Category Archives: Transition

TV space

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Here are some images of the interiors used in the tv series Girls
The set design is not particularly interesting except for maybe the space of the room of the character Charlie. In the series he complains to his girlfriend (forgot her name, just Google it yourself) that she never has shown any interest in where he lives. It seems that until the second season she has not even been to his room (probably due to production costs most of the characters are kept in one room). But then we see Charlie’s room, and what a man cave it is!

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Floor plan of Charlie’s rather spacious room

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Sketch of the space designed by the series’ production designer Laura Ballinger Garnder

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View of the actual set

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Detail of the bed

Tokyo and the end of architecture (an informal tale about Tokyo)

I wrote a short piece on Tokyo for the UIA World Congress of Architecture which will be held here in Tokyo in 2011.

A visiting architect-friend of mine described Tokyo colorfully as “an urban disaster with shit-piled-upon-shit”. Seeing my slightly annoyed face, he thoughtfully added “but it is fascinating shit”. This is a stereotypical reaction I have heard many times over, and not only from visitors. The Japanese themselves, architects as well as non-architects mutter an apologetic reference to European cities when we talk about Tokyo. Kenzo Tange once said that Tokyo has had many times over the chance to rebuild itself: after the Great Earthquake of 1923 or after the World War â…¡ bombings, but according to Tange the rebuilding from an urban design’s point of view always failed. Did Tokyo, the world’s largest urban entity, really fail?

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Man, woman, space.

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What do men, women space and comfort have in common?

Malcolm Gladwell wrote an interesting article which you can find on his website called listening to khakis:
Not long ago, two psychologists at York University, in Toronto-Irwin Silverman and Marion Eals-conducted an experiment in which they had men and women sit in an office for two minutes, without any reading material or distraction, while they ostensibly waited to take part in some kind of academic study. Then they were taken from the office and given the real reason for the experiment: to find out how many of the objects in the office they could remember. This was not a test of memory so much as it was a test of awareness-of the kind and quality of unconscious attention that people pay to the particulars of their environment. If you think about it, it was really a test of fashion sense, because, at its root, this is what fashion sense really is-the ability to register and appreciate and remember the details of the way those around you look and dress, and then reinterpret those details and memories yourself.
This idea-that men eliminate and women integrate-is called by Meyers-Levy the “selectivity hypothesis.” Men are looking for a way to simplify the route to a conclusion, so they seize on the most obvious evidence and ignore the rest, while women, by contrast, try to process information comprehensively.”

Meyers-Levy notes that:

“Females generally attempt to engage in a rather effortful, comprehensive, piecemeal analysis of all available information. On the other hand, men are more selective processors of information, who tend to pick up on single, highly salient or personally relevant pieces of information that are quickly and easily processed. They disregard the rest.”

I think this is an interesting idea, especially when you think about sexualizing space, dividing it into male or female space. At this presentation by  Andres Duany the discussion is about the de-sexualization of space. 

“Family rooms instead of dens. Clean garages. Women in cigar bars and boxing clubs. American females have commandeered, or at least infiltrated, nearly every part of the private and public realm. After the terrible centuries when interior space was overwhelmingly male, a balance was gradually achieved, culminating with the house plans of the first half of the 20th century. Now has the balance tipped too far? If the New Urbanism provides a place for everyone, should it also program specifically for male activity, however abhorrent? Are sheds and rear alleys enough?”

Net hubs

In the early days of the web (don’t worry this is not a “once upon a time” story), in the early days of the web the limited access due to its technical nature meant that the people who used it were seen as hermits, people-shy geeks, who felt secured by the isolating element of the web. The early days of the web reinforced the geek’s idea of now finally (at last!) they were able to live without ever having to physically meet anyone. Now it was possible to order everything over the net, with the keyboard and the flickering green screen acting as a safe buffer between the modern day seclusive and the outside world. The internet acted as an individualizer. Ironically reinforcing the individuality of those who were afraid of social interaction as they went online they needed to proof their individuality but through their specific access codes, user names, passwords could hide behind larger than life avatars. The individualizing element of the web created the Kafkaesque fear that the web would turn us all into hermits, each of us psychologically unable to interact with anyone anymore. Even for sex we would use the computer for love, as the Kraftwerk song goes.

But as the net is becoming easier to access to more and more people we start to see that it is a great way of actually bringing people together. For example, when I joined Twitted recently I noticed that there are two types of tweets (is this how you call the people who are on Twitter?). There are those that are hunting for connections, their goal is to get as many connections as possible. Why? Maybe for to satisfy their ego (I have 100 or 1500 or 29,678 friends and that is important for ME to show this to everyone). What I also noticed is that apart from those that select their connections based on actual interesting topics, others are linking with people in their immediate vicinity. Although there is no actual filter in twitter to select locations (as far as I know) to do this, I noticed that many people based in Tokyo had a large part of their links to people based in Tokyo (or immediate vicinity).

