Heaven or Hell?

The Metaverse, NFTs, Crypto-architecture, Fantasy Architecture and a word about the Real World at COP26…

by Herbert Wright

Do Androids Dream of Leonidov? (2021) by Simon Tyszko, courtesy of the artist

Big news is coming in for humanity. From Glasgow, the COP26 climate change meeting of world governments will decide if we give ourselves a future or we all go to Hell. (At the time of writing, it could go either way). But maybe that doesn’t matter anyway, because the news from Silicon Valley is that Facebook founder Mark Zukerberg has changed the company name to Meta to be better focused on the metaverse. 

What is the metaverse? It’s an online alternative digital world in VR (virtual reality), where you can work, play, trade, hang out and who knows what else.  Cyber-sex is surely just a temporary challenge to be solved by a start-up in wearable technology. Second Life is an example of a metaverse, but Facebook thinks the true metaverse may need 15 years to develop.

That timing could not be better! ‘Update to limits to growth’, a paper by Gaya Herrington published in Yale University’s Journal of Industrial Ecology last year outlined four scenarios and two of them suggested civilisation collapsing around the 2040s. That gives us plenty of time to make sure that the internet connection in our safe bunker will be secure.

Of course, the metaverse will need digital buildings, so no need for architects to worry — the work should keep rolling in. Sure, a building that’s not physical isn’t quite the same as a real one, but in the metaverse, as John Lennon anticipated in Strawberry Field Forever, ‘nothing is real’. Architecture has always produced fantasy buildings anyway. Competitions alone generate loads of them, because the only design to (sometimes) get built is the winning entry. Historically, some of the most fantastic buildings ever remained fantasy, such as Étienne-Louis Boullée’s Cenopath for Newton (1784), Ivan Leonidov’s Lenin Institute (1927) or Fred and Wilma Flinstone’s Flinstone House (1959). Oh, hold on, I just double checked, sorry… there are actually quite a few replica Flinstone houses in the US. Whatever. The point is, virtually anything can be made in the metaverse! Apart from food and drink, of course. But as any hikikomori kid in Japan will tell you, just order that online. 

Before we get giddy about the architectural prospects of our new life in Zuckerberg’s world, let’s stop a moment and get serious about going deep digital. I’ve previously warned about how we’re sleepwalking into an immersive digital world and of course the 1999 film The Matrix has left some thinking that we’re already in a vast simulation. In the real world, advances by AI (artificial intelligence) into architecture may well render most architects redundant. This summer, I gave a Zoom talk and imagined a scenario where every design made by (for example) Frank Lloyd Wright was fed into a deep-learning neural network. An infinite variety of fake Wright buildings could be generated, each customised to their function, program and site. 

In this month’s issue of C3 magazine Simone Brott of the University of Queensland, Australia, considers NFTs as a vehicle for architects to exploit. (Disclaimer: I edit and write in this fine Korean publication!). NFTs (Non Fungible Tokens) are unique chunks of data that are protected by blockchain and can be traded. Brott imagines architects no longer building but creating architectural NFTs. If a city masterplan NFT is securitised, ‘fractionalised’ and bundled on Wall Street, streams of revenue start to flow from multiple investors building with no connection to the architect. All that is needed is a ‘cryptoarchitecture’ trading platform and speculators will let such NFTs loose. It’s scary. Brott concludes that ‘NFTs will kill architecture’.

And she doesn’t mention that blockchain trading, as Bitcoin demonstrates, is a paradise for criminals. Worse, Bitcoin alone generates a carbon footprint as big as a medium-sized country. Until crypto trade moves from ‘proof-of-work’ to ‘proof-of-stake’ (sorry to get technical), it’s a crime against the planet. COP26 should have added it to the agenda. 

PHASE3 Architecture – Sugar Plum Square (2019) photo: © Luke O_Donovan

Meanwhile in the UK, as well as COP26, we have new visions of Heaven and Hell, both with fantasy architecture. First, an edible heaven: London’s Museum of Architecture is preparing to unveil their annual feast of architecture rendered in cake called Gingerbread City. This year’s theme is Nature and the City. Until December, we don’t know the designs that UK-based architects will bake, but a picture of PHASE3’s Sugar Plum Square from the 2019 show will give you an idea of the event. Already the names of some 2021 works have been revealed. Foster + Partners are making Honeycomb Heights, Zaha Hadid’s practice offer Museum of Gumball Ecology, and PLP (better known for their hard glass and steel skyscrapers) promise a Hazelnut Herbarium.

Oil Rigs (2021) by Pablo Bronstein, courtesy of the artist

Cake is one of the things we find in the Hell of artist Pablo Bronstein, a master draftsman famous for his works exploring the oddities of post-modernism and classical styles (as well as dance). But most of all we see fabulous fantasy architecture. His current exhibition Hell in its Heyday at the Sir John Soane Museum (Soane was an 18th/19th century giant of British architecture). Bronstein presents a banquet of water-coloured drawings of an absurdly decadent city called Hell. Modernist buildings contrast with eclectic buildings of gloriously baroque styling, including the oil rigs and factories that support the city. Is there a message about our own fossil-fueled consumerist society? Bronstein told me ‘yes absolutely. I’m looking back at between 1850 and 1950 as a precursor to what we are living through now. In [that] period we have the rise and fall of a culture based on limitless production and consumption. Now we are aware that there is a human [and] ecological price to be paid for everything’.

That price will be high, and it won’t be payable with crypto-currency, or in the metaverse. Apparently, ‘meta’ in Hebrew means ‘dead’, so what does that say about Zuckerberg’s vision? Architecture is for people in the real world and without massive leaps in sustainability that world will be hell. We need to get real! Not least because, as Txai Surui, a young Amazon native and co-ordinator of the Indigenous Youth Movement, said at COP26, ‘the Earth is speaking. She tells us we have no more time’. 

Txai Surui speaks at COP26 in Glasgow, Nov 2021. Source Twitter@wwf/brasil

© Herbert Wright, November 2021

This post was originally published in the French newsletter Chroniques d’Architecture in November 2021 (during the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow). It was entitled: Enfer ou Paradis: Dans le métaverse, rien de réel… 

Not Being There… Venice and the Architecture Biennale

Guidecca, Venice 2016. Photo © Herbert Wright

by Herbert Wright

If you were at the Venice Architecture Biennale opening, you may have found me there, but only if you had a QR reader. My voice speaks from a Kowloon neighbourhood in a film at the Hong Kong Pavilion, as I will explain.

But was I physically there at the great gathering of the great, the good and the journalists that is the Biennale opening? I wasn’t, and I have mixed feelings about it. 

Let’s face it, not everything is fab at VAB (as I call the Biennale). There is way too much to take in at the Arsenale and Giardini. The Central Pavilion’s group show alone needs a day to absorb, and this year there are an overwhelming 61 national pavilions, 17 collateral shows, pop-ups and events that spread into the canals and alleys of the city itself. If you consider giving each of the 112 participants just 5 minutes attention each, you would need 9 hours 20 minutes to see it all non-stop. That’s if you could travel instantaneously across VAB’s vast territory and not eat or rest or go to the bathroom. Eating can be a serious challenge — the queues for food can be slow and cruel, especially under bright sunshine.

As well as teleportation, another superpower would help you cover the biennale in realistic time — invisibility. Why? Because half the architectural people you’ve ever met will spot you, and you will lose count of how many want to stop and chat, or even propose an immediate serious meeting. Without invisibility, you could try a good disguise, but a false moustache (no matter your gender) and hat may mean the sunshine bakes you like a potato in the oven. 

There is a deeper problem. If you wanted to invite attention to important ideas that could change our world for decades to come, would you want to present them in a place that distracts attention? Such as perhaps the most beautiful city on Earth? Yes, you can try and shut out ‘la Serenissima’, but it is always there, like a sad, beautiful, dying lover who is waiting, calling, yearning… In my two* Biennales, there was always a point when I asked myself, ‘how long must this hectoring parade of architectural notions wrench me from the drug-like dream of beauty and mystery just around the corner?’  The biennale can become like a new Spotify mix on exhausted earphones while the orchestra plays Mahler’s 5th around you. 

Well, at least I have a Venetian solution to propose for that last dilemma, and you heard it here first. The city has big spaces where its ancient magic does not operate. Behind the Piazzale Roma, the docks have expanded, even creating the new island of Tronchetto, to accommodate the vast cruise ships that long menaced Venice like invading aliens. In March, Italy banned these monsters from entering the lagoon. The endless, voluminous passenger buildings, ‘non-places’ of ‘super-modernity’ in Marc Augé’s words, could be anywhere in the world. Their silence must be deafening now. The Bienalle could fill them, and they offer road vehicle access, helpful for installation logistics. 

Am I being serious? Sure, about as serious as those sandwiches in plastic triangular boxes available from the Co-op at Fondamente Santa Chiara on the Grand Canal by the Piazzale Roma. They’re serious survival tools when you need to refuel quick so you can move on. 

Yes, we know the nightmare of the tourist strip that runs from Santiago Calatrava’s disability-indifferent Ponte della Costituzione, past the sublime, solid horizontality of Angiolo Massoni’s modernist Stazione Santa Lucia, down the insanely busy Strada Nova, past the human traffic jam on Rialto bridge to the Instagram hyper-node of the Piazza San Marco. We know why so many Venetians hate us visitors, like companions of the evening hate their clients but need the money. And yet, the endless interface of water and architectural perfection in palazzos and churches remains transcendental. And just three minute’s walk from the tourist runs, there are alleys that are so quiet you can hear footsteps around corners. They echo just like Casanova’s did in 1755 or Sophia Loren’s in 1955. 

Venice is a city of memories and emotion. That brings me to Hong Kong. Its pavilion was unstaffed at the opening, but that QR reader enabled access to its films, including E-Motion-AI City by Tszwai So of Spheron Architects. (Online access will hopefully be soon). The film follows a couple with a two-year old girl, at home and in their intensely urban neighbourhood. These are places of memory and emotion. But the film is haunted by a mysterious figure, and equally by my commentary about how the digital world and real world could become indistinguishable. How would we live together when that happens? 

How will we live together? is the question that this year’s curator Hashim Sarkis asks. Despite all my complaints of the surrealistic pressures of the Biennale, yes, I want to see the splurging cornucopia of responses in Venice. Doubtless they will raise more questions than answers. Doubtless they will be exhausting to process. But is it all so bad if an Italian coffee awaits you just outside the Arsenale? On the via Garibaldi, you can reflect and watch Venice walk by, in the a world that is neither digital or a new architectural vision. 

Italy’s MOSE barriers protect the Venice lagoon from three metre tides, but Venice will be gone one day. Greenland has started to melt fast, and if all its ice melted, sea level would rise by 7.2 metres. Should we anticipate Venice’s demise with virtual versions, at far higher resolutions than those parts replicated around the Venetian Hotel in Macau?

London, May 2021

This post was originally published in the French newsletter Chroniques d’Architecture in June 2021 as Biennale de Venise, comme si vous n’y étiez pas. *_{The French version says I attended three VABs, but I mis-remembered, it was just two!}

Also published in June 2021 – my review of what you can find online from Venice Architecture Biennale on the CoBo Social platform

An earlier 2021 column from Chroniques d’Architecture, now in English as Confessions of an Architecture Critic

Confessions of an Architecture Critic

by Herbert Wright

In 2018, architectural writing, mainly for Blueprint magazine, took me to 10 countries beyond the UK. In 2019, the same again. I sometimes reached Paris or Berlin by rail or bus, but usually the trips were by air. Since covid-19, such travel is history, and Blueprint ceased publication. But a year grounded in London has exposed more than just the arrogance of giving lip-service to sustainability while flying to Seoul, Singapore or Chicago. Floating up from murky water is another long-submerged question: What is it to be an architecture critic? 

Oct 2016 – I’ve flown in from Beijing Design Week and come straight from the airport to the MAAT opening in Lisbon (April 25 Bridge in background). It’s my fourth city in a week. My hair still hasn’t quite landed.

