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犬を各種ブログ(Blog)から一括検索します。

• New designs on diplomacy [Monocle]
  "Post September 11 every embassy was built as a bunker ready to repel all comers. But now, from Kathmandu to Harare, architects are reinventing the mission as a national calling card. Robert Bound reports."
• EngD Centre in Systems | Urban Information Architecture [Bristol University]
  "Applications are invited for an EngD Research Engineer (RE) to work on a collaborative research project between Arup and the EngD Centre in Systems at the University of Bristol ... Arup has an opportunity for a research engineer (RE) to join them for their Engineering Doctorate research as part of the Consulting Sector in London. The successful applicant will carry out research in the use of information management in new and existing cities to create resource efficient urban developments which are great places to live, work and visit. This will involve research into: Urban Information Architectures (UIA) – Networks, Systems & Services that support resource management of cities; Urban Management Frameworks (UMF) and understanding of the supply chain components of Information Management in cities. Particularly in relation to to telecoms and utilities." Check it out.
• Four Stories [ear studio]
  "Built into the structure of the two glass elevator cabs in Library Hall, "Four Stories" displays the titles of recently checked-out books in large, illuminated text as the elevators move between floors. This text is visible from much of the Library Hall. "Four Stories" is a permanent public artwork commissioned by the city of Minneapolis."
• Japanese Good Design Awards 2008 [Bustler]
  "The Japan Industrial Design Promotion Organization, the organization involved in the comprehensive promotion of design, recently announced the results of the 2008 Good Design Awards." Some great stuff here.
• 3XN - arkitekter
  More great Danish architects. Love their new CPH bridge.

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更新日:2008年11月27日 0時0分

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• Roden download [Paul Schutze]
  "In making this piece I was determined to capture some sense of the immense time scale expressed both in Roden Craters design (some apertures are made to view events of incredible infrequency, some will not happen in our lifetimes) and in the astronomical calendar. There is a profound sense in which our need for narrative and resolution is absent both in the landscape and the experience of the Roden project so I needed the piece to force this "non- relationship" of parts and events."
• Icons in the Fire [The Measures Taken]
  "It should not surprise us that a style of consumption would return under neoliberalism, but the formal affinities of pseudomodernism with this aesthetic offers an explanation for what often seems an arbitrary play of forms. By drawing on the futurism of the McCarthy era, the architecture of the neoliberal consensus establishes a link between two eras of quietism, conformism and technological acceleration. It also enables us to reinterpret what purports to be an aesthetic of edification as one of consumption. In the computer-aided creation of futuristic form, today's architects are producing enormous logos, and this is only appropriate. The architecture once described as 'deconstructivist' owes less to Derrida than it does to McDonalds." Quite brilliant.
• Courage and prudence, advises Keynes [Inside Story]
  "But the claim that Keynes is back is arguably sentimental and superficial. It may be closer to the truth to argue that Keynes never really went away and that in the current crisis there are simply no alternatives to the broadly “Keynesian” approaches now being attempted. Keynes has re-emerged because there seems be be no other way of ameliorating at least some of the difficulties facing economies around the world."

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更新日:2008年11月24日 0時0分

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• Cutaways in Information Graphics [maxgadney.com]
  "A cutaway is a basic graphic - the state of things made clear, like a graph with one variable of data, rather than seeking to draw comparison, reasoning, correlation or causation. The danger is that they celebrate the basic rendering rather than information imparting. They are doubtlessly beautiful but I wonder to what end."
• Joints by Nathan Wierink [Dezeen]
  "The mahogany table is manufactured using a CNC router, which allows more complex joints to be made than are possible with traditional hand tools."
• How Nike's Social Network Sells to Runners [BusinessWeek]
  "Nike (NKE) is winning a new game that other corporations, from Coca-Cola (KO) to Verizon (VZ) to General Motors (GM), have tried unsuccessfully to play: building brand loyalty via online social networking. "
• fLux Binary Waves: Urban Visualization Installation [information aesthetics]
  "fLux, binary waves [lab-au.com] is an urban visualization installation based on the measurement and real-time representation of infrastructural (passengers, cars...) and communicational (electromagnetic fields produced by mobile phones, radio...) flows. The kinetic wall comprises of a network of 32 rotating and luminous panels of 3 meter-high and 60 centimetres wide, placed apart every 3 meters. The panels rotate around their vertical axis, and have a black reflective surface on one side, the other being plain mat white."
• So Much to Answer For [sit down man, you're a bloody tragedy]
  "Not wanting to pre-empt the F.J's long-promised post on the late Anthony H. Wilson, but a post impelled by (coincidentally) reading I.T's typically ostranenie-inducing photo essay on Manchester and watching Grant Gee's Joy Division (far superior to the abortive Control) in the same afternoon." Excellent stuff.
• Book review - The Chinese Dream [we make money not art]
  "The Chinese Dream - A society under construction, by DCF, Neville Mars and Adrian Hornsby." I have this too, and hope to review one day myself. In the meantime, this is good review.
• The crystal house: "Seizure" by Roger Hiorns. [Gabion]
  "I have squeezed myself into a tiny, abandoned, apartment in the backlands behind South London's Elephant and Castle. Abandoned, but mysteriously colonised. Who knows who once inhabited this 1960s bedsit, but since they left, an alien substance has taken over. The entire flat - walls, ceiling, fixtures and fittings - has sprouted not mould, not fungus, not graffiti, but something far stranger and more beautiful. Hard, glittering, jagged, bright blue crystals. A joint product of the fecund Artangel and Jerwood arts organisations, this place of chilly, sinister beauty is Roger Hiorns' Seizure installation."
• Efficiency’s Mark - City Glitters a Little Less [NYTimes.com]
  "Now, rising energy costs, conservationism, stricter building codes and sophisticated lighting systems have conspired to slowly, often imperceptibly, transform Manhattan’s venerable nightscape into one with a gentler glow. Instead of tower after tower shining at all hours — the World Trade Center stayed aglow long after its occupants went home — the skyline is becoming a patchwork of sparsely sparkling buildings decorated with ornamentally lighted tops."

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更新日:2008年11月23日 0時0分

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Well, more or less. Not quite the full platform imagined in that post - or this - but a small step in that direction.

I'm currently teaching a two-week class at University of Technology Sydney, on the Master of Digital Architecture degree. As per the 'street as platform' idea, we're creating a multiperspectival portrait of the street, seen through the lens of data. Some of this data is derived from various sensors we're placing around the immediate urban environment, some of it is scraped from websites or other sources. The patterns arising from the collision of these datasets are being explored through visualisations produced in the Processing language. 

We've got the 12 or so students blogging about their progress throughout the course, which extends from learning Processing from scratch (plus working in a web services-enabled design environment) to exploring the possibilities and vagaries of real-time data, scraping historical data off the web, and thinking through what it means to visualise patterns in urban data, from conceptual, aesthetic and pragmatic viewpoints. We're heading towards a small exhibition based around an installation in which the visualisations are projected - so ultimately exploring the ideas of projecting urban behavioural data back into the street, as per this system diagram.

The Masters course is run by Anthony Burke, and my teaching colleagues also include Mitchell Whitelaw (University of Canberra/The Teeming Void) and Jason McDermott. We must also thank Dr. David Lowe of the Centre for Real-Time Information Networks at UTS, and those helping from afar include Usman Haque. Plus, we have a forum tomorrow including local luminaries Marcus Trimble and Andrew Vande Moere. Particular kudos also to the students, who are working incredibly hard.

