Al Manakh 2 is out

The really big book on the architecture, urbanism, economy, society and culture of the Gulf region of the Middle East, that has consumed my life for most of my time here in Amsterdam, is out now.

I formed part of the production team at Archis/Volume, contributing research, a handful of blog posts and a number of articles and illustrations, particularly focused on the role of foreign consultants. A full list of my contributions is over here.

It was an incredibly rewarding experience to work on such an ambitious undertaking. With four editorial partners (Archis, AMO, NAi and Pink Tank) more than 120 contributors, plus the designer Irma Boom, the barrage of emails was unrelenting. I had never worked on a project which held such high ambitions for quality and depth. Every idea, text and illustration was interrogated and reworked seemingly countless times; and at least one big name critic had their piece rejected outright.

Although the book is focused on the Gulf, more than anything it explores the role architecture and urbanism plays in larger systems of global finance, politics, sociology and heritage; concepts which are important today the world over. If you haven’t flicked it or seen it, I urge you to pick one up.

Related to this, editor of Al Manakh Todd Reisz and myself have recently begun a weekly column for the US news website Huffington Post. We’re still finding our feet, but so far it seems to be a great way to expose some of this research buried deep within the 500+ page tome to a broader audience. All our articles so far and an rss feed are collected on our bio page.

There is also a robust and critical discussion of our piece on Dubai-bashing – which has attracted the most attention (and heat) so far – over on the excellent blog Mammoth. Big thanks to Stephen and Rob.

Finally, fellow Volume-er Timothy Moore and I have written an opinion piece for Architecture Review Australia on lessons to be learned from Qatar. Titled ‘Give Us Vision‘, it tackles the shortfalls of democracy today in delivering large-scale public projects, and treads into some unsolicited territory toward the end.

Office for Unsolicited Architecture

The previous post from almost a year ago was written just as I was coming to terms with the concept of ‘unsolicited architecture’. Since then, I took on a part time position with the Netherlands Architecture Institute to set up and manage a small studio in Amsterdam that would try to turn the largely untested concept of unsolicited architecture into a legitimate practice model. To create the Office for Unsolicited Architecture for real.

Well, at least that’s what I thought the brief was when I got into it. Unfortunately this never eventuated, and despite months of work and countless meetings, it became clear (to me at least) that something as inherently independent and potentially critical as unsolicited architecture will always run into conflicts with a large publicly-funded institution such as the NAi.

Having said that, it had some great moments. Working with Anneke Abhelakh was an absolute pleasure, and together with the brilliant DUS Architects we produced two related projects which I’m particularly proud of.

In the short film Unsolicited Proposals for the City of Rotterdam, we dash around town pasting over municipal project announcement boards, revising them to express our own suggestions of how to make them more sustainable, more social and more exciting. A plan to fix up the lake in the park becomes a wellness resort for the homeless; a plan to fix up the docks becomes an algae farm and power plant; maintenance on a green-banked canal becomes an urban golf course. Thanks to filmmaker extraordinaire Emile Zile, all of our embarrassing appeals to the camera and cheesy stunts are captured in high fidelity.

To back up our unsolicited proposals, and to prove that we were not messing around, we came back to Rotterdam the following night and assembled the Bucky Bar. This geodesic umbrella dome is the brainchild of Hans, Hedwig and Martine of DUS, who’s interest in temporary, spontaneous architecture as an armature for social activity can be traced through much of their work, most notably their Gecekondu pavilion which popped up all over Amsterdam last summer.

With a short spell of rain, enough to prove the concept but not dampen enthusiasm, our party inside the glowing red dome was excellent. Without the proper permits for the structure and the licence to serve alcohol (they proved prohibitively expensive and slow to obtain for a project of this type), we fully expected to be shut down within minutes. But the generous local constabulary turned a blind eye until well after midnight when the noise complaints started to roll in. As was the point of the project – beyond a good party of course – we showed that events like this need not be perceived as threatening, and regulated as such, but that spontaneity can contribute positively to the urban experience.

Finally, the Office for Unsolicited Architecture was invited to produce an ‘action’ for the Australian Institute of Architects national conference in Sydney. The concept was to host interviews or further unpacking of ideas off the main stages. With Timothy Moore, we developed a set of chairs with very high backs that could be arranged to form small interiors, giving enough privacy to add focus to a conversation. They also acted as an exhibition in their own right, with slogans for unsolicited architecture printed on the backs. Photos of the project are here.

We also put together a ‘bootleg’ issue of Volume, which featured new texts on unsolicited, and some articles from the archive dealing with this idea. Only a small handful were printed and tied to the chairs. A pdf is available online to view here.

While it has been a bit quiet on this front lately, there are plenty of ideas for more projects and stunts in the pipeline, as is often the case, it’s just a matter of finding the time to actually do them. But most importantly, I see ‘unsolicited’ as simply an attitude or approach shouldn’t belong to any one particular office, but is a strategy to be deployed by anyone.

‘Real’ Architecture

With all this research, writing and unsolicit-ing, it may look like I’ve abandoned the main game: building. To an extent that’s true. After a number of setbacks the last few years – one project was denied a planning project outright, another 2 were cancelled due to the economy, all were very far along – I’ve started to feel a little disillusioned by all that work amounting to nothing. Of course, for any architect, this is just business as usual; with every built project there are dozens that will never see the light of day. Perhaps I just have to come to terms with that.

At any rate, I’ve been working for the best part of the last year on the design of an advertising agency here in Amsterdam. The construction documents are done, the tenders are coming in (within the ballpark) and the final disputes with the municipality over planning are slowly coming to a resolution. It’s all very exciting. We should be on site in the next few months if all goes well.

