prince of persia

Bahram Gur was King of Persia between 420 and 438; he is a popular figure in local folklore as well as a character celebrated by great poets such as Nizami and Omar Khayyam. These miniatures were painted around 1524-25 and represent Bahram Gur in two of his palaces. Apparently Bahram Gur had seven palaces, one for each day of the week, each a different colour, and seven beautiful mistresses, one in each palace.  The miniatures are stunning for their strong sense of composition, mixture of perspective with axonometric view, and rich textures.

A funny detail is the way in which the artist breaks the 'fourth wall' inserting an element that bleeds beyond the frame of the miniature, sometimes centered, and sometimes (see images below) asymmetrical, peeking into the white margin studded with flakes of gold. Both Bahram's story, and the visual imaginary of Shaikh Zada, are miles away from the Prince of Persia videogame we used to play - and all the better for it. Beyond the beauty of Shaikh Zada's illustrations, there is also a certain mathematical beauty in Bahram Gur's life model - seven days, seven colours, seven palaces, seven women.

Interestingly, the seven colours, as portrayed in Nizam's and Zada's work here, don't necessarily sound familiar: next to the Blue, White, Green and Yellow palaces, we find a generic Dark palace (looks like a dirty, somber blue in the miniature), again a Turquoise (again a variation on the blue theme) and a mysterious Sandal palace (sandalwood-coloured, orangey). Once again, the perception of colours is, here, very culturally constructed - after all, if we had to pick seven colours today, we'd choose a different list, and surely ancient Romans and Greek would not have had a single blue, never mind three.

Incredibly, these are not images that gain by tweaking 'brightness-contrast' on Photoshop as the level of contrast is very even across the image due to the nature of the patterns. It is this lack of chiaroscuro, rather than their 'non-realistic' geometry, that confers the miniature their extreme flatness. 

There are more Shaikh Zada goodies to show, so stay tuned, we'll have another Bahram Gur post very soon.

"Bahram Gur in the White Palace on Friday"

See the yellow palace below.

Detail from "Bahram Gur in the Yellow Palace on Sunday".

Familles, Je Vous Hais! On Architecture and Reproductive Labour

Far from being a haven of tranquillity, the house is not only the battlefield of social and personal conflicts of class, gender, and ethnicity, but it is also arguably the most important workplace. However, while in the pre-modern era the productive vocation of the home was not qualified, the refined division of labour that is a hallmark of early capitalism expelled the production of goods from the home, leaving behind the unwaged and unseen toil of women. The institutionalization of reproductive labour, that is to say the sum of the efforts needed to generate, maintain, educate and care for the workforce, is perhaps the single most effective act of primitive accumulation we can imagine; in this process, half of the population is dispossessed of any control on their work which becomes a simple natural destiny sweetened by the trappings of domesticity and familial love.

Francois Boucher, Le Dejeuner

The home of the middle and working classes, which had hardly been a concern for European architects until the late Renaissance, is invented precisely as a tool to optimize this process. The presentation will use projects and writings developed in France from Sebastiano Serlio to Charles Briseux, the Grands Ensembles, and Lacaton and Vassal to retrace the way domestic space has been choreographed first as a mechanism to separate production and reproduction, and later as a disciplinary microcosm of which the housewife is both victim and villain. Such a critique is all the more urgent today as the last decades have seen the ambiguous blurring of reproductive labour into the ungendered, micro-entrepreneurial field of ‘affective labour’. It is perhaps in such a conjuncture that architecture could claim the responsibility it refused to assume before, and think again housing within and against the realm of labour.

Louise Bourgeois, Cage XXV

We will present this research at the Labour & Architecture Symposium at the AA, 13 November 2015. Join us there!

POCHE TO POACH

Jacques-Francois Blondel's architecture handbook does not exactly make the most inspiring of reads. The full title, Cours d'architecture ou traité de la décoration, distribution et constructions des bâtiments contenant les leçons données en 1750, et les années suivantes is already indicative of the rather pedantic character of the book. Moreover, the title also seems just plain wrong in terms of its very 'architecture', of its logical structure (decoration, distribution and construction? give me Vitruvius any day of the week... Blondel should get his priorities straight...). And in fact the structure of the book is a bit all over the place. But, it has to be said, the virtue of these tomes is to be, if nothing else, full of examples - some, again, uninspiring, some amazing, some average, some unexpected. The drawing above is the plan of the Church of Saint-Marie-de-la Visitation in Rue St. Antoine, Paris. The church was originally part of a convent; it still exists today and is known as the Temple du Marais as it operates as protestant church. The plan definitely stands out from what is Blondel's rather monotone collection, and in fact, this is a work by none other than Francois Mansart. What is more, the church dates to 1632, which means it is really a rather original project and not a rip off of Italianate models as one might have thought. In fact, if we consider that Borromini wouldn't get his San Carlino commission until 1634, the use of the core church space as a shell that creates a poche-non-poche circulation ring is quite unique in such an early project.

