cityofsound

Recent and forthcoming

Spot of admin, forgive me. I'm doing a presentation at Creative Social tomorrow night (Thursday 14th May 2008), here in Sydney. This particular edition of Creative Social is organised by my friend Tim Buesing, and forms part of a wider global network of workshop-style sessions and presentations aimed at creative directors. I'll be doing something around these themes of urban informatics, or how information and communications technologies are re-shaping all things urban: form, everyday life, planning, wayfinding, architecture, public space and so on. Keynote is glaring at me from the dock, below, so I'd better get to it shortly.

I gave a precursor of the talk at a public lecture organised by University of Technology Sydney, a couple of months ago. I was invited by Adrian Lahoud, and it formed part of an excellent series of public lectures around architecture and urbanism. If you're at a loose end in Sydney tomorrow evening and would prefer an alternative to my talk, you could do worse than go and see the next installment in the lecture series, delivered by none other than the Lord Mayor of City of Sydney, Clover Moore MP. She'll no doubt be majoring on their recently launched Sustainable Sydney 2030 strategy, much inspired by Jan Gehl's recent report for the City of Sydney. I'll post my own thoughts on all that soon enough.

For my lecture, I essentially 'performed' my Street as Platform piece, augmented with candid pics from a recent trip to Melbourne. I think it worked well, as a kind of freeze-framed narrative, in terms of conveying how much the street weighs these days, as Bucky might say, when you take into account the largely unseen digital communications. I called it The Not-So-Quiet City this time, as a nod to Aaron Copland's lovely 'Quiet City' piece of 1941, and to play up the sensory design aspects. This was partly due to it being a roundtable on 'Atmospheric Urbanism', where I was presenting alongside the excellent Nadia Wagner, a researcher in 'urban olfactics'. Her work is absolutely fascinating, and most Pallasmaa. The reason I think the two lectures worked well is that we got some absolute corkers in terms of questions afterwards, many of which have been percolating through my mind ever since. And I'm still not sure I have particularly concrete thoughts on them. "What is the creative challenge for architecture, in response to all this?" was one intriguing question in particular, a googly bowled by the ever-thoughtful Lahoud. (He's organised a follow-up roundtable too.)

Next week, Duncan Wilson and I are attending the Pervasive 08 conference here in Sydney. Our position paper was accepted by the workshop on Pervasive Persuasive Technology and Environmental Sustainability and so Duncan and I will be taking part in that, alongside a bunch of international researchers and practitioners in this area, such as the likes of Eric Paulos, Paul Dourish, Tom Igoe et al. I'm looking forward to the whole conference hugely and hope to post our paper shortly, including reflections on the workshop.

One of the workshop organisers is Marcus Foth of QUT (previously, here), and in June I hope to be attending a related conference at QUT, organised by their Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCI). Called Creating Value: Between Commerce and Commons, the workshops on 'Broadband innovations and the creative economy' and 'Creative Industry development agendas: design as value-add' look great. Richard Allen of Cisco is a particularly good addition to the cast of speakers (see also Henry Jenkins.)

Finally, in July, I'm speaking at Design Capital, part of the State of Design festival in Melbourne, as part of the 'Convergent World' session on day 3. It'll be great to hook up with friends like Allan Chochinov of Core77 and Michael Trudgeon of Crowd, and to meet a few new people too.  Also happy to say I'm a judge in the 2008 Premier's Design Awards there too.

Do get in touch if you're in town at the same time, or want more info on any of the events.  More news to follow, and then a return to your usual programming.

"How much?" A question about imageability and seams in transport fare systems

(Something of a follow-up post to the recent transport informatics survey.) A recent conversation with Jarrett Walker, a consultant based here in Sydney, popped up the following thought. Jarrett, experienced in metropolitan transit systems, was thinking through ideas around fare pricing given the new possibilities enabled by fully automated systems.

Design of fare structures have been fundamental to transit planning for years, attempting to define charges for journeys in equitable yet efficient fashion. Balancing those last two factors mean that the basic problem is often shot through with tensions - e,g, richer suburbs paying less than poorer, due to zoning often based on radial principles emanating from a central core, and so on. Jarrett knows more about that than I. Whatever, existing systems based around zones etc. do at least usually have a stated, consistent pricing for journeys that can be easily communicated, even if not necessarily agreed with.

However, Jarrett was wondering about some emerging thinking he'd heard around the possibilities of new smart card-based, integrated ticketing systems, and the sense that varying prices could be generated in real-time, based on variables like distance, time of day, number of passengers on board, overall running costs of the system at that point, demand etc. That you wouldn't know the actual price you'd been charged for that particular journey and that actually, you needn't. You just swipe the card and conduct your journey, in the knowledge you'll have pre-paid to a certain amount, or pay a monthly bill subsequently. You'll trust the system will charge you fairly, of course, and you could see the breakdown of costs at the end of the month, or when your pre-pay card needs topping up, and so on.

(As an analogy, you'd contend that few people really know/care the exact cost of each one of their phone calls, for instance. The payment is represented by sometimes complex monthly plans, based around a number of free minutes/texts that are bundled, a certain number free within a network and so on. Obviously, some do know what they pay each time, but hasn't the general tendency has been towards bundling into monthly packages, abstracting away from pricing the actual individual calls at time of connection? With a pay-as-you-go model for those without financial security.)

So the drift towards an ongoing service model of variable pricing bundled into pre-paid or direct-debited packages seems an option. With an increasing deployment of GPS devices in all vehicles and RFID-based tracking of passenger entry/egress, it seems likely that some transit systems will try this out, in effect neatly hiding the complexity of pricing from the citizen.

This is partly also due to the sheer complexity of pricing systems e.g. Sydney's train system alone has over 120 'fare products', apparently. Multiply that by ferry, bus and light rail. This fare complexity is largely a result of attempting to be equitable, and at the moment the complexity is shared by both system operator and customers.

