cityofsound

Post-occupancy evaluations of public wi-fi

As the result of some conversations about a month ago, Arup have been commissioned by the State Library of Queensland to do some analysis of their free wi-fi service, which runs throughout their Infozone and Knowledge Walk areas.

I’ll be doing research there next week, looking at usage patterns from various quantitative and qualitative perspectives, some analysis of how the variability of wi-fi maps onto the informal use of space enabled by the Library’s open design, some benchmarking against best practice in terms of denoting the presence of public wi-fi, some technical discussions. That kind of thing.

I’m keen to explore new ways of discerning spatial usage patterns, including software-based analysis of video If possible. Otherwise, it’ll be students, counting.

I’m also keen to explore some interesting ways of visualising the use of wi-fi mapped onto use of space. Whilst thoughts on the methodology and sketches of representations are ticking over nicely I thought I’d ask readers if there are any interesting examples of similar research that we should be aware of. In return, I’ll post some observations on methodology and visualisations afterwards (IP-permitting, and with the Library’s approval of course.)

I know of two studies in particular. Paul Torrens’ work on ‘wi-fi geographies’, which layers signal strength data over Geographical Information Systems (GIS), usually for urban-scale spaces such as this visualisation of wi-fi access points in Salt Lake City:

I quite like the visualisation of a wi-fi cloud hanging over the city (see movie here, about half-way through) though I’m not sure how actually meaningful the representation is. Additionally, I’m dealing with a microcosm of this space, rather than an aggregation of numerous wi-fi access points across a city.

Then there’s Andres Sevtsuk, Sonya Huang, Francesco Calabrese, and Carlo Ratti's work with the SENSEable City Laboratory at MIT (see “Mapping the MIT Campus in Real-time Using WiFi” (in Foth 2008, full ref. below.) Their work focused on mapping usage of the campus-wide wi-fi network, using a system (iSPOTS) which observed the volume of traffic emanating from the numerous wireless access points. This gave them a way of producing images of the blooms of wi-fi coverage across the campus (incidentally, nice axonometric view reminds me of Stirling, Archigram etc.), as well as graphs mapping the amount of usage at different times of the day.

Both interesting approaches. Any others?

I'm also interesting in surveying best practice in denoting the presence of wi-fi. This is an interesting area, as - obviously - wi-fi is invisible, so the service is usually denoted by the presence of people with open laptops, and/or small signs, for which a universal language has not quite emerged. Perhaps both of these indicators are fine, but are there better alternatives?

I know, c/o Fabien Girardin, of Orange Innovation's idea of faux-bamboo wi-fi signal strength indicators, which would actually fit in quite well from a local flora point-of-view, while also indicating the variability of wireless signal. Strikes me you could also look to communicate speed (in a non-technical sense), or use a proxy like number of users currently connected, as a way of indicating the likely levels of service before you flip open your laptop.

But do you know of other interesting, robust, useful and beautiful ways of communicating the key facets of a wi-fi network (presence, availability, speed etc.)? If so, please add to the comments below, and many thanks.

References
Sevtsuk, A., Huang, S., Calabrese, F., & Ratti, C. (2008, in press). Mapping the MIT Campus in Real-time Using WiFi. In M. Foth (Ed.), Handbook of Research on Urban Informatics: The Practice and Promise of the Real-Time City. Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference, IGI Global. ISBN 978-1-60566-152-0. http://eprints.qut.edu.au/archive/00013308/
State Library of Queensland, Brisbane, Donovan Hill Peddle Thorp, plus some notes on libraries in general

Barangaroo Tomason (超芸術トマソン)

Greg Allen posted about the concept of 'tomason' a while ago, inspired by the fabulous Tokyo-based architectural practice Atelier Bow Wow and their relentless documentation of the the city and its quotidian architectural foibles, in books like Made in Tokyo and Pet Architecture. He described the thomason (超芸術トマソン) thus:

