(Incidentally, the interview was also recently published on the new-ish Australian Design Review website - which amalgamates AR with its sister publication (Inside) - and which is rather nice and proving more than a little useful. Kudos to Andrew Mackenzie and Mat Ward for steering that through so well.)

To the discussion/article ...

Carlo Ratti and his colleagues at the SENSEable City Lab at MIT are doing as much as anyone to define a future of architecture. Ratti and I meet up at the Metropolis Congress in Sydney, where he has delivered a keynote on his projects, sandwiched between Saskia Sassen and Kathy Pain. Ratti’s presentation provided a strong counterpoint to Sassen’s impassioned yet personal world view, and Pain’s apparently analytical yet ultimately superficial ranking of cities. The work of his team was, in contrast, suffused with data emerging from the aggregate of millions of tiny signals. Yet it was often realised in lustrous visualisations that attempted the alchemy of transmuting data into information into knowledge, while shifting effortlessly from physical to digital to physical.

Ratti, an architect and civil engineer by training, has ended up creating new urban forms from mobile phone signals, the movement of bikes and digitally-controlled jets of water. My own work, leading on ‘urban informatics’ for Arup in Australasia, is also getting our business into unlikely places, at both ends of the ‘design food chain’ and hovering around this intersection between physical and digital. The name ‘informatics’ will change, surely, just as talkies became movies, and Ratti talks instead of a “living architecture”, “liberated pixels” and “physical plus”. Yet we, and many others worldwide now, are all wrestling with the promise of digital activity thoroughly permeating urban fabric.

Ratti is a tall, slender and slightly gangling arc of good-natured exuberance. He in no way belies Italian caricatures by gesticulating with a flourish as he talks, carving the air around him into sinuous forms, sweeping his hands to indicate progressive movements. Sitting in the culturally arid hub of Darling Harbour, we talk for a couple of hours, exploring the implications of this emerging field of design work, and how it may change the nature of both architecture, and also cities and buildings themselves.


Just as with Ratti, his projects emerge from an intrinsically multidisciplinary environment. The Water Pavilion, for the Zaragoza Expo, was produced by a team of engineers, architects, sociologists and physicists, and built by Siemens. The presence of the social science disciplines is particularly interesting, enabling a focus on user behaviour in far more detail than is often the case with the built environment. As Ratti puts it, designing public spaces that are infused with informational activity means absolutely addressing “a new type of space and a new type of (augmented) physical body”, which is why he sees sociologists as so important, to help quantify some of these changes, and to monitor and understand them.

I reflect that in industrial design and web design in particular it is far more common to have that sort of user research-led approach, but that it doesn’t often happen in architecture or urban design. Though some architects have frequently indicated the possibilities of introducing industrial design techniques into architecture, others respond that buildings are generally one-offs, that “each building is a prototype”, and not mass produced as cars are (leaving aside the so far largely unrealised promise of prefab).

Ratti agrees that approaches such as ethnographic research or user-centred design, don’t occur within architecture often. He suggests that the focus on the user’s behaviour pervading the design process (to the extent that product designers like Naoto Fukasawa can say, “Design is dissolving in behaviour”) is largely due to the rapid pace of technological change in product design, whether industrial or informational (or the emerging hybrid of the two). But, as he explains, “Traditionally architecture is much more static. Now, because of all the new technology in the city, you might require this new type of responsive city – and building that comes from other disciplines too, including industrial design.”

Architecture can be very slow-moving by nature, partly as many basic conditions don’t change that much – such as the structural loads on buildings from wind or snow – and that materials tend to have a slow pace of change, with many years in between the introduction of concrete and that of ETFE, for instance. Whereas the world of consumer electronics, product design or, more obviously, online social software, can change radically almost week to week.

Ratti notes that behaviour around these products flexes accordingly too, in a symbiotic relationship, and this must be understood in detail. At MIT, he benefits from a highly multidisciplinary environment, despite the silos universities can sometimes wrangle themselves into. Technological innovation can be situated in an environment where there can be “a dialogue between the technology side and the behavioural side – an interplay between the social and the technology”, as he puts it.

With the SmartBiking project – in the context of a Copenhagen where 30 to 40 percent of all trips are already undertaken by bicycle – attempts to further promote the use of bikes need to genuinely develop new thinking over and above the pervasive provision of bike lanes. By looking at powerful connective tissue of social software networks, Ratti’s team – working with William J. Mitchell and others at MIT – is developing what they call “spatial smart wheels” that harvest energy when the rider brakes, within the context of a city-wide carbon trading scheme. Their sensor-enabled bikes connect briefly to other cyclists as they ride by, and then enable Facebook to play back the patterns of who passed who in the street that day.

This is hardly the traditional work of the architect, yet this sense of working with a layer of soft infrastructure, overlaid onto the hard infrastructure of the city, is a theme common to this work. One thing that I consistently get asked by clients when I talk them through these kinds of changes is, “Yeah, but how will it change the physical form of cities? How will the cities look different?” I sometimes respond by referencing those other bike-sharing schemes in Barcelona, Paris, Lyon et al and illustrating how these are really informational services; soft infrastructure coordinated by informatics, and laid over the existing fabric of the city. Aside from hubs for the bikes, there are very few physical changes to the cities. Yet these systems have radically changed the sense of mobility in their cities, utterly changing the way the city feels.

Ratti agrees, seeing that digital activity is a layer in interface with the city. It’s not a separate virtual space, as some seem to think, but it’s augmenting our physical space. As he points out, we’re hardly going to change or destroy all these existing buildings and spaces anytime soon – urban form just doesn’t change that quickly, but the profound changes in the way cities feel and function may be in this internet-enabled informational layer.

And yet, Ratti is an architect (in practice with his Turin-based firm carlo ratti associati – Walter Nicolino & Carlo Ratti) and he is still drawn to creating new forms and shaping physical space. The Water Pavilion suggests a newly fluid, reconfigurable architecture, although with exterior walls comprising jets of water. By controlling these jets – broadly, with a similar principle to ink-jet printers – words and shapes can be formed in the ‘walls’ and the walls themselves can appear and disappear from one second to another, such that the form of the building responds to people approaching it, shifting climactic conditions and other patterns of behaviour. In this sense, it’s beyond simply responsive architecture, and more genuinely interactive. Ratti describes these projects as exploring a new form of skin, which he sees has potential to be “reactive, responsive, more living”. He’s proud of how kids in particular responded to it, fluidly altering the physical space. “More Spacebook than Facebook,” he says, smiling.

For the New York Talk Exchange (NYTE) project – a visualisation of global traffic over AT&T’s network, zooming from country to city to borough, to construct a kind of real-time census – the team included an urban designer, information designer, sociologist, exhibition designer, architecture student and a couple of advisers on the content itself. The latter was to advise the project on the content contained within the data, almost to avoid the team becoming seduced by the visualisation possibilities. Ratti believes this project begins to enable an understanding of the structure of cities from the fine-grain (even though the NYTE project could still be criticised for its lack of context, poor Dr Kathy Pain following Ratti’s presentation at Metropolis simply had no way of responding to this detail of data; the GAWC index of cities begins to look very old-fashioned as a result).

Real-Time Rome provided another compelling example of these urban patterns, drawn from the aggregated mobile phone signals over the course of three days surrounding the 2006 World Cup Final between Italy and France. Using AI techniques to infer pedestrian activity from the signals, it’s clear in which bits of the city the fans gathered to watch the game, where the victorious Italian team paraded the trophy through the streets, and how this use of the city changed in response to events during or after the game.

We then talk of how ‘dataviz’ like NYTE and Real-Time Rome may have a physical existence too, a presence in the city. Ratti certainly sees the possibilities in extending these information layers across mobile phones and web, onto the fabric of our streets and buildings, using LEDs and other technologies to enable quite fluid forms of display. He likes the idea of these clouds of pixels deployed around the street, the idea of the ‘liberated pixel’ not contained within the overbearing rectangular form of ‘the big screen’.

Yet beyond installations, Ratti suggests that these kinds of real-time systems may actually radically reorient services such as transport, which are still wedded to the somewhat blunt Industrial Age artefacts of timetables and prescribed routes. Put simply, he says the bus could follow us, rather than us following the bus.


As with the internet itself, this work comes from somewhere, and also has a history within architecture. Perhaps our roots are showing, but in terms of antecedents, I suggest (Brits) Archigram, Reyner Banham and Cedric Price, whereas Ratti references (Italians) Archizoom and Superstudio. Yet for Ratti, Buckminster Fuller’s concept of “comprehensive anticipatory design” provided most inspiration.

His team, he says, are trying to define possible future urban conditions, which are articulated through design and then generate research responses. I suggest this approach – design and publish – is also close to Archigram and Superstudio, and Ratti particularly responds to the Superstudio comparison. He recalls their technique of creating radical visions of extreme or absurd conditions. In this sense, he thinks, they were not anticipatory, instead extrapolating a present condition to absurdity, as with the Continuous Monument or its heritage-parodying proposal for flooding Florence.

With these intense exaggerations of form and city, they were commentaries on contemporary conditions, almost as a science fiction writer will almost inevitably write about today when depicting visions of tomorrow. Ratti is clearly drawn by this idea of exaggeration and extrapolation, almost to the point of absurd reductions, and I wonder whether there’s a link with Real-Time Rome, where instead of addressing the vast richness of all of city life, we use only mobile phone data to tell a story about the city. It’s a slice through the city on only one axis, which is a slightly absurd thing to do. Yet it still enables interpretation. It still speaks of now.

