Skateboarding and The City

April 25, 2008March 3, 2009 moleitau4 Comments

Skateboarding and The City, originally uploaded by blackbeltjones.

“The triumph of non-labour, however, does not entail an absence of effort but an even more profound redefinition of what ‘production’ might mean, and it is here too that skateboarding strikes at the heart of the business city. At first sight, skateboarders’ labour produces no ‘products’ beyond the moves skaters make, a ‘commodity’ exchangeable only by means of performative action. Furthermore, skateboarders, like students, offer a potential labour force but they deny this by undertaking seemingly meaningless productions, and so appear to waste effort and time. But that ‘principle of economy’ which sees a ‘waste’ of energy as abnormal is itself a reduction of life to mere survival. Skateboarding, in contrast, undertakes a release of energy that either creates or modifies space, espousing play, art and festival.”

– Prof Iain Boarden, Skateboarding and The City

“The Earth is becoming unearthly” – Geoff Manaugh/BLDGBLOG at The Bartlett

January 23, 2008September 19, 2008 moleitau4 Comments

Geoff Manaugh/BLDGBLOG at The Bartlett, originally uploaded by blackbeltjones.

Bldgblog
Bartlett
23.1.08

RAW NOTES:

Free software and access = no obligation so feeds enthusiasm ?like sunlight or vitamin c?
(He speaks very fast in a NE USA accent this is not going to be a transcript)

Archigram x Ballard x Philadelphia x depression x claustrophobia = start of bldgblog

A catalogue of enjoyment.

Changed his life.
> Map of climate zones in europe projected in europe 2071 from the guardian
How do design climate-appropriately for a rapidly changing climate? What is site-specificity in this dynamic context?

Refs “solastaglia” cf. Collision Detection (http://www.collisiondetection.net/mt/archives/2005/12/solastalgia.html) – climate-change melancholy. Losing a homeland without moving anywhere
Will future pharma companies sell you pill to combat climate change
Obsessed by the fact that the earth is becoming unearthly
Showing projected maps of the future coastline is in some senses “adventure tourism”
Be aware of the risks of showing these images – might be exciting rather than prohibitive

Quotes from “The Drowned World”
> Shows billboard architecture
Could climate change refugees be clinging to billboards on the hammersmith flyover?

> Battleship island, japan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashima_Island

> Bannermans island: private home of the world’s biggest arms dealer at the time of the spanish-american war

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bannerman’s_Castle

Rumour was that he used faulty cannons as rebar-the thoughts of turning weapons into architecture is exciting
> Island fortress of the coast of india
> Maunsell towers off whitstable – influence for archigram
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maunsell_Forts

Texas tower off the coast of new jersey – post-war
http://www.radomes.org/museum/documents/TexasTower.html

> Oilrigs by statoil
– Man standing on the seabed
Costs about the same as flat in downtown manhattan / camden designed by rogers
The premium offshore oil-rig market could be tapped into
Dubai terraforming
– The thing that you don’t realise is the scale
Dubai is very disappointing, very boring. Invest that much money and all you can come with is dumb homes for sports-stars? That much hubris, time, money and slave labour? And that?s all you come with? Islands in the shape of a palm tree?

> Artifical reefs – what if archigram had been active in this area?

– Looks remarkable looks like chinese armillary spheres- jesuit astronomy instruments
– The reef has a brand on it.
– In 300yrs when this is a “quote/unquote” a natural object – someone will find a logo.
– Sovereign control of undersea structures: there is a feature under the sea between china and japan. Japanese are cultivating coral in order to grow an island so that they can make the territory claim.
What do artificial islands imply for the future of sovereign territory: is the future of colonialism reef science?

George Perec: worms/table/epoxy
http://www.amazon.com/Life-Users-Manual-Georges-Perec/dp/0879237511
China Mieville: slow sculpture
http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/sciencefiction/0,,1312147,00.html
http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2006/01/demolition-sculptures-or-sandblasting.html

The evolution of the landmass of north america >california is not solid ground – it is “the remnants of islands, former continents, lost indonesias”

Google Earth: Ron blakey geology maps
http://tinyurl.com/223rmr

San andreas fault is itself an assemblage of microfaults

Taipei 101 is activating the surface of the earth – causing minor tectonic faults – is it a long term weapon?

The interaction between architecture, weight and the earth’s surface could be further explored
The more people move to LA and build, the safer it will be to live there. The anti-taipei101. Pin the earth down.
We could be massaging the tension out of the earth surface with traffic.

A view to a kill – christopher walken and “terrestrial weaponisation”

US military: “Earthquake Array”

The us military is the real Archigram.

