Architectulation = Architecture + Articulation

Toward utopia or not toward utopia?

2004-09-05T22:27:00.000+09:00

Two issues continue to trouble me: How can the outcomes of social analysis and critique of the city become translated into design? Should the urban planner/architect design for society's existing and expected needs, or for some sort of utopia (and if so whose -- the designer's)?

These two questions are linked, perhaps especially in the given historical situation of the present. Social analysis points out a problem (or, usually, problems) and occasionally alternatives or ideals. Let's look at the increasing privatization or growing control of public space in Europe (and elsewhere) in the 90s and the responses by social movements (many outlined in INURA's Possible Urban Realms). Out of the lessening role of the municipal authorities in managing public services, and a rise in the corporatization of the city, many spaces that were formally public were sold off to companies to run, making them semi-public spaces. In addition, the increase employment of surveillance and tightening of limitations on the times both public and semi-public spaces, made these spaces more and more alienating and simply difficult to be in.

So how does the architect/planner account or counter this in design? Especially when most are employed by the municipal authorities and/or big business developers?

Architects of the Parecon Society

2004-08-22T18:12:00.000+09:00

ZNet - Parecon - Architecture of the New Society

This article from Chris Spannos of Vancouver offers a good, in the quick, overview of past "visions" of non-capitalist city's/urban societies as well as the vision of the parecon (participatory economy) city and the role of the architect and planner in it.

The parecon vision is commendable and appealing, perhaps good to use a guiding light. Spannos only offers one sentence on how we can build the parecon city: "Transition from capitalism to parecon would have to begin with "building the new society in the shell of the old."

Fortunately, the source of a quote offers us some guidance: self-management. Tom Wetzel, in his article The City: From Self-managed Movements to the Self-managed City, cites community land trusts and similar organizations, as important mechanisms, particularly if networked, that can be used now to work toward the parecon city.

Architecture hit list

2004-08-18T17:02:00.000+09:00

Architect calls for Scotland's ugliest buildings to be torn down - The Herald

An architecture hit list is misguided/ing. Granted the buildings may be ugly and perhaps should be torn down for aesthetic or social reasons. But before rolling out the demolition ball, studies should be done to see if it would be more efficient (environmentally, financially, socially) to rework or, less preferably, simply let these buildings live out their lives. Should the buildings be torn down, measures first need to be in place to ensure their replacements will not be of a quality the same or worse.

Foremost in importance, however, is implementing good design in the first place. Second to that is the awareness that taste changes.

Bush speaks the truth!

2004-08-06T16:58:00.000+09:00

This from AP:

Bush misspeaks, says his administration seeking 'new ways to harm our country'

WASHINGTON, Aug 4. (AP) -- President George W. Bush offered up a new entryfor his catalog of "Bushisms'' on Thursday, declaring that hisadministration will "never stop thinking about new ways to harm ourcountry and our people.''

Bush misspoke as he delivered a speech at the signing ceremonyfor a $417 billion defense spending bill.

"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we,'' Bush said. "They never stop thinking about new ways to harm ourcountry and our people, and neither do we.''

No one in Bush's audience of military brass or Pentagon chiefsreacted.

The president was working his way toward a larger point. "Wemust never stop thinking about how best to defend our country. Wemust always be forward-thinking,'' he said.

White House spokesman Scott McClellansaid Bush's misstatement "just shows even the most straightforward and plain-spoken people misspeak.''

"But the American people know this president speaks with clarityand conviction, and the terrorists know by his actions he means it,'' McClellan said.

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UNBELIEVABLE

Anarchy Archives

2004-07-20T16:36:00.000+09:00

Anarchy Archives

Great resource! Even if you don't subscribe to the theories, informative information on some great thinkers and their thoughts. From Pitzer U.

"Architecture is a dynamo for the production of soft power." - Muschamp

2004-07-20T15:11:00.000+09:00

House of Games: "Architecture is a dynamo for the production of soft power."

Soft power is persuasive force, Hebert Muschamp writes. It "is not an exercise for fools. It takes strenuous exertion to generate soft power... It takes agon."

Look at me! - Landmark Buildings

2004-07-13T17:29:00.000+09:00

SocietyGuardian.co.uk Society Look at me!