"Made in Toyko was about ridiculous hybrids: a department store with a driving school on the roof; a cement factory integrated with the workers' dorms. They called these ridiculous, pragmatic spatial phenomena dame [dah-may] architecture, using the Japanese term for 'no good'. Such ad hoc, aggressively undesigned accidents stick in my mind as I read about Tomason [also spelled Thomason and Thomasson in English]. If dame architecture is the awkward result of relentless functionality, Tomason are the useless, abandoned leftovers. Stairs to nowhere are a favorite. Bricked up windows are a close second. Tomason are the flashings and detritus of the incessant churn of building, destruction, and redevelopment that characterizes the Japanese city. No clean slates here, no way ..."

"The term comes from the art & architecture collective formed in 1986 known as Rojo Kansatsu [Roadside Observation], which counted the author/artist Akasegawa Genpei as a founding member. Rojo's inspiration was Gary Thomasson, who was given the biggest contract ever in Japanese baseball in 1981-2, only it turned out he couldn't hit; then he blew out his knee. He was a giant, useless lump on the bench." [greg.org, my emphasis]

The photos you see here are of a tomason I'm particularly fond of, found down the road from work in Sydney. It's a sequence of steps to nowhere, with the entrance and exit long bricked-up. There's no way in, there's no way out. It just sits there embedded in the sandstone. The base is thoroughly bricked-up, ensuring no-one can climb into the section in the middle, which presumably would've taken too much brick to warrant fully enclosing.

As a tomason, it's not exactly a remant of Tokyo-pace redevelopment; more some long lost relic of an early wave of urban development that had paused a long time ago. 

It's on Hickson Road, as part of the extraordinary sandstone wall which curves right round the contours of the harbour here, part of the area now known as Barangaroo (more photos here), all the way to the Harbour Bridge. The wall was once host to a series of sky-bridges, comprising a form of connective tissue between the wharves of the harbour and Millers Point and the rest of The Rocks up on the hill. The tomason is tucked in next to the two remaining arched bridges at this point.

Browing some New South Wales state archives, I came across a couple of relevant images: the first showing the construction of the major sandstone wall along what would become Hickson Road (I think) and the second showing the construction of the adjacent bridge, taken in 1911.

Note the steps aren't visible in this photograph. Interestingly, note that also the houses on the street above the wall (High Street, appropriately enough) remain fairly unchanged, at least structurally, though their backdrop is rather different now. Big fan of these houses; more to follow.

Who knows if the steps were bricked up as part of the bridge construction, or afterwards. Either way, I declare them Sydney tomason. As the Barangaroo development unfolds, I'm quite clean to plant trees or a green wall in it, or use it as temporary exhibition space, bounded as it now is on all sides.

On Tomason, Or the flipside of dame architecture [greg.org]
Thomason group on Flickr

State Library of Queensland, Brisbane, Donovan Hill / Peddle Thorpe, plus some notes on libraries in general

Some notes on the State Library of Queensland (SLQ) in Brisbane, designed by Donovan Hill / Peddle Thorp (2007), on top of the original scheme by Robin Gibson (1988). The best public library I’ve seen anywhere. Certainly superior to the Bibliothèque National de France, far superior to the British Library, and superior even to the otherwise peerless Seattle Public Library, to name but three I’ve studied in person. And despite having a fraction of their budget, I’d guess. More on other contemporary libraries later, but here are some observations from the numerous times I’ve visited the SLQ, alongside other notes and references.

Density, via the Weaire-Phelan structure, the Holbæk Kasba and the Monaco House

Many of you will have enjoyed the work of the Bjarke Ingels Group aka BIG, and their indefatigable leader, Bjarke Ingels. On a recent trip to Melbourne, for the International Design Festival, Ingels was interviewed on Triple R's The Architects recently and was a breath of fresh Danish air.