Ratti agrees, but then outlines the possibility of accreting layers of such data – in partnership with the buses, the taxis, the wider city – to create a platform for exploring the city through data. In this, his aspirations are indeed closer to Fuller than Superstudio, as it becomes a form of anticipatory design. He doesn’t think you can show the city of the future as it will be, but you can see real-time information along one slice, one axis, and this enables us to anticipate a future city where perhaps the majority of the urban activity will generate impossible swathes of real-time data.

I wonder whether we can almost think of information as a material in a sense, in terms of it having its own capabilities, qualities and performance criteria. Ratti responds by saying that there’s no doubt that the digital revolution has genuinely changed the way we do things, the way we live, the way we interact and talk with others. And rapidly too, as if 1993 was 50 years ago in “internet years”. He thinks there are similar conditions here as those that Le Corbusier reflected upon in 1929, when he saw a machine civilisation looking for and finding its architectural expression. Clearly Ratti believes that this age too has now begun its search.

So these cities of the future are still made of concrete, but also of transient slivers of silicon and amorphous clouds of wireless activity. Atoms and bits. The great promise of informatics – or whatever we end up calling it – is that the fabric of the city is once again malleable, responsive and can adapt through learning from layered patterns of behaviour. Perhaps we don’t call it informatics, but architecture and engineering, just a new form of both crafts. Yet these developments pose radical changes, from the point of view of skills, processes, business models and purpose, and Ratti and his crew of collaborators are indicating one possible future for our work. He concludes by tentatively suggesting, “It’s almost redefining, I believe, what being an architect is.”

Carlo Ratti Associati
MIT SENSEable City Lab
Australian Design Review

Bonus postscript: My sketch of the new multidisciplinary architectural practice:

I like British artist Jeremy Deller's work a lot. I referred to his Acid Brass project years ago - in a very early entry on music metadata - as well as his moving recreation of the Battle of Orgreave (in Sheffield and The North). Recently I heard about his 'It Is What It Is' as I was ploughing through old Studio 360 shows, given the iPhone's new double-speed playback mode (which I'm loving, although I think it doubles my heart-rate too. Particularly listening to New Yorkers.)

So I watched his recent 'Procession' for the Manchester International Festival with interest. An actual procession through the centre of Manchester, it's a great big ramshackle civil serpent; sometime endearing, sometimes camp, sometimes misplaced, sometimes sad. Not everything works but it's a great idea - in a 'the city is shaped by events' sense. Here's a video on the artwork from The Guardian's report.

So imagine my surprise when someone's Twitter feed led me to the new advert for 'legendary' Australian beer VB. It's a beautifully done ad; pretty bloody funny - I can't decide between 'Cashed-Up Bogans', 'Manscapers' or 'Blokes Punching Above Their Weight'. Obviously the tone, location and purpose is quite different, but being a former resident of one city and a current resident of the other country, it's almost like I can imagine the two processions colliding, with hilarious consequences, The VB ad perhaps owes, well, a bit of a debt to Deller, no? [Higher quality here, embedded below]

Robert Miles Kemp’s talk was always interesting and occasionally spellbinding, most of all when showing the work in responsive robotic structures. His videos of simple blocks self-assembling into what he called “nano-architecture” are quite extraordinary (sometimes eliciting a collective delight similar to that of The Living at Postopolis! NYC). Kemp situated this within a wider context of interactive and informational architecture, centred around his work at Variate Labs and renowned new media deisgn firm Schematic (and his blog, Spatial Robots) described in a consistently interesting talk, covering many of the primary themes in contemporary interface design - and indeed extending the idea of where and what interfaces are.

Kemp starts by stating his interest in “robotics, new control systems, and user interface displays” and suggesting that the “the line between digital and physical is becoming increasingly blurred.” To illustrate the latter, he shows a video of Microsoft’s vision for 2019 (produced by Schematic for Microsoft Research?), talking through the primary themes. These include “information being attached to objects, objects existing beyond physical space, merging information and physical space into one thing, information embedded into actual structures …” and so on. He notes how this “blurs the line between software and control device; how everything is beginning to get jumbled up.”

Continuing Kemp’s broad themes, he sees that “simulation is the real thing, information is physical (or can be)” and he states that “architecture should be interactive.” (A statement that also requires interrogating, as well as defining carefully, given how many architects have been talking about interactive spaces well outside of contemporary technology for a long time. One person’s definition of interaction is not necessarily another’s definition of interaction. Similarly, as Kemp would well know, much emerging interactive architecture is 'merely' responsive.)

In his forthcoming book, Kemp will run through a “history and future of interactive space”, which should be fascinating, with his last chapter identifying a range of different fields and advances, mainly dealing with new means of control and interaction via robotics and new trends in user interface design. He then talks through a few of these headings.

Starting with the “Robotics” theme, he describes his work with what he calls “nano-architecture” in 2006, and particularly the “shift from humanoid robots to robots as networks or as series or different parts” He shows videos of the USC ‘spider robot’, and the ‘Hot lips robot’ at Cornell. Also, a 3-storey robot, “huge transformable structures built with networked architecture.”

He shows “self-similar robots”, which create “nest-able shapes of waterproof and solid structures” (more Cornell Uni work). These incredible robots rotate within themselves, with “intelligence built into systems - they find each other and rearrange themselves into configuration which enables a structure, which they can move in unison again.” (Leaving aside queries over the definitions of ‘intelligence’, these are quite incredible videos, showing these blocks tentatively exploring each other, coalescing into formations which then become new, larger units with new capabilities, or scaled/nested versions of the previous movements. Extraordinary.)

With “Interactive nano-Architecture”, Kemp talks about building an architecture out of hundreds of thousands of little robots, each the size of a coin (so not that ‘nano’). This is like a kit of parts (broadly redolent of John Frazer’s ‘An Evolutionary Architecture’?) that can come together to build new physical structures. He suggests that this kind of architecture could enable a “house could become multiple houses, or move to a new space altogether.” (Again, extraordinary possibilities; well beyond the (wonderful) Sliding House, towards the ideas of Yona Friedman; closer yet to some genuinely responsive surface ideas Carlo Ratti once showed me.)

A current example of this might be “Touch and Multi-touch Interfaces”, also indicating the multi-touch as building block - like the multi-touch cells of multitouch.fi.

Kemp then moves on to “Expression, Emotion and Cognitive Control.” He describes how “you can control interfaces with thoughts”. Shows the Emotiv project, though notes that he “hasn’t really started hooking this up to architecture yet”. He talks about real-time communication and real-time information, facial, mood-based and cognitive processing. Then “new hybrid UI controls”, centred on touch, gesture and cognition.

He says “architecture is about designing gesture and interaction - and also information exchanges. More and more these things are becoming this one combined thing. The information and physical object are two things working together in real-time.”

He shows us a visual calendar project, by Potion Design Group in New York, which is “state-based and not page-based”. (I think it's this one for RISD; not sure. I like this one though.)

He shows some of his designs for the Nike Beijing 2008 video player for Mexico, in the context of illustrating how architecture informs his work, “developing systems that move in space.“ (Nice piece of work.)

He describes some of these inferences from architecture - the importance of positioning physical objects; using geomterty to organise information. He describes work on the Grey’s Anatomy website, pulling back blog entries about Grey’s episodes, where the organisation correlates date, popularity etc. (Again, a nice piece of work - akin to visualising our ripples ideas five years ago - but I’m personally not sure about how much genuinely ‘architectural’ thinking informs these visual interfaces. A different architecture informs the definition and organisation of the originating data - which can be perceived spatially - yet the visual and conceptual organisation of data is its own discipline, with quite different idioms, models etc.)

He then talks about “digital visualisations of real-world concepts”, such as the much-blogged-at-the-time Current State iPhone app indicating energy consumption in real-time. He describes the “use of space to organise complex real-time information”, with reference to the much-blogged-but-rarely-seen Photosynth.

Kemp closes by stating that, now, ‘architecture is digital and physical. It’s more important than ever that architects design this relationship between information and space.”

Kemp politely disagrees, which is fair enough. He certainly sees the potential in the approach of architecture in terms of interface design. 

I also see the potential - at least when architecture is reconfigured more broadly as concerning “spatial intelligence”, after Leon van Schaik’s recent book. It’s just a real stretch for architects, currently, and will require a radical redrafting of education and practice. To be clear, many architects clearly would make good interaction designers. Some already do (Kemp, for instance). It’s just that most currently don’t. At all. It’s a quite different design discipline, despite the field becoming increasingly 'spatial' (a term which needs picking apart). Again, industrial design is the potential bridging discipline, it seems to me - not least in terms of understanding ongoing iterative processes, systems, user research-led innovation, never mind haptics, IA, interaction models etc. - and it’s interesting that industrial design’s influence on architecture is as strong here in LA as anywhere.

Regine picks up on the terminology, asking about the difference between ‘interactive’ and ‘responsive’. She notes that many of these new architectural experiences are basically responsive, as compared to the genuinely interactive work of, say, Gordon Pask. Kemp replies that “interactivity augments human experience”, which is an interesting and useful starting point, when taken forward. While responsiveness could also do this to a degree, this idea of “augmenting human experience” suggests a deeper, more meaningful connection.

Regine also asks about the current context of projects, of “crisis” - either the GFC or of environmental sustainability. She wonders whether “these projects exist in a world parallel to this world? Can robotics give some answer?”

Kemp replies that he think that robotics could be useful, but that “he’s not 100% interested” as such. He finds “green architecture interesting” but isn’t really motivated by it. Regine finds it odd that, with these projects, there’s “never someone there talking about sustainability?”. Kemp says “Never. I’m not going to be one working on those projects.”

