Monday, April 26, 2010

Small Bizarres No. 5 - Car in Corridor...


An example of lateral thinking by some of my students. Not being able to open the external access doors to the new workshop they instead decided to drive their truck (with its heaving load of hand-made mud bricks) through the building's corridor to the workshop's hallway entrance, thus saving us plenty of manual labour... That's mi boys...

Small Bizarres No. 4 - Suspicious TV Remote...


A TV remote from a hotel in Oman. Never dared to press the indicated button though..?!

Wednesday, April 21, 2010

The Extraordinary Ordinary - Doors, Floors, and a Bit about Ceilings...

Metal Doors in Oman...

Whilst 'flaneur-ing' (urban strolling) around diverse locales in the region, I've noticed that I've managed to take an almost inordinate amount of photos of various local doors and doorways. This might seem a somewhat pastiche thing to do, as one can find postcards and posters depicting doors from most cosmopolitan cities or a bit more picturesque towns almost everywhere, but it is perhaps exactly this ubiquity that also is what makes observing doors so intriguing – they fulfill the same function and purpose everywhere, yet still retain a distinctness and clearly differ from one place, function, and culture to another. Their pervasiveness is exactly what allows us to note the deviations between what we're used to from that which diverges from our norm.
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The door must be amongst the more intimate constituents of a building. It's among the sole elements of a building we touch and handle daily. It's also the first thing we touch when entering a building. It's a door's handle which provides, as the Finnish architect and theoretician Juhani Pallasmaa has said, the 'handshake of a building'. A building's door defines the realm where greeting and goodbyes are expressed, it's the transitional 'in-between' threshold venue which belongs neither (or both) to the 'inside' nor 'outside' of a building. It's also a building's doors and floors which, unlike the walls (let alone the ceiling), we engage with directly on a physical and somatic level. However, while the floor might be the surface with which we have a more constant engagement with, it still remains a passive partly during such interactions (i.e. we move across the floor rather than the floor moving, one should hope, across us) and while a floor is usually perceived through an intermediary – a shoe or sock – a door includes an inherently sensory, tactile and directly kinesthetic attributes, as we literally have to 'handle' (push, pull or slide) a door to provide access or an exit from one space to another.
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A door includes an intrinsic multi-sensory quality, it has a radius and range of motion, a weight, degree of friction and its surface has a texture and latent temperature. Its proportion and scale are a reflection of its intended users and utility. A glass door for a busy shopping mall is a very different contraption from a wooden door of a private residence. The heavy and gigantic metal doors of a city gate not only perform as a protective, both symbolic and actual, deterrent, but also express the power and might of the city, as well as act, through their ornamentation, as twin billboards of its wealth and artistry. The laminate doors of a kitchen cupboard, on the other hand, attest to a quite different set of aims, where the doors' vertical surfaces are often intentionally plain and modest in their appearance. Here, unlike in the city gates, a shopping mall or a residence, the intention is not to emphasize or celebrate what's behind them, but more about hiding, camouflaging and neutralizing the detergent bottles, surface-wipes, buckets and sweeps that are usually concealed behind such below-the-sink doors. This connotative ability of a door can be expanded to apply to the features on a door, where the type and size of door-handle, if it has a window or not, a mail slot, spy-ocular, or the size of its threshold can inform you about its purpose. Even a door's position in comparison to its door-frame and be used to indicate the degree of access to a space. Here a closed door suggests 'do not enter', an open door 'come on in', and a door slightly open hinting one should 'proceed with caution' (how welcome depending on how ajar the door is). Doors hide and reveal - they open, close, revolve, slide, protect, uncover, represent, suggest, and inform.
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So I'll probably continue photographing doors, as they're simply too catalytic and irresistible a motive to ignore...


Wood doors in Oman...

Sunday, April 18, 2010

Small Bizarres No.3 - Anthropomorphic Light Switches...


Wether the correct term is anthropomorphic, humanoid or something else, these light switches found in my apartment remind me of faces, whose 'noses' I interact with daily. They each have also a surprising amount of personality... I haven't named or started talking to them as of yet, but one never knows...


Friday, April 16, 2010

Small Bizarres No.2 - Flickering Hand Shadow...



