Friday, May 27. 2011Chantiers volantsThursday, May 26. 2011Long ExposureVia Fubiz ----- by Versa Le photographe Terence Chang parvient avec talent à prendre et capter les lumières des avions et propose une série de clichés autour des tracés de lumières. Illustrant des lumières dans le ciel, ces visuels capturés à San Francisco sont à découvrir dans la suite.
Personal comment: We've seen this for cars, but with cars it is slightly different: they are on the road that already has a shape. In the case of long exposure with planes, we see invisible shapes and "luftbahns"... Some shapes of global & physical mobility. Monday, May 02. 2011Landform Building
Even if this is rather a riding area and playground for moutain bikers (or such) underneath a highway (see below the glacier image), it can give us additionnal ideas toward a sort of "architecture as landscape" approach. We consider "architecture as landscape" a different type of variable environment: it is not the infrastructure that evolves (robotized and heavy approach), but the light, the weather, the (networked, mediated or computed) conditions, the creolization and spatial interferences. Similar to a landscape where climate and context evolve and where you "freely" migrate within, depending on the conditions and your activity or needs. A sort of Sanaa's Rolex Learning Center, but diy approach.
I'm also therefore taking the occasion to mention this new book about a similar topic: Landform Building, Lars Müller Publishing
Thanks to @BLDGBLOG for the following link, via F.A.D. (Free Association Design) ----- Circuits Beneath the Freeway
[flow lines of ramps, berms, drops and various home-spun earth retaining systems beneath the I-5 freeway] While in Seattle this past weekend I had the chance to make a brief stop by the city’s Colonnade Park. Given it’s size, I managed to cover about half of the accentuated terrain (on foot) built into the underbelly of the I-5. The brilliance of the park’s siting becomes obvious when you are immersed in it: the steep and jumbled topography; the formerly barren and listless ground in the shadow of the overpass; the industrial cathedral that serves as ready-made shelter for the 9-out-of-12 soggy months of the Northwest climate; and perhaps the most critical factor – the challenges and indifference towards such spaces – which allowed for it to be co-opted into something else equally unique and unpolished. [storage shed built into a ramp and elevated planks] It hard not to be enamored by the successful and improvised gestalt of the whole thing, in both program and materials. Much of what it is made of was donated or recycled from demolition projects around the city. And typical off-the-shelf items, like permeable waffle pavers (above), have been retooled as robust and removable cellular confinement systems. All the pieces of the circuits have this hand-made, custom quality that is site + multiple user specific. One comes away with the impression that the park will keep remaking itself incrementally, over and over again. Pieces and segments will be modified as they wear out, with new experiments being plugged in as desired. It seems that the builders and volunteers that have constructed it might actually be a little forlorn if the park were ever fully finished.
Related Links:
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Architecture, Territory
at
08:59
Defined tags for this entry: architecture, artificial reality, atmosphere, interferences, mashup, mobility, territory, variable, weather
Thursday, April 21. 2011Tous les utilisateurs d’iPhone sont pistésVia Libération -----
Capture Ecrans
Dire où l’on se trouve en permanence via son smartphone, c’est simple comme bonjour : on peut le déclamer à qui ça intéresse (indice : personne) via les versions mobiles des réseaux sociaux type Facebook ou Twitter, ou check-iné comme un fou sur les appli spécifiques de géolocalisation comme Foursquare. Mais il y a un autre moyen, d’autant plus simple qu’il est automatique : avoir un iPhone et permettre sans le savoir à Apple de pister nos moindres déplacements. La découverte est signée Alasdair Allan et Pete Warden, deux spécialistes qui l’ont annoncé aujourd’hui à la conférence Where 2.0 après l’avoir explicité sur le site Radar. Leur trouvaille peut être résumée ainsi : les iPhone et iPad 3G fonctionnant sous le système d’exploitation iOS4 (disponible depuis juin 2010) enregistrent régulièrement la localisation des produits dans un fichier caché, dont le contenu est restauré à chaque sauvegarde ou migration d’appareil. Concrètement, d’après Radar, les localisations sont stockées dans un fichier appelé consolidated.db, avec coordonnées géographiques évoluant en fonction de la date d’enregistrement. La chose n’est pas toujours archi précise, triangularisation oblige, mais un test auprès des collègues de Liberation.fr montre le genre de données ainsi enregistrées :
Un logiciel baptisé iPhone Tracker est disponible pour lire à son tour ce genre de traces. En mouvement (soit en faisant évoluer la chronologie), ça donne ça :
Washington DC to New York from Alasdair Allan on Vimeo.
Radar précise qu’à ce stade, rien ne prouve que ces données puissent échapper au contrôle de l’utilisateur (comprendre : être envoyées via le Net à des serveurs cachés contrôlés par de maléfiques Big Brother en puissance suivant la moindre de nos traces). De même, l’existence même de ce type d’informations n’est pas en soi une nouvelle : les opérateurs téléphoniques en disposent et peuvent les transmettre aux autorités dans certaines circonstances (enquêtes, etc.), mais uniquement sur demande en bonne et due forme (mandat, par exemple). Le problème ici soulevé est que le fichier en question n’est pas du tout crypté, donc facilement accessible en cas de vol ou d’emprunt de téléphone, par exemple. Des fonctionnalités permises par l’iOS4, comme la classification automatiques des photos prises par l’iPhone en fonction du lieu de la prise de vue (cf capture à droite), peuvent éventuellement constituer une piste d’explication quant à la présence d’un tel fichier dans le téléphone. Parmi les pistes suggérées par Radar pour éviter ce genre de désagrément, on peut citer l’option « Encrypt iPhone Backup » accessibles via les paramètres d’iTunes une fois l’appareil connecté à l’ordinateur. Alasdair Allan et Pete Warden expliquent en détail leur trouvaille dans la vidéo ci-dessous (en anglais, 20 minutes) :
Pour la petite histoire, Peter Warden a travaillé durant cinq ans pour Apple (mais jamais directement sur l’avancée de l’iPhone), avant de quitter l’entreprise « en bons termes » il y a trois ans. Sur la page permettant de télécharger iPhone Tracker, qu’ils ont conçus eux-même, les deux geeks semblent presque déçus de leur découverte : « on est tous les deux de grands fans des produits Apple, et on ne prend vraiment aucun plaisir à mettre en avant ce problème ».
