creative bike parking III

By the third episode of a TV series things have settled into a routine and something special is needed to keep things moving along. By the third in a series of feature length movies only a miracle or an obsessive fan base will keep the numbers rolling in. The third blog post on a topic? Well, I think probably only the author is going to care... unless there's something really special to share. And this is it. Yes, its the ultimate jukebox-inspired, robot controlled, multi-storey, swipe-card operated, architectural marvel... a bicycle parking contraption. This is the stuff of Wallace and Gromit's basement laboratory. In fact, its just thing I need in the basement. I will never snag my pyjama cuffs on a pedal as I stumble around in the pre-ride darkness again! A simple swipe and within 23 seconds today's bicycle is waiting. Now where did I put that darn swipe card? What was the bay number for the yellow racing machine again? 23? Or is that the old ten-speed? :-(

art dec-adence

The (now closed) Art Deco blockbuster at the NGV was a gallery-sponsor's dream. Plenty of photo-opportunities, advertising quality (and advertising) imagery, spectacularly sleek cars, elegant dresses, striking accessories, exotic furniture and household goods. Everything was designed to within an inch of its life utilising the best in brushed or polished steel, gloss black enamel and the finest shagreen. The NGV was the house of style. Had it been a shopping centre for homewares I may have been tempted to buy one or two of everything. A wander certainly topped even a trip to the local Ikea megastore, social-democratic, utilitarian designed, pine extravaganza. Thankfully visitors were spared the Swedish names (Does anybody outside of Scandinavia want to sit on a couch called Ektorp Jennylund?) and I suspect none of the goods was flat-packed (apart maybe from the glass and chrome Strand Palace Hotel foyer).

Its great to see the attention lavished at the time on linking materials and form, especially for mass-produced household goods. Bold colours, material contrasts and strong geometry are a welcome change to the current soft, fuzzy friendliness of much of today's design. Of course these were times when no heed was paid to environmental impact. Decadence was the style of the day (for those who could afford it and for some who couldn't). I hope we don't rebel against the current green trend and head this way again, but I still enjoy looking back at the glory that was. The greenest thing in the show was the jade AWA radio.

what's wrong with second life? [rant]

Second Life (henceforth referred to as 2Life) is the cyberspace version of the hole in the ground on Highbury Rd. that used to be a quarry and now is trying to become (for about the third time) a middle-class housing estate. I have never been into either 2Life or the old quarry. In each case I can see an entrepreneur investing heavily in the idea and then trying to con others into believing that they should pay good money for it. You can buy real-estate in the giant hole in the ground, or in the giant hole in cyberspace. Both would be a complete waste of resources.

However undesirable living in a baking, flooding hole in the ground is, with real-estate prices in Melbourne what they are, this offers a place to put a house in which people could actually try to live a normal life (albeit with high air-conditioning and heating bills given the micro-climate of the hole).

2Life is a place for people too inhibited to dress up (judging by the screen-grabs, in bat wings, expensive dresses and enormous boots etc.) in real life or too constrained by the dress code of their 9-5 office jobs to let loose with an international assortment of others who feel a similar repressed urge. What is the point in spending money on a pretty dress for an avatar!? Are these people stupid? What is so wrong with their own real lives that they feel compelled to invent new ones and play out their fantasies from a desk chair? I could well understand if people suffering through war or the pain of terminal illness might for a moment wish to step outside of the real and enter a make-believe world in which they can, just for a moment, be someone else and somewhere else. I can also understand somebody wanting to step outside a tiring real job and other commitments for a time. But to waste resources in buying a stupid dress for a character that doesn't exist. To buy "property" and spend money on virtual "architecture" is appalling. This is just virtual decoration for a glorified chat room where people lose focus on the content of the chat and instead pride themselves on their latest pixel pot plant arrangement.

Send the money to people who need it. Make a difference to people who need it. Buy them a real house. Plant a real tree in real dirt. Don't throw parties for avatars owned by other middle-class morons with more money than sense. Brighten up a person's life by sending them a food package. Buy them a bicycle so they can get around. Send them some relief clothing instead of buying another set of pixel lingerie. You make me so mad! Wake up. You are being stupid. It is not too late. Help make somebody's FIRST and ONLY life worth living. If you are not happy with your own life and can afford to waste money in 2Life, you can afford to do something useful for yourself in real life too. Turn off your computer and go outside.

creative bike parking II

Earlier I put out a challenge for designing a better bike rack (David Byrne gets a D- for his poor clichés). Nobody listened to my blog post but all the same, I have now found a lovely solution, the bike tree by Abhinav Dapke!
Bikes are kept out of reach of thieves. The owner is recognised by finger print. That's a great idea... as long as you don't need to loan the key to somebody! The version installed in Geneva apparently has a smart card which is probably, ummmm, smarter. In addition it has an umbrella to keep the bikes from getting rained on. (What bit of a bike can't get rained on? I am not sure about the need for this although: (i) it keeps sheep-skin seat covers from getting soggy; (ii) it stops dirty rain marking flash paintwork; (iii) you can stand under it to eat your lunch and gaze up at the lovely bikes. The bikes are winched up using solar power too. I am truly impressed!