However, Jarrett wondered whether citizens might actually want to understand, or engage with, their public transport system a little more deeply. That pricing is one way of perceiving the structure of the transport system, and that's something that customers might innately want to do. He thought that it might be important to perceive how the system works, at least as expressed in fare structures. It's a map of the city, in a sense. In a city like London, the topography is overlaid with a mental model of the zones, which take on a kind of meaning over and above fare products (I proudly lived in zone 1, would more or less travel to zone 2, and so on.)

When he asked me the question about whether perceiving the sysetm was important, I immediately thought of the importance of seams and imageability.

Seamfulness, some long time readers will know, is a particular interest here (and of others, like Anne Galloway and Adam Greenfield.) It holds that a desire to hide complexity via an apparently perfect, hermetically-sealed product can actually mitigate against a successful informational system.

A classic example here is the iPod, which given its undoubted success also indicates how complex the argument is. That success is down to its carefully linked system architecture with iTunes as well as its rigorously reduced interface and seductive aesthetic. And yet its alleged undoing is also to do with its 'perfect' design, in that batteries are difficult to replace (meaning most people don't) and that it's a music experience that can't be tweaked or modified much. You could argue that if the iPod showed its seams a little more, it would be more malleable as a device, and even more engaging as a product experience. Doing that without damaging its seductive sheen and usability would be tricky but potentially rewarding. That old "beautiful seams" ambition.

The other reference is of Kevin Lynch's concept of imageablity, from his pivotal book The Image of the City, which I've always thought should apply to system design - the ability to perceive the system around you (visually, spatially, intellectually) and be left with a strong 'image' of its structure. Also known as legibility. A few years ago Peter Lindberg developed the idea specifically around software architecture, and I've subsequently thought it an essential feature of good system design (whether the system is a building, a music-playing device, a transport system or indeed Grand Theft Auto.)

So it seems to me that the ability to show/hide structural detail is fundamentally important element of a system. It enables the legibility of the system. And that showing a bit more detail, if carefully and sensitively articulated, can only engage the user further. Not necessarily exposing minute technical detail - though a handful will always want that - but enabling perception of the basic ambit, structure, joints, seams, influences, and so on. It certainly enables that form of engagement known as adaptation or even hacking - not in the pejorative sense of the word - but in the sense of building upon systems and extending them - as we've seen with transit systems that do begin to expose their behaviour.

And of course, as these and similar pervasive systems migrate into many spheres of life, deciding how visible to make parameters, motives and controls becomes even more important. Will hiding such intricacies reduce civic engagement in urban information systems? Or conversely, will its seamless design lead to increased take-up of services like public transport and thereby greater civic engagement?

What do you think? I'm aware that I'm posing the question to a particular audience, but do you think that, in this case, a transport system that has a choice to hide the potential complexity of a fare system should do that? Or should it reveal its complexity either through having set fares or by displaying the calculated fare on the spot? Does convenience trump legibility?

50/60/70: Iconic Australian Houses, by Karen McCartney

This is a handsome coffee table book. Literally. It's full of handsome houses with handsome coffee tables. Every house in this book of "iconic Australian houses" is indeed a corker, each defining a new take on a regional modernism. Like Australia itself the architecture is influenced by Europe, America, Asia and filtered through its own indigenous cultures, powerful climate and terrain to produce something novel and distinctive.

The European influence is all continental, leaving contemporary Australia's British heritage well behind generally a good idea when it comes to aesthetics.) Architects like Harry Seidler are direct European injections; others draw from a form of humanist or organic modernism perhaps in common with Aalto and Saarinen. The American influence is Californian, just as the climate in Australia's south-east is similar, and the Case Study Houses were all absorbed, but the principal influence is probably that of Frank Lloyd Wright. Asian architecture is evident in the vernacular forms of Pacific architecture, particularly in Queensland, but again principally from Japanese architecture.

The writer, Karen McCartney, points out the latter in her introduction:

"Many attributes of Japanese architecture have been adopted for use in Australian domestic architecture: the tradition for post and beam construction; extensive use of wood and the exposure of the structural elements; sliding screens for flexible floor plans; changes in internal levels; framed garden views and the linking of internal and external space."

This, then, appears to have been a new architecture of both sides of the Pacific, a wave of European emigrés developing work in Australia and California, increasingly influenced by the combination of Japanese and indigenous, climactically-sensitive architecture, until a new form emerges.

It's fascinating to watch the work develop, from Seidler's Rose Seidler House in 1950 - a quietly revolutionary marker for a new way of thinking - through to the fibreglass capsule house of Ian Collins in 1974. Some houses seem responses to previous statements, widening the range of possibilities within this regional modernism, with the opening salvo of Seidler cleverly followed by Peter Muller's Audette House. Muller's house appeared to sidestep Seidler's International Style by developing an alternative way forward, dissolving into the landscape in a low-lying organic form, with local materials and references subsumed into entirely modern thinking and practice.

McCartney reveals how Seidler - forever playing Roark star - said at the time, "Does not this (organic) architecture seem rather weak, subservient and not very proud of itself?". She asked Peter Muller recently about Seidler's quote, and Muller's response, in email, is fascinating:

"Seidler was pushing for international architecture which abnegated all concerns to preserve local diversity. The climatic, geographic, cultural and spiritual integrity, and deeper meanings for ornament were regarded as some kind of superstition. So-called organic architecture was regarded as 'romantic' and intuitive, rather than intelligent and no match for what the Brave New World had to offer with its high-tech, machine-driven materials. Today, of course, with concerns for global warming, fossil fuels and so on, emphasis shifts once again and the use of natural and sustainable materials in an intelligent and sensible way to reduce energy overloads is considered admirable and strong-minded. Pride comes before a fall, subservience to Truth is a blessing and the weak shall inherit the earth."

