garethace
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Nine squares was a project on their web site ages ago, must have re-organised the website again – I guess you cannot show every single project. Blackhall Place would be another open space of course.
But this is the problem as I see it, to build up an understanding of the city takes a long time and a lot of looking at the problem. There is no client sitting across a table from you, directing you what to do, nothing to react to – it is just you and an environment. Because a larger part of the architect’s earnings would derive from single clients, who give you a large enough budget to build something. That sort of wraps back I think, into the education process – with some architects giving the bias, of looking for single clients, and buildings with nice budgets, to do nice finishes and details.
It is very hard to break away from that and look at problems on the scale of cities – especially, right now, for a lot of architects – because there is so much incentive to chase the AAI award, and the client who will provide you with an opportunity to design a great once-off building. I guess, that is where Frank McDonald’s forte lies. At least, through years of investment of his time and energy, the man has managed to grasp something of the dynamics and scale of money, decision-making and politics at the level of the ‘entire’ environment. That is an achievement in itself, and something that few architects manage to do in a lifetime. It is unfortunate, that non-architects like Frank McDonald seem to reach that level of understanding and the architect trails so far behind in terms of perception. From that point of view, there is a lot of merit in somebody like Frank being part of an architectural school, in the hope that some of his focus may ‘rub off’.
Unfortunately, architecture is like a company that says, rather than diversify our product range, we are going to produce this one product in exclusion. In fact, Architects have developed one product so well, that no one can beat them. I wonder though, was this victory false, is the environment worse for it? Was the superiority achieved at too great an expense and needless waste of potential talent along the way? I have always enjoyed the urban scale view of things – but when trying to present a project in this way to a tutor in architectural school in Ireland – I felt I wasn’t getting across to them. It somehow did not fit into their mind-frame, of this neat ‘client-architect’ building relationship – with the nice details, and quirky use of steel and glass. When you get to the ‘intangibles’ of urban environments, and try to show them in diagrammatic or model format to an architect, the impact is often lost on them. It is like, because we haven’t discovered this yet, neither will you.
I always wonder about this when attending the architectural awards ceremony. The absence of awards or presentation of investigative work, to do with the broader environment. Most of it has been so ‘text-based’, as in Frank McDonald’s work, or that of Rem Koolhaas, or even our own AAI Building Material publications. The text-based urbanistic focus of the Building Material magazine, plays a second fiddle to the glossy diagrammatic pages of the AAI awards book. I am not sure really, there is anyone in the architectural community – or any rewards-based system, for that matter, to counter-balance, the colossal ‘im-balance’ the AAI awards process seems to have put on the profession here in Ireland.
I mean, you have only to look at the entries to the AAI awards – and there is really no ‘experimental or investigative’ work going on, to do with peoples’ observations about public spaces and places – it seems to have vanished from the radar, lost in a plethora of ‘cool’ looking jewel objects, that are tailor-made for awards selection. It requires a lot of disipline, on an individuals part not to be seduced by the jewels, and actually move ones’ focus towards the larger issues and the public realm. This seemed rather important to Thom Mayne in his talk the other night. I guess the urban problem requires a different kind of thinking to that in designing a good building – Mayne reckons a lot of problems architects will have to deal with in the future will be urban design problems.
The effect of the AAI awards process has been bad. Even if you just want to do some research, there is a massive stumbling block in the way – because, other people will say, ‘Look at that fellow, must be trying to pull out some new concept to win an award!’ So investigative people, people with inquiry in their soul, get a difficult time from their piers. The AAI awards process has been a rotten thing, the public look up to architects to become the leaders for the environment – when you see this mass-self-promotion through the glossy brochure, it doesn’t send out the right message. I always give the Daniel Goleman links below to people I know. I would reckon, the architect studies everything except for one important, crucial thing: leadership.
