cityofsound

Postopolis! LA, day five / SYNTHe green roof project / Los Angeles

Final day of Postopolis! LA. On the one hand, it’s difficult to believe that the end is in sight (and sad, too); on the other, my tiredness is an indication that, yes, we have been doing this for almost a week now. But the exhilaration associated with the event carries us through the finale and beyond.

Before the evening’s events unfold in predictably unpredictable fashion though, most of the Postopolis! LA organisers, curators and several speakers and guests converge on the SYNTHe urban green roof project in Downtown LA. This is a pretty fantastic project in many ways, and allegedly the ‘first green roof in LA’ (although that’s slightly hard to believe. Or indeed define. Also, conflict of interest alert: Arup Los Angeles were consultants to the project, which I had no idea about until afterward.)

 

 

Designed by SCI-Arc teacher Alexis Rochas it’s a laser-cut (increasingly everything in LA is laser-cut) galvanised metal roof, creating a curving landscape on the top of The Flat, a converted Holiday Inn. The roof curves not just for formal experiment but also as sits on top of the varied bulky services that typically adorn such buildings, neatly covering up these air-conditioning units as well as creating a new façade (This aspect of exploring the “fifth façade” of the roof is interesting in itself - given the rise in popularity of both tall buildings and satellite-based mapping like Google Earth, these surfaces are looked down upon as never before. There is no longer any justification not to care about the design of these spaces.)

No two panels up here are alike; each panel is bent to shape (along score marks created by the CNC machines, presumably?) and then snapped into place on-site.

 

 

 

However, the roof is essentially significant due to its productive capacity. The roofing structure is designed with grooves of varying depth, filled with a custom soil mix and then planted with various edible plants which are used by the restaurant at the base of the building (called Blue Velvet. Dennis Hopper not included perhaps fortunately). Food waste from the restaurant (the non-meat stuff, to avoid rodents) is returned to the garden as compost. The residents of the low-income apartments that comprise the rest of The Flat get to tend and use the garden apparently, though its primary function is in this nice closed loop with the restaurant.

 

Initial concern over heat build-up due the use of the metal was dissipated a little by realising that the reflected heat will reduce the thermal build-up in the building (if more roofs were like this, would it have the same impact as the humanity-saving white paint idea?). And of course green roofs have fantastic qualities in terms of better dealing with stormwater run-off as well as this natural thermal insulation. Still, it was hot up there that day, and it wasn’t summer yet. It’ll be interesting to see how the plants will do when it's hotter than July, but their planting is rotated to match the menu and seasonality, so presumably the plants are selected with climate in mind too.

 

95% of the planting is edible, with the remaining 5% to brighten the place up (though lavender is there both for ice-cream etc. but also to attract bees to help with pollination.) There was a patch of grass down one ‘terrace’, which was deliberately planted for people to sit on towards the end of the day, as the sun is going down. The view is fairly spectacular from up there, being on the edge of Downtown largely facing away from the high-rises, and being up there with a glass of wine, a book and a sunset would be wonderful. Grass is thirsty, so there plan is to water it until it’s fully bedded in and then let it dry out to form a kind of thickish layer of dry grass matting, which seems smart.

 

 

The roof was strong enough to hold a fair few people, as tested by our visitors gathering around Rochas, eager to hear more details about the garden (in fact, one thinks some informatics display illustrating the garden's real-time performance from street level would be interesting (web cam, soil temperature, acidity, moisture etc.). You'd never know it was there from the street.) Still, this garden structure absorbs people very well, creating dramatic, almost heroic, romantic views.

 

 

 

It's an odd but enjoyable feeling being up there. The structure gives a little under foot, contributing slightly to the sense that you shouldn't be up there. But that's derived from our traditional and absurd waste of these spaces. (When I think of Saul Griffiths' concept of 'peak waste', I often interpret it as much spatially as anything else, through wasted roofs, under-used office space, inefficient systems like car parks and the like.)

 

There are always loading issues when retrofitting existing buildings with green roofs, as wet soil can get very heavy. Rochas explained a special soil mix reduced the load. Irrigation is by hand at the moment, via volunteers who look after the garden, but they’re keen to get “robots” to do the watering in future.

I’m not sure how much food it generates, or indeed what is used by the restaurant. At lunch after, it’s clear that a very small percentage of the restaurant’s needs could be catered for by the garden, just as the restaurant would produce far more compost than the garden could possibly handle. So the loop is a little out of kilter. However, the project remains inspirational. Standing up there, looking down onto thousands of square metres of non-productive, non-useful roof space, just sitting there in the sun soaking up heat, wasting energy and giving nothing back to the city, you realise you’re standing on a structure and a system that could be 'cut-and-paste' across all those roofs, utterly changing the city. [More SYNTHe photos here and lots more detail on the project here]

If it had only demonstrated this, it would have been a great project, but it's fascinating and engaging on numerous levels. It’s perhaps the primary project I’ve talked to people about since I got back to Australia, just as Benjamin Bratton’s talk tonight was and remains the most thought-provoking presentation.

And as such, SYNTHe echoed one of the primary themes emerging from the week’s work. Oddly enough - or perhaps not oddly at all - car-bound, concrete-covered LA is home to numerous thriving projects, at all scales, that engage with food production, gardens and other productive landscapes. Not least in the work of Fritz Haeg, Ari Kletzky, Fallen Fruit, Greenmeme and others speaking at Postopolis! but also visible elsewhere around the city.

Perhaps the other themes emerging from the week, for me at least, would gravitate around the complex form of LA itself (I always learn so much from the cities that conferences are held in that it should be listed as a formal component of the conference) and the palpable sense of innovation around the place.

Directly related to my work, the talks by Ben Cerveny, Eric Rodenbeck, Patrick Keller, Christian Moeller, Robert Miles Kemp and Bryan Boyer were particularly useful and enlightening.

Another theme would be the increasingly ubiquitous presence of fabrication tools, techniques and practice: through laser-cutting, CNC machines and sometimes rapid prototyping. Evidence of this is everywhere. You walk into any restaurant, bar or shop and you’re likely to be looking past a complex undulating roof structure or a panelised screen etched, scored and punctured to within an inch of its life. On a recent trip to London, I was struck by the preponderance of large LED screens around the city; here it’s laser-cut structures of varying scales. (Is that due to lack of sunshine in London and excess of same in California?!)

More significantly of course, its influence is visible at larger scale in the work of Eric Owen Moss and others emerging in and around the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), with many documented in the edition of A+U I mentioned earlier. This work exemplifies the looming, benevolent influence of SCI-Arc on ‘the scene’ here. Just as certain universities provided a silent backdrop to Postopolis! New York, here SCI-Arc is behind a lot of the work and thinking here, often to great effect (a note to follow on that).

This emphasis on fabrication has a long history in Los Angeles architecture, design and engineering, not least due to the ability to borrow tools and techniques from the car design industry so strong around here. And before that, an earlier wave of LA designers like Neutra, Eames, Lustig et al relied on the skills and craft of the boat-building industry. So this concern with fabrication and industrial design has a long and honourable history here, yet it feels like this is allied with an increasingly broad intellectual framework. Again, this is perhaps a sign of SCI-Arc at work.

In an occasionally oblique interview at Archinect, current director of SCI-Arc Eric Owen Moss talked a little about this. About “those people understanding, utilizing and applying new technical skills; milling skills, CNC skills, vacuum forming skills, laser cutting skills, all of the 3D forming skills, parametric drawing and BIM skills, and so on. But what you want, are the students who can combine those tools with conceptual skills ... you want students who are not interested in (only tools) but also interested in conception, idea, fabrication.”

He had earlier stated:

“Sci Arc is not a trade school. We still have the capacity to satisfy the requirements of accreditation boards. However, our objective has always been to create independent, critical and intellectual students. I think the point is, to teach a group of students to deal with complicated subjects, in a clear coherent way. To speak to the world they are going into, and not to speak to the architects only. The architects as professionals have the problem of only talking the language of their profession. In the process of doing buildings nowadays, especially the bigger projects, architects have to have the capacity to talk and work with many people who are not necessarily architects. This is very important. So, we have many people coming from different areas lecturing on philosophy, science, engineering, fabrication, history. We are bringing in the usual and the unusual voices into the profession to develop that capacity to think, understand and analyze. And after that, the students have to go out into the world and find a way to make their critical and intellectual capacities useful and productive.” [Interview with Eric Owen Moss at Archinect]

This points to another theme of Postopolis! LA: that of architects and other designers increasingly engaging in fields outside their traditional discipline boundaries, working in multi-disciplinary collaborations often focused on deploying ‘design thinking’ to the broader themes of the day. Not simply solving problems but framing questions. Not simply building stuff but helping shape a lens through which to understand and shape our world. This I am all in favour of, with the caveat that it is best done with grace, humility and broad skills and experience. The theme emerged several times, and is perhaps the most interesting area of design at this point. But one also wonders whether it is simply a reaction to the global financial crisis and the vertiginous drop in jobs in architecture and urban development i.e. a need to find a new job, a new role. (Later that evening, Paul Petrunia mentioned that Archinect job listings had plummeted by something like 90% almost overnight.) Fortunately, most of the time at Postopolis! LA, the discussion was a lot deeper than the need to find a new job, not least in Bryan Boyer’s great contribution and some of the local practices’ Q&As with the ArchDaily Duo.