These fierce differences of opinion, sometimes expressed in letters by the more vocal protagonists, other times in concrete, brick and wood, bounce back and forth across the projects gathered here. Yet from today's distance, the houses appear to have more in common than difference.

Robin Boyd, perhaps the most influential Australian architect of this era, offered up the aphorism "Australia is the small house", and 50/60/70 showcases many of the best of those small houses, drawn from the three decades the title lists. A book like this makes clear where today's exemplary work emanates from, detailing a rich modern tradition. (I've previously written about how strong Australian domestic architecture is, perhaps at the expense of civic buildings.)

The work is breathtakingly beautiful, each house a gem amidst the banal Australian outer suburban architecture excoriated by Boyd in his book The Australian Ugliness (a charge recently reiterated by Elizabeth Farrelly in her book Blubberland). This contrast, if you know it, further highlights the importance of this work. The level of quality in the build, as well as the integration with the landscape, look to be of the highest order and should still be aspired to.

Yet despite some of these houses being on generous plots, and photographed as if majestically standing alone in the terrain, there's a starker comparison with today, also made clear in McCartney's introduction.

There was a restriction on plot size post-WWII of 134m² and the lifting of that, combined with the new prosperity of the '50s and '60s, enabled many of the houses here to flourish. Yet most are still essentially modest propositions, with generally small bathrooms and bedrooms. The general consensus was that bathrooms should be like toilets - small, functional and not places to hang around. Ditto bedrooms are often small-ish, with a greater emphasis on the shared living spaces. This in contrast to today's houses, which are 264m² on average and, as McCartney notes, 600m² not unheard of. These larger houses, today's private commissions, feature 3 or 4 bathrooms, mostly en-suite, as well as media rooms, in-house gyms and swimming pools. Few if any of the houses in 50/60/70 have pools, and even Buhrich's famous lipstick red fibreglass bathroom - with construction inspired by boatbuilding techniques - is relatively discreet compared to today's faux-Roman monstrosities.

Of course, many houses here are built by architects for themselves, with the other half private commissions from clients apparently well-versed aesthetically. A wander - or more realistically, a drive - around Sydney and Melbourne's suburbs will tell us that many terrible houses were built at the time, blissfully unaware of this fabulous work.

Yet while the houses in 50/60/70 are in no way high-density living - Boyd noted that "it was said that flats were for foreigners" - many here are modest, and highly sympathetic to context. We could do well to learn again from building modest houses, for I hope obvious reasons. There are enough clues here as to how to do it. (And we'd also do well to look to our Japanese neighbours again to learn how to build truly high-density dwelling of quality, suiting urban context as well as 'natural'. On that count, seeing as Australia can be thought of a nation of foreigners, perhaps Boyd's quote RE flats can be reconfigured as an optimistic one.)

The houses featured here are by (in chronological order) Harry Seidler, Peter Muller, Roy Grounds, Peter McIntyre, Russell Jack, Robin Boyd, David McGlashan and Neil Everist, Enrico Taglietti, Neville Gruzman, Bruce Rickard, Hugh Buhrich, Ian McKay, Iwan Iwanoff, John Kenny and Ian Collins.

Personal favourites here? From the Melbourne masters who fell out: the wonderfully simple 1954 house of Roy Grounds and Robin Boyd's Walsh Street House of 1958. Plus, John Kenny's 1976 house, as an attempt at a modular, sustainable, late-period Case Study House, is laden with useful thinking. Though a better authority, architect Peter Myers, said that Hugh Buhrich's Buhrich House II, in Sydney's famous Castlecrag, is "easily the best modern house in Australia." The quality of all the projects here is incredibly high.

Victoria's reputation emerges from this period, and has been documented many times, but it's the work of 'the Sydney School' throughout NSW that is particularly well represented here. (There are few other non-Syd/Melb examples: a Taglietti in Canberra, an Iwanoff house in Perth, and nothing from Queensland save a few mentions of Hayes and Scott. Perhaps an oversight.)

The book contributes good if small plans for the houses, and all projects been beautifully photographed, with each house followed by a series of details which look at individual elements of construction or furnishing. Indeed, as you might expect from McCartney, an editor of interior design magazine, the furnishing is a key facet of this book. Houses were included on the basis that "the interior furnishings ... were stylistically sympathetic, if not original." Some great houses, such as Boyd's Lyons House (1968) - which in being a Sydney house by a Melbourne architect almost exemplifies many of the themes here - would have been ruled out by those criteria, but I can see why it's been done. The book works as a sourcebook for mid-century modern furniture of the highest order too.

This book won't have the erudition, breadth of reference or insight of Philip Goad's New Directions in Australian Architecture, several others by Goad, or Boyd's books for that matter. Largely as it makes more space for photographs, which are beautifully shot and well reproduced, rather than text. But it sits alongside those books as a finely curated collection of exemplary architecture, amongst the finest examples of houses anywhere, and many examples here provide potent, rich visions of the heights domestic architecture can reach when emphasising quality and modesty.

(More pictures below. Click on any image to see a larger version at Flickr. And many thanks to Celia for giving me this book.)

50/60/70: Iconic Australian Houses, by Karen McCartney [Amazon UK|US]

Sydney mapping exercises

Adrian Lahoud of UTS writes to say, "Thought you should know that as of last week 200 psycho-geographical maps have been pinned up around four routes through the Sydney CBD, with invitations for use and comments at archurbanism at gmail.com ..."

Transport informatics

The following is a quick survey of new informational approaches to transport, hinging on individual behaviour and engagement via public data. We'll travel from wifi on buses to designs for timetables embedded in the fabric of stations, stopping off at trams in Google Maps and proposals for roboscooter sharing schemes.

