garethace
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I just wish to add a little twist into this discussion here,…. just a query if you will. I am wondering, to what extent does the phenomena described in the following piece,… apply to the Bolton Street DIT smoking shed?
In 1958, the social scientist Thomas C. Schelling ran an experiment with a group of law students from New Haven, Conneticut. He asked the students to imagine this scenario: You have to meet someone in New York City. You don’t know where you’re supposed to meet, and there’s no way to talk to the other person ahead of time. Where would you go?
This seems like an impossible question to answer well. New York is a very big city, with lots of places to meet. And yet a majority of the students chose the very same meeting place: the information booth at Grand Central Station. Then Schelling complicated the problem a bit. You know the date you’re supposed to meet the other person, he said. But you don’t know what time you’re supposed to meet. When will you show up at the information booth? Here the results were even more striking. Just about all the students said they would show up at the stroke of noon. In other words, if you dropped two law students at either end of the biggest city in the world and told them to find each other, there was a very good chance that they’d end up having lunch together.
It has occured to me, from reading frequent fliers, and college newspapers around Trinity College,… there is this expression that keeps on cropping up,…
“The word on the ramp is,… “
I can only assume, that is the ramp, outside the Arts Block? Anyhow, this expression, has become synonimous with other familiar expressions, like ‘the word of the grapevine is’,… ‘the word on the block is’,… or ‘the word on the street is’… That is, I assume to be ‘in the know’ of what’s happening in Trinity, you need to visit the ‘Ramp’ periodically. Even though, Trinity is now probably one of the most dispersed, dislocated campuses around… it still sort of ties itself together ‘socially’ with that one simple expression, ‘the word on the ramp is’.
It is a little intriguing, that the ‘Ramp’ in Trinity college also functions in an equivalent fashion to the smoking shed and surrounding area in Bolton Street. I remember in the old days at DIT Bolton Street, the patio area between the fire escape and the new studios, used to function as the gossip corner, for the Architectural Department. It was very amusing sometimes to observe the clashes of authority between the students wanting to use the roof top to smoke and talk etc, while the staff would try to discourage it.
I don’t know if there is an equivalent in UCD or other campuses around the country. Any thoughts anyone?
Brian O’ Hanlon.
P.S. The above quote is from James Surowiecki’s book – The Wisdom of Crowds.
Okay, I took a hell of a lot away from this talk tonight, but one lesson was just pure priceless, for myself at least. One thinks about going to visit some good architecture abroad, everyone has their own wish list of ‘must-see’ built architecture around the globe,… etc, etc,… but then I see this interesting work the office was doing with Cork IT, and I have to say, I now feel a little bit stupid, to think, I have never investigated their work at Cork IT campus in the flesh. Sure, the work at Cork IT has been highlighted I think, with an AAI Award or two. I mean, you almost expect this practice to be in the shake up for an Award nowadays. In fact, I used to wave off, De Blacam and Meagher projects as the perfect Architecture to win awards with. But I am glad to report, that after tonight’s presentation at DIT Bolton Street, Mr. Meagher has managed to convince me, I need to look deeper at their architecture, than just spending two seconds viewing an AAI catalogue page about their latest masterpiece.
It calls into question the whole AAI Award, ‘chicken and egg’ format of presentation, doesn’t it? It just makes it too easy, for any of us, without getting off our behinds, to just dismiss something, because ‘we saw it in the Awards’. Somehow, the AAI Awards claim to be an independent barometer of good work happening here in this country. But I think it just packages together a bunch of cool looking architectural photography etc, – so much so, I am starting to worry about it’s signal to noise ratio. What message is it indeed trying to convey – with all due respect to the fine volunteers who have managed to keep that venerable old Association running for many a year.
Unlike any AAI Awards Exhibition, somehow Mr. Meagher’s talk tonight educated me, at least, to all the opportunities that can exist, even in Ireland, to explore interesting architectural programmes and arrangements of public buildings and space. In the lecture he described some of the early conceptualisation of how Trinity campus worked – a very, very old campus with a reputation that draws tourists from everywhere – and it was bookended very nicely indeed in the talk, by this new campus in Cork which is only breaking the ground for the first time. Somehow from the few slides in tonight’s talk, I didn’t get the impression that Cork IT new additions, landed from outer space in the form of some gigantic ‘H’ Block figure.
Lets face it, a lot of us were educated in a ‘H’ block of one kind or another, yet no matter, how old these ‘H’ blocks become, you never feel like they have grown old and integrated with the place, or the community – they always feel like something supplied from a mail order brochure of the Welfare State – they seem designed to ‘say’ we provide for the people – just like some campaign poster wrapped around a lampost or something. Yeah, I can safely say, I grew up and even managed to reach adulthood (no laughing) with a perception that educational architecture’s brief, had to be something expressingly saying ‘providing cabins for poor people to learn in’,… or something to that effect.
