1,400 Pages how long can it take um yes this is about buildings and cities I'm Luke Jones I'm George ginel this is s mlxl yeah we might only do s or possibly a bit of s and a bit of M it's by REM Kus and it's about the work of om and it's a unique piece of architectural publishing and also yeah like an absolutely iconic bit of '90s media massive bit of zeitgeist ISM yeah it's um it's incredibly '90s like anyone I think who's been an architecture student will have come into contact with it at some point uh it is well I had a question about that yeah do you think the kids know about it uh yeah I suspect so it's an interesting and to use a cool house word paradoxical piece of um of architectural monography because at one level and you know it says this on the back and it says in the introduction as well it's a book which sets out to disrupt the kind of false closure of the normal yeah architectural monograph the normal way in which architectural design is presented as coherent conclusive a sort of story of ideas uh which lead from kind of the early parts of of projects all the way through to the end and instead to reveal it its actual reality as as kol house calls it a chaotic Adventure yeah in some way to kind of break apart the myths and bring the whole thing low but paradoxically is also the most successful bit of charismatic hero formation in architectural monograph form probably since the second world war it kind of I'd say there's two in the 20th century yeah there's towards a new architecture by L buer and there's this one and there's this and they're completely different yeah and we're going to do that's about creating the image of an architect as in that that's what I mean the context of Architecture is a hazardous mixture of omnipotence and impotence ostensibly involved in shaping the world for their thoughts to be mobilized archtics depend on the provocations of others clients individual or institutional therefore incoherence or more precisely Randomness is the underlying structure of all Architects careers they are confronted with an arbitrary sequence of Demands with parameters they did not establish in countries they hardly know about issues they are only dimly aware of expected to deal with problems that have proved intractable to brains vastly Superior to their own architecture is by definition a chaotic Adventure coherence imposed on an architect's work is either cosmetic or the result of s censorship smlxl organizes architectural material according to size there is no connective tissue and then yeah goes on to talking about restoring a kind of honesty and Clarity to the relationship between architect and public well we'll see about that I'm not sure that it's enormously to its detriment if that turns out not to be true but it's useful to have that as the kind of thesis statement anyway what did he want to say about it I wanted to describe the what the book is like as a physical object yeah it's large it's large it's certainly in the range of the sizes of the Bible that you get on the lecton of a church not like the little convenient Bible that you have on the bookshelf it's got a similar number of pages as well although an awful lot less words it's silver it's got huge letters s m l XL it kind of reads like a slab monotype grotesque is the font yeah it has a single color on the front originally yellow highlight Rome cool house's name to make him seem very special yeah in the first edition it's yellow and in the second edition it's orange for you know the second and then for the plebs in subsequent editions it's blue I can remember you getting that and it went into the wheel of your bicycle and chewed up the side of it yeah that's why it's got this little uh on the way home yeah the sheer weight of it caused my the bag I was carrying to deform and it um it rubbed on the on the wheel of the bicycle all the way home yeah did you do that in first year why could I remember that yeah I think it must have been yeah it was it was yeah yeah yeah we studied together for one year that was enough yes anyway inside it is the things that he said it is it's a huge book one of the ways in which it resists the normal business of an architectural monograph is normally they try and present at least what the architect thinks or wants to show it to be about in a clear way so in towards the new architecture Loco buer is trying to make a small and cohesive point about what he thinks is good architecture or the future should be like yeah how technolog is going to change architecture and you're meant to be able to understand it reasonably straightforwardly or at least the convention is to try and make the work understandable in this book A lot has gone into making it hard to understand yeah no it's much more of a kind of exhilarating fever dream isn't it it's not yeah sort of and we can go through are you okay to go through like some basic things about how the book is yeah let's do let's say some basic things about the book it's starts with a series of graphs set against photographs from the office and they recount the history of the office statistically in Workforce and things like that yeah I think these are the these are the graphs that you could get out of like mid90s XL aren't they the uh I guess so I think it might have been more Swanky than XL but yes there like 3D 3D line graphs and things all very cool they're very this is very much in the same um kind of like visual culture world as those like cool Windows 95 screen savers and things yeah the one that went goes around like a endless Labyrinth and uh I think we can describe what all the things are like yeah and then there's a page where it says smlxl black on white very large like the lettering at the beginning of Rocky yeah like huge things scrolling across the screen and then there's the credits very large an introduction and when the introduction something else begins which is on the left hand side all the way through the book where there isn't something else there there is an alphabetical list of quotations which are not cited until the end which are fairly arbitrary and we will deal with examining that detail in a bonus for those of you who are really interested yes the stealth essay of the of the um of the kind of dictionary and it does sort of have content but it's also uh deliberately cool and distracting and hard to tell what that's about and in there there's also images and then it just gets into the business and it's a mixture of he says organized by scale and that's not quite true it's not organized really hierarchically on any coherent basis is something like scale so it matches together projects essays real built things and more speculative things without chronology from 20 years approximately on scale the projects are presented with some text drawings and then whole page images which may interspersed with images that are not really strictly to do with anything just sort of photographs from the news or provocative things there's various photographs of real or fictional violence uh there's a few bits of pornography art as well just to keep you engaged and Landscape but there's defin some definitely some of which are meant to be sort of provocative whole page sort of do Doodles there's things there's blocks of essays there's bits of things that seem quite ephemeral like pages of scribbled notes from a structural engineer yeah and so on and it goes through that and then at the end there's a series of kind of useful well not quite at the end sort of in the middle at the end to make it kind of hard to find there's a chronology yeah there's credits there's the explanation for or at least what the things on the left hand side are is there some other there the photo credits and things like basically some stuff that is kind of pointing towards being a key to some of the information which is conveniently held and then after that there's a whole load of there's another project there's another project and then there's a big picture of ding Shia ping yeah the back cover click from a newspaper yeah and then it ends we can describe the effect of this but it's a very capacious container yeah all the projects are different so the I mean there's kind of broad strategies they adopts for different projects but but each of them is its own little uh world of graphic design and um yeah sometimes the presentation is uh extremely lengthy even over