FANCY

^Building, Matteo Thun, 1983

We can’t help who we are attracted to, we have no control over which person draws our eye in the tube carriage, just as we are not always in control of our thoughts, they wander off without us to whatever takes their fancy, day dreaming precisely at the moments when we should probably be concentrating, working on something. It can be irritating being turned back into a lusty teenager through no desire of your own, or drifting off unprompted into puerile, fanciful worlds of escape in your head, but on the other hand it is those moments when something truly singular sparkles into life.

It is in those moments that our rational minds briefly lose control of our waking instincts, momentarily relinquishing authorship over our thoughts, letting our bodies and our intuition guide us. It is right then, if we pick up a pen or a pencil, and use all the skills at our disposal to take our flight of fancy seriously and frame it, capturing it, that we can extract from the ebb and flow of our daily lives — always so concerned with satisfying the judgments of others — a pure cross section of ourselves, a distilled fragment of subjective creation.

The sketch and the Capriccio, the former capturing the fleeting structure of an idea as it passes by, the latter being the flesh added to its bones, the full flight of fancy, the private and passionate love affair between the artist/architect and his imagination, drawn out and expanded into vignettes of autoerotic intensity, which if pursued with enough zeal begin to stand on their own as inspirational artifacts, intriguing specimens from the intimate obsessions of our fertile minds. It is in the caprice of our fancy — the beautiful face we cannot stop staring at, the ideal place we keep trying to imagine — drawn out and expanded, that we will find the coming together in one space, in one scene, compressed, of the very subjective ground of our anterior architectural instinct.

....................................................

NB, this post was initially published in The BiBlog

Roll Over & Differentiate My Data Sets Baby.....................................................Patrick Schumacher & Some Old School AA-Speak

^annotation in personal copy of LOG21 by blog author

“This is not something I am dogmatically imposing, I’m just observing that I, my friends, my students, naturally adhere to these principles without fail. Their hand would fall off rather than draw straight lines. Is anybody here drawing a triangle, a square, or a circle? Ever again? No!”

“you will always work with laws, with rule-based systems of differentiation. These can be applied meaningfully, for instance, in the adaptation of facades to create an intelligent differentiation of elements. You can do this by taking data sets like sun exposure maps and make them drive an intelligent differentiation of brise-soleil elements, which are scripted off the data set. But you can also apply this sort of technique to urbanism. We’re talking about urban fields, about the lawful differentiation of an urban fabric according to relevant data sets.”!

“You can always identify where the rigid forms still persist, where there is still too much simple repetition, where there are still unrelated elements. You can always ask for further softening, further differentiation, and further correlation of everything with everything else. There’s always more to script and correlate to intensify the internal consistency and cross-connections and resonance within a project and to a context. It’s a never-ending trajectory of a project’s progression. The intensification of relations in architecture reflects the intensification of communication among all of us, everyday and with everything.”

Extracts from "Parametricism And the Autopoiesis Of Architecture" by Patrick Schumacher in the winter 2011, 21st edition of Log magazine, published by AnyoneCorporation, & edited by Cynthia Davidson

Frivolous & Serious Play

^drawing of Wonderwall, New Orleans, 1982-1984 (dismantled)

Extract from Charles W Moore's essay "The Yin, The Yang, and The Three Bears"

"Buildings, I have insisted for a long time, can and must speak to us, which requires that we grant them freedom of speech, the chance to say things that are unimportant, even silly, so when they are grave or portentous we can tell the difference. I have taken it as my particular mission to emphasise the light and sunny moments. I’m calling some of my projects Frivolous and Serious Play; I think the two are not inimical, and that both can be joyous."

^Wonderwall, New Orleans, 1982-1984 (dismantled)

Collapsed Time in Collected Space

Scene in the Antique Dealer's collection, taken from Honoré De Balzac's philosophical novel "The Wild Ass's Skin", where he outlines the uncanny and alluring effect of a multitude of collected objects -not yet divested of historical allusion or meaning, nor icily institutionalised- contained in a small, compressed private space, and set upon by an eager imagination.
.......................................................................................


Extract From "The Wild Ass's Skin"


At first site the showrooms offered him a chaotic medley of human and divine works. Crocodiles, apes and stuffed boas grinned at stainless glass windows, seemed to be about to snap at carved busts, to be running after lacquer-ware or to be clambering up chandeliers. A Sevres vase on which Madame Jaquetot had painted Napoleon was standing next to a sphinx dedicated to Sesostris. The beginnings of creation and the events of yesterday were paired off with grotesque good humour. A roasting-jack was posed on a monstrance, a Republican sabre on a medieval arquebus. Madame du Barry, painted in pastel by Latour, with a star on her head, nude and enveloped in cloud, seemed to be concupiscently contemplating an Indian chibouk and trying to divine some purpose in the spirals of smoke which were drifting towards her.

Instruments of death, poniards, quaint pistols, weapons with secret springs were hobnobbing with instruments of life: porcelain soup-tureens, Dresden china plate, translucent porcelain cups from china, antique slat-cellars, comfit-dishes from feudal times. An ivory ship was sailing under full canvas on the back of an immovable tortoise. A pneumatic machine was poking out the eye of the Emperor Augustus, who remained majestic and unmoved. Several portraits of French aldermen and Dutch burgomasters, insensible now as during their lifetime, rose above this chaos of antiques and cast a cold and disapproving glance at them.

All the countries on earth seemed to have brought here some remnants of their sciences and a sample of their arts. It was a sort of philosophical midden in which nothing was lacking, neither the Red Indian's calumet nor the green and gold slipper of the seraglio, nor the yatogan of the Moor, nor the brazen image of the Tartar. There was even the soldier's tobacco pouch, the ciborium of the priest and the plumes from a throne. Furthermore, these monstrous tableaux were subjected to a thousand accidents of lighting by the whimsical effects of a multitude of reflected gleams due to the confusion of tints and the abrupt contrasts of light and shade. The ear fancied it heard stifled cries, the mind imagined that it caught the thread of unfinished dramas, and the eye that it perceived half-smothered glimmers. Lastly, persistent dust had cast its thin coating over all these objects, whose multiple angles and numerous sinuosities produced the most picturesque of impressions.

To begin with the, the stranger compared these three showrooms, crammed with the relics of civilizations and religions, deities, royalties, masterpieces of art, the products of debauchery, reason and unreason, to a mirror of many facets, each one representing a whole world. After registering this hazy impression, he tried to make a choice of specimens he enjoyed; but, in the process of gazing, pondering, dreaming, he was overcome by a fever which was perhaps due to the hunger which was gnawing at his vitals. His senses ended by being numbed at the sight of so many national and individual existences, their authenticity guaranteed by the human pledges which had survived them.

