Kosmograd

Grootens

2009-11-04T09:17:07+00:00

Operating at the intersection of data visualisation and urbanism, the Atlas work of Dutch book designer Joost Grootens is without peer. At its best, graphic design and data visualisation reveals new truths, ways of seeing and understanding. In Grootens' work on publications such as the Metropolitan World Atlas this focus has been on the urban realm, and in Atlases such as the New Dutch Water Defence Line, and the Vinex Atlas, specific aspects of the Dutch built environment. But while they may be preoccupied with specific elements of the Dutch landscape, they reveal a process of representation which rewards patient study.

" Its position in the landscape, the forts, the inundation system, the geomorphology, the strategic system and recent developments can be read off in maps rendered so as to give an understanding of all aspects of the defence line landscape. The defence line reveals itself as a many-tentacled military defensive system of forts, group shelters and polders that can be flooded at the threat of war. The maps show the cohesion of the defence line as a landscape-strategic structure as well as the topographic composition of this structure in layers and components. The more detailed maps of the forts display the wealth of historic places, insertions in the landscape and defining elements."

As with the Vinex Atlas, an exhaustive, analytical guide to the Vinex districts across the Netherlands, a seemingly dry topic of limited appeal is embued with a rigourous aesthetic sensibility.

In December this year, 010 will publish an Atlas of the Conflict - Israel-Palestine, designed by Grootens, and in January 2010 a Grootens monograph entitled I swear I use no art at all will be published, taking an analytic, atlas-like approach to mapping his own work:

"A monograph that works like an atlas, it charts in a systematic and neutral fashion the first 100 books designed by Grootens in the past ten years. In the first chapter, ’10 years’, Grootens uses timelines, lists and plans to trace the course of his career as a designer, the people he works with, the places where the work gets done."

You can find out more about the work of Joost Grootens studio at his website, and watch video interviews here and here.

Branding the boroughs 2

2009-10-13T18:30:22+01:00

In Felix Barber and Ralph Hyde's superb book London as it might have been, we can read of a Victorian plan to change the structure of the London boroughs, part of a plan to prevent overcharging by cab drivers.

"In the middle of the 19th Century a slightly fanatical Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries published a scheme for an hexagonal London".

".. John Leighton suggested that the old borough boundaries should be altered to conform to a honeycomb pattern. Within a five-mile radius of the General Post Office all the sprawling, differently sized boroughs were to become hexagonal-shaped areas, 2-miles across. There were 19 altogether with the City in the centre of the honeycomb. Each hexagonal borough would be identified by a letter, and the letter as well as a number would be painted or cut out of tin-plate to be visible day and night on lamp-posts at every street corner."

It's an inspired idea, and one that can also serve as the starting point for the Rebranding of the Boroughs.

John Leighton's hexagonal map only extended about 6 miles from the centre of London, but it's a relatively process to extend more concentric rings of hexes, turning the Great Wen into a setting for a boardgame, Settlers of Catan or Squad Leader re-imagined upon London.

With a clear demarcation between boroughs, it becomes much easier to define transition from one border to another. Unlike the Japanese municipal flags, whose forms are symbolic images and katakana, for London a more typographic treatment was chosen.Inspired by HAL in 2001, each borough is given a 3-letter code for a consistent visual identity.

Now the jumble of logos and graphical devices can be replaced with a consistent, uniform identity system. The only change is to rename the borough of Haringey as Highgate to avoid the clash with Harrow.

Within each borough, each individual hex can also be given it's own identity, further reinforcing the idea of London as a series of villages. And you could zoom in, each larger 2 mile hex could be divided into a grid of smaller hexes.

Previously: Branding the boroughs

City of signs 9

2009-10-07T17:58:47+01:00

Well covered by the blogerati, (such as here, here and here) but worth investigating further, Logorama is a short film by H5 that has been doing the recent round of film festivals including onedotzero, In the animation all characters, objects and buildings are represented by logos, the city of signs in the most literal way possible.