Data, transported and shaped by the internet, is increasingly becoming a primary way that people expect to engage with public transport in particular. Engage, as in access and navigate through transport service information, but also explore and understand the transport service itself. This last aspect might sound initially far-fetched - “Why would people want to explore their transport networks?” - but many of these examples indicate that people do. They often go well beyond basic communications initiatives like integrated transport systems and into genuine two-way and many-to-many network-based interaction. Whilst they can do little to help if the eventual public transport service itself is poorly run, built over a well-run system (such as Helsinki’s or Zürich's) such systems might increase satisfaction amongst existing users and attract new users.

Further, engaging with the energy output of transport is something people may directly engage with too, to help shift behaviour. Studies elsewhere, such as Pacific NorthWest National Laboratory of the Energy Department indicate that when exposed to the effects of their behaviour in terms of domestic energy use (electricity, water, gas etc.) via simple PC-based feedback tools, people may change their behaviour, leading to a 15% reduction in peak load on utilities. (And more might be achieved than that, through more sophisticated and better designed schemes.) Will this carry across to transport energy?

So, here are transport systems where usage data has become available - or could become available - and is then built upon, as a way of exploring whether various ‘live dashboards’ of transport across a city will engender new levels of engagement with transport. And whether this will increase awareness of personal behaviour and impact on emissions accordingly.

Some of the examples will have been seen before, so I’d be interested in any further examples you might have of urban informatics applied to transport - please add examples/thoughts via the comment form at the bottom of this post.

Extract from 'Mrs. Dalloway' by Virginia Woolf, 1925

"For having lived in Westminster - how many years now? over twenty, - one feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense (but that might be her heart, affected, that said, by influenza) before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; the the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. Such fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. For Heaven only knows why one lives it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; can't be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason: they love life. In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June."

Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf

Monocle: design notes

It’s a year or so after launch of Monocle and things are going very well, both in print and online, so it's time for me to move on. Having worked with Tyler Brûlé and the rest of the Monocle team to breathe life into the project, creating the first volume of the magazine and iterations of the website and steering it through its first successful year of operation, I decided to leave, and departed at the end of March 2008. The project is up and running, with good solid foundations. Thus, others can run the daily business from here on in.

With that, I thought I’d pause to reflect on some of the design and strategy choices I made with Monocle.com and share them here. I’ve often tried to be ‘transparent’ about the work done on projects here, in the hope that it stimulates useful thought or conversation in other projects elsewhere, and partly to facilitate my own reflections on work. None of what follows is rocket science, and it’s not the place to look for thoughts on 2.0/3.0, social software, or urban informatics. That would be in the accounts of different projects. But if you’re interested in the honest craft of website work, almost deliberately old-fashioned ‘classical’ web design - and how to ally this with innovation in magazine publishing - the following should provide a decent account of several of the key decisions in this particular project.

During the course of an insanely busy year there are many other key decisions that just occurred and aren't noted here - most of them, in fact. And of course some that are confidential. Nor is this particularly structured. Nonetheless, it contains early sketches, outlines of strategic thinking and some insights into decision-making, tool choices and design practice. I hope you find what follows to be useful or interesting.

Context
As someone put it, Monocle was probably the most blogged about magazine last year. It was written about offline a lot too, but I won’t dwell on the magazine specifically here, except where it relates to the design and production of the digital services. (For a bookended account, Monocle's editor Andrew Tuck wrote about the launch and Tyler and Andrew were both recently interviewed a year on.)

Many were too quick to judge perhaps,  but others were less so and considered responses emerged throughout the year. Reception varied wildly, as one expects, but leaving aside the reception for the magazine and brand overall, the website itself often received much critical acclaim, for which many thanks. The likes of Eye, Print, BusinessWeek, MagCulture and Design Week all suggested we were onto something with our integration of print and web specifically. I’ve mentioned the Eye article before, but the Print piece by Andrew Blum was particularly sharp in identifying the Monocle.com difference. While the new media commentators often mistakenly looked for a 2.0 platform play, Blum noted our attempt to bring quality back to the table, trying to use a new platform to reinvigorate broadcast journalism itself. Similarly BusinessWeek spotted that the “web component (is) more like TV than print”. It actually feels somewhere between the two, but that was the intention.

Perhaps more importantly, the user figures have grown healthily throughout the year. Unique users and time spent on the site are all doing fine, but I knew from the BBC that getting the broadcasts into iTunes would be the thing that really extended the viewership of the programmes, our primary purpose. When we added BBC radio podcasts to iTunes they really thrived, and sure enough, since November 2007, viewing figures have been doubling month on month for Monocle’s movies, driven by iTunes’ ease-of-use. We’re now shifting terabytes of editorial each week. If you have audio or video material, the value of iTunes at this point cannot be stressed enough. It’ll be interesting to see how that platform develops.

Best of all, we hit number 1 in the iTunes News & Politics chart just before Christmas 2007. It’s hardly the most rigorously calculated chart in existence, but still an achievement, I think, to have the likes of the rather more well-funded and well-established Economist, Guardian, BBC, Reuters and Sky trailing in your wake through December, even temporarily (with the first four there having an average age of over 100 years or so, and our brand barely 10 months old at that point.)

So for an entirely new non-mainstream brand, with a no-celebrity policy allied to serious global coverage of subjects that are often little known before we cover them, I’m very happy with the favourable response from readers and viewers. We’ve covered e-Sports in South Korea, the animated title sequences of Kuntzel+Deygas, Narcotecture in Afghanistan, Tezuka architects’ Fuji kindergarten, Lexus’ brand issues, Paula Scher on Brand America, the train from Istanbul to Van, the CEO of Lego, the Tällberg Forum, the 2007 Salone industrial design fair and Frankfurt Motor Show, slow food in Turin, our top urban design solutions, mayoral summits in New York, photojournalism from Murmansk, Tajikistan, Zimbabwe and Abkhazia, and much more besides, Plus, we got name-checked by Lupe Fiasco.

