Moving

I have finally moved over here: http://www.mooseplum.org/

Who knows, maybe I will even start posting more often again.

The Political Arcology

The Continuous Enclave: Strategies in Bypass Urbanism

An interesting, if impractical, idea to use arcologies to redefine and unify fractured political geographies.

From BLDGBLOG

Words of the Day

borders

• superfluidity
• extraterritory
• thresh/hold
• recognition
• preemption
• futureclosure
• underneath

From Mute magazine.

Movement as Design

Speaking of movement as a driving factor in design, and much design as the act of congealing movement in solid form ...

Zaha's Shoes ... from bdonline.uk.

Car Locked

Case in point of letting our movement systems dictate our lives, even when we don't want them to.

Cities rethink wisdom of 50s-era parking standards from NPR.

Word of the Day: Ekranoplan

With fuel costs skyrocketing, and airlines hurting because of it ... maybe this should be the future of trans-oceanic flight.

An article from the BCC on the Soviet Ekranoplan, aka. The Caspian Sea Monster.

This is a salient quote:

What they were looking at was, in fact, an Ekranoplan; a wing in ground effect or WIG craft designed to fly at very high speed a few metres over the top of the sea. It sounds not unlike a hovercraft. But where a hovercraft floats on a skirt of air, the Ekranoplan sits clean above the surface and relies on a well known, if little understood aerodynamic phenomenon called "ground-effect".

In very simple terms the wing produces a dynamic cushion of air when it's close to the ground and the Ekranoplan effectively rides upon this. It's the same effect that pelicans use when flying low over the sea and it's a remarkably efficient way of flying, actually increasing lift by as much as 40%. All of which means the Ekranoplan was far more efficient than conventional aeroplanes.

Now, update the technologies to the modern day ... all the while thinking about a 40% increase in efficiency.

Cute Gone Wrong

Musical roads from the BBC.

What a wonderful idea! Let us never talk of it again.

Movement

I have already spoken about movement in this blog. It is really one of my favorite topics. And I really do think it is underepresented in the discussion of architecture and urban form.

What? No wait! That can't be. The discussion of movement is one of the most critical parts of urban design. The same can be said about occupant flows in architecture.

True. But I have one word for you.

Reification.

Movement has been reified in the discussions. Moreover, it is not necessarily any particular form of movement that has been reified, but movement itself.

In urban form movement is considered in design, but it is too often considered as where to do put roads so people can drive from point A to point B. The question of "do we need roads in the first place", or "where will we park when we get there", is less often asked. The reason why the discussion of movement of urban form is critical is acknowledged by urban planner itself. Urban planning is heavily skewed towards building structures for the effective flows of people and goods. It is less often about whether those flows are really necessary in the first place.

Of course, by definition, some flow is necessary. But the question is not what flows are necessary, but how to maximize flows. I am admittedly, looking mostly at the United States and its car obsessed culture in making this point.

Comparatively, in Japan, it is possible to live in the country-side without a car, let alone in the city. The necessary avenues of movement are there to move people from point A to point B and back again. And yet, much of Japan is still of a very old urban form, where except for the main arterials, there are many places where automobiles are not even considered in the design and layout of the region.

Much of the Japanese urban landcape is pedestrian based. Even in newer urban spaces, like the perfect grid of central Fukuoka City, there are very few cars on the side roads that were built for them. They are more sort of long narrow parking lots for the shops on them. And I can assure you that you definitely feel like you are invading non-automotive space when driving down them. Compare that feeling to stepping into a sidestreet in New York City.

The practical upshot is that movement can take many forms in urban design, yet much urban design can get caught up in specific kinds of movement. Currently it is the automobile. Before that it was the trolley car, before that the railroads, before that the barge canals, before that navigable bays and channels, and long before that the processional routes to the temples.

But there is an important shift that occurred somewhere around the rise of Mercantilism. That is movement ceased to be about how people move and become more about how good and resources move. In other words, urban form became less about people and more about the flow of goods and services. In other words, it became about things.

This brings us back to my mention in a previous post about modern architecture and urban form being about the technology and the people. Movement is no longer really seen as something that people do, but rather as a technique. Which is to say, it is no longer a verb, to move, but has been reified into a thing, movement.

