cityofsound

Staircase, University of Technology, Sydney

To describe my relationship with the staircase at the Denys Lasdun-designed Institute of Education as an obsession would be going a bit far. Yet I've written about it, describing it as 'London's Most Thrilling Staircase', and would always look out for it, as if an old friend, whenever passing through the vicinity. I'd slow down as I walked past, in order to enjoy its angles revealing, unfolding and revolving, allowing it to repeatedly frame the surrounding IoE megastructure, the muscular Senate House and the rest of the Bloomsbury campus.

That's 17000 kilometres away from me now. The new arrival in the city often appears to see a feature from his previous home, shoe-horning an entirely new structure into a familiar shape willed from his memory. The first white arrivals in Sydney, 219 years ago, described this utterly alien new terrain as 'a deer park', as if they'd sailed round the world to discover an impossibly large Kentish garden, that is before they tried to plant anything remotely Kentish.

As for me, I've been in Sydney just over a month and I've seen a cracking concrete staircase.

Due to the vagaries of long-distance relocation, we temporarily find ourselves walking past the University of Technology, Sydney, at no. 1 Broadway, Ultimo, on an almost daily basis. The UTS building is a brutal slab - I mean that in the good sense, of béton brut, or 'raw concrete' - with a sturdy 28-floor tower providing a handy landmark for wayfinding, beckoning people out of the eastern edge of city centre. Even in Sydney's light it's not pretty but it is striking. At its base is a wide podium, uncomfortably windswept, but at the base of that, there's a usefully wide tiled courtyard leading into a spacious interior reminiscent of the Barbican.

It's tricky to find out who designed it - the internet offers up only the anonymous "NSW Government Architect". As is often the case with brutalist architecture, it's been voted its city's ugliest structure. And as is also often the case, it's not all that bad.

I don't know enough about the building to want to say any more about it. But, quietly tucked away off to one side, a parasitical little structure catches my eye. A simple external concrete staircase. Adjoining the podium level at its top, and leading from the courtyard at its base, it's a beautiful, elongated vertical cube, slabs of concrete appearing to carve repeating angled grooves on the outside, echoing the ascent of stairs on the inside.

The interior is pleasantly cool on this already hot spring day, deep pools of shadow falling across the concrete, with angles cut in dazzling white stripes emblazoned by the sun. As you climb, the blue sky begins to pierce through, and then slowly fill the space above, as angled fragments of the city can be viewed through the slits in-between the concrete shell at eye-level.

On the way down, I find an old man having a quiet cigarette, sitting on the stairs, watching as the courtyard fills with graduating students, posing for pictures taken by proud parents, theatrically tossing their mortarboards into the air.

As with much great architecture, even when as nondescript as this, it frames the city around it, depicting it as a series of jump-cut fragments, buildings twisting and unfolding, in and out of sight. And as with all things set against this overwhelming blue sky, there's a momentary duck-rabbit figure-ground reversal - the blue of the sky suddenly appears to be the object, the staircase the negative space surrounding. The sequence of photographs above suggests a new construction, the white line-breaks occasionally flowing in and out of the white sun bouncing off the concrete edges in the images - a dazzle-ship camouflage disguising its actual shape. Elsewhere, the geometric slashes in the side of the concrete recall the swoosh of some imaginary logo or device. Looking up, to the top, and how it adjoins the podium, the modular design is clear - it looks like a 2=pin plug, suctioned by the body of the UTS building.

If you actually compare to the IoE staircase and perform the equivalent of a conceptual squint, it's as if Lasdun's has been carefully collapsed, concertina-style, at 45 degrees, sliding together into a more compact form, as if for transit. You might well think "Bloody hell man it's only a staircase." Me, I think I've folded up Lasdun's staircase and taken it with me.

+&-=X 20 years of typo-graphics from the Tokyo Type Directors Club. UTS Gallery, Sydney

We're temporarily staying near to the intriguingly-named Ultimo inner-city suburb of Sydney, just in time to catch the last few days of an excellent little exhibition entitled: +&-=X 20 years of typo-graphics from the Tokyo Type Directors Club. The show's over now, but I managed to take some quick photos. Running at the University of Technology Sydney's tiny UTS:Gallery, it was curated by John Warwicker, one of the founders of UK design collective Tomato. (Warwicker is now living in Melbourne, I note, where the show started at Monash University. I also note that Warwicker quietly designed one of my favourite Australian magazines, The Monthly.)

"Since 1990, the Tokyo Type Directors Club has staged an annual international design competition to celebrate the visual expression of letters. Along with international judges, fifteen of Japan's leading typographers and graphic designers assess the best work. The award's freshness and vitality has constantly challenged what is thought of as typography and type design."

Warwicker is one of these international judges involved in Tokyo Type Directors Club, so has been well-placed to take a long view of the work emerging from this prestigious award. And sure enough, it's fantastic work. It's mainly poster-based, and seemingly well beyond straightforward typography - that phrase "the visual expression of letters" captures the sensibility perfectly. There are a few typefaces, but far more art, illustration, advertising, a few books, some sharp information design in the form of a wayfinding system, a few objects and so on. Many of the Japanese posters are flavoured with that distinctive vivid lyricism, rendered abstract through my lack of understanding of the language. As such, they have to be appreciated purely in terms of their graphical form, texture, colour. Many of them are startlingly lovely. (Sadly, the exhibition didn't easily list the designers, so I can't tell you who they are. Apologies.) Even the more obviously mainstream commercial work has a graceful elegance about it. In formal contrast, although also appealing, are the posters by the non-Japanese designers. These are more immediate, familiar, easier to decode, identify. Angus Hyland's charmingly direct 'This is a poster' - it's certainly not a pipe - stands out, through its clarity and wit. Likewise Alexander Gelman's poster. See also London's Kerning. But many other works also catch the eye and tweak the synapses.

