The International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (Icsid) announced today, that the appointment of World Design Capital™ (WDC) 2012 has been conferred to the City of Helsinki (Finland). Announced during the closing ceremony of the Icsid World Design Congress in Singapore, Helsinki will move on to be the third city to hold the biennial designation in 2012.

Appointed to cities based on their accomplishments and commitment to design as an effective tool for social, cultural and economic development, the WDC designation is an ambitious project initiated and managed by Icsid to promote the impact of design on quality of life. Since its inception in 2004, the project has developed into a tangible venture and is being recognised internationally for its ability to showcase the merits of design-led initiatives within various municipalities.

Icsid President Prof. Carlos Hinrichsen stated “The WDC designation impresses upon cities, the importance of design as a primary developmental tool. As the world seeks to understand the changing fabric of urban environments, the initiative is uniquely positioned to reflect on the many equations that collectively impact the quality of urban life. From urban regeneration and planning policies, to product development and technology, these and other developmental initiatives have proven that design can be used for the betterment of the human condition.”

For the City of Helsinki, design has for decades been a pivotal enabler to building an open city. The concept of ‘Embedded Design’ has tied design to innovation and has enabled desirable solutions that have addressed the needs of its inhabitants. Helsinki Design is also part of world design – it is created together with the international design community and the people of the world. Helsinki Design includes well-known global brands, such as Nokia, Kone and Marimekko, popular events, like the annual Helsinki Design Week, outstanding education and research institutions, such as the University of Art and Design Helsinki, and exemplary architects and designers such as Eliel Saarinen and Alvar Aalto.

The WDC 2012 Jury consisting of Prof. Carlos Hinrichsen, Icsid President (Chile); Deyan Sudjic, Director of the Design Museum (United Kingdom); Guto Indio da Costa, Architect (Brazil) and Se-hoon Oh, Mayor of the City of Seoul (South Korea) was facilitated by Prof. Dr. Peter Zec, Icsid Senator and WDC Founding Chair (Germany). A comprehensive SWOT analysis was implemented during the deliberations resulting in a unanimous final selection. A nuclear approach to Helsinki’s design culture is perhaps the defining expression of Helsinki’s inclusive vision for WDC 2012.

Mr. Jussi Pajunen, Mayor of the City of Helsinki stated, “The decision to designate Helsinki as WDC 2012 brings great responsibility and we accept this title with an open mind and with great enthusiasm. It is an important accomplishment for the metropolitan region, as well as for Finland and will be celebrated with the consortium of municipalities and partners that supported our bid.”

“The WDC designation allows cities to demonstrate that design can be a catalyst for change. Helsinki is ready to be one of those cities and is eager to become a global role model in 2012.”

Leading up to this moment, Helsinki shared a finalist spot for the WDC title with the City of Eindhoven (The Netherlands). “It was an honour for us to have shared the platform with such a reputable city of design,” stated Pajunen. “We are naturally very open to collaborate with all design-led cities.” A bond has been established between Helsinki and Eindhoven, as the two WDC 2012 finalists. This will lead to innovative partnerships between these prominent European design communities.

Helsinki is a vibrant community – a great place to work, live and explore. A modern landscape where talented individuals encompass every sphere of international and Finnish society, it is a hotbed for innovation and a positive environment for creative industries. The City of Helsinki will follow in the footsteps of Torino (Italy) and Seoul (South Korea) to develop an inviting programme for 2012.

For more information, please contact:

Ms. Dilki de Silva, Icsid Secretary General
+1-514-448-4949 ext. 227 ddesilva@icsid.org

Ms. Andrea Springer, Icsid Communications Manager
+1-514-448-4949 ext. 232 aspringer@icsid.org

Pekka Timonen, Cultural Director, City of Helsinki, Chairman of the WDC 2012 Helsinki Project Team
+358 50 337 4386, +358 9 310 37001 pekka.timonen@hel.fi

Eero Waronen, Chief Communications Officer, City of Helsinki
+358 50 547 73734 eero.waronen@hel.fi

Cuestiona todo lo que generalmente se piensa que es obvio  (Dieter Rams)

