on site review

What About the Aesthetics of Dirt? A manifesto for contemporary urban design

2012-01-30T07:42:00.001-08:00

WAI Architecture Think Tank

As a dim light gradually brightens up the pitch-black scenery, the silhouette of 19 dancers is slowly revealed through a thick haze. The sound of Henryk Gorecki’s melancholic Symphony No. 3 (The Symphony of Sorrowful Songs)heavily echoes through the thin air, and accompanies the visually leaden movements of performers hastily crossing a velvet-cushioned stage that seems to sink each time deeper under their steps. The spectators are soon absorbed by the metaphoric maze of this urban epic.

Chinese choreographer Wang Yuanyuan’s dance piece was heavily inspired by a city striving under the effects of air pollution. In fact, it appeared as if the small particles of dust and sand that so commonly float through Beijing’s air, had penetrated through the acoustic walls of the Performing Arts Centre. The scene unfolds a sharp vision of blurred environments. Haze is a contemporary dance performance about a contaminated environment. Haze is a subversive performance about Dirt.

Art as deus ex machina
Unfolding in three parts, Haze displays the bodies of the dancers in a continuous struggle with the pollution of the contemporary city. In the performance the urban tale is narrated with a strong visual mise en scène as it reflects our own behavior within a hostile environment, when the dancers embrace a series of attitudes that include mirroring, judging, and persecuting each other. Portrayed through a blurred atmosphere, Haze is a perfect illustration of the potential of dirt to inspire art, and the potential of art to address an unpolished version of reality. When art is inspired by the neglected features of our surroundings, a new dialectic relationship can be established with our urban context.

Following a similar strategy, Andrei Tarkovski’s 1979 film Stalker, exploits a smudged environment and makes it into the visual catalyst of the whole plot. In Stalker, dirt acquires a transcendental role as the plot reveals the journey of three characters that are in search of a mystical zone, and will go from a grimy village, to a contaminated landscape of abandoned buildings, and polluted ruins of old factories. While the bodies of the personages are constantly dipped into stagnant water, sunk into mud, buried into the soil where syringes, bottles, and every kind of dirt lies, the real pollution is converted alchemistically into a strikingly beautiful imagery.

Has art managed to address a topic so long ignored by the discipline responsible for thinking, understanding, and designing cities? Can urbanism learn from other forms of art and deal with the issues it usually ignores? What if, for once, dirt and other neglected inherent areas of our urban domain stopped being a matter of our repulsion, and instead were transformed into the source of our inspiration? What if we were able to reconsider the aesthetics of the urban imperfections?
Why if dirt is usually in the city, it appears as if doesn’t belong to it? Why if art can address the problems of the urban environment, urbanism has distanced itself from them? Why is dirt never diagrammed, mentioned, analyzed? Why do the renders always show clear blue skies and immaculate streets? What about the potential of the aesthetics of dirt?

The modernist case
Ever since modernism (although justified) became infatuated by hyper-hygienic urbanism, dirt has turn into a topic of taboo on the urban sphere. The modernists got rid of dirt from their diagrams, but dirt didn’t disappear from the city. Why then, if the city has proved to be more than the four Le Corbusian values of urbanism (habiter, travailler, circuler et cultiver le corps et l'esprit), has dirt remained an elusive topic?

Why have the only brushes with the topic of dirt come in very sporadic proposals, like the diagram by the Team 10 in the fifties (Bidonville Grid, 1953), or the project by Koolhaas in the seventies (Exodus or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture, 1972)? Why is it easier to flirt with floating cities, and gravity-less architecture, than to face dirt? Has our cleanliness become a Potemkinesque illusion of an unfathomable obsession?

A call for narratives
As a strategy to address neglected topics on urbanism, we have been working on a series of architectural narratives. The creation of these urban episodes allows us to discuss topics that usually will be left out of any discussion. The first of the narrative series titled Wall Stalker uses Andrei Tarkovski’s film as inspiration and as a theoretical framework as the main protagonists and its inherent grimy environment become part of our reflection on urbanism. The images of the animation display the journey of a three man exodus out of a failed city in search of a mystical wall where they wish to find the essence of architecture. The animation contrasts the visually puzzling effect of urban abandonment with that of the ultimate form of hygienic architecture: a colorless, featureless wall. This monumentally silent element enhances the presence of all the neglected parts of the city from where the three characters came from.

Like Haze, and Stalker, the animation proposes to activate urbanism’s inner convictions, and make dirt as much a part of the aesthetic cannon of the discipline responsible for thinking our urban environment. In order to achieve this, the images of desolation, neglect, dust, and haze have to form part of our visual repertoire, both as provocations, and as rhetoric pieces of intellectual dialogue. We must not strive to glorify or work to achieve dirt, but we should include it as a potential tour-de-force. Dirt must be part of urbanism’s lexicon; it must be discussed, analyzed, and represented. As with Wall Stalker, we propose a subversion of the dirt and all that “it” represents. In order to achieve change, and make urbanism relevant again, we propose to make it part of our representations, and the aim of our efforts. We call for a manifesto of Dirt.

WAI Architecture Think Tank is a workshop for architecture intelligentsia based in Beijing. Co-founded in 2008 by French architect Nathalie Frankowski and Puerto Rican architect Cruz Garcia, WAI constantly asks, What About It?
Their website is here: www.wai-architecture.com

A synopsis of Wall Stalker, an animated architectural narrative, in which the characters of Andrei Tarkovski’s 1979 film Cталкер (Stalker) (based on Roadside Picnic) become the protagonists of a three man exodus from a city of icons, in search for the essence of architecture, follows:

A Stalker is what people in Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic (1971) call a whole new profession of misfits that risk their lives in the Zone (a mystical place of transcendental powers) to seize valuable things. A Wall Stalker then, is somebody who is taking the same risk to grasp whatever he can find in an equally mysterious Wall.

Wall Stalker is an animated architectural narrative, in which the characters of Andrei Tarkovski’s 1979 film Cталкер (Stalker) (based on Roadside Picnic) become the protagonists of a three man exodus from a city of icons, in search for the essence of architecture.

After opening with the title illustration, the first image of Wall Stalker shows an overview of Egoville, the capital of Ego in which the skyline is highlighted by a wasteland of desolated icons. This post-apocalyptic environment offers no hope for the three characters as they decide to break away from this city product of the cynicism of man, and reach for the legendary wall, where they believe the essence of architecture can be found. Once the characters leave the city behind them, they find themselves melancholically traveling through a purgatorial landscape of post-iconic desolation. Submersed in a forsaken desert with their last hopes about to evaporate, they finally spot the legendary wall they’ve been looking for. The mysterious presence of this mystical element becomes accentuated by its striking visual silence. Free of any kind of symbolism and stripped of any ideological aesthetic, the wall only offering for the three exhausted men its inherent inertness. After completing their intended journey, the new predicament of the three wanderers will be how to grasp the mythical “essence” of the wall. From that moment on, their lives and the city will never be the same.

Wall Stalker is a graphic journey through the fictional subconscious of architecture. Using pieces of Jan Garbarek as acoustic background the architectural narrative is built around twelve chapters/photomontages that depict the three men odyssey through the dialectics of architecture and the city they created. The compositions of the twelve chapters not only absorb into its plot Tarkovski’s film but also pieces of El Lissitzky, Vladimir Tatlin, Paolo Soleri, Caspar David Friedrich, and Giambattista Piranesi in the form of collage, in order to create a scheme full of symbolism while simultaneously being disconnected from any other plot.

Wall Stalker is divided into three parts with four chapters/photomontages in each. The first Part is titled Egoville and includes The capital of Ego, The Meeting I, Exodus, and The Last Glimpse. The Second Part is named Un Voyage Purgatoire and includes Les Portes du désert, Sea of Sand, The wanderer, and Conquest. And the Third Part is The Wall, which includes The Meeting II, Inquisition, No turning Back, and Blindness.

Wall Stalker is the first of a trilogy of architectural narratives of WAI Architecture Think Tank that explore the essence of architecture.

By Nathalie Frankowski and Cruz Garcia (WAI Architecture Think Tank)
www.wai-architecture.com
http://www.vimeo.com/13919911

WAI Architecture Think Tank. 'What About the Aesthetics of DIrt? A manifesto for contemporary urban design..' On Site review, no. 26 Fall 2011
©Nathalie Frankowski, Cruz Garcia and On Site review

The Soviet Kommunalka

2012-01-17T14:25:00.002-08:00

Kira Varvanina

A Room in Between
   The fact that the English word “private” is not easily translated into Russian can be explained by the word's ambiguity. On one hand, it implies any entity that is not run by the government, which explains its derogative meaning during the Soviet regime. On the other, the term carries individual and confidential connotations and is simply substituted in Russian with “personal”. As a result, in Soviet terms, private space is not owned by an individual but is considered national. In many ways this explains the bizarre fusion of private and public worlds in the everyday Soviet lives. In this essay I attempt to look at the influences of communal living arrangements on the tightly intertwined realms of national and individual identities during the USSR era.
Throughout the first years of the Soviet Regime, much of the working class was relocated to urban centers and colonized in cramped kingdoms of "kommunalkas"— large flats that once belonged to the Tsarist ninetieth century bourgeoisie. They were later redistributed among the working class, often leaving as many as fifty people co-existing in ten living rooms, one large kitchen, two water closets and a bathroom. Even though these apartments were similar to dormitories, where sharing of public space was part of everyday life, kommunalkas were permanent places where inhabitants could have lived their entire lives.
    While the name “kommunalka” is a vernacular short form for a communal apartment, the long mazes had little in common with the Western flat. Firstly, the residents were placed there by the state, which resulted in a diverse and forced social structure of these quarters. Secondly, there was a clear division between what “belonged” to an individual and what “belonged” to nobody (in other words, public). Living and sharing the “national territory” of kommunalka resulted in constant clashes between neighbours and often developed into comical settings. For example, because there were only two water closets shared by numerous inhabitants, it was common to own and carry around one’s personal toilet seat. This seat would have its own hanging place in the safety of a family room.
The original grand rooms of nineteenth century bourgeoisie apartments and smaller cramped family “corners” in kommunalka had very little, if anything, in common. Divided numerously into smaller spaces, what was often inhabited by entire families, many rooms were narrow. High ceilings, chandelier cords hanging unpretentiously in the corner and disproportionately large windows were the only traces of the building’s former use and grandeur. The lack of space made every corner of the room valuable for potential functionality. A window often served as storage for food and the ceiling would house a clothes line. Consequently, the quality of Soviet life was often measured in cubic meters — the fact that generally defined individual desires and needs. Curiously enough, even within one’s personal space, one could not necessarily count on privacy. Proximity of neighbors and lack of personal space made kommunalka’s environment transparent to the views of cohabitants and altered the sense of personal confidentiality.
The communal spaces, however, were true manifestations of the individual within the realm of national and social. Accompanied by rules, public settings carried a sense of the impersonal and ownerless.   Here the theatre of life, so often despised for its lack of humanity, was played out by common Soviet people. Although each family owned part of a stove , a table and a cabinet, the kitchen was often in a state of war for territory. This was not a space for a peaceful dinner or other functions associated with a home, but a place where one would line up to wash the dishes, argue about the electricity bills or discuss communal matters. Bathroom had its own schedule as well. Imagine numerous washing machines and drying clothes illuminated by a steamy, stifling incandescent lamp. Inhabiting shared environments tested the extent of human compassion and defined one's consciousness within the society.
Living with strangers was not an easy task, considering that it could potentially last a lifetime. Especially in the first years of USSR, individual idiosyncrasies, those that distinguished persons from each other, were not only judged and discouraged within the public atmosphere, but most significantly, scrutinized within one’s home. During this time the meaning of the word “private” gained a negative connotation. Being exposed to the eyes of the state and neighbours resulted in the lost sense of personal identity within the greater Soviet population. The living conditions during these years depicted a simple truth – what was humane and personal was replaced in favour of the national.
Perhaps the picture described above will seem gloomy to most, but that is not my intention. The sketch was an attempt to show the distinction and, most importantly, coexistence of a national consciousness and conditions of individual identity within the structure of communal living. Of course, the aspects of collective life were not limited to negative insights, where war and argument constantly preoccupied tenants. On the contrary, the kommunalka was, and still remains, a diverse and fascinating environment, where endless personal stories are intertwined with the stories of old and new generations and both the past and present histories of Russia.

Kira Varvanina has Master of Architecture degree from Carleton University and is currently an independent installation artist based in Toronto. In her work Kira explores spatial transformations by means of technology and interactivity. Kira Varvanina and Edward Lin work together as Studio 1:1. www.studio1to1.ca

Kira Varvanina 'The Soviet Kommunalka.' On Site review, no. 25 Spring 2010
©Kira Varvanina and On Site review

Interview with Yoshiharu Tsukamoto, Atelier Bow-Wow, Tokyo

2012-01-12T07:35:00.009-08:00

Steve Chodoriwsky

I'm interested in the connection between your small-scale preoccupations and your larger scale urban research. Do you feel that there are appropriate, effective ways to shift from the small scale to larger scales, or vice versa?

In terms of scale, the biggest programs can also be embedded in the small scale. This idea always encourages me to be brave or proud to be working at a very small scale. I like to deal with large issues through a scale that can be really handled. Because you need a good ear to hear the echo between a very small thing and a big issue. I really like to make this comparison. Showing the sound of the echo between this and that can be sometimes very enigmatic, sometimes elegant . . .

. . . And sometimes humourous. In a recent essay you wrote that, when designing a small house in Tokyo, it's impossible to have an effect on the city, and so "it is allowed to be dreamlike—an object of our imagination." I've always felt that in your small works, they're somewhat fleeting, maybe even suitably incomplete. They’re not microcosms of grand concepts—you don't tend to work like that—you seem more concerned with articulating this echo relationship . . .

I learned this from Jean-Luc Godard, when he was criticized by French journalists for not going to Vietnam to shoot a film; instead, he stayed in Paris. And Godard said, it's not necessary for a film to go to Vietnam, but the more important thing is to let Vietnam pour into the film. This is an issue of echo. I like very much this attitude to the world, that you cannot be representative of the whole world, but you can create an echo with it.

Much of your work focuses on a serious consideration of small space as bona fide space—not as something nostalgic or cute, but rather as a contemporary fact, something both useful and enjoyable. What are your thoughts on this?

I think smallness can be a very strong tool for directing a design. For me, the very important thing is to handle the differences that emerge in every level of architectural composition and articulation. So if you want to make even a simple composition between rooms, some differences already emerge. Each room is just a room, but once they’re connected, their relationships create great differences—where you go in, or where you look . . .

. . . It becomes complicated very quickly . . .

It starts to be full of difference through these things. I think that, currently, the architectural discussion in Japan is based on how to deal with these small differences: how much you rationalize inevitable differences, how much you avoid or accentuate given differences from the outside environment—like site conditions or sunlight. If you start to be conscious of these changes, you need to break down levels of understanding into smaller elements and dimensions. For example, if you are aware of the temperature, this part of the room is really different from over there, near the window. The light condition also changes. This is my interest with smallness—how to open up these kinds of different investigations, to understand the different qualities of space.

The concepts "Pet Architecture" and "Micro Public Space" come up consistently in your activities. With them, how do you feel smallness is linked to promoting good spatial practice?

I am interested in the concept of smallness as it relates to body consciousness—a relationship between space and the body. Since most of our basic understanding of urban space for everyday living is very segregated, life becomes quite mechanical somehow. All the pieces are articulated as a kind of packaged service within the city, and if you have enough money, you can enjoy this itinerary, visiting these packages, one by one. The body, though, is something which tries to go beyond this controlled experience, through inventive spatial practice. In certain places, right when the body goes beyond this package, you can feel like you have discovered the earth—a kind of wild aspect of the living condition of human beings. I like very much the feeling of de-packaging these services. So if you buy a house produced by Sekisui [an industrialized housing company], in a new suburban development, ninety minutes from Tokyo Station by train, your whole life could be packaged. But on the other hand, in Pet Architecture buildings, which we found to be very interesting, they don't fit into this framework . . .

Yes, although they lack size, they retain extremely customized functions, and also personalities . . .

Their time and space are not served by anyone or anything, they're really there, and this condition is irreplaceable. And the participation of the real body really supports the existence of that combination of time and space. This is quite strong for me; it stimulates my sensibility of urban living conditions today. Our intention was to show Pet Architecture as the foreground—I think it is often just pushed to the background.

Do you think they play the role of urban monuments?

Yes, I think it's a kind of micro-monument, a witness to the transformation of the city. I found that Pet Architecture emerges out of specific contexts, where new or enlarged streets cut through old urban fabric, or, in spaces where the geometry of curving rivers or railways encounter orthogonal street patterns. They always appear at very unique points where these interventions occur. In that sense, they definitely have a monumental aspect . . . And people are really fond of these buildings, they become imprinted onto individuals’ memories. If you ask someone to talk about Pet Architecture in their neighbourhood, they can usually mention at least two or three really tiny buildings . . .

Compared to an individual’s daily routine, which you frame as a series of complete packages, Pet Architecture becomes a kind of jarring interruption.

This tells of an insufficiency or incompleteness in the packages of these buildings. But this allows them to open to the environment—that’s an important quality. They can't be closed-off systems; they must be helped by other buildings . . . I really like the generosity of Tokyo, which allows these kinds of structures. The city doesn’t want to clean them up, or force every building to be formal. Of course new construction must fit to regulations, but still, they can keep a feeling of informality . . .

This is part of an interview between Steve Chodoriwsky and Yoshiharu Tsukamoto from the spring of 2010, specifically about Pet Architecture and micro-urbanism.
At the time of writing up this interview, Steve Chodoriwsky was at the Tsukamoto Lab, Department of Architecture at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. He then participated in the research program of the Centre for Contemporary Art in Kitakyushu which he said was 'a one-hour train from Fukuoka, a two-hour plane from Shanghai, a three-hour boat from Busan, and a glorious thirteen-hour bus from Tokyo'. He is currently a researcher in the Design Department of Jan Van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, Netherlands.

Steve Chodoriwsky 'Interview with Yoshiharu Tsukamoto.' On Site review, no. 23 Spring 2010
©Steve Chodoriwsky and On Site review

First Dereliction, then Occupation. Architecture and the Unspeakable

2012-01-02T08:54:00.002-08:00

John Szot

In this building proposal, a partially-completed building is temporarily abandoned and left at the mercy of New York City’s street writers and guerrilla artists to be provisionally occupied and abused without supervision. By exposing the raw structure to all the violence and rambunctiousness of a metropolis, this experiment allows us to capture activity and ideas that usually lie beyond the architect’s grasp in a manner that does not compromise their cultural currency. The result is an authentic slice of urban subculture that occupies a legitimate position within the urban fabric, and thus within the identity of the city.

This is an inversion of the typical life cycle of a building. Here, dereliction occurs before inhabitation. Therefore the final product remains unknown and outside the reach of conventional architectural documentation. In order to bring some degree of insight into the process during design development, the entire structure was subjected to a simulation in which we developed a narrative to describe the activity that might take place during the period of ‘induced dereliction’ and do justice to the subtleties inherent in this unlikely marriage.

links: http://www.johnszot.com/archandtheunspeakable
http://www.mascontext.com
http://www.johnszot.com

John Szot 'First Dereliction, then Occupation.' On Site review, no. 26 Fall 2011
©John Szot and On Site review

John Szot is a designer working in New York. His work has been exhibited in Chicago, New York, Portland and the Netherlands. He currently teaches architecture and digital visualisation at the Graduate School of Architecture + Planning at Columbia and is one of the directors of the Experimental Modern Arts Collective.

http://www.johnszot.com/archandtheunspeakable

Mongolian Migrations

2011-12-27T10:09:00.003-08:00

Rob Story and Giovana Beltrao

Migration can be a comfortable pattern or a tumultuous struggle. A culture built on migration has it woven into life. Movement is integral, anticipated and essential. But migrating a culture out of that pattern can be a different story.

The people of Mongolia have migrated for centuries, routinely carrying their iconic gers with them as the seasons changed. But now, many have made the last migration - into the city, the migration of a culture, a pattern of life, an economy and an architecture. The move is not only theirs. It is a global phenomenon over which a nomadic family has little control over the pushes, pulls and consequences.
People are pushed by nature, pressures on resources, a collapsed economy; pulled by awareness of alternatives to the hardships of traditional life, by the draw of the city's bright lights. The young leave and the traditional cycle collapses. The search for a replacement life is inevitable, but the consequences can be traumatic and adjustments complex.
The draw of the city often dumps people into an urban poverty worse than the rural one they hoped to escape. A new settlement pattern must be adopted, a new economy must be entered, accessing basic needs must be re-learned, and an architecture must adapt. Developing governments are seldom ready to cope with the needs, and neither are many families. Sprawling slums are the result.
The traditional Mongolian family is nomadic and self-sufficient, moving with its herds through the hostile environment of the open steppes from summer grazing to winter protection. Long-standing communal traditions of land tenure recognize which families have grazing rights in a particular watershed and where their winter camping spots are. When the season ends, it takes only a few hours to fold up the family ger, pack it onto a couple of camels, or into a creaking old Russian truck, and move.
Architecture is the management of environments for people and their activities. By definition it must be holistic. Good architecture embodies the realities of a community's social structure, cultural beliefs, environment, economy and available technologies and materials. Indigenous architecture is always good architecture, it has no choice or it disappears. Best of all it is innately affordable and without formal debt. The well-know ger (yurt in Russian), is a perfect example. It evolved over generations in pragmatic response to that very set of drivers. When the drivers change, the architecture will follow. The situation in Mongolia exemplifies the challenges in doing so.
The ger is designed for the pattern of seasonal migration. We are familiar with the ger's classic kit-of-parts design, the hardware components, but less familiar with the software components, traditional family roles, social structure, household routines and the community relations that the ger encompasses. Migrating to an urban setting changes all of those. The software components are the first to feel the impact of urban migration, then the hardware must evolve. On the land the squat, decorated ger door opens from the expansive steppe to culturally ensured hospitality. A visitor need never knock. The mandatory salty butter tea is always on the stove. In the city, the door is behind a high fence, the gate is locked, the door is locked and the stove may be cold with family away in the cash economy.

Four contemporary events dramatically altered Mongolia's nomadic norms: the rise of Soviet control in the 1920s, its subsequent collapse in 1990, a twist of nature and globalising communication.
Under Moscow's direction, supply-driven rural industries were established throughout the countryside spurring a wave of migration off the land as families opted to abandon their nomadic lifestyle in favour of sedentary employment. Many brought their gers with them while others took advantage of Soviet-supplied workers housing in blocks of typically poor quality flats.
The collapse of the Soviet Union triggered another wave of migration. Overnight, rural industries became unsustainable and collapsed. Former nomads were stranded in small towns without employment, and without the ability or desire to go back to the land. The option was to migrate again, this time into the capital, Ulaanbaatar.
Then nature kicked in with two consecutive devastating winters that decimated the herds of the remaining nomads and launched yet another wave of rural-urban migration, this time straight from the land to the capital.
Compounding all of these, globalised communication is beaming exposure to lifestyle alternatives into even the most remote rural ger with its satellite dish and solar panel attached to a car battery. Aspirations rise, migration accelerates.

Ulaanbaatar is centuries old having evolved as a trading hub and a religious base anchored by Buddhist temples from which nomadic monks provided far ranging support. During the 70 years of Soviet domination, large portions of the simple traditional core of Ulaanbaatar were transformed into the semblance of a developing 20th century city with a combination of grand Soviet public buildings, shoddy apartment blocks, wide streets, centralised infrastructure and central government land control. The social and architectural contrasts between the two eras are stark.
With the end of Moscow's subsidies in 1990, government resources to manage urban growth disappeared. The result is that about 70% of Ulaanbaatar's built-up area is unplanned, sprawling beyond the Soviet-era core in poorly serviced, informal ger areas.
The nomadic perception of free rural land usage is dramatically different from that of an urban sense of ownership with a cost. Government guidance to orderly development of land, infrastructure and economic development should come first as the framework for growth, but the pace of rural-urban migration far outpaces government's capacity. Families can't wait and the building is always first. Real life replaces planning. Government then struggles to overlay some form of land tenure and insert infrastructure into the organic form of an informal settlement.
Incremental processes of development and densification over time are readily evident in Ulaanbaatar's "suburbs". New families arrive on the edge and plant their ger behind a new fence. Whatever plan, infrastructure and control exist have not made the transition to urban needs. Someone will claim land ownership, official or not, and payment for a "fence" will be needed, but without recourse to a Central Land Titles Office. It may be hundreds of metres to the nearest source of water with a wheelbarrow to pay market prices up to 20 times that of the subsidized urban core. The sanitation system is a hole in the ground. Food comes from a shop and shops want money and that needs employment.
In older ger areas a single "fence" may have densified to contain two or three gers and several contemporary structures built as the family grows, aspirations are realised, or relatives arrive to share the space. Gers may have even been replaced all together. Corresponding improvements to infrastructure, however, are usually far behind. Bankable land tenure is not in place. Primitive pit latrines remain frozen through the harsh winters, then melt in spring and flow into the dirt passages serving as streets. Coal, dung and wood smoke from thousands of rural stoves choke the urban winter air. The struggle to enter the cash economy can rapidly alter the familiar family structure with the men migrating for work, women leaving the house and kids on their own.
It is true that the perceived social and economic opportunities of the city exist, but for far too many they remain out of reach. Migrations will continue. Cities must embrace the dynamic processes involved and target the key points of intervention if the goals of urbanised social, economic and environmental health are to be met. With the framework in place, a new vernacular architecture will evolve.

Rob Story: a Calgary-based architect, urban planner, traveller and photographer working with human settlement issues throughout the developing world for the past 25 years. President of HABICO Planning + Architecture. Giovana Beltrao: a Brazilian-born architect and urban planner who started working in the favelas of Brazil 18 years ago and continues to work on human settlement projects throughout the developing world with Rob and HABICO.

Story, Rob and Giovana Beltrao. 'Mongolia Migrates' On Site review, no. 24 Fall 2010
©Rob Story, Giovana Beltrao and On Site review

Dust Bowl Designs: the Federal migrant camps of the Great Depression

2011-12-13T12:49:00.001-08:00

by Joseph Heathcott

Beginning in 1932, the topsoil of the American plains took to the wind and scattered eastward across the country. Decades of sodbusting, mono-cropping and deep furrow plantation had exhausted the fragile soil structure, leaving it vulnerable to drought. When the rains failed in 1931, the earth began to dry up. By 1934, the United States was experiencing its worst drought in history. As the soil desiccated, the fierce winds of the plains gathered tremendous plumes of dust and carried it over millions of square miles. All told, a billion tons of earth moved on, devastating farms, wrecking communities and setting in motion the great westward migration of families seeking work.

In response to this ecological catastrophe, the Roosevelt administration reorganised the rural relief effort and charged the Farm Security Administration (FSA) to coordinate a range of housing, credit, health and education programs for farm families, migrants and itinerant workers. As part of an expansive New Deal state, the ultimate goal of the FSA was to democratise land ownership by eradicating rural tenancy. The immediate challenge, however, was to organise temporary shelter for millions of people in motion – the displaced and the dispossessed.

In 1937, the FSA launched a government camp project to provide shelter and services to migrant workers in 15 states, mostly in the West, but also in farm and fishing communities in the Northeast and the South. For many migrants, shelter per se was not the foremost challenge – many families took refuge in their vehicles or in makeshift squatter camps. The main problem was that a lack of stable housing forced them to spend large portions of their income on fuel in order to keep moving. Thus, the FSA would not only supply shelter, but would site camps strategically in order to maximise transportation efficiencies. FSA officials used government trucks to transport workers to agricultural jobs in the areas around the camps. This enabled migrants to spend less on fuel and to retain a larger share of their earnings for essentials.

While shelter was just one part of the larger array of challenges migrants faced, the FSA viewed its provision as a top priority. The Roosevelt administration, Congress, and FSA leadership regarded the unhinged population with alarm, worried that the lack of stability could lead to radicalization. For government planners and architects, self-built squatter camps that cropped up across the country presented an ungovernable landscape full of moral and physical danger, magnifying the already dire conditions of the Great Depression. They argued that only the rational delivery of modern shelter units in sufficient numbers could draw people out of their makeshift interstitial communities.

To build the camps, the FSA liaised with the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and other federal relief agencies. With primary responsibility to construct dams, bridges, hospitals, post offices, and other government buildings, a great deal of architectural and engineering talent was concentrated in the WPA. The CCC maintained an in-house staff of land surveyors, planners and road builders because of its work in constructing state parks, fire roads, retreat camps and other rural facilities. By the end of the decade, the FSA had built up its own stable of architects, engineers, planners and surveyors, managed by a vertical system of national directors, regional administrators, and local camp officials.

The FSA deployed a range of measures to scale up design and construction of the migrant camps. Rather than hire one architect or firm for every project, the FSA retained a pool of architects to develop standardised plans around a limited and uniform program of building. While the FSA contracted with private construction companies to build the camps, it retained control of the supply chain of materials in order to reduce costs and speed production. Civil engineers moved from site to site in order to oversee the surveillance, grading, utility installation and other site preparations. Many camp services were delivered through mobile rather than stationary means, including dental and health clinics installed in manufactured structures and mounted on trailers.

In general, the FSA favoured modular, functionalist design, reflected in the work of some of its most well-known staff, such as landscape architect Garret Eckbo, architect Vernon de Mars and civil engineer Nicholas Cirino. FSA camps attracted notice from modern architecture circles, including the influential Pencil Points architectural journal, which devoted an entire issue in 1942 to the camps.

Most camp buildings were wood frame clad either in canvas, wood or metal. In some regions, architects made attempts at vernacular design adaptations. Camp Osceola in Florida, for example, featured small porches and low-angle gables on stilt-raised residential buildings not unlike local houses, while community facility buildings in Texas and California were often open to the air; camps in Arizona used adobe for wall construction. But most camps rose up according to a set of centralised codes and specifications meant to accelerate the process of construction and multiply the number of sites in the pipeline. This centralisation of design led to such follies as tin roofs in Texas and metal cladding in Florida, forcing residents out of their units in the long summers.

As federal architects and civil engineers sited, planned and constructed the camps, the Head of the FSA Information Division, Roy Stryker, dispatched twenty-two photographers throughout the country to document the effort. He employed many of the top photographers in the United States, including Dorthea Lang, Jack Delano, Gordon Parks, Ben Shahn, Marion Post Wolcott, Walker Evans, Arthur Rothstein, Russell Lee and Marjory Collins. He supplied his photographers with 'scripts' describing the range of subjects and treatments deemed appropriate to the purpose. These photographers left a detailed visual record of the camps, with tens of thousands of unique images.

FSA photographs depict rural families adapting to life far from their Kansas and Oklahoma farms. Planners organised each camp on some variant of an orthogonal grid surrounding a public square, a landscape condition largely alien to the residents' experience of rural agricultural life in the Midwest and Great Plains. People shared water sources and bathing facilities, recreation spaces and dining halls. In many of the camps, the FSA operated co-operative stores, day care centres, adult education classes, libraries, health clinics and kitchens. Architects invariably sited camp manager offices next to the gates in order to enhance surveillance.

And yet, these images of the architecturally uniform and rigorous camps belie the fragility and transience of their condition. With the 1940 elections, the political winds in Congress shifted against bold federal experiments such as the migrant camps. The entry of the United States into World War II in 1941 absorbed millions of migrants into the military and defence production force. In 1943, Congress shifted all migrant relief programs into the more conservative and narrowly conceived War Food Administration in the Labour Department. By the conclusion of the war, the federal camp program was shuttered.

In the end, the camps presented highly ambivalent landscapes. They were less communities than collections of strangers, coming and going at intervals, forming rapid but tenuous connections amid dire circumstances. The architecture itself expressed this ambivalence. On the one hand, camp planning and organisation spoke of a tentative optimism in the provision of the public good. On the other, it expressed the aims of government through modular and temporary construction suited to the immediate provision of shelter, but less suited to the broader goal of the New Deal to remake American democracy. The camps had sprung up amid volatile political and economic forces – by the time the government had constructed a sizeable network of camps, federal priorities had shifted to the war effort. Migrants disappeared into factories and defence housing springing up in cities; construction materials flowed out of FSA warehouses and into war production. In hindsight, the permanent state of the camps had always been impermanence; they were momentary and ephemeral, much like the dust that drove people westward in the first place.

