In the beginning of September, we received a visit from a friend who is from London, he brought with him a program for the upcoming “Open House London”, I went through the program and became really surprised by its contents. The organization Open House is an independent organization which once a year manages to open the door of some of the most important buildings in the city, I am talking of around 690 different sites, from classical historic buildings to high end houses and contemporary architecture. This means you could go and visit any of this variety of sites and actually have an in site guide to explain the building. It is open to public in general, so in that way they connect to the public in general and try to bring them up close and personal with architecture. This becomes a powerful tool, because it is not closed to people with architectural background, which means there is a direct involvement of society in general. Presenting the city as it is, showing what architecture in all its scales does to the city. On the other hand allowing everyone to live the space as it is, definitely not the same as learning from them in books or through pictures. I believe this organization is a step forward into helping general public to learn the importance of architecture for their everyday lives, and to help the authorities involved in city planning to learn how to manage better decisions, including everyday citizens opinion’s in them. Wouldn’t you just love to be able to visit those buildings that you always see in magazines or books? Wouldn’t you like to touch the stones that make up a building you know? Wouldn’t it be nice to check a construction detail up close and personal?

I believe architecture has to be lived, touched and experienced, it can not remain in a digital or 2d environment, and this is the knowledge this kind of programs can give away. Unfortunately in other countries, you have to pay to get in some buildings, or you will never be able to visit them, and others are not even open for visiting, creating a boundary between people and architecture, they do not get mixed in decisions, and people who make this decisions do not have the knowledge and the feedback of the citizens who do live the city.

All this just makes me wonder if I really know my city, or even if I am part of it at all.

Shouldn’t we encourage and support this kind of programs in our own cities in order to fill them as ours?

http://www.londonopenhouse.org/

photo “Central London from the sky” flickr by silyld photographer - Dr. David J. Otway

photo “Trafalgar Square No. 2″ flickr by Dan Wade

The WaterCube PTW, Arup

Since 2004 Neal Leach has been curating an Architectural Biennial in Beijing, exposing the country to some of the most innovative and impressive architecture from schools and architects around the world. This year a workshop in Scripting and Parametric processes was held in conjunction with the exhibition, just another one of those good ideas that Leach is able to make happen. Somehow I manage to persuade my company to allow me the time off and to participate in the workshop. I am curious, can my mind into finally learning scripting (not another new computer program it groans) and how these new techniques will be adopted by the local industry. Can China go Parametric / Algorithmic?
One day before the workshop, my body finally succumbs to the dangers local cuisine. Dumplings on the street or takeway noodles ? I?m not sure which is to blame, but this is not a good start to my trip. Somehow I make it to Beijing and to my hotel, but the day of sightseeing and exploring is replaced by rehydrating and sleeping. In the evening I get out to the Olympics Precinct. I limp home for more water, plain egg noodles and try and squeeze some comfort out my hard mattress and equally hard pillow (see wheat bag).

The workshop

82 students including 20 other foreigners attend the workshop. The room is an above average size classroom and packed. The main door to the building is closed and it takes me three attempts to find the entry, typical.

The week is augmented with lectures from each of the tutors and key guests, tutorials in the new skill sets, then a small assignment due for the end of the week. Organised by the guys at Node, co-founded by Qiang Chang, Ning Duo, Alvin Huang, Yan Gao and Feng Xu, with interests in digital design in China. Chang, Yan & Feng are directly involved in the workshop, along with, Stefan Krakhof from Fosters HK, Monika Prabhu from Bently, Bittor Sanchez-Monasterio from Archi-Techtonics, and Diego Perez from MAD. All young and up-and-coming experts and designers with international experience in the digital realm. We were organised into small groups within three workshops, each with different brief and software focus for the week.

Early on the sense is that the skills are difficult to grasp, the tutors are too fast in their explanations. Sketchup and 3d Studio max are the dominant skill sets in the class, so this is a long way from what most have come to experience before. For me, I struggle both with a group that has disappeared from the classes and my brain that is accustomed to thinking about parametrics and drawing. I battle error messages and lucidly wake in the mornings thinking of things in code. Is this all part of the process, a matrix type transition from understanding the world of appearances to reading the code that is all behind it? Will I wake in a Neo type transformation and finally grasp it all so clearly?
Not in four days! Our final presentation is tough but fair. We aimed to represent natural complexity and in a lot of cases (especially ours) we fail to get anything that approaches an emergent growth. But for other students, there I optimism. Some have managed to create new things, to think parametrically. They quiz me on where I work, will we use scripting and parametric processes in the future. Is it optimism, excitement with having learned a new tool, or a beautiful nativity to attain the images of complexity we have seen? My painful experiences in parametric design at iaac tell me that it takes more than a week to shift your way of thinking so profoundly, to go beyond the seductive image. Still I am amazed by the enthusiasm that the chinese students display and think this will somehow propel them forward. Wearily we are herded out the front of the school for an official photograph (the norm in china with everything it seems) and onto a bus to take us to the main event.

