cityofsound

Postopolis!: Eric Rodenbeck, Stamen

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.

In which Eric Rodenbeck returns to New York, with a little bit of history to clear up. He starts by revealing how he got kicked out of Cooper Union a few years ago, saying he just couldn't make those "grand architectural gestures" that seemed to be part of the deal. (Laura Kurgan, who follows later, assures him he wouldn't get thrown out of any architecture school these days.) Not that it matters either way, as Rodenbeck is a founder of Stamen, one of the more interesting new media companies around. Based in San Francisco, Stamen work with flows of data, ideally massive amounts of data in real-time. They introduce a mapping and information design sensibility to this, and construct meaning from these flows.

Central to their approach is their belief that, as Rodenbeck puts it, "data visualisation is a medium - not a technology". That is, it has conventions, gestures, constraints, techniques, even jokes. Rodenbeck runs through a few of these, including the percentage of pie chart that resembles Pacman. By this point, he's warming to his theme, an irrepressible New Yorker unfurling words and concepts as if he were his own real-time data flow. Fortunately, he assembles meaning from himself in real-time too.

So their medium is data; live, fast and deep data. Rodenbeck runs through a few early projects, such as Mappr, in which they deconstruct the Flickr photo-sharing site along an axis of location. Around 40% of the tags describing photos on Flickr are location-based, so it's a rich set. They realise that a visualisation of place can effectively draw itself, if they place photos onto a map based on the tag description. Sure enough Route 66 emerges, based on photos tagged 'Route 66'. There are a few anomalies but these are interesting in themselves. He also runs us quickly through their work with Digg Labs, which is wonderfully visually and also exposes the horror of most content at Digg, as well as their interesting Oakland crime maps [technical note here].

A favourite project of mine is Cabspotting, derived vast amounts of GPS data from cabs in San Francisco. The tracking system knew where the cabs were, whether they'd picked up and dropped off, and the time inbetween these events. Thus, it could draw a map of San Francisco, without having a map of San Francisco to reference. Rodenbeck shows a movie of 4 hours of taxi activity, with white lines indicating high speed traffic – principally on the airport run and over the bridges – and a downtown full of red lines, indicating slower progress and more pickups. The topography of the city emerges from the data beautifully. At one point, Rodenbeck seems to merge with the data himself here.

As the movie speeds up, Rodenbeck notes that it almost has "a capillery action"; that the city had same kind of mechanisms in it that, say, a heart would. This is fascinating, and links to the numerous analogies of the city as body (Ackroyd's London etc.). But it really just gives a sense of the malleability of this medium; that you can choose to map it in different ways, for different effect.

Rodenbeck also suggests that "broken isn't always bad", in terms of this data. As with the Route 66 anomalies previously, the Bay Bridge from SF to Oakland tells an interesting story based on erroneous data. The bridge is on two decks, which most conventional maps wouldn't tell you. However, as GPS receivers work less well on the lower deck, the map indicates fainter lines there; both decks of the bridge are visible. To Rodenbeck, these "seams of data", combined with places where data was missing, can be mined to show you more of the real, physical world than a conventional map would.

Finally, we see Stamen's latest project, with the real estate company Trulia – Trulia Hindsight [more here]. This quite wonderful visualisation had only been launched a few days before, so it was great to see Rodenbeck demonstrate it. It's based on the data gold mine of the real-estate company's vast amount of data from all properties sales in the United States, mapped to location and over time back to the early 20th century.

Again, with the biological metaphors. We look at San Francisco and Las Vegas growing over time – the latter rapidly – and Rodenbeck notes the similarity to mould (recall Julia Solis talking about landscapes of mould first thing that morning?). Las Vegas actually looks more like a rash suddenly flaring up (which is perhaps an appropriate representation.)

He says it needs a new vocabulary accordingly, and claims to be struggling for words to describe these patterns of data. The biological metaphors seem entirely apposite, to my mind, though Rodenbeck also suggests the terminology of film-making. Seeing a zoomed-in Levittown New Jersey, neighbourhood suddenly flare out of the map is "like a jump cut in a movie relative to a slow pan", perhaps.

It's an absolutely stunning tool for watching the development of cities, whether zoomed right out to watch a city expand its boundaries, or zoomed right in to see individual streets emerge in grids, or follow the topography of the landscape, as in San Francisco. They've collected some great examples of visualisation emerging from Trulia Hindsight here. (It's getting a lot of traffic at the moment, so be patient. Plus Flash 9 is best for this I think. I could play with this for hours, though I'm not entirely sure what business Trulia hope to derive from it, other than via brand extension. It's close to what I was getting at with my proposed Google Earth extension a while back, though that was based on historical maps rather than other data. In a sense, the data is better, having its own integrity and purpose, not having been collected or designed to draw maps – and thus portrays a more impressionistic sense of the city, which allows more room for interpretation.)

There's a brief discussion of the pros and cons of Flash 9 versus Processing – ultimately they both have their qualities and uses, and Stamen use both accordingly. Truliia's system is built on the Modest Maps framework, by Mike Migurski, Stamen's CTO.

I asked about whether they'd explored some integration with physical architecture. Rodenbeck replies that they're beginning to explore things in that area. Strikes me that there's huge potential for those who understand 'data viz' as a medium, in terms of working with both cities and buildings, given how these live, deep, fast flows of data are beginning to emerge from those things. I personally think making this behaviour visible, but in interesting expressive or impressionistic fashion, may be incredibly powerful. Laura Kurgan asked about the graphical choices made in their Oakland crime maps, and opened up a whole area of debate about representation, particularly of people (which she'd return to in her talk later.) Rodenbeck noted that you can choose to denote, say, prostitution and murder in different ways, visually, implying the difference in their 'seriousness' as a crime. Tricky stuff that, but surely one of the most important aspects to think through.

There's a character and flavour to this work which entirely backs up Rodenbeck's assertion that this is a medium of its own. Janet Abrams, responding to a review of her book with Peter Hall, 'Else/Where Mapping' in the excellent 'Urban Design Review: Spring 2007' says that "I truly hope that mappings become recognised as expressive media artifacts, rather than just useful instruments, and that their intent is more than just simply inform, but also to intrigue and convey ... hopefully they will produce emotional reactions as well as intellectual ones." In the best work of Stamen, and others, across this fertile, emerging terrain we're beginning to see 'artifacts' which delight, amaze, shock and inform. With Trulia and Cabspotting, we're seeing products which are entirely of their medium – data visualisation – and it was a particular delight to share the excitement which Rodenbeck and other pioneers in this field are experiencing.

(Thanks also to Eric for putting up with his presentation being cropped by the projector. For further reading, there's a write-up of talk Stamen did in London recently, by Rod McLaren.)

Postopolis!: The Living

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

The Living are a New York-based architectural studio, producing work which is both conceptually strong and physically impressive. As a result, David Benjamin and Soo-in Yang were able to give us a talk which was half-theoretical presentation and half-live science class demonstration.

Much of their work has been documented in two volumes: 'Life Size 1' and 'Life Size 2'. Their methodological approach is governed by a practice they call 'flash research'. These research projects are "open-source, incremental and small scale". Each has a budget of under $100k, lasts for less than 3 months, and produces a prototype as a proof of concept. The emergent ideas can be expanded, and taken into further research projects, so in a sense ideas can be daisy-chained together to extend beyond 3 months. The prototypes are generally full scale, and the result of "looping back and forth between hypotheses". They also ensure they publish "building instructions, so people can pick up where we left off."

The first project they showed Postopolis! was entitled 'Living Glass'. It's a fairly extraordinary piece of work that shows built fabric responding to interaction in real-time. By exploring different patterns of movement, and thickening, stretching and contracting of material, they are able to build a transparent wall with louvred "gills" across its surface. These gills open and close when a wire contracts, in response to some sensory input (they used infra-red but it could've been any of a number of stimuli). The end result is that the 'glass' membrane actually opens up when people approach, in order to let fresh air in.

They demo this in front of the Postopolis! crowd, and it's truly impressive. It literally draws a gasp from the audience. The transparent glass louvres bend and twist open as Benjamin breathes on the surface. It's a lovely movement, far more organic than mechanical (although this is work that blurs concepts like organic and mechanical together.)

