cityofsound

Postopolis!: Joel Sanders

Note: This is a summary of a talk given at Postopolis!, taken in real-time, with minimal editing. Reader beware! Postopolis! was organised by BLDDBLOG, City of Sound, Inhabitat, Subtopia, and the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, and ran from May 29th-June 2nd 2007. Flickr group for photos here. YouTube videos uploaded here. All Postopolis! posts here.

The New York-based architect Joel Sanders closes day 3 of Postopolis! for us. Geoff had previously covered Sanders' Mix House idea – and extended it – here. Sanders gave an entertaining, impassioned talk, centred around "new technologies for living" as he put it.

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.

Postopolis!: Lebbeus Woods

Note: This is a summary of a talk given at Postopolis!, taken in real-time, with minimal editing. Reader beware! Postopolis! was organised by BLDDBLOG, City of Sound, Inhabitat, Subtopia, and the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, and ran from May 29th-June 2nd 2007. Flickr group for photos here. YouTube videos uploaded here. All Postopolis! posts here

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?

Bryan's done a fantastic transcript of the talk over at Subtopia, and here's an excerpt of the conversation with Lebbeus Woods:

NB. Image of Woods' work are taken from an excellent review of a Lebbeus Woods lecture at Life Without Buildings.. Hope that's OK. The image of his early work is taken from one of Geoff's posts.

Postopolis!: Day Four

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.

A Free Radical: Len Lye

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':

'Free Radicals' is perhaps the pick. It belies its age - coming up for its 50th birthday next year - and feels quite contemporary. Partly due to the timeless nature of the music perhaps - but the only real difference between this and Tröllback's gorgeous visual setting for Brian Eno and David Byrne's 'Moonlight In Glory' [QuickTime] is the latter's sophisticated effects. The formal structure is essentially the same though. Actually, it even sounds like something from 'My Life In The Bush of Ghosts'.

See also the lovely Rainbow Dance:

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.

Suspended at a junction in time: Australia, Silent Running, The Drowned World and the University of Queensland

Walking around the University of Queensland campus about a year ago, I was struck by the beauty of James Birrell's architecture, but also the slightly disrespectful way in which the rampant sub-tropical foliage was engulfing it. The overall sensation was a delightfully heady fecundity, enveloping the gorgeous concrete structures in a deadly embrace of vines and roots. Yet also a vague sense that I'd seen this before somewhere. I hadn't, but I realised the overall campus reminded me of the 70s sci-fi movie 'Silent Running' – somewhat bizarrely, given the acres of clear blue sky above.

It wasn't just the specific forms of the campus architecture – as with most educational establishments, a mish-mash of styles reflecting different funding models and regimes, but featuring some fine brutalist-lite plastic and concrete cubes of the sixties and seventies.

It was also the sense of building structures as a colonising force; of growing things in defiance of the environment. In 'Silent Running', it's the surreal vision of gigantic hydroponic pods, lifted from Bucky's geodesic domes, attempting to literally grow life while suspended in life-less space.

At Brisbane's UQ campus, it was the beautifully manicured lawns and carved lakes, in a terrain increasingly scorched. Bamboo grows effortlessly, as do other local plants and trees, each adapted to their terrain. The sub-tropical foliage is clearly on top, in this slow, lazy struggle in the sun.

As with elsewhere in Brisbane - say the heavy-bricked Tudorbethan houses in New Farm's Abbott Street - an imported, imposed European sensibility always hangs a little askew here. The artificiality of a giant ornamental pool of water, carefully scooped out of sweeping lawns, in a city with an apparently permanent water shortage, is exaggerated by the sight of giant lizard, lying in the sun, perfectly still, delighting a small child. A turtle is equally static atop its manhole cover island. You half expect a couple of squat robots to come waddling round the corner, ready to trim the herbaceous borders.