Beijing Biennale Opening Night

The Exhibition
In a fabulous old factory building as part of the 759 Art Precinct, we go to the main part of the events, the Biennale Exhibition. A crush waits at the door (again fairly normal for china), we cannot come in until 7pm exactly and the doorman counts down the time on his watch (literally). Enter. There is no alcohol (author sighs). The space is organised with panels on the walls and an arrangement of hexagonal display pods on the floors. There is two MC?s with a pre-written and awkward speeches. Government officials, deans and al concerned give a speech (again typical china, everyone loves a speech). Neal and the curators talk about their respective regions between models dressed in lasercut paper clothes and martial arts performers.

Display Pods

We were told earlier in the week that Matias del Campo was originally to reproduce his pods for the exhibition. However they could not find anyone in the country to do this particular type of vacuum forming in china. The positive arguments for parametric and digital design processes, state its ability to improve construction efficiencies ? to make designs more affordable and difference with little or no cost differences. Looking at these identical hexagonal boxes I wonder if either it was a diplomatic decision so not to favour one exhibit over another or a flaw in the argument of construction efficiencies. Somebody picks up a boithing 3d print and I cringe (its gonna get broken). The display should have incorporated the models and allowed for difference of representation. Maybe its not just the students who are not yet adjusted to a parametric way of thinking, but the local established practices, clients and fabricators. Maybe we all from the west are still taking for granted the shifts that have occurred in the last 10 years whereby buildings like Gehry’s Guggenheim, which once seemed so unique, now seem dated and primitive in its approach and adjusted the building industry accordingly.
As Leach says, even though the Olympic stadium was parametrically designed, it was still built with a hand labour force. The Birdsnest and Watercube are stunning examples of buildings that have benefitted from digitized practise and their implementation in china will surely cause a great wave of influence for the future. However, the arguments about economies are different in China. With such a large population China needs to employ as many people as possible and the uptake of new computer aided manufacturing I think does not have the same economic advantages as in the west.
What will be the lasting effects of the workshop and continued Biennial? This is where the difference will be made. For his part, I feel Leach is akin to the curators of International Modern Art Exhibition bringing art of Europe to America in the early 20th Century. At the time it was seen as an outrage to the established American art culture. Marcel Duchamps Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 was considered the ‘rude descending the stair’. In the conference in Beijing after the exhibition some audience comments questioned why are the designs so ugly, so inconsiderate of the human scale In time the American art scene would take on the influences of the European moderns and turn it into their own form of rebellion through Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, etc. In time, I wonder to what direction will the influential designers of china will take.

all photographs by the author

Weinstock argument was very reach with implications to social, biological and computational sciences, but if one would like to boil it down to an argument strictly relevant for masters of architecture students (the lecture was after all meant to be a part of DRL lecture series), it was that the architects role is inevitably going to be a subject to change. According to Weinstock, architect current role is the one of “shape makers”. But he precisely said that he doesn’t believe this role will last for even a decade, simply because nobody will be able to afford the shape-makers’ work in forthcoming economical and political climate.

Michael Weinstock has some very suggestive arguments about how many people will have to move to other parts of the world even if only the very moderate predictions of worlds’ average temperature rise (3.5 degrees Celsius) will become true. Due to those migrations, and very widely discussed great drying up, we will witness great shifts in power distribution across the globe. A whole new scene, in social, cultural and political sense, is likely to emerge. Thus architects work will be the one of adaptation of spatial formations to these new conditions. It will be more of rebuilding than building from scratch. And it will be rebuilding not in purely physical sense - demolishing what was there and erecting monuments of new times, but rather in the sense of reinventing the performance of spatial formations. Architects then, Weinstock argues, need to become aware of the complex systems behind the spatial formations on every scale, ranging from a scale of a molecule, to a scale of “metropolis”. He is also not afraid of saying directly, that there is no theoretical or ethical reason to start “designing nature 2”.

