Month: August 2009

The second upcoming event that I want to announce is Digital Architecture London, organized by Ruairi Glynn. That will take place on Monday, September 21st, at the Building Centre here in London. “Introducing the latest developments in digital design practice,” we read, “the conference will explore new spaces, social interactions, design and fabrication processes, and speculate on architecture’s post-digital futures.”

A related book – Digital Architecture: Passages Through Hinterlands – edited by Glynn and documenting the parallel exhibition, will be released the same day.

The program sounds amazing, and I’m really looking forward to this. The day’s complete list of panelists looks like this: Rachel Armstrong, Tony Dunne, Marcos Cruz, and Rachel Wingfield will be discussing “Digital Architecture & Bio-Technology”; Usman Haque, Matt Webb, Tobi Schneidler, and Stephen Gage will look at “Digital Architecture & Interaction”; Brett Steele, Patrik Schumacher, Marjan Colletti, Alvin Huang, and Daniel Bosia will analyze “Digital Architecture & Form”; and Bob Sheil, Hanif Kara, Charles Walker, and Michael Stacey will discuss “Digital Architecture & Fabrication.” I will be speaking on a panel featuring Alan Penn, Neil Spiller, and Murray Fraser, and our topic will be “Digital Architecture & Space.”

[Images: Two projects from the Hinterlands exhibition: (left) MatArc by Patrick Usborne, (right) Crackology by Mayhem].

Information about venue, timing, tickets, and more can all be found on the conference website.

This weekend in Lund, Sweden, Sir Peter Cook and Abelardo Gonzalez will be hosting the 2009 ASAE conference, the theme of which is Communicating Architecture.

ASAE is an annual symposium at the School of Architecture, Lund University, Sweden. It celebrates the beginning of the academic year. This year’s ASAE will be a two-day event with lectures, seminar, critique, exhibition and more.

I’m still pretty stunned to find myself listed as a speaker, alongside people like Thom Mayne, Odile Decq, and Hernan Diaz Alonso; but I’m also excited by the opportunity to bring blogs again into this sort of organized discussion.

Unfortunately, I’ll be speaking first thing Saturday morning! But I’ll be giving a talk called “Optioning Architecture.” There will be at least two major themes to be developed:

1) What are the options available to architects when it comes to communicating spatial ideas? Are renderings, plans, and diagrams still the most communicationally effective media to use (from the perspective of the interested public) or simply the most industrially useful (from the perspective of fellow architects and contractors)? What happens when, say, Bernard Tschumi‘s next building is not announced to the public via well-rendered images and a press release but in the form of a novel? There is also much to discuss here by inverting this scenario and asking: what happens when novelists, screenwriters, poets, and so on begin creating buildings to communicate their literary and narrative ideas, instead of producing texts? While this obviously risks repeating the textualist arguments of an earlier decade, it still seems worth asking what might have happened if James Joyce, for instance, had been a junior architect at KieranTimberlake: what effect might his literary urges have had upon that firm’s built output? Put another, slightly cheesy, way: if Mervyn Peake had been a successful architect, what strange and sprawling manor houses might now exist somewhere in the English countryside? In any case, what, in the end, are the communicational options available to architects?

2) What possibilities exist for “optioning architecture,” in the sense that a book, short story, or screenplay can be “optioned” by Hollywood for production in another media? That is, what might happen to the world of architectural design if your final graduate thesis project was to be optioned by Steven Spielberg or David Fincher? Would this be similar, in some ways, to the relationship between Rem Koolhaas’s co-authored graduate thesis project, “Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture,” and Rupert Thomson’s under-appreciated novel Divided Kingdom? To what extent is the latter a novelization of the former? Finally, would it be possible for someone from DreamWorks to come along, see a new museum under construction in Chicago or Baltimore, and then option it, the way he or she might option a promising novel? Could you literally translate the spatial dynamism and implied narrative logics of a building – could you option them – into an act of mainstream cinema? How might such a process work – and is there a reason why this hasn’t yet occurred (i.e. it would be a totally ridiculous thing to do)?

Of course, there are other types of architectural options that we could discuss here – but I’ll be focusing on the two ideas described above.

The complete conference line-up includes Florencia Pita, David Garcia, Drura Parrish, Megumi Matsubara, and Daniel Golling. Read more on the conference blog.

Amongst the huge stacks of reading material that I always seem to accumulate, even while traveling, I have just picked up a copy of Philip Parker’s new book The Empire Stops Here. In a nutshell, the book documents Parker’s epic tour around the former edge of the Roman empire, “visiting all its astonishing sites, from Hadrian’s Wall in the north of Britain to the desert cities of Palmyra and Leptis Magna,” the book jacket explains. We’re reminded that “the Empire guarded and maintained a frontier that stretched for 10,000 kilometres, from Carlisle to Cologne, from Augsburg to Antioch, and from Aswan to the Atlantic.” So why not explore the whole thing?

