:: GussetBLOG ::

:: Wednesday, May 28, 2008 ::

Herding Cats

Atheists in the US are arguing amongst themselves about whether we/they need buildings that can fulfil the social function of a church in a community but without the religious baggage [Church of no God, via null.devivce].

It's something I've thought about before, especially as I work on a lot of developments where a church will plough money into a community centre that no-one else would be willing to stump up for. But then I think about what social functions would be performed in a building if you stripped out the religious requirements. What you a re left with is a multi-purpose social meeting space. Somewhere where people can meet to chat, probably with a small stage for performances. Something open to everyone, regardless of faith.

Then I realised we have it already, it's called a pub (although non-alcohol drinking faiths may take issue with this). It's basically something any well equipped pubic house can provide. As long as it's somewhere that provides enough in the way of variety of products, from tea, coffee and cakes during the day, to relaxed social drinking in the evening, and has a family friendly policy, I think it could cover all bases. Even a well equipped café could do the same. I suppose the key difference is that you would most likely be expected to purchase something when you were there, which churches sort of don't do. Sort of.

Update:
Thanks to abscond for the comment. You're right, a squat also fulfils all of these functions and avoids the consumerist problem. Although as a general rule they are not included in new developments. But I take your point, I can almost hear Naomi Klein screaming at my proposal to further reduce public space and replace it with a commercial alternative. So I’m changing my mind and proposing that all new residential development areas have a purpose built squat included. It is, unfortunately, a flight of fancy of the likes usually confined to bldgblog, but it’s an alternative to the Church of no God proposal.

Labels: architecture, Religion

:: Dan 28.5.08 [Arc] [1 comments] [links to this post] ::
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"We’re not just talking typical city noise," the article says, "but what scientists here say is more like living inside a factory."

Bldg Blog on noise in Cairo

"Provided I can ever get my act together on this, I've got a long and totally fascinating interview with Jace Clayton, aka DJ /rupture, coming up here on the blog, in which we discuss the sonic qualities of cities, focusing on New York and arriving there via Marrakech, Barcelona, and even Rennes, France."

That sounds really interesting. You can, incedntally, hear DJ/Rupture's appearnce on the Goatlab Radio show here:
GoatLab Radio with Parasite and special guest DJ/Rupture - October 2007

Bldg Blog continues, "I'm tempted to organize something called World Noise Day*. Make your city as loud as possible. Take advantage of car horns, personal stereos, supermarket broadcast systems, and the local radio. Play Merzbow† all day, cruising loops in boom cars. Rebuild Luigi Russolo's intonarumori. Install Japanese war tubas and British sound mirrors throughout the city. Turn on hair dryers. Yodel. Record the sounds of noise in the morning – and play them again that night, much louder."

* Of course our friend Shitmat already runs an annual National Noise Day here in the UK.
† And coincidentally I have a gig with Merzbow on Friday! He's playing at the Croft just before Goatlab starts (thanks to some strange booking thing I won't go into).
Look like the UK is one step ahead here.

Labels: Acoustics, architecture, Noise

:: Dan 16.4.08 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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Oobject's Guide to Anechoic Chamber Architecture
"In this kind of space, no one can hear you scream. Anechoic chambers use spiked walls to eliminate echoes, the end result might literally sound dull but the visual effect can be stunning, such as at the enormous anechoic hangar. Vote for your faves."

[via Music Thing]

"There is nothing not to love at Oobject's Guide to Anechoic Chamber Architecture. Above is AFJ International's tank-sized chamber, and the Auditory Localization Facility is a person-sized loudspeaker-filled geodesic sphere packing a generous punch of awesome. Less high-minded readers might also enjoy Nick Knight's rather splendid fashion/audio crossover The Sound of Clothes, which includes several not entirely SFW videos."