lengthy almost like a mini book in its own right and sometimes it is incredibly kind of uh truncated or OB fiscated but I think it's good to just there is a project which wasn't built but was developed to quite a great extent and worked on which is represented by a 3D CAD perspective of some trusses yeah exactly that is the entire presentation of the project I think we should overall it is an assault of style on meaning yeah and it's very stylish and cool yeah I would say like a couple of things about its uh significance it's it's incredibly 90s it's like an incredibly '90s piece of media it's a brilliant piece of graphic design like graphic and typog typographical design like it's a you know it's like a a very very uh successful combination of all of these different types of media and type and photography and everything to create yeah this real like assault on the senses it's a sort of super Montage of information on top of information it's very much its own little uh hyper intensified sort of slice through a very distinct contemporary moment which I think is now increasingly distant and quite interesting to to visit the '90s is a long time ago this is very much of the of that moment I feel that it's an interesting moment to attack this book which was so famous yeah when we were young and isn't yet old enough I think to be really reconsidered or reevaluated yeah REM cool house is still around yeah still working his AG is exactly between the incoming and outgoing presidents of the United States I say that because they are people whose age has been disussed a great deal he's part of that generation although always seem to be looking forward in a way and sort of projecting younger this work which comes across as something young and cool was actually done when he was in his early 50s yeah well it doesn't read like that so it this is before reconsideration I think in general culture and after hype yeah we're early to the party which is you know it's good uh good place to be yeah the book begins with I mean this is like just the first of many provocations is to show how much money the studio actually making or not making um you know one of the many things that's like decorously left out of the story of architectural practice is what it's actually like as a in in how it's normally presented to an external public is what it's actually like as a business and uh what the graphs reveal is not very good they've never made any money but I think that's also if you want to if if you're running a business with no aim of making money you may well succeed in never making any money yeah there is the second graph the first graph graph is Workforce which illustrates that there was a small Workforce through the 1970s and then through the 1980s it grew dramatically and then in the early '90s it began to collapse the second graph shows a similar curve with income and expenditure which are two lines without really any gap between them yeah they have uh which means that any architecture practice that doesn't make a profit will go bankrupt eventually yeah and they did and they did go after the publication of the book um you need to this is a point not to do with this book yeah but I en counted a notion that it was sort of wrong to make a profit yeah or resistance like profits result from not being fair and that doesn't work no if you have a business it has to actually make money and if it doesn't make money net it's going to go obvious point and there are various other ones and in the background there's Lively pictures of the office which are fun on a couple of AES one they show the process and you know bits of projects in the background but also for now they show bits of '90s culture which is kind of fun one of them's got a big foam model in the foreground and a drawing desk with one of those drawing machines that you know you can move all sorts of parallel motions on yeah which has got the um Leo Expo in it bit of breakfast in another one stacks of foam seems to have been very popular in this office yeah blue foam they're very much a blue fo office and then and then we hit SM smlxl yeah a index at the beginning or at least a sort of list of things which which describes what it calls all the things by that I mean Exodus voluntary prisons of architecture AA final project but also things like learning Japanese poem well kind of it's more like description of what a housing project in Fukuoka it's more like a housing project in fukua obstacles yeah uh imagine nothingness text but other texts are called things like bedtime story meditation yeah so sometimes he chooses to say Passion Play epito yeah then there's a big acknowledgement I think Rome Co has is both good and bad at giving credit to the collaborative nature of his work he knows it's completely collaborative he says it he celebrates the collaborative quality of architecture yeah but is also a successful and Powerful ego which successful Architects almost need to be and then it says foreplay in big words which gives you another indication of the sort of thing we're in for yeah which is that then I mean that's a project that we've already talked about on another episode is um this kind of voluntary prisoners competition uh and which which gets another outing Delirious New York gets a kind of outing we get these kind of black and white photographs of a slightly worn first edition with a sentence running over the top in like bright orange that's hard to read read but I might read it out anyway because it's worth worth thinking about what it means the permanence of even the most frivolous item of architecture and the instability of the Metropolis are incompatible in this conflict the met the Metropolis is by definition the Victor in its pervasive reality architecture is reduced to the status of a play thing tolerated as decor for the illusions of history and memory in Manhattan this Paradox is resolved in a brilliant way through the development of a mutant architecture that combines the aura of monumentality with the performance of instability its Interiors accommodate compositions of program and activity that change constantly and independently of each other without affecting what it's called with accidental profundity the envelope The Genius of Manhattan is the Simplicity of this divorce between appearance and performance it keeps the illusion of architecture intact while surrendering wholeheart edly to the needs of the Metropolis this architecture relates to the forces of the grat which just means Metropolis like a surfer to the waves which is a quote I'm pretty sure I remember that being in Delirious New York and what is included is only the propositional appendix yeah so it shows the the original front cover all this is in black and white I think the book was originally published in color um and what that shows one thing that shows is that the addition that we've got Now is really quite different and actually I would say graphically less good yeah than the original and someone should publish aimil of the original please yeah they made all the pictures much smaller for some reason and the layout less good and um it's more comprehensible and they've also I think possibly even excluded some of the pictures yeah uh what does the sentence mean or what does the paragraph mean you read it quite quickly yeah I had thought of it I would say what it's about is it's no good fighting against the city and against capitalism Architects shouldn't kind of set themselves up as being in ethical kind of opposition to the state of the world because ultimately they live in a society they live in in an economy what you really need to do is kind of fully inhabit the world fully be part of it and then sort of somehow like Neo at the end of The Matrix like sort of swoosh up on this pure kind of wave of your own creativity and nevertheless create something magical out of the kind of inherent like and necessarily destructive energy which you're surrounded by and I think that that's basically this is the sort of essence of like cool hary and sort of Charisma is like both to be kind of critically distanced from the world and also like wholly a part of it and wholly kind of um born Along on its energy like it's kind of like bismar right you can't um You Can't Make History you can only catch the coattails of it as it passes oh okay and attempt to manipulate it's a quote like that isn't it