Most of all though, the backdrop to this Postopolis! was not Los Angeles, food production and fabrication, or the changing nature of architecture and urbanism but the Banquo at the feast that is the GFC itself (an ugly acronym which does not possess the elegance, power or appropriate levels of heartbreak as the term ‘Great Depression’ it seems to me.)

As noted I was struck by the intensity of focus on this subject, sometimes in maudlin hand-wringing fashion, sometimes with due concern and trepidation, and sometimes as an inspiration for actively and creatively trying to shape better things. It’s not quite the same in Sydney, a city half the size of LA but with much in common. The wheels of creative destruction turn slower here in Australia, which is both good and bad. Most people would not yet be arguing that there’s little or no future in daily newspapers, most mining, broadcast advertising models and much broadcast media, most domestic commercial aviation, speculator-driven property development, private education, shopping malls, supermarkets, big cars, big houses and Nicole Kidman. Or more importantly, that we should “resist the recovery”, as Bratton put it, and that perhaps much of the world needs this change. Much of Australia hasn’t felt the sharp end yet and may be meandering along a little too comfortably, perhaps buffered by China. Perhaps. Though China, of course, already has a very different economic and political model. It would be ironic if Australia were left last man standing with an un-reconstructed 'western-style' neo-liberal economic model due to its trade relationship with China. Although Rudd's government is possibly beginning to move things on - witness the brave and ambitious decision to build a government-led FTTP national broadband network, announced while I was in LA - the scale and complexity of change required is daunting.

When he was Treasurer, Paul Keating, who would later become Prime Minister of Australia, famously said of the early ‘90s recession that it was “the recession Australia had to have”. Well, I suspect this might actually be the one. However. It would be insensitive to stress this point given that tens of thousands of Australians have already lost their jobs.

I realised during this week in Los Angeles that the USA was already being hammered by recession to a far greater degree. perhaps as it had gone bigger and deeper than anywhere else in the first place. Yet this meant that some were thinking about alternative futures to a far greater degree than elsewhere too. To some degree that is coinciding with the Obama effect - how wonderful to hear his speeches sampled in hip-hop all around - though whether he can, or wants to, go far enough isn't clear. In a decent attempt to reimagine the American character - though even I might say written in overly-optimistic fashion - Kurt Anderson notes that aspects of the 'Obama effect' (which would be as temporary as the Bilbao effect anyway) have been put on the back-burner given the need to get on with business. Or get on with reconfiguring what business is. But he's doing the right thing fairly often e.g. General Motors e.g. high-speed rail etc. Government is there to lead, not merely reactively heal over market failure, and this combination of Obama + GFC is leading in potentially interesting directions. Outside of government or other macro-scale movements, perhaps more so.

I understood this intellectually before I arrived, but to see it and hear it in situ was often compelling. I had not thought that witnessing or even partaking in some of these conversations and thought-processes would be a thrilling, unforeseen and personally valuable side-effect of the event. For this I am grateful.

This sensation was most clearly articulated in Benjamin Bratton’s talk, which was the curtain-raiser on our final day on the rooftop of The Standard. I’ve written that one up and Bratton’s kindly agreed that we could re-post his talk in full, so do go and have a read. I think it will continue to resonate for some time. Geoff noted that Bratton’s profile had been framed in the late-afternoon sun by a giant Citibank logo on a ‘scraper behind him. While we're doing landscape irony, over Bratton’s left shoulder was the gleaming cylon-esque form of the Bonaventure hotel, which Fredric Jameson had pronounced the icon of late-capitalism in his landmark 1988 essay ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’. A building as theoretical signifier of a theory about signifiers. Bratton noted that:

“As Zizek was fond of saying, quoting Jameson talking about blockbuster sci-fi movies featuring exploding aliens and cities, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. Perhaps that is less so today.”

Quite so. But if late capitalism might now be late as in parrot, we have work to do. The Bonaventure, which was the structure that instantly cut me off from the street on my first day in Los Angeles, sat there across the urban airspace, stubbornly glaring at us throughout the week. Whether it exemplifies or resists late-capitalism I'll leave to the professional theorists, but I recall it also features as a silent signifier in William H. Whyte's quietly powerful book The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, not directly referenced in the text but sitting there glowering on the page nonetheless, amidst his impassioned chapter on megastructures:

"One feels somewhat disembodied in these spaces. Is it night? Or day? Spring? Or winter? And where are you? You cannot see out of the place. You do not know what city you are in, or if you are in a city at all. The complex could be at an airport or a new town. It could be in the East or the West. The piped music gives no clue. It is the same as everywhere. You could be in a foreign country or on a space satellite. You are in a universal controlled environment. And it is going to date very badlly. Forms of transportation and their attendant cultures have historically produced their most elaborate manifestations just after they have entered the period of their obsolescence. So it may be with the megastructures and the freeway era that bred them. They are the last convulsive embodiment of a time passing, and they are a wretched model for the future of the city." [From The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces by William H. Whyte]

Quite so again. Whyte was writing that almost 30 years ago and Bonaventure and the freeways are still there - this is a problem with hard infrastructure - but I take great solace in the fact that Postopolis! LA was going on right under its nose, and that many of the protagonists were carving out far more interesting, useful and exciting futures for the city.

Bratton was followed by an artist whose work I’ve long admired: Christian Moeller (see a couple of entries in this earlier post on facades) and it was a pleasure to meet him. Write-up to follow.

Yet after Bratton and Moeller the format for the rest of the evening comprised of panels. With Postopolis! New York, this was the one aspect that arguably didn’t work. There the last day felt a bit shambolic, which was probably more of a reflection on us organisers than the panellists. Here, the panels largely worked. The first, on new media art, didn’t fire on all cylinders perhaps, but the subsequent panels were largely fascinating. I won’t attempt to annotate these however. Reviewing a single speaker is tricky enough; a quick-fire panel of between 3 and 5 contributors, 1 or 2 moderators and audience Q&A is beyond me. Suffice to say I gleaned a lot from the media and photography panels in particular, and the last session with the editors of Dwell and Good magazines also worked well.

The turnout for the last day was great, as it had been all week, so thanks again. However, our plans for a grand closing party were foiled somewhat by the venue. But they’ve been gracious hosts for most of the week so we can’t complain too much. Apologies to those who wanted to hear Jace Clayton DJing again (but to those who were hoping to hear Dwell editor Sam Grawe's promised balearic stylings, you might have been better off without.) The event dissipates with a gracious 'thank you to all' from Storefront director Joseph Grima, and people drift off into the night. Most of us organisers actually hang around on the rooftop for a while, slightly dazed but happily chattering away, slowly beginning to relax and unwind, cold fingers gripping glasses of rapidly chilling red wine. It's almost as if we can’t leave the place, or don’t want to. We’re all so happy with the week that we feel we could just carry on. Do another week just like it. After a day off perhaps.

If I'd criticise elements of the week, I'm a little disappointed we didn't manage to get more representation of a Latino view on the city and its landscape (save Rochas perhaps, and Michael Dear, though I'm not either 'qualify' as such). Still we don't want to be tokenistic about such things. We had a few technical hitches but then it's all done for not-much-money, as if you couldn't tell, so that's going to happen. The temperature was of course ridiculous at times. In terms of the online distribution of the event, I though the Twitter feed was particularly good (thanks Geoff), and although our blog entries could've got up quicker, I like the fact they're delayed. Someone commented on one of my posts that 'it's almost like there was more information in there than the actual talk'. Well, that's the idea. You can't approach the sensation of being there, but you can at least add context, analysis, links and your own take on such things. This will slow the process down (as you'll see, when my reviews of this thing are still emerging a few weeks from now) but I hope it's better for it. Anyway, these quibbles aside, I'm personally really happy with how Postopolis! LA turned out..

