Practical Sheet and Metal Work by Evan A. Atkins...

Whilst meandering around the web, I came across this, to me, quite intriguing book titled Practical Sheet and Plate Metal Work by Evan A. Atkins, published in 1908 by Sir. Isaac Pitman & Sons Ltd.

The images along are truly inspiring and, when combined with their suggestive utilitarian qualities, can easily lend themselves to an abundance of designs...

Food for thought (& action)...

You can access the related website by clicking here...

The Extraordinary Ordinary - Magazines & Books in China...

A few quick images of magazines (that I liked) in various news stands in Shanghai and Beijing... 

Architects Independent Website is Live...

Our new website, Architects Independent, is in the ether... You can inspect the results by clicking here... 

Our London based sister company, Independent Architects, can be accessed by clicking here... 

Jaakko ja Maailmanvalloittajat in Qatar...

Pasi and Jaakko - the cameraman and host of the program. 

A few weeks ago we had a visit from a TV crew from Finland making a program titled Jaakko ja Maailmanvalloittajat (which translates from Finnish as 'Jaakko and the World Conquerers'), a program about various, perhaps somewhat peculiar, Finns living in diverse exotic places around the world. This time it was our turn... 

The program is scheduled to air in the Fall of 2012 on Finnish TV 1... 

All photos by Maysaa al-Mumin taken on her iphone...

 Liisa, the program's producer.

Me and Jaakko...

SAM Street in Men's Passion Magazine...

An image charting the various typologies of commerical enterprises on a stretch of SAM Street (this image is not included in the Men's Passion piece)...

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The May issue of the Kuwait based Men's Passion magazine has an article on Salmiya's (in Kuwait) SAM Street, summarizing some of the polemic debated on this as well as the smArchitecture blog...

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Please click here to access the piece on the smArchitecture blog.

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...

KU Student Work Featured in Canvas Magazine...

Some of the work produced by my students has been published in the latest issue of Canvas Magazine's Canvas Guide... The project featured aimed to find an alternative or better way to achieve the aims, and perhaps even question the validity, of the 'black blotch' censorship currently practiced in Kuwait... The Canvas piece can be accessed by clicking on the included images, and a related piece featured earlier on this blog can be accessed by clicking here...

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Addendum 06/01/10 - I've been informed by powers that be at Kuwait University that due to the, what some consider 'delicate' nature of the images featured in the article ,they would have to be 'neutralized'... Thus included below are (done as a favour to a friend) the now re-(or double) censored images from the Censorship project...

Censoring in Kuwait...

Image from a Kuwaiti news-stand, showing examples of the inconsistency in censoring various women's magazine covers. The magazine to the left has its shoulders blackened out, a body part the three right hand magazines show. On the other hand the side of the chest and armpit have been censored in the second magazine from the right, an area left exposed in the cover to its left. The magazine to the right shows shoulders, upper arms, chest as well as abdominals...

Often, particularly whilst passing a news-stand or going to the movies, I've been wondering about the guidelines according to which censorship is applied in Kuwait. Beyond the general dismay that a kiss, even between a married couple, is censored in a film whilst a gory decapitation seems to be acceptable, and with cable channels and Internet permeating almost every household makes censoring somewhat redundant, there also seems to be a marked inconsistency in how and what is censored. Female cleavage, shoulders, legs above the knee, abdominals and buttocks seem generally to be blackened out. On men, however, most of these areas appear to be acceptable to show (even though some of the bodybuilding magazines show men with much more pronounced cleavages than those found on female models in a women's magazines).

These same conditions also seem to apply to more representational, even abstract, renditions of the human form, such as paintings and sculpture, where many an art history book have become unreadable due to the ink daubs permeating its pages. Where does the threshold of censorship lie on more abstract work? Would, for example, the nonfigurative nudes in Picasso's Mademoiselles d 'Avignon need to be selectively blackened? How about the photographer Andre Kertesz's distorted nudes (who photographed his models' reflections in a warped mirror) would his images, that sometimes require a concerted effort to distinguish heads from tails, need censoring?

Image from a recent International Herald Tribune, where a number of sculptures have been selectively neutralized of their more risky bits...

When does a chest turn into a cleavage? Why is an upper arm and shoulder considered more suggestively agitating than an elbow or forearm? Why is it that semi-exposed men are considered less sexually provoking than women? At what height should the imaginary hemline of a censors black marker or scissors actually go when reviewing the latest issue of Italian Vogue? As can be seen in some of the included images it seems like some of the censors themselves aren't too sure...

On the other hand, many books (without provoking covers) and texts seem to be left untouched. An interesting example of which can be viewed below, where in an article about wine, the images of the wine have been blurred and pixelated, but the piece itself is untouched. I also remember a while back coming across a samples of Voltaire, Mishima's, Focault's, Satre's, Beauvoir's and Miller's work at a local bookshop which seemed a bit surprising considering their chosen subject matters.

