We (Arup Sydney) were part of the worldwide event known as PARKing Day yesterday. Grabbing a bit of spare tarmac outside Customs House by Circular Quay, colleagues from various teams set up shop with some mulch, haybales, fruit and veg, connectivity, one of the fleet Smart cars - and this being Australia - a chook.
PARKing Day is a one-day, global, open source-style event where parking space is reclaimed (simply by pumping some dollars into a parking meter, usually) and turned into temporary public parks - see events in San Francisco (where it started, invented by REBAR), LA and Melbourne, for instance. I was in Brisbane for the day, so didn’t get to see how our park turned out in person - though I did see a parking spot in the Valley turned into a grassy table football venue (the Brisbane PARKing Days are really well organised, with over 47 ‘parks’ this year, apparently).
Our team had chosen the theme of ‘productivity’ - hence the urban agriculture and wi-fi - and the little park drew a lot of positive attention from passers-by throughout the day. We asked people to contribute their wishes for Sydney, which were pinned to a tree in the ‘park’.
People seemed to love it and we think we may have been one of the only such parks in Sydney (drop a comment in if you know of others) although there was a brave park on King Street, Newtown back in April.
Much thanks to my friends at Customs House, and thanks also to Wired Sky for the wi-fi coverage, and several others from the office who helped out hugely. Most credit goes to planning technician Safiah Moore, who initiated and organised the whole thing. And donated the chook. A good day.
Back in January, in an entry on façades, I noted a recent, and relatively local, favourite - the extraordinary western face of the Brisbane Girls Grammar School Creative Learning Centre. Brisbane buildings have to posess a trick or two to deal with the fierce sun on their western side, and local firm m3architecture obliged with a protective layer of anodised aluminium slats, overlaid onto a wall painted with black and white stripes ... which just happens to create a gigantic moiré effect as you move past it.
The school sits on a hill adjacent to the six-lane Inner City Bypass, and so commuters witness the entire six-storey façade undulating and revolving as they drive past. In my earlier post I promised a video of the thing in action and I'm yet to deliver, but in visiting the excellent (and aforementioned) 'Place Makers' exhibition at the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane recently, I captured the next best thing - some rough videos of the exhibition's simplified 1:11 scale model of the western wall.
That is essentially exactly what it looks like, just 1:11 scale. The moiré effect is surprisingly simple, as this close up of the model indicates. (For the curious Wikipedia's definition of the moiré is worth a read.)
Some photos of the model at 'Place Makers', which is also simple but a very effective display.
Some images from an Architecture Australia article, indicating what it looks like in context:
m3 produced some notes on their design for the building on their website, though they don't reveal much detail about the provenance of the moiré idea - except perhaps in the phrase "dynamic space of circulation". I half-wonder whether the feathers of local parrots or the ubiquitous slats and blinds of Queenslanders' verandahs may have provided subconscious inspration.
A few months ago, Scott Burnham kindly asked me to contribute to the exhibition catalogue for Urban Play, a project he conceived and then developed with Droog Design.
It is being sponsored by the city of Amsterdam and is premiering there
this September. In Scott's words, "Urban Play is about placing the
individual at the heart of the city’s development and encouraging
creative interaction between the individual and the physical city". You can also find out more at the Experimenta site.
Scott's posting up focus pieces on some of the interventionists featured in the exhibition, starting with the quite brilliant work of Gilberto Esparza, a Mexico City-based artist who creates 'Urban Parasites', "small robotic creatures made from recycled consumer
goods which wander, climb, crawl and explore the marginal areas of the
city." (Check the videos at Scott's site.)
I've reproduced the full essay below. I believe the other contributors to the catalogue were to be Usman Haque on open source architecture and Richard Reynolds on guerrilla gardening, so it'll be worth keeping an eye on. Many thanks to Scott for his considerable patience, and for asking me to contribute in the first place. It's a relatively speculative, deliberately optimistic piece, continuing some ideas from 'The Street as Platform'. Hope you find it interesting.
