Locally-owned independent retailers contribute a vast
amount to cities. Equally, it's almost impossible to see how national or
multinational chains genuinely contribute much to cities at all.
That's not to say that national retailers don't have a place - the Mujis of
this world clearly contribute a great deal, economically but also symbolically,
as cultural goods. But they don't contribute to cities in the same way.
Exploring numerous cities worldwide leads to an almost instinctive
understanding of this, but recent research from the US indicates that between
54 and 58 cents of every dollar spent at a locally-owned retailer stays in that
local environment, as they tend to employ a local accountant, a local delivery
service, local web designer, local graphic designer and signwriter, local
architect, advertise in the local paper, and so on. A national store
contributes only 15 cents to the local environment, for every dollar spent, as
they tend to centralise those same functions in order to induce greater efficiency.
(The research was cited by Stacy Mitchell, author of The Hometown Advantage, on
the excellent Smart Cities radio show/podcast, in a show marking the 25th
anniversary of Miami's Books & Books store.)
But it's not a simple economic value. They are also nodes in the tight networks of
weak ties that form local communities. Further, the grain, vitality and
appearance of the street is nourished and enlivened by the local independent
retailer - whether a grocer, a kids' shop, a paper shop or my own area of fervent
interest, the book store or record store.
When I arrived in Sydney from London, I managed to sniff out Published Art
bookshop and TITLE Film + Music within the first week. I knew everything
would be fine after that. Published Art is truly a world class design,
architecture and art/photography bookshop, tucked into the city end of Surry
Hills. Curating with some discernment, only single copies of books are stocked
and thus don't remain on shelves for long. This means that titles can be
displayed cover outwards, as intended, and the store always has (too many)
books and magazines of interest every single visit.
TITLE is also a world class music and film store, located amidst the urban
greenery of Crown Street, also in Surry Hills. The cinema is catered for
through a near-perfect selection of DVDs, heavy on the Criterion Collection
specials, quality boxsets, art-house movies from around the world, and with a
peppering of curios and cult classics.
The music selection is equally wide-ranging, with what must be the densest concentration of ECM in the southern hemisphere alongside the best
of the world's avant garde labels and non-mainstream music from reggae to
classical, all threaded through more accessible product to hook the half-interested.
A global view, combined with a strong representation of local antipodean
product, sidesteps any lazy notion of 'world music'. It's just a great
selection, curated by staff who know their onions and who also provide
excellent service. Not everything works and not everything is to my personal taste, but that's the point. In curating, you take a stance, make an editorial decision. Again, it's clearly more than 'just a business'.
Not long after discovering it, I wrote a short piece on TITLE for Monocle's
regular record store column, but I thought readers here might be interested in
a longer, near un-edited cut of the interview I did with owner Steve Kulak.
To me, Kulak's work indicates the value of the local independent retailer to the
community, particularly when selling cultural products. It also shows the value
of cultural businesses - local and global at the same time, hooked into local
networks of producers and consumers as intermediaries, vibrant and challenging,
emanating from the specific cultural milieu of the city, and making money and
making streets at the same time.
I’d like to organize a Festival of Home Movies! It could
be wonderful — thousands of the things… You might find an odd genius, a
Fellini or Godard of the home movie, living in some suburb. I’m sure
it’s coming… Using modern electronics, home movie cameras and the like,
one will begin to retreat into one’s own imagination. I welcome that…
J.G. Ballard, quoted in ‘Interview with JGB by Graeme Revell’, RE/Search No. 8/9, 1984.
Simon Sellars of the excellent Ballardian and HarperCollins UK have made it so. They suggest the mobile phone's videocam is the contemporary incarnation of Ballard's 'modern electronics', and provides "an unprecedented window into inner space." The films should be no more than a minute in duration, and a Dogme-like approach to post-production i.e. let's have none of that. Prizes are plenty of lovely books, including Ballard's forthcoming autobiography. All the information you need is at Ballardian.com.
I thought the following was an interesting observation by director Ang Lee (from the January 2008 edition of Sight & Sound magazine). Interesting in relation to the idea of an almost synaesthetic approach to visual representation via information-dense icons &c.:
Nick James: There's a beautiful little book by Donald Richie that explains Japanese aesthetics. I wish there was an equivalent for the Chinese.
Ang Lee: There's a huge difference between people who use phonetics for language transcription and those who use characters, as in China. The Chinese system is more like movies, like montage, like drawing with sight and sound. The shape itself means something, so when you see the word it resonates in your head. When the Chinese see Lust, Caution in characters with the comma in between it has a shocking vibe.
(That issue of Sight & Sound also features an excellent essay on the hyper-specific genre of 1930s British movies set on foreign trains: "For The Lady Vanishes, Alfred Hitchcock invented a quirkily archetypal version of the English abroad with a steam train, light banter, cricket obsessives, tweedy spies and phallic symbols", by Graham Fuller. I note also that two noir classics of a decade or so later, Night and the City and Cry of the City, have been properly released on DVD by the BFI, though see also the Criterion edition of Night and the City)
"SYDNEY faces a temperature rise of up to 4.3 degrees by 2070, and a tripling of the number of days a year when the thermometer soars above 35 degrees, if global greenhouse gas emissions are not cut deeply, a report warns. But it is already too late for the city to avoid a warming of about 1 degree by 2030 as well as a 3 per cent reduction in annual rainfall because of polluting gases present in the atmosphere." [Sydney Morning Herald, 3 October 2007]
When I started writing this piece, I was sitting on a park bench in the shade, no more than 2 metres from the thin strip of sand that comprises the beach at Sydney's Double Bay. The sparkling water of the harbour eased out in front of me, shifting through translucent green and turquoise into a deep blue 50 metres away, where small boats were moored, gently rocking in the water. Further out, dozens of sleek boats were gliding easily through Port Jackson, returning from the ocean. Wednesday is race day. To my left, the ridiculously expensive apartments of Double Bay (aka Double Pay), basking on the hillside leaning back from the water. And it was very hot, yes, but a quick paddle in the cold water reassured me it was still officially spring. Sydney seemed as far away from an apocalypse as you could get.
