Re-Constructing Blackness: A New Urban Code

Re-Constructing Blackness: A New Urban Code

Euan Russell Rooms + Cities

A New Urban Code

MArch Thesis, 2012/13 Dundee School of Architecture, University of Dundee

“I’m only radical because the architectural profession has got lost.

Architects are such a dull lot – and they’re so convinced that they matter.”

Cedric Price

Contents

7

Preface

Lessons from John Soane

8

12 Part 1

The work of Cedric Price

Technology and the Synthetic Enclave 27 Part 2 Urban Sprawl

Non-Plan 39 Part 3

Breaking the Stupefying Cycle

54

Lessons from Air Rights

57 Conclusion

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References + Bibliography

Appendices

I Blackness Figure Ground Studies

II

Blackness Block Analysis

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Preface By 2050, 75% of the world’s population will live in cities. This paper explores the idea of a move away from careless outward expansion, and towards a specific integration of new development within cities.

Through the lens of Soane’s adaptive approach, this paper introduces the social ideology of Cedric Price, in embracing Architecture as a series of strategies. This is a marked comparison to the contemporary masterplan which foresees form as something which is instantly developed and overly static.

If today’s approach to development is one of ‘form follows profit’ that seeks control and negates on it’s relationship with the city, then a paradigm shift must occur. The final part of this thesis claims the necessity to create a new strategic approach to accommodating the flux of the contemporary city, at the micro scale of the post-industrial enclave of Blackness in Dundee, Scotland.

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Lessons from Sir John Soane This analysis of an ‘adaptive’ Architecture begins from an exploration of the process of change undergone at numbers 12, 13 and 14 Lincoln Inn Fields, London.

Soane used an iterative process of re-formatting and creating new spaces within adjoining Victorian townhouses, on the North of the square between 1792 and 1825. The free-standing facade which references it’s neighbouring buildings does not make any suggestion of the rich inner labyrinth of spaces, which Soane carefully modified to house his prodigious collection of artefacts.

These incremental changes recorded the gradual transition from the townhouse’s beginning as an individual private family home into museum spaces tuned for cataloguing his collection. The new circulation rejects a more typical residential layout, with a radical shift (fig.1) forming a newly carefully choreographed set of rooms and volumes stitched together within the three adjoining buildings. Over time these have been continuously de-constructed, altered and re-filled with niches, light wells and skylights that highlight the specific placing of Soane’s artefacts (fig.2). The interior has evolved into a layered landscape that despite appearing static, is kinetically charged.

Soane’s articulately detailed and complex spaces lie at the surface of a larger architectural agenda, one which recognises an inherent awareness of the need to actively change the buildings and spaces we occupy. The city can be seen as a ‘palimpsest’, a metaphorical concept referring to the work of scraping off a layer of the city to apply another, echoing the process of drawing using pencil and a sharp blade. The rooms and buildings that form the fabric of the city can only benefit from reworking and become richer through the knitting of current agendas within the historic claims on space. Soane’s microscopic attention to detail when adapting Lincolns Inn Fields is a viable and timely precedent, which might inform a macro attitude towards retrofitting our cities today.

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Figure 1 The Soane Museum: An adaptive Architecture Author’s own.

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Figure 2 Incremental Growth The Soane Museum: 1796 to 1810 Author’s own.

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Figure 3 Incremental Growth The Soane Museum: 1822 to 1837 Author’s own.

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Part 1 Social Enabling and Intermediacy While Soane’s ideology of an ‘adaptive architecture’ can perhaps be viewed as an essentially analogue approach of physically re-writing spaces for new programmes, the later work of Cedric Price within post-war 1960’s Britian, was imbued with a commitment to a more socially responsive architecture, through an interest in the prevalence of technology. However unlikely a pairing, perhaps one can learn from Price’s socially accessible spaces, which may perhaps be simultaneously rich with Soane’s intricacy, knitting into the existing fabric of the city?

Price’s work defies the traditional notions of containing space using walls, doors and windows to create a ‘building’. Instead he formed an adaptable ‘Kit-of-Parts’ language that allowed an easy curation of different events through altering clip on component parts, which served as a new interpretation on the status quo of permanence and the Vitruvian idea of the building as a static object.

His largely theoretical work embraces the idea that one should be able to exert control over one’s environment, demanding a level of interaction and engagement from the user. This is fundamentally different from the position of Soane, and as such his thoughts on the role which the Architect plays is markedly different;

“Architecture is peripheral to the most important social aims. I wish it was less peripheral. That’s why I’m an Architect” Cedric P 1961. As cited by Ricky Burdett at LSE Urban Age Electric City Conference, London 2012.

This clarity of thought questions whether Price thought an Architecture, and thus the traditional notion of building at all, was key to empowering the user, taking an almost benevolent approach. The non-traditional ways of representing his work and the lack of built precedent which allows one to visually engage in his work, is addressed by Kester Rattenbury:

“Unlike almost any other Architect’s work, if your first reaction is to ask what it looks like, you have probably missed the point.”