Keep an eye on the students' blog for progress updates, and I'll post more links, context, images, notes &c. to follow, but for now, a quick word from the street itself:

Master of Digital Architecture class 11/08: 'Street as platform': students' blog

作者:Dan Hill

更新日:2008年11月20日 12時46分

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• OUTLIER Tailored Performance Clothing for Cycling in the City
  "Tailored performance clothing for cycling in the city. Clothing you can wear from your bike to the boardroom. OUTLIER is about classically tailored garments made with the best technical fabrics around. Clothing that looks great no matter where you are in the day, riding to work, meeting with clients, or out on the town" Fantastic.
• RjDj
  "RjDj is a music application for the Iphone. It uses sensory input to generate and control the music you are listening to." [Via everyone]
• Jessica Rohrer Sweeping the BQE [P·P·O·W]
  "P.P.O.W Gallery is pleased to announce our second solo exhibition of Jessica Rohrer's paintings, entitled Sweeping the BQE. The BQE is the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, the brainchild of Robert Moses that was originally intended to alleviate traffic throughout Brooklyn and on the bridges to Manhattan ... Having lived within one hundred feet of the BQE for over seven years, Rohrer's paintings record and literally reflect the cars, roads, neighborhoods and implanted nature that a traveler might find while near this thoroughfare."
• Workspring
  "Workspring introduces a new way to work away from work. Discover a truly productive escape—infused with local flavor, equipped with collaborative tools, and designed with your comfort and your goals in mind. Reserve sessions in bright modern studios where ideas flow and technology works like the breeze. Take a break, or gather together before your meeting, in open spaces that provide refreshment and inspiration."
• ABC Innovation’s Sidetracks - a mobile heritage pilot featuring some Powerhouse content
  "ABC Innovation has launched their Sydney Sidetracks project. This is a lovely experiment in developing a mobile heritage application which takes some of the archives of ABC TV and Radio and combines them with static imagery and research from the cultural heritage partners - Powerhouse Museum, State Library of NSW, National Film & Sound Archives, Museum of Contemporary Art, the City of Sydney Archives, and the Dictionary of Sydney." Great stuff, well done Sarah, more to follow.

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更新日:2008年11月16日 0時0分

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• Image, Data and Environment: Notes on Watching the Sky [the teeming void]
  "We occupy an increasingly detailed graph of accumulated data, but remain trapped inevitably in the present, at its right hand edge."
• Database City: notes/linkbombing [serial consign]
  "Well, three days into VISUALIZAR'08 and I feel like my head is going to explode. I can't recall the last time I heard so many great presentations in such a short span of time." Great collection of talks.
• CTA Bus Tracker "API"
  "Chicago's Transit Authority recently released a couple webapps that allow people to track bus locations and routes. It is awesome. This is the documentation of the API they have exposed to power their apps."
• Keating's fury at park reversal [smh.com.au]
  "(Keating) said there was little chance that a building could be designed that would equal the high standard of the Opera House. "What modernism would give us would be a box." Leaving aside the politics for a moment, Keating clearly has no idea what modernism is. Ironically enough, given the Opera House.

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更新日:2008年11月10日 0時0分

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• Jonathan Raban: 'He tried his best to veil it, but Obama is an intellectual' [The Guardian]
  "The best thing about living in the United States since Tuesday has been the gilt-edged assurance that, somewhere out there, very smart people are thinking and talking in a serious conversation from which narrow ideologues have been rigorously excluded ... (Obama) is sure to disappoint those of his supporters who believe he can raise the dead, turn water into wine, and walk on water. But he has rescued the White House from the besotted rationalists of PNAC with their Platonist designs on the world, and restored it to the realm of common reason. It's a measure of the madness of the last eight years that, for this seemingly modest contribution to the nation's welfare (and not just this nation's), grown men and women wept in gratitude on Tuesday night." [via Cel]
• 56Leonard.mov (Quicktime)
  "Anish Kapoor's huge stainless steel balloon sculpture floats gently out of the Manhattan sky to land on-site at 56 Leonard Street, where it is compressed into final form under the descending weight of architects' Herzog & de Meuron's twisted-glass and steel 57-story hi-rise residential tower. So opens directing and new media studio Tronic's stunning hi-def branding production ..."
• Berlin Metro Bans Free iPhone Timetable Application [Wired.com]
  "Fahr-Info Berlin is an iPhone application which helps Berliners to navigate the excellent city metro system. Or rather, it was. BVG, the company which runs the Berlin Metro, has ordered 21 year old student and programmer Jonas Witt to remove the free application from the iTunes Store. The reason, as you will have guessed, is the catchall excuse called copyright ..."
• CityGML
  "The City Geography Markup Language (CityGML) is a new and innovative concept for the modelling and exchange of 3D city and landscape models that is quickly being adopted on an international level. CityGML is a common information model for the representation of 3D urban objects. It defines the classes and relations for the most relevant topographic objects in cities and regional models with respect to their geometrical, topological, semantical and appearance properties."
• Uncertain futures: A Conversation with Professor Anthony Dunne [Adobe - Design Center]
  "Placebo projects we see more as a way of negotiating a relationship to something. It’s not solving a problem. You’re setting up a situation that facilitates a discussion. The more poetic the space—such as a discussion about invisible fields in the context of the home—the more interesting the stories."
• All Tomorrow's Parties on Cockatoo Island [Sydney Festival 2009]
  "2009 sees the first ATP in Australia, curated and headlined by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds. The full festival line-up will be performed twice in the centre of Sydney Harbour on the beautiful Cockatoo Island. With its characteristic industrial and maritime landscape and set in the picturesque Sydney Harbour, Cockatoo Island is the perfect setting for the Sydney Festival debut of this unique event ... As well as performances by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, the festival includes seminal international artists such as British transcendentalists Spiritualized and US avant-bluesman James “Blood” Ulmer, alongside celebrated Australian bands The Saints, Laughing Clowns and The Necks ..."

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更新日:2008年11月9日 0時0分

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• STREET WITH A VIEW: a project by Robin Hewlett & Ben Kinsley
  "Street With A View introduces fiction, both subtle and spectacular, into the doppelganger world of Google Street View. On May 3rd 2008, artists Robin Hewlett and Ben Kinsley invited the Google Inc. Street View team and residents of Pittsburgh’s Northside to collaborate on a series of tableaux along Sampsonia Way. Neighbors, and other participants from around the city, staged scenes ranging from a parade and a marathon, to a garage band practice, a seventeenth century sword fight, a heroic rescue and much more... " Fab. [Via the Swiss Miss, via Ben T]
• Maradona, Mascherano and philosophy [BBC SPORT]
  "With that sentence I only wanted to establish the difference between narrative intelligence and footballing intelligence. The first has more prestige but the second has more complexity. I wrote various articles about that goal and I stand by what I said then. Great football, to me, is the art to improvise, to find solutions, and that goal was the perfect demonstration."
• URBAN SONAR | how it works
  "Four Maxbotix Ultrasonic Range Finders are mounted in the front, back, and shoulders of a hooded sweatshirt, measuring the proximity of people and objects on all sides of the body. Four conductive fabric leads, stemming from the Polar Heart Rate Monitor, are strapped around the fingers to measure pulse. The rest of the electronic components are housed in a pocket inside the sweatshirt at the small of the back"
• One Pixel Webcam
  "This project began with a desired to feel more connected with my environment and particularly with the daylight. By taking one sky-pixel from a webcam in my town and duplicating that colour periodically as my desktop I am continuously reminded of the outside world. My desktop colour changes with the sky."
• From Scratch - A Conversation with Andrew Sorensen [the teeming void]
  "Andrew Sorensen is an Australian musician and programmer, author of the Impromptu live coding environment as well as a live coding musician of note. I recently caught up with his latest work, documented as screencasts on his site. In A Study in Keith Sorensen builds a Keith Jarrett machine that juxtaposes two linked layers of performance - qwerty and (phantom) piano keyboard"
• Travelling around [yesyesnono]
  "Processing sketch made on the train journey between London and Newcastle and Newcastle and London. This is an attempt of recording a journey, or at least a part of it."

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更新日:2008年11月8日 0時0分

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Following on from my recent 'post-occupancy evaulation' of the State Library of Queensland's wi-fi (see previous post), I thought I'd share a couple of outputs. (Thanks to Tory Jones of the State Library of Queensland for permission).

One of the ideas I've been exploring relates to how urban industry - in the widest sense of the word - in the knowledge economy is often invisible, at least immediately and in situ. Whereas urban industry would once have produced thick plumes of smoke or deafening sheets of sound, today's information-rich environments - like the State Library of Queensland, or a contemporary office - are places of still, quiet production, with few sensory side-effects. We see people everywhere, faces lit by their open laptops, yet no evidence of their production. They could be using Facebook, Photoshop, Excel or Processing.

