Waterfalls

I did something unusual yesterday, at least for SL. I went for a walk.

Now, I will often buzz out in a random direction flying over sims looking for interesting things, but this time, I hopped on the nice Linden road half a sim from my mainland holdings and just went for a walk. Or perhaps, since I was being something that walks on all fours, a canter.

Walking about on mainland SL can be a wonderful experience, at least in places where people haven't destroyed the Linden public works that allow you to walk around, or even take the train. It immerses you in the random creativity of people and forces you to experience what is there instead of taking you to some known or intended place. Sometimes it even makes you go ... I never realized this was right next to that, and I go to both of them all the time. And it is only something that can be experienced by getting out of the insulated private islands and wandering about the mainland.

On this day I found quite a few interesting things, the first two of which are here as a set. They are waterfalls. Both wonderfully done. Both probably looking much better at night, which it was. The locations are where I was standing when I took the pictures.

Hamlin (28, 8, 80)

Paw Paw (44, 42, 83)

It helps, maybe, that there was a small plot of land selling bunnies and playing ChouChou on the audio stream right at the top of the first waterfall.

A Busy Marketplace

This video is strangely compelling. It says something about the adaptability of human nature.

Via gizmodo.

The Impossible Weirdness of Being

It’s impossible to legislate weirdness, which is a sad thing for the city’s architectural heritage.
from New York Magazine

Reality TV

Note that they don't appear to be installing them in inner cities. At least not for the same reason.

Suburban reality TV.

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

How the City Hurts Your Brain

How the City Hurts Your Brain from the Boston Globe.

Now, personally, I find cities exhilarating, at least dense metropolitan ones that still have pre-automobile sensibilities about them. I start moving at their pace. Put me in the countryside and I quickly start to find the lack of distractions to be most ... distracting. I guess I'm just weird that way. After all, most of the most creative and intelligent people in the world live off in the middle of nowhere and always have, right?

But the comments in the article about the importance of green space and nature is interesting. Because it is not just some nature that is really important. It is the diversity of that nature that makes a difference. So perhaps the problem is that our brain reads urban settings as a sort of monoculture, like an empty field. This doesn't refute the argument in the article, it just changes it a little. It also allows us to ask how we create urban forms that aren't monocultures.

The other reason I find the need for complexity interesting is the difference between Frederick Law Olmstead and a typical Japanese formal garden. A Japanese formal garden is so complex, so carefully laid out, that it compels your attention at every moment. Suddenly, every little detail becomes cogent and tangible and needing your attention. On the other hand, I have an Olmstead park a few blocks from where I currently live. I cut through it alot, but it doesn't compel me to attend to it. If anything, I am too busy watching for creeps lurking behind trees as I wend through the interesting bits and avoid the intimidating wide open spaces. But the article is right on the point that such natural complexity does help to clear the senses.

Perhaps for truly high level functioning, we need the energy, dynamism, and synergy of the city, of the properly people-oriented city, combined with the ability to step away into the cleansing realm of nature to bring those energy levels back down. So how do we do a better job of building spaces like that?

Cities Without Names

A post by Lebbeus Woods on the mysterious, the anonymous, the illusory ideal.

Perhaps it is commentary, perhaps fiction, perhaps poetry. Certainly it is art.

Final Wooden House

An awesome, wooden, not quite house from ArchDaily and Architecture Lab.

The Psychotic Metropolis

Madness for the masses!

Perhaps a little collective psychosis is needed for a vibrant urban fabric.

From Movement of Existence, which is a plain good read most of the time, including now.

An iconography of what now?

Empty vessels: eye-con architecture from The Independent.

In its more grandiosely hubristic manifestations, iconic architecture seems indistinguishable from studio-lit tubes of because-you're-worth-it face cream: today's architectural icons are usually bizarre curios, or a manifestation of penile dementia.

City of Open Secrets

City of Open Secrets

An essay by Christopher DeWolf from urbanphoto.

