Content exhibition, installed in Berlin’s Mies-designed Neue Nationalgalerie, 2003.

This audacity wasn’t limited to the presentation; the projects too propelled prankishness to the next level. CCTV’s unthinkable cantilever (“why don’t engineers ever say ‘no’?”); the Whitney Museum extension’s ‘reach around’ of Breuer (another offended master); the Seattle Library’s ‘waterfall of information’ rendering the institution’s very source of value an unintelligible torrent; the pragmatic EU barcode flag collecting new member states like notches on the bedpost.

It’s with this in mind (and much in-between, including having worked with Koolhaas/AMO on Al Manakh 2) that I approached the latest exhibition of the practice: Progress, staged at London’s Barbican Centre. I’d avoided all images, all reviews of the show, and plugged my ears when friends would talk about it — all in the belief that an untainted mind would increase the chance of another explosion. But my head stayed stubbornly intact, it barely even fizzed…

Progress exhibition, installed in London’s Barbican Gallery, 2012. Source.

The exhibition is built around the productive evidence of an office serious about building: including marble flooring samples, sightline analyses, 1 to 1 truss mockups, an unfinished plasterboard wall, glazing film tests, and presentation models. Of course, this focus on construction and materiality is a key interest of Rotor, the Belgian-based designers invited to curate the show, but they were surely invited for a reason… Notwithstanding a number of flashes of the OMA we know and love (the handwritten commentary, the ‘secret room’, the relentless flashing images pulled from the server) the overwhelming statement made by this exhibition is: “We’re not the cultural agitators you think we are! We’ve grown out of that phase, and we’re actually really good at making buildings!”

This must be the ‘progress’ that the show’s title describes: from audacity to competence.

The shift is not just limited to OMA’s exhibitions, but to their output as a whole. Where Al Manakh 1 was fast and loose, Al Manakh 2 is scholarly and rigorous. Where the CCTV humbles you with its cantilever, the Rothschilds HQ speaks of polite contextualism and sightlines. Where the IIT campus centre challenges the orthogonality of Mies, Cornell’s Milstein Hall takes pride in its earnest box-ness. Etc.

These comparisons imply a specific point in time that the office’s agenda changed tack, but this transition is not explicit, and is far from complete. The Cronocaos exhibit at the 2010 Venice Biennale (particularly the work on the upper level) was typical of the Content-era attitude to ‘research’ – loose with the facts, and persuasive at the expense of rigour. Equally, the imminent completion of the CCTV and its prominent use in the Progress publicity images, blurs the fact that this building was designed almost a decade ago, and is therefore a product of the ‘old’ office.

Cronocaos exhibition, installed in the Italian pavilion as part of the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale.

There doesn’t seem to be a single catalyst for this shift, but a combination of internal direction and external reality. In an economic climate of uncertainty, maintaining the solvency of a large commercial architectural practice requires a safe business strategy – as evidenced by the elevation of Victor van der Chijs to partner. On an architectural scale (OMA), with higher borrowing costs and a flagging real-estate sector, clients and developers are more risk averse and are looking for architects with a safe pair of hands, not just a capacity for designing an icon. On the level of research (AMO), criticism from such respected voices as Mike Davis or John Thackara has forced the think tank to lift its game. In this regard, the unpublished Lagos book featured in the exhibition, seems to stands right on the edge between these two states of the office: cancelled despite years of work, assumedly — judging from a quick read of the draft copy in the reading room — for employing the intentionally naive approach to research, which no longer fits with the office’s new self-conception.

Draft copy of the abandoned Lagos book project, as exhibited in Progress.

Of course all architecture should aim for quality, professionalism and scholarship – but these are not subjects I had associated with OMA/AMO, who occupy the elevated narratives of globalisation, identity and culture. Whether this new trajectory is considered ‘progress’ depends upon your perspective. It’s probably good for business, but bad for 3rd year students hoping for their heads to explode.

This is a belated posting of a piece Timothy Moore and I contributed to the Moon issue of Volume, released at the end of 2011. We spoke to artist and self-described ‘experimental geographer’ Trevor Paglen about his work peering into the dark worlds of the military industrial complex. Here’s the lead from the original publication:

Our vision of planet Earth is oft-skewed by accepted grand narratives, which cloak alternative realities from view. Trevor Paglen, artist, author and experimental geographer, visualizes elements in these shadowlands, from military installations to classified reconnaissance satellites, in order to return the gaze back upon democratic institutions. By combining empirical research with artistic interpretations, Paglen questions the truths told about the frontier landscapes of today.

Timothy Moore: In a period where the whole world can be seemingly mapped, we still have a plenitude of blind spots. And in this blindness, we can find so-called ‘black architecture’. Can you describe this black world?

Trevor Paglen: The black world is a phrase that emerged in the 1980s when the amount of spending in the American defence and intelligence budget reached historic highs. Billions of dollars were being spent on secret programs: on everything from stealth fighters and bombers and weird ‘Star Wars’ space weapon systems, to spy satellites and all kinds of very expensive technology projects.
There was an extension of what they called ‘covert operations’, which are paramilitary operations. In the 1980s, this was mostly in Afghanistan and Central America where the American government was fighting in secret. Because this secret part of the state had become so prominent, yet strangely invisible, people in defence and intelligence circles started to talk about something called the black world. There is a materiality to this world so when we talk about secrecy, we are not just talking about secret documents, we are talking about an entire landscape and a geography of secret things.
I started to research this world before there was Google Earth, Terraserver or other commercially available satellite imagery. Back then, if you wanted to look at aerial or satellite photographs, you would have to go to government archives. But the US geological archives are incomplete. There are photos that do not appear in those archives. When you go through them, you notice some are missing. You literally had blank spots on the map.
I thought it was an apt metaphor as blank spots allude to European and imperial histories: dark spaces inhabited by ‘dark’ people, places where fantasy and reality became intertwined in some very violent ways. To me, it seemed like this metaphor also worked for some of these military and intelligence geographies because they were also places that we did not have access to, and were marked by fantasies and extreme forms of what we may call informal violence.

TM: Yet this black world is maintained by infrastructure and logistics. For example, if the military are testing new fighter planes, they need a landing strip. People also have to commute daily to work on these projects. How is it plausible that this black world remains hidden?

TP: I am not sure this world remains hidden from our view. When we talk about the way we see, it’s a matter of believing in something and then seeing it. For example, when we look at its architecture, like the National Reconnaissance Office in Northern Virginia, it looks totally unremarkable. It looks like a big office building. Thousands of people drive past it each day and don’t know what it is. That is one form of this architecture. It looks like anything else. But parts of this architecture are more remarkable but hidden in different ways. In the state of Nevada, which is basically a giant desert, the military has a section of Nevada called the Nellis Range, where they have their own country. It’s the size of Switzerland. Nobody is allowed in there. There are other ways that secrecy works as well like setting up outposts in remote parts of the world, like Afghanistan.

TM: How does one pick up on traces or signs where the secret world intersects with the world we know?

TP: If you can describe the borders of it, you can get a negative image of it. Architecture has to interface in all kind of ways. You have to find where those intersections or contradictions are. Then you can perhaps learn something about that world. In Torture Taxi, I looked at the CIA’s rendition program: a program that kidnaps and tortures people. The CIA, and parts of the military, use a civilian cover during these operations. The whole point is you don’t want your fingerprints on it. You don’t want it to point to you. Often you will adopt the guise of private enterprise or corporations to do these operations. The advantage of this is that you are able to hide in plain sight.
The problem is, if you are setting up an airplane company for instance, the aviation industry is highly regulated so you actually generate a paper trail in public. One of the things that we realized is that if you could figure out what airplanes the CIA was using for this program, then you could learn quite a lot about the structure of the front companies. You could follow where the airplanes went and that would give you some clues to the outlines of the program’s spatial geography. You collect data points and connect them to other data points. It happened a number of times when somebody got out of one of these secret places and said, ‘you’d never believe what happened to me. I was tortured for the last six months and I was not actually sure of where I was but I think it was Afghanistan’, and he could give you some details like he was kidnapped at a certain date. Then we find a tail number from one of the airplanes that we have connected to the program landing in an airport from where he was kidnapped from and then flying to Afghanistan.

Trevor Paglen, ‘Morning Commute, ‘Gold Coast’ Terminal, Las Vegas, Nevada, 2006′

Rory Hyde: As an artist, you must end up with strange neighbours. On the one hand, you have the conspiracy theorists who are scanning the skies for UFOs and wearing silver hats. On the other hand, you have the hardcore investigative journalists. How do you position yourself?