Reflexivo enunciado para la próxima exposición del Design Museum de Londres titulada [less and better] introducida por una breve pero intensa entrevista de Deyan Sudjic al propio Dieter Rams. Es natural volver a preguntarse ¿qué es el diseño?. Al parecer el propio Sudjic en su libro “El lenguaje de las cosas“ [reseña via telegraph] encadena más preguntas que respuestas persiguiendo el sentido de una disciplina que se desvirtúa y redefine a la velocidad de la moda. Si efectivamente, como afirma en esta entrevista de elpaís, [los objetos están lejos de ser inofensivos], surgen todavía más preguntas. ¿Es el diseño una herramienta del consumo? y por tanto ¿son los objetos el reflejo de la sociedad que los crea? Parece que en la empresa [vitsoe] que comercializa uno de los mejores diseños de Dieter Rams lo tienen claro  (no perderse el vídeo de la web sobre el sistema de estantes del diseñador alemán)

via designboom

O texto de Henk Oosterling Dasein as Design fala-nos não só do percurso da história do Design desde o seu início, há cerca de 150 anos atrás, como do seu relacionamento com diferentes artes e culturas. Apesar de originado pela necessidade do mercado para tornar um produto esteticamente apetecível, esta designação de Design foi levada ao extremo no início da década de 60, onde a forma e estatuto social prevaleciam sendo a utilidade dispensável.
Em 1990, surge uma 3ª fase do Design devido à revolução digital e globalização: a criatividade já não pertence só ao Designer, mas expande-se para um espaço intermédio entre criativo e consumidor. Esta mudança dá início ao Design Relacional, assim como a um novo papel social. A referência a este papel social já tinha gerado polémica em 1972, quando Victor Papanek escreveu:

“Design has become the most powerful tool with wich man shapes his tools and environments, and by extension, society and himself.”
Victor Papanek, Design for the real world

Hoje em dia, Dasein é Design de uma forma natural, mais precisamente Design Relacional. Aprendemos a viver numa envolvente sociedade mediática, em constante comunicação e dependência. Qualquer impedimento em aceder ao espaço inter deixa-nos out: sentimo-nos ostracizados e perdidos. E temos o sentimento permanente de insatisfação, devido à criação constante de novas necessidades.

“Passion gets spent so quickly”
Deyan Sudjic, The language of things
The Sound of Young America

Só nos apercebemos da Radical Mediocrity em que vivemos quando temos noção da abundância que nos rodeia. Apesar das diferentes abordagens a este problema pela parte de muitos Designers, a resposta está na necessidade de enfatizar o processo e não o produto final. Com a globalização, o individualismo e o processo criativo unilateral foram substituidos pela interdisciplinidade e pela interactividade: A Radical Mediocrity deve ser transformada em interesse.

“We live in a time when our relationship with our possessions is undergoing a radical transformation.”
Deyan Sudjic, The language of things

Este desenvolvimento relacional também está presente na Arte e Arquitectura, criando uma rede de relações não só com o público mas entre as diferentes disciplinas. O Design Relacional evoca o respeito, a honra e a responsabilidade – valores desconhecidos para o consumismo e o individualismo -, apelando à consciência de cada Designer para a criação em conjunto de um novo ideal criativo.

“ Relational Design is the overture to a creative lifestyle whose cornerstones will be ecopolitical sustainability and geopolitical responsability.”
Henk Oosterling, in Dasein as Design

Wall-E

Not so very long ago I would have been excited by the announcement that a company has figured out how to manufacture video screens on paper and bind them with the pages of a magazine. I would have been thinking about embedding screens into the television guide books I’m making, a sideline project I’ve started on the blog 21CTV. Now the idea of millions of magazines out in the world with screens blinking inside them seems like nothing but a colossal waste of resources. When I look at newspapers now, the day’s discarded towers of Sydney Morning Herald’s and Australian’s sitting on a table outside the cafe next door to my apartment all I see is dead trees and the skyscrapers of garbage that Wall-E builds. The idea that there would be video screens interleaved with those coated lifestyle liftout sections and that they would sit together in landfill imperfectly melting down into toxic sludge is creepy, bordering on irresponsible. Even the new and improved Kindle’s and Sony book readers seem a colossal waste of resources.