I mean, I think that ‘portacabin feel’ has left some pretty deeply engrained impressions upon the Irish population of what an educational building should be about. I guess, generations older than me, might have similar thoughts on the architecture the catholic church implemented for the purposes of education. I think, I might have come away from this lecture tonight with something new in terms of how I perceive educational architecture. But this ‘change of perception trick’ isn’t just restricted to Educational Buildings. Residential living room spaces on the first floor are a very logical idea, I think, in either rural or urban situations. Both Mr. Meagher and several other practices in Ireland have changed our perceptions in that sphere lately. It even extends to materials – and peoples’ perception of what wood should look like – that it must be varnished etc. Even something like a bicycle shop – I always liked this piece about Cycle Ways shop in Parnell Street, it is interesting I think.
http://www.cycleways.com/store/aboutus.asp
Nice Talk, thanx Bolton Street.
Brian O’ Hanlon.
Well now, isn’t this cosy?
BTW, for those of you interested, Sputnik’s translation into English, is something like ‘Travelling Companion of the Earth’. 🙂
Hmmm… Deep.
Anyhow, couple of good genuine comment at CG Architect too.
http://www.cgarchitect.com/vb/showthread.php?p=70285#post70285
I believe that future students competitions, all around the world, should lever modern Internet technology – sort of realtime crits via web space etc, etc…. would add an even greater level of interaction and teamworking.
Just email me, via this address fergus,
if you remember that thing some Friday or something, have a skupe. 🙂
Brian O’ Hanlon.
Another way, to calculate large figures,… via distributed computing, over peoples’ mobile phones!
:-0
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=22424
It certainly is a brave new world isn’t it?
Brian O’ Hanlon.
Congratulations, you have had the first say, in a discussion that will probably last for generations. 🙂
Brian O’ Hanlon.
Yeah, you probably have to be a registered member of CG Architect, to see the images,… Heuston, we have a problem, anyhow, lets try something different.
Here are the jpegs.
I am sure, that our Cyber Master, Mr. Paul Clerkin, has got the technology and the ‘know-how’ to also launch a Sputnik into Cyberspace, from the Archiseek launching site.
Care to give it a go Paul? I don’t know quite how to present photos, so they are visible in a post here, in sequential thumbnails or something… I have organised the photos in a specific order. (a,b,c,d… )
That TV series, on Sky at the present, called ’24’ is something I became pretty addicted to lately. It is full of SUVs, shopping malls, public spaces, guys with ear-pieces running around looking at sophisticated palm pilots and surveillance systems, linking via satellite and all sorts. It is a really cool show, I want to buy the DVD collection at some stage…. but in Lott’s linked article I simply could not pass out the description of the ‘lifestyle centre’ reinvention of the shopping centre concept, and the link with this TV series called ’24’, …. so ‘post 9/11’,… preserving the freedoms of this great nation sort of angle. It is really funny, how lifestyle centres and SUVs nowadays, seems to equate to the American-ised perception of ‘freedom’ in some way,… while I have gone to considerable lengths in my posting here, to look carefully at that supposed conception of ‘consumerised, free Nirvana’. Anyhow I still think Jack Bauer is cool, anymore votes?
http://www.imdb.com/gallery/scrapbook/22/Sbk/22/60860_1_6.jpg?path=gallery&path_key=0285331
I mean, wouldn’t anyone feel safer with that fellow looking over and protecting us all? Using the latest sat-Nav and best SUVs that money can possibly afford? “CTU agent Jack Bauer has to race the clock to handle both a presidential candidate assassination plot and his daughter’s kidnapping, while dealing with a mole inside the agency”. Also from the article Lotts linked:
Ever since Victor Gruen constructed the first indoor shopping center in a Minneapolis suburb in 1956, the mall has been supersizing itself.
BTW, my quote about shopping centres, earlier on in this thread was about ‘The Mall of America’ in Minnesota, think the movie Fargo, a place where it is cold for most of the year, so shopping centres made a lot of sense, but then they became gigantic in scale. Minnesota also happens to be one of the biggest centres of computer technology and software companies in the country – I guess there is nothing else to do it is so cold. I dunno, you go to a city like Helsinki which is pretty cold too, is a contender to become another Silicon Valley like centre of innovation and technology, and yet they still manage to have city streets, and nice open public spaces, granted all public buildings there, which there are plenty provide massive ‘cloak rooms’ for coats you will need to wear.
I hate to do this, on a public forum, and I know providing this link here, might be a little bit on the inappropriate side, . . . . but I think, we need to be aware and educate ourselves, carrying on the theme of a TV series like ’24’, and Jack Bauer etc, maybe the world post 9/11 is indeed a different place. I think the link below should dispel most any doubts left, about whether ‘technology’ is being used to push consumer products of all kinds, upon the modern society.
http://archives.neohapsis.com/archives/isn/2002-q3/0004.html
Even personnel at the bottom of the cartel food chain have Israeli night-vision goggles, ICOM radio frequency scanners, and Magellan GPS handhelds.
Brian O’ Hanlon.
Will do that, thanx.
Just put a quick link here so I can find it again:
I have noticed, however, that noone has picked up on the obvious Kevin Lynch, Image of a City,…
Kinds of parallels, I have been exploring here, with my ideas about webspace and edge city, and shopping centre architecture. The notion, that people draw out a picture of the city in their brains, and that defines how people use the city. One of the most common, although, dis-inter-mediated techniques of navigation these days,… is the rocket-fuelled, ‘Smart’ broadband way, of the world wide web.
I cannot decide honestly, if the people themselves expect cities to replicate that kind of navigational experience, or if planners lay it out that way,… but it is a curious question indeed.
Brian O’ Hanlon.