Despite this lack of physicality of late, it was very gratifying to be included in Wallpaper magazine’s Architects Directory. (I’m interpreting it as a sign of faith in what may come, so the pressure is on.) For the feature, each of the architects were invited to design a compact and sustainable infill terrace house. I proposed the ‘Many Happy Returns’ house, which gives back to the owners and their surrounds socially, economically and environmentally, by introducing new uses into the standard envelope. A kind of ‘house as public building’.

Also, on the built front, when I went back to Australia for the conference, I finally got to visit Susie’s Pavilion, which was completed a month or so after I headed over here to Europe. It sits really well on the site, the timber is weathering back nicely, the slide is steep enough to be a bit scary, and most importantly the kids love it.

And finally for this section on ‘real’ architecture, I put together a competition bid for an Arctic Research Base with friends Toby Natrass-Pond and MB-Studio. We found some great old drawings of Mawson’s hut, which relied on snow as an insulator, and designed an inflated bubble which gets covered in snow. Maximum space, minimal cost, I thought it was a nice idea, but needless to say we didn’t win.

Random stuff

A quick list of some other random projects and writing from the past year:

• Edwin Gardner and I started the Action! blog on the Archis platform. It combines our research on the practice of architecture and the mind of the architect. In particular I’m pleased with the posts Studio as Afterimage on the organisational structure of Olafur Eliasson’s studio, and my review of the ‘extra/ordinary’ conference.
• I have written a number of pieces for Volume magazine, of which Guided by Unbuilt Ambition, co-written with Kate Rhodes is up online.
• My response to Michael Kubo’s Publishing Practices piece in Volume, titled Who’s Steering This Thing?, was generously reproduced in a pamphlet (pdf) by Columbia’s Network Architecture Lab to accompany a discussion forum.
• Rotterdam-based artist Annie Wu and I created a newspaper titled The End of Empire for an exhibition in Melbourne. It exclusively contains articles that document threats to society; including pandemics, nuclear apocalypse, and computer viruses.
• This site, and my main projects site, have both had makeovers.

Upcoming

One reason for getting this blog ship-shape and up-to-date is that I hope to post some reports from a couple of exciting events coming up in the next few months. I’m heading to Berlin to crit a studio for Michael Roper and James Staughton at AEDES. Amy and I have our press passes for the Venice Architecture Biennale vernissage where I’ll be grabbing the big hitters by the elbow and sticking a mic in their faces for The Architects. Finally, I’m very pleased to have been invited to report from Helsinki Design Lab 2010, a conference/workshop examining the confluence of design and governance put together by Bryan Boyer and his colleagues at Sitra.

If you’ve made it this far, I apologise, this has been an exercise in satisfying my own peace of mind more than sharing anything of general interest or worth. Thanks for sticking with it nonetheless.

One of the more enduring themes running through Volume magazine is that of unsolicited architecture. This mildly aggressive term describes an alternative model of practice that is directed to social need, and not the whims of a client. The economic crisis has spurred a great deal of reflection upon the viability of a profession that is dependent upon commissions; not only are we financially exposed to the instability of the market economy, we perhaps feel a deeper crisis of relevance in only being able to react to a clients wishes. Despite our skill and experience in manipulating space and material, we are impotently incapable of addressing the needs of society unless we have first been explicitly asked to do so.

As Arjen Oosterman explains in the editorial of the issue devoted to this subject, architects need to “redefine their role, transform themselves from extremely competent executors of assignments into entrepreneurs and producers.” Of course, he outlines, architects used to be far more socially motivated, particularly in the post-war boom of social housing and reconstruction across Europe. However by the end of the 20th century, the discipline had become increasingly marginalised, “[t]he architect as social engineer, as organiser of social relationships, as the one who inspires political decisions, as a professional power player in the game of spatial distribution appears to be a remarkable intermediate phase in architecture’s century-long development.”

Volume 14 also contains a description of a potential ‘Office for Unsolicited Architecture’, produced as part of a studio at MIT led by Ole Bouman in 2007 and edited by Andrea Brennen, John Snavely and Ryan Murphy. In my mind, the most potent explanation of this office is the chart ‘How to Make Unsolicited Architecture.’

Image: How to Make Unsolicited Architecture, Volume 14, 2007, p.33. Click for large.

Establishing the 4 pillars of a traditional architectural commission – client, site, budget and program – the chart declares that unsolicited architecture operates in the absence of at least one of these. Thereby making the project undesirable or even impossible to tackle using the standard tools of the commercial practice. The chart also reinforces the role of reality in the production of an unsolicited project. And here comes my favourite bit: “If you design the object without the financing, you’re an academic; if you design the marketing without the object you’re a politician; if you design the financing without the object, you’re a capitalist.”

This is arguably what separates unsolicited architecture from so-called speculative or paper architecture. While Archigram’s visions of a walking city may have addressed a social need – for free and undetermined public event space – without financing or marketing, it comes across as entertainment. Which is of course, what it was intended to be, to the extent that it was even presented in comic book form. Which is also not to say that entertainment cannot inspire a real project, but that the strength of the unsolicited rests in its very tangible potential to be pursued through to realisation with the right political, financial and public support in place.

Here follows a brief selection of projects that I see as operating in an unsolicited manner, although they may be produced by practices with a traditional organisational and financial structure. Indeed, unsolicited architecture need not be a threat to standard practice, but can operate alongside, and even be produced by practices that otherwise fund their activities through commissions.

