Finally, an urban informatics project I worked on that I can talk about here, even if it’s currently still ‘paper architecture’ (pixel architecture?). The nature of urban development is such that I can’t yet say much about recent design work on projects (including Masdar (with LAVA), Helsinki (with Sauerbruch Hutton/Experientia), and just yesterday Seoul (with Studio Libeskind) etc., as well as various others I can’t yet mention, and building/infrastructure-level projects in Brisbane and Sydney.)

This one though - the CLOUD - is being announced today, on the BBC, by the MIT press office, via its website, on Facebook, here at City of Sound, and elsewhere. We thought we’d try to share most of the details of the project. I think it speaks to a few new ideas of what a monument could be, what a contemporary design process can be, what a structure can be, what we can do with data, and so on.

(It’s also been on show in Sydney over the last month, as part of an AAA exhibition called ‘Remodelling Architecture’ at Customs House, curated by Gerard Reinmuth (Terroir) and Marcus Trimble (Super Colossal). This exhibition is, in theory, a presentation of recent work by ‘young emerging architects’ on the Sydney scene, so being included there is faintly amusing as I’m neither  ‘young’ nor an ‘architect’, though I suppose all of us (except Barack Obama?) are eternally in the process of ‘emerging’. Those of you in Sydney can see it, and great work by other locals such as Anthony Burke, Adrian Lahoud, Joanne Jakovich, David Burns et al, including a couple of projects we also contributed to to varying degrees: Masdar, again, with Chris Bosse’s LAVA, and some ideas for a UTS Broadway competition entry with Super Colossal.)

The CLOUD project is, in a nutshell:

“The CLOUD proposes an entirely new form of observation deck,connecting visitors to both the whole of London and the whole of the world, immersing them in the euphoric gusts of weather and digital data. Each individual footstep on the ascent to the CLOUD participates in a vast collective energy-harvesting effort. Everyone from around the world can contribute to the Cloud - whether by visiting or by sponsoring an LED, helping to keep the Olympic lamp aflame.” [From the CLOUD website]

Before I go further, I should say this was a massively multidisciplinary team effort, running across 15 different teams/contributors in almost as many cities (a note on the design process to follow, based on the visualisation you can see on p.3 of the exhibition boards linked to below). The architecture is largely by Carlo Ratti, Walter Nicolino, Atmos, SENSEable City Lab et al, with the amazing visualisations by London-based GMJ and graphic design by Studio FM Milano. The artist Tomas Saraceno was heavily involved in the conceptual work. Structural engineering was Schaich Bergermann und Partner (of Munich Olympic stadium fame, amongst others) with numerous other engineering services by my colleagues here at Arup in Sydney and in London. Google were on board, as were landscape architects Agence Ter. The advisors included Umberto Eco, William J. Mitchell, Chris Bangle and others. The full team is detailed here, and I thought Carlo Ratti put it nicely when he said in an email, “Our team is a bit like a cloud - nothing to do with the traditional idea of promethean architects and artists. As such, it’s important to me that the project comes out as a collaborative effort.”

Carlo, who readers may recall from an earlier interview here, pulled everything together and deserves huge credit as benevolent ringleader, creative inspiration and driving force, nonetheless.

Within that team effort, the project lent me an opportunity to explore many of the concepts I’ve been developing on the aforementioned (and not-mentioned) projects, ranging from the ideas of the ‘civic scale smart meter’ creating feedback loops for human activity, with data drawn from wide arrays of sensors (in the widest sense of the word), to realising this on at a ‘land-art’ scale and so exploring civic relationships with urban systems rather than individual relationships, via data visualisation amongst other things. Many, though not all, of the concepts core to my urban informatics work at Arup got an outing here, as I was primarily involved in the conceptual design of the overall thing, working closely with Carlo Ratti and Alex Haw in particular. Some of the discrete system ideas included augmented reality overlaid onto the city, but from a viewing platform that enables entire urban systems to be articulated. This structure could also be as digital as it was physical, and later discussions centred around an ongoing iterative design process for urban fabric.

Strategically I was also interested in foregrounding the idea of ‘re-industrial cities’, in which contemporary manufacturing returns to cities, partly through visualising patterns of production in cities - and in curating data we are choosing what stories to tells - but also ensuring that the manufacturing of the structure itself is done as locally as possible. (I’m proud we sourced, albeit at high level for the pitch, British manufacturers for the project.) Oh, and all that stuff about drizzle, Turner, Constable etc. was largely my doing I think. Apologies, Mother Country.

Overall, it was, of course, a chance to explore an interactive, responsive architecture at a scale beyond a building, somewhat in the spirit of Buckminster Fuller’s Geoscope, Archigram’s Living City, Yona Friedman’s Ville Spatiale, and many other projects I’ve found inspirational over the years. Credit where it is due.

To communicate the project, Studio FM Milano have built a website for the project, which contains a large amount of the presentation material produced for the pitch. You’ll find images of course, but the texts also contain some useful background information.

I thought I’d share the (A1) boards I designed for the exhibition (6.4mb), as they do a decent job of conveying the project from my angle. (You can download that, but I’ve also extracted the text I wrote for the boards and included it at the end of this entry. Again the amazing background images here are the renders produced by GMJ based on the designs produced by the architectural side of the team.)

Unbeknownst to me, Carlo + team, Alex Haw (Atmos) and others had been thinking similar thoughts as those contained above - and had in fact moved it forwards by a huge degree, importantly, developing something buildable - and the concept came together remarkably quickly and coherently.

I usually produce work in a different way - by sketching and designing spaces, basic structures or products, detailed interface and interaction designs; or writing 'design fiction' to convey how urban experiences might change - but here I was working in a far more conceptual mode. Doing concept design, strategic design - I'm not quite sure what to call it. When working at the urban scale, or doing urban strategy, I sometimes produce these kind of outputs, those kind of diagrammatic scribbles and pulled references, but it was interesting to play this role on a building project - albeit for a particular kind of building. I guess it's a structure working at an urban scale.

A lot of the text at the the CLOUD website is an amalgamation of all our thoughts, but I must say Alex Haw in particular proved extremely adept at weaving meaning and poetry from the numerous concepts at play here. It was a great pleasure to work with him on both this and the digital design/interaction models, as it was with Carlo and the rest of the team.

The CLOUD website

Text on the CLOUD from Remodelling Architecture exhibition boards follows. Written for a public architecture exhibit in Sydney, so please bear that in mind:

This is the story of a design process more than a built outcome. Iit might articulate a new idea of what a monument can be, as well as exploring several emerging aspects of urban informatics and outlining how design can be increasingly distributed across time and space. 

Carlo Ratti assembled a team, including myself, to create a form of monument for the 2012 Olympic Games in London. The project team never assembled in its entirety at any point in the 2-month process. Indeed, I never met anyone regarding the project, working on all aspects via email and Skype (though I knew Carlo previously, and several of my colleagues at Arup of course). The project team grew rapidly, ultimately scattered across 15 different cities.

Design should be a humble trade. Hence the focus on the team, the ideas, and the story. They are, in this case, all the design consists of.

Given the site was East London, my thoughts quickly turned to rain, of course. In particular, the landscape and history as explored in JMW Turner’s paintings. Dealing with the sublime (and monumental) yet through the ethereal, ephemeral and environmental, these paintings suggest light, pale and wan with sudden shards of gold, swollen clouds, billowing steam and fierce winds, engineering and technology, harnessing energy, event, spectacle. They are deeply rooted in the English landscape. (Also, the English obsession with weather.) 

The landscape here is also unique: flat, wet, crushed under vast clouded skies. The Thames Estuary in particular is astonishingly beautiful, in a Northern European sense. The environmental characteristics are rich too: cloud, storms, spray, mist, smoke, fog. Again, Turner’s paintings spring to mind. Working with clouds seemed like a promising lead.

The site’s history is rich and evocative. It emerged as a key component of London in its pomp, as the ‘workshop of the world’, when the city was the last European iteration of Jacques Attali’s nine ‘core’ post-Enlightenment mercantile cities. He describes London from 1788-1890 as powered by steam, the British Empire massively expanded by energy, speed, industry and innovation, connecting the city to the world.

My own practice is largely concerned with urban informatics — drawing patterns from the urban experience and projecting them back into that experience, in order to reveal how the city is performing. This is often related to urban sustainability, in the widest sense, attempting to make the invisible visible in meaningful ways.

I saw an opportunity to develop my ongoing interest in the idea of the ‘civic-scale smart meter’ — a structure that acts as a real-time feedback loop on the performance of urban activity within a civic framework. I’ve explored this idea in several recent projects, yet this gave an opportunity to work with a richness of data, given Google as partners, which is generally unavailable in the urban landscape. Likewise, the Olympics Games would cast a long ‘digital shadow’.