As the science fiction visions swirled around my heat-stroked head, these bits of Brisbane appeared more and more like a colonisation - the 'tyranny of distance' common in both early notions of Australia and in the incomprehensible light-year expanses of space exploration. In the late-18th century London, Botany Bay may as well have been outer space.

I'm ever-conscious of writing about Australia from the slightly iffy perspective of an Englishman, as a foreigner, and here specifically as a non-Brisbanian. I'm also wary of the outsider's tendency to derive exotica from the everyday. But seeing Australia through these varying lenses led me to stop and think further about building, climate change and our response.

The architecture is often wonderful at the University of Queensland - again, particularly James Birrell's stuff - but is it now suited to its terrain and climate? Perhaps better suited than the hydroponic pods of 'Silent Running', which simply created a barrier to the external environment (though curiously reminiscent of Robert Hughes's fantastic phrase from 'The Fatal Shore': "the breaking open of a capsule ... the protective glass of distance broke".) But certainly not as well-suited as the effortlessly thrusting bamboo or wonderfully adaptive Queenslander vernacular housing seen elsewhere. (Which is another story.)

Ballard's 'The Drowned World' (1962) was another reference point constantly in mind - the giant ferns and submerged cities of that wonderful book were never far from my thoughts as I wandered around Brisbane's baked yet verdant streets.

Whilst Australia's terrain is often characterised by dry, ancient rock, Brisbane and the north are rather more lush, and it's not too much of a stretch to imagine the drowned world there. The water shortages and eight-year droughts are changing the habits of Brisbane's residents for sure; the gardening column in the local Courier Mail newspaper featured fervent debates about whether to alter planting patterns or just wait for the drought to break. But the mangroves, paperbarks and poincianas seem just fine in the heavy humid air. (Over-salination is another matter, however - see Jared Diamond's 'Collapse' for the sobering state of play, but also on Australia's possible way forward.) The half-submerged mangroves and plodding ibises of Queensland's coast particularly call to mind 'The Drowned World's' primeval flora and fauna:

"In the early morning light a strange mournful beauty hung over the lagoon; the sombre green-black fronds of the gymnosperms, intruders from the Triassic past, and the half-submerged white-faced buildings of the twentieth century still reflected together in the dark mirror of the water, the two interlocking worlds apparently suspended at some junction in time ..." ['The Drowned World', JG Ballard]

Australia seems poised at this junction right now, beginning to explore new and old ways of dealing with its water supply, from divining, to not-building dams -  "a 20th-century response to 21st-century problems" - to finally recycling. Cosmos magazine covers this situation well, noting that Australia could usefully play the role of petri dish for the rest of the world:

"John Radcliffe, a commissioner for Australia's National Water Commission, describes Australia as "having the scope" to lead the world in water innovation. Because Australia is so dry, and its situation so dire, it could prove a harbinger of things to come globally." [Cosmos magazine]

The following photos are from an excellent slideshow courtesy of the 'Sydney Morning Herald', on the depleted,  dam-created Lake Eucumbene, exposing the submerged Adaminaby township. Taken with Paul Sinclair's recent 'Age' article, it perhaps reinforces the folly of building dams in Australia.

These are certainly drought-created situations. But perhaps the learning we could derive predates drought altogether. The inherent unpredictability of the Australian climate - the El Niño Southern Oscillation which led to the pragmatic indigenous practice of building a nomadic culture (see Tim Flannery's 'The Future Eaters' for more) - may turn out to have been an inadvertent precursor for weather patterns elsewhere. A letter to 'The Economist' a while back claimed that agriculture uses 75% of Australia's water yet only contributes around 8% of the GDP. Perhaps this points to one of many imminent changes for Australia; changes that could actually be bent into progressive shapes. Allegedly the most urbanised nation on earth - aside from city states - only 16% (24,909 gigalitres) of Australia's water ends up in its cities. The Mary Valley controversy in Queensland, reported in excellent Aussie magazine The Monthly in September 2006, is a pointer of what will certainly be many disputes to follow between the country and the city over water supplies. The city is the only realistic future, I'm sure, but these transitions are painful, and swamping beautiful national parks that are homes to endangered species will be both unpopular and destructive. Yet if city life is endangered by irresponsible water usage, that's an order of magnitude worse. There's a spectacular Aussie version of 'Chinatown' or 'City of Quartz' to write here.

