cityofsound

"The Shinkansen to Melbourne is now boarding at Central Station, platform 27 ...": A new high-speed rail network for Australia

There's a lot of interest in high-speed rail networks at the moment, with good reason. European networks are beginning to form a continental grid of high-speed trains, and Japan's supreme bullet trains of the Shinkansen are being exported. Interest in reinvigorating the USA's Amtrak is being discussed seriously for the first time in decades. London's St. Pancras finally delivers. (And what is the design of new Macbook Air, if it's not a Shinkansen 500 nose welded to the backside of Porsche 928S, as if Luigi Colani was grinning away in some dodgy East End garage, glowing oxyacetylene torch in hand ...)

Monocle's latest issue covers many of the developments. Also, Treehugger just posted an interview with Andy Kunz, of newtrains.org, which covers the situation in the US in some detail and worth a read (if you skip past the New Urbanist bit at the start, which is woefully short of the kind of ambition and imagination that created high-speed trains in the first place.)

Meanwhile, Monocle also has a new film up - one of my favourites thus far, I must say - covering the train journey from Istanbul to Van, on the way to Tehran. Our correspondent Saul Taylor produced a wonderfully atmospheric little mini-doc, capturing exactly the dislocating sensation of those long train rides across Eastern Europe.

My own Eastern European train journey from Sheffield, via the Netherlands, to Budapest in 1991 is still a vivid memory. I've been lucky enough to experience many great rail networks. Doing a lot of business with the IHT last year meant many meetings in Paris, a very swift and easy ride away from London (it's even faster now). I recall the magnifique TGV from the north, down to Marseille; extremely fast, through beautiful terrain, and smooth as silk. Getting the train down the north-west coast of the US, from Seattle to Portland, was a not terribly comfortable ride but through the most sublime landscape imaginable. A hot dusty train from Milan to Pistoia gave me a clear sense of Italy's country and city, before I really set foot in it. The Shinkansen in the (entirely affordable) first class Green Car from Osaka to Tokyo was perhaps the pinnacle, sitting back in an armchair and watching Mount Fuji slide by, reaching phenomenal speeds yet gliding gracefully, attendants bowing to passengers upon entering and leaving the carriage. Yet Swiss railways, on simple trips along the edge of Lake Zürich, are the best examples of service design I've ever seen.

As a non-driver and only occasional flyer, the train is by far my preferred mode of transit. It's easier to work on a train, to relax and read, to stroll to the restaurant car (again, watch the Monocle film on the journey to Tehran for a particularly fine, if old-fashioned, example of the restaurant car in action.) Sleeper trains, if operated by Deutsche Bahn and not the generally woeful British rail companies, can be a wonderful way to travel longer distances in real comfort. They're safer too, if run well (the Shinkansen hasn't had a single passenger fatality in shifting 6 billion passengers over its 40-year history, including through earthquakes and typhoons).

My European roots might be showing here, but the New Rail Revolution isn't limited to that continent. Juergen Kornmann of Bombardier - one of the world's biggest train manufacturers - told Monocle about the investment in rail elsewhere.

"It's those emerging markets - India, China and Russia especially. They're making huge investments in infrastructure. They have a big need for new material, and this means very good business. Russia has an urgent need for freight rail infrastructure because they have such huge distances within the country, from the mines in the east to the population centres, and Europe, in the west. In India, passenger traffic has increased as more people move to big cities. In China, it's both."

The options for trains are increasing too. Over and above the Shinkansen, Deutsche Bahn has a fleet of ICE trains, which can reach speeds of 300km/h. Generally, an all-electric line would be the way to go.

So high-speed rail cuts across countries with vast open spaces as well as densely-packed Europe. And now we are either just post-peak oil, or thereabouts depending on who you read, the other benefits of trains over cars and 'planes barely need stating. (Again, read the Treehugger interview with Andy Kunz if you do want the stats on how much more energy efficient trains are.)

But it's not just about efficiency. There's a romance to the train journey that has never been fully captured by the aeroplane, save those early heady days of flight, and the initial commercialisation of airways (see Evelyn Waugh's Labels for an example). The road movie has a certain panache, admittedly, but is usually defined by an existential solitude. Flying is usually defined by anxiety and fear, whereas the train by intrigue, chance, possibility, cameraderie, romance, and travelling rather than arriving. Examples abound, from Patricia Highsmith's Strangers on a Train to Georges Simenon's The Man Who Watched The Trains Go By to Greene's Travels With My Aunt, and many others. See also the films, such as Strangers ..., The 39 Steps, The Lady Vanishes from Hitchcock alone. You will have your own favourites.

