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Sunday, November 7, 2010
Another interesting documentary to look out for is Ellas, Filipinas, produced by Marisa González.
In Hong Kong, 120,000 to 200,000 women from the Philippines work as domestic helpers.
They are women that have sacrificed their personal life to give their own family, their children, a better life and education. They do not have private life. They suffer racism, and in many cases exploitation.
In their only day off, Sundays, they invade the downtown financial and commercial district, where they transform and occupy the streets, bridges, parks, plazas, shopping centre, the main commercial street, and also the emblematic building of the HSBC Hong Kong Bank. These women change the meaning of the commercial public space, where they transport their habits and traditions through leisure, rest, religion and culture. The luxury downtown city on Sundays becomes a domestic space where they meet, rest, eat, dance, play cards and pray.
They impose different codes into the space, building a new and unique human cartography. Their location is precise, constant.
We haven't yet seen this 1-hour documentary, but we're sure it will profoundly resonate with us, as our own immediate and extended family history abounds with stories of displacements. Ours is a transnational family whirled about the world by the diasporic forces of globalization.
Here's the trailer:
This testimony given to the filmmaker by Cecilia, a nurse who has been working in Hong Kong for 10 years, is typical.
I left my home in the Philippines because I needed the money to maintain my family. Working as a domestic helper I could pay the medical studies of my daughter, the education of my five brothers and sisters and the medical assistance of the cardio problems of my father.
But it is difficult to explain the bitterness and the great sacrifices of our lives. We all feel very lonely. We live far away from our husbands, from our sons and from all our loving friends. We do not have our own family life nor a social or cultural environment. It is an immense sacrifice that we do not deserve, even if we are poor. We also suffer discrimination and abuse in our work during the long daily hours.
We must have high school or university studies but we are treated as servants. In most cases we are more qualified than our Chinese employers.
We have only two weeks of holidays every two years of work. Only every two years we can visit our sons, our family. On Sundays we are happy when we invade the open spaces of Hong Kong and meet together to remember our identity and our culture. It is the only day in the week that we can do our personal things like shopping, go to the bank to send our salary to our families, go to Church and send boxes back home full of clothing, shoes, books, toys. This is our only physical contact with them.
We can laugh, sing, dance, eat and share between women our happiness, friendship and the solidarity that we miss in our domestic work. On Sunday we feel happy in foreign land. The parks and streets of the financial district of Hong Kong become Filipino territory, like the plazas of our little towns. The HSBC Bank is our cathedral and the cardboard casitas are our home.
But we are homeless women. At 8 or 9 in the evening we have to return to our job. We cannot sleep at the houses of our employers.
It's interesting to point out the HSBC Bank that Cecilia refers to above. Designed by Norman Foster, its public space was created with a specific urbanist purpose, as as financial and commercial center of the city. An area that otherwise might be empty and abandoned on weekends is instead turned into a bustling small town, somewhat autonomous from the city and with its own parallel economy of exchange and transactions.
For related reading, check out Rhacel Salazar Parrenas' Servants of Globalization: Women, Migration, and Domestic Work, which briefly explores similar transient spaces by a similar immigrant community group, but in Rome and Los Angeles.
Particularly in Rome, they congregate at Santa Pudenziana, the national church of the Philippines; the parking lots of Mussolini's EUR; Metro stations; and crowded post-war tower block apartments on the periphery. In these pop-up piazzas temporarily dotting the eternal Papal and Fascist grid, Filipinos seek relief from feelings of exclusion both from their host country and distant families, find solidarity with their fellow countrymen, and commit acts of resistance through fugitive visibility.
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
We really like the idea of the 72 Hour Urban Action, a rapid, real-time architecture competition at the 2010 Bat-Yam International Biennale of Landscape Urbanism in Israel.
For this DIY pow-wow, organizers invite ten teams of architects, students, designers, artists and craftspeople who will be tasked “to respond to community needs and wants in relations to its public spaces.” Each team will be given up to $2,500 for materials, room and board, a central work space and a truck for transport. Engineers will also be on hand for construction and safety consultations. Starting on September 25, 2010, the launch date of the biennale, the teams will have three days and three nights to design and build their projects, some of which will be chosen to remain on site permanently. There's also a money prize worth $3,800 for the top project.
The deadline for registration is August 8, 2010. That's only a few days away, so if you're interested, you'll have to hustle.
