Kosmograd

From Hodge to Hooverville

Could Margaret Hodge be our very own Sub-prime Minister?

There are more insane ramblings from UK architecture minister Margaret Hodge in this weeks Building Design (20,03.2008). Cleverly giving herself enough rope to hang herself, BD invites Margaret Hodge to show them around her consistuency of Barking, East London, and see what kind of architecture she likes - "Now that’s what Margaret Hodge calls architecture".

She starts off well enough, criticising a spec housing development by Bellway homes, (albeit for reasons that should be within the council and planning departments ability to enforce):

"It's horrible, cheap housing with no facilities: no schools, no transport infrastructure, no buses, no shops. This is just want you don't want."

Then she starts to show a little of her own design 'vision', for the Barking Riverside masterplan:

"I don't think it works," she says. "There are enormous pedestrianised areas. They haven't integrated the housing properly. New communities only work if people have their own gardens, fenced off."

Now it's possible that Margeret Hodge has been feverishly reading nutters like Oscar Newman and Alice Coleman et al, or channeling the spirit of Jane Jacobs through a kind of New Urbanist distortion field, since landing in the poisoned chair at the DCMS in June 200. However, it's more likely that she has made this gross, sweeping statement off the top of her head. Margaret Hodge has nailed her colours to the mast of environmental determinism.

But the killer comes when Hodges takes BD to Barking Learning Centre:

Among her high points is Barking Learning Centre, formerly the central library, designed by Alford Hall Monaghan Morris. This mixed-use building, which is the centrepiece of Barking Town Square’s redevelopment, is an example of the government’s vision for integrated public spaces, with council services, a lending library, educational facilities and residential apartments all on the same site. Hodge is very proud of it.

"Look, a buggy park!" she exclaims, as we view the children's library, a book club meeting in progress. Hodge points out the "welcoming entrance", which she sees as friendly and inclusive, and insists there ought to be a coffee shop here too. Her only disappointment is that the flats have been sold to a buy-to-let investor. "There’s nothing you can do about that." [My italics].

There's the money quote. With one throwaway comment the UK's architecture minister washes her hands of the parlous state of the UK's housing.

Buy-to-let, where investors buy properties as a business venture and enjoy tax breaks, has completely altered the UK housing landscape over the last 10 years. Fed a diet of 'you can do it' property investment programmes such as Relocation, Relocation, Property Ladder and How to be a Property Developer, the middle-classes of England have been steadily sinking themselves in debt taking out multiple mortages and riding the milktrain.

But now the chickens are coming home to roost.

Writing in the Guardian, Sympathy for the buy-to-let devil?, (22.03.2008), Patrick Collinson states:

Lenders keep telling us Britain doesn't have a "sub-prime" problem like the US. Yes we do - in the shape of a million buy-to-let mortgages.

Collinson then details some of the scams and sharp practices that have dominated the buy-to-let feeding frenzy:

"On paper, you couldn't obtain a 100% mortgage for a buy-to-let. But developers offered fake 15% "discounts"; credulous surveyors gave fanciful valuations; lenders skimmed over loan applications. Hey presto, wannabe landlords were able to obtain an "85%" loan which was really 100% of the purchase price, and start building a "portfolio" without spending a penny upfront. And they didn't even have to pay tax on the income.

It wasn't much of a worry to the lenders that the whole thing might later go wrong. They could "package" or "securitise" the buy-to-let loan, mark it down as a profit and take it off their books. Only in the coming few months will we see where in the financial system the losses turn up.

Compare this with first-time buyers. They have to stump up a deposit. They have to prove their income. They have to make monthly mortgage payments from a taxed salary. There could only be one winner in such a one-sided game. With access to easy finance, the buy-to-letter could outbid the first-timer and push prices up to ever more ludicrous levels."

Now the bubble has inevitably burst, not only are tens of thousands of get rich quick investors stuggling to make interest payments on mortgages, but overstretched owner-occupiers are faced with large mortgage hikes, while the banks and financial institutions who have been ridden by this loa of greed and exploitation get bailed out by the Bank of England. As a nation we are overextended on credit per capita to a much greater extent than the US.

Barking Learning Centre, held up by Hodge as the shining example of urban regeneration in Britain, is actually just the mirror to the failed state of housing in the UK. Who will maintain the properties at Barking Learning Centre? What can motivate investors, who are losing millions of pounds on the empty promise of buy-to-let, to look after their properties and ensure that they are good places to live?

To bring it back round to Robin Hood Gardens, and it's recent threat of demolition, Amanda Bailieu states in her recent BD editorial:

As one would expect from this government, Margaret Hodge believes the newly built Barking town centre in her constituency offers a more hopeful model for the future of British housing than the rugged, generous and light-filled flats at Robin Hood Gardens.