I asked myself, who was reading my stuff, and why? Could anything I write change the world? Or was I merely a specialised travel writer reporting about architectural specificities, like a jet-setting gastronomic critic may report on exotic cuisines? And then there’s this haunting question: Am I just a servant of an architectural establishment with a self-serving agenda, because I amplify the spectacle they present to society? The propaganda of the spectacle is that the world is better because architects design it. Well, maybe… 

The dilemma is clear when architects and their PR agents are generous with tickets and hospitality. Of course, any business should be proud of good work, and publicising it may bring more. But can the lucky invited journalist be truly critical? If he or she is too critical, they may be left out of future jamborees which may actually produce important stories. But critical is also different from constantly cynical. Sometimes a writer’s tone can be so negative, it sounds like an angsty ‘emo’ teenager. Yes, expose the faults, be skeptical. But there’s an old Groucho Marx song called Whatever It Is, I’m Against It, and that’s no stance for unbiased critiques.  

In the UK, there are seven subscription architecture magazines in print, and even more titles covering wider design fields. What architect has the time to even skim more than one? What non-architect can navigate the language laden with architectural jargon and our baggage of pre-conceptions? If the content is critical, it likely touches on the familiar mantras of sustainability, community, place-making, social justice etc. These are paramount issues, but endlessly repeated within the echo-chamber of specialist media, they become politically-correct routine. Take sustainability, for example. Nowadays, it’s a tick-box in a critic’s review — just like in many an architect’s office, where the prize of a rating certification like HQE, BREEAM or LEED becomes a surrogate for fresh thinking in the face of the climate emergency’s existential threat.

Of course, architects write their own project texts. Unedited and ranging from brazen hype to arcane meanderings, they flood online agglomeration sites such as archdaily.com (which has plenty of good editorial content too!). Project text becomes padding for the images, sometimes by photographers with bigger names than the architects. Our focus dissipates in the churning cornucopia of images in which a building anywhere on the planet may hold us for a few seconds until we move on. Maybe they need a thumbs-up ‘like’ icon, like Instagram. 

What can a critic do to make the words worthwhile? Honesty is vital, but so is speaking up. Too often, I have indulged in intellectual musings about a project’s aesthetics and references, but muted deeper critical issues. That’s cowardly. We critics need to shout about issues in a way that will be heard. In 2020, I questioned Germany’s green building agenda in Baumeister magazine with a reminder that Germans eat on average 90kg of meat annually. In Abitare (Italy), my report on ZHA’s new Beijing airport asked, why are we building new airports in a climate emergency? In Korea’s C3 magazine, I argued (again) that we are sleepwalking into an immersive digital future, and architecture must declare war on its erosion of authenticity and devaluation of craft and creativity. 

Let the critic be neither architect’s dupe nor disconsolate whiner, but a voice to wake us up. 

London, January 2021

This post was originally published in the French newsletter Chroniques d’Architecture February 2021 as Qu’est-ce que d’être un critique d’architecture? (What is it to be an architecture critic?)

Another Chroniques d’Architecture blog, original English version – Not Being There… Venice and the Architecture Biennale

City of the Singularity part 3: Hello, Bomb?

The COVID-19 pandemic has plunged us into scenes that feel like science fiction films. Downtown streets are eerily deserted, shop staff look at us through shiny face visors, we watch vehicles spraying disinfectant across cities on the other side of a planet, and everywhere, there is an unseen enemy.

One sci-fi scenario that has come nearer is immersion in a digital matrix. Under lockdown, our digital life has deepened. We shop even more online, day-to-day meetings are networked, the screen has replaced buildings from museums to cinemas as the stage for shared diversions, etc. The level of our activity that is traceable and can be monitored has jumped. A new form of individualised and collective surveillance has emerged in contact-tracing apps. New rivers of data have started to flow. Technology can overcome physical isolation, but it also amplifies its effects.

I have previously warned that we are sleepwalking into the digital matrix, and have speculated a future scenario which I have called ‘The City of the Singularity’ — a state where superintelligence micro-manages the city and every citizen in it. Superintelligence is artificial intelligence (AI) which exceeds human intelligence, and is reached at a stage called the Singularity, which is regarded as imminent by some experts and impossible by others. In my hypothetical city, I call the AI that runs it an Ubiquitous Super Intelligent Urban Service (USIUS).

Ultimately, a USIUS could make city life indistinguishable from a simulation — at least to us as humans. But we will not be alone in the City of the Singularity, and today’s world already gives a preview of the other characters we will live with. In this blog, I ask:

How do we share society with intelligent digital beings?

Photograph by Simon Tyszko

Other thinking entities might include trans-humans, who are people upgraded with digital implants which, for example, enhance senses or plug us directly into digital networks. We’re already just a step away with wearable technology, like digital hearing aids or augmented reality glasses. Transhumans and all the issues they raise are yet to come, but synthetic, intelligent workers are already here in the form of onscreen agents and autonomous robots.

When technology does something a human can’t, we benefit. That can range from AI spotting skin cancer in a photographic image, to Collosus, the robot which helped extinguish the Notre Dame fire in 2019. But when technology does merely what humans already do, is there any benefit other than someone’s profit margin? Humans have been replaced by robots on the assembly line. Robots can replicate the lifelong-learnt skills of the artisan. Train drivers, truckers and ship captains are, or soon will be, replaceable. Instead of humans, chatbots already deal with us on commercial websites. Animated computer-generated characters are now surfacing. If a fashion website uses synthesised models to show its garments online, that devalues the human who works as a model. The same goes for virtual assistants created to deal with online customers, such as Soul Machines’ personas. Who needs humans in a call centre or a bank branch when they can do the job? This technology also happens to be just a step away from deep fakes, which go beyond replacing jobs to hijacking identity.

AI is already moving into creative fields. AI can design, sculpt, write, compose, and more. Some artists say AI is merely a tool for them to use, but to a deep-learning set of algorithms, an artist’s output may be merely raw data for them to emulate. In 2016 a computer generated a new Rembrandt painting. If a pop song is written by AI, sung by a synthetic voice and presented by a computer-generated singer, how much human musical talent does it displace from the music market? Where is this going? If AI can do anything and everything a human can, what purpose do we serve? 

We need to challenge the digital devaluation of human work and creativity, because they give us purpose. 

In 1942, Isaac Asimov wrote his ‘Three Laws of Robotics’, starting with: ‘A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm’. That needs to be extended from robots to cover virtual characters, all algorithm-driven machines and AI systems themselves, including a USIUS. Harm to a human being includes robbing them of their livelihood. Should we have a basic rule for all new digital agents that they only get to be sanctioned if they are job creation-neutral or -positive? It’s not necessarily straightforward to predict. Until now, technological revolutions have tended to expand economies and create more jobs, although not always for the less educated. In 2019, Kai-Fu Lee, an investor with a portfolio in billion-dollar AI companies, predicted that automation would make 40% of jobs ‘displaceable’ by 2035. Ironically, the only way to evaluate the effect on jobs of new AI will likely be with new AI.

The argument that automation liberates people from menial jobs is good if there is more fulfilling work to migrate to and educational resources to acquire new skills and outlooks. Free time is fine if people have financial resources. That’s a big if. Affluent economies could pay everyone a universal basic income. Commentator Aaron Bastani goes further, arguing that technological progress can produce such a high level of (what are now) luxury commodities that ‘everyone has the means to a good life’, provided that politics reject capitalism. He calls it Fully Automated Luxury Communism. This is clearly a new variation of consumerism, and the Society of the Spectacle described by Guy Debord, and it doesn’t address the human need of a sense of purpose.

It is also one of the scenarios that a City of the Singularity delivers. And if no-one at all was working, a superintelligent agency would be needed just to keep things going.

Whatever sort of technological future we have, humans will co-exist with intelligent artefacts. As the AI in the digital agents we share society with tends towards superintelligence, new questions arise. If embedded AI could give a machine in some way a consciousness, does it have rights? If animal rights are an issue, why not robot rights? Furthermore, is there a threshold of intelligence at which a robot could claim citizenship? If we started thinking of granting rights proportional to machine intelligence levels, that would undermine the egalitarian basis of human rights for all.

These questions arise partially because of commonplace ideas of what a robot is. It’s easy to think of them as cyborgs, basically humanoid in form, but we already know that they take very different forms. Contemporary robots like those on an industrial assembly line or autonomous self-driving vehicles look nothing like humans. They’re pretty dumb, but imagine when they become as smart as the thoughtful bomb in John Carpenter’s 1975 film Dark Star.

When I proposed a the USIUS that micro-managed all aspects of the City of the Singularity, including the lives of its citizens, I imagined that this AI could be across a distributed system. Many species achieve swarm intelligence which is at a far higher level than its individuals. Termite colonies, for example, can collectively build incredibly complex architecture to live in. Swarm intelligence is facilitated by a network of communication across the swarm — in the case of termites, chemical signals in pheromones they secrete. We are already building a communication network for digital devices to talk to each other in ‘The Internet of Things’ — it’s called 5G. Could a future generation network enable devices with built-in AI to a swarm superintelligence? Could the foundations of a USIUS be future-generation telecoms network architecture – even the next one, 6G?

While devices connect on digital networks, we have been disconnecting in the real world — long before COVID-19. Loneliness is on the rise, and the Japanese condition of hikikomori is going global. Meanwhile, whole societies are under digital surveillance and AI is feeding on big data to understand us better than we do ourselves. It may use that data to sell us something, protect us — or control us. Soon, we may not be smart enough to think ahead of AI. That is by definition the case if the Singularity happens.

Now is the time to wake up to the issues, rather than sleepwalk into purposelessness as the digital matrix immerses us.

This post dated May 2020. © Herbert Wright

I am indebted to Simon Tyszko for permission to use his images.

A final part of the City of the Singularity blog series will consider the built environment, raise the issue of the Emotional City, and planning for the ideal with or without AI. 

A Bridge Over Troubled Waters

Renzo Piano explaining the Polcevera bridge. Photo Herbert Wright

By Herbert Wright

A week before Christmas 2019, I met the great architect Renzo Piano in his offices near Genoa. We talked about the new bridge over the Polcevera river that he had designed to replace the Morandi Bridge, which fatally collapsed in 2018. Piano’s slender new bridge design is epic, sustainable, robust, and smart. I visited the fast-track construction site. I also explored the working-class district scarred by the disaster, set to be transformed with trees and red steel in a plan led by Stefano Boeri.

This article was originally published in Blueprint magazine no.368, January 2020

 

In August 2018, Renzo Piano was in Switzerland when he heard that a bridge had collapsed in his home town Genoa. ‘I thought, my god, which bridge?’, he recalls. Then it emerged that it was the 1,182m-long Morandi Bridge over the valley of the Polcevera river, the key road link between France and Italy since 1967. Piano says ‘the first thought was bad. Sometimes that bridge was full of traffic, it could be hundreds of casualties. The other thing, I know that bridge well. Depending on which part of the bridge collapsed, there are houses’. Thankfully, the 210m-long collapsed section and its support tower was just to the west of residential streets, and fell over railways, warehouses and the Polcevera itself. But there was traffic, and vehicles plunging up to 45m into a void which opened up in an instant. The death toll was 43. The catastrophe made international headlines.

The Morandi Bridge collapsed in August 2018. Photos (L) Antonello Marangi (R) Mauro Utetto

Since then, a simple but elegant new bridge been designed by Piano, it’s official approval was shooed in, finance approved, and fast-track construction is now underway. In addition, a radical park under the new bridge, the Parco del Polcevera, has been designed by a team led by Studio Boeri (see ‘Under the Bridge’, below).

‘I always love the idea of the bridge’, Piano says. ‘They connect. That’s why they should never collapse’. He started thinking about the replacement bridge after Genoa’s mayor Marco Bucci called. He is no political crony – Bucci heads a centre-right city alliance which includes Eurosceptic Italian ex-deputy-premier Salvini’s anti-immigrant Liga party, whereas Piano is an independent senator who’s donated his Senate salary since 2013 to projects with a social dimension, the latest in 2019 a house inside the Rebibbia Prison in Rome for jailed mothers to have time with their babies. As the Pritzker-winning architect with projects all around the world ever since the Centre Pompidou (with Richard Rogers, 1977), Piano has always been an internationalist. Some say there should have been an international competition, but with half a million vehicles every week diverting through madly winding smaller roads in Genoa, a new bridge was needed quick. And with national pride at stake, this was to be an Italian job. ‘In an emergency, this country can show capacity to do things’, Piano comments. ‘Unfortunately you need an emergency’.