No client, budget or political will – PLOT (BIG & JDS) Clover Block, 2007

PLOT (now BIG & JDS) produced this scheme in response to a housing shortage in Copenhagen that was forcing out the lower wage earners crucial to the city’s function. In typical fashion, they introduced 3000 new apartments in a perimeter block wrapping the Kløvermarken park, thereby inject[ing] public life to the area … without sacrificing a single football field.”

Their next step was to generate some public discussion by promoting it in the media. This broadcasting and marketing stage is central to the unsolicited process – when you don’t have a client or the political power to execute it alone, getting the public behind your cause can generate the necessary momentum.

However in this case, the tactic seems to have backfired. After much attention and public support, instead of the handing PLOT the commission, the government invited 7 other teams to make proposals for the site. Despite their advanced scheme, PLOT were awarded second place, losing out to another scheme that seems to have just shuffled the new housing blocks into the corners.

Winning Kløvermarken redevelopment proposal by KLAR arkitekter and others.

The PLOT project demonstrates that although unsolicited architecture is directed to the social need, it is not necessarily a purely altruistic undertaking. Despite offering to provide much-needed new housing, their motives were clearly also driven by the desire to generate a new (very large and potentially lucrative) project for the office. If the outcome is the same, this is fine by me.

No budget, no client – NL Architects ‘Paid Parking’, 1994

(Cheers to Michael at NL for sending through this one from the archive.)

Although probably categorised as ‘speculative’, NL Architects ‘Paid Parking’ project is interesting as it proposes an alternative means of financing. Instead of paying to use a carpark, you are paid by a company (in this case Mazda) for your contribution to the formation of their logo, which is located under the aerial gaze of the Schipol airport flight path. While building yet another carpark hardly addresses what would typically be considered ‘social need’ (although it might), more importantly it represents a potential model for unsolicited projects that lack a traditional client and budget.

No client, no political will – Harmen de Hoop and Recetas Urbanas

Image: Harmen de Hoop, Basketball Court #6, Amsterdam, 1992

Not surprisingly, unsolicited projects flourish at the very small and very ‘community’ end of the spectrum as urban interventions, largely because they can be constructed affordably by the designers themselves.

Rotterdam-based activist/artist Harmen de Hoop (also featured in Volume 14) has amassed an archive of micro-interventions in the city, of which none have been solicited. His series of basketball courts (9 in total) comprise of painting the lines of a court on the ground in a public square without obtaining permission from the council in a subtle comment on the highly regulated nature of public space. If the square is too small, the court is simply cut off. In one instance, his guerrilla intervention was legitimised to an extent by the installation of a basketball hoop, albeit in the wrong place in relation to the court.

Image: Recetas Urbanas ‘Skips. Dumpsters’, 1997

The work of Spanish architecture studio Recetas Urbanas similarly flouts the regulations of public space by exploring bureaucratic loopholes as a starting point for design. The project ‘Skips. Dumpsters’, comprises of specific instructions for negotiating around complex planning and safely requirements in order to install a public see saw, by instead applying to locate a dumpster. The dumpster of course, is not used for rubbish at all, but has a see saw built on top of it.

Conclusion

This list is focussed on decidedly ‘urban’ and ‘developed’ conditions, intentionally overlooking the efforts of aid organisations in reconstruction and disaster relief as in a sense to be unsolicited is standard practice in these circumstances. Instead this lists intends to suggest opportunities for new forms of proceeding with a project that are not dependent on a client, a brief, financing or political will. Far from being an ambulance chaser, practicing unsolicited architecture enables a critical and autonomous view of the city and its issues. The tools of architecture and architectural thinking are only powerful if they can be unshackled from the increasingly marginalised opportunities to react to a given brief. In times like this, the chance of not getting paid for your efforts is perhaps one worth taking, and who knows, you might land the jackpot.

By aligning itself as an aesthetic discipline – of appearance not space; of image not use; of icon over agenda; and of authority over community – architecture has become an abstract mute backdrop. There are plenty of moments in real life where social interaction explicitly relates to physical space: moving large pieces of furniture, riding a see-saw, getting on a boat, going up a tall ladder (when someone has to hold the bottom), helping someone put on their coat, playing team sports, asking someone to take your photo, carrying the shopping with someone, etc. Could these be the source for a kind of socially engaged design?

Some recent projects seem to be drawing on these kinds of basic interactions as the basis for an architecture, creating opportunities for social transformation. Here are three I think really capture this idea:

Slides by Carsten Höller

Photo by Phil Gyford on Flickr.

Belgian artist Carsten Höller has been building slides in galleries since 1998, and were most famously installed in the turbine hall at the Tate Modern in 2007. Their location in the gallery clearly asserts them as sculptures, but more importantly, they beautifully produce this moment of social transformation. As described by the artist at a talk, “going down a slide is not so special in a sense, but it can make you feel like you are participating in something.”

Despite this simple and optimistic description, these pieces are produced out of frustration with an increasingly utilitarian society, where “other forms of seeing and acting have become almost impossible.” (Art Forum, 1999) In the face of this, the slides offer an opportunity to ‘let go’, a sense of ‘relief or even freedom’.

