Thanks to Hugh in New Jersey and Mark in San Francisco for alerting me to some of the micro-living news the world seemed to be awash with last week. There was global incredulity over the 4,500-bed hive dormitory proposed for University of California – Santa Barbara. Already horrendous as an idea, it became worse the more one learned about it. These images are from the Santa Barbara Independent.

With an area of 1,680,000 sq.ft, the population density works out at 28,830 persons/ sq.km which is greater than Port-au-Prince in Haiti but less than Dhaka in Bangladesh (at 27,395 and 29,069 persons/ sq.km respectively).

Rooms are organized into clusters of eight around a communal table, shared kitchen and two single-person bathrooms.

Eight clusters are then grouped into “Houses” sharing a corridor with vertical access at one end and a communal living room and fire escape at the other. Eight “houses” are then grouped to configure the building. It has the cold logic of an air conditioning duct system layout.

Or a slave ship. [c.f. Cold Logic vs. Warm Logic]

It’s probably a coincidence this hit the news while the COP26 UN Climate Summit was happening in Glasgow but it did make me wonder what the operational energy of this building would be for full-time artificial illumination, air conditioning and mechanical ventilation. I’m also assuming each living room has an adjacent laundry room and that all laundry will be dried by dryer. It might be an idea to give the bath-towels a daily spin.

A different approach to student housing.

All the good things about windows are due to them being on external walls. I know some internal cabins on cruise liners have fake windows that have projections of the ocean view you haven’t paid to see for real. [c.f. Machine for Living]

And there’s also a clever kind of fake skylight that illuminates with rays of light that are parallel, not radial, and this too has its uses. [c.f. The Sheltering Sky]

Windows are great for free ventilation and illumination but they also transmit sound and allow us to see the world outside and make us feel connected to it. This is good, psychologically speaking. If I’m going to be living in a building with 4,449 others, then I’d like them all to be well-balanced and happy people, unstressed and with no personality issues or social grievances.

News of that building killed some of the shock value of two other articles last week, one from the US and the other from the UK. Both had to do with the decreasing size of apartments. In last week’s post I mentioned the Bloomberg article from Nov. 9, regretting that stopgap buildings were being built in response to a problem but that the buildings themselves merely shrank an existing typology and gave no thought to what might have been wrong with the existing typology, what problems shrinking a poor typology might exacerbate, or what new ones it might cause. The article had the following photograph of a 220 sq.ft (20.4 sq.m) apartment. That sunlit window and balcony are now looking pretty good.

When ArchDaily wants to tell us about 10 Tiny and Under 38 sq.m Apartments we can be pretty sure that they’re already unachievable for most people. Articles about tiny apartments usually contain interviews with people saying their 20 sq.m apartment is something to be tolerated for a few years and then moved on from but maybe one day we’ll aspire to have 20 sq.m to call our own. We really need to be giving this some thought now.

Over in the UK people are giving it some thought and this is what they’ve come up with. It’s basically putting a bed in the same room with a noise-producing source of heat (the boiler, the radiator) and coolth (the refrigerator), and a source of moisture and odors (the sink – which doubles as washbasin).

• It’s always tragic seeing British micro flats with a full-size oven, as if not having a place to roast a joint of beef is an indicator of poverty..
• Despite the array of kitchen knives and collection of timber stirrers, I don’t imagine much boiling or frying happening in this room as there’s not even a recirculating extractor hood and fan.
• I hope that boiler is electric but, even if it is, the radiator will gurgle.
• It’s nice to see a full-size washer-dryer but, without any space inside or outside to dry clothes, using the dryer will mean at least hour of noise and a humidity spike. Drying everything above the radiator will be quieter but all that moisture still has to go somewhere.

The UK already has some rather shabby apartments converted from office buildings [c.f. Heroes and Villains] It’s said the price per square meter of an apartment like this is more expensive because the cost of providing heating, water and plumbing is not directly proportional to size. The same was said of tiny apartments in Hong Kong. This sounds like a license to print money and one of the UK’s large-volume housebuilder companies is poised to enter the market soon with a micro-apartment offering. These companies aren’t in the building business as a social service so I’m not expecting the product to be any better than what we see above. The bar is already set very low and it’s going to stay low if articles such as the Bloomberg one keep quoting people’s low expectations of an exploitative housing product.