Heathcott, Joseph 'Dust Bowl Designs' On Site review, no. 26 Fall 2011
©Joseph Heathcott and On Site review

Highway of Heroes: 65 overpasses on highway 401

2010-11-11T13:51:00.002-08:00

arrival in Toronto

Christine Leu

The Highway of Heroes is a stretch of the 401 Highway between Canadian Forces Base Trenton and the coroner’s office at the Centre for Forensic Sciences in downtown Toronto. It was renamed in honour of Canada’s fallen soldiers.
      Regardless of where a Canadian soldier is stationed, a soldier is repatriated at a ceremony at CFB Trenton, and then transported with a family and military automobile entourage to Toronto for an official autopsy. The current count of fallen soldiers who have travelled this route is over 130.
      The Highway of Heroes began as a grassroots movement. In an impromptu manner, people began to congregate on the 65 overpasses between Trenton and Toronto which represent the only safe and accessible opportunity for the public to pay their respects to the country’s fallen: CFB Trenton is open only to family, military, dignitaries and media; the coroner’s office is also closed to the public.
    Despite the contentious nature of the Afghanistan War, the public ritual gained momentum and there were calls to officially name the route. The big break was when an online petition was mentioned on morning radio airwaves. The number of signees was a few thousand, but by 10:30am, the number had risen to over 9000. A few days later on August 24 2007, the Highway of Heroes was officially designated by Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty, in the midst of his successful re-election campaign.

Each overpass is different due to variables such as landscape, topography, adjacencies, span and the period in which it was built. A few are exclusively for trains, but the vast majority is for motor vehicles. Human occupation was not considered. It is no wonder as overpasses are inhumane places – they are like standing in a blustery wind tunnel and a howling pit stop at the same time. On a typical day, overpasses are used almost exclusively by motor vehicles to traverse the great divide that is the 401 Highway.
     Around the time the convoy is expected to pass, however, these overpasses are transformed into impromptu mourning grounds. The east-facing guardrails overlooking oncoming westbound traffic are lined with locals: civilians, former military, fire, police, ambulance workers and the media. There is a surprisingly jovial air as people wait – people chat while holding their Tim Horton’s double-doubles; others rig their Canadian flags to the guardrails. Below, truck drivers honk their horns and drivers and passengers wave the peace sign; people on the overpasses wave in response.
     That air changes to respectful silence as the flashing lights of the motorcade appear on the horizon. It takes only a few seconds for the police escort, hearse and entourage to pass. Then the overpass community quickly evaporates until the next soldier’s death.

Leu, Christine. 'Highway of Heroes' On Site review, no. 22 Fall 2009
©Christine Leu and On Site review

Basic Gestures: tortured positions

2010-11-11T13:11:00.001-08:00

Untitled (Abu Ghraib)

Shawn Michelle Smith
Private First Class Lynndie England became the most salient figure in the 2004 US media coverage of the Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal. Few can forget the images of the woman holding the leash, or pointing to men’s genitalia and signalling ‘thumbs up’. As the Abu Ghraib photographs circulated globally on the World Wide Web, the infamous ‘hooded man’ became the international icon of the anonymous Arab victim, and England, a white female soldier, became the international icon of the American torturer. In many ways, England became a symbol of the war gone wrong.

     Many were shocked to discover torture enacted by U.S. soldiers, and many more were shocked to see that torture perpetrated by a young white woman soldier. England became a symbol of the perversion not only of American democratic ideals and military procedures, but also of an ideal of white American femininity. If women soldiers have always unsettled ideals of gender norms, women soldiers as torturers did so doubly. England figured as the negative and inverted image of that other gendered symbol of the war, the heavily scripted hero, Jessica Lynch.

     Now years after the revelation of torture at Abu Ghraib, the legality of American military procedures continues to be debated. England has served a term in prison, but the orchestrators of the torture policy have not been prosecuted. Today England figures as both torturer and scapegoat, as one of the few punished for a much more pervasive administrative and military strategy.

     In this triptych I reproduce the now iconic gestures of England, but reduce them to their minimal forms. In doing so I hope to highlight the fundamental disconnect between these familiar, cocky, even seemingly innocuous expressions, and torture. Choosing white silhouettes, I hope to evoke the ways in which England, and the acts of torture she has come to represent, continue to haunt American culture. Ultimately I hope to trouble the disjuncture between ideas about American innocence and righteousness and the illegal provocations the nation has normalised.

Shawn Michelle Smith is Associate professor of Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Smith, Shawn Michelle. 'Basic Gestures: tortured positions' On Site review, no. 22 Fall 2009
©Shawn Michelle Smith and On Site review

Dark Tourism: spectacle vs barbarism

2010-11-11T13:05:00.001-08:00

www.stealth-g.net/

Taïka Baillargeon
For about a decade now, newspapers and travel guides have talked about a growing phenomenon called Dark Tourism which is described as ‘the act of travel and visitation to sites, attractions and exhibitions which has real or recreated death, suffering or the seemingly macabre as a main theme’.1 For some countries and particularly cities that experienced war in the last century, such tourism has become one of the most – if not the most – profitable branch of the local economy. For the purpose of tourism, sites are commonly transformed, redesigned, revamped, in order to be more accessible to the public. Malcolm Foley and John Lennon, who came up with the idea of dark tourism in 2000, talk about a ‘fundamental shift in the way which death, disaster and atrocity are being handed by those who offer associated tourism ‘products’’2 While this shift is promoted by politics, economy and media, it is often criticised, or at least questioned, amongst theorists. What is to be questioned here is not tourism itself, but the conversion of places of traumatic history into spectacles.

Some would argue that for most foreigners, going to countries that experienced wars and visiting memorials or remembrance sites seems to put them more directly in contact with a reality they don’t fully comprehend; it informs them. On the other hand, for local communities, the transformations of these places and/or their reconstruction often pushes a re-evaluation of history, forcing them to consider ethical and aesthetic values of space and building, which is necessary in order to go forward. Nevertheless, several theorists who thought about the importance of rebuilding and redesigning as an effort to embody – or simply remember – history, have mentioned their doubts on the commercialisation of theses places. The main problem is that promoting market-driven representations of history encourages reproduction instead of invention, as it keeps one prisoner of his past instead of turning him to his future; it also creates a slowing down of continuity and prevents the making of a new start. For Françoise Choay, the cult of patrimony ‘is justifiable only for a period of time: the time to take your breath in the present’s run; the time to re-insure a destiny and a reflection. Past this point in time, the mirror of patrimony would forfeit us with false conscience, fiction and repetition’.3 In this sense, even though a memory work is necessary, the ethics of it should be carefully handled.
What is to be feared here is that when history becomes a spectacle, the witness becomes a passive spectator. Although the spectacularisation of past events might have some cathartic and educational effects, it also keep the spectator uninvolved: ‘the alienation of the spectator, which reinforces the contemplated objects that result from his own unconscious activity works like this: the more he contemplates, the less he lives’.4 Guy Debord stated that ‘the spectacle is the bad dream of a modern society in chains and ultimately expresses nothing than its wish to sleep’.5   By visiting these places, spaces used and transformed for the purpose of an industry, dark tourists as well as locals might end up avoiding reality – even if unconsciously: we accept a spectacle in order to refuse a reality, to remain still, if not, detached.
While reading Foley and Lennon, I was challenged myself: what makes me want to visit post-war cities? Although I recognise that by going to these places I want to see and experience history, I think that perhaps Foley and Lennon have left something out. Dark tourism should also be considered as a more profound search for change, movement and creation in a time of global saturation. We might not visit these cities to see the end but the beginning. We might look for what is hidden beyond the spectacle in order to find something new. We are looking for a place where invention and movement is still possible and the destruction of certain cities and buildings doesn’t only provide new spaces for construction, it forces one to innovate and create. We therefore recognise destroyed sites and post-wars zones as purely inspirational. Global saturation pushes us to search for positive barbarism as Walter Benjamin described it in Poverty and Experience: ‘Barbarism? Yes, indeed. We say this in order to introduce a new positive concept of barbarism. For what does poverty of experience do for the barbarian, it forces him to restart from scratch; to make a new start; to make a little go along way; to begin with a little and build further looking neither left nor right’.6   We, the contemporary dark tourists, are not necessarily voyeurs as we might not ‘[yearn] for new experiences’.7   We want to see and practice the making of a new start; we want to take part in the development of new mindsets.

Belgrade – the wild
Thinking of Benjamin’s barbarism in this context also made me think of the countries that experienced wars in this context of global saturation. I then considered the wars that have occurred since the second half of the twentieth century and, referring to my own experience, I thought most particularly of Belgrade.
     During my few visits in Belgrade, I had a strong impression that everything was possible in the Serbian capital. As most Westerners, I first expected a greyish torn-down city, but then realized that despite its complex politics and critical war-history, the cradle of ex-Yugoslavia is extremely upbeat, lively and dynamic. Although the city was bombed five times during the twentieth century and regardless of the political and economic instability, the city experienced tremendous changes – most of which were lead by the citizens themselves. In fact, Belgrade is for me a very convincing example of what positive barbarism can look like and bring in terms of cities, architecture and urbanism.

In 2002, Stealthgroup (a group of architects from Yugoslavia and the Netherlands) published an article in which they referred to Belgrade as a wild city.9 They explained that ‘the paradigm of ‘wildness’ emerged through non-planned and scarcely regulated processes. In the urban domain, these processes feature a remarkable degree of innovation and led to possibilities for redefining institutional participation in the creation of urban space. The project shows a city that acts as an incubator of new urban forms’.10 They portrayed Belgrade as a city that continuously redefines itself, presenting and analysing ‘the uncontrolled urban processes that took place in the city of Belgrade during the 1990s’.11 Since 2002, the Stealthgroup has presented many projects concerning urban development in the Balkans, always with the idea that these wild processes were to be considered by other professionals and foreigners as a powerful and creative new approach to architecture and urbanism. The main idea here is to promulgate a positive balkanisation that is very close to what Benjamin called positive barbarianism. The work of the Stealthgroup shows how the experience of war has permitted new mindsets.12 And this type of projects is – or should be – part of what makes us dark tourists, it should be what pushes us to visit a city that experienced war. We have to stop visiting the past and start visiting the new. We have to accept that war is over and acknowledge what happens afterwards.

We live in a society of the spectacle, a saturated world where everything is a reproduction, where life goes faster and faster and where competition, in every domain, forces us to go further all the time without ever fully experiencing renewal. As a result, some of us might suffer from something close to what Walter Benjamin called poverty of experience. When, following the First World War, Benjamin recognised a new poverty, it wasn’t related to the war itself but to the rapid changes that occurred after it. This rapidity never really slowed down since and what Benjamin was presenting a century ago is still present today. What is left for us is ‘to free ourselves from experience [as] we long for a world in which we can make such pure and decided use of our poverty […] that it will lead to something valuable’.13

1 Stone, Phillip, Dark Tourism Forum, http://www.dark-tourism.org.uk, [June 2009].
2   Foley, Malcolm & John Lennon, Dark Tourism: The attraction of Death and Disaster. London: Thompson, 2000.   p 3
3   ‘Le culte du patrimoine n’est justifiable qu’un temps : temps de reprendre souffle dans la course du présent, temps de réassurer un destin et une réflexion. Passé ce délai, le miroir du patrimoine nous abîmerait dans la fausse conscience, la fiction et la répétition.’ Choay, Françoise, L’Allégorie du patrimoine. Paris: Seuil, 1992. p 189
4   Debord, Guy, The Society of The Spectacle. London: Rebel Press, 2004. p 30
5   Ibid p 10
6   Benjamin, Walter, ‘Experience and Poverty’ in Walter Benjamin. Selected Writings: Part 2, 1931-1934. edited by Michael W. Jenning, Howard Eiland & Gary Smith. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2005. p 732
7 Ibid p 734
8   1914 and 1915 (WW1), 1941 and 1944 (WW2), 1999 (NATO).
9 The StealthGoup: Ana Dzokic, Milica Topalovic, Marc Neelen & Ivan Kucina, ‘The Wild City’ in Hunch. Berlage Institute, 2002. pp 106-127
10 The StealthGoup, http://www.classic.archived.nl/wildcity/, [June, 2009].
11 The StealthGoup, ‘The Wild City’ in Hunch, Berlage Institute, 2002. p 108
12 We could easily visit such concept through a political point of view, for it could be seen as close to fascism or terrorism. This should certainly be looked at, but for the purpose of this text, it is more in terms of art and raw creation. This is not to make an apology for war but to acknowledge barbarism as Benjamin presents it.
13   Benjamin, Walter, ‘Experience and Poverty’ in Walter Benjamin. Selected Writings: Part 2, 1931-1934. edited by Michael W. Jenning, Howard Eiland & Gary Smith. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2005. p 734

Baillargeon, Taïka. 'Dark Tourism: spectacle vs barbarism' On Site review, no. 22 Fall 2009
©Taïka Baillargeon and On Site review

Ties That Bind

2010-11-11T12:56:00.001-08:00

Deryk Houston

Ties that Bind was installed at Beacon Hill Park, Victoria BC in the spring of 2009. In such work there is the legacy of a lifetime, in this case, emigration, the death of my young mother, and in the aftermath an awareness of the fragility of life. There is also the present: the ongoing deaths of British soldiers in Afghanistan.

War, and its inevitable deaths of soldiers and civilians, grandmothers and children, is the negation of so much about living that we take for granted. It is argued that war is a necessary evil even if it is complete hell. The counter to this is that life is precious and must be protected. Life must be held together.

Deryk Houston’s work has focussed on peace issues for the past fifteen years, including a series of earthworks, the subject of an NFB documentary, From Baghdad to Peace Country, 2003. www.derykhouston.com

Houston, Deryk. 'Ties that bind: (en)countering war' On Site review, no. 22 Fall 2009
©Deryk Houston and On Site review

Deception in the Art of Camouflage

2010-11-11T12:48:00.003-08:00

USS West Mahomet, 1918, in razzle dazzle camouflage
courtesy of Naval Historical Foundation, Washington Navy Yard

Aisling O'Carroll

Concealment and deception in hunting have been necessary for the survival of man since the earliest times. Survival in nature is a struggle in which speed, wit and especially concealment are vital. While many creatures have devices of camouflage and deception inherent in their physical make-up, humans have had to develop these methods of protection. The development of military technology was central to the development of camouflage in military activities.
Military camouflage falls into three categories: concealment, screening and misdirection.1 Concealment makes use of natural and artificial means such as colouration, paints or materials, or covering areas with netting to make the objects – for example, factories, airfields or troops – blend into their surroundings. Concealment is only effective with long-range weapons where attacks can be made from such a distance that colouration and shade conceal one’s position and machinery. Screens such as walls, hedgerows or smoke also can be used to hide military activity.
It is deception and misdirection that allows the widest range of approaches to camouflage. This method attempts to either mislead or distract the enemy. Rather than making an object disappear, it is made to look like something else. Deception provides the most interesting and surprising look into camouflage.

Deception in nature
Cuttlefish have the ability to change the colour of their skin within seconds to reflect and blend into their surroundings. This survival mechanism is produced by layers of cells in the skin, chromatophores – small organs containing dense pigment which can be expanded or contracted to show a dot of a particular colour on the skin’s surface. The layer beneath contains iridocytes, which produce a reflective or iridescent quality in the skin.2 Certain species however do more than disappear in their environment; Sepia officinalis uses disruptive patterning to distract and hypnotise both predator and prey. Wrapping around the central region of its back, irregular bands of light and dark colour radiate outward in a flowing zebra-pattern. This mechanism abstracts and confuses the contours of the body, distracting the creature in question long enough for the cuttlefish to either escape or make an attack.3

Dazzle Painting
Similar disruptive patterning was proposed in 1917 by Norman Wilkinson, a naval lieutenant and painter, to protect the British Navy from German submarines. Ships could not be made invisible through regular camouflage because of the constantly changing light and weather conditions at sea, but by painting them with strong patterns their recognisable shapes could be rendered as apparently distinct masses. Dazzle-painting, called Razzle Dazzle in the USA, made it difficult for a U-boat to determine the exact position or direction of the ship it wished to attack. The patterns were designed for maximum distortion when viewed using a periscope through which distance was normally calculated through a bioptic alignment of surfaces, something totally confounded by the stripes and colours of dazzle painting.4 Although there exists no real statistical evidence to prove dazzle painting did save ships, it was reported that sailors felt safer in them.

Decoy on D-Day
Deception can be used to produce two main effects, firstly to draw an enemy’s attention away from the real attack, and secondly, to distract from the real target and cause the enemy to expend its energy and ammunition on a false target. Both of these results may be produced by strategic use of decoys and dummies. A manifestation of this is the use of false radio transmissions and the planting of false operation directives and plans of battle. In many cases however, the decoy is quite literally constructed of dummy tanks, troops and artillery.
Camouflage was integral to the success of the D-Day invasion in WWII. By land and air different tactics were used to deceive the enemy. On the night before D-Day, dummy parachutists were dropped in a large-scale diversion over Normandy to distract from actual airborne landings. These dummies were designed one-third the size of a normal man, with parachutes to scale and weighted with sandbags. Noise mechanisms were attached to them to simulate the sound of weapon fire when the dummies hit the ground. As a small number of real Special Air Service troops were also dropped, it was the breadth of the operation that camouflaged the real from the decoy.5

In the North African campaign, also in WWII, an intensive plan of deception was laid out in order to break through the German lines, cutting their supply routes. Seven weeks were spent preparing for the October 23 launch of an offensive at El Alamein. While the main Allied infantry attack came from the north, a diversionary attack diverted German attention to the south. Once the northern infantry broke through the line, it was planned that armoured troops would follow to cut off supplies. Huge effort was put into concealing the vehicles assembling to the north, and simultaneously constructing enough decoy armour for the south to suggest preparation for a substantial battle. During the final stages of preparation for battle, trucks served as place-holders along the northern front, and would be furtively replaced by tanks on a night preceding the battle. The tanks themselves were disguised by ‘Sunshades’ – canvas covers giving them the appearance of trucks, so the Germans would not realise a switch had been made. As well as disguising weapons and vehicles, it became necessary to conceal 6000 tons of supplies. This was creatively achieved in a number of ways; petrol tins lined the walls of trenches as if they were masonry reinforcement, and food supplies were arranged in the form of trucks and camouflaged with canvas coverings. Meanwhile, similar effort went into bolstering the ruse of a larger offensive gathering to the south. As well as the apparent movement of armoury, the construction of a dummy pipeline to the south was staged. A trench was dug in regular stretches, with dummy pipes laid out alongside it. Each night these pipes would be moved forward to the next stretch, and the trench filled in. Dummy pump stations and filling tanks were constructed to reinforce the scheme.

Propaganda
After defeat in WWI, General von Seeckt was commissioned to reduce the German army as outlined by the Treaty of Versailles to a size less than the army of France. Defeat was not happily accepted by Germany, and while re-forming the Reichswehr according to the guidelines, von Seeckt also developed a nucleus idea – in theory, a small military nucleus could defeat a larger enemy with well-trained troops, superior mobility and mechanical strength.6
Mobility was addressed in 1930 when Fritz Todt, an engineer, veteran of WWI and close friend of Hitler, published a paper, ‘Proposals and Financial Plans for the Employment of One Million Men’, outlining his idea for a new national highway system. In theory this system was devised as a solution to the country’s unemployment problem, however also provided mobility for the armed forces. After Hitler’s election in 1933 Todt became the administrative director of the Reichsautobahnen and led the building of the Autobahn which was often presented as a facilitator of tourism in Todt’s magazine Die Strasse.7 Todt then went on to direct the construction of the West Wall fortifications, a 5-mile deep band of thousands of pillboxes, observation posts and anti-tank defences8 which drew the Allies to destroy it, even although it was not actually used in attack until near the end of the war.
In 1945 President Eisenhower presented his proposal for a National Highway System – an interstate network linking major cities. It was portrayed as an urban planning tool, reducing urban blight by redistributing population to the suburbs. Although this portrayal diminished the awareness of the network’s military uses, Eisenhower considered the system as a defence highway: ‘the road net must permit quick evacuation of target areas, mobilization of defence forces and maintenance of every essential economic function’.9 With both the Autobahn and the Interstate Highway System, deceptive propaganda successfully camouflaged the military significance of monumental infrastructure projects, portraying road networks as simple vehicles of liberatory convenience.

For the camouflage to successfully aid both offensive and defensive plans, it must be integral to the organisation of the operation. In war, disguise and confusion rely on cunning and inventive deception to considerably help one’s chances where total protection is impossible. However, deception only works when everyone, including civilians, believe the camouflage, not the underlying military narrative.

1 Hartcup, Guy. Camouflage, A History of Concealment and Deception in War. Vermont: David & Charles Inc, 1979. p 7
2 Norman, Mark and Amanda Reid. A Guide to Squid, Cuttlefish, and Octopuses of Australasia. Victoria: CSIRO Publishing, 2000. pp 12-18
3 Cott, Hugh B. Adaptive Colouration in Animals. London: Methuen & Co, 1957. p 96
4 Hartcup, Guy. p 43
5 Ibid. p 91
6 Mallory, Keith, and Arvid Ottar. The Architecture of War. New York: Pantheon Books, 1973. p 111
7 9 Vahrenkamp, Richard. ‘Tourist Aspects of the German Autobahn Project 1933 to 1939’. Working Papers in the History of Mobility No. 4/2006. University of Kassel, 2006
8 Mallory, Keith. p 109
9 Branyan, Robert L and Lawrence H Larsen. The Eisenhower Administration 1953 - 1961. New York: Random House, 1971. p 545

O'Carroll, Aisling. 'Deception in the Art of Camouflage' On Site review, no. 22 Fall 2009
©Aisling O'Carroll and On Site review

walls of the cold war

2010-09-09T10:40:00.007-07:00

by Açalya and Jens Allmer

On a visit to Berlin chances are high that you encounter little colourful pieces of concrete advertised as parts of the Berlin Wall, the manifestation of the iron curtain, being sold as souvenirs. Do you end up buying one of them? – sure you do!

       Walls in architecture can be ambivalent: do they keep people in, or out? Unlike the Great Wall of China which kept out the Mongols, or a prison wall which protects outsiders from its contents, the Berlin Wall which separated East from West Berlin displays exactly this ambiguity. Built in 1961 as a response to brain drain from communist East Germany (German Democratic Republic) to capitalist West Germany (Federal Republic of Germany) it was obviously meant to retain its inmates. However, propaganda in East Germany declared that the wall was protecting its East Germans from the threatening, all-engulfing, capitalistic ideology on the other side.
       The Berlin Wall became an icon of the Cold War. No other military installation, from bunkers and missile silos to military airports and any other military construction, ever gained such visibility. Clearly, its roots were in the aftermath of World War II and the subsequent division of Germany into four parts, each governed by one of the Siegermächte.
       Twenty-eight years after its construction, in 1989, the Berlin Wall was torn down. Thousands of Berliners attacked the wall with any tool they could lay their hands on. Today, on the twentieth anniversary of the demolition of the wall, is a quite different scene: groups of tourists now visit the remaining wall segments, such as the East Side Gallery near Warschauer Straße, or the Mauerpark near Prenzlauer Berg. The physical destruction of the wall was straightforward but removing it from people’s minds proved more difficult. Years after you are still able to hear some West-Germans say: ‘Let’s rebuild the wall but make it higher’.
The wall in its raw form as constructed by GDR’s Walter Ulbricht can hardly be called a piece of art but countless graffiti artists enhanced the appearance of the side facing the FDR. Painted peace-related topics and comments on the existence of the wall itself added value to its existence. Without this illegal (as the wall was completely on GDR territory) artwork the Berlin Wall would most likely not be exhibited as widely as it is today. Many pieces of it have been presented to political leaders and museums around the world – the Imperial War Museum in London and the Intrepid Sea Air Space Museum in New York, for example, underlining the historic significance of the object-nature of the wall: although either absent or dispersed, it still, fragmentally, exists.
       Shortly after the fall of the wall, selling its pieces, especially those with visible traces of graffiti, was very successful – buying a piece of the wall meant taking home a piece of German history. However, these pieces may represent more than a fragment of the wall; they can be considered a collective memory of what happened in Berlin. Through the wall’s elevation to a historical monument partially through its status as an artwork and mostly owing to its demolition, the Berlin Wall has been transformed from a symbol of the Cold War into its complete opposite, a symbol for overcoming differences and an icon representing peace.
       In the process of opening new construction sites, the authorities could possibly demolish the remaining fragments of the original wall. Soon we may no longer see the object that changed the lives of so many, that separated not only countries and ideologies, but more importantly families and lovers, just by its mere existence. It will become history in the word’s most literal meaning. 1
       Scattering its pieces as widely as possible (one per tourist, coming from anywhere in the world), makes it impossible to actually rebuild this wall. As long as sellers do not run out of wall fragments (how they do not is a mystery since large parts were exported and others were used in road construction), such a small piece of painted concrete sitting in your far-away house is not just a souvenir of Berlin but is also part of the dismantling of the Cold War. People who buy pieces of the Berlin wall take an active role in its deconstruction and may as well help in overcoming other, still existing barriers.
       Long after the complete disappearance of the wall from Berlin, with its memory dissolved in history, little pieces all over the world will collectively remind more people of its former existence than if it had remained on site. We therefore strongly encourage anyone to buy a piece of an amalgamation of history, art and peace. Is the piece you bought genuine? Doesn’t matter. With all the ambiguity and ambivalence of all walls, it is the concept that is important not the actual material.

1 A Deutsche Welle TV documentary on the Berlin Wall can be found at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwQsTzGkbiY
Allmer, Açalya and Jens. 'Walls of the Cold War: Berlin Souvenirs'. On Site review, no. 22 Fall 2009
©Açalya and Jens Allmer and On Site review

Fishing the Atchafalaya

2010-01-07T09:18:00.008-08:00

Allons au camp!

David Courville

Here in Louisiana, Spring happens early and quickly. By the beginning of April, the fig trees are leafed out, the peach and pear trees have set fruit, wild berries are ripe, irises are in full bloom, crawfish are cheap and we’re waiting for the flood, the annual flood of the Mississippi River. What we’re really waiting for is the flood’s recession…and the start of Camp season.
8,277 square miles of Louisiana are covered by water. There are 4000 miles of navigable waterway, 7,721 miles of tidal shoreline, 6000 square miles of marsh and a whole lot of swamp in Louisiana. There’s a lot of water here, but it’s not as accessible as you’d think it is. Once you’ve gotten to a place where you want to be in the marshes or the swamps, you can spend only a few hours there before you need to leave.
There are 1800 square miles of swamp in the Atchafalaya River Basin alone, the largest swamp in the United States, where most of the photos in this article were taken. The buildings in the photographs are called Camps. They are the solution to being able to spend longer periods of time on the water.
Before the Basin was leveed after the 1927 Mississippi flood, there were communities in it occupied with logging, fishing, crawfishing, moss-gathering, trapping, frogging, crabbing, etc. If there were camps then, they were more than likely work camps. Leveeing raised the flood levels of the Basin to a point where the communities were flooded on a regular basis and the residents moved outside the levees. About that same time, the outboard motor became commonplace, World War II moved a lot of people from the farms into towns and the Basin, now more accessible, was the target of newfound leisure time.
Camp Culture
As one Cajun carpenter put it, when asked whether the impressive structure he was building on the Pecan Island cheniere was a house or a store, ‘Iss not a house; Iss not a sto’; Iss a Camp!!’ Camps aren’t houses; they’re not cabins; they’re not a place to go to get away from people. They allow people to get together in a setting where personal space is shared with bugs that bite, snakes that bite, alligators that really bite and lots of other creatures not that bad. There are different types of Camp, but they all have one thing in common: active, independent-minded people who want to be ‘at the Camp’. Income level, for the swamp Camp builder has, until now, been a minor consideration.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Camps were relatively primitive. Few had electricity. Some had cisterns. A few might have had generators by the 1970s. Now, you’ll see generators, electrical lines, water wells, air conditioning, TV antennas and even satellite dishes at the Camp. Typical activities include hunting, fishing, cooking, eating, gambling, water sports – nowadays, with the addition of more amenities, Camps are becoming more house-like and more family-oriented.
Camp Etiquette
It’s a job just getting to a camp, much less building one. Because they are remote and relatively small, being invited to a Camp borders on being bestowed with an award. You bring your best attitude and you make a contribution of effort to keep the Camp clean and organised. They’re a lot like small ships.
Site
There are two primary determining factors in situating a camp. If the camp is built to float, the site selection is more flexible. The Camp can be situated entirely on the surface of the water. Floating Camps tend to be placed in navigable areas outside the current of the river and its associated bayous. Man-made canals left over from oil-field activity are ideal because of the adjoining spoil bank which can be used for creating small yards, elevating generators, etc.
If the Camp is land-based, the site selection is limited to those areas which allow the camp to be elevated to a height above flood stage and the outdoor components to be on the water. These sites tend to be near an intersection of a bayou with a lake or river, or on the bank of a chute between lakes, where the spoil from dredged channels has formed a mound. On a larger scale, more Camps are situated in the lower Basin where flood levels are less extreme, or outside the levees, where the swamps are relatively protected from flooding.

Access: the procession
The procession from ordinary places to Camps defines the layout of Camps on-site, especially those that are land-based. Access is by boat, arriving at the dock of the Camp, from which there is a walkway to the Camp, often including a stair to the porch of the Camp. The walkway either traverses or bypasses the waterside pavilion, where most of the daytime activity at the Camp happens: fish fries, crawfish boils, swimming, fishing, crabbing and playing. On the water, there are fewer mosquitoes, there is usually a breeze, and there is the View.
Construction
The most difficult part of camp construction is building the foundation. It involves either the construction of a floating platform or the construction of a raised platform. This phase of construction requires the heaviest logistics: pontoons, poles, heavy timbers, etc. After the foundation is built, the remaining construction is accomplished with modular transportable materials (small pieces that fit in a boat):
– sheet materials like plywood, and metal building components
– roll materials like sheet metal and roll roofing
– lumber and boards.
Camps were and still are built from leftover or salvaged materials.
New weather
Recent hurricanes – Katrina, Rita and Gustav – devastated Camp populations, especially in the marsh along the coast. The coastal Camps have sprung right back up, larger and stronger and with them, so have land prices and the Building Codes. On the other hand, the Basin Camps managed the storm surges from the hurricanes and were somewhat protected from the winds. Unfortunately, accessibility to coastal Camps has become a financial hurdle, rather than a physical one. But the Basin and other swamp areas are the holdout for the middle-income Camp. Building codes aren’t enforced in the swamp, yet, and the sites are generally leased from the State for a reasonable fee.

Courville, David. 'Allons au camp!' On Site review, no. 21 Spring 2009
©David Courville and On Site review

Ice Fishing

2010-01-07T09:11:00.002-08:00

Village Life
Paul Whelan

As soon as Lake Simcoe starts to thaw, the fisher folk decamp their ice huts and wait out the summer heat until the next winter freeze. Not all the huts get transported to land in time and some poorly-timed hut removals end up in the water as boating hazards. The ice huts are extremely straightforward structures which directly reflect the simple requirements of ice fishing. Most importantly, the huts have to be light so they can easily be transported off and onto the ice. Even during the fishing season the ice huts get moved around as fishers tire of their location and chop other more alluring holes in the ice.
At first and even second glance, the settlement pattern villages appear completely random. These villages do not have to follow urban planning conventions. All the careful rules that Canadians construct to regulate every aspect of our built environment are abandoned on the ice. This is somewhat due to the lack of jurisdiction. The federal government regulates navigable bodies of water. When this water freezes, the local townships and villages do not have any power over activities on the ice. This regulatory vacuum sets up some unusual situations. Local restauranteurs complain to the City of Barrie about the unregulated food (and alcohol) businesses that supply the ice huts. Beer, rye whisky and high cholesterol foods are an important aspect of ice village life. Alas the local authorities have no jurisdiction so the ribs and rye continue to nourish the villagers.
As always with humans settlements, there is an ordering pattern, but it is not based on the criteria that drive settlement on land. The ice is free and there is no shortage of prime real estate. Instead the first ordering principal is proximity to a public road so the huts can be dragged onto the ice. Public boat launches and marinas are perfectly suited. The second ordering principal is established by the fish themselves. While the idea of ice fishing may seem rustic, the fishers use sonar to locate fish which generally congregate in the deeper underwater valleys. This fish congregation is further encouraged by the release of live minnows as ‘seeds’ for attracting even more fish. The huts are scattered in response to water depth and winter fish habitat. This critical settlement imperative creates an apparent random hut placement on the frozen lake.
On the ice, sanitation is rudimentary. This particular ice village had a portable toilet. Ironically it is much cleaner than the more easily serviced toilet on shore. It might be possible that at minus 20°C and with a strong wind howling across the flat ice, the fishing holes may do double duty.

