I’ve just finished working with Carlo Ratti and various cohorts on a great little project, which I hope might see the light of day here before too long. In the meantime, I thought I’d post this discussion I had with Carlo late last year, which was recently published in Architectural Review Australia. We met at the Metropolis Congress in Sydney, where Signor Ratti had just given a presentation on his work at the MIT SENSEable City Lab, an outfit whose work I admire hugely, working as they do across many of my interests: interactive architecture, urban informatics, responsive envronments, multidisciplinary design and other implications of real-time networked pervasive information systems for the city.
(Incidentally, the interview was also recently published on the new-ish Australian Design Review website - which amalgamates AR with its sister publication (Inside) - and which is rather nice and proving more than a little useful. Kudos to Andrew Mackenzie and Mat Ward for steering that through so well.)
Robert Miles Kemp’s talk was always interesting and occasionally spellbinding, most of all when showing the work in responsive robotic structures. His videos of simple blocks self-assembling into what he called “nano-architecture” are quite extraordinary (sometimes eliciting a collective delight similar to that of The Living at Postopolis! NYC). Kemp situated this within a wider context of interactive and informational architecture, centred around his work at Variate Labs and renowned new media deisgn firm Schematic (and his blog, Spatial Robots) described in a consistently interesting talk, covering many of the primary themes in contemporary interface design - and indeed extending the idea of where and what interfaces are.
NB: This is a write-up of a talk that took place at Postopolis! LA during April 2009. Notes are taken in real-time, with editing and context added afterward so reader beware. All Postopolis! LA entries are gathered here.
Another interview by David A and David B of ArchDaily, this time with Whitney Sander of Sander Architects, another LA-based firm. Their work is largely interesting due to the focus on prefab construction techniques - as noted previously, this is a consistent theme in some LA-based architecture.The Davids get Sander to talk about his Living Steel works by way of introduction, investigations into prefab construction. Sander notes that working out such projects would come in at $6000per sq ft was a breakthrough moment.
Sander describes how the prefabricated light-gauge metal building industry is actually about 100 years old, and now highly refined. He states it’s the most mature industry in the country (difficult to prove?); the patents wore out long ago. The Butler Box - or Butler Building - is the most well-known example. As it’s so mature now, the margins are very low. “The product is bullet-proof”, he says. “It’s computerised from the minute you place the order.“
(For more on Sander's prefab products, see their Hybrid House)
A few months ago, Scott Burnham kindly asked me to contribute to the exhibition catalogue for Urban Play, a project he conceived and then developed with Droog Design.
It is being sponsored by the city of Amsterdam and is premiering there
this September. In Scott's words, "Urban Play is about placing the
individual at the heart of the city’s development and encouraging
creative interaction between the individual and the physical city". You can also find out more at the Experimenta site.
Scott's posting up focus pieces on some of the interventionists featured in the exhibition, starting with the quite brilliant work of Gilberto Esparza, a Mexico City-based artist who creates 'Urban Parasites', "small robotic creatures made from recycled consumer
goods which wander, climb, crawl and explore the marginal areas of the
city." (Check the videos at Scott's site.)
I've reproduced the full essay below. I believe the other contributors to the catalogue were to be Usman Haque on open source architecture and Richard Reynolds on guerrilla gardening, so it'll be worth keeping an eye on. Many thanks to Scott for his considerable patience, and for asking me to contribute in the first place. It's a relatively speculative, deliberately optimistic piece, continuing some ideas from 'The Street as Platform'. Hope you find it interesting.
Another bit of admin. After a couple of weeks of rapid-fire consultancy directly post-Monocle, I joined Arup as a senior consultant in their urban planning business across the Australasian region. A month in, and I'm enjoying it hugely. I'm particularly proud to be working for Arup, a company I've long admired for both their work and their approach to work.
For those that don't know, Arup are one of the world's largest multidisciplinary design firms: 10,000 strong across nearly 90 offices worldwide, comprising designers, engineers, planners, business consultants etc. Multidisciplinary working is at the heart of the firm, and the strong philosophical foundations are derived originally from the founder, Danish engineer and philosopher Ove Arup.