The posters of Tom Purvis, those GPO films of the London to Brighton route, numerous great pieces of music. A nostalgic point admittedly, but what a different class of cultural production, as if the imagination is stoked by the train more than any other mode of transport.

Moreover, trains can be amongst the most thrilling examples of industrial design, train stations our sublime secular cathedrals, rail bridges our finest creations in civil engineering, and so on. So this isn't at the 'knit your own scented mung bean' end of sustainability; rather, gleaming future cities ascribed with high-quality, high-tech mass transit.

Except here in Australia.

Many think the Australian economy will be shielded from recession by China, and it's currently running at a fairly hefty budget surplus. Either way, spending on infrastructure works is one way of dealing with productivity during global economic slowdowns. So there's money. And sure enough, the Australian government is looking at infrastructure.

"Cabinet also decided yesterday to go ahead with plans to establish Infrastructure Australia, a body to co-ordinate public and private investment in areas such as ports, roads and railways."

Yet the train network has long since departed from the popular imagination, and that's the major issue (economic capacity to invest in infrastructure is really a question of will, which is in turn a question of culture). In fact, Australia might just have been a little too new for it to really have ever landed, as a concept. Even though my initial observations suggest that large areas of Australia's cities are given over to rail and related infrastructure, many will see this as ripe for redevelopment (e.g. the certainly very good CarriageWorks development of the Eveleigh Rail Yards.)

Certainly, this is a car-based culture, just as with the US. Yet it's significantly without that cultural memory of the long arms of iron railroad, hardwiring America out of its mid-western plains (described most wonderfully in Jonathan Raban's Badland.) The interior of Australia is still largely untouched by industrial development, and will always remain so. Politically, the governance model has been left in an unhelpful position, indicating the careless negligence with which rail has been treated. Rail networks were created and run by the states, rather than the federal government, even leading to different gauges of track being laid down from state to state, apparently. They're still run by state-based companies, which means you sometimes still have to change trains to get from Sydney to Melbourne, an incredible state of affairs in 2008.

Of course Sydney to Melbourne is no small journey. Australia is such a vast country, based around effective city state economies, that a constant series of flights shuttle back and forth between cities almost every half-hour, providing hour-long journeys between Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide. The iconic drives take a day or so, if done by car, which people seem happy to do.

But neither of those modes of transport are tenable going forward, for mass transit, from almost any perspective you'd care to mention. To be clear, cars and planes will still be valid options, just not for the vast proportion of the travel required. The road journeys - the Great Ocean Road, the Grand Pacific Drive, the Pacific Highway - will still be tourist experiences, quite rightly. Infrastructure like the Sea Cliff Bridge in New South Wales will always provide visceral experiences of Australia's beautiful terrain, almost second to none.

But the roads need to be replaced as as the platform, no pun intended, for mass transit. They're barely suitable for freight, and certainly not suitable for business travel. A AUS$3.6 billion upgrade to the Pacific Highway alone is a lot of money to spend on a short-term solution.

In comparison, the train wins out in almost every possible future scenario. Leaving aside that small matter of peak oil, trains are far more comfortable to work in, as long as the space plan is generously laid out (again, don't look to British trains here). Wireless and mobile networks are far easier to implement on trains than in the air. And they deliver you from city centre direct to city centre, as opposed to depositing you well outside the outer suburbs with another journey ahead of you (never fun rushing from the airport to a meeting in near-tropical conditions.) Moreover, as Kunz points out, it's easy to integrate interstate trains with an urban light-rail/tram network, in a three-tier system of national, regional, local.

I see the opportunity for a primary southern- and eastern-coastline based network, connecting Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide, with a tangent shooting off to Canberra, and a possible stop at Newcastle. These are all classic 'city pairs', in the language of high-speed rail network planning. (Perth and Darwin are just too far to connect on this line directly, but should be served by long-distance high-speed sleepers, with the level of comfort and service achieved by the Deutsche Bahn City Night Line. Lines exist on these axes already, run by Rail Australia essentially for tourists - the Ghan (bottom to top, Adelaide to Darwin, 3000km) and the Indian-Pacifc (the 4300km from Sydney to Perth via Adelaide)).

Let's call this new network the Southern Cross Line, as Melbourne's excellent re-worked Spencer Street station could be its centre-piece (it's a fine station by Grimshaw, and winner of the Walter Burley Griffin award for Urban Design in this year's RAIA awards. It indicates the fine opportunity for quality in civic architecture the railway station presents).

Just as that station attempts to suture Melbourne's CBD together with its Docklands, the high-speed rail network would genuinely connect most of Australia's major cities. Roma Street in Brisbane and Central Station in Sydney would both need a re-vamp (yet Elizabeth Farrelly in the Herald suggests a way forward for the latter in Yuval Fogelson's plan to sink Central underneath Sydney's inner-west.)