But today also sees the city beginning to be encircled by numerous bushfires, whipped up by the high winds from the interior desert - winds that will approach gale force in the next few hours - combined with the heat and low humidity. It's 34 degrees and climbing. Having grown up on a crowded lump of rock in the North Atlantic, artificially warmed by the gulfstream (though not for much longer) but relatively close to the lower edges of Arctic circle, this heat is bewildering, enjoyable and slightly fearful, all at once. I like the heat, personally, but I also understand what it means, and that this amount of heat at this time of the year - set to be the hottest on record - does not auger well in the long run.
The experience of heat itself is difficult to write about - hence the papers resorting to apocalyptic images of the sea levels rising or helicopters water bombing bushfires near Oxford Falls in Sydney's north. "It's going to be a busy day," a Rural Fire Service (RFS) spokesman said this morning. By the afternoon commuter highways from Sydney to Newcastle had been closed for safety reasons as several fires roared through the state. My taxi driver grimaced and said, "It's just a tinderbox out there".
Peter Carey's 30 Days in Sydney is a fabulous little book on the city in general, but in a memorable passage he depicts the horror of the burning city, from a very personal perspective of chucking buckets of water around a house being approached by flames. (He also cross-references this with the ancient indigenous practice of firestick farming.) To me, coming from London, a city on fire means two things: the Great Fire or the Blitz, and both are resolutely entombed in history rather than lived experience. Here, a city on fire is a possibility, and a reality if you live on the sprawling outer fringes. These, incidentally, are the outer fringes where it is imagined that most of Sydney's projected population growth will live.
"We need urgent action right now," Dr Peacock said. He suggested making what he termed "an heirloom quilt" to patch together a range of strategies. These would include bio-sequestration - the storing carbon in trees, grass and shrubs. He also suggested taking another look at setting up nuclear power in Australia and using clean coal technology. However, he said neither could be online in this country for at least 10 to 15 years."
But haven't we heard this before? Did you switch off in the previous paragraph or not? The projections to 2070 are problematic as a) they're so far off as to be refutable, and b) beyond many people's lifetimes. Personally, I'll be dead, but I'm aware of the importance of "urgent action right now", even if I also struggle with the daily shifts in behaviour required. I'm more interested in the tactics and programmes required to shift habitual behaviour on a massive scale, and I'm collecting a few examples of how Australian city and state governments are providing information about climate change to citizens. There are some creative, imaginative tactics, as noted here before, as well as some rather less-thought-through frustrations as to 'why can't people just change'. But there's clearly more to do, across a huge number of areas.
I don't think rattling on about sustainability is enough - or rather, that might be barking up the wrong tree. Architect Glenn Murcutt sounded almost bewildered by it in that recent issue of A+U:
"While it seems to be a very new thing in our profession, I just sit and smile. I have been working with this since I started my practice in 1969 ... As we're in a temperate climate in Sydney, this house and office, designed and shared with Wendy Lewin is not heated nor air-conditioned. We rely on opening the windows and doors during the warmer months to receive the air while in winter we close them and put on more clothes."
I love that. The simplicity of living sustainably is such that it shouldn't need the threat of an ensuing apocalypse to become a desirable way to live.
Melbourne-based architect Andrew Maynard, in a recent issue of POL Oxygen: "We dismiss sustainability as a theme. It is simply the right way to do things." That's a far better way of thinking about it, and also negates the argument that Peacock refers to - why should Australians change when they contribute only 1% of global emissions? Because it's just the right thing to do.
But Murcutt's jumpers and 'doing the right thing' doesn't seem to have an urgent tone about it either. And although it is that simple, and it is simply a question of living in a civic fashion and designing and building in the right way, the population at large still doesn't get it. In that SMH article, it continues, "Addressing the 700 assembled scientists, Dr Tim Flannery said: "We need urgent action." Science would drive the agenda on how to address climate change from now on, and this had to be done via the United Nations and the Kyoto framework during the upcoming climate talks in Bali, he said."
And it's great to see the likes of the heroic Flannery "driving the agenda", but just speaking from a perspective of communication - or indeed marketing, if we must use that term - I still wonder about the tactics employed. If the science community used the same production values that, say, filmmakers had - or politicians for that matter - it might have had more effect already. It's only with the airing and promotional blaze of Al Gore's stunt-Powerpoint An Inconvenient Truth that some begin to pay attention. Even then, many, perhaps the majority, have still not thought deeply about it, never mind changed behaviour or attitude.