NB: This is a write-up of a talk that took place at Postopolis! LA during April 2009. Notes are taken in real-time, with editing and context added afterward so reader beware. All Postopolis! LA entries are gathered here.

Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee, principals of Johnston Marklee, were interviewed by David A and David B of ArchDaily/Plataforma Arquitectura.

Johnston Marklee are LA-based and were formed in 1998. Their key works include the Sale House, the Hill House in Pacific Palisades (ArchDaily), and the recent Complex concrete house in Argentina. They say the office has a “team of between 7 and 12 people depending on what month it is …”

(I’m afraid I didn’t generally record which answers were from Johnston or Lee, so these answers below might present an accidentally unified view of the practice.)

The David’s now-familiar opening gambit: “What is architecture?”

They take the answer for a walk along on a circuitous route, noting that there are “different moments in history where architecture is discussed a lot - say with the ‘80s and pomo. Now it’s discussed a lot in the general public.” They say that “architecture has to bear the responsibility to take on every new thing” but that it’s “important to realise what architecture does best - and there are certain things that other media does better …” (A playfully evasive answer, but interesting.)

The Davids ask “what do you think should be the role of an architect?”

Johnston replies that “we’re heading off to a lecture - “Designing Life” - and the gist of it is about how design thinking can inform practice and inform discipline …” They say they’re certainly “interested in how architects can inform political practice.”

Lee adds, tongue firmly in cheek, that “architects should be superstars - and solve all problems of the world.” He then proceeds with “culture is very fast and architecture is very slow. It demands a lot of financial resources, impacts on city in a very permanent way. It’s a very slow art. What an architect does best is to reaffirm the importance of the physical environment. In virtual world, many different human relationships have been consecrated, and less attention paid on the physical realm.” (This slowness, like slow food perhaps, could certainly be a strategic virtue.)

When asked about innovation and creativity, Lee continues by mentioning George (what sounded like Batard but was probably) Bataille, who “talked about writing out of pure experimentation as opposed to writing that came out of pure necessity. When you need to be inventive out of necessity, that’s a time for architects to step up and be creative. Now architects needs to address the most important issues - whether it needs to be sustainability or housing. We have to deal with moments of excess we have to deal with in our practice. You have to be in both realms.”

Johnston notes that “we reference a lot. We have a extensive library. We measure our work against history - so we don’t have the impetus at the start of every project to ‘be innovative’. It’s a by-product of the way we understand the parameters of our practice.”

“Social networking?”

They reply that “it’s important, but not separate from process of architecture.”

As if cheekily following on from this question, David A asks how they got involved in the (in)famous Ordos project. Sure enough, Johnston responds with “Networks”, with a grin. They both studied at Harvard; they both studied with Herzog + De Meuron. They describe Ordos as a “mega architectural orgy”. They say “the scale is what fascinates us. Beyond a certain scale it beocmes something more than just a collection. We suspect our disbelief. We’re interested in a selection - and how it’s curated, when all don’t necessarily share the same tastes or sensibility … Ai Wei Wei is an important figure. There may be a way of still creating a certain coherence despite all the difference.”

In their work in general, they say they’re “interested in finding clients and collaborators that we will travel with together. We’re interested in clients who come to us who see an aspiration in the long run, as opposed to someone who has arrived and sees us as a trophy …”

Afterwards, Joseph Grima asks about their work with the photographer Livia Corona and their work on the Sale House project. They say she was interested in “the content, the mathematics of the house, the colour scheme of the house.” She “created a portfolio that became her commentary on gerontology.” They were interested in the “life outside of architecture - the inhabitants … We asked her to do the project as we thought it would bring out something that we wouldn’t see … which we then took into the new project.”

(I like this idea very much - the idea of working with multidisciplinary collaborators to further explore the work. It’s not only humble, but exploratory.)

Johnston Marklee

NB: This is a write-up of a talk that took place at Postopolis! LA during April 2009. Notes are taken in real-time, with editing and context added afterward so reader beware. All Postopolis! LA entries are gathered here.

Another interview by David A and David B of ArchDaily, this time with Whitney Sander of Sander Architects, another LA-based firm. Their work is largely interesting due to the focus on prefab construction techniques - as noted previously, this is a consistent theme in some LA-based architecture.The Davids get Sander to talk about his Living Steel works by way of introduction, investigations into prefab construction. Sander notes that working out such projects would come in at $6000per sq ft was a breakthrough moment.

Sander describes how the prefabricated light-gauge metal building industry is actually about 100 years old, and now highly refined. He states it’s the most mature industry in the country (difficult to prove?); the patents wore out long ago. The Butler Box - or Butler Building - is the most well-known example. As it’s so mature now, the margins are very low. “The product is bullet-proof”, he says. “It’s computerised from the minute you place the order.“

(For more on Sander's prefab products, see their Hybrid House)

Moving on, the Davids ask him “What is architecture?” Sander gives the negative response to begin with: “An over-used term that has been applied to too many things (and yet) an over-regulated term - (in that you’re) not allowed to use it unless you’re registered with the AIA.”

Seeing this only part-resonates, he moves on to answer more constructively, “the making of habitation … or the studying of paradigms of doing new ways of doing this.” It’s also “cultural production”, he said, “it’s expressive of where we’re going - of what we’re doing.”

In response to a question about innovation, Sander replies that they “understand new forms for new times. We don’t take prototypical forms - this is contrary to what I said about Butler Buildings - but we also figure out what things last, what things have value. We listen to Mozart and look at work of Le Corbusier.” He looks for the right word for a few moments before settling on “Connoisseurship!”, which he interprets as the ability to “accept the best from the past but look forward to what else could be.“

When asked about social networking, Sander dismisses the notion, finding that if it only involves ”networking with a lot of architects”, it’s of little value. “A lot of architects are into themselves”, he says, whereas “you got to get out”. He says he’s not a member of AIA.

(In my notes, there’s another line from Sander, but I’m not sure of the context: “If architecture is reduced to a quantum process, then you’re lost …“)

During the interview Sander had also dismissed much of LA’s urban form and architecture, making the familiar complaints about it being crude and not human-scale. Geoff suggested another view, saying that if you “compare LA to the Grand Canyon rather than Paris or London you can instead see it as almost geological experience.” Or it can be viewed as an “existential investigation, in that you can look at the city and find emptiness. Then there’s an alternative psychological possibility in a city with bank towers and no people.”

Sander says he agrees and finds the idea fascinating. That LA is “vacant in some ways and yet also magnificent”. Then he seems to return to his original theme  “I just wish it were better. It’s being done better in Europe. When’s the last time someone built a good skyscraper in US?”

(Geoff recalls the idea that the US is a concentrated rebound of Europe, coming back to haunt the psychology of Europe. Maybe Dubai is a concentrated rebound of the US …)

Ben Cerveny asks about user-generated content and whether prefab might enable a form of user-generation of architecture, or at least building?

Sander doesn’t seem to get this. He likens it to “fast food prefab”.

Ben suggests it may be more sophisticated than that, more akin to the architecture of the favela rather than fast food? Sander states instead that “the process of building structures is becoming more complicated rather than less so.” In this he appears to mean in terms of a bureaucracy of approvals, litigation and so on, saying “our role as mediators of a paper trail is where we could end up.” (He clearly doesn’t seem interested in the potential of prefab that Ben’s hinting at, in terms of modular ‘kits of parts’ that enable a more adaptive design, more creatively involving the end-user as a co-creator i.e. smartly and sensitively accentuating a process that tends to happen anyway etc. etc.)

David Gissen delivered one of my favourite talks at Postopolis! LA, for sure. Gissen is a historian - yet lest that conjure up a certain image - an AJP Taylor, EP Thompson, or Eric Hobsbawm, bless ‘em - he actually cuts a very different kind of figure: exploratory, intrinsically multidisciplinary, and given to speculative imagination. Gissen delivered a fascinating, illuminating and often funny presentation which utterly reconfigured ideas of preservation and historical research.

He started, as few others did funnily enough, by quoting Nietzsche. In stating “scholars are not human beings”, Gissen was evoking the peculiarly tortured mode that academics, researchers, scholars can end up in. He suggested that “the more you go into the archive, the less you have to say about how people should live” and wonders whether perhaps the “philosopher and architect has more to offer”. He ponders whether his kind of research can indeed lead to “becoming something less than human being,” after Nietzsche. (He’s playing this up a little much, but anyone who’s done a Phd, or witnessed a friend go through one, will know the truth of this.) 

By way of contrast, he brings up Reyner Banham (which others also did funnily enough), noting his “name gets tossed around a lot”, and how different his image was. “(Banham) constantly photographs himself in a car, on a bike, in the desert - never in an archive. He’s trying to show you that one can live as a scholar that’s very different from what we expect.”

Moving on to projects, he starts with that of his colleague Jorge Ateropalos Jorge Otero Pailos (corrected, thanks Javier), who conducts studies of dirt and pollution, and here we start hearing about attempts to reinvent the idea of preservation. Ateropalos proposed making preservations of pollution in a factory in Balsano, Italy. He casts the dirt on walls as a way of understanding - through preservation - the lived experience of the factory, the behaviour of the factory.

Gissen then mentions Michael Caratzas, and his project for the Cross-Bronx Thruway (an infamous Robert Moses project.) He proposes preserving the entire Cross-Bronx Expressway highway, rather than demolishing it. “What if you did preserve it?”, Gissen asks. Preserving means “to keep it in good shape and also an aspect of history …” It means both maintenance and understanding. 