The longing that had caused him to visit the shop was satisfied: he left real life behind him, ascended by degrees to an ideal world, and reached the enchanted palaces of ecstasy where the universe appeared to him in transitory gleams and tongues of fire; just as, long ago, the future of mankind had filed past in flaming visions before the gaze of Saint John of Patmos.

A multitude of sorrowing faces, gracious or terrifying, dimly or clearly described, remote or near at hand, rose up before him in masses, in myriads, in generations. Egypt in its mysterious rigidity emerged from the sands, represented by a mummy swathed in black bandages; then came the Pharaohs burying entire peoples in order to build a tomb for themselves; then Moses and the Hebrews and the wilderness: the whole of the ancient world, in all its solemnity, drifted before his eyes. But here, cool and graceful, a marble statue posed on a wreathed column, radiantly white, spoke to him of the voluptuous myths of Greece and Ionia. Oh, who would not have smiled, as he did, to see upon a red background, in the fine clay of an Etruscan vase, the brown girl dancing before the god Priapus and joyously saluting him? Facing her was a Latin queen lovingly fondling her chimaera! The capricious pleasures of imperial Rome were there in every aspect: the bath, the couch, the dressing-table ritual of some indolent, pensive Julia awaiting her Tibullus. Armed with the power of Arabian talismans, the head of Cicero evoked memories of republican Rome and unwound for him the scroll of Livy's histories. The young man gazed on the Senatus pupulusque romanus: the consul, the lectors, the purple-edged togas, the fights in the Forum, the plebs aroused to wrath. All this filed past him like the insubstantial figures of a dream.

Then Christian Rome became the dominant theme in these presentations. One painting showed the heavens opened and in it he saw the Virgin Mary bathed in a cloud of gold in the midst of angels, eclipsing the sun in glory, lending an ear to the lamentations of the sufferer on whom this regenerate Eve smiled gently. As he fingered a mosaic made of different lavas from Vesuvius and Etna, in imagination he emerged into sun-drenched Italy: he was an onlooker at the Borgias' feasts, he rode through the Abruzzi, sighed after Italian mistresses, worshipping their pale cheeks and dark, elongated eyes.

Espying a medieval dagger with a hilt as cunningly wrought as a piece of lace, with rust patches on it like bloodstains, he thought with a shudder of mighty trysts interrupted by the cold blade of a husband's sword. India and its religions lived again in an idol dressed in gold and silk with conical cap and lozenge-shaped ear-flaps folded upwards and adorned with bells. Near this grotesque figure a rush mat, as pretty as the Indian dancer who had once rolled herself in it, still exhaled the perfume of sandalwood. The mind was startled into perceptiveness by a monster from China with a twisted gaze, contorted mouth and writhing limbs: the creation of an inventive people weary of unvarying beauty and drawing ineffable pleasure from the luxuriant diversity of ugliness.

A salt-cellar from Benvenuto Cellini's workshop brought him back to the bosom of the Renaissance at a period when art and licence flourished together, when sovereign princes found diversion in torture and prelates at Church Councils rested from their labours in the arms of courtesans after decreeing chastity for mere priests. He saw the conquests of Alexander carved on a cameo, the massacres of Pizarro etched on a match-lock arquebus, the wars of religion -frenzied, seething, pitiless- engraved on the base of a helmet. Then the charming pageantry of chivalry sprang up from a Milanese suit of armour, brightly furnished, superbly damascened, beneath whose visor the eyes of a paladin still gleamed.

For him this ocean of furnishings, inventions, fashions, works of art and relics made up an endless poem. Forms, colours, concepts of thought came to life again; but nothing complete presented itself to his mind. The poet in him had to finish these sketches by the great painter who had composed the vast palette on to which the innumerable accidents of human life had been thrown in such disdainful profusion.

GLUTTONY

^Mr Creosote, Monty Python's "The Meaning Of Life"

“How are your steaks, tonight?”

“Our steaks, sir, are if I may say so quite simply superb. Only the choicest cuts of beef, carefully selected and even more carefully aged, cooked to perfection as perfection is defined by your instructions, served with your choice of potato and vegetable and richly delicious dessert.”

“Sounds scrumptious.”

“Yes.”

“I’ll have nine.”

“Pardon me?”

“Bring me nine steaks, please.”

“you want nine steak dinners?”

“Please”

“And who, sir, may I ask is going to eat them?”

“You see anybody else sitting here? I’m going to eat them.”

“And how on earth are you going to do that, sir?”

“Well, gee, let’s see, I think I’ll use my right hand to cut, tonight. I’ll put pieces into my mouth, I’ll masticate, acidic elements in my saliva will begin breaking down the muscle fibre. I’ll swallow. Et Cetera. Bring ‘em on!”

“Sir, nine steaks would make anyone sick.”

“Look at me. Look at this stomach. Do you think I’ll get sick? No way. Come here –no, really come around and look at this stomach. Let me lift up my shirt… here. See how much I can grab with my hand? I can’t even sit close to the table. Have you ever seen anything so hugely disgusting in your whole life?”

I’ve seen bigger stomachs.”

“You’re just being polite, you just want a tip. You’ll get your tip, after you’ve brought me nine steak dinners, with perfection being defined as medium-rare, which is to say pink yet firm. And don’t forget the rolls.”

“Sir, this is simply beyond my range of experience. I’ve never served any one individual nine simultaneous orders on my own authority. I could get in horrible trouble. What if, for example, you have an embolism, God forbid? You could rupture organs.”

“Didn’t I say look at me? Cant you tell what I am? Listen to me very carefully. I am an obese, grotesque, prodigal, greedy, gourmandizing, gluttonous pig. Is this not clear? I am more hog than human. There is room, physical room, for you in my stomach. Do you hear? You see before you a swine. An eating fiend of unlimited capacity. Bring me meat.”

“Have you not eaten in a very long time? Is that it?”

“Look, you’re beginning to bother me. I could bludgeon you with my belly. I am also, allow me to tell you, more than a little well-to-do. Do you see that building over there, the one with the lit windows, in the shadow? I own that Building. I could buy this restauarant and have you terminated. I could and perhaps will buy this entire block, including that symbolically tiny Weight watchers establishment across the street. See it? With the door and the windows so positioned as to form a grinning, leering, hollow-cheeked face? It is within my financial power to buy that place, and to fill it with steaks, fill it with red steak, all of which I would and will eat. The door would under this scenario be jammed with a gnawed bone; not a single little smug psalm-singing baggy-skinned apostate from the cause of adiposity would be able to enter. They would pound on the door, pound. But the bone would hold. They’d lack the bulk to burst through. Their mouths and eyes would be wide as they pressed against the glass. I would demolish, physically crush the huge scale at the end of the brightly lit nave at the back of the place under a weight of food. The springs would jut out. Jut. What a delicious series of thoughts. May I see a wine list?”

“Weight Watchers?”