Daniel Goleman, author of emotional intelligence and Primal Leadership, where he introduces the ‘six styles of leadership’,….
http://www.pfdf.org/leaderbooks/l2l/summer2002/goleman.html
Nice matrix arrangement of things here:
http://www.12manage.com/methods_goleman_leadership_styles.html
Another bit on Goleman:
http://www.businesslistening.com/primal-leadership.php
Six Thinking Hats by Edward De Bono is another book I think, helps to look at the crucial skills needed, for architecture as negotiation, when dealing with the urban design problem. What I am saying really, is the kind of thinking required for single buildings and urban design is different.
Brian O’ Hanlon.
Somehow, the nuts and bolts of the architectural and spatial training – were contained within this very tight, exclusive and high-end profession or institute. What has happened really, is that engineers and planners, people with a very ‘text-based’ kind of instinct have graduated into all of the important public service positions. The process been accelerated by the rise of information technology – the capability of local authorities now to churn out high quality text-based publications and reports. Which provide the platform and ‘illustration’ in words normally, of their ideas about the environment. A lot of these very half baked ideas, then become written into the legislation and the environment you witness every day of the week.
This is contrasted with architecture, with its tiny band of dwarfs, pretending to mount some opposition, which was never really there, except in myth. So the debate on all environmental matters nowadays, doesn’t even enjoy the input from individuals, who retain some sense of spatial awareness. There is a Charles Darwin, kind of evolutionary, survival of the fittest logic that should be applied to the construction related professions. Call it a ‘free market’ approach, or something similar – rather than pretend each profession is ‘protected’ by its own institution. They are actually in competition. Then you can begin making useful observations, and come up with useful suggestions.
Things like spatial awareness were never fully incubated and developed into sucessful business models, by our architectural profession, which for a long day, stayed just too miserable and small. You have people nowadays making the decisions who understand ‘hard’ things, but not the softer things that knit it all together – the muscle and tissue so to speak. The walk through those public spaces I refer to was a lesson in soft-ness, that manages to knit an urban environment together. The trouble is though, the people who are concerned about money rather than ‘value’ have graduated into all of the key positions – and what you are seeing, is some very intelligent people like such, seeing the world as all hard, un-budging elements, like budgets, regulations, standards, legislation, guidelines, rules, timelines and deadlines.
The side of the brain, which is needed to understand the softer elements, is ‘catered for’, in some small print, or additional image/documentation, that goes with the 100 page report, and relegates the soft issues to a background rather than a middleground or foreground role. By the way, I have studied in some detail myself, the occurance of similar ‘splits’ of opinion between hard and soft-types of personnel working in large technology companies or projects down through the years. It is just an interesting comparison, to that same split now occuring in the built environmental professions. As Thom Mayne iterated at last nights talk at the National Concert Hall, ‘Architecture in the public realm, is negotiation’.
The city needs those able negotiators from both the hard and the soft sides of the debate – in order to have a debate in the first place – at the present, we don’t have both sides, largely due to the inability of the architectural profession to assert itself forcefully within the public realm. It often appears, their ‘kind of language’ only extends as far as the private end of things, where you can sit across a table from ‘a client’ and not much further. Architects particularly at the moment, with individual people in Ireland commanding large sum of cash, leveraged nine times by borrowing, seem to be smitten by the idea of knowing the individuals, and doing nice, but ‘small’ works.
Brian O’ Hanlon.
