The Neighbourhood Video Series: City of Water

City of water is a film by the firm Squint/Opera, producers of the previous Surreal Estate video about the Victoria House building. Using architectual modeling, CGI, and animation, the firm creates an inspiring vision for this urban plan of how to bring life back to this middle eastern city.

The Chanel Mobile Art Gallery

The Gallery Entrance

The Chanel Mobile Art Gallery could be coming to a city near you. One of the latest creations by Zaha Hadid, an architect who is certainly making a mark on the urban fabric of a great many towns, The Chanel Mobile Art Gallery is traveling the world in a movable building that started its tour on the top floor of a park aid in Hong Kong. There is a video on the site that talks about how this building is revolutionary, how the geometry was solved, and generally just loving on itself, but this gallery does bear special mention.

Its shape reminds me of a shell you might find on the beach, but instead of a shy little crab the inside of this travelling room is full of art pieces inspired by the iconic handbag label. Patrons enter and exit the gallery through the same area and filter into the gallery taking a circuitous route that eventually circles back on itself. The shape is alien enough in its look that it would be impossible to miss in any urban area. Imagine coming upon it parked in the corner of a park or parking lot the simple fact that it is very ‘not square’ would trigger your awareness.

Interior views

The shell like Shape

While it would be easy to write this gallery off as a travelling sales man for a big name company a look at the artists listed as part of the tour makes this gallery more then just display case. One of the artists featured is the Blue Noses. The bio lists them as having been formed at the time of the millennium bug, as a collective of happy imbeciles, they use comedy to make critiques on the stupidity of modern society and its values. Their scenes are often very comedic but with an underlying violence. The Blue Noses are considered the rascals of contemporary Russian art.

On of the Blue Noses' scenes

The tour visits following six cities; Hong Kong, Tokyo, New Tork, London, Moscow, or Paris, you can check out the and if you live in New York or one of the latter four you can swing by the site to check out tour dates. If you were not able to catch it in one of the cities that it visited click the link below for a virtual tour, with some pretty creepy sound effects.

Chanel Mobile Art

Maps when the world was especially vast.

David Rumsey Historic Map Collection

Maps are the way that most of us conceptualize the world. When someone asks you what the world looks like most of us picture the world map, and usually that map is the Mercator projection. North America up in the top left corner, Europe in the middle to right, Russia over in the top right, Africa lower middle and Australia down in the right. So much of our outlook has been shaped by these maps. Australians refer to themselves as being from ‘down under,’ everyone thinks that North America is just as big, if not bigger then Africa. This is mostly due to the proportions and layout of the Mercator projection. When people look at different projections of the world like an equal area projection it tends to make most people a little unsettled, the world tends too look wrong.

While I was a lecturer at Ulsan College I brought a copy of the “What’s up? South!” world map back from one of my trips home. After it had rolled off a conveyer belt in Newark, and slowly followed me back to Korea via a number of exotic airports I was finally able to put it up on one of my office walls. I had no sooner gotten it unrolled that one of my co-workers, the garrulous Professor Ahn came over to pay me a visit. When he saw the map I was trying to put up upside down, he asked me what I was doing. After explaining that the map was oriented so that south was on top he instructed me to hang it with Northa America still at the top regardless of the way the writing was done on the page. South being up was just wrong and he quickly left the room, definitely a little unsettled. His reaction may seem strange when you write it down but if most of us are honest with ourselves we would have to admit that it isn’t that dissimilar from our own.

The Gulf of St Laurence During the Colonial Era

The same can hold true when looking back at historical maps, before satellites and google earth mapped every square inch of the planet for all to see maps of faraway and ‘new’ lands tended to inspire awe and a sense of mystery when you looked at them. Its possible to get a sense of what it may of felt like to look at this evidence of distant places that you may never have ever thought existed. The David Rumsey Collection is a vast online collection of historical maps, boasting thousands of historical maps that are digitized and accessible via the website. Looking at old area maps of the urban area’s that we live in can give a greater understanding of how these areas came to be. Not to mention its just kind of fun to look through them.

