Vertical Zoo!!!

I've been joking about designing a vertical zoo for Marseille for a while, but someone has actually designed one! Theoretically speaking, it is in line with Tschumi's projects to design for programmes on sites which are traditionally too small. It also goes against the Zaera Polo's uncritical attitude to programme, which assumes an basic formal type for a given programme.

Confused transnational networks...

Sitting on the train from Edinburgh to London, using East Coast Mainline's free wireless. Apparently we have left the UK. Spotify has started playing Swedish adverts at me (very funny they are too, despite or because I don't understand them!). Another reminder that virtual and physical networks and spaces do not map 1:1 onto one another...

Plus; from the train, the junkspace that grows up around railway lines - a collection of shopping centres - seems no where near as fantastic and full of possibilities as Koolhaas asserts...

Week 10: Sprawl, Megacity, (Post)Urbanism

Key readings:

Jameson - Future City

Koolhaas - Junkspace

Lin - CHINESE ARCHITECT ©

This week’s readings take off where the previous ones left off, with the failure of urbanism to be able to deal with the urbanising trends of the third world, but also suburban sprawl and the economic conditions which create this new condition of ‘junkspace.’

Together, the Chinese Architect© and Junkspace portray a fascinating, if somewhat terrifying vision of potential futures of architecture. Through extreme commodification, the architect is transformed from the designer of buildings and spaces to someone who applies a given plan to a site. Despite the increased importance of Architecture©, the agency of the architect is heavily reduced – economics govern the structure of the city. Perhaps the only remaining recognisable role of the architect is in designing the ‘hat’ or skin that adorns the generic plan, or otherwise in creating one of the architectural ‘recipes’ which others then apply to their sites. But in Architecture© even these tasks are fully subservient to the economies of development, with a drive to the most economical designs, regardless of issues of comfort and well-being.

China designs and builds with a speed that for us is unimaginable. But the shocking compromise in quality sometimes reveals itself in the news. In this building collapse in Shanghai, perhaps the most worrying aspect is that in the background there stand numerous other identical buildings, all of which presumably share the same major error in the design of their foundations.

In Junkspace, Koolhaas addresses many of the same issues (albeit in more extreme forms) that concerned Calthorpe in his vision for the Next American Metropolis. However, whereas Calthorpe flees in terror, Koolaas’ acceptance of the condition of junkspace and the way in which he embraces the possibilities it offers makes it a much richer account, and although it is largely diagnostic, he begins to set up a vocabulary of architectural techniques to deal with the condition: “clamp, stick, fold, dump, glue, shoot, double, fuse.”

“We have made them [hospitals] (too) human; life or death decisions are taken in spaces that are relentlessly friendly, littered with fading bouquets, empty coffee cups, and yesterday’s papers.” – Junkspace, p. 185

Would you like a skinny cappuccino with your hip replacement, madam?

This extract reminded me strongly of a recent BBC news item on Foster’s new Circle hospital in Bath (above). According to the reporter, the hospital was designed to make it feel like a hotel, with the aroma of coffee in the reception to make people feel more at ease. Although there is something slightly strange and unnerving about the transformation of healthcare buildings into branches of Starbucks, if the quality of space has a positive effect on the health of patients, then perhaps this is not too bad after all.

Week 9: Morphology, History, (New)Urbanism

Key readings:

Calthorpe: The Next American Metropolis

Rossi: The Structure of Urban Artifacts

Rowe & Koetter: Crisis of the Object: Predicament of Texture

As I read through Calthorpe’s vision of the Next American Metropolis, I found myself becoming increasingly critical. He uses data to back up his argument, but I can’t help feeling that this often has his own spin on it. He claims that ‘the car wants to travel more’ (p. 27), quoting an 82% rise in vehicle miles against a 21% population growth between 1969 and 1990, but this is surely also bound up in the increasing affordability of the car and petrol, and increased car ownership, in part a lifestyle choice? His portrayal of a hierarchy of public and private buildings seemed too black and white to me, ignoring the increasingly complex nature of public/private space. And whilst I agree that commuting by train is preferable to each person driving to work, he seems to have a very romanticised idea about how comfortable this would be…

Calthorpe's preferred choice of reading location?

