cityofsound

'Nairn's London' by Ian Nairn (1966)

(A half-written entry on Ian Nairn's book 'Nairn's London' had been lying dormant for almost a year. However, a conversation on Twitter last night between myself, Kieran Long (of the Evening Standard), Justin McGuirk (of The Guardian), Charles Holland (of FAT), and Owen Hatherley (of Owen Hatherley and more besides) prompted me to finish off the sentences and hit 'publish'.)

The Economist’s Christmas special (2009) had a typically fascinating article about being an outsider, an emigrant, a foreigner, and the role and practice of writing in terms of understanding the nature of a place. The article described the effect on perception that 'being a foreigner' may have:

"Foreignness is intrinsically stimulating. Like a good game of bridge, the condition of being foreign engages the mind constantly without ever tiring it. John Lechte, an Australian professor of social theory, characterises foreignness as “an escape from the boredom and banality of the everyday”. The mundane becomes “super-real”, and experienced “with an intensity evocative of the events of a true biography”." ['The Others', The Economist, December 17th 2009]

Unrelated to this, Owen Hatherley and I had a very brief email correspondence a while ago about whether one could capture the essence of a city - or perhaps an essence of the city - in a brief visit, as with his research-fuelled excursions for Building Design (which are turning into a kind of retrofitted Pevsner for the 21stC) or my own scribbles garnered from a mere 24 hours in Geneva or Seoul, or 48 hours in Seattle or Turin or Milan, or a few days in Boston/Cambridge, or several intermittent weekends in Barcelona, and so on. Can you detect and describe an essence of place from a brief visit? I’ll leave it to you to decide, though I think that—with practice, and research—you can indeed quickly conjure an essence of a city, which may even be a decent facsimile of how many people perceive the place. (Somewhat like The Dishonourable Kirstie Allsopp’s 11 seconds rule on Location Location Location, though not really.)

Ian Nairn's book Nairn's London is quite the opposite—a rich book derived from a life spent amidst the city, a city which he clearly worshipped even as it was changing around him. And although written from the point-of-view of the insider, I'd argue it manages to transform the "banality of the everyday" into a "super-real, evocative, true biography" of a city, too.

Finlandia: the greatest architectural mistake ever made? Aalto's benign errors

I've been to Helsinki a couple of times this year. It's one of my favourite cities - civic, compact, cultured, curious, crafted. Charming but not overly so. Pale yellows, pale greys, pale whites, pale blues. Sea-borne and wrapped in rock and forest. Jugend and modern, eastern and western. Solid sometimes stolid. A quiet riot of componentry. Literate in most senses, especially in design. Cold and beautifully bleak, crisp in spring and soft and warm in summer, and so on and so on.

I've visited many times yet for some reason I'd never got round to visiting Finlandia, the concert hall designed by Alvar Aalto.

It's a quite fabulous structure, perhaps even the equal of Utzon's Sydney Opera House though certainly less well-known. in fact, it's a similar structure to Sydney, though without its soaring shells - which I admit is a little like saying it's like Miles Davis without a trumpet, but still.

World Design Congress 2009, Beijing: Carsten Nicolai / Alva Noto

(Continued from World Design Congress 2009: Day three. Written at the time, last October.)

As noted, I’ve followed Carsten Nicolai’s work for years, so it was a pleasure to see — and hear — him in the flesh. Nicolai, aka Alva Noto, is one of the stalwarts of the avant-garde electronica/noise/sound scene, but also works as a visual artist, as we’ll see.

For some time before the scheduled start, there are clearly set up issues with Herr Nicolai’s equipment. There is lots of quiet, concentrated discussion around the projector and sound set up. The projector resolution doesn't seem sharp at all, and worried-looking young organisers are all talking into headsets, making agitated waves up to the AV booth at the back of the auditorium. Throughout, Nicolai is calm and considered but insistent. With little else to look at, I note that he’s an elegant dresser - loose, dark wool flared trousers, grey top, deep burgundy scarf, impeccable white Adidas.