The New Village movement or What's the name of the dictator that helped build Granny's?

A Village formerly known as 'A New Village'

A happy house with late summer crops drying in the sun

President Park was another strongman, but this time he had some vision. He rounded up the usual suspects, a group of gangsters and mob breakers, and handed them the countries future on a plate. These baddies were such players as the presidents of Hyundai and Samsung. Both companies later grew into massive global organizations, all backed up with Park’s money. There was more then just corruption though, President Park actually meant to build a country, and he did. He forced a highway to be built from Seoul to Busan, and pushed Korean soldiers into the Vietnam war, where they basically fought as American mercenaries, bringing home the dough to help propel their country. During this period he started a moved called the ‘new village’ movement.

The basic goal of this program was to build modern infrastructure in the country. Seoul had electric street cars in the 30s, but most of Korea in 1960 was still mud and wattle huts. President Park planned to change this. He gave each village a few hundred tonnes of free concrete. Then, the next year, whomever used the concrete best would get more. This lead to be building of industries, and a revolution in the countryside. The mud and wattle began to disappear, as newer (though still very traditional) concrete houses began to spring up around the country.

Though these villages abound in the countryside, few remain in the cities. The houses were all traditionally designed, with small outbuildings surrounding a center courtyard and closed in by a large gate. These courtyards were the heart of the old villages, where all the veggies were dried (Korean food involves a lot of dried foods), games were played, life was lived.

New Village?

But, as President Park was fated to be killed by his right hand man (who feared that Park was becoming a megalomaniac) the villages were troubled. Thanks to Parks massive reforms, underhanded business dealings, the extra-ordinary efforts of the common working man and woman, and plain dumb luck, Korea started to boom. With a modern boom comes urbanization, and the death of villages.  Though there are still tens of thousands of ‘new villages’ spread across Korea, the inhabitants are almost all ‘silver citizens’. Korea is now one of the most urbanized countries in the world, and men who still make a living on the farm find it almost impossible to attract a Korean wife. 52% of rural weddings in South Gyeongsang province last year were Korean/S.E Asian weddings. Rural men are finding it easier to acquire a foreign wife who is willing to farm than a modern, urban Korean girl. The fate of the Korean countryside is in question.

Surreal Estate

I came across one of the most interesting property videos today. While looking for video’s on YouTube came across a number of video’s by Squint/Opera showing the work of architecture firms. This particular video was produced for Alsop architects in London of a property  they renovated. The Victoria House property is a mixing together of traditional and modern styles. The video is a surrealists trip through the property starting with the more traditional aspects of its architecture an moving to the more modern elements as the footage progresses.

16mm film of a redeveloped 1930s building in Bloomsbury, London.

Shot on 16mm, the film narrates the character of this redeveloped 1930s building in Bloomsbury, Victoria House. The architecture was designed by Alsop Architects and developed by Garbe.

Expressionism and the Homeowners Association

Photo by kian esquire

There are a number of different places I like to go to read about buildings, urban areas, urbanites, trends, innovation etc. etc. etc. but I must admit that one of the people I am most enjoying following right now is the column of Allison Arieff, By Design at the New York Times, the last couple columns have been about issues common to a number of neighbourhoods. In the most recent one she raises a number of good points about homeowners associations, clotheslines, and the joy of having the liberty to decorate however you please. When you think about it, inflicting a rigid set of rules as to what things should look like, what appeases everyone just ends up being bland. When did we give a committee the power to paint our homes? Homeowners associations are important when it comes to maintaining a building and helping communities to interact. When neighbours start telling each other how to paint their homes, there is going to be blandness and bad blood.