Rattenbury, K. Hardingham S 2003. “Opera”. London: Wiley-Academy 14

Figure 4 Crystal Palace Joseph Paxton: 1851 Piggott, J. Palace of the People

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Rattenbury’s comments underline the significance of Price’s Fun Palace project (fig.5). Taking the form of an architectural strategy for temporary spaces, events and social situations, the project’s diagrams reject the approach of a fixed design manifesting itself as a traditional building form. Perhaps Price’s approach is one from which the planning of the contemporary city can take precedent.

As an open and flexible frame for re-education and activities, the structure sought to take advantage of the post-war increase in leisure time, on the site of Mill Meads, Lea Valley in East London. The project was an evolution of the ideas brought forward by Paxton in the 1851 Crystal Palace project (fig.4), for the Festival of Britian, in parallel with the ideology and stylistic imagery formerly explored by the Metabolists and Archigram movements.

Likewise the Potteries Thinkbelt project proposed an ‘anti-institution’, rooted in the socialist ideology of the welfare state. Thinkbelt suggested mobile and rudimentary structures for housing, industry and education that occupied the disused railway infrastructure that littered the post-industrial landscape of Staffordshire, England. The Thinkbelt is typical of the prescient nature of his ideas, being proposed as a non-physical institution which could be accessed where and when it was needed; a concept expanded and implemented, in theory, as the Open University. Potteries shows Price’s work in it’s most powerful sense; an ability to project on, and be part of, the infrastructure of the city.

These projects clearly mark Price’s interests, fitting the title of an ‘anti-architect’, given to him by historian Robin Middleton. The theme of impermanence is apparent in both the Fun Palace and Potteries projects, where Price puts particular emphasis on the limitations of the structure’s relevance and thus defines it’s social expiry date. Price not only produced assembly drawings for the laymen user in an effort to empower those to construct their own space, but equally recognised that his Architecture may cease to be necessary the audience for whom it was initially relevant.

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Figure 5 Fun Palace Cedric Price: 1962 Matthew, S. Agit Prop to Free Space

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“We are building a short term play thing in which all of us can realise

the delights that the 20th century environment owes us. It must last

no longer than we need it.”

Matthews, S 2007. From Agit-Prop to Free Space. London: Black Dog Price strongly believed that since the future could not be fully understood or predicted, the form and programmes should reference this indeterminacy.

Price’s ideologies have never been so relevant than today. Price has a concern with an architecture that is self-effacing, morally appropriate and strategic in it’s underlying design. Price’s notion of structures which constantly re-asses their timeliness seems at odds with the static interpretations of buildings which litter our city edge today. Although the out-of-town shopping parks and mass marketplaces of Tesco share Price’s ‘big shed’ typology, their role as accessible public realms which engage with urbanites is a fundamental failing.

Their very location on the edge of the city requires a complex infrastructure of transport networks, roads and systems that link them into the city grid; while this web severs surrounding parks, residential areas and consumes open land.

The evolution of technology and the virtual space where supply chains are managed, products centrally picked and distributed along physical nationwide networks, means goods and services are delivered to flexible spaces on the edge of our towns and connected to cities through a landscape of dead spaces, unconnected streets and soulless car parks. Is this really the urban landscape Price would have imagined? There is a disconnect between Price’s ‘joy de vivre’ and embrace of technology as a positive tool, and our current interpretation and utilisation of technology within our cities. The contemporary city’s state of flux and constantly changing demands is the site for a re-interpretation of these values.

“Technology is the answer, but what is the question?”

Cedric P 1964. As cited by Ricky Burdett at LSE Urban Age Electric City Conference, London 2012

Perhaps, put simply, the question is: ‘What have we failed to engage with successfully in the design of our cities?’

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Figure 6 Potteries Thinkbelt Cedric Price: 1965 Matthews, Stanley. Agit Prop to Free Space

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“The contemporary environment is now so conditioned by maximized technology that the possibility of creating significant urban form has become extremely limited[...] to a kind of superficial masking to which modern development seems to gravitate in order to facilitate marketing while maintaining a prerequisite level of social control” Frampton, K 1999. ‘ Seven Points for the Millennium: An Untimely Manifesto’

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Technology and the Synthetic Enclave Price’s integration of technology was limited to ideas that manifested themselves as singular structures, ones which were to a degree pre-planned and synthetic environments for random events. These spaces were separate from the armatures and enclaves that make up the city, and were tools as destinations for which your attendance in one space was necessary in order to fully engage. Although this is, in part, because Price’s projects manifested themselves as a form of Architecture, it is interesting to re-visit Price’s work with a reference to the current integration of technologies that affect our interpretations of, and control our interactions with, the city today.

In December 2012, Deyan Sudjic opened the LSE’s Urban Age Project Conference in London by reminding us that electricity, and thus the mechanism for change in our built environment over the last century, ‘is both a thing and an idea’. In a sense, electricity radically changed the geography of the city, altering the way we interact with it and with each other. 1 The strong sociological aims of Price’s work and his interest in the feedback our interaction with it creates, have until now, taken place within one particular physical space, however Sudjic reminds us that technology has ‘created a new urban realm, out with the traditional physical confines of the city.’ Sudjic’s refers to technology and the internet as being used to run ‘market stalls as open source designs’ referring to the increasing use of e-commerce, and in passing to the negative impact this has had on the typical town high street.