Thanks so much to all the speakers who contributed their time and thoughts; to the audience who braved the cold (who knew LA could even get that chilly?), as well as those watching the live streams, Twitter feeds and blogs; huge thanks to my fellow curators and co-hosts at BLDGBLOG, Subtopia, We Make Money Not Art, Mudd Up! and ArchDaily - we had a blast; to ForYourArt for all their help in supporting the event and The Standard for hosting; and to the Storefront for Art & Architecture extended crew for performing above and beyond the call of duty again, playing away from home this time; and to director Joseph Grima in particular, for making it all happen.

I’ll now concentrate on getting all these other notes online, and you might also read various summings-up, across numerous blogs, websites and news outlets elsewhere, and from the Postopolis! LA team themselves e.g. Bryan’s rather poetic post-PostOps post, Regine’s various great summary posts (days 1, 2, 4 and 5), Geoff's thanks and narrative planetarium, ArchDaily’s reflections and so on. There’s more to come here, but for now, until the next time …

Postopolis! LA [Storefront for Art and Architecture]
SYNTHe photos [Flickr]
More details on SYNTHe project [io-platform.com]

Patrick Keller / Fabric (Postopolis! LA)

Patrick Keller’s talk was so up my strasse it’s ridiculous. Keller is from the Swiss architecture practice Fabric, originally from Geneva and now in Lausanne (I’m not sure why he was in LA.) He’s interested in the collaboration between information designers and architect, and works in the space between these disciplines, interested in creating responsive architectures (As am I.) He notes wryly that most of his projects are as yet un-built, “like most architecture”. (As are mine.)

He runs through a few projects in quick succession, each a progression of the other. There’s a lot more to his projects than we were able to get through in 30 minutes. All concern the interplay between the environmental characteristics of spaces, in terms of the idea of conditioned environments (somewhat apposite, given Banham’s ideas of Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment (see my own spin on that) and as LA must be home to as much air conditioning as anywhere.)

The first project is from a few years back as evidenced by the title. ‘Real Rooms’ (2005) takes its name from Real Player, then one of the de rigeur streaming media players. The idea being that instead of streaming media you could stream actual environments into spaces. This project, for Swiss giant Néstle, was situated in the world HQ of Néstle, a late-modern building with large areas of transparent glass on the outside but an almost hermetically sealed series of interior spaces (corridors, offices, cubicles, boxes etc.) which had precisely controlled environments in terms of internal artificial climates, artificial lighting etc. 

So given the building had lost a relationship with climate, at least on the interior, Fabric proposed a series of container-like interior ‘boxes’ which could be altered in terms of temperature and lighting to ‘stream’ artificial climates into those spaces, representative of climates and time zones from across the world (playing up Néstle’s global reach, perhaps) - that you could “invite a climate into the box” in Keller’s words. So you could make one environment always 8am, staying on the same latitude. Some could be “always dark, some always daytime - some very cold and some very hot”.

 

The building looked particularly beautiful at night, when only some part of it is lit, forming the shape of daylight across the globe. This shape would then change slightly varying with season.

The second project Keller showed also concerns internal atmospheres, but instead of controlling, this is about “letting climate go by itself”. A competition entry for a tower in San Jose, containing a huge volume of air.  This building would also communicates climate around the globe, but using the natural processes of convection, albedo effect and so on within the volume of air. As opposed to the former project, this would just enable a climate within the structure, articulated by the volume of air, and then communicate the performance of that air volume via boxes with sensors on the exterior, linking it to climates worldwide.
The tower enables a kind of “porosity in vertical axis” so the air can ascend or descend, but with no porosity on the sides, it is trapped, in order to manifest the daily patterns within that volume.

Keller says it’s a sort of test tube environment for climatic variation: “In the morning you’d have cold air at bottom and warmer air at the top remaining from the day before … During the day, it gets warmer, and goes to the top, then cooler air is present at the bottom. Humidity collects at the top, condensates on the facade and runs down. Pollution particles are more dense at the bottom than at the top (as they’re heavier)”. And so on …

So the form triggers a natural atmospheric variation into building, which is then captured by the sensors. These sensors then feed information displays on part of building (essentially on each floor), enabling a comparison at each moment of the performance of the building itself, and then “related atmospheres” to other places on the globe. (A fascinating idea, and really close to my own ideas of building as urban dashboard.)

The third and final project was ‘Environ(ne)ment’ for the CCA, working with Philippe Rahm. This was both a form of “test environment and representation“ concerning an ‘artificial sun’ (as per Eliasson's Weather Project?) triggering differences in heat, light etc. within the gallery space. These phenomena then sampled by sensors, and feed projections about what’s going on in the space. Moving the ideas forward, Keller described how this exhibit then offered suggestions about how you could inhabit these spaces with differing climates - “propositions generated through software”, such as cooking on floor, sleeping on carpet, wearing clothes or not, furniture, activity and relationships all changing function in response to the different environmental characteristics. (This is an intriguing step forward for the ideas, moving into behavioural relationships as a result of changing environments quite directly, rather than the previous two projects with their more subtle but potentially ignorable approach of prompting.)

So Keller sums up by noting how the first project concerned a “conditioned environment” which is then questioned and reopened. The second was a “let go” environment, which is “more natural and costs nothing to trigger variation”. The third concerns “some new way of inhabiting those climates”. He believes this third is interesting as neither totally conditioned nor totally free, but somewhere in between …
Geoff asks a question concerning moving beyond the building into urban and landscape design through temperature gradients. “Could you engineer microclimates through LA? Could you bring different climates to the city?”

 

Keller responds that it could theoretically “go large scale, though it is hard to trigger it at this scale. At urban scale you have to deal with natural conditions as well”. Having said that, in a sense the cities have already changed our climate at this planetary scale of course - and we could do so again, he suggests, say by “painting the cities all white and replace polar caps” accordingly.

(There are many more fascinating projects at Fabric’s website, as well as details of the projects noted above, and it’ll be worth watching the work of this practice. This kind of work is at the most interesting junction with architecture and urbanism, to my mind, and perhaps the most potentially fruitful.)

Fabric.ch

Fritz Haeg / Edible Estates (Postopolis! LA)

Fritz Haeg of Edible Estates kicks off Postopolis! LA with an engaging talk around urban food production, a topic which I’ve become fascinated by since I moved to Australia. Edible Estates is one of the standout set of projects in this burgeoning area, with a particular take on how to bring localised, distributed food production to our city’s streets.

Haeg discussed how he had focused from an early age on architecture and buildings, drawn to being an architect for as long as he can remember. So he says Edible Estates “comes from a place where I had an obsession with buildings”. He got over this obsession though, almost coming out the other side, such that he’s no longer interested in buildings, “or in the physical structure at least.”

When he moved to LA 10 years ago, he started exploring the activity that happens inside and outside of buildings, almost the ‘life between buildings’ as Gehl would put it. (I thought that in the context of Los Angeles this is particularly interesting proposition. Amongst the spaces defined by the more Anglo Angelenos life between buildings is often brief and transient. The Latino community - and others - has utterly changed this, but Haeg’s work focuses on those urban and suburban spaces where “activity outside of buildings”, as he put it, has been most invisible.)

With 30 events over 6 years, all centred around his house, Haeg started started strategies for “inhabiting spaces and occupying environments”. These included events like ‘Sundown Salon’, knitting salons, events for kids where they built a fort and a mudpit, conventional literary salons, hair and makeup days and so on. The output of all these performances/events is being gathered into a book (a 150ft long page of paper with images on one side and text on the other).

With an arch of his eyebrow, Haeg notes that he understandably got a little ‘over’ having hundreds of people in his home every weekend, and then took on the idea of ”reconsidering the role of the home in society”, converting it into something akin to a schoolhouse and running a series of itinerant projects, via a mobile geodesic tent, where he would coordinate community education activities as companion to projects for institutions such as the Whitney, a ‘Philadelphia Training Camp for Expression Skills’ and so on.

On particular project ‘How To Eat Austin’, in which workshops would start with “dirt” in week 1 and progress to cooking in week 8, leads directly to the Edible Estates projects. These grew directly out of the 2004 election, and the perception that the USA was divided in two halves - red and blue. That there was a cultural divide here, at the heart of America. Haeg thought that architecture and art seemed an introverted dialogue and wondered whether an art project could bridge audiences. He started in Kansas i.e. the geographic centre of country, and with the front lawn itself.

Haeg sees the humble front lawn as a space that has so much potential. He says that it “also epitomises everything we stand for as Americans. It represents comfort and prosperity. I mean, how free must you be at the weekend to care of it?” It’s also a space that’s homogenised across America, such that it can look exactly the same in LA or NJ.

