David Barrie

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.

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.

A useful first base

For all of those people out there sick and tired of looking at stuff and itching to get stuck in to making new realities comes a very simple statement from curator Nicolas Bourriaud, writing about the art of Philippe Parreno:

Interpreting the world does not suffice; it must be transformed.

Image courtesy of Bruce Sterling.

A new age of purgatory

According to Alex at Worldchanging

Optimism, especially optimism which is neither foolish nor silent, can be revolutionary.

I'm certain of this but just now nothing beats private equity investor David Rubenstein, CEO of the €1.1bn Carlyle Group, and his recent comment on the financial markets.

According to the London Financial Times,

Mr Rubenstein said that if 2007 was private equity's golden era, then 2008 marked the start of a new "purgatory age".

Thank your lucky stars that in Catholicism, Purgatory is a temporary punishment.

But remember that according to Dante, there's a problem...it's just one step up from Hell...and for a moment just check out who else is on the beach:

:-o

Despair image courtesy of Bruce Sterling.

Go forth and aggregate

One of the key business technology trends of 2008, according to The McKinsey Quarterly [registration required], is making businesses from capturing information.

As we know from shopping sites and business-to-business product directories on the net, there's money to be made from accumulated pools of data.

But something we're failing to do in parallel is understand and exploit the value of accumulation and - more importantly - aggregation to social and economic progress.

A huge amount of information and relationships accumulate in national local government.

Extensive networks of diverse social, economic and physical assets aggregate around the commercial redevelopment and regeneration of towns and cities.

A vast diaspora of hopes and interests sit in devolved off and online groups of people, be it 5-a-side soccer leagues, Facebook groups, community gardeners or moderators of Wikipedia.

There's a vast amount of dispersed energy, enthusiasm, activity and innovation out there. And it's brilliant.

But a key challenge has to be how public managers - not just designers of online entertainment platforms - public initiatives - not just pressure groups - and central and local government - not just eccentric entrepreneurs or innovators - can aggregate this activity.

Why bother?

Because new value might be captured for the benefit of all.

So, here's a message for Lent:

Go forth and aggregate.

And start trading and packaging social, not just physical assets.

 

What's the point of community involvement, 'co-design' etc. etc.?

...as scribbled on a stickie at a recent event I ran in Chongqing, South-West China.

But it's something more.

An architecture of social relations, brilliantly expressed in a story told by Barack Obama in a speech inAtlanta on the eve of the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday [Video here/transcript here]:

There is a young, twenty-three year old white woman named Ashley Baia who organizes for our campaign in Florence, South Carolina. She's been working to organize a mostly African-American community since the beginning of this campaign, and the other day she was at a roundtable discussion where everyone went around telling their story and why they were there.

And Ashley said that when she was nine years old, her mother got cancer. And because she had to miss days of work, she was let go and lost her health care. They had to file for bankruptcy, and that's when Ashley decided that she had to do something to help her mom.

She knew that food was one of their most expensive costs, and so Ashley convinced her mother that what she really liked and really wanted to eat more than anything else was mustard and relish sandwiches. Because that was the cheapest way to eat.

She did this for a year until her mom got better, and she told everyone at the roundtable that the reason she joined our campaign was so that she could help the millions of other children in the country who want and need to help their parents too.

So Ashley finishes her story and then goes around the room and asks everyone else why they're supporting the campaign. They all have different stories and reasons. Many bring up a specific issue. And finally they come to this elderly black man who's been sitting there quietly the entire time. And Ashley asks him why he's there. And he does not bring up a specific issue. He does not say health care or the economy. He does not say education or the war. He does not say that he was there because of Barack Obama. He simply says to everyone in the room, "I am here because of Ashley."

Transforming society spud-by-spud

This is a photo of artist Kathryn Johnson's giant and very weird potato presentation at the Really Super Market art fair earlier this year in Middlesbrough, North East England.

Johnson's latex and polyester sculptures were a high point in an event curated by Bob and Roberta Smith and the culmination of a design project on food systems in the town.

Here's artist Bob and Roberta taking it easy during the event - and yes he's one person...