Labels: Acoustics, architecture, Fashion

:: Dan 15.3.08 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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bldgblog on The future warehouse of unwanted books

Coincidentally I've been thinking about libraries recently. I was back up in Manchester over the weekend. As well as taking some time to do some Christmas shopping I made a point to take the time to wander around and take in the sights again, too see what has changed in the six years since I lived there. In places quite a lot had, in others it was reassuringly familiar. I loved wandering around Vinyl Exchange and Piccadilly Records and Afflecks Palace* again.

* Why is it full of 13 year olds? With their parents. Buying them pink studied off the hip belts. And that's just the boys.

After enjoying the refurbished Art Gallery and some bratwurst from the obligatory German market I found myself wandering into the central library for a look around (and to abuse the toilet facilities). I spent hours here as a student - the library, not the toilets - and love the building. An online student guide tells me it is "the largest local library in Britain, created in 1934 as a circular building based on Rome's Pantheon." So there you go. I'd love to spend a few hours in there with my camera. I'm fascinated by the odd little stairways all over the place, roped around the top as they descend into the floor, ending in a dark oak door marked "staff only" at the bottom.

John Rylands library is even more impressive in its Gothic splendour.

[more on architecture in Manchester]

With this fresh in mind I read the first link above and the related Guardian article - Inside the tomb of tomes

"This warehouse is being built to house the books and journals that no one wants. With the British Library's UK collection growing at a rate of 12.5km of shelf space a year, is the notion of the copyright library really sustainable?" [guardian]

"In other words, a relatively random piece of 100-year old legislation [the 1911 Copyright Act] has begun to exhibit architectural effects. These architectural effects include the production of huge warehouses in the damp commuter belts of outer London. These aren't libraries, of course; they're stockpiles. Text bunkers." [bldg blog]

It's a shame that this is what we have come to. At the exponential rate the data we produce is growing, how are we going to continue to store it? Digital storage seems the obvious answer but brings further problems with it.

"It's been estimated that €3bn are lost across Europe [over an unspecified time period] entirely due to bad management of digital files in libraries ... Would we have enough confidence to throw everything away? Would you?"
Rory McLeod, digital preservation manager at the British Library quoted in The Guardian

The Internet Archive sets about trying to solve the same problem for digital data.
"The Internet Archive Wayback Machine contains almost 2 petabytes of data and is currently growing at a rate of 20 terabytes per month. This eclipses the amount of text contained in the world's largest libraries, including the Library of Congress."

Google Books is trying to get searchable versions of books from many great libraries online.

We are warned that Data growth outruns ability to manage it [Computer Technology Review, Feb, 2002]

Wikipedia: Modelling Wikipedia's growth

And then how do we decide what data to store? Said copyright act states that everything printed should be stored. Do we need to do the same online? Right down to the live journals and the cat photos and the porn? Maybe so.

"The Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris is, for the first time, opening its extensive collection of pornographic materials to the public. Part of the contents of the forbidden section, officially known as "l'Enfer" (Hell) and consisting of pornography and erotica from the 17th to 19th centuries."
[via null device]

"Only bona fide academic researchers have been allowed access to the "L'Enfer" collection until now. The omnipresence of erotic or pornographic images in the modern world has persuaded the French national library that it is permissible, finally, to open the doors of Hell.

"The exhibition reveals some interesting, historical differences in erotic tastes. The earliest, 17th and 18th century, material dwells on the straightforward pleasures of the flesh. The celebration of the pleasures of pain – imposed or submitted – begins with the Marquis of Sade in the late 18th century. Pornography from the French Revolutionary period is mostly political, especially scurrilous allegations about the sexual appetite and imagination of Marie Antoinette. The 19th century concentrates on the blazing sexuality lying below the stern conservative or domestic exterior of life."
[via the independent]

If this too needs to be saved, then this all has knock on effects on the amount of server space required, which I thought about writing about until bldgblog saved me the effort with this follow-up post - Server Rooms and the Future of Humanism - which likens the environmental impact of server farm to the carbon footprint of an SUV.

"Is this the long-term historical irony of humanism – with its museums and libraries, its institutionalized nostalgia – that all these air conditioned warehouses and rural server farms don't represent the indefinite continuation of the humanist project but, rather, that project's future ecological demise?"

