Samples of Laurie Baker’s architecture:
(1) The Laurie Baker Centre, Trivandrum
Ms. Shailaja Nair talking to the first-year students about Laurie Baker and his architecture.
(2) The Centre for Development Studies, Trivandrum
(3) The Indian Coffee House, Trivandrum
(4) The Hamlet (Laurie Baker’s own house), Trivandrum
(5) Loyola College, Trivandrum
(6) Buildings by some of Laurie Baker’s “disciples”
Brickmaking in Kerala
The first-year student workshop:
(1) “Playing” with bricks
(2) The College of Engineering Trivandrum wall
(Angel Varghese, Anuja J., Archana, Anna Baby, and Nisha Nelson)
(3) The elephant/butterfly wall
(Muhammed Jiyad, Hisham A.A., Amalraj P., Ahmad Thaneem Abdul Majeed, Muhammed Naseem, Sankasnath P.M., Sai Prasad C., and Suneer K.K.)
Bricklayer Joy Francis showing the students how to use a plumb bob
Joy Francis and the students using a “homemade” spirit level
Is it two elephant heads or a butterfly?
(4) The brick jali wall
(Soumya S. Warrier, Deepthi B., Anutpama Warrier, Saijith M.S., Nikitha, and Nikita Jimmington)
Ambitious!
A cement bucket made from old tyres
(5) The herringbone and stepped wall
(Parvathi P., Prasanth R., Najeeb T., and Rahul Sarovthaman)
Testing the wall’s stability. No worries!
(6) The fish wall
(Dheeraj K., Abraham Philip, Richard Lalduhsaka, Vignesh Sajeev, and Abhijath Ajay)
(7) The little house wall
(Gitanjiali V.R., Harsha Hareendran, Roshni Maria George, Athira P., Akshaya K., Aryaa, Mizna Reem, Aafreen Fathima, and Reshma Cherian
(8) The double-curved wall
(Magna George and Jisa George)
(9) Feedback session
After testing the tarpaulin’s strength, Wally needed a jar of “Pileless — Wonder Relief for Piles” …
Joseph Stalin — Still a hero in Kerala!
In 2010 I visited Iran, courtesy of a travel grant from the Iran Heritage Foundation, to look at Iranian brickwork. What marvellous brickwork I discovered there! But that is another story.
Travelling around Iran (which I found to be quite different to that usually depicted on the six o’clock news, by the way), photographing some spectacular brick walls, naturally I stopped to eat from time to time, and as a result I found myself unexpectedly examining something else besides the country’s brickwork—Iran’s ubiquitous kebab shops.
The differences between say Melbourne, where I live, and Tehran, the capital of Iran, are in the main truly vast, but here was one tiny thing that both cities have in common.
This got me thinking after I returned home: if I found the kebab shops in Iran so interesting then perhaps I should look more closely at the kebab shops in Melbourne.
So I asked the Master of Architecture students who took my Popular Architecture and Design course in 2011 at the University of Melbourne, where I teach, to pair off; to each select a kebab shop in Melbourne; and to record the following basic information about them:
• The kebab shop’s name and address
• A plan of the kebab shop, including its fittings and furniture
• A photograph of the front façade of the kebab shop
• A photograph of the kebab shop next to the other shops in the street
• A photograph of the kebab shop at night
• A photograph of the other side and rear facades of the kebab shop (where they were accessible)
• Photographs of the interior of the kebab shop
• Photographs of the kebab shop’s advertising/signage
• A copy of the kebab shop’s menu
• A brief description of the kebab shop
• A brief interview with the shopkeeper and perhaps some customers
Kebab Shops in Melbourne: An Architectural Survey, a new book published by the Custom Book Centre at the University of Melbourne, contains all of this data exactly as collected by the architecture students and given to me.
The idea of compiling an eclectic-style, uncritical and unedited “encyclopaedia” like this was suggested by the 800-page The Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping (2002) by the Dutch “starchitect” Rem Koolhaas et al.
Several people have looked at and written about everyday places that are usually taken for granted and not given a second thought. One of the most interesting is the late French author, Georges Perec (1936 – 1982), whose work I introduced to the Master of Architecture students-cum-“kebab shop detectives.” His little book, An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (first translated into English in 2010), is a quirky masterpiece in my view.
Another source/sauce of inspiration was Reyner Banham’s brief but amusing and surprisingly insightful assessment of hamburgers and hamburger shops contained in his classic study of Los Angeles, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971).
