to market, to market

I had a most enlightening and stimulating afternoon wandering around the Market Estate in North London today.





A few weeks ago, in my guise as the director of Salon (London), I received an email inviting me to come have a nosy round the estate and to submit a proposal for the Market Estate Project. The 1960s Market Estate is set to be demolished early next year and the folks behind the MEP are transforming the flats and public spaces within the estate into a spectacular art exhibition. The whole estate will be a giant, freakish, creative, insane art museum - but for one day only - before the bulldozers come in and tear the whole thing apart.

what the new estate will look like

The very nice Helmut from MEP took me round the estate this afternoon, explaining how the tour would work during the one day the artists' work would be on display and just generally showing me around. The estate is pretty grim - even though people are still living there - and incredibly imposing. But the views from the flats on the upper floors are spectacular and there's this amazing old clock tower still on site. Apparently the Estate was built on the location of an old cattle market - the Metropolitan Cattle Market - which was set up by Prince Albert in 1855 and covered 30 acres. The clock tower dates back to the original cattle market and was used as a prototype for Big Ben - pretty amazing that it's still there. You can only see it from within the estate as it's not visible from the surrounding streets even. This is one of the things I most love about London: history in the strangest of places...





But it wasn't until we went inside a few of the flats that I started to get really interested. The layout of one of the flats we went into was inexplicably bizarre. You walked in the front door and immediately went down a small flight of stairs where a kitchen occupied a room to the left with a living area in the room just next to the kitchen. To access the bathroom and the bedrooms you turned right at the bottom of the first flight of stairs and went down a further two flights of stairs to get to two tiny bedrooms, with a bathroom on the sort of mezzanine level between the living area and the sleeping area. I'm not describing it very well here, but the layout was just completely bonkers. I've never seen anything quite like it.

In any event, the MEP is a fantastic project and I'm really, really excited to see how the whole thing turns out. Stay tuned for more news. Over and out. Yeah, I'm a geek.

i am here

photo credit: Rowan Griffiths

i am here

13 September 2009 � Autumn 2011

Samuel House Estate, Dunston Road, E8 4HN

[a shorter version of this review appears in The Architectural Review, November 2009]

Boarded-up housing estates have become clich�d, yet increasingly prevalent, symbols of doom and gloom in the modern urban landscape. Thankfully there are those willing to push the boundaries of such clich�s, as evidenced by new installation, i am here, by artist collaboration Fugitive Images (FI). Their installation replaces 67 bright orange boards � which have covered the windows of empty flats in Samuel House since April 2007 � with large-scale photographs of residents of the estate.

Though Samuel House was formally transferred to housing association London & Quadrant Housing Trust (L&Q) in October 2008, it is not scheduled for redevelopment until late 2011. In the meantime, there has been, �a gradual wearing down process� as artist Lasse Johansson calls it, in order to get residents re-housed before development works begin. As long time residents of Samuel House, Johansson, along with FI colleagues Andrea Luka Zimmerman and Tristan Fennell, have lived through flats being bricked and boarded up.

The three have been documenting the drive toward the estate�s redevelopment over the past six years in a variety of media. In addition to the �i am here� project, they are also collaborating on a book and a film, both aimed at catching this particular moment of imminent change in Hackney�s urban landscape.

Johansson is surprisingly candid and captures the crux of the underlying problem with urban estate housing, especially given last year�s furore over London�s Robin Hood Gardens estate and a failed campaign to obtain listed status for the building: �I�ve learned a lot, both from this project, but also just from living here. Initially, I had a very black and white view of redevelopment and I began to feel very nostalgic for what we would lose, but I also could see that residents who have lived here for 20 years deserved better facilities.�

photo credit: Rowan Griffiths

Speaking about their inspiration for the project, Zimmerman explains that it stemmed from a desire to confront this pessimism, from the estate�s residents as well as from outsiders. The charming top-floor flat Zimmerman and Johansson share faces the Regent�s Canal and both say they often struggled with comments made by passers-by. �People were always speculating about who lived here, whether anyone lived here�, Zimmerman says, �but also, there was the issue that the people who do live here were unable to project any kind of positive future for the estate. There was this idea that even in 10 years time everything would still be the same and we wanted to challenge these preconceptions.�

Zimmerman continues, �people saw a failed building and immediately equated it with failed inhabitants � we needed to challenge this one way dialogue and so we thought how can we make a work that addresses this idea and involves the individuals in the community.�

Armed with signatures from 98% of the estate�s residents, FI took advantage of a Community Growth Fund set up by L&Q for residents and presented their project proposal in February of this year where they were granted one-third of their budget, the rest of which was fundraised.

