cityofsound

Metropolis Congress, Sydney

I'm at the 9th World Congress of Metropolis here in Sydney for bits of today and tomorrow. It's an odd event - perhaps the major global gathering of urban bureaucrats (alongside C40 and UN Habitat, perhaps), combined with numerous academic speakers and intellects, businesspeople and local councils, and several points in-between. As Saskia Sassen put it earlier, "multiple, very specialised forms of knowledge are in circulation".

Unfortunately, that can mean that elements of events like this are remarkably dull, with years of experience of different cities averaged out in an attempt at communication. And leaving many ultimately saying nothing.

However, the speaker list had some stellar talent on it too, and highlight of the day was certainly was the session 'Connecting Cities', featuring Saskia Sassen (Columbia University), Carlo Ratti (MIT)  and Dr. Kathryn Pain (Loughborough University).

Sassen's talk was fascinating, encompassing urban density, the recently released Mastercard World Centres of Commerce city ranking, and the fall-out from the credit crisis. Continuing the city ranking theme, Dr. Pain presented the latest globalisation and world cities index (aka GAWC). Both indexes show Sydney rising up fast, albeit on the coat-tails of its major trading partners Shanghai, Beijing and Hong Kong. They also show medium-sized European cities on strong form, the steady disappearance of American cities (save NYC) but most of all the continued rise of East Asian cities. Their data was largely collated before the current financial meltdown - but that as is only likely to reinforce this global reorientation towards Asia Pacific.

However, the most interesting and engaging presentation was by Carlo Ratti, showcasing the work of his SENSEable City lab at MIT, which many readers will be familiar with (their site has a great list of papers, as well as projects, if you're not familiar with their work).

Carlo and I had a good discussion afterwards, which I'm writing up for a piece in Architectural Review Australia, all being well. So I'll save the details of that for another time. More to follow.

PARKing Day Sydney 2008

We (Arup Sydney) were part of the worldwide event known as PARKing Day yesterday. Grabbing a bit of spare tarmac outside Customs House by Circular Quay, colleagues from various teams set up shop with some mulch, haybales, fruit and veg, connectivity, one of the fleet Smart cars - and this being Australia - a chook.

PARKing Day is a one-day, global, open source-style event where parking space is reclaimed (simply by pumping some dollars into a parking meter, usually) and turned into temporary public parks - see events in San Francisco (where it started, invented by REBAR), LA and Melbourne, for instance. I was in Brisbane for the day, so didn’t get to see how our park turned out in person - though I did see a parking spot in the Valley turned into a grassy table football venue (the Brisbane PARKing Days are really well organised, with over 47 ‘parks’ this year, apparently).

Our team had chosen the theme of ‘productivity’ - hence the urban agriculture and wi-fi - and the little park drew a lot of positive attention from passers-by throughout the day. We asked people to contribute their wishes for Sydney, which were pinned to a tree in the ‘park’.

People seemed to love it and we think we may have been one of the only such parks in Sydney (drop a comment in if you know of others) although there was a brave park on King Street, Newtown back in April.

Much thanks to my friends at Customs House, and thanks also to Wired Sky for the wi-fi coverage, and several others from the office who helped out hugely. Most credit goes to planning technician Safiah Moore, who initiated and organised the whole thing. And donated the chook. A good day.

m3 moiré façade model

Back in January, in an entry on façades, I noted a recent, and relatively local, favourite - the extraordinary western face of the Brisbane Girls Grammar School Creative Learning Centre. Brisbane buildings have to posess a trick or two to deal with the fierce sun on their western side, and local firm m3architecture obliged with a protective layer of anodised aluminium slats, overlaid onto a wall painted with black and white stripes ... which just happens to create a gigantic moiré effect as you move past it.

