The best thing about California City, California, is the following line, given uncorroborated and without any intended irony, from the city’s Wikipedia page: “Temperatures range from about 33° F (1° C) to about 118° F (48° C).” Balmy Santa Monica, this ain’t. Of course if those figures sound a mite implausible, you may be relieved to know that they’re contradicted by most official data, which lists the highest recorded temperature as a mere 112°—and the lowest as -5°.

Sounds charming, doesn’t it? Equatorial summers, Scottish winters.

Climatological extremes are, of course, a fact of life in the high deserts of the West, and California City is in the heart of the high desert, just an hour’s drive from Death Valley along a barren stretch of two-lane highway. It’s good country for old prospectors, survivalists, Burning Man types, the Manson family. But it is not the kind of place you might be keen to set down roots and picket fences.

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Yet that was the vision of Nat Mendelsohn, a real estate developer who bought 80,000 acres of land in the middle of the dry Mojave in 1958. His dream: to create California’s next great metropolis. The state was booming at the time, and California City was planned to rival Los Angeles for size and population. Even today, it remains the third largest city in California by area.

Not, however, by headcount. The suburban hordes that Nat had bet would flock to California City never materialized; today, seen from above, California City is a vast network of rubble-strewn streets, empty cul de sacs and lonesome main drags etched into the hard sand of the desert. Earlier this spring, marginalia-freak blogs BLDGBLOG (the work of the indefatigable Geoff Manaugh) and Atlas Obscura led an expedition to California City, during which a troupeau of writers, artists, and adventurers set out to see whatever there is to see and do whatever they it is felt like doing. The results were interesting to say the least.

Countries all over the world abound in ghost towns and still-born urban dreams just like California City—think of Australia’s own Environa near Canberra—and conceptual explorations of these marginal zones can be most revealing—I’m thinking especially of Lucy Raven’s essay on a Utah mining town in the online journal Triple Canopy last year. Reflecting on these non-sites, one is bound to consider such imponderables as the vanity of human enterprise, the false hopes and dead ends of capitalism, the artificiality of our relation to land and to nature, etc.; such was certainly the case with Manaugh’s and others’ reflections on California City, though the preoccupation of both BLDGBLG and Atlas Obscura with curiosities for their own sake all but proscribed a more critical, cerebral approach like Raven’s on the creepy community of Daybreak, Utah.

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Yet California City comes with a special asterisk that distinguishes it from both Daybreak and Environa, and it’s worth observing. In a response to a follow-up post written by Manaugh for GOOD, one commenter notes that Mendelsohn’s dream for California City wasn’t born of some kind of misplaced irrational enthusiasm, the typical stumbling block of the doe-eyed American dreamer: it was based instead on the very sound assumption that the United States military intended to make nearby Edwards Air Force Base the testing location for its new B-1B Lancer aircraft. Such had been the US government’s stated intention; and if it had followed through, the jobs and money the project would have brought to the area might very well have sparked exactly the kind of growth Mendelsohn had anticipated. Tough luck for Nat, the project ended up going elsewhere.

But there’s something even more unique about California City, which is that for a ghost town it has very few ghosts—more to the point, it has some 13,000 residents, all of them very much alive, apparently undaunted by either the miles of vacant lots or the extremes of hot and cold. For them, white pickets in desert soil seem just fine, and they’re not alone: the town is on pace to grow by at least ten percent since 2000, making it the twelfth fastest-growing city in the state (and this in a state that’s seventeenth for growth nationwide—out of fifty, mind you). The city’s  living residents don’t appear to have been much consulted by the bloggers who recently descended upon it, another difference from  Raven’s more in-depth study in Utah. None of which is to say that California City is not a fascinating corner of America deserta—only that it probably seems considerably less obscure to the 3,000-plus families who live there.

The annual South by Southwest (SXSW) Conferences and Festivals, held in Austin, Texas, offer a unique convergence of original music, independent films and emerging technologies. Every year there is opportunity to attend workshops and debates where new ideas are considered and deliberated. This year saw a conference panel discussing, Design for the Dark Side.