“Garcon, what you have before you is a dangerous thing, I warn you. Human beings act in their own interest. Huge, crazed swine do not. My wife informed me a certain time-interval ago that if I did not lose weight, she would leave me. I have not lost weight, as a matter of fact, I have gained weight, and thus she is leaving. Q.E.D. And A-1, don’t forget the A-1.”

“But sir, surely with more time…”

“There is no more time. Time does not exist. I ate it. It’s in here, see? See the jiggle? That’s time, jiggling. Run, run away, fetch me my platter of fat, my nine cattle, or I’ll envelop you in a chin and fling you at the wall!”

“Shall I fetch the maître d’, sir? To confer?”

“By all means fetch him. But warn him against getting too close. He will be encompassed instantly, before he has time to squeak. Tonight I will eat. Hugely, and alone. For I am now hugely alone. I will eat, and juice might very well spurt into the air around me, and if anyone comes too near, I will snarl and jab at them with my fork –like this, see?”

“Sir, really!”

“Run away for your very life. Fetch something to placate me. Im going to grow and grow, and fill the absence that surrounds me with the horror of my own gelatinous presence. Yin and Yang. Ever growing, waiter, Run!”

“Right away, sir!”

“Some breadsticks might have been nice, too, do you hear? What kind of place is this, anyway?”

………………………………………………………………………..

Extract from “The Broom Of The System”, David Foster Wallace, Abacus (7 Aug 1997)

SYMMETRY

^Order 12 Latin Bi-Square as used by Georges Perec

In 1947 Raymond Queneau wrote 99 short descriptions of the same pair of unremarkable events: a man was seen on the ‘S’ bus having a run-in with another man, and was then seen again later that day at the Gare St-Lazare. Each description was written in a different style, following its own set of specific literary rules, with the effect that the scene is transformed completely in each instance, as if imagined or remembered through the lens of a hundred diverse minds. In 1969 Georges Perec began a project in which he chose twelve places in Paris where he had either lived or had attached certain memories to. He then proceeded to write descriptions of two of these places each month, one written at the place as an objective description, the other written from memory. He slipped these into sealed letters together with photos of the locations, taken by a friend. Each year he repeated the task, taking care to follow an algorithm based on a Latin bi-square, so that each place was described during a different month to the previous year, ensuring that the same pair of places was never described in the same month. This was continued for twelve years, until each place had been described twelve times as both an objective list of elements and as a collection of thoughts and memories.

Both writers belonged to Oulipo, a group for whom the constraints and formal logic of poetry and mathematics were “encouragements for inspiration, so to speak, or else, in a way, aids to creativity”*. Around these frameworks the tangle of events, narrative and language could grow in wild profusion while the core would remain as an elegant plan. The productive play against rules was nothing new, what was unusual was how these writers consciously played with the rules themselves, creatively reformulating the structure of their medium each time they began a new project. Their techniques ranged in complexity from the simple structure of Queneau’s exercises in style, effectively a ten by ten grid with an equivalent numerical array, so that one can mirror any grid location to any other with total correspondence (except the one empty square, precisely positioned to destabilize its total internal symmetry), to the twelve sided Latin bi-square that ordered Perec’s archiving of fact and experience, in the form of time, embodied by the Gregorian calendar.

At every node, in each of these structures, the writers unified numerical differentiation and equivalence with the complex and psychological effects of memory and form. While the grid of identical units in Queneau’s array are all interchangeable, their transformation through the filter of perception and style rendered them entirely unique and totally asymmetrical. Perec’s square — divided according to units of time and space — is transfigured by his recollections and the atemporal nature of memory, which weaves a network of new correspondences across the boundaries laid out by his framework. It is precisely the power of the related patterns created by this intermingling and overlaying of objective mathematical clarity and subjective effect, each time generated anew, with novel and surprising consequences in every Oulipian tract, that offers up a richer definition of symmetry. Rather than being described only in terms of abstract geometric and numerical reflectivity, this form of correspondence dynamically binds the structure to the effect uniting co-ordinated language with its phenomenal, subjective counterpart in the world of memory and experience.

......................................................................................................

* "Letters, Numbers, Forms: Essays, 1928-70" by Raymond Queneau, translated by Jordan Stump. University of Illinois Press (October 15, 2007)
NB. Post originally published in The Bi-Blog

GRACEFUL

Graceful, 19C Samson Reproduction of an 18C original by the London Porcelain Factory of Bow

The expert at the auction house told me how you are supposed to be holding something that must have broken off a long time ago — a cauldron or a flame — but it simply cannot have been that your maker had wanted you to stay that way. If you had indeed once been holding something, then whoever made you must have placed it in your hands as a trial, a challenge for some future owner to come forward and avail you of your burden. Your arms are far too elegant and relaxed, your posture far too languid and flowing, your limpid expression and rosy flesh far too untroubled to have ever been meant for any sort of exertion. The likes of you are intended for nothing but a soft and diaphanous easiness, a perfect absence of conflict, like the sleeping face of a baby, or the slow caresses of enamored lovers. And if whatever it was you were holding was meant to tell a story, or convey a moral, then it must have weighed you down even more than the few grams of its clay, darkening the crimson of your cape with arduous meanings. Whoever it was, before you came into my possession, that had the grace to free you of your flame or pot, and whatever moral imperatives it came laden with, emptied you of content and set you floating slightly off from the ground, weightless, dancing ever so slightly. The way you are now must be what your maker had intended: a little embodiment of that mindless perfection of ease which we all secretly yearn for, that elegance which comes from the triumph of the body over its troubled interior, that quality we refer to as divinely bestowed since it releases you from the burden of the intellect, and which positively affirms the subject on which it has been bestowed as being that celestial thing, Graceful.
...................................................................................................
This text led to the Graceful-Gif trilogy. Episode one, two, and three, over on HandBin

NB. Post originally published in The Bi-Blog

.............SATURATED SPACE .............. ..........research cluster proposal..........

What follows is an application I submitted together with Antoni Malinowski, Chiara Nosarti and Hugo Spiers, to the AA for a Research Cluster in their next round of year and a half long research grants. We would be working together with the Courtauld, UCL, and hopefully the Wellcome Trust, with whom we would like to develop the project in any case if we do not receive a positive response from the AA in March.

...................................................................................................