The new engineering: a discussion with Arup's Tristram Carfrae

This discussion is part of a series of interviews conducted for Arup’s Drivers of Change programme. See Drivers of Change for more information.

I met Tristram Carfrae at Arup’s Sydney office, which sits in a couple of storeys of a fairly anonymous block on Kent Street. The anonymity is typical for Sydney’s ultra-business-like CBD, but so is the casually wonderful aspect – in this case, overlooking the vast Barangaroo development site on the side of the city’s CBD, and the splintered skein of deep harbour out towards Balmain, criss-crossed with ferries and functioning as the occasional water-berth of the ocean liners, great white slabs of floating architecture that add a temporary residential function to the port, before moving on east to Hawaii or north to Hong Kong.

We sit in the reception and talk for a couple of hours, over a few plastic cups of instant coffee, and just behind a model of the National Aquatic Centre, the building designed by Arup, led by Carfrae, and Australian architects PTW with Chinese partners CCDI, and that opened in Beijing just over a month ago. Known colloquially as the ‘Water Cube’, it’s being seen as a new masterpiece of structural engineering, already enjoying a flurry of publicity that will only increase in fervour when the Games start this winter. But Carfrae's career extends well beyond the Cube, and he's generally thought to be one of the leading structural engineers of his time.

We talked about the Cube, and the changing practice of structural engineering that informs such projects, and how this is radically changing architecture, building and cities. We chewed over multidisciplinary working and design processes in general, as well as techniques new and old. I’ve organised this piece into loose themes, as the conversation jumped around a little.

Robin Hood Gardens is not the same as a digital model of Robin Hood Gardens

There’s an extraordinary - and rather British, I must say - kerfuffle going on over the future of the Robin Hood Gardens estate in London at the moment. Essentially, the building, designed by Alison and Peter Smithson (aka The Smithsons) and completed in 1972, is in danger of being pulled down. Margaret Hodge, a UK culture minister, appeared to back the demolition of such buildings, suggesting a digital model could capture the essence of a building in its stead. She said:

“When some concrete monstrosity — sorry, I mean modernist masterpiece — fails to make the cut despite having expert opinion behind it, let’s find a third way. This is the 21st century — a perfect digital image of the building, inside and out, could be retained forever.”

In rides Building Design magazine on a white horse, and they launch a campaign to instead have the building renovated and cared for, for perhaps the first time in its existence.

I left London before I got to experience Robin Hood Gardens in the flesh, but I hugely admire the work of the Smithsons, for both their thinking and practice (such as the Economist building in central London, which I have experienced). Along with Cedric Price, Reyner Banham, Archigram and a few others, they provide a historical framework for much of the technologically-enabled and culturally-informed best practice of today.

Robin Hood Gardens, in an area of East London so historically rich you can almost hear the psychogeographers whispering, is essentially a concrete megastructure housing project that’s been in need of such attention for most of its life. Carelessly built and serviced, the design never stood a chance.

Long before the GLC disappeared, TLC for such buildings had disappeared. Recently, a handful of enlightened property developers have discerned the public appreciation of brutalism moving in the right direction, but at glacial speed. Here, demolition plans appear to be moving a little too quickly, nosing well ahead of public opinion and this critical rearguard.

But Building Design is quite right to point out the importance of the building in terms of design history, and also its latent opportunities for re-development (and the iffy process going on around the building). There’s nothing inherently flawed in such structures - and of course Hodge’s line about concrete is extremely revealing, as is the subtle giveaway of a very British insecurity over ‘expertise’. With some of that expertise, allied to willpower and a smarter framework that sees the development as an ongoing bit of work, Robin Hood Gardens can be turned around, and should provide a counterpoint to some of the lazier development blighting that part of London.

Listen to one of the current residents, admittedly thrust forward by BD, on the RHG’s units:

“When this was first built it was very modern and people were fighting to get in here. It was very cleverly built,” she says. The way it has upside down maisonettes, you never hear noise from anyone else. And the nice thing is that every room has plenty of light — one wall is all windows and you’re not looking into someone else’s house. I don’t think these people who are proposing thousands of new homes for this site have a clue.”

RHG needs a lot of work but it is an eminently saveable building.

I’m not in favour of preservation for the sake of it. We should demolish buildings that have outlasted their use, and replace with better or more suited to the needs of the time. These new buildings should have a sense of their likely life-span. (Cedric Price was once asked what to do about York Minster, and he replied “flatten it”. Buildings that have outlasted their use should be disposed of “like a worn-out pair of Hush Puppies”, he suggested.)

But RHG is important is in at least three ways, particularly in the context of Britain: an example of British modernism (and local culture needs more working examples of this), ambition and optimism (ditto,  described by Peter Cook as “strange English romantic”) and apartment-based, high-density, affordable housing (ditto again, and that passes the CP test, as many cities need good examples of this more than ever.)

Building Design’s campaign has already drawn in an extraordinary list of support, almost a who’s who of contemporary architecture and urbanism. While their simple comments-based petition system is not exactly watertight, it appears to be hugely successful in terms of garnering a groundswell of opinion.

It’s odd to see one’s name alongside that of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, Zaha Hadid, Tony Fretton, Alain de Botton, Patrick Keiller, Benedetta Tagliabue, William Menking, Peter Cook, Iain Borden, William Mitchell, Joel Sanders, Stefano Boeri, Joseph Rykwert, Hugh Pearman, M Christine Boyer, Toyo Ito, Richard Meier, Ricky Burdett, Ted Cullinan, Kenneth Frampton, and hundreds of others. (You can sign the petition here, before March 7th) (See also Richard Rogers, who has written to the culture secretary Andy Burnham, and BD's and The Guardian's Jonathan Glancey.)