Sometimes in Architectural exhibitions, you come across these silly futuristic presentations, called ‘paper architecture’,… but I think the usefulness of these presentations, is they very often time capsule a notion or anticipation of something, just before something happens, or something is unleashed upon the world. Can anyone think of similar examples of this?
I remember one, in the joint Scottish/Irish ‘Young Irish Architects’ exhibition from a decade ago roughly, which contained something by a Mr. Kevin/Jonathan Woods,… sorry, may even have that name wrong,… but I also remember sitting down listening to the fellow deliver a 5-10 minute discussion about this notion of webspace, and the city. He was thinking about how, cyberspace, could be navigated like the physical world, where you would see similarly kind of urban forms etc.
Anyhow, it only just occured to me, how prophetic that presentation actually was,… I wouldn’t mind actually catching a glimpse of the A1 original again sometime. I mean, is there some sense, in maybe re-exhibiting some things like this, as part of Irish Architectural exhibitions? At the time, I say, this particular presentation, I had absolutely no clue as to what the guy was trying to fix in upon. So I just left it there.
I think, the particular scenario, the Architect in question envisaged a decade ago, has sort of materialised. But with a twist, I think – there is this thing called irony, that sometimes comes into play awfully in real life. I considered, how the environment in Ireland these days, has become like the following: The car roughly equates, in modern webspace jargon, to the ‘browser’. The car has been embedding into everyday life, similar to how the monopolistic Microsoft Corporation, managed to embed their browser, into their operating system product. Whereas the road infrastructure basically equates to the search engine, where you type in something randomly and look for a suggestion. The modern Shopping centre, in the context of both the car and the road infrastructure, is like the ‘Home Page’ you find, when you click on one of the links you find through your search engine.
The home page, is really the prime real estate, because that is where the eyeballs are all monetized, to use the Amazon.com e-business jargon. 🙂 It is funny, how these mad-cap architectural paper presentations, with musings and philosophical ideas, sometimes turn out to be so close to what you end up with in the reality.
Brian O’ Hanlon.
Trying to understand, all of these things, on so many different scales is challenging I will admit,… ten years ago, I simply could not have gotten my head around it very well,… that is the trouble, when you are a mere student stumbling across the odd architectural journal with articles about Edge City etc. So lets just carry on the same vein as the rest of my posting here, and deal with Edge City as a concept.
I happened to find this piece today, which uses the metaphor of containerisation in the physical world, to explain packets of data, the little bits of information, that are the nuts and bolts of how the Internet works. It is a rather nice piece of writing I think, and manages to draw together two separate ideas from the virtual and physical worlds. The other important thing to know about how the Internet works, is that the Internet, ‘is a network of networks’,… rather than a top-down imposed uniform system. Noone actually maintains the whole system, it is just a whole bunch of different, independent systems, which are virtually simulated into a seamless whole,… through the use of packets, which are like the standardised containers, and also things called routers, (think products from Cisco Systems etc) which are like the cranes that do all the heavy lifting at ports and railway stations.
The TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) idea was the electronic equivalent of the containerisation revolution which transformed the transport of international freight. The basic idea in the freight case was agreement on a standard size of container which would fit ships’ holds, articulated trucks and rail wagons. Almost anything could be shipped inside a container, and special cranes and handling equipment were created for transferring containers from one transport mode to another. In this analogy, the transport modes (sea, road, rail) correspond to different computer networks; the containers correspond to the TCP envelopes; and the dockside and trackside cranes correspond to the Cert-Kahn (Inventors of TCP) gateways (routers). And just as the crane doesn’t care what’s inside a container, the computer gateway (router) is unconcerned about the contents of the envelope. Its responsibility is to transfer it safely on the next leg of its journey through Cyberspace.
Simple though it is, the Cerf-Kahn idea of a gateway (router) linking different types of network was the key both to the subsequent growth of the Internet and to the explosion in creativity which it fostered. Its emphasis on ‘end-to-end’ reliability meant that the network would essentially be indifferent to what it was used for. The gateways (routers) had only one task – that of getting packets from one place to another. They cared nothing for what those packets represented. As far as the network was concerned, a packet containing a fragment of a love letter was the same as one containing a corner of a pornographic photograph or a segment of a digitised telephone conversation.
So you can understand what I mean, when I say the crack between the virtual world and the physical world is getting wider all of the time,… as more and more of Cyberspace, jumps into the physical world, and becomes ‘Edge City’, a world of standardised containers and articulated lorry transport, railway hubs and ports which are large containerised warehouses. Modern technical journalism and everyday press has focussed on the notion, of everything ‘moving onto the Internet’,… moving into Cyberspace,… but the reverse is also just as true. The movement of Cyberspace back down into the physical environment, simpy hasn’t got the same press, except for a few vague architectural notions, like that of Edge City, which tries rather desperately to grapple with a huge issue now facing the urban environment.
By the way, most of the companies we know nowadays, with any established success in doing business through the Internet – the Dell Computers, the Amazons, the Fed-Ex Parcel Delivery Service, Walmart Supermarkets in the US – all of those have foremost come to realise the opportunities now afforded, by use of containerisation, transportation, and that whole physical/virtual reality which is Edge City. I think one of the funny, or not so funny examples, James Marcus cited in his book Amazonia, was while helping out in the Christmas rush in the Amazon.com warehouse in Seattle, how he would roll a trolley around a huge warehouse somewhere on the outskirts of that city, collecting the orders that customers placed through the Internet. Remember this was Christmas time, and one order he put together for a customer included a company of ‘Mein Kamp’ by Adolf Hitler. Now, I think that probably underlines what was said above, about the packets/containers not even caring what was inside. 🙂
Brian O’ Hanlon.