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Interaction design, Science & technology
at
08:21
Defined tags for this entry: interaction design, mobile, mobility, monitoring, privacy, science & technology, surveillance
Monday, April 11. 2011Chinese Workers Struggle to Catch 'The Last Train Home' in World's Largest Human MigrationVia Treehugger -----
Every year, 130 million people throng China's railway stations, frantically trying to obtain a seat on a train that will take them home for the lunar New Year -- a trip that is for many rural people living and working in the country's industrial cities their only chance to see the families, and even the children, they have left behind. In addition to the human drama, the trek, believed to constitute the largest human migration in the world, taxes the country's transportation systems to the limit. The chaos at the train stations, the stark difference between urban and rural China, and the alienation among families of economic migrants are strikingly portrayed in the new documentary "Last Train Home" by Lixin Fan, who previously worked on the acclaimed film "Up The Yangtze," about the controversial Three Gorges Dam. In his debut feature, which screened at this year's If! Istanbul Independent Film Festival, the director focuses on one couple who have been making the New Year's trip for 16 years, their sole break from a life of difficult factory labor. But, of course, they are not alone. In addition to their millions of counterparts in China, a similar migration occurs each year in Indonesia, where 30 million workers go home for the end of the Muslim month of Ramadan. Mass Migrations Tax Transit Systems According to the New York Times, Ramadan travelers in Indonesia "brave enormous jams, exhaustion, and bandits to make it back home," with hundreds dying on the road each year. Though the Indonesian government makes efforts ahead of the holiday to repair roads and carry out other initiatives to ease travel, McKone writes, the problem will remain as long as the world's massive cities continue to expand at the expense of investment in the environment and rural regions. More On China's Cities Related Links:
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Culture & society, Territory
at
09:54
Defined tags for this entry: culture & society, globalization, goods, mobility, people, product, territory
Wednesday, March 23. 2011Norman Foster Recreates Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion CarVia ArchDaily ----- by Kelly Minner
“I was privileged to collaborate with Bucky for the last 12 years of his life and this had a profound influence on my own work and thinking. Inevitably, I also gained an insight into his philosophy and achievements,” shared Lord Norman Foster. Recreating the legendary futuristic Dymaxion Car, Foster’s No. 4 version was a lengthy and expensive two year project, but was obviously a labor of love. Buckminster Fuller’s futuristic three wheeled car was brief, with a mere three actually built. Incredibly efficient the streamlined body with long tail-fin averaged 35 miles to the gallon and could achieve 120 mph. The Zeppelin inspired design with a V8 Ford engine was intended to fly as well, Fuller’s vision of revolutionizing how people traveled.
Referencing some 2,000 photographs as a starting point, Foster was also able to borrow the only surviving Dymaxion Car (No. 2) from the National Automobile Museum in Reno, Nevada, with the promise of creating a much needed new interior for the car. Recreating the interior for the new car (as well as for No. 2) ended up being more of a historic approximation relying primarily on images of the original Dymaxion Car, tracking down (if any) original components, and building replicas from scratch.
