Detailed session outlines for each day of the Critical Visions conference are listed below, including listings of the speaker participants in each session.
Thursday 10 April
sTute
Date: Thursday 10 April
Time: 0845 – 1200
Location: Studio (Parkside110)
Following the success of Supatute at the 2007 Conference, Critical Visions is developing the tutorial style session through sTute: a Student Studio Critique.
sTute: Will run on Thursday 10 April from 8.45am to 12.00pm prior to the official opening of the 2008 National Architecture Conference. International Keynote and Australian speakers from the Conference will act as critics and tutors, with registered SONA and student attendees invited to bring along work for discussion and feedback from some of the world’s most influential architects.
Keynote: Architecture in the Age of Globalisation
Speaker: Kenneth Frampton
Introducer/Interviewer: James Weirick
Date: Thursday 10 April
Time: 1300 – 1445
Location: Auditorium (Parkside)
The diverse phenomena that accompany globalisation are closely associated with the ever-escalating rate of telematic communication and the constant increase in transcontinental air travel. As a consequence, the practice of architecture today is as global as it is local, as we may judge from the international celebrity architects who are increasingly active all over the world, directly responding to the flow of capital investment.
Our current susceptibility to spectacular imagery is such that today the worldwide reputation of an architect is as much due to his or her iconographic flair as it is to their organisational and/or technical ability. This worldwide phenomenon has been termed the ‘Bilbao effect’ - so coined for the way in which, throughout the 1990’s, provincial cities vied with each another to have a building designed by the celebrated American architect Frank Gehry, largely as a result of the media acclaim accorded to his sensational Guggenheim Museum, realised in Bilbao in 1995.
During the decade that succeeded this triumph, the scope of the celebrity architect widened immeasurably, with signature architects traveling all over the globe in order to supervise the erection of iconic structures, thousands of miles apart, in totally different cultural and political contexts. This is particularly evident in Beijing today, where diverse architectural stars rival each other with the projection of one spectacular building after another, from Paul Andreu’s National Grand Theatre of China, with its three auditoria housed under a single titanium dome (2006), to Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron’s over-structured Beijing National Stadium, projected for the 2008 Olympic Games...
...Despite this dystophic prospect of an ever expanding ‘motopia’, we have to acknowledge the positive impact of increased media communication in general, which seems to have had the effect of raising the general level of current architectural production. Thus, although urban sprawl remains as entropic as ever, the one-off architectural work is possibly, on balance, of a higher quality now than it was some twenty years ago. Today, architects seem increasingly to assess their work against a constantly improving global standard of technical and cultural sophistication. The vagaries of fashion notwithstanding, this upgrading is as prevalent on the periphery as in the centre, and occurs as much with local, small-scale works as on an international scale.
Keynote: Site/Situation
Speaker: Brigitte Shim
Introducer/Interviewer: Paul Berkemeier
Date: Thursday 10 April
Time: 1530-1645
Location: Auditorium (Parkside)
Shim-Sutcliffe’s work reflects their constant shaping and manipulation of light, water and space to build their architecture. Their projects emerge from a deep understanding of site, program, construction and place. The results are exploratory and probing buildings that are intertwined and connected to the landscape and site in meaningful ways.
Keynote: Exploring Boundaries
Speaker: Chris Wilkinson
Introducer/Interviewer: Haig Beck
Date: Thursday 10 April
Time: 1715 – 1830
Location: Auditorium (Parkside)
Chris Wilkinson will talk about his approach to architecture, current themes and preoccupations and discuss recent selected works of the practice.
Exploring Boundaries, which is also the title of a recently published book on the Practice, aptly describes aspects of their approach to design in which each project is seen as an opportunity to explore something new. This process has led to a rich diversity of ideas and design solutions throughout their portfolio of architecture which ranges from small bridges, glass houses, infrastructure projects, cultural and education buildings, urban interventions, sports and leisure buildings.