I thought of a three-level structure initially. A responsive middle layer moves and is lit in response to patterns of data, a glowing net-like structure held aloft on diaphanous threads, as if data-streams, gently floating and swaying in the wind. LED ‘twine’ forms guy-lines and connects the data to earth and to energy-gathering kites above. Possibly inflatable, from earth it looks like cloud-like (and so nods to the idea of cloud computing, as well as the landscape.)

Unbeknownst to me, Carlo, Alex and team had been working on similar thoughts, imagining a supported balloon structure also with kites. The team quickly aligned these thoughts to suggest an elevated cloud-like structure, extrapolated from Tomas Saraceno’s artworks, its form embedded with data as well as people.

Data is to be drawn from the Olympic Games in real-time, telling particular stories — of industry, energy, innovation and connectivity — as well as of the basic facets of the Games themselves. This data could be visualised as ambiguous spectacle, using the effects most redolent with the landscape and locale (cloud, smoke, steam, fog, mist, water, wind, mechanical engineering, data). The Cloud physically twists and ripples in response to data patterns captured from environmental sensors placed around the grounds, data scraped from web activity, drawn from mobile carriers in real-time, interpreting audio to discern the different languages being spoken, acting as a giant scoreboard floating above the events, detects the viewing and listening figures around the games in real-time, explores the behaviour of localised weather systems, projects the global internet traffic to and from the Lea Valley, forms a gigantic smart meter for Stratford and surrounds at civic scale, and so on and so on.

In this way, it takes aggregate individual patterns and reveals them at civic scale, thus binding the city’s activity together via a gentle ambient drizzle of data.

There are two sides to the interaction, both predicated on the physical experience of the Cloud augmented with data. 

The first mode foregrounds the structure. The Cloud’s experience is physical, visceral — about altitude, atmosphere, exposure to the climate. People are in and on the translucent bubbles of the Cloud. Yet its skin is threaded with an addressable 3D matrix of LED lighting, forming a glowing membrane capable of displaying broadcast video or abstract visualisation. It ripples in response to data and presence of people, such that the Cloud feels alive to the touch. This integration of the display layer with structure means the physical cloud itself can be free of everything except structure. Secondly, while people climb the Cloud and stand amidst the glowing data, augmented reality interfaces create a further interaction layer, overlaying visualisations and media onto the Cloud’s view of London. This layer can project real-time energy data over the city, reveal the medal table hovering over the stadium, depict the Lea Valley as it was a century ago, and so on.

I was also interested in the rich industrial history of this site, and the need to build a productive post-Olympics legacy. So we explored how The Cloud could be a showpiece of contemporary manufacturing, a process that produces reams of data rather than plumes of smoke. Yet we could visualise these new smokestacks, exposing the seams of production in order to subtly bend the trajectory of London’s economy towards a more diverse base. The narrative thus outlines a possible future of production in a Britain that has been systematically denuded of manufacturing industries. In curating data to display, we are describing possible trajectories, affecting the stories that a place tells about itself.

Finally, a structure so entwined with software, its architecture dissolving in behaviour, means that its design is an ongoing process, and so distributed further over time, closer to industrial design or service design than traditional architecture. And as with almost all such projects, there is no sole author here, and I was certainly only one small part of this complex design (the conceptual side was driven by CarloRattiAssociati, Atmos, Tomas Saraceno and myself.) The full team is listed above, overlaid with a visualisation of project emails to/from my in-box, plotted over time and space, leading up to submission of the first stage design proposal.

My flight from Brisbane to Sydney had been delayed en route, due to 60kph winds at Sydney leaving only one runway operational, and so the plane was directed into a holding pattern. Presumably we were stacked alongside other aircraft, though none were visible.

The Australian landscape had also disappeared into the gloom of evening surprisingly quickly outside the window, a gigantic land mass suddenly and easily secreted away. On take-off from Brisbane, ascending above the mangroves and oil refineries at the mouth of the Brisbane River an hour earlier, the lower stratosphere of South East Queensland had been suffuse with a yellowy haze from the dust storms apparently now firmly ensconced along the east coast. But now the view out of the thick starboard window was complex in composition and banal in content, a multi-layered montage of grime and moisture in the foreground, vast inhuman darkness pocked by the odd spot of light in the background, and my trousers reflected in the cabin reading light somewhere in-between.

The delay, which again reminds me of the brittle nature of the oft-inappropriately-named civil aviation (and the essentially unsustainable nature of domestic commercial aviation in the long run), does however give me enough time to both start and finish Alain de Botton’s A Week at the Airport, his account of spending, well, a week at the airport, as writer-in-residence at Heathrow’s Terminal 5, courtesy of BAA. 

To my mild surprise, I enjoyed it hugely.

I’d picked it up at Brisbane airport’s sorry-excuse-for-a-bookshop, like I had previously picked up Jacques Attali’s A Brief History of the Future and Stephen Carrol’s The Art of the Engine Driver, both of which had also been enjoyable - a decent hit-rate from a poor shop, so far. De Botton’s is a small book, like those I referenced here, and that too was in its favour. (The book is also punctuated by rather nice documentary photographs by Richard Baker.)

I’ve had issues with De Botton’s work in the past, most of which are too nebulous to articulate, or indeed dwell on. But constraining the man in this format - literally constraining him to one location, and then to the format of a short book - seems to have worked. There’s a focus and passion to the writing, at least in his reserved English-Swiss style, that is also insightful and, at a few points, genuinely affecting. It’s also funny.

De Botton can be critiqued for lack of critique. He’s about as far from the ‘intellectual as attack dog’ that you recall Denis Healey’s description of Geoffrey Howe - “like being savaged by a dead sheep” - which would actually be rather unpleasant, when you think about it. Yet behind the pale visage and courteously benign manner there does lurk a subtle critique of sorts. In this context - Heathrow - he repeatedly points out the associated externalities (destruction of green belt, carbon emissions, noise, negative first impressions of Britain, and so on). But they’re expressed as mere descriptors rather than sustained critique. Put simply, he doesn’t stick the boot in and he clearly could’ve done.

Perhaps with this in mind, he addresses the issue of his patron, BAA, right away, and does so carefully, thoughtfully, and with humour. He’s intensely aware of his delicate position here, and the power structures around him. He partly suggests that the new economic reality of the publishing industry has made him consider this alternative, and ancient, business model. I’m not sure that’s relevant - it’s a well-understood model, and we can judge the book on its merits, reading between lines as we see fit. I think once given the green light to say what he likes - and as mentioned above, BAA have chosen a writer that is hardly going to stick the boot in; at worst, a thin smile disguising a delicate stiletto nick - de Botton would clearly jump at the chance of this commission.

And who wouldn’t? Airports are fascinating places, and emblematic tokens of our civilisation. This last year has been a year of flying for me. I’ve probably done over 2000 km per week for the last year, on average (with an appropriately hideous carbon footprint as a result) and so I’ve overly familiar with certain of these spaces. But curiously, I still enjoy them, as places. They perform a compression of so many things the experience is both everyday (almost) and surreal simultaneously.

And de Botton picks apart that paradox from almost every angles one can imagine. In fact, his starting point is that the airport is essentially the emblematic human structure:

“In a world full of chaos and irregularity, the terminal seemed a worthy and intriguing refuge of elegance and logic. It was the imaginative centre of contemporary culture Had one been asked to take a Martian to visit a single place that neatly captures the gamut of themes running through our civilisation - then it would have to be to the departures and arrivals halls that one would head.”

A Week at the Airport is not as learned or as deep as David Pascoe’s rich cultural audit Airspaces (part of the brilliant Topographics series). Then again, it’s not one quarter as long. But Pascoe’s book does dwell on a figure that is absent at the feast here. The one figure who would really explore a space such as this, suggesting its essence through an entirely different mode, and thus via all the angles one would not imagine. A figure whose relatively recent absence is felt all the more keenly when reading this book.

Ballard.

“In Ballard’s utopian vision, even the curtain-walling of the terminal buildings and the multi-storey car-parks behind them belonged to an enchanted domain; such houses ‘of glass, of flight and possibility’ are, according to the narrator (whose surname happens to be Ballard), ‘the departure point for our own lives and deaths’. Almost a quarter of a century later, this stark view of airspace seems unchanged: ‘Airports and airfields have always held a special magic, gateways to the infinite possibilities that only the sky can offer.’” [From Airspaces, by David Pascoe]

Anyway. Back down to earth, and de Botton’s book will have to suffice.

A few notes and quotes.

