David Barrie

Stickier media

Just now, broadcasters in the U.K. are angsting over the role and meaning of public service broadcasting.

The personalisation of media, growth of the Internet and disappearance of traditional ideas of public realm have thrown the meaning of the public value of the media in to crisis.

What's great is that new platforms promise to end monopolies on narrative and its traditional form. 

So should old media players just pack their bags and go home?

No.

In the real world, there is a crying need for 'connectors' to bridge between people, government and life.

The return on investment required by the public and private sectors in the built environment place ever more importance on the social, not just physical infrastructure of place.

And companies increasingly recognize that there is competitive advantage to be had in sustainability, not just in the resource flows of material culture but also social and human capital.

What's exciting is that broadcasters now understand that new media platforms are just that - platforms and not pipes through which information can flow.

What's clear is that the public still identify and want some form of support to enable them to manage real and personal economies.

The challenge for broadcasters is whether they can meet their pledge to use new media to support public service - and define what that service is.

For if it's to mean more than acting as a nodal point for information and social networks, it needs to engage with the dreaded 'm' word...moral purpose.

In my mind, there's no dread in this.

And there's a willing audience out there. 

Why?

Because people innately understand through their everyday experience that communication matters.

The challenge is to embrace this understanding, take on the 'm' word and be inspired by the words of John W. Gardner, the former U.S. Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare under Lyndon Johnson and founder of Common Cause:

Communication in a healthy society must be more than a flow of messages; it must be a means of conflict resolution, a means of cutting through the rigidities that divide and paralyze a community.

Image of TV courtesy of  Niemster. Cross Story Platform Telling by Russell Davies. Video shared by yannoucs.   

Architectural salvation

Coming soon to a screen near you will be the first genuine exposé of the pleasure and pain of designing public space.

In 2002, Channel 4 Television in the U.K. decided it wanted to corporately socially invest in the renewal of the former coalmining town of Castleford, Yorkshire, England. 

In parallel, it commissioned the production of a wholly independent series of TV shows to track the process, presented by Kevin McCloud of Grand Designs.

I ran the project for three years.

In 2003, we ran an architectural competition and the new generation of British architectural stars stepped forward, including Renato Benedetti, Sarah Wigglesworth, Deborah Saunt of DSDHA, FAT and Alex de Rijke of DRMM.

Here's FAT presenting their scheme:

Five years later, here's an image of Benedetti's (almost complete) bridge:

Wigglesworth's early designs for a new pontoon on Castleford waterfront:

And Saunt's new subway underpass under construction - and for completion within the next few weeks:

With vast amounts of innovative public involvement and commitment, nine projects have now been completed - with two in second phases led by community groups.

And an initial grant of £100k ($195k) from Channel 4 has become a capital and revenue works programme valued at over £11m ($22m) and led by over 11 public agencies.

What's more, the process has been credited with helping leverage over £2o0m ($380m) of new commercial and residential development in the town.

The TV series and its design content will be revealed over the next few weeks - and I'll post some stuff here. Blogroll me.

But for now I wanted to make a small point.

I once spent a lot of time with a senior officer in the British army who served in the Falklands.

In the heat of The Battle for Goose Green, with his commander dying of wounds, a bullet came the way of this second-in-command. In his pocket was a book. He claimed it saved his life. It was by the 20th century desert mystic Carlo Carretto.

Now for all those involved in urban renewal or wanting to bring a town or city forward for transformational change - and deliver it - you'd do worse than strap a book to *your* chest, but by another desert mystic, of sorts: co-author of a famous homily to Las Vegas, Nevada, architect Denise Scott Brown.

In her book The Public Realm (1985, now out of print), Scott Brown wrote:

Where civic design succeeds it is usually because it is sponsored by a civic organization that operates as watch-dog, implementer, funder, maintainer, and supporter of the project and because this group has convinced the city that its project is in the interest of the whole community.

If you want to support a town, public agencies or communities renew the world in which they live, you'd do well to have this wisdom strapped to *your* chest.