For a small space, there was a lot of work, but it didn't feel over-crowded. The exhibition design was appealingly spartan, with most posters simply clipped on the wall, though - as ever - I could have done with a little more context. At least a simple guide to the designers, mapped to their work perhaps. So the photos I took (see full set) actually give you a sense of moving through the exhibition as I did, pausing over some of the items, hugely enjoying drifting through the images but unable to delve much deeper beyond that. Also, some of the more beautiful items couldn't really be captured digitally, such as this below, comprising gold printed over black but entombed within a case and suffering the reflection of the overhead lights. It was still possible to see how lovely it was.

A small good thing, this exhibition. Discreet, unpretentious, concise but laced with technique and ideas. It may re-assemble and travel again, so keep an eye out for it. In the meantime, I've compiled a full set of quick photographs I took, over at Flickr.

Noted elsewhere: September 2007

Here's a little portmanteau posting, compiling a few items of interest from elsewhere. I try to keep this site free of this kind of post these days, using the 'noted elsewhere' column instead (to the top-right if you're looking at the site; or in the daily links in the feed). But these items deserve a little more context, visual or otherwise. They're all worth a look.

Mayne and Blum in San Francisco
First up, an excellent conversation between Thom Mayne of architecture firm Morphosis and the writer Andrew Blum. It's centred on the former's new Federal Building building in San Francisco, but wanders freely and interestingly. It's a good discussion, augmented by photos of the building and surrounds. I was particularly taken with the fact that its the first (major) naturally-ventilated building on the west coast since the introduction of air-conditioning, and Mayne's intentions for a form of post-occupancy evaluation (POE); he didn't call it that as such, but referred to a series of studies over the forthcoming years, to track the use of the building. Conducting POEs has become a CoS mantra, so it's great to see it explicitly referred to in a discussion about building. It's also an excellent piece on introducing radical architecture into San Francisco, a latterly-conservative city in this respect.

San Francisco Federal Building from AIA San Francisco on Vimeo.

Neutral at the Architecture Foundation
Architectural visualisations a-go-go at the Architecture Foundation's Yard Gallery in London, with an exhibition on filmmakers Neutral, which opened last week and runs until 13 October 2007. Neutral have been communicating architecture through digital animation for a few years now, producing work for Zaha Hadid and Herzog+De Meuron along the way. The exhibition also features two never-seen-before installations. I can't be there to see it, so I'd be interested in any responses from visitors.
 

Energyville, by The Economist and Chevron 
The Economist Intelligence Unit have partnered with energy giant Chevron to produce a small but good online game: Energyville. It's a fairly direct rip-off of SimCity, but for broadly educational purpose - discovering how difficult it might be to power up a city, scrolling forwards to 2030. It would be easy to be cynical about this kind of partnership, but the simulation has actually been done with some care and attention. Though the available parameters, and their impact, would benefit from a little more explanation, you do genuinely learn something about the varying energy sources available to a particular kind of city (a standard SimCity model, and therefore essentially a medium-sized US city). It's interesting how the organising level is urban too, not national - I don't think that's just SimCity defining a kind of 'default setting' for these kind of simulations; rather a sense that the city is the most interesting and effective scale to work at.

Z-A at the Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York
The Storefront in Manhattan is one of my favourite places, and was even before they hosted Postopolis. So it's nice to be able to point at their 25th anniversary events, called 'Z-A' and which run for 26 days, from 2 days ago, in a specially built pavilion in the adjacent Petrosino Park, by Korean architect Minsuk Cho. If you're in NYC, it's a must-see. (I expect people in NYC get told something is "a must-see" every day, but this one really is.) There's a full line-up at the Storefront site - it looks an incredibly varied programme, with many fascinating contributions. I'd be intrigued to hear from Stefano Boeri and Gianluigi Ricuperati on the new Arbitare magazine, for instance. The day after sees Tomas Saraceno's research on "inhabitable lighter-than-air airborne structures as a solution to the world's exploding population". That gives a flavour of things, I think. Oh, and Vito Acconci on Oct. 10th.

Joseph Grima just sent me these pictures (below) of the opening night.

I also note they're starting "Storefront Books, a curated micro-bookshop." That's excellent. I've very taken with Published Art bookshop, here in Sydney, and really appreciate their editing - only stocking the latest of the best magazines, and the best new books. It ensures that you can evaluate them properly, and see their covers. (Contrary to that silly old saying, you almost always can tell a book by its cover.)

The Monthly
One of my favourite Australian magazines is The Monthly. It's a serious yet witty, multi-faceted, passionate publication, covering a broad spectrum of current affairs and culture. It makes space for lengthy articles, is well-designed (by John Warwicker, no less) and genuinely values words and thinking. There are few examples of this kind of magazine, so it's a real treasure. Their website, however, has generally been a lacklustre effort. Thankfully though, they just redesigned. There are still several flaws, from a web design perspective, but it's much better. In particular, you can browse back issues and read a fair few articles. You can point at all of them, such as this superb article on the Mary Valley controversy in Queensland, or an interview with Robert Hughes, or Peter Conrad's pasting of Clive James. And you might start reading with a piece that has actually changed policies on the Tasmanian logging industry, or Gideon Haigh on the British influence on Australia, or this article by Robert Manne on the converse - the American influence in Howard's version of Australia.

Mimoa
A new European architecture website, comprising a user-generated set of pictures and notes on modern architecture. Confining it to Europe actually seems a little unnecessary in a way, but it's rather nicely designed, both in terms of its information architecture and aesthetics, feeling somewhat 2.0 but not drenched in cliché. And it has a point, unlike most 2.0 work. I can't quite tell if it's linked formally to the lovely European architecture magazine A10. Interesting either way.

