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.

The Cinderella of the Volga

Here's Natalia Vodianova on a recent tour of Russia raising funds - and promoting Nina Ricci - for her charity, the Naked Heart Foundation:

Vodianova's tour manages to grab no less than 22 pages of this month's Vogue: a Versailles Revisited romp through an orgy of fund-raising gigs that includes a 220 ton ice palace and, God help us,

A Slavic Tania Bryer lookalike called Polina Kitsenko paying €90,000 for a privately performed love song by Bryan Adams.

Vodianova's charity is devoted to creating modern parks for less fortunate children in Russia, spreading health and happiness in Natalia's homeland, according to her charity's website.

But not once does Vogue tell you what the organization does other that it somehow relates to children and Vodianova thinks that play is therapeutic.

Over at Vanity Fair, there's a ten or so page spread given over to Madonna to promote her new album:

The piece contains a shockingly pretentious comment on her new documentary on Malawi:

I feel this film was seriously influenced by Godard...He's the one film-maker I was always inspired by...

(Godard would love this - I interviewed him once and he's a total slave to pop.)

Once again, there may be mention of a generic concern for children but the article doesn't give readers the faintest idea what the charity she represents does.

There's something in all of this that says that you can personalize a brand but you can't personalize a cause.

You can attach your name to something: but the media is interested in you, not what you think or hope others will think you're about.

In effect, what may be genuine conviction becomes myth-making, as Vodianova and Madonna harness their image-making credentials and abilities to a cause but can't escape being represented as a brand.

Madonna continues to be Queen of Pseudo Fetish Super Pop.

And for the umpteenth time, Vogue recycles Vodianova as Cinderella.

Vodianova image by Mario Testino. Madonna by Steven Meisel.

Unravelling the spaghetti

This is an image of the Spaghetti Junction interchange in the West Midlands, England.

In 1990, several architectural designers came up with some alternative design ideas for the area over and under the Junction: an infrastructural megastructure that's magnificent to see from above and travel through but that cuts up communities living either side.

Robert Adam, the classicist English architect, decided to accentuate the interchange as a gateway to the city:

American internationalists Swanke Hayden Connell  decided to condense the structure by building on top and around it with offices and housing: 

Annoyingly I don't have an image of the scheme by Melanie Sainsbury, a former partner in crime of Nigel Coates and the Narrative Architecture Today group.

But Melanie imagined a fabulous, Hamburg-style nightclub beneath the interchange piers:

And alongside recent RIBA Gold Medal winner Edward Cullinan, Finnish landscape architects Pirkko Higson chose to use the scale of spaces beneath the interchange

and imagine a jungle:

Five architects, five revisions of a public space: oh God! another architectural ideas initiative!

Yes. But there's a small but important dimension to this project.

Over at BLDGBLOG, there's speculation on the relationship between architecture and the media.

How are architectural ideas communicating through...various media? Does the medium itself inform the message, as it were – and in what specific way? How are architecture and architectural ideas repackaged for discussion in these various forms?

The project on Spaghetti Junction contributes to the discussion because it was commissioned by the British Broadcasting Corporation and was broadcast as a special edition of an innovative arts TV series called The Late Show.

The person who came up with the project idea - er, me! - wanted to speculate upon the different pictures of the world in architectural designers' heads, suppressed by tight top-buttons done up and the virulent anti-architectural spirit of the times, triggered by Prince Charles' outburst against the National Gallery extension by Venturi Scott-Brown. 

Nothing much has happened to the space since this outburst of creative visioning, perhaps confirming in the abstract architect Bernard Tschumi's thought that

No spatial organization ever changes the socio-economic structure of a reactionary society.

But one principal stands tall.

Architecture need not be communicated by the media simply through reportage.

It can be communicated by the media acknowledging that it has a role as a protagonist in the public realm and that it can make its presence known as commissioner and cultural speculator.

In some places or situations, civic organization is dead and buried.

In others, it is fractured in to bowling associations, amenity groups and people obsessed with the world on their doorstep.

In others still, local government has given up the job of curating the physical quality of public life.

The question is whether the media can and is willing to fill the void and become an activist promoter of civic value and support the common sense prescription of architect Denise Scott-Brown when she wrote:

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

Yes, the media is entertainment. And yes, it's devoted to making money. It would be deadly if it were otherwise.

But if architecture is defined by the actions it witnesses as much as the enclosure of its walls, ditto the media.

Somewhere between the two there is common purpose.

So the job has got to be to get media corporations to not just commission superstarchitect head offices but become activists and sponsors of design and social innovation.

