The Bartlett Summer School 2018

Have just spent an hour just getting a feel for the amazing variety of work that is on show - it gives a real sense of how great architecture's impact is and just how wide a spectrum of ideas, areas of influence and understanding of our past its study opens up. The detail that goes into the model making is incredible (a very small sample below).

I particularly liked the Unit 26 work (Film) - I guess the moving image will always have a head start when it comes to engaging you on a whistle stop tour. The sequence including some Bladerunner style imagery was mesmerising (sorry I forgot to not the student details).

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The Mystery L

Clapham Wind Tunnel One area where being able to talk to the people who worked for John Laing is really helpful is unravelling the odd mystery. I have noticed that in a number of photographs from the 1950s there is one or two individuals who had a large L on their jacket. I speculated on what this might be and thought that most likely it was to designate the leader of a team of workers. I was able to put a short piece in John Laing's Retired Employees' News asking for any information on the mystery L and several people kindly wrote to explain the mystery - which was no real mystery at all. The L simply stood for Laing but only new employees would be given a jacket with the logotype and so this took a long time to permeate through the organisation. A case of applying Occam's razor and not overthinking things for me.

PhD Introductions

So 2 months into the degree it is time to talk about my research ideas to a wider audience. On 4th Dec the School will be running a session titled PhD Introductions. The purpose of the event is to introduce the students' previous work and research interests, to discuss their current research ideas, developments and experiments and to generate a lively discussion about research in architecture. I get to do a 10 minute presentation followed by comments/questions/discussion. It has been a useful exercise so far - thinking about how to condense a somewhat sprawling thought process into a short piece and to make sure that it is accessible in the sense of providing enough of the background and context to allow the audience to make some sense of everything.

PHRC 2019

The PHRC conference at De Montfort was tremendous and provided a lot of insights for me to go away and think about. In particular there was a lot of discussion about what is missing from an archive and what that tells us - sometimes as much as the extant material. Things for me to think about include: How colour photography creates a new sensory experience - maybe tying this into the work that Lynda Nead has done Who are the keepers of corporate memory - the business or the people who work in it? How posed are the images - are they pictures of work in progress or staged Do the images sanction and "testify" to a particular (curated?) history I was also pointed at other work that I need to read - the pile keeps getting higher!

The Good Builder - Researching John Laing

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