no2self.net

Lyddle end is nigh, originally uploaded by eversion.

Receiving my share of the Lyddle End masterplan thanks to Russell
Davies.

Shimmer, originally uploaded by eversion.

Inside the guts of The Public

*UPDATE: for those viewing in RSS, click through to the site for the video as it may not appear in your reader*

The Pecha Kucha presentations from last week’s be2camp are now available in both slide and video. The guy who wanders on screen in the eighth minute with a beer in his hand is me. I then hang around for a further 6 minutes 40 seconds (them’s the rules) and tell a story that involves Jane Jacobs, the internets and orgone accumulators.

(Warning: this video contains further abuse of the Venn diagram)

Having just been dubbed a social media architect, I’d better keep up appearances with a post highlighting the voting going on at Show Us A Better Way. It’s a government funded initiative seeking to invest in the most worthy web2 widget. From the site:

This is a competition about information, about communication and above all about making government information more useful.

The government produces masses of information on what is happening around the UK. Infomation on crime, on health, on education. However, this information is often hidden away in obscure publications or odd corners of websites. Data tucked away like this isn’t  of use to the ultimate owner of that information YOU.

The Power of Information Taskforce want to hear your ideas on how to reuse, represent, mashup or combine the information the government holds to make it useful.

Thanks to some great advice from Simon Berry I snuck in a submission of my own on the closing day. Can I rely on your vote?

I’ll be parachuting into the capital on Friday to take part in the first be2camp unconference. I’m really looking forward to being able to properly announce one of my latest projects: YouCanPlan Lozells.

A few weeks ago, Birmingham City Council put out an invitation to tender for an extremely innovative and ambitious proposal that would allow the residents of Lozells to comment on the plans for their community through a dedicated virtual environment. The bespoke software was required to be accessible both on and offline, allow the user to explore their neighbourhood in 3D, adjust the model themselves and make comparisons between design options then submit feedback to inform the next stage of development. It should show varying levels of detail, from the widest to the smallest and it should be ready to go in a matter of weeks.

It was a tall order, but I’ve managed to meet it with the help of the guys at Slider Studio. We’ve been collaborating on the development of their YouCanPlan software to create a model better suited to wider public consultation and aim to have the new version in the hands of the Lozells residents by December. In its original outing YouCanPlan was designed for the self-procurement market and saw its first big test during a competition featured in the AJ. The challenge for our Lozells project has been to improve usability for a more diverse user group and test the way hardware restrictions meet the breadth of parameters you need to accomodate in urban design critique.

Michael Kohn from Slider will be joining me at be2camp to talk about what we’ve achieved so far during the afternoon session of stream 2, so please come along and join in the debate about how (or if!) web 2.0 can play a part in the built environment. There’s also going to be a Pecha Kucha session in the evening and I think it still needs more participants…

“Stunning new look for Birmingham’s New Street station…”

Wait a minute, that looks rather familiar…

Gare de Lyon by Santiago Calatrava

Times are hard. Your credit is being crunched and there’s nothing you can do about it. Your value is being chamfered.

Open the door and run. Run like the wind. Jump. Jump up. Jump up, jump up and get down. Nobody can take that from us, it’ll always be ours. Everything else has gone to hell in a handbasket. Run, run free…. free run.

Dan Mathieson, Head of Sponsorship at Barclaycard, the title sponsor of the World Freerun Championships said: “Freerunning is an amazing sport and some of the moves executed by the top performers are truly breathtaking. For Barclaycard, the fluidity of movement that is at the very heart of free running has a clear parallel with the freedom that we give our customers through such innovations as contactless payments and travel with the Barclaycard OnePulse card. We’re proud to support the first of what we are sure will become major annual events”

Oh dear.

This month saw the first Freerun World Championships in London and they were sponsored by Barclaycard. There’s little point dwelling on the obvious, soul crushing irony here; it’s just too depressing. Anyway, who am I to begrudge these guys the chance to go legit and pay the rent doing what they love most? Every form of human endeavour becomes a potential franchise in the end, right? Might as well embrace it before your sponsor goes belly up in the coming economic event horizon.

However, there’s no escaping the emptiness of the black boxes and railings in the video above. Surely free running has meaning and sense of purpose defined in part by the reinterpretation of the urban landscape? Or put another way, it looks a lot cooler with a good piece of architecture in the background.

So, come on Barclaycard, how about next year you employ some architects to design the course? Or perhaps rebuild seminal spaces from urban topographies around the world. Take a vote from freerunners everywhere and then construct their favourite places on the other side of the world, allowing the locals to reap the benefits of your global reach without all that tedious mucking about with carbon spewing plane jouneys. See how the London boys take on the spaces of Manhattan, or let the New York team tackle urban Russia. You could even employ Richard O’Brian to present it.

Buy the Birmingham Library and turn it into the world centre for freerunning.

Because let’s face it, enlarged photos of shuttered concrete just doesn’t cut it.

More notes from Architecture, You and Me by Siegfried Giedion (found in a second hand bookshop in 2005). This time it’s the recounting of a delightful list of important urban design developments since 1850 – books and building – according to Mr Giedion.

The New Urbanists amongst you may find the regular appearance of Corb a little upsetting. Nevertheless it’s a useful reference with many projects that deserve further investigation. I’ll be adding notes and links in the coming months to a wiki page: no2self.net/wiki. Feel free to edit it as well.