Links:
Architectural and many creative professions lack a sustainable business model. Understanding that weakness is a first step towards improvement:
https://archiseek.com/content/showthread.php?t=4479&page=3Carlisle Pier attempt at knitting together a social fabric:
https://archiseek.com/content/showthread.php?t=2744&The hardware and the software:
https://archiseek.com/content/showthread.php?t=4308&Yeah, imagine if pubs in Ireland were only allowed to sell Bud in a can or something equivalent, to the excuse for music on radios. Because that is basically all that local and often nationwide broadcasting companies are trying to do – sell everyone Bud in a can, and make you like it. Burp! Broadcasting centres display an even greater lack of creativity than the music stores do. The government issued broadcasting rights to the stations – and how the stations make things solvent, is really, just a matter of find the cheapest and most cynical way to exploit the mass audience. I am afraid, in the broadcasting industry it is all about cynical marketing decisions – and whatever music earns the most – that is what will be played. It has nothing to do with the quality of the music, it is just some ‘business person’ in an office, who probably doesn’t enjoy music at all – or has terrible tastes, dictating what ‘is best’ for the radio station in terms of pounds, shillings and pence. If you have Real Player, you should be able to stream this lecture given by Yochai Benkler at the Duke School of Law in North Carolina. Freedom in the Commons, or a Political Economy of Information.
http://realmedia.oit.duke.edu/ramgen/law/frey/benkler.rm
Couple of more links:
http://www.law.duke.edu/webcast/
http://www.law.duke.edu/pd/realcast.htm
http://www.law.duke.edu/pd/mpegcast.htmlHere is Benkler’s key paper: Coase’s Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm.
http://www.yale.edu/yalelj/112/BenklerWEB.pdf
Non-market production of information, and radically decentralised production of information. Basically, because bandwidth is now available to individuals – and the individuals themselves own a substantial part of the network infrastructure – namely your means of capturing the information in digital format and putting on the network via you mobile or PC – people themselves are now starting to behave in ‘Smart Mob’ fashion as Howard Rheingold described it – people themselves are starting to become broadcasting facilties. Rather than all the ‘capital’ being concentrated in one single massive block called the Radio or TV station, owned/controlled by investors and vested interested – the network and capital associated with the infrastructure of the network, is widely dispersed amongst individuals. Even something like a university owns a large part of its network, in terms of the critical hubs, switches, bandwidth and responsibility for its content. Heck, even something like Google and Yahoo, started off on a university campus network. Google consumed half of the total bandwidth available at Berkeley University campus in California, before becoming an actual company it was owned and run by students, who managed to beg, borrow and steal the hardware required to get it running. That is a U-Turn from the twentieth century notion of the high cost of being a public speaker – you had to be a capitalist and own a broadcasting facility or newspaper. Like our own De Valera, who sold bogus shares in the United States to try and set up his own newspaper here in Ireland – it worked for him too, in typical 20th century fashion. Namely, the Fordism model applied to the production of units of cultural exchange.
Brian O’ Hanlon.
Guess I may as well tie on the essential Archiseek shopping centre thread here:
https://archiseek.com/content/showthread.php?t=3703&
Anyhow, every stage of the process of buying music in a music store is all wrong. Take the beer industry as a comparison. The classic example of all, of ‘sampling at the sourse’, has to be that irish expression: ‘Ah, sure I’ll go for one’. Which is usually followed by ‘Ah have another one’, and eventually ends up with ‘Sure have one for the road’. Imagine how sucessful the beer industry would be, if it tried to sell you something wrapped in shrink-wrap plastic, which you had to ‘take away’ from the store premises in order to consume. Instead of selling you ‘shrink-wrapped’ cans of beer though, the beer industry provides the customer with a reptacle from which to ‘sample’ the product – namely, a pint glass.
The distribution channels for the selling of beer are also well developed. The beer product has found its way into every village and hamlet in Ireland. The ‘last mile’ of delivery of the beer product, to the lips of consumer being carefully taken care of by a dedicated bar keeper. The coffee industry in Ireland has also learned the value of distribution channels recently too. Before, you just bought coffee in a jar, on special offer at the supermarket – but nowadays you can ‘get’ your coffee in many more ways than before. Basically, other industries have shown intelligence and business acumen, whereas the music industry has shown itself to be dumb and primitive by comparison.
Brian O’ Hanlon.
