The architect's library: books, shelves, cases, collections, displays, exhibitions and READING.
ON SITE r e v i e w
TOOLS
39 summer 2021
S White
From the call for articles: which is the tool here? the book, or the map? or the multi-function pliers.
When I posted this pair of pliers years ago on the On Site miscellanea page, someone wrote back from Brazil saying they were window dresser’s pliers. They hammer and pull small nails and tacks, they clip wire, they pry things, they are the size of your palm and fit in your pocket. But here, in this case, they simply hold the little street atlas open long enough to take the picture. The 1969 London street atlas is open to a section of the dockland where I worked on the restoration and conversion of an 18th century granary and wharf building in 1975. The atlas was a tool for finding new paths to cycle to from Sloane Street to the Prospect of Whitby next door to our buildings, which I see from Google maps are no more. The pocket road finder is now a tool that checks my memory. q
ON SITE r e v i e w
TOOLS
39
summer 2021
contents
Stephanie White, editor Michael M Simon
2 3 4 5 6 8
Introduction Toolbox-thing Trans/mission November 17, 2019 Collected Tools Signifying Objects The Stereoscopic Lens Adaptor SM 9711031 Measuring Tools On the Level Small Level Tools Talk Back Drawing Modelling Instrument Magnifying Liliputians Ice Tools 1996 Terramite T5C, AKA ‘Buster’ Learning from the Tree Crusher Branding Irons Grain Bikes The Roundover Bit Lost Devices
Ron Benner Scot Bullick Yann Ricordel-Healy Photolanguage: Nigel Green, Robin Wilson Stephanie Davidson Karianne Halse Mark Dorrian
13 14 16 17 18 22 24 28 30 32 35 36 40 42 46 47 48 49
Stephanie White Suzanne Mathew Roger Mullin Yiou Wang Lawrence Bird Greg Snyder
Douglas Robb Adrian Cooke Emily Vogler Michael Blois David Murray
Miscellaneous tool sightings Masthead and contributors 40: the architect’s library 41: infrastructure
calls for articles: 41: infrastructure
front cover back
Trenching tool, found beside the highway Estwing hatchet, found in the basement
on site review 39: tools 1
introduction stephanie white
Tools. Even the simplest of concepts can open up enormous boxes full of semiotics, definitions and other complexities. It must be the times, we all read too much theory at school and it has marked us like a chalk line Have thought a lot about tools since posting the call for articles, receiving the proposals and ordering this issue; thinking of transitive and intransitive tools, much like verbs. Some tools are single action things, others are part of a process: their particular use means little without a place in a chain of events. If the tool simply exists, and one delights in its making, its potential, its appearance, it rests as an intransitive object: meaning stops there. If a tool is important because it performs in a way that enables some change, it is transitive. In keeping with the materiality that is On Site review ’s preoccupation, I have opted to go with things of material substance, beyond words and lines on paper, which often carry the most important qualities of architecture and design, but for this issue we want to break down process into acts of hand and tool. Tools have form. They can be simple or complex, but they all have a task, and their main import is the performance of that task. Yann Ricordel-Healy suggested I read Caroline A Jones’ 1996 Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist , specifically Smithson’s ‘relation to tools as expressed through his writings and photographic documentation’. 1 Jones points out that the post-studio art of the 1960s signalled a change in how art was produced — no longer the studio-atelier system but something superlatively American and masculine: a post-war industrial production of art. Her case studies are Frank Stella, Andy Warhol and Robert Smithson who all eliminated the authority of the hand and moved on to tools as generators of art objects. In Smithson’s case his tools were bulldozers and dump trucks. This stopped me in my editorial tracks, such as they are. My choice of tools as the subject of an On Site review summer issue was mostly because I like tools, we all have tools we use and love. The tools I had roughly in mind all had to do with the hand when the first three submissions came in: a tree-crusher, a backhoe called Buster and a piece on methodology. Of the tools you see here, in this issue, only a few are hand-held.
Mark Dorrian suggested I read Fabio Morábito’s Toolbox , pointing out that the tree-crusher, backhoe and methodology were all tools of pain. So many common tools are about cutting, breaking, ripping apart — violence inflicted on some unsuspecting material. Which is where, several months later, Caroline Jones’ outline of post-studio art as a masculinist, violent disruption of hitherto passive material, touches tools of pain. Smithson’s 1969 Island of Glass was planned for Miami Islet, ‘wind swept, preferably flatish and barren, in short an island that would have no commercial value’, in the Strait of Georgia off Vancouver. 2 Controversy at the time was local. A barge of broken glass on its way from California to Miami Islet was intercepted as just more US junk to be dumped in Canada. Theoretically and conceptually, the project shifted to a search for other sites, culminating in Map of Broken Glass (Atlantis) and Map of Broken Clear Glass , both gallery installations. The feet of seagulls and the seals that would unwittingly climb onto an island of glass shards were outside critical discourse. It is still seen that his ‘dialectical method eschewed sentimentality and anthropomorphism, viewing the landscape as always in flux and apprehended in a necessarily violent confrontation of mind and matter’. 3 Looking back on it now, Smithson’s project is violent all the way through. And imperialist, and colonial. Tools of colonisation range from guns to treaties, railways to residential schools. Tools are enablers. And a vast range of enabling technologies allows ideas to be planted as surely as does a new seed drill.
