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. 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.)
The Japanese architectural firm SANAA rightly have the adulation of the world's press bestowed upon them. After a steady, sure ascendancy over the last decade or so, they've now joined the big league with their recent New Museum of Modern Art on New York's Bowery.
However, this excellent book by the Barcelona/New York-based publisher Actar concentrates on what might actually be a more important aspect of their portfolio - houses. For as good as the New Museum appears to be - I haven't seen it, but it is by all accounts a great bit of building - we should be carefully questioning the value of innovation in museum or gallery design.
It's not that there aren't fine, adventurous buildings emerging that take advantage of those cities chasing the sometimes elusive Guggenheim effect. (cf. Steven Holl's Block Building for the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City.) And the civic aspects of galleries and museums are indeed vital and valuable for cities. But when this largely well-understood design problem gets solved anew, the attention it gets is slightly out of proportion.
For housing will always be a more valuable design problem. And from the perspective of Japanese architecture, and Japanese culture, it's perhaps the pivotal built form. Indeed, Kristine Guzmán claims here that "Japan's sociological unit is the home, not the family." Further, Japanese cities, often defined by density, provide a testbed for exploring ideas of habitation that should become increasingly relevant elsewhere. Particularly in those American and Australian cities that need to unlock their muscle memory for density, their sprawling perimeter eventually withdrawing from recently singed edges, folding in on themselves such that more people simply have to inhabit less space.
So these explorations in discreet, civil density are immensely valuable. To be clear, the buildings themselves won't translate simply to other cities, as the conditions are quite distinct. Urban Japan's societal norms and cultural values are still utterly unique. Several of the insightful essays here explore exactly what those values and conditions might be, all with varying degrees of success in terms of conveying them for an English-speaking audience. Some things will always be lost in translation, it would seem, and attempting to pin down Sejima and Nishizawa's work in one book of many photographs, one interview and three essays is like trying to nail jelly to a wall. Moreover, if one could distill the essence of their work, you couldn't simply relocate it in another city. It's so different, so distinct. Equally, we shouldn't kid ourselves that this is the kind of affordable housing that many of our cities so badly need. These are mainly works for individual clients (even if SANAA explore ideas of communities of little dwellings within that, as with the Moriyama House, and their materials are often inexpensive.)
And yet, this book is about work of the highest build quality, incredibly interesting engineering and architectural approaches that might translate, and some overriding concerns and concepts that should be of value almost everywhere. Most of all, a focus on houses, and on houses that reinforce a civic sense of connection with the surrounding environment and the enveloping informational context, while reinforcing discretion, privacy, intimacy and flexibility, and often in a high density context of small plots and tight spaces. As such, it's a rejoinder to the kind of architectural journalism that focuses on the iconic free-standing residence. (Exhibit A: a collection of a certain kind of Australian architecture, featured in A+U, ironically, a Japanese publication. This depicts "the isolated object in the infinite landscape" as Philip Goad has it. Here, SANAA's houses are often connected objects in a very finite space indeed.)
This balance between the personal and the civic, in the city, is explored in almost every single project here (there are a few exceptions). The projects are grouped into unfinished and finished, with seven of the former and five of the latter, and are drawn from an exhibition at Museo de Art Contemporáneo de Castilla y León. Each project is presented in drawings, photographs and models, with only a small paragraph describing each. As such, you're left somewhat adrift on the specifics of the projects. Yet, the projects are so obviously fascinating that this rather dry presentation inevitably shifts the reader into contemplative mode, meaning a far richer engagement with the work. I usually prefer more exposition rather than less, but on this occasion the blankness suits.
Blankness, or ideas of immateriality, translucency, weightlessness, and conjuring an innate simplicity are often to the fore in the exposition the book does offer up, in three contrasting essays by Guzmán, Luis Fernández-Galiano and Yuko Hasegawa. Novelist Haruki Murakami is even suggested as a totem in Fernández-Galiano's smart attempt to find some reference points for SANAA's work.
"His exploration of contemporary values through a hypnotic, jovial and surreal cocktail of lyrical levity, atmospheric sensuality and attention to material detail are perhaps a better parallel to SANAA's architecture."
Hasegawa's piece, 'Radical Practices in constructing Relationships', situates these houses in the context of SANAA's other work for museums and cultural centres, perhaps as you might expect from the curator of the Museum for Contemporary Art in Tokyo. It's useful, but rather side-steps the subject of this book.