P.S. I hope that Noisy Mynas or Pigeons don't take up residence. Maybe some graffiti for birds is in order.

a nest of camellias

This morning whilst I was eating my Weet-Bix a Grey Butcherbird was attempting to build a nest from pink Camellias outside our kitchen window. It would tear a flower from the tree, hop across and attempt to wedge it into a crook between two branches. Inevitably the Camellia would tumble to the ground. Unperturbed, the Butcherbird would grab another and try again. Sadly for us, and for it, the nest-construction was eventually aborted. A nest of Camellias would have been quite special! Imagine if we could all live in such a home: soft, pink, biodegradable and it requires only sunlight, water and nutrients to produce the building materials. I suspect the design might be flawed. After a few days the pinkness would be replaced with a rotten browness.

The bird could be heard singing nearby for a short time. Now it seems to have left. Oh well. Maybe an Australian native will work better. Wattle perhaps?

space invaders - the new gargoyles

The Roman ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum sat with their fantastic mosaics under ash and rubble since 79 AD until they once again saw the light of day and the tourists descended. I am particularly fond of the minotaur in the maze at Conimbriga in Portugal also.

Its amusing to think that some of the mini-murals by Parisian street artist known as Invader may be around as long. When I first saw these in the streets of Paris I wasn't sure who had made them. They cropped up in so many places, sometimes obviously threatening you from prominent architectural facades, sometimes peeping down at you from a more hidden recess. I thought perhaps they were a group-art project or a new kind of tagging.

Well, now I know that the hundreds of invaders are the work of one person. This website has maps and photographs of the invasion of Paris. The official website also has details of the international invasion including an image of the arrival of a scout in Melbourne!

Part of the appeal of these works for me is that they are scattered around the city, that with a map you can find them, and that they are aesthetically to my taste. I suppose they are like contemporary gargoyles. As an avid gargoyle spotter I can only say this invasion is very cute!

suburban wetlands - ecosonics

I used to live about a ten minute walk from a creek and surrounds that, long ago, used to be a wetland. Then it was just a suburban drain in a strip of land between a freeway and some cricket pitches and monitored by massive power-pylon robot-monsters. Then it was remade into a wetland again, complete with a secluded bird-watch. I used to regularly scoot down to the waterside on a hot Summer's evening to enjoy the frogs' competition with the nearby freeway traffic noise. I have since moved house.

As Spring has now arrived I am very pleased to find that once again the frogs are near at hand. I was out at midday, at last enjoying some sunshine, and I found myself in a wetland a 20 minute walk away — quite manageable and well worth the steep return trip. The frogs were making a lovely din that completely drowned out any traffic. That is quite a feat in suburban Melbourne! Its a shame about the ever-present DIY renovation junkies and their circular saws and routers. Even the frogs were stretched by this competition. Why aren't people happy with their homes as they are? Anyway...

I heard at least three frogs. Thanks to the marvellous Frogs of Australia website's audio resources and a CD of Australian frog-calls, I can say with (shaky) confidence that I heard: the Eastern Common Froglet; the Eastern Banjo Frog (I prefer its other name, the Pobblebonk); and lastly, a frog that made a very short, percussive "click" sound. I suspect this was the Spotted Marsh Frog. If not, it may have been the Striped Marsh Frog (named like an Italian beer, Limnodynastes Peroni). The frogs were set off delicately (!?) by the screech of playing Lorikeets, the warbling of Magpies and the playful antics of the native Noisy Miners.

These local wetlands are absolutely brilliant. I wish all storm-water drains and creeks could be de-concreted and replanted. The urban sonic environment would benefit immensely.

middle-class ruins

My favourite suburban architecture is the "middle-class ruin". There are a few gems around although they are becoming scarce as developers take hold. Once lovely weather-board homes have been left to fade in middle-class leafy streets. Their elderly occupants do likewise as the lawn threatens to swallow them and their decrepit, unpainted coffins whole.

Not far from my house one of these is piled under tons of scrap metal, old fence posts and palings, rusty car doors and broken garden furniture. If the house wasn't positioned prominently on a slope overlooking the street, the entire block would look like a junk yard. Instead the house, its balcony crammed to the rafters with detritus, displays its face to the middle-class street. It defies the trim lawns and designer landscape gardens, the ecologically sound architecture with four-wheel drive tanks parked in the driveways to lodge a complaint.

