the

UNPUBLISHABLES

theunpublishables

The A fanzine that celebrates young Unpublishables designers, architects,

curators &makers

Issue no.1 Spring / Summer 2013

Editors Letter
The Unpublishables was founded in the beginning of 2013 following my own frustration towards the difculties young architects face getting their writing and personal projects into press. There is something unique about the moment we nd ourselves, post-study and prior to long-term experience in industry; one foot in education, with the other planted in the challenges of practice. This moment of inbetweeness seems to give way to exciting things. A graduate of architecture myself I have been party to and heard about interesting debates, projects and studies that young graduates are developing independently and outside of full-timeemployment. It struck me that these ideas and debates dont have a natural place to be explored through writing, and published. This is partly because mainstream press leans towards offering page space to established practitioners and critics. It might also be partly because projects being developed by young designers are often not tangible built works they are studies, research or thought pieces that arent always easily collectively publicised. In the UK there is an established movement of architectural fanzines. Most of these pursue specic themes geographically, typologically, thematically. What I felt has been missing is a publication that distinctively sets out to give space to the interests, concerns and ideas of young people involved in architecture. In developing the fanzine it was important to me that the publication be cross-disciplinary and that it welcome projects from those involved in the wider reaches of architecture in designing and crafting, photographing, curating and writing - with architecture as a core focus from which we have extended outwards. I have tried to set up an opportunity for invited contributors to ll these pages as they choose, and the experimental nature of this zine accepts the variety and richness of responses. The only constraint I did set was that for this rst issue we deal with issues here in the UK ideas,

projects, places that we could see without the need to board a plane. If there is another issue (and were discussing there being a second in the Autumn of 2013) then we will getinternational. In these pages you will nd a breadth and depth of responses, pieces that individually are disconnected from one another but come together as a whole in one collective, collaborative rst issue. I have been thrilled by the response of contributors, in their willingness to take the initial project idea and run with it, each in a different way. I am immensely indebted to their hard work and enthusiasm for the project. Without them there would be nopublication. There is no funding behind this issue; the project is not for prot. The publication is wholly independent and has been put together through generosity andcommitment. Particular thanks must go to our graphic designer Catherine Smith, for her consistent support and hard work. She has sought to create a graphic layout that is simple, paired back and allows each piece to stand apart from the next whilst creating a visual thread that runs through the whole publication. Her skills on this project have been invaluable. We hope you enjoy this rst issue and nd the collection of writings thought provoking, unexpected and interesting. If you wish to contact us or be involved in future issues do be in touch: hello@the-unpublishables.co.uk.

Zo Berman
Founder and Editor of The Unpublishables

Contributers

Adam Currie studied architecture at

Amanda Rashid studied architecture

Dundee School of Architecture. In 2011 he was nominated for the RIAS Scottish Student Architecture + Design Scotland Urban Design A ward and won The Gordon MatthewsonAward. In 2012 Adam worked with McGarry-Moon Architects in Northern Ireland before moving to London and joining alma-nac collaborative architecture as a Part II Architectural Assistant. Adam is fascinated by printing, from traditional to digital. When he is not in the architecture studio you can nd him somewhere hiding behind acamera. Adam continuously explores the realms of architecture, craft and process through his discourse of photography. A recent project titled 1030 x 875 mk1 involved the construction of an ultra large format mobile camera from Scottish elm timber which captured images measuring 1030x875mm on traditional photographic paper. This project has been exhibited in London, Perth andBelfast. www.adamcurrie.co.uk

at University of Cambridge and London Metropolitan University where she graduated in 2011. She is currently an Architectural Assistant at Cottrell and Vermeulen Architects where she works on a number of education projects. She has previously worked for Ash Sakula Architects on community and mixed use schemes and on large scale urban research projects with Publica Associates. Since 2011 she has been involved in a number of international education projects including the construction of a primary school in Freetown, managed by the Architecture of Rapid Change and Scarce Resources (ARCSR) at London Metropolitan University Faculty of Architecture. In 2012 she helped produce a design and construction compendium Transitional Learning Spaces for UNICEF, based in Nairobi, Kenya. For her fth year thesis she spent two months in Seoul, South Korea studying the ubiquitous highrise apartment blocks of thecity. In 2012 Amanda collaborated with Priscilla Fernandes on a refurbishment of a clothing shop Lo-key Lifestyle on High Road Leyton as part of the Branding Lab scheme for Waltham forest. They are now working on a similar scheme for Redbridge council.

Catherine Smith studied History at the

University of Shefeld, while also continuing to develop her training as a chef. After graduating she taught at several cookery schools in London and worked as a recipe tester for Waitrose Kitchen. Alongside this she developed a portfolio of design and graphic projects. One of these projects tackled issues of politics and gender in connection with the UKs rst SlutWalk in London 2011. The project subsequently appeared in national and international press as the unofcial logo for themovement. In 2011 Catherine moved to New York where she studied graphic design, and on returning to London completed placements at Matter of Form, Nalla Design and WRBurton before nding a permanent home as a Junior Designer at More Creative. Unwilling to give up her side projects in spite of agency hours, Catherine still has several personal projects on the go - The Unpubishables being her biggest and most exciting to date. Other include a graphically rich cookbook for those who are deantly bad at cooking, and another for children and adults with readingdifculties. www.thepicturesmith.com

Chee-Kit Lai is an architect and director

of Mobile Studio. He is a graduate of the Bartlett School of Architecture and now runs an award-winning BSc Degree Unit at the Bartlett UCL. Nominated for Young Architect of the Year Award in 2008, Mobile Studio is based in London and specialises in gallery and exhibition designs for museums and public institutions. Mobile Studios design for converting North Lodge, UCL into a contemporary gallery space was short-listed for The Architects Journal Small Projects Award 2011. The practice recently produced and published a booklet entitled Display for a Display - cataloguing a series of their designs and reusable modular systems which have been commissioned and used by clients as a spatial platform to engage their museum collections with a wideraudience. Prior to establishing Mobile Studio Chee-Kit gained experience from working for a number of successful small-medium sized design-led architecture rms, including Dr Ken Yeang (TR Hamzah and Yeang), Peter Barber Architects and FeatherstoneAssociates. Photo credit - Chiara Marchini. www.theMobileStudio.co.uk @theMobileStudio

Dan Tassell studied architecture at the

David Valinsky studied architecture at

Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL) and the University of Shefeld, graduating with distinction in 2011. Dan currently works at Haworth Tompkins Architects where he has worked on a number of projects for the Royal College of Art and several high prole theatre projects. Outside of practice Dan has worked with Factory Fifteen on several 3D animation projects and has exhibited lm works in the V&A and numerous other galleries within London and the UK. He has worked on several short lms including an experimental short for Veuve Cliqout (directed by Keichi Matsuda) which used augmented reality to explore the cavernous roman mines under the city of Reims in which their millions of bottles of champagne are stored. Since graduating Dan has been actively involved in teaching and research, most recently tutoring within Peter Cooks unit at the cole Spciale dArchitecture in Paris and also alongside ScanLAB Projects on a research trip to Kielder with a group of Bartlett students exploring the use of 3D laser scanning withinanimation. He has recently established the research group Captured City which explores notions of place through photography, lm andwriting. www.dantassell.com

