Books, Design and Culture
Skydweller combines over 5,000 photographs of London taken from the top of Cromwell Tower, one of the three residential towers in the city’s Barbican Estate. The short film is accompanied by music specially composed by Tom Rosenthal and poetry by Paul Haworth:
(via ArchDaily)
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Christopher Turner reviews Building Seagram by Phyllis Lambert and Mies van der Rohe by Franz Schulze and Edward Windhorst for February’s London Review of Books:
Comments closedMies had dreamed of building skyscrapers since the early 1920s when, as a young architect in Berlin recently returned from the war, he’d been seduced by images of the thrusting New York skyline. Influenced by the utopian futurism of Paul Scheerbart, author of Glasarchitektur, Mies proposed a 20-storey tower completely sheathed in glass. It would have loomed over Berlin like an enormous faceted crystal: each wall was positioned at a slight angle to reflect and refract the light. He was fond of quoting St Augustine – ‘beauty is the radiance of truth’ – and wanted to celebrate rather than disguise structural form. ‘Only skyscrapers under construction reveal the bold constructive thoughts,’ Mies wrote, ‘and then the impression of the high-reaching steel skeletons is overpowering.’ In his glass tower, the bones of the building, with their cantilevered floor slabs, would have been visible through a shimmering, crystalline skin.
The glass skyscraper was, as Schulze and Windhorst put it, ‘beyond the threshold of constructability’ (and would only be possible in the 1970s – Mies was fifty years ahead of his time), but it was intended less as a realistic proposal than a radical, modernist statement. It would thrust him to the forefront of the European avant-garde.
The Rizzoli Bookstore is one of the most beautiful bookstores in the world and an icon of New York City architecture. Unfortunately the owners of 31 West 57th Street, the store’s home for 30 years, have recently announced their plan to demolish the six-story, 109-year-old building and replace it with a highrise “ultraluxury” tower. The Landmarks Preservation Commission, whose mission is “to be responsible for protecting New York City’s architecturally, historically, and culturally significant buildings,” has declined to grant landmark status to the building on the grounds that the property “lacks the architectural significance necessary to meet the criteria for designation,” despite its apparent architectural and cultural importance. A campaign to save the store, and a petition to have 31 West 57th Street designated an individual and interior landmark have been started.
You can read more about the plans to demolish the building in The New York Times. While at The New Yorker, Jon Michaud wrote about his time working at the store:
Comments closedMany of the things that Rizzoli offered its customers (and its staff) are now easily obtainable online: international periodicals, European popular music, and books in foreign languages. But there is nothing online that will replace the ambiance of the place. With its vaulted atrium, marble flooring, and wood-panelled shelving units, Rizzoli looked like the private library of a Medici prince, the sort of place where an Umberto Eco character would hunt down an ancient secret.
I was just in Chicago this past weekend, so I was really interested in this short documentary about the battle to preserve the former Prentice Women’s Hospital in the city. Designed by modern architect Bertrand Goldberg, the building — composed of a nine-story concrete cloverleaf tower cantilevered over a rectangular five-story podium — is owned by Northwestern University, which is in the process of demolishing it. The film is directed by journalist and Northwestern alumnus Nathan Eddy:
Comments closedI didn’t know that influential German artist Kurt Schwitters spent the last years of his life in exile in England’s Lake District creating something called the ‘Merz Barn’. Did you?
Schwitters started constructing the original ‘Merzbau’ (pictured above) inside his Hannover studio in the 1920’s and continued to work on it until he fled Nazi Germany in 1937. The Merzbau itself was later destroyed in an Allied bombing raid in World War II.
The uncompleted ‘Merz Barn’ that Schwitters began building near Elterwater in the Lake District is much less well-known. The latest TateShots video visits this only surviving example of Schwitters’ Merz environment:
(I’m not entirely sure how or why radio presenter Tom Ravenscroft (son of the late John Peel) is involved, but if you don’t listen to his weekly music show on BBC, you should probably take a listen… if you like that sort of thing.)
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Cartoonist Chris Ware has rightly been garnering a lot of attention for his new ‘graphic novel’ Building Stories, 14 books, booklets, magazines, newspapers and pamphlets that collect a decade of comics from The New Yorker, The New York Times and McSweeney’s, as well as previously unpublished work.
