cityofsound

Best Urban Places and Spaces: Update

We've been fantastically pleased with progress on the World's Best Urban Places and Spaces project that Russell Davies and I announced a few weeks ago. We now have almost 200 images in the pool over at Flickr, contributed by 105 of us. It's fascinating to see how people are interpreting the brief and are generally not following the well-trodden paths to the predictable places.

In 'production news' I'm particularly delighted to say that one of my favourite designers, James Goggin of Practise, has agreed to help out with the design of the book(s) of selected places. James is a quite brilliant designer, with a portfolio that includes work for the Tate Modern, Momus, Channel 4, V&A, as well as art directing The Wire magazine, creating the identity for the Docklands Light Railway public arts programme, exhibiting in the recent Forms of Inquiry show at the AA, and check his site for more besides. We're delighted to have him on board.

We've decided to pin a self-imposed deadline of the end of the month (31 January 2008), at which point we'll do the first selection, for the first edition. So please do join the group, submit your photos, and importantly, please describe the place in a few words, indicating why it's a special place.

Reminder: anyone can join and contribute images (if you don't already have a Flickr account, you can sign up for free here. Once you've joined the group, use the 'Send to group' function above your photo.). You can interpret place or space however you like - that's part of the fun - and they really don't have to be world heritage sites in any way. We'll publish the best in a free downloadable pamphlet form, with a more stylish printed offering for sale (though free to successful contributors). And though we do ask for a few words of description, you don't have to be Jane Jacobs any more than you have to be Berenice Abbot.

You can browse through the entire Flickr set right here (requires Flash):

Below, a random selection of some of my current favourite images. There are many more great examples in the group, so do take a look and more importantly, contribute.

Here we have a perfect Roman square (by kjpm), the Pike Place Market in Seattle (by peterme), night in Turin (by Luca Vergano), Singapore's apartment blocks in the trees (by marc0047), a typical Tokyo scene (by Jan Chipchase), a Prague side-street (by jakekrohn), a bus in Amsterdam (by Ti.mo), and a quiet corner of Chengdu (by rogersjones):

World's Best Urban Places and Spaces [Flickr group]
City of Sound: Best Urban Spaces

Best urban spaces

Russell Davies and I have cooked up a little project, inspired by Andrew Hudson-Smith's World's Worst Urban Spaces and Places idea. It didn't take a leap of genius to realise that we - being "mindless optimists", as Russell put it - would be interested in the World's Best Urban Spaces and Places. We asked Andrew if he was OK with that, and he kindly said yes. So that's what we're doing. We're also trying out the same broadly collaborative approach to building our list, which means you get to contribute.

Russell has more info here, but it's very simple: we're using a Flickr group, so you join that and then send appropriate photos of great urban spaces or places to the group. (Once you've joined our group, use the 'Send to group' function above your photo. If you don't have a Flickr account, you can sign up for free.) Once we've a suitably rich set, we'll filter it down, and publish the best in a free downloadable pamphlet form, with a more stylish printed offering for sale (though free to successful contributors).

For the purposes of this project, I'm not overly worried about the knotty definitions of 'place' or 'space' - or even how you choose to interpret 'best' (the academic within will worry over that, but really, you shouldn't). It'll just be interesting to see what emerges. And I'm also aware that a photo-centric project will not allow much in the way of sound or other sensory information, or memory, but it'll do. Yahoo's maps integration is so clunky that it's not going to be worth fully exploiting that layer, at least initially, but we do ask that you use photo's caption area to describe the place a bit. That would be both useful and informative.

The places and spaces don't all have to have the perceived gravitas of a Piazza San Marco or a Greenwich Village, either. It could simply be a bench, a garden, a market, a tram stop, a library ... it's your call.

Enough preamble. We've already built up quite a few contributions - 75 at time of writing - so have a browse and over to you.

World's Best Urban Places and Spaces [Flickr]

Postopolis!: Julia Solis

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

Solis is author of 'Underground New York: The Anatomy of a City' (more here), but today she showed Postopolis! an extraordinary series of photographs from more recent work, which essentially comprise a form of imagining new landscapes amidst images of deterioration and decay.

Entering abandoned buildings with her camera, Solis seeks out spaces and objects which have long since been forgotten or discarded, such that the natural processes of decay have been left to carry out their work unhindered. So we see the process of deterioration that we're familiar with but, as she puts it, "we don't have process that is normally there with that" i.e. presence of rats, or attempts at clearing of debris, looming bulldozers etc. These are entirely abandoned spaces, either forgotten or neglected on purpose.