I've been developing a few ideas for exploring this industrial activity, which I hope to share here later, but the post-occupancy work on the Library's wi-fi involved creating a few representations of the service; a service which is all but invisible. Outside of monitoring the server logs, the wi-fi can only be perceived through the presence of users themselves, or of course via devices that detect wi-fi.

So as well as photo-essays, videos and in-depth interviews with users, and relating to this idea of making the invisible, visible, I mapped the strength of the wi-fi signal across levels 1 and 2 of the Library, the primary areas that the Library’s wi-fi is used. By taking readings across the floor of both levels, using standard wi-fi-enabled consumer equipment in order to mimic the conditions for the average user (in this case a MacBook laptop and a Nokia e65 mobile phone), I was able to construct a snapshot of the wi-fi signal strength across the Library.

I then articulated this set of readings as a basic 3D model in SketchUp, with peaks representing good wi-fi signal strength (4 bars, for example) and troughs representing poor wi-fi signal strength (no bars/no connection, or intermittently 1 bar). Each ‘bar’ defined a level in the 3D model (1 bar = 1 metre, roughly). This gives a sense of the wi-fi as a shape, with a physical form. Although literally misleading, it helps to understand wi-fi as a discrete phenomenon, via a form of translation.

While this model is not intended to be totally accurate - wi-fi signals may change in different atmospheric conditions, and perceived signal strength will vary depending on the equipment used - it does convey a sense of the overall ‘shape’ of the wi-fi, as if we could perceive it in physical form. Sensing the wi-fi like this is almost akin to dowsing - detecting the presence of unseen forces - and mimics the sensation of users attempting to discern where the wi-fi signal is strong.

The model was initially overlaid onto a floorplan of level 1, and subsequently scaled up to sit over a snapshot of the site from Google Earth. When comparing with the built form, we can explain the strong signal over the north-western egress of the Knowledge Walk. Through our observations at the Library, we saw that users have figured out that this is a good spot - one of the 3 wireless access points currently on that floor is located in the nearby meeting rooms, not that users would know this. The presence of the ‘bench’ extruded from the wall provides useful affordances for users too, almost suggesting it’s a good spot to sit and access the wi-fi (although again, we suspect that is accidental coincidence of design). Similarly, the floor-to-ceiling windows from meeting rooms and open corridor leading outside means there is minimal concrete to block the signal. So this 3D model helps suggest a correlation between use of the space, the shape of the space, and the strong wi-fi signal.

Following the central spine of the wi-fi model through towards the south-eastern edge, we can see how the wi-fi ‘leaks out’ of this end of the building, through the open end of the Knowledge Walk outside onto the concourse in-between the Library and the building destined to be The Edge. Elsewhere, thick concrete mitigates against wi-fi spreading far, unfortunately including the café and the fabulous deck areas on the river, where the signal falls off sharply (currently).

I allocated the SketchUp model a skin of netting, in a nod towards the Cedric Price-designed aviary at London Zoo. This seemed to me a similar structure, and suggests that 'wi-fi cloud' might actually feel like a containing volume - a net of wi-fi, as if seen from a user’s or bird’s point-of-view.

Formally, the result is hardly elegant, and bears little relation to the AIA award-winning structure by Donovan Hill/Peddle Thorp. (Incidentally, it’s been a great pleasure to work with Timothy Hill on this and other projects recently). The sharp angles and abrupt faces are accidents of the crude construction in SketchUp and the simplicity in my measurements. I should probably take it into 3D Studio Max or something, to render it with more graceful curves, or a material that would more properly represent the qualities of radio waves - perhaps something like Diller+Scofidio's Blur Building.

There's a full set of screengrabs here, here's a fly-through animation, and here's the original SketchUp model. I don't want to overplay the significance of this approach - it was simply one of several methods for expressing the presence of wi-fi in the Library, and partly just sketching out loud ...

Constructing another tangent on the wi-fi, I was struck by how users adopted the Infozone space - where the wi-fi is primarily located - and the furniture provided for them. The low desks, small tables, various chairs, benches etc. afford numerous variations for wi-fi users, and sure enough people drape themselves all over them.

Discussions with Timothy Hill indicated how the design of furniture across the Infozone was intended to, in his words, “break up the traditional anthropomorphic relationship between the user and their laptop”, based on observations of how intimately people actually relate themselves to their laptops. Hill had noted how people rest the laptop on their knees, lie down with it, use it in bed, curl up around it on the sofa, and so on. So the fixtures and fittings in the Infozone were intended to suggest this intimacy - in common with the ‘domestic’ touches in the design of the Library in general - and provide a wide variety of options as to how to use a laptop in the space.

As well as the hundreds of photos I took in the space, I decided to do a few sketches of the more interesting positions, which I suggested might work something like a aircraft identification manual or compendium yoga positions perhaps. With the latter in mind, I was tempted to name a few, such as "The perch", "The front crawl", "The huddle", "The sandwich", "Battleships", “Reverse Battleships", “The Horse", "Side saddle", "Lotus", "The NASA control room", "The occasional-table hug" and so on.

Below, a few of the quick sketches I did, illustrating some of these positions:

Wi-fi shapes photoset [Flickr]
Wi-fi shape animation [Vimeo]
State Library of Queensland, Brisbane, Donovan Hill/Peddle Thorp
Post-occupancy evaulations of wi-fi
State Library of Queensland

作者:Dan Hill

更新日:2008年11月8日 13時16分

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As I understand it - and now I've seen all 5 seasons of The Wire, I feel like I now ought to know this kind of thing - the sight of a pair of shoes dangling high from telegraph or electricity wires, usually over a junction, is a tacit sign that this might be a place to 'score' of an evening.

Yet how on earth to explain this?

A pair of catfish strung over a wire in St. Lucia, Brisbane. Photos shot through the windscreen of a State Library fleet car, on our way to UQ. Catfish Blues.

作者:Dan Hill

更新日:2008年11月3日 13時24分

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I'm at the 9th World Congress of Metropolis here in Sydney for bits of today and tomorrow. It's an odd event - perhaps the major global gathering of urban bureaucrats (alongside C40 and UN Habitat, perhaps), combined with numerous academic speakers and intellects, businesspeople and local councils, and several points in-between. As Saskia Sassen put it earlier, "multiple, very specialised forms of knowledge are in circulation".

Unfortunately, that can mean that elements of events like this are remarkably dull, with years of experience of different cities averaged out in an attempt at communication. And leaving many ultimately saying nothing.

However, the speaker list had some stellar talent on it too, and highlight of the day was certainly was the session 'Connecting Cities', featuring Saskia Sassen (Columbia University), Carlo Ratti (MIT)  and Dr. Kathryn Pain (Loughborough University).

Sassen's talk was fascinating, encompassing urban density, the recently released Mastercard World Centres of Commerce city ranking, and the fall-out from the credit crisis. Continuing the city ranking theme, Dr. Pain presented the latest globalisation and world cities index (aka GAWC). Both indexes show Sydney rising up fast, albeit on the coat-tails of its major trading partners Shanghai, Beijing and Hong Kong. They also show medium-sized European cities on strong form, the steady disappearance of American cities (save NYC) but most of all the continued rise of East Asian cities. Their data was largely collated before the current financial meltdown - but that as is only likely to reinforce this global reorientation towards Asia Pacific.

However, the most interesting and engaging presentation was by Carlo Ratti, showcasing the work of his SENSEable City lab at MIT, which many readers will be familiar with (their site has a great list of papers, as well as projects, if you're not familiar with their work).

Carlo and I had a good discussion afterwards, which I'm writing up for a piece in Architectural Review Australia, all being well. So I'll save the details of that for another time. More to follow.

作者:Dan Hill

更新日:2008年10月23日 13時59分

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We (Arup Sydney) were part of the worldwide event known as PARKing Day yesterday. Grabbing a bit of spare tarmac outside Customs House by Circular Quay, colleagues from various teams set up shop with some mulch, haybales, fruit and veg, connectivity, one of the fleet Smart cars - and this being Australia - a chook.