And yet Hodge cannot find any housing in Barking that actually works.

In the US, the credit crunch and the fallout from the subprime mortgage farrago is refiguring communities and the suburban landscape, creating new housing archetypes - subprime shanty towns and exurban slums. The death of the buy-to-let market in the UK could do the same in this country. Margaret Hodge could find herself with a Hooverville in the midst of her constituency.

What is needed, now more than ever, is a richer mix of housing types and typologies. This needs to encompass social housing, letted accommodation, housing associations and cooperative living, as well as owner occupied dwellings.

Instead of hanging round Barking, Hodge should try visiting Rotterdam.

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

Guinea airport car park is seat of learning

In a syndicated news story by Rukmini Callimachi, (viewable here), we learn that each night, children in Conkary, Guinea head to the car park at G'bessi International airport to study under the floodlights.

It's a tale that illustrates strongly how a dream-myth of globalisation, with an international airport bringing empty promises of prosperity, contrasts with a poverty stricken nation, "ranked 160th out of 177 on the United Nations' development index", where only a fifth of Guineans have access to electricity, and power cuts are frequent. But the counterpoint is the resourcefulness of the children, desperate to gain an education, and what William Gibson would call "the street finds its own use for things". A concrete bollard becomes literally a seat of learning, a floodlit car park transformed into a vast study hall, with it's own spatial hierachy:

"They sit by age group with 7-, 8- and 9-year-olds on a curb in a traffic island and teenagers on the concrete pilings flanking the national and international terminals. There are few cars to disturb their studies."

Elsewhere across Guinea, students have to study at gas stations, or crouch on the curbs outside the homes of wealthy families.

"'We have an edge because we live near the airport,' says 22-year-old Ismael Diallo, a university student."

Meanwhile the precious, fragile nature of electricity in Guinea highlights the ubiquitous excess of energy that is consumed in the West.

"According to U.N. data, the average Guinean consumes 89 kilowatt-hours per year — the equivalent to keeping a 60-watt light bulb burning for two months — while the typical American burns up about 158 times that much."

Recent power outages in San Francisco in the US or water shortages in Gloucestershire in the UK are seen as outrageous affronts to our civility. Taking electricity and other utilities for granted makes us forget how privileged we are.

It's an urban world, after all

While the timing may differ, everyone is agreed that imminently, more than half the population of the Earth will live in cities. Thoraya Obaid, executive director of the UN Population Fund, proclaims that this will happen next year, as reported in The Guardian.

The article is accompanied by a superb infographic which shows at a glance the urbanised areas of the world. Surprise is that Venezuela is the most urbanised country in the world, with 94% living in cities. The UK and Argentina come in second at 90%. Of course, city-states like Singapore probably score 100%, but that's not the point.

London Loves Lawn

(image from Flickr user Jonny2005)

FlyTower, by Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey is an art project to grow grass on two faces of the Flytower of the Lyttelton Theatre at the National Theatre on London's South Bank.

Intended to last up to 10 weeks, the artists expect the grass to turn yellow and die, a poetic reminder of global warming.

Turf puns are essential, it would seem. "When the going gets turf .." chirps the Times, while "It's turf at at the top" chimes the Telegraph:

"The couple have dreamt of "growing" the theatre for years. "We used to get the 59 bus across Waterloo Bridge to Brixton, which is where we were living," says Ackroyd. Then Harvey chips in: "We joked about growing the whole building."

But I think this is less about greening the grey brutalism of the South Bank and more about tapping a national obsession of the English with their lawns. We have a fundamental basic desire to each own a patch of grass (which partially explains why we've never taken to apartment living).

It's no surprise that Wimbledon is the only world class tennis tournament to be played on grass, or that the turf at Wembley or the pitch at Lords are hallowed, sacred terrains. (Indeed, in the 1970's, Scottish football hooligans delighted in digging up the Wembley turf as an act of desecration, much celebrated by PM in waiting, Gordon Brown, who proudly proclaims: "There's a pub in central Scotland that displays a lump of Wembley turf to commemorate the victory").

Elsewhere, Pingmag features the work of Patrick Blanc, who has been growing Vertical Gardens, or mur vegetal, for many years:

"It has been proved that the Vertical Garden enhances atmospheric humidity in its vicinity, thus enabling small ferns and mosses to appear and seeds to germinate. Shops and museums turn out to be very suitable places for this kind of implementation indeed. And even though a car park is supplemented with specific artificial light… tropical plants that survive by growing in the shades are perfectly suitable for sunless locations."