So the decay makes new landscapes out of old objects. Solis indicates close-ups of objects which are impossible to place, waving her hand over the image to point out the new features, which seem to take the form of a beach setting, with a lake, pebbles, some kind of breakwater. Of course it's none of these things, but as Solis points out, this degradation presents a form of history, which is perhaps more interesting than the natural landscape, given this layer of time built-in to these micro-landscapes.

She shows the "small landscapes that could be found on a bed", in a hospital that's been abandoned for about 15 years. In another room, ceiling tiles have dropped down to form an entirely new terrain, a form of "mountainscape with geological strata, a canyon."

Inside a gigantic warehouse in Detroit, paper falls in on itself, to create small environments. She says you want to "explore the small habitat, imagine who might live there." As she puts it, "I'm really a big fan of waste. To me, it just means history". We see patterns emerging in a discarded white shoe. Elsewhere, the top of a bed reveals possible cave formations. Elsewhere still, a board with a Disney Snow White image slowly fading away is more interesting still, as it contains a story embedded within it. This new darker context "opens it up more to interpretation."

Hospitals have been the focus of her recent work, and Solis shows us some beautiful photographs of deserted hospitals: a New Jersey mental hospital; a children's hospital in Maryland. See her projects with Suzy Poling, 'Fantastic Degradation' and 'Funeral Play' for more. (She notes one of last great hospitals burnt down last night - the Hudson River State Hospital, which had been standing since 1871 (pictures and thread here; news story here). She thinks this is just explorers being careless, rather than arson.)

Solis is asked about the conditions in the buildings she works in. Replying that she sometimes has to wear a respirator, she says that many of buildings have a lot of mould in them, and an unbelievably bad smell. She can get incredibly bad headaches after visiting these buildings. Geoff asks about the desire to garner narrative from these apparently dead spaces, and her background in fiction emerges. Earlier on, she was just looking for interesting spaces where you could play hide and seek. The desire to find new spaces is always there in the urban explorers movement, she says: "Once you've seen one kind of abandoned house, you might not go back. They tend to be very similar." It's clear this runs beyond hide-and-seek, or mere exploring though. She helps run Ars Subterranea: The Society for Creative Preservation in New York, which is far more concerned with "constructing narratives around the city's forgotten relics."

There's a question about other mythological deserted spaces in New York, and a discussion breaks out between Solis and the audience about the famous Beach subway; a block-long pneumatic tube. It's long been disassembled, but some think it's still there. (More here, here and here.) There's also a famous waiting room, built to convince people that the subway was a good idea. Somewhere around Warren and Reed, around Broadway. The waiting room was decked out in velvet curtains. Solis thinks that might still be there. It was used as a shooting gallery for a while, but the building on top burnt down, and something else was rebuiilt on top. That could be still there, she says ...

We've seen an interesting connection emerging this week between those studying dereliction and demolition from very different angles – Solis, Byles, Janz –  and the uninhabited infrastructure photographed by Stanley Greenberg. Julia Solis is somewhere in-between the concerns of Janz and Byles, perhaps – post-inhabitation and pre-demolition – and her photography stretches our perception of landscape, history and the life-span of buildings.

Postopolis!: Jeff Byles

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

Not surprisingly perhaps, despite our attempt at a fairly wide peripheral view, most talks at Postopolis! centred on the creation of buildings, places and landscapes. But in reading from his book 'Rubble: Unearthing the History of Demolition', on the demolition industry, Jeff Byles draws our attention to the other end of buildings life-span.

Sounding somewhat like a younger Bruce Sterling, Byles's delivery is martini-dry, sardonic and witty as he runs through some "demolition high points". There are some great quotes littered throughout his reading, and his book looks well worth picking up.

For instance, the notion that "New York is a sutured city ... (that) like all great cities, it's a tapestry of time." Byles starts with a focus on NYC, searching back through a history of 'wreckers', such as the infamous Jake Volk. Throughout the rapidly reconstructing Lower East Side, Volk was known as "the dandy of devastation", and Byles paints his picture in the "full heroic mode of the 1920s". Volk personified the glorious age of wrecking, and Byles shows some amazing early photographs of the defenestrated city, including that of the remains of the 22-story Gillander building, which was only 12 years old at the time. It indicates the delirious pace at this time. Byles says, "New York was the new Rome, and it was all guilt free"

They're wonderful pictures, if a little laden with nostalgia in this context. His delivery undercuts this slightly, and it's also clear he's fascinated by the people whose job it was to destroy – like "modern day saboteurs".