Kristine Guzmán's is the most useful essay, moving easily through the multiple notions of 'Japan-ness' (after Arata Isozaki) that SANAA play with. She places Sejima and Nishizawa's work after that of Kenzo Tange and Tadao Ando, in terms of "integrating the aesthetic values of traditional Japanese architecture within a modern architecture." Guzmán suggests this may be "unconscious", though there's a revealing passage in the interview with Agustin Pérez Rubio that opens the book:
Nishizawa: "We are very much influenced by Japanese architecture. We have just never tried to quote directly from the Japanese past." Sejima: "We cannot avoid drawing some influences from Japanese tradition." Nishizawa: "It is not an option we can take."
Guzmán's essay continues to explore the importance of the house, of transparency, harmony with nature, shifting spatial function over time, transcendence, emptiness, and the values that SANAA's work stands for. It's fascinating.
In following the work, all three essays lead the reader back to the front of the book, to want to go through the projects again. The aforementioned interview is also relevant, allowing the architects themselves to frame what follows.
The setting for the interview is as revealing as anything, however. It takes place at a table in the studio shared by three practices, which is later used for eating at, and had previously been used for a client meeting, and before that, model-making. This multi-functional use of space is one of the more distinctive features of the projects here. Again, in describing a domestic architecture that enables the program to shift through different spaces over time, SANAA describe the useful 21st century urban home, a place where working and living co-exist, where private and public twist around each other, where informational media potentially pervades every space, yet where there is still room for shielded reflection and a relationship with nature.
(This last aspect is an ever-present theme in these projects, with large white spaces dotted with splashes of pot plants and flowers. There's little reference of this in the texts, but it's clearly a preoccupation of SANAA's. Their 'House in a Plum Grove' is the most overt attempt to synthesise the edifice with its environment, but almost all these spaces are also urban gardens. It's wonderful.)
Elsewhere, gardens become living rooms become offices become playrooms become basketball courts. Sejima and Nishizawa are working with a contemporary urban culture here, but also aware of the informational qualities of that culture - in that a space's function is now also heavily influenced by the personal technology within it. As Guzmán puts it:
"The link between the idea of information culture and certain notion of flexibility is explained in the book Blurring Architecture by Toyo Ito, where he reflects on space in 21st century architecture based on the Modern Movement, and says that an architecture that serves as a bridge between a biological and electronic body must have "a floating nature that allows for changes over time (...) because in today's society it is absolutely essential to do away with borders based on simplified functions and establish a relationship of overlapping spaces."
This is why SANAA are quite so interesting. In drawing from civic architecture and public space - parks, libraries, museums - they imbue domestic spaces with informality, intermediate spaces, chance spaces, private spaces that shift easily to public and back again, the freedom to occupy a space with an unintended function - in a sense, providing a platform for multiple behaviours and histories. SANAA's projects become a series of metaphors for understanding how informational spaces and physical spaces are beginning to entwine.
Further, in doing this mostly in the tightest of urban contexts - their 'Small House' here has a site area of 60m²; a typical Australian plot has shifted from a rationed 134m² just after WWII to 264m² today, with 600m² not unheard of - SANAA give us an optimistic vision for high-density urban living that is innately civic. When viewed through that lens, this collection could provide a pattern book for concepts, to be interrogated by architects, planners and anyone else who cares about the modern city. The ideas need translating, and some certainly won't take elsewhere - just as this text occasionally feels a little slippery, presumably translated from Spanish and Japanese into English. But that's a useful lesson too.
It's not at all perfect, the Japanese city, but there is still much to draw from it. Sir Peter Cook spoke warmly about the Japanese take on urbanism in a recent interview - he described it as "naughty thinking". We could well use a global outbreak of this naughty urbanism.
A further point to draw from this work is that of craft. SANAA can achieve such lightness in their architecture only through manufacturing of the highest build quality. The sense of weightlessness of 'House in Plum Grove' comes from interior walls of structural steel plates that are only 10mm thick, and exterior walls that only 50mm thick. This devotion to detail is also a useful tenet to reinforce worldwide. It's why it is encouraging to see SANAA's museum project apparently succeed in New York, after many Japanese architects had found American contractors incapable of their craft.