‘Merry-go-round’ coat rack by Weiki Somers

The ‘Merry-go-round coat rack’ designed by Weiki Somers perfectly captures the social opportunities of something that is usually so pragmatic.
Instead of handing your coat to an attendant (and usually along with some money), you unlock a rope from the circular pulley system, lower a coat hanger down from the ceiling, hoik it up, and lock your rope in place. Although this sounds altogether anti-social — as the attendant you once had to deal with has been replaced by a system of pulleys — the trick is that the empty coathangers have a habit of running away by themselves, requiring you to get someone to hold one for you while you approach with your coat. I sat and watched it for a while, and this arguably functional ‘problem’ seemed to illicit a certain childlike joy and exploration amongst the visitors. Some of these encounters are captured in this film.

Unstable Obstacle by Ludens

The Mexican practice Ludens led by Ivan Hernandez Quintela explicitly explores this social territory as a design inspiration, claiming that “all [his] projects are about the same thing: how we share space and how the objects that surround us affect the way we share it.”

One of the clearest and simplest expressions of this is the ‘Unstable Obstacle’, a roughly circular bench with a rounded base that requires the coordination of a number of people in order for it to become stable. While probably slightly confronting at first, the bench itself necessitates social exchange in order for it to function. Brilliant.

So, in hindsight,

you’d be hard pressed to call these projects ‘architecture’, sure they all deal with space, but probably lean more toward design and art. The question is then, how possible is it to create an ‘architecture for heightened social engagement’? I expect it would be pretty straightforward to use these kinds of moments as the basis for a house, but you might run into more difficulty designing an office tower. I think it’s different to Koolhaas’ ‘social condensers’ described in Delirious New York and deployed in Park de la Villette and the void at Lille, which are more about overlaying and intersecting of different programs to create spontaneous events. Anyway, it’s something I was thinking about while designing Susie’s Pavilion – which operates as a little social hub for kids – with a slide, a staircase forming a bandstand and interior. It would be great to hear of other projects that might fit this mold.

Zaha Hadid’s Chanel Pavilion in Central Park, October 2008

St Albans Pavilion Musuem by MUF, 1999-2004

Seven months on, it seems it has now become irresponsible, indulgent and egotistical to discuss what something looks like, let alone propose an icon. The Guardian reports the UK’s ‘next generation’ are “deliberately eschew[ing] what might be called the wow factor”, they’re “less interested in being stars”, and one architect is (peculiarly) rather proud of making the “project space and office furniture [all out of] the same plywood.” Claiming the same source of material as a design feature is surely the height of banality.

Which got me worried that the boom-bust pendulum might have swung too far already. We’ve gone from the idolism of the ‘starchitects’ – with talk of new forms, new software and new construction methods – to an almost blanket dismissal of these ideas in lieu of ‘sustainability’ and ‘modesty’. Which are of course, very good things – and about time architecture underwent its own ‘market correction’. But what concerns me is the underlying morality of the green and modest position, I just don’t think architects are very sincere when they’re trying to be ethical – it’s more about getting on a bandwagon in order to attract more commissions, which may not necessarily be the answer, especailly if we’re talking about modesty.

I also don’t think that architects are interested in doing ‘background’ buildings that don’t make a statement – I found it next to impossible to find a suitably un-iconic project by any of the firms listed in the Guardian piece to sit as counterpoint to Zaha’s swirling fantasy. Perhaps this is explained in part by the inherent sluggishness of architecture – in the timescale of a typical project (normally measured in years) the recent market crash has yet to register on the output. And of course, the ‘iconic’ position and the ‘modest’ position always coexisted (indeed the MUF project above predates Zaha’s), perhaps only now every new project is just prefaced with the label ‘sustainable’ or ‘modest’, when in reality there has been no fundamental change to the approach.

Besides, what’s wrong with being a star anyway? Students need people to look up to (so do I) and their (mostly) impressive ‘iconic’ projects bring attention to our work from beyond the discipline – which I would argue is good thing.

This piece was partly formed out of a discussion on The Architects’ 200th show spectacular, with Stuart Harrison, Simon Knott, Karen Burns, Paul Coffey and Christine Phillips. Link to podcast to come.

No city is invented from scratch. To use another city as a precedent is by no means exceptional; it is inevitable that urban planners and city officials draw upon their experience and knowledge of pre-existing cities. Pure urban invention is today dismissed outright as megalomanic. But when the precedent is so far removed from the intended destination, something is truly amiss.

Why would Abu Dhabi look to Adelaide as an example? Culturally, contextually, climatically and politically these cities could not be more distinct. Even within Australia, Adelaide is a joke, better known for its bizarre murders than as a model of exemplary urbanism. It is not a world-class destination listed alongside New York, Paris, London or Tokyo. Nor is it a so-called ‘livable city’, ranking unremarkably at no. 32 in the Mercer index. Admittedly it is higher than Abu Dhabi at 88, but why not aim for Vienna? Aside from lowering expectations, what could Adelaide possibly stand to offer?

Mercer Quality of Living Global Index 2009 – click for larger.

Rather than being selected for its appropriateness or relevance, this minor Australian state capital is imposed on a burgeoning global centre because of a sequence of seemingly coincidental financial, political and corporate transactions between these two cities. A bond forged with slight consideration for the metropolitan implications; the selection of an urban prototype is guided by the forces of globalisation.

Writing in the Emirati newspaper The National, Australian Foreign Minister Stephen Smith highlights the areas in which in which “Australia and the Gulf are natural partners’”, these include “combating climate change, urban design, education, tourism, renewable energy and green technology.” Despite this claim to the future of sustainability, Australia and the UAE act as mutual enablers of environmental destruction. Statistics from DFAT value Australian exports to the UAE at AUD $2.4Bn, largely composed of passenger vehicles, raw minerals and construction materials. Similarly, of the AUD $1.7Bn exported from the UAE to Australia, 88% is crude petroleum. In addition, the very infrastructure for enabling this transaction is managed by the UAE. DP World, a government-owned Emirati holding company and marine terminal operator owns a majority 60% stake in South Australia’s main container terminal.

