A section is an architectural drawing convention which cuts vertically through a building. It shows everything all at the same time, and in doing this it allows us to look at a building in an entirely different - and unnatural - way. It's a view that is entirely different from the way you would actually experience a building. Walls - which usually divide rooms into discrete entities containing activities that, for practical or social reasons have been separated (bathroom from bedroom, public areas form private areas and so on) - become frames, as though the drawing becomes a cartoon strip describing a frozen moment in the life of a building. The sectional drawing convention allows us to see inside each of these discrete places simultaneously - allowing us to see their juxtaposed proximity. At the same time, the convention ask us only to draw the architecture, not the occupation of the architecture - the things which might be happening in the bedroom or the bathroom. Human figures are only normally included to suggest a sense of scale rather than activity.

The idea of seeing the simultaneous occupation of architecture is however, a cinematic staple. Think of the opening shot of Rear Window which pans across the back facade of an apartment block, its windows framing the diverse activities of the buildings inhabitants as though each were its own movie screen. The shot is set up as though it were an architectural architectural drawing: the facade in the same plane as the screen.

But this scene from "I Am Cuba" brings a more lyrical, gymnastic quality to what we might call sectional cinematography. Here the camera moves as though it were drawing the scene itself, tracing a line through space - rather than presenting in orthographic projection. Along this path we experience a multitude of intimate moments and distinct activities - as well as big vistas across Havana. The continuous tracking shot ties these diversities together so that we are aware of their spatial relationships.

Of course the technical accomplishment of this shot is astounding - as are others in the film. It's mind boggling to imagine how the actors and camera were choreographed. Apparently, the camera lens was coated with a film developed for the periscopes of Soviet submarines which allows it to dip in an out of the pool without us seeing quite so much as a drip. Viva Sectional Cinematography!

Big thanks to Rick, who swiftly solved the mystery of the half timbered brutalism which came up in the preceeding post. It turns out that the images were stills from a startlingly brilliant film made by Zeitguised - "a lateral studio for moving images .... Zeitguised's high gloss artschool 3D punk blends complex geometries, surreal subjects, artificial behaviours and the recycling of digital readymades into their distinct halluzinatory narration style"

About Peripetics:

Zeitguised made a piece in six acts for the opening exhibition at the Zirkel Gallery. It entails six imaginations of disoriented systems that take a catastrophic turn, including the evolution of educational plant-body-machine models and liquid building materials.

I have a couple of pieces in the second issue of Junk Jet (link to suitably mid nineties animated gif-tastic website). One on the Popemobile, and the other on bad, really bad construction. Its great to see such a messy, un-resolved and obscure publication - one that would sit well amongst the archi-fanzines that make up Clip/Stamp/Fold. Equally, it seems it would be in good company in Mimi Zeigers upcoming show 'A Few Zines: Dispatches from the Edge of Architectural Production'.

Inside is a real gem - and almost completley unexplained. This project that combines brutalism with Elizabethan op-art half timbering. Anyone who knows me will understand that these images are like my dreams come true. I can't help be both relieved that I'm not alone in being haunted by imagery such as this and jealously at not being able to articulate it quite so brilliantly.

All it tells us is the following: "zeitguised: exhoused and blockhaus, filmstills, 2008". What could this mean? Does anyone know any more about this project?

Josh Azzarella. Untitled #23 (''Lynndied'')

Next Nature

Denise Scott Brown recalls her childhood bemusement at being asked to make Christmas cards depicting snowy scenes of Surrey in the summer of colonial South Africa. The idealized cultural image, dislocated and juxtaposed by Imperialism: Downs against veldt; winter against summer; Europe against Africa.

But equally, snowy Christmas card scenes look just as alien when you're actually in Surrey. Christmas images are not paintings depicting atmospheric conditions, temperature or geography. They are images that describe a mythical place that never existed anywhere.

Christmas' winter wonderland is an image of nature fed through the filter thousands of years of culture - replayed though literature, movies, music, images in a feedback loop. It's a myth that's been overwritten to the point of illegibility: from obscured pagan origins, through Christianisation, then by varied secular interests (St. Nick as Coca Cola trademark; John Lennon's hippy-dom). It squirts out the other end a collection of half broken, half forgotten sentiments distilled into super strength imagery. Christmas' iconography is a super narrative that refers only to itself: each iteration a way of recalling the last, as George Michael so pertinently observed (though perhaps because of its impossible nostalgia, our hearts will be broken every year).

It's this fractured, dreamlike scenography that we assemble each year with plasticky, shiny, and papery stuff - a way of physically manifesting a cultural concept as an ephemeral landscape, an imaginary space laid over our real environments.