Cambridge University where his work won the 2006 E. S. Prior Prize and was nominated for the RIBA Bronze Medal and continued at London Metropolitan University where he studied with Florian Beigels Architecture Research Unit. During his time there he contributed to and edited the Units publications, Architecture as City (2010) and Baukunst (2011). He graduated in2011. Between these two architecture courses David studied for a Master of Philosophy degree in Architectural History at Cambridge University investigating the written and built work of E. S. Prior. Since completing this the research has been developed into a book An Architect Speaks: the Writings and Buildings of E. S. Prior due to be published late in 2013. For the past ve years David has taught the Meaning of Architecture course at Cambridge University to History of Art students and, in connection with his research, has lectured on the work ofE. S. Prior. David works as an RIBA Part II Architectural Assistant at NRAP Architects in Cambridge. Previous work has included positions at Hopkins Architects and Kilburn Nightingale Architects. He is currently studying RIBA Part III in order to qualify as an architect.

Giles Smith is a designer and writer

Liam Morrisey completed his rst

interested in the relationships between architecture and participation, craft, and contemporary digital culture. His current work is concerned with the nascent eld of glitch architecture. Giles graduated from Cambridge in 2009 and, with friends, set up the architecture, art and design collective Assemble in 2010. Together they designed and built The Cineroleum (2010), Folly for a Flyover (2011) and Sugarhouse Studios projects (2012) and are currently working across a range of scales to different degrees offormality. Giles has spent the last two years at the Royal College of Art colliding digitality and architecture. Any remaining time has been divided between writing for a variety of publications, including Building Design, and being a visiting critic and lecturer at London Metropolitan University, the Royal College of Art, and Westminster. www.gilesspsmith.com @gilesspsmith and, with friends here www.assemblestudio.co.uk

architecture degree at The University of EastLondon. Following a year with Ramsden and Partners architects he moved to What If: projects, taking up the role of draftsman for the Romford Ring Road Masterplan, then as the lead on the multiple award winning Vacant Lot social housing estate gardenprogram. He undertook his second degree at London Metropolitan University alongside a Masters degree in Spatial Planning and Urban Design, in collaboration with Design for London. A highlight was to be selected to represent his masters program in a public Pecha-Kucha evening with the theme Rip It Up And Start Again. Continuing his work with What If: he undertook The Albert meanwhile project - a not for prot group that supports artistic experimentation, creativity and communityengagement. He gave a masterclass in meanwhile use at the Re:Think festival, London and has carried out a number of installation projects such as a roaming orchard for The South Bank festival this summer. Liam has been a guest critic for various student groups at the Universities of Brighton, East London and LondonMetropolitan.

Poppy McNee studied architecture in

Punya Sehmi is an architectural and urban

South Australia and graduated in 2004. Before leaving for London she taught at the Adelaide University. She moved to the UK in 2006, neglected to leave for nancially warmer climes after the crash of 2008, and has muddled along ever since, mostly employed at GrimshawArchitects. Her most recent project has been working closely with Nicolas Grimshaw as project architect for the new UK headquarters for Herman Miller, creating a welcome opportunity to delve into the rich history of industrialbuildings. Much of her career at Grimshaws has been spent championing sustainable design, and she is now beginning a practice wide study of the post-occupancy life of buildings. Poppy was shortlisted for the 2012 Architects Journal Young Writer of the year, and would like more time towrite. Concurrent to practice she writes science ction, plays cricket and goestwitching. Her current interest is the life of Alfred Russel Wallace, and she is developing a short piece of theatre about beetles.

designer with a continuing fascination with photographing and drawing the worlds around her. She believes in thinking through making. Capturing and recording place and experience in the built environment is at the core of her architectural process. Punya studied at the University of Shefeld, where she was awarded the John Carr Memorial Prize, and at London Metropolitan University, holding both a Masters in Structural Engineering and Architecture, and a Professional Diploma inArchitecture. Punya is currently at Publica Associates where she has worked on several public realm projects, and has gained previous experience at Hawkins\Brown architects, Elliott Wood Structural Engineers, and Sir Robert McAlpine contractors. Punya is a visiting critic at London Metropolitan University and the University of East London, and was tutor and coorganiser for Project Odessa, a summer workshop for ASD Projects. She is also a member of Voluntary Design & Build, a creative collective that design and construct projects for charitable organisations; their Tarlungeni Kindergarten won the AJ Small Projects Community Award2009. Punya recently exhibited her photographic work at the Brick Lane Gallery, London. www.punya-sehmi.com

Ruth Lie lives and works in London,

currently managing the Friday Late programme at the V&A, a monthly series of large scale curated evening events - including installation, lm, workshops andperformance. Having initially studied RIBA Part I Architecture at the University of Shefeld, she recently completed an MA in Curating Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art. She is interested in the crossovers between contemporary art, design and architecture, as well as the fast paced nature of the site specic andtemporal. Ruth has previously worked as a co-ordinator at the ArchitecturalAssociation. She has been involved in and helped establish a number of exhibitions including Sum Parts in June 2011, and in September 2012 an evening programme of screening and talks that explored space through the audio and visual entitled Brick Wall, Waterfall.

Zo Berman founded The Unpublishables

in 2013. She studied architecture at the Shefeld University and London MetropolitanUniversity. Zo currently works with The Cass Projects Ofce an architectural practice that supports and engages in live projects with students. Concurrent to this she has recently collaborated with Sandy Rendel Architects on a design project inOxford. In the academic year 2012/13 she joined Sabine Storb and Pascal Bronner as a tutor of undergraduate at The Cass Faculty ofArchitecture. Previously Zo has worked with SCABAL Architects, BGS Architects and the multidisciplinary practice Pentagram. Wanting to better understand the collaborative process between architect and engineer she spent a year with Buro Happold engineers, working on a number of projects in the UK. Zo has a particular interest in collaborative working and learning through participation. She has a love for craftsmanship and materials, and concurrent to working in practice has recently been training in furniture making and joinery to better her understanding of how things aremade. www.zoeberman.co.uk

Contents
Glassland // Poppy McNee Architecture - please? // David Valinsky Dungeness // Dan Tassell Rebuilding the Council House // Amanda Rashid The Unintended // Ruth Lie City Sections I // Punya Sehmi The Motive of the Algorithm is Still Unclear // Giles Smith Healthy Architecture // Liam Morrisey Pleasure of the Ordinary // Zo Berman The Barbican // Adam Currie In Between Spaces // Chee-Kit Lai Footnotes Acknowledgements & Thanks 02 05 09 14 19 22 30 33 36 39 46 50 51