See the plan of San Carlino:

The facade of this Mansart church is also very interesting - here's the elevation from Blondel:

There is something rather bizarre in this façade that juxtaposes two equally strong elements - a dome and a portal - without really establishing a hierarchy between the two. The portal itself is a thing of beauty, with just a hint of a gigantic order in the flattened mock-pillars, and two rather small columns flanking the main door and sticking out in full, 360 degrees detail from the wall (apparently Mansart was a fan of Michelangelo). The large oculus offset by a rather ironic curved cornice is the only decoration of a façade that stands out for the amount of blank wall it offers to the eye. Blondel also reproduced the portal in a second illustration, as a standalone piece - probably ready for his students to poach - see below.

Kopfkino

Kopfkino happens when 'it's all in your head'. It's head-cinema in German, literally. It is supposed to relate to something negative - ie imagining bad things that might never happen. However this photo of Kisho Kurokawa's National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka (1973-77) seems to portray exactly that kind of stepped, mineral-landscape-y project that has starred in our Kopfkino for some years now. And yet, it really exists! Have a good weekend all of you, and see you next Friday @ AA for the Architecture and Labour symposium.

The Medieval Good Life

This 'Tacuinum Sanitatis' is a medieval Latin version of Ibn Butlan's treatise on health; it contains tens of illustrations of everyday life conditions including the one above, originally titled 'Wake', or the state of being awake. The book and miniatures probably date back to the 11th century - a couple of centuries later, somebody would also add a German translation of the text below the Latin one. These miniatures let us into medieval houses and workshops - and perhaps there was no real difference between the two - letting us see how people slept, ate, worked, and loved. The architectures depicted are all characterized by a lack of real typological differentiation between rooms - kitchens double up as working spaces, bedrooms as offices, stables as living rooms and vice versa. At the same time, though, the houses present a strong individual linguistic expression in terms of decoration and colours. Furniture and textile elements are used to construct privacy as well as a rudimentary functional hierarchy between spaces. Animals and humans coexist. Women work just as much as men. The book is also the product of early Arab scholarship and supremely sane and modern in terms of the kind of advice it gives: no hocus pocus, just medicinal herbs and a lot of good advice on how to eat well, sleep peacefully, and get along with the rest of the world. The good life.

This looks almost too modern:

Perspecta 48: Amnesia

The new Perpsecta will be launched tonight in New York - 7 pm at the Trespa Design Centre for those of you who are in the city. The issue revolves around the dialectic between memory and amnesia and it is an exciting cross section of texts that deal with everything from data centres to Hejduk to the architecture of websites (of architecture). The editors picked an eclectic list of authors - it is indeed refreshing to see the variety of the positions included by Aaron Dresben and his colleagues. Mario Carpo, Stani von Moos, and Sam Jacob between the others are featured alongside our very own Maria S. Giudici and Tommaso Franzolini aka Sigmund Frantz, the author of a stunning series of photos of the Soane Museum. Memory and amnesia are the twin faces of our digital selves: we are condemned never to forget, never to be forgotten, through the non-stop nostalgiafest that social media provide us today. Googling our past lives, from youtube videos of our favourite songs to photos of ourselves continuously reposted, has forced us paradoxically into an eternal present where, weirdly enough, fashions never change because there's always a comeback going on. The vintage image is past, present, and future, instagrammed and filtered just right, and soon forgotten without ever being truly forgiven. A short memory allowed many of the greatest moments of the past: Brunelleschi was as distant from Carolingian architecture as we are from him today, and yet, at the same time, infinitely more distant. The whole Renaissance celebrated a past that was largely invented, well, by the Renaissance people themselves.