Graham Morrison touches on a lot of good points in this article, and ideas it presents harkens to issues raised by both Bacon and Kevin Lynch (and even way back to Sixtus V). Landmark buildings have valuable functions, but too many -- as we see with the replication of the image -- depletes each building's significance and its ability to play an individual role, reducing it to a "one-liner".

From a city design point of view, landmarks have power as an organizing force in their capacity to draw and project energy. They standout in peoples mental images and (can) help create a sense of place (i.e. endowing it and, more importantly, its surroundings with a unique identity).

Morrison suggests a criteria of what constitutes a successful landmark -- an architectural icon: a building must be "visually impressive, workable and in keeping with their surroundings without compromising architectural integrity".

This, however, sounds much like the attributes most architects aspire (or should aspire) to when designing buildings. Obviously, not every building achieves this and many, despite the hopes of designers, are not made to be so on account of clients' wants. To play devil's advocate, what if every building made did meet this criteria, how would we fulfill the role architectural icons currently play? Silly question, really.

Polarization through London regeneration

2004-06-27T14:25:00.000+09:00

The main lessons to be learnt from the London section of INURA's The Contested Metropolis are short and bitter.

Essentially, there are grassroots and local initiatives to regenerate parts of the city, as well as top-down initiatives implemented -- or at least voiced -- by the central and municipal governments. Aspects of each occasionally coincide.

The texts, mostly written during or just after the creation of the Mayor of London's draft London Plan, point to disappointments. Essentially shortness in funding and support from governments for neighbourhood efforts and the lengthy times development plans require to take off deplete energies and the glue of bonds at the local level, meaning private developers and landowners tend to win the most influence over a project with little or no consultation or participation from those most directly affected – the existing communities.

This, in turn, more often than not leads to rises in property prices in a neighbourhood (and increase profits for developers), and as areas targeted for regeneration are usually poorer ones, locals are displaced. Michael Edwards' contribution gives a good analysis of the workings that effect regeneration and development from the global to the local. His argument stems from the basic premise that the same forces creating wealth for London (or at least for some of its citizens and businesses) also creates poverty for London (for far more people than those gaining wealth), thus resulting in further polarization.

civic realism - eraser of difference?

2004-06-19T20:22:00.000+09:00

Peter G. Rowe in the first chapter of Civic Realism (1997) defines the two concepts that constitute the title and how they interact, and in particular, how they interact in relation to urban planning and what public spaces should do.

Using Sienna's Piazza del Campo as an example, Rowe defines a civic place as one that is “more than public” and “recalled fine moments from the past, and provided palpable guidance about what form of public behaviour was not only acceptable but preferred” (7).

A civic space is then one that historic (i.e. carries the past forward), but normalises behaviour -- not only guiding the behaviour of inhabitants of that space toward current norms, but also normalises and reifies what is considered as proper behaviour by the dominant cultural group (though this line of argument requires more development, I will not do so here, mainly due to a lack of time).

Rowe defines the real, in terms of architecture and urban design, as that which is “clearly understandable” (7). In the case of civic realism, and the exemplar Campo, architecture is to represent “civic life and expectations” (7). In other words, architecture and city design are realistic when they depict their physicality as it is and convey with clarity what is considered normal, if not ideal, public behaviour.

By extension, then, using civic realism as the basis and/or ideal for design means creating for either the status quo or an idealized version of public life.

Rowe’s notion of civic almost harkens back to the Enlightenment concept of civilisation, which, as Richard Sennett explained in The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities (1990), was the great eraser of social difference and identity. Back then, civilisation “was about the virtues of a certain kind of disguise” (Sennett, 79). Under the notion of civilization, people treated “one another without reference… to their identity” (Sennett, 80).

Upon first impression, the practice of civic realism then becomes the practice of pacifying the different behaviours of social groups that do not meet norms, of regimenting the system and of suppressing difference (this will have to be further qualified through further reading).

Rowe’s argument for civic realism leaves some room for optimism. If urban design has the power to influence behaviour in such ways, then it could be used to normalise behaviour not considered normal; that is, it could urban design could be a tool to counter and challenge conceptions of what constitutes normalcy and civilization, as well as to assert new ones.

As contemporary systems for designing and developing architecture and the city are usually most influenced by those with money and power, the responsibility may then fall to the designer her- or himself to create spaces that give “palpable guidance” about what forms of public behaviour, other than the norm, could be deemed acceptable.

I will revisit this issue upon completing the book.