Meanwhile, perhaps the entire Venice Architecture Biennale in 2012 could be turned into a massive 72 Hour Urban Action festival. Instead of installing also-rans from the previous year's Art Biennale or taking the pickings from an august atelier's dusty model museums or asking Zaha Hadid to make another sofa, the architecture world's elite and bright young tykes are flown in, given a slightly plumper budget and then let loose in Venice and the surrounding salt marshes, with some perhaps venturing inland to the industrial landscapes of Veneto.
Just as at Bat-Yam, they have 3 days (could be longer) to design and build a project that meets a local social need or improves the urban experience. Biennale groupies can watch the teams while they work and then play around in/with the completed spatial interventions. They might even be asked to lend an extra pair of helping hands to hammer a few nails, to the horrors of biennale lawyers and insurance people. And in case you're wondering, the teams will be housed, fed and given working spaces at the Arsenale or in their country's pavilion.
Also like at Bat-Yam, some of the projects will be allowed to remain permanently. Every couple of years, new projects are plugged-in to the built environment, perhaps even to an earlier intervention. In this way, Venice and its environs are continually reshaped and renewed.
After countless biennales, we might have two Venices. There's La Serenissima, flooded and crumbling. Above it is the newer Venice built out of all the accumulated projects. This encrustation of ad hoc interventions is where the indigenous Venetians live and work, where the tourists buy their souvenirs after venturing down to the ancient city below.
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
The Vanishing Mosque is a winning proposal by RUX in the Design as Reform competition organized by the Dubai-based Traffic Gallery.
Rather than a physical building, this mosque creates a place of worship in the spaces between buildings whose qibla is formed by skewering the urban grid to “forg[e] a forced perspective view in the direction of Mecca.”
Rather than an impervious (or quasi-impervious) block, it is “seamless with [the] streets, connected directly to the pulse of daily, and open to anyone and everyone at anytime.” At other times, it functions as an outdoor plaza.
“The inside of The Vanishing Mosque is its outside,” writes RUX. “Its community extends to the limits of the city at large, creating a sense of shared ownership, collective identity, and deep roots that connect spiritual life to modern urban living.”
Stadium Gang
Friday, June 18, 2010
Last Friday, Chicago celebrated the Blackhawks' Stanley Cup victory in half a century with a ticker-tape parade in downtown ending with a rally at the foot of the Michigan Avenue bridge, kitty-corner from the recently completed Trump Tower. According to estimates by the city, 2 million people joined in the celebration, all jam packed in ridiculously small street footage.
A few things:
1) We're curious to find out the reasoning behind the decision to hold the rally in what is essentially a street intersection. The nearby Millennium Park is maybe too precious and dainty to survive the revelry, if it even could contain such a large crowd, but there's Grant Park. It's an incredibly rugged urban park, proving summer after summer that it can handle a stampede of wild festival goers. It's spacious, and there, more people might actually have seen or at least heard what was happening on the stage besides a sea of heads. Then again, why would you need a clear sightline when, even if your view was blocked by a skyscraper, you could probably get instantaneous updates and live feeds from your social network via a mobile device. It's the urban spectacle of the early 20th century amended by the network culture of the early 21st century, perhaps in the process mitigating the monopoly of Victorian and American 19th park typologies for such occasions.
But we'll probably just end up learning that the choice of venue was informed by budgetary issues or simply that the parade ended there.
2) We're also curious to find out what tactics the city would have employed if they had an urban panic on their hands.
3) We were reminded of Studio Gang's proposal for a sports stadium built right smack-dab in middle of the cramped innards of a city.
“Designed for the U.S. Pavilion at the 2004 Venice Biennale,” we are told, “the stadium design explores the potential of an urban stadium to accommodate throngs of people and disappear when not in use. The proposed structure would employ a kinetic seating bowl, lifted 30 floors above street level, comprised of a series of transforming seating and support elements, many constructed to fold into the adjacent high-rise buildings in a dense urban center.”
Considering the timeframe of its development, one wonders how much cross-pollination was going on between this project and the then nearly finished Millennium Park, that Frankenstein of programming and constituencies “lifted” above a multi-story garage, as well as New York City's failed bid to host the 2012 Olympics for which, at least in the early proposals, the Olympic Stadium would have been built on the West Side of Manhattan.
Perhaps Studio Gang's hyper-programming was more directly informed, after Burnham, by early 20th century epic proposals to build airports, not just way stations for blimps but humongous concrete surfaces filled with winged vuvuzelas, in the bowels of dense metropolises.
In any case, since everyone is predicting multiple championships for the Blackhawks in the near future, perhaps a retrofit in the manner of Studio Gang's stadium might be in order for that particular street intersection for future rallies. To use phraseology en vogue, let's do some urban and infrastructural hacking.