yeah um that sounds like it yeah and that's spirit is an ongoing part of the sort of philosophy and presentation of R cool house yeah and at one level it seems very reasonable and opposition to it seems Dar yeah and in a way he's saying all of the schools of thought of my peers yeah are canards yeah shouting Into the Storm yeah they're saying the what they see is wrong and that they will change it really what you should do is take what it is and steer it slightly Yeah well yeah I mean well is that yeah yes or no yeah but I mean this is something just to prefigure what we're going to talk about like like a lot of smart people a lot of cool H's Big Ideas are formed on the Anvil of other people's bad ideas and they're like very often often when we're reading the essays like a bit later or even on the Anvil of other people's of opposition to other people's good ideas well yes okay I'm just you know I'm ventriloquizing obviously they would be bad otherwise why would you criticize them the um like when you're reading the essays they're often like quite disperate and there are different bits floating around and what brings them into focus is when you when you realize like oh yeah this is the sort of mirror image of something else that was floating around in Zeitgeist at the time and and when you kind of put it together you can see suddenly uh what it's um what its kind of generative parts are I think we should just Lurch into the into the explication of the of the bits yeah we go through it and then the themes will emerge as we do let's start small you immediately get like a a bit of a picture of how this is going to how this is going to work and how this is going to differ from a kind of conventional architectural monography so we get I mean we've got a few at the start which I think are not really worth talking about in any detail there there's a an exhibition a contribution to an exhibition at the trional in Milan that they did which is a kind of uh historical fantasy about um Mis Vander roa's Barcelona Pavilion which I think at that point had it yet been reconstructed at that point in the 80s I'm not sure whether it had or not it was originally built in the around the 1930 is I think deconstructed and then was rebuilt at some point in the late 20th century and is now there again um what the presentation of the book has is tinted black and white backgrounds inverted in that example although not all of them not all of them yeah uh in the background of bits of the Barcelona Pavilion or things like it and in the foreground a series of images that are not strictly related to anything yeah except they're sort of political some of them are kind of in some ways connected the idea is it's a story of The Pavilion and its materials but large parts of it are just made up they're kind of a fantasy about you know where it's Mater it's marbles get taken away and get used in in kind of other contexts during and the reason I was talking about the presentation is because it is it doesn't show what the exhibition was like no it also doesn't show what the Barcelona Pavilion was like no or his take on the Barcelona Pavilion no it doesn't explain what the images it's showing are no but the spreads it just puts things next to each other in opposition the spreads are rather lovely bits of uh graphic design though they look good I I kind of suspect that some of these pictures might have been um things in the exhibition some of them yeah I'm pretty sure that probably was a bit of the exhibition this one funny column on it um absolutely maybe this other closeup was as well often in the presentation of the projects the bits which are completely excluded are the Long View where you can see the whole thing many of the projects are shown to us en entirely as a series of close-ups and it seems to be very much about Vibes yeah kind of immersive atmospheric but withholding of kind of explanation which is seems to be one of the one of the Maneuvers there's a little uh house project yeah well there's a little essay about Mis vandero which we don't need to go into uh there's a little house project which is like a little house on two levels for some friends and it's like which looks like a international modernist house except with cool house detailing which in this case is crinkly tin yeah and yes thick profiled sort of aluminium windows and things but it again this kind of establishes one of the ways in which projects are going to be shown which is a big emphasis on photography the photography is got a guy called Hans verman I think in general the book is like quite an advert for film photography he does the the kind of the type of Photography is mostly color mostly like a sort of Highly saturated slightly grainy color which par generally sort of magic magic hour kind of greasy well kind of Darker Than That kind of darker than magic hour mostly kind of kind of Dusky Dusky or nighttime the color the color palette is cold and slightly greasy greeny gray Bluey of yeah like very I don't know like the very cyani Skies sometimes lots of Reflections and they feel like quite C cinematographic like the some some of them which which have a bit of the coloration and kind of like finesse of sort of 70s o film or something like that like I think that that that's probably one of the things that they that he likes about it and actually most of the book probably 80% of it is black and white which in this period would have been an economic concern particularly for a book this big yeah and then here we've got sort of classic things so we've got um slight titilation naked person behind a um frosted glass screen uh we've got one of um the naked people are always women yeah we've got one of these what what Bruce Mal Call's world images they they're like things from news media in this case a big building with the facade blown up which I haven't quite been able to work out which one it is but well I think it's the old HSBC building in the city that in the corner is Tower is Nat West Tower okay so this is a post Ira bombing this is an IRA bombing and it's turned sideways there sort of images of real violence which are used as Graphics which I think is to be provocative really yeah and then you got like a nice photo of the facade s like quite cropped in lovely sky Reflections you like a bit of kind of intriguing but basically incomprehensible um sort of view into the interior somewhere dictionary down the side with a big kind of floating photo of a Christo project yeah you know here's the the kind of classic sort of scrap Bicky kind of this is going to this is cable TV channel fcking yeah yeah very cool very like MTV so anyway we those aren't projects which aren't that interesting to talk about but this one is interesting to talk about this is the Fukuoka housing project and this one is treated at some length and it starts with what is the way that he generally wants to introduce all of the projects which is a kind of an aerial photo in this case through an absolutely inscrutable Hae yeah of somewhere which is nowhere near anything to do the project tell where it's near oh is that Fuji well that's Mount Fuji in the back in the middle of Japan and fuk Walker is at the end of Japan so that is a different bit of Japan but there you go and like what are the Aerials trying to say they're they're I think he's really well in this case it's saying this is the sort of urban condition which is there's a messy bit of Scrappy City and then there's a baron was site with a big arrow pointing to it same project goes here yeah here's the sea here's the infrastructure here's all of these here's all this building here's all this stuff I mean you know one of his kind of thesis on the is like it's a big mess and we got to we' got to try and love it we already have been shown a project some projects completely out of context yeah and now we're demonstrating completely out of chronology because this is really late yeah this is a project from the '90s yeah which is almost at the end of the of the yeah um so the it's a development of 23 houses I think and then two little blocks that might be right it's this one of them's got one extra I think okay one's okay sure yeah I think and some and some shops at the front yeah some shops and stuff and basically it's like a hovering horizontal block like a sort he calls it a sockle which is a sort of word for a kind of Podium he uses