I’ve enjoyed their work, from afar at least, for a while and one project in particular grabbed me, given my interest in densification and urbanism. Their plan for a largely residential development in Holbæk - the Holbæk Kasba - in Denmark's Sjælland region, is fascinating (see also Archidose on the Holbæk Kasba). Their proposal started with equal size plots and boxy units of equal height - and then twisted them to create tightly interlocking relationships, focusing on the spaces and views in-between.

“How do you combine the harbour areas on the big scale with intimacy with intimacy and sensory experiences on the human scale? We propose to construct a dense and low kasba of dwellings that have been twisted and turned thus creating a labyrinth of small open spaces and hiding spaces for life, play and socialising between the houses. The kasba is placed on an artificial sloping hill that raises the built-up area for parking underneath and providing each residence its own view of the water and life on the harbour.” [BIG]

All above images via BIG.dk

The relationship between the units is so dense that it reminds me of the core design principle behind the Beijing National Aquatics Centre (aka 'Water Cube'), developed by the team of Arup, CCDI and PTW. Arup’s Tristram Carfrae has discussed how the design of Water Cube - see discussion here - was inspired by the way soap bubble structures efficiently sub-divide a space. This structural principle is known as a Weaire-Phelan structure, which emerged as a solution to the problem set by Lord Kelvin in 1887: how space could be partitioned into cells of equal volume with the least area of surface between them.

BIG’s ‘kasba’ looks to almost have similar characteristics, although looser, as if the valency has varied a little between its atomic units, the Water Cube’s bubbles had floated apart slightly. They're still locked together through an invisible force - here, a desire to engender interaction rather than isolation, yet still enabling the views required of such developments. The bubbles form a new kind of urban grid, though not Muller-Brockmann at all. This is a new kind of subdivision, sharing some elements of the older, organic urban form (the nod to kasbah; or with the Water Cube, the allusion to biological structure) but with an underlying design strategy that is programmatic. It would be even more interesting to take the code-led aesthetic - seen in Water Cube, but also the Olympics opening ceremony - to produce tightly integrated but infinitely variable generative urban form.

These tactics for density, albeit deployed in relatively open contexts here, are interesting given the need to introduce denser elements into many of our Western cities. Japanese urban architecture generally provides a rich sourcebook of how to build creatively in tight urban contexts. For example, the Seijo townhouses by Kazuyo Sejima;

Or Atelier Tekuto's Project 1000:

Or the 63.02° by Schemata Architecture Office (see also):

Monaco House, which I checked out in Melbourne recently, indicates a local example of creative infill. It folds a 3-storey embassy and bar into a fairly small plot in a laneway off Little Collins Street (Ridgway Place).

Though a fairly basic box at the back, and presumably through much of the interior, the front crumples and folds as if mirroring the flag fluttering above. It catches the light beautifully, not least on the purple translucent balcony, and reflects the trees and tall commercial buildings surrounding. A clever little fold at the bottom-left corner wittily enables a tiny patch of ‘grass’.

View larger map of context of Monaco House

Designed by local practice McBride Charles Ryan, it was the deserving recipient of a Premier’s Design Award for Victoria recently, where the judges said:

"This design is the result of a comprehensive understanding of the spatial unfolding of the city of Melbourne crystallised in a small building that contributes a big moment in this city’s fabric. The building demonstrates a high level of architectural resolution. It realises a potential of widely-held views about the spatial character of the city of Melbourne – laneways and grid – by means of an unerring exploration of complex mathematics and contemporary digital production.”

It's the kind of daring project that only the creative loam of Melbourne’s architecture scene can facilitate in Australia at the moment. Yet it’s exactly the kind of project that Sydney needs to get its head around, as the opportunity here lies exploring in the numerous plots in Sydney’s inner urban cores, rather than expanding to its edges. Recent proposals to reactivate latent laneways and small bars legislation will help here, but so will a little more experimentation with density.

[More Monaco House photos are on Flickr, and these examples of density and related discussions are filed under 'density' in my ‘noted elsewhere’ links at Delicious, as well as here.]