A central theme is the (accurate, I think) impression that few industries are as “vulnerable to disaster” as commercial aviation, but that this leads essentially to a kind of pervasive frustration running through much of the experience. Here, the business simply cannot win. It is perpetually teetering on the the edge of delivering failure. All that changes is the scale of ‘disaster’. The fact that you’ve been delivered safely to and from 25000 feet is conveniently ignored by passengers in favour of being miffed by the size of the taxi queue, or by being infuriated by a mildly officious attendant at the check-in desk, or sitting for hours on the runway due to pre-departure engine failure at Bangkok, or by one’s luggage flying to Belgrade while you fly to Buenos Aires. Focusing on these smaller ‘disasters’ is perhaps a way of dealing with the extreme nature of the experience of flying, and the everyday aversion of real disaster by these incredible systems of technology and people. The whole act is too surreal to think too deeply about - so people don’t, generally rejecting thoughts about how precariously they’re travelling by distracting themselves with the more mundane and everyday breakdowns in a system that’s far too complex to run smoothly. (This perhaps necessary obfuscation is also why Brian Eno’s Music for Airports will rarely actually be played at airports.)

He is particularly good on the peculiar sense of pervasive yet largely internalised tension created by the emotional and psychological pressures of airports. He makes a series of acute observations predicated on this interplay between banal environment and heightened emotional intensity. Perhaps it’s that the situations are indeed essentially emotionally intense, often being a series of greetings and goodbyes, set to the backdrop of persistent minor failures of complex systems amidst the possibility of major disasters. It’s quite a brew. De Botton wryly skewers this extraordinary emotional confection, describing the long goodbyes of couples or the simmering cauldrons that are families on holiday.

“We may spend the better part of our professional lives projecting strength and toughness, but we are all in the end creatures of appalling fragility and vulnerability. Out of the millions of people we live among, most of whom we habitually ignore and are ignored by in turn, there are always a few who hold hostage our capacity for happiness, whom we could recognise by their smell alone and whom we would rather die than be without. There were men pacing impatiently and blankly who had looked forward to this moment for half a year and could not restrain themselves any further at the sight of a small boy endowed with their own grey-green eyes and their mother’s cheeks, emerging from behind the stainless-steel gate, holding the hand of an airport operative.”

Oddly, given de Botton’s various stated predilections there is comparatively little direct focus on the architecture. (Just as a visit to British Airways’ Customer Experience Division reveals less than I’d hoped.) He doesn’t ignore it, several times pausing to praise the immense interior and its engineering (by Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners and — disclosure alert — Arup et al), but he doesn’t really take it apart spatially for us.

Nevertheless, he does offer a lovely, hopeful point about the function of the architecture to stamp a version of Britain onto visitors’ minds.

“The structure was proposing a new idea of Britain, a country that would be reconciled to technology, that would no longer be in thrall to its past, that would be democratic, tolerant, intelligent, playful and lacking in spite or irony. All this was a simplification, of course: twenty kilometres to the west and north were tidy hamlets and run-down estates that would once have contravened any of the suggestions encoded in the terminal’s walls and ceilings.

Nevertheless, like Geoffrey Bawa’s Parliament in Colombo or Jørn Utzon’s Opera House in Sydney, Richard Rogers’s Terminal 5 was applying the prerogative of all ambitious architecture to create rather than merely reflect an identity. It hope to use the hour or so when passengers were within its space — objectively, to have their passports stamped and to recover their luggage — to define what the United Kingdom might one day become, rather than what it too often is.”

This is a fine assessment of an ambitious architecture: ambition explored in terms of attempted strategic aspiration rather than simple programme or form.

There’s a fascinating note on the entire point of civil aviation - and how simple economic measurement is not a ‘fair’ judge of the business, as if it were almost an art-form instead. This comes during a chat with Wille Walsh, CEO of British Airways. Perhaps his artwork had begun to leak and engulf his entire surroundings by this point; in a peculiarly infrastructural case of Stockholm syndrome.

"Considered collectively, as a cohesive industry, civil aviation has never in its history shown a profit. Just as significantly, neither had book publishing. In this sense, then, the CEO and I, despite our apparent differences, were in much the same sort of business, each one needing to justify itself in the eyes of humanity not so much by its bottom line as by its ability to stir the soul. It seemed as unfair to evaluate an airline according to the profit-and-loss statement as to judge a poet by her royalty statements. The stock market could never put an accurate price on the thousands of moments of beauty and interest that occurred around the world every day under an airline’s banner: it could not describe the sight of Nova Scotia from the air, it had no room in its optics for the camaraderie enjoyed by employees in the Hong King ticket office, it had no means of quantifying the adrenalin thrill of take-off.”

As someone fascinated by measurement - or value - of non-quantatitative experiential criteria - such as the urban experience - I whole-heartedly agree, particularly as I spend so much time flying over Oceania, with the aforementioned dust clouds over South-East Queensland coast, the peculiar terra-forming of the Gold Coast, the drab brown wrinkles of Victorian terrain, the startling skeins of Sydney harbour and the wriggle of the Parramatta river.

Yet this is also overly-romantic tosh, for if this were the case, and airlines were more akin to literature or equivalent, then surely airlines would offer a far more interesting experience. The problem with civil aviation - one of them - is that it is run as a business to a very tight profit-and-loss statement, and so tends to cut as many corners as possible. It’d be fascinating to idly speculate how, over and above a baseline of completely safe operation, civil aviation would be a different experience if it were seen as a subsidised art form. Something more akin to the Pan Am in 2001: A Space Odyssey perhaps …

Some general asides occur, including this one on how productively he was able to work at a nondescript desk installed in the middle of the the busy departure hall. As a fan of working in public spaces like libraries and cafes, I wholeheartedly agree with the following: 

“Objectively good spaces to work rarely end up being so; in their faultlessness, quiet and well-equipped studios have a habit of rendering the fear of failure overwhelming. Original thoughts are like shy animals. We sometimes have to look the other way - towards a busy street or terminal - before they run out of their burrows.”

On the influence of literature on essence of place, while browsing in WH Smith:

“Milan Kundera was being suggested as a guide to Prague, and Raymond Carver depended upon to reveal the hidden character of the small towns between Los Angeles and Santa Fe. Oscar Wilde once remarked that there had been less fog in London before James Whistler started to paint, and one wondered if the silence and sadness of isolated towns in the American West had not been similarly less apparent before Carver began to write.”

My own impressions of T5 tally with de Botton’s to a large extent, for what it’s worth. It’s an impressive space, and generally beautifully equipped. Some rough edges - as it’s not actually Munich or Tokyo - but essentially it does single-handedly lift Heathrow from one of the worst cultural assimilation experiences in the world, to one of the better ones. However, to me, the retail mix seemed entirely out of kilter with the times, as I briefly noted before. I remember gawping at unit after unit of Prada, Harrods; Dior; Mappin & Webb; Gucci, Mont Blanc; Smythson; Tiffany & Co and the like. All predictably empty; nothing in the middle range. 

De Botton does talk about retail, and the considerable amount of retail that T5 entails:

“…(M)ore than one hundred separate retail outlets vied for the attention of travellers - a considerably greater number than were to be found in the average shopping centre. This statistic regularly caused critics to complain that Terminal 5 was more like a mall than an airport, though it was hard to determine what might be so wrong with this balance, what precise aspect of the building’s essential aeronautic identity had been violated or even what specific pleasures had been robbed of, given that we are inclined to visit malls even when they don’t provide us with the additional pleasure of a gate to Johannesburg.”

(I don’t like lazy use of ‘we’ in that last sentence.) But fair enough. Yet those complaints are actually quite straightforward, and perhaps the converse of what de Botton says I.e. there is no particular connection between flying and retail either. Hence the odd fit. De Botton does actually get to the bottom of this, in his own way, after an observation on religion, a chat with the airport priest, and by once again invoking the ever-present potential of imminent death. He suspects that duty free shopping bags are the last things one wants to surround oneself with when “setting thy house in order” before dying; that it might reveal an uncomfortable truth about the role of consumption in contemporary society - that we should place retail at the heart of what might be a final resting place; that the act of flying is a near divine, eternal experience. It’s a morbid, elegiac thought, and hardly one that will consciously run through the retail planners at BAA, but perhaps at the heart of this almost subconscious discomfort.

Lest you imagine him tramping around in a post-consumerist rage, on the very next page de Botton succumbs to the pleasures of the terminal’s first class lounge - the Concorde Room, presumably named without irony - which he describes as “humblingly and thought-provokingly nicer than anywhere else I had ever seen at an airport, and perhaps in my life.”

Finally, de Botton reflects again on his project:

“I worried that I might never have another reason to leave the house. I felt how hard it is for writers to look beyond their domestic experience. I dreamt of other possible residencies in institutions central to modern life - banks, nuclear power stations, governments, old people’s homes - and of a kind of writing that could report on the world while still remaining irresponsible, subjective and a bit peculiar.”