P.S. This kind of report, will probably make more sense to the PlayStation Generation Forum Members, but I will post it anyhow:
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2005/03/23/extended_outages_for_world_of_warcraft.html
One of the slogans throughout Amazon.com’s growth as a company and worldwide business, was the old faithful,… ‘monetize those eyeballs’,… meaning, that you get people who browse your virtual world, to drop more items per visit into that online shopping cart. Anyhow, I coincidentally, just stumbled across this article at a regular web site of mine today:
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=22103
About Identity theft, so anyone care to tell me again, why I should fill ‘elated’ about the new opening of a centre like Dundrum etc, near me? ? ? ? I mean, I don’t mind getting familiar with my local Deli counter staff or whatever, but some of this ‘voucher scheme’ rubbish is just getting ridiculous these days, and in my opinion is also illegal. I just wonder how many clip-board holders were flying around on that opening day at Dundrum? 🙂
See ya!
Brian O’ Hanlon.
There is just one more thing, on the subject of Acoustics and Architecture, I would like to deal with though. This Architect, gave a talk recently at Trinity to the AAI,…
http://www.irish-architecture.com/aai/events/data/1108444687.html
By the way, that is an open air community building you are looking at there in the photographs, I know, an open air community building was a first for me too, but it just goes to show, how far we have to climb, in terms of mind-broadening in this country – what the real possibilities are. Imagine that space, full of busy traders or something on a Saturday morning, and the buzz of their activities seeping out through the openings to the streets outside, and attracting the attentions of random passers-by. I am not sure, if putting everything into a glass dome, and blasting hot air into that dome, for all the ‘shoppers’ to feel pleasantly toasted, is the only answer. But the Irish planners and developers seem to have settled upon that paradigm, for the time being anyhow, and that is what every client is climbing over one another, in such a hurry, to achieve.
The Swiss Architect, in question, talked a lot about ‘pushing to the limit, the technology of the wood’. You have to try to do a Swiss accent, to get that right though. Anyhow, during question time at the end, this Swiss Architect was very forthcoming, in wanting to answer all of our questions and queries. Ger Carthy of Grafton Architects, asked what I believe to be a very good question, about a particular multi-storey school building the Swiss Architect had done in Basle or someplace. The question related to the minimalism of the spaces in the school, the whole multi-storey building being cast basically in one single piece of concrete, and it had exposed concrete all over the place, in its finished state. But Ger asked quite rightly, what effect did this have upon the functional operation of a school? That, with all the exposed concrete material, would there not be a problem with echos etc. The school was full of open plan circulation areas, lightwells, and all sorts of really ‘cool stuff’, that Architects love to deal with. 🙂 Yeah, the school did seem like a ‘calming oasis of knowledge’.
Anyhow, the Architect put special absorbant sound panels, just the minimum required, and they were so minimal, as not to look overbearing, they were integrated with the style of the architecture. The School teachers love the building, have no problems with noise, or echos, and can teach just fine. Now, the problem I find with the Shopping Centre, is that it does something very weird with noise, when a place is full of thousands of busy shoppers, when you most expect to hear the ring of heels clipping off of hard surfaces, like you do in Trinity, or in Stillorgan open walkway streets, or in a semi-pedestrianised shopping area,… in Shopping centres, this very attractive sound of the clipping of heels, or people moving about,… which would also be the attraction of a nice piazza, side walk cafe in any great European city,…. this aspect is simply missing in the shopping centre.
Don’t get me wrong, I know all about ‘the roar’ that Grafton Street can emit, when you are walking up it, full of bustly shoppers, and how terribly uncomfortable that is. But the sound of peoples movements, in a shopping centre, doesn’t really work – or the music in the centre is getting over it. Maybe there is simply too much absorbant materials, or something. But the shopping centre space, really deprives you of that one nice thing, about communal shopping areas – the acoustic dimension. I am thinking of when I was at Helsinki, and the harbour side fish market, in the big square at the centre of that city, where people mingled through the stalls, walking on cobbles and being intoxicated with the many smells, sounds of people selling/buying and enjoying themselves. Interestingly, Michael M., mentioned this aspect about the design of the Liffery Board walk, and compared it with sitting in the folks car, at summertime, driving over the wooden bridge to Bull Island. I can even think of a good example closer to home, that of the St. Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre, where the OPW I think, decided to keep all of the old materials, like old wooden planks and walkways, that creak and move slightly, reverberate, when you traverse across them. I quite like this, and it humanises the place very sucessfully I think.
