Here's the dude that's burning black the last of our home's larch cladding. The final few bits are going up today (before 4pm when they all speed off to drink barrel loads of beer)... yay!

I know it's Halloween and all, but I was still ill-prepared for the horror of seeing our little roundhouse without a roof today. That's me standing frightened among the builders who assure us that, from now on in, they'll be more and not less to look at. Pity you can't see my shoes though; they're wildly inappropriate!

Albeit in a slightly different location, our funny little mill was once sketched by Turner. Having severed one worker's arm and seen-off a highly unfortunate woman, it finally succumbed to flame in 1909. Hopefully we'll add another layer to centuries of history here with last week's granting of full planning permission for extensive alterations.

Finished mostly in burned black larch, this new structure may still look a ruin. And, if obtaining permission was tough, getting the thing up on a slender budget could prove even tougher. Still, we're celebrating. These are Edward's original sketches; insufficient for builder's measurements but good enough for building impressions!

It was Edward's birthday this week so I bought him some fudge. He also picked out an expensive strap for his Bulova Accutron. We first saw the Spaceview in a video outlining the ethos of architect Richard Rogers, and it's an interesting looking thing, but instead of ticking it emits an electronic whine that makes the cat frown.

Hans Hollein (1934-2014)

Image: European Centre of Volcanism, 1994-2002, Auvergne, France

We spent the best part of last week eating our way around the London streets like Pacman. Moments before I booked an hotel, a friend offered us her garden studio flat. In the light of these beautiful spring mornings, it felt more like a summer house.

I'd intended to visit more galleries but so many were between shows. I did check out the Serpentine's additional new Sackler Space though. Martino Gamper: Design is a State of Mind is well-paired to the concurrent Haim Steinbach show, Once Again the World is Flat; both explore notions of display and place the shelf centre stage. The show flows seamlessly into a shop that's curated by Momosan.

The boy stayed with his grandparents and had an exhibition of his own... in crayon on their wallpaper! We all came back a little bit fatter.

Geodesic Doom

Unless they're world famous, say, The Golden Gate or, more latterly, Øresund, bridges tend to connect destinations rather than form destinations in themselves. This being said, I was curious to see the new Adur Ferry Bridge on a recent visit to the Shoreham. Replacing the charming-but-reedy walkway, cast from concrete in the 1920s, this glass and steel hybrid for pedestrians and cyclists has transformed the way people use the town.

 

On the way home we take the coastal road, flanked with warehouses and processing plants, more like massive machines than buildings proper. Kingston Baci lighthouse is still there, topped inexplicably with a bronze sphere, but something else is missing; the dark geodesic dome that glowered like an HQ for sci-fi baddies.

One day planning and conservation officers will get their knickers all twisted over odd, outmoded structures like these but, for now at least, they're preserved for posterity on Google Street View.

Last week we took full advantage of a lull in stormy weather and caught the tail-end of Philip Guston and Basil Beatie at the Jerwood in Hastings. Here's my son talking me through the finer points of British abstraction... before making his own composition in macaroni cheese from the café upstairs.

The work of HAT Projects, the building itself is a worthy addition to the coastline; the ceramic cladding appears black like surrounding fishing huts, but has an added oily pearlescence. I'm baffled to learn of local pressure to resist gallery plans, after all, if this town has another attraction they keep it very well hidden.

Star Shape

Just how Christmassy does Marina Abramović's star-shaped house look with a light sprinkling of snow? I'm surprised it hasn't all melted with her super intense art energy.

Built Black

This week, we paid a visit to the brand-spanking wing of Ditchling Museum; its black zinc bulk looked as impressive in the thin winter sun as it does in this austere artist's impression. I have a thing for black buildings right now; whether they're charred like the gorgeous Hunsett Mill in Norfolk or tarred-sticky like Norway's Knut Hamsun Centre and Shingle House (not too far from Derek Jarman's garden at Prospect Cottage). Oddly, my favourite (Sottsass Associates’ Bischofberger House, Zurich) doesn't really feature online anywhere… yet.

Life

If you're not running too late you can glimpse the curious new Design Museum taking shape behind the hoardings on route to Kensington Olympia... not that Olympia didn't have enough curios of its own at Top Drawer trade fair earlier this week. It's been predictably good to catch up with old friends (now stockists), Black Bough and some of our oldest friends (also now stockists), Present London.

It wasn't all familiar faces though, we spent a few days in the spirited company of Joy, Anna and Rose of London Pooch and Anna Wright, even getting to meet Polly, one half of pattern-mad design duo, Wrap. While I admit the current copy (No.8) is my first, at least I can check out those back issues while I wait for more!

Too preoccupied to scour the charity shops proper, we did find a copy of Charlotte Salomon's (1917—1943) extraordinary document Life? or Theatre? in Oxfam, W8. This untimely 836 page tome dates from the early 1940s and forms a dream-like diary, or early graphic novel, where each gouache panel becomes a fevered or fluid artwork in its own right.

This week's downers include a couple of council reps putting the kibosh on our plans for home improvement... on the plus side, we've been wearing sandals! (Is it wrong to want the black pair too?)

• Paolo Soleri, 1919—2013, architect of under-populated Arizona ecotopia, Arcosanti. Wonderful pictures found here and here.

Whoever designed this flyer must be too cool for Crimbo or something... what's with the architecture and bold sans serif? I want sausage dogs in Santa hats with jingle bells galore. Still, hopefully the event will be full of festive fun with bargains by the sack-load. I'll be selling my usual quality seconds at rock-bottom prices and getting all squiffy on warm beverages that taste like old man's aftershave. Now, that must have sold it to you!

