I am going to Scandinavian countries and Germany soon and I was choosing guidebooks for my trip. "Every Swede's dream is to own a loghouse in the forest facing a river,"  a guidebook said. Ah, reading this while surrounded by Scottish accent, tell me that this is the key difference between Scots and Swedes. Although both of them have great landscapes, but why it seems that the familial optimism that shines through Carl Larsson's paintings, Bergman's Wild Strawberry and IKEA's catalogues don't seem to have its counterparts in Scotland? The bleakness of films like Young Adam, Trainspotting, or the teased upon Thorfinn in Beside the Ocean of time by George Mackay Brown. The only close thing to Carl, is Charles Rennie Mackintosh, the Glaswegian Art Nouveau artist/architect. But it seems to me that he didn't thrive or had a good time in Scotland(being snubbed by his contemporaries, not receiving commission for new buildings and focused on watercolours, escaping to the south of France).

Back to my own experience and observations on Scotland within this 1 year, it seems that Scottish life doesn't have a big difference to the rest of the British one.(at least in the university). Alcohol, going out, gossips, irregular and unhealthy meals and trashy magazines. What they aspire for is the kitschy glamour found in a club. Where do the rolling landscapes, ever-flowing rivers and the clear sky play in this culture? Where are the people who can speak eloquently of what they think, instead of using that self-contained pool of thought-terminating cliches. Just answer every question with the standard answer: cool.

I am sure that there is something underneath this glass layer. Can anyone tell me how to read the Scottish psyche? 



 

Scotland is unwell

Scotland is neither the best wee country, nor the worst, but at least it is one of the most reflective and reforming.
 
Pat Kane 
guardian.co.uk, Monday 11 June 2007 19.15 BST 
Article history

If there was ever a newsflash to channel the deepest anxieties of the Scottish psyche, it's the one that appeared in this morning's bulletins. As the BBC story succinctly put it, "Scotland is 'worst small country'".

Given that this headline is clearly riffing on one of the shallowest boasts from the Scottish psyche - the previous Labour administration's branding of Scotland as "the best small country in the world" - you could be forgiven for passing the story over as a mere battle of the memes. (It's also, perhaps, a chance to write a headline that Salmond-weary sub-editors throughout these islands couldn't possibly resist). The truth will, statistically and eventually, end up somewhere in between.

But the report from John McLaren, a respected adviser to both previous Scottish governments and the UK Treasury, is intriguing enough to give pause. He's used the latest OECD statistics on the performance of successful European nations, using indices of GDP, employment, education and health.

The particular measure that generated the headlines was confined to a list of 'small' nations (under 9 million population). And where Scotland performs averagely on GDP, and somewhat better than average in rates of employment and education, it's the health and life-expectancy rates that drag Scotland way down to the bottom of that list.

Indeed, in terms of life expectancy, Scotland is bottom of the OECD's list of the world's 24 most prosperous countries. (If our health indicators were at an average level, says McLaren, Scotland would sit just behind the oft-quoted paragon of Finland in terms of overall national performance).

Why might this be so? In a country whose previous devolved governments have been notable for their zeal in public health - whether taking the lead in banning smoking in public areas, or funding incessant and expensive campaigns on exercise, diet and wellbeing - it seems faintly weird that the statistics are sliding into reverse.

McLaren's report itself contains many subtleties, though. He emphasizes how Glasgow's particularly terrible performance in terms of deprivation was a major factor in dragging down the overall Scottish mean. (There can be as much as a twenty-year gap in life expectancy between rich and poor areas of Glasgow). A recent report from Demos on Glasgow, The Dreaming City, was attacked by the local council for giving voice to many of the misgivings that Glasgow residents have about the extremes of affluence and poverty in the city.

And if you live here, you know that Glasgow is becoming a dark, divided place - where criminal networks are never far away from stylish bars or consumer emporia, and where the drugs economy grips large areas of estates, filled with the 'flotsam and jetsam' (to use an SNP ministers words) left over by the end of industrialism. CiF's own Christopher Harvie has called Glasgow a "fortress of illegalism".