(It’s interesting to extend the idea of preservation in this direction. I’m personally opposed to preservation in the form of unnecessary heritage protection, taking the Cedric Price view of heritage (“York Minister? Flatten it.”) such that our cities continue to progress. But the preservation at work here is quite different to heritage.)

Gissen’s HTC Experiments (a “bloggish thing I started about 6 months ago”), is a great ongoing exloration of these issues - what he describes as “history as a form of experimentation”. One such project is located around a building for the California College of Arts in San Francisco, which is an adaptive re-use of a former bus shed. The building would have been full of fumes in its former life. Yet now that’s all gone. It’s one of two remaining of its type. In a sense, he says, the gentrification of such spaces means literally “less exhaust”. The buses and smokestacks disappear, taking the smoke with them. Gentrification “changes the actual atmosphere of a portion of the city.” 

His proposal is to “reconstruct an exhaust plume as a sculptural element”. In effect, to denote this shift by illustrating what was once there, at least symbolically. (This is an idea I enjoy, and have used in my own work to some degree, exploring how the air quality in the Green Square Town Centre urban renewal project Sydney will have radically changed since its days as site of the city’s primary incinerator, a space subject to decades of community concerns over air quality. I proposed real-time air-quality monitoring, projecting data visualisations onto the defunct incinerator chimneys. Leaving aside issues of representation and the form of ‘progress’ it purports to entail, it’s interesting to note that gentrification does at least mean cleaner air.)

Similarly, Gissen describes a project for Pittsburgh, to “make Pittsburghians think about how the space has changed”. To understand the history of the city through the history of the air of the city. Particularly where “the air that’s been in the city is really quite foul.” Gissen asks “What if you just projected the atmosphere that used to be in the city?” He shows an illustration, looking akin to a Superstudio project, but made out of smoke. He then decided to make “a less utopian image” (less heroically Superstudio, in that sense) and showed a progression that’s “like a balloon that’s made of smoke (to indicate that it’s) actually a really positive sign. It makes you realise how the city has transformed, (and how) the atmosphere is designed in a way that’s different from the one that was there before.” 

Gissen then shows another project .. “to reconstruct floating bathhouses in the Hudson” (and thus addressing water quality), and another, centred around a chance to explore the history of the park. His proposal here was to create “a history of the park in which the park doesn’t exist.” So it’s “a proposal to do a counter-history of New York in which the parks in the park system never happened. It makes people understand the history of the city differently …” (These are all interesting variations on these theme of highlighting what is not there - what in other areas we might say are ‘making the invisible visible’ strategies - but here dealing with the creation of alternate pasts or alternate presents, in order to highlight the difference something has made. Either the difference from removal (pollution) or addition (parks).) 

Gissen shows a map of Midtown Manhattan from the air, noting that many innovations in cartography have happened around Manhattan (my friend Jack Schulze has just delivered one of the latest). Yet Gissen says that “no maps tell you what it feels like”. He means ‘feel’ as in environmental quality (rather than say accretion and dynamics of cultural capital, which is just as difficult to map in NYC, despite what some might claim.) In terms of the environmental quality of Manhattan, Gissen reckons that due to air conditioning “more indoor air was produced in this space than anywhere on Earth (until recently, possibly).”

Hence, an idea for an air conditioning map of Manhattan. Gissen’s interested in the work of Philippe Raum or Francois Roche - “or those that work with atmosphere”. “How does their work get preserved? You can’t photograph it. Why not have an archive in which the actual chemical content is preserved?” 

Having started with Nietzsche, Gissen closes with an anecdote about his next door neighbour’s parrot. After many days of suffering the parrot’s incessant screeching, Gissen eventually realised that the parrot was imitating the sounds around their neighbourhood. It would squawk the buses’ brakes, or imitate the sound of washing up, and so on. Gissen sees the “parrot is a type of architectural and living archive” of his neighbourhood. He then speculates further, noting that some parrots might travel through war-zones, picking up the sounds they hear there. “So their song is of urban and social destruction,” he says. They end up in zoos, singing a song of distant conflict. He says when we look at “the way that non-human life can be used as an archive, we consider the way that the social, natural and historical can not easily be divided …” 

In the Q&A, Geoff recalls the Duchamp piece 2cc of Paris air indicating it reminds him of Gissen’s approach, and wonders aloud about what the limits of preservation might be. Can we ‘preserve’ the Iraq war, or a traffic jam on the ‘10’ here in LA? Gissen says you can reconstruct anything - but preservation has its limits. 

With an eye to my day job, I ask Gissen about the overlap between ‘his kind of preservation’ and planning and design in urban development. Both are involved in projections of alternative cities. Gissen projects alternate cities in order to explore history, to assess the results of interventions ; in urban design, we project alternate cities in order to explore the future, constructing complex models attempting to predict the city’s behaviour as a result of a potential intervention. It’s very similar, technically. 

Gissen appears to like this notion, and draws out its multidisciplinary implications - that historians might be involved with designers more directly, working on shared models, projections, analysis. He thinks that “a return to the confusion of the 18th century would be interesting, where history was not so far removed and historians would engage in (this kind of) projection too”. (I wholeheartedly concur. We should draw ever more disciplines into design practice, particularly around modelling which can otherwise be extremely reductionistic.) 

As Greg Smith points out to me afterwards, it’s great to see a historian draw. I suspect they might’ve done so more frequently once, but he’s right - it’s great to see this kind of creative historical provocation rendered in such imaginative and communicable ways. Gissen’s talk is full of possibilities, looking backwards and forwards.

HTC Experiments / David Gissen

Mary-Ann Ray has worked with Michael Graves, James Turrell and Richard Meier. She is now principal, along with Robert Mangurian, of the firm Studio Works in Los Angeles. She, they, also teach at SCI-Arc. I like that her CV includes several schools in the USA, and would like to hear more about the process of designing state schools in the US, yet tonight she is talking at Postopolis! LA about their work in China, which includes the studio BASE (confusing website ahoy) in Caochongdi.

Unfortunately I missed the start of her talk due to ‘technical issues’ (as in, the need to buy some fries from the bar opposite, in order to stay warm and nourished throughout the slowly chilling evening.) Apologies to Mary-Ann for this.

I returned to find her halfway through a fascinating discussion on a 1959 plan for Beijing. Apparently, this has never been published and it’s an extraordinary document. Ray notes that Mao played a primary role in the idea of making the city of Beijing - "as a kind of ruralised urbanism”. The plan divides the city into a series of “dispersal group units” - these are tripartite arrangements that each has elements of housing (commune), factory and natural productive districts. These are then distributed in various combinations all over the city. Between these settlements are trees and green spaces, meaning around 40% of the total land is gardens, parks and farms. Ray notes that there are currently 3 million trees being planted in Beijing, so at least this aspect of the plan is perhaps being realised ...

The plan was never put into practice, yet it remains a fascinating document. Ray illustrates a mapping of these combinations in Beijing today, via satellite photos indicating green agriculture, blue factories, housing. They’re not traditional hutong neighbourhoods, says Ray, but they’re more akin to traditional village-like organisations - at least in this relationship between village, factory and agriculture around the edge. She indicates a detail of a “burgeoning urban village”, with multi-storey buildings being illegally built by entrepreneurial farmers.

Ray then talks about their forthcoming Caochangdi: Beijing Inside Out book, and their work in Caochangdi (or Cao Chang Di), one of over 300 “urban villages” currently in Beijing, and therefore interesting in the context of the earlier discussion of the Mao plan. Ray, Mangurian and studio live and work in Caochangdi, alongside a population including between 4000 and 7000 mostly illegal residents.

She describes an entirely fluid and variable use of space, which seems (somewhat bizarrely, or perhaps utterly typically) poised in perfect tension between high art and low commerce. Ray quickly runs through a typology of the layered spatial uses she encountered, each indicating a complex rendering of translation, appropriation, authenticity: a dog meat restaurant; Korean Christian church operating under cover of an animation studio; Ai Wei Wei projects; quonset huts; Mongolian corn-fed restaurant; a miniature golf course with Chinese characteristics; a driving school with fake on/off ramps; migrant sewer workers in temporary tent housing; a Swiss art gellery … (And that was only a few of her examples I managed to jot down).

Elsewhere, partly due to the influence of the omnipresent Ai Wei Wei, Chinese artists are everywhere. Ray notes, with a wry smile, that even Martha Stewart visited. There’s a tree-planting campaign - attempting to hold at 40% green - which is ironically reminiscent of the 1959 Mao plan. But the real action is in the illegal multi-storeys, temporary cafés, scruffy construction sites dotted with urban shepherds tracking solitary pigs, and so on.

Ray’s talking to photographs of Caochangdi. Many illustrate the migrant workers - known as the “floating population” - who take what she says are known as “the 3D jobs - dirty, dangerous and difficult”. The studios she’s led have constructed typologies of these jobs, or mapped the migration of dogs, and so on (another theme of Postopolis! LA is architects making infographic mappings of skewed demographic incursions into the city.)

Ray describes a typical scenario, which started with farmers making buildings “in a very normative way” (simple red-brick structures etc.) Then Ai Wei Wei hits town and starts building projects in the village too, in a particular style - essentially, a minimalist reinvention of these vernacular forms, in a distinctive sober grey. Ray then relates that, as these are Ai Wei Wei works, foreigners come in and start paying more for these buildings. And so, the local farmers copy them, almost exactly. In turn, Ai Wei Wei then has to start working in red brick to avoid these copies of the grey … So Ai Wei Wei’s famous ‘Fake’ project is usurped by fake-Fake designs. We have real-Fake design vs fake-Fake design.

