cityofsound

Noted elsewhere: September 2007

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.

San Francisco Federal Building from AIA San Francisco on Vimeo.

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.)

The Monthly
One of my favourite Australian magazines is The Monthly. It's a serious yet witty, multi-faceted, passionate publication, covering a broad spectrum of current affairs and culture. It makes space for lengthy articles, is well-designed (by John Warwicker, no less) and genuinely values words and thinking. There are few examples of this kind of magazine, so it's a real treasure. Their website, however, has generally been a lacklustre effort. Thankfully though, they just redesigned. There are still several flaws, from a web design perspective, but it's much better. In particular, you can browse back issues and read a fair few articles. You can point at all of them, such as this superb article on the Mary Valley controversy in Queensland, or an interview with Robert Hughes, or Peter Conrad's pasting of Clive James. And you might start reading with a piece that has actually changed policies on the Tasmanian logging industry, or Gideon Haigh on the British influence on Australia, or this article by Robert Manne on the converse - the American influence in Howard's version of Australia.

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.

Monocle updates
Some items of particular interest at Monocle might be an interview with Pentagram's Paula Scher, on re-branding the USA, and the branding business in general. Scher is one of the world's greatest designers, and is always worth listening to. There's also a great little slideshow piece on Abkhazia, the breakaway Baltic state, which is fascinating (working alongside a corresponding magazine article). Many people picked up on the slideshow we did around the Fuji Kindergarten by Tezuka architects, but if you didn't see it I can recommend that too - a progressive philosophy embedded into a fascinating building. See also our short documentary from the Fuji Rock festival in Japan, which Glastonbury and the like could learn a lot from, and our reports from the Tällberg Forum in Sweden. And moving on from the movies, you might also want to follow our Monocle Quality of Life Index, a regularly-updated guide to interesting products and services, big or small, that improve your quality of life, drawn from our correspondents around the world. Oh and this week sees a piece on the Frankfurt Motor Show, featuring some incredible footage of the stagecraft involved in selling a new car. Issue 06 of Monocle magazine might still be on newsstands, focusing on the notion of nations, in particular how nations new and old might reinvent themselves. Issue 07 fans out across the globe from this Thursday 27th September.

Pecha Kucha 07, Sydney
And finally, as they say on ITN, I'll be appearing at the next Pecha Kucha night here in Sydney. 27th September, 18.30, Mars Lounge, Surry Hills. Free entry! Lord knows what I'll be saying.
Facebook event | Pecha Kucha Volume 07 [Super Colossal] 

GTA IV

These are lovely. Shots from the forthcoming 'Grand Theft Auto IV' game. See the Koyaanisqatsi-inspired trailer here. Its good to see them actually take on New York, after the New York-inspired Liberty City of 'GTA III'. Hints at the possibility of Rockstar et al moving into the city simulation business (LA/San Francisco, Miami, NY), rather than games/movies as such. The people-trafficking story seems suitably Rockstar, but it's years since I actually played a game like this in concerted fashion. Too much else to do. It would be lovely to move around, and listen to, this New York, though - as I've noted before, the sense of having an imagined New York 'in a box' like this is more than enough for me.

Rockstar: Grand Theft Auto IV

Previously, on cityofsound:
Gangs Of New York, World-Building
Los Angeles: Grand Theft Reality
Scarface is Vice City is Scarface
Modelling Urban Behaviour Amidst Networked Ultraviolence
Video game flâneur
Manhattan As Muse For Video Games

Architects may come and architects may go ...

I'd usually post items like this over on the 'Noted Elsewhere' section of this blog, but this is too appealing not to reproduce here. Part of series of posts at Dr Andrew Hudson-Smith's Digitally Distributed Environments blog, concerning visualisations of cities in video games, such as Half-Life's 'City 17'. Here, the Half-Life engine has been used to create a walk-through of Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater:

In no way will such visualisations ever provide a true experience of physical architecture - whatever that means - but it's certainly interesting how video game engines seem to be providing the most fluid, rich environments for exploring buildings, short of being there, outpacing much traditional architectural software. Multiply these engines by open-source screen capture software, to the power of YouTube, and you have a pretty rich formula for translating and transporting learning about architecture.

Of course, virtual environments, especially those in games, are as much part of the contemporary architectural experience as 'the real Fallingwater', as noted by Geoff Manaugh's fabulous blast theory on such matters of a few months back. If not more. Sadly, this may be as close as I ever get to the actual Fallingwater. Yet we shouldn't fool ourselves that this is a replacement for physical experience - it's an additional architectural space.

The sensual textures of these representations are interesting too. Experienced without smell, taste and touch, this 'Fallingwater' in sound and vision only would be well short of the rich physical experience - that dank, damp stone, wood and glass, scented with pine trees and rampant fungus, in this case. Visually, the game engines have an unreality of their own, which is immediately attractive yet quite unlike an actual interplay of light on material. In terms of the movement, it's a fantastical, non-physical dream, as the final few seconds of the walkthrough above suddenly become an impossible fly-by, in which Fallingwater is revealed to be floating in space, a castle in the air, devoid of its geographical context, existing only as architectural or cultural form.

