Research Institute of Robotics and Technical Cybernetics, St. Petersburg.

S. V. Savin, B. I. Artiushin, Research Institute of Robotics and Technical Cybernetics, St. Petersburg. 1973-1987,

Some rather serious Soviet business, designed by S. Savin, B. Artiushin, no doubt featured in CCCP by Chaubin. We like it because it combines robots + concrete, two of our favourite things.

eltono | traces

Characteristically simple, subtle and effective, Eltono hits us again with his lateral take on the surfaces and inscriptions of the city. Traces

life in the margins

The social peripheries of urban life and the resultant connections and networks of individuals and groups through various cultural proximities suggests a complexity of spatio-temporal relationships woven through the urban fabric of cities. This notion formed the basis for the research paper ‘Living on the edge: cultural proximities, social peripheries and spatial margins’ presented by the authors at the recent Architectural Humanities Research Association Annual Conference 2011: Peripheries, held at Queen’s University, Belfast, 27-29 October.  The paper expanded on the use of films as mapping devices to provide legibility or disclosure of the contemporary urban landscape, complementary to the ‘imageability’ that Kevin Lynch sought to identify in his early research on understanding cities, by contributing to our knowledge of cultural proximities interwoven with the appropriation of residual urban space. Furthermore, films were positioned to have the capacity to render the city as a narrative in a reflexive relationship concerned with spatial sequence, editing, revelation and event. Of particular significance here was the value of films as diagnostic instruments that afford us the opportunity to describe and understand urban conditions and spatio-temporal relations through the experience of them. Indeed, the ability of the camera to move through space and place facilitates the articulation of these architectures, allowing us to perceive the lived experience of the films in a visually rich manner, compressing the complexity and density of information into an understandable sequence.

Gated communities, surveillance culture and spatial tensions, La Zona, Rodrigo Plá, 2007

manchester modern: a flickr set

M56419 Picadilly Plaza + CIS Tower

Richard was recently invited by the Greater Manchester County Record Office to curate a set of images from the Manchester Local Image Collection on flickr. He used the collection extensively during a period of research and as such had a readymade set of images that he wanted to share and provide comments upon. The collection is a huge resource and available to all. The momentum is building to the reopening of Manchester Central Library in 2013, when previously inacessible collections will be archived and able to be searched. The Record Office and the Local Studies services will be combined into a mega-resource for those studying the region.

the image of the urban landscape

The imaging and imagined urban landscape, its processing and representation is fundamental to geographies of the city. From Bill Bundy to Kevin Lynch, from Otto Neurath to James Corner, reimagined and processed versions of urbanity are used by geographers, architects, urbanists, statisticians and artists to interpret and afford legibility to the complex edifice that is ‘the city’. It was with notions such as these in mind that the authors recently chaired a session ‘[Re_Map]: the image of the urban landscape’ at the Royal Geographical Society Annual International Conference 2011: The Geographical Imagination, held at the Royal Geographical Society, London, 31 August – 2 September.  The session sought to expose the theory, the practice and the methodologies of mapping and representation techniques across a range of disciplines to explore the inherent proximities and tensions in relation to vocabulary, terminology and realisation. The cross-disciplinary session covered a considerable breadth of topics and depth of issues and commonalities in relation to: urbanism, mapping, representation, narrative and notation. Crucially, the session enabled the perceptible gap in the research and practice of geography, architecture, art and computational design to be discussed and further explored in relation to urban space. Commencing the session with their paper, ‘Data Mining: Abstract Urban Topographies’, the authors opened up the territory and debate by questioning the role of data mapping as part of architectural and urban design strategies and offering insights into its application as a means to develop instrumentality within the increasingly complex scenarios of contemporary urbanism.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Space Intelligence Agency – Automatic Urbanism, 2009.

urban maps

Ashgate have just published ‘Urban Maps: Instruments of Narrative and Interpretation in the City’ by Richard Brook and Nick Dunn. Their book concerns the city and the ‘devices’ that define the urban environment by their presence, representation or interpretation. The texts offer an interdisciplinary discourse and critique of the complex systems, artifacts, interventions and evidences that can inform our understanding of urban territories; on surfaces, in the margins or within voids. The diverse media of arts practices as well as commercial branding are used to explore narratives that reveal latent characteristics of urban situations that conventional architectural inquiry is unable to do.

The subjects covered are presented within a wider framework of urban theory into which are embedded case study examples that outline the practices, processes and interpretations of each theme. The chapters provide a contemporary reading of urban socio-cultural conditions using ‘mapping’ as a lens to explore and communicate the social phenomena and lived experiences of the dynamic and temporal city. Mapping is developed as a form of critical instrumentality to expose, record and contribute to the understanding of the singular essences of space, place and networks by thematic, cognitive and experiential modes of investigation.

