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It's on now
The days are long now
Curb my confines, I'm your carpet knight
Am I right?
You give me the signs
It's the night, I can be who you like,
Just sit tight
And I'll quietly leave before it gets light
This project is a conversion of a gritty 250m2 brick warehouse in the old industrial area of Fitroy into a family home. The former industrial building is a mixture of intimately scaled family spaces and vast entertaining voids.Two full height voids act as the lungs of the design bringing both light and sky views deep into the internal space. The private areas such as the study and bedroom are accommodated on the first floor by volumes of a more intimate scale.
Have you ever blogged about 'defensive architecture' like spikes to prevent the homeless from sleeping in certain spaces? / Do you have any examples of architectural practices that are purposefully non-defensive?
Defensive architecture is revealing on a number of levels, because it is not the product of accident or thoughtlessness, but a thought process. It is a sort of unkindness that is considered, designed, approved, funded and made real with the explicit motive to exclude and harass. It reveals how corporate hygiene has overridden human considerations, especially in retail districts. It is a symptom of the clash of private and public, of necessity and property.
his tripartite pressure of an increasingly hostile built environment, huge reduction in state budgets, and a hardening attitude to poverty can be disastrous for people sleeping rough, both physically and psychologically. Fundamental misunderstanding of destitution is designed to exonerate the rest from responsibility and insulate them from perceiving risk. All of us are encouraged to spend future earnings through credit. For the spell to be effective, it is essential to be in a sort of denial about the possibility that such future earnings could dry up. Most of us are a couple of pay packets from being insolvent. We despise homeless people for bringing us face to face with that fact.
Defensive architecture acts as the airplane curtain that separates economy from business and business from first class, protecting those further forward from the envious eyes of those behind. It keeps poverty unseen and sanitises our shopping centres, concealing any guilt for over-consuming. It speaks volumes about our collective attitude to poverty in general and homelessness in particular. It is the aggregated, concrete, spiked expression of a lack of generosity of spirit. Ironically, it doesn’t even achieve its basic goal of making us feel safer. There is no way of locking others out that doesn’t also lock us in. The narrower the arrow-slit, the larger outside dangers appear. Making our urban environment hostile breeds hardness and isolation. It makes life a little uglier for all of us.
Unfortunately, we as architects can only suggest and try to steer clients away from using these strategies on their projects and many times after we win the initial battle but we lose the war, when one or more of the strategies are implemented once the project is completed. The solution needs to be to address core society problems like homelessness. Shelters, when found, are not always welcoming and some prefer to stay on the streets. No one lives on the street because its a chosen lifestyle, it only happens when someone has run out of options.
Purposely non-defensive architecture? All architecture has a level of defensiveness (is that a word?). Your house has walls and a door, your yard might have a fence, cities used to be walled in. I think a bench should be a place where two people can sit together without a division in between (installed there to limit people laying down) and a low wall should be a place where you can sit don for a moment. Architecture should be a reflections of our values as a society where we can coexist, but lately that personal opinion has been put to the test, I am not sure that is the goal of the majority.
Robin Lasser andAdrienne Paoare interested in the land and the body as sites of seduction. Dress Tents are a fusion of architecture, the body and the land played out through living sculpture, moving images and still photography. The wearable architecture is installed and worn in the landscape in order to be photographed. Humor is paramount in these photographs, which are meant to be alluring and whimsical. In other instances, the installations are performed and displayed in a gallery or museum as interactive living sculptures. These tent-like forms are worn at the opening reception and additional scheduled performance times. A dress form substitutes for the figure during the duration of the exhibition. On occasion the Dress Tents are commissioned as semi- permanent, interactive public art installations. The interior of the installations house video and sound pieces that refer to the original landscape. The Dress Tent project investigates desire from a female centered perspective and uses seduction as a vehicle to explore the relationship between the body and the land. The Dress Tents question what is up, under a women’s skirt in the 21st century.
Heiko Gerlicher is a 47 year old award winning photographer living near Coburg, Upper Franconia (Germany).His photographic main focus are landscapes, especially forests and trees.
Ebb Tide by Tyler Haughey focuses on the Wildwoods, a group of small shore towns situated on a five-mile-long barrier island along the southern New Jersey coastline, and home to one of the most important architectural collections of the 20th century. They contain a trove of midcentury modern motels that make up the largest concentration of postwar resort architecture in the United States. These motels remain fully functioning and virtually unchanged since their original construction, in many cases over fifty years ago.
Adopting a spare aesthetic and using contemporary materials such as poured concrete and glass, the motels brought European high modernism to America’s middle class. Applying the idea of the “decorated shed”, a term coined by renowned postmodern architects Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steve Izenour in their seminal 1972 book Learning from Las Vegas, each motel relies on unique architectural features and symbolic ornament to form its own identity and set itself apart from the others nearby. Infused with space-age optimism and experimentation, and utilizing the iconography of faraway, exotic destinations, these structures represent the way America’s middle class traveled and vacationed during the postwar era.