Specifically concerning urban design, of the Australian planning and architectural consultants operating in the UAE, the three largest and most visible all originated in Adelaide. Commercial architecture firm Woods Bagot; engineering, infrastructure and defence consultant Hyder; and landscape architecture and planning firm EDAW.

Indeed the success of this consultant invasion has become too much to bear for brain-drained South Australia. In January 2008, the state government engaged the peculiar tactics of popular culture in a ploy to reverse this trend. The Adelaide Crows played the Emirates airline-sponsored Collingwood Magpies in an AFL demonstration match in Dubai. With little interest in the sport beyond Australia, the true intentions of the match according to the SA Department of Economic Development were to “promote the state’s interests in Dubai in the automotive and defence industries (although I have no idea how a game of football could achieve that) and to help attract back SA expatriates.”

Adelaide Crows training on Jumeirah Beach in nearby Dubai.

With thousands of expatriates based in the region, the imposition of Australian urban models into the Arabian context occurs in plain sight, implicitly and naturally, as these experts simply draw upon what they know. Could Abu Dhabi’s proposed lightrail network be inspired by the trams installed in 1900, clanging through the streets of Adelaide? Perhaps it is not a problem if the trams were. To examine and ‘learn from’ cities traditionally outside the canon was famously endorsed by Venturi and Scott Brown in their study of Las Vegas, a city which was at the time considered shockingly popular and distasteful, not offering anything to the educated urbanist. But Vegas was extraordinary, a radical sprouting of linear form driven by new forms of transportation, gambling regulation, and propelled by a nearby source of cheap energy.

Sultan bin Mohamed Al-Qasimi, the ruler of the UAE state of Sharjah, is shown a didgeridoo on his visit to Adelaide University in 2005. Adelaidean.

Abu Dhabi is currently undergoing its own urban explosion as sovereign wealth propels an immense construction and real-estate boom. Peculiarly, it is this deployment of the speculative as a strategy that Adelaide and Abu Dhabi have in common.

Adelaide was Australia’s first colony based on free settlement rather than convict labour. In 1834, it was proposed that instead of granting free land to settlers as had happened in other colonies, the land should be sold, and the money used to transport labourers to the colony from the major hubs of Sydney and Melbourne. Adelaide was in effect named, planned, advertised and largely sold before a single settler had set foot in their new home. This peculiar origin in speculative investment offers a strange precedent to Abu Dhabi’s contemporary enlisting of real estate as a key economic driver of development. The current development boom in the Gulf is far from unique, but has parallels with colonial city-making of the 19th century.

Finally, in another bizarre twist, it was recently discovered that this notoriously second-rate city offered inspiration to arguably the 20th century’s most original urbanist, Le Corbusier. A recently discovered drawing shows that in 1950 Corb drew the plan of Adelaide using CIAM conventions, noting the grid planning, the location of major public buildings, and the encircling parkland. It has been argued that this plan served as a key reference for his design for Chandigarh, executed only six months later. Anthony Moulis writes that ‘Le Corbusier’s overtly rhetorical approach to design would not have admitted the plan of Adelaide … as a source of influence or as the master plan of Chandigarh, yet this drawing provides compelling evidence of a covert connection between the two.’

Le Corbusier’s sketch of Adelaide, 1950, via AA. Click for large.

Far from being a joke, Adelaide could be the silent hero of urban prototypes, with countless other cities modelling their transportation networks and zoning mix on this unassuming minor state capitol. Perhaps Adelaide is not a bad precedent, just an unglamorous one that nobody has been bold enough to disclose, until now.

(Excuse: This piece was written to test a hunch that the urban models of Adelaide and Abu Dhabi may be connected in some way. Turns out, they’re not really, I know the arguments are dodgy. Feedback appreciated.)

At first I was shocked at the pervasiveness of the interning culture in the Netherlands – indeed the whole of Europe would probably grind to a halt in the absence of all this free labour – and I was particularly dismayed to find myself interning immediately after finishing a PhD. But I’ve grown addicted to the independence and autonomy that this role engenders, particularly if your ‘employer’ (host?) is equally nonplussed as to your output. Not only is it harder to disappoint (as expectations are excitingly low) but if you do make something good, the feeling of accomplishment is magnified. This isn’t only due to gratitude, but it can lead to opportunities outside of your intended function in the operation, chiefly because you are untethered by a contract.

Of course, I can’t afford to do it for long, I’m simply spending my small amount of savings just to be here; effectively giving the money I earned in one office to another in the form of my time. Which sounds to completely ludicrous, and I can’t explain why I feel good about it, except it’s a great office with great projects, and, well, I’m in Amsterdam and it’s pretty nice.

Villa Nurbs, Empuriabrava. Detailed to the point of almost being Baroque, this house is a composite collage of design ideas, facade systems and manufacturing processes. A built catalogue of architectural possibilities.

Edwin Gardner and I spoke to Enric in a nice leafy courtyard in historic Delft – a world away from the radical images shown in the lecture moments earlier. I started by asking him whether there is any distinction between what he can dream up and what he can build, or, are you effectively building student projects?