‘Urban Maps provides an interesting new way of “minding the gap” between the contemporary urban condition and architectural design. Calling on familiar and well-loved theoretical friends like Walter Benjamin, but also bringing in exciting new contenders such Thomas de Quincey, the narrators interrogate an interdisciplinary array of projects from graffiti to branded environments. The map is posited as a central element of design behaviour, and Brook and Dunn argue convincingly that to address today’s pressing urban issues architecture must move outside its normal frames of reference, and engage with a new vocabulary and conceptual framework comprising images, networks, films, marks and objects.’

– Jane Rendell, The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, UK, author of The Pursuit of Pleasure (2001), Art and Architecture (2006), Site-Writing (2010)

 

‘Fifty years ago, Kevin Lynch offered us a classical reading of “the image of the city” based on a waning ideal of clear built landmarks and distinct urban signs. Now, through inspired insights and an in-depth inquiry into a vast array of contemporary urban practices, the authors of Urban Maps reveal us how the complex narratives currently converging in the appropriation and redefinition of an eroded urban space require a totally revamped cognitive mapping… From the readings of cinema to the interventions of street art, from the markings of graffiti to the identities of brandscapes, and from the wanderings of contemporary art to the fictional drives of theory, architecture is confronted with the need to review the cartography of its references when facing the ascendancy of the urban condition – and the prominence of new networked, information augmented realities – as substituting for previous conceptions of the city.’

– Pedro Gadanho, architect, curator and writer, Lisbon, Portugal

mapping the internet

The image was published in 2007 and is the work of research scientists at the Bar Ilan and Hebrew Universities in Israel.

 

A map of the internet circa 2003 showing the connections between different internet routers, from the Opte Project.

Peer 1 Hostings - Map of the internet

Chris Harrison - Internet visualisation

It is strange that visual representations of the internet are always explicitly structured and often align with the perceived mental image of ‘network’. There is frequently an ethereal allure to these vaguely recognisable structures and a sense of tangibility and simultaneously an unfathomable, but believable, complexity. The recent rush for new methods of infographics has been captured in several books, most notably the two volumes of Data Flow and also in McCandless’s Information is Beautiful, but the beauty and complexity expounded in these compendiums is at odds with the physical infrastructure of the web; endless cables and wires that circumnavigate the globe at one scale and end up in tangled knots behind our desks at another. That isn’t to mention the vast server farms that are growing up next to a river near you (vast amounts of cooling water) and requiring the onward construction of new power stations to support the huge amount of energy consumed in data storage and processing.

At one end, yes, the web is strange, complex, alluring and beautiful, at the other its a messy, messy business.

projection mapping / light space

Pablo Valbuena - Medialab Prado, Madrid

First brought to our attention via the digital archive slowly building on the excellent ICASEA blog attached to the UK/JP electronic art label, the work of artist/architect Pablo Valbuena challenges the perception of space by the direct manipulation of light to create complex geometric illusions. The use of form, space and light, highly conventional architectural terms, as layers of intervention and re_presentation through sculpture and projection mapping in his work is well removed from the prevalent employment of such.

Perhaps of most interest here are the interventions in urban space, rather than those in interior environments. The animation of the hard rectilinear landscape outside of the Medialab Prado in Madrid (2007) is a post-Tron digital dissection of space. It is remarkable how the aesthetic of cybernetic art has returned to a minimal and binary position. The works of Carsten Nicolai and Ryoji Ikeda have consistently relied upon a retreat to minimal linear and geometric form that can be easily perceived as not too distant from the pioneering work of Lloyd Sumner and Roman Verostko.

Ryoji Ikeda - Datamatics

watch this space

This is an entry that definitely falls under our tagline ‘instruments of control’. Normally reserved as a term we apply to the ambiguities of space formed by formal response to policy, in this instance the Casio F91W watch is the instrument of control and is reported by the Guardian newspaper to be the Al-Quaeda electronic timer of choice. Apparently it was the universality and cheap retail price of the watch that made this ubiquitous item the focus of training sessions at camps in Afghanistan. Wikipedia has a list of Guantanamo detainees who were wearing Casio watches purportedly supplied by Casio themselves. In this escalating and slightly hyped narrative Casio were then forced to deny sponsoring terrorism. This isn’t news to Casio, who have actually been involved with the US Department of Homeland Security since 2005.

I had an F91W when I was a runner in my youth, it’s probably still in the drawer in the spare room at my mum’s. There is a healthy number of colourways for the discerning athlete these days and a fashion conscious runner who chooses to accessorise their training shoe highlights with a complimentary timepiece, thus engaging in multiple purchases, may well find themselves on a ‘watch list’.

punctuate by gersham

This is one of those things that we met during our research for the pending book Urban Maps, but it never made the cut.

Sourced from the early web based graf site n-igma by Dek. He didn’t know then and we don’t know now; who and why?

All that can be said here is that type characters and the space between is/was a distinct counterpoint to graf that conventionally is about fills and coverage. Obviously type and fonts have a history in graf, as Steve Powers states, ‘The first time I saw somebody paint their name as a font, it was SANE, and it was a complete shock’ (interview Jan 2010)

Most of all… we like it.