The Willed City

2004-06-13T22:08:00.000+09:00

The city is willed. That is, the city is formed by the choices of its actors. And these choices are based on their values and corresponding motives. This is the point of the opening chapter of Kevin Lynch's Good City Form (1984). Through the historical examples he has selected, it is quite clear that the wills of those with more power have more influence on a city's form. However, these wills face limits in their influence, as they must contend with the wills of other power holders, those with less power, the physicality of the land itself and the "inertia" of existing city forms and structures.

The issue of value also arises in Richard Sennett's The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities (1990). In his book, the eye at once orders the city that is around us and is ordered by it, while those who most influence city form attempt to order the city according to their eye, that is to their values and morality.

Notions of morality, of good and evil, are messy business. One what person may think is good, just, proper or of value, another may think it is bad, unjust, unsuitable and useless. This may explain why cities, despite the intentions of some, are so messy -- as they perhaps should be.

In contemporary times, as most likely in previous times, urban design is most influenced by the wills of developers, governments (usually the friends of developers), certified professional urban planners and architects (who usually work for one of the former two), and to a lesser extend those who will potentially pay for (or consume) the designed spaces (i.e. usually the moneyed). This set of wills constitutes a rather small group when compared to the rest of the actors in a city, who may or may not directly engage in the designed space, but will be affected by it via is relationship to the rest of the city.

In urban design, then, it is important to give 'voice' to a wider variety of wills than is common practice in order to create a city that is "good" for the majority. This then leads to the issues of participatory planning: the time and costs involved; who will pay for those costs; who gets to participate; whose voices are loudest; issues of knowledge among nonprofessionals; incorporating the views (eyes) of those who willingly do not operate within the system (for example, anarchists, some homeless); and others.

Though this will certainly make the process of designing messier, the resulting forms may be considered "good" or "better" by a wider range of people (and by extension perhaps allow them live in closer accordance with their wills). The efforts of participants in the International Network for Urban Action and their affiliated groups are good examples to look at to see ways of making messy planning productive.

City living and city making should be messy, because without it they'd be banal and unlivable.

A new conscience

2004-06-11T22:31:00.000+09:00

In The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities (1990), Richard Sennett outlines the history of the dominant conceptions of that conscience in the West and how it has been transposed into the physical and social realm of the city. Moreover, he problematises this history and its effect on the life and design of the city, while suggesting some ways to move toward a new conscience of the eye that will induce a more humane way of urban dwelling.

My only complaint is that Sennett offers few concrete examples of how this can be done through design (but then he is neither urban planner nor architect). His historical account suggests that more than design is required; huge philosophical, ethical and social shifts are needed. Though to have real strength and impact this shift would probably have to take place throughout Western culture, I think Sennett with this book is calling on planners, architects, developers and others involved in designing cities to make such a shift in conscience first, which will propagate itself through the built environment, or the urbs, to the civitas.

Cities should be designed for exposure, Sennett argues. Urban spaces/structures are to expose urbanites to contemplation, (a calm) contemplation of differences, and expose urbanites to each other (mutual exposure). Urban forms are to expose through differences, displacements and discontinuities. This, Sennett says, can be achieved through designing mutations, overlays of differences, weak boundaries (not walls) and spaces that are simply constructed to enable flexibility and permit alteration.

New Urban Living Design Experiments in Seoul

2004-06-01T00:13:00.000+09:00

Seoul over the past year has seen the (high) rise of a new living and urban design experiments. These experiments are about a square kilometer or two in size, containing a variety of singular and clusters of similar apartment towers (some of the tallest buildings on the Korean Peninsula), with a few office blocks thrown in for good measure. Each area is largely designed and built by one developer (inevitably a chaebol -- a family-owned and operated conglomerate). Two examples are Dogok (Samsung) and Omokyo (Hyundai).

The experiments through the design of the individual apartments, the buildings and the urban layout intimate a new, Western -- and therefore "modern" -- lifestyle. This is all the more apparent when they are contrasted with the dominant form of apartment complex design (and therefore living) that has been, and continues to be, erected en masse since the 1960s by the very same developers (i.e. chaebol). These older cookie-cutter cement slab apartment buildings composed of identical apartment units dominate every South Korean city today -- sometimes built row on row, sometimes in fours facing each other, but almost always with the space in between filled with parking lots. The usually 10-20 storey blocks, though bland, economical and severe, did attempt through form to accommodate mainstream Korean lifestyles.