The whole argument about understanding the notion of adaptivity of human environment is entirely appealing to me. Yet I’m skeptical about one detail. Isn’t it actually an argument which should be presented to policy makers as well as to corporate decision makers, rather than to architects themselves? After all - is the architect himself able to redirect the course of history? Forgive me, but I absolutely need to quote my old friend here (and a little time frame would be necessary here too, since he said it at 4PM while we where finishing a housing competition, and I was still working in a Spanish company in Warsaw at the time); what did he said actually?: Todos estamos prostitutas. I don’t think this needs any translation. Taking upon the issue slightly more seriously, Weinstock criticizes the “new cities”, such as Masdar, coming from the Fosters office as cities which repeat the mistakes of already existing urban formations, being completely isolated from the surrounding environment. But is it Foster, who makes the decision about the localization and about the character of this new project? Most importantly, does Foster decides on the timetable for it’s completion? Rather not. The developer (be it a government, a dictator or a multinational corporation) is to “blame” here. Blame is putted in quotation marks because the architectural community can not expect developers to posses knowledge about cutting edge theories in the field of built environment, if it didn’t make an effort to communicate them in the first place.

So, after all, it seems there are tough times ahead of us. I don’t particularly agree that architecture in 2010 will be able to go back conceptually to where it was in 2008. The time of “shape-makers” might not be back. But, on the other hand, the times of change are always the times of opportunity, if only one doesn’t let himself fall into stagnation and accept the status-quo (I know it’s a cliche). Architects will need to adapt the way they work, but they also have to try to influence the ways in which people outside of the profession think. There can be little doubt that Michael Weinstock tries to do just that. One of his more important remarks which I remember from his lecture over a year ago, back at Iaac in Barcelona, was that the biggest problem of architects is that they tend to talk only to themselves. We urgently need to start to talk to policy makers and all other kinds of people in order to make them aware of the concepts which concern us all (us - all, not us - architects). Perhaps embracing the web 2.0 tools would be a good way to do that. I suppose that’s one of the aims for which this very site was created.

Michal Piasecki

Photo by AndrewEick; from Flickr

GINA, the new car designed by BMW, features a sleek and highly sophisticated performative skin. Instead of the traditional steel and plastic body shell, it uses a textile fabric stretching over a carbon fiber frame. This unique idea allows the car’s skin to change shape, stretching to match the position and curve of the wire frame, providing significant flexibility to the car doors as they open, cushions pop out, the engine gets open like a zipper, its embedded ‘blinking’ headlights shining throught the transparent membrane. The structure is rendered dynamic by actuators, creating a performative relationship between structure and ’skin’.

GINA stands for Geometry function in Infinite Number of Adaptations. According to its creators, the real issue was that of context over dogma. Fundamental questions to challenge pre-conceived notions were crucial for the design team to complete their mandate. What do we need the skin for? Does it need to be out of metal? Can a frame be handled without skin? Sculptural form was driven by the capacities of the material, performance considerations, and environmental forces (1).

Why are designers exploring such highly sophisticated design processes? Furthermore, what are the lessons contained for architecture?

An instrumental approach to relational behavioral characteristic as a way of modulating spaces and environments, however, requires operative retooling for architects with respect to analytical and generative methods, techniques, their relations and phasing within the design process (4). Within this context, industrial design, the aerospace and automobile industries have often challenged the boundaries of technology, aesthetics and performance. Digital design techniques enable now to connect architecture and engineering, such as in CATIA, a software developed by Dassault Systems, originally targeted for aerospace but now widely used within the automobile industry and also by some architectural studios, such as Gehry Technologies, Foster and Partners, even now widely used by architectural students. Furthermore, several initiatives within the software industry are exploring to blur the boundaries between disciplines: architectural, engineering, even biology are concurrently operating. The future of digital processes rests on the ability of computer-mediated environments to facilitate the creation of architectural designs so that digital thinking becomes indeed architectural thinking.

Perhaps the most deterministic factor within any design process is how problems are constructed or formulated. ‘True thinking consists in problem posing, that is, in framing the right problems rather than solving them. It is only thru skillful problem-posing, that we can begin to think diagrammatically’ (2). Beyond the obvious questions of innovative forms, it is the notion of challenging preconceived dogmas and the form finding procedures that provides an entirely different dynamic for design professionals, uncovering a vast horizon of possibilities.