Douglas Wolk, author of Reading Comics, reviews the book for The New York Times:
You will never be able to read “Building Stories” on a digital tablet, by design. It is a physical object, printed on wood pulp, darn it. It’s a big, sturdy box, containing 14 different “easily misplaced elements” — a hard-bound volume or two, pamphlets and leaflets of various dimensions, a monstrously huge tabloid à la century-old Sunday newspaper comics sections and a folded board of the sort that might once have come with a fancy game. In which order should one read them? Whatever, Ware shrugs, uncharacteristically relinquishing his customary absolute control. In the world of “Building Stories,” linearity leads only to decay and death.
Comics historian Jeet Heer is as insightful as always for a somewhat undeserving Globe and Mail:
This marriage of comics and architecture might sound surprising, but it has a long history, which Ware, deeply knowledgeable about the past, knows well. The modern skyscraper emerged at the same time as modern narrative cartooning, in the middle of the 19th century, although both forms had prehistories that extend further into the past. The classic Sunday newspaper comic strip, with many panels on the page laid out on a grid, has obvious parallels with tall many-windowed office buildings, a fact that pioneering cartoonists like Winsor McCay played with when they drew stories that used the New York skyline not just as a backdrop but as a virtual character. The drawing board of a cartoonist is not unlike the drafting table of an architect. And in both drawing comics and imagining homes, you work with grids, rectangles and cubes and need to have mastered perspective.
And Rick Moody, author of The Ice Storm, gets terribly excited at Salon:
Building Stories is a masterpiece, above all, because it cares about human beings, many of them women. It cares enough to observe human beings closely, both when they are behaving themselves, and when they are engaging in their manifold selfishnesses. It cares enough about them to depict them when they are attractive and when they are singularly unattractive. The contemporary novel, it bears mentioning, does not care this much, because the contemporary novel is so preoccupied with affirmation that it will not risk what Ware is willing to risk.
Other reviews include David L. Ulin for The LA Times, Glen Weldon for NPR, Ian McGillis for the Montreal Gazette, and Rachel Cooke in The Guardian.
The Guardian and New York Magazine also have short interviews with Ware, but there also several excellent longer ones.
At Publishers Weekly, Ware speaks to Calvin Reid:
the idea behind the book is to try to get at the way we remember things, the way we put our lives together in our memories and kind of rewrite our own memories sometimes to suit ourselves. Also to get at a sense of how when you are remembering something that’s happened to you, sometimes you can almost lose yourself in that memory to the point where you lose the sense of the world around you, maybe just for a few seconds or something like that. I had hoped that with this book, that if say you start reading one story and interpret it as the present and then move on to another part of the book and realize that it wasn’t actually the present you were reading about, it was actually the character’s past, that that that might get at a little tiny bit of that feeling. I mean, every book is about a story happening from beginning to end and somebody changing as the story goes on but I wanted to try to create something that is maybe a little more analogous to the way that it feels in my brain, which is maybe a little more three dimensional and uncertain than that…
At the The LA Review of Books, Casey Burchby:
I don’t draft or script; the drawings and stories form themselves out of the images and what they suggest as I draw them, along with the memories they might dredge up. There’s really no way I could plan these things; the connections and coincidences that occur have to happen on the page. I’ve noticed that there’s a sort of nervousness on the part of the reader as to when exactly it is that the writer or artist starts winging it, as if that information has to be taken into account when assessing whether a story is believable or not, but it seems to me that writing an outline or a script on typing paper is just as much winging it as drawing directly on the page, and the latter approach allows the composition and scale to structure and shape the story, as well – which only taking notes or making thumbnails does not do. I do erase. I also have general ideas, themes, notions — whatever you want to call them, but I think that scripts come too perilously close to turning the process into illustrating words, which overlooks the inherent power of what cartooning — essentially a key to visual memory via the structure of language — can be.
And at The New Statesman, Alex Hearn:
I’m simply trying to present life as I’ve experienced it, though admittedly in my own very shielded, first-world way. My characters suffer very little compared to someone who might’ve seen their parents killed in a genocide, or endured starvation or disaster. I don’t know why some readers or viewers don’t find it more depressing that most popular books and movies and television programs can’t seem to not be about murderers or rapists or psychopaths — as if a story simply isn’t interesting unless someone is brutally threatened or killed. Violence is always the cheapest shortcut to emotional involvement.