It's an utterly unnatural simulatation of a memory of nature. The sparkle of LED lights might recall a starry pagan sky and prayers for the suns return. Frost is rendered as glowing fiber optic tips of artificial fir trees. We string tinsel from ceiling tiles as though wintry vines were creeping through our open plan offices. We spray plasticized versions of snow onto windows as applied meteorology.

We watch cranes lifting trees onto the pediments of neo-Classical buildings as though the city might become a forest. German markets appear overnight like hallucinations in unlikely situations (this years favorite: in Chicago at Mies' Federal Plaza)

The electro-pseudo-winter is incredible in its intricacy and depth. But it's also at odds with what's happening to 'real' winter.

Climate change science shows winter shrinking. Many European plants flower a week earlier than in the 1950s and lose their leaves 5 days later. Birds and frogs breed earlier. The Northern Hemisphere spring ice thaw begins 9 days earlier than150 years ago. The autumn freeze typically starts 10 days later. North of forty degrees north latitude, the growing season for vegetation has increased by several days. The artic is becoming greener and might be ice-free during summer by 2060. Father Christmas might think about trading in his sled for a 4x4.

Ski Dubai, UAE

Perhaps these statistics explain why we artificially stretch the festive season. It bleeds across the calendar like an icy inkblot. Maybe it's because there are fewer real snowflakes that we feel the need to manufacture decorative ones, why Harrods' Christmas shop opens in August and mince pies are on the shelves in September. Perhaps it's guilt and fear made palpable through tinsel and fiber optics - an attempt to salve a loss that we can't quite yet comprehend. Or perhaps it's preparation for a future where winter simply doesn't occur naturally anymore.

Super computers run digital simulations of climate change, crunching equations that calculate potential futures. What these winters will look like is probably not part of these simulations. But perhaps our super-scaled festive installations will escape their manmade habitats and begin to fill the voids of winter-depleted landscapes. Perhaps we will see forests of white fiber optic trees planted over the slopes of Bavarian mountains, colour-cycling through warm nights. Or perhaps sparkling neon snowflakes will be suspended in flocks over a scorched North Pole. Maybe armies of set-dressers will squirt spray-on-snow over pine needles. Perhaps these installations will become an artificial Narnia - permanent monuments to a vanished season.

Want one?

Steven Meisel photoshoot, 1983

"I was having the time of my life." Says model Kelly Emberg, "I just love Steven. His pictures are the hottest thing since Richard Avedon. There's simply nobody who can get you into a fantasy the way he can." "Nastier!" yells out Meisel, "Stranger!" ... via

One of the conceits of our globalised word is that we feel able to duplicate places. It is a sensation that perhaps arises out of easy and frequent travel, out of instant communication, out of the inescapable torrents of images that passes for contemporary culture. It's an idea that a place might be franchisable - duplicated, copied, and repeated in distant locations, multiplied over geography. Sometimes this occurs as image, sometimes as organisation, and sometimes as characteristics of massing, density or other qualities might be encoded into urban replicants. Just think of the number of projects that begin with a reference to Barcelona's urban plan (see also 'Tuscan hill town' and many other popular precedents that populate the rhetoric of urban design). Its part of the tactic that's become knows as 'Placemaking' (or, as we might call it here in an effort to acknowledge the role of simulation, 'Placefaking'). As Starbucks succinctly puts it "Geography is a Flavour".

Right now, across Britain, there's been an outbreak of a particular kind of place-based-hallucination: a series of Laplands - essentially Christmas theme parks - which have taken over decidedly English landscapes in attempts to manifest some kind of non-specific winter wonderland.

Its when they go wrong that it gets interesting. There has been a flurry of stories about many of these Laplands being closed down by environmental health and trading standards officers on account of their utter rubbishness. Not so much Laplands as Craplands.

The BBC report on Lapland New Forest where a security guard resigned because because he was "ashamed to work there":

"Santa got attacked, one of the elves got smacked in the face and pushed into a pram. I was punched in the forehead in the ticket office by an irate customer. I was ashamed to work there, really, really ashamed."

The Sun reports on the weird effects of iconocgraphic doubling: "Children queued on a muddy hillside for TWO different Santas at the same time -- ruining any sense this chap was the real deal."

Another story on Lapland West Midlands from the Times is titled ' No snow, no Santa - must be another Lapland':

" THERE should have been huskies, real snow and an ice rink, but yesterday the families turning up to the opening of a Lapland theme park were met by empty marquees, a muddy field and trading standards officers.
Lapland West Midlands, based in a field close to one of Britain's busiest motorway junctions, had been abandoned not just by Santa and his elves but by its organisers, too."

" "Lapland" was flanked by a shooting range, a grey icy lake and mobile phone masts. Even the birdsong from the nearby woods was drowned out by noise from the nearby M6."

