SuperSpatial

022. Tru Born Playa

2011-05-27T10:39:00.000-07:00

I was browsing through the vinyl in a record store the other day when I came across this. Tru Born Playa by Gridlok and Prolix, featuring MC Fats.

If you look carefully you can see Zaha Hadid's Phaeno centre. I'd love to know who did the artwork.

The track itself is a fairly bangin' piece of drum'n'bass. You can listen to it here:

Gridlok & Prolix 'Tru Born Playa' by realplayaz

<< Raise your hands if you're a Tru Born Playa >>

021. The wrong Kaufmann House

2011-05-16T13:29:00.001-07:00

I've become somewhat obsessed with the imagery and advert for the Ministry of Sound Chillout Sessions XII.

It features artwork by Australian design firm Collider, who created a model diorama based on Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater, but given a West Coast poolside setting. It's beautifully constructed and shot, but I can't help but think they chose the wrong Kaufmann House.

It's easy to forget from this diorama that the house at Fallingwater, by FLW for Edgar J Kaufmann in 1937 is actually set in a dense woodland just outside Pittsburgh PA, with the house set on top of the waterfall that gives the house its name.

The story of the design of Fallingwater is the stuff of legend, and lovingly told by Hugh Pearman here:

"Eventually Kaufmann's patience ran out and he telephoned to say he was driving over - a distance of 140 miles. "Come on over, EJ - your house is finished," said Wright calmly, and put down the phone. Everyone in the office knew that not a single line had been drawn. So Wright sat down, got out his coloured pencils and - in two hours flat or as much as three by some accounts - designed the house, in its entirety, down to the smallest detail. As he drew it, he talked, describing it. It was all in his head. Wright placed the house on a great rock right on top of the waterfall. He named it, and signed it. This astonishing feat of speed-design is the single most celebrated act of architectural creativity ever"

Elsewhere, Pearman recounts it thus:

"As related by his disciples, the design just poured out of Wright’s head, and he talked as he drew, wide-eyed underlings handing him a stream of freshly-sharpened pencils. He was talking to himself, mainly, describing the narrative of the design, where the members of the family would be, how the house was going to relate to the stream in the wood. He named it, signed it, and handed over the drawings to his assistants to finish as he strolled out to meet his clients with the immortal words: ‘Come in, EJ. We’ve been waiting for you."

Fallingwater without the waterfall is a strange conception, the vertical wall of water was the primary generator for the form of building, with its massive horizontal concrete cantilvers and vertical stone walls. Wright chose the most dramatic part of the site and instantly knew that this was where the genius loci - the spirit of the place - dwelt.

Edgar Kaufmann commissioned another famous house, designed by Richard Neutra, and built in Palm Springs. I think this house would have suited the vibe that the MOS Chillout Sessions diorama is going for, and the mid-century moderne aesthetic typified by the TV series Mad Men that Collider are tapping into.

My favourite episode of Mad Men is Jet Set, from the second series, where Don Draper goes to the West Coast and then to Palm Springs. He ends up at a beautiful villa and pool which could be the Neutra Kaufmann House (although i understand the episode was actually filmed at the Fox Residence, Chatsworth, California).

I'd love it if for a future Chillout Sessions release Collider could use the other Kaufmann House.

020. Slam City.

2009-03-27T02:02:00.000-07:00

Love these illustrations by Borja Bonaque. And if that wasn't enough, there are also these beautiful skateboard deck graphics. Just the thing when you're reading Iain Borden's Skateboarding, Space and the City.

019. My Playground.

2009-01-15T05:29:00.000-08:00

Via the Skira Yearbook site, take a look at this parkour video shot at the intriguing Mountain Dwellings housing development in Orestaden by BIG.

It's a teaser for a documentary by Kaspar Astrup Schröder, My Playground, featuring the parkour skills of Team JiYo. Regardless of what you might think of parkour/free running, the video really brings alive the spaces of the fascinating building by BIG.

018. All Streets

2008-11-12T01:01:00.000-08:00

All streets is a project by Ben Fry which maps all 26 million roads to the lower 48 states in the USA. No other features were added yet as Ben notes cities mountains and other geographical features emerge from the absense of roads or their patterns as are diverted around these unseen obstacles.