The film takes the concept that we are immersed in a saturated advertising landscape to its logical conclusion, the city becomes a brandscape of overlapping marks and symbols. The ubiquity of these logos as part of a collective visual consciousness has overtaken their role as badges denoting a product's provenance.

A trailer can be watched here.

Previously:

City of Signs 8
City of Signs 7
City of Signs 6
City of Signs 5
City of Signs 4
City of Signs 3
City of Signs 2
City of Signs

The past bleeds into the future

2009-06-30T16:39:01+01:00

In a similar realm to the virtual bleeding into the real (still the most popular post on this blog), these amazing images of St. Petersburg show the past bleeding into the future. Images of modern day St. Petersburg are meticulously matched to wartime images of the city during the Siege of Leningrad.

Instead of a slippage between two spaces. these photos show a timeslip, the exact same location caught at two moments in time. A wormhole opens, we cannot help but fall into it.

Ghosts of the past enter the present.

Leningrad merges with St. Petersburg.

Road to the Stars

2009-06-23T13:28:54+01:00

Here is Pavel Klushantsev's 1957 film, Road to the Stars, on RuTube:

Previously: Klushantsev

Klushantsev

2009-06-18T09:16:51+01:00

Without Pavel Klushantsev, Kubrick might never have made 2001.

In 1954, Klushantsev, pioneering Soviet sci-fi film director, began working on a short film, part-documentary, part-visionary projection, about the Soviet conquest of space. The film follows a young man as he learns the basic principles of space flight, before the final parts of the film depict the launch of the first Soviet man in space, life on an orbiting space station, the first man to set foot on the moon, and concludes with the possibilities of colonising Mars.

You can watch the film online here.

In 1957 Sergei Korolev, the 'father' of the Soviet space program, proclaimed "the road to the stars is open" following the historic flight of Sputnik 1. Klushantsev quickly shot footage to represent this momentous occasion, and the film was released a month later.

Road to the Stars is a delirious film, stunning in its prescience about many aspects of space exploration that would unfold over the next 40 years.The similarities between Road to the Stars and Kubrick's 2001 are obvious, and Kubrick was known to have been inspired by Klushantsev's film. Indeed, parts of 2001 can be considered a homage, or as this article states, a shot-for-shot copy.

[Slightly related, here's an article I wrote called Road to the Stars for Kino Fist about Baikonour and a space station called Kosmograd from the short story Red Star, Winter Orbit, by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling.]

Kudriashev

2009-06-04T13:32:13+01:00

I discovered these great images of paintings by the artist Ivan Alexeevich Kudriashev here.

Painted in 1925, both entitled Construction of a Rectilinear Motion, they're both stunning examples of Futurism in Soviet art. There is very little about Kudriashev online, so if anyone has any more information, please let us know.

From the book Laboratory of Dreams, edited by John E. Bowlt & Olga Matic, in a chapter "Tsiolkovsky as a moment in the prehistory of the Avant-Garde" by Michael Holquist, about the Soviet father of rocketry Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, we learn the following:

"Kudriashev, an important member of the left-wing movement OST, was the son of a master model builder. In this capacity the elder Kudriashev had been invited by Tsiolkovsky to Kaluga, where the rocket engineer needed someone who could build wooden mock-ups of this machines. The young art student accompanied his father on these journeys, and actually helped translate Tsiolkovsky's technical drawings into miniature space ships.

The relation of the new sense of cosmic, interplanetary space to the manner in which space was perceived on Earth became a major preoccupation of Kudriashev. As the artist himself would write, it was his aim to provide in his paintings 'a realistic expression of the contemporary perception of space ... that is the substantial novelty that today is producing the space-painting ['prostranstvennaiazhivopis'].'

The connection of interplanetary travel to the striving of OST members can be demonstrated in a number of ways, as in the 1922 construction by Vladimir Liushin entitled A Station for Interplanetary Communication."

