no2self.net

Wandering around Architecture Island
posted by Eversion Orman on Architecture Island using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

Some work on a lecture I recently gave about Secured by Design (more on that coming up) produced a spin-off diagram worth sharing. Unashamedly following the Indexed model (what’s the formal name for this diagram type?), it pitches three elements of urban design (accommodation, people, transport) against each other and marks intersections, inputs and outputs.

What I’m interested in here is the way this type of diagram turns boundaries or edges - lines - into space to inhabit, both intellectually and physically. Territory that is usually microscopically small, like the surface tension between liquid and its container - such as the boundaries that bump into each other between a path alongside a garden, or a pavement alongside a road - is ripped open, forming a space (A, B and C) that must be negotiated and moved through, rather than stepped over.

I like the idea that these rifts, as Jack Harkness might call them, have a temporal viscosity, as Fassin Taak might say, that could range from foggy pea-soup to sticky treacle. I like the fact that the intersections, the crossing of streams, as Egon Spengler might say, rather than “…causing “total protonic reversal”, destroying the gate and removing Gozer…”, denote the rainwater outlets. The gutters. The connection to the wider infrastructure beyond the diagram.

At the end of all this, when I’m cross-hatching the bits in the middle, I’m defining that qualitative quantity ever-present in urban design discussion: density.

Update: Let’s be more explicit with our hyperlinks: the foggy link is an overlap with some recent posts by Adam Greenfield commenting and expanding on the work of Steven Flusty - see this post also: Foggy, further to Flusty’s five.

Also, I realise now that this was merely a continuation of my previous posts, Vacant Space and Theory about practice.

Rumours of my blogging death have been exaggerated. I’m still here. Normal service will resume shortly.

A summer invested entirely in production, has left no time for pontification.
My RSS list is currently running at around 5000 unread entries from all you lovely people. Let me know if you can recommend any short cuts to the sweet stuff buried in there from the last few months.

Question for the IT boffins out there: any idea why my entries that attempt to embed flickr images are only showing the contents of the ‘alt’ description rather than the full image? I’ve checked the css and it doesn’t seem to contain anything that would strip out the image.

Having the same trouble with an embedded flash gizmo from vodpod.com as well.

Answers on a post card to the usual address.

Help!

A few weeks ago I read an entry on the always informative downloadsquad.com blog that pointed me to the Google Co-op project. It was a how-to explaining an easy way to construct a list of sites to include in a custom search engine by importing your XML list of sites from your RSS reader. The geek in me who still remembers the day his father came home with a Spectrum 48k couldn’t resist experimenting, so today I’m launching the no2self architecture and design blog search:

no2self.net/blogsearch.

Currently it’s built around the following blogs:

• architecturesketches.blogspot.com
• aggregat456.blogspot.com
• www.brickonomist.net
• www.bryanboyer.com
• www.cityofsound.com
• rob.annable.co.uk
• thingsmagazine.net
• archiblog.info
• no2self.net
• archidose.blogspot.com
• archinect.com
• b2architecture.blogspot.com
• bldgblog.blogspot.com
• www.bryanboyer.com
• www.bronxelf.com
• developingnews.blogspot.com
• doyouwantcoffee.blogspot.com
• www.elasticspace.com
• transstudio.com/tm/
• www.gravestmor.com
• www.christopherdgray.co.uk
• inhabitat.com
• www.interactivearchitecture.org
• javierarbona.net/javlog.html
• www.landliving.com
• lifewithoutbuildings.net
• rodcorp.typepad.com/rodcorp
• www.rotational.co.uk
• www.spaceandculture.org
• www.strangeharvest.com/mt/
• tesugen.com
• www.brutaljoint.com/blog/
• www.resarch.net
• www.tropolism.com
• varnelis.net/blog
• massengale.typepad.com/venustas
• www.doorsofperception.com
• partiv.blogspot.com
• www.strangeharvest.com
• www.brickonomist.net
• www.neighbourhoods.typepad.com/neighbourhoods
• interconnected.org/home/
• schulzeandwebb.com/blog/

I’ve undoubtedly overlooked many worthy sites so let me know in the comments who I’m missing. I expect to use this in a couple of ways. Aside from the obvious ability to refine new topic searches to specific sites you trust and admire, I think it will also prove very useful for mining for old vaguely remembered entries that passed by you in an RSS blur.

I had to give it a description so I took the line of least resistance and just went for ‘architecture and design’ but this doesn’t really reflect the variety of ideas and topics you’ll find in the above sites. Be open minded with other suggestions too and tell me about thinkers/writers who could bring something fresh to the search engine.

Notes from last week’s Ecobuild conference

Some advice: If you’re due to speak at a seminar about the environment any time soon, please, stop to think about what your audience is likely to know already.

Ditch the stuff about how we’re all doomed and you’ve got the pie chart to prove it. We know. It’s not looking good and that’s why we’re there, listening to you, in the first place.

Ditch the stuff about how you knew this years ago, before the rest of us, but no-one has been listening.

Ditch the sermon from atop the moral - sustainably drained - high ground.

Just get on and tell us what you think we should do when we get back to the office.