The school sits on a hill adjacent to the six-lane Inner City Bypass, and so commuters witness the entire six-storey façade undulating and revolving as they drive past. In my earlier post I promised a video of the thing in action and I'm yet to deliver, but in visiting the excellent (and aforementioned) 'Place Makers' exhibition at the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane recently, I captured the next best thing - some rough videos of the exhibition's simplified 1:11 scale model of the western wall.

That is essentially exactly what it looks like, just 1:11 scale. The moiré effect is surprisingly simple, as this close up of the model indicates. (For the curious Wikipedia's definition of the moiré is worth a read.)

Some photos of the model at 'Place Makers', which is also simple but a very effective display.

Some images from an Architecture Australia article, indicating what it looks like in context:

m3 produced some notes on their design for the building on their website, though they don't reveal much detail about the provenance of the moiré idea - except perhaps in the phrase "dynamic space of circulation". I half-wonder whether the feathers of local parrots or the ubiquitous slats and blinds of Queenslanders' verandahs may have provided subconscious inspration.

m3 moiré façade videos at Vimeo
'Place Makers' and architecture scenes
'Place Makers', Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane
m3architecture

The Adaptive City

A few months ago, Scott Burnham kindly asked me to contribute to the exhibition catalogue for Urban Play, a project he conceived and then developed with Droog Design. It is being sponsored by the city of Amsterdam and is premiering there this September. In Scott's words, "Urban Play is about placing the individual at the heart of the city’s development and encouraging creative interaction between the individual and the physical city". You can also find out more at the Experimenta site.

Scott's posting up focus pieces on some of the interventionists featured in the exhibition, starting with the quite brilliant work of Gilberto Esparza, a Mexico City-based artist who creates 'Urban Parasites', "small robotic creatures made from recycled consumer goods which wander, climb, crawl and explore the marginal areas of the city." (Check the videos at Scott's site.)

To my small contribution: Scott asked me to write something about 'the adaptive city', noting some of my previous entries, such as 'Punching holes in Ciutat Vella; adaptive urban form in Barcelona' and 'Architecture and interaction design, via adaption and hackability'. That was pretty much it by way of direction, so I had some free rein to take those thoughts for a walk, and introduce them to some more recent ideas around urban informatics and urban information design, the impact of real-time data and collaborative planning on urban form, and so on.

I've reproduced the full essay below. I believe the other contributors to the catalogue were to be Usman Haque on open source architecture and Richard Reynolds on guerrilla gardening, so it'll be worth keeping an eye on. Many thanks to Scott for his considerable patience, and for asking me to contribute in the first place. It's a relatively speculative, deliberately optimistic piece, continuing some ideas from 'The Street as Platform'. Hope you find it interesting.

The Murder of Crows, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, Biennale of Sydney 2008

As part of the recent Biennale of Sydney, I took in the Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller installation at Pier 2/3, Walsh Bay. The festival programme describes the work thus:

“Since the 1990s, the experimental art of Canadians Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller has been a fascinating exploration of how sound affects and shapes our experience. World-premiering at the 2008 Biennale is their largest installation to date, The Murder of Crows – an astounding 100-speaker artwork that envelops the viewer/listener in the experience of the sculptural and physical qualities of sound. The large and cavernous space of Pier 2/3 is filled with speakers mounted on stands, chairs and walls, creating a minimalist ‘flock’. The installation is structured like a play or film, but with images created only by voice, music and sound effects. Inspired by Goya’s The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters – from the series of etchings called ‘Caprichos’ (c. 1799), which was a denunciation of the evils of society in Spain in his day – the artists have placed a lone megaphone horn on a table in the middle of the space. Out of this horn comes Cardiff’s voice reciting dreams and thoughts as if, like Goya’s sleeper, she is absorbed in her own nightmares. Using multiple soundscapes, as well as compositions by Freida Abtan, Tilman Ritter and Titus Maderlechner, the artists create a ‘sound play’ that physically envelops the listener in a moving field of sound and music. Morphing in a dreamlike way from war marches to lullabies, the piece is a requiem to today’s battered world.” [Biennale of Sydney]