(For fun, I've dashed off a simple identity, drawing on the best elements of the Australian flag set on the turquoise of the accompanying ocean, then indicating how an animation could warp the constellation slightly to indicate the major destinations (below), a sequence of pearls along Australia's coastline. The Commonwealth Star remains on the logo, alongside the Southern Cross, indicating this wider national sensibility connecting the city states. This bending of the Southern Cross stars towards the cities relates to the maps of Europe warped by high-speed rail I posted about before. I've half a mind to re-draw Australia on that basis, indicating a pinning of the fabric pulling towards this densely-packed south-east corner. And of course a train with a hooter like the Shinkansen (top) surely deserves a pimple.)

It barely needs pointing out that this 'Southern Cross Line' would also instantly be amongst the most beautiful rail journeys in the world, particularly given a few show-stopping bridges and viaducts hugging the coast as much as possible, yet also easing through lush pasture and rocky outcrop, tinder dry plain and damp rainforest.

The trains should quite simply be imported Shinkansen bullet trains. Taiwan have bought the first exports (700 series) from Hitachi (video of Taiwanese tests below). Russia are interested, for their Trans-Siberian Railway. China has taken a joint-venture approach, modifying bullet trains built by Kawasaki. Even the UK has ordered 29 aluminium Javelin trains, from London to Ashford for the 2012 Olympics (possibly overkill given the UK's small footprint. Unless they give it a bit more of a journey, it'll be like tethering a greyhound on a very short leash.) So the Shinkansen import model is alive and well, and if elements of Japan's service culture and attention to detail in branding and service design (certainly a little more thought than my five-minute sketch above) can be imported too, all the better.

Australia has imported wisely from its Asian neighbour in the past - its peerless architecture is heavily influenced by Japanese tradition through the work of Robin Boyd, Roy Grounds et al, and its cuisine likewise. There's no harm in doing a bit more importing here.

From Tokyo to Fukuoka is 1,174km, and the N700 bullet trains do that in five hours. Melbourne to Sydney is roughly 900km and currently takes around 10 hours. Sydney to Brisbane is 1000km and currently takes around 13 hours. Both services run essentially 1 train per day. With Shinkansen, and newly built track optimised for high-speed, you might guess that Melbourne to Sydney would take around three and a half hours, and Sydney to Brisbane around four hours, and you could run them on the hour. That's getting comparable to flying time, as trains have far quicker check-in and can deliver you from city centre to city centre.

This 'Southern Cross Line' can run alongside the Gahn and the Indian-Pacific, which remain great tourist services. And of course, cars and planes are still part of the mix. It's just that, given the circumstances, the balance now has to shift heavily, back towards the train.

So I call on Mr. Rudd's administration to spend some of that budget surplus - which could be around AUS$18billion - and build a national high-speed rail network. Reorganise the governance to be a federal network, as rail is inevitably an interstate issue. Buy the trains from Japan and lay down the track. Create a network that people would be thrilled to use; would be proud of, as the Germans, French and Japanese are proud of theirs; that would ultimately make them leave the car at home and the plane on the runway. Rudd is right to have made broadband networks one of his administration's priorities, but this is a different network, a different level of investment - and return on investment - altogether. It's a new network for Australia.

Ballardian home movies

I’d like to organize a Festival of Home Movies! It could be wonderful — thousands of the things… You might find an odd genius, a Fellini or Godard of the home movie, living in some suburb. I’m sure it’s coming… Using modern electronics, home movie cameras and the like, one will begin to retreat into one’s own imagination. I welcome that…

J.G. Ballard, quoted in ‘Interview with JGB by Graeme Revell’, RE/Search No. 8/9, 1984.

Simon Sellars of the excellent Ballardian and HarperCollins UK have made it so. They suggest the mobile phone's videocam is the contemporary incarnation of Ballard's 'modern electronics', and provides "an unprecedented window into inner space." The films should be no more than a minute in duration, and a Dogme-like approach to post-production i.e. let's have none of that. Prizes are plenty of lovely books, including Ballard's forthcoming autobiography. All the information you need is at Ballardian.com.

Let's see if there's more to this than happy slapping. And of course slow pans across the grimy Westway.

1st Ballardian Festival of Home Movies

Musashino Plateau

In my recent review of the book Houses, on SANAA's work, I noted the potentially useful understanding of density in Tokyo and related cities. And that the sprawling cities of America and Australia may have to rebound from their singed edges, folding back in on themselves, to what end? Hardly a shattering insight.

