Mary-Ann Ray has worked with Michael Graves, James Turrell and Richard Meier. She is now principal, along with Robert Mangurian, of the firm Studio Works in Los Angeles. She, they, also teach at SCI-Arc. I like that her CV includes several schools in the USA, and would like to hear more about the process of designing state schools in the US, yet tonight she is talking at Postopolis! LA about their work in China, which includes the studio BASE (confusing website ahoy) in Caochongdi.
Unfortunately I missed the start of her talk due to ‘technical issues’ (as in, the need to buy some fries from the bar opposite, in order to stay warm and nourished throughout the slowly chilling evening.) Apologies to Mary-Ann for this.
I returned to find her halfway through a fascinating discussion on a 1959 plan for Beijing. Apparently, this has never been published and it’s an extraordinary document. Ray notes that Mao played a primary role in the idea of making the city of Beijing - "as a kind of ruralised urbanism”. The plan divides the city into a series of “dispersal group units” - these are tripartite arrangements that each has elements of housing (commune), factory and natural productive districts. These are then distributed in various combinations all over the city. Between these settlements are trees and green spaces, meaning around 40% of the total land is gardens, parks and farms. Ray notes that there are currently 3 million trees being planted in Beijing, so at least this aspect of the plan is perhaps being realised ...
Despite noting there is little research (thought I’ll note some later), The Economist says “Some drivers say that when their cars are in electric mode people are more likely to step out in front of them. The solution, many now believe, is to fit electric and hybrid cars with external sound systems.” Their subtitle - “Sound generators will make electric and hybrid cars safer“ - indicates this is their position too.
Short books are often better books - The Eyes of the Skin; Undesigning the Bath; In Praise of Shadows; Peter Zumthor’s books; the Writer and the City and Pamphlet Architecture series, and so on. While this entrant into a new series called Edge Futures isn’t quite in that class, it is a good, useful and engaging read, detailing the symbiotic relationship between the modern city and the contemporary office environment. In particular, Work and the City convincingly details how this has led to a grossly inefficient under-utilisation of resources with damaging effects on individuals, corporations, and almost all aspects of urban ecosystem.
Duffy is a co-founder of the firm DEGW, and thus well-placed to discuss the ‘health’ of the modern office environment. DEGW are one of the few to make that their business, and have been influential in bringing to bear a more sophisticated understanding of the importance of calibrating the working environment. They do this through focusing on space-planning, organisational consultancy, post-occupancy and myriad other techniques.
As an architect, he is also well-placed to hit home with one of his first critiques - that architects are seduced by building new buildings, rather than addressing the existing built fabric. When much of what is to be built is already built, and much of it is inefficient, surely we should focus more on that existing fabric, rather than constructing new edifices?
Yet before working through solutions, the book offers a whistle-stop tour of a story well-told elsewhere but always worth considering - how we got into this fix, via the Taylorism-inspired production of the modern office, culminating in the hegemonic 1960s American environments (so lovingly conjured up in the US TV show Mad Men, incidentally). Duffy draws on sociologist Richard Sennett's phrase of “brittle cities” to illustate the infrastructure this leaves cities with: over-centralised and over-engineered to mono-functionality, and thus under-used and inflexible.
Particularly as much of this existing space is so little used. DEGW’s data indicates that total occupancy of all office workplaces - desks, combined with meeting rooms and other social and semi-social places - peaks at 60%, and that’s for the Monday-Friday 8-hour working day. So the total occupancy 24/7 would be less by a considerable amount. In a world waking up to the significance of waste, this is rather pertinent.
We hear frequent claims from major cities that they’re running out of office space. Yet when existing office space is actually being used half the time during a third of the day, something is not quite right. (Note: I was reading an early review copy, and a few errors remained in the text, including the data on these occupancy levels being expressed differently at different points, with little detail on its exact provenance. It’s such a key finding that it warrants emblazoning in large letters, and so requires a little precision and backup through references and data.)
Duffy also draws on Stewart Brand’s equally well-known layers model, in order to indicate how these buildings - and cities - often aren’t designed to ‘learn’ from the shearing effects of skin, structure and space plan moving at different paces. In this respect, he finds London’s Soho to be a more resilient urban form than its Docklands, and London, New York and Paris to offer numerous examples of dense, physical complexity that almost organically offers a sophisticated flexible urbanism.
This is all well-understood - or at least well-discussed in enlightened professional circles - yet Duffy does go on to offer a new take on how these brittle developments still get built. Duffy suggests that the ‘Anglo-American supply chain’ for new buildings in most developed economies, centred on property developers, is not likely to produce less brittle results any time soon. Given the dislocation between developer, owner and occupier, the eventual buildings barely stand a chance. By way of an interesting counterpoint Duffy offers up an alternative - what he calls the “Social Democratic office”, emerging in the post-war environment of Germany, Scandinavia and the Netherlands.
Finance and development for the Social Democratic Office emerges from the business owners (and occupiers) themselves, as with Niels Torp’s SAS headquarters in Stockholm, for example. This simple reorganisation of the supply chain would surely produce better working environments, and Duffy is right to point out that it is essentially “cultural choice” that has ignored that opportunity elsewhere, in favour of other, arguably purely financial, opportunities. That it is cultural choice doesn’t mean it’s easy to fix, of course. Just that it is fixable.
Either way, the industrial revolution has careered into the knowledge revolution unchecked, at least on the surface, and Duffy is optimistic about the benefits of distributed, more social, more informal working styles - as long as people don’t overly adhere to the tyranny of permanently-connected BlackBerrys when trying to flatten the tyranny of distance and time, for instance. He describes the curious verisimilitude of teleconferencing on the high-end Cisco and Hewlett-Packard systems, and finds them immensely beguiling.