q
There are many ways to consider tools; clearly in their material and operative sense as a collection of metals and woods, machined parts and handles assembled to perform some task, and as instruments of measurement, taking the temperature of our desire to register the world we have inherited, mashed and manipulated, bruised and over-heated. Rather than On Site review ’s self-selecting gender balance, very few women submitted articles this time. Where are the sewing machines that transform planar material into 3d forms? the knitting needles that make lines into complex garments, the bendy spatulas that smooth drywall better than those big rigid things made for the purpose? Is it that the word tool itself is something from the world of men’s work, and that women don’t think of the things they use as tools, rather simply as how to do something?
q
1 Caroline A Jones . Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019
2 https://holtsmithsonfoundation.org/island-broken-glass
3 https://johnculbert.wordpress.com/2014/10/04/erratics/
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on site review 39: Tools
TOOLBOX-THING MICHAEL M SIMON
Michael Simon
I’m staring at this toolbox. At least it looks like a toolbox. It’s toolbox shaped. It’s almost rectangular, a bit more than a forearm long by a hand wide and tall. The two longest edges on the top are chamfered thirty degrees or so. Without having to pick it up, I can imagine its weight and it gives the sense that it is made of metal. The colour is that bright fire engine red that a lot of metal toolboxes are painted. It has a hinged handle on top and a draw latch on the front - both have shiny nickel plating. It looks a lot like the toolbox that followed my dad around when I was growing up. If it wasn’t on the workbench in the garage, it was in the trunk of the car - wherever we were going. “Just in case” he would say. It looks just like that, except for one small thing. Well, more like, for the absence of one small thing. It is missing a line. The line. There is no line to divide top from bottom, lid from box. On any other toolbox that line is a seam. Really, it’s the absence of a physical line that is important there as well. Maybe it is more importantly a space demarcated, in fact, by two lines – one that defines the top edge of the box and another that defines the bottom edge of the lid. The tiny radius created by the hemmed edge of the metal however further dissolves the line and upon staring it is more of a soft dissolving gradient - from bright red to blackness. Either way, whatever you want to call it, it’s not here, not on this toolbox-ish thing. This toolbox cannot be opened, not physically anyway, not without destroying it. Whatever is in there is never coming out and nothing else is ever going in. Its contents, even if just empty space, are forever cut off from the outside world. I remember, as I laid down that last weld that finalised the division of inside from out, the focus of making was momentarily broken by the feeling of doing something wrong. The contents can now only be contemplated. But is it a toolbox? Was it ever a toolbox? I mean, it looks like a toolbox. I cannot NOT see a toolbox when I look at it. As I write this, it just continues to sit there, quietly, doing whatever it is doing. Is it useless? I would say no. This particular toolbox was never made to open, not literally anyway; it was never intended to contain or store another physical tool. It was made to be made and now it is a point of focus, enabling me to write this paper, and at least in this moment it’s doing that perfectly well. Like a word said too many times – toolbox, toolbox, toolbox, toolbox, toolbox – this object is moving farther and farther away from normative sense the longer I look at it, and in a way it is taking the toolboxes it represents along with it. q
on site review 39: tools
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trans/mission: November 17, 2019 ron benner
Ron Benner
Trans/mission: November 17, 2019 . The date refers to an article/op-ed in The Globe & Mail by St. Louis-based journalist Sarah Kendzior where she described the Trump administration as “a transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government.” I subsequently bought her book, Hiding In Plain Sight , in April, 2020 which became the title of an open-call, online exhibition for the Embassy Cultural House which was zoom- launched on October 30, 2020 with 51 contributors. For the exhibition I photographed the process and tools involved in the making of Trans/mission: November 17, 2019 which was completed on October 8, 2020. The tools used were the following: The Globe & Mail newspaper, the op-ed article and sentence, “a transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government” by Sarah Kendzior, watercolour paper, Mexican stencils, a ruler, a pencil, a mortar and pestle (cochineal), a Mexican lime squeezer (limes), a stainless steel cup and spoon, a recycled plastic container, a paint brush and a Canon Rebel 35mm camera. Before the arrival of Europeans, the cochineal insect (a scarlet red) and the indigo plant (a translucent blue) were major trade items exported by the indigenous people of Oaxaca, Mexico to other parts of the Americas over thousands of years. I have used these colours, both raw and ground, in my work since 1987. q
embassyculturalhouse.ca
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on site review 39: Tools
collected tools scot bullick
Scot Bullick
Oracles Garden, 2020
This best represents my first instincts to collect and when the habit reaches mature saturation one has to make difficult decisions to find value in the items amassed. Delve deep and find the root of such instincts. Or reposition them and bring their aesthetics and history along.