So as SANAA and their projects inexorably grow in size, their skill with at the domestic scale should be especially lauded. That's why this book is actually more important than the slew of recent articles on the Bowery. It does an excellent job of documenting SANAA's work on houses, up to late 2006, and by respectfully leaving room for interpretation, it offers up numerous prompts for how functional and informational flexibility and density might be enabled through their sheer craft with material, space and program.
The book's photographs shifts in and out of focus, as if aping these ideas of blurring and graduating transparency (also sometimes due to being shots of models). Some photographs often feel flatter than 2D, somehow. This doesn't always add value, but essentially the projects are presented extremely well, often imaginatively framed, sometimes captured in the grainy cinéma-vérité of DV screengrabs, and usefully accompanied by plans and sketches.
Yet as Hasegawa, perhaps un-helpfully given the context, notes in his closing essay: "SANAA's architecture has many elements that are impossible to understand unless one actually 'experiences' it. In contrast with modern architecture, SANAA has many aspects that cannot be revealed in 'representative' media such as plans, models, and photographs." I've only 'experienced' one SANAA building - the breathtakingly graceful Dior store on Omotesando, Tokyo - and can thus extrapolate a little from my understanding of that.
But only a little. And though Hasegawa is essentially correct that representation cannot begin to approach the phenomenological depth of experience that actually being there provides, the book is still ultimately composed of 'just' these "plans, models and photographs".
Certainly this key point - of documenting how the architecture enables change, multiple functions over time, and absorbs and responds to information flow - is rarely attempted, save for a few diagrams from the practice. It'd be interesting to hear more about how Sejima and Nishizawa might articulate these ideas, other than through their architecture. How might one represent that blurring, overlapping or "floating nature", as Toyo Ito has it. Information graphics, diagrams, automatic documentation? Ongoing Building Informational Modelling, forming a form of post-occupancy evaluation perhaps? Or film, even? Perhaps SANAA's architecture is too subtle to be so crudely pinned down. Either way, aside from the following images, the book rarely attempts it.
The design of the book is also drawn towards a purity of blankness, a floating abstract simplicity that sets the text gracefully in black sans- amidst white space. Photographs are generally full-bleed, with the most representative - of the book and the work itself - those of streetscapes or rooftops pinned down to the bottom of the book by the empty weight of the white Tokyo sky.
"A pretty sky just gets me wound up, and my head starts pounding. The city doesn't need a sky."
The lack of ornament in that sky is mirrored in SANAA's houses below, as well as this book. Everywhere, the ancient Eastern notion of "omnipresent emptiness" that Guzmán refers to.
And so, room for people emerges.
Houses: Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa. SANAA [Amazon US or UK]
A real-time dashboard for buildings, neighbourhoods, and the city, focused on conveying the energy flow in and out of spaces, centred around the behaviour of individuals and groups within buildings.
A form of 'BIM 2.0' that gives users of buildings both the real-time and longitudinal information they need to change their behaviour and thus use buildings, and energy, more effectively. An ongoing post-occupancy evaluation for the building, the neighbourhood and the city.
A software service layer for connecting things together within and across buildings.
As information increasingly becomes thought of a material within building, it makes sense to consider it holistically as part of the built fabric, as glass, steel, ETFE etc.
INTRODUCTION
This is a somewhat overdue write-up of my talk at Interesting South, November 2007. For expediency, you could watch the video of the presentation. (It's 10 minutes long and punctuated at the end by the intro to 'These boots are made for walkin''). This is the extended write-up with notes, references and slides.
Caveat: I've often seen this site as essentially sharing my sketchbook, so please bear in mind that what follows is no more than a sketch, and series of notes, rather than any attempt to envision a fully-formed product. Any attempt at the latter would entail these sketches being tested by a more coherent design and research process. For now, this is simply a sketch, a kind of un-built architecture (for it is architecture, of a sort), and a simple, not necessarily innovative, idea drawn up for a swift 10-minute presentation at a highly multi-disciplinary event. Please take it in that spirit. I'd like to see something like this realised as a product on the market, which is part of my rationale for publishing here. In other words, feel free to make this - or some version of this - a reality yourself. If you find that the central idea doesn't ring true, I've written in such a way that you may still find some of the references or thoughts useful.