TP: I don’t really hang out with conspiracy theorists. It’s very easy to imagine things into the evidence that you have because the evidence is partial and inconclusive. There is always an opportunity to imagine it as being something completely different than what it probably actually is.

RH: Do you have an agenda? Is there an instrumentality to what you produce?

TP: With the visual works, it is about a political epistemology. How do we know what we know in a political moment where it’s unclear what the state is doing? What is the difference between truth, falsehood and propaganda when it’s unclear how to differentiate these things from one another? With the Torture Taxi book, I had a clear agenda. The whole point of the book was to shut the project down.

TM: And you are trained as a geographer, so there is the notion you are still generating or producing space.

TP: This is what I call ‘experimental geography’, something I have written about, which explores the dynamics between research, geography and artistic practices. Geography provides a powerful way of thinking. It is the last materialist discipline. It emphasizes the way we produce the world around us, and are produced by it. There’s a whole tradition in comparative literature and semiotics about how our world is meaningful and socially constructed.
If you reframe those questions as questions about geography and the dialectical relationship that we have with the surface of the Earth, it is a much more convincing way to approach these questions, whether you are studying global warming or ecosystems. It gives you a framework within which you see the role that humans play in sculpting or changing the surface of the Earth.

TM: Or the skies above us. You talk about satellites as secret moons in your project The Other Night Sky, where you capture traces of covert spacecraft. What do you mean by secret moons?

TP: The Other Night Sky is a project that involves tracking all of the spacecraft in orbit around the Earth. The United States military strategic command has a catalogue of the spacecraft, which has about 20,000 objects, and includes French spy satellites and German spy satellites. Other countries get cranky when the US military publishes it for everyone to see. What is not in the catalogue is all of the secret US and Japanese satellites. A friend of mine, as a hobby for about 30 years, has been maintaining a supplement, which is all of the things that are missing from the military catalogue. He does that by going out with binoculars and telescopes and making observation of these objects, keeping track of them and trying to follow new launches as they go up.
The Other Night Sky uses this catalogue based on amateur observations to track all of these secret satellites and photograph them. To do this work, you are basically using seventeenth-century maths. You are using Kepler’s laws of planetary motion. Here we are in the twenty-first century, and we are able to use the actual basic tools of the early Enlightenment to do a very similar type of work.

Trevor Paglen, ‘Four Geostationary Satellites Above the Sierra Nevada’, 2007.

Galileo famously looked up with a telescope in 1609 and saw Jupiter had moons that were not supposed to be there. That fact undermined what was established as truth. So the Ptolemaic worldview had to be wrong. The second part of that was even more radical: anyone with a telescope could look up and see the exact same thing. Right there, at the very sight of truth, there was a reorientation towards what we might call the ‘liberal’ or ‘bourgeois’ subject. It didn’t matter who you were but you could look up to the sky and see the same thing and the truth would emerge from this rational consensus. It’s very interesting for me to think about what we can still recover from the early Enlightenment project. Those ideas that were so radical at that time: are they still radical at this point? Is there something that we can recover politically?

RH: It’s interesting that this Enlightenment idea of the bourgeois subject has never eventuated. The evident truth – looking through the telescope – has not trickled down beyond a small cluster of experts. We still have an ‘us versus them’ scenario, whether it be against the Catholic Church or the military. Despite shared knowledge or shared expertise, we haven’t found a common ground. In your position as an artist, would you be interested in working from the other side of the fence, from within the military for instance?

TP: A lot of my work relies heavily on collaboration with people in the military and intelligence services, but off the record. Would I like to join the military? Absolutely not.

RH: The reason I ask is that one of the other ideas we’ve been discussing as part of the research for this issue is broadening the kinds of experience of those participating in space or military research. If we sent an artist into space, what might we learn that would be different? Or how could you tinker with the space program to create different outcomes beyond science, outcomes that are potentially more important and relevant for society?

TP: People have always looked to the skies to understand ourselves or the world, whether that’s looking at the constellations and explaining events on Earth, or sending up a Hubble Space Telescope and trying to see the most distant reaches of the universe and its origins; where we come from and where we are going. Of course, when we look at the science of space, it is dominated by the empirical tradition of rationally trying to understand what is out there. But there are limitations to that and perhaps that is where artists have a role to explore space which we don’t know or cannot know due to the limitations of a rational empirical approach. I’ve been talking to guys from Mountain View and Berkeley who search for extra-terrestrials, and I’ve been really fascinated by them because of lot of what they do is trying to understand what humans are. A part of the project of trying to discover aliens, or to communicate with them, is trying to radically imagine different ways of being in the universe.

TM: Is the universe the frontier landscape of today?

TP: The frontier has always been in our minds. [Laughs] It is the imagination of empty space. There is always something there. In a cultural sense, the frontier has shifted to space. This was more true in the Star Trek era: space as the final frontier. People were actually figuring out things like how to go to the Moon. That’s over. If we wanted to go to the Moon today, we couldn’t do it. There a lot of people who imagine space as a frontier to be conquered. More practically, it represents a condition of confinement. Space is more so a prison than a frontier and that notion is depressing. To me, the most powerful image having to do with space is Pale Blue Dot, requested by Carl Sagan and taken by Voyager. It makes me think of space not as a condition of possibility but as a condition of confinement. It reorients our tension to the Earth itself when we realize that there is no place else to go – so we better not mess this up … People get angry when I say this, but I don’t see us colonizing space: who’s going to pay for it?

For more on Trevor Paglen see paglen.com and his recent monograph Invisible: Covert Operations and Classified Landscapes, published by Aperture.

Related: my other piece for Volume’s Moon issue: ‘Whole Earth Rise‘.

Our scheme is titled Office for Opportunistic Architecture (or OOA, as in ‘ooh, aah’), and, well, that’s about as much as I can say about it for the moment… Winners will be announced in September and until then it’s top secret unfortunately. Needless to say we’re chuffed to get this far, but well aware that the real work still lies ahead. Especially as we’re up against an impressive array of thinkers and doers, wish us luck!

1. The Voyage/Voyeur
Creative team: Amelia McPhee & Andrew Maynard

2. Super Seed
Creative team: Jan van Schaik (Minifie van Schaik Architects), Cameron Bruhn (Architecture Media) & Andy Sargent (SouthSouthWest)

3. Practice Formations; Agency and Architecture.
Creative team: Gerard Reinmuth & Anthony Burke with TOKO (graphic design)

4. RISING INFLECTION. From here to there to here to here to there…….
Creative Team: Robert Grace, with team members Monique Vaute, Denise Neri, Richard Allan, Liz Stirling, Felicity D Scott, Esther Charlesworth, Joanna Goldstein, Warren Ellis, Labotorio Morsoletto, Linus Gruszewski

Interviews from Venice 2010

This seemed like an opportune moment to throw up some interviews I did at the Vernissage (that’s a snooty French word for exclusive preview) of the biennale last year. I’ve been sitting on these for almost 12 months, but with the speed of architecture, they’re still very much within their use-by date. Here’s a selection of the twelve I did in three days, completely hectic, but really great to meet all these people just wandering around Venice, like exotic beasts in an architectural zoo…

Interview with Momoyo Kajima – Atelier Bow Wow

Momoyo Kajima is a partner of the Japanese architecture firm Atelier Bow Wow. Her studio / house was featured in the Japanese pavilion as a huge 1:3 scale model, extending throughout the space. She discusses how this project fits into the theme of the Japanese pavilion, Tokyo Metabolizing.

Interview with Momoyo Kajima by Rory Hyde

Interview with DUS Architects

DUS are an Amsterdam-based architecture practice led by Hedwig Heinsman, Hans Vermeulen and Martine de Wit, best known for combining architecture with social experience through urban interventions. Their Gecekondu project, a temporary summer house / event space built in one night, was featured in the Vacant NL exhibit in the Dutch pavilion at the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale.

Interview with DUS Architects by Rory Hyde

Interview with Ross Lovegrove

Ross Lovegrove is a British industrial designer, increasingly working on building-scale projects. While not involved in any particular exhibit at the Venice Architecture Biennale, his chairs were everywhere.

Interview with Ross Lovegrove by Rory Hyde

Interview with Jeffrey Inaba

Jeffrey Inaba is director of Columbia University’s Laboratory for Architectural Broadcasting (C-Lab), founder of Inaba Projects, and special features editor of Volume magazine.