However, he is also right to indicate that these, and other advanced ICT not covered in much detail here, won’t replace the essential functions of urban life, and makes a strong argument for the rich physical serendipity of the city remaining essentially sovereign and highly valuable. These systems augment urban life, and could usefully reduce unnecessary travel and its associated emissions whilst retaining global connectivity. But the desire for the city certainly shows no sign of dissipating - quite the opposite.
While I agree with Duffy’s primary assertion, we may yet have to work harder to devise new working environments which truly respond to the promise of pervasive global interconnectivity. Indeed, we should embark on new place-making strategies which creatively resist this tendency of ICT - and economic globalisation for that matter - to smooth out the essential differences between places. And while Work and The City doesn’t really explore the potential in this new overlay on the city, Duffy does enough to suggest its importance. To truly articulate this new area would be a much larger book.
Equally, another larger book would provide more detail on how to solve 'new building syndrome' by retrofitting existing urban fabric, or offer up a few specific strategies for dealing with office occupancy levels, over and above paying for space by the hour, as per a hotel or co-working space. (Recent work by James Calder at Woods Bagot - including their publication WorkLife - is worth reviewing in this respect.) Yet this short book does more than enough to outline the issues, explain how we got here, and suggest the key trends that might move us forward.
Where the book does seriously fall down is in implicitly conflating 'work' with 'office work', something that’s all too easily done. Last month I spoke at an (Inside) magazine public lecture on the ‘Changing contemporary workplace’ - part of their Idea Week, leading up to their interior design excellence awards. I was speaking alongside Woods Bagot's Calder, Suzanne Perillo of Schiavello, Rosemary Kirkby, Peter Geyer of Geyer Architects and Tone Wheeler of Environa Studio. I’d talked through some of these issues of advanced ICT, architecture and the office work environment, while others had discussed other aspects of the changing office environment.
In closing the session, however, architect Tone Wheeler was right to pick us all up for making the same mistake as Duffy. He suggested that even in a knowledge-based city like Melbourne, for example, the office environment must cover around 15-20% of the locations for employment at best. In focusing on offices, we ignore necessary innovation in retail and service environments - which would cover the majority of employment, and a vast diversity of spaces - as well as all scales of manufacturing and craft.
However, the areas that Duffy’s book does focus on are still hugely important. Given the pioneering work of his firm, he is uniquely placed to address the changing nature of much urban work, and this simple, inexpensive book provides an excellent overview of both the evolution of cities and their possible futures.
A few months ago, Scott Burnham kindly asked me to contribute to the exhibition catalogue for Urban Play, a project he conceived and then developed with Droog Design.
It is being sponsored by the city of Amsterdam and is premiering there
this September. In Scott's words, "Urban Play is about placing the
individual at the heart of the city’s development and encouraging
creative interaction between the individual and the physical city". You can also find out more at the Experimenta site.
Scott's posting up focus pieces on some of the interventionists featured in the exhibition, starting with the quite brilliant work of Gilberto Esparza, a Mexico City-based artist who creates 'Urban Parasites', "small robotic creatures made from recycled consumer
goods which wander, climb, crawl and explore the marginal areas of the
city." (Check the videos at Scott's site.)
I've reproduced the full essay below. I believe the other contributors to the catalogue were to be Usman Haque on open source architecture and Richard Reynolds on guerrilla gardening, so it'll be worth keeping an eye on. Many thanks to Scott for his considerable patience, and for asking me to contribute in the first place. It's a relatively speculative, deliberately optimistic piece, continuing some ideas from 'The Street as Platform'. Hope you find it interesting.
I’ve enjoyed their work, from afar at least, for a while and one project in particular grabbed me, given my interest in densification and urbanism. Their plan for a largely residential development in Holbæk - the Holbæk Kasba - in Denmark's Sjælland region, is fascinating (see also Archidose on the Holbæk Kasba). Their proposal started with equal size plots and boxy units of equal height - and then twisted them to create tightly interlocking relationships, focusing on the spaces and views in-between.
“How do you combine the harbour areas on the big scale with intimacy with intimacy and sensory experiences on the human scale? We propose to construct a dense and low kasba of dwellings that have been twisted and turned thus creating a labyrinth of small open spaces and hiding spaces for life, play and socialising between the houses. The kasba is placed on an artificial sloping hill that raises the built-up area for parking underneath and providing each residence its own view of the water and life on the harbour.” [BIG]
The relationship between the units is so dense that it reminds me of the core design principle behind the Beijing National Aquatics Centre (aka 'Water Cube'), developed by the team of Arup, CCDI and PTW. Arup’s Tristram Carfrae has discussed how the design of Water Cube - see discussion here - was inspired by the way soap bubble structures efficiently sub-divide a space. This structural principle is known as a Weaire-Phelan structure, which emerged as a solution to the problem set by Lord Kelvin in 1887: how space could be partitioned into cells of equal volume with the least area of surface between them.
BIG’s ‘kasba’ looks to almost have similar characteristics, although looser, as if the valency has varied a little between its atomic units, the Water Cube’s bubbles had floated apart slightly. They're still locked together through an invisible force - here, a desire to engender interaction rather than isolation, yet still enabling the views required of such developments. The bubbles form a new kind of urban grid, though not Muller-Brockmann at all. This is a new kind of subdivision, sharing some elements of the older, organic urban form (the nod to kasbah; or with the Water Cube, the allusion to biological structure) but with an underlying design strategy that is programmatic. It would be even more interesting to take the code-led aesthetic - seen in Water Cube, but also the Olympics opening ceremony - to produce tightly integrated but infinitely variable generative urban form.