That’s about right, and immersing oneself in a 100 speaker installation is of course an affecting experience. Indeed, I’d seen/heard Cardiff/Bures Miller’s prototype for this work, Forty Part Motet, on a bleak Sheffield day a few years earlier, an extraordinary 40-speaker recreation of Thomas Tallis’s Spem in Alium (1573), with once voice tracked to each speaker. It’s as if you’re a ghost, able to move around a full choir as you please, pausing to listen to one voice, or a group of voices, without the ‘singers’ noticing. (Someone captured a fragment of it here, and there’s more information about it here.)

A few years later, as I through around the forest of speakers placed around Pier 2/3 at Walsh Bay, winter sunlight bursting through the high windows and the gentle creak of the old pier introducing itself to the mix, under duress to the harbour’s currents, I can’t help but conclude that Cardiff and Bures Miller - in this mode at least - are a bit 'one-note', which is somewhat ironic given the polyphonic spree that their works increasingly revolve around. It's the same principle as 40 Part Motet, yet with 60 extra speakers. Having said that, it’s still a beguiling trick. Technically adept, often sublime, but I'm not sure how deeply it affects, ultimately. I think perhaps Tallis’s Spem in Alium is also a far superior piece of music, although The Murder of Crows has far more variation.

(Another Cardiff/Bures Miller piece is the The Muriel Lake Incident, seen at Tate Modern years ago, which has a lightness of touch absent in Forty part Motet and Murder of Crows. It's almost penny arcade, but no worse for that.)

The videos below are partly the result of the usual games of ‘exhibition pacman’ with the Biennale’s staff, after I'd noticed a small poster declaring an unnecessary (I thought) ban on the use of cameras. So the first of these videos is taken with the camera behind my back, in my clasped hands, as if I were going for a stroll along a promenade. Hence it looks as it does. You can hear the choral component fading as I move towards the speakers denoting the piano. The other is a little smoother, featuring a segment in which the sound of the ocean dissolves into a woman's voice recounting a dream. The woman's voice is apparently located within the megaphone horn mentioned above. The music varies considerably over the 30-minute duration, so don’t take these elements as representatives of the entire piece. And obviously, any sound recording would struggle to convey the sculptural quality of the sound, distributed as it is, never mind reproduce the fidelity - and certainly not my digital camera.

I did enjoy the work, though wasn’t as moved by it as I was by Forty Part Motet. In fact I was most taken with Pier 2/3 itself, which is a simply wonderful space. One of the 4 salvaged piers that comprise Walsh Bay, right by the Sydney Harbour Bridge, it’s a place with stories to tell for sure, despite its cavernous interior being left unadorned, detritus simply shoved to one side. It has its own distinctive music nonetheless.

Pier 2/3 also contained a reconstruction of Luigo Russolo’s noise-makers, Intonarumori (1914), and a quite beautiful untitled painting by Doreen Reid Nakamarra.

A simulated Baltimore

The Believer published a fascinating interview with David Simon, creator of the magisterial TV show The Wire.

Among the many intriguing insights delivered in the interview, the following passage struck me as particularly interesting, in the context of a day job increasingly concerned with formulating simulations of cities, and particularly urban models which begin to layer in the more intangible aspects of city life, such as culture and creativity.

"The show would instead be about untethered capitalism run amok, about how power and money actually route themselves in a postmodern American city, and, ultimately, about why we as an urban people are no longer able to solve our problems or heal our wounds. Early in the conception of the drama, Ed Burns and I—as well as the late Bob Colesberry, a consummate filmmaker who served as the directorial producer and created the visual template for The Wire—conceived of a show that would, with each season, slice off another piece of the American city, so that by the end of the run, a simulated Baltimore would stand in for urban America, and the fundamental problems of urbanity would be fully addressed."