The iPhone I bought last year and the Apple computer in March, after a decade of owning PC’s (a Sony VAIO and then a Compaq Presario) has changed everything for me. My computer is my audio system and DVD player. My iPhone is everything else. If I dream of anything to do with video it’s a very old fashioned, solar powered projector extension: imagining using my iPhone to stream video that would screen on my living room wall, like those home movies screened onto sheets hung outside at barbeques and birthday parties. I dream of a book reader that’s something similar, a projection device that screens the text onto a Rhodia bloc for easier reading at a cafe. There’s already a laser device that screens a keyboard onto a surface. I want that as an iPhone app. Dazzling perfection is no longer the issue for me. I’m happy for primitivism to resurface: for new applications and functions added to iPhones and laptop computers to have the inelegance of the radioactive, boxy green text on original computer screens, or there to be a little switching and delay involved in shifting from an audio application to a video one. The convenience of having everything together outweighs the pure elegance of the function. The saving of resources (power and material) is paramount.

I’m immune to the desire the Apple wants me to feel for the object. I’ve wrapped my iPhone in a clunky but practical protective black plastic case, and I bought the cheapest computer I could, the white plastic one, and it’s starting to look really shabby. The power cord for the iPhone is shredding, I’ll have to buy a new one soon but I plan to hold onto both devices until the absolute last moment upgrading and augmenting them until there is no possible regenerative energy left in them.

I think I’ve arrived at the “wave of revulsion against the phenomenon of manufacturing desire that Deyan Sudjic suspects might be coming. In The Language of Things he writes about the spell of his new Apple computer being broken as soon as he took it out of the store with the discordant note of clunky white cables for a sexy black machine. “There is nothing about this lack of colour coordination that makes the computer work any less fluently, and yet I could feel my sense of disappointment rising as I unwrapped my purchase. How could this portal to the future have such shaky, inconsistent foundations?”

He writes of the scuffs and inevitable marks on phones and computers as he used them destroying their appeal, in marked contrast to early cameras, whose dents and scratches added to their allure. “The traces of life as it is lived once seemed to add authority to an object, like those battered old black Nikons that Vietnam-era war photographers lugged around the killing fields of South East Asia, the shiny logo taped over to avoid the attention of snipers, the heavy brass body showing through the chipped black paint. These were objects to be treated with a certain respect. They were the products of craftsmen, ingenious mechanical contrivances that, at the press of a button, would lift the mirror that allowed you to see through the lens. These were objects with the sheer physical presence to reflect their intelligence and their value. They would last and last, delivering the performance promised by the skill with which opticians had ground their lenses, and the care with which the metallic blades that defined their shutter apertures had been designed. These are not qualities that diminish with the years. Possessions that stayed with us for decades could be understood as mirroring our own experiences of time passing. Now our relationship with new possessions seems so much emptier. The allure of the product is created and sold on the basis of a look that does not survive physical contact.”

The foundations of Editions Ballard books are built on accepting and welcoming patina and scuffs. I get an extraordinary response to the covers for my notebooks which are simple and low-tech, a modest grade of unbleached boxboard covered with a couple of coats of shellac. They feel smoothly organic and they’ll develop a rich glow, over time, as they’re handled. There’s also a benefit that I didn’t realise until I started testing my samples. That the covers are water resistant (maybe even fully waterproof, I haven’t done that test yet). So coffee and wine will run off them in cafes, and oil, vinegar and soy sauce will run off them in kitchens. The dilemma I face now is how to transfer those low tech materials and hand production techniques to the factory processes to make thousands of books.

Lace sweater

I’m now beginning to think about how some of my notebooks might be produced in factories. I’m an armchair industrialist. I don’t have any first-hand experience of factories. All of my research is from library books and photographs of hulking, brutish machinery served up by Google searches. I’m not working entirely in the dark: I’m re-acquainting myself with the principles of physics and inorganic chemistry. Some of the design decisions are common sense: it doesn’t take specialist knowledge to grasp that a certain material might snag on a production line, or that a particular surface texture might be too slippery for glue to adhere to it, and throw book spines out of alignment.

I’ve borrowed Deyan Sudjic’s 1990 study of Comme des Garcons from the library and it has useful practical information about the manufacturing process:

“It was Hiroshi Matsushita who devised the rayon criss-crossed with elastic that allowed Kawakubo to make the garments in the women’s collection of 1984 bubble and boil as though they were melting. And it was Matsushita who formulated the bonded cotton rayon and polyurethane fabric Kawakubo used for her asymmetric dresses of 1986 … For Matsushita, the distinctive character of a Comme des Garcons garment can be traced back to the thread that will be used to weave the fabric from which the collection will be made.”