That’s hopefully set the scene. Here are a few quite a lot of notes I took from some of Thursday’s speakers.

Adrian Hewitt from the London Borough of Merton presented some research done in collaboration with Fabio Carrera from WPI to help allow municipalities to understand it’s energy uses. Hewitt, understandably proud of his success in achieving the ‘Merton rule’, spoke about his plans to roll out CHP systems in Merton but was restricted by the cumbersome, costly process of assessing where best to deliver it. 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.

The project has been farming the data and combining it with GIS mapping. Carrera’s research can be found at http://www.wpi.edu/~carrera

Peter Studdert from Cambridgeshire Horizons gave a very good talk on ‘design and sustainability at 3 levels - sub-regional, neighbourhood and individual buildings’ - via an all too familiar theme of comparisons with projects in the Netherlands and Germany. They always do it better abroad. Examples worth creating carbon emissions to visit include:

Cambourne SUDS Flows Project

Accordia, Brooklands Avenue

SmartLIFE

Malmo - Bo01

Vauban and Riesenfeld in Freiburg

He gave a sound assessment of the value of design codes versus current development control techniques - get the overall urban design principles right and let the details deliver diversity, rather than ignoring the bigger picture and just coming down hard (and late) on styles of windows.

Professor Koen Steemers talked us through the detailed computer modelling of urban microclimates (in relation to ‘urban heat islands’) and his findings on the relationship between choice and perceived comfort. An external environment version of the ‘adaptive opportunity‘ work in indoor spaces that shows how being able to choose, for example, to move between a warm space and an open window creates a greater perception of comfort than a space that delivers a steady optimal temperature throughout. The conclusion: microclimate diversity results is greater desireability. He had the nicest graphs.

Sandy Halliday from gaiagroup.org provided the I’ve-been-doing-this-since-the-70s talk. Which, for me, got in the way of what was otherwise clearly an impressive body of work. To end the morning session, Michael Squire pointed out to us that trying to ’save the planet’ was daft, as numerous previous extinction events demonstrate that the planet will get along just fine; it’s the humans that are screwed.

In the afternoon I switched to the Cityscape session (podcasts available) to hear the talks on a topic close to my heart: suburbia.

Nick Falk from URBED continued the examination of Freiburg mentioned already during the morning session and added Almere in the Netherlands. His ‘lessons to be learnt from the Dutch’ highlighted a fact that had been touched on by others and I can corroborate with experiences in my own work: the rented housing sector is the only one delivering the quality that the industry is supposed to be striving for. I’ve no doubt CABE would agree.

I enjoyed his simple suggestion that front gardens are the epitome of suburbia. He also pointed out that the urbed.com web site was replete with studies and critical tools, and Built Environment magazine was worth a look. I hadn’t heard of that publication before.

Richard MacCormac made me jealous by talking about some research that I never seem to be able to find the time to do. His study examined housing typologies and the resulting densities over 5 combinations, ranging from 50 dwellings per hectare to 120.

• Courtyard housing
• Terraced
• Mews
• Mews and terrace
• Mews + flats and maisonettes

A valid question however, is whether either MacCormac or I need to do the research from scratch at all, as the debate about housing density has been going on a long time and there are plenty of existing examples to look at. I was reminded of a study published in 1934 that I recently learnt about on page 29 of ‘Eric Lyons & Span‘:

I can’t recommend this book highly enough. You’ll be hearing lots more about it from me in the coming weeks, especially this particularly outstanding chapter - Models for Suburban living - written by Alan Powers. Here he is describing the study behind this image: A Hundred New Towns For Britain by Arthur Trystan Edwards.

Edward’s two storey terraces, each with at 150 square feet of private outdoor space, were to be ‘charming streets and quadrangles which represent a happy mean between garden suburbia on the one hand and the tall standardised block on the other’, built at densities of 30 to 38 houses per acre.

The combination of distinctly recognisable typologies is as seductive now as it was in 1934 because it provides fertile ground for a debate on economics and aesthetics simultaneously. McCormac worked through the presentation of the aesthetics for each group and then moved to the economics to help him make a proposal for the most useful and robust density for new housing.

It goes like this: DETR figures state that for a neighbourhood to be served by a viable transport network you need 5000 dwellings. To design a ‘walkable’ neighbourhood we should provide all key facilities within a 10 minute walk. This defines an area contained within a circle of 600m radius. Take away the space recognised as necessary for communal facilities and roads and you’re left with a dwelling density of 50 per hectare.

Cue a series of images showing potential layouts at 50 per hectare, which MacCormac admitted himself was barely the beginning of any qualitative judgement of the resulting spaces. His key point, touched on throughout the presentation, was how this qualitative judgement is dependent on an improved understanding of the net vs. gross density - or, crudely put, the houses vs. the spaces.

He’s absolutely right and there’s a thread across this entry that moves from the CABE audit I mentioned earlier (which has much to say about better highways integration), to the car free environment of Trystan Edward’s terraces (whose high density probably land back at about 50 when you introduced parking), through the Span story of quality landscape better mediating the Radburn car/pedestrian divorce, to the shifting tessellations of MacCormac’s houses and gardens.

Relax, we’re almost done.