This Small Bizarres submission was taken on board the HMS President 1918, a ship (a Corvette) permanently moored to the Embankment in central London. We used to have our office onboard, in its stern. In many ways it was a brilliant place for an office, if you were able to get used to the slight but constant rocking of the place. It also provided a great conversation piece, as there probably aren't too many offices that ascend and decent over five meters every twelve hours.

The video is the shadow of my hand, seen through the reflected light off the rippling surface of the Thames.

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Small Bizarres No. 1 - The Tree in the Middle...


This is the first submission of the Small Bizarres posts. Their aim is to document various, usually small but strange, features found in and about various local as well as more distant settings. These posts are in part related to the Extraordinary Ordinary posts. But whereas they usually focus on easily hidden or overlooked beauty in ordinary things or events, these posts main purpose is to point out various subtly surreal or bizarre - 'second glance' - affairs.
In this post we find a tree in the middle of a road, which hence makes vehicular access quite impossible. The adjacent traffic signs somewhat wishful message suggesting such access, and the carefully laid and newly painted bee-striped curb surrounding the tree, only manage to amplify the benign absurdity of the situation...
The picture was taken looking towards the gap between the newly erected buildings 5A and 5B at the University of Nizwa in Oman...

Saturday, April 10, 2010

The Extraordinary Ordinary - Early Morning at Sharjah Harbour...


The included images were taking during an early morning walk at Sharjah (commercial) harbour. Clearly not a high foot-count turist spot, the harbour nevertheless managed to introduce a unique local flavour (and fragrance) and reflective choreography of the fishermen and sailors' daily routines. The harbour has a pace and cadence of sounds and colours all of its own...






Monday, April 5, 2010

Printed Matters in the Gulf...

A few years back I had a chance to partake in a Royal Designers for Industry (RDI) Summer School, an event that usually lasts just short of a week, and that year took place at a grand mock-Tudor mansion in Wales (with a complicated name I can't recall). Adjacent to the main building a small print-shop held residence, which specialized in very limited edition, high-end, art books. Many of these books apparently fetched prices up to several thousand pounds each which, having had a chance to inspect them close-up, wasn't surprising. The thickness and quality of paper, the resolution and texture of the ink prints, the hand-bound formatting and composition of the books themselves reeked of long hours of painstaking but passionate dedication and craft. The exposure to such a book became about much more than just reading, it's weight, subtle smell, its tactility and the books' kinesthetic and proprioceptive properites (how one had to handle it, its size, the way its pages behaved when turned) became something close to a physical manifestation of a dear memory. This type of a book reminds one of the fact that books on a book-shelf are about more than just information, but also fulfill the role of a mnemonic storage bank - each book spine along the stacked shelves reminds and represents to its reader a sequence of moments, brief, intimate periods of time, or perhaps more accurately, summarized episodes, which inevitably our more comprehensive (life) experiences are made up of. It's this perceptually multi-dimensional, physiological, quality that a computer can't replace.
Here in the Gulf I very seldom see people reading books (at least in public) and, at least in Kuwait, decent book shops are few and far between. This is regrettable, as the act of reading provides a degree of intimacy that no other medium of communication can. It's the reader who determines the pace of reading - a sentence is allowed to be interrupted by a stray thought, a paragraph re-read, or an impulsive note jotted in the book's margin - all things that aren't possible (with the same ease) in mediums such as video or audio recording or even any of the more recent digital tablets (such as the Kindle or the iPad).
I read somewhere recently that the Middle-East, as a total, has translated less books into Arabic in the last decade than Spain has translated into Spanish in a year. This is a true shame, and also says something about the somewhat misdirected curricular emphasis in most of the region's educational institutions, but it also introduces an opportunity to do something about it. The region still retains examples of amazingly crafted and detailed historical, mostly religious and scientific, texts (many of an example which can be viewed at the recently inaugurated Museum of Islamic Art (MIA) in Doha), with this precedent in mind, what's stopping us from creating an updated rendition of this art form for the contemporary Gulf? What would the production of a high-end (art/ craft) publication entail and involve in today's Middle-East? Are there still the required set of skill, passion, perseverance and creativity to do so? Would there be an interest, a market, for such endeavors? If not, shouldn't we just do it and begin building one anyway..?

The workshop location in Wales...

Printing related (analog) machinery...


Stored and discarded templates...


Above and below - Various print making related paraphernalia...




Things on and along walls...


Various publications produced by/ influencing the printers...