One interesting point of contention between the American Metropolis and Collage City concerned the nature of outdoor space. I am inclined to agree with Rowe and Koetter that an increased complexity of outdoor space is fundamentally more interesting than a barrier free expanse of public land. Calthorpe by contrast called for all exterior space (at least all that meets the street, given his strongly defined public and private spaces) to be in the public domain. He equates closed off spaces with the negative image of gated communities, which I do not think that Rowe and Koetter are advocating when they call for a complexity of outdoor space.

The main argument of the Crisis of the Object is that objects (which have valuable qualities despite their tendency to attempt neutrality to their urban context) should become part of the urban texture so that both figure and ground are enriched. Having seen today some images of Zaha Hadid’s proposal for Zürich Airport (and also thinking about her CMA-CGM tower in Marseille), it is evident that this idea is not universally held; the ego of the architect allows itself to be bigger than that of the city.

Zaha's object is obviously attempting to dissolve into the urban fabric of Marseille...

Throughout the Architecture of the City, there were constant implicit references to ideas from Umberto Eco (which it predates): the changing meanings of buildings over time, a split between function and type (semiotic implications of a church that is used as a cinema, for example). In some ways Rossi also shares common ideas with Latour, in that social relations are embedded in the architecture of the city. A lot about a city’s social and economic structures can be understood by looking at the patterns of land ownership across the city.

As Stephen pointed out with reference to Koolhaas in the lecture, figure ground plans are limited in that they only work on one level. My site in Marseille is a good example of this limitation, despite being in a historic city centre. Although demonstrating the density of the block at ground level, a figure ground plan would oversimplify the complexity of different private and semi-public spaces at higher levels.

Spectacles of waste

Somehow, we are attracted to the spectacle the surrounds the end of a building's life, especially in the case of hated industrial buildings, or failed council housing: Landmark Northfleet 550ft cement towers demolished

Week 8: Entropy, Maintenance, Waste

Key Readings:

Bataille: The Notion of Expenditure

Crisman: From industry to culture

Hetherington: Second-handedness: Consumption, disposal and absent presence

An interesting new comparison to the other museums discussed by Crisman would be Chipperfield’s refurbishment of the Neues Museum in Berlin. Although the project did not deal with the empty shell of an industrial building, many similar issues would have been tackled, such as what to restore and what to replace, as well as the relationship between the building and the objects on display.

“The museum is above all a conduit of disposal.” Hetherington, p. 166

For me, this statement provides a radical new way of understanding the programmatic nature of museums that has strong implications on their design. It becomes all the more interesting when the museum itself is built in a recycled shell, since whilst it holds objects before disposal, the museum itself also undergoes a process of disposal and decay (perhaps more so than a complete new build). Both Hetherington and Crisman touched on ideas from Eco’s text on the semiotics of architecture, acknowledging that a building’s meaning and value is not a constant, but changes over time.

In my 4^th year project on the Edinburgh Kitchen, I worked with Olly Cooper to study the contrast between a typical architect’s conception of an immaculate kitchen against the reality of a lived-in kitchen and its own landscapes of dirt. It reminded us of the difference between our ideas and the messy reality of life, as well as highlighting the different forms and materials that take dirt differently – which are the areas of a room that are always dirty, and do they need to be designed differently? Are there areas where dirt is acceptable? In Crisman’s essay, as well as in Auer’s ideas on plastics, we were reminded about the futility of attempting to control weathering in materials. In the Dia:Beacon, the scrupulously cleaned brick has become covered with a white efflorescence.

Musicians tend to deal with entropy much more directly than architects. For a note to be sustained over a longer period of time, more input is required from a musician. With string instruments, this is done through bowing technique. The ends of notes are even more significant in ensemble music, since if all musicians do not end simultaneously, the result is a ragged performance. Ligeti created a musical equivalent to Robert Smithson’s Asphalt Rundown in his work, Poème Symphonique, in which 100 metronomes are wound up and released simultaneously, slowing to a halt over about 20 minutes. Although his primary interest is in the rhythmic patterns created by mechanical imperfections, this piece could also be read as a study of the entropic condition of musical production.

