Dan on “The Knowledge”: a test that London taxicab drivers have to take:
“You do it once, that’s it – it covers an insanely large area of London, from Stretford in the east to Acton in the west, way north to way south – all the main roads, and main locations. From then on, it’s all practice, reinforcing your knowledge of the city by driving it, reinforcing certain routes just as neural networks do.”
Hugh Pearman reminds his readers that the process or tools involved are not always the story:
“Prefabrication is an overhyped subject: it’s not the end, just the means. In the same way, writing is not to do with the pen or the keyboard, but the words on the page. Always remember this: architecture is not the same as building.”
» Hughpearman.com: Creative Lego: are prefabricated homes architecture or building?
From a grimly fascinating piece on ambient advertising media in today’s media guardian:
“…increasingly, a higher premium will be placed on an environment ‘unpolluted’ by commercial messages. Like with nude bathing or public drinking in some societies, many people think product placement of this sort should be restricted to certain public spaces.”
Some parts of London are already like “message-parks” – full of the latest guerilla advertising and imagery. Commercially-backed or by an enterprising artist [and the line is fuzzy] every inch of structure and shelter in them is covered in messages and memes, fighting for the attention of the hub-hipster-virus hosts who are meant to hang out there.
Thos who create the messages and own the media of course reside, or aspire to reside in the whitewashed georgian elegance of Notting or Primrose Hills, untroubled by the eyenoise and spatial-spam they unload on the rest of us.
Space and quiet are getting more expensive – inflated by the invention of those who desire it most.
Ecotone is a wiki for collaborative writing about “place”:
“The Ecotone wiki is intended as a portal for those who are interested in learning and writing about place. It came about as a meeting spot for a number of webloggers who write extensively about place in their own blogs and were wishing to work more collaboratively, as well as raise awareness to this genre of weblogs.”
Fascinating also to find the term ecotone means “A transitional zone between two communities containing the characteristic species of each.”
“Of course there is no Hadid to be found yet in Britain apart from the woman herself and her colleagues in a converted school in Clerkenwell. She won the competition for the Cardiff Bay opera house years ago, only to be stymied by the forces of English conservatism and Welsh parochialism, a deadly combination.”
» Gabion.com: “Zaha Hadid brings subtlety to Cincinnati. Not something it’s used to.”
Putting a “pull” handle on the push side of a door. Here seen with the classic “hastily-laserprinted-correctional-signage” in the BBC New Media reception area.
What’s your T.T.D.D.T.D.M.T.M.M.E.E.?
—-
Update: As Chris Barrus points out… “Don’t these new media guys read The Design Of Everyday Things?”: Don Norman would indeed be pulling his beard out.
Whatever beefs I may have with the BBC, it’s pretty cool for that I work for an organisation that can use an Italo Calvino quotation on it’s “Danger: Men At Work” signage.
Man that was terrible, I must have my phaser set to pun. Anyway, Chris Heathcote wants to encode psychogeography in RDF, with a lazyweb idea he calls FOAP: Feel Of A Place.
Full-circle then, from SBJ’s “Cities are great at answering search queries” analogies for the evolution of the web that he suggests in “Emergence”.
So are our cities to be rendered obvious through technology – reduced to digital mappings of the nearest McDonalds pushed to our 3g phones? Yes and no I think is my nonanswer.
Most current visions of ubiquitous computing within the urban real are nothing more than: Cities + Technology + Ease-of-Use. FOAP starts to point to a more complex, advanced mix: Cities + Technology + People + History + Ease-Of-Abuse. This sufficiently advanced technology in the city could be magic.
There are times all of us want to get from A to B, and sometimes we want to get from A to Beowulf: to get lost in the sagas of the city.
I spent a day in the City of London last summer at the height of all the warchalking tizz with artist Heath Bunting, and Kate Rich from Mute where we followed the line of the 2000 year old London Wall. Heath dowsing for water with a twig he cut hastily from a hedge at the start of our walk, and me dowsing for wireless with a TiBook and MacStumbler. Here’s an exchange between the three of us:
“HB: Have you thought of doing a tour? Like the history of cyber or internet or electronic London. Just offer people the stories?
