Sustainability redefined

At last, a piece worth reading about sustainability.  Gillian Darley's re-definition of the term as durability opens up a far more interesting forum than the  myopic focus on carbon reduction that has smothered the industry.  Don't get me wrong, I'm all for building efficiency, but the idea that low-carbon housing is in itself an architectural ideology scares me witless.  The Passivhaus debate is relevant here: super-sealed buildings don't sit well with flexibility (think of Stewart Brand's 'shear layers' in how buildings learn); but more importantly why are they so often located in suburban contexts, reliant on the car? do their owners eat beef, own mobile phones and fly abroad on holiday? and why are the buildings always so ugly? Sustainability in Architecture asks all these questions, but we are currently answering none of them.  Sadly, I fear that Gillian's definition of sustainability will be ignored.  Carbon reduction is a convenient area of sustainability as a marketing tool for products.  You won't see many stands on the issues Gillian is talking about at Ecobuild, but you will see a plethora of ordinary building products, marketed as being sustainable.  Sustainability cannot exist in isolation: there is quite simply no such thing as a sustainable product, building or city; only a more or less sustainable society.  

The Architects: a review

This year's Christmas present was a ticket to a performance of The Architects by theatre group Shunt.  Situated in a former biscuit factory in Bermondsey, this pop-up, interactive play is in a similar vein to Shunt's previous performances and those of similarly inventive groups such as Punchdrunk.  Entry is through a plywood maze of rooms, acting as a filter between the prosaic environment of the Council estate outside and the main theater set: an ocean liner in which the audience gather round tables as on a deck.

The Architects: lost in the maze

Over the period of an hour it fills to capacity of around 300, with a bar and band to assist the ambience.  The play begins with the four eponymous Architects introducing themselves in dodgy scandinavian accents, one of whom provides a monologue on what Architecture is and should be: a rejection of the neutral, an art that raises the spirits, and so on.  The speech is apparently satirical, swerving between postmodern contradiction: "radicalism is deeply rooted in tradition" and Modernist brio: "Architects are optimists, we have to believe the world can be made better".  During this, the same actors, in different roles are watching us all via a video screen.  They turn out to be debauched, drunken commissioners/parents, variously engaging with the action, but quickly becoming bored and petulant with their artists/offspring.  The space is vast and a combination of sound and lighting effects immerses the audience in a sense of complicity with the main protagonists as they make seemingly random announcements for programmed cruise-liner activities and their after-effects (sorry but the fifth deck is closed after the party whilst someone's stool is cleared from the pool).  In between each brief snapshot, the space is plunged into absolute darkness.  The Architects' children appear, seek affection from the passengers and return to bed.  There is a moment of panic; a fight; blood and everyone has to leave the ship.  "play the evacuation song" someone shouts and the band plays it: "Get off this motherfucking ship", they sing, first in the style of thrash metal, then easy listening; the first and only good joke.  This is the cue for us to leave the space, but split up from our friends or partners into two groups, who then interact with the continuing performance from two different points of view.

Having seen a number of these shows now, including Shunt's own Amato Saltone in 2004, I guess I've become more immune to these devices, so they no longer hold the same excitement.  Its useful to compare The Architects with Amato Saltone: they had much in common, but for my money, the earlier play was far better.  In that event, staged in the arches under London Bridge station, the audience also gathers in a bar, but the interaction begins right away.  People are asked to collect their keys from a bowl, in the style of a swingers party and this device is used to divide the audience into groups (in these performances, you're always separated from your partner, so you have a connection with the other group).  The groups then follow actors through a series of rooms.  In each case, something quite serious has evidently just happened; its never clear what, but the audience has to try and pick up the pieces.  A phone rings, and the audience-member nearest has to answer it and explain to someone where we are;  A mad axeman bursts into the room and for a split-second I instinctively, genuinely feel he's coming for me; one scene we take part in is completely opaque until we move to another room and watch the next group of audience members carrying out the same role-play from behind a one-way screen.  The narrative is fragmentary and never resolved, but the fun is in playing with the pieces and making connections between the parts.  In the last scene we wonder into the aftermath of a party, occupied only by drunk, pregnant women; its surreal, but somehow authentic.