My own patch of lawn is a failure. The grass is lumpy, mossy, has bald areas. In the summer the ground cracks, and the grass yellows. Not for me a verdant green carpet. I detest mowing. My secret plan is to install Astroturf, but I can't help but feel I'd be betraying my Englishness.

The house in the middle of the M62

The story of these home-owner holdouts reminds me of the infamous house that sits in the middle of the M62, the motorway that crosses the Penines between Manchester and Leeds. At Stott Hall Farm, in Calderdale, the 3-lane east bound carriageway and 3-west bound carriageway split, each to take a different way around the farm. The story goes that the farmer refused to sell up, so the developers built the motorway around him.

However, according to the Wikipedia entry on the M62, this is an urban myth - the road splits due to the contours of the ground. But the coincidence seems too great, and besides, it's a much better story.

More on Stot Hall Farm here and there's a shockingly bad quality video of a BBC news story here

Floating Cities 1

As part of an investigation of new urban typologies I am undertaking as part of TeamHelsinki for the Greater Helsinki Vision 2050 competition, I came across this scheme by the Mexican architectural practice Productora, on DomusWeb [via Dezain, inevitably]

This scheme, created for the competition from Arpafil, proposes floating an entire city block above the ground, in part of Guadalajara, Mexico's second largest city.

The proposal echoes Corb's urban utopian ideals, of letting the landscape flow around and beneath the built form. But here it is also a programmatic and organisational tactic:

To be able to create new quality public areas in the city, we decided to elevate one of the city building blocks. The new ‘floating’ building provides the City of a new Centre for Dance and Audiovisual Media: a complementary new department of the University which is distributed through the historical centre. The elevated urban block allows us … (1) to create a new reference point in the monotonous and isotropic urban structure (2) to establish a dialectic relation between the historical plaza and the newly created public plaza (3) create views (´new perspectives´) over the very horizontal texture of the existing city - establishing a relation with existing monuments such as the Cathedral. We believe that the city of Guadalajara needs powerful interventions in the neighbourhoods surrounding the actual centre of the City, to convert the city from a uni-central into a pluri-central urban network. The new Centre for Dance and Audiovisual Media could be a first step into this development.

More at Productora's website.

Cities and Sand 3

The trouble with a tabula rasa is that the tabula is rarely rasa after all.

Adu Dhabi has unveiled it's plans for a cultural district on Saadiyat Island ("Happiness Island"). But by inviting four of the biggest names in world architecture - Hadid, Ando, Gehry and Nouvel to create a performing arts centre, a maritime museum, an art museum and a classical museum respectively on a blank 670 acre canvas masterplanned by SOM, questions inevitably arise as to whose culture will be represented.

In the wonderful book, Delirious New York, Rem Koolhaas memorably describes Le Corbusier as a "Cartesian carpetbagger", attempting to get his Radiant City concept of huge cruciform skyscrapers built, anywhere, after the rejection of his Plan Voisin for Paris.

Frank Gehry is the modern equivalent - a non-cartesian carpetbagger. There is no city in the world that wouldn't be improved by a Gehry Guggenheim, Walt Disney Concert Hall or Experience Music Project. Often called the Bilbao-factor, the vision that is sold to most second-order cities of the world is that if they want to step up a gear, the answer is to bankroll at $400 million curvilnear temple to the arts.

Abu Dhabi is the latest city to fall under the Gehry/Guggenheim spell, and here he's really turned the Gehryfication dial up to 11. To paraphrase Spinal Tap further, the question is how much more Gehry could it be? And the answer is, none more Gehry.

Many artists later works tend towards self-reference, endless repeating the formula that worked, reducing their initial breadth of ideas to one unrelenting central theme, an instantly recognisable motif. Obvious examples would be the paintings of Piet Mondrian or Mark Rothko. But it easy for this self-referential loop to drift into self-parody, such the books of our beloved JG Ballard, whether knowingly or unknowingly.

Has Gehry fallen into the realms of self-parody? Unlike painters, for an architect to relentlessly churn out the same formal tropes regardless of context or site is more disturbing. From the press release, quoted at Dezeen.

"The site itself, virtually on the water or close to the water on all sides, in a desert landscape with the beautiful sea and the light quality of the place suggested some of the direction."

I'm not buying this at all. Is he doomed to reproduce his signature style around the world for clients with deep pockets and cities with aspirations of instant cultural kudos?

The one-style fits anywhere approach to architecture is one that has it's detractors, and the Saadiyat Island development in Adu Dhabi is one that has attracted criticism as a kind of globalisation, or perhaps more accurately a cultural imperialism.