Architects aren’t being much help either. If it’s not Sir Norman foster designing apartments for billionaires, it’s architects with Archdailyable ideas for 38 sq.m apartments. Neither are what we’re going to be needing.

Already, The Guardian article tells me, the median area of UK apartments of less than 37 sq.m is 29 sq.m. It’s just a race to the bottom now. This is a problem architects should be applying themselves to. It’s not that they haven’t in the past. Almost one hundred years ago, the former Soviet Union was a hotspot for housing research, much of it for comradely communal housing.

A century later the West flirted with communal housing as privately supplied and rented accommodation called co-living since co-housing implied long-term.

In 1964, foreign journalists attending the Tokyo Olympics, likened Japanese houses to “rabbit hutches”, a criticism that stung then and has never been forgotten. In the 1980s this next apartment would have been thought small at around 30 sq.m but we can now see they were just forty years ahead of the curve. Compared to the offerings in the English-speaking countries today, a lot of thought has gone into how people are going to live in 30 sq.m. I expect similar amount of thought is going into apartments much smaller now.

All the hard work has already been done. People have worked out what works and what doesn’t. Here’s two successful ways to not put a bed in a kitchen. The one on the left looks like it’s about 28 sq.m and the one on the right possibly 40 but could be done in less and still be quite a nice place to live.

This next I’m copying and pasting from my post on Riken Yamamoto. ROOM 3 isn’t large at about 30 sq.m but it looks livable and that there’s more to it than a place to sleep. In other words, IT’S BEEN THOUGHT ABOUT. It might be time for the active band. [c.f. The Active Band]

These small apartments have their kitchens and bathrooms against the window. I think this is more for the benefit of the people inside than the ones outside. In these more introspective spaces, it’s good to be reminded why one bothers showering and having breakfast, etc. Outside society matters less in the living space.

I hope so but the good ideas aren’t necessarily the ones that find favor, or even win one of the monthly micro-house or micro-apartment competitions we seem to be having these days. We don’t need any more ideas for compact living in tiny houses in the countryside when what we need is ideas for how people can live with dignity in smaller dwellings that are packed and stacked.

This next page image is of a small project I did in 2003. The brief was to provide overnight accommodation and some sort of meeting room for corporate training and bonding. The rural site in Kent, England, had a canopy of trees and clear views to wheat fields beyond. I didn’t want these views obscured by conventional cabins. The leopard print idea is courtesy of Edouard François.

This will be my basic living unit but all floors don’t have to be stacked. I want to see how closely I can pack them in a cluster of maybe twelve, and without sacrificing visual privacy or private outdoor space at ground level. I’d like it to be better than this example you saw last week, and aspire to Ricardo Bofill’s experiments with cellular planning.

I could always arrange my four-story houses and equivalent amounts of open space in a chessboard pattern, give each outer wall one window at one end and then pinwheel those windows around the open space so that no window looked directly into another’s despite being 3–5 meters away. With this arrangement, no apartment would share a wall with another and every floor could be cross ventilated in two directions. My first thought however, was something more loosely packed.

The next morning before theory class I managed to fit in four more units.

The same floors are arranged in several ways and with some shared walls, floors and roofs. Let’s say 32 persons live in sixteen apartments occupying a site that’s 725 sq.m. That’s approx. 44,000 persons per square kilometer, a figure already higher than the population density of Manila in The Philippines (41,515) [in 2015] .

It turned out okay. Its 39.4 sq.m of internal area provides up to three people with four different places to be, and at a density one third higher than that Santa Barbara vertical farm for students.

I never knew Neo-Fururism had been a thing since 2007 so I had some catching up to do. [c.f. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-futurism] I did know that Futurism V1.0 had been an early 20th century artistic movement that wanted to do away with everything old and create only things that were new. The original Futurists were particularly fascinated by machines, especially those that moved forward. Here’s Gino Severini’s 1915 painting Armoured Train. It’s no chocolate box, but I like it.