These tactics for density, albeit deployed in relatively open contexts here, are interesting given the need to introduce denser elements into many of our Western cities. Japanese urban architecture generally provides a rich sourcebook of how to build creatively in tight urban contexts. For example, the Seijo townhouses by Kazuyo Sejima;
Monaco House, which I checked out in Melbourne recently, indicates a local example of creative infill. It folds a 3-storey embassy and bar into a fairly small plot in a laneway off Little Collins Street (Ridgway Place).
Though a fairly basic box at the back, and presumably through much of the interior, the front crumples and folds as if mirroring the flag fluttering above. It catches the light beautifully, not least on the purple translucent balcony, and reflects the trees and tall commercial buildings surrounding. A clever little fold at the bottom-left corner wittily enables a tiny patch of ‘grass’.
"This design is the result of a comprehensive understanding of the
spatial unfolding of the city of Melbourne crystallised in a small
building that contributes a big moment in this city’s fabric. The
building demonstrates a high level of architectural resolution. It
realises a potential of widely-held views about the spatial character
of the city of Melbourne – laneways and grid – by means of an unerring
exploration of complex mathematics and contemporary digital
production.”
It's the kind of daring project that only the creative loam of Melbourne’s architecture scene can facilitate in Australia at the moment. Yet it’s exactly the kind of project that Sydney needs to get its head around, as the opportunity here lies exploring in the numerous plots in Sydney’s inner urban cores, rather than expanding to its edges. Recent proposals to reactivate latent laneways and small bars legislation will help here, but so will a little more experimentation with density.
A while ago, I contributed two ABC Radio National shows to Speechification: documentaries on two Australian cities with two distinct and rich musical histories: Melbourne and Brisbane.
In terms of the genuine 'musical scene', Brisbane emerges with one of the richest scenes in the history of Australian cities - a fierce counterpoint to the “boot stamping on a human face forever” school of governance then in play in 1970s Queensland. The Melbourne scene, as recorded in the documentary, is more focused on a particular time and place. Very particular.
No, the scene is usually a relatively short-lived concentration of artistic activity, but one that kick-starts or exemplifies some wider creative, and usually economic, actvity. Over the years it becomes subject to furious debate and wild claims but there's something there and something powerful, no matter how intangible.
Richard Florida, and others many others before him, noted the importance of music scenes in cities, despite his focus being too limited by genre and US-focused at that. Florida calls it the ‘audio identity’ of the city, which doesn't feel quite right given the transient nature of most scenes. Audio identities, perhaps, as cities can lead multiple lives here. ('Madchester' is long gone, for instance, though it was a sort of identity at the time, or just after the time. It can co-exist with the city getting a new centre for classical music around the same time, all arguably stemming from cultural patterns discernible from the mid-19thC onwards.)
But Florida gets the gist nonetheless. In an article back in January 2008 (in the Globe and Mail, and on the back of him observing the healthy music scenes in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver) Florida discerns the overwhelmingly metropolitan nature of music, seeing them as classic examples of what Michael Porter would call 'local clusters in a global economy'.
“Music scenes provide a useful lens through which to better understand why innovation and economic activity continue to cluster in today's global economy. Their clustering is puzzling because music-making requires little, if anything, in the way of physical input (such as iron ore or coal) to succeed, and they don't generate economies of scale. Because musical and artistic endeavours require little more than small groups to make their final products, you would think that musicians should be able to live anywhere they want. Music scenes have every reason to "fly apart" and spread our geographically, especially in this age of the Internet and social media. But they don't. Instead, they concentrate and cluster in specific cities and regions.”
To me, having grown up in scene-rich Sheffield and Manchester, this is all rather obvious. (I was also influenced by doing my MA in Manchester studying creative industries and the city, where my colleagues Adam Brown and Justin O’Connor were more actively researching the music industry and the city specifically, from the early ‘90s onwards.) In those ABC RN documentaries Brisbane and Melbourne have distinct 'audio identities' on display - identities which appear to have little in common with the large, successful cities we see today, but in fact were important formative influences on both. There are numerous other examples of transformative scenes from the last few hundred years.
San Francisco, 1966-68 (Jefferson Airplane, Grateful
Dead, Janis Joplin, Steve Miller, Bill Graham's Fillmore, Tom Donahue's
'free form radio,' Jann Wenner's Rolling Stone magazine)
New Orleans, 1900-1910 (Jazz)
Paris, 1987-2004 (Les Negresses Vertes, Mano Negra.)
Liverpool, 1961-63 (Kenny Ball and his Jazzmen, Big Three, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, The Silver Beetles)
Memphis, 1951-56 (Johnny Ace, Bobby Bland, Rosco Gordon, Sam Phillips)
Barcelona, 2000-2004 (Ojos de Brujos, Dusminguet, Macaco)
Detroit, 1959-68 (Berry Gordy & Motown, Bob Seger, the MC5, Iggy and the Stooges)
Dakar, 2004 (hip hop, Daara J)
New Orleans, 1955-1956 (Fats Domino, Little Richard)
St Petersburg, 2000-2004 (Leningrad, Markscheider Kunst)
Chicago from the mid-50s to the mid-60s (large scale African American migration north creates electric blues);
Vienna (early-20th century contemporary composition of Schoenberg, Webern, Berg etc.);
Canterbury (early 1970s folk-rock scene);
Seattle (early to mid-90s grunge);
Manchester (mid-80s to mid-90s, from Joy Division through to the 'Madchester' of Happy Mondays, via Smiths, New Order, Stone Roses etc.);
Sheffield (early-80s: Heaven 17, Human League, Cabaret Voltaire, ABC etc.).