In an deeply suspicious article, A Vision in the Desert, in the New York Times, Nicolai Ourousoff reviews the designs in Adu Dhabi as a new Xanadu in the desert, but there is an unpleasant subtext to the article which attempts to contrast Abu Dhabi's desires for a quick hit of architectural credibility with the urban decay of Beruit and Baghdad:

"With once-proud cities like Beirut and Baghdad ripped apart by political conflict bordering on civil war, Abu Dhabi offers the hope of a major realignment, a chance to plant the seeds for a fertile new cultural model in the Middle East."

This is an abhorrent statement, firstly because it is such a gross simplification and skewed viewpoint of the situations in Baghdad and Beruit, but it casts Adu Dhabi, Baghdad and Beirut as some kind of homogeneous Middle East bloc with no separate identity of their own.

Ouroussoff is rightly called out for this in a discussion at Archinect,in which Javier Arbona writes:

"Ouroussoff is himself putting into practice the very obscurantist colonialism that he dismisses initially as "global branding" and which rewrites its own history. This reeks. But rather than actually succeeding at disabusing the pernicious monumentality of the project that just helps to make more invisible the American violence in the region, Ouroussoff only reveals himself as a pawn to the disappearing act".

Who is the cultural quarter in Abu Dhabi being built for? My guess is that it is more about Adu Dhabi's desire to tap into the Bilbao factor, to increase it's standing in the world, to attract tourists and overseas investment; and to compete with the folks down the road in Dubai, rather than the cultural enrichment of the citizens of the Emirates themselves.

The Emirates are defining their own identity precisely by doing the opposite - an ahistorical non-identity, a brave new world of shining global modernity.

Cities and Sand 2

The fractal dimension of the Gulf coast is increasing.

Inspired by the recent pamphlet, The Gulf by Rem Koolhaas and AMO, my current obsession is looking at the Persian Gulf coastline on Google Earth. The publication, based on the research presented at the recent Venice Biennale, (as mentioned in this previous post), seeks to analyse the remarkable development occurring along the Gulf coast:

"A coastal analysis reveals a new regional and global order of effort, conceptualization, and rivalry that needs to be acknowledged and investigate".

Whilst the great land reclamation projects in Dubai are the best known, such as the Palm Jumeirah, the Palm Jebel Ali and the bizarre World development, a closer look at Google Earth shows that all along the Gulf coast, man-made curlicues and geometric patterns are being created, little Julia Sets, increasing the fractal dimension of the Gulf Coast. The new Palm Deira, announced in 2004, will be larger than Paris. In total, the Palm islands will add 520km of beach to Dubai's coast.

One side of the concertina folding pamphlet is a composite satellite image of the Gulf coast from Dubai up to Kuwait, straightening out the curve of the land into a straight line. Onto this image are added images of future projects planned, proposed an hypothetical, from the emerging Palm islands of Dubai to the Pearl development in Qatar, new land reclamation projects in Kuwait City and Bahrain.

But Google Earth replaces the uniformity of the Koolhaas satellite image (from Earthsat, ) with a stunning, interactive Suprematist composition of form and colour. The blocks corresponding to individual images have slightly different tones according to the time of day they were imaged, and across the landmass of the Arabia peninsular we can the traces of the satellite sweeps across the terrain. The brown and yellow hues of the desert contrast with the azures and lazuli of the sea. Zoom in and the image is blurred into an Impressionist canvas, an instant Monet. Slowly detail images, an island, a coastline, and then cities, roads, the trace of man:

"Sand and sea along the Persian Gulf, like and untainted canvas, provide the final tabula rasa on which new identities can be inscribed."

Zoom in on Dubai and the Palm islands appear, zoom closer and you can see the Burj al-Arab hotel, road networks laid out for future development. All along the coastline, SimCity is being played out for real.

In the article "Dubai's Satellite Urbanism", George Katodrytis describes how the UAE's Ministry of labor are using hi-res satellite images to monitor construction.

"There is a new type of urbanism: designing islands and coastlines visible from the sky, recorded by satellites and transmitted across the Internet as jpeg attachments. Technologies that are used to monitor wildlife development, hydrography and land drought is now a tool for global transmission of projects under construction. Post-card GIS and reconnaissance technologies turn into spectacle and telegenic fantasy addressing mass tourism. Dubai’s suburbs are rising from the water, in the form of artificial and prosthetic islands, imitating Venice. Dubai is turning into a postcard portrait city of the future. Satellite imagery of unfinished projects gives rise to the exciting promise of fantasy."

But while developers and government agencies are using satellite images to design Dubai, Google Earth is also the ideal way to visit Dubai.

Dubai is the first city in the world designed to be viewed from space.

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.