I've been wanting to see cut-and-paste-sci-fi movie Sunshine for some time, not because I think it'll be any good, but simply to see an arresting image I'd heard about - a frozen solid Sydney harbour, Opera House and all, locked in ice. A few years back, I started listing a few films that depicted deserted cities, just drawn by how affecting an image it is. With Sunshine's snowy Sydney, I understand it affects not just because it's a vibrant city of 5 million people reduced to ice cube, but also because it's Sydney, a place generally depicted - increasingly correctly - as baked rather than iced. That most unlikely of film review publications, New Scientist, is hardly likely to have Cahiers du Cinema quaking in its boots, but it did point out the '2070 problem' when highlighting the role played by actual physicist Brian Cox as adviser to the producers of the film:
"Well, it's true that the Sun is expected to die, but not for five billion years or so. That, says Cox, is too far in the future for audiences to be able to relate to. By setting the action just 50 years in the future, when for example we see the roof of Australia's Sydney Opera House poking from a huge ice sheet, it gives us something we can worry about." [New Scientist]
Much as I hate to endorse the shock tactics - I'd really rather people understood the science, had a think, and shifted their behaviour accordingly, but hey - it might be that we need to generate a few more visions, and tell stories that extrapolate from the position Sydney finds itself in; of a city with sea levels rising as fast as food and water prices and surrounded by an inferno closing in at high speed. Apocalypse Sydney is ludicrously overplayed, but sitting here typing away, as the dry heat shows no sign of diminishing well into the evening, we might need a bit of drama to hold that temperature rise to 1 rather than 4.3 degrees.
Here's a little portmanteau posting, compiling a few items of interest from elsewhere. I try to keep this site free of this kind of post these days, using the 'noted elsewhere' column instead (to the top-right if you're looking at the site; or in the daily links in the feed). But these items deserve a little more context, visual or otherwise. They're all worth a look.
Mayne and Blum in San Francisco First up, an excellent conversation between Thom Mayne of architecture firm Morphosis and the writer Andrew Blum. It's centred on the former's new Federal Building building in San Francisco, but wanders freely and interestingly. It's a good discussion, augmented by photos of the building and surrounds. I was particularly taken with the fact that its the first (major) naturally-ventilated building on the west coast since the introduction of air-conditioning, and Mayne's intentions for a form of post-occupancy evaluation (POE); he didn't call it that as such, but referred to a series of studies over the forthcoming years, to track the use of the building. Conducting POEs has become a CoS mantra, so it's great to see it explicitly referred to in a discussion about building. It's also an excellent piece on introducing radical architecture into San Francisco, a latterly-conservative city in this respect.
Neutral at the Architecture Foundation Architectural visualisations a-go-go at the Architecture Foundation's Yard Gallery in London, with an exhibition on filmmakers Neutral, which opened last week and runs until 13 October 2007. Neutral have been communicating architecture through digital animation for a few years now, producing work for Zaha Hadid and Herzog+De Meuron along the way. The exhibition also features two never-seen-before installations. I can't be there to see it, so I'd be interested in any responses from visitors.
Energyville, by The Economist and Chevron The Economist Intelligence Unit have partnered with energy giant Chevron to produce a small but good online game: Energyville. It's a fairly direct rip-off of SimCity, but for broadly educational purpose - discovering how difficult it might be to power up a city, scrolling forwards to 2030. It would be easy to be cynical about this kind of partnership, but the simulation has actually been done with some care and attention. Though the available parameters, and their impact, would benefit from a little more explanation, you do genuinely learn something about the varying energy sources available to a particular kind of city (a standard SimCity model, and therefore essentially a medium-sized US city). It's interesting how the organising level is urban too, not national - I don't think that's just SimCity defining a kind of 'default setting' for these kind of simulations; rather a sense that the city is the most interesting and effective scale to work at.
Z-A at the Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York The Storefront in Manhattan is one of my favourite places, and was even before they hosted Postopolis. So it's nice to be able to point at their 25th anniversary events, called 'Z-A' and which run for 26 days, from 2 days ago, in a specially built pavilion in the adjacent Petrosino Park, by Korean architect Minsuk Cho. If you're in NYC, it's a must-see. (I expect people in NYC get told something is "a must-see" every day, but this one really is.) There's a full line-up at the Storefront site - it looks an incredibly varied programme, with many fascinating contributions. I'd be intrigued to hear from Stefano Boeri and Gianluigi Ricuperati on the new Arbitare magazine, for instance. The day after sees Tomas Saraceno's research on "inhabitable lighter-than-air airborne structures as a solution to the world's exploding population". That gives a flavour of things, I think. Oh, and Vito Acconci on Oct. 10th.
Joseph Grima just sent me these pictures (below) of the opening night.
I also note they're starting "Storefront Books, a curated micro-bookshop." That's excellent. I've very taken with Published Art bookshop, here in Sydney, and really appreciate their editing - only stocking the latest of the best magazines, and the best new books. It ensures that you can evaluate them properly, and see their covers. (Contrary to that silly old saying, you almost always can tell a book by its cover.)
Mimoa A new European architecture website, comprising a user-generated set of pictures and notes on modern architecture. Confining it to Europe actually seems a little unnecessary in a way, but it's rather nicely designed, both in terms of its information architecture and aesthetics, feeling somewhat 2.0 but not drenched in cliché. And it has a point, unlike most 2.0 work. I can't quite tell if it's linked formally to the lovely European architecture magazine A10. Interesting either way.
In writing 'Celluloid Skyline', James Sanders had contributed one of the more interesting texts about the city in recent years. He'd been working on the book for 12 years, and it showed. As his site puts it, it was about two cities, both called New York – one is the physical city, and the other is imagined New York in film. The book is essentially a contribution to urban theory – it has that depth – but by drawing from '42nd Street', 'Taxi Driver', 'North by Northwest' and 'Big', it was also accessible, riveting. Sanders had recently revisited the material of the book to construct an exhibition on 'Celluloid Skyline', which is currently running at Grand Central Station. There, the book comes alive, as projections of actuality films stand alongside giant scenic backings from studios, surrounding a series of excellent explanatory boards (designed by Lisa Strausfield's team at Pentagram). Sanders is a practising architect, as well as a writer.
