OD 119 - Spatial Richness and layered History

The "OD119" is the students house I lived in during my stay in the Netherlands. It is a registered National Monument on the corner of the Oude Delft and the Kloksteeg in Delft, the Netherlands. I am fascinated by the variety and quality of spatial sequences and the layering created through history. Other factors, such as laws and regulations and the resulting ad-hoc solutions as well as the current inhabitants, namely young, creative and energetic students are highly influencing the current appearance of this building as well.

The building is situated on a narrow and long parcel and has organically grown from the front part of the house to ultimately cover the entire place. At present one still refers to the "Voorhuis" and the "Achterhuis" each with their individual staircases. Every Floor has its own kitchen and bathroom/shower, and there is one central commons room adjacing the bike shed on the ground floor. Despite the long corridors resulting from the narrow parcel, almost every part of the semi-public circulation space gets light from a different orientation due to a variety of irregular exterior openings.

One likes to speculate about the stories behind the clash of forces taken into absurd dimensions on various places in the house. The standard green and beige colors stretching all over the interior due to a monumental preservation law; A stucco ceiling and a fireplace that are cut in half by a later erected wall; The only bathtub of the house that can only be accessed if walking through the smallest kitchen; The trim of a doorframe that extends further along the wall until it touches a corner; The antique wholewood crafted railing on the back stairs covered with layers of paint and and clothes; A disused voided furnace, now containing a fridge and a gas cooker; And the layers of sometimes disused electrical and telecomunications cables and their apparatures or the variety of water and sewage pipes stretching over the entire house like a spiderweb, blending into the exisiting walls with the same color as if they were a new type of ornament.

The spatial configurations can be read with a portion of humour and add to the production of strange, unforseenable daily situations. This enriches the notion of dutch student life. But an additional layer has invaded this particular house along with the students. A kind of all over graffiti culture reaching from painted brick walls to exchange of fiddling messages on the markerboards act as physical extension of online forums. Comments, poetry and new house rules are posted on different locations, mostly commented and extended or modified by other inhabitants.

Most individual rooms are higher than wide, thus the space is used in three dimensions. Practically everybody sleeps in a loft bed, still having plenty of workspace below. But three-dimensionality stretches beyond the individual rooms to the organization of the house at large. Split levels and double heights result less from deliberacy than from the constant modification and reorganization of the interior over history. This questions the role of authorship and the designer. It seems that organically grown structures within certain restrictions and contexts can create unforseenable qualities and layers of lecture and interpretation.

CSI SP Exhibition Opening at the TU Delft

On Friday the exhibition of the results from the CSI SP Workshop has opened. The work of all participant is exposed along the corridors of the faculty. A selection of the enormous amount of information gathered in São Paolo this April has been condensed and graphically reworked. My personal research with Marleen de Ruijter regarding the squatter movement in Cortiços is part of this larger frame. One wishes to have more time to go more in depth as most works including my own has not yet reached a relevant intellectual depth. I personally see the exposition as a fruitful contribution to the creation of awareness of informal processes and urban poverty at large among other students and as a first step for further investigations in one particular of the multiplicity of treated themes.

In a participatory approach the exposition was completed by the visitors, fixing around two hundred cards with photos taken by participants during the workshop on to the largest magnetic wall of the exposition.

A virtual version of the exposition should be online soon.

http://www.urbandetectives.com/projects/csi/sp/?v=post&p=postexpo&lang=en

From Architect to Paperboy - Robert Winkel and Mei

The architectural office of Robert Winkel, Mei architects & city planners Rotterdam released the first edition of the "Mei Krant" last month. I had to smirk about the lucid wordplays with the word Mei throughout the publication that has the format of a polemical imitation of commuter newspapers. Obviously the Meikrant-team must have had a great time editing the variety of articles, especially the riddle and gossip section. But Winkel does make a fruitful contribution to the debate on copyright and originality in architecture. Titled "Copyright is for loosers ©®" his essay dismisses the hopless 19th century idea of explicit authorship in architecture and pledges for an affiliation to the cut and paste culture that emerged in new media and Hip-Hop culture. He argues for the emergence of a regulated creative commons system for architecture opposed to the deperate attempt of architects to control every detail of the buildings appearance including the prohibition of changes a posteriori of which the most prominent example might be Richard Meyers The Hague City Hall. Instead Winkel accepts and embraces changes made by inhabitants as part of a normal cycle in a buildings evolution.