I then chanced across this incredible animation, by Nobuo Takahashi - a Maya Master - which either seems to critique or celebrate - or possibly both - this very particular sensibility for density. I say 'celebrate', due to the loving care that's gone into the renderings of buildings enmeshing and blurring with each other. Though it's probably intended as a critique - it's a post-human city for sure - it's a city that has generated incredible architectural visions nonetheless.

Starting with the kind of ruined, deserted city that the architects of the sub-prime mortgage crisis might soon identify with, the buildings quickly re-erect themselves, as if falling dominos in reverse, unfurling and entwining with the peculiar twisting and rippling of raw code - shifting between staccato and adagio, akin to the movement of Troika's Cloud - ultimately revealing a spiraling tower-like structure, ascending into the sky. What on earth is the back-story here, if any?

(Musashino Plateau refers to a key component of the geological underpinnings of Tokyo, I believe.)

(Another Nobuo work, 'Japan', deploys this idea with a little more restraint, disappointingly, to describe the growth of a Japanese metropolis from its rural origins. Still rather compelling.)

Houses. Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa. SANAA (Actar 2007)

The Japanese architectural firm SANAA rightly have the adulation of the world's press bestowed upon them. After a steady, sure ascendancy over the last decade or so, they've now joined the big league with their recent New Museum of Modern Art on New York's Bowery.

However, this excellent book by the Barcelona/New York-based publisher Actar concentrates on what might actually be a more important aspect of their portfolio - houses. For as good as the New Museum appears to be - I haven't seen it, but it is by all accounts a great bit of building - we should be carefully questioning the value of innovation in museum or gallery design.

It's not that there aren't fine, adventurous buildings emerging that take advantage of those cities chasing the sometimes elusive Guggenheim effect. (cf. Steven Holl's Block Building for the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City.) And the civic aspects of galleries and museums are indeed vital and valuable for cities. But when this largely well-understood design problem gets solved anew, the attention it gets is slightly out of proportion.

For housing will always be a more valuable design problem. And from the perspective of Japanese architecture, and Japanese culture, it's perhaps the pivotal built form. Indeed, Kristine Guzmán claims here that "Japan's sociological unit is the home, not the family." Further, Japanese cities, often defined by density, provide a testbed for exploring ideas of habitation that should become increasingly relevant elsewhere. Particularly in those American and Australian cities that need to unlock their muscle memory for density, their sprawling perimeter eventually withdrawing from recently singed edges, folding in on themselves such that more people simply have to inhabit less space.

So these explorations in discreet, civil density are immensely valuable. To be clear, the buildings themselves won't translate simply to other cities, as the conditions are quite distinct. Urban Japan's societal norms and cultural values are still utterly unique. Several of the insightful essays here explore exactly what those values and conditions might be, all with varying degrees of success in terms of conveying them for an English-speaking audience. Some things will always be lost in translation, it would seem, and attempting to pin down Sejima and Nishizawa's work in one book of many photographs, one interview and three essays is like trying to nail jelly to a wall.  Moreover, if one could distill the essence of their work, you couldn't simply relocate it in another city. It's so different, so distinct. Equally, we shouldn't kid ourselves that this is the kind of affordable housing that many of our cities so badly need. These are mainly works for individual clients (even if SANAA explore ideas of communities of little dwellings within that, as with the Moriyama House, and their materials are often inexpensive.)

And yet, this book is about work of the highest build quality, incredibly interesting engineering and architectural approaches that might translate, and some overriding concerns and concepts that should be of value almost everywhere. Most of all, a focus on houses, and on houses that reinforce a civic sense of connection with the surrounding environment and the enveloping informational context, while reinforcing discretion, privacy, intimacy and flexibility, and often in a high density context of small plots and tight spaces. As such, it's a rejoinder to the kind of architectural journalism that focuses on the iconic free-standing residence. (Exhibit A: a collection of a certain kind of Australian architecture, featured in A+U, ironically, a Japanese publication. This depicts "the isolated object in the infinite landscape" as Philip Goad has it. Here, SANAA's houses are often connected objects in a very finite space indeed.)

This balance between the personal and the civic, in the city, is explored in almost every single project here (there are a few exceptions). The projects are grouped into unfinished and finished, with seven of the former and five of the latter, and are drawn from an exhibition at Museo de Art Contemporáneo de Castilla y León. Each project is presented in drawings, photographs and models, with only a small paragraph describing each. As such, you're left somewhat adrift on the specifics of the projects. Yet, the projects are so obviously fascinating that this rather dry presentation inevitably shifts the reader into contemplative mode, meaning a far richer engagement with the work. I usually prefer more exposition rather than less, but on this occasion the blankness suits.