Closely linked to these form generative processes lies the concept of ‘responsive environments’ that modify/shape/inform morphology, therefore “buildings can respond to and express the non-linear forces of nature.”(3). It is when the design process embraces certain aesthetic responses as a result of generative conditions that design becomes meaningful, as it is conceived as an extract, a sum, a brief to a given set of problems.

The aim is to ‘propose an architecture that actively differentiates environmental conditions by means of its morphological and material articulation, by linking behavioral tendencies and performative capacities of material systems with environmental modulation.’ (4)

Undoubtedly, the question of CONTEXT over DOGMA, elegantly posed by BMW GINA, may be at the center of the architectural paradigm at the beginning of the 21^st century.

References:

(1) Youtube.com

(2) Eco-logics by Helene Furjan, Softspace, Edited by Sean Lally & Jessica Young, Routledge, 2007.

(3) “A process oriented architecture” David Jirklandm Nicholas Grimshaw & Partners Ltd, chapter 4, pp41. “Innovation in Architecture” Edited by Alan J.Brookes and Dominique Poole. Spon Press Taylor & Francis Group, London and New York. 2004.

(4) “Nested capacities, gradient threshold and modulated environments” Towards differentiated and multi-performative architectures. Michael Hensel and Achim Menges (Ocean North) pp. 62, Softspaces. Edited by Sean Lally & Jessica Young, Routledge, 2007.

]]> http://www.wehavenovision.com/?feed=rss2&p=185 http://www.wehavenovision.com/?p=248 http://www.wehavenovision.com/?p=248#comments Sun, 09 Nov 2008 20:41:55 +0000 mariana.paz http://www.wehavenovision.com/?p=248

This is the situation that we are facing every day, images selling products that try to make your life better, the idea of comfort and luxury surrounding every environment that you step in. This is the concept of a new life, a so called modern life style where luxury is all around you, but who really has access to this fantasy? Could it be the sponsors or only the buyers who are willing to spend huge amounts of money in buying this lifestyle?

The best example for this phenomenon is Dubai, the capital of the frenetic development, where everything is possible, from the biggest entertainment center of the Middle East to the tallest skyscraper in the world currently under construction. This center is also a world business hub situated between London and Singapore. ‘The government’s decision to diversify from a trade-based, but oil-reliant, economy to one that is service and tourism-oriented has made real estate more valuable, resulting in the property appreciation from 2004-2006. Large scale real estate development projects have led to the construction of some of the tallest skyscrapers and largest projects in the world Dubai’s economy was built on the back of the oil industry. Revenues from oil and natural gas currently account for less than 6% of the emirate’s revenues. Real Estate and Construction (22.6%), Trade (16%), trading post of merchandise (15%) and financial services (11%) are the largest contributors to Dubai’s economy.’ (1) With this exponential growth Dubai has become a magnet for architects and developers.

This Real Estate phenomenon has been seen already in some other cities like Las Vegas, Hong Kong, etc; and the result is always the same, an artificial environment ready to house artificial lives while another hot spot is being generated in some other place on earth. My concern is as a designer; I see this and can only wonder:

What is happening to the city and which is the line being followed by architects and developers?

My personal opinion is that none of this really exists, the projects are being held by individuals, the concept of the city is complex if not lost. Everyone wants their own bit of acknowledgment, but no one concerns themselves with the whole package. Evidently disappointing, some of these so called new developers do not sell real architecture, they are selling images to fill up empty spaces where the lack of urban planning and public space is evident. Have you heard about Dubai land? , the biggest entertainment center in the world, where everything is of course artificially created, but how else could it be if we are in the middle of the desert.

On the other hand we have the powerful construction enterprises which always have the biggest contracts no matter if the project is good or not, these are the ones who have the power to develop projects which small offices can only be dreaming of, and this chain of events are the ones hitting us at the end, the endless list of small offices that cannot afford to hire you, but have really nice ideas in which you can apply these new technologies learned or these new idea that came to your mind while doing a master program, seem to be far from your reach because only big offices are managing to keep on going. Frustration rises, due to the lack of response and opportunities closing in front of you, and trying to start up an office becomes more difficult than ever, mainly moved by fear of investors due to the present economic situation.

I do not mean to sound fatalistic but it is true that the present situation worldwide makes it hard to go out and find a job, even if you are better prepared than a lot of people around you. But this is only the last part of a large chain of events which has been growing without constraints for the last 20 years. The real question is, are we ready to be part of it?

