Being employed by Birkbeck College School of Law in London, while also

attending the postgraduate programme at the Bartlett School of Architecture, I

had occasion to walk around the Bloomsbury area of London quite a bit. Doing

so, I began to notice one or two peculiar ‘architectural’ features that set me

thinking. I put ‘architectural’ in quotes, because to refer to these features as

architectural is actually a bit of a stretch: they don’t derive from, or aspire to,

the tradition of architectural craft that seeks, at its best, to combine aesthetic

possibility with the potentials of social and political life. Rather, these features

seemed to be afterthoughts, ad hoc additions that, in an extremely rough and

ready manner, sought to answer an apparent problem that, at the time of the

architectural plan, had not been foreseen. Being improvised, these features have

no common factor in the usual sense of architectural design or form, making it

difficult to group them within a particular category or genre. What they do share

is an intent, or particular relation to the world. Consequently, their commonality

is more virtual than actual (but nonetheless real), and it was this in particular that

forced me to start thinking about them.