Chart credit: Jason Nunes

I find the above light and dark diagram fascinating; I have many interests that fall into the ‘dark side’ (excluding hip hop!) and am skeptical of many things on the ‘light side’. Chaired by IDEO’s Ben Fullerton, Design for the Dark Side looked at the practicalities and challenges of designing for a catastrophic or dystopian future. The panel included screenwriter, author, and playwright Jason Nunes, Rachel Abrams, who is Creative Director of Turnstone Consulting, and independent designer, architect and critic, Liam Young. Liam is also the founder (along with Darryl Chen) of Tomorrows Thoughts Today, a group whose projects explore the consequences of fantastic, perverse and underrated urbanisms, and was recently tipped by Blueprint magazine as one of the 25 people who will change architecture and design in 2010.

The premise of Design for the Dark Side was that design usually focuses on improving the world around us, and often from an optimistic viewpoint. Yet, we know life is not always a walk in the park; it can be seedy, grimy, down and dirty just as much as it can be sun-spattered and sweet-smelling. So, is it not just as important to consider the dark side of human experience in design?

The SXSW panel contemplated a variety of dystopian eventualities and how they could be catered for, while considering questions put to them. These included: “Can designers think negatively as well as positively?”, “What kinds of worst case scenarios might be the most interesting to design for?”, and “How do you stay productive in the face of certain doom?”

It became obvious that the idea of designing for the dark side as a futuristic concept is not something that will happen; it’s happening now – there’s no need to imagine it. Death, destruction, war; they’re things that seldom disappear. However, these are the most obvious traits of the dark-side; it is the hidden fall-out from chaos that is often overlooked, but just as present. The global financial meltdown has produced some of the darkest times people have had to experience for a long time. Unemployment is soaring; homelessness is increasing at a drastic rate and natural disasters seem to be happening more frequently – these in turn result in rising poverty; depression, oppression and despair.

Dystopian societies are ever-present, yet consistently and conveniently ignored. Designers and architects, in their efforts to push boundaries, often look to the future, perhaps too much, and as a consequence neglect the areas desperate for change now. Designing for the dark side is more of a reality than anyone envisaged.

Listen to the “Design for the Dark Side” discussion here, and check out the SXSW website for details on next year’s conferences and festivals.

Now that you have been introduced into the dark side, what would you ultimate project be?

Photography and mathematics are rarely mentioned in the same sentence. If your like me then the ‘m’ word conjures feelings of high school, dread and misunderstanding. Yet, one woman has a great love for both and is on a mission to convey her passion for maths through photography in the hope others learn to appreciate it the way she does. That woman on a mission is Nikki Graziano, a maths and photography student at Rochester Institute of Technology, NY.

Her collection of images, entitled Found Functions, are random shots of natural habitats which she manages to graphically represent using complex mathematical equations. In a recent interview with Revolver, Graziano said of her work:

“My found functions series is the only project that I’ve worked on as a cohesive series. My aim was (is still) to sort of take a step back and focus on sublimity and the gaze in both an aesthetic and mathematical way, to communicate both ends of beauty in the natural world.”

Graziano doesn’t necessarily go out to look for hidden functions within the hedgerows but instead chooses an image she likes from many taken on various walks and drives then orchestrates the graphical forms by tweaking the mathmetical function. The resultant undulating images are then superimposed onto the original photograph it represents, producing an entirely new view of nature and its forms.

Regardless of your mathematical abilities, the images are intriguing and appealing. The Found Functions series highlights the often overlooked mathematical component of nature and gives the viewer the opportunity to see something new. For some the end result may be a renewed love of maths, but for me Found Functions is more about appreciating  the way we look at the world.

See more of Nikki’s work on her website.

I recently asked Ian Volner to comment on the purpose and implications of the upcoming Shanghai 2010 World Expo. Ian Volner is a writer, critic, and publicist living in Manhattan. A regular contributor to Architectural Record and Bookforum among other journals, he’s presently at work on a book about planning and public housing in 1960s New York

Shanghai isn’t just your run-of-the-mill Chinese boomtown. If you want to see the dynamism that’s become standard fare for Chinese urbanism, you can as easily go to Hangzhou or to Harbin, to Tianjin or Wuhan, or to any one of a dozen mainland metropolis with vertiginous population growth and a building boom to match. No, Shanghai is not one of these: Shanghai belongs in a class of its own. Not only is it China’s largest city, but it’s also home to the country’s largest stock exchange, the second largest in the world. As China—slowly but surely—opens its economy to the world, Shanghai seems well poised to stake its claim as the country’s great global city, the heir apparent to New York or London.

Yet a lingering apprehension of the pace of change on the part of the Chinese leadership could threaten that ascent. That’s why the upcoming Shanghai Expo, opening May 1^st, is a big deal: the Shanghai fairgrounds, with its dozens of innovative pavilion designed by a wide assortment of international architects, is a proving ground for Shanghai’s future, a controlled experiment for a city in transition.