Sensing they’re onto a winner in terms of their relevance and influence, and maybe saving the building while they’re at it, Building Design is ramping up their activity, publishing article after article. It’s great to see an architectural magazine trying to make a difference in such concrete (ahem) fashion. Given the issues with existing built fabric in our cities - far more problematic in terms of sustainability than new building stock - you almost wonder whether campaigns such as these are the contemporary equivalent of Arts & Architecture’s pioneering Case Study Home program of an earlier age. I wonder what The Sesquipedalist will make of it?

Alan Powers presents the most informed view on the issues of listing and renovation of such buildings, so allow me a lengthy quote:

“On most counts, Robin Hood Gardens should be a prime candidate for listing. It is the only housing built by architects who devoted much of their lives to the discussion of dwelling at various scales. Among architectural thinkers around the world today, these architects are seen as the most important to have worked in Britain in their generation. This is heavy weight to put against counter-claims that the buildings were not built as first designed, and experienced social teething problems owing to the almost universal post-industrial problems of the early 1970s in Britain.”

“Emphasis should be put on the place-making quality of this housing, heroic towards the Blackwell Tunnel approach, embracing towards the nurturing mounds of the green space between the snaking block, where a big sky opens amid the scattered street patterns of the East End. As for resident satisfaction, the present Bangladeshi population seems to have no problem about inhabiting these monumental cliffs, in a way that the Smithsons would surely have recognised as a fulfilment of their intentions.”

“This is no Holly Street or Aylesbury Estate, best destined for the dustbin. The pressure is on, and someone must decide whether or not we are going to look like international idiots who let Robin Hood Gardens fall prey to the bland machinery that calls itself “regeneration”, while effacing the useable legacy of the welfare state.“

The Park Hill flats in Sheffield indicate a partial precedent for Robin Hood Gardens. Also inspired by the Smithsons (and Le Corbusier before them), they were built in 1961, from designs by Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith, on the site of tenements so rough they were known as ‘Little Chicago’ in the ‘30s. Unfortunately, that malaise didn’t seep clear of the ground with the destruction of the tenments, and seems to have carried over into the new development. And particularly when the British lack of facility with modernism - save a few shining examples - led inexorably to poor implementation, careless use of materials, and little ongoing servicing. And thus, the flats quickly gained an unsavoury reputation.

When I were a lad in the Sheffield of the early 1980s (cue Hovis commercial), the Park Hill flats were the stuff of legend. Playgrounds would buzz with lurid stories of what happened over at Park Hill - and the city’s other high-rise social housing, at Kelvin and Hyde Park. Though the story I remember is the rather tamer tale of a TV set being chucked out of the window, from one of the higher storeys, my mind’s eye constructing the slow heavy fall and sudden implosion on concrete. It was as if simply living there was like being in a cold, damp Northern version of Beirut under siege, glancing nervously up at the silvery sky as you scurry between blocks, darting for cover and hoping not to see the silent, graceful arc of a television approaching your head. It wasn’t like that, of course, though it was certainly not pleasant (As with RHG, Ian R. Taylor, in a book I once reviewed, did find firm evidence of  ‘community’ there nonetheless.)

Photo by Lee Gardland.

I visited once, going to see my first girlfriend’s grandmother, high up in one of the blocks. I don’t remember much detail, but I do remember how distinctly different it felt to the suburban late-1890s semi I was living in over the other side of the city. Not better or worse, just different way of housing, subtly reinforcing the importance of these developments in Victorian cities.

The OU’s From Here To Modernity site has a decent account of the history, if in need of an update:

“Park Hill was awarded a Grade 2* listing in 1998. Although an important milestone in the development of Modernist housing theory in post-war Britain, the public incredulity which greeted the award spoke volumes about the success of Park Hill and its 'streets in the sky'.”

Public incredulity knows no bounds of course, particularly when stoked up by the often architecturally short-sighted British media. Ill-considered lists of Britain’s most hated buildings hardly help. (How is Channel 4's Demolition progressive broadcasting, exactly?). In this sense, Building Design’s primitive petition with its untidy collision of expertise and punter, is perhaps far more democratic form than Demolition, even given that it’s preaching to the converted?)

Now, the Park Hill flats are being ‘re-made in Sheffield’ (clever, that) by developers Urban Splash. Europe’s largest listed building - which is an odd honour really - will be re-vamped to provide nearly 1000 apartments close to the city centre, with a third affordable and two-thirds, well, un-affordable presumably. (It’s the presence of the latter that will shift public opinion round on the matter, you watch.) Lee Garland’s photography, if a little sombre, indicates the muscular presence of the building - even more so when you see it in situ, banked back on the hill overlooking the central train station and city centre. It’s a powerful building, and with the care and attention that Urban Splash will lavish on it, it’s easy to imagine the building transformed.

I’ve seen many of Urban Splash’s conversions, particularly their early work amidst Manchester’s former textile warehouses and mills in the mid-’90s, and they’re usually pretty good renovations. It’s also interesting to see them now taking on brutalism, instead of the rather 'easier' warehouse conversions (which may be desirable now, but were also marked for demolition a generation earlier, apparently beyond redemption.)

Elsewhere in Britain, the Brunswick Centre in London, covered here before, may need more careful curation in its choice of retail and services, but is full of life for the first time in years and really seems to be working. Erno Goldfinger’s Trellick Tower has also gone from “eyesore” to “desirable” in the last decade. The Barbican and South Bank still feature in those ugly contests, but are increasingly being recognised as the gems they are.

Park Hill benefits from proximity to its city centre, a short walk away. As with the Brunswick, Barbican, Trellick and many others, being surrounded by good urban fabric helps. It’s a simple note, but absolutely key, and remains a problem in the case of Robin Hood Gardens. The surrounding context also needs to be addressed for the building to work - social, informational and physical - for this kind of high density living can easily reinforce an urban core, and is less well suited to the being sited on a periphery. East London has enough presence for it to work, and RHG is connected to the centre(s) of London fairly well but it will need careful local orchestration nonetheless.