Topical megacities

Article in the Guardian today, looking at the issues of megacity sprawl.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/mar/22/un-cities-mega-regions

Week 7: Material, Immaterial, Virtual

Key Readings:

Auer - Baustoffe sind von Natur aus künstlich

Damisch - Blotting out Architecture? A fable in Seven Parts

Cache - Digital Semper

Auer's argument revolves around the idea that all building materials are artificial, and that the idea of natural materials is an illusion of an unattainable nature, therefore he argues that the idea of a material having an essential quality or truth is false. If we agree with Auer's ideas, then we can use materials in any way - the brick does not need to 'like an arch' (Louis Kahn) but can be used in any way. This then starts to set up oppositional groups of those who believe in a truth to materials, and those who treat materials for their cladding purposes. Its hard to say which I would try and work with, as both sides have very strong points - there is a strength in the beauty of Kahn's Ahmedebad project, or Ando's churches, but then the possibilities of being able to use materials in a wide variety of different ways is very tempting. Perhaps the distinction is not so clear anyway, and it is an issue that I would be able to look at afresh in each project.

As a continuation of Auer's ideas, we discussed in the tutorial the notion that our lives are not on the whole 'authentic', and that our experiences are a combination of real and virtual ones. We talk to people on the other side of the world over the internet with skype, but this is no different to talking to people in the next building on the phone. Physical and virtual networks often overlap, so an inauthentic existence is not necessarily a bad thing. So many products around us are labelled with 'authentic', that the word hardly seems to have any real meaning or value any more. If this is the case, then why do building materials need to be used in an authentic sense? This is quite interesting in relation to Gunther Vogt's lecture at the ECA where he talked about his unease at architects' interests in 'instant' nature in buildings through living walls. This rested on a critique of the belief that we are able to create and control nature - his own work tries to make it clear that the 'nature' being created is just an image.

Diller and Scofidio's Blur project, as discussed by Damisch is undoubtably interesting in the way that it uses an unconventional material - cloud - to create a dynamic form and obscure the primary steel structure, but this still remains one of the only built examples of a formless building, and its application in other uses is quite unclear to me.

In music, there is a similar question as to what is a real or artificial instrument. With electronics, sounds can be created without the need for traditional percussive, bowed, plucked or wind methods. The theremin (as demonstrated by Bill Bailey) is an early electronic instrument which creates sound based on the proximity of objects to the instrument. Messiaen combines a modern symphony orchestra with the electronic theremin in his Turangalila Symphony, mixing very different sounds together. Despite having a very different nature to traditional instruments, he is happy to deploy it in his range of texture and tone colour. A really interesting recent extension of virtual instruments can be heard in the music of Super D'Orch, an Edinburgh based laptop orchestra. From my own experience of playing in orchestras, digital and analogue techniques can combine very effectively together (Roxburgh's Saturn, where a quartet of violin, flute, trumpet and xylophone are recorded live during the performance and fed back into the music at a later stage).

Baugeist, lost in translation...

"desto freier kann sich menschlicher Baugeist artikulieren"

"the more freedom the architect has to articulate himself"

- Gerhard Auer, Baustoffe sind von Natur aus künstlich, p. 22

This phrase in English and the original German reminded me of why it is good wherever possible to read texts in their original language. My complaint with the translation is that it doesn't address the word 'Baugeist', turning the human spirit of the building into the articulation of the architect. If you were to read the text in English, you would miss out on this extra layer of richness. Perhaps it is an untranslatable word, but then we use other words such as Zeitgeist and Schadenfreude in their original state, so why not use Baugeist too?

The other strange problem with the translation was the curious omission of an entire paragraph (with my translation beneath)...

"Wir erschraken demzufolge vorübergehend vor der Verwitterungsfestigkeit der Plaste; ihre aufdringlich bunte Renitenz galt als Menetekel. Doch die Recycling-Philosophie erteilt jetzt den Sündenfall symbolische Absolution und verwandelt ihn in einen Triumph: Der natürliche Wiederauferstehungskreislauf der Materie ist zu beschleunigen und zu kontrollieren; ewige Reformierung. Unsterblichkeit ist programmierbar geworden." p. 33

We are therefore momentarily alarmed by plastic's resistance to weathering; its brash colourful refractoriness is the writing on the wall. But the philosophy behind recycling grants symbolic absolution to the fall of man and transforms it into a triumph; The natural life cycle (note that Wiederauferstehungskreislauf contains the word Auferstehung - resurrection - so is even more potently charged) of materials is accelerated and controlled; eternal reformation. Immortality has been made programmable.