The design of each project is very specific to its Brief and Context which has led to a considerable divergence in scale, form and visual appearance. Projects featured include the recently opened Arena and Conference Centre for Liverpool’s City of Culture Celebrations, twin towers in Guangzhou and glass houses for Kew and Singapore Harbour.
Friday 11 April
Keynote: The Future is Green
Speaker: Christoph Ingenhoven
Introducer/Interviewer: Lawrence Nield
Date: Friday 11 April
Time: 0900 – 1015
Location: Auditorium (Parkside)
In a world of globalisation, there are the same or similar situations and problems all over the world. The dramatic climate change and the ending of resources are some of the problems we all share on this planet and instead of destroying it, we should look for solutions for a better world to come. Architects have a huge responsibility and opportunities to find solutions.
To design environmentally-friendly buildings, to reduce energy consumption, housing the masses, excellent infrastructure and quality of public space are the some the challenging tasks for an architect nowadays.
From the very beginning Ingenhoven Architects followed a sustainable and ecological orientated architecture, combined with a high standard of new technology and green building techniques.
In the mid ninties last century, one of the first so called ecological high-rises, a building with a double facade and natural ventilation, was designed by Christoph Ingenhoven and built for RWE in Germany. Since then all projects of the studio measure themselves against international standards among others LEED or the Australian Star system, for example the Lufthansa Aviation Center in Frankfurt, the European Investment Bank in Luxemburg or the University College Dublin. The twenty-nine-story ‚Space‘ Tower for DB RREEF at Sydney’s 1 Bligh Street will be the first highg-rise in Australia to reach a ‘6 Star’ rating in the Green Star rating system of the Australian Green Building Council.
Panel Presentation: Form Generation: Digital and Virtual Systems
Date: Friday 11 April
Time: 1045 – 1200
Location: Auditorium (Parkside)
The significant influence of digital technology on the processes of architectural production, processes and envisioning will be explored together with the digital as a source of cultural representation and design ideology.
Presenters include: Justine Clark (chair), Chris Bosse, Tom Kovac & Howard Raggatt.
Justine Clark (chair)
How do we make form? This is one of architecture’s perennial questions, and is intimately tied to the media and tools used to explore, describe and make architecture. From the impact of stereotomy in eighteenth-century France, to the impact of the axonometric on Modernism, the varying means of drawing and describing architectural form have had a significant effect on what forms might be conceived and what might be built. Over the last two decades the rise of digital technologies and techniques has had an increasing and rapid effect on how we think about and through architecture. Initially this focused on design process, and on what forms might be imaged and explored – and the irony was that, when realized, these inventive, apparently futuristic forms where often built using hand-crafting building technologies. This is also changing, with the digital increasingly being directly involved in the physical production of the built forms, some of which might look “digital”, but not all. And the digital is also now significantly changing the management processes and structures through which a building might be made and information shared, and, in doing so, changing again the role of the architect. This panel will explore the impact and potential of this constantly developing digital environment.
Chris Bosse - Geometry beyond the BLOB.
The “first wave” of digital architecture hit the world in the mid nineties. 90 percent of all final projects at my faculty were hand-drafted on tracing paper and out of balsa wood. Three years later, for my masters project, 90 percent of my fellow projects were digital. The digital revolution happened fast. However, with this first wave, there was no gravity, no materiality and very little constraints. Thus architecture divided between the digital visionaries and the ‘real’ architects who build. In today’s “second wave” THE DIGITAL enables us to conceptualize in an entirely different fashion. Previously unknown complexities have become imaginable and manageable. The computer now enables that which divided us: “to build stuff”.
The WATERCUBE Beijing and a series of space filling installations such as the MOET MARQUEE or Entry PARADISE are examples of how the DIGITAL enable the REAL. Chris Bosse`s Laboratory for Visionary Architecture (LAVA) explores geometries beyond the blob on a variety of projects on 4 continents.
