Charlie Harris - Part i

Charlie Harris

Portfolio Studio 55 A Latin Provocateur Latin Metal Federation

Studio 06 Fragile Relationships Reframing Rottingdean

BA (HONS) BRIGHTON

A Latin Provocateur Monuments to Jara Victor Jara, idolised and controversial folk-singer, hero of the poor and the left, scourge of the Chilean elites. Jara was from the oppressed copper mining community and rural poor.

The Chilean singer-songwriter is a national hero in Chile for his stance against General Pinochet’s facist government. His message was one of peace and unity amongst the working class and he is still celebrated to this day for his music, poetry and political ideas.

Jara had been a Chilean theatre director, poet, singer-songwriter, and political activist whose work flourished in the early 1970s. Deeply connected to the traditional folklore and melodies of Chile, Víctor Jara’s music spoke to Chile’s working classes. His music focused on themes of social and economic inequality and the plight of the indigenous poor.

Jara played a key role in the popularisation of the music genre Nueva Canción ‘new song’. This was the sound of a social movement and musical genre, characterized by folk-inspired styles and socially committed lyrics. Nueva Canción is widely recognised to have played a profound role in the social upheavals in Latin America during the 1970s and 1980s and became a direct response to oppresive regimes. So much so, that the military government exiled and imprisoned artists and went as far as to ban many traditional Andean instruments in order to suppress the Nueva Canción movement.

Jara’s conviction to this message ultimately led to his death, executed by General Pinochet’s militia force. However his music and spirit lives on to this day. His memory is celebrated in Chile by a national holiday to commemorate him.

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PERFORMANCE AREA

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ENCLOSED AREA

OPEN AIR TIERED SEATING

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VIEWING SCREEN

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Victor Jara’s ‘Last Song’ A poem written whilst under armed guard by the Chilean military. In this poem Jara wrote of the conditions in the National Stadium in which he was held captive for the final 4 days of his life. This poem was smuggled out as a note hidden in a shoe of a fellow prisoner and through word of mouth. As such this message was never performed again by Jara, so I felt that in memorial to him a monument should be created to honour his memory, and provide a space for a perfomance of his last song and reflection about his legacy.

How could Jara be best honored and in what way would he want to be remebered?

The model shifted the focus from Jara’s music, to his politics and his spirit. I wanted to encapsulate the notion of monumentality and memorialisation within my design.

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“Copper is the salary of Chile, just as the land is it’s bread” Salvador Allende, July 11 1971 In the three years of Allende’s Popular Unity government, Victor Jara supported Allende perfoming at rallies and galvanizing workers. Jara championed Chilean culture and music, he stood against the tide of trite coca-cola culture imported from the US. Just as Allende was attempting to prove that there was a ‘Chilean road’ to socialism and justice, the artists and musicians of the Chilean New Song Movement were working to develop a sense of their own culture.

Jara saw the multi-national corporations as thieves that profiteered from Chile’s resources and Jara wanted more stringent land rights to secure the nation’s wealth and began to mobilise the masses to defend Chile’s copper.

They took their music to factories, copper mines and isolated villages. Jara saw it as his business to support the struggles of ordinary people by telling the truth about their lives in song. ‘My guitar is a worker,’ as he sang in Manifesto.

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As the project developed it began to expand from Victor Jara to the workers of Chile which his music celebrated. This meant the copper industry became a key focus. Breaking down the production process into stages helped me understand the complexities of this ecosystem, and an industrial language of machinery began to enter my design. The program would be split across 3 disinct monuments.

These would work together to create a part museum part factory.

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1. Ore Feed Bin 2. Extraction Vents 3. Deployable Mechanic Legs 4. Control Centre / Monitors 5. Rotating Plate 6. Communications Satellite 7. Air Intake Valve 8. Slurry Intake 9. Concentrate Release Nozzle

PENA

BELT CONVEYOR DEPOSIT

INFORMACION MONUMENT

SMELTER FURNACE

GRINDING MILL DEPOSIT

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Monument : PeĂąa

A PeĂąa is a meeting place for groups of musicians or artists in various South American countries. In Chile in particular, the term came to mean a cheap, popular venue where folk music was played and simple food and drink were available.

Because of its association with the Unidad Popular Government of Salvador Allende, the concept of a PeĂąa is often associated with social justice and grassroots culture.

The design therefore took a utilitarian aesthetic to reflect the industrial vernacular. The space functions as a workers cafeteria with the possibility for music and speeches to be perfromed from the stage, all whilst overlooking the surrounding factory. This kind of music, popularised by musicians such as Victor Jara in the 1960s and early 1970s, usually had an underground nature to it. However in this proposal the space has been elevated to the top of the building and is in open air, to be celebrated.

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Monument : Processo

A monument which commemorates the production of copper, Chile’s main export. The monument aims to educate the visiting public to the physicalities of the process through an interactive installation. The exhibits are housed in the form of the shell of a hydrocyclone, a machine which is involved in the process.

The design borrows from the architectural language of machinery by reimagining the machine’s scale, making it an inhabitable structure.