Vogt Landschaftsarchitekten - Lecture, 04.03.10

Hotel Greulich, Zürich (note the drain cover under the image of nature)

A very interesting lecture from Gunther Vogt, in contrast to the work of Gross Max, where I spent some of my placement.

Some of the interesting points from the lecture:

- The difficulty of landscape architecture, in that has a difficult relation to scale and time.

- Suspicion of contemporary architecture's desire to control and create a false image of nature through living walls and green atria.

- Architects tend only to be interested in very particular parts of landscape architecture; perennials and living walls.

- Loss of agency of landscape architects as a discipline due to a tendency towards graphic design in practice.

- The distance between trees in a project is not based on biological reasons, but should be a design decision.

- Landscape design in an urban context should be simple to deal with the complexity of the city.

- Especially in Europe, the distinction between native and exotic plants is a false one, since it is impossible to tell which plants are truly native (especially in a time of climate change)

Week 6: Technology, Infrastructure, Hardware

Key readings:

Latour - Mixing Humans and Nonhumans together: The Sociology of a Door-Closer

Zaera Polo - The Politics of the Envelope: A Political Critique of Materialism

Graham & Marvin - Splintering Urbanism: Introduction

Latour's essay on 'the sociology of a door-closer' seems to affirm the position of the course here at Edinburgh, where architecture is seen as a social product (although as Zaera Polo reminds us, also political, economic, technical...). His argument wittily shows how studying social relations purely between humans is a false idea, since it grossly oversimplifies the complex relations between humans and non-humans. For us, we can look at it from the other perspective - to study the relations between spaces and (non-humans) without looking at the social relations that occur around and within them would be false, since it ignores the fact that social relations are written into the architecture that we create.

Zaera Polo's opening gambit got me interested, but I found his way of writing convoluted and perhaps as a result, many of the ideas seemed unconvincing. He claims to be investigating the politics in architecture, but then constructs an argument entirely around the envelope, which he claims gives us the most potential. However, the reduction to 4 different types of envelope and the different political battlegrounds they come with seemed a little too simplistic (although perhaps it was necessarily so). Especially in light of Tschumi's approach, Zaera Polo seemed to take a very uncritical approach to programme, simply equating function with a formal typology. As a result I felt that he really missed an opportunity to engage with something that could be strongly political - if we don't question the programme, can we really design critically for it?

At this stage of the design process, Splintering Urbanism is the easiest text to relate to. We have been looking at the development of our site over time (below right), trying to discover what its 'agenda' is. Part of this has involved looking the transport links of the site (See below left. As yet, we do not come close to Graham & Marvin's aspiration that architects involve all kinds of infrastructure in their analysis). Our site has gained significance through strong transport links (Part of the first 'ring road,' early tram connections, metro, and underground car parking). It might be an interesting study to see which areas have been detrimentally affected by the changes which strengthened our site.

As we start to design fragments of our projects, the ideas of Latour (and perhaps Zaera Polo) become more relevant. We are looking at the interface between a 19th Century axis and the Cours Julien area of Marseille, trying to understand how we can design for this condition of a strongly independent area in contrast to a large scale urban strategy. Understanding the social and political relations embedded in the space will be key to the success of any design moves.

The combination of Latour's deconstruction of human and non human relations with the ideas of networks and urbanism reminded me of this news story from September. Clearly in this case, the delegation of a task from human messenger to non-human carrier pigeon (via computer, memory stick etc.) is more effective than to an unreliable network...

In the tutorial we had an interesting discussion following on from Grimshaw's lecture on Monday. His architecture references machines throughout, exposing the structure of the building, and in the FT printworks showing the mechanism of printing the papers. However, in an age where technology is compact and hidden behind an ipod case, the machine reference is no longer relevant. To what references can we design, or does this new technological era lead even more towards bubble architecture?

Week 6: Failed to open page

I was going to update this morning, only to get this screen:

The uni's internet wasn't working. Oh the irony... Unable to get to google maps, photos of the site, or references to other projects, our reliance on the internet was exposed:

"The normally invisible quality of working infrastructure becomes visible when it breaks: the server is down..."