PARKing Day is a one-day, global, open source-style event where parking space is reclaimed (simply by pumping some dollars into a parking meter, usually) and turned into temporary public parks - see events in San Francisco (where it started, invented by REBAR), LA and Melbourne, for instance. I was in Brisbane for the day, so didn’t get to see how our park turned out in person - though I did see a parking spot in the Valley turned into a grassy table football venue (the Brisbane PARKing Days are really well organised, with over 47 ‘parks’ this year, apparently).

Our team had chosen the theme of ‘productivity’ - hence the urban agriculture and wi-fi - and the little park drew a lot of positive attention from passers-by throughout the day. We asked people to contribute their wishes for Sydney, which were pinned to a tree in the ‘park’.

People seemed to love it and we think we may have been one of the only such parks in Sydney (drop a comment in if you know of others) although there was a brave park on King Street, Newtown back in April.

Much thanks to my friends at Customs House, and thanks also to Wired Sky for the wi-fi coverage, and several others from the office who helped out hugely. Most credit goes to planning technician Safiah Moore, who initiated and organised the whole thing. And donated the chook. A good day.

作者:Dan Hill

更新日:2008年9月20日 15時40分

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Back in January, in an entry on façades, I noted a recent, and relatively local, favourite - the extraordinary western face of the Brisbane Girls Grammar School Creative Learning Centre. Brisbane buildings have to posess a trick or two to deal with the fierce sun on their western side, and local firm m3architecture obliged with a protective layer of anodised aluminium slats, overlaid onto a wall painted with black and white stripes ... which just happens to create a gigantic moiré effect as you move past it.

The school sits on a hill adjacent to the six-lane Inner City Bypass, and so commuters witness the entire six-storey façade undulating and revolving as they drive past. In my earlier post I promised a video of the thing in action and I'm yet to deliver, but in visiting the excellent (and aforementioned) 'Place Makers' exhibition at the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane recently, I captured the next best thing - some rough videos of the exhibition's simplified 1:11 scale model of the western wall.

That is essentially exactly what it looks like, just 1:11 scale. The moiré effect is surprisingly simple, as this close up of the model indicates. (For the curious Wikipedia's definition of the moiré is worth a read.)

Some photos of the model at 'Place Makers', which is also simple but a very effective display.

Some images from an Architecture Australia article, indicating what it looks like in context:

m3 produced some notes on their design for the building on their website, though they don't reveal much detail about the provenance of the moiré idea - except perhaps in the phrase "dynamic space of circulation". I half-wonder whether the feathers of local parrots or the ubiquitous slats and blinds of Queenslanders' verandahs may have provided subconscious inspration.

m3 moiré façade videos at Vimeo
'Place Makers' and architecture scenes
'Place Makers', Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane
m3architecture

作者:Dan Hill

更新日:2008年9月13日 14時29分

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A few months ago, Scott Burnham kindly asked me to contribute to the exhibition catalogue for Urban Play, a project he conceived and then developed with Droog Design. It is being sponsored by the city of Amsterdam and is premiering there this September. In Scott's words, "Urban Play is about placing the individual at the heart of the city’s development and encouraging creative interaction between the individual and the physical city". You can also find out more at the Experimenta site.

Scott's posting up focus pieces on some of the interventionists featured in the exhibition, starting with the quite brilliant work of Gilberto Esparza, a Mexico City-based artist who creates 'Urban Parasites', "small robotic creatures made from recycled consumer goods which wander, climb, crawl and explore the marginal areas of the city." (Check the videos at Scott's site.)

To my small contribution: Scott asked me to write something about 'the adaptive city', noting some of my previous entries, such as 'Punching holes in Ciutat Vella; adaptive urban form in Barcelona' and 'Architecture and interaction design, via adaption and hackability'. That was pretty much it by way of direction, so I had some free rein to take those thoughts for a walk, and introduce them to some more recent ideas around urban informatics and urban information design, the impact of real-time data and collaborative planning on urban form, and so on.

I've reproduced the full essay below. I believe the other contributors to the catalogue were to be Usman Haque on open source architecture and Richard Reynolds on guerrilla gardening, so it'll be worth keeping an eye on. Many thanks to Scott for his considerable patience, and for asking me to contribute in the first place. It's a relatively speculative, deliberately optimistic piece, continuing some ideas from 'The Street as Platform'. Hope you find it interesting.

The Adaptive City

City, heal thyself.

The scale of cities is limited by the technology of the age. With a pre-industrial city, scale was defined by how far and how effectively water could be transported, or the range of goods and services delivered on foot or via animals.

The cities of the industrial revolution transformed by rapidly building ways of distributing water and other basic amenities over a larger scale, shock cities emerging from an engine of mechanisation. Water, waste and energy were shifted over far greater distances through the construction of gigantic sewers, water supplies, gas and electricity networks and ultimately mechanised transportation. These cities had developed a kind of artificial metabolic system, enabling growth throughout the 20th century.

Eventually they reached urbanism’s psychological limits in the form of sprawling suburbs. At this point scale had outgrown the post-industrial city’s ability to react and respond to change. Cities become gridlocked, congested, with under-supply of affordable housing and over-supply of unaffordable housing, doughnut effects of depressed inner-urban cores, then inverse doughnuts of an emptying outer suburbia as oil prices start to suppress mechanised movement. City governance no longer fits this urban form. Stretched taut to breaking point, the city’s fabric snaps in numerous places. It’s too big, too fragmented, too complex.

These cities have become essentially inhuman, increasingly manifestations of the over-extended artificial metabolism rather than the citizen. Constructed at the scale of cars and other material resources rather than people. The most important markets now are financial, informational rather than physical, and thus do not provide firm enough bindings to fuse communities to place.

There is much wringing of hands all round, at least within the professions concerned with the city. Meanwhile the new shock cities of the so-called emerging economies career down the same cul-de-sacs at breakneck speed.

Elsewhere, the enormous and chaotic urban systems of the global south appear to provide an alternative model to an academic mind, but there appears to be little that individual agency there can do to construct a collective sense of urban progress. These cities are highly strung in a series of tensions arising from an wildly uneven topography of development, leapfrog technologies like mobile phones and WiMAX co-existing with barter economies and shanty towns.

Rewinding through the development of urban form, we find the remnants of cities constructed before the artificial metabolism, tucked away in the ancient centres. The old hutongs of Beijing formed a kind of continuous skin over the lived city, enabling a co-operative, dense habitat for centuries until their recent ongoing destruction. The blocks, alleys and courtyards of Barcelona’s Ciutat Vella are so conjoined as to create a hermetically sealed membrane. The Walled City of Kowloon in Hong Kong could accommodate near infinite variation, adaptation and internal growth, as if New Babylon, despite its anarchic and essentially intolerable conditions. The old city of Tokyo before The Fire was made of light wood and paper, such that an earthquake could only rearrange the pieces with minimal damage to their inhabitants, with simple reconstruction occurring as soon as the roofs stopped falling. Even in intrinsically modern New World cities like Brisbane, the ‘timber and tin’ Queenslander house, mutations of South Pacific vernacular architecture and colonial exports, are systems that are lived in, operated, maintained and adapted by their inhabitants, ultimately binding citizen and built fabric into a intimate relationship.

These urban forms appear ancient but are actually ageless, their fabric woven so tightly as to heal over self-imposed wounds effortlessly, shifting shape to enable change. Punctures in the fabric would be quickly sealed, and generally by the citizens themselves. Ciutat Vella will witness a block removed daily, as if a loose tooth, only to be filled again within days. The built fabric in this part of Barcelona is more like a continuous textured skin rather than discrete streets, blocks or roads. Urban life is constructed through shared density, diversity and the physicality of public space, enabling quotidian chance interaction with strangers, with change.

Yet though they comprise a supremely adaptive system, these city forms could also be stifling havens of poverty, rife with disease, malnutrition and limits on the possibility of the wider city. The mechanised creation of the Eixample to the north of Ciutat Vella enabled the city to draw breath and develop, with its own admirable model of adaptive architecture.