• 1856-1867 The Public Squares of Paris – Alphonse Alphand
• 1857-1860 Central Park, New York – Frederick Law Olmsted
• 1882 The Linear City – Arturo Soria y Mata
• 1889 The Art of Building Cities – Camillo Sitte
• 1898 Garden Cities of Tomorrow – Ebenezer Howard
• 1901 The Industrial City – Tony Garnier
• 1901 Housing Legislation in Holland
• 1915 Cities in Evolution – Patrick Geddes
• 1920 Welwyn Garden City, England – Raymond Unwin
• 1922 Plan Voisin, Paris – Le Corbusier
• 1927 Weissenhof Housing Project, Stuttgart
• 1927 Roemerstadt, Frankfort – Ernst May
• 1928 Dammerstock Housing Project, Karlsruhe – Walter Gropius
• 1929 Siemenstadt, Berlin – Walter Gropius
• 1929 Radburn, New Jersey – Henry Wright and Clarence Stein
• 1929 The Neighbourhood Unit – Clarence Perry
• 1933 The “Charte D’Athenes” – CIAM 4
• 1934 Broadacre City – Frank Lloyd Wright
• 1935 La Ville Radieuse – Le Corbusier
• 1938 Culture of Cities – Lewis Mumford
• 1944 The Greater London Plan – Patrick Abercrombie
• 1945 Saint-Die, Vosges, France – Le Corbusier
• 1948 Harlow New Town, England – Frederick Gibberd
• 1948 Chimbote, Peru – P.L.Wiener and J.L.Sert
• 1951 Chandigargh, Punjab, India – Le Corbusier
• 1951 The Core of the City – CIAM 8
• 1952 Vallingby, Sweden – Sven Markelius
• 1953 Back Bay Center, Boston, Massachusetts – Walter Gropius and others
• 1956 Alexander Polder, Holland – R.Bakema and Group OPBOUW
• 1956 Southdale Shopping Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota – Victor Gruen
• 1956 Lafayette Park, Detroit, Michigan – Mies van der Rohe
• 1957 Brazilia, Brazil

And then the book was published in 1958. So where do we go from there? Answers on a postcard please, I’m off to compile a list from 1958 onwards.

Still here. Like a Norwegian Blue, I’ve just been resting. I return with some summer frippery.

First, another day in the life post, since the past one proved quite popular. This time delivered via twitter, an offering made even more poignant perhaps by yesterday’s news that they’ve pulled the plug on the UK.

So, from the bottom up¹:

I’m going to keep these up for as long as I see other blogs in this industry complaining about what a career in architecture is really like outside the cozy world of academia. Too many posts these days about how rarely you actually get to Design, or how undervalued the client makes you feel, or how rubbish everyone else is.

Cheer up you miserable buggers², your career is what you make it.

Next a repost of summer reading and listening suggestions that Phil Clark at Building magazine asked me to help with. You can see many more on his original post.

Books:

100 Houses 100 Architects: Editor – Gennaro Postiglione

Refreshingly critical coffee table picture book that even has some
floor plans. Worth it for Till/Wigglesworth house alone. Euro-centric
cast list means it misses Charles Moore though.

Bay Area Houses: Editor – Sally Woodbridge

Making up for lack of Charles Moore in previous with this one. Perfect
case studies in beautiful suburban housing. Effortless English Arts
and Crafts sensibilities jump the turn of the last century Atlantic
and learn to loosen up in the Californian sunshine. Expect to see
timber shingles in my next project.

This Is A Man – Truce: Primo Levi

There’s a generation of Italian writers who cannot be surpassed. Well,
two at least – Levi and Calvino. Levi tells the story of his time in
Auschwitz and in doing so defines the furthest corners of every human
soul in history. Nothing can prepare you for the visceral contents.

Music

The Red Album: Weezer

Flawless grunge is an oxymoron. If that’s so this the best damn
oxymoron I ever heard. Another perfect album from the guys who started
with little more than a poorly knitted jumper. Includes an ideal
soundtrack for architects: ‘I Am The Greatest Man That Ever Lived’.
That was a joke. Maybe.

Seldom Seen Kid: Elbow

I’m praying with all my atheist might that Elbow don’t get struck by
the Mercury Music Prize curse. If they win we all have to promise not
to make a fuss and let them carry on crafting such heart stopping
moments of metaphysical revelation. Not to mention the moments of
(less-than-meta) physical revelation that you can scream along with
them perfectly; as long as you’re in the car on your own. With the
windows up.

Piazza, New York Catcher: Belle & Sebastian

A novel in one track. I think I finally ‘get’ Belle & Sebastian. Took
me bloody long enough.

notes:
1. ‘designing a house for myself…’ – watch this space, I’m currently making a bid for a plot of land
2. this month’s Monty Python quote quota has now been met. Next month: The Two Ronnies

A quick note to highlight some places I’ll be this week, in the hope that you’ll come by and say hello if you happen to be there too…

Tomorrow I’ll be taking part in a workshop event leading up to the btween conference in Manchester. I’m very flattered to find myself invited along to play geek architect of the group. Here’s the premise:

The workshop is the first stage of a project designed for Beacon to develop collaborative proposals for on online service that will map connections between people, place and knowledge, and creative activity across Manchester

A process of scoping, seed idea proposals, selection and development will lead to ideas pitching and final selection of one concept to be commissioned to answer Beacon’s needs effectively

The workshop will generate ideas and questions that will form the heart of a story cube collaboration that will run throughout b.TWEEN 08 on the 19th and 20th June

Story Cubes – a consultation tool developed by Proboscis. I’ve been a fan of their work for a long time so I’m looking forward to meeting the people behind the projects.

On Wednesday I’ll be at Urban Vision North Staffordshire for the last in their series of green design seminars. They’ve decided to end in a slightly more lighthearted way and run a Dragon’s Den style event following a morning design workshop. I’ll be playing one of the dragons alongside 3 others from UVNS, CABE and Open University.

My only concern is that I’ve never actually watched an episode. Are there any catchphrases I need to learn? Colleagues tell me that TV dragons are arrogant and full of themselves. I’m sure I’ll fit right in.