cityofsound

Bryan Boyer (Postopolis! LA)

File under 'better late than never'. NB: This is a write-up of a talk that took place at Postopolis! LA during April 2009. Notes are taken in real-time, with editing and context added afterward so reader beware. All Postopolis! LA entries are gathered here.

I’ve known Bryan for a few years, so it was a pleasure to have him speak at Postopolis! LA. (Note: some of the images below are from Bryan’s deck, which he kindly sent me afterwards.)

An editor at Archinect, and a recent grad from Harvard GSD, Boyer now notes that “he works for Finland”, essentially, as he’s now employed at Sitra, the Finnish Innovation Fund. 

One of the more forward-thinking architects I know, Bryan exemplifies one aspect of the architecture on show at Postopolis! LA - that of fluid frontiers around the discipline, of the application of a design discipline for strategic value outside of its traditional parameters of the built environment. (There are echoes of the debates around design thinking here, even further beyond Leon van Schaik’s notion of architecture re-calibrated as “spatial intelligence” rather than “technologies of shelter”.)

Michael Downing, Deputy-Chief of Counter-Terrorism for LAPD (Postopolis! LA)

File under 'better late than never'. NB: This is a write-up of a talk that took place at Postopolis! LA during April 2009. Notes are taken in real-time, with editing and context added afterward so reader beware. All Postopolis! LA entries are gathered here.

Bryan’s pulled off a real coup here. He’s only invited the Deputy-Chief of Counter-Terrorism and Criminal Intelligence Bureau for the LAPD to speak at Postopolis LA. (Later that year, Downing would become interim Chief of Police).

Bryan’s typically articulate and impassioned introduction contextualises LAPD as “one of the world’s largest police forces, bigger than the military forces of many small nations”, before Michael Downing steps forward. He’s burly, packed into a sleek suit, looking every inch the pro football player turned successful local businessman. As such, he’s highly incongruous amongst the crowd at the Standard’s rooftop bar. (Don’t get me wrong - a few more suits, literally and metaphorically, would not have been a bad thing, in a way.)

Freya Bardell and Brian Howe (Postopolis! LA)

File under 'better late than never'. NB: This is a write-up of a talk that took place at Postopolis! LA during April 2009. Notes are taken in real-time, with editing and context added afterward so reader beware. All Postopolis! LA entries are gathered here.

Freya Bardell and Brian Howe (of Greenmeme) presented several projects centred on landscape, sustainability, gardens and communities. They start by stating that the projects’ “underlying commonality is a deep concern for our planet and inhabitants of our planet”. Their practice is about “designing of sustainable strategies for community engagement”. They also describe it as partly “art activism”.

Their 2006 project GreenYourRoof involved monitoring plant species and documenting on website. They say the “data collection was very basic” comprising an environmental forum on invasive species etc.

Journal: Notes on New Songdo City. Or, What does your Seoul look like (Part 1)

(Much of this originally written at the time, September 2009.)

A day trip to Seoul. Depart Sydney Thursday midday, arrive in Seoul Thursday night, depart Friday late-afternoon back to Sydney. I'm in international airspace for longer than I'm on Korean soil. Don't ask.

What follows is a series of thoughts, vignettes and photos from your tired but intrigued correspondent.

I'd love more time to even begin to explore this city, but not this time. And actually I'm not really in what most would think of as Seoul at all, but New Songdo City. (The taxi driver called it Songdo New City; others call it New Songdo City. Who knows. I was actually visiting the Songdo International Business District. Which is part of Incheon Free Economic Zone. There's a furious series of city branding skirmishes going on over here.)

New Songdo City is a vast new development on reclaimed land — the Song Do tidal flats, in fact, just on the edge of Incheon and Seoul. I arrive at around midnight on the Thursday night. My taxi driver waves his hand towards the lines of lights ascending into the murky sky, describing loose outlines of skyscrapers.

Sketchbook: Visualising emails on the CLOUD project, or sketching the ‘new smokestacks’

Regarding the previous post on The CLOUD, the eagle-eyed amongst you may have noticed the visualisation I layered over the third of my AAA exhibition boards. This was no more than a quick sketch, rattled together very late one night - by hand, direct into InDesign (not a good idea, by the way) - illustrating the emails to and from my in-box relating to the CLOUD’s design process. Although it was produced quickly, there’s a little more thinking behind it than meets the eye, and like most sketches, it’s development rather than destination.