DAVID CARR-SMITH :   2015 ...

INDEX :    IMPROVISATION / DESIGN / ART / KITSCH / CHANCE 


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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 MASS-PRODUCTS & TASTE - HOUSE

"HOME" - MY LOCATION VIA PERSONAL CHOICES   

ART - GOTHIC INTO RENAISSANCE INTO EARLY 20thC

ART - 20thC COLLAGE INTO MASS-MEDIA  
GRAFFITI INTO STREET-ART 
KITSCH
CHANCE & DESIGN


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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. 

 

THE 4-SITES

"GRAIN SILO"

"TETTERODE"

"DE LOODS"

"EDELWEIS"


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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).


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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.


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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.


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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.


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

Temporary-architecture is intermediate between opportunistic self-referencing improvisations and commissioned 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 commissioned architecture it shares a separation 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. 
 


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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'.


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"HOME" - MY LOCATION VIA MASS-MARKET PRODUCTS & TASTE(pt 1: LIVING-ROOM)

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

(Such mass-homes are the antithesis of the improvised dwellings shown above (ref: "IMPROVISED ARCHITECTURE IN AMSTERDAM..." and the section "IMPROVISED VILLAGES..."). This enables a comparison of the physical and experiential results of two radically different ways of forming a home:
 choosing mass-marketed products and styles or improvising ones own on the basis of immediate needs.)


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"HOME" - MY LOCATION VIA MASS-MARKET PRODUCTS & TASTE:  (pt 2: HOUSE)

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.


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"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. 

(This is a companion to the previous section
s, which shows the homes of people who display to themselves and others the quality of their commitment to the styles, meanings, behaviors of their society's averaged concept of "home".)


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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. 


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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.  


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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. 


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KITSCH & STEREOS

This section offers examples of products that purvey pretend-value via quotation. This is a mode of design whose products least resemble 'works of Nature' - its forms and reasons are expressions and exploitations of 'deceit', and are thus 'non-sequitur objects' whose only possible origin and residence is the human brain. 


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CHANCE & DESIGN 

This section offers examples of relations between chance and intention / design and chaos.