Essentially, the idea is for a system that makes previously invisible aspects of people's behaviour visible, in order to help change individual and collective behaviour. In this case, the primary drive is towards leading a more sustainable personal life, encouraging less consumption and more contribution, also taking into account the context of your behaviour in wider neighbourhood and city. By tracking your energy and resource usage, and playing this off against possible contributions made through generating energy or resource, systems are able to build simple aggregated profiles for these aspects of a person's or household's behaviour. Using popular techniques drawn from social software, these profiles provide users with historical trends for their behaviour, and allow the profiles to be compared, contrasted and recombined with those of others. By opening up these data feeds through APIs, within appropriate ethical and privacy frameworks, unforeseen applications of this information can emerge, even enabling the 'gaming' of consumption and contribution profiles, encouraging civic and sustainable behaviour through competition. By conveying this information through multi-sensory feedback and persuasive visualisation distributed across discreet domestic interfaces, the effects of a person's behaviour can thus be discerned in the everyday.
It's a kind of real-time, responsive, itemised bill for all the different kinds of primary resource usage (electricity, gas, water, transport etc.) in your life, which also takes into account the contributions you make. A sustainable lifestyle, leaving aside the thorny definition of such a thing, could at least become a little bit more tangible.
As it concerns this somewhat over-used word 'sustainability', I wanted to start the talk with the following image of the Sydney Morning Herald to indicate that I was less interested in apocalyptic headlines or hectoring people into submission, and more interested in giving people tools and information to encourage positive behaviour, and to explore ways of taking personal control of a more sustainable way of living (More on 'Apocalypse Sydney' here).
"The house is cold, someone keeps turning the lights off, and the greywater toilet is blocked again. As a way of life, sustainabilty often sounds grim. The media don't help: they tell us we have to consume our way to redemption. The shopping pages are filled with hideous hessian bags; and ads that used to be placed by double-glazing cowboys now feature wind turbines, and solar roofs. Adding mental discomfort to the mix, politicians scold our bad behaviour as if we were children dropping litter. And preachy environmentalists expect us to feel guilty when we fail to embrace their hair-shirted future with joy."
So this is an idea to make sustainability something personal, intimate, meaningful and orientated towards positive contributions, as well as connecting the individual's actions to the wider urban context.
I thought the following was an interesting observation by director Ang Lee (from the January 2008 edition of Sight & Sound magazine). Interesting in relation to the idea of an almost synaesthetic approach to visual representation via information-dense icons &c.:
Nick James: There's a beautiful little book by Donald Richie that explains Japanese aesthetics. I wish there was an equivalent for the Chinese.
Ang Lee: There's a huge difference between people who use phonetics for language transcription and those who use characters, as in China. The Chinese system is more like movies, like montage, like drawing with sight and sound. The shape itself means something, so when you see the word it resonates in your head. When the Chinese see Lust, Caution in characters with the comma in between it has a shocking vibe.
(That issue of Sight & Sound also features an excellent essay on the hyper-specific genre of 1930s British movies set on foreign trains: "For The Lady Vanishes, Alfred Hitchcock invented a quirkily archetypal version of the English abroad with a steam train, light banter, cricket obsessives, tweedy spies and phallic symbols", by Graham Fuller. I note also that two noir classics of a decade or so later, Night and the City and Cry of the City, have been properly released on DVD by the BFI, though see also the Criterion edition of Night and the City)
Repeating my hasty sketch, intended to indicate sounds bouncing through a space ('wavetracing') after Arup's SoundLab, it's easy to mentally reconfigure that to indicate wind - although of course the engineering actually being carried out here is far more precise, and wind has quite different characteristics to sound.
The engineering on the Southwark project is by Brian Dunlop Associates and Gas Dynamics. Dunlop says:
"There’s plenty of data for photovoltaic performance in urban locations but very little regarding urban wind power. From a planning point of view, we want to put to bed fears over noise and vibration, and so far the results have proved positive." Dunlop does add, though, that there is an enormous amount of data to be analysed. “The equipment used collects information every second using sophisticated software created by Gas Dynamics,” he says. "At the moment South Bank University is analysing data gathered from the first three months."
Arup's engineers are also modelling the way wind moves through open urban spaces, which sounds impossibly complex. Arup's Rupert Blackstone:
"Modelling urban wind movement is a real challenge. It’s almost impossible to be predictive because every environment has local characteristics that affect air flow. The surface roughness — meaning the variation in height of a neighbourhood’s buildings — has a huge influence on the wind resource available. There’s really no point in extrapolating from meteorological data — you have to be location-specific in your analysis.”
