Chapter 06_Interim Presentation

Core to the presentation made by our group was the idea of an integrative system which would alter the scale and coincidences of interaction through re-localised food production.  
Our intervention addresses contemporary issues: food consumption, sustainability, social dynamism and technology. 

Populations in cities are growing at an extremely fast rate, particularly in western, rich Australian cities like Brisbane.  However, if lifestyles of Australian city dwellers are sustained to current trends, soon over-population will be a serious issue where footprint (physical and carbon) for supporting such a population will have severe consequences.
The force of this growth could typically be a contemporary family residing in the hills of Paddington, sitting on Ikea couches, BMW car in garage, watching big brother on a flat-screen TV while obliviously feasting on a meal of unknown origin or journey to the local shopping centre, sold at shocking profit margins by corporate wealth entity WOOLWORTHS.  
This up-rising demographic is not only left out in the dark on unsustainable food production processes but has insatiable appetite for consumer products and immediate entertainment which has disconnected them from traditional values of community. 
Ultimately this has lead to an unintegrated, unmotivated, uninvolved and uninspiring homogeneous neighbourhood.

With this in mind we would hope to re-facilitate and educate the locale.  The basis for our intervention will sustainably integrate a programmatic mix of retail, farming and education.  The new Paddington Central will engender something of a neo-agrarian community, strongly encouraging all members of Paddington regardless of social standing to be involved in the food they eat: interacting, producing, educating and sharing.
Ideally, the Paddington Central redevelopment will act as a hub and catalyse further smaller scale emergent situations within the streets and around the neighbourhood, creating a sustainable network of resources.

Chapter 05_Architecture as a Dissident Practice_Reading

Chapter 05_Erasing architecture into the system_Reading

Chapter 05_Architectural Possibilities_Studio

Chapter 05_Strategic New York_Lecture

Chapter 04_Politics and the Situationist International_Reading

Winters (2007) addresses the fundamental issues between built and paper architecture.
Paper architecture might provide some sort of overarching vision for society, but perhaps this is not the most important asset for a built project.  Rather, they should envisage and incorporate the mapped patterns of life.  "A man's life is there to be chosen.  It is, therefore, a problem for a man, but not for an animal, as to how he might live."

Winters summarises the importance for vision, but at the same time imparts the path of the pragmatic.  Architecture is a pragmatic confluence of vision - real and pseudo. 

Chapter 04_Architectural weaponry_Reading

One of the primary roles to be played by the experimental activists in architecture is not to come up with new ideas of what architecture should be, but to come up with new ways to talk about it - NEW MEDIA.  Maybe, rather - it should be about using the NEW MEDIA to present an alternative perspective.  Im not saying necessarily a solution, just a possibility.

He says that in the sense of new media, it's absolutely crucial we foster new technologies of communication - can the communication channels be aligned with the architectural axes?

Use science fiction - it is an incredibly important mode of theorising about technology and about space...

To what extent then, are we surrounded by more architecture than ever - or less architecture than ever before? If Architects are builders who theorise - articulate builders... where is the balance that defines the architecture and the building?

Architecture is obsessed with being slow.  We can made the most exciting thing dull.  We have that expertise.  Our social role has been that: to be slow, to be stable, to be a reference point for change.  It's in a sense, how we have been so clearly the enemies of turbulence - and the question is: how do you foster turbulence.  Slow Architecture is not acceptable for a flexible user.

Everybody wants their future to be absolutely predictable from their present state.  I think what would be really interesting is to take away that absolute desire to control you own future and to take a risk.

Unsolicited Architecture (Ole Bouman): Architecture that didn't think it was already architecture.  It produces something that wasn't asked for, in aesthetics, programme, future consequences and counter proposals in light. 

Architecture must engineer a crossover between all programs, forms, materials, etc. Creates a rich, unpredictable dialogue, a kind of complex ecology in which new species emerge (like a new level on a computer game, that is exciting, unknown, the enigma).
Productive mutations that make us hesitate - don't reinforce patterns, interrupt them for greater social change.