This brings me to further musing on the subject of data organisation. I've noticed that the job title Information Architect seems to be growing in popularity. Architects love to describe their discipline as "the most public of all art forms" (I believe this quote is attributable but I can’t remember to whom). It seems obvious that someone involved in designing computer networks would hope some of that glamour would rub off through use of the word.

One day this may not seem as jarring a comparison to the layman as it seems now. I'm sure if I stopped someone on the street outside now and asked them what an architect does the response would be something like, "they designs buildings and stuff, dun 'em?" [can you tell I'm in Bristol as I write?] Yet if I asked what an Information Architect does the responses will probably range from "someone who designs computers?" to "something to do with the internet?" to stunned silence.

As we move towards a future where our virtual existence is increasingly blurred with meat space will we increasingly see the people behind these systems as creating a form of public art? "That GUI is very modernist in style don't you think." "I like the gothic phone system they have in that building." "I though I'd add some Art Deco influences to this database." And so on. I've just re-appropriated existing stylistic names, when logically on new names created from no on will be appropriated in that way, but I hope you see where I'm coming from. This could be a two way flow, ideas from IT could be integrated in architecture too, creating skinable buildings, hyperlinking lifts, rss feeds of the people passing through reception, but I'm sure things like that are being tried already.

Labels: architecture, Literature

:: Dan 4.12.07 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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Iannis Xenakis: Phillips Pavilion, Poème Electronique, Edgard Varèse [Brussels 1958]
I've read a lot about, and listened to a lot of, Xenakis’s music, so it's interesting to see something pop up about his architecture now and again. Especially when it was designed as a specific audio/visual display space.

Labels: Acoustics, architecture, Art, Visuals

:: Dan 24.10.07 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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BLDG BLOG is a brilliant blog of "architectural conjecture, urban speculation & landscape futures," that I have just discovered thanks to Natali linking to this post about Hot-Mapping. Apparently Haringey Council have been busy flying planes over their district taking thermal images of the area. The council explains it here and full maps of the region are available here. It's interesting to look over. I would genuinely be interested to see how my own house compared to others around it. I'm sure it would be exactly the same as all the others on the estate (it is new build) but I'd really like to know how it compares to houses of different ages and see how age and build vary. The comment on the blog bring up privacy issues, although I'm not sure how much heat loss your house suffers from is a private issue? As long as vigilantes don't start searching out energy loss offenders I think it's pretty harmless from that point of view and I think I'd like to see more councils doing it.



The blog also has two noise related posts from the last week or so. This one following up an interview with neurologist Oliver Sacks about the affects of noise on people. It's interesting although, as with psychology generally, it relies heavily on the exceptional cases rather than the norm. I guess that makes things a lot easier to test and interpret.

This lowest common denominator approach is similar to the way the World Health Organisation Guidelines for Community Noise are based on preventing adverse health affects in the most sensitive population. From conversations with the papers co-editor Birgitta Berglund I know that children in particular are her largest concern. Perhaps by designing to ensure the protection of the most sensitive we can bring down average noise levels over a period of time?

(The Erik Satie anecdote sounds like he failed to do Eno was doing with Music for Airports etc. I imagine these days you could get away with it without anybody flinching. Sometime a space without background music seems odd.)

There is also a post about intentional additions to urban noise to make cities sound more "musical" and to help mask more unpleasant sounds. Soudscaping cities is a bit of a buzz word with architects these days and I've been involved in the soundscaping of some major district developments in the middle-east (without ever actually going there annoying!) I'm interested to see how this study pans out.

Labels: Academic, Acoustics, architecture, Art, Maps, Noise

:: Dan 30.9.07 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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"Want to live in a home designed by a famous architect? Then get a council flat in Madrid."
Nicely timed article about architecture in Madrid. I was upset we weren't going to be able to find time to go and see some Gaudi buildings in Barcelona while we're over there, but this should provide some alternatives for the visit.

Labels: architecture, Madrid, Spain

:: Dan 21.2.07 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post] ::
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