As visitors circulate through the monument they are able to become a participant in a miniaturised copper factory. With scaled down machinery it is possible to interact with each stage of the copper production process, grinding ore, hoisting the rubble with pulleys, smelting and refining until eventualy they are able to make a small piece of copper.

This happens alongside an educational process and a viewing platform offering views into the surrounding copper factory.

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Monument : Informacion

Vicor Jara and his message of freedom of thought and expression are still powerful and he remians a national icon in Chilean culture. The themes of his songs focused on love, peace, and social justice.

The monument will feature a cinema, gallery space and a space to hear his music. The cinema located within the monument will exhibit documentary footage that focuses on the Chilean coup, Nueva Cancion as well as shorter clips that champion workers rights and socialist ideas. The level directly below the cinema is a quiet and reflective space that will feature an auditorium with ramped seating. The public will be able to collect a set of headphones that will play a collection of Jara’s work with his discography available to listen to.

The space has views out into the factory to see the workers that Jara sang of and championed.

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01 Workers enjoy a music performace

02 Worker operating a copper ore crushing machine

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Latin Metal Federation Millenium Mills Located in Silvertown Quays, London, Millenium Mills, a turn of the 20th century flour mill now lies derelict. Once an industrial powerhouse , the mill was a thriving hub of production that employed over 100,000 people and .

This project’s aim was to rejuvenate the site, a GLA redevelopment area, into a Latin infused cultural centre. Only fragments of it’s original machinery remain, with the grain silos having been removed leaving voids in the monolithic structure.

These voids allow the oppurtunity for inteventions and new programs. With an ambition to enliven the space and power up the abandoned factories and the one thriving quay-side, returning it to it’s glory days of productivity.

This scheme would expand on ‘A Latin Provocateur’ by designing a cultural centre.

It would be focused around copper and its importance economically and culturally to Latin American nations.

SAVE ME !!!!!

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telephone traders receive clients’ orders and provide a commentary.

ring clerks put orders into ring and keep record of transactions.

ring dealers conduct business across the ring with other dealers.

Metal futures are traded at the London Metal Exchange (LME) sessions and conducted in 5 minute intervals for each metal.

This drawing attempted to codify the performative nature of ring trading. By tracking both movement and hierachy a narrative unfolded around the ring.

10:00am TRADING OPENS

BIDS AND OFFERS EXCHANGED

HAND SIGNALS USED TO COMMUNICATE

SILENCE AS FINAL MINUTE APPROCHES

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10:05am SESSION ENDS/ RING RESETS

Modelling both physically and digitally concurrently allowed rapid spatial developments. By recomposing some important spaces and reconsidering the circulation between these masses a new form was developed. This new design was capable of intersecting the existing Millenium Mills building and swept around it to reveal a view to the historic royal docks.

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A large part of the scheme is dedicated to a private space in which metal is traded. Following the traditions of the LME this trade floor would feature a trade ring, along with a debating chamber for union members. There is also an amphitheatre situated directly below the trade ring, here grass roots groups can form and educational talks can be held to discuss issues concering Latin Amercian trade.

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CROSS SECTION

01 - Central cover panel 02 - Side cover panel / stainless steel 03 - Main beam / truss 04 - Facade panel / stainless steel 05 - Lower side panel / stainless steel 06 - Floor panel 07 - Lining panel 08 - Steel column 09 - Shoe 10 - Extruded polystyrene 11 - Upper flange of the vierendel beam 12 - Vapor barrier 13 - Polystyrene 14 - Plaster 15 - Vinyl bar 16 - Plaid vinyl 17 - Bottom flange of the vierendel beam

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Designing Mechanical Architectures Using Devices As Generative Instruments (extract)

This text seeks to identify how mechanic concepts can be applied within architecture. What lessons can we learn as architects about how to design with future technologies. We, without realising, are parts of machines ourselves and interface with them more regularly than we think. Machines govern and shape our routines and activities, a building that conditions it’s users into particular patterns of activity is mechanic in its nature. However, the beauty of a mechanical architecture is when a building is reactive to its users, allowing them to engage with their environment in new ways.

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Jackson, Doug, Wes Jones, Marc Neveu, Aryan Crawford Omar, Steven Purvis, Randolph Ruiz, Mohamed Sharif, and Sanford Kwinter. 2017. Soupergreen!. 1st ed. New York: Actar. p.126 2.

Ibid,. p.195 1.

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role in bridging physical world. expertise and it the poetic

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Architecture can play a pivotal the gap of technology and our Architecture’s unique spatial ability to speculate affords

Visionary schemes that merge cutting edge technology and mechanics with speculative thought, truly lead the way in reimagining the role of the machine in modern society. Mechanical architectures become a guiding light in the endeavour of a poetic yet efficient landscape.