Monocle updates
Some items of particular interest at Monocle might be an interview with Pentagram's Paula Scher, on re-branding the USA, and the branding business in general. Scher is one of the world's greatest designers, and is always worth listening to. There's also a great little slideshow piece on Abkhazia, the breakaway Baltic state, which is fascinating (working alongside a corresponding magazine article). Many people picked up on the slideshow we did around the Fuji Kindergarten by Tezuka architects, but if you didn't see it I can recommend that too - a progressive philosophy embedded into a fascinating building. See also our short documentary from the Fuji Rock festival in Japan, which Glastonbury and the like could learn a lot from, and our reports from the Tällberg Forum in Sweden. And moving on from the movies, you might also want to follow our Monocle Quality of Life Index, a regularly-updated guide to interesting products and services, big or small, that improve your quality of life, drawn from our correspondents around the world. Oh and this week sees a piece on the Frankfurt Motor Show, featuring some incredible footage of the stagecraft involved in selling a new car. Issue 06 of Monocle magazine might still be on newsstands, focusing on the notion of nations, in particular how nations new and old might reinvent themselves. Issue 07 fans out across the globe from this Thursday 27th September.

Pecha Kucha 07, Sydney
And finally, as they say on ITN, I'll be appearing at the next Pecha Kucha night here in Sydney. 27th September, 18.30, Mars Lounge, Surry Hills. Free entry! Lord knows what I'll be saying.
Facebook event | Pecha Kucha Volume 07 [Super Colossal] 

In Every Dream Home A Heartache: The Great Australian Dream and its architecture

The August 2007 issue of the sumptuous Japanese magazine Architecture + Urbanism, or A+U, (previously recommended here) covers recent Australian architecture. The selection of projects is fascinating, the presentation utterly sensational, and the architects involved are drawn from the cream of Australian practice: Wendy Lewin and Glenn Murcutt; John Wardle; Sean Godsell (featuring his Beach House, noted here); Donovan Hill; Durbach Block; Iredale Pedersen Hook; Stutchbury and Pape; O'Connor + Houle; Jackson Clements Burrows; Gregory Burgess; Casey Brown; Troppo. Few of the smaller interesting teams in Australia are covered but that's another story for another publication, I suspect. As a series of projects, it's hard to imagine a higher quality, or simply more beautiful, architecture anywhere in the world.

Respected critic, historian and educator Philip Goad has written numerous books on Australian houses, and here contributes a great overview - seeing the distributed Australian coastal cities as 'islands', and thus the coast "an archipelago of conurbations". Comparing to a Japanese cultural understanding of the space between things, he sees the Australian sensibility as that of "the isolated object in the infinite landscape". This works at the level of the cities dispersed across Australia but also, zooming in Google Earth-style, at the level of dispersed housing within the terrain. Thus, "for the everyday Australian, (the detached house) still remains an inspiration whether as a suburban house, a beach house, or a bush retreat".

Chris Abel writes an accompanying piece, tracing the development of the Australian house - from Pacific vernacular fused with English brick, via California bungalow and Seidler's European modernism, to today's distinctive sum of all those elements - and also reinforces the relationship between space, landscape and house, in this most urbanised of countries:

"If the urbanization of Australia is a fact of life, the Great Australian Dream of living in one's own home on one's patch of land, like the Great American Dream it mirrors, is as much, if not more driven by history and mythology as it is by any rational criteria. As the Australian architect and polemical author, Robin Boyd, put it, 'Australia is the small house'. ... However, unlike his British counterparts, he also understood the outward spread and extreme low density of Australia's cities as the manifestation of a deeper, immigrant's yearning for space, and the need to find a foothold in a landscape, like North America's, with no apparent limits."

Perhaps this yearning pervades, for almost every project in this edition of A+U is residential, and represents a particular Australian take on residential at that. Many of these projects are situated on, or within, the beautiful Australian terrain, isolated in the infinite landscape. There are no urban projects as such in the entire edition. Some of them are in some of Sydney's outlying bays, but hardly in, say, a tight urban context with complex legal restrictions around use or conservation.

But if the detached dwelling embedded within the infinite landscape is what Australians aspire to - though I'd guess it's rarely expressed like that - are these then defining Australian works?

Robin Boyd, mentioned above, wrote one of the great books on Australian architecture and urbanism, 'The Australian Ugliness', first published in 1960. It's a brilliant book - it'll return here for sure. Written in a very different climate to that surrounding the work in A+U, and addressing very different issues, it's somewhat dated as a result. Yet it still affects, and Boyd is presence in both Goad's and Abel's essays.

In '... Ugliness', Boyd described how it was difficult to define his country's architecture. It was slippery, elusive, "not because there is no Australian character in building and display and product design but because it is so confused and so subtle that all but the historian or an intense student are likely to lose patience in the search." But now, leafing through these pages of A+U and looking around me in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne, it is entirely possible to discern a distinctly Australian contemporary architecture.

It's impossible not to fall for it. An Australian ugliness could not be a more alien concept. You end up dreamily lost somewhere between the red earth and sandstone, and the azure sky and ocean, mentally running your fingers over the spotted gum hardwoods and cedar, sheltering from over-exposure under the canopy of a broad decked verandah, between the crisp shadows of louvred blinds and batons dissipating the sun through giant windows, corrugated galvanised or oxidised steel and polished concrete alternately create permeable exteriors, variations on the skillion roof sweep shallow angles overhead as stilts or cantilevered slabs elevate beneath, these dwellings nestling into soil, rock or foliage, as if emerging from them, "touching the earth lightly" in Murcutt's words, with spaces and hollows punctuating, inside and outside at one and the same time ...

But this seems a clichéd and limited idea of Australian architecture, just as cliched as "red earth and azure sky". There is as much variation in the architecture here as there is variation between Australia's snowy mountains, tropical wetlands, interior desert and sophisticated coastal cities. Yet it's the alluring Australian Dream-Home architecture featured here in A+U.

I snap out of this glorious sun-drenched dream when I recall an old copy of The Architectural Review from 1970 (No. 884 October 1970, picked up for a fiver at Margaret Howell). That issue featured an 'Australian Newsletter' by its legendary editor J.M. Richards (see bottom of article for the full scanned pages). Despite best intentions, the article is suffused with a snobbish demeanor and insularity that would probably have driven any self-respecting Australian architect mad, cultural cringe or not.

And yet, by only seeing Australia refracted through his own cultural context of European modernism - and at least admitting it - Richards accidentally stumbles upon the future for an Australian architecture not featured in A+U. In his 'Australian Newsletter', there are far more urban projects, which mostly comprise high-density building for multiple inhabitants - public swimming pools, apartment blocks, art galleries, town halls. There's only one detached dwelling in there, alongside two small housing estates. In a sense, this makes his little newsletter a far more progressive document than this latest edition of A+U.

