Hinterland

Last night I was fortunate to be able to go to the Hinterland event at the derelict St.Peter’s seminary in Cardross. As some of you know, my love and fascination with Brutalist architecture goes back a long time, and my years of living at the Barbican centre in London will forever be enshrined in my memory as perfect architectural bliss. The site of the abandoned St.Peter’s seminary has been on my architectural radar for a while, but I had always hesitated to make the trip there for fear of unexpectedly bumping into some of the vandals that have been steadily dismantling the site. I am not talking about some of the absolutely stunning graffiti that has happened there over the years, but rather the smashing of the fairly sizeable altar stone (how???) and other such random acts of destruction. So when the Hinterland event was announced as part of the opening event of the Festival of Architecture 2016, my tickets to go were booked immediately.

Arriving at the site by shuttle bus, we were handed illuminated walking sticks to navigate through the dense woodlands along a footpath that featured a rather spooky sound installation on some sections and led to the small back door of the sacristy. The outer wall of the sacristy immediately reminded me very strongly of Le Corbusier’s Chapelle Notre-Dame-du-Haut, with its incredible thickness and tiny square windows set deep into the wall. The highly regarded chapel was completed in 1955, a mere eleven years before the seminary opened in 1966. Le Corbusier was reportedly a significant influence on architects Gillespie, Kidd & Coia, and this is evident in many of the features of this beautiful Scottish Brutalist masterpiece, such as the long columnar walkways, the open layout of the main spaces and the tiny dimensions of the novice’s individual cells.

Following a sloped, spiral walkway into the main hall of the seminary to the broken altar, the light installation staged by NVA created a surreal and fantastical colourful landscape on the graffitied walls and pillars of the seminary. In what used to be the central area of the knave, an oversized ceremonial pendulum was suspended over a shallow pool of water and occasionally set in motion by two priest-like protagonists, spewing forth thick white smoke. This was accompanied by eerie abstract choral singing and a ritual of welding steel inside a cage situated on the far side of the pool, creating an incredible interplay of shadow and bright white light on the ceiling, columnar wall and surface of the water. Progressing through the seminary, it became obvious what a tranquil and meditative space it used to be, and this struck me most when coming out of the recreation block into a secluded inner courtyard. The seminary is much more compact in scale than I expected and from ground level a warren of complementary geometries opened up like a darkly lit multistorey labyrinth. We spent about two hours at the site itself, and even though photography was not permitted inside the building, I managed to take a few of the outside as seen from the garden, although many more beautiful professional images have been released online since the event opened last week, and there is also some video footage  by others on Youtube.

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Arts organisation NVA have recently taken on the site, with an exceptional vision to turn it into a venue where experimental art and community engagement events can take place – head over to their website to watch the beautifully shot promotional video that explains their plans better than I could, and maybe make a small donation? Further funding of £4.2 million has just been announced and it now looks like all the pieces are in place to go ahead with the building plans and hopefully re-open in 2017/18. I was particularly pleased to hear that they want to remake the large lantern skylight that was lost over the years, and which was a particularly stunning feature of the original building. For a glimpse of what the seminary was like when initially built and used by the Catholic church to train priests, have a look at this fascinating footage from the 1972 architectural documentary “Space and Light” by Murray Grigor. In 2009, Grigor also released the shot-by-shot re-make companion piece “Space and Light Revisited”, visually contrasting the current decaying state of the seminary with its pristine original condition. I am already very excited about seeing the restored building in the near future, hopefully to return and take some more competent photographs.

Making a PCB – the Jeweller’s way! (Part 1)

Sometimes, having trained as a jeweller is surprisingly useful when it comes to working with electronics. After finally having got my head round the way in which ICs are programmed and used on circuit boards with this handy programmer, I decided that the easiest way to incorporate small-scale electronic components in my jewellery was to make a customised PCB (Printed Circuit Board) – it was time to put the theory into action! Not only would creating custom PCBs save me a whole lot of cash (the components are a fraction of the price of a finished circuit board), but it would also allow me to fully control the shape and size of my PCBs.

The first step in this endeavour was creating the circuit design files. Now, there are a number of ways to do this, and which method you use depends largely on your skill base, the complexity of the circuit you want to design and what method you will be using to produce the final board. There are a lot of great freeware packages available online, the most popular probably being the EAGLE PCB software offered by cadsoft. However, I could not get the freeware version to install on my system, and so decided to look for alternatives in the meantime. Fritzing offers a PCB generator as part of its package, but I wanted to use a software that would let me customise tracks and components easily, while offering a library of ‘pre-fab’ parts to play with until I am more familiar with the pin spacing of components and minimum track widths, so after a false start with the very basic FreePCB, in the end I chose the DesignSpark PCB package (v.7.1). Equipped with a full library of parts, as well as a searchable online database of parts offered by UK electronics distributor RS components, this program was really easy to use and before long I had laid down my first PCB design. For the experts out there it is also possible to make PCB layouts in any vector-based graphics software (such as Adobe Illustrator), but of course you will have to be 100% certain of your design as there are no automatic checks or set design rules in a graphics application. DesignSpark has customisable rules and warns you if components are spaced too closely together or if there are missed connections. It is by no means perfect, and I ended up tweaking some of my PCB designs in Illustrator after finalising the layout in DesignSpark to account for crooked or awkward tracks, as well as adding my logos to the boards.

Once I was happy with my designs, I tried to figure out which would be the best way to get them onto the copper covered particle board. After initially considering using the iModela at our MakeSpace, I decided that maybe the old ways are the best and ordered the chemicals required for photoetching. From my time as an undergraduate at ECA I still had some PNP blue resist lying around the studio, and even though some people swear by the slightly more accurate UV-exposure method for transferring your artwork to the resist, if you have a laser printer at home the PNP is easily the most hassle-free solution. After transferring your design to the dull side of the film with a laser printer or photocopier, the film is ironed onto the thoroughly cleaned and de-greased surface of your PCB board. When ironing on the resist, don’t put too much pressure on the iron, as it can spread the ink and make your tracks bleed into each other. There are some great tutorials online about this process, although I would recommend the use of a glassfibre brush (available from enamelling suppliers) for degreasing your board rather than acetone, as it is more reliable and there’s no need for chemicals.

Once you have transferred your artwork to the board, gently peel off the PNP film, and touch up any imperfections or gaps with a black indelible marker pen. In order to preserve the rest of your board, mask off any areas that are not to be etched with brown parcel tape. You should end up with something like this:

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The shiny exposed copper areas are going to be etched away, leaving only the black track marks behind. Depending on which chemical you use, prepare as stated on the packaging and fill a small plastic tub with just enough solution to cover your particle board. Gently slide in your board, and agitate the solution roughly every two minutes either with a feather or by gently tipping the tub from side to side. Eventually, all the copper will have been eaten away by the acid, at which point the board needs to be removed quickly from the acid bath with plastic tweezers and rinsed thoroughly under running water. Don’t ever leave your board unattended in the acid, as the acid can undercut the tracks if left too long. Some people have also successfully used the sponge etching method, but I prefer the traditional way as you have a lot less direct contact with the chemicals. After the board has been thoroughly rinsed, you can remove the parcel tape and the resist with acetone.The end result will look similar to this:

First PCB03See how to finish the job in part II…