CHROMATIC DISCOURSE

“Moral puritanism and aesthetic austerity, along with resentment and old, stubborn, and underhanded desire to equate drabness with beauty, thus make their righteous alliance and take delight in a constantly reiterated certainty: only what is insipid, odourless, and colourless may be said to be true, beautiful and good.”                                                                                                   

The Eloquence of Colour Jacqueline Lichtenstein

CONTEXT:A Since Plato’s opposition of image to reason, defining image as antithetical to logic, and the consequent antagonisms of rhetoric vs. discourse, painting vs. drawing, and colour vs. form, there has been a consistently strong iconoclastic, de-saturating, purging tendency within Western thought and Architectural discipline. It is a line of reasoning that pits superficiality against depth: a moral analogy masquerading as a logical opposition. Depth is idolised as pure, abstract, white, difficult to grasp, serious and linguistic, while whatever is sensual, eloquent, colourful and essentially non-linguistic is ridiculed as superficial, cosmetic, vulgar, indecent, and even pornographic. That which bypasses the rational mind, and operates directly on the senses is demonised and feared for the potency of its power, and ultimately subordinated by its exclusion from “serious” discourse. Colour in Architectural discipline and theory is necessarily affected by this traditional categorisation, with its legitimacy, although never its power, in perpetual doubt. Through the research of this cluster we will begin the process of re-evaluating and restructuring the frame of this apparent contradiction. The cluster will seek to develop a set of spatio-chromatic methodologies, and form them into a combined figure of complementarity, rather than subordination or opposition, with theoretical and scientific discourse.

“You recognise these joys: to feel the generous belly of a vase, to caress its slender neck, and then to explore the subtleties of its contours. To thrust your hands into the deepest part of your pockets and, with eyes half closed, to give way to the slow intoxication of the fantastic glazes, the bursts of yellows, the velvet tones of the blues…”                                                                                         

Journey To The East Le Corbusier

CONTEXT:B Architecture has a multitude of interfaces through which it can engage its occupants. The most immediate and direct of which is through that most highly evolved of our perceptual apparatuses, the eye, whose language is that of light, spoken in a vocabulary of chromatic combinations.  Reflected off an inexhaustible range of environments and materials, colour, in all its forms, is the architect’s first and most consistently powerful line of atmospheric influence. As techniques of fabrication, and new modes of materiality proliferate in the arena of Architectural production, a whole new set of possibilities are arising for the orchestration of an unprecedented level of spatial richness. At the same time colour is beginning to be rediscovered as an area of interest in Art theory, as well as in neuroscience and neuroesthetics. With the process of design, fabrication and discussion as the linear core around which to weave these various bodies of knowledge, the Cluster (explained below) will seek to generate and document creative feedback loops between each set of viewpoints (those of four design teams, art theorists & historians, and scientists), with influences and reconsiderations reverberating in both directions.

ARCHITECTURE’S HUE

FOCUS:FRAMEWORK The Cluster seeks to reintegrate spatial colouration back into the working methodology of Architecture and Academic discourse, providing the starting shot, and groundwork for further work in the area. This will be done through a process of design, debate and experimentation organised around a few key events. A Seminar will collect knowledge and frame the area of investigation. Four teams, two consisting of designers and a scientist, and the other two designers and a theorist, will develop and build a set of saturated spaces, coloured objects and environments. The scientists and theorists will form the initial core of the Cluster staff, whilst the design teams will be selected based on a body of work and a proposal that shows a practical and clear engagement with the topic, whilst at the same time expressing a distinct and singular approach to experimentation in the subject. These will be exhibited, and events around the exhibition will be used to propose further ambitions for larger scales of research. A concluding publication will not only summarise the cluster’s experiments, but provide a space for texts setting out the importance of, and possibilities for colour in contemporary architecture, ending with a set of visionary proposals questioning the role of the medium in society today, and what its manipulation could potentially produce across all scales.

SEMINAR:WORKSHOP An initiatory seminar and workshop will bring together specialists from the three fields of Colour Theory, Science, and Architecture to share thoughts and knowledge on the subject of Colour as an instrumental tool and subject of inquiry in Architectural space. The current status of expertise in the topic will be broadly laid out and introduced to the Association as a specific area of debate. It will be approached simultaneously as an Historical, culturally embedded protagonist in the development of Occidental notions of Space; as a Phenomenological device of Spatial manipulation and poetic tool; and as an objective object study in relation to the human body, its physiology and responses, and hue and texture themselves as responsive molecular constructs. The seminar will feed directly into the creation of four interdisciplinary design teams, two of which will work in collaboration with a scientist, and the other two a theorist. Two teams will be invited by the cluster, and the other two will be selected based on an open competition.

BRIEFS:COMPETITION Following the seminar workshop a summary will be drawn-up, roundly circumscribing the issues raised in discussion, and concluding with a set of categories for investigation in relation to materials and fabrication, design, theory and analysis. These will be formulated as a set of four Briefs, intended as catalysts for one of four interdisciplinary teams to build on each. Two teams will be invited by the Cluster, whilst the other two will be selected through an open competition that will call for ideogrammatic proposals to explore the subject in an immediate and effective way through material experiments and physical constructions. Each group will need to have a specific palette of materials and fabrication techniques that they wish to engage with, and they will all be asked to work at two scales, that of the object, and that of the enclosure, both of which are to relate intimately to the human body, and remain relatively consistent to its dimensions.

DESIGN:RESEARCH Based on the theme of the group, the scientist in the team will formulate specific question in relation to colour and space for the design element to explore, and the design side will equally formulate questions for the scientist to research. The designers will be required to generate speculative explorations, stories, as well as their concrete space and object, elaborating on the group theme and the questions set by the scientist, while the scientist will construct the framework for experiments based on the designers’ questions that will be carried out on the items they have fabricated. While there is a clear dualism here, it is intended that the two sides will work symbiotically, discussing and evolving through each stage from the formulation of the questions through to the development of the tests and the spaces, each adding their clear areas of expertise towards a common experimentation.

BUILD:TEST:EXHIBIT The fabricated colour-spaces, the process leading to their design and build, the equipment used to test them, the findings and conclusions by each of the teams, and comments, musings and responses from the Colour Theorists will be the material used for an exhibition of the Cluster’s work in Progress. Artists and writers will be invited to respond to the work in their own fashion, adding a layer of subjective interpretation and impressions to the body of design intention and objective experimentation. This will be an opportunity to reach productive verdicts about the approaches of the teams, of the material gathered by everyone involved and how that material and knowledge related, informed and transformed into the actual spaces, and in turn, how those spaces are subjectively received. The exhibition will ultimately act as the basis for the positing of a second generation of questions, further to those that generated the work on display, a series of interesting avenues which could be travelled down at wildly different scales, in completely different contexts.

SUMMARISE:SPECULATE:PUBLISH The Cluster aims to conclude with a publication summarising and describing the topic, and the cluster’s processes and research, a publication which itself will conclude with a large body of propositional speculations on the potential places, spaces, materials and uses led to by the second generation questions. These will be produced through a collaboration by all members of the cluster, that will produce a spectrum of speculative and conceptual propositions, at all scales, ranging from the poetic to the practical, the urban to the microscopic, material to digital, all extending out from the ideas and techniques explored during the course of the cluster.