q
on site review 39: tools
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signifying objects yann ricordel - healy
Self-portrait, digital photography
© Yann Ricordel-Healy 2016
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on site review 39: Tools
The Hammer, "Black Objects" series, steel, wood, wood dye, matt varnish, 9 x 25.5cm © Yann Ricordel-Healy 2021
on site review 39: tools
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The Stereoscopic Lens Adapter photolanguage : nigel green , robin wilson
Nigel Green/Photolanguage
photo fieldwork and fragmentation
The first time we used the adapter as a tool for speculative field work was in response the water meadow landscape of Christiania in Copenhagen during a project called Surface Tension (Brandon LaBelle, 2007), and the peripheral landscapes of the Swedish city of Malmö for the first phase of the project Land Use Poetics (Maria Hellström Reimer, 2009). Both of these projects were brief, with sites explored, work made and exhibited within a window of approximately five days. The Stereo Adapter was part of a tool kit aimed at the production of a radical imagery with little time for processing and evolution. The work from Land Use Poetics was exhibited in the Museum of the Sketch ( Skissernas ) in the university town of Lund and dedicated to preparatory sketches for public art, sculptural works and monuments. Although largely photo-based, we thought of the works we presented there as ‘sketches’ — propositional, but for a ‘monumental’ or ‘sculptural’ outcome that would remain absent (the preparatory imagery for a never-to-be-realised future work). This role of the photographic image as assuming a transitional status (not a definitive, referential one), also underpins our use of the Stereo Adapter in a broader sense, for we do not use it for the production and display of stereograms (the completed ‘3-d’ image manifest through the additional use of stereoscopic viewer), but for the qualities of the ‘raw’ print itself, as a duplicated image. We value it in its in-between state, for the way its lenticular duplication intervenes into and distorts conventional photographic space.
In 1924 F E Wright of the Geophysical Laboratory of the Carnegie Institute advocated the use of the three-dimensional effects of stereoscopic imagery in geological fieldwork, writing of its ability to enhance the visual account of ‘the story of the field relations between certain features’. 1 Wright was drawing attention to the sometimes inadequate results of conventional photography within geological research and its ‘revisualisation’ with regards to photography’s capacity to record a strong enough ‘impression of space’ and of the ‘spatial relationship between details’ within the field. Noting that the taking of stereoscopic imagery is often associated with expensive, specialist equipment and impractical for the already over-burdened geologist in the field, Wright proposed that a sufficient result can be obtained through the careful taking of near-duplicate images with a conventional camera, and then provided the mathematical equations that would support effective stereoscopic imaging. We write (nearly one hundred years later) to advocate the misuse of stereoscopic technologies within the field of urban and architectural field work, in order to destabilise and re-invent ‘the story of the field relations between certain features’; to make utopic space through architecture’s ‘re-visualisation’. The constraints on equipment and cost in fieldwork outlined by Wright are familiar to us but have been improved by a more recent invention: the stereoscopic lens adapter. This is a relatively cheap addition to a standard 35 mm camera lens — a configuration of dual mirrors within a small and light-weight housing, facilitate the taking of dual images on a single 35 mm negative. The version we use is a 1980s Pentax Stereo Adapter.
1 F.E. Wright, ‘Stereoscopic Photography in Geological Field Work’, Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences, vol 14, no. 3 (Feb 24th, 1924), pp. 63-72
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on site review 39: Tools
Nigel Green/Photolanguage
Stereo print of Spillepeng, Malmö, 2008
In Malmö, the Stereo Adapter perhaps found its most pertinent use as a response to the landscape of Spillepeng, a new landfill peninsula projecting into the Baltic Sea, created with bagged waste from Malmö. Sections of Spillepeng had been landscaped by a team from the Landscape Laboratory of the Agricultural College at Alnarp. The dual stereo image posed a nexus of critical questions around the notion of new land, amplifying the sense of unease in the navigation of a terrain that was not simply being worked, but in the act of being made anew – its substrata, surface and its animate life all established little more than two years before our visit. Although Spillepeng was too new to be on coastal maps at the time, it was a model extension to the indigenous ecologies and habitats of Southern Sweden. An image of a shallow valley with young willows, with a season of regrowth after pollarding, captures powerfully the newness of the land, one which has not yet completely settled from the industrial processes of its creation. The stereo print amplifies a sense of disjunction in the terrain: on one hand, the photographic image itself could be said to resonate with a history of art of the worked landscape such as Van Gogh’s sketches of Dutch farming landscapes around Nuenen, or Peter Henry Emerson’s documentations of the Norfolk Broads (both from the 1880s), even Rembrandt’s etching St Jerome Beside a Pollard Willow (1648). On the other hand, the effect of the doubled image within the stereo print suggests processes of replication, cloning, the artificial; a terra forma, a sci-fi landscape in which the assumed relationship between the natural and man-made has to be completely reassessed.
A distinctive feature of prints using the Stereo Adapter is the black border in the centre of the dual image, which occurs as a result ofa blind spot between the two mirrors. This is not a crisp demarcation between the two, as with a stereo camera, but an unpredictable void in vision that distorts the inner margins of both. With practice one can mitigate the effects of the blind spot and limit its encroachment on the two halves of the image. However, with our interest in the intermediate phase of the print itself, we embrace the distortions of the central void as a generative zone of interference. It is a central frame that is rogue; that appears as a hostile inversion to the luminosity of the photographic image. It is a third region of image-making within the print, where the indexical realism of the photograph is in fatal dialogue with abyssal depth and obliteration.