A blurred glass of wine...

Pixelated wine bottle labels...

Some Victorians used to shroud their table legs with covering hemlines to avoid provocation. They did so whilst simultaneously subscribing to some of the most explicit kink of any age that would make even the most sordid of today's Berliners blush. It is important to find some form of a balance between unreasonable censorship and excessive exposure, as, if either condition goes too far, there will inevitably either be a backlash, usually resulting in the pendulum swinging too far in the opposite direction, or a quasi-covert sub-culture develops where any such 'alternate' behaviour will be practised anyway.

In the end, 'impropriety' is always in the eye of the beholder, entailing that at least some of the judgement regarding what should and shouldn't be seen and practised by an individual should be left to their subjective selves to decide.

Printed Matters in Kuwait...

In the recent local press, there's been a number of articles lamenting the difficulty of accessing decent books, particularly those with a bit more select slant on things. The same can be said about magazines, where the situation isn't perhaps as dire, but the selection is still somewhat, shall we say, 'predictable' regarding what magazines one encounters on the shelves. Neither does their price (which seems to be the same in Dinars as they were in Euros, Pounds or Dollars) nor the censorship (black blotches and ripped off pages) increase ones wish to purchase them locally.

To create stimulating, interesting and worthwhile work one needs to be exposed to stimulating, interesting and worthwhile ideas, be these in picture and/ or text format. It was thus invigorating, as a born and bred bibliophile, on a recent trip to Europe to be reintroduced to the fantastic variety and selection of printed matter (books & magazines) available. This doesn't only include regularly available (best selling) magazines and books, but also more, call them, obscure and unusual material, limited edition prints, one-off publications, special interest papers, university press editions, etcetera. As someone interested in design and architecture related matters, the choice of specialized book stores on London's Charing Cross and its vicinity is heartening, as there are anything from large book department stores such as Borders, Foyles, and Blackwells, to smaller more specialized stores such as Koenig Books (art), Magma (design), AA Bookshop (architecture and urban design), Forbidden Planet (comics and graphical novels) or the book-shop at the Photographer's Gallery, to mention a few. Along its sidewalks there are also an abundance of antiquarian book stores (some with fireplaces, that are nice to nip into on cold winter nights) that each carry their own musty fragrance of decades, even centuries, old books and knowledge.

Similar locales, on a smaller scale (comparative to Kuwait), can be found in cities such as Singapore, Luxembourg or even Helsinki, which all have well stocked book stores, libraries and a well developed cultural life (aspects of a developed society that seems to be linked).

The Academic Bookstore in Helsinki (designed by Alvar Aalto)...

During my studies and practice life in London these places played an inherent role in my education, and aided in keeping me updated on the latest ideas and technologies. Visiting them became a daily early evening routine, that acted as almost an initiation, or catalyst, for some of the tasks that needed to be completed later. They, along with the various libraries and other peripheral cultural institutions (museums, galleries, theatres, etc.) made a considerable contribution to how I practice my discipline(s) today.

There are some great (English language) cultural magazines that focus specifically with the Middle-East, ironically, some of them, such as Bidoun and Meada, are actually based respectively in New York and London. Other worthwhile publications are Canvas, Brownbook, and even a student publication such as T-Square, done by architectural students at Kuwait University. An additional, by now unfortunately terminated, publication worth a note was Alef Magazine, which had some of the most evolved editorial content and formatting around.

If you have any know-how of further worthy magazines please let me know, as it's always great to encounter and learn more regarding this genre of press...

The Kuwait School Manifesto in the Al-Watan Newspaper...

Yesterday's (Thursday's) Al-Watan newspaper, one of the country's leading English newspapers (affiliated with the Herald Tribune) had almost a full page article about the Kuwait School Manifesto, which is great, and we sincerely hope it will introduce some of the presented ideas to a wider audience. Whether it will catalyse a discussion regarding the related issues remains to be seen. Let's hope it will...

In regards to the article itself, if a bit of criticism is allowed, the piece would have benefited from including the headings of the eight maxims in the text. As it stands, the pacing of the text is quite difficult to decipher as the manifesto's eight maxims aren't partitioned form each other, resulting in the points being read as a continuous extended paragraph. The inclusion of the pictures from the presentation help with conveying the overall message, but as their locations within the piece aren't synchronized with the text, they end up adding to the confusion.
It brings to mind Kenya Hara's (the Japanese graphic designer's) dictum found in his book 'Designing Design' (2007), in which he informs us that, "verbalizing a design is another act of design" - the composition of the message is not complete until its reconfigured into its final format (in this instance the framework of the newspaper page). The layout and the pictorial structure of a written piece plays a fundamental part in how successfully it will communicate its intent.

Please click here for a link to the Al-Watan article.