Naïve Melody vs. In A Sentimental Mood

I read two unrelated pieces in quick succession last week. The first was the accompanying essay to the great reissue of pianist Keith Jarrett's 1983 New York sessions with Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette, entitled 'The Art of Metamorphosis' by Peter Rüedi. The second an interview with Cecil Balmond, deputy chairman of Arup, in the equally excellent recent edition of architecture journal 306090, concerning models in all their various guises.

I was intrigued by the following coincidence of thoughts. I'll just quote both, a bit out of context:

"But Jarrett was not thinking in terms of historical retrenchment, whether towards Bill Evans or even toward the founding fathers of the Great American Songbook. He was searching for a 'sentimental' approach to the past, both jazz's and his own. But he meant the term in Schiller's sense, not as mawkishness, but as something akin to a renewal or revitalisation of the old from the distance of another time and community. To Jarrett, the standards formed a sort of common tribal language. If these three men couldn't remember them, he felt, the language itself would fall into oblivion, like the language of bebop, only a fraction of whose potential had been exploited before it was buried beneath an avalanche of comparatively limited commonplace phrases. To live is to remain in memory." ['The Art of Metamorphosis' by Peter Rüedi, in Setting Standards: New York Sessions]

"That's an interesting idea 18th or 19th century concept by Friedrich Schiller. The naïve versus the sentimental is what is important. Those who try very hard for a particular thing, force themselves into it, and forcing it to work, is sentimental. In the naïve something else breaks through. Primitive art we call naïve, which doesn't mean that it's simplistic. True genius, like a Bach, or a Shakespeare, is naïve. Though the works are the ultimate in construction, they're naïve, because they come straight through to you, and enter into you. You take a Shakespeare play, and it's there (pointing at his chest); it speaks to you directly. Whereas if you take a play by Marlowe, or someone else who is not such a great talent, what you recognise is that the author is working to make it work; you are conscious of layers of trying buried in the work; the work stays here (pointing to the head). It's a kind of extreme argument, but it's interesting." [Cecil Balmond, interviewed by Eric Ellingsen, in 306090]

Balmond, who's perhaps a little harsh on Marlowe there, goes on to talk specifically about the patterns and structures of jazz, as an analogy with pattern, structure and rules within architecture - it's a fascinating interview - but I enjoyed this other unwitting overlap with Mr. Jarrett et al, and that poised halfway between the two passages is the sense that to be naïve or sentimental, after Schiller, could both still have some specific value and purpose.

2030

For future reference, a fairly random selection of urban visions/strategy statements. Interesting how many are pinned on 2030. Far enough away to enable the magical convergence of speculation and possibility? I presume Cerda's Barcelona plan or Hausmann's equivalent for Paris weren't framed in the context of a quarter of a century hence? New York's and London's here have the feel of ongoing development projects instead (perhaps therefore forgoing the opportunity to envision the future of each city? But perhaps also more pragmatic.)

• Abu Dhabi 2030 - Urban Structure Framework Plan
• Birmingham 2026
• Kuala Lumpur 2020 City Plan
• London Plan
• Melbourne 2030
• New York City - PlaNYC: See also PlaNYC Report and PlaNYC Progress Report 2008
• Portland 2030: A Vision for the Future
• Rotterdam Climate Initiative
• Sacramento Sustainability Implementation Plan 2008 [PDF]
• San Francisco Environment Plan 2008 [PDF]
  
• Sydney 2030 Vision
• Vancouver BC Sustainability Plan for 2030

Please do add any more you know of.via the comments link below.

Two or three recent diagrams

A simple diagram to describe a simple system, produced for a client recently to describe a possible virtuous cycle enabled by urban information strategies.

Starting at the bottom and moving clockwise, elements of the city’s behaviours are captured by urban informatics - that is, drawing real-time data from sensors and other probes of urban behaviour - which is then stored, analysed in city information models. In part, the output of these models is better urban design decisions (informed by the richness of real-time behavioural information).