"First season: the dysfunction of the drug war and the general continuing theme of self-sustaining postmodern institutions devouring the individuals they are supposed to serve or who serve them. Second season: the death of work and the destruction of the American working class in the postindustrial era, for which we added the port of Baltimore. Third season: the political process and the possibility of reform, for which we added the City Hall component. Fourth season: equal opportunity, for which we added the public-education system. The fifth and final season will be about the media and our capacity to recognize and address our own realities, for which we will add the city’s daily newspaper and television components."

"Did we mention these grandiose plans to HBO at the beginning? No, they would have laughed us out of the pitch meeting. Instead, we spoke only to the inversion of the cop show and a close examination of the drug war’s dysfunction. But before shifting gears to the port in season two, I sat down with the HBO execs and laid out the argument to begin constructing an American city and examining the above themes through that construction. So here we are." {David Simon, The Believer, my emphasis]

A constant theme here has been how the cultural aspects of a city inform the sense of what a city is, and can be. Hence my interest in films about cities, songs about cities, writing about cities, games about cities, music scenes in cities, and so on. These all seem to be useful - or at least evocative - in terms of understanding a city, and are usually lacking in any analytical models of cities, and certainly from most urban planning and governance processes. Something we're trying to change. But it's fascinating to hear Simon describing his particular art as "constructing an American city."

Interview with David Simon [The Believer]
[via TAFKAB]

A collaborative map of modernism in Australia

I'd long ago decided to try to deliver constructive criticism with this site. So in discussing the ideas for 'distributed exhibitions' in the previous review of the 'Modern Times' exhibition at the Powerhouse, I decided to try to make an example of what I meant.

The simplest possible offering that still illustrates the point would be a Google Map of 'modernism in Australia' - an artefact that lives outside the exhibition, guiding people to examples of the work that exist outside the exhbition. So I started a map, dragged a few blue markers into place, and then enlisted a few friends and colleagues to help me kickstart it.

And many thanks to Super Colossal's Marcus Trimble, Canberra House's Martin Miles, Rory Hyde from The Architects, who did the bulk of the additions. Stuart Harrison, Andrew Maher from work and a few others formed a supportive advisory panel. We have a few more potential contributions to come from Perth's Best, Max Creasy, architects at Terroir and Hassell, and a few others I hope.

But within a week, we'd got a pretty good set of examples - over 180 buildings and structures, located pretty exactly, and many with links and images (and we've tried to credit images where possible.) Houses, skyscrapers, civic buildings, sculptures, memorials. (And we didn't want to get into a debate of what formally counted as modernism and what didn't - inclusivity was the order of the day. Having said that, if you think there's a property that shouldn't be listed there, for whatever reason, do let me know.)

It's a little skewed towards the south and east, to say the least - Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Canberra, to be precise. We're hoping to rectify that, with your help. We need contributions for the other major cities in Australia, and I've decided to take a curatorial approach rather than fully open, given the hard work put in by others thus far and the lack of back-up/roll-back facilitites in Google Maps. So if you want to join in, and if you know of examples of modernism in built form - buildings, sculptures, infrastructure, built or unbuilt - drop me a line (email address below-right, where it says 'email me') and I'll happily welcome you in.

In the meantime, we hope you find the map useful, interesting. It's embedded below, though you might find this direct link more useful. I'll also send it to the Powerhouse Museum, offering it up as a potential adjunct to their exhibition, if they're interested.

View larger map of modernism in Australia

Modernism in Australia [Google Maps]
"Modern Times: The untold story of modernism in Australia", Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, plus some notes on architectural exhibitions
Modern Times exhibition [The Powerhouse]

"Modern Times: The untold story of modernism in Australia", Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, plus some notes on architectural exhibitions

The “Modern Times” exhibition at Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum - part of Sydney Design 08 - is something of a curate’s egg. Containing some wonderful artefacts, the show is worth seeing for a few items alone. However, the unimaginative presentation is fairly disappointing and you walk away sensing an opportunity lost, as much as you are enlightened and enlivened by the possibilities inherent in the material.