Look, any of these industries that always had it easy on the highstreet, were sucessful because of ‘sampling at the source’. Which basically means, you walk into a bookstore and pick up a book and thumb through it, and say, wow! I need this reference on my bookshelf. Or you walk into a clothes shop, try on something and end up buying it. The movie industry has a very ‘advanced’ distibution channel – you can pick up movies on supermarket shelves, in rental stores, on your TV set, in the cinema, subscription movie channels and so on. In other words, the movie industry is encouraging you to try out samples. Eventually you end up buying a DVD, because you like the movie so much, having perhaps seen it already in a cinema, on TV and on rental. Music at the moment suffers, because it doesn’t have a great distribution network set up, nor does it have any effective ‘sampling at the source’.
You walk into a music store, and for as long as I can recall, you might hear some great track on the speaker system in the store, but there was never any billboard, or display screen that tells the ‘musically-un-sophisticated’ (potential) customer,… what the heck is play’in. How hard can it be, to organise that nowadays? Yet stores have half a dozen store managers, loads of staff underlings, a premises on highstreet, and a pile spent on store fit-out and stocking the shelves, but never manage to tell you what is playing on their speaker sound system. Huh??? I often queue in a line, just to ask the sales desk at Golden Disc what the heck is that playing. Right there is an opportunity for ‘sampling at the source’ within the music store itself and they have squandered it. Who knows, perhaps a parent and kid are in the store together, and the kid says ‘mum, I like whats playing’. If the display in the store, visibily showed a playlist, then the parent could take note of the artist and buy something like that, for their kid’s birthday or xmas gift. Look at the stores that sell the XBOX and playstation – they make damb sure there are a couple of kids playing the latest and greatest release of game. The also make damb sure to advertise via cardboard cut-out or some means, what that game is – more for the parents, rather than the kids I would imagine. I mean, look at cinema – they use billboards showing you the line-up of what is on at the moment – often visible from a motorway or major road junction! The cinemas that are smart constantly show the trailers in the foyer space too.
But the music store expects you just to fork out 20.00 Euro because the CD cover looks cool. I mean, even if you take the CD cover as your major selling point, the CD boxes, should be closer to eye level, when you are looking through them – instead of buried someplace around your crotch, so that if you have repetitive strain injury or back problems – then going to HMV or Golden Discs and doing this kind strain your spine backways to try and look at the bottom row of CD boxes,… once you do that for more than 5 minutes, you have had enough. Yet every music store out there follows the exact same formula – with these almost useless display systems – from the human ergonomic point of view. The second you are down into this awkward leaning-backward with focused gaze on the row of CD covers, someone wants to ‘get by’ you, the customer circulation aisles being so narrow, and you have to return to upright position again. So a visit to a music store, becomes like a painful torture gym class. No fun I say, no fun whatsoever, unless you are a quite flexible teenager, in which case have no money to spend anyhow. If you are sitting at a PC, the music samples and cover design all come to you, whilst you are sitting down in one place. If a music store was a workplace – it would have serious health and safety issues for people with back problems. But this is meant to be a store, where they expect you to ‘spend’ instead. You would imagine stores would bend over backways to make it more comfortable for their customer. ? ? ?
Why can’t people go into music store, jack in their iPod and start doing their thing? Pretty soon it will be at the stage where wireless internet connectivity will have enough bandwidth to enable decent download speeds. Then I can just sip coffee in a wifi zone, whilst my laptop batch downloads the latest album I want, and burns the CD for me there and then – no music store, no queue. Like as if computer terminals weren’t cheap, and internet bandwidth wasn’t available – but you never see internet terminals that you could ‘jack into’ at music stores – I would more than willingly bring my own set of headphones or iPod set and jack right into some good fast bandwidth, and begin to buy music. Alternatively, if you wish to sell CDROMs, have it like an Argos routine, where you pressed a button and went to the check-out in your turn to get the CDROM itself. Cut down on all this needless floor staff, walking around arranging CD covers all day long. At xmas time, this was most apparent, with queues of shoppers out the doors in all music stores on the highstreets in Dublin – but at the top of the queue, you might have two people serving who cannot even work the till properly – or else, the till itself doesn’t work properly. Another way to look at music retail on highstreet, would be to do the suse bar idea of a conveyor belt – allow people to sit down together and get relaxed and choose music as it went around a conveyor belt or something.
