ABSTRACT
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.