Never too removed from dodgy politics, The Futurists saw war as a cleansing thing but, times being the times, this may have been opportunistic sensationalism suiting the tenor of their manifesto that admittedly was also a product of its times. All the same, some fine painting was produced in its name. I have a soft spot for “Lunar Prisms” by Fortunato Depero in 1932. [c.f. Architecture Misfits #5: The Futurists]

Futurism’s lasting contribution to 20th century architecture was the idea of making a complete break from the past, of beginning afresh and producing new things that would be better simply because they were new. It was a powerful idea in the aftermath of WWI but to treat this idea now as some outdated artistic notion is to either deny or wilfully forget how it continues to colour our attitudes towards most everything.

This is no ordinary artistic concept but the defining concept of the past century.

• The notion that newer is better drives all consumer production as well as all advertising that is its extension
• It drives the subset of artistic production as well as the publicity that is its extension.
• It pervades the information economy not just in terms of newer research being somehow of more value, but in newer news being superior to news for which any time has passed since its generation or its receipt.
• Social media prove that being newest is sufficient for any event or information to be newsworthy. The newest is at the top and we’ve come to accept this. It’s called a News-Feed.

Futurism refuses to die because, no matter what the era, there will never be anything newer than something that appears to have just dropped out of the future and into the present. Buildings can’t compete with something as ephemeral, fleeting, and pervasive as information. They’re old long before they’re completed [Point: This is why visualisations have more news value than completions or openings]. We’ve come to prefer the unbuilt promise to any built reality that, at best can only represent a dated image of the future. [c.f. The Venus Project]

The idea of new being better is embedded in the name Modern-ism when it refers to a style but is absent from the contemporaneous Functionalism when it (correctly) refers to an approach to building. Modernism and Functionalism exist in different dimensions and this is why functional buildings aren’t necessarily modern and modern ones not necessarily functional.

Douglas Haskell would have said Neo-Futurism really began in the 1950s back when atomic energy was regarded as a good thing, when the words “automatic” or “electric” were terms of highest praise, and when automation was going to make everything better [c.f.  Architecture Misfit #16: Douglas Haskell].

It was also the era in which imminent threat of atomic war was articulated and alleviated and heightened at the same time by horror sci-fi movies objectifying anything external as “the other” and as something to be feared.

Harking back to the Arts & Crafts distrust of industrialization and machines, even technology was presented as something to be feared. Evil robots from outer space were added to the objectification template.

Futuristic buildings known as Googie were invented to reassure people there would not only still be a future but that it would be fabulous. Stylistically, Futurism V2.0 did this by smoothing over the messy realities of materials and construction that were tell-tale signs of being stuck in the present. Haskell noted that Googie buildings were concentrated along roadsides and boldly designed to have unconventional geometries and colours to attract the limited and fleeting attention of people speeding by. Hmm.

Googie was an early example of the commercial possibilities of eye-catching buildings being created not by architects for the conventional reasons of corporate prestige, but by designers more attuned to popular culture for businesses more attuned to its purchasing power. Googie was the original Look-at-me! architecture and the concept was soon appropriated by approved architecture and its history writers.

The 1958 building now known as the LAX Theme Building was still on the popular side of the divide between popular Googie and Architecture, but Eero Saarinen’s 1960 TWA Building was on the other even though it is pure Googie in signifying the future by being swooshy, by not having anything that could be seen as a structure with any kind of precedent, and by showing no evidence of the materials, construction or labour that went into its making. White in colour because materiality was a thing of the past, these two airport buildings identified themselves as serious architecture by referring back to Post-Futurist Modernist precedents. It’s not as complicated as it sounds.

Disney’s 1957 House of Tomorrow was a popular Disneyland attraction yet Peter and Alison Smithson’s contemporaneous and equally plastic House of Tomorrow did exactly the same thing but the latter has always been regarded as having architectural importance. I’ve never understood why.

It’s all history now, but everyone was happy with their futurisms until the newer new idea of learning from the past came along. Post-modernism was never billed as a return to pre-Modernism. It was billed as moving on from (i.e. rejecting) what went immediately before. Anything that rejects the immediate past and claims to fix what was seen as its failings is a futurism even if disguised as a new past. In terms of how we were expected to engage with it, Post Modernism was just another modernism – V3.0 by my reckoning.

