cityofsound

The windy city

Reading a recent Building Design article on the introduction of wind turbines on Elephant & Castle in London, I sense a tenuous link between that and last month's note on modeling the behaviour of sound in urban spaces, not just within buildings.

Repeating my hasty sketch, intended to indicate sounds bouncing through a space ('wavetracing') after Arup's SoundLab, it's easy to mentally reconfigure that to indicate wind - although of course the engineering actually being carried out here is far more precise, and wind has quite different characteristics to sound.

The engineering on the Southwark project is by Brian Dunlop Associates and Gas Dynamics. Dunlop says:

"There’s plenty of data for photovoltaic performance in urban locations but very little regarding urban wind power. From a planning point of view, we want to put to bed fears over noise and vibration, and so far the results have proved positive." Dunlop does add, though, that there is an enormous amount of data to be analysed. “The equipment used collects information every second using sophisticated software created by Gas Dynamics,” he says. "At the moment South Bank University is analysing data gathered from the first three months."

Arup's engineers are also modelling the way wind moves through open urban spaces, which sounds impossibly complex. Arup's Rupert Blackstone:

"Modelling urban wind movement is a real challenge. It’s almost impossible to be predictive because every environment has local characteristics that affect air flow. The surface roughness — meaning the variation in height of a neighbourhood’s buildings — has a huge influence on the wind resource available. There’s really no point in extrapolating from meteorological data — you have to be location-specific in your analysis.”

Wind turbines, as with other renewable energy sources, are only likely to increase in number throughout urban space, and personally I'm all for them. I've never quite understood arguments against their introduction - a few messy bird-kills here and there aside - and have personally almost always found them aesthetically appealing. I recall Justin Good's piece for Design Observer, when he almost systematically 'proved', in that way philosophy doctorates do, that "wind farms are objectively beautiful."

However, the article was predicated on the most likely current siting for wind farms - rural environments - and so hinged on the suggestion that people found wind farms unappealing as they resembled modernist sculptures, and so "don’t want the ideology of high modernism disrupting the very different order of the natural world."

In urban environments, smaller vertical axis wind turbines can look like modernist sculptures and all the better for it, perhaps more universally at ease in this setting. With some of the newer wind turbines on the market, they're not a million miles away from the Alexander Calder or Barbara Hepworth sculptures that we see at the Fundaçion Joan Miro or pinned to the side of John Lewis in Oxford Street.

Still, the portrayed settings for these turbines are often the ex-urban 'object in the landscape'-style houses familiar to photogenic regions of Australia, California, Scandinavia etc.

This is perhaps due to their unwieldy size thus far but also, I think, a cultural association between renewable energy and 'the great outdoors', which is entirely false and actually problematic. As with water tanks there's an irony that most renewable energy products appear to be designed for properties in rural settings or at best on the fringes of urban sprawl. Whereas, of course, most people live in cities, in areas that are the highest contributors to greenhouse pollution. I'd like to see small elegant turbines intended for domestic use in tighter urban context.

That's why it's so interesting to see the experiments at Elephant & Castle. As Monocle reported last month, on some days Denmark achieves all its electricity demands via wind power - with an average of 20 percent. The blades developed by leading Danish company LM Glasfiber are 61.5m long, travel at around 300km/h and pull 9Gs. Not exactly what you want atop your house. But the Windspire, Helix, and particularly the Quiet Revolution, designed for small scale wind generation in cities, are developments that just might. Indeed, Quiet Revolution is almost designed to take advantage of the turbulence found in urban settings - or at least not be impaired by it.

Their current QR5 is 5-metres tall, but appears to need a 9-metre base - again, outside of what most urban residents have space for. But just as water tanks are now being designed with apartment dwellers and renters in mind, we'll surely see smaller-scale generators extrapolated from the QR5 - such as their 'in development' QR2.5 for instance.

Their projects include a QR5 to be mounted on top of a listed building on Southwark Bridge Road; planning permission granted, installation in "late 2007".

See also these seven turbines planned for the top of a development in Croydon. (Has all of south London been turned over to a giant test-bed for wind power or what? Wouldn't be a bad thing.)

Quiet Revolution's display turbines are also interesting, comprising LEDs embedded in the blades, combining renewable energy with informational possibilities - hopefully carried a little further than simple branding (an obvious display would be amount of energy contributed, in the spirit of the presentation I gave last week at Interesting South). I'd also love to know what they sound like. I suspect, in the spirit of positive soundscapes, that they would sound fantastic, actually. Should it necessarily be a quiet revolution?