Their roll-call of buildings and built infrastructure is almost the stuff of legend. It's really impossible to list the projects - but a few personal highlights would be: Highpoint 1, Spa Green Estate, Tate Modern and Millennium Bridge in London, Centre Pompidou in Paris, Seattle Public Library, Casa da Musica in Porto, CCTV and National Aquatic Centre in Beijing, the Channel Tunnel Rail Link, the Oresund Bridge, the Dongtan project outside Shanghai ... and many projects here in Sydney, from the small but perfectly formed Andrew Boy Charlton Pool to perhaps the greatest building of the 20th century, the Sydney Opera House.
I sit within the urban planning business here, and in a nutshell I'm responsible for figuring out how information and communications technologies (ICT) will shape future cities. That means a lot of things to a lot of people, but would include urban informatics and pervasive or ubiquitous computing, how to shape or 'landscape' informational services and products within the context of both masterplanning and urban design, the various relationships between data and built fabric, information visualisation and urban design, building new platforms and interfaces for urban design, changing design processes and the knock-on onto organisations (including our own), exploring how we can engender sustainable behaviour via feedback on behaviour, advising on urban policy for innovation and ICT, urban renewal via creative industries etc. etc.
I'm currently exploring a few ideas in particular, such as extrapolating and aggregating Building Information Modelling (BIM) techniques up to the city level - to form a kind of 'City Information Modelling' (CIM). Taken with the feedback from urban informatics, this could then extend the design process out over the true life-cycle of the project, including inhabited and adapted, which would mean a four-dimensional modelling process taking into account the living city, or a '4D Urbanism'. You'll note these concepts are still a bit slippery, to say the least.
Best of all, I get to try to do this in the context of real live urban development projects - which is a true test, with very real constraints, but the opportunity to really make a difference. (For a small portion of my time, I'm also working across some of our Foresight, Innovation and Incubation work with colleagues in London, particularly the Drivers of Change programme. No doubt, I'll also be doing some knowledge management and comms work from time-to-time, too.)
I'm hugely excited by the promise of all this. About 13 years after I started exploring the impact of ICT on cities and vice versa - with the Northern Quarter Network in Manchester, UK - I've come full circle. As ever, I'll try to share what I can here, in this semi-public sketchbook or journal, and now the dust is settling a bit I'll attempt to publish a little more regularly again. OK! Enough admin.
Spot of admin, forgive me. I'm doing a presentation at Creative Social tomorrow night (Thursday 14th May 2008), here in Sydney. This particular edition of Creative Social is organised by my friend Tim Buesing, and forms part of a wider global network of workshop-style sessions and presentations aimed at creative directors. I'll be doing something around these themes of urban informatics, or how information and communications technologies are re-shaping all things urban: form, everyday life, planning, wayfinding, architecture, public space and so on. Keynote is glaring at me from the dock, below, so I'd better get to it shortly.
I gave a precursor of the talk at a public lecture organised by University of Technology Sydney, a couple of months ago. I was invited by Adrian Lahoud, and it formed part of an excellent series of public lectures around architecture and urbanism. If you're at a loose end in Sydney tomorrow evening and would prefer an alternative to my talk, you could do worse than go and see the next installment in the lecture series, delivered by none other than the Lord Mayor of City of Sydney, Clover Moore MP. She'll no doubt be majoring on their recently launched Sustainable Sydney 2030 strategy, much inspired by Jan Gehl's recent report for the City of Sydney. I'll post my own thoughts on all that soon enough.
For my lecture, I essentially 'performed' my Street as Platform piece, augmented with candid pics from a recent trip to Melbourne. I think it worked well, as a kind of freeze-framed narrative, in terms of conveying how much the street weighs these days, as Bucky might say, when you take into account the largely unseen digital communications. I called it The Not-So-Quiet City this time, as a nod to Aaron Copland's lovely 'Quiet City' piece of 1941, and to play up the sensory design aspects. This was partly due to it being a roundtable on 'Atmospheric Urbanism', where I was presenting alongside the excellent Nadia Wagner, a researcher in 'urban olfactics'. Her work is absolutely fascinating, and most Pallasmaa. The reason I think the two lectures worked well is that we got some absolute corkers in terms of questions afterwards, many of which have been percolating through my mind ever since. And I'm still not sure I have particularly concrete thoughts on them. "What is the creative challenge for architecture, in response to all this?" was one intriguing question in particular, a googly bowled by the ever-thoughtful Lahoud. (He's organised a follow-up roundtable too.)