I like this last phrase, reminding me as it does of the work of some of my favourite writers. De Botton’s not in that list, yet, but this small book is peppered with interesting thoughts, observations and references nonetheless, not all of which I agree with or find resonant but which spurred numerous thoughts of my own, and continue to do so.

I said farewell to my family at Sydney airport today, as they went up to Brisbane for a few days, and felt the acute and immediate longing and loss that is occurring right now to people at airports all over the world. I’m getting on a plane tomorrow morning to fly to Hong Kong and then Beijing, where I expect to discover a quite different airport experience altogether.

A Week at the Airport, by Alain de Botton [Amazon UK | US]

I've been meaning to post more on this theme for a while - it's partly one of those entries that is really a 'note to self'. But when Timo Arnall and Jack Schulze posted their fascinating research into visualising the (otherwise invisible) characteristics of RFID last night, it prompted me to hit 'publish'.

Their research piece Immaterials is quite lovely, exploring the spatial qualities of RFID in terms of its readable volume, captured with a simple LED/sensor and camera. Here's their video, in which they explain more:

(As well as the conceptual backdrop, outlined in more detail by both Timo and Jack, I particularly like the care and attention they've given to the visualisation, and the presentation of the research. This is quality design.)

In their work I even see something of the early experiments of, say, Benjamin Franklin and Nikola Tesla in terms of understanding the behaviour of electricity, such that it can then be tamed, conducted, and put to work. It's perhaps drawing a long bow to make that comparison, but it feels like a similar sentiment. Whilst electricity is hardly invisible, there is a sense of trying to understand such immaterial phenomena through prototyping and experimentation. (And again, while some would see that as the province of science, it's also the contemporary purpose of design.)

(In this particularly fine image, we see Tesla's friend Mark Twain conducting high-frequency high voltage current, bringing a lamp to incandesce. Tesla is lurking in the background.)

Part of the purpose behind Immaterials is to understand more about RFID in terms of an emerging 'material knowledge', as Timo put it, from the designer's perspective. But perhaps also in order to raise awareness of a technology which is essentially invisible - and often feared - such that we can better understand it, and so make informed choices. It's similar to my own far sketchier work exploring the shape of the wi-fi at the State Library of Queensland (written up here) - if you could perceive the phenomenon of wireless internet as a physical space, what might it look like? (It'd be more interesting to ask what it feels like, actually.)

Despite the fact that it suggests the already massively overused term "making the invisible visible", I'm particularly interested in tapping into the content in such transactions, as well as their materiality/immateriality, as a way of understanding patterns of behaviour in what I'm calling the new soft city. 

Closing the loop then means finding a way of exhibiting these invisible phenomena back in physical space. In an email exchange with Jack last night, I suggested that we might see such blooms or halos sparking as transit card-carrying passengers walk through ticket barriers in subway stations (I'm currently working on informatics for a subway project; it was front-of-mind). Jack had already put it thus:

"Having produced these visualisations, I now find myself mapping imaginary shapes to the radio enabled objects around me. I see the yellow Oyster readers with plumes of LED fluoro-green fungal blossoms hanging over them – and my Oyster card jumping between them, like a digital bee cross-pollinating with data as I travel the city."

As well as the wi-fi research, I've also been fascinated by capturing existing everyday examples of how the city assesses invisible or hidden characteristics of its infrastructure.

I've been taking photos of people who appear to be sensing the city - in the broadest, er, sense of the phrase. The following shots are from Sydney and Los Angeles, and indicate the more quotidian, prosaic activities involved in instrumenting and monitoring the city - from surveyors to telecoms operators, from vans counting passing traffic to guys probing underground pipes, from markings on streets indicating what's underneath to this peculiar footage of what looks like someone using a sonovac but is probably just a device checking for cables.

I've created a public group at Flickr called Sensing the City, so if you have similar photos, do add them there. I'd be interested to see what turns up. 

While it's a very different sensibility and approach to the aforementioned explorations of radio frequencies - it's often a very material city, rather than immaterial; just hidden - in the context of discussions around instrumenting the fabric of our cities via urban informatics it's interesting to consider how much of this already occurs on our streets. And despite being marked by traffic cones and fluorescent work jackets it's become an invisible activity, somewhat ironically, for passers-by. These people are sensors.

I recently helped secure a 3-year research project, part-funded by the Australia Research Council, with Queensland University of Technology, Arup, Beijing Academy of Science and Technology, Creative 100, China Executive Leadership Academy Pudong, and Communication University of China. The outcomes of the project are likely to feature here a fair bit, all being well, as it crosses over with many perennial concerns (role of design in an economy and culture, return of production to urban centres, informatics to express often invisible knowledge work, new ways of living in cities, the new global focus of the Pacific, and so on and so on). 

The project currently has the less than snappy title: "Soft infrastructure, new media and creative clusters: developing capactiy in China and Australia". (Yes, we'll get a better title when we start the project blog and conduct a public launch in Bejing shortly.)

So watch this space for further updates - but I wanted to post a quick note about a vacancy on the project. We’re looking for a smart researcher to work on the project, which should also involve undertaking a Phd. Dr Justin O’Connor, author of the excellent Shanghai Diaries I carried here a few years ago and now at QUT, is the person to ask for more information (contact details here).

In terms of the project, we're interested in the 'creative cluster' model in urban development* and how that's being developed in Chinese cities, initially focusing on Shanghai, Beijing and Qingdao (though we'll be comparing and contrasting with Australian cities to some extent, and running workshops in both China and Australia throughout the course of the project). Part of the context here is the rapidly developing capacity in creative industries in Chinese cities, and how the cluster model fits or doesn't, or is translated/adapted, in these cities, and what conditions are required for such urban environments to thrive. 

We've described those conditions as a 'soft infrastructure', such that we can explore everything from the 'structure of feeling' to business networking culture; the milieu, cultural history and urban design; the facilities, amenities and events, property development and business models, and so on.

And particularly from my perspective, soft infrastructure includes the way that urban informatics can help shape the identity of a city by identifying, exploring and expressing patterns of real-time activity in knowledge-based work - partly, the 'new smokestacks' idea I've been pursuing for a while (I'm also wanting to ensure that the knowledge industry definition is broadened to include actual physical production, making, craft, predicated on the resurgence of light manufacturing via CNC, prototyping etc. The kind of thing I hinted at in my piece on microphone manufacturers Røde, and elsewhere.) But it would also include new planning models, responsive urban systems, the particularly fluid approach to the ICT infrastructure and so on.

I'm personally excited to be submerging myself into the culture of Chinese cities first hand now. With that in mind, I'll also briefly mention I'm speaking at the World Design Congress in Beijing (English version / Chinese version) at the end of this month. It looks like a design conference on a truly fantastic scale, with great speakers and events - another example of the cultural leapfrog? Do come along and say hello, if you're in town.

* By creative clusters we mean areas of city that develop as concentrations of 'creative industries', emergent or designed. For example, clusters might be typically be described as neighbourhoods or districts like Shoreditch in London, Lower East Side of NYC, Belleville or Marais in Paris, Naviglio in Milan, Temple Bar in Dublin, Northern Quarter of Manchester, perhaps 798 Art Zone or Caochongdi in Beijing etc. Or they could be led by a particular development or network, such as M50 in Shanghai, or Creative 100 in Qingdao etc. Or even different models like Singapore's Mediapolis etc. Of course, the definition and ideology behind all of this is open to critique, which we won't overlook.

There was much to chew on in terms of show's ideas and implications, even though I wasn't even able to see it in person. I've offered what I hope is a constructive critique below, yet found that I couldn't address the subject without really addressing the role of architecture more broadly. And though I only really touched on that it's not a topic one can get in and out of quickly or, indeed, unscathed.

Toward the Sentient City, New York

This show does nothing less than delineate a possible future trajectory for architecture, in which it remains relevant in the development of 'sentient cities', put frankly. It also implicitly indicates how far architecture has to go to do so. 

Curated by Mark Shepard and organised by the Architectural League of New York, who through their various events and podcasts are doing as much as any architecture organisation worldwide to grasp the possibilities of the internets, the exhibition runs at the Urban Center. For those who aren’t a subway ride from Madison Avenue, the League’s website smartly and straightforwardly organises more details on the commissions themselves in the context of other writers’ responses, of which this is one, curatorial statements, an open archive, public programs, tweets etc. Interviews are distributed via Urban Omnibus, another fine initiative from the League. Whilst a little more activity could’ve been nurtured on further outer rings of content like YouTube or architecture-oriented discussion sites, it really is a very impressive body of work around a theme, and a great example of how to use the internet to stimulate informed discussion.

Enough meta. The content of the show itself, including the various supporting statements, is also generally impressive, hinting at the new possibilities for architecture enabled by urban informatics, or the increasing impact of networked, real-time, data-driven and responsive/interactive systems on physical objects and spaces.