In our piece on the Soane Museum we look at the way in which the modern concept of memory has been painstakingly constructed by intellectuals, politicians, and, most notably, by architects. However perhaps today what we need is not anymore a project to teach us to remember, but, perhaps, a project to learn how to forget.

Black Square thanks the Soane Museum, Aaron Dresben and the Perspecta Editors, and Sigmund Frantz for this great opportunity.

City-Architecture PhD programme hosts Mario Carpo

Tonight at 6 pm the City-Architecture PhD Programme of the AA, led by Pier Vittorio Aureli, will host Mario Carpo for a lecture on Sebastiano Serlio. The lecture will take place in the Soft Room. 

Imitation, method, and the invention of the system of the orders in Sebastiano Serlio's books 3 and 4, 1537-1540

The Seminar will comment on Serlio’s influential architectural theory of the orders and the way it has changed the production of architecture. The dialectic between Rule and License is at the core of what used to be called mannerist architecture. Ndot all rules in sixtheenth-century architectural theory were visual, but the visual canon of standardize orders established in and through print by Serlio and many who followed, is the precondition for the ‘poetic of license’, or licentiousness that took root almost simultaneously with, and parallel to printed standard of the orders. The seminar will argue how the invention of what we call ‘architectural language’ was the result of architecture’s reification by the the process of printing.

The Grand Domestic Revolution at AA

Today at 6.30 in the First Year Studio three recent graduates of AA Diploma 14 will present their thesis projects. Diploma 14 is run by Pier Vittorio Aureli and Maria S. Giudici and for the past few years the unit has been developing a research on housing. If you are in London, drop by to see the work of Jesper Henriksson (co-founder of Hesselbrand), Luis Ortega Govela (member of the AYR collective) and Antonis R. Papamichael (architect at Chipperfield and author of the project pictured above, Alcoves, runner-up at the 2014 GAGA Awards). Jesper, Luis and Antonis will talk about their own perspective on the unit's agenda, and on the challenges of rethinking radical housing solutions for the contemporary city. Luis' thesis dissects the myth of the domestic garage as the locus of entrepreneurship; Antonis' prototype forecasts the end of the rigid individual room and challenges the nuclear family apartment; and Jesper's projects reimagine new technical and formal solutions for the single dweller, an ubiquitous subject that is still largely ignored by typological representation. The work of these three young architects shows us how it is still possible to design spaces of living that do not conform to a standardized formula. In fact, each of the projects, rather than proposing a solution, asks us fundamental questions about the way we live today - our ability to share or be alone, our need to handle work and private life, our aspirations and discontents. Don't miss it.

The Housing Question - Dogma in Berlin

The exhibition 'The Housing Question' will open tomorrow at the HWK in Berlin; our friends Dogma are part of it with a 1:1 prototype of a living unit. The unit is a fragment of the urban villa prototype they developed for the Realism Working Group, an association of German artists who are looking for new working-living solutions for freelance workers. If you cannot visit the exhibition in Berlin, you can still buy the book here http://www.spectorbooks.com/#communal-villa-production-and-reproduction-in-artists-housing (unfortunately it's not published by us!). The urban villa is a very interesting proposal, both architecturally and in terms of economic strategy, as it is meant to represent a pressure group able to rethink flexible housing 'within and against' the current market. The architecture of the unit itself is really beautiful: an open-plan area is flanked by a service core made of wood which contains services, storage and the bed. Part living wall, part studiolo cabinet, the service core is reproduced in the installation at the HKW. Don't miss it (spoiler: the bathroom is painted in the most stunning intense azure and it can be fully opened to take a leisurely bath in your own private tub. Really beautiful). 