ADDICTION

^Image From "Up" The movie source

Everything has to change all the time as quickly as possible, so that we buy more in ever more creative ways so that we don’t even know that we are buying anything anymore, no we’re helping Djiboutian fisherman and Fijian forests and making our kids cleverer with Omega 3 in their margarine and an iPhone for their app store, just constantly adapting, running around frittering our energy away making social signs and advertising revenue on Facebook and re-tweeting tweets about a demo against Phillip Green’s tax evasion so that he’ll know to brand himself as an ethical investor and good citizen in the future, eating dietary chocolate that makes you shit yourself instead of digesting it and carefully shopping around in vintage stores to make sure we don’t look like we are a part of this no, we are unique, but we’re not and millions of square meters of the spaces we exist in are not really there, they’re really shares and loans that are hedged sold bought and repackaged around the world to the tune of $4Tn a day, gutting Amsterdam and Paris and London but cleanly so that the scene is still intact like some Herculean act of Taxonomy, their facades still there even though their insides are enacting the implosions and explosions of banks and funds like Pruitt-Igoe on a hyper fast unreal real whatever loop, a permanent crisis so that we are all glued to the rise or fall of the value of our houses because they aren’t homes that we live in they are dirigibles we can fall from, pumped full of capital they need all that $4Tn dollars a day to keep them floating, our plastic working, keep us up here tweeting like sparrows about books that are like faces and trying really hard not to panic when we realise that we can’t stop, can’t imagine what it might be like if it all stops and, but that the party’s gone on too long and everyone’s exhausted but we still want more and it might in fact all end and it’s too big to think about, our mascara is smeared and we are having panic attacks and constant high level terror threats and cravings without quite understanding why or what for anymore, and we don’t want to anymore, we want help, but there isn’t any, there’s only the last lonely resort of an addict beyond saving up there in an attic or downstairs in a cupboard, in the bathtub or the living room armchair, for real, with a tie, or a piece of rope, or some uppers and downers, or if in Switzerland or the US, perhaps a gun, messily staining the walls and ceiling, for real, really, in a house that for that split second, or minute, will, momentarily, ecstaticaly, come crashing to the ground and be just that –really- and nothing else, totally divested, and intimately: your home.

Reflective Nostalgia

^Sphinx, by M.Shemyakin, St Petersburg source

The second excerpt from Svetlana Boym's "The future of Nostalgia". The first here.

Reflective Nostalgia: Virtual Reality and Collective Memory

"Restoration (from re-staure –re-establishment) signifies a return to the original stasis, to the prelapsarian moment. The past for the restorative nostalgic is a value for the present; the past is not a duration but a perfect snapshot. Moreover the past is not supposed to reveal any signs of decay; it has to be freshly painted in its “original image” and remain eternally young. Reflective nostalgia is more concerned with historical and individual time, with the irrevocability of the past and human finitude. Re-flection suggests new flexibility, not the reestablishment of stasis. The focus here is not on recovery of what is perceived to be an absolute truth but on the mediation on history and passage of time. To paraphrase Nabokov, these kind of nostalgics are often “amateurs of time, epicures of duration,” who resist the pressure of external efficiency and take sensual delight in the texture of time not measurable by clocks and calendars.

Restorative nostalgia evoke national past and future; reflective nostalgia is more about individual and cultural memory. The two might overlap in their frames of reference, but they do not coincide in their narratives and plots of identity. In other words, they can use the same triggers of memory and symbols, the same Proustian madeleine pastry, but tell different stories about it.

Nostalgia of the first type gravitates toward collective pictorial symbols and oral culture. Nostalgia of the second type is more oriented toward an individual narrative that savours details and memorial signs, perpetually deferring homecoming itself. If restorative nostalgia ends up reconstructing emblems and rituals of home and homeland in an attempt to conquer and spatialize time, reflective nostalgia cherishes shattered fragments of memory and temporalizes space. Restorative nostalgia takes itself deadly seriously. Reflective nostalgia, on the other hand, can be ironic and humorous. It reveals that longing and critical thinking are not opposed to one another, as affective memories do not absolve one from compassion, judgement or critical reflection.

Reflective nostalgia does not pretend to rebuild the mythical place called home; it is “enamoured of distance, not of the referent itself.” This type of nostalgic narrative is ironic, inclusive and fragmentary. Nostalgics of the second type are aware of the gap between identity and resemblance; the home is in ruins or, on the contrary, has been just renovated and gentrified beyond recognition. This de-familiarisation and sense of distance drives them to tell their story, to narrate the relationship between past, present and future. Through such longing these nostalgics discover that the past is not merely that which doesn’t exist anymore, but, to quote Henri Bergson, the past “might act and will act by inserting itself into a present sensation from which it borrows the vitality.” The past is not made in the image of the present or seen as foreboding of some present disaster; rather, the past opens up a multitude of potentialities, non-teleological possibilities of historic development. We don’t need a computer to get access to the virtualities of our imagination: reflective nostalgia has a capacity to awaken multiple planes of consciousness.

^ "Der Berg" installation in the Palast Der Republik, Berlin, two years before its demolition to make way for a reconstructed Palace that was on the site prior to WWII source

The virtual reality of consciousness, as defined by Henri Bergson, is a modern concept, yet it does not rely on technology; on the contrary, it is about human freedom and creativity. According to Bergson, the human creativity, élan vital, that resists mechanical repetition and predictability, allows us to explore the virtual realities of consciousness. For Marcel Proust, remembrance is an unpredictable adventure in syncretic perception where words and tactile sensations overlap. Place names open up mental maps and space folds into time. “The memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment;  and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years,” writes Proust at the end of Swann’s Way. What matters then, is the memorable literary fugue, not the actual return home.

The modern nostalgic realises that “the goal of the odyssey is a rendezvous with oneself.” For Jorge Luis Borges, for instance, Ulysses returns home only to look back at his journey. In the alcove of his fair queen he becomes nostalgic for his nomadic self: “Where is that man who in the days and nights of exile erred around the world like a dog and said that Nobody was his name?” Homecoming does not signify a recovery of identity; it does not end the journey in the virtual space of imagination. A modern nostalgic can be homesick and sick of home, at once.

As most of the stories in this book suggest, the nostalgic rendezvous with oneself is not always a private affair. Voluntary and involuntary recollections of an individual intertwine with collective memories. In many cases the mirror of reflective nostalgia is shattered by experiences of collective devastation and resembles –involuntarily- a modern work of art. Bosnian poet Semezdin Mehmedinovic offers one of such shattered mirrors from his native Sarajevo:

“Standing by the window, I see the shattered glass of Yugobank. I could stand like this for hours. A blue, glassed-in façade. One floor above the window I am looking from, a professor of aesthetics comes out onto his balcony; running his fingers through his beard, he adjusts his glasses. I see his reflection in the blue façade of Yugobank, in the shattered glass that turns the scene into a live cubist painting on a sunny day.”"