The concept of “living heritage” is far from new, but it is still not widely understood. “Heritage is anything that carries memories,” said Dinu Bumbaru, policy director of Heritage Montreal, on a sunny morning this spring, shortly after I returned from my trip to Hong Kong. “We tend to look at buildings and then very quickly turn technical. We forget there is the know-how of the artisans, the story of the families who lived there and so on.” Vital, often intangible, heritage exists in the present, not as part of some nostalgic past.

Definitely a good read.

Freakonomics in Suburbia

An interesting article on the future of suburbia from the New York Times.

It looks like it is front-loaded with the more radical, and humorous, commentary, then gets down to the more pragmatic analysis.

I remember being at a talk given by James Howard Kunstler once (who gets first rant in the article) as part of a Ph.D colloquium series. I found it interesting because many people seemed downright offended that he even had a right to make the claims that he did when he didn't have a degree in the topic. Yes, he was, as usual, talking about suburban form. No, the program was not in any way, shape or form and urban design program. Yes, the program prided itself on community outreach and community activism and participation. Apparently, that had to be qualified as obedient community participation.

I don't remember the outcome of someone making this protest, just at my being offended at people who claim to respect indigenous knowledge getting bent out of shape when actually faced with it. Apparently, indigenous knowledge is something to be used by authorities to further professional knowledge, but the gods forbid that it should become anything close to professional knowledge without their sanction.

This is probably why I like Kunstler's ideas so much. I think some of them border on nut job (to be fair, so do some of mine), but there are many kernels of inconvenient truth there that many of us don't want to have to face.

Slum Preservation

An argument for preserving slums when they clearly serve more good in maintaining them then the benefits of anything that could replace them.

Or to put it another way, just because a region is dirt poor doesn't mean it isn't a thriving, self-sufficient community that is making a positive contribution to the urban landscape.

This is in fact the kind of self-sufficient, self-sustaining 'village' community that Mahatma Gandhi -- the Father of the Nation -- dreamt of and wrote about in his books on India’s path to development.

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.

Arcology?

I must admit, I find the ideas that Paolo Soleri puts forward on single structure mega-cities to be utterly fascinating. His ideas at times seem to have an odd undertone of misogyny, praising a technological future encased in the symbolism of human-male hegemony. But there is still some pretty awesome stuff there. His works are a must read for anyone exploring architecture, urban form, anthropology, and the human condition. For his notion of residual anguish if nothing else.

And yet, this project, from MAD, is something I find to be creepy. Something about the social politics presented are extremely discomforting. Pay attention to the implied definitions of education and culture.

The Magick Bullet

This is connected to the notion of utopia and the perfect form.

The magick bullet is the one perfect solution that is going to make everything better. An idea that is in many ways part and parcel of utopian idealism, implicit in the hubris to assume that your solution will in fact succeed where others have failed and will make the world a better place. Such is hubris well spent, normally, but it is hubris nonetheless. Particularly because most such ideations get fixated on one solution to one problem or one set of solutions to one set of problems, on the assumption that fixing that will cause everything else to fall conveniently into place.

Thus we are first presented with Plato's Republic, ruled by carefully schooled philosopher kings, who are more equal than others, and who will bring the world to a grandeur akin to Hesiod's Golden Age. And from there we progress through the Western tradition (I confess not having enough knowledge on other traditions to speak meaningfully about them) in a series of what are essentially debates on who is fit to rule and why, each manifest in material form and represented in architectural and urban forms. Of course, the argument about who is fit to rule in this context is not one of who is the wisest, for the scholars long ago realized that wisdom has many faces. It is not a matter of how much wisdom, but rather whose wisdom and correct and contains the greater truths that will lead the world toward perfection.

Although it is easy to find the historical record of this, bringing it closer to the modern time makes it more difficult to see who is propounding what. And there is a reason for that.

