cityofsound

Towards a new architect: an interview with Carlo Ratti

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.)

To the discussion/article ...

Oyler Wu Collaborative (Postopolis! LA)

Another question and answer session with The Two Davids of ArchDaily/Plataforma Arquitectura. If you want to start a smart, funny, Chilean architecture-based talk show, you know where to go.

Oyler Wu Collaborative are an LA-based but they started in NYC in 2001. (I’m interested in these practices that move across the country, given the different cultural backdrops. It was a perhaps inadvertent theme in the ArchDaily guys’ choices - note wHY architecture’s combination of Japan and American and see also Austin Kelly straddling LA and Switzerland.)

Dwayne Oyler and Jenny Wu provided a set of smart, thoughtful answers. I’ll do my best to recall them here.

To the difficult question of ‘what Is architecture for you?’, Oyler replied, as many did, that “architecture is inherently a synthesis of so many different things” - not evading the question so much as suggesting it’s too complex and variable to answer. Though he did then attempt to nail it with “architecuture is specifically the exploitation of material and tectonic ireas for the creation of spatial experience” (which I note is perhaps closer to a more traditional answer to this question, more akin to Corb's “masterful, correct and magnificent play of volumes brought together in light”...)

Wu suggests they’re “more interested in the process itself”, in “experimenting with new ideas,” and constantly exploring detail in the work, throughout construction. Here she specifically mentions fabrication (a theme that would emerge numerous times over the week, perhaps partly due to the looming presence of SCI-Arc in the architectural community here and partly due to the long LA tradition of working with industrial design (boat builders, car designers etc?)

They’re also involved with academia (as many architects tend to be - it’s a way of making a living) and so constantly questioning their work is part of the deal.

Question: "What should be role of architects in current society?"
As opposed to some of the ‘strategic thinking / design thinking’ answers this question sometimes elicited, Oyler suggests that “architecture tends to work on an individual basis” I.e. it affects one person at a time. It concerns “how one person engages the work from a tactile and experiential standpoint”. Wu adds that the “architects’ role is the making of space, of human interactive space”. Oyler adds this is about an “obligation to build … and to build well.”

In terms of innovation, Oyler suggests that there’s an “incredible over-emphasis on the role of innovation - we never set out to design projects that are ‘innovative’. Yes, technology can enable some new possibilities but you can also create incredibly innovative architecture without technology - so if ‘innovation’ is driving the thing you’re making, it’s misguided.”

In terms of this ‘innovative’ technology, Wu describes how, yes, their work is “all CATIA, Rhino, Maya. You have to know it, as a tool, but it’s not the end point in itself. Don’t let the tool become the end product.”

The ‘social networking’ question draws a blank look. They ultimately respond that it’s “important, but not our favourite thing to do.” They’d also suggested that their schools are the source of networks to some degree, and to the Davids’ question about education for young architects, they respond that its fundamentally important to “go to the schools, talk to the people there, see which school has the right spirit for you …”. They say this as, at the end of the day, “architecture is real hard. It’s hard work, long hours, the pay’s not great. You have to love what you do - have to really love it.” They give the sense that it’s important to flush this out early on.

As to what skills they look for, Wu responds, with a smile, “You have to be able to do it all! That sounds like a joke, but when the 2 of us are teaching 3 days a week it has to be someone who does it all. We had someone in the office in front of a computer doing Maya in the morning and he was pounding nails in the afternoon. We’d like to be an office that gets big enough so that that’s not the case, but right now you have to do it all.” She adds that they “work in iterations”, and they don’t employ ‘grunts’. “We don’t have grunts in our office.”

(That’s an interesting sentiment in terms of ‘liking to be an office that’s big enough not to have people doing it all’. Another approach is to stay small in order to retain the ‘do it all’ holistic nature of the work - that the architecture might be better informed by someone comfortable and proficient with both Maya and nails. But the drive towards scaling up is seen as a natural - if incredibly difficult - progression in architecture for sure.)

A good conversation, although you feel Oyler Wu have a little more to give, perhaps, particularly as they’ve been featured on one of the handful of truly essential architecture blogs: that of Lebbeus Woods. I was particularly taken with their write-up of their Density Fields project there, not least the final passage, which further reinforces many of the primary interests we heard about at Postopolis! LA, from OW and others:

“The lack of conventional separation between design and fabrication has allowed us to use the construction phase as an extension to the design process. It has been especially helpful with our aspiration to create a level of engagement that is equally as powerful at the scale of an individual as it is as a site strategy. Overall, this process has led to a period of material discovery, invention, and experimentation that comes only through the difficult, but profoundly rewarding task of realizing the work on a given site.” [From 'Density Fields', by Oyler Wu Collaborative, at Lebbeus Woods]

Oyler Wu Collaborative

Røde, and the new manufacturing

Over a year ago now, before the real emergence of the current economic ‘global financial crisis’, I wrote a piece for Monocle on Røde, the Australian microphone manufacturer. I’d used their microphones at Monocle, and had been intrigued by this Scandi-sounding brand producing beautifully crafted mics that could only be German or Japanese … until I saw ‘Made in Australia’ on the box. The story appeared a couple of issues back in truncated form but I thought I’d post a longer cut here for a number of reasons.

