In the past week the most powerful man in the economic world, the US Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, commented on the unusual uncertainly that the world economy is experiences currently.  The predicted bounce back in economies over the world since the recession is not occurring.  No one quite knows why.   One possible, perhaps even probable reason, is that we are hitting planetary limits on growth.  The supply cheap energy and technological progress we have relied on for the past 200 years is not keeping up with our growing demands.   The standard explains this:

“The problem (one of the problems) is that we can’t see the forest for the trees. People still think that the great recession was a problem with the finance system, triggered by a housing crash. But that’s just a proximate cause. The underlying cause was the oil crunch and the next great recession will occur within a matter of years as a result of another crunch, as the IEA, US military, and others have predicted. But the likelihood is that recession will be blamed on another proximate cause and everyone will try to carry on as if infinite growth is possible, as if the rules haven’t changed. Bernanke didn’t mention oil once in his testimony to Congress.”

The reality of this is both exciting and scary.  Scary because it means the established economic models and frameworks are clearly operating in the dark. Exciting because as the head of  VEIL mentioned last night, when your view of the future is uncertain, the only thing to do is to design it.

“Any discussion of design needs to release that we are facing a critical period in human history, I think we are facing a industrial revolution of  scale greater than any other in human history.”

Consider the above to the current discourse around elections in Australia, where unreality’s of phantom immigration problems, and half arsed-green spin dominate proceedings.

We’re in a whole with little illumination and our politicians and media long ago lost their abilities to lead.

Not to mention that this mode of communication is a superb.

Care of The Royal Society of Arts.

“Bestselling author, political adviser and social and ethical prophet Jeremy Rifkin investigates the evolution of empathy and the profound ways that it has shaped our development and our society.”

Travel can be a strange and inexplicable thing. Every time I return to Japan, I’m constantly intrigued by how fascinatingly different it is as a place on most spheres of life; i.e. culturally, socially, economically and architecturally. As an unashamed tourist armed with my brochures, maps and pamphlets, I’m inevitably drawn to Japan through an exotic eye and it is this exoticism and the idea of what that means for the architecture of cities that I’m most interested in illustrating throughout the following parts.

Part 2. Gardens

As a city, Kyoto is well contained within its semi-enclosed basin topography. The street grid and buildings are located mostly (if not all) on the flat and for this reason one can immediately gain an appreciation for how the tree-covered hills frame the city and add legibility to the north, east and west. I was told that the belt of greenery is more or less a reflection of the municipal government’s intention to preserve the surrounding hills for cultural and historic reasons – in some cases dedicated temple grounds. Most of the temples and its gardens inhabit areas of sanctuary to the north, east and west – between the wooded hills and city proper: a no-man’s land for spiritual connection, but close enough to the city to sense its physicality. In each axial direction, subway lines work in tandem with the seamlessly efficient bus system infrastructure to provide connections to the various tourist experiences. At first instance, Kyoto seems like a virtual city of gardens: a ‘Tourist world-city’ where experience is seemingly specifically engineered for the enjoyment of its visitors. To my surprise, not far away from my mother’s apartment was the ‘Garden of Fine Arts’ designed by architect Tadao Ando and completed in 1994 (see fig. 1). It’s a curious enclave just off the main road in Kamigamo, consisting of a series concrete ramps that lead visitors through a journey of viewing large recreations of well known art works (apparently the recreation of Michelangelo’s Last Judgement is approximately the same size as the original in the Sistine Chapel), carefully reproduced on large porcelain panels: it claims to be the ‘world’s first outdoor art garden’ (see fig. 2).

Ando uses water here to its full effect in order to create an contemplative, almost monastic experience through the scale of spaces; however it represents a disjunction to the realities of the outside world – in some ways it codifies a mini-version of an ideal Kyoto: an embryonic microcosm that attempts to anaesthetize the realities of it’s mother urban Kyoto through creating its own reality constructed from concrete, water, porcelain and the ‘great masters’. The ramps as streets, each art piece proclaims a place for reflection – a virtual Kiyomizu temple in its own right.