Since the 19^th century, cities have used world fairs and fair architecture to announce their arrival on the global stage. The Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851 established London’s bona fides at the forefront of the industrial revolution; the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1889 was a declaration of the triumph of French art and ingenuity—with the Eiffel Tower as a punctuation mark. It may be that Shanghai’s expo comes too late to produce a corresponding architectural emblem of China’s national genius: that place would seem to have been taken already by Herzog & de Meuron’s famous “Bird’s Nest”, the Beijing National Stadium for the 2008 Olympics. Yet for sheer scope (28 acres, 45 national pavilions, with two new subway lines constructed to accommodate an expected 70 million attendees) Expo 2010 is bound to rank in the uppermost tier of world fairs. As a coming-out into global society, Shanghai could hardly ask for a more glamorous debutante ball.

Of course it could also be averred, with equal accuracy, that fairs have too often produced false positives. New York made a splash with the 1939 fair, but its sequel in 1964 was an architectural dud and a financial fiasco that augured nothing but three decades of ruin, crime, and decline for the city. Expo ’70 in Osaka, Japan, was a more successful affair all around, though the junky, clunky megastructures that typified the fair pavilions more or less signaled the end of an over-ambitious era in architecture. And then there are the even greater number of fairs that come and go, the ones leave their host cities no worse but certainly no better than before. Hannover 2000, anyone?

So why pin any hopes on the Shanghai expo? Well, a couple of reasons.

As is well known—especially since Google recently announced its provisional departure from the country—limitations on free speech threaten the growth of the Chinese market nationwide. Shanghai suffers as much or more so from these restrictions, but there are additional constraints which are peculiar to the city: as big as its stock market is, foreign investment in it is tightly controlled by the PRC government. Afraid of losing control of its economy, the authorities insure that state-run enterprises have a leg-up over foreign competitors.

Discreetly, within the safety zone of the fairground’s perimeter, the exposition undermines that position. The Chinese were eager to insure that United States participated in the fair, and they got their wish: the American pavilion, designed by architect Clive Grout and sponsored by companies like GE and Boeing, will be a centerpiece of the exposition. Other global companies—Siemens, GM—will have their own pavilions in tandem with their respective nationalities. The very presence of these buildings, and the clear wish of their builders to delight and to surprise the visitor, is an appeal to the Chinese people. It’s also an affront, albeit a polite one and on a limited scale, to the country’s economic insularity, and an attempt to ready the way for a more cosmopolitan China.

But more than that, the expo and its architecture could serve as a powerful metaphor for the cultural enterprise on which China is now embarked. For the architect, “exposition” implies a kind of liminal space, a suspension of norms. Architectural experiment is very much in evidence in the photos of the Shanghai fairgrounds—there’s Britain’s “Seed Palace” looking like a dried anemone, the Arab Emirates’ like an orange soda manta ray. This frenzy of formal experiment is a fairly accurate reflection of a city that is itself looking to experiment as it tries to open itself to the world.

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Shanghai is the leading city of China, its financial capital, but if it’s too assume the stature of previous famous expo cities then it must find a way to transform its economy and its culture. The almost garish variety of architecture at the 2010 expo—some of it strange, some of its successful, some of it not—is a model, in built form, of how a plurality of provisional solutions can be assayed without any danger of the whole structure (of a building, of a society) collapsing on itself. It’s also a dipping-of-the-toe into the global waters, and a teaching moment for a city and a society still unsure of what its future should look like.

Marcus Trimble established Sydney based Architecture firm Super Colossal in June 2007.  Trimble is a tutor in design at the University of Sydney.  Additional to running a successful architecture firm and blog, he is actively involved with the Australian Institute of Architects, where he is a member of DARCH – a group of committed architecture geeks that run competitions, public forums and slide nights.

In 2009 Trimble was named one of Sydney’s Creative Catalysts – a collection of 100 of the city’s top creative pioneers – as part of the Creative Sydney festival.

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Interviews Super Colossal

1. Which of your projects has been the most rewarding and why?

MT: For sheer speed of production, the cardboard cubby house that we made a few years back was very satisfying. It had a one week lifecycle from been installed at a trade show for a couple of days, then reassembled in my niece’s backyard where it sat until it rained, slumped and fell, and was recycled.

