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14 AR | AUGUST 2012

OverviewEDINBURGH, UK

TEDsters’ picnicEspousing a radically open future, the annual TED conference was ironically closed to most journalists. Here TED insider Rachel Armstrong reports for the AR on the implications for architects

What is the role of the architect in a world of ‘radical openness’? Exploring this theme, the annual TED (technology, entertainment and design) conference in June, TEDGlobal, challenged established notions of community, design interaction, manufacturing and even the way that cities are organised. The non-hierarchical, distributed, cooperative forms of social interaction set the scene for a global community in which the status of architects could be critically diminished. From the profession’s perspective, radical openness is a way of countering the industrial age’s bureaucratic systems, which have subsumed practice and impinge upon creative and ethical freedoms.

Although design has been the least well represented of the TED pillars, the programme content was certainly pertinent to architects. Massimo Banzi, the inventor of Arduinos, enthused about a growing open source ‘maker’s movement’ where low cost, simple platforms and recycled materials could create

‘something great’ like smart cat feeders and errand-running quadcopters. Banzi’s turbo-charged DIY community of non-specialists were creating a bottom-up innovation platform to shape the interaction design of devices, homes and public spaces to forge a ‘maker’s paradise’ in which plants communicate with citizens via Twitter accounts.

Clay Shirky revealed how the power of decentralised cooperative actions can overturn powerful hierarchies through the story of Martha Payne. This nine-year-old girl diligently recorded her school dinners in a food blog called ‘NeverSeconds’ and discovered one day the local council had censored her. The ensuing public outcry from her thousands of followers not only reinstated Martha’s school dinner journal, but as Shirky reminded us, also went against the logic of ‘all of human history prior to now’.

Perhaps the strangest and most memorable talk was ‘Eyeborg,’ Neil Harbisson’s incredible story of being born in a greyscale world.

To enrich his experiences he began a collaborative project in 2003 to create an electronic eye using a digital camera, and learned to ‘hear’ different sounds that were equivalent to the spectrum of visible light. Harbisson’s personal ‘radical openness’ about his most intimate experiences of digital synaesthesia not only revealed intriguing ‘sound portraits’ of faces but also provided a taster of how private and public domains might be shared through augmented reality.

The only architect of the session, Michael Hansmeyer, talked about using an origami-inspired process that exploded volumetric space into single surfaces to make organic-looking sculptures. These were on display during the conference although most TEDsters (TED attendees) didn’t actually know what they were until after Hansmeyer’s talk, and many commented that they appeared difficult to clean. ‘Radical openness’ had almost exclusively focused on digital rather than ecological design

Benjamin Dillenburger and Michael Hansmeyer use CAD techniques to create fractal Baroque forms, as in their Study for a Dome

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Overviewplatforms, so you speculate whether Hansmeyer’s process could become genuinely ‘organic’ by encouraging the rough digitally manufactured surfaces to collect dirt. Perhaps, then, the installation would bloom with indoor micro flora on these architectural soils as a living component to the production process. Sadly no bacterial films or mouldy growths began to colonise the pillars and I wondered if NASA’s Jonathan Trent, who demonstrated an ingenious approach to algae wastewater treatment using permeable plastic tubing, could find a range of ecological uses for Hansmeyer’s convoluted surfaces.

But TED is more than its main stage presentations and hosts a couple of pre-conferences over several days running up to the official TED conference. Specifically, the TED Fellows programme provides a platform for the coveted fellowship recruits of young innovators from around the world, such as architect Mitchell Joachim, who talked about how his New York ‘urbaneers’ explored guerrilla best practices in tackling issues as diverse as waste, communication, sanitation and education − which seemed a more radically ‘open’ architectural gesture than form-finding. Additionally, the TEDU (TED University) programme showcases projects solely from TEDsters. My talk on how the chemical sensors of Hylozoic Ground − a collaboration with architect Philip Beesley for the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale (a version of this installation is currently being exhibited at the Sydney Biennale) which used life-like chemistry to literally grow functional architectural materials − was accepted for presentation among others, such as Manu Prakash, who demonstrated how to make a working laboratory microscope out of paper and democratised access to the microscale world.

Of particular architectural interest is this year’s TED Prize, which was awarded in February to the idea of the City 2.0 for projects

around the world that would make a difference to their urban communities, such as an open-sourced WikiHouse and a mapping project to improve sanitation, and therefore preventing cholera, in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. Yet although these projects were very ‘open’, locally engaging and fundworthy, City 2.0 missed important opportunities to use TED’s incredible global platform of committed activists to galvanise its community around a project as important as our urban futures. At its best TED has the potential to create the kind of momentum that the TEDx (independently-organised) events have generated, but the lack of curation diluted out the available resources and lost its focus around an ‘idea’ rather than a ‘person’. This made it hard for the audience to see exactly what or whom they should rally around.

