Archis/Volume and VURB present the Internet of Things Workshop II: Builders at Play. September 2-4, Waag Society, Amsterdam.

Calling on architects, coders, urban geographers, sociologists, and urban explorers interested in bettering the city through digital means. Following the May 7th Internet of Things Workshop at the Staalvilla, Archis/Volume, VURB, Caro van Dijk and Alexander Zeh will organize the second iteration with the explicit goal of creating prototypes observably eliminating the division of virtual/real. Join us for a three-day hands-on workshop where we will create viable and functional prototypes for the city.

The results of this workshop will then be presented at PICNIC 2011, which will take place between September 14-16 at the NDSM-werf in Amsterdam with the theme of Urban Futures. The three-day festival will explore globalization and its impact on our cities, our society and our lives.

Click here to download a PDF with more information regarding the workshop, and/or contact Vincent Schipper (vs@archis.org) to subscribe or to learn more!

July 13-14, 2011

During a two week field trip organized by the AA (Liam Young and Kate Davies) in London, a group of 42 students and experts visited locations where the impact of technology on nature has produced extreme landscapes. The expedition combined nuclear power and space travel by checking Chernobyl’s nuclear power plant in Ukraine, dried out lake Aral, the rocket launch site at Baikonur and the uranium mines of Astana, all in Kazakhstan. As Unknown Fields network partner Volume witnessed the nuclear part.

Into the War Zone

One of Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Rules of suspense’ prescribes that the audience has to be informed about a looming danger (the classic scene of a couple enjoying a drink and conversation with a ticking bomb under the table) in order to experience the intended emotion. Entering Chernobyl’s 30 kilometer ‘Exclusion Zone’ this lesson of the old master popped up in my head. Passing the barrier (all had to get out of the bus and individually pass the gate on foot with ample checks of passports and outfit – obligatory long sleeves, long pants and closed shoes – plus signing a form that denied any liability of the Ukraine government for the visitor’s health now and in the far future) made entering a serious thing, but the following 30 minutes ride through woods and fields was without any trace of disaster. It wasn’t exactly leading up to a dramatic confrontation. Unless you knew. The only slightly discomforting sign was the absence of any activity. No human beings, no agriculture, hardly any sounds. Just nature as a pleasant postcard image. A couple of farms along the road had obviously been deserted long ago. That was it. But the 42 of us in the bus were well aware that we had entered a highly polluted area, that we were nearing this immensely dangerous nuclear power plant, a sleeping giant that even 25 years after it had erupted like a volcano and had been tamed at great cost, was still invisibly spreading death and decay and will do so for millenniums to come.

In the spirit of a proper thriller, misleading and redundant information came along. The unfinished reactor no. 5, surrounded by cranes was initially taken for its unfortunate sister no. 4. It would take another day before we would actually be confronted with the shrine of evil itself in full. For now a worker’s lunch and consecutive visit of the nearby vacated city of Pripyat would have to satisfy our appetite for drama, only adding to the suspense of course.

Nature Reclaims

Walking through a vacated town, where trees are growing through the tarmac and inside buildings, where the bus stop is in the middle of a bush and where most window panes are broken, isn’t an everyday experience for most people. Yet, films and photos have made this into a familiar scene. The wind playing with a plastic bag, broken glass all over, water dripping from the ceiling, an empty pool, rusty toys, these are just a few of the uncanny scenes used in movies to create a feeling of discomfort and potential threat. Indiana Jones must be around the corner and our guide in a semi-military outfit is only adding to the feeling that we are taking part in some adventure movie.

One shouldn’t get distracted by the romance of the surroundings and keep an open eye for the former beauty of the city. Life must have been real pleasant here. Apartments are small, but the large and well designed cultural center, a municipal swimming pool and a lovely coffeeshop on a hill with views over the lake are indications of the comfortable lives people lived here. But a series of mistakes, misjudgments, a lack of information and communication causing this disaster in the nearby energy plant, led to the hasty evacuation of all 50.000 inhabitants (plus those in some 60 villages in the wider area) 33 hours after the nightly explosion occurred.

The place is not only a commemoration site and warning for future generations, it is also a real life terrarium to study nature’s reaction to radiation and radio-active contamination. Mythical wingless birds, giant mushrooms, deformed bugs, and poisonous mosquitoes are supposed to populate the place, including bears and other big game, but reality seems less spectacular. Still, the consequences of high radiation levels are dramatic. The forest next to the power plant was completely killed by radioactivity (thereafter called the ‘red forest’) and had to be removed entirely as radio-active waste, together with all the furniture and most of the belongings in the houses, the contaminated machines, cars and trucks, that were all buried in mass-graves on site.