But as McLaren also points out, Scotland contains Orkney too - where positive lifestyle indicators are on the increase, and where there may be "insights into how Scotland can change for the better without necessitating large increases in income across the board".

On this economic point, the real politics come into play. For one of the most important ideological disputes in the new, post-SNP-government Scotland is the question of economic growth - and a presumption that employment and enterprise reverses all negatives. The SNP edged over the line into power with a pretty fair wind behind it from the business community. Moguls and gurus of all kinds declared themselves economic patriots, to the extent that the SNP (at least in its ambitions for independence) could reconfigure the country as a pro-enterprise, pro-growth zone.

It should be noted that the McLaren report wasn't commissioned by a charity, NGO or public sector agency, but by the Federation of Small Businesses. The patriotic anxiety of business leaders about wasted potential in Scottish life shouldn't be underestimated.

Yet will more jobs, more work - whether "endogenously" created, through a revival of native Scottish enterprise, or "exogenously" imported, through grants and tax-breaks - necessarily improve these appalling health outcomes? Before we get to some Scandinavian ideal - where skilled, motivated and equitably paid workers put their committed labours into robust national companies - many parts of Scotland have a long, long way to travel.

To a degree, the 'positive', 'can-do' politics of progressive nationalism can create the mood-state within which potentials can be raised. The rise of 'netroots' activity in Scotland (much of it focussing on the call for a people-driven Constitutional Convention) is an attempt to exploit that mood-state. They're consciously using Web 2.0 technologies to encourage Scottish consumers of media to become producers of media - piggy-backing on a spirit of creativity and activism that's already abroad in popular culture.

Yet such citizens' endeavours could only provide a marginal uplift, when faced with the hundreds of thousands of exhausted, listless, self-loathing Scots who occupy these health and mortality statistics. Employment for its own sake, or an active citizenry, might not be enough to address the extremes of Scots' negativity towards the future of their own bodies.

Salmond knows what he's doing when he bids for this or that sporting extravaganza to come to Scotland. Sport is the simplest cultural solution to the lifting of spirits in Scotland. But that's ultimately a cheap and easy fix, deployed with some regularity in Holyrood over the last decade. And it doesn't seem to have resulted in an outbreak of mass athleticism (a la Australia).

Remember, this is the nation that spawned Irvine Welsh, whose scepticism of all positive lifestyle narratives- "Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television" (Trainspotting) - is even more mordantly captured in the title of his forthcoming short story collection: If You Like School, You'll Love Work.

The legacy of Presbyterianism in Scotland - that sense of one's life trajectory being predestined, and demanding a life of toil in the meantime - has always generated its anarchist and hedonist response in Scotland (see the much lamented televisual Diogenes, Rab C Nesbitt).

But an overbearing sense of responsibility and guilt, relieved by the occasional eruption of self-destructive disorder, is hardly a recipe for bodily and mental wellbeing. All the epidemiologists and psychologically-informed economists have been telling us recently, in the happiness debates, that mental health directly affects physical health. The peculiarities of Scottish collective identity must surely have its effects also.

We take care of ourselves, simply put, when we feel we have a future that requires us to be healthy and active. So the lack of self-care in far too much of the Scottish population - mostly in Glasgow, but clearly throughout the rest of the country as well - has to be tied to the continuing growth of a much bigger "post-materialist" narrative, becoming generic throughout the developed world, about the purposefulness of life in general.

There is no doubt that an assertive Scottish government could make native links between this general anxiety, and a daily desire to be an active shaper of the nation's destiny. For example, a 'green' Scotland could be more than just a nervous and defensive response to climate change, but also be about gearing up its population to be mass innovators in environmental technologies and practices.