On the day of the event, skyscrapers pop out viewing boxes and lower gangplanks bolted with seats. Windows become electrified and aggregate into a giant television screen. Even the Michigan Avenue bridge is raised to reveal more seating areas. Someone will then shout, Trump Tower, transform! And it will!
Not only will 2 million people be then able to fit in but also the entire population of the Chicagoland area. (It might not, however, adequately contain the apocalyptic hysteria during the victory rally to be held for the Cubs after they finally win the World Series.)
When the crowd dissipates, so too will this hyper-intersection.
4) Just in, via @SubMedina via @loudpaper: RUX's vanishing mosque. “What if a mosque was not a building? What if it vanished into the fabric of a city?”
Stadium City
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
Friday, February 12, 2010
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Speaking of augmented game spaces, here is an interesting interactive installation set to come online at the of the month in three UK cities. Created by KMA, Great Street Games will be a “huge, participatory, high-tech athletics tournament” in which participants in Gateshead, Sunderland and Middlesbrough compete against each other virtually in real-time using the city as platform.
KMA will use projected light and thermal-imaging technology to create interactive 'courts' in which human movement triggers light effects. The physical movements of players determine the outcome the games, which will run on ten-minute cycles. Participants develop their game-playing skills as they progress through a number of levels to help their area to victory or to simply have fun.
The parameters of this urban sport are described thus:
The ‘courts’ created by projected light; each court comprising a central playing area and two zones representing the other two locations. Balls of light appear from the centre of each court – these projected images can be moved by players physically ‘touching’ them. The aim of the first game is for each location to gain points by moving as many balls as possible to the other locations. Games last 90 seconds and 5 games make a series – through which the games increase in complexity as players become more familiar with the rules. The town or city with the most points at the end wins.
It reminds one of the telepresent urban spaces of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer.
You're walking home alone one night through pedestrian unfriendly, darkly lit corridors. All of a sudden, you trigger a sensor and projectors spray the pavement with technicolor lights. Ebullient geometries seemingly float above the asphalt.
“Wanna play,” a disembodied voice rings out from a speaker.
“Umm, sure,” you instinctively respond, even if you don't how to play what is to be played. “I'll learn along the way,” you say to yourself.
And then it's hours later; the sun is about to rise and wash out the lights. The two of you promise to return the following night (tonight, actually) to continue the game, with friends to make it a team competition. It'll be Chicago vs. Manchester.
“Is this some sort of a next generation MMORPG game?” you wonder.
A week or two later, you find out on Twitter that there are other similar game spaces installed throughout the city, but their locations are a secret. There's no iPhone app for it yet. So you set on a walkabout, hoping that you might again trigger a sensor.
Actions: What You Can Do With The City finally comes to Chicago at the Graham Foundation. Organized by the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the exhibition features “experimental interactions with the urban environment [that] show the potential influence personal involvement can have in shaping the city.”
These “actions” tend to be modest in scale and budget, opportunistic and informal, communal and participatory. If broadly categorizing, they might fall messily under the heading of urban hacking. They are not the great tectonic reconfiguration of urban landscape and infrastructure dreamt up by messianic urban planners, urbicidal architects and despotic graphic designers. Rather, they are merely common activities like walking, playing and garden but reprogrammed with new tactics to “instigate positive change in contemporary cities around the world.”
As there are 99 “actions”, we'd like to offer one more to round out the number: urban golf.
While the rules may differ in cities and even within cities, the game is invariably played in urban settings. Rather than in well-tended lawns, players tee offs on the street, sidewalks, alleys or on top of buildings. Urban parks, it would seem, are avoided, though certainly not a prohibited course.
One aspect of the game that we find interesting is that it isn't merely the manifestation of ennui among the hipster crowd. It's guerrilla theater with the requisite social commentary.
Quoting Wikipedia (though we might be quoting an outside text copied almost verbatim but uncited by a wiki editor):
Urban golf is seen by many as social commentary on the nature of golf and its traditional opinions and attitudes [i.e., elitist, sexist and racist club policies]. Considering golf pompous, dogmatic and quite often inaccessible, urban golfers worldwide have adopted many different urban environments as their new course to engage in this recreational pastime. Commonly, urban golf organisations tend toward using disused or under utilised urban areas to play golf, not just to reduce the risk of damage or injury, but also as a statement toward the development and reuse of the city.
We haven't used this meme on this blog yet, so: is there an iPhone app for that?