And for architects to not take such a snobbish, PR-orientated attitude towards the media, acknowledge a mutual role as shapers of the public realm, not hide in the basements of their buildings...and PLAY!

Pictures of Spaghetti Junction courtesy of Tim Ellis.

Bankrupt avatars

The Wall Street Journal reports on a bank collapse in the make-believe world of Second Life.

The company that runs the online world has 

pulled the plug on about a dozen pretend financial institutions that were funded with actual money from some of the 12 million registered users of Second Life.

Linden Lab said the move was triggered by complaints that some of the virtual banks had reneged on promises to pay high returns on customer deposits.

According to The Inquirer

Avatar bankers have ruined the game where people pretend to own land, run businesses and build homes.

The banks of Second Life courted deposits by offering interest rates. While some paid interest as promised, others used the money for dodgy SL land and gambling deals.

In a virtual re-run of the panic surrounding Northern Rock

The shutdown has caused a real-life bank run by Second Life depositors. Though some players managed to get their Linden dollars out, others are finding that they can no longer make withdrawals from the make-believe ATMs.

I haven't a clue what this means for Second Life.

But ten minutes after reading the story - spread-eagled in Seat 66c on a flight from Bangkok to London - a thought from free software pioneer Eben Moglen jumped off the page of my book:

It's an emergent property of connected human minds that they create things for one another's pleasure and to conquer their uneasy sense of being too alone.

Sure.

But if people suffer from the dodgy-dealings of bankers in Second Life, we're reminded that digital networks can cause not just cure isolation.

And I do wonder: are the rivers of Second Life lined with the remains of bankrupt avatars?

Luxury erotic

Some collect Panini stickers of soccer stars. Others porcelain ducks. I....I seem to be collecting JPEGs of photographer Steven Meisel's series Four Days in L.A.: The Versace Pictures.

Meisel made his Versace photos over four days in two L.A. mansions in 2000. As Pernilla Homes writes, nearly-identical supermodels Amber Valetta and Georgina Grenville are

primped and preened within an inch of their lives, dripping in gems and gold, they are surrounded by orderly opulence from Old Master paintings to hyper-groomed poodles.

So why am I collecting these things?

Because they're gorgeous. But also they're vacuous.

Nicolas Ghesquiere, the creative director of Balenciaga, once said the most fantastic thing:

We have idols but no models to follow. You have to define your own model.

Meisel gets this.

In the L.A. series, he creates a model from an idol - and vice-versa.

And rather than be political and meld and switch between the authentic and ambiguous in a Hillary Clinton kind of way, these images are totally inauthentic *and* ambiguous.

Pure sheen. I love  it.

The Three Food Musketeers

This is a picture of The Three Musketeers of food politics in the U.K. - chefs Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Jamie Oliver and Gordon Ramsey.

The Three Tenors will feature heavily in Channel 4 Television's Big Food Fight, a season of factual programming that starts tomorrow and aims to change the way you think about food.

Across the season, Athos, Porthos and Aramis will be up to all sorts of jolly japes designed to raise awareness and encourage debate about food production, animal welfare and healthy eating.

They'll parry with intensively farmed chickens and supermarket hegemony; alongside Dr Gunther von Hagens who's due to carry out an hilarious - or is it tragic? - autopsy of a fast-food addict.

Just a decade ago, food didn't have such a prominent, extensive place in the TV schedules as an issue of consumer rights or current affairs.

Of course this is about food as popular culture, lifestyle and environmentalism. But is something more important going on?

Two weeks ago, I had a drink with a well-known auteur chef. Because I don't know which-chefs-do-what, I ended up treating him like an installation artist and asking a totally embarrassing question: "What's your signature dish?"

Fifteen years ago, I made documentary films about architecture since it was a useful prism for understanding contemporary culture, especially the ball and chain of 1960s modernism.

At the moment, I'm making a film for Channel 4 on contemporary taste and morality but not with an up-tight messianic designer, over-paid cultural commentator or Young British Artist - but two chefs.

The Strategy Unit at the U.K. Cabinet Office has just published an analysis of issues in food. And three headlines deserve attention:

UK consumers are spending a smaller proportion of their income on food than ever before and allocating a greater share of that outlay to eating out of the home.

Eating is becoming a more public than private phenomenon with more people spending time eating out than at home.

As well as looking for healthier options, people also want to indulge in food, particularly for reward, special occasions and at the weekend.

Take this increasingly public nature of food, add in all these chefs binning chopping boards for consumer rights, animal rights and cultural morality and you've got the makings of a tantalising recipe.

You have food not as fuel but as a key currency of public life.

And you're left with one - er, slightly pretentious - question for afters on the politics and needs of modern life:

Are chefs the new architects of the public realm?