There might even be a kind of answer here to the proletarian vacuum left by the end of industrial Scotland, and whose psychic wounds have clearly not been closed over by welfare dependency and popular culture. A "sustainable Scotland" could be a hands-on, technique-intensive, solidarity-oriented, we're-all-in-this-together activity - where communities rebuild and redesign themselves, in concert with Scottish companies and enterprises, animated by a clear sense of national direction.

Well, it's one idea. But the strangeness of these Scottish health statistics, in a nation otherwise economically and educationally robust, might require even more off-the-wall notions. Neither the best wee country, nor the worst, but at least one of the most reflective and reforming, might well be a start.

PBS interview of Maya Lin (3.0 Mb)

Love research and landscapes,
she must be me in a parallel world.

via: Grapevine.is




Glaswegian artist Katie Paterson
She does work about Vatnajökull glacier.
Dial the glacier (April 2 – June 1): +44 (0)7757001122
www.katiepaterson.org




What is it about the clear air,
the steambeam connecting the sky and the thermal bath?
The black beach and the pale Icelanders?
The ring of a rust bell
and the roar of the weather front?

I wanted to know more about cabins, because I have decided to build them for my project.
I had some thoughts i really like already, and then i saw this blog.
http://www.shedworking.co.uk/

It got every information I want to know about cabins, and it gives me, without exaggeration, orgasmic excitement to see so many mind-bogging pieces.
And then after sex all animals are sad. I feel really scared because I think I can add so many things into my original design. And it shakes my original belief on whether my original design is really good enough.

It feels like going into a furniture shop and almost everything is so great and free, but you have not enough time, not enough space at home to put them in.

I get this extreme high when I am coolhunting on the web/library. I feel even more unexplainably high when I see some coincidences or some hidden relationship between two things when on the surface they seem not a bit related.

But this excitement also comes with a frustration that you cannot tell others exactly what you found exciting, because the journey from the starting point of researching to the current point is too convoluted.

This problem plays a big part in my studies. In my course, you have to find yourself some examples of others' work, preferably(to my tutors) 'masters' of architecture, ie those people in the canon of great architects. I think many of my classmates are not adventurous enough to find their own favourites and they are not really excited by those architects they quote. Maybe it's because the time allowed for us to do research is very limited, and the working process has to be crystal clearly presented. So even the path of my research is like a maze, I still have to describe in words and drawings on sketchbooks the whole thing. So that many of us choose to do 1 portion of research, 9 portion of documentation. But for an information-surfer like me, I can do 10 portion of research and 0 portion of documentation. This was the main reason I didn't do well last project.

But then the lust for information and fear of missing out treasures are too big.

I am honing up my instinct on my way I think. Instinct is the most useful thing during this time. It tells me what I really need and what I want to put there just to make my project looks more glamourous.

I found that when I trust my instinct, things usually fall into place when you see from hindsight.

Does architectural research suit me better?
 

 

Today I was talking to my friend that I don't want to further my design on the current project, because I think it is in its optimum now. He asked me if there is anything called overdesigning. "Yes, it is when you try to be 'too clever'," I said.

Actually I am not definitely if there is anything as such in architectural design. I was told that I was trying to be to clever when I was doing A-Level art. It was something I couldn't understand at that time. I asked an art history student if there was such thing, and he said my teacher had a sound artistic mind.

I think overdesigning means making things too complicated, like trying to force similes or proverbs (esp in Chinese composition) into a sentence, while making it sounds clumsy or not elegant. This is how kitsch is produced.

But then, isn't it more sensible to experiment(/"develop", an architecture student buzzword) more, hence increasing the volume of process in a first year project to show that I am not a slacker? I remember there was a scene in Project Runway when a contestant made something quite nice, but very plain. The judge(should be Michael Kors slashed his design, saying that he was provided a week, so that he should have produced something "more".

 

 I have decided to spend my time on detailing that design I like, because to force the design further won't bear any fruit. I will just be stacking Play-Doh without reasoning and get annoyed by it.