The Architects never achieves this level of engagement.  The audience is too big; we're sitting down for too long and the tricks are too clumsy (men have to leave through one door, women another).  A screen tells us what to shout so the women hear us and we hear them, both being manipulated, but we know they're just responding to another screen.  Most importantly, the nonsense is happening in the now, rather than the recent past; there's nothing to figure out.  Its loaded with crude metaphors: the cynical patrons of the arts, the programmed situationism of the cruise-liner entertainers; a ship of fools; the maze and the minotaur who scares us off the boat.  It feels disappointing: tired and cynical.

Shunt and these other pop-up performance artists achieve some remarkable sets and special effects.  Somehow they manage to avoid the mundane requirements of fire safety paraphernalia  so the audience can genuinely feel lost in the darkness.  They make the best use of the size and weirdly empty spaces they inhabit and by rejecting complete narratives, they create a reason for the audience to engage theatrically.  But, at least in the case of Shunt, they don't seem to have developed the idea with the times.  Architects and artists can't feel cynical about their patrons when they no longer have any.  Instead, their situationist instincts can be put to productive use in the most meagre of ways, as demonstrated by Architects collective Assemble.  Having graduating from Architecture school without jobs, they invent their own projects, find their own money and build things themselves.  Their Architecture is theatrical and situationist, but ultimately optimistic, even whilst retaining postmodernism's unavoidable irony.  The biggest problem with The Architects was simply that it wasn't funny.  Five or ten years ago, it probably would have been both funny and true, but the world has moved on and now it seems as though the joke is on them.

Folly for a flyover: Assemble's temporary performance space in 2012

HMP Everthorpe, East Riding of Yorkshire

View across the fields to HMP The Wolds

The landscape of the East Riding is remarkably flat and open and the view dominated first by power stations, then wind turbine farms, then the Humber estuary as you travel eastward on the train.  The fields are large and open, with only intermittent hedgerows and small areas of woodland.  Its obviously rich arable land, due to the alluvial geology, I guess and farmed in the manner of the industrialised west that makes it easy for combines, but hard for nature.  The remorseless use of the land also leads to the paradoxical situation of being in a rural area where there are few footpaths or land for walking, apart from the roads which are usually narrow and without verges.  The Wolds Way is national trail through the hills to the north, but its poorly connected into the wider landscape.  The result is a strange kind of green prison.  

I'm working as part of a team from the RSA to test their Transitions proposal to reduce re-offending amongst prisoners.  We're working with HMP Everthorpe, a Government prison, located adjacent to another prison, HMP The Wolds and set within 45 acres of land.  There is a Victorian manor house and more than 80 residential properties in the grounds, but its also quite bucolic, with woodlands, a fast stream and small fields that have not been farmed for 10 years.  Its actually a kind of little oasis and the residents like living there, because its quiet and safe, but also because its a little piece of the countryside in an area dominated by industrialised farmland.  Over the next year we'll be working with local and national stakeholders to develop a business case for a facility in the grounds next to the prison, providing training and education for prisoners, enterprise and nature tourism opportunities to link into the wider landscape.  We're only just about to start in earnest this month, but we met with some of the prisoners, to ask them about their aspirations for the project.  Their positivity was overwhelming and left me in no doubt as to the importance of the task in hand.  The statistics are bleak: 3/4 of offences committed in 2011 were committed by repeat-offenders, but that includes cautions and reprimands - statistics for prisoners are worse still.  

Picture diary from The Production of Place

Our ambition of an academic conference, three construction workshops and a photographic exhibition all in the space of our architecture studio and all interacting with one another seemed to work....

All photos and works are copyright the Production of Place team 2012:
Roland Karthaus / Alan Chandler / Michela Pace / Raphael Lee / Alberto Molletto / Christina Pollak / Juliet Saky-Ansah / Richard Wilson / Tejo Remy

The problem of Indian Retail

The sheer quantity of small shops, market stalls and street-sellers is an immediately obvious characteristic of India; the only requirements to set up shop are a space next to the road and a tablecloth.

