Ace Jet 170

Hospitaleyes

 

This is, probably, my favourite building on the Belfast skyline; ever since we moved here I've admired it. I may be in the minority but I know I'm not alone. In fact, I'm very grateful to James Greive, who wrote about his fascination for the Belfast City Hospital building a few years ago on Architecture Ireland — not least because his piece fills in some gaps (and, provided the architect's impression below. Hope that's OK James).

The hospital building was the brain-child of 'avant-garde' architect Louis Adair Roche while he worked at Munce and Kennedy who don't seem to be around anymore. Cork-born, Roche's family moved up to the northern territories of the British Empire during the 1940s with LA packing his suitcase and heading over the water to study making buildings and that at University College London…in London. It seems that the hospital was his finest work, although it is also considered by many to be a monstrous carbuncle. I flipping love it.

Surprisingly, to me at least, it was opened in 1986. I've always assumed it was from the seventies. But, speculating wildly, that date might be a clue to explaining how the flip LAR got away with dropping that spaceship into the south western corner of the city.

I've heard stories about other Belfast buildings built during 'The Troubles' (late 1960s to late 1990s): against the backdrop of paramilitary shenanigans, seriously dubious city planning decisions were made. Maybe there were a few backhanders here and there; maybe there was a little 'pressure' applied — a little 'persuasion', you might call it. Who knows; between you and me I get the distinct impression that the laws of the land, during those difficult times, were somewhat more flexible than in other regions of the United Kingdom.

Whatevz. I for one (and I think Mr Greives would agree) am glad that the Rochemeister was granted approval for his design.

 

This gives you an idea of the building in context although you get a much better sense of its prominence from the ground.

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By the way, I didn't take the photos! They're great and I stumbled across them online, on the MDE Installations website. Finding them (the best photos of the building I've seen) is what prompted this post but they weren't credited so I can't say who took them. I use them with gratitude to the photographer and in the hope that whoever it was doesn't mind and won't be round to punch my lights out :-)

 

 

Roche died in 2014.

This is what The Irish Times had to say.

And here's a piece in The Irish News.

Loose Threads

I'm just putting these here. I've sold a couple, without trying but one day I'd like to get them out there and see if anyone's interested. Personally, I love them, which is the best place to start. Watercolour with cotton threads.

Kickstarting Dwiggins

W. A. Dwiggins (1880—1956) was one of the pioneers of American graphic design. A skilled calligrapher, type designer, printer and illustrator, he was a major force in print design in the early half of the twentieth century. He's one of those enigmatic figures that influenced so much — an ever-present name even if you don't know much about him.

Written and designed by Bruce Kennett, W. A. Dwiggins: A Life in Design is the first comprehensive biography on the great man. Currently a live Kickstarter project, from the Letterform Archive, it's already well exceeded its pledge goal but if you want a piece of the action go here now.

 

Is that Switzerland in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me?

My interest in cartography intensifies inline with the concentration of cartography. Sheets are lovely but an atlas! With an atlas comes a frenzy of map-joy. And a pocket guide! A small, maption-packed book…with cloth-bound, foil-blocked cover…and a plethora of tipped-in fold-out maps. Man alive! 

On a recent drive to Galway (a four hour slog from Belfast) I listened to an episode of the BBC's Seriously podcasts. It was a spliced together collection of recordings of Roald Dhal, talking about his past. It's great. Amongst all the things he touches on is what an adventure travel used to be. It still is, of course, but not like it was back in the day.

Obviously, you might still purchase a pocket guide for your holiday – and that guide might still be a thing of beauty, albeit super-efficiently mass-produced – but may I suggest that the reduction in adventurial magic that Mr Dahl refers to is directly proportional to the reduction in production investment in pocket guide production. Needless to say, I'm sure the cover price also reflects this difference.

Homage to Romek

 

Around the middle of 2017 I made one of these, just for the pleasure of sewing those lines and pinning those pins: The Marber Grid, rendered in cotton thread and map pins on a canvas board. A tribute to Romek's very clever system that brought unity to so many Penguin and Pelican covers through the 60s and 70s.

It was pretty well received on the social medias back then and again more recently when I made one for friend-from-the-internet Daniel Benneworth-Gray. So I'm now making them them to order — there are a few of them out there now, hanging on various walls.

The grid is re-created, by hand, at actual size, as the great designer intended it, i.e. Penguin and Pelican paperback size.