References

• (1) Wikipedia

The figure is imaginative since there are no statistical facts to support it. But there’s a crucial conjecture based on the metaphor of this phrase – its ability to transcend architecture. Worldwide construction industry is suffering due to reduced capital flow. In spite of the Olympics, the largest show (on earth!) scheduled within the next 4 years, London has frozen recruitment for graduates surfacing on architectural horizon this year. Even employment agencies are refusing applicants who cannot produce proof of over 5 years UK experience and RIBA III qualifications.

Besides US and European countries which indicate similar trend, hitherto booming economies of the East also seem to be flooded with surplus manpower this year as business declines and demand is poor. Fresh Graduates face tougher competition as they compete with experienced experts, already employed and available at reasonable remuneration. Yet the word ‘unemployed’ is not entirely correct for these budding architects who are crossing over job titles, professional fields, income brackets and international borders in order to grab any vacancies and make a living whether respectful or demeaning.

Few years ago around 2001, as a student of Bachelors in India, I witnessed the first ever campus interviews for architecture students; healthy, above average pay packages were offered for in house design and maintenance work in IT and product manufacturing companies. Already, architects were turning into builders and contractors by then, taking up small scale turnkey projects like independent residences; design and build and sell. In the years to come, some of my more entrepreneurial colleagues set up practices offering presentation and simulation services to other offices and some even went on to become graphic designers in banner advertising firms. In the past few years, salaries have risen as multi-national commercial architectural firms set up their ‘back-offices’ in India. In lieu of work nothing more intelligent than drawing, many young architects were paid handsomely who willingly turned into draughtsmen. A number of international projects began to be drawn and detailed in India. To get their Indian projects executed, foreign firms collaborated with Indian counterparts who provided project managers and construction manages with B.Arch degrees!

Now, with real estate slump foreseen this year, these lucrative jobs are vanishing. Architects will offer their services to infrastructure projects and structural engineering firms. Most of the fresh graduates will not work in a design office or an architectural firm as we conventionally know them. There are possibilities that they may undertake restoration and conservation projects, as renovation work will gain priority or heritage and property valuation by utilising the authority to certify buildings. Some may turn into surveyors, land valuers or researchers in one of the many fields that architecture will diversify into. Others may opt for product design, furniture design and hardware design. I was once suggested to pursue set design in theatre and entertainment industry! As trained to be ‘jack of all trades’ architects will exploit software skills, construction and site experience and even theoretical knowledge to gain employment in commercial or academic professions.

For more than a decade, we saw ambitious architectural projects and glossy images competing for world fame. Now, virgin land is barren and new projects are scarce. But once the buyers become keen again, and architects enrolled in niche markets are called upon to draw and build again, new considerations towards architectural thought and new criteria of construction will influence the next decade of built scapes.

Photo source - author

]]> http://www.wehavenovision.com/?feed=rss2&p=251 http://www.wehavenovision.com/?p=211 http://www.wehavenovision.com/?p=211#comments Tue, 16 Sep 2008 23:00:44 +0000 hemant.purohit http://www.wehavenovision.com/?p=211

ANNUAL PHENOMENON

Every July – August, tourists put to test Barcelona’s infrastructure, clearly witnessed in Metro congestion, shortage in natural resources like water and increased street crime. A prototypical Mediterranean city (1), Barcelona is more than the average mix of ancient city bazaar and sunny beaches. Ciutat Villa, characterised by narrow paved streets is dotted with museums and pubs while Cerda’s grid compact-s the whole city - architectural edifices, modern shopping hubs, bars & restaurants, housing & public services, all inclusive, consistently distributed and comfortably accessible by one way traffic roads. Together they accommodate 1.6 million ‘permanent’ residents. Complementing this man made landscape the coastline, enhanced by connectivity and programmatic diversity, is the day-time recreational venue. Municipal strategies have focussed on development of public spaces and Barcelona continues to function smoothly under such sudden pressures.

The debate from this introduction, related to the importance attributed to a city’s performance as a tourist hub should look beyond the usual ‘salesman’ argument of revenue generation and popularity. This article suggests a second perspective – participation in the city aided by information is the key to comfort levels and performance in a city. The scale of participation lies not only in the extent of using city infrastructure, accessing services and contributing to social or civic activities but also in adhering to norms & regulations as well as observing or accessing the information and responding to it, a phenomenon which largely constitutes local urban culture. Urban design influences culture, law and order, independency and public response.