One of India's small retailers

The Indian parliament, in winter session is currently in paralysis over the ‘FDI in Retail’ issue.  Indian newspapers write only in acronyms, but Foreign Direct Investment is a recent removal of the Indian law restricting ownership of multi-brand retail developments to less than 50%.  Conventional Indian malls, as found in the centre of Raipur are really an agglomeration of small shops that open directly onto the street.  Its more about congregation, than the western hermetic, internalised mall environment.  The law doesn’t prevent these though and many are springing up on the outskirts of Raipur, catering for the increasing wealth of its citizens.  The FDI restrictions did effectively prevent large format retailers though, especially global supermarkets but also Ikea, who have been one of the first to confirm Direct Investment now the restrictions are being lifted.  The debate paralysing parliament is around the likely impact on India’s millions of small retailers.  Our experience in Europe is that supermarkets do have a distorting effect on the market, but of course they cater for real desires and liberate a portion of people’s time that would otherwise be spent grocery shopping.  The Hindu nationalist party BJP have argued that the FDI law is unconstitutional; being anti-socialist, but the motivation behind the change is also based on a social problem.  India produces enough food for all of its population, but storage and distribution are so poor that food rots whilst many go hungry. The Government’s hope is that global retailers will be able to transform India’s distribution networks where the state has failed to. Whoever is right, this will be an unprecedented experiment, affecting more than 1 billion people.  

Mixed-use building in Raipur, with retail at the ground floor

An experience of Chandigarh

Earlier in the year, as part of our scoping for the workshop in Raipur, we visited Chandigarh: Le Corbusier’s planned city, built from the 1950s.  Mostly the city feels as European as it does Indian, but in the south where the city expanded later, we came across this neighbourhood with an entirely different character.  A consistent module of narrow, 3-storey terraced houses, each customised by their owners; arranged around tight open spaces barely 20m x 30m.  Although organised rigidly on a grid, the scale of the streets, the buildings and the spaces seemed to us to work almost to perfection.  Key vernacular elements such as the threshold space between building and street is successfully integrated into a modern urban pattern.  Scale, rather than form is the key here.

An experimental 'rehabilitation colony' in Chandigarh

Now in Raipur, we discovered that this neighbourhood was a village re-housing scheme, developed through consultation with the residents.  For the workshop, we built two comparator massing models at 1:250.  The first model shows a large section of this neighbourhood, with a density of approximately 2,000 persons per hectare.   The second model shows a portion of the currently planned central ‘sectors’ in Naya Raipur, with an average density of 225 persons per hectare.  The road through the middle of the model is a secondary road – 60 metres wide, whilst the primary roads are 100m wide.  An entire block from the Chandigarh neighbourhood can fit in this road, with space either side for traffic.  These models have prompted intense debates within the teams: what is the minimum intensity for a city?  How can public transport, commerce and Indian life be supported in a city with such a suburban character?  The teams will present their work to an international Jury, including the Naya Raipur development agency on Friday.

Scale comparison models at 1:250 - Naya Raipur in the foreground 

and the neighbourhood in the photo from Chandigarh in the background

Raipur, India, 17th November

I’m in India with French Urbanism NGO Les Ateliers, running a workshop on the new city of Naya Raipur.  Professionals from around the world have been selected to bring alternative points of view to the emerging masterplan over the next two weeks.  This morning we had a tour of the existing city of Raipur (its my second visit) and the participants are clearly engaged and fascinated by the vibrancy and immediacy of the streetlife.  After visiting inside an old courtyard house and a temple in the city centre, in the afternoon we visit some new developments on the periphery. 

Raipur is a city of ponds that provide spiritual, practical and social resources

‘Fortwall City’ is aptly named: accessed via a kind of causeway across the fields, we enter a heavily-secured perimeter gate into an oasis of calm.  The Italianate villas are huge and very well-built especially by Indian standards.  A pool and terrace and immaculate gardens complete the surreal picture.  The experience is literally that of leaving India: ‘offshore urbanism’ as somebody described it.  Clearly aimed at the urban elite, it is roughly half occupied; apparently people are reluctant to move so far from the city centre. 

'Fortwall City' provides a sanitised version for urban elites

In later discussions we talk about how the new city has to attract development by providing what people want.  There is clearly an appetite for these elite enclaves, which are a relatively new phenomenon in India.  But, there is also a resistance to them.  Indian society is so inextricably interconnected that the isolation offered by these developments runs against the grain of people’s daily lives.  The services provided by informal workers to the middle classes are not easily replaced by Western-style living.  As we drive back out along the causeway, we see the cinder-block shacks, presumably erected by the construction workers for their families; the seeds of a new slum, which is not antagonistic to the new development, but symbiotic with it.  This segregation is not what the new city of Naya Raipur is aiming for, but the combination of market forces and weakness of development control in India makes the outcome difficult to predict.  This will be the subject of the workshop.  www.ateliers.org/en