It would be interesting to consider how these virtual representations are affecting physical architectural form though, by altering the practice and sensibilities of architects, much as the black and white photography of the early modernist masters affected the form of late-modernist architecture. The highly contrasted shadows and light of monochrome photography actually shaped architectural form - and created a slew of pure white buildings - in a fascinating symbiotic process.

It's a bit glib to look at the work of Hadid, Libeskind, Gehry and others, and infer that a later symbiosis is taking place - between architecture and video games - as I suspect those architects are too old to have inculcated this aesthetic into their work. (Yes, their teams may have done, but the head of the studio still has a fairly defining role.) So, given the harnessed narrative propulsion of YouTube, how will the intrinsic aesthetic of game engines and Flash video encoding affect contemporary architecture?

Digitally Distributed Environments: Frank Lloyd Wright Architectual Visualisation in Half Life

Interaction Design Classics #2: The big pink arrow from 'Grand Theft Auto'

Second in an occasional series, featuring the excellent method the 'Grand Theft Auto' games have for signalling your next mission encounter - a giant, glowing pink arrow oscillating above the target. Perfectly visible at speed, driving through dense urban environments, sometimes under fire and/or listening to Foreigner. Remarkably eye-catching. (Arguably, this should be filed under 'information architecture classics', but who cares.)

Rockstar "abandons trappings of modern excess", allegedly

Cyclically, site owners tend to undertake projects to 'redesign the website to within an inch of its life, back to a point of clarity of purpose and sense of space'. Rockstar Games recently attempted just that, and while the new site is not that placid or beautiful, they perfectly articulate the promotion of it with typical elan:

"The old Rockstar website was a hell of a lot of fun. Relentlessly camp, the life of the party, silly at times, but always endearing. Nevertheless, there's only so long that such a lifestyle can go on. And the cougar really began to show her wear and tear."

"The new Rockstar website presents a time to reflect. To step barefoot on that soggy sand on a misty autumn dusk, stare out to the sea, and connect with the celestial ether. To abandon the trappings of modern excess and superfluousity and embrace a more placid and substantial beauty."

"Let the rest of the world overconsume to the point of combustion. Step inside and decompress at www.rockstargames.com."

Rockstargames.com [Flash]

Fauna, flora, pixels and paper

This new image of King Kong sitting atop a 1933 New York cityscape is all over architecture and urban sites like a rash, with good reason, and this blog's not about to miss out on the action. It plays entirely to my desires of pausing the film at that point, taking control of the camera, and just wandering about this incredible simulation, possibly with an improvised non-director's commentary. I've mentioned this previously, in relation to Gangs of New York and The Warriors/video games for flâneurs. With Kong, the ravishing pixellated-yet-painterly recreation of a decent chunk of thirties New York is too compelling to ignore.

Things mag has some insightful thoughts on the city and architecture generated as a side-effect of King Kong, not least the inspiration of Italian futurist art and particularly Tullio Crali's 'Nose Dive on the City' on the final, famous, fabulous dog fight around the Empire State. (As much as I find that Italian stuff fascinating, I'd have like to have seen some influence of Hugh Ferriss there too - why should Batman have the monopoly there? - perhaps that could be a 'filter' we could overlay on to the vicarious urban-architectural experience suggested above?)

Elsewhere, a new favourite blog - BLDGBLOG - has further interesting ruminations inspired by Kong, on the nature of animal inhabitation of cities - an 'urban natural history' no less (as well as a variant on the film/game/model idea above). Such talk jolted me to post about a project I've been meaning to point to for a while ...

Discovered after my recent note on the 'paper buildings' of Shigeru Ban, Alan Morrissey's work for his architectural diploma researched the use of paper-based architecture for sustainable community development, in the context of a piece called 'Demanufacture' [more info on the RIBA President's Medals Student Award site]. His work is interesting on a number of levels - pragmatic and poetic, sustainable and imaginative - but what springs to mind here, given the dreamt evolution of the A3044 and surrounding reservoirs, are Morrissey's beautiful images of the 'trans-species inhabitation' of his architecture, recreating a home for natural forms - birds, cattle, foliage - who would reclaim the environment offered around the lattice-like paper towers.

"The space becomes a new form of implied landscape providing a rich array of textures and surfaces. This forgotten place, in turn, takes on a new sustained meaning derived from natural requirements to become useful once more. Feeding, breeding, birth and death all occur whilst the established society of the edge city exists in parallel."

Whilst not 'deep-urban' as such, with the context of Heathrow airport it's all strangely reminiscent of JG Ballard's brilliant, odd, magical novel The Unlimited Dream Company, which features all manner of fauna and flora in bizarre congress with urban fabric. The permeable form of Morrissey's imagined buildings could enable an extraordinary and profound blurred boundary between people and species various, between artificial and natural, between urban and rural, between permanence and transience.

