200words: Louis Kahn - The Power of Architecture

"Your prophets have been like jackals among ruins, O Israel."
Ezekiel 13v4

There is a recognisable formula to the eulogising typology of fan-exhibit: a fawningly dreary hodge-podge of uncritically splayed miscellany, soundbites, remnants left by  a man who could do no wrong. The whole dimly lit ensemble reads like a skim through the colour plates illustrating an inconclusive essay yet to be written, I am titillated and briefly diverted, and I leave hungry, none-the-wiser.

This exhibition concerns itself with 'the Power of Architecture', as if it were a brute force, as if that were a good thing. This exhibition concerns itself with the phenomenon of an individual, without a sensitivity to any meaningful context for these isolated details of Kahn's life and work now cluttered into a reliquary. It is in this very contextlessness that the motive force for such an exhibition is betrayed: to reinforce all myths of genius, to validate the narrative of creation ex mystique.

Against this, however, there is footage on one screen, perhaps by Nathanial Kahn, which dwells at first on the inhabitation of the National Assembly Building, in its shade weathered elders share a cup of tea, glinting dazzling faces blur past in their unmonumental everyday urgencies. Then the building is left behind altogether and we dwell on the rich human landscape of so much that is not-architecture, so much that is rusty and perpetual, fervent and alive. This vast portrait of the Dhaka into which Kahn's geometry is pressed suggests the subtle tensions and reciprocities which give to the form a richer endurance.


Design Museum

200words: kings cross development

“Truth, Lord: yet the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters' table.” Matthew15v27

My experience of Kings Cross was marked by two unexpected encounters, aptly two necessarily and inextricably constitutive of the development's totality. The first, a gate ajar to the Skip Garden. 'Are you open?'; 'No, but help yourself to a look around.' said she washing some tin plates under a plastic roof. And all around me at once, verdent emergence, a mellow, fruitful bricolage. 'Thankyou.' A wander further and security detail betray a happening of quite another kind. 'Have you registered?' 'No..' 'Would you like a canape?' Google's eyewear is being launched, a protoyped product, one of a billion identical devices primed to usher an age of augmented urbanity. 'Ok Glass' These two encounters could be comically or tragically contrasted, but more interesting, I think, is to consider the enterprise which absorbs these both and stands to profit by urbanism done well. This city quarter is taking shape inorganically, with stupendous capital ventured on its success - the chickens of such speculative development must be counted before they are hatched. All this simulated and subsidised cultural incubation, therefore, seeks pre-emptively to engender that intangible quality of place, that energetic buzz to a something willing itself to emerge: the city as a happening. Would that all urban spaces were so motivated, even cynically, to be present tense continuous and ecstatic.

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A little about the architecture: If, conceptually and ethically, we permit this vast and profiteering form of development there is little to fault in its realisation, Kings Cross does all the details of aggressively slick urbanism with superlative panache. Chipperfield's elemental and bullish One Pancras Square revives the pleasure of monumental cast iron in architecture with warmth and intricacy. Allies&Morrison's Two Pancras Square shimmers: the gradiated window reveals subtly give the appearance that the glassy soul of the building soars while it yet withdraws into a mysterious interior as it ascends. This variation, somewhat akin to entasis renders an elevation sublime, and combined with the gilded highlights, the architects achieve exactly the distraction desired. Distraction from the volumetrics at work, unit to plot, net to gross, floor to ceiling squeezed, heaved and disguised in the ruthlessly rectilinear gridded graph paper of New London vernacular.

kingscross.co.uk
gridironkingscross.co.uk
twopancrassquare.com
hargreavesfoundry.co.uk/foundry/architectural_cast_iron/architectural_case_studies/casestudyview/24
globalgeneration.org.uk/kings-cross-skip-garden

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texting matthew twenty eight

The end of the beginning. Still texting daily on 07729056452

Mt28v1-2 'always a bolt from the blue for the broken.' Jesus, I pray for myself, that you thunderclap me out of self-centred anxiety. Thunderclap me out of my tombs, my dark places, into your light. For Phil, for the parents, for the question of architecture, for j, for h&a, for l&a, for e, e, i & v, for f. Bolt each from the blue. Amen.

Mt28v3-4 This bolt from the blue, this shock-and-awe, this the shattering sound of history in the making, and the guardians of the status quo are, naturally, discombobulated, being at the epicentre of a reality that is being remade, rules of the universe bent and broken before their eyes. 'like dead men..' could be a faintness and falling over as their grid was shut down by the electro magnetic pulse that just went off. But I rather consider it to be a right comparative, that I, though alive, am as dead before this Lord of light and life, so vastly lifely is he is blazing life.