Blankness, or ideas of immateriality, translucency, weightlessness, and conjuring an innate simplicity are often to the fore in the exposition the book does offer up, in three contrasting essays by Guzmán, Luis Fernández-Galiano and Yuko Hasegawa. Novelist Haruki Murakami is even suggested as a totem in Fernández-Galiano's smart attempt to find some reference points for SANAA's work.

"His exploration of contemporary values through a hypnotic, jovial and surreal cocktail of lyrical levity, atmospheric sensuality and attention to material detail are perhaps a better parallel to SANAA's architecture."

Hasegawa's piece, 'Radical Practices in constructing Relationships', situates these houses in the context of SANAA's other work for museums and cultural centres, perhaps as you might expect from the curator of the Museum for Contemporary Art in Tokyo. It's useful, but rather side-steps the subject of this book.

Kristine Guzmán's is the most useful essay, moving easily through the multiple notions of 'Japan-ness' (after Arata Isozaki) that SANAA play with. She places Sejima and Nishizawa's work after that of Kenzo Tange and Tadao Ando, in terms of "integrating the aesthetic values of traditional Japanese architecture within a modern architecture." Guzmán suggests this may be "unconscious", though there's a revealing passage in the interview with Agustin Pérez Rubio that opens the book:

Nishizawa: "We are very much influenced by Japanese architecture. We have just never tried to quote directly from the Japanese past."
Sejima: "We cannot avoid drawing some influences from Japanese tradition."
Nishizawa: "It is not an option we can take."

Guzmán's essay continues to explore the importance of the house, of transparency, harmony with nature, shifting spatial function over time, transcendence, emptiness, and the values that SANAA's work stands for. It's fascinating.

In following the work, all three essays lead the reader back to the front of the book, to want to go through the projects again. The aforementioned interview is also relevant, allowing the architects themselves to frame what follows.

The setting for the interview is as revealing as anything, however. It takes place at a table in the studio shared by three practices, which is later used for eating at, and had previously been used for a client meeting, and before that, model-making. This multi-functional use of space is one of the more distinctive features of the projects here. Again, in describing a domestic architecture that enables the program to shift through different spaces over time, SANAA describe the useful 21st century urban home, a place where working and living co-exist, where private and public twist around each other, where informational media potentially pervades every space, yet where there is still room for shielded reflection and a relationship with nature.

(This last aspect is an ever-present theme in these projects, with large white spaces dotted with splashes of pot plants and flowers. There's little reference of this in the texts, but it's clearly a preoccupation of SANAA's. Their 'House in a Plum Grove' is the most overt attempt to synthesise the edifice with its environment, but almost all these spaces are also urban gardens. It's wonderful.)

Elsewhere, gardens become living rooms become offices become playrooms become basketball courts. Sejima and Nishizawa are working with a contemporary urban culture here, but also aware of the informational qualities of that culture - in that a space's function is now also heavily influenced by the personal technology within it. As Guzmán puts it:

"The link between the idea of information culture and certain notion of flexibility is explained in the book Blurring Architecture by Toyo Ito, where he reflects on space in 21st century architecture based on the Modern Movement, and says that an architecture that serves as a bridge between a biological and electronic body must have "a floating nature that allows for changes over time (...) because in today's society it is absolutely essential to do away with borders based on simplified functions and establish a relationship of overlapping spaces."

This is why SANAA are quite so interesting. In drawing from civic architecture and public space - parks, libraries, museums - they imbue domestic spaces with informality, intermediate spaces, chance spaces, private spaces that shift easily to public and back again, the freedom to occupy a space with an unintended function - in a sense, providing a platform for multiple behaviours and histories. SANAA's projects become a series of metaphors for understanding how informational spaces and physical spaces are beginning to entwine.

Further, in doing this mostly in the tightest of urban contexts - their 'Small House' here has a site area of 60m²; a typical Australian plot has shifted from a rationed 134m² just after WWII to 264m² today, with 600m² not unheard of - SANAA give us an optimistic vision for high-density urban living that is innately civic. When viewed through that lens, this collection could provide a pattern book for concepts, to be interrogated by architects, planners and anyone else who cares about the modern city. The ideas need translating, and some certainly won't take elsewhere - just as this text occasionally feels a little slippery, presumably translated from Spanish and Japanese into English. But that's a useful lesson too.

It's not at all perfect, the Japanese city, but there is still much to draw from it. Sir Peter Cook spoke warmly about the Japanese take on urbanism in a recent interview - he described it as "naughty thinking". We could well use a global outbreak of this naughty urbanism.