KR: In LA you can do tours of architecture that isnt there any more. Norman Klein. [The History of Forgetting: LosAngeles and the Erasure of Memory http://www.heise.de/tp/english/inhalt/buch/3169/1.html & http://ucmedia1.ucxonline.berkeley.edu/sales/artshum02/ahmain1.html#movie38460]
HB: This is Finsbury Circus, the Circle Line goes underneath this. It also runs under a significant portion of the city wall. It was always interesting to me why it did that – like people said, where shall we put the Circle Line? and 2000 years later the wall has affected the route of it. This was a roundabout question to you Matt: have you any recognition that this mapping that youre doing is influenced by more ancient networks or nodes like wells, or meeting places, or routes?
MJ: Not apart from the obvious one: IT is concentrated in the city of London for the same reason as the powerbrokers, that is for very historical reasons. Other than that Ive not really divined a corridor.
HB: Would they be in the same places as the first cellphone base-stations then?
MJ: No. If you think about the network engineers, they are looking for the most coverage for the most profitable groups of customers. The thing about wireless is its bottom up, grassroots up, no-one really plans how it emerges. So you sort of get this ad hoc collection of nodes around where people are activists.HB: So you think that an archaeological dig of wireless networking will reveal no ancestry?
MJ: I think it would be twice removed if there at all.
HB: I remember ten years ago, one of the first mobile phone networks only operated in the tube.
MJ: Rabbit.
HB: Rabbit, yeah. It was a really good idea: you have a phone in the office, a phone at home, in the tube you dont have anything. Now you cant even make a phone call from the tube. I always think its good to look back in history to find your ancestors. It gives you legitimacy or understanding.”
Building on other recent thoughts and efforts, FOAP’s a great idea, that could encode and encourage the understanding of cities, not just their easy negotiation.
there’s a thousand things I want to pict to you, to paraphrase P. Weller.
In last week’s excellent Guardian supplement on urban design, “Cities Reborn”:
“How anyone can say that popular culture does not influence the changes to our cities, that popular culture doesn’t spark urban regeneration, is beyond me,” stresses architectural journalist and presenter Phil Griffin. “It has more influence on cities than anything else.”
A quote from Will Alsop jumps out:
“It was punk and acid house that made people in general visually literate”
Walking through London’s supposedly-hipper districts, you’re bombarded with images on every available surface: aside from graffiti and adverts, it’s a visual cacophony of guerilla-marketing, guerillia-marketing that’s been adbusted, artworks masquerading as guerilla-marketing.
It deafens one’s eye.
It also makes the city a rich source to sample from with your camphone. If you want to compose a witty montage to communicated with friends, then your pallette is all around you. Needless-to-say then, that a mobile phone operator is already using guerilla marketing posters to that effect [requires Flash] to push it’s camphones…
Just like professional photographers have their favourite haunts and locations around the world and within cities to capture and communciate with, we’re all going to have our favourite locations to compose and parcel-up our pictograms of thought and emotion.
These areas may respond – becoming hotspots for public art collectives, graff-writers and other visual urban guerillas. Marketers as always will fast-follow – hunting the new, cool urban upload spots, to try and squeeze some pixels of their own into our pictorial conversations. And, tech-by-tech, step-by-step, arm-in-arm, we all wander into the visual dreamlands imagined by Noon, Stephenson, Gibson, Ballard and Burgess.
“All architects long for the defining project, the high-profile plum job that people will remember them by, for good or bad. At 63, that death-or-glory moment has arrived for Sir Richard MacCormac. He has plucked the plum of plums, the rebuilding of the BBC’s Broadcasting House. It comes with a price tag of at least £400m.”
One thing that isn’t mentioned are the new technologies that might be available for use within or without the building’s working and public spaces by the time it’s ready to be occupied (in 2008!)
Putting to one side the advances in pervasive computing that might affect personal working style, there are the advances in technology which will affect building use, building fabric and it’s relationship with the city:
Will the BBC and their architects embrace these changes between then and now, or in 6 years will we have a landmark built for now – not then?
» Hughpearman.com: Heart of an empire: MacCormac rebuilds the BBC.
Petafloptimism 