Enric Ruiz-Geli: Yeah for sure. I think we are coming from an educational period of the industrial age where things have to be categorised in order to be understood. We come from a Darwinian perspective. Now, it’s about particles, there is no body and outside the body, there is only particles. The body is made of particles, the weather is made of particles, the earth is made of particles, and these particles are running us. It’s one system. A continuous liquid system. Therefore what kind of role, what kind of added value can we offer to this system? What kind of positive attitude can we bring to this new realisation of particles? In this age of knowledge, it’s all linked, and we have to pay attention to this. There is no global warming, economic crisis and financial meltdown. It’s all one. And an economist will tell you that. Petrol is linked to energy and therefore to war, to the stock market, to our lives, to our culture, to everything.

Rory Hyde: The references you are drawing on are from science and technology – not architecture. Do you see yourself as an inventor-architect? Are people like Buckminster Fuller, Frei Otto or Nikola Tesla more likely to offer inspiration than Corb or Mies?

ERG: That’s a tricky question, but I like it. What I like from Buckminster Fuller was his sentence ‘we are all astronauts in this spaceship called Earth’. I think it is possible that we are all active in this role. We are all players in this one picture. I also think that post-Modern architecture was trying to separate layers in order to understand complexity, but today we need to integrate complexity. Science has always worked in an integrated way. Another thing, is that we have the sense that our parents have sent us away, to see the world, to learn English, to see other cultures. So we don’t come from a culture that was closed, but was opening and willing to collapse, to embrace culture by accident, by crossing, by crashing, by getting to Australia and seeing what’s happening there too. Culture happens in this crash way, and as we were saying, beauty happens in this landscape of events. So, please be open to crash.

SED Pavilion, Expo Zaragoza, 2008. Exploring the biological capacity of sweating, the pavilion is covered in sprinklers that activate when the structure reaches a certain temperature, covering it in a fine mist of salt water, thereby cooling the pavilion evaporatively.

RH: That was another theme of the lecture I think, this idea of ‘just do it’ – an insistence to not think about it too much (perhaps), not to overwork, overthink, but to have the idea and just take it into the shop and build it. What role does this spontaneity play in your architecture?

ERG: I do and then I think.

RH: Shoot first ask questions later.

ERG: Yeah, shoot first ask questions later. I think of course software is taking over, and there is all this programming, parametric design, all these things are happening – and it’s not very human. The more data, the more information that lays on the table in architecture, the more I’m interested in intuition, indetermination, fantasy, fiction – but not just like that. I really think there is a possibility to work in ‘science’ and ‘fiction’ – not ‘science-fiction’, but ‘science’ and ‘fiction’. There is a gap between what is parametric design and what is random, what is chaos, or undetermined. I like to say that going from John Mather to John Cage is a pretty good open field of research.

Hotel Prestige Forest. Covered in a network of cells comprised of micro solar panels, light sensors and coloured LEDs – the facade of this hotel records its solar exposure throughout the day and replays it as light throughout the night – producing a reflective diagram of the potential for solar power generation within cities.

RH: While we’re on technology. Your work engages parametric design, sensors, LEDs, CAD/CAM – all this new machinery that’s often overlooked in architecture, and normally more closely associated with fields of electronics or automotive manufacturing. Do you see any limits to what architecture is or can engage with?

ERG: I was reading a lot of Antonin Artaud, this idea of ‘Opera Totale’ – and I think the more I’m doing buildings, and gaining more expertise, the more I think architecture has to be a platform of integration, of hosting contemporary art, of engineering. So the more we open these limits of architecture, the more it can operate on the city level, the more it becomes democratic. Are video games architecture? Sure they are! If architecture starts to open these limits, by looking at video games for instance – there is space, landscape, acting, research, cosmetics, costume design, light design, and architecture has to be there. It has to go all the way to these open limits. This is a way it will be stronger, and then it will allow us to lead. So it’s not about architecture or engineering, it’s about hosting engineering, hosting smart grids, hosting green IT, hosting software, hosting Media Lab thinking, hosting programming. All this – if we have a big stomach – can be hosted in an open-mind architect’s field.

Media TIC, Barcelona, in construction. View of the upper structural truss being lifted into place. Each of the floors are then suspended from this roof, placing the structure for the floor plates underneath in tension and thereby saving 30% steel tonnage for the project and enabling a column-free ground floor.

Edwin Gardner: Since you’re working so closely with a big variety of high technology and software, probably you’ve also developed some ideas about how software could improve or better fit your needs. What do you think would be interesting developments for software to use in designing?

ERG: Ok, I think this is great. So we have a huge problem with global warming, let’s talk about global warming. Number one case of CO² emissions are buildings. Not cars, but buildings. Number two cause of emissions is agriculture, interesting no? Meat production, cows, gardening, cultivating food, etc. Cultivating agriculture is number 2. Number 3 is cars, we look at cars like the big problem, they are not. Ok, could you imagine a big computer that could tell me what is happening with global warming now. What is CO² emissions, clouds, flow, traffic? Tell me this. Visualise the enormous intensity of this problem. Show us the visuals. Show me what is invisible. Show me what architects are doing wrong. And in this way we will create a conscience. And people will be aware. Now we have the computers to run them, to calculate, to compute this data. These are great tools, these are great rewards for architects offices. So, it’s like, ‘how is this building going to perform for the next 7 years, day by day, minute by minute? Ready? Go.’ We can manage this complexity with computing. So why don’t we do it? Why don’t we build the links between a smart traffic light and smart cars?

EG: So you need more data to work with?