Secondly, they show research which responded to the question "What if architecture produced its own energy?". They run through some example systems which collect and expend small amounts of energy, in balance. In other words, systems that can "harness energy and spend it at an equivalent ratio". They then show photographs of tests of a full scale prototype of a water-borne system, in Yang's bathtub (!). The system they've designed is to be deployed in a river or lake, indicating water purity in real-time. A series of these floating sensors could be cast out into the water, forming a "hovering cloud of light". The light changes, depending on the quality of the water. It's a lovely idea. They demonstrate the light in front of us again, pouring an impurity into water in which the sensors are immersed. The 'beacon' changes from green to red in a very satisfying fashion, but the important thing with this experiment is to note that this is approaching an energy-neutral system.

With all of their research, they publish a manual on their website, which extends the work into "a form of open-source construction", they say. Picking up on this topic, also raised by Lebbeus Woods, I ask how far they go in explaining their work. I think we cross wires slightly at this point as Benjamin answers from an intellectual property angle, indicating that their projects are at a stage with few issues inhibiting a full explanation of the work. I was actually asking as to the specific nature of the instructions, and how much 'architectural knowledge' they embed in the instructions – this to Woods' points about having to convey the 'rules of the game', in order to avoid the problems encountered by the design advocacy movement of the 1960s. Either way, its an interesting answer from Benjamin. He says thus far "the stakes aren't high enough" so they're on "an indie scale rather than being on a major label." But they're keen to ensure the research doesn't just "exist within a closed bubble" and further, they employ "or steal source code from the internet" in the work too. You can visit The Living's website to see how they explain their work.

Next, a project by students they taught at Columbia GSAPP, entitled the 'Huggy Wall'. This elicits the odd 'aah' of delight from the crowd (it's certainly one of the more participative presentations at Postopolis!). It's another 'reactable' material, featuring a cosy membrane-like substance enclosing itself around a person upon contact, literally giving the person a hug. It's only slightly disconcerting.

A further research theme is 'better, cheaper, faster; and asks "What if good architecture and bottom line development was the same thing?" Here, they attempt to take a weak material, which when bound together becomes strong (similar to Aranda/Lasch's experiments with 'packing'). The Living's constructions with these materials are based around an inherent structural integrity which enables objects to be "stackable and easily transportable", in this case in the form of a collapsible lightweight framing system. It's easily assembled with simple tools by non-experts in an hour (they show a video to prove this, starring themselves as the "non-experts"). It affords a structure that can be built for $9 per square foot.

Another project within this theme comprises a 'House of Doors', constructed from 384 salvaged metal and wood hotel doors i.e. 95% salvage material. We also see a tantalising glimpse of another project based around a user-created micro-network of 'motes', or communicable sensors, which create a street-level map of air quality (akin to their water-borne project earlier.)

In response to a question from the crowd, we began to get at a fairly subtle but powerful difference between reaction and responsiveness, in terms of how The Living saw their systems behaving. This again deserved more time than we could give it, but they responded by seeing that their simple processes of input –> processing –> output are predicated on a more responsive relationship than simply reacting i.e. their systems are not simply about the behaviour of a garage door, opening and closing in response to infra-red contact.

The way they responded to this question left me with the sense that The Living are truly exploring behavioural products, not simply reactive architecture. In this, they're producing fascinating cutting-edge work, which is also aesthetically complex and has rich sensory qualities, as the Living Glass projects show. If 'design dissolves in behaviour', as I've suggested here several times, borrowing Naoto Fukasawa's line, The Living are drawing us constructive sketches of what this might mean for the fabric of the built environment.

Postopolis!: James Sanders

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

In writing 'Celluloid Skyline', James Sanders had contributed one of the more interesting texts about the city in recent years. He'd been working on the book for 12 years, and it showed. As his site puts it, it was about two cities, both called New York – one is the physical city, and the other is imagined New York in film. The book is essentially a contribution to urban theory – it has that depth – but by drawing from '42nd Street', 'Taxi Driver', 'North by Northwest' and 'Big', it was also accessible, riveting. Sanders had recently revisited the material of the book to construct an exhibition on 'Celluloid Skyline', which is currently running at Grand Central Station. There, the book comes alive, as projections of actuality films stand alongside giant scenic backings from studios, surrounding a series of excellent explanatory boards (designed by Lisa Strausfield's team at Pentagram). Sanders is a practising architect, as well as a writer.

For his talk at Postopolis!, Sanders did something that few other speakers did, which was to engage directly with the name, and perhaps theme, of the show. By thinking through the word 'postopolis', Sanders concentrated on "the city after", or what might be "post-city". And for his case study, selected for Postopolis!, he attempted to talk about depictions of the contemporary city. But not using a "high art film –like Tati or something", but a contemporary film. In this case the animated feature 'Shark Tale'.

Sanders then plays us 2 clips from 'Shark Tale', featuring the underwater cityscape mis-en-scene of the movie, and then talks us through the salient points as he sees them. The first – you can see a QuickTime clip here – inadvertently picks up on the previous panel's discussion of 'expressions of urban fear', by illustrating a near-dystopian, empty grey cityscape suddenly come alive with the news that 'the sharks are gone', presented by news reporter, Katie Current (Couric), broadcasting live from downtown. The city in 'Shark Tale' is clearly New York, with "a great central urban space ... modeled on Times Square" (though bits of LA are thrown in.)

As he points out, "the city is already underwater", predicting perhaps the inconvenient truth about downtown Manhattan in a few years. As the previously empty city explodes with life, Sanders runs through the "rich mix of things you'd see in the city". He says we see garbage collection, a form of urban grid, fish taxi drivers (which have some kind of South Asian heritage), Jamaican, Japanese etc. A richly diverse mix of fish, in fact, conjuring "the classic late capitalist city". This is a city, he says, whose urban life is saturated with electronics, and therefore images of, well, urban life. This self-referential aspect will become a central theme of Sanders' talk.

Once the news that 'the sharks are gone' filters through, Sanders says the city itself is essentially a "vibrant positive place". He suggests you "wouldn't have shown New York City in the same way, 20 years ago", which in some ways reinforces this idea that 'the city is back'. However, there is also this clear pervasive threat, from without. No prizes for guessing the symbolism here.

So we have the successful late capitalist city, though threatened from forces unseen outside. The city is a colourful diverse mix of ethnicity and possibility. Digital screens are everywhere.

The second clip exemplifies this last point, playing out a fight scene from later in the movie. In this, we see multiple, complex, textured conflation of image and reality. The central characters fall and swerve in front of screens, which show images of themselves in real-time, which they react to, and this – their reaction to seeing themselves broadcast – is then filmed and re-broadcast. This is a densely layered city, in which they're "interacting with their own televised image".

Sanders pauses to note a difference here. In the history of the city up to the 1950s, the 'agora' was shifting out of the centre, being dispersed. Now with real-time electronic newsgathering and the advent of large scale electronic displays in urban environments, Sanders says we're seeing a form of agora reborn. Bizarrely 'Shark Tale' shows a new hybrid – a new kind of space, which is urban and electronic at the same time, real-time and broadcast entwined symbiotically.

Of course, Times Square used to have a giant news ticker years ago, but there is a difference in immediacy here; this is news being made in real-time and then broadcast in real time. There's some element of 9/11 shifting things here; on that day, people stopped and watched live feeds of the towers, even those a few blocks uptown.

'Shark Tale' is also to do with the "push towards celebrity". It's everything to do with a media-saturated culture, in which the characters want to be famous most of all. And this is actually why, Sanders reckons, that the city is back. A celebrity is an urban phenomenon. The central character in 'Shark Tale', voiced by Will Smith, has all the ambition of the newcomer to the city, familiar from a thousand previous films, yet desires fame most of all. That's the way to the top. "Could've been a contender" is very clearly now "I want to be somebody".

It's a fascinating exploration of the themes implicit within the film's urban environment. Sanders suggests that this is actually the first mainstream depiction of this new kind of hyper-media-saturated city, with real-time broadcasting of the city woven into the city itself. This actually makes 'Shark Tale' significant (if it was largely insignificant in every other way.) These lmost subconscious renderings by designers and directors comprise a form of code for understanding contemporary urban life. This is the reason he thinks films are such valuable texts about the city.

In terms of whether 'Shark Tale's' city is genuinely the first mainstream depiction of a new kind of city, Geoff makes a strong counterpoint: that architecture has always contained embedded narratives – and narrative potential – about the city, but Sanders thinks that the immediacy and real-time reaction of this hybridised physical-digital space is something new, and 'Shark Tale' is exploring just that.

