February 15, 2005

"Crimogenic" design

Posted by Chris

Reason Magazine has a long piece attacking New Urbanism co-written by an architectural liaison officer with the West Yorkshire Police and someone from the Thoreau Institute. It would be tempting to suggest the Onionesque headline:

Libertarians: “World would be better if designed by the police.”

Laurence Aurbach has a detailed rebuttal on the City Comforts site .

November 24, 2004

Cityscapes

Posted by Kieran

Via Patrick Nielsen Hayden, a cool index of photographs of cities. Of the cities in the index, I’ve lived in Cork, Tucson and Canberra, in that order. I imagine our cosmopolitan CT crowd can do better than that.

The database isn’t without its errors: this claims to be Cork but is in fact Cobh, a town down the road that was the Titanic’s last port of call.

September 18, 2004

New CT corporate HQ?

Posted by Chris

Mira Bar-Hillel has an interesting piece in the Spectator about the way in which English Heritage has undermined its own role by backing a deal not to reconstruct the Baltic Exchange in the City. I did a little googling to find out what the old building looked like and I was surprised to discover that the whole thing is up for sale in a dismantled state! Not on ebay, but on a web page of Complete Large Buildings for Sale (scroll down). I happen to think that the Baltic Exchange would serve nicely as a new Crooked Timber corporate headquarters, though getting my colleagues’ agreement on location might be difficult.

August 24, 2004

Blackwell

Posted by Chris

greylake.jpg

This is a colour photograph of Lake Windermere last Thursday afternoon! Fortunately there were other things to do and among them was a visit to Blackwell , the masterpiece of Mackay Hugh Baillie Scott. It is a wonderful example of the Arts and Crafts Style, brilliantly conceived and stunningly decorated. It also incorporates work by other leading designers of the period, most notably William de Morgan. It is, I think, worth a very long drive to visit. We also caught the Sickert and Freud exhibitions at Abbot House in Kendal before a much sunnier trip up to Scotland. Normal blogging will resume shortly.

July 24, 2004

Lunch with Jane Jacobs

Posted by Chris

The Financial Times has a profile of Jane Jacobs , author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities (which I think of as a very great book indeed). Jacobs’s other works haven’t achieved as much and some of them have been pretty crazy, but she’s still at it, now aged 88. Worth a look.

April 27, 2004

Pont de l'Alma

Posted by Maria

I work right beside the Pont de l’Alma where Diana, Princess of Wales, Dodi Fayed and Henri Paul died in that infamous car crash. It’s a very ordinary underpass, and probably disappoints the tourists who still come to see the accident site. It’s also much too dangerous to walk into the underpass, so most visitors leave their mark on a superbly tacky and incongruous sculpture across the road. (The sculpture is a brassy looking ‘eternal flame’ meant to symbolise American-French friendship, and probably deserves a post of its own.)

Sometimes, when walking past observing the cars whizzing down the ramp, I wonder about the tens of thousands of vehicles that have emerged at the other side, and the one that didn’t. But anyway, aside from presenting the occasional minor moral conundrum of whether to give directions to tourists who ask where Diana died (I always do - it’s vulgar and morbid, I know, but they’re so helpless and lost, and are always cheered up to be told where the three people died.), the bridge and underpass is unremarkable.

But yesterday at lunch time the traffic was funnelled into one lane and a line of camera vans and police trucks was parked along the road nearby. About half a dozen police were standing in the middle of the underpass entrance, and various serious and important looking people were walking around. I assumed it was a well-connected documentary crew, or possibly some sort of follow up to the french investigation of the crash.

But today’s Guardian tells me that no less a person than Sir John Stevens was there doing his own investigating into Diana’s death. Also present was the coroner leading the British inquest. Stephens said afterwards that the tunnel was “narrower than I expected, and the gradient steeper”. I found it reassuring that a man in such an elevated role still thinks it’s essential to do some groundwork himself.