New Babylon: a hidden mechanism that repeats itself endlessly and automatically, shaping and controlling the everyday environment, even while no one can directly engage with that mechanism. Example of architectural Stalinism - a world of total control. a la matrix.. reality_shift.
The real revolution here would be that technology would take away the political advantage of the boss vs the worker.  What if we can completely remove this facet? 

Consider:
What are current personal freedoms? And what should they be?

Ananananananananalogy... Within the nomadic mobile home culture, you're only free to go anywhere you want insofar as you never leave the US highway.  
We really build constraints - we don't build freedoms: we build reductions of freedom. Although the controlling system of New Babylon is hidden from citizens, it is still a reductive limitation.

Chapter 04_People and Lifestyles_Studio

Chapter 04_People and Lifestyles_Lecture

Chapter 03_"The aspatial city." The continuous partial everywhere_Reading

Chapter 03_How buildings learn : what happens after they’re built_Reading

This reading got me thinking about the potentials of Paddington Central as a suburban site.
Brand (1997) introduces the six S's as the temporal layers of architecture. To introduce and apply these to the paddington vicinity:

Site: Paddington Central on La Trobe Terrace is a topographic site located in very close proximity to the Brisbane CBD.  Although fundamentally 'inner-city' context, it was historically developed as a worker's suburbia in earlier Brisbane days.  It remains a suburban setting, with hints of urban cosmopolitan and activity.  I propose that an intervention at Paddington Central should tempt suburbia to the intellectualism of goals and ambition inherent within central urbanity.
Structure: The structure SHOULD curtail a broken form which grants blocked vistas but acts as an anchor to the community.
Skin: Technology is literally changing the face of Architectural language.  Perhaps an intervention at the Paddington Central site
Services:
Space plan:
Stuff:

Chapter 03_Sustainable Future_Studio

Chapter 03_How to Measure Sustainability_Lecture

Chapter 02_Emergent Green Survivalism

Archigram proposed sensitised plants which detect gardeners desires (Archigram no. 9 - David Greene "Bottery")
"The system monitors urban homeostasis functions - temperature, transport, goods supply, craneways, self-sufficiency, population, plug-in infrastructure (where alterations to the physical system are required - i.e. add a capsule to hydration module 1.0), birth rate/death rate, food supply, consumption, recreation and power supply" - Dennis Crompton, Computer City 1946 (p121)






[image]






The discussion of an architectural survivalism adminstered through technology and social program CANNOT ignore the survival of the natural organic environment. 
Emergent Green Architecture "survivalism" is borne.  In this system, the sustainability of a built environment works in union with the requirements of the architecture. They are dependant on each other.

Chapter 02_The facts

Chapter 02_Tsunami Warnings, Written in Stone_Reading

TSUNAMI WARNINGS, WRITTEN IN STONE

We are creatures of comfort.  But sometimes the comfort of our own laziness or ignorance will be detrimental.

Mr. Kimura says: There are rules of culture and context! Many are forgotten in todays preoccupation with setting new standards of hierarchy  and making ground breaking technological advances. "There is no time for history," they will say.

///WARNING WARNING WARNING DISASTROUS CONSEQUENCES MAY RESULT\\\

Use history as an example to read warning signs. Historical information is a powerful tool of knowledge.  We can use it to preempt disaster (Brisbane Floods a clear case of negligent planning).  Context places a building and should be used to engender design, or face placelessness!

So what are the facts of Brisbane that we should be sensitive to when designing for the future?

Chapter 02_Urban Form and Locality_Future_Visions and Scenarios_Reading

Urban Form and Locality

-       Two valid arguments for urban design.

-       Sustainable spatial strategies and urban form

-       The significance of density, the validity of the concept city strategy and the appropriate role for new settlements

-       Much of the academic discourse is driven by concern for global warming and the desire to reduce transport emissions.

-       There are major problems with housing forecasts and greenfield protection – this can be said particularly for Australia.

-       At one extreme there is dispersal into hamlets and villages, while at the other extreme is concentration into dominant cities.

-       In between there are ‘dispersed concentrations’, equated with polycentric regions – a city with expanding suburban towns.

-       The second dimension is the degree of segregation or intermixture of urban activities.  This particularly concerns the way in which industry and commerce is located, both within centres and within the urban area as a whole.