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Whereas the earlier stereos, taken and printed using analogue methods, were left either untreated or subject only to light interventions (such as the addition of a spot stains of coffee), the stereo prints of Ivry were processed digitally with additional layers added in Photoshop. These in part respond to the architecture of the stereo print itself, as much as the architecture represented with it, re-enforcing its internal frames and borders, and adding colour tints to accentuate the effects of the doubling of the image. Within the example shown here of Cité Spinoza, we see a core at the centre of the image where a detail of the undercroft’s structure and the fenestration of a community building remains legible, relatively stable, but doubled. In the outer regions and margins of the image, however, dynamic effects of compression, overlap and transposition take hold. The Stereo Adapter has re-moulded space radically, the hazard of mirror-play and its distortions introduce a phantom tectonics and a theatrical sense of mobility to this space of vital structure. Pilotis dissolve before they meet the ground, and are eaten by colour as if by acid. At the foot of the image a doubled procession of heavily pruned botanical forms appear, jutting out of the lower, black frame of the stereo, grotesque and gesticulating, like Surrealist marionettes. In hindsight, with these monstrous botanical denizens at the base of the image, the grotto-like enclosure of the wider scene, the tints of green and cerise, we can associate this revisioning of Cité Spinoza with a curiosity from the popular cultural history of stereoscopic imagery: the French Diableries of the 1860s to, roughly, 1900. 2 These were modelled, miniature fantasy scenes of the underworld recorded in stereoscopic photography, peopled by devils in revelry, served by an army of skeletons and young women. The scenes were enhanced with back-lighting and watercolour tints.
Robin Wilson/ Photolanguage
Nigel Green using the Stereo Adapter in La Courneuve, Paris, 2018
After a quite long period of inactivity the Stereo Adapter was reengaged in 2018 for field work in the outer districts of Paris. In research for the Brutalist Map of Paris we had come across the work of Renée Gailhoustet and Jean Renaudie at Ivry-sur-Seine town centre. Renaudie’s language of ‘difference’, of the cut and rotated plan in endless mutation, produced the well-known Étoiles D’Ivry. Just to the south east of the town centre is Gailhoustet’s lesser known Spinoza housing complex of 1971, akin to a Le Corbusian Unité, but with the public spaces of the undercroft divided not by regular pilotis, but by a series of monumental tectonic slabs with arches and circles cut-out, a visual play of recessional screens and intersecting spherical geometries creating a sculptural space of promenade with diverse opportunities for repose and for sheltered socialisation. Our use of the Stereo Adapter at Ivry was driven by a curiosity as to what the stereo would do to an already highly complex architecture. We were working toward a particular curatorial dissemination, an exhibition in the foyer of London’s Barbican Centre, Re-wiring Brutalism .
Stereo print of Spinoza Housing Complex, 2018.
Nigel Green/Photolanguage
on site review 39: Tools 10
The ‘devilry’ of our undercroft imagery, realised through the accidents of mirror-play, is not diabolically inspired, but perhaps critically associated with rogue spatial impulses akin to the underworlds of the Caceri d’ invenzione series of Piranesi, which indeed may well have been a distant reference in the minds of Gailhoustet and Renaudie themselves. They share a drive to break existing rules of spatial order, to overturn hierarchies of attention through disorientation, to actively assert the image as a site of spatial mutation which challenges that of architectural production. If there is a latent critique within the disorientations of our stereo prints, it is not so much directed at the architecture of Gailhoustet or Renaudie, as at the culture of imaging that currently disseminates such architectures on social media, and which defines a fetishised, global media spectacle of brutalist icons. For Re-wiring Brutalism we positioned Brutalism within the radical technologies promoted within the Barbican’s wider 2019 season of curatorial projects, called Life Rewired . We proposed Brutalism as a spatial technology that reached an apotheosis with the work of the likes of Renaudie, the implications of which are yet to be fully appraised. Rather than presenting examples of Parisian Brutalism as a conventional architectural, curatorial portrait, we wished to introduce the work of Renaudie and Gailhoustet as part of a fragmented sampling of brutalist spaces, which included imagery of Chamberlin, Powell and Bon’s Barbican itself, presented in-situ. The Stereo Adapter was the primary tool of fragmentation and the production of a comparative and defamiliarised aggregate of Brutalist space. In the article ‘Photography and Fetish’ the film theorist Christian Metz developed some thoughts on the differences between photography and film regarding the issue of fetishisation. 3 What emerges from his differentiation is a powerful sense of the force of the photographic frame as the imposition of an ‘immobility’ and a ‘silence’ through which still photography asserts its authority over the referent. He wrote, ‘Photography is a cut inside the referent, it cuts off a piece of it, a fragment, a part object, for a long immobile travel of no return’. In Metz’s understanding, the notion of the ‘fragment’ alludes to the referent of the photographic image itself, that which is presented as the centre of viewing and attention, but which, by definition, is formed through the exclusion of other things (the wider contingencies of a relational reality beyond the frame). This, we suggest, corresponds to the design object-centred structure of much architectural photography prevalent in professional architectural and social media. The raw prints issuing from the Stereo Adapter cannot be said to restore the relational complexities of a wider context beyond the architectural, object-centre, but they do actively fragment and disturb Metz’s ‘immobile’ ‘fragment’.