It's impossible not to deal with the context, though, both of the publication and the situation. The Architectural Review of those days was on a mission, campaigning against the creeping suburbanisation it saw at home and abroad, and Richards gave Australia both barrels:

"The Australian suburb must be criticised severely for what it is: the product of a land sub-division system that imposes identically sized plots on all development: of social prejudice that makes property-owning the ambition of every individual, demands a separate identity for every dwelling and causes cheap synthetic materials and flimsy brickwork to be regarded as preferable to timber because of the latter's association with early building projects that have degenerated into slums; and reliance on speculative developments without strict enough control of land-use."

His roots were showing - note the emphasis on planning, control - but there was a truth there, written more deeply about by Boyd in '... Ugliness'. In that light, the architecture in A+U is a thorough excoriation of that perceived lack of building quality, 40 years on. But there is little in A+U that indicates a subsequent attempt to deal with the flawed urban form Richards wrote about. And while differing editorial sensibilities between The Architectural Review and A+U also have to be taken into account, the latter's focus on Australian Dream-Homes suddenly seems anachronistic.

Back in 1970, Richards could not be sure about the shape of cities to come, particularly in this other land:

"In Australian conditions, and in the age of the motorcar, it may well represent the basis of the city life of the future, and it may be we who, in condemning the suburb, are clinging to out-dated ideas of urbanism."

Not so. Both the car-driven sprawl, and the notion that the Dream-Homes have had their time, is actually recognised in A+U, in Chris Abel's piece. Abel ends by suggesting that climate change is drawing this Great Australian Dream of detached dwellings to a close - "the end game in the long struggle to come to terms with the Australian landscape" - just as its architecture reaches this near-perfect state of maturity:

"The problem lies neither in individual projects nor in their designers, but in the detached dwelling type itself, and in the energy intensive infrastructure required to support the low-density settlement patterns it generates. After over two centuries of mostly reckless development, the habitable land and natural resources of Australia, which were always far more limited than the size of the country suggests, have been stretched to the point of exhaustion, with worse to come ... A sustainable strategy for development must include substantial increases in the density of the urban population, supported by a major shift from private to public transportation - strategies which directly challenge the Great Australian Dream so eloquently expressed in these houses."

Still, it's inconceivable, and would be ill-considered, to suggest that the Australian Dream-Home architecture represented here will diminish. As Goad notes, the "detached single-family house in Australia has been, and for the most part, continues to be the major laboratory of architectural experiment and innovation." This kind of building needs to exist; and no doubt there is demand. It represents a pinnacle of craft, and these projects have been carefully curated to embody the ne plus ultra of this architecture.

Goad also makes clear that they're emblematic of a particular kind of architecture, ending his essay with a subtle critique of 'big architecture', as well as the more indulgent end of discourse around a digital architecture. He argues that "in Australia, there is much virtue in slowness and the small, because they also have implications for a greater vision of the world." He draws on a phenomenological foundation here, reinforcing the importance of conjoining "body, place and making", accommodating human scale and the creation and challenge of place. I wouldn't argue with this one iota, but I would like to see some ideas for how this can manifest itself in higher density building too, and in typologies other than the detached dwelling. One example from Australia might be John Wardle's recent DOCK 5 development in Melbourne's Docklands, likely to deliver far more enjoyable high-density living than that which resulted from the Harry Seidler Sydney blocks covered in Richards' Australian Newsletter. 'Bigness' is over-exposed in the architectural press, and Goad is right to resist it in favour of dwellings with a genuinely human scale and a depth of meaningful experience derived as a result. Yet there is still something in Richards' little 'Newsletter' and his coverage of the municipal and the civic, missing from the seductive lustre of A+U.

Ironically, Abel's words suggest that we've ended up with similar conditions to that which led earlier European architects and urbanists to shape the European city in the 20th century - a drive towards high density living, with shared public space and high quality public transportation. Not through the lack of space that defines Europe, but through lack of resource. The Australian landscape still has "no apparent limits" in terms of dimension; it's still effectively infinite. Yet other limits are now all too obvious, even to the naked eye, as the Snowy Mountain reservoirs become dusty, cracked craters and the Murray River needs our assistance just in order to limp through to the ocean. Boyd wrote "The Australian ugliness begins with fear of reality", and to hide from this new reality would be an ugly act indeed.

So if the A in A+U is as well represented, albeit within the perfect iterations of the 'small house' that Boyd suggested defined Australia in 1952, the U has gone missing. Drawing from recent history again, we find another trail gone dead in a quite brilliant speech by Gough Whitlam, written just before he became Prime Minster in 1972. I urge anyone interested in developing cities to read it. There is little there that isn't relevant now, yet it's written, spoken, in the language of the time, as with Richards. Messages emerge as high-handed 'Government Responsibility for Cities' and the inflections would certainly be articulated differently now - but probably also without Whitlam's considerable verve, insight and elegant phrasing. But in seeing cities as the solution, Whitlam was laying bare the issues that still face developed nations.

"The required restructuring of the economy can be nothing short of a restructuring of the society. And to restructure the society, we have to begin at the heart of society--the cities which we must rebuild, the new cities we must build, if the cities and the society are not to be destroyed. But destroyed they both will be, by drift and by default, if Australia pursues for the next quarter-century the course of wasteful neglect of the past quarter-century. We have the chance once more to be pioneers and revolutionaries. New cities can be the new frontiers, and we can, like the best of revolutionaries from the Gracchi on, strive to replenish and restore the society by uniting the city and the country. "

Planning the 'new cities', as Whitlam and Richards both saw it, wasn't quite the solution . But ignoring urbanism altogether, as this issue of A+U all but does, denies the possibility of cities as the solution. And in Australia, cities are where everyone actually lives.