If not, it probably isn't too difficult to program an app that maps out an urban golf course, pinpoints where the teeing ground and “hole” are located, shows and vectorizes the streets or alleys or parks or bridges or whatever disparate features of the built landscape comprise the “fairway,” and lists what hazards to expect, for instance, traffic, storm drains and street furniture.
Wired to sensors strategically placed on buildings and lamp posts outside the course, this app could even forecast wind speeds at various urban canyons. Perhaps a popular feature would sync your urban golf calendar to Twitter or Facebook, announcing your scheduled tee off time in the hopes that you will be joined by other enthusiasts.
Once finished with one course, it will direct you to the next one and then further on to another and so on until the final hole. Collectively, these courses represent a new urban layer augmented physically and virtually onto the city. At the end of play, you will have explored your city from one end all the way to the other end, perhaps experienced it anew.
It's worth further fantasizing, meanwhile, this imagined urban layer becoming more and more codified. Teeing grounds become permanently delineated, not just marked with chalk. Viewing stands are placed next to the hole. Building facades that abut the fairways will be colored to denote this border. As urban golf becomes grotesquely popular and insanely profitable through sponsorship, these courses become permanent fixtures, like (18) stadiums but carved out of existing urban fill. Traffic and pedestrian flow will be diverted. Commerce will colonize their edges. And the city will grow thick around these recreational voids, encrusting the stadiums with an enveloping shell.
When urban golf suffers the inevitably crash in popularity, what happens to its walled game-spaces will be similar to The Stadium of Domitian, which later became Piazza Navona.
It's also worth further fantasizing the notion that playing through all 18 holes across the city is a form of tactical tourism. The photos decorating this post were downloaded from Urbangolf.fr. We may be embarrassingly stereotyping the people behind the websites, but we're imagining them to be part of an underground scene, whose members are mostly of African and Middle Eastern descent — the ones probably fictionally documented in La Haine. At night after a day of parkour, they trace the imaginary outlines of urban golf courses. Starting from the suburban ethnic ghettos that encircle Paris, from streets disconnected locally from Haussman's boulevards yet ironically connected via immigrations to the rest of the world, they infiltrate the interior arrondissements of the French capital.
From cramped public housing high-rises of the banlieues to fin de siècle hôtels particuliers, from ringed roads to the spacious Jardin du Luxembourg, from the outer flames of race riots into the City of Light, a new breed of urban critics embarks on a self-guided tour of spatial inequity and conflict.
Fore!
We ♥ Irish Handball Alleys
Friday, September 11, 2009
This is a quick survey of sorts in three parts. The first two parts covered built projects. This last part contains two unrealized projects, one a student thesis project and the other a masterplan for a major urban revitalization program.
Published in 306090 07: Landscape within Architecture (2004) is Hans Herrmann's Public Domain and the Dispersed City, his thesis project at Clemson University. Sited at the intersection of Interstate 85 and Interstate 285, also known as the topologically knotty Moreland Interchange, in Atlanta, Georgia, this project aimed “to provide new forms of access to the space of the interchange through the introduction and incorporation of an urban park. As a device, the park is designed to bring focus and articulation to the roadway’s existing status as a public monument.”
Because this issue of 306090 is out of print and used ones are rather expensive, we'll quote a good chunk of the article, specifically the part about “organizational tactics”:
The park is arranged according to three structuring systems. One system is made up of a network of paths and event pads or surfaces that define activity zones both on and above the ground plane. The paths link event pads located throughout the park, while also carrying services that may be used to delineate individual event spaces. Power, water, and other utilities are supplemented by secondary sets of inlays (e.g., information-conveying conduits such as telephone lines, DSL, satellite feeds) that are accessed through the paths and pads. The pads and surfaces are paved, inlaid, or sometimes planted. To promote varying forms of occupation, the pads feature points of connection to the utilities supplied through the adjoining paths.
Throughout the course of a year, the paths and pads are opened and closed by a second structuring system: a carefully maintained program of plantings. The continual redefinition of space by shifting vegetation ensures a constant revitalization of the park as new venues and points of interest become available and familiar ones are closed off. In doing so, the park becomes a barometer of sorts through which the seasonal events and traditions of the city may be observed.
Given that the space of the interchange is largely conditioned by the daily cycle of traffic, time becomes the third structuring system. As conceived, the park has two temporal modes. The first is a twenty-four-hour park, comprised of the indeterminate spaces and events supported by the paths and pads, as well as the everyday points of operation such as service stations and welcome centers. The second mode is a carefully defined and choreographed set of events and venues that operate on a pre-determined timetable. That schedule is governed by a calendar of events decided upon by the city and its parks and recreation council. Those systems will function simultaneously to allow for overlaps of use and occurrence to take place while within the space of the interchange and the city at large.