In the Q&A, Ray is asked “How can we, or should we, ‘learn from Beijing’ in terms of cities elsewhere.”

Ray replies that “Cao Chang Di is a unique thing,” and seems to resist the idea that much can or should be transferred elsewhere. When pressed, however, she does think it’s important to look at some of the processes at work here and in cities with similar structures, processes and drivers. “Most of the concrete being poured in the world is being poured by squatters”, she says, with “architects making one half of one percent”. She points to (Postopolis! NYC speaker) Robert Neuwirth’s Shadow Cities book; that might “hint at something” in terms of thinking about contemporary urban infrastructure.

She also describes how democracy usefully exists at a very local level - the (urban) village leader is elected directly and is far more approachable than in many ‘western’ urban governance models.

Geoff asks about Beijing’s “water issue” and Ray notes the extraordinary geoengineering at work in order to stop the advance of Gobi desert. She says that sandstorms have been described as “the fifth season” there. But having lived and worked in Beijing a while, she can report that things have been getting better: “Summers have got better since greenery has been deployed to hide urban villages from expressways.” (Interesting that urban villages are hidden from expressways, not the other way round.) 

Ben Cerveny asks whether the classic hutong structure features in these urban villages. Ray responds that the hutong was really seen in the inner city of Beijing. In this respect, hutong-dwellers were related to imperial family in some way. “Not directly,” she says, “but you might be the imperial diaper cleaners …” However, “once you were out of that, you were in the outer city (and) further out was lower class (further out again were prostitutes and thieves, or at least thought to be so by the rest of the city)”. Out here, these “villages achieved densities that were akin to mid-rise housing”. This was “partly to conserve land and partly to conserve heat.” This density, she says, is Chinese in essence.

Overall, this was a fascinating talk. Elements of the talk - in common with many ‘Westerners’ talking about China - perhaps sounded a bit like anthropologists discovering ancient cultures during the 19th century. Perhaps this is an inevitable side-effect of the format and situation. A fellow PostOps organiser also wanted to know more about the synthesis of western and Chinese culture at this point, rather than continuing to focus on the outsider's view of China.

Yet Ray and colleagues appear to have engaged far deeper than most, and her analysis feels considered, informed and interested. Her exposition of the 1959 plan for Beijing, and its unlikely informal parallels today, provided a fascinating insight into the true haphazard nature of urban development, in China and elsewhere.

We may have a soft spot for architects and designers working directly with media as a way to influence architecture and urbanism. Perhaps this is partly given the heritage of Archigram, Superstudio, Cedric Price, Reyner Banham, Yona Friedman et al, but also due to us ‘curators’ all being bloggers, at least to some degree.

So Jeffrey Inaba’s work at the Columbia Laboratory for Architectural Broadcasting (C-LAB) is particularly interesting, not least their magazine Volume, an influential component of the architecture and urbanism press, produced in collaboration with Archis and AMO. Volume is always worth reading, not least as it takes a very broad-minded and inquisitive view of what architecture can be in the first place. It’s as comfortable with an article on the history of Pininfarina or the Watergate complex as it is with various political agendas. It’s variably designed - sometimes fashionably undesigned, in the contemporary lazy style; other times excellent, confident, exploratory and playful. While you have to wonder whether Volume has any impact outside of “the converted” or the niche audience of the existing architecture and academic community, it does at least try to engage through a widescreen view on contemporary urbanism whilst retaining a sharply intellectual tone and a nose for the political in architectural practice. A good thing.

Inaba concentrates mainly, though not solely, on Volume throughout a talk in which he rapidly disappeared into the gloom of the first night of Postopolis! LA, lit only by the large projected images of page spreads above his head.

He starts somewhat awkwardly by appearing to apologise, on behalf of architecture, for a couple of decades of opulence, frivolity and overblown unsustainable projects. This, presumably, in the context of a new mood, even a ‘new deal’ and just maybe a new opportunity for architects to engage with the wider concerns of the day, and particularly ‘the recovery’ (or alternative), whether it involves buildings or not. Inaba says: “We need to gain credibility if we’re to switch focus from private to public. We need to accept some blame for the ambitions of private clients.” He says this should include an “expression of mea culpa of what we’ve been involved in.“ (Interesting. I may have the nuance wrong here, but I think that's what he said). 

Moving on, he notes that C-LAB produces numerous projects, but concentrates on Volume magazine, and most recently the “Power” issue.

Looking at “people in power” primarily, it produced, amongst other things, a DIY kit for conjuring up leaders e.g. a Secretary of Human Health and Health Services that might include belief in holistic care. (This kind of game-playing - conjuring up imaginary leaders - was done in Monocle more convincingly and with a straighter face a couple of years ago. I'm not sure this exercise is best done with a wink or not...)

Another feature looks at a maintenance problem common to all “Class A office buildings” (e.g. AT&T building, UN building, Empire State etc.) - that is, gum on the sidewalk. This was documented in detail by C-LAB (they also focused on London artist Ben Wilson’s hardened, painted gum logos). He mentions a pre-emptive project for a sidewalk (possibly for a Sejima building?) - laying down a graphic that already has gum stains on it ...

A feature on Kazahkstan, where Inaba wryly notes that the opponents of the President appear to commit suicide with regularity. A country about the size of western Europe but one-fifteenth the population. The sheer emptiness fascinates Inaba, and he talks about rational and irrational responses to vastness of scale and development in the architecture, showing a fabulous series of photographs. These images also reveal a fascination on the behalf of Kazahkstani architects with the form of the diagonal and with gold. He notes that detailing is a problem in the architecture, due to a temperature range from -40 to +40, indicating several building details that appear to be melting under duress.

Inaba then talks of C-LAB’s work in urban porosity projects in South Korea, delivering masterplans, models etc., and then a work exploring scale, around an object that is scaled up to the size of a building, works at ticket kiosk scale, and then down to an object that could be sold in gift shop ...

They work with information design and infographics, indicating a broader notion of architecture. With this in mind, Inaba talks about the idea of US Ambassador Richard Holbrooke being the “architect of the Dayton Peace Accords” (as he was often referred to in the press). Inaba takes the idea seriously, illustrating how Hobrooke did actually organise the project spatially, from drawing up the location and length of boundaries through to denoting where negotiators at the Accords would sleep.

Back to infographics, and we see an optimisation of space in terms of hedge funds (400000 dollars of income per sq ft in one image; another indicators number of hedge funds per floor in a skyscraper; another explores debt to GDP ratio). He updates this by noting that all the hedge fund spaces he’s indicated are currently all vacancies now. (He doesn’t seem to have a particular rhetoric or tool to explore this vacancy, however, as compared to the portrayal of abundance. I need to look at the infographics in more detail to judge them. Difficult to tell at a distance, which probably means it fails some kind of Edward Tufte directive for projecting information halfway up a skyscraper.)

Their latest edition of Volume focuses on urban China, in a 'bootleg issue' (see review at We Make Money Not Art). Inaba then talks about a “downsizing of America, de-accessioning under-performing states.” (It feels like Volume/C-LAB can end up walking a tightrope between playful and overly ironic. The latter is dangerous territory, at last ...)

He indicates a mapping of skies in disaster movies, exploring how film uses background as a way to presage disasters. It’s not always via dark skies … He also indicates another work, on the emergence of wild feral animals. He says “they’re a good indication that a crisis is going to strike.”

Inaba closes by saying they want to understand what the value of design is, whether it can reproduced rather than acting as one-offs. Whether “the ambitions of the private sector can be transferred as we move into public sector”, whether architects are any good at infrastructure design ...

Geoff, in his role as interrogator, asks after the role of the architect, and whether - essentially, with fewer new building projects around - we’ll see a return of the architect as drawer, thinker, avant-garde provocateur?

Inaba talks about the “whole transportation infrastructure” issue currently in vogue, “If all it means is to design light rail and bus stations, then that’s a waste of a crisis.” He clarifies this by wondering “What about alternative ideas? Like subtracting from the transportation systems we have now?” (This is later echoed in Benjamin Bratton’s talk, and is a key theme right now.) He asks “Would it then give us credibility to do other projects, that indicate that we’re not just in it for money?” (Clearly a concern; does the proximity of AMO, and thus OMA, influence this concern?) Geoff then asks about “architects as research anthropologists”; that “they sit on statistics that others don’t have”, they have a kind of “informational reserve” that can be turned into something? (I’m not sure this is always true - many architects don't - but many do, and I know what Geoff’s getting at.)

Inaba reckons that architects are “good at processing disparate information”. They are often in the business of “producing proposals that are a synthesis of diverse information. That’s a skill that’s way more important than doing RFQs.” (Again, that’s clearly not unique to architects, but common in many disciplines. Certainly most designers can claim facility with this. Also again, though, it is a vastly important role and one architects can play well on projects they’re involved in.)

Geoff suggests that, in addition to the emergence of feral animals, another sign of a crisis is empty space ...

Inaba responds by referring to their work on hedge funds, indicating a clear “densification, but what we’re seeing now is an evacuation of space”. He wonders “How do you plan for emptiness? What do you do with all that vacancy?” They’re often looking at “mapping out the physical phenomenon of geographies (and) now we’re looking at concentrations of emptiness.” He finds it interesting that narrative representations of this kind of emptiness, say with The Omega Man, the classic story of the last man standing, or as with the Will Smith movie, (it’s) always some kind of external non-human thing that eradicates people … but here it’s of our own doing.”