For his talk at Postopolis!, Sanders did something that few other speakers did, which was to engage directly with the name, and perhaps theme, of the show. By thinking through the word 'postopolis', Sanders concentrated on "the city after", or what might be "post-city". And for his case study, selected for Postopolis!, he attempted to talk about depictions of the contemporary city. But not using a "high art film –like Tati or something", but a contemporary film. In this case the animated feature 'Shark Tale'.
Sanders then plays us 2 clips from 'Shark Tale', featuring the underwater cityscape mis-en-scene of the movie, and then talks us through the salient points as he sees them. The first – you can see a QuickTime clip here – inadvertently picks up on the previous panel's discussion of 'expressions of urban fear', by illustrating a near-dystopian, empty grey cityscape suddenly come alive with the news that 'the sharks are gone', presented by news reporter, Katie Current (Couric), broadcasting live from downtown. The city in 'Shark Tale' is clearly New York, with "a great central urban space ... modeled on Times Square" (though bits of LA are thrown in.)
As he points out, "the city is already underwater", predicting perhaps the inconvenient truth about downtown Manhattan in a few years. As the previously empty city explodes with life, Sanders runs through the "rich mix of things you'd see in the city". He says we see garbage collection, a form of urban grid, fish taxi drivers (which have some kind of South Asian heritage), Jamaican, Japanese etc. A richly diverse mix of fish, in fact, conjuring "the classic late capitalist city". This is a city, he says, whose urban life is saturated with electronics, and therefore images of, well, urban life. This self-referential aspect will become a central theme of Sanders' talk.
Once the news that 'the sharks are gone' filters through, Sanders says the city itself is essentially a "vibrant positive place". He suggests you "wouldn't have shown New York City in the same way, 20 years ago", which in some ways reinforces this idea that 'the city is back'. However, there is also this clear pervasive threat, from without. No prizes for guessing the symbolism here.
So we have the successful late capitalist city, though threatened from forces unseen outside. The city is a colourful diverse mix of ethnicity and possibility. Digital screens are everywhere.
The second clip exemplifies this last point, playing out a fight scene from later in the movie. In this, we see multiple, complex, textured conflation of image and reality. The central characters fall and swerve in front of screens, which show images of themselves in real-time, which they react to, and this – their reaction to seeing themselves broadcast – is then filmed and re-broadcast. This is a densely layered city, in which they're "interacting with their own televised image".
Sanders pauses to note a difference here. In the history of the city up to the 1950s, the 'agora' was shifting out of the centre, being dispersed. Now with real-time electronic newsgathering and the advent of large scale electronic displays in urban environments, Sanders says we're seeing a form of agora reborn. Bizarrely 'Shark Tale' shows a new hybrid – a new kind of space, which is urban and electronic at the same time, real-time and broadcast entwined symbiotically.
Of course, Times Square used to have a giant news ticker years ago, but there is a difference in immediacy here; this is news being made in real-time and then broadcast in real time. There's some element of 9/11 shifting things here; on that day, people stopped and watched live feeds of the towers, even those a few blocks uptown.
'Shark Tale' is also to do with the "push towards celebrity". It's everything to do with a media-saturated culture, in which the characters want to be famous most of all. And this is actually why, Sanders reckons, that the city is back. A celebrity is an urban phenomenon. The central character in 'Shark Tale', voiced by Will Smith, has all the ambition of the newcomer to the city, familiar from a thousand previous films, yet desires fame most of all. That's the way to the top. "Could've been a contender" is very clearly now "I want to be somebody".
It's a fascinating exploration of the themes implicit within the film's urban environment. Sanders suggests that this is actually the first mainstream depiction of this new kind of hyper-media-saturated city, with real-time broadcasting of the city woven into the city itself. This actually makes 'Shark Tale' significant (if it was largely insignificant in every other way.) These lmost subconscious renderings by designers and directors comprise a form of code for understanding contemporary urban life. This is the reason he thinks films are such valuable texts about the city.
In terms of whether 'Shark Tale's' city is genuinely the first mainstream depiction of a new kind of city, Geoff makes a strong counterpoint: that architecture has always contained embedded narratives – and narrative potential – about the city, but Sanders thinks that the immediacy and real-time reaction of this hybridised physical-digital space is something new, and 'Shark Tale' is exploring just that.
He suggests that designers and architects could learn a lot from the practice of production designers. I ask him about this; about what architects and designers could draw from film-making. His answer is fascinating; he explains that production designers are always building an architecture to be inhabited by a narrative, which means people (99.9% of the time.) There are effectively no films about buildings i.e. without people. Certainly no popular films. There are numerous films made about streets, cities etc. but all as the backdrop for people and stories. Geoff wonders about the 'haunted house' genre, and whether the buildings play a leading role here. Sanders counters that if Jodie Foster didn't show up in 'Panic Room' fairly soon, there wouldn't have been much of a film. So his key point is that the production designers who create the buildings, streets and other built fabric for movies are actually working in a way which engages inhabitants more directly than many architects. Indeed, he points, it's only relatively recenlty that architectural phtography in magazines started having people in shot. He suggests architects prefer their buildings empty, unused. (Ironic that Andrew Blum's talk had preceded, noting how Libeskind's museums are often initially empty.)