A further point to draw from this work is that of craft. SANAA can achieve such lightness in their architecture only through manufacturing of the highest build quality. The sense of weightlessness of  'House in Plum Grove' comes from interior walls of structural steel plates that are only 10mm thick, and exterior walls that only 50mm thick. This devotion to detail is also a useful tenet to reinforce worldwide. It's why it is encouraging to see SANAA's museum project apparently succeed in New York, after many Japanese architects had found American contractors incapable of their craft.

So as SANAA and their projects inexorably grow in size, their skill with at the domestic scale should be especially lauded. That's why this book is actually more important than the slew of recent articles on the Bowery. It does an excellent job of documenting SANAA's work on houses, up to late 2006, and by respectfully leaving room for interpretation, it offers up numerous prompts for how functional and informational flexibility and density might be enabled through their sheer craft with material, space and program.

The book's photographs shifts in and out of focus, as if aping these ideas of blurring and graduating transparency (also sometimes due to being shots of models). Some photographs often feel flatter than 2D, somehow. This doesn't always add value, but essentially the projects are presented extremely well, often imaginatively framed, sometimes captured in the grainy cinéma-vérité of DV screengrabs, and usefully accompanied by plans and sketches.

Yet as Hasegawa, perhaps un-helpfully given the context, notes in his closing essay: "SANAA's architecture has many elements that are impossible to understand unless one actually 'experiences' it. In contrast with modern architecture, SANAA has many aspects that cannot be revealed in 'representative' media such as plans, models, and photographs." I've only 'experienced' one SANAA building - the breathtakingly graceful Dior store on Omotesando, Tokyo - and can thus extrapolate a little from my understanding of that.

But only a little. And though Hasegawa is essentially correct that representation cannot begin to approach the phenomenological depth of experience that  actually being there provides, the book is still ultimately composed of 'just' these "plans, models and photographs".

Certainly this key point - of documenting how the architecture enables change, multiple functions over time, and absorbs and responds to information flow - is rarely attempted, save for a few diagrams from the practice. It'd be interesting to hear more about how Sejima and Nishizawa might articulate these ideas, other than through their architecture. How might one represent that blurring, overlapping or "floating nature", as Toyo Ito has it. Information graphics, diagrams, automatic documentation? Ongoing Building Informational Modelling, forming a form of post-occupancy evaluation perhaps? Or film, even? Perhaps SANAA's architecture is too subtle to be so crudely pinned down. Either way, aside from the following images, the book rarely attempts it.

The design of the book is also drawn towards a purity of blankness, a floating abstract simplicity that sets the text gracefully in black sans- amidst white space. Photographs are generally full-bleed, with the most representative - of the book and the work itself - those of streetscapes or rooftops pinned down to the bottom of the book by the empty weight of the white Tokyo sky.

It's reminiscent of Yoshihiro Tatsumi's bleak, brilliant manga The Push Man, with the iconic Tokyo line:

"A pretty sky just gets me wound up, and my head starts pounding. The city doesn't need a sky."

The lack of ornament in that sky is mirrored in SANAA's houses below, as well as this book. Everywhere, the ancient Eastern notion of "omnipresent emptiness" that Guzmán refers to.

And so, room for people emerges.

Houses: Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa. SANAA [Amazon US or UK]

SANAA
Actar
Houses: Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa. SANAA [Actar]
SANAA boxes clever in New York [Building Design]
Bowery Dreams [The New Yorker]
Successes stack up for Tokyo design duo [Japan Times]
Tokyo Architects SANAA Score in US, Europe, Japan [Japan Focus]
Miracle on the Bowery [New York Review of Books]
SANAA : kazuyo sejima + ryue nishizawa [Designboom]

Best Urban Places and Spaces: Update

We've been fantastically pleased with progress on the World's Best Urban Places and Spaces project that Russell Davies and I announced a few weeks ago. We now have almost 200 images in the pool over at Flickr, contributed by 105 of us. It's fascinating to see how people are interpreting the brief and are generally not following the well-trodden paths to the predictable places.

In 'production news' I'm particularly delighted to say that one of my favourite designers, James Goggin of Practise, has agreed to help out with the design of the book(s) of selected places. James is a quite brilliant designer, with a portfolio that includes work for the Tate Modern, Momus, Channel 4, V&A, as well as art directing The Wire magazine, creating the identity for the Docklands Light Railway public arts programme, exhibiting in the recent Forms of Inquiry show at the AA, and check his site for more besides. We're delighted to have him on board.

We've decided to pin a self-imposed deadline of the end of the month (31 January 2008), at which point we'll do the first selection, for the first edition. So please do join the group, submit your photos, and importantly, please describe the place in a few words, indicating why it's a special place.