And you could add in Kothen 1717-1728, London 1962-66, Düsseldorf in the early 70s, Brisbane in the late-70s as above, Liverpool in the late-70s, Chicago House and Detroit Techno during the mid-80s, and probably hundreds more. Canterbury is perhaps the odd-man-out there; the rest are all splendidly urban.
But not only do music scenes, and their study, form vital examples of how creative industries make the city and vice versa, the finding that music scenes are distinctly urban also tells us a wider truth about creativity, technology and cities.
All this ‘soft infrastructure’ - such as cultural industry - is overwhelmingly metropolitan in nature (70% of the UK's creative employment is metropolitan.) This is only reinforced by information and communications technologies. Contemporary cities are characterised by networks; creative industries are predicated on the most hyper-networked of organisational forms; ICT is enabled by, and in turn enables, networks above all else. So ICT and cities tend to be a good match.
(In fact you could argue, even though I’d certainly class ICT as soft infrastructure, that the very real capital costs and physical outlay of facilitating ICT are even more of a reason for focusing it ever more in cities. Far more so than music.)
Yet there’s still this decentralisation myth about ICT and cities. And it’s alive and well, believe me. There exists a surprisingly robust school of thought that ‘telecommuting’ - and how quaint and Toffler-esque that sounds - will enable human activity to relocate and work in ex-urban or rural locations in usefully significant numbers. Odd, I know, but it’s a constant theme still echoing round the intersection of urban planning, regional policy, and the various ICT industries. It’s around in Australia, with its complex, too-successful cities and superficially limitless spaces in-between, but it’s also abroad in the USA and Britain. It’s perhaps associated with so-called digital immigrants, but it might also exemplify an inability to deal with cities intellectually and emotionally (a desire to look for an answer elsewhere, as intrinsically unsustainable as that may be).
It’s also a misunderstanding about some contemporary working practices - and innovation and creativity - which is better characterised instead by ideas such as ‘nomadism’, as The Economist has it, or other ways of working increasingly influenced by the structures and approaches of the creative industries. (I'm not suggesting everyone enjoys the ability to be nomads in The Economist mould. Many don't have that luxury, of course. But the knowledge workers envisaged to be telecommuters would certainly fall into this category.)
Those expecting ICT to enable a decentralisation of urban activities fail to recognise this apparently essential truth about cities and technology - that they only reinforce each other, and that both are enablers for something else. Even though I'd be the first to suggest we need to see 'information as a material' and that it can be be useful to consider it a medium in its own right, for most of the time it is simply a quiet platform for other things. This analogy with music might be useful to make the point even clearer.
As Florida points out, there’s essentially no physical logistical reason that music scenes are centred on cities. Yet they overwhelmingly are, for the reasons he describes in his article. People go to the city to test their ideas, perform, learn, sell, discuss, share. And they do this physically and digitally, in and around the city. Suggesting that ICT might enable decentralisation instead is focusing on technology at the expense of understanding what people do with it.
It’s somewhat like suggesting that the Fender Stratocaster's potential availability in a village would mean that music scenes will relocate there. The evidence suggests the opposite, of course. ICT enables distinctly urban activities, and does little - save for a relatively small handful of edge cases - for anything else. It is a means to an end, and that end is generally urban in context. I’d guess the increasingly pervasive nature of ICT - this physical computing - is only likely to reinforce this urbanity.
In his Flight of the Creative Class, Florida also rejects Thomas ‘The World Is Flat’ Friedman’s assertion that technology has levelled the playing field. Whereas Friedman states that “you can innovate without having to emigrate”, Florida instead finds that the world is not flat but “spiky”, consolidating in cities.
“The tallest peaks - the cities and regions that drive the world’s economy - are growing even higher, while the valleys mostly languish.”
(Of course, Florida’s work has been critiqued elsewhere, but the critique does nothing to level this spiky world, instead offering up other cities to disprove Florida’s other theories.)
A little fluidity within the urban growth boundaries - the nomad model - does not equal decentralisation, but a richer, more evenly dispersed city in which the CBD is usefully dissipated over the built fabric. Thus ICT reinforces the city rather than displacing or dispersing it, as it's an enabler for something else, something deeper - a human instinct and desire for physical connection, expression and exchange, which cities then consolidate in social capital, intellectual capital and cultural capital.
Brisbane and Melbourne in the late-’70s/early-’80s were not cultural backwaters but fertile environments for change, creativity and cultural exploration, as those twodocumentaries so vividly depict. Both cities still have strong aspects of innovation, perhaps characterised now by other creative industries rather more than distinct music scenes. But just as music scenes locate there, ICT as an enabler for creativity and innovation is only more likely to reinforce these, and other, urban centres. Music scenes, and their history, provide a clue as to why technology-enabled decentralisation will essentially remain an un-helpful myth.
The following is a quick survey of new informational approaches to transport, hinging on individual behaviour and engagement via public data. We'll travel from wifi on buses to designs for timetables embedded in the fabric of stations, stopping off at trams in Google Maps and proposals for roboscooter sharing schemes.
Data, transported and shaped by the internet, is increasingly becoming a primary way that people expect to engage with public transport in particular. Engage, as in access and navigate through transport service information, but also explore and understand the transport service itself. This last aspect might sound initially far-fetched - “Why would people want to explore their transport networks?” - but many of these examples indicate that people do. They often go well beyond basic communications initiatives like integrated transport systems and into genuine two-way and many-to-many network-based interaction. Whilst they can do little to help if the eventual public transport service itself is poorly run, built over a well-run system (such as Helsinki’s or Zürich's) such systems might increase satisfaction amongst existing users and attract new users.