Wind turbines, as with other renewable energy sources, are only likely to increase in number throughout urban space, and personally I'm all for them. I've never quite understood arguments against their introduction - a few messy bird-kills here and there aside - and have personally almost always found them aesthetically appealing. I recall Justin Good's piece for Design Observer, when he almost systematically 'proved', in that way philosophy doctorates do, that "wind farms are objectively beautiful."
However, the article was predicated on the most likely current siting for wind farms - rural environments - and so hinged on the suggestion that people found wind farms unappealing as they resembled modernist sculptures, and so "don’t want the ideology of high modernism disrupting the very different order of the natural world."
In urban environments, smaller vertical axis wind turbines can look like modernist sculptures and all the better for it, perhaps more universally at ease in this setting. With some of the newer wind turbines on the market, they're not a million miles away from the Alexander Calder or Barbara Hepworth sculptures that we see at the Fundaçion Joan Miro or pinned to the side of John Lewis in Oxford Street.
This is perhaps due to their unwieldy size thus far but also, I think, a cultural association between renewable energy and 'the great outdoors', which is entirely false and actually problematic. As with water tanks there's an irony that most renewable energy products appear to be designed for properties in rural settings or at best on the fringes of urban sprawl. Whereas, of course, most people live in cities, in areas that are the highest contributors to greenhouse pollution. I'd like to see small elegant turbines intended for domestic use in tighter urban context.
That's why it's so interesting to see the experiments at Elephant & Castle. As Monocle reported last month, on some days Denmark achieves all its electricity demands via wind power - with an average of 20 percent. The blades developed by leading Danish company LM Glasfiber are 61.5m long, travel at around 300km/h and pull 9Gs. Not exactly what you want atop your house. But the Windspire, Helix, and particularly the Quiet Revolution, designed for small scale wind generation in cities, are developments that just might. Indeed, Quiet Revolution is almost designed to take advantage of the turbulence found in urban settings - or at least not be impaired by it.
Their projects include a QR5 to be mounted on top of a listed building on Southwark Bridge Road; planning permission granted, installation in "late 2007".
See also these seven turbines planned for the top of a development in Croydon. (Has all of south London been turned over to a giant test-bed for wind power or what? Wouldn't be a bad thing.)
Quiet Revolution's display turbines are also interesting, comprising LEDs embedded in the blades, combining renewable energy with informational possibilities - hopefully carried a little further than simple branding (an obvious display would be amount of energy contributed, in the spirit of the presentation I gave last week at Interesting South). I'd also love to know what they sound like. I suspect, in the spirit of positive soundscapes, that they would sound fantastic, actually. Should it necessarily be a quiet revolution?
We look forward to hearing more about these projects, and their impact on surrounding neighbourhoods, and also to a further refinement of their design, derived both from the sculptural lineage noted above and the huge variety in urban conditions found worldwide (wind may be the same force everywhere, but the spatial characteristics, cultural capital and related environmental conditions certainly aren't. Will we see cities such as Chicago and Wellington increasingly talking up their windiness?)
Do add a comment if you know of similar projects (perhaps even, dare I suggest it, outside of south London).
Finally, returning to the first point, modelling wind through these spaces is just one of the numerous fascinating developments around urban modelling - extending increasingly sensor-based models of buildings, generated and maintained throughout the lifecycle of a building and known in the trade as building information modelling (BIM), up to the scale of cities, aka city information modelling (CIM). So as well as developmental tools, speculating as to potential environmental behaviour of buildings and spaces, some of these systems could be built as real-time feedback loops, indicating the behaviour of urban spaces in real-time. It's a burgeoning loosely-defined field at the moment, running from indices of air pollution, water pollution or informational behaviour through to these live 'field recordings' of wind or sound. As the Building Design article suggests, "an enormous amount of data" can emerge from recording the dynamics of urban wind power, but our ability to now process this data - and then make sense of it through information design - has given us new possibilities for assessing the behaviour of urban environments.
It's also not without problems, as models are just models and not reality, and as such are limited in their expression of territory and have various patterns of power or ideology coded within them - a great editorial by Flavio Albanese in Domus #908 made a similar point about maps, recently - but when used imaginatively and with well-informed civic value in mind, we begin to have ever-more useful tools that may enable us to sculpt wind, sound and other elemental forces for the benefit of cities and citizens.