But this also enables urban information design, which is aggregated and analysed information fed back to the street, for example in the form of smart meters, transit information, environmental performance data or quality monitoring, community information, and so on and so forth. This then enables individuals, organisations, neighbourhoods to change behaviour, if relevant. And so it continues.

Secondly, the value of those city information modelling (CIM) in terms of the design phase.

Firstly (above), the traditional design process in the built environment (here simplified hugely.) With this, we gain learning intensively during the design phase but generally move on once the built fabric is occupied, with only occasional feedback about performance, such that next stages or next projects are largely uninformed. Knowledge is patchy and leaky.

 

We can now develop this by deploying urban informatics (sensors &c) into our built environment projects (above). Thus we can begin to generate significant data on actual use. Our design practice is informed for subsequent adaptations and projects by these constant streams of data about use, which also informs our CIM's input into other projects. The models are informed by elements of behaviour that are general - thus agent-based modelling we use is more ‘realistic’ - and specifically, any subsequent work on this site is informed by this existing dataset.

 

Finally, by using this data to build rich City Information Models, each subsequent design is informed by this steadily accreting knowledge. Each design and occupancy phase reinforces the models. Running through this model-enabled design process a few times, and deploying the models across different sites, we start creating a live model of the real-time city, almost as a side-effect of the design process. This to be used as a platform for public engagement in design, as well as a platform for conveying the city’s behaviour to its citizens. (Note: a model is not the design, merely part of the design process.)

Aerial music over Beijing

All images via Boston.com

Although I'd been meaning to post the previous note on the Terracotta Army for months - in fact, since I'd first read the article in the LRB back in January - I actually hit the 'save' button in the middle of last night's stupendous Olympic opening ceremony from Beijing. It somehow seemed apposite, even though the quote was only tangentially relevant to the extraordinary events unfolding on-screen.

The ceremony frequently left me amazed, delighted and at times awe-struck, through its sheer ambition, scale, beauty and technical panache. As a friend noted in an email sent shortly after the movable type sequence, "there's raising the bar and then there's blowing the bar right into space". An extraordinary spectacle, and sublime in the original sense.

(London might as well pack up now. What could they possibly do in 2012 to match the extraordinary craft, precision and artfully poised readings of history delivered by Zhang Yimou, 14000 performers and an LED screen the size of a football pitch? I shudder to think, particularly given it might well involve Banksy, Amy Winehouse and Gary Lineker.)

And so it's clear, as Mitchell Whitelaw notes, that this was a Bob Beamon-esque 'leapfrog' by China, indicating their potential culturally and technologically, now way beyond much of what would be called the West. Whitelaw addresses the particular aesthetic of digital design in the ceremony and its architecture:

"The Water Cube and the Birds Nest don't simply display China's modernity, they claim a jump into a digital, sustainable, mega-scaled future. The computational aesthetics of multiplicity that mark these structures are, again like the opening ceremony, a powerful cultural narrative: coherence, strength and beauty made of countless tiny pieces. Like the flickering grid of the drummers, the ordered diversity of these structures is important too, in that it's not total uniformity, a simple (modernist) grid. In fact these buildings contain a kind of post-industrial grid, where the uniformity or regularity is not literal or material, but procedural or computational - the computer's ability to resolve complex distributions of force is what enables the "organic" multiplicity here." [Mitchell Whitelaw, at The Teeming Void]

I'm interested in how those aesthetics of 'organic multiplicity' apply to the ancient practices of the Terracotta army, scripting, documentation and art, the patterns of China's ancient cities, and then evolve into these contemporary practices of digital design. Codes, arrays, patterns, complexity.

To balance the scales a little I'll end with this beautiful image of an earlier Beijing I found in this book review at The Economist:

"The city of street markets, temple fairs and the "little games" that so delighted Beijingers: for instance, their passion for keeping fighting crickets, fed with honey, and for inserting tiny carved flutes of bamboo into the tail-feathers of pigeons; whole flocks created aerial music over this reviewer’s courtyard house just a decade ago."

