016. Reimagining Robin Hood Gardens

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.