Winkel is also a practicing example of "open source architecture", drawing only principle schemes and rough details of certain façade parts in a big scale project Schiecentrale, deliberately leaving room for cheap and practical ad-hoc and on site solutions. This might be a more successful strategy than the desperate attempt to control every corner with a swiss precision. I think here in particular of Anette Gigons complaints about the sloppy nature of execution on big scale construction sites in the Netherlands related to their Housing project in Almere. Wikel and his team probably have a less stressful life and more leasure time - or time to produce entertaining publications.

Issues can be ordered on www.meikrant.nl
Office website: www.mei-arch.nl

Google and the Architecture of Knowledge Part Two

On Wednesday, May 20, Lev Manovich, one of the leading New Media Scientists and Visual Arts professor at the University of California, held an interactive lecture with the self-assigned title "What would Google do with Architecture?". The lecture was placed within the lecture series "The Architecture of Knowledge - The Future of the Public Library" of the Netherlands Architectuurinstitut NAi. I was dealing with his benchmark book "The language of New Media" in an essay two months ago, so it was interesting to see the naturalized russian immigrant in full action.

Library - Media Archive - Web

Manovich sees an evolution in the typology of archives. From the traditional library with physical objects to a media archive (with broadcast material) to the web as interactive and ever-growing database of knowledge. This enormous amount of information changes the conception of knowledge, so Manovic. Knowledge is knowing where the information is stored. The web is organized in a non-hierarchical way, attached metadata (tags) describing the content replace a traditional folderstructure.

Data Mining Society

Tagging every scene of daily broadcast material manually is a task almost impossible to perform, so automatic semantic notation programs that are currently developped will play an important role in the future. With the attached metadata, finding patterns in massive amounts of data and acting upon them has emerged as one of the key new paradigm. Software like Googles adsense, Last fm or Farecas.com permamently scan your personal actions and general trends on the web and come up with personalized ads, music or airplane rates. Sensenetworks.com even goes further and analyzes realtime locations of individuals with a GPS phone feeding back information about patterns of similar users.

With API data including geotags provided for many photos on flickr Lev's research lab evaluated the top twenty landmarks according to the amount of all taken pictures on each location. An automatically created map with the density of taken pictures is one emerging representation for indexing the density of media and popularity of spaces and is typical for the new paradigmatic shift.

From "Object Recognition" to "Looking for Pattern"

OLD: Statistics / Modernity
- know what we are looking for
- working with a sample of a population
- modeling population as a normal distribution

NEW: Data Mining / Software Society
- not know what to look for - scan for unusual pattern
- working with whole population
- by aggregating information from different databases one can find information and knowledge which does not exist in any of them individually
- sampling extrapolation

According to Manovich, Google search is a new cultural methodology. Google deos not look at a sample of web pages, it analyzes all. From "Top 40" model to a "Long Tail" model. In this model every object finds its user.

When asked about his political position and his responsibility as researcher, Manovich refused to be political: "If Google was running the world, it would be more efficient than the bureaucracy we have now. I do not believe in cultural critique. Instead we can produce new structures. With my design lab I want to create new representations." Digital literacy is the key for accessing this new world, unmediated spaces will be conquested. He finished with "Architects, you need to think like Google!"

We all leave digital shadows even if we don't want to. I can be seen on Google Street View even if I wasn't cybernetically active. Maybe Manevic is right and the global Mediatization is as inescabable as the global industrialization a century ago. The quicker we learn the language the more we can profit from it.