I've mounted mine in a 30 x 40cm Gunnabo from IKEA but they don't seem to be available now so I've switched to the Hovsta (available in dark brown, medium brown and birch). These have the necessary extra depth for the map pins and I'd be happy to supply the 'Homage' framed the same way, or you can take care of framing yourself.

There's a bit of work involved but I'm keeping my pricing as tight as a taut thread, hence: 
Framed: £75 / Unframed: £65

Happy to include UK postage and packaging in that cost but will have to charge a little extra if you're further afield – I'll let you know how much before you commit. If you'd like one email me by clicking here. We can arrange payment through PayPal (if you don't have an account it's really easy to sign up). Allow around two to three weeks for me to make your 'Homage to Romek'.

 

Map pins mark the critical grid points:

One grey thread represents the broken line on RM's original drawing.

Click each image for a closer look.

 

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Post updated 31.12.17

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.

Magic

Episode 1: A Potter

I'm not a fan of The Potter. Too derivative for me. But I know, I concede, I’m in the minority; I certainly am in our household. I’m not sure what the dog thinks but everyone else (the goldfish doesn’t count) flipping loves a bit of Potter.

During the summer we went to The Making of Harry Potter, down there at Leavesden Studios near Watford. Even I was a little excited – I imagined there would be at least one or two things I’d find interesting. I was wrong. There was loads of stuff. You’d have to be a very cold-hearted troll to not enjoy it; if you're a Potterette, I expect you’d need some kind of charm spell to keep your brain from exploding. There is much to get excited about.

The sheer volume of stuff is enough to make you pledge your allegiance to He Who Shall Not Be Named in order to obtain just a tiny fragment of it. Thankfully your soul is saved (although not your bank balance) by the gift shop, crammed as it is to the mythical sea creature’s gills with fabulous stuff. The perfect takeaway being, obviously, a wand and we were delighted to be fleeced two-fold…for two.

Magic: a delightful visitor experience and a perfect memento of the day.

 

Episode 2: The Poet

At the end of September Tandem’s latest project went live: Seamus Heaney | Man & Boy is a permanent visitor experience, housed within HomePlace, a new arts centre dedicated to, arguably, Ireland’s greatest modern poet. I had very little to do with the project so when we all went along just prior to launch day, I could enjoy it without too much baggage. I wasn’t that involved but I was in close enough proximity to the project team for a little Heaney magic to have rubbed off on me and I had by this time come to enjoy his words immensely.

Man & Boy has been received very well so far with some great press coverage in the Irish Times, the Guardian and the New York Times. It is a special experience and I think you'd have to be a very cold-hearted troll to not enjoy it; if you're a Heaneyite, I expect you’d need some kind of charm spell to keep your brain from exploding. There is much to enjoy. At the centre of the inspiration gallery upstairs there is a fountain pen, suspended as if in thin air. It's the kind of pen Heaney used.

The perfect takeaway? His wand…his gold nibbed, inky wand.

 

Episode Three: Two Jokers

You can’t buy a Conway Stewart from HomePlace. The company that made them went out of business, first in 1975 and then later in 2014 after an attempt to rejuvenate the brand just didn’t come off; despite the company's reputation for excellent pens demand was just not high enough.

The company was started originally in 1905 when Frank Jarvis and Thomas Garner left De La Rue, a leading fountain pen manufacturer, to set up on their own. Legend has it that they named the business after two music hall comedians of the day. It didn’t do them any harm, things went pretty well and Conway Stewart enjoyed great success with their top notch and affordable fountain pens.

It must have been some time in the 50s that Seamus Heaney was presented with his pen by his parents. He was 14 and went on to use that pen for the rest of his life. He wrote about it more than once: in ‘Digging’, the first poem in Death of a Naturalist, Heaney famously wrote:

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun

In the more explicit 'The Conway Stewart’, from Human Chain, he beats less around the bush and goes into so much detail that pen nerds have speculated confidently over precisely which model he describes – probably a 58 although some have suggested a 388.

Mine is a 15.

I got it on ebay. It’s a nice example although not exactly like the Poet’s. His had three gold bands around the lid, mine only has one. But still, when it arrived my hands trembled as I removed it from its modest packaging. It feels nice in the hand and is, I have to say, an elegant pen. Yes, it’s “squat”, as Heaney described his and yes, it does feel “as snug as a gun”.

It also feels magic.

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.

Depero Futurista

I just got an email from Russell from Designers & Books. In October they launch a Kickstarter to re-publish Depero's Bolted Book. So, nothing really important then. (Oh my god! They want to re-publish the Bolted Book!).

More here.