I spoke to him about the latest issue of Volume produced by C-Lab, Counterculture.

Interview with Jeffrey Inaba by Rory Hyde

Interview with Fuad al Ansari

Dr. Fuad al Ansari is curator (with Noura Al Sayeh) of the exhibit Reclaim Bahrain, which was awarded the Golden Lion for Best National Participation at the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale.

Also see my review of Reclaim Bahrain, co-written with Todd Reisz for the Huffington Post.

Interview with Fuad al Ansari by Rory Hyde

Interview with Ronald Rietveld and Saskia van Stein

Ronald Rietveld and Saskia van Stein are curators (with Erik Rietveld and Jurgen Bey) of the exhibit Vacant NL in the Dutch pavilion at the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale.

Interview with Ronald Rietveld and Saskia van Stein by Rory Hyde

Interview with Ivan Rijavec

Ivan Rijavec is a Melbourne-based architect, and curator with John Gollings of the exhibit Now and When at the Australian Pavilion as part of the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale. (And just by-the-by, Ivan gave me my first job in architecture, making models in his Fitzroy studio.)

Interview with Ivan Rijavec by Rory Hyde

The other alignment is that Timothy and I mention a scheme for the Netherlands’ 2028 Olympic bid by the Rotterdam-based architects MVRDV, where I have recently started working, more to say on that front soon I hope.

Give us Vision!

The prospect of returning to the desert when the oil runs out was once accepted as inevitable in the Arabian Gulf. Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum, the late ruler of Dubai famously said, “My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I drive a Mercedes, my son drives a Land Rover, his son will drive a Land Rover, but his son will ride a camel.”

Instead of resignation to the desert, the fate of this region has been shaped by vision. Vision, the ambition and power to guide a course for the future, has been deployed superlatively across the Gulf: better, faster, stronger. With this vision, cities have been constructed with unparalleled determination to ensure the future generations of the rulers, and their people, can continue to prosper – and continue to drive Mercedes (electric, no doubt) – long after the oil runs dry.

This vision is no more evident than in Qatar, where, guided by the Qatar National Master Plan 2010-2032, they have delivered projects across a wide-range of fields with startling clarity of focus. A new airport and the new 40-kilometre Bahrain-Qatar Friendship Causeway will link Doha regionally and globally. The new IM Pei-designed Museum of Islamic Art holds an extensive collection of Qatari cultural heritage. In sport, Doha hosted the 2006 Asian Games and is bidding for the FIFA World Cup in 2022. In media, the news outlet Al Jazeera is now a dominant player in the global news feed. The Qatar Investment Authority (QIA) holds stakes in Porsche and Volkswagen while the QIA real estate arm, Qatari Diar, has amassed a diverse portfolio of international projects, including the high profile Chelsea Barracks and the Renzo Piano-designed ‘Shard’ in London. Doha’s Education City boasts branches of six US universities including Carnegie Mellon, Georgetown and Northwestern. On the diplomatic front, Qatar has been hosting negotiations with Sudan, Lebanon and Yemen to end wars. And of course, in the fields of science and technology, Qatar’s commitment to innovation has been demonstrated by the impressive new research facility designed by Australian architects Woods Bagot.

Despite the key roles Australians are playing in shaping the future vision of the Middle East, lessons from this bold approach and decisive attitude to large-scale urban development are yet to have been brought home. Regardless of numerous proposals and endless public discussion, the Sydney-Canberra-Melbourne Very Fast Train link has made little to no headway in decades. Sydney’s Barangaroo development has been compromised beyond recognition as attempts are made to appease every stakeholder and interest group. Discussions and competitions for this site have also been happening for decades. There is also impasse in Melbourne. The urban growth boundaries laid out in Melbourne’s 2030 planning document of 2002 were almost immediately disregarded as the government caved into pressure from home builders, leading a promising piece of legislation to become yet another disappointment. Efforts on our own soil to deliver large-scale urban projects seem dogged by confusion and disagreement.

Australia has had many successes too; the Snowy River Scheme, the Canberra city plan and more recently Melbourne’s Federation Square and the Docklands stand as exemplary projects where bold vision was delivered, albeit with compromises. In contrast, our current climate seems to be more focused on doing what is minimally required, rather than envisioning and delivering a future.

On the surface, it may be difficult to compare Australia with Qatar. With a population of only 1.4 million, it is home to fewer people than Perth alone. Qatar is also the fastest growing economy in the world, so perhaps money is what is holding Australia back? However, both Australia and Qatar feature in the top 10 list of countries with sovereign wealth; Australia’s Futures Fund held an estimated $87 billion at the end of 2009.

Assuming we can afford it then, this rapid development model may not be desirable to us anyway. It is easy to criticise the Qatari initiatives as just ‘buying culture’, ‘buying property’ or ‘buying ideas’ – and surely they are – but these efforts are also seeds for the future. So what is stopping us from taking bold steps forward? Of course, the key difference between Australia and Qatar is political. Although Qatar has stated its aim to move toward a form of democracy, the Emir still holds incredible executive powers. For Australia to take the lead in addressing issues of sustainability or population growth for example, it would require decisive gestures of a scale that would be no doubt compromised by our system of consensus-based politics, a process entangled in community consultation, senate committees and market reality.

The limitations of Western democracy in achieving major change are not new. The Club of Rome, in its report on tackling environmental sustainability in 1972, acknowledged that “Democracy is no longer suited for the task ahead.” More recently, Jaques Herzog, of the Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron, took a swipe at the stifling climate of his home country while discussing a massive new museum his office is designing for Kolkata. He remarked in the Financial Times: “If you grow up in Switzerland, with its hard-core democracy, then you travel, you realise we have reached our limitations – the popular vote is not an expression of freedom anymore but of the manipulation of an agenda by the political class and politics is just a game played among politicians.” While complaints like this may be motivated by the architect’s personal desire to build a legacy (and to make money), consensus politics doesn’t merely deprive architects of their commissions, but the public of vision.

This kind of logic leads to an uncomfortable conclusion: let’s do away with democracy! Long live dictatorships and all the freedoms they give to architects! But to do this would fail to learn from history – Qatar’s history – where until being deposed by his son in 1995, Qatar’s Emir Khalifa bin Hamad Al Thani stagnated the nation’s economy with corruption. To focus on our political system as the target of revision is to throw the baby out with the bath water. Though what is clear is that our elected leaders – as they try to appease every stakeholder, including their opposition – are unlikely to give us this vision or the means to deliver it.

Rather than bemoan this situation, architects should seize this as an opportunity to get engaged with vision-making. There’s no reason to wait for clients or governments to give us briefs on the future; we should take responsibility for our cities by establishing and instigating our own briefs instead. Architects create narratives that help get our challenges across to policymakers; they give shape to our objectives and what is possible in a spatial context. Furthermore, by initiating proposals for the future, architects can stake a claim to be a part of the process of shaping it from a very early stage, instead of merely being asked to determine what it looks like.

MVRDV did exactly that with its proposal for The Netherlands to host the Olympic Games in 2028. Complete with economic feasibility study, a survey of precedents and detailed spatial designs – this self-initiated scheme gave the impetus for the government to pursue the idea in earnest, and earned MVRDV a voice in how this plan proceeds.

But these visions need not come from large established practices, nor operate on a giant scale to have impact. Peruvian design student and activist, Camila Bustamante, drew attention to the halted construction of the metro line in her hometown of Lima simply by sticking up signs for the planned stations with the projected date that they would be completed. This small intervention revealed that, based on current progress, some stations would not be completed until the next millennium. This was enough to reignite the debate within the national media.

For architects, this is unfamiliar territory. Our professional training does not encourage us to initiate projects without a client, brief, site or budget, but to simply respond to a given question. To deliver vision may require us to leave the comfortable confines of our discipline and engage policy-makers and the market, and to shepherd these ideas through to delivery. It is us, as designers, that need to take responsibility for the future, a whole generation of ‘citizen Emirs’ with the generosity and enthusiasm to care.

We may not be threatened by the urgency of a post-oil future, or the terrifying prospect that our children may not drive Mercedes, but neither should we become complacent. Qatar is an example of a place with a clear focus on the future, with a political system that enables a view beyond the election cycle. Australia has plenty of financial, institutional and human capital. Now, give us vision.

