There’s something very satisfying about the way this building keeps facing you as you round the bend. Successfully enfronting the site I think Charles Moore would say.

update:

Yep, enfronting it is:

I’m building a house. I’m attempting to be both client and architect and it’s not easy living this split personality. So I’ve been turning to seminal texts for support – comfort blankets if you like – wrapping myself in them at night and sharing a bath with them occasionally.

You’ll know the books I speak of – Poetics of Space, In Praise of Shadows, The Place of Houses to name but a few.

If you follow my twitter feed you’ll be heartily fed up with it by now. Elsewhere, more discretely, I’ve been noting stuff down for the last year and a half over at home4self.tumblr.com and over the festive season it finally started to fall into place. Gaston started talking to Charles, Junichiro got on better with Peter and the seeds of a home have begun to grow.

Of all the spirits I’ve called on though, it’s the ghost of Charles Moore that has been most supportive. The Place of Houses, written with Gerald Allen and Donlyn Lyndon is the best book on housing architecture I’ve got and the best book you should get. Its influence has been broad and many levelled; for example:

At Ecobuild last year I cited the ‘saddlebag’ technique in my talk about passive solar and it me helped explore the social/spatial benefits of the bolt-on, extra space that sunspaces provide. A buffer zone of many uses that breaks social housing out of its tight regulatory framework and minimum/maximum room sizes.

After the Stirling Prize was announced it explained to me one of the reasons that I, like the judges, had decided who should win.

And with its words on ‘inhabiting’ in the closing chapter it found a new way to make me think about what I’d been trying to convey in past discussions about legibility and ownership.

The fundamental principle is that in places where people live all space should seem to belong to someone or something; space either should seem to be inhabited, as if it belonged to or could be claimed by particular groups of people, or should be understandable as part of a coherent larger order, such as the natural landscape or the traditional fabric of the town or system of altogether new urban spaces.

So if I get that all off my chest here on this blog then perhaps I can stop sounding like a broken record. I’ll be making no such promises over on home4self though, as I’ll no doubt need plenty of help from Moore and his colleagues to take the sketches you see there and work out the order of rooms, the order of machines and the order of dreams.

Question answered:

cityofsound says:

It was a conversation between Matt Jones and I, wherein he sketched out his idea (using your notebook it would seem) about a kind of perspectival layered data landscape, building up from Dopplr and related web services – in the manner of the classic New Yorker cover on ‘the x view of the world’ …

I think.

Vision-lozells.org represents my first attempt to get closer to the ideas in Dan Hill’s ‘Personal Well Tempered Environment’ concept and the subsequent notes in my own post, ‘Up On The Roof’. I’ve been collaborating with the guys at Slider Studio to develop the next stage in our investigations into online consultation work; but this time, by developing the platform they created for the self-build market, we’ve moved into the third dimension.

You know what I’m into. I want to start plugging it in to stuff. Getting data from the real world in and out of it. The notes below and the Ecobuild presentation I gave start to describe how we might do that using solutions most of you will know well.

I’ll be spending this weekend at our last public open day for ecoterrace.co.uk, followed by an event with the residents of blurtonvision.co.uk to start our version of the Open Street Map / public data mashup. Unfortunately this means I won’t be able to attend the Homecamp event on Saturday and get more connected with the folks developing exactly the ideas I’m pitching here. However I will be able to come along to the next Be2camp and do my bit to draw connections between the social bits, the media bits and the home bits. Come along and criticize/help.

BIM and Social Media

Axis Design and Slider Studio have created a new tool for Birmingham City Council called YouCanPlan Lozells. Slider’s ESP software has been resigned to suit the challenges of the diverse people and places of community consultation work. The software will be distributed via both CD and online to over 2500 households. It can be used both online and offline to ensure it can be used in any venue, but we hope that the benefits of the online mode means that people using it from home can make the most of both the live updates to proposals in the coming months, as well as using survey and chat tools to tell Birmingham City Council what they think about the designs being proposed by the city’s urban design team.

At its first public test during an event in the local park it was well received. In particular by the local teenagers who instantly took to the interface and chat tools. Making contact and building enthusiasm with the younger generations is often one of the biggest challenges with consultation work so in this case we hope that we’ve created something that will help us hear the voices of the future generations and perhaps bring some parents with them, curious to see what their children are using. Whilst the ability to consult with people from the comfort of their own home is huge step towards a more representative mandate from a neighbourhood, we’ve always described this as a tool to supplement the vital face to face debates that need to go on. With that in mind the software can be used in offline environments and the investment in 3D modelling can be used to produce rapid prototyped physical models that match the software .