He suggests that designers and architects could learn a lot from the practice of production designers. I ask him about this; about what architects and designers could draw from film-making. His answer is fascinating; he explains that production designers are always building an architecture to be inhabited by a narrative, which means people (99.9% of the time.) There are effectively no films about buildings i.e. without people. Certainly no popular films. There are numerous films made about streets, cities etc. but all as the backdrop for people and stories. Geoff wonders about the 'haunted house' genre, and whether the buildings play a leading role here. Sanders counters that if Jodie Foster didn't show up in 'Panic Room' fairly soon, there wouldn't have been much of a film. So his key point is that the production designers who create the buildings, streets and other built fabric for movies are actually working in a way which engages inhabitants more directly than many architects. Indeed, he points, it's only relatively recenlty that architectural phtography in magazines started having people in shot. He suggests architects prefer their buildings empty, unused. (Ironic that Andrew Blum's talk had preceded, noting how Libeskind's museums are often initially empty.)

Sanders' talk, and his Celluloid Skyline projects, approach architecture and urbanism from the periphery of their depiction in films, and this makes for compelling viewing and listening. If you're in New York, do try to get to the exhibition (Celluloid Skyline, Vanderbilt Hall, Grand Central Station, until June 22nd.)

Postopolis!: Design Observer panel

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.

As with our sustainability panel earlier in the week, some issues call for multiple voices onstage. A hugely successful design weblog, with multiple writers who are also professional designers or writers, is a decent example. So Geoff and I find ourselves hosting a session with some key personnel – Michael Bierut, William Drentell, and Tom Vanderbilt – from the excellent Design Observer website on day 4 of Postopolis!.

Design Observer pretty much hit the ground running when it emerged a few years ago, contributing excellent articles from the start. It moved quickly beyond the 'design supergroup' model by introducing other voices into the mix, yet retaining quality throughout personnel changes. I've personally always appreciated the site's commitment to raising the bar in writing about design online, and enjoy the style of lengthier, considered mini-essays. This style of 'original contributions to the internet', rather than merely pointing and commenting, has helped shape the weblog form for the better. So it was a great pleasure to invite them to Postopolis! to represent another angle around design.

Drentell begins by taking us through the origins of Design Observer, recalling how he, Jessica Helfand, Bierut and Rick Poynor had prototyped some essays a few years back. They'd all "shared certain frustations" with what it was like to write for magazines. They've set up the group weblog such that they only post typically 2 or 3 essays per week, though they're "pretty finished essays" circa 1000-2000 words. Initially, he says, they found it "funny that people come back". Rick Poynor dropped out after a while, partly because, Drentell says, he was finding it difficult to reconcile "making a living as writer where a third of writing is for free". They slowly added other writers to the point that there is now around 7 or so writers in the group.

While on the structure of the blog, we talk about the value of comments. As with the sustainability panel earlier, they note problems with quality. They reckon only about 30-50% comments offer anything constructive (and they're probably being generous here.) The longer they go on, they're less tethered to original piece, with positive and negative results. Bierut suggests that it is incredibly rewarding for the writers, but Drentell confirms that "comments isn't a priority for our blog", though they won't be turning them off.

On the difference between writing for print and writing for weblogs, Bierut has written about this in depth recently, on the announcement of his new book. He says he initially found he had very irritating traits reinforced by writing for print, chiefly one of procrastination. Having worked on magazines, he knew that the "deadline I've been told wasn't the real deadline. There was some other deadline." So he'd leave it all until the last minute. Then having rushed that, it wouldn't be published for weeks, months. Finally, there was "no evidence that anyone on earth had read this thing." In contrast, with writing for blogs, he'd "hit publish, and all three of those things are eliminated:"

In terms of quality control, and working without the print infrastructure of sub editors etc., Drentell notes that they're now effectively their own editors and "typically take more care" on that sort of thing. There's a "different sense of responsibility that we subject oursleves to", which is in some way more engaged. The essays often don't come in as finished pieces - with some exceptions like Julie Lasky, who delivers a perfectly finished piece. So they edit too. Sometimes pieces take weeks to finish – particularly their own, they groan. There's some clearly envious discussion of how quickly Jessica Helfand can write a good piece. Being acutely aware of the size of the audience on the end of the writing also affects things too. They certainly take more care as a result.

However, some differences between magazines and group weblogs can be more problematic. Rick Poynor, having worked in magazine editorial (notably as a brilliant stint in charge of 'Eye') "always got a sense that he was missing something"; that there must be some regular editorial meetings or something, as per magazines, that he couldn't be at. The sense that Design Observer was, in Bierut's words, "this funny thing that just kind of accrued", could be maddening. (I wonder about this also, working as I do at Monocle in London, and about to work remotely from Sydney.)

We also talk about writing about design for non-designers. They think there's definitely a responsiblity in their writing to explain things. Bierut recalls Andrew Blum earlier talking about having to explain the Pritzker price; in Bierut's piece on the evolution of the AT&T logo, he notes how careful he was to provide a brief mini-history of the logo. We discuss the inherent facility for links within online writing, and how useful that can be from a contextual point-of-view. I recall Steven Johnson's 'Interface Culture', and his early work on Suck and Feed, and the dense inter-textual referencing possible through links. Sometimes links would be dropped in to add semantic weight to something; some links not even intended to be clicked on – merely to suffuse with irony. Geoff trumps us all by claiming that he has sometimes added links to the *spaces in-between words* on BLDGBLOG!

The conversation sidesteps into one of branding of the urban environment. Bierut tells us about his "loquacious cab driver" he had while taking a taxi to the Storefront through a crowded downtown Manhattan laden with distressed type, both original and faked. Drentell and Bierut both recall working with Tibor Kalman, who was "obsessed with issues of authenticity" and tried to avoid the "too slickly designed". Both now feel that it's near impossible to "be authentic" with this urban branding, ad don't know how to solve that problem. (If indeed it is a problem.) I mention Tobias Frere-Jones' talk earlier in the week, and about the layers of history that can be perceived in NYC signage and lettering; about how this lettering was as important a part of the muscular, confident character of New York as the accent people spoke with, or the architecture. But given this is fading, or inauthentic, where is that character expressed now?

Bierut mentions Frere-Jones' font Interstate, as well as Gotham, as some kind of "perfect vernacular" typefaces – which he notes he was all over like a rash when they came out. (He may not have used those words.). He says, taking things like the Port Authority sign as inpsiration, that Frere-Jones and Hoefler have done an "exquisite job of rendering" this, but once it becomes a "commercial option that you exercise at will" it's a complex scenario, and perhaps loses some of that New York character. He asks if people know the book 'God's Own Junkyard' by Peter White, which he thought was the most "beautiful, romantic book in the world", yet was intended to show the horror of the everday vernacular in the USA. So when this kind work can be so easily or carelessly subverted as nostalgia, shorthand or something entirely unrelated to its origins, Bierut seemed to be suggesting that it was difficult to talk about authenticity and character in branding for the urban environment, or even figuring out how the urban environment is expressing itself. He says contemporary corporate logos can instantly reference nostalgia – cf. American Apparel. It's like his kids pining for the "great, early days of Nickleodeon".

We riff back and forth about these invisible and visible layers of information within the city. Bierut mentions the incredible media visions created for the film 'Children of Men', ostensibly about tomorrow – yet not. He adds that with New York in particular "you have to wait till tomorrow, to characterise yesterday", which I thought was a great point, beautifully put. He finds the city "hard to bring into focus in real time."

Relating to "photographs of streetscapes", Drentell mentions how this has almost become a "classic assignment" in graphic design schools, such that he was teaching in New Orleans recently and one of the existing classes was based around taking pictures of distressed letterforms. He pauses to note that this was New Orleans, and that there was "not a single assignment about the future of city" on the curriculum. He doesn't think that would be true of an architecture school, but it is often sadly true in graphic design.

Bryan asks about images of fear and security within the landscape, mentioning Vanderbilt's book 'Survival City: Adventures Among the Ruins of Atomic America'. Vanderbilt is currently working on a book about traffic, and he says can't stop returning to that subject. He says the USA suffers 43000+ road fatalities in a year, which is the equivalent – in raw numbers at least – of a 9/11 every month. He thinks at least part of that number is due to increasing the number of people on the road; including through security alarms by the way. If there's anywhere we should be directing resources, he says, if security is an issue then it should be onto making traffic safer. He says "Our way of life is more dangerous in general than the so-called threat to our daily life."