Glassland by Poppy McNee

Glassland
// Poppy McNee
His woman spits buttons. Her women were sewing women, in the darker recesses of Europe they made ne beaded dresses that glowed under hand, bright as beets in the wet earth. She makes nothing, but she spits ghost buttons in her sleep, ghost thread runs through her useless ngers. Her hands are busy with nothing. She is always tired. His ngers are idle-busy too, he works in Glassland. He moves numbers around a distant country he cannot even imagine, where the air is too foul to breathe, and hands are still busy, making endless copies of objects he might be persuaded to desire, and buy, and desire again.
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From his desk by the window he can see Glassland all around him, spreading away from its rst crop near the old docks to the east. The long battle of his father for a corner ofce seems laughable now as he stares out of the window into the darkeningcity. The buildings of Glassland negate complexity, he looks for texture, for mass and scale, for shadow and fold and the touch of weather. There is none. Glass meets only glass and the nest threads of aluminium and steel: the edges of architecture have been avoided. The cornice, the eave, the window sill and the carved edges are gone; Glassland has one language - only of glass skins and sheets. Here glass panel patterns replicate in a garish relief, here glass shrouds a bright frame, but its all the same language and palette. His eye is relieved by the tiny part of the old city he can see below, jostled with bricks and stone, streets and people, dark corners and open doors, the stain of water and the glow of light, a place for the risk of ugliness and the danger of beauty. Time passes down there; there is incident and occasion. The building opposite is almost empty though it is still only afternoon. The desks lie fallow - the rooms he can see are empty, the building is far behind the changes its people are living. It is expected to stand for a mere thirty years or less, to replicate itself again and again in similar forms but surprising skins, just another mechanism for prot and profane waste. The oor below him is a sea of cubicles fenced into yours/mine, an ocean of under-achievement and industrious emailing. The oor above is free form and de-cluttered, coloured and bright but still empty, lone heads sit apart and occasionally coalesce, both oors appear different but are equallyanachronistic. The architects of Glassland are busy with forms and gestures, making posturing shapes high above the city; glass faces leaning in upon themselves, rearing outwards and upwards, crashing

unthinking into the streets below. The relief he feels at gazing down at the low at city is denied to the people moving below, the surfaces of Glassland are negations, endless, unchanging replications of fractured sky. The interior of Glassland is consistent, always, everywhere, only the textured cities outside the sealed window changes with place and season. Wind and rain slide fast off the face of Glassland and pool riotously at the street level, pushing people away from entrances and receptions scaled for giants. The architects of Glassland still subscribe to a brief invented a hundred years ago, on the back of theories of scientic management, the new industry and centralised management. They work for no client but a nondescript end user to deliver their buildings as automatons t for no precise purpose. They work in the slimmest of zones, the skins and planes of Glassland but inside the air and space are petried and stale, the ideas are old. Ideas once revolutionary are replicated and repeated while the world has sped up and left them behind. They forget to challenge, to question and idealise. Humankind always works best in a collective environment, just as we are now thronging to our cities. Glassland was founded for the typewriter. It is far behind the new changes shaping work around the planet. At an enormous cost of resource, operational and of conception, it ignores the cultural changes that could shape the future for the better, it is stuck in a cycle that would be questioned in any other type ofconstruction. At his desk by his window he is perched right at the end of a supply chain that has such inertia as to seem unstoppable. You can visit Glassland any time you like, but even the wealth of cities cannot afford to host it much longer. The next generation of architects will need to bring the rich mutability of the city street up into the sky, to make spaces complex and changeable enough to survive, to build for a hundred years and be unafraid to challenge and question an outdated brief for our cities. For them the question of conversion of workspace into ats will be no matter, it can be done, unlike in our time. The sheer blind faces and proud postures of Glassland will appear quaint and strange and they will wonder at our subscription to anachronistic concepts when faced with profoundchange.\\

Architecture - please?
// David Valinsky
Three fundamental facts need to be acknowledged. Firstly, to paraphrase Louis Kahn, architecture is the creation or enhancement of beautiful internal and external space. It is nothing less than this and, signicantly, nothing more. It is therefore important but not necessary. It is a gift of delight to our surroundings at any scale the value of which should not be underestimated but it is not the indispensable provision of shelter (intimately tied with this though it may often be) or a panacea for social, political, environmental or economic ills. Secondly and consequently, architecture is appreciated by all except its designers almost solely as a spatial, visual, tactile and emotional phenomenon. This, combined with our rst fact means that in order to create architecture, the architect must be skilled in the judgement of space and in the judgement of what denes that space. If the architects ego was hurt by that rst fact, let them be consoled with the knowledge that such skilled judgement is no easy task. The belief that constraints imposed by function, environment, cost or any other rational scientic investigation will produce architecture is the refuge of the talentless. The discovery of an acceptable compromise between such often competing demands is where architecture begins, not where it ends. Judgement is therefore needed for the creation of architecture because architecture must stand and fall on its own merit. It cannot be justied by its constraints though it must operate within them, nor can it be justied by words, particularly the usually amateurish and often bogus teleological, historical, social and psychological theories produced by architects that smack of a desperation for order and an imposition of phantom limits that would simplify the task of architectural decision-making. No, the architect accepts that judgements must be made without recourse to externally imposed restrictions judgements about the scale, proportion and arrangement of space, and the manner in which a space is discovered and experienced judgements about the hierarchies, views and movement between neighbouring spaces. Concurrently and

indivisibly the architect must also make judgements about the surfaces that dene spaces: their material, texture and colour; scale, massing, articulation and proportion; the placement of openings within surfaces, the scale and proportion of these and between these. This is the architects palette of creative possibilities and none of these judgements exist individually; they will all affect each other. What a task for the architect who wants to design! For there will never be clear answers, only judgement derived from experience and imagination; a judgement that is subtle and perceptive or arrogant and crass; a judgement that suggests placing a window just here rather than there; above all a subjectivejudgement. Our third fundamental fact, already implied, is that unlike other artists the architect does not have the luxury of making their subjective judgements within a logic system of their own creation, be it a diagram, a form or a theory. The architect must accept that such systems will be neither of import or value to others and, furthermore, that architecture cannot be experienced in isolation. It will have a relationship, good or bad, with its surroundings whether they be city or landscape. An architect is always making just a small contribution to a greater whole. The quality of this relationship falls, again, to the judgement of the architect. All the decisions described above, difcult as they already are, must be made with this in mind. The architect must also accept that, again unlike other arts, architecture cannot be selectively displayed or experienced. Every mistake, every piece of poor judgement is placed indiscriminately in full public view and is tauntingly, painfully,permanent. Consequently architecture more than any other art is public, referential and evolutionary. It demands the utmost consideration and care because bad architecture, unlike a bad painting, cannot be ignored, forgotten or easily destroyed. We live every day with judgements good and bad made by architects over many centuries that must be accepted as contributions to the larger artefact that is the city. In the best cases these various contributions will create a greater artwork of controlled harmony and dissonance, tension and release. In the worst cases we must endure a monotonous, torturedcacophony.