The National Gallery extension by Benson and Forsyth isn’t bad either, I like the way that sounds merge together and float around through the space is wonderfully exciting and cool ways. When you talk about ‘freedom’, it is really weird, just the kinds of qualities of space, that most of all underline for the participant in the Architecture a sense of freedom, or not. Michael McGarry, spoke too of the limited ‘infrastructure’ associated with some of the most wonderful and memorable public spaces in older European cities,… for the horse race in Sienna, they put down straw so that the horses don’t slip, but that is really the only ‘maintenance’ they get. Open space, has the potential to work this kind of magic, at its best,… I noticed that O’Connell street has begun to change ‘acoustically’ for the better in its lower half too, where the pedestrian margins have been widened, and somehow, the traffic isn’t ‘the only’, thing you hear now on O’ Connell Street. But funny, how the top half of O’Connell Street, still has the deafening ‘roar’ of bus diesel engines and motorbike two-stroke engines whizzing in and out… you stand around the old Carlton and you are still just ‘blown away from that traffic noise.
But for my own money, the Jervis Centre, or any of these modern indoor complexes do not transfer this ‘free’ kind of feel of space, because of reasons like acoustics,… amongst many others. I would understand in a prison, or some awful facility for holding people captive, the designer of an ‘institution’ wanting to communicate a feeling of captivity to the participant, in the architecture,… but I simply don’t understand, why a shopping complex would want to make you feel ‘internalised, and trapped’…. maybe some people find it safe or something, dunno. But then you have that awful contrast, when you finally emerge with your shopping to the multi-storey carpark, and you are back again, in this cold, drafty, lofty, tar-macked, oil-smelling, possibly rat-infested garage entrance,… which is the car parks in the shopping centres. On this subject, I think Carme Pinos, spoke nicely about her approach to designing car parks, for multi-storey office buildings.
But finally, on the subject of cars, and tracking your movements, gathering information etc,… I think, when I opened up the Evening Hearld last night, and saw on the front page, a feature about the Gardai, having a camera on every corner, connected up to a system, which could search your number plate, and find out everything about you in seconds,… well, how long is it, until the eyeballs in everyones’ head are going to get bar-coded too, so that the entire city just becomes like one big prison? I found it interesting, how the traffic engineering department too, who have been responsible for so much anti-social design in cities over the recent decades, how they have been so quick to get to this table, and begin feasting on all of this information, they can gather about people/movements. Of course, the real trick, will be ‘to scan’ each and every car that goes into the shopping centre, and track that frequency against, what they buy, how much they buy, and all kinds of other ‘information’ that exists out there now about people, barely separated systems, by what could only be called ‘Chinesse Walls’,… the physical world we live in nowadays, has increasingly just become a shadow of the virtual one.
Brian O’ Hanlon.
Some Conclusions?
Okay, here is my best shot.
I received this question recently, while discussing the subject of Internet Commerce at another message board. This guy is from Texas, and he was asking me about something called Push. Bear in mind, that coming from Texas he has probably seen it all, in terms of poor Mexicans skipping over the border, and taking up positions in the service industry, similar to the way Dublin has gone only now.
Push is definately here and only getting bigger – the idea debuted before its time – but the age of computers feeding you content based on your preferences/history is already here.
I am curious, in Ireland, do grocery stores require you to shop with a club card to recieve the lowest price on items? Here in the states, if you don’t use your club card at the grocer, you don’t get the sale price on items and sometimes coupons aren’t accepted. This is all so the supermarket can track your purchases, which help them determine what to stock in the store, what to put on sale, and most importantly, it allows them to send you coupons for specific items to “push” you into buying. For example, they might see that you buy a 16oz can of peaches every week. Next thing you know, you are getting coupons for 50 cents off if you buy TWO 16oz cans… By doing this, grocers very effectively pump up their sales.
Barnes and Nobe bookstore has adopted this method over here in the States as well and require a club card to take advantage of the discount price. It is very convenient, since they record your book purchases, they are able to send you notice when new books in your favorite genres are on sale, or when new books you may have interest in are released.
Basically, in Amazon.com, the main front home page of that web site, hasn’t been ‘touched’ by a human hand in years. Because the idea, is to gather information about everyone, so when you visit Amazon, the web page, will display things, that it ‘thinks’ using Artificial Intelligence, are to your liking. There were some funny things initially, like, if you typed the name of a children’s book, you got up a whole load of flick knives, and numerous other examples. But after a while, the programmers manage to iron out this ‘kinks and wrinkles’. So you are not as aware that it is happening anymore – that is really when it begins to do its job. You can catch a glimpse of that in the Minority Report movie, where the ads on the side of the street change whenever you walk past them, ‘targetting’ you so to speak, and tracking your movements around the modern city. This technology is just going to become more pervasive, sophisticated and powerful. Very soon you will not even notice the jagged edges, that give away ‘its digitally altered’ identity, like at the moment.
All you are seeing with large shopping centres, is the physical world trying desperately to stay abreast of all that has suddenly happened in the past 50 years, in terms of the amount of ‘media’ and messaging available to us, constantly, all our waking hours, every day. The large shopping centre, is like the ‘Cinema Theatre’ equivalent of what you normally just consume through the little screen, the radio sound or the computer monitor, newspaper, magazine etc, etc. I do find it strange how suddenly, young kids have become the target of so much carpet bombing marketing/advertisement campaigns. I am just wondering what kind of relationship the future generations will try to build with all of this media – how will we establish an etiquette to it all? LIke the couple of 12 year old kids in UCG cinema in Parnell Street, have these ‘unlimited card’ things, which allow them to get into movies each week for a cheaper price. Yet, what the cinema is doing, is at the ripe old age of 12, the kids likes, needs and so on, are being recorded onto the system – by the time these kids reach 30 or 40, I am sure sophisticated systems will exist to take advantage of all that data.