Further, information and cataloguing is now performed online, as ‘the great free library and archive that is Wikipedia. These networks may not be physical, however their ease of use and dominance has fundamentally changed the social and economic planning of our towns and cities.1 The Fun Palace’s location is detached from the city, as a structure where feedback was gathered, analysed and re-dispersed within that environment meant the building did not plug into the existing cityscape. This notion is similar to two new ‘smart cities’, being developed within the Far East.

Masdar is a stand alone city in the process of construction on the edge of Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates. The city follows a Ford-ist principle, being strictly planned, defining and locating each function.

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Figure 7 Masdar: Dislocated from Abu Dhabi Author’s own

Figure 8 Masdar: A new enclave adopts it’s own geometry and rules Google Maps 22

Figure 9 Masdar: A levelling surface, a new tabula rasa The synthetic cityscape, the ground floor becomes level 1 Author’s own

Figure 10 Masdar: The ground plain services hardwired technology Foster + Partners 23

American sociologist Richard Sennett, introduces the potential negative impacts of technology being ‘hard wired’ into the city fabric for technical research, as being controlling and presenting a fake vail of choice to the user; “..there’s no cognitive stimulation through trial and error, no personal

encounter with resistance. User-friendly […] means choosing menu

options rather than creating the menu.”

Sennett, R 2012. The Stupefying Smart City, LSE Electric City

Newspaper. London: LSE Technology and cybernetics are used in a different way in Masdar, laying out a comprehensive pre-planned blueprint which dictates the activities of the city, where the implementation of cybernetic theory is primarily for the benefit of those doing the monitoring. Due to funding of these environments by large technology congolmerates, information is processed and used for research.

In short, the city here is one large experiment. This is a city as a notional Fun Palace, however it’s purpose does not directly benefit it’s resident, but the financial backer. Sennett argues that living and working in a pre-planned and ordered city is to significantly deplete the quality of the urban realm;

“Informal social process are the genius of the city – the source of

innovation economically and foundation of an arousing social life.

Technology must be part of the process of giving the city that informal energy.”

Sennett, R 2012. The Stupefying Smart City, LSE Electric City

Newspaper. London: LSE Sennett makes clear the need to deal with technology as it is imposed onto existing cities, rather than something integrated into the planning and subsequent over design of our new 21st century cities. Masdar and other planned cities, such as Songdo in South Korea, un-intentionally dissolve a randomness and opportunity for richness in urban spaces, through over planning. This is an approach which rejects the key principles of the Fun Palace. Alexander Trocchi, a Situationist poet, expressed his marxist view of culture on post-industrial society, specifically on a utopian community published in his ‘Project SIGMA’ manifesto;

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“How to Begin?[..] not too far from the City of London... we envisage the whole as a vital laboratory for the creation and evaluation of conscious situations; it goes without saying that it is not only the environment which is in question, plastic, subject to change, but men also.”

Trocchi, A 1960. Project SIGMA Manifesto. Agit Prop to Free Space

The references to a ‘laboratory’...’not too far from the City’ aligns with the idea of the ‘closed-loop’ systems of planned cities being built out with the traditional city edge. The funding model of Masdar is channelled through ‘Masdar Capital’, an umbrella which benefits from the funding of Credit Suisse and Seimens AG.2 Much like the vested interests of out of town development within Dundee, the city’s sole role as a functioning laboratory is placed ahead of a varied streetscape or attempt to integrate physically or socially into the existing Abu Dhabi area. The Situationist’s strategy of ‘creating aimless urban wanderings (the derive)’ and the ‘insertion of events into random situations (detournement)3, seem far removed from the precedents set by the trend for mono-programmatic technology parks, housing estates and disparately distributed leisure spaces that continue to expand our towns and cities.

This is not an isolated issue. Throughout history new technologies and tools have come into use before people know how to use them. The 20th century saw the invention of the internet that aided global supply chains and efficient capitalist businesses, such as Tesco, to fully develop the need for ‘white box’ supermarkets into our suburbs and change the way people shop. Instead of integrating the new technology within the traditional confines of the city, we have taken the easier approach of consuming brownfield land. In other words, the 21st century capitalists have negated on their ability to re-use the city buildings and fabric by taking a ‘carte blanche’ approach. The growth of the service or tertiary industries has lead to the rapid development of the city edge, and the simultaneous dereliction through rejection of the inner city industrial areas. These new ‘brain industries’ are developed in areas where zoning never imaged their growth.4

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Figure 11 Rio: Technology for co-ordination, over control.

Preparing for Rio 2016 Brasil.gov.br

Figure 12 Rio: Organised Complexity Google Maps

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“Foster’s idea of the city […] assumes a clairvoyant sense of what should go where. Put crudely, the city is over zoned: the algorithms of the CPU do not envision their own violation.”

Sennett, R 2012. The Stupefying Smart City, LSE Electric City Newspaper. London: LSE

Assuming the planning model of out of town development continues to exist, and the creation of whole new cities out with current settlements continues, what will happen to decaying inner city post industrial areas and gap sights?