A Great Australian Dream that could, in Goad's words, "offer a vision of the world" would be to derive a broader Architecture and Urbanism that responds to its new environment. These A+U Dream-Homes do that, in a sense, but rarely in a scalable fashion. They offer beautiful local solutions to particular physical nooks, whilst conveying a sense of how to build with great beauty and purpose on the small scale. But there is little here - save for Iredale Pedersen Hook's Walmajarri Community Centre, O'Connor + Houle's Heide Museum of Modern Art, and Gregory Burgess Architects' Twelve Apostles Visitor Centre - that has, say, a broader municipal purpose or aligns more than a few people in the same shared space. That would not only address the moral and economic benefits of cities that Whitlam hoped for, but also illustrate a sustainable way of living in a country particularly challenged by that.

The dream could be to find an urban architecture for Australia, upon networks of public transportation, civic institutions and shared space, that also retains the precision, craft and "conjoining of body, place and making" we see in A+U. A new city, using Whitlam's terms, that derives its buildings from a synthesis of this 2007 Japanese magazine and that 1970 Australian Newsletter. If, as Tim Flannery says, "Australia is a harbinger of what is going to happen in other places in the world", then the architecture that emerges from this combination of skill and invention, ancient landscape and new environment, could be a harbinger for much of the rest of the world's architecture too.

[As this recent August 2007 issue of A+U should still be available in any good design and architecture bookshop, I won't bother to scan it in. But do try to pick it up, not least for Goad's and Abel's fascinating essays, plus the wonderful projects and a short but inspiring interview with Glenn Murcutt. But here below are the 'Australian Newsletter' pages from 1970's 'Architectural Review' (click for larger versions, and there are larger versions still in this Flickr set). Magazine enthusiasts might like to know that the article text was printed on matt paper, and the 4 pages of projects, as well as the opening shot of the Metropolitan Water, Sewerage and Drainage Board building, are on gloss. The striking cover image is "a close-up of the keyboard of one of Olivetti's most recent typewriters (not yet available in England), the Lettera 36, designed by Ettore Sottsass  with Hans von Klier as collaborator. Keys and casing, in silvery white black letters, are two-dye moulded plastic. The photographer was Jean-Pierre Maurer." This signposted a lengthy special feature on "the physical and psychological elements which make up the office environment", which I might feature later. The issue also had a photo-led article on 'Folk Art in Ulster' and a short, bitter-sweet piece on 1830s Australian Club building, Sydney, then being redeveloped out of existence.]

The Anti-Fun Palace: APEC Fence, Sydney lockdown

The APEC summit is in town, and Sydney is on full-alert. At least as much as Sydney is ever going to be. The leaders of the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation forum have more or less brought downtown to a standstill. Drawn from nations representing over 60% of the global GDP, featuring the premiers of the USA, China, Japan, Russia, South Korea, Australia and many others, it's the most powerful international assembly ever in Australia. To some APEC appears to be little more than a talking shop, and others have grumbled about the upheaval the event is causing. But former Australian PM, the brilliantly outspoken Paul Keating, who provided much of the impetus for APEC in its early days, essentially says that the city should be proud APEC is here, and deal with it. (I agree with him, for what it's worth, and despite what I write below.) Keating intriguingly goes on to suggest that "one of the greatest pieces of software that Australia developed in the 1980s and mid-1990s was foreign policy", describing APEC as an artifact of that, and suggesting what the forum should really be about, particularly for Australia.

Meanwhile Sydney is just agog that Vladimir Putin is here, Shinzo Abe is here, Hu Jintao is here. George Bush "arrived by water" - I love that phrase, as if he splashed up a beach in the dead of night, face blacked up, knife clenched between his teeth - a couple of days ago, and the local media are twittering about everything from his surf'n'turf'n'no-veg diet to his understanding on Iraq with current Australian PM John Howard. For Howard it may be one of the last things he does in office, but for Sydney it's a chance to play host at a glittering ball, and it's laid on its jewel, the Sydney Opera House, as the venue. Playing host these days, however, means less a spirit of welcoming, open embrace, than a total lockdown of the urban environment.

First up, read fellow Sydney-resident Marcus Trimble's excellent piece on what this has meant for the city's urban form, describing the extraordinary 5km fence that's been built around the Opera House area in the CBD, Sydney's new temporary (non-autonomous) zoning, and the informational security measures in place.

Yet not everyone finds it as interesting. The New South Wales Transport Minister John Watkins said of the traffic restrictions and the fencing off of Sydney's centre:

"The message is very clear - there is nothing to see so please stay away."

Actually, it is of course fascinating: I overhear people talking of going to actually see The Fence, as if it were a new temporary attraction, and when I visited on Wednesday, many Sydneysiders were just hanging out in the "sniper-ridden ring of steel", watching the whole circus. News sites are full of it, and Sydney has been radically altered for a few days. There is plenty to see.

The city's lampposts are festooned with APEC banners, creating orange gates - a Christo fan somewhere? - and the place is largely devoid of traffic.

In addition to the slightly desperate plea of Watkins above, today was declared a public holiday and the official literature actually suggested people leave the city for the weekend - and a somewhat inadvertent drive towards walking the city and taking public transport.

In the Sydney Morning Herald's special APEC section, John Huxley writes of prison language - 'lockdown' - and the Dead City that's left behind. I find the peculiar atmosphere a little reminiscent of the accidental pedestrianisation of London after the 7/7 bombings, though here cultivated through the power of nightmares rather than actual terror.

The eminently quotable Mr. Watkins again:

"The fence is ugly but is there to keep delegates and people of Sydney safe from public order problems and the threat of terrorism. These are the ugly realities of our world."

His ugly realities perhaps. But from an architecture or urbanism perspective, it's ugly and interesting.

In the spirit of Cedric Price or Archigram, you could see the entire fenced structure as one transient building - a kind of tentacular walking city, with its own streets and arteries, overlaid temporarily over the concrete city beneath, as if it's squatting on the CBD, attempting to suffocate or strangle, perhaps. I'd like to see a photograph or plan of The Fence from above, and then extrude its form from the streets (sketch below).