Norman Foster driving his Dymaxion Car
The completed Dymaxion Car was featured in an exhibition of the work of Buckminster Fuller curated by Foster in Madrid last September. Our coverage of the exhibition can be found here. Foster shared that, “driving the Dymaxion is a revelation. There’s something in that feel as you wind the steering wheel and increase the power. The horizon just kind of spins around the cockpit. It’s quite extraordinary. And it’s a showstopper. Even now, seventy-eight years later, it still has the power to stop people in their tracks.” © Gregory Gibbons, Courtesy Ivorypress
Metropolis Mag Q&A: Norman Foster and the Dymaxion Car What inspired you to recreate Bucky’s famous Dymaxion Car? Bucky is never far from my thoughts. We collaborated on projects for the last twelve years of his life. When I was awarded the Royal Guild Gold medal in London, he gave the talk. At that point we had decided to do houses for each other. So he came over and we talked about the project. He gave the talk and then he left for America, off to see his terminally ill wife, Ann, in the hospital. On arrival, he had a fatal heart attack at her bedside and she died thirty six hours later. Curiously, on that trip to England, he said to me, “You know, Norman, anytime, I can pull the plug.” I guess that’s when he pulled the plug. He got there and realized that his wife wasn’t going to recover. Why remake the Dymaxion now? It was an interesting exercise for us. Like everything else he did, the car was pure Bucky. He was a friend of Henry Ford, which insured that he would get Ford parts for 30 percent of their true cost. So he took the flathead v8 engine, the wheels, the steering wheel, the transmission, and turned it 180 degrees. So you can make a like-by-like comparison between the Dymaxion car and Fords from 1913 to 1933. But the Dymaxion was three times the volume. It had the potential of taking up to eleven rather than four. It was significantly faster, and consumed half the fuel. It was truly doing more with less. In recreating the new car, where did you draw the line between faithfully executing those original plans and drawings, and making improvements to them? The #4 car is not a replica of the #3 car, but we did replicate the engine, the Studebaker ignition, the Ford wheels and steering wheel. The only thing that’s not completely authentic and original is the hand break. The original didn’t have one, for some strange reason. I saw the surviving Dymaxion at the Whitney show a few years back. The interior had badly deteriorated. Your team must have done a great deal of detective work to recreate the interior. Yes, unbelievable. Fortunately, we know the people at Stanford well, where the archive is. And the people we chose to do the restoration work were also extraordinarily incredible at research. We generated a huge body of knowledge. People would email and call in. We developed a great archive and out of that produced a book on the car. The book is tiny, tiny tip of the iceberg on all the material we generated. It took two years to complete this. How much did the project cost? I’d rather not talk about that. The true answer is an arm and a leg, a lot of money. It took twice as long and cost significantly more than I had budgeted for it. Of course, that’s everybody’s story with any classic restoration. Everyone underestimated the task. But then, it was a group of perfectionists involved, and it’s an absolutely stunning vehicle. What is the car’s relevance to automobiles today? First of all, the maxim of doing more with less is more urgent and imperative today than it’s ever been. In a way the Dymaxion was the classic people-mover before its time. The three wheel configuration caused a lot of debate. Was it a stable configuration? Not withstanding the size. It does produce this extraordinarily dramatic turning circle. There is a vintage movie of Bucky pirouetting the car around this policeman. It just nudges the policeman as it circles around him. I’ve driven it in an airfield and explored exactly that capability. There’s something in that feel as you wind the steering wheel and increase the power. The horizon just kind of spins around the cockpit. It’s quite extraordinary. And it’s a show stopper. What’s the ride like aerodynamically? It’s not soft, but it’s amazingly cushioned. It’s more like a boat. Of course it was co-designed with Sterling Burgess, the America’s Cup-winning yacht designer. So the ride is quite remarkable. It has a lot of the characteristics of 1930s cars: the break pressure is quite heavy, but that’s normal for vehicles of that period. It has its British MOT and British plates. It is road legal, but since it has precious value I’m not sure that I’m about to drive it on a narrow country lane. What can it do on a straight away? You’d be very conformable on legal road speed limits. Natural caution on my part, possibly a side affect of advancing years, introduces a degree of hesitation. Would it comfortably do 100 kph [sixty miles per hour]? Oh, yes. It’s also a precursor to something called the D45. The D45 was an urban car, seating five, with the same three-wheel configuration. But the drawings of that demonstrate that it had better stability at speed because the rear wheel extends out to increase the wheel base. We did a series of studies and developed an absolutely beautiful film. We showed that as part of our Bucky exhibition in Madrid. It is quite amusing. The Dymaxion comes out of a 1930s garage in New York and drives past all these old cars. It goes past the Hearst Building, which of course was still relatively new, then crosses the river and goes into a tunnel. It comes out the other side in present day New York. It still looks like something out of a science fiction movie. It’s interesting how you and Nicholas Grimshaw and Richard Rogers were all drawn to Bucky in your formative years. What drew all of you into his orbit? It was his philosophy, his optimism, his belief in friendly clean technology that would enable the species to survive if they used their intelligence. There were other influences during that time. But I never dreamed that a few years later I’d end up being approached by Bucky to collaborate with him on projects and for it to become such a close relationship. You’ve talked about Bucky to younger audiences. Do his ideas connect with them? I think they really resonate. He empowered a generation. It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that he triggered the green movement. Whether anything has made enough of an impact can be debated, but certainly the environmental movement is rooted in Bucky. He has tremendous appeal and relevance to younger generation architects and environmentalists today and in a way, I feel that he’s not recognized the way that he should be. He’s been much more widely understood in Europe. I don’t know how you feel, but I don’t think he’s ever been truly understood in America.
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Architecture, Design
at
11:22
Defined tags for this entry: architects, architecture, design, engineering, history, mobility, research, speculation
Wednesday, March 16. 2011Aerotropolis: An Interview with Greg LindsayVia BLDGBLOG ----- by noreply@blogger.com (Geoff Manaugh) In his book London Orbital, Iain Sinclair writes that Heathrow Airport—with its "inscrutable geometry," surrounded by "international hotels, storage facilities, [and] semi-private roads"—is utterly "detached from the shabby entropy" of London. Indeed, "Heathrow is its own city, a Vatican of the western suburbs."