In light of some of the recent scary exchanges between America and Iran, it is oddly comforting to realize that fast food is fast food no matter whether it comes from Los Angeles or Tehran.
I hope that Kebab Shops in Melbourne: An Architectural Survey will encourage further and more detailed research into the humble kebab shop, which is an interesting and ubiquitous—nevertheless almost “invisible”—part of the urban built environment not only in Australia and Iran, but also elsewhere (for example, on a recent trip to Auckland, New Zealand, I spotted many kebab shops there too).
To sum up then, Kebab Shops in Melbourne: An Architectural Survey describes over 40 kebab shops in various Melbourne suburbs by means of descriptive prose, line drawings, black and white photographs, and interviews with shopkeepers and customers. This data was collected by Master of Architecture students at the University of Melbourne and compiled, warts and all, by Derham Groves. This quirky 500-plus-page book is perhaps best described as The Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping meets Georges Perec.
http://www.bookshop.unimelb.edu.au/cbc/?IS.9781921775710
http://considerthesauce.net/2011/11/21/40-melbourne-kebab-shops-in-500-pages-book-of-the-year/
The cover of Anna May Wong’s Lucky Shoes designed by Huey Groves
The book is published by the Culicidae Press and is available via Amazon.com or Culicidaepress.com
A review of the book by Zoe Nikakis in Voice in The Age, 10 October 2011
The suite of six letterboxes in front of Holmesglen Institute of TAFE
Lachlan Michael
Muhummad Abid
En Yee Teh
Audrey Zerafa
David Young
Nur Zainal Abidin
Rubina Barooah
NOT JUST ANOTHER BRICK IN THE WALL
An innovative program at the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning has seen students design unique letterboxes which were then built by bricklaying apprentices at Holmesglen TAFE. Zoe Nikakis reports.
As part of the Popular Architecture and Design subject, students created a brick wall or letterbox and wrote clear design briefs for the apprentices to follow.
Lecturer Dr Derham Groves said the subject was about teaching the students how to put theory into practice.
“We have all these students with so many ideas, who just need a vehicle for them,” he says.
Dr Groves chose letterboxes as the focus of the project because he has always been interested in their symbolic qualities.
“I focused on letterboxes and the Australian D.I.Y. movement in my PhD thesis,” he says.
“In past decades in Australia, if you were to go crazy in terms of the built environment, if you were to do something bizarre, you could do it with your letterbox and people would be forgiving.
“You could have one area of unfettered creativity, unfettered madness, where people wouldn’t hold it against you.”
Seven students’ designs were chosen for construction: Lachlan Michael, Muhummad Abid, En Yee The, Audrey Zerafa, David Young, Rubina Barooah and Nur Zainal Abidin all created highly original designs which ranged from a multicoloured Pacman letterbox to one featuring a brickwork prawn.
Pacman letterbox designer Nur Zainal Abidin says the project was very interesting, because she got to design something besides buildings and could be wacky in that design.
“Although the brief said we had to use bricks, it didn’t stop me being creative. I took it as a challenge to create interesting shapes, and I came up with a Pacman shape,” she says.
She says she enjoyed the challenge very much. “I really like the design I’ve produced, and it felt really amazing to have it chosen to be built. The guys in Holmesglen did a very good job in putting it together. I was thrilled.”
She says also that letterboxes can actually be part of the house design.
“It could be something hilarious and unthinkably unique that people would be amused by. Letterboxes can inform the character of the house owners, some might choose to be bold and go the extra mile in designing it, but some might not.”
She says her idea for the Pacman letterbox came to her during a lecture.
“Derham gave a lecture about brick pattern designs using image pixilation, and I thought it was actually a great method, but I didn’t just want to pixilate a picture and design the letterbox shaped like a skinny brick wall, I wanted it to have a shape, so then I thought of other pixilated things, which made me think of video graphics, which then led to those old-school video games that I used to play.
“I love the Pacman game, so I decided to use the Pacman in its ghost shape.”
The University and Holmesglen have now collaborated on four student projects in the past decade.
Dr Groves says it was truly a win-win situation.
“The students and the apprentices take so much pride in completing these projects, because it really forces them to think.
“On the day the letterboxes were launched, the pride on the students’ faces was great to see.
“For many architecture students, the letterboxes are the first things they’ve designed which have been built. They’re never going to forget it.”