Ace Jet 170

Dublin: Bull Island—Raheny

 

 

Over the last two weeks I have, periodically, been walking the streets of Dublin's coastal villages as research for a Tandem project. Nice work if you can get it. The 130 bus carried me out of the city to Bull Island and Dollymount (more on the island later) from which I walked inland through St Anne's Park to the nearest DART station, at Raheny.

Once you're through the park, the scenery takes a distinct dip in quality as you scurry on, in appropriate haste, through an unfamiliar council estate, but after a little while you come into Raheny village. A bit better. Then, turn a corner, and behold!…Our Lady Mother of Divine Grace.

Rising like a great brutal pointy gateway to another world the Roman Catholic Church was designed by architects Peppard & Duffy and completed in 1962. The main entrance is distinctly modernist; an interpretation of romanesque churches and abbeys of Ireland with that arrangement of triangles that simultaneously points to both heaven and earth.

I think I accidentally approached from the perfect angle; my first site of the building was sudden and was preceded by mundanity at best so the effect is striking.

As ever, I have to add what is becoming a standard disclaimer: I can't find much about the church online. It's built on the site of an ancient holy well of St Assam, which was the name of the previous over burdened church.

A very short entry on Archiseek notes that the overall design is, 'Not completely successful, the remainder of the church is quite boxy', and I must admit that, after looking for more interesting views of the building I found none. All the effort must have gone into the entrance but maybe that's enough. It was for me.

Raheny station is almost literally at the back of the church so my progress was hardly hindered by this diversion.

 

 

Ship Heads

 

I don't really post anything specific about the day job here but I keep thinking about the work we did for the Titanic Hotel Belfast and, in particular, how it relates to things I enjoy most about what we do at Tandem.

The truth is, I stumbled into Tandem. I was only supposed to be there for ten months, covering someone's maternity leave. That was just over five years ago and, unless something drastic happens beyond my control, I have no intention of leaving.

I've completely fallen for interpretation design. Maybe I've explained this before – it's hard to keep track on what I put out on this blog – but, in summary: the work is worthwhile and we get to do great things with surprising means. It's hard, challenging work that takes us all over the island of Ireland mostly (although not exclusively). At its heart, interpretation design is loaded with values that bring cultural and societal enrichment. It's 'hearts and minds' stuff on the whole, rarely with a commercial objective.

Even with this particular project – where there is a commercial backdrop to the work we did – our focus was on preserving the stories and heritage of an important building now that it has been re-purposed as a fancy hotel.

You can read about this Titanic Hotel project on the Tandem website but here's a potted overview:

Titanic Hotel Belfast can be found right across the plaza from the 'World's Best Visitor Attraction' Titanic Belfast. The building was the Harland & Wolff Drawing Offices and Headquarters – originally designed, very cleverly, to give the designers of H&W's ocean-going vessels the very best conditions to work in. The two main drawing offices are vast, vaulted and many-windowed rooms positioned to make use of the northern (i.e. best diffused) light which swamps the spaces.

Putting that in context: other shipbuilders kept their draughtsmen in temporary sheds that they moved around their ship yards. By comparison, H&W's working conditions were literally second to none.

As part of the purchasing deal, the hotel operators were charged with being responsible for preserving the heritage of the building. And that's where we stepped in. We developed a bunch of 'light touch' interventions that highlight what working life within the building was like during H&W's glory days.

We referred to the plaques pictured above as 'Room Labels' – just one of the aforementioned interventions. They appear all over the original part of the building and tell visitors about each specific room, or original feature in some cases. They are my favourite part of the project.

A mahogany frame matches the timber work around the offices and an engraved brass surround (inspired by plaques found on H&W engines) frames a vitreous enamel text panel. The brass surround is based on the foolscap paper format which would have been used in the offices for admin docs. The H&W motif is the company's original motif.

Other interventions included routered Corian® wall panels that feature a floor tile pattern found in the building along with ships names or (as pictured) the job roles found within the walls of the Drawing Offices. 

Here and there, super-discrete pieces give visitors little moments of delight – like the engraved lamp base below which features an amusing quote from the one of H&W's big cheeses, Mr Wolff himself.

 

 

Peter Saville meets Alfred Wainwright

 

 

Extracted from Ordnance Survey map keys, actually from a 1975 metric edition of B. Lockey's The interpretation of Ordnance Survey maps and geographical pictures. I've got plans for them. Isolated like this, 'Saville vs. Wainwright' sprang to mind.

Chester Rocket

 

Chester, 1963: The custodians of the cathedral faced a dilemma. The bells needed maintenance work but it was feared that putting them back might have a detrimental effect on the buildings structural/architectural integrity. An alternative plan was hatched by architect George Pace, who specialised in ecclesiastic structures.

It took a while but by 1968 Pace had been commissioned to design a solution by Dean G W O Addleshaw, backed by his crack team of clerics. Work on the Addleshaw Tower began.

I’m sure Pace was the best man to sort the bells out and perhaps Addleshaw’s support of the scheme meant the Dean absolutely deserved to have the new building named after him. I am definitely not suggesting for a second that anything fishy occurred and, quite frankly, I’m shocked that you might even think such a thing! Shame on you.

In June 1973 the foundation stone was laid on what was once an old burial ground, in the south east corner of the cathedral’s grounds. Building work continued in ernest and by October of the following year a new set of twelve bells, recast from all but two of the originals, were installed.

Chester heard the first proper ringing of the new bells in February 1975, for a posh wedding. Something to do with the Duke of Westminster.