Given the importance of what I have lazily described as skilled judgement, how is the architect to develop such a skill? The answer is not Im afraid an amateur study of phenomenology, philosophy, psychology, sociology or physics, nor an investigation of the possibilities of graphic design and nave politics as a distraction from architectural mediocrity, as so many schools of architecture steadfastly demand. The architect may of course be interested in any number of other disciplines (as long as the interest is genuine and thorough) but their scant contribution to developing architectural judgement makes for a poor return on the investment. No, the answer is simple and disappointingly unavoidable skilled judgement is developed slowly through experience based on observation and experimentation. The architecture student must study architecture, sketching to aid observation and to pinpoint specic judgements and ideas. They will begin to discover the joyous delight that accompanies a beautiful architectural moment and, furthermore, discover that it is indenable and careless of any theoretical or philosophical expression. There can be no prejudice imposed based on the age of the source for to insist on or imply the inferiority or irrelevance of the architectural ideas of the past, recent or distant, is to incomprehensibly insist on an extreme poverty of inspiration. Such prejudice produces architects who are incapable of engaging with 99% of the built environment, arrogantly ignorant of, and ignorantly arrogant towards, their unavoidable architectural context. Because this context is an agglomeration of architectural judgements made over vast swathes of time, and because the students rst-hand experience will be greatly limited, it is also necessary that they study architectural history. Not primarily the objective, rigorous history of the architectural historian that exists for its own sake but rather a subjective, investigative, discriminating history that, being primarily a journey in space rather than time, takes the student out of their immediate surroundings and opens their eyes to the innite possibilities, complex richness, potential power and staggering beauty of their craft. Such study constantly widens the students palette of ideas and demonstrates how particular judgements have been made by others while giving

them the condence to experiment further. How much more capable the student would then be in judging their contribution to the urban context and in discriminating usefully between good and bad rather than uselessly between old and new. What a difference if Hadid had quickly learnt from the works of Borromini and Neumann the vast gulf between mere sculptural form and rich sculpted space; or if Terry had learnt from Palladio the difference between experimenting with earlier ideas and recycling them. Such an education is complicated and heterogeneous and promises none of the quick answers offered, falsely, by theory or amateur science. Nevertheless, if we desire architecture and its continuing relevance, this education cannot be avoided. As subsidiary roles are steadily (and thankfully?) taken away from the architect, those who are incapable of producing architecture (and there are too many) will nd it increasingly difcult to justify their existence. When asked what it is they contribute they will be unable toanswer.\\

Dungeness
// Dan Tassell
Steep shingle banks fade into the water. On the horizon muscular silhouettes rise like rectilinear mountains in the otherwise at landscape. Their steel and aluminium cornices cast forbidding shadows in the pale sunlight. Faded glyphs spell out the names of reactors. B21, B22. Here, time is marked out in the triangular arrangements of single storey cottages, their faades deformed by sagging beams, paint peeling like a rash. The arrangement of windows and doors appear to cast saddened faces. Trucks trundle up and down dirt tracks depositing endless tonnes of shingle into defences while the 3,000 year old promontory attempts to continue stubbornly on its slow geological journey through the ness. Two land-locked lighthouses made obsolete by the receding shoreline pierce the landscape. They stand together awkwardly as though totemic monuments to mans impotence against nature.
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It seemed as though one day a thousand vessels fell to the beach, their smashed hulls and rusted prop shafts resting on the beach like picturesque jewels from a shattered necklace. Relics of sherman and smugglers caught in some kind of storm surge, or perhaps the surge of technology and quotas. There are no signs of astruggle. The ebb and ow of past and present industries is met with indifference by the tough landscape. Pylons radiate out from the shadows. Arms stretched, loyally holding onto their high voltage cargo. Beyond the shingle ats endless yellow elds of rapeseed form the new Garden of England, stretched out across the land forming a patchwork of warning signs to passengers descending towards Gatwick Airport. From Pett Level to Hythe the ebb and ow of the sea plays out a natural rhythm, met only with the gentle hum of electricity.

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Rebuilding the Council House

// Amanda Rashid

The Case of Camden Architects Department 1965-73

The housing schemes of the Camden Architects Department between 1965-1978 are considered to be the last great output of social housing this century.1 These forty or so projects, realised under borough architect Sydney Cook (1965-73) offered an alternative to the familiar but notorious high rise, system built council estates being constructed in most local authorities. Within the context of the current housing crisis in the UK, where a nationwide social housing waiting list of 1.8 million 2 households is exacerbated by a dire shortage of housing supply, it becomes particularly poignant to look at the strengths and weaknesses of the Camden schemes. As the idea of local authority building once again gains currency, it is instructive to understand how the Camden projects were designed, nanced and delivered within the context of a localauthority. Thirty-two new boroughs were created following the London government act of 1963. Camden was created from the old boroughs of the very wealthy Holborn, the progressive Hampstead and the strongly socialist St Pancras. Housing was now the direct responsibility of local authorities, and the borough aimed to build 4,800 homes between 1964-19683 to deal with a waiting list of 11,200 people. Councillors from St Pancras were in the majority and their desire to improve the physical and social condition of the borough melded well with the architects modernist vision to reshape the city, summed up by Councillor Peggy Duff in 1971: How could we pull down and rebuild large areas of the borough in such a way that new communities could be created in the difcult car ridden circumstances of inner citylife?.4
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As newly appointed borough architect, Sydney Cook was keen to avoid building the ubiquitous high rise point block in a cleared site. It was a common misconception that high rise meant high density.5 But the low rise, linear stepped section housing advocated by Cook matched or even exceeded housing densities of high rises. As early as 1946 Trystan Edwards demonstrated that rows of terraced housing could be built to densities of 275ppa.6 Neave Brown, the young architect hired by Cook explored these ideas employing modernist style. He felt that to avoid the problems of the 1950s and 60s housing should return to the traditional quality of continuous background stuff, anonymous, cellular, repetitive, that has always been its virtue.7 Fleet Road (1971-75) of 71 dwellings, utilised the low rise, stepped section design but also adhered to Parker-Morris space standards, borough density requirements and government cost allocations. This gave the Camden experiment some legitimacy and license to explore this typology at a grander scale. Neave Browns next project, Alexandra Road (1967-78) in South Hampstead had a density of 210ppa, well exceeding borough requirements of 150ppa. The 520 dwelling estate housed 1,660 people and contained a number of amenity facilities and outdoor spaces. The 600m long linear structure of four to six-storey stepped section gently curves around the railway track, creating two

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pedestrian streets that form the heart of the estate. Brown said the scale of the street was similar to nearby Belsize Park, but smaller than Victorian Bayswater.9 In contrast to the high-rise block within an asphalt expanse where the human scale is dwarfed, Alexandra road has an intimate, domestic scale akin to a traditional Victorian neighbourhoodstreet. Despite these virtues the schemes, particularly Alexandra Road, received much negative criticism. The construction was subject to severe delays and resultant overspending. The complicated, bespoke nature of the design necessitated careful, constant supervision which was not always possible throughout the protracted length of the project (construction took 7 years). Over time, the political landscape changed. Central government switched from Labour to Conservative and support for such an ambitious scheme dwindled. It became apparent that it was almost