Rei Kawakubo gives Matsushita abstract instructions: “I’d like something using thin thread, rather than bulky thread,” perhaps. Or “something with a cold feel, something flat as opposed to something bumpy, something with depth and texture.”

Deyan wrote in the caption to a photograph of Rei Kawakubo’s “lace” sweater of 1982 that “it is a seemingly random pattern of holes provides a commentary on the redundancy of handicraft in an era of machine-made perfection.” She’d instructed the operators of machines knitting the sweaters to loosen a few screws so that holes would be knitted into the sweaters.

Deyan mentions the cryptic instructions Rei Kawakubo gives her pattern cutters: “The pattern-cutters talk about the challenge of executing something that was by no means obvious from the drawings Kawakubo sometimes, but not invariably, produces. ‘Once she gave us a piece of crumpled paper and sad she wanted a pattern for a garment that would have something of that quality. Another time she didn’t produce anything, but talked about a pattern for a coat that would have the qualities of a pillowcase that was in the process of being pulled inside out. She didn’t want that exact shape, of course, but the essence is that moment of transition, of half inside, half out.”

“There is no standard pattern which the patterners work with and adapt each time. They are expected to innovate,” Rei Kawakubo told Deyan, who observed that her while her working methods encourage the pattern makers to deviate from tradition, that they begin with an underlying grounding in basic principles, that are then subverted.

Claire McCardell design

When I lived in New York I wrote many stories about the exhibitions at the Fashion Institute of Technology curated by Harold Koda, who is now Head of the Costume Department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the late Richard Martin. Richard gave me a fantastic grounding in design history. We’d put on white gloves and go into the vaults and he’d bring out a selection of pieces by Claire McCardell, for instance. She was an innovator in American sportswear in the second world war era, making clothing with the exquisite tailoring of Madeleine Vionnet’s clothing, but from denim, mattress ticking and calico. She made skirts to wrap around swimsuits and bolero jackets so that women could move easily from the beach to dinner. And she used unusual fabrics: wool jersey for bathing suits.

I’m intensifying my research on two different fronts: reverse engineering notebooks that I admire, to try and identify the manufacturing processes, particularly the breakdown of the components assembled by machine and those added by hand. And making an application to the Powerhouse Museum to visit its vaults and make detailed observations of some of the Yohji Yamamoto and Issey Miyake clothes that are among my chief inspirations.

“Usefulness is inversely proportional to status,” Deyan Sudjic writes in his new book “The Language of Things: Understanding the World of Desirable Objects.” “The more useless an object is, the more highly valued it will be.”

The author is referring to the relative value of art versus industrial design – but the observation can be applied equally well to cities such as San Francisco.

Think about it: The physical need to occupy a specific patch of earth has never been less important to one’s success. Everything we might acquire can be tracked down online; most culture we seek can be procured through a handheld device.

Our 21st century equivalent of an office tower turns out to be a cafe with free Wi-Fi.

All this should signal a death knell to the traditional core. Instead – recession aside – marquee hubs such as San Francisco stand more desirable than ever. It’s not that we need to be here. But the center serves as a stage set, the spotlit focus for people who use urbanity to define themselves and their tribe.

Cities aren’t the focus of Sudjic’s book, a well-tailored provocation that both explores why the best design work is timeless and decries how it can be debased for status or show. Thomas Chippendale and his 18th century furniture are explored as a precursor to Ikea – “a pioneer in brand creation” – and the ever-shinier line of Apple products is contrasted with the demise of the fountain pen as status symbol (“the basic concept has lost its relevance”).

The underlying theme: the quest among designers and clients for “emotional resonance,” the design of a watch or a laptop computer that connotes something beyond what it does: “to provide us with a reminder of the world beyond utility.”

More

John King
SF Gate (San Francisco Chronicle)

Exhibition review: Green Architecture for the Future in Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen, Denmark.

Recently, I’ve come across a lot of talk about transforming cities into green spaces. Not long ago, I wrote about an exhibition in London Building Centre called London Yields: Urban Agriculture. In the article, I speculated on (and modified) a concept first coined by Salman Rushdie, namely tropicalizing cities.