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2. Super Colossal recently won the Gold Coast Cultural Precinct Masterplan, what was unique about your proposal and in what way does it contribute to area?

MT: Our proposal looked to the existing urban characteristics of the Gold Coast – high rise strip along the beach backed by a system of man made canals – and proposed a new canal that would cut the site off from the mainland, creating a new island as a byproduct. This island then is a discrete precinct dedicated to civic activity, and the part of the site attached to the mainland given over to parkland.

Goldcoast and Cultural and Civic Precinct Masterplan

3. How do you think architecture will change in the next 50 years?

MT: Architecture will go through its motions, new tricks will be learnt and exploited. Old tricks will continue to serve us well.

Architects and architecture offices, however, are more likely to undergo radical change in the next 50 years than buildings are. Architects will likely become further removed from the decision making procees and will see their responsibilities diminished as more and more branching specialist consultancies stake their territory. On the other hand, architects will find opportunities to engage in the environment in increasingly diverse ways.

The design and documentation of buildings will be a small component of the typical architecture office in 50 years time.

4. What changes would you like to see in the Architectural profession?

MT: I would like to see  a profession that is more united and open with one another. I think that this is starting to happen in Sydney, with younger offices being very supportive of each other and being much more engaged with each other’s practice through blogs, twitter and so on.

5. Do you think that Architecture tends to be trendy today?

MT: Architectural image making is susceptible to trends given the tools now available and the easy distribution model that design and architecture blogs offer. Architecture itself has such a long gestation period that more often than not it resists trends, or the trends get so watered down by the design by committee model that dominates building that only the most resilient ideas survive.

And architecture is rarely (ever?) a trending topic on twitter.

6. What would students learn from reviewing the body of architectural projects you have completed? Do you have any advice for upcoming students?

MT: I would hope that there would be a clarity present in our projects. And optimism. My advice to students is to travel, to study the great cities and works of architecture around the world.

7. What are you most proud of in your career or any aspect of life?

MT: Being in business three years later.

8. Who do you think is the most overrated architect, and who do you think deserves more credit/recognition?

MT: Not that they are overrated, but the rotating roster of El Croquis coverstars paints a picture that all good archtiecture is carried out by a handful of architects. Hopefully blogs and print on demand tech will help to broaden the scope of the canon and expose people to a far wider range of the excellent work that is out there.

As far as under-rated, the work that Paul Pholeros is doing in indigenous communities in Australia is incredible.  It is an architecture of infrastructure where basic problems like a safe power supply and clean water and hygienic waste treatment yields substantial increases in the quality of health for remote indigenous communities.

9. What aspect of Architecture do you find most important? What is fundamental to your practice and your design process?

MT: Clarity of intention. And being able to negotiate this intention through the inevitable barriers on the way to having a project realised.

10. What inspired you to become involved in Architecture? What inspires you now?

MT: I suspect having a number of architects (and one committed archi-evangelist) in the family helped push me in the direction… But beside that, I have always been drawn to the city and the opportunity to work in a profession that deals with the city is a continuing motivating factor.

11. What other interests do you have?

MT: Current Comic Crushes – Flex Mentallo by Morrison and Quitely, anything by Paul Pope, Grant Morrison’s run on Batman, Urasawa’s Pluto (a re-imagined Astro Boy story), JH Williams III art on Detective Comics is incredibly good, and Frank Miller’s various Batman books will always have a special place on the shelf.

Movies – anything by Kubrick and Michael Mann, The Godfather, Alien, Children of Men, District 9. Books – Slaughterhouse 5, Catch 22, Oscar and Lucinda, James Ellroy’s American Trilogy the latest of which, Blood’s a Rover, blew me away.

Games – Ico and Shadow of the Colussus are perfect games.

Also, I like running.

12. What is your favourite time of the day, and why?

MT: Right now, because I am aiming to run a marathon at the end of the year, I am spending a fair bit of time running along the cliff edge along South Head to the Gap at Watsons Bay. It is an extraordinary part of Sydney, vertical sandstone cliff faces over the Pacific Ocean on one side and Sydney Harbour on the other. Pretty much where that dentist had his office in Finding Nemo.

13. What would be your ultimate design project?

MT: The foyer to the space elevator, a space station, Guggenheim Mars? Basically any project involved in a renewed optimism and fervour for space exploration.