- Graham & Marvin, Splintering Urbanism, p. 32

The idea of connection to a network of infrastructure exercises fascination in many popular musicians:

Regina Spektor, Machine

Week 6 (preview...)

Lecture by Alejandro Zaera Polo at the California College of the Arts on the topic of the politics of the envelope.

Week 5 (contd.): Kitsch...

On the topic of kitsch and ugly... with some impressive machines for the destruction of objects of bad taste! Perhaps there should be an architectural equivalent...

Images from www.core77.com

Week 5: Affect, Atmosphere, Sensibility

Key Readings:

Merleau-Ponty - The Intertwining: the Chiasm

Pallasmaa - The Eyes of the Skin

Wigley - The Architecture of Atmosphere

The texts by Pallasmaa and Wigley set out two counter arguments around the topic of atmosphere in architecture. For Pallasmaa, the atmosphere of a building comes about largely from an engagement with all the senses, beyond the purely visual. His argument is incredibly romanticised and in some respects an oversimplification (especially when he talks about 'natural' materials) though several parts of the essay do strike a chord with my own thinking. By contrast, Wigley argues that architecture can create atmosphere through a 'stage set' which does not depend on tectonic logic and is highly visual. He makes a convincing argument about the difficulty of approaching the topic of atmospheres in architecture - those who deny atmosphere still create them, and those who center their work around atmosphere displace themselves and their buildings. Whilst I agree that no matter how much the architect denys it, atmosphere is always created, I am less sure about the issue surrounding the second point. Does it really matter if the architect is displaced? If architecture is about the creation of atmosphere, does it matter that the building itself is subordinated?

Haptic architecture - Travels in Helsinki & Vals: Aalto, Holl, Zumthor

Merleau-Ponty is referred to heavily in Pallasmaa's essay, especially with regard to the critique of ocularcentrism. The idea that the body is in a thickened relationship with the world, and that sight and touch are superposable, but separate conditions might help explain the relationship between the haptic and the visual in Corbusier's architecture, which seemingly prioritises sight.

A common theme that I notice grows throughout this course is the constant criticism of architectural representation. Perhaps this is rooted in the curious role of the architect between autographic and allographic artist. Since we do not (usually) realise our projects ourselves, a crucial part of all architectural discourse is how we communicate our ideas to others. Wigley's analysis of Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier's drawings reminded me of last week's text by Stan Allen, where he suggests that dry notational representation could ultimately be the best way to draw complex atmospheres. Another approach to emotive drawing could be seen in the 'digital' drawings of Gross Max, which do not attempt to simulate reality, but give a sense of the atmospheric intention behind the design (and in some of the imagery used, they are quite kitsch...).

Ideas about atmosphere were a part of my dissertation from 4th year, comparing and contrasting the 'tonal' atmospheres of Zumthor with those produced by Libeskind through a kind of structural tonality. In it I argued that Zumthor's notion of atmosphere had strong parallels with Peter Høeg's literary understanding of atmospheres and tonality:

"She Almighty had tuned each person in a musical key, and Kaspar could hear it... They reached the centre of the courtyard, and Kaspar got his first sense of their musical key. It was D-minor, at its worst. As in Toccata and Fugue in D-minor. Great fateful pillars of music." P. Høeg, The Quiet Girl, p. 3

The basic concept being that you could use musical tonality as a metaphor for describing the qualities of a space, which has interesting implications when looking at the transitions (or modulations) between spaces. Libeskind approaches atmospheres from a very different angle, based on a spatialisation of the musical scale, but in some ways reaches very similar effects. An interesting point is that both architects create an atmosphere around their work in how they write about and discuss their buildings. Libeskind in particular conjures up an aura around his use of music in design - he often refers to directly using music, but never explicitly as to how.