Ecoboulevards (photo: una ballena de seis ojos)

This exhibition also takes on the concept of tropicalization, suggesting how to modify our surroundings towards something greener. Some plans are already under execution, while others are mere scetches. A group called Ecosistema Urbano proposed an interesting (and fully executable) plan as how to increase the amount of trees downtown. As a part of this plan, titled Ecoboulevards, a meeting plaza surrounded by a structure of trees giving shade was presented. Here, community issues can be discussed under trees away from the heat. Simple and interesting democracy/sustainability project.

Some plans were small, others big. Some artsy, others down-to-earth. A common theme was new architectural or city planning solutions to managing energy, water and other resources sustainably. I, as a non-professional, did not understand all of the fine technical details. Nevertheless, I found reading about the technology very inspiring! I was reminded of the Eiffel Tower – made from cast iron, it was an expensive construction with a lot of flaws, but it foreshadowed the era of steel

Transport vehicle in Masdar City (photo:tuexperto_com5)

fortified concrete. Perhaps some of these constructions may be remembered as the start of a greener era? Let us hope these expensive pioneer projects will pave way to what will be mainstream in the future. One very interesting project is the Masdar City, a sustainable carbon neutral city currently being built in Abu Dhabi by Foster architects.

I forgot to bring my camera along, but it was ok, since a great portion of the exhibition consisted of excerpts from the book The Endless City (Ricky Burdett and Deyan Sudjic, Phaidon) I already have at home. Both this part of the exhibition and parts of the book were a tad disappointing for hanba’s scientist-wired brain. Glimpses of data are presented in a haphazard manner, throwing a figure here, another there in flashy orange writing: “There were 547 million Europeans in 1950” or “121 buildings over eight storeys in 1980 in Shanghai”. It is hard to draw accurate conclusions or predictions from this mess of data. I guess it’s like this so the people would get ANY glimpse of the data. Seeing as percent figures aren’t so sexy to discuss, I guess it’s better to tread on a floor where one can hop over bright colored text stating: “60,981 days to the end of gas”, then to have the data not catch any form of attention at all.

Just as interesting as it is to see the green visions, it is fascinating to see the flip side of the coin. Stefano Boeri decribes in “Green dystopias”, three possible negative scenarios we need to prepare for. One is how to maintain the balance of wild nature and tamed parks if we turn more and more of the city into wildlife. Also, if we turn city into agricultural land, we should make sure that this land will not be “monopolized” for one crop or company. I was reminded of BLDGBLOG’s comment about urban agriculture and disease control (talking about the swine flu); when you mix people and cattle, diseases may catch along.

One of my favorites was United Bottle Project by Instant Architects, featuring water bottles you could recycle just like normal. At the event of a catastrophe, however, you could first use the bottles for clean water and then fill the discarded bottles with sand and use them as building blocks for houses. Very creative.

All in all, the exhibition was  very thought provoking. In fact, since I came home I’ve looked into changing my electricity contract into a green one…

I’d like to finish with a quote on the wall in Louisiana by Stefan Behling, Foster architects: “Consumption is a matter of needs, and needs depend on design. Your need for petrol depends on the design of your car, a need of a car, in turn, depends on how the city you live in is designed. So if you can change the design of your city, you can change your needs and in the end, your consumption.”

–
See also: New York’s High Line park - a green park that has just opened http://www.thehighline.org/

Upcoming: Since some readers have (with full right) been confused about the term “pink, saccharine architecture”, the next post will provide a definition for this concept. Newly built libraries in a Swedish city will be used as an example…

architetti

Nel suo “ Contro l’architettura” del giugno dell’anno scorso il sociologo e architetto torinese Franco La Cecla accusa le archistar dell’architettura contemporanea di “involgarire e imbruttire” con le loro opere le città di mezzo mondo. Infatti, basta confrontare quel guazzabuglio di volumi al titanio del Guggenheim museum di Bilbao con le articolazioni armoniose del palazzo dei Papi di Avignone oppure quel groviglio metallico dello stadio “nido d’uccelli” di Pechino con il rigore compositivo del Colosseo di Roma oppure quella raffineria del Centre Pompidou di Parigi con la sublime bellezza del palazzo ducale di Venezia oppure il velario hi-tech di Rho Pero con la copertura stellare della Sala dei Baroni di Castelnuovo di Napoli per concordare con la denuncia di LaCecla. Il quale ha però omesso di aggiungere che queste archistar costituiscono un clan. Quello degli “intoccabili”. Nel quartiere Chelsea di Londra c’è un’area denominata “Chelsea Barracks”, a ridosso del Tamigi, occupata da alcuni capannoni dismessi, nella quale la famiglia reale del Qatar vorrebbe costruire un lussuoso ed esclusivo insediamento abitativo. E ha commissionato il progetto a uno dei più famosi architetti contemporanei, sir Richard Rogers, quello che, com’è noto, ha disegnato il Pompidou parigino assieme a Renzo Piano. La sagoma pentagonale dell’area gli ha suggerito di piazzarvi cinque edifici prismatici, alti quattro piani, paralleli ai due lati corti del pentagono e ortogonali al lato lungo, due costituiti da 2 scale, due da 3 scale e il quinto da 4 scale.