Does this mean we have become almost too afraid to confront our past? Price’s ideology of social enabling cannot be implemented in a built environment where people are not connected through proximity within well planned urban spaces. Further, one cannot work with our current inflexible attitude towards adapting our cities when, as Price teaches us, our requirements inevitably change.

If the economic context under which Soane worked was that of individual wealth and responsibility, and Price’s one of a post-war state ‘paternalism’, then Masdar as a vehicle funded largely by private capital, is the epitome of the Architect’s 21st century context. The Architect is increasingly answerable to boards of shareholders, whose categories for evaluating the end product are profit margin or technological exploration as a research or marketing tool.

Whilst recognising this private input as important in accelerating the growth of the economy , perhaps a more socially aware approach can actually aide the bottom line, while providing a more sensible approach to adapting and re-using areas of the city.

Building new population centres such as Masdar does not solve the issues within our cities. One cannot create cultural randomness, variety and the rich urban environment by expanding the landscape our cities take up, when a move towards density and re-use strengthens the economies of scale of new transport and services.

Technology should be responsive of it’s conditions, an added layer, and not embedded within it’s making.

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Figure 13 Dundee: Craigie Estate 1938 Britianfromabove.org

Figure 14 Dundee: Fintry 2013 Google Maps

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Part 2 Sprawl and Dundee The city of Dundee in Scotland has a history of being at the forefront of embracing new technologies. From the middle of the 19th to the turn of the 20th century the city’s population rose from just 41,000 to over 120,000 people.5 The rapid expansion in Jute manufacturing and associated industries brought economic prosperity to Dundee.

The import and export trade densified and activated the port area, centralising services and housing to create a bustling urban centre where commerce and day to day living came into direct contact with an increasingly industrialised city fabric. As an ambitious international trade post, the city’s expansion lead people away from the busy central town and towards the suburbs.

The general consensus was that in order to achieve social betterment, it was necessary to physically detach oneself from the city. (fig.15) It is telling that the government poster, ‘The Home I Want’ displayed a detached house set in farm land as ‘A1’, where an image of a dense urban street commands the title of ‘C3’. This aesthetic discrimination, warps the vision of what we categorize as poor living conditions; open space no matter what the condition is preferable to the density of urban living. This poster sets the tone for common attitudes on urban planning, for which the effect can still be seen within our urban planning policies today.

By 1960, Council planners had constructed four large stand alone housing estates, notably Craigie (fig.13) Fintry, Douglas and Charlestown. These mono-programmitic estates set in motion the idea that inner city living was inferior to the space that sprawl afforded. It is important to recognise that slum conditions did affect Dundee, with the demolition of the back-to-back terrace was a relief from physical conditions which exacerbated poverty.

However, these working class estates were constructed from rapid prefabricated building systems, methods used similarly in Newcastle’s Nursery farm Estate and a pre-curser to the in situ frame methods implemented at Park Hill, Sheffield. Industrial methods translated into a rigid planning order which favoured site layout efficiency over an attempt at linking public spaces, destroying social cohesion previously afforded within the slum housing.

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Figure 15 Post-War Housing Poster: c1953 Are we victims of a mass aspiration pull to the suburbs?

Historic Britian

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In the 1970’s Jane Jacobs advocated an urban make up which embraced a city where it’s high density promoted a dynamism while fostering a social cohesion amongst it’s residents.

Jacob’s influential writing about the American housing projects in East Harlem conveys her commitment to an urban typology which did not separate programmes, thus decreasing the social functions of the neighbourhood.

“Everything tends to degenerate into ineffective cliques, as a natural course. There is no normal public life. Just the mechanics of people learning whats going on is so difficult. It all makes the simplest social gain extra hard for these people” Jacobs, J 1916. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. London: Penguin 2004

Jacob’s writing was clear to differentiate between the consistent density of an urban environment, and the remote density of suburban ‘housing projects’, that used tower blocks to stack residential apartments within a relatively low rise planning set out. This light urbanism, was a vision installed into the minds of Britons as an aspirational move away from tightly packed streets of the inner city.

This model of housing and developments continues to occur within UK cities and specifically Dundee, this time being developer rather than government led. Despite Dundee’s year 2000 population trend report indicating the city is actually contracting in population size, sprawling housing and associated leisure buildings continue to be built upon the edge of the city. Simultaneously, this occurs as the post-industrial inner city enclave of Blackness retains good quality Mill buildings and gap sites. Instead they stand as a hollow monument to the city’s past prosperity.

The analogy of Soane’s redevelopment of his London townhouse is a scalable solution to re-using and recycling inner city land, incorporating the already existing businesses and residents which already exert ownership over streets and public spaces.

These generic sprawling developments are devoid of design and planning merit, and starve urbanites of a micro scale of streets and routes which allow for meaningful public spaces and the possibility for chance engagement with other residents.

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Figure 16 Levittown, New York: Banality in repetition New York Times

Figure 17 The new public high street: Profit geared enclave of the private white box supermarket Are we victims of an mass aspirational pull to the suburbs?