I hope what follows is a constructive critique, during which I’ll try to address the questions implicitly asked by this probing exhibition, such as what architecture is for. Bear with me.

Few commissions here are actually that radical, which makes one wonder about the role of such an exhibition - is it to display the currents running through urban development or to suggest the avant-garde, to convey where a field of practice might go next? To someone working directly in the field, the show contains ideas that are actually already in production, or at least very close to commission and development, on mainstream urban development projects. For instance, over the last 18 months, on urban development projects in Helsinki, Sydney, Masdar, and Brisbane, Arup Informatics has been producing designs for water-borne water quality sensors, co-working infrastructures, smart street furniture, tagged urban agriculture and so on, often using similar technologies.

What’s different of course is the critical nature of these ‘… Sentient City’ works, beyond mere technical similarities. Outside of the stunted rat race of property development, the contested terrains of urban renewal, or even the more benevolent ballet of urban design, these exhibits can explore themes that actual ‘stakeholders’ (in the crude language of the business) would find unpalatable, frivolous or uncomfortably close to a few home truths, perhaps.

In doing so, just as  with Dunne and Raby’s ‘critical design’ examples, they provoke important questions about the business, the nature of urban design, and the role of civic space and urban infrastructure in the 21st century. Certainly, as a practising designer in the field, the show has made me think more deeply about the work. Job done in that respect.

Yet I’m left wondering whether they exhibits go far enough, across a number of axes.

The first is a minor point: that technical axis. Again, there is little here that is genuinely pushing at a boundary. Though technical bravura is clearly far less important than meaning at this point, a show such as this might have had more of an imperative to prototype beyond the charted terrain a little. But perhaps one commission might have explored, say, an indication of how how a membrane of responsive systems over the city might drive shifts in physical fabric, via shape-memory alloys or the seductive surfaces implied by the BMW GINA prototype, for instance. (The Living have some previous here, with their Living Glass project.) Or perhaps another commission might have exploited the current explosion of interest in augmented reality applications concerning urban space and activity. (Having said that, for all AR’s promise, I have a hunch there’s more meaning in informational experiences that are more directly physical and embodied, and that this is where architecture may have real value.)

Another axis would be around the process of building in urban space, and how that may change through pervasive use of advanced digital technologies. The more iterative, responsive, data-driven, fabrication and prototyping methodologies of industrial design and interaction design are within reach of some elements of architecture and planning, just, yet there is little discussion of their implications here.

Finally, a further axis would be the positioning of architecture itself: do these exhibits outline ways in which architects can increase their sphere of influence in order to help shape more productive, sustainable, equitable or engaging cities? This might include strategically using advanced technologies and informed urbanism to increasingly understand the city, expanding the perspective of governance, planning and citizen engagement. Some have argued that architecture has a lot to offer to the practice of design thinking, or service design, and I reckon it might. But while the exhibition moves some way in that direction, it perhaps inadvertently describes the currently limited role of the architect as much as anything.

Urban form has largely been shaped by technologies of mobility - human, horse, streetcar, elevator, automobile etc. - rather than architecture, just as structural form has largely been shaped by the engineer, and infrastructural form by the spreadsheet. Too few buildings and spaces are actually directly shaped by architects. This is not a criticism of architecture, at least not directly. I would welcome a greater involvement in all these things by architects. The profession does have to look at itself, though.

The Melbourne-based educator Leon van Schaik suggests architecture took a wrong turn when professionalising in the mid-19th century, in thrall to the engineer of the emerging industrial economy. Van Schaik’s critique is profoundly important, as it describes the seeds that have led to architecture’s near-marginalisation but also of its potentially influential future:

“To complete with this practical glamour our forebears went to the heart of making in architecture - its technologies of carving, moulding, draping or assembling - when they staked their claim to be caretakers of a body of knowledge for society. The architectural capacity to think and design in three and four dimensions, our highly developed spatial intelligence, was overlooked, and for the profession space became, by default, something that resulted from what was construction … What if our forebears had professionalised architecture around spatial intelligence rather than the technologies of shelter? Might society find it easier to recognise what is unique about what our kind of thinking can offer?” [Leon van Schaik, Spatial Intelligence: New Futures for Architecture]

The articulation and exploration of spatial histories that van Schaik suggests would be a fascinating next step for exhibitions such as this, and the designers involved. How might exhibitions help develop this understanding of how spatial intelligence, and how it augments the other intelligences of kinetic, natural, linguistic, logical, mathematical, musical and personal? (In fact I’d hesitate before suggesting there is also an emerging ‘informational’ intelligence … but only just. Similarly, at other points a few of us have talked of understanding ‘information as a material’, and while this could conceivably lead to the digital equivalent of shelter-fixation, this too may be a theme worth developing.)

Developing a way of communicating such intelligences -  and possibly related sensory modes such as an urban or informational form of proprioception - may be key to where this work goes, at least in hovering around an avant-garde that can generate useful prompts for the emerging mainstream business of urban informatics. 

An axis this exhibition does positively explore, however, is that of seeing architecture itself as communication. I’m reminded of something Swiss architect Bernard Tschumi said recently on the Melbourne radio show The Architects:

“Architecture is a form of communication … of knowledge. Architecture is a way to understand our world, and also possibly to have some effect on it. It doesn’t have to necessarily be through buildings - it has to do with ideas that involve our immediate environment, our physical space. Any way to use that physical environment, that architectural context, as a means to discuss issues I think is very appropriate”

That few of these projects concern a traditional understanding of the building, focusing instead on the implications of space and urban fabric ‘becoming sentient’, is thus hugely important. Tschumi’s directive enables the profession to freely explore issues, ideas and interventions, only some of which need be built, or appear to be buildings. The League could continue to productively plough this furrow, moving further beyond the traditional limits of building, articulating the implications of architects as conductors for spatial intelligence within a society and connecting ever deeper to an understanding of how people live in cities. These and others projects might then begin to match the leaps of imagination made by Peter Cook and Reyner Banham, as referred to by Shepard in his valuable curatorial statement.

So let’s look briefly at how these particular exhibits “use the physical environment as a means to discuss ideas”, in Tschumi’s words.

Amphibious Architecture is by The Living Architecture Lab at Columbia Uni (formerly The Living) and Natalie Jeremijenko of NYU and elsewhere. It’s a rather beautiful piece of work, comprising two interactive networks of floating tubes, connecting the Bronx River and the East River. The tubes are both sensors and actuators, the latter in the form of LEDs, the former measuring water quality, presence of fish and so on.

A development of an earlier project by The Living, the glowing, bobbing lights are immediately compelling, but more interesting is this exploration of the relationship between urban bodies of water and the city. As Jeremijenko points out, there is a vast amount of public information about water quality yet this generates only small pockets of engagement. Meanwhile, waterfronts in New York and elsewhere have become attractive again to urban development, though only at a superficial level of the view over the water. “Harbour glimpses”, as we say in Sydney. This project moves beyond that facile surface connection to engage with water as a body, rather than a mirror with a memory. In doing so, it helps us understand something of what’s going on in the opaque mass that created, nourished, supported and shaped New York.

The idea that you can “text-message the fish” is somewhat dubious, however. We’ve probably done enough to the poor buggers without now subjecting them to spam too. (Another Jeremijenko project has already suggested the fish in the Hudson River are on anti-depressants.) The project works perfectly well by remaining in the responsive, reflexive camp, without the need to suggest this faux-interactivity.

If SMS for fish is possibly a joke, David Jimison’s and JooYoun Paek’s  project Too Smart City certainly is. They deliberately use comedy to highlight the potentially absurd nature of placing too much hopes in so-called smart technology, or rather outsourcing responsibility for civic spaces to algorithms and actuators. By subtly engaging with the political undercurrents in urban design, they’ve created a set of smart-arse street furniture that is all too plausible, embedding a sort of grumpy, obstreperous character into benches and trashcans, as if years of neglect had finally caused the city’s street furniture to flip out.

The Smart Bench tips you up if you spend too long on it, disturbing potential vagrants. The Smart Sign berates you with legal codes. The Smart Trashcan spits your waste back atcha if it’s deposited in the wrong bin.

The artists describe the objects as “so smart that they’re functionally useless”, and it’s good to see humour being deployed here. If Tschumi’s directive to engage is taken seriously, then not being serious at all by going for laughs is entirely fair game, and probably essential, occasionally. Certainly these are close to the “funny because it’s true” category. William H. Whyte’s seminal 1970s photographs of New York are full of benches and ledges that are not supposed to be inhabited for any length of time - in fact you almost fear that this bench design may end up in the wrong hands and get actually commissioned. Similarly, the rhetoric around sorting one’s waste can verge on a slightly desperate hectoring that makes the Smart Trashcan seem like Oscar the Grouch in a rare good mood.