Yet the urban form benefited from a reflexive, responsive urban system nonetheless, a kind of everyday architecture and shared social framework that comprised a direct relationship between the action of the citizen and the city, a sinuous nervous system in which urban form and collective governance, of a sort, fluttered in response to the patterns of behaviour on the streets in real-time.

Fast forward, and some have written of the this century’s cities developing new artificial nervous systems, to supersede those articulated metabolic systems of the 19th century. These newer nervous systems, not centralised but distributed, and predicated on digital networks of networks in which every object is informational and every movement or behaviour is trackable, could combine to form a new kind of lattice-like informational membrane, hovering magically over the physical fabric of the city. As if one of Calvino’s imaginary cities comprised solely of information, a limitless multidimensional data-based shadow structure represents the life of the city in real-time.

Not all of the life, of course. There are limits to such models, as there are limits to the perceptive capabilities of sensors and of filters to interpret the data. Real life continues in parallel with the real-time city model. In an inversion of the body, where the human subconscious is capable of processing vast amounts of data not perceived by its conscious self, the real-time city model can only capture a tiny fraction of the information present within the city. So the city information model cannot approach the subconscious of the city, but can provide a facsimile of consciousness.

Facilitated by networks of sensors, the data emerging from the new nervous system appears limitless: near-imperceptible variations in air quality and water quality, innumerable patterns in public and private traffic, results of restaurant inspections, voting patterns in public referenda, triggers of motion sensors, the output of heating ventilation and air conditioning systems, patterns of water usage, levels of waste recycled, genres of books returned at local libraries, location of bicycles in the city’s bike-sharing network, fluctuations in retail stock controls systems, engine data from cars and aeroplanes, collective listening habits of music fans, presence of mobile phones in vehicles enabling floating car data, digital photos and videos locked to spatial co-ordinates, live feeds from CCTV cameras, quantities of solar power generated and used by networks of lamp-posts, structural engineering data from the building information models of newly constructed architecture, complex groupings of friends perceptible in social software multiplied by location-based services, and so on. Myriad flows of data move in and around the built fabric. As many or most objects in the city become potential nodes in a wider network, enabled through the natural interoperability of systems influenced by the Internet and its open-source philosophies and standards-based protocols, this shimmering informational field provides a view of the entire city.

The built fabric becomes less important than the behaviour of the city itself, and we finally have a sense of the latter. As Reyner Banham suggested all those years ago, services and infrastructure become far more relevant to the way the city feels.

However, these urban informatics do become manifest in the built fabric nonetheless; they have a potential physical presence, as the model is only partly concerned with drawing data from the city. It also feeds it back. Urban information design emerges in a call-and-response relationship with informatics, filtering and describing these patterns for the benefit of citizens and machines.

The invisible becomes visible, as the impact of people on their urban environment can be understood in real-time. Citizens turn off taps earlier, watching their water use patterns improve immediately. Buildings can share resources across differing peaks in their energy and resource loading. Road systems can funnel traffic via speed limits and traffic signals in order to route around congestion. Citizens take public transport rather than private where possible, as the real-time road pricing makes the true cost of private car usage quite evident. The presence of mates in a bar nearby alerts others to their proximity, irrespective of traditional spatial boundaries. Citizens can not only explore proposed designs for their environment, but now have a shared platform for proposing their own. They can plug in their own data sources, effectively hacking the model by augmenting or processing the feeds they’re concerned with.

If a group of interested parents suspect that a small playground added to the corner of their block might improve the health of their kids, with knock-ons for nearby educational facilities, cafés and the natural safety of a more active street, they can wrangle these previously indiscernible causal relationships into a prototype and test their new designs, garnering the requisite public engagement along the way.

Everyday design could become a conversation within social software networks, and citizens have data and tools that urban designers can only dream of. In fact, professional urban designers have this data too, and thus their practice is transformed.

The model is already being built. With only the simple visualisation of data scraped from the management systems of bike-sharing networks Vélib’ and Bicing we can already see the pulse of the city, Barcelona’s bikes heading to the beach into the sun, whereas their Parisian counterparts saunter from the Périphérique inwards to the centre, mirroring the city’s intrinsic wider rhythms of work and play. Systems deliver immediate information on air quality to mobile phones when texted a zip code. The smokestack of a power station in Helsinki is illuminated with high powered laser to provide feedback on output to the surrounding neighbourhood, who alter their patterns of electricity use in response. Collaborative mapping projects feed voraciously from every aspect of published public data about a neighbourhood, and create maps of crimes, film locations, lost and found postings, and building permits, creating a new hybrid of journalism. Bicycle networks are built along the routes that people have already indicated they take, plotting their journeys on shared maps.

With a wider set of data, fed back in imaginative, multi-sensory and distributed fashion, what stories of the city might emerge and how might they affect the way the city sees itself and thus behaves? And how might citizens use this data, how might they add their own feeds, weave together their own filtered aggregations of everyday data? Could it provide a platform through which citizens learn about the city, and are then able to better build the city?

If so, the city becomes shaped by side-effects. Each action produces a torrent of metadata describing that action, which can be aggregated and combined with other data in order to provide rich representations of city life. The individual informs the model, and thus development, through their behaviour. Paths through parks emerge where people walk, rather than the other way round. This is subconscious collective adaptation.

Yet there is possibility for more active conscious interventions too. To enable this, the informational city must be reconfigured with a series of seams, hooks, handles and portals. In the language of code, the city itself has APIs, through which information can be read and written, enabling a self-reflexivity that in turn enables the city to adapt, just as those early cities were able to through physical proximity. A panoply of varying smart meters, sensors, and schema are required to feed data to the model, and so the only possible technical architecture is an open one. This openness also provides safeguards against misuse, opportunities for creative hacking and enables a vast set of possible outputs. As openness informs the model, with more data-sources providing a richer model, the aggregate is open too, a web service that citizens can immerse themselves in just as much as city officials and planners. The model is something everyone can touch, as it is comprised of everyone. It encourages interaction, reflexivity and adaptation.

And this is not a sawn-off SimCity. This is not a simple series of parameters unfolding with algorithmic predictability. This complex lattice allows for unforeseen events, mashes together previously disparate data-sets with abandon. The influence of contemporary informational thinking means the data is captured, stored forever, easily addressable and processed continually without a particular end-point or raison d’être in mind. Instead the data is allowed to play out its own rhythms and textures. To see what arises.

However, despite its detail, the important aspect of the model is not the model itself, but how its presence affects governance, the city, and the way people feel about their city. This platform only comprises a subset of the city’s actual behaviour, in which individual and collective unpredictability - the stuff of distinctive cities - cannot be absorbed in real-time. Yet it provides the nearest approximation to the real-time city, behaving more like contemporary web service than traditional urban governance and moving closer to the older nervous system shared by the ancient city limited by scale and physicality. This new, distributed nervous system flexes over far larger urban forms. Governance becomes more akin to gardening, tending a system by homeostatic nudges, responding to the everyday patterns of movement in the city yet also able to look back over a vast terrain of data to find deeper meaning.

Urban planning is a history of metrics, measures and commentary. This is a new systemic, service-based approach, balanced between the cold, hard averaging of statistical analysis and the hawk-eyed urban observations of William H. Whyte and Jane Jacobs. It takes an informational viewpoint that says: "draw data from everything it can". No matter how banal or inconsequential the data seems, the model remains open to its potential. It can give us historical patterns and real-time interrupts, live from the street.

For citizens, the model provides an interface onto the same processes, the same city. It gives them a user interface for governance, in which they play an intrinsic role. Holes in, say, the service of the bike-sharing networks are visible to all, over data feeds and multiple diverse platforms, and a delayed letter from the government department responsible, promising a subsequent investigation, is no longer going to be seen as an appropriate response. Where professional design interventions are not required, the city designs itself. With the model as common platform, there is sufficient data to indicate the likely impact of improvements, experiments, and adaptations to the city. A new mode of civic engagement emerges.