Author’s Own

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Figure 18 Fintry, Dundee: Housing and industrial space.

Mini mono-programmatic enclaves, bisected by infrastructure Author’s own

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Their basic repetition is protected to satisfy the shareholders’ bottom line.

As David Harvey puts forward in his 2008 paper ‘The Right to the City’, if ‘the rights of private property and profit rate trump all other conception of inalienable rights’5, can the ideology of the Fun Palace even start to be integrated into the city under the current model of development?

This failed planning experiment creates an uneven distribution of privately owned enclaves which fail to meet in a common ground that makes up the city.

Soane’s careful choreographed circulation in re-using Lincolns Inn Fields is rejected for a new ad-hoc approach to infrastructure. Public services are randomly strewn throughout, in a way which makes no attempt to engage with the dense urban core. Price’s ideology of social enabling has been reversed, instead social decline is exacerbated by a connective tissue which has given up holding together the enclaves that make up the city.

The traditional Roman Forum is being replaced by the contemporary ‘white box’ supermarket, accessed from the Stoa of the dual carriageway bypass.

However if, post-2007 crash, developer led housing is no longer the profit centre it once was, and manufacturing through 3D printing is converting the supply chain towards the localism of ‘print on demand’, how might the city address this in it’s strategy for the future?

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Sprawl More?

BBC News 28.11.12 Reports that planning minister, Nick Boles, advocates the best approach to relieving the housing shortage is to build on 2-3% more open land than currently occurs.

Just a ploy to stimulate the Redrow house builder?

Middle-Ground?

What about b row nf i el d land and gap sites?

Change Uses?

Financial Times 21.01.13 Reports that developers will be able to convert office blocks into housing, without seeking prior council permission. In an effort to ease the housing shortage, and increase the number of first time purchasers under mortgages.

Figure 19 The case for change Before converting office blocks, why not first re-densify inner city sites?

BBC and FT.com

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The publication of ‘Non-Plan’, a paper in New Society in 1969 by Hall, Banham and Price was an intellectual basis for a new approach to planning the city. They advocated ‘a precise and carefully observed experiment in nonplanning’ and ask:

“What would happen if there was no plan? What would people prefer to do, if their choice were untrammelled.”

Hall, P 1969. Non-Plan: An Experiment in Freedom. New Society.

London

Within the centralised planning of the 1950’s, a ‘top-down’ approach attempted to re-write large swathes of city through ambitious public housing projects, an overly paternalistic vision managing the post war growth. Hall’s comparison with ‘the most vigorously planned cities-like Haussmann’s Paris’ portrayed the planning of large city scapes as a static and rigid approach, one which favoured the grand street and formal language of the city as a whole, critical of ‘the way[...] Paris gladdens the tourist; it was not such a help, though, for the poor through whose homes the demolition gangs went to create those avenues and squares.’8 The rhetoric imbued within Hall’s paper seems to suggest an almost criminal malice under Haussman’s rule and thus from this a clear manifesto appears. A vigour to enable people to choose and be a part of designing their own parts of the city can be seen as an extension to Price’s social enabling.

Peppered with the words of ‘democracy’, ‘vitality’ and ‘spontaneity’, the text plays the role of a written foil to Price’s illustrated Fun Palace diagrams, while operating at the macro scale of a vision which references the utopias of Constant’s ‘New Babylon’. This was a visual language which sought to allow the individual to the construct their own environment, where they could subsequently control, dictate and have a say in activity that occurred around them.

“The right approach is to take the plunge into Heterogenity: to seize

on a few appropriate zones of the country”

Hall, P 1969. Non-Plan: An Experiment in Freedom. New Society.

London The connotations were of a hedonistic set of conditions that sought to redefine the powers of control, critical of the current lack of social sustainability of the city under flux without a critical input from it’s inhabitants.

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Figure 20 The suburbs as a financial instrument The production line of the cityscape Author’s Own

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Perhaps this was a likening to the feedback Price championed within the Fun Palace, his view of the city as an organism which was cybernetic; constantly growing, shrinking, changing and responding to the needs of it’s residents.

This was the Fun Palace’s ‘social enabling’ and empowerment on a macro scale.

It is therefore surprising to realise that planning around the 1970’s has almost entirely ignored the thoughts expressed in ‘Non-Plan’. Hall failed to foresee the reality that deregulating planning conditions did not allow the empowerment of the city resident, but rather allowed the market to interfere and impose a new urbanism.7 Form follows profit is the new idiom. Over half a century after Non-plan, one wonders what relevance it still holds in contemporary urbanism.

Hall correctly defined the appearance of the roadside filling station, predating the work of Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. This glorified the Vegas Strip and growth of the city along an armature of signs and neon, in turn defining a new public realm dominated by the car.

“Watch the little filling station, it is the agent of decentralization.”

Hall, P 1969. Non-Plan: An Experiment in Freedom. New Society.

London

Hall correctly predicted that the associated environment of the filling station became the cornerstone for development of the city. Physically it refers correctly to the increasing use of the car and the ring road as the new public realm. Figuratively, the forecourt stands as the homogeneous ‘non-place’ which exists as the new space for exchanging goods and services, frequently attached to the sprawling car park that affronts the out of town supermarket.