Finally, everything is good enough. The projector still isn’t as sharp as it needs to be, but Nicolai starts with a short video ... It’s a crisp glitch piece, with patterns of dots on screen. Then the fizz and static and rumble of a distant roar, until visual and aural static takes over. It’s the kind of start I’d expected, and a good one.

Contingent: recent films by BERG/Dentsu London and Keiichi Matsuda

Two (or three) recent films are worth watching for how they accurately depict the grain of the future. They are 'Making Future Magic' by BERG/Dentsu London:

And 'Augmented City'/'Domestic Robocop' by Keiichi Matsuda:

Both films - I'm counting Matsuda's as one film for the sake of argument - are interesting as they convey a sense of contingency in contemporary media technologies and informatics, or near-future extrapolations of such things. They indicate that such technologies are slightly awkward, incomplete, jittery, fizzing in and out of focus. And yet magical. Coverage is patchy, positioning vague, interaction is compromised yet the capabilities of people, buildings and cities are extended nonetheless. The aesthetic of both films - though quite different - is fascinating in terms of conjuring this sensation. (It's a sensation I tried to describe in text with The Street as Platform.)

Dentsu/BERG's reminds me of the work of Len Lye to some extent, and I can pay no higher compliment (and their collaborator Timo Arnall deserves special mention once again).

It's a form of light painting, which is as old as film itself in some respects despite their utterly contemporary methodology. And while it's difficult to see an application for it other than as raw aesthetic, and so lending itself neatly to branding and cinema, it's powerful precisely because of that aesthetic. 

As with Matsuda's masterful short film, the various augmented components twitch, jitter, blur, fade, wobble, jiggle, shiver, fade, snap, crackle, pop, hiss. Watching those blocky letters jelly about in mid-air is oddly familiar for something we've never seen before. For working with these and related technologies quickly reveals that they are contingent, awkward, unpredictable and far from the seamless experience generally depicted in films, promos (or my own designs for urban interaction, if I'm honest - though here we hit the tricky question of selling such ideas to clients, who in the case of city governments and property developers will rarely want to hear about contingency. Still, much of the most interesting, influential and useful work is without client at the moment.)

In Matsuda's worlds everything is interface and everything is social media, spam and partially relevant advertising, the holy trinity of internet background noise. This is an architect who understands that spatial intelligence now includes an understanding of data as material, just as architecture understands other materials such as glass, steel and plastic. And as such, an understanding of the essential limits, stresses, tensions and density of these new materials too. Or transmaterial as Mitchell Whitelaw would say. (Though watching the 3D 'Augmented City' without the glasses is probably even closer to how technology feels. Everything only just works, but even that is incredible.)

This sense of contingency can even be heard in the background noise incorporated into Matt Brown's soundtrack or in the crackly static Muzak underpinning 'Domestic Robocop'.

It's also a good example of how design itself can hover between research and art, being neither and both. Contingent. The BERGers are old friends, and though I don't know Matsuda, I'd guess that none of them would call themselves artists. Or researchers for that matter. But this work is, well, hovering in that indeterminate space, like a perfect 10 or a false 9.

There's something else: that these are films. Video is rapidly becoming the pre-eminent mode for communication of ideas (just as everyday photography is increasingly becoming video too). My day-job regularly involves discussions about whether animated 3D models or films are best for conveying ideas. Here both are used but film is the dominant medium, and the visions of all the designers here are interesting precisely because they can be situated in a film world with the gritty texture of reality, rather than the smooth polygons of pure animation.

Making Future Magic: BERG and Dentsu London
Keiichi Matsuda

Three taxis: Shanghai, Helsinki, Turin

See also: Three taxis: Melbourne, Beijing, Milan

'Urbanism in the House', Tuomas Toivonen

One of the related highlights of HDL Global was meeting Helsinki-based architect Tuomas Toivonen (who has the great studio NOW), and in particular hearing him perform his new record ‘Urbanism in the House’ a couple of times.

Put simply, which is probably the best way with something like this, ‘Urbanism in the House’ is a record - and yes, on vinyl - that consists largely of a smart history of modern architecture and urbanism delivered in Tuomas’ Finnish-accented rap and set to metronomic house backdrop. Of course! Toivonen points out that house is the most architectural of genres, after all ...