Urban design takes place in a shared space, and so evokes a tacit recognition that design is an ongoing social process. Thus, design and governance must be adaptive and continuous, fluctuating in response to use. Where urban design was oriented towards the macro, individual micro responses were often only resistant, subversive hacks - in some cases inspired, in others inspiring, but more about checking unwelcome development than co-creation. Yet this new shared space for urban design is neither macro nor micro; it’s somewhere in-between.

To be a shared space, its seams are clear, providing affordances for interaction and contribution. Certain basic rules about privacy, security and graceful recognition of people’s right to their personal data are intrinsic to the system being trusted. The clumsy surveillance culture of CCTV and speed cameras is seen as ludicrous and long-forgotten. The eyes of the street itself - now enhanced by the data of the street - ensure safety and responsible behaviour, within constraints set by the neighbourhood.

Despite the promise, these technologies are beset with potential flaws. Or rather, there is immense potential for the culture around being unable to adapt accordingly. Will architecture, property development and urban governance be able to deal with a system which indicates the pace the city is actually lived at, which indicates how designs are actually used and abused, which requires an ambient ongoing service design model? Can the capital costs be spread over the life span of urban fabric, rather than delivered up-front? Can the power relationships implicit in a top-down governance system be reconfigured into this shared space? Can such a technology ever be designed appropriately, in order to avoid misuse, privacy and security issues, or just poor user experience design? Might a simulation simply distract from physical reality, rather than enhance it?

Sadly, the history of technology and the city is not actually one of smooth implementation, shared standards, and open access. It progresses awkwardly, in fits and starts, rather than smoothly and equitably. Yet the history of urban development itself is also awkward. Nonetheless, here is the hint of a promise that a city could heal itself, as if the adaptive membrane of earlier cities is present at the scale of later cities.

As Jamie Lerner has said “If you can design the city, you understand the city, you respect the city.” The new technologies of urban informatics and city information modelling enable citizens to reflect on their city, engage in the design, adapt their behaviour and the city around them. It could well lead to a new understanding and a new respect, and so to a new city.

作者:Dan Hill

更新日:2008年9月7日 14時3分

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As part of the recent Biennale of Sydney, I took in the Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller installation at Pier 2/3, Walsh Bay. The festival programme describes the work thus:

“Since the 1990s, the experimental art of Canadians Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller has been a fascinating exploration of how sound affects and shapes our experience. World-premiering at the 2008 Biennale is their largest installation to date, The Murder of Crows – an astounding 100-speaker artwork that envelops the viewer/listener in the experience of the sculptural and physical qualities of sound. The large and cavernous space of Pier 2/3 is filled with speakers mounted on stands, chairs and walls, creating a minimalist ‘flock’. The installation is structured like a play or film, but with images created only by voice, music and sound effects. Inspired by Goya’s The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters – from the series of etchings called ‘Caprichos’ (c. 1799), which was a denunciation of the evils of society in Spain in his day – the artists have placed a lone megaphone horn on a table in the middle of the space. Out of this horn comes Cardiff’s voice reciting dreams and thoughts as if, like Goya’s sleeper, she is absorbed in her own nightmares. Using multiple soundscapes, as well as compositions by Freida Abtan, Tilman Ritter and Titus Maderlechner, the artists create a ‘sound play’ that physically envelops the listener in a moving field of sound and music. Morphing in a dreamlike way from war marches to lullabies, the piece is a requiem to today’s battered world.” [Biennale of Sydney]

That’s about right, and immersing oneself in a 100 speaker installation is of course an affecting experience. Indeed, I’d seen/heard Cardiff/Bures Miller’s prototype for this work, Forty Part Motet, on a bleak Sheffield day a few years earlier, an extraordinary 40-speaker recreation of Thomas Tallis’s Spem in Alium (1573), with once voice tracked to each speaker. It’s as if you’re a ghost, able to move around a full choir as you please, pausing to listen to one voice, or a group of voices, without the ‘singers’ noticing. (Someone captured a fragment of it here, and there’s more information about it here.)

A few years later, as I through around the forest of speakers placed around Pier 2/3 at Walsh Bay, winter sunlight bursting through the high windows and the gentle creak of the old pier introducing itself to the mix, under duress to the harbour’s currents, I can’t help but conclude that Cardiff and Bures Miller - in this mode at least - are a bit 'one-note', which is somewhat ironic given the polyphonic spree that their works increasingly revolve around. It's the same principle as 40 Part Motet, yet with 60 extra speakers. Having said that, it’s still a beguiling trick. Technically adept, often sublime, but I'm not sure how deeply it affects, ultimately. I think perhaps Tallis’s Spem in Alium is also a far superior piece of music, although The Murder of Crows has far more variation.

(Another Cardiff/Bures Miller piece is the The Muriel Lake Incident, seen at Tate Modern years ago, which has a lightness of touch absent in Forty part Motet and Murder of Crows. It's almost penny arcade, but no worse for that.)

The videos below are partly the result of the usual games of ‘exhibition pacman’ with the Biennale’s staff, after I'd noticed a small poster declaring an unnecessary (I thought) ban on the use of cameras. So the first of these videos is taken with the camera behind my back, in my clasped hands, as if I were going for a stroll along a promenade. Hence it looks as it does. You can hear the choral component fading as I move towards the speakers denoting the piano. The other is a little smoother, featuring a segment in which the sound of the ocean dissolves into a woman's voice recounting a dream. The woman's voice is apparently located within the megaphone horn mentioned above. The music varies considerably over the 30-minute duration, so don’t take these elements as representatives of the entire piece. And obviously, any sound recording would struggle to convey the sculptural quality of the sound, distributed as it is, never mind reproduce the fidelity - and certainly not my digital camera.

I did enjoy the work, though wasn’t as moved by it as I was by Forty Part Motet. In fact I was most taken with Pier 2/3 itself, which is a simply wonderful space. One of the 4 salvaged piers that comprise Walsh Bay, right by the Sydney Harbour Bridge, it’s a place with stories to tell for sure, despite its cavernous interior being left unadorned, detritus simply shoved to one side. It has its own distinctive music nonetheless.

Pier 2/3 also contained a reconstruction of Luigo Russolo’s noise-makers, Intonarumori (1914), and a quite beautiful untitled painting by Doreen Reid Nakamarra.

作者:Dan Hill

更新日:2008年9月5日 14時25分

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The Believer published a fascinating interview with David Simon, creator of the magisterial TV show The Wire.

Among the many intriguing insights delivered in the interview, the following passage struck me as particularly interesting, in the context of a day job increasingly concerned with formulating simulations of cities, and particularly urban models which begin to layer in the more intangible aspects of city life, such as culture and creativity.

"The show would instead be about untethered capitalism run amok, about how power and money actually route themselves in a postmodern American city, and, ultimately, about why we as an urban people are no longer able to solve our problems or heal our wounds. Early in the conception of the drama, Ed Burns and I—as well as the late Bob Colesberry, a consummate filmmaker who served as the directorial producer and created the visual template for The Wire—conceived of a show that would, with each season, slice off another piece of the American city, so that by the end of the run, a simulated Baltimore would stand in for urban America, and the fundamental problems of urbanity would be fully addressed."

"First season: the dysfunction of the drug war and the general continuing theme of self-sustaining postmodern institutions devouring the individuals they are supposed to serve or who serve them. Second season: the death of work and the destruction of the American working class in the postindustrial era, for which we added the port of Baltimore. Third season: the political process and the possibility of reform, for which we added the City Hall component. Fourth season: equal opportunity, for which we added the public-education system. The fifth and final season will be about the media and our capacity to recognize and address our own realities, for which we will add the city’s daily newspaper and television components."

"Did we mention these grandiose plans to HBO at the beginning? No, they would have laughed us out of the pitch meeting. Instead, we spoke only to the inversion of the cop show and a close examination of the drug war’s dysfunction. But before shifting gears to the port in season two, I sat down with the HBO execs and laid out the argument to begin constructing an American city and examining the above themes through that construction. So here we are." {David Simon, The Believer, my emphasis]

A constant theme here has been how the cultural aspects of a city inform the sense of what a city is, and can be. Hence my interest in films about cities, songs about cities, writing about cities, games about cities, music scenes in cities, and so on. These all seem to be useful - or at least evocative - in terms of understanding a city, and are usually lacking in any analytical models of cities, and certainly from most urban planning and governance processes. Something we're trying to change. But it's fascinating to hear Simon describing his particular art as "constructing an American city."

