Kosmograd

RMB City

Chinese artist Cao Fei, AKA China Tracy, has an exhibition of her Second Life installation RMB City at Lombard Freid Projects in New York from February 29th to April 5th, 2008.

RMB City is an installation created by China Tracy in Second Life, a parody of contemporary Chinese culture - a giant panda swinging on a crane counterweighted by OMA's CCTV building, for instance, and a commentary on the urban development goldrush currently at full steam across China:

"RMB City will be the condensed incarnation of contemporary Chinese cities with most of their characteristics; a series of new Chinese fantasy realms that are highly self-contradictory, inter-permeative, laden with irony and suspicion, and extremely entertaining and pan-political. China's current obsession with land development in all its intensity will be extended to Second Life. A rough hybrid of communism, socialism and capitalism, RMB City will be realized in a globalized digital sphere combining overabundant symbols of Chinese reality with cursory imaginings of the country's future."

You can see more on YouTube here: RMB CITY - A Second Life City Planning:

Brutal Virtuality

Margaret Hodge, UK architecture minister, on modernist architecture:

"When some concrete monstrosity - sorry, I mean modernist masterpiece - fails to make the cut despite having expert opinion behind it, let's find a third way. This is the 21st Century - a perfect digital image of the building, inside and out, could be retained forever."

Hodges comments come a few weeks before English Heritage will make its recommendation to Hodge whether to list Robin Hood Gardens, a housing estate in the Brutalist style, completed in 1972.

So what would Robin Hood Gardens look like in digital form?

Much of what makes brutalist architecture so polarising is that it is so uncompromising - its brooding physicality is almost the antithesis of the pure superficiality of the digital simulacra . Brutalist buildings don't ask to be liked, and as Amanda Baillieu says in her BD editorial, the Robin Hood Gardens estate "is not an esay place to love". Much of their appeal (or 'monstrosity') comes from the raw qualities of concrete, what Le Corbusier called the béton brut, with the patina given by years of staining, weathering and abuse. Can this uncompromising materiality ever be represented in cyberspace?

As can be seen from many recent computer games, virtual environments are getting better at representing the dirt in the cracks of the real world, creating imperfect alternate futures. There's no reason why digital architectural models cannot move beyond the shiny plasticity of most of todays walk-throughs and fly-bys to show something more visceral and down at heel, representing the ravages of time, weathering and unsocial behaviour.

In some ways, a digital simulation of a project may be a more accurate representation of it's original aims. Robin Hood Gardens was never used or inhabited the way that the Smithsons intended. Inevitably it became filled with low-income families, as previously mentioned about Park Hill: "sink social housing for the dispossessed, the rootless and the shiftless".

Simon Smithson, the son of architects Alison and Peter Smithson, recalls the early days of Robin Hood Gardens in an interview at BD online:

I think it became obvious soon after the families moved in, and we went to see it. They moved in problem families from the outset, and when we talked to the warden and he showed us that the old peoples' centre that had been smashed up and had to be locked, it shook my father to the core.

But what I remember as a child is how modern the flats were. They were big, light and had central heating, which we didn't have at home. The flats were well built and the detailing was of a quality you simply don't see today. The way the acoustic problems were dealt with was a tour de force.

Given that RHG, if saved from demolition, will never to be restored to it's pristine original state, and will need to be remodelled and adapted to new uses, there is a strong case that a digital archive may be a more accurate preservation of the original building. Imagine a comprehensive digital archive of Robin Hood Gardens, available online with access for all, with drawings and documentation, photographs of the building tracing it's troubled history. Combine this with a collection of state-of-the-art 3D models, available for download under a Creative Commons licence, and including models capable of being experienced, navigated and inhabited with the latest immersive technologies, would be a fine legacy for the Smithson's endeavour.

Inevitably, the more people learn about Robin Hood Gardens the more keen they will be to visit it, to experience it in real life, which is why I support the listing and revitalisation of RHG. But it cannot be preserved as a monument, a shrine to Brutalism - it must be made to work as a building, a place.

Margaret Hodge has backed herself into a corner with her comments. She cannot now do nothing. She must either agree to list Robin Hood Gardens, or commit to a National Digital Architecture Archive. It is my passionate hope that she does both.

Previously:
Virtual Brutality
Luder's Lament
The Alsopification of Park Hill

Virtual Brutality

Another Brutalist landmark is under threat of demolition. This time it's Robin Hood Gardens in Poplar, East London. Designed by Alison and Peter Smithson, and completed in 1972, it looks likely that the local council, Tower Hamlets, will demolish the building and look to redevelop the site.

The only hope is that it receives listed building status, and becomes the protectorate of English Heritage. But conferring listed building status ultimately lies in the hands of the architecture minister, Margaret Hodge, who has weighed in with the following astonishing comment, in the recent issue of Grand Designs, and requoted in Building Design:

"When some concrete monstrosity - sorry, I mean modernist masterpiece - fails to make the cut despite having expert opinion behind it, let's find a third way. This is the 21st Century - a perfect digital image of the building, inside and out, could be retained forever."

This is either visionary prescience or the inane ramblings of a deranged lunatic. There is the germ of an amazing concept here - that we should create a National Digital Archive of high quality 3D models of our countries best buildings, which can be visited and explored in a virtual environment.

That this then presumably clears the way to demolish all that doesn't fit Hodge's aesthetic sensibilities is where she lurches from visionary to tyranny.