ERG: Of course we do, because we have the smart cars and we have the smart lighting, but they don’t talk to each other. The city does not know where the cars are, the cars do not know the map of the city. I mean, what’s happening? It’s just a link. It’s just to know the format to work together. And I think this is really the key point for software development. That we are able to know what a fire is doing in a forest, and this is linked to the firetruck, and Google is telling us there is a tsunami coming, and the people on the beach are receiving alerts. The world we are living is is not linked. And this is a big problem.

Rendering of completed Media TIC with inflated ETFE facade panels.

RH: All of your projects sound so incredibly research-driven, with a lot of work going into them, lots of people involved, all very expensive undertakings both to build and to develop as a practice I’m sure. Is there a whole series of Cloud 9 bank fit outs or rectangular office buildings not in your lecture that pay the bills?

ERG: No, no, no, no. To tell you the truth, this office is 9 years old now, and for the first 7 years it was about doing projects, and spending the money left over on doing prototyping, paying for patents, doing research. Today we have a pool of firms that is supporting the research of the office, we have over 12 firms, supporting with over €25,000 to know what’s next, what’s happening, ‘where are we going?’, ‘show me some future path.’ What this means is that our office has a floating economy of research, very much based on the Media-Lab strategy, they support us. And what they know is that in 2 years time, these little games, these little jokes, these little reports, will probably become a building, a masterplan, a new skin. And that is why they want to get this information in advance, they want to lead the market, and I would recommend any firm, any technological firm, to invest in talent, human talent. Don’t invest in banking, invest in talent, and in 2 years time your research will become a building and you will be sending off invoices for €2 million.

RH: Enric Ruiz-Geli, thanks very much for your time.

ERG: Thanks very much for hosting this conversation, and see you in Australia.

Big thanks also to Indesem for organising and hosting the lecture.

The audio of this interview is scheduled for broadcast on The Architects in a few weeks time.

Golfstromen is Jeroen Beekmans and Joop de Boer – they call themselves ‘placemakers’ but I’d say they are more like ‘urban interventionists’. They work with existing fabric and places, often by introducing new technology to create spaces or architectural interventions that can form the backdrop for events. They also run the ace blog The Pop Up City which draws together projects on temporary structures, collaborative working models, and emerging web-based enterprises that deal with the physical world. They also coordinate the Pecha Kucha nights here in Amsterdam.

Image: ‘Spacebuster’ temporary inflatable venue by Raumlabor Berlin, via The Pop Up City.

Partizan Public was founded by Christian Ernsten and Joost Janmaat, they describe themselves as “a think and action tank devoted to a braver society.” They host the excellent ‘Masters of Intervention’ lecture series, and were recently in Detroit researching the urban and architectural effects of the economic crisis and the collapse of the real-estate market there as part of the Detroit Un-Real Estate project.

Both of these practices employ architectural thinking for non-architectural outcomes. The best example of this type of organisation might be AMO – the ‘mirror-image’ of Koolhaas’ OMA – except that it is much more closely aligned with an architectural practice that produces buildings (and therefore income).

Image: Content exhibition by OMA/AMO installed in Mies’ the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, 2003.

On a more institutional level, The Why Factory is a new school headed up by Winy Maas of MVRDV and affiliated with a number of institutions (including TU Delft and the Berlage Institute) – it has just launched its first semester with students, but also produces research and exhibitions independently.

Other examples of organisations that deal with ideas more loosely associated with architecture (society, technology, space etc.) are The Waag Society who host Amsterdam’s Fab Lab; and Mediamatic Lab who are similarly focussed on the interface of digital culture in the physical world, producing interactive installations and other creative projects.

Image: Amsterdam Fab Lab at The Waag Society

All these practices or organisations are focussed on examining and producing architectural content and ideas – just not buildings. This is also what I like best about ‘architecture’ blogs that rarely discuss new buildings by famous architects – you wont see renderings of Zaha’s new concert hall on Kosmograd, BLDG BLOG, Subtopia, Ballardian, City of Sound or SuperColossal – but they each undeniably deal with architecture and architectural themes. There really needs to be a course for this, a course in the city and how its inhabited, but maybe that’s just called living?

This formed a short introduction to a show on research practices on ‘The Architects’, it can be heard on the podcast along with a great interview with Michael Trudgeon from Crowd Productions.

A city is more than the sum of its buildings, roads, infrastructure, and terrain. It is comprised of people, presence, communities, discourse and production. As the finishing touches are put on the Burj Dubai tower, the aspiration to create a truly global city out of what was desert only decades ago is unquestionably realised. Well, the image of one at least. With most of the concrete in place attention is now being directed to capturing the more elusive cultural aspects that make up the whole experience.

Image: Model of Saadiyat Island cultural district, masterplanned by EDAW, with projects by Gehry, Nouvel, Hadid and Ando. Photo by PJ Fanning.

Despite a rich local history, the strategy for cultural expansion is decidedly global, captured most succinctly by the US $27 billion development of Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island. Comprised of a Frank Gehry designed Guggenheim, a Jean Nouvel designed Louvre, a Zaha Hadid designed Performing Arts Centre, a Tadao Ando designed maritime museum and a Foster + Partners designed national museum. It will be a cultural destination of unprecedented scale by virtue of its architecture alone. However, this version of culture is familiar, sanitised and predictable, of highly curated experiences based on established and successful precedents. In the same mould is the recent arrival of international auction houses Christies and Phillips de Pury, both opening offices in Dubai, and Sotheby’s, opening in Doha. All aim to capitalise on the incredible wealth of the region, undoubtedly transforming it in the process.