017. Revolutionary Minds.

2008-10-20T15:08:00.001-07:00

From a recent edition of Seed Magazine, Revolutionary Minds explores the work of several designers and architects working with a very generative and organic approach to creativity. Embedded below are clips featuring Skylar Tibbits and Aranda Lasch.

016. Reimagining Robin Hood Gardens

2008-07-22T00:33:00.000-07:00

Here is our entry for the recent competition for Robin Hood Gardens as run by Building Design.

Our proposal for the recent competition for Robin Hood Gardens as run by Building Design, focused on restoring Robin Hood Gardens at the heart of a dense urban realm for Blackwall Reach.

Robin Hood Gardens' high rise but low density development, with a unique green open space at its centre, forms the centrepiece for a fundamental urban redevelopment that focuses on public space and interaction.

Thus proposal attempts an intensification of the urban field around Robin Hood Gardens, re-establishing prior street patterns and creating new ones through a series of urban interventions, exploring both existing archetypes of urban form and also new urban prototypes.

Touching lightly on the facade of RHG, 4 mobile, kinetic parasitic structures provide security, lighting and telecommunications, an exo-refit for RHG. Mobile, robotic units, they move along the articulated facade of RHG.

As can be seen on the BD website, most of the shortlisted entries focussed on new approaches to the two blocks themselves, with numerous protrusions, and slicing into the building, and across the estate.

015. A Night at the Opera

2008-06-24T01:30:00.000-07:00

Hadid's Opera House in Dubai is the first true architecture of the 21st Century. Digital. Sleek. Perfect. So why build it?

That most celebrated of building types, the Opera House has given us culture barns such as La Scala in Milan, the Beaux Art Paris Opera, and of course Utzon's masterpiece in Sydney. If Sydney Opera House was the iconic building of the 20th Century, perhaps Hadid's Dubai Opera House might be the definitive work of this.

It is the culimination of the proceses her practice has been exploring throgh projects such as the Phaeno Centre, the BMW building, and the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Rome. Traditional architectural elements are dissolved, the arrangement of spaces determined by the composition. Form follows function is an antiquated concept these days, but here function is a mere conceit. Form follows more form.

Form rides everything is where parametric modelling leads - an aesthetic darwinism of evolved appearances. You can see it in almost every project to come form the DRL at the AA, the farm team for Zaha Hadid Architects, and where Patrik Schumacher teaches.

With this project, walls and roof are united into a sleek 'hull', transformed by parametric process which warped slice and skew the form into a sensuous, sinuous form that rises and twists it's way across the dunes.

The sheer beauty of the renderings is breathtaking. I want to inhabit its spaces (virtually). I want to fly through it. I want to explore its surface, its textures and materials. But I have no intention of visiting it.

The only reason to build it is to prove it is buildable, that the building can capture the essence of the renderings.

But the reality will never live up to the beauty of the proposals. So why bother?

The future of architecture is not Dubai, but Dezeen.

014. Meet the Starchitects

2008-06-20T09:02:00.000-07:00

These fantastic caricatures, drawn by Kathryn Rathke, can be found in the latest issue of Intelligent Life magazine from The Economist. In the Summer 08 issue, you'll also find a great profile of Queen Zaha by Jonathan Meades.

I think these caricatures could become the definitive image of these architects, I especially like Nouvel's Dr Evil pose. Click on the thumbnails below for larger images.

013. Gundam Architecture

2008-04-11T05:56:00.000-07:00

Here are some remarkable images of Aoyama Technical College, by Makoto Sei Watanabe, posted by Flickr user Viggo:

The building, in the Shibuya district of Tokyo, has been developed from a process of self-organisation in an attempt to define an emergent urban form for Tokyo:

"The self-organizing, organic system that emerges on this principle, however, is-like a natural phenomenon-not conscious. As long as it remains an unconscious principle, it is difficult to draw upon in creating, for example, some building."

"By extracting from the spontaneous workings of this principle those methods that we can consciously apply, it is possible that we might develop a conscious principle upon which to create a new architecture for the city. The Aoyama Technical College aims to discover such a principle for establishing a new order"

Elsewhere, we learn of a Japanese robotics expert, Takayuki Furuta, who wants to build a six-storey tall Gundam battle robot, and has costed it out at approx $742 million.