“At the Young Architects Forum which took place during the Australian Institute of Architects conference three weeks ago, a select bunch of emerging architects from Australia were invited to present to an international jury of quite critical architects. Under that glaring spotlight it was interesting to see how many of our emerging architects retreated into discussing ‘bush poetry’ as a theme, perhaps as a way of explaining their mundane situation of working. Rory did not do that. And I find that a great relief. It’s nearly a decade since Glen Murcutt won his Pritzker, and I think it’s about time that we had another way of talking about architecture and design. So please welcome Rory Hyde.“

Lecture: Potential Futures for Design Practice from Rory Hyde on Vimeo.

The rest of this post is basically one big ‘thank you’ to all those who propelled the original ‘Potential Futures…’ piece to another level. The response has been incredibly gratifying and overwhelming for me as a researcher. It all started very innocuously: after an interesting round of emails with Gerard Reinmuth of Terroir, who has recently taken up the role as Professor of Practice at UTS, I decided to chuck it up online to open up the conversation, not really expecting anything.

What followed took me completely by surprise. Largely thanks to some extensive and thoughtful comments by Dan Hill, Bryan Boyer, Marcus Westbury (whose projects were each cited) Anita Morandini, MM Jones, Noah Raford, and many others, the conversation really got going — now totalling some 20,000(!) words — and was picked up or mentioned all over the place: BLDG BLOG, An-Architecture, Architizer, Liquid Architecture, Archinect, Architect Magazine, Mammoth, Creative Commonwealth, ETC. Of this we are sure, and more.

On top of that list, I’d like thank Greg J. Smith in particular for really propelling the conversation forward with a piece for Current Intelligence where he invited Mason White, Imran Morandi, Marius Watz and David Bausola to respond and expand upon the original piece. Just terrific.

In all, it’s confirmed my faith in the potential of the blog as a platform for intelligent discussion, introduced me to the work of dozens of incredibly smart people, and perhaps most excitingly for me, has attracted the interest of a publisher with the offer to develop it into a fully-fledged book. There’s not much I can say about it at this stage, as we’re still in the negotiation phase, but only that it’s spurred me to pick up and extend the topic further.

As it now stands, the book will be largely made up of a series of interviews with those people or practices who I believe are carving out a path for innovative means of shaping the city in the future. As with the original piece, not all are architects, but all offer unique strategies for engaging urban or architectural space.

Importantly, these people have not been selected for their innovative modes of practice alone, but for their capacity to create contributions to the city of the highest quality. The underlying message of this book is therefore not that architects and designers should expand into new territories because they are needed elsewhere, but because an understanding of these expanded territories is needed to succeed in their core aim: creating great spaces.

I hope to be able to share more on that here soon.

Now, this is a topic that’s preoccupied my thinking for a while, and I’d even situated an early project of Ingels’ (when he was still called PLOT) under the unsolicited theme, so naturally I was pretty keen to hear what he had to say*. How would somebody like Ingels ”” surely architecture’s premiere showman ”” wrap up and re-present an idea like unsolicited?

Here’s a video of the presentation, (thanks to Stephanie for sending through the link.)

bjarke ingels from Logan Mackay on Vimeo.

With beer in hand and casual swagger in full-effect, Bjarke only spoke briefly on the topic of unsolicited before jumping into the projects. And the rhetoric was very much in line with how its been discussed elsewhere, as stated in his intro: “we architects often sit around waiting for the phone to ring, or for somebody to announce a competition. Essentially we always leave it to those with power – the politicians – or those with money – the investors – to stake claims on the future of our cities.” This quote seems to capture all the core points; personal opportunism tempered by urban responsibility, and the unique role of the architect in being able to think beyond the time span of political office, or of the developers margin.

To this, Bjarke added a great anecdote as to architects’ passive role in the determining of what a project can be, by only ever being invited after the brief is written “we are like chefs who are doomed to only cook with ingredients that somebody else has bought us.” Good stuff.

He then went on to describe a number of BIG’s projects, including the Superharbour for the Baltic sea, a number of proposals for Copenhagen including a rooftop park for a department store, a bridge / apartment building, the Klovermarken project (discussed here) and a relatively new design for an energy centre / ski slope.

I’m not going to describe the projects here, you can watch the video, but one thing that did stick out was the incredible resourcefulness (or perhaps desperation) to find clients for these unsolicited proposals. The Superharbour is initially pitched at the CEO of container company Maersk Sealand – who’s logo conveniently matched the six-pointed star-shaped plan – but upon rejection, the project is redesigned with five points for a Chinese client to match the flag of the People’s Republic. Cheesey, yes, but you’ve got to applaud the guy’s determination. Similarly, the sweeping roofscape of the Klovermarken park is re-worked as a rollercoaster to rejuvenate a flagging amusement park in Abu Dhabi. Again, nice try.

Without a doubt, BIG’s work sits at the opportunistic extreme in the scope of the projects I see encompassing unsolicited architecture, and that’s also why I like it. All of the projects are designed with the numbers in mind, they solve a problem, and they claim to make money. The lesson seems to be, when proposing unsolicited projects to unsuspecting developers or governments, you need to play their game, the money game.

* This interest shouldn’t be confused with any claim to the topic on my part ”” I don’t believe unsolicited architecture should belong to anybody (and if it did, it would belong to Volume who coined the term with their issue back in 2008).

For more Bjarke action, here’s an interview I did with him for the radio in Melbourne back in July 2008.

All of this conspires to produce a design landscape of unprecedented complexity, one that cannot be adequately addressed by the traditional tools of the design professions.

Calls for a new kind of designer stretch back to the middle of the 20th century, most famously in Buckminster Fuller’s description of a “synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist and evolutionary strategist.” [1] A role that Bruce Mau has more recently embraced in the establishment of his Institute Without Boundaries, acknowledging that the complexity of today’s problems would necessitate these roles to be taken up by the “collective intelligence of a team”. [2] MOMA curator of design Paola Antonelli calls for designers to adopt the role of “society’s new pragmatic intellectuals ”¦ changing from form giver to fundamental interpreter of an extraordinarily dynamic reality.” [3] John Thackara similarly calls for designers to “evolve from being the individual authors of objects or buildings, to being the facilitators of change among large groups of people.” [4]

But with all of this demand for change, where are the results? While the mainstream may be slow to adapt, there are designers around the world eagerly carving out opportunities for new kinds of engagement, new kinds of collaboration, new kinds of practice and new kinds of design outcomes; overturning the inherited assumptions of the design professions.

Here follows a brief survey of these new roles for designers, each representing potential futures for design practice.

The Community Enabler

The healthy boom of the past two decades has led the architect to become accustomed to producing boutique solutions for private clients; a comfortable scenario that has distracted us from our responsibility for society at large. By reconceiving the role of the architect not as a designer of buildings, but as a custodian of the built environment, the space of opportunity and tools at our disposal are vastly expanded.

Hunter Street Mall Newcastle in full swing during the Red Lantern Night Market, December 2009, following Renew Newcastle’s initiatives. Photo: Marni Jackson.

The Renew Newcastle project, established and led by Marcus Westbury, illustrates the value of people in the improvement of a public space. While millions had been spent by local government on rebuilding the physical aspects of Newcastle’s rundown and largely deserted Hunter St mall, the simple gesture of opening up vacant spaces for use by creative practitioners and businesses has kick-started its revival. [5]

The Visionary Pragmatist

The stereotype of the architect as an obsessive, black skivvy-wearing aesthete who produces detailed artefacts of beauty is a pervasive one that may sometimes live up to the truth. This is a potentially dangerous perception however, as it promotes our interest in form over our value as strategic thinkers. By promoting our capacity to challenge the underlying assumptions of a problem and to develop responses informed by a larger context, we can hope to be invited into projects at an earlier, more decisive stage, and not as mere cake-decorators.

Elemental, community housing, Iquique, Chile.

Chilean practice Elemental, led by Alejandro Aravena, views the larger contexts of policy, financing and social mobility as equally important territories for the architect to understand and engage. The multi-unit housing project in Iquique proposed a unique solution to the issue of the limited funding allocated per unit of social housing. By providing ‘half of a good house’ [6], and configuring it in a way that enabled future expansion, the residents can create housing of real personal value and utility.

The Trans-Disciplinary Integrator

The complex, manifold and integrated issues of today cannot be solved by architecture alone. To be truly instrumental, we need to open ourselves to new constructive alliances with thinkers and makers from beyond our discipline.

Design Research Institute studio session. Photo: Stuart Harrison.