-       The third dimension is about settlement density – the question of low versus high density is sometimes confused with dispersal versus concentration.

-       Fourth dimension concerns shape.  Designers of new towns mid century distinguished 3 basic types depending on transport emphasis: stellar, grid and linear (OR nucleated and linear)

-       Neighbourhoods are the building blocks which combine to create the wider pattern

DISPERSAL VS CONCENTRATION

Rural autonomy

-       The eco-idealists expound an ecosystem approach to settlements partly justified by the hope of social transformation.  Ecologically and socially they consider ‘small is beautiful’ (Schumacher, 1972).  They picture small-scale self sufficient communities repopulating the countryside.

-       By giving people the opportunity to live in the countryside, in low impact dwellings and pursuing a low impact lifestyle, he believes the planning system could create richer and more diverse rural communities.

-       Ironically the image, if not the substance, of this supposed rural idyll also reflects the aspirations of the consumer society

-       For the moment at least the promotion of rural settlements will simply promote the further urbanisation of the countryside.

The Compact City

-       Processes intend to foster urban regeneration and increased urban density as the sustainable alternative to greenfield development.

-       The relationship between modal choice, trip generation, density, centralisation and transport systems. Concentration leads to lower fuel consumption than dispersal, and that the average density of an area is a key predictor of energy use *LOOK AT BRISBANE PUBLIC TRANSPORT DATA

-       Even the poorest of households find they cannot do without a car in dispersed areas, while conversely in accessible inner urban areas some of the richest households choose not to own a vehicle – this is obviously European data. Bikes for paddo central??

-       However, as far as the advocates of the compact city are concerned the benefits are not only reduced emissions and resource consumption but also social, economic and environmental benefits.  The compact city is seen as offering the opportunity for creative and dynamic activity, the revival of a rich and diverse cultural lifestyle.

-       See quote – page 108 top and bottom

-       There is “opportunity for more user of resident control, more initiative (Colin Ward, 1989)

-       Densifiy and intensify (urban mix) on brownfield sites – perfect for paddo

o   Market conditions and environemental policies, is not sufficient to achieve much intensification or to avoid further urban sprawl. – Baker 1997

-       Sustainable characteristics of older settlements

Neighbourhood location

-       where similar residential developments are located in-town as opposed to out of town, then transport energy use can vary by 100% (Birley, 1983)

-       Good connections are important

-       There are dangers of ‘overspill’ settlements beyond a green girdle.

-       Dispersion doesn’t result in less travel time – need to keep concentration

-       Any new neighbourhoods should be located as close to the town or city that is generating the household growth as possible

-       Decentralisation at current prices does not work *use the essence of it, but in density and economies of scale and community

Mixed Use

-       move away from the prevalent system of segregated land uses to one where activities are more integrated throughout the urban area

-       The value of interspersion (mixed use) can only be realised if people choose to use facilities that are close to them

-       When the deterrent effect was weak then larger and more distant centres became relatively more attractive than small local ones.

-       Maintain local character

Local densities

-       eco-neighbourhood principal

-       urban density/urban capacity

-       how far would people accept flat living, smaller garden, less space for cars, and is there the realistic prospect of the market being able to deliver intensification?

-       Density gradient

-       Post-office catchment ~7000

-       Higher net residential densities force the adoption of energy efficient built-forms such as flats and terraces, and deter single story and detached forms which are innately less efficient.  So long as higher densities do not involve highrise, then there are also advantages in terms of embodied energy: shared walls and shorter infrastructure lengths means less building materials needed

-       Solar/wildlife belts to enhance local biodiversity

-       Problem, falling household sizes social side – embrace a higher proportion small houses

Conclusion: Linear concentration

-       dispersal vs concentration, high vs low density, segregated vs integrated land use patterns

-       consider energy constrained future

-       net housing densities sufficient to allow energy, access and community benefits.  Complemented by quite extensive open space networks provided the lungs of the urban area and often based on water courses

-       It is not suburbia which is wrong per se – it is its lack of shape

-       Linearity should not ideally take the form of stellar or radial growth – which can put undue pressure on congested radials – but rather adopt a tangential or loop pattern.