Next week, Duncan Wilson and I are attending the Pervasive 08 conference here in Sydney. Our position paper was accepted by the workshop on Pervasive Persuasive Technology and Environmental Sustainability
and so Duncan and I will be taking part in that, alongside a bunch of international researchers and practitioners in this area, such as the likes of Eric Paulos, Paul Dourish, Tom Igoe et al. I'm looking forward to the whole conference hugely and hope to post our paper shortly, including reflections on the workshop.
One of the workshop organisers is Marcus Foth of QUT (previously, here), and in June I hope to be attending a related conference at QUT, organised by their Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCI). Called Creating Value: Between Commerce and Commons, the workshops on 'Broadband innovations and the creative economy' and 'Creative Industry development agendas: design as value-add' look great. Richard Allen of Cisco is a particularly good addition to the cast of speakers (see also Henry Jenkins.)
Do get in touch if you're in town at the same time, or want more info on any of the events. More news to follow, and then a return to your usual programming.
This discussion is part of a series of interviews conducted for Arup’s Drivers of Change programme. See Drivers of Change for more information.
I met Tristram Carfrae at Arup’s Sydney office, which sits in a couple of storeys of a fairly anonymous block on Kent Street. The anonymity is typical for Sydney’s ultra-business-like CBD, but so is the casually wonderful aspect – in this case, overlooking the vast Barangaroo development site on the side of the city’s CBD, and the splintered skein of deep harbour out towards Balmain, criss-crossed with ferries and functioning as the occasional water-berth of the ocean liners, great white slabs of floating architecture that add a temporary residential function to the port, before moving on east to Hawaii or north to Hong Kong.
We sit in the reception and talk for a couple of hours, over a few plastic cups of instant coffee, and just behind a model of the National Aquatic Centre, the building designed by Arup, led by Carfrae, and Australian architects PTW with Chinese partners CCDI, and that opened in Beijing just over a month ago. Known colloquially as the ‘Water Cube’, it’s being seen as a new masterpiece of structural engineering, already enjoying a flurry of publicity that will only increase in fervour when the Games start this winter. But Carfrae's career extends well beyond the Cube, and he's generally thought to be one of the leading structural engineers of his time.
We talked about the Cube, and the changing practice of structural engineering that informs such projects, and how this is radically changing architecture, building and cities. We chewed over multidisciplinary working and design processes in general, as well as techniques new and old. I’ve organised this piece into loose themes, as the conversation jumped around a little.
There’s an extraordinary - and rather British, I must say - kerfuffle going on over the future of the Robin Hood Gardens estate in London at the moment. Essentially, the building, designed by Alison and Peter Smithson (aka The Smithsons) and completed in 1972, is in danger of being pulled down. Margaret Hodge, a UK culture minister, appeared to back the demolition of such buildings, suggesting a digital model could capture the essence of a building in its stead. She said:
“When some concrete monstrosity — sorry, I mean modernist masterpiece — fails to make the cut despite having expert opinion behind it, let’s find a third way. This is the 21st century — a perfect digital image of the building, inside and out, could be retained forever.”
I left London before I got to experience Robin Hood Gardens in the flesh, but I hugely admire the work of the Smithsons, for both their thinking and practice (such as the Economist building in central London, which I have experienced). Along with Cedric Price, Reyner Banham, Archigram and a few others, they provide a historical framework for much of the technologically-enabled and culturally-informed best practice of today.
Robin Hood Gardens, in an area of East London so historically rich you can almost hear the psychogeographers whispering, is essentially a concrete megastructure housing project that’s been in need of such attention for most of its life. Carelessly built and serviced, the design never stood a chance.
Long before the GLC disappeared, TLC for such buildings had disappeared. Recently, a handful of enlightened property developers have discerned the public appreciation of brutalism moving in the right direction, but at glacial speed. Here, demolition plans appear to be moving a little too quickly, nosing well ahead of public opinion and this critical rearguard.
But Building Design is quite right to point out the importance of the building in terms of design history, and also its latent opportunities for re-development (and the iffy process going on around the building). There’s nothing inherently flawed in such structures - and of course Hodge’s line about concrete is extremely revealing, as is the subtle giveaway of a very British insecurity over ‘expertise’. With some of that expertise, allied to willpower and a smarter framework that sees the development as an ongoing bit of work, Robin Hood Gardens can be turned around, and should provide a counterpoint to some of the lazier development blighting that part of London.