Atmospheres of structural tonality - Architectural Design Dissertation

In my opinion, Zumthor gets extra points for referring to music written for viola in his architectural writing. In Atmosphären, setting out his ideas about architectural atmospheres, he describes the opening to Brahms' Viola Sonata in E flat. He believes that whilst not as immediately powerful as those in music, the atmospheres created by architects can also have a very rapid effect on people. His chalk and charcoal design drawings convey a sense of the atmosphere from the outset, and by working through projects in large scale models he is able to come very close to the final atmosphere during the design process. This becomes a precise way of working with atmosphere, which he describes as "a little like tempering a piano, in other words, finding the right voice." Atmosphären, p. 35

Week 4: Programme, Event, Gesture

Key Readings:

Allen: Mapping the Unmappable - On Notation

de Certeau: Walking in the City

Koolhaas, Tschumi: 2 Architects, 10 Questions on Programme

This week, another set of texts which are very pertinent to the current design studio. Currently we are continuing our study of Cours Julien in Marseille, and some point soon will start to design pieces to test our ideas and the tectonic language that we are developing. As yet we have no idea as to what programme these will have, and may indeed be without programme. However, the ideas of Tschumi seem to us a good starting point for thinking about programme and event in our design. His belief that architects always have their own agenda is very relevant here, and when the time comes for us to think about the programme for our projects, we will not be able to have a passive attitude towards programme. Koolhaas' idea of the city as a programme is also of interest - does Marseille have a programme? It could be said with some certainty that areas of Marseille have a very distinct agenda - we recently found a French term for the inhabitants of our study area, Bobos - bourgeois bohemian - which describes the community's agenda quite well.

In the Manhattan Transcripts, ice skaters, tightrope walkers and military battalions overlap, creating a richly layered programmatic or event space. We believe that the nature of Cours Julien is heterotopic (using Lefebvre's definition of the term). This can already be seen in an investigation into the site's music scene, but its events and programmes also give weight to this argument. Some of those which we aim to record in our constructed site drawings:

- The first balloon ride across the Mediterranean, which took flight from La Pleine in 1899

- The collapse of a pioneering concrete bridge at Rue d'Aubagne in 1867

- The diurnal, weekly, and annual rhythms of Cours Julien

- Santa's sleigh meets a jazz trio, with cats sleeping on cars underground

Stan Allen's ideas on drawing and notation are very interesting in relation to our work as designers. The drawings below (and at the top of this blog) make attempts at temporal and anticipatory drawings of projects. I think that we can learn quite a lot from landscape architects, who have to consider the life and growth cycles of plants in their design work - it is an aim that I have had for a while now, to develop this multi-perspectival temporal drawing, moving through a landscape scheme across the seasons.

However, these drawings fail on several levels to be the kind of notation that Allen calls for - they are still very much analogue drawings, not the digital drawings where difference between reality and the image makes them more powerful. Similarly, they do not represent the invisible conditions of the projects - of particular interest to me of course is the sonic environment of a project. We will probably be working with a combination of analogue drawings and digital diagrams with our design projects, in order to convey different aspects of the scheme.

Allen's description of allographic and autographic arts is something that I had come across in my 2nd year music course, as well as in my research into Liszt last semester. The definitions are broadly speaking, very strong, however in relation to music, it is not as clear cut as Allen makes out. Can free improvised jazz really be considered to be allographic? This is further complicated with recording and editing technologies. Liszt was also one of the first musicians in the school of thought (against Schumann), who thought that the performance of music was much more important than the musical score, giving rise to the virtuoso performer.

De Certeau's chapter provides a good counterpoint to the grammatical view of architecture offered by Eisenman in last week's lecture and reviews. His and Tschumi's ideas of human activities creating space and performitivity interest Tom and I in our design work (mainly coming from Tom's house for Django Reinhardt - mine for Liszt was more about the construction of the piano than Liszt's performances). The text

provides an interesting (but complex) theoretical background to Tschumi's work. We are working at the moment mainly on the grammar and vocabulary of our architectural proposals, but soon we will need to consider the rhetoric, and for that, de Certeau and Tschumi will be good starting points. However, the big question is how to move on from the stage which both have brought us to today?

To end with a distortion of Tschumi's words:

To really appreciate architecture, you may even need to play music. Music in the Street differs from Music in the Cathedral in the same way as love in the Street differs from the Street of Love. Radically

Week 3: Signs, Semiotics, Signification

Key Readings:

Barthes - The Eiffel Tower

Eco - Function and Sign: The Semiotics of Architecture

Jencks - The Iconic Building is Here to Stay

Many of the ideas in Umberto Eco's text seemed to be stating the obvious, albeit in a very clever way, as though you always understood these rules, but never known why. The 4th section, on architectural codes seemed to be asking too much of architecture at times. Eco compares architecture's reliance on limited pre-existing codes and conventions with the freedom of verbal languages. To me this seems to be an unfair comparison. Architecture is always tied to real constraints - programme, gravity, economics etc - and if it was absolutely free in its expression, would it be intelligible?