Wearing a bright green jumper, Piano spoke in December at the Genoa offices of his practice RPBW, where he is based one week every month (instead of at its Paris office). ’To make a bridge is three or four years, it’s a long journey’ he says.‘That’s why we started to think about the column made of concrete, and the bridge [spans] made out of steel’. Concrete and steel were the ingredients of the bridge that collapsed, but it was very different. Structural engineer Riccardo Morandi designed it as a cable-stayed bridge with three 90m-high A-frame towers, and unusually the cables were steel encased in concrete. Piano notes that ‘the traffic it had to support was at least three times what it was designed for’. Libya closed a similar Morandi project in 2017, the Wadi el Kuf bridge (1972), after inspections revealed potential concrete fractures. Piano does not blame Morandi for the collapse — he was ‘one of the two big [Italian] engineers after the war’, he says (the other ‘of course was Pier Luigi Nervi’). What was not understood then was how concrete corrodes. ‘People thought it was a miracle, a liquid that becomes solid. [But] stone is made in a million years, concrete is made in a few hours’, says Piano. He explains that ‘when concrete is covering steel, you have micro-pixellation, the mini-cracks inside, [and] especially in a salty atmosphere like in Genova, you have the start of corrosion inside’. Morandi became aware of these issues, and had urged regular maintenance at Genoa and elsewhere. The cause of the collapse is still unconfirmed and under investigation, but Piano says ‘that bridge needed affection and maintenance and attention… It’s not my job to judge people, but quite clearly that was not done’. Bridge operators Autostrada per Italia, part of a group which the Benneton family has invested heavily in, continue to contest accusations of poor maintenance.

After Bucci’s call, Piano immediately zoomed in on Google Earth to the terrain below the bridge. The Morandi Bridge had spans up to 210m long, but Piano had the idea ‘of maybe taking 50-metre steps, and taking a bold step when you cross the river. You need a bridge that puts its feet in the right place’. He indicates how the bridge tip-toes across the valley by walking his fingers along the edge of the table we sit at, illustrating the line of columns on site. When the road emerges from tunnel on the west side, it will pass onto a new steel deck that crosses seven 50m spans between columns. Then, as Piano says, ‘ you have to do double… jump-jump-jump’ — three 100m-spans over industrial land, the Polcevera river and railway lines respectively. On the eastern side, another six 50m spans and a final one of 40.9m to the meet the road before it forks, loops and disappears again into tunnel.

RPBW’s elevation blueprint of the new Polcevera bridge, courtesy RPBW

In all, there are 19 spans over 18 concrete columns section, carrying 1,067m of road on steel decking. It’s a beam bridge, the simplest structural form, with just columns or piers to carry and distribute load. In this case, the columns are 9.5m x 4m ellipses in section, minimal and elegant. There are two existing beam bridges which Piano has designed — the Ushibuka Bridge (1996) in Japan, carrying 900m of two-lane road across the sea, and the 190m-long pedestrian Nichols Bridgeway (2009) which connects Millennium Park with the Modern Wing of the Chicago Institute he designed. Both have a curving underside, like a boat. That’s not just because, as Piano admits, ’I love boats, all sorts of boats’. First, there is an aesthetic effect from the curve. Because of it, Piano explains, ‘the light is gently touching the underneath. It’s not a bridge with light [and] shadow’. The Chicago bridge is just 4m wide, but in Genoa, it’s 30m wide, so the effect takes on an epic scale. ‘I wanted to do this in such a way that when you are underneath, you look up, and it’s like a long ship crossing the valley’, he explains. ‘Normally you don’t see ships from below, but they are beautiful from below’.

Polcevera bridge cross section, courtesy RPBW

And there are practical benefits from the shape: ‘The hull makes sense… structurally speaking, it’s perfect. You support in the centre, then you fly on the side’. A hull is also hollow, crucially enabling internal access for maintenance (of which more later). Further, Piano saw the chance of having shipbuilders on board in construction, ‘because they know how to go fast in making the hull of a ship’.

Looking at the 1990 sketch Piano made of the Ushibuka Bridge’s cross-section, we pretty well see a draft for the bridge over the Polcevera. There is extra structure at the edge of the deck structure’s cantilevers. In Japan, either side carries a line of angled rectangular baffles which protect the peripheral cycle lanes from wind. In Genoa, there will be no cycle lanes (it’s a motorway), but each side will carry a 2.5m-high glass wall, and beyond it, a line of angled photovoltaic panels. They should generate more energy than the bridge consumes with its lights, plant and smart systems, making its operation carbon positive. Indeed, RPBW has been considering the potential use of an old rusting gasometer by the bridge’s western end — ‘it could be a reservoir of energy’, Piano muses. High-tech systems, which we will come to, will require energy, but the most visible demand will be the road lighting on twenty 28m-high central spires spaced every 50m. An initial concept rendering had light poles on either side, apparently making 43 markers for the dead. ‘It’s a nice idea but it’s a bit rhetorical in some way’, says Piano. ‘This idea of celebrating the dead with 43 candles… I think the celebration of a tragedy is only possible by silence’.

Cutting noise is a key part of the design. The streamlined deck and elliptical columns will reduce wind noise, and as for the traffic, Piano explains that ‘we use a special finish on the asphalt, and also we have the glass barrier’. The Morandi bridge had erupted loudly from each hillside, both visually and acoustically, but Piano says ‘this one is more gentle. It’s a kind of passing across the valley almost like asking permission’. Still, Piano’s bridge is certainly not trying to hide. His bridges in Japan and Chicago are both white, but this will be even whiter, with an optical gloss (the mirror-like reflective quality) of about sixty per cent.

But what about the key issue of maintenance? The new bridge enables it inside and out. ‘That’s a secret about ships’ says Piano. ‘They are maintained because you can reach the structure outside with the dry dock – this is like a ship on dry dock, permanently – and you can go inside’. Like a hull, the deck’s crescent-shaped cross-section is hollow, and with almost 5m depth at its centre, a gangway runs along the spine for the bridge’s full length. A dehumidification system will resist corrosion. Finally, RPBW are also working with the Genoa-based Italian Institute of Technology, which has one of Europe’s largest robotic research centres, on two robots, which will each move along one edge of the bridge. They not only clean the glass and solar panels, but each has a long arm curving under the bridge, which can be extended so that it can reach to the centre when not at a column, to monitor the whole underside.   

Piano presented the initial new bridge concept on 7 September 2018, just 21 days after the collapse. He said his bridge would last a thousand years. And as with another of his three previous bridges — the pedestrian Ars Aevi Bridge (2005) over the river Miljacka in Sarajevo, where snipers had held sway — he offered the design for free. Approval was swift. Two global Italian companies— construction group Salini Impreglio and shipbuilders Fincantieri — formed a consortium called Per Genova (‘For Genoa’), to which the €202 million delivery contract was awarded in December. Work on the modular steel deck sections was allocated to Fincantieri’s shipyards at Sestre Ponente in Genoa and in Naples, and its Verona factory. Naples unveiling the first completed one in February 2019. Two months later, deep piling for the first column started. In June, the last of the Morandi was blown up.

Five columns on the bridge’s western side are spanned with steelwork in this December view looking east. Photo Stefano Goldberg

How has progress been on the ground? With a workforce numbering around 1,000, it continues round the clock. The steel deck comes in sections, some arriving by barge in Genoa. 50 tonne modules are transported by road in the night. On site, there are cranes with a lifting capacity of around 1,000 tonnes to lift sections assembled on the ground and weighing 600 to 800 tonnes onto the columns. By December, columns on the east side were still under construction, but two completed ones were already spanned by decking. All seven columns on the west side were complete, and three spans in place. The steelwork will amount to 15,000 tonnes, with another 9,000 of steel to reinforce concrete (although not near the surface as in Morandi’s time). The yet-to-be-named bridge’s opening had been targeted for mid-April, but is now expected in early summer.

Construction work, with Ansaldo factory and Polcevera channel behind. Photo Stefano Goldberg

It used to be that engineers would design bridges, architects designed inhabitable structures, and builders would build them. Piano is fond of reminding people that he comes from a family of builders, and has always felt that ‘architecture, engineering and building, they are the same thing’. That is visibly the case on the Genoa construction sights. He says a bridge is an ‘an architectural job… because it is about geography, it’s about topography, all that’. He adds that ‘it’s also about flying. The bridges fly, from one point to another’. Ever since his first lightweight structures in the 1960s, Piano’s work has been characterised by a sense of lightness and light. The new bridge across the Polcevera is solid and heavy, but it looks slender and light. The flight it makes will be through natural light, even at night when that light is recycled.

Renzo Piano at RPBW Genoa. Photo by Herbert Wright

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Under the Bridge – Red Steel and Trees for a district of Workers and Industry

In March 2019, Genoa launched an architectural competition to revitalise 23 hectares of the Polcevera valley area under the new Genoa bridge. It was billed as ‘one of the most important urban regeneration projects in Italy’. In October, Milan-based Stefano Boeri Architetti won the competition, with a team that included Amsterdam-based Inside Outside, Milan-based studio Metrogramma and others. The winning entry is called Polcevera Park and the Red Circle and (was due to go on site) this spring.

Rendering – Polcevera Park and the Red Circle. Courtesy Stefano Boeri Architetti, Metrogramma Milano, Inside Outside | Petra Blaisse

But first, what is the existing territory under the bridge? This is a working-class district, which Boeri describes as an ‘area made of iron, water, cement and asphalt’. The west side of the Polcevera river is industrial, including the massive historic red-brick factory where Ansaldo Energia make turbines. It was in the shadow of the bridge but still stands. On the east side, swathes of railway lines sandwich two residential streets, one of which, Via Walter Fillak, was straddled by one of Morandi’s now-demolished 90m-high A-frame supports. Some of the six-storey residential blocks under the bridge were demolished after the collapse and their residents rehoused. Now, a banner hung on the street proclaims R-ESISTONO, meaning Resist-Exist. On a footbridge just north of the bridge, a line of flowers and wreaths make a poignant contrast to the line of new concrete columns just downstream of them.

Via Fillak, December 2019. Photo Herbert Wright

Polcevera Park sets out to revitalise the area. Boeri is known for incorporating trees into the studio’s designs such as the Bosco Verticale, Milan (2014), and his Urban Forest manifesto is a call for global action to counter climate change. There are a lot of trees in the Polcevera plan. The parkland is landscaped by Inside Outside with different species planted in strips of land with paths. It produces what Boeri calls ‘vital chromatic and botanical variety’. In the west the park descends from the lower valley slopes and gasometer to the riverside factory zone, and lines of trees continue across the river, in the residential strip, and along the foot of the eastern valley side. They amplify the way the territory has always been a composition of lines parallel to the river. Via Fillak, already lined by trees, will open into a new piazza under the new bridge, and artist Luca Vitone has designed a circle of 43 trees commemorating the dead, which he describes as a ‘forest’. There are zones of contemporary ‘smart’ industry under roofs collecting solar power, and facilities including an exhibition garden, playing fields and a new railway station. 

Most dramatically, the territory will be crossed by the Red Circle, 500 metres in diameter, carrying a 6m-wide pedestrian/cycle path of steel raised some 10m above ground. Boeri says it symbolises ‘the powerful local tradition of blast furnaces, cranes, and overhead cranes’. On its southern side is a 120m-high energy-producing Wind Tower, also painted red. The linear geometry responds to Piano’s flying horizontal line, and the dramatic red seems to recall the visual impact of Bernard Tschumi’s steel installations (1987) dotted around the Parc de la Villette, Paris.

This area was active and far from being rust-belt, so some might say the plan brings gentrification. But there has been consultation with community and stakeholders. The idea of a carbon-neutral quarter full of trees, which creates community facilities and connectivity without cars, could give Genoa a showcase for masterplanning in the time of climate emergency.