Futurism V3.0 came along at more or less the same time Post Modernism V1.0 was at last consigned to the past. We’ve since suffered far shakier stylistic notions than Neo Futurism so we should at least try to pin down how this new one is different from the old one, the mid-century Futurism V2.0 Revival, late 20th century Mannerist Modernism, and early 21st century Structural Baroque. If the selection of buildings below is anything to go by, not much. All but one follow the usual rules of being white, having complex geometries and being more than a little swooshy.

One World Trade Center is the odd one out by not having curves, implied curves or implied motion. It presumably made the list for articulating the idea the future will be better but it does so with a gesture of resolve rather than a gesture of optimism, and does so using mass and size rather than the preferred Neo-Futurist attributes of colour and shape.

Of the twenty-six buildings, three are airports, two are office buildings and fifteen or so supposedly relate to arts and culture. Housing is represented by one mixed-use building. Our new future for sustainable low-cost rental housing doesn’t look great.

Floors 2-12 of Twisting Torso have 4,200m² of office space above which are 147 rental apartments of floor areas of 45–190m². Covering those areas of floor with a mixture of polished limestone (entrances), oak (elsewhere) and heated granite (bathrooms) redefines the notion of “sustainable tower” for the future.

For obvious reasons, Zaha Hadid buildings now represent a past representation of the future and nothing dates more quickly than one of those.

Without Zaha Hadid on the Neo Futurist stage, guys Santiago Calatrava and Norman Foster are reverting to type as our main neo-futurists, Calatrava with his Dubai Creek Observation Tower and Norman Foster with Tulip Tower – a building with three ferris wheels embedded in its façades.

Calatrava and Foster may beg to differ but we’re definitely looking at a style here and one that seems one peculiar to early twenty-first century neoliberalism. If we’ve never been allowed to escape Futurism then it follows that we’re not wanted to. Sure it’s okay to embrace the past but never for its own sake. It always has to be reinvented, reinterpreted or reimagined for our times. Whether fashion, food, or cocktails, anything “classic” (i.e. in need of updating) has to be given a modern twist. We’re constantly being primed to anticipate what the next new thing might be. It’s as if looking forward to the future is more important than how we live in the present and this of course is why futurisms exist. They are easy diversions for troubled times.

I ended last week’s post with the sentence “most highly evolved are the starchitects keen to deliver the architecture wanted by the economic system that rewards them, while dutifully avoiding addressing any problems created by that economic system.” It’s difficult to see the problem for which the above two buildings are the solution. This is because we’re looking for the wrong kind of problem. Whether it’s the size of Calatrava’s Shaft or the sensation of Foster’s Tickler, our future architecture seems devoid of any function other than pleasuring those willing and able to pay for the experience. I can’t imagine those who don’t or can’t pay feeling any kind of national or civic pride, or any joy in the future of architecture. Perhaps their real purpose of these structures is not to generate hope for the future but, in the guise of doing so, to destroy all expectation of an architecture that is relevant to anything? From observation it seems like a reasonable conclusion.

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The problem is much the same around the world, whether Barcelona, Dubai or Crested Butte. Short-term rentals for holiday lets are changing the way people think about where they live.

“Destroying local communities” is a fairly emotive term but so is the flipside, “Local residents sell out!” Rather than question whether the sense of community is really as strong as thought, it’s easier to shift blame to outsider profiteerers [1]. The word “community” is used to define the unwanted. Outsider profiteerers do exist but the market is still mainly driven by people renting out places of residence as if they were hotels, and the bulk of friction with neighbours occuring when those places are treated as one. Those renting out properties aren’t those who have to live with the consequences. Renting involves a tenancy contract between tenant/guest and owner/landlord but no social contract exists between the short-term renters and their neighbours.     

It takes many people to create a community and residents are usually thought the most important. The adjective local implies a community that thinks of itself as self-reliant and self-contained. Short-term rentals introduce strangers into this system that is now no longer self-reliant nor self contained. The fact airbnb’s – I use the word generically now – are taking over the world suggests local communities were never as local, as self-contained or as community as they liked to think they were. The word community evokes a false nostalgia.