We look forward to hearing more about these projects, and their impact on surrounding neighbourhoods, and also to a further refinement of their design, derived both from the sculptural lineage noted above and the huge variety in urban conditions found worldwide (wind may be the same force everywhere, but the spatial characteristics, cultural capital and related environmental conditions certainly aren't. Will we see cities such as Chicago and Wellington increasingly talking up their windiness?)

Do add a comment if you know of similar projects (perhaps even, dare I suggest it, outside of south London).

Finally, returning to the first point, modelling wind through these spaces is just one of the numerous fascinating developments around urban modelling - extending increasingly sensor-based models of buildings, generated and maintained throughout the lifecycle of a building and known in the trade as building information modelling (BIM), up to the scale of cities, aka city information modelling (CIM). So as well as developmental tools, speculating as to potential environmental behaviour of buildings and spaces, some of these systems could be built as real-time feedback loops, indicating the behaviour of urban spaces in real-time. It's a burgeoning loosely-defined field at the moment, running from indices of air pollution, water pollution or informational behaviour through to these live 'field recordings' of wind or sound. As the Building Design article suggests, "an enormous amount of data" can emerge from recording the dynamics of urban wind power, but our ability to now process this data - and then make sense of it through information design - has given us new possibilities for assessing the behaviour of urban environments.

It's also not without problems, as models are just models and not reality, and as such are limited in their expression of territory and have various patterns of power or ideology coded within them  - a great editorial by Flavio Albanese in Domus #908 made a similar point about maps, recently - but when used imaginatively and with well-informed civic value in mind, we begin to have ever-more useful tools that may enable us to sculpt wind, sound and other elemental forces for the benefit of cities and citizens.

Postopolis!: Stanley Greenberg

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stanley Greenberg's website

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

From A-to-Bee

Interesting story filed in the 'Navigation/Wayfinding' section of the BBC News site today. (Sorry, that should read "the 'Science/Nature' section of the BBC News site". I forgot to remove my filter.)

On bumblebees. And their extraordinary facility for wayfinding.

"What we are showing is that it is eminently possible for bumblebees to forage more than five kilometres from the nest," said co-author Dr Mark O'Neill, from the University of Oxford ... It is not entirely clear how the insects navigate but their vision seems to help keep them on course and recognise landmarks. "We believe there will be a difference, because they use vision, especially the horizon edge for guidance. So a cluttered environment is liable to be more problematic and challenging to the bees than a green field environment," said Dr O'Neill."

"The insects' "maps" also include odours, but these are limited to less than 2m (7ft). For example, when a bee has emptied the nectar in a flower, it leaves chemical "post-it notes" to tell others where it has been. The countryside has a more varied scent composition than the urban landscape, and researchers are now plotting bee routes to see which kinds of environment the insects prefer. "We are trying to find out more about how bees forage, or look for their food," explained Dr O'Neill. "We're particularly interested to see if they find certain environments easier to navigate."

Interesting stuff. Full story.

Coincidentally, I picked up a couple of books for the office recently, neither of which appear to mention bees but perhaps ought to. The first, entitled 'Wayfinding' (Rotovision) has been out a while, and looks OK if a little mundane. The second - and perhaps I'm being seduced by the sheer quality of Lars Müller publications here - looks far more interesting, and is called 'Wayshowing' by Per Mollerup.

It's utterly beautiful and looks to pull of the trick off being thorough, imaginative and practical. For example, Mollerup's introduction includes a couple of definitions of 'sign':

"The first meaning covers the sign outside the butcher's shop, the directional signs in the airport, the traffic signs in the street, and so on. The other meaning uses the word 'sign' to stand for any phenomenon that has a meaning. That usage is related to Umberto Eco's definition of a sign as anything that human beings can use to lie. In this meaning, the word 'sign' is used more or less synonymously with with such words as 'mark', 'symbol' and 'signal'. A letter, a whistle signal, a red beret, a hand waving, and a Nike swoosh are all signs. But so are the signs outside the butcher's shop and any other sign in the narrow meaning described previously. The broad meaning includes the narrow meaning, not the other way round"

By widening the scope, 'Wayshowing' is deliciously ambitious. Yet it's full of practical examples, models and photographs, and it looks like I'll be drawing from it for years. As to the title:

"Wayfinding' is a term that many designers and manufacturers of signs and signage systems like to use. They claim that they work with wayfinding. Perhaps they do, but they haven't found a way to precise language. In their work as sign writers, they should be occupied with 'wayshowing'. Wayshowing relates to wayfinding as writing relates to reading and as speaking relates to hearing. The purpose of wayshowing is to facilitate wayfinding. Wayshowing is the means. Wayfinding is the end. Wayshowing is a new terms developed by the author of this book to clarify this distinction."

