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Here in Birmingham we await the results of the competition to see which starchitect will be delivering us their iconic vision for the future of the city’s library. As you can imagine, we’re all jolly excited about it *cough*.

Before we get to this bright new future, the previous one has to be dealt with. The city is determined to demolish the existing library and Margaret Hodge will soon be faced with deciding the fate of another part of our brutalist history.

Designed by John Madin, one of Birmingham’s most prolific and well respected 20th Century architects, the library was completed in 1974, controversially replacing its much loved Victorian predecessor. Like other’s being hotly debated at the moment (Robin Hood Gardens) it wears it’s structural heart on it’s sleeve and seems well suited to refurbishment rather than demolition. They’ve found a way to do it with Park Hill in Sheffield and elsewhere in Birmingham we’ve seen the reopening of the city’s other ‘icon’ from the same period - the Rotunda. A building that in my opinion achieved iconic status by way of it’s Lynch-friendly urban node location and height only, rather than any inherent architectural quality.

That said, petitions signed by the architecture fraternity screaming for the retention of a period piece like Robin Hood Gardens for it’s architectural value alone make me deeply uncomfortable. Does it actually work as a home, or in this case a library, anymore? If you want to tear down a cherished monument, is it wise to ask the people it was designed to monumentalize?

I argued for the retention of the Bull Ring, but in that case, as well as here, my position is perhaps summed up by one simple observation: Oh dear, here we go again.

Alan Clawley from Birmingham’s Friends of Central Library was kind enough to come over to our office last week and give us a showing of a 1965 BBC documentary that John Madin has given him permission to distribute.

Filmed as part of a series following six influential men, this episode (in the somewhat predictably entitled ‘Six Men’ series) provides a perfect freeze frame of the period. Bold and assertive, ambitiously moving into a future whose success is dependent on the amount of it that can be controlled by the vision of one man - “I’d like to design a town, completely“.

Madin was the starchitect of his day.

It’s too good to be left on DVD alone, so I’ve released it on the world via Google video (click the link, I can’t get the embedded option to work here): Six Men - John Madin

It’s a fascinating piece of footage, but for me the most important moment comes a few minutes in as we see Madin discussing projects with his staff, one of which is my much missed friend and mentor, Tony Goodall, leaning on his board the same way he used to when teaching me many years later.

There’s a collection of stills in a flickr set (Six Men) that capture a few moments from the film and I’ve also added the movie to the architecture video pod I run: architecture.vodpod.com

Also, footage of Madin himself recently discussing the fate of his building is available via The Stirrer.

Our man in Australia, Dan Hill from City Of Sound, sends his latest dispatch by video over at InterestingSouth2007, pitching an idea for sustainability points scoring encouraged by neighbourhood social networking competition. Bruce Sterling meets Robert Venturi - toaster spimes shout via roof top neon signs.

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.

Architecture Week is upon us and we’ll be taking part in Open Practice in Birmingham again this year. Axis Design will be opening it’s doors to the public on Friday 22nd June to talk about our latest work; the topic this year is How Green Is Our Space? We’ve had a very successful year developing a number of projects with a strong green agenda and I’m excited about the opportunity to get some comments and input from visitors.

Unfortunately, to my bitter disappointment, we weren’t included in this year’s paper catalogue. After a few moments of cursing and wondering whether to call it off for fear of lack of advertising I gathered my thoughts and realised I had a secret weapon: You.

Please, help me spread the word and flex my Google muscles a little. Pass it on, tell your friends, link me up - I’ve put an entry on the office web site with more details, please drop it into whatever blogging, bookmarking, digging, tumbling tools you have at your command:

Architecture Week Open Practice Day

Better yet, come and see me next week, I’d love to show you some of the work we’ve been doing. Failing that, I have a shiny new digital whiteboard to play with and if you’re lucky I’ll get some biscuits in.

Continuing in the yearly tradition, I’ve picked out a few items (after the jump) from the Architecture Week events list for the West Midlands. Work your way through as many as you can and then come and tell me about them when you visit next Friday! Last year’s podcasts and Google Earth route is still available to help you find your way to the office.
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Vodpod	22 March 2007 23:20
I thought you might like this collection of videos, called a ‘Pod’.Come have a look. You can join the Pod, watch the videos I’ve collected, and tell people what you think and what you liked.Or build your own collection with your own Pod, with videos you make yourself, or videos from dozens of sites like YouTube, Google Video, and more. architecture Cameron Sinclair’s TEDPrize acceptance speech: “Design like you give a damn” Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles MacGabhann Architects FKL Architects Please click the link below to view the collection: architecture.vodpod.com