The world of the aerotropolis is a world of instant cities—urbanization-on-demand—where nations like China and Saudi Arabia can simply "roll out cities" one after the other. "Each will be built faster, better, and more cheaply than the ones that came before," Aerotropolis suggests: whole cities created by the warehousing demands of international shipping firms. In fact, they are "cities that shipping and handling built," Lindsay and Kasarda quip—urbanism in the age of Amazon Prime. The world of the aerotropolis, then, is a world where "a metropolitan area's position in the airline network determine[s] its employment growth and not, as commonly supposed, the other way around." Or, as a representative from FedEx explains to Greg Lindsay, "Not every great city will be an aerotropolis, but those cities which are an aerotropolis will be great ones." Surely, though, this kind of breathless rhetoric is a reliable sign of hype. What are the real political and economic conditions of the aerotropolis; what transformations might it undergo in an age of peak oil and climate change; and who, in the end, will actually live there and manage it? This latter question seems particularly urgent: does the aerotropolis represent the culmination of the city's slow depoliticization—an urban form without mayors or democracy—run instead by a managerial class of logistics professionals and CFOs? Or do these very questions reveal a misconception about what the aerotropolis is and will be? [Image: A plan of Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson Airport, via Wikipedia]. To begin to answer these questions, and in preparation for a live interview that will take place in Los Angeles on Tuesday, April 5, at the A+D Museum, I spoke to Aerotropolis co-author Greg Lindsay about these and many other topics, from the aerotropolis itself to instant cities, the appeal of the urban realm for today's technology firms, and metropolitan futurism circa Le Corbusier. The resulting conversation, included below, shows Lindsay to be both frank and refreshingly candid about the book. He is also someone clearly excited to talk about the future of the city, aerotropolis or not: simply to transcribe this interview, I had to slow the audio file down to nearly 85% of its original speed just to unpack Lindsay's jet stream of ideas and references. Consider this a teaser, then, for the event on April 5. Until that time, pick up a copy of Kasarda's and Lindsay's book to see what you think; and, if you get a chance, take a look at the second half of this conversation, during which the tables are turned and Lindsay interviews me for Work in Progress, the newsletter of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. There, we discuss the role of the architect in a world of smart cities and instant urbanism, the fate of criticism in the context of architecture blogs, and where we might turn next for tomorrow's spatial ideas. BLDGBLOG: Let’s start with the most basic question of all: what is an aerotropolis? Greg Lindsay: John Kasarda, of the University of North Carolina, came up with the idea twenty years ago—though, in researching the book, I found that word’s original appearance in print was actually in Rem Koolhaas’s Great Leap Forward, quoting a local Chinese official. Kasarda first heard it in China, as well. In terms of vision, I think there are really two definitions of it, depending on which of the two authors you speak to—Kasarda or myself. Kasarda’s notion of an aerotropolis is basically a city or a region planned around an airport. In his mind’s eye, everything is spatially divided by usage: hangars, cargo terminals, office parks, business hotels, six-lane highways, merchandise marts. There’s no real urban form at all. On one level, it’s like Edge City: the form is dictated by development money and the respective need for access to the airport at the center. But, on another, the design is glossed over or left out. In models and renderings, they never achieve a resolution above little white boxes. He sees the aerotropolis purely in terms of time/cost equations. Density and design is secondary. A layperson would describe it as sprawl. It’s an urban vision without any real urbanity. Then there’s my definition of it—and I think I take a broader view. I would describe the aerotropolis as any city that has a closer relationship to the air, and to other cities accessible through the air, than to its immediate hinterlands. It’s a city that was basically invented because of the necessities of air travel. Dubai, to me, is a perfect example of that. Thirty years ago, of course, there was nothing there; Dubai had little oil and even fewer people. But, basically through sheer will, it used its airport and its airline, Emirates, to build itself into a hub. It transformed itself legally and regulatory-wise, and made itself the freezone of the Middle East—and the pleasure den, and all the things it’s become. Dubai’s also interesting because it illustrates the grander vision of the book, which is that transportation always defines the shape and look of cities. Joel Garreau made this point twenty years ago, that cities are defined by the state of the art of transportation at the time. I think many of the cities we love today are classic railroad cities—such as New York, built around Grand Central Station, and Chicago, where the first skyscrapers sprang up across the street from the Illinois Central’s railyard. But the idea now is: if you’re building a city from scratch in the middle of China or India, then you’re building it around an airport. The airport is the city’s economic reason for being. You’re trying to connect to a global economy, starting from zero. Dubai is interesting in that regard. Nobody really understood what Dubai was about, or what they were trying to do there, but its plans make sense if you look at it from the perspective that there’s this theoretical population all dispersed across the Middle East and southeast Asia, and they’re all flying in to use the city in bits at a time. The notion of the aerotropolis, then, is basically that air travel is what globalization looks like in urban form. It is about flows of people and goods and capital, and it implies that to be connected to a city on the far side of the world matters more than to be connected to your immediate region. The aerotropolis spatializes what people like Saskia Sassen have been writing about for twenty years in books like The Global City. [Images: Dubai International Airport promotional images; vertical distortion is in the originals. Courtesy of the Dubai International Airport Media Center]. BLDGBLOG: I’m curious about the political requirements for making an aerotropolis happen. On the level of regulation, zoning, and so on, what needs to occur for an aerotropolis to become realizable? Lindsay: Well, I always say that we built our airports in the United States before we knew what they were for. We didn’t really understand the scale of future operations or the geographic footprint they would need, so we built