Interview with David Simon [The Believer]
[via TAFKAB]

作者:Dan Hill

更新日:2008年9月3日 14時23分

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I'd long ago decided to try to deliver constructive criticism with this site. So in discussing the ideas for 'distributed exhibitions' in the previous review of the 'Modern Times' exhibition at the Powerhouse, I decided to try to make an example of what I meant.

The simplest possible offering that still illustrates the point would be a Google Map of 'modernism in Australia' - an artefact that lives outside the exhibition, guiding people to examples of the work that exist outside the exhbition. So I started a map, dragged a few blue markers into place, and then enlisted a few friends and colleagues to help me kickstart it.

And many thanks to Super Colossal's Marcus Trimble, Canberra House's Martin Miles, Rory Hyde from The Architects, who did the bulk of the additions. Stuart Harrison, Andrew Maher from work and a few others formed a supportive advisory panel. We have a few more potential contributions to come from Perth's Best, Max Creasy, architects at Terroir and Hassell, and a few others I hope.

But within a week, we'd got a pretty good set of examples - over 180 buildings and structures, located pretty exactly, and many with links and images (and we've tried to credit images where possible.) Houses, skyscrapers, civic buildings, sculptures, memorials. (And we didn't want to get into a debate of what formally counted as modernism and what didn't - inclusivity was the order of the day. Having said that, if you think there's a property that shouldn't be listed there, for whatever reason, do let me know.)

It's a little skewed towards the south and east, to say the least - Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Canberra, to be precise. We're hoping to rectify that, with your help. We need contributions for the other major cities in Australia, and I've decided to take a curatorial approach rather than fully open, given the hard work put in by others thus far and the lack of back-up/roll-back facilitites in Google Maps. So if you want to join in, and if you know of examples of modernism in built form - buildings, sculptures, infrastructure, built or unbuilt - drop me a line (email address below-right, where it says 'email me') and I'll happily welcome you in.

In the meantime, we hope you find the map useful, interesting. It's embedded below, though you might find this direct link more useful. I'll also send it to the Powerhouse Museum, offering it up as a potential adjunct to their exhibition, if they're interested.

View larger map of modernism in Australia

Modernism in Australia [Google Maps]
"Modern Times: The untold story of modernism in Australia", Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, plus some notes on architectural exhibitions
Modern Times exhibition [The Powerhouse]

作者:Dan Hill

更新日:2008年9月1日 14時30分

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• New designs on diplomacy [Monocle]
  "Post September 11 every embassy was built as a bunker ready to repel all comers. But now, from Kathmandu to Harare, architects are reinventing the mission as a national calling card. Robert Bound reports."
• EngD Centre in Systems | Urban Information Architecture [Bristol University]
  "Applications are invited for an EngD Research Engineer (RE) to work on a collaborative research project between Arup and the EngD Centre in Systems at the University of Bristol ... Arup has an opportunity for a research engineer (RE) to join them for their Engineering Doctorate research as part of the Consulting Sector in London. The successful applicant will carry out research in the use of information management in new and existing cities to create resource efficient urban developments which are great places to live, work and visit. This will involve research into: Urban Information Architectures (UIA) – Networks, Systems & Services that support resource management of cities; Urban Management Frameworks (UMF) and understanding of the supply chain components of Information Management in cities. Particularly in relation to to telecoms and utilities." Check it out.
• Four Stories [ear studio]
  "Built into the structure of the two glass elevator cabs in Library Hall, "Four Stories" displays the titles of recently checked-out books in large, illuminated text as the elevators move between floors. This text is visible from much of the Library Hall. "Four Stories" is a permanent public artwork commissioned by the city of Minneapolis."
• Japanese Good Design Awards 2008 [Bustler]
  "The Japan Industrial Design Promotion Organization, the organization involved in the comprehensive promotion of design, recently announced the results of the 2008 Good Design Awards." Some great stuff here.
• 3XN - arkitekter
  More great Danish architects. Love their new CPH bridge.

作者:

更新日:2008年11月27日 0時0分

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• Roden download [Paul Schutze]
  "In making this piece I was determined to capture some sense of the immense time scale expressed both in Roden Craters design (some apertures are made to view events of incredible infrequency, some will not happen in our lifetimes) and in the astronomical calendar. There is a profound sense in which our need for narrative and resolution is absent both in the landscape and the experience of the Roden project so I needed the piece to force this "non- relationship" of parts and events."
• Icons in the Fire [The Measures Taken]
  "It should not surprise us that a style of consumption would return under neoliberalism, but the formal affinities of pseudomodernism with this aesthetic offers an explanation for what often seems an arbitrary play of forms. By drawing on the futurism of the McCarthy era, the architecture of the neoliberal consensus establishes a link between two eras of quietism, conformism and technological acceleration. It also enables us to reinterpret what purports to be an aesthetic of edification as one of consumption. In the computer-aided creation of futuristic form, today's architects are producing enormous logos, and this is only appropriate. The architecture once described as 'deconstructivist' owes less to Derrida than it does to McDonalds." Quite brilliant.
• Courage and prudence, advises Keynes [Inside Story]
  "But the claim that Keynes is back is arguably sentimental and superficial. It may be closer to the truth to argue that Keynes never really went away and that in the current crisis there are simply no alternatives to the broadly “Keynesian” approaches now being attempted. Keynes has re-emerged because there seems be be no other way of ameliorating at least some of the difficulties facing economies around the world."

作者:

更新日:2008年11月24日 0時0分

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• Cutaways in Information Graphics [maxgadney.com]
  "A cutaway is a basic graphic - the state of things made clear, like a graph with one variable of data, rather than seeking to draw comparison, reasoning, correlation or causation. The danger is that they celebrate the basic rendering rather than information imparting. They are doubtlessly beautiful but I wonder to what end."
• Joints by Nathan Wierink [Dezeen]
  "The mahogany table is manufactured using a CNC router, which allows more complex joints to be made than are possible with traditional hand tools."
• How Nike's Social Network Sells to Runners [BusinessWeek]
  "Nike (NKE) is winning a new game that other corporations, from Coca-Cola (KO) to Verizon (VZ) to General Motors (GM), have tried unsuccessfully to play: building brand loyalty via online social networking. "
• fLux Binary Waves: Urban Visualization Installation [information aesthetics]
  "fLux, binary waves [lab-au.com] is an urban visualization installation based on the measurement and real-time representation of infrastructural (passengers, cars...) and communicational (electromagnetic fields produced by mobile phones, radio...) flows. The kinetic wall comprises of a network of 32 rotating and luminous panels of 3 meter-high and 60 centimetres wide, placed apart every 3 meters. The panels rotate around their vertical axis, and have a black reflective surface on one side, the other being plain mat white."
• So Much to Answer For [sit down man, you're a bloody tragedy]
  "Not wanting to pre-empt the F.J's long-promised post on the late Anthony H. Wilson, but a post impelled by (coincidentally) reading I.T's typically ostranenie-inducing photo essay on Manchester and watching Grant Gee's Joy Division (far superior to the abortive Control) in the same afternoon." Excellent stuff.
• Book review - The Chinese Dream [we make money not art]
  "The Chinese Dream - A society under construction, by DCF, Neville Mars and Adrian Hornsby." I have this too, and hope to review one day myself. In the meantime, this is good review.
• The crystal house: "Seizure" by Roger Hiorns. [Gabion]
  "I have squeezed myself into a tiny, abandoned, apartment in the backlands behind South London's Elephant and Castle. Abandoned, but mysteriously colonised. Who knows who once inhabited this 1960s bedsit, but since they left, an alien substance has taken over. The entire flat - walls, ceiling, fixtures and fittings - has sprouted not mould, not fungus, not graffiti, but something far stranger and more beautiful. Hard, glittering, jagged, bright blue crystals. A joint product of the fecund Artangel and Jerwood arts organisations, this place of chilly, sinister beauty is Roger Hiorns' Seizure installation."
• Efficiency’s Mark - City Glitters a Little Less [NYTimes.com]
  "Now, rising energy costs, conservationism, stricter building codes and sophisticated lighting systems have conspired to slowly, often imperceptibly, transform Manhattan’s venerable nightscape into one with a gentler glow. Instead of tower after tower shining at all hours — the World Trade Center stayed aglow long after its occupants went home — the skyline is becoming a patchwork of sparsely sparkling buildings decorated with ornamentally lighted tops."