Of course, it's the antithesis of what Price and Archigram attempted with their visionary work - a kind of Anti-Fun Palace, in which possibilities are diminished and the only course of action is to be shepherded out to the perimeter of the city. From an urban planning perspective, it's the opposite of creating a contemporary open space. You could see the whole thing as a design problem - perhaps run as an avant-garde exercise in a crazed design school somewhere: how to tighten the grip a very public space, centred around one of the country's principle attractions? Again, you begin to look at The Fence as a temporary architectural incursion in the city, a reversal of the usual - or at least more written about - architectural and urban design work. You half wonder where The Fence is heading next.

As Marcus points out, this design work now also include a tightening of the informational grip on the city, by deliberately eroding data services over strategic locations. He describes as a "lo-fi-ing of Sydney, resolution as security measure", in which Google Earth/Maps high-resolution imagery of the Sydney CBD is subtracted, such that it becomes temporarily blurred over the Opera House and other related places. One speculates as to how that happened. (Of course, Google wouldn't want to be held responsible if anything terrible did happen, as will no doubt have been pointed out to them. Though it's a little ludicrous to suggest that their service offers the potential plotter anything over the many readily accessible, detailed paper maps of Sydney apparently still in existence.) It's also strange to note just how overly precise the blurring is. In this image below, of Google Maps on my phone taken on Wednesday, note how the edge of the Opera House (left) is the exact point at which the blurring/sharpening occurs. A curiously limited definition of the danger zone.

Shifting the map inland to the Royal Botanic Gardens, we see the same sharp:blurred boundaries, creating odd hybrid buildings with one wing in focus (lower-half), the other dark and blurred (top-half), perhaps like Diller+Scofidio's blur building. Presumably this link to that exact spot will improve in resolution after APEC, so writing about this transient architecture necessitates a screengrab:

It's an oddly crude tactic, and in terms of an analogue to the physical Fence, it's far less effective. The Fence covers a huge area, across 5km, whereas this strategic blurring seems a little tokenistic. However, note also that this informational space extends to the media too, with ABC's satirical TV show The Chaser being warned off "trying anything" in the area. Of course, that didn't work [video]. So, seeing its media as a part the city's digital fabric, APEC's security measures attempt to restrict that too.

As a precursor of things to come, it's instructive to see all this as the kind holistic informational urban planning - blurring physical and digital cities - that the academy has been rattling on for years. Here it is, folks.

It's also going to be instructive to think how these powers might extend, just as the Declared Area has extended police powers in the streets - to a carefully orchestrated temporary enfeebling of the informational city. I wonder which city is the more resilient in the face of these strategies - physical or digital?

Wandering around on Wednesday, I manage to take several photos of The Fence - despite claims that people would be stopped doing so - as police close off streets, occasionally check IDs, and generally funnel people away from what are usually Sydney's busiest streets.

The Fence is very configurable, allowing different streets to be closed at different times. Indeed, the police occasionally seem unsure which streets to shut off, when.

The transport services have been reconfigured too, with bus stops shifting location for APEC and indicating just how malleable the city can be.

The casual militarisation of the space is clear - again recall how Archigram, Price et al were influenced by the temporary, configurable or prefabricated architecture of WWII; pillboxes, sea-forts, funnies &c. - but I also begin to see that the whole thing is working a little like a reverse of la tonnara, the traditional Italian fishing net structure, which can be seen as a kind of transient, underwater building. With la tonnara, tuna were ushered through a series of netted chambers, ultimately towards entrapment. With The Fence, people are ushered through a series of steel fenced chambers, out of the city and away from APEC.

It's eerily quiet, save for the constant drone of helicopters patrolling overhead. I feel a little cheated, as we were promised Black Hawks, which are an entirely beautiful if malevolent machine. Instead we get bulbous police helicopters, sprouting with antennae. Yet their ambient drone adds a new note of threat to the city, in streets otherwise bereft of their usual soundtrack.

The atmosphere is a little tense - with that many armed police around, and people being corralled through metal fencing, how could it not be? - but I suspect it's far less tense that it would be in other countries.

Back in sleepy Vaucluse, at the mouth of Sydney's wondrous harbour, I spot a small, grey Australian navy patrol boat, bobbing up and down in the whitecaps off the South Head. Helicopters buzz the cliffs a little more persistently than usual. Yet this seems like an empty show of force. I wander past an old disused gun emplacement - looks circa WWII - with the rusted mount for an anti-aircraft gun, angled towards some imagined enemy approaching from the ocean. Any threat to Sydney now is apparently in the opposite direction, within the harbour, around the Circular Quay where modern Sydney was founded. The defences the city mounts are now internalised, covert, temporary digital or light steel structures. In a week or so, there'll be no trace of them, quite unlike the crumbling chunks of concrete, as if a child's discarded toys, quietly sitting up here on the raw bluff headland.

For a full set of larger images relating to the APEC fence, see cityofsound at Flickr.

For more architectural perspective on walls and fences of all descriptions, check Bryan Finoki's excellent blog Subtopia.

Flat rates, Flat whites

Before moving to Sydney, I'd promised myself that this site wouldn't become completely overwhelmed with notes on Australia. Yet these are precious moments, when my wide eyes are eating everything up, even more than usual. This is a rare time, first impressions hitting hard - as Dyer said of Lawrence, he would start writing about a place from the train on the way there. The active naïvety of the outsider -  familiar in some of my favourite writing by Raban, Robb, Carey, Dyer - is a powerful force when well trammelled. Mark Twain said something similar. Though you never know with Mark Twain.

Every day provides a cavalcade of differences, a sensation will be familiar to anyone who has lived in another country. From yoghurt pots to the layout of bus timetables to bar protocol to forms of government, and all points in-between. Even the certainties of death and taxation will be handled differently. Australia, which shares the same language as my native Britain - to some extent - and with it a strong residual cultural influence, is still utterly different. Perhaps it's more surprising as at the meniscus, the culture seems familiar, but the differences are actually fathoms deep. If you're on top of things, this is a wonderful feeling, a gently bewildering, continual mild surprise.