[Image: Hadrian’s Wall].

On page one Parker writes that “I have concentrated deliberately on the edge of the Roman world, on the lands that promised victory, booty and glory and yet so often left the bitter taste of compromise or defeat instead. Here, unique societies developed, distinct from that of the mother-city” – frontier micro-cultures amidst border country that, even today, remains populated with architectural and anthropological evidence of these long-ago evaporated Roman outposts. Outpost tourism, perhaps. Edge-traveling.

It would be a curious project, indeed, to try something similar for a nation-state today, when borders are often fluid and even exportable. In fact, I’m reminded of a plan to “take the UK border overseas,” as the Times reported last year, dematerializing the actual national border and replacing it with a series of offices and points of entry maintained far away in the country of origin. Right when you think you’ve found the perimeter of Britain, it’s relocated yet further away, pushed to an airfield or embassy two thousand miles in the distance.

How interesting would it be to set out to explore the edge of a country – only to be unable to find it? China Miéville meets Tlön by way of the UK Border Agency.

For now, Parker’s book only seems to be available in the UK – but I’ve got high hopes for it and plan to report back as I read further. You can listen to a brief interview with the author here.

[Images: All photos by Danny Wills, from his recent photos of Barcelona; I’ll print a t-shirt: “Cathedrals are the shape that gravity makes when it takes on the form of a building”].

I couldn’t resist posting a few more fantastic photos by Danny Wills, this time of a cathedral in Barcelona.

(Earlier on BLDGBLOG: Doors, Thirds, Bridges, and Doors).

[Image: A parking meter photographed by shooting brooklyn, via a Creative Commons license].

A story I missed earlier this summer reports that Oakland, California, is making up for falling tax revenue by “aggressively enforcing traffic violations.”

The decision is driven by the city’s budget woes, which deep cuts to city services alone did not solve. Falling sales and property, property transfer and hotel taxes have contributed to a $51 million decline in revenues.

It’s worth asking, though, whether paying “aggressively” increased fees and fines for our everyday use of the city – whether this means road tolls and garbage collection fees or suddenly unaffordable parking meters – is the best financial model for a post-taxation metropolis.

Put another way, if the ongoing recession has revealed, amongst other things, that a new type of city, run along very different financial lines, looms just weeks away – a kind of make-your-own-omelette city of fines, fees, and services, where every ingredient is individually priced – then perhaps the recession might also stimulate a wider debate about what could be called method of payment.

That is, what method of payment do we wish to use when it comes to living in a functioning metropolis? If we find ourselves paying no tax at all, for instance – no income tax, no sales tax, no property tax – would we be happy to pay parking tickets that hit upper limits of, say, $2000 or more each time, if this is what it takes to keep the city running? Conversely, would we be happy to pay more sales tax in order to avoid things like road tolls altogether? How exactly do we mix and match these urban outlays and receipts?

This would seem to cut to some of the most basic questions of what services constitute a city in the first place: what a government might provide and how it is that we will pay for what it offers.

In a distant way, and by means of a long digression, I’m reminded of the oft-repeated idea that nationalized health care would be a mere “hand-out,” not a central platform of what any government might do to protect its citizenry.

For instance, one man at a recent but quite bizarre anti-health care rally – during which a U.S. senator apparently praised this very man for his publicly announced support of terrorism – said that “he could trace his ancestors back to the Mayflower and said ‘they did not arrive holding their hands out for help.'” Ergo, this man should not “hold out his hands for help” and ask the government for a doctor’s visit. Of course, this same argument would surely never be advanced against, say, calling the police, calling the fire department, or accepting the defense of the U.S. military. Yet these are all tax-funded government services.

The bizarre irony for me throughout all of this has been that police officers, fire crews, and members of the military are all, to use this language very deliberately, the most socialized subsector of the U.S. economy. That is, they are paid through what many people would call “government hand-outs.” On the other hand, it is these very social positions that are often held up – by these same critics – as triumphant examples of national service and personal heroism. Indeed, it is not entirely inaccurate to say that The Greatest Generation was a generation of near-total tax-funded employment.

If the recent health care debates are to be believed, doctors are not subject to this same sense of national appreciation; they are mysteriously yet fundamentally unlike the police, we are meant to believe, offering services that only private money can afford. But where is the line between private health (diabetes) and public safety (tuberculosis) – and when might this solidify into actual government infrastructure?

Doctors are not like the tax-funded fire departments who we freely call to save us from wildfires, this logic goes, and they are quite unlike the government-supported soldiers who we have stationed in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. Surely, then, anyone who relies on the U.S. military to protect them is “holding their hands out for help”?