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Yet it can still work there. Wöhnpark Alt-Erlaa is situated outside the centre of Vienna, but with enough inherent density to anchor itself. That’s the promise of the megastructure. It’s on a different, more ambitious scale - it contains no fewer than 5 schulen, 4160 balkone and 7 schwimmbäder, most on the dach - and that, plus the integrated U-bahn, would make all the difference.

It does, of course, appear to be extremely well-built, benefiting from the Mittel-European comfort with aligning modernism and craft that was all but alien to Britain. Most of all, it will be well-run too, with a mix of residents (it's not strictly social housing). Again, the ongoing servicing and maintenance of these buildings - of both built and social fabric - will make the difference.

Back to RHG, and Stephen Bayley weighed in too, noting that “Robin Hood Gardens has been a social calamity” and reiterating that the Smithsons’ building was indeed flawed, but those flaws were embedded by the builders.

“Alas, their architectural reach exceeded the grasp of the builders and Robin Hood Gardens suffered from the start with a singular lack of commodity and firmness …”

He’s rather brutal himself, no pun intended, when apparently suggesting that the building rather suffered from its tenants:

“As Marx asked, does consciousness determine existence or does existence determine consciousness? Or to put it less correctly, do the pigs make the sty or does the sty make the pigs?”

Personally, I suspect the tenants were let down by the implementation of the building, and lack of ongoing service - as well as the post-industrial context Powers refers to -  rather than any inherent piggery.

Bayley continues:

“(But) Margaret Hodge's remarks about concrete are ignorant prejudice. Concrete is a fine material, but needs maintenance and care as much as marble and oak need maintenance and care.”

Too right. And so to those comments of Margaret Hodge, and particularly her idea of preserving the building through a digital model. Here, again, is what she said (in Grand Designs magazine, perhaps the most influential British architectural periodical of its day. BD reproduced the article.)

“When some concrete monstrosity — sorry, I mean modernist masterpiece — fails to make the cut despite having expert opinion behind it, let’s find a third way. This is the 21st century — a perfect digital image of the building, inside and out, could be retained forever.”

Leaving aside her value judgement on modernism - which speaks volumes by itself - and the cultural relativism elsewhere in the article that underpins her notion that modern architecture shouldn’t be judged in the same way that 'historical' structures are, it’s this ‘digital image’ comment I find fascinating.

First of all, that particular train of thought could obviously be applied to any building. If I decided, say, that Tower Bridge or all of Poundbury were particular eyesores, would they too be replaced by digital models? Bayley spots this a mile off:

“The minister herself declares that historical purposes may be served by a detailed digital record of the building, an argument which could, I think, with equal force be applied to Uppark, Windsor Castle or Stonehenge.”

So leaving aside Hodge’s peculiar notion that most of Britain’s heritage could instead be experienced as some kind of Second Life island, perhaps like Orange County’s ‘Wee Britain’ or ‘Thames Town’ in Shanghai, one also wonders whether she had lunch with someone from Autodesk that week.

You might expect City of Sound to be the kind of place that extolled the virtues of digital modelling, and indeed I do. Building information modeling (BIM) and computer-aided design (CAD) have already revolutionised building, and the immense benefits are yet to be fully realised. Increasingly tidying up the more inefficient and unsustainable practices of construction, once BIM truly extends into four dimensions, generating and broadcasting data about the ongoing use of a building (incl. delivering the instructions for its de-construction and recycling) a more sustainable architecture can be realised. And once the building becomes a platform for other communication, from personal to civic, and if that scales up to a neighbourhood and city level, then we’re really going places. Truly revolutionary.

But I don’t think Hodge is talking about that. I think she imagines some kind of 3D fly-through. Perhaps wearing goggles. But she, and we, should be clear about the limits of models too. In no way do they - and we can even say, will they - approach the experience of a building. Simple as that. A cursory reading of Pallasmaa will make that clear. Few models can deal with the peripheral, never mind the multi-sensory experience of being there, and never mind the multi-layered historical weight of a place or space. Digging further into her Merleau-Ponty isn’t something I imagine Hodge does of an evening, any more than I do, but if she were to, she might reconsider her strategy of replacing buildings with “digital records”.

Entrusting those digital records to her particular government would be like giving it to the informational equivalent of the Deen Brothers anyway.

Experiencing a building in the flesh is so different to constructing and studying a digital model, that it’s frightening that Hodge  - a culture minister - could even think to suggest it.

I recall walking into a small, very old cathedral in Milanese side-street, I think, lured by the sound of the choir, and once inside I hear their voices conjoin with the wails of black-clad kneeling women, rocking backwards and forwards near the altar, and sensing the sheer physical presence of that sculpted block of sound hanging in the rafters of the immense vaulted roof over my head, light puncturing the gloom through stained-glass windows and illuminating the sparkling motes of cool dust floating around me, some microscopic elements falling on to my tongue and fusing taste and smell with those being inhaled in my nostrils, the interior rushing away from my body as I begin to stand upright and breathe it all in, having ducked through the small threshold into its cavernous innards, my eyes adjusting to the gloom and slowly revealing the detail in the polished wooden pews that a million hands before mine had touched. All that, and more that I don’t have the words to describe, in a transition from outside to in, over a few seconds … And equivalent sensations might be enjoyed in a grain elevator, a converted power station, a public administration building, a swimming pool, a side street of SoHo at midnight, a small house in Tokyo in the early morning, a square in Melbourne at midday, a summer house in Finland at dusk, or in practically any kind of building. You will have your own examples.

Well, I’m sure a digital model will exist for that church, but I’m not sure I’ll get that same sensation when I click on it.

Let’s quickly put to bed this idea of digital models replacing a building. They can augment a building, and are certainly invaluable in design processes, ongoing running of buildings, education, heritage and a thousand other worthwhile pursuits. But they are not simulacra, for buildings exist.