For Haeg, architects tend to be obsessed with making a mark - making something permanent. The lawn, for them, has a powerful function in terms of ‘frame’, almost “pushing the landscape down to make room for the awesome building”. The lawn us thus a “repressed vacant abstract nothingness”. It’s an anti-social no man’s land and often polluting.

So could we transform that into productive connecting space? He divided the country up into 9 squares and decided to do one garden each season. He references the High Line project in NYC as a reclaiming of such space for an urban garden (though this isn’t productive as far as I know).

In Salina, Kansas, he worked with people to create these little ‘edible estates’ - productive gardens in what was their front lawn. All gardens are permanent, all are productive.
In terms of methodology, Haeg intriguingly notes that he “dictates the terms on a project and then finds collaborators”. (Hm wonder if there’s more to this process?)

The converted lawns can have a tendency to “piss off other suburban neighbours”, a side-effect Haeg clearly enjoys when it happens. He notes that with one house, one neighbour freaked out, while the elderly German immigrants next door were ecstatic. Haeg finds it fascinating to look at the spectrum of responses to “what is basically, y’know … a vegetable garden”. To see what “responses that space elicits”.

Other projects include some outside the US, at Brookwood Estate, London, commissioned by Tate Modern, creating a kind of pleasure garden in middle of city, which also produces food. He set up an Edible Estates Temporary HQ in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern. (The website notes: "This first planting includes fruits, vegetables and herbs: apples, plums, raspberries, currants, tomatoes, aubergine, brussel sprouts, scarlet runner beans, peas, lettuce, rocket, spinach, bok choy, artichokes, fennel, onions, parsley, coriander, sage, bay, basil, rosemary, thyme, oregano, mint, dill, calendula, marigolds and nasturtiums.")

Other gardens are in Austin and Baltimore, and you can find out more in the book Edible Estates - Attack on the Front Lawn and on edibleestates.org.

Haeg’s clear that he doen’t want to make gardens that are beyond peoples’ means - it must be “something anybody can make In the weekend”. As a result, it might sometimes look “scrappy”, at least as viewed through conventional means.

His next project sounds fascinating. It’s in Chelsea, NYC, and centres on the idea of what the space was on September 10 1609 I.e. a simulation of what it looked like and how native Americans lived off the land. This is linked to a project for the Whitney, ‘Animal Estates’, that explored the animals that used to live in that particularly space, including the construction of a beaver pond and beaver dam in spirit of Whitney architect Marcel Breuer. “Sort of”.

Regine asks a couple of questions, including one about why the use of the word ‘estate’? Haeg notes that graphic design and names are an important part of the work, and that the Edible Estates logo was designed to look familiar to Americans that might have seen suburban housing developments - that he was playing with the idea of legitimising it, of taking a radical activity to the people least likely to accept it (interesting echo here with Stephanie Smith on day two - more later). Haeg knows how hard it is for many homeowners to take the first step to plant the edible lawn there - it’s such “a big break with habit to change the antiquated notion of the lawn we have”.

Regine also asks about how the gardens are later on. Haeg says he’s In touch with all families, and almost all (if not all?) are still tending the gardens successfully. In fact the new owners of one house contacted him to take care of the garden they inherited from the previous owners - you have to be a relatively skilled gardener to pull this off, he notes - and he’s now working together with the family. (I’m interested in the skill level. I know from my own experience how much care and attention is required to grow even the smallest crop, and this seems to be a crucial factor in how this takes off. Having said that, I also know the time taken in such activities is hugely enjoyable, therapeutic, and generates a genuine sense of achievement. Even in the production of a few cherry tomatoes.)

(Distributed urban food production is a fascinating topic, not least for the civic possibilities of people working together in shared community gardens, allotments, and increasingly the little strips of urban space that were previously decorative at best. While it may never supply a ‘base load’ of food, it’s of fundamental importance to our cities going forward, for numerous reasons. It was good to hear Haeg talk about his experience here.)

(A local friend later notes there is a deeper irony here in terms of Los Angeles - again with the Mike Davis 'Magical Urbanism' idea in mind - that the Latino population has an almost intrinsic understanding of  public urban space, as if carried down in some kind of urbanism gene from the cities of Southern Europe, and that they’re increasingly retrofitting this onto LA’s urban fabric. My friend noted that Latino culture in LA has always had chickens running around in the yard, for instance, and this was generally very much frowned upon by the Anglo-Saxon Angelenos. So while Haeg is attacking the front lawn of suburbia, Los Angeles in general may be racing ahead to a future where food production is intrinsically part of the warp and weft of urban space anyway. The productive backyard may engulf the manicured front lawn either way.)

Fritz Haeg / Edible Estates
Edible Estates - Attack on the Front Lawn, by Fritz Haeg et al

Joost Greenhouse, Melbourne

The Greenhouse, by Joost and others, is an opportunistic temporary insertion into a gap in Federation Square, Melbourne.

It’s built entirely from recycled and recyclable materials. The exterior is dis-assembled shipping containers and packing crates, filled with straw bale and covered with plants. When I was there, the walls were embedded with strawberry plants and potatoes were planted on top (and used in the potato salad served below), amongst other things.

Work and The City, Frank Duffy (2008)

Short books are often better books - The Eyes of the Skin; Undesigning the Bath; In Praise of Shadows; Peter Zumthor’s books; the Writer and the City and Pamphlet Architecture series, and so on. While this entrant into a new series called Edge Futures isn’t quite in that class, it is a good, useful and engaging read, detailing the symbiotic relationship between the modern city and the contemporary office environment. In particular, Work and the City convincingly details how this has led to a grossly inefficient under-utilisation of resources with damaging effects on individuals, corporations, and almost all aspects of urban ecosystem.

Duffy is a co-founder of the firm DEGW, and thus well-placed to discuss the ‘health’ of the modern office environment. DEGW are one of the few to make that their business, and have been influential in bringing to bear a more sophisticated understanding of the importance of calibrating the working environment. They do this through focusing on space-planning, organisational consultancy, post-occupancy and myriad other techniques.

As an architect, he is also well-placed to hit home with one of his first critiques - that architects are seduced by building new buildings, rather than addressing the existing built fabric. When much of what is to be built is already built, and much of it is inefficient, surely we should focus more on that existing fabric, rather than constructing new edifices?

Yet before working through solutions, the book offers a whistle-stop tour of a story well-told elsewhere but always worth considering - how we got into this fix, via the Taylorism-inspired production of the modern office, culminating in the hegemonic 1960s American environments (so lovingly conjured up in the US TV show Mad Men, incidentally). Duffy draws on sociologist Richard Sennett's phrase of “brittle cities” to illustate the infrastructure this leaves cities with: over-centralised and over-engineered to mono-functionality, and thus under-used and inflexible.

Particularly as much of this existing space is so little used. DEGW’s data indicates that total occupancy of all office workplaces - desks, combined with meeting rooms and other social and semi-social places - peaks at 60%, and that’s for the Monday-Friday 8-hour working day. So the total occupancy 24/7 would be less by a considerable amount. In a world waking up to the significance of waste, this is rather pertinent.

We hear frequent claims from major cities that they’re running out of office space. Yet when existing office space is actually being used half the time during a third of the day, something is not quite right. (Note: I was reading an early review copy, and a few errors remained in the text, including the data on these occupancy levels being expressed differently at different points, with little detail on its exact provenance. It’s such a key finding that it warrants emblazoning in large letters, and so requires a little precision and backup through references and data.)

Duffy also draws on Stewart Brand’s equally well-known layers model, in order to indicate how these buildings - and cities - often aren’t designed to ‘learn’ from the shearing effects of skin, structure and space plan moving at different paces. In this respect, he finds London’s Soho to be a more resilient urban form than its Docklands, and London, New York and Paris to offer numerous examples of dense, physical complexity that almost organically offers a sophisticated flexible urbanism.

This is all well-understood - or at least well-discussed in enlightened professional circles - yet Duffy does go on to offer a new take on how these brittle developments still get built. Duffy suggests that the ‘Anglo-American supply chain’ for new buildings in most developed economies, centred on property developers, is not likely to produce less brittle results any time soon. Given the dislocation between developer, owner and occupier, the eventual buildings barely stand a chance. By way of an interesting counterpoint Duffy offers up an alternative - what he calls the “Social Democratic office”, emerging in the post-war environment of Germany, Scandinavia and the Netherlands.

Finance and development for the Social Democratic Office emerges from the business owners (and occupiers) themselves, as with Niels Torp’s SAS headquarters in Stockholm, for example. This simple reorganisation of the supply chain would surely produce better working environments, and Duffy is right to point out that it is essentially “cultural choice” that has ignored that opportunity elsewhere, in favour of other, arguably purely financial, opportunities. That it is cultural choice doesn’t mean it’s easy to fix, of course. Just that it is fixable.