The most obvious of these are ondol, under-floor heating, and the veranda, that each of these older apartments has. Ondol is conducive to life at floor level, where most Korean living customarily has taken and continues to take place. The verandas are not usually used for tables, lunching or leisure; they most often serve a place for performing daily household chores, including laundry and food preparation. Moreover, they are the clearest definer of the apartment blocks’ facades.

What is most noticeable about these new living experiments is the loss of the veranda. The activities that belonged to the veranda now belong to modern convenience: combination washer-dryers replaced the need for space to hang clothing to dry (by far the most common use for the verandah in the older-style apartments); food can be bought prepared and packaged, meaning the end of laboriously washing, cutting and fermenting vegetables (Korean staples) on the balcony. The main living space, or “living room” as it is known in North America now opens directly to the outside. Ondol is still there (which is perhaps for the best, as it is an economical and efficient heating method).

The buildings themselves tend to live up to certain current prescriptions for good design, particularly mixed-use and varied apartment floor plans. However, the inhuman scale from the street, the uniformity in tenants (the well-off aspiring for Western-style living) and commercial focus on upscale food and restaurants is not creating a lively neighborhood. The streets are dead, the commercial spaces not well patronized. The monumental scale of the buildings, most with a three-to-five-story base for a shopping mall are domineering, leaving no place for people to want to stop. Even the plazas created between the buildings are so controlled that they are cold, void and unattractive. Given the expensiveness of the stores and restaurants and the uninviting streets, people from outside the area are rare to venture in.

The experiments have thus in part achieved their goal: Western living -- that of a static haughty North American suburb made vertical.

Rant on 'Artist' Renderings

2004-05-30T22:26:00.000+09:00

In Korea, the large 'artist' renderings hung on the barriers at construction sites often depict the buildings-to-be in a fantasy world of lush greenery, vehicle-free streets and smiling pedestrians under a bright blue sky.

This idyllic land couldn't be further from the reality of a Korean city, especially Seoul. There isn't any greenery, the streets are usually congested with cars and pedestrians, packed onto sidewalks - if there are any, choke on exhaust fumes and "yellow dust". The sky is seldom blue, but rather more a yellowish gray -- the same color the building will be tinted with in two-year's time (of course not pictured).

These artistic renderings, moreover, do not usually show the building-to-be in relation to others around it. It is often an isolated 'work', glorified for itself (even if the design is simply of a drab box). The building is not depicted in its future cramped quarters, either outweighed by a neighboring box or itself towering over a decrepit, hunched over cement block thrown up within a week in the 1960s. The rendering does not show the ragged tents or umbrellas of the vendors that will sit in front of it.

The happy-happy land in these renderings hide the toxic materials used by megaconstruction firms, the corners cut in engineering, and the shabbiness the building will inevitably be in just a few short years. The do not reveal neither the the drab, stale and poisonous air its users will breathe day in and day out nor the personality-less interior where workers will be made drones.

The artist renderings lie. The builders lie.

And then there are the accompanying nature pictures that are to intimate that the building and the builder are conscious of nature.

Builders, pedestrians! A picture of a tree does not make a project environment-friendly.

criticism to design

2004-04-03T20:50:00.000+09:00

Criticisms of globalisation and its effects on the city, sociospatial relations and the built environment abound. However, how can architects and planners process such criticisms and work to counter the targets of criticism through design? That is, how does one move from social critique to design?

INURA's Possible Urban Worlds (1999) is a great source of such criticisms, and moreover offers up a wealth of examples of social movements and actions that counter the forces of globalisation and advanced capitalism, particularly in Europe and North America. However, such criticisms do not offer much guidance for the planner or architect. The article Gilde van Werkgebouwen, Amsterdam from Peti Buchel, Carolien Feldbrugge, Bert Hogervorst, and Annie Wright and the (Firenze) Italian contributions, especially Participated Projects on the Outskirts of Florence by Anna Lisa Peccoriello and Iacopo Zetti and The Town Plan of Villasanta: A Case of Community Planning by Monica Vercesi, offer some ideas or guidance. Other possibilities (no play on the book's title intended) for the designer is to appropriate ideas from the examples of the Wagenburgen, Zentralstrasse 150, La Habana / Ecopolis Project, etc. However, if these ideas are reapplied in design, is there any guarantee that they would effect the same social usage with the social movements that created them? That is, wouldn't they lose their organicity and thereby potency?