The Addleshaw Tower was George Pace’s last major work and while it caused a bit of a stir initially, largely because of its modernist sensibility, the ‘Chester Rocket’ also received much praise and a Grade II listing, for its respect to its historic setting.

I first saw it from the roof of the cathedral while on the tower tour. It’s stunning and I was lucky enough to be able to admire it from almost all angles.

Redacted

 

It was Culture Night. My eldest teenager was heading into Belfast with some 'friends' to wallow in the free culture dripping from every corner and crevice of the city centre.

I'd never been to Culture Night in Belfast, even though I'd heard it's a great night to be out in; I'm too miserable for such free and easy public expressions of culture. No, The Night of Culture is a night for me to stay home and close the curtains. Batten down the hatches in case some culture breaks free and catches the bus out to the suburbs where we live – I keep a large stick by the front door just in case some culture comes a'knocking.

Of course, my son was really out talking to girls, his interest in an evening of extreme free-roaming culture thinly masking his real motivation.

At least my other son was safe at home.

Not for long. His mate Patrick rang and asked if he'd like to go to Culture Night. Wrenched from the comfort of our comfortable sofa (with matching very large food stool – it's soooo comfy) we head city-centre-wards; the two children too young to roam free on Crazy Night without an adult within rescue distance.

Once in town I was soon abandoned and wandered the cultural streets in search of a familiar face. Instead I discovered a familiar place –  Keats & Chapman open late to cash in on the culture punters, so in I went, with cash (K&C is the city's finest book cave and it flipped my evening better side up).

Top find: This Penguin Education edition of 'Academic Freedom', circa 1974, with a top notch cover by Omnific/Peter Thompson.

 

Pintorinterest

 

What was I doing last August? The one in 2017. Whatever it was it must have been all-consuming because I completely missed the publication of Moleskine's Giovanni Pintori monograph. Actually, that Moleskine published anything was news to me!

Pintori and Olivetti are, as you may know, bound together as tightly as the pages of this monograph. In the days when the typewriter was king, Olivetti was the Commander in Chief and Pintori was its…erm…Field Marshal. Armed with an ammunition box full of colours and shapes (and typewriters) the Lance Corporal Designer General would charge into battle, decimating lesser typewriter regiments with a frenzied volley of sub-machine artwork.

It would be fair to say that Pintori is the man that set the standard for the company's marketing activity, raising it head and shoulders above its competitors and visualising Adriano Olivetti's product vision. Pintori left the company in 1967, a few years after the death of the man, although continued to work for Olivetti on a freelance basis while growing his own independent practice.

The monograph brings together many of Olivetti's iconic ads along with original artwork and sketches then other commissions the designer carried out after leaving Olivetti.

If you're not so familiar with Pintori's work then a quick PinterSearch will yield much delicious fruit.

Mountain

I can’t tell you very much about Hans Thoni except that he died in 1980 aged 74 and was a Swiss graphic designer. There are a few of his posters online and some stamps he designed. There’s much more online about Finsteraarhorn, the highest and less popular mountain in the Bernese Alps.

It’s nothing personal, Finsteraarhorn is, I believe, a perfectly respectable Alp, It’s just that it’s hard to get to. And I don’t mean ‘no public transport’ hard to get to, I mean it’s in the middle of flipping nowhere. It’s, what we explorers call, “a very very long way away”.

Of course, I’m an armchair explorer really and would much rather scrutinise the results of a tectonic uplift from the comfort and relative warmth of my living room, with or without Kendal Mint Cake…

Thoni’s economic illustration of Finsteraarhorn is as sparse as a mountaineer’s emergency rations after three days of blizzard-bound isolation. I count three colours and really, not much drawing. But everything is just right. Just as it should be.

I’m a little obsessed by this tiny depiction of a very big thing. 

Floral Tribute

Between the years of 1876 and 1890 Justus Oehler's great-grandmother Agnes Leibbrand made 42 flower pressings which she kept in a decorative envelope box and which, after her death, remained hidden away, as if forgotten in a drawer, waiting to be unearthed by Oehler decades later. In the latest Pentagram Paper (No. 46) all surviving compositions are reproduced at actual size and Oehler tells of discovering the treasure in his grandparent's house.

Agnes carefully labelled each piece with a number, a date and a description of the fauna's origin. Oehler reflects on his great-grandmother's meticulous work and on the 19th century pastime, "…an art whose delicate beauty and emblematic floriography reflected the social and aesthetic sensibilities of the time".

It's a touching collection, made all the more interesting by how Agnes seems to have stopped pressing when she got married…as if, perhaps, the activity represented a time that had come to an end. I don't know, the Paper's text is very brief but Oehler wrote enough to trigger thoughts on the collection's significance.

It's a good idea, not nostalgia.

Can we stop referring to the Co-op “re-brand” as nostalgic please?

It’s a shallow response to a well considered solution. If we hadn’t seen that mark before, would we think it retro? Just look at it! I would suggest that if we hadn’t seen it before we’d think it a bold, maybe even ground breaking design for a business built on strong ethics.

OK, perhaps nostalgia comes as a bi-product but it clearly wasn’t the intention of the designers. It’s actually a great example of really smart, grown up graphic design; recognising that the solution was already there and there are better things to spend the client’s money on. In that respect, it’s a beautifully appropriate and ethical solution. It reminds me of this.

Let’s talk about that instead.

Getting under your feet

The latest (and over-sized) Pentagram Paper is a celebration of the ignored; ever-present but invisible to many, the ubiquitous maintenance cover is a hatch to a world below our feet that our feet will never explore. The paper is a collection of reproduced rubbings taken from street covers found around London. It was designed by Marina Willer and printed in dayglo inks. You can read more about it here.