cityofsound

Towards a new architect: an interview with Carlo Ratti

I’ve just finished working with Carlo Ratti and various cohorts on a great little project, which I hope might see the light of day here before too long. In the meantime, I thought I’d post this discussion I had with Carlo late last year, which was recently published in Architectural Review Australia. We met at the Metropolis Congress in Sydney, where Signor Ratti had just given a presentation on his work at the MIT SENSEable City Lab, an outfit whose work I admire hugely, working as they do across many of my interests: interactive architecture, urban informatics, responsive envronments, multidisciplinary design and other implications of real-time networked pervasive information systems for the city.

(Incidentally, the interview was also recently published on the new-ish Australian Design Review website - which amalgamates AR with its sister publication (Inside) - and which is rather nice and proving more than a little useful. Kudos to Andrew Mackenzie and Mat Ward for steering that through so well.)

To the discussion/article ...

Robert Miles Kemp (Postopolis! LA)

Robert Miles Kemp’s talk was always interesting and occasionally spellbinding, most of all when showing the work in responsive robotic structures. His videos of simple blocks self-assembling into what he called “nano-architecture” are quite extraordinary (sometimes eliciting a collective delight similar to that of The Living at Postopolis! NYC). Kemp situated this within a wider context of interactive and informational architecture, centred around his work at Variate Labs and renowned new media deisgn firm Schematic (and his blog, Spatial Robots) described in a consistently interesting talk, covering many of the primary themes in contemporary interface design - and indeed extending the idea of where and what interfaces are.

Cars b/w Are Friends Electric

An article in The Economist suggests that electric cars should generate a noise to compensate for the loss of combustion engine noise, as they are so quiet.

Despite noting there is little research (thought I’ll note some later), The Economist says “Some drivers say that when their cars are in electric mode people are more likely to step out in front of them. The solution, many now believe, is to fit electric and hybrid cars with external sound systems.” Their subtitle - “Sound generators will make electric and hybrid cars safer“ - indicates this is their position too.

Where to start?

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

'Soft infrastructure superpowers': Lift09 presentation

Saving me from having to transcribe my presentation, the very well-organised Lift09 conference got Swiss French Television to film all the talks. So please see the embedded video at the end of this entry, or here on Vimeo.

When I finally got to deliver this speech, I'd been travelling for some time without rest, as previously noted (and indeed, as described at the beginning of the talk). So perhaps understandably there were a few points I accidentally missed out, or stumbled over.

• Firstly, the reason I was dwelling on the airline story so much is that it's the commercial model underpinning contemporary aviation - a model I see as part of soft infrastructure - that leads to poor service, not any particular technical issue as regards hard infrastructure. Boarding the passengers whilst doing the safety checks on the aircraft is a manifestation of how close to the wire airlines have to run things. Equally, there is little or no redundancy built into the system, due to the particular financial models underpinning them, which are in turn expressions of underlying social, cultural, political fabric. When something goes wrong, therefore, it causes very large ripples through that soft infrastructure of service and system, in turn.
• The effect of bike-sharing networks such as Vélib' and Bicing, are so key to me as they indicate how soft infrastructure can utterly change the perception of the city - in this case the sense of mobility, effectively warping physical distance - without altering much in the way of hard infrastructure.
• The closing video, which people always find compelling, is lifted from a fantastic advert for the Madrid Metro, which I discovered on SuperSpatial a while ago. I re-edited, and replaced the soundrack (using a bit of Jacaszek, I seem to recall). I'm not sure who created the original advert, but it's a beautiful piece of work and I usually try to declare its provenance. Here I forgot/ran out of time. I deploy it to illustrate the promise of informatics in terms of seeing through the hard infrastructure to the activity and behaviour of the city itself, the way people actually use the city. Here's my cut of the video:

I can't show much of my work in detail due to the stage some of the projects are at - and the nature of those projects - but they'll all make it out here in time. Thanks to Keynote's effortless integration of video I now use clips heavily in presentations, but that makes it a little tricky to easily share talks afterward. The camera crew often neglected to capture the screen, so missing out on a few of the videos. So for the record, here are a few of the videos used during the talk:

"Network + network + network = network". Lift09 conference, and Geneva

It's a crisp clear Swiss winter day. Geneva looks beautiful in the pale sun. That sun, which feels like a slowly failing 20 watt bulb, is the second clearest sign I'm a long way from the New South Wales I left behind on Monday afternoon. The clearest sign is that it's -2°C here, which is essentially 32° difference to the Sydney summer day I departed from. I wear a coat for the first time in almost 2 years.