The “untold story of modernism in Australia” is a tagline open to misinterpretation. It’s not that modernism in Australia is an “untold story” - as Australian modernism, through the likes of Boyd, Grounds, Seidler, Nolan, Preston, Dupain, the Featherstons et al, has a well-documented history here, and the architectural scene in Sydney in particular has an ongoing relationship with modernism. It’s more that the curators intended to tell a different story of modernism, one that focused perhaps a little less on architecture and built environment, and more on the social and cultural patterns emerging throughout the modern period. (This insight gleaned in an interview with curator Ann Stephen on ABC Radio National’s By Design show.)

While this is laudable, it should not negate engaging with architecture and urban planning - as this is the built expression of those social and cultural patterns. And it’s the buildings that we’re left with, marking modernism in the streets around us every day, long after the fashions, posters and poems have faded. Sure enough, many of the artefacts directly relate to architecture and urbanism nonetheless. In fact, although the exhibition opens on the body, health and the emerging fashion, it tends to become more centred around architecture, cities, and other fragments of built fabric as it continues.

Post-occupancy evaluations of public wi-fi

As the result of some conversations about a month ago, Arup have been commissioned by the State Library of Queensland to do some analysis of their free wi-fi service, which runs throughout their Infozone and Knowledge Walk areas.

I’ll be doing research there next week, looking at usage patterns from various quantitative and qualitative perspectives, some analysis of how the variability of wi-fi maps onto the informal use of space enabled by the Library’s open design, some benchmarking against best practice in terms of denoting the presence of public wi-fi, some technical discussions. That kind of thing.

I’m keen to explore new ways of discerning spatial usage patterns, including software-based analysis of video If possible. Otherwise, it’ll be students, counting.

I’m also keen to explore some interesting ways of visualising the use of wi-fi mapped onto use of space. Whilst thoughts on the methodology and sketches of representations are ticking over nicely I thought I’d ask readers if there are any interesting examples of similar research that we should be aware of. In return, I’ll post some observations on methodology and visualisations afterwards (IP-permitting, and with the Library’s approval of course.)

I know of two studies in particular. Paul Torrens’ work on ‘wi-fi geographies’, which layers signal strength data over Geographical Information Systems (GIS), usually for urban-scale spaces such as this visualisation of wi-fi access points in Salt Lake City:

I quite like the visualisation of a wi-fi cloud hanging over the city (see movie here, about half-way through) though I’m not sure how actually meaningful the representation is. Additionally, I’m dealing with a microcosm of this space, rather than an aggregation of numerous wi-fi access points across a city.

Then there’s Andres Sevtsuk, Sonya Huang, Francesco Calabrese, and Carlo Ratti's work with the SENSEable City Laboratory at MIT (see “Mapping the MIT Campus in Real-time Using WiFi” (in Foth 2008, full ref. below.) Their work focused on mapping usage of the campus-wide wi-fi network, using a system (iSPOTS) which observed the volume of traffic emanating from the numerous wireless access points. This gave them a way of producing images of the blooms of wi-fi coverage across the campus (incidentally, nice axonometric view reminds me of Stirling, Archigram etc.), as well as graphs mapping the amount of usage at different times of the day.

Both interesting approaches. Any others?

I'm also interesting in surveying best practice in denoting the presence of wi-fi. This is an interesting area, as - obviously - wi-fi is invisible, so the service is usually denoted by the presence of people with open laptops, and/or small signs, for which a universal language has not quite emerged. Perhaps both of these indicators are fine, but are there better alternatives?

I know, c/o Fabien Girardin, of Orange Innovation's idea of faux-bamboo wi-fi signal strength indicators, which would actually fit in quite well from a local flora point-of-view, while also indicating the variability of wireless signal. Strikes me you could also look to communicate speed (in a non-technical sense), or use a proxy like number of users currently connected, as a way of indicating the likely levels of service before you flip open your laptop.