Nigel Green/Photolanguage
Robin Wilson installing work at the Barbican Centre, 2019
Detail of Photolanguage’s exhibition at the Barbican Centre, 2019
2 For information on the Diableries see, https://www.londonstereo.com/ diableries/index.html 3 Christian Metz, ‘Photography and Fetish’, October 34 (1985), pp. 81-90
Nigel Green/Photolanguage
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The opportunities for stereo duplication within the Barbican were diverse, reflecting the range of interior, exterior and transitional public spaces at different scales that one has access to there. I wish to describe here one image of a northerly section of the complex, within the undercroft colonnade space of the apartment blocks around Beech Gardens to invoke through description the potential of the raw print of the Stereo Adapter as a productive reordering and fragmentation of the architectural photograph, toward a reinvention of, to recall F E Wright’s words, the ‘spatial relationship between details’ and the ‘story of the field relations between certain features’.
One of the building’s massive jack-hammered pilotis, a signature component of the public spaces of the Barbican, is the ‘central’ referent of this image, but its centrality is, of course, immediately displaced and doubled. Its role in a stable and legible order of perspective depth within the colonnade and the garden’s rectangular lake is fragmented, and we see instead an ambiguous cluster of four columns. The doubling of the nearest column now suggests the cruder structural system of a sub-flyover space, whereas in the mid-ground beyond, columns are subject to varying levels of dissolution, with one almost withered and substituted altogether by the central black ‘frame’-void of the stereo print. Distortions at the base of the print introduce an uncertain threshold, a blurred jetty of mirror play, confusing the boundaries between solid ground and water. A radical transformation manifests at the right-hand-side where the mirror mechanism of the adapter imports a slice of urban detail from outside the expected scope of the frame: one of the three iconic Barbican towers, Lauderdale, is compressed into a skeletal slice of balcony and frame, reduced to a quarter of its actual thickness but still coherent as architecture and reminiscent of the slimmest of Hong Kong’s high-rise dwellings. This right-hand region of the image is configured like an arched aperture, or even a transparent column, and overlaid with a faint screen of dirtied orange, encouraging our gaze out to zones beyond the limits of the Barbican, where a blander, more recent office street façade pushes into the frame. The fetishised homogeneity of the Barbican enclave is broken by a sudden reminder of the wider contexts and conditions of urban modernity. q
Stereo print of Barbican Centre, 2019
Nigel Green/Photolanguage
on site review 39: Tools 12
sm 9711031 stephanie davidson
My washing machine sits in the corner. It is not attention-seeking. Dutiful, reliable, loyal, more of a friend than a machine. This is a portrait.
q
Kenmore washing machine SM 9711031, age unknown
Stephanie Davidson
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measuring tools karianne halse
Karianne Halse
A collection of nine (ancient) plumb bobs Various materials: brass, iron, cotton (strings), wood (reels)
Manufacturer and year of production: unknown Acquired in Venice, 2019.
The plumb bob is a measuring tool used for suspending a vertical line in space. It embeds a spatial relation, through the force of gravity. Suspended from a point above, the plumb bob embeds time and movement; requiring patience while seeking stability, balance and symmetry. The collection of ancient plumb bobs was acquired in Venice for a particular use. It was put into dialogue with a 3d photogrammetry operation, measuring Venetian building facades. The plumb bob was placed physically into the context, defining a vertical datum within the digital scans; a stable vertical in an environment where all other lines are everything but straight. In today’s society, the plumb bob as a measuring tool has become obsolete, replaced with laser technology possessing an outstanding degree of numerical precision. However, the plumb bob manifests a spatial relation and immediate relationship between the tool (object) and place – a quality which is rendered visible in a 3d environment where gravity, sense of scale and time is lost.
on site review 39: Tools 14
Karianne Halse
Folding ruler (ancient, Danish) Materials: wood, brass
Manufacturer: Thomas Aston & Sons Makers, Birmingham Year of production: Before 1897 (after 1897 taken over by I & D Smallwood) Acquired in Copenhagen, 2020.