14. What are you doing at the moment?

MT: I am not very good at staying focussed on a particular task, so right now I am making some changes to the documentation for the Australian Peacekeeping Memorial, proofing photos of the Watsons Bay House, organising the Sydney leg of the Pecha Kucha for Haiti global fundraising tilt, updating my blog, reviewing fee proposals from engineers for a small addition to a house in Randwick, browsing the net.

15. Who would you most like to work with on a project?

MT: Stanley Kubrick would have been an incredible mind to work with for his single-mindedness, breadth of interest and obsessive research. And if they have to be living, Christopher Nolan is making blockbuster films that are deal with film structure and the city as a baroque playground as the backdrop for science fiction and contemporary myth making. Can I work on Batman 3?

Ashfield House

Australian Peace-keeping Memorial

North Sydney

UTS Broadway

Watson’s Bay House

I’d like to thank Marcus for participating in the interview, it was a pleasure. If you’re interested in getting in touch or finding out more about Super Colossal, e-mail marcus@supercolossal.ch

If you are interested in being interviewed and featured on Archi-Ninja, please contact me.

Australian Design Review (ADR) recently asked me to comment on how the Internet has affected design journalism, and what the future might hold for architectural criticism. You can check out the full article here, or pick up the April/May issue of Architectural Review Australia.

Congrats to one of my favourite local firms TERROIR who owns the cover with their project Burnie Maker’s Workshop.

Below is an extract from the article which summarises who I think is tomorrows architectural critic and it is partly reason that I’m so excited and enthusiastic about the future of our profession; real people, talking about real issues, in real time.

“In contrast to the current condition, today’s public is tomorrow’s critic. While Architectural magazines and print journals present criticism from a singular frame of reference, blogs with their multivalent, comment-heavy and user-participatory framework; offer an unconventional way of communicating Architectural ideas in a way that is as flexible as buildings are grounded, as provisional as structures are permanent.

Online culture and blogs have handed the reins of criticism over to the public – diluting the ‘hyper-theorised’ and ‘building-specific’ criticism that has dominated for the latter part of the previous century. Architectural criticism, in the hands of the public will evolve both the perception and practice of Architecture, by producing a design culture that is more immediate, more diverse, more responsive, more public, and more criticised than ever before.”

Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG recently suggested that Architecture’s students today didn’t necessarily grow up on Le Corbusier; they grew up on Ghostbusters and Half-Life 2”

I was far more concerned with BananaMan and Superted before I ever knew of Le Corbusier’s existence. Things larger that traditional concepts of Architecture like Cartoons, punk music, muscle cars, skateboarding and Pinky and the Brain continually influence my perception, practice and criticism of our profession.

I explain in the article “I didn’t set out to provide people with news and information, and I have no desire to compete with magazines or traditional media – I blog, rather, because I feel the desire to revolt, to find the obscure, to agitate, to be critical, to be self-critical, to expand and to question.”

Full Article Here. Narf!

Plan magazine is an architecture and interior design magazine straight out of Ireland and the UK.. In this month’s issue, they put a question out to design bloggers asking why they think blogs could change the way we understand and produce Architecture.

The following design bloggers were featured in the article:

‘The Pro’ – John Hill

Blogs: A Daily Dose of Architecture & A Weekly Dose of Architecture
Short Bio: John started his blog in 2004 as an outlet for discovering new Architecture.
Quote from the Article: “Blogs impact design in terms of how it is presented and disseminated rather than how buildings, spaces, objects, etc are actually designed. Computer software and economic and social changes have more of an impact on design than web pages presenting architects and buildings. If it does have a (positive) change it will stem from increased criticism about architectural production on blogs, not from the promotion of projects that are photogenic and therefore suitable for the www.”
Recent post: Monday, Monday – you should totally read these each week – John always packs them with really interesting reads!

‘The Ninja’ – Linda Bennett

Blogs: Archi-Ninja
Short Bio: Sydney based architecture student Linda Bennett is the author of Archi-Ninja, a discussion and critique of current architectural projects and ideas
Quote from the Article: “Unlike traditional media, blogs provide architects with an almost instant feedback loop that they can choose to use to their advantage (or disregard altogether). Design has become more immediate, more responsive, more public and more criticised than ever before. Blogs recognise ideas and respond to current concerns, therefore redefining the way we present and communicate architecture. I’d like to think that design and architecture will move forward more receptively as a result.”
Recent post: This post : )