Restorative Nostalgia

^Reconstructed Cathedral of Christ Our Saviour, Moscow source

The first excerpt of two laying out the two entirely incomensurable and often confused forms in which contemporary nostalgia manifests itself -Restorative and Reflective- the one dangerous and easily abused, unconscious and easy to accept, the other profoundly complex, personal and requiring active contemplation and engagement, and ultimately hugely rewarding. Both extracts are from Svetlana Boym's deeply inspiring and thorough book "The Future of Nostalgia", in which she takes Nostalgia as an intrinsic and inescapable condition of moderinty, set only to increase in potency in the years to come, and sets about breaking it down into its component parts, its various appearances, sinister and beautiful, and states the case for positively engaging with it as a key to understanding and in a way, enjoying, our fantastically unstable 21st century Human Condition. It was my best read since, and the best possible Architect's addendum to "In Search Of Lost Time", and was also strangely similar, but far more precise and ambitious than Nicolas Bourriaud's The Radicant, in which Bourriaud posits an artistic form of  nomadic rootlessness, in which artists engage in creating their own micro-narratives of belonging in a life-long, international trajectory, positing the artistic project as one of a perpetualy Reflective, and transformational Nostalgia.

.........................................................................................

Restorative Nostalgia: Conspiracies and Return To Origins

"Two kinds of nostalgia are not absolute types, but rather tendencies, ways of giving shape and meaning to longing. Restorative nostalgia puts emphasis on nostos (returning home)and proposes to rebuild the lost home and patch up the memory gaps. Reflective nostalgia dwells in algia (aching), in longing and loss, the imperfect process of remembrance. The first category of nostalgics do not think of themselves as nostalgic; they believe that their project is about truth. This kind of nostalgic characterizes national and nationalist revivals all over the world, which engage in the anti-modern myth-making of history by means of a return to nationalist symbols and myths and, occasionally, through swapping conspiracy theories. Restorative nostalgia manifests itself in total reconstructions of monuments from the past, while reflective nostalgia lingers on ruins, the patina of time and history, in the dreams of another place and another time.

To understand restorative nostalgia it is important to distinguish between the habits of the past and the habits of the restoration of the past. Eric Hobsbawn differentiates between age old “customs” and nineteenth century “invented traditions”. Customs by which so-called traditional societies operated were not invariable or inherently conservative: “Custom in traditional societies has a double function of motor and fly wheel… Custom cannot afford to be invariant because even in the traditional societies life is not so.”

On the other hand, restored or invented tradition refers to a “set of practices normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and a ritual of symbolic nature which seeks to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition which automatically implies continuity with the past.” The new traditions are characterized by a higher degree of symbolic formalization and ritualization than the actual peasant customs and conventions after which they were patterned. Here are two paradoxes. First, the more rapid and sweeping the pace and scale of modernization, the more conservative and unchangeable the new traditions tend to be, Second, the stronger the rhetoric of continuity with the historical past and emphasis on traditional values, the more selectively the past is presented. The novelty of invented tradition is “no less novel for being able to dress up easily as antiquity”.

Invented tradition does not mean a creation ex nihilo or a pure act of social constructivism; rather, it builds on the sense of loss of community and cohesion and offers a comforting collective script for individual longing. There is a perception that as a result of society’s industrialization and secularization in the nineteenth century, a certain void of social and spiritual meaning has opened up. What was needed was a secular transformation of fatality into continuity, contingency into meaning. Yet this transformation can take different turns. It may increase the emancipatory possibilities and individual choices, offering multiple imagined communities and ways of belongingthat are not exclusivelybased on ethnic or national principles. It can also be politically manipulated through newly recreated practices of national commemoration with the aim of re-establishing social cohesion, a sense of security and an obedient relationship to authority.

Cultural identity is based on a certain social poetics or “cultural intimacy” that provides a glue in everyday life. This was described by anthropologist Michael Herzfeld as “embarrassment and rueful self-recognition” through various common frameworks of memory and even what may appear as stereotypes. Such identity involves everyday games of hide-and-seek that only “natives” play, unwritten rules of behaviour, jokes understood from half a word, a sense of complicity. State propaganda and official national memory build on this cultural intimacy, but there is also a discrepancy and tension between the two. It is very important to distinguish between political nationalism and cultural intimacy, which, after all, is based on common social context, not on national or ethnic homogeneity.

^93metre high statue of Peter The Great in the Moskva River, built 1997 source
National memory reduces this space of play with memorial signs to a single plot. Restorative nostalgia knows two main narrative plots –the restoration of origins and the conspiracy theory, characteristic of the most extreme cases of contemporary nationalism fed on right-wing popular culture. The conspiratorial worldview reflects a nostalgia for a transcendental cosmology and a simple pre-modern conception of good and evil. The conspiratorial worldview is based on a single trans-historical plot, a Manichean battle of good and evil and the inevitable scapegoating of the mythical enemy. Ambivalence, the complexity of history and the specificity of modern circumstances is thus erased, and modern history is seen as a fulfilment of ancient prophecy. “Home”, imagine extremist conspiracy theory adherents, is forever under siege, requiring defence against the plotting enemy.

[...] Nostalgia is an ache of temporal distance and displacement. Restorative nostalgia takes care of both these symptoms. Distance is compensated by intimate experience and the availability of a desired object. Displacement is cured by a return home, preferably a collective one. Never mind if it’s not your home; by the time you reach it, you will have already forgotten the difference. What drives restorative nostalgia is not the sentiment of distance and longing but rather the anxiety about those who draw attention to historical incongruities between past and present and thus question the wholeness and continuity of the restored tradition.

Even in its less extreme form, restorative nostalgia has no use for the signs of historical time –patina, ruins, cracks, imperfections. The 1980s and 1990s was a time of great revival of the past in several projects of total restoration –from the Sistine Chapel to the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow- that attempted to restore a sense of the sacred believed to be missing from the modern word."