So which ever way you try and slice or dice it, the music stores deserve everything they get – because frankly, they think like they are back in the dark ages. I have scant sympathy for music stores, they knew as well as anyone else how cheap digital storage was becoming, and how accessible bandwidth was to the market. You only have to put two and two together. But even with that, downloading can only take a very small slice of the market anyway. Anyone who has gone through the hassle of downloading will know, that it can be grief – it can be time consuming, and for anyone except the thorough music lover – downloading is not the answer. You need to set up a whole lot of things, and get them working together for the process of downloading music to work – and even then, the process is far from flawless. So downloading per se, is not stealing any great customer base – that’s bullshit. All downloading is doing, is providing certain customers who need something more than the stores could offer. And if the stores got their shit together, they might even win back some of those downloaders too. Because after you have downloaded your 1000th song, the appeal has kinda worn off, and you would like to be able to just walk into a store and buy the CD for a change. With the rise in popularity of the service industry, with coffee shops etc, etc, and given their city centre locations – I often wonder, if an opportunity exists to do a hybrid of service industry and music industry. Dunno. In the same way, that Cinemas offer you the movie cheaply and then make up most of their profit from selling the higher margin drinks and popcorn.
Steve Jobs kinda ties down a lot of issues here I feel:
Brian O’ Hanlon.
Simulation is a technique where you provide very simple rules of bevahiour of individual “actors” in a system and then programatically fill an environment with instances of these acotrs. Often complex behaviour will emerge and become apparent even though the rules of the individuals are almost trivial. An example is the flocking behaviour of birds (and fish); this looks quite complicated and the “reaction” of the flock to intruders for example looks as if the entire flock is operating under a single “intelligence”. In actual fact such behaviour can be simulated easily by endowing each individual with extremely simple rules.
On that, for a real laugh, check out this early 2003 scribbling of mine here:
Virtually Simulated Battle for Middle Earth.
http://www.aceshardware.com/forums/read_post.jsp?id=80066252&forumid=1
Yeah, LOTRs was all the rage back then.
Brian O’ Hanlon.
I don’t know why this thread was named ‘Habitat College Green’.
For me, the replacement of the Suffolk Street facade on the rear of the site, has been one of the most interesting aspects of this project. I have taken a while to think about this Suffolk Street facade, and I guess it was needed. The old steel stanchion four storey Mies van der Rohe imitation was never going to hack it, as far as retail space was concerned. The new facade on Suffolk Street appears to have been a very good investment for the whole project. I think, the glass gap between Ulster Bank and Habitat works too, as a way to kind of link those two facades up together. Interesting project I must say, as I begin to observe it in use at weekends, evenings etc, etc.
Of course, keeping the Suffolk Street to College Green pedestrian route is worthy of praise too.
Brian O’ Hanlon.
Yeah, thanks for that correction Rory. One of the useful aspects of the distributed forum format in my mind, is its ability to quickly snuff out those little errors. Thanks.
Even though times are good, I am concerned about the kind of business model employed by young architects. The ’boutique’ firm can specialise in doing cool insertions into the built environment. I like jewel structures as much as the next guy. I have my doubts about building jewels, as a good business model for the profession of architecture. Architects are delighted when their buildings are published in magazines, in all their shimering photographic glory. But the jewel, is an over-specialisation on the part of architects. They have put themselves in a vulnerable position. Who are the first people always hit by the recession? You’ve guessed it, the Architects. Between the building boom periods the architectural profession suffers because of over-specialisation. Boutique firms hit the wall, and have no alternative skillset to support them. Since most of the architectural profession is organised squarely around the boutique, it is unstable at best and often volatile. The university professor’s seat is the only refuge for many in the lean periods. When the boom re-appears architects waste most of their valuable time re-building up to strength. That is a costly process and normally involves the importation of talent from abroad.