‘The Rebel’ – George Agnew

Blogs: The Architecture of Fear
Short Bio: George started his blog three years ago originally as an extension of an independent study he was working on, and it continued to have it’s own life after he graduated. “The Architecture of Fear” publishes articles on architecture, war, art, terror, media, communication, design and destruction to create a relevant architectural theory on how we live our lives under the unconscious umbrella of fear and danger
Quote from the Article: “the profession of architecture has not traditionally been known for its transparency and I wonder with some of the more popular architecture blogs if they really give any insight to the actual process of architecture. It seems to me that most architecture blogs still focus on the end product and act as catalogues for some great work. That being said, more and more firms are using the blog as an extension of their practice in which case there is a real possibility to uncover how they work.”
Recent post: The Architecture of Authority

‘The Non-Architect’ – Régine Debatty

Blogs: we  make money not art
Short Bio: “we make money not art”, a blog that focuses on the intersection between culture, science and social issues.
Quote from the Article: “I find blogs to be a great platform for mixing emerging art with activism, mainstream art and architecture. Art and design magazines tend to put the usual suspects on their cover. If you want to discover the emerging scene you have to get your hands on indie magazines. If you are into activism then you really have to do loads of research till you find some paper or website that corresponds to your interest. I mix all that on my blog and I don’t care about the resulting chaos.”
Recent post: Synthetic Aesthetics, exploring the territory between art, design and synthetic biology

‘The Futurist’ – Geoff Manaugh

Blogs: BLDGBLOG
Short Bio: Los Angeles-based writer Geoff Manaugh provides architectural news and conjecture, heavily illustrated.
Quote from the Article: “There’s a real enthusiasm out there for Architectural ideas as well as a keen interest in expanding the available field of references. Architecture’s students today didn’t necessarily grow up on Le Corbusier; they grew up on Ghostbusters and Half-Life 2”
Recent post: Open (Landscapes of Quarantine) – a group exhibition exploring the spaces of quarantine, from Level 4 biocontainment labs to underground nuclear waste repositories.

So what do you think – Can blogs change the way we understand and produce Architecture? Please leave your thoughts in the comments below!

Nathalie de Vries founded MVRDV in 1991 together with Winy Maas and Jacob van Rijs. Early work such as the television centre Villa VPRO and the housing estate for elderly WoZoCo, both in the Netherlands, have lead to international acclaim and established MVRDV’s role in the international architecture scene.

MVRDV have recently been voted #44 of the worlds most innovative companies by Fast Company. I have always been fascinated with the work of MVRDV because of their radical methodical research: on density and on public realms. Nathalie de Vries lectures and teaches throughout the world.

Interviews Nathalie de Vries from MVRDV

1. Which of your projects has been the most rewarding and why?

N.DV: That is our realized work, but after five years or so. Not haunted anymore by what could or should have been, just seeing it in full use being a real addition to people’s daily lives. The architect is forgotten.

2. Your work is heavily underpinned by research and methodology, what is the primary motivation behind your work?

N.DV: Call it an attitude. This is part of our work, a way of dealing with the design process itself, and also a way to think beside and beyond the single commissions. Otherwise all architectural development would stagnate. What interests me is the challenge to fit all the different aspects and disciplines of the project together, like a complex jigsaw puzzle.

3. How do you think architecture will change in the next 50 years?

N.DV: The most important development is the growing urbanization of the world population. Most people will live in cities in the future, we need to meet this development by creating more capacity. Clever infrastructure, waste management, energy and food production will become a bigger part of architectural projects. In the same time we will see an increase in effectiveness: more re-use of materials and buildings. The future will look strangely familiar.

4. What changes would you like to see in the Architectural profession?

N.DV: We have seen a rapid change of our working tools in the past 20 years; architecture is thoroughly connected to all changes in information technology. But the development of new building techniques and materials has stayed behind. Probably architects in 50 years from now will still be designing buildings but using different parameters than now.

5. Do you think that Architecture tends to be trendy today?

N.DV: Architecture itself is now temporarily out of fashion. I don’t mind. I am still designing buildings.

6. What would students learn from reviewing the body of architectural projects you have completed? Do you have any advice for upcoming students?

N.DV: From our projects you can see that there is not an MVRDV style but an attitude, our work shares the same language as direct as possible, an agenda and attitude.

My advice to students would be: Take a look at what others have been doing and then do your own thing. You probably know better.

7. What are you most proud of in your career or any aspect of life?

N.DV: My best creations are my daughters. In architecture generally speaking I am proud of the way we are working today, our ever evolving process. The point of development we have reached and the kind of projects we are doing and the way we conceive them.