The ancient Danish folding ruler embodies a bygone measuring system. The now abandoned system of measurement ‘tomme’ was replaced by the current metric system in 1907. The measuring unit of ‘tomme’ embeds a bodily relationship, where the human body acts as point of reference. One unit equals a thumb, with variation between countries: In Scandinavia, there were at least three different tomme-measurements (a Danish ‘tomme’-unit was 2,62 cm, the Swedish was 2,47 cm, and the Norwegian was defined as 3,14 cm). This folding ruler is acquired in Copenhagen for a particular use. It has been used in dialogue with a traditional panel door, measuring a sectional cut. First measuring with an ordinary metric folding ruler, the measurements of the door did not give any sense, giving strange numbers. However, when introducing the old folding ruler, it became clear how it spoke the language of the door. The logic of the door’s dimensions became revealed. The ruler itself possess bodily attributes. Operating the tool involves a performance of movement, and a choreography of rotation and folding out. Almost like a dancer. The hinges and rotation-mechanisms resembles joints between bones. Stretching out limbs, defining spaces between - before returning into an entwined position. q
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On the level mark dorrian
Mark Dorrian
There is something comforting and reassuring about this thing. I received it as a gift and it has always seemed to me to be a kind of moral object, in the same way that Joyce’s Leopold Bloom describes Davy Byrne’s as a ‘moral pub’. There is something of that world in it too, with its brass and hardwood, reservoirs of spirit and glass optics, which I imagine as seen in mid-day sunlight filtered through leaded windows. It has a calm demeanour, quite different from files or hammers or saws. Its role is not to act upon another object, but to rest in relation to it and to tell us something through that adjacency. The level’s presence bestows a stillness and it has to be still to be used. Its action doesn’t come from the application of some force, but in rest, when the movement of the bubble comes to a halt in its gently-arcing capsule of volatile liquid. The substance is a warm yellow and the bubble so thing-like that it might seem an object trapped in a magically liquid amber, or even a little parcel of air conveyed to us from some primeval past. The level is not graduated, only the middle point matters, and around this the tool is symmetrical – with the exception of a second liquid sight, this for reading verticality, which is let into one side of the instrument. Now, although I’ve just claimed that the level doesn’t demand the action of a force, of course it does, but it’s one not applied by its user, for it relies upon the differential effect of gravity upon the air and ethanol in the glass chamber – the same force that renders the surface of any bucket of water horizontal, or rather subtly compliant with the curvature of the earth.
Levels seem to be about lines or planes, but in the first instance they are really – as the etymological link between level and the Latin libra implies – about points of balance around which these are projected. Spirit levels are scales that weigh things against one another, converting this vertical relation into a projection of horizontality that is ultimately tangential. The tapering curvature of the sides of this level, with the protective brass plates laid into the ends of its bottom face, I much enjoy, partly – I suppose – because it ambiguously both draws the object to a close and projects it, giving the instrument a conclusiveness while at the same time extending it by gesturing along the line it constructs. But the pleasure is also to do with the affinity that the resultant form suggests with liquidity, on which the tool’s principle of operation depends. The level’s ship-shape brings to my mind eighteenth-century engravings that I have sometimes seen of ships at sea emerging from below the horizon line, or Pliny’s story of a light at the top of a mast seeming to descend and eventually disappear below the watery surface as the boat recedes from view. While this level is a small object that fits comfortably in the hand, its sensitivity to great – planetary, even cosmic – forces makes it something much more than this and feeds the imagination with vast horizons. Today we may live in a world of unprecedentedly precise technologies, but I find they don’t – as this level does – give me an idea of precision that sets my mind in motion in the same way. The micro-circuitry embedded in my iPhone gives me information, but as an object it is, I have to say, far from a tool with which to dream. q
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small measurements stephanie white
S White
1:1
No information on this. I use it to level clocks, of which I have many, sitting on old chests of drawers which warp and unwarp with the seasons. If the clock mechanism is slightly atilt the clock doesn’t run for very long. Big fat mantel clocks bonging out their Westminster chimes every 15 minutes are rather looser in fit than the three Japy Frères clocks which are like skittish racehorses: elegant and termpermental. Sometimes just a piece of paper is enough for a shim. Longer levels skip over small variations, this little 4 1/2” level is for very local changes of grade. The eye can see when things aren’t quite square; the level indicates the degree. Contemporary levels centre the bubble between two lines; with this one you have to balance the ends of the bubble in relation to the middle. You can level clocks left to right by ear. The tic and the toc have to be absolutely equal or the clock won’t run. The small level is for front to back levelling, perpendicular to the pendulum arc: the clock will run if it tilts slightly to the back or the front, but eventually it will loosen the mechanism. Clocks communicate with each other when they are fairly close. Slowly, they will coordinate their speeds. I don’t know how this can possibly work other than something happens when sound waves meet brass. We can do fairly fine adjustments using the pendulum length, but the perfect adjustments are done at some molecular level and involve temperature and gravity: any change and things all go agley.
This level lives in its little case in my desk along with other rarely used but lovely metal things — letter stencils, WWI binoculars, a 50’ black steel tape measure in a leather case, a set of draughting instruments — all tools, meant to be used and which over their long lives have accrued a powerful presence. Even small penknives worn smooth by years in a pocket full of change have an insistent longevity: they might be beautiful, but they also work. They illustrate nothing but themselves. Is this my cabinet de curiosités , tools so far removed from contemporary daily life that they constitute an archaeology of things? But I have used most of them, I remember whose they were and where they came from. They are hardly curated — a compass, a mechanical dash board clock; there is a kukri and something else deadly I cannot bear to look at. But there is also a slide rule and my much-used ruling pen. We were once fluent in these tools. And we once fixed things. But we have become inarticulate and impatient.
q
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Tools Talk Back suzanne mathew
figure 1 Market Square Weather Data Survey Weather instruments can generate large amounts of data about the environment. In this survey collected for Market Square in Providence, data measurements included wind speed, wind direction, temperature, humidity, pressure, and location. While the survey is thorough, the spatial effect is lost.
all images: Suzanne Mathew
My methods for surveying microclimates are simple: using hand-held weather instruments, I take incremental measurements of changes in light, temperature, wind speed and direction at certain intervals across a site. These measurements may be taken on a set grid, at set distances along a transect, or at specific moments of transition or change. These plotted measurements are used to generate a visual representation of the climatic atmospheres. Each survey I conduct requires a certain degree of in-the-moment responsiveness, of in-situ decision making, and this is where I’ve learned to hybridise both my body’s and my instrument’s capabilities.