A Little Person Up There In The Crane

Over the past decade I’ve been living around more than my fair share of large construction sites, and I’ve enjoyed their cranes' sudden appearances, their elegant slow movements for a couple of years, and then their equally sudden disappearances as the hoardings come down around the brand spanking new building they helped to construct. The way they hover delicately over the weighty assemblage of static material below them, engaged on tight sites in a slow, precise and controlled choreography in the sky above the building so as to deliver bundles of material without knocking into each other, somehow without being swayed too far by the wind, and without damaging anything, or anyone below. And up there in the little cabs, like the minute brains of a stick insect, are the crane operators, heroic and alone, who I only ever saw as the sites would shut operations for the day, and probably in response to an alarm in their cabs, or a call on the mic, the cranes would come to a halt, frozen in position, and they would all descend simultaneously from their cabs, level by level down ladders on the insides of the cranes’ far too slimly proportioned structure, taking breaks at the same landings on their way down, perhaps as a prescribed precaution, until they disappeared from the view of anyone outside the site’s hoardings, either to have a cup of tea and discuss the day’s more exciting moments, or else to run on home. The first entry on this blog, back in 2008 was a retelling of the impact that the cranes on the site of Renzo’s Central St Giles had on me, on a freezing cold night, together with the sheer battlements of that project’s clustered cores. I'd thought it magnificent, and as his multi-coloured confection opens its doors to its unexciting content, and as its beautiful construction process passes into memory, I have a crane that has appeared, right in front of my bedroom window, in the last week. No soaring beauty to this crane, but I did notice that I can almost make out how the man inside might look, his proportions, and that there isn’t a toilet up there, and the operator doesn’t leave the cab all day. On further research Ive learned that they are either magnanimously handed piss pots by the firm to urinate in, or they have to improvise something along those lines, of the mineral-water screw-top kind id imagine, which they keep with them all day, no doubt handling them carefully as they descend in said orderly fashion as the site closes. The operator facing my room also seems to have a computer up there, and, wondering if there are any forums for discussion and socialising on the net used specifically by the class of 4000 lonely crane operators around the country who could no doubt do with a bit of company (this new crane is the only one on site), I rummaged around and found the trailer of what looks like a beautiful film here, and a discussion forum, from which are some snippets below, direct from those who get to live a distinctly alternative, and fascinating London High Life:

Forum Discussion Started With A Member’s Poem:

never mind the b*ll*cks!!!!!!!!!!

When the jib slews still,
the magic moment arrives,
its free slew button time,
and now for the climb.........down down down wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee away home,
no more b*llocks,
no more lifts,
F*** you and ,
yer horrible concrete.
no more radio babble,
its motoring time,
its 12 hours at least,
before I have to see,
those knobjockeys again,
and they see me,
so give me steak and chips,
ya ba*stards,
and F*** off till tomorrow.
I wrote this little poem for your pleasure or scorn, as you can see its poetical scope is limited,rather akin to a gorilla with Parkinsons trying to play a violin with a hammer. Sorry.

Forum Discussion About Accessing The Net In Crane Cabs:

Writer 1: just wondered who else sits up their crane with the laptop plugged into their mobile surfin the worldwide between lifts??or maybe ya poached your connection from a nearby wireless con.??? 
made a great table to sit the old laptop out of me info screen +operations manual...

Writer 3: was on job in dublin on the quays, was on relief one day, went up tc 2, christ like bloody comet up there.........laptop, digi radio, lcd tele and ps2. I kid you not. 

Writer 4: i worked for elliotss on dublin quay and had my laptop tv radio play station kettle irish broadband and loads of of other s*** pluged into two 4 sockets come out of one lol f*****g best job in the world.

Writer 7: I brought up me mobile DVD player and I could'nt see a fooking thing on the screen with the light in the cab,maybe you'll see a bit if you put a magazine over it but its very uncomfortable,less you put up curtains all round the cab,would'nt say the foreman would think that was suspicious, hehehe,thought it was'nt worth a w*ank,is it not the same for laptops????????

Writer 8: i bought an 8in lcd tv from amazon.co.uk.it cost approx £70 with postage. 
its got the 35+ channels from freeview.you can also use it as a freeview set top box at home (i think) 
its an 8in x4 tech . 
im in london and have been impressed with the quality of the picture from the aerial. 
below is the model spec. 
X4-TECH SOL8 DVB-T TV Silver

Forum Discussion About Difficult Cranes:

Writer 1: Anybody hate their crane ??????? ehhhhhhhh?????? anybody like to give it a good kicking?? cant quite figure out the timing ?? horrible slew brake?? cab that shakes to F*** every time you look at the levers ??? small and uncomfortable cabs ??? ehhhh??? anyone like to break off the levers and chew em before hurtling them out the window??

Writer 4: There was a haunted Jaso crane in Dublin that still operates that I for one hold up my hands and say that I still dont know what the F*** was going on there,I could'nt conquer it at all, it was certainly haunted as it had a mind of its own and made the strangest noises ever , not ya run of the mill crane groans but horrible fooking screeching all day, when trolleying back the trolley would suddenly get a massive bump and shake the whole jib like F***,when slewing as I came to the mark it would stop as normal and then suddenly the whole jib would violently shake sending the load beserk making me look like a tw*at driver,I dont know whether it was a violently deranged slew brake with a mind of its own or what and I dont give a F*** either long as I never see that crane again,nice vertical ladder it had up to it too,lovely, I felt numb driving home after driving that bas*tard and had to lie down a horrible horrible cu*nt of a crane,I hope they fooking cut it up with giant skill saws and melt it down into gates or fenceposts or something,anyone else got a crane they hate ??????????????

Writer 13: when it comes to comfort you cant beat a saez insainly small cab, a fixed seat off a site dumper. no form off adjustment so you can have a decent kip oh and the only way to get in the cab is to clime over said seat. and not forgeting dead man on the levers that make your fingers bleed keepin the ba****ds up.apart from that not a bad crane

Forum Discussion About Summer Heat In A Crane:

Writer 1: not looking forward to this summers heat.i hate the heat when you are up crane.winter is the best, you feel cold nock the heat up one in the summer you feel hot you feel like hitting someone .
can anybody tell me why there is no aircon. NO I WILL TELL YOU THEN
i rang my boss two years ago when it was hot 51 degrees in the cab ,site managers told me to come down the crane it was so hot.
my dear boss said its just another reason for drivers to refuse to climb the crane when it stops working.like when you have no heat .which is true because if i had no heat the site has no driver.but come on the summers are getting hotter and iam getting fatter i need cool air ...
anybody else find summer stressfull please tell   

Writer 4: Luckily some cabs heaters can be set to cold, but your dead right there aint nothing worse than sweating like a *astard on a hot Summers day up a cab, even with all the doors and windows open its horrible, except for those celestial moments when a cool breeze blows over the entire cab,like Nigella Lawson just breathed on yer , oooooooooooooooooooo, ,on days like this one feels like a lion after a heavy feed that wants to lie down,its Spring now anyway, wont be long before the sellotape and news papers will be going up on the windows to keep out that sun.

Writer 6: Top tip lads - Get yourselves one of those beaded car seat covers.  Nothing like it for promoting air flow in the crack of doom on those hot summer days 

Writer 9: that hot summer a couple of years ago, the site my bruv was on put a water cooler in his cab!! freezing cold water on tap! bloody brilliant. What is the score with heat?? soon as i am out of juice i am down for a refill or get the good old slinger to bring some up. He gets a shock when he sees me sat in my skiddies looking like a porn star!!