Its origins are from an publication by the Urban Land Institute funded by The National Association of Home Builders and certain federal agencies: the FHA, U.S. Public Health Service, Office of Civil Defense, the Veterans Administration and the Urban Renewal Administration. The were always intended to control the communities they represented, first by the developer and then by the residents after the the developer was done selling the bulk of the properties. Some of them have developed into vibrant activist organisations. Some simply take care of their residents needs in a quiet an efficient manner. A number of them however tend to be mostly concerned with the colour of the garage or front yard foliage. Which do you think you would prefer to be a part of?

Start reading Allison Arieff’s column.

Big Brother Buildings… without the cameras

Yuri Ivanov of the Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories has come up with a comprehensive building monitoring and tracking system that may actually be less invasive of peoples privacy then current CCTV systems. He and his college Christopher Wren outfitted their office with 215 detectors placed at 2 meter intervals. These detectors capture less information in terms of raw data, but they are actually able to generate much more data then a conventional CCTV system. To understand how this is possible one only needs to think of the way that these sensors work.. a motion sensor picks up and relays if and when a person goes by, by having the sensors spaced closely together they are able to track a persons movements through the office. A CCTV on the other hand captures images of the areas they surveil regardless of whether anyone is there or not. Wren explained the difference as such;

“It’s not going to catch you picking your nose. You can only tell that some person went by,” Wren explains, “maybe this is better than living under thousands of cameras.”

The system basically knows that you are in the building but you could be walking around naked and it wouldn’t be able to tell. In order to make sense of all the data that these motion sensors capture the pair developed a software package that we have only seen before in Harry Potter of all places, they developed their own version of the marauders map. People on the display show up as bright spots of light with a comet tail that fades away behind them. Giving viewers the ability to both see where they are and what their trajectories are. The program also allows them to compile this movement data over extended periods of time and look for anomalies and patterns.

The implications for security and human traffic data collection are exciting. The pair was able to analyse data from a fire drill to discover that two out of three of the fire exits went virtually unused. The congregation habits of people and how long they stay at work also have implications for making air conditioning and heating systems more efficient. The system seems like an excellent trade off for better security without compromising personal privacy.

The battle of the Super towers

It’s always said that a guy who has a big skyscraper has a big … investment portfolio. South Korea is a country where all men aspire to have big … investment portfolios. In the last few years, every town, village and post office box has announced it’s plans to build the tallest building in the neighbourhood, town, province, or galaxy. It’s gotten rather confusing, but I’m going to try and sort through the hype and look at some of the future giants that will make the skylines of Korea more unique. People might try to point out the lack of supertall buildings currently in Korea, but one must remember that the Burj Dubai is being built by none other than Samsung construction.

Samsung Tower Palace, Dogok-dong, Gangnam-gu, Seoul

Currently the tallest building in Korea is the beautifully named “Samsung Tower Palace building G”. The logic behind these towers sprouting up in almost every neighbourhood in Seoul is simple. Land is too expensive, but everybody wants 45 pyeong to themselves. (Don’t ask me what a pyeong is, I couldn’t tel l you even if I wanted to since the word became outlawed last year).

Seoul doesn’t have a Manhattan skyline, which is probably why it has avoided being destroyed by aliens. But, hoping to attract foreign and possibly alien visitors, Seoul is branching UP. Yongsan, currently the home to a US army base that (in theory) will be closing, and an ugly railway yard is going to change, and like all change in South Korea, it’s going to be drastic. Seoul’s office vacancy rate is currently hovering around 1%, which has driven prices up by as much as 25% this year. The Korean government is trying to attract foreign companies to the city, but with spiraling costs, it seems unlikely without new office towers being built.