Tom Kovac - Visualising the Virtual Concourse. Linking the real and virtual environments through architectural intelligence
Visualising the Virtual Concourse focuses on public behaviours that sustain creative communities. Virtual environments, when supported by a spatially unifying concept, offer the possibility that learning communities in the digital city can be both more dispersed and more intensely related than ever before. While social networking sites such as facebook and flickr allow for viral clustering of individuals with like minded interests, we ask what kind of relationships between real and virtual environments offer support to learning communities.
In Visualising the Virtual Concourse we are exploring relationships between real environments, rich in sensory and spatial information and virtual environments - the realm of architecture - and opportunities for using architectural intelligence in virtual space using emerging communication software applications such as Quick-Links that are information rich collaborative tools. The VVC experiments and demonstrates potentials for architecture beyond conventional accommodative opportunities, re-assessing current modes of operation and re-contextualising them within the virtual, but always relating that back to material, physical realities.
Through VVC we propose the creation of user generated, web 2.0 visual models for engagement and self-monitoring that offers the possibility of positive new linkages between material and virtual space.
Howard Raggatt – Sleeping with Rhinoceros
Of course everything we do in architecture is digital and it sometimes seems that this is enough, that it is enough to make fascinating forms, or it is enough to understand everything in three dimensions, enough to love innovation or enough to conceive of self generating variations, sensational animations, self effacing manifestos, even if accompanied by censorious diatribes or even platitudes.
Of course machines are marvellous, relieving us of the inadequacy of drawing form, of imaginary shapes and pretending exactitude; a rhinoceros can do that.
But of course machines make us very busy and they make us very productive, they seem to make us satisfied, they make us happy, they even give us joy.
But of course perhaps none of this is yet what we hope for architecture, what we really think about or what we can believe in. Perhaps none of it really helps us know what it is that we want to make or why, what it is that would really satisfy us or why it is that we are never really happy with IT; that mere object, that silent product of such tremendous effort. Is that IT, is that all there is?
Of course we say “No, no!” We say form is still a Longing, only an approximation and something we have to resort too, something we cannot abandon, something through which we speculate toward the human condition.
Of course now our machines are indispensable, perhaps we cannot even think without them anymore.
Jury Session: Dialectical Bridge
Date: Friday 11 April
Time: 1045 – 1200
Location: Studio (Parkside110)
Selected projects prepared by students from around Australia will be critically reviewed in a ‘jury session’ by a distinguished panel of International and Australian architects and academics.
Jurors include: Chris Wilkinson (chair), Camilla Block, John Denton, Richard Green, Richard Leplastier & Defne Sunguroglu.
Keynote: Morpho-Ecologies
Speaker: Michael Hensel
Introducer/Interviewer: Tom Kovac
Date: Friday 11 April
Time: 1315 – 1430
Location: Auditorium (Parkside)
The paper focuses on the paradigm of performance-oriented design that underlies the research of OCEAN. OCEAN is the leading independent and inter-disciplinary research network that conducts research by design in the intersection between architecture, urban and landscape design, industrial and product design, engineering, biology, ecology, micro-climatology and music. Research groups are located in Frankfurt, London, Oslo, Paris, Rome, Sydney and Tel Aviv with 20 active members and researchers.
The dictionary explanation of performance is to ‘carry out an action’ or ‘to fulfil a task’. Invariably, this definition invokes a tired utilitarian debate on the relation between form and function. OCEAN’s aim is to imbue this debate with a different take by positing the definition of form not as the shape of a material object alone, but indeed, as the multitude of effects, the milieu of conditions, modulations and microclimates that emanates from the exchange of an object with its specific environment, a dynamic relation that is perceived and interacted with by a subject. Performance evolves from the synthesis of this dynamic relation, while OCEAN’s morpho-ecological design concerns the instrumental approach to this dynamic relation, making form and function less of a dualism and more of a synergy, in the service of achieving integral design solutions and an alternative model for sustainability. A variety of works from the diverse research and educational activities and collaborations of OCEAN will be discussed.