As a civic construct, the proposed park supplements the interchange by supplying it with new opportunities for access. Functioning in many different ways to serve the public, the park and interchange attempt to bring dialogue to, and between, the occupants of both spaces, while fostering a dynamic layering of activities and interactions.
The East River Waterfront Esplanade and Piers is a planned series of public spaces below and in the vicinity of F.D.R. Drive, an elevated highway on the eastern edge of Lower Manhattan.
The masterplan was developed by multidisciplinary teams that included Ken Smith Landscape Architect, SHoP Architects, several engineering firms and the planning and transportation departments of New York City. You can download it from here.
Now it's your turn to let us know in the comments (or on twitter — @pruned) what similar “reclaimed” spaces below still functioning highways, bridges and rail lines that we have missed.
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
This is a quick survey of sorts in three parts. This is the second part.
Covering about 7.5 acres under Interstate 5 in Seattle, Washington, is the I-5 Colonnade Park. Weaving through this concrete forest are trails, pedestrian crossings connecting two neighborhoods, an off-leash dog park and a couple of picnic areas. A major portion of the park is a series of mountain bike skills trails constructed by the Evergreen Mountain Bike Alliance and its volunteers.
This park, together with Burnside Skatepark, pictured above, is an instructive contrast to the super-designery landscapes in the first part of this quickie survey. It suggests a way to rehabilitate these forgotten, dark urban spaces without eradicating heterogeneity and fostering exclusion, which often accompany so many regeneration projects. This park is “dirty,” not Dutch, but thrives nonetheless.
A short documentary about the mountain bike park can be viewed here.
Raumlabor's Spacesbuter is a mobile pavilion made of “an inflatable bubble-like dome that emerges from its self-contained compressor housing. The dome expands and organically adjusts to its surroundings, be it in a field, a wooded park, or below a highway overpass. The material is a sturdy, specially-designed translucent plastic, allowing the varying events taking place inside of the shelter — dance parties, lecture series, or dinner buffets — to be entirely visible from the outside and likewise the exterior environments become the events’ backdrops.
“When inflated, the dome has proportions of 65.5 feet deep, 33 feet wide and 21 feet high. The space is highly adaptable and will morph depending on the surrounding environment. It merges with its surroundings: enveloping lampposts and trees while yielding to building facades or nearby vehicles.”
Looking like a den for muggers awaiting lost pedestrians retracing one desire line after another in the hopes of finding an escape route is West 8's Carrascoplein. Located underneath railway tracks on the outskirts of Amsterdam, the park (perhaps landscaped boulevard is a more apt term), as described by Ian Bourdain, is “made up what initially appears to be little more than an artificial wooded landscape: grass and asphalt surfaces littered with cast-iron tree stumps lit up from within. At night, the latter glow and cast shadows over the concrete columns and undersides of the overhead bridges. The effect is at once calm and unsettling, at times empty and eminently ignorable (especially during the day), and at others (particularly after nightfall), ambient, moody and almost unsettling in the way that light, shadows and colour flicker across the site.”
The park may look inhospitable and barren in photographs, but Bourdain assures us that the park “has been welcomed by local pedestrians, many of whom now feel much more willing to traverse the space, as well as by those seeking an alternative urban experience – in this case, a dance of light and shadows. The risk of doing something quite strange in an out-of-the-way location has been repaid by improvements in the quality of the place and its attractiveness to people living elsewhere in Amsterdam.”
Battle i Roig's Parc Nus de la Trinitat (1993) is located in one of the most important road networks in Barcelona. With public open spaces at a premium, the designers planned out a very dense program arranged within two semicircular bands around a central circular green space. Squeezed inside include a water channel, two tennis courts, urban farm gardens, a volleyball court, a basketball court, a mini-football pitch and picnic areas. The layout no doubt echos the presence of the ring roads; nevertheless, through grade changes, landform construction and strategic plantings, the roundabout and its traffic are visually and aurally screened out. In some areas, you would hardly think that you were in the middle of “the largest system of ring roads in the city.”
(Or actually, according to this post [in Catalan; thanks, Louis Carrogis, for the translation] and the photos contained within, the park is hardly a peaceful respite. In fact, it's in a very dilapidated state. The entrance to the park, says the author, looks like an industrial zone or a big parking lot that's far from inviting. The pool is without water, and the bathrooms and courts badly need maintenance. The landscape is unsightly. Must be the recession, drought — i.e., climate change — and opportunistic squatters marginalized from other public spaces.)
To be continued.