As part of the recent Biennale of Sydney, I took in the Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller installation at Pier 2/3, Walsh Bay. The festival programme describes the work thus:
“Since the 1990s, the experimental art of Canadians Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller has been a fascinating exploration of how sound affects and shapes our experience. World-premiering at the 2008 Biennale is their largest installation to date, The Murder of Crows – an astounding 100-speaker artwork that envelops the viewer/listener in the experience of the sculptural and physical qualities of sound. The large and cavernous space of Pier 2/3 is filled with speakers mounted on stands, chairs and walls, creating a minimalist ‘flock’. The installation is structured like a play or film, but with images created only by voice, music and sound effects. Inspired by Goya’s The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters – from the series of etchings called ‘Caprichos’ (c. 1799), which was a denunciation of the evils of society in Spain in his day – the artists have placed a lone megaphone horn on a table in the middle of the space. Out of this horn comes Cardiff’s voice reciting dreams and thoughts as if, like Goya’s sleeper, she is absorbed in her own nightmares. Using multiple soundscapes, as well as compositions by Freida Abtan, Tilman Ritter and Titus Maderlechner, the artists create a ‘sound play’ that physically envelops the listener in a moving field of sound and music. Morphing in a dreamlike way from war marches to lullabies, the piece is a requiem to today’s battered world.” [Biennale of Sydney]
That’s about right, and immersing oneself in a 100 speaker installation is of course an affecting experience. Indeed, I’d seen/heard Cardiff/Bures Miller’s prototype for this work, Forty Part Motet, on a bleak Sheffield day a few years earlier, an extraordinary 40-speaker recreation of Thomas Tallis’s Spem in Alium (1573), with once voice tracked to each speaker. It’s as if you’re a ghost, able to move around a full choir as you please, pausing to listen to one voice, or a group of voices, without the ‘singers’ noticing. (Someone captured a fragment of it here, and there’s more information about it here.)
A few years later, as I through around the forest of speakers placed around Pier 2/3 at Walsh Bay, winter sunlight bursting through the high windows and the gentle creak of the old pier introducing itself to the mix, under duress to the harbour’s currents, I can’t help but conclude that Cardiff and Bures Miller - in this mode at least - are a bit 'one-note', which is somewhat ironic given the polyphonic spree that their works increasingly revolve around. It's the same principle as 40 Part Motet, yet with 60 extra speakers. Having said that, it’s still a beguiling trick. Technically adept, often sublime, but I'm not sure how deeply it affects, ultimately. I think perhaps Tallis’s Spem in Alium is also a far superior piece of music, although The Murder of Crows has far more variation.
(Another Cardiff/Bures Miller piece is the The Muriel Lake Incident, seen at Tate Modern years ago, which has a lightness of touch absent in Forty part Motet and Murder of Crows. It's almost penny arcade, but no worse for that.)
The videos below are partly the result of the usual games of ‘exhibition pacman’ with the Biennale’s staff, after I'd noticed a small poster declaring an unnecessary (I thought) ban on the use of cameras. So the first of these videos is taken with the camera behind my back, in my clasped hands, as if I were going for a stroll along a promenade. Hence it looks as it does. You can hear the choral component fading as I move towards the speakers denoting the piano. The other is a little smoother, featuring a segment in which the sound of the ocean dissolves into a woman's voice recounting a dream. The woman's voice is apparently located within the megaphone horn mentioned above. The music varies considerably over the 30-minute duration, so don’t take these elements as representatives of the entire piece. And obviously, any sound recording would struggle to convey the sculptural quality of the sound, distributed as it is, never mind reproduce the fidelity - and certainly not my digital camera.
I did enjoy the work, though wasn’t as moved by it as I was by Forty Part Motet. In fact I was most taken with Pier 2/3 itself, which is a simply wonderful space. One of the 4 salvaged piers that comprise Walsh Bay, right by the Sydney Harbour Bridge, it’s a place with stories to tell for sure, despite its cavernous interior being left unadorned, detritus simply shoved to one side. It has its own distinctive music nonetheless.
Among the many intriguing insights delivered in the interview, the following passage struck me as particularly interesting, in the context of a day job increasingly concerned with formulating simulations of cities, and particularly urban models which begin to layer in the more intangible aspects of city life, such as culture and creativity.
"The show would instead be about untethered capitalism run amok, about
how power and money actually route themselves in a postmodern American
city, and, ultimately, about why we as an urban people are no longer
able to solve our problems or heal our wounds. Early in the conception
of the drama, Ed Burns and I—as well as the late Bob Colesberry, a
consummate filmmaker who served as the directorial producer and created
the visual template for The Wire—conceived
of a show that would, with each season, slice off another piece of the
American city, so that by the end of the run, a simulated Baltimore
would stand in for urban America, and the fundamental problems of
urbanity would be fully addressed."