Perhaps City 2.0’s flaws are the biggest positive message for architects. That, even with the advent of ‘radical openness’, the profession has a critical role to play in an age of megacities − ‘radically open’ sprawling urban environments that spread from the bottom-up like weeds. But it is not in the pretty details of these sprawls where architects have the greatest role to play, but in their capacity to shape the ‘big picture outcomes’ in concert with urban communities to find ways of creating social coherence. TED’s real value to architecture is as a

barometer of change in the ways we relate and learn about one another, as the world becomes interconnected. In a radically open world the future of the architect is a visionary role that transcends its current servitude to the property markets, regulatory bodies and construction companies − and curates, agitates, enables and provides consultation for communities on many scales to become avatars of our urban futures.

SINGAPORE

World Cities SummitCarlo RattiGlobal city gatherings have multiplied in recent years thanks to the increased prominence of urban issues on the global agenda. But among them, Singapore’s World Cities Summit (WCS), a biennial gathering now in its third edition, stands out. Over 15,000 delegates, hundreds of mayors and city officials from all over the world and a large number of companies active in the urban arena − from Accenture to KPMG, IBM to Siemens − flocked to the Asian city’s towering new casino complex (designed by Moshe Safdie) at Marina Bay to discuss pressing urban issues.

Of the many topics on the table, one cropped up again and again: Smart Cities. What does it signify? Why are companies racing haphazardly to implement ‘smart urban solutions’? Why is IBM forecasting the growth of a multi-billion dollar market in this arena by 2015? The idea is that what is happening at an urban scale today is similar to what happened two decades ago in Formula One. Up to that point, success on the circuit was primarily credited to a car’s mechanics and the driver’s capabilities. But then telemetry technology blossomed. The car was transformed into a computer that was monitored in real-time by thousands of sensors, becoming

‘intelligent’ and better able to respond to the race’s conditions.

In a comparable way, digital technologies have begun to blanket our cities over the past decade, forming the backbone of a large, intelligent infrastructure. Broadband fibre-optic and wireless telecommunications grids are supporting mobile phones, smartphones and tablets that are becoming increasingly affordable. At the same time, open databases − especially from the government − that people can read and add to are revealing all kinds of information, and public kiosks and displays are helping both the literate and illiterate to access it. Add to this foundation a relentlessly growing network of sensors and digital-control technologies, all tied together by cheap, powerful computers, and our cities are quickly becoming like open-air computers.

At the WCS, Singapore was an obvious reference. As stated by Cheng Hsing Yao from the Centre for Liveable Cities: ‘Singapore is a country and a city. We face constant pressure on making the best use of our limited land and resources which have made us become like a living lab where we can share our ideas.’ The transformations have been impressive. This city state of just a few million people, with limited natural resources (even water is imported from neighbouring Malaysia), has moved from struggling with slum clearance in the 1950s to having one of the highest GDPs per capita in the world today. As part of this transformation, Singapore has pioneered some of the first smart city solutions − from dynamic road pricing (subsequently adopted after a fashion by London) to smart energy and intelligent water management.

However, for all Singapore’s successes, the summit also gathered consensus on an important hurdle: many different models will be needed in the coming years to foster the development of our cities.

Neil Harbisson cannot see colours. He augments his vision with a head-mounted camera that transforms colour into sound

16 AR | AUGUST 2012

Such was, for instance, the stance of Barcelona’s Deputy Mayor Antoni Vives i Tomàs, who is proposing a more Mediterranean interpretation of a smart city, drawing on urban excellence in the Catalan capital. A city ‘tout court’, as his team puts it, in view of the fact that any city should be smart. A city where public space has priority over most other infrastructures; where participatory bottom-up citizenship is more important than top-down urban optimisation; where intelligent city means more than open-air computing. And where − as Abha Joshi-Ghani from the World Bank put it by paraphrasing Burma’s leader Aung San Suu Kyi − ‘development cannot be at the cost of democracy’. The discussion will probably continue at the next stopover of the urban globetrotters and solution seekers: Barcelona’s own conference on Rethinking Cities: Framing the Future organised with the World Bank (8-10 October 2012).

LONDON, UK

Urban WrenaissanceTerry FarrellAs part of the London Festival of Architecture I gave the inaugural Wren Lecture, in aid of the appeal for St Bride’s Church, one of Wren’s undisputed masterpieces. The architect’s contribution to London is unsurpassed and the inscription on his tomb ‘if you seek my monument, look around you’ is as true today as it was in the 18th century.