RMIT’s Design Research Institute, established in 2008 by Professor Mark Burry, is a research centre directed toward collaboration and information sharing between students and professionals from over 30 disciplinary backgrounds. By harnessing collective expertise, the DRI is able to address major social and environmental dilemmas that do not conform to the traditional boundaries of design training. [7]

By transcending our own expectations and limits, we can in turn recast society’s expectations of what we are capable of addressing.

The Social Entrepreneur

The economic crisis has been heralded as the end of architecture’s ‘obsession with the image’. What this hope overlooks however, is the powerful narrative potential of architectural communication in catalysing complex visions for the future. Deploying this power to address social aims allows architects to contribute meaningfully to the future of the city by posing the critical question: ‘what if?’

PLOT’s Clover Block proposed for Klovermarken park, Copenhagen, 2006. Image thanks to Felix at JDS.

PLOT’s (now BIG and JDS) scheme for the Klovermarken park was developed in response to Copenhagen’s acute housing shortage. Through a media campaign which promoted their solution to provide 3000 units within in a perimeter block without sacrificing a single sporting field, PLOT were able to generate significant public interest in the project, which led to the government holding a competition for the site. Although PLOT did not win the commission, the project is proceeding nonetheless, providing much-needed housing to the inner city, and demonstrating the value of practical vision. [8] (I’ve discussed this project before in an earlier post on Unsolicited Architecture.)

The Practicing Researcher

Architecture’s current model of charging as a percentage of the construction cost does little to justify the thinking and intelligence that is embedded in the process. The inability to distinguish our conceptual value from our production-focused value that this model implies also means we are not natural candidates for projects that require the approach of an architect, but that may not result in a building.

OMA/AMO, image from the report ‘Roadmap 2050′, 2010. Thanks to Laura Baird.

AMO, the think tank of the Office of Metropolitan Architecture, was established precisely to focus on this type of work, by applying ‘architectural thinking in its pure form to questions of organisation, identity, culture and program’. [9] The project Roadmap 2050: A Practical Guide to a Prosperous, Low-Carbon Europe, commissioned by the European Climate Foundation, delivers on its title with a radical scheme of integrated green power generation stretching from North Africa to Norway. By not being constrained to any particular building commission, this research can operate at a scale that holds the potential for real global impact. (I have discussed this project further in an earlier post Whole Earth Rise.)

The Long-Term Strategist

While form is an important aspect of the architect’s repertoire, it is now just one of a larger set of tools directed at achieving results. The challenge of environmental sustainability has brought with it the necessary obligation that buildings perform as designed, and can adapt throughout their life to meet changing demands and targets. We can no longer simply design the object, but must also design the strategy of implementation and long-term evaluation as part of our responsibilities.

‘C_Life’ by ARUP, Sauerbruch Hutton, Experientia and Galley Eco Capital – winning entry of the Sitra Low2No competition.

The Low2No competition organised by the Finnish innovation fund Sitra made these long-term strategies a central requirement of the design brief. [10] With the ambitious aim of producing an urban development solution in Helsinki that would over time be carbon negative, the teams were asked not only to produce an architectural vision, but a future strategy for delivering these environmental results. By looking beyond the immediate horizon of project completions, the strategist takes on a greater responsibility and interest in a successful outcome.

The Design Management Thinker

One of the current buzzwords in the design world at the moment is ‘design thinking’. Although it has many definitions, one interpretation is of the application of a design approach to problems in fields outside of design, such as business and management. [11] This is heralded as a potential means for designers to expand their reach and to reclaim their instrumentality and relevance to other disciplines.

McKinsey & Company, SOM, et al, Vision 2030 Bahrain. From Al Manakh 2: Gulf Continued.

However, we are also witnessing the rise of its inverse; a more threatening scenario whereby management consultants occupy the territory traditionally held by architects. As the role of cities in the globalised world evolves from simply being designed to deliver quality of life, to being speculative instruments of investment, governments are increasingly turning to financial and management consultants for advice instead of urbanists or architects. This is particularly true in the Gulf region of the Middle East, where McKinsey & Company has produced the Vision 2030 plan for Bahrain, and have reportedly also been developing the plans for Saudi Arabia’s new economic cities. [12] This potential future should be treated by architects as both a warning and an opportunity for coalition.

The Unsolicited Architect

The potential for architects to address the challenges of the future are limited by our reactive model of commissioning. In a concept outlined by Volume magazine in the issue of the same name, unsolicited architects create their own briefs, identify their own sites, approach their own clients and find their own financing. This requires a more entrepreneurial mindset, as the tools of architecture and architectural thinking are only powerful if they can be unshackled from the constraints of a given brief.

ZUS, De Dependance proposal for Schieblock building, Rotterdam. Via.

Faced with the planned demolition of the building where they have their offices to make way for encroaching gentrification, landscape architects ZUS created ‘De Dépendance’, a counter proposal to reuse the building as a centre for urban culture and a hub for like-minded institutions and businesses. [13] With support from the municipality and media exposure, they were able to turn around the developer, who now supports their proposal. By developing a viable alternative, instead of merely protesting, ZUS were able to steer the project to an outcome that is both equitable and beneficial for all parties.

References

Acknowledgements

This piece was written in July 2010 for Architecture Review Australia #116: Future Cites, published under the title ‘Future Practice’. Big Thanks to Mat Ward at AR, Tobias Pond and Timothy Moore for various discussions that helped to shape the text.

Matt’s presentation formed part of the ‘Near Futures’ chapter of the day, jumping from definitions of design, power sockets that look like faces, two-dimensional tomatoes in space (seriously), and of course a dash of BERG’s own design projects. It was a fantastic and fascinating lecture, you can catch the video of a similar delivery from the Reboot conference earlier in the year.

Matt refers to BERG as a ‘product invention company’, a fairly modest description for a studio which often seems to be making nothing short of magic. They created a compelling vision of a tablet magazine before the iPad even existed; they turned the presumably dull calculation of the readable volume of a RFID card into a viral video; and exposed the league tables of Britain’s public schools with little smiling buildings.

Immaterials: the ghost in the field, a video explanation of BERG’s Touch project to visualise the readable volume of RFID.

Many of their ideas or projects are communicated in short films which have arguably become BERG’s trademark, being endlessly embedded and discussed all over the web. Mixing matter-of-fact descriptions and beautiful imagery with elegant production design, the films reveal the studio’s generous approach to sharing their ideas beyond the office.

My image from the outside is of a group of thinkers and tinkerers, playing with technology, reading widely, taking things apart, drinking lots of coffee, and putting them back together again, only better. To think of BERG as our contemporary Eameses (that’s not mine, somebody said it on the tweets, but I have no idea who), is a useful comparison, if not one that places unwieldy expectations on such a young studio.

Like the work of the Eameses for Polaroid for instance, where the explanation and narrative is indistinguishable from the product for sale, BERG’s commercial work feels like an experiment they want to share with us. Their Making Future Magic project even spawned an app released by their collaborators Dentsu, so you too can wave words of light about at home, if that’s your thing, and judging by the Flickr group, it turns out to be quite a few people’s thing.

My attempt at a hovering love heart using the Penki app for iPhone. Developed by BERG and Dentsu London.

But what really seems to separate them is their ability to transgress disciplinary boundaries. The projects above aren’t exclusively web, product, interaction design or software, but a fluid combination. To explore this idea of an emerging discipline or new model of the designer further, I started by asking Matt about his favoured definition of design by his partner Jack Schulz, which simply states that ‘Design is about cultural invention.’

Matt Webb: I don’t have a design background, so one of the things I’m curious about running this design studio is what is design anyway? To break it apart for myself I started keeping a list of every time somebody used ‘designer’ as their job role, and I got up to seven mutually incompatible descriptions. So I started looking for other definitions of what design could be. There’s communication, product invention, understanding the world, design fiction – all these are valid. But the one that best describes the thing that we do, is we attempt to invent things and create culture. It’s not just enough to invent something and see it once, you have to change the world around you, get underneath it, interfere with it somehow, because otherwise you’re just problem solving. And I wont say that design has an exclusive hold over this – you can invent things and change culture with art, music, business practices, ethnography, market research; all of these are valid too – design just happens to be the way we do it.

Olinda, one of the most product-y projects by BERG, a digital radio hooked up to social networks that subtly displays when and what your friends are listening to.

Rory Hyde: I like this model of the designer that doesn’t solve problems but that creates culture. Are you thinking about value when you are doing this, or are you more thinking about interestingness, or things that make you smile? Are you consciously out there trying to make products, or does that just happen by accident?