As a number of the articles in Possible Urban Worlds point out, urban social movements have done much to contest and critique globalization and other hegemonic forces in their cities as well as construct alternate politics, forms of social organization, spaces, architectures and more.

incomplete...

Questions

2004-04-03T20:03:00.000+09:00

How do power relations (social, economic, political) shape and in turn become shaped by city design?

How can the social and political effects of not-yet-built space on potential inhabitants be estimated during design?

How can city designers accommodate the needs of the economically and socially marginalized in the context of globalisation and the growing influence of market forces?

How do people adapt to, change, resist or counter the programmes designed into the city?

How can potential inhabitants, not trained as urban planners or social scientists, become more empowered in the city design process?

Should architects/planners design for current socio-economic conditions or design for ideal conditions and if so whose? Their own?

How can the architect/planner process and apply critical studies of socio-economic conditions and processes (and their effects), such as globalisation and privatisation of public space, in their designs?

attempts at definition

2004-04-03T19:45:00.000+09:00

Off the cuff and to be modified and added to over time:

What is the city?
The city is a (spatial) area in which there is a high density of people, buildings and infrastructure; its limits are fuzzy and loosely bordered in by areas of low or much lower density (the city bleeds); and its identity as a unit is usually distinguished as such by those living in and outside it (in/in between/out group distinction).

What is urbanism (the way of being)?
Urbanity is the possessing or imparting of the experience of living in a city, i.e. in an environment of density and diversity (of people, buildings, infrastructure).

Architecture of Reality?

2004-03-24T01:10:00.000+09:00

In "For an Architecture of Reality" Michael Benedikt argues for, as the title implies, an architecture that "just is". That is, an architecture that does not seek to express meaning beyond its existence. He sites for example a description in a novel of the unintentional beauty of the suburban street lights and their effects on a suburban "reality", this beauty being the beauty of the light itself and the silhouettes of objects, themselves, in this light and a poem that describes some cat lazing near a window near a plate of peppers. He proposes that architecture, like the "bone white plate" in the poem, should express simply the reality of what it is, and not express further meaning. For him this "bone white plate" simply is.

However, this "bone white plate", like architecture, is a designed and manufactured artefact. If the poem read the "hot pink plate", a whole different set of connotations could arise and alternate meanings inferred. Benedikt has fallen into the trap set by the poem's author, who has chosen "white" -- a colour that in Anglo-American culture can connote purity, void of meaning, a clean plate have you will. Whoever made the plate, intentionally or unintentionally was intending some sort of meaning beyond the plate, the thing, itself -- why did the designer not make it black, pink, white with purple flowers? And why did the owner of the plate not own a different plate, or put the peppers on a differently decorated plate? And again, the poet chose a "white plate" for a reason. Similarly, architecture is a made, constructed object, extremely more complex than a plate and impossible to be void of cultural meaning. Architecture cannot be simply of itself. It cannot be of reality in the purist, abstracted -- nearly "modern" -- sense of the reality Benedikt is aiming for. When a building is designed, choices on behalf of the designer are made -- meaning is imparted a la differance.

Caveat: I have only started to read the book.

It must also be noted that his argument, formulated between 1979 and 1984 and published in 1985, is in reaction to the "scenographic attitude" of postmodern architecture -- of growing dominance at the time --, as Benedikt notes in the preface. And against this, his argument does raise the valuable point that architecture at this time/of this movement was very surface level, even in its highbrow attempt at self-referentiality and "tongue-in-cheek witticism" (as per Venturi et al.).

So what then is reality?

Impressions of the East Side: The Perverse Beauty of the Urban

2004-03-02T22:25:00.000+09:00

This is (a very slightly modified) piece I whipped up in Sept. 98 about Vancouver's Downtown East Side:

As one walks through the East Side, the strongest impression one receives is one of difference and variation. The visual cacophony of architectural styles from various historical periods is representative of the various groups, past and present, inhabiting this area. Along Pender Street are run-down single unit housing hotels, monumental condominium projects, the orientalised western architecture of Chinatown, and artist lofts. Next to the waterfront, at the edge of Gastown, Vancouver’s oldest city part, lie chic cafes, thrift shops and local fashion designer stores. At the heart of the East Side is the intersection of Main and East Hastings Streets cornered by imperial architecture containing a library, a major bank, a pharmacy and a community bank. Within this area are numerous bars and night-clubs for the varying tastes of Vancouver’s night (and afternoon) life. The seemingly solid built environment contains a series of fragmented impressions and experiences.