*
The huts themselves are tiny. They are designed to permit two or four people to sit in deck chairs huddled around one or two holes. There is often not enough headroom to stand. The design is driven by reducing the hut’s weight and heated volume. Even within these constraints there is some variety and opportunity for self expression. While ice fishing may seem a northern rural phenomenon, its popularity on Lake Simcoe, within walking distance of downtown Barrie, suggests ice fishing also has a powerful urban draw. Aside from an obvious love of fresh fish, what is the draw? Perhaps this is the ultimate thumbing of the nose at winter. The fisher people simultaneously experience the over-heated claustrophobia of an ice hut while floating on a wind-swept field of frozen water. After all, it is impossible to forget that first needle-sharp intake of breath when stepping out from the fug of a dimly-lit hut into the blinding light of a sub-zero day.

Whelan, Paul. 'Ice Fishing 2' On Site review, no. 21 Spring 2009
©Paul Whelan and On Site review

the ice huts of Lake Nipissing

2010-01-07T08:54:00.006-08:00

Weather-causing architecture
Steve Sopinka

Every winter, the waters of Lake Nipissing in North Bay, Ontario freeze solid. The result is a frozen icescape, 875 square kilometres transformed into new territory for snowmobilers, cross country skiers, snowshoers and ice fishers. There is something intriguing about the reclamation of the frozen water — even more captivating are the ice-fishing huts that begin to appear and evolve into an ad-hoc frozen shanty village. These structures capture the eye of the prefab enthusiast, the mobile-architecture buff, the Ministry of Natural Resources and, most importantly, ice fishers who are reminded that fishing comrades are ‘out there’ and they are not. On Lake Nipissing, weather defines an incidental, accidental architecture.

If there is an architecture that has almost no cost, is void of conscious architectural style and exceeds the expectations of its dweller — the ice-fishing hut could very well be it. Depending on your need for comfort and your ideas of how to outfit an ice-hut, your hut may or may not begin to look like your neighbour’s. The list of materials used is both long and unconventional: used lithograph plates, recycled wood pallets, metal flashing (and lots of it), discarded road signs and $1 trouble lights. Rigid styrofoam SM insulation is an interior finish. A converted greenhouse and an old garden shed have been given second life as ice huts.
Given their often slapped-together construction, their random assemblage of otherwise discarded materials into ad hoc shelter, does considering ice huts as architecture give them too much credit? Maybe the taxonomy isn’t important. It isn’t to the ice fishers – it’s all about the fishing – just ask any of the inhabitants. Try to talk architecture or even building, and the conversation inevitably ends up in a discussion about lures, ice augers and more importantly, the weather.

Maybe it isn’t about the fish or the architecture. The most compelling aspect of experiencing these ice huts is the visual transformation of water into ice – to see the massive frozen expanse that begins underfoot and disappears into the horizon. The formation of this newly constructed icescape, brought on by the change in weather, is what is most fascinating.
We talk about buildings being connected to site, integrated with their surroundings, symbiotic with the landscape. An ice hut integrates directly with the snow-covered ice surface of the lake, literally freezing to the ‘site,’ as currents and wind shift the ice. There is something strangely indigenous about these huts. They have become something familiar — an icon, a symbol, a retreat, a weather vane, a black dot in an otherwise uninterrupted landscape.

The heroic effort of constructing a small hut, transporting it out onto the ice by snowmobile, maintaining it and securing it from being blown away during a sustained wind storm lies in the larger idea of weather-causing architecture: an ephemeral building, upon a temporary landscape, within a unique season. The ice hut grows out of the collective phenomena of weather and architecture where these two entities meet in a typology of low-tech habitation full of simplicity and honesty.

The idea of transformation, mobility, temporality and resourcefulness, combined with weather, over time, equals one ice-fishing season on Lake Nipissing. Land artist Andy Goldsworthy has said that ‘a landscape doesn’t have to involve land – time is a landscape’.

Why does an ice-covered lake in Northern Ontario accommodate some of the most honest, dynamic, and vulnerable architecture to have evolved directly out of the weather? It is both out of necessity and functionality, but also is underpinned by the seasonal climate change that reclaims of a body of water and establishes static boundaries usually unassociated with such undefined and expansive territory.

The ice huts demonstrate and reveal value as objects, as shelter, as a means to survive and simply as a way to connect with uncommon ‘ground’. The weather, the economy and current architecture trends all have something in common, but the ice hut has a life of its own. It is sustainable by default. It has the potential to weather the climate and recession with resilience.

Sopinka, Steve. 'Weather-causing Architecture' On Site review, no. 21 Spring 2009
©Steve Sopinka and On Site review

Rock and Liberty

2009-11-27T07:10:00.004-08:00

Açalya Klyak

Speaking bluntly, there are not many significant differences in the construction of the classically draped Liberty Statue and Frank Gehry's recent buildings.

CLOTHING AND DRAPERY
Clothing is an area of concern that modern architects often dealt with, referred to in their writings and made direct comparisons with architecture. Similarly, tailors, fashion designers and editors talk about the 'construction' of clothes, which begins with flat patterns and becomes three-dimensional after a series of operations, i.e. cutting, sewing, and stitching. However, drapery is a word rarely mentioned in architectural discourse. What exactly is a drapery? Basically it is a piece of cloth. It is the simplest method of clothing. It can be hung or laid over the body without cutting or sewing the material. A drapery can be made from either one rectangular piece of cloth or several cloths of various sizes, having no form by itself. It moves freely with the positions and movements of the body and it behaves differently according to the thickness of the cloth. In antiquity, Egyptians, Assyrians, Greeks, and Romans used clothing of this kind.

INSIDE THE LIBERTY STATUE
The representation of the draped body, associated with luxury, wealth, and nobility, has been a widespread theme in fine arts for centuries. Yet, compared to sculpture or painting, the rendering of drapery in architecture is quite rare. One notable example is the 151 feet tall and 225 tons of Liberty wearing a green copper drapery, designed in 1880s by the French Neoclassical sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi in direct imitation of antiquity. The Statue of Liberty is habitable; unlike other statues, its skin encloses an interior space. Her loose copper drapery is hung over the armatures placed on her iron skeleton, designed by Gustave Eiffel. The inner surface of Liberty's copper skin and the iron skeleton are not intended to be visually connected. This uncanny conjunction is also a part of the visitor's experience. Bartholdi conceived Liberty entirely in terms of its outer contours. After settling the final form in a clay model, it was enlarged to a full-scale set of plaster fragments in his Paris workshop. Following the contours of the plaster, massive wooden moulds are built. And then thin copper sheets (2.5 millimetres in thickness) are forced into shape of the moulds by hammering. The copper panels are fastened together, hung on the iron skeleton and eventually present her webbed 'skin'.

IT'S ONLY ROCK AND ROLL
Experience Music Project (EMP) in Seattle, opened in June 2000, was the first large-scale Gehry building after Bilbao. EMP is a music museum, dedicated to the memory of the Seattle-born Jimi Hendrix, thanks to the cofounder of Microsoft, Paul Allen's love of rock music and his 240 million dollars. The museum's webpages explain that EMP's structure symbolises the energy and fluidity of music; while an electric guitar is the source of inspiration. One can imagine Gehry, a classical music fan, going to the guitar store in the neighbourhood and buying several electric guitars. After taking the guitars back to his office to examine, Gehry ends up being inspired only by their shiny finish. EMP shimmers in vivid red, purple, blue, gold, and silver, dominating the Seattle convention area.

FROM OUTSIDE IN
Strictly speaking, in the complete monograph of Gehry, only one section and a few plan drawings if EMP appear. There is an obvious reason: try to imagine the difficulty of describing the building by means of conventional drawings. The traditional plan, elevation, and section are no longer employed by Gehry. Building EMP from orthogonal drawings would be nearly impossible. In a similar instance, Robin Evans wrote that in Scharoun's Philharmonie project construction workers confronted serious difficulties in setting out the foundations. Only after taking large-scale sections at very closely spaced intervals across the breadth of the building, could workers continue to build. To describe EMP one would need to chop the building into billions of thin slices. Instead of this burdensome task, Gehry's office employed a digital three-dimensional model as the single source of information for the entire project. Working with a wire frame model of the exterior surface of the building, EMP is conceived from outside in, not unlike the Statue of Liberty. The way in which EMP is constructed also presents similarities with Liberty. Gehry begins with a study model. Once he decides on the final form, the model is digitised and scaled to full-size in the computer environment. At this stage one can experience the building constructed virtually in three-dimensions. The software, acting like a weaving program, allows the three-dimensional forms to be charted two-dimensionally. In a method similar to tailoring, cutting machines produce each shape from flat sheets of metal.

ARCHITECT VERSUS TAILOR
One can speculate that L. William Zahner, the head of a steel company in Kansas City, Missouri, is equally a tailor. Working directly from the digital model provided by Gehry, Zahner's firm produced the nearly 4,000 panels that form the exterior skin of EMP. Each panel holds about seven shingles that have a unique shape and size, tailored to fit exactly in its designed location and each panel is woven together in situ. As a result, the building's surface looks like a patterned drapery. Consider the time, energy, and amount of money spent in draping the metal shingles over the EMP's structure. Given the materiality and weight of the building, rendering of a drapery is not an easy task.

BEHIND THE DRAPERY
What one sees in EMPs drapery is the representation of technology. The other representation beneath the glossy surface is the unlimited budget of the client. It seems that drapery continues to suggest luxury and wealth as it did in art for centuries. Recall the practice of depicting drapery in European Renaissance paintings linked to the rise of rich merchant families. There was no purpose for depicting drapery in those paintings other than 'to take delight in the way it looks'. It is also interesting to note that over-draped fabrics were derided by reformers in the nineteenth century because it was believed that they just represent 'a millionaire's notion of the pretty and nothing more'.

Anne Hollander, writing on the role of drapery in art, explains the concept of drapery as 'something which while it conceals, yet confers an extra ennobling or decorative dimension upon the essentially wretched and silly human form'. The question of what is behind the drapery in EMP comes to mind. Drapery directs one's attention to the presentation of the object, but what happens if the drapery becomes the main subject displayed? Unlike the Statue of Liberty, EMP is a museum — the structure is not its only material presence. The museum website tries to put the content forward: 'If you think its wild on the outside, just wait until you get inside. There you will find interactive exhibits, rare artefacts and a one-of-a-kind ride!' Paying $20 to get inside, rather than stopping at the exterior skin, is their aim.

The many connotations of drapery, luxury, excess, concealment and display seem unintentionally appropriate for EMP. The surface is almost a fetish. Although it appears as a loose drape laid over the structure, it is uniquely tailored, an expensive, shiny, boozy dress ready for a rock concert. Versace for buildings.

sources: Of the statue and its structure, see Marvin Trachtenberg. The Statue of Liberty. New York: The Viking Press, Inc., 1976. p 119-50 Repoussé is an ancient technique (i.e. Greek bronzes, made of hammered sheets of metal), revived in many nineteenth-century large-scale architectural and sculptural projects, ibid., 121. Robin Evans. The Projective Cast: Architecture and Its Three Geometries. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1995. p 120-1 Anne Hollander, 'The Fabric of Vision: The Role of Drapery in Art' Georgia Review 29 (1975): 431. Gen Doy. Drapery: Classicism and Barbarism in Visual Culture. London, New York: IB Tauris, 2002. p 11 Anne Hollander. Seeing Through Clothes. New York: Viking Press, 1978. p 15

Açalya Klyak. ''Rock and Liberty' On Site review, no. 9 Spring 2003
©Açalya Klyak and On Site review

Sewing the Landscape

2009-11-23T07:03:00.004-08:00

Mugwort (Artemesia vulgaris) at a hydrant on Kings Plaza Station, New York

Christina Maile

1
Nature is the secret order of things, which requires only the essence of our pure and rational thought to make itself truly understood. We believe our survival depends on the success of this search for order. However, every supposed revelation of pattern has become for us, in turn, a compelling pattern for remaking the world around us. In the end we have been conditioned by the conditions we have created.

Our cities and buildings have come to reflect a perception of nature, as it should be — symmetrical, inflexible, ordered, and predictable. To be uncivilized is to live illegibly in the cluttered wilderness of nature, dressed in the skins of animals, the ragged remnants of manmade cloth hanging like the tattered ends of rationality. Against this, the vast cities we have created cover the earth like a fabric, an unwavering, unending fabrication. It is an intelligence of hard, opaque disjunctive pieces in tight, complex displays of designs and motifs, encased in grids. The metaphor is obvious. The manmade environment is a Cartesian quilt of surfaces.

Upon it, the scissored, precise, regulated landscape (no longer nature) is serrated to the geometries of architecture and artifact. Trees are the green’pieces’ of landscape sewn between the grey and blue ’pieces’ of concrete and asphalt. Any foundation planting, including the largest - city parks - are sentimental appliques of pastoral art, neatly stitched into the grid of the city. Like the scenic curtains from which our current view of landscape is taken, the grass is never long, the trees never too large, and the shrubs always clean, tight and numerical. Maintenance-free and as real as the flowers of the city which are never picked, but purchased — the urban landscape is scentless, nameless and ultimately rootless.

There is no here, no site specificity in the landscape of the city. We stand in the snow and stare through the glass at the pieces of gigantic palm trees sewn (at great environmental cost) into a mid Atlantic skyline and never say,’Isn’t that sad.’ We hurry by oaks buttonholed into tiny concrete boxes and never cry bitter tears. There are no roots in the urban landscape because there is no origination. Like fabric, the landscape exists on the surface, gridded, denatured, sterile. Seeding, fruiting, growth and decay all denied, the urban landscape takes on the properties of a commemorative urn, a sputtering eternal flame kind of presence, fed by petroleum, more’4ever green’ than green, more funereal than real. In the city, landscape is the death of nature, and the death of our perception of it. Save for one spark of beauty.

2
For like a quilt, the surfaces of the city, its structural pieces, are not seamless. They must all meet in adjacencies. No material melts into another continuously. Old concrete against new, asphalt against steel curb against stone, there remains a void, a space, a joint, an interstice between the two materials. These joints, as do the materials they buffer, eventually open as the result of successive waves of weathering. Form follows tempo. Asphalt unravels, concrete frays, metal shrinks, and glass tumbles. Edges are created. And into these small openings, the hereness of the city, the wild and crazy roots and shoots of nature break forth, ripping open ever-larger seams. The bed has assaulted the quilt. (Innuendo intended).

Sex, sex, sex, rampant seeding, fruiting, pushing, shoving, thrashing, tumbling, clasping, unclasping, bursting forth. The edges of the city that are everywhere are alive with a voracious beauty, possessed only by the wind, the sun, and the rain. Enemies of good design and moral order, they are not the right plant in the right place. Instead they boldly and promiscuously push themselves outside of, inside of, on top of, and all around the gates of paradise (the walled Garden of Eden). They are called many names - mulleins, lambsquarters, eleusine indica, mugwort, goosefoot, and soldago, to name a few. But the name everyone knows them by is …weeds.

Webster’s Dictionary defines a weed as an economically useless plant of wild, obnoxious growth and unsightly appearance whose presence either excludes the growth of more valuable plants or contributes to the disfigurement of the place. That is the landscape definition of a weed. But not mine. Rather these incredible beings, these shimmering threads of stubborn desire are the city’s true connections to the fertile, chaotic bed of organic creativity lying just beneath us. The fabrication of the mind, this urban fabric is, in fact, rent by a deeper fabrication. An earthy, prowling subconscious whose initial manifestation — a bumpy rosette of tough knotted stems — represents the continuing presence of nature’s irrational behavior. And our failure to destroy it. To weed: to free from something noxious, offensive or superfluous. It is not surprising, then, that weeds are described as growing in disturbed areas. For we are greatly disturbed. They dare invade our gridded neighborhoods, unthread the brocade of our tidy streets and gardens. Hanging around at all hours of the night they just , it seems, appear overnight. And now in broad daylight, there they go, strutting their berries, wiggling their tiny flowers, their erect panicles indiscriminately casting seeds to the winds. They colonize every raveled edge, every joint, rooting themselves in, uprooting our stuff out. It’s criminal. Call the cops. Weeds should be charged with disturbance of the ’piece’.

3
To ‘wear weeds’ at one time referred to a fabric especially woven (wede - to weave) and worn to indicate an occupation, a situation or a position. Now it defines only mourning. And while that meaning may resonate visually in the somber straight lines of the urban landscape, the key word is weaving. For what we see in the homonymous weeds is a testimony to their occupation as healers, as weavers of green and fulsome blankets which spread stitch by stitch, warp by woof to cover the beaten and broken remains of the natural world. They mend, no, they amend all that is missing in our geometries — spontaneity, authenticity, growth. Whether we come up on them as small gestures of grassy stems with fuzzy ends, or bold sweeps of branches coruscating against stony skies, what we truly come upon, long hidden and obscured by culture, is the genius of the place. The absolute hereness of weeds. Not the here denoted, or the here designed. Not the here of utility, or of property. But that inexhaustible, nimble hereness which arises from a particular, fortuitous swirl of sun, rain, wind and edge. The hereness that creates place. It is the here whose center is not I-standing-here. It is the here where our carefully-hemmed natural order is undone, where unloosened the knots which keep us bound to the things we have created disappear. And it for this reason we fear this or that place where weeds grow, and grind back into dust or concrete their unbidden, heedless therapy. The oak in its box, the palm tree in its glass. That’s how nature should be, forever indebted, grateful to us for life, no matter how mean, brutal, shallow, sterile and short.

Yet here where weeds grow, what nascent beauty is endlessly being embroidered beneath the curling edges of asphalt at our feet; what forests contained beneath the mantle of these small tough leaves; what sudden valley, what shadowed stream? Weeds are the memories of earth. It is their presences, furtive, unwanted and denigrated which connect us, tie us to the natural world, and undo in endless filagree the hard edges of chaos we have created. The cracks of the city are the furrows for their lessons; weeds, persistently ‘weaving the weeds’ of exquisite permutation, of place, of immortality.

We are proletarians subjugated to the opiate of rational order, delirious with geometry, forever coming apart at the seams. Weeds are the warnings against the catastrophe of perception which continues to generate the monoculture known as the man-made environment. If we continue to see them as destroyers of our order, if we fail to recognize in them the fate of our own shining beauty, the darkness will continue to descend over our wounded eyes.

Maile, Christina. 'Sewing the Landscape' On Site review, no. 8 Fall 2002
©Christina Maile and On Site review

Velo-City

2009-11-19T14:00:00.005-08:00

Chris Hardwicke

It’s Monday morning. You grab your gear and strap your bag onto your bike. It is cold and raining, and the traffic’s heavy, but it’s only a few minutes to the bikeway. Here it is. A quick lane change and you are pumping your way up the onramp and gliding through the entrance. The street noise falls away as you join the flow. Already you feel the draft of the other cyclists blurring past in the fast lane, their steady wind pulling you forward. You relax into the rhythm and the tension leaves your shoulders as you let down your defences. No more cars breathing down you neck.
You ride along, matching your speed to those around you and looking through the raindrops on the glass-domed tube at the panorama of the city. Up ahead, you see a friend’s familiar bike trailer– he’s taking the kids to daycare. Pulling into the slow lane you chat for a few minutes before they get to their off-ramp.
Soon the bikeway opens up, widening to six lanes as you pass the commuter train station. Hundreds of suburbanites on yellow bikes merge smoothly into traffic. As you cross a valley, high above the expressway, the sun breaks through the clouds. You shift down, and take the next exit to work. Checking your watch, you notice you are early again.
Welcome to velo-city.

Velo-city is a highway for bikes, a network of elevated bicycle roadways connecting distant parts of the city. There are three lanes of traffic–slow, medium, and fast–in both directions, each direction having a separate glass-roofed bikeway tube. The separation of directions reduces wind resistance and creates a natural tailwind for cyclists. The reduction of air resistance increases the efficiency of cycling by about 90 percent, allowing for speeds of up to 50 km/hr.
Because it is elevated, Velo-city can be located in existing highway, power, and railway corridors, adapting to the built environment while requiring no additional real estate. Bikeways float above intersections and fit into spaces where trains, subways, and roads simply can’t go due to their size, noise, and pollution. Light and compact (you can fit seven bicycles in the road space taken up by one car) Velo-city produces no noise or pollution, so it can run right beside or even into buildings.
For commuters, Velo-city delivers total travel times that rival any other form of high-speed transit, and it is active rapid transit. In contrast to the passivity of taking a train or a bus; it includes exercise as an essential part of an urban lifestyle. Personal independence is expressed in individual freedom of movement. By working as a parallel infrastructure connected to subways, railways, highways, and parking lots, the bikeways expand commuting choices, while reducing congestion on our transit systems and highways. Bikeways are the ultimate in efficient, health-generating rapid transit.
Maintenance costs for Velo-city would be substantially lower than the expense of keeping subways and highways in good operational order, because the weight and vibration of bicycles is considerably less than that of automobiles or railways. And because Velo-city is covered, the lane surfaces would be sheltered from weather distress.
The culture of a city is often defined by its transportation system: yellow cabs in New York City, bicycles in Beijing, streetcars in San Francisco, freeways in Los Angeles, double-decker buses in London, scooters in Taipei, vaporetti in Venice, cyclos in Ho Chi Minh City, and the Paris Metro. Modes of transport create interdependent relationships with urban forms and city culture. Think of the relationships between cars and shopping malls, subways and skyscrapers, streetcars and main streets, scooters and roadside stalls. Over time, Velo-city will create a cycling culture for the cities it inhabits: kiss ’n’ rides, shower facilities, cycling fashion shops, velodomes, bike parks, health clubs, cycle path stalls, repair shops, bike couriers, bike picnics, car-free housing and intermodal stations. Velo-city would simply give bicycles the same level of dedicated infrastructure that other modes of transportation have enjoyed.

The bicycle has been around for more than a hundred years. It was a brilliant, modern invention back then, and remains one today. Bicycle enthusiasts have always been tenacious and devoted. And now, perhaps, it is an idea whose time has come back – bicycles now outsell automobiles in North America.

Hardwicke, Chris. 'Velo-city' On Site review, no. 21 Spring 2009
©Chris Hardwicke and On Site review

Archival Magpies

2009-08-24T06:51:00.003-07:00

the role of photography in the work of Measured Architecture

Matthew Woodruff

If you’re a collector, you’re a collector, and we are collectors. We collect furniture, books, old bones, plants, music, collaborators and eccentric friends. We also have a profound desire to catalogue the world; to gather textures, colours, forms, effects, places and moods. Starting at home we’re searching for tidbits that could find their way in to our work. Photographs are seductive because of their transparency. Do they represent things, or are they things themselves? A collection of photographs is seductive as well. It’s substantial (due to quantity) and ephemeral, for the meaning often lies in the space between the images. The digital age only enhances this contradiction, with our collection existing as it does only on the office server, and in a few ratty printouts. What, beyond the knowledge of it, do we really have?
As archivists we draw meaning from a group of images. Our desire is to record everything that exists, as a means of understanding it. Do shadows fall differently on a wall than a floor? How does concrete age? Which walls get graffiti, and which don’t? We have inventories of stains and plants, of forms and textures. We’re interested in the liveliness of old spaces, and the sterility of new ones (including ours). Where does that come from? Photographs are a good way to explore this.

Our practice is grounded in the belief that architects are storytellers. We tell the story of the site and the path of the sun, the story of construction, and the story of daily life. We also tell the story of our client’s values. As communicators we find that photographs help us to explore these stories and then tell them effectively. Photographs can be tremendously powerful, as much because of what is left out as what remains within the frame. A photograph is a way of simplifying chaos. The problem of course is that life itself is not so easily digestible.

Each project in the office starts with a pinup wall filled with images, and the first few meetings are always spent with clients gathered around this wall, seeing what they respond to. Because we use images to start thinking about a project, the narrative of similar spaces, of effects and experiences, modified by our discussions, becomes our departure point. But, we are wary of the pitfall of the Facebook generation, which can confuse photographing something with actually seeing it. It’s not enough to have the document, it has to be understood, absorbed, digested and reworked. At best, each photograph represents an idea, but it must contribute to the project and reinforce the concept as a whole to have a place in the building.

The virtual world (and images, especially photographs, don’t have much weight as things themselves) has created a virtual life, where the record of an event or a place, becomes a surrogate for it, thus creating a filter to the past. In contrast, our process is deliberate and only begins with the click of the shutter. The best images are tagged and printed, pinned up and rearranged in a search for meaning. Certain images become touchstones. Why is this? We like to think it’s because they communicate a mood, but perhaps it’s just because ordinary experiences are delivered in bite-sized pieces. Our buildings tend to solidify slowly around events and we use photographs as surrogates for the experiences we are planning. It’s meaningful to a client to explain where they will see this or that shadow, or the colour of the light by pointing to a picture. It makes an abstract idea come alive.

Ultimately, architects are shameless magpies. We would be fools if we argued divine inspiration over mimetic skill. However, by accepting the visual language of modern life, and surrounding ourselves with these stimulants, we can absorb, digest, work and rework them, until they finally appear as ideas in our projects. In the end, we can trace the thread of a shadow from Cairo to a house in Vancouver.

Woodruff, Matthew. 'Archival Magpies' On Site review, no. 20 Winter 2008
©Matthew Woodruff and On Site review

Home Movies

2009-08-24T06:45:00.003-07:00

film archives

Jen VanDenBurgh

There was once an archive housed in the basement of post-WWII, Levittown-inspired, pitched roof house in the Toronto suburb of Mississauga. The street was Cortland Crescent in Applewood Acres, so named in honour of the apple orchards that were razed to build the neighbourhood. Now I draw your attention from the exterior design of the street space where everything looked the same, choreographed to keep kids playing in view of their parents, to the basement where no one but an invited guest was meant to look and I doubt that ever happened. Guests belonged upstairs. This subterranean space was for family, a museum curated by my grandparents as a monument of who they believed we collectively were and their hopes of what we would become. In this place, we would watch my grandfather’s movies.

Cool, damp and dimly lit, the habitable portion of the basement was a ‘finished’ box of acoustic tile on a dropped ceiling, speckled black and white linoleum squares, and faux wood paneling. While the rest of the basement was ‘for storage’, this room, too, stored objects in the spirit of utilitarian reverence, housing treasures from Gramps and Jeannie’s family homes, from the family they made together, and the travels they had together once their family had grown. A leather rocker and a large circular mission-style coffee table came from my grandfather’s side of the family. On the table, scented hotel soaps and restaurant matchbooks, trophies from my grandparents’ travels filled the basket and the lacquered ballerina box that my sister and I dumped and sorted and sniffed through. If my sister and I answered a geography question correctly, Gramps would dole out artifacts from the ‘secret box’, a trove of trinkets from Christmas crackers, airline freebies, and office supply relics from his time at the Red Cross and the Ministry of Education stashed in his leather studded desk beside the stairs. An L-shaped bench-style couch wrapped two of the main walls and was upholstered in black, synthetic ‘wool’-covered foam. Its size was important since it allowed my family to huddle together: me, my sister, my parents, my grandmother, and, on occasion, two cousins, and an uncle and aunt. Here, we would sit and watch my grandfather set up the awkward and threatening spring-loaded screen, and thread his 8mm projector as my father played the piano that had come into my grandmother’s family when she and her eight brothers and sisters were asked by their father whether they wanted to spend that year’s farm surplus on a piano or a car. Behind the piano hung a gilt-framed painting of a fancy Victorian woman lounging at a similar piano, done by Blair Bruce, Jeannie’s storied cousin who left Hamilton to find his fortune as a painter in Europe, and though well-thought of now, impoverished his parents by requiring patronage and having the misfortune of sinking the bulk of his work on a downed ship.

Here in this basement museum, my father’s childhood and mine existed simultaneously, separated only by a reel change. In Gramps’ films, dad jumped into Georgian Bay at the same age as I was only moments before, silently dancing all arms and legs before the camera. All of us in the family had our moment as babies wriggling on Jeannie’s white flikkati rug. In these images we were indistinguishable, even to our mothers who scrutinised and discussed our telling features. This identification was part of the tradition – ‘was this 1966 or 1968?’ — but the point, I think, was that we blended together. Watching these films was an exercise in how connected we are in the passage of time. My father instantly transformed from a child on the screen to a parent before me. I’m sure other families have identical film archives, collections of Christmases and vacations that are interchangeable with mine, but that is also the point. The archives might be the same, but the space and lived experience of every family museum has particular variances and rituals, a language of its own. My dad played the piano during the reel changes and when the film melted in the gate. This was the culmination of years of disgruntled practice that he passed down to my sister and me, music history memorised off of Gramps’ shirt cardboards because Jeannie said it was to be done. This, like the rack of hats from around the world that my sister and I would wear for these occasions, were rehearsals in the cultural capital my grandparents hoped we would represent. This museum architecture had purpose. This space that smelled of soap and damp, that felt so cool on the feet with just enough room to seat my family together, to laugh at the screen, no one for the moment preparing a meal or otherwise distracted. This was a museum where we munched on After Eights, watching the past, knowing the future was quickly rushing in. Here I learned with all my senses the feeling of being embodied in time and in a family, knowing the bittersweet truth that it would pass.

VanDenBurgh, Jen. 'Movies' On Site review, no. 20 Winter 2008
©Jen VanDenBurgh and On Site review

Necessary Stories

2009-08-07T08:37:00.005-07:00

the Black World History Museum

Jaclyn Jones

In 1996, Lois Conley opened the Black World History Wax Museum in a renovated 1916 Catholic school building, in a predominantly African American neighbourhood on the north side of St. Louis, Missouri. More than a decade later, the museum is a significant institution in St. Louis’s cultural landscape. Nearly twenty life-sized wax figures of prominent African Americans, dressed in period clothing and surrounded by contextual material objects, form the basis of the exhibits, designed to introduce visitors to the contributions each individual made to American history and culture. The exhibits expose visitors to lesser-known aspects of common American histories as told from an African American perspective without succumbing to the pitfalls of American exceptionalism often encountered in American history exhibits accessible to children.

The museum’s four main rooms and single wide hallway contain wax figure displays and text panels arranged in roughly chronological order. Starting from a poignant exhibit about the trans-Atlantic slave trade, visitors move through the years to the final exhibit, which features the Reverend Earl Nance, one of St. Louis’s most well-known African American contemporary religious leaders. In between, visitors meet George Washington Carver, Dred Scott, Sojourner Truth, Madame C J Walker, Miles Davis, Josephine Baker, Clark Terry, Reverend Martin Luther King Jr and several others whose striking likenesses help tell their respective stories.

While much of the impact of the exhibits comes from their ability to place visitors within reaching distance of each memorable figure, the most moving exhibit does not highlight any one notable individual. Rather, the trans-Atlantic slave trade exhibit features a collection of anonymous brown bodies, barely clothed and chained in small stalls, surrounded by rats and filth. This is where visitors are instructed to begin their tour of the museum, by boarding a full-size portion of a model slave ship. On the top deck, netting surrounds the wax figure of a small black child trying in vain to climb up and off of the ship, and two wax models of a white man fending off a mutinous attack from a black man. In the holding area below, the life-sized wax models of African people lie, chained and crowded. Mirrors expand the scene infinitely in either direction, giving an appropriate impression of the size and depth of the original slave ships. A large mirror placed in front of the ship spans the entire width of the below-deck area, so that visitors who go below-deck see themselves amongst the captured Africans. Stepping onto the slave ship is a powerful experience, making it the most successful of many successful exhibits in this museum.

For its ability to connect with current African American fashion and culture, the exhibit that features Madame C J Walker is impressive and impactful. Walker was a tremendously successful St. Louis cosmetics entrepreneur who pioneered a national line of hair and makeup products made specifically for black women in the early part of the twentieth century. Through a large collection of African American hair care products and tools from the turn of the century through the 1970s, we learn about the strenuous efforts black women took to create ‘socially acceptable’ hairstyles, striving to achieve a standard of beauty dictated by a white-dominated beauty industry. Also displayed are a 1940s-era standing electric hair dryer and a list of African American superstitions about hair. As is the case for many exhibits in the museum, these items speak to a larger phenomenon than Walker herself and provide a trajectory into the present that may prove powerful for young African Americans today.

The very presence of the museum as a black-operated cultural institution in an economically-depressed neighbourhood performs important work as well. Before the museum opened, the building in which it is housed sat empty and deteriorating for nearly eight years. Today, as it was in 1996, it is surrounded by empty lots, vacant row houses and abandoned apartment buildings. Over the last five years however, signs of revitalisation have started to materialise and Conley is proud to have been one of the first individuals to bring a vibrant, stabilising element to the neighbourhood. With a low admission fee of $5, she ensures that working class and poor African American families, as well as young students, can visit the museum. For Conley, it has been important and meaningful that the museum become part of a community that is racially representative of the figures within its walls.

