The New Verulamium

This evening I've spent mostly reading theoretical architectural texts, namely extracts from Neil Spiller: Vacillating Objects; Manuel De Landa: Policing the Spectrum; Paul Virilio: The Aesthetics of Disappearance; Margaret Wertheim: The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace.

While several proposed interesting ideas about the influence of the virtual domain upon the physical domain, I still feel my work lacks depth. It feels like I'm yet to scrape the surface of what I'm really dealing with architecturally. My understanding of the site was enhanced by a recent visit to St Albans and attempting to draw spatially how I understand the landscape from numerous frames of reference. Perhaps this is the key. The ability for the image to be comprehended in a multitude of ways from a variety of perspectives, both physically and metaphysically. Wertheim cites the Memory Theatre by Giulio Camillo and the Apple desktop working in similar ways, but enabling the processing of complex ideas into simple structured 'spaces' associated with memorable images or motifs.


Image courtesy of: http://www.spamula.net/blog/i05/camillo.gif

From a glance, the theatre displays reminders of numerous ideas associated collectively with their location spatially and virtually through their alignment to a particular planet. It enables complex subjects to be memorised and arranged for future consultation, in a structure akin to the ordering of the world wide web or contemporary filing systems.

Maybe this ordering of memories and images reflects how we navigate through familiar landscapes. It becomes our means of orientation, through place and through our own thoughts. We assign images fused into our heads that are attributed to greater memories. Some of these remain in the subconscious realm of our psyche, until triggered by similar images encountered throughout our daily lives. The strength of the image ingrained in our minds will determine the degree to which past experiences are recalled. Could we create environments that can orientate one in the future by creating powerful images in the present? Perhaps this isn't the direction my project will take, but a thought nonetheless.

So how can the project progress in the physical? I.e. stop writing and start creating and drawing. The relationship between St Albans and Verulamium is interested. The Roman city is abandoned. The exposed relics become sites that represent the trauma of citizens as the city fell and the paganist traditions were dismantled.


Photo of the Verulamium walls (South) and the London Gate, Ali Abbas 2009

Extraordinarily, the town relocates as one ideological system supersedes another. Should settlements be nomadic? What becomes of decadent components of an old city? In the case of St Albans, they represent an old culture. One that for 400 years outlawed alien beliefs, so much so that Alban was martyred for practising Christianity. Verulamium seems forgotten, hidden beneath layers of history. Small parts are uncovered and framed by iron railings. These frames become the only reference points for inquiry into the past. One navigates between them, and they project onto the landscape reference points for the hidden city. Why was the city never redeployed as a second settlement, or as a new built function. The contemporary use of the site as a park, described as the 'lungs of the city', becomes a vital place for people to escape the stresses of the city. Escaping contemporary St Albans and effectively arriving back in Verulamium. The new Verulamium...

Crit Presentation

So the work I presented at the crit was a summation of work since the hand in of the Briefing Document (which I happened to get 69% in...).

As a development of building an astrolabe, I created Astrolabe MKII. This was a heath robinson-esque device that reiterates the spatial qualities of the Astrolabe in its attempt to coordinate sidereal time and coordinated universal time (UDC) through the projection of one system onto another.

Photo of mechanical clock mechanism, Ali Abbas 2008

Using a standard mechanical clock mechanism, the device progresses over time as a clock would. By winding the mechanism, the series of gears revolve at the rate of seconds, minutes, hours, days and years.

This system is connected to a revolved set of discs containing simple switches that represent sunrise and sunset. An arm rotates around each disc (a separate disc for each day of the year) over the course of a day. It is connected to the minutes gear, so any movement is directly related to UDC time. As the arm passes the sunset switch, the circuit is complete until it reaches the sunrise switch and a light is activated. The duration of the lit period changes over the course of the year as the length of day becomes shorter or longer.

Drawing of Astrolabe MKII, Pencil drawing, Ali Abbas 2009

The automatic sign produced by the Astrolabe MKII in coordination with the daily celestial cycle eliminates the prerequisite in the Astrolabe to possess knowledge of how the device works, and how to make sense of the overlaid scales. Comprehending the relationship between UDC and sidereal time is effectively democratised. I wasn't actually too happy with the outcome, the drawing was quite nice but I sort of felt like I was creating objects for the sake of creating objects, as opposed to developing the spatial qualities of my work.

Drawing of multiple frames of reference in St Albans, Hand-drawing and collage, Pencil on Watercolour paper, Ali Abbas 2009

So to reinvigourate my project, I decided to use the spatial structure of the Astrolabe (dealing with place, time, culture, celestial spheres, projection, transposing of various scales and means of understanding the world) as a tool for comprehending my site. I created a drawing that exposed the various frames of reference on the site and how they relate to one another.