The Proposed Yongsan Tower by Samsung

Proposed Hyundai Mir Tower for the same site

The planned Yongsan Landmark building

“In Seoul, the planned 151-story Yongsan Landmark Building, at 2,046 feet, will tower over all the city’s existing structures, and even some nearby mountain peaks. “Seoul is the capital, so it must have the tallest building,” said Han Bong-seok, an executive at Korea Railroad, the national railway company, who heads the project to build the tower on the site of an old train yard. “This is for the pride of Seoul.” “(NYtimes, May 2007)

Proposed Lotte World Tower Seoul by Skidmore Owings & Merrill

International Buisness Center

Also on the South side of Seoul there are other monsters planned, the Sangnam International Business Center which will (possibly) become the center of Sangnam Digital Media city. This one will be 580m and 130 stories tall. The other is Lotte World Tower Seoul, which would be 555 meters. Lotte World is already the world’s largest indoor amusement park, but construction has not started on either of these projects.

But, as Seoul might be the largest city in the country, it isn’t the only major city looking to change it’s skyline. Both Incheon and Busan and rebuilding their cities, and their images. In Incheon they are currently building some massive apartments that will become part of Songdo International city. Korean’s love placing “International” into titles, even if it has little or no meaning at the time. Songdo is being built in the former industrial south end of Korea’s western port city.

This is another 151 story monster that
will become the heart of a new waterfront development. There is also a new bridge under construction that will link Incheon city to the slightly ironic Incheon airport, which, though in Incheon’s metropolitian boundaries, must be accessed by driving into and then out of Seoul. Incheon, facing towards China, is dreaming of being the heart of growth and investment as the 21st century looks to China, just as the 20th looked to America.

The third city to be planning towers is Busan. Currently there are two towers being planned or constructed in the city. Busan is one of the busiest port cities in the world, and as such, has a much seedier and grittier image than either Seoul or Incheon. Most of Busan’s recent development has been centered around Haeundae beach and Gwangali bridge. Haeundae new town is the home to many of the tallest buildings outside of Seoul, and is seeing even more development planned in the future. In the south end of Busan is the old city center, Nampodong, which has missed most of the recent additions to the city. Nampodong has a rundown air, and is in serious need of urban and transportation revitalization.

How many of these towers will be constructed is anyone’s guess. Koreans are famous for talking big, but then, they are also famous for doing things that seemed impossible. Posco, Samsung, and Hyundai were all but dreams 40 years ago, and now each stands amongst the giants of the world. It is easy, as a foreigner, to dismiss Korea as just a small Asian country, but it is a small Asian country with big dreams. I wouldn’t be surprised if ALL of these towers were completed.

Toronto Rediscovered

So this post is mostly a little Canadiana for you all. Canadians are very familiar with the fact that Toronto is the city that many of us love to hate. It is our biggest city, the economic center of the country and has always occupied a peculiar place in the Canadian mind. When travelling Canadians will pull it out when comparing International cities, two and a half million people and the (formerly) tallest free-standing structure in the world (Stupid Burj Dubai.) At home Canadians tend to dislike Toronto, there is always some reason that it is not as nice as where they are from and Montrealers, well it’s best we not go there. Torontonians tend to just be oblivious to it all, confident in the knowledge they live in ‘one of the world’s most livable cities’ source.

Tonight thanks to Spacing We find a travel article written in 1982 for the New York times by Margaret Atwood. The article talks about they way she saw her city.

THE CITY REDISCOVERED

Published: August 8, 1982

MARGARET ATWOOD is a novelist who lives in Toronto. Her newest books, ”Dancing Girls and Other Stories” and ”True Stories,” a collection of poems, will be published by Simon & Schuster in September. By MARGARET ATWOOD

W hen I was growing up in Toronto as a child, in the 1940′s, I loathed it. I associated it with standing in the slush with dampness seeping through my boots, itchy bloomers, gray muggy skies, old ladies who hit your knuckles with the metal edge of the ruler if you didn’t know the words to ”Rule, Britannia.” Later, when I was in high school, I liked Toronto a little better, though not much. There did not seem to be a great deal to do, apart from sock hops, smoking in the washrooms and avoiding the appearance of being too interested in frog dissection. As for university, it produces angst in the best of us, and I was probably wrong to attribute mine specially to Toronto. Nevertheless, I did.