When we experience outside space, our bodies sense a number of factors that we cannot see – changes in light, temperature, humidity, and sound create atmospheric envelopes that we move through, that we are aware of and that we consciously inhabit. But our sensory functions operate far too quickly for us to fully understand what we are experiencing, and as a result we often omit the dimensions of the phenomenal environment from our depictions of space. While weather instruments can measure near-invisible changes in microclimate, I’ve tried to develop methods for observing these phenomena to better understand how we ourselves can more fully sense exterior space. The utility of such tools goes beyond their mere capacity to measure: these tools talk back , and in that have the ability to increase our own capacity to notice. By using tools, I’ve been able to condition my consciousness to recognise the small changes in atmospheres that often evade us.
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good at: measuring and recording small incremental changes not good at: recognising patterns or space
good at: detecting contrast perceiving enclosure quickly recognising significant changes in atmosphere
figure 2 Body-Instrument dialogue
what the tool notices, and what this tells the body
what the body notices Bodies and weather instruments have different relationships to environmental data. Bodies are adaptive: as we sense external conditions we adjust to maintain a level of internal stability – our pupils contract to control light, our circulatory systems have temperature gradients so that we can protect our core. Our skin’s sensitivity to heat, pain, and texture varies across our body’s surface. Because we are so good at remaining stable, small incremental changes in light, temperature, or moisture can be difficult to notice if we aren’t paying attention. In other words, we aren’t that good at sensing gradients. But what has become clear in my environmental surveying is that our bodies are really good at sensing contrast – a sudden change between two adjacent conditions, or a direct change happening in one place over time. As we move through space, we sense invisible edges between atmospheres: the boundary of a volume of shade where there is a sudden change in light and temperature, the cool moist volume of air that hovers near the water’s edge, the heat that travels up through a city street grate. These sudden changes mark the edge of a bubble of space, and by sensing atmospheric edges our bodies build our feelings of interiority and exteriority when we are outside.
The hand-held weather instruments I have used are highly sensitive and give a precise reading of environmental conditions to a tenth of a degree. It would be easy to assume they provide accurate measurements, but many of these tools are designed to take stationary readings or to adjust to changes slowly, and because of this they don’t acclimate as quickly as a body – accuracy often requires 1-5 minutes of waiting for an instrument to settle into its surroundings. In walking surveys, this has meant that the instruments are good at sensing gradients, but sudden contrast or change interrupts the instrument’s functioning as it needs time to recalibrate. These differences in behaviour create a dialogue between the body and the instrument that allows me, as the surveyor, to make more frequent and more sensitive observations by comparing what my body feels to what the instrument displays. We are often in disagreement, and these moments of incongruity force me to look more closely at what is going on. If the instrument is accurate, what am I not noticing? How is my body adjusting? If my body is accurate, has the instrument failed to acclimate? Or is it not affected by elements that are affecting me? In this dialogue I am forced to collect the data again, this time looking more closely, examining the context and environmental dynamics and understanding that my body is reading them all at once, while the instrument is pulling them apart.
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figure 3 Market Square Microclimatic Mapping After data was collected it was mapped using GIS, Rhino and Grasshopper. The survey was conducted in a series of linear transects through key locations in and around the site. In this preliminary data mapping, color gradient points and their corresponding circle diameters represent the temperature measurements, and the arrows indicate wind direction and speed.
sensory space comprehension Bodies and weather instruments can both sense, but where instruments measure and collect data, bodies adjust, react and comprehend in real time. Instruments extract and isolate singular climate factors, bodies process multiple inputs at once and immediately compress them into a reading of comfort and space: our sensory impression is simultaneously qualitative and dimensional. These capabilities can be complimentary, but when they differ in the field, the complexity of our multi-sensory systems becomes legible. As an example, in the surveys of Market Square ( figures 3 and 4 ), I often found that I disagreed with the temperature readings of the Kestrel weather meter that I was using, but in these disagreements I formed a clearer understanding of how multiple dynamic factors affected my own inner feeling of temperature.
all images: Suzanne Mathew
figure 4 Market Square Atmospheric Projection
This drawing uses the first mapping as a reference to render the spatial temperature gradients in the square. Tall canopy trees and the projected building shade create intermediate temperature zones between the river (left) and road (right).
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Suzanne Mathew
figure 5 Thermal Envelope Sequence
This final drawing remaps the same weather data as a notational sequence that describes the chronological experience of the body from the beginning to the end of each survey. Dash marks are used to indicate changing temperatures along the walks (a morning and afternoon survey). The spacing between the marks correlates to temperature, and indicates how the sensation of space might expand and contract based on the perception of thermal changes in the environment.