Either way, the industrial revolution has careered into the knowledge revolution unchecked, at least on the surface, and Duffy is optimistic about the benefits of distributed, more social, more informal working styles - as long as people don’t overly adhere to the tyranny of permanently-connected BlackBerrys when trying to flatten the tyranny of distance and time, for instance. He describes the curious verisimilitude of teleconferencing on the high-end Cisco and Hewlett-Packard systems, and finds them immensely beguiling.

However, he is also right to indicate that these, and other advanced ICT not covered in much detail here, won’t replace the essential functions of urban life, and makes a strong argument for the rich physical serendipity of the city remaining essentially sovereign and highly valuable. These systems augment urban life, and could usefully reduce unnecessary travel and its associated emissions whilst retaining global connectivity. But the desire for the city certainly shows no sign of dissipating - quite the opposite.

While I agree with Duffy’s primary assertion, we may yet have to work harder to devise new working environments which truly respond to the promise of pervasive global interconnectivity. Indeed, we should embark on new place-making strategies which creatively resist this tendency of ICT - and economic globalisation for that matter - to smooth out the essential differences between places. And while Work and The City doesn’t really explore the potential in this new overlay on the city, Duffy does enough to suggest its importance. To truly articulate this new area would be a much larger book.

Equally, another larger book would provide more detail on how to solve 'new building syndrome' by retrofitting existing urban fabric, or offer up a few specific strategies for dealing with office occupancy levels, over and above paying for space by the hour, as per a hotel or co-working space. (Recent work by James Calder at Woods Bagot - including their publication WorkLife - is worth reviewing in this respect.) Yet this short book does more than enough to outline the issues, explain how we got here, and suggest the key trends that might move us forward.

Where the book does seriously fall down is in implicitly conflating 'work' with 'office work', something that’s all too easily done. Last month I spoke at an (Inside) magazine public lecture on the ‘Changing contemporary workplace’ - part of their Idea Week, leading up to their interior design excellence awards. I was speaking alongside Woods Bagot's Calder, Suzanne Perillo of Schiavello, Rosemary Kirkby, Peter Geyer of Geyer Architects and Tone Wheeler of Environa Studio. I’d talked through some of these issues of advanced ICT, architecture and the office work environment, while others had discussed other aspects of the changing office environment.

In closing the session, however, architect Tone Wheeler was right to pick us all up for making the same mistake as Duffy. He suggested that even in a knowledge-based city like Melbourne, for example, the office environment must cover around 15-20% of the locations for employment at best. In focusing on offices, we ignore necessary innovation in retail and service environments - which would cover the majority of employment, and a vast diversity of spaces - as well as all scales of manufacturing and craft.

However, the areas that Duffy’s book does focus on are still hugely important. Given the pioneering work of his firm, he is uniquely placed to address the changing nature of much urban work, and this simple, inexpensive book provides an excellent overview of both the evolution of cities and their possible futures.

Work and the city, Frank Duffy, Edge Futures/Black Dog Publishing (2008) [Amazon UK and US]

Writing, about Sydney

As Australia settles in to its blissfully warm summer holidays, and as I emerge from a particularly crunchy period of work largely responsible for the intermittent posting here recently, I thought I’d bring you up to date with a few bits of writing I’ve done for other places this last year.

I’ve already posted The Adaptive City essay I wrote for the Urban Play exhibition catalogue a few months ago, which provoked thoughtful responses from many, for which much thanks.

I should also point out a short piece in the book that accompanies the Canadian Centre for Architecture’s Actions exhibition, edited by Mirko Zardini and Giovanna Borasi. The book is available soon, and the exhibition is on now - the website is well worth a look. While I can’t make the trip to Montreal, I’ll report back on the book when I receive a copy.

Even earlier this year I wrote an article for Architectural Review Australia, addressing the late-2007 report on Sydney’s central business district (CBD) produced by near-ubiquitous Danish urban design firm Jan Gehl Architects. Gehl is a one-man force for good in terms of reawakening cities to the promise of walkable - and bike-able - urbanism. Yet I suggest there are flaws in their approach when it came to addressing what I consider to be the real problems of contemporary Sydney. While I agree with much of what Gehl’s team suggested, it seemed to miss several of the wider issues, as well as the newer area of urban design I’m pursuing, around urban informatics. However, please note also that it was written for the end-piece of AR, a traditionally opinionated section of the magazine, and this context shows a little in the eventual piece too. I’m actually more of a fan of Gehl’s work as an advocate for cycling and walkable urbanism than it sounds, though I find that his firm’s wider urban design and planning strategies are often less interesting (see also Jonathan Glancey and David Barrie.)

I’m posting a slightly extended mix of the article below - partly for the record but also to spur a few related entries on urban strategies.

While it’s a specific piece, focused on Sydney in late 2007, it also betrays some of my thoughts on contemporary cities at the time. I have to say, eight months on, I wouldn’t write the same piece in the same way, which I hope indicates some development in my thinking, as well as almost a year wrestling with Sydney in the ‘day job’. The problems in this wonderful city are complex. Indeed, it’s all too easy to develop a love-hate relationship with Sydney - although casual indifference is the dangerous mode most citizens are in, as the city’s obvious natural charms lull people - including politicians - into accepting poor quality of thinking and execution in too many aspects of everyday life.

Sydney certainly can live up to the well-known image of the global city bejewelled with beaches, ocean pools and a glittering harbour, as seen in these beguiling little tilt-shift-like movies by Keith Loutit:

It benefits from a thrusting, ambitious CBD (albeit overly-focused on the 'B') and the many wonderful inner suburbs surrounding, most built around diverse ethnic mixes, the ghosts of former industries in Redfern, Waterloo, Pyrmont or Paddington or the finely grained streets of Potts Point and Rushcutters Bay, often threaded with compact rows of reusable terraces with numerous pockets of startling greenery, and much more besides. These inner suburbs are perhaps a little overly-residential, rather than more usefully mixed up, but each have their own character and promise. The basic 'natural' qualities of life - climate, terrain, food, and good-humoured, bright people (in the main) - are all enviably rich along Australia's immense coastline, and Sydney benefits from all of them.

But Sydney is also the following, often overwhelming all this:

These extremes set up an interesting counterpoint, more so than most. Sydney has perhaps the most effortlessly beautiful urban mis-en-scéne imaginable, but its built fabric is often truly, breathtakingly awful. Most of Sydney, of course, is somewhere in-between. At a basic, almost topographical level, the tension that results from this may contribute to the city often being fractured and knotted in a peculiar stasis.

Yet creative tension is at the heart of all cities - cities are not things which tend towards equilibrium - so this is really no excuse for consistently stuffing up infrastructure projects, over-gearing towards shopping malls, or the internecine squabbling that often characterises city-state relationships. Analysis of that means swimming in deeper undercurrents again, as even a cursory glance at the first sections of Norman Abjorensen’s excellent article at Inside Story will make clear, indicating the ideological backdrop to liberal city hall politics in Sydney (though even this is muddied by the varying contenders for a ‘city hall-like’ function amongst the three tiers of government overlaid onto New South Wales.)

The Gehl report - which is available for download via the City of Sydney - was a precursor to the major strategy for the city unveiled only a few months later, Sustainable Sydney 2030. Note that all this concerns the local authority, the City of Sydney, rather than the actual city of Sydney itself, which is composed of 40-odd other local authorities and sprawls over one of the largest metropolitan regions in the world. Therein lies a problem, as I indicate below. Despite this focus, and while it’s not a bad strategy as far as it goes, the other danger of such initiatives is that they don’t deliver genuine change in the city and can be too easily sidetracked - cf. Melbourne, a successful site of Gehl Architects’ work years ago, but whose Melbourne 2030 strategy (no relation) appears to be increasingly ignored, with particularly egregious decisions occurring all too regularly now.