Terence Riley, gave this talk at xmas in Trinity:
http://www.irish-architecture.com/aai/events/data/1094589443.html
About how Architecture is somehow ‘losing’ market share, in terms of the information it displays… basically, architecture is just fading into the background altogether, and it is all just big signs and Neon. I do think we have duties in this department certainly, real responsibilities, not to be ‘gullible’ about what is actually happening out there. Given these kids are going to grow up in a time, where ‘Push’ operates in so many ways on everyone. Heck, look at the amount of info, contained about you and me on this message board. What I do know, is that most of us are in a real hurry to black-slap one another and make out like its all a ‘great days work’. But our daily environment is starting to get manichured and wired in ways, we cannot even understand right now. I liked the picture of Nixon, and the microphones. It sort of speaks about the early days of Cyberspace and Cyber-Power, when the world was initially starting to get wired, and understand for the first time, without innocence, that it had deeper effects in terms of how we all live today.
And here we have a group of catives of the new information age?
And finally, I have chosen these Robert Capa photographs, and the David Douglas Duncan portrait of Nixon, is basically, because I wish to imply a feeling of the scale and numbers we are dealing with here – because large numbers and statistical analysis, is really what ‘economics’ is to do with, and this in turn affects our environment.
So lets all say ‘Hurray’ for shopping centres. 🙂 Again, courtesy to both Mr. Capa and Mr. Duncan for taking those photographs.
Brian O’ Hanlon.
A lot is made of shopping malls and consumerism and how unhappy we supposedly all are – at the end of the day it’s up to yourself, the individual.
Well, I am afraid, that is just too naive for this time and age,.. producers of merchandise of every sort, pay dearly to get there brands pushed under the consumers noise, so unfortunately, we just end up buying what ever passes our radar,… not necessairly, the best product. See the Amazonia book link below, if you are really interested in this topic.
There is just too things, I would like to add to what I have already said.
Firstly, that when I refer to Architects and Planners, as being compartmentalised in their thinking, I should also qualify that statement – while I looked at the negatives of this, I suppose it is only right to point out, that ‘focus’,… a much more positive word, to describe a similar behaviour, is a good trait, when dealing with problems too.
Unfortunately though, focus was not ever my forte. 😉
Anyhow, the other point is simply this, and it does underline, my own lack of focus a bit too. I think, that books about the Dot.com revolution, really good ones, like Amazonia:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1565848705/103-5113124-6063846
Have become required reading, for anyone who considers themselves planners, architects, masterplanners and so forth,… anyone who is concerned about the built environment basically. Because in having to define the virutal world of E-tail,.. these tombs, also go into some depth about the physical world that was retail, before the dot.com era.
Certainly, reading any of these books would manage to ‘mop up’, on some of my meanderings about Cyberspace and cracks existing between different worlds. By Cyberspace too, I refer to TV, Radio, Internet, Text Messages, anything and everything where the world has become virtualised. Even a hole in the wall ATM.
It is just that I found it strange how planners, manage to talk about Banks wanting to get out of O’Connell Street, without, at least mentioning, where some of the impetus for that move away from physical streets and places in they city, initially came from.
Brian O’ Hanlon.
I listened to a young member of the architectural profession, a number of years back, trying to argue that the Awear store on Grafton Street, could actually become a ‘calming oasis’, amongst the bustling thoroughfare of Grafton Street. I guess alarm bells should have been ringing in my ears back then – but at the time, I thought nothing of it. That was before the country got some fast money. I guess every young designer, is keen to jump on an opportunity to prove their ‘design talent’. Indeed, that young designer could well have been me, if I could get my nice renderings together quick enough for a design review! 🙂
Grafton Street itself, remember is an early example of an unholy marriage between Planning and commercialism in Ireland. Grafton Street, to this day, neatly encapsulates that earnest and well-meant aspiration about the provision of ‘public open space’ being good for all. But for me it also demonstrates, people who pawn a high-margin commodity, like the Flower sellers, command the ability to block the road, so a pedestrian street doesn’t work so pedestrian friendly anymore. Take motor cars out of the equation, and it makes the conjestion even worse! I just love the way, the flower sellers managed to the pick the points, where they could create the maximum amount of pedestrian conjestion!
Lets just cut to the chase here, the modern shopping centre is another extension of the advertising campaign, from the worlds of TV, radio and Cyberspace, coming through into the physical world. The crack between real and virtual worlds has opened so much wider nowadays. The two worlds seem to knit together into one homogenous fabric of existence. Just as more and more chunks of physical world, move into cyberspace, a lot of Cyberspace would appear to be moving back into the physical world. Urban design and architecture, have both emerged with a brand new manifesto – because they offer a large canvas – a new kind of ‘Media Space’ as it were. I am afraid though, the Environmental professional is begining to look like a puppet bouncing up and down on these ever strengthening ‘Cybernetic’ strings. As if you went to shop, for more or less the same reasons, you went into a Church or other kind of sacred space, to make amends with your Creator and quietly complemate your existence? ? ? The message has become very garbled, religion and commerce, professionalism and exploitation,… as often happens, much is lost, in the digital translation. The shopping centre, like any good advertising campaign, tries desperately to bring commercialism, to some kind of higher plane.