It’s not a new notion. Seaside Florida was designed to be a pseudo-community of short-term rentals. Its walkability and screened porches within “howdy pseudo-neighbour!” hollering distance of the sidewalk was intended to simulate the experience of folksier times past for those who’d never experienced them. Community as theme park, Disneyworld for grownups, Westworld for the fainthearted. [c.f. Architecture Myths #18: Popular Culture]

The town of Celebration, (Fl.) was Disney’s attempt to roll the dream out on a larger scale. The strength of the dreamworks became apparent in 2010 when people were unable to comprehend how a brutal murder could occur in a community developed by Disney.

No studies exist to prove if Seaside or Celebration ever achieved sustainable levels of pseudo-neighbourliness. Two two years ago I wrote

You can make your booking here. “There’s something to suit every budget.”

Seaside Florida has its own bookings website. We now have many more that aren’t location-specific. VBRO is the one mentioned in the article above.

Since May 2016 regulations controlling the rental of short-term holiday accommodation have been relaxed here in Dubai.

“This comes shortly after DTCM issued new regulations at the end of April that govern the leasing of holiday homes in Dubai. The new regulations ask that private homeowners apply for a holiday home license without the need to go through an approved Dubai Tourism operator, provided they meet certain criteria. Moreover, tenants renting a property can also lease their accommodation as a holiday home with a short-term permit, provided that they first obtain a “no objection” certificate from their landlord and meet all DTCM requirements.”

It’s a fact of life everywhere now, and our buildings aren’t keeping pace. The apartment building I currently live in is all-rental and managed directly by the owner’s management company. At least eleven apartments are now being managed as short-term rentals and the apartment building is in the process of becoming a short-term let hotel. The five-star hotel next door manages another eighteen as hotel-apartments. Tenants rent by the year and “guests” by the week or day but it’s sufficient to generate an airb’n’b effect similar to that experienced by the residents of Crested Butte, Colorado.

Guests have no long-term investment in their temporary accommodation and, through either ignorance or nonchalance, don’t respect the rules. In an apartment building, this means treating the place as a hotel, not saying hello to people in the elevator, and perhaps making too much noise in the corridor. The building lobby becomes a place to re-pack luggage, or perhaps let the children sleep until the agent arrives to check them in. This is all standard hotel stuff.

Dubai is not Paris, Barcelona or Venice but this article describes what I’m experiencing as a side-effect of city-centre tourism concentrated on specific activities and sights.

I’ve no problem with any of this. There’s no danger the corridor outside my door will turn into Les Champs Elysées, Las Ramblas or the Grand Canal. I’ve always championed co-housing and shared facilities but this is not co-housing where people live together because they share the same values. Much might actually be shared but the difference of tenure duration is sufficient to place these two types of tenant in opposition. Neither’s permanent but the longer-term contract at the very least implies a different level of financial commitment.

One: We need buildings that are up to the task.

Architecturally, the problem becomes how to reconfigure buildings to allow for more than one type of tenancy in a way not detrimental to anyone. We need to figure out which parts of our buildings aren’t up to these new ways of being filled with people. First, I suggest we accept we’re all temporary tenants in whatever accommodation we have, even if we own it. I don’t mean to come across all existential but buildings generally outlast people. Our patterns of urban living are changing and, whether we like how it is changing or not, there might be ways that buildings can change to make our adapting to other changes less fractious. This is to neither champion nor criticise the political, social or economic conditions that brought about those changes. It’s just that the role of the architect is to suggest solutions to changing realities yet not pandering to the forces that brought them about – much like Moisei Ginzburg et. al did in the 1920’s Soviet Union with their “social condensers” for the anticipated new society that, in the end, didn’t happen as planned.

Nor did society change to validate streets in the sky as proposed by The Smithsons, perhaps because theirs were merely called “streets” without providing any of their real advantages. People on their way home will always have the capacity to annoy, whether it’s a street, a street-in-the-sky, an access gallery, or a corridor. One suggestion I have to to make apartment corridors more like shared communal space. [c.f. The Landscape Within (July 2017)] This might encourage longer-term residents to feel less territorial and shorter-term residents to feel more responsible.