It's my first time in Geneva, surprisingly, but being amidst the effortlessly elegant Mittel-European urban form again is a delightful confirmation of certain beliefs after getting all-too accustomed to the New World sprawls of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. Bikes, trams, 4-5 storey apartment blocks, pocket parks and quietly civic squares everywhere - it's all so right, even given that Geneva is far from the best example. The other, more institutional bits of Geneva feel more like one's living amidst the giant sets of Tati's Playtime, which a part of me would be entirely happy to do.

The relative proximity of Africa, rather than that of South-East Asia, is visible in the faces around me on the streets. The flat northern European colour-scheme of white, brown, grey and black across the textures of stone, brick, bare trees and filigreed overcast sky is a subtle and beautiful counterpoint to the intense light and rich colours of Australia. I'm lucky to live in both these worlds.

I also encounter 3 examples of haughty Swiss brusqueness in quick succession, from airport to taxi to hotel, which is a shock after the naturally easy-going and friendly Australian service culture. Still, I'm back in the country of my birth and I can live with this. My Swiss-ness is something I've continually over-stressed, entirely out of proportion to the <2 years I spent here after my birth in Zürich, and have spent much of my adult life adulating the likes of Josef Muller-Brockmann, Le Corbusier, Max Bill, Jan Tschichold, Herzog & De Meuron, Peter Zumthor, Claudio Sulser. The coffee's predictably poor, given its French heritage, but I can forgive almost all these foibles given the sheer delight of being in a country with the world's finest array of door handles, locks, window fittings and banknotes.

This is the pleasurable sense of disorientation I'm feeling. The less pleasurable aspects are due to the fact it took me 4 days to get here, when it should've taken just over 24 hours. This is due partly to 3 malfunctions across 2 different planes on the runway at Bangkok airport, but mainly due to the ineptitude of British Airways and Thai Airlines, which shuttled us backwards and forwards from runway to airport hotel numerous times. It was a bravura performance of truly appalling 'customer service', a cavalcade of unthinking, desperate, flailing, inhumane incompetence, all too familiar when encountering the raw edges often left exposed by global capital.

The journey ends up being Sydney to Bangkok to Hong Kong to London to Geneva, the last 4 airports all experienced within in 1 day. Despite the intense fatigue, hassle and frustration - which eventually left me drained of anger and resolving into a zen-like state of near-calm, as if the body itself was beginning to fade - I did at least get to explore Bangkok Suvarnabhumi (pretty good; wonderful concrete alongside giant  stretched-taut silver canvas loops; not enough places to sit; over-staffed shops (not a bad thing necessarily); no wi-fi), Hong Kong (night-time descent along the lights of Macau; currently being re-modelled but still delivering a sense of massive; cavernous escalator-threaded atria; great automated transit; old people working everywhere; good shops and good food; good free wi-fi all over the airport), London Heathrow Terminal 5 (disclaimer: Arup worked on it; actually surprised by how much I liked it; also good automated transit; the finish of many details was very good; beautiful exposed structural details; the shops entirely out of kilter with the times (a glance down the departure lounge: Prada, Harrods; Dior; Mappin & Webb; Smythson; Tiffany & Co ... all predictably empty); wi-fi everywhere but not free and therefore not used) and finally Geneva (classic small European airport; functional, efficient and pleasingly so; concourse roof being remodelled presumably; no need for automated transit or shops; surrounded by Alps and so a wonderful arrival:departure experience.)

The 4-day journey is actually much longer story, which I'll spare you in detail, but it did inadvertently provide me with the opening few minutes of my speech at the Lift 09 conference. For that's why I'm here in Geneva.

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.)

The street as platform, under construction

Well, more or less. Not quite the full platform imagined in that post - or this - but a small step in that direction.

I'm currently teaching a two-week class at University of Technology Sydney, on the Master of Digital Architecture degree. As per the 'street as platform' idea, we're creating a multiperspectival portrait of the street, seen through the lens of data. Some of this data is derived from various sensors we're placing around the immediate urban environment, some of it is scraped from websites or other sources. The patterns arising from the collision of these datasets are being explored through visualisations produced in the Processing language. 

We've got the 12 or so students blogging about their progress throughout the course, which extends from learning Processing from scratch (plus working in a web services-enabled design environment) to exploring the possibilities and vagaries of real-time data, scraping historical data off the web, and thinking through what it means to visualise patterns in urban data, from conceptual, aesthetic and pragmatic viewpoints. We're heading towards a small exhibition based around an installation in which the visualisations are projected - so ultimately exploring the ideas of projecting urban behavioural data back into the street, as per this system diagram.

The Masters course is run by Anthony Burke, and my teaching colleagues also include Mitchell Whitelaw (University of Canberra/The Teeming Void) and Jason McDermott. We must also thank Dr. David Lowe of the Centre for Real-Time Information Networks at UTS, and those helping from afar include Usman Haque. Plus, we have a forum tomorrow including local luminaries Marcus Trimble and Andrew Vande Moere. Particular kudos also to the students, who are working incredibly hard.

