Metro-land: romanticising the mundane
Metro-Land, the 1973 BBC documentary was Sir John Betjeman's "gift to romanticise the mundane: in this case a tube ride from Baker Street to Amersham, celebrating the north-west London suburbs created by the Metropolitan Railway between 1910 and 1933. ...
'Metro-Land' was the advertising slogan developed to entice workers from cramped homes in Central London out into the rural paradise of Middlesex, Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire. It was invented in 1915 by the Metropolitan Railway's in-house copywriter James Garland, who according to legend was ill with influenza and sprang out of bed when he thought of the term. ...
It was, of course, largely a con. The creation of Metro-Land destroyed the very thing - open countryside - which was used to advertise it. The speculative homes thrown up around the new stations bore few resemblances to the Tudor cottages depicted in the advertising materials: most were dreary semis, constructed at great haste and sold for as little as £400 each. Modern first-time buyers can only dream: that is equivalent to just £20,000 in today's money."
(Telegraph Media Group Limited, 26 Sep 2006)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Making up Postcards: expressing real and fictional stories
"To me Postcards and Blogs share something in common. Both contain basically private information but can be read by people who have nothing to do with the writers. There is nothing wrong with reading a postcard that is not addressed to you or checking out a blog that is all about the personal life of an unknown person. A typical way of protecting privacy is using information that will be understood only by the people whom the message is addressed to. Another defensive approach is to be laconic, rather inexpressive. This last strategy is typically seen in postcards.
This blog is intended to play in a sense with these issues of privacy. For this reason my approach is purely literary (another way of protection). Here I mix together real and fictional stories. Some people who 'receive' a postcard from me are real people, others unrelated or almost unknown to me. Of course I, as an architect, 'send' only architectural postcards. Some of them were already postally used and therefore now they are being rewritten by me. In short, I am just making up postcards.
Las Tarjetas Postales de siempre tienen algo en comun con los Blogs de ahora. Su caracter es publico, (cualquiera puede leer su contenido) aunque su intencion sea privada (la correspondencia va dirigida a una persona o grupo concreto). Un blog es publico porque cualquier persona tiene acceso a el, pero su caracter tiene algo de privado porque va dirigido a alquien en particular. Se escribe un blog pensando en un grupo de personas mas o menos numeroso pero concreto. Eso no quita para que haya blogs mas 'universales' con los que algun 'desconocido' pueda identificarse. Pero aun asi, todos los blogs tienen algo de personales, de diarios.
Mi blog versa sobre arquitectura moderna, que es algo que me interesa mucho. Esta es revisada a traves de tarjetas postales de arquitectura que son reales (las cuales yo poseo y colecciono). Las tarjetas estan dirigidas a personas concretas que conozco, conoci en el pasado o quise conocer. Algunas tarjetas son recientes, otras muy antiguas y las demas ni lo uno ni lo otro. Algunas estan escritas y enviadas, otras por escribir. Lo que yo hago aqui es escribirlas o a veces reescribirlas. En todo caso reinventarlas. Son pues Postales Inventadas."
(Rafael Cazorla)
Fig.1 7 March 2011: Hotel Savoy-Bandung- Indonesia
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Otto Neurath and Josef Frank: habit and tradition shape daily life
"the interpretation I would like to offer is that the relationship between architectural modernism and the Vienna Circle was a problematic one at best. The principal reasons were philosophical and ideological in nature. Specifically, over the course of the second half of the 1920s and early 1930s [Otto] Neurath and Josef Frank grew increasingly skeptical [sic] of the idea that the planning of the physical environment could cause corresponding changes in the social environment. That is to say, they were acutely conscious of the role that habit and tradition played in shaping daily life, and they were not convinced that the anti-decorative language that modernist architecture embodied would bring about social and political change of its own accord. "
(Nader Vossoughian, HOPOS Lecture, 25 June 2004)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Claustrophobic spaces of German modernity and agoraphobic spaces of American post-war film genres
"Running throughout our essay as its leitmotif is the opposition between the claustrophobic spaces of German modernity (epitomized in Expressionist cinema and in the noir films directed by Germans in Hollywood) and the agoraphobic fear of wide open spaces, exemplified by post-war American space (suburbia and the urban "superblock") and by the post-war film genres of the western and the road movie. Lacking a frontier myth, Germans fantasized about an expansive sense of space and dreaded a claustrophobic one. By contrast, the American cinema developed a morbid fear of open spaces devoid of human community and fantasized about the possibility of a tightly-knit urban community."
(Ed Dimendberg and Anton Kaes)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
