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.