012. Surreal Madrid

2008-03-18T06:55:00.000-07:00

This advert for Madrid Metro presents a view of the city from below, the Spanish capital literally turned into a floating city, a worms-eye view of the world, suspended in a moment in time.

This video reminded me of the worms-eye axonometric drawigns that James Stirling was infamous for, a sadly underused representational technique in these days of 3D computer modelling. Alas there seems to be a distinct lack of these drawings available online - they are an exquisite way of capturing space.

011. Songlines.

2008-01-24T10:57:00.000-08:00

Here is the entry from Team Helsinki for the Helsinki 2050 competition, from which your humble SuperSpatial team was formed.

[click on the images for larger-scale versions]

Called Songlines, we sought to create 6 urban corridors connecting regions across Helsinki, attempting to create sustainable communities that subverted the normal urban-peripheral dualism of most concentratic city plan. This model, with it's Central Business District, cultural centre and radial hub-and-spoke transportation system seemed to us a 19th and 20th Century pattern that had little relevance for the citizens of mid-21st century Helsinki.

So we sought to create mini-decentralised cities, areas of urban intensification in linear suburbs, each of which could possess unique characteristics due to special planning, tax or other regulations. Thus the Vantaa – Riipilä corridor (or 'songline') might have tax relaxtions which would attract high-tech business start-ups, while the Järvenpää – Mäntsälä zone would be declared petroleum free zone.

Our proposal went into the most depth along the Katajanokka - Vuosaari corridor, which we envisaged as a gateway to the city, focussed around a high-speed Helsinki-St. Petersburg 'Shinkansen'. This area is ripe for development to help meet the requirement for the amount of new housing that a growing city like Helsinki would need by 2050, as set out in the brief, but rather than use the proposed metro line as the engine of development, a well planned shuttle tram service would be cheaper and more environmentally friendly.

The area was an opportunitity to explore a number of housing and mixed use typologies

Our entry was placed a lowly 58 (out of 109 accepted entries), with the jury finding "an ironically made (e.g. bioterrorism courses for a prospective Sipoo university and a Christiana-type community in Kauniainen), incomplete entry, nevertheless featuring beautifully presented documents."

However, we can be proud that we produce something with such a limited resource which contained the germ of some genuinely good ideas that sparked some interesting debate.

Download our detailed proposal for Katajanokka - Vuosaari.
Download detailed_proposal.pdf (49.6K)

Download our 'helsinki vision' document
Download helsinki_vision.pdf (81.9K)

010. Emeralds shimmer in Helsinki.

2008-01-18T01:02:00.000-08:00

The recent Greater Helsinki Vision 2050 ideas competition drew a large number of entries, and was an extremely well run and judged concours. With over €250,000 on offer in total prizemoney, it attracted some very polished and professional entries.

You can download a document with a thorough overview of all the entries here.

The winning entry, Emeralds, by WSP Finland is stunning. The basic concept of "green bays" of development form a urban tapestry which act as both a unifying element as well as a distinguishing feature. The rich, multi-disciplinary entry addresses issues that Helsinki will need to consider over the next 40 years social, spatial, transportation and infrastructure and presents a compelling, vivid, proposal - everything good architectural speculation should do.

TeamHelsinki, which both Lewis and Kosmograd were members of, managed to put an entry together, which while not matching the depth of thought and presentation quality of the top entries, nevertheless had some good ideas, and was a great way to stretch those flabby architectural muscles, so to speak.

As a whole, the Greater Helsinki Vision 2050 competition should serve as a benchmark for other architectural competitions to strive for.

009. Oslo Recoded

2008-01-15T01:52:00.000-08:00

Oslo following many cities worldwide over the past two decades is redeveloping its waterfront, and rethinking the way it approaches the water, now that these areas are required less and less for industrial use. The area of Bjørvika, a no mans land behind Oslo's Central station is being redeveloped into a new city district. Barcode is the name of this small area of mainly office redevelopment, part of a greater regeneration of Oslo waterfront. Its a tight space for offices with Oslos planning limitations deliberatly changed for the area. Higher buildings are allowed, the tallest in Norway, and the planning law was aesthetically subverted too.

