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Daniel Libeskind’s Gazprom building

YOU have built flatpack furniture – now you can live in a flatpack house. Ikea, the Swedish furniture giant, is to create a series of prefabricated homes, for sale or rent, in Glasgow.

The company will build up to 100 easy-to-assemble homes in Drumchapel as part of the area’s £100m renaissance.

The prefab BoKlok homes, which roughly translated means smart living, are hugely successful in Scandinavia and are lauded for their flexible open-plan layout, high ceilings and large windows.

Here’s a little snippet from the email Tim, who works at Prospect, just sent me:

So please cast your mind back over the last three years to that moment when you drew up in a strange town, got out of the car and then… got straight back in again. Then put your foot to the floor, taking the speed bumps laid out on the otherwise empty high street at full pelt. Or that time when you stopped dead in your tracks by the sheer goddawfulness of some new building or housing estate.

Early contenders for the Plook on the Plinth include Kilwinning and Ardrossan. But who do you think should win? Have you been to Nitshill, Boghall or Harthill? Do you know anywhere worse? Which town has left you shuddering at the sight of grey estates stretching out into the distance? Which town’s windswept car parks have left you breathless? Have you seen the new SMG building in Glasgow? Seen anywhere worse?

The thing is, when faced by the sort of place nominated for awards like this my reaction isn’t to flee, it is to wander around taking photographs, enjoying all the concrete, litter and vandalised signage. Which is probably an even worse reaction than setting up an award to rub salt in the wounds of folk who find themselves living in failing small towns (which is what this feels like to me, however much Prospect spin it as a positive call for better built environments). So, I think my vote will go to that slutty piece of eye-candy on the other coast, Edinburgh. It’s so needy, that place, like a not-quite-pretty-enough bridesmaid in too much make-up, dancing on her own at the wedding of History and Beauty, desperate to bag that rich American uncle holding court at the bar. Or something.

Anyway, here’s the good stuff in Glasgow, in no particular order:

• Cinema City: During Hollywood’s golden era , Glasgow was home to over 130 cinemas- more than any other city outside America. This exhibition celebrates Glasgow’s historic reputation as Cinema City and explores the internal and external architecture of its city centre ‘Picture Palaces’ from yesteryear and today.
• Strathbungo Architectural Walk: An architectural walk around the Strathbungo conservation area, former home of Alexander Greek Thomson and Charles Rennie Mackintosh, as part of the Strathbungo Society’s annual Bungo In The Back Lanes midsummer event. The walk looks at the origins, growth and architectural features of Strathbungo.
• Tales Between Two Cities - A Cummuting Exhibition: Tales between two Cities draws attention to the built environment of the “in between” of Scotland’s two major cities and will provide information on origins or purposes of buildings and artefacts, their architectural or engineering merits, their socio-economic histories or environmental impacts. The exhibition takes place in the Glasgow-Edinburgh commuter train.
• Performance and the built environment: Minty Donald works site - specifically, using projected imagery and sound to explore our relationships with the built environment. She will be discussing the work she made during her Creative Lab residency at CCA, and her plans for its development in a three year research programme.

I was hoping there’d be a talk on or guided walk around St. Peter’s Seminary at Cardross, but no such luck. (There are, however, tours of both the CCA and the Lighthouse, the two most profoundly depressing buildings/conversions in Glasgow’s recent history.)

Finally, since it sounds like one of the best Architecture Week events in Scotland, here’s one for the Dundonians:

• The Public Realm Of The Senses: A series of talks initiated by artist Apolonija Sustersic that looks at the various factors shaping Our Surroundings. With the aim of looking across the disciplines of art/architecture/planning/landscape and the use of the public realm in the context of current developments in Dundee.

The benches love to be sat on, and they often take up position in new spaces to make themselves more attractive to potential human sitters. Sometimes, when it rains, they move themselves to drier, shadier areas of the square. To attract potential human sitting folk, they like to form patterns - the benches moving in to shapes in the centre of the piazza.

The bins are a little more solitary. When the mood takes them, the furniture like to burst in to song. Sometimes, small clusters gather together and sing a tight six-part harmony, and occasionally, though much more rarely due to their shyness, the bins join in with their sweet soprano voices.

Each bench drifts slowly around the square and is equipped with sensors that detect the presence of objects in its immediate vicinity, coming to a complete halt when any object is coming close.

Overly cute, I think. Aggressive, sarcastic and bullying benches pitted against weak, craven and bullied bins would be much more fun to watch.

(Via We Make Money Not Art)

From the windows of my new flat, I can see five spires: one University, which was founded in 1451 by a bull from Pope Nicholas V, one Episcopalian Cathedral, and three churches, (one Methodist, another Catholic, I think, while the third is now a bank).