8. Who do you think is the most overrated architect, and who do you think deserves more credit/recognition?

N.DV: Anyone who beats us in a competition is overrated…why not choose us instead?

More recognition should be given to Herman Herzberger. He has influenced hundreds of Dutch architects with his intelligent teaching.

9. What aspect of Architecture do you find most important? What is fundamental to your practice and your design process?

N.DV: Happy clients are essential. Fundamentally we should be happy too and the project should make a difference and our design process should have evolved after each project.

10. What inspired you to become involved in Architecture? What inspires you now?

N.DV: I liked design, technique, politics, fashion and languages. I could not choose. Instead I chose to study architecture. In architecture I can use all my interests. There are no boundaries to what inspires me to design something. And in the end there has to be a building. That is a very clear task for someone who has difficulties in making choices. There is always a deadline.

11. What other interests do you have?

N.DV: Cities of course, literature, music, to give some examples: Favorite place in the world to me is the port of Rotterdam and Berlin. The favorite Book: Istanbul by Orhan Pamuk. Music: at the moment La Roux, the Killers, Kyteman, Zita Zwoon, Tinariwen.

12. What is your favourite time of the day, and why?

N.DV: For thinking, early morning with a cup of coffee, for designing afternoon in the office, and dinnertime for being with family and friends

13. What would be your ultimate design project?

N.DV: Upgrading and redesigning downtown Rotterdam and doing a couple of buildings as well.

14. What are you doing at the moment?

N.DV: Actually, we are working on parts of this dream right now in Rotterdam. Furthermore our current work is an exciting variety, it ranges from a public library to a bank headquarter and from an entire Chinese city to a small installation.

15. Who would you most like to work with on a project?

N.DV: In the past we have done a study for Vitra, a facility for a production line that was in the end not necessary. It was a nice experience and it would be great to work with Rolf Fehlbaum again.

Anyang Peak

Ypenburg Masterplan

Gwangyo Power Centre

Logrono Montecorvo Eco City

Motorcity Alcaniz

Philips Lighting Container

RVU

Brabant Library

MVRDV Book Giveaway!

Archi-Ninja and MVRDV have teamed up to give away 5 books titled ‘reading MVRDV’. The book examines the context of MVRDV’s research and radical design strategies. To win a copy all you have to do is answer the following question:

Which MVRDV project or concept is your favourite and why?

Leave your answers in the comment section below, my favourite answers will win.

I’d like to thank Nathalie for participating in the interview, it was a pleasure. If you’re interested in getting in touch or finding out more about MVRDV, e-mail office@mvrdv.nl

If you are interested in being interviewed and featured on Archi-Ninja, please contact me.

In a rapidly growing urban world, slums and informal settlements provide shelter for a sixth of the planet’s population and unless effective action is taken they are likely to become the most common form of dwelling on earth by 2030.

Parallel to this lies another inconvenient truth that architecture as a profession is affecting no more than 5% of what is built every year around the world.

This sounds like the loudest call for Architecture to re-assume its political content and broaden its field of action, or to eventually accept, as a discipline, its irrelevancy in facing new and inevitable urban challenges.

Id love to hear your thoughts in the comment section below. How can we address these urban conditions and  how do we make a difference?

This post was written by Nick Sowers. Nick is practicing the construction of space with sound and 2×4s in the SF Bay area. He is finishing an M.Arch at UC Berkeley this May after a year of traveling around the world studying militarized landscapes, bunkers, US bases, memorials, and more. Visit his blog

I first became interested in the intersection of sound and architecture while traveling in Japan in 2003. At Nijo Castle in Kyoto, Japan, there is a famous hallway which makes use of an uguisubari or Nightingale Floor. It’s a simple construction technique where nails are inserted in the floor-boards abutting a small metal bracket, so that it is impossible to walk on the floor without making it squeak. It was a passive ninja-defense system: assuming that a ninja would always find a way past the guards and into the palace, s/he would never get to the innermost chambers undetected.

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You can listen to a Nightingale Floor at Daikakuji, also in Kyoto, here:

If you are interested in sound, naturally you become interested in the technology of sound recording. I bought my first pair of binaural stereo microphones in 2004, a few months before beginning a trip to the Mediterranean. I had spent many hours listening to field recordings including one by a binaural recording enthusiast who walked around the San Francisco Bay over a 24 hour period and edited the piece down to about ten minutes. It was an experience unlike anything I had previously known. I was hooked by this ability for binaural field recording to collapse linear time while generating a consistent 3d image of space.