The basic setup of life in a new country immediately brings many of these differences rushing to the foreground, in a way that holidays never do. I won't bore you with my thoughts on what the differing designs of electrical plugs can tell us about national characteristics (OK, then: the overly safe, sturdy British plug, as if made of brick; the insouciant apparent lack of a pin for earth on the Continental European; the Australian discreetly positioned half-way between European and American styles, doing its own thing etc.) nor the other quotidian surprises: Weetabix being called Weetbix, the shape of coins, randomly different pronunciations, the curious affection for lawn bowling, the abundant size and flavour of local produce, with exotic fruits no longer exotic, the prevalence of school uniforms, the trajectories of news coverage. More immediate again: the more expansive, more experimental architecture; the obviously different climate and beautiful flora; the genuine political issues; the enlivening sense of limitless space, of earth and sky, that you just breathe in 'till your chest swells and your head is filled with possibilities ...

All these subtly different experiences will ultimately tell me a lot about this place, as the dust settles. In all this, I discover a bit about local approaches to technology adoption, regulation, geography, urbanisation - and some global patterns too. As with most western economies, they're all caught on the apparent dilemma of providing both individual choice and effective public service, bobbing up and down in the often turbulent wake of Milton Friedman's work, particular interpretations of the call-and-response between government regulation and market forces. Australia has of course developed numerous iterations of its own political and economic strategies, filtered through a complex historical prism and multiplied by geography and regional aspect - it's far too detailed and subtle for me to appreciate yet. But if the reasons for things feel obscured, blurred, opaque, the differences are felt sharply nonetheless.

In setting up a business, I encounter more contrasting systems - here, the importance of state-level business administration versus national taxation systems. Equally, registering for health care, opening a bank account, moving about. In terms of public transport, one has the feeling that Sydney is sort of trying them all out at once without really getting behind any of them with any vigour: bus, tram/light-rail system, an urban rail network that briefly dips underground downtown, as if trying out being a subway then quickly thinking better of it, ferries, taxis, water-taxis, even a monorail for goodness' sake. With banking, we find internet-based e-banking and contemporary financial services, but also charges on ATM transactions and in-person appointments with an actual human representative to open an account. (This latter turns out to be a more improved service, actually.) Health services are far more responsive, less under the cosh than in London. Getting a mobile, I find a far more confident, competitive and coherent 3G market than in the UK. Bolder, sharper.

Alongside all the myriad benefits and improvements I see - albeit through the rose-tinted view of the newcomer - one negative difference that hits home quickly is relatively woeful broadband environment. It's a shock to feel it, coming from the UK, where the rabid competition in telecommunications has hammered everything in favour of the consumer, leading to low, low prices and relatively fast speeds. And this is something you feel; it's like suddenly carrying a lead weight. In Australia, the available speeds are much slower on average, products can be non-standard, service can be poor (connections drop without warning), the former state telco Telstra still dominates, and the deals are structured around limited data usage and bandwidth per month, rather than the flat rate 'as-much-as-you-can-eat' packages you get in the UK and elsewhere. It's only with flat rate packages i.e. consistent pricing irrespective of usage, that this technology is really freed up.

In this respect, Australia suffers from a particularly unfortunate comparison with its South East Asian near-neighbours. Urbanisation is often mentioned as the key to South Korea's reputation as high-speed haven, as it's only really Seoul that benefits from ubiquitous high-speed connectivity but that's the majority of the population. Seoul's infrastructure was built through a combination of government drive and corporate muscle, but neither driver appears to have really kicked in yet in Australia, leaving the environment caught between regulation and competition with neither apparently able to move quickly. It needs to invest, sharpish. The government should make it a priority, at national, state and city levels, and provide whatever catalysts are needed for infrastructure provision and then let intense private competition do the rest. I'm too new to the market and culture here to take the detail of this argument much further, so listen to Leith Campbell:

"If the race has started to develop really fast broadband in the Asia-Pacific area, Australia has already all but lost, a leading telecommunications analyst says. And if that situation is to change, the Government has to encourage investment in taking optical fibre cables not just to street corner nodes, but all the way to homes." ['The connection's just not there', Sydney Morning Herald]

Australia has one of the most urbanised population in the world, so it should be able to share some of the natural benefits South Korea had. Given that, there's no need to worry too much about far-flung communities. (They can almost be picked off as special cases, and will not get in the way of commercial roll-out to the majority. Again this is different to dispersed European populations, where there's a complex variegated spread of population in a relatively smaller space.) So despite its massive scale, Australia benefits from a very usefully focused dispersal of its population. Yet some think this is not the case:

"The comparisons are somewhat unfair, of course. In Asia, with high population density, a fibre-optic cable connected to the base of a large apartment block instantly connects hundreds of people to very fast broadband." ['Wide hopes on broadband', The Age]

Indeed, Australian housing patterns are lower density than in Seoul, but they're still highly concentrated, when viewed at a macro-level of broadband rollout and compared to the European situation. By far the majority of the population lives in the well-organised 7 coastal cities - opinion varies as to the actual proportion, from 75% to 95% of the population - and these cities are relatively contained spatially, despite Australia's effectively unlimited space. Any resistance to the idea that Australia should have extremely fast broadband, competitive with its Asian neighbours, smacks of defeatism, myopia and lack of ambition.

The best story I heard recently for a successful technology- and culture-inspired rollout that takes advantage of urbanisation is perhaps somewhat oblique. But it's also an Australian story; that of how it ended up with the best coffee culture in the world. (Yes, New Zealand, you may quibble now.)

Coffeegeek.com has a great article explaining how this happened, written by coffee entrepreneur George Sabados. Before 1948, and the invention of the mass produced electric pump-driven espresso machine, most Italian emigration was to the United States, taking with it the old-fashioned approaches to making coffee, and little knowledge of the espresso as we know it. The invention of this new espresso machine coincided with the Australian government attracting vast numbers of new immigrants, via its '£2 ticket' scheme, whereupon most Italian emigrants then switched course and headed South. (For the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, a third of the city's population were Italian, or Italian-Australian. And Peter Robb, in his majestic 'Midnight in Sicily', writes briefly of this Italian emigration to Australia, particularly from the mezzogiorno, and the taste for coffee that went with it.)