The filling station though represents most of what is wrong about the decades of planning and the situation with which we are currently left. The forecourt is a joyless and functional zone, stripped of any character, grain, sense of place or vitality. Tightly controlled, secured and privatized is the contemporary formula for creating spaces.

“Cities are problems in organized complexity[...]where the streets are

it’s vital organs.”

Jacobs, J 1961. The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

London: Penguin 2004 38

Jacobs thoughts on cities are as ‘living organisms’ however, suggesting the diverse linkage of many uses which appear through organic growth, according to the actual social and economic conditions.

This intermediacy is not reflected in the market lead speculative housing that sprawls from the city edge, nor the inaccessible ‘public’ buildings which lie in between. Current efforts to re-assess the notion of cities as pre-planned enclaves themselves in Masdar or Songdo continue to be an overly synthetic approach to dealing with the fundamental richness of the existing condition.

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Figure 21 Which way do we proceed?

Complexity and contradiction in Architecture Author’s Own

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Part 3 Breaking the Stupefying Cycle

“Cities go through cycles of prosperity and decline as their functions change...It is far more rewarding to design attractive buildings and spaces within existing cities than to plonk a series of indentikit structures on straggling roads and open land.”

Rogers, R. Power, A 2000. Cities for a Small Planet. Cambridge: University Press.

The rise of the ‘branded development’ is on the increase. Straggling estates of housing and ‘big shed’ leisure parks are the weapon of choice for developers in creating ever more remote enclaves, ones that radiate away from the urban core. Housing developments are heavy with an architectural imagery of the suburban dream, the semi and detached two storey houses laid out soley for reinforcing each houses ability to be marketed as a single product. Here, buildings take the form of a product re-packaged and sold regardless of it’s context (fig.20). Mass developments are an exercise in extracting profit from the developer’s land bank, where the city has become a collection of repetitive artefacts. These are not carefully curated against sensitive planning, akin to Soane, but merely scattered by-products of the wealth accumulated through speculating on property.

Even when frequently developed within the notional city limits, the city is now a homage to buildings as the product of a post-industrial process of finance.

Whilst sprawl has a corrosive effect on a city’s urban vitality, merely building within the city or within areas designated as urban development zones does not necessarily create an urban realm which is freely accessible or offer socially beneficial spaces. Indeed, Peter Hall, advocate of promoting a move towards ‘hetereogenity’, is also a key author in the creation of the ‘Docklands Enterprise Zone’ of Canary Wharf, London.

Canary Wharf was a private initiative in building pure area of floorspace for financial institutions, becoming a new enclave of the city which offered the ability to start from scratch in building open plan, double height trading floors for large investment banks.

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Figure 22 Reuters Plaza, Canary Wharf: Swiss Clocks alone at night Time is important here, but not by the same measure as Price.

Flickr

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Development here was underpinned by competing on floorspace sold per metre squared, within a strictly planned grid iron street system. Whilst it has been a commercial success, the district deviates substantially from the vitality and democracy promised within ‘Non-Plan’.

Banal repitition and the safety of the international standard, raised service floors, conditioned repetitive spaces and buildings that, without shame, turn their back on the street. The lobby incloses sterlie seviced floorspace, while exclosing an urban street equally devoid of character.

“One was fascinated and somehow pleased by the fact that all the lifts in the tower were equipped with a power point, located in the same place in every lift. Another friend told me that she liked commuting to Canary Wharf because the Jubilee Line carriages always stopped in exactly the same place.”

Minton, A 2009. “Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the 21st Century City,” St Ives: Penguin.

The banal over simplification of the interior is the product of our desire for sameness and reliability, which is in-built and designed into an environment that is to be rented and serviced with the utmost efficiency. Perhaps this banality of our offices and city spaces is a direct result of a market driven approach to developing cities, an approach that has lost it’s focus on the rich complexity that inner city relationships afford. It is clear that in an effort to forecast the potential financial gain from our buildings, we have forgotten that cities are empowered and operated by people, and not instruments akin to derivatives from which one reaps pure profit.

Many streets of the financial district are left vacant outwith office hours. They take second preference to the network of underground passages and tunnels that lead from lobbies directly to the Jubilee Line station downstairs, accessed by navigating through the obligatory shopping mall. As an enclave of the city Canary Wharf craves control, and this results in a static environment where in built technology and desire for efficiencies make it immensely marketable to the impartiality of international business.

If Canary Wharf is the epitome of an era which made great use of the ‘shell and core fit out’ contract, then proposals for Dundee City Waterfront Masterplan only seek to continue this condition.

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Figure 23 Lincolns Inn V Canary Wharf: Division of ownership A multitude of uses fronting the street is replaced by just one local stakeholder Author’s Own

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Figure 24 Dundee City Waterfront Masterplan: Figures An exercise in carving out voids and ‘non-spaces’ in floorplates of profit Dundee City Council

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“Most people unfortunately just sit and stare at a number. They literally say: Right, the land cost that. The amount of development is going to be that. I’ve got to be able to squeeze that. The pounds per square metre I’m going to get back is this, because Savilles told me.