“When this was first built it was very modern and people were fighting to get in here. It was very cleverly built,” she says. The way it has upside down maisonettes, you never hear noise from anyone else. And the nice thing is that every room has plenty of light — one wall is all windows and you’re not looking into someone else’s house. I don’t think these people who are proposing thousands of new homes for this site have a clue.”
RHG needs a lot of work but it is an eminently saveable building.
I’m not in favour of preservation for the sake of it. We should demolish buildings that have outlasted their use, and replace with better or more suited to the needs of the time. These new buildings should have a sense of their likely life-span. (Cedric Price was once asked what to do about York Minster, and he replied “flatten it”. Buildings that have outlasted their use should be disposed of “like a worn-out pair of Hush Puppies”, he suggested.)
But RHG is important is in at least three ways, particularly in the context of Britain: an example of British modernism (and local culture needs more working examples of this), ambition and optimism (ditto, described by Peter Cook as “strange English romantic”) and apartment-based, high-density, affordable housing (ditto again, and that passes the CP test, as many cities need good examples of this more than ever.)
Building Design’s campaign has already drawn in an extraordinary list of support, almost a who’s who of contemporary architecture and urbanism. While their simple comments-based petition system is not exactly watertight, it appears to be hugely successful in terms of garnering a groundswell of opinion.
It’s odd to see one’s name alongside that of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, Zaha Hadid, Tony Fretton, Alain de Botton, Patrick Keiller, Benedetta Tagliabue, William Menking, Peter Cook, Iain Borden, William Mitchell, Joel Sanders, Stefano Boeri, Joseph Rykwert, Hugh Pearman, M Christine Boyer, Toyo Ito, Richard Meier, Ricky Burdett, Ted Cullinan, Kenneth Frampton, and hundreds of others. (You can sign the petition here, before March 7th) (See also Richard Rogers, who has written to the culture secretary Andy Burnham, and BD's and The Guardian'sJonathan Glancey.)
Sensing they’re onto a winner in terms of their relevance and influence, and maybe saving the building while they’re at it, Building Design is ramping up their activity, publishing article after article. It’s great to see an architectural magazine trying to make a difference in such concrete (ahem) fashion. Given the issues with existing built fabric in our cities - far more problematic in terms of sustainability than new building stock - you almost wonder whether campaigns such as these are the contemporary equivalent of Arts & Architecture’s pioneering Case Study Home program of an earlier age. I wonder what The Sesquipedalist will make of it?
“On most counts, Robin Hood Gardens should be a prime candidate for listing. It is the only housing built by architects who devoted much of their lives to the discussion of dwelling at various scales. Among architectural thinkers around the world today, these architects are seen as the most important to have worked in Britain in their generation. This is heavy weight to put against counter-claims that the buildings were not built as first designed, and experienced social teething problems owing to the almost universal post-industrial problems of the early 1970s in Britain.”
“Emphasis should be put on the place-making quality of this housing, heroic towards the Blackwell Tunnel approach, embracing towards the nurturing mounds of the green space between the snaking block, where a big sky opens amid the scattered street patterns of the East End. As for resident satisfaction, the present Bangladeshi population seems to have no problem about inhabiting these monumental cliffs, in a way that the Smithsons would surely have recognised as a fulfilment of their intentions.”
“This is no Holly Street or Aylesbury Estate, best destined for the dustbin. The pressure is on, and someone must decide whether or not we are going to look like international idiots who let Robin Hood Gardens fall prey to the bland machinery that calls itself “regeneration”, while effacing the useable legacy of the welfare state.“
The Park Hill flats in Sheffield indicate a partial precedent for Robin Hood Gardens. Also inspired by the Smithsons (and Le Corbusier before them), they were built in 1961, from designs by Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith, on the site of tenements so rough they were known as ‘Little Chicago’ in the ‘30s. Unfortunately, that malaise didn’t seep clear of the ground with the destruction of the tenments, and seems to have carried over into the new development. And particularly when the British lack of facility with modernism - save a few shining examples - led inexorably to poor implementation, careless use of materials, and little ongoing servicing. And thus, the flats quickly gained an unsavoury reputation.