A dilapidated single-room, low-rent hotel across from the latest multimillion-dollar condominium project; below the penthouse owner with a million-dollar view is the bloody, shoeless junky struggling to inject on the steps of a bank machine. I am worried about touching his bloody hands as I give him my unfinished cigarette. Aids is a reality in the East End: I justify my worries. He offers us information where the next bank machine while his bare feet repeatedly bounce off the sidewalk as he is jonesing for the hit in his left hand.

By the waterfront, a renovated artist loft, turned gallery. The chic crowd, dressed in black, peruses art and sips on martinis; spills into the street. Individuals dole out twenty dollars for a deck of art cards and a fridge magnet. A success. "Can you spare some change?" "Sorry I’m broke."

A few blocks up from the gallery, drunken "Indians" stumble out of a fake wood-panelled bar, yelling. Are the two men fighting? Are they friends and joking? Why did the woman they are apparently with stumble to her knees and they do not notice? Behind them out of the bar comes a white older man, barely walking, clinging to the wall. The smell of urine lingers out of the alleyway.

The mirrors above each of the Ovaltine’s tables, a restaurant unchanged since the fifties, reflect the living history and many faces of the Vancouver’s East Side.

The junky hunched over staring at her reflection in a windowpane under the afternoon sun. She asks herself how she got here, she questions her history and her present state: how did my face get this way and when did it happen? Or perhaps she, suddenly overwhelmed by her personal history, is painfully aware of everything she has done to get where she is, tracks and all. Or perhaps she finds it trippy how she can never see her self strictly in profile, but can only come so close as seeing sixty percent of her face.

In Chinatown, the shouts of the store workers override the buzzing frenzy of produce markets. It seems as though there is an orderly chaos to the shoppers’ movements. A couple of confused German tourists stand out of the way between produce stores in front "Chinesed" architecture looking over their unfolded map of “Where: Vancouver”. No one stops to assist, including I. They ask no one either. The shopping, the yells of the employees and the sidewalk flow continue. Perhaps they will find their way through this foreign city.

The population of the alleys is dominated by those who have a reason to be there. Between sixty-year old buildings one sees the junky scoring his fix, the prostitute talking to her pimp cum drug dealer, a homeless person seeking refuge, a passed out drunk lying in the foetal position amongst the garbage, and the two artists hunting for art supplies in the trash.

Still afternoon, the sun still pounding, its rays reflect off the gentrified "artists" lofts and are absorbed by the plywood of bordered up storefronts.

Around the edges of Oppenheimer Park sit the downtrodden, the drunk, and the stoned enthusiastically watching a clean uniformed Filipino community baseball game. A few cheers and random shouts from both participating groups in this seemingly mismatched, however lovely, scene.

Workers going home after a long day and tourists wait for the bus by Pigeon Park, Vancouver’s most notorious drug park, in the late afternoon. Unnoticed, a woman in her forties scores her junk two doorways away from a young man carrying a cell phone. Above an old white man watches the happenings from his single-room residence.

Watching a Drag King show in a basement bar named the Lotus* – really the only lesbian-oriented bar in the city. The host rants and raves about how the show is not about politics, it is not at all about gender, it is purely about having a good time and drinking it up! The bar, according to the host, is a haven away from all the “oppressive shit” out there in world, it should not enter into this space. I keep thinking the bar and the show are inseparable from the world out there, its politics and it’s gendering. Nevertheless, sometimes one does feel the need to forget, especially in the East Side.

Outside the bar, across the street from the latest mammoth condominium project we say our goodbyes, standing interspersed between some Vietnamese drug dealers, who loaf about on the corner. A woman in ragged clothes, carrying fresh white roses asks for spare change. No one gives her any. She claims to have been raped. Do we believe her; regardless we feel mixed feelings of guilt and concern and distrust. She walks away; we walk away.