Imagine that. What did it sound like? How does this intimate everyday artistry relate to that now rendered at the scale of the new Beijing?

Related links
Array Aesthetics (Olympic Edition) [The Teeming Void]
Facts and figures about Beijing Olympics opening ceremony [Xinhua]
2008 Olympics Opening Ceremony [Boston.com]
Arup in Beijing, incl. Bird's Nest and Water Cube
China: The Three Emperors
Shanghai Diary

Modular mass production in China

Circa 210 BC, in the Terracotta Army 兵馬俑

“Scholars of this material generally subscribe that the use of a system of ‘module and mass production’ accounts for the diversity. The phrase was coined by the German art historian Lothar Ledderose in 2000, when he used it as the subtitle of his book, which had an image of the Terracotta Army on its cover and contained a compelling thesis about the distinctive nature of creativity in China. Most commentators have picked up on the mass-produced nature of the figures; a display case in the exhibition shows a modern reconstruction in little clay figures of the production line. It is modelled in the style of the Socialist Realist sculpture that was used in Mao’s day to generate such vast agitprop dioramas of life-size figures as Rent Collection Courtyard (portraying the ways of pre-1949 ‘evil landlords’) or Wrath of the Serfs (portraying the ‘evil ways’ of the pre-1949 Tibetan monastic establishment). The point is not just mass production but the mass production of modular forms – three types of plinth, two types of leg set, eight types of torso and so on – which can be combined and recombined and combined again into a simulacrum of diversity. This is not so much mass production in the sense of the Industrial Revolution as in the sense in which it is deployed by Starbucks, where everyone can think they are getting just what they want.”

“Ledderose’s analysis of module and mass production in Chinese culture extends across a range of phenomena, one of them being the Chinese script, where again a relatively small number of modules can be combined to generate forms running into tens of thousands. The contemporary artist Xu Bing used the same principles to generate thousands of unreadable characters in A Book from the Sky of 1987-91.”

From 'At the British Museum', Craig Clunas, London Review of Books.

 

Lyons House, Robin Boyd, Sydney

(An account of a house-visit to a modernist classic, with reflections on the importance of clients who know what they want, and can express it in terms that increasingly make sense 40 years later, and the results of a Melbourne architect working in Sydney.)

A couple of months ago, the Trimbles and I drove down to the south of Sydney to see the Lyons House. Designed by the great Robin Boyd in 1966, it's a wonderful house, and still inhabited by the original owner, Dr. Lyons, some 40 years on.

After Boyd died young, aged only 52 in 1971, Joseph Burke said he was "the artistic conscience of his country, in the future of which he believed passionately." That gives a sense of his importance as an architect - particularly in practice with Roy Grounds and Frederick Romberg - but also as an influential writer and critic (I’ve mentioned his influential ‘The Australian Ugliness’ before, but more influential were his weekly columns for The Age, work for the Small Homes Service and his book 'Australia's House'.) This, however, was the first Boyd house I'd experienced in the flesh.

The Lyons House is essentially unchanged, functioning beautifully and well-cared for. It’s a great example of a form of mid- to late-century modernism, and still stands out in its environment as brave, progressive and thoughtful architecture. The access was arranged by Nic Dowse, organiser of the Boyd Homes Group, and we joined a group of around 10-15 Boyd home owners (lucky devils), fans or folk otherwise interested in Boyd’s work or the architecture of that time. (I've put a full set of photos up on Flickr, though I have to say, it was a difficult building to capture.)

The sprightly Dr. Lyons described the house in intelligent detail, and in particular its commission and relationship with Boyd. This last aspect is particularly fascinating and Lyons himself indicated the value of a client who knew what he wanted in terms of function, and his good fortune in meeting a sympathetic architect at the top of his craft.