POCHEMUCHKA

Pochemuchka refers (in Russian) to a 'why-er', the kind of person who keeps on asking why - just about, well, everything. It is an ambivalent #wordoftheweek because on the one hand it's easy to be annoyed by a pochemuchka but, at the same time, we're all pochemuchka every once in a while. Kids tend to be more pochemuchka than adults, or more healthily pochemuchka at least, as the world of a kid tends to be rather full of wonders you haven't yet worked out. This plan of the Villa del Casale at Piazza Armerina, Sicily, is still able to turn architects of any age into pochemuchkas. It is just so difficult to understand where the formal stops, and where the functional begins (if ever). It is also infinitely baffling how Roman architecture - which, almost 20 centuries afterwards, we tend to consider one big indistinct lump - changed so radically after the introduction of a widespread use of concrete and the poche, rounded shapes it allows to produce. The villa dates to the early 4th century, when this kind of spatial solution was relatively diffused, but we do know that apses and niches were not that common at least until the 1st century - no private buildings in Pompeii show a similar degree of geometric flamboyance. It is said that perhaps the first instance of use of concrete for a non-infrastructural building was Nero's Domus Aurea (mid-60s). Of course it would be difficult to label the Domus Aurea as private, or even residential, architecture; but still, it might have been the first case this kind of technique was used outside of works of public interest - the heyday of concrete will start towards the beginning of the next century to climax in Hadrian's era. Roman architecture would never be the same. Even in the provinces, even in a relatively obscure building, the new technical possibilities would bring another language. Why? Remains the question. Why all those apses. Why all those conflicting axes. Why all those bizarrely shaped rooms. Why.

One Year of Black Square

One year ago "The Marriage of Reason and Squalor", an exhibition of drawings by Pier Vittorio Aureli curated by Marie Coulon, opened at Betts Project in London. As the catalogue of the exhibition was the first product of Black Square, we see that day as our birthday. So thank you all for your birthday wishes, unexpected and heartwarming. With two more projects coming out soon, a first workshop at CAMPO, and many more projects in the pipeline, it's been an exciting first 12 months. The people we should thank here are far too many (you know who you are!) but a special thought goes out to all the young architects and students who have supported us with their enthusiasm and interest. For the first time in some years, ebook sales have slowed down and physical books seem to be having a kind of comeback so the idea of printing cheap, simple, unpretentious black and white books of drawings still seems to make sense right now. We are not particularly committed to the book as an object per se, but we are committed to the book as a project that has a beginning and an end and a logic and architecture of its own. One year ago we were realized that the stream of pinterest and tumbler images we kept 'liking' and 'pinning' was boring us to death, or (on alternate days) generating a profound anxiety of the FOMO kind - as in, oh my, this image has no link, what is it? where can I find it? who did it? Nothing wrong with internet archives: we are definitely not luddites and actually a tiny bit addicted to technology. However, we felt that going back to making projects with their own narrative, sequence, and consistency was an antidote to the pervasive sense of unease we felt. So, here's where this project started.

As a side note, we never wanted to be 'called' black square. We wanted a name that was an image and a logo at the same time, universal, recognizable, and basic. The fact that this needed to be translated into two English words is just due to the need to acquire a web domain (and to register, get ISBNs, and pay taxes). However feel free to call us cherniy kvadrat, carre noir, quadrato nero, patrat negru.

MERAKI

Meraki: in Greek, the quality of doing something fully, completely, putting the whole of yourself into it. Doing whatever you are doing with your heart and soul. This could be the cheesiest #wordoftheweek ever... or not, given how often one feels disconnected from what he or she does. The picture is a XIX century engraving by Tardieu which is supposed to represent a Greek gymnasium 'after Vitruvius' (from Voyage du Jeune Anacharsis en Grece, 1825). While it's not necessarily believable from the archaeological point of view, it is still a pretty neat project; it is very simple, but it manages to put together nature and artifice, greenery and architecture, bodily presence and formal ambitions. Enough of an encouragement to make architecture with meraki this coming week.

MORGENFRISK

#wordoftheweek - In Danish Morgenfrisk is that sensation of freshness, energy and new beginnings you have in the morning, when you wake up after a good night's sleep. It is a beautiful word that links a physical sensation with a psychological attitude. The tangible and the intangible are tied together in Morgenfrisk. 

The sensation it evokes is also what we wish to all of you restarting a new academic year this week. The French call it 'la rentrée': it is much more than the simple act of coming back to school and work after the summer, it's a whole ritual. But rentrée is a rather sad word. While it does celebrate the discreet charm of going back to normality, it also evokes the repetitive nature of a bureaucratic routine. We hope that on the contrary this week you won't feel dragged back, but rather filled with curiosity for what will come next. The picture above has been taken by John Ng, studio master at the Architectural Association, and it portrays the AA's first year studio space in all its Morgenfrisk glory at the beginning of the year. 

Bare, empty, and yet full of possibility. Not cold: fresh. Have a great start of year, all of you out there.