Inaba then claims that LA is the densest city in the US (as noted before, this isn’t actually true; although it does depend on how you count it. It’s more important to understand that LA is dense, however; certainly denser than most people think.) He continues that the “densest bit of LA is all 3-storey buildings. All of us are living in such buildings, more unhappily, than we might assume.” (I’m not sure where he’s going with that - he went on to talk about “relocated cities” but I didn’t catch it.)

It’s a good talk. And C-LAB is a good thing, as is Volume. As I’ve suggested above, I find it occasionally veers a little too close to a position of detached irony, which is as out of step with the times as starchitecture. Equally, it’s jostling for space alongside numerous networks of blogs for whom a broad multi-perspectival view of architecture and urbanism is not just possible but an inherent feature, well beyond the traditional architecture press that Volume certainly supersedes. Having said that, Volume’s credentials and ambition still hoist it high in that landscape. Cities and buildings can be shaped by such thinking and publishing. Credit to Inaba and team.

An article in The Economist suggests that electric cars should generate a noise to compensate for the loss of combustion engine noise, as they are so quiet.

Despite noting there is little research (thought I’ll note some later), The Economist says “Some drivers say that when their cars are in electric mode people are more likely to step out in front of them. The solution, many now believe, is to fit electric and hybrid cars with external sound systems.” Their subtitle - “Sound generators will make electric and hybrid cars safer“ - indicates this is their position too.

Where to start?

Let’s quickly deal with the safety issue first. People will adapt easily enough. We’ve adapted to numerous successive modes of transport in the past without the need to artificially increase the noise that mode of transport generates (though the first automobiles required a man with a flag walking in front of them. Is this not the aural equivalent of that, and so equally likely to fade away?)

One of the numerous reasons why bicycles are a more civic mode of transport is that they do not make much noise. Even at the speeds cyclists can get up to, this near-silent mode is apparently still safe enough not to warrant a pedal-powered drone, say. A bell suffices, and after that it’s about taking due care and attention on both sides. As bikes slowly become the dominant mode of personal transport in cities, this shouldn’t change. Cyclists, a few idiots aside, have to rely on individual responsibility to a greater extent than motorists, partly due to their relative fragility. This is not a bad thing necessarily - it forms a thin undulating layer of civic substrate.

This first aspect of The Economist’s article is borne of auto-centric thinking, and so the concomitant desires for speed and freedom … and often irresponsibility. Speed and freedom are not intrinsically problematic, but they can be. Cars moving at speed in urban areas are indeed dangerous - they are responsible for truly horrifying numbers of fatalities and injuries, and it’s a bit rich to suggest the solution to that particular problem is fake engine noise. Presumably, if people had genuinely wanted to solve this problem they’d have tried a little harder before, rather than apparently relying on the side effect of a noisy carburrettor.

A user comment from The Economist article:

“As a Prius owner offended many times daily by excessive noise of motorcycles, trucks, booming car radios, horns, rude cell phone users, etc., I applaud the quiet! I am a responsible person and expect others to be … end of discussion.”

Quite. And another comment, pointing to interesting-sounding research:

“The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration held a hearing in Washington DC June 23, 2007 to gather the facts and data. It turns out that in spite of having over 500,000 Prius in the USA starting from 2000, there is no accident data showing an unusual risk to pedestrians. The Prius has the same pedestrian accident rate as ordinary gas vehicles.”

On more general safety, the congestion that cars cause also limits their average speed in cities (currently down to about 30km/h in Sydney at the moment). There’s an argument to make them slower than this. Someone will suggest a GPS-enabled limiter fitted to cars at some point i.e. enforcing a low top speed when the GPS indicates it’s in particularly built-up areas (e.g.). However, the whole point of cars is freedom rather than inhibition, and I'd prefer to see these issues solved through ‘shared space’ strategies, such as those espoused by Hans Monderman. Here, drivers are responsible for negotiating urban space alongside others, with few if any demarcations or regulations of space between cars, pedestrians, bikes etc. It’s been proven to make streets both safer and more effective. In terms of the way streets might feel it’s closer to this film of George Street, Sydney in 1906. (The version I’ve uploaded here allows you to first compare it with the Sustainable Sydney 2030 strategy for a pedestrianised, light-railed George Street.)

Without wishing to romanticise aspects of that 1906 film (yer actual bubonic plague had been lurking in that same city a few streets to the north only a few years before that film was shot) it does indicate a more progressive system, based on interdependent real-time responsive actors negotiating space far more fluidly than the averaging effects of mid-20th-century road design, where everyone eventually comes off worse. This is hardly a cityscape without noise, and note how these blurred lines of George Street enable pedestrians, bikes, trams and carts to occupy the same spaces, relying on multi-sensory feedback but essentially with shared responsibility for being aware. Remaining alert and riding the horn might become more relevant than the constant (and therefore less useful) hum of engine noise.

Regarding shared space and horns, a passage in Geoff Dyer’s typically enjoyable latest Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi reminds us that not all urban traffic and noise is the same. "Jeff/Geoff" is in India:

“The din of horns rendered use of the horn simultaneously superfluous and essential. The streets were narrow, potholed, trenched, gashed. There was no pavement, no right of way - no wrong of way - and, naturally, no stopping. The flow was so dense that we were rarely more than an inch from whatever was in front, beside or behind. But we never stopped. Not for a moment. We kept nudging and bustling and bumping our way forward. Given the slightest chance - a yard! - Sanjay went for it. What, in London, would have constituted a near-miss was an opportunity to acknowledge the courtesy of a fellow road-user. There were no such opportunities, of course, and the idea of courtesy made no sense for the simple reason that nothing made any sense except the relentless need to keep going. From the airport to the hotel, Sanjay had used the horn excessively; now that we were in the city proper, instead of using it repeatedly, he kept it going all the time. So did everyone else. Unlike everything else, this did make sense. Why take your hand off the horn when, a split-second later, you’d have to put it back on?“ [From Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi by Geoff Dyer]

Back in 'Western' cities, private car use will likely drop anyway, for reasons which I hope are by now obvious. (I can see that the loss of engine noise might be an issue for blind people, but would look for a specific solution - perhaps a non-visual alert only they can perceive as a car approaches - rather than reduce the quality of the urban experience for everyone (ethically dubious perhaps).

Beyond autocentric, the second aspect of The Economist’s article is borne of what Juhani Pallasmaa would call ocularcentric thinking - an inability to perceive the city, or much at all, in terms of non-visual senses. If the safety issue resolves itself - through fewer cars, and people adapting - and understanding that engine noise is hardly keep the streets safe in the first place, let’s move on to two more interesting implications.

One, if naturally quiet cars should generate a noise, what should that be? And two, if that doesn’t happen, what might increasingly quiet cars do for the urban soundscape?

On the first point, The Economist quotes a Dr. Rosenblum who is researching this area:

“What sort of noise should electric-powered cars make? They could, perhaps, beep as some pedestrian crossings do, or buzz like a power tool. Having worked with blind subjects, Dr Rosenblum is convinced of a different answer: “People want cars to sound like cars.” The sound need not be very loud; just slightly enhancing the noise of an oncoming electric vehicle would be enough to engage the auditory mechanisms that the brain uses to locate approaching sounds, he adds.” ['Electric cars should make a noise', The Economist]

Leaving aside the spurious idea of giving people what they claim to want, reproducing the sound of the internal combustion engine would be ridiculous. It would be a skeuomorph too far - a design feature that nods to an earlier functional incarnation, with absolutely no need to. At some point a function has to replaced, and slowly takes its idioms and by-products with it. The car industry is traditionally loath to do this of course. One of the most exciting features of the MIT CityCar project is that in suggesting a new driving experience. it implicitly indicates how little has changed about interface design of cars - ignition, accelerator, throttle, brake, steering wheel etc; all remain essentially unchanged for decades (save a few brave attempts from Citroën et al). This is not an issue of icon design - as with an old telephone handset representing the function to make a call on the iPhone - but an entirely new functional mode. These are new forms of mobility, potentially, and suffuse with possibility -  unnecessarily tying them to vestiges of the previous mode may prevent them realising their potential.

Doing this with sound would generate aural externalities that simply don’t warrant that level of intrusion. A floppy disk icon still meaning ‘Save’ in Windows 7 is anachronistic and doesn’t augur well for the Microsoft brand, but it hardly changes the essence of the immediate urban area.

Electric or hybrid cars do make a sound of course. It’s just a different noise to the combustion engine. It's a whine, a hum, a whoosh. Even the ugly Prius is a joy to hear in comparison, if not to see, noiselessly reversing out of a drive. As one of the comments on The Economist article brilliantly points out, there is potential for a rather more progressive sound choice here:

“My vote is for a somewhat high-pitched humming noise ala the Jetsons. After all, when I was a kid, this is what I expected 21st century vehicles would sound like”

(I’m imagining that as the vehicles in Woody Allen’s magnificently silly Sleeper. This too is a form of nostalgic projection, though.)

Yet if electric cars do have to make a specifically designed, generated noise, let’s at least explore that a little. Brian Eno once suggested that horns in cars should have a little more variation in their noises - that they could play a variety of audio signatures, depending on context. The car is the same. Just as the lovely Honda Puyo concept car suggested its bodywork could glow different colours to indicate different states, so the audio signature of the car could be malleable and responsive. Akin to an instant messaging status indicator, the car’s noise would indicate modes or states that the user wishes to convey, or change in tone as it passes the phone of a friend in the street (admittedly, a feature that would need an off button, for sure.)

