short fat unit 4 - material form
the arbitrary nature of this architectural education begins to worry me and my scheduled conversation with gerry adler has been postponed. kiad is simply a factory reproducing the shitstem and i should know that people will not be able to behave at their best within it. all of us are occasionally aware of the disabling institutionalised nonsense that surrounds us. attending a third year class on a pattern language yesterday i realised i should have written the seminar "christopher alexander - an introduction" weeks ago and already be repeating it. the world i want will only come about through civic engagement and education
meanwhile, like a souk, my arse. why do these short fat units feel like administrative conveniences manufactured just in time. is it to do wth the poor level of presentation or just their general incoherence. i doubt that a souk would arise in the castle street car park even after a nuclear holocaust. living marketplaces are the result of incremental adaptive growth and their structure unfolds in space over time
the most beautiful part of the site is the steep bank, the trees and the view of the back gardens of the adjoining terraced houses. when it's sunny the place is magical and the large black shed has a powerful presence. obviously their wholeness was ignored and the area severely damaged by the building of the car park. personally i like the brutality of concrete but the cartesian nodes formed by these prestressed members look like comparatively weak centers
having earlier chosen to try and display the center for environmental structure's collection of carpets i gave up on the site and decided to submit a really good "Submission Requirements: 1. Principle of space and form generation:" instead