[Note to self: Investigate whether these principles can be applied to a slab typology.]  

Two: Community-driven, handmade, pop-up architecture

This array of keywords comes from the same place as the “architecture, ad-hoc, handmade, community-driven” tags mentioned in the last post. What could possibly be wrong with pop-up architecture? After all, it uses idle land or buildings, costs little to make and build, is a good thing for assemblages of people with maybe an architectural education to do, and it benefits others.

It costs little to make and build.  Great. Let’s put the idea in people’s heads that if they want to live in a house of their own then they should stop their complaining and instead use a bit of imagination, sequester materials and labour for nothing and just get on and build themselves one. Bingo – housing crisis solved! Teach a man to fish and he won’t ask you for one.

It’s a known method. “In 1962 Soviet armed functionaries brutally suppressed local food riots in the event known as the Novocherkassk massacre. Instead of increasing food production in response, the government inaugurated a system for gifting people land close to where they lived, effectively making them responsible for feeding themselves. [c.f. The Dacha (Apr. 2016)]

It uses idle land or buildings. The spin here is that a pop-up cinema brings some joy to a street that a derelict petrol station no longer provides. The “structures” are generally small, low-cost, often display and ingenious use of materials and their sourcing, and provide a temporary source of entertainment or diversion for locals and passersby. The word community is often invoked but customers or market is more accurate.

It’s a good thing for assemblages of people (perhaps with an architectural education) to do. For graduate architecture students yet to enter the workforce and work for the man, pop-up architecture is an opportunity to let potential clients know that they understand that 1) architecture is all about adding value to land, 2) they are adept at sourcing low-cost materials and labour, 3) they display knowledge of how social media can create instant buzz for little or no outlay, 4) creating the appearance of community benefit is a selling point. None of these are new. The only innovation is that it can all take place outside the triad of academia, practice and media.

The traditional career trajectory used to be work for a company, design a house for a relative, design another one, start one’s own practice, gain recogntion with perhaps an art gallery, land a large commission that turns out to be seminal, and then sell out. For those without a job or wealthy relatives, pop-up architecture is the new substitute. Commissions will follow not because of any innate talent, but because clients like architects that understand the food chain and are open for business. The same principles that starchitects have successfully applied over the past forty years have now been shown to work for architects less stellar. Interesting times ahead. 

It benefits others. Ad-hoc, handmade and pop-up structures are now being used by large-scale property developers to indicate how small-scale and hip they are. Why spend a fortune on marble-floored malls when people will pay good money to sit on packing crates inside shipping containers? Win-win. The perception is that these places must be inexpensive because they look cheaply constructed. Not so. This is the legacy of Post Modernism and the representation of a thing (as inexpensive) being the primary experience and more important than the reality (expensive). Ad-hoc, handmade and pop-up have been monetized and assimilated into the commercial mainstream. That pop-up vodka bar or whatever in Shoreditch in 1995 was the thin end of a different but same wedge.

Three: We should think more about how the word community is used

We automatically think anything to which the word “Nature” is attached is good. The word “Community” is getting the same treatment, mostly to denote goodness and positive feelings towards services that until modern times were performed at local-government level. The message is: “Sort yourselves out! Do it yourselves! Don’t expect any help from us!” The glamorization of ad-hoc, handmade, community-driven architecture is a sign of the times. It’s not a sign of faith that centralized government will do the right thing by its citizens. Ad-hoc, handmade, community-driven architecture is especially irksome when it’s performed by people who can afford to work voluntarily and who enlist unpaid labour under the guise of “self-help” or “empowerment”.

Community initiative
Community health
Community centre
Community-funded
Community service [not what it used to mean]
Community outreach
Community participation

I don’t know if it still does, but the Holcim Awards used to have a category called Community Engagement or similar. The upcoming Venice Bienalle made me think of Alejandro Aravena for the first time in a long time. Last I heard was he went off to be consultant for Holcim, delivering sustainable solutions to conflict zones worldwide. This sounds like a worthwhile endeavour, but then so too did ad-hoc, handmade, pop-up and community-driven. 