...and here's a dish served up at the event that was created from fresh produce cultivated by a thousand new 'urban farmers' in containers across the town.

Over 6000 people attended the Super Market event; and the food project - Dott07 Urban Farming - was a great success.

On one level, it fostered new enthusiasm for growing produce in the town. The town's new 'urban farmers' plan to run the process again in 2008. Local government is planning to release vacant lots across the town for new urban food production. And plans are moving forward to create a new restaurant in the town that will be organized as a co-operative social enterprise and supplied by the town's new farmers in the future.

But the initiative wasn't just a success because it offered people an opportunity to grow stuff. It worked because it created a new opportunity for people to communicate - and it now seems no accident that the culminating event was framed by an artist.

In his book on relational aesthetics, French curator and art critic Nicolas Bourriaud writes of

the dawning of the society of extras where the individual develops as a part-time stand-in for freedom, signer and sealer of the public place.

In discussing the work of artists like Rirkrit Tiravanija, Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Carsten Holler, Bourriaud celebrates the end of modernity's regressive fantasy of sacredness and singularity.

He sees in their art a reintroduction of the idea of plurality

...inventing ways of being together, forms of interaction that go beyond the inevitability of families, ghettos of technological user-friendliness, and collective institutions on offer.

In Bourriard's  mind, this is an urge towards creating new models of sociability.

In our post-industrial societies, the most pressing thing is no longer the emancipation of individuals, but the freeing-up of inter-human communications, the dimensional emancipation of existence.

More often than not, urban renewal and public involvement projects keep their creative and intellectual thrust hush-hush.

The sociability of public art also often plays second fiddle to imaging and market.

But it's interesting to start to see participatory design, art, social and economic renewal projects in the same frame as, say, Carsten Holler's metal slides at the Tate.

And be reminded that these projects are not just confirmation of how great it is to be alive, kicking and sociable. They are also microscopic opportunities to transform society step-by-step, spud-by-spud. 

Potato image courtesy of earth2potato.

Your glimpsed lash....

Your glimpsed lash is like a fault in the view-finder,
a shadow of your self
                                          falling
through the sky's
                                  widening lens.

From Trumpeldor Beach by Fiona Sampson in the latest collection of her poetry.

Image from Naomi Morlan at Flickr.

Have you prayed REALLY hard?

At a moment when algorithms control an increasing amount of our lives and the securitisation of debt doesn't appear to spread risk sufficiently to avoid a run on the bank, this old-tech logic courtesy of Boing Boing seems like a sturdy rock to lean on.

Smooth space

For time immemorial, I've been trying to understand why and how we can orientate ourselves in immense, featureless, self-effacing spaces and landscapes like this one. And how and why standing in the middle of the Sahara Desert some years ago was a disorientating but invigorating experience.   

Austrian architect and artist Lars Koretzky offers a clue in his recent book devoted to movement, the impressions within and between spaces in cities and lines that he sees swirling around. (!)

Koretzy quotes philosopher  Gilles Deleuze and psychotherapist Felix Guattari's investigations of 'striated' and 'smooth space' in their book A Thousand Plateaus: two spatial arrangements with two systems: one that is State-oriented and static, the other nomadic and fluid.

In striated space, lines or trajectories tend to be subordinated to points:one goes from one point to another. In smooth space, it is the opposite: the points are subordinated to the trajectory...In the smooth space, the line is a vector, a direction and not a dimension or metric determination. It is a space constructed by local operations involving changes in direction....smooth space is filled by events or haecceities, far more than by formed or perceived things. It is a space of affects more than one of properties. Whereas in the striated, forms organize matter: in the smooth, materials signal forces and serve as symptoms for them. It is an intensive rather than an extensive space, one of distances, not of measures and properties.

In 2002, I visited the Western Desert of Egypt to make a documentary on nomadism and the design of the Pyramids.

When I stood in front of the enormity of the landscape, I felt as though I was distributing myself across the space, almost surfing.

Now (maybe) I start to know why. It was a 'smooth space', occupied by intensities, wind and noise, forces, and sonorous and tactile qualities.