Bierut takes another tack, noting there are actually very few expressions of urban fear in urban landscape. More expressions of amelioration or a kind of desperately numbing reassurance that everything is OK. After 9/11, he remembers the discussion that "Maybe we'll never have any advertising any more", as it felt strangely inappropriate. Well, he says, compared the the endless flags and articulations of national security, he'd rather have a big ol' Calvin Klein ad anyday.

Jill asks a question about sustainability and graphic design, from the perspective of someone who was once a graphic designer. After briefly suggesting that only graphic designers care about effect that graphic designers have on the world, Bierut has noted a different. When he was educated in the 1970s, "he never had a single assignment that was social or cultural" in perspective. Now that's different. However, with graphic design, it's generally very closely aligned with, or alongside market forces, as an amplifying effect. "Graphic design is really only about someone's message", he says. And that message is almost always about, in broadest possible terms, trying to sell someone something. If you're designing poetry magazine, you're selling poetry. These are "the tools you have available". Additionally, the "thing they do only lasts as long as the message is being transmitted". This is a major difference with architecture, he thinks. Architecture grows out of particular situation and series of relationships between client and architect. Yet 5, 10 years later, the circumstances of that genesis get ever more obscure. Buildings begin to lose sight of their origins. Graphic design rarely has that ability - it tends to be rooted quite specifically in the moment, and often the client. (Of course some design has eventually drifted clear of its moorings – few now see, for example, a Josef Müller-Brockmann poster in the context of a specific live music performance on a foggy Zürich night in 1954. But in general it's a really interesting point of difference that Bierut makes. Graphic design is either forgotten and discarded more rapidly, or carries its context with it, more readily than architecture. A 1933 broadsheet has more easily observed essence of its age, its creation and even the client than say a 1933 building, as evocative as it is to the trained eye. The reusability of architecture enables this in particular. I've written a bit about the importance of carrying context of creation forward, as its effects are still being worked out with digital media.)

Drentell takes this forward, by recalling all the discussions he had with Tibor Kalman about this, which good as they were, could tend to be overly simplistic. He thinks all models are getting much more complicated. One of Drentell's posts on Design Observer, on Rem Koolhaas, created a huge amount of discussion. It centred around the environmental, cultural and political impact of both Koolhaas's CCTV headquarters in Beijing and his flawed social commentary. A specific point was made around the amount of steel used in the construction steel of the CCTV building (see also Matt Clark's presentation from Wednesday.) And yet, such is the nature of weblogs, someone took Drentell to task in the comments for his previous, allegedly unsustainable, work throughout the '80s. It's not easy to pick apart the issues in practice and teaching around sustainability and design. As Drentell says, it's complex, perhaps too complex for comments on a weblog. (Funnily enough (!) that particular someone was Miss Representation, who would speak at Postopolis! a day later. The comment thread on the Koolhaas post is also a good illustration of 'arc of comments' that Mark Wigley would talk about a day later too.)

There were other things said. I've noticed the magnetic presence of the dynamic Mr Bierut to my immediate right seems to have skewed my notes in that direction a bit. There were many more nuances, subtleties and quite a few topics I missed altogether. There were also many more questions I wanted to ask, like why they rarely write about their own work there, or whether they would go beyond the occasional slideshow to extend what is a very literate blog into drawings, sketches or more photo-based work. But it's difficult to follow a conversation between 5+ people at the best of times. Suffice to say Bierut, Drentell and Vanderbilt certainly exemplified the depth and authority of Design Observer in person, although they also threw in a dash of twinkling good humour for good measure. They should tour or something.

Postopolis!: Andrew Blum

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.

"Eight-year-olds—or anyone who maintains a childlike wonder at the world—will grasp this immediately. And it will stay with them. Architecture is an optimistic art."

Andrew Blum is a contributing editor for 'Wired' and 'Metropolis', but writes about architecture, cities and places for a wide range of publications. For Postopolis!, he reads us one of his latest pieces, for 'ROM', the magazine of the Royal Ontario Museum.

Looking somewhat like the young Robert Zimmerman, Blum revealed he hadn't read a piece for an audience before, but I hope he does it more. It works well, and although the writing is written to be read, it's pretty good heard too.

Blum starts by talking about his dangerous relationship with blogs, in that he might spend all day looking at them instead of actually writing. With his own blog, he gently subverts the process by ensuring that everything he writes for print goes up there. He'll also attempt to find things that aren't online and put them online. Though he writes for print in order to be paid, he says there are few greater thrills than having people link to his work online. If it were possible to make a living from blogs, he'd pursue it, for the ability to write as yourself, and write in the moment too (our Design Observer panel later would also talk about this.) In general however, as well as the cash, he says the non-financial conditions of writing for print can also be useful. He notes that even a piece as personal as that he reads us today is still "an assignment, which comes with its own constraints". He takes pride in fitting those constraints – "that rigour is pretty important to me".

Blum says that, despite being labelled as an 'architecture writer', his "real subject is place, and the sense of place". He ascribes at least some of this interest to having grown up in New York, "going to an 1890s public school" – perhaps as if the richness of thie environment has attuned him to seeking out the conditions of place in some way.

His essay for 'ROM' is on the new Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, by Daniel Libeskind which, he says with a grin, "looks a lot like his other buildings". He notes that architects tend to have lost patience with Libeskind, and so brought it to Postopolis! with the hope that "a love letter to Libeskind might piss you off a bit." He wrote it for his wife's grandmother, who she lives across the street from ROM and hates it. In fact, he says, "everyone in Toronto seems to hates it." (For example. Or this.) That he really likes it is, he says, clearly a "major shortcoming" in his taste and likely career prospects!

However, his motivation in writing the piece was as a "statement of optimism". Blum spent some years in Toronto, studying human geography and in particular, the notion of "sense of place". (I'd loved to have discussed this more with him, as it's a particular interest of mine. See some earlier pieces here e.g. on "structure of feeling".) And so this essay, "The Dreamlife of Toronto", looks at the Libeskind museum – known at the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal – in the context of Toronto's shifting identity.

As it's online, I won't try to reproduce the main themes – you can read it for yourself here. However, I'll pull a few quotes from it; those that resonated with me, or those I feel provide some kind of distillation of Blum's writing.

"Places may seem like physical things, but they come to life only when imbued with memories. And that’s what thrills me about the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal at the ROM: more than just a museum of objects, it seems destined to become the leading repository of the dream life of Toronto. And not a moment too soon."

"What I missed about New York was the sense that the city itself had a collective identity—a shared set of stories that tied together its disparate parts and its people. A “melting pot.” But Toronto defied cultural hegemony, in both its people and its places. Often this was beautiful—and more humane, as people from everywhere could continue, in meaningful ways, to be from everywhere. In physical terms, that same quality defines Toronto in what has become a cliché—a “city of neighbourhoods.”

"At moments, the arrivals hall at Pearson International Airport, which compressed Toronto’s “global soul” into a single location, came close. But airports make bad public spaces; they are too controlled, too corporate, and too physically cut off from the rest of the city."

"More than an opera house, art school, stadium, or office building, a museum offers itself to everyone equally—particularly a museum of both culture and nature. A museum is a gift to the public life of the city."

"Toronto was good; Toronto was pleasant; but not until this building did it offer the inspiration that arises out of excess, out of the gratuitousness of imagination. A culture that produces a building like this—and a truly public one, not just one for rich people—strikes me as a culture that believes in limitless possibility. Libeskind has put this beautifully:“Architecture is a civic art, and a museum is not just a container to be filled with treasures; it is a place where people are brought to wonder about the spaces of their own futures.”"

"It isn’t entirely unique—Libeskind has also designed museums for Denver and Berlin that, at first glance, appear similar. But just as Gothic cathedrals all celebrate the same God, the twisting forms of each of these buildings respond to the same shared sense of modernity, arising out of the confusing nature of the world today. The Michael Lee-Chin Crystal is not about that old sense of place—the one that dictated the European architectural styles of the ROM’s earlier buildings."