Reminder: anyone can join and contribute images (if you don't already have a Flickr account, you can sign up for free here. Once you've joined the group, use the 'Send to group' function above your photo.). You can interpret place or space however you like - that's part of the fun - and they really don't have to be world heritage sites in any way. We'll publish the best in a free downloadable pamphlet form, with a more stylish printed offering for sale (though free to successful contributors). And though we do ask for a few words of description, you don't have to be Jane Jacobs any more than you have to be Berenice Abbot.

You can browse through the entire Flickr set right here (requires Flash):

Below, a random selection of some of my current favourite images. There are many more great examples in the group, so do take a look and more importantly, contribute.

Here we have a perfect Roman square (by kjpm), the Pike Place Market in Seattle (by peterme), night in Turin (by Luca Vergano), Singapore's apartment blocks in the trees (by marc0047), a typical Tokyo scene (by Jan Chipchase), a Prague side-street (by jakekrohn), a bus in Amsterdam (by Ti.mo), and a quiet corner of Chengdu (by rogersjones):

World's Best Urban Places and Spaces [Flickr group]
City of Sound: Best Urban Spaces

OMA renders cold North European light beautifully

I get sent quite a few press releases, with the most interesting ones generally finding their way into the 'Noted Elsewhere' column over to the right (or daily links if you read this site via the RSS feed, or del.icio.us/cityofsound if you want to see all the entries archived. Those that don't send press releases with a useful explanatory link will struggle, as will those that don't send interesting press releases, I suppose.)

And it looks like Geoff Manuagh and I are on several of the the same mailing lists, too, as he's swiftly posted about two recent releases for projects I also found intriguing. Head over to BLDGBLOG for more information on the wonderful Elastic Houses by Etienne Meneau:

And also read Geoff's thoughts on the winning entry for the Polish Pavilion for the EXPO 2010 in Shanghai, whose perforated skin should probably have made it into yesterday's round-up on façades in retrospect:

The quality of the rendering there is fairly compelling, which leads me neatly to a release in today's in-box that I did want to highlight, and - I'm not ashamed to say - purely for the presentation. The renderings for OMA's final design for the Science Centre and Aquarium in Hamburg’s Hafencity have such a dramatically sombre grain to them. Not to get too W.G. Sebald about it, but that cold, harsh North European pallor almost makes me grimly nostalgic for the grey, light-starved skies over that continent right now. Almost. [Do click the following images for larger versions]

Read more at the OMA site, though to be honest, there's little there as compelling as these drawings.

Etienne Meneau
Polish Pavilion
OMA's designs  for the Science Centre and Aquarium in Hamburg’s Hafencity

Façades: expressive, responsive, interactive

A series of notes on the contemporary façade, from expressive and performative to responsive and interactive.

(This is by no means an attempt at an exhaustive survey; there are many more advanced façades out there - do feel free to note your favourites below. And for further examples, see the excellent Interactive Architecture dot org. Nor is this about contemporary façades in general (currently foremost for me, the glowing "lenses" of Steven Holl Architects' extraordinarily beautiful, quietly bravura Block Building for the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City (amateur video here and here) and the soap-bubble structure meets ETFE skin of Arup/PTW's National Aquatic Centre in Beijing).

Instead, this is simply a curated set of façades, juxtaposing a few different approaches to expression or interaction.

Sketchbook: The Personal Well-Tempered Environment

SUMMARY

• A real-time dashboard for buildings, neighbourhoods, and the city, focused on conveying the energy flow in and out of spaces, centred around the behaviour of individuals and groups within buildings.
• A form of 'BIM 2.0' that gives users of buildings both the real-time and longitudinal information they need to change their behaviour and thus use buildings, and energy, more effectively. An ongoing post-occupancy evaluation for the building, the neighbourhood and the city.
• A software service layer for connecting things together within and across buildings.
• As information increasingly becomes thought of a material within building, it makes sense to consider it holistically as part of the built fabric, as glass, steel, ETFE etc.

INTRODUCTION

This is a somewhat overdue write-up of my talk at Interesting South, November 2007. For expediency, you could watch the video of the presentation. (It's 10 minutes long and punctuated at the end by the intro to 'These boots are made for walkin''). This is the extended write-up with notes, references and slides.

Caveat: I've often seen this site as essentially sharing my sketchbook, so please bear in mind that what follows is no more than a sketch, and series of notes, rather than any attempt to envision a fully-formed product. Any attempt at the latter would entail these sketches being tested by a more coherent design and research process. For now, this is simply a sketch, a kind of un-built architecture (for it is architecture, of a sort), and a simple, not necessarily innovative, idea drawn up for a swift 10-minute presentation at a highly multi-disciplinary event. Please take it in that spirit. I'd like to see something like this realised as a product on the market, which is part of my rationale for publishing here. In other words, feel free to make this - or some version of this - a reality yourself. If you find that the central idea doesn't ring true, I've written in such a way that you may still find some of the references or thoughts useful.