Emotional design

According to The Times newspaper's Year of Ideas

Next year is the year that emotional design moves mainstream.

Now that it's 2008, let's explore that emotion further. 

Lucia Van der Post cites writer Ilse Crawford as a harbinger of change. In her latest book on interior design Crawford

pointed out that, very often, the language surrounding the home reeked "simply of the balance sheet", when what people craved was much more the notion of home as "a safe place, a loving place and a creative place. A place where we can explore our inner life."

Van der Post goes on:

Looking  back, it seems amazing that the cold logic of "form follows function" and the almost universal aversion to anything decorative reigned so supremely for so long.

And on:

Today, more and more designers acknowledge that their job is not just to produce efficient products but also to provide things that give much deeper, emotional pleasure.

Rather than pious simplicity, this is a vision that's decadent as well as spiritual.

'Emotional design' sounds like sitting in a room reading the complete works of guru Sri Aurobindo while occasionally glancing at walls decorated with paintings by Gustav Klimt.

Spin through other pages of The Times and Sunday Times magazines and the idea of gilt-edged naturalism writes itself large:

- A recipe by chef Gordon Ramsay for Pineapple Ravioli with iced Mango and Mint

- An inside view of Trudie Styler's new range of organic jams, created at her

Jacobean manor house set in 198 acres of farmland, grounds and walled gardens, with a picturesque hamlet of barns and outbuildings

- And a frill-free retreat to a yoga camp in the Turks and Caicos, retailing at £3185 per person, previewed by a supremely cheese-on-cheese byline

Just when did life get so busy? We all need time to think to de-stress, to recover, to lose weight, to get fit, to find inner peace - and spas have evolved to just do that.

If 2008 is to be a year of 'emotional design', we're going to need a road map to help us through this mash of aspiration and austerity.

And rather than renew that subscription to the anarchist journal Black Flag, I can see 2008 as the year of finding ways to celebrate but also turn this  new emotionalism in to something other than an expression of surplus wealth.

Alien invaders

I was in a park in London earlier today and spotted several ring-necked parakeets, part of a larger 'invasion' of our shores from Africa, South America and South-East Asia.

It is estimated that there are 30,000 ring-necked parakeets now in the U.K. - see pictures here. It is all very serious, so serious that the BBC reports that The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds is considering a cull and

The Government is currently developing a framework for dealing with non-native species - such as the parakeets, Chinese mitten crabs and grey squirrels - and assessing the impact of native species to these shores.

I started to pay attention to the issue of parakeets after I read Jacob Cartwright and Nick Jordan's guide to Non-Native Species of the Britisher Isles - Volume 1.

In their book, the artists identify new alien species, outline efforts given to their control and create an hilarious, understated, pseudo-scientific satire on what can only be called 'migrant neuroses'.

It's an illness that's catching on in the U.K. just now.

The media carry and then recycle news stories about white people becoming a minority in the cities of Leicester and Birmingham: after research carried out at the University of Manchester.

Then there's me earlier this year preparing a major TV investigation in to official statistics on immigration. The film didn't enter production but the story did break, causing the Government lots of angst.

How to deal with rising numbers not of migrants but of increasingly hysterical journalists who cover immigration?

Maybe Cartwright and Jordan have an idea for parakeets that could be adapted:

Captured birds could be sent to the Phillipines to compensate a decline in their native parakeet population, caused mainly by the birds being used for military target practice.

Image courtesy of Damien.

Facebook is for nosey parkers

For those who have the Friend Wheel application on their Facebook page, this wheel is the equivalent of being in heaven.

Friend Wheel creates a visual representation of how all your Facebook Friends are connected. Each of your friends has a color and lines connect to the people they’re friends with also. What results is a colorful geometric looking wheel of all your friends connections.

But don't be deceived in to believing that the wheel represents interactive relationships.

In a recent paper on the dilemmas of marketing in an age of social networking, Professor John Deighton of the Harvard Business School and Leora Kornfeld of the Mobile MUSE Consortium draw attention to research carried out by the guru of web page usability Jakob Nielson.

Nielson suggests that 1% of web interactivity is truly communal, 9% is instrumental (using a community for some temporary advantage) and 90% is watching others being communal.

In other words, web interactivity and by implication digital platforms that support it are about voyeurism, not social exchange.

Nielson's numbers says it's romance to think of networks like Facebook as platforms for participation.

Facebookers know this. In fact, if we're honest, that's why we love it.

It's simply another knowledge tool.

Or the digital, mass observational equivalent of Mark Lewis' camera in the movie Peeping Tom.