Further, engaging with the energy output of transport is something people may directly engage with too, to help shift behaviour. Studies elsewhere, such as Pacific NorthWest National Laboratory of the Energy Department indicate that when exposed to the effects of their behaviour in terms of domestic energy use (electricity, water, gas etc.) via simple PC-based feedback tools, people may change their behaviour, leading to a 15% reduction in peak load on utilities. (And more might be achieved than that, through more sophisticated and better designed schemes.) Will this carry across to transport energy?
So, here are transport systems where usage data has become available - or could become available - and is then built upon, as a way of exploring whether various ‘live dashboards’ of transport across a city will engender new levels of engagement with transport. And whether this will increase awareness of personal behaviour and impact on emissions accordingly.
Some of the examples will have been seen before, so I’d be interested in any further examples you might have of urban informatics applied to transport - please add examples/thoughts via the comment form at the bottom of this post.
There’s an extraordinary - and rather British, I must say - kerfuffle going on over the future of the Robin Hood Gardens estate in London at the moment. Essentially, the building, designed by Alison and Peter Smithson (aka The Smithsons) and completed in 1972, is in danger of being pulled down. Margaret Hodge, a UK culture minister, appeared to back the demolition of such buildings, suggesting a digital model could capture the essence of a building in its stead. She said:
“When some concrete monstrosity — sorry, I mean modernist masterpiece — fails to make the cut despite having expert opinion behind it, let’s find a third way. This is the 21st century — a perfect digital image of the building, inside and out, could be retained forever.”
I left London before I got to experience Robin Hood Gardens in the flesh, but I hugely admire the work of the Smithsons, for both their thinking and practice (such as the Economist building in central London, which I have experienced). Along with Cedric Price, Reyner Banham, Archigram and a few others, they provide a historical framework for much of the technologically-enabled and culturally-informed best practice of today.
Robin Hood Gardens, in an area of East London so historically rich you can almost hear the psychogeographers whispering, is essentially a concrete megastructure housing project that’s been in need of such attention for most of its life. Carelessly built and serviced, the design never stood a chance.
Long before the GLC disappeared, TLC for such buildings had disappeared. Recently, a handful of enlightened property developers have discerned the public appreciation of brutalism moving in the right direction, but at glacial speed. Here, demolition plans appear to be moving a little too quickly, nosing well ahead of public opinion and this critical rearguard.
But Building Design is quite right to point out the importance of the building in terms of design history, and also its latent opportunities for re-development (and the iffy process going on around the building). There’s nothing inherently flawed in such structures - and of course Hodge’s line about concrete is extremely revealing, as is the subtle giveaway of a very British insecurity over ‘expertise’. With some of that expertise, allied to willpower and a smarter framework that sees the development as an ongoing bit of work, Robin Hood Gardens can be turned around, and should provide a counterpoint to some of the lazier development blighting that part of London.
“When this was first built it was very modern and people were fighting to get in here. It was very cleverly built,” she says. The way it has upside down maisonettes, you never hear noise from anyone else. And the nice thing is that every room has plenty of light — one wall is all windows and you’re not looking into someone else’s house. I don’t think these people who are proposing thousands of new homes for this site have a clue.”
RHG needs a lot of work but it is an eminently saveable building.
I’m not in favour of preservation for the sake of it. We should demolish buildings that have outlasted their use, and replace with better or more suited to the needs of the time. These new buildings should have a sense of their likely life-span. (Cedric Price was once asked what to do about York Minster, and he replied “flatten it”. Buildings that have outlasted their use should be disposed of “like a worn-out pair of Hush Puppies”, he suggested.)
But RHG is important is in at least three ways, particularly in the context of Britain: an example of British modernism (and local culture needs more working examples of this), ambition and optimism (ditto, described by Peter Cook as “strange English romantic”) and apartment-based, high-density, affordable housing (ditto again, and that passes the CP test, as many cities need good examples of this more than ever.)
Building Design’s campaign has already drawn in an extraordinary list of support, almost a who’s who of contemporary architecture and urbanism. While their simple comments-based petition system is not exactly watertight, it appears to be hugely successful in terms of garnering a groundswell of opinion.
It’s odd to see one’s name alongside that of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, Zaha Hadid, Tony Fretton, Alain de Botton, Patrick Keiller, Benedetta Tagliabue, William Menking, Peter Cook, Iain Borden, William Mitchell, Joel Sanders, Stefano Boeri, Joseph Rykwert, Hugh Pearman, M Christine Boyer, Toyo Ito, Richard Meier, Ricky Burdett, Ted Cullinan, Kenneth Frampton, and hundreds of others. (You can sign the petition here, before March 7th) (See also Richard Rogers, who has written to the culture secretary Andy Burnham, and BD's and The Guardian'sJonathan Glancey.)
Sensing they’re onto a winner in terms of their relevance and influence, and maybe saving the building while they’re at it, Building Design is ramping up their activity, publishing article after article. It’s great to see an architectural magazine trying to make a difference in such concrete (ahem) fashion. Given the issues with existing built fabric in our cities - far more problematic in terms of sustainability than new building stock - you almost wonder whether campaigns such as these are the contemporary equivalent of Arts & Architecture’s pioneering Case Study Home program of an earlier age. I wonder what The Sesquipedalist will make of it?