West, D. Parvin, A 2009. The Profit Function-. Issu

The Dundee City Council Vision of 2009 states that the masterplan ‘aims to transform the City of Dundee into a world leading waterfront destination for visitors and businesses, through the enhancement of it’s physical, economic and cultural assets’. A vague quota of ‘commerical’, ‘leisure’ and ‘residential’ accommodation, divided simply by thirds of a total floorspace area of 124,000m2, is the only regulation of the new masterplan.9

“If you start by saying I want to build to 50 units per hectare or 60

units per hectare, you’re approaching the problem from the wrong end.”

Zogolovitch, R. Parvin, A 2009. The Profit Function. Issu Building new floorspace appears to be a tool to market the city’s brand; an effort in creating abstract building forms which meet no apparent demand. If the way to create more diverse, socially and economically ‘sustainable’ cities is to revert urban sprawl, then masterplanning large swathes of new buildings on un-built land is not the way to re-densify.

“Instead of happening on the streets, communication now takes place via cable connections in the seclusion of one’s own home. Armed with mobile communication equipment like smartphones or laptops, people are now being released back onto the streets. We are now returning from the nighttime of the street to the daytime, where the sun shines and we need shade.

This is why I think the time is ripe to re-conquer the street as the

stomping ground of a new flaneur, which in turn depends on the

design of the city.”

Tröger, E, 2011. Touch Me! The Mystery of the Surface Kosel: Lars Muller

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Blackness is a post-industrial enclave of Dundee, that lies to the North West of the city centre within a natural geographical depression (fig.26). This is a key reference to the areas importance as a centre of the Jute trade, where the location of the ‘Scouring Burn’, a small river that passed through the area, serviced the industrial machinery through the construction of cooling ponds. Densely packed with Jute mills, foundries, rope works and large scale machine storage, Blackness played a pivotal role in the emergence of Dundee as an international trading post.

This density was both the areas strongest and weakest asset. The multitude of different businesses in close proximity to other producers, support industries and associated traders gave the area a unique commercial advantage. However, it’s poor conditions and dense pollution left the area vulnerable after the collapse of the Jute trade in the mid 19th Century. The ‘organised complexity’ of Blackness has since been eroded through dereliction and abandonment, with the city’s economic stimulus of the Universities and National Health Service deeming the buildings and spaces unusable for their purposes.

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Figure 25 Dundee: The site for an investigation into the particular Google Maps

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Figure 26 Dundee : Locating the post-industrial enclave of Blackness Google Maps

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Paradoxically, the large Jute Mills have large free spanning spaces and the areas good quality brick and stone buildings are robust enough to undergo change and re-use. The alterations at a micro scale make better buildings and spaces than an abstract attempt at filling a quota of floorspace under a masterplan. An adaptive architecture is the only way to ensure the buildings we construct today are open-loop, well designed tools that enable us to accommodate the change of the next few centuries.

Tay Mills (Appendix II, Block 1) and several other buildings within EastBlackness have been slowly converted into student flats and units for light industry. Some vacant land has been developed, (Appendix II, Block 4) for example into a mosque for Dundee’s Islamic community. However, these new insertions undermine themselves through no thought for integration into the existing fabric or other users. Potential connections and economic links between these new uses has been ignored in the access to, frontage of and connection between new and old. In essence, Blackness has started to be repopulated under the ‘sprawling city’ model of development; little or no consideration of urban space, a lack of social mixing and a rejection of the ‘streets as vital organs’.

Amoungst delerict buildings and undeveloped land the area is home to scattered student flats, a supermarket, nightclub, mosque, community centre, restaurants, a casino, climbing centre, car garages, artists studios and more.

This rich mix of users require access at different times, have different agendas and exercise different claims on space. Blackness epitomises the complexity of the city.

A new urban code should lay down a series of simple rules with which we can re-align and co-ordinate these users when incrementally developing the city.

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Figure 27 Blackness: Mapping an area in a constant cycle of flux Author’s Own

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Figure 28 Learning From Soane: A multitude of spaces and users within one area Author’s Own

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Figure 29 Blackness Figure Ground: Incrementally developing the enclave Author’s Own

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Lessons from Air Rights Air Rights is a collaborative project undertaken by the Rooms and Cities studio group. The form of the project has arisen from the initial individual room studies, carried out at the start of the year. Using these studies we sought to reduce each room to a fragment which defined it’s qualities, to allow a collective response of research through making.

The site for the project is an open-to-below, 2.5 by 46m atrium directly adjacent to our studios, which overpasses a busy communal thoroughfare and exhibition hall. A board marked, cast-in-situ concrete balustrade encloses it’s horizontal plane, with it’s upper and lower edges more ambiguous.

Alongside the conceptual aims of inclosing an ambiguous interior and finely detailing the steel flat bar and L-sections against the existing parapet, the project and it’s output hold real lessons for dealing with the contemporary city.