And finally, Debbie Millman chats with Ware for the design podcast Design Matters:
Design Matters: Chris Ware mp3
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City A Guidebook for the Urban Age is the fascinating new book by British writer and reviewer by Peter D. Smith. Published by Bloomsbury, it is a wonderfully meandering collection of essays on cultural history of the world’s cities and an exploration of architecture and urban life from the earliest cities in Mesopotamia to the future dystopias of The Sleeper Awakes and Blade Runner.
I first came across Peter via his reviews for The Guardian newspaper and his lively Twitter feed which, if you are interested, provides the curious with steady stream links about books, history, science and architecture of the kind one might expect from another cultural magpie, William Gibson. City was still a work in progress at that point and having followed it’s development over the past couple of years, I was glad to finally have the opportunity to read it last month. It didn’t disappoint.
Peter and I talked by email…
When did you first become interested in writing?
As a child I was always writing stories, usually fantasy or science fiction. When I was about thirteen we had to write a story for school during the summer holiday. Mine was a space opera about bug-eyed aliens on a distant world. By the end of the holidays I had filled a whole exercise book and even designed a cover for it. I doubt my poor teacher read it all. But I got top marks for effort at least.Afterwards the other kids in my class started reading it and passing it around. Then this boy from another class got hold of it. He had close-cropped hair and wore Doc Martens boots. Weedy bookworms like me generally tried to keep out of his way, but one day he stopped me outside the school gates. I thought he was going to hit me. Instead he started talking about my story. He liked it! I was astonished and I’ve never forgotten that moment. It taught me something about writing and its ability to connect with people.
Your previous books are about superweapons and Albert Einstein. Why did you decide to write a book about cities?
My doctorate was about scientific ideas in German literature, from Goethe to Brecht. The biography of Einstein and the cultural history of doomsday weapons grew directly out of my interest in the way science and culture influence each other. But for my next book I wanted to do something a bit different, from the point of view of both subject and style. I like subjects that cross boundaries and, right from the start, I loved the idea of writing a history of cities. It allowed me to explore everything from the technology of cities to the invention of writing and theatre. It also gave me the opportunity to experiment with different narrative structures. The vast scale of the subject meant it was impossible to explore in a straightforward narrative. Eventually I decided to write it as a guidebook to an imaginary Everycity. Of course, this brought its own challenges, but it was also fun. Most importantly, it made the whole project – which is in a sense a survey of civilisation – manageable as well as opening up the idea of the city, both as an idea and as a physical reality.
Is learning more about the subject you’re interested in part of the impulse for your writing?
Absolutely. I love researching a new idea. Writing a book is a bit like juggling with different bits of information, ideas, places, and characters. You have to keep them all up in the air, then gradually bring them down to the ground in some kind of order. It’s always an immense challenge and sometimes you feel you’re not up to it. But it’s a great thrill when you find something new – an idea, a fact, a juxtaposition. That’s what makes it all worthwhile.
Which books most influenced your thinking about cities?
Lewis Mumford’s The City in History was one of the books that inspired me initially. It’s an immensely impressive survey. Similarly impressive in both scale and erudition is Peter Hall’s Cities in Civilisation. The sheer imaginative range of Geoff Manaugh’s writing on architecture and urbanism on BLDGBLOG is also a constant source of inspiration. And, of course, Italo Calvino’s wonderful Invisible Cities was always there in the background. It’s such an evocative piece of writing about cities and the urban experience.
Why do you think there has been renewed interest in urban living in recent years?
In the US, the 2011 census showed that more young people are choosing to live in cities. For the first time in a century, big cities in America are growing at a faster rate than the suburbs. That’s happening elsewhere too. Perhaps this is because, after the recession, people are less inclined, or able, to buy homes and prefer to rent instead. Or it could be that a new, wired generation has rediscovered the joys of urban life: of living somewhere with public transport, where you can experience diverse cultures and lifestyles, and where you can tap into the creative buzz of city life. In the developing world cities are also growing at an unprecedented rate, morphing into megacities of 20 or even 30 million people. They are the largest artificial structures ever built. People are drawn to them as they have always been – to find work, education, health care, or to escape the confined world of the village. As the medieval German saying goes: Stadtluft macht frei – city air sets you free.