Bizaarely, the Guardian’s angle on it all was to quote a victims of crime group who think the whole investigation is a waste of money. I can’t help thinking that if the inquest was not being taken so seriously by the head of the Metropolitan police, the Guardian would be clamouring for a proper investigation to lay bare the ‘cover up’. But instead it implies that Stevens and co were off on a PR stunt/jolly and leaves unchallenged the assertion by Clive Elliott of the Victims of Crime Trust that “If there is to be any priority, it should be given to those still suffering from the effects of crime.”

Em, no. The priority of the police is investigating crime, not compensating its victims. I’m very glad we live in relatively luxurious times when the focus - for example, in rape cases - is shifting more to protecting and advocating for victims of crime. But the first and clearest priority of law enforcement agencies, and the government in general, is preventing and detecting crime.

These days, NGOs are just as media savvy as other players, and the plug for a resource centre for victims of crime comes wrapped in a soundbite that makes a spurious claim to know a dead person’s mind and the predictable comparison of apples and oranges so beloved of single interest groups;

“I am sure Princess Diana was the sort of person who would agree with that sentiment (the statement that victims should be the police’s priority). We have been trying to raise £1m for a resource centre for victims. If Sir John gave us half the money being spent on this inquiry it would keep the centre going for 10 years.”

No again. Diana herself let loose a hundred later conspiracy theories by documenting her own private fears that an attempt would be made on her life. I don’t claim to read the minds of the dead either, but I suspect she might have preferred a thorough investigation into her own suspicious death to the setting up of a resource centre. But of course the comparison is completely bogus. Though writers of press releases like to suggest that ministers gleefully decide to spend money on cruise missiles at the expense of paediatric intensive care units, I think we all know that Stevens cannot choose to shut down a public inquiry and hand the cash over to victim support. It’s a fatuous point and a cheap shot that adds nothing to our understanding of the investigation or its context.

Of course it’s true that much more money is being spent to investigate Diana’s death than any other criminal investigation. And it’s probably true that the outcome of the investigation will be inconclusive. But it’s still essential that the police fully investigate a death which is of enormous public interest - and I mean public interest in the strict sense, not the satisfaction of prurient curiosity.

March 22, 2004

BoBo Brutalism in Pasadena

Posted by Kieran

I arrived in Pasadena (from Sydney) yesterday. Or possibly today. I’m still adjusting to jetlag, driving on the right and Los Angeles in general. The view of the mountains from the hotel is beautiful, at least in the photo in the hotel guidebook. Right now the smog makes them invisible. The area around the hotel has the usual collection of dull office blocks and carpark-like structures that turn out also to be office blocks. I’ve seen three buildings so far that are more than three stories tall, face the street on at least two sides, and have no windows at all: a Bank of America, a Target, and a Macy’s. I don’t have very high expectations when it comes to urban design, but these things look like the Simpsons’ Springfield Mall. They might as well have “Ministry of Truth” or “Central Reprocessing” written on the side. Is Pasadena particularly bad in this respect? Or has nine months away from the U.S. been enough for me to start paying attention to this kind of thing again?

February 20, 2004

Memorial Memorial

Posted by Kieran

Time to compare and contrast rejected proposals for the World Trade Center Memorial, from prehistoric to prehensile, from schmaltz to spikes, literal minded to questioning, melted to missed the point, patriotic to flowery, amateur to amateurest … on and on they go, all 5,201 of them.

February 17, 2004

Bilbao

Posted by Chris

gugg.jpg There’s been light blogging from me over the past few days as I’ve been in Bilbao , biggest city in the Basque country and home to Frank Gehry’s wonderful Guggenheim Museum. The Guggenheim is really the main reason to visit the city and is a visual and technological marvel. The computer-generated curves link sufaces of stone, glass and most memorably titanium scales which shimmer over the bank of the Nervion river. Gehry isn’t the only architect in town, though, with Norman Foster represented by the new Metro which runs all the way out to the sea. Building the Guggenheim cost around US$100 million of public money but the effect has been to regenerate a decaying industrial city and put it back on the map as a tourist destination. Good to see a practical demonstration of the power of compulsory taxation and state-sponsored public works projects!