作者:

更新日:2008年11月23日 0時0分

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Well, more or less. Not quite the full platform imagined in that post - or this - but a small step in that direction.

I'm currently teaching a two-week class at University of Technology Sydney, on the Master of Digital Architecture degree. As per the 'street as platform' idea, we're creating a multiperspectival portrait of the street, seen through the lens of data. Some of this data is derived from various sensors we're placing around the immediate urban environment, some of it is scraped from websites or other sources. The patterns arising from the collision of these datasets are being explored through visualisations produced in the Processing language. 

We've got the 12 or so students blogging about their progress throughout the course, which extends from learning Processing from scratch (plus working in a web services-enabled design environment) to exploring the possibilities and vagaries of real-time data, scraping historical data off the web, and thinking through what it means to visualise patterns in urban data, from conceptual, aesthetic and pragmatic viewpoints. We're heading towards a small exhibition based around an installation in which the visualisations are projected - so ultimately exploring the ideas of projecting urban behavioural data back into the street, as per this system diagram.

The Masters course is run by Anthony Burke, and my teaching colleagues also include Mitchell Whitelaw (University of Canberra/The Teeming Void) and Jason McDermott. We must also thank Dr. David Lowe of the Centre for Real-Time Information Networks at UTS, and those helping from afar include Usman Haque. Plus, we have a forum tomorrow including local luminaries Marcus Trimble and Andrew Vande Moere. Particular kudos also to the students, who are working incredibly hard.

Keep an eye on the students' blog for progress updates, and I'll post more links, context, images, notes &c. to follow, but for now, a quick word from the street itself:

Master of Digital Architecture class 11/08: 'Street as platform': students' blog

作者:Dan Hill

更新日:2008年11月20日 12時46分

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• OUTLIER Tailored Performance Clothing for Cycling in the City
  "Tailored performance clothing for cycling in the city. Clothing you can wear from your bike to the boardroom. OUTLIER is about classically tailored garments made with the best technical fabrics around. Clothing that looks great no matter where you are in the day, riding to work, meeting with clients, or out on the town" Fantastic.
• RjDj
  "RjDj is a music application for the Iphone. It uses sensory input to generate and control the music you are listening to." [Via everyone]
• Jessica Rohrer Sweeping the BQE [P·P·O·W]
  "P.P.O.W Gallery is pleased to announce our second solo exhibition of Jessica Rohrer's paintings, entitled Sweeping the BQE. The BQE is the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, the brainchild of Robert Moses that was originally intended to alleviate traffic throughout Brooklyn and on the bridges to Manhattan ... Having lived within one hundred feet of the BQE for over seven years, Rohrer's paintings record and literally reflect the cars, roads, neighborhoods and implanted nature that a traveler might find while near this thoroughfare."
• Workspring
  "Workspring introduces a new way to work away from work. Discover a truly productive escape—infused with local flavor, equipped with collaborative tools, and designed with your comfort and your goals in mind. Reserve sessions in bright modern studios where ideas flow and technology works like the breeze. Take a break, or gather together before your meeting, in open spaces that provide refreshment and inspiration."
• ABC Innovation’s Sidetracks - a mobile heritage pilot featuring some Powerhouse content
  "ABC Innovation has launched their Sydney Sidetracks project. This is a lovely experiment in developing a mobile heritage application which takes some of the archives of ABC TV and Radio and combines them with static imagery and research from the cultural heritage partners - Powerhouse Museum, State Library of NSW, National Film & Sound Archives, Museum of Contemporary Art, the City of Sydney Archives, and the Dictionary of Sydney." Great stuff, well done Sarah, more to follow.

作者:

更新日:2008年11月16日 0時0分

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• Image, Data and Environment: Notes on Watching the Sky [the teeming void]
  "We occupy an increasingly detailed graph of accumulated data, but remain trapped inevitably in the present, at its right hand edge."
• Database City: notes/linkbombing [serial consign]
  "Well, three days into VISUALIZAR'08 and I feel like my head is going to explode. I can't recall the last time I heard so many great presentations in such a short span of time." Great collection of talks.
• CTA Bus Tracker "API"
  "Chicago's Transit Authority recently released a couple webapps that allow people to track bus locations and routes. It is awesome. This is the documentation of the API they have exposed to power their apps."
• Keating's fury at park reversal [smh.com.au]
  "(Keating) said there was little chance that a building could be designed that would equal the high standard of the Opera House. "What modernism would give us would be a box." Leaving aside the politics for a moment, Keating clearly has no idea what modernism is. Ironically enough, given the Opera House.

作者:

更新日:2008年11月10日 0時0分

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• Jonathan Raban: 'He tried his best to veil it, but Obama is an intellectual' [The Guardian]
  "The best thing about living in the United States since Tuesday has been the gilt-edged assurance that, somewhere out there, very smart people are thinking and talking in a serious conversation from which narrow ideologues have been rigorously excluded ... (Obama) is sure to disappoint those of his supporters who believe he can raise the dead, turn water into wine, and walk on water. But he has rescued the White House from the besotted rationalists of PNAC with their Platonist designs on the world, and restored it to the realm of common reason. It's a measure of the madness of the last eight years that, for this seemingly modest contribution to the nation's welfare (and not just this nation's), grown men and women wept in gratitude on Tuesday night." [via Cel]
• 56Leonard.mov (Quicktime)
  "Anish Kapoor's huge stainless steel balloon sculpture floats gently out of the Manhattan sky to land on-site at 56 Leonard Street, where it is compressed into final form under the descending weight of architects' Herzog & de Meuron's twisted-glass and steel 57-story hi-rise residential tower. So opens directing and new media studio Tronic's stunning hi-def branding production ..."
• Berlin Metro Bans Free iPhone Timetable Application [Wired.com]
  "Fahr-Info Berlin is an iPhone application which helps Berliners to navigate the excellent city metro system. Or rather, it was. BVG, the company which runs the Berlin Metro, has ordered 21 year old student and programmer Jonas Witt to remove the free application from the iTunes Store. The reason, as you will have guessed, is the catchall excuse called copyright ..."
• CityGML
  "The City Geography Markup Language (CityGML) is a new and innovative concept for the modelling and exchange of 3D city and landscape models that is quickly being adopted on an international level. CityGML is a common information model for the representation of 3D urban objects. It defines the classes and relations for the most relevant topographic objects in cities and regional models with respect to their geometrical, topological, semantical and appearance properties."
• Uncertain futures: A Conversation with Professor Anthony Dunne [Adobe - Design Center]
  "Placebo projects we see more as a way of negotiating a relationship to something. It’s not solving a problem. You’re setting up a situation that facilitates a discussion. The more poetic the space—such as a discussion about invisible fields in the context of the home—the more interesting the stories."
• All Tomorrow's Parties on Cockatoo Island [Sydney Festival 2009]
  "2009 sees the first ATP in Australia, curated and headlined by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds. The full festival line-up will be performed twice in the centre of Sydney Harbour on the beautiful Cockatoo Island. With its characteristic industrial and maritime landscape and set in the picturesque Sydney Harbour, Cockatoo Island is the perfect setting for the Sydney Festival debut of this unique event ... As well as performances by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, the festival includes seminal international artists such as British transcendentalists Spiritualized and US avant-bluesman James “Blood” Ulmer, alongside celebrated Australian bands The Saints, Laughing Clowns and The Necks ..."

作者:

更新日:2008年11月9日 0時0分