Sanders' talk, and his Celluloid Skyline projects, approach architecture and urbanism from the periphery of their depiction in films, and this makes for compelling viewing and listening. If you're in New York, do try to get to the exhibition (Celluloid Skyline, Vanderbilt Hall, Grand Central Station, until June 22nd.)
The first residential project he showed "displaces the quintessential suburban lawn underground", partly for practical reasons – it's situated in Minneapolis, which has harsh winters and mosquito infested summers – but also for personal reasons. The bachelor owner wanted a private spa. So the banked fence Sanders created lends a zone of privacy from outside, but when seen from the interior it dematerialises the boundary, covered with astroturf, and angled up such that from the picture window it looks like an arcadian image of lawn and sky. The entrances to the residence are also playful, framing silhouette of bodies entering and exiting the house.
That playfulness is also visible (possibly?) in the second residential project Sanders shows. This derived from an exhibition, 'Big Brother, Architecture of Surveillance', and is dubbed the 'Access House', on an island off the coast of Georgia. This takes as its inspiration, the "ubiquitous feature of the American vacation home: the picture window." Yet it defends against the "double-edged nature of picture window" (Sanders shows images from films, a particular influence, I can see, of people looking through pictures windows or being seen in picture windows) by ensuring the vulnerability is ameliorated by pervasive surveillance techniques throughout the house. A central core, carrying all services, including a dumb waiter – "a sophisticated tree-like mass" – forms a kind of "updated American hearth", which also carries CCTV footage of the outside and all rooms, to all areas and spaces within the house. It's ultra hi-tech, with motion sensors tracking the house and surroundings, as well as screens indicating events elsewhere, weather, people in remote locations etc. It's an attempt to transform home surveillance devices, turning the house into "a benevolent Big Brother, with eyes throughout house", in order to make it feel safe. (Personally, I'm not sure this would do anything other than make the inhabitant more paranoid and less trusting!). The multiple split screens throughout play on the sense of thurllers and horror movies, and also of being watched as well as watching. Sanders seems to hint at the contradictions here. Indeed, there's a 'panic room' in the basement - where you can watch images of house, watching images of outside.
Continuing the theme of transparency, and into perhaps the most interesting of Sanders' projects, is the Mix House. This is fascinating. He says, "we tend to be indifferent to acoustics" in contemporary residences, and think only of "competing with traffic outside". Normally, he continues, "architecture is about being quiet", whereas there's a rich history of sound and architecture - especially in pre-literate societies. He talks of the clarity of sound in the Greek amphitheatre, of the intentional use of sound spaces in Medieval and Gothic cathedrals, which were "designed by acoustics as much as visual principles - they were considered 'sacred resonators'".
Sanders says this changed with the invention of printing, and Palladio, "under the spell of perspective", which began to organise architecture under what would become seen as a "Western ocularcentric perspective". (Again, Juhania Pallasmaa's 'The Eyes of the Skin' springs to mind.) So what we end up with, as the "quintessential icons of modernism" is the floor-to-ceiling window, the curtain wall. These present acoustical problems, but have dominated architecture since. Sanders credits Emily Thompson's book, 'Soundscape of Modernity', with this mini-history of sound and architecture. Looks worth reading.
So this signature element of modernism actually "signals a divorce between place, space, sound." Architecture is again quiet. So the Mix House attempts to re-introduce sound into the residence, to play with both visual and aural transparency. It suggests a "sonic picture window and sonic entry porch", and a further "sonic window, oriented towards the sky". Sanders mentions the ingenious listening posts and acoustic mirrors in Norfolk and elsewhere (more here, just because I like them) as an inspiration. Also a series of microphones, cameras and a sort of bellows mechanism to manipulate the sound. The sonic picture window, aimed at the backyard, can swivel to extend its range. There's even an eavesdropping skylight. The idea is that sounds from inside and outside can be sampled and mixed, combined with other sounds, to compose original soundtracks for the house - to "create new domestic soundscapes" in his words. (Personally, I'm always interesting in listening to displaced sound when mixed with that of the street outside; I've spent many happy hours listening to, say, Jake Tilson's dislocated recordings of India, or Sublime Frequencies' Indonesian night recordings, when in central London.) This is a lovely idea, particularly if it was extended to project sound from inside to the outside – again playing with that double-edged nature of the picture window – and then combined to form the sounds of neighbourhoods. In some senses, with sharing of iTunes libraries over the internet possible now we can mix our record collections together, but we're not forced to confront our neighbourhood, enabling a sometimes unhealthy withdrawal into personal domestic space. It would be interesting to think through how we could create new civic sounds as well as personal domestic soundscapes.
Finally, Sanders shows us how these sound-based themes have been extended into his firm's low-budget renovation of Campbell Hall school of architecture, Charlottesville, VA. Asking, "can you link spaces sonically?", they've designed a form of audio spotlight, based around closely-focused directional speakers. These enable "semi-public sound interactions". Trying to deal with the reality of students wearing iPods and effectively turning themselves off to the sound of public space, these distributed audio spotlights have three channels - a combined playlist (music contributed by all students); a channel from other rooms in the school, where students can hear crits, or tune into other views within school; or wire in other schools altogether.
There is some beautiful work, and bigger projects, detailed on the JSA website, but in the work he chose to present at Postopolis! it's clear that Sanders' firm is exploring some fascinating terrain here, fusing architecture with digital technologies that see media as something malleable. Whilst I'm personally uneasy about the surveillance projects, I'd hope that the Mix House and related work will help lead to a renewed interest in sound – and other senses – in architecture and public spaces.