What does the non-hierarchical organization in media science mean for architectural production and organization? Will hierarchies in spatial production disappear as well? Should architecture integrate media and technology into its spaces or merely use it for production? Is architecture non-hierarchical? Who is setting priorities if not the architects? Manovich's line of thought and joyful experimentation is certainly enriching for a attaining a certain flexibility in intellectual thinking.

lab.softwarestudies.com

Lev Manovich's lecture was announced to be published on www.tomaat.org

The Stranded Decorated Shed

Maybe this isn't even worth a mention, but do to my momentary architecture project which is dealing with the hybridity between buildings and ships I decided this is entertaining enough. My father spotted this surprising landmark on the way to the historic windmills in Kinderdijk. Venturi would have loved this one. But do to its large scale the facade manages to be more than just a simple decoration. Seen from across the river its base is hidden behind the shorebanks. This irritates, but the riddle is solved at second glance. Advanced postmodernism, maybe? Satelite pictures reveal the two and a half dimensional character of the decoration depicting the building as a banal crossing between an offshore cruizeship and a factory building with rooftop parking.

Google and the Architecture of Knowledge Part One

{should have been posted on Wednesday, May 20}

Two months after the launch of Google Streetview in the UK and the Netherlands I got photographed in the streets of Delft by a google Streetcar while on my forthdaily run today. I saluded the the car with an expressive jump and a grimace and got reminded by a bunch of giggling schoolgirls shouting from their bikes that I will be made inrecognizable.

I wonder if a expressively jumping guy with an orange basketball pant is inrecognizable. Indeed Google has run into problems with privacy advocates and authorities around the world, pictures had to be blurred, removed or retaken. The hunt for the top ten strangest Street View pictures and speculations about the stories behind them has long started.

If we understand mapping as an abstract representation of reality then we might question if Street View - understood as geotagged, systematically shot panoramic images - technically still counts as such or if new definitions of mapping are needed. Google does not only blur faces and carplates, they also blur the border between three dimensional representation, and momentary snapshots of reality. Street View is just another step in the company's successful conquest of a seamless inclusion of preferably all information types of varying privacy into one enormous interactive database.

One recalls Deborah Hauptman's remark in David Harvey's book "Condition of Postmodernity" that local information and means no longer are necessary to map a region and that mapping is related to power aspiration. Spatial information is now gathered by satelites and a technologically equipped car, exceeding the precision of a local geometrician. A private company measures the entire world much more efficient than any public institution has ever been cabable of.

Instead of continuing on a path of criticism it is more interesting to observe the development of seamless integration. Still, the 3D city model and the 360 views are two mutually integrated but separate representations, interconnected with a cinematographically dramatized fly-in/out camera shot. Will the barrier between the two representations eventually fall? Is the panoramic image with integrated hyperlinks just another small step towards an ever higher resolution of the mediatized world?

WTF? T?F In Superdutch Orange

The opinions about Winy Maas and the dutch architectural office MVRDV divided. But one cannot deny their excellency in staging contradictory projects. The Why Factory (T?F) is a Think-Thank initated by Winy Maas and the TU Delft and "concentrates on the production of models and vizualizations for future cities. Anywhere. T?F makes new cities! It researches possible directions of our urban futures." (www.thewhyfactory.com)

T?F just moved into their new studio space in one of the new courtyards of the "new old" Architecture Factulty building of the TU Delft. The tribune designed by MVRDV has triggered a big discussion. Not so much because of its spatial disposition as for its signal color. One recalls the discussions about the superdutch orange studio house for the graphic design firm Thonic in 2003 that had to be repainted in green later on. I recall that as a quarter dutchman and prospective architect I also painted the walls of my room orange once. I was seventeen and I really liked it. I thought the tribune in Delft was a temporary installation for the demonstration of national pride during the queens day festivities two weeks ago. Originally even the historic brick walls of the old factulty building circumscribing the new hall were supposed to be painted. Unfortunately the old building is a registered national heritage, so the walls cannot emit the bright orange haze and have to do with being drowned by it, just like everything else around it. In terms of the International Design Seminar (www.indesem.nl) which is happening this week at the faculty one might argue that provocation equals user-friendlyness. However, the unpredictable sequence of follow-up colors and further modifications (by users) is an event to be followed.