Gerard, who lives nearby, pointed out all the spires and said, ‘We’re hemmed in by God.’ A lovely coinage, I think (unless he nicked it from someone else).

First, Things:

The plan form of the NatWest building famously reproduces the bank’s interlocking logo, but are there other buildings designed with such graphic simplicification in mind, so they can be easily distilled into a logotype? The Gherkin lends itself well to this approach, but there must be many more.

This spurred a question at Rodcorp:

“How simply (or in how few lines) and recognisably can we draw buildings?”. The question tends to privilege strong silhouettes and bridges, but so be it. Here’s a list… and some drawings from unreliable memory.

Next, Dan Hill shares his rather beautiful sketches of the Guggenheim in Bilbao at City Of Sound:

I’m not going to apologise for the hasty, impressionistic style of the sketches. Having tried and failed to draw the thing vaguely accurately, I decided the only possible response was to let go.

Dan’s post was in part following the discussion on buildings as logotypes, and the drawing of them, but also responds to Peter Lindberg’s thoughts on the contextual nature, or otherwise, of the Guggenheim at Tesugen:

Salingaros has claimed that Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao completely ignores context, and yet Gehry himself calls it very contextual. And my impression… is that this building has meant a lot for the city of Bilbao, and that people living in Bilbao feels it has given the city a boost in self-confidence. But Salingaros says it’s nothing more than a tourist attraction.

Seeing loose discussions like this unfold (and fold back on themselves - Peter’s post is in response to an earlier post of Dan’s about Peter’s writing) more than make up for having to scroll infuriated past a hundred ‘Me too!’ entries in my aggregator.

Of course, this post is itself a little echo slapping off the back wall of the webloggers’ cave. Sorry about that, but I know sod all about architecture and can’t draw for toffee.

Update: Peter just dropped me a line to point to another response, this time from Deconstructor, bringing talk of shared conceptual images of common shapes to the table, and much else besides. (And to gently chide me for my misspelling, now corrected, of his weblog’s title. There’s something about the word Tesugen that demands an extra ‘n’ before the ‘g.’ That’s my excuse, anyway.)

The aim of ARTitecture is to encourage a broader public awareness and appreciation of architecture through the work of fifteen artists who explore and interpret aspects of both individual buildings and our urban environment, through various media.

The dynamic and often challenging artwork is intended to introduce visitors to the aesthetic value of architecture while creating for architects, both new and established, a renewed focus on the many sensual experiences which the built environment can, and should, offer.

As well as a group show at the Collins Gallery, Glasgow, there’s a one-day conference on the relationship between art and architecture, film screenings and lectures. And workshops too, the best of which looks to be The Sound Of Architecture, led by Thomas Witzmann.

You really don’t want to go the The Lighthouse to see Emerging Architecture 3: Beyond Architainment. Admittedly, that subtitle should be warning enough, but just in case you might be tempted, here’s my review:

All exhibitions about architecture have a problem to overcome: buildings do not, as a general rule, fit inside other buildings. The onus is on the curator to find novel ways of presenting the architectural design process from initial sketch to finished product. In this respect, Emerging Architecture 3 is an abject failure.

Each of the young Austrian architects here is given a cute little modular trolley, with explicatory notes, s and blueprints printed on every surface, and an iMac screening footage of buildings. The notes are obfuscatory — there is talk of ‘spatial netting’, architects are said to ‘offensively address given restraints in urbanistic terms’ — and the floor plans and photographs are chosen for graphic impact, rather than charting the creative course.

Not that the work on show is bad. One Room have built a wonderful, topsy-turvy kindergarten that grows out of the surrounding landscape. Holz Box Tirol’s stackable modular housing is a treat, as is their supermarket project, both are skinned in dark wood, deftly making the functional formally appealing. Indeed, all the architects represented are adept at working within constraints, whether in terms of location, cost or materials. The problem is, it’s hard work drawing these conclusions: you can only guess at the challenges faced by these architects, and must divine the thinking behind their solutions yourself.

Contemporary architecture in Austria seems to be in a healthy state, unfortunately this exhibition will not tell you the why or how, offers little in the way of insight and, as such, teeters on the brink of pointlessness.

“Renewing, Rebuilding, Remembering combines photographs, models and renderings that illustrate diverse responses to traumatic events, each of which have had dramatic impact on urban life. The focus of the exhibition, however, is not damage and devastation, but reconstruction - success stories where urban spaces have been revived and monuments to tragedy integrated as living memorials within regenerated spaces. Cities represented in the exhibition include: Beirut, Berlin, Kobe, Manchester, Oklahoma City, San Francisco and Sarajevo.”

Despite the rather happy-clappy tone of the press release, this should be rather good.