It's always a little risky meeting one of your heroes. It can be cruelly disappointing. However, this was as far away from that as you can get. Lebbeus Woods was incredibly generous with his time, his attitude and his intellect, and he effortlessly won us all over. Not that he had anything to prove – Woods is one of the most important conceptual architects and theorists of his time, and we were truly honoured to have him at Postopolis!.
The Storefront was packed by the time we sat down with Woods for our 'conversation'. We hadn't prepared anything as such, so Woods had no idea what questions we would ask, and despite a quick 'pre-game huddle' beforehand, we didn't really know what questions each other would be asking. Again, the instinctive informality of Postopolis! served us well though, as the conversation flowed relatively easily.
Geoff starts by asking about the constant theme of post-Earth landscapes and instability in his work. Woods replies with a grin –"I suppose that my life has been unstable!" – instantly settling any nerves. He says he was a "military brat" as a kid, always moving, and the autobiography figures into these things, one way or the other. He's also seen a lot of history: "There is a basic instability that we have to deal with in our culture. The earthquake and the war are the most obvious manifestations of it." (Indeed, Woods has often worked directly and proactively in areas that have suffered some kind of recent trauma e.g. Zagreb, Sarajevo, Havana, Loma Prieta earthquake, and now I hear New Orleans.)
Bryan asks about the political nature of architecture, as seen from a wide historical perspective of the Roman Empire and frontier architecture through to homeland security, borders, gated communities, etc. Essentially, Woods replies, architecture as we normally think of it as a profession and a practice is really "not very far from the Roman Empire". They're still building monumental buildings, which "are bowdlerising the hierarchy of power and authority in society". Even when it's a museum it's really about "the elite's ability to gather works of art". No more than that. He thinks that the work on gated communities and the like are part of a "defensive posture" that architects are forced into, inevitably securing enclaves of power and wealth. They're really doing no more than making it look good.
Woods wants some other possibility for architecture, and the reason he's here today is that blogs seem to have some sense of that, in that the internet is a place for "some other view of architecture to emerge". (This is fascinating, encouraging, and generous. I hope that a function of this kind of work, and these events, is in terms of approaching architecture from different angles, from the periphery.)
I asked about the role of architecture from a craft perspective, based on some of the conversations at Postopolis!, where we'd seen the notion of the master builder dissipating. I'd read about some recent work in projects in Vienna and Paris, centred more on creating a set of guidelines and rules for constructing things rather than specifiying the details of the implementation, which are carried out and configured on site. Does this enable an architecture which can thrive and use the conditions inherent in instability? Woods confirmed that was the idea. If there's to be another movement, "another direction in architecture". It has to engage and involve in some way; it has to "interactively involve them other than as spectators". Otherwise this is completely the society of spectacle. It has to engage them as creators.
Woods recalls living through the 60s, when numerous projects attempted to "empower people in lower economic class communities" via an approach known as "design advocacy". The architect became the advocate of the people and the community; they facilitated meetings with people in communities; provided space, tracing paper and pens and so on. Woods thinks this was a noble effort but also a total failure, as people just couldn't think in terms of designing - they weren't educated for that, they weren't prepared for that. So nothing much ever came of it. So it didn't come out as a real movement in architecture ...
So he thinks, yes, you have to engage people, but fundamentally you have give them the tools to work with, the rules of the game – "If you play poker, you have to know the rules of poker! You can't just throw cards around" – then some basic techniques. How you do things, not what you do. Then show some examples - "It could look like this. Or it could look like that, if you follow these rules ... This way, you're giving people a leg up." Some of his projects of the last 4 or 5 years, although it reaches back to work in Sarajevo in the '90s, is conducting these kind of practise, although he modestly wonders whether it will be any better than the design advocacy of 60s. It hasn't "got the momentum yet", he says. But the important factor is that people have choose to do it - he doesn't believe that it's something to be imposed from the top down - people have to want to do it. (This is all fascinating to me, given my interest in adaptive design, systems design etc., and particularly how you put creative power into the hands of people who aren't architects or designers.)
Developing this perhaps, Geoff notes how Woods' work often captures the imagination of those outside of architecture. Woods replies that "the irony is that he has always addressed my work to architects." Yet if it's ironic that others would pick it up, he's thrilled that they do, particularly if "architects are asleep" as he half-jokingly puts it. He does want to influence architects, though, as they have an important responsibility to society. He notes that he's approached architecture philosophically, drawing from ethics, cybernetics (from late '50s, early 60s), and so on, and this emphasis on the philosophical and visual side of communicating architecture may have enabled some of this transference to other disciplines or another form of discourse.
Picking up on the visual communication side, Bryan mentions that one of his favourite examples of Woods' work is in Michael Sorkin's book 'Against the Wall: Israel's Barrier to Peace', and actually was a game, rather than a drawing. Woods is clearly pleased that the subject of the 'border wall game' came up, and tells how, instead of creating a building or some other construction project, they created a metaphor for simultaneously keeping the structure in place and tearing it down. He felt that anything he did was going to endorse the wall, unless he could find a different way of approaching it. So he took on the idea of bringing the wall down creatively, in a creative act, using the idea of a game (deploying rules again, interestingly). He seems to enjoy the idea of using games in this context, noting "We all know it's just a game ... a very serious game."