THE NEGATIVE OF CERDA BLOCKS

Barcelona ‘ground plane’ as the negative of Cerda’s built grid is dotted with civic utilities (street furniture and dustbins), traffic regulatory amenities (lights, parking guidelines, dedicated carriageways) and substructure accesses (basement parking, subways, metro exits). Together they facilitate movement and flow on the street. The simplicity and repetition of this information (largely due to the grid) across the city makes the city more user-friendly. While the Barcelona blocks (positive) have stood for 100 years with minor alterations, the ground plane (negative) has been altered and updated rapidly. The advantage of grid design is not just organisation of built mass but also in the ordered flexibility ascribed to the ground plane. Without attention to elements on 1:1 scale the master plan is but an aerial representation of frozen form that can at best anticipate flows and land-use. In other words, master plan patterns represent political and ownership information but day to day psychological experience of citizens and tourists is based on the order of information distribution on ground plane which they interact with.

INFORMATION & PARTICIPATION

Simple determination of various scales of information and its transmission at ground plane through signage, material application and demarcation supersedes any annotation on a master plan or the land-use plan, making the social - civic space more transparent. To evoke participation, isn’t it the layout of information and how it percolates through scales down to the user that is more important, than the large scale formal design initiatives? What will be the means and elements of information for the future city plans would largely complement our social and security concerns.

1 – Introductory definition of Barcelona by Joan Busquets in The Urban Evolution of a Compact City

All pictures source - Author

cover of the “Forum” issue number 33 (11.08-17.08.2008)

And only big money allows architects to create truly impressive pieces of architecture. Dictatorships tend to have the money for architects and pay them well for materializing what the regime stands for. Other powers able to do so, are big corporate brands, as Verena mentioned in her article here. Those brands can finance all sorts of design, be it a “good” one (BMW) or a “bad” one (Disney).

“BMW World” by Wolf D. Prix; photo: The New York Times

Celebration; a city of 5000 founded by the Disney corporation; photo by: Mark Burwood

I have recently spoke about the above building with a friend of mine who study under Wolf D. Prix at Angewandte in Vienna. He said something that I can hardly agree with, which is that only through such building an architect is able to communicate a message, because only those make it to mass media. They indeed make it to mass media, but not as the architects message, but as brand identity. Let’s not live in a dream: architects do not differ much from marketing specialists here.

Coming back to the interview with Herzog. He claims that the bird’s nest is some sort of “Trojan horse”, because it was designed to enable informal meetings in places where “it’s impossible to place CCTV cameras”. Of course, I haven’t seen the building by my own eyes, but being in London quite often, I don’t think there are any places where it’s impossible to place the CCTV. Sadly, Herzog’s argument sounds to me (yet again) as a justification of branding of a very “contemporary” regime.

Sitting in a cozy room of some design school, where light is deemed and mac books are humming gently, we might think that Watercube heralds a new kind of architectural practice because of it’s unique structural system. But in reality, saying that architecture in not a political practice is wishful thinking.

WaterCube; photo by Greg Baker

A banner by 5 pro-Tibet activists in front of the bird's nest. Photo by: sfthgphotos

Unité d'Habitation

The facelift also illustrates the change in occupation. Once a means for dealing with the influx of immigration into Marseille and France (ibid), now houses a higher income bracket, looking to live in a design icon. I cannot get in as I have not booked a tour (ibid) but its hard to confirm its success today as a model for vertical living. The grounds, designed as a place to rest– are deserted of activity. There are cars and bikes. Though I do not venture inside, the building, there are not a lot of people around. Blog information tells me only that the hotel is a favourite for designers (now they tell me) but I’m not sure who else (ibid). As a means for creating a community with roof top and ground space for activities, there is not much going on.

‘old lane housing' , the Shikumen

Is Shanghai somewhere close to Corb’s vision for modern city? Im not sure. It both scares and inspires me. I have come here to work having visited three years ago. Has the city changed that much or does my memory fail me? Where Australian and European cities struggle to implement change on a major scale, Asian cities and Shanghai seems to have no problems in doing this. Nanjing Road & the Bund, its major touristic areas have major developments that have razed and excavated whole blocks. I am told there are at present over 4000 official construction sites in Shanghai.