Though questioning what they describe as “the myth that technology is going to be a transformative force” is also fair game, it would be good to move beyond the question and at least hint at some answers, however. But as with many of the projects here, you can track ongoing progress on their entertaining blog and watch what develops, not least Jimison’s attempts to create an “ass algorithm”.

As if emerging from the rear end of the waste-bin in Too Smart City, Trash Track is a continuation of the MIT SENSEable City Lab’s research into sensor-based interventions into existing urban and telecommunications systems. In this case, trash is tagged with sensors and then followed throughout its slow, inexorable and often depressing journey to landfill or recycling. As with many projects in this area, it concerns the now-ubiquitous idea of making the invisible visible. In this case, the ‘out of sight, out of mind’ problem when it comes to dealing with waste. Some initial visualisations indicate an interesting product-centred view of how garbage interacts with the city, yet with this broader goal I’d be more interested in a sense of the aggregated footprint of the city itself, derived from all the coffee cups discarded over time. 

The project suggests it’s almost a practical demonstration of a core idea in pervasive computing - that of ‘smart dust’. Though it isn’t there yet - the sensors are large, cumbersome and apparently placed by hand - it hints at its possibilities, if remaining a little uncritical. The connection to architecture and urbanism is not as obvious, despite positioning garbage as an urban system, perceived in terms of mobility. I suspect the implications are more broadly for industrial design and product design. Again, though, it’s worth reflecting on the sense of ambition, scale and connectivity that often comes with MIT’s work. Their ability to connect does place them in a sphere of influence, and at the highest levels.

Usman Haque, a designer who in the creation of the Pachube data-meets-place-meets-people platform  has grasped the promise of informatics as much as anyone, makes a typically fascinating contribution. Natural Fuse is simply more interactive - it’s not just an abstract signal that might raise awareness around energy consumption, and so possibly stimulate intervention, but actually and actively requires an intervention of the users. The possible outcome of the Natural Fuse system - that PLANTS WILL DIE! If energy consumption gets too high - may be the more visceral mode of engagement that is required around energy consumption, as compared to the quietly glowing LED screens of smart meters that have replaced the flashing ‘12:00’ of VCRs in homes around the land. (Though you half-wonder whether an ‘arms race’ of ever more gruesome natural deaths may be required if people become inured to wilting brown husks of Leopard Lily?!)

The project also describes an architecture around the exhibit - of websites, RSS and Twitter feeds, maps and of the platform of Pachube itself. Again, the team led by Haque appear to have the greatest facility with this networked aspect of informatics. And this is interactive, at least to some degree, where others are responsive. Whether there is a spatial intelligence being articulated here is another matter - this is perhaps more informational intelligence than spatial. And so is it architecture? Many of Haque’s other works certainly are, rather more obviously, but his sense of “the software of space” is certainly interesting and a genuine attempt to reconfigure architecture around an understanding of the shared and ongoing production of cities. Watch that (soft) space.

The most genuinely interactive contribution of all - in that it comprises an essentially open and accessible platform - is from the team led by Anthony Townsend and featuring several from workplace consultants DEGW. Breakout! is inspired by the co-working spaces (or “jellies” as some are known) that enable work to take place via shared resources. It’s a mobile infrastructure of power, connectivity and social interaction, supported by smart social software application to facilitate  transient workplaces. While the stated motive is to “liberate office workers from office buildings”, it could be argued that this is already happening - see all the ventures the Breakout! team is inspired by, for a start. When it doesn’t happen, it’s not for lack of infrastructure in a city like New York, but rather social, cultural and economic issues around present-day business culture. However, the Breakout! team can hardly change that overnight, and like the annual PARKing Days, we’re reminded of the value in creating a series of public focal points on such activity, and so of the powerful role of events in shaping the city. In terms of the environments the Breakout! team can create, I’d like to see a more varied set emerging, with different kinds of workshop available, particularly those that involve physical ‘making’ via the return of light manufacturing to urban environments. But that can come later.

Almost all of these commissions do variously deal with the social rather than built form, with explorations of the civic realm rather than physical structure. Sure, there are a few shortcomings but taken as a whole they comprise an excellent set of examples of how a more sophisticated relationship between architecture and the sentient city might unfold over the next few years. 

“Might” is a key word there, for it’s going to take a lot of effort to retrain and reorient architects in general for this particular form of spatial intelligence, and while programmes like this are part of that effort, they’re not enough in themselves.

Gregory Weissner’s introduction indicates that the show is “intended to bring architects and urban designers into a conversation that until now has been limited largely to technologists." He continues:

"Don’t be confused by the technology (and the terminology), though. What we are talking about is nothing short of a complete reorientation of our relationship to the built environment and the unintended consequences are not going to be all positive. Either architects and urban designers insert themselves now into the discussion about how these technologies are conceptualized and deployed or they risk diminishing the unique contributions they bring to shaping our world."

Architecture and urban design should be in this debate, no doubt, but its entire practice, sensibility and economic model may need redressing (as with many other fields, of course.) Given their previous predilections, the lack of technical and conceptual understanding - never mind an apparently congenital inability to design a decent website - the profession has a long way to go before it can demand a seat at the table. An admittedly fading tradition of thinking of itself as the ‘master builder’ needs to be entirely excoriated once and for all. Devising the architect’s new sensibility - what Paul Dourish would describe as “the designer’s stance” for the discipline - will also be fundamentally important. Either way, complex urban systems are well beyond the ken of the sole master builder; they have been for years, but increasingly so with this ever more multi-layered understanding of the city.

Other design disciplines - interaction design, industrial design, service design, to name three - are currently far better placed to lead on these ideas, within multidisciplinary design teams. So the architect may be best-placed as part of that team, leading on spatial intelligence just as others might lead on information and communication systems, materials, structures, embodied interaction, behavioural psychology, topography, acoustics, biodiversity and so on. In a recent conversation with the SENSEable City Lab’s Carlo Ratti, we ended up sketching out a loosely multidisciplinary team in which the architect was one of perhaps ten different disciplines, all of whom would lead at various points.

Yet there doesn’t seem to be much explicit recognition of that here. I’d like to have seen more of a debate of the craft, process and shifting nature of disciplines throughout - though I appreciate that’s harder to make a compelling public exhibit around. 

And of course the smart, progressive and more inclusive designers represented here are far-removed from the Roark stars of architectural mythology. But whether many in the wider profession have moved far enough in their direction is another matter. 

To put it another way, who would you actually rather designed some sentient street furniture? Naota Fukasawa or Frank Gehry? Jonathan Ive or Daniel Libeskind? Luigi Colani or Ken Yeang? (Actually, I suspect that the intentions of any sentient furniture designed by Colani may not be entirely honourable. Wipe-off plastic required. Be careful where you sit.)

But given that it’s actually the likes of large software and hardware corporations that are currently attempting to claim the ‘smarter cities’ mantra for their own, I’d like the profession to pull up a chair nonetheless. At least many architects and urban designers have an understanding of what makes good cities tick.

With that in mind, this exhibition - not least through its manifestation as a widely-communicable online exhibit - is fantastically useful and worthwhile. It weaves together several threads running through contemporary thinking around cities and information, and through the provision of context and discussion, it does indeed use architecture, of a sort, as a means to discuss ideas, as Tschumi suggests, or to more broadly exert a form of spatial intelligence, after van Schaik. In this, it suggests the new form of architecture that we’re all striving for, something beyond variations on shelter or indeed the gaudy showmanship of the last two decades, in which new ways of living can be articulated via a genuinely open and interactive framework.

Devising an urbanism that extends this last aspect - urban fabric suffused with rich forms of civic interactivity - is perhaps the biggest challenge. Funnily enough I’m reminded of the British architecture critic Ian Nairn’s line about the avenues of trees in Bushey Park, surrounding Hampton Court - and by extension England, and design:

“Man proposes, and a noble enough proposal. Nature takes over, but heeds man’s direction. All you see now are the glorious trees: but they would not have been so glorious without the initial design. As a symbol of Hampton Court, and of the whole of England, you could do worse: the tree allowed to grow freely, but to man’s pattern.” [Ian Nairn, Nairn's London]

Perhaps in this line from 1966, concerning a design from the 1530s, there are the seeds of a more responsive and sometimes interactive architecture, iterative in development, predicated with change in mind, a space described around both biological and social ecosystems, constructed around the organic, chaotic and complex, yet symbiotically shaped by clarity and intent.

Van Schaik implores us not to unthinkingly overlay inappropriate spatial histories and asks instead “What spatial constructs does this new place allow?” We should ask the same of such rare opportunities for addressing the promise of the sentient city.

This stimulating exhibition begins to tentatively trace out some lines describing this new place, and those of us who inhabit cities will benefit hugely from continuing to pick apart its implications.