On the other hand there is local culture. The collection of artists, galleries, designers, skateboarders, whoever, that make up the scene that is authentically engaged at the street level. Setting out to find examples of this has been a surprising process of questioning my own assumptions and limited worldview.

Image: Covers of Bidoun #4, #15, #16 & #17.

Bidoun is a quarterly magazine focusing on “art and culture from the Middle East”. When I first picked it up, my initial impression was one of confusion, I couldn’t understand what I was looking at, I had no idea that something so contemporary, outspoken, critical and ‘cool’ could come out of a region that is portrayed as being so closed, hierarchical and censored. Indeed, it is this perception that the magazine explicitly sets out to disrupt, as the imprint declares:

“Bidoun was created as a platform for ideas and an open forum for exchange, dialogue and opinions about arts culture from the Middle East. Bidoun’s primary goal is to bring together cultural expressions from a vast and nuanced region. Bidoun also addresses some of the widespread misconceptions about the region and its Diaspora by inciting readers to take a fresh look at the Middle East and its peoples, too often presented as one-dimensional or stagnant.”

The strategies for achieving this are a focus on local artists (including Rheem Al Ghaith, Ziad Antar and Lamya Gargash), the commissioning of local writers (often including young bloggers), and by forming close ties with the number of local galleries and arts festivals, including Art Dubai and the arguably less ‘commercial’ Sharjah Biennial, for which Bidoun produced the excellent catalogue.

Image: Bidoun magazine, feature on the “War Horrors” paperbacks published in the US in 1979. Titles include “Prisoners of the Iranian Sadists” and “Victims of the Arab Pigs”.

But the outspokenness of it still bugged me – especially after recently discovering that even Skype is banned in parts of the UAE – with articles on hardcore novels and the drinking game ‘Beirut’, I wondered how they got away with it? Turns out, Bidoun’s editor Lisa Farjam is based in New York, the magazine is largely produced there, and all the articles are in English. On some level I feel like this is a bit of a cop-out, a magazine that defines itself by its engagement with a particular part of the world is made a very long way away, geographically and culturally. But perhaps this is part of its success, by producing a magazine in a ‘global culture hub’, and by drawing upon the advantages this offers – highest quality design, printing and feedback from peers – Bidoun is able to capture a far larger audience, drawing greater attention to its subject. It’s great precisely because it treads way over the boundaries that would restrict any locally-produced publication.

Image: Thaili Zine Distro website

What is the ‘authentic’ scene in the Gulf then? The Thaili Zine Distro run out of Dubai has an awesomely crap site, and claims to “promote an underground press where there is none; literacy and awareness in a cultural wasteland.” Please correct me if I’m wrong, but the cynic in me suspects this is run by an expat’s daughter, meaning it’s still cast in the Western model of a radical press. Same goes for Skate Arabia, although still worth checking out their youtube channel as Abu Dhabi makes an amazing set for a skate film: perfect weather and empty marble plazas everywhere.

Video: Skate Arabia ‘Abu Dhabi Weekends’

I’m sure there’s an ‘authentic’ youth/underground/counter-culture in parts of the Gulf, but it’s no doubt small and has a limited presence on the web, in English especially. In the face of such an overwhelmingly globalised nation – 80% of the population of the UAE is expatriate – these micro-cultures need to be encouraged and promoted. Cities like Dubai and Abu Dhabi merely play host to a highly transient population with no long-term personal investment in the region, and thus limited interest in forging long-term links or fostering a genuinely local voice on street level. I know Deira is often cited as the only evidence of authentic urbanism left in Dubai – street stalls, souks, a vibrant port with old boats – but this is just nostalgia, a tourist destination in contrast to the towers.

If the concrete city is the container, and the content is the living cultural city, what happens when franchised art museums are enlisted to fill this role? The instant city is filled with instant content, squeezing out any possibility for a local culture to develop its own language and direction. Culture can’t be imported, you need to grow it from scratch.

The Master of Digital Design is a new course at the University of Canberra’s Faculty of Arts and Design exploring digital processes, digital materials and digital contexts as a means to approach key themes of the changing nature of the public sphere, the question of urban space, and the urgent challenge of sustainability.

It approaches the digital as a field of study in and of itself, developing techniques in generative design, data visualisation and physical computing to students that can then be applied in their specific disciplinary fields. Established and headed-up by Mitchell Whitelaw, it builds upon his experience as a practitioner and researcher, captured in his awesome blog The Teeming Void. As the course blurb explains:

“Increasingly, innovation in design is a result of using computers to do things that only computers can do. … Digital designers need to understand the fundamental elements of computing – data and algorithm – and work directly with them to create new processes, forms and practices.”

This is right smack in territory I explored through my PhD (p.52 of the draft if you really want to know); specifically that designing digitally requires a fundamentally unique approach, employing the capacity of the computer for computation, rather than merely reproducing analogue media in a digital space (scripting and parametric design compared to AutoCAD linework is the most basic example.)

I am proud to form part of the advisory panel, representing the digital architectural design angle I guess, alongside Karsten Schmidt of Post Spectacular in London, Anthony Burke of Offshore Studio in Sydney, the Brussels-based creative research studio FoAM and the Boston-based Nervous System. With the teaching staff of Stephen Barrass, Geoff Hinchcliffe and Sam Hinton; I can’t wait to get into further discussions as the programme comes together.

As an extra teaser, Mitchell has built this awesome web applet in Processing for growing your very own furry ‘D’ like the one above. He outlines how it works here.

The course is currently recruiting research students so if it sounds up your alley, check out the course page, and for total immersion, follow the MDigitalDesign updates on Twitter.