Images courtesy of McDowell & Benedetti, Sarah Wigglesworth Architects and Tim O'Connor.

A pretty cool idea from the 1960s

According to those nice people at the BBC, regular defrosting of a fridge-freezer,

ideal positioning in the room, keeping lids on liquids and even giving it a once-over with the vacuum cleaner can minimise a fridge-freezer's CO₂ emissions.

But here's a better idea from Swinging Sixties London - an article from an edition of real estate magazine Estates Gazette [subscription required] in 1965:

With developers worrying about the land-take of sustainable development and no-one worrying about  sustainable food consumption and supply in to new housing, isn't this a totally brilliant idea?

And...err....forgive my neekiness...

(Definition of 'Neek": a cross between a Nerd and a Geek.)

Fridge graveyard image courtesy of she's a renegade.

Beer mat architecture

In yesterday's London Times newspaper, The Cratehouse in Castleford, Yorkshire was named one of the top ten works of public art in the U.K.

Created by German artists Wolfgang Winter and Berthold Hörbelt, it's made out of hundreds of bottle crates perched on a shipping container.

 

In their book on Fleeting Architecture and Hideouts, Robert Klanten and Lukas Feiress saw The Cratehouse as part of a general trend for modular building and another brick - or is it crate? - in the wall of architects

losing their traditional sovereign right to the formal design of buildings/spaces...the overthrow of established etiquette in our built surroundings...

What's great about The Cratehouse is that it's a mad mix of the beautiful and the useful.

So experimental film-maker Katie Clark has made this:

And for two years, the object has been used for poetry readings, school workshops, meetings of the Rotary Club, even as a Santa's Grotto and halloween hideout.   

A brilliant combination of walk-through sculpture - described by the artists as a space of light - and usable object.

In late 2008, The Cratehouse will move from Castleford, Yorkshire to Kielder Forest, Northumberland and  join a number of installations there that include a Skyspace by James Turrell. 

The artwork was commissioned by Arts Council England, Yorkshire, curated by Yorkshire Sculpture Park and managed by City of Wakefield Metropolitan District Council. Its fabrication was supported by Northern Containers, Hessle Fork Trucks Ltd. and HDS Associates.

 

Peripheral porn (in Hartlepool)

Israeli sociologist Erik Cohen once defined tourism as involving movement from the cultural centre to the periphery.

In the North Sea port town of Hartlepool, England, park up on the edge of town, pass under a railway bridge, head towards the sea and you fall across this:

It's called Steetley Refractories.

The site of a factory that once extracted magnesia from the sea and reacted it with dolomite deposits in giant tubs, tanks and kilns.

This is what the site looked like in the 1960s.

And this is it today, a floor show of vast blue lagoons that push for attention as land art.

The BBC reports that there are plans to turn the site in to luxury flats.

But for the moment, it remains a classic English example of what Matthew Coolidge, founder and director of  The Center for Land Use Interpretation calls the contemporary landscape as museum.

And a way better piece of cinema than either Mongol or Prom Night.

For directions, go here.

Judgement of Paris

Rubens is my favorite painter of all time.

And this picture - The Judgement of Paris - is one of his greatest.

But forget all talk of composition, shape, form, blah blah - and any other pompous conoisseur catalogue stuff. 

For from the chasms of the Internet, by an artist of no known name, comes a perfectly executed version of the story that may express far more accurately what was really going on when Hermes brought the son of Priam beautiful goddesses to judge.

I can see through you

All day, every day, people are telling us what we should think.

And loads of things that are labelled 'empowerment' are fairly (and sadly) obvious exercises in pushing people around.

From John Riedl and Joseph Konstan's brilliant book on collaborative filtering, comes a pious thought from mathematician Blaise Pascal that's worth remembering in an age of super-smart messaging and fairly loose use (and abuse) of the 'E' word:

We are generally the better persuaded by the reasons we discover ourselves than by those given to us by others.

Image from Danske via Flickr.

God Save the Queen

In London, we have a very large but very local architectural problem:

In last weekend's Guardian, Madeleine Bunting basked in the early Summer sun and asked a simple question: why can't Londoners use Buckingham Palace - especially its gardens?