Further, these strategies rarely get at more productive strategies for the city, instead focusing on the thin (though important in its own way) veneer of urban design and planning. I hint at this in the following piece - what is Sydney for? - but a much sharper critique of Sustainable Sydney 2030 was made a few months later in Monument magazine, by Ingo Kumic and Gerard Reinmuth. Excuse the lengthy quote but it's worth it, as they outline alternative, productive approaches to urban strategy:

"The result is a document concerned with designing the city - its image - rather than empowering it to exist. So, while it is rich on images of happy people on bicycles, it falls short of anything we may call a productive strategy. The city is redesigned rather than empowered to produce and re-produce itself. The task of empowering the city requires a serious analysis of the many varied yet interdependent economies that comprise 'Glocal' Sydney. This is a different project to the one the City of Sydney has championed, as it is fundamentally based on understanding the impediments to building capacity in the city to exist in a highly competitive world and therefore the capacity of its people to make their place. Having established the limitations and strengths of myriad economies, we can begin to innovate the systems of production, distribution and consumption that define them. We can temper them with new and emerging social and environmental agendas and we can introduce new ideas concerning governance and inclusion, such as corporate social responsibility. This project will then ensure that the economies that define Sydney are grounded in our unique proposition and thereby exploit the increasing importance of cultural capital ... The current emphasis of strategic plans on designing cities, rather than empowering them, stems from the fact that the design economy revolves entirely around the capitalisation of the experience of a designed object ... Mature cities - such as Barcelona, with its Metropolitan Strategic Plan of Barcelona and London via the the London Plan - demonstrate that the consumptive experience of the city is a consequence and not a driver of a city's capacity to make its own place ... The Sustainable Sydney 2030 vision simply delivers design images of creative capacity rather than the productive strategies that may enable creative capacity to emerge ... This city, like any city, is its society - not its bricks and mortar. If we fail to build capacity for the city to make and re-make itself, we fail to underscore the fundamental reason for its existence." ['(Re)Making Sydney: Image, form and crisis of vision', Ingo Kumic & Gerard Reinmuth, Monument magazine #87, October/November 2008]

(Actually, while I agree with much of their article, I'd quibble with the idea that design only concerns image - good design also includes the re-framing of questions like what is Sydney for, and image is only one aspect of its output. But that's a designer talking. I'd also quibble with the idea that London doesn't partake in the kind of 'design economy' practises their critique focuses on. Much of this ideology stems from London directly, for good or ill. Finally, there is a more subtle interplay between urban infrastructure (including urban form and the quality of urban design) and the productive practises that emerge there. It's not quite one leading the other, as they make out, but rather more symbiotic. However, their article reinforced my perennial interest in the soft infrastructure of a city - people, networks, culture, society, civic relationships - and its interplay with the hard stuff, expanding on a few points I'd tried to make below.)

Either way, such strategies do provide a forum for debate about what flavour of urbanism is appropriate for the city, and that is of immense value. It’s somewhat ironic that one of the world’s most urbanised nations needs to kick-start debate about its major cities, but that remains the case. So in that spirit, I offer this piece up as constructive criticism, an attempt to take a good report and make it better.

(And apologies for wheeling out the Saarinen quote yet again, but as usual I can’t resist it.)

Recent and forthcoming

Spot of admin, forgive me. I'm doing a presentation at Creative Social tomorrow night (Thursday 14th May 2008), here in Sydney. This particular edition of Creative Social is organised by my friend Tim Buesing, and forms part of a wider global network of workshop-style sessions and presentations aimed at creative directors. I'll be doing something around these themes of urban informatics, or how information and communications technologies are re-shaping all things urban: form, everyday life, planning, wayfinding, architecture, public space and so on. Keynote is glaring at me from the dock, below, so I'd better get to it shortly.

I gave a precursor of the talk at a public lecture organised by University of Technology Sydney, a couple of months ago. I was invited by Adrian Lahoud, and it formed part of an excellent series of public lectures around architecture and urbanism. If you're at a loose end in Sydney tomorrow evening and would prefer an alternative to my talk, you could do worse than go and see the next installment in the lecture series, delivered by none other than the Lord Mayor of City of Sydney, Clover Moore MP. She'll no doubt be majoring on their recently launched Sustainable Sydney 2030 strategy, much inspired by Jan Gehl's recent report for the City of Sydney. I'll post my own thoughts on all that soon enough.

For my lecture, I essentially 'performed' my Street as Platform piece, augmented with candid pics from a recent trip to Melbourne. I think it worked well, as a kind of freeze-framed narrative, in terms of conveying how much the street weighs these days, as Bucky might say, when you take into account the largely unseen digital communications. I called it The Not-So-Quiet City this time, as a nod to Aaron Copland's lovely 'Quiet City' piece of 1941, and to play up the sensory design aspects. This was partly due to it being a roundtable on 'Atmospheric Urbanism', where I was presenting alongside the excellent Nadia Wagner, a researcher in 'urban olfactics'. Her work is absolutely fascinating, and most Pallasmaa. The reason I think the two lectures worked well is that we got some absolute corkers in terms of questions afterwards, many of which have been percolating through my mind ever since. And I'm still not sure I have particularly concrete thoughts on them. "What is the creative challenge for architecture, in response to all this?" was one intriguing question in particular, a googly bowled by the ever-thoughtful Lahoud. (He's organised a follow-up roundtable too.)

Next week, Duncan Wilson and I are attending the Pervasive 08 conference here in Sydney. Our position paper was accepted by the workshop on Pervasive Persuasive Technology and Environmental Sustainability and so Duncan and I will be taking part in that, alongside a bunch of international researchers and practitioners in this area, such as the likes of Eric Paulos, Paul Dourish, Tom Igoe et al. I'm looking forward to the whole conference hugely and hope to post our paper shortly, including reflections on the workshop.

One of the workshop organisers is Marcus Foth of QUT (previously, here), and in June I hope to be attending a related conference at QUT, organised by their Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCI). Called Creating Value: Between Commerce and Commons, the workshops on 'Broadband innovations and the creative economy' and 'Creative Industry development agendas: design as value-add' look great. Richard Allen of Cisco is a particularly good addition to the cast of speakers (see also Henry Jenkins.)

Finally, in July, I'm speaking at Design Capital, part of the State of Design festival in Melbourne, as part of the 'Convergent World' session on day 3. It'll be great to hook up with friends like Allan Chochinov of Core77 and Michael Trudgeon of Crowd, and to meet a few new people too.  Also happy to say I'm a judge in the 2008 Premier's Design Awards there too.

Do get in touch if you're in town at the same time, or want more info on any of the events.  More news to follow, and then a return to your usual programming.

Transport informatics

The following is a quick survey of new informational approaches to transport, hinging on individual behaviour and engagement via public data. We'll travel from wifi on buses to designs for timetables embedded in the fabric of stations, stopping off at trams in Google Maps and proposals for roboscooter sharing schemes.

Data, transported and shaped by the internet, is increasingly becoming a primary way that people expect to engage with public transport in particular. Engage, as in access and navigate through transport service information, but also explore and understand the transport service itself. This last aspect might sound initially far-fetched - “Why would people want to explore their transport networks?” - but many of these examples indicate that people do. They often go well beyond basic communications initiatives like integrated transport systems and into genuine two-way and many-to-many network-based interaction. Whilst they can do little to help if the eventual public transport service itself is poorly run, built over a well-run system (such as Helsinki’s or Zürich's) such systems might increase satisfaction amongst existing users and attract new users.

Further, engaging with the energy output of transport is something people may directly engage with too, to help shift behaviour. Studies elsewhere, such as Pacific NorthWest National Laboratory of the Energy Department indicate that when exposed to the effects of their behaviour in terms of domestic energy use (electricity, water, gas etc.) via simple PC-based feedback tools, people may change their behaviour, leading to a 15% reduction in peak load on utilities. (And more might be achieved than that, through more sophisticated and better designed schemes.) Will this carry across to transport energy?

So, here are transport systems where usage data has become available - or could become available - and is then built upon, as a way of exploring whether various ‘live dashboards’ of transport across a city will engender new levels of engagement with transport. And whether this will increase awareness of personal behaviour and impact on emissions accordingly.

Some of the examples will have been seen before, so I’d be interested in any further examples you might have of urban informatics applied to transport - please add examples/thoughts via the comment form at the bottom of this post.

The new engineering: a discussion with Arup's Tristram Carfrae

This discussion is part of a series of interviews conducted for Arup’s Drivers of Change programme. See Drivers of Change for more information.

I met Tristram Carfrae at Arup’s Sydney office, which sits in a couple of storeys of a fairly anonymous block on Kent Street. The anonymity is typical for Sydney’s ultra-business-like CBD, but so is the casually wonderful aspect – in this case, overlooking the vast Barangaroo development site on the side of the city’s CBD, and the splintered skein of deep harbour out towards Balmain, criss-crossed with ferries and functioning as the occasional water-berth of the ocean liners, great white slabs of floating architecture that add a temporary residential function to the port, before moving on east to Hawaii or north to Hong Kong.

