DAVID CARR-SMITH ART DESIGN IMPROVISATION KITSCH CHANCE

THE 4-SITES

"GRAIN SILO"

"TETTERODE"

"DE LOODS"

"EDELWEIS"

Unlike the improvised homes shown in the previous website, which are made inside large buildings and thus enjoy primary shelter, this website shows villages improvised on open-sites. These large unused areas of relatively cleared urban land (often owned by local councils or 'developers') are usually occupied by people who want to build a village of dwellings that as far as possible is self-sustaining and minimally wasteful of resources. With no primary shelter, not only are all the homes and shared facilities complete and independent structures, but their disposition on the site - unconstrained by the priori organisation of an enclosing building - must be at least provisionally organised in relation to facilities and routes. A loosely developing village plan thus grows more or less intentionally - as a sum of individual and communal choices - uniting the seperate building-structures as foci in a single pattern. These latter are works of scrap-architecture that necessarily use a minimum of materials - improvised from scavanged building debris and donations of local people.

ALLOTMENT IMPROVISATIONS - PUBLIC, LEGAL, SOCIALLY INDORSED

Allotments are the last UK preserve of scope-limited but free inventiveness - places where grown-ups can improvise practical structures from what elsewhere would be despised as 'rubbish'. Their plots display objects that provoke one to examine the junction between practical improvisation and art. Their inventions sometimes exceed the allotment's traditional raison d'etre of food production and elaborate pragmatism into 'play'. Though their intention is to develop 'settlements' for the welfare and managment of plants, the plans and furnishings of their plots may resemble sketches and models of possible human architecture.

LINK TO :

TEMPORARY-ARCHITECTURE: ("FRANK'S CAFE" & "SOUTHWARK LIDO")

Temporary-architecture is intermediate between opportunistic self-referencing improvisations and comissioned buildings designed for clients. It shares transience with improvisation which (but for different reasons) imposes an imperative of material economy and distillation of function, with which aestheticism and extraneous expressiveness are incommensurate. With comissioned architecture it shares a seperation of client and designer whose consequence is a 'model' of a need rather than (as with self made provisions) an emergent and inevitable expression of it.

In the 1970s this hill-top village began to display the results of a rather sudden increase of wealth. This effected the farm buildings and the village houses differently. The farm buildings continued as they always had, to espouse only pragmatism, even though this new wealth changed their means of construction. The village houses however increasingly exhibited symptoms of 'design-disease'.

This study of the constituents of mass-taste/market homes uses examples from the UK's ‘stage-set’ suburbia. In particular it includes an analysis of the intended and subliminal meanings of a typical mass-kitsch living-room, its tensely ordered stereotypes of security and “good-taste” and its functioning as an experiential ‘front-line’, a locus of attempts to mediate and placate existential conditions via the familiar objects and arrangements that constitute and furnish it: the ‘enclosure’ and its openings; its ‘ancestral-hearth’; mantle-clock; pictures (paintings of fantasy, photos of memory); its trophies, ‘antiques’, decor and styles.