The contradictions of the city are its source of perverse beauty. A variable of individuals who constitute a variable of cultural groups, each with their own histories, is the basis of these fragmentary impressions of Vancouver’s East Side. Do they compose a whole, just as these impressions do, that is, are they a whole because they are contained within in a delineated space, be it that of a page or that of a city part. Are these conflicting groups a community, and if so how? My impressions lead to questions rather than answers.

*The Lotus is now long gone.

artwork from the edge

2004-02-29T01:37:00.000+09:00

Creation checklist

2004-02-21T15:27:00.000+09:00

Program
Minimize role of car
Sun/shadow paths (maximize use of natural light)
Wind flows
Paradigmatic relations (context of surrounding built environment)
Weather protection
Lighting (safety)
Visual lines into/out of building/complex
Existing nature
Accessibility
Access routes

To continue...

Migrant Worker Union Leader Detained in South Korea

2004-02-16T16:19:00.000+09:00

South Korean immigration officials detained the head of the nation's only migrant worker union group Feb. 15, the three-month mark for his group's sit-in demonstration against an incoming foreign labor system at a downtown Seoul church compound.

Nepali Samar Thapa, the chief of the Equality Trade Union-Migrants Branch, was apprehended by 5 immigration officers and forced into a nearby car as he, alone, approached Hyehwa Cathedral on the edge of central Seoul, where he was to give documents to a Filipino migrant workers group and then meet with other ETU-MB members in the area.

He was quickly whisked off to a holding center in Yeosu, 455 km south of Seoul, ETU-MB officials said.

Thapa's immediate fate is unknown, but one ETU-MB members concur that he is definitely facing deportation.

"This is a dirty trick by the immigration authorities before the Justice Ministry comes to the bargaining table with the ETU-MB," said a source close to the migrant workers union. Immigration is under the authority of the Justice Ministry.

The day before Thapa's detainment, a delegation from the Justice Ministry met with members of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU), the more progressive of South Korea's two labor umbrellas, and said they were willing to meet with the ETU-MB to discuss its demands and problems the union has with the Employment Permit System (EPS), she said. The ETU-MB is a member of the KCTU.

On Nov. 15, Thapa and over 80 ETU-MB members began a sit-in demonstration at the Myeongdong Cathedral, a customary haven from the police for labor and civic groups, to demand the government not proceed with a crackdown on illegal foreign workers, to begin two days later, and to instead legalize them.

The crackdown is part of government measures to put into effect in August the EPS for procuring and managing foreign workers, mainly for so-called "3D" (dirty, dangerous and difficult) jobs at small- and medium-sized manufacturers. The EPS was to replace the older and problematic Industrial Trainee System (ITS), but now will run along side it.

Thapa and his peers from Bangladesh, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and other nations are also calling for the abolishment of the ITS, the creation of a five-year work permit system, the freedom to choose their place of work, the release of all migrant workers being held in detention centers, and the guarantee of the three basic labor rights stipulated by the South Korean Constitution: the rights of organization, collective bargaining and collective action.

As the crackdown has continued, the government has enacted a number of grace periods to allow migrant workers to voluntarily leave the country without penalization, including the current one until the end of the month, during which Thapa was apprehended.

Local English daily the Korea Times reported last week that Lim Chae-lim, an official at the Justice Ministry's Residence Control Division, said his ministry would collaborate with the police from next month to crackdown on illegal foreigners. He also said that as of last Monday his ministry has detained 3,192 undocumented foreign workers, deporting 2,831 of them, since the roundups began. There are an estimated 120,000 illegal foreign workers in South Korea.

Currently, some 65 migrant workers and a group of supporters are camped out in the cold in a makeshift shelter at Myeongdong Cathedral, holding daily demonstrations at 7 p.m.

Space is a battlefield... la la la

2004-02-14T02:23:00.000+09:00

Just finished reading Beatriz Colomina's article "Battle Lines: E.1027" in the "Architect Reconstructing her Practice" (editor: Francesca Hughes). My first impression of the article was interesting, well written but that it does not present a straightforward argument – not that that is necessary (but I guess I expect it).

In the article Colomina narrates a path of concepts in telling the tale of how Le Corbusier colonized the work -- specifically E.1027 (built 1926-9) – of Eileen Gray: horizon as enclosure; the violence of the modern concept of public space, i.e. the turning of its back, its opposition against the private; photography/paintings as tools of colonialism, tools of claiming the other via the physical/visual breaking and entering into the space of the other; fetishization of the image/image of the other; the mural as destroyer of architecture. My immediate response was that Le Corbusier was a bit of a bastard – perhaps typical of his time, but a bastard nonetheless.