Beautiful, in its own way, no? It sounds like the ideal place to spend a completely contemporary Christmas: Geography in bad, festive drag.

This swiftness of the transformation hits built culture hard. The economic collapse has revealed the world as a place undescribed by the maps and charts we had drawn. Designed for one scenario, buildings find themselves completed in a different landscape, appearing on the skyline like giant mausolea for a failed ideology, or abandoned half-built like freshly minted ruins.

The markets had evolved into hyper sophisticated, super-calibrated, cleverly geared systems whose logics supported an ever-finer kind of abstraction. They became a machine for manufacturing value and growth in vaporous form, decoupled from substance. Their failure is the failure of a particular kind of technological, algorithmically programmed fantasy of abstraction.

History suggests that the construction of the most ambitious architectural projects immediately precedes the deepest economic slumps. And that's exactly what we've seen in progression from the Guggenheim Bilbao to the cities from zero in the Gulf. This headline grabbing architecture has been driven by the logic of the boom. That's to say, the ideology of the global market has been the context for architecture. These projects attempted to turn the flush of cash and credit delivered by fluctuations of abstract systems into something real: a thing or a place. They sprung up in the ruins of industry or were fueled by the fleeting bounty of mineral extraction. And they were designed around the most distracted and least reliable kind of programme: tourism. Each project competing as a destination to max out vacationers credit lines. It's created an architecture of spectacular, hollow unreality: based on unreal money, housing unreal programmes.

This unreality has infused architectural production, often finding resolution in hysterical, liquid, fluid form at audacious scale - the kind of thing recently dubbed 'Parametricism'. (Note: Just as the height of building might be a warning sign of impending turmoil, the articulation of a stylistic manifesto is a sure sign of hubristic overconfidence). Displays of beyond-human formal complexity drop out of the computational design systems employed in the search for exoticism and difference - a difference that was demanded by the market pluralism of ultra capitalism. Appropriately, these projects seem to use the very same kind of tools that has maximized, magnified, and deepened our current financial crisis. If the Modern movement had the abstraction of industry as its reference, millennial architecture had the systemized abstraction of late capitalism.

This union of ideology and form has decoupled in dramatic fashion. The swift disjunction leaves a generation of architecture rendered instantly out of time - as un-possible as Gothic architecture in the Renaissance. These glistening new-ruins are adrift in the landscape of global recession, abandoned like ghost ships, doomed to unknown fates.

Architecture stands as a record of sensations long vanished. Through it we can vicariously experience sensations of vanished cultures. At Versailles we can feel the vanity, excess, and self-glorification of pre-revolutionary France; At Chartres, the soaring, overbearing might and mysticism of medieval religion; At Stonehenge we feel the presence of something than we will never know.

Tomorrows visitors to todays (or yesterdays) iconic buildings will feel the swoosh of volumes, the cranked out impossibility of structure, the lightheadedness of refection and translucencies. They will marvel at buildings that hardly touch the ground, which swoop into the air as though drawn up by the jet stream. They will feel stretched by elongated angles that seem sucked into vanishing points that confound perspective, and will be seduced by curves of such overblown sensuality. And in this litany of affects they will find the most permanent record of the heady liquid state of mind of millennial abstract-boom economics. We might rechristen these freakish sites as museums of late capitalist experience, monuments to a never to be repeated faith in the global market.

Actually, taking the last couple of posts, plus something that comes out of Owens post here, I think I'm heading towards a idea that 'high' High Tech architecture (the Pompidou, and especially Lloyds - with its moments of historicism such as the Lutine Bell and surreally transposed classical Italianate wood-panelled Adam Room - as well as its fetishisation of function/structure/mechanics) is actually a form of proto-Steampunk.

Or maybe latent Steampunk. Certainly, the argument runs that this strand of modern British architecture is a descendant of Victorian engineering - that the origin of modern British architecture begins with Brunel. Perhaps, the future of High Tech (which seems in its own way to have run out of steam - if you'll forgive the pun) should be found by reaching into Science Historicism, rather than chasing what seems to be the sci-fi future (blobs, digitalism etc). Certainly, etched brass High Tech would be super beautiful ...

In a reversal of Lloyds futurist-gothic-industrialism, we might wonder what if - for some unexplained reason -industry took on the aesthetics of historical architecture. This image of a historicist oil rig explores this particular notion.

In a perverse move - given the current carnage in the construction industry - we're hiring at FAT right now. One of the interview candidates is currently working for an oil company and was describing the role she performs in the design of oil rigs. It's interesting to consider the role of architects in the design of infrastructure - which remains the preserve (on the whole) of engineering (apart from chi chi bridges which have come to symbolise a certain kind of regeneration). What might happen if you put Leon Krier in charge of Crossrail, for example?