I find Røde interesting as they exemplify the possibilities of manufacturing in the contemporary city, using advanced but increasingly affordable techniques like rapid prototyping via laser cutting, and so integrating design processes with manufacturing. As a result, they have many of the benefits of a pre-industrial craft economy (design and manufacturing aligned; mass customisation possibilities; stock levels managed flexibly, almost on-demand; reduced environmental externalities through aggregating all activities under one roof and with increasingly light industrial processes), with the potential global scalability of the industrial model.

They suggest that a modern diversified economy could - should - still have manufacturing at its core, alongside service industries. And that so-called knowledge-based work is present in both. They employ local people, and have global presence. Sure, it won't employ the thousands that, say, the Colonial Sugar Refinery in Pyrmont once did but they employ people nonetheless. It’s a design-led business, with the aspirations of a premium brand, but sells in high volume at affordable prices.

So in the context of previous writing about Sheffield and other cities largely (though not totally) stripped bare of their manufacturing heritage, this little story from the baking hot streets of Sydney’s western suburbs may have resonance elsewhere.

Although the proportion of manufacturing industry in Australia (10-12% of GDP) is even lower than the UK’s (13-16% of GDP), oddly it feels higher here. Despite Australia being a laissez-faire economist’s dream, there’s somehow still a strong debate about the importance of, say, the car industry to Victoria. There may be some deeper understanding that actually making things is important. As I noted earlier, I wrote this piece before the GFC - as you can tell from only the early portents of a “US-driven recession” - which continues to hammer economies structured as Australia’s is. While I personally won’t shed a tear for the devaluation of mining and shopping malls the speculation that, for instance, Melbourne is to be hit harder than Sydney due to its larger manufacturing base sends out the wrong message. The recession originates in the service sector (financial services, to be precise) and manufacturing need not be dragged down with it (though they are of course linked). Now is the time to innovate our way out of this with new models, and these examples of new, smart hybridised businesses that are both manufacturing- and knowledge-based may be all the more important right now.

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.

Arup

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.

Transport informatics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo by Lee Gardland.

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

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

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

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

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

I’ve seen many of Urban Splash’s conversions, particularly their early work amidst Manchester’s former textile warehouses and mills in the mid-’90s, and they’re usually pretty good renovations, 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bayley continues:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Materials Monthly (Princeton Architectural Press)

After a hiatus, Princeton Architectural Press have re-started Materials Monthly, in their words the “popular, build-your-own materials library subscription service that delivers the latest in materials research, from our desks to yours.” And that it does.

I’ve had a chance to look over, and pore over, issue #11, based around the theme of ‘Modern Adaptations’, and cannot fail but to be very impressed with this unique publication. Arriving in a pleasingly chunky cardboard box, the package contains actual examples of the materials discussed, alongside some well-produced loose-leaf editorial discussing them and their use, in this case historical. The ability to pick up, touch, rub and generally explore the tactility of materials is surprisingly affecting. I’ve long been espousing the virtues of senses other than sight in terms of assessing the impact of the built environment, drawing heavily from the likes of Juhani Pallasmaa, Stephen Holl, Paul Schütze, Mirko Zardini etc., but here’s a publication that actually takes that idea and delivers a sensory experience.

In The Eyes of the Skin, Pallasmaa discusses the relationship between touch, objects, memory, history and process - "The surface of an old object, polished to perfection by the tool of the craftsmen and the assiduous hands of its users, seduces the stroking of the hand … The tactile sense connects us with time and tradition … it is time turned into shape." He notes that "the skin reads the texture, weight, density and temperature of matter."

Indeed, despite only being fragments and samples, it is a revelation to feel the cool weight of the small block of pigmented structural glass, or the delight on peeling back the protective wrapper to stroke the small square of sharp, highly-polished prismatic stainless steel. This simple yet rewarding experience actually suggests that the series serves not only as a regular prompt for designers and builders, but almost as an oblique critique of the ocularcentric architectural press elsewhere.

Of course its target audience is really designers, builders and engineers, and the publication is tuned to that crowd accordingly, but you half-wonder what if other, more general magazines like Dwell, Monument, A+U, Architectural Review, Frame and Mark took this approach, perhaps as a multi-sensory special-edition every quarter.

But for now, you have to subscribe to Materials Monthly for that kind of experience. They say:

“Each issue now includes at least five material samples and spec sheets with mechanical and physical properties, life cycle analysis data, sourcing and manufacturing details, digital and prefab options, installation, maintenance, and preservation advice, and other important technical information.”

It’s well-designed for use, with pages in loose form to be bound later, and a coding system linking object to text and beyond that makes the information architect within twitch with glee (he doesn’t get out much these days, so you’ll forgive me.) Subscribing, you'd quickly build a fantastic collection of materials, and copious notes on their historial, and potential, use. With so much attention being paid to new materials - e.g. the Transmaterial series amongst others - but so little opportunity to genuinely sense them, Materials Monthly, and Princeton Architectural Press, deserve a lot of credit for this smartly realised service.

Materials Monthly (more images below)