that word a lot in this book yeah yeah it's a little piece of class classical vocabulary that he's very attached to but but yeah like a sort of like it's like there's a sort of Podium of a building but it's actually hovering at first floor level and it's kind of cut away underneath it and uh the houses are mostly in that like hovering first floor level which is black concrete although some of them come down to the ground each of them is a little Courtyard house their roof profiles are kind of joined together to create these um sort of little uh kind of papery sculptural forms and then at ground floor level there are various Maneuvers going on but which create bit of shops bit of offices way into the underground parking I think and lot of void yeah I'm I've put in a couple of picks which are from the website but not shown in the work because they allow you to see what the what the building is really like so that's a uh that's a model of one of the blocks and you can see like the way in which it it works together it's kind of it's like a sort of square-ish block slightly irregular uh which has been divided into sort of 3x4 is to create exactly 3x4 and um and yeah but the presentation in the book you know it becomes a big story about lots of things but mostly about the kind of Lost in Translation e story of um being a foreigner in in Japan uh it has a diary that runs all the way through it has sort of medit like bits of um Japanese ephemera including quite a lot of pornography yeah and sort of more or less sort of droll profound or benal kind of observations about the process of of going there and working uh working in this context and it is all quite engaging he really enjoys being compared the architect Compares him so he's working with a local Japanese architect and developer and the development is we're going to get a series of sort of St Architects to do a series of developer housing yeah I think the impetus was initiated just before the massive crash and it managed to continue and get done yeah rather than get cancelled and the local architect that he's working with Compares him his architectural design style to an auto atic pitching machine yes um which he enjoys and which points possibly to some qualities we could get into later with the style there is quite a lot of that going on I don't really know the story of Fukuoka but it seems to have had there's quite a lot of post of sort of development around this time there's a big Aldo Rossy project there it's quite cool cool facade yeah weird yeah which actually I mean Co has himself talks about in the globalization essay I think at one point he does yeah there are these little drw drw kind of moments I like this one about meetings we had been six times to Japan each time for seven days each day we had meetings 25 people today together from 8:00 a.m. to 10: p.m. at each meeting meeting 200 to 400 points Point number one please choose between two grays for the bathroom well people who I've had a pretty modest contact with office architecture but yes buff or satin satin yes or semi gloss but then the punch line Point number 113 the foundations don't work yeah this inability to Define hierarchy what's this what's this about he says uh Japanese inability to Define hierarchy or deliberate scrambling to keep the Foreigner on high alert and then he says that they all do the Japanese meetings now and I don't believe it no I don't believe it either I think it's a little rough and then he actually does provide quite a lot of information about the buildings and how they work which is which at one level means you can actually work out how the project works I don't think we should discuss this project at Great length a lot of Maneuvers have gone on to make it sort of architecturally interesting I'm not sure if the net result the net result is that there's a lot of in information you can read in the plans and sections about how the man set of Maneuvers he's done to create um different like control views and things and and lift the plan I I am agnostic about whether the net result of all of this clever cleverness is would be good or mediocre but it would at least be interesting and he's also left all the plans labeled in Japanese so that you have to then go to a key to work out what the Japanese words mean um they're incredibly minimally labeled and I find them quite hard to read yeah but I did look at them a bit and you can work out what the Project's all about with them even though it's relatively complicated there is unusually for this book quite a lot of useful yeah but this also this is also like the classic approach so we have kind of introduction we've got some photos we have this travel log which intersperses travelog Japanese porn and other ephemera um some black and white photos of the Interiors of the completed project and then we have like a massive info dump of a load of plans and loads of sections rather unhelpfully labeled and very starkly black and white without any context and then we have one picture of um some Shinto priests blessing a site next to a Motorway and that's the end of the project yeah and it's you know this is the kind of yeah this is the sort of slightly confrontational if you spend a lot of time with it and really chisel away at it you can with the information he's provided for this project work out what it's about how it would work there's the information in this example at least I recommend looking it up on their website though because they have often the things although even the website is quite selectively edited the website's very selective but e the you can also see there are bits which are still in the canonical record of projects which he's left out of the book which are nearly always things which show the overall project in a way where you can understand it as a kind of three-dimensional form yes that's the thing which is nearly always excluded you can work out when the book came out you wouldn't have been able to do that yeah you wouldn't have had access to this that I don't know if you may have had a website or not but it wouldn't have been a way that people dealt with information you would had to cross reference it with the L cocis um or something like that something like that but it would have been very difficult he's kind of wanting you to only be able to understand it if you really really really work at it in a way that nearly everyone wouldn't you can get it but you've got to like yeah first you can see I'm really cool and once you've got I'm really really cool once you've got I'm really really cool then you can really work at it if you think if you're good enough and then you might be able to understand some basic things about this project which are quite straightforward there a little I mean there very yeah I mean one of the ways of thinking about this is a little bit like I'm not going to sing the chorus you guys already know the words you know like that kind of yeah it's very it's caky yeah you can either like be a sort of elite you can either be kind of elite and understand it or you can be an acolyte already and sing the chorus yeah I've already got the addition of a+u 10 and something something which has got this project in so yeah that's it yeah and then on the surface just like really really Z iy yeah which is both cool and quite a dick move yeah and then we get a project which only has two pages which is a refurbishment of a hotel somewhere in the Alps which is two photos as kind of very washed out um full bleed background one of the photo of the hotel perched far away on top of a hill in a big landscape and one an extreme closeup of some chairs on a Terrace and then there again there's like a much more um much sparer kind of diary SL travelog with some absolutely tiny pictures which are I mean they're not literally thumbnailed but they're about the size of the first did joint of my thumb yeah that's one of the ways in which we're going to encounter projects yep uh he offered does this to El Li stuff he doesn't like yeah just thinks that thinks are kind of boring and then we get one of the projects which is actually given like a really long treatment in s which is the um the v v dealva v dealva which is a house in Paris and he clearly quite likes this project yeah like he quite likes for quer but you can tell he likes it Villa Dal dala yeah I don't know how I'm not going to in San clude the