Map showing Verulamium in relation to the Roman Empire

http:/www.creationism.org/images/SmithBibleAtlas/BibleAtlas/index.htm

Map showing largest Roman cities in Roman Britian and proximity from London. London at the centre, then St Albans, Silchester, Canterbury, Cirencester, Wroxeter

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/19699/19699-h/images/zbritain_roman.png

Beneath contemporary St Albans verulamium park lies the ancient city of Verulamium, the 3rd largest city in Britain during the Roman Empire. The gates located on the surrounding city walls led to Chester, Silchester and London. Within the walls, the urban grain of Verulamium was a typically Roman orthogonal grid, only disrupted on the south side by Watling Street. This angle was believed to be due to a pre-existing Celt settlement.

Map showing Verulamium overlaid onto contemporary St Albans

google earth image

When drawing the site, I feel like it almost is a contemporary astrolabe...with my architectural intervention becoming the means of reading the astrolabe and finding sense between how the various scales interact with one another.

Below are a series of panoramas created to show the landscape I'm dealing with:

View looking South of Verulamium park including Lake and Roman wall ruins, Ali Abbas 2009

View looking North West of Verulamium Park, Ali Abbas 2009

View looking West of Verulamium park, including Roman Wall ruins, Ali Abbas 2009

View looking West of the London Gate of Roman Verulamium and football pitches, Ali Abbas 2009

View looking North of Roman wall ruins

View of side of MUF Architects' Hypocaust Building and Gabion wall landscaping. Looking East. Ali Abbas 2009

Internal image of the Hypocaust building by MUF Architects. The architecture frames the relics; the mirrored ceiling provides glimpses of the outside and inside, and carefully placed openings naturally light parts of the ruins without overexposure. Lovely, modest intervention. I need to make this part of my precedents study. Ali Abbas 2009

The contemporary site of Verulamium contains only fragments of the past, much is undiscovered and hidden beneath the earth. Parts of the wall and London gates have been excavated; the theatre and hypocaust are also exposed. The present landuse is mostly recreational parkland. Part is seasonally occupied by school football fields, and to the north the Verulamium museum exists over the site of the Forum. Coincidentally while I was surveying the site, groundsmen were marking in chalk the position of the football fields. Like they were scarring the landscape with new orientational territories. It creates further interplay between the contemporary and historical Verulamium. The football pitches frame the relics.

Photostitch of Roman wall ruins on east of Verulamium park. Ali Abbas 2009

Groundsman marking out football lines on the Verulamium turf with chalk. Ali Abbas 2009

Aside from these uncovered relics, one can only imagine the extent of the city through the growth of trees beside the line of the Roman wall on the east and North Verulamium perimeter.

Several astronomical phenomena have been particularly inspiring over the past fortnight. The first was an image from Verulamium, The Roman City of St Albans by Rosalind Niblett. Taken during the drought of 1976, the simultaneous record high temperatures and low rainfall led to exceedingly thin soils and the positions of the subterranean roman remains appearing as markings on the fields. Alignment of historical, celestial, geological strata...

Drawing showing image Copyright St Albans Museum and overlayed section through ground, charts showing rainfall and annual temperatures. The drawing illustrates the numerous factors that enabled the markings over the fields of Roman roads appearing during the summer of 1976. Pencil & Photocopied images on Watercolour paper. Ali Abbas 2009

The second was my own experience while studying the site. Standing on the north west side of the site (middle of a field looking eastwards towards the Hypocaust building), with the sun overhead at 2pm (Thursday, 29th January) a ray of light shone towards the St Albans skyline and reflected from a passing train directly towards me. The alignment of the train network (an artificial timing system based on the current cultural routines) and the ever present daily solar location and fluctuating weather conditions seems both coincidental and a phenomenon that occurs only once a year at that particular place and time. For the rest of the year, one can observe the various frames of reference my themselves.

Photo looking East of the St Albans skyline. The Cathedral can be seen to the right of the image. Ali Abbas 2009

Sketch showing the coincidental alignment of Sun, train and human position in the Verulamium landscape. Pencil on Watercolour paper. Ali Abbas 2009

The opportunity to see these aligned reminds me of a passage from Cyber_Reader by Neil Spiller. In Erik Davis_Techgnosis: Magic, Memory and the Angels of Information_1993 he quotes a passage from the Divine Invasion by Phillip K. Dick (Mr. Blade Runner) which says:

'The total structure of Scripture formed, then, a three-dimensional cosmos that could be viewed from any angle and its contents read. According to the tilt of the axis of observation, different messages could be extracted...If you learned how, you could gradually tilt the temporal axis, th axis of true depth, until successive layers were superimposed and a vertical message-a new message-could be read out..' Dick, P. K., 'Man, Android and Machine', in Science Fiction at Large, Peter Nicholls (ed), New York, Harper & Row, 1976, p216

This suggests an opportunity for an architecture that can evoke similar spatial qualities. It can uncover hidden messages, images and memories in the landscape that exist between the various fields of orientation. One can decode (recode) the landscape depending upon how one interacts with the architecture.

This is about as far as my review went. Comments from my crit in the next post...