I'll leave you to read Blum's final fantastic paragraph of "The Dream Life ...", which crackles with civic pride. I hugely appreciated his approach to seeing the building within the wider Toronto, and I see also that his writing itself helps create this sense of what Toronto is – it in fact creates Toronto – just as the new museum does. The "dream life" motif is a good one, conjuring a sense of the vaulting optimism inherent in good cities. Cities are for dreamers; the entire construction is predicated on dreams, ambition. Blum, as a New Yorker, would see this right away, but it's his ability to evoke this in Toronto, a city which is sometimes characterised as "lovely but boring", that is important. (Caveat: I've never been to Toronto, have only heard this about it. I'd love to go; it sounds great.) Many 'outsiders', particularly from a city as bombastic as New York, would not see this in Toronto. But Blum seems to have an instinctive knack for getting under the skin of a place, and seeing the potential. As he says, to be optimistic about it. As an eight-year-old might be, yes, but also as that's what architecture – and cities in general – are about.

In questions, Geoff asks him why Libeskind now appears as unpopular as he is. Blum thinks a fair part of this must be some "baggage" with New York City. He thinks this building, the ROM Crystal, will change people's attitude a bit. He also notes that Libeskind's personality is something to do with this. People don't know how to react. "He's pretty silly" in person, he says. Another question concerns the museum, and how it works with the exhibits. Blum replies that he saw it empty, and that in fact it'll be empty for the entire first month. (As with the Jewish museum in Berlin.)

I asked about this question of writing about place, or a sense of place, from the specific perspective of 'an outsider'. (Something that I do all the time e.g. Australia, Seattle, Barcelona, Boston etc., and both troubles me and delights me.) I note that some of my favourite writing about place has been done by 'the outsider' – Jonathan Raban on the American mid-West or Seattle/Alaska; Peter Robb on Italy or Brazil; Robert Hughes on Barcelona or London; Peter Carey on Tokyo or New York. (Indeed, a Postopolis! fantasy football panel might be Hughes, Carey, Robb and Raban on 'New World Cities'). I wonder if the outsider or newcomer is often bound up in the relentless optimism of seeing a place for the first time, trying to find it – almost the thrill of the chase – and is also able to see things anew that the inhabitant has come to take for granted? Blum speculates that it might be easier to write about place in that mode. Yet he also has great fun writing about New York. (Clearly the 'insider view' also works.) When Blum was in Toronto, he did find that he distinctly wrote from the American view - "which I took very personally, and made it my own" he says. Perhaps this gives a position, or podium, from which to write?

As I've suggested, this one question – of conjuring a sense of place – warrants an entire session of its own, and Blum would be on it. His "Dream Life ..." essay gives an indication of the importance of seeing any architecture in its wider context. One of my favourite quotes I tend to deploy upon long-suffering design teams is by the Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen (father or Eero), who said: "Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context – a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan." Given that design is an ongoing social process, Blum is doing just this with respect to the ROM and whatever else he writes about – considering buildings in their larger context, in a sense contributing to their design. His work illustrates just how architecture and the city are symbiotically bound together, each creating the reality of each other.

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!: Joel Sanders

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

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

The first residential project he showed "displaces the quintessential suburban lawn underground", partly for practical reasons – it's situated in Minneapolis, which has harsh winters and mosquito infested summers – but also for personal reasons. The bachelor owner wanted a private spa. So the banked fence Sanders created lends a zone of privacy from outside, but when seen from the interior it dematerialises the boundary, covered with astroturf, and angled up such that from the picture window it looks like an arcadian image of lawn and sky. The entrances to the residence are also playful, framing silhouette of bodies entering and exiting the house.

That playfulness is also visible (possibly?) in the second residential project Sanders shows. This derived from an exhibition, 'Big Brother, Architecture of Surveillance', and is dubbed the 'Access House', on an island off the coast of Georgia. This takes as its inspiration, the "ubiquitous feature of the American vacation home: the picture window." Yet it defends against the "double-edged nature of picture window" (Sanders shows images from films, a particular influence, I can see, of people looking through pictures windows or being seen in picture windows) by ensuring the vulnerability is ameliorated by pervasive surveillance techniques throughout the house. A central core, carrying all services, including a dumb waiter – "a sophisticated tree-like mass" – forms a kind of "updated American hearth", which also carries CCTV footage of the outside and all rooms, to all areas and spaces within the house. It's ultra hi-tech, with motion sensors tracking the house and surroundings, as well as screens indicating events elsewhere, weather, people in remote locations etc. It's an attempt to transform home surveillance devices, turning the house into "a benevolent Big Brother, with eyes throughout house", in order to make it feel safe. (Personally, I'm not sure this would do anything other than make the inhabitant more paranoid and less trusting!). The multiple split screens throughout play on the sense of thurllers and horror movies, and also of being watched as well as watching. Sanders seems to hint at the contradictions here. Indeed, there's a 'panic room' in the basement - where you can watch images of house, watching images of outside.

Continuing the theme of transparency, and into perhaps the most interesting of Sanders' projects, is the Mix House. This is fascinating. He says, "we tend to be indifferent to acoustics" in contemporary residences, and think only of "competing with traffic outside". Normally, he continues, "architecture is about being quiet", whereas there's a rich history of sound and architecture - especially in pre-literate societies. He talks of the clarity of sound in the Greek amphitheatre, of the intentional use of sound spaces in Medieval and Gothic cathedrals, which were "designed by acoustics as much as visual principles - they were considered 'sacred resonators'".

Sanders says this changed with the invention of printing, and Palladio, "under the spell of perspective", which began to organise architecture under what would become seen as a "Western ocularcentric perspective". (Again, Juhania Pallasmaa's 'The Eyes of the Skin' springs to mind.) So what we end up with, as the "quintessential icons of modernism" is the floor-to-ceiling window, the curtain wall. These present acoustical problems, but have dominated architecture since. Sanders credits Emily Thompson's book, 'Soundscape of Modernity', with this mini-history of sound and architecture. Looks worth reading.

So this signature element of modernism actually "signals a divorce between place, space, sound." Architecture is again quiet. So the Mix House attempts to re-introduce sound into the residence, to play with both visual and aural transparency. It suggests a "sonic picture window and sonic entry porch", and a further "sonic window, oriented towards the sky". Sanders mentions the ingenious listening posts and acoustic mirrors in Norfolk and elsewhere (more here, just because I like them) as an inspiration. Also a series of microphones, cameras and a sort of bellows mechanism to manipulate the sound. The sonic picture window, aimed at the backyard, can swivel to extend its range. There's even an eavesdropping skylight. The idea is that sounds from inside and outside can be sampled and mixed, combined with other sounds, to compose original soundtracks for the house - to "create new domestic soundscapes" in his words. (Personally, I'm always interesting in listening to displaced sound when mixed with that of the street outside; I've spent many happy hours listening to, say, Jake Tilson's dislocated recordings of India, or Sublime Frequencies' Indonesian night recordings, when in central London.) This is a lovely idea, particularly if it was extended to project sound from inside to the outside – again playing with that double-edged nature of the picture window – and then combined to form the sounds of neighbourhoods. In some senses, with sharing of iTunes libraries over the internet possible now we can mix our record collections together, but we're not forced to confront our neighbourhood, enabling a sometimes unhealthy withdrawal into personal domestic space. It would be interesting to think through how we could create new civic sounds as well as personal domestic soundscapes.

Finally, Sanders shows us how these sound-based themes have been extended into his firm's low-budget renovation of Campbell Hall school of architecture, Charlottesville, VA. Asking, "can you link spaces sonically?", they've designed a form of audio spotlight, based around closely-focused directional speakers. These enable "semi-public sound interactions". Trying to deal with the reality of students wearing iPods and effectively turning themselves off to the sound of public space, these distributed audio spotlights have three channels - a combined playlist (music contributed by all students); a channel from other rooms in the school, where students can hear crits, or tune into other views within school; or wire in other schools altogether.

There is some beautiful work, and bigger projects, detailed on the JSA website, but in the work he chose to present at Postopolis! it's clear that Sanders' firm is exploring some fascinating terrain here, fusing architecture with digital technologies that see media as something malleable. Whilst I'm personally uneasy about the surveillance projects, I'd hope that the Mix House and related work will help lead to a renewed interest in sound – and other senses – in architecture and public spaces.

Postopolis!: Jake Barton, Local Projects

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

Jake Barton runs a design firm in New York called Local Projects. He says they call themselves 'media designers', as they work at the intersections between broadcast media, interactive media, architecture and physical space. It's as good a term as any for a field still emerging. Barton's background is in interior architecture, and the firm is fairly multidisciplinary. The firm's name comes from their belief that, just as Tip O'Neill used to say "all politics are local", they believe all design is local. That is, local to the specific project; there is no predetermined house style or methodology, they're platform agnostic, solution agnostic. (This is an interesting, valuable approach.)