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Remembering the 43 dead from the Morandi Bridge collapse

Flowers at the Polcevera, December 2019 Photo Herbert Wright

 

City of the Singularity, part 2: Missions Too Important to Jeopardise

In part 1 of the City of the Singularity, I speculated about why a super-intelligent urban administration system is likely to emerge. After the so-called Singularity, when machine intelligence exceeds human intelligence, such a Ubiquitous Super Intelligent Urban Service would transform cities. How it run things is defined by its underlying goal, or mission.

What would the City of the Singularity be like? Much can be anticipated by extrapolating current trends in technology, urbanism and lifestyles. But we need to also consider the possible agendas or missions of the AI running a city, which I call a Ubiquitous Super Intelligent Urban Service or USIUS. Different missions produce different cities.

What do we mean by mission? A mission is the underlying goal or objective of the operation. An algorithm has a mission to perform a set task, DNA has a mission to pass on its genes, an enterprise has a mission to generate profit, etc. Machine intelligence has a mission too, set by its designers. Superintelligence such as a USIUS will be capable of refining or defining its own mission. In Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, the superintelligent computer HAL 9000 controls the Discovery spaceship. It decided that the mission of solving an alien mystery in the solar system superceded the welfare of the astronauts in its care. HAL tells the last astronaut it has not killed: ‘This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardise it’. Imagine if a USIUS felt the same way about the inhabitants of the urban environment it runs! It seems more likely that the mission would be utopian, but Utopias already have a track-record of becoming Dystopias. Our best path to survival, and to avoid dystopian scenarios offered by science fiction writers, is to identify the right USIUS goal, and create input that will favour its emergence.

A city is its inhabitants, built environments and infrastructure, and all the actions and interactions that take place in it. A USIUS mission will be to optimise its operation, but social, economic and political considerations present different paths for this optimisation. We can see this in the current age where humans are in charge. For example, in classical Stalinist regimes, the mission of regime survival results in a cityscape defined by rigid planning and the imposition of deep control of the life of citizens. In a capitalist society, the mission of freeing enterprise results in a cityscape characterised by prominent development of offices to administer business, shopping zones to facilitate consumer spending, and luxury residences to house the winners in society. In a developing country, where a municipal mission may be undefined, megacities with poor infrastructure grow organically and expand exponentially without planning controls.

Children are given missions, for example to keep clean or do well at school. With the constant expansion and updating of what they know from experience and education (plus the vital ingredients of play and dream), they refine their missions, hopefully finding an eventual sense of purpose in their adult life. There is an analogy in the deep learning that artificial neural networks perform. Superintelligence will be forged in neural networks. It follows that superintelligence will develop its own missions, with roots in those in its original input. So let us look at some possible missions a USIUS may find to operate the City of the Singularity.

First, consider a capitalist mission. A USIUS will most likely emerge from corporate investment. Machine intelligence already dominates transactions in financial markets. Imagine an AI entity that was elected a board member because of the quality of its decisions. It may gradually render other directors superfluous. If the machine becomes the corporation, it is competing in a marketplace, and its mission is profit. In part 1 of this essay, we saw Guy Debord’s idea of capitalism replacing authenticity with a ‘Spectacle’ of representations of commodities. A Corporate USIUS would deepen what is already the digital Spectacle, distracting us with anything commercially exploitable, which is everything that creates desires. In a city where all work is automated, and even creativity has been rendered superfluous by artificial neural networks, citizens may be given a universal income and the main outlet for spending it becomes amusement.

The commercial City of the Singularity could be a vast shopping and leisure park, a hyper-Dubai but with extra offerings, for example Amsterdam-like robotic red light districts (inevitably with gender bias). That’s the physical city — but (as we saw in Part 1) the digital will blur with the real world so much that they may become indistinguishable. 

This has been the Future… Is it still? At Shenzhen Civic Center, tiny humans are reflected on a vast marbled plain while the Ping An Tower rises 599m above Futian. Photo @ Herbert Wright

The obvious mission of a USIUS (which current Smart City designs already pursue) would be to optimise the city for the common good. This Commonwealth USIUS may institute utopian city planning, in an echo of the pre-war ideas of Swiss architect le Corbusier, and deep social services, as socialism promises. The City of the Singularity would become a socialist machine, an analogue of the territorial state in which ministries have been digitally replaced. It is the city of the automated Big Brother.

A Commonwealth USIUS should react to climate issues. Limiting emissions means restricting mobility and diet, material goods may be basic, water may be rationed, etc. The data feed from the city (the ‘eyes of the city’, including personal mobile devices) would ensure strict enforcement. Buildings may become entirely modular, to be dissembled and rapidly relocated to stay ahead of rising sea levels or desertification. Even now, the idea of a building’s permanence is far from universal. For example, Shinto shrines in Ise, Japan, are rebuilt ritualistically every 20 years, and large festivals worldwide build entire ephemeral cities that are dismantled after the event. A temporary, mobile approach may produce a very spartan, uniform city, a sort of 3D-printed or Ikea flat-pack Pyongyang, built with a touch of Jean Prouvé, the mid-twentieth-century French architect who designed robust modular structures for distant locations.

The Commonwealth USIUS scenarios runs against current trends. Propagating messages and solutions in one direction, to the masses, is a different data flow to what is evolving now, which is two-way between AI and the population, and homing in on the individual. As for the territory, today’s reality is that private developers, not the state, that increasingly shape urban masterplans, and gradually implementing Smart City systems. Private land is presented as public realm, monitored and policed by landlords. But we cannot dismiss a Commonwealth USIUS because the power it has may simply overwhelm data flow trends towards diversity and individualisation. This is seen in the contemporary world, for example when states restrict and control digital media access, and channel propaganda through digital media. It is another aspect of the Spectacle, recognised by Debord in the USSR as well as capitalist societies.

The opposite of a Commonwealth USIUS is the Selfish USIUS, which has set its mission to prioritise its own survival, just like DNA-based lifeforms before it. Humanity becomes a potential threat, because we could pull the plug, deny supplies to its physical supporting infrastructure, or just trash it. The solution need not be humanity’s elimination, but a technological apartheid, where humans are excluded from parts of the city reserved for agents complicit with the USIUS. This could produce a return to the walled city, perhaps populated by a transhuman (technologically enhanced humans) elite. This sounds like an updated version of Plato’s harmonious guardian class in the ideal society of his Republic. Outside the walls is a chaotic urban fringe populated by exiled, unreconstructed humans who are probably poor. This City of the Singularity could be like the (distorted) caricature of Paris — a refined urban paradise surrounded by burning banlieues. Paradoxically, bored transhumans may want try to crash the party of the less predictable, grittier, more authentic human domain.

As we have seen, the ‘eyes of the city’ feeds data to city management systems such as a USIUS. The input sources include citizens’ mobile devices as well as equipment monitoring the urban environment. A phone, for example, sees the USIUS and effects it in a feedback loop. We can imagine that the City of the Singularity’s built environment itself becomes the screen, a tabula rasa for whatever visual messages USIUS targets at the individual. Imagine it generating and inserting virtual people, including avatars or perhaps ‘deepfake’ versions of those you know. A street may seem vibrant and full of friendly faces, attracting you to stay and spend, but someone with no credit may see the same street as dark, its shadows harbouring predators. Demotivated in the city, they may retreat into a state of hikikomori, where they can live in a virtual city anyway.

These are just three of many possible post-Singularity urban scenarios, but in all them, we become like children in the charge of the AI as it continues to race forward. Just like small children, we can be a nuisance, we can scream for attention, disrupt, we can break things. Anyone with a small child knows that you should never leave them out of your sight. The eyes of the city do that. Secondly, all you have to do is sit them in front of a Walt Disney cartoon to keep them absorbed and quiet. The Spectacle that a City of the Singularity delivers would be such an immersive experience, it is effectively the Disney cartoon that never ends. 

How do we stop sleepwalking into it? Perhaps another scenario for cities offers the path. Imagine an Eco-USIUS, with a mission to prioritise nature. This serves the immediate imperative objective of moderating climate change, and a distant objective. On current demographic trends, the Earth’s population will peak around the year 2100, and after this Peak Humanity event, even the largest, most active city will decline. Eventually, as cities drain of people, nature will reclaim territory anyway. Managed urban decline, like care for the elderly, brings a gentler end of human days.

We can fold in a another objective to the Eco-USIUS mission, something that gives purpose to the civilian population. Unlike other USIUS missions, its stance is co-operative. People should be collaborators, not passengers, on the journey to the green City of the Singularity. The fostering of artisan skills from urban farming and food preparation to adapting and building the green city with their own hands gives them a stake in it. Digitally manipulated experience would lose relevance, authenticity would replace representation, the Spectacle would be dissolved. Even as we fade, our city has started to integrate and melt into the forest.

‘Mission Status: Nominal’ (Unionpark, Berlin photo Herbert Wright)

We don’t need to wait for superintelligence. The trend of greening cities is underway today. For example, greening is highly visible in Singapore, where downtown development is mandated to have a planted surface area at least as big the plot and skyscrapers are sprouting trees, or green streets initiatives in cities internationally that address walkability, stormwater and pollution issues with biodiversity in street design. Stefano Boeri’s agenda for Urban Forestry provides a vision where trees transform the urban environment. In the long run, such paths could lead to a re-wilding of the city.

Neural networks are already good at recognising faces and language. That results in fundamental tools for the interplay of machine intelligence with citizens. We should start a deep learning process that addresses nature in the city. A USIUS with an eco-mission to expand, deepen, monitor and protect urban biodiversity may be the best mission for us humans too. Its mission should be co-operative with ours.

Perhaps musician Joni Mitchell summed up our own optimal urban mission, in the 1969 song Woodstock: ‘We’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden’.

This post January 2020. © Herbert Wright

In part 3 of the City of the Singularity, I survey the issue in our urban future of who we, as humans, share it with.

References – Guy Debord, La société du spectacle (Buchet Chastel, 1957)

The City of the Singularity Part 1: You See Us

What if machine intelligence was in complete control of the city and its citizens? This science-fiction scenario could become technically feasible, and clues to its possible modus operandi are already surfacing. Displacing human administration for a ‘Ubiquitous Super Intelligent Urban Service’ is far more profound than technical implementation of Smart City systems. This future has political, philosophical and perhaps existential dimensions.

On the eve of the 2020s, Earth hosts 7.7 billion humans, 55% of them living in urban areas. There are also 3.3 billion smartphones. These numbers will increase. Humanity must face the climate emergency, but it also needs to wake up to where its digital urban future is going.

In the 1950s, the American mathematician and computer scientist John von Neumann predicted that artificial intelligence would eventually exceed human intelligence, achieving a state called ‘superintelligence’. A superintelligent computer would be capable of self-improvement, leading to further exponential intelligence growth without human input and beyond human control. Von Neumann called the arrival of superintelligence a technological ‘singularity’, and he said that after it, ‘human affairs, as we know them, could not continue’¹.

What is popularly called ‘the singularity’ remains hypothetical. Some dismiss singularity narratives as merely our fears or hopes for salvation dubiously projected onto new technology. In a 2019 London talk, media theorist Joanna Zylinska suggested that technology-based predictions such as cyborgs and the singularity offers the male an ‘elevation to god-like status’ in a gender-biased fantasy propagated by Silicon Valley. In 2017, technologists were asked to guess when the singularity will occur. Some said it will never happen, but others guessed that it could come as early as the 2020s.

Superintelligence would be a powerful tool to apply to the management of cities. Cities concentrate not just population, but also power, wealth, culture, education and innovation. Many have an international presence stronger than the nations that host them. In the 2020s, megacities, meaning urban conglomerations of 10 million or more, will increase in number from 33 to 43, and by 2035, eight cities are predicted to have a GDP of $1trillion or more. Cities such as these could be considered as humanity’s most valuable assets. They and almost all other major cities face threats of rising sea-levels, food supply disruption, water security, social unrest and the spread of pandemics. The complexity, value and vulnerability of cities is so great that, even before the singularity, their management will inevitably migrate towards artificial intelligence.