Eco's exposition of three modes of design in existing social systems were for me a key part of the essay:

- Integration with existing codes

- Deviation from existing codes

- Innovation in relation to existing codes

My own aim would probably be innovation, trying to create something new, but which still finds a place with the existing society, even if it requires a little adjustment to work. As it was put in the reviews of our work last week, trying to find the metapresence of Marseille - what about our projects make them particularly Massilian? However good Eco's modes sound, there is a difficulty which we might encounter in our studio work. It assumes that a society is coherent - in Marseille, with so many cultures overlapping the task of understanding local codes is that much harder, but also much more interesting. Another key lesson following on from this, is that architects work within history, but do not significantly alter history. As the primary and secondary meanings of designed objects are not fixed, but can change through history, an specifically overcoded design will soon find itself redundant, more than one which leaves things more open. In Jencks' terms, this would be the enigmatic signifier, where there are multiple interpretations of one building possible.

Jencks' text on icons is straightforward, journalistic, but felt a bit too simplistic at times. However, given the level of analysis that architects put into studying buildings, the essay is perhaps a good understanding of how the public perceive our buildings. This can be seen particularly in the sketches of different metaphors, and the understanding of the role of the media in contemporary architecture. Barthes' analysis of the Parisian icon, the Eiffel Tower is a good counterpart to Jencks' study of the icon genre. It reveals the complex and changing semiotic nature of the Eiffel Tower, giving several different viewpoints for its deciphering; tourist, engineer, inside-outside.

In the design studio, Tom and I have been looking at our study area of Marseille, trying to unpack particular characteristics of the area. We have been trying to find out about voids and cases in the site, trying to define what they are in Marseille. One example which we like is the local construction method for building extra chimneys onto the side of a building:

A few points in musical semiotics:

- Monteverdi: Cruda Amarilli (the start of seconda prattica, where harmony

is crucial in conveying the meaning of the music)

- Beethoven: 9th Symphony, 4th Movement (shifting meanings; drinking

song, Nazi appropriation, A Clockwork Orange, EU Anthem)

- Wagner: Tristan und Isolde, Prelude (at the height of expression in music)

- Webern: Variationen für Klavier (modernist reaction against expression and emotion in music)

E-Day reviews, and couple of other things...

Ok, so I still haven't mentioned last weeks' readings on semiotics, but it has been pretty busy preparing for interim reviews of our design work, with Peter Eisenman as visiting tutor.

Eisenman got very interested in one group's title of Marseille Archipelago, referring primarily to Ungers' Berlin as green archipelago. Thanks to my friends at Raumbureau, I know a little about it, through their exploration of the idea in Pilzen. However, Tom and I do not understand Marseille in the same way - in what we have seen, we think that there is far too much overlap of different communities and architectures to be able to draw out separate islands. So when faced with the question, 'what urban idea do we follow?', I am at the moment inclined to return to Lefebvre's heterotopias, or differential space. Looking at Cours Julien (model below), we see an area where many different cultures overlap, something that we were even able to identify from a distance by looking at the distribution of different types of musical performance across the city.

A theme that came out in reviews, and more so in Eisenman's lecture was one of architectural grammar. The key question he asked us was around what it means to design in Marseille; what about our projects reflect the grammar of Marseille? In his lecture, he argued that currently we have a new rhetoric, but not an architectural grammar to deal with it. This reminded me a lot of Eco's essay, in particular his description of the anthropological approach, in which the architect must first understand the codes around which a society works, in order to develop an architectural response that is aware of its meaning in the society. Part of what Tom and I have been looking at in Cours Julien tries to gain an understanding of what certain things mean in that context; in particular, void and casing.

Whilst drawing to get ready for the reviews I've been listening to Kafka's The Trial. One line in particular reminded me of the previous week's readings on the surveillance society. Whilst talking to the painter, K is interrupted by a group of young girls, trying to listen in on their conversation. The painter then explains to K that 'these girls too belong to the court.' In other words, everyone around him is involved in the mechanisms of discipline and control within the city. Kafka's writing often seems to predict a world of bureaucracy and power which is becoming more prevalent today.