them within footprints that were never going to be sustainable for the levels of traffic they would ultimately absorb. So we ended up with places like LAX. One of the things I love noting is that, when LAX was first built, it was criticized because the field was seen as too far from downtown—whereas, today, you have an airport that’s basically landlocked on all sides, and has been for almost fifty years. This puts LAX and Los Angeles in an intractable situation, considering the economics of air travel, which require concentration for hubbing, for operational efficiency, for all of that. It’s in the best interests of an airline to concentrate in one place—and LAX is a place that just cannot expand. The next stage is understanding the scale you need to operate on: you need to plan for a larger region. We talk about regional planning in the United States, but we do so little of it. We hardly even understand how economies cross what are almost arbitrary borders at this point, between counties and cities. I had difficulty finding reliable gross metropolitan product numbers, and Richard Florida had to go so far as to measure light pollution from space in one of his books. In Los Angeles, because of the failure of Orange County to build a second airport, if you’re going to fly internationally, and if you’re basically anywhere from Malibu to the Mexico border, you’re going to pass through LAX—which is a hell of a catchment area and an incredible strain to put on one airport. That’s partly due to when Orange County tried to build an airport at the former El Toro Marine base and ended up in a bizarre civil war: you had the right-leaning NIMBY interests on the side of the environmentalists, and you had the Chamber of Commerce siding with the poor immigrants of Orange County, because they wanted the jobs. It made for this schizoid conflict. To continue from a narrow American perspective, I think the examples of Memphis and Louisville are fascinating, where the sheer economic force of FedEx and UPS basically willed them into being. Those cities used to be river-trading towns—cotton and tobacco, respectively—before they became basically southern rustbelt towns. But then, in the 1970s and 80s, they were reborn as company towns of FedEx and UPS. In a sense, their economics—for better or for worse, and that’s very much up for debate—are held hostage by our e-commerce habits: every time we press the one-click button on Amazon, it leads to this gigantic logistical mechanism which, in turn, has led to the creation of vast warehouse districts around the airports of these two cities. One of the things I tried to touch on in the book is that even actions we think of as primarily virtual lead to the creation of gigantic physical systems and superstructures without us even knowing it. [Images: Laser-guided FedEx hub urbanism at work; all images courtesy of FedEx. Meanwhile, it is about UPS—not FedEx—but John McPhee's essay "Out in the Sort" is a minor classic in what I might call the logistical humanities]. BLDGBLOG: In this context, you point out in the book that Kasarda “proposes building cities by corporations for corporations, guaranteeing their survival by tailoring them to clients’ specifications—beginning with the airport.” The city is not an expression of human culture, so to speak, but a kind of 3-dimensional graph of economic activity. Lindsay: Yes, the aerotropolis—as Kasarda preaches it and as has been implemented in places like Dubai and elsewhere—is less about urbanity than repurposing the city as a “machine for living,” to quote Le Corbusier. The aerotropolis is basically an economic engine. Planners are looking for ways to make these cities as frictionless as possible in terms of doing business—which means that, in places like Dubai, the tax-free zones and enclaves such as Dubai Media City and Dubai Internet City and the Jebel Ali Free Zone can basically wage an economic war of all against all when it comes to competing cities. They were designed as weapons for fighting trade wars, and their charter—to be duty-free and hyper-efficient—reflects this. So it’s interesting in the sense that these cities are infrastructure-as-weaponry, which Rem Koolhaas wrote about in “The Generic City” [PDF]—“City X builds an airport to kill City Y.” They’re competing rather than complementing. China’s cities, in particular, are building infrastructure not as a way to improve urban living across these larger regions, but basically so that they can do battle against one another for attention and investment. BLDGBLOG: Sticking with Dubai, at one point you write: “High-functioning dictatorships such as Dubai’s don’t faze [Kasarda]. If anything, they’re the only ones who move fast enough.” This sounds quite ominous. In some ways, I’m reminded of recent architectural debates in which people seemed to side either with a revival of Jane Jacobs or with a revival of Robert Moses—where the latter camp claims that what we really need now is a kind of infrastructural dictator, someone who will get the job done, whether that’s high-speed rail or a new tunnel between New Jersey and Manhattan. But what are the political implications of the aerotropolis—and is a “high-functioning dictatorship” really the most appropriate form of government for such a city? Lindsay: Well, it’s obvious if you look at the projects under way that a great many of them are being realized by authoritarian governments, whether that’s China or the Middle East monarchies. Basically, the aerotropolis, or any kind of instant city project, seems to be enabled by autocracy. That’s the case whether you’re building an aerotropolis in Dubai or whether you’re building one in Beijing, or whether you’re building smart cities in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is building six “economic cities,” quote-unquote, which will double as aerotropoli. The Saudis are trying to revamp their whole air system, develop their national airline, and then also make these smart cites into job magnets, thinking that they could basically build a society from scratch. It’s funny that you’d mention Robert Moses, though, because I didn’t even really think of him in the context of this book. It’s gone beyond the scale of Moses. Moses was a regional planner operating in what is ultimately a democratic government. But you have planners—in fact, you have technocrats—who are commissioning and building whole cities now. I think Robert Moses would be a fantastic figure today—because he would be a vast improvement over some of the secret decisions being made in China over what they’re going to build, where, and to what end. This goes back to what I was saying about the war between cities. I was reading a description by Steven Cheung, a Chicago School economist who taught in Hong Kong. He presented a paper in Beijing in 2008 that was partially translated in Richard McGregor’s The Party, where he discusses the economic model that has driven China. His notion is that every city there is at total war with each other economically, in order to