'This is the first plan in Norway where rules are not drawn up regarding each plot, but instead there are rules for how plots within a particular area should be designed in relation to each other. If we design a house with a flat roof, then the next house may not have a flat roof. If we design a glass building, the next house must use a different material.'

The Barcode masterplan was conceived by MVRDV in partnership with a-lab and Dark. Its interesting because the masterplan imposes change between each new building without defining a particular style, only that it be different from the last. It also uses a modern 'valueless' iconography of the barcode to impose some order instead of an architectural aesthetic a classic reworking of an MVRDV theme. I like that it reverses the normal planning rules and imposes non conformity with the neighbouring buildings to try to create a sense of urban life.

The first building in this new area designed by a-lab is the PWC building. Its nothing really special, and I'm wondering if there will really be any exciting Architecture in a relatively bland looking development so far, but the idea of a planning regime that imposes change but not style is really attractive.

Some more links:
Arkiteknytt (Norweigian Architects website)
OSU (The developer of Bjørvika)
Skyscrapercity (a thread with some great images of new developments generally in Oslo)

008. Oceannorth

2007-11-19T02:27:00.000-08:00

Superspatial, this collaborative blog, is also a venue for design and competition entries. However this group would be impossible without the internet, as we are a geographically distributed network. For me anyway it allows a path or natural extension of blogging and an interest in active urban speculation to develop into actual work. I was wondering if anything has happened like this before, then I remembered reading an article in AD about Ocean. They were founded in 1992 and restructured in 1998 into OCEANNORTH and was as far as I know the first geographically distributed design network with no clear hierarchy or constant centre. At this time of writing has four nodes now in London, Oslo, Frankfurt and Rome.

They are more of a kind of thinkthank and research group with no actual architectural projects yet realised, yet they were the first to attempt to design across distributed geographical network without a clear single identity. Reading the description of how they designed in the beginning though you can see they were more of a semi-formal travelling network with most of the design being done face to face with members running workshops concurrently in different design schools and running between them to coordinate.

That they are a loose and flexible group is shown by the number of people that have joined and left. The Helsinki node for example was really active with Markus Holmsten, Toni Kauppila Lasse Wagner, and Kivi and Tuuli Sotamaa helping to do some of ON's most notable work, they have all now left, the Helsinki node gone, but still ON carries on.

Certainly their work you could say is reflective of a geographically distributed system with process, local networks, and biological growth more influential on design typology than the local geography. It is interesting in this current climate for starchitects that a much more anonymous, collaborative and distributed design network can exist. Certainly I don't really believe in the Renaissance Architect with his signature on every detail and decision anymore, and although common corporate structure, architectural egos, and the need for a steady source of income probably preclude this type of network from really having a wide impact on architecture, it is good to see that some other types of organisation can exist and make substantial works. Some of their projects are below - click through on an image to read about it. (all images from oceannorth).

007. Rethinking Venice

2007-11-14T00:38:00.000-08:00

We submitted an entry to the recent design competition organised by 2G magazine seeking ideas for a Venice Lagoon Park on an area of land at the northern tip of the island of Murano, in Venice.

Inevitably we stretched the brief, to engage in a critical rethinking of the Venice Lagoon. As it is an anonymous competition, we cannot say more, but we will post more details after the results have been announced.

006. The Manhattanisation of Bilbao

2007-10-26T01:22:00.000-07:00

Zaha Hadid has completed the development of the conceptual masterplan for the Zorrozaurre region of Bilbao, (details here and here). Currently a rather shabby and run-down semi-industrial area on a peninsula formed by the River Nervion and a canal, the masterplan extends the canal to make Zarrozaure an island. This will not only assist future flood defences, but gives the island a strong identity, linked to the rest of the city by a narrow causeway and a series of bridges.

I'm fascinated to see how the designs have evolved from the early presentation drawings first seen back in January (there's a great photoset of the original designs here). The design team have taken on concerns from the existing residents of the island (set to grow from 450 currently to over 15,000), to preserve many of the existing buildings, and reduction of through traffic lanes.

The masterplan can be read as an exercise in densification, or the 'Manhattanisation' of Bilbao. The dynamic composition of the original designs may have been diluted, but the result still retains much of the sense of the exploration of high-density urban typologies promised by the initial designs.

