Nestled among the skyscrapers downtown is an attractive corner office decorated in the minimalist style. A sign announces that it is the offices of “SMED International” though what business SMED might be involved in is not immediately apparent. The receptionist is very polite, though she insists that she is unable to answer any questions unless you have an appointment.
In Alain de Botton’s The Architecture of Happiness, there is a passage where he considers the apparent failure of architecture as a device for making us better people.
Not only do beautiful houses falter as guarantors of happiness, they can also be accused of failing to improve the characters of those who live in them.
…
Medieval devotional paintings may try to remind us of sadness and sin, they may seek to train us away from arrogance and worldly pursuits and render us properly humble before the mysteries and hardships of life, but they will hang in a living room without active protest while butlers circulate the fingerfood and butchers plot their next move.
Alain de Botton – The Significance of Architecture (from The Architecture of Happiness)
If buildings haven’t been able to protest in the past, it’s because we haven’t built them for it. They didn’t have the eyes and ears to notice, nor the power to do something about it. That’s beginning to change.
Witness the new power-use visualization devices, perfect accessories to your environmental devotional, and a means to give mute buildings a voice and opinion about your ecological footprint. This is going mainstream. There is stimulus money. Google is getting involved. Machines to raise your consciousness, machines to make you feel shame.
The Internet of Things expands. More devices are equipped with sensors and they can talk to each other about you. They notice that you spend too much time in front of the television. They wonder why you haven’t been on the exercise bike in days. They gauge the volume of your voice, the pheromones in the air, the sharpness of your movements, and know that you’ve been fighting a lot.
What to do with all of this information? Upload it to Daytum. Analyze it in iGoogle. Tweet about it.
A businessman programs in his New Years resolution. As he falls short of his best intentions, the house begins diverting power from the television, cutting it off completely for days at a time. Only miles on the exercise bike will restore the flow of entertainment.
A study links the colouring and lighting of rooms to the moods of the people therein. The methodology is weak and the conclusions disputed. It’s enough to sell books and spike sales in colour-shift walls. Thousands of complex algorithms are marketed, promising to cross reference sensor data with the latest pseudo-science. Fire-engine red for energy, passion, and late night deadlines. Sea blue to calm arguments and children. Alternating goldenrod and pearl for concentration and intelligence. A software patched is released in order to address reported strobing events which could occur under certain conditions “in a small number of cases”.
After the death of a child on a stretcher in a hallway, a special committee is convened. Battles erupt about patient confidentiality and data security. The Opposition makes headway in the poles by demanding the release of full waiting-room positional data. All new hospitals will have timers projected on to the walls above waiting visitors, counting up.
A small religious community commissions a planned community of morality houses. They are secretive and little is known about their practices. When reports do emerge, there are sensational headlines for weeks.
After the fourth shooting – the result of a toxic mix of firearms, frayed nerves, smart homes, and late night electronic intrusions – the Attorney General announces a crackdown on haunters, while urging new standards of encryption and security. “No one should be afraid in their own home.”
The appeals process in the first gunman’s case drags on.
When he was still running the Viridian Movement, Bruce Sterling introduced the idea of involuntary parks. Spaces in the world that have become so polluted or otherwise unusable by humans, that they’ve been left to nature (or, at least, savagery).
Involuntary Parks are very Viridian. They are not representatives of untouched nature, but of *vengeful* nature, of natural processes reasserting themselves in areas of political and technological collapse.
Bruce Sterling, Viridian Note 00023.
This is an idea that’s worth revisiting, I think.
Beginning with a canonical one: the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea is a 250km x 4km sea of mines, barbed wire and rare animals. It’s been left more or less untouched for over 50 years.
photo credit: US Army Korea – IMCOM
Bonus knowledge: Kijong-Dong is one of two villages still inside the DMZ. It’s on the North Korean-side, full of bright white and blue buildings which officially house a 200-family collective farm along with the world’s tallest flag pole. The buildings are empty shells, without interiors or even windows. It is suspected that a skeleton staff mans the village, keeping it clean and creating the illusion of activity.
Second canonical involuntary park: Chernobyl. Abandoned after the meltdown in 1986, Chernobyl’s creatures have had a little less time to reclaim, but they seem to be doing fine (despite a little extra mutation).
Bonus knowledge: If current demographic and migration trends hold, a lot more of Russia will be abandoned to savagery, due to the massive depopulation of the country.
A chance to see an involuntary park’s creation? Seaweed is growing so quickly on the beaches of Brittany in France, that it’s turning into toxic chemical minefields. People – including a civic employee paid to clean up the mess – are being put into comas.
Bonus Knowledge: Brittany (a.k.a. Aremorica) is where Asterix and Obelix are from. One of my favourite stories involves Caesar trying to finally assimilate/evict the village with a redevelopment project. It was an attempt to raze the swath of forest created by a ring of containment garrisons and Rome’s inability to put down the villager’s resistance.