I woke up this spring morning to discover this view from our hallway, our neighbours' tin roofs and gum trees being battered by 100km/h winds: 

At first it seemed like a very odd sunrise. Then we realised the red wasn't a sunrise red, but something duller, earthier. A kind of powdered mineral deep orangey-red, like vermillion or cadmium perhaps with a dash of ochre ... or like dust from the parched interior of Australia, in fact.

Which of course it was, as all your news networks will have told you by now. You can get the fairly extraordinary facts elsewhere, along with numerous first-hand experiences. Here are a series of reflections that occurred to me throughout the day.

Moving downstairs, the odd light was both inside and out, casting everything in an orange haze. I moved over to my Macbook on the kitchen table and was surprised to see that its screen appeared blue. I thought it was broken at first, but realised this too was the effect of the strange orange filter newly overlaid onto the world. This is what the backyard looked like:

Slowly it became clear what was going on. It seemed on the scale of an eclipse. A thin film of dust was on everything, inside and out. Barely any windows had been left open, due to the wind and rain the night before, yet this new microscopic layer could be felt under the fingertips everywhere.

(In a sign of the times) I turn to Twitter to find out what's going on, and tweet a little myself. My friend Tom picks up on it and curates a fantastic set of the images being uploaded in real-time to Flickr. Have a look at that set to see how eerily beautiful the whole thing was. My photos here don't approach them in terms of drama or quality, but are what I saw, and so just as affecting to me.

The dust came from South Australia, via the distant mining town of Broken Hill. The distances involved here are indeed vast. The dust cloud covered half of New South Wales and then stretched 600km up the coast to Queensland, where it would later appear in Brisbane in an altogether yellower guise. It had travelled around 1500km to get to Sydney, dropping millions (billions?) of tons of dust over the east coast.

It's almost beyond comprehension that the dust filling the air is from that far away; that you're inhaling South Australia. It's akin to the notion that you're constantly breathing in detritus from the Big Bang. One's reminded of the scale of the intercontinental weather systems around here, not least the El Nino, which covers almost half of this side of the planet and is probably on its way soon, bringing further extreme weather conditions.

By the time I leave the house, the red colour was beginning to become paler, settling on a glowing sulphurous yellow. The dust picked out the structural supports of a spider's web on our porch and covered the electricity cabinet in the street. All the cars were clearly covered in a thin film. Silver was not a good paint-job for a car this morning.

The air quality was perhaps the filthiest on record. It seemed to have a sulphurous quality to it, but that may have just been projection. But despite this obvious sensory input, people - ourselves included - seemed to be essentially oblivious to the poor air quality and went about our business as any other day. The Herald notes that:

"A normal day would see around 10 micrograms of particles per cubic metre of air and a bushfire might generate 500 micrograms. Today, levels soared to 15,400 micrograms per cubic metre of air at one location."

To the naked eye, the dust appeared to all but dissipate by about lunchtime, yet on closer inspection visibility was still lower than normal. The light in Sydney is one of the most extraordinary things. It's without the blinding over-exposure of Queensland to the north, but is intense, vivid and so richly revealing in terms of colour, detail and texture. Today, it just wasn't there. Even when it appeared to have lifted, look beyond the crisp near distance and Sydney faded unusually quickly.

The word "apocalyptic" comes up in conversation a lot today. Many argue that this particular phenomenon had no formal relation to climate change but many others made a connection nonetheless, given that the Australian interior has been reconfigured by the Big Dry. Sydney often offers up some fairly apocalyptic weather, being a place of natural extremes, but this was something else.

I read a book about dinosaurs to my two year-old son Oliver every night. He loves it all but I'm privately fascinated by the pages describing their (most likely) demise due to an asteroid strike in New Mexico and the resulting giant dust clouds that enveloped the planet, extinguishing the dinos and much else besides, ushering in a near-ice age. It had been 30 degrees a few days ago - unseasonably warm, but it was maybe 15 degrees below that today. The wind was still fierce, and the sun couldn't penetrate the blanket of dust.

The sun in Australia usually gives the impression it could penetrate steel if it wanted to, but here it hung uselessly in the sky, a hazy wan glow effortlessly subdued by the dust. Some fairly spectacular effects emerge as its distant gleam creates transient reflections in some passing car windows, a sudden focal point amidst the pervasive flatness of light elsewhere.

The sudden nature of the dust storm's appearance was one of its most curious, compelling aspects. While a cold front had been expected from the south, there had been no warning of this. It had finally rained the night before, after what seemed like months with barely a drop, and then we wake up to an entirely different landscape. How incredible that no weather forecast had been able to predict something on this scale.

It occurs to me that the microscopic layer of dust has made Sydney marginally taller, bigger this morning. Alexander Trevi suggests that it's more likely that Sydney is slightly sinking.

I'm heading for a workshop in Chowder Bay and a cab drives me out to the north shore. The traffic is horrendous, even for Sydney, meaning a slow crawl over the ANZAC Bridge and then the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Usually the giant structures of these bridges frame views of the perfect blue harbour and the thrusting concrete-and-glass CBD of Sydney. Here they float freely against a backdrop of nothing.

Over in north Sydney, several people in the street are wearing face masks. I was in Seoul last Friday, and had been reminded of the east Asian tendency to wear face masks when suffering a cold. Apparently face masks were flying off the shelves today in Sydney, a good business to be in today, just as tomorrow will be a good time to be in the car wash sector.

My taxi driver is originally from Beijing, and he remarks he'd seen similar sights there a few times, though pointed out that was mostly through pollution rather than dust storms (though it's not immune to those either, blown from Inner Mongolia). When he discovers I lived in London before Sydney, he asks whether the famous London fog has the same quality. He seems mildly disappointed when I tell him those smog-induced fogs don't really happen anymore in London.

Moving over bridges suddenly robbed of their views, it occurs to me how odd it is to see Sydney without perhaps its signature quality - the view. It's one of the most remarkable, rewarding aspects of the city, but here there was apparently nothing beyond the edge of the road, over that cliff, behind those trees. Everything faded rapidly into a flat white haze, a void.

It's not so much a new landscape, but the absence or removal of landscape altogether. The vanishing lines vanish after a few metres. It feels like one of Calvino's Invisible Cities all of a sudden, an impossible construction fading at the edges in all directions. There are echoes of those maps of the imagined Terra Australis, a land searched for in uncharted territory, of an Australia perched on the edge of the world, edges of the map fading into nothingness.

We glide slowly by one of my favourite Sydney buildings, a Metabolist-like housing block just off the east edge of the Harbour Bridge. Usually this is lost in the thicket of skyscrapers behind it. Here, it appears bold in sepia, the previously overwhelming background reduced to faint ghosts hovering over its shoulder.

By the time I'm at Chowder Bay, a former naval base on the north shore set amidst forests of gums, the light has lifted again. Having looked at a map, I'm aware that the spectral trees we're driving past are right on the shoreline. Yet it's still impossible to see the water only metres away. 

The website for the venue speaks highly of the view. It's somewhat academic at 9.30 this particular morning.

Yet by lunchtime, the same view looked like this:

The dust storm was over, apparently.

This island continent is an extraordinarily vivid place in terms of naturally-occurring phenomena. Whether the recent weather conditions are "naturally-occurring" or "carelessly invoked" is another matter - though this is clearly drought-related - but the range and intensity of the weather is constantly startling. Sydney is generally blessed with perhaps a perfect climate - a kind of subtle improvement on the southern Mediterranean - yet on days like today Australia seems to be building up to something. And we're still not yet in bushfire season. Then again, tomorrow will probably be just another perfectly crisp, sunny spring Sydney day.

The Guardian dispassionately tacked this onto the end of their bulletin, followed by no comment:

"As dust blanketed the east coast last night, heavy rains lashed Adelaide in the nation's south, flooding streets. At dawn, two tremors shook Melbourne. Later in the day hailstones as big as cricket balls pelted parts of New South Wales. Heavy rain is expected to follow and flash-flood warnings have been issued. While residents in the south brace for rain, Queenslanders are preparing for fires to erupt with the unseasonally dry weather in the far north where firefighters battled several blazes yesterday."

That's Australia. It never rains but it pours, hails, burns, storms, dusts ...

Last year I helped teach a course around 'The Street As Platform' idea on the University of Technology, Sydney Master of Digital Architecture course, working with Anthony Burke, Mitchell Whitelaw and Jason McDermott. I mentioned it at the time, and will post up some of the outcomes at some point.

This year, I'm helping teach a course called 'Urban Sensing' at the University of Sydney, as part of their graduate program in Interaction Design and Electronics Arts, working with Andrew vande Moere (of Information Aesthetics fame), Elmar Trefz and Gabriel Ulacco. It's in broadly similar areas to 'Street As...', concerning urban informatics, sensors, visualisation and architectural interventions driven by such things. It's longer in duration though, and this one includes fabrication of what Andrew's currently calling 'contraptions', via CNC machining etc.