I mention his extraordinary drawings, which are both detailed and impressionistic, therefore having a certain open-endedness that reinforces his earlier points, perhaps. I ask whether he's approached work with any other media, that might either engage a wider sensory range – beyond visual stimulation and communication, say into soundworks or communicate via the other senses – or has thought of working in film, say. He says that other than some installations, it's "not my thing, I haven't been there yet." (I like the subtle way Woods implies he's still learning, developing here.) In terms of film, he mentions an engagement with the film 'Alien 3' in 1993, which he worked on for a few weeks. However, he laughs, "you don't want to be designer working in movie industry!" You're the lowest of the low, apparently. He finds it amusing that architects complain that clients don't understand their work; they should try working with studio execs. Tantalisingly, he mentions he does have a fantasy of making a big budget Hollywood movie. He actually wrote a screenplay a while back, based on his underground Berlin project. He diligently read the Syd Field book. But he thinks that it would be too frustrating. In Hollywood, he says, you don't produce a product, it's always about the process. But he finds it an intriguing media.
He says "The drawings are about ideas ultimately. They're not about drawing." So he uses drawing to find an idea. "If you could use the movie in the same way - it would be incredible". And he know movies have been used in this way – it's clearly a medium he respects and admires, when done well – but he ends by saying that are by and large formulaic. (I suspect he's looking for a malleability and complexity to communicate his work that the economics of movie making just impinge upon (currently). His work to me often suggests film, as powerful as they are drawings. But I love this point about trying to search for ideas through the act of drawing – it's why, in my own small way, I occasionally scribble here on City of Sound, as well as write. I think blogs could do more to communicate through drawing.)
In terms of where his inspiration comes from, in response to a query from Geoff about this and his approach education, Woods says he can't honestly say where inspiration comes from, directly. He settles on reading as a major influence – "Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Sartre" – and then art, such as "plenty of Brueghel, Goya and Picasso" ... "Everything visual stimulates me", though some media less than others, he notes with a wry grin. But ultimately, "texts have a profound influence on the way I think".
In terms of education, he's taught at Cooper Union where he's been given real latitude. He makes a point of saying that he works with students as he would with any other people – "Students are just people, aren't they?!". He almost hates the term student. The most important thing is to set out to question, lay down some rules, develop modes of answering the question. The most important thing a teacher does is ask the right question. (He also runs the Research Institute for Experimental Architecture).
Bryan asks what Woods is working on today. Woods replies obliquely, beginning by outlining his approach to work. He's always worked alone, more or less. Never really had an office. He has collaborators, from time to time. Basically he sits down, spends a lot of time thinking, not necessarily doing anything, I read, I draw. "I've recently done some very large drawings". "The ideas that interest me now", he says, "are always around the artificial landscape, architecture being a method of reforming the earth's surface ... we're re-forming nature ... making a new earth. I used to call it "Terra Nova in my latinate years!"
He hasn't worked on any building-like structures as such, recently. The work in Vienna was Investigating architecture as energy - trying to look at architecture and making of space that way. "Socially", he says, "we all have to deal with the question of slums". References the Mike Davis book, and the importance of studying, and working with, favelas. It's something he's turning some of his attention to. He says "it's a little preliminary to say (what he's doing) but if we can do anything from the outside for those on the inside, it's going to be to empower them somehow, to transform the slum from the inside. It can't be us airlifting in ready-made solutions ..."
Again, this reinvigoration of, and reconfiguration of, design advocacy. Fascinating. He says he'll contact us first when these projects emerge, leading to his closing point. He says that he very much believes in books – he publishes books – but of architecture blogs and the internet, he says "I think what what you people are doing is so incredibly creative, that's why I'm here tonight." And with that, we close.
So many thanks to Lebbeus Woods for sharing his skill, experience and insight. He was a naturally witty, wise speaker – a genuine communicator, in an entirely off-the-cuff way; friendly, and extremely patient with our informal approach. Ultimately, a real inspiration as a theorist, educator and practitioner. He binds these three elements together so well, such that each informs the others, and then deploys these ideas in war zones and disaster-stricken cities. As highly regarded as his work is, it makes you think he deserves more credit still. Despite constantly challenging architecture to reinvent itself for contemporary conditions, there's clearly a love and value for what the practice and the profession should be. Despite this, he's rarely described as an architect and is, to a certain extent, marginalised by an architectural community in thrall to starchitects. Yet in terms of reconfiguring what architecture is, is there a more important architect working today?
The notional mercury in the notional thermometer at Storefront exploded through the roof today. It's unbelievably hot, effortlessly racing past 90 on the street, and probably more inside the gallery. The city has a humid, tropical feel, as if it were Manila more than Manhattan. You can almost slice and shape a chunk of the thick, damp air with your hands. Rain threatens but never delivers. The vinyl letters are peeling off the front of the gallery, perhaps in protest. Hang in there, fellas; one more day to go. My keyboard actually feels stickier in this heat, and I feel my note-taking slowing down a bit. Bear with me as I catch up on some lost time on Saturday morning.
Our Postopolis! bookmarks turn up (an innovation of Geoff's, to hand out to punters) and we now have a laser pointer and everything, but Joseph's Powerbook got dropped somehow - the screen burns out, there's a DVD stuck inside and some minor keys are missing. Presenters have to make do. Thanksfully we had a few people (Blum, Sanders, Weschler) talking from hand-written or printed out notes today, which was not only lucky for us but also very engaging. The show is building momentum day by day, with each new session bringing new thoughts, or reinforcing new connections. I almost feel that we should just carry on inhabiting this space and keep the ball rolling, just inviting new speakers all the time. The advantage of doing this in New York is that we'd never run out of people.