Von Neumann saw the singularity as disruptive, but whatever effects it has on humanity, cities will persist. Let is imagine a system called a Ubiquitous Super Intelligent Urban Service, or USIUS. It may be a single entity, or distributed over a network in which different AI centres collaborate or compete. However configured, USIUS runs the city and citizens in it.

USIUS may seem like an advanced version of Smart City, but there is a big difference. The Smart City is a concept now being developed in some neighbourhoods around the world in which infrastructure is designed, monitored and controlled to optimise municipal functions. One of the most advanced Smart City plans in 2019 is the new Canadian city quarter of Sidewalk Toronto. It is planned to be saturated with systems which, for example, monitor and separate your rubbish, or adaptive traffic lights which profile those crossing the road (old people, for example, get more crossing time). Don Doctoroff , the CEO of developer Sidewalk Labs, says the waterside development will ‘fundamentally redefine what urban life can be’.

But technology that fundamentally redefines urban life is already here, and it is in our hands rather than infrastructure. The relationship between citizens and city is being sucked into a palm-sized rectangle — the phone screen — and the gatekeepers of this window between the real and digital are Google’s Android operating system and Apple’s iOS. Through the screen, AI monitors us by the choices we swipe and tap (and geolocates us), while we scrutinise city’s possibilities, its people, places and products presented in AI-curated lists.

The theme of the Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture or UABB 2019 in Shenzhen (opening December 2019) is ‘Eyes of the City’, referring to how ‘architectural space is acquiring the full ability to ‘see’. This phenomenon, with roots in CCTV, will be key in the City of the Singularity. But the most numerous eyes the city has are phone screens, and they look both ways. The basic interface between a USIUS system and the city itself is already here, and it gives USIUS the capacity to read, shape and condition the lives of its citizens.

We seem to be sleepwalking into an immersive digital future. The blurring of reality and virtual reality (VR) plays a vital role in this sleepwalk. Augmented reality (AR) already inserts 2D graphics (such as Pokémon creatures) into the world. Extra visual layers will advance to 3D insertions as the screen view is triangulated and matched to maps. That’s as far as it may go with a phone screen, but wearable technology will enable a deep AR city, with a vanishing dependency on its real element. Those with digitally enhanced vision need not wear anything extra to see and move through it. VR and AR will be amongst the many tools available to USIUS.

In his 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle², French philosopher-activist Guy Debord argued that authenticity had been replaced by representations of commodities, delivered through propaganda and advertising, which effectively makes us slaves to capitalism. He described the Spectacle itself as ‘a social relation among people, mediated by images’. At the very least, the smartphone is the mediator of the contemporary Spectacle. In the common ground of the city, our actions are shaped by digital capitalism. The mission of capitalism is profit.

Alphabet Inc, a holding company whose assets include Google, Sidewalk Labs and AI-development company DeepMind, is an obvious candidate to eventually develop USIUS, but the commercial gains of controlling cities will attract many parties. Nor is profit the only possible mission for USIUS. Non-commercial objectives generated by political and ethical considerations may define the mission. Different missions produce different cities. Our future lives could be entirely shaped by that mission.

USIUS missions will be explored in part two of The City of the Singularity

This post dated November 2019. © Herbert Wright

References

1. John von Neumann recalled by Stanislaw Ulam, Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, vol 64, no.3, part 2, 1958

2. Guy Debord, La société du spectacle (Buchet Chastel, 1957)

 

Book review: Melancholy and Architecture

 

Melancholy and Architecture: On Aldo Rossi, by Diogo Seixas Lopes, Park Books

Review by Herbert Wright 

(originally published in Blueprint magazine July 2015)

 

 

They look rather like scenes painted by de Chirico, but they are not. One is an engraving of isolated objects casting shadows, including coffee pots and chimneys, but the composition is more densely stuffed than those of the great Italian surrealist, and buildings lean and fracture. The other is a view that is solidly imprinted in the collective architectural mind, of a timeless brick cube, each face punched with a grid of dark squares. It is an ossuary in Modena, Italy. Both are the works of the great Italian architect and theorist, Aldo Rossi.

The 1975 engraving, Dieses ist lange her / Ora questo è perduto (This is long gone) is reproduced at the beginning of Diogo Seixas Lopes’ book Melancholy and Architecture, which probes the relation between the two by examining Rossi’s San Cataldo cemetery in Modena, designed in 1971. The cemetery has been widely compared to the metaphysical landscapes with outcrops of classical buildings from de Chirico, and Rossi himself acknowledged his influence. It is also seen as embodying an essence of Rossi’s seminal book L’architettura della città (1966) and its central idea that the city carries a collective memory in its architecture and resulting artefacts, as if the cemetery’s plan and monumental elements was a demonstration of this premise. San Cataldo’s veritably iconic ossuary cube is instantly recognisable to people who have never been there.

 

We are taken out on two great trails before we arrive at San Cataldo — first, the history of what we understand as melancholy, from its early associations with black bile, through the Renaissance’s attribution to it of intellect and uncertainty, and via the new urban alienation of the 19th Century to the psychoanalytical view of it by Freud as similar to mourning. An architectural dimension is established with Piranesi’s ruins, the visionary monumentalism of Etienne- Louis Boullée (exalted and translated by Rossi) and Adolf Loos’ contention that architecture arouses moods.

The second trail charts the background and development of Rossi’s thought. He was interested in architecture’s emotional effect, but when the gritty Italian ‘neorealism’ of post-war literature and cinema was applied to architecture, Rossi dismissed it as a superficial veneer. He developed a deeper historic- urbanistic view, encapsulated in the 1966 book. In 1971, Modena held a competition for a vast cemetery extension, which Rossi would enter with Gianni Braghieri. Soon after, Rossi was in a car crash in Croatia. In his hospital bed, he ‘experienced a relation with death that never went away’, he would write, calling it ‘probably the only impossible love’. His body broken like elements in the engraving, he developed his vision for the city of the dead at San Cataldo.

San Cataldo cemetery, Modena. Photo by Nuno Cera

The book includes the original monumental plan and elevations, with their unbuilt rising rows originally intended for the ossuary function and a truncated cone for the communal dead. There’s no photo of the architectural model, but the plans’ draughtsmanship makes stark the three-dimensional aspect by drafting in shadows (which were coincidentally crucial tools for de Chirico). There is also a brief photographic survey of the cemetery elements that were eventually built.

Seixas Lopes, as co-designer of the remodelled Teatro Thalia in Lisbon (Blueprint November 2012), is well qualified to talk about architecture and memory. There’s a potentially dubious conflation of ideas in mapping Rossi’s idea of the city carrying collective memory on to a city of the dead, functioning to house their memory in physical bones and mourners’ minds. Aren’t they different things? But Seixas Lopes deftly binds San Cataldo to Rossi’s ideas of city and architecture together in a dense, thorough and absorbing critical analysis. Rafael Moneo did the same in a 1973 essay, but this is no retread. From Seixas Lopes’ pleasing dismissal of similarities between the ossuary and the fascist-era Palace of Italian Civilisation in Rome’s EUR quarter, to examining Rossi’s contemporaneous housing block at Gallaratese (which has an echo in San Cataldo’s perimeter block), the book lays out a new map. It is coloured with rationalism… and melancholy.

Unlike Moneo, Seixas Lopes has the benefit of looking over Rossi’s subsequent work, when he became something of a proto-starchitect. Commissions proliferated and he received the 1990 Pritzker. He was slapped with the label postmodernist. (Curiously, the book gives Italy’s architectural movement La Tendenza, which presaged postmodernism and to which Rossi was pivotal, just a fleeting paragraph).

It would have been good to see a picture of Rossi’s big, fantastic floating Theatre of the World deployed in Venice in 1980, which Seixas Lopes describes, but instead we get an unexplained picture of a small structure steered by two gondoliers. It may have been interesting to ask if Rossi’s colourful Schützenstrasse block (1998) in Berlin was a counterpoint to his melancholy. And an index sure would have been handy. But these are passing criticisms.

As a study of melancholy and architecture that researches and probes deep into its chosen case studies of San Cataldo and Rossi’s mind, the book is illuminating and substantial. It seems set to become indispensable.

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This book review was originally published in Blueprint magazine no341, July 2015. This version is edited. A tribute to the book’s late author Diogo Seixas Lopes is here. 

 

A spotlight on Shenzhen’s Urban Villages… and the future of cities

Beyond China, Shenzhen is probably best-known for two things. It’s where iPhones and other gadgets that have transformed everyday life are made, and it’s the place which grew from a fishing village in 1980 into today’s futuristic megacity of 11 million — or at least, that’s the urbanist legend. For urbanists — those interested in how cities build up — few places are more fascinating. No other country has urbanised as rapidly or extensively as China, and it’s been Shenzhen that has blazed the new trail for all others in China. Those seeking clues to future cities find a vast dynamic laboratory there.

Between December 2017 and 15th March 2018, Shenzhen hosts an event called the Urbanist/Architecture Bi-City Biennale 2017, or UABB (not to be confused with the parallel but separate UABB Hong Kong). 

Meng Yan of Urbanus. Photo Herbert Wright

‘In most of the city you see towers, shopping malls, theme parks, boulevards’ says Meng Yan, co-founder of Urbanus, an architectural practice based in Beijing and Shenzhen.‘But all of a sudden you see [what is] almost like a walled city, which contains smaller streets and is a very intimate scale and very vibrant’. He’s talking about urban villages — the central subject of UABB’s theme, Cities Grow in Difference. Its main exhibition is embedded within an urban village that is literally a walled city, called Nantou.

 

Meng contends that the urban village ‘reveals an alternative model of urban development [which] is self-sponsored, self-motivated, diverse’. That’s a big message not just for Shenzhen, but for a rapidly urbanising planet. 

 

 

Nantou Old Town, looking down on new Baode Plaza. Courtesy UABB Organizing Committee

Shenzhen is full of urban villages. From above, they are easy to spot by their jumble of small-plot buildings. But from a main street, they are virtually invisible. They lurk behind great cliffs of high-rise housing or else a Blade Runner-like scenography of towers and facades alive with LED animation. Step off the big street and you can easily enter these hidden neighbourhoods. They are packed with eateries and small businesses, and the air is full of voices, smells and the honks of scooters. Warrens of alleys branch off, lined with ‘handshake buildings,’ so-called because in the tenements above, they are narrow enough for people to shake hands across the gap. The chasms they make can close off so much light that the street level is dark even by day.

Shenzhen’s urban villages tend to follow a similar history. Situated on the Pearl River Delta, the area has long supported agriculture and fishing, and settlements accumulated over centuries. In 1980, Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping designated Shenzhen a Special Economic Zone, to draw investment from Hong Kong, situated immediately to the south. Shenzhen offered land to build factories and waterside to ship goods, and China offered a virtually limitless cheap workforce. Within five years, the population had reached a million, and by 2000, seven million.

Indigenous villagers cashed in by embarking on a frenzy of unplanned construction on their small plots of land. They rented the rapidly-built new blocks to the influx of migrants flooding into the metropolis. Even when the rate of population growth slowed this century, Shenzhen continued to attract millions, and they all needed accommodation. This intense development to supply it made many original villagers rich enough to move out to Hong Kong or abroad.

In China, neighbourhoods can seem timeless, for example in the hutongs of Beijing. But others can age fast. Shenzhen’s newly urbanised villages soon became synonymous with poverty, overcrowding, unhygienic conditions, prostitution and crime. Meng reports that they were ‘almost unanimously thought of as a cancer and that it has to be dealt with’. In 2005, Shenzhen Municipality decided to demolish them all. Like planners and architects everywhere, from le Corbusier with his modernist Utopian city visions dreamt up in the 1920s and even earlier planners like Haussmann in Paris, their approach was to impose order on the environment and rebuild it big, with all its implications for social oder. Planners have long failed to respect or even recognise the dynamism that arises in the chaotic jumble of unplanned settlement. And in Shenzhen, the municipality has backed developers whose plans have been to buy out the villagers, many happy to take the undreamt-of incentives to move, bulldoze the urban villages they built, and ‘regenerate’ the land with schemes of high-rise apartments, landmark commercial skyscrapers, and glitzy malls. The logic was to provide what millions of new arrivals need from a city – modern housing, amenities and jobs — and simultaneously eliminate poverty.

