plaza in space

Here at [Re_Map] we’re not just about future visions and computation and an interesting exchange with a historian of technology this week brought together some thoughts, conversations and recent archive footage, of which we had been in receipt, to make this rumination. The historian in question had been to visit RAF Barnham where the Blue Steel nuclear deterrent was stored until 1963. His observations included one concerning the plan of the outer perimeter that had unnecessarily assumed a pentagonal plan, a type of fortification that stretches back to the C14 to contain C20, state of the art, weaponry. The point being that the act of ‘design’ in technology can be seen to be frequently referential to earlier forms and methods, as some sort of default and even in the most extreme of circumstances.

Much has been made, in architectural circles, of ‘interactivity’ and of designed ‘intervention’ in the public realm. One has to ask is this at the expense or in lieu of ‘decoration’? There has been a physical and metaphorical ‘flattening’ of the city in its vertical plane. Relief in facades, over the course of the twentieth century, has diminished, though depth has not necessarily receded in the same way, as new double-skinned solutions emerge to try and affect climate change and carbon reduction. Interactivity in material and built terms is often an applied surface with a variety of environmentally responsive reactions that may include automata, light or sound and in all probability began to emerge from museum display and theme park technologies. The augmenting of reality with some new form of audio-visual encounter that crosses the real-virtual divide is a difficult territory to discuss critically in a blog post – the question as to whether it is even worthy of discourse would have to answered first; are these types of experience in the public realm simply ‘entertainment’? Should we expect the continued Disneyfication of reality as we continue to be great consumers? The role of the ‘image’ in the urban landscape is also an essay in its own right, these are not questions to be answered here.

More exactly here is the fact that ‘interactivity’ and ‘responsive art’ is not new and attributable to the rise of the Arduino and other prototyping platforms. The cyberneticians of the 1960s were all investigating such and the Jasia Reichardt curated exhibition of 1968 at the ICA is now seen as pivotal in bringing together creative from various disciplines around the ideas of interactive, generative and responsive art. Somewhere, amidst the maelstrom of unfettered creativity that seems, from this distance, to characterise the late 1960s was an artist known as William (Bill) Mitchell.

Bill Mitchell explains the setting for his illuminated art on the narrow side of Piccadilly Plaza in Manchester.

Mitchell doesn’t classify himself as an artist, in his words, “I’m a doer, I like doing things, making, and art gave me the opportunity to do that.” His output from the 1950s onwards was prolific and he pioneered new techniques in casting, blasting, moulding and formwork using concrete, plaster, glass, ceramics, rubber and other self-prepared compounds. It is this large scale and ‘machined’ art for which Mitchell is most well known, but his sparkling imagination would not confine him to ‘sculpture’ in the conventional sense (despite his unconventional approach), he found himself concerned with the “brashness” of applied illuminated advertising in places like Piccadilly Circus and set about finding a way to control the arrays to combat the pollution by disorganised agglomerations of neon. He set his sights on the growing tower of Piccadilly Plaza in Manchester, eventually subject to a suitably futuristic marketing campaign which saw it branded as the ‘Hotel in Space’. Footage sent by Mitchell to [Re_Map] shows him describing the context in which the new building sits as being formed mostly from a “bus station and lots of extraneous matter like trees, not very good trees”. He wanted to develop a design for a “flexible, sort of piece of drawing paper, that you draw on with light” that would cover the entirety of the narrow side of the new tower and would face Piccadilly Gardens.

Text from publicity brochure for Piccadilly Plaza. Held at Salford Local Studies & Archives.

Mitchell’s own working model of sensors and activated bulbs.

The 300ft x 65ft façade was to be covered with 16,000 photoelectric cells in panels each of 11ft in height to align with the floor-to-floor dimensions of the tower. The photoelectric cells when subjected to a signal, in this case light, would activate bulbs in a panel of a different scale, but the same gauge; there was a sensor for every bulb.

Mitchell stands in front of a full scale mock up panel. The model on the left is a scale model of the tower and the small white rectangle represents a single panel.

Mitchell was as much an inventor as a designer or artist and in his studio he mocked up a ‘Heath Robinson’ version of his idea using a  “home movie outfit” and sensors and circuits he had put together himself as well as a full scale mock up panel and models of the building.