005. The city destroyed by its own beauty

2007-10-11T05:23:00.001-07:00

Recently I've been watching the superb television series Venice, repeated on BBC4, and also available on DVD and with an accompanying book, as the urbane, aristocratic Venetian architect and historian Francesco da Mosto shows us around Venice, and recounts it's history.

Da Mosto - a white-haired Gianfranco Zola -is perfect for this programme. Venice is his playground, whether it's languidly piloting his boat up the Grand Canale, smoking a cigarette (a very unusual sight on British television) in St. Marks Square, or diving into the water and swimming to the steps of the Ca' d'Oro.

But there's a wistful side to da Mosto too, lamenting the loss of half of his family tree to syphilis during the era of Casanova, or musing upon the over-running of Venice by tourists. With the indigenous population dwindling to less than 50,000, and the oldest average age in Europe, da Mosto worries for the future of the city, as he brings his children up in what has become essentially a theme park for the hordes of visitors that cross the bridge link into the city, or pull up in the huge cruise ships that stop-over in Venice.

The danger for a city as a theatre or theme-park is that it becomes a stage set, a backdrop. This inevitably treats citizens as actors, there for others amusement. This leads to a simulated city as Baudrillard would have it, a city of the hyperreal as Umberto Eco might tell us. What happens when the audience is not there? Visit Venice on a windswept January and you'd probably find a virtual ghost-town - in fact many people have commented that Venice at night is eerily quiet, as almost no-one lives there, and relatively few tourists stay on the main island.

As Richard J. Williams explores in his book The Anxious City, the idea of the city as theatre favours the visitor (the theatre-goer) as a privileged observer, a bourgeois consumer of a 'spectacle'. Williams dissects a number of recent urban developments in the UK, and finds plenty of evidence of the 'staging of the city' masking a profound urban anxiety. Richard Rogers might argue that to 'act' in the city, to drink a cappuccino in a pavement cafe, is to enact the public realm, and participate in the physical expression of democracy. But it is a participation that excludes as many as it engages - just check the price of a cappucino in St. Marks Square.

In the UK, the nearest equivalent we have to Venice in its theatricality is Bath. Stephen Bayley asked recently in The Observer "Is Bath Britain's most backward city?". The Georgian city of Bath seems content to remain dreaming of an era of Nash crescents and Jane Austen novels. There is an antipathy and suspicion towards modern architecture and development (Bayley calls it "a ferocious hostility to productive change") that has recently derailed two exciting projects - an extension to the Holburne Museum and a School of Innovation and Design half-funded by James Dyson - and threatens any future investment and job creation,

But judging from the letters in response to Bayley's original article, Bathonians (Bathers?) seem largely happy living in a heritage time-capsule, while turning their back on the chronic lack of housing, traffic congestion, and shabbiness of many of the streets. But Bath is in danger, as one correspondent says, of turning into "a white, upper-middle class, conservative ghetto.", whilst another writes "The appallingly narrow-minded, fearful and mundane councillors of Bath should be reminded that Bristol is close and getting closer. If they want to be seen as a pretty garden suburb of a thriving city, then they are going the right way about it."

The challenge for all cities with a rich architectural legacy is to find a balance between preserving the historical identity without becoming a slave to it; to recognise that stopping the clocks is to condemn a city to irrelevance, the vicissitudes of fickle tourism, or death.

004. The urban futures of rising tides.

2007-09-18T11:33:00.000-07:00

I recently discovered a great review of the 2005 Rotterdam Architecture Biennale over at Core 77, which highlights the progressive way in which Dutch architecture, landscape designs and urbanism, is tackling issues of rising sea levels and flood defences.

Under the theme of The Flood, and curated by landscape architect Adrisan Geuze of West8, the biennale was structured to give an overview of how water has historically influenced the Netherlands's architectural and civil engineering traditions, and compared these initiatives with others from around the world.

One of the most intriguing parts of the exhibition was Three Bays, with work by Hidenobu Jinnai (Tokyo University), Marino Folin (University of Venice) and Maarten Kloos (Arcam) comparing Tokyo, Amsterdam and Venice as three cities built by water during a similar period.