What of the future and the implications for BIM? How can this tool help us manage data about a building or street? In its current format the model and software is a framework that can take inputs and changes in a top down fashion from stakeholders whose roles are well understood. It will receive new models and designs of steadily improving detail and can display images and links to other sources of info provided by local authorities and RSLs, but what of the community? How do we build a system that allows data rising from the streets – in a bottom up fashion – to manifest itself in the model and record live information about the neighbourhood. Our experience with web 2.0 tools and consultation work tells us that there are tools available to help us and they come under the title ‘social media’. Let’s look at a few examples and then imagine how YouCanPlan could use them to bring BIM, post-occupancy monitoring and community consultation together.

Pachube, developed by architect Usman Haque, is a service that aims to broker data for you. It takes information from physical objects that can record things, tidies it up, then spits out the results in a number of useful formats that you can plug into (or point at) another location. The simplest example is electricity meters. I have a meter at my office recording the number of kW used. It sends the info to Pachube allowing me to access it from anywhere and do anything with it. A number of visualisation methods have already been created by others, allowing me to either simply display the info online or feed it into other tools such as the AMEE carbon emissions calculator, letting me know how many tonnes (gulp!) of carbon I’m churning out.

Another social media tool that takes simple inputs and creates powerful outputs is Twitter. Unless you’ve been living under a particularly analogue rock lately, you’ll have probably heard of this web site. Twitter simply wants you to tell it what you’re doing. No, really, that’s it. Just tell it what you’re doing and do it within 140 characters. I’ve been using it for a couple of years for keeping in touch with like-minded architects and bloggers and more recently using it as a tool for dispatching the lyrics of one of my favourite bands one line at a time. Others, like Andy Stanford-Clark from IBM, have found ways to use it for recording more than just bon mots and satirical one liners. By plugging it into all the activities around the house Andy has found a way to make his home twitter. A live feed of building information as devices switch on, doors open and phones ring.

Mapping is an important part of information modelling; the data is most useful when tied accurately to location. However, mapping can be a prohibitive field as commercial restrictions can often make extensive availaibility and re-use of map information costly. Open Street Map allows us to avoid this problem by providing up to date maps that are completely free to use and adapt. The wikipedia of mapping, Open Street Map is by the people and for the people, created by volunteers with GPS devices all over the world. Its open source nature allows us to look at ways of combining the info with other tools such as phonecam sites like moblog.co.uk or flickr.com. Marking the position of a photo – an option increasingly done automatically by some phone models – allows us to track the latest events and activities in a neighbourhood visually. This has been succesfully developed, alongside other services such as planning alerts and transport links, by Tom Chance and Thomas Wood and their interactive map of Sutton.

Tools like these will turn platforms like YouCanPlan into a virtual environment augmented by reality. By allowing the model to plug into other information modelling systems the buildings will convey live information about the current state of a house or street or neighbourhood. The data shown in the model will help local authorties record and assess public information, and the residents will be able to keep in touch with the activities of friends and family and show landlords and local authorities what the most pressing issues are right now. The recording and public display of energy information for a household introduces the possibility of encouraged energy saving through competition. Who has saved the most money in the street this week? Who has created the most carbon?

The successful reduction of carbon emissions in the built environment to meet the targets of 2050 is entirely dependent on an improvement in performance informed by regular post-occupancy monitoring. BIM can continue to play a vital role in this process beyond the completion of the construction and there are powerful social media tools available to help make it happen. A creative approach to the field and an open mind to the power of open data formats will help the profession to share knowledge and avoid the usual debates about interoperability. We need to improve the communication between the designers and users throughout the life of the building, not just as we hand over the keys.

I’m particularly looking forward to the latter of the two as I’m hoping it will give me the chance to bring some be2camp ideas to a more mainstream (?) crowd.

See you tomorrow.

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)

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.

In the time honoured blogging tradition of curating x and pointing out that it’s a bit like y, here’s a quote from Booker Prize winning author Anne Enright that got me thinking about spatial comparisons and architectural narratives (my emphasis).

A short story is a slight thing, the only thing it does is change the quality of the silence after the last line. Just a shift. Just a change. It doesn’t have to be epiphanic, it can be metaphorical, it can be a change of weather. I’m quite interested in slight changes. I like the silence after a fly has flown out of the window. That kind of change. That’s a lovely and subtle thing if you can catch that.