The Warriors emerge

Rockstar announce a new slew of games, including the promised new version of Grand Theft Auto for the PSP. Also, with an eye perpetually trained on riling Middle England, their new game Bully. Any gossip on that?

Possibly more of interest - to me anyway - is the announcement that they are making a videogame version of the classic early 80s NYC movie, The Warriors, which I speculated about this time last year.

Looking back, I suggested that Rockstar now had an urban form it could 're-skin' for numerous different games.

"Rockstar and others have virtually (pun intended) built the digital infrastructure to generate generic large city forms. All they have to do is drape a particular cultural fabric over it, and the architecture, clothes, music, adverts etc. all just fall into place" [Video Game Flâneur]

And looking at the screenshots on the currently basic Warriors promo site, it would seem that the mis-en-scene is indeed a remix of the dystopia fantasy devised for GTA and Manhunt.

As those games were in turn based on the imaginary cities conjured up by films like The Warriors, it's no surprise we're in this increasingly rich symbiotic swirl of fictional cities and histories. Leaving aside the 'video game flaneur' aspects, I'm intrigued to find out how good the game will be - whether it'll capture the sense of 'broken city' so evident in the movie (and others of the same time, like Downtown 81, Escape from New York etc), the great sense of an 'alien' fashion and music emerging, and yes, the campness of the whole thing too :)

Either way, again Rockstar seem streets ahead in terms of building a platform for city-based gaming.

Rockstar: The Warriors

These are a few of my favourite Things

As the Bloggie awards build to a heady climax, and the number of unread posts across the 100+ blogs I subscribe to recedes into the 1000+ distance, I find that I can no longer bring myself to coherently recommend a route through the vast territories of thoughts and links being written into existence every day. I feel like I haven't 'read the internet' for months. This is no reflection on those sites - far from it - but only on my inability to keep up with them during periods of intense workload. So, as my sole post on these matters, I'll simply recommend the following entries from the site I generally enjoy visiting most, things magazine. Most of these are posts where the editor Jonathan Bell collates links and thoughts around a particular subject, rather than the equally enjoyable random daily linkfests we often see there. So, in lieu of a bloggie recommendation, go and read these in-no-particular-order entries at things:

Superstudio, 'Croydon B' and the Purley Way / On Massive Change / Cold War Houthouses / On architectural publishing / Spring Heel Jack / On Design Observer on architecture / Frank Lloyd Wright and Deconstruction / Shuffle, thin-slicing and rapid cognition / Virtual representations of cities and war / Positional goods and branding / Gentrification and eugenics / Glamour and design

Los Angeles: Grand Theft Reality

Had a few thoughts about Los Angeles recently, which I'll combine into this portmanteau post loosely joined to that city, starting with a few words on the Michael Mann film Collateral I didn't get round to posting earlier. It's an OK film in retrospect, no more. It's set in LA, however, and this aspect is arguably reason enough to see the film anyway, as it's beautifully shot - in fact absolutely stunning. Shot on high-definition digital video cameras (Thomson Grass Valley Viper FilmStream and Sony CineAlta), the screen fizzes with neon signs and streetlights, burnt orange skies polluted with light and smog, reflections raytraced from mirrored corporate 'scrapers, spots of blue liquid crystal glow from mobile phones lending theatrical uplighting on characters' faces. Sight and Sound described it better, thusly:

"Probably the first studio director to embrace digital for its purely aesthetic potential, Mann uses the high-definition technology - in particular its ability to register a rich array of colours and tones in low light and at night - to realise his vision of the city. If the LA of Heat was crisp, almost photorealist in its high-gloss intensity, here the night-time cityscape is rendered with a watercolour delicacy. Collateral's after-hours timescale may be classic noir, but Mann's subtle night-vision - the dark sky seems bathed in an urban glow (the pale wash of orange street lights, streaks of white automobile headlights) - softens the genre's chiaroscuro tendencies." ["It Happened One Night", Sight & Sound, on Collateral]

Mann, in interview:

"(Y)ou can't see the city at night on motion picture film the way you can on digital video ... I think this is the first serious major motion picture done in digital video that is photoreal, rather than using it for effects. DV is also a more painterly medium: you can see what you've done as you shoot ... Digital isn't a medium for directors who aren't interested in visualisation ..." ["Paint It Black", Sight & Sound]

Yet again, Los Angeles is a 'visualised' city. Twas ever thus, and with such interesting effects on our understanding of the city - and not just visually, but formally. Mike Davis's City of Quartz is often thought of as the peerless book on LA, with respect to both the imagined city of Chandler and Chinatown and the dark movements of the political and social throughout the 20th century. Reading that means that one then engages with almost any film set in LA in terms of a far richer back-history of imagined and real corruption, beauty, horror, sensual image and vivid music, exploitation, aspiration, politics, crime, grime and so on. It's as if each film is simply a small scene in a growing 'meta-work' about the city (more on this later).

San Andreas in da house

My house that is. There's a fair chance postings could be a bit intermittent for a bit.