Mt28v5-6 Look & see where he lay. Adorn your homes with empty crosses as well as crucifixes. Let there be empty spaces in your art, pictures of the emptiness that emptied itself to an empty tomb, which is precisely a plenum, the plenumyist of them all, full of resurrection life, life-in-all-its-fullness-life. Can you feel it in the air?

Mt28v7-8 When I talk about running. We've visited this before in Habakkuk (Hk2v2) goo.gl/p7v6FY : we are heralds and time is short. We have a God who runs Lk15v20, so should we. There is something irreducible about running which an ambling pedestrian Christianity misses, something in the burning lungs, the moments in each stride where you are not touching the ground, the fight, the wind, the ache. There is a propulsive force to such a supernatural event adequately explained, with words (v6). He. Is. Risen. Use those words, because you have to.

Mt28v9-10 While the NIV has Jesus' first words as 'greetings', the GNB has 'peace be with you', echoing Jn20v19, 21, 26 the peace of the Lord be with you, the peace of resurrection, the peace of Pentecost. It is a command to peace, like the command to the raging sea. You are at war in yourself & between yourselves, says Jm4, you are unpeaced by the multitude of voices & chemicals & shocks & abandonments. & suddenly he speaks it: peace be with you.

Mt28v11 "While they were going, behold, some of the guard went into the city.." - So the dominoes start to fall, this is the progressive collapse of an empire beginning: quiver the city they run to. The resurrection reality breaks in waves, rippling out through space and time. See the narrative threads of a new history divide as these two heralds on two roads bearing one message for two audiences: one man's good news is another's tragedy, both equally urgent. He is risen! He is risen indeed. Oh no.

Mt28v12  "a sufficient sum of money.." (esv) Almost wry the choice of 'sufficient': How much would protect and keep you? What value would you put on a story? 'Sufficient' covers the cost of comfort. Their sufficiency was paid out of the temple taxes or the private funds of vested stakeholders. My comfortable silence is payrolled by polarbears, sweatshops, and my children's children, the voiceless who bear the cost of my fleeting excess. Bribed and blackmailed by modernity I am mercenary first in my definition of 'sufficient' regarding the lifestyle expectations I expect and the violence I permit to enable my entitlement. I am mercenary all over again with the gospel, how often I sell people short, I am economic with the truth, I am silent and so deadly. The proliferation of lies is always lucrative, defending the vested interests of pressure groups pays and reinforcing hegemonic false consciousnesses can make you money, no one has a vested interest in a gospel of free grace, so it is a costly story to tell.

Mt28v13-14 Trading the lie for the truth of God. Trading a belief in magic bullets for a daily cross, & resurrection each morning. Won't you help me to mean it?

Mt28v15-16 Aptly those dubbed 'white-washed tombs' (Mt23v27) extend their personal paintwork to a systematic cover up, a blanket ban, a media campaign, to this day, still painting the Forth Bridge..  My own cosmetic efforts painting, decorating, retouching, reframing my own minor truth claims, refashioning my own whiter than white identity, soon snowballs to cumulative crises requiring an exponentially vast conspiracy. I paint myself in vain (Jr4v30). It need not be. (Is1v18)

Mt28v17 Two ways of reading this verse? There were two groups: the worshipers & the doubters. Or: some doubted, but still they worshiped? Can you imagine the confused desperate prayers at this time, the frantic to-ing & fro-ing in the mind, wanting to be wise, wanting truth, fearing mistakenness. How does one know? As well as the bolt from the blue, let us not underplay the constant, incremental dialectic of doubt & worship, towards the light.

Mt28v18 All authority. Musing on Saturday re Logstrup's 'life is a gift' therefore I have no rights. Rights & authority language always seem to go together in philosophy, but might they not? Might it be that we have authority without rights, for authority too is given as a gift. Jesus says 'is mine' to give us a 'therefore'. We live in an unlikely currency, christian, so pull on your gifted rightless authority, as freely given, to freely give.

Mt28v19-20 goo.gl/gHOhin Mt1-28 therefore go. Mt21v23-24 The servant king's authority empowers, envalues, defends and takes responsibility. Jesus is Lord is the gospel. Therefore go. Mt24v35-36 Jesus knew he was beloved Mt3v17, he knew the bible's commands Mt4v4,7,10, and it's promises 4v16. What do you know? Therefore, go. Mt25v19-20 God loves you yet unconditionally. Therefore go. This is the end of Matthew and the beginning of everything. Go.

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