My overarching concern is with the shape of the thing. And also with keeping it moving, I like the sentences to move, I like lives to move, I want fluidity, I want a kinetic thing. It’s like a poet wants the poem to move and be still at the same time. I’m interested in getting the sentences around corners, and I’m interested in getting the light to change, and I’m interested in them not being fixed, that’s when I say that they have these free running minds – these people. So whatever happens, good or bad, happy or unhappy, to me isn’t as important as the shifts.

(see also: John Tusa interviewing Edmund De Waal transcribed on no2self1.0 and my brief entries on Walsall Art Gallery for examples of those shifts.)

December 2006, London, RIBA HQ. Flicking through the pages of the book to accompany the Eric Lyons exhibition at the RIBA, I send a text to Rod: In the RIBA cafe, muffins are terrible. A quaint, pre-twitter messaging technique that now seems obscenely intrusive.

Not all muffins you understand, just these ones, in that moment. Taking the edge off an otherwise enjoyable exhibition. Criticized in reviews, fairly I think, for being little more than a version of the book blown up and pasted on the wall, I was nevertheless glad I made the trip to see for myself. Sedate, linear, easy to follow, suburban even, I made the most of having the time to soak it up slowly; something that my parental duties usually prevent me from doing.

Colleagues had recommended I look at Lyons after I designed a project that reminded them of his work (see part 1). Pouring over the images on the wall I certainly had to (proudly) admit there were moments when we spoke in the same suburban dialect; the same vernacular language, but a direct reference didn’t jump out at me.

Until I opened the book. Muffin in one hand, page 30 in the other, I found the connection.

And, not for the first time, I had to admit that without the benefit of input from older, wiser colleagues I would have continued to believe that I’d reinvented the wheel. The image shown in the brilliant essay by Alan Powers is taken from a book published in 1938 called Europe Rehoused and is cited, along with the work of Trystan Edwards, as a likely influence on the young Lyons. Shades of it can perhaps be seen in the plans for New Ash Green or Templemere.

I wonder with increasing regularity, how often my peers, currently finding their feet in senior positions in offices across the UK are fortunate enough to be directed to moments like this. Helped, gently through the Total Persepective Vortex of housing design history and reminded of where we’ve come from.

Humbled and reassured I went back to the exhibition with Rod (and his camera) and before long we homed in on the drawings. All two of them. This is where the exhibition missed out, there simply wasn’t enough drawings. Surely there are piles of them in storage somewhere?

I’ve been thinking about this drawing and the importance of landscape to Lyons work ever since.

Continuing the theme of slow blogging, I offer it to Sue Thomas from Writing and the Digital Life as a possible answer to her question from December 2006: “How might one build a physical groupspace for work and leisure according to Web 2.0 principles?”

The answer is found in landscape. The communal spaces between the private thresholds of the Span houses engender social networking. There’s no need for me to expand on this further because, thanks to the unique way the BBC is funded, it’s already been written up for me. Look:

He placed three basic principles at the heart of the Span projects:

• community as the goal
• shared landscape as the means, and
• modern, controlled design as the expression.

Many developments focus only on the creation of private domestic space – they treat the area beyond the front door as incidental.

But Eric Lyons turned this on its head. Each development found ways of building the homes around central or shared green spaces. The architect’s aim was to engineer a sense of community by forcing people to interact.

from the BBC article: A house like no other?

Treat Span as interchangeable with web 2.0 and Eric Lyons as interchangeable with your favourite interaction designer and you’ll see what I mean.

Could there be a relationship between the form of the media we are using and the wide ranging appeal of some of the sites that curate the analogous topic? Landscape, blogging, topography, delicious, geology, fffound, urbanity, flickr – medium and content seamlessly linked.