The footage shows Mitchell explaining his role and that he then “had to get somebody who could put two wires together”. That someone was “Mr. Parker”, though we never discover where Mr. Parker came from. To produce a picture they needed to generate half tones using thyristors on the circuit boards, it was this sort of knowledge that Mr. Parker brought to the project. It is unclear from the footage whether indeed this was a commission to build or to experiment or just something that the energetic Mitchell decided to do. The conclusion of the footage states that the developer, Bernard Sunley, has yet to decide whether or not to stump up the £180 000 required to realise the dream – obviously he turned it down. It is also not certain whether the lights would be in lieu of the circuit board relief panels that were eventually used on the end walls of the tower.

Mr. Parker demonstrates his more sophisticated model that can produce half tones.

The possible application did not stop there, architect Gerry Matthews of Covell & Matthews thought that Blackpool promenade would be the ideal location for a similar set up based on two screens and outdoor amphitheatre adjacent the promenade. At the new Curzon Cinema in Mayfair Mitchell switched the light sensors for audio sensors and generated kaleidoscopic ambient projections that were years ahead of their time.

In this short film is encompassed a mass of ideas and latent commentaries that are contemporary in the twenty-first century; the notion of brand and its impact upon the city, the idea of reactive and responsive environments, the role of art in the public realm, kaleidoscopic urbanism and electronic art to name but a few. Mitchell is an intriguing character who is currently penning his own biography and this will undoubtedly yield more evidence of the innovation embodied in his practice.

Infra_MANC Catalogue

The 2nd Edition of the catalogue to accompany the Infra_MANC exhibition [February/March 2012] is now available at The RIBA Hub on Portland Street Manchester and will be on sale from tomorrow via the Manchester Modernist Society online shop. The first edition of 100 copies vanished in under 4 days, this edition is also limited to 100 retail copies, so don’t sleep.

From the introduction:

One way to academically approach the city is to interrogate the infrastructures that keep it moving, operating and communicating. Engaging extensively the materiality and technicality of infrastructure is still relatively uncommon in the social sciences. It is also somewhat unusual to focus on infrastructure that never came to be and technical systems that remained on the paper plans.

Infrastructure typically exudes physical permanence, at least to superficial visual inspection, and on the overview plans and construction schematics, it can appear so believably real. Moreover, the functioning of technical space and built structures as infrastructure services for the city often equates to cultural permanence, which has generated a widespread lack of technological comprehension [or even awareness] by the general public. Essential to infrastructure is that it can be seen as invisible and ignored in everyday discourse. In established industrialised cities, like Manchester, the ‘basic’ utilities of water, power and communications are seemingly present everywhere and  always ‘on’ and working, presenting an image of infrastructural permanence and stability. In contrast to this image of permanence and stability, systems of infrastructure are in reality delicately balanced and prone to failure, which can expose the vulnerability of urban processes that depend upon them. As such,  one of the defining aspects  of utilities and structures, which achieve cultural status of infrastructure, is that they become ‘visible upon breakdown’.[1]

This limited project has sought to uncover the technical specification of, and socio-political context for, several infrastructural elements and plans in Manchester  as a means to examine the post-war decades and the dreams, ambitions and realities concomittant with societal changes between the early 1950s and the mid 1970s.

The research conducted over the last half year has delved into the engineering detail and concrete materialities of a number of iconic projects and several unrealised infrastructural dreams within post-war Manchester and the impact these have had on the shape of the contemporary city. The immediate goal for the research was to build up a narrative understanding and a visual record of the four key modes of communication – road infrastructure, railway transportation, passenger aviation and telecommunication –  and to display this to people in the city. The results are assembled as Infra_MANC an exhibition that seeks to analyse the conception, planning, construction and promotion of four key infrastructural projects: the Mancunian Way, the never realised Picc-Vic railway tunnel, the Guardian telephone exchange and fanciful dreams of a city centre heliport.

Two were built as planned at considerable financial cost, but were rather ineffectual by completion, two were to remain the unrealised dreams of city planners. They were large scale pieces of infrastructure, that it was imagined would create new spaces for communication, with two being buried underground and two being up in the air to facilitate movement above the congested city. They partially overlap and intersect across and through the central area of Manchester [see Overview Map]. One is an infrastructure icon  [the Mancunian Way] , another is a source of intrigue for some [the Guardian underground exchange], and the two unrealised infrastructures are significant in that they offer scope to imagine how the city would be different had they been built.

