DAVID CARR-SMITH : 2015 ...
INDEX : IMPROVISATION / DESIGN / ART / KITSCH / CHANCE
.
INDEX
IMPROVISED ARCHITECTURE IN AMSTERDAM INDUSTRIAL SQUATS & COLLECTIVES AN
ARTIST'S
PUBLIC-SITE INSTALLATION WORKS
IMPROVISED
OPEN-SITE: ("THE NOMADIC COMMUNITY GARDEN")
IMPROVISED VILLAGES: (WANDSWORTH & KEW BRIDGE 'ECO VILLAGES')
ALLOTMENT
IMPROVISATIONS - PUBLIC, LEGAL, SOCIALLY INDORSED TEMPORARY-ARCHITECTURE:
("FRANK'S CAFE" & "SOUTHWARK LIDO")
VERNACULAR - PRAGMATISM & STYLE: (BERDUN VILLAGE BARNS & HOUSES) "HOME"
- MY LOCATION VIA MASS-PRODUCTS & TASTE - LIV-RM
"HOME" - MY LOCATION VIA PERSONAL
CHOICES
ART - GOTHIC INTO RENAISSANCE INTO EARLY 20thC
ART - 20thC COLLAGE INTO MASS-MEDIA
"HOME" - MY LOCATION VIA MASS-PRODUCTS
& TASTE - HOUSE
GRAFFITI INTO STREET-ART
KITSCH
CHANCE
& DESIGN
.
LINK TO :
IMPROVISED
ARCHITECTURE IN AMSTERDAM INDUSTRIAL SQUATS
& COLLECTIVES
This large 'web-book' is a visual/conceptual/experiential documentation of
four squatted and collectivised industrial sites in central Amsterdam, researched and recorded between 1990 and
1997 and between 2006 and 2008.
LINK TO :
AN ARTIST'S PUBLIC-SITE INSTALLATION WORKS
This
web-site is an exploratory list of public-site 'installation' works of the artist Angela Wright. It shows examples of non-practical site-interventions that can be compared - as an alternative type of personal manifestation - with the pragmatically-improvised environments shown in some of these Sub-Sites (eg: Improvised Architecture in Amsterdam Squats ... etc).LINK
TO :
IMPROVISED OPEN-SITE: (THE "NOMADIC COMMUNITY GARDEN")
This section shows an urban open-site used for more general social purposes than a 'village' of dwellings. This 'Nomadic Community Garden' is intended for public entertainment, socialising, art/design creativity, and allotments for local flat dwellers. Like the urban improvised villages it utilises an unused area of relatively cleared urban land (owned in this case by a developer), like them it hosts works of scrap-architecture and art that use a minimum of materials, usually improvised from scavenged debris and donations of local people.
LINK
TO :
IMPROVISED VILLAGES: (WANDSWORTH & KEW BRIDGE 'ECO VILLAGES')
Unlike the improvised 'villages' shown in the 'Improvised Architecture' website, which are made inside large buildings and thus enjoy primary shelter, this section 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 a priori organization of an enclosing building - must be at least provisionally organized 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 separate building-structures as foci in a single pattern. These latter are works of scrap-architecture that necessarily use a minimum of materials - improvised from scavenged 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 management of plants, the plans and furnishings of their plots
may resemble sketches and models of possible
human architecture.
LINK
TO :
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 :
This
study of the constituents of mass-taste/mass-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
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
LINK
TO :
An extraordinary aspect of British culture is that people whose main social/working persona is 'adult' - 'tough' / 'professional' / 'hard-headed' / 'no-nonsense' / 'commonsensical' / 'power-seeking' - can, apparently without embarrassment, expose to the gaze of all who pass their house, even proudly display, a view of a 'private' persona that is dominated by sentimental fantasies.
LINK
TO :
"HOME"
- MY LOCATION VIA PERSONAL CHOICES
This section
shows homes that have formed primarily around
personal needs and experiences; whose use of their society's products is
more practical than 'tribal' and for whom the game of 'taste-display' is an
irrelevance.
LINK
TO :
ART
- GOTHIC INTO RENAISSANCE INTO 20thC
This section
discusses two radical qualitative changes in European experiencing, as mediated via art - from Gothic to Renaissance and from Renaissance to the early 20th century.LINK
TO :
ART - 20thC
COLLE
INTO MASS-MEDIA
How
experiential potentials, released via art, disseminate their effects. It refers
specifically to the discoveries of 1911 to 1920’s Cubist/Surrealist
‘collages’ - how these increasingly differentiate into mass-info forms: are
exploited in ads and predict the inherent possibilities of electronic mediation.
LINK
TO :
GRAFFITI
- FROM TAGGING TO STREET-ART
In this 'Graffiti' section I want to sort out (solely on the basis of my own naive observations of their results) the public works of our citizen artists. Without knowledge of their individual or social background, based only on my personal sense of their contributions to the 'art-gallery' of public space, I will simply try to categorise and assess the various types and qualities of the experiences they offer.
LINK
TO :
LINK TO :
This section offers examples of relations between chance and intention / design and chaos.