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impossible to realise a scheme of the utopian scale of Alexandra Road with public money.10 Critics advocated lower density, more traditional forms of housing or rehabilitation of existing stock. Camden was accused of being a free spending local authority and support for publicly funded housing dwindled in the late 1970s as right-to-buy came to thefore. Conversely successive policy since the late 70s has gone to the opposite extreme and deprived local authorities of the ability to directly deal with their housing problems. They are unable to replenish depleted social housing stock, relying on housing associations or private house builders to meet their needs. In Camden in 2011 only 520 affordable homes were completed ,11 but there are 22,000 households 12 on the waiting list. The 2011-2016 Camden housing strategy for Camden is highly pessimistically summed up by the tag line managing expectations we cant house everyone.13 National government policy focuses on providing incentives to private house builders with relaxed planning controls, reected in Camdens recent UDP where the affordable housing requirement has been slashed in order to remove perverse disincentives14 for developers. However, last years self-nancing reform gave councils responsibility for their housing stock for the rst time in decades.15 Local authorities now control over 700,000 houses giving them a high credit status on which to raise loans and potentially build more housing.16 Town halls believe they could sustainably borrow enough money to deliver 60,000 new homes.17 But centrally imposed borrowing caps prevent councils from taking out such loans. Under current UK law, this would count as public borrowing, and thus considered to raise the national decit. Cynics argue that rules are unlikely to change, as there is still a deeply entrenched mistrust of councils investment in bricks and mortar. Clearly, this prejudice needs to be reconsidered and a balance must be found between the overspending but youthful and energetic thinking of Camden council in the 1960s and the stringent conservatism of the following decades if we are to build our way out of this presentcrisis.\\

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The Unintended
// Ruth Lie

Estate of Robert Smithson/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2013.

Its that moment when it could go either way. Youve been working the whole month for this one day, this one project,this balancing act of success or failure. But how do you measure success anyway? And whos to say that failure isnt as much a part of the process? Its all just temporary anyway. Success through failure. Lets celebrate the risk takers. Im intrigued by the temporary within contemporary art and design. The projects that are conceived with the absolute end goal in mind: to eventually be destroyed. There is no permanence here. Instead, artists and designers have to be ingenious in the way in which they carve out and construct an idea that can only be conveyed in a split second. It becomes essential that these short projects are remembered, because it is often only through documentation and individuals memories that these projects remain. The artist Robert Smithsons theory of entropy described this impermanence as a natural cycle, an irreversible process involving a domino effect whereby breaking or collapsing is inevitable. His work Partially Buried Woodshed (1970) was one of the most important examples of this. Arriving at Kent State University in Ohio as a visiting artist, he gained permission to bury an abandoned wood and stucco

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shed, once part of an old farm that was acquired by the University. The process would stop when the central beam of the structure cracked and nature would then be left to its own devices - the very essence of entropy in themaking. With his artworks and writings an intrinsic part of each other, it seems natural that his theories of entropy were played out through the physicality and processes of his works. Smithson sought to move away from the traditional gallery format, as he hated the permanence and preciousness of art as an object. He was very much part of a new approach to art making at the time - the initiation of unique, temporary and often remote art works. In my view there were two distinctive moments of change within the life span of this work. Firstly, someone graftied the date of the Ohio student shootings (MAY 4 KENT 70) on Partially Buried Woodshed, a tragic event which had occurred a few months after the work was made. Some might conceive this to be a mistake, a failure to look after the work, as one should with a piece of art. On the other hand, this unintended moment, this non-artistic intervention instantly politicised the piece it threw Partially Buried Woodshed back into the reality of its historical context. Secondly, Smithson was interested in the accumulation of history, imagining that his work might gain in legend and meaning as it decreased in physical reality. Going back to Smithsons descriptions of an entropic need, perhaps this was a physical manifestation of the human hope for disaster. The need to create a more personal memorial was perhaps as intended by the unknown maker as it was unintended by the artist. The notion that the object is made at the moment of the buildings ruination the works simultaneous self-effacement as it comes into presence suggests that it actually rises into ruin, to borrow an expression fromSmithson.1 Where Smithsons theory of entropy left the matter of the destruction of a work to a natural and unavoidable cycle, an artist like Gustav Metzger centred around an intentional and planned destruction in order to demonstrate a profoundly political concept. Metzgers manifesto AutoDestructive Art theorised destruction within art as a form of political

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statement or mode of resistance against social and political violence. His Acid Paintings in the early 60s were a physical example of this manifesto, presenting both the destruction and subsequent creation of an artwork, through the use of hydrochloric acid, which destroyed a canvas and yet revealed an alternative scene. In these instances the matter of a political statement was decided entirely by Metzger from beginning to end. Compare this to Partially Buried Woodshed, left in the hands of unintentional intervention and time to allow for a perhaps more considered public reaction. One might argue that the latter had a truer outcome, as the nature of the work was drawn out through events and scenarios that were separate to the original intent of work itself. Smithson is proof that a temporary work does not necessarily mean less relevance, signicance, or meaning. When you commission a work that you know will be temporary time does not often allow for the luxury of too much thought and consideration. But this is not negative. You can lose the exhilarated rush when youre stuck beneath layers and years of rethinking and decision making. What I have found exciting is the personal interpretation born from the knowledge that you might never see this piece of work in the same form or context again. Smithsons strengths lay in the impermanence of his works. The site-specic and temporary strategies he employed demonstrated the feeling of many other artists during the 60s and 70s, a desire to move away from the conventions of the gallery space and to challenge the institution. From individual memorialisation to an unknown act, these unintended moments, whether physical, personal or otherwise, resulted in new and political meanings; the creation of memorials, legacy and eventual decay.\\
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City Sections I
The Blackfriars Project 2013 // Punya Sehmi
This photographic essay is a selection from The Blackfriars Project, which forms part of The City Sections Series - a wider ongoing study that takes each time as its starting point an irreverent splice through the urban fabric. These photographs begin from a fundamental principle of Punyas architectural process: engaging with context at multiple scales to bring near the experience of place. Blackfriars has long been dened as its north riverbank location, but focus is swiftly shifting towards its southern counterpart, hidden from view by its topographic condition. As major development opportunities within such easy reach from the citys nancial and commercial centre grow fewer, Blackfriars Road is at the crest of a rebrand, and at the centre of a new wholescale vision for the area. Investment in the new Blackfriars over-bridge station with its dual north and south exits acknowledges this importance, and presents the question: what can we dene as Blackfriars? Blackfriars Road is a eld where the citizens of London once took outdoor exercise; a grand new axial avenue leading from the Victorian bridge; a nineteenth century slum; an unrelenting juggernaut of ofce blocks; an inhospitable trafc artery; a discontinuous string of residential enclaves and stagnating disused buildings; a bright new commercial opportunity for international property investors; the next residential quarter; urbanity version 2013? These photographs are taken amidst a growing tension between developers and local community groups as they realise that what little remains of their neighbourhood is under threat. A number of prime locations directly on or anking the south bank of the Thames - such as Ludgate and Sampson House, Kings Reach Tower and One Blackfriar - are being developed as luxury residential schemes with limited, if any, social housing or affordable homes. With more land acquisitions in progress, we must interrogate the species of regeneration of which this valuable part of Southwark will be subject. Will we see a richly context specic, incrementally developed urbanity - or has this prime estate been permitted to decay sufciently to provide the archetypal clean slate that makes way for yet another repeating short circuit of glazed chain food outlets and retail emporiums for those who can afford them?
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The Motive of the Algorithm is Still Unclear