We are talked through the destruction of the Hudson Department Store in Detroit, Penn Station in New York, and of Hausmann's main "surgical operations". Byles then relates the advance of technology throughout this sector, making demolition easier, safer, and yet somehow less interesting. There's an astonishing picture of Seattle's Kingdome stadium, dynamited in 2000 in "a tempest of dust and debris". There's a love of the process in Byles's voice when he relates the observation of one of the contractors on site, noting that the remains of the building were: "so compact and origami-like, it looks like a pressed flower".

Technology has advanced such that now buildings "seem to disappear into the ground, unseen, mutely." But is this invisibility a good thing? Surely, he asks, "We are going to want to know what it means again to destroy our past."

He then shows some beautiful images from Danny Lyon's 1969 book 'The Destruction of Lower Manhattan'. (I managed to pick up this book in a sale once, and it's one of the most treasured street photography books I have.) In 1966, when Lyon moved downtown, 60 acres of mostly nineteenth-century buildings were slated for demolition, all below Canal Street. Swathes of Lower Manhattan were cleared at this point, to make room for the Twin Towers, a new ramp for the Brooklyn Bridge, the expansion of Pace University, the removal of Washington Market, and so on. The place was torn apart. As Lyon said, "what mattered to me was they were about to be destroyed," not their particular architectural significance.

It's interesting that Byles seems to focus on the nature of demolition itself – that drift towards the invisible removal of buildings, barely passing to reflect on their passing, on their meaning at that time and place. In questions, Geoff recalls the fantastical proposal related in Byles's book: that downtown Detroit should basically be abandoned, and re-opened as a form of urban memorial and theme park. Byles says, "what these places and ruins do is so valuable" and that they can have profound effects on people. Byles also states that he's not a preservationist though; perhaps obviously, given he's written a book about demolition. To illustrate this further, he remembers someone telling him that the original, much-lauded and much-missed Penn Station was 'a terrible place really', and this about a demolition that led the New York Times to pen a "Farewell to Penn Station", saying "We want and deserve tin-can architecture in a tinhorn culture. And we will probably be judged not by the monuments we build but by those we have destroyed." (Genuine nostalgia here.)

I ask him whether he's read Chrisopher Woodward's book In Ruins, about the nature of ruins from an (overly) art history perspective. In that, Woodward's thesis is that artists love ruins, as they show the passing of time on an object, indicate an external process at work and somewhat out of control; whereas architects fear ruins ... as they show the passing of time on an object, indicate an external process at work and somewhat out of control. Byles replies that is surely painful for architects to see their buildings torn down. Yet with more and more adaptive reuse and adventurous preservation efforts, and with architects getting more and more excited working within such situations (working with an existing object), that may change. Echoing a theme of the conference exemplified by some of LOT-EK's projects, making a new program from these existing buildings or spaces, instead of just demolishing them, is an increasingly appealing creative challenge. (However, Owen Hatherley indicated demolition's pervading dominance over adaptive reuse recently, with respect to Kisho Kurokawa's Nakagin Capsule Tower coming down.)

Joseph Grima, Storefront director, makes a great observation at this point, stating that the Storefront gallery we're sitting in was built as a temporary installaton in 1992, by Holl/Acconci, and was intended to be up for no more than a year. (There's a rich history of this, perhaps most famously with the Eiffel Tower.) Joseph then goes on to remind us of the great Cedric Price's maxim that all buildings should come with expiration dates. Indeed, when asked what should be done with York Minster, Cedric said "Tear it down". Joseph notes that this iconoclastic approach continues to some extent in Rem Koolhaas's ideas, that buildings and cities should be continually refreshed, akin to some kind of crop rotation.

But perhaps the most apposite comment on Jeff Byles's talk on demolition was by the building itself. Just as anyone who mentioned the sound of the city had their point underlined by a fire engine screaming past outside, as Byles was talking a good-sized chunk of ceiling plaster dropped down behind him.

Postopolis!: Gianluigi Ricuperati

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

Gianluigi Ricuperati, a journalist and writer, gave us a presentation which was disturbing, enlightening, complex and fascinating in equal measure. Based around his book, 'Fucked Up', it concerned graphic, uncensored imagery of the current Gulf War. Ricuperati was Interested in the effects of war on those who don't make war; and of seeing war through the eyes of those that do make war. It's the story of, in his words, one of the "most effective mimetic presentations of war in recent memory". For Postopolis!, as with Krulwich's talk, it relates to the media's space, and the landscape of a place as altered through representation.

