those who would claim it as their own.

This is a difficult problem to solve. It is unlikely that coastal beaches are going to spring up west of Parramatta and Sydney’s west, no matter how many motorways that are built, will always be physically divorced from the coastline.

The roadblocks set up last weekend enforced this geographic division and I suspect only strengthened the resentment. Granted, they did seize some pretty nasty gear, and there were no reports of further violence on the beaches, however this is a bandaid solution and an insidious one at that. 2005 has been a bad year for civil rights in Australia and now in the name of protecting our beaches you can add the ability for the police to lock down suburbs and search and confiscate vehicles for whatever reason to the list.

On the surface, order may have been restored, but this is at the price of turning the beach into gated and exclusive community.

A Quality Assured Christmas

Wishing you all a Very Compliant Christmas.

Download the full size PDF.

Among the better notes:

“Christmas present manufactured by Santa Claus or approved Equal. Wrapped in Semi gloss festive paper with adhesive clear strips.”

“Installation of this project does not gaurantee personal joy, merriment or other typical emotional feelings of the holidays.”

“ADA Ramp Sloped for Wheelchair Access to Fireplace.”

This came to me by forwarded email, so if it is your work and you want credit, let me know.

Lego is obviously the building material de jour for Those Interested In Building The Impossible.
First it was used by a Lego Moses to part the Red Sea, and now Andrew Lipsom has built Escher’s Impossible staircase in his attic.

The simplest of building elements rendering the most complex of spaces.

The world could do with one of these.

Just idly sweeping the streets early in the morning, picking up fallen leaves, brushing up cigarette butts and stripping the facades off unslighty commercial office buildings.

I have no idea what it is - the site is entirely in Japanese and I found it at Bezembinder, which is all in German…

As mentioned the other day, Johnson Pilton Walker have been awarded the commision for the new National Portrait Gallery in the ACT.

There is not a great deal of information on the actual building on the website - a perspective or two, a video that won’t load, an illegible plan. However, with JPW at the helm, I am sure that there is nothing to worry about - they have been entrusted with the Opera House renovations after all and produce arguably Sydney’s finest commercial buildings.

However what the official release does have though is lots of words (uncredited so I am not sure if they belong to the architects, the client, the PR department, monkeys). They are words like these:

“It is expressive of the diversity, creativity and openness of the Australian character.”

“The design reinforces our national identity, and encourages us reflect on what it means to be Australian.”

“The public spaces are planned on a single level with no apparent hierarchy and thus reflects the egalitarian character of Australians.”

What a you beaut bonza gallery this is gonna be! Throw another Portrait of Dame Edna on the barbie!

Architecture as jingoistic propaganda.

You only have to look at the eradication of collective bargaining and the newly introduced sedition laws (trust us! we’re only going after the baddies!) to know that Australia is not a country that votes for openness, a fair go and civil liberties. It is a nation that votes to close its borders and to protect mortgage repayments.

Again at the press conference, the gallery’s director, Andrew Sayers laid the nationalism on thick, saying that

“as a functional woolshed shows its bones, so will this building reveal its structure in a very elegant way.”

Fucking woolsheds. The woolshed has to be the most abused reference in Australian architecure. How is this building like a woolshed? Because it has large open spaces? Dude, its a gallery. Large open space and natural light are nothing in this department. Because it has an exposed structure? Please.

A couple of photos from our DARCH party last week. It was an excellent night, there were origami fish heads, yellow trace hoodies, opera house hats and a dodgy reflex rep.

It rained pissed down for a while, and the party moved inside. It is good to know that even the Institute of Architects leaks…

A couple of misfits:

And finally, some random couple:

Quickly.

I have made a couple of small changes to the structure of this page. You may have noticed a series of short links with yellow titles popping up in the content lately. These are links to items I find interesting and want to share but couldn’t be bothered writing about.

For those of you who read this through a newsreader and don’t want this bunch of random links popping up all the time, there are now two RSS feeds available. The first is the standard content without the links, the other contains only the links. Drag whichever or both of the RSS links to your newsreader from the menu to the left to subscribe.

If you have no idea what I am talking about, go here for an overview.