“On most counts, Robin Hood Gardens should be a prime candidate for listing. It is the only housing built by architects who devoted much of their lives to the discussion of dwelling at various scales. Among architectural thinkers around the world today, these architects are seen as the most important to have worked in Britain in their generation. This is heavy weight to put against counter-claims that the buildings were not built as first designed, and experienced social teething problems owing to the almost universal post-industrial problems of the early 1970s in Britain.”
“Emphasis should be put on the place-making quality of this housing, heroic towards the Blackwell Tunnel approach, embracing towards the nurturing mounds of the green space between the snaking block, where a big sky opens amid the scattered street patterns of the East End. As for resident satisfaction, the present Bangladeshi population seems to have no problem about inhabiting these monumental cliffs, in a way that the Smithsons would surely have recognised as a fulfilment of their intentions.”
“This is no Holly Street or Aylesbury Estate, best destined for the dustbin. The pressure is on, and someone must decide whether or not we are going to look like international idiots who let Robin Hood Gardens fall prey to the bland machinery that calls itself “regeneration”, while effacing the useable legacy of the welfare state.“
The Park Hill flats in Sheffield indicate a partial precedent for Robin Hood Gardens. Also inspired by the Smithsons (and Le Corbusier before them), they were built in 1961, from designs by Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith, on the site of tenements so rough they were known as ‘Little Chicago’ in the ‘30s. Unfortunately, that malaise didn’t seep clear of the ground with the destruction of the tenments, and seems to have carried over into the new development. And particularly when the British lack of facility with modernism - save a few shining examples - led inexorably to poor implementation, careless use of materials, and little ongoing servicing. And thus, the flats quickly gained an unsavoury reputation.
When I were a lad in the Sheffield of the early 1980s (cue Hovis commercial), the Park Hill flats were the stuff of legend. Playgrounds would buzz with lurid stories of what happened over at Park Hill - and the city’s other high-rise social housing, at Kelvin and Hyde Park. Though the story I remember is the rather tamer tale of a TV set being chucked out of the window, from one of the higher storeys, my mind’s eye constructing the slow heavy fall and sudden implosion on concrete. It was as if simply living there was like being in a cold, damp Northern version of Beirut under siege, glancing nervously up at the silvery sky as you scurry between blocks, darting for cover and hoping not to see the silent, graceful arc of a television approaching your head. It wasn’t like that, of course, though it was certainly not pleasant (As with RHG, Ian R. Taylor, in a book I once reviewed, did find firm evidence of ‘community’ there nonetheless.)
I visited once, going to see my first girlfriend’s grandmother, high up in one of the blocks. I don’t remember much detail, but I do remember how distinctly different it felt to the suburban late-1890s semi I was living in over the other side of the city. Not better or worse, just different way of housing, subtly reinforcing the importance of these developments in Victorian cities.
“Park Hill was awarded a Grade 2* listing in 1998. Although an important milestone in the development of Modernist housing theory in post-war Britain, the public incredulity which greeted the award spoke volumes about the success of Park Hill and its 'streets in the sky'.”
Public incredulity knows no bounds of course, particularly when stoked up by the often architecturally short-sighted British media. Ill-considered lists of Britain’s most hated buildings hardly help. (How is Channel 4's Demolition progressive broadcasting, exactly?). In this sense, Building Design’s primitive petition with its untidy collision of expertise and punter, is perhaps far more democratic form than Demolition, even given that it’s preaching to the converted?)
Now, the Park Hill flats are being ‘re-made in Sheffield’ (clever, that) by developers Urban Splash. Europe’s largest listed building - which is an odd honour really - will be re-vamped to provide nearly 1000 apartments close to the city centre, with a third affordable and two-thirds, well, un-affordable presumably. (It’s the presence of the latter that will shift public opinion round on the matter, you watch.) Lee Garland’s photography, if a little sombre, indicates the muscular presence of the building - even more so when you see it in situ, banked back on the hill overlooking the central train station and city centre. It’s a powerful building, and with the care and attention that Urban Splash will lavish on it, it’s easy to imagine the building transformed.
I’ve seen many of Urban Splash’s conversions, particularly their early work amidst Manchester’s former textile warehouses and mills in the mid-’90s, and they’re usually pretty good renovations, leaving aside broader concerns over 'regeneration'. It’s also interesting to see them now taking on brutalism, instead of the rather 'easier' warehouse conversions (which may be desirable now, but were also marked for demolition a generation earlier, apparently beyond redemption.)
Elsewhere in Britain, the Brunswick Centre in London, covered here before, may need more careful curation in its choice of retail and services, but is full of life for the first time in years and really seems to be working. Erno Goldfinger’s Trellick Tower has also gone from “eyesore” to “desirable” in the last decade. The Barbican and South Bank still feature in those ugly contests, but are increasingly being recognised as the gems they are.
Park Hill benefits from proximity to its city centre, a short walk away. As with the Brunswick, Barbican, Trellick and many others, being surrounded by good urban fabric helps. It’s a simple note, but absolutely key, and remains a problem in the case of Robin Hood Gardens. The surrounding context also needs to be addressed for the building to work - social, informational and physical - for this kind of high density living can easily reinforce an urban core, and is less well suited to the being sited on a periphery. East London has enough presence for it to work, and RHG is connected to the centre(s) of London fairly well but it will need careful local orchestration nonetheless.
Yet it can still work there. Wöhnpark Alt-Erlaa is situated outside the centre of Vienna, but with enough inherent density to anchor itself. That’s the promise of the megastructure. It’s on a different, more ambitious scale - it contains no fewer than 5 schulen, 4160 balkone and 7 schwimmbäder, most on the dach - and that, plus the integrated U-bahn, would make all the difference.