I was lucky enough to see Toivonen perform it at the opening dinner for HDL Global (Sitra are, I believe, in some way a patron of the project, hence the tie-in with HDL and Low2No), and then again at an album launch party in a club a couple of days later (with Bryan Boyer, Justin Cook, Marko Ahtisaari, Rory Hyde and Cynthia Shanmugalingam).

Live, it’s quite something. In his track 'Teachers' (loosely based on Daft Punk) Tuomas name-checks everyone from Cedric Price to Sejima, while 'U is for Utopia' roll-calls “Mr. Ebenezer Howard and his theory of three magnets”, La Ville Radieuse and 'Less is a Bore'. To watch the room, er, 'blow up' in both cases was both surreal and immensely pleasing. Only in Helsinki?

Here’s the video of the first track ‘U is for Utopia’:

You can hear it at Myspace, or buy it here. And there's also an interview with Tuomas towards the end of the latest Monocle Weekly.

Suomenlinna

I’m just back from another intellectually enriching visit to Helsinki for a Sitra strategic design event. HDL Global 2010 followed the Helsinki Design Lab studio I was part of earlier in the year, and combined notes on all this to follow. For now, the HDL site provides a great record of events.

The video was taken on Suomenlinna (Wikipedia) the sea fortress guarding the harbour in Helsinki, which turned out to be a wonderfully contemplative place to sit and read the briefing notes for the Sustainability session I was moderating at the event.

(I must also admit to another sly bit of 'method designing' here too, as Suomenlinna was the venue for the first Helsinki Design Lab in 1968, which featured Buckminster Fuller, Victor Papanek, Christopher Alexander et al.)

World Design Congress 2009, Beijing: Day three

(Continued from World Design Congress 2009: Opening ceremony, World Design Congress 2009: Day one and day two. Written at the time, last October.)

The third and final day of the conference - for me at least - and the sky in Beijing is cool, grey and damp, shrouding any memories of the clear blues and crisp shadows of the opening day. The air itself seems thicker, somehow.

The air quality here is usually bad, at least by the standards of Sydney, say. There’s a Twitter feed of Beijing air quality, which paints a fairly clear picture. (Intriguingly though, it’s from a measuring station atop the US Embassy, which is not far from a motorway and whose daily reading at 1900 hours catches the end of rush hour. If I were China, I’d feel that this, and the Wall Street Journal’s Beijing Air Quality widget might be a none-too-subtle form of propaganda. There is a difference in measurement too, with the US figures measuring different pollutants to the Beijing sensors.)

However, it occurs to me later that it’s also possible to too easily connect the way the sky looks with air quality issues. Beijing (and much of Eastern China) has always have been subject to a misty atmosphere, as much ancient Chinese visual media attests.

There’s no doubt, however, that the air quality can often by filthy. By the end of an afternoon spent walking over the city, I’m suffering for sure. However, there’s also something genuinely fascinating, even thrilling, about the air and the particular conditions it creates, as Bryan Boyer described after his first visit to Beijing, when he was similarly breathless (pun intended.) The way the immediate environment fades in the near distance, everything feels tantalisingly out-of-reach and the city itself seems as if it could simply continue for ever, as if beyond the edges of the map.

“As a visitor it's pathetically easy for me to put aside the sad reality of the pollution and its long-term effects on the people who live there. For the moment I'm in thrall with the incredible optics of a city that is so vast it yields the potential for, but ultimately denies, infinite vistas with vanishing points in every cardinal direction. These forever-boulevards literally choked by smog are tragically beautiful with something akin to the sad sadism of foie gras. In so many ways, Beijing is the foie gras of cities: ethically complicated but undeniably exquisite. It's a city that any kid who grew up with video games already knows: the Z-buffer culling of distant objects to reduce render time is exactly what dense smog produces. Successive layers of massive buildings and leafless trees rendered as increasingly pale outlines encapsulate you in a little sphere of existence, your own little microcosm of the endless city, as if seeing the whole thing at once would simply require too much processing power from your human brain. Please upgrade your buffers before you visit the city of the future Beijing has vanquished the vanishing point. What's next?” [Bryan Boyer, Of This We Are Sure]

That’s exactly right, and I too am that careless visitor entranced by the chilly fug enveloping everything around me in a beguiling poisonous embrace. I do later feel the visceral effects of being outside in Dashanzi all afternoon, but early this morning the atmosphere is simply intriguing.