A landscape interwoven with machine, and cybernetic in nature, must be the goal we strive for as our techno-centric society grows in scale. Championing both the reactive traits of a machine, and interactive traits of the devices that comprise them, heralds a vernacular that re-engages machine with the urban fabric we inhabit. “Enviro-machinic” devices as Sharif calls them playfully, re-script how we might live alongside the world we inherit and leave behind.2

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Speculative mechanic architectures allow us to engage with the not so distant future, which is an exciting prospect. The progressive visions they offer are neither utopian nor dystopian; rather libertarian. This is where architecture has the remit to shape the fabric of our future realities.

A dialogue begins around how we will interface with infrastructure and technology in the future.

Where technological innovation is championed, architectural honesty liberates future design.

Fostering an ethos of a vivacious exuberance of mechanical architectures, the systems that operate in our architectures are allowed to be celebrated.

A techno-tectonic style of architecture is the logical evolution to its predecessor of the polemicist early high-tech practices like Archigram, and smart systems oriented architects like Cedric Price, who appropriated industrial construction vernaculars. Accordingly, architecture has adopted the green movement’s emphasis on new products and technologies.

Architecture has therefore framed it’s primary role as an innovator and showcase for these new technologies. Wes Jones has described this as “a vernacular for what does not yet exist” as currently these technologies are invisible or designed to be indistinguishable from the lowerperformance products they replace. However; when the machine is celebrated, and no longer hidden behind a facade, these innovations become more evident and the building gains a sense of honesty to it’s form.

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The functions we require from our buildings are becoming more technical, systems of high complexity can offer a means to address these pressing concerns around sustainability and interconnectivity in our physical worlds. As we are increasingly becoming a techno-centric society the role of machine is becoming more prevalent in our daily lives. Has architectural discourse begun to shift towards embracing the role of systems and representing their functions in an honest manner?

One such way of considering and working with the idea of mechanic architecture is to design from devices which can inform us in their operability and ability as instruments to interrogate. Through utilising devices in a scientific yet poetic manner, we can extract a language of machine that can then be re-appropriated to scales of various orders.

licence to apply technolgies to new spaces and scenarios. The incumbency for machines to play a role in our futures and potential for good is an exponentially necessary one. Wes Jones, a more positive proponent of the machine sees the machine as an ‘active, conscious responsible, independent and transparent’ tool to engage with the environment.1

Fragile Relationships Body + Landscape Devices With a project brief to design a device related to the human body, I chose to develop an idea around viewing. A device that would make the viewer an active particapant within the landscape.

This could offer a means to engage the public with Rottingdean once again, and give purpose to the currently redundant beacon atop Beacon Hill.

Perhaps the most defining feature of Rottingdean is it’s topology. The name Rottingdean derives from the word Dene: dene /di:n/ noun: dean a vale, especially the deep, narrow wooded valley of a small river. “Rottingdean�

This has led me to explore the nature of the relationship between hills and humans. Once used for sending messages through beacons and later for measuring the landscape with trigonometric stations. These high points show the rich palimpsest of human activity. The use of the hills demonstrates the value the natural landscape has held for millenia.

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Newlands Barn

Beacon Hill

1. Woodland Wander

via Steyning Rd 56 m

47 m

21 min 1.60 km

2. Coastal Circuit

via Marine Dr 58 m

49 m

26 min 1.93 km

3. Town Trail

via Whiteways Ln 54 m

46 m

24 min 1.77 km

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1652mft

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After surveying Rottingdean two points of interest were Beacon Hill and Newlands Barn. Beacon Hill famously used for signalling the approach of the Spanish armada, and Newlands Barn a Trigonometric station used to map Britain. These two locations have a direct viewline between them.

Using Beacon Hill as my starting point and finishing at Newlands Barn trig point I mapped 3 differing paths which have been selected for their views of Rottingdean, with points of interest dotted along each.

DIRECT ROUTE | AS THE CROW FLIES A | WOODLAND WANDER B | COASTAL CIRCUIT C | TOWN TRAIL

- TRIG POINT - BEACON

These maps shall be used along with the the device, which is fixed to the beacon. It’s intended f use is for walkers to investigate the landscape. This could offer a means to engage the public with Rottingdean once again and gives purpose to the currently redundant beacon and trig point.

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Reframing Rottingdean

The project expanded to take our findings from devices and apply the principles to an architecture. This conceptual model begins to develop a responsive armiture, using card and piano wire a hinging mechanism is being tested as a potential method. The model is the result of merging elements from the design of a viewing device, with the concerns my site demanded.

The series of renderings opposite show the pier as the tide changes. When the tide retreats the reflexive armiture is exposed and is not affected by tidal currents allowing it to be explored safely at ground level. As the water encroaches it starts to submerge the arm and the tidal force begins acting upon the foil structure beneath, allowing the observation platform the sweep with the direction of flow.

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THANKS I would like to thank my tutors from both studio 55 + studio 06 Pedro Gil Kevin Widjer Graham Perring Sarah Stevens Duncan Baker-Brown Alessandro Zambelli

CONTACT Email : iamcharlieharris@hotmail.com

CHARLIE HARRIS RIBA PART 1 ARCHITECTURE PORTFOLIO COPYRIGHT 2020 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Arch BA (HONS)

Telephone +44 796 606 4633

iamcharlieharris@hotmail.com