It does, of course, appear to be extremely well-built, benefiting from the Mittel-European comfort with aligning modernism and craft that was all but alien to Britain. Most of all, it will be well-run too, with a mix of residents (it's not strictly social housing). Again, the ongoing servicing and maintenance of these buildings - of both built and social fabric - will make the difference.
Back to RHG, and Stephen Bayley weighed in too, noting that “Robin Hood Gardens has been a social calamity” and reiterating that the Smithsons’ building was indeed flawed, but those flaws were embedded by the builders.
“Alas, their architectural reach exceeded the grasp of the builders and Robin Hood Gardens suffered from the start with a singular lack of commodity and firmness …”
He’s rather brutal himself, no pun intended, when apparently suggesting that the building rather suffered from its tenants:
“As Marx asked, does consciousness determine existence or does existence determine consciousness? Or to put it less correctly, do the pigs make the sty or does the sty make the pigs?”
Personally, I suspect the tenants were let down by the implementation of the building, and lack of ongoing service - as well as the post-industrial context Powers refers to - rather than any inherent piggery.
Bayley continues:
“(But) Margaret Hodge's remarks about concrete are ignorant prejudice. Concrete is a fine material, but needs maintenance and care as much as marble and oak need maintenance and care.”
Too right. And so to those comments of Margaret Hodge, and particularly her idea of preserving the building through a digital model. Here, again, is what she said (in Grand Designs magazine, perhaps the most influential British architectural periodical of its day. BD reproduced the article.)
“When some concrete monstrosity — sorry, I mean modernist masterpiece — fails to make the cut despite having expert opinion behind it, let’s find a third way. This is the 21st century — a perfect digital image of the building, inside and out, could be retained forever.”
Leaving aside her value judgement on modernism - which speaks volumes by itself - and the cultural relativism elsewhere in the article that underpins her notion that modern architecture shouldn’t be judged in the same way that 'historical' structures are, it’s this ‘digital image’ comment I find fascinating.
First of all, that particular train of thought could obviously be applied to any building. If I decided, say, that Tower Bridge or all of Poundbury were particular eyesores, would they too be replaced by digital models? Bayley spots this a mile off:
“The minister herself declares that historical purposes may be served by a detailed digital record of the building, an argument which could, I think, with equal force be applied to Uppark, Windsor Castle or Stonehenge.”
You might expect City of Sound to be the kind of place that extolled the virtues of digital modelling, and indeed I do. Building information modeling (BIM) and computer-aided design (CAD) have already revolutionised building, and the immense benefits are yet to be fully realised. Increasingly tidying up the more inefficient and unsustainable practices of construction, once BIM truly extends into four dimensions, generating and broadcasting data about the ongoing use of a building (incl. delivering the instructions for its de-construction and recycling) a more sustainable architecture can be realised. And once the building becomes a platform for other communication, from personal to civic, and if that scales up to a neighbourhood and city level, then we’re really going places. Truly revolutionary.
But I don’t think Hodge is talking about that. I think she imagines some kind of 3D fly-through. Perhaps wearing goggles. But she, and we, should be clear about the limits of models too. In no way do they - and we can even say, will they - approach the experience of a building. Simple as that. A cursory reading of Pallasmaa will make that clear. Few models can deal with the peripheral, never mind the multi-sensory experience of being there, and never mind the multi-layered historical weight of a place or space. Digging further into her Merleau-Ponty isn’t something I imagine Hodge does of an evening, any more than I do, but if she were to, she might reconsider her strategy of replacing buildings with “digital records”.
Experiencing a building in the flesh is so different to constructing and studying a digital model, that it’s frightening that Hodge - a culture minister - could even think to suggest it.
I recall walking into a small, very old cathedral in Milanese side-street, I think, lured by the sound of the choir, and once inside I hear their voices conjoin with the wails of black-clad kneeling women, rocking backwards and forwards near the altar, and sensing the sheer physical presence of that sculpted block of sound hanging in the rafters of the immense vaulted roof over my head, light puncturing the gloom through stained-glass windows and illuminating the sparkling motes of cool dust floating around me, some microscopic elements falling on to my tongue and fusing taste and smell with those being inhaled in my nostrils, the interior rushing away from my body as I begin to stand upright and breathe it all in, having ducked through the small threshold into its cavernous innards, my eyes adjusting to the gloom and slowly revealing the detail in the polished wooden pews that a million hands before mine had touched. All that, and more that I don’t have the words to describe, in a transition from outside to in, over a few seconds … And equivalent sensations might be enjoyed in a grain elevator, a converted power station, a public administration building, a swimming pool, a side street of SoHo at midnight, a small house in Tokyo in the early morning, a square in Melbourne at midday, a summer house in Finland at dusk, or in practically any kind of building. You will have your own examples.
Well, I’m sure a digital model will exist for that church, but I’m not sure I’ll get that same sensation when I click on it.
Let’s quickly put to bed this idea of digital models replacing a building. They can augment a building, and are certainly invaluable in design processes, ongoing running of buildings, education, heritage and a thousand other worthwhile pursuits. But they are not simulacra, for buildings exist.
So well done to Building Design for bringing this sorry bit of politics to the foreground of at least the architectural press, and good luck to them with their campaign. As a fan of the Smithsons’ thinking, and of several of their buildings, I'd like to see this pioneering architecture cared for.
Here’s the bullet-pointed version that cabinet ministers may be more used to:
Park Hill, Brunswick, Trellick, South Bank, and Barbican all show that British modernist buildings that were once though beyond salvation can be turned around.