As I aged, I was pleased to discover that I was not the only person who found Toronto loathsome. Almost everyone else did too. Montreal was where international flavor, international finance and naughtiness (which meant, to Torontonians, wine with dinner) reigned supreme. New York was where the truly sophisticated hung out, and Buffalo was where you went if you couldn’t afford the other two. Toronto was … well, Toronto was where you lived when you weren’t having fun. The notion of anyone actually visiting Toronto, for any purpose other than to attend the sickbed of a moribund relative, was alien to me. I set my first published novel in Toronto (where else was I to set it?) but was so embarassed by the location that I never actually named the city and disguised the street names as best I could. Everyone knew that real novels were not set in Toronto.

Continue Reading the Article

IKEA 1, Breuer 1/2

Marcel Breuer's 1969 Armstrong (aka Pirelli) Building, pre-IKEA

In Urban Neighbourhood’s continued expansion as the posts get larger and the links get more numerous I am constantly coming across new things. Today over at archidose (a great blog devoted to architecture) I came across a post about what happened when an Ikea went head to head with the Armstrong Building, built in New Haven Coneticut in 1969 by Marcel Breuer. It is the age old story of old versus new, contemporary historic vs current economics. The Pirelli Building sat on a lot adjacent to where Ikea was building one of their stores, and needed parking spaces.

Click here to read more at archidose and see what happened when IKEA came to town.

The author also has the same thoughts about where parking should go as in our article about parking at asian department stores.

Article at Pruned on Deep Water Cooling

Toronto's Proposed Deep Lake Water Cooling System

There is a great little article over at Pruned about proposals for Deep Water Cooling for the city of Toronto. What some people may not realise is that the city already does this, and has been doing it in a limited fashion for quite a long time, the cities water intake system is designed to use the lake water its pulling in to cool some city structures before sending it out into the city water system. There is some debate over the environmental impact of expanding the system and the impact it would have on lake Ontario. If it became the delfacto air conditioning unit for the city… however I would recommend you click below and read the pruned article for that debate.

Enwave and the City of Toronto have created an innovative cooling system that brings an alternative to conventional air conditioning to cool Toronto’s downtown core — one that is clean, price competitive and energy efficient. A permanent layer of icy-cold (4°C) water 83 meters below the surface of Lake Ontario provides naturally cold water. This water is the renewable source of energy that Enwave’s leading-edge technology uses to cool office towers, sports & entertainment complexes and proposed waterfront developments.

Continue Reading the Pruned Article

Overcrowding in the summer

People escaping Seoul on a summer day

Overcrowding is a problem in most major cities. In the summertime the temperature climbs, and peoples nerves start to boil. Overcrowding, as per wikipedia, has a large number of consequences, including; inadequate freshwater, depletion of natural resources, deforestation and loss of ecosystems, changes in atmosphere, desertification, mass species extinction, high infant mortality rate, new epidemics, starvation, capital inflation, low life expectancy, unhygienic living conditions, and elevated crime rates.

Haeundae Beach on a Saturday afternoon

It would seem logical to avoid overcrowding at all costs, a few of the consequences seem to be calling cards of the apocalypse. It would take a lot for people to PURPOSEFULLY seek out overcrowded places.

When the temperature hits 35C and the humidity is dancing around 99%, you’re thoughts start to turn to ocean breezes and the splash of cool water. As the office afternoon drags on, the image of beautiful girls in bikinis might enter ones mind (or guys in tight speedos). Why not hop a bus to a beach and cool off. Maybe even call up your friends, get an umbrella and a small barbecue…and make a whole day event? Wouldn’t anything be better during the summer?

Haeundae beach in Busan is the most popular beach in South Korea, and per bather density (if anybody studies these things) is quite probably the most popular beach in the world. This beach is only 1200 meters long and yet it sees up to one million visitors in ONE DAY. Source.