One day after I went to a networking event, a message the next day on Twitter thanked 5 or 6 names that I knew from Twitter to having attended the event. I knew the online names, but was surprised that they were at the event as well. My point is that the border between online and offline is blurring. The net now provides ”us with the opportunity to meet more people than would be physical possible. But in contrast most of those online are not hermits, on the contrary many of the people online are very active both online as well as in real space. I have written in more detail about this in my chapter for the Denmark symposium paper “Tokyo City of Networks”. In the paper I argue that in cities such as Tokyo the net is providing an extra layer for the variuous tribes who are transversing the transitional spaces that is called Tokyo. I believe that when we think about the future of work, it are those urban nomads who easily jump from virtual into real space and back again that should be seen as the driving forces of where our societies are going. Many of the people I meet recently don’t have a typical nine-to-five-job anymore, but they all have professional passions and they meet up with liked minded people to share and discuss these passions. In a way the social networking sites are becoming more like dating platforms where contacts are initiated rather than merely ephemerally satisfied.

This is where space comes back again. Many of the network events are taking place in cafe’s or restaurants where presentations are given, name cards are exchanged, and new connections are made. Even though interesting by itself, wouldn’t it be even better to rather than merely talking and listening there could be a place where you could all of this, plus have the opportunity to work together? Maybe the future of work, and the future of the office is in these kind of net hubs like this co-working space in Portland called Nedspace. The net as a social platform staged on a local level.

Self promotion?

I believe we live in the age of self-promotion. After we saw the industrial revolution in the18C, the social revolution in the 19C and the technical revolution in the 20C, today we are witnessing a Narcissistic revolution.

Good or bad, today it is all about ME (or moi, ich, ik, watashi). Time magazine dedicated their person of the year in 2006 to you.

Why? I call it “individualizers”, elements in our lives that make us more individuals. Here is my list of six individualizers:

  1. Shareware: technology makes it all happen, from the internet to our mobile phones, from the banal to the exquisite, we are all witnesses and are driven with a need to share,
  2. Marketing: product marketing is focusing on individualism as a form of self-expression. “You shop therefore you are” is the mantra of our times. We buy products to express not only who we are but also who we want to be. Which iPod are you?,
  3. Therapy: is the new religion, over 1 million patients are treated every day in the US alone. The search for our unique selves leaves a void,
  4. Real: in our confusion “the real thing’ is driving us for a search for real food, real jobs, a real home, a real family, a real me, real self-promotion,
  5. Space is individualizing us: from hotels to airports and theme parks, each visitor is carefully checked and tracked. We need to prove who we are before we can enter these transitional spaces,
  6. Finally, there is no place to hide. What yesterday might look like fun with the boys (and or girls), will tomorrow end up tagged as “Priceless!” on Youtube.  

Why is Tokyo so ugly, but how can it still generate such fantastic architecture?

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The question for 2008, and here is my (easy) answer:

1. Japan has the highest pro-capita rate of architects, of the 1.2million registered architects world-wide Japan has over 300,000,

2. There are very few aesthetic regulations: anything goes,

3. In the chaos architects work hard to make their buildings stand-out,

4. Tokyo has some of the world’s most daring and cash-rich clients,

5. Japanese construction companies (not only the major ones) are the world’s most advanced,

6. Buildings have an average life-span of around 30 years,

7. The city has been destroyed many times over (and most likely will be again soon).

Architecture and methodology

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When one thinks about architecture and methodology "architectural programming" or brief formulating" come to mind. These are the techniques for formulating a creative process. As Robert Kumlin has written an excellent book on the subject of architectural programming, so I will not touch on it here.

The creative process is only one issue of the spectrum I have in mind when using the word methodology. At Waseda I thought for six years methodology to first year students, and we looked at the various methodological ideas and systems, such as Aristotle’s method of induction, phase space or Kepler’s backflips to make mathematical relations fit natural phenomena.

What I am interested in as I write about methodology and architecture, is to see the shifts that have been taking place within the process of architecture as a system. (I have written about this in the book: eBussines and Workplace Redesign) When we talk about architecture as a system then we need to look at what is happening both within as well as at the forces outside of architecture. I believe that there have always been two, opposing forces in place: internal and external. With internal and external I don’t mean the interior and the exterior of the space, but an entangled kind of yin-yang duality that pushes the process of architecture along. And with process I mean a persistent structure or a quality that follows a Darwinian path. This stucture is an evolutionary process that modifies the hierarchical elements of architecture slowly but at certain points the structure takes on catastrophic proportions. Our main interest thus should be towards these "modifiers". The internal and external forces are what create the shifts within the system.
Even though the system will remain open ended, in itself as a methodology it is closed. It is however important to take into consideration that these internal as well as external modifiers have always been dormant within the system, there is nothing new, and as such the system is complete. The changes are taking place only in the hierarchical interrelationships within the system.

The question of architecture and methodology really is: What is driving the formulation of our spaces?

Let us for example look at Buckminster Fuller’s methodology. Here we can see how internal and external factors shape Bucky’s design, and through his 4D thinking we can see that internally his focus has been on ways to reduce materiality while creating higher structural strength, what he calls “tensegrity”. External factors are, for example, his ideas for the Wichita house where a factory assembly line that during WW2 was building bomber planes, Bucky envisioned to be changed to a house-building plant.
I will add some more examples later on, as I think this is unchartered territory. It will tell us from a historical perspective the contribution certain architects have had on the progress of architecture. I wonder whether we would be able to able to pinpoint the catastrophic shifts within the system when we map enough of these modifiers?