Air Rights is a project with a real budget, real investors, real permissions, real time frames, real learning curves and as we encountered, real set backs. In defining the boundary of the upper parapet and lower soffit as our site, a more critical architecture can emerge from the dialogue between the new and the existing. Perhaps Air Rights is a manifestation of the Fun Palace space, a cube component structure that accepts the existing, and delicately integrates into the fabric of the building (city). Air Rights is framework for future events that rejects the ownership and control of the floor plates above and below.

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Figure 30 Air Rights: An analogy for approaching the city Author’s Own

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Conclusion Cedra’s plan for Barcelona, like Haussmann’s Paris, holds up the city as an object that appears complete from priori ideas. Price’s critical theory rejects this approach, questioning every structures social and physical relevance, where time is a key component in the longevity of his Architecture. However unlikely a pairing, John Soane’s adaptation of Lincoln Inn Fields utilises Price’s abstract theories in carefully planning and choreographing the changes to his townhouse, as and when the new artefacts of his collection dictated change.

Soane’s continuous process of changing circulation, spaces and openings mirrors the complex set of conditions which are imposed on the ideological planning of the Fun Palace.

Almost 40 years since Price’s ideological peak, our reading of the city has dramatically changed. Masdar ‘Smart’ City, Songdo and Media City UK are all examples of enclaves created almost instantly, in an effort of masterplanning which runs in parallel with an Architecture increasingly used as another form of the financial derivative. The city has become itself an open air factory, a test bed for the outputs of ‘land banking’, which has played a destructive role in the social decline of the city. It may be true to say that people live with, and navigate through, a collection of buildings and zones that operate under the ownership, and answer to the profits, of shareholders.

I am not against the proposition to develop and embrace new technologies and spaces which react to our current agendas, nor am I advocating a return to a romantic past or freezing the city as an open air museum. However, as Sennett points out, the increasing prevalence of ‘hard-wiring’ technology and static planning as something physically integral to the planning of the city, results in a stupefying effect.4 This ultimately undermines the vivid myriad of spaces and complex relationships which were championed by Jacobs.

A move away from careless outward expansion, and towards a specific integration, is the strategy which will socially, economically and environmentally strengthen our relationship with place and to each other.

A new urban code for Blackness therefore, becomes a micro case study in managing inevitable population growth, where Architects are repositioned at the front end of the debate in the future of our cities.

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References 1. The LSE Electric City Introduction, Sudjic, D. 2012, online video, accessed 12th January 2013, <http://ec2012.lsecities.net/videos/>.

2. Masdar, Funding Model, 2013, accessed 12th April 2013, ,<http://www. masdar.ae/en/home/detail/masdar-clean-tech-fund>.

3. Mathews, S 2007. From Agit Prop to Free Space: The Architecture of Cedric Price. London: Black Dog. 4. Sennett, R 2012. “Electric City Conference Newspaper”, Urban Age Project, London School of Economics, accessed 4th December 2012, <http://files. lsecities.net/files/2012/12/the-electric-city-newspaper.pdf>.

5. National Record of Scotland, Dundee City Council Demographics Facsheet, 20th December 2012, accessed 9th February 2013, < http://www.groscotland.gov.uk/files2/stats/council-area-data-sheets/dundee-city-factsheet. pdf>.

6. Harvey, D 2008. ‘The Right to the City’, New Left Review, accessed 13th February 2013, <http://newleftreview.org/II/53/david-harvey-the-right-tothe-city>.

7. Caruso, A 2001. “The Emotional City”, Quaderns, Issue 228, accessed 4th January 2013, < http://www.carusostjohn.com/text/the-emotional-city/> 8. Minton, A 2009. “Ground Control”, London: Penguin.

9. Dundee City Council 2005. “Dundee Local Plan Review”, Dundee.

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Bibliography Invited Delegate, Electric City Conference, Urban Age Project, London School of Economics, Old Street, London, 2nd-3rd December 2012.

Sennet, R 1977. The Fall of Public Man, University Press: Cambridge Middleton, R 2006. “Architecture and the Unfinished” Thames and Hudson: London Venturi, R, Scott Brown, D and Izenour, S. “Learning From Las Vegas” MIT Press: Cambridge 2008 Keiller, P 2001. Dilapidated Dwellings, 78Mins, Video Documentary Price, C 2003. “Opera”. Samantha Hardingham. Wiley: England Mau, B 2004. “Massive Change”. Phiadon: London Mathews, Stanley 2007. From Agit Prop to Free Space: The Architecture of Cedric Price. 1 Edition. Black Dog: London Hughes, Jonathon 2000. “Non-Plan: Essays on Freedom, Participation and Change in Modern Architecture and Urbanism”. Architectural Press: London Rogers, R, Power, A 2000. “Cities for a Small Country”. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge Lee, P M 2000. “Object to be destroyed: The work of Gordon Matta-Clark”, London: MIT Press Kai, V 2007. “Transnationale Räume =Transnational spaces”, Herausgegeben von Regina Bittner, Jovis: Berlin Chung, Chuihua Judy, 2001. “Great leap forward :Project on the city.” Harvard Taschen: Cologne Lefebvre, H, 1905. “The Production of Space”. T.J Press: Cornwall

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