Its thingness can be clearly seen in a work like the OMA redesign of the Seattle Public Library. The stacks form a beautiful flow, progressing gracefully through the building from one end of the catalog to the other. The entire building has a nice organic feel to it in terms of the way things flow through it.

So why can't people find their way around the building?

Well, besides the need for better wayfinding, the fact that the building itself represents or captures a certain type of flow or movement, does not mean that this movement is commensurable with the needs of humans moving through it. In fact, the self-contained, fluid spiral of movement that is the building's conceptual structure, may actually be disorienting to people since it's self-contained nature creates and illusion of seamlessness that make the interfaces with exterior elements more difficult to find. Interfaces such as ... exit doors.

A beautiful building, of course, and it captures a representation of organizing knowledge whose structure is seemingly continuous and lends itself to being represented as a flow. In those senses it is very much a success. The failure of people to find their way around it is, by contrast, almost a triviality. It is easily fixed by some improved signage to help with wayfinding.

The problem arises in that this building is not unique in its failure to adequately address the way in which people will move through space in relation to the final structure. Though, admittedly, compared to most of what is out there, it makes a darn good attempt.

Whenever designing a structure for human use or habitation, we need to make sure the human factor does not get missed in the design. Talking about movement needs to start with how it is that people move about and what can be done to maximize the valency of simple human movement. Not transportation, movement. Movement, in the end, is a something that people do, not an abstract concept to be represented in material form, except as art.

The Shape of the Divine

In Everyware, Adam Greenfield talks about the coming age of ubiquitous computing and makes an interesting assertion: in the creation of a responsive technosphere that responds to our every action we are reestablishing the ideal of an animistic universe. The spirits would be man-made and in that sense not separate from us, but everything could have the potential for a rudimentary consciousness and ability to respond to us, to interact with us, and to be fickle and not do quite what we wanted. (It will be interesting to see what rituals grow out of this.)

More to the point, he asserts that this drive towards creating an animistic universe exists because it has been absent from our cultural traditional for so short a time in the grand scheme of things that it's absence is a mere blip on the cultural radar. Nor is he alone in this assertion. David Noble, in The Religion of Technology present us with the argument, echoed by many others, that religion is still a motivating force in much of our technological development. Bruno Latour takes it a step further and says we have not even got past being proper Platonists yet, let along having come any further along the ladder of social and cultural advancement (We Have Never Been Modern), an the greatest flaw of modernism was failing to realize its own ideals in favor of merely assuming we were right and and didn't need to address the big picture because external variables were inconsequential.

The divine has always been part of our built environment. And, in many ways, it can be seen as the part of our built environment that does try to capture the big picture. That big picture may, in and of itself, have been incomplete, otherwise why keep looking, but it was present.

The history of the divine in the built environment is talked about enough that I am going to move rapidly to the present. I just want to take a moment to point out that the point of the divine in the built world is to make the the building, the space, the thing created, an object of transcendence, to move us, or inspire us, toward perfection. From the Greek search for perfect forms to the Medieval cathedrals to the exuberant displays of wealth of the Baroque and Rococo back to the search for pure and clean forms of modernism, there has been a notion of the transcendent all the way across history.

With the rise of the Industrial era, phasing into the Modern, and then the post-modern, there appears to be a break from this history of the divine, a removal of God-with-a-capital-G from the picture within the Western tradition. Yet, there are two key points here. One is that God-with-a-capital-G was a relative late-comer to the roots of the Western tradition, only spending the last 2000 years as something other than the belief of a small, rather oppressed, minority. Moreover, such monotheism seems to be something unique to the Western tradition (allowing for its origins in what we now define as the Middle East). From a perspective of the global Web of beliefs it is just a drop in the bucket, regardless of its current popularity..

Back to the beginning and the point about a return to animism. The divine has been present, though as it was before, it is again, not focused on one God, but rather on that which we hold to be transcendent, having properties if the divine. If the works of David Noble, David Nye, and others are to be believed, that thing which we hold to be transcendent is that elusive creation known as technology. Certainly it fits the criteria of the divine, and overarching, ubiquitous, undefinable force that has a perpetual and significant impact on our lives, or relations, and how we conduct ourselves.