Market Square is a small urban brick-paved plaza, adjacent to the Providence River. In the summer, the site is exposed to full sun but also to an intermittent breeze that flows down the riverway, which is channelised and surrounded by urban conditions. A federalist brick building projects shade into the square, while on its other side a grouping of large oak trees creates a small, enclosed garden. Most of us may anticipate that it would be cooler in the shade, and warmer in the sun. But in measurement the river’s edge, though fully exposed, was 4°-9°F cooler than spaces further away from the river, even though some of those spaces were in deep shade. What I came to understand is that by the river my feeling of warmth was a negotiation between the warm air coming from the piazza and cool air hovering above the water, the impact of the sun’s radiation on my skin, and the intermittent cool breeze coming through the corridor. Here, while the instrument registered lower air temperature, my inner temperature began to rise due to the direct exposure to the sun, but the intermittent breeze created a fluctuating tempo of warming and cooling in a space that otherwise looked uniform. The intensity of light drew my attention to the surface of my skin and my feeling of space compressed, though in this spot I had the longest depth of view up and down the length of the river. While the temperature felt cooler in the shade, the instrument registered warmer air than expected in both the building and tree shade.
This clarified for me that the buildings and trees significantly blocked the cooling effects of the breeze, and that warmer air was getting trapped under the tree canopy, while the brick surface of the plaza retained heat and radiated warmth back into the plaza. Although it remained cooler than the urban street, it was warmer than the exposed space by the river ( figure 5 ). Through these surveys my body has become more aware of moments of enclosure marked by phenomenal transitions, and I am also seeing that the dimensions of volumetric space are dictated not only by solid boundaries, or the distance of the horizon, but by the contrast of these atmospheric moments and their relative effect on the surface of my skin. The instruments I’ve used have their own metric scale and range of precision, but what has been more important is how they pose contradictions to my assumptions, and how they point out finer phenomenal gradients than I may notice when taking in all of the effects of a dynamic environment. Instruments and tools are conceived with specific functions, and in that are reflective of what we see as our own limitations. But what I’ve found is that the measuring tool can be treated as a temporary aid – that in borrowing and observing its own incremental sensing of the environment, we can tune our own. q
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Drawing Modelling Instrument roger mullin
This is a scaffold for imagining: a box of bits that assemble to ring a spherical space for work, a jig that provides several extra sets of arms. Jump here to Cartesian spaces and remember Calder’s Circus, Hejduk’s Victims, travelling workers and pocketbook philosophers.
This is a unique tool that is 25 years young. By design, it doesn’t do the same thing twice. It gives your hands a chance.
Gauges of wire cross and mesh, scale collapses and re- emerges as found form.
q
Roger Mullin
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Roger Mullin
facing page, counter-clockwise from top: Carrying case, 2013. Tool disassembled Circular configuration (1/3) and tripod Untitled , 2013. Wire object produced with tool this page, from top: Untitled , 2013. Wire object produced with tool Plume , 2013. Wire object produced with tool
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magnifying lilliputians yiou wang
ut i l i t y
Then God said ‘Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth.’ – Genesis 1:26-28
‘Man as measure’, an historic thought underlying art and architecture since the Renaissance, has persisted as an aesthetic to fix the proportions of architecture to those of the human body. From Vitruvian Man, to plaster cast figures, to wooden mannequins, the importance of man as measure presented the human body as a regulator of architectural form, a function which has a connection with, but is different from, the industrial indication of the scale of a space – the height of the ceiling, the width of the prospect space, the depth of the room. Originally man as measure meant replicating the proportions of the human body onto buildings, since the human body was believed to be perfect. However ‘man as measure’ has been used for decades as the comparison of the building scale to the size of an average 6-foot inhabitant. The scale figure gives the viewer a direct and perceptual understanding of spatial scale.
Scale figures, tools made in our own image, are widely used in architectural models and drawings. Our miniature facsimiles populate the scenes we create, filling in architectural spaces, landscape, places and their blank margins. Different from Divine Creation that endows people with agency, designers deprive scale figures of both agency and the human psyche. Scale figures are standardised, commodified tools in human shape. People, bodies that occupy the space, are the subject of architecture, they make demands upon space, they manipulate space, they enact space and they navigate space. Conversely, in architectural practice, minuscule versions of people are objects of architecture. Space demands them, manipulates them, and enacts them, and they just passively sit still in perpetual poses whose only existence depends on a designer’s representational needs. Although things that manipulate people’s emotions and actions can have agency, as Gell postulates with dolls, the resemblance of a scale figure to a social agent is only superficially visual. 1 Despite the progression of technology and digital culture, photorealistic resemblance of miniature facsimiles to people is incrementally simplified to abstract symbols of humans, reducing their person- ness layer by layer. The scale figure cannot exercise agency when the decision of whether to add it and where to add it involves nothing but straightforward utility. But it is not trivial — a passive recipient of agency from the human architect, the scale figure registers intention and subconscious projection.
from left to right: Toy Soldier, circa 1920 Wooden mannequin vs Nendoroid Le Corbusier, Early sketch of Modular Man Chris Ware, comic character Woody Brown, from Rusty Brown , 2019 Tamiya 12622 1/350 Crew Set Eric Wong, detail from Cohesion
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