RIP Tinsley Cooling Towers 6 + 7

It seemed unfair that these towers had spent the last 40 years cast into darkness every night until that is the night they were to be demolished, when they were lit up as ghostly spectres for a captive audience to snap at with picture phones, digital cameras and video cameras. I can only hope that these images live on as a timely reminder to what we once had and what we don’t have anymore.

Evacuated Fields

S,M,L,XL Koolhaas, R. and Mau, B. (The Monaceli Press, 1995) p401

“Rotterdam is a city that makes no demands.

It is the average destroyed and reconstructed post-World War II European city, its attractions emptiness, neutrality, a work ethic, and the absence of history, pretension, “interest”, temptation.”

The circus sets up beside the railway tracks temporarily occupying an evacuated field – the circus is in town

From Top of the Tower

(Images from www.28dayslater.co.uk)

Tower 7 has been recently scaled by a group of ‘urban explorers’, offering a tantalising glimpse of what only the birds have been able to savour till now.

http://www.28dayslater.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=27436

Quadric Hyperboloids

A fantastic piece of writing by Hinchcliffe and Hodgson (2007) inspired by the Tinsley Cooling Towers to be read by two people:

http://wordsaloud.wordpress.com/2007/05/11/so-cool-were-practically-dead-by-hinchcliffe-and-hodgson

“So cool we’re practically dead
Quadric hyperboloids!
That’s what we are.
A three dimensional continuous surface described by the mathematical equation
X squared over a squared, plus y squared over b squared, minus z squared over c squared = 1
We are thin shelled structures.
Maximum height and strength with minimum material.
A kind of “less is more” principle in practice.
And we are heavy.
Collossal actually and pressing down hard on an underpinning lattice of diagonal concrete pillars.
Not Doric or Ionic, just Iconic.
Tensile stress encircling two deep black cauldrons of what was once steaming hot water.
Turbulent, boiling rain.
A funny storm in an even funnier funnel!

Today, the two pools we still stand over are flat and stagnant.
Each one reflects a circular glimpse of sky, framed by the edge of our perforated crowns.
Light at the top of the funnel, not at the end of a tunnel.
We once took the heat out of it all
A very intricate process
Hot water, used to cool the turbines at Blackburn Meadows Power Station was pumped to the top of us.
Scalding and steaming, it cascaded down on the updraft of cooling air, sucked up by the pressure increase created in our pinched hyperbolic waists.
Now it appears we are a waste.

We are the last of seven you know?
Seven of us built between 1937 and ‘42
and only two of us left.
But Regal!
Majestic!
And Magnificent!
Advanced engineering
And Radical Architecture!
Presiding over Great Britain’s 1st motorway.
We altered its course forcing it to skirt around us as it rolled north.
That old M1 has kept us alive
They couldn’t blow us up because we’re too close to it
Only 48 feet away
But now the cleverly controlled implosion techniques of the 21st century, will be the downfall of us both.
Whatever happened to
RESPECT FOR ALL MONUMENTS

Interdependent Constructs

“…architects grapple with the socially constructed body more than they will care to admit. Even the “pure, plastic” icons of High and Late Modernism resonate with the overwhelming expression of the body’s denial. The problem, rather, has been in the reluctance of contemporary architectural practice to reward the body and space as interdependent constructs, inseperable from the cultural forces which have shaped them. Architecture refuses to admit that space is already constructed before it gets there-coded legally, politically, morally and socially. Space is nothing more than “contractual,” and is prescribed in advance of architecture.”

Flesh, Diller and Scofidio (Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 1994) p.39

the map is not the territory

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:

“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

the writing is on the wall

Back in Manchester now at Urbed

www.urbed.coop

more to follow…