Keynote: Dutch Mountains
Speaker: Francine Houben
Introducer/Interviewer: Rachel Neeson
Date: Friday 11 April
Time: 1430 – 1545
Location: Auditorium (Parkside)
For Francine Houben, architect/director of Mecanoo architecten in Delft, The Netherlands, buildings are the mountains of the flat Dutch landscape: Dutch Mountains. Beauty in architecture, urban development and landscape architecture is partly determined by compositions, sizes, relationships and proportions. Intensive land use and high-rise buildings are logically situated in places where they coincide with efficient public transport, forming the peaks in the landscape of Dutch Mountains. Each city in the Randstad can choose the height to suit its own identity. Rotterdam, of course, is the Mount Everest of the Dutch Mountains. For this city Mecanoo designed the highest residential building of the Netherlands: the 152 metre high Montevideo.
Landscape, culture and climate are important design inspirations behind Mecanoo’s designs. For Lleida in Spain Mecanoo designed theatre and congress centre La Llotja, a large stone edifice that seems to have sprouted from the Spanish earth. The National Performing Arts Centre in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, with its passageways and open spaces is inspired by the wide crowns of the centruries-old Banyan trees on location.
Panel Presentation: Form Generation: Materiality, Sensory and Assembly
Date: Friday 11 April
Time: 1615 – 1730
Location: Auditorium (Parkside)
This session will examine the constructed nature and sensory experience of architecture as a basis for the generation of architectural form. The significance of human perception, the human body and materiality in creating meaningful representations within our contemporary condition will be explored.
Haig Beck (chair)
To ‘know’ the concrete materiality of form, we rely on two opposing modes of thought – empirical and rational.
Empirical knowledge relies directly on experience without reference to reason. We are constantly engaged in ‘knowing’ the world through the senses. Without conscious effort or any apparent process of logic, we instantly apprehend the concrete materiality of architectural form through countless sensory oppositions: light/dark, hard/soft, warm/cold, shiny/dull, loud/quiet, rough/smooth. Subtleties such as reverberation times and density under foot give further subliminal clues to materiality.
Rational knowledge requires the application of reason. When in this mode of thinking, we consciously analyse the ‘stuff’ of architectural form and its manner of assembly for clues about its materiality. We use pattern recognition, referring to patterns we have collected that help us make sense of our environment. Structural masonry does not resemble masonry cladding. Each has its own readily recognised pattern. Those patterns arise out of the materials and their mode of assembly.
By juxtaposing these two modes of cognition – the experiential realm of the senses, and the rational world of pattern recognition – we will explore, through the work and ideas of our three panelists, the materiality of architectural form and their approach to form generation.
Camilla Block
A brief look at the shifting fascinations of the office of Durbach Block, and the loose principles that underlie the work.
Jill Garner - Less noise
Architecture lacks the agility of other creative forms of expression – it is constrained by its ordinary purpose, economics, its complex realisation and its permanence. Architecture makes for great conversation – hypothesis, conceptualisation and speculation is critical to debate. The history of architecture is rich in theory, theoretical projects and in contemplation and critique by the ‘informed’.
Outside the walls of the atelier, architecture speaks for itself, to those who inhabit it - often with profound impact. An uninformed occupant can tell whether they like a space, without understanding a deeper architectural meaning. Is their experience of that space enhanced by an underlying sense of order, beauty, proportion…?
In our early projects, we found ourselves preoccupied with form. Our first built works, albeit always acknowledging the beauty of the plan, were experiments in objective, tectonic elaboration, overlaid by sequence to order the context. Later works explored the possibilities in surface with an emphasis on the dynamic relationship between abstract idea, material, detail and the fundamental notion of enclosing space.
We have grown to understand that program, sequence, context, construction, materiality, tectonics and form are distilled in the consideration of space. Space is the central discipline. Our architecture now makes less noise, so that light, volume, thickness, weight, clarity and restraint can be heard.