attract foreign investment. They’ll promise you everything, and they’ll move as fast as possible, and they’ll build whatever you need to make it happen. And that’s the same impulse behind the people who are building aerotropoli. You end up with a city like Chongqing, with 32 million people, where they’re building a massive new airport that will create hundreds of thousands of new jobs for the millions of people who were displaced by the Three Gorges Dam. On some level, I think in America we don’t even understand the level and the pace of change that is happening in China, where, because of decisions made by central planners, millions of people are being urbanized—literally at the flip of a switch, because they’re simply changing their legal status from “rural” to “urban.” Suddenly, three million farmers turn into three million urbanites, and now you have to find jobs for them, and situate them, and do all these things. For an autocrat, it’s easy to will that into existence—and the pleasures of doing so are well known. I mean, Thomas Friedman in Hot, Flat, and Crowded has a whole section on “if only we could be China just for one day…” In terms of the aerotropolis, maybe the most interesting developments will be in India. They intend to build, I don’t know, a hundred airports from scratch, and they are actively planning a few in the mold of Kasarda’s aerotropoli. And considering India is a democracy, it’s led to some massive political battles. They’re fighting over the land; they’re fighting over whether to build one above coalfields. It will be very interesting to see at what rapidity they can move forward with a true democratic process. But I think the classic example in the book is in Thailand, where Kasarda has been a teacher and government advisor for years and where he sold his vision of the aerotropolis to Thaksin Shinawatra—who was then the elected prime minister but was almost universally considered an oligarch. People who were involved in that process are still unsure that Thaksin ever understood what Kasarda was trying to tell him, or whether Thaksin simply saw it as a land grab—a way to install his own family members in development companies and reap huge profits from it. The flipside is Dubai. They screwed up a lot of things there but, through several generations of rulers now, they’ve understood that investing in infrastructure and investing in trade was the key to long-term success. [Image: The now-erased runways of Denver's old Stapleton Airport; the airfield has since become a New Urbanist residential development. Photo courtesy of the Colorado Department of Transportation]. BLDGBLOG: A few times now, you’ve mentioned the prospect of a failed aerotropolis—or at least an aerotropolis that is incorrectly implemented. I’m really curious about that—about what might happen to an aerotropolis if the growth of air freight and business travel doesn’t actually pan out as expected. In the book, you do touch on things like climate change and peak oil—but is it short-sighted, in a way, to build cities specifically around one form of transportation, one that might someday prove inaccessible? Lindsay: In terms of building a city around an airport, there’s a common misconception that we’ll be building homes right up to the fence of the airport. But the airports we build today are massive, and they have huge noise buffers around them, which isn’t the case at older airports. Denver’s old Stapleton Airport is a classic example of this, where people actually did live a couple hundred yards away from the runways, with all of the piercing noise. But when they built the new Denver International out beyond the city, it’s two miles from the runway to the border of the airport, and it floats on this sea of grass that nothing can ever get close to—though developers are trying. So, even though you’ll have fast access to the airport, it’s not like you’re going to look across the street and see planes landing. Then again, I live in brownstone Brooklyn under a flight path, eight miles from LaGuardia, and, on rainy nights, it sounds like planes are about to land on my desk. It’s all relative. As for peak oil and climate change, I devoted a whole chapter to them in the book. I believe wholeheartedly in peak oil—you simply cannot geometrically increase consumption of a finite resource—but I do believe that biofuels, likely harvested from micro-organism production platforms, can produce sustainable, replenishable jet fuel. The science is sound; the scale of production is what’s in question. But even if you think climate change is inescapable, or that peak oil will do us in first, and even if you think that aviation will go away and that globalization will stop, for good or for bad—but probably for good—to me, the question is: Are you willing to bet the future on that? Because what’s interesting to me is that, in China, India, and the Middle East—and anywhere else in the developing world whose cities have been cut out of globalization so far—they’re building these cities to connect themselves to the global economy, in which they intend to participate, if not someday to dominate. The more unsettling question that I wanted to raise in this book—rather than just cheerlead for airport cities, as some critics have accused me of doing—is ask whether we need to do the same to keep pace. Do we need to build or re-build our cities to more efficiently process goods and people? Or will these places collapse under their own weight? In China, the answer may be both. But this is the world we made—one-click shopping creating giant hubs in Louisville and Memphis—and this the world they’re making. It may end in disaster, or it could lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty—and hurt our own economy further in the process. These are questions I wanted to leave to the reader. The reasons autocracies are so eager to embrace an aerotropolis or an instant city is because they’re willing basically to throw money and people at the problem in an attempt to catch up to us in an incredibly rapid timeframe. I was just reading the other day about Kangbashi, the “ghost city” of Ordos, China. It was built in five years flat for a million people. It’s interesting to me that they’re willing to work at this speed in an attempt to catch up, even regardless of the consequences. [Image: A rendering of New Songdo City, courtesy of Kohn Peterson Fox]. BLDGBLOG: I’d like to discuss the idea of the “instant city” more generally. It’s an evergreen vision, in many ways, and an ideologically promiscuous one, appealing both to the 1960s architectural avant-gardes and to the overseas forward-operating bases of military planners. In your own work, you’ve covered things like the “City in a Box,” New Songdo City, and Russia’s “silicon forest” where cities are basically treated as products that you can buy—like customizing a BMW off a website and then hitting the purchase button. Where is this sort of instant urbanism going, and who or what is driving it? Lindsay: The thread I see going through the