How to reconcile urban development with climate change? How to build a sub-tropical architecture that adapts to the environment? How to use dangerous environmental conditions to the benefit of a nation, a culture, a people? There are ways forward amidst all of these questions; there is learning from both the vernacular past and the imagined future of science fiction. From the past, richer ways of thinking about weather patterns, or of the environment holistically, or of building for sub-tropical environments (bit more later). And looking forward, perhaps we need imaginative, progressive visions of a future radically altered by climate change. In Wreck-Diving London, Geoff Manaugh binds Ballard's submerged London from 'The Drowned World' with Turner's wondrous hazy swirls of light and water - say, of previously submerged city, Venice. Manaugh indicates how imaginative writing and cut-and-paste imagery could form a useful, if playful, bricolage:

"Till, someday, a distant heir of J.M.W. Turner will return sunburnt from the tropics to find London an archipelago of failed sea walls and water-logged high-rises, the suburbs an intricate filigree of uninhabited canals, bonded warehousing forming atolls amidst sandbanks and deltas. Amidst new islands of former rooftops, he will rename the constellations to fit British geography as it used to be: Piccadilly Circus, King’s Cross, Tottenham Court Road, all burning above a city that quietly rushes with black waves."

Ballard's thesis in 'The Drowned World' concerned time itself rolling backwards: as environmental conditions began to resemble those of the Triassic era, so plant forms, animal life and ultimately human consciousness began to roll backwards too, our 'lizard brains' emerging from the deep sleep of the hypothalamus. As we begin to mentally mimic the stillness of a turtle on a manhole cover island in the burning sun, we'll need these skewed spurs and spikes to prick our thinking and find interesting ways out. Like Ballard's hero, head to the south, into the sun, to find the future. It's counter-intuitive, but it might just work.

'Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait', by Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno

I've had a sporadic relationship with Douglas Gordon's work, yet it's had a profound effect on me when I've seen it, heard it. Maybe I've been lucky enough to have experienced  his greatest hits, the two works based around Alfred Hitchcock; '24 Hour Psycho', in which the film is slowed down to play over a duration of 24 hours, and 'Feature Film', in which a zoom onto a conductor's hands is foregrounded, guiding the performance of Bernard Herrmann's soundtrack, while the movie itself is footnoted, diminished.

Both are fascinating, effective studies of time, movement, image and sound. His other work has been described as less successful, yet there was no way I was going to miss his collaboration with French artist Philippe Parreno, 'Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait'.

Music for Films: Top 12 Appearances by Bands in Films

A bit of New Year fun for you ... Looking at a favourite music list from a couple of years ago, I noted the jazz club scene from the film 'Collateral', and how much I enjoyed such scenes in films. So Chris Jones and I have been playing a little game, augmenting our fading memories with the magnificent YouTube, in order to create a list of the classic band performances in films.

The completely arbitrary rules are these: it mustn't be a musical like 'An American In Paris', or music-orientated like 'Round Midnight' or 'Downtown 81', or about a band, like 'Magical Mystery Tour' (which sadly rules out this classic Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band clip. Take a look anyway). Many early films are counted out as they would often feature a number as part of the show, functioning more of as entertaining interlude than plot device. Obviously, we're not talking backing music á là Scorcese's 'Mean Streets', either.

No, the examples we're looking for are those where a band performance is used as a signifier or symbol. They're not a character as such, more an atmospheric effect into which characters are thrust. Not part of the plot, but part of the scenery, almost. So there's a golden era for these, from the late 1950s, when jazz and then psychedelic bands would be used to indicate when a character was about to dally in something a bit shady, up to the mid-1980s, when bands stopped being, well, bands. In a meaningful sense for the movies, like.