In this context, it’s worth speculating what might happen today if fire departments had, until now, been entirely privatized, motivated to protect you only if your insurance policy was up to date (as, indeed, was the case with the first urban fire departments, and as is now re-emerging in places like California). What would be the reaction, then, if someone proposed that these services be folded into a more general package of government services?

If fire crews, in this model, suddenly became tax-funded and available to all citizens – indeed socialized as part of a shared, city infrastructure – would there be the same level of outrage? One wonders if fire crews might ever attain the entirely deserved levels of public adulation they now receive, if their tax-funded nature was, once and for all, revealed. Protesting citizens, like the gentleman cited above, might never have the stomach to “ask for help” from the government, even if their houses are burning down around them.

In any case, I mention all this because of the urgency with which we need to rethink the world of urban services and the economic basis through which we pay for them. If the tax system, as it is currently operated, cannot pay for the very activities that we once thought synonymous with urbanity, are radical increases in one-off fees a permanent, economically viable solution to this problem or simply an irritating and only mildly effective band-aid? Is it better to pay more, once a year, in order to avoid such fees altogether?

Further, how are we best to judge the effectiveness of increased fines and pay-as-you-go services: by the psychological sense of irritation that a penalty-based system might cause – I’m reminded of parking attendants required to wear bulletproof vests during streetwork – or by the comfort that a lack of taxes might provide?

Or, more measurably, do we judge them by their physical effect on the city?

(Original article spotted via the denialism blog).

[Image: Inside Hagia Sophia; via].

While scuba diving beneath Hagia Sophia, an exploratory team led by filmmaker Goksel Gülensoy has “managed to reach areas that until now, no one had ever managed to reach,” down there in flooded basins 1000 feet beneath Istanbul’s heavily touristed religious structure.
In the process, they have discovered 800-year old submerged graves containing the remains of “canonized children.”
This was just part of a larger, underwater archaeo-spatial survey:

The divers and specialists explored the connection of the basins underneath Aghia Sophia with the aqueduct and the palace of Top Kapi. In addition they attempted to locate the secret tunnels from Tekfour Palace to the Islands.

Those “secret tunnels” are presumably the rumored subterranean extensions of the Anemas Dungeons – but who knows.
Either way, I have long been fascinated by the idea of scuba diving beneath – if not actually through – architectural structures, so I am definitely looking forward to watching Gülensoy’s forthcoming documentary about these discoveries. That film, appropriately enough entitled In the Depths of Hagia Sophia, will begin screening at film festivals this autumn.
“I believe what is beneath Hagia Sophia is much more exciting than what is above the surface,” Gülensoy explained to the Hürriyet Daily News and Economic Review. There, we read about the flooded basins in more detail:

Years ago, Erdem Yücer, one of the former directors of the museum, had shown Gülensoy a photograph that was taken of the foundations of Hagia Sophia. The photo showed researchers in a boat in a place filled with water, resembling the Yerebatan Cisterns. Seismic research had also demonstrated that the area underneath the big hall was empty. The team, which had previously lowered a camera down from the second door during the first exploration, was thrilled to see two passages extending to the center of the building and to the exit door – passages that might extend to Yerebatan and Topkapi.

For somewhat obvious reasons, I’m reminded of the “huge underground lake” discovered underneath Budapest late last year. “Budapest is built above a maze of unexplored underground caves,” The Sun reported at the time.
In any case, the Hürriyet article includes short descriptions of the actual tunnels beneath Hagia Sophia, and it mentions plans for these otherwise archaeologically unknown spaces to be scanned for later study. This latter detail reminds me of the Bill Stone video that I linked a few days back.

(With thanks to John Maas! Vaguely related: recreational fishing in the basements of Manhattan).

Having arrived back in London to another massive stack of books, magazines, and other architectural publications – including one-off broadsides, pamphlets, and even a deck of urban-themed playing cards – I’ve been immersed in a sea of mind-bending spatial ideas.
This morning, I’ve been specifically thinking about the publication of student work, as I’ve (finally) been able to read through a recently published catalog of the Bartlett School of Architecture‘s 2009 school year.

[Image: From Unit 23 at the Bartlett, taught by Bob Sheil and Emmanuel Vercruysse].