Modular, portable cities, temporary structures, flexible autonomous cities
Dungeon instancing/sharding: in WoW – what are the implications of that for architecture. If you had billions of dollars and very nimble stagehands you could perhaps achieve this effect in the physical world. If I walk into the same building 5 mins later to you? Is it the same?

Subterranea Brittanica
http://www.subbrit.org.uk/
Where have all the trapdoors gone? Why doesn?t pret-a-manger have trapdoors?
Border tunnels – hidden entrances in cargo containers on the border. Crosses through sovereign space into a store front in mexico. “The border is filigreed with this sort of thing. Landscape experiences that are not available to you if you are law-abiding”
Ground-penetrating radar – non invasive archeology

Underground cities could be faked? if you hack the GPR?
Biking under london from bethnal green to whitehall – in the 80s?
Urban exploration: burgeoning
Michael Cook/toronto: interview on bldgblog
http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2007/08/drains-of-canada-interview-with-michael.html
Different tunnel technology sound different – you can almost sonically-navigate around

From underworld to offworld
Mars rovers are the landscape photographers of the future
The new landscapes of the sublime are off-world
Kim Stanley Robinson: comparative planetology is a new thought process for humans.
We’re exporting a earth-centric template onto the other.

> Columbia hills complex of mars of memorial sites for dead astronauts
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4143223/
“Mars is becoming earth through our melancholy”
Mars analogue site is being constructed on earth: mars conditions and appearance.
We are making mars like earth and earth like mars, either deliberately on a small scale like this or accidentally on a large scale through climate change :

These are interesting times – “The Earth is becoming unearthly”

One for the diary: Future City: Experiment and Utopia in Architecture 1956-2006

May 22, 2006 moleitau2 Comments

Jonathan Glancey in today’s Guardian, on an upcoming must-see exhibition at the Barbican:

“Cities built out to sea. A city that encircles the globe. Houses that look like space pods. An “instant city” that can be constructed almost overnight. Visions like these are the stars of Future City: Experiment and Utopia 1956-2006, an exhibition opening next month at the Barbican in London. It will include some 300 intriguing and often baffling drawings, models and animations of attempts by the most radical architects of the past 50 years – from Archigram to Zaha Hadid via Shigeru Ban and Superstudio – to create the architecture of the future.”

And in his closing paragraph of the preview, Curly’s almost channeling BLDGBLOG:

“If only the members of Archigram or Superstudio had been able to buy, in the 1960s, the kind of cheap digital technology available on high streets today. They may not have been able to get their dream cities constructed, but they could have visualised them in mini-movies – much more enticing than so many drawings, lectures and models.”

Of course if he really was on the BLDGBLOG tip, then he would have followed through into newer media of the 21st century, i.e. gaming and avant-garde architecture…

Here’s the link to the Barbican website about the exhibition. It starts on June the 15th.

Computer Baroque

May 9, 2006 moleitauLeave a comment

My new favourite style of everything, as coined by Jonathan Glancey in his review of UN Studio’s Mercedes-Benz Museum:

What is difficult to grasp, until you have spent some time wandering around the building, is that this plan is far from being two-dimensional; instead, it curves and loops up and away from the floor in smooth concrete folds, twisting and turning in ways that makes floors become walls, and walls ceilings. The interior is, in fact, one fluid, continuously unfolding space.

More on computer-baroque soon, I hope.

Architecture without architecture*

May 6, 2006 moleitauLeave a comment

Just part of a masterful rant about the state of architectural criticism from BLDGBLOG:

“The Archigram of today is not studying with Bernard Tschumi and openly imitating The Manhattan Transcripts. The Archigram of today works for Electronic Arts, has no idea who Walter Gropius is, and offers more insights about the future of urban design, space, and the built environment to more people, in more age groups, in more countries, than any practicing architectural critic will ever do, writing about Toyo Ito.
Videogames are the new architectural broadsides.”

Excellent.
—
* happens to be the title of a book about Archigram that I haven’t read yet…

Planet of Clippy

May 1, 2006 moleitauLeave a comment

Over at Interactive Architecture Dot Org, a report of Stephen Gage and Will Thorne’s “Edge Monkeys”:

The UCL EdgeMonkey robot, picture from interactivearchitecture.org

Their function would be to patrol building facades, regulating energy usage and indoor conditions. Basic duties include closing unattended windows, checking thermostats, and adjusting blinds. But the machines would also âgesture meaningfully to internal occupantsâ when building users âare clearly wasting energy.â They are described as âintrinsically delightful and funny.â

I applaud the idea, and (for now) look forward to a world chock full of daemons and familiars helping us do the ecological-right-thing… but I think trying to make them “delightful and funny” would be a mistake.