Some page spreads and a handy link below.

Wayshowing, by Per Mollerup [Amazon UK|US]

The Shock of the New World, with respect to the flora and fauna of Australia

[First of several notes from a trip to Australia in April 2006]

Australia was familiar - same language; a shared culture to a large degree, more so than America - but utterly foreign at the same time, and I hadn't expected that difference to be articulated so immediately through its natural environment. In response, here's an impressionistic selection of notes and images on encountering Australian flora, fauna and environment for the first time, influenced partly by my simultaneous reading of Robert Hughes's majestic The Fatal Shore. (This motif - reading historical accounts, whilst encountering the contemporary - is lifted specifically from Jonathan Raban's Passage to Juneau.) I've also folded in other accounts of New Worlds, including Brazil and America, drawing from art, film, food and books, all circling around the sense of environmental difference to Europe.

(Despite the title of this piece combining an earlier Hughes classic with the concept of the 'New World', amidst talk of flora and fauna, I'll try to desist with the Georgian vocab. I'm aware of the politics that could still swirl around a white Englishman writing about such things, even 228 years later. Equally Peter Conrad notes that even Australian writers should move on from wallowing in the country's fascinating if "painful past". I'm not Australian, and despite my belief that history informs the future, point taken. Further caveats: I saw, oh, less than 5% of Australia, it's all too easy to fall into cliché when confronted with the unexpected, and my notes will particularly suffer comparison to the quotations they sit next to. Either way, here goes.)

As soon as I stepped off the plane at Brisbane airport, my jetlag-frazzled senses seemed instantly reorientated towards the natural world suddenly around me; an indistinct sensorial collision involving me and a flurry of trees, shrubs, birds, insects, spiders, flowers, soil and so on. The intense sub-tropical heat and light almost over-exposed everything initially, heightening the effect as my squinting eyes slowly began feasting on everything around me ...

London hasn't changed

Interesting piece in The Economist on Friday (by Tim Cross I think). It reports on an updated version of the highly influential 'Descriptive Map of London Poverty' by Charles Booth plus team. (I mentioned the map previously here, and a version is available online.) What this new research suggests is fascinating, perhaps particularly to those interested in psychogeography, spatial haunting, structures of feeling or any other approaches to investigating the collision between past and present in the city. The Economist article - 'There goes the neighbourhood' - finds that there is a consistency of place even within a city in as apparently constant flux as London.

"In many ways, London has changed dramatically in the past century. It has sprawled far beyond its 1898 boundaries. The network of underground transport has expanded, and cars have appeared. The city has been bombed in two world wars. The middle classes fled, then returned. Yet when Booth's maps are updated using data from the last census, the changes are less striking than what has stayed the same. Not only do the broad patterns found in the 19th century hold—the East End is still poor, the West End still rich—but so do many local ones."

One of the interesting things about Booth's map for me was the "necessarily impressionistic" approach to judging streets. His researchers simply walked all over London, noting down what they saw - from the shape of the streets to the tiniest details of flotsam and jetsam of living - as well as talking to people. The streets were then coded - sometimes with facets like viciousness! - and mapped. I'm interested in these variable approaches to working with cities. For all their lack of validity, ethics or scientific rigour, they are often far more detailed, ironically, and the subjective personal views therein often provide  engaging hooks upon which to hang your own constructed response to the city - and the latter is surely key to sensing the soft city.

Hence Booth's Map will always be interesting artefact; a key point in the creation of social science, yet impressionistic. What this new research indicates, using the 2001 census data and combining by collapsing categories, is that the narrative of the map  is holding up rather well a century later. That is, a remarkable number of places within London have much the same 'look and feel' - or socio-economic status - in 2001 as they did in 1898. For instance, Chelsea has changed more than most, as the diagram below indicates, and yet "most of the poorest areas in 2001 were also poor in 1898, and in almost exactly the same places."

The article runs through the economic reasons for this - according to The Economist, essentially slum housing stock being replaced by poor-quality public housing in the mid-20thC, and so on. Those areas that retained Georgian and Victorian housing stock have gentrified.