Interestingly, Steven Holl, in the excellent Urbanisms: Working with doubt (Princeton Architectural Press), describes this an entirely different way. He talks not about the Z-buffer but the Z-axis, reclaiming the section for 21st century urbanism, and about “multiple horizons and vanishing points” in Beijing. He nimbly side-steps (or ignores) the failed ‘streets in the sky’ model of mid-20th-century housing projects and instead proposes that the “Z dimension of the development of buildings in section has overtaken the planimetric. The section can be fifty times more consequential than the plan, especially in metropolitan centers such as Manhattan, Shanghai, Tokyo, and Hong Kong.”

Referring to Linked Hybrid (of which more later), and in suggesting it directly “responds to the real pressures of rapid urbanisation”, he writes:

“All architectural works are in some way urban works; they either deny or affirm the potential of the city. The metropolitan density of the twenty-first century asks for a further spatial affirmation in the vertical and the diagonal. A diagonal rise by elevator through overlapping spaces of a modern metro station yields an open-ended spatial sensation. The limited conditions of linear perspective (from planimetric projections) disappear as modern urban life presents multiple horizons and vanishing points.” (Steven Holl, p.25 of Urbanisms)

But as interesting as this strategy is, driving from the Chaoyang District to CAFA on this grey morning, the vanishing points vanish rather than multiply.

World Design Congress 2009, Beijing: Victor Margolin: The politics of survival, the potential of data display

(Continued from World Design Congress 2009: Day two. Written at the time, last October.)

Victor Margolin was up next. Writer of numerous books, and he did focus on sustainability, and very directly.

In fact, after an introduction which sets the scene in terms of industrial development leading to climate change (probably not something many needed in the room, but you never know), he stressed the importance of COP15, and stated the need for “greater transparency” about the direct and indirect “causes of climate charge”. He noted that “environmental problems are global not just regional/local” and that there was a broad “public mistrust of companies, and of organisations to act in the interest of citizens.”

The “result” of this, as he sees it, is a “demand for more information on the one hand - and improved products and systems on the other .”

We’re engaged in a “politics of survival”, a “politics of protest.” As such, he sees a “new role for the graphic designer”. That there is a latent “demand for graphics and visual displays to help people understand condition of the world - (to create) explanations of what is happening on the planet as a result of human activity ...”

 

World Design Congress 2009, Beijing: Zhu Dake: "Consumerism, authoritarianism, inconsistency, harmony and modern China"

(Continued from World Design Congress 2009: Day two. Written at the time, last October.)

Based at Tongji University, where he is a professor at the institute of cultural criticism, Zhu Dake might be an example that the public intellectual in China has a little more leeway than is often characterised in the West (see also this interview at Danwei.org). His speech centres on the balance, or tension, between authoritarianism and consumerism that China is facing - or encouraging, depending on how you look at it - and features some subtle critique of both aspects of that balancing act. I’ll reproduce it in a bit more detail here (though please excuse any inaccuracies due to my typing or the translation at the time.)

He starts with Mao's legacy; since the second round of reform and the “opening up”, China has been engaged in consumerism and late stage capitalism, he says. So a curious hybrid between consumerism and authoritarianism has led “to a specific spatial logic in China.” These two systems “inconsistent yet they coexist with seeming harmony”.

He then shifts to talking about china (as in porcelain, china-ware), which “can be traced back a long way” and how “china transformed into China”.

Here, he starts to outline the danger of over-use of specific cultural symbols - not only china, but also the overuse of the colour red, which he calls a “visual disaster”. Red, he points out, is “representative of authority, just like the wall of Forbidden City”. It represents “conquer and warning to the general public.” (He shows some photos of the reddish outer wall of the Forbidden City.)