When I were a lad in the Sheffield of the early 1980s (cue Hovis commercial), the Park Hill flats were the stuff of legend. Playgrounds would buzz with lurid stories of what happened over at Park Hill - and the city’s other high-rise social housing, at Kelvin and Hyde Park. Though the story I remember is the rather tamer tale of a TV set being chucked out of the window, from one of the higher storeys, my mind’s eye constructing the slow heavy fall and sudden implosion on concrete. It was as if simply living there was like being in a cold, damp Northern version of Beirut under siege, glancing nervously up at the silvery sky as you scurry between blocks, darting for cover and hoping not to see the silent, graceful arc of a television approaching your head. It wasn’t like that, of course, though it was certainly not pleasant (As with RHG, Ian R. Taylor, in a book I once reviewed, did find firm evidence of ‘community’ there nonetheless.)
I visited once, going to see my first girlfriend’s grandmother, high up in one of the blocks. I don’t remember much detail, but I do remember how distinctly different it felt to the suburban late-1890s semi I was living in over the other side of the city. Not better or worse, just different way of housing, subtly reinforcing the importance of these developments in Victorian cities.
“Park Hill was awarded a Grade 2* listing in 1998. Although an important milestone in the development of Modernist housing theory in post-war Britain, the public incredulity which greeted the award spoke volumes about the success of Park Hill and its 'streets in the sky'.”
Public incredulity knows no bounds of course, particularly when stoked up by the often architecturally short-sighted British media. Ill-considered lists of Britain’s most hated buildings hardly help. (How is Channel 4's Demolition progressive broadcasting, exactly?). In this sense, Building Design’s primitive petition with its untidy collision of expertise and punter, is perhaps far more democratic form than Demolition, even given that it’s preaching to the converted?)
Now, the Park Hill flats are being ‘re-made in Sheffield’ (clever, that) by developers Urban Splash. Europe’s largest listed building - which is an odd honour really - will be re-vamped to provide nearly 1000 apartments close to the city centre, with a third affordable and two-thirds, well, un-affordable presumably. (It’s the presence of the latter that will shift public opinion round on the matter, you watch.) Lee Garland’s photography, if a little sombre, indicates the muscular presence of the building - even more so when you see it in situ, banked back on the hill overlooking the central train station and city centre. It’s a powerful building, and with the care and attention that Urban Splash will lavish on it, it’s easy to imagine the building transformed.
I’ve seen many of Urban Splash’s conversions, particularly their early work amidst Manchester’s former textile warehouses and mills in the mid-’90s, and they’re usually pretty good renovations, leaving aside broader concerns over 'regeneration'. It’s also interesting to see them now taking on brutalism, instead of the rather 'easier' warehouse conversions (which may be desirable now, but were also marked for demolition a generation earlier, apparently beyond redemption.)
Elsewhere in Britain, the Brunswick Centre in London, covered here before, may need more careful curation in its choice of retail and services, but is full of life for the first time in years and really seems to be working. Erno Goldfinger’s Trellick Tower has also gone from “eyesore” to “desirable” in the last decade. The Barbican and South Bank still feature in those ugly contests, but are increasingly being recognised as the gems they are.
Park Hill benefits from proximity to its city centre, a short walk away. As with the Brunswick, Barbican, Trellick and many others, being surrounded by good urban fabric helps. It’s a simple note, but absolutely key, and remains a problem in the case of Robin Hood Gardens. The surrounding context also needs to be addressed for the building to work - social, informational and physical - for this kind of high density living can easily reinforce an urban core, and is less well suited to the being sited on a periphery. East London has enough presence for it to work, and RHG is connected to the centre(s) of London fairly well but it will need careful local orchestration nonetheless.
Yet it can still work there. Wöhnpark Alt-Erlaa is situated outside the centre of Vienna, but with enough inherent density to anchor itself. That’s the promise of the megastructure. It’s on a different, more ambitious scale - it contains no fewer than 5 schulen, 4160 balkone and 7 schwimmbäder, most on the dach - and that, plus the integrated U-bahn, would make all the difference.
It does, of course, appear to be extremely well-built, benefiting from the Mittel-European comfort with aligning modernism and craft that was all but alien to Britain. Most of all, it will be well-run too, with a mix of residents (it's not strictly social housing). Again, the ongoing servicing and maintenance of these buildings - of both built and social fabric - will make the difference.
Back to RHG, and Stephen Bayley weighed in too, noting that “Robin Hood Gardens has been a social calamity” and reiterating that the Smithsons’ building was indeed flawed, but those flaws were embedded by the builders.