This is akin to the ‘I Crossed Your Path’ Facebook app from MIT’s SmartBiking, but in real-time. Perhaps the sound is a filtered rendition of the music playing in the car - RJDJ externalised rather than internalised - or is simply the music playing directly across the bodywork (one of the more appealing sounds associated with cars in cities is that of a crunching, throbbing sub-bass so impossibly distracting that one looks across and notices that the back seats have been surgically removed to create a giant bass-bin, with the entire chassis becoming a sound-generating devices. These cars also often have a glowing UV light under their skirts, and thus we can only assume the drivers are clearly amongst the most safety-conscious on the streets, announcing their imminent arrival to the blind and deaf alike.) Whether the sound of the streets is improved or further diminished by more clearly hearing this collective cacophony will depend on the musical literacy of your city.

While most signals are necessary for the driver only - battery life indicators, personal messages etc. - and so best directed inwards, there may be some possibility in cars as broadcasters of something rather more enriching than the dull roar of internal combustion.

As these cars will be located, addressable and responsive (sooner or later) there’s possibility of creating an interplay between their sounds and the urban environment. Cars could communicate with each other in real-time, as they pass, and so shift their sounds in response to each other to create discordant atonalities or shimmering consonant harmonies. As you drive across 110th Street in Harlem, your car cheesily fades up into the bassline from ‘Across 110th Street’, with a passing Fiat joining in on percussion while two Nissans emulate the horns and electric guitar. (Pedestrians hanging on the corner are destined to suffer the most annoyingly intermittent cover version imaginable). An array of pipa and guan strike up as you drive through Chinatown, sounds commissioned by the local tourist board. Kyoto’s pedestrian crossings are scored with the engaging knock-knock of doppler’d shishi-odoshi.

Better, some urban areas commission sound designers to ‘prime’ their streets with latent compositions, which are then performed by passing cars. SND score Sheffield as a series of pulsing, jittery staccato tones; cars pausing at a stop-light in Ginza are suddenly part of a DJ Signify tune; Steve Roden pins up a series of aleatoric triggers across Echo Park; Janek Schaefer creates fields of static and broadcast fragments aurally hung across car park exits throughout West London in homage to JG Ballard, marking up the Westway and its concrete islands, whereas Burial positions a layered series of sub-bass tones along Hackney Road; Steve Reich re-scores City Life - and most of his work for that matter - for city streets, cars chattering back and forth to each other in fragments of conversation, strings and piano; Filastine sees cars as an intercontinental echo chamber between Barcelona, Kyushu and Marseilles, bodywork rippling with live feeds from distant city streets; Juana Molina plants her sinuous sounds across Buenos Aries, activated as cars drive through her invisible urban space. Drivers begin to follow the threaded patterns through the streets, attempting to stay ‘in tune’ …

Sound is so affecting - often far more distracting than visual interrupts - that its use and abuse should be of primary concern. It is certainly another arena of urban informatics that could be mishandled by a pervasive surveillance culture, even one trying to affect behavioural change ‘for the better’. (The pitch of the car’s electric whine shifts depending on the collective energy or water consumption of the area it’s driving through, and so residents receive constant, nagging aural reminders of their performance. The nuances in local crime levels are played out, a form of Oakland Crimespotting with cars generating aural heatmaps, incidentally increasing the nervousness of all within earshot. Perhaps the noise of the car changes if the driver is talking on their mobile, the driver’s speech patterns triggering exact echoes in the car’s hum (so you can tell an Italian driver from a New York driver from an Indian driver ..) Perhaps the car’s whine increases in pitch if the driver has had a drink or two. Russell Davies appears in my thoughts, with respect to urban spam …)

I actually think that, given half a chance, we won’t miss the noise of cars (as we know it) in our cities at all. When we (Arup) design new cities, and are able to design without private car use, our city models and simulations indicate noise levels that are far more appealing. I don’t mean quiet, as cities are always noisy - as people are, and this is one of the glorious things about both - but that it was possible to hear more, in more detail, and over a wider range.

When Geoff Manaugh interviewed Arup’s Neil Woodger (in Dwell, June 2008) about new cities and the SoundLab aural modelling tool, Woodger said, “These cities are an opportunity to think about a new urban sound experience, including the ability to bring sounds back into cities. People haven’t really known that they can change the sounds of a city …” Masdar, outside Abu Dhabi and predicated on light rail, personal rapid transit and no private cars, affords the same possibilities as the  Dongtan design. (I’ve previously speculated about the kind of urban SoundLab approach.)

Cities should not be quiet, or only replete with so-called ‘natural’ sounds - whatever that means post-nature, and post-industrialisation - but the urban soundscape is something that could use a little more room for manouevre, dynamically. To be clear, I'm not averse to cars or car noise. Some car noises are hugely appealing. It’s just best experienced as a distinct note and timbre in a richer, more dynamic city symphony, as opposed to the pervasive ambient roar of thousands of combustion engines. This latter has a totalising suppressing effect on urban sound, akin to the scourge of overusing the compressor in contemporary music production. If everything is loud, nothing is.

Buses – the public transport mode that car-based cities tend towards - are often the worst offenders. Sydney buses are particularly egregious, amongst the loudest I’ve heard in any city. As I’m that way inclined, I’ve taken to sporadically measuring the decibel level on city streets using the promising but currently flawed iPhone app WideNoise (see also NoiseTube), and find levels well over 100dB when a bus or two roar by, even on an open street corner. This is akin to standing in a sheet metal workshop, and you can watch people actually grimace, subconsciously feeling how unpleasant it is. It leads to iPod users turning the volume up further as a form of aural arms race (a lose:lose scenario). More importantly, it flattens the possibility of varied urban sounds. (That people have started to cover their ears for the last few years, denoted by white headphones, may be telling in itself.)

That buses are allowed to be this way is due to an endemic lack of understanding of sound - it simply isn’t valued by many policy-makers and so rarely measured. In the case of public transport planning and procurement, travel times is seen as far more important than experience. Again, this is the outcome of an ocularcentric culture to some degree, but also a culture that suffers from a paucity of understanding of the urban experience in general. City and state government officials need not be conversant with the works of John Cage, but basic qualitative probes into the urban experience are surely important.

(Programmes like the London Ambient Noise Strategy are unusual, yet even when they do exist they are usually about noise abatement rather than ‘positive soundscapes’.)

When Jan Gehl's team were focused on Sydney's CBD, with predictable results, they also came to the conclusion that the city was particularly noisy, and due to the combination of buses and urban form (tight canyons). In an article in the Sydney Morning Herald's glossy (sydney) magazine last year focusing on noise, Gehl said "Sydney has tremendous noise levels in most streets and squares ... The main cause is the buses that create a tremendous roar when they accelerate and a shrieking sound when they brake." The Herald measurd decibel levels in several places in Sydney's CBD and also managed to record over 100 decibels outside the Queen Victoria Boulevard, noting "any exposure to noise above 85dB can permanently damage your hearing - any exposure above 120dB, however brief, can have far greater consequences. High noise levels are also associated with hypertension, stress, heart damage and depression."

Oh joy. However, this focus on volume (and decibels) as a measure of sound is a little crude, leading naturally to noise abatement rather than a more expansive palette of sound. How high and low frequencies might interact, or more qualitative, descriptive aspects of sound, are rarely discussed or devised.

So with heavily car-scaled cities like Sydney, or Los Angeles say, it's almost impossible to imagine how different these streets might sound without cars.

Amazing photographs of road infrastructure in Los Angeles, by Benny Chan (Good Magazine)

With a new suburb like Vauban in Freiburg, Germany, which has been planned to effectively function sans autos, the aural possibilities should be fascinating. Typically, this New York Times article on Vauban makes very little reference to how different it might sound. There is only the tantalising line: "When I had a car I was always tense. I’m much happier this way,” said Heidrun Walter, a media trainer and mother of two, as she walked verdant streets where the swish of bicycles and the chatter of wandering children drown out the occasional distant motor."

It would be interesting to explore how a city’s sound might be articulated, either naturally or by design, without the presence of pervasive engine noise. If conversation is as loud as, say, 55db, should an electric car be about the same? Or should a car's engine be effectively silent, so our streets become defined more by the sound of an espresso being made, the grind and whirr of contemporary industrial machinery, chatter, whistling, a parakeet, trees in the breeze, lapping water in the harbour, chimes of ringtones, the rumble of trains and the foghorns of distant ships, a record shop or a violinist tuning up, a pub argument and sundry art installations, the bells of a clocktower, prayer calls etc.?

The Positive Soundscapes project indicates the range of noises that people may find appealing is actually far broader than this - "car tyres on wet, bumpy asphalt, the distant roar of a motorway flyover, the rumble of an overground train and the thud of heavy bass heard on the street outside a nightclub, a baby laughing, skateboarders practising in underground car parks and orchestras tuning up." And though I note “the distant roar of the flyover in that list”, I’d rather hear more about the results of their research than Dr. Rosenblum’s.

I don’t think we’ll miss the noise of cars much, apart as something special. And cars can be something special in the urban environment (as I hope my decision to illustrate this piece with snippets of Sisek make clear). Cars are essentially about freedom not transit. Cars are for fun, not for the daily grind. They may increasingly be seen as out of place in a busy city on a Tuesday morning at 0830. The idea of them as mass transit, for most people, given ever-increasing urbanisation, is faintly ludicrous. Instead, they're for casual use, for the sheer enjoyment of the driving experience. Something for the weekend, if you like.