During the last few days I’ve spotted a couple of other examples that might provide similar inspiration. Firstly, DfL’s Green Grid proposals for London examining the green infrastructure between 6 areas of the city; described in Kieran Long’s AJ editorial like this:

You probably will have noticed that the AJ has been tackling urbanism in a serious way in recent weeks … But time and again while researching these features we have come across the same problem – no-one has a drawing that can adequately sum up a strategic approach to a place. For this alone DfL should be congratulated.

source: Architects’ Journal 13.12.07

Secondly, whilst hiding – during a post office party hangover – between the pages of a Calvino book, I found my favourite author citing dialect instead of drawing as a tool for fixing these liminal spaces:

Lexical richness (as well as richness in expressiveness) is (or rather, was) one of the great strengths of dialects. Dialects have the edge on the standard language when they contain words for which the standard language has no equivalent. But this lasts only as long as certain (agricultural, artisan, culinary, domestic) techniques last – techniques whose terminology was created or deposited in the dialect rather than in the standard language, Nowadays, in lexical terms, dialects are like tributary states towards the standard language: all they do is give dialectal endings to words that start off in technical language. And even outside the terminology of trades, the rarer words become obsolete and are lost.

I remember that the old folk of San Remo knew dialects that represented a lexical wealth that was irreplaceable. For instance: chintagna, which means both the empty space that remains behind a house that has been built (as always in Liguria) up against terraced land, and also the empty space between the bed and the wall. I do not think an equivalent word exists in Italian; but nowadays the word does not exist even in dialect; who has heard of it or uses it now? Lexical impoverishment or homogenization is the first sign of a language’s death.

source: Hermit in Paris – Italo Calvino

I found this gang of hellraisers staring back at me from the pages of a book in the dentist’s waiting room this week, looking like they’d just stepped out of some liminal rock ‘N’ roll space. When assembled in this fashion they were fittingly called The N’Betweens.

For extra festive season points, who can tell me the name of the band they would eventually become?

Clue: IT’S CHRISTMAS!!!!!!!!

Update: Slade! Although for the life of me I can’t work out which one is Noddy Holder.

Home owners collate their energy use, export the stats to their neighbourhood’s Facebook group and then float the results out over the street with a hovering, illuminated super-graphic. You can imagine a community where street lights have been replaced with glowing balloons of green pride or red shame.

Dan’s request for input makes me recall the notes I took at last year’s Ecobuild conference:

Enter Carrera and his ‘City Knowledge’ project, which aims to ‘…transform municipalities from hunter-gatherers into farmers…’, farming information about it’s energy uses throughout all it’s processes to build a constantly up to date database. Described in three moves, this takes you from,

plan demanded data,

which is costly to turn into

plan ready information,

when it would have been better to have

plan demanding knowledge.

Because at this point you get the reverse and the knowledge begins to demand a plan, creating new, unforeseen possibilities.

This was part of a presentation by Fabio Carrera about the work he was developing with Adrian Hewitt (of Merton Rule fame), following his PhD exploring the concept of City Knowledge:

City Knowledge leverages the dominant plan-demanded mode of data acquisition to gradually and inexpensively accumulate high-return data and to ensure sustainable, low-cost updates. It produces plan-ready information, by exploiting the self-serving and opportunistic pursuit of instant return-on-investment by frontline offices. Thanks to its emergent qualities, City Knowledge engenders unexpected plan-demanding situations, where the ability to conduct second-order analyses leads to deeper knowledge of our cities.

Carrera and Hewitt have begun to collate environmental data and combine it with GIS mapping. Following Carrera’s ‘middle-out’ model, this emanates from the municipal departments, rather than bottom-up people power or top-down government departments. Described in his 2004 dissertation thus (in a section seductively topped with references to both Lynch and Calvino):

With the advent of the web, a culture of interconnectedness and a certain familiarity with the concept of sharing through a distributed network of independent computers have created the right mindset upon which the City Knowledge concept of “middle-out” can now be grafted. Middle-out entails that each department will first and foremost take care of its needs, so that the primary functions that the department or office performs will be invariably performed with or without the connection to the outside world.

The City Lab department of WPI has been developing this middle out data farming in a number of fields, including the Local On-line Urban Information System (LOUIS).

It seems to me that LOUIS needs help to get out of the lab and into your living room. In Dan’s model, the middle-out municipal department is the aggregation of a community through web 2 social networking. The people become their own Ministry of Environmental Truth, with an attractive AJAX interface, freely accessible API for iPhone toaster control apps and a folksonomic tagging system for all the white goods.

These two approaches should get together for a meetup. Tom Carden should be invited. Carrera seems to have dabbled with web 2 ideas, but the trail disappears after a single blog entry and solitary del.icio.us bookmark – perhaps he’s moved onto web 3.

Final proof that these were two paths destined to cross eventually: Carrera’s City Lab has its own City Sounds project

Elsewhere, Matt Webb – characteristically ahead of the game – announces his sustainability score to the neighbourhood by burning tyres on the roof.