The water, unseen in this photo is alive with yellow tubes up to 20 meters out, then there is a line of buoys which nobody crosses. Swimming is almost impossible as the simple mass of bodies and yellow inner tubes makes free space almost impossible. Also, one must have the patience to line up for 5 minutes before even reaching the water.

Overcrowding is more than just a problem in Korea, or even a lifestyle. It is purposefully sought out for fun!

Obviously not the one million Saturday

But where is the apocalypse? The famine, the drought, the disease? Well, the famine and drought are taken care of by old women wandering through the crowds selling fried chicken and beer. The crime is managed by large groups of ‘boycops’ or conscripted police officers. Safety is handled by the same conscripts but wearing lifeguard uniforms instead of police, riding jet skis up and down the buoy line. Capital inflation certainly takes place, as everything is at least twice or three times more expensive than the rest of the city. I’ll leave questions about low life expectancy or unhygienic living conditions up to you to discuss.

Green Rooftops for Living

There is a great little gallery of rooftops posted on Flickr by one jwilly. It is a number of photographs of different roof top gardens and green spaces on top of the city. The possibilities are amazing when you consider the type of space a rooftop could be. Quite frankly I would argue that roofs are very under utilized. Look out on the roofs in the middle of most cities and all you will see is a sea of grey, blank spaces. Think about what kind of space a rooftop can be. If you open the access and add plants, you suddenly have a space that you can spend time in, a space that you want to bring other people into. Why shouldn’t every roof have a dwelling or communal space on top of i? Sure I know that most of the roofs in the city were not designed for these uses and therefore can’t handle the load, but we should be thinking that way from now on shouldn’t we?

Rich People Rooftops NYC

Concrete shoes for carbon dioxide

Wet concrete + children handprints = art.

The times online has an interesting article about capturing the carbon dioxide created in cement and concrete production by storing it in the very stuff that produced it. Believe it or not but concrete and cement production is responsible for roughly five percent of the world’s human caused carbon dioxide emissions. Carbon Sense Solutions believes that they have come up with a relatively simple way of storing it back into it during the curing stage of the process. The firm believes that about sixty tons of carbon dioxide can be stored in one thousand tons of concrete. It is possible that this process could reduce emissions by one percent. That may sound small but when you consider that we are talking globally it becomes a much larger impact.

Read the Times Online article.

Detroit is losing its population, both alive and dead….

Grave digger removing a casket

In an article published on detnews.com on Tuesday it has been reported that Detroit is losing a segment of its population to the suburbs that isn’t usually shall we say ‘upwardly’ mobile. In the past five years according to public records the city has seen the remains of about 1000 people disinterred and moved outside of the city. To look at in relatively for every thirty living people who leave, one dead one follows. One Detroit professor suggests that the figures may be as much as twice that based on anecdotal evidence that he has compiled.

The migration appears to be mostly attributed to former Detroiters who left the city years ago due to your standard suburban flight, and are now moving their deceased family members out too. Patrick Lynch, a local funeral director and member of the executive of the National Funeral Directors Association believes that there are a couple reasons for the flight of the dead. “People have to drive to a place that may take them through neighborhoods that they otherwise may never go, their safety might be compromised. Whether that is real or perceived, it is real to them.” The evidence would seem to support his theory as the cemetery that is losing the most is Mount Olivet which is located in the east side; considered to be the worst part of town. The majority of those being moved are going to Resurrection Cemetery in Clinton Township which is out in the suburbs and shall we say much more peaceful.

“In our family you don’t forget about your people,” Palazzolo said. “I hope that’s human. It’s at least Italian.”
Love. That was one part of the decision. There is another.
“To tell you the truth, yes, it’s fear,” Palazzolo said. “Have you been to Detroit? I pray the car doesn’t break down. I cringe when I drive down Gratiot. I’m worried for my life. There’s a lot of bad people in Detroit. But to tell you the truth, there’s a lot of bad people out here. But at least we’re closer this way.”

This a side to the white flight issue that most of us would never have considered.
Read the detnews.com article.