As to the project�s reception, Johansson says that it has definitely changed people�s perception of the estate, but he also points out that, because of city space and collective memory, the project has an infinite number of receptions: �it�s like Melanie Counsell�s installation at Matt�s Gallery [in 1995] when she lowered the ceiling - for those who were familiar with the gallery space, there was an immediate realisation of what had happened to the building, a different level of understanding for those in the know.�

Zimmerman chips in to clarify, �Of course, there are two different audiences for our project and for us they are very clearly defined: there are the people who live here and the outside world. Some of the people who didn�t live here will have remembered the orange boards and notice the difference immediately. People who have never seen the orange boards have a completely different reaction to the photos.�

Zimmerman crosses her legs before concluding, �A question that interests me, especially about social housing, is whether it is the building itself or the people who live in the buildings that makes it architecture? Perhaps the obvious answer is a bit of both and this project is about highlighting that.�

Samuel House before...

and after

screw anonymity: I want snow

I've been sitting on this for a few days as I couldn't decide whether I hated it or loved it, but I think I'm coming down in favour of the latter.



This video is part of a new ad campaign by Sony. Sony invaded the village of Seyoisfjorour in Iceland, set up speakers absolutely everywhere and pumped out music for 3 days and nights. On the project website, Sony says that they collaborated with a number of artists including Richard Fearless and the Guillemots, but it isn't quite clear whether new music was specifically commissioned for the project of if 'collaborated' just means that the artists agreed to allow their music to be used in the ad.

I've seen a number of cynical comments on various blogs where Sony is accused of Big Brother-like intrusion into an unspoilt Icelandic village. There's something not only very simple minded about such comments but also remarkably naive. In the first place, there would have been no way Sony could get away with such a project without the collaboration and agreement of the residents of Seyoisfjorour - the village also probably got a nice chunk of change in return for their participation, but these issues are pedestrian and ignore the most interesting aspects of the project.

Just a guess, but if some hip, young, Berlin-based artist initiated the project instead of Juan Cabral for Sony, I bet the general reaction would have been completely different. The idea behind the ad is fantastic. I can't remember the number of times I've thought how cool it would be to have a soundtrack for life which is exactly what's happening. I don't think anyone could stand such a thing for more than a few days, but I love the idea of an experience shared by an entire community.

I only know of one other similar project - one that aims to tap into this idea of a city-wide shared experience - and that's the Emotional Cities project in Stockholm. A Swedish agency Farfar collaborated with artist Erik Krikortz to design a project which reflected the emotional state of Stockholm-dwellers and projected it via coloured lights onto sky scrapers in the centre of Stockholm. To get involved, residents log in to the EC website to update their mood, which is then collated and averaged with all other respondents and the corresponding colour is projected on the building 24-hours a day. Such an interesting idea to have a visual gauge of how everyone in the city is feeling.

While I think the Sony project only works because it's in a small village, I don't think the results are any less interesting - perhaps even more so - in big cities. In fact, it's probably more important to encourage large-scale collaborative projects in big cities, where a sense of community is often difficult to come by. And before you say that people live in cities for the anonymity and don't really care about that lack of community, I charge you to think of the NYC blackout in 2003 (a lovely post of someone's experience of the blackout here) or the big snow storm in London earlier this year where everyone I know took the day off to go play in the parks. City-wide shared experiences change people for the better, even if only for a day or two. As far as I'm concerned, the more of that the better, and while I'd prefer if such endeavours weren't financed by corporate communications companies, if that's the only way to make it happen (apart from mother nature and father energy grid), then so be it.