Sure, Commerce, as the client, can afford to pay, those trendy polo neck wearing designers, in the ‘Architectural Review’ Magazine, to clad new commercial pleasure boats, with some kind of austerity and ‘calm reflective meaning’. But errrh,… sorry, I am simply not buying your brand, I just prefer the honesty of the Roman solution. Millenia later, we can be honest, and say that the Romans built the Collusium to keep the masses contented – there was absolutely no higher motive behind it – absolutely no ambiguity. It is a sign of the strength of that culture rather than its weakness, that it was able to make such an honest statement, all those many years ago. Shopping centres are trying to look reserved, astute and smart,… like some high powered Calvin Klein branding strategy, to corner a very lucrative demographic,… the austerity, plainess and understatement is carefully aimed to mask the actual intent – to bring in the real dollars.
I wish designers and planners would have a less compartmentalised view of their world. Not to try and operate in a vacuum, and talk about things like Urban space without reference to the world, Ireland and the expanding world of Cyberspace, as they are today, and how they relate with each other.
Brian O’ Hanlon.
I just think that most of the major achievements, which both Architects and Town Planners have ‘claimed’ as achivements in their respective fields, have gone very much hand in hand, with the commercial side of the equation – namely the explosion in service-industry related activities, and usually just pure exploitation of the public. This is a very ‘compartmentalised’ way of looking at the environment I think.
Large commerce has been a good client, yes, from the point of view, of building large shining monstrosities, but useless from some points of view. … Big commerce, does what big commerce does,… it is like a jugernaut when it gets into the mode of focusing money on a large project or undertaking – then it has no middle gears unfortunately. I find that an awful lot of the service industry growth and property development, has gone very under-regulated.
Like the Ancient Roman’s would rely on a good day out at the events in the Collusium, with the lions and tigers etc, to boost their mood somewhat… the modern explosion in the service industry does quite the same sort of thing for city inhabitants, it would appear, distracting you from a lot of basic short comings in the system at present, and sticking a fresh tasty bagel in your mouth, telling you to, ‘Just cheer up, and get over yourself’. The Collusium and such examples in the past, may have integrated more into the urban fabric though, and provided lasting urban icons. I am not so sure, that many of the urban designers in Ireland, have gotten their heads fully around the scale of this problem in Ireland yet, especially, if some of the model designs and proposals I have seen, are anything to go by.
So given, that the modern city dweller has been snagged into this inescapable consumer net, and the LUAS, new public spaces and so on, are just more and more sophisticated ways to get you on board the big ‘eat’ and the big ‘spend’. The fact, that so many architects and town planners, have adopted this service industry boom, as evidence of exceptional work done in their fields, is I suppose, a very notable example of their willingness, to use the explosion to generate some good self-centred PR hype – but usually that is all. It still doesn’t convince me, that any Irish Architect has sucessfully managed to even look at this problem, and enlarge the debate to any significant degree – there just seems to be one very sucessfully packaged solution. The client – Commerce is the major player behind all of this. The trouble for me, with the way environmental designers talk about themselves and their creations nowadays,…
https://archiseek.com/content/showthread.php?t=3818
Is really their inability to place things in any social context, that is, Ireland in 2005. They do mention poverty related social problems, which plagued public space in past decades, but everyone seems to be afraid to point any finger, at our recent wealth bubble, and the social issues it has raised too. You have to look at Liffey Board Walk, Wolfe Tone Square, O’Connell Street, Henry Street, Hueston Station, IFSC, Dundrum and everything else, within the context of a city, which has become very much geared up behind a booming service industry sector.
Brian O’ Hanlon.
Wood Quay Presentation.
So did people retire to the golf clubs, and back gardens in Surburbia for a couple of decades, and now are folks just been drawn back in various ways, into the central public domains?
Good talk, some quite interesting, calm, collected reflections upon what is actually an enormous discussion topic, and area of study. An area with a huge history too, Michael M., was talking about things in the 1600s, as if it were only yesterday. It struck me strongly, how landscape design, perception and approach continues to evolve to this day, and will do so into the future. I wish someone had plucked up the courage to ask about the prospects of making a pedestrian diagonal through St. Stephen’s Green,…. 🙂 In a different time, this may not seem so outrageous. Perhaps even with car parking underneath, at a cost of 25,000 Euro per space! 🙂 Dunno, dunno,… maybe it could work? The more ambitious entries in the Carlisle Pier Competition in Dun Laoghaire, didn’t waste the opportunity to at least, look down this avenue either – the Libeskind entry in particular, I recall, was strong on the notion of a plinth containing loads of carparking.
But in the meantime, I would like to point out some simple examples of ‘intensity of usage’, and poly-directional-ism, in design of space. I would wish to point everyones’ attention in the direction, of what was once, the ‘Kylemore’ cafe on the first floor, in St. Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre… basically, because it highlights the point about ‘intensity of use’, that need, in any modern public domain. It has been transformed from a sort, mono-directional pipeline catering industry approach, with a cash register ‘gate’ at one end, and a double door at the other,… into some kind of ‘poly-direction’ mingling area, where you just wander around this food court, through all these free-standing ‘Tschumi inspired Follies’, being directed mainly by your stomach, colours, senses, as opposed to any really pre-designated route. But it has worked, it has got the place, once ignored suddenly packed to the rafters… This, I think is where the old Bewley’s system fell down altogether, because they attempted to force people through narrow passages, in some kind of old-fashioned ordered passage way.