Far better to make them slightly grumpy and world-weary – rather than have a insufferably jolly robot ask if you really want to leave that light on.

Who needs a planet of Clippy?

“The city that ate the world”

October 17, 2005 moleitauLeave a comment

Has to be in the running for best article headline of the year, and – simultaneously, a Morrison/Ellis story waiting to happen. It’s in fact from a piece by Deyan Sudjic on the singularity of citybuilding that is China, and specifically Beijing:

There are dumps of steel everywhere. So much steel, in fact, that it starts to become only too clear how the Chinese hunger for the metal has pushed up world prices to the point that British construction sites are rediscovering the art of building in concrete. There is enough steel here to explain why Australia has reopened iron-ore mines and why ship brokers have taken bulk carriers out of mothballs from their anchorages in the Falmouth estuary…

By some estimates, half the world’s annual production of concrete and one-third of its steel output is being consumed by China’s construction boom.

Definately worth a read, if just to boggle at the rate of change of the rate of change, conveyed by Sudjic’s personal recollections of his visits to Beijing over the last fifteen years. And also how “starchitects” like Rem Koolhaas frame the somewhat Faustian nature of their work there:

Westerners such as the critic Ian Buruma question the propriety of designing a building that can be seen as endorsing the propaganda arm of a repressive state that tells a billion people what to think. It is criticism which Koolhaas dismisses with growing impatience. ‘Participation in China’s modernisation does not have a guaranteed outcome,’ he told one interviewer. ‘The future of China is the most compelling conundrum, its outcome affects all of us and a position of resistance seems somehow ornamental.’

Resistance Is Ornamental – the cry of the globalist neomodern Borg-in-Prada?

The power of nightmares – to shape architecture

June 30, 2005 moleitauLeave a comment

Freedom Tower designs by David Child - from the NYT

Via greg.org, Nicolai Ourousoff on the compromised, redesigned “Freedom Tower” in the New York Times (reg. reqd.)

“…if this is a potentially fascinating work of architecture, it is, sadly, fascinating in the way that Albert Speer’s architectural nightmares were fascinating: as expressions of the values of a particular time and era. The Freedom Tower embodies, in its way, a world shaped by fear.”

The original design, with it’s open-air structural crown dissolving into the sky was a fairly poetic commemoration of what happened in NYC on the 11th of September. As poetic and hopeful as commercial architecture tends to get, anyway.

It reminded me (and others) of Jean Nouvel’s unbuilt “Tour sans fin” – itself a product of a different, hubristic hopeful time.

Jean Nouvel's unbuilt Tour Sans Fin, La Defense, Paris

Jonathan Glancey on Nouvel’s Tower in pre-war-on-nouns May 2001:

“we could learn much from Nouvel’s unbuilt project: how to build heavenwards without being lumpen or incurring the wrath of God. “

Nouvel himself, happily, seems to still be preserving the spirit of those times. Dina Mehta writes of his self-curated show of work: “The Louisiana Manifesto” at Worldchanging – from which this quote:

“Instead of the archaic architectural goal of domination, of making a permanent mark, today we should prefer to seek the pleasure of living somewhere.

Let us remember that architecture can also be an instrument of oppression, a tool for conditioning behaviour.

Let us never permit anyone to censure this pursuit of pleasure, especially in the domain of the familiar and intimate that is so necessary to our wellbeing.

Let us identify ourselves.”

This new “Freedom Tower” as Ourousoff points out, does not seem to identify the vibrant resilience of New Yorkers and NYC itself, as much as the psychopathologies of its political classes.

Hotel Puerta America, Madrid

May 28, 2005 moleitauLeave a comment

New life goal: stay in at least three of the suites by different architects at the under-construction Hotel Puerta America in Madrid.

From John Pawson’s site

“The Hotel Puerta AmÃ©rica project brings together a team of collaborators which includes Jean Nouvel, Marc Newson, Zaha Hadid, Norman Foster, Christian Liaigre, David Chipperfield, Kathryn Findlay, Jason Bruges, Arata Isozaki, Jonnie Bell, Harriet Bourne, Ron Arad, Plasma Studio, Araki, Richard Gluckman, Teresa Sapey, Vittorio & Luchino, Felipe Saes de Gordoa, Javier Mariscal, Fernando Salas and Arnold Chan.”

There is a sneak preview (in audio) in this week’s “In Business” programme on BBC Radio 4, entitled “Tall Storeys” where Peter Day interviews David Chipperfield about the project, whilst conducting a survey of the state of the architectural profession.

Incidently, “In Business” can now be enjoyed in mp3 format delivered to the ‘podcasting’ software of your choice, thanks to the fine work of BBC R&Mi.