The book includes some amazing imagery and ideas – from a cantilevered “salt spa,” by Janinder Bhatti, partially held up on shadow-casting stilts, to a “sailing school” proposed for a trans-continental urban site on the Bosphorus by Nicholas Elias, by way of a “landfill tower” for Manhattan designed by Gabriel Chung.
There are two entirely separate designs for blood banks (one in Brooklyn by Stefano Passeri and one on the U.S./Mexico border by Victor Hadjikyriaki); there are the extraordinary-sounding “archaeological prosthetics for the Schliemann excavations of Troy” by Fei Meng; there is an ingenious pitch for a “South African Land Registry and Claims Court,” in the guise of exploring “political geology,” by Joshua Scott; there is a “dissolvable pavilion” by Snow Cai, a “Museum of Dust” by Olivia Pearson, and a “Roosevelt Island Respiratory Clinic” by Chiara Montgomerie, all from Unit 8, taught by Johan Berglund and Rhys Cannon; there is a “flower therapy institute” by Sandra Youkhana; and there is something that I am dying to know more about, called “Pioneering Weather” by Martin Tang. This latter project appears to be a kind of nuclear-powered sky-alteration device, complete with conical cooling towers and a wharf-like extension, perhaps implying its use for coastal weather generation.

[Image: Unidentified student work from Unit 15 at the Bartlett, taught by Nic Clear and Simon Kennedy].

However, I have to point out right away that the publication heavily over-prioritizes the instructors’ own studio descriptions, giving, in almost all cases, no descriptions (sometimes not even a title) for the student work. When I say, above, that Martin Tang’s project “appears to be” something, it is not because I didn’t read the caption or because I don’t want to repeat what Tang himself intended; it’s because there is no textual explanation of what these student projects actually are (and the images themselves are too small to help).
In other words, we’re given tantalizing imagery and the occasional project title – but that’s it. In fact, this seems to be a trend in year-end school publications, and I think it’s a bad one.
After all, when we see an extraordinary image for something called “Phileas Fogg’s Orchestral Landscape,” as designed by student Okan Kaleli, what exactly does this tell us? What is an “orchestral landscape,” for instance, and how does this relate to the writings of Jules Verne? I would genuinely like to know – and I have a feeling that Kaleli would like to tell us.
Or, when we stumble upon an eye-popping collage of architectural sections by student Nancy NiBhriain, what exactly are we looking at? What is the story or idea behind the image?
One more example: one of the most complex 3D-printed objects I’ve seen in years – like some sort of nautiloid architectural structure as devised by H.R. Giger after spending two decades lost in the geometric depths of the Alhambra – is captioned simply as a project by Yousef Al-Mehdari (but what is it? what’s the scale? did Al-Mehdari give it a title? or a story? is it meant for a certain site or purpose? is it a prototype? is it 3D-printed at all?). Readers like myself – and, I have to imagine, these students – are left frustratingly curious as to what it is that actually occurred inside that studio.
It is sadly the case that year-end school catalogs like these are the only times that many of these students’ work will ever be published, and so it would be nice – if not emotionally important – even to see short, 50-word descriptions of each project.
After all, these students have worked their asses off for years now, and they deserve the exposure.

[Image: From Unit 21 at the Bartlett, taught by Christine Hawley, A. Ashton, and A. Porter].

Commendably, the instructors of 2009’s Unit 14 – Stephen Gage, Phil Ayres, and Richard Roberts – do exactly this, including short descriptions of each image; and, as a reader, I hugely appreciate it.
For instance, we read: “Max Pringle, Wearable Buildings: Max is following a long standing interest in the boundaries between architecture, furniture design and fashion. This project is part of a ‘collection’ that proposes a wearable table cloth that is shared between two people.” Or this: “Sam McElhinney, Switchable Labyrinths: Sam develops a maze by switching between monocursal labyrinth forms. This is investigated digitally through the creation of intelligent maze forms populated by intelligent agents and then at 1:1 [scale] as an interactive maze.”
That’s it – but at least now I know what Pringle’s and McElhinney’s projects actually were, and I’m even given a glimpse into a whole suite of other possible ideas – all in less than 40 words. Less than 40 words. As a writer, it feels absurd to be asking that these students be given 40 words’ worth of attention, but it’s absolutely better than nothing. It’s better for the students, better for the readers, and, I’d assume, also better for the school.
Put another (and much more cynical) way: when every architecture student in the world today is busy producing vast, triangulated web-structures that sort of sprawl all over the city, for no immediately obvious reason, it is often the idea behind the project (and not, in fact, the rendered visual quality of your bio-, phylo-, viro-, rhizo-, this, that, and the other thing) that will make or break the project in final reviews.
Of course, this raises another question, which is: why on earth is everyone currently engaged in architecture producing viral triangular web-nets? But I think that’s a conversation for another day.
Finally, an expansion of focus on student content like this will almost undoubtedly require more pages in future editions of these catalogs, but I would also urge these publications to step away from heavy, coated paper toward thinner stocks that allow for longer books while hitting the same price-point and actually, in the end, being easier (that is, lighter) to carry.
The students would, presumably, appreciate the extra attention – and readers like myself would love to learn more about what they’ve made. For my own part, I know that, five years ago, it was year-end reviews of student projects, published by Cornell and the AA, that really got me interested in the narrative possibilities of architectural design – and it’s a shame to see this aspect of spatial education played down today.