“Alas, their architectural reach exceeded the grasp of the builders and Robin Hood Gardens suffered from the start with a singular lack of commodity and firmness …”
He’s rather brutal himself, no pun intended, when apparently suggesting that the building rather suffered from its tenants:
“As Marx asked, does consciousness determine existence or does existence determine consciousness? Or to put it less correctly, do the pigs make the sty or does the sty make the pigs?”
Personally, I suspect the tenants were let down by the implementation of the building, and lack of ongoing service - as well as the post-industrial context Powers refers to - rather than any inherent piggery.
Bayley continues:
“(But) Margaret Hodge's remarks about concrete are ignorant prejudice. Concrete is a fine material, but needs maintenance and care as much as marble and oak need maintenance and care.”
Too right. And so to those comments of Margaret Hodge, and particularly her idea of preserving the building through a digital model. Here, again, is what she said (in Grand Designs magazine, perhaps the most influential British architectural periodical of its day. BD reproduced the article.)
“When some concrete monstrosity — sorry, I mean modernist masterpiece — fails to make the cut despite having expert opinion behind it, let’s find a third way. This is the 21st century — a perfect digital image of the building, inside and out, could be retained forever.”
Leaving aside her value judgement on modernism - which speaks volumes by itself - and the cultural relativism elsewhere in the article that underpins her notion that modern architecture shouldn’t be judged in the same way that 'historical' structures are, it’s this ‘digital image’ comment I find fascinating.
First of all, that particular train of thought could obviously be applied to any building. If I decided, say, that Tower Bridge or all of Poundbury were particular eyesores, would they too be replaced by digital models? Bayley spots this a mile off:
“The minister herself declares that historical purposes may be served by a detailed digital record of the building, an argument which could, I think, with equal force be applied to Uppark, Windsor Castle or Stonehenge.”
You might expect City of Sound to be the kind of place that extolled the virtues of digital modelling, and indeed I do. Building information modeling (BIM) and computer-aided design (CAD) have already revolutionised building, and the immense benefits are yet to be fully realised. Increasingly tidying up the more inefficient and unsustainable practices of construction, once BIM truly extends into four dimensions, generating and broadcasting data about the ongoing use of a building (incl. delivering the instructions for its de-construction and recycling) a more sustainable architecture can be realised. And once the building becomes a platform for other communication, from personal to civic, and if that scales up to a neighbourhood and city level, then we’re really going places. Truly revolutionary.
But I don’t think Hodge is talking about that. I think she imagines some kind of 3D fly-through. Perhaps wearing goggles. But she, and we, should be clear about the limits of models too. In no way do they - and we can even say, will they - approach the experience of a building. Simple as that. A cursory reading of Pallasmaa will make that clear. Few models can deal with the peripheral, never mind the multi-sensory experience of being there, and never mind the multi-layered historical weight of a place or space. Digging further into her Merleau-Ponty isn’t something I imagine Hodge does of an evening, any more than I do, but if she were to, she might reconsider her strategy of replacing buildings with “digital records”.
Experiencing a building in the flesh is so different to constructing and studying a digital model, that it’s frightening that Hodge - a culture minister - could even think to suggest it.
I recall walking into a small, very old cathedral in Milanese side-street, I think, lured by the sound of the choir, and once inside I hear their voices conjoin with the wails of black-clad kneeling women, rocking backwards and forwards near the altar, and sensing the sheer physical presence of that sculpted block of sound hanging in the rafters of the immense vaulted roof over my head, light puncturing the gloom through stained-glass windows and illuminating the sparkling motes of cool dust floating around me, some microscopic elements falling on to my tongue and fusing taste and smell with those being inhaled in my nostrils, the interior rushing away from my body as I begin to stand upright and breathe it all in, having ducked through the small threshold into its cavernous innards, my eyes adjusting to the gloom and slowly revealing the detail in the polished wooden pews that a million hands before mine had touched. All that, and more that I don’t have the words to describe, in a transition from outside to in, over a few seconds … And equivalent sensations might be enjoyed in a grain elevator, a converted power station, a public administration building, a swimming pool, a side street of SoHo at midnight, a small house in Tokyo in the early morning, a square in Melbourne at midday, a summer house in Finland at dusk, or in practically any kind of building. You will have your own examples.
Well, I’m sure a digital model will exist for that church, but I’m not sure I’ll get that same sensation when I click on it.