But do you know of other interesting, robust, useful and beautiful ways of communicating the key facets of a wi-fi network (presence, availability, speed etc.)? If so, please add to the comments below, and many thanks.

References
Sevtsuk, A., Huang, S., Calabrese, F., & Ratti, C. (2008, in press). Mapping the MIT Campus in Real-time Using WiFi. In M. Foth (Ed.), Handbook of Research on Urban Informatics: The Practice and Promise of the Real-Time City. Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference, IGI Global. ISBN 978-1-60566-152-0. http://eprints.qut.edu.au/archive/00013308/
State Library of Queensland, Brisbane, Donovan Hill Peddle Thorp, plus some notes on libraries in general

Barangaroo Tomason (超芸術トマソン)

Greg Allen posted about the concept of 'tomason' a while ago, inspired by the fabulous Tokyo-based architectural practice Atelier Bow Wow and their relentless documentation of the the city and its quotidian architectural foibles, in books like Made in Tokyo and Pet Architecture. He described the thomason (超芸術トマソン) thus:

"Made in Toyko was about ridiculous hybrids: a department store with a driving school on the roof; a cement factory integrated with the workers' dorms. They called these ridiculous, pragmatic spatial phenomena dame [dah-may] architecture, using the Japanese term for 'no good'. Such ad hoc, aggressively undesigned accidents stick in my mind as I read about Tomason [also spelled Thomason and Thomasson in English]. If dame architecture is the awkward result of relentless functionality, Tomason are the useless, abandoned leftovers. Stairs to nowhere are a favorite. Bricked up windows are a close second. Tomason are the flashings and detritus of the incessant churn of building, destruction, and redevelopment that characterizes the Japanese city. No clean slates here, no way ..."

"The term comes from the art & architecture collective formed in 1986 known as Rojo Kansatsu [Roadside Observation], which counted the author/artist Akasegawa Genpei as a founding member. Rojo's inspiration was Gary Thomasson, who was given the biggest contract ever in Japanese baseball in 1981-2, only it turned out he couldn't hit; then he blew out his knee. He was a giant, useless lump on the bench." [greg.org, my emphasis]

The photos you see here are of a tomason I'm particularly fond of, found down the road from work in Sydney. It's a sequence of steps to nowhere, with the entrance and exit long bricked-up. There's no way in, there's no way out. It just sits there embedded in the sandstone. The base is thoroughly bricked-up, ensuring no-one can climb into the section in the middle, which presumably would've taken too much brick to warrant fully enclosing.

As a tomason, it's not exactly a remant of Tokyo-pace redevelopment; more some long lost relic of an early wave of urban development that had paused a long time ago. 

It's on Hickson Road, as part of the extraordinary sandstone wall which curves right round the contours of the harbour here, part of the area now known as Barangaroo (more photos here), all the way to the Harbour Bridge. The wall was once host to a series of sky-bridges, comprising a form of connective tissue between the wharves of the harbour and Millers Point and the rest of The Rocks up on the hill. The tomason is tucked in next to the two remaining arched bridges at this point.

Browing some New South Wales state archives, I came across a couple of relevant images: the first showing the construction of the major sandstone wall along what would become Hickson Road (I think) and the second showing the construction of the adjacent bridge, taken in 1911.

Note the steps aren't visible in this photograph. Interestingly, note that also the houses on the street above the wall (High Street, appropriately enough) remain fairly unchanged, at least structurally, though their backdrop is rather different now. Big fan of these houses; more to follow.

Who knows if the steps were bricked up as part of the bridge construction, or afterwards. Either way, I declare them Sydney tomason. As the Barangaroo development unfolds, I'm quite clean to plant trees or a green wall in it, or use it as temporary exhibition space, bounded as it now is on all sides.

On Tomason, Or the flipside of dame architecture [greg.org]
Thomason group on Flickr