business of the business of where to draw the line of pronouncing foreign words is only going to end up with looking like a you can tell here's something I thought you could tell he likes this project because it starts the first image of it you know he does his like sight aerial thing and blah blah and then there's a kind of diary down the side as we often have of his musings and it starts with the site at an angle with it cut out going I'm going to show this in a really confrontational way and then the next picture is I can't I can't we it this is too cool my work is too good I'm going to show you the same thing anyway and I'm just going to come pretend I haven't which is a picture where it shows you the project and it is a cool project it's uh it's this was this was referenced so much yeah especially these little column little thin columns at funny angles so this yeah is an extremely like like Euro 90s kind of um house it's the brief is there's a family with a grown-up daughter and want a little apartment for for them and they want one for her and uh they also want various other things they want a swimming pool on the roof they want a roof Terrace well initially she's meant to be an infant yeah but it not for long yeah well they kind of want the option of that in the in the future and it's basically these two like boxes which are connected uh so it's a bit like a I don't know how you describe it like a little two two kind of boxes with the sort of perpendicular bit in the middle which contains the entrance to circulation a swimming pool on the roof and the kind of bottom and top bits are um are like bedroom accommodation and yeah and they're floating they're two like floating first floor boxes which are clad again in uh anodized crinkly um crinkly uh metal and they've got strip Windows uh the front one is on these um kind of wonky little thin columns um in a maneuver later better associated with um will allop who I kind of really did this to death but and yeah what can you what can you kind of say about it it's um it's a cool house there's a sort of story about how the form of it comes to some extent out of the out of the kind of permissible zoning there's obviously uh relationship and to some extent kind of satire on ler who has some houses uh not that far away there is a kind of fun story in the final design about construction where there are some sort of little constructional jokes like the um the upstairs balcony uh is actually fenced off with this kind of plastic Orange um netting that you get around construction sites as a kind of permanent feature yeah it's a really expensively built building with some really cheap stuff in it really cheap plywood yeah it's got conspicuously local buan or International modernist details in some places and then things that are very much not that yeah it's kind of the the pilosis have gone wonky they're steel and they've got the strip Windows um for someone against someone who's like railing against sort of postmodernism in this book quite a lot although often at a slight distance yeah he does a lot of it he does yeah well that's the or people railing are getting he rails against deconstruction yeah he thinks it's moronic but um he does quite a lot of it I can't remember someone's got a quotation about like this is one of the things which um K House's contempories found annoying about him was that he was he was against all of these things except when he did them in his own special way and the presentation is gets initially there's a sort of a kind of sparse like diary of the project which recounts the kind of chaotic early stages of it and it going off the rails and you know um kind of classic things like them having to move in while it's still on site and things like that which is actually extremely common then we kind of get straight into have you ever worked on a house where someone has that didn't happen it didn't happen yeah uh no no I mean I'm living on one now in in a rather kind of polite way um and then we kind of get straight into the pictures lots and lots of full bleed pictures and sometimes we have kind of multiple pictures on a page or we have like one where he's put in a little bit of um uh verir as some sort of aspirational it's quite a good bit of um Graphics that layout actually it's the color the color work is classy I think the photos are great I mean they they're super of their time but like I think the book in general I would say is a real advert for film photography and digital publishing yeah like yeah that you this wouldn't really be possible this work wouldn't be possible without you know whatever it was yeah probably like a probably a quark file that was testing the upper bounds of hard disk size in those days but um yeah it you know the the best of the both of them there lots of like lovely Reflections there's a sort of a photo you know one the whole thingers about Quark it's like um in design right the files are tiny oh no I thought was is it uh someone can correct us yeah might be I thought it's all embedded is it it doesn't really matter maybe I'm wrong anyway oh dear sorry if I've calumniated good old Quark here's a classic sort of titillating photo with someone's naked feet sticking out of a bed in uh shown in reflection in the in the right of the of the shot loads and loads of photos lots of pictures in addition to there being strategies to make it hard to understand there are even more strategies to make the book bigger he wanted this book to be enormous yeah I think REM cool house was quite driven got a lot of stuff done work a lot he said he spent seven months just working on the book and there's a he's really wanting to show that um there's a lot of stuff here and so it's just got lots of pages and where you could have Illustrated this project with fewer images he's used a lot of images which don't necessarily add to your understanding of it very much I mean this photo here with you got someone in the swimming pool wearing a jumper and someone in the background wearing a kind of dressing gown VIs ible through a window which looks like uh that looks like a piece of kind of like music photography from a Art Market magazine in the yeah '90s or something like that you can see architects who are really influential often sort of invent uh a kind of model of celebrity that they want to be or like a kind of cuz it's not really totally clear what like a famous architect is meant to be like and quite often when Architects have become famous in a new way they've also slightly appropriated like a model of celebrity from elsewhere in the elsewhere in the firmament like you know Peter Eisenman very much sort of at times in his career is is is kind of channeling the image of the French theorist cool house at this point is like very much seems to be you know trying to be a kind of cool magazine guy you know it's funny the pictures you've got on the um slideshow yeah there's quite difference to the book which is that your phone which you took them with no these These are with a camera but or the camera yeah which you've taken them with has color balanced them yeah and um and also sort of washed them out a bit has well the opposite it's kind of punched them up quite a lot like well I'm sorry about the violence that's not that's not bad it's just that um they make it look a lot more uh they make it look a lot less grainy and washed out yeah and smear and funny colors than it appears in the book yeah I don't know if the if the if the print's different in the additions yeah actually it's gone much more contrasty in the dark areas yeah I mean look also look at this the the one in the slideshow makes it look quite tropical yeah this one has got a kind of heat Haze in the original photo which again has been oh dear I've probably got some kind of setting on that I oughtn't I oughtn't to I mean also I mean one rather than scanning stuff I did I took photos of the book partly because I couldn't face scanning it cuz it's so annoying to scan so big it's insanely annoying and difficult to scan that's what he did yeah when he includes bits of all photographs yeah and um yeah but it means that they've all been photographed in the kind of weak watery uh winter Skylight in my upstairs room so it's not um it's not necessarily the best the best conditions it also has drawings which in this case are like quite small on the page pseudo like construction