// Giles Smith

Peter Zumthors Saint Benedict Chapel represented as an algorithm

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We did not in any way deliberately create the offensive t-shirts in question and it was the result of a scripted programming process2 On 2nd of March 2013, Amazon and a print-on-demand T-shirt company called Solid Gold Bomb found themselves in the middle of a furore over their sale of T-shirts bearing offensive slogans such as keep calm and rape. The Internets explosive response was justiable anger to what was clearly a stupid and insensitive product. What is interesting about this episode, however, is how the company, Solid Gold Bomb, chose to defend itself. Instead of assuming responsibility and apologising, they credited an algorithm with the authorship of theproducts. The algorithm did it. To spectators of contemporary digitality this is all part of a worrying trend of granting anthropomorphized agency to computers. This trend is one that has begun to be documented in the work of the nascent critical movement initiated by James Bridle, the New Aesthetic. Bridle put it best when he declared: its 2011 and I have no idea what anything is or doesanymore. 3 This is of grave interest to those concerned with the practice of creating architecture. After all Anthony Vidler was already writing in 2001 that between the 1960s and now [] there has emerged the great divide of the digital between the virtual space of computation and the real space of architecture.4 Certainly, over a decade later, it is hard to see many architects successfully breaching that divide. There is a perception that an architect is either digital, and interested in future-scenarios where their curvaceous forms will be possible, or they are a regressive Heideggerian maker, indulging in a deeply material practice. All the while we all live in a world of robotic bricklayers, crapjects, and ubiquitous computing. We are all digitalnow. I believe the anxieties of architects caused by the computational comes partly from the same lack of understanding that is behind the misconception of algorithmic agency. That is to say, both its adopters and detractors appear to be under the belief that it has the ability to

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replace architectural creation, and so fear or laud it. Computation should be perceived as a tool, and one that instead of divorcing architects from the act of creation brings them closertogether. As a provocation I have used the parametric modelling software Grasshopper to recreate a model of Peter Zumthors St Benedict chapel. Its intention is to show that a tool like Grasshopper, which is frequently abused in the service of generative form-making, is simply a tool like any other. In fact it is particularly apposite because it represents the process very distinctly as an algorithm. I dont claim that the chapel could have necessarily been improved by the use of the tool, particularly as it was built nearly a quarter of a century ago, but it is interesting to perceive the chapel as the function of an algorithm as much as a one of creative genius. As William Morris said, that talk of inspiration is sheer nonsense [] there is no such thing: it is a mere matter of craftsmanship. 5 And the modern craftsman is as likely to use an algorithm as they areahammer. If we are able to conceive of digital computation, or even algorithms, as architectural tools, then might we be able to see them as a means of breaching the divide between conceptual and architectural space? In his work, the Alphabet and the Algorithm, the historian Mario Carpo ascribes to Leon Battista Alberti the foundation of our contemporary allographic construction methodology.6 Alberti having overturned architecture from the autographic roots of craftsman-builders. It seems that in an age where digital fabrication technologies are increasingly prevalent and the results are increasingly architectural, we are getting close to returning to our autographic past. If we return to Vidlers divide, I think that the tools of digital fabrication offer the best hope for unication. Digital technologies, far from divesting the architect of creative authorship, can invest the architect with a more direct authorial relationship over their creations. They allow architects to become makers, to have immediate effect on the materials of construction. It is time to stop seeing the algorithm as a threat, and time to begin seeing it as an opportunity.\\

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Healthy Architecture
// Liam Morrisey
Health is as broad a term as architecture - at once descriptive, evidential, opinioned, good, bad, scientic, skilful, disputed. Almost every planning decision or policy has a potential affect on human health. 1 By association, so do those of the architect, from the strategic to thedetailed. As architects, we must agree to consider health implications in our designs - right? Yes. However, individual designs and trends in health dont effect us all equally; vast inequalities exist. Inequalities in health arise because of inequalities in society - in the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age. Taking action to reduce inequalities in health does not require a separate health agenda, but action across the whole of society. 2 This view could be trivialised if the below were not also true: Suburbs that rank similarly in more equal afuent countries than the UK are home to people who have better levels of health, education and well-being than those of the British and Northern Irish.3 This is particularly relevant as most OECD4 (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries are considered to be more equitable than the UK.5 A more equitable society is, therefore, of benet to members of society across the social gradient. Individual buildings will not solve these issues though; we must assert that better architecture is part of the approach. With vast swathes of the built environment not designed by architects and forces such as the prot motive, land parcelling and planning restrictions being generally much stronger drivers, how can we affect thischange?

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Different theories have evolved. A study into the correlation between increased lighting levels and productivity in the Hawthorne Factory, Chicago in the 1920s dealt a severe blow to the architectural determination theory. Higher luminosity on the factory oor would surely mean happier workers and thus greater prots? The workers polled did report increased happiness as the studycontinued. Doubt was cast however when the effects of the study itself were considered. Staff were getting happier - but not necessarily because of the increased light, but because their opinion was being invited; for the rst time the management were seen to be genuinely concerned about their welfare. If not determinism, how about todays evidence based design approach where measures are inputted into formulaic models and cost versus benet isassessed? The World Health Organisation (WHO) have made many studies into the determinants of health in developing countries, especially in those caught up in the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Of all the methods to disrupt the spread, perhaps surprisingly, it is provision of universal primary school education that has been the most effective. This is not a result of children being taught preventative measures. It is the school as a focus for the community it serves, offering classes for parents, health visits and education in and distribution of preventative measures, delivered under the watch of trusted people in the community, the teachers. The school has multiple secondary purposes, which have a much bigger impact on its community than any other facility, and the built space facilitates these activities. Even if these tertiary factors were identied and considered, how could they be quantied, measures be inputted in a formula to bereplicated? In a BBC Radio interview architecture critic Charles Jencks, joint founder of Maggies Cancer Caring Centres,6 argues: Architecture does matter for cultural reasons and because, like all art, it makes life worth living -

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not because it affects patients all that much. He nds himself surprised by the response from the doctor he was sharing the interview with who said: architecture really does make a difference for health - if the building is bad or doesnt work well, then we dont show up for work. In buildings designed with intentional bias to support patients and their families and friends and with huge budgets, the biggest impact the architecture has on the programme may have been the inadvertently improved conditions for thecarers. Architecture is art; and creativity and imagination are required. Its not a craft dened by the skill of making. The design of a new luxury at in Kensington is not an architectural process, there is no art in reafrming the status quo, even if I like it, I like it. Here we go. 7 It is a craft, perhaps skilfully made but not requiring imagination. Campaigning for better parks in Islington is equally tenuous. Sure, there are many people on lower incomes in Islington that benet positively disproportionately, thus reducing the boroughs health inequalities. However relative comparison nationally would indicate Islingtons parks are already of better quality. This danger is increasing with the localism agenda. Lower income communities, with residents already more socially isolated,8 fail to draw as much benets locally as those more well-off, who consolidate their own positions, thus increasing inequality further. Your local is good, ours is rubbish - why would we bother improving ours when we can aspire to be part of yours? A building or environment cannot be only designed for its purpose, but should as best as possible allow for what we dont know. Flimsy perhaps, but Im not talking about the big decisions now, but those as simple as widening or narrowing a corridor to allow or force interaction, also depending on the program. Architecture is not about object. Objects are successful or unsuccessful versions of themselves - architecture is neither of these but it functions, whether successfully or not. The act of architecture then is a choice, to make a positive contribution to the world we live in, to reduce inequality and provide places where people can lead positive, healthy lives.\\