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[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/feb/12/profiteers-killing-airbnb-erode-communities

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First there was practice … and then there was spatial practice … but all spatial practice is not architecture. The machinery I’m going to describe at the beginning of this post does useful things like position stuff – in space, as it happens – in order for some benefit to be achieved from them doing so. None of it is architecture. It’s just perfect things exquisitely evolved to perform tasks that can’t be performed by anything else. I first began thinking of this when two of AERTSSEN company’s heavy-lift crawler cranes were parked across the street.

They’re magnificent beasts. Jibs are delivered in sections and assembled onsite. Crawlers arrive on separate lorries, soon followed by two more lorries hauling the chassis and drive unit. Counterweights can be fixed or on a outrigger caddy having a fixed connection so it revolves around the crane as it swivels. The caddy bogies rotate 90° so wheels are parallel to the direction of travel when the crane moves linearly. These cranes will never zip from one end of a site to some other but they’re surprisingly manouvreable. Here’s one doing a spot of weightlifting at Dubai Arena.

Previously, there’d been two such cranes on the site to place the primary trusses. One was then dissasembled and its jib components used to reconfigure the other for longer reach to place the secondary trusses. I can’t imagine a better way to do it. These modular cranes are not trying to be beautiful. Here’s another one warming down on the street behind. Cranespotter me didn’t wait around to check but I suspect it’d been used to place A/C equipment in that hotel’s machine room twenty or so stories up.

Up. Airports exist so aircraft can take off and land on runways, taxi on taxiways, and come to rest on what’s called the apron. All these are dedicated spaces. Also running around airports are regular vehicles such as fire tenders that operate in the same way they do anywhere else. Ground support vehicles are a third category of vehicle that service aircraft on the apron. Aircraft movement on the apron is entrused to two types of ground support vehicle. The first is the tug which does just that. It takes considerable muscle to tow an aircraft and these vehicles have outputs of 330KW, (448hp) and can tug up to 600 tons using 460kN of drawbar pull.

The towbarless tractor is a variation that links to an aircraft by carrying its nosewheel array.

Thrust reversers decelerate aircraft on runway and engines propel it on taxiways but aircraft can’t travel backwards and don’t have a reverse gear for manoeuvring on the apron. I don’t intend to explain what pushback tractors other than to say that they transmit force to the nosewheel differently. If, say, a sumo wrestler wants to push another sumo wrestler backwards, they’ll be able to transmit more force if they push with the palms of their hands than their fingers.

Some towbarless tractors can also function as pushback tractors and this has the advantage of limiting the number of vehicles on the apron. Goldhofer are the experts. [Why is all this equipment German?]

“Schopf Tractors are at home everywhere. In order to keep such enormous forces under control, we use power shift transmission, four wheel drive and all-wheel-steering as standard – features which allow A380s and Antonov 225s to be manoeuvred safely at anytime.”

The A380 we know but this is an Antonov 225 which, as you’d imagine, is the world’s biggest aircraft. It’s big.

Schopf also has a miltary specification though I can’t imagine what would make it different. Top speed perhaps? Apparently, they offer maximum reliability in extreme environments at high altitudes, in hot climates or arctic cold! [!].

The catering vehicle is the ground support vehicle we’re most likely to have seen from our seat window. It solves the problem of quickly getting carts of food and drink from ground level to a higher level without the risks and time associated with double or triple handling.

Baggage also has to change from one level to another and the conventional system of conveyor belts and baggage handlers involved the risks and time associated with double or triple handling. Larger aircraft these days use a unit load device (= “container”) system that minimizes time and risk. This is a unit load device loader.

Loading the unit load devices and then loading them into the hold quickly and efficiently is a good example of spatial practice, as is getting your luggage to where you are impatiently waiting for it.

An aircraft shifting space containing passengers from one place to another is spatial practice. Air traffic control – getting all those aircraft to not collide as they converge and land in sequence on the same land – is a stunning example of spatial practice, as is sending anything into space and making it orbit around anything. Keyhole surgery is spatial practice, as is surgery in general. Architecture has nothing to offer any of these.