Nonetheless, a limited budget makes publicity and upkeep difficult; visitors cannot miss the poor physical condition of some of the wax figures inside. Although their presence reconstitutes the context of the surrounding artifacts, missing fingers and peeling facial hair damage their potential life-like aura. However, in spite of the damage, visitors of any demographic will leave the museum with an increased understanding of the many African American contributions to the wealth and growth of the United States, and adults in particular will recognize the singularity and importance of the museum’s mission. Hopefully, some will leave a donation on their way out the door.

Black World History Wax Museum
2505 St. Louis Avenue
Saint Louis, Missouri 63106

Jaclyn Jones. 'Necessary Stories' On Site review, no. 20 Winter 2008
©Jaclyn Jones and On Site review

Marginal Stories

2009-08-07T08:07:00.006-07:00

South Point Douglas
Gregory Beck Rubin and Conrad Dueck

In the process of junking its tools of production, Winnipeg has assembled the objects for a museum. Curated by homeless people, bound by trees, tall grass and water, Sheldon’s junkyard archives without restriction the making of the prairie city. And its location is symptomatic of development in Canada – build it, junk it: there’s so much more land. But a closer look at the topography of Point Douglas reveals the framing of the junkyard, and this frame anticipates a new kind of museum.
Covering roughly one-half square mile, South Point Douglas is marginalised in part by its proximity to Winnipeg’s downtown. It is bordered on the west by Main Street, the premier street of Winnipeg, which constantly revolts against efforts at gentrification. Bending around the south and east of the site is the main waterway dividing the city, the Red River, badly polluted and threatening to flood every spring just after break-up. The train tracks that bisect the city pass through the Point, and compose the northern edge of South Point Douglas, ultimately isolating this area from normal city development.
Containing the old Canadian Pacific Railway station, South Point Douglas is a former city centre, one in a string of attempted civic re-inventions. At its tip is Sheldon’s junkyard, a swelling of the city’s waste under casual surveillance, the final destination for decommissioned industrial machines, heavy metal, rusted truck cabs, antique domestic objects, dunes and dunes of paper. This is a museum that documents the possible lives of objects, but the collection is uncontrollable, wild and under constant tension.

one
Behind the main gate is a factory wall punctured by the openings of delivery docks; the factory has been closed for years. Parts of the brick wall have been tagged by graffiti artists, and the ground is scattered with countless stoves, fridges and other domestic appliances. It is a jumbled lot, and it is hard to focus on any particular point.
We notice the sound of water, closer than the river. Its gurgling draws our attention to the far end of the wall where there’s a pipe hanging off the roof, in front of a window. It’s a peculiar water collection system: discharged from the pipe, streaming in front of the glass before landing and running down long sections of ductwork; the water trickles through an opening to the long aluminum counter top along which it rolls neatly to the corner, slows down, and pools. The pool reflects the sunlight on the wall, and the water slowly drips off the counter and into a black bucket on the ground. Vegetation has crept through the spaces of rusted metal, and little plants grow along the top of the ductwork towards the pipe. The industrial cabinet is tilted, and the peeling paint reveals coats of teal and salmon mousse.

two
Near the tracks to the east of the compound is a yard littered with machines, swallowed by paper in drifts like snow banks. The paper creates a malleable landscape, an elaborate topography engulfing cars, forklifts, bins, switchboard, and containers. It curls like roots into the spaces in and between them, crawling through the windshields, twisting itself to fit through engines and broken glass. The limits of the paper topography are unclear: it appears to reach all the way to the river. We are tempted to step onto this landscape, but like a snowdrift, it could refuse to support us and we would fall in.

We are looking for the responsiveness of objects to multiple forces. We seek out the proofs of decay and reinvention; we want to gauge the vitality of things that fill places like this. Every element of the junkyard makes apparent the wide-ranging and co-existent forces trespassing the site, with no distinction drawn between causes. Objects are moved by people with divergent motivations, causing new systems to develop: an abandoned factory, a flourishing architecture; technology transcending its original function. The site, as a part of the city, demonstrates the inevitability of continual change, redefinition of an area that has been considered as finished.
Leadership is taken from the margins, in terms of the systems of power in the city. The curator is neither a single person carefully crafting a single line, nor a group of people working in concert, rather curation is a series of decisions in competition with one another, undermining and reframing what others have thought to have completed. And almost every action is anonymous.
The person who comes to observe this museum is just one of a diverse group of trespassers, all of whom curate the collection: whether out of necessity or curiosity, they all activate this site. Unlike the normal order of museum-making, objects sit in an apparently unplanned state: time will elapse, objects will move, the specific interaction, the play of water, will have changed – the experience may or may not be repeated – the junkyard museum is an organism, never static.

Rubin, Gregory Beck and Conrad Dueck. 'Marginal Stories' On Site review, no. 20 Winter 2008
©Gregory Beck Rubin and Conrad Dueck and On Site review

The Katsu Kaishu Peace Museum

2009-07-14T07:41:00.005-07:00

A Small Protest

Steve Chodoriwsky

When I asked the composer Nakai if he could recommend an interesting museum in Tokyo, he began to tell me the rumour of one dedicated to a certain Katsu Kaishu. ‘Actually I’ve never been there myself’ he said. He had heard that to visit this private (or was it public?) collection, you would first need to bring an object that somehow deals with its namesake. Your contribution is both the ticket and price of admission. There appeared to be some sort of screening process as well. ‘I think it can be anything’ Nakai said ‘as long as you can prove to the owner how it relates to Kaishu’s life’ (as it turns out Kaishu is a critical figure in late seventeenth century Japan – statesman, naval officer, swordsman, peace advocate and one of Japan’s first international representatives. It was his diplomatic skill that is considered instrumental in Japan’s transition of power from the Tokugawa shogunate to the reinstatement of Imperial rule).

Nakai then put me in touch with the architectural historian Nakatani, who was at first puzzled by my interest. ‘You are making a very personal request’ he told me when we met, ‘the museum is just my father’s house’. I soon learned that the so-called Katsu Kaishu Peace Museum is the ongoing project of an 83-year-old retired mathematics teacher and lifelong Marxist, and an anomaly of a museum in what often feels like an entire city composed of anomalies.

The corner property has three parts: a sturdy but featureless two-storey concrete house (which Naktani’s father himself designed), the remaining portion of a mid-century wooden dwelling and a courtyard garden. As is so often the case in Tokyo the lot is tiny and surrounded by a patchwork of neighbouring buildings. Nakatani and his father led me up to the second floor of the concrete building, where the exhibition occupies but a single room. The flick of a lightswitch revealed four walls covered with carefully hand-drawn maps and black and white photographs, coupled with several anti-violence texts focussing on the life and virtues of Katsu Kaishu and, a bit unpredictably, the thorough decimation of Tokyo during the Second World War. In fact the general site of the house is not without significance. Located in a neighbourhood just north of downtown, it was an area largely destroyed by aircraft bombing and completely rebuilt after the war; Nakatani’s father had at that point moved to, and has lived on, this property ever since.
Nakatani then explained to me his father’s activities. For several years, he has been conducting a slow and meticulous archaeological excavation of his property. Sure enough, in the corner was a small glass display case with the objects unearthed so far, dating ruins of the fire-devastated area, centred around everyday life: fragments of ceramic bowls and saucers, bits of glass or crystal, sake cups, utensils, buttons and jewellery, half bottles and pieces of jars.

Nakatani is at least in part his father’s co-conspirator. He has designed a conveyor belt will which transport the objects up to the second floor to be sorted for display. And he is poetic about the implications, referencing the original wooden house on the property. The earth, he explained, is part of the domain of the ground floor. It is used in traditional dwellings to form the doma, a hard-packed earthen floor mixed with hardening components such as bittern and ash. But here the site’s earth goes through a process of displacement, where its bits and pieces are upended and elevated, examined and exposed.

The garden takes up half the property and is thriving in midsummer with watermelons, grapes, rice and sweet potatoes growing amongst recently-planted saplings, various digging sites and collections of pebbles in the midst of being sorted. ‘My father has a long history of being a protester’ Nakatani explained as we wandered through the small wilderness. By excavating objects from his property and categorising them, it is, in his own peculiar way, a protest against violence – the violence that obliterated this and many other areas of Tokyo, and the violence that Kaishu rejected by never drawing his sword. The yield of fruits and vegetables, off of which Nakatani’s father largely lives, then becomes a next stage of the site’s rehabilitation.

The original concept of admitting only those bearing Kaishu-related paraphernalia has since fallen away, but the museum remains a work in progress and subject to its creator’s curatorial whims. For instance, on the property, the remaining portion of the original post-war wooden house contains fifty years’ worth of collectibles, documents, household objects, and ‘trash’, in a state of perpetual disarray. Unfortunately I was unable to see inside. The future intention, I was told, is to assemble it all into a ‘museum of ordinary life’, which would complement the excavated artifacts found on the property.

A thought occurred while talking to this spry octogenarian that this bizarre little conceptual complex, dedicated to peace, is less the product of an old man’s contempt for lethargy and more a device, in its own personal way, against the act of forgetting. ‘Therefore, doesn’t it succeed as a museum?’ I asked Nakatani upon leaving. Ever the patient observer of his father’s escapades, the architectural historian shrugged, musing ‘Maybe, at the age of 83, the difference between useful everyday things, trash things, and art things is really not so much’.

Chodoriwsky, Steven. 'A Small Protest' On Site review, no. 20 Winter 2008
©Steven Chodoriwisky and On Site review

At the Titan Missile Site

2009-07-10T08:27:00.005-07:00

rehearsing the end

Joseph Masco

‘We don’t strike first; we strike fast’ says our guide, a former cold war Titan missile commander now taking us through a simulated launch of a thermonuclear missile. We are standing in the control room of a Titan II missile silo, 30 miles south of Tucson, in Sahuarita, Arizona. We are buried deep underground, facing a wall of lime green computer terminals that look much too archaic and quaint to produce any real degree of violence. We play out the authorising of failsafe launch codes, the countdown and launch sequences, and imaginary nuclear war – an act that happens daily in this room just as it did for the two decades of the Cold War (1962-1982) in which this Titan silo was a central part of the US nuclear deterrent. Now presented to us as ‘history’, the nuclear war logics that support mutual assured destruction and the necessity of the Titan missile system are visible today only as relics, seemingly disconnected from the nuclear militarism of the contemporary United States.

The Titan Missile Museum is the only place in the world where you can see an intercontinental missile system on public display, joining a number of new US history museums devoted to the cold war security state. It stands as both a museum and an archive of cold war technology, presenting an all too rare chance to walk through the infrastructure of the nuclear ‘balance of terror’ and interact with the former Titan missileers that now staff the museum. A museum visit consists of viewing a small display of artefacts and cold war history, a film presentation which gives background on the Titan system (hosted by Chuck, a pony-tailed narrator who looks more like a forest ranger than a cold war veteran) and in my case, a tour of the missile silo by a former Titan commander. The Titan Missile was part of a global system for nuclear war, linking the US and the USSR in a shared technological apocalypticism. We learn, for example, that the Titan Missile bases were located as close to the US - Mexican border as possible to maximise the time for radar to pick up Soviet missiles coming over the north pole, giving the missile crews time to launch their retaliatory strikes.

The Titan Missile itself is over 100 feet tall and protected by eight-foot thick steel blast doors hardened against nuclear attack. The entire facility sits on giant springs to absorb the impact of nearby nuclear detonations; even the electrical and plumbing systems were designed with enough slack to allow 18-inches of bounce.

Massive silo doors (now bolted open to allow satellite reconnaissance of the decommissioned missile) are the only visible aspect of the silo from ground level. However, an above ground museum site is now populated with outdoor displays of the multiply-redundant communication and security systems, plus an exhibit on rocket engines and fuel management systems. [overleaf, top] Much of the tour however is spent underground rehearsing the security of the site (working through multiple code words, safes, telephone checkpoints and procedures for crews entering the facility and various failsafe mechanisms for preventing infiltration or an unintentional launch) and playing nuclear war.

We learn early on that crew members carried a pistol at all times while on duty, marked as necessary for site security but also to ensure that a reluctant crewman ‘did his job properly in case of a launch order’. They needn’t have bothered with this implied threat. The crew was pre-selected and trained precisely for their ability to launch a thermonuclear missile on command. Our guide tells us, for example, about daily life in the missile silo – the four person teams (two on duty, two off) that would work 24 hour shifts, and spend each minute on alert checking and double-checking the equipment. This constant rehearsal of maintenance and launch sequences served also to make the crews robotic in action and thought regarding the facility.

Our guide states repeatedly that the US would never launch first – even though Air Force policy suggested otherwise throughout much of the Cold War – underscoring the strange moral authority required to be a cog in a larger nuclear war system. The one-shot Titan missile was, of course, pre-targeted by military planners. The silo crew (which rotated shifts between multiple silos) never knew where any of the missiles they controlled would land: their job was simply to maintain the facility and to push the launch button without hesitation on order of the President. Crew members simply knew that ‘58 seconds after the launch keys are turned the engines will ignite’ and ‘thirty minutes later a target on the other side of the planet will be destroyed’ — where, when and why was someone else’s responsibility.

Today the technology looks so archaic as to be incapable of being truly violent. The computer controlling missile guidance – ‘state-of-the-art 1963 technology’ we are told – has a total of 1 kilobyte of memory. ‘That 1K is less than the ring tone on your phone’, says our guide in the best laugh line of the tour. But consider what this 1K system could unleash: lifting off via a two-stage liquid fuel rocket, the Titan II ballistic missile could reach near space orbit and then send its heavy payload, in this case a 9-megaton thermonuclear warhead, back to earth with enough precision to destroy an entire city. Withstanding radical acceleration and vibration as well as extremes of heat and cold, the Titan missile system was designed to launch within sixty seconds and deliver absolute destruction from over the horizon to anywhere on the planet in under 30 minutes. Never has the potential for mass death been rendered as automated, anonymous or immediate as in the Titan system.

The Titan II missile system was a central part of the technological and psychological infrastructure of the nuclear age. Built in terrified reaction to the Soviet launch of Sputnik, the first artificial satellite in 1957, the Titan missile was a response to the perceptions of a ‘missile gap’. Top-secret reports at the time imagined a Soviet Union deploying hundreds and soon thousands of intercontinental ballistic missiles. John Kennedy was elected President in 1960 in part to solve this so-called missile gap through a massive arms build up. Soon after his election the new top secret Corona reconnaissance satellite provided proof that the Soviets had deployed less than 10 missiles, not the hundreds imagined by US planners. The phantom Soviet missiles of the 1950s that produced the Titan Missile complex were very much like the phantom Iraqi WMDs in 2003 that ‘enabled’ the invasion of Iraq. As fantasy they say much about the power of fear and militarism in American culture. At the Titan Missile Museum there are only hints of this history and its over-determined form, for example, in the exhibit on nuclear overkill. Overkill is a theory of nuclear targetting that accounts for imagined future failures in the system by exponentially multiplying the number of nuclear weapons used. In its ultimate form, this produced a US nuclear arsenal of over 36,000 weapons by 1968 and a target list designed to enable a simultaneous global nuclear strike on all communist states. It is difficult today, despite all our current rhetoric of terror, to imagine the social conditions capable of producing a technological system of such total destruction or a national culture that could accommodate the apocalypse so completely within everyday life that it was soon rendered all but invisible.

The Titan Missile Museum is today largely devoted to veterans, who make up the vast majority of visitors. It is run by veterans, caters to military tourism and is designed to enable Cold Warriors to have a public site of recognition and remembrance for their service. However, this call to memory is complicated, supported as much by amnesia and repression as by recognition and commemoration. This is because the national security state fundamentally relies on, and strives to produce, an absence of public memory. The ability to shift public fear from one ‘enemy’ to the next relies on a combination of perception management and state secrecy enabling, in the case of the U S, the constant roll-out of new threats and new technologies to meet them. Just as declassification can change our understanding of past national security policy and conflicts, public memory is always at odds with a national security apparatus that relies on such a highly flexible approach to the production and management of danger.

Put differently, the fears supporting the Cold War ‘balance of terror’ can morph into the ‘war on terror’ today not because it makes any real sense but because the images of threat can be presented to American citizens as both coherent and eternal. Efforts to unpack the detailed history of the Cold War, or to address the specific claims of current counter-terrorism, inevitably challenge the rationale of the national security state. For this very reason, the public history museums and archives that address aspects of American security are both essential and highly politicised. Thus, when Chuck, the narrator of the Titan Missile Museum film, tells us that ‘peace is never fully won, it is only kept from moment to moment’ and then thanks the Titan missile crews for a ‘job well done’, he merely underscores survival. However, walking through the technological infrastructure of a cold war nuclear complex also forces us to think about the constant nuclear war rehearsal that took place in Titan Missile silos (and in other places, then and now) and to consider the production, not only of a nuclear deterrent, but also of a highly militarised, nuclear culture. Cold war ‘defence’ produced a minute-to-minute ability to destroy human civilisation and a militarised national culture that continues to naturalise such a possibility as simply an aspect of the world system. The Titan Missile Silo Museum provides access to the origins of this project while occluding the continuing power of these ideas in the US by presenting them as archaic technology.

The ultimate question provoked by the Titan Missile Museum is, then, what would it take to imagine, let alone engineer, a world that does not rely on such mechanised terrors and a society that will not naturalise such apocalyptic potentials?

Masco, Joseph. 'Rehearsing the End' On Site review, no. 20 Winter 2008
©Joseph Masco and On Site review

Samarkand

2009-07-03T07:41:00.005-07:00

travelling the silk road, archiving empires

Gerald Forseth

Samarkand, Uzbekistan has a growing population over 425,000 of which 50% are 15 years or younger. The city is divided neatly in two: east (old) Samarkand, and west (new) Samarkand, each with a distinct spatiality.

East or Old Samarkand
Old Samarkand is an Asian town near the mid-point of the ancient Silk Road with tangled alleys on hills and valleys, tightly constructed spaces, hidden courtyards and beautiful, contemplative and reflective public places. The oldest buildings and squares remain important places of pilgrimage and visitation, and close to each other. Walking is easy and pleasurable. The main axis is Tashkent Kuchesi between the sumptuous, historic Registan Madrassah and Maydoni [public square] and the central bazaar – a frenetic and colourful display of shawls, embroidered dresses, traditional coats, western jeans, turbans and hats of every nationality and every era. The west boundary of old Samarkand is Koksarai, a modern Russian-built maydoni on a visible old/new division line running north and south.

West or New Samarkand
In Central Asia, the Russian imperialists of the late nineteenth century built beside existing towns, leaving the old intact, liveable and protected. In west Samarkand shady European avenues radiate from the Koksarai Maydoni, the modern heart of the city and province, and adjacent to the old heart, the Registan madrassah complex. Russian empire planning contributed underground sanitary services, broad boulevards, tree-lined streets, large plazas, immense parks and gardens, gigantic fountains and monumental sculpture. Beaux-art façades were built of local beige brick and stone, continuous and long on the street, with grand doorways, sculpted jambs and headers, and lofty interior rooms. Soviet planning, particularly in the 1950s, installed Corbusian planning theory: isolated, tall, concrete buildings within large green parks surrounded by wide streets specifically scaled for fast-moving automobiles. This planning has led to a continuous, sprawling footprint. Covering west Samarkand on foot requires much traversal of heroic concrete plazas, green parks and long distances. Using public transit is necessary, now handled by thousands of small Daiwoo vans.

Samarkand Through History
Samarkand (known as Marakanda to the Greeks) was founded in the fifth century BC. It is one of Central Asia’s oldest settlements, located on the edge of the Khryzlkhum desert east of the Caspian Sea, nestled into the foothills of the Tian Shen and Fan Mountains, and situated north of the great Hindu Kush and Pamir mountain ranges. In 329 BC Alexander the Great from Macedonia conquered central Asia and married pretty Roxanna from Samarkand.
At the crossroads of the great Silk Road between China, India, Persia and Italy, Samarkand grew to a city larger than the one we see today. From the sixth to thirteenth centuries it changed hands about every 100 years, occupied by Western Turks, Arabs, Persian Samanids, Karakhamids, Sejug Turks, Mongolian Karakitay and Khorizmshaw. Amir Timur, born near Samarkand, a powerful tyrant and a grand patron of literature and the arts made it the capital of the Tamarlane empire by 1370. Timur and his grandson Uleg Beg (1400-1447) forged Samarkand into a new, magical, economic, cultural and intellectual epicentre with extraordinary fortress walls and gateways, mosques, madrassahs, minarets, mausoleums, palaces, bazaars, caravansaries (traveller’s inns) and an astronomical observatory.
In 1868 the army of the Tsars of Russia arrived, constructing the Trans-Caspian Railway in 1888 as a fast link to Moscow. In 1924 Samarakand was declared, briefly, the capital of New Uzbekistan Soviet Socialist Republic, but in 1930 lost that honour to Tashkent.

Samarkand Today
Samarkand is an archive of its imperial pasts. There are archaeological sites with exposed parts of the original Arks [fortress walls] destroyed by Alexander the Great in 329BC, by Atilla the Hun in the fourth century AD, by Ghengis Khan and his Mongol horde in 1220 and by his grandson Kublai Khan in 1250. There are historic and sumptuous UNESCO-protected buildings (Zoroastrian and, after the seventh century, Islamic) commissioned by, for example, the Samini tribe (ninth century), by Amir Timur, the greatest builder in Samarkand (1369-1408), by Uleg Beg, ruler, scholar, mathematician and astronomer (1410-1450) and by the feuding Khanates from Kokhand, Bukhara and Khiva of the 1800s. There are the adjacent broad streets, immense plazas and monumental buildings parachuted into Samarkand by the Russian empire (1873-1917). There are immense and brutal concrete apartments, offices and bureaus constructed under Lenin, Stalin, Khruschev and later Soviet presidents (1917-1993). Finally there are contemporary steel /glass hotels and offices to accommodate global tourism and multi-national petroleum companies, and replacement public sculpture dedicated to the pre-Russian past representing post-Soviet unfettered capitalism and heroic nationalism (1993 – now).
By 100BC the Silk Road, linking Europe to Asia, was pretty much established. Cultural conversions and conversations moved quickly along that road – around the same time the Chinese Kushan dynasty converted to Buddhism. The peoples of the Silk Road worshipped a mix of Greek, Roman, Buddhist, Iranian and Hindu deities; this mix continues – in Samarkand today some people live as they might have the fifteenth century. Others sport iPods, buy Guess-designer clothing and drink mocha lattes. Samarkand exhibits the great mix of Europe and Asia, past and present. It also impressively presents people and places that profoundly and proudly showcase European and Asian linguistic, music, fashion and food distinctions. All this contrast can be easily and precisely observed at the boundary that separates extant old Samarkand from new Samarkand.

Forseth, Gerald. 'Samarkand' On Site review, no. 20 Winter 2008
©Gerald Forseth and On Site review

Collioure

2009-06-24T07:25:00.004-07:00

city as museum as landscape

Matt Williams
I came to Collioure, a small French city on the Mediterranean coast, during a walking trip that took me across the French Pyrenees. Starting from the Atlantic Ocean, my travelling partner and I traversed various sections of the Grand Randonée 10 trail until we reached the sea, just north of the Spanish border. Over the course of the journey I discovered the ‘noble art of walking’ as Thoreau declared it.1 Walking provides a fine-scale experience, revealing the details that would go unnoticed by travellers in cars, buses or trains. These details become central to the walker’s experience. The minute vernacular – door-knobs, house interiors, tiny gardens – is discovered when you enter a town by way of a trail or side-street and not the main road. Walking then became the central mode of travel as my partner and I made decisions as to how and where to spend our time. For two months we moved from place to place primarily on foot and camped in hidden fields, mountainsides or tucked away campgrounds. Thus we arrived in Banyuls sur Mer, the end of our pre-determined travelling plan, and decided to continue walking up the Mediterranean coast. After a day we came to Collioure.
The landscape in this area of France is a hot, dry shade of brown, with white, clay-roofed stucco buildings, dissected by green lines of vineyards. Tall, globe-shaped pine trees bubble over the rolling foothills of the Pyrenees that gently fall into the sea. Cascading pink roses, blue shutters, yellow doors and an ever-changing and endless sky radiate from the brown and white landscape. As I discovered Collioure and its vibrant palette I could see how, after spending time here in the early twentieth century, Henri Matisse and Andre Derain founded the style of painting that became known as Fauvism.2
In Collioure, Matisse and Derain were struck foremost by the quality of the light. ‘Above all, the light. A blonde light, a golden hue that suppresses the shadows’, Derain wrote.3 This light, paired with the brilliantly coloured landscape, encouraged Matisse and Derain in their use of bright, vivid colours in flat tracts, the characteristics of Fauvism. Derain, particularly, found the culture in Collioure a magnificent subject for recording.
The city forms a natural port and is divided in two sections along the coast by a large royal chateau. Jutting into the opening to the sea is a promontory on which sits the picturesque Notre-Dame-des-Anges, a lighthouse converted to a church. Away from the sea, narrow streets are lined with irregularly shaped and brilliantly painted buildings that break to form quiet public spaces. In Derain’s time, the beach was crowded with small, multi-coloured fishing boats and their Catalan captains returning with their daily catch. Today, a few of these boats remain, mainly for historical and tourism purposes, and annually, during July, many boats gather in celebration of Catalan fishing culture. At this time, the sea becomes dotted with white sails and the shore clustered with bright boats and characters.
The legacy of Derain’s and Matisse’s artistic achievements made in Collioure is vivified throughout the city by the placing of reproductions of their work at locations depicted in the paintings. Twenty works are displayed, forming la Chemaine de Fauvisme. This path can be followed, but more often the works are simply encountered casually throughout the city, a way to view the work in a manner not offered by the Centre Pompidou, Musee d’Orsay, or any other museum. This interface, between the painting, viewer and landscape, allows the viewer to make connections between the place and the painting. It allows one to consider how a landscape could be abstracted, what assumptions were made by the painter, what details were glorified or suppressed and to speculate what the painter was trying to express about that landscape in time and space.
Landscapes themselves are cultural creations. They are a phenomenon where human and natural systems coalesce and do not exist until they are interpreted as something beyond their mere physical composition. Landscape painting thus reflects a personal, and by extension, social understanding of our environment through the composition of various elements, real and imaginative, that exist in the world or in our minds.
Collioure is not a static French village clinging to its heritage as tourist promotion. Its arts community continues to thrive, with numerous galleries of recognised artists. The countryside thrives with vineyards producing the regional aperitif Banyuls and its hand-cured anchovies are a French delicacy. It has an everyday life similar to most rural French villages, though its Mediterranean climate and culture provide good reason for a large influx of visitors during the summer. As a gallery, Collioure provides the unique experience of viewing the Matisse and Derain paintings, but it also provides viewers the ability to frame their own paintings and develop their own interpretations of the landscape. At various locations throughout the city empty frames are positioned to provide both prominent and everyday views of the city. These frames allow viewers to stop, dwell upon a scene and develop their own interpretation and abstraction of the landscape.
Collioure, as a city as a museum as a landscape, creates opportunities for greater understanding of landscape and culture by communicating and exhibiting its heritage in situ. Perhaps visitors sharing this experience will begin to develop a greater appreciation for their own daily surroundings. Perhaps they will begin to see their surroundings as worthy of a work of art and the city as a shifting cultural institution that ‘exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment’.4

1 Thoreau, Henry David. Walking. San Franciso: Harper Collins, 1994 2 Freeman, Judi. Fauves. New South Wales: The Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1995
3 Derain quoted in Freeman, 1995.
4 What a museum does, as defined by the International Council of Museums.

Williams, Matt. 'Collioure' On Site review, no. 20 Winter 2008
©Matt Williams and On Site review

The Teatre-Museu Dalí

2009-06-20T15:13:00.004-07:00

the architecture and archive

Miriam Jordan and Julian Jason Haladyn

We arrived early in the morning in Figueres, Spain; we had spent the night on a train and got little sleep. It was therefore all the more dreamlike when we came upon the Teatre-Museu Dalí, a surreal mirage at the end of a street, a majestic pink building dotted with triangular loaves of bread and topped with giant eggs. Our reason for visiting Figueres was specifically to see this museum, designed by the Surrealist artist Salvador Dalí to house his artwork, his extensive collection of art – which is displayed as the context for his work, and his crypt. But, more than simply a site that contains Dalí’s artwork, this structure is, as the guide book for the museum notes, ‘a Dalinian piece, a work to which Salvador Dalí, with his typical stubbornness and thoroughness, devoted thirteen years of his life’1. In other words, the museum can be seen as a grand architectural-scale work of art that Dalí produced to present his work in a context that reflected and embodied his artistic interests and motifs.
The Teatre-Museu Dalí was constructed out of the ruined Teatre Principal, an auditorium built in 1849 by the architect Roca Bros, which had been virtually destroyed at the end of the Spanish Civil War; all that remained was ‘a dramatic semi-circular shell of blackened stone’2, which Dalí incorporated into the building of his museum. Although Dalí proposed the idea in 1960, the project was not realised until 1974 when it finally opened to the public. This project represented a significant accomplishment for Dalí, whose ambition to establish a major collection of his work, specifically within his home country of Spain, and his home city of Figueres, was of the utmost importance to him, particularly in terms of the manner in which the location serves to contextualise the artist and his work.

From the moment of our arrival, we entered a Dalinian world; the landscape of the surrounding countryside was like that of so many of the artist’s surrealist depictions and the abundance of pomegranates served as an appropriate frame for Dalí’s kitschy museum, an architectural fantasy that appears to have emerged from the artist’s strange paintings.
The equally quirky interior of the Teatre-Museu Dalí – walls, ceilings, windows, arches, stairwells – function as a canvas for Dalí’s imaginative artistic vision. He rebuilt the stage of the ruined Teatre Principal underneath a latticed dome, which resembles the compound eye of a fly and designed by the Spanish architect Emilio Pérez Piñero. To link the geodesic dome with the supporting vault, Dalí painted the vault with a red lattice, mirroring the lattice of the dome, on a blue ground. The vault painting bleeds into the supporting walls which Dalí covered with blue paint spatters and draped with several of his giant shaped plywood paintings, made specifically for this location: one wall sports an enormous nude titan with a cube for a head squeezing a blue sheet; another wall bears two gigantic hands draping a white sheet over a fluffy cloud, while countless nude figures spill down the walls to the floor.
Dalí covered the back wall of the stage with a huge painting on canvas copied from his original scenery for the 1941 New York production of the ballet Laberinto for which the artist also created the libretto and costumes. The stage is rebuilt as a fantastical stage-set that displays the inherent drama of Dalí’s artwork to its fullest advantage – a quality that can be found in every detail of the elaborate museological construct.
One of the most significant spaces in the museum is the Mae West Hall, which houses Dalí’s room-sized installation Face of Mae West Which Can Be Used As an Apartment (1974) constructed by the artist with the assistance of the architects Óscar Tusquets and Pedro Aldámiz. The museum visitor can survey the optical illusion created with this installation by climbing a set of stairs and peering through a reductive lens, which Dalí positioned beneath the belly of a plastic camel. From this vantage point, the visitor sees Dalí’s literal transformation of a three-dimensional space into a two-dimensional image of Mae West’s face as a drawing room, complete with the ubiquitous sofa lips, Saliva-sofá (1974), constructed by Tusquets from red spongy material. To claim that we had entered the world of Salvador Dalí, in this case, would be a literal description of the experience of this room.
Through his consistent use of the architectural space of the museum to actively frame his artwork, Dalí constructs an life-sized cabinet of curiosities for the visitor to wander through and interact with. Like much of Dalí’s artistic production, the museum is an erotically charged space that at times disorients and creates a feeling of paranoiac unease through the juxtaposition of architectonic space and artworks made out of eclectic objects. Reprising the organisation of Surrealist exhibitions – for example, Rainy Cadillac, located in the middle courtyard, directly references Dalí’s famous Rainy Taxi from the 1938 Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme – this museum actively defies visitors’ attempts to make sense of this space in any coherent manner. Instead we find ourselves meandering through countless rooms of cultural objects and historical minutiae; an experience epitomised in the Palau del Vent, a series of three rooms filled with oddities, such as a golden gorilla skeleton positioned next to a giant seashell bed supported by curving dragons, both of which are positioned beneath a tapestry reproduction of Dalí’s famous painting The Persistence of Memory.
As an archive, the Teatre-Museu Dalí represents more than a space provided to passively view Dalí’s artwork and collection, but instead exists as an artwork to be actively experienced and remembered. Ironically, we can only remember it as a dream.

