Tainui burial stones

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Tainui was one of the waka (canoes) used in by the Māori when they came from Hawaiki to Aotearoa New Zealand. After landfall near the East Cape, it followed the coast, was carried across to the Manukau Harbour, and travelled southwards to Kawhia. The waka was buried, and two stones, named Puna and Hine, were placed to mark its bow and stern. Photograph from early 1900s of Puna and Hine, from the Alexander Turnbull Library.

Kennicott on MVRDV pseudo-controversy

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Phillip Kennicott, art and architecture critic for the Washington Post, doing his job on the MVRDV pseudo-controversy:

The controversy seems part of a larger cultural effort to make the events of September 11, 2001 somehow sacred, to use the meaning of the terrorist attack for larger, more overbearing cultural control. So now it is being deployed against contemporary architecture, not because there is anything inherently offensive in this design (which may or may not be an intentional reference to 9/11), but because the emotions generated by the attack have been co-opted by one part of the political and cultural spectrum.

MVRDV in the echo-chamber

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MVRDV IN THE ECHO-CHAMBER

MVRDV are in trouble for cashing in on the 9/11 terrorist attacks. From Tracy Connor’s report for the NY Daily News:

A mockup shows two soaring skyscrapers connected in the middle by a “pixelated cloud” that evoked the clouds of debris that erupted from the iconic World Trade Center towers after terrorists flew planes into them.

John M. Glionna goes further in the L.A. Times:

Even at first glance, the design renderings for the soon-to-be-built pair of apartment towers here pack a wallop: They evoke New York’s World Trade Center towers in mid-explosion in the terrifying moments after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

The reason it evokes it so strongly at first glance is, of course, because the article is headed up with a pair of carefully selected images designed to make the link. Do the reporters or bloggers involved actually accuse MVRDV of deliberately evoking the terrorist attacks to make money? No, of course not. They just reports the controversy. And in the case of Tracy Connor, drum up a little more by poking the images under the nose of random people predisposed to be offended, in this case a retired New York firefighter.

This patently ridiculous claim originates with gossip website Gawker, for whom generating outrage is just another way to get clicks. Currently, they are also headlining “‘Elvis Monkey’ has a Michael Jackson Nose”.

The echo–chamber takes over, with nobody adding or asking anything new, or weighing the insinuations or claims. But then, this is the game MVRDV were playing. As Wouter Vanstiphout points out, it’s a “logical outcome of the global trade in empty images”, a trade in which MVRDV are complicit.

UPDATE: 24hrs later, the same story, with precisely zero new content, continues to echo.

Alexander off-balance

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ALEXANDER OFF-BALANCE

Christopher Alexander:

“this power we have is so firmly rooted and coherent in every one of us that once it is liberated, it will allow us, by our individual, unconnected acts, to make a town, without the slightest need for plans, because, like every living process, it is a process which builds order out of nothing.” (p. 14)

Alexander believed that the built environment should be a natural production. Towns and buildings should emerge naturally, like birds make nests. The things we make should themselves “be” nature. But his concept of nature relies heavily on the idea that nature finds equilibrium, conceived as a basically static (or at least, very slowly changing) condition. This is evident in his example of trees balanced against the force of the wind:

“These trees and branches are so made that when the wind blows they all bend, and all the forces in the system, even the violent forces of the wind, are still in balance when the trees are bent; and because they are in balance, they do no harm, they do no violence. The configuration of the trees makes them self-maintaining. But think about a piece of land that is very steep, and where erosion is taking place… The system is self-destroying; it does not have the capacity to contain the forces which arise within it.” (p. 31)

Alexander seems to intend that we understand the stable condition of the tree-ground-wind system as better than the system in flux. But what sense does it make to call erosion unnatural? What might appear to be the disorderly and chaotic disruption of the hillside might, from the perspective of the entire watershed and river-system of the region, be part of an ordering or patterning process. I was reminded of the second episode of Adam Curtis’s All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (2011), which points out that natural equilibrium was an unexamined hypothesis in the ecological and cybernetic thinking of the sixties and seventies. There are many states a system can find itself in, of which equilibrium is only one. Alexander wanted us to believe that if we model our built environments on nature, they will inevitably be balanced and harmonious, but in fact he illicitly imported harmony and balance into his very definition of nature—balance is a premise which forms his idea of nature (and thence building); not a quality of nature.

Klein on public infrastructures

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Naomi Klein, on ‘reviving and reinventing the public sphere’, in The Nation:

One of the key areas in which this collective action must take place is big-ticket investments designed to reduce our emissions on a mass scale… The private sector is ill suited to providing most of these services because they require large up-front investments and, if they are to be genuinely accessible to all, some very well may not be profitable. They are, however, decidedly in the public interest, which is why they should come from the public sector.

Where does Christopher Alexander go wrong?

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WHERE DOES CHRISTOPHER ALEXANDER GO WRONG?

Where does Christopher Alexander go wrong? In A Pattern Language (1977) he describes a design methodology that tries to capture the apparently spontaneous success of vernacular building:

“The elements of this language are called patterns. Each pattern describes a problem  which occurs over and over again in our environment, and then describes the core of the solution to that problem, in such a way that you can use this solution to that problem a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice.” (p. x)

Each pattern describes a particular relationship that can be manifested any number of ways. For example, the pattern ‘Arcades’ specifies that paths along the edges of buildings should offer continuous shelter; and the pattern ‘Necklace of Community Projects’ specifies that town halls should be connected to a ring of facilities for community groups. So far, so good. But somewhere down the line he gets to arguing that we should only use warm colours inside, that all farms must be public parks, and that its impossible to make a comfortable space using thin columns. I react strangely to his work: his desire for a generative theory of the built environment sounds great, but somewhere along the line it gets weird and ends up being retrograde.

Cost-benefit analysis is a technical process in the guise of analysis.

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COST-BENEFIT ANALYSIS IS A TECHNICAL PROCESS IN THE GUISE OF ANALYSIS.

How do you know if projects like the Auckland Rail Link or the Puhoi-Wellesford Highway are worth doing? Someone does a cost-benefit analysis. But as Jarrett Walker writes:

The problem with Cost/Benefit analysis is that it requires you to convert all the costs, and all the benefits, to the same currency. That means you must know, with imperial confidence, the cost in dollars of such things as:

  • each minute of each customer’s time
  • a particular ecosystem to be destroyed or preserved, which may involve various degrees of endangerment (of species, and of ecosystem types)
  • historic or cultural resources to be destroyed or relocated, or preserved.

Assigning dollar values to some of these things is ridiculous, and we should reject the idea that dollar value provides any kind of common denominator for valuation. Cost-benefit analysis is a simplistic model that gives only an impression of rigour and fairness.

Should communities talk about how to weigh competing values that are in conflict?  Or should they let those decisions be made inside a technical process in the guise of analysis?