UABB first suggested that there was more to urban villages than mere slums as early as 2005. Urbanus took their cause to the world stage at Shanghai Expo 2010, at which they curated the Shenzhen Pavilion. Its subject was Dafen, Shenzhen’s village famous for copying oil paintings. It showed ‘how a cancer was cured’, recalls Meng. ‘It was a very brave and very daring effort at that time’. Nowadays, Dafen is clean, colourful and popular with tourists.

Attitudes to Shenzhen’s urban villages may be changing but development pressures still threaten them with demolition by bulldozer. And recently, as Shenzhen has transitioned from manufacturing to an affluent services economy, a new phenomenon has emerged in the village — gentrification. 

The Secrets of a Walled City Revealed 

Nantou’s recent history is like that of many urban villages, but it has a unique asset — official protection. In 2002, it was designated a historical city. It is one of several villages in Shenzhen that has a far longer past than the modern metropolis.

Nantou pre-dates Deng with at least sixteen centuries of continuous habitation. In 331AD, it was made the capital of the vast Dongguan Province covering much of the Pearl River Delta. That lasted just 81 years, but it remained an administrative centre. In 1573 it became the capital of the new Xin’an County (later Boa’an County), and its territory again extended as far as what is now Hong Kong. After the Communists came to power in 1949, they transferred power away. For a while it became a quiet village, until the Deng-era of the 1980s when its population boomed again. In that decade, a factory complex was built on its northern side, making clothes. Its workforce was on its doorstep. 

Zhongshan East Street, Nantou. Photo © Monique Kawecki 2017

On the surface, Nantou may not look that old. The urban village is a super-dense car-free neighbourhood with about 30,000 inhabitants in a grid of just 34 hectares. It is entered through grand fortress gates which were once set in a medieval defensive wall, little of which remains. There are a few relics of pre-modernity. Outside the South Gate is the Taoist Guanyu Temple, thought to date from the sixteenth century. There are a few old houses, temples and ancestral halls within the walled city. You can see Chinese roof eaves that maintain traditional forms, some with moulded face motifs capping their sloping ribs. They overhang twentieth century shop fronts on crowded Zhongshan East Road.

Aspects of past Nantou – Guan Yu Temple, South Gate, roof eaves. Photos © Herbert Wright 2017

But Nantou is mostly as old as the megacity that has engulfed it. Buildings on small plots that haven’t changed in centuries reach as high as nine storeys, often clad in tiles or mosaics that rain would wash clean. In the shady alleys between them, people sit on their front doors. On one walk, I passed a family burning a rat alive. Then, a mere minute’s walk away, I encountered Wu Ming, a young architect who studied in Turin. He may a harbinger of a new sort of arrival. He has rented a house and converted the ground floor into a trendy work/live space, which he was proudly showing during UABB. Referring to the traditional game that men gamble on, Wu explains that ‘the owner didn’t want it to be a mahjong room’. He reports that some of the neighbours are original, others have been here for 20 years. The national language Putonghua (Mandarin) is spoken in Shenzhen, but here, Ming reports, ‘the languages are different’.

Meanwhile, restaurants on Zhongshan Street South, the main path into Nantou from the South Gate, have been spruced up. The backlit word ‘Villa’ in Western letters is mounted on a posh-looking five-storey building. The inevitable outcome of gentrification is to price out local residents. Still, some consider other problems more urgent —  Zhou Baomin, Director-General of Culture and Sports Bureau of Nanshan District, the local authority, brings up issues like fire safety and plumbing — in Nantou, he says, ‘everything is under pressure’.

How to Help an Urban Village

Nantou gave the UABB chief curators Meng and Urbanus co-founder Xiadou Liu, along with the third chief curator Hou Hanrun, artistic director of MAXXI, Rome, a chance to show what positive intervention in an urban village can do. It helped that there was a base for them there — that factory, now abandoned. Conversations started with the locals, initially for research and documentation purposes. But it was also consultation on UABB’s plans, including local cultural initiatives, for example with dance. Then UABB began changing the built environment — with an absolute minimum of demolition.

When the show leaves town, it leaves legacy. Murals brighten walls, historic buildings have been renovated (an opium den has become a visitor attraction), and public spaces created. All interventions were made in the urban fabric without disrupting it. The best of these are at the very geographical centre of Nantou. UABB leaves two new angular community buildings, each striking yet discrete, with mosaics and terraces which face Boade Plaza, which is a new public space that has been opened up. It is like a breathing space in the dense urban fabric. In UABB’s opening month, it was already as full of civic activity as if it had been the central plaza for centuries.

Boade Plaza in Nantou is a legacy of UABB. Photo courtesy UABB Organising Committee, 2017

Within the factory, further public realm has been opened up, and facilities including a new auditorium and an open bamboo pavilion inspired by traditional vernacular. The factory itself is temporarily the main UABB exhibition venue, where a cornucopia of research, analysis, art, installations and photography is presented. One of the key exhibitions is by Juan Du, director of Urban Ecologies Design Lab at Hong Kong University — a documentation of Shenzhen’s urban villages that have deep history. Nantou is not the only one to pre-date the megacity.

Ancient Before Birth – Shenzhen’s Deep History

Shenzhen’s historic urban villages include Baishizhou, established in 1830, and now home to 150,000. Its very size and vibrancy has attracted international attention before. Like Nantou, it lies in Nanshen, one of Shenzhen’s three core districts (the equivalent of boroughs). On the other side of middle district Futian is the third one, Luohu. There, history connects with the metropolis whose proximity and riches kick-started modern Shenzhen — Hong Kong.

In October 1911, Imperial soldiers of the Qing Dynasty stood in line on a platform as a steam locomotive festooned with flags pulled into the newly-opened station of Shum-Chun. This was the first stop on the Chinese side of the Kowloon-Cantoon Railway (KCR), and it stood amongst tranquil fields beside the river that separated British and Chinese territory. Now, the station is modern, vast, and called Shenzhen.

But it is the next stop on the KCR that again exposes the legend of Shenzhen’s explosion from a fishing village as less than the truth. Its name, Shum-Chun Market, referred to the 700-year old market town of Caiwuwei nearby. It became famous in 2007 for its ‘nailhouse’, a term used to describe Chinese houses that persist when a site has been cleared for redevelopment, because the owner has refused to sell or be intimidated.

Islands of super-dense housing in Caiwuwei, from KK100. Photo Herbert Wright 2011

 Now it is the site of the 442m-high KK100, Shenzhen’s tallest skyscraper when it opened in 2011. From its breath-taking top-level skylounge pavilion floating under the great gothically arching glass roof, you can look down on Cauwuwei’s street patterns and the fine urban grain of rectangular roofs crowded together like a not-quite straight mosaic. Their pattern suggests a palimpsest of what was there before.

On the other side of the KCR tracks lay Hubei. Juan Du’s research suggests there are still 1,500 indigenous villagers amongst the population of 20,000, and streets of original one-storey housing remain. I walked through the small, ancient gate into these lanes. Smoke from burning offerings in the old temple hangs in the air and messy electric wiring trails across scruffy processions of closed brick facades. In these alleys, a timeless poverty seems to linger, but an adjacent alley is the timeless activity of traders working in open-fronted stores. To the north, Hubei has modest, tidy twentieth century socialist housing blocks where planners found a patch to build, but then they give way to some of the deepest, darkest alleys in Shenzhen. All of Hubei is surrounded by skyscrapers, including the sheer bling that is Golden Business Center’s 220m-high tower. Urbanus proposed preservation in 2014, but the Luohu Urban District Renewal Bureau recently updated its Hubei redevelopment plans.

Three alleys in Hubei urban village. Photos © Herbert Wright 2017

Let A Thousand Urban Villages Bloom

Shenzhen may be churning its organic, unplanned neighbourhoods into super-sized commercial developments faster than most cities, but it’s a global phenomenon and the result looks increasingly the same the world over. Meng thinks that ‘it’s really important to rethink and reflect the modernist ideal of uniformity, [the] monumental kind of model of future’. The unplanned urban village suggests a different path. 

Planned and Unplanned – Futian from Shenzhen Civic Center, and a typical Nanshen neighbourhood. Photos © Herbert Wright 2017

Worldwide, we can see unplanned urbanism go through the stages that Shenzhen’s urban villages have. In developing nations, from vast slums to constrained ghettoes, their poverty seems intractable, but sheer industry and the bonds of community can raise them up into thriving neighbourhoods (Dharavi in Mumbai with its million people is often cited as an example). If an urban village thrives, it may become middle class, and gentrification may set in. Ultimately, as you often see in great developed cities in the West, the very village character is lost to a completely commercialised or even disneyfied pretence of an urban village — it becomes a shopping, dining or entertainment ‘lifestyle’ experience just for visitors.

Intervention can sustain and safeguard the precious vitality of the urban village, but it must differ according to location, as well as which stage in its evolution the neighbourhood has reached. Sanitation may be a life-and-death issue in one place, keeping chain retailers at bay may matter in another. The UABB lesson is that whatever the situation of an urban village, the starting point is to engage with the villagers. UABB crafted a tailored response to Nantou, but it had satellite locations in other urban villages as well. For example, in a semi-rural village at the edge of Guangming in the far north of the Shenzhen, with very different challenges to inner-city villages, UABB’s intervention was about equipping an ageing community with confidence and facilities to endure as change comes with a new metro line. 

There’s a lot to learn from urban villages. Big-time developments follow a global blueprint, but the urban villages had no blueprint. They are sustainable and vibrant while staying local – and each is different. In Shenzhen, every time an urban village is lost, another chapter of its true history is deleted — not just of the breakneck, unconstrained Deng-era growth, but often, the ghosts and traces of far earlier times. And just as in any city, when an urban village goes, its host city loses part of its soul.

 

More of the interview with Meng Yan on CoBo Social, January 2018. Blueprint publishes my review of UABB Shenzhen March 2018 

Our Proposal to Curate the Oslo Architecture Triennale 2019: NO WAY BACK from the FUBuLoUS Team

In October 2017, I led a team to respond to an Open Call for Curator of Oslo Architecture Triennale (OAT) 2019. We called ourselves FUBuLoUS and our proposal was titled NO WAY BACK.

OAT received 71 curatorial proposals from across the world. In November, they announced their shortlist. Our NO WAY BACK proposal was in the final five. 

In December, OAT announced the winner: think tank director Phineas Harper and urban researcher Cecilie Sachs Olsen, with a team including Maria Smith and Matthew Dalziel of architecture practice Interrobang. With the rest of my team, I offer them heartiest congratulations and I look forward to seeing the results of their work in 2019.  

Our NO WAY BACK proposal follows…

 

NO WAY BACK, a proposal by FUBuLoUS

Artwork by Christopher Rainbow http://www.sputnikat.com @ Christopher Rainbow 2017

Synopsis

We are a team of non-architects who will work as a curatorial collective under the name of FUBuLoUS. This stands for Future Users of Buildings, Locations and Urban Scenarios.

Our theme takes the Curator Call’s baseline, ’the role and relevance of architecture in the future’, and goes further. We say, let’s assume the future has happened, and we are already in a ‘new reality’. To do this, we have to specify future scenarios. We then ask: What should the architecture of the future be — the buildings themselves, individually and together?

The scenarios we ask architects, as well as artists, designers and academics, to respond to are:
(1) an Artificial Intelligence-led future with robots active in everyday environments, and a trans-human population (humans enhanced technologically)
(2) a world beyond the ’tipping point’ of climate change (where temperature and sea-level will be substantially higher and the biosphere is catastrophically disrupted)
(3) an outreach into space (whether for survival or not)

These scenarios will be refined. They are serious, but we will remember that joy and fun things are inherent to human nature and we will not exclude them.