They don't have to be real bands, though bonus points if they are.

Last rule is that the sequence has to exist on YouTube. That's just for practicality's sake. I just hope the following stay up long enough.

So here's our top twelve sequences of bands in films, in no particular order. There must be many more out there, so use the comments to suggest other contenders. In the meantime, enjoy! (Tip: If you're finding the videos a bit jerky, as I've embedded quite a few here, click the YouTube logo on the video itself and watch it there.)

San Francisco dinner jazz in 'Bullitt'
The scene that got me started. I've seen Bullitt so many times and this is as emblematic a scene as the famous car chase. Steve McQueen manages to look both super-cool and out-of-place simultaneously, eyeing up the beautiful Jacqueline Bisset, as a boho 'Frisco jazz band get busy amidst the diners. It's fantastic. No idea who they are. All we know is that the guitarist is Mike Deasy. He was also in 'Dirty Harry' you know. Correction! See comment below.

Jazz club scene in 'Collateral'
Jumping forward, this scene is related to 'Bullitt' perhaps, yet this is a sharper brew - a version of Miles Davis' 'Spanish Key'. Michael Mann's use of music is exemplary, although he rarely places it in the foreground like this. The club shootout scene (here re-edited with just track, no dialogue) later - soundtracked to Paul Oakenfold - is more contemporary Mann. But this is beautifully put together.

Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds in 'Wings of Desire'
Fantastic couple of performances. A classic example of mood-setting, Aussie wasters conveying Berliner decadence as angels wander invisibly on stage. Lovely. See also Crime and the City Solution's 'Six Bells Chime' in the same film.

Cliff Richard 'Junior' in 'Thunderbirds'
Oh yes, this qualifies. Just in case you thought this was all getting a bit dour. Cliff and The Shadows in puppet form, guitar-shaped rockets and all.

The Pretty Things and Norman Wisdom in 'What's Good For The Goose'
Yes, you read that right. Norman Wisdom plays a hippy in this 1969 British film, and goes to see a band called The Electric Banana. They're played by The Pretty Things. Norm seems to be getting into it. As Chris said: "Far out Mr. Grimsdale" etc. There's another clip here, dubbed in German and featuring swings, for added surrealism. (Norman Wisdom link for overseas readers.)

Graham Bond Organisation in 'Gonks Go Beat'
To complete this triumvirate of unbelievably dated British movies, here's a groovy classic featuring Carry On player Kenneth Connor encountering The Graham Bond Organisation, in some kind of future 'beat club'. Absolutely hilarious. And a fantastic track. The dancing is particularly enticing. Features the young Jack Bruce, Ginger Baker and John McLaughlin before their subsequent stellar careers. Oh, and Kenneth Connor. Dig?

Warhol party scene from 'Midnight Cowboy'
OK, the band aren't actually visible in this, but it's clearly a Warhol Factory affair, so we can assume that John Cale arguing with LaMonte Young about tape loops somewhere while Nico and Lou Reed check out the girls. And boys. Actually, according to the comments, the track is 'Old Man's Willow' by Elephant's Memory. It's a great example of rock being used to denote seediness.

Moby Grape from 'Sweet Ride'
You have to fast-forward this one to about 5' 28'' in. (Although you'd be advised to just let it play through, as Moby Grape were rather good.) Anyway, when you get there, you'll see a scene from 'Sweet Ride' (1968), showing a freak-out in full effect. Note how 'engaged' the San Francisco crowd are compared to the London scene in 'Blow Up' (below). Check the drummer in a pith helmet. See if you can spot Lee Hazlewood and Peter Fonda too. "Phew it sure is wild out there ..."