Barton lists a few of their recent projects, such as for the Museum of Chinese and the Americas, a cellphone tour for the Statue of Liberty, and their recent hefty commission for the World Trade Center memorial museum in partnership with Thinc Design. He then goes on to outline their approach and interests – they explore innovative interfaces in physical space, hybridising between physical interfaces and online interfaces, and have been particularly engaged in collaborative storytelling projects.

He shows the Miners Story Project, which is based around a caravan in which a recording booth resides. The exterior looks like a dot matrix image of a copper miner, but as you get closer you realises each of the 'dots' is also a speaker. Thus the caravan itself is a giant speaker which plays oral histories captured within. Barton says that Making Museums Matter by Stephen Weil has been a particular influence, in terms providing inspiration for museums turning themselves inside out; or providing ways of ensuring that musuems are spaces for knowledge production, rather than just repositories preserved in aspic.

Of course, with internet-based media, this notion has been hoovered up into the term 'user-generated content', providing both a contemporary goldrush and much hand-wringing. Thanks to an earlier project, the now well-known StoryCorps, Local Projects is in the position of having helped create an almost iconic example of how to obtain user-generated content in physical space. StoryCorps was directly inspired by the influential Works Progress Administration (WPA) projects of the early 20th century. (Which is about as good a reference point as you can get.) It links with a weekly NPR show to capture oral histories. As interaction designers for the project, Local Projects worked with architects to design the listening stations that sit outside of booths, and dynamic signage. Based in Grand Central Station, the WTC and elsewhere throughout the US, they've been hugely successful, garnering over 10,000 stories. Barton plays us a few selections. (I'd actually heard these before, having spoken with Jake at IDEA 2006, but they're still hugely affecting everyday stories.)

This was an early example of user-generated content, from pretty much before the term existed within the museum/exhibit context. Additionally, the booth at the WTC is the only physical architecture on the site itself which interprets 9/11. Nobody had the green light to do an interpretative project before, but there's something about the shape of these projects, Barton suggests, that allows for a broadcasting of a message like this; to be capable of talking about 9/11 on the site.

Moving on, Barton takes us through his firm's collaboration with author James Sanders (who would talk at Postopolis! a day later): Timescapes, at Museum of the City of New York. This is a giant 3-screen projection that enables people to approach the city itself from different angles simultaneously. It's an ambitious attempt to create something which engages the numerous New York City buffs, and therefore has the granular detail that cartography really affords, as well as being approachable to the newcomer. Barton says they tried to reverse the typical paradigm in which history is communicated i.e. a neatly ordered sequence great people and great events. In Timescapes only 3 people are mentioned directly. Rather, the point of view is rendered in the map - attempting to convey the city as a series of systems, a group or cloud of actions, each affecting the next. For instance, the creation of subway lines visibly affects the subsequent creation of apartments and communities built along those lines, enabling the creation of the Bronx and Queens. This is a fascinating take on the evolution of the city, and deserved more exploration than we were able to give it, sadly.

Their new project is on the building of the city itself - and how the city is evolving in contemporary life. It's in relation to Bloomberg's 'Plan NYC 2030', and the idea that 1 million new people will move into NYC by 2030. (Barton pauses to reflect that the last talk on Lagos, where they're growing by a million a year, is "very humbling" in this context.) Working with the AIA's Center for Architecture in New York, it's called the Public Information Exchange, or PIE AIA. (Barton says they pronounce pieaia.org as 'paella'. Oh ho.)

It's a project to foster some kind of "proactive dialogue between all those involved in public architecture", as Barton puts it. There are a few sides to this. He says "when I talk to museum people, I usually talk about broadening the space for dialogue. When I talk to architects, I say this wants to be the MySpace for architects." Essentially, the site enables architects and planners to upload photographs, images of models, plans, schemes for new buildings in New York, and then draw commentary from all involved, including the public. Every image has comments, prompted by questions which can be set by the architects, and thus encourages a deeper level of engagement than merely 'thumbs up or thumbs down'. When I asked Barton about the quality of comments, he replied that so far things have gone well. That is perhaps in part to the excellent design of the interactive space.

(Personally, I believe that quality design encourages quality responses from users, just as design for public space or public housing encourages civic behaviour. I made this tenuous analogy between British post-war public housing and user-generated content a few years ago.)

Barton states that it's not designed to be a wiki-style system for co-creation. He doesn't believe in the "collaborative creation of architecture ... I think that's a fallacy", he says. But architects can use it as a tool to get research, to ask the questions that you want to know of the public, or other stakeholders. It enables architects and builders to promote aspects of the project like LEED certification, or go beyond that. It's designed for both the small playground just built in your neighbourhood, to public street furniture, to major private projects.

A huge yellow stripe gives emphasis to public commentary on the page, making clear a balance between the projects and their stakeholders. For Barton, this project should form a widely distributed, "open memory" around architecture.

(In my professional opinion, it's beautifully done. Each building has Google maps integration, further links, space for a variety of renderings, and at this early stage anyway, excellent engaged comments from users. It's contemporary without being clichéd. There are only a handful of projects uploaded at the moment, but it looks to be an excellent, scalable example of integrating architecture with the web. There are some nips and tucks required but nothing major. All it needs now is far more use than the project currently has; go to it NYC-based architects and planners.)

In a nice touch, the yellow stripe is also clear in the physical manifestation of PIE, at the Center for Architecture's Public Resource Center, located at 536 LaGuardia Place, between West 3rd Street and Bleecker Street. There are public access workstations, designed by Grimshaw who recently did street furniture for the city.

Barton asked the Postopolis! crowd whether people would use it. A few of the architects in the crowd put their hand up. Others would use it stakeholders or users, and it's clear that that's where the value is. Barton notes that collaborative projects like Architecture for Humanity are really architect-to-architect, as good as they are, whereas this is for users of architecture too. Architects may need some convincing, despite the 'Myspace for architecture' tag, as these issues of consultation, and a form of ongoing post-occupancy evaluation are deeper than the lack of a platform. But at least it now has a platform, in New York at least.

This project seems emblematic of Local Projects' approach – rooted, considered, elegantly open, and specific to the problem at hand – and Barton's talk gave us an imaginative yet pragmatic illustration of the potential in the overlap between physical and digital spaces.

Here's a video excerpt of Barton's presentation:

Postopolis!: Robert Neuwirth

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

Author of the influential 'Shadow Cities', Robert Neuwirth was a perfect if entirely coincidental choice to follow Lebbeus Woods, picking up the baton in terms of turning our attention to slum cities. His book has been incredibly successful in terms of shifting the dialogue around cities forward, both from romantic views of long-lost Western cities and in terms of re-imagining the cities of the Global South with a little more respect and inhabited by "the true builders of our global urban future", in the words of Mike Davis.

Neuwirth is a charismatic, laconic speaker, though he starts by receding into the shadows himself, showing a film he'd just made in Lagos, Nigeria. It's utterly spellbinding. Here are the notes, fragments of words, I scribbled during the movie:

incredible noise, dissonance horns, calls, traffic horns, buses, cars, people, chaos, fabric, meats, everything, people crowding on and off bus, bursting with life, every corner full, or signs, products, people, markets stalls, noise becomes quiet on water, black water, huge rubbish tips, dust, smoke, quiet, giant 'Be Unlimited' advert, dugout canoes on water, interspersed with quick interviews, characters, new houses going up somewhere, odd constructions ...

That just about captures what I saw, as best I could. The overriding images were those of the incredibly dense market, every inch inhabited. Then that slow camera moving, on a boat, through a water-borne shanty habitation. Finally, signs of development; 'western-style' homes, each on a discrete patch of land, looking oddly out of place as a result.

Neuwirth then proceeds to talk through what he experience when living there. He says Lagos is a very misunderstood place, "it's tremendously cacophonous ... and seems tremendously crazy". But a lot of patterns there are created by people themselves, which is fascinating. These are "people-generated patterns of economy ... Lagos is to me the largest open air market in the world."