Chapter 02_The Possibilities_Studio

URBAN POSSIBILITY

Source: Own photo

Our group explored the possibility of rezoning all exposed surfaces to create "green revivals".  The green revival areas are equal in size and are spotted irregularly around the CBD and inner city suburbs.  To discourage car-centric culture in the dense urban environment each Revival is closed to car, passible only by foot or light rail which has stations at each revival location.

At each Revival, all pavement and bitumen is ripped from Earth's crust and replaced with luscious green grass. Orchards will grow on the streets, where the cars once drove. 

URBAN POSSIBILITY II

Source: Own photo

As an alternative or supplementary conceptual urban intervention, we considered CBD underground parking.  In our idyll scenario, where cars are a commodity of the past; underground car parks are now redundant.  To take advantage of Brisbane's sub-tropical rains, the carparks will be emptied and converted into giant open air water tanks that collect rain and water run-off from monstrous CBD office buildings.  

They not only collect rainwater, but help cool the city as breezes pass over the water. Each parking-tank provides an oasis within Brisbane's urban concrete jungle.  City dweller's will be able to partake in recreational activities on/in the urban lakes (boat rides, swimming, etc).  

The Brisbane public transport metro system, built to handle the large influx of population into Australian cities will arrive at underwater stations situated at various urban lakes/Green Revival's.  The unique underwater stations will be glass-encased, transparent capsules, giving the feeling of floating.  The first underwater metro stations in the world.  Retrofitting the stations within the parking-tanks/urban lakes utilises the already substantial digging that has taken place to build the car parks, creating a cradle-to-cradle use for the parking space,  minimising damage to the environment.

Coupled with the Green Revival concept, the city will have a thriving sustainable and recreational habitat in co-existence with the modern urban form.

SUBURBAN POSSIBILITY

Source: Own photo

Our group developed an idea which survives the essence of 'community' within the Paddington suburb.  
We developed an ideas of an entirely technologically-based  system whereby users can order all supplies from the comfort of their own home and then it would be delivered from the 'Paddington distribution market'.  Alternatively, at the Paddington centre, a shopping 'simulator' system is in place where users simulate walking through the shopping centre, picking items as they need - then similarly to the system above they are delivered directly to the house. Retaining the current experience, however refreshing it with technology and removing the despised 'checkout queues'!  
Another alternative I thought of after the tutorial would see users driving there cars into a docking bay at the Paddington centre.  The shopping possibilities are then displayed on the vehicles HOD (heads up display - already featured on many luxury cars - market forces will soon bring this to all car drivers) where users shop virtually.  The goods are loaded into the rear of the car as they order.

Reflectively, I think the first two suburban possibilities seem deductive and commonplace in technological predictions for retail. Personally, I think such systems will engender a heavier influence on consumer driven markets.  Too, the proposals ignorantly encourage laziness and inert human body states.  
Technology will be critical in the retail environment.  I do believe there is a place for interactive, technological, seamless shopping (preferably on-location), however, in the state we proposed, not all ethics are adressed to handle societal problems, we as humans, already face difficulty handling. 
i.e. Australia is the fattest nation in the world.

VIRTUAL POSSIBILITY

Source: Own photo

In this element we worked with nodal ring ideas for systems control of the city and how it could monitor inhabitants.
Unfortunately our group didn't have much time to address this scenario. 
However, I think that it is critical to address the virtual systems society will be dealing with in the future. 
See - organicism and cybernetic posts previous...

Chapter 02_Future Scenario_Lecture

Where did we fail!? What happened? How did modern living suddenly dispair and become a vision of dystopia. The fact of the matter that humans as robots occupying the same streets and the same neighbourhood is science-fiction makes no difference.  History repeats itself.
But where DID we go wrong? Was it in the dependence of an overarching technological system which in 'the end' is nothing more than a wrathful chaos of bits and bytes?
Perhaps the answer doesn't necessarily lie in the an entire overhaul of technology.  Last week I introduced that a social order reminiscent of simpler time could be the answer to the disconnected, disenchanted, detached, digitised culture dictated by technology.

The selection of studio themes was presented.  All are particularly valid in contemporary society, and particularly in Australia where change is occur at spectacular growth for all the proposed sites: urban, suburban, regional and virtual.