Defne Sunguroglu – Towards a Performance-Oriented Integral Design Method – 2 Pilot Projects
The paper will focus on an integral design process and method for a performance-oriented architecture, which will be discussed through two research projects: Complex Brick Assemblies and Membrane Canopy. In this context, performance entails more than just fulfilling ‘tasks’: it implies the generation and regulation of spatial and environmental conditions, new opportunities for habitation that aims for a higher level sustainability for our built environment. This approach entails the synthesis of form-generation with materialization, material behavior, environmental modulation and the combined conditioning of spaces from the onset of the design. The complexity is driven by generative and analytical methods through means of physical and digital experimentation and the feedback between the two through an evolutionary design process. While new technologies and applications are integral to the design process, this process must be capable of being applicable context-specifically to high-tech or low-tech production. The two pilot-projects serve to introduce this integral design approach and redefine the challenges of building and modulating environments with different types of material systems.
Jury Session: Future Vision Australian Architecture
Date: Friday 11 April
Time: 1615 – 1730
Location: Studio (Parkside110)
In a fast paced and intense session of presentation and jury critique, a diverse series of compressed ‘visions’ for the future of Australian architecture will be presented by three Australian practitioners and critiqued by two academics. The mode is then reversed with three academics visions critiqued by two practitioners.
Andrew Mackenzie (chair)
To conceive of the future of anything, be it cars, cities, architecture or kitchen appliances, one cannot but acknowledge how wrong we have been in the past. We have often rushed to the wrong conclusions. Futuristic visions of unbridled utopian progress or dark dystrophic zones of control reflect more the dramatic needs of the movie industry, than any real grasp of our changing world. The future, we know, is less polar.
That said, architecture and the world we live and work in is changing. Technology creates opportunities for convergence; in design, planning and construction. An opportunity, but also a challenge to authorship. It also opens doors to a more pliable morphology that stretches to the limit, architecture’s formal capacity. The environment has become a juggernaut of change; for some a call to return to ancient precepts, for others an opportunity to retool from the bad habits of a hundred years. For all, there is an understanding that business as usual is not an option. At the practical end of practice, contracts, risk management, insurance, planning regulations, green legislation, changing client expectations and larger global economic currents all conspire to create a work environment more changeable than the autumn weather. At a regional level, even the general classification of Australian architecture remains vexed. As Australia remains periodically visited by national angst, architecture in Australia cannot but attend to its ever more hybrid, transnational, cross-cultural constituency.
First presenters
Howard Raggatt
Hannah Tribe
Tone Wheeler
First critique
Leon van Schaik AO
James Weirick
Second presenters
Tom Heneghan
Sandra Kaji-O’Grady
Gevork Hartoonian
Second critique
Tom Kovac
Lawrence Nield
Keynote Panel Discussion: Form Generation and Civic Representation
Date: Friday 11 April
Time: 1800 – 1900
Location: Auditorium (Parkside)
Drawing from the presentations and discussion throughout the day this session will explore contrasting forms of meaningful form generation and civic representation within the contemporary context of globalisation and domination of capital.
Panel includes: Richard Francis-Jones (chair), Kenneth Frampton, Jill Garner, Michael Hensel, Tom Kovac, Brigitte Shim, Chris Wilkinson & Tod Williams.
Saturday 12 April
Keynote: Resistance
Speaker: Billie Tsien
Introducer/Interviewer: Wendy Lewin
Date: Saturday 12 April
Time: 0900 – 1015
Location: Auditorium (Parkside)
Material level – the development of material and construction that shows the hand at work. Spatial level – the desire to create an architecture that reveals itself slowly and is not image driven. Global level – the search to make buildings that are particular to the place where they are made.
Panel Presentation: Cultural Export or Exploitation
Date: Saturday 12 April
Time: 1045 – 1200
Location: Auditorium (Parkside)
This session will explore the cultural consequences of the contemporary globalise production of architecture. The relevance and possibility of a meaningful architectural of locale within the dominance of intense, high speed unprecedented urban development and international design ideology will be examined.