1 J.L. Giménez-Frontín. Teatre-Museu Dalí. Madrid: Tusquets/Electa Guides, 1997. p 9
2 Giménez-Frontín, p 13

Jordan, Miriam and Julian Jason Haladyn. 'Surreality' On Site review, no. 20 Winter 2008
©Miriam Jordan, Julian Jason Haladyn and On Site review

La Musée Rodin, Paris

2009-06-19T06:57:00.002-07:00

House and Home

Jordan Ellis
Beside the grand golden dome of Les Invalides in Paris, sits a relatively more subtle house. It is hidden by an old wall inset with a modern stone and glass entrance and the sign Musée Rodin. While this house/museum and grounds are surrounded by a high, hiding curtain, the art inside is the opposite. The separation of art to viewer (voice to listener) is as transparent as the spaces are to the art within: here is not the submissiveness of the modernist white box, nor the fight for attention provided by many new gem galleries — intuitively I feel a historical similarity, a cohesion in the relationship between space and object. But is there really such a relationship? From where I stand with my digital camera and space-age mind I am looking for more than just an old thing and an older thing.

The older thing (house-museum) is the Hôtel Biron, built in 1728-30, and not home to artist Auguste Rodin for its first two centuries. It lived lifetimes in possession of many people before taking its current role. In its penultimate (to date) existence, it was hotel to several prominent artists, such as Henri Matisse and Jean Cocteau, with Rodin moving in, in 1908, in admiration. Quickly, Rodin began to place his sculptures in the garden; he drew and painted on the walls; there was always some physical relationship between his art and his space. But it is just another old house, no? What interests me is the question: would his work have been realised differently if he had lived in another space, another place?

I am reminded of Salvador Dalì’s house in Catalunya, truly of his mind. It is not so much that he was influenced by his surroundings, but rather that he formed his world as an illustration of his imagination. So, in this surrealistic building there is no segregation between object/space because they were constructed coincidentally. Rodin, on the other hand, had little control over his surroundings, which may be why, in 1911, he began to consign his life’s work to the French state upon condition that a museum be devoted to him at the site of the Biron. Could the museum be as confident in its artistic holdings if it was at another site, like so many other artist museums that are continents-removed from the place of artistic creation; is this relationship little more than historical efficiency and regional politic?

Outside the house is the garden, a small-scale formal layout of pathways, parterres and fountains. Along the path, and at nodal points, are cast sculptures of human characters forever locked in personal or relative tension. If art and its ‘poetics can be articulated only in a broad collaboration and over time’, then while the object remains quantifiably the same, how we see it is forever changing. Perhaps this regular French garden works in favour of Rodin, then. Its iconic and historic conventionality converges with Rodin’s figures, so that over time the viewer increasingly sees a kind of correctness about the placement.

Inside the house lies what we might call the soft arts; paintings, marble and clay objects formed in contrast to the cast-bronze garden figures. The precarious craft of these objects is reflected in the delicate fabrication of detail on walls and ceilings; nonetheless, the solid construction of the building protects the brittle art works. Any building could [hopefully] do this. What is special about this building that makes the art belong here? If the artist’s intention cannot be immediately read, then we must look at his story: ‘there can be no narrative without a narrator and a listener’ writes Roland Barthes, and it is not the canonic form, but rather the regulated transformations that truly matter. It is not what the artist wanted us to see a century after his death, but the transformation of meaning with each new visitor. By neither hiding in the shadow, nor dominating the object, the museum lends itself to an adaptable narrative. Rodin did not necessarily make art specifically for his surroundings, but that does not guarantee dichotomy or offense between one and the other.

I will not intuit Rodin’s intentions, inspirations and the degree to which this hotel influenced his work. As Mies wrote, ‘the visible is only the final step of a historical form, its fulfillment […] then it breaks off and a new world arises’.

What I hear now is not what necessarily what was spoken a century ago. While I am thankful that enough care was taken to keep the house looking as it did when Rodin claimed it as the proper venue for his work, I expect it should not remain this way forever. Whether this building could house any other art collection, and whether this art collection would be the same elsewhere, I will say only that Auguste Rodin thought it appropriate that his artistic expression have a home in the Biron, and while the building may not look like a Rodin sculpture, I certainly appreciate the dialogue between object/space, in/out, and all other sides.

Ellis, Jordan. 'House and Home' On Site review, no. 20 Winter 2008
©Jordan Ellis and On Site review

Corrado Feroci's Museum in Bangkok

2009-05-13T08:14:00.004-07:00

a home far away from home

by Tonkao Panin
Upon entering the Fine Arts University in Bangkok, one passes through small gardens and courtyards before one sees, hears and smells art productions of all kinds. Students walk in and out and sit at small courtyard cafes looking at exterior walls that are never left blank but always adorned with ever-changing images. Despite its many public art galleries welcoming visitors, this is only a tiny university occupying only half of a small street block in the heart of Bangkok’s old city. Its location is just opposite to the prime tourist spot, the Grand Palace, thus the university is at once a public arena and a small private universe, depending upon who you are and why you are there. At once tranquil and lively, it is a place one easily feels at home already on the first visit. A hundred years ago, this was not possible. Such a place simply did not exist.

Art education in an ‘old’ country such as Thailand is something surprisingly ‘new’. And the man who made it all possible was brought in from far away, Florence, Italy. In 1923, King Rama VI sent a request to the Italian government for a sculptor to train Thai craftsmen. The man who came for this temporary task but ended up staying in Thailand for the rest of his life was Corado Feroci, a sculptor from Florence who left his family behind for the task entrusted upon him. Feroci first served the Thai government as a sculptor under the Royal patronage, and was assigned to train Thai artisans of various trades. Shortly afterwards, his reputation as a unique art teacher was known, thus he was asked by the Thai government to establish a curriculum and textbooks for the formal training of artists, which never existed before in Thailand. Thus was the first art school in Thailand born in 1937 with Feroci as its first director, known as Silpakorn School of Fine Arts. In 1943, amidst the turmoil of World War II, the school became the first university of Fine Arts, with Feroci as the first dean. He continued working for Thai government, creating 18 famous monuments, and taught generations of Thai artists until he died in 1962 at the age of 70.

Throughout the 38 years Feroci lived in Thailand, he occupied a rather small studio inside the university. It is located near the school’s entrance, on the first floor, allowing him to observe dynamic changes throughout the day. As he was usually the first person to arrive and the last to leave, everyone would see him working, hear him repeatedly singing Santa Lucia which later became the school’s anthem. Feroci’s years in Thailand were dedicated to rigorous teaching as well as artistic productions. Generations of artists and art students regard him as the father of modern art in Thailand. On September 15th of each year, Thai artists and art students commemorate and pay homage to the man, his life and work that made others’ artistic lives and works possible.

Today Feroci’s working space has been transformed into a museum – its name, once Feroci’s studio and now Feroci’s museum, already suggests the past, something that is no longer current and active. Despite the fact that almost every object in the studio is still present, the place seems haunted without its active owner. When in use, everything was simply an integral constituent of the place, acted and reacted in concert with the man who conducted them. They occupied their logical and participatory locations, though not always composed and tidy. Thus the crucial question for the organisation of this museum is ‘how should all the objects be placed in relation to one another?’ If left in their original positions, the objects may emphasise the sense of missing spirit, so much so that they would simply become ghosts that linger in a place of nowhere. If orchestrated into a composed display, the objects may become just nameless antiques, far detached from the life they once lived. How could such a museum be organised to represent both the life it once housed, and the true sense of time and value the objects hold in the present?

The solution turns out to be quite simple. Helped in that it is less than a hundred square metres in size, everything is organised into two layers of story. While the first narrative deals with the past, the second is aimed at the present. Feroci’s actual and active occupation sets the spatial framework for the place. Pieces of furniture act as architectural elements determining the configuration of the place as a whole. One moves and turns within the small space the same way Corrado Feroci did decades ago. Yet, objects are deliberately ‘misplaced’, for while some are in their logical positions, many are not. A number of objects are set to become ‘active’ reminders of the past activities, but many are orchestrated into an overtly museum-like display. Together they create a strangely familiar place, at once real and unreal, given a sense of both being somewhere and nowhere. In other words, it becomes a place that the memory of Feroci both owns and disowns. As we walk into it, the structural configuration made me feel as if we are probing into someone else’s private life, yet looking closely at objects and art works we are suddenly brought back into our own life and time. It is a place that allows both kinds of experience to constantly fluctuate within the same visit.

A few years ago, Romano Viviani, Feroci’s only son came from Florence to visit the school and the museum. Even though the place his father described in the letters was certainly unfamiliar, he finally acknowledged that however small, it represents a dream, a determination, a sacrifice and a hope for Thai art students. This confirmed the presence of the person he remembered. Upon entering the ‘studio’ Viviani admitted he could no longer picture his father in the place, but somehow it was the smell and sound he used to imagine.

Panin, Tonkao. 'A Home Away from Home' On Site review, no. 20 Winter 2008
©Tonkao Panin and On Site review

Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park

2009-05-08T13:29:00.002-07:00

When I am President
by Mike Summerton

In central Accra, in the same stately quarter as the grandiose and always empty Independence Square, past the road to Osu Castle where the president lives, and opposite the new national stadium, you should turn towards the Atlantic off 28th February Road before it becomes High Street and the city centre’s de facto main car park. There is a green garden with some strange shapes in it.
Outside top Accra hotels a tranquil, maintained green space with flowering palms, firs and mahogany is a big deal. The Ghanaian capital is aggressively welcoming, and chock-full of mothers and children, animals, footballers, boxers, businessmen, preachers, and taxis and minivans full of them all. Even the cemeteries are full of dancing, singing mourners or folks sleeping off work or malaria. Here, though, birds swoop and wheel on the winds coming off the unseen ocean. Senegal coucals and pied crows. Somewhere in the trees there are peacocks – you can hear them. This garden, empty of people in the late afternoon, must be somewhere special.
Rather than bowl straight in, I shout “Hello! How are you?” to wake up the big woman in the small ticket hut. These encounters are usually fun. We compare the books we are reading. Mine an existentialist novella about a crime of passion, hers a get-rich-quick-through-prayer manual published by a pastor in Richmond, Virginia. We enjoy acting nonplussed at one another until eventually she sells me a ticket and photo-pass for the Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park.
At midnight on 6th March 1957, Kwame Nkrumah announced Ghana’s independence from colonial power, the first state in Africa to do so, and also created the country’s first public park. He chose the Old Polo Club in Accra, previously capital of the Gold Coast, to make his declaration that Ghana would ‘manage its own affairs’. The club had been the preserve of British colonials and closed to black people. The choice of location could not have had more resonance. My guide for the next hour or so was the museum’s manager, Stephen, whose commentary was nothing if not rigorous. He immediately challenged my capacity for the interesting facts that he would share until he felt assured that I could take it all in. ‘I can tell your brain is not a paw-paw’ he said.

*

In 1972 the young Ghanaian architect Don Arthur was in London, having travelled from Moscow where he was pursuing his doctorate degree. Nkrumah, in exile since a coup in 1966, died in hospital in Bucharest, Romania where he was receiving cancer treatment. His body was then buried in Guinea where, in sympathy for the Pan-Africanism he espoused, he had been appointed co-president. Meanwhile, in London, African students gathered to mourn. Many of them had been educated abroad as a direct result of Nkrumah’s education reforms. Together, the African Students Union in London, amongst them Don Arthur, wrote and sent a memo to Guinea asking that the body of the late president be brought to Ghana at such time that the military government would denounce the coup. Thus the project for the Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park was born, but it would be twenty years (1992) and two more coups before President Jerry Rawlings decided to commit to honouring the country’s first leader with a permanent memorial. Nkrumah’s coffin was exhumed (it had since been moved from Guinea to his hometown in rural Ghana) and Don Arthur, himself now a Minister was appointed as lead architect and landscape designer.
Arthur re-read Nkrumah’s autobiography and focussed on four key facts: Nkrumah admired Gandhi and his non-violent philosophy; he was inspired by the French Revolution; and by the October Revolution in Russia; as an African he took pride in Egyptian civilisation, going so far as to marry an Egyptian, Fathia.
Arthur then looked to prominent architecture in these diverse cultures and realised that with the exception of the Great Wall of China they contained the ‘seven wonders of the world’. He developed design principles based on the Taj Mahal in India, the Eiffel Tower in France, the Pyramids of Egypt, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Alexander Tower and the Mausoleum for Lenin in Moscow. As events in his lifetime and surrounding his death had proved, Nkrumah, in the minds of his adherents at least, was a global figure deserving of a globally significant monument. The challenge was how to express this sense of monument in an architectural vocabulary that was fundamentally African.

*
On entering the park from the main gate, two reflective pools (a concept lifted from the Taj) lead you to a bronze statue of Nkrumah. These pools are fed by 2 rows of statues of kneeling pipers. These fountains were never actually on during any of the three visits I made researching this article: ‘Cutbacks’ said Stephen. ‘Broken’ said the ticket woman. Because the sound of the (hypothetical) water is carried by the south-west trade winds coming off the Atlantic, at the point at which you pass the last fountain the sound supposedly recedes and you are left in silence, intimate with Nkrumah’s statue in bronze. Some Ghanaians claim that he was so progressive in outlook that he lived 100 years ahead of his time. The distance from the main gate in to the grounds to Nkrumah’s statue, which is sited on the exact point that he made the announcement of independence, is measured at a hundred steps.
Moving beyond the statue, the strangest shape of all is a truncated swoop in grey marble that reaches up about five storeys. This is the mausoleum and its design, like everything here, is significant. It is designed to evoke a tree stump. The tree has roots and needs water. These are important and perennial concepts in Africa. The trunk is solid but the branches have been chopped down in their prime. Nkrumah’s project was unfulfilled, cut short by the coup d’etat in 1966.
One passes through the mausoleum, finished in kitsch Italian marble, containing the caskets of Nkrumah and Fathia, Nkrumah’s beloved wife. She was buried here just last year. ‘Chop. Chop. Chop’ Says Stephen (‘Eat. Eat. Eat’). ‘What can be said? Our women love to chop and they grow fat. Alas she died’.
Beyond, across a dainty drawbridge, the museum itself is a semi-subterranean single-storey room, faced with a stunning white Modernist-Egyptian frieze dedicated to Fathia. The frieze, my favourite thing in the whole park, has a weird, timeless quality as it appears Soviet on first glance, but depicts traditional Ashanti symbols such as ‘Sanko Fa’ (returning to one’s roots) and circumspection (an elderly woman holding an egg representing the fragility of political power in a cleft stick), all in rigid hieroglyphic elevation.
Inside the museum is a limited but stunning collection of black and white photos. They have the allure of snaps kept in a tin at the in-laws’, brought out to reminisce on family occasions. But these photos show Nkrumah with the pantheon of post-war political icons: standing stern-faced in a VW convertible on his release from Fort James prison in 1951; resplendent centre-frame in a white suit tabling the motion for independence in 1953; in the back of Kennedy’s limousine; at the UN with Krushchev; in tuxedo, quick-stepping with Queen Elizabeth; on a sofa with Fidel Castro; in three-piece tweed with Harold MacMillan; in Mao’s garden in traditional kente cloth; on the tarmac at Addis Ababa airport with the tiny, doll-like Selassie; sharing a joke with Nasser, who handpicked Fathia as Nkrumah’s wife.
However, Nkrumah is not one of those icons himself. I didn’t learn about him at secondary school. He wasn’t assassinated or killed in battle. He succumbed to prostate cancer in exile in 1972. However, he would hands down win the best supporting actor Oscar for post-war leaders. Nkrumah was the engine in developing a Pan-African consciousness and forging links between the developing world and the soviet bloc. I cannot think of any one other figure of the cold-war, post-colonial moment who achieved dialogue with such a range of world leaders.
His moment in the sun, when highlife music set the tempo for an ambitious programme of public works and nation-building, couldn’t last. Ghana stoutly refused to capitulate to the neo-colonial pressure of the US – he steered the country towards communism. This led to a populist coup in 1966 and Nkrumah’s flight to Guinea.
These days, a year on from the fiftieth anniversary celebrations of independence, there is in Ghana a warm nostalgia for Nkrumah, and I feel, having visited the museum, that he represents a lost era when politicians were creating a global consciousness based on alternative ideas and values and debate – things that technology now somehow flattens and stands in for. But what does the place mean for Ghanaians? Stephen tells me ‘this country’s reliance on aid and tourism is not what Nkrumah would have wanted. He wanted self-reliance for this country. He should be resting here after his hard life, but I think that he is not’. I’m sure that Stephen, an active member of the opposition NDC, is only half joking when he says ‘When I am President I will continue Nkrumah’s work – so that the branches can grow to their highest height’.

Summerton, Michael. 'Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park' On Site review, no. 20 Winter 2008
©Mike Summerton and On Site review

House of Reconciliation

2009-05-06T12:03:00.005-07:00

the metamorphosis of Beirut City Centre Building
by Farid Noufaily
The signing of the Ta’if Agreement on 22 October 1989 marked the beginning of the end of the Lebanese Civil War that had raged since 1975. The war ended in March 1991, when the new Lebanese Parliament enacted the General Amnesty Law, which stated that there were to be no victors and no victims in the war (la ghalib le maghlub). Unfortunately, this law allowed the Lebanese people to turn a blind eye to the ugly truths of the war and ushered in an era of uneasy silence in Lebanon, where no word is uttered, no acknowledgement nor responsibility is taken by anyone surrounding the desperate events of the past 33 years. Today, as Lebanon’s political battle for independence and a unified national identity continues, the government still hasn’t supported the public in breaking the silence. I believe that this legislated lack of collective/public self-expression has rendered both the local and the diaspora populations incapable of reconciling with their traumatic past. Though public confessions, art, film and novels have begun to facilitate some discourse, architecture’s role will be to gather, catalyse, and give voice to the countless victims of the war. The rehabilitation of Beirut City Centre Building (CCB) is an architectural proposal to breach the silence.

A failed attempt at modernism...
A sinister sniper point along the infamous Green Line...
An impromptu brothel during the civil war...
A failed retrofit by the Ministry of Finance in 1992...
A venue for illegal raves in the mid 1990s...
Slated for demolition in 2003...
These are but a few of the many different incarnations of the former Beirut CCB which stands just south of Place des Martyrs and is the only remaining ruin in the centre of Solidère’s newly-restored Beirut Central District. Referred to by locals as the bubble, the soap, the blob or, most often, the egg, the ovoid CCB was cursed by the misfortune of being at the exact geographic centre of the civil war, and has been blackened by neglect ever since the war ended. Even in ruins, the 6,000 m2 building remains a remarkable surviving icon from Beirut’s golden age of Modernist architecture.

Lebanese architect Joseph Philippe Karam designed the CCB in 1965. The urban complex was planned as three blocks: Block 1 would contain five underground floors (total 22,500 m2) for car parking and a taxi service station; Block 2 would be three floors with 144 retail shops, a 1000 m2 supermarket, a 900-seat cinema, a restaurant and a snack bar; and Block 3 was to be three mixed-use towers with eight, twelve, and 21 floors respectively — a wide range of commercial services under one roof.
Karam’s vision was never completed; only part of his original proposal had been built when the war broke out in 1975 — two floors of the base in Block 2, the cinema and one tower. The CCB’s adjacency to the Place des Martyrs, as well as its unique shape, made it a prime target for heavy shelling during the war. After 17 years and many failed renovation proposals, today’s CCB sits vacant, guarded and inaccessible.

CCB promised, as did all modernist architecture, a rational future of increasing peace, prosperity and social justice. History betrayed this promise, and the CCB instead became a powerful symbol of the impotence of modernisation when confronted with unresolved social and ethnic conflicts from the past. The New CCB, proposed here, can be a symbol of national unity through the rebuilding and re-appropriation of what was once a potent symbol of a rational future. The surviving elements of the ruin will be incorporated into the new building. The plan makes use of the remains of the original, housing the many program elements required to address new roles for the building: archive space, both digital and material, indoor and outdoor exhibition space as well as artist residences and state-of-the-art meeting and research spaces. All of these surround the most important space of all, the space of the voice, where citizens are invited to share their account, experiences and opinions of the civil war. The New CCB will stand as a beacon – a place for reconciliation of the past and discussions for the future. The new program begins at the datum of the city street (the present), descends through the strata of the city’s layers to the space of dialogue, memory, and recollection (the past) and finally rises to the commanding contemplative view of the city (the future).

the present: the living monument
By implementing a non monumental program that is part of the everyday life of the city, the New CCB will become a living monument that not only commemorates the history of the civil war, but also celebrates the present. Visitors are free to wander onto the premises of the New CCB directly from the redesigned Place des Martyrs. The various pavilions provide access to the restored theatre (the egg), a café, residential and commercial floors above, and a nightclub. A bus and taxi station south of the CCB will again centralise the transportation network that once ran so actively through Place des Martyrs.

the past: the descent to reconciliation
Below the level of the city lies the ruins and origins of Lebanon. Descending into this void brings one closer to not only the original level of the historic city, but to something sacred. The archives containing the collective memories and voices of the citizens, both patriot and expatriate, are located in the lowest levels, where they are protected from the current unstable and uncertain present. This imagery is not unlike our own escape to the chthonic origins of our hearts, depicted in our escape to the safety of the underground in times of war. Here, the archives frame the Space of the Voice. It is in this space, where whispers echo, that the voices of all Lebanese – regardless of nationality and sect – are heard. Here, the three shared languages – Arabic, French, and English – resonate in the space, and blend, as if one dialogue.

the future: truth and reconciliation archive centre (TRAC)
The archive itself, though effective at storing and encouraging dialogue, is only one step in mastering the past and imagining a bright future for the Lebanese people. The ascent from the sacred darkness is equally important. An elevator links the Space of the Voice (at the archive level) with the privileged Research Level. Perched high above the city, researchers, builders and planners of the future city can cast their gaze from the mountains to the horizon, and to the city in between.

The New CCB will not only become the Space of the Voice amidst a landscape of silence, but a hub for conducting research and promoting art. By gathering, in a single place, a wide range of works and research dealing with the civil war in many media, Lebanon can begin to articulate a unified voice. Rebuilding the CCB will be more than simply revitalising part of Lebanon’s dark past. As its ruins reflect the mindset of a people long ago, its new form will allow for the re-imagination of a unified people and a unified Lebanon.

Noufaily, Farid. 'House of Reconciliation' On Site review, no. 20 Winter 2008
©Farid Noufaily and On Site review

Living History

2009-03-16T07:00:00.005-07:00

Being involved with the arts can have a lasting and transforming effect on many aspects of people’s lives. This is true not just for individuals, but also for neighbourhoods, communities, regions and entire generations, whose sense of identity and purpose can be changed through art.

spmb projects: Eduardo Aquino and Karen Shanski
Monuments, including the ones in Vimy Ridge Park, commemorate heroic past moments. Even though Vimy Ridge represented a victory towards freedom and democracy, creating a hopeful path for generations to come, maybe, after these 88 years, we are on a historical threshold where the notion of celebration will also shift, promoting and celebrating peace and communication among people. Public art challenges the traditional notion of monument by reinventing public space, unfolding new modes of celebration, placing the public at the centre. Our notion of a living history addresses qualities of the present, to remember the present as it is lived, about and for the people that are alive and participating in the life of a community.

COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT Art that is rooted in a “listening” self, that cultivates the intertwining of self and Other, suggests a flow-through experience which is not delimited by the self but extends into the community through modes of reciprocal empathy. The audience becomes an active component of the work and is part of the process.

If the project is not about other heroes from other times but it is about the people, everyday heroes of the present, then it is about the people of Wolseley, the primary users of the park. The first character of public space is the public. For this project we have proposed an engagement strategy to create an opportunity for direct participation of the community. If public space is about the people, then the people should participate in the process.

PROCESS: PARTICIPATIVE DESIGN But a central objective of community-based site specificity is the creation of a work in which members of a community – as simultaneously viewer/spectator, audience, public, and referential subject – will see and recognized themselves in the work, not so much in the sense of being critically implicated but of being affirmatively pictured or validated.

The engagement strategy created a dialogue around the project, establishing a link between the people of Wolseley and the artists. If there is something in common with all Wolseley neighbours it is language. Through language we establish relationships and build community. Words become the link between people, private and public, past and future. We invited the people of Wolseley to contribute WORDS to the project. Each household were asked to donate 5-word phrases that represented a sentiment about the place; a desire or a dream; or the memory of an event that took place in the neighbourhood. With all the collected phrases we composed a narrative, a story, a history of Wolseley – a landscape of language.

COMMUNITY TABLE
The dinner table is the centre for the teaching and practicing ...of conversation, consideration, tolerance, family feeling, and just about all the other accomplishments of society...

Traditional monuments in public space have, for most of the time, glorified a moment or an individual. This glorification has lent the convention obelisk-like objects and statues: frontally presented, privileged siting, usually taller than the people, placed straight up, installed on a base. These overpowering features have unconsciously distanced the people and altered their interaction with public space. We take an opposite position by inverting these features in order to bring the people to the project, and to develop a situation where interaction is valued – the return of the public. We considered the project to be horizontal, close to the ground, harmonious with the existing landscape, accessible and appealing to the most diverse activities. When getting together around the TABLE, participants engage physically, socially and emotionally as ideas, inspiration and a sense of community occur. A TABLE can make a family of strangers connect through sharing, talking, watching and listening. The unpredictable nature of what happens around a TABLE sets the stage for an event to occur – not prescribing the event, but allowing the community to establish it. The WORDS donated by the community, imprinted on the TABLE, make the people recognize themselves around the TABLE by being affirmatively pictured and validated. The TABLE and collection of WORDS become not the main subject but the canvas that creates the space of happening.

SITE CONSIDERATIONS
The designated site for this public art project plays an adjacent role to the whole park’s program. It moves away from the primary vocation as a playground for kids, as we see along Home Street, to a more isolated, quiet zone along Canora Street. The path network present on the site privileges the orientation north-south, servicing pedestrians moving in and out of the neighbourhood via Portage Avenue. This elongated disposition clarifies the vocation of the site as a passage. The project preserves this function adding to a group of specific spaces along the proposed table to respond to the diverse set of activities that may take place. In this manner the project is responsive to the site by creating these spaces without restricting the existing uses. The table assumes the size of the community, carefully observed during the community consultation process.

spmb projects. 'Living History' On Site review, no. 16 Winter 2006
©Eduardo Aquino, Karen Shanski and On Site review

Breaking Ground

2009-03-01T07:44:00.003-08:00

shifting city spaces
Joey Giaimo
Current construction activity in Vancouver is redefining spaces in the city as well as relationships between its inhabitants and visitors. The Canada Line is an extension to Vancouver’s rapid transit system, providing a north-south link from the downtown peninsula to central Richmond, with 16 new stations and connections to other existing lines, the SeaBus terminal at Waterfront Station and the Vancouver Airport.

The new City Centre Station will be located underneath Granville Street, between Robson and West Georgia streets. One of the first blocks to be affected by the line’s construction, it is part of a major retail and club district, bound on one side by the monolithic Sears store and on the other sides by small retail buildings and office towers.

Site Observations
This block is being prepped for a very large hole to accommodate the underground station. As a result, traffic has been stopped and fixed street elements have been removed. As the construction crew excavates below grade, fencing has enclosed the portion of the site adjacent to the Sears building. The remainder of the block is open to pedestrians, prompting creative appropriation of public space.

Partially severed from the retail strip, the block’s role as an urban connector to adjacent blocks has been reduced. Construction fencing along the Sears building has compressed the majority of pedestrian movement to the opposite side of the block, creating moments of intense density. This density has also prompted alternative movement patterns as cyclists, skateboarders, rollerbladers, walkers and joggers now use the whole street with liberty, in an act of involuntary and temporary appropriation.

As part of the surface clearing, trees that lined the sidewalks’ edges have been cut down leaving behind neon orange spray painted stumps to deter potential pedestrian casualties. These stumps mark an absence of verticality – like a phantom limb – tracing the outline of what once was.

The loss of the trees has framed the block in a new and unexpected way, opening up vistas and exposing the road surface to direct light. It heightens attention to any remaining vertical elements, including the decapitated streetlights and smaller ornamental lights whose main role was to provide sidewalk lighting below the trees’ extended branches.

Appropriating Public Space
Unplanned appropriations are becoming scarce. Increasingly there is little in the Canadian urban context that promotes difference or interaction with the physical form of the public realm. In Vancouver, agitators have been replaced by adjudicators who build the city with expedient consistency. Through rigorous and decisive planning methods, the potential to re-conceive public space has almost expired.

The ubiquitous point tower’s exterior spaces (the singular typology currently filling any and all remaining tracts of land in downtown Vancouver) have left little room for public engagement or interpretation. Possible easements have been contained and marked (with varying degrees of discretion) as private property, resisting any activity other than those explicitly designed for and used by the paying residents.

Traditional examples of appropriation can be found in Vancouver — sidewalks are often re-adapted by Chinatown retailers, entrepreneurial street vendors and restaurateurs. But even these appropriations are mostly planned, under permit and limited to transactions of commodity or consumption. In this context, appropriation has become paradigmatic and privatized.

To promote a rich urban culture there must be room for the unknown, the inconvenient and the impractical. There must be serendipitous moments where the city’s inhabitants are able to interact with physical form whose function or purpose is not deliberate and prescribed.

Construction and Chemical Composition
Like the handhelds, big GlowSticks are hollow translucent plastic tubes with ten inches of concrete in the base. Six feet high, an 18” diameter base, they weigh about ten pounds. Although awkward, they are relatively easy to handle since they are bottom heavy. This lightness allows for handling by a single person.

The translucent plastic tubes contain a mixture of chemical elements in a chemiluminescent reaction that emits light. When a hydrogen peroxide solution, phenyl oxalate ester solution and a fluorescent dye combine, new compounds are formed with a substantial release of energy. As this energy subsides, it is released as light. A range of dyes produce different colours.

In the handheld version the reaction is triggered when the plastic shell is bent, cracking an internal glass vial containing the hydrogen peroxide solution. Large GlowSticks arrive on site ‘pre-cracked.’ The tube is filled with phenyl oxalate ester and the dye. Hydrogen peroxide solution is added just before shipping to the site, triggering the reaction.

GlowSticks
Influenced by closures and surface scraping in this downtown block, this proposal promotes a different kind of urban relationship. A field of GlowSticks, an overblown version of the handheld kind, intervenes in the construction project to add a new layer of difference, spectacle and event, promoting a sensorial experience unlike any other space in the city.

The GlowSticks not only soften the disruptive effects of the building of the station but provide new unexpected moments of social and cultural construction. The enclosed block presents an opportunity to test a different attitude in the public realm. The flat asphalt surface acts as its testing ground and allows a simple and peculiar object the opportunity to appropriate a substantial and prominent space through its multiplication.

GlowSticks’ programmatic opportunities
By moving the sticks, pedestrians can make private spaces of reprieve from the city, or they can weave through and around them in their own patterns. Retailers can use them as a buffer from the construction, and to mark their coffee shop patios and sidewalk vending.

Like orange construction barrels and cones, construction workers would use the GlowSticks as safety and hazard markers and to enclose the construction area. Arrangements could be continually reworked to accommodate construction, creating denser, purposeful arrangements, and new interpretive opportunities. The sticks’ lack of fixity promotes limitless opportunities for engagement. They can be dragged, picked up, knocked over, moved around and carried away. They are urban fixtures which refuse to be static. The GlowStick is an element with no singular purpose or program. Its lack of reasoning is precisely its point. It relies on the urban participant to give it its purpose. These gestures are engagements within the public realm that are largely nonexistent.

The impact of the GlowSticks is unknown. Will they be used for violent means? Will they be taken away? Will the area’s club and bar patrons use them as a means to continue their festivities on the streets? Will they be ignored?

Paradoxically, their success will rely on bureaucratic support to create the serendipitous moments which the city craves and architects have been indicted of not supplying. The architectural response is that often the strictures imposed by bureaucracy are so prescriptive that there is little room for spontaneity. This GlowStick proposal presents the municipality with the opportunity to plan the unplanned, to insert this ‘serendipity’ on a slot of land that they both own and control.

The sticks glow brightly in daylight and warm temperatures. Evening temperatures cool the sticks, slow down the reaction and emit a softer glow. This night mode regenerates the GlowSticks and prepares them for the following day where, in daylit warmth they will resume their brightness. Even simply placing the sticks upon the block’s cleared surface allows them to perpetually metamorphose on their own. Although large sticks glow much longer than the small ones, their light will eventually diminish and be replaced with replenished sticks, producing different intensities throughout their duration on site.