MW: I think the idea of products is really important. I have these things I look for in our work; one is hope, I think our things should be hopeful, and not just functional. Another is that it should be beautiful, inventive and mainstream. I think mainstream is important because otherwise you’re just affecting a few people. A product is a good gate because you start to ask ‘how is this going to be consumed by the market?’ We don’t have many ways of judging whether something is really good, and money is one of them. And that’s kind of what products do.

I will say something about why to invent as well. Because you could see our work as experimental, or science-fiction, or futuristic; but I would say – and others in the studio may not agree with me – that our design is essentially a political act. We design ‘normative’ products, normative being that you design for the world as it should be. Invention is always for the world as it should be, and not for the world you are in. By designing it, it’s a bit like the way the Earth attracts the moon, and the moon attracts the Earth just a tiny bit. Design these products and you’ll move the world just slightly in that direction.

Availabot, a small character plugged into your computer who stands up when a particular friend comes online, and falls over when they go – a more human indicator of being able to chat with a friend on Skype.

RH: It also feels as though you’re building on a long history, I mean, you talk about the practice being about the future, but a lot of slides you showed were of the history of design fiction – such as HAL from 2001, the film War Games, and the incredible speculative images of a suburban future in space as imagined by NASA in the 70s. What role does history play in the studio?

MW: I try not to make a distinction between things that are true and things that are fictional, because they all hang together in the same human brains. Anything whether it’s 2001, or the history of Levittown, or what’s on the market right now in the Argos catalogue is ripe for research. We’re mining the same fields. Some things are conscious probes, so 2001 is a conscious probe into what it would be like to have a world where we’re surrounded by artificial intelligence. Kubrick said that very specifically. War Games probably isn’t the same kind of intellectual probe, but it works all the same because it hangs together as a story, and that means it’s true, in a certain kind of way. I don’t like to make a distinction between these things as research.

The incredible Making Future Magic video by BERG and Dentsu London.

RH: Just to explore this Argos example further, in your presentation you said that ‘the future is happening right now under our noses, and it’s in the Argos catalogue’, which you also referred to as the ‘evolutionary soup’ of product development. In particular you focused on cheap toys which employed what you termed as ‘fractional AI’. What is fractional AI and how is it different to what we understand as regular artificial intelligence?

MW: The first thing I’ll say is that the idea of Chinese manufacturers as an evolutionary soup is an idea of Bruce Sterling’s from a short story. When you read the Argos catalogue, you get the feeling that things aren’t being designed deliberately, but they’re just throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks, and that is a system for natural selection.

About ‘fractional AI’, I reference two things there, one is artificial intelligence as it is seen in movies of the mid twentieth century; human scale or larger intelligences as seen in books by Arthur C. Clarke or Isaac Asimov for instance. But then there’s this idea which emerged in the early 1900s of fractional horsepower. Horsepower used to be the thing that we measured factories by, but fractional horsepower says that instead of motors that are as big as buildings, we could have motors that were as big as fists. So we could take the fruits of these factories, make them really really tiny, and put them in our homes. Fractional horsepower enabled genuine improvements in quality of life, through appliances like washing machines, refrigerators and hairdryers. And we had half a million fractional horsepower motors in the US by the 1920s, it was an incredible explosion that made domestic life better.

My belief is that we’re going to have the same explosion with artificial intelligence. And we wont see it as was depicted in films as controlling nuclear weapons (War Games), or controlling space ships (2001). Fractional AI means that the tiny things around us will be smarter. And the very first place you see this in a very tiny way is in children’s toys. It used to be that children played with Meccano or Lego, now they play The Sims. The Sims is a representation of a world in which everything is intelligent in really tiny ways, and we’ll be seeing more of that I think in conventional products. What does an intelligent car look like? It maybe only will be as intelligent as a puppy, so what does that mean?

RH: How much of the intelligence of an object or device do we bring to it ourselves? You also showed these photos of taps, power sockets or curtain rails which we read as faces, applying a personality at some deep emotional level to random inanimate stuff in the world. It seems like this step to making things smarter or more human or more magical is a very small one.

Schooloscope, a project by BERG for 4iP, which ‘turns official government data about schools into easy-to-read English, and smiling faces.’

MW: We’re already doing this, if you look at the fronts of cars, they look like faces. The arrangement of a bumper and two headlights can make a happy face, or a demanding face, or an exciting face, or an ‘I want to go faster’ face. We bring to these things our expectations of what faces mean, so yes, we bring a lot to it by our expectations. But it also points to the idea that there is a role for someone in the design of the personality, which is increasingly the behaviour of an object. So when we’re designing a computer game, or a car, or an appliance, do we want it to make us feel like we can get involved more? Or that we have to be humble to it? Or that we’re in a collaborative relationship? It used to be that we didn’t think about these things, but we’re going to have to think about how to design them soon. And I think that’s happening right now.

RH: As someone trained in architecture – a literally very ‘concrete’ and often serious discipline - this idea that we need to design the emotions seems kind of exciting, and potentially frivolous. But I also feel like it shouldn’t be. Is functionalism still far too dominant in how we approach design?

MW: We’ve experienced a shift in the last fifty years, in that the bleeding edge of technology used to be industry, so the objects we got in our homes were the off-cuts of industry; look at computers, or the mobile phone, or the internet; those came from industrial mainframes, or battlefield communications, or decentralised information systems. We’ve experienced a flip now, the technology we have starts on the desktop, in games consoles, or from texting your mates. That is the bleeding edge of technology, and it is leading the way. And it’s quite unsurprising that the world we were trained to be in - the industrial one – was one that’s a bit soulless, where you had to follow orders, be a cog in the machine. So maybe we’re not quite trained right for the things we’re being asked to design now, which start from the domestic sphere. Now that’s incredibly exciting, because we get to look at other disciplines for where we should learn our craft, and maybe that’s character animators, child psychologists, cartoonists, or architects of intimate domestic spaces instead of office buildings.

RH: Just to wrap up with one final question, we’re here in the Architectural Association, have you got any advice for young designers about to graduate into the big wide world?

MW: One of the things that impressed me when I discovered the web was the number of architects who work on it. And I started asking them why they were so well adapted to work on the web, in this brand new medium. I got lots of different answers, but one of the things that struck me was that architects really understand how people - and specifically groups of people - respond to the structures and spaces around them and how they move through different spaces that have different expectations on them. We’re going to be in a world where there’s going to be brand new technology around us which responds to our expectations, and responds to our behaviour, which we will experience in groups. Architecture is fantastic training for that, so, know no boundaries.

A big thank you to Matt for his time.

Thrilling Wonder Stories 2 was held at the Architecture Association on Friday the 26th of November, 2010. If you missed it, a video archive of the presentations is available in four parts (1, 2, 3, 4) on the AA website. See also my interview with organisers Geoff Manaugh and Liam Young.

Images of the Earth from space hold a profound ability to illicit philosophical reflection. They lead us to position ourselves within the vast timeline of the universe and to question our place within it. They force a big-picture view of humankind’s achievements and contributions, and prompt speculation on the future of our species. These images contain a radical power to shape our collective consciousness, acting as a mobilizing force for the shared beliefs and moral attitudes of society.

So far this collective consciousness has been shaped for the better. Although only a small handful of individuals have witnessed these sights first-hand, the widespread dissemination of these images of the Earth from space has variously been credited with catalyzing the environmental movement, global action on policy, and spurring transnational collaboration.

The most influential of these images is Earthrise, an ‘unscheduled’ photo taken by the astronauts of NASA’s Apollo 8 mission in 1968 while scouting for landing sites on the Moon. It was the first time our planet was seen to rise above the horizon of another. Commander Frank Borman later recalled the moment as ‘the most beautiful, heart-catching sight of my life, one that sent a torrent of nostalgia, of sheer homesickness, surging through me’. The tiny, solitary blue sphere, surrounded by darkness, spoke of the fragility of Earth and the need to nurture it. It adorned the cover of the first Whole Earth Catalog where it was described as having ‘established our planetary facthood and beauty and rareness’ and became the icon of Buckminster Fuller’s concept of ‘Spaceship Earth’, a call for international cooperation on issues of global importance. [1]

In his 2008 book Earthrise: How man first saw the Earth, Robert Poole reflects upon the almost-instant effect this image””and the similar Blue Marble photograph released in 1972””had in forging our collective conscience for the environment. ‘As soon as the Earth became visible [”¦] it began to acquire friends, starting in 1969 with Friends of the Earth. The years 1969-72 saw no fewer than seven major international environmental organizations come into being.’ Released at a time when knowledge and awareness of the harmful effects of pollution on our atmosphere was rapidly spreading, these images of the Earth from space gave the environmental movement a tangible symbol to fight for.