We sit in the reception and talk for a couple of hours, over a few plastic cups of instant coffee, and just behind a model of the National Aquatic Centre, the building designed by Arup, led by Carfrae, and Australian architects PTW with Chinese partners CCDI, and that opened in Beijing just over a month ago. Known colloquially as the ‘Water Cube’, it’s being seen as a new masterpiece of structural engineering, already enjoying a flurry of publicity that will only increase in fervour when the Games start this winter. But Carfrae's career extends well beyond the Cube, and he's generally thought to be one of the leading structural engineers of his time.

We talked about the Cube, and the changing practice of structural engineering that informs such projects, and how this is radically changing architecture, building and cities. We chewed over multidisciplinary working and design processes in general, as well as techniques new and old. I’ve organised this piece into loose themes, as the conversation jumped around a little.

Robin Hood Gardens is not the same as a digital model of Robin Hood Gardens

There’s an extraordinary - and rather British, I must say - kerfuffle going on over the future of the Robin Hood Gardens estate in London at the moment. Essentially, the building, designed by Alison and Peter Smithson (aka The Smithsons) and completed in 1972, is in danger of being pulled down. Margaret Hodge, a UK culture minister, appeared to back the demolition of such buildings, suggesting a digital model could capture the essence of a building in its stead. She said:

“When some concrete monstrosity — sorry, I mean modernist masterpiece — fails to make the cut despite having expert opinion behind it, let’s find a third way. This is the 21st century — a perfect digital image of the building, inside and out, could be retained forever.”

In rides Building Design magazine on a white horse, and they launch a campaign to instead have the building renovated and cared for, for perhaps the first time in its existence.

I left London before I got to experience Robin Hood Gardens in the flesh, but I hugely admire the work of the Smithsons, for both their thinking and practice (such as the Economist building in central London, which I have experienced). Along with Cedric Price, Reyner Banham, Archigram and a few others, they provide a historical framework for much of the technologically-enabled and culturally-informed best practice of today.

Robin Hood Gardens, in an area of East London so historically rich you can almost hear the psychogeographers whispering, is essentially a concrete megastructure housing project that’s been in need of such attention for most of its life. Carelessly built and serviced, the design never stood a chance.

Long before the GLC disappeared, TLC for such buildings had disappeared. Recently, a handful of enlightened property developers have discerned the public appreciation of brutalism moving in the right direction, but at glacial speed. Here, demolition plans appear to be moving a little too quickly, nosing well ahead of public opinion and this critical rearguard.

But Building Design is quite right to point out the importance of the building in terms of design history, and also its latent opportunities for re-development (and the iffy process going on around the building). There’s nothing inherently flawed in such structures - and of course Hodge’s line about concrete is extremely revealing, as is the subtle giveaway of a very British insecurity over ‘expertise’. With some of that expertise, allied to willpower and a smarter framework that sees the development as an ongoing bit of work, Robin Hood Gardens can be turned around, and should provide a counterpoint to some of the lazier development blighting that part of London.

Listen to one of the current residents, admittedly thrust forward by BD, on the RHG’s units:

“When this was first built it was very modern and people were fighting to get in here. It was very cleverly built,” she says. The way it has upside down maisonettes, you never hear noise from anyone else. And the nice thing is that every room has plenty of light — one wall is all windows and you’re not looking into someone else’s house. I don’t think these people who are proposing thousands of new homes for this site have a clue.”

RHG needs a lot of work but it is an eminently saveable building.

I’m not in favour of preservation for the sake of it. We should demolish buildings that have outlasted their use, and replace with better or more suited to the needs of the time. These new buildings should have a sense of their likely life-span. (Cedric Price was once asked what to do about York Minster, and he replied “flatten it”. Buildings that have outlasted their use should be disposed of “like a worn-out pair of Hush Puppies”, he suggested.)

But RHG is important is in at least three ways, particularly in the context of Britain: an example of British modernism (and local culture needs more working examples of this), ambition and optimism (ditto,  described by Peter Cook as “strange English romantic”) and apartment-based, high-density, affordable housing (ditto again, and that passes the CP test, as many cities need good examples of this more than ever.)

Building Design’s campaign has already drawn in an extraordinary list of support, almost a who’s who of contemporary architecture and urbanism. While their simple comments-based petition system is not exactly watertight, it appears to be hugely successful in terms of garnering a groundswell of opinion.

It’s odd to see one’s name alongside that of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, Zaha Hadid, Tony Fretton, Alain de Botton, Patrick Keiller, Benedetta Tagliabue, William Menking, Peter Cook, Iain Borden, William Mitchell, Joel Sanders, Stefano Boeri, Joseph Rykwert, Hugh Pearman, M Christine Boyer, Toyo Ito, Richard Meier, Ricky Burdett, Ted Cullinan, Kenneth Frampton, and hundreds of others. (You can sign the petition here, before March 7th) (See also Richard Rogers, who has written to the culture secretary Andy Burnham, and BD's and The Guardian's Jonathan Glancey.)

Sensing they’re onto a winner in terms of their relevance and influence, and maybe saving the building while they’re at it, Building Design is ramping up their activity, publishing article after article. It’s great to see an architectural magazine trying to make a difference in such concrete (ahem) fashion. Given the issues with existing built fabric in our cities - far more problematic in terms of sustainability than new building stock - you almost wonder whether campaigns such as these are the contemporary equivalent of Arts & Architecture’s pioneering Case Study Home program of an earlier age. I wonder what The Sesquipedalist will make of it?

Alan Powers presents the most informed view on the issues of listing and renovation of such buildings, so allow me a lengthy quote:

“On most counts, Robin Hood Gardens should be a prime candidate for listing. It is the only housing built by architects who devoted much of their lives to the discussion of dwelling at various scales. Among architectural thinkers around the world today, these architects are seen as the most important to have worked in Britain in their generation. This is heavy weight to put against counter-claims that the buildings were not built as first designed, and experienced social teething problems owing to the almost universal post-industrial problems of the early 1970s in Britain.”

“Emphasis should be put on the place-making quality of this housing, heroic towards the Blackwell Tunnel approach, embracing towards the nurturing mounds of the green space between the snaking block, where a big sky opens amid the scattered street patterns of the East End. As for resident satisfaction, the present Bangladeshi population seems to have no problem about inhabiting these monumental cliffs, in a way that the Smithsons would surely have recognised as a fulfilment of their intentions.”

“This is no Holly Street or Aylesbury Estate, best destined for the dustbin. The pressure is on, and someone must decide whether or not we are going to look like international idiots who let Robin Hood Gardens fall prey to the bland machinery that calls itself “regeneration”, while effacing the useable legacy of the welfare state.“

The Park Hill flats in Sheffield indicate a partial precedent for Robin Hood Gardens. Also inspired by the Smithsons (and Le Corbusier before them), they were built in 1961, from designs by Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith, on the site of tenements so rough they were known as ‘Little Chicago’ in the ‘30s. Unfortunately, that malaise didn’t seep clear of the ground with the destruction of the tenments, and seems to have carried over into the new development. And particularly when the British lack of facility with modernism - save a few shining examples - led inexorably to poor implementation, careless use of materials, and little ongoing servicing. And thus, the flats quickly gained an unsavoury reputation.

When I were a lad in the Sheffield of the early 1980s (cue Hovis commercial), the Park Hill flats were the stuff of legend. Playgrounds would buzz with lurid stories of what happened over at Park Hill - and the city’s other high-rise social housing, at Kelvin and Hyde Park. Though the story I remember is the rather tamer tale of a TV set being chucked out of the window, from one of the higher storeys, my mind’s eye constructing the slow heavy fall and sudden implosion on concrete. It was as if simply living there was like being in a cold, damp Northern version of Beirut under siege, glancing nervously up at the silvery sky as you scurry between blocks, darting for cover and hoping not to see the silent, graceful arc of a television approaching your head. It wasn’t like that, of course, though it was certainly not pleasant (As with RHG, Ian R. Taylor, in a book I once reviewed, did find firm evidence of  ‘community’ there nonetheless.)

Photo by Lee Gardland.

I visited once, going to see my first girlfriend’s grandmother, high up in one of the blocks. I don’t remember much detail, but I do remember how distinctly different it felt to the suburban late-1890s semi I was living in over the other side of the city. Not better or worse, just different way of housing, subtly reinforcing the importance of these developments in Victorian cities.

The OU’s From Here To Modernity site has a decent account of the history, if in need of an update:

“Park Hill was awarded a Grade 2* listing in 1998. Although an important milestone in the development of Modernist housing theory in post-war Britain, the public incredulity which greeted the award spoke volumes about the success of Park Hill and its 'streets in the sky'.”