Wren was of a generation of revolutionary thinkers the like of which had never been seen before and may well never be seen again. The two-cultures debate that emerged during this era of enlightenment was an incredibly powerful and in some respects uniquely British phenomenon. When Blake depicted Newton he was lamenting the limitations of

science through the medium of artistic expression. This dichotomy between the rational, ‘top-down’ approach, which has pervaded architectural and planning theory ever since, and the creative, artistic approach that celebrates complexity and diversity is still very much in evidence today.

Much as I admire Wren, there is one scheme of his that I am glad was never implemented: his masterplan for London. It is revealing how an architect of his stature approached a city-wide proposal, and reflecting on it today prompts certain thoughts about the future of the capital in the 21st century.

London, unlike Paris, was never rebuilt according to a grand plan and has a long history of adapting and making incremental changes that is more like the self ordering that we see in nature than anything Haussmann would identify with. The closest Wren came to this was ‘Haussmannising the skies’ as a result of the peculiarly British and arbitrary legislation protecting views of St Paul’s that have determined where all our tall buildings are.

Later attempts by Abercrombie to impose a plan that was civil engineering-led were also rejected in favour of working with the grain and we must learn lessons about this natural inclination to evolve organically and move away from the iconic and gestural

planning that has been favoured even in recent years (as was evident at the South Bank and Paternoster Square) over what works, and what manifestly does not, in the context of London.

One of the most extreme examples of this was the debate over Mansion House where the architectural community were almost unanimously in favour of Mies van der Rohe’s plan. Since then the debate has moved in the right direction − albeit slowly and painfully − away from a Corbusian view of the world towards a paradigm that Jane Jacobs would be more familiar with. It is no coincidence that this has happened at the same time that most other industries have moved from a ‘Fordist’ model of mass production to a more open and bottom-up model that celebrates diversity and consumer customisation, driven by the internet.

Today, throughout London major regeneration projects are stitching black holes in the fabric back together again, many of which are situated along London’s lost and industrialised rivers such as Counters Creek, the Fleet and the River Lea. The important thing is to really analyse these patterns and get under the skin of a city that has built up layer after layer over many hundreds of years. The most successful projects that are moving forward these days are not trying to reinvent but are

instead celebrating the key ingredients that make London the most liveable city in the world.

My work advising the Mayor in recent years on the importance of high streets and the public realm has manifested itself in projects that my practice has been working on such as Earl’s Court, Holborn and Vauxhall. The imperative has been about placemaking and the subordinate role of the ‘object’ (as in buildings) over the surrounding streets, squares and public spaces.

There is an old Irish saying that if you want to get there I wouldn’t start from here. My appeal to those planning London’s future who may have top-down visions, is that here is not such a bad place to start after all.

LONDON, UK

Bronze medal for the OlympicsJacques DuroyThe same night that the Shard pathetically launched itself upon a hapless populace with a fanfare of green lasers, the Southbank hosted a lively debate about that other great Qatari investment in London: the Olympics. The panel event, organised by the Architectural Association and chaired by FAT director Sam Jacob, approached the urban significance of the Olympics from diverse perspectives.

In essence the questions discussed were: what is London, and what is it becoming? And how are we to understand the terrific and terrifying forces reshaping the urban fabric − both in the physical territory, and the complex socio-political and economic landscape that overlays it?

What emerged was a picture of a city consumed by private development, founded on a deeply flawed economic model that is both morally and financially bankrupt. Anna Minton, author of Ground Control (which details the impact of privatising ‘public’ spaces), highlighted the fundamentally undemocratic

Wren's London plan, a departure from the organic on a par with Corbusier's Plan Voisin

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operation of this system. After the 2008 Crisis, Britain bailed out the Olympics to the tune of £5.7bn. But rather than this public acquisition resulting in public assets, instead what came about were citadels of privately owned and controlled space − closed islands, where strict conditions of access and behaviour curb public expression (from rollerblading to political protest). Whether considering the corporate ownership of the deceptively named Queen Elizabeth Park, or the spec suburb now sold to the Qatari royal family (the Olympic Village), Minton argued ‘the proliferation of these undemocratic spaces exposes the fact we’re not really living in democratic times’.

The totalitarian effect of international finance on the development of East London was poignantly depicted in the photography of Stephen Gill, who has worked in Stratford and Hackney for more than a decade. Initially consumed with images of a post-industrial landscape overrun by verdant nature, as the work progresses the fields of wild flowers are slowly partitioned by signs of their impending transformation: compulsory purchase orders, high-security fences and gleaming fresh roads. Gill captured a city of stark inequalities, of migrant markets in derelict greyhound racecourses, of mountains of old fridges framed by Canary Wharf. Without nostalgia, he catalogued the Londoners exercising their rights to common territory, where today the same land hosts Westfield mall (into which 70 per cent of Olympic visitors will arrive).