Neuwirth tells the story of one of the interviewees we've just seen – a young man called an 'agberro', who extorts money from the buses. Every bus that goes past has to pay the guy, and so these guys are making big money, like $85 a day. Yet he's also a member of the National Union of Road Transport Workers, who maintained the mass transportation system when the government got out of that business. So this whole practice is effectively self-regulated in a complex web of relationships.

Peering through the dust clouds of the garbage dump scene, Neuwirth picks out a character, a teenage scavenger who is now selling soap (Neuwirth passes around two examples of the soap, which smells heavily carbolic). Elsewhere, 'Monserrat' works as what they call a 'pure water' sales person, carrying trays or buckets of water around on their head (it's not necessarily pure water as we'd understand it, says Neuwirth). Neuwirth had clearly done a fair amount of investigation here, and was able to list what everybody made financially.

Calculating the size of this informal sector is complex, but it makes a vast amount of money. Probably 85-90% of people in Nigeria work in the informal sector, Neuwirth reckons. So these individuals are more important, in an aggregate way, than Shell Oil is to Nigeria. It makes more money, in aggregate. Not only that, but the informal economy is regulating the redevelopment of the city of Lagos, hence the "giant market" allusion.

He says, interestingly, that it's "so overwhelming you didn't know how to look at it." A train actually comes through the middle of market regularly. People simply pick up their kiosks and move them out the way. After the train passes, they put the kiosks back. These are, in Neuwirth's words, "self-created nodes of market activity ... these are the engine of Lagos", a city that's growing by a million people a year. Neuwirth's main thesis seems to be this: if we can figure out a way to look at it, to see the opportunities, and to figure out how to act with informal sector, that would be the way forward for these kinds of places. (There are some echoes here of Lebbeus Woods talking earlier about working within favelas, rather than imposing from the outside. Some echoes, but not all.)

So Neuwirth is now going to places where he can investigate the informal economy. In fact, he says, the smarter multinational businesses are beginning to make their money through the informal economy. For example, when mobile phone companies first came into Lagos and tried to approach it as in the West (via branded stores, packages etc), it just didn't work. So they reconsidered their approach, and make 99% of their money by selling phones, not the airtime. It's all GSM, so you can just put in whatever SIM card you use. (This reminds me of the work of CK Prahalad, Nirmal Sethia and other 'bottom of the pyramid' economic/business theorists.)

Bryan asks as to whether Neuwirth has any thoughts about the informal economy in 'developed world'? He replies that 8.3% of the GDP of USA is considered to be the informal economy. This is small relatively, but largest in the world due to size of US economy. However, this is a quite different condition to Lagos, and the communal, problem-solving when a great proportion of the economy is informal. To illustrate this, Neuwirth recalled that on one day, he counted that electricity came on for 2 seconds. That's came *on* for 2 seconds. So people buy diesel generators, share electricity by splicing cables together. So this communal aspect to the informal economy is different, and useful - it provides feedback mechanisms within the huge system of the city.

I remarked that his description of Lagos reminded me of Manchester; that is the Manchester of 1750-1850. Manchester was the original 'shock city', the first modern city. It grew so rapidly, and in entirely new directions, such that people didn't know how to describe it. Wealthy travellers on the Grand Tour would stop off there, after seeing Venice, Athens and Rome, staring agog at the chaotic, dirty, out-of-control city. Alexis de Tocqueville struggled to describe it in words, though when he did, notice the similarity with descriptions of today's slum cities "It is from the midst of this putrid sewer [Manchester] that the greatest river of human industry springs up and carries fertility to the whole world. From this foul drain pure gold flows forth. Here it is that humanity achieves for itself both perfection and brutalisation, that civilisation produces its wonders, and that civilised man becomes again almost a savage". Painters didn't know how to paint it. For its time, Manchester of the time shared many characteristics with Neuwirth's depiction of Lagos. So I asked about representation and measurement. How can you measure Lagos? Even financially? I suggested it's not going to be a question of totting up tax returns. In terms of representation, I was struck that he showed a 5 minute film, for example.

He replies that representation is complex, and the only way he knows round that is to go and talk with people and let themselves describe it. Hence the video. (I suspect a few of my former urban sociology colleagues might shudder at the methodology here.) He wants to avoid clichéd representation of 'poverty of Africa' – he doesn't want to put them in some sort of pigeonhole – and thinks that outsiders will often impose other viewpoints on it; whereas the citizens of Lagos he talks to are just doing what they do. He also likes photos, which can also be talked through in some way. (Again, issues of ethnography and representation, but he's hardly passing it off as academic research, and I personally prefer the impressionistic approach to conjuring a city.)

Geoff Someone in the audience asked whether the informal economy is moderated by the threat of violence. Is it a last resort, or more visible than that? Neuwirth says you have to separate criminality from outright criminality. He mentions Friedrich Schneider at University of Austria, who has made it his life's work to measure these informal economies, apparently. Schneider reckons that outright criminality accounts for only about 25% of money in this informal economy. So it is more to do with the threat of violence, rather than actual violence – in Lagos, the equivalent of the policemen for are called 'area boys', who can be intimidating, but Neuwirth tells a story of how you can negotiate with them.

Overall, Neuwirth is extremely convincing, and along with the work of Davis, Koolhaas and others, is helping change perceptions of these 'squatter cities' or 'slum cities', and indicating that there's gold in places that don't glitter, too. Personally, however, I'm still not totally convinced by his work. There are issues of representation for sure, and also you wonder whether Neuwirth, Koolhaas et al will ever be able to be objective about cities in which they are essentially visitors, as de Tocqueville was in Manchester. The ability to just get up and leave is what separates the visitor from the slum inhabitant.

The violence seems far worse than Neuwirth mentioned; warring gangs fuelled by religious hatred often ensure disagreements can flare into week-long battles. In a city where only 0.4% of the citizens have a toilet connected to a sewer system, you wonder whether citizen is the right word at all.

And yet the point of these new theories is that citizen, as we understand it, isn't the right word at all; or at least, not the right way to frame this new kind of urban environment. Rem Koolhaas said of Lagos:

"What particularly amazes me is how the kinds of infrastructure of modernity in the city trigger off all sorts of unpredictable improvised conditions, so that there is a kind of mutual dependency that I’ve never seen anywhere else. With its massive traffic jams creating instant markets on roads and highways, Lagos is not “a kind of backward situation (but rather) an announcement of the future.”

The sixth-largest city in the world and as the fastest growing of all, it will soon by the third largest behind Tokyo and Mumbai. So we have to deal with these megacities if we are to talk about cities at all in 2007, and huge thanks to Neuwirth (and others) for bringing it to Postopolis!. Yet Lagos feels different to the other mega-cities in that the slum just seems omnipotent. George Packer's article for the 'New Yorker' last year took issue with Neuwirth et al, and these ideas of a new urban form, based a new kind of hybridised, co-dependent, self-organising, real-time evolution. Packer wrote: "But the megacity doesn’t encourage social responsibility and collective action to improve public life. The very scale of it is atomizing." Having read both, and not been myself, I'm now left equidistant from Packer and Neuwirth. Yet it still feels we need new ways of understanding this city.

So where are we? Will the real Lagos stand up? Will it ever be able to stand up?

Postopolis!: Lebbeus Woods

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

It's always a little risky meeting one of your heroes. It can be cruelly disappointing. However, this was as far away from that as you can get. Lebbeus Woods was incredibly generous with his time, his attitude and his intellect, and he effortlessly won us all over. Not that he had anything to prove – Woods is one of the most important conceptual architects and theorists of his time, and we were truly honoured to have him at Postopolis!.

The Storefront was packed by the time we sat down with Woods for our 'conversation'. We hadn't prepared anything as such, so Woods had no idea what questions we would ask, and despite a quick 'pre-game huddle' beforehand, we didn't really know what questions each other would be asking. Again, the instinctive informality of Postopolis! served us well though, as the conversation flowed relatively easily.

Geoff starts by asking about the constant theme of post-Earth landscapes and instability in his work. Woods replies with a grin –"I suppose that my life has been unstable!" – instantly settling any nerves. He says he was a "military brat" as a kid, always moving, and the autobiography figures into these things, one way or the other. He's also seen a lot of history: "There is a basic instability that we have to deal with in our culture. The earthquake and the war are the most obvious manifestations of it." (Indeed, Woods has often worked directly and proactively in areas that have suffered some kind of recent trauma e.g. Zagreb, Sarajevo, Havana, Loma Prieta earthquake, and now I hear New Orleans.)