I went on to record the sounds of Islamic cities like Istanbul and Fez, Morocco. The most profound spaces were not in the bazaars but on the roofscape. The muezzin’s call to prayer in the early morning emanates from multiple minarets in and out of phase with each other, reflecting off of thousands of buildings before reaching my ears. This experience produced in me the desire to understand the urban soundscape. How could this phenomenon not only be described but designed?

There is a history, of course, to the design of soundscapes and it relates to when people started to realize “Hey, cities are loud and we should do something about it!”. The regulation and design of sound is an early 20th century phenomenon.

Emily Thompsen’s 2004 book The Soundscape of Modernity documents both the progression of noise abatement and the advancement of noise-absorbing materials. The culmination of this process is the Radio City Music Hall in New York City, where reverberation–the sonic signature of a space–is eliminated to the greatest degree possible, and instead the sound experience is mediated by the loudspeaker. The new field of acoustic science simultaneously made sound the subject of much architectural research and labeled sound as a deleterious effect, an unwanted agent like smoke or mold. (The decibel was invented at this time as a unit-less measure of sound intensity, describing the smallest change in volume that the human ear could detect.) By the 1930s many of the tools for measuring and controlling sound were in development, and the logical extreme was not that sound would be this highly scripted, celebrated quality of buildings but rather it would be regulated, mitigated, and divorced from the space in which it is heard. I have embarked upon a trajectory to challenge this tenet of Modern Architecture.

Once I had my pair of microphones, I began to hear things that I never realized I tuned out. Try this experiment: keeping the levels constant, record a string of experiences throughout a day, as you move through a city and in and out of buildings, and then play it back. You might discover that there is a wide spectrum of sound that our brains selectively eliminate. The act of recording foregrounds your peripheral hearing. Often the recording gives us too much spectral information, and we must go through a digital process to lift the intended sound out of the background noise. But what if instead of systematically eliminating that sound, we seek to amplify it, and to make sense of it.

While I was training my ears to open up to the rich texture of a city’s background noise, I made a discovery which still resonates with me today. This was at the Los Angeles Cathedral by the Spanish architect Rafael Moneo.

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The building is adjacent to the 101 freeway. The courtyard is separated from the freeway by a transparent noise barrier, engraved with angels (a holy noise barrier). I was walking around the courtyard, and then I approached the building, making my way to the entrance. I brushed past the exterior wall of the cathedral’s nave and almost missed a gentle rush of sound coming from above. I looked up at the projecting soffit, wondering what it was that I just heard.

I stood there dumbfounded. The sound of the freeway, defracting over the top of the barrier, was being reflected down into a band of space about one foot thick, maybe about six inches off of the face of the building. A personal sound-shower. How many other buildings contain surprises like this? I’m sure Moneo didn’t design this effect into the building, but it’s my favorite part. You’ll never read about it because everyone else was oohing and aahing over the alabaster windows.

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I’ve reached back into my archives and pulled out some recordings from that day. In this track I move from the outside into the courtyard where the sounds of the street can still be heard and then into the sanctified, noiseless space of the interior. The ceiling as you can see above is acoustically treated. The interior form has nothing to do with sound, except to eliminate it.

Designing with sound has never been something I fully considered until now. I remember sitting through the acoustics portion of building sciences in undergrad thinking “well this is interesting but if I do ever design an auditorium or a concert hall, I’ll just hire an acoustic engineer to figure this stuff out.” Like most consultants that the architect hires, their role is often subordinate, not partaking in the design process but rather left with extremely specific tasks like “figure out how I will light the lobby in this particular way.” So if sound is to be more of a player in the design of buildings, architects should be investigating its potentials, just as we obsess over light and visual phenomena through models and renderings. Juhani Pallasmaa has written extensively on the imbalance of seeing with respect to our other senses–touching, smelling, and hearing among them. But we still need to build the tools or adapt those that acoustic engineers use to produce specific effects. Sound in space is more than a poetic notion – it is an atmosphere which all of us inhabit, which can have unwanted health effects if unregulated. Sound is political. Sound is also a layer of construction in our cities.

As the artist James Turrell, like the architect Louis Kahn before him, considers light to be the ultimate building material, what is to be said of sound? I wonder if the end-game is to design a building with sound as the only material. A ‘Blur Building’ of noise. I call it a Soundscraper.