January 21, 2004

North By Northwest

Posted by Chris

I watched North By Northwest again last night and was struck more than I had been before by the boldly modernist style the film projects. The texture of the film is wonderful: the future we were promised and never had. The opening title-sequence in which the titles are aligned with the straight lines of an international-style skyscraper with New York taxis reflected in the windows is really striking (the Seagram building?). And Roger O. Thornhill and Eve Kendall (Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint) throughout project a thoroughly enviable lifestyle that is sharply at variance with other images of the 1950s. In fact the whole film (1959) has a taste of the optimistic side of the 1960s about it: the NASA—Expo 67—white-heat-of-technology—007 side. That optimistic image of the future is something I grew up with: children’s comics like Look-and-Learn painted a picture of future cities in which we’d all be whizzing about in our personal aeroplanes (those who weren’t travelling by monorail of course). That isn’t exactly what is happening in North by Northwest, but rather a projection of of what the future might be like if the world of North by Northwest were the present (a TV in every hotel room in 1959!). Architecture and design do the work: from that opening sequence, through the United Nations (clean, sharp lines) through the exquisite train ride from New York to Chicago, through the scene in the cafe at Mt Rushmore (such a clean Scandinavian feel) to the Frank Lloyd Wright-style house at the end. Fantastic.

January 13, 2004

New urbanism update

Posted by Chris

Many aeons ago I posted on a controversy about crime and the new urbanism (here and here ). David Sucher has an update on that argument over at City Comforts Blog .

January 06, 2004

Cities of Signs

Posted by Henry

I haven’t been blogging the last couple of weeks, because I and my wife have been on a belated honeymoon in Venice and Florence. For Venice, I brought along one of my favourite books, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. Calvino’s book is a series of accounts of imaginary cities - thin cities, hidden cities, trading cities, continuous cities, cities of signs - each of which is Venice, or refers to Venice, or points to Venice by virtue of Venice’s absence. By happenstance, I also brought along Steven Berlin Johnson’s Emergence, which I’ve been meaning to read for a while. To my surprise, Johnson’s book also turns out to have a chapter that is more or less about cities of signs, and moreover uses Florence as its main example of how the city makes itself legible to its inhabitants. Johnson talks about how the organization of cities into neighborhoods, each of which may be a discrete and specialized cluster of activity, stores knowledge and makes it legible. If you are a Florentine who wishes to buy silk products, you know that you need to go to Por Santa Maria. Similarly, if you are a producer of silk, it may behove you to locate your activities close to other silk producers in Por Santa Maria, so that you may more easily exchange ideas, goods and services. In this way, neighborhoods may serve to collate, exchange, and represent information. All of this is of particular interest to me - the larger part of my Ph.D. research was on the clustering of economic activity in Italy. More importantly, Calvino’s and Johnson’s books offer refreshing and unusual vantage points on two cities which are a little stale to many tourists because of the overwhelming conventional wisdom about where you should go and what you should do.

December 30, 2003

Gin Lane

Posted by Chris

The image of Hogarth’s Gin Lane comes to mind after reading three pieces on Open Democracy on the booze culture in England , Ireland and Scotland . Central Bristol on a Friday and Saturday night is very much as Ken Worpole describes the centre of many British cities: full of inebriated teenagers, casual violence and, eventually, vomit. Dublin — a destination of choice for young Brits seeking to get smashed out of their brains — also has a big problem:

The results of this behaviour are alarming –- doctors, from a variety of hospitals, estimate that from 15-25% of admissions to accident and emergency units in 2002 were alcohol-related. In March 2003, representatives of the medical profession highlighted some of the horrendous consequences of excessive drinking. Mary Holohan, director of the sexual assault treatment unit at the Rotunda Hospital in central Dublin, said the pattern of alcohol consumption had changed greatly. One shuddering statistic that emerged was that in the past five years there had been a four-fold increase in the number of women who had been so drunk they could not remember if they had been sexually assaulted.

That last could be a dodgy statistic (if the number rose from one to four for example) but it sounds like there’s a serious issue.

December 16, 2003

Eyesores

Posted by Kieran

Architects like to think of their work as social theory made real. Conversely, paging through the examples in James Howard Kunstler’s Eyesore of the Month is like reading a stack of freshman essays on Smith and Marx written by students who didn’t do any reading and were too drunk to come to lectures.