The book covers a lot of different topics, but the idea of ‘the city’ is a vast, open-ended subject. Were there things you were sorry to leave out?
Yes, certainly. There were many topics that had to be dropped. They included urban myths, street painters, and secret cities, like the ones built during the cold war. Even without these, the first draft was too long and more material had to be cut. But I’m very happy with the finished text. Sometimes in a book like this, less is more.
One of the more sobering part of the book addresses climate change. But you see cities as part of the solution. Why is that?
The population of the world is rising inexorably and cities are growing larger. We need to reduce the ecological footprint of our cities. This can be done with good planning and the use of cutting-edge technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Cities can be green: they can generate their own energy, they can provide bicycle lanes and efficient public transport, they can even grow some of their food in rooftop greenhouses. Concentrating people in cities is a highly efficient way of supplying large numbers of people with clean water, healthcare and energy. By contrast, suburban living, where everyone drives cars and lives in detachedhouses, is wasteful of scarce resources and is unsustainable as a model for the world as a whole. Although New Yorkers produce many times more greenhouse gasses than those who live in Mumbai, New Yorkers are responsible for only a third of the carbon dioxide of the typical American. City living can certainly be part of the solution to the environmental challenges of the future.
Has new technology changed how we live in cities?
Yes, new technologies are always changing the shape of cities. Think of the automobile. The internal combustion engine has had a huge impact on cities and how we live in them, as did railways and subways. In the future, cities will be more aware of their inhabitants. Surveillance technologies and electronic chips and sensors will pervade the structures and spaces of the city. Buildings and streets will respond to your presence, automatically adjusting things like air temperature and lighting. But no matter how advanced our technology becomes, cities will still have to satisfy the same kind of demands that city dwellers have had for millennia. We are social animals and our greatest cities will always be dynamic centres of work, culture, entertainment, and shopping.
Why do you think Blade Runner’s dystopian portrayal of Los Angeles has become the prevalent cinematic vision of the city of the future?
It’s true – in modern fiction and film, future cities are usually depicted as dystopias. Blade Runner – one of my favourite films – draws on a rich fictional tradition, including HG Wells’ The Sleeper Awakes and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. But this has not always been the case. In the Renaissance, dreaming up ideal cities seems to have been something of a philosophical game among intellectuals and artists. They wanted to reform society and they believed people could be improved by creating perfect cities. The quest for ideal cities continued among architects and city planners into the twentieth century. But writers and filmmakers became more pessimistic about the urban future. Today these dystopian visions have become something of a cliché. People are no longer fleeing the city as they were in the second half of the twentieth century. Maybe the time is ripe for a new idealism about the urban future. As Calvino said, ‘With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed…’.
Do listen to music while you write? What did you listen to writing City?
Yes, I do usually listen to music, both while reading and writing. If I’m writing non-fiction it tends to be classical music, such as Mozart or Bach, especially the cello suites played by Paul Tortelier, which I really love. But it depends on my mood. Sometimes I’ll choose something by Michael Nyman, Keith Jarrett or Brian Eno’s Apollo soundtrack, which is one of my favourites. If I’m writing fiction then it can be anything from Radiohead or Bjork, to Pink Floyd or Talking Heads.
What books have you read recently?
Fiction: Balzac’s Old Man Goriot, Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest, Nick Harkaway’s Angelmaker, and Sam Thompson’s Communion Town. Non-fiction: Taras Grescoe’s Straphanger, Roger Crowley’s City of Fortune, and Man Ray’s Self-Portrait.
Do you have a favourite book?
Mervyn Peake’s Titus Groan. Gormenghast is such a powerful imaginary architectural space – a kind of Gothic megastructure. It’s a remarkable creation.
What are you working on right now?
A new non-fiction book about the city of crime. It’s still in its early stages but I’m enjoying it immensely. It’s a wonderful excuse to watch film noir and to read lots of great crime fiction.
Are you concerned about the future of books and book reviews?