Public incredulity knows no bounds of course, particularly when stoked up by the often architecturally short-sighted British media. Ill-considered lists of Britain’s most hated buildings hardly help. (How is Channel 4's Demolition progressive broadcasting, exactly?). In this sense, Building Design’s primitive petition with its untidy collision of expertise and punter, is perhaps far more democratic form than Demolition, even given that it’s preaching to the converted?)

Now, the Park Hill flats are being ‘re-made in Sheffield’ (clever, that) by developers Urban Splash. Europe’s largest listed building - which is an odd honour really - will be re-vamped to provide nearly 1000 apartments close to the city centre, with a third affordable and two-thirds, well, un-affordable presumably. (It’s the presence of the latter that will shift public opinion round on the matter, you watch.) Lee Garland’s photography, if a little sombre, indicates the muscular presence of the building - even more so when you see it in situ, banked back on the hill overlooking the central train station and city centre. It’s a powerful building, and with the care and attention that Urban Splash will lavish on it, it’s easy to imagine the building transformed.

I’ve seen many of Urban Splash’s conversions, particularly their early work amidst Manchester’s former textile warehouses and mills in the mid-’90s, and they’re usually pretty good renovations, leaving aside broader concerns over 'regeneration'. It’s also interesting to see them now taking on brutalism, instead of the rather 'easier' warehouse conversions (which may be desirable now, but were also marked for demolition a generation earlier, apparently beyond redemption.)

Elsewhere in Britain, the Brunswick Centre in London, covered here before, may need more careful curation in its choice of retail and services, but is full of life for the first time in years and really seems to be working. Erno Goldfinger’s Trellick Tower has also gone from “eyesore” to “desirable” in the last decade. The Barbican and South Bank still feature in those ugly contests, but are increasingly being recognised as the gems they are.

Park Hill benefits from proximity to its city centre, a short walk away. As with the Brunswick, Barbican, Trellick and many others, being surrounded by good urban fabric helps. It’s a simple note, but absolutely key, and remains a problem in the case of Robin Hood Gardens. The surrounding context also needs to be addressed for the building to work - social, informational and physical - for this kind of high density living can easily reinforce an urban core, and is less well suited to the being sited on a periphery. East London has enough presence for it to work, and RHG is connected to the centre(s) of London fairly well but it will need careful local orchestration nonetheless.

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Yet it can still work there. Wöhnpark Alt-Erlaa is situated outside the centre of Vienna, but with enough inherent density to anchor itself. That’s the promise of the megastructure. It’s on a different, more ambitious scale - it contains no fewer than 5 schulen, 4160 balkone and 7 schwimmbäder, most on the dach - and that, plus the integrated U-bahn, would make all the difference.

It does, of course, appear to be extremely well-built, benefiting from the Mittel-European comfort with aligning modernism and craft that was all but alien to Britain. Most of all, it will be well-run too, with a mix of residents (it's not strictly social housing). Again, the ongoing servicing and maintenance of these buildings - of both built and social fabric - will make the difference.

Back to RHG, and Stephen Bayley weighed in too, noting that “Robin Hood Gardens has been a social calamity” and reiterating that the Smithsons’ building was indeed flawed, but those flaws were embedded by the builders.

“Alas, their architectural reach exceeded the grasp of the builders and Robin Hood Gardens suffered from the start with a singular lack of commodity and firmness …”

He’s rather brutal himself, no pun intended, when apparently suggesting that the building rather suffered from its tenants:

“As Marx asked, does consciousness determine existence or does existence determine consciousness? Or to put it less correctly, do the pigs make the sty or does the sty make the pigs?”

Personally, I suspect the tenants were let down by the implementation of the building, and lack of ongoing service - as well as the post-industrial context Powers refers to -  rather than any inherent piggery.

Bayley continues:

“(But) Margaret Hodge's remarks about concrete are ignorant prejudice. Concrete is a fine material, but needs maintenance and care as much as marble and oak need maintenance and care.”

Too right. And so to those comments of Margaret Hodge, and particularly her idea of preserving the building through a digital model. Here, again, is what she said (in Grand Designs magazine, perhaps the most influential British architectural periodical of its day. BD reproduced the article.)

“When some concrete monstrosity — sorry, I mean modernist masterpiece — fails to make the cut despite having expert opinion behind it, let’s find a third way. This is the 21st century — a perfect digital image of the building, inside and out, could be retained forever.”

Leaving aside her value judgement on modernism - which speaks volumes by itself - and the cultural relativism elsewhere in the article that underpins her notion that modern architecture shouldn’t be judged in the same way that 'historical' structures are, it’s this ‘digital image’ comment I find fascinating.

First of all, that particular train of thought could obviously be applied to any building. If I decided, say, that Tower Bridge or all of Poundbury were particular eyesores, would they too be replaced by digital models? Bayley spots this a mile off:

“The minister herself declares that historical purposes may be served by a detailed digital record of the building, an argument which could, I think, with equal force be applied to Uppark, Windsor Castle or Stonehenge.”

So leaving aside Hodge’s peculiar notion that most of Britain’s heritage could instead be experienced as some kind of Second Life island, perhaps like Orange County’s ‘Wee Britain’ or ‘Thames Town’ in Shanghai, one also wonders whether she had lunch with someone from Autodesk that week.

You might expect City of Sound to be the kind of place that extolled the virtues of digital modelling, and indeed I do. Building information modeling (BIM) and computer-aided design (CAD) have already revolutionised building, and the immense benefits are yet to be fully realised. Increasingly tidying up the more inefficient and unsustainable practices of construction, once BIM truly extends into four dimensions, generating and broadcasting data about the ongoing use of a building (incl. delivering the instructions for its de-construction and recycling) a more sustainable architecture can be realised. And once the building becomes a platform for other communication, from personal to civic, and if that scales up to a neighbourhood and city level, then we’re really going places. Truly revolutionary.

But I don’t think Hodge is talking about that. I think she imagines some kind of 3D fly-through. Perhaps wearing goggles. But she, and we, should be clear about the limits of models too. In no way do they - and we can even say, will they - approach the experience of a building. Simple as that. A cursory reading of Pallasmaa will make that clear. Few models can deal with the peripheral, never mind the multi-sensory experience of being there, and never mind the multi-layered historical weight of a place or space. Digging further into her Merleau-Ponty isn’t something I imagine Hodge does of an evening, any more than I do, but if she were to, she might reconsider her strategy of replacing buildings with “digital records”.

Entrusting those digital records to her particular government would be like giving it to the informational equivalent of the Deen Brothers anyway.

Experiencing a building in the flesh is so different to constructing and studying a digital model, that it’s frightening that Hodge  - a culture minister - could even think to suggest it.

I recall walking into a small, very old cathedral in Milanese side-street, I think, lured by the sound of the choir, and once inside I hear their voices conjoin with the wails of black-clad kneeling women, rocking backwards and forwards near the altar, and sensing the sheer physical presence of that sculpted block of sound hanging in the rafters of the immense vaulted roof over my head, light puncturing the gloom through stained-glass windows and illuminating the sparkling motes of cool dust floating around me, some microscopic elements falling on to my tongue and fusing taste and smell with those being inhaled in my nostrils, the interior rushing away from my body as I begin to stand upright and breathe it all in, having ducked through the small threshold into its cavernous innards, my eyes adjusting to the gloom and slowly revealing the detail in the polished wooden pews that a million hands before mine had touched. All that, and more that I don’t have the words to describe, in a transition from outside to in, over a few seconds … And equivalent sensations might be enjoyed in a grain elevator, a converted power station, a public administration building, a swimming pool, a side street of SoHo at midnight, a small house in Tokyo in the early morning, a square in Melbourne at midday, a summer house in Finland at dusk, or in practically any kind of building. You will have your own examples.

Well, I’m sure a digital model will exist for that church, but I’m not sure I’ll get that same sensation when I click on it.

Let’s quickly put to bed this idea of digital models replacing a building. They can augment a building, and are certainly invaluable in design processes, ongoing running of buildings, education, heritage and a thousand other worthwhile pursuits. But they are not simulacra, for buildings exist.

So well done to Building Design for bringing this sorry bit of politics to the foreground of at least the architectural press, and good luck to them with their campaign. As a fan of the Smithsons’ thinking, and of several of their buildings, I'd like to see this pioneering architecture cared for.

Here’s the bullet-pointed version that cabinet ministers may be more used to:

• Park Hill, Brunswick, Trellick, South Bank, and Barbican all show that British modernist buildings that were once though beyond salvation can be turned around.
• Other high-density housing megastructures elsewhere indicate they can be done well in the first place, if carefully constructed and serviced.
• Concrete is one of the most useful, pleasing and thrilling of materials.
• Digital models have immense value, but not as replacements for buildings.