In the wilderness between my home and work a derelict building site for a dream home lies frozen at the moment the money ran out. Neatly stacked timber and bricks are succumbing to dandelions, uncut grass and ivy. Kids have smashed the windowpanes and scrawled tags on the rendered walls. Bright fingers of electrical wiring emerge from a hole in the eaves over the front door. Are they clutching at the space where a light fitting was supposed to be?

An abandoned swimming pool. Its blue paint is cracking and peeling. Slimy black sludge has collected at the deep end. A few straggly weeds are sprouting here too. In spring they'll flower into pretty, white daisies. Is that the corpse of a possum or a cat down there?

There are places even in Melbourne's suburban sprawl where the imagination can roam free.

artistic bicycle racks

Some amusing New York city bicycle racks designed by David Byrne are to be employed for a year and sold as art afterwards. Utilitarian "street furniture" never looked so... tacky? They're not amongst my favourites but neither are they as bad as the usual water-piping trusses found in school-yards and train stations across the world.

The stainless-steel "circle emerging from the footpath" is more a elegant design. Unfortunately like most designs it needs a long chain or cable to secure both wheels unless the rider removes the front one and locks it beside the frame and rear wheel. Is there a design that is secure, nestles the front wheel and bicycle into a situation from which they can't be removed without a key, and doesn't scratch the frame? Bike lockers are a good idea but very space-hungry and easy to hog with a single padlock, regardless of whether there is a bike inside. A better design is needed.

The Japanese have a couple of ideas that work with varying degrees of success. The supervised bike parking station, and the unsupervised footpath crammed for hundreds of meters with countless unlocked (or poorly locked) bikes. The latter option works on the principle of safety in numbers employed by fish schools and zebra herds.

notes on monuments

Note 1. In the paper, Public Monuments, from Alan Sonfist's contribution to Artful Ecologies, University College Falmouth, 2006, pp 9-10, the artist reiterates some of his ideas from the late 60's. Specifically, he suggests that a city should erect public monuments to commemorate the natural systems that they replace. We are all familiar with memorial statues, plaques, monoliths, commemorative parks and gardens, even symbolic trees. But these are usually placed in recognition of significant human events such as wars, adventures, political careers, lives spent in service of the poor or perhaps the prior existence of an important civil building or the residence of a respected citizen. Sonfist wishes for monuments to be made for nature. Why not place a reminder of a river that has been lost? A copse of trees to commemorate a forest that was axed?

Note 2. A monument is, by definition, something that aims for the permanence of stone. The ancient Egyptians had this idea and it has been dominant right through the Greek and Roman periods, the Middle Ages and Renaissance right up until the present day. The art of sculpture took until the 20th century to overcome its obsession with monolithic forms carved from stone or cast in bronze (See Herbert Ferber, On Sculpture, 1954). On human time-scales these massive works are sturdy yet... Andy Goldsworthy remarked when observing the stone about him (documentary, Rivers and Tides, 2000), that where it has bent and buckled in its molten form, or where it has crumbled and decayed through weathering to be returned to dust and recycled by the same processes that created it, it is easy to see that even stone is fluid. A geologist works with this same fluidity on a massive scale. A rock climber recognises stone's seams and pockets, bubbles and streams at the macro level. Yet humans are short-lived and physically weak so of course stone is for us a powerful symbol.

Note 3. A planted tree has an immensity, power and above all a dignity about it that a stone monument can never have. A tree, like us, has a beginning and an end, even if these are thousands of years apart. A tree also has the active force of any organism. A tree makes a lovely symbol without the arrogance of stone. The tree retains its own identity even when used as a symbol. A stone's identity is stripped when it becomes a monument.

Note 4. The act of scratching a person's name into a cut stone as a long-term reminder of their existence, presence or passing is ancient. Have such cuts been made in living trees for as long? What is the first evidence for the practice?

(Examples: the Dig Tree in Queensland has become an icon due to the unique set of circumstances surrounding its carving. The Sister Rocks near Stawell in Victoria are an indication of just how arrogant and ugly people can be.)