idee_generatrici

Una sistemazione rigorosamente razionalista secondo i dettami del Bauhaus. E perciò simile al Dammerstock di Walter Gropius, al Bad Durremberg di Alexander Klein, all’Ellerhofsiedlung di Mart Stam, alla Milano Verde di Giuseppe Pagano, al quartiere “Fabio Filzi” di Franco Albini, alla città satellite di Rebbio di Giuseppe Terragni , alla Frei Scholle di Bruno Taut,alle case popolari di viale Augusto di Luigi Cosenza a Napoli…A conferma che l’architettura contemporanea si dibatte in una congerie di tendenze tra neorazionalismo, appunto, e decostruttivismo, postmodern, neogotico, hi-.tech, neoclassico, cheapscape, espressionismo, plasticismo e chi più ne ha più ne metta. Una sistemazione che non piace al principe Carlo che, com’è noto, ama occuparsi di architettura e di urbanistica, e che ha suggerito agli arabi di rivolgersi a un altro architetto londinese, il suo amico Quinlan Terry. La cui fantasia ha partorito una soluzione a cortili chiusi, ispirata, dice lui, nientemeno che a Palladio. Apriti cielo. Undici archistar, di cui sei insigniti del “Premio Pritzker”, che un deficiente ha battezzato il “Nobel dell’Architettura”, hanno pubblicato sui maggiori quotidiani londinesi una lettera di protesta .

museo

“ Il progetto di Rogers è uno straordinario intervento in un’area significativa e se al principe Carlo non piace deve argomentarlo in un pubblico dibattito”. Hanno scritto indignati Renzo Piano, Norman Foster, Zaha Hadid, Jacques Herzog, Pierre de Meuron, Jean Nouvel, Frank O. Gehry, Nicolas Serota, Richard Burdett, David Adjlave e Deyan Sudjic. Capisco difendere un’appartenente al clan. Ma arrivare ad esaltare una sistemazione protorazionalista in pieno Terzo Millennio…Per derimere la questione sarebbe il caso che la città di Londra affidasse la sistemazione del “Celsea Barrack” un concorso internazionale aperto a tutti gli architetti.

GERARDO MAZZIOTTI

Shepard Fairey’s Obama poster was named as the Brit Insurance Design of the Year on Wednesday night.

Photo: Steve Rhodes

However, there is some dispute over whether or not Fairey deserved to win. He used an Associated Press (AP) photograph taken by Mannie Garcia to create the poster, and AP has accused him of copyright infringement.

The question is: If he didn’t take the photo, does he deserve to win a prize for the poster?

The answer is yes. Artists and designers often use other people’s images in their own work. It’s what they do. Andy Warhol, for example, used images from newspapers and magazines to create his print screens. Fairey should acknowledge Garcia’s photography skills, but the credit for this poster goes to him, and him alone.

And it is without a doubt the most iconic and historically important design of the last year.

As Deyan Sudjic, director of the Design Museum said: “The Obama poster is a reminder of how extensively the design world impacts our everyday life. It has become an international emblem of recent history.”

Source: Creative Review

I went to an awesome talk tonight at the RSA – unfortunately I didn’t take a notebook so I’m gonna have to riff on what people said a little – it was called ‘Question Time on sustainable design and development’ and was hosted by Griff Ryhs Jones who was as smart as he was funny – in fact the whole evening was both insightful and hilarious. There were a heap of people talking Koen Steemers was interesting and at hand with facts and figures, Dr Shahrah Ali was a bit meh and kept bleating on about Green Party policy but luckily there were 4 awesome people as well.

