Casablanca

Between all of the end of year uni work, we squeezed in a field trip to Casablanca, Morocco.  The trip was designed to be incorporated into the studio, as a contrast city to Edinburgh.  In terms of city rankings, Edinburgh and Casablanca are Gamma cities, they have strong ties to the surrounding region, looser ties globally and are key financial centres.  They also both had large housing developments built post WW2.  So, the trip in pictures:

Arid landscape between Marrakesh and Casablanca with stone wall courtyard houses

One of the post WW2 housing developments.  Many were designed to provide similar living arrangements to traditional village housing.  These estates further out of town were designed bot Moroccans, while the inner area of the city was reserved for European settlers/colonisers.

Lots oh the older 1940s-70s housing stock has been informally modified, mostly by adding on 1-3 storeys.  Building out to create verandas on the street level is common.

At the collective arts centre (former abattoir site), lots of graf art amongst other things.  The arts collective was created as a mixed arts space for studios and gallery space, performance space for theatre, music and dance.  Workshops are held by a variety of organisations for people of all ages and is designed to add arts education into the community, as arts are not a part of mainstream school curriculum.

The best stencil graf art I think I've ever seen.

In one of the main arts spaces

Abattoir buildings

Old machinery tracks

Ventilation

Main arts space with installations

Casablanca is a city of white buildings.

In the habbous

The administrative centre with the catholic church in the background.  The administrative buildings are all designed along traditional courtyard house design.  The church also uses more Moroccan style techniques - the stained glass is set straight into the walls and not lead light.

The Nouvelle Medina.  Another post WW2 housing estate.  This one has been heavily altered, the original layout was squares of 8mx8m half of which was courtyard, half two roomed house.  The courtyards have been built in and several storeys added to each square, ground floors converted into workshops and businesses.  Its quite a good example how infrastructure is appropriated and modified as need requires through self organisation.  It is interesting to note that the areas where this happened transitioned from housing only to mixed use.

Downtown.  This is the area of town was designed Parisian style with wide boulevards and narrower feeder streets - good for creating beautiful vistas lined with high standard architectural designed apartments, and for mobilising an army during civil unrest.

There are pockets of informal slum housing throughout the city, this is on the outside of the old Medina wall, about 300m away from the multi million dollar Hussein II Mosque. Morocco, like many developing nations has no middle class.

Inside the Mosque

The craftsmanship is amazing in it detailing.

Mint tea

Outside the mosque

Spice market in the old Medina (which, by the way is mot that old.  Rebuilt after fires destroyed it in the 1950s)

Waiting for the train at Marrakesh station

One of the many white art deco buildings.

And I got a lovely week of sunshine.  I love living in Scotland, but I am realising as the days grow shorter that I am just a bit solar-powered, and need regular sun fix.  Am enjoying the crisp blue sky days and crunchy frost though. 
Thats all for the moment, there are another 1500 or so pictures - some of which I might post at a later date.  For now its back to the final assignment of the semester.....

Beautiful Snow!

I knew it snowed here, I wasn't quite expecting it to snow so soon, or so furiously.  I was expecting to get a 'practice' snow first; for it to snow a bit, get a bit slushy, rain a bit and wash the snow away then maybe snow for real in about a month.  But instead we have all the snow right now!  I have experienced snow before, been skiing a couple of times but I have never been snowed on before, or really seen it falling from the sky.  It is beautiful, and it completely changes the city.  The colours are amazing with grey stone, black bark and white, white snow.  And watching snow falls is kind of like watching a fire, always changing and active and mesmerising.  I have already stepped in a puddle of slushy wetness and got snow in my eye too.  Right now I'm enjoying the snow from inside, with hot tea and ugg boots.  Makes for some cosy essay writing.  Here are some photos from the trip to the library the other day.....

Field trips and pictures!

The past few weeks have been taken up with lots of field work, including projects on journeying, non place and modernist housing.  Here's a quick glimpse from the field trips:
First off we go to Ikea - the non place. A non place is somewhere which is not connected to its surroundings or history, that could be anywhere.  Airports, supermarkets and global department stores are the classic examples, I've been wondering if massive new housing estates could also fit into the category....  Also been wondering about how we're now culturally programmed to negotiate non place, and even find them comfortable - always knowing what to expect, how to behave, how to negotiate the way finding systems - if you notice them at all.
Still, interesting to go to Ikea and be guided by arrows and yellow and blue signs and be pleasantly compelled to dream of new furniture for rooms at home much smaller than any of the overly large, regularly shaped display areas and marvel in the stacks of products and efficiency of packaging as a design feature. 

 

 

 

Stacked plants (they are real!)

 

 

The lighting section

rows and stacks and packaging and people...