Another NASA photograph, known as the Pale Blue Dot, inspired one of the most reflective and deeply moving passages on our position within the Universe. Voyager 1, having completed it’s primary mission and upon leaving the Solar System, turned its cameras around and directed them back to Earth from a record distance. Within the image, Earth takes up 0.12% of a single pixel, set against the vastness of space. The astronomer Carl Sagan, who requested the photograph, wrote of it in 1990:

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again that dot. That’s here, that’s home, that’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. [”¦] Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. [”¦] To me, [this image] underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known. [2]

Despite Sagan’s insistence that ‘this is where we make our stand’, images from space increasingly offer us the possibility of another home. Neil Armstrong’s stirring ‘one small step’ moonwalk in 1969 collapsed the science fiction idea of colonizing other planets and demonstrated it as a scientific possibility. But even more tellingly, when NASA returned to the Moon in 1971, they brought with them the ultimate symbol of home and American independence: the automobile. The photos of the lunar lander, with a flag firmly planted and the rover parked outside, made the potential of colonizing space a future we could grasp and relate to. This was the lunar equivalent of the proud suburban homeowner, standing outside, with the American flag adorning the porch and the Chevy in the driveway.

Colonization of the Moon did not take place; instead, our sights are set on the next frontier. Obama’s cancellation of the Constellation program to return to the moon reveals a renewed focus for NASA directed toward sending a man to Mars. Russian cosmonauts are currently in a replica living module for two years, while doctors and scientists monitor the physical demands required for the long journey to the red planet. China, India and the UK have each established their own space agencies to cooperate on this ambitious undertaking. Current estimates suggest humans could walk on Mars in the 2030s.

While much of the same 60s-style inspirational rhetoric of a brave new era of scientific discovery is being used to galvanize voters and justify the costs – the reasons for going today are vastly different. We are building the ark. With the recent development of the capacity to wipe ourselves out””through either global epidemic, nuclear apocalypse, or environmental revenge brought on by human-driven climate change””the single frightening reason to colonize other planets is to ensure the survival of our species. As Stephen Hawking said in the Telegraph, ‘I don’t think the human race will survive the next thousand years, unless we spread into space. There are too many accidents that can befall life on a single planet.’ [3] While evoking the spirit of Russian space visionary Konstantin Tsiolkovsky’s oft-quoted justification for space exploration of 1911””‘the Earth is man’s cradle, but one cannot live in the cradle forever’””Hawking’s version is deeply pessimistic, and tantamount to giving up on the Earth.

The habitation of Mars demands we prepare for the possibility of a negative impact upon our collective consciousness, rolling back the effects of the recent period of image-driven planetary enlightenment. Demonstrating that we can live on Mars shows that we have another home, and may give cause for carelessness here on Earth. Carl Sagan’s inspirational text accompanying the Pale Blue Dot comes unstuck, as his reasons for nurturing Earth are based on the absence of an alternative.

While not exploring space for fear of discovering evidence of an alternative ‘home’ that may be detrimental to our worldview would be shortsighted, we need to prepare for this possibility and challenge it with new images. But what kinds of images can compete with the inspirational power of a glimpse at the new frontier? In the last issue of Volume tech guru and former editor of the Whole Earth Catalog Kevin Kelly gave a surprising answer to this question, asserting ‘one of the biggest agendas we should have is to get a picture of the whole Earth.’ [4] Now hang on, surely we already have one of those. Stewart Brand’s famous campaign of badges asking ‘why haven’t we seen a photo of the whole Earth yet?’ led to the publication of the Blue Marble, a definitive picture of the whole Earth if ever there was one.

However, the Blue Marble is a photograph, and nothing more. Its impact on our collective consciousness was driven by aesthetics alone, and therefore its usefulness beyond that of an icon is limited. As the estimated threat of global warming becomes larger, our need to thoroughly understand our planet’s climate system becomes increasingly critical. Kelly is not asking for a photo, but a global atmospheric monitoring system.

Such a system was once almost realized. As Stewart Brand explains, Al Gore as US Vice President in 1998 proposed DSCOVR, ‘a space camera that would provide a constant real-time, high resolution video of the Earth turning in the sunlight, both for inspiration and for science.’ [5] Although ridiculed by Congress as ‘Al’s screensaver’, the project found support in the National Academy of Sciences who proposed loading up the satellite with instruments to measure ‘variations in the Earth’s ozone levels, aerosols, water vapor, cloud thickness, and the reflected emitted radiation””the total energy budget””of the whole planet.’

The module was built and ready for launch in 2001, but was blocked by the incoming Bush administration who were hostile to Gore and climate science in general. If ever launched by the Obama administration, as promised, the information it generates could lead to a new understanding of the interconnectedness of our global ecosystem. More importantly, it could expose the hollow ignorance of climate change denialists and drive a more constructive convergence of global efforts to head off catastrophic global warming.

When it comes to generating new images, architects too can help. We are the image-makers for Earth, but rarely do our images inspire shifts in collective consciousness. We need to work on creating compelling images of our future here, to ‘sell’ our planet back to ourselves, by creating visions that both allow and invite us to stay home and care for our planet. Like the hoped-for composite data relayed from DSCOVR, we need to produce images with depth; multiple layers that both offer inspiration and enable a path toward a tangible solution.

Some projects reach for this illusive objective by simultaneously capturing a future narrative and providing the infrastructure to achieve it. What most architectural propositions lack is a global perspective, a barrier most famously transgressed by the quintessential global thinker Buckminster Fuller. Fuller’s Whole Earth Game and global energy grids examine the crises we face on the scale required to deal with them. This spirit has been most recently evoked by OMA/AMO in the Roadmap 2050 plan for a distributed energy creation and transmission network stretching across Europe between Norway and North Africa.

OMA’s plan assigns specific regions to be equipped with the infrastructure best suited for local renewable energy generation – such as wind turbines in the Netherlands, tidal generators in the North Sea, hydroelectric dams in the French Alps, and solar power plants in North Africa. The energy generated is subsequently shared based on seasonal demand, an infrastructural collaboration that would transform Europe from the collection of nations with competing interests it is today into an integrated organism. It is Spaceship Earth in practice, deployed to head off one of Earth’s greatest challenges.

One need not have global reach to convey a global perspective. A single building, MVRDV’s Dutch pavilion for expo 2000 in Hanover, offered a compact, stacked ecology of diverse landscapes and inhabited spaces. This mini-ecosystem is an optimistic sign for the capacity of architecture to recast itself as a generator of sustainable energy and agriculture rather than merely a drain on resources. Despite its limited size and impact, it is clear how such a prototype could be expanded. What unites both these projects by MVRDV and OMA is the capacity to exploit the narrative potential of the image to reinforce their claims.

Yet projects of this sort are difficult to spot among the wasteland of excess and consumption, leading to the question of whether architecture really is up to the task. Perhaps, as Stewart Brand has argued, we need a new kind of designer, one who transgresses disciplinary boundaries to look for the shortcuts to action and results. A planetary architect, who can bridge the worlds of image making and global thinking; to create images with the instrumental and inspirational depth to convince and enable us to stay here on Earth.

Footnotes
[1] Buckminster Fuller explored this concept most substantively in Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1963). Although published five years before Earthrise, the photo was subsequently used on the cover of later editions.
[2] Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (Westminster: Ballantine Books, 1994).
[3] Roger Highfield, ‘Colonies in space may be only hope, says Hawking’, Daily Telegraph, October 16, 2001.
[4] ‘Infinite Faith’, Kevin Kelly interviewed by Yukiko Bowman and Julianne Gola, Volume 24: Counterculture.
[5] Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto (New York: Viking Penguin, 2009), p. 279.

This piece first appeared in the Moon issue of Volume magazine.

I spoke to organisers Geoff and Liam in a noisy Italian restaurant following the nine-hour marathon day of presentations to explore further their vision of the future for architecture, and what architects can stand to learn from exposing themselves to an expanded scope of references.

Rory Hyde: I wanted to start by asking about the title, it’s clearly not ‘the post-digital city in the neo-liberal landscape’ or something, in fact it doesn’t seem to have an explicit theme at all, but simply to be pulling together all things interesting, thrilling or wondrous. What version of architecture are we talking about here?