Not really. The world of publishing – both of books and newspapers – is certainly changing. I’m writing this on my new iPad which I’ve bought mostly in order to be able to read e-books. I’ve run out of shelf space in my house, so I’m going to expand my library into the digital realm. I’ll always love paper books, just because that’s the technology I’ve grown up with. But a new generation will grow up using e-readers and they’ll see (and read) things differently. I think people will always want to read book reviews in newspapers, whether they are on paper or online. But now book lovers also read and write book blogs and they want to discuss what they’re reading on Twitter. Once if your book didn’t get reviewed in the press that was probably the end of the story. Now a book can become a bestseller because enough people rave about it online. Clearly there are major challenges facing publishers, especially regarding piracy and the pricing of books in an age when many people seem to think they should be free. There’s no doubt it’s a tough time to be making a living as a writer! Plus ça change…
Thanks Peter!
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Do It Yourself — John Self, of the excellent Asylum blog, on the power of independent readers, at The Guardian:
if publishers and authors are limited in what they can do for a book online, who is left? They want to harness word of mouth, and power lies collectively in the independent readers – you and me. Can we make a difference when the bookselling world is full of outlets, online and off, which primarily sell what already sells, or can be related to a proven success (“It’s Fifty Shades of Grey meets Harry Potter!”)? If social media has inspired a new age of grassroots political activism, why not literary activism, too?
I picked up Keith Ridgway’s new book Hawthorn & Child almost entirely on the basis of John’s recommendation (I also read Colony by Hugo Wilcken, one of my favourite books of recent years, as a result of John’s review). The astonishing cover (pictured above) is by Tom Darracott by the way.
(Semi) Colonoscopy — Mary Norris on how to use the semicolon, at The New Yorker:
So the semicolon is exactly what it looks like: a subtle hybrid of colon and comma. Actually, in ancient Greek, the same symbol was used to indicate a question.
And it still seems to have a vestigial interrogative quality to it, a cue to the reader that the writer is not finished yet; she is holding her breath.
And finally…
Imaginary Buildings — Jimmy Stamp on the locations of 221B Baker Street, for The Smithsonian:
Comments closedThe mystery of 221B Baker Street is not one of secret passages or hidden symbols. Rather, it could be described as a sort of existential spatial riddle: how can a space that is not a space be where it is not? According to Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories, Sherlock Holmes and John Watson lived at 221B Baker Street from 1881 to 1904. But 221B Baker street did not exist in 1881, nor did it exist in 1887 when A Study in Scarlet was published and Baker Street house numbers only extended into the 100s. It was a purely fictional address – emphasis on was. Time marches on, Baker Streets are renumbered, and 221Bs are revealed…
City Air Sets You Free — Mark Lamster interviews P.D. Smith about his new book City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age, for Design Observer:
It was never my intention to write an architectural history. Cities are much more than the sum of their architecture or infrastructure. A city is made great by its people. Nevertheless, you cannot ignore the structures and spaces of a city. Winston Churchill once famously said: “We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us.” Our urban environments undoubtedly shape us as people. That’s why between each of the eight sections in the book there are essays on more concrete features of the urban landscape, such as the Central Station, the City Wall, the Skyscraper or even the Ruins. But I hope that even here I don’t lose sight of the people who use these architectural spaces. After all, they are the life-blood of the city.
Pop Detritus — Peter Paphides reviews When Ziggy Played Guitar by Dylan Jones, for The Observer:
For many critics, Ziggy was the last desperate act of a craven opportunist. A New Yorker writer flown to see the Ziggy shows fretted that “Bowie doesn’t seem quite real”. But, as long as music journalism has existed, performers – be it Bowie in 1972 or Lana Del Rey in 2012 – have been docked points for their apparent lack of authenticity.
And, besides, it was those very notions of authenticity with which Bowie was playing when he created Ziggy. After several hapless reinventions, the only hit he had to show for his efforts was Space Oddity, but, as Jones points out, Ziggy Stardust was the result of a decade spent sifting through pop cultural detritus and working out which bits he could use to turn him into a pop star.
Don’t Believe the Type — Estimable Jon Gray on the recently revealed cover design for J.K. Rowling’s new novel:
JD Salinger famously had a clause written into his contract stating that no imagery could appear on his covers. Günter Grass will only allow his own drawings. The classic orange Penguins, the poetry covers of Faber: they tell us nothing other than this is a book of note, a book of importance. JK Rowling’s name is the important piece of information, the quality assurance mark, and it is stated very simply and boldly in the brightest and clearest way possible.