While the words 'conservation' and 'heritage' generally cause shivers to run down my spine, the revitalisation of the Brunswick Centre and to a lesser extent the redevelopment of Park Hill in Sheffield by Urban Splash, show that there is plenty of demand for some BoHo Brutalism. Superficially, it took little more than a Starbucks and a Waitrose to transform the concourse of the Brunswick Centre from a forlorn, windswept precinct to a popular urban hangout.

Goldfinger's masterful Trellick Tower was once also held with similar contempt as the Smithsons RHG, and now its flats are in high demand, often selling at above market rates. Likewise the Unite d'Habitation in Marseille, which was a powerful precedent for Robin Hood Gardens. Could Robin Hood Gardens also be turned into a desirable residence for owner occupiers? Unless and until more compelling alternatives are put forward, it should be saved.

(images from Flickr user Joseph Beuys Hat)

The Island: London Series

On show in the atmospheric Crypt of St. Pancras church at the moment (until 2nd March) is an exhibition of the remarkable drawings of Stephen Walter. Called The Island: London Series, it presents a dense layered symbolic map of London, represented as an island.

While geographically accurate, it replaces the austere, regimented symbolism of an Ordnance Survey map with a rich semiotic cartography, tracing Walter's personal pre-occupations as well as historical references, landmarks, and scattered throughout with the symbols and logos that infest the urban landscape.

It's a kind of proto Google Maps, rendered in crude pencil rather than crisp pixels. But it's a heroic attempt at a individual reading of the city, overlaying much more than the simple geography of roads and buildings. It's an exploration that has obvious touchpoints with the writings of Iain Sinclair, and also Phyllis Pearsall's A-Z of London.

You can see all of The Island here.

Re-presenting Hadid

Here are a few recent paintings by Zaha Hadid, from a show at the Galerie Buchmann. (see Flickr set here). There were also some of these silver prints on display at the recent Zaha retrospective at the Design Museum.

While visually stunning, they are little more than a striking way of re-presenting computer renderings, rather than design explorations. Does the act of producing these images change the design approach?

The place of design is now within the computer, not the drawing.

These paintings are pure surface.

"The Silver Paintings are executed on a polyester skin treated with chrome and gelatine then mounted on to an aluminium DI-BOND to resemble polished metal.

Different media are used depending on the desired effect. Stained glass paint offers transparency while acrylic and Chinese lacquer generate opaqueness. UV-resistant ink combined with vinyl gives the highest degrees of reflectivity. These techniques combine to suggest a gradual intersection between reflectivity and opacity, from one architectural feature to the next."

Decon in Decay

Few things illustrate the schism between built and graphic representation in architecture more profoundly than some down at heel deconstructivism.

This image, posted by Flickr user 'thegoatisbad', of Zaha Hadid's Landscape Formation 1 (aka LF-1, LFOne and Landesgartenschau) at Weil am Rhein, has attracted a fair bit of attention in the rarified atmosphere of the architectural blogosphere. It causes Murphy over at ENTSCHWINDET UND VERGEHT 'problems'.

"it does bother me when this spatial language is just the unintended byproduct of some shitty acrylic paintings."

See more images from goatisbad's Flickr collection here

It's a disturbing image because it gives the work a history, rather than existing in a kind of continuous Suprematist present. It also, inevitably shows the slippage that occurs between 2D architectural speculation (eg drawings, renderings, animations etc), and 3D built form.

It also seems strange that a seminal early work (it even has a book dedicated solely to it) by such a celebrated architect as Zaha would have been let go to seed, seemingly unloved and uncared for, to such an extent, just 10 years after it was completed. A fuzzy, jerky video on YouTube tours the building and lingers over pitted concrete, stained walls, weed-ridden surrounds, and one solitary piece of graffiti.

Hadid's early built works are crude attempts to translate the language and energy of the drawings and paintings into buildings, often constructed cheaply and with little regard for detailing or longevity.

Only in more recent projects such as the Phaeno centre and the BMW Central Building is there an exploration and focus on the materiality of concrete. Conversely the drawings accompanying these projects are much more prosaic - one gets the impression that these buildings are not the result of a design process fuelled by wildly visionary drawings.

In the Source Books in Architecture on the BMW Central Building, Patrik Schumacher of ZHA calls the BMW Central Building a 'field project', and traces the lineage of it back to the LF1 building:

"BMW continues investigations begun in earlier projects such as the Contemporary Arts Center in Rome and the LF1 project in Weil am Rhein. Each of these projects deals with eh organization of a number of trajectories over different levels, with the complexity that arises from these trajectories crossing and intersecting, and with the spatial experience of moving through them."

But while LF-1 is pure composition turned into a building, a drawing made flesh, the BMW building (which was the winner of a competition) was always designed to get built. Its composition arises to fulfil programmatic functional requirements, on a tight, restrictive plot.

The series of drawings and computer renderings of the BMW central building, fascinating thhough they are, bear this out. Only a few characteristic squiggle sketches show any sense of 'artistic' rather than programmatic composition. There is much more concern about materials, textures and details.

BMW and Phaeno are buildings first, theoretical playgrounds second. Hadid certainly does concrete a lot better now. LF-1 was an architectonic composition that had the fortune (or misfortune) to get built. Desperate to avoid the epithet of being a "paper architect", most architects seek the legitimisation of having a project built.

Which leaves LF-1 as some kind of bastard offspring that no-one wants to know. Now windswept, graffitied, and with weeds poking through the terrain, it looks rather forlorn. How well it works as an operating building is unknown.

That LF-1 is now a landmark of 'accidental brutalism' might perhaps gives it a second act, as a posterchild of decon in decay.