We have chosen to approach the materiality and imagined forms of these four infrastructures by analysing them primarily through visual artefacts of engineers and original mapping of the planners, much of which is never normally published or even meant to be exposed to the public. Undertaking primary research in archives, seeking recollections of those involved and borrowing key items held in private collections, we have striven to present the distinctive aesthetic of a Modern city as viewed from the professional eyes of the engineer, technically-minded architects and the transport planner. Many of the drawings are highly technical – apparently de-humanised and seemingly a-political – showing only what was to be manufactured and installed. Whilst harsh at first sight, infrastructure often has sculptural qualities to its insertion in the landscape, the angular geometries, specified materials and architectural styling often speaks of the age in which they were conceived. Infrastructural plans, sectional diagrams and drawings depict fluidly shaped lines of piping routing, sinuous steel reinforcing and muscular concrete forms, along with arrays of cryptic acronyms and hand-drawn annotations that truly invites visual scrutiny. The rewards from the time one must take to decode the content of such engineering schematics and planners diagramming of space, we would argue, bring a new kind of mechanistic beauty to the fore. Of course, one might counter-argue that it is not beauty one is seeing displayed, but merely infrastructure being laid bare to be easily objectified as pornographic exposure of the working of city space. We leave it to the judgement of visitors to the exhibition and readers of this catalogue to reach a verdict.

[1] Star, S. and Bowker, G. [2006] ‘How to infrastructure’, Lievrouw, L.A. and Livingstone, S. [eds] Handbook of New Media: Social shaping and social consequences of ICTs [London: SAGE], p.231.

Networks + wires

Thumbing Royston Landau’s New Directions in British Architecture (1968), part of the Studio Vista series, brought two interesting items to our attention. We’ve been looking at the birth of computing in Manchester and Cambridge and have come to learn that Lyons & Co. catering company ordered one of the first business computing machines in the UK. The firm was also responsible for the commissioning of Cedric Price to conduct a feasibility study into a ‘walk through’[1] centre to act as an ‘information machine’[2]for the public. The scheme was proposed for an existing building on the corner of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road in London and known by the acronym OCH (Oxford Street Corner House) and designed to handle up to 5,000 visitors and staff in a flexible and dynamic arrangement designed to offer skills training, ‘teleconnections’ for the press, information storage and inter-city conference exchanges. Price conceived these interfaces using diagrams that made allusion to scientific structures and interconnectivity. This particular project preempts a plethora of technologies and services that have become embedded in modern cultural life, as far as Price was concerned the site and the city ‘must indeed allow for continuous delight in the unknown in social terms’ [3].

‘OCH can be used as a citizens’ inquiry service where teleconnections can be made to press news rooms, travel agencies, government ministries, to Parliament, industry, commerce etc, thus making information accessible which is at present underused or ignored because of access difficulties. [diagram A].

Or OCH can offer a skill-learning or research facility service through programmed machines [a Link drive-a-car trainer or a language teaching machine] or through teleconnections to other study centres. [diagram B]

Or OCH can be used as a centre equipped to provide facilities for information exchange, at a meeting level, at a conference level, or at an inter-city [concurrent exchange] conference level. [diagram C]

The basic user component in the centre would be the two-seater information carrel, but open floor space for observation, wandering, wondering, rest and refreshment by mobile preparation units is fundamental to the full use of the centre.’

Price did not consult a UK computer manufacturer during his period of research and development, instead he corresponded with US firm IBM over the use of their 360-30 computer in the development of a ‘cyber-teashop’.[4] The variety of high street typologies and interconnectivity of media that this proposal preempts are vast – the shop as no longer a place for exchange of finance and product, but as a showroom in the manner of the pioneering Nike Town projects of the 1990s, virtual learning environments, video conferencing and media hubs are but a few of the later established settings that can be perceived as embedded within Price’s notion.

Matthews (2007) writing of the project proposes that OCH ‘was a deliberate attempt to explore new architectural and educational territories’[5] and quotes Price as wishing to examine these contexts ‘unfettered by tradition – scholastic, economic, academic or class structure’[6]Matthews continues to suggest that the scheme developed as biased towards the technological concerns of the framework and that the social agency and interactivity became less prominent as Margaret Littlewood was not involved in the project. Of course a technologically driven series of environments had already emerged during the 1950s in the form of new manufacturing facilities which, in some senses, whilst acknowledging of the ergonomic demands of an environment were largely technocratic in nature.