I think the sign of a good conference is the way it constructs connections over different sessions, sometimes inadvertently, coincidentally, but sometimes as the speakers can fold ideas from earlier into their talk. (This isn't a conference, as such, though I'm not sure how else to describe it. I like to think of it as a form of living exhibition, I suppose.) With Postopolis!, the drop-in nature means that many of the speakers aren't there until near their slot, and maybe hang around a bit on the other side – but few are there the whole week. But the connections are building nonetheless, and by now, there's a densely-woven latticework of connected themes and ideas emerging in my mind, and no doubt in the minds of others who have been to more than a few sessions.
Today we see more overlaps between maps, data, and representation, before the brilliant Lawrence Weschler ends the day by wisely weaning us off all this talk of systems, zooming out to focus on the intensely human convergences between people, history and culture. It's a gently magnificent talk, and I now want to read everything he's ever written, including shopping lists, birthday cards and tax returns.
Julia Solis started with drop-dead beautiful photos of abandoned spaces, with their live landscapes of mould, which look remarkably like the visualisations of Las Vegas that Eric Rodenbeck shows a few hours later. Eric hadn't been there for Julia's talk, but made the connection nonetheless. (Vegas looked like a nasty rash to me, for what it's worth.) There was overlap between Kevin Slavin's talk and Eric's as well as Laura Kurgen's. Andrew Blum gave a fabulous talk about place, with respect to Toronto and Daniel Libeskind's Royal Ontario Museum. Our panel with Design Observer front line (Bierut, Drentell, Vanderbilt) went well, again picking up themes from earlier in the week (in this case, writing and blogging, streets signs in New York etc.) James Sanders continued this by rendering the contemporary city, or post-city, with a couple of clips from Shark Tale no less, and The Living literally made people gasp by giving a couple of science class live demos. In this case, a louvred 'living glass' wall that beautifully fanned open as you approached. More to follow on all these sessions.
Russell Davies was very kind to point at Postopolis! earlier in the week and noted that there was 'something in the air' about the kind of conferences and shows around at the moment. Indeed Russell is about to put on one of his own – Interesting2007 – which I'd recommend people keep an eye on, as it'll be completely brilliant. However, I could quibble (very English, that) with some of the reference points Russell suggests (the Reboots, Barcamps etc.). While those gatherings are all good things, I've personally had little interest in them for years, and I know my fellow organisers will probably not even have heard of them (being from different disciplines, backgrounds.) A more likely influence, although rarely consciously noted by us in organising this, would have been the Archigram-style happenings of the late-60s, based around informal drop-in centres, a permeable space, right in the middle of the big, bad city. But they're all in the same ball-park, as it were. And yes, we have wifi but it's not open, and so 99% of the focus - except for your correspondent, frantically trying to get down notes - is on the speaker, the presentation, the questions, and I think that's really healthy. I'm bored of a seeing a glassy-eyed crowd with heads angled down towards a screenful of IM, web, email, Flickr, Twittr, Shittr etc., as much as the neophyte in me would defend that practice as layering an ever-shifting information space over the physical space of the conference or some such bollocks. It's been incredibly healthy to have this informal space, with focused, serious questions about important things, and not deflect that focus with screens, only with noisy New York in the rear window. The gaze is upwards, ears are cocked, the stance correct. Lawrence Weschler closed today's session with an oblique reference to this, I think.
Bit of housekeeping: I've filed all these posts in a new category: Postopolis. And following from above point, we're taking notes and photos during the show, but filing them afterwards. You may noticed I've been uploading photos to Flickr first, and the Storefront crew have been diligently doing the same with videos to YouTube; you can check these now, but I'll go back in and adorn posts with the relevant photos, links and videos afterwards. I'd like to draw a diagram of all these waves of media fanning out from our show.
Of course, amidst the torrent of brainless drivel studded with thunderously great clips, it was inevitable that The YouTube would end up with loads of avant-garde film. I recently chanced across these old favourites, which I hadn't seen for many years, by the great New Zealand artist Len Lye. I used to have these on a dusty old VHS, lifted from a long-lost Channel 4 documentary on avant-garde film, featuring Lye, Malcolm LeGrice, Stan Brakhage, Chris Marker et al. (Hard to imagine Channel 4 doing that now, instead of 'F**k off, I'm a Forty-Stone Bishop!' or whatever it is they're making these days. Anyway.)
Len Lye is something of a heroic character in early film, having thoroughly explored indigenous South Pacific culture, including Australia, Polynesia, and Samoa, where he was expelled by the New Zealand colonial administration for living within an indigenous community. He headed for London in 1926, traversing the globe by working as a coal trimmer on a steam ship, whereupon he embarked on a career as avant-garde filmmaker and visual artist, sponsored by supporters of the surrealist movement and the likes of the courageous G.P.O. Film Unit. It's great that he's going to be commemorated through a Len Lye centre, in New Plymouth, New Zealand. His work is best described through the films themselves; or in abstract terms, in his own words: "One of my art teachers put me onto trying to find my own art theory. After many morning walks an idea hit me that seemed like a complete revelation. It was to compose motion, just as musicians compose sound. [The idea] was to lead me far, far away from wanting to excel in traditional art."
First up, 1935's 'A Colour Box', for the G.P.O. Film Unit, followed by 1958's 'Free Radicals':
I find it a delicious irony that seeing these films, in this way, is an unlikely by-product of late-capitalist, 'emergent' poster child YouTube and the stentorian 'top-down' state-sponsored output of the G.P.O. Film Unit and the New Zealand Film Commission. Unlikely bed-fellows but these films wouldn't be in front of you now without the efforts of either.
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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