drawings they've been marked up in red pen all although the marking up is uh kind of direct as commentary rather than actual sort of Corrections when he presents this project in lectures he likes to talk about the main decision like the house just came together like nothing whatever I didn't really have to think about it uh but mainly we were working on what what line the Garden Path should take should it be Wiggly yeah that's all marked up in here there's a big uh kind of something which is very fond of big internal ramp when we go through this book uh and in the later episodes of this book we'll talk about ramps and not level floors but at this stage it's still or in this example not stage cuz this is quite late in its final Incarnation it feels very much like a lusian ramp in the beginning of modernism there's the promise of the ramp the ramp is much more exciting than the staircase or the level floor it points to a position that's about the way people move in three-dimensional space and the movement is dynamic which is the one I can't remember any of the names of the Villas now but which the one with the internal ramp which is the one where he also has the vision for the art collection where you L Ro is it lar Ro yeah yeah uh where you walk where the ramp is actually somewhere to be yeah as well but there's a significant ramp in savoir as well yeah it's just feels really modern right it's like something you might get in a machine machine but you also have the excitement of moving in three dimensions feels like a Motorway yeah but there are some obvious reasons why most of the time not level floors for the accommodation of the building is a bit of a dead end and then it has this funny little postcript which is like they lived happily ever after uh one day they looked out the window and 30 people were standing outside looking in which is you know yeah the face of people who build build a a great B of architecture as their as their private residents they said they wanted a Masterpiece in it and uh that's what you're going to get I you don't do that by accident do you yes indeed it does look it does look like a a very cool house and yeah the um it's just the materiality is just very 90s isn't it it's kind of like lightweight that there was a particular way that everyone was doing their windows at that time wasn't there like like relatively thick on and sort of flat on the outside uh glazing profiles yeah like a kind of plasticky either either plastic sticky or or kind of anodized often with quite a lot of intermediate bars yeah slightly soupy green glass surfaces being flat and having like a sort of flat cutout texture yeah and a bit of material that just runs to the edge and then you just see the flat edge of it and then it it's all something else none of the planes have any thickness like paper yeah shiny and it's like the beginning of the computer I think computer aesthetic the the atmosphere should be very synthetic silver like the front of the book is silver yeah it's a lot of nostalgia about the fashion of the era at the moment I notice yeah there is yeah um and then at the end of s which we might just talk about uh we then suddenly get this burst of three essays together two of which are technically an S and one of which is technically the beginning of M which are imagining nothing imagining nothingness the terrifying beauty of the 20th century and field trip which are written two in 1985 and one in 1993 just just kind of immediately before doing this book I guess the essays sort of align with the different scales of the book in the sense that the there's sometimes a theme or a concept that is the dominant one like L and XL I feel like there's a kind of broad like thematic consistency in S and M and we kind of got this and we've also got one or two other ones it's a bit more various and they deal quite a lot actually with his formation the way in which he sort of has critically kind of formed himself against his contemporaries and the the kind of charismatic figures of the preceding Generations the essays and the writing in general is a real Attack on everyone else more or less so we could read a bit from the start of this um who does not feel an acute Nostalgia for the types who could no more than 15 years ago condemn or was it liberate after all whole areas of alleged Urban desperation change entire Destinies speculate seriously on the future with diagrams of untenable absurdity leave entire auditor auditoriums panting over Doodles left on the Blackboard manipulate politicians with their Savage statistics bow ties the only external sign of their Madness for the time when they were still thinkers so this is kind of which is a description there is only one bit of that which is not cool house which is the bow tie with him it's like the turtleneck sweater yeah uh all Steve Jobs but the thesis like the thesis is like we're no longer in an age of Heroes and I think it was true like Architects after the 60s had kind of become increasingly a bit sort of marginal they they were really in a in a kind of world of high art and um uh Prestige sort of culture but no one there are sort of episodes in the history of om where people asked for a bit of help on a city quarter or whatever but but in general people are not really looking for new thesis on how to but do you think do you think they actually were asking for that in the 50s and 60s uh there were periods yeah I mean in the immediate post war definitely there were and then people kept talking it for about it for a while afterwards well people were doing the cities and people were using the Architects but I don't feel that there was I think when you look backwards time is telescoped down and the influence of thinkers pops out because it's clear but I think at the time it usually seems a lot more impotent you're relying on the self-promotion of the architects in question or or Urban designers and if we look back at the time that he was dealing with I think it's no less true in the postwar era in Europe there were a lot of blown up cities and so there were a lot of plans for them often to blow them up a bit more a lot more yeah and that finished the job kind of social economic political movement is the thing that changed and what he's describing is someone exactly like what he wants to be I mean the the the essay is kind of cryptic it talks about various things it talks a bit about this um project this OAS project uh for Berlin where they were talking about dealing with what then was very much a shrinking City by kind of selectively demolishing all the nondescript bits and kind of con concentrating it into an archipelago of characteristic Urban fragments cool house himself had worked on that I think lots of these um essays which are very engaging to read there's no difficulty his writing is very easy to go from one sentence to the next and um it's got a nice clip yeah and it's argued with a real Force although where his voes in that Force is ambiguous like is this something I'm arguing for and when I say ambiguous I don't mean that he's not he's standing back from it like sometimes it seems that he's arguing for it and sometimes not and it sort of flips yeah well they're not they're not aligned are they they like the voice of the essays and the voice of the buildings are um too linked but kind of semi-autonomous but the voice within the essays just within the works themselves sometimes is um uh a remote commentary and sometimes is an argument for something he does occasionally do that yeah he will want to kind of flip between them but then when you've read this nice Pros it's very difficult to work out what he's talking about quite a lot um as what he means in particular yeah I wonder if this one originally was attached to something like a bit more obvious imagining nothingness is Pompei a City built with the absolute minimum of walls and roofs the Manhattan grid Central Park broa City the Guggenheim Hiller's Midwest which is I think a project by lud hiler for Chicago which I don't know anything about but it sort of ends up as this uh slightly cryptic kind of homage to vacuity in the Metropolis big spaces Big Empty things it's funny isn't it because one of the themes going through the urbanism of here he's still in favor of congestion yeah and earlier on he'd called himself an apostle of congestion but now he's also in favor of void these