That old Kylemore cafe was basically a space, was one the food and catering industry had forgotten, written off, for a long while, but today has been radically turned around from an economic and general crowd activity/usage point of view. The Introduction, to this talk tonight, spoke of how Temple Bar, ‘front loaded’ its new galleries, restaurants and other ‘Land Uses’, with re-definition of the public space. I mean, this synergy between service industry type ‘intensity of usage’, and a huge space like O’Connell Street may also congeal together in the near future. Even in Cinema design, you don’t go through a logical A, B, C, D, route anymore, but rather you can spend a hour in the bar, or just wandering around aimlessly if you want. Funny how commerce, picks up on these tendancies of crowds, a while before urban planners often do. I was watching Team Amercia: World Police, at UCG in Parnell Street recently, definitely a movie for over 18s, if ever there was one. But something really highlighted for me, the absolute relaxation of crowd control. Right in the middle of that said movie, two young male kids of approx. 12 years of age each, walked straight in, calm as a cucumber, holding shakes and pop corn, and just sat down! So I guess the mingling principle isn’t entirely appropriate in every circumstances. I dunno, I did not feel comfortable sharing an over-18s movie showing with two 12 year olds, but noone in the cinema attempted to do anything about it. Am I being old fashioned?
I dunno, while I applaude the opening up of city centre locations etc, etc, with public space, I feel there is a strong underlying commercial impulse behind it, which often ends up exploiting the youngest and most vunerable segments of our populations. The Commercial industries on the other hand, know this well, and are deadly is targeting the kids, upon whom more and more spare wealth is being lavished. Whether it be, 100 Euro Sneakers, or over-18’s movies, for 12 year olds. I mean, were those backgardens in Surburbia really that awful for kids, or were they just more boring?
Brian O’ Hanlon.
To give you all some idea, where my comments were actually coming from, I put this much together. I have volunteered my services from time to time, to help out with quite a bit of technological scribbling, so getting to grips with a little bit of Enviro-Techno speak, here at Archiseek, is just a slightly different flavour of this. At a stage in the future, when I have developed a serious point of view, on Environmental Architecture, I may be just prompted to structure something more comprehensive on the topic. But presently, it is more to do with a hobby, than anything else.
System-ness, is a huge topic of debate in technological circles presently, because, who is going to do it? Who is going to drive it? Certainly not the Russians. With the Asian’s at the end of their ‘technological development’ golden era, with Europe in decline in the area of scientific and technological development for decades, and with the United States kind of struggling desperately, agains the cost of doing anything ‘white-collar’ at all, on its soil, I would suspect, that someplace like India while be a superpower in the coming decades. 🙂 Dunno, maybe Kenya or someplace too, if they got their hands on some heavily discounted PCs and some bandwidth. Basically, systems as we know them today are radically different from what they were even 10 years ago. They have become especially complex, and hard to achieve, except for the best, biggest and most well organised corporations – the MicroSofts etc. There is really not all that much competition anymore, at the ‘seriously large and tricky’ end of the project spectrum. The evolution of Project Management in all fields of technological contracting, has meant that projects are ‘defined’ from the outset,.. which has the unfortunate consequence, that very few people, are looking at things from end to end anymore at all. I think, you just need this ‘end-to-end’ perspective, to look at any large inter-dependent system-ness problems, the likes of which are often found in architecture. I like Jeff Bezos’s comment, the founder and still current CEO of Amazon.com, who believes, if you cannot feed a ‘team’ with two pizzas, then that team is too big. Amazon, realised early that it didn’t have any huge single advantage over its competitors, so it decided to distribute lots of ‘small teams’ amongst lots and lots of small projects, to innovate and improve its technologies. Amazon, in turn, licenses a lot of the technology it develops, to other smaller web developers, who would not have the resources to develop as such themselves, but find very clever ways to employ Amazon’s cool features for their own needs. In other words Amazon, Google, Yahoo etc, are getting more and more into the fields of research and development, which is some positive outcome, post dot.com.
What is the point of my tour of global scientific research? Well this,… expect in the future, more and more of the systems embedded in buildings especially, to become part of the Internet in future. Even light bulbs in future, will alert the Electrical contractor, before they blow, and send a schematic telling the technician where exactly in the building to find the bulb that is ‘about’ to blow. In future, you will probably call a programmer instead of a plummer, to fix a leak! 🙂 Bandwidth is in oversupply, storage, computational resources are all way over supplied,… but the punitive information that systems embedded in our buildings, currently send back to base, is like is was back in the middle of the last century. And even much of that punitive amount of information, currently floating around, through the fibers embedded in a building, is discarded by the systems reading that information. I know it may sound a little bit like ‘Minority Report’, but, I am wishing there was more serious review of the designs of these large centers, into how they function from a ‘System-ness’ point of view. Environmental is just an aspect of this larger holistic system-ness view of a large built complex. I did a medium-sized summary of the Dubai Conference Centre here:
https://archiseek.com/content/showthread.php?t=3516
Enjoy, garethace.