Jennifer Taylor (chair)
Where am I? Who am I? … Place is everywhere, and everyone is everywhere. Everyone has/wants a television set. There is no point in decrying globalised culture: first, it is what we have – it is the current episteme, and second, potentially it is a culturally enriching condition. At its richest it is neither Export nor Exploitation but Exchange. The situation from each mix is distinct, frequently with unexpected, and sometimes fertile and revealing outcomes, resulting from strange, and often uneasy, contacts between introduced practices and those of the locale. This can be damaging, but on the other hand it can produce new and exciting ways of being and doing. The problem with Australian architecture is that, unlike Australian cuisine, it been slow to learn and benefit from the amazing mix of creative cultures to which it is exposed.
Designers and design have been imported and exported throughout the history of architecture. Justinian brought Anthemius from Tralles and Isidorus from Miletus for the building of Hagia Sophia. Even Australia has a history of international export, certainly since Joseland and Vernon were invited to design for The New Hebrides Condominium at the beginning of the last century.
So what’s new? What is new today is the extent and spread and, most importantly, the mesh of influences. The mesh of widely differing influences is unprecedented, and contains the highest potential for a challenging global architecture for the 21st century.
It is a new world. Will it be a better world for being and doing or will it be a worse world? Architects today are being offered an amazing opportunity to help determine the course of environmental developments.
John Denton - Architecture as a Cultural Commentator
Globalisation has seen architects traveling the world in search of projects and conversely clients all over the world are looking to these international architects to give them an edge in the increasingly competitive market.
So is exploitation involved? Who is doing the exploiting? And what is a cultural export?
John Denton reflects on these questions and looks at how Denton Corker Marshall has used architecture as a form of cultural commentary from their Melbourne base.
He argues that working in Sydney or Brisbane is not much different to working in Beijing or Manchester – you are an outsider the moment you leave your hometown.
He also argues that feeding the frenzy in, for example, Dubai or Shanghai is making architecture a fun park commodity and destroying its claim to an intellectual integrity. But does that matter?
Lawrence Nield- Predators and False Heroes and Heroines
Globalisation favours the rich and powerful. Over the recent years of increasing ‘free’ trade, rich and powerful cities have ‘suffered’ an uninterrupted building boom. This boom has lead to new forms of practice. It has produced:
- Giant predators - huge offices in the US and London with from 1,000 to 7,000 architects who make architecture into a brand.
- False heroes and heroines - ‘starchitects’ who are used to try and break city planning controls particularly with towers.
- The ubiquitous computer image - instant glossy images and extraordinary shapes are made at the expense of the city or pieces of city.
- Sweat shops - plan factories with the ubiquitous computer in India, China or Vietnam producing cut price documentation and blurring the architectural outcomes while backyard studios produce amazing glossy images and animation. This is about export not cultural export.
But there are cultural exporters – expert technicians and real heroes and heroines that by competition and reputation make significant and principled architecture, from hospitals, airports and stadia to museums, theatres and opera houses. They are interested in framing a way of life, not a ‘cure’, a sale or a fortune.
Leon van Schaik AO - The role of local cultures of architecture in an age of globalisation
Globalisation drives towards internationalism, which in architecture equates to the bland uniformity of the International Style, or to harried attempts to collect Iconic landmark buildings, which collections are themselves doomed to a form of sameness. Just as in politics, however, some forces unleashed by globalisation encourage local identity (Basque, Catalan, Scottish, Welsh, Slovenian, Serbian and so on).
There is much to be won from this in architecture. There is a very specific quality in architecture that is the product of the intense inter-weavings of local cultures. City regions such as Graz, Barcelona, Randstad and Melbourne have all development discernible architectural cultures that have flourished in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The role of the local culture is not however only tribal: young architects in London know that the reason that they are invited to do work outside England lies in the identity that they build up through the local culture of architecture in London – teaching in the schools, exhibiting, publishing, entering competitions, arguing and talking they build a paper reputation that attracts external attention and commissions.