Facts, Bare Facts

The whole two-day visit, including a night at the local hotel (barrack) in the exclusion zone, was a balancing act, trying one’s convictions, trust and beliefs. There were no simple facts to be found. The whole group was wrapped in orange protection overalls, wearing masks and shoe covers and strongly advised to refrain from drinking, eating and smoking in the open. Yet the guards at the entrance gate to the ‘sarcophagus’ were sitting in the sun, smoking a cigarette, and wearing T-shirts with short sleeves (temperature was 33°C and over). During breakfast, lunch and dinner in the canteen or hotel, no one was bothered about his or her clothing, or the food (identical for each meal) itself for that matter. The second day we met a resettler, one of the 150 odd farmers that had returned to stay at their farms after a few years. This couple returned after only a year and a half. They were 73 and 74 by now, farming their own vegetables, feeding a dozen of chicken and a few pigs. When they had just returned they wore protective masks, like the others, but soon they stopped wearing them; too oppressive. And now here he was, open shirt, shoes with holes, but not looking unhealthy.

Another confusing discovery was the number of people still working there. Some 3000 in total go around the area or work in buildings in the vicinity of ChNPP4 to keep things under control, to monitor and prepare for the next phase: the replacement of the concrete cover of ChNPP4 with a more lasting solution. The isolation of the disaster area is in stark contrast with this ‘business as usual’ image on the street: men and women wearing suits walking from one building to another, guards standing idle in small groups. What is supposed to be a dead zone, devoid of life, is in reality still an industrial area with building sites and (a low level of) activity.

On our last day, in Kiev, a visit to the Chernobyl Museum produces yet another take on reality. The funerary chapel atmosphere of the place stresses disaster and human suffering. So do the portraits of hundreds of children that lived there during the time (not necessarily all dead now), so do the rubber suits and gas masks on display of the firemen and other ‘liquidators’ that fought the war in the first days, weeks and months. Immediate death, slowly creeping death, terrible pain and suffering, it is all presented and exposed here. A prayer and a candle for the Chernobyl heroes. The religious approach recalls Agamben’s thesis of homo sacer; by making Chernobyl into a cosmic event, of a magnitude that surpasses our imagination, the mother of all horrors, it becomes a sacrifice. By making Chernobyl ‘exclusive’, the rest of the world becomes normal by contrast. We can continue our lives – Chernobyl is ‘out there’, well protected, under control, a warning for sure, but first and foremost a safety valve to save ‘the system’ as a whole.

Outside the ‘exclusion zone’ the world feels normal, we behave like we do at home. The thin line of barbed wire marks the difference between danger and normality, between the wild reserve of radiation and the ‘natural’ rest of the world. One of the researchers in the groups had started his measurements with his dosimeter in London. Conclusion: radiation levels in London are higher than at the gates of Chernobyl.

Click here to order your copy!

When things start talking back, you’ve become part of an Internet of Things. Auto-sensoring, basic intelligence, interaction, we’re increasingly part of a world were things and living souls are equally connected. The fridge is a node just as you are. Volume #28 dives into these new dimensions of reality, into the consequences for design and for our understanding of our own position in the world. Coders and architects are different beings and speak different languages, this issue seems to conclude. Since merging virtual and physical requires knowledge about both worlds, this reality should be overcome. So this Volume is not just about framing the issue, but also about indicating a practice in the making: we call it correlation designing.

Volume #28: Internet of Things with:
Stephen Gage, Shintaro Miyazaki, Nina Larsen, Edwin Gardner, Marcell Mars, Deborah Hauptman, Ken Sakamura, Lara Schrijver, Mark Shepard, Tomasz Jaskiewicz, Ben Schouten, Golfstromen, Ole Bouman, Philip Beesley, Bart-Jan Polman, Carola Moujan, Hiroshi Ishiguro, Nortd Labs, Tuur van Balen, Ruairi Glynn, Justin Fowler, Eduard Sancho Pou, Mark Dek, Nina Larsen, Christiaan Fruneaux, Vincent Schipper, Timothy Moore, Amelia Borg, Lorna Goulden, Usman Haque, Ed Borden, Mette Thomsen, Dimitri Nieuwenhuizen, Ben Cerveny, James Burke, Juha van ‘t Zelfde. Also featuring ‘Tracing Concepts’ editors Edwin Gardner and Marcell Mars, plus our second Trust Insert with Premsela Foundation: ‘Trust Design 2: The Internet of Things’ editor Scott Burnham, design Roosje Klap.