As a detailed review of the Venetian portion of the exhibition expresses:
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"Reclamation technics, settlement rules and urban foundation dynamics are very similar, sometimes completely alike. Observation of the three cities and their territory shows, between other things, that reclamation through building of coves and sandbanks (the famous Dutch polders) is not an exclusive of the Dutch tradition, as it has often been theorized right in Holland, on the contrary it is common to the three lagoon environments, where it takes, since remote times, surprisingly similar shapes and technologies."

The great stuff coming out of the NAI and the Architecture Biennale only convinces me further that Rotterdam's secret history is as an experimental urban laboratory.

003. A bridge too far?

2007-09-18T10:58:00.000-07:00

Just nearing completion in China is the Hangzhou Bay Bridge. At 36km, it is the world longest sea-crossing bridge in the world, supplanting the Donghai bridge (32.5km). However, the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, at 38.4km remains the longest bridge in the world, for the time being.

The Hangzhou crossing, with six lanes of motorway in both directions, shortens the distance between Shanghai and Ningbo, in the Zhejiang province, by 120 km, and is sufficiently long to merit a service station along it, built on a platform raised above the sea.

At a cost of nearly $2 billion, it is doubted whether this project will ever reap the benefit fo the huge investment cost.

But the advent of these super-long bridges now makes it possible to speculate where else could conceivably be joined by a bridge - it is economics or political whim rather than engineering that dictates. Thus proposals to link Helsinki and Tallinn are touted (approx 80km), and the Friendship bridge between Qatar and Bahrain is on the drawing board, whereas a tunnel linking Spain to Morocco seems unlikely, despite only being 12km. Perhaps one day there will be fixed links between mainland UK and Ireland.

A recent proposal to link Abu-Dhabi to Qatar was quashed by the Saudi's, who objected to a bridge that would cut-across their coastal waters.

The will to connect urban centres is becoming greater than the geography that divides them.

002. Parametric Urbanism on the Thames Estuary

2007-09-08T13:58:00.000-07:00

As found on the Zaha Hadid Blog, 'Form Informing Urbanism - Parametric Urbanism' is an animated film created by Zaha Hadid and Patrik Schumacher for the recent Global Cities exhibition at Tate Modern.

"The film presents a range of experimental design solutions for the Thames Gateway regeneration corridor to the east of London, based on “parametric” techniques pioneered by Hadid."

The Thames Gateway, one of Europe's biggest urban regeneration projects, is seen as a unique opportunity to create an urban laboratory for London, and explore new typologies to housing and urbanism, responding to the particular requirements of the site.

From the Commissions section of the Global Cities website:

"Hadid and Schumacher’s project is underpinned by research into the historic permutations of different building types in London and internationally. This information is presented in illustrated bands along the panels in their installation. They examine four main building types: individual villas, high-rise towers, slab-shaped buildings and city-blocks. These can be thought of as points, lines, planes, and volumes. Four rapid prototype models give examples of how each type might be dispersed in a landscape.

"Hadid & Schumacher use advanced computer modelling software to project these four building types over a base map of the Thames Gateway. They have adjusted this model to reflect the area’s current conditions, and used it to speculate on possible forms of future development. They have tested multiple combinations of the different building types, often fusing them to create hybrid structures. The outcome of these experiments is documented in a large-scale image with a range of striking new forms, and an animated sequence which shows the evolution of an intensely urban pattern across the area."

The animation presents an almost hynoptic dance as the four basic typologies are stretched and squeezed to create a range of forms at various densities and building heights. These are then applied to the site constraint and boundary conditions of the London Gateway. This modelling reminds me of the Game of Life, and other generative art experiments. There is an aesthetic Darwinism at work here, a form and function survival of the fittest.

001. Seattle Art Museum Sculpture Park

2007-09-08T13:36:00.000-07:00

The new Seattle Art Museum Sculpture Park by Weiss/ Manfredi Architects, takes am uncompromising urban brownfield site and turns it into a dazzling, tightly controlled journey. Responding to it's difficult shape and size with a zig-zagging series of layers, and switchbacks that fly over roadways that bisect the site, and present "choreographed vistas" that address the skyline and the waterfront, and into which the various pieces of sculpture help create a narrative journey.

Panoramic views can also be seen here.