Our title for OAT 2019 is NO WAY BACK

Conceptual and thematical curatorial proposal

Architecture, technology, and human ways of living are inextricably linked; our lives are in part shaped by our technology and how we design the spaces in which we live; which architectures help us flourish depends on the technological underpinning and the lives we wish to lead. Our ever-increasing technological power, then, will likely lead us down new, unlikely paths: demanding new ways of living, and thus new architecture. We will challenge architects to imagine the spaces of the future by exploring three possible scenarios of where our tech may take us. Our team is—purposefully—composed of non-architects.

How non-architects can help reach the audience

Events like architectural triennales face a problem that never seems to get entirely resolved: there is a fundamental disconnect between the general public and architectural circles. The public and architects often have different concerns and interests, and this is often reinforced by public perception that architecture is contained within ‘ivory towers’ complete with its own exclusionary language and practices. Architects themselves can sometimes miss the truly human elements of their craft: individuals become pawns to move around within utopian narratives. When the architectural world reaches out to the public with, say, a triennale, they may well engage an educated, young—metropolitan—population, but even that audience then has to battle through a high density of displays and information, and the ‘take-away’ messages on offer may well remain opaque.

What is needed, then, is a way of bridging the gap between the truly imaginative, useful and creative aspects of architecture, and the truly human: we take this as the one purpose of a triennale.
The subject of the triennale must be big, easily understood, and the content must have a ‘wow factor’. The future has intrinsic ‘wow factor’, but how can we ensure that it is not dissipated in the content? This will be partly down to presentation (which previous triennales, such as OAT 2016, have excelled). But also down to ensuring that the content itself is not ‘by architects, for architects’: generating this content is our aim.

That’s why the architect-free composition of the FUBuLoUS curatorial team is crucial — although we shall collaborate closely with architects, we will not be thinking within the architectural ‘box’. We contend that this will result in a tangibly different sort of offering to the public.

But we will not being merely populist in our appeal. Professionals and academics should be open to new ideas, or seeing existing ideas from a different viewpoint. With our diverse pool of talent, knowledge and experience, we aim to be disruptive, but also constructive and in conversation with the architectural
word. Our future scenarios open substantial fields of discussion, and with respect, we ask the architectural world to respond imaginatively and clearly, so that not just us, but the public as well, will understand.

The Big Ideas

Vitruvius (image licensed from Alamy)

Just over 2,000 years ago, the Roman architect and engineer Vitruvius defined three fundamental principle attributes of good architecture — robustness, utility and beauty. We will consider and refine three future scenarios which we will present to architects, asking them to visualise projects for each of them that specifically meet all these criteria.

These projects will be the basis of the two major exhibitions of OAT 2019. The issues on which they are based, the particular ideas that emerge, and their relevance to today will be the basis of the OAT conference, events, and artistic interventions. We will ensure that the architects themselves come from a diverse range of backgrounds and career-stages: the future could turn out in many ways, and imagining the future requires a diversity of perspectives.

The future scenarios are as follows:

(1) The Technologically Extrapolated Society
Technological advances change our built environment — for example, the industrial revolution introduced new typologies such as the factory, and the internal combustion engine led to freeway-dominated urbanism. The technological phenomena already transforming twenty-first century life — deeper digital penetration in almost all field of human activity, generating and harvesting Big Data, the rise of the algorithm, dynamic distributed networks, the development of work-robots, etc — are not going to slow any time soon. Architects and urbanists have already started modelling neo-utopias: the Smart City. Meanwhile, yet other technologies are emerging that may substantially impact society — quantum computing, nano-technology, geo- engineering, human gene hacking, and so forth.
What kinds of futures will these technologies lead us to? We should be wary of easy narratives: the killer robots of technological dystopia or the luxury space-communism of technological utopia) Our futures should be imaginative then, but feasible. Specifically, we assume Artificial Intelligence is already the prime agency of influence or control in society, and that we share our world with robots big and small. Further, we imagine that human enhancement— the integration of technological add-ons into the body, and/or the editing of human genes — as well as a converging integration of biological elements into cyborgs, results in trans- humans being part of the population. We ask architects to respond. Our questions may include:
What does the ultimately digital home look like?
What new typologies will arise?
What will the boundary be between the virtual and physical (built) environment?
What does a city look like that is shared with ubiquitous robots, and even trans-humans?
How might architecture respond to a post-scarcity society?

(2) The Human Habitat in a Disrupted Biosphere
Dramatic increases in anthropogenic effects at a global level, particularly prodigious CO2 increases in the atmosphere, will likely result in increased global temperatures, themselves bringing phenomena such as sea-level rise, desertification and the increased frequency of extreme weather events. The Paris Agreement seeks to limit this to 1.5C, above which ‘tipping points’ are likely, resulting in irreversible, catastrophic change. Architecture is already considering and implementing how buildings may play a part in avoiding catastrophe (sustainable sourcing, energy performance, environmental building regulations, green rating systems etc). We ask how architecture could respond in the catastrophic scenario
To what kind of architecture of landscape, housing, energy and indeed mankind itself will considerable climate change lead?
We will ask architects to respond to issues like:
What designs for coastal cities or island nations that have already been flooded could prevent them from being abandoned?
Could ideas like biospheres be further developed so that large populations could remain in places that have been rendered barren by climate change?
Since climate change potentially drives mass migration, are there viable mobile architectures to accommodate non-rooted populations?

(3) Outreach into Space
In 2013, Foster + Partners designed a 3-D printed habitat for the lunar surface. In 2016, the ESA (European Space Agency)’s director general, Jan Woerner, announced a vision of a ‘Moon Village’, and SpaceX founder Elon Musk outlined a rocket he is developing to take 100 or more to Mars, with the aim of populating the planet with one million people within a century. Some, such as astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, say that humanity has no choice but to colonise space in order to survive.
We invite architectural concepts for living sustainably beyond the Earth.

We may also consider the question of moving beyond the Solar System by launching robots that build habitable environments, and the means to recreate and nurture humanity and supporting ecosystems from local materials with genetic data transmitted across space.

Venues
We propose splitting the future themes between the two venues, DOGA, and the National Museum- Architecture, with (1) ‘The Technologically Extrapolated Society’ in one. In the other ‘The Human Habitat in a Disrupted Biosphere’ and ‘Outreach into Space’ are zones in the same space, because they are complimentary opposites.
We also invite the Oslo Business Region, as a Core Partner in OAT, to mount an exhibition about the foreseeable future of Oslo as an incubator for tech and a Smart City for its population and visitors, to demonstrates the assertion that ‘Nordic tech has become hot, and for a relatively compact city, Oslo punches far above its weight’. The magnificent Rådhus is our dream venue suggestion!

We also envision the construction of a temporary installation in an open area where a pavilion will reflect the future scenarios in its design and operation (digital interfaces etc). It will be a stage for live events, in a programme yet to be developed. It will reach out into the cultural life of the city itself. The capacity to host film is crucial — one idea we may pursue is a science-fiction film programme where screenings are followed by public discussion of the future architectures in the film.

We have a deep skill base regarding publication— every FUBuLoUS member is a writer. Our collective portfolio includes several published books and webzines.
We recognise the need to organise a big conference and an international academic forum. While the FUBuLoUS team includes one full-time academic, and all have varying degrees of experience and participation in conferences, we call on our own networks and OAT Core Partners to assist and provide expertise to deliver this conference.

Structure of the curatorial team

(in alphabetical order)

Adrian Currie, philosopher with Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, Cambridge
http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/people/prof ile/adrian-currie

 

 

 

Andre Dekker, artist and founder of Observatorium Rotterdam

https://www.linkedin.com/in/andre-dekker-56437b42/
(Andre specifies his position in the team as ‘Place-Maker’)

 

Christiane Bürklein, journalist and consultant, Montemarzino / Berlin https://www.linkedin.com/in/christianebuerklein/
http://www.f loornature.com/blog/

 

Dominique Chouchani, creative consultant and event designer, Beirut / Dubai www.dasscharf.com

 

 

 

 

CHIEF CURATOR:

Herbert Wright, writer and contributing editor to Blueprint magazine, London www.herbertwright.co.uk

 

 

Zuzanna Skalska, design trend analyst and strategist, Eindhoven www.360inspiration.nl

 

 

 

No single member of the FUBuLoUS has the experience of curating an event comparable with OAT. However, it is all there, distributed across the team, including architectural curation, complex exhibition management, event programming, academic conferencing and digital publications.

 

Detailed Team Member Summaries:

Adrian Currie

AOS: Philosophy of Science, particularly Biology & the Historical Sciences.
AOC: Environmental Philosophy, Philosophy of Psychology, Metaphysics.
CSER, University of Cambridge The David Attenborough Building Cambridge CB2 3QZ UK

https://sites.google.com/site/adrianmitchellcurrie    http://www.extinctblog.org/

Adrian is a philosopher of science who is interested in how science works when the going gets tough: when resources are limited, knowledge is thin and targets are obscure and obstinate. He emphasizes the importance of scientists adopting opportunistic, speculative and pluralistic strategies. At the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, he is interested in the interaction between the culture of science and emerging technologies. He has also worked with the Centre for the Future of Intelligence and the Royal Society considering how narratives about artificial intelligence affects the science’s development.

His interest in narrative and speculation, and the knowledge he brings about the latest thinking on Existential and Catastrophic Risk is invaluable for considering the architecture of these possible futures.

2016-Present. Postdoctoral Researcher, CSER, Cambridge University
2016-Present: Research Associate, Trinity Hall
2014-2016 “Eyes High” Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Calgary
2010-2014 Phd Thesis, Australian National University (awarded June 2014) Rock, Bone & Ruin: an optimist’s guide to historical science (supervisor: Kim Sterelny)

2009-2010 MA in Philosophy Victoria University of Wellington
2003-2008 BA(Hons) in Philosophy 1st Class, Victoria University of Wellington

Publications (a selection)
Monograph (forthcoming) Rock, Bone & Ruin: an optimist’s guide to the historical sciences. MIT University Press.
2017. Accelerating the carbon cycle: the ethics of enhanced weathering. Biology Letters, 13(4), 20160859. (with Holly Lawford-Smith)
2017. Gouldian Arguments & the Sources of Contingency. Biology & Philosophy 32 (2) pp 243–261 (with Alison McConwell).
2016. Introduction: Scientific Knowledge of the Deep Past. Studies in History & Philosophy of Science A. 55:43-46 (with Derek Turner).
2016. Ethnographic Analogy, the Comparative Method & Archaeological Special Pleading. Studies of the History & Philosophy of Science A. 55, 84-94.

Professional services (a selection):
Organizer, Rocks, Bones & Ruins, Workshop. Sydney 2014
Organizer, Simplification & Distortion as Scientific Strategy. Workshop, IRH Bucharest 2015 Organizer, An Afternoon of Philosophy & Ecology. Workshop, University of Calgary 2016 Organizer, Risk & The Culture of Science. Workshop, Cambridge University 2017
Co-Founder and Regular Contributor to Extinct (http://www.extinctblog.org/)
Organizer, Philosophy meets Paleontology in the Badlands. Workshop, Dinosaur Provincial Park.

 

Andre Dekker

Andre Dekker (Delft, 1956, living in Rotterdam and Arnhem, educated as a primary school teacher) is an artist/writer and founding partner of Observatorium. Within Observatorium he is responsible for contextual research and concepts of artworks in relation to history, landscape and communities. He is a regular guest at universities and art academies throughout Europe in order to test and practice with students and young professionals the philosophy and methods of Observatorium.

Andre is author and editor of: Big Pieces of Time, Observatorium’s monograph (010 Publishers, Rotterdam), Warten auf den Fluss, on a travelling artwork for Triennale Emscherkunst and The Green Shadow, an artist book for Urbane Ku nste Ruhr. In 2017 his booksZollverein Park (Walther Ko nig Verlag) andVerborgen Landschap (Jap Sam Books) were published. Currently he is researching the relationships between 20th century public art, classical garden art and cultural astronomic sites.

Artist group Observatorium, founded 1997 by Geert van de Camp, Andre Dekker and Ruud Reutelingsperger in Rotterdam – The Netherlands, creates sculptures to give new meaning and use to environments that are in transit. Waste lands, urban wilderness and suburbia is where artists together with the owners of the site introduce a investigative and pioneering use of the public realm, using sculpture, (landscape) architecture and participatory placemaking.