 The journeying projects took a couple of weeks, one by bus and one by foot.  The bus journey was based around each group taking a different bus route transecting the city of Edinburgh.  We had route 25 going from Heriott Watt uni in the west through Gorgie, the West End, Princes St, Leith Walk and to Craigentinny in the East.  I'm not going to go on about city planning, street elevations, built fabric, passenger statistics etc except to say that the top of a double decker is an excellent vantage point by which to observe all these things.  What was interesting was the particular framing of views and the quality of light and reflections through the bus window.  Cities are reflective because of the substantial use of glass, and the images projected looking through glass at glass are fascinating.  A few of my favorite pics:

Tourist shot framed by window

Can't see out at all!  A fairly frequent occurrence now its getting a wee bit chilly.

Reflections

More reflections

  When its dark and not too many people are fogging up the windows it becomes quite impossible to see out the window without seeing back in as well.  This became particularly apparent when we were carrying out our field work and daylight saving got turned back, and it got dark by 5pm - making views like these the ones what most commuters will see for every trip between now and Feb/March.  For a great, comprehensive look at bus experiences, check out http://www.studioincite.com/73urbanjourneys/   

Second field trip was on foot, focused around the city centre.  I have walked around Edinburgh a fair bit in the last few months, but there are two things which always surprise me.  The first is the amazing views within the city, vistas punctuated with monuments or the crags.  (Always makes me smile!)

View of Arthur's seat from North Bridge

View of the castle from Princes St

The second is the shear amount of street barricading that occurs.  I don't think I have ever seen so many bollards, fences, edging and temporary barriers anywhere!  There is the opinion that separating people from moving vehicles gives a degree or feeling of safety.  I can't help feeling that the barriers are more of a hindrance to pedestrians, creating bottlenecks on intersections of people queuing to get to the safety of the footpath but being prevented by the barrier.  The fear of being caught on the wrong side of a barrier.  The nervous run on the outside of the barrier to get through when greeted by the pram and slow person side by side.  The additional obstacle to avoid on a busy street when there's already a mass of street furniture and signage and people to avoid crashing into.  Surely if we want pedestrian friendly cities we should be making the pedestrian route a pleasure to walk and use less divisive methods that perhaps put a bit of trust in the users - isn't a raised kerb or pavement differentiation or a parking strip enough? 
 

  


 We also attended the Samhain festival, marking the end of the light half of the year and the beginning of the dark half.  A bit chilly and rainy, but some spectacular costumes.

Next few weeks will be taken up with reading and writing essays......

Lots of School....

The last few weeks have been spent in the studio working on mapping exercises.  The studio works as a shared space between the Architecture and Urban design group (AUD) and the City group (my group).  We have a lot of shared group exercises as well as a semester long individual portfolio exercise.  This semester is based around different research methods related to the city with a particular focus on looking at marginality in the city through the lenses of shopping, dwelling and worship. 

The last couple of exercises have been about map creation (what is chosen as important information for a map, by whom and why) and map deconstruction.  Usually, as a landscape architect I am involved in the map and plan creation.  We make maps and plans to depict analysis and appraisals, explain a new design for a site.  Its usually accompanied with sections, elevations, photos and aspirational perspectives.  We do this to sell the idea to a client and to illustrate the benefits of the design.  We may choose to focus on one aspect of reasoning that drives the design - a particular bias. We also present these plans in quite a standardised way, a common plan language understood within the development disciplines.

It has been quite an interesting process pulling apart plans rather than putting them together.  We broke the class up into four teams and each team took a plan of Edinburgh from the last 250 years.  The plans were the New Town, a civic survey and plan for Edinburgh (the Abercrombie Plan), the Airport Master plan and the Leith Waterfront Master plan.  My group worked with the Abercrombie plan which was commissioned in the years after WW2.  We had a few quite surprising discoveries - 1) the plan  was based on large scale data gathering and analysis (with the prevailing theme that it is evidence based so must be right) 2) the survey plans and proposed plans are depicted in different formats, making comparison challenging 3) it advocates for quite dramatic alterations to the urban form to provide better heath for citizens, better working environments, traffic systems etc. 
After much research and staring at the plans for a few days, we began to think that representing our findings of the plan in the format of a plan wasn't going to show the differences between the existing and proposed as clearly as we would like.  So we made a film instead.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNaMpN9IhqU
Its a bit rough, but its also our first foray into film making.........

Other things going on have been a lot of reading, flat decoration and an afternoon in Crammond. 
Random photos:

Sheep in a field near Crammond

Pedestrian bridge over Leith St from St James Shopping Centre.  This is quite an amazing bridge - it was the the thing that I noticed and went wow over on the taxi ride after just arriving in Edinburgh after 36 hours of travel.

The astronomer's/caretaker's house at Carlton Hill  - Edinburgh is built on granite.  The castle sits on the plug of an extinct volcano and the royal mile is along the route of a lava flow.  One of the reasons why Edinburgh has such amazing architecture from the middle ages (12 story buildings!!!!!) is because the foundation rock is very, very solid.

Chimney Pots

Piers out to Crammond Island

The 'pointy' skyline of central Edinburgh

The studio at Forest Hill.  It used to be an old army barracks complete with shooting range in the basement.