Threads Through Sheffield

Domus 908 November 2007

My personal interest in drawing and mark-making has always made me intrigued by the making of maps; so when I was reading a recent edition of Domus that focused some of its attention towards to this very topic, I was motivated to make a note of its relevance to studio six work. In the foreword to November’s edition of Domus, the editor Flavio Albanese starts his foreword by quoting Bateson: “the map is not the territory” (Gregory Bateson, in “Form, Substance and Difference,” from Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972)) This short but succinct observation has many connotations in the realm of ‘mapping’.

Albanese expands by describing the map as: “…not a real place… [but as] …an image of the world” A simple observation, but one that would appear to have been blinded by the expansion and increased use of satalite navigation and google earth. These ‘new’ ways of seeing our planet are throwing up certain attitudes towards maps, ones that in my opinion make for passive spectatorship rather than more reciprocal relationships, that could throw up questions rather than ‘answers’.

This point demonstrated most clearly in a local news article that revealed Sheffield’s recently opened inner ring road will not feature on any in-car sat nav system for at least 2 years. Due to the company who program the digital maps not being able to update the system anytime soon. (i.e. too many other new roads to update). The company will have to send a special mapping van to drive the new road in question and record/trace the new highway.

Road to nowhere?….

Related Links:

Ignore your Sat Nav:

Sat Nav Crime Rate in Sheffield:

I have just found a scrap of paper in my pocket with the words: “Full Circle, Natalie Taylor” scribbled on it. Not remembering why or when I wrote this note to myself, I did what any other 21st Century person would do…. and googled. And it all came back to me. 

Whilst in Edinburgh I also visited The Storytelling Centre on the Royal Mile, designed by Malcom Fraser Architects. Sat inside I found myself eating a very spicy pumpkin and chickpea soup and reading an article in the Guardian Saturday Newspaper entitled: ‘London Fields’ by Robert Macfarlane. Fortunately I have not got a ’storytelling’ voice so I wasn’t sat in any circle, just simply at a solid hardwood table away from the slushy weather outside.The article is about the London 2012 Olympics, or more specifically about the fields it is in the process of devouring. The article is accompanied by a page of blurry and eery photographs taken by Stephen Gill, on a camera he bought for 50p in Hackney 3 years ago. The article is worth a read and that is why I have attached it to this entry. London Fields - Arts Review, Saturday Guardian, 08.12.07My personal interest is the similarities faced by my site in Sheffield. The Tinsley Cooling Towers site is about to be sentenced back to being a powerstation by its landowners Eon (Powergen). The natural wildlife habitat that has been allowed to grow due to the site’s relative inactivity has flourished in a city that is still licking its environmental and economical wounds from the departure of it’s steel industry. What also seems quite cruel and careless is that the communities of Tinsley, Carbrook, Brightside and Wincobank, who already suffer from some of the lowest health standards in the country, let alone Sheffield are to be sentenced to inhaling further toxins from the new powerstation. With the busy M1 motorway on their doorstep, more and more children are being diagnosed with breathing difficulties, so the proposal of a new powerstation is not going to exactly ease the situation.Rather than filling the site once again (see Meadowhall!!!) why not leave these as green lungs for the surrounding communities. Firstly make them accesible, (suspended bridges, cycle paths, waterways) rather than filling them once again and then secondly give them some extra reasons/activity for people to walk through (a circus school perhaps, a carboot, a festival?, a campsite, a rose field? maybe all of the above?)The site needs more than just a single occupation, and the same applies for the London fields that will be filled with Olympic themed ‘things’. Anything less and the site will all too easily become static and stagnant, essentially boring, or even worse dejected by the local community who need it most.

A visit to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh this weekend, introduced me to a piece of work by the British artist Tom Phillips; started back in the late 1960’s, Phillips work uses the obscure Victorian novel ‘A Human Document’ by W.H. Mallock (1892) as his ‘raw-material’. Re-named by Phillips as ‘A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel’ his work since the late sixties has been to alter and manipulate Mallock’s original book into an entirely new artist’s book.What I found particularly poignant was how he wasn’t starting from scratch, in fact he wasn’t even starting with something half finished, he started with a completed and fully published book or ‘product’. Using an existing narrative, Phillips draws, paints, scratches out printed words to reveal new narratives within the existing pages of text.My thoughts turned to Architecture and what Phillips work could possibly mean for the discipline and for the profession. Firstly a valuing of process could be transferable, by how the project demonstrates the advantages of a ‘work in progress’ that is constantly evolving and attempts to replace itself by updated revisions. And secondly, developing an ability to craft something interesting and of value out of the mundane. Both characteristics which are of course “easier said than done” but non-the-less, I believe will become ever more important in developing an Interdependent Architecture.

“Life is right, and the architect is wrong”Le Corbusier (toward the end of his life)A statement that often falls on deaf ears in my very short experience to date. I don’t know what is more interesting/surprising, the honesty of the statement or the fact that Le Corbusier himself said it. Either way its relevance to the debate on Interdependence and Architecture is important to acknowledge. I personally read it as a kind of warning sign rather than a mantra to be chanted or preached (Corbusier was very good at preaching!)If the architect is wrong, then what aspects of ‘life’ do we need to unearth or start to appreciate more in Architecture? hmmm… I may be sometime….could you put some money in the meter?

“If we re-enact earth as living connectedness, then we are called to see our place (being placed) in/on the earth in a transformed, enlarged way. We need, then, to re-inhabit our place. … To re-inhabit is to relearn dwelling.”Martin Heidegger