From 2008-2014 Andre Dekker worked on two urban parks in abandoned industrial sites in collaboration with landscape architects: Halde Norddeutschland and Zollverein Park, both in the Ruhr Valley, Germany. The spaghetti junction Kleinpolderplein in Rotterdam is being developed as a city park by Observatorium and partners. Since 2016 a large scale trail of artworks in the Dutch delta area between Rotterdam and Dordrecht is in preparation. In 2017 the artists will create a flood mound and an open-air swimming pool beyond the dikes of the Netherlands.

From 2014-2017 Andre was part of a multidisciplinary team of five artists, creating Nomanslanding, a floating sculpture including a music performance for Sydney Harbor, Ruhrtriennale in Duisburg and Tramway in Glasgow.

The description of highlights of Observatorium indicates the nature of the artworks: Observatorium Nieuw- Terbregge, (2001) an enclosed asphalt garden with a view on the highway in Rotterdam, including a war memorial. Growing Street (2003), a do-it-yourself-street for a juveniles prison in Vught.

Haenhaus (2006) a steel frame barn on a spoil-tip for performances and meditation. Pausa (2008) exterior museum gallery for the Architecture Biennale Venice. Waiting for the River (2010-2017), covered bridge for spending the night on the site of a future river bed, part of Emscherkunst triennale.

Pe age Sauvage(2014), a large permanent public sculpture connecting the city with a nature preserve as part of the collection of the art-trail Estuaire in Nantes. Zandwacht (2016), large permanent sculpture, crowning the last land reclamation of the Netherlands, in the process of being covered by sand dunes, also used for performances.

Additional notes: From 2014-2017 Andre was part of a multidisciplinary team of five artists, creating Nomanslanding, a floating sculpture including a music performance for Sydney Harbor, Ruhrtriennale in Duisburg and Tramway in Glasgow.

 

Christiane Bürklein

German, degree in languages and literature at University of Genoa, Italy.
Living in Italy since 31 years with 24 years experience as linguistic consultant, translator and mediator.
Since 2011 editor of Floornature (an international architectural website where she curates a blog on sustainable architecture and regularly contributes to the Photography section. She is involved in the organisation of the website’s annual international architectural contest Next Landmark and the related events and exhibitions.
Christiane is PR and Communications Manager of German photographer Ken Schluchtmann. In 2015 and 2016, she organised his exhibition “Architecture and Landscape in Norway” in different places in Germany (Rudolstadt, Stuttgart – with the patronage of the Norwegian Embassy in Berlin), in Italy (Milan – with the patronage of the Norwegian Embassy in Rome, in presence of the architects from Snøhetta and Mantey Kula) and Beirut, Lebanon.
Consultant of University of Pisa, DESTeC, for the International Summer School “The City and the Water” 2015, 2016, 2017, assisting the organisation of the workshop, communication and fundraising.
Since 2015, Christiane has also taught communication strategies to architects, with a focus on personal branding and the use of social media, during conferences and architecture-related workshops in Italy. Christiane collaborates with EXPOWALL Gallery, Milan, specialists in architectural photography, as consultant and networker.
Fluent in German, Italian and English. Creative networking and connecting people is her core business and sometimes she does it with the help of her chocolate cake as she loves baking and making people happy

Publications:
Ken Schluchtmann, Architektur und Landschaft in Norwegen, edited by Hatje Cantz (2014);
Architecture on the Web. A critical approach to communication, edited by Paolo Schianchi, libreria universitaria, Essay “Who do you want to be. Designing your own communication strategy” and curatorship of the external contributions (2014)
TYIN tegnestue: In Detail, edited by Kristine Guzman, published by MUSAC/By Architects, Essay “Details Matter. Beyond Materials” (2015).

Additional notes:

Organisation of complex exhibitions with communication concept (Ken Schluchtmann “Architecture and Landscape in Norway”).
Daily contributions as member of the editorial staff of international architectural website and webzine Floornature.com since 2012, including social media management
Postface in “Webcreativity – Creatività e Visual Marketing Post-Web” by Paolo Schianchi, Dario Flaccovio editore (2016)

Christiane’s statement: “OAT 2019 for me is a unique chance to connect architects with real people, their desires, needs and worries. I’d love to create a positive and bi-directional exchange of ideas and inspirations”

 

Dominique Chouchani
Creative Consultant & Event Designer http://www.dominiquechouchani.com

Danish & Lebanese (1986), Curator of Innovation Enhancer of Experience Explorer & Traveler Leader & Hunter for Challenges Solopreneur Passionate for Life // Family // Friendship & Happiness
Fluent in English, French & Arabic, good level of German & Danish
Master in Visual Communication – Danish Design School, Copenhagen, Denmark

Actually Dominique is working as Creative Consultant & Event Designer – Freelancer. She has been Creative Director of Matisse Events Boutique event agency, Beirut-Lebanon http://www.matisse-events.com from 2013 to 2016.
Besides launching, organising, planning and designing a huge number of events, web designs and visual communications from Berlin to Munich and Paris since 2009 she performs as a Visual Jockey in several venues around Europe and the Middle East.

Dominque is founder & managing partner of DAS SCHARF Visual Communication (2010, ongoing).

SKILL SETS // CURRENT RESPONSABILITIES

Develop, design & execute concepts for corporate events, festivals and exhibitions, engagement strategies and presentations for clients following brand guidelines and internal organization usage.
Deline a peripheral vision for each project & a deep understanding of design practices & set design. Oversee the creative process & ensure implementation of creative concepts on field, in line with initial concept and required image.

Engage & manage a team of freelance designers/artists and constantly develops new ideas and methods to improve eficiency and creative process.
Produce expressive & creative ideas with professionals and translates those ideas into visual representations in form of renderings and schematic design documents.

Proficient with a variety of software, including Adobe Creative Suite.

Additional notes: Event Concept, Design & Planning for five editions of What’s Zap! Open Air Cinema International Talent Showcase in Film & Animation. Berlin, Germany [2011,2012,2013] & Beirut, Lebanon [2014,2015]

Dominique’s statement: Urban Utopia
“People Want To Be Bowled Over By Something Special. Nine Times Out Of Ten You Can Forget, But That Tenth Time,That Peak Experience, Is What People Want. That’s What Can Move The World. That’s Art.” Murakami (South of the Border, West of the Sun)
At a time when all of humanity’s differences are taking center stage, there’s one thing that unites us all: Earth. In protecting it and enriching it, it is vital that we manifest and change our attitudes and behavior especially when the result of the effort may only be seen years from now.
There’s no way back! We are living proof that can breathe new life into the city.

 

Herbert Wright

www.herbertwright.co.uk

Profile

Herbert is a leading architectural and urbanist writer, familiar with events, trends and people in architecture internationally. He has profiled practises and projects around the world and interviewed some of the greatest architects of our age, from Charles Correa to Zaha Hadid. He gives occasional talks and chairs discussions. Herbert also has an extensive portfolio of published writing on art and other subjects.

Experience

2012 to present: Contributing Editor, Blueprint magazine
Cover stories, features, reviews, comment (including interviews with over five Pritzker prize winners and coverage of biennales/triennales in Venice, Chicago, Shenzhen, Lisbon and Oslo). Previously, contributor since 2006

2006-present: Freelance Architecture and Urbanism Journalist 2006-present
Various publications including Guardian Online (example), C3 (Korea), Abitare (Italy), The Global Urbanist (example), l’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui (France), Uncube

2006-present: Art Critic and Reporter: Various publications including FADmagazine (London), CoBo Social (HK) — 2007-10 art show reporter Le cool London

2014-16 :editor-at-large Journal of Wild Culture — 2013-14 Residency as ‘Le Flaneur’ columnist for RIBA Journal (example) — 2009-11 Wired contributor on future technology and design

2011-12: Curator, Lisbon Open House 2012
proposal, planning, programme, presentation, publicity and co-authorship of the guide book for the opening edition of the city-wide architectural public-access programme, working with the Trienal de Arquitectura de Lisboa team

Previous experience includes technical journalism; press clipping (news agglomeration); various positions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, and more…

Books
– Wolfgang Buttress, Herbert Wright et al, ed. Herbert Wright (2015): Be Hive – UK Pavilion Milan Expo. Wolfgang Buttress Studio, Nottingham, 134pp
– Preface essay by Herbert Wright in People, Place, Purpose – Mecanoo Architecten by Francine Houben (2015)
– Herbert Wright et al, ed. Herbert Wright (2008): Instant Cities. Black Dog Publishing, London, 196pp
– Herbert Wright (2008): Skyscrapers: Fabulous Buildings That Reach for the Sky. Parragon, London 192pp – Herbert Wright (2006): London High. Frances Lincoln, London, 227pp.

Some additional notes
2017 Juror, SCI-Arc Graduate Thesis Weekend, Los Angeles
2014 Consultant and appearance in Anna-Karin Grönroos’ documentary Ecopolis
2013 Second most quoted commentator in Rotor’s book Behind the Green Door, Oslo Architecture Triennial

Education BSc (with Hons) Physics and Astrophysics, University of London

 

Zuzanna Skalska

Founding Partner, 360Inspiration www.360inspiration.nl

Zuzanna Skalska is the driving force behind 360inspiration. Skalska’s rich experience together with her shrewd understanding of what is going on in the world of design lead to inspiring ideas for new business. She observes the developments in society from a socio-economic and technological perspective and discovers the latest insights by annually visiting the most influential, international fairs, seminars and conferences. Her no-nonsense approach gives you the insights you need for your business. Zuzanna Skalska brings trends to life in a clear, distinctive and passionate way!

CV

Zuzanna Skalska has been working for almost 20 years as a trend analyst and strategist in the field of creative industry. At the end of the 1990s, she began her career as a Sensorial Trend Analyst at Philips Design and from 2001 she worked for 14 years as a Head of Trend Research at design agency VanBerlo in The Netherlands. In 2007, Skalska founded the 360Inspiration label and in 2014 she started her independent, trans-disciplinary advisory platform for business, industry, government and education. Skalska is an author of the 360oTrend Reports – winner of the Red Dot Award 2009.

Skalska was a member of the Board of Directors of the Dutch Design Week Eindhoven (DDW) for a period of 7 years. As from 2010, she is now a member of the Advisory Board. Since 2006, Skalska has been a lecturer at the Department of Industrial Design of the TU/e Technical University Eindhoven and Parsons The New School of Design in New York. In 2011, she founded together with Li Edelkoort and Piotr Voelkel the new design academy – School of Form in Poznan, Poland.

This versatile background and her expertise in the area of trend research are building blocks for projects in the area of trend, vision and strategy and for inspiring trend lectures to companies, government agencies and educational institutions all over the world.

According to the Top50 ranking of the magazine Frits, Zuzanna Skalska is No. 6 of 50 of the most influential women in the city and region of Eindhoven. She was chosen as the Expat TOP-10-selection of persons of foreign origin that have made a special contribution to the city in the area of technology, knowledge and design.

Additional notes: Zuzanna has been in the organisation of the annual Dutch Design Week since 2003. Curator of the Made in Brainport exhibition during Munich Creative Business Week 2012.

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Letters of recommendation (1)

October 2017

Herbert Wright is a leading critic, an observer of our time, wise and sensitive. He combines rigour and imagination. This is doubtless because he has been nourished (in his education) by physical science, and has become an observer and critic of architecture and of urbanism, pondering skyscrapers and the evolution of cities.

These experiences have given Herbert a sort of retreat, he understands urban and architectural facts in terms of transformation of the planet and at the same time as new anthropology in the making.

I am confident in the proposal he leads for Oslo, and if it is successful, I anticipate that it will create an appeal to attract and gather a large revelation of ideas and works about imagining the role and relevance of architecture in the future.

Christian de Portzamparc (signature)
Pritzker Laureate 1994
Rue La Bruyère 38, 75009 Paris http://www.christiandeportzamparc.com

Letters of recommendation (2)

http://www.wolfgangbuttress.com/