All of which is getting me very excited for the Futurism show at Tate Modern, starting next week (Friday 12th June 2009).

Komarov

2009-05-24T20:34:15+01:00

Vladimir Mikhaylovich Komarov was the first man to die in space.

The Russian cosmonaut died aboard Soyuz 1 on April 24th, 1967, which crashed on its return to earth due to failure of the parachute mechanism.

Soyuz 1 was the first step in the Soviet's race to put a man on the moon. The plan was to launch Soyuz 1, then launch Soyuz 2 a day later with a three man crew, and complete a spacewalk of two cosmonauts from Soyuz 2 to Soyuz 1.

The problems with Soyuz 1 began shortly after it achieved orbit. One of the solar panels failed to open, depriving the ship of half of its planned solar power. Komarov repeatedly attempted maneouvres to orient the spacecraft to the sun, without success. Ground control decided to bring Komarov back to Earth earlier than planned. A series of poor decisions by ground control, and additional equipment failures meant that Komarov made 19 revolutions before able to attempt a manual orientation with retrofire to bring the vessel into a descent.

On an early orbit, Komarov makes a strident radio broadcast:

'for (or in the benefit) of the peoples of our fatherland along the for the whole humanity famous way to communism. Pilot-cosmonaut Komarov.'

Realising he was aboard a stricken craft, Komarov's radio communiques became increasingly agitated. Several persons claimed to have picked up radio communications from Soyuz-1, either as dedicated amateur radio enthusiasts, or officials working at military listening posts. This analysis of the flight of Soyuz-1 tries to piece together what happened to Soyuz-1 from the mass of often conflicting data.

According to one recording made by a NSA listening station in Istanbul, Komorov's radio communications became increasingly fraught, and knew that he was doomed:

"He understood that there was trouble with "stabilization" and that Komarov replied to commands from the ground by saying "I'm doing it...it still isn't working..." He kept asking "How long till re-entry?".

Some reports have Komarov allegedly cursing Brezhnev, the spacecraft designers and flight controllers, and accusing them of killing him, while other radio intercepts claim that he remained calm and loyal even in his final moments. His last words are thought to be "the parachute is wrong" and "heat is rising in the capsule".

The capsule crashed near the village of Karabulak in the Orenburg Region of Orsk, (now part of Kazakhstan). Komarov's badly burnt body was recovered from the capsule and flown to Moscow for a post-mortem. Komarov's ashes were interned in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis on the Red Square in Moscow. A memorial was created on cosmonauts alley in Moscow.

In 1969, Neil Armstrong placed a small memorial on the moon, to Komarov and the three American astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee, who died during a training mission Apollo 1 in January 1967.

The track Komarov by the artist Regis appeared on the compilation Merge 7, and samples some of Komarov's radio communications.

Download komarov.mp3 (5Mb)

Kondratyuk

2009-05-19T22:40:38+01:00

This page on the BBC web site, reminds us that today is the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 10 mission, the penultimate mission before a lunar landing would be attempted.

"In May 1969, with only seven months to go before the end of the decade, the first Lunar Module to fly in orbit around the Moon was powered up and readied for undocking from the Command Module.

Astronauts Tom Stafford, John Young and Gene Cernan were about to test out a technique for lunar landing which had first been proposed in 1916 by a Russian mechanic called Yuri Kondratyuk.

Kondratyuk's thesis described how a small landing craft could leave a mothership in lunar orbit to ferry its crew to the surface and back - a technique later referred to as Lunar Orbit Rendezvous or LOR."

Kondratyuk had a fascinating life, as the biography on Wikipedia reveals. Born Oleksandr Gnatovich Shargei, and having already escaped death once, he took the name and identity of the deceased Yuri Vasilievich Kondratyuk, following the Russian Revolution, to avoid being arrested as an enemy of the people.