I think suburban will ultimately be my theme choice.  I am particularly familiar with Paddington, having lived there in the past for two years.  I would welcome this opportunity to put my ideas and thoughts that crossed my mind while living in the neighbourhood, into a real project.

Chapter 01_2062: Reality

In the never ending story of evolution, the.  Technology smoothly and swiftly runs and replaces medial tasks so inefficiently and rarely achieved.  An evolving organic code is administered which will program how streets are walked, houses lived in, food eaten, governments run, air breathed.

“… it revealed a world beyond architecture: a sublime world of pure servicing, information, networking, transcience.” 
- Archigram no. 6

Technology is in-flux connecting ideas with an intuitive “flash-like act of connecting elements not obviously belonging together” 

Unclear direction, but clear intentions.

”Architecture is probably a hoax, a fantasy world brought about through a desire to locate, absorb and integrate into an overall obsession a self interpretation of the everyday world around us.” – Letter to David Greene by Chalk 1966

"Architecture does not need to be permanent – Architecture does not need to be" 

– Peter Cook

Chapter 01_Social Framework

The Indeterminists list a number of projects (e.g. Galeries Des Machines, Eiffel Tower, Crystal Palace) suitable as a framework for social re-evolution that embraces Summerson's rubric where "buildings would be formed by social requirement.” 

Joseph Paxton - Crystal Palace (London, 1851) / / Victorian kit-built-architecture. 

Source: http://soa.syr.edu/faculty/bcoleman/arc523/lectures/523.crystal.palace.images.html


Ferdinand Dutert & Victor Contamin - Galeries Des Machines (Paris, 1889) 

Source: http://www.expo2000.de/expo2000/geschichte/detail.php?wa_id=6&lang=1&s_typ=3

On first sight, the above image immediately reminded me of section illustration of the Kowloon Walled City (Chapter 01_Equivocal Emergent).  It shares a similar aesthetic of framework in chaotic order.


The works of Frei Otto are superlative examples of the modern, idealist program of The Indeterminists.


Frei Otto - Ökohäuser (1991, Berlin, Germany) / / simple, revolutionary design. Users purchase a 'space' within the framework which is then built to their needs.  Otto retained control to ensure the outcome of the project.  To this day it is an extremely successful project, still under a constant evolution of change.

Source: Technische Universität Berlin - LIA Studio


Frei Otto - West Germany Pavilion (1967, Montreal) / / Membrane Architecture was the basis of Otto's design.  A layer of skin was 'stretched' across a tensile structure in a literal interpretation as an adaptive outer layer or membrane.

Source: http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2011/AccesstoTools/


Frei Otto - Concept development (??, 1972) / / Concept development of membrane structure.  The undulating membrane surface also collects rainwater at the depression points.

Source: "the work of frei otto"- MOMA - Glaeser, Ludwig,1972 - http://www.sculptors.com/~salsbury/agri-towers.html



The architectural equivalent of an social program becomes heavily influenced by technological automation. – see Frei Otto – West German Pavilion. The “...skin of a building as a membrane” perpetuates a "continuous realm of biological-electronic control systems." 
Another cybernetic manifested architecture: Archigram's system monitors self-sufficiency, population, plug-in infrastructure where alterations to the physical system are required – i.e. add capsule to module 1: hydration.), birth rate/death rate, food supply, consumption, recreation and power supply.



These words foretell Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion House (1927).  The program of the house exemplified sustainable recirculation and packaging of liquid and solid waste as part of a mutual complex system integrated into the house that approaches organicism.  

Buckminster Fuller - Dymaxion House (1927)
Source: http://seedbankdesign.com/?page_id=33

The exemplars above question, rather existentially, whether architecture need be nothing more than a framework for program.  Banham (1965) of The Indeterminists said - "When it contains so many services that the hardware could stand up by itself without any assistance from the house, why have a house to hold it up?"
I think that while it is impossible to ignore the importance of technology, the dimensions of a framed social program starts to sound bleak, like a decidedly destructive prose from a Philip K. Dick novel.  Where is the enthusiasm?

I posit, a technologically biased program which references tried-and-proven architecture, but where people determine FORCES, forms and spaces!