Let’s quickly put to bed this idea of digital models replacing a building. They can augment a building, and are certainly invaluable in design processes, ongoing running of buildings, education, heritage and a thousand other worthwhile pursuits. But they are not simulacra, for buildings exist.
So well done to Building Design for bringing this sorry bit of politics to the foreground of at least the architectural press, and good luck to them with their campaign. As a fan of the Smithsons’ thinking, and of several of their buildings, I'd like to see this pioneering architecture cared for.
Here’s the bullet-pointed version that cabinet ministers may be more used to:
Park Hill, Brunswick, Trellick, South Bank, and Barbican all show that British modernist buildings that were once though beyond salvation can be turned around.
Other high-density housing megastructures elsewhere indicate they can be done well in the first place, if carefully constructed and serviced.
Concrete is one of the most useful, pleasing and thrilling of materials.
Digital models have immense value, but not as replacements for buildings.
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.
"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]
I love this Honda Puyo concept car, just exhibited at the Tokyo Motor Show. Not least for its looks, its clear orientation towards high-density urban living - it can spin 360 degrees to park - plus the now obligatory 'green' credentials of electric motors and hydrogen fuel cell, but mainly because of two ongoing obsessions: sensory and behavioural aspects of the design.
Firstly, the car's roof explores tactility (as well as safety). According to Honda, "PUYO is a Japanese onomatopoeia that expresses the sensation of touching the vehicle's soft body.":
"The body of the Puyo is not traditional metal but a soft gel designed to look and feel like human or animal skin. As well as the marketing appeal of a such a radical finish, the soft exterior delivers improved safety performance, especially when it comes to pedestrian protection, something Honda leads the world on."
And secondly, the car's exterior has behaviour, in line with its conditions:
"The Puyo’s body can also glow various colours to change its look and – depending on how you view it – its personality. Honda says the changing colours alert owners to the condition of the vehicle, “facilitating a more intimate relationship between people and their cars”."
(It might enable the car to daub its own 'CLEAN ME' graffiti, perhaps.) This capability reminds me of Herzog & De Meuron's Allianz Arena, of course, but also Brian Eno's idea for re-equipping cars horns with a suite of aural motifs designed to communicate various messages - or provide a greater range of expression - to other drivers and pedestrians. The Puyo's visual approach may be quieter if no more discreet, but I do like the idea of the car communicating its state and behaviour with subtlety. It might have been more interesting to connect these two approaches and communicate state through tactility as well as visual feedback. I'd love to hear more detail of the various parameters involved, and associated interfaces (given that changing the exterior colour of the car will be of negligible use to the driver inside, leading to possible later confusion.)
"The RiN uses sensors to monitor the driver’s mental state. The futuristic concept can determine if the driver is flustered or calm and display the results on its modern dashboard."
Though if you need a car to tell you how you feel, I suspect you're beyond help.
John Birmingham: Leviathan: The unauthorised biography of Sydney A fantastic read. Thoroughly subjective, impassioned, personal and slanderous. Well researched and hefty, but written with a light touch, it takes apart the Emerald City, revealing it to be both impossibly dark and essentially conservative. Along with The Fatal Shore and a few others, essential reading in terms of understanding the city. (*****)
Gary Hume: Toyo Ito: Sendai Mediatheque As with the Seattle Public Library book in this series from Actar, I've been poring over this over the last year, pulling details and insight into recent work. A good resource, well-produced. (*****)
Christos Tsiolkas: The Slap Clever yet eminently readable novel of modern Melbourne manners. Written with the devilishly compelling page-turnability of a good grown-up soap opera, it's also a smartly structured and beautifully nuanced depiction of contemporary Australian urban:suburban society, warts and all. (*****)
Steven Carroll: The Art of the Engine Driver Lovely evocation of late-'50s Melbourne suburb, and of the railways just before the heart was ripped out of them. Not just a warm nostalgic costume drama, but with rich atmosphere and complex themes rippling beneath the surface. (****)