Observation and speculative intervention questions how public space is understood, perceived and presented, and reveals how the structure of the city rigorously dictates the use of its spaces. The disruption of construction procedures and subsequent GlowStick intervention present opportunities for new and different adaptive spatial practices in a city in dire need of difference.
Giaimo, Joey. 'Breaking Ground | shifting city spaces' On Site review, no. 16 Winter 2006
©Joey Giaimo and On Site review

Blue Roofs

2009-02-11T13:15:00.007-08:00

the fifth façade – beautiful affordable eco-roofs

Owen Rose www.ecosensual.net
The human body is largely composed of water and its intimate connection to the blue planet does not stop with the flush of a toilet.
Often a source of grief; too much or not enough, water is both a visible and invisible concern for cities. not only do we have to find a source, clean it up for potable use and then distribute it, but we also have to dispose of it. Black or grey, waste water treatment is a costly and difficult task. Think of cities such as Halifax and Victoria that dump their untreated wastewater directly into the ocean. Although Montréal has a large sewage treatment plant a the east end of the island, the city still averages about 22 discharges of untreated sewage directly into the Saint Lawrence River each year. When it rains too much the combined storm and sewer system cannot process all of the water from our houses, hospitals, factories, rooftops and polluted streets. Thus the problem is passed on to the fishes, whales and other cities downstream.
Now that we have started to face the growing threat of environmental problems such as urban heat islands, air, water and noise pollution as well changing weather patterns, ecological building criteria such as the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) green building rating system have encouraged the construction and design of more ecologically sustainable buildings. In the six LEED categories, water management takes on several forms: one is a vegetated roof.
Instead of installing deserts of tar and gravel on our roofs, more and more institutions, businesses and homeowners are opting to grow fields, gardens and vegetable patches on them. Aside from their obvious beauty, green roofs offer natural cooling, a greater lifespan and better rain water management. They retain about 50% of fallen rain (returning water to the atmosphere bypassing the city's sewer system). The other 50% will still find its way to the drain, but the return of this water is delayed, which helps city infrastructure manage water levels during downpours and intense rainfall.

What about Leaks?
Modern green roof experience started in Germany fore than forty years ago, and the waterproof aspect of such roofs is no longer a major concern. In North America, quality waterproofing membranes are on the market, capable of withstanding the constant humid environment of green roofs. Also, earth cover protects the membranes from large day to night temperature fluctuations and the sun's ultraviolet rays, both of which break down conventional roofs over their 20-year lifespan, whereas green roofs should last about twice as long. The real challenge is in created the lightest technology possible so that plants are still able to survive summer droughts and, more importantly, cold Canadian winters.

Green roofs on New or Existing Buildings?
In the deluge of new interest in green roofs, some owners of existing flat-roofed structures have looked at retrofitting an extensive green roof on their buildings; however, not all existing flat roofs are able to support the weight of even the lightest green roof assemblies. To study residential green roof retrofit possibilities, the Montréal Urban Ecology Centre built a demonstration project on top of an existing 100-year old Montréal duplex in 2005. the project included the complete reconstruction of the roof structure followed by the installation of a 15cm thick extensive roof. Half of the project cost was related to the structural retrofit. Although successful, the project was expensive.

In the case of new construction, extensive green roofs are much more economical and usually cost two to three times the amount of normal roof standard roofing systems; however, these green roofs should also last twice as long. With the natural renewal of a city's building stock, the widespread installation of green roofs with new construction would transform a city's roofscape over time. In 2006, the City of Toronto adopted public policy to encourage green roofs through urban planning and financial subsidies [www.toronto.ca/greenroofs/index.htm].
More and more building professionals and contractors are learning about green roof construction. to facilitate the learning process the Urban Ecology Centre [www.urbanecology.net] published two green roof reports (in French) in 2005 and 2006. the first report, Toîtures vertes a la montréalaise, was a 100-page introduction to green roofs for the southern Québec climate with a survey of green roof experiences in Québec and around the world. The second report, Projet-pilote de toît vert, documents the demonstration project form its initial planning to ongoing plant maintenance. It includes many photos and illustrates the project's costs, materials, earth and plant choices, the role of each team member. the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) has also published reports relating to green roofs [www.cmhc-schl.gc.ca].

Team Effort
The basic construction team for a green roof includes the client, architect, structural engineer, green roof supplier, general contractor and roofing subcontractor. Depending on the extent of the project, a landscape architect or a horticulturalist could also be part of the team. there are more and more green roof suppliers in Canada. Technically, the construction of a green roof is not that difficult; however, due to the additional weight, a structural engineer should always be consulted. Ultimately the success of a project is determined by the correct choice of plants and substrate thickness given the roof's particular microclimate and the client's desired aesthetic. the true test of a green roof is whether the plants are able to survive three consecutive winters; so, when a new green roof technology appears, it is always a good idea to ask if it has at least three years of proven success and/or a good warranty.

Green Roof Composition
The green roof system can be installed once the roof structure has been properly designed and the appropriate roofing membranes have been applied. the system varies from one supplier to another, but usually contains a number of items such as an anti-root membrane, water drainage panels, a geotextile and specially formulated green roof light earth substrate. The weight of the earth holds the system in place by gravity.
Now the gardening begins! The most appropriate categories of plants for extensive green roofs are wild grasses, wild meadow flowers and sedums (waxy plants). the ecological goal is to favour indigenous plants, but the final choice depends on the chosen green roof technology and the roof's planned use. A number of institutional extensive projects in Montréal have used clover for its low-cost and tenacious character. Each green roof supplier is capable of furnishing information about the appropriate choice of plants and their aesthetic impacts. The installation of an irrigation system also depends on the type of roof and choice of plants. The more ecologically-oriented the roof, the less likely that it will need an irrigation system. In cities, irrigation of green roofs and gardens uses municipal water. Rain and/or grey water recuperation and indigenous landscaping strategies can help reduce summertime demand for city water resources.

It's Alive!
Unlike a normal roof that most of us tend to forget,a green roof does require regular maintenance. For an extensive ecological roof, the maintenance is minimised to about six times a year from spring through to autumn. This requires inspection of the roof drains to make sure that they are clear of debris, trimming the plants in spring and periodic weeding. If the roof does not have a built-in irrigation system, even the hardiest of ecological roofs may need additional irrigation during intense summer heat waves. Much of the roof's maintenance will depend on how the roof is used, the plants that have been chosen and the owner's gardening habits. Residential green roofs can also be used for recreational gardening.
Loft owners in Montréal have also invoked the idea of an urban cottage where the roof may include an outdoor bedroom, shower, summer kitchen and patio surrounded by a roof-top meadow and views of the city. For the building owner, green roofs increase building value and create a personal urban oasis. For the larger community, green roofs reduce the load on a city's water infrastructure and help to moderate urban temperatures. Clearly, green roofs not only benefit individuals, but they also benefit our neighbourhoods and our cities. the fifth façade has never shown so much potential.

Rose, Owen. 'Blue Roofs' On Site review, no. 17 Spring/Summer 2007
©Owen Rose and On Site review

Soggy Bottom Architecture

2009-02-10T09:03:00.007-08:00

worried about rising sea levels? Go to the Netherlands — they have lots of experience with these things
Paul Whelan, illustration: New New York by Hugo Arriojas
According to a pair of studies published in the journal Science, global warming has already committed our planet to rising sea-levels. Jonathan Overpeck, an earth scientist at the University of Arizona in Tucson who co-authored both studies, says that the sea level will rise at rates of up to a metre per one hundred years – and it could go faster.
Humans are vulnerable because we build most of our cities in low coastal areas. The recent example of New Orleans and the ongoing struggle between the Netherlands and the sea are reminders of our future reality. We know that the water is rising, so what can we do? The obvious answer is to reduce our dependence on carbon ... but humans are catastrophically bad at taking preventative actions. Inevitably we will have to adapt to global warming and all its consequences, including higher sea levels.
However, there is a continuum of available responses ranging from holding back the water, making or buildings float, or simply doing nothing.

Beavering Away
If we decide to fight the seas and hold the water back, the Netherlands offers planning, engineering and political lessons Their extensive systems of dykes, dams and drainage strategies are designed to keep land below sea level dry. Rising sea levels threaten the entire country.
Recently a Dutch landscape firm, H+N+S, have proposed a new response to the triple threat of rising sea levels, subsiding land and increasing rains. To dampen the impact of ever-increasing storm surges, H+N+S propose selectively channelling the water behind the defences. H+N+S advocate catchment systems for fresh and salt water and reservoirs for excess rainfall. This strategy will require relinquishing land so strenuously won from the sea. The landscape will change from traditional farmland with water channels and ditches to one of raised lakes and reservoirs – a kind of non-sensical contour map. However, it could be the only way the Netherlands can save its country.
Regardless of the engineering and planning, the Dutch rely on a highly centralised government to construct and maintain their sea defences. Their system of participatory and centralised democracy is a political anomaly and I fully expect that fighting the sea would more likely result in less-friendly autocratic government.

Floating
Happily, buildings can float. there are two models for floating foundations. the Canadian model is based on the diving raft with concrete poured around polystyrene. These structures are unsinkable, but tend to be less stable for non-square geometries. Not surprisingly, the Dutch have been experimenting with floating buildings. Based on the river barge, Dutch technology consists of a floating concrete container in which the lower level becomes an underwater basement. Waterstudio Architects of the Netherlands have designed floating houses and are currently developing a 25-storey floating office tower and courtyard housing prototypes.
To date, floating buildings depend on nearby dry land for services or are anchored with mooring poles that also provide an umbilical connection for services. Without sea defences, floating buildings will be extremely vulnerable to increasingly violent storms, except where large expanses of newly inundated lagoons could provide a storm-damping environment in flat low-lying areas. Floating buildings could be effective in marshy delta areas that are already threatened by rising waters.

Do Nothing Romanticism
Doing nothing may ultimately be the most romantically compelling response to rising sea levels. Venice, a city that accepts its regular inundations, may offer the most clues for the benign-neglect approach. As Venice slowly disappears, many other cities could take its place as a magical tourist destination. Imagine gondoliering through a New York transformed into a city of canals and skyscrapers. However, a deliriously wet New York will ultimately require serious design to ensure the right level of submersion. At the very least, infrastructure such as the subways, potable water, power and sewage would have to be re-engineered.

Saving our sinking sea-level cities will be an expensive undertaking. The capital needed to re-engineer an entire city will be scarce as businesses move away to drier and higher ground. Whole districts of the city will elegantly decay as the water laps at their second floor windows. We live in an era where financial markets dictate settlement form. As in Venice, it is quite likely that at some tipping point, the rich will abandon the coasts for safer inland settlements, leaving the poor to cope with their deteriorating coastal cities.
In any built response to rising sea levels, infrastructure and its maintenance will be a significant challenge. What we humans lack in intelligence we sometimes compensate for by cleverness. Perhaps we will be making floating cities anchored to the atlantan ruins of our submerged cities. Maybe our future will be a combination of Futurism fantasy and Disney picturesque.
Whelan, Paul. 'Soggy Bottom Architecture' On Site review, no. 17 Spring/Summer 2007
©Paul Whelan, Hugo Arriojas and On Site review

Dubai Culture

2009-02-06T06:55:00.004-08:00

Jumeirah Lake Towers, New Dubai UAE
Ski Dubai at the Mall of the Emirates, Dubai UAE

photos by Barbara Flanagan-Eguchi

Real Eguchi
It seems to me that there is an unhealthy disconnect between the cultural heritage of Dubai and the western culture it is embracing. When I say unhealthy, I mean the resulting consequences for people and the local environment that stems from recent development. I hope Dubai is not just about the culture of greed. Let’s reflect upon our own beliefs and values, since development in Dubai may very well be congruent with what we do here, except more intense at the moment.
Eguchi, Real. 'Dubai' On Site review, no. 18 Fall 2008
©Barbara Flanagan-Eguchi, Real Eguchi and On Site review

Beach as Model

2009-02-04T07:16:00.007-08:00

enduring urban images

spmb_projects
Copacabana is more than a neighbourhood. It is the limit between the city and local enclosures. Copacabana moves between the sensorial, the externally visible, offered through forms, colours, architecture, traffic and people, and from the other side, the spaces are reduced to the invisibility of everyday life where thousands of people submerge, anonymous faces stamped by unknown life. —Wilson Coutinho

The aerial view above is from Manchete, a Brasilian popular news magazine from the seventies, which we, spmb_projects, use almost as a logo, as a central reference for our practice. The beach engages public space in the most radical sense, where territoriality is blurred by a new possibility of spatial negotiation. It is also one of our favourite spaces in the world. Here the inhabitants of different backgrounds, cultural formation, racial roots and social classes share one same landscape in relative harmony. The beach becomes the image of the ideal urban social equaliser – a spatialised democracy in a sense. Other qualities that constitute this ideal land/urbanscape are: warm air, natural and human soundscapes, soft surfaces, views, informal infrastructures – beach vendors, ocean water, pick up soccer and kiosks; formal infrastructures – abundant transportation systems, boardwalks, health and safety stations, public washrooms, life guards, restaurants and bars, security, and large events like concerts, parades or celebrations.

The iconic design of Roberto Burle-Marx was completed in 1970, and Copacabana was redefined through the expansion of the public space by stretching the surface of the beach and the promenade through the use of traditional Portuguese mosaic paving stones, creating the now famous pattern. Based on the achievement of Copacabana beach as an exemplary case of engaging urban design, and for its renowned quality of an urban environment, this experience could even suggest a new field of exploration that we refer as Beach Urbanism. It serves us as a model for the ways we practice in public space: the beach as an urban infrastructure.

spmb_projects. 'Beach as Model' On Site review, no. 18 Fall 2008
©Eduardo Aquino, Karen Shanski and On Site review

Form and Settlement

2009-02-03T13:48:00.004-08:00

the social construction of landscape

Elizabeth Shotton
North Atlantic Rim (NAR) Research Collaborative: University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway. Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada. University College in Dublin, Ireland. Academy of the Arts: Architecture and Design in Reykjavik, Iceland.

NAR's series of cross-cultural studies of coastal settlements on the north Atlantic started in 2004 with initial drawing and documentation studies of coastal landscapes and settlements in Norway and Ireland. It continued the following year in Iceland, and concluded the first phase in Nova Scotia in 2006.

The project has examined natural landscapes, altered landscapes, historic and contemporary building responses to these conditions, and the relationship between material resources and building form. North Atlantic coastal landscapes face significant development pressures and environmental threats to their fragile ecosystems, landforms and settlements. Conte drawings from the scale of landscape to building form and detail, scaled aerial drawings of each region and site photography have formed a basis for comparisons, identifying salient issues of culture and settlement patterns, landscape and its relevance to built form.

NAR's project parallels Richard Saul Wurman's work with design student at the University of North Carolina, later made into a small book called Cities: Comparisons of Form & Scale (1963). His representation of city form in sand castings insipred NAR's study of landscape and settlement in drawings. Wurman's thesis was that 'the healthy existence of cities is the degree to which the beginnings of a particular city is apparent'. NAR's focus reaches further back to the primacy of landscape to understand its critical relevance in shaping the form of human culture and settlement. While Wurman's work responded to the underlying pressures on city development during the mid- to late-twentieth century, environment is key to our present and future evolution, allied to current issues of sustainability.

Robert Thayer, in Gray World, Green Heart: Technology, Nature and the Sustainable Landscape, proposes that 'surface versus core' is one of the most fundamental ways to understand landscape. Describing the ever-widening dislocation between these two, he proposes that surface values are based on what is in front of us. As a visually-trained profession we see the surface condition of landscape, and work to reveal its poetic beauty through our remaking of its surface through building. Difficult to achieve and admirable when realised, it is the manner in which young architects are trained and old architects work. However, it does not engage the core.

Core values are those hidden conditions of the land, its ecological and material processes – the operative level of landscape. Re-linking those processes construed as natural and those construed as made, challenges the surface-core dichotomy with a more holistic picture of continuity and interdependence – landscape as the thing that hold us. Sustainability as a reading of core, of processes and interrelationships, was commonplace until technology and industry severed this understanding.

However, recent ecological consequences have reached a crisis, revealing once again our interdependence with the land. This critical immediacy between landscape and building is the subject of NAR's research — to understand how intimately architecture can be informed by its place by comparing four places of similar but unequal landscapes, with four similar but unequal legacies in building.

Ireland, Norway, Iceland and Atlantic Canada share some surprising landscape alliances. Although Norway has steep mountain ranges and deep fjords, its habitable coastal lands strongly resemble the others. Each place is dominated by coastline, Iceland and Ireland as islands and Nova Scotia and Norway as peninsulas. The Atlantic Ocean tempers the environment each, maintaining green landscapes of small valleys and hills interrupted by rock outcroppings and cliffs. It also inform the industry and culture of these regions.

Subtle distinctions in form, built or unbuilt, the relationship to resources, climate and culture become manifest when studied through the discipline of drawing. When various research interests are brought to bear on the drawing project, from the relationship between perception, representation and design, to environmentally-driven foci on material resource management and use in architectural practice, a diversity of cultural, material and formal readings emerge. excerpts from students' notes demonstrate this vividly.

Cultural and personal backgrounds of the participants have enriched these studies. Perceptual biases both influence the reading of the terrain under investigation, and recast one's own culture in comparison. Legacies of physical and cultural alteration to the landscape that come from inhabitation become not only explicit but also often poignant when coupled with the shared experiences of a cross-cultural research team.

If limited only to the yearly exchange of ideas among students and staff, the project has value enough as it gives new insights into architectural form, space making and cultural meanings.

The second phase of the NAR project will revisit the four countries, expanding its base of documentation and including built experiments.

Shotton, Elizabeth. 'Form and Settlement' On Site review, no. 17 Spring/Summer 2007
©Elizabeth Shotton and On Site review

Watering the Seeds of Doubt

2009-01-30T12:58:00.005-08:00

Jamelie Hassan's garden of light questions the process of peace

Miriam Jordan and Julian Haladyn
The Lester B Pearson Garden for Peace and Understanding was designed by the landscape architect Paul Ehnes in the grounds of Victoria University in the University of Toronto. It commemorates the life of Pearson, who graduated from Victoria University in 1919 and served as Chancellor from 1952-1959. As the fourteenth Prime Minister of Canada and the 1957 recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, Pearson was a fierce advocate for peace who, as the inscription on the railing overlooking the garden reads, 'established Canada's reputation in the 20th Century as one of the world's great peacekeeping nations and helped define Canada's modern foreign policy'.

A small waterfall flows from beneath this railing and cascades into a calm pool of water surrounded by a lush perennial garden that includes bugleweed, anemones, coneflowers, globe thistle and heuchera.1 Flat stones in the pool make a shallow, gradated water garden, punctuated by larger rocks similar to the space in a Japanese garden. The calm and peaceful atmosphere of this tribute to Pearson comes from Paul Ehnes' use of 'water in all of its states to illustrate the process of education which is essential for peace'. 2

The winner of the 2001 Governor-General's Award in Visual and Media Arts, Jamelie Hassan's practice as a Lebanese-Canadian artists, writer and curator often confronts issues of colonialism, patriarchy, militarism, censorship, sexuality and cultural identity. She explores personal and public histories often ignored in public discourse, such as the salient fact that peace is not a daily reality for all too many people throughout the world. She chose the Lester B Pearson Garden as the context for her installation Garden of Light, a site-specific artwork that was part of Nuit Blanche, an all-night art event that took place the night of September 30, 2006. This event featured more than 130 contemporary art projects that interacted with other sites throughout Toronto, including Maize Barbacoa, a corn roast in Yorkville Park by Hassan's partner Ron Benner.

For Garden of Light, Hassan added night-blooming lilies, plastic flowers that let of a soft glimmer of light when placed in the water and, also in the pool, a series of 10 letter-shaped ceramic pieces that spell the word 'eventually'. Through these elements, Hassan invited spectators to reconsider the concepts of peace and understanding specifically where Ehnes used water as a symbol for the process of peace.

The most interactive element of Hassan's installation was the glowing plastic flowers which could be seen floating throughout the space of the pool adding an intimate illumination to the garden. The flowers were transformed into an element of delight. When people realised that the flowers stopped glowing when removed from the water, they started to play with these flowers, picking them up and throwing them back into the water as through making wishes. This interactivity between the spectators and Garden of Light turned the calm, passive and meditative space of the Lester B Pearson Garden for Peace and Understanding into an arena of communal activity. By relating this participatory project to the conceptual construction of the garden itself (water as symbolic of peace and understanding), Hassan invited the spectators to become participants, actively working towards peace through the communality of play. The coming together of spectators from all walks of life during this one-night encounter illustrates the necessity for people to work together to forge real and enduring peace throughout the world.

This is heightened by the ceramic letters scattered throughout the pool. That these white letters might combine to form the word 'eventually' can easily be overlooked – a discreet reminder that peace has not been achieved in spite of our intentions, a reminder that we cannot sit passively by and hope that people will be achieved 'eventually'.

How easily this was overlooked can be seen in many responses published after the event, in which Garden of Light is discussed almost entirely in terms of the beauty of the glowing flowers. But anyone familiar with Hassan's work knows that her presentation of beauty is always accompanied by political commentary; in the case of this installation the commentary is very subtle and must be pieced together using the original intentions of the garden itself – a meditation on peace and understanding. The beauty of Garden of Light is that the peacefulness of the installation depends on a fragile moment in time when visitors come together and forget their differences in the play of the lights and water. The addition of the scattered letters adds to this participatory experience, in which the activity of piecing the word together required visitors to walk around the garden and, as was often the case, to talk to one another, communicating this little secret.
'Since that night', Ashley Gallaugher writes in her article on Nuit Blanche, 'when I look at the garden on my way home from class, it seems like something vital is missing. It was great seeing people interact with the garden'. 3 What is missing is the community that Hassan brought together for one evening with Garden of Light. The water in this garden symbolises the clarity, enlightenment and understanding that comes with peace. By situating her installation in this water Hassan planted a seed of doubt about whether we have truly reached this state of understanding. The fragmented letters drifted in the water, implying that if the currents come together in the right way, peace will follow – eventually.

1 For a list of the perennial plants in the garden, see http://www.vicu.utoronto.ca/Alumni/The_Lester_B_Pearson_Garden_for_Peace_and_Understanding/Perennial_Plant_List.htm
2 Victoria University website on The Lester B Pearson Garden for Peace and Understanding, http://www.vicu.utoronto.ca/Alumni/The_Lester_B_Pearson_Garden_for_Peace_and_Understanding.htm
3 Gallaugher, Ashley. "Nuit Blanch help us up all night, in a good way". The Strand, 15 October 2006: 11.

Jordan, Miriam and Jason Haladyn. 'Watering the Seeds of Doubt' On Site review, no. 17 Spring/Summer 2007
©Miriam Jordan and Jason Haladyn and On Site review

We Are The Environment

2009-01-29T12:27:00.006-08:00

plug us in, connect us to the earth and we might start to get it

Jonah Humphrey
We are altering the chemistry and biology of our world: human endeavours are not just limited to the local, but now operate at the scale of the globe itself.
The earth, spatially and temporally, is immense. We fear that our alteration of life-supporting processes will be irreversible and uncontrollable. However, when combatting environmental changes, we often react against natural transformations such as floods, earthquakes and hurricanes. Our fear and uncertainty wants a kind of permanence. We try to prevent 'natural processes' from changing and evolving.
We must reconcile our own personal spatial interactions with the new global connectivity that exists between technology, the material products of our cultures, and the natural environment. Global connectivity was a twentieth century concept —Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller each saw a coming hybridisation of technology and nature in new spheres of global interconnections.
Teilhard de Chardin believed that our capacity to generate complex systems and technologies of interaction mimics the evolutionary and biological development of consciousness. After the geosphere, and the biosphere, comes the nöosphere – a sphere of thought that now surrounds the earth. McLuhan saw this connectivity as driven by global media to the point that systems of sound and video will be so inter-linked as to form our environment entirely. Fuller demonstrated technological and biological interconnectivity in a geodesic dome, a geoscope, the interior of which was lined with aerial images simultaneously displaying flows of economic and natural resources: a control centre for the earth's cultural and ecological processes. Link the world wide web to contemporary theories of global ecology and we experience the earth as an enormous entity of organic, fluid and artificial system interwoven in a network of physical and virtual space.

Why then, with such powers of transformation, do we have a fundamental fear of altering the environment?
We need a better understanding of the inherent forms of feedback that already exist between the world and us. As we adapt to drastic environmental change, we can measure the perceptions and preconceptions we hold of ourselves compared to the environment's own character, state and nature.

Land|Scope, a theoretical project, addresses some of these things. It defines landscape as a combined realm of ecology and culture borrowing ideas from Fuller's Geoscope to find new applications for responsive technologies – systems embedded in structures that allow them to sense, think and act within the environment. Whereas Fuller's proposal was an enclosed, spatially separated global system of control, Land|Scope is an integrated landscape of interaction, offering a place for interpretation and reconciliation with the environment.
This project is sited at the Canada Centre for Inland Waters (CCIW), home of the National Water Research Institute (NWRI), which researches and tests natural and man-made water-based systems. CCIW sits on Hamilton Harbour beside the Skyway Bridge that connects Burlington to Hamilton – a site between suburban development, industrial lands, remediated wetlands and the open waters of Lake Ontario; a site quite literally at the centre of many of Canada's leading environmental concerns, including the state, the natural environment, industrial production and pollution, and fresh water reserves. The NWRI houses Canada's Global Environmental Monitoring System for freshwater (GEMS/WATER), part of the United Nations Environment Programme.
It is precisely this monitoring that Land|Scope aims to use as a basis for interpretation and response. the current monitoring done at the NWRI, as well as monitoring of new systems in a hybrid natural/industrial landscape surrounding the site, will be brought into the architectural component of the project – a monitoring centre where our interactions with the local ecology can be publicly accessed, showing the connectivity between the wetlands surrounding the facility, Hamilton Harbour and the biosphere.
Responsive architectures – whole environments of connection – have the potential to free us from the rigid ideas that we currently use to define our environment. Within new hybrid environments, we might better understand phenomena present in nature and technology alike, reacting and adapting accordingly as both the living creatures and the cultural beings we are.

I would like to extend my thanks to Michael Forbes, Science Liason Officer for Environment Canada, and the NWRI, for allowing me to tour the facilities, and providing me with the information to make my research and design work possible.

Humphrey, Jonah. 'We are the Environment' On Site review, no. 17 Spring/Summer 2007
©Jonah Humphrey and On Site review

Draping Vancouver

2009-01-27T14:38:00.008-08:00

accidental urban typologies
Joey Giaimo
The perpetual buzz of building activity in downtown Vancouver — 46 residential complexes currently [2007] under construction — is contributing to the accumulation of a single building type. The exalted condominium tower on a podium has resulted in thousands of hastily injected living units in the downtown core. Planners have long recognised the shortcomings of this typological saturation, yet have had to accept the consequent exhaustion of downtown lots.
Besides a questionable density of inhabitants, with each concrete pour the end product is clear: another podium, another tower, another quasi-public space. Difference is presented in tweaks and gimmicks rather than forceful pushes towards less predictable, more challenging directions.

Fleeting Occurrences
Every new hole in the ground, the inevitable erection of the crane and its associated surface activities interrupt, disrupt and reorganise public space. In Vancouver the choreography of city building is well-rehearsed, as are the concessions made by those who walk, pace and wander through it. Downtown flâneurs have prudently unleashed those turtles that haven't already been crushed by the ten-ton trucks which jerk and chug from one site to the next.
There is always room for optimism — these transient disruptions provide an alternate way to negotiate city surfaces and form. But a different kind of construction activity is also taking place, one linked with two words, leaky and condo, always spoken under Vancouver's breath, and one that, catalysed not by construction fever but by its failure, inadvertently re-represents or even de-represents architecture in the cityscape.

Ghost Building
In the frenzy of building activity a number of scaffolds wrap previously completed structures. Scaffolds come in various guises buy typically are cloaked with an emerald green perforated fabric — a unique and detailed veiling. However, there are variations: several skids of brick in the lane behind one building signal cladding replacement. To maintain a consistent mortar temperature, the scaffolding has been wrapped in an opaque, silky white sheathing to hold tempered air between drape and façade.
A phantasmic presence, this wrapped building marks a striking difference to the stock of condo towers dotting the downtown core. It may look like just another leaky condo but it is also a spectacular and captivating phenomenon, a changeling in this ephemeral condition.

Mute Rendering
Formally, the Ghost Building presents itself like all the others, twenty to thirty-something storeys extruded vertically and placed the bylaw-eighty-feet from its neighbours. In its simple slip, it has masked itself from the city and bowed out of the point-tower posturing race. However, this new typology has inadvertently transformed the everyday into event.
Ghost Building grabs attention with an undeliberate ingenuity that other condos would like, but can't have. The draw of its pillowy skin is immediate. It undulates. It shakes and shivers. It billows and shimmers. At night it is a glowing collage with subtle punctuations of colour from the still-occupied units inside. Positioned in a field of static sameness, this wrapped building makes no overt claims for attention, but its silence commands attention anyway. Muffled and mute the building is inconclusive. Ghost Building's detached, new intensity contests the city's zealous efforts to provide the perfect mould for city living. The decorative nips, tucks, swirls and swooshes of the neighbours look insufficient and superfluous against its tremulous mass.
Androgenous, silkily clad and not its usual muscular brick self, the Ghost Building also obscures all those involved in its original presence: the planners, the advisory design panels, the city's council, local community groups, the architects, the engineers, the endless assortment of building consultants, the marketing team and ultimately even the building's own inhabitants, who register only when their lights are on at night.

Something of Difference
I don't wish to present Ghost Building as good architecture or as an urban success story. Its premise is based in failures that are a menace to its inhabitants; it is ethereal but an aberration. But by effectively shutting itself off, it questions both the external and internal uniformity of high-rise residential living throughout the peninsula.
While condo marketing and architecture collude to sell the ideal interior condition, Ghost Building has propelled this condition to its absurd apotheosis. Ghost Building's fabric has imprisoned the inhabitants in an interiority that has everything they paid for, except that all-important view. In a further irony, the fabric delights only those looking at if from the outside, turning he whole notion of privileged lifestyle on its head, and pointing out how transitory a thing lifestyle is.

Beyond Lifestyle
Processes of construction, decay and repair flag the shortcomings of unrelenting urbanistic production: Ghost Building's interruptive architecture displays all the urban and formal contradictions of Vancouver's insistent residential tower type.

Giaimo, Joey. 'Draping Vancouver' On Site review, no. 17 Spring/Summer 2007
©Joey Giaimo and On Site review

São Paulo's Water Ways

2009-01-27T10:14:00.008-08:00

redefining the power of São Paulo's infrastructure
Fernando de Mello Franco
On the verge of summer, when pluviometric rates in São Paulo are at their highest, the chronic problem of flooding resumes. With the intense process of disorderly urbanisation, the soil has become excessively impermeable. The transformation and occupation of São Paulo Basin riverbanks and fluvial plains, which used to control water flows, just worsen the problem.

The entire population is hit by the flooding. Underprivileged populations who live close to water flows in historically depreciated areas are directly affected in their own dwellings. The risk situation of these populations represents for every public administration a reason for concern, which might be either of lower or higher level, according to their social commitment. This issue has never been tackled in an effective manner, and suffers with continual government changes and discontinuity.

The population not affected in their own dwellings is affected by difficulties imposed by a lack of mobility when the main road system, situated on a tableland and strategically placed parallel to the water ways, floods. As water incapacitates traffic flow, the problem gains a metropolitan dimension, also reaching production sectors.

As flooding is a factor of urban diseconomy, harming the efficient flow of people and goods, it belongs to the city administration plan and political agenda, to which successive governments have allocated funds, although never enough. In this investment, there is an opportunity for action, pinpointing needy areas throughout the metropolis.

Articulating Systemic and Local Concerns: the network of piscinões
The issues involving water resources — urban drainage, sanitation and water supply — are complex and demand efforts at both macro and micro levels. Since 1990 it has been dealt with by the State Plan of Water Resources (PERH) and Macro-drainage Plan for the Upper Tiete Basin.
One of the solutions proposed for city flooding is the construction of a set of large reservoirs, piscinões, to retain and control rain water, holding it back from city rivers and streams, reducing any overflow. In short, the piscinão replaces the original regulating function of the fluvial plains, now occupied and fully impermeable.
Presently, there are about 319 built reservoirs out of a total estimate of 131, which will be sable to hold 15.5 million cubic metres of water. They are distributed throughout the micro-tributary basins of Tiete River, covering the entire São Paulo water system. Many are located in peripheral areas, close to informal sectors of city occupation. Thus, in order to face the metropolitan dimension of flooding problems, there must be some meaningful public investment in peripheral areas. Finding a fit between the metropolitan and local dimensions of this question is the starting point toward any solution.
The 'informal' sectors have the most need for public spaces. In São Paulo, where disputes over space are often mediated by violence, there are still some unoccupied areas: pieces of land usually devoted to football fields, and other community activities. In the informal sectors, samba, funk dance and football matches are important events for the construction of social and communal networks, highly necessary for the strengthening of relationships to resist the adversities present in a large metropolis. They are a spontaneous manifestation that shows the value of public space in these areas.