Introducing TYPE studio at AA

Black Square will play host for the TYPE studio lecture on December 7 at the Architectural Association; co-founder Sam Nelson is a long-time friend of ours, as he graduated from AADiploma 14 (honours) in 2012, with a thesis tutored by Square's author Pier Vittorio Aureli and founder Maria S. Giudici.

Sam founded TYPE with Tom Powell,  Ognjen Ristic and Matt Cooper. At the AA they will present a candid snapshot of their work as a young office, reflecting on their experience of the multiple, changing and often contradictory aspects of architecture in practice.

Their lecture will be part of the "What's next" series organized by Manijeh Verghese. The series returns after the successful run of last year, during which it not only provided an opportunity to discuss the different ways in which young architects construct their own career, but was also a perfect occasion to talk about where architectural practice at large is going, and what architecture means in the contemporary condition.

It is often said that the jump between school and real world is even harder for those who have been good students. Especially in the field of architecture, negotiating the constraints of materiality, economy, and feasibility, can be very disheartening. Moreover, in school all projects are rhythmed by terms, while in reality things sometimes simmer for three, five, ten years - or need to get done in two weeks. And there's the whole 'l'enfer, c'est les autres' chapter: coworkers, clients, engineers, you name it - in school, you never have to compromise that much.

But the story of TYPE is an encouragement: Sam's student projects were beautiful and thought-provoking, and so is the work he produces with his partners today. They will tell us all about the challenges they had to face, and what lies ahead, at the AA on December 7: don't miss it.

http://www.aaschool.ac.uk/VIDEO/lecture.php?ID=3271

RADICAL SETTLEMENTS: DIP 14 AT AA

The 2015-16 brief for the Architectural Association's Diploma Unit 14 is now online. The Unit is led by Pier Vittorio Aureli, author of our The Marriage of Reason and Squalor, and Square's own head Maria S. Giudici.  This year the unit will broaden their horizon: while the final project will be resolved at the scale of architecture, the students are challenged to rethink landscape, infrastructure and logistics as part of their "radical settlements". Beyond the dichotomy between form and function, morphology and typology, come take part in an experiment on new forms of political imagination that can start from the design of a bed - and end up in a 100x100 km analogical map of a territory. Check out the pdf brief on their website www.diploma14.com.

FERNWEH

#wordoftheweek - Fernweh is the longing for that which is far away. It is the opposite of Heimweh that is the longing for home. It is a bit like Wanderlust but while Wanderlust puts the accent on the act of travelling itself, Fernweh is all about the idea of distance. It's perhaps the desire of far-ness. Some people experience Fernweh in a very direct way and move farther and farther away from the place that once was home. Perhaps, though, Fernweh can be interpreted in a broader sense as the strong pull we feel for something that is ultimately unattainable - and that, if we were ever to reach it, would cease being the object of our desire.

Airports used to be the place of Fernweh, and the place of Heimweh. As travel is increasingly easier and we become more and more mobile, sometimes it is easy to think many dichotomies cease to make sense: Fernweh and Heimweh, far and close, here and there, home and away, the wanderer and the homebody, the tourist and the local. However, this is not entirely true - every time we leave, we really do leave something behind, and at the same time, while it might grow fainter and fainter, some of us still feel the pull of Fernweh, the thrill of waking up to another sky tomorrow, the thrill of distance, of the clarity distance brings, of the freshness and the newness for that which is far.

This is a week for Fernweh and Heimweh, a week in which many of us are and will be out there in airports and on the road - those who fly back to their schools for the start of the academic year, those who fly around for the fall fashion weeks. Choose your poison: the near, or the far?

The Supreme Achievement now open at CAMPO

Check out the work produced during the CAMPO-Black Square workshop! The exhibition is open at CAMPO, via della Marrana 94, Rome (www.campo.space) until October 3. On the walls of CAMPO, 12 poster-sized visions by architect contributors Amid/Cero9, Aristide Antonas, Behemoth, Dogma, Didier Faustino, FORA+ Beth Hughes, MAPOffice, Alex Maymind, Microcities, Miniatura, Philippe Morel, Raumlabor. On the floor, 12 plaster models scale 1:33 produced by the workshop participants in 5 days. 

In the picture, participants Hunter Doyle and Sofia Pia Belenky show us their 'happy campers' pose nest to their model of Behemoth's "Penelope" reinterpreted as a thermal bath. Between them, Behemoth co-founder Francesco Marullo.