His pioneering ideas on spaceflight had to be self-published after no publisher would accept them. Foregoing the chance to work with rocketry pioneer Sergei Korolev for fear of his real identity being discovered, Kondratyuk pioneered work on wind turbines, and died in 1941 while serving in the Soviet army. Fortuitously, his notes on space travel eventually found their way to the United States when a neighbour took them with him when escaping the Soviet Union after World War II.

The history of the Soviet space program is littered with fecund stories of human invention; paranoia, power and corruption; missed opportunities; epic failures; lost dreams and bitter tragedy. But it is also my hypothesis that it harbored the secret continuation of the Constructivist 'project' after Stalin's Socialist Realism became the only acceptable form of artistic expression. More to follow.

Kempf

2009-05-19T21:45:47+01:00

I've been spending time over the last month getting to grips with Petra Kempf's remarkable publication You are the City.

Subtitled "Observation, organization, and transformation of urban settings", the main element of this publication are 22 sheets of clear acetate, onto which are printed different conceptual layers and frameworks of a city. It's based on a earlier project called Met(r)onymy 1, from 2001.

In 'You are the City', the 22 diagram drawings are split into four operational categories: Cosmological Ground; Leglisative Agencies; Currents, Flows and Forces; Nodes, Loops and Connections.

By combining different sheets, and adding layers, a huge range of different compositions can be created - a handmade decon version of SimCity. It invites the user to make new urban connections and realities, as different spatial arrangements and possibilities reveal themselves. In these digital days it's quite refreshing to play with something so low-tech and tactile. The slick sophistication of digital interfaces often make it easier to gloss over them, here the simple act of shuffling clear plastic sheets and seeing the resultant overlays makes for a contemplative pleasure.

Accompanying these diagrams is a slim pamphlet of accompanying essays, brief user guidelines, and notes on each of the diagram layers (referred to as index cards). Kempf herself calls these diagrams an 'adaptable framing device' with which to decode current and developing urban conditions:

"It provides a tool to observe, organise and outline the dynamic structure of cities in a non-hierarchical manner. Thus the urban construct can be studied and revealed in multiple ways, without assuming a specific order. Although we will never fully comprehend the entire complexity of a city in one moment, we can understand the urban construct through the interaction of its parts. This set is comprised of twenty-two transparent index cards that can be either viewed one at a time or in various overlaid combinations. By isolating and superimposing individual components, new perceptions and viewpoints will emerge. There are as many interpretations of cities as there are people."

It reminds me strongly of a book called Ubiquitous Urbanism, the publication of a studio project a Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation led by Zaha Hadid, which follows a similar approach of layering highly abstract functional layers into a rich, dense Suprematist construction.

Layering is preferred to the traditional town-planning conceit of zoning to create a greater intensity of urban experience. These mapping exercises are first applied to a number of American cities to test their fit, before the final application as a theoretical project for Tokyo.

This is what Queen Zaha has to say in her introduction:

"My proposal to the studio was to pursue again what has been the undercurrent of my preoccupations over the years and, I claim, has been until recently the central ambition of twentieth century architecture: the synthesis of architecture and urban planning as a three-dimensional as well as social art and science. ... A new approach to integrating architectural intervention had to be posited in the face of the seeming exhaustion of large-scale planning and against the postmodernist and deconstructivist onslaught ."

In You are the City there is a similar attempt to try and work across the schism between architecture and urbanism, using the diagrams and their levels of abstraction as means to see things in a different way. Catherine Ingham, in one of the accompanying essays, Cities of Substance, Cities of No Substance, puts it thus:

"The diagram is one of of the only mechanisms by which conventional thinking about cities can be located and dislodged. The diagram is where conventions, givens, are wrestled with ... Kempf uses abstraction, aggregation and overlay to subvert the conventional urban plan."

You are the City is a powerful antidote to most city-planning exercises, a conscious attempt to free up rigid spatial thinking and start thinking about networks and connections instead.

Petra Kempf can help us move from the notion of ubiquitous urbanism to that of the continuous city.