Keep an eye on the students' blog for progress updates, and I'll post more links, context, images, notes &c. to follow, but for now, a quick word from the street itself:

Master of Digital Architecture class 11/08: 'Street as platform': students' blog

Wi-fi structures and people shapes

Following on from our recent 'post-occupancy evaulation' of the State Library of Queensland's wi-fi (see previous post) in my role at Arup, I thought I'd share a couple of outputs. (Thanks to Tory Jones of the State Library of Queensland for permission).

One of the ideas I've been exploring relates to how urban industry - in the widest sense of the word - in the knowledge economy is often invisible, at least immediately and in situ. Whereas urban industry would once have produced thick plumes of smoke or deafening sheets of sound, today's information-rich environments - like the State Library of Queensland, or a contemporary office - are places of still, quiet production, with few sensory side-effects. We see people everywhere, faces lit by their open laptops, yet no evidence of their production. They could be using Facebook, Photoshop, Excel or Processing.

I've been developing a few ideas for exploring this industrial activity, which I hope to share here later, but the post-occupancy work on the Library's wi-fi involved creating a few representations of the service; a service which is all but invisible. Outside of monitoring the server logs, the wi-fi can only be perceived through the presence of users themselves, or of course via devices that detect wi-fi.

So as well as photo-essays, videos and in-depth interviews with users, and relating to this idea of making the invisible, visible, I mapped the strength of the wi-fi signal across levels 1 and 2 of the Library, the primary areas that the Library’s wi-fi is used. By taking readings across the floor of both levels, using standard wi-fi-enabled consumer equipment in order to mimic the conditions for the average user (in this case a MacBook laptop and a Nokia e65 mobile phone), I was able to construct a snapshot of the wi-fi signal strength across the Library.

I then articulated this set of readings as a basic 3D model in SketchUp, with peaks representing good wi-fi signal strength (4 bars, for example) and troughs representing poor wi-fi signal strength (no bars/no connection, or intermittently 1 bar). Each ‘bar’ defined a level in the 3D model (1 bar = 1 metre, roughly). This gives a sense of the wi-fi as a shape, with a physical form. Although literally misleading, it helps to understand wi-fi as a discrete phenomenon, via a form of translation.

While this model is not intended to be totally accurate - wi-fi signals may change in different atmospheric conditions, and perceived signal strength will vary depending on the equipment used - it does convey a sense of the overall ‘shape’ of the wi-fi, as if we could perceive it in physical form. Sensing the wi-fi like this is almost akin to dowsing - detecting the presence of unseen forces - and mimics the sensation of users attempting to discern where the wi-fi signal is strong.

The model was initially overlaid onto a floorplan of level 1, and subsequently scaled up to sit over a snapshot of the site from Google Earth. When comparing with the built form, we can explain the strong signal over the north-western egress of the Knowledge Walk. Through our observations at the Library, we saw that users have figured out that this is a good spot - one of the 3 wireless access points currently on that floor is located in the nearby meeting rooms, not that users would know this. The presence of the ‘bench’ extruded from the wall provides useful affordances for users too, almost suggesting it’s a good spot to sit and access the wi-fi (although again, we suspect that is accidental coincidence of design). Similarly, the floor-to-ceiling windows from meeting rooms and open corridor leading outside means there is minimal concrete to block the signal. So this 3D model helps suggest a correlation between use of the space, the shape of the space, and the strong wi-fi signal.

Following the central spine of the wi-fi model through towards the south-eastern edge, we can see how the wi-fi ‘leaks out’ of this end of the building, through the open end of the Knowledge Walk outside onto the concourse in-between the Library and the building destined to be The Edge. Elsewhere, thick concrete mitigates against wi-fi spreading far, unfortunately including the café and the fabulous deck areas on the river, where the signal falls off sharply (currently).

I allocated the SketchUp model a skin of netting, in a nod towards the Cedric Price-designed aviary at London Zoo. This seemed to me a similar structure, and suggests that 'wi-fi cloud' might actually feel like a containing volume - a net of wi-fi, as if seen from a user’s or bird’s point-of-view.

Formally, the result is hardly elegant, and bears little relation to the AIA award-winning structure by Donovan Hill/Peddle Thorp. (Incidentally, it’s been a great pleasure to work with Timothy Hill on this and other projects recently). The sharp angles and abrupt faces are accidents of the crude construction in SketchUp and the simplicity in my measurements. I should probably take it into 3D Studio Max or something, to render it with more graceful curves, or a material that would more properly represent the qualities of radio waves - perhaps something like Diller+Scofidio's Blur Building.

There's a full set of screengrabs here, here's a fly-through animation, and here's the original SketchUp model. I don't want to overplay the significance of this approach - it was simply one of several methods for expressing the presence of wi-fi in the Library, and partly just sketching out loud ...