It’s a coal mine that started burning in 1961. It’s predicted to last another 250 years. This is where things get interesting.
The Viridian idea of involuntary parks is these savage nature sanctuaries. Environmental or political ruin-zones where humans fear to tread. But just as there’s a wide variety of usage scenarios in designated parks, there’s a sliding scale of inhospitability.
Centralia’s evacuation was gradual. Congress didn’t even start funding the relocation of residents until 1984. People moved out slowly and there were still hold-outs in 2007. The result is feels very much like a recreational facility. Not so much a preserve as a place where people can fool around on their ATVs.
Bonus knowledge: In 2002, Centralia’s ZIP code was revoked. As far as I can tell (please correct me!) it’s the only time that this has happened.
The Turcot Interchange is a sprawling knot of roadways, the bane of many a visitor to Montreal. The roads are soaring. They are massive concrete ribbons, built to allow ships to pass through the canal and proclaim Montreal’s 1960s status as a big player on the world stage.
The network is ageing, and slabs of concrete have taken to falling off the overpasses. Debates are raging about how to redevelop or repair the system. Unexpected resistance came from the residents of nearby St Henri who – in addition to being unhappy with the idea of the highways coming down to ground level – were quietly using the spaces between the spires to walk their dogs, practice their golf, and generally recreate. The area also houses a rare species of brown snake.
photo credit: Christian & Cie
Bonus knowledge: Spacing Montreal has more (including aerial photos) on the history of the area.
Detroit’s status as an involuntary park is fragile. Unlike everything else on the list, Detroit’s neighbourhoods are being abandoned because of economy instead of environment. In theory, residents could return, were Detroit to pick back up as a place worth living. For now, it’s shrinking fast with an area the size of San Francisco totally abandoned. One proposed solution is to simply bulldoze huge sections of the city, concentrating the population in a smaller area.
In the meantime, Detroit is practically becoming a tourist destination for all the ruin. People are doing art installations, photography (so much photography), and experimenting with architecture. This is a fine line between park and redevelopment. If things go too well, eco-gentrification is sure to follow.
Bonus Knowledge: You will not regret exploring these pictures (especially #10).
On Monday, the Re-Burbia contest announced the 20 Finalists. The entries are a lot of fun. There are zeppelins and Metabolist housing and even a perpetual motion machine.
Looking at the optimistic renderings (especially the clean lines of the currently-in-the-lead zeppelins) brings to mind one of my biggest frustrations with visionary architecture: The persistent gap between the artist’s rendering and the reality that will inevitably follow.
Consider this list of 7 urban freeways with their dingy “before” photos and the lovingly rendered “after” images in water colours and computer graphics. All of them from a vantage point that no human – who is not in a low-flying plane – will ever see.
What would architecture look like if RFPs only allowed eye-level views of the building? No birds-eye shots, no models.
When the Catholic Church decides whether to canonize someone, part of the process involves the devil’s advocate who applies due skepticism to the candidate. I would love to see an architectural contest that had devil’s advocate entries. A 2-part contest.
Part 1 is held like normal. People submit their starry-eyed ideas, hopefully with some sense of how possible the details might be. Three winners are chosen. Then, in part 2, we release the cynics.
I want to see independent special effects teams aging the proposals 20 years. Putting them through neglect, weather, budget cuts, and all the other insults that happen to a building. Taking the renderings and redoing them on a cold rainy day in November. Covering them in posters and billboards and graffiti.
“In Fig. 1 we ignore the naive assumption that the flower beds will be maintained. We’ve imagined a likely configuration of weeds.
“Fig. 2: We show a likely pattern of discolouration owing to nesting pigeons. Alternately, Fig. 3 shows how installed spikes might corrode.
“Fig. 4 offers a split view of the sidewalks, on the left is over-crowding while on the right, we imagine where gangs of menacing teens are most likely to congregate.”
This contest could be just as much fun, if not more fun than the optimistic first half. We love looking at ruins, we love watching things fall over. We love it when angels fall.
In the industrial area, there is an abandoned lot that once held an oil tank. It is surrounded on three sides by a concrete wall. The fourth is blocked by a crumbling chain-link fence. The three walls have been appropriated by the graffiti community and act as a kind of shifting mural. Every night, they sneak in and add to, alter or erase part of the mural. Sometimes, the changes are tiny, other times they are a sweeping reworking of a whole wall. You explore the communal effort, taking delight in the inventive forms and innovative colours. Describing the mural is pointless – it is too big and, anyway, it will be unrecognizable when you return.
You should subscribe via RSS feed: click here.
You should also follow me on Twitter: click here.