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Pleasure of the Ordinary

// Zo Berman

This time it is not about foreground. We always look at the thing in front. The loudest, pushiest, shiniest. Our focus is drawn to that which stands out. But theres something else behind. For the forefront to be striking, there must be a background. Critically, background refers to the mundane and the dreary. Here is where your eye drifts over the everyday and the commonplace the building blocks of routine. The shiny relies on the dull; one would not be without the other. The background stuff is not where glamour lies. We glide past background. The design media leans forwards to peer at the new, the sparkling, the elegant and the rest settles into a routine of unnoticed and common place. Interesting things can happen back there. Quietly, without any fanfare, there is the essential plodding of day-to-day architecture that gives the leg up to the gleaming towers. We tend to notice when things go horribly wrong, and a carbuncle is held up and prodded, sneered at and ridiculed.

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Sometimes rightly so its a failure, an embarrassment or a gross example of pomposity and posturing. We notice when something is spectacular a wild success, a popular masterpiece, a graceful piece of design that can be widely enjoyed andadmired. There is a middle. Sometimes we move so fast we dont notice it. A little slow down is needed. In between the clanking failures and the glowing successes stands the medium. At a city scale the essential but often unnoticed is the infrastructure that allows inhabitants to move through their place and be supported by its existence. At mid-scale you start to see a series of buildings that support the everyday and offer us our spaces for working, leisure and rest. They may not at rst glance be gorgeous but perhaps, ideally, they might succeed in marrying functional with aesthetically agreeable. Zoom in closer and good design will start to reveal pattern and texture. Here and there you start to notice a fragment that is not obviously beautiful, but thought and care has gone into its design. As an observation these ideas rst came to mind on a site visit to Croydon. A city outside of the city, I spent a day trying to get to grips with the place, studying its identity and its architecture. There was something both exciting and intensely dull about the place. Simultaneously energetic

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and depressing. As a place it is a strange hybrid of the great and the ugly. With its stubby towers and stretching, wide roads the centre feels like the love child of Manhattan and Milton Keynes. I found the viewnder of my camera became a frame that drew my attention to corners that were I not looking closely, and trying to scrutinise the place I would quite probably have passed by. This was the st time I had used an SLR camera. Leant to me by a friend for the day I delighted in this new tool, this exciting piece of kit that encouraged me to look closer. With this quality instrument, superior to anything I owned myself, I thought more intently about what each shot mightcapture. My day of walking and snapping left me with a lasting idea that I should be paying more attention to the gaps in between built fabric and also the lesser noticed corners of citys. This would not necessarily give way to an approach towards designing projects that are particularly sensational, or even particularly radical. Maybe we already have enough designers in the UK who prioritise form making, new ideas and pusue that ugly buzz phrase of being innovative. A little less innovation. Less jostling, less visual shouting, and distinctly unshiny. Supporting simple things. Allowing for a street market, sitting on a bench, a main road. We need good background architecture that you can happily walk past, and barely notice it because the buildings are right, they t. How about trying to make some architecture where ordinary lives can be played out comfortably, safely, quietly, humbly. Walking around our cities there is a desperate need for buildings and spaces that act as the fabric that supports the mundane, domestic and the essential aspects ofdailylife.\\

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The Barbican
// Adam Currie

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Hailing from the Irish countryside, my rst experiences of London were that of startlement and exasperation at not being able to investigate and breathe in its landscape at my own pace. It was a city that I couldnt appreciate at that point during my architectural education. I was failing to recognise the many nuances which existed within such a metropolis. I just couldnt see them.

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One weekend during my rst spell of living in London I stumbled across a place that was unknown to me. Stepping through a concrete threshold I passed into an environment that had such a humble and understated atmosphere yet at the same time contained immense character, presence and poise. As I explored it through the viewnder of my 50 year old twin-lens reex camera, I was presented with a quality of light and texture that rendered timelessly. I began to see a composition of structure, landscaping, and materials that forms one of my now favourite places to peregrinate through London; theBarbican.

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In Between Spaces
// Chee-Kit Lai
I was born abroad in the late 1970s. I left shortly after Christmas in the mid-90s and arrived in London Heathrow a few days before the NewYear. Technically I spent less than two days to get from my country of birth to London. This included eight hours time difference between the two countries, a couple of hours waiting time at both airports and approximately thirteen hours ight on theairplane. Strangely, I do not remember much of this period.
Italo Calvino, If On a Winters Night a Traveller

Its 2 oclock on Monday morning. I am just getting off the night bus from town. Its dark outside. I dont feel cold, perhaps due to the consumption of alcohol earlier in the evening. There is only one thought on my mind; I am ying in about six hours. Its now four. With packing done and a cleared bed, I collapse onto it. Only to be woken up after what seems like ve minutes of sleep. Its now quarter to six. After having a hot shower, I put on the set of clothes I have laid out on my armchair the night before. In the kitchen, where I have to tiptoe because the oorboard is cold, I drink, very quickly, a glass of cold milk. Instead of speeding up, I am delayed by an instant pain at the back of my head. Back in the bedroom, I am writing my name, address and telephone number on a small blue tag. It has a thin white elastic band to allow itself to be fastened onto my large blue knapsack with. My watch is telling me I have only ve minutes before I shall be late. Its still dark outside, as dark as when I came home yesterday. I use the word yesterday because my ex-at mate, Billy, used to say a day does not end at twelve midnight, but instead ends as soon as one has hadsleep. I leave my room and walk to Kings Cross Station via Caledonian Road. My chest and back is becoming increasingly damp.
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You fasten your seat belt. The plane is landing. To y is the opposite of travelling: You cross a gap in space, you vanish into the void, you accept not being in any place for a duration that is itself a kind of void in time; then you reappear in a place and in a moment with no relation to the where and the when in which you vanished. Meanwhile, what do you do? How do you occupy this absence of yourself from the world and of the world fromyou?

A few days ago, Ruth and I agreed that we would meet at half past six, outside WH Smith at the station. Caledonian Road, where I had just come from, is quiet but Kings Cross is quite the opposite. In the building the noise and number of people suggest that it could be any time on a winters day. Amongst the crowd, a petite girl is walking towards me. Her long curly hair is somewhat untidy; she gets closer and greets me. Good morning, I reply, with the lingering taste of milk in my mouth, I wonder if shenotices. We are both on time.