Bryan asks about the political nature of architecture, as seen from a wide historical perspective of the Roman Empire and frontier architecture through to homeland security, borders, gated communities, etc. Essentially, Woods replies, architecture as we normally think of it as a profession and a practice is really "not very far from the Roman Empire". They're still building monumental buildings, which "are bowdlerising the hierarchy of power and authority in society". Even when it's a museum it's really about "the elite's ability to gather works of art". No more than that. He thinks that the work on gated communities and the like are part of a "defensive posture" that architects are forced into, inevitably securing enclaves of power and wealth. They're really doing no more than making it look good.

Woods wants some other possibility for architecture, and the reason he's here today is that blogs seem to have some sense of that, in that the internet is a place for "some other view of architecture to emerge". (This is fascinating, encouraging, and generous. I hope that a function of this kind of work, and these events, is in terms of approaching architecture from different angles, from the periphery.)

I asked about the role of architecture from a craft perspective, based on some of the conversations at Postopolis!, where we'd seen the notion of the master builder dissipating. I'd read about some recent work in projects in Vienna and Paris, centred more on creating a set of guidelines and rules for constructing things rather than specifiying the details of the implementation, which are carried out and configured on site. Does this enable an architecture which can thrive and use the conditions inherent in instability? Woods confirmed that was the idea. If there's to be another movement, "another direction in architecture". It has to engage and involve in some way; it has to "interactively involve them other than as spectators". Otherwise this is completely the society of spectacle. It has to engage them as creators.

Woods recalls living through the 60s, when numerous projects attempted to "empower people in lower economic class communities" via  an approach known as "design advocacy". The architect became the advocate of the people and the community; they facilitated meetings with people in communities; provided space, tracing paper and pens and so on. Woods thinks this was a noble effort but also a total failure, as people just couldn't think in terms of designing - they weren't educated for that, they weren't prepared for that. So nothing much ever came of it. So it didn't come out as a real movement in architecture ...

So he thinks, yes, you have to engage people, but fundamentally you have give them the tools to work with, the rules of the game – "If you play poker, you have to know the rules of poker! You can't just throw cards around" – then some basic techniques. How you do things, not what you do. Then show some examples - "It could look like this. Or it could look like that, if you follow these rules ... This way, you're giving people a leg up." Some of his projects of the last 4 or 5 years, although it reaches back to work in Sarajevo in the '90s, is conducting these kind of practise, although he modestly wonders whether it will be any better than the design advocacy of 60s. It hasn't "got the momentum yet", he says. But the important factor is that people have choose to do it - he doesn't believe that it's something to be imposed from the top down - people have to want to do it. (This is all fascinating to me, given my interest in adaptive design, systems design etc., and particularly how you put creative power into the hands of people who aren't architects or designers.)

Developing this perhaps, Geoff notes how Woods' work often captures the imagination of those outside of architecture. Woods replies that "the irony is that he has always addressed my work to architects." Yet if it's ironic that others would pick it up, he's thrilled that they do, particularly if "architects are asleep" as he half-jokingly puts it. He does want to influence architects, though, as they have an important responsibility to society. He notes that he's approached architecture philosophically, drawing from ethics, cybernetics (from late '50s, early 60s), and so on, and this emphasis on the philosophical and visual side of communicating architecture may have enabled some of this transference to other disciplines or another form of discourse.

Picking up on the visual communication side, Bryan mentions that one of his favourite examples of Woods' work is in Michael Sorkin's book 'Against the Wall: Israel's Barrier to Peace', and actually was a game, rather than a drawing. Woods is clearly pleased that the subject of the 'border wall game' came up, and tells how, instead of creating a building or some other construction project, they created a metaphor for simultaneously keeping the structure in place and tearing it down. He felt that anything he did was going to endorse the wall, unless he could find a different way of approaching it. So he took on the idea of bringing the wall down creatively, in  a creative act, using the idea of a game (deploying rules again, interestingly). He seems to enjoy the idea of using games in this context, noting "We all know it's just a game ... a very serious game."

I mention his extraordinary drawings, which are both detailed and impressionistic, therefore having a certain open-endedness that reinforces his earlier points, perhaps. I ask whether he's approached work with any other media, that might either engage a wider sensory range – beyond visual stimulation and communication, say into soundworks or communicate via the other senses – or has thought of working in film, say. He says that other than some installations, it's "not my thing, I haven't been there yet." (I like the subtle way Woods implies he's still learning, developing here.)  In terms of film, he mentions an engagement with the film 'Alien 3' in 1993, which he worked on for a few weeks. However, he laughs, "you don't want to be designer working in movie industry!" You're the lowest of the low, apparently. He finds it amusing that architects complain that clients don't understand their work; they should try working with studio execs. Tantalisingly, he mentions he does have a fantasy of making a big budget Hollywood movie. He actually wrote a screenplay a while back, based on his underground Berlin project. He diligently read the Syd Field book. But he thinks that it would be too frustrating. In Hollywood, he says, you don't produce a product, it's always about the process. But he finds it an intriguing media.

He says "The drawings are about ideas ultimately. They're not about drawing." So he uses drawing to find an idea. "If you could use the movie in the same way - it would be incredible". And he know movies have been used in this way – it's clearly a medium he respects and admires, when done well – but he ends by saying that are by and large formulaic. (I suspect he's looking for a malleability and complexity to communicate his work that the economics of movie making just impinge upon (currently). His work to me often suggests film, as powerful as they are drawings. But I love this point about trying to search for ideas through the act of drawing – it's why, in my own small way, I occasionally scribble here on City of Sound, as well as write. I think blogs could do more to communicate through drawing.)

In terms of where his inspiration comes from, in response to a query from Geoff about this and his approach education, Woods says he can't honestly say where inspiration comes from, directly. He settles on reading as a major influence – "Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Sartre" – and then art, such as "plenty of Brueghel, Goya and Picasso" ... "Everything visual stimulates me", though some media less than others, he notes with a wry grin. But ultimately, "texts have a profound influence on the way I think".

In terms of education, he's taught at Cooper Union where he's been given real latitude. He makes a point of saying that he works with students as he would with any other people – "Students are just people, aren't they?!". He almost hates the term student. The most important thing is to set out to question, lay down some rules, develop modes of answering the question. The most important thing a teacher does is ask the right question. (He also runs the Research Institute for Experimental Architecture).

Bryan asks what Woods is working on today. Woods replies obliquely, beginning by outlining his approach to work. He's always worked alone, more or less. Never really had an office. He has collaborators, from time to time. Basically he sits down, spends a lot of time thinking, not necessarily doing anything, I read, I draw. "I've recently done some very large drawings". "The ideas that interest me now", he says, "are always around the artificial landscape, architecture being a method of reforming the earth's surface ... we're re-forming nature ... making a new earth. I used to call it "Terra Nova  in my latinate years!"

He hasn't worked on any building-like structures as such, recently. The work in Vienna was Investigating architecture as energy - trying to look at architecture and making of space that way. "Socially", he says, "we all have to deal with the question of slums". References the Mike Davis book, and the importance of studying, and working with, favelas. It's something he's turning some of his attention to. He says "it's a little preliminary to say (what he's doing) but if we can do anything from the outside for those on the inside, it's going to be to empower them somehow, to transform the slum from the inside. It can't be us airlifting in ready-made solutions ..."

Again, this reinvigoration of, and reconfiguration of, design advocacy. Fascinating. He says he'll contact us first when these projects emerge, leading to his closing point. He says that he very much believes in books – he publishes books – but of architecture blogs and the internet, he says "I think what what you people are doing is so incredibly creative, that's why I'm here tonight." And with that, we close.

So many thanks to Lebbeus Woods for sharing his skill, experience and insight. He was a naturally witty, wise speaker – a genuine communicator, in an entirely off-the-cuff way; friendly, and extremely patient with our informal approach. Ultimately, a real inspiration as a theorist, educator and practitioner. He binds these three elements together so well, such that each informs the others, and then deploys these ideas in war zones and disaster-stricken cities. As highly regarded as his work is, it makes you think he deserves more credit still. Despite constantly challenging architecture to reinvent itself for contemporary conditions, there's clearly a love and value for what the practice and the profession should be. Despite this, he's rarely described as an architect and is, to a certain extent, marginalised by an architectural community in thrall to starchitects. Yet in terms of reconfiguring what architecture is, is there a more important architect working today?

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

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