Volume #28 – Internet of Things
176 pages, with an insert on Trust, Design#2 and Tracing Concepts
Binding: Soft cover
ISBN: 9 789 077 966 80
Price: € 19.50
Release: 15 July, 2011
Editor-in-Chief: Arjen Oosterman

Contributing editors: Ole Bouman, Rem Koolhaas, Mark Wigley
Design: Irma Boom and Sonja Haller
Publisher: Stichting Archis
Click here to order your copy!

For more info please contact Valérie Blom at pr@archis.org.
Click here for the press kit.

Volume has a vacancy for a managing editor!

He or she will be responsible for the textual quality of the magazine and all related text production. This includes editing and finalizing author contributions, proof reading and taking care of the textual integrity and consistency of Volume. Dealing with deadlines and timeframes is part of the job, and so is communicating with contributors from different cultural and language backgrounds. A potential second element of the position is contributing to Volume’s content in editorial meetings and with own contributions. Volume offers a prestigious platform and network to contribute to and work with.

Candidates must be native English, fluent in speech and writing, have serious editorial experience, be precise and deadline aware. To be able to participate in content production candidates should be open, curious, internationally aware and research minded. A degree in architecture is considered as positive. The position is on a freelance basis and (depending on editorial involvement) can add up to 3 days a week at our offices in the vibrant surroundings of the Tolhuistuin in Amsterdam-Noord.

Please send your resume and motivation to Lilet Breddels (lb@archis.org) before August 1.

Volume is an independent quarterly magazine that sets the agenda for design. With going beyond architecture’s definition of ‘making buildings’ it reaches out for global views on designing environments, advocates broader attitudes to social structures, and reclaims the cultural and political significance of architecture. Volume is a project by Archis (Amsterdam), AMO (Rotterdam) and C-Lab (Columbia University, New York).

Summer 2011 Trajectory Public Forum. Chernobyl Exclusion Zone to Baikonur Cosmodrome. Architectural Association Gallery, 11 July, 2011, 11 am – 4 pm. 36 Bedford Square, London. Free for all. Click here for more information.

This year, on the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s first manned space flight and the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, we will pack our Geiger counters and space Suits and chart a course from the atomic to the cosmic to investigate the strange natures that stretch from the exclusion zone of the Chernobyl Nuclear Reactor in the Ukraine and Gagarin’s launchpad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Before we leave on our research trip we will be joined in London by an ensemble of artists, authors, scientists and designers to present a series of projects and thoughts motivated by the sites we will be visiting. Through the lens of these 2 events we will re-examine our contemporary attitudes toward the natural world and discuss our cross section through the haunting landscapes of the ecologically fragile and the technologically obsolete. We will explore the ‘Unknown Fields’ between cultivation and nature, between utopian projections and dystopian ruins as we spin cautionary tales of a new kind of wilderness.

This article was written by Martijn de Waal and published on The Mobile City. Click here for the original version.

Last Thursday I attended the first edition of the Cognitive Cities Salon in Amsterdam. Here are some notes on two of the lectures. What I found interesting was that both were addressing urban design not as primarily an aesthetic discipline but as a social and cultural one. Caro van Dijk discussed the design of urban and virtual objects around which urban publics can form and thus bring about an urban public sphere. Edwin Gardner looked at the use of computer algorithms to make urban design more adaptive to the needs of citizens.

Making public space with urban objects
Caro van Dijk is one of the co-organizers (together with Archis and VURB) of an upcoming workshop on the internet of things and architecture. She introduced the design-approach that they would like to use as a point of departure for the workshop (presumably to take place during picnic 2011, here in Amsterdam in september.

This approach is based upon Yiri Engestrom’s notion that:

“people don’t just connect to each other, they connect through a shared object.”

Whereas Engestrom is concerned with the role of social objects that can be shared through social networks, Van Dijk looked back into the history of architecture and found inspiration in Aldo van Eyck’s playgrounds. After the second world war this Dutch Archtiect designed more than 700 playgrounds for the city of Amsterdam which transformed numerous open and often derelict city spaces. These playground consisted of bare, geometrcial shapes functioning as sandpits and climbing frames.

These interventions did two important things, Van Dijk Explained. First, because of the use-value of those objects for kids, they turned underused spaces into public spaces, where people started to hang-out, take notice of each other, interact, meet up. In other words: these objects brought about an urban public sphere. Perhaps as important is that they were able to do this because of the bare structure of these objects. The use of these objects wasn’t prescripted, but afforded an open sense of play. Kids could use their own imagination and use the tools as props in their own stories or events. (A similar claim for the design of open ended play was made earlier that evening by Kars Alfrink of Hubbub, see also here.)