Chico Hamilton Quintet in 'Sweet Smell of Success'
Noir often used jazz as one of its key signifiers. Frankly, could've used many similar clips here. I discounted Frank Sinatra as Frankie Machine in Preminger's superb 'Man With The Golden Arm' due to it being too obviously about music. This strikes a better balance of scene-setting for the principal characters. Features Chico Hamilton. And it's a great film.

Jazz band creates havoc in Tati's 'Playtime'
Tati himself helps with the destruction of the impossibly ill-conceived modern restaurant in 'Playtlme' yet the super 'ip jazz band help things along by filling the dancefloor and playing at one hundred miles an hour. And keep going while everything falls apart around them and new social groupings emerge. Fabulous.

Bauhaus in 'The Hunger'
Sadly I can't embed this one, so you'll have to follow this link to see Bauhaus performing 'Bela Lugosi's Dead' at the start of 'The Hunger'. Deneuve, Sarandon, Pete Murphy. Hmm doesn't quite follow does it. Anyway, this one just sneaks in, despite being a little bit promo/title sequence.

The Yardbirds in 'Blow Up'
Perhaps the quintessential 'band in film' scene features The Yardbirds - Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck an' all - in Antonioni's 'Blow Up'. Love the way that Beck so carefully wrecks his amplifier. It's all so studied. As are the crowd. Look how utterly London they are. Motionless, too-cool. Compare again to the Moby Grape crowd earler! Save for a couple of groovers at the back, they're barely there. At least they wake up a bit when Beck chucks what's left of his guitar into the crowd. This was shot in the 100 Club on Oxford Street, which is still there, although Oxford Street looks a bit different now.

Spaces speak, as do cities, Buddha Machines, films

A quick portmanteau post which certainly approaches the title of this site. First up, via Russell and others, Ambient Addition:

"Ambient Addition is a Walkman with binaural microphones. A tiny Digital Signal Processing (DSP) chip analyzes the microphone's sound and superimposes a layer of harmony and rhythm on top of the listener's world. In the new context, some surprising behaviors take place. Listeners tend to play with objects around them, sing to themselves, and wander toward tempting sound sources. With Ambient Addition, I'm hoping to make people think twice about the sounds they initiate as well as loosen up some inhibitions."

Watch the video and you'll get the picture, as it were. It's a quite lovely effect, taking as input the ambient sound surrounding you and then processing that into something more 'musical'. I'm not sure about this aural enhancing of the city's noise; any more than a visual enhancing. Yet it's probably better than isolating oneself with an iPod.

Of course, it's not the raw sound of the city filtered; there is definite a musical sensibility at work in the choice of effect in Ambient Addition. Just as there is in 2006's other great music toy, the rather more basic Buddha Machine. I picked up one of these - from Boomkat, £14.99, bargain - and it's huge fun. It's a small, mass-produced - in China, for maximum futurism - plastic box, containing some very simple noise-making hardware. Nine electronic loops, which you can switch between via a small button on the side. On/off switch combined with volume. Headphone socket. That's it. But the loops are charming, in an ambient electronica kinda way. Very well crafted loops, actually, by Christiaan Virant and Zhang Jian of the FM3 label in Beijing. Most charming of all, the low cost production values and combination of slowly fading batteries and simple speaker technology mean that every box will sound slightly different. The plastic box and lo-fi AM radio-style reproduction lead to a fuzzy, crackling tone which offsets the ambience perfectly. It's also fun to mix with other music. When most people hear it, they either say a) "That's perfect accompaniment for a massage/yoga/beautician" or b) "That's perfect accompaniment for my hardcore electronic music project." Apparently the first customer was Brian Eno. Who bought six, based on seeing a prototype at dinner. As you do. You can imagine the conversation with the VCs: "We see our target market as beauticians and Brian Eno". Either way, they've sold over 10,000 and counting.

There's a compilation, Jukebox Buddha, which is pretty good, and Boomkat has an excellent interview with the creators.

