© - 2009 - DAVID CARR-SMITH
IMPROVISATION / DESIGN / ART / KITSCH / CHANCE
.
LINK TO :
IMPROVISED
ARCHITECTURE IN AMSTERDAM INDUSTRIAL SQUATS
& COLLECTIVES
this is now at www.davecarrsmith.co.uk
This large 'web-book' is a visual/conceptual/experiential documentation of
four squatted industrial sites in central Amsterdam, researched and recorded mainly between 1990 and 1997.
Since 2005 new info is being added.
LINK
TO :
OPEN-SITE
IMPROVISED VILLAGES: (WANDSWORTH & KEW BRIDGE 'ECO VILLAGES')
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.
LINK TO : .
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.
LINK
TO :
VERNACULAR
PRAGMATISM & STYLE: (BERDUN VILLAGE)
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'.
LINK
TO :
"HOME"
- DEFINING MY LOCATION VIA MASS-MARKET
PRODUCTS
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.
These mass-homes are the antithesis of the improvised dwellings shown in the website above ("IMPROVISED ARCHITECTURE IN AMSTERDAM ...") - this section enables a comparison of the physical and experiential results of these completely different ways of forming a home: improvising ones own on the basis of immediate needs or choosing mass-marketed products and taste.