Essentially, the idea is for a system that makes previously invisible aspects of people's behaviour visible, in order to help change individual and collective behaviour. In this case, the primary drive is towards leading a more sustainable personal life, encouraging less consumption and more contribution, also taking into account the context of your behaviour in wider neighbourhood and city. By tracking your energy and resource usage, and playing this off against possible contributions made through generating energy or resource, systems are able to build simple aggregated profiles for these aspects of a person's or household's behaviour. Using popular techniques drawn from social software, these profiles provide users with historical trends for their behaviour, and allow the profiles to be compared, contrasted and recombined with those of others. By opening up these data feeds through APIs, within appropriate ethical and privacy frameworks, unforeseen applications of this information can emerge, even enabling the 'gaming' of consumption and contribution profiles, encouraging civic and sustainable behaviour through competition. By conveying this information through multi-sensory feedback and persuasive visualisation distributed across discreet domestic interfaces, the effects of a person's behaviour can thus be discerned in the everyday.

It's a kind of real-time, responsive, itemised bill for all the different kinds of primary resource usage (electricity, gas, water, transport etc.) in your life, which also takes into account the contributions you make. A sustainable lifestyle, leaving aside the thorny definition of such a thing, could at least become a little bit more tangible.

As it concerns this somewhat over-used word 'sustainability', I wanted to start the talk with the following image of the Sydney Morning Herald to indicate that I was less interested in apocalyptic headlines or hectoring people into submission, and more interested in giving people tools and information to encourage positive behaviour, and to explore ways of taking personal control of a more sustainable way of living (More on 'Apocalypse Sydney' here).

John Thackara has also noted this problem with the sustainability message:

"The house is cold, someone keeps turning the lights off, and the greywater toilet is blocked again. As a way of life, sustainabilty often sounds grim. The media don't help: they tell us we have to consume our way to redemption. The shopping pages are filled with hideous hessian bags; and ads that used to be placed by double-glazing cowboys now feature wind turbines, and solar roofs. Adding mental discomfort to the mix, politicians scold our bad behaviour as if we were children dropping litter. And preachy environmentalists expect us to feel guilty when we fail to embrace their hair-shirted future with joy."

So this is an idea to make sustainability something personal, intimate, meaningful and orientated towards positive contributions, as well as connecting the individual's actions to the wider urban context.

Open Architecture Challenge, deadline imminent

New Year, new project? Get your skates on and enter the Open Architecture Challenge. Details below; the closing date of 15th January 2008 is looming.

"Funding Already in Place to Build Winning Design of AMD Open Architecture Challenge. AMD and Architecture for Humanity challenge the creative world to develop sustainable technology centers for underserved communities. Help connect 50% of the world to the Internet by 2015. Enter the AMD Open Architecture Challenge.

Challenge Award: The winning design team will have the opportunity to work on site with the community partner and Architecture for Humanity to build their design.

Architecture for Humanity and AMD invite architects, designers, students and others to participate in the AMD Open Architecture Challenge, an open design competition to help bring connectivity and computing power to communities that lack access to the Internet. Participants are charged with designing digital inclusion centers for up to three community organizations: the Kallari Association in Ecuador, SIDAREC in Kenya and Nyaya Health in Nepal. The technology centers will empower community members with the knowledge and information available via the Internet, helping residents to realize greater educational, social and business opportunities and take advantage of health-related resources."

To enter: http://www.openarchitecturenetwork.org/challenge/

More details from Open Architecture Network below.

Halley swings round again

A couple of years ago I posted about the new Halley research station for the British Antarctic Survey. And during a brief visit to London recently, I noticed that Architects Journal had an update on the project. Here are a few of the pages from that issue (click through for larger versions).

As it nears the start of its life, I'm increasingly fascinated by this project. It could exemplify some aspects of The New Engineering, with a highly bespoke, site-specific, tightly integrated bit of design, assembled from pre-fabricated components and containing the instructions for its own demise - disassembly and recycling as a specified decommissioning point. (The station is designed to last a specific number of years and no more, which is something Cedric Price would've approved of, albeit longer than its predecessors due to its ability to move. I'm not sure about the recyclability aspects of the station.)

(Totally incidentally, I'm not convinced by the serif-led redesign of AJ. Was it also APFEL? I preferred their original.)