Denton Corker Marshall, arguably Melbourne’s most successful international practice export the culture that they are party to building, and are at their most successful architecturally when they find a linking rationale between their thinking in Melbourne and what needs to be thought elsewhere. Icon chasing is a self-defeating strategy. What really differentiates cities and makes them interesting is the extent to which they grow their own architectural cultures. We know a lot about what underpins such growing.
Jury Session: Sydney Future Visions: City Centre
Date: Saturday 12 April
Time: 1045 – 1200
Location: Studio (Parkside110)
Using Sydney as an ‘urban laboratory’, this presentation and jury critique session will explore polemical visions for possible urban futures. A select group of emerging architects will present visionary responses to the critical issues of climate change, intensifying urbanisation, social inequity and cultural conflict. These contrasting visions will be reviewed and critiqued by a distinguished jury panel.
Jury participants: Bridget Smyth (chair), Michael Hensel, Thomas Herzog, Peter Mould, Billie Tsien & James Weirick.
Submissions by:
Scale Architecture
Alt_City investigates architecture’s capacity to reclaim a determined role in ‘making the city’.
What if the population of Sydney was to reach 10 million? How would the city deal with a sudden explosion of urban growth, while maintaining the character of the Australian landscape, the value of our iconic centre, and an ecological defence?
The burgeoning sprawl of our city threatens the viability of the centre. Current estimations place more than 2.5 million people living west of Parramatta by 2030, putting enormous pressure on the landscape to provide dwelling and land for employment.
It is therefore impossible to think of the CBD without thinking about the broader territorial condition of the city. Our proposal is for an intense series of developments to visually contain the sprawl of the city. Located at the crossing point of established network systems, the project is about designing the conditions for the contemporary city to take hold, allowing all the trappings and seductiveness of a true metropolis.
Tribe Studio
The personal car no longer exists.
How do you get half a million people per day into the CBD? How do you transport materials and goods into the city, and transport waste out?
Redundant streets are given over to residential buildings. Underground carparks are converted to hydroponic farms, water harvesting centres and waste facilities.
New linear residential and public buildings are sited in the centre of Sydney’s existing streets. This radically increases the density of the urban fabric of the city, reducing the scale of the streets to pedestrian level. The city becomes an intense network of narrow streets and existing intersections offer the respite of public squares.
The proposal makes a denser city, with streets that relate to the scale of pedestrian movement and activity. It will be a truly 24-hour city, with a mix of commercial, retail, public and residential typologies. The character of Sydney will change from a loud, congested car-focused city, to a dense, active, pedestrian place.
Room 11
Premiss 0.0
The problem of the top-down Utopian imposition is that society is excluded and it rebels: we are not proposing a new shape – the solution is not a new designed form.
Premiss 0.1
By the year 2050 we will have unprecedented possibilities for the mapping, analysis and modelling of the vast array of information that makes up the world as we know it.
Current conceptual tools for urban design are commonly 2D. We need a 4D digitally networked tool to build a contemporary civic networked urban reality.
What is the potential of a democratic digital urban design network? We propose the montaged, sampled, networked future – the illbient data city, a gateway for universal change. The illbient data city expands the available resources for urban designers, expanding traditional data-sets beyond current emerging technologies into a new meta-tool for shaping the city. The convergence of these once disparate.
Keynote: Curatorial City
Speaker: Qingyun Ma
Introducer/Interviewer: Xing Ruan
Date: Saturday 12 April
Time: 1315 – 1430
Location: Auditorium (Parkside)
Everyone thinks he or she owns the city, particularly in a democratic society where people are so used to thinking they have equal rights. But that is false! It is false because they confuse the notion of owning with belonging. In fact, no one owns the city, not you, not me, not the mayor, not the architect, not the planner. We belong to the city by way of living it, in an extremely similar way we do not own life, we live it! The beauty and power of life is how you organise it, reorganise it and disorganise it, so to maximise its vitality. This is the curatorial meaning of life. The same applies to the city.
