Flatpack self build

Deckhouse by ExS Architects

This is self-build week in the UK!

Oliver Wainwright, Guardian columnist, asks readers with experience of self-build to send him
details of their experiences.  Here is the link

He has also written about the affordable architect-designed range of kit houses recently launched in the Netherlands.   20 architects were commissioned to produce  30 varying designs.  The building cost could be as low as £97,400, and the buildings, made from prefabricated parts, can be assembled within 6-8 weeks.

This  scheme helps architects to build their housing portfolio as well.  For buyers it offers a cheaper and less uncertain version of self build..  "If more local authority land can be opened  up, and architects retained art the centre of the process, it seems to make more sense than ever to go Dutch", says Wainwright

Here is Wainwright's architecture and design blog. 
For spirited debate on the self build issue - cost of plots in UK for one thing

Mary Modeen and phenomenologist approach to print-making

 

The Absolute Other   digital print by Mary Modeen

Mary Modeen is an artist and a thinker, who teaches at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design in Dundee.  She is interested in "perception as a cognitive and interpretive process, and place-based research, which tends to connect cultural values, history and embodied experience".  She herself makes a complex and layered digital prints (see above).

Recently she gave a talk at the Edinburgh Print-makers Studio, explaining her view that print-making is process-based and based on emergent techniques, which combine the thought and feelings of the artist in dialogue with the technique.  Therefore the print-maker can never predict the outcome or the process of a particular idea or print.  For me this is more true of a technique such as stone lithography because of the difficulty in controlling the etching and the quantity of medium, as well as the varying quality of the stones.  Screen printing on the contrary seems more of a predicable process, where perhaps the uncertainty occurs during the making of the original drawing.

Modeen stressed the need to be aware of "becoming" and of the impossibility of closure in art.  She quotes Barthes and the Death of the Author.  The author might make the first work, but it is interpreted infinite times by the viewers, who are in effect co-creators.  The phenomenological theory is reminiscient of the ideas of Christopher Alexander as quoted in my recent post.  In architecture, the project, whether house or city, is constantly being reinvented and given new meanings by its inhabitants.  As Heidegger also remarked, each generation has to find its own way of dwelling.