Somewhere in the evolution of modernism and its children we made the shift from which ideas and ideals, in their realization, will provide the magick incantation that will make the world a better place. Now we instead are caught up in which devices and forms will provide this for us. Certainly the first glimmer of this can be seen in things like Ebenzer Howard's Garden cities, but it is much more evident in the new urbanism. In the new urbanism, it is not a set of ideals that make the place a good place, but the correctness of its form. The new urbanism builds infrastructures for living. And, as people are finding, just because it is built to look like the perfect place ...

So we hunt for forms that will somehow allow us to transcend to a better world, not only in highly planned urban forms, but also in architectures that attempt to be the voice of the new, somehow invoking deep insights in the masses, leading to a realization of an elightened populace through expanded consciousness. At least, I can think of no other motivation for such experimentation beyond ego. Not that much of it isn't beautiful to behold. But we tend not to hear as much about functionally aesthetic as we do pure aesthetic. We hear much more about Frank Gehry's latest melted contribution than we do about things like the ACROS building in Fukuoka. Unless, of course, we are reading books by Ken Yeang and studying sustainable design.

Although sustainable design fits this mould of forms and technologies as magick bullets. Who knows, it may even validate the idea that good forms make good people and all this bickering about who's ideals were right are an antiquated way to try to make things better. It is also a nice segue into the other aspect of the topic: technology and devices as solutions.

Much architecture and urban form in the modern age is built around the idea that certain technologies will automatically make things better. Certainly an inarguably visible one is the automobile and the idea of personal transport. If everyone is free to move where they will, as they will, the world will be a better place. The problem, of course, is that the resources of the world are not sufficient to support everyone in the world having a car, except maybe as a place to live, There is just not enough room to put everyone on the roads. Besides, where would they go where we to succeed?

The problem with expecting technologies and devices to move us toward utopia (barring being able to find it on a map and driving there) is two fold:Oone is that the forms we devleop begin to become more focused on accomodating that device or technology and less on human needs. The other is the surrendering of agency to that technology to allow it to assist us, even though it is an agency that the technology does not possess. In other worlds we expect something an inanimate object to actively assume the role of caring for us. This is where the magick bullet comes into the picture.

The point of the magick bullet is that even though it is supposed to be an inanimte object, technology, or concept, devoid of agency, it is nonethelss infused with a divine agency (thus the magick bit) which allows it to function in a way that goes far beyond its expected parameters and create some effect, hopefully for the better.

In many ways it is taking the idea of unintended consequences and trying valiantly to ascribe them to something by laying claim to an unkonw agency, and then extending that to the assumption that there is yet more agency to be discovered if we can just purify our bullet and find its true form.

I would hope that for some of you, in the context of the discussion, the notion of "purify" is cause for a momentary discomfort. It should be. The world is a messy place, and works much better when allowed to stay that way.

Beause of this shift from representation of ideals as forms to the presentation of the ideal device or technology in the way on which we build our structure and urban forms we have created a model for both architecture and urban form that are no longer about place. They are no longer about capturing our ideals both projective and in the historical trappings of our culture. Rather they are about representing the machine which constructed them. The putatively post-modern of today (and whatever we chose to name what has come after it) is not so much about the destruction of form as it is about representing the limits of technology. Put simply: look what I can do with my toys.

Certainly this has happened across history, just look at cathedrals. The difference is that prior forms were grounded in cultural context, a context of human society, not of machine. The beginning of this loss of the human component is as old as the Industrial Revolution, though it did not really gain strength until the height of modernism, where the worship of clean and crisp efficiency stripped away the old cultural trappings, which now only return in ironic, rather than iconic, forms.

When we find people competing to design the largest, tallest, or most abstract building yet to grace the skyline of Dubia, or of Mumbai, we see forms not generated for people, but to praise the machine. In other words, we have not escaped modernism, only purified it (there's that word again) and abstracted it, so it is an empty vessel that no longer contains a assumption of the same clean efficiencies with.

Urban Myths

An interesting collection of short works of fiction (single pagers) from airoots.

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.

Real Virtual Cities

When gentrification takes real cities and makes them virtual...

Living in a Tourist City is No Vacation.

From the National Post.