You see a plethora of small architectural ’boutiques’ now appearing on the scene. They can rent the same kind of business premise you would find an internet cafe housed in. Normally some street tucked away, off of the high street. These youngsters are undoubtedly keen to try and harvest some of the wealth available. But the boutique has not got the size or the sophistication to mine the wealth and opportunities in the building industry effectively. Architects fall back upon the design ‘jewel structure’ and make a statement about ‘purity, light and form’, usually in some glossy magazine double-page spread. The Jewel provides a very necessary escape clause from reality. The jewel of sufficient pedigree, like the Glucksman Art Gallery, stands for everything that mainstream building design doesn’t. The whole negative psychology of the ‘jewel building’ is interwoven into the fabric of the architectural profession. The royal institute and the architectural awards process underpins it. You cannot expect payment in real money, except for loose change to buy a Porsche. You are paid in terms of ‘fellow-peer-recognition’ instead.
The local authorities have the size of money-hoover required to suck up the payments for services and consultancy. Local authorities seem to extract money out of every nook and cranny. Finding opportunities for gain, where architects could only dream. If architecture is to become a serious contender in the game, you need the right kind of management. In short, you need more business brain power. In parts of the world, the building contractor is sophisticated enough to become the designer and complete a whole project. I believe architects should become involved in the mogrel work out there and move into the local authorities space. Really wrestle for it. It could afford architecture a more sustainable business model than building ‘jewels’. You need to grow and build your strength over the lean years aswell. The local authority has a killer business model compared with architecture. The local authority grew and expanded in size and sophistication throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Now they have the design teams, the expertise, suitably large offices and a virtual monopoly.
Brian O’ Hanlon.
Thanks for pics Brian it appears Starbucks did a very tasteful job
Not really, the main reason I posted up the thread at all, was to make a very straightforward point.
This simple insertion of a cafe use into an existing structure highlights a lot of limitations in the way Architects approach their work. Unless the building is a ‘design jewel’ then it is not considered worthy of the awards process. That warps how architects view the world. This particular process of indoctrination begins in the architectural school and cripples potential. In the workplace, architects are consumed for a large part of their time, trying to make buildings with a bad concept, look ‘beautiful’. It is crucial to realise the built environment is made up of different stock. The most pleasing mix results from having ‘okay’ design from different eras, in close proximity to one another. My favourite places are places where you see buildings done at different periods – rather than all of the same pedigree. That is the trouble with a lot of ‘new areas’ now in Dublin. They look cool for 12 months and then you get jaded with them.
The architectural awards remind me of the way dogs are judged in a dog show by their pedigree. The architects remind me of people who comb the dogs and feed them special meals and vitamins to make their skins shine. The dog has to peak for the dog-show, and after that will probably go into a decline and be forgotten about. It gives the attitude like, ‘stone cladding is so last year. Its all about timber now.’ A mongrel such as Starbucks cafe doesn’t qualify for the competition. It’s coat will probably never shine brightly enough to be considered for Krups. I think their should be a ‘mongrel’ architectural awards process to complement the pedigree architectural awards. In the real world, not every job can attain ‘best-of-breed’ status. That is a huge element of denial that has managed to built itself right into the core of what motivates a lot of good architects: to get mentioned in the awards ceremony. Unfortunately, it goes right as far back as the educational process opted for in the schools, where one student in particular is appointed as ‘the chosen one’. There really badly needs to be a counter-revolution to all of this imbalance, which the AAI organisation managed itself to exascerbate. It was undertaken with the best of intentions certainly, but it has back-fired.
Brian O’ Hanlon.
Bits of a nice piece in Irish Times article, last April by Sheila O’Flanagan.