While Green Park is used by up to a million people a month in the summer, right next door a park of near-comparable size remains largely empty; pristine lawns behind 10ft brick walls, bristling with barbed wire and metal spikes....

Buckingham Palace Gardens is the largest private green space in central London. (It's all the area to the left of the picture above...)

Its forty acres of fine garden, lakes, two thousand animal species and flamingos were once common ground when the Palace was plain old Buckingham House in the early eighteenth century.

Today, surrounded by walls, wire, speakers and surveillance cameras, it is in the words of architect Sir Terry Farrell, an essay in

bad neighborliness...Either the monarchy is paternal and they share in a paternal way and we enjoy it; or they are behind walls, and it is us and them.

Several years ago, Terry and me made a documentary film arguing that it was time to turn the forecourt of the Palace in to a 'world square' and puncture its architectural front:

And replace the walls that surround the Palace grounds with railings and allow public access:

Architect and writer Charles Jencks fell in to our ranks, seeing the building as like a Hollywood stage set, 

a very uptight facade that says nothing. The message is all to do with control...It is as if being a monarch was a real pain. And dangerous!...Being a monarch cannot always be a burden. It should be a celebration.

But royalist Lord St John of Fawsley lumped us in with an alternative aristocracy and gave us a terrifying glimpse of an ancient ax:

Along come these architects and intellectuals and others who really do not understand what people are like, with these mad crazy schemes. Well, away with them! In another age they would have been sent to the Tower!

I wasn't sent to the Tower.

And the idea hasn't developed.

The message:

We may be adapting physical and metaphorical landscapes throughout the world, de-commissoning and re-commissioning 'place' - but there are limits.

Politicians and designers may be busy re-defining the role of service providers and promoting inclusion - but there are limits.

And the monarchy is serving the nation in many ways other than exclusivity - but it has its limits.

Fact is that our idea of monarchy remains captive to the idea of magic and awe of the private landed upper class.

The Windsors find it difficult to link leadership, value and play.

And assets such as the Palace and its gardens are classified as a 'home' - i.e. a private, not a public asset. 

I told you that it was a local problem.

Suffice it to say: God Save the Queen!

42 Ways to say no

Just when you might be lost for words, conceptual artist Mel Bochner comes to the rescue in a piece (resolutely) called No, currently on show at the Peter Freeman Gallery, New York.  (via Frieze).

Crunching on credit

It was on this parade of shops in Whitechapel, London in the 1970s, in a kosher restaurant called Blooms, that I had my first gherkin.

The British call the cucumber a Wally which is a bit of a shame since - in shape at least - it has graced the gardens of the Chatsworth House stately home in Derbyshire, England.

In some weird twist of fate, the (slightly) uncouth vegetable turned totally luxe when someone decided to call Norman Foster's chic Swiss Re building in the City of London "The Gherkin".

 

But now thanks to Norm and financial journalist Chris Blackhurst, the small, bitter and not actually very pleasant gurka has come of age.

Writing in real estate magazine Estates Gazette [subscription required], Blackhurst turns Foster's building in to a ready reckoner for measuring demand and supply of office space in the City of London.

Everywhere I go, should I meet any property developer with an interest in the Square Mile, the chat quickly gets on to the Gherkin.

So we've had a warning of 40,000 City job losses - or the equivalent of eight Gherkins (500,000 sq ft each, at 100 sq ft per person).

Meanwhile, Lehman Brothers analyst Mike Prew has calculated that a total of "11 Gherkins" are being built by developers.

All hail the Gherkin!

The indigestible cucumber has become as august a measure as the Roman Mile or French meridional definition.

5000 people = 1 Gherkin

30 people = a nibble on an indigestible stalk end.

Image of Whitechapel High Street, courtesy of Danny McL. Chatsworth, courtesy of  Dr Loplop.  Gherkin packers in Bangalore, courtesy of Lefranz. Foster's Gherkin, courtesy of  acampm1.