"The social geography of London may change even less in the next 108 years than it has done since 1898. There are, after all, fewer poor neighbourhoods with pretty housing, of the kind that may be colonised by middle-class pioneers. The supply was beginning to dry up even in the mid-1960s, when the hero of Michael Frayn's novel “Towards the End of the Morning” tries to find one. Following a frustrating search, he admitted defeat: “There was no shortage of slums; but they were not Georgian or Regency slums.”"

Yet perhaps there's more to it than The Economist's rather dry property-based filters are suggesting? (Even in London, where for centuries money and property has been all, such that this effect will be magnified.) Perhaps areas may have a form of intrinsic character - which is expressed in the built fabric for sure and can certainly morph over time - but also in other ways, beyond simple housing stock. For if there isn't, it indicates an even higher level of agency for architecture and urban planning in the creation of the city, right?

Change is on the cards

To Arup last night, on the way home, to the 'book' launch of their Drivers of Change 2006. The word 'book' is in inverted commas there as this is actually a box of cards - somewhere between IDEO's interaction design Method Cards and the classic Oblique Strategies, but here containing rich, research-based information across numerous sectors refracted through the STEEP framework (Social, Technological, Economic, Environmental and Political factors. Wot no 'cultural'? Never mind.)

"What will our world be like in 2050? This set of cards identifies some of the leading drivers of change that affect our future. Each card depicts a single driver. A factoid and rhetorical question are on one face, backed up by a brief indication of the breadth and depth of the content on the other face. The set was devised by the Foresight & Innovation team at Arup, a group tasked with exploring emerging trends and how they impact upon business of Arup and its clients. The publication serves not only as a vibrant visual record of research, but also as a tool for discussion groups, personal prompts, for workshop events or as a 'thought for the week'."

I thoroughly commend this kind of highly enlightened 'open-sourcing' of research (I mentioned similar strategies, under the sub-heading 'Transparency and nurturing design', in a report for the DTI.) It's a more pragmatic version of their colleague OMA/AMO's output, perhaps.

Chatting to Duncan Wilson, of Arup's Foresight and Innovation team, they'd come up with the idea after running many research-based workshops, designing this card-set to kick-start such sessions, prompting discussion, providing tools for inspiration, as well as a distribution channel for these usefully provocative facts. (Maybe they should have released the cards individually, in order to create a Pokemon-style trading cult around them. Ah the possibilities ...)

Either way, they may prove very useful for anyone doing any kind of situated innovation work anywhere, and you can find out more at Arup's Drivers of Change 2006 site. Cheers to Duncan for the invite. A few snaps:

Arup: Drivers of Change 2006
Arup: press release

"China: The Three Emperors, 1662-1795", Royal Academy, London

I may be somewhat overwhelmed after absorbing this exhibition of such extraordinary richness, historical interest and crushingly lovely detail, but as I wander from the Royal Academy's Three Emperors show into cold, dark late-afternoon London, I am almost struck dumb with awe. I can barely write, such will be the chasm between these words and those works. I've never witnessed anything like it. I half suspect that London has never seen an exhibition of such sheer craft before, even given this world city's position as a major cultural centre stretching back to the time much of this work emerges from.

The skill, scale and detail of these works is almost beyond comprehension. One room of these national treasures, many of which have never been sent abroad from the Palace Museum in Beijing before, would have been a treat in itself. However, we have twelve packed rooms of artworks to navigate, across numerous media. It's a wondrous, thoroughly inspirational experience.

The works induce a studious, rapt gaze so it's worth finding a time when tourist numbers will be low. The otherwise excellent catalogue can only fail to represent the physical beauty of the exhibition, given that photographic reproductions on the page simply cannot do justice to works almost exclusively painted on to silk, with its delicate weave often revealing shimmering patterns when viewed from different angles. Equally, the scale of many of the pieces - some of the scrolls were originally 60 metres long, and even unfurled to a detail take the full length of some of the Academy's galleries - require the ability to peer at the detail of individually painted leaves in trees and the expression on a courtier's face and then stand back to take in the full view of the Yangzi river or walled city of Ghuazou. These dizzying shifts of scale, from near-microscopic paintwork of ten-thousand 'long-life' (shou) characters on a jar signifying eternal life through to one of the actual throne rooms of the Forbidden City, are perhaps the single most enlightening aspect of the entire exhibition.