Again, preceding the update on semiotics, I came across this project in China, based around the piano. If I ever produce anything like this, then please stop me!! To use Jenck's terms, it is not an enigmatic signifier, but a definite one-liner. Its lack of appeal perhaps comes from its instant comprehension and dismissal as something very trivial, the idea too obviously translated into built form. Its overcoding makes it liable to become redundant very easily.

Strangely, Eisenman heard that someone in the class was interested in Liszt, and without hearing any more detail, described the terrible city that he imagined this student to be designing based on music translated directly into architecture via some strange computer algorithm... I was very tempted to point out that this particular student had no inclination to do that whatsoever. Or perhaps even more tempted to play along with the idea to see what would happen...

Week 2: Capsules, Networks, Surveillance

Key Readings:

Castells - Space of Flows, Space of Places

de Cauter - The City in the Age of Transcendental Capitalism

de Cauter - The Rise of Heterotopias

Foucault - The Eye of Power

This week, a much darker set of texts about the contemporary city. Castells' essay lays out key issues surrounding urbanisation and globalisation, pointing out the possibilities and dangers of a society that is increasingly fragmented. Whilst it has strong points, it did feel like a highly repetitive essay with each point being repeated over and over again. Also to bear in mind when reading, it was written in 2004, and much has changed since then - social networking and twitter, to name only a couple. The two essays by de Cauter, both angry in style, describe the rise of a capsular society. However, the second text, on heterotopias read a bit too much like a review of a few books that the author had read (thats what this is... sort of). The interview with Foucault is an illuminating text on panopticism and the surveillance society, which he argues is diagrammed architecturally in Bentham's Panopticon prison.

A frustrating point in Castells' essay is when he starts to discuss the role of architects in society - apparently, our most important task is that of creating 'meaningful forms.' (Castells, p. 452) Is this too reductive a statement? Perhaps I take it too literally as form-finding, which I would find too narrow an idea to by our primary task.

What can we as architects do within these conditions? We don't (and perhaps shouldn't) have the power to change society, politics, or economics. But we need to be able to work with and around these trends. It may be that buildings we design make small changes, which are part of the seeds of greater changes. Importantly, we need to be aware of the politics of space, since if we are unaware, then we can be easily manipulated against our own ideals.

The surveillance society is a very modish theme in the press at the moment. As one of the most watched societies in the world, there are cameras wherever you go. But is anyone actually watching? The idea of a self-disciplining society reminded me of a news story from October last year, about a website where members of the public are able to earn money by spotting crimes on live CCTV feeds. And then people start getting upset, when members of the public take photos... On a similar note, two fantastic recent(ish) films about surveillance societies, both questioning who the beneficiary of surveillance really is: Red Road, and Das Leben der Anderen

Back to the design studio, de Cauter's attack on cultural capitals is very relevant, with Marseille holding the European title in 2013. This spectacle of culture is already being greeted with suspicion - the musicians we spoke to there saw very little positive coming out of it. Presumably someone, somewhere is making a lot of money out of it, and its resulting in projects which probably won't benefit the city in the long term (at least, not as much as better housing, infrastructure...). The culture of fear that pervades a surveillance society is also evident in Marseille - many gated communities surround the centre, with the aim of reducing crime and reducing their insurance premiums. Paradoxically, the gates signify wealth, and in some cases the crime rate has risen since they shut themselves away. As France's second largest city, with a very diverse population, the interaction between flows and places is highly complex. I don't know what I will end up designing, but these issues will almost certainly become relevant. Still looking at the aural architecture of Marseille, where musicians find it too loud to record music, the government policy focuses almost entirely on quantitative measures of sound reduction. The politics of silence (balance of freedom of expression, against a right to silence, or at least a right to good quality sound) is a theme that I'd be interested in exploring, one which would strongly affect our understanding of the city.

Quite a long post for this one - so many issues to contend with, and I've only picked out a couple... De Cauter's capsular dystopia is quite depressing (note to self: must design for integrating societies). The obvious music for the readings is Hard-Fi's Stars of CCTV - any better suggestions welcome!