Other high-density housing megastructures elsewhere indicate they can be done well in the first place, if carefully constructed and serviced.
Concrete is one of the most useful, pleasing and thrilling of materials.
Digital models have immense value, but not as replacements for buildings.
A few recent entries attracted useful responses, and several contemporaneous links opened up new angles on similar subjects. I thought I’d pause briefly to tie a few of these loose ends together.
The “Shinkansen to Melbourne …” story on the potential for a Very High Speed Train (VHST) link up and down the east coast of Australia generated a fair bit of buzz, and some extremely useful comments from readers. Several comments provided detailed reasons why it would be difficult, though none of them convinced that it shouldn’t happen. Have a read and let me know what you think - particularly if you have further insight or experience on large infrastructure projects of this nature. To me, it feels like a case of ‘when not if’, but a concerted effort is clearly required to help people here believe that.
Partly, this will be enabled by moves elsewhere - in that the road and air alternatives are not only being seen as increasingly out-of-step with the times, but shooting themselves in the foot (if indeed a transit system can have a foot to shoot itself in). Road traffic congestion in and around Melbourne is now reaching the breaking points also witnessed in Sydney and Brisbane (with some talk of congestion charging at last, even if not officially. It’s mildly instructive to read this piece from Mayor John So from only 2006, boasting of how ‘the car is welcome in Melbourne’, and then reflect on these subsequent and ensuing woes; and so different in tone to the Gehl proposals for Sydney’s CBD). The train service in Sydney is now being used so heavily that it’s at bursting point - almost necessitating the use of ‘push men’ - despite clear evidence of some years of under-investment. Ditto buses, which desperately need further investment but are still heavily used. This at least indicates that Sydneysiders are not that averse to public transport.
The item also featured briefly in The Architects on Melbourne's Triple R (cheers Rory). It’s just good to hear this being discussed, and most fervently by those who have experienced the likes of the Shinkansen and TGV. To be clear about the piece: I’m not anti-car or anti-plane. Far from it. I find the New Urbanist rhetoric that attempts to expunge the car from the urban memory to be wholly misplaced and not useful, and air travel can refresh the parts other modes of transport simply cannot reach. It’s a massive shift of balance that’s important, towards the likes of a tripartite framework for rail (VHST interstate, loca/regional and then inner-city); augmented by smarter bus networks (see Curitiba, Bogota and beyond), as well as an overlay of quality pedestrian and cycle networks. Ferries, monorails, integrated ticketing systems, the lot. This, augmented by minimised air travel, and car-use that is, primarily, recreational (as Iain Borden has recently suggested). It’s about redesigning the city for public transport, and redesigning public transport for the city (see also Mitchell Joachim) - and that includes rapid links throughout the spaces in-between the cities. Infrastructure is in the news a lot at the moment, not least due to China’s extraordinary expansion, and Infrastructure Australia has recently been announced (chaired, intriguingly by a former BA boss). So watch that VHST network-shaped space, I reckon, not least for an interesting debate.
“The Street as Platform” garnered even more attention, not least because William Gibson and Bruce Sterling both linked to it. (I think I just need RU Sirius and Rudy Rucker now, to complete my Mondo 2000 Panini sticker collection. Younger readers will have no idea what I’m on about.)
With startling serendipity, Adam Greenfield happened to post a piece at almost exactly the same time, detailing his ‘central dogma’, related to his forthcoming book, and discussing many of the same ideas and issues, but from a usefully different angle. Do go and have a read (and his follow-up, which is indeed ‘On the same side of the street’). Molly Wright Steenson has also started a useful blog, which looks like it will frequently cover the work of City of Sound pin-up Cedric Price, and specifically his Generator project. One of her posts reminds us of the fundamental importance of designing the social and operational frameworks around technological systems, a point I was very keen to make in "The Street ..." (see also recent Economist articles on e-government; this sense of redesigning the systems and organisations around technology, when designing a technological system, is a generally sound tenet.)
I’ve had very useful conversations around much of this, so watch this space for more developments on the ideas in “The Street…” and PWTE soon, I hope.
And finally, an update on the Best Urban Places project. James, Russell and I are knee-deep in good, honest production issues for the first issue now - we’ll give a further update on that shortly. In the meantime, the group keeps growing and the photos keep coming. Please do keep them coming in, ideally accompanied by your short introductions, as issue 2 is already being set up nicely.
In my recent review of the book Houses, on SANAA's work, I noted the potentially useful understanding of density in Tokyo and related cities. And that the sprawling cities of America and Australia may have to rebound from their singed edges, folding back in on themselves, to what end? Hardly a shattering insight.
I then chanced across this incredible animation, by Nobuo Takahashi - a Maya Master - which either seems to critique or celebrate - or possibly both - this very particular sensibility for density. I say 'celebrate', due to the loving care that's gone into the renderings of buildings enmeshing and blurring with each other. Though it's probably intended as a critique - it's a post-human city for sure - it's a city that has generated incredible architectural visions nonetheless.
Starting with the kind of ruined, deserted city that the architects of the sub-prime mortgage crisis might soon identify with, the buildings quickly re-erect themselves, as if falling dominos in reverse, unfurling and entwining with the peculiar twisting and rippling of raw code - shifting between staccato and adagio, akin to the movement of Troika's Cloud - ultimately revealing a spiraling tower-like structure, ascending into the sky. What on earth is the back-story here, if any?
(Musashino Plateau refers to a key component of the geological underpinnings of Tokyo, I believe.)
(Another Nobuo work, 'Japan', deploys this idea with a little more restraint, disappointingly, to describe the growth of a Japanese metropolis from its rural origins. Still rather compelling.)
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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