Which leads us to the second and ultimately technocratic incidence of architecture, the Central Electricity Generating Board’s (CEGB) National Tower Testing Station (NTTS) at Cheddar Gorge in Somerset. The site was designed by a team under the direction of W.R. Box and operated as a commercial testing laboratory for the full scale testing of pylons and other structures from 1966. Landau, writing in 1969, is fascinated by its hugely flexible demands and expandable setting as architecture without buildings and whilst not emerging from a critical territory nonetheless embodied the spirit of Price and his contemporaries. The dramatic night time photo is from Landau’s book, as is the schematic.[7]

A 100 sqft mounting pad was secured to the floor of the disused quarry and the quarry sides used as fixing points to test the strength of the towers. Without the use of this particular site a 200ft high stand alone structure would have been required to serve the same function as the post-industrial manufactured landscape. The unique laboratory allowed specific loads to be applied to sections of the towers to test one area of the structure at a time and not to test the entirety to destruction.[8]

As ever those ‘pesky kids’, the urban explorers, have been scratching about the modern day ruins of this not so distant remnant of the future. The photograph above is from the UK site 28dayslater and was taken by user ‘rigsby‘ in December 2007, even less now remains on site as testified by later visits. As an edifice this scheme is loaded with associations to things that interest us: the infrastructure and architecture of the post-war period, the design work of the nationalised industries, the hardware of infrastructure, planning and infrastructure as networks and the use of scientific language in design, modern ruins and a host of other loosely floating notions yet to be tied down. In many senses we are yet to arrive at the type of mobile and ultimately flexible architecture presupposed by a generation of future thinkers, in others the ‘new’ forms of socio-cultural space have been erased from the memory as reality fast outstrips imagination – who remembers internet cafes with names like ‘Cyberia’? One installation here reminds us of the hardware demands of the other – the apparently ethereal, networked space, ‘free’ at the point of connection, tied by its attendant transmission devices. Infrastructure can be volume or void, solid or lattice in its manifestation, but its steady accretion in service of our continuing urbanisation in virtual and real contexts can be seen as the surreptitious age of networks + wires.

[1] Landau, R. (1968) New Directions in British Architecture (London: Studio Vista) p.108.

[2] Landau, R. (1968) p.108.

[3] Price, C. (1984) The Square Book (London: Wiley Academy) 2003 Edition, p.54.

[4] Matthews, S. (2007) From Agit-Prop to Free Space: The Architecture of Cedric Price (London: Black Dog Publishing) p.177.

[5] Matthews, S. (2007) p.180.

[6] Price, C. (1984) ‘Oxford Corner House’ in Cedric Price: Works II (London: Architectural Association) p.65 as quoted by Matthews, S. (2007) p.180.

[7] Landau, R. (1968) pp.88-89.

[8] Lightfoot, E. & Duggan, D.M. ‘Rig for failure tests on scaffold towers’ in Materials and Structures, Volume 8, Number 6 (1975) pp.473-479.

RIP Donna Summer

urban informatics and data navigation

The mapping of latent urban conditions as a diagnostic tool with which to evolve discourse and develop sites of enquiry for architectural design is becoming transformative to our understanding of them. The increasingly widespread cartographic impulse that pertains to numerous branches of creative practice is coupled with the accessibility, accumulation and mapping of data surrounding the built environment. How this information is transposed and described through maps to reveal characteristics of the urban landscape becomes significant in the pursuit of developing dynamic modes of enquiry, reflecting the flux of the city itself. This type of activity and communication affords instrumentality and interpretation of complex datasets and extant scenarios. Indeed, as we progressively mediate our experience of urban conditions through a variety of digital media, the phenomenal and ephemeral aspects of the city may also experience a transformation that provides opportunities to both understand and negotiate the boundaries and layers that were previously distinct but are evolving a greater coterminous relationship. This shift provided the platform for the research paper ‘Interface and Implementation: negotiating the boundaries between physical landscape and digital territories for architectural design’ presented by the authors at the recent Theoretical Currents II: Architecture and its Geographical Horizons, held at EMMTEC, University of Lincoln, 4-5 April 2012. The paper also critically discussed the appropriation of mapping methodologies and representation for architecture as a means through which the complex spatial demarcation of the contemporary urban realm and its, often unstable, geographies may be useful in edifying our knowledge of such situations. The syncretised nature of urban space comprising of the physical and the perceptual was then extrapolated as a notion through which we may reveal and further understand the traces of various cultures that hitherto reside on the edges of normative society.

OODA Loop, John Boyd, 1976.

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.