Hugh Barton from the WHO Collaborating Centre for Healthy Cities and Urban Policy had the thankless task of talking us through a bunch of statistics at 3:30 in the afternoon. However, beyond the tables of numbers was a perfectly timed foil to the density studies of the previous speaker. Interviews of people in 6 different suburban communities examined the actual performance of walking/cycling/driving possibilities to assess the health implications for residents. His conclusion? Reductionist principles to urban studies do not work; we need phenomenological case studies.

Ian Abley, the chair for the afternoon session, began the final panel discussion but stumbled out of the blocks confused about what the net vs. gross stuff all meant. Discouraged I headed for the door to deal with the all too phenomenological train journey home, wishing the density of passengers hadn’t caused me to sit next to the self righteous prick with the Powerbook who wouldn’t shut up about people’s phones going off in the ‘quiet zone’.

A good conference, which I’ll certainly be attending again next year. Splitting the day across different sessions was a good way to avoid excessive greenwash. Remind me next time to pre-book the lunch.

Related links: notes from Hana at Developing News

Sat in internet hovel in Islington. 50 pence lighter. Don’t use the bus ticket machine at Angel tube station - I just broke it. Hiking to destination, Will Self style, instead.

Going to Ecobuild conference tomorrow at Earl’s Court - any readers attending? Mail me if you want to get together in the lunch break: rob [usual] annable.co.uk

Will be Twittering for those who want updates.

And there I was thinking I ruled the roost when it came to sharing architectural images of days gone by. A link by thingsmagazine.net to nastybrutalistandshort caught my eye for another reason when I spotted a Gorden Cullen sketch taken from a book that currently resides on my bedside table*: Homes for Today and Tomorrow (Ministry of Housing, 1961)

Which proved to be only the beginning of a collection of wonderful images from this period posted on Owen Hatherley’s site The Measures Taken. Other examples include the work of Cedric Price, Alison and Peter Smithson and the GLC.

His opening paragraph also provides a perfect connection with my recent entries about architectural figures (my emphasis).

An intriguing by-product of the 1960s’ architectural fetish for the ex nihilo was its proliferation of deeply peculiar drawings. A budding Piranesi or Chernikhov would have all manner of opportunity to sketch out their own particular vision of a collective future, and in so doing created something as jarring in its schematic, rectilinear design as Library Music LPs or Penguin Book covers, only less lauded, perhaps because of the realities that the plans would degenerate into. They would be mocked by writers like Jonathan Raban by the 70s as depictions ’strangely tapering humanoids’ who couldn’t mess up the immaculate architecture and the geometric certainties of the town plans. Actually the images from this time veer from genuinely rather terrifying images of technocracy that evoke something to break the will of Number Six in The Prisoner, to really quite cute scribbles of happy proletarian families in their open-plan Parker Morris apartments.

Image and quote from The Measures Taken

(* intimate location details provided for texture only - relationship to bed irrelevant - I love architecture, but not that much)

A final collection of archive links before accepting the need to get on with 2007 and write something new.

The podcast (which so far contains only two episodes):

• Episode 2 - ArchWeekWalk
• Annotated walk to my office
• Episode 1 - Jencks and Erskine
• Erskine puts the world (and critics) to rights

And other topics…This is the journal of an architect, rather than an architecture journal, so occasionally you get entries like the ones below:

Recipes

• Spoon the mix into the ring
• Integral part of book-coffee-cheesecake maneuver
• Eves Pudding
• Domestic goddess Be-Ro style

Misc.

• Rodeohead and John Peel
• The mighty Peel uttering my humble name
• More Tea Mr Bond?
• The key to MI5
• Flash Mob Birmingham
• ‘Twas me
• We note, you blog
• Art baton
• Diagramming, Climbing
• Diagrams, mapping and me with my shirt off

Hello 2007. Hello new blog address: no2self.net

When you have a blog that’s named so as to remind you not write posts that are too self centred, using your own name as the URL is a little daft. After 3 years I finally got round to re-launching under a proper address.

The RSS feed will continue to be the feedburner address (http://feeds.feedburner.com/no2self) so it should be a seamless transition for most, but please check your subscription as anyone who came along some time ago may still be running on a previous address. I shall also be swimming with the tide of conformity and switching to Wordpress.

Blosxom has served me very well - with just the right amount of geekery involved in keeping it trim and the basic txt file format to avoid locked in content - but the comments options and spam has always been a problem. People who know much more about this than me tell me that Wordpress 2 does a great job with preventing spam. That’s good enough for me.

A huge thank you is owed to Brett O’Connor who has very generously put up with me nagging him over the last few years for help to keep the del.icio.us linklog script running. With perfect timing he’s just this minute e-mailed me with the latest version. I’ll be continuing to use it for behind-the-scenes blosxom blogs I use.

Can anybody recommend a good del.icio.us daily log plugin for Wordpress?

Layout at the new blog is currently based on the One Column theme but I imagine I’ll be tweaking it over the coming weeks. Underneath the main content is the latest trail left by my data shadow, with various highlights from the other key sites I use. All the usual suspects.

So, farewell rob.annable.co.uk, we’re all off to no2self.net.