"First season: the dysfunction of the drug war and the general
continuing theme of self-sustaining postmodern institutions devouring
the individuals they are supposed to serve or who serve them. Second
season: the death of work and the destruction of the American working
class in the postindustrial era, for which we added the port of
Baltimore. Third season: the political process and the possibility of
reform, for which we added the City Hall component. Fourth season:
equal opportunity, for which we added the public-education system. The
fifth and final season will be about the media and our capacity to
recognize and address our own realities, for which we will add the
city’s daily newspaper and television components."
"Did we mention these grandiose plans to HBO at the beginning? No, they
would have laughed us out of the pitch meeting. Instead, we spoke only
to the inversion of the cop show and a close examination of the drug
war’s dysfunction. But before shifting gears to the port in season two,
I sat down with the HBO execs and laid out the argument to begin
constructing an American city and examining the above themes through
that construction. So here we are." {David Simon, The Believer, my emphasis]
A constant theme here has been how the cultural aspects of a city inform the sense of what a city is, and can be. Hence my interest in films about cities, songs about cities, writing about cities, games about cities, music scenes in cities, and so on. These all seem to be useful - or at least evocative - in terms of understanding a city, and are usually lacking in any analytical models of cities, and certainly from most urban planning and governance processes. Something we're trying to change. But it's fascinating to hear Simon describing his particular art as "constructing an American city."
I'd long ago decided to try to deliver constructive criticism with this site. So in discussing the ideas for 'distributed exhibitions' in the previous review of the 'Modern Times' exhibition at the Powerhouse, I decided to try to make an example of what I meant.
The simplest possible offering that still illustrates the point would be a Google Map of 'modernism in Australia' - an artefact that lives outside the exhibition, guiding people to examples of the work that exist outside the exhbition. So I started a map, dragged a few blue markers into place, and then enlisted a few friends and colleagues to help me kickstart it.
But within a week, we'd got a pretty good set of examples - over 180 buildings and structures, located pretty exactly, and many with links and images (and we've tried to credit images where possible.) Houses, skyscrapers, civic buildings, sculptures, memorials. (And we didn't want to get into a debate of what formally counted as modernism and what didn't - inclusivity was the order of the day. Having said that, if you think there's a property that shouldn't be listed there, for whatever reason, do let me know.)
It's a little skewed towards the south and east, to say the least - Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Canberra, to be precise. We're hoping to rectify that, with your help. We need contributions for the other major cities in Australia, and I've decided to take a curatorial approach rather than fully open, given the hard work put in by others thus far and the lack of back-up/roll-back facilitites in Google Maps. So if you want to join in, and if you know of examples of modernism in built form - buildings, sculptures, infrastructure, built or unbuilt - drop me a line (email address below-right, where it says 'email me') and I'll happily welcome you in.
In the meantime, we hope you find the map useful, interesting. It's embedded below, though you might find this direct link more useful. I'll also send it to the Powerhouse Museum, offering it up as a potential adjunct to their exhibition, if they're interested.
The “Modern Times” exhibition at Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum - part of Sydney Design 08 - is something of a curate’s egg. Containing some wonderful artefacts, the show is worth seeing for a few items alone. However, the unimaginative presentation is fairly disappointing and you walk away sensing an opportunity lost, as much as you are enlightened and enlivened by the possibilities inherent in the material.
The “untold story of modernism in Australia” is a tagline open to misinterpretation. It’s not that modernism in Australia is an “untold story” - as Australian modernism, through the likes of Boyd, Grounds, Seidler, Nolan, Preston, Dupain, the Featherstons et al, has a well-documented history here, and the architectural scene in Sydney in particular has an ongoing relationship with modernism. It’s more that the curators intended to tell a different story of modernism, one that focused perhaps a little less on architecture and built environment, and more on the social and cultural patterns emerging throughout the modern period. (This insight gleaned in an interview with curator Ann Stephen on ABC Radio National’s By Design show.)
While this is laudable, it should not negate engaging with architecture and urban planning - as this is the built expression of those social and cultural patterns. And it’s the buildings that we’re left with, marking modernism in the streets around us every day, long after the fashions, posters and poems have faded. Sure enough, many of the artefacts directly relate to architecture and urbanism nonetheless. In fact, although the exhibition opens on the body, health and the emerging fashion, it tends to become more centred around architecture, cities, and other fragments of built fabric as it continues.