"The Melody Road will allow a car passing above it to play a simple tune, which is made audible by ridges on the road’s surface. The pitch of the note created is increased by increasing the frequency of the ridges, and the opposite is also true."
It may be intended to be a traffic calming measure - the video below is a little unclear on whether the resulting Sunn O)))-meets-gaguku drone is calming or entertaining - but what happens when people start improvising, veering out into the other lane to skip certain notes? Or zipping back and forth over one particular note? Total mayhem, that's what; burning cars dotting the side of the road, strangely beautiful discordant whines drifting through the smoky haze. You mark my words.
While the kind of sound artists I mentioned previously might pause briefly to consider another possibility for generating 'positive soundscapes', I doubt the resolution of tyre-on-grooved tarmac is quite high enough for any truly engaging noise.
Joanne Jakovich kindly invited me to be a "guest critic" at the UTS Architecture degree final presentations for the 2nd year design studios, alongside a few other professionals from, as she put it, "the real world". And so yesterday, representing the Rest of the World, myself and few architects - we were all, minus one, dressed in black as per the cliché, preposterously - had a hugely enjoyable afternoon sitting through presentations great and not-so-great from students on the course, and giving what we hope was useful feedback. Even the not-so-great presentations were chock full of ingenious solutions or careful renderings, and it was immensely rewarding to be in the lively, scruffy environment of a school fizzing with ideas.
In Jo's words: "The students have been designing an intensive, multi-program architecture for a tiny alleyway space in the back of Chinatown using methods of information mapping (interim image above)."
It's a tiny space; no more than a sliver in the dense urban fabric of Chinatown, and so a great problem to work with.
And there were some cracking ideas in response, running the gamut from APEC-esque domineering security structures to karaoke bars/meditation centres; each student presented on boards and with models (no film, interactive or other screen-based work, sadly, although it's also good to see drawing and modelling reinforced); the starting point of mapping the space (in terms of patterns of pedestrian movement, clothing, chewing gum or wireless networks) provided much thought and discussion for your correspondent, as did the sense that the software students use is intrinsically determining some of the form and representation (fractured, Libeskind-like, multi-faceted forms abound, although wedged into this tiny space, that may well be entirely appropriate.)
Many thanks to Jo and the students for a stimulating session. Hopefully, more to follow.
JG Ballard: Kingdom Come Ballard running on only one or two engines, but still chock full of wonderful ideas and observations, and with a few lines that will resonate forever. Curiously full of holes (no CCTV on the original crime?) but as a depiction of an England rotten to the core, timely and useful. (****)
Peter Jones: Ove Arup: Masterbuilder of the Twentieth Century Slightly haphazard biography of one of the great designers and leaders of the 20thC. The parts on building, design, organisation, context and practice are fascinating, and the portrait of Ove Arup himself is detailed and heartfelt. Some personal aspects are a little uneven and the writing is curiously disjointed in structure but it's a thoroughly good read overall, on one of the great thinkers and practitioners in architecture and engineering. (****)
Nevil Shute: On the Beach Absolutely fantastic read, if as thoroughly downbeat as a story about the end of the human race ought to be. Set in an Melbourne post-armageddon, as the last few people on earth live out their last months, it's a fascinating portrait of its time (1957) and Australia. (*****)
Elizabeth Farrelly: Blubberland: The Dangers of Happiness Architecture, urbanism, desire, happiness, beauty, obesity, greed, depression etc. A potent mix. A bit uneven, and journalistic in essence (which jars in this form) but good on Australia's architecture in particular, and with a beguiling speculative last chapter. (****)
Robert Hughes: Things I Didn't Know: A Memoir Hughes is amongst the finest cultural critics and historians, and here focused on the first part of his own history and culture. So we get rich portraits of Australia, WW I and Vietnam, Italy, London, the 60s, art, food, sex, model aeroplanes &c as well as Mr. Hughes. Supreme writing applied to fascinating subject matter. (*****)
W.G. Sebald: The Rings of Saturn Jonathan Raban said "The finest book of long-distance mental travel that I've ever read" and I'm inclined to agree. A quietly majestic book, with peerless clear, evocative prose, drawn from immensely erudite research, and interspersed with simple ghostly photography. (*****)
That's why it's so interesting to see the experiments at Elephant & Castle. As 
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