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)

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."

The days pass quickly in the Mies courtyard house.

With this level of detailed modeling (over 1 million polygons) and advanced photo-realistic rendering, it makes the act of building a rather redundant step. Which is fine for an unbuilt Mies project, but I wonder if advanced architectural rendering will make built architecture unnecessary.

Introducing Superspatial

Just a quick note to mention the launch of a new collaborative weblog, called Superspatial, that I am involved in.

Superspatial will focus on architecture, urbanism and architectural speculation, while Kosmograd will hopefully become more refined in tackling issues of disurbanism, urban representation and virtual space.

Currently the only other author on Superspatial is Lewis Martin, from the excellent Helsinki-focussed archi-blog lewism. If you are interested in joining in, get in touch.

Some recent posts on Superspatial:

004. The urban futures of rising tides

003. A bridge too far?

002. Parametric Urbanism on the Thames Estuary

001. Seattle Art Museum Sculpture Park

Team Helsinki

[London 2066, as painted by Zaha Hadid]

Things have been a little quite here on the Kosmograd Newsfeed recently. One of the reasons for this was that I was working on the Team Helsinki submission for the Greater Helsinki Vision 2050 ideas competition.

It was an interesting project to work, both in terms of the subject - reimagining Helsinki in 2050, as well as working collaboratively online, making use of tools such as a blog, Google groups etc.

The Team has a blog at: teamhelsinki.blogspot.com

Some of my posts have looked at urban visions of the future in other cities:

New York 2106
London 2071
London 2066
Tokyo Fibercity 2050

Other posts have explored a range of themes, some of which fed into the final proposal:

Modern movements in Mass Transit
Real Time Rome
Car free Helsinki
City as Playground
City as Operating System

As it is an anonymous competition it's not appropriate to discuss our proposal here at the moment. Once the competion results have been announced I'll be able to post more details.

The virtual bleeds into the real

While computer graphics, animation and games get more 'real', far more interesting to me are the cases where the virtual bleeds into the real.

The best recent example of this was "Modern Japanese Classic" this wire-frame sculpture of a Subaru Impreza by artist Benedict Radcliffe. It was recently parked outside a gallery in Mayfair which was showing more work by Radcliffe inside.

The wireframe car, sits impassively, unexplained, a ghost from the virtual. It marks a point of slippage between the world and a mirror world. It certainly confused the hell out of local parking wardens, who issued it with a number of tickets.

This slippage between the real and the virtual - sometimes called Hybrid reality - is also the work of artist Aram Bartholl. In the installation Speed, he faithfully recreated the track marker arrow from the computer game Need for Speed in Bremen, Germany.

Then of course, there is the emergence of real world Google map pins. There's no limit to where this could end.

London: A life in maps

Currently showing at the British Library, until 4th March 2007, is an exhibition looking at the history of maps of London, from the panoramic views across the Thames, to Regency masterplanning, to Google Earth.

It never fails to amaze the phenomenal growth of the city in Victorian times, in the 18th Century a map of London was drawn to try and impress that London was as big as Paris, but by the middle of the 19th Century thhere was no contest. How quickly the collection of villages in north London, the sleepy hamlets of Tottenham, Highgate, Friern Barnet, Colney Hatch became swallowed by a sprawling monster.

There's a great book to accompany the exhibition in case you can't make it to British Library, a dog's breakfast of a building compared to the breathtaking beauty of the neighbouring,St. Pancras, of which more another day.

From the British Library website you can also download overlays of some of the maps as layers for Google Earth. But it would be great if there was some kind of time dimension capability to Google Earth, so that you could zoom backwards and forth in time as well as space. This is something that Dan Hill at the wonderful City of Sound has been banging on for a while, with particular reference to Barcelona.

Wilfullness reigns at Gazprom

The six architects solicited by Russian oil giant Gazprom to design their new headquarters after relocating from Moscow to St. Petersburg, have revealed their designs this week.

Situated directly opposite the Smolny Cathedral on the Neva River, the brief for a building not higher than 300m drew condemnation from locals, and a boycott from Russian architects.

Which left the door wide open for a gaggle of starchitects (and RMJM) to submit their designs. You can't tell RMJM aren't starchitect quality because on the official competition page they have their company logo instead of a photo of a serious looking bald-headed man.

Gazprom are set to reveal the chosen design on December 1st. But they've got a tough job - all the designs are unspeakably hideous. Where do you start? Herzog & de Meuron, RMJM, and Massimiliano Fuksas all offer dreamy spires, Nouvel a kind of bridged glass slab, and Libeskind has created what has been called "Brancusi's poodle". Which just leaves Koolhaas/OMA's "will this do?" sugar cube stack. If I was a betting man, I'd put money on Herzog and de Meuron.

In a competition where context has been banished, pure willfulness runs riot. The buildings could look like anything, and as a consequence, they all look like shit. It's rather depressing that the five of the biggest names in world architecture (and RMJM) couldn't come up with a half-decent design amongst them. Fuksas' design looks the most polished, but that's hardly surprising since he's used it before for a project in Savona.

Mikhail Piotrovski, director of the world-famous Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, has urged that the project be blocked.

"Some of the designs show genius," he said. "But putting it opposite Smolny would deform the historic skyline of the city and look like a challenge.... It was mere accident that we inherited this fantastic city. We must not damage it."

I find it most surprising that Koolhaas, having spent so long courting the Hermitage as a client, would risk damaging the relationship by coming up with this clunker.