In that respect, their sounds can be considered as something special too. We can more fully appreciate the throaty purr of a 1969 Ferrari Daytona or the brawny roar of a 3.5 litre 1978 Ford Capri or the lawnmower rattle of a 2CV or the saucy throb of an old DS, lifting skirts and all, just as we’ll always appreciate the sizzle and hiss of tyres on wet road.

The corollary of this is that we won't particularly miss the sound of a 2002 Mazda 323 or a 2007 Honda Jazz or a 2004 Holden Barina or 1998 VW Golf. These kind of cars are, after all, by far the most prevalent on our roads.

Peter Cusack’s Your Favourite London Sounds - a favourite indeed - also lists a few traffic noises (”16th floor up, London roar from the top of a tower block, Holloway Road, on a damp evening”; ”Taxis waiting at Euston Station, squeaky black taxi brakes”; ”Under the flyover, Hackney Wick”). But they’re by far in the minority. (Have a listen to the archive; see also Beijing and Chicago.) Removing cars would enable the other sounds to be picked out more clearly, also accentuating urban difference, in that cars tend to be a somewhat homogeneous globalising force - due to their high production costs, they are essentially the same across the world; the platform for a VW Golf not only services the Golf, but the Skoda Octavia, Seat Leon and Audi A3.

Other sounds are also global in provenance of course, but many more sounds are local. Note how Cusack picks this out in his thoughts on his Favourite Beijing project:

“So what does the city sound like? The answer is that it’s amazing. Central Beijing has an astounding soundscape. Its shear (sic) scale envelopes you immediately and its variety constantly surprises. This may not last. The older uniquely traditional sounds are fast disappearing, as newer, more globally familiar, ones take their place. Peak traffic is already at high volume. But at the moment the old and new co-exist. Amongst the loud and brash, there are still places of the utmost quiet, where a breath of air touching a dead leaf will catch your ear. Elsewhere people talk, hum and sing loudly, not minding who listens. Music, live and recorded, plays anywhere. It is a city of sound loops. Ubiquitous loud hailers blast out advertising slogans that endlessly repeat in or out of sync with music from the shop next door. Pigeons fitted with bamboo whistles create eerie chords above your head when they fly. Buses screech, shop assistants yell and clap their hands, taximeters talk and woks sizzle. Street cries are commonplace. And in the parks older people sing revolutionary songs in choirs hundreds strong, while others engage in caged-bird singing contests, ballroom dance or practice t’ai chi.” [Favourite Beijing, Peter Cusack]

Toyotas are largely the same in each city; pigeon whistles are not. Yet rather than position this as old (local) versus new (global), it may be that the ‘electric car as noise generator’ discussed above provides an opportunity to create new local sounds.

Scoring the city is an interesting idea, whether via discrete car-based sounds or taking advantage of the absence of car-based sounds. Strong urban places already have their own signature, through their behaviour, a point made by William H. Whyte in his 1980 book Social Life of Small Urban Places, when he and his team rendered the patterns of movement through the plaza at Seagram's in New York as a form of graph. 

He noted that this could be perceived as "music of sorts":

"Since the Seagram's chart looked so like a player-piano roll, I wondered what the sound would be if all the dots and dashes could be played. A composer friend was fascinated: with the right tonal scale, he said, the roll could be orchestrated and it would be music. I hope one day it will be: A Day in the Life of the North Front Ledge at Seagram's, Adagio." [from William H. Whyte's Social Life of Small Urban Places. Note: I immediately thought of opening up a music app and making this. Haven't done it yet - if someone wants to do that, turn to pages 70-71 in Whyte and go for it.]

The opportunity to genuinely explore the sound of the city without this blanket of private cars is compelling, whether through sculpting sound through active intervention or simply through enjoying a level aural playing field for the everyday sounds that already conjure the city.

At first glance, taking The Economist to task for suffering from a severe lack of creative imagination might seem a little like admonishing Cristiano Ronaldo for not spending his Sundays reading Žižek. But let’s at least discuss how sound and the city should best intersect given the emergence of this new mode. We can slowly fade down the volume on that wall of noise - what might we want to hear its stead?

What lies beneath? What might we hear on streets without the sound of combustion engines? An old man and his battered stereo, playing distorted easy listening to the street (Bondi Junction, Sydney, May 2009)

The sound of silence [The Economist]

Next up, Austin Kelly, one of the principals of the firm XTEN Architecture, as interviewed by David A and David B of ArchDaily/Plataforma Arquitectura. Intriguingly, the two principal architects at XTEN are Kelly and Monika Häfelfinger, who come from very different backgrounds: Los Angeles and Switzerland respectively.

In responding to the Davids’ question as to their profile, Kelly starts with this fact. He notes that Monika coming from Switzerland lends a very different sensibility to the office - her education and experience combining with his in interesting ways (elsewhere it's been described as "minimal vs. expressionist") - particularly as they strive for an open office environment, characterised by frequent “debates and arguments in the office”. Kelly says they have a “very horizontal office” in this respect. (Having been a manager of teams large and small myself, I recognise that this is the kind of thing we managers often say, frequently with little justification. Kelly sounds like he means it though, and his thoughtful, considered answers lend credence to his claim.)

In response to the question “what is architecture?”, Kelly replies that it’s “a process of questions, a method of inquiry. From the questions we develop 3D models, diagrams, drawings etc. Then we debate, and then we start synthesizing these ideas into material dimension - physical, connected, spatial ideas …”. It’s a literal answer to a question that is often interpreted in more abstract fashion, but in almost instinctively focusing on their work, their practice, Kelly says a lot about their firm with this answer. 

When asked about the role of architects in current society, Kelly tentatively suggests that “we do have wider role.” By way of an example, he suggests that the school system in particular “has not been addressed in Southern California”, and that if “architects can get a seat at the table” they would have a lot to offer to that thought process, amongst others.

A question on the role of innovation in their practice. He answers that they do base some of their built form on the possibilities afforded by technology - such as their laser-cut Diamondhouse - but they think innovation manifests itself more in collaboration. They use competitions to derive ideas, as many practices do, but innovation seems to emerge more through working together on mock-ups, and in particular work with fabricators, and so on. He notes that “lots of fabricators are coming out of automobile design industry, developing composites and glues …”

(This is fascinating, and as I noted in my PostOpsLA summing up, a real theme in Los Angeles architecture, perhaps emerging originally in boat building and the aeroplane industry, and then in automobiles - and still prevalent. A few years ago, I was fortunate enough to be part of a UK Government-funded research tour, around the theme of user-centred design, along the entire West Coast of the USA. The stop-offs at BMW and Volvo design labs rarely revealed much in the way of user-centred, or people-centred, design practice, but they were still fascinating. To see how car designers work is always interesting to me - there are good things and bad things about it - but it would be particularly interesting to explore this elision between LA-basedarchitecture and the history of design as pursued by the fabricators of the local car/plane/boat building sector.)

Kelly then talks about how they split work over their offices in Switzerland and USA. He clearly finds it amazing and inspiring (as do I) how the Swiss manage to attain such high standards in design (albeit generalising somewhat). He asks “why the post office is a brilliant architectural building, or grocery stores …” He mentions a particular grocery store in Lucerne as “a brilliant piece of work” (tried to find a reference and couldn't; anyone?). He puts this down to the competition system in Switzerland, in that they have ”competitions for almost everything.” He outlines briefly how the Swiss equivalent of the AIA administers competitions, governs rules, and ensures towns get incentives if they do a competition. As he notes, this is very different to the USA (and indeed Australia), where they “don’t do competitions much.” (I think this is profoundly important cf. recent UTS competition here in Sydney, in terms of creating an open and discursive culture around design in concert with raising awareness of, and therefore quality of, design.)

Kelly’s answer to a question about how the office does ”social networking” is a nice one, I think. He says they “don’t really go to cocktail parties … We tend to focus on the work and let the work go out and network for us …”

I asked a question about this overlap with industrial design, and the use of contemporary fabrication techniques (laser-cut, pre-fab etc. etc.) As well as a technical overlap between industrial design and architecture, I’m interested in these two ideas of the building as one-off, due to particular constraints of site, client etc. - ‘every building is a prototype’ - versus the ideas at play in industrial design, where you might think of a building as a series of designs which iterate over time. In short, that if you draw from the tools of car design, can you - and should you - also draw from the processes and systems of car design? (I should note that one of the foremost thinkers on these issues is the Australian architect Michael Trudgeon of Melbourne firm Crowd Productions, who currently has an exhibition in Melbourne - I haven’t been yet, but I know it will be worth checking out. I was lucky enough to read Trudgeon's fantasitc Phd thesis around these ideas.) Kelly thought this was interesting theme, and said that they do have a prototyping culture and are very much oriented towards fabricating off-site and then assembling on-site. He suggests he hadn’t thought through whether that could in turn enable a kind of iterative, “series approach” to architecture, as with cars and other industrial design, and seemed intrigued by that idea.

Another question from the audience concerns whether and how they swap architects between the Swiss and US offices. Kelly replies that they do work across both offices, and notes that “it’s difficult in terms of timezone and things” but otherwise straightforward and often beneficial. All their team know metric, but getting their head around the codes in Switzerland is more difficult, as they are “intense”. He says the “energy requirements in particular are probably 20 years ahead of US in terms of everything - in terms of the performative aspects of a building”. (Which is interesting.)

I enjoyed Kelly’s approach to these questions, and the thoughtful considered responses, particularly those highlighting issues around the design process and fabrication, as well as insights into the cross-cultural Swiss-US practice straddling such different working environments.

XTEN Architecture