The way Sabados tells it, the acceleration of coffee culture in Australia was enabled by its urbanisation - "The concentration of the population bases in these cities (Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, Perth, Brisbane) set the framework for the rapid spread of espresso" - and then through competition, during the eighties and nineties, competing in terms of quality of experience as well as quality of coffee. This leads happily to a vibrant, distinctive small entrepreneur-led market, as well as some national franchises. (Interestingly, Sabados tells of how Australian coffee developed the integration of milk with espresso too, leading to more variety than the Italian market and the fabulous Flat White.)

The result is an extraordinarily rich coffee culture, arguably the best in the world, with numerous fantastic cafés throughout its cities and a highly knowledgeable populace brewing at home too.

It's perhaps frivolous to suggest telcos and government could look at this and learn from it, but essentially this too is a story of regulatory catalyst, technology adoption and new cultural influence through immigration to an urbanised population, wherein competition can improve quality. The ingredients may be electricity and water supply, trade routes and knowledge, and the context quite different historically and culturally, but all these facets are also the results of that 'call-and-response between government regulation and market forces' I mentioned earlier, and take strategic advantage of Australia's urban culture. Seeing broadband as a feature of a culture akin to coffee shops, rather than technical problem, may help too. Coffee shops often get used as metaphorical placeholders for the information age - not least here - but here's something that describes their genuine culture- and technology-driven evolution, through urbanisation. Equally, in terms of immigration-driven change, standing in a long, busy line at the Department for Immigration and Citizenship the other day, I was only one of a handful of immigrants who didn't appear to be South East Asian. Perhaps they will bring the broadband, as Italians brought the coffee.

The View

One thing R said to me, on leaving, was that that distance might enable me to gain new perspective on London, Britain, Europe. We'll see about that. But a thought does occur on London, with respect to views and skylines. My new city, Sydney, has what you might call A Proper Skyline. It's stunning, and visible from numerous angles, distances; from the water or from the green, hilly surrounds. When the sun sets over the city, seen from the bus curling its way back to Vaucluse, from Bondi up the Old South Head Road, or through Double Bay and Rose Bay on the New South Head Road, it's truly beautiful. It's barely worth taking a picture of it, as you can't really capture its splendour, and there are probably several hundred thousand out there anyway. (Difficult to resist though). It's not even the only view, as Sydney is blessed with many of them, in almost all directions. The obvious views become augmented by the sudden, surprising glimpses, a slice of the Bridge, a sliver of harbour.

How great that citizens can quietly enjoy these views every day. Like many of Sydney's natural advantages - sitting on Bronte beach in the winter sun, for example - it's a very cheap form of entertainment in a city not renowned for a low cost of living, by Australian standards anyway. Even if I end up like David Wenham in 'Three Dollars', I'll still have The Views.

We'll see how that feeling endures, as time breeds familiarity, which in turn breeds not contempt, but somehow engenders a blasé ocular oversight, leading to taking such things for granted. I suppose you must just stop pointing out that "It's a glorious day" at some point too. It's interesting to observe how Sydneysiders react to the ubiquitous jaw-dropping views. Needless to say, their jaws don't drop every time they see one. Cranial osteopathy would be Sydney's most lucrative profession if they did. Instead, you might see an old feller steal an odd glance across the sparkling deep blue water, from the North Shore Line train over the Harbour Bridge, before his eyes settle back into the middle distance ahead.

I'd seen this effect before, in Bilbao. I remember being up early one morning, stepping out for a breath of fresh air after feeling the combined effects of travel and Basque wine, and wandered over to this sculpture of a building, the Guggenheim, gleaming gold in the pale light. I stood in front of it, agog, for a good 20 minutes. Meanwhile, around me, Bilbao was going to work, or out jogging, or heading for a coffee, but rarely looking at the Guggenheim. I saw several jog right past this enormous, glistening beast without even looking across once. Given its opulent, over-the-top form it was as if the building was daring them not to look, unfurling itself before them, the sun's rays creeping across the undulating tiled skin, as if a Frill Necked Lizard living up to its name. And Bilbao's citizens just jogged right past, running along the riverside that broadsides the gallery, not even a quick glance of recognition. Perhaps even the most riveting views fade with time and repetition.

London has few such obvious views. It's not a city of spectacle, with little beauty in its natural setting - like Tokyo or Paris, and quite unlike Sydney, or Seattle, or Rio, or Zürich - and it's a city that makes the resident and visitor work hard to unpick its secret delights. Sure, you have the odd spot, such as views back from north London (as noted before). But the view of the city is one of a largely featureless, low-rise sprawl, with only the city and Docklands providing some brief vertical interest, fairly incoherently. It doesn't have the classical urban form of a slowly building crescendo of buildings downtown, as with Sydney, where the upwards curve of the Harbour Bridge draws a trajectory up to a series of 'scrapers culminating in Centre Point. London is more dissonant, polyphonic, dispersed, difficult to get a grip on. The central curve of the Thames can present a good aspect. But it's not a city with the views at every turn you can get in Sydney. The skyline isn't something you can draw, and although a loose assemblage of icons will do in terms of representing a city - for example in this set - the skyline isn't something you think about in London. Only here, when I chanced across this view on Google Earth - which might be gone now, due to the regularly updated satellite imagery - did I think about a skyline along the south bank of the Thames, for instance. I hadn't noticed it had a skyline, until I saw it here, stretched out in shadows.

It struck me that this is an entirely representative London view - unlikely, difficult to observe or describe, a little ragged and dirty, in brown and grey, and probably gone tomorrow. But perhaps all the more interesting, as a result.

The odd sniffy Melbournian might say that all Sydney has is The View. Which is a little harsh. Just how harsh remains to be seen, but for the new immigrant to this city - as I am - the views are startling, wonderful and an everyday pleasure. I may get used to the weather, even being English, but I'll try to resist becoming blasé about The Views.