He tells the story of his encounters with the website nowthatsfuckedup.com, and its producer, Christopher Wilson. It was a moderately successful amateur porn site, before Wilson decided to contact servicemen in Iraq and Afghanistan, and ask for images of daily life during wartime, in return for free access to the porn. It's not quite clear why he decided to do this – Wilson never agreed to meet Ricuperati – but Ricuperati feels that it was out of sheer curiosity. That he, like millions of other young men in America, "wanted to desperately know how it feels". At same time, they wouldn't go there. For Ricuperati, "This is the difference on a moral plane ... (saying) I want to know everything about what it's like to be there, but I wouldn't go."

Over the next 6 months, the amount of porn stayed consistent, but it increasingly offered a rising amount of war images, images that covered all shades of what is representable in war. Of what war is. Uncensored, and direct from the front line.

Ricuperati's book was an attempt at "a democratic tool". It sold a couple of thousand copies in Italy, and he feels that the fact it didn't sell many is "totally due to fact that images are beyond limit of what is representable in mainstream media." We see examples of these images, with Joseph Grima translating the captions, sent in by the servicemen, in real time, from the translated Italian. The captions are amongst most interesting things as they present the raw voices of American servicemen, struggling to deal with the reality of their situation. In some senses, you hear their bewilderment – they can barely try to work out what's going on in Iraqi or Afghani minds. Indeed, there is much scorn as to the motives of locals. It sounds hateful. But perhaps they are trying to figure out it, in a way, through their sheer frustration, manufactured hate and ennui. Ricuperati also studied the interesting community visiting the site. He reckons the captions, and responses to them, was also part of some kind of mass query: "What's the story behind the picture?"

The images are of dead bodies torn apart, prisoners humiliated, photos through the sights of guns and rocket launchers, focused on people, places. The landscape of Iraq and Afghanistan is immediately recognisable; what's not familiar is that these images are inhabited, full of civilians or insurgents about to get shot. We're over-familiar with videos shot from the nose cone of missiles, but the targets are always buildings. An abstraction. Here, they're people. We also see the end result. They're fairly shocking, but the more affecting images to me are those through the sights.

What we see here – "digital images daily life in Iraq traded for images of sex life in America" – soon came to the attention of the Pentagon, who investigated Christopher WIlson's servers, but couldn't prosecute. They blocked access to soldiers in Iraq, but soldiers still found access numerous other sources. Eventually, a judge invoked a 19th century decency law, and Wilson was jailed for 2 months and fined $100k. The site got shut down, effectively, so Ricuperati decided to ensure that the material, and the story, was preserved in book form. Christopher Wilson disappeared from public eye, although not before becoming a cause celebré of the anti-war movement, despite being "somewhat totally conservative, someone pro-war, that becomes, by paradox, about freedom of expression". He didn't want to shame the American army at all. Rather, it was kind of a tribute. A totally militaristic act. Ricuperati's greatest regret is that Wilson never accepted a meeting.

He notes that these kind of photographs are totally different to professional war photography. It's war as seen through eyes of those who make war. None of the images have the quality to win a Pullitzer, but for Ricuperati they do show the essential qualities of war, particularly those of "shame and boredom", and the everyday idiocy that results (e.g. Abu Ghraib.) He wanted to create an anthropological dark fable of our time. Everyone who submitted pictures, dead people in pictures, people who commented, even Ricuperati himself, he says – all contributed to something that is really disquieting from a moral plane.

In questions, Ricuperati notes that you can find same pictures in soldiers' wallets from WWI, WWII etc. And it's not exclusive to American soldiers either; soldiers all over the world do this. Ricuperati says, "If I were there, probably I would shoot these pictures. I take pictures of daily life, and the daily life of soldiers is fucked up." So what's different with these pictures is the velocity; the shortened, almost non-existent time in which photographs are made and then displayed.

Ricuperati's talk gave us another angle from which to consider place, landscape, the space of war, and representation through photography and new media. If I say it provided a sober, sharp, disquieting point of difference within Postopolis!, I mean that as a compliment. He's working on a form of revisioning of Arbitare later in the year, so watch that space.

Postopolis!: Stanley Greenberg

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

Stanley Greenberg is a photographer of architecture, but from very different angles. Geoff's post at BLDBBLOG gives a good background to Greenberg's work, which has focused on the infrastructure of building and the city, such as Invisible New York: The Hidden Infastructure of the City and Waterworks: A Photographic Journey Through New York's Hidden Water System.

Greenberg tried to investigate and photograph the city's water system to the point where he was pretty much considered a terrorist threat! He knew more about it than the city did. He managed to finish the project in Spring 2001, which he points out was pretty lucky, as it would be difficult to get to those places now, post 9/11. He showed some amazing pictures of the subterranean New York, including some unbelievable photos of the valve chamber, about 300 feet deep.