Incidentally, I had no idea that the Dark Tower of Barad-Dur — eye of Sauron and all — is now located in Nashville.

November 01, 2003

New urbanism and crime

Posted by Chris

I promised to come back to the new urbanism and crime issue. But as it happens, David Sucher — more knowledgeable than I has done a pretty good job of responding to the alarmist and misleading Operation Scorpion report . And don’t miss the comments to his post, especially from Matthew Hardy of the International Network for Traditional Building, Architecture & Urbanism (INTBAU ).

October 21, 2003

Crime and the new urbanism

Posted by Chris

Iain Murray links to a police-sponsored report claiming that housing estates built on “new urbanist” principles are more vulnerable to crime than private estates built in cul-de-sac format incorporating the notion of “defensible space.” Interesting stuff, especially since many of the ideas that inform the new urbanism are very influential with both local authority planners and amenity societies. I’m a little sceptical when too much is claimed for design. Just like carpenters thinking that a hammer and a nail is the answer to all problems, architects like to put everything down to design (I’m sure I’ve stolen that line from Colin Ward). And I’d like to know more about the other factors distinguishing the two environments studied in the report. But this certainly warrants further attention.

UPDATE: I’ll try to say more in a few days. But a more careful look at the police document suggests that this isn’t a matter of comparing the experience of similar communities but rather a “projection” of data some of which is derived from experience of estates from an earlier period which (according to the police) incorporate “similar” design features.

On the design front, I understand that the police SBD philosophy frowns on features like recessed porches and collonades (good for hiding) leaving us with the a general flattening of building surfaces. Attractive? I don’t think so.

Do conservatives and libertarians really want their urban spaces designed according to a police approved philosophy? Really? Do the urban environments people like, such as Bath, Venice, Florence, …. (fill in your preferred name) conform to Secured By Design principles? As I said, more when I’ve got a moment…

September 14, 2003

Restoration and the urban environment

Posted by Chris

In recent weeks the hit TV programme on British TV has been Restoration, which invites viewers to vote for the dilapidated country house, castle, factory or mausoleum they most want renovated. Patrick Wright has been a shrewd observer of the “heritage industry” since the publication of his landmark On Living in an Old Country in the mid-1980s. He has a good essay in the Guardian on the ambivalence of restoration and on the often -attached social snobbery. He reveals, among other things, that it was veteran anarchist Colin Ward who coined the phrase “heritage industry” in the first place. I’ve been active in Bristol Civic Society for the past few years, and the tension Wright points to between a backward-looking conservationism and the desire to preserve and build a well-functioning urban environment is one that I see played out all the time. Read the whole thing.

September 08, 2003

Beneath the city

Posted by Chris

Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s latest post - The Fabric of the City - deserves a wide readership, both for itself and for the wealth of resources it links to. Lots of stuff about New York’s transportation infrastructure, abandoned subway stations and so on. There’s something about abandoned stations (especially underground ones) that calls to mind murder, mystery, romance (the stuff of old movies basically). There used to be such a station, perhaps more than one, on Berlin’s U-Bahn. It was part of the West Berlin network but was situated under East Berlin. The trains would pass through slowly, the old station was illuminated by a few 40w light bulbs and (I think) sometimes there were East German police on the platform with dogs.

September 05, 2003

Non-plan

Posted by Chris

OpenDemocracy has a short piece by Paul Barker on the late Cedric Price and the idea of the Non-Plan. Here’s a quote that will delight some and annoy others:

“Architects”, he once said, “are the greatest whores in town. They talk in platitudes about improving the quality of life, and then get out drawings of the prison they’re working on.”

The idea of the non-plan sounds fascinating:

He and I collaborated on Non-Plan, an anti-planning polemic, which infuriated architects, planners and assorted do-gooders. The idea emerged during a conversation I had with Peter Hall, geographer and planner, in the late 1960s. Both of us were appalled at the disasters that urban planning had brought about. We wondered if things could be any worse if there were no planning at all.

What worried our critics, who were many, when the four of us published our Non-Plan issue of New Society (20 March 1969), was their uncertainty about our political stance. Was this anarchism? Or deep-dyed conservatism, a precursor of Thatcherism? Our essential point was that you should always think very hard before telling other people how they ought to live. They had their own preferences, which ought to be respected.