The man and I decided to do the retail experience last weekend. [break] So we made the trip out to Dundrum Town Centre (which, of course, is not actually the town centre at all but just the much vaunted shopping centre) on the basis that this was where the retail pulse now existed and it should be able to fulfil all our shopping needs. We did it by public transport, choosing bus and Luas to get us there. At the Luas station we had the option of buying an integrated bus and Luas ticket but the bus driver could only sell us a single bus ticket. I know the integrated ticket thing is supposed to happen soon but why can the Luas do it already and not the bus?
After the bus and Luas trip, the man and I were falling apart with hunger and so we checked out the eating emporia. Unfortunately – because there are plenty of food outlets – we chose the one where they were making sandwiches to order and the time from queuing to receiving was 25 minutes. [break] The 160 cm fitted sheets were as elusive at Dundrum as they’ve been everywhere else in the city and so we backtracked to St Stephen’s Green, called into a few more shops in a somewhat haphazard and very uninspired way (I bought shoes though – somehow I always end up buying shoes) and then completed our global experience by nipping in to Salamander in Andrew Street for a bottle of red wine and some almost authentic tapas. The 123 (without a doubt one of the best bus services in Ireland) back to Marino got us within striking distance of home and then we collapsed in front of the telly.
Looks to me like a decent enough thread to add into the planning section of the forum Paul. What do you think? Would any of the posters mind, any opinions? Might be nice to get a couple of transportation threads rubbing together in a sub-area of the Irish planning section. Any merit in an idea like that? I mean, since getting around by whatever means of transport, seems to be a sore point for many people now. And heck, we live in one of the most expensive places on the planet – which normally means you get something above the average for your money – except in our case that is. I can already see the Irish planning section, beginning to lose a sense of its own identity. It would be a good idea, in my personal opinion to tie it up better right now, from the point of view of its own future development. A Transport section, a conservation section, a sustainable design section – couple of sub-headings like that may not go amiss – and serve to keep a few good threads, taking different ways to look at the same thing – together, and make a kind of synergy between different ways to look at some things. Like transport for instance.
Just a thought.
Also, as it is the new year I decided to bring this up: A lot of people who find themselves in Irish media at the moment, seem to have appointed themselves as ‘experts’ on the built environment. I am thinking in particular of a few people from the RIAI side, and while they add a lot to the debate. They also make some quite outlandish claims on behalf of every Irish person that ever lived. Like, one in particular that struck me as taking too many priveleges: “The Irish were spoiled by poverty”. I mean, it is a very convenient re-writing of history for a certain group of individuals who are big and powerful within the RIAI. They talk about the Christian brothers ‘writing the history’, but Architecture isn’t far behind the clerical figure heads, in recent times. When you listen to them in the media.
Brian O’ Hanlon.
Simulation is used extensively for traffic engineering but traffic can be modelled easily with simple behaviour models for vehicles. Pedestrians obviously (to me anyway) have far more complex individual behaviours so the problem would be far more difficult. However I did some cursory googling and it doesn’t seem that anyone attempting to do this; the best I found was some fire safety research done using simulation to model how long it would take for people to escape a building. However, I’d be more interested in pedestrians in an urban environment – interacting with shops, roads, each other obviously, transport modes, parks, footpaths and other significant features and whether such modeling could be used to predict the effects of altering the environment on how crowds behave. It’s something I might try to explore if I get some time.
While cleaning up a hard drive today, I came across some old research I did myself on the Net about this a couple of years back. You may or may not find something useful there. Site and organisation written down below.
Brian O’ Hanlon.
The Paper I read was:
Agent Based Pedestrian Modelling, Paper No. 61.
by Michael Batty.http://www.casa.ucl.ac.uk/working_papers/
Casa,
Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis,
Unversity College London,
1-19 Torrington Place
Gower Street
London WC1E 6BTit’s a useful place to keep up with developments, learn from more experienced players, express opinions on subjects about which I’m knowledgeable and maybe even have an impact on current thought and debate.