Liam Young: The title actually comes from a pulp science fiction magazine launched in 1929 and which ran all the way through the golden era of sci-fi up until 1955. Our interest in that a publication was that it catalogued a series of visions of the future that are very iconic of the age of which they come from. Nothing dates like images of the future I suppose, but in that dating you can see the consequences and the context of which they were made much more clearly. So these Thrilling Wonder Stories are emotive, full of whimsy, they explore speculative fictions as a design enterprise, and in doing so they both project what things could be, and at the same time they talk about the way things are now in a really unique and interesting way.

RH: This idea of the ‘now’ seems to connect to your work Geoff. Liam introduced you as an ‘archaeologist of the present’””a title I like very much””and you presented rats as a way of understanding the architectural history of New York; fossilised Playstation controllers as a projected discovery of today by a future race; and the idea of ‘animal printheads,’ or bees that can create concrete honey. Many of these ideas have their source in truth, as read (or mis-read) in the newspaper or scientific journals. Is truth stranger than what we can invent, and somehow more interesting?

Geoff Manaugh: Well, one of the many things we were trying to do with this event was to look at fictions which are stranger than truth, but also to leave open the possibility that truth can be stranger than fiction. After all, they both feed into one another. The imagination of new storylines, plots and fictional cities can often produce extraordinary things, as if out-doing reality, but then something comes along and you learn something absolutely wonderful about an archaeological site, or you learn about a new project underway somewhere in the real world today, or you learn about what Nicola Twilley was presenting in her talk, about the smell of the moon being accidentally discovered by the Apollo astronauts only to be lost on their return to Earth. These stories have something by virtue of the fact that they are real””they have a particular kind of relationship to the truth, precisely because they are historical, not mythological. So, again, it works both ways.

RH: The other term that kept popping up today is ‘narrative.’ I guess that for myself coming from the more professional world of architecture, it’s not really a term that comes up in the office for instance. Of course today we’ve had presentations from comic book artist Antony Johnson, computer games writer Edward Stern, and the author Will Self; all people who think about plot and narrative experience in a very intimate way. Do you think that narrative is something which is overlooked in the professional architectural world?

LY: I think narrative has always been a part of architecture, as has fiction, the critical thing is though that there are certain points in history within the canon of architecture that it has made more sense than others. The original magazine Thrilling Wonder Stories comes from a point in time when we were intoxicated with potentials of the technologies of war, before the horrors of war onset, but then postwar America killed narrative, and it became about rationalism. A similar thing happened in Germany where German Expressionism and the narrative impulse was killed by Mies and German rationalism. And then it pops up again with Archigram and Ant Farm in the 60s, where there’s a speculation about new technologies and embracing them to see where they could take us, but then that kind of dies off again in the 70s with Koolhaas and Elia Zenghelis, who’s work is more about a fantasy of the imagination, not so much about narrative.

I think there’s something about where we are now that fiction and narrative starts to make sense again. Just the scale of support for BLDGBLOG and other genres of architectural discussion suggest that right now is a moment when narrative, fiction, speculation and the future can again become a project.

RH: I guess that leads onto the question which is that you guys both teach””Geoff more sporadically all over the world, and Liam here at the AA””what kind of architects are you training, and what kind of architects do you think we need today? In the background of this question I’m thinking of the recent debate over the legitimacy of the architectural blog and what’s presented on these blogs, as opposed to traditional architectural criticism, which may look at capital ‘A’ architecture, or architects who have large practices who build large public buildings. It doesn’t seem to me like you guys are interested in that, but also suggests that there might be space for architects who can exist outside of this system.

GM: Speaking only for myself, with my background as the author of BLDGBLOG and with the kind of ideas that I tend to cover there, it might come as something of a surprise to learn that, when I’m teaching, I actually tend not to push my students down a path where they’re all suddenly forced to write science fiction novels, or they all have comic books coming out instead of buildings. I guess I see it as my responsibility as an educator to find ways to bring outside ideas and influences into the classroom, things that my students might not otherwise be looking for””but, at the end of the day, they are in an architecture department and they are looking for a certain kind of spatial education.

For me to pretend that they’re actually enrolled in the English department, and that they’re actually here to write short stories or to design video game environments or to work on films””I think that would be a misunderstanding of my role as their teacher. In other words, I think my role is to be a kind of conduit between the inside and the outside, and to show up in class every morning with recommendations for things that might give my students cool ideas, whether that be a film or an ancient myth or an archaeological report or a science fiction novel. In fact, I think this is a really important aspect of architectural education today: to show how advanced spatial ideas and design concepts exist outside of the academy, outside of the architectural press, and outside of built forms altogether. At the end of the day, though, I don’t think I’m trying to train architects who are incapable of putting buildings together, where all they can do is sit around reading comic books all day. That’s definitely not my goal.

RH: Certainly the symposium today wasn’t just about pure speculation, it wasn’t an abandonment of the real world. There was even a lot of talk about market realities; Matt Webb from BERG London spoke about ‘making magic’, but he’s also interested in the way people will use it, and interested in appealing to people’s human senses because there’s a market in that. Edward Stern also discussed a similar ambition to create a unique experience, while acknowledging his obligation to sell computer games. Do you think that architects can apply this same logic in the professional world, to find the gaps inside their traditional commission to insert some kind of extra layer of interest, or an extra layer of criticality, or a bigger idea?

GM: I think there is a way to do that. In fact, a lot of architects are already inserting these sorts of Thrilling Wonder Stories-like, non-traditional ideas into their projects; they just aren’t necessarily being academically recognised for their work. You mentioned the idea of the market, and I think you would simply be catering to a different market, a different clientele. And what they want from architecture is pretty profoundly different from what the academy wants from architecture””and it’s not nearly as dumb as the academy makes it out to be.

I guess if you’re trying to do a kind of trigonometric extension of the canon into the future, and to imagine where might we be in fifteen years based on how the canon currently exists, then you’re going to produce a very referentially limited type of architecture. But if you pursue a line of design that might have some narrative in it, and it might even have some kitschy or gamey elements in it, then it might not sit well with Mies van der Rohe, but it would still be a really exciting direction for architecture to go in.

LY: I think for us there’s also a very big difference between fantasy and speculative fiction. Fantasy is about removing oneself from context and disappearing into another world, whereas speculative fiction involves some kind of relationship with something familiar and from that point you project beyond. I think that in terms of operationalising that within architectural practice it actually becomes a really interesting territory for architects to start to work in, because architects traditional field of operation often takes so long for an idea to become reality.

For the sole output of an architect to be built form, for the sole practice of an architect to involve excel spreadsheets, talking to consultants, builders, all those sorts of things, really limits the nature of how we can operate within the world. But by dealing with a fictional project””not a fanciful project””but one that is actually engaging with emerging conditions or emerging technologies, we’re able to engage with it much more immediately than we could if we waited for those technologies to filter down into the market to the point where we’re actually building objects. I think it means we can operate with much more dexterity if we open up the gamut of what an architectural practice is, and not constantly see things as being solely about the means towards an endpoint that relies on a physical object produced.

RH: I guess just to wrap up with one final thought on this ‘expanded discipline’ or expanded range of sources for the discipline, is that what’s always surprised me working in practice is that clients don’t bring with them the baggage of architectural training or architectural history, so to work outside of that is nothing shocking to them, and actually to work inside of that canon, to bring that baggage of references””of the seemingly arcane history lectures that are fed to us at school””is unusual in the real world. So to me the agenda you are both promoting through events like Thrilling Wonder Stories feels both at once like a challenge to the architectural tradition, but more like a correction.

LY: Architects are amazing self-censors. We put the parameters around our profession much more than anybody else does. Part of my teaching practice, when I get students in their final year of study, is very often about unlearning all the things they expect from their architecture degree, and opening up the possibilities of what it could be. And that’s part of the game, to try and subvert the idea of what they think they’re supposed to be doing, which is a culturally constructed form of what the architect is, and actually thinking on a project by project basis or thinking completely within a set of interests that the student might have to determine where they want to take their practice as an outcome of their own world view.

RH: Well I think it’s an exciting time for redefining what the architect and what the profession is, so congratulations on a successful day and on pulling together such a great range of speakers, and I’ll let you get back to your dinner!

Thrilling Wonder Stories 2 was held at the Architecture Association on Friday the 26th of November, 2010. If you missed it, a video archive of the presentations is available in four parts (1, 2, 3, 4) on the AA website. A big thanks to Geoff and Liam for their time.