book and the work I’ve been doing for Fast Company is the notion that the people who are planning cities today, and who have really gotten interested in urbanism over the last few years, are people who are neither architects nor planners. The city is experiencing a white-hot moment, and this is converging from a bunch of different areas. You have the whole camp coming out of Richard Florida’s work, for example, who have gone through the economic effects of cities and the cultural spillover of knowledge and training—basically, the notion that cities are engines of creativity and engines of ideas and job skills. Harvard’s Edward Glaeser is deservedly enjoying his moment in the sun for his academic work around these issues. To him, the key economic actor of the future is the city. Then you have the technology companies who have been piling in, led by IBM. This is what really led to the resurrection of the “smart city” a couple years ago, which is the notion that, coupled with the "internet of things"—assuming we reach a point of ubiquitous sensors and constant data flows—the city becomes the next computing paradigm. This has been discussed academically for decades, but now it might actually happen—or at least there’s a lot of money and corporate support behind it. Then you get to the notion, again, of infrastructure—of Kasarda, of the aerotropolis, and of people who are building cities as competitive weapons. Some of the most interesting things I like writing about are places like New Songdo City. Songdo is billed today as a smart, green aerotropolis, but it was invented by the Korean government at the insistence of the International Monetary Fund following the 1997-98 financial crisis, when the IMF bailed out Korea to the tune of $58 billion—which seems like nothing now. The IMF insisted the country open itself up to foreign direct investment. So its leaders decided to build a city for foreigners, and that led to finding an American—Stan Gale and his partners—to build a whole city from scratch off the coast of Korea. It was basically willed into existence by the necessity of paying back the IMF; that’s why Songdo was born. Or there are the smart cities being planned. Masdar, for example, is supposed to be a smart eco-city. Masdar basically exists to be an incubator and an R&D park so that Abu Dhabi can dominate clean-tech technology. Again, this is basically the city as an economic weapon, not a utopian vision. I find the people drawn to these projects equally fascinating. For example, Stan Gale is your classic story of American real-estate development. He’s a third-generation developer who got his own start in Orange County in the 1980s, and he witnessed the master planning and the financialization of real estate that began there; he then worked in New Jersey in the 1990s, where the market evolved into edge cities; and now here he is working at the global scale, trying to convince more Chinese mayors to help him build cities for them. He’s got a whole consortium of companies, like Cisco and United Technology Corporation—which, incidentally, builds more pieces of the city than I think anyone really knows. Otis Elevators, fuel-cells—all these things that you need for a project being built at the city scale. Someone else I find equally fascinating is Paul Romer, the economist who’s pitching the idea of the charter city. I’d like to think he’ll win the Nobel Prize for the work he did in the 1990s on what’s been called New Growth theory, which described increasing returns to scale. Paul basically decided that the best way to raise people out of poverty—the best instrument—is to build a city from scratch and use it as a tool for developing skills, trade and everything else. And it appears that he’s actually now found a country willing to let him do it, in Honduras. This is a man who has absolutely no urban planning background. Urbanism to him is secondary—he cares, but he’ll leave it to the experts. The urbanism itself is not paramount to him. It’s interesting to me that these outside elements—whether it’s a technology company or an economist or a developer—feel like the architecture and the urban planning is just—you know, we can get experts to do that for us. And it’ll be great. Architects like Kohn Peterson Fox, who are responsible for Songdo, rather than build a perfect city from scratch, basically borrow the best pieces of every city they can find to create a new city. And, you know, having been there a couple of times, I feel like it may actually work; I don’t know what the completed city will be like, but I feel like it’s working. Gale uses the phrase “city in a box,” which you mentioned, but they’re also saying things like “we’ve cracked the code of urbanism”—which is a hell of a statement to make. To think you’ve solved 9,000 years of urban practice and that you can just move on is quite dramatic. So those are some of the things I find particularly interesting: that the city has become this nexus of interests for so many people, only it’s being made or stimulated by people who aren’t architects or urban planners. [Image: Le Corbusier's infamous Plan Voisin, meant to replace the heart of Paris, France]. BLDGBLOG: It’s easy to see how all this can sound quite technocratic and dystopian—which makes it all the more interesting that you open the book with an unexpected pair of quotations. One is from Le Corbusier, the other from novelist J.G. Ballard. To anyone familiar with Ballard’s work, in particular, I might say, this seems like a strangely subversive gesture against the book's own premise; it's like opening a golf course community and saying you were inspired by Super-Cannes. Why did you choose these quotations, and what effect were you hoping they would have? Lindsay: I’m so glad you brought that up. I’ve been curious what people would make of it. What I love about Ballard is the kind of dark irony of his work, which is something I find in Koolhaas’s writing as well. They know the future is slick and disposable, and they revel in modernity’s contradictions. They know how dark globalization’s undercurrents are, but go on despite—or even because of—them. The book reviewers who said the aerotropolis had “forgotten” a soul completely missed the point—these cities never had souls to begin with. That’s why I find them fascinating! The Ballard and Le Corbusier quotes should be read as a flashing red light, signaling to the reader: Caution: Unreliable Narrator Ahead. You’ve been warned. Especially that Le Corbusier quote: anyone who knows anything about urbanism who encounters that quote should immediately have their guard up—which was my intention all along. Thanks again to Greg Lindsay for having this conversation—including the second half, which you can read over at Work in Progress—and to Stephen Weil for all his help in setting this up. Finally, I hope to see some of you in Los Angeles at the A+D Museum on April 5th, when Greg Lindsay and I will pick up this conversation in person. The event is free and open to the public, and it kicks off at 6pm.