This collection of vacant urban spaces in São Paulo can be converted into an opportunity for a new network of public spaces. For example, the piscinão is only active about 3 to 4 months out of the year, during high-water periods. For the other months it is idle. New programs can be added to the piscinão, building on the future steps of the Macro-drainage Plan.
Piscinões unit both the system of the borough's public spaces and the technical system for the drainage, treatment and re-use of water resources. They can serve as a landmark and spatial reference on the cityscape of the borough, laying water's claim to the floodplain.

Re-urbanisation of Água Branca, São Paulo, SP, 2004
Fernando de Mello Franco, Marta Moreira and Milton Braga, in association with Camila Toledo Fabrini, Guilherme Wisnik, Martin Corullon and Roberto Klein.
São Paulo will have to be consistent in managing its natural resources in a sustainable and rational manner. In this context, the effective urban reconfiguration of an area as large as the proposed new borough in Água Branca can only be achieved through the infrastructural planning of the region. However, an intervention on this scale essentially means defining the design of that urban infrastructure, giving legible form to a strategic action on behalf of the public authorities.
The association between transport and water-related issues in São Paulo surfaces here as a project theme, broached through a consequent critical deportment.

New train stations on existing lines are proposed to fulfill a strategic role as points of mediation between scales, and to serve as links between the metropolitan transport non-polluting railway system and the localities. In our project, these train stations are organised as agglomeration points for public facilities, special services and social housing.

Another matter is the definition of public spaces in this project: recreational and gathering spaces, which seek proximity with the circulation system and with the watercourses, arise out of precisely this conviction. the resulting water square holds both the system of the borough's public spaces and the technical system for the drainage, treatment and re-use of water resources. Fruit of a wellspring of non-contaminated groundwater, it will serve as a landmark and spatial reference on the cityscape of the borough, laying water's claim to the floodplain, at once technical and symbolic, rigorous and crystalline.

de Mello, Fernando. 'Water Ways' On Site review, no. 17 Spring/Summer 2007
©Fernando de Mello Franco and On Site review

Urban Guerillas

2009-01-23T12:48:00.008-08:00

sociopolitical architecture of the public realm

Christopher Roach
I [one]
On the east end of 24th Street in San Francisco, stretching from Valencia Street to Potrero Avenue, is a world that is neither exclusively Latin American, nor definitively North American, but is particular to San Francisco and, more specifically, the Mission District. I can get fresh masa to make tortillas at La Palma Mexicatessen, sip the best cappuccinos at Café Venice, buy fresh produce from several sidewalk groceries, feast on tacos al pastor for a few bucks at Taqueria Vallarta or have a malted milkshake at the St. Francis Soda Fountain. Tree-lined, two-way, crowded with slow-moving traffic on a busy Saturday afternoon, I can still call out to a friend across the street and jaywalk safely to shake his hand. Both sides of the street are lined with small storefronts, catering largely, though not exclusively, to the resident Latino community. There are relics of a more distant past, such as the St. Francis, when Mission was a working-class neighbourhood of Irish, Italian and Scandinavian immigrants. There is also a creeping, eminent gentrification: several stylish cafés and boutique stores have cropped up to serve the growing white professional class that is moving into the affordable Mission neighbourhoods.
At the other end of 24th Street, heading over the hill at Dolores Street and down into Noe Valley, is a different though not altogether alien world, where French bistros replace taquerias, and tandem strollers almost outnumber cars. At this end of the street I’m more likely to find artisan cheese and an expensive bottle of wine, or perhaps a nice pair of shoes, but I can still grab a greasy slice of pizza and watch a soccer game at the local pub. Punctuating the continuous row of small three and four-storey buildings is a small parking lot that becomes an upscale farmer’s market on Saturdays; further down, the local CalaFoods supermarket is set back behind its parking lot. Nonetheless, this end of 24th continues familiar, small-scale retail with a few storeys of housing above. The sidewalks are clean and most buildings have a fresh coat of paint, but there’s a noticeably more homogeneous and sanitised feeling on this end of the street. There are no murals, less graffiti, fewer street vendors, and I rarely hear a foreign language spoken here.
These two ends of 24th street represent a kind of urban dialectic of use and culture representative of larger forces at work in the evolution of a city such as San Francisco. There are certainly streets that are more grand, and others more important in the city’s history and culture – Market Street, Mission Street or Columbus Avenue – but in these 24 city blocks one can still read an entire dissertation on the particularity of a place and time in the life of the city. A hermeneutical reading of streets reveals a fragment of the underlying code of our entire society. By parsing the language of the social, political, and economic structures embodied in our streets, they can tell us volumes about ourselves and the world we have made; both the delights and the dangers that we face. For if we turn the page to read another street, we may find that the tale it tells is not one of urbane diversity and harmonious civility, but one of dislocation, disenfranchisement and decay.

2 [two]
Our streets, as much as our buildings, are a physical manifestation of our social and cultural values, especially those relating to the context of human settlement. Streets are, in their boundless ubiquity and variety of form, expressions of our attitudes toward communication, commerce, transportation, privacy, security, hygiene, dwelling, public speech, beauty, nature, geography, history and culture. As these attitudes shift and evolve over space and time, so do our streets, like a slowly evolving living organism.
Streets are, even more than buildings, the most pervasive and essential physical embodiment of the public realm.1 They are not just vessels and nodes in the circulatory system of the city, but are the fountainhead of civil society, and therefore one of our most precious physical and cultural resources. Streets are the public stage for our everyday lives as well as the singular events that mark the passage of a common history: battles and parades, protests and celebrations, markets and marathons, carnivals and funerals. On this stage we have played out the grand drama of our most celebrated and infamous social conflicts, from the barricades of pre-Haussmann Paris to the Civil Rights marches and anti-war protests of 1960s America.
But streets are also the theatre for the public performance of daily life, where we engage in the activities of civic Being, whether through commerce, recreation, spectacle, or speech. As Alan Jacobs notes in his seminal book Great Streets, ‘sociability is a large part of why cities exist and streets are a major if not the only public place for that sociability to develop’.2 Streets are where the personal and the political flow together, and for many, streets are the only place where sociability, or even identity, can form freely. Particularly in modern societies that are dominated by a homogeneous popular culture, streets have been the locus for the formation and dissemination of counterculture. In fact, contemporary North American counterculture is largely synonymous with street culture, whether in the form of punk, hip-hop, skateboarding, bikers or street gangs and their associated forms of music, dress, language, art and identity politics.
Most importantly, streets have historically been the locus for resistance, whether cultural or political, and resistance is a form of participation critical to the formation and existence of civil society. In our hermeneutical reading of streets, we find that resistance is still relevant, and necessary, because the physical and cultural space of our streets is threatened by the same encroachments of privatisation, surveillance, commercialisation and negligence that face civil society itself. Just as we witness the sale of our public institutions and infrastructure to private enterprise, so too can we find in our streets a creeping erosion of the public sphere.

3 [three]
Functionalism’s reign as the dominant paradigm of mid-century architecture and urban planning gave rise to a general philosophy of segregation of uses within the public right-of-way.3 This, combined with the ascendancy of the automobile, left a decades-long legacy of robust traffic engineering and weak urbanism. Ironically, the functional separation of uses that was supposed to promote health, safety, and revitalisation of the modern city mostly resulted in less safety, more congestion, and bleak stretches of empty asphalt cutting through entire neighbourhoods. Despite the eventual outcry by Jane Jacobs and the reformations of the Preservationist movement (and later, the New Urbanists), our streets remain bloated by increasing volumes of automobile traffic, and marked by the remaining artifacts of elevated highways, vast intersections, narrower sidewalks and stranded islands of nervous pedestrians. Moreover, functionalist zoning regulations and redevelopment failed to prevent, and may have even enabled, the flight of the urban middle class to the suburbs, resulting not only in the physical decline of urban centres, but also in the decline of the remaining residents’ political power.
Road building, once one of the great public works of the state, has now largely been turned over to private enterprise; our streets are increasingly entitled, funded, designed, built, maintained, policed and even owned by private or public-private entities. State and local governments stripped of funding and maxed out on their bonding capacity, can often no longer afford to build and maintain infrastructure and must turn to large developers to carry out the construction and administration of streets, public spaces and entire neighbourhoods. While these projects must go through the environmental review process and are usually handed over to the city or state upon completion, the profit motive inherently reduces the input citizens have on the form of their cities and communities. In the cases where these private entities retain ownership or administration of the streets and public spaces they construct, even basic freedoms we expect to be self-evident in public spaces are called into question.
As suburban flight has abated and as people and businesses have begun to return to downtown, political power over the planning process has once again shifted, but not into the hands of the long-time residents or cultural pioneers who created value where there once was none. Business and real estate interests have come to wield inordinate political influence over the urban planning process in cities that are experiencing an explosion of growth in the urban core. This is especially true in downtown shopping areas, where retailers’ perceived need to compete with the convenience of suburban malls drives them to lobby for policies that favour commerce over public amenity: increased capacity for automobile access and more parking versus wider sidewalks, traffic calming and green space.4 This erosion of public space is furthered by the intrusion of advertising into every aspect of the streetscape. The cacophony of signage, billboards and advertisements on bus shelters, benches, kiosks, newsstands and sandwich boards has become so familiar as to be virtually invisible, and is accepted by many as the cost of having a robust and free market.
Retail businesses rely on pedestrian traffic for their sales and are particularly interested in creating an environment of safety and stability, leading to the propagation of security cameras and private security guards and fostering a culture of surveillance and control on the street that has a chilling effect on free speech and expression. This has a subtle and insidious influence on what is deemed to be an acceptable use of the street, or even what is viewed as appropriate public behaviour. Public actors in the theatre of downtown streets are encouraged, provided they generally abide by the script of the marketplace. As long as they’re shining shoes, selling jewellery, hawking a sale or entertaining for a coin they are accepted, or at least tolerated. But as soon as they try to speak out, stage a spontaneous protest or performance or just do something ridiculous, they’re harassed, asked for their permit or just whisked away.
Many of these downtown neighbourhoods were once predominantly populated by a particular ethnic group or co-opted by specific fringe cultures. As they are being gentrified, the very rituals, customs and events that marked the outward expression of these groups and gave these areas their unique identities are coming under attack. The new residents and businesses that have become their neighbours pressure the city to crack down on parades and street fairs, either banning them outright, imposing prohibitive security and permit fees or moving them to other non-threatening sites.5 These lively street events, once the inheritors of the spontaneous expression of humanity’s inner chaos called carnival, are now so scripted, controlled, surveilled and commercialised that they are either disappearing altogether, or becoming mere symbols of themselves. The only events that seem to survive are able to do so through corporate sponsorship, or are themselves merely commercial events masquerading as festivals or parades.6
Even our remaining public open spaces may not be as public as they seem. Another disturbing artifact of the privatisation of the public sphere is the creation of pseudo-public spaces that appear to be public streets or plazas, but are in fact owned or administered by private entities. In San Francisco, a number of ‘privately-owned public open spaces’ associated with downtown highrise developments have proliferated as a result of a zoning ordinance that grants developers more building area in exchange for providing a plaza, roof deck, or atrium space accessible to the general public.7 POPOS8 may resemble a public space, but look closely, and you’ll see the security cameras, guards, and subtle markers noting that your right to pass is by permission of the owners. These and other pseudo-public spaces are becoming a common practice nationally and worldwide, the result of a Neo-liberal reconsideration, or outright questioning, of the public sphere.9

4 [four]
How are we, as architects, to engage in this discourse of multifaceted and often competing interests claiming ownership of our streets? How can we act to restore balance to the architecture of the public realm?
Architects may think themselves powerless in this battle, that the content and form of the streets outside the envelopes of their buildings are best left to landscape architects and urban planners who can operate more effectively at the scale of the neighbourhood or city. Architects relinquish to urban planners the messy business of working with the political power granted to them to leverage the resources of both the government and private investment to map out and achieve long-term planning goals. However, the power of the urban planner has been weakened by a lack of capital resources, called into question by opponents of government authority and challenged by his own disenfranchised constituents. This situation calls for all actors in the urban environment, including architects, to reconsider their roles.

Sociologist Peter Arlt calls for us to consider the role of the tactician in urban planning. In his excellent essay ‘Urban Planning and Interim Use’, Arlt draws on military theory to contrast the strategist who has the power and the money to overcome any external conditions blocking the way, with the tactician who must engage circumstances and adversaries to achieve the goal.10 Arlt argues that because urban planners have the political authority to act as strategists, but no longer the resources, they must now act more as tacticians, or ally themselves with tacticians to achieve the same ends. This means working with actors in the urban arena who propose, and impose, interim uses for urban spaces that are seen as opportunities for action, commentary and change.

The classical interim user is the squatter, but whereas the squatters appropriate underused space as an essentially antisocial act, there is a new breed of cultural interloper who seeks to temporarily appropriate a public space as a site for art, performance or political commentary. These urban guerillas are the prototypical tacticians; they operate locally in territory that is familiar, with support from locals and popularity in the media, and most importantly, are highly motivated not by money, but by putting ideas into action. ‘Enthusiasm’, says Arlt, ‘is the capital of interim users, and urban planners should recognize this and use it tactically’.

Architect Ursula Hofbauer and artist/filmmaker Friedmann Derschmidt have been having breakfast with friends and strangers in Vienna’s public spaces for over ten years. They begin by setting up a table in a plaza, street or other public space, and offering coffee and sundry breakfast items to any passers-by who care to join in. The only requirement for participation is that their guests organise another similar public breakfast the next day and invite others to join in turn. In theory, this follows the logic of a chain letter, so what may begin with four people grows to sixteen the next day, then sixty-four on the third, and on the tenth day over a million people having breakfast in public. In fact Permanent Breakfast, which began as a game, public art performance and urban critique in 1996, has since grown to take root in many European cities, as well as New York and Taiwan. The point of Permanent Breakfast is not only to surprise and delight those who appropriate public space for their own means, but to directly engage in a discourse with the limitations, both perceived and actual, to public space. As Hofbauer and Derschmidt claim, ‘it is possible to precisely gauge the understanding of just how public a location is by observing the reactions of other users and ‘protectors’ of the public space. Permanent Breakfast thus becomes a sort of litmus test for the accessibility of public space. In carrying out such breakfasts, it is possible to reveal the superficial look of invisible spatial situations, such as private, formerly public spaces or publicly disguised private spaces’.11

In November 2005, a group of landscape architects, artists, and others calling themselves REBAR ‘rented’ a metered parking space in downtown San Francisco and transformed it into a tiny public park, complete with grass, a bench for seating, and a tree for shade. The park lasted only for a matter of hours, and was met with a mixture of ‘surprise, approval, joy, and indignation’, but, surprisingly, no one was arrested or fined.12 In the two years since this intial act of guerilla urbanism, the idea has exploded into something of an international phenomenon. On PARK(ing) Day in September of 2006, REBAR installed five more PARKs, and were joined by other groups who installed 16 more in San Francisco, 13 in Berkeley, as well as PARKs in New York City, London, and Rio De Janeiro. In 2007, PARK(ing) Day grew to 180 PARKs in 47 cities worldwide.13 According to REBAR, the purpose of PARK(ing) Day is to broaden the discourse on public space in urban contexts by creating a ‘temporally distributed network of public open space’ and by testing reactions to these interventions in a variety of socioeconomic situations.

REBAR has also collaborated with the performance group Snap Out of It on a project called COMMONspace to systematically evaluate and critique San Francisco’s privately-owned public open spaces. In this project, REBAR have mapped the 14 official POPOS in downtown San Francisco and run reconnaissance missions in order to probe the explicit and implicit rules that govern these quasi-public spaces. In conjunction with Snap Out of It, they have returned to these spaces to participate in various paraformances, or Situationist-inspired performances which begin with individual plausibly-deniable actions and scale up to full-sized occupations that engage the public as audiences and participants.14 Similar to Permanent Breakfast, these performances limn the boundary of where the public and the private both meet and conflict.

Permanent Breakfast, PARK(ing) Day, and COMMONspace represent successful examples of tactical urban planning which, in conjunction with more strategic projects, can have a long-term effect on providing public open space in our streets. As Peter Arlt states, ‘Interim use is always seen as a provisional measure rather than as a permanent solution, although it can also be a way of demonstrating a concept’s success in order to convince an investor that the chosen use could also provide a permanent solution’.15 Thus, there is a symbiotic relationship between the strategic and the tactical. The tactical act relies on action and immediacy to influence its audience, and this instantaneous public outreach can lay the groundwork for broader support for more long-term changes. Strategic methods, on the other hand, leverage this political will with capital investments to implement change on a larger scale, legitimsing the tactician’s goals, and drawing a new front for further tactical action.
On PARK(ing) Day in 2007, REBAR collaborated with Public Architecture, a San Francisco nonprofit dedicated to pro-bono work, to install four PARKs on Folsom Street. These included a dogwalk plaza, a beauty plaza sponsored by an adjacent cosmetology school, and a sidewalk plaza in front of Brainwash Café featuring a sixteen foot long table where participants and spectators were invited to sit and enjoy a temporary spot to relax, sip a coffee or chat. These PARKs were not strictly intended to be temporary, but rather were full-scale mock-ups of a series of permanent sidewalk plazas that Public Architecture has proposed to provide public open space along Folsom Street. As a result of this engaging community outreach, and their work with several municipal departments, Public Architecture has been awarded a grant from the city to construct a permanent sidewalk plaza in front of Brainwash Café, whose owner will provide ongoing maintenance and the remainder of the construction funds.
This and future sidewalk plazas are part of an overall vision that Public Architecture has proposed to the city for transforming Folsom, Howard and other streets in the South of Market neighbourhood to provide traffic calming, robust public transportation and much-needed open space. Their vision has many more obstacles to overcome before it’s fully implemented, but it has already gained traction with the city’s Planning Department to the extent that it directly influenced their inclusion of similar ideas in the adjacent Rincon Hill neighbourhood plan.16
Public Architecture’s collaboration with REBAR clearly illustrates how an interim use of space can directly inform the planning process to influence its eventual permanent use. Thus, through the implementation of tactical means architecture itself can act on its immediate context as well as at the urban scale to bring about strategic ends. These guerilla actions are currently taking place at the margins of architecture and urban planning, but we must co-opt them into common practice if we are to counteract the erosion of civic space in our streets. Alan Jacobs has said that ‘the best streets encourage participation’.17 In the context of the current assault on the public realm, it may be better said that the best streets demand participation. p

1 Jacobs, Alan. Great Streets. ‘In the U.S., from 25 to 35 % of a city’s developed land is likely to be in public rights-of-way, mostly in streets’. p6
2 Ibid. p4
3 Le Corbusier, for one, perceived an ever-stricter segregation of traffic as an essential affirmation of social order — a desirable and ultimately inevitable expression of modernity. To this end, proposals were advanced to build vertical streets where road vehicles, pedestrians and trains would each occupy their own levels. Such an arrangement, it was said, would allow for even denser development in the future. These plans were never implemented comprehensively, a fact which today’s urban theorists regard as fortunate for vitality and diversity. Rather, vertical segregation is applied on a piecemeal basis, as in sewers, utility poles, depressed highways, elevated railways, common utility ducts, the extensive complex of underground malls surrounding Tokyo Station and the O-temachi subway station, the elevated pedestrian skyway networks of Minneapolis and Calgary, the underground cities of Atlanta and Montreal, and the multilevel streets in Chicago. Wikipedia .
4 For example, San Francisco’s Proposition H of 2007, which was largley funded by downtown developers and backed by the Gap’s Don Fischer.
5 Some of San Francisco’s most popular outdoor events such as the Haight-Ashbury and How Weird street fairs, Gay Pride, Halloween and the North Beach Festival have recently been threatened by organised neighbour complaints and exorbitant fees from city departments. See Witherell, Amanda. ‘The Death of Fun’ San Francisco Bay Guardian, May 23, 2006
6 For the past two years, Larry Ellison’s Oracle Open World conference has erected a tent over Howard Street from 3rd to 4th Street for an entire week, complete with massive LED screens at each end. On November 22, 2004, the band U2 took over the streets of New York to shoot a video for ‘All Because of You’, the second single off their new How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb.
7 Section 138 of the City of San Francisco Zoning Ordinance.
8 The term POPOS was coined by REBAR
9 Hofbauer, Ursula. ‘Horror Vacui’
10 Arlt, Peter. ‘Urban Planning and Interim Use” in Temporary Urban Spaces by Haydn, Florian, Robert Temel, eds. Birkhäuser, 2006. See also de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.
11 Hofbauer, Ursula, & Friedmann Derschmidt ‘Horror Vacui’ in Temporary Urban Spaces by Haydn, Florian, Robert Temel, eds. Birkhäuser, 2006
12 REBAR estimated they provided an additional ‘24,000 square-foot-minutes’ of public open space.
13 All information taken from REBAR and their website www.rebargroup.org
14 Ibid. REBAR
15 Arlt, Peter. ‘Urban Planning and Interim Use’ p 39
16 Meanwhile, REBAR has also aadopted more strategic methods, handing PARK(ing) Day off to the Trust for Public Land, and advising the San Francisco mayor’s office on the city’s Better Streets program.
17 Jacobs, Alan. Great Streets. p9

Roach, Christopher. 'Urban Guerillas' On Site review, no. 19 Spring/Summer 2008
©Christopher Roach and On Site review

Water Mythologies

2009-01-23T07:22:00.007-08:00

building civic narratives that read like novels
In the skin of a Lion in many ways parallels Roman Polanski's equally mythic film, Chinatown. Ondaatje's dream-like quality sets it apart from Polanski's harder-nosed struggle over water supply in the creation of modern Los Angeles. Certainly there is a comparative reading in the privatised and violent nature of American birth as opposed to the civil service Canadian approach. But in the end there are the respective stories and their artefacts.

Paul Whelan
Lacking any kind of magical foundation story, Toronto craves a mythology. It's often left up to artists to create the magical bedrock for a city's future mythology. In Toronto, poet bp Nichol developed an urban imagery through a creative re-reading of its geography and street names. And it was Michael Ondaatje's 1987 novel, In the Skin of a Lion, that widely disseminated a personal myth of the city's coming of age. The novel focusses on the Bloor Street viaduct and the Victoria Park Filtration Plant, both constructed in the 1920s and 30s through the bullheadedness of a remarkable civil servant, RC Harris, Toronto's Commissioner of Works.

Harris proposed that a 2-mile intake tunnel be built under Lake Ontario, terminating at a new filtration plant. In Ondaatje's novel the filtration plant is referred to as the Palace of Purification. The industrial processing of water may seem an odd choice for the basis of a new mythology, but as was well understood by all ancient cultures, the regulation of water underlies both the foundation of the city as well as its on-going well-being. Ondaatje portrays Harris as a mythic hero who provides the vision, ambition and political will while Thomas Pomphrey, the filtration plant's architect, provides the architectural expression to house Harris's project.

Early in the book, while talking with Pomphrey, Harris muses, 'before the real city could be seen it had to be imagined, the way rumours and tall tales were a kind of charting'. Toronto's filtration plant is a testament to this kind of imagining, an architectural anomaly mysteriously beached on the shores of Lake Ontario. Contemplating this beaux arts composition with its grass terraces, palaces and commanding views, it is almost sacrilege to believe that its raison d'etre was simply to solve Toronto's water purity problems by processing millions of litres of lake water.

The architecture is modernist in the direct way that structures sand their placement reflect the inward flow of water and the industrial production of clean drinking water. In contrast, the architectural styling shares nothing with a reductive modernist sensibility. The materials alone – yellow brick, limestone, copper, bronze, terrazzo floors, black marble, herringbone tile work and fine plaster, coupled with inventive detailing and fine craftsmanship – create a sumptuous environment in which the mechanics of the pumps and controls are elevated to a shining, functional art.

The pump house, in an elegant ballroom, is at the lowest terrace, nearest the water – an aqueous anteroom to the purification project further up the terraces. The alum tower marks the nest step on the water's path to purification. Water passes under the tower and coagulant is dropped into it before the underground pipe turns 90 degrees to approach the filer building on axis, a simultaneous beaux-arts compositional rule and a modernist functional diagram. Small particulates in the water adhere to the alum, sinking to the bottom of settling tanks. Clean water is then piped to the city. The tower could easily have been a simple metal tank, but is instead a vertical punctuation mark on a horizontal process. The functionally unnecessary top floor belvedere exists only to offer powerful views of Lake Ontario.

The upper ground is dominated by the sprawling filter building, buttressed by administration towers that flank a monumental arched entry. An octagonal rotunda marks the crossing of the filtration building wings and the administration building. In the centre of the rotunda is a pylon providing data on filtration rates, water capacity and time of day. Like the entire plant, this device only needed to be a prosaic piece of equipment, but instead is celebrated and elevated in an elaborately detailed stone obelisk.

At every turn our expectations about water filtration are eclipsed by the exuberance of Pomphrey's architectural ambition for mere infrastructure, almost as if Nicola Salvi and Pope Clement XII had re-imagined a Trevi Fountain to celebrate the arrival of water in the modern city.

What of Ondaatje's fascination with the Palace of Purification? It is possible that the Harris Filtration Plant is just one site for inventing a Toronto mythology. Perhaps Ondaatje's novel is a single particle of alum dropped into raw lake water. With enough alum, maybe a movie or two, the ooze that settles from the raw water will become the material of rumours and tall stories. And while we wait for the stories to accrete, we celebrate the delivery of clean water.

Whelan, Paul. 'Water Mythologies' On Site review, no. 17 Spring/Summer 2007
©Paul Whelan and On Site review

Bombay Dhobi Ghats, New York Laundromats

2009-01-22T13:39:00.009-08:00

a laundry list for urban vibrancy: drip-dry urbanism

Aniket Shahane
In the Laundromats of Bombay and New York, water and power go hand in hand. Not only do they comprise the infrastructure required for the Laundromats' operation (water for washing and electricity for drying), but their availability as resources determines both how and how much space is claimed by this banal activity. The architecture of the Bombay Dhobi Ghats — a generations-old Indian public Laundromat – and the New York City Laundromat unveils the impact of infrastructure on people, activity and architecture.

India's infrastructure can be characterised as fragile at best. Although improving, the supply of both water and electricity are unreliable. Power outages are not uncommon and water is often unsanitary, if running at all. Low levels of water and electricity instill in Indians a frugal mindset towards the consumption of these resources. Water needs to be carefully allocated. Electrical loads must be at a minimum. But what India lacks in resources, it more than makes up for with resourcefulness. In Bombay, a city of 18 million individuals, the human hand is the best means to monitor the quantity of water that flows from a tap. Reliance on manpower is critical and is most evident in the architecture of the Dhobi Ghat.

Like many other Laundromats, Bombay's Dhobi Ghat provides complete laundry services for its clientele including clothing pick-up/drop-off, washing, drying and ironing. However, in contrast to Laundromats that have a stronger infrastructure at their disposal, the Ghat survives on a spartan attitude towards water and energy consumption. It works like this. Upon request, a courier from the Ghat is dispatched to a client's home to pick up dirty laundry. The clothes are wrapped in a brightly coloured sack and swiftly delivered to the Ghat by the courier, usually on a bicycle or other man-powered vehicle (water and electricity are not the only resources that are hard to come by in Bombay). Upon arrival at the Ghat, the clothes are sorted, marked and handed over to the laundrymen. Unlike washing machines, which provide little flexibility in water usage, washing men can regulate the stream of water from a tap so as to use only the amount necessary for a given load of laundry, minimising wasteful water consumption. After the appropriate amount of water is released, soap is added and the washing man begins his job. Knee deep in sudsy water, he dunks a few articles of clothing at a time, pulls them out, smacks the garments on a flogging stone in order to beat out the dirt, and then wrings the clothes of excess water with his bare hands. The process is repeated until the washing man determines the load to be clean, at which point he carries the garments in his arms to one of many clotheslines strung from one side of the Ghat to another to begin the drying process. The clothes are hung to air-dry individually one article at a time; the occasional Bombay sea breeze is far more dependable than the Bombay electrical infrastructure. Finally, the dried, wrinkled clothes are hand-pressed using a heavy iron heated in a wood-burning oven. They are then folded, packed in another colourful sack, and returned by courier to their rightful owner. The Dhobi Ghat is a place of messy, physical work that engages the entire human body and demands much from its architecture.

Above all, the Dhobi Ghat needs to house men performing an arduous job. Unlike the washing machine, a washing man requires more space and maintenance. He needs to be able to bend down, stand up, scrub and flail wet clothes. It's necessary for him to be able to eat, drink and communicate with other washing men. He is far less predictable and productive than a machine. He can slip and fall, take ill, bear a bad mood, or demand better pay. Moreover, the washing man lacks the capacity to wash as many loads as one washing machine. Therefore, in order for the Dhobi Ghat to run as a legitimate business, it needs to house many washing me. With such a complicated program, it is not wonder the Ghats are designed the way they are: they are not enclosed at all. An open Laundromat – one with no walls – gives the washing men enough room to manoeuvre as required while allowing plenty of natural air circulation to mitigate the pervasive dampness. In this open format, rows of concrete pens on the ground are sized to allow one laundryman to wash. Bundles of pipes feed the fragile Bombay water into each one of these pens through a spigot. Overhead a web of clotheslines make an ad-hoc trellis. In Bombay, where the act of washing and drying clothes can't be trusted to resource-guzzling machines, a man inside a concrete pen and a clothesline suspended in open air are the best substitutes.

The architecture of the New York Laundromat, in contrast, is far more subdued. The city's robust infrastructure gives New Yorkers the licence to use as much water and energy as desired, even at a time when the word 'sustainability' is all the rage. This allows the demeanour of the New York City laundryman to be drastically different than his counterpart in Bombay. Like the Dhobi Ghat, the typical New York Laundromat also provides full laundry services for its clients. Once the clothes have been dropped off at the Laundromat, the laundryman empties the bag of clothes into a washing machine, usually separating whites from colours. A plastic dial is twisted to select water temperature, while seven quarters are thrust into a metal try in order to start the machine. After exactly twenty minutes, it stops, at which point the load is assumed to be clean. The clothes are then unloaded by the laundryman, transported in a cart a short distance to the drying machine, and tossed into a dryer. A fabric softener sheet is added, another dial is turned to select the desired level of heat (i.e. electricity) for the job, more coins are inserted to determine drying time (one quarter buys six minutes of hot air), and finally a button is pressed to begin the machine drying process. the only part of the New York City laundryman's job that doesn't involve the use of a machine is the folding of clothes, which has to be done by hand. If clothes are folded soon enough after drying, there is usually no ironing required. Because the laundry process in New York is not nearly as labour intensive as in Bombay, it enables many clients to come in and do their own laundry – an option not available at the Dhobi Ghat. Locals will arrive at all hours, unload a bag of clothes into a washer, return thirty minutes later to transfer the clothes to a dryer, then come back once again to take the clothes home. compared to the Ghat, the New York Laundromat is an easy, tidy operation.

The architecture of the NYC Laundromat is a direct reflection of its resource-abundant, labour-deficient process. It requires space to accommodate a certain number of machines with identical dimensions and predictable behaviours. A rehabbed ground floor of a row house will do just fine. The Laundromat on Smith Street in Brooklyn is a typical example. Besides the overflow of glaring fluorescent lighting from the large storefront window, there is very little that gives away the activities that occur inside. The interior contains two rows of machines with a centre aisle. Washing machines are towards the streetfront, while dryers occupy the back of the space. The floors, walls and ceiling are a ragtag composition of vinyl and acoustic tiles, in order to provide an economical and acoustically sound enclosure. The architecture of the New York Laundromat is, for the most part, fairly discreet.

In both the Dhobi Ghat and the Smith Street Laundromat, space is generated not only by the physical form, dimensions, and organisations of men and machines; it is also a direct result of varying degrees of access to water and energy. Because the Dhobi Ghat has to be a physically open space in order to function, it is possible for the average passer-by to peer down on the space and witness the chaotic collection of people and clothes, wet and dry. The sound of laundrymen bellowing to each other and the smell of dirty cloth and caustic soda contribute to the public assault of one's sense. The Ghat's location next to the train line allows the activity of clothes-washing to be a landmark passed on the commute to and from work. In more ways than one, the Dhobi Ghat asserts itself onto its city. In fact, this kind of emphatic claim of urban space is typical of Bombay locals. When given scarce resources, countless Bombay residents take matters into their own hands. They claim the space of their city as their own, not just for washing and drying, but also for cooking, eating, sleeping, bathing, entertaining, defecating, urinating and cremating. Bombay is a city of perpetual urban aggression – each individual carrying out in public what they cannot do in private.