He's recently been working on photography of buildings by 'starchitects' – Holl, Hadid, Gehry, Libeskind, Foster etc. Initially, Stephen Holl got in touch, so he got to photograph the construction of MIT Simmons Hall. They look remarkably different to the final structure, providing very beautiful photos of the skeletons of buildings, which can't be perceived with the naked eye. They almost look like Lebbeus Woods structures, particularly the free-flowing forms of buildings like the Stata Center at MIT and Zaha Hadid's Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinatti. (He hasn't actually been to any of Hadid's completed buildings.)

(Aside: Greenberg noted that there were different ways of pouring concrete in different cities i.e. different from the MIT buildings in Cambridge, Mass. to buildings in New York.)

None of the photographs were commissioned by the architects. The kinds of pictures that the architects wanted was completely different to the ones Greenberg wanted to take.

Hearst Tower on 57th St, by Foster + Partners. Difficult shoot as the firm didn't really want him on site. Only had the engineers' lunch break to take pictures. Of course, the resulting picture hangs in the Hearst HQ.

He usually does a fair amount of homework, looking at plans beforehand, and also architect's previous work. Also has a safety briefing, which is a useful way of casing the building.

In his most recent work, he's moved from how buildings and cities work to, as he puts it, "how the universe works", by photographing research into neutrinos and other sub-atmoic particles. This means working with massive structures. As he points out, "the smaller the particle we're looking for, the larger the apparatus looking for it". Some photos are of the 20-mile in radius CERN research lab, which "if it's successful, it'll be the biggest science experiment ever, and if it's not successful, it'll be the biggest earthwork ever." Also the Stanford Linear Accelerator. He points out that physicists are much easier to work with than his previous subjects.

He showed some electron accelerators - clearly from the 1960s. They had a Brussels Atomium feel to them. Geoff and I wondered whether there were aesthetic choices in the devices. Greenberg points out that they were essentially made by engineers, and that probably the inherent qualities of the materials and components would've defined the look primarily. (Just as aesthetics of an age are defined by inherent properties of materials, components, as much as purely aesthetic choices.)

While on aesthetics, Greenberg notes that particle physicists have been worried that the cosmic physicists are getting all the press at the moment. So the fact that all the new kit at CERN is rendered in bright colours may not be entirely accidental.

Greenberg finished with some quite beautiful pictures taken by the equipment, of inside "the bubble chamber", detecting sub-atomic particles. I guess there's a relationship between trying to show the internal structure of buildings – as per the skeletons of Simmons Hall – and the internal structures of material itself.

It's interesting that there isn't much information in the pictures to denote scale, and I asked about this. He suggests ttht there are some hints to convey scale in there, but it's almost subconscious now as to how and when they go in. He likes the fact that not having these obvious references to scale makes you work more - draws you into the picture; doesn't give you a foothold. I also find it a nice nod to some aspect of the original notion of 'the sublime' i.e. something almost fearfully beyond human comprehension in terms of scale.

Greenberg's an engaging speaker about his distinctive and important photography. Another great talk. The video of Stanley Greenberg's presentation is here.

Stanley Greenberg's website

(Aside: I bump into Stanley's friend Evan Eisenberg after the talk, who had introduced himself to me after I'd mentioned his amazing book 'The Recording Angel', and drawn from it here.)

Sublime visions

I can't shift these images from my mind. Two particular sets of recently-linked-to photographs which, although very different, seem connected in some way. They are both bystanders to an entwining of natural processes and human engineering. And both sets of images are sublime, but in the original fearful, awe-inspiring sense of the word.

Barcelona & Fotografia exhibition, Barcelona

Possibly the best way to spend €1.50 in Europe at the moment (discuss!) would be to go to the 'Barcelona & Fotografia' exhibition at the Museu D'Historia de la Ciutat in Barcelona.

It's a supreme collection of photography pertaining to Barcelona, and perhaps the best exploration of the relationship between photography and the city I've ever seen.

More photos of Shanghai by Paul Schütze

A few more photos of Shanghai from Paul Schütze [more here]. Click these crops for full image:

Some photos of Shanghai by Paul Schütze

My friend Paul Schütze has just returned from a quick trip to Shanghai and was suitably amazed. He sent me a few photos and I thought I'd share them with you. These will be the tip of the iceberg's-worth of photos Paul no doubt took, but are fairly extraordinary. The email containing the last one had the subject line "Pollution? What pollution?". Click on these hasty crops to get the full images.