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Architecture, Territory
at
10:56
Defined tags for this entry: air, architecture, books, consumption, globalization, mobility, territory, theory, tourism, urbanism
Monday, March 14. 2011Workshop: Pervasive Urban Applications, 12 June 2011, San FranciscoVia The Mobile City ----- by admin
This workshop is organized by MIT’s Senseable City Lab, Newcastle Culture Lab, and IBM. Deadline for paper has already passed…:
The First Workshop on Pervasive Urban Applications (PURBA) will take place in conjunction with the Ninth International Conference on Pervasive Computing in San Francisco, CA, USA on June 12-15, 2011. Over the past decade, the development of digital networks and operations has produced an unprecedented wealth of information. Handheld electronics, location devices, telecommunications networks, and a wide assortment of tags and sensors are constantly producing a rich stream of data reflecting various aspects of urban life. For urban planners and designers, these accumulations of digital traces are valuable sources of data in capturing the pulse of the city in an astonishing degree of temporal and spatial detail. Yet this condition of the hybrid city – which operates simultaneously in the digital and physical realms – also poses difficult questions about privacy, scale, and design, among many others. These questions must be addressed as we move toward achieving an augmented, fine-grained understanding of how the city functions – socially, economically and yes, even psychologically. This workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners to discuss and explore the research challenges and opportunities in applying the pervasive computing paradigm to urban spaces. We are seeking multi-disciplinary contributions that reveal interesting aspects about urban life and exploit the digital traces to create novel urban applications that benefit citizens, urban planners, and policy makers. Organizers:
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Posted by Patrick Keller
in Architecture, Interaction design, Territory
at
10:53
Defined tags for this entry: architecture, artificial reality, conferences, interaction design, interferences, mobility, monitoring, territory, urbanism, wireless
Friday, March 11. 2011Seadromes… On Islands and MegastructuresVia dpr-barcelona -----
A seadrome, concept developed by Edward Robert Armstrong, is an enormous floating islands of steel and concrete, to cover 100 or more acres and be anchored at intervals across the Atlantic. According to Armstorng’s design, it would be rise 70 feet (21 m) or more above the surface of the ocean by tubular columns that would allow waves to pass underneath. We can read the following description:
We can see how engineer had influenced the avant-garde and radical architecture. If now we can see proposals to reuse abandoned oil rigs or some other that are based on the idea of recycling ships and marine structures, some of the designs of the 1960s and 1970s were based on this idea of seadromes as floating islands orfloating cities. That’s why we found really provocative to talk about the seadromes and how they have been “adopted” by different disciplines, including architecture.
Time magazine wrote on November 27, 1933:
The seadrome idea was also the starting point of another utopian project, the Habakkuk by Geoffrey Pyke, based on a scheme to assemble an elite unit for winter operations in Norway, Romania, and the Italian Alps, which is basically an aircraft carrier out of pykrete [a mixture of wood pulp and ice]. Pyke envisioned ships as vast and solid as icebergs. But, as we can read at Cabinet Magazine, the Habbakuk was never built anyway. Land-based aircraft were attaining longer ranges, U-boats were being hunted down faster than they could be built, and the US was gaining numerous island footholds in the Pacific—all contributing to a reduced need for a vast, floating airfield. The idea of the seadrome as a floating island just takes us to analyze how they were part of the inspiration of some floating megastructures. Reyner Banham pointed on his book Megastructure: Urban Futures of the Recent Past that mostly all of the first megastructure designed on the first years of the avant-garde movement were inspired by piers and freight platforms, such as the Scheveningen pier in the Netherlads or the Santa Monica pier in Los Angeles. So we can see that the relationship with the idea of floating cities was there, since the earlymegastructuralist projects. But talking about more recent projects, we can see the evident similarities from this airport designed by M. Lurcat for the middle of the river Seine, in the midst of Paris in 1932: To the Megafloat project in Japan, currently under construction: So, the interesting idea here is to discuss if all this seadromes and floating islands can become new territories to be inhabited. Hernán Diáz recently wrote for the issue Islands on Cabinet Magazine an interesting article called A Topical Paradise. Here he quoted the poem “islands” written by W. H. Auden, pointing:
After this reflections, we just think: What will come next… Islands in space inspired by seadromes? It seems that we’re going on that way:
“Far off like floating seeds the ships —– Related readings: “I will walk around the island. Look to see if there is something to eat. Build a house from straw and wood. Carve a bow and arrow to hunt wild pigs and tigers. Look for a man to fall in love with. If I don’t find him, I’ll make one from clay and mud [...] I don’t think I will make art on a desert island.”
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Architecture, Territory
at
15:35
Defined tags for this entry: architecture, engineering, infrastructure, mobility, speculation, territory
Wednesday, March 09. 2011Situationist [iPhone]Situationist is an iPhone app that attempts to make your everyday life more experimental and unpredictable. Inspired by the Situationist International of the 50′s, who advocated experiences of life being alternative to those admitted by the capitalist order, for the fulfillment of human primitive desires and the pursuing of a superior passional quality, the app takes on the “situation” element of the movement, attempting to create random rendezvous and interactions with strangers to induce the unpredictable. Using the iPhone and it’s geolocation features, the app alerts members to each other’s proximity and gets them to interact in random “situations”. These situations vary from the friendly “Hug me for 5 seconds exactly” or “Compliment me on my haircut”, to the subversive eg “Help me rouse everyone around us into revolutionary fervour and storm the nearest TV station”. Members simply upload their photo and pick the situations they want to happen to them from a shortlist, in the knowledge that they might then occur anywhere, and at any time. Situationist was created by Ben Carey and Henrik Delehag aka Benrik.
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fabric | rblgThis blog is the survey website of fabric | ch - studio for architecture, interaction and research. We curate and reblog articles, researches, writings, exhibitions and projects that we notice and find interesting during our everyday practice and readings. Most articles concern the intertwined fields of architecture, territory, art, interaction design, thinking and science. From time to time, we also publish documentation about our own work and research, immersed among these related resources and inspirations. This website is used by fabric | ch as archive, references and resources. It is shared with all those interested in the same topics as we are, in the hope that they will also find valuable references and content in it.
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