So well done to Building Design for bringing this sorry bit of politics to the foreground of at least the architectural press, and good luck to them with their campaign. As a fan of the Smithsons’ thinking, and of several of their buildings, I'd like to see this pioneering architecture cared for.

Here’s the bullet-pointed version that cabinet ministers may be more used to:

• Park Hill, Brunswick, Trellick, South Bank, and Barbican all show that British modernist buildings that were once though beyond salvation can be turned around.
• Other high-density housing megastructures elsewhere indicate they can be done well in the first place, if carefully constructed and serviced.
• Concrete is one of the most useful, pleasing and thrilling of materials.
• Digital models have immense value, but not as replacements for buildings.

Loose ends, February 2008

A few recent entries attracted useful responses, and several contemporaneous links opened up new angles on similar subjects. I thought I’d pause briefly to tie a few of these loose ends together.

The “Shinkansen to Melbourne …” story on the potential for a Very High Speed Train (VHST) link up and down the east coast of Australia generated a fair bit of buzz, and some extremely useful comments from readers. Several comments provided detailed reasons why it would be difficult, though none of them convinced that it shouldn’t happen. Have a read and let me know what you think - particularly if you have further insight or experience on large infrastructure projects of this nature. To me, it feels like a case of ‘when not if’, but a concerted effort is clearly required to help people here believe that.

Partly, this will be enabled by moves elsewhere - in that the road and air alternatives are not only being seen as increasingly out-of-step with the times, but shooting themselves in the foot (if indeed a transit system can have a foot to shoot itself in). Road traffic congestion in and around Melbourne is now reaching the breaking points also witnessed in Sydney and Brisbane (with some talk of congestion charging at last, even if not officially. It’s mildly instructive to read this piece from Mayor John So from only 2006, boasting of how ‘the car is welcome in Melbourne’, and then reflect on these subsequent and ensuing woes; and so different in tone to the Gehl proposals for Sydney’s CBD). The train service in Sydney is now being used so heavily that it’s at bursting point - almost necessitating the use of ‘push men’ - despite clear evidence of some years of under-investment. Ditto buses, which desperately need further investment but are still heavily used. This at least indicates that Sydneysiders are not that averse to public transport.

Moreover, Sydney Airport is about to close down one of its runways due to safety concerns (was due for April and now put back in the year, for reasons unclear). This will have a massive impact on the ability of the airport to service demand to Melbourne and Brisbane. Reports suggest that it’s already struggling with that. Closing this runway can only cause problems for that air corridor, and those who live along it, for that matter (I didn’t go into noise pollution in the piece I wrote, but it is of course an issue.) Meanwhile, oil prices 'surge past' 100 US dollars a barrel …

The item also featured briefly in The Architects on Melbourne's Triple R (cheers Rory). It’s just good to hear this being discussed, and most fervently by those who have experienced the likes of the Shinkansen and TGV.  To be clear about the piece: I’m not anti-car or anti-plane. Far from it. I find the New Urbanist rhetoric that attempts to expunge the car from the urban memory to be wholly misplaced and not useful, and air travel can refresh the parts other modes of transport simply cannot reach. It’s a massive shift of balance that’s important, towards the likes of a tripartite framework for rail (VHST interstate, loca/regional and then inner-city); augmented by smarter bus networks (see Curitiba, Bogota and beyond), as well as an overlay of quality pedestrian and cycle networks. Ferries, monorails, integrated ticketing systems, the lot. This, augmented by minimised air travel, and car-use that is, primarily, recreational (as Iain Borden has recently suggested). It’s about redesigning the city for public transport, and redesigning public transport for the city (see also Mitchell Joachim) - and that includes rapid links throughout the spaces in-between the cities. Infrastructure is in the news a lot at the moment, not least due to China’s extraordinary expansion, and Infrastructure Australia has recently been announced (chaired, intriguingly by a former BA boss). So watch that VHST network-shaped space, I reckon, not least for an interesting debate.

“The Street as Platform” garnered even more attention, not least because William Gibson and Bruce Sterling both linked to it. (I think I just need RU Sirius and Rudy Rucker now, to complete my Mondo 2000 Panini sticker collection. Younger readers will have no idea what I’m on about.)

With startling serendipity, Adam Greenfield happened to post a piece at almost exactly the same time, detailing his ‘central dogma’, related to his forthcoming book, and discussing many of the same ideas and issues, but from a usefully different angle. Do go and have a read (and his follow-up, which is indeed ‘On the same side of the street’). Molly Wright Steenson has also started a useful blog, which looks like it will frequently cover the work of City of Sound pin-up Cedric Price, and specifically his Generator project. One of her posts reminds us of the fundamental importance of designing the social and operational frameworks around technological systems, a point I was very keen to make in "The Street ..." (see also recent Economist articles on e-government; this sense of redesigning the systems and organisations around technology, when designing a technological system, is a generally sound tenet.)

A piece earlier this year, The Personal Well-Tempered Environment (based on last year’s presentation at Interesting South) got picked up by USA Today and FastCompany amongst others and it’s also worth checking again for the many useful comments. I’d pick out Usman Haque’s work on XML schema for communication between objects and their environment, some research from the States indicating that basic feedback can seriously improve personal energy usage, and also note a follow-up post at Headlessness and a beautiful realisation of some related ideas by The Living in NYC. I’m collating links to do with these concepts at delicious/PWTE.

I’ve had very useful conversations around much of this, so watch this space for more developments on the ideas in “The Street…” and PWTE soon, I hope.

And finally, an update on the Best Urban Places project. James, Russell and I are knee-deep in good, honest production issues for the first issue now - we’ll give a further update on that shortly. In the meantime, the group keeps growing and the photos keep coming. Please do keep them coming in, ideally accompanied by your short introductions, as issue 2 is already being set up nicely.