Van Dijk compared this approach with Primal Source, a project by Usman Haque, that was carried out at the Glow-festival in Santa Monica in 2008. This installation consisted out of colorful projections on a waterscreen. The shapes, colors, rhythms and intenstiy of these pojections were determined by software analyses of the reactions of the public picked up by 8 microphones. This provoked the audience to start singing, yelling, and clapping, sometimes individually, sometimes in concert. Thus, a public that shared a communal experience emerged out of the collective, interactive use of the art-installation.

Can we now make use of new media technologies to design urban interventions that do something similar? That work as virtual/physical/hybrid objects around which (temporarily) urban publics can form, thus calling an urban public sphere into being? That is indeed an interesting starting point for a workshop.

The Algorithmic City – a techno-utopian scenario
A second presentation that I wanted to highlight here was held by Edwin Gardner who presented his ongoing research work on the algorithmic city.

Gardner asks the question what happens to urban planning when we add algorithms to the urban planning process? How can we use algorithms to make planning and urban design a more generative, adaptive process, that works in the interest of citizens rather than that of project developers or investors?

So far algorhithms have shown up in ‘parametric design’ where all kinds of parameters can be tweeked that the computer will then turn into a design for a building or even a complete city. Gardner is not so much interested in this approach. The problem is that there is no relation between the paramaters, the shapes generated and the society that is going to make use of these shapes. Social or ecnomic data are hardly used as parameters and the result is ‘a fetishism of easthetics’, at best beautiful to look at, but completely meaningless.

Gardner instead takes inspiration from Christophers Alexander‘s A Pattern Language, a book that was based upon:

“…the idea that people should design for themselves their own houses, streets and communities. This idea… comes simply from the observation that most of the wonderful places of the world were not made by architects but by the people.”

A Pattern Language therefor gave an overview of various planning ‘problems’ and provided patterns that could be used as a solution, it was a catalogue of planning tools, that could be used to structure the city. These patterns or design-objects could be used to draw-up a city, the indiviudal elements combined into a ‘language’. Later, Alexander would say the pattern language had three essential features:

First, it has a moral component. Second, it has the aim of creating coherence, morphological coherence in the things which are made with it. And third, it is generative: it allows people to create coherence, morally sound objects, and encourages and enables this process because of its emphasis on the coherence of the created whole. Although A Pattern Language was first aimed at both architects as well as ordinary people who wanted to prove upon their enviromnent, in the 1990s Alexander turned to computer scientists. Could they design software algorithms that would help generate cities based on patterns that were livable and adjusted to a human scale?

Gardner picks up this question and looks at three levels in which algorithms could play a role:

1. Building Code
Building codes (code as in law) can be understood as the program that currently generates the city. Its restrictions and prescriptions determine the parameters that planners and architects must design within. Now, Gardner asks: what if we turn building code as in law into a building code as in computer software: ‘How can we turn building code around from a bureaucratic obstacle, to an open standards object-oriented programing platform with an ecosystem of API’s and apps empowering civlilans and city authorities, both amateurs and professionals?’ Can we use models of the city such that are currently used in BIM-software as living models, in which all sorts of sensor-assembled data about the city is constantly fed back into the model, and that can be used to develop the city further?

2. Algorithmic Masterplanning
Building upon that, can such a system be used to plan a city more organically? Now master-planning is mostly a ‘shock-and-awe’-discipline, especially in countries like China where complete cities are drawn from scratch. But what if we can make use of a living city model that anyone could add upon, that would enable incremental urban growth initiated by smaller parties?

3. Algorithmic zoning
Can we design systems that can temporarily adjust the use of existing urban spaces to human needs, rather than to the logic of investors? For instance, could we think of an algorithm that detects long-term vacancy of office buildings and comes up with alternative uses?

I found all three provocative ideas to think about, even though, as Gardner himself admitted in the subtitle of his talk, they are still very much techno-utopian.

At the same time, a presentation of James Burke showed that such a future might be not that far off. He is currently working on an app that would make use of social networking to address the problem of empty office space and the resuse of such urban places. Can a system be designed that allows citizens to temporarily make use of such places? The discussion learned that perhaps the sofware code is the easiest part of this problem (bringing people, ideas and empty spaces together). The harder part will be dealing with legal codes such as contractual regulations, and zoning uses that are related to tax-regimes that may prevent owners from participating in such a system.