We suggested carrying out a Non-Plan test. Four districts should be freed from all controls, and we could then judge whether the upshot was any worse than what happened with the controls on. To make readers sit up, we chose four much-cherished slices of English countryside for our test. The resultant incandescence was highly satisfactory.

I’m intruiged, and mean to find out more.

August 01, 2003

Wandering the Halls

Posted by Kieran

The Australian National University’s Research School of Social Sciences, where I am presently ensconced, is a great place. It has amiable institutions such as Morning and Afternoon Tea, for instance, which make it possible to pass the entire day moving from one sort of break to another. It also has lots of interesting people in it. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to find any of them because they are all located in the Coombs Building. On the other hand, you may bump into them while you are looking for your office again.

The building’s layout is a marvel of logic and clarity, provided you are looking at it from the outside and are in a helicopter. Like a gigantic carbon molecule, it is composed of three, three-storey hexagonal blocks each of which shares a side with one of the others. One (soon to be two) of the hexagons has a stub protruding from it that appears to be the bottom side of a fourth hexagon but of course is not.

Once inside the building, finding your way around is simplicity itself. Rooms are numbered according to an elementary system whereby the first digit denotes the block, the second the level and the third the room itself. You will of course not be tempted to think there are three blocks (on an obviously absurd analogy to the three hexagons) but rather will intuit straight away that there are seven. Blocks are numbered beginning with the main entrance corridor at the bottom of the middle hexagon (which offers the shortest route between the left and right hexagons) and ascend from 1-7 in half-hexagon sized chunks proceeding in a clockwise fashion along the three blocks, sorry I mean units, except for block six which is the stub to the rightmost unit mentioned earlier.

To aid navigation across the floors there are staircases on every third (or sometimes fourth) turn. Bear in mind that when you take a corner you are making a 60-degree rather than a 90-degree turn. Due to the slightly sloping nature of the site, the upper floors in two of the hexagons do not line up vertically with the third, so occasional half-staircases are necessary to facilitate the transistion from one hexagon to the next.

Seminar rooms in the building are helpfully labelled A to F. Some of them also have proper names, such as the Nadel Room.1

The information booth (if you can find it) is staffed by helpful people who will give you directions and even a map of the building. All the same, I may soon invest in a GPS unit of some sort, and a copy of A Pattern Language, which Chris has recommended before. The book offers a set of basic building patterns that make for livable and navigable spaces, and a set of rules for distinguishing patterns that work from ones that just look good on the drawing board. I wonder if the “three interlocking hexagons” pattern is in there somewhere.

Any other contenders out there for least-easily navigable building in the world? More precisely, buildings which look at first glance like they ought to be navigable, but turn out to be impossible?

1I believe this room is named for the anthropologist SF Nadel, whose analysis of role structures in his Theory of Social Structure inspired some of the pioneers of modern structural social theory. Nadel was amongst the first to note that an objective picture of a society’s role structure need not map directly onto the picture of that structure carried around in the heads of the people who constitute the society, and that the two will affect each other in complex ways. This seems appropriate.

July 29, 2003

Cities, buildings, architecture 1

Posted by Chris

I’ve been interested in buildings, architecture and cities for about ten years now. Truth be told, probably for much longer than that: but I’ve been conscious of it as an interest for that time. It is an enormously interesting and absorbing subject in more ways than are worth enumerating here. But one of the aspects that has interested me as a philosopher and borderline social scientist is the way in which buildings and cities are records of human reason in the face of all kinds of practical problems (social, topographical, economic, weather-related, material related) at the same time as being items of great aesthetic importance. Form, style, design are all products of human trial and error and what emerges is often striking and beautiful. Sometimes the product of an individual’s vision; at others the result of the accumulated strivings of numbers of people working without any general conception. (Often, for cities at least, the best results have come when humans have worked blind; and the worst when some architect of other has been given free rein.)