Fig. 1 Fine Arts Garden by Tadao Ando - plan and section

Fig. 2 View towards Michelangelo's 'Last Judgement'

Part 3. Towers

Through the dense urban jungle of Osaka, Kobe and Kyoto, one cannot readily distinguish where cities begin and end. Towers have an interesting function in this way as they have the ability to allow visitors to locate themselves within the larger city fabric (even though in some cases I still had some difficulty in determining this). Tsutenkaku tower near Dobutsuen-mae (a southern part of Osaka) is an interesting example of observation platform as urban marker. The tower’s name literally translates to ‘tower reaching heaven’ and it was originally built in 1912, originally patterned from the Eiffel tower. It was also connected to the nearby amusement park, Luna Park via an aerial tramway (see fig. 3). Its height of 64 metres made it the tallest structure in Asia at the time of its construction. A fire in 1943 severely damaged the tower, so instead of repairing the structure, it was dismantled for iron supply during the Second World War. The height of the current tower is 103 metres in total and was constructed by the local citizens in 1956. The tower is also a timekeeper – it has Japan’s largest clock on its east side, which is LED and octagonal in shape. Through its neon turret, it can inform its citizens of upcoming weather forecasts via a combination of three different colours as it is connected to the meteorological observatory – tower as weather barometer. Architecture as scientific instrument. As well as having a scientific dimension, the tower also has a spiritual one: it houses the local street god ‘Billiken’ – the god of good luck (it also houses a robotic personification of the tower). In some ways, the second incarnation of the tower represents a wider subversive architecture of urban hybridization – whether through its role as observation platform or weather sock, it remains as a ghostly neon shadow of its former self (see fig. 4). Through its different permutations and likenesses the tower has become a beacon of entertainment and subtle pragmatism, a motif that remains common within Osaka’s pleasure and amusement culture. If Tsutenkaku can be seen as a hybrid of its various representations and functions, then the next tower may be seen as a hybrid of urban archetypes and program. The ‘Floating Garden Observatory’ is a circular observation platform 173 metres high above Osaka at the top of what is known as the Umeda Sky Building (see fig. 5 & 6). The platform not only provides a panoramic view of the city skyline, it also provides a ‘tender romantic experience’ in the form of the ‘Lumi Deck’. Young couples in love can purchase a ‘Heart Lock’ from the shop below on the retail level and attach it to the ‘Fence of Vows’. The couple can measure their degree of love by sitting on a bench and holding hands across a dome that lights up the floor below in the shape of a heart, the light pattern changes to reflect the couple’s ‘degree of love’. A camera stand is also available to capture this intimate experience. The hybrid mix of being both ‘tower and garden’ lends the ‘Floating Garden Observatory’ to traverse extreme scales of human experience: from the intimacy of human courtship to the ‘feeling of bigness’ from placing oneself within the expanse of the urban largeness.

Scales of human emotion are channelled through the confluence of the ‘garden tower’ – to almost parody the role that 19^th century English and French gardens had (most noticeably in literature) as environments for romance and subtle nuance. The perversion here though is that visitors have the opportunity to not only enjoy the view, but also witness (in a voyeuristic way) the falling out between a couple once they’d realised there relationship had been a complete sham from the glowing wonder of the Lumi Deck.

Fig. 3 The original Tsutenkaku tower and aerial tramway circa. 1912-1920

Fig. 4 The current Tsutenkaku tower in all its neon glory

Fig. 5 Umeda Sky Building diagram

Fig. 6 Umeda Sky Building and The Floating Garden Observatory

Part 4. Arcades

My Father once told me a common Japanese saying, where ‘people from Kyoto put their money on their backs, whereas people from Osaka put their money in their stomachs’. I think this saying has some truth to it; Kyoto does have the feeling that their inhabitants spend more time and money on fashion as opposed to the people of Osaka, spending their earnings on food and entertainment. If Kyoto can be seen as the reserved, quite traditional and well-dressed father figure in the family of Japanese cities then Osaka would be the slightly grungy teenager that eats too much and spends too much time at entertainment arcades. Shinsai-bashi and Doton-bori are the hedonistic heart and soul of Osaka. They are made up of a network of pedestrian only arcades, usually two to three storeys high and covered with a barrel-vaulted ceiling (this varies depending on the arcade’s distinct identity). These arcades provide the blood that pumps the consumer heart, through an immersion of lights, sound, general pandemonium and wave after wave of people it creates a euphoric overload of sensual experience and anachronistic pleasure – the arcade becomes the perfect architectural device to facilitate the experience (see fig. 7). Firstly, arcades allow the visitor to feel like they have entered another ‘womb-like’ world – a kind of mini-city where calendar time has been replaced by periods between eating kushi-katsu and getting the latest fix from a gaming parlour. The narrow format of the arcade (being two-sided) means that the visitor can really only go either side – going forward or the way they came can be a long journey, so there is really no escaping once they are in there. Secondly the arcade’s pedestrian only nature makes one feel like they are a part of something larger – i.e. to feel like a part of the scene, as characters in a virtual theatre of wanton apocalyptic consumerism and abandon.