We have replaced transcendence through external agency with transcendence through our own means, but the idea of transcending, of reaching the divine has not gone away. Much of what has come after the rigors of Modernism can be seen as a casting about for new forms to realize then, when Modernism itself clearly failed to produce. The monolith has failed us, so let's try the fluid, the imperfect, the incomplete, the ironic, the retro, the contradictory. Yet, as with the Modern, much of it is still a veneer over the simple necessities of functionality and usability. This is not to say that wonderful things do not sometimes result, but so do ridiculous things, much like everything that came before.

But today's changes in the built environment are also caused by another force: the monotheistic mindset. In holding our own creations as transcendent, we persist in doing so from the stance of one right answer, one true path to transcendence.

I would propose that the one true path we have fixated on is movement. Moving as fast as possible, through space with vehicles, through time with acceleration of technological advance, in place through media that brings the entire world into the here and now. But except for the last item, that is not transcendence. For movement to be transcendent, it must obliterate time and space and put everything in the here and now. The vehicle to move people between perfect spaces was the core of the Modern. Now we instead try to move spaces to people through idealized abstractions.

And that is the next item.

Movement as Fetish

Is it just me or has movement become a fetish? I mean, it has been a fetish since the Marinetti's Futurism, if not from the inception of the steam locomotive. But even the locomotive moved at a relatively human scale, and modernism, with its clean, crispness held motion in check in its fixation on primal, rigid forms.

In many places I look movement seems to have been promote to the driving factor in much of what passes for design today. I don't just mean in engaging online environments, but in everything we do.

From the way we build our cites to the way we build our corporations, from networking to miniaturization to the deconstruction of form. We run wires between places and keep trying to make things smaller so everything can be here and now and we don't have to go anywhere else, or be anywhere else to acquire it. And yet no thought is given to that terminal of here and now and how it should be designed. It is just an abstract node in the network. The only people getting good design of the here and now are wealthy people who hire their own designers to build something customized for them (and, ironically, in this age of growing awareness of disparity, the severely impoverished rural citizens of industrialized nations ... and sometimes non-industrialized ones).

The egotistical architecture of the moment ... which is to say, what is hot, because organizations, municipalities, and people that want to flout their egos commission egotistical architecture ... is the architecture of the fluid. Amorphous deconstructions of buildings that look like they are in the midst of flowing apart, or appear incomplete, like something waiting to happen, each a fluid form caught in transition between stable states.

All this seems to come at the cost of designing for both people and place. Foresaking the rough form of the tactile in favor of the smooth and only purportedly sensual. The sleek interface of an iPod is not sensual. Silk is sensual. So is tree bark. An iPod is austere. A very aesthetically pleasing austere, but austere. It seems we have cast aside the underlying structures on which we build our modernist facades, but kept the modernist facades. Not so much for their aesthetics, as their efficiency. Clean is only one form of aesthetic, and only one form of beauty. Baroque is another. Organic yet another. They are also more expensive to manufacture than clean and austere. And it looks like things would flow off it so smoothly. The clean lines we have retained from modernism are symbolic of movement, and are realized as such by divorcing them from the primal and static forms they used to enshroud.

On the other hand, at least the iPod is well designed. That is because it is a conduit for bring everything to the here and now. But the here and now? Cheap balloon frame houses, too large for any practical use, or for most to afford in sprawling developments of uniform mediocrity. Safe for kids? Probably. Healthy for the human psyche? Well, that's a different story. The modern suburban housing track differs from old, cramped industrial row houses only in scale and the surface veneer, not in substance.

People and place need mixes of aesthetic. Uniformity and austerity create neutral spaces meant to abstract people from the space they are in. Spaces that are easy to slip through on the way to somewhere else. We need dynamic spaces that are about interactions, not about movement. At least from this perspective, there is something to recommend the architecture of egotism, even when it is fixated on movement in its forms of representation: it mixes things up, it adds to the melting pot of ideas, it competes with the other structures that are architectures of ego around it, and it creates a locus around which to build place. Of course, only really relevant for markets, civic and cultural buildings, but there is some seed of inspiration to be found there.