(Needless to say, Jon’s thoughts are more interesting that the cover itself).
Material World — An interview with mighty Coralie Bickford-Smith:
I always start by asking myself ‘what is the most effective set of book covers I can produce using just standard materials which are simple but incredibly effective to be within the usual budget constraints?’ To marry design with materials in the most considered and best way possible. So in a way it always starts with the materials so I can make my design suit that method of printing. With the cloth classics its was all about creating a book that would be loved and cherished and not throw away. The materials were the starting point. The foiling was a real struggle at first, the detail of the design cant be too intricate. So the patterns were all designed with this in mind so that the printers could reproduce the design easily. Every material has its limits and its all about getting to grips with those limits to produce an end product that looks effortless and deceptively simple.
My interview with Coralie is here.
And finally…
The Long History of the Espresso Machine…
In the 19th century, coffee was a huge business in Europe with cafes flourishing across the continent. But coffee brewing was a slow process and, as is still the case today, customers often had to wait for their brew. Seeing an opportunity, inventors across Europe began to explore ways of using steam machines to reduce brewing time – this was, after all, the age of steam. Though there were surely innumerable patents and prototypes, the invention of the machine and the method that would lead to espresso is usually attributed to Angelo Moriondo of Turin, Italy, who was granted a patent in 1884 for “new steam machinery for the economic and instantaneous confection of coffee beverage.”
Great stuff… (see also: The Once and Future Coffeehouses of Vienna)
Comments closedMontreal in the 60’s is a short film by assembled by Jim Dayshine from archival images from the National Film Board of Canada.
I posted this at the other place earlier today, but I’m re-posting it here because it is beautiful and more people need to see it.
(Thanks Derek)
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I first saw the work of Nigel Peake in his book In The Wilds, published by Princeton Architectural Press in 2011. Collecting Nigel’s beautiful and meditative drawings and watercolours of rural landscapes and buildings, the book reminded me of both of the work of Paul Klee (Highways and Byways, for example) and Rings of Saturn, W. G. Sebald’s discursive record of ambling through East Anglia.
I subsequently discovered, of course, that Nigel had already produced a significant body of work prior to In the Wilds, including illustrations for Ninja Tune, Hermes, the Royal Horticultural Society, Habitat, The Believer and Dwell magazine, as well as several books.
And in this shiny digital age, there is undoubtedly something wonderful in Nigel’s meticulous hand-drawn maps and tumbledown sheds. We corresponded by email.
Do you remember when you first become interested in art and illustration?
I feel like I have always drawn. Some of my earliest memories are associated with painting and the things that surround it, the plastic containers that held the primary colours and the smell from the cheap paint. When I was growing up I did not really think in terms of design or illustration I just had a wish to draw all the time. And that is still true now, I type this surrounded my paints, pens and paper… so maybe not much has changed. Drawing for me, is essentially a way of thinking through a thought or an idea, to document and try to understand what is around me.
What was your first job as illustrator?
When I was still studying and finishing my architecutural thesis I designed a snowboard graphic for a company in California. After that I worked on a project with Ninja Tune…
And how did the project for Ninja Tune come about?
In truth I am not too sure, I remember leaving a zine for DJ Food when he was djing at Edinburgh, I was not even thinking of it in terms of work , I just wanted to share my work with those that I admired. One way or another I ended up drawing the artwork for the Coldcut ‘Sound Mirror’ LP and singles. They were really nice people to work with and I have made a few other things for them since.
You’re also an architect as well as an artist. How does that inform your work?
I am not a ‘complete’ architect – in that I have yet to finish it professionally. I did study it for 6 years. Studying architecture did not directly affect how I draw, but it did introduce me to a lot of different ways of thinking. I read a lot of interesting books and listened to some wonderful conversations. It was hard work, and the studio ethic of working all day is still engrained in me. I am interested in architecture and how it holds all these moments that occur every day. I recently made a book about the bridges of London, these fantastical structures that essentially have become invisible to those who live there. It is amazing to be in a city and look around, and you have all these forms and shapes that where designed and made by us. It is the combination of our efforts.
Why did you decide to move away from the city?