are some things he like he likes big motorways running through the city chopping everything up he likes big open blank spaces in the city he likes density and specificity he likes generic things and he doesn't and he thinks that his peers are fools yeah well they probably are I mean you know what Architects are like so then the terrifying beauty of the 20th century is well it's about kind of modernist modernism and modernist revisionism first of all the um the kind of Goan often rather destructive optimism of uh modernism in the in the 20th century city I mean this is more about Europe than other places yeah he talks about thoughtless modernity well I mean everyone knows what the Redevelopment of these these sorts of cities is like lots of slabs lots of blocks lots of motorways lots of um kind of accidental and slightly blasted spaces in between lots of ugliness and then this sort of Swing which he'd witnessed in his peers and people probably slightly older than him back against that and uh towards a kind of Revival of historicist sort of value and um contextualism and things like that which he satirizes rather enjoyably he talks about I mean this is one where you can see he's talking a little bit more about kind of design practice he's talking about working in Rotterdam he satirizes people who like over over fix8 on the existing context both in the sense of so when they're proposing something somewhere both like over endowing the things around with a kind of ideological charge you know like this this modernism kind of represents the domination of kind of rationality or the kind of crushing of the human Spirit or the kind of the rupture with the the sort of uh kind of organic historic vernacular or whatever it is just sort of thinking too too much about all of that and then letting that kind of determine your response and he kind of um yeah even the most mediocre aspects uh are invested with a retroactive conceptual and ideological charge and he says like a lot of stuff that you encounter in um these cities kind of churned up by War rebuilt by modernism and now 30 years later and looking a bit shagged uh like a lot of what you're encountering is just accidental is just kind of uh someone's not very good pragmatism and that it's much better not to overthink it he sort of satirizes all the kind of contextualists as chasing the faintest hit of an hint of an idea with the obstinacy of a detective on a juicy case of adultery which is like you have to imagine in the kind of classic like Dead Pan um accent and then his which is definitely a uh which is funny like disease I mean it's a disease more of student work than God yeah the context it doesn't matter that much like well it can matter a lot yeah but it doesn't always and most certainly just because something's there it doesn't matter actually context matters a great deal but it isn't not everything about the site you can't latch on to something on the site and yeah uh go this thing makes everything make sense it's not um you know it's not like you can reconstruct the whole thing from any thing parent examined to the point of Destruction so anyway he ends up with this kind of call for recognizing the objective potential of these sites and exploiting them in kind of whatever way without worrying too much about their kind of ideological charge and also for kind of doing things which are big and simple R cool house known for simple Maneuvers yeah they're not exactly simple he's no I would all his projects are highly convoluted but again so here we here we're like encountering uh what are we on the mirror image of here like uh postmodern historicism kind of new urbanism and also Dutch structuralist uh kind of Dogma in favor of breaking things down into like the smallest uh possible level kind of trying to always bring a later um essay he will literally list yeah things he's attacking yeah and I think that like so the structuralists had been they're like the big uh sort of Team 10 generation there of in the Netherlands you know they're people who are are kind of like young and upand cominging Architects with big ideas in the early 1960s and I think that they were still knocking around and I I at one point I think Kus was teaching at Del and I think no doubt no doubt kind of rled with a lot of the older uh generation and it's quite enjoyable to go liberate yourself from your neurotic concerns about yeah the existing and do something big and bold sort of what he's saying a recurring theme not always what he actually does yeah yes so I contradict myself yeah very well I contain multitudes the part of the structure of the book I think is that it is chaotic and then a level of um background layout and you know putting clashing images together which is added allows the contradictory um tones and expressions to sit alongside each other meaning that um it's very yeah it's got a lot of capacity you can hold a lot inside this book because it's so messy when You' collage didn't do this after being a student but when I was would colge as a student I'd put everything together and then the images would have like different sort of resolutions and Grains and then you just put uh noise on top and then blur the noise yeah and he's putting all these different images and things that are not to do with anything and this like strip of stuff down the side allows I think the contradictory aspects to be accommodated because they're not any more contradictory than the general and quite obviously deliberate tone so something that he's doing with his writings is I'm I'm going to try I'm going to vehemently make a case that I'm not sure is quite right to see if it works yeah and to provoke a response yeah you know if his method of thinking is I'm going to react against a proposition with a with a counter proposition and then then I guess look at that myself and see how it responds yeah it's dialectic isn't it yeah well it's like that thing you know you don't have to debate people you can just saiz them like you can just make fun of them you can well that is also debating them in a way well no it's not like you don't have to give your counterargument we don't have to both have a thesis I don't have to say what I think I should do instead I could just make fun of you and make you look stupid that's also that's also like a way to do it and uh but he often he but he actually does put a lot of he doesn't all he doesn't you're not sure about how much he's committing to them but he puts a lot of thesis in this often ones that are quite absurd free floating yeah okay and then there's one more which is which is field trip uh which is an essay about the Berlin walls and this is really his kind of um origin story as a student characteristically kind of strange and provocative way to do it normally for a student you would imagine them finding their identity as a designer through their main design project through their their kind of thesis design or something like that but um for kol hus it's through uh this kind of measured drawing project that you had to do in the summer holidays where you were expected to go and draw you know a palladian villa or uh or something of that sort and do proper plans and sections of it and bring them back and he chooses to do the Berlin Wall the Berlin Wall as architecture you can see that that is at one level readable as slightly juvenile piece of provocation but his story is that it turns out to be unexpectedly profound and that you kind of learn all sorts he learns all kinds of things through this engagement with the Berlin Wall the the essay starts off with a a little sketch of the various large and charismatic personalities um who are floating around the AA at that time including Peter Smithson Cedric price Charlie jenx Alvin boasi um his future partner Elia zenelis Lewis khah who I think was just there for a lecture the essay is really the story of how he kind of got out from under them and all of their various kind of hobby horses and projects and got out on his own and it's the Berlin Wall those kind of observations which are sort of obvious but which are nevertheless like some more interesting like the wall is actually when you really think about it around the free part of Berlin not the unfree part you know like it's an the the geography of um East Germany was that there was this chunk of West Germany floating in the middle of it which was a kind