After the entrance of embroidered silk costume and full-size portraits depicting the three Emperors themselves - the Kangxi Emperor (1662-1722), the Yhongzheng Emperor (1722-1735) and the Qianlong Emperor (1736-1795) - the next room of work produced by artists of the Qing dynasty court had the greatest effect on me, dominated by tall vertical paintings arranged around huge horizontal scrolls depicting events such as 'The Qianlong Emperor's Southern Inspection Tour, Scroll Twelve: Return to the Palace' by Xu Yang and assistants (1764-70) or 'The Kangxi Emperor's Southern Inspection Tour, Scroll Eleven: Nanjing to Jinshan', by Wang Hui and assistants (1691-98). The scroll form is fascinating, enabling both a diagrammatic representation of the city as well as a literally unfolding narrative. It conveys architectural and geographic detail, as well as historical events and portrayal of ritual, moving across mist-shrouded, forested islands with jade-like outcrops of rock, into the rigorous geometry of the Forbidden City, realistically depicted in great detail by artists living inside the palace. The series, 'Portraits of the Yongzheng Emperor Enjoying Himself throughout the Twelve Months', conveys both a vivid sense of place - somehow other-worldly and everyday at once - whilst depicting a distinct cultural practice. Historically revealing and aesthetically powerful.

Given his own research into multi-perspectival maps, my friend Jack Schulze will particularly enjoy the twin-perspective city view of Beijing from 1767, by Xu Yang, 'A Scene Described in the Qianlong Emperor's Poem 'Bird's-Eye View of the Capital'. It's a beautiful piece of representation, featuring the more traditional axonometric perspective, from a viewpoint high above the city, morphing into a European-influenced 'vanishing-point' linear perspective. As well as being formally fascinating from a design perspective, it's also a breathtakingly gorgeous depiction of the snow-covered city at the lunar New Year, full of architectural detail. In this practice of jiehua, or architectural painting, from this period, we see an intriguing compromise emerging from the constraints imposed by fusing these two modes of perspective, with buildings often fading out into mist at the top of the painting, hiding the otherwise misaligned vanishing points.

The beauty of this jiehua can also be conveyed by simply reading the names given to spaces in these cities: "The Room of the Ink Clouds in the Hall of Mental Cultivation"; "Hall of Supreme Harmony, Forbidden City"; "Hall for Worshipping Ancestors"; "Palace of Earthly Tranquility"; "Mountain Villa to Escape the Heat"; "The Gate of the Mid-day Peace" and so on.

Elsewhere, I was also taken with twin sets of sixteen bells (bianzhong) and sixteen sonorous stones (bianqing), hanging from 3.5 metre-tall stands constructed from gilt bronze, gold-lacquered wood and nephrite (jade) - the sound of which is tantalisingly absent. The catalogue mentions that the Kangxi Emperor was "intrigued by European musical pitch, and commissioned a major work on Chinese pitch as a result of this exposure." I suppose the only way of enriching this exhibition would be to include some other relevant sensory context, such as the sound of the language and music of the time or the smell of sandalwood from the incense burners, but much of this would either be speculation at best or would appear gimmicky if not articulated extremely carefully indeed, in what is actually an appropriately restrained bit of exhibition design.

Historical context is laced throughout the displays, particularly focusing on the expansionist nature of the Qing dynasty. We see many examples of zhong xi he bi - a combination of Chinese and Western artistic techniques, practiced most successfully by the 'adopted' Jesuit artist Giuseppe Castiglione. Fascinating collisions of technique, aesthetic, philosophy and ritual. Technology too, as scientific instrumentation from Europe was explored thoroughly in workshops around the Palace. Some revealing maps of the world from the Southern perspective are on display here, alongside many clocks and instruments for celestial observation. A small set of dark wooden geometric shapes for exploring Western mathematics are carved so precisely it's as if they are barely physical at all, existing only as formulae, vectors possessing physical presence. The fusion with Buddhist tradition is equally fascinating. As with other successful empires, conquering territories meant infusing their existing ritual with native cultural practices, and there is much evidence of hybridised cultural production as a result. For instance, the jade sculptures in a room devoted to a religious practice hovering around Tibetan Buddhism, Manchu shamanism, Daoism and Confucian rituals of state - such as the Set of Seven Royal Treasures: Golden Wheel, Horse, Elephant, Loyal General, Able Minister, Woman, Divine Pearls - with which, according to Indian myth, the possessor would be aided in ruling his domain. And of course, the calligraphy, not only in 'traditional Chinese' as practiced by the Emperors themselves, documenting ancient poetry, but often in a variety of scripts. There are numerous Imperial documents in Manchu and Mongolian scripts, somewhat Arabic in appearance though read from left-to-right, converging alongside Chinese scripts read from right-to-left. In one extraordinary document, Latin alongside Chinese and Manchu, as an admonishing 'memo' to the Pope declaring the loyalty of sixteen Jesuit missionaries to the Kangxi Emperor.