Writer 10: Gives me cause to wonder Merlin what can you imagine would be the most uncomfortable outfit you could wear for a days driving?????????? I think a pair of pinch tight jeans (the type that chokes yer knackers like a python curling around a rat) with a hand knitted heavy jumper with no t-shirt on underneath and marching boots with gimp leather face mask and ear muffs the size of dinner plates, anyone else got anything they can think of, the more ridiculous the more we will respect you.

Writer 12: HOW ABOUT CLOGS OVER THICK HIKING SOCKS, DOUBLE PAIR, CHAIN MAIL TROUSERS WITH SACKCLOTH UNDERNEATH, MONGOLIAN TRIPLE FUR JACKET OVER A DONKEY JACKET WITH AN ARAN UNDERNEATH ,DOUBLE MONKEY HATS WITH A COLDSTREAM GUARDS ARMY HAT ON TOP,ZORRO FACEMASK WITH THICK FIFTY PENCE GLASSES ON,MIFFS MADE OF RUBBER FOR THE HANDS WITH A WEIGHTLIFTERS BELT AROUND YER WAIST ASWELL AND A PAIR OF HUGE FAKE PLASTIC PARROTS GLUED TO YER SHOULDERS!!!!!!!!!!

Are you a narky *astard of a driver ,ready to be a source of abuse and grief at slightest oportunity ? or are you a nice driver willing to help anyone to get through the day easy before you go home ? this special quiz trys to answer these questions, answer A , B or C, collect points and see how you get on at the end.......................... 

Q.1 Whilst walking to the canteen a member of site management innocently cracks a joke about drivers pretending its too windy, do you................ 
(a) Laugh lightly and continue on yer way with yer sensible lunch in yer bag and sit down . 
(b) Firmly but not rudely tell him that the wind speed is obove the recommended limit and your hands are tied on the matter. 
(c) Grab him in a choke hold till his face turns blue, the banksman rushes in and manages to persuade you to stop. 
******************************************************* 
Q.2 A self erecter driver has inadvertently slewed into yer path dropping off some shutters, do you 
(a) Wait for him to slew outta the way, you drove them before yerself and know that its hard enough driving on the ground sometimes. 
(b) Ask him to slew outta the way as soon as the load is down. 
(c) Scream down the radio to get that fooking pile of sh*ite outta the way quick smart or there'll be trouble. 
***************************************************** 
Q.3 A scaffolder relizes that he wanted the stillage over another ten metres to the left, do you .............. 
(a) Say no probs into the radio, cheerfully slewing another ten metres left. 
(B) Remark to the banksman that them scaffloders are always changing their minds whilst bringing it over. 
(c)Slam it down on the slab where it is shrieking like a maniac for them all to F*** off. 
*********************************************** 
Q.4 A load of Romanians are doing the pour on the concrete, they want you to follow them around so that they dont have to rake it all over the place , do you................. 
(A) Diligently jab the levers ,controlling the skip smoothly travelling where they need the concrete. 
(B) Wave yer hand to them saying yes but mutter under yer breath that they are letting the concrete out too fast and to give yer a chance to adjust. 
(c) F*** THEM !!! 
**************************************************** 
Q.5 Its starting to get a liitle windy but not too serious, do you.............. 
(a) Keep an eye on the windclock and be extra cautios in case someone hurts themselves. 
(b) Tell the banksman that its getting a little windy,we can keep working but no shutters you are both in agreement. 
(c) Block up, radio off , you use this opportunity to ring up yer Missus and tell her you fooking hate her or get stuck into yer porn. 
************************************************ 
Q.6 The foreman who is actually a sound head and well liked by the crane staff walks into the craneys hut on the break, do you............... 
(a) Shout alright mate with all the other lads and ask him does he want a cuppa as their is still twenty minutes left. 
(b) Give a reserved hello and be friendly watching what yer say though ,as he is management and you have to watch what yer say. 
(c) Stare at him when he says hello saying nothing with a look that would give Charles Manson the creeps. 
*************************************************** 
Q.6 A fumbling but friendly safety officer calls a toolbox talk for the craneys and banksmen, do you................ 
(a) Sit there with the rest of the lads outlining safety concerms that you feel need to be addressed, but listening to everyones point of view aswell. 
(b) Sit there and laugh at the corny jokes it'll all be over in a while, you've been driving twenty years and know bettre than most. 
(c) Sit there fuming for no particular reason suddenly bursting out with an unintelligible rant about how the brickies are all *unts and noone understands F*** all in this kip, kick over a couple of chairs on the way out. 
*****************************************************
Q.7 Another craney comes over the radio asking you to slew left please as he just wants to get a couple of blocks in, you havent even got a load on yer ropes and have'nt done a lift in hours, do you............. 
(a) Say no probs mate slewing outta the way in moments giving each other a friendly wave as yer do so, 
(b) As obove. 
(c) Shout "listen yer *unt, I'm the Daddy on this site , the big crane does'nt have to give way so BO*LLOCKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 
***************************************************** 
Q.8 The banksman makes a small series of mistakes during work, he is not at it too long and apoligizes, do you.............. 
(a) Remember when you were banking and the mistakes you made and carry on regardless. 
(b) Your a bit annoyed but as we've said yer know better, yer driving twenty years for Petes sake. 
(c) Yer up in Wormwood Scrubs prision, the judge gave you a whole life tariff over what yer did, (gulp) 
******************************************************* 

Q.9 Whilst walking to the canteen a harmless but annoying brickie makes a silly comment about not getting his lifts, do you............... 
(a) Say "sorry mate, but we really are quite busy, but I shall do my best for you after the break,cheerio". 
(b) Inform him that the crane is busy and if he has a problem to address it to the crane co ordinater, yer not being smart with him yer just telling him whats going on. 
(c) Use yer army training to trip him up and jump on top of him brandishing a bowie knife up to his throat gibbering incoherently that yer gonna cut his fooking gizzard out, a banksman starts pleading "no mate , leave it, its twenty fooking yers mate, for fooks sake calm down man". 
****************************************************** 
Q.10 Yer walk into the pub across the road on Friday evening where all the drivers and banksmen are, do you.................. 
(a) Shout hello and pull out yer money buying around for everyone quicksmart. 
(b) Just sit down with yer cash and buy a round for the banksmen that you know yerself. 
(c) Pull yer wages outta yer pocket and sniff the fresh crisp notes as if it were Nigella Lawsons's scants before ordering two pints, one for yerself and one for ermmmmmm yerself before sitting down and getting drunk pi*ssing everyone else off with yer rude banter. 
**************************************************** 
If most of yer answers were A or B yer a sound head who likes an easy life with no probs,yer there to earn a living and no more...................... 

If yers answer were mostly C , yer a belligerent *astard who gives noone a chance,yer only happy when yer being a *unt, anything sets you off, its like driving a lorry load of nitro gylicerine around a stock car track on a good Saturday, CHILL OUT !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!