We're doing various things, but last week I tried a technique with them that I've often used myself. Writing on photographs of an average street scene, we asked students to imagine all the data that could be derived from the scene via sensors (in the broadest sense of the word), and then go on to sketch interventions or hacks into those scenes, drawn from such data sources.

I often produce photomontages in my work at Arup, in order to show how the city might be transformed by informatics in some way. These are a form of rendering, in the architectural sense, and yet also an old technique of course. Yet by overlaying onto the actual and everyday, it is possible to connect a future of some kind to today's reality. This is something that clients often struggle with otherwise, given the often-invisible nature of data-driven interventions and the relatively advanced technology at work.

Obviously, such an approach tend to focus on the technological possibilities - the data, the architecture - rather than the social and cultural context, systems and patterns at play here - it's not as easy to draw those, though diagrams would be possible.

Anyway, the students went at the first part of the exercise with gusto, imagining a rich diversity of data emanating from the photos (I'd just selected 30 or 40 shots of various streets scenes, some dense and urban, some suburban, some chock full of infrastructure, some apparently not, and drawn from LA, Geneva, London, Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra etc.)

It's somewhat worrying how easily students moved into Orwellian mode, but I think they were aware that, say, a hidden infrastructure weighing everyone on the street and generating their BMI whilst x-raying their handbags and profiling their facial characteristics might have some issues associated with it. We talked about it, at least.

It was more difficult - as ever - to generate meaningful interventions in these environments. Some seemed initially interesting, but quickly failed the 'so what?' test. Yet some great ideas emerged from all corners nonetheless. Street furniture that collected rainwater, sprouted stalks to tie your dog to while you go into a shop, and offered the dog filtered rainwater to drink whilst using the remainder to clean the pavement after the dog has left (again, easier to summarise in sketch than in words, clearly). The gigantic casino in Melbourne was seen as a particularly interesting 'data generator'. Real-time transit information that is projected only when someone stands at a tram-stop (avoiding the 'data projected in the forest with no-one there to witness it using unnecessary power' problem). Several health-monitors for neighbourhood trees. Various solutions for conveying parking amenities. Numerous variations on real-time transit data. A building that progressively cloaks or reveals itself depending on how ugly passers-by judge it. Road barriers as actuators, sliding around in response to traffic flow, a little scarily. A display that indicated which ATM is 'winning' based on daily activity (with a modification that would indicate when you're standing behind an ATM user that is typically slow.) And so on and so on.

The drawing activity works well, but I'd also like to test the students with narrative construction at some point, getting them to write - along the lines of the original 'street as platform' piece, perhaps. These alternative fictions are another way of portraying possible futures, eliciting opportunities and issues as well as developing persuasion skills. Experience suggests, however, that writing will prove more challenging than drawing - experience, that is, of professional architects and designers, many of whom can barely write at all, sadly (the honourable exceptions almost make up for it.) Writing is as important as drawing in practice, and can be just as exploratory, experimental and convincing when done well. It feels to me that it should be developed as a technique within a well-tempered design education.

I'm interested in all such techniques, somewhat in the spirit of 'critical design' (after Dunne & Raby), and would love to hear about other patterns and plays.

Time-lapse footage of burning chaparral in California (near Los Angeles, if it makes sense to say "near Los Angeles" for something so amorphous) by Dan Blank, set to music from Brian Eno's Another Green World.

The video above is unsettling, unnerving and almost impossible not to watch. Again, sublime in the original sense. Fires continue to burn around Los Angeles; unusual 'winter fires' burn on the south coast of New South Wales with forecast of an El Nino for this spring; the Premier of Victoria recently warned Victorians that 13 years of drought will make the coming fire season the worst ever.

Whilst burning of Californian chaparral is required for germination and hence regeneration of the terrain - akin to, if not exactly the same as, Aboriginal firestick farming here in Terra Australis - there can be little doubt that such events are only likely to increase in scale and ferocity due to climate change. I'd only recently seen the similarities between southern and eastern Australia and California first-hand, but here they are linked again by fire. And while Australia is naturally "an arsonist's wet dream" as Thomas Kenneally put it, this feels like something else.

DH Lawrence wrote of the Australian bush (in Kangaroo, 1923): "It was biding its time with a terrible ageless watchfulness, waiting for a far-off end, watching the myriad intruding white men.” With that in mind, it seems apposite to link back to my earlier post on the possible relationship between "intruding" urban sprawl and bushfires.

I’ve drawn on the contents several times and will continue to do so I’m sure. Yet a particularly fine feature are the maps in the inside covers. They’re both a useful reference and an additional fiction, and although they also largely emerged before Google Maps, their hand-drawn, loose evocations form a kind of response to latter's ubiquity. Just as the physical books themselves represent a minor and inadvertent pre-emptive strike on the Kindle and whatever tablet Apple have up their sleeve. I'm not sure Bloomsbury are still them running as a series though I hope so.

Of course maps wrapped around stories have a long history, perhaps as long as written history itself. Michael Chabon wrote a beautiful article about childhood, maps and adventure recently, noting the relationship between story and topography:

"Most great stories of adventure, from The Hobbit to Seven Pillars of Wisdom, come furnished with a map. That's because every story of adventure is in part the story of a landscape, of the interrelationship between human beings (or Hobbits, as the case may be) and topography. Every adventure story is conceivable only with reference to the particular set of geographical features that in each case sets the course, literally, of the tale. But I think there is another, deeper reason for the reliable presence of maps in the pages, or on the endpapers, of an adventure story, whether that story is imaginatively or factually true. We have this idea of armchair traveling, of the reader who seeks in the pages of a ripping yarn or a memoir of polar exploration the kind of heroism and danger, in unknown, half-legendary lands, that he or she could never hope to find in life. This is a mistaken notion, in my view. People read stories of adventure—and write them—because they have themselves been adventurers. Childhood is, or has been, or ought to be, the great original adventure, a tale of privation, courage, constant vigilance, danger, and sometimes calamity." [New York Review of Books]

Chabon's article is worth a read on many counts (I fully endorse his eulogy for adventure in childhood) but I liked this casual aside about the relationship between maps, landscape and narrative.

So here, below, a set of the maps from a few of the Writer and the City series, covering Florence, Paris, Sydney, Rio de Janeiro and New York. I’m particularly drawn to the New York map which adds a further layer of imagination to imaginary place-making. Take a closer look.

Secondly, while discussing inactivity, there has actually been some activity on what we called the Best Urban Spaces project a 'while' ago. Russell Davies, James Goggin and I did the initial cut of images over a year ago; then production issues - by which we all mean other work - beset us. 

However, Practise have done some sterling work on the design and layout and it's all coming to fruition. James and Russell are investigating the appropriate printing options (from London; add a note below if you want to suggest something; though we're not thinking Lulu or equivalent with this particular project). It's looking great, and we're really excited that it will be emerging soon. I think the project has quietly uncovered some interesting reflections on what people consider to be good or great urban space, and even what they think urban space is in the first place. Some sneak peeks in the crops below (some of you may recognise photos of yours; those that do will receive a free copy of the book, if you remember the deal):

We're renaming it Splendid Urban Places. This is partly as the opportunity for synchronisation with the Worst Urban Places project is long gone; partly as we don't want to, or simply couldn't, claim to be as authoritative as the word 'best' implies, and also because I was taken with the following passage by William H. Whyte in his Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, which better captures the spirit of our project (and which eagle-eyed readers will recognise from a certain recent speech). And because despite its American provenance, it sounds rather English.:

"Some of the more felicitous spaces, furthermore, are leftovers, niches, odds and ends of space that by happy accident work very well for people. At 57th Street and Madison Avenue in New York there is a bank with two window ledges. They're low enough for sitting and are recessed enough to provide wind protection. There is sun all day, a parade of passersby, and a the corner a vendor squeezing fresh orange juice. It is a splendid urban place. There are other such places, most provided by inadvertence. Think what might be provided if someone planned it." [my emphasis; from The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces]

Practise have spent time designing a flexible layout (which was tricky, given the highly variable dimensions, aspect ratio and resolution of the images people submitted) which will serve the project well through subsequent editions.

So we might imagine suggested pastes into an urban environment could be elements of urban infrastructure - trams, funiculars, recycling systems, local food delivery services, community gardens - as well as services - integrated ticketing systems a la Oyster or Octopus or Go Cards, say. Cuts could be unnecessarily large freeways, examples of dreadful architecture, potential development sites being sat upon, shoddily run services and so on. 

So, stay tuned for Splendid Urban Places and in the meantime why not visit Cut 'n' Paste cities; have a browse through both groups and ideally, join up and contribute.

Cut 'n' Paste Cities
Splendid Urban Places Flickr Group