(no subject)
May. 17th, 2006 10:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shinytoasterI think I'm getting better at grilling steaks, I nearly managed a medium-rare tonight. Leastways it was still slightly red inside when I cut it. And I have a nice glass of Chianti that was half price at Tesco - marked down from eight quid, so it is actually a pretty good wine, and some fried mushrooms and chips to go with it. I also have a Danish Blue (cheese, not porn) and half a Brie left to finish - unhappily I have no crackers. Must remember to pick some of those up tomorrow.
Missed most of the football in favour of watching two complete arses botching this high concept house on Grand Designs. They'd built this house of two halves thinger, half of which was designed to look like an Edwardian potting shed, and the other half - oddly - designed to look like Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's exquisite Barcelona pavilion, and then they comprehensively fucked it up by firing the architect and shitting all over his (very striking) design so that the end result looked less like an ethereal floating glass box and more like an airport lounge. It was a very poor show, usually Grand Designs is true property pornography and has self-designed and self-built houses that are enough to make any interior designer or wannabe interior designer ejaculate straight into his pima Calvins. But this was so dreadful that halfway through I had to get out my Frank Lloyd Wright book and ogle some houses built by a man who knows what good design is all about. I think when L and I design our own house, I'd like to try and marry Lloyd Wright to van der Rohe, I reckon the result could be inspirational if we get it right.
Designing your own house appeals to me immensely - a dwelling is an amazingly personal space, a place where you have to sleep and eat and excrete and procreate and so on. It simply doesn't strike me as right to live in some kind of Barrett designed faux-Victorian monstrosity because the designers of all these out-of-town estates with twisty cul-de-sacs and a rakish cupola on every third house, houses with names like The Winchester or The Hamptons (why, while we are about it, have we not yet seen Barrett homes called The Solihull?). How can the desk-jockey who designed those things know what the people who buy the house possibly want? It reflects no individuality or soul, merely a desire to retire to your ochre-bricked, UPVC windowed excresence and maybe wash the Vectra of a weekend afternoon. I want a house that tells people passing who I am, not one that someone tells me who I aspire to be. People shouldn't be afraid to demand what they want. There are these people in Germany - i think the company is called Huff - who design these amazing, bespoke glass and timber villas, and they sell lots in Germany and are even starting to sell a few to monied Brits.
And the enemies of this kind of design piss me off royally. It's mainly the fault of that comprehensive arsehole the Prince of Wales and his cohorts of pathetic ninnies, as depicted in frankly painful accuracy in last month's National Geographic - and note to any foreign readers who think that ridiculous excuse for an article is in any way a reflection of life in Britain you are deeply mistaken - who make it their business to evangelise this ridiculous notion of a rural golden age that is so far beyond mythical it has entirely ceased to be funny. Poundbury, Prince Charle's pet 'project' is not noteworthy in any way, being merely a collection of Barrett style homes. The future lies in developments like Bedzed.
This is why I fully intend to have a glass-fronted pavillion of my very own, to piss off Prince Charles. Different is fun.
Missed most of the football in favour of watching two complete arses botching this high concept house on Grand Designs. They'd built this house of two halves thinger, half of which was designed to look like an Edwardian potting shed, and the other half - oddly - designed to look like Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's exquisite Barcelona pavilion, and then they comprehensively fucked it up by firing the architect and shitting all over his (very striking) design so that the end result looked less like an ethereal floating glass box and more like an airport lounge. It was a very poor show, usually Grand Designs is true property pornography and has self-designed and self-built houses that are enough to make any interior designer or wannabe interior designer ejaculate straight into his pima Calvins. But this was so dreadful that halfway through I had to get out my Frank Lloyd Wright book and ogle some houses built by a man who knows what good design is all about. I think when L and I design our own house, I'd like to try and marry Lloyd Wright to van der Rohe, I reckon the result could be inspirational if we get it right.
Designing your own house appeals to me immensely - a dwelling is an amazingly personal space, a place where you have to sleep and eat and excrete and procreate and so on. It simply doesn't strike me as right to live in some kind of Barrett designed faux-Victorian monstrosity because the designers of all these out-of-town estates with twisty cul-de-sacs and a rakish cupola on every third house, houses with names like The Winchester or The Hamptons (why, while we are about it, have we not yet seen Barrett homes called The Solihull?). How can the desk-jockey who designed those things know what the people who buy the house possibly want? It reflects no individuality or soul, merely a desire to retire to your ochre-bricked, UPVC windowed excresence and maybe wash the Vectra of a weekend afternoon. I want a house that tells people passing who I am, not one that someone tells me who I aspire to be. People shouldn't be afraid to demand what they want. There are these people in Germany - i think the company is called Huff - who design these amazing, bespoke glass and timber villas, and they sell lots in Germany and are even starting to sell a few to monied Brits.
And the enemies of this kind of design piss me off royally. It's mainly the fault of that comprehensive arsehole the Prince of Wales and his cohorts of pathetic ninnies, as depicted in frankly painful accuracy in last month's National Geographic - and note to any foreign readers who think that ridiculous excuse for an article is in any way a reflection of life in Britain you are deeply mistaken - who make it their business to evangelise this ridiculous notion of a rural golden age that is so far beyond mythical it has entirely ceased to be funny. Poundbury, Prince Charle's pet 'project' is not noteworthy in any way, being merely a collection of Barrett style homes. The future lies in developments like Bedzed.
This is why I fully intend to have a glass-fronted pavillion of my very own, to piss off Prince Charles. Different is fun.
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(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-18 02:58 pm (UTC)I had a book when I was a kid called 'How Were They Built?' and one of the buildings in the modern section, once you'd got past all the medieval cathedrals and the Eiffel Tower and everything, was L'Unite D'Habitation and I remember thinking it looked pretty cool back then. I will take a look at that website when I get home from work.
Sustainability is all well and good but it's so hard to attain. Of course it would be great if we could all offset all our carbon emissions and minimise our so-called footprint. But equally that kind of living isn't conducive to living in beautiful cities (like Llubljana, for argument's sake), so I wouldn't feel too bad for Slovenia.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-19 07:31 am (UTC)I didn't even know about L'Unite before we studied it at uni :) L'Unite D'Habitation is quite cool in the fact that it's standing on pillars and you can walk underneath this big building. Also, I really liked standing on the roof, it felt sort of like floating. But the man didn't connect his architecture with the outside world much and that is the main thing that bothers me about his work: the fact that nature for him is something to be admired from afar. I love the glass pavillion thingies like the one you plan on having in your post :) Because it enables you to be there, among the nature in bad weather and yet not be cold, get wet from the rain etc.
Well thank you for calling Ljubljana beautiful :) even if you were just being nice and all.
There is a lot being said about sustainability, but I feel around here it's really more about theory. I loved a lecture I was on by Glenn Murcutt (Australian architect, great guy) and what he does is he doesn't try to create beautiful architecture, but he tries to do something that is as functional and sustainable as possible (really working best to suit the site, collecting water from roofs etc.) and in the end, his buildings really work, whether you think they're beautiful is a secondary issue.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-19 05:19 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-19 07:23 pm (UTC)