William Alsop is a famous architect who I’ve never heard of before but was completely awesome and I’m going to call him the Christopher Hitchens of Architecture – he was quite contrary and at one point proposed that we ‘wipe Hull off the map’ and later stated laconicly stated that it didn’t much matter what we do about sustainability what with China coming up behind us. He did however have some interesting things to add and much of it seemed to be around geographical location of both houses (supposedly you can reduce up to 80% of emmissions or waste from a house just by positioning it to face east / west) and demographically – here he proposed we move 50% of the population to London, where it seems everyone wants to be, thus reducing transport issues and freeing up the rest of the country to awesomeness – oh and he also said that Milton Keynes shoudn’t exist – ha!

Sat next to him was Nick Johnson, a chartered surveyor who seems to work here as well as advising the government on stuff – he was really enthusiastic but at times pained at the way that the construction industry has no incentives to build really sustainable housing and that there is no real ‘value capture’. He was also very animated by the fact that sustainability should not be a burden on the punter which was interesting – he talked about how the producers and industry need to be making it easier for us to be green rather than blame consumers for not recycling properly etc.

Then there was Rod Liddle who is awesome – he generally chatted about the planned eco towns and how there are supposedly something like 750,000 vacant houses in the UK which is more than double the proposed new builds and putting people in them would save on emmissions creating the new towns! Sounds like sense to me.

Then was Deyan Sudjic, director of the Design Museum – he was very awesome and much of what he chatted about was around ‘planned obsolescence’ and how we’ve created a culture of need and want which doesn’t help the housing market seeing as we’re always looking to upgrade and move and consume more.

This was one of the main points of the evening which reminded me of what Neil Boorman talks about – we’ve created this culture of avarice, people want and want and want, we have to keep buying new stuff because new is good but also because the new stuff we buy isn’t built to last. The government would rather create new eco towns than address the problem of changing/modifying the existing ones. Everyone seemed to agree that a paradigm shift was needed in the way we view sustainability – not only in the incentives to industry but also governmental policy through legislation and somehow shifting the public’s mindset that new and more etc good and better.

Rob Liddle made and interesting point in closing saying that he thought the credit crunch and housing crisis was a blessing in that it will give everyone a chance to reflect on this culture of greed and waste that we find ourselves in – I think he’s right and this whole sustainability thing is just part of a huge change in mass conciousness that needs to happen – the most salient point coming from Neil Boorman’s Bonfire of the Brands is that whilst we’re all way too obsessed by brands and this is not good for our mental health, its much worse that we wantonly get ourselves into debt clamouring after their next offering when we don’t even need the things – what we need is someone like Boorman to team up with Mark Earls and maybe Lucy Siegle (she’s pretty and that always helps) and work on some sort of uber ‘less is more’ campaign to educate people that debt isn’t cool and can fuck you up, driving a massive SUV isn’t cool (yes people are coming round to that), bigger isn’t always better and new is often much worse than old – now I guess this opens a whole new can of worms so I’ll leave it there to be picked up another day but since I’ve been alcohol detoxing recently I’ve really been thinking about having a branding detox or really it should be an aspiration detox – maybe we all need a bit of time to think.

El año pasado la editorial Ariel publicó el libro “La arquitectura del poder” de Deyan Sudjic, director del Design Museum de Londres. En el libro, el autor analiza y reflexiona sobre los vínculos existentes entre la arquitectura y el poder. Dos componentes que desde épocas remotas se han fusionando con el objeto de preservar la gloria y la supremacía de un período determinado de la historia. A los cuestionamientos que este libro despierta, Sudjic ha sumado otras opiniones y propuestas. La más reciente pone sobre la mesa la siguiente disyuntiva: ¿La ciudad del futuro será una visión del infierno o un motor para la vida civilizada? Difícil saberlo. Sin embargo, el autor desentraña en su último libro, Endless City, una serie de argumentos y conjeturas sobre el papel de las ciudades en nuestras vidas. Después de todo, lo queramos o no, la urbe determina el comportamiento de sus habitantes, la armonía o el caos, el silencio o el bullicio. Porque, como deben imaginarlo, no es lo mismo vivir en una ciudad como Lima (Perú) que en una ciudad como Reykiavik (Islandia). Definitivamente, no.

[enlaces]
Fragmento del libro “La arquitectura del poder”
“Los arquitectos son los políticos más listos”