The arcades of Dobutsuen-mae are a slightly different story – while the arcades of Shinsai-bashi and Doton-bori house the most contemporary of Japanese cosmopolitan culture, Dobutsuen-mae’s arcades are quieter in comparison, virtual ghost towns inhabited by the homeless and frequented the most by a noticeably older generation of Osaka citizens (see fig. 8). It made me think of the possibility that the Shinsai-bashi arcades may become like Dobutsuen-mae as an inevitable sign for its future as a hub for Osaka’s consumer and entertainment culture.

Fig. 7 Shinsai-bashi arcade by night from bridge

Fig. 8 An arcade in Dobutsuen-mae

Part 5. The tourist and the city

In some ways the architecture that a tourist encounters is very much in flux: it is the compression of time and space – thus condensed experience: buildings become momentary material, which frame that very experience as slippages of time and shards of space governed by subway timetables and airport itineraries. For the tourist, architecture (and the city for that matter) becomes a constantly shifting sea of images, sounds and smell – a kinaesthetic melting pot of expectation constrained by the limitations of one’s budget. I’d like to think of it as that old adage of which came first, the chicken or the egg? Did the architecture of cities generate the tourist culture or the other way around? If I were to infer from the impressions of my recent visit, I would have to say that the former may be more evident, but in reality I would assume that it would perhaps be a complex amalgam of both.

One thing that I can be sure of is that cities in general are vastly complex organisms; they are not only built up of accretive layers of infrastructure, public/private economic interests, street patterns, planning rules and regulations (et cetera) – but also the inexplicably intangible layers of human desire and anxiety conditioned by hundreds of years of society and culture. These aspects to me are not easily quantifiable or even statistically manageable in any readily available way, but they are documented – not conventionally in any library or bookshelf – but rather within the cities themselves.

Dale Fincham

Image sources:

Fig. 1 Fine Arts Garden by Tadao Ando – plan and section (image from tourism brochure)

Fig. 2 Fine Arts Garden – view towards Michelangelo’s ‘Last Judgement’ (photo by author)

Fig. 3 The original Tsutenkaku tower and aerial tramway circa. 1912 – 1920 – source: http://homepage1.nifty.com/masaaki/osaka/osaka1.htm

Fig. 4 The current Tsutenkaku tower in all its neon glory (photo by author)

Fig. 5 Diagram of Umeda Sky Building (image from tourism brochure)

Fig. 6 Sky Building from below (photo by author)

Fig. 7 An arcade in Shinsai-bashi by night from bridge (photo by author)

Fig. 8 An arcade in Dobutsuen-mae (photo by author)

Half Caste Broadcast.

“The three winning projects are The Architecture Drawing Project, by Bryon Kinnaird and Barnaby Bennett from Victoria University Wellington – a project exploring the different modes of architectural drawing; (in)human habitat, by James Gardiner, RMIT (SIAL) PhD candidate – a proposal that looks at using the built environment to preserve ecological habitats; and CityBreeder, by David Pigram and Iain Maxwell, Canberra University and GSAPP Columbia/AA London graduates – a propsal that reshapes the urban design model as an open-source, real-time interactive platform capable of adaptive growth.”

“Global poverty is not something recently invented for the benefit of multinational corporations. Let’s turn the clock back to the Third World as it was only two decades ago (and still is, in many countries). In those days, although the rapid economic growth of a handful of small Asian nations had started to attract attention, developing countries like Indonesia or Bangladesh were still mainly what they had always been: exporters of raw materials, importers of manufactures. Inefficient manufacturing sectors served their domestic markets, sheltered behind import quotas, but generated few jobs. Meanwhile, population pressure pushed desperate peasants into cultivating ever more marginal land or seeking a livelihood in any way possible–such as homesteading on a mountain of garbage.

Given this lack of other opportunities, you could hire workers in Jakarta or Manila for a pittance. But in the mid-’70s, cheap labor was not enough to allow a developing country to compete in world markets for manufactured goods. The entrenched advantages of advanced nations–their infrastructure and technical know-how, the vastly larger size of their markets and their proximity to suppliers of key components, their political stability and the subtle-but-crucial social adaptations that are necessary to operate an efficient economy–seemed to outweigh even a tenfold or twentyfold disparity in wage rates.