Thirdly, Barry Blesser writes, noting that readers of cityofsound might be interested in his new book with Linda-Ruth Salter, "Spaces Speak, Are You Listening? Experiencing Aural Architecture" which has just been release by MIT Press. It does look right up our strasse. The blurb goes: "We experience spaces not only by seeing but also by listening. We can navigate a room in the dark, and "hear" the emptiness of a house without furniture. Our experience of music in a concert hall depends on whether we sit in the front row or under the balcony. The unique acoustics of religious spaces acquire symbolic meaning. Social relationships are strongly influenced by the way that space changes sound. In Spaces Speak, Are You Listening?, Barry Blesser and Linda-Ruth Salter examine auditory spatial awareness: experiencing space by attentive listening. Every environment has an aural architecture. The audible attributes of physical space have always contributed to the fabric of human culture, as demonstrated by prehistoric multimedia cave paintings, classical Greek open-air theaters, Gothic cathedrals, acoustic geography of French villages, modern music reproduction, and virtual spaces in home theaters. Auditory spatial awareness is a prism that reveals a culture's attitudes toward hearing and space. Some listeners can learn to "see" objects with their ears, but even without training, we can all hear spatial geometry such as an open door or low ceiling. Integrating contributions from a wide range of disciplines - including architecture, music, acoustics, evolution, anthropology, cognitive psychology, audio engineering, and many others - Spaces Speak, Are You Listening? establishes the concepts and language of aural architecture. These concepts provide an interdisciplinary guide for anyone interested in gaining a better understanding of how space enhances our well-being. Aural architecture is not the exclusive domain of specialists. Accidentally or intentionally, we all function as aural architects." Sounds good eh? You can pick it up at Amazon [UK | US]

Finally, Christian Marclay's 'Video Quartet' (2002), recently installed at the Tate Modern is one of the best artworks to hit London in recent years. A four-screen projection, room-sized, a 13-minute collage of hundreds of clips of music and sound effects in films, tightly cut and orchestrated together into a glorious new piece of music and film. It's utterly stunning. I saw it today, and I'll be going back. I could sit and watch it for about an hour.

It was commissioned by SFMOMA a few year's back, so it's fairly well-covered online [Wired | Kottke | Brooklyn Rail] but Greg Allen has a good description of the production process, apparently all done in Final Cut Pro: "What had seemed impossible or magic before was now revealing itself as a complex creation, the product of arduous, inspired effort."

Fifth floor, north-west side, room 8 I think. Go and see it if you can. You won't be disappointed. Here's a few pics; a couple from the Tate site, a couple from me.

Kapitaal

Kapitaal is a quite lovely animation by Holland's Studio Smack. Commissioned by Museum de Beyerd, Breda, it was created by Tom Meijdam, Thom Snels, Béla Zsigmond and is available for download at their site. (It's also available on YouTube, but go to studiosmack.nl for the higher-quality version.) As Jim Coudal says, it's "a brilliant vision of the world stripped bare of everything except corporate identities and signage". Formally reminiscent of Antoine Bardou-Jacquet's classic video for Alex Gopher's "The Child", spatially it also recalls the faux-perfect Euro-urban 'Tativille' of Playtime.

Despite the possible critique suggested by the title, it's actually an incredibly seductive little film. Inadvertent perhaps, but pulled back to high contrast, monochrome vectors and smooth, fluid movement and transition, it has little of the jittery, poorly-printed, vibra-colour, jump-cut harshness of real urban centres. Anyway, it's wonderfully executed, with or without interpretation. Some grabs below, but you really have to see the thing move to do it justice.

Studio Smack: Kapitaal

Interaction Design Classics #1: The 'progress bar' on the Voice-O-Graph in 'Badlands'

An occasional series, commencing with this fine example of a 'progress bar'.

More images in sequence below, as used by Martin Sheen in Terence Malick's film 'Badlands' (1974).