In New York, on the other hand, the introverted nature of the Smith Street Laundromat betrays its city's tendency toward privatisation. The abundance of resources in New York affords a city that is luxurious enough to individualise almost everything, including access to a washer and dryer. Everyday mundane chores such as washing and drying clothes don't require the effort they do in Bombay and are mostly kept out of the public realm. Why air dry outside when there is plenty of electricity to machine dry inside? In fact, it is so uncommon to see clothes hung out to dry in New York that on the rare occasion when it actually happens, it often induces outcries from neighbours. Hanging laundry in New York today is seen as a sign of a neighbourhood in decline. It devalues adjacent property. So even if New Yorkers are tempted to air dry (to save on electric bills, for example), they will most likely opt to be good neighbours and use a drying machine instead. Alas, the price of living in a city with seemingly endless reserves of water and electricity is the burden of propriety: please use a clothes dryer rather than a clothesline to dry your clothes so my property does not depreciate; please grill in your own backyard rather than on the sidewalk so I don't smell your cooking; please play your music in your living room rather than on the street so my quiet evening at home isn't disturbed. The affluence of New York infrastructure has instilled in New Yorkers something that currently does not and cannot exist in Bombay: a common sense of civic etiquette. It is a reminder that commodities as basic as water and electricity have the power to affect people, behaviour and ultimately, space.

Considering the impact of architectural spaces such as laundromats on cities like Bombay and New York begins to shed light on the possibility that seemingly naive everyday acts such as cleaning clothes, washing dishes, or taking baths do much more than tap our collective infrastructure. They promote or sometimes impede urban vibrancy. A vibrant city is an arena for both celebration and conflict, a place that readily counteracts order and predictability with unanticipated spontaneity. Now is a time when New York, despite – or perhaps because of – all its resources, is in danger of becoming so bound by civic etiquette that there is less room left for New Yorkers to improvise on their streets. Conversely, if Bombay's infrastructure doesn't catch up to India's charging global economy it stands to marginalise millions of Bombayites, which could exacerbate, among other things, the city's serious problem of shanty towns (a most extreme kind of urban improvisation). Sustainability and globalisation gurus have drilled into us the notion that we are one global village, inter-connected and networked; consuming resources in New York equates to depleting them elsewhere. But what if New Yorkers relied less on water and energy not only to slow down global warming, but also as an excuse to bring to New York some of Bombay's penchant for spontaneous street intensity? what if the clothesline poles that stand in the backyards of so many Brooklyn brownstones were activated with clean laundry once again, not just to help save the planet, but also to help keep Brooklynites from co-opting their borough's air space? If the proponents of the Green movement are proven correct, then reducing the load on New York's infrastructure might eventually have positive repercussions in other parts of the world. What is certain, however, is that it will almost immediately shift more activity from New York's private to its public realm and help encourage a more free-spirited vigour on its streets.

Shahane, Aniket. 'Drip-dry urbanism' On Site review, no. 17 Spring/Summer 2007
©Aniket Shahane and On Site review

Surfing

2009-01-12T12:13:00.003-08:00

the architecture of waves
Zubin Singh
Through the act of surfing, as no other human activity, man enters the domain of the breaking wave, is contained by and participates in its broadcast, measures and is in turn measured, meets its rhythm and establishes his own, negotiates continuity and rupture at the scale of the body. What is the nature of this inhabitation? A bold proposition: surfing is an architectural act. Through it the surfbreak is drawn within the sphere of culture and the wave becomes an architectural domain.

Geographically the surfbreak represents an actual threshold between environs, but historically it has also been a symbolic Porta between two overlapping and irreconcilable realms, two inimical elements: the land and the sea, earth and water. On the one hand, the stable and the familiar: the ground upon which humankind has built its civilisations and institutions, established its relation to space and time, defined culture. On the other, the capricious and unknowable: the quintessential other, Nature at her most fecund and ruinous, that which is beyond, indeterminate. It is not accident that Hesiod's Aphrodite was conceived in the spume, or that Botticelli's Venus is born ashore on the crest of a breaking wave: the surfbreak has always been a fertile territory in the human imagination, a metaphor of paradox, of life.

As a point of departure: the pier, beginning with a comparison between surfing and skateboarding — an analogous relation between the surfer's appropriation of the pier and the skateboarder's appropriation of the urban environment. In Skateboarding, Space and the City (Berg 2001) Iain Borden present skateboarding as a 'performative critique' of the values associated with life in the modern capitalist city, specifically as they are manifest in architecture, as they order our relations with space and time. Skateboarding subverts the intended function of architecture (namely utility) by reducing architecture to a terrain — a composition of objects and planes to grind, jump or ride. 'Skateboarders analyse architecture not for historical, symbolic or authorial content but for how surfaces present themselves as skateable' (p 218K); 'the city for skateboarders is not buildings but a set of ledges, window sills, walls, roofs, railings ...and so on' (p229). While skateboarding often rejects the commodification of space (frequently the skateboarder transgresses the boundary between public and private) it is also a rejection of time as a commodity: 'Skateboarders are...more concerned with temporal distance as proximity (temporal closeness of things, temporal locality), and its repetition, than with time as a valuable resource or measure of efficiency' (p226). The surfer appropriates the pier in a similar fashion.

Ever since surfing emerged on the California coast its adherents have congregated around the pier (the Huntington Beach Pier is perhaps the most famous example) because of the structure's inadvertent tendency to create sandbars, whose presence enhances the shape and power of the breaking waves. The intended function of the pier, on the other hand, is primarily commercial. It exists as a simple structure built for fishermen (who pay to use them), or as a more elaborate commercial enterprise designed to attract tourists (e.g. Santa Monica Pier). As skateboarding does with the urban fabric, surfing subverts the intentions of the architectural object; the surfer rejects its commercial function, which she appropriates for her own purposes — free of charge. Surfing transforms this largely utilitarian artefact into an armature of the surfbreak, the locus of an alternative social realm: the privileged refuge of the individual surfer, engaged in the solitary session; or a remote commons, where local surfers gather outside the spatial and social bounds of conventional society. In the end however, it is not the pier but the wave itself to which the surfer is drawn; and it is ultimately the wave that determines not only the space of the surfbreak, but more profoundly the surfer's relationship with time.

In the water the surfer is constantly in motion, negotiating the ever-shifting regions of 'inside' and 'outside', the areas shoreward and seaward of a breaking wave that each successive wave redefines. In surfing timing is everything: not only while riding, but in simply finding the evanescent wave, whose rhythms do not obey the constructed meters of modern society. Surfing is not something to be scheduled; rather it must be scheduled around. consequently, in order to surf on a regular basis, all surfers must inevitably submit to the wave — the spatial embodiment of cyclical time.

Waves are created by vast pelagic storms; they follow the paths of the seasons, respond to the pull of the sun and moon, to the alternations of night and day — to rhythms that once defined our understanding of time's passage. The practice reflects this reality: surfers tend to return to familiar breaks season after season, year after year: the surf-session is defined by elliptical orbits — surfers paddle outside, wait for and catch a wave, only to return outside and repeat the sequence again; there is no score, no tangible goal, no clear beginning or end. This stands in stark contrast to the linear conception of time upon which the idea of progress is founded, the imperative which drives the modern world. As a result, surfers are often caught between the demands of irreconcilable worlds as well as inimical elements.

Even the surfboard spans two seemingly antithetical domains: the mass production of the foam 'blank' (the primary component of the modern surfboard) and the hand-craftsmanship of the board shaper; the impersonal and placeless nature of the industrial process, coupled with the fact that shapers often craft surfboards in collaboration with surfers in response to particular conditions and locations — the gently tapered lines of Malibu or the fast-breaking tubes of Pipeline.

In the threshold between land and sea, between progress and nature's incurable cycles, between the modern and the vernacular, dwells the surfer. In the shadow of the pier a wave swells, steepens, suddenly mortal; and on a thin blade of glass and foam a surfer strokes into the wave, rises to his feet and descends — at the moments of its collapse: a dialogue, an architectural dialogue, between permanence and change.

Singh, Zubin. 'Surfing: the architecture of waves' On Site review, no. 17 Spring/Summer 2007
©Zubin Singh and On Site review

Prince Albert, Saskatchewan

2008-10-31T11:49:00.001-07:00

Tim Atherton
After being established in 1866 Prince Albert experienced early success and prosperity, but this turned out to be a fleeting and often temporary experience. The Canadian Pacific Railway chose a more southerly route that sidelined the city. When the important institutions were shared out, Prince Albert lost the university to Saskatoon and got the penitentiary instead. Since then, the city’s fortunes may rise and fall – but never quite far enough to be disastrous or truly prosperous.
So, downtown Prince Albert and its Central Avenue didn’t undergo all the periodic changes that other prairie cities went through. And now the central core can either appear mildly depressed – following the closure of the Weyerhaeuser pulp mill – or, a year later, now optimistic with the potential of a diamond mine from DeBeers, the mood judged by the opening of the new cappuccino bar.
Walking Central Avenue you find yourself going from the brand new hopeful and contemporary Forestry Centre to pre-First World War stone faced bank buildings to false-fronted early twentieth century shop-fronts to the flourishes of tinwork frontages and Prairie Historicism all within a couple of blocks.
Big wall-sized mid-twentieth century advertisements still remain painted on brick-sided buildings for O-Pee-Chee chewing gum and Old Chum Tobacco, faded almost to transparency. Elaborate cornices and touches of Romanesque are noticed if you take the time to look around.
Along with this, the post-modern migration – even in such a small city – from centre to edge continues unabated. The first generation of malls, dying and almost empty, are now being replaced by new parking-lot surrounded mega-stores – the home building/lifestyle supplies stores, the super-Walmarts, competing supermarkets and the drug store chains that now sell everything from cough syrup to milk to summer garden supplies.
John Szarkowski, Director of Photography, Museum of Modern Art said, ‘these pictures have a kind of fragile, tentative beauty that I associate with such northern places (including my own home town) where the idea of civilisation itself seems an experiment, on probationary status’.
In Prince Albert the grain elevator just hangs on and civilisation here does indeed often seem to be on probationary status, still an experiment.

Atherton, Tim. 'Prince Albert, Saskatchewan' On Site review, no. 19 Spring/Summer 2008
©Tim Atherton and On Site review

Nunavut

2008-10-31T11:47:00.003-07:00

rejecting an architecture of fearRobert Billard
Planning departments and elected officials of small Canadian communities constantly struggle with what form growth should take: is it the preservation of history or the need to foster a vision consistent with the needs of today’s society? Is it a struggle to find any sort of coherent vision out of a history of seemingly haphazard development? This last one is Nunavut.
From decades of federal government initiatives to maintain sovereignty in the north, communities were built on the sites of seasonal hunting or fishing destinations. Within a general commitment to all Canadians, the government invested in infrastructure for these new settlements. To say that the same care was taken with northern communities as with those in the south would be a gross error.
These new settlements were approached in the same manner as setting up a military or mining camp — in many cases those that worked on the architecture and planning were those that supplied services for the military or industry. Expediency and cost, overriding factors that shaped the architecture of the north, continue to direct built form, fostering a vision that could be described as an architecture of fear – that plagues community governments and inhabitants.
City councils should not be the ones to set guidelines for form and function, although councils have a role in speaking out on people’s behalf. Responsibility lies with the architect, developer, contractor, owner and general public, whether local or visiting, to understand the land and culture they are about to impact. There is no excuse for subsistence architecture where expediency and cost are the only mitigating factors. Striving only to meet these criteria is bound to fail on a far more meaningful level. Submitting to fear, whichever form it takes, stunts the positive growth of a community. While design should pay attention to cost and the entrenched views of local populations, these fears should not steer architecture.
Fear of the Environment
Fear of weather created a knee-jerk architecture that stuffed a yawning hole we had created in the first place. The hulks of Inuksuk and Nakasuk schools are a testament to this: fibreglas mounds with bullet-hole windows designed to keep out the environment at the expense of sunlight, fresh air and consequently students’ health. Houses were made small and culturally useless with materials that are alien to the landscape. Despite this, it was perceived by southern populations and those that knew nothing different in the north, that developers and distant governments were doing the best thing – providing a humanitarian service: housing and schooling. In the absence of anything else and the publicity nightmare of northern homelessness and English illiteracy, any solution southern architects and contractors could offer was accepted.
Fear of the cost of building in the north fostered a use of substandard materials and an inappropriate use of others, and a complete abandonment of the idea of actually making buildings look and feel good. While the south had long abandoned the frontier mentality, the Arctic was built seemingly in just that way.
Things have begun to change, in part due to the development of better building materials, and, to a lesser degree, the fact that Nunavummiut began to ask for more. Local people began to travel south and saw what they were missing in the way of architecture and sustainable, healthy communities and people from the south began to move north expecting to have what they had before. Thus was born the second phase of the architecture of fear: the fear of simply being here.

Fear of Place
Northern houses often copy nondescript subdivisions south of 60° or, even more distressing, resemble First Nations’ reserves of the 1970s. Northern contractors and prospective homeowners plagiarise plan magazines, adapting them to suit steel-piled foundations, no basements and tanked domestic water and sewage.
Rarely does much thought go into how any kind of house might sit on its site apart from a possible view of the bay. Few engage the landscape or create a dialogue with their surroundings; there is more regard for set backs than wind, plants or daylight. It is as if southerners do not want to acknowledg the north; they retreat from the world around them and leave the Arctic behind.
Social housing has atrophied from a complete lack of understanding of local culture and environment. To combat this, local jurisdictions and social housing organisations have solicited the help of southern architects and planners to develop prototype housing for all of Nunavut. This will only perpetuate the problem by forcing yet another stifling blanket of homogeneity coloured by a limited understanding of the culture and landscape.
When buildings do not engage the landscape, there is little attention to the streetscape, to exterior place-making, or to the human experience of the building. Communities are full of buildings that most of us will never enter but nonetheless experience everyday. This relationship has to be recognised. Many Arctic communities suffer from a complete lack of a sense of architectural place. Expediency and fiscal restraint, repeated designs and a cookie-cutter mentality peppers the north with identical air terminals, health centres, schools and arenas. If it weren’t for the differences in landscape, it would be difficult to tell which community you were actually in.
From this fear blossoms yet another: the fear of trying anything different.

Fear of Change
Anything not a box, or with an angle other than 45 or 90 degrees, or that uses a different material than commonly accepted is perceived to immediately add 25% to the building cost. To compound this problem, the trades, when forced to abide by the will of the designer or owner, can be ill-equipped to handle deviations from the norm. Piles go in wrong locations, designs change over night without consent from designer or owner and corners are cut.
Recently things have started to change. Recognising they must compete with southern contractors now moving into the northern market, there are some builders who are willing to try different things, developing an appreciation of challenges to the norm. Local governments have begun to expect more from their designers and are demanding innovative solutions to their projects. Federal projects, required to meet LEED™ Silver sustainability levels, have raised the bar on architectural problem-solving. The aesthetics of a project are more in the forefront and quality of space is actually being discussed.
The Nunavut Legislature and Government of Canada buildings in Iqaluit, the Kugaaruk High School in Kugaaruk, the Killiniq High School in Cambridge Bay and some more challenging house designs by Full Circle Architecture and others have spurred an appreciation for design and are developing local form: a Nunavut architecture that fights its fears.
Billard, Robert. 'Nunavut: an architecture of fear' On Site review, no. 19 Spring/Summer 2008
©Robert Billard and On Site review

The Streets We Need

2008-10-31T11:44:00.003-07:00

mechanical and social developmentAlfredo Landaeta
Not so long ago, streets were very simple: no sidewalks, curbs, infrastructure or public transit, and without strict differentiation between pedestrians and other means of transportation. Ancient mesopotamian cities show narrow streets and cul-de-sacs that provided access to courtyards linking clusters of dwellings belonging to extended families or clans. Streets were not a continuous system connecting urban settlements but rather the minimum necessary space required to delineate distinct clusters. It is perhaps this concept of the street as the in-between that first tinted it with a social undertone, establishing such spaces as the meeting place, the political arena, the place of commerce.
Mediæval streets show a similar simplicity: street networks evolved, becoming more complex, intertwined and hierarchical in nature and, in many instances, actively incorporating trees and landscape as part of their design.
The street as a socially populated void with minimal technological attributions is still very much in use today. Informal settlements in developing countries, products of completely unregulated and unplanned development, usually generate dramatic streets and alleys, uncannily proportioned to the human scale, uncaring of accessibility codes or infrastructural logic. These spaces arise purely from the tension between the pressure of occupation and the need to circulate. There is an organic quality in these spaces that is clearly lacking in the formal city.
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In many contemporary cities, streets have become flow: their value is not for what they host, but for how good they flush; the simplicity of the original void has been filled as an inevitable consequence of modern life, with a long list of stuff: parking, public transport lines (at times in exclusive rights-of-way), mail boxes, lamp posts, power lines, storm water channels – and all that just above the surface. Below grade is almost as crowded with water pipes, telephone lines, electrical cables, gas and sewage lines, fibre optics, metro lines, district cooling and heating, even grey water lines for landscape irrigation. In fact, streets are the de facto location for most of our ever-increasing infrastructure needs. To design a street these days is to necessarily accommodate, combine and reconcile all of these different requirements.

This mechanistic conception of the street as a device for the mobility of people, vehicles and services leaves little room for the street as a true public space. Good streets not only function as conduits for all types of transportation and services, they also must perform as social ground, negotiating transitions between zones and loaded with historical and cultural content.

The value of the street is based in the complex ballet of movements and carefully timed rhythms and sequences that it hosts (compellingly amplified and portrayed by fast-motion movies such as the 1983 Koyaanisqatsi) than in its spatial qualities. This exhilarating tapestry of movement and activity is the very definition of modernity; it is what draws rivers of people to urban centres and what simultaneously repels and attracts us.

Let us look at a typical mid-density neighbourhood street servicing a mixture of residential and commercial uses. Depending on the culture, context and climate we will find that the street, conceived as a technological device, is designed, calibrated and built with the intention of maximising the performance of non-human elements — the social component is often negated entirely. Differentiated strips for pedestrians, trees, vehicles and public transit facilitate the uninterrupted flow of traffic, justified by arguing that this clear separation is for the safety and congeniality of otherwise incompatible uses and activities. As such, the contemporary street is inevitably hierarchical and specialised, predestined at the design stage to fulfill a specific role within the urban continuum.

What happens if the initial assumptions established at the planning stage no longer hold true, or if significant technological changes begin to affect the behavioural patterns of people? What if political and cultural changes cut deep enough to affect the nature of its use, or if the basic assumptions related to the cost of mobility are challenged?
Our paradigms for developing and designing our cities, and by extension our streets, are currently under revision. Growing environmental awareness is placing great pressure on a way of life that is increasingly wasteful and responsible for our current state of environmental deterioration. As this awareness permeates the core of our values, changes will begin to accelerate. Streets will require as radical a redefinition as will our production-consumption-disposal cycle.

Wishful thinking? No. This transformation is of similar proportions to the one experienced when the industrialised world transformed itself into the car-oriented society of today. Car manufacturers in conjunction with the oil industry successfully lobbied for an aggressive highway system that put suburban development on steroids, making it not only a possibility but the preferred alternative to traditional urban life. This transformation was unstoppable; there have been very few other historical moments with such a concurrence of interests: the cultural perception of a better way of living complemented quite neatly by the interests of big corporations, swiftly backed up by politicians with the necessary regulatory backup.

Climatic change and emerging environmental awareness are creating a new alignment of interests based not on a perception of how we might live better, but on the assumption that such a transformation will ensure that life itself will continue. As research and scientific evidence amasses, the future looks bleak indeed. As pressure on leaders and political institutions to deal with global warming and environmental degradation increases, cities are likely to become the preferred ground for a fair number of initiatives — escalating oil prices and pollution levels demand measures that reduce car dependency, favour public transit and increase densities.

The potential for the most change exists in personal and public transportation – more bicycles on the road, more designated bike lanes. Bicycles and pedestrians will share the public realm with alternative mobility options such as Segways and electrical bikes, replacing some or most cars (even if alternative technologies reduce the nasty side effects of internal combustion engines, personal cars still require significant and unconscionable space to circulate and park while consuming massive amounts of resources for production and maintenance). Public transit can be diversified: high capacity buses with reserved lanes, people-movers along pedestrian corridors and personal rapid transit systems (PRTS), where small automated vehicles in dedicated lanes transport people directly to their destination. Streets, therefore, will be forced to accommodate different overlapping systems of mobility at the expense of driving lanes. As with most human inventions, accumulation of knowledge results in better and more elegant solutions.

It is impossible to know how streets and cities will evolve and change as society shifts paradigms; technology, education and social aspirations seasoned with ample doses of chance will play equally important roles in defining the emerging dominant trends. No matter how they develop, streets as design artifacts will have an obligation to be responsive to climate and location and, most of all, to be tailored to reflect local values and cultural standards. Streets should be the sites where people act in concert, as Hannah Arendt defined politics in its broadest sense. Maybe then, by understanding the streets as spaces of true social interaction, they will echo a new and better urban ideal.
Landaeta, Alfredo. 'The Streets We Need' On Site review, no. 19 Spring/Summer 2008
©Alfredo Landaeta and On Site review

The cul-de-sac

2008-10-31T11:40:00.002-07:00

private streets, public spacesHavva Alkan Bala and Hassina Nafa
The curving, narrow streets which give you the feeling of an old town may sometimes lead to somewhere or may not. A dead end road is not a cul-de-sac, neither is it a dead-and-street. It certainly isn’t the second one. It is obvious that a culture like this has not experienced such a dead end road. A young child who sits looking out of a window on to a dead end road will never get bored. This is the sitting room of the neighbourhood. Even though it may seem like the houses in the street are leaning against each other, once you walk through the garden gates you can feel the independence. Some are gardens, some are just backyards. Whichever type it is, it is just a sitting room with four tall walls around it but doesn’t have a ceiling. —Balamir 1994

cities are composed of buildings, open spaces between buildings and the streets that connect them. These elements are arranged in a way that reflects their culture. Cul-de-sacs in traditional Anatolian cities represent Ottoman as well as Islamic city culture. Although mediaeval European cities have similar dead-end streets, the usage and the approach to cul-de-sac phenomenon have been completely different. In the traditional urban texture of Anatolian cities the cul-de-sac is a semi-public street safe for children and a semi-private social space for adults: it is well known that crime is less predominant in such urban layouts: cul-de-sac in the Islamic/Ottoman context is to do with segregation, privacy through space, hierarchy and control.
In modern cities, cul-de-sacs are not much appreciated in streets designed for motor vehicles. Although the cul-de-sac has a function as a transitional space between public and private space, they are disappearing in modern cities.

concept
Cul-de-sac is defined in architecture and urban design literature as ‘the street pattern open only in one side and connected to other larger streets’. (Keles 1999), (Sözen ve Tanyeli 1992) (Figure 1).
In Western logic cul-de-sac triggers something not positive: dead-end street, blind alley, blind path are used alongside cul-de-sac, namely dead, numb, dead, lazy, sluggish, lethargic, shiftless, indolent ways (Keles 1999). Cul-de-sac is either a semi-private or semi-public road for residential groupings with only one-way access.

logique
Traditional Anatolian cities were organic, free, rhythmic, not geometric (Aru 1998). The pattern of traditional residential areas was 1-3 floors, having a courtyard belonging to house and a cul-de-sac, curved, narrow and full of bends (Aktüre 1978). The cul-de-sac pattern gives to users a sense of belonging, a territory where they feel safe and protected. The public, semi-public, semi-private and the private overlap (Stewing 1966) (Figure 2).

The growth of these cities occurred in two ways (Figure 3). The first way was the filling the gaps (graveyards and un-constructed areas) in the city pattern. The second way appeared as an expansion of urban settlement areas out at the edges (Raymond 1995).
Under Ottoman rule, people and animals that carry loads used the Anatolian city (Schwarz 1959) — cabriolets were either limited or used on the main road (Yerasimos 1996), hence the roads are generally narrow and change direction frequently (Schwarz 1959). Narrow and broad streets follow each haphazardly, their dead ends have short or long branches and widely varying widths.
Dead ends, divided from each other by gates according to their value and ethnicity, are a civic transportation system organised through closed districts. Ethnic or denominational differences hold the potential for social conflict. Such mixed districts are divided from each other by doors and walls that construct a cul-de-sac (Lapidus 1967), (Stewing 1966) (Figure 4). As well, neighbourhood and family relations affect urban patterns, particularly when a son gets married an extension is added to the house of the family. These extensions make a cul-de-sac by attaching two separate houses (Figure 5) — not legal but it in line with constitution and traditions (Yerasimos 1996).
Dead ends seen in Mediaeval cities (Mumford 1989), (Morris 1979), (Moughtin 1992) do not share the same peculiarities with the cul-de-sac of Anatolian Ottoman and Islamic cities. According to Stewing (1996), Islam attaches more importance to private property rights than public property as long as such rights do not directly harm other people, and it is Islamic city culture that defined the spatial and physical structure of the cul-de-sac. Islamic cities are not spaces one can bypass from one point to another, one quarter to another as one wishes. There is a soft, gradual and hierarchic transition from the most public spaces such as the mosque or bazaar, the square or large street through the garden gate to the most private spaces of garden and house. Oleg Graber defines Islamic cities as ‘human-faced’ where cold laws disguise humanistic warmth in streets (Armagan 1996). Although urban and rural areas are unplanned and uncontrolled due to absolute individualistic interests at the forefront in housing, and positioning according to parcel of land (Cerası 1999), this too is a reflection of Islam. Stefan Yerasimos (1996) in this context clarifies this warmth in a legal dimension.
The status of dead end is a wonderful example in terms of the priority of the rights of natural person. The partnership of property in dead end is not monotype; every resident is the partner of the property, which starts from the entrance of dead end and ends in the threshold of his house. Therefore he cannot enlarge his threshold towards the dead end without the approval of the other owners of the property. The area of the dead end, which is getting more private towards the inner area, becomes the private property of the owner located at the end. Social status of the street residents follows a decreasing order towards the open end (Yerasimos 1996).
In Islamic cities private property is more important than public property and the border concept is shaped through this understanding. The concept of boundary separating private and public property in Islamic cities is called fina, and is used in place of border, which means the progressive transfer from one unit to another. The phenomenon of cul-de-sac, turns the public area into private area in accordance with the fina enabling the transfer from one property to another in Islamic law (Yerasimos 1996). It is a kind of privatisation process of public usage based on the agreement of property owners of buildings that have a surface facing towards the cul-de-sac. (Stewing 1966, Yerasimos 1996). The owner of private property can occupy the street in front of his private property; moreover he can have the right to use this area permanently. Therefore, this street becomes his fina. Two neighbours facing one another may break off the road and divide it into two dead ends with the permission of the street residents. These two dead ends become the property of the residents. Thus, people in this area could privatise a public area.
Administrative, legal and economic alterations were observed in Anatolian countries under the rule of Ottomans after the 1839 proclamation of ‘Tanzimat’ which was a series of Western-influenced regulations (Denel, 1982). These alterations comprise the transforming of the traditional Ottoman city pattern into a grid by deteriorating traditional city patterns. The social logic which creates cul-de-sac has become ‘the other’, starting from the Tanzimat period. When new spatial hierarchies were taken into consideration, the modern city lost the cul-de-sacs as interface.

mots dernieres
Modern movements in architecture and city planning have contributed to the neglect of the street and its architecture. Le Corbusier was one of the main offenders claiming that streets no longer worked and we have to create something that will replace them. One of the significant problems of today’s cities is the sharp-edged transition between private and public space. The cul-de-sac has offered a traditional solution to this sharp-edged transitional problem, with particular buildings between public and private spaces, which provide soft, gradual and hierarchic transition.

Bala, Havva Alkan and Hassina Nafa. 'Turkey: the cul-de-sac. Private Streets, Public Spaces' On Site review, no. 19 Spring/Summer 2008
©Havva Alkan Bala, Hassina Nafa and On Site review

Porta Portese

2008-10-31T11:38:00.002-07:00

the evolution of a Roman street marketDanielle Wiley
Each Sunday morning, the Porta Portese market overwhelms the Portuense neighbourhood of Rome, spreading through streets, sidewalks and squares. Although its architecture consists of lightweight bancarelle, the market is one of Rome’s densest spaces. There are 1000 official vendors, but the Comune di Roma estimates the actual number to exceed 30 000. While the surrounding neighbourhood gives shape to the market, the market reciprocates by actively shaping its milieu. Over the past six decades, bus and tram lines have been deflected, segments of streets have been widened into piazzas, and the municipality’s ambitions to redevelop the neighbourhood have been stymied. The city and market are mutually constitutive, on a very tangible physical level as well as on a cultural one.
Porta Portese is Rome’s largest Sunday-morning market and also one of its youngest. When in 1943 the main avenues into Rome were bombed and blockaded, a spontaneous group of black market carrieri materialised, running private cars with contraband food and goods into the city. By 1965 the demography of vendors at the market had shifted. The new majority were Neopolitans who would spend six days trolling the Campagna region for wares, sifting through local beaches and farmhouses abandoned during the war. They would then arrive in Rome at midnight on Saturday to secure the best spots along Viale Portuense. Today, most clothing stalls along Viale Portuense are managed by recent immigrants from North Africa and India. Along Via Ippolito Nievo, established vendors of predominantly eastern European origin sell furniture, while contraband peddlers compete for space on the sidewalk, laying out CDs on sheets of cardboard. A recent wave of Chinese vendors selling home electronics and digital novelties reflects Italy’s new political relations with China. The shifting demographics, activities, wares and territorial boundaries in the Porta Portese market describe a facet of the city’s evolving identity.
The Porta Portese market is a loose space – relatively self-organising and highly adaptive. The market might serve as a vernacular precedent for the kind of event space that is de rigeur in contemporary architectural theory and practice. More deft than a formal piazza, the market responds to changes in the city’s cultural, political and economic conditions. This responsiveness may stem from the market’s paradoxical status as a marginal space within the city’s centre. The market negotiates many boundaries: the ancient Aurelian wall and its seventeenth century portal, an industrial riverbank of the Tevere, an edge of the mediaeval city and tracts of modernist post-WWII palazzi. Many contemporary urban scholars, including the Rome-based Osservatorio Nomade, argue that the peripheral zones of historic European cities have the greatest capacity to generate new urban forms, experiences and identities. The Porta Portese Market, although embedded in the city centre, has the qualities of an urban edge. The market’s generative capacity becomes apparent through its weekly transformations. Each Sunday morning produces a new iteration as the stall keepers negotiate their territory and adjust their wares according to season and fashion.
The idea of a street, square or market as an archetypal public space becomes contentious in view of transnational and cross-cultural dynamics in places like the Porta Portese market. Even the most basic precepts of public space come into question: what it is, where it is, who is it for, what it should do. Since the late 1990s, the diaspora of people between and within Italy, the EU, Africa and Asia have caused rapid shifts in the make-up of local districts in Rome, particularly in Esquilino and Portuense. This intense movement of peoples, at a global and a city scale, is paralleled by transnational flows of commodities, information, images and ideas — in Rome, which once maintained a mono-cultural image in the face of all contrary evidence, nowhere is this transnational mobility as evident as in Porta Portese market.
Those who participate in street life now carry with them a much greater diversity of historical models and different, possibly conflicting, symbolic expectations of public space. Some fear that the public sphere might become too fragmented to sustain a dynamic yet cohesive street life. Over and above the pressures of absorbing so many multiple interests into urban public space are the challenges that an expanding digital public realm presents to the street as a primary scene of encounter. The permeation of the city by communications technologies – which, in fact, make this mobility between the global and local possible - transforms our sense of place. Contemporary urban theorists suggest that the new role of public space is to reassert a sense of place by expressing local identities in relation to a globalised public domain. What does this prescription for public space mean for architects, who take the front line in making public spaces?
Vernacular precedents are valuable models for architects to study how these broad concerns play out in ways that are in fact very material and case-specific. The Porta Portese market, for example, demonstrates how layers of permanent and temporary structures, everyday practices, regulatory policies, and changing economic and cultural conditions can create a vibrant and resilient public space – one that is, in the end, very particular to Rome. Porta Portese also raises questions for how such sites are observed, mapped and, finally, interpreted in an architectural design. Architects might consider what investigative and representational strategies would be appropriate to a public space that, like the Porta Portese market, is best understood as an encounter between a place and its inhabitations – one that is extended through time and embedded in a specific cultural milieu.

Wiley, Danielle. 'Porta Portese:the evolution of a Roman street market' On Site review, no. 19 Spring/Summer 2008
©Danielle Wiley and On Site review