Geoff Dyer: Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi: A Novel Hugely enjoyable, as ever. One of the finest British writers around. Not autobiography, but autobiography. Fiction, and non-fiction. Travel writing, and not travel writing. Hilarious and occasionally moving, learned and light, warm and bad-tempered, revelling in facile reactions and almost immeasurably deep. A mess of contradictions that establishes a coherent world-view. Which is a contradiction in itself, of course. Beautifully turned prose too, apparently effortless but almost certainly not. (*****)
William H. Whyte: The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces Amazingly, I'd never read this in linear fashion, from cover to cover, until recently. Quite brilliant, clearly, and written so well. With humility and grace, wit and candour, insight and experience. Although focused primarily on New York of the '70s, it's still essential. (*****)
David Peace: GB84 Not sure why it's taken me so long to read this, as I'm a big fan of David Peace's writing and this book is set in and around the early-80s Sheffield of my youth. But it was well worth the wait. Peace fictionalises the miners' strike, and the extraordinary events of 1983-85 as Britain teetered on the edge of large scale civil unrest. But it's only just fiction, no matter how brutal it seems. A brilliant evocation of the time, and a social fabric stretched taut to breaking point. (*****)
Cormac Mccarthy: The Road I don't recall being quite so affected by a book before. Absolutely extraordinary, particularly if you read within one day. It left me speechless, shattered and reflective. (*****)
Julianne Schultz (Editor): Griffith REVIEW 21: Hidden Queensland (Griffith Review) Very good issue. Although it pores over the same old ground again and again from numerous angles, it ultimately reveals a fascinating, multiperspectival portrait of a place. Beneath its becalmed, languid easy-going surface, QLD has the scars of an extraordinarily rich half-century of history; a set of stories and characters well drawn out here. (****)
Frank Duffy: Work and the City (Edge Futures Ser.) Excellent summary of issues around working environments by DEGW's Duffy - from numerous angles, taking in history and future. Very useful read, even if you sense there's much more to come here. (*****)
Models: 306090 11 (306090) Fantastic collection edited by Eric Ellingsen, covering all aspects of models as pertaining to designing the built environment. Digital and analogue in all modes, and philosophical and aesthetic considerations besides. (*****)
Monoliths and Dimensions Sunn 0))): Monoliths and Dimensions Ye Gods, the most startlingly beautiful thing I've heard for a long time. Absolutely stunning. They say: "the most musical piece we’ve done, and also the heaviest, powerful and most abstract set of chords we’ve laid to tape"." Features Eyvind Kang, Julian Priester (!), frequent collaborator Oren Ambarchi and a Viennese choir. (*****)
SND: Atavism Brutal in its starkness, these ultra-precise, ultra-sparse clipped rhythms are the polar opposite of Sunn O))). (*****)
Filastine: Dirty Bomb Not every track works here but those that do are fantastic. A rich stew of jump-cut rhythms and Hispanic samples, framed by an architecture of R&B. (****)
Various Artists: Pop Ambient 2009 A few quite lovely tracks on here, generally those featuring the brilliant Klimek. Others are pretty enough but a little insubstantial. (****)
Flying Lotus: Los Angeles Beautiful fractured rhythms and smeared fizzing neon samples. Wondrous piece of work. LA, indeed. (*****)
Antony and the Johnsons: The Crying Light Luminous, shimmering, iridescent. Seriously, quite lovely. Only a couple of off-notes; otherwise, a major progression. (*****)
Balla et Ses Balladins: The Syliphone Years Wonderful Guinean dance music troupe from the early-60s, recording on the state-owned Syliphone label. Sparkling guitar lines in particular. (*****)
1897 Seaworthy: 1897 Recorded inside the Newington Armory heritage-listed arms depot in Sydney (built in 1897), and so redolent of cavernous reverberating chambers, this is full of lovely drones and fragments of picked guitar. Rather good. (****)
Coward Nels Cline: Coward Fabulous new solo album from 'Patsy'. Hanging around Wilco has informed things a little here, but elsewhere you can hear the influence Ralph Towner, Thurston Moore, Derek Bailey, Fennesz, Rod Poole, Bill Frisell etc etc. But it's Cline, above all, and he's certainly eased himself into that august company now. (*****)
Dance Mother Telepathe: Dance Mother Very saucy NYC art-pop. TV On The Radio-influenced (and indeed aided and abetted by TVOTR) but fresher, sharper. Beyond the studied hipness there's substance here too. [via Jace] (****)
Le Journaliste Anne-James Chaton & Andy Moor: Le Journaliste Best record I've heard in ages. Impenetrable torrents of raw French over Moor's brutal guitar-led soundtracks. I heard this on DJ Rupture's show and was immediately intrigued. You will be too. (*****)
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