And then something changed. Some combination of factors that we still don’t fully understand–lower tariff barriers, improved telecommunications, cheaper air transport–reduced the disadvantages of producing in developing countries. (Other things being the same, it is still better to produce in the First World–stories of companies that moved production to Mexico or East Asia, then moved back after experiencing the disadvantages of the Third World environment, are common.) In a substantial number of industries, low wages allowed developing countries to break into world markets. And so countries that had previously made a living selling jute or coffee started producing shirts and sneakers instead.

Workers in those shirt and sneaker factories are, inevitably, paid very little and expected to endure terrible working conditions. I say “inevitably” because their employers are not in business for their (or their workers’) health; they pay as little as possible, and that minimum is determined by the other opportunities available to workers. And these are still extremely poor countries, where living on a garbage heap is attractive compared with the alternatives.

And yet, wherever the new export industries have grown, there has been measurable improvement in the lives of ordinary people. Partly this is because a growing industry must offer a somewhat higher wage than workers could get elsewhere in order to get them to move. More importantly, however, the growth of manufacturing–and of the penumbra of other jobs that the new export sector creates–has a ripple effect throughout the economy. The pressure on the land becomes less intense, so rural wages rise; the pool of unemployed urban dwellers always anxious for work shrinks, so factories start to compete with each other for workers, and urban wages also begin to rise. Where the process has gone on long enough–say, in South Korea or Taiwan–average wages start to approach what an American teen-ager can earn at McDonald’s. And eventually people are no longer eager to live on garbage dumps. (Smokey Mountain persisted because the Philippines, until recently, did not share in the export-led growth of its neighbors. Jobs that pay better than scavenging are still few and far between.)”

‘The union launched a campaign called Take Our Jobs, showcased on the website www.takeourjobs.org, to highlight the reality that illegal immigrants in agriculture are not taking jobs away from U.S. citizens and other legal residents.’

Tom Karst – The Packer.com

I am continually drawn to her work, which is not accidentally architectural: she speaks very well on the subject of her work as studies/cosmologies/maps of cities and other tectonic and cultural spaces/structures.  I danced with the idea (and still do, often) of using this work in my architectural research, but whether or not I weave this into an academic enquiry, it remains a formative series of works in my worldview of architecture, and the greater ‘expanded field’ of things/worldliness.

(Please click to get the super-size-me size).

I’ve recently acquired a monograph ‘Black City’ which is the first to publish a substantial collection of her work, past and present, and it is simply amazing.  I’ve selected a few of my favourites here, but you can view some of her work here, at White Cube who represent her, and here is a video/interview with Mehretu in Berlin, where her latest exhibition ‘Grey Area’ was shown (at the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin) which has now travelled to the Guggenheim New York if you’re there, go see it!

An interpretation that I dallied with for a while, and hope to re-animate in the future, is the notion of syncretism, which refers to an ‘attempt at reconciliation of two opposing or different principles, practices, or parties…’, in my reading and understanding (or at least the part that I enjoy about it) is the idea of an equilibrium which nontheless sustains its aspects of tension. This idea not surprisingly was something that I was reading in architecture schools –my subject of interest– how an academic is responsible for simultaneously critiquing a body of knowledge, whilst disseminating it, or how an architecture student grapples with the hypothetical studio project (with all its fantasy, experimentation, failure, risk etc etc), whilst knowingly attempting to replicate and learn principles of the real world.  They are contradictory objectives, but they have to be maintained.

This is clearly not an idea exclusive to architectural education or architecture or architects, which is why I mentioned my deep interest in this work as a framework or doorway into an expanded field of thinking and being.  The obvious subject of some works in particular address the City, and it is immediately obvious that these works are grappling with the coded, multi-layered, crumbling, ghosting, dynamic, etc etc, representation of the City.  They are both fragmented, but approach wholeness; they surround the void with speeding and violent (or beautiful) mass and lines and points; they are architectural, but never building; they are constructed, of deconstructions; they attempt new meaning by obfuscating prior meaning… and they are huge.  The Seven Acts of Mercy (pictured here) is over 6 metres long, and nearly 3m tall.

I think these works probably explain more about me than I have been able to explain them to you about architecture (or the City), but I still wanted to share.  I’d love to hear from anyone in NY who could make it along to her show, it’s open til October I think.