A train to the airport has just left the Piccadilly Line westbound platform. There is no rush. The next train is arriving in ve minutes. I am walking down the platform along the yellow line next to the edge. I am sweating again. The next train to the airport is here. I walk into a random carriage and occupy an end seat with a glass panel to my left. To my right is Ruth. We both put our baggage on the oor between our legs. I unbutton my duffel coat and begin to chat to Ruth. After a while, I press my head against the glass panel, carefully avoiding the grease, and doze off into a small sleep.

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A.Abbas, The Erotics of Disappointment

Time weighs heavy not because it is empty, but because it has gone through strange loops. Eventually now precede the event, outpacing it, anticipating it. When the event eventually occurs, the result is always anticlimax, disappointing.
A.Abbas, The Erotics of Disappointment

The nomadic and the erotic have something in common, neither can avoiddisappointment.

My head drop suddenly and I am awake. The train has arrived at South Kensington where Charlie joins us in the same carriage by chance. He is sitting across from Ruth. The roaring sound of the train is making it impossible for me to conduct a decent conversation with Charlie. Ruth is reading the Metro paper. I start to look at other trivial things. There is an elderly man sitting directly opposite, and is reading the Quran. He is dressed in white linen and is muttering softly to himself in a foreign language. At the other end on my row of seat is a Chinese woman. She has with her a few unlabelled plastic bags on the oor. I guess the bags must be fresh food from a wet market nearby. Studying the repetitive black view out of the windows, I feel my head sway in circular directions. I think I must fallen asleep again.
A.Abbas, The Erotics of Disappointment

The train has now reached Osterley, six more stops to the airport. It will take us another twenty-four minutes; an average of four minutes from one stop to the next. The view has improved, from underground to above ground. The young sunlight is shining through into the carriage, slowly warming up the uorescent light in the cabin with a pale orange tone. I can see elds and endless rows of brick terrace houses. Sometimes it seems like we are driving through peoples back garden, with a brief glimpse of them having breakfast in their dining rooms.
Steven Bode and Jeremy Millar, Airport published by The Photographers Gallery

I step onto the conveyor belt. I placed my right hand onto the rubber handrail. I can feel the rubber handrail is not travelling at the same speed to that of the conveyer belt. I reposition my hand.
Janet Cardiff, Missing Voice, Case Study B, exhibition Whitechapel Gallery

Disappointment is the perception that every origin that we want to believe is unique and individual is already a repetition Architecturally and geographically, airports inhabit a strange kind of in-between space. Often located outside the city in thesuburbs There is a woman with a suitcase standing beneath us looking at the notice board. She just turned her head and glanced up at me, I like watching the people from here. All these lives heading off in different directions, one story overlapping with another.
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\\He was enjoying the feeling of freedom imparted by having got rid of his luggage and at the same time, more intimately, by the certainty that, now that he was sorted out, his identity registered, his boarding pass in his pocket, he had nothing to do but to wait for the sequence of events.
Marc Auge, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity

Anticipation! It occurred to him that his anticipation was more pleasant to him than his experiencing. Was it always going to be like that?
Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr Ripley

As expected, there is a problem with my name again. My ticket is issued with a name KitLai/CMR. The travel agent where the ticket is booked through has mistaken my surname for Chee and my forenames as Kit Lai. My name is Chee Kit Lai. After the usual banal negotiations he hands me a boarding pass

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Footnotes
Rebuilding the Council House The Case of Camden Architects Department 1965-73 // Page 14
01. Swenarton, Mark, Geared to producing ideas, with the emphasis on youth: the creation of the Camden borough Architects department, Journal of Architecture, vol 16 no.3 June 2011 p.387-414 02. Local authority housing statistics 2011-12, Dept. For Communities and Local Government https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/local-authority-housing-statistics-for-england-2011-to-2012 03. London borough of Camden Planning committee report, 31 May, 1961 04. Duff, Peggy, Left, Left, Left: Personal Account of Six Protest campaigns 1945-65, p.60 05. Towers, Graham The Implications of Housing Density p.146 06. ibid 07. Brown, Neave, The Form of Housing in Architectural Design, September 1967, p.432-3 08. Persons per acre 09. Alexandra road, the last great social housing project, AA les 30, 1995, Andrew Frear p.35-46 10. ibid 11. A future for housing in Camden Camdens housing strategy 2011-2016, p.5 12. ibid 13. ibid 14. A future for housing in Camden Camdens housing strategy 2011-2016, p.4 15. Hollander, Gavriel, 25,000 homes to be built thanks to HRA change, Inside Housing, 8th March 2013 16. Hetherington, Peter Budget 2013:will George Osborne x Englands deepening housing crisis The Guardian, Wed March 20th 2013 (http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/mar/20/george-osborne-budget-housing crisis?CMP=twt_fd) 17. National Federation of ALMOS, Lets get building: the case for local authority investment in rented homes to help drive economic growth (http://www.almos.org.uk/document?id=5300)

The Unintended // Page 19

01. Pamela M. Lee, chapter entitled Monument to Entropy: Robert Smithsons place for Matta-Clark, in Object to be Destroyed, The Work of Gordon Matta-Clark, p. 46.

The Motive of the Algorithm is Still Unclear // Page 30

01. Mysterious Algorithm was Responsible for 4% of Trading Last Week, CNBC, 8th October 2012, as quoted by Tim Maly, Algorithmic Rape Jokes in the Museum of Babel, Quiet Babylon (accessed March 2013) <quietbabylon.com> 02. Company Apologises for Keep Calm and Rape T-Shirts, ITV News (2nd March 2013) <www.itv.com news/2013-03-02/company-apologises-for-keep-calm-and-rape-t-shirts/> 03. Bridle, James, The New Aesthetic, Waving at Machines, (Sydney: Web Directions South, October 2011) 04. Vidler, Anthony, Warped Space: Art, Architecture and Anxiety in Modern Culture (Cambridge, Mass: MIT) p.245 05. From Mackails, the Life of William Morris, 1899, as quoted in Pevsner, Nikolaus, Pioneers of Modern Design: from William Morris to Walter Gropius (London: Penguin Books, 1960) p.23 06. Carpo, Mario, The Alphabet and the Algorithm (Cambridge, Mass: MIT, 2011)

Healthy Architecture // Page 33

01. Healthy Urban Development Unit, The Correlation Between Planning and Health, 2009. 02. The Marmot Review, Fair Society, Healthy Lives, 2010. 03. Danny Dorling, Using the concept of place to understand and reduce health inequalities, 2010. 04. OECD includes 34 member states from the developed and developing world. 05. Wilkinson and Pickett, The problems of relative deprivation: why some societies do better than others, 2009 06. Maggies Cancer Care Centres, blurb, 2013: communities of support and building design to create exceptional centers for cancer care. 07. John Fogerty of band Status Quo, Rockin All Over The World, 1975. 08. The Marmot Review, Fair Society, Healthy Lives, 2010.

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Acknowledgements & Thanks

The Unpublishables would like to thank the following people for their support and input in making this fanzinehappen. Charlotte Hobson Dan Cash Flo Nicoll The Albert, Kilburn Will Burton

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