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

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

Echoes of the Past

Interesting to compare this:
Ningbo Urban Snapshots from movingcities.org
to this:
Hakka architecture, which, though I also first saw in a blog, I don't remember which one, so ... Wikipedia it is.

I wonder how many other echoes of the past there are in those snapshots that aren't immediately apparent to the Western eye without side-by-side comparison.

Adaptive Reuse

Just because a UFO crashed into your city is no reason to let that futuristic megastructure go to waste ...

Adaptive reuse of crashed starships from Life Without Buildings.

Cities without ideas

Cities without ideas, an article from IndianExpress, via Five Foot Way.

Architecture as purely surface treatment. In fact, urban planning as purely surface treatment. Wouldn't it be easier to just get a really, really big bucket of white paint ...

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.

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.

Indigenous Design

# Josh Horowitz 5.9.08 / 9pm
Hi Leb, Diego,
Architecture is dead. A return to indigenous design is needed.

# amp 5.10.08 / 4pm
Josh - interesting proclamation. The only indigenous craft of the American people at this point in history is a tricked out myspace page. Can’t live in it - but it is work of the people, from the people and for the people.

An old quote just found in the comments section in Lebbeus Woods' blog back in May of 2008.

Then and Now

An article on the changing face of a slice of New York City from the New York Times.

However, it is not the article that is interesting. What is interesting is the cool and simple little tool for viewing the then and now pictures.

Word of the Day

Psychogeography

See also:

• The Imaginary Museum
• Bureau of Public Secrets
• National Psychogeographic
• 3AM Magazine
• The Library at Nothingness

And, of course, some psychogeographers:

• Will Self
• Will Self

Wait, that can't be right ...

Arcologies

I confess to growing up thinking arcologies were really cool.

I know I certainly felt compelled to dot Sim City with them. Has anyone besides me noticed the number of Blake's & references that were in that game? Anyway ...

More floating cities for your enjoyment.

From Vincent Callebaut Architectures.

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.

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.

Happy Birthday!

Happy birthday to you!
Happy birthday to you!
Happy birthday dear modern suburbia!
Happy birthday to you!

Some articles on Levittown at 50:

• Levittown Turns 50
• State of Suburbia

Mind you, it is just a Levittown and not the Levittown, but the articles are not about nostalgia, so I forgive them and the hype. On the other hand, unlike the original, this one was made up up houses much more in line with what we think of as classic American suburbia.

I live just a few blocks from a small enclave of original-style Levittown houses, many still in their original tiny boxy form. Maybe I should go snap some picture in celebration.

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.

Kowloon (in SL)

Well first you need to check out Wikipedia to find out where and what Kowloon is.

Since it's old organic form is finally giving way to development, it has been in the architectural news quite a bit as of late. But it is, in essence, a very high density urban structure built by the people for the people. Sort of a primitive arcology.

In Second Life, there is a sim called Kowloon which does a decent job of giving on a sense of what it is like to live in such a place. It is small, cramped and dark, with multiple levels to move around in and things tucked into the weirdest corners.

Judging from much of the signage, it was built by some people who speak Japanese fluently and English less so. Guessing that makes them Japanese, but won't swear to it.

Being full of interesting spaces, surprises and jokes, and cheap stuff to buy, it is a fun place to get lost in for a bit.

Though the cheap stuff to buy raised an interesting question from someone I was talking to, which is why is is that most of the Japanese designers charge very low prices for what they sell in SL, compared to some of the gouging to be found elsewhere. Are they just happy to earn enough to make tier? Or maybe just happy that people would actually buy their stuff?

I want on a shopping spree while in Kowloon and returned with a huge collection of 百円 swag (dollar store swag).

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.