We should not be so keen to conflate architecture with spatial practice. All architecture may be spatial practice, but all spatial practice is not architecture. This is the propositional fallacy known as Affirming the Consequent – i.e. when “the antecedent in an indicative conditional is claimed to be true because the consequent is true; if A, then B; B, therefore A]^“*  Architecture is a subset of spatial practice. It does not constitue it. Attempting to conflate them is a power grab for continuing relevance.

Deus ex machina: (From the Latin ‘god from the machine’)

The term has evolved to mean a plot device whereby a seemingly unsolvable problem is suddenly and abruptly resolved by the inspired and unexpected intervention of some new event, character, ability, or object. Its function can be to resolve an otherwise irresolvable plot situation, to surprise the audience, to bring the tale to a happy ending, or act as a comedic device.

• The notion that architecture could be ornamented with stucco arrived at a time when carved stone ornament in interiors was becoming prohibitively expensive.
• The notion that architecture could be constructed from brick arrived at a time when stone masonry construction was becoming prohibitively expensive.
• The notion that architecture could be constructed from “space” arrived when a shortage of landed clients made it the best way to refresh its market.
• The notion that architecture could be constructed from “meanings” and “references” freed it from the physical properties of materials and tedious obligations such as durability. This gave us “Snapchat architecture” that disintegrated once the media fuss was over. Time and the natural processes of weathering did not exempt “meaning-free” architecture. Representing the absence of meaning is itself a meaning.

And then came critical spatial practice. The term was introduced by Jane Rendell in 2003 to describe forms of practice located between art and architecture. Rendell later consolidated and developed the term as one that defined practices located at a three-way intersection: between theory and practice, public and private, and art and architecture. This seems awfully like how architecture used to be considered half a century ago. […] Her definition aims to transpose the key qualities of critical theory – self-reflection and social transformation – into practice. I’ve nothing against all or any of these influencing how things get built for the good of all. I just don’t understand why it’s suddenly a thing.  In Rendell’s work, critical spatial practices are those, which seek to question and transform the social conditions of the sites into which they intervene, as well as test the boundaries and procedures of their own disciplines. It was all good until this which indicates a shift in the ends to which that practice are directed. To “question and transform the social conditions of these sites into which they intervene” is a licence to do anything. “Testing the boundaries and procedures of their own disciplines” amounts to finding out what one can get away with and continue to call “testing boundaries and procedures.” It’s a bit like that term “research-driven practice” – it’s a remit for anything and everything.

The term critical spatial practice is thus a moveable feast that’s been moved in various directions, one of which is criticalspatialpractice.org

Assemble Studio seem to be the smiley face of critical spatial practice. This article on metropolis is indexed by trendy keywords such as architecture, ad-hoc, handmade and community-driven. http://www.metropolismag.com/architecture/assemble-studio-creates-architecture-ad-hoc-handmade-community-driven/ As you may know, Assemble Studio won the UK’s Turner Prize for art in 2015, instantly putting the art bit back into critical spatial practice.

Me, I have my doubts if a collective of between fourteen and sixteen people who work voluntarily (albeit in an ad-hoc, handmade and community-driven way) has anything to do with practice as in architectural. I see serious cashflow problems, unless it’s all done on zero-hour contracts – a practice nobody should be championing. I suspect everyone has independent means to sustain themselves while working for maximum media effect and little or no remuneration. (Philip Johnson probably wasn’t the first to make a name for himself this way and Zaha Hadid obviously wasn’t the last.) Perhaps the reason Assemble exist and have received the amount of media coverage they have is because they glamourize the concept of working for nothing? Perhaps they have distilled the essence of the starchitect office where people work for little or no money in exchange for media presence? If so, that’s very clever. The lack of a figurehead is a simplification and to be honest no great loss but it doesn’t stop this form of “practice” from being a cynical devaluing of the very thing it’s presented as championing.

Next week’s post will ponder contemporary misuse of the word “community.”

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The header image is “Aircraft tug” by pixpix / Alamy Stock Photo, and is available here. 

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