Upon reflecting on the title of the article, the point of Colomina's came clear: E.1027 was the site of battles -- not only those of World War II (the building incl. the interior had been riddled with bullet holes) --, but these lines, as they came across in the article, were lines of advance. Though there were other acts of violence, which I won't mention here, the one Colomina focuses on foremost in the article is Le Corbusier's drawing of eight murals, of which one is of most interest to Colomina, on the walls of E.1027 -- he also managed to privately and publicly disassociate Gray from the house she designed.

This made evident who was one the one side of the battle line: Le Corbusier, modernism, the colonial master, androcentrism, the Nazis (Le Corbusier included a swastika in one of the murals -- painted in 1938). I said the battle lines were lines of advance as, in the article, there does not seem to be much description/explanation of counterattacking protagonists on the other side of the lines. Colomina does mention that Gray/Jean Badovici (her friend for whom she built and shared E.1027) wrote a letter or two and that Gray had been "outraged" by certain of Le Corbusier's acts, but Colomina does not mention more. It is unfortunate; I would have like to read more of the defences or counterattacks, to stay with the metaphor.

To extrapolate to the level of the overly general, this notion of a place/space as battle line between numerous forces could hold true for many/most/all space, be it public or private. The ideas of power and contestation invest space with a constant possibility for conflict, and on the positive side this means challenges can be made to dominant social forces -- lines of advance can be made against them or those by them can be pushed back. Indeed, the notion that Eileen Gray, a woman born at the tail end of the Victorian Age, could design and build such a house in the 1920s and accomplish the other things she did before and after that attests to these possibilities and offers inspiration. Perhaps, Le Corbusier's murals were actually his counterattack against Gray's building of E.1027.

What can urban/architectural design do?

2004-02-08T22:46:00.000+09:00

The question of the ability of city design to determine social activities is one of the more interesting questions/points Malcom Tait of the Department of Town and Regional Planning of the University of Sheffield raises in his article "Urban villages as self-sufficient, integrated communities: a case study in London's Docklands" published in Urban Design International.

Proponents of the "Urban Village", as indeed do those of other planning solutions/utopias, tend to assume that if you build it, they will act this way. In other words, a plan -- or more particularly its resulting space and forms -- are expected to set off a particular and intended chain of behavioral, social, economic, political, etc. reactions that will ultimately result in a (closed) social system (in the case of the urban village, a "community").

The question of the ability of urban or architectural designs/spaces to determine the behavior of inhabitants is a fundamental one to all architects, planners, developers, and others involved in the formation of buildings and cities. I propose that the built environment influences, not determines, social behavior. That is, it frames our experiences, but is only one of a number of factors that inform how we live, the choices we make and what we do. That is, the design of the built environment sets off a wave of ripples (reactions), but this wave is at times/places confounded or complimented by waves from other social, political and economic factors.

As Tait points out, the activities of the inhabitants of West Silvertown were greatly influenced by an entanglement of factors such as location of employment, job status, housing tenure, life stage and mobility. The spatial relations of the 'village' do not account for these - they are rather additional factors.

This suggests that design plans cannot provide a totalizing solution.

So what can urban and architectural designs do? -- I'll come back to this (well hopefully eventually).

Rhetorical Excess in South Korea

2004-02-02T15:00:00.001+09:00

Rhetorical excess -- this term would be an accurate descriptor for most government and big business English-language dispatches, especially those focusing on future plans. Steeped in superlatives -- the world's best, No. 1, the greatest, the largest, state-of-the art, world leader -- these dispatches smack more of an inferiority complex than ambition. At times it would seem South Korea's political elites and business moguls have yet to forgo schoolyard competitiveness.

With the vantage of looking back, perhaps the rhetorical excesses may indeed spring from some form of ambition -- like that which helped the nation repay its loans from the IMF in record time and overcome the economic crisis that caused need for those loans. This notion is reified if one looks at the tempering of the rhetorical excess by the economic slump weighing down the nation over the last year or two. Does this mean, the upper echelons of old men leading business and government are starting to realize they just need to learn to focus on being good before being the best? My guess, however, is that they are too mired in covering up their bribery and corruption and evading formal charges to pay attention to anything else in the meantime.