The extraordinary corporate power to manifest whole villages in the middle of depressed zones, to possess whole streets, was examined by noted urban theorist Saskia Sassen, who suggested this power is weakening our potential as active citizens. At a national level, the notion of citizenship can seem abstract. But at the city scale we are all implicated in the construction of our identity. The

privatisation of the city threatens to transform us from makers of our citizenship into only consumers. Sassen asked, ‘Is this the best way to develop such a vast portion of land? Let’s not even talk about the money, but ask: does it add to the urban capability of the city?’

The final speaker, novelist Will Self, tied the strains of conversation together under a single moniker − the metamorphosis of London’s landscape, the corporatisation of public assets, the relentless marginalisation of democracy and the foothold of power elites to conjure whole villages in the midst of depressed boroughs − saying, ‘In contemporary architecture, form follows finance, and the most ostensible fact about the form of contemporary buildings is their short life spec. For 1,500 years the Colosseum remained the largest constructed space. You can look at the Olympics as our own anodyne version. The Colosseum was open for three centuries; the Olympics will be over in just three weeks. The Colosseum’s message was one of venal satiation for an unruly mob, the Olympics’ message is veneering over people’s looming sense of inequality in society.’

If the artificial sustenance of these economic and corporate models is allowed to continue (at the expense of democracy and the taxpayer), London may detach from its hinterland, like the UK’s Monaco. And as with Montreal or Athens, the Olympic venues could become decaying embarrassments − London’s new ruins.

OBITUARY

Günther Domenig 1934–2012Peter CookAustria has seen some of the most creative and progressive architecture during the last 40 years: the strangeness of some of it has fed into every crevice. And yet Günther Domenig, as a seminal figure, is in danger of

Economic meltdown: Günther Domenig's famous Zentralsparkasse Bank in Vienna

disappearing into the mysterious crevices of lost reputation.

Back in the 1960s he was an exotic and brilliant student: developing megastructures and city projects that still resonate with audacity and expertise. Then he started to build, along with his friend Eilfred Huth, and their high school in Graz was fearless in its use of unadulterated concrete. If Brutalism has been ascribed to the Smithsons and some German and Dutch architects, it is this school that should be studied as the key reference.

Yet just down the street, the pair created an even more adventurous structure: a meeting hall-cum-refectory for a convent, hidden from the street in a courtyard. This armadillo-like structure with oval ‘eye’ rooflights can be clearly stated as the start of the ‘Grazer Schule’ − a conglomeration of somewhat expressionist architects, which included Szyszkowitz and Kowalski, Klaus Kada, Volker Giencke and some others.

Toshio Nakamura (editor of the Japanese magazine A+U) caught a glimpse of the ‘Z’ Bank in southern Vienna and naughtily chose it for the magazine’s cover. For many years this extraordinary structure, with its tumbling metal facade, its twisting ventilation tubes, and its giant sculpted hand on the wall, remained an essential part of Vienna for student tours.

Domenig would flit in and out of the capital city: never really part of it but somehow bypassing its rivalries and paranoias. Indeed he would flit in and out of other European cities: admired by select coteries, but never mastering speaking English so remaining apart from international stardom.

The AA’s Alvin Boyarsky did nonetheless stage a really evocative show in London, complete with original drawings and an exotic ‘bird’ piece. At that time (the late 1980s), Domenig was embarking on his life’s dream: the construction of the Steinhaus (stone-house) on the lakeside site outside Klagenfurt that he inherited from his grandmother.

The wherewithal for this undoubtedly came from some very substantial commissions: a large (rather Modernist) hospital and a composite two-block ‘megastucture’ for Graz University as well as a building for Graz Technical University, where he was Professor. In his first months in the post, he brought Cedric Price, Raimund Abraham, Coop Himmelb(l)au and me down to the school for one-week workshops. It says something about the man that he invited such rivals down to his school.

A fair crop of original structures can be found around Austria: museums, hotels, lakeside port buildings and probably a load of stuff that we don’t know about. Yet in the later years it was the Steinhaus that seemed to haunt him, somehow intended as, not so much a ‘house’, but a shrine to architecture. Characteristically generous with hospitality he would almost dare you to walk down the precipitous garden walls, only one day to fall off himself − with serious injuries.

He lived life seemingly as a dare, smoking like a chimney and driving his red Maserati like a demon through tunnels beneath the Alps. He was the essence of the Austrian phenomenon and a truly good bloke. ☛ For archive coverage of Günther Domenig's work visit architectural-review/Domenig