I’ve blogged about this before on Junius. But a new forum gives an opportunity to look again, so I thought I’d do a series of posts about important books in the field that I’ve learnt from and been inspired by. First of these is Stewart Brand’s remarkable How Buildings Learn: What happens after they’re built. Brand’s book really gripped me when I first read it, and looking back over its pages is still both informative and fun. I’ve given copies to a number of friends and relatives over the years and I’d recommend it to anyone. Aside from the intrinsic interest of the subject matter, Brand had a biggish effect on my political and philosophical outlook. To caricature what I believed before somewhat, I moved from being somone who thought that smart people applying the right principles could make the world right to someone inclined to be much more sceptical about what we know or can know in politics, who takes much more seriously people’s lived experience of institutions, plans, projects and buildings (devised by ‘experts’) and who has more of a focus on rules of thumb, practice, ‘knowing how’, tacit knowledge, “satisficing”, skill, craft and so on.

Brand’s book is a visual delight. Much of the book consists of pictures of the same buildings or urban vistas over a series of decades. The cover features at drawing of two identical Greek Revival brick townhouses from the 1850s next to a photograph of the same buildings in 1993. One has become a storey higher, the other has grown sideway. This kind of juxtaposition is repeated through the book for restaurants, gas stations, living rooms and streetscapes, all complete with commentary on the pressures which led to change. Brand’s focus isn’t on any one kind of building: he’s happy discussing Chatsworth and Salisbury Cathedral one moment and MIT’s Building 20 or an office in a container the next.

As a fairly neglectful and manually incompetent householder, I can’t read the chapter called “The Romance of Maintenance” without feeling guilty, but Brand manages to bring some poetry to the subject:

The root of all evil is water. It dissolves buildings. Water is exilir to unwelcome life such as rot and insects. Water, the universal solvent, makes chemical reactions happen every place you don’t want them. It consumes wood, erodes masonry, corrodes metals, peels paint, expands destructively when it freezes, and permeates everywhere when it evaporates. It warps, swells, discolors, rusts, mildews, and stinks.

Most basically the book is about adaptation and flexibility and the need to design in ways that permit change. Most architects build to a conception of a building’s purpose. But two things are likely to happen after a building gets built: people start to use it in ways that the architect didn’t predict (will the building help or hinder their preferred ways of working or living) or the building gets sold and used for some quite different purpose. As Brand puts it “All buildings are predictions. All buildings are wrong.”

Although the book has a more or less sequential text, much of the pleasure of it (particularly coming back later) lies in the little bits of sidebar commentary to the pictures, the diagrams etc. Brand really is a master of all this and he also has a magpie like ability to draw on anecdote, history and literature in support of his thesis. (Check out, for example, the Gregory Bateson story about the renewal of the oak beams in the New College, Oxford dining room on pp. 130-1). Highly recommended.

Brand’s book finishes with a really extensive list of further reading, some of which I’ll write about in future posts.

July 24, 2003

Financing basic income

Posted by Chris

The new issue of Prospect includes a rather meandering piece by Samuel Brittan on baby bonds, basic income and asset redistribution. A central issue in this area is how to finance such proposals, and that’s something Brittan gets down to at the end of his article. He canvasses Henry George-style proposals for land taxation and also mentions inheritance taxes, but finally comes up with a somewhat odd suggestion:

… a very simple practical proposal, why not auction planning permission? Many local authorities have approached this piecemeal by making such permission conditional on the provision of local services such as leisure centres, approach roads and so on. But why not return this windfall to the taxpayer in the form of asset distribution and let citizens decide how to spend it?

An intruiging idea, certainly, but a great deal of UK planning law would need to change to implement it. For one thing, under the current system, more than one person or body can hold a valid permission to develop the same land. I can even apply for permission to demolish your house, though having planning permission to do so doesn’t entitle me to knock it down! Presumably, also, there would have to be some specific thing that was being auctioned: but planning permissions are specific to the purposes that the applicant intends. You want to build a cinema and I want to build a supermarket: you aren’t interested in my permission and I’m not interested in yours. And giving citizens assets as a result of such auctions doesn’t solve the problems that “planning gain” is usually used to address: your proposed superstore will generate more traffic, so we get you to pay to improve the roads, thereby covering costs which would otherwise fall to the local taxpayer. Still, there may be a workable idea here, but I can’t quite see it.