Jin Mao tower

Pudong, once rice fields, is now a modern metropolis. The Jin Mao tower at 88 storeys is now overlooked by the World Financial Centre and soon another that looks to become the highest building in the world. Around these are shopping complexes and ‘expat housing’ typical for creating a gated community’s feeding skyscrapers with worker bees. As Shanghai’s financial prosperity brings in foreign workers, these gated communities grow. This at the same time as the city grows with China having some of the highest recent increases of urbanization in the world.  Generally, they have replaced the ‘old lane housing’ , the Shikumen with its high density and run down facilities. The problem of housing those displaced into adequate and affordable housing is the problem for modern china.

The gated communities of Pudong, could be argued to the modern Unite. Up to 5000 people are accommodated in groups of large vertical buildings of around 30 storeys. There is no free ground plane, but the buildings are spaced well enough for creation of common gardens, pools, tennis courts, restaurants and community centres. At ground level the density feels comparable.
That is where the similarities end. Cost is the major and obvious difference. Creating integrated communities is another. The Shikumen are a “hybrid of the British row house with the Chinese traditional courtyard house.” (ibid). They do what the gated communities fail to do in providing for community. Interaction occurs on a daily level with communal kitchen and washing facilities, whilst the gated communities reinforce an internal and insular living arrangement. Unfortunately, due to the rapid urbanization of Shanghai in the 20th century, most of the Shikumen have occupancy of 5 times their original and fallen into disrepair. How wonderful Shanghai would be if it could provide reconciliation between the two? I look around the city, over the demolition sites of the Shikumen and the new gated communities that are built in their place. Where do all the displaced people now live? What will happen to the community structure of Shanghai (and other cities like it) when people are living in more isolated modes of living? I wonder if there is a place for a new Unitie d’Habitation?

During WWI and WWII, a government propaganda strategy became a moral buster during these harsh years for the communities of the allied countries. Under the name “Victory Gardens”, the plan Aimed to alleviate the shortage of vegetables supplies in the urban areas- since big part of the production was being destined for the soldiers across the Atlantic- by encouraging the residents of urban areas to plant their on vegetables in their front gardens. With the slogan “Our food is fighting”, this represented the citizen’s involvement in the war and the program was originally referred to as War Gardens. The strategy was highly effective and gained great popularity in the US, Canada and Great Britain. In fact, at the highest production period, the Victory Gardens produced 40% of the vegetables consumed nationally. By the end of WWII, the interest in the gardens and the production declined dramatically, even though there was still a shortage of vegetable supplies in the urban areas.

Today, our necessities are different, and the war we are fighting is not against a totalitarian regime threatening our freedom and forcing us to make collective sacrifices. Today’s fight is about statistics and the struggle to adjust to our future reality. The cold numbers tell us that by 2050 75% of the world population will be living in the cities, and we must take the statistics seriously when we read in the papers that every day 100,000 Chinese migrate from rural areas to urban centers. This situation is a disproportion which will threaten our food supply in a near future. It is essential that we start planning the infrastructure of the future in order to restore the balance and to truly make these megalopolises sustainable in all aspects. Part of the solution might very well be to fully integrate the old idea of the Victory Gardens into the urban fabric.

Some steps are already being taken. Not only are the Victory Gardens coming back in all different forms and shapes across America, but also the urban farm is transcending the front yard scale to transform itself into parks and public spaces of great influence in the communities were they are located. This is the case of Shelby Farms in Memphis, Tennessee in the US. In this proposal, Field Operations juxtaposes contemporary amenities over the site’s agricultural history to create an urban park 5 times the size of New York’s Central Park with a rural backdrop.

Across the Ocean, the urban farm takes an even more influential stand. Valencia is one of the fasters growing cities in Spain and it has already expanded well beyond its medieval walls. Even though this growth has brought along progress and has definitely placed Valencia on the map, it has also created social problems that required immediate attention. The region surrounding the old Valencia was land of work for small farmers whose crops represented a large part of the local food production. The local government became conscious of the situation and began to seek for solutions. This inspired the emergence of Sociopolis. Currently under construction, this project aiming to insert farming in an urban context as part of green space and also as part of an urban strategy to integrate a lost tradition providing work in a sustainable community.

Whether the Victory Gardens will transform the landscape of our cities remains to be seen, but perhaps what is clear is that the problems caused by the massive transformation the urban centers are undergoing, due in part to mass migration, can be resolved through innovative solution. And these solutions are contributing to reach social sustainability above all.

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