What goes on at this discussion forum, or any other, is not particularly interesting. The discussion threads here do not cover a fraction of the whole landscape of thought. In fact, they are quiet poor places to expose yourself to the different theories. A discussion forum is an artificial and opinionated information environment. That is without getting into the shortcomings, of not meeting people face to face and having to interact socially. What a discussion forum does serve to do, is allow people who wish to understand the dynamics of discussion, a chance to explore that. Throughout the twentieth century, we had commercially produced information beamed into our livingrooms. People short on discursive abilities, were air-brushed out of the picture.
With the foot soldier’s diary approach, the passive recipient begins to read, and listen to someone else’s voice. In so doing, begins to realise their own voice and contributions may have some value. Other than being mis-used to get into dead-end argumentative situations with their peers. The whole twentieth century information environment, taught people to undervalue their own voice. To want to pay others to produce an acceptable finished product – you could listen to or view. The biggest challenge facing the family unit, is for a few people of different ages to sit together for half an hour. That is currently too much to ask for some families. The content of the discussion is not important – the mere idea of discussion as a medium, itself, is very important to counteract the mis-learning of the twentieth century. What you encounter in architectural schools, is tutors with poor or even disfunctional communication skills themselves, trying to teach kids, through the medium of verbal abuse! It only serves to make the efforts by those kids to mature into something harder rather than easier.
Brian O’ Hanlon.
Crap.
You should realise that we are experiencing a unique time in Ireland, from the points of view of ALL people involved in planning, construction and design. I am not going to even try to justify what I write – that is not the point. The only point is to capture something in real time, and allow the folks in time in the future, to figure out, what is important about this time we are living in right now. There is just no substitute for a real time, individual account, on the ground, as it were.
Like you can read the diary of some fellow who died in the Somme years ago, and from those brief few scribbles, much later on, an historian can extract some key points from that. It is important to capture something of these unique times here in Ireland – they will not last – but vanish as quickly as they came about. I write from the point of view of the foot soldier, the guy standing in the trench as things all played out. There are other methods of capture, of history and time, like 25 years of architectural awards for instance. But I am trying to capture things in a different kind of way. Our dumb conversation and ping-pong argument, may prove an important anecdote in years to come, you never know.
Brian O’ Hanlon.
It is not easy being a planner. The country is full of bright, attractive young architects from around the world. Each one has an ego larger than the size of Belturbet. Their ideas and ways to ‘improve’ the environment are revolutionary. Be it sustainability, higher density, public transport or cool once-off housing. Some ideas come out of magazines, and are recycled back into planning submissions. The architects wish to make Ireland into a laboratory for building cool stuff out of magazines! Look! They have realistic visualisations too!
What is happening to this country? Planners feel they are on the wrong side of the fence. They are selling innovation at a point when the market buys creativity. Planners who would have sat quietly in their cubicles doing traffic studies, are suddenly emboldened. Planners wish to ‘approve’ 3D Visuals and call themselves ‘urban placemakers’. 3D visualisation allows a planner this augmented view into the designer’s mind. The designer’s imagination is transcribed into digital information and printed onto glossy paper. I think it is a cheap and nasty approximation.
https://archiseek.com/content/showthread.php?t=4237&highlight=innovation
Brian O’ Hanlon.
Pics I promised. I would just like to remind people, this corner or space, used always by the taxi drivers, ‘never even existed’ until lately, as far as most people who inhabit the city were concerned. That is some transformation to make, from nothing to something, just like that. Architects, always talk about leaving the site, ‘in better condition’ than what they found it in. I think, that has been achieved here, and also the possibility of other things are even suggested, just by this intervention. It probably will not receive an award, since it doesn’t come with any poetic description, trying to tell you how philosophic and deep it is – but heh, you can’t have everything.
Brian O’ Hanlon.