of um enclave and actually weirdly it wasn't part of West Germany it was occupied yeah it was part of an ongoing unending yeah occupation of France Britain in America yeah you could go there and not have to do your national service you know he charts like the history of and the development of the wall as a barrier which does start off literally with like a line of soldiers preventing people from crossing the city one day and then becomes a kind of barbed wire barrier becomes a kind of Breeze block barrier and then you know laterally quite rapidly expands into this quite large Minefield and free fire zone with a big wall on either side of it yeah the history is interesting as a project firstly I thought he went to architecture school having done other things for a few years and would have been a bit older than everyone and kind of stood back would be more experienced and able to kind of better pull off a provocation and also I think he'd gone into architecture school knowing that he wanted to be something and probably had a more coherent idea yeah of what he wanted to become there's two kind of tones I think yeah in this one of which is the Berlin wall is clearly quite profound yeah it was a profound a great and terrible thing he talks about the image of people being stuck shot dying on the top of the Barb Wire yeah of this image dividing and it of the city divided and its effect po little moments of in the early days of the wall uh where the two halves of a wedding party are kind of waving to one another over the over the top of the barrier uh and that's all quite true and it obviously is an enormous intervention and it's an intervention which is like architecture it is an architectural intervention because it's a physical built thing and it's obviously also political principally um architectural acts are often political acts the architecture is often a tool of policy and there's that tone which is smart right but it is also mixed with a tone which is juvenile and deliberately provocative sort of enjoying he finds it beautiful and funny well yeah he talks about the kind of the beauty of the wall and even that is a statement which you could defend yeah I mean he talks about it uh about a kind of dreadful Beauty I don't know there are some bits which are a bit like sort of weird zingers which he then seems to have toned down a bit to make them less crash like at one point he s of talks about like here's the ultimate proof that less is more it's like is the kind of undemonstrative nature of um of this big pre-cast wall marching across the landscape there's a tone and in fact it goes through the work and it goes through his things which is Crash and juvenile he could put he but he has sort of toned it down like there could be a version of this project and maybe it's in its original presentation it was like this which could be like Bernard schumi's um posters about architecture like these kind of um kind of r large sort of provocations um and a lot of it he's you know he has a kind of obscure reference to shinkle sloth gleener which is a a kind of early very strip back bit of bit of classicism which I mean I I sort of I take to be a referenced to a kind of like a sort of a minimal but what else is there the gica bridge which is the bridge where bought East Germans were returned to the West oh really God you know where the where the sort of exchange would occur and lots of Cold War stuff happens what comes out of this um project I think chronologically is before the voluntary prisoners of architecture which is crass in the the um in that it's like an archigram joke of torture yeah yeah it's a kind of arram version of the Berlin Wall the volun prisoners but it it depicts violence done against people you know kind of it sort of depict sort of War crime Aesthetics yeah and comedy cartoon Aesthetics together yeah I mean I think arag probably deserve a bit of that you know because I've got to burst their bubble somehow well that's fine yeah um but it is done as a joke as well yeah I mean to be honest with REM cool house there is a problem that it like appears to be a real lack of humanity you know he likes congestion and all this sort of stuff and likes all these people getting together but you don't get a feeling that he has like a lot of heart and there's not like a lot of it's quite often clever and cold and the way he you know talks about life is quite inhuman but he does laugh yeah the sometimes the the the laughter is humanizing yes the cool mask will sometimes break and he'll be finding things genuinely funny yeah um the laughter is humanizing I think he just doesn't like all these kind of sanctimonious self- mythologizing kind of buffoons he I don't think it's the weapon against them is kind of a a kind of merciless yeah a kind of merciless sort of rhetorical cruelty but yeah no yeah yeah but I don't but I don't think that's like the whole I think it's genuinely um I think being able to eliminate the worrying too much about the human qualities allows for a greater intellectual freedom to explore uh sort of formal and special prop anyway blah blah blah blah blah yeah the other thing about this actually the um this essay is it comes yeah right at the end of the period of the chronology of this and addresses the beginning the beginning yeah so it's looking back 20 years quite a lot had happened well we've now got to M we've bridged the Gap from s we've run out of time to record now so we'll just have to do a bit of M in the next section but if if this ends up being the end of this episode then thanks a lot for listening and I think that will probably be a good place I think shorter episodes is better episodes yeah I guess we'll paste some stuff from the book on our socials as normal they're at about uncore buildings on most platforms or about hyphen buildings rather annoyingly new I've always working on on the new social media platform which I have always internally thought of as blue Ski Blue SK and and all the things the skis and sort of doing everything with it but um it's blue SK speaking of liberal enclaves uh yeah we're on blui now and um yeah we're uh yeah it's about hyphen buildings Oni because the underscore is not permitted but yeah F we'll find us that it's the same content on all the platforms so just you know yeah go on whichever one you prefer I'm uh happy we're doing this work I wasn't excited about smlxl I was revolted by it when I was younger and I think I'm REM curious now oh are you okay but I think I'm probably slightly REM jaded but I'm happy to yeah you you were you were REM acolyte I'm REM I'm early on I'm happy to talk about it I definitely find it more interesting as like a piece of media now I think I've got quite a lot to talk about there and it's nice the old about buildings method where you have to read it all the way to the end is kind of a I mean it's an ordal but it's um there's a trick with this book though it's actually do you think SML XL is longer than Delirious New York as in terms of words in terms of like a mount of stuff I'm not sure it really is I don't know I think there is quite a lot in there I've I realized reading it that I had never got to the end of XL before yeah in all the time you were really yeah okay can we just have a little reminisce about how you found this when you first encountered it because I can remember you being very enthusiastic about it yeah well it is good I mean yeah I loved I loved the early projects and I love um well the bits that we'll talk about in the in in kind of M&L there some there some great projects and I love the presentation I think uh it is a really great and successful bit of um of graphic design yeah I guess I fell under its spell a bit Yeah but that that was sort of 19 or something so yeah some time ago some ago have a think have a think about it cuz I've kind of yeah I mean yeah my relationship to discovering this book is sort of similar to kol House's reminiscence of Peter Smithson in the crit room you know it's a couple of decades ago now yeah but I'm not sure I've got anything as uh uh as kind of worked out as he does to say about it well we're going to stop now yeah and you can think about it yes and we will have a a a pause of a few days and the release will probably have a much greater pause yeah they normally do uh but yeah thanks for listening and uh see you on the next one thank you very much bye-bye