Image credit: picture from Wikipedia of the (ugly!) stone monument in Royal Park to commemorate Burke and Wills' expedition departure in 1860 from the site.

on surfaces and the superficial

Whilst it was Lin Miaoke whose face adorned the screens televising the Olympic Games opening ceremony in Beijing, it was the voice of Yang Peiyi that emerged from the loudspeakers. One girl was not pretty enough to please the Chinese organisers, the other couldn't sing well enough.
Of course television is more about vision than sound. Newspapers can present visual information too, but sound is foreign to the medium. In an age when radio has taken a back-seat, so much of what we build and value is purely superficial. In the text Ecological Design, the authors lament that since photography and architectural magazines have become the dominant means for architects to display their wares, we have become too concerned with a building's appearance. Insufficient attention is paid to what a building is and what it does, especially where its roles in ecosystems are concerned.
Many (all?) nations bury their dirty laundry, some more so than others. Here we see China presenting the face the world deserves... a pretty face no doubt. The face the world wants to see. But not the face of the song. Would we place a pretty model on the podium in place of the less attractive athlete who actually won? Not yet.

ecological design

Notes on the 10th Anniversary Edition of Ecological Design, by Sim van der Ryn and Stuart Cowan. This is a terrific book that collects ideas from numerous sources into a coherent statement of how we might best rectify the mess we have gotten ourselves into. In some places it waffles a little but it is always thought-provoking and helpful.

"In many ways, the environmental crisis is a design crisis. It is a consequence of how things are made, buildings are constructed, and landscapes are used. Design manifests culture, and culture rests firmly on the foundation of what we believe to be true about the world. Our present forms of agriculture, architecture, engineering, and industry are derived from design epistemologies incompatible with nature's own. It is clear we have not given design a rich enough context. We have used design cleverly in the service of narrowly defined human interests but have neglected its relationship with our fellow creatures. Such myopic design cannot fail to degrade the living world, and, by extension, our own health." (p. 24-25)

This quote sums up the authors' approach neatly. The text proposes that human designers should not "take from nature" but that our designs should actually become a part of it by playing the same roles as organisms and ecosystems. We must ensure that the processes we employ for construction, and the structures they generate, mesh directly with nature's own processes. Everything we do must sit comfortably inside biology. So far our actions primarily degrade it.

My response to this book is therefore, "Design all things within the parameters laid down by organisms and ecosystems." That's a tough call, especially for someone whose career is based on the use of equipment that is so ecologically destructive. Green Computing? Yikes, that is a far cry from the kind of environmentalism the authors of this book champion.

radioactive and urban decay

A re-wander through the site by Elena "Kidd of Speed" reminds me of the variation in the scales of decay. The radioactive shower that Chernobyl received will last many generations. As far as
the former inhabitants and those that have chosen to die amongst the poison are concerned, too long to contemplate. The city itself is crumbling. Plants and animals are taking over, a little at a time. The website is compelling. For me it conjures up John Wyndham's Chrysalids (1955). I expect Elena is correct. Human life in the region will most likely vanish.

The view of Chernobyl given by Google maps confirms my feelings regarding maps and wilderness. I include a satellite image and a Google street map of the city to illustrate: I find the void disconcerting.

an immanent aesthetic: art -> architecture

Notes from, Andy Webster & Jon Bird, Better Living Through Electrochemistry? in Artful Ecologies, University College Falmouth, 2006, pp 121-128.

Image credit: Andy Webster, 51 Aqueous Dispersals, 2006, Viscous Solution & Air, 36”x24”.


Webster and Bird discuss G. Bateson's The Roots of Ecological Crisis. The basis of all threats to humanity’s survival are technological progress; population increase; and the prevailing values of western culture. In particular, again it is the Western notion of self as independent of environment that is called into question. Shades of Deep Ecology here.

How and what can art do to change people's values? Well, I am skeptical it can do anything apart from change the views of those who care about art. In Australia at least we are in the minority. And to make matters worse, this minority is quite likely already converted. Art might not have any impact here. I can't see art stopping the developing world from desiring to emulate the Western lifestyle either.

Webster and Bird call for immanent art that allows the materials to find their own form, rather than having form imposed by an artist in a transcendent art. Imminent art they say has, "the greatest potential to correct people’s view of their relationship with the environment".

To a large extent I feel that any artist is always "discovering" the form of a medium. Whether that be words, sound, the line, plate metal, mud-brick, computation or any other. What the authors seem to be getting at though is a desire to explore natural, physical, chemical or biological (and I add computational!) processes by letting them speak for themselves. Yet the artist must always set up the boundary conditions. I feel strongly that art is a biologically instigated intervention in the world. We can argue about the degree of control the artist maintains, but there must always be some, even if only at the initiation point.

Immanent art exhibits physical, chemical or biological dynamics that act independently of the artist. That is, the art's form is self-determined, possibly for an extended period. Art that clarifies or heightens one's experience of a natural process (like melting ice, flowing tides, cell reproduction) can really be enlightening and I hope to see much more of it, even though I am a reasonably environmentally-aware pessimist with his eyes glued to screens for much of my life :-)

If anything really has the potential to change our view of the self as extending into the realm of what we currently label "the environment" I feel it is most likely architecture. This operates more broadly than art since: all of us, whether we are intellectually interested in it or not, engage directly with it; it is absorbed subconsciously and mediates our experience of the climate and other organisms. A topic for another post.