It was not intentional, it just happened. I was tutoring and drawing projects and then I seem to end up in the country, I probably got tired of being in a city. I had been living in Edinburgh for 8 years. At the moment I travel a lot with my work so it is nice to live somewhere that is quiet and simple, and a place that I want to return to.
What is it about the details of vernacular architecture that particularly interest you?
I am not sure, it is probably because it is what I have grown up around. I enjoy how things are put together, and vernacular architecture is very honest in that respect – you can see what holds what up.
Also a lot of things fall apart because of the wind and the rain and old age, and I find this equally beautiful because when this happens you see all the parts that where previously hidden to the world.
It is an architecture determined by what is close to hand and so the materials and colours used are more interesting. Blue twine holds it together and plastic bags and old gates bridge the gaps.
Is there a tension between your love of the countryside and your fascination with built structures?
Not particulary, probably because I look at them with the same interest, when I look at a leaf I am still amazed by the detail and the wonder of it and then when I look at a skyscraper I can not believe that we can make such incredible structures. The only tension is that if I spend too long in a city I want to go to the places where there are no buildings, I particularly miss the sea if I have not seen it for a while.
Do you take a lot of photographs or do you rely more on sketchbooks?
I do take photographs, but not to draw from, but just to remember things that I see along the way. I also like how a camera allows you to frame what is around you – by taking a photo of something you edit everything else around you and that one moment is held. I keep sketchbooks and draw in them every day not because I think it is fashionable or because I think I should but because I will forget things – so I use them to hold those things that might turn into something someday. I think this idea of keeping a book comes from school because for years we sat at tables with books marked maths, geography, chemistry… so it seems normal to keep writing and drawing things into a book.
Apart from nature and buildings, where do you look for inspiration?
Nearly everything I see has an affect upon me, one of my favourite things is to sit and just look, not as a form of procrastination but as a way of observing what is around me. There is so much to see and hear in everything.
Beyond what I see, I know that music is probably my biggest influence. In the same way that I have early memories of drawing – these are entangled with memories of music. My mother played Gracelands on repeat in the house or the car. And my father always had Pet Sounds. On a Friday night we would have record night and each of us would get to choose one to play. I always listen to music when I am drawing or making things. It is such a beautiful thing to close your door for a while, sit at your table and put on a record and simply draw.
You publish some of your work with Analogue Books in Edinburgh. How did that come about?
I studied architecture in Edinburgh and Analogue opened a few years after I had arrived. I remember going in and liking the books they had and more importantly the people who owned it seemed kind. And so I started to bring some work in and got to know Russell and Julie through that. Since then we have published zines and books and exhibitions and probably eaten a lot of McVities biscuits. They are some of the best people I have met through my work. Hopefully in the next few months we are going to make some new things.
Your work does seem particularly well suited to the books. Are you interested in the juxtaposition of word and pictures?
Books are wonderful objects. There were a lot of books around me when I was growing up.
The possibilities are endless, in terms of what words and pictures can do. Making a book is as close as I will get to making an album. With this form, you can tell a story or not, but with each page you can explore an idea, knowing that it will be seen after what went before, so for me there is a beautiful rhythm to a book. The flicking of a page has great joy in it. For now I like making work as a series ( maps, sheds, bridges, birds, billboards, cameras…) and so books are perfect for this exploration.
Who are a few of your favourite writers?
To name a few who I can always return to, in no order.
John Steinbeck, Earnest Hemmingway, F Scott Fitzgerald, Seasmus Heaney, George Simenon, Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, Francis Ponge, Jorge luis Borges, Gaston Bacherlard, Walter Benjamin, Arthur Conan Doyle and John Cheever.
What are you reading currently?
At the moment I am living in Austria and have read all the books I packed so for now I am reading the newspaper.
Thanks Nigel!
Full Disclosure: In the Wilds by Nigel Peake is published by Princeton Architectural Press, and distributed in Canada by my employer Raincoast Books.
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Minka is an award-winning documentary short based on John Roderick’s memoir about the traditional hand-built farmhouse he acquired 1967 while working for the Associated Press in Japan. Filmed just following Roderick’s death at 93, the film interviews architect Yoshihiro Takishita, Roderick’s adopted son who worked on the house, and explores themes of place, memory, architecture, and home. Beautiful:
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