Other areas of fascination remain in mind, over and above the general wealth of exhibits. I was captured throughout by the graphic flourishes that will absorb other visual designers, from the various examples of tessellated patterns, to the silken rainbow curves in costume depicting waves merging into symbolic icons, abstract and figurative. Equally, the Emperor's seals, embodied in lacquered boxes and deployed as innately authoritative red graphic devices.

A more expected style, the traditional monochrome ink landscapes of the educated elite - the literati - are all the more alluring 'in person', often combining bold composition with delicate brushwork. This work of the 'literati', produced outside the Court, often appeared to comprise works of starkly quiet, coded rebellion, infused with symbolic patterns mourning the lost dynasty of the Ming - somewhat like the layered meaning of Shostakovitch's symphonies under Stalin. Particularly startling is the deliberately distorted calligraphy of Fu Shan. His 'Running Cursive' (c.1682) renders the phrase "The 76-year old man Fu Shan wrote in a small garden beneath willows" almost illegible with wild flourishes and loops, now seen as a protest in purely formal terms - described as "mad-cursive" in the catalogue - and, given the context, as avant-garde as anything I've seen recently.

The final room reflects on the rich layering of meaning in much Chinese work, with the language's many homophones deployed in elaborate visual puns. Actually, our word 'pun' almost devalues the beauty of these constructions, in both linguistic and visual form. For instance a particularly vivid work, 'Ten Thousand Blessings to the Emperor', depicts a cloud of black and red bats descending on a glade of ancient pine trees. With the bat (fu) as a homonym for blessings (also fu); and given the red colour (joyful, warding off malevolent spirits) and the pine trees (representing longevity), this becomes an elaborate birthday card for the Emperor.

Overall, these are brief personal highlights from what is probably the single greatest collection of historically significant artistic work I've ever seen. The exhibition runs in London for months (until April 2006) and will hopefully travel thereafter. Do see it if you can.

Royal Academy of Arts: China: The Three Emperors, 1662-1795
Three Emperors exhibition catalogue (hardcover) [Amazon UK|US]

The positive leap second is cancelled

Working where I do - BBC Radio and Music, and vaguely close to the operational support around live and on-demand broadcasts - I tend to get some occasionally fabulous emails. Here's today's, from one of our broadcast duty managers:

"More "timelord" information. Sorry to be the harbinger of news of yet more cutbacks but the Earth Orientation Centre of IERS Observatoire de Paris have announced that the positive leap second scheduled for the end of June 2005 has been cancelled. So we are to get one less second than previously expected! For more information see: http://www.npl.co.uk/time/leap_second.html "

So that's alright then.

Transportation Futuristics

"What is “transportation futuristics”? Many of us are familiar with covers from Popular Science that depict commuters buzzing around in tiny aircraft and landing on rooftops, or fanciful drawings of vehicles that run on roads, float on water and also take to the air. The basic problem many of us face each day-- how to get from Point A to Point B in the least amount of time with the least amount of trouble-- has inspired many to dream of marvelous ways to solve that problem ... This exhibit examines some of the efforts to address transportation needs in ways that didn’t quite get off the ground literally or figuratively."

Transportation Futuristics
[via Peter Marsh - thanks!]

Science Museum opens up storeroom

"The Science Museum is opening up its vast storerooms in west London. The public can now book a curator-led tour of some of the 170,000 objects that are not on display in the museum's South Kensington exhibition halls. Known as Blythe House, the storerooms are home to early telescopes and operating tables, Stone Age tools and even freeze-dried GM mice."

The (quite-brilliantly-named) manager of collections at the Science Museum, Xerxes Mazda, says "each object, everything you see, tells a story." I'm sure, given that the Science Museum itself only displays 7% of the collection - the rest is at Blythe House. Tours are alternate Wednesdays and free, but must be booked in advance (details)

BBC News: Tours open up science treasures
Science Museum: Ingenious Tours