Friday December 7, 6.30pm-10.30pm
Saturday December 8 2012, 12pm-6pm
Great Western Studios, 65 Alfred Road, London W2

Hubbub

Spent last weekend staying with pals in London's bright autumnal sunlight. We felt like just-landed aliens from a US film, eyeing the human hubbub and sudden wealth of stuff with a too naked curiosity, putting away pastries like we'd never tasted your Earth food.

The baby went to his first private view too, Hannah Sawtell's crisply coherent Vendor at the Bloomberg Space but like good parents we swerved the after-show party for some more of your Earth food. And, though we'd missed the opening of Simon Martin's UR Feeling at The Camden Arts Centre, we caught up with him after the Sunday talk from Frieze's Dan Fox.

Simon's work may look like a dour museological re-presentation of the C20th anthropological artefact but plays-out like an ultra-hip cultural studies lecture. Neither entirely canonical nor wholly obscure, works selected here seem to operate on the boundaries of this-or-that discipline. This sharp curatorial collection forms the research for a forthcoming film and includes pieces from Sottsass, Burton and Shore, alongside his own open-edition poster, a knowing skit on the structural exposé of New Wave marketing. 

from top: Richard Artschwager, Chair, edition of 6, 1965-2000 // Storm Thorgerson/Hipgnosis, LP cover for XTC's Go2, 1978 // Ettore Sottsass/Memphis, Malabar room divider, 1982 // Stephen Shore, Twenty-First and Spruce Street, 1974

Kiosk

We've been selling this card for over a year now, but every time it went onto screen some aspect of the artwork was missing; once the heart, then the poodle's bow! Finally printing off a few hundred, I got to thinking about the telephone box (the K2 in particular) and how the curve of the roof is based on Sir John Soane's family tomb. Part of his own architectural vernacular, you can see the domed-square especially clearly on The Dulwich Picture Gallery. This seemed like the kind of trivia you might pick up watching The London Nobody Knows (1969) or, even better, Patrick Kellior's elegiac London (1994).

Of all paeans to London though, Patrick Hamilton's Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky (1935) steals the best title, suggesting the manifold intertwining narratives of millions, humbled by the city's scale. But then I accidentally read Wordsworth's Upon Westminster Bridge (1802) while searching for something in an entirely different emotional key. Just beautiful.

Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth like a garment wear

The beauty of the morning: silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky,
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.

Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour valley, rock, or hill;
Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!

The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!

Though I love the name Ira, we'd pretty much settled on Eli for the kid... a pity then that Chris Evans nabbed it so publicly last week. He gets called Meatloaf or Frazzle-Face right now, but I think we're pitching for Orson; it sounds a bit like 'Our Son', teams well with Underwood, and —even better— means bear-like. Trouble is, everybody says 'Like Orson Welles?'... whose real name was George.

 

There's a few other Orsons though; the feral original from a 14th century tale Valentine & Orson (pictured here in a 1566 street theatre study from Bruegel), or the intense looking phrenologist, Orson Squire Fowler, advocator of social reform and octagonal houses. With all this quick Wikipedia knowledge, I should apply for a job as a research assistant!

• model-maker's pic from the amazing smallhousepress

,',','

Rats! I think I've got a dose of the national pastime, obsessing over the weather. It could have its own clickable category here on the right but it just wouldn't be fair to the rest.

• Façades & Faces, Osbert Lancaster, John Murray 1950

The short answer to Milly's recent question is yes... there's fewer walls to bounce off. I'd love to post some more pics of our home online, but the tiny stone yurt still needs so much attention. Here's an exterior view from 1935; a well-cropped shot of the interior; another rundhaus in Aalen, Germany; and The Round Building in Derbyshire (ostensibly a factory), designed by Michael Hopkins for David Mellor in 1990.

The latter's circularity isn't entirely void of symbolic content; it's interesting to note that, eschewing the prevalent C20 trend for Fordism, Mellor encouraged his metal workers to "rotate from task to task, increasing job satisfaction through a sense of involvement in the project as a whole".[1]

Culpable Earth

We didn't make it to the opening night of an old friend's exhibition, for a pregnant woman it seemed far too far for a couple of hours of standing and shmoozing. Hopefully we made up for it by taking the round trip to Colchester a couple of weeks later. Standing over the final plinth of Steven Claydon's Culpable Earth (lathed wooden cylinders resembling tins, a modular Euclidean cube in red on a recessed back-lit resin bed) another visitor struck-up conversation.

Like most awkward people, I tend to deflect suspected small-talk with a series of stock responses (you know the drill, every statement a light conclusion, never a leading question. Polite and trite in equal measure), and yet this energetic septuagenarian engendered something else entirely. Emboldened and enlivened by the work, we all spoke for a time about the stranglehold of Catholic symbolism; object/artefact/relic; transubstantiation and the appearance of matter; the pure becoming of life; the imperceptible end of a bell's open note; and his expansive hunch that some moments can never be truly lost in time but continue to unfold everywhere and always at once.

On the train back to Liverpool Street we laughed at the way the stranger had become and integral part of the show... or at least our experience of it. It's a pity he won't be waiting there for everyone, an uplifting and interpretive tool for an artist who's often awkward and always engaging. Sure, Essex isn't the most glamourous destination but with an ancillary gallery pairing Constable's cloud studies with Carl Andre's infamous Equivalent VIII, there's certainly a stack of reasons for visiting Firstsite this season.

Steven Claydon: Culpable Earth, 4 February - 7 May 2012

Firstsite, Lewis Gardens, High Street, Colchester CO1 1JH

• from Steven Claydon's Culpable Earth, 2012 [Andy Keate]
• Firstsite, Colchester, Rafael Viñoly Architects, 2012 [Richard Bryant]
• John Constable, Rainstorm over the Sea, c.1824-1828
• Carl Andre, Equivalent VIII, 1978, Firebricks