Keynote: Pioneering Sustainable Architecture
Speaker: Thomas Herzog
Introducer/Interviewer: Peter John Cantrill
Date: Saturday 12 April
Time: 1430 – 1545
Location: Auditorium (Parkside)
Roughly half of the energy consumed worldwide is used to run buildings. An additional 25% is accounted for by traffic in many places. Large quantities of non-renewable fossil fuels are used to generate this energy, fuel that will not be available to future generations.
This situation calls for a rapid and fundamental reorientation in our thinking, particularly on the part of planners and institutions involved in the process of construction. The form of our future built environment must be based on a responsible approach to nature and the use of the inexhaustible energy potential of the sun.
The role of architecture as a responsible profession is of far-reaching significance in this respect. In future, architects must exert a far more decisive influence on the conception and layout of urban structures and buildings on the use of materials and construction components, and thus on the use of energy, than they have in the past.
Accompanied by images, the lecture will provide an insight into relevant work – in the form of buildings and projects and the development of new products – carried out over the past decades by German architects, mainly by the architectural practice of Herzog + Partner and in the university department. Due to their high architectural quality, many of these buildings received national and international awards. Both – concept and realisation of these buildings will be addressed.
Panel Presentation: Crisis: Climate Inequity Urbanism
Date: Saturday 12 April
Time: 1615 – 1730
Location: Auditorium (Parkside)
This session will explore the interconnected challenges and potential state of crisis, which confront architecture in a globalised context. The response or complacency of architecture to the critical confrontation of climate change, social inequity, cultural conflict, human displacement, and the consequences of intense urbanisation and consumption will be examined.
Andrea Nield (chair)
There is an increasing need for architectural engagement in humanitarian action after natural and manmade disasters. Emergency Architects Australia was founded to address this need. Work done by Architectes de l’Urgence, our French associates, had found a great need to have architectural expertise available immediately to help international agencies. Architects in this role can assist in reducing further disaster, such as deforestation and other environmental consequences of reconstruction of settlements.
Architects are seen as an irrelevant and expensive profession. This is despite the many planning and architectural projects undertaken by architects during the 20th century under various political ideologies. That was in response to the vast population movements, increasing urban density due to industrialisation. We are seeing this same movement from the land to the city now in developing countries, due to environmental degradation caused by population increase, unsustainable agriculture due to climate change, inequitable trade policies, industrialisation, war and political unrest. We are at a critical junction. Critical action is needed. The profound inequity is morally repugnant and our skills may of service.
The 21st Century is the century where we will pay for the neglect of the environment during that century of growth and more importantly the unequal distribution of wealth after the end of colonialism. The movement of the poor or displaced into marginal spaces in both urban and rural areas means that most climatic change causes great loss of life. This session will address these issues.
Mark Diesendorf - Climate Change and Peak Oil: Major Challenges for Architecture and Urban Planning
The twin threats of global warming and peak oil will continue to drive up the prices of fossil fuels over the next decades. Parts of the solution can come from ecologically sustainable architecture and urban planning. Buildings will be designed for energy efficiency and the utilisation of solar energy for hot water, space heating and cooling, and electricity generation. Cities will be designed for the integration of urban planning and transport planning. There will be fewer cars and trucks, less road space and more heavy rail, light rail, buses, cycling and walking. One possible urban structure, that is compatible with this shift, is a city based on a number of town centres, linked to one another by heavy rail. Each town centre would be the centre of a transit city, in which many local centres are connected to each town centre by bus light rail or cycling. If planned well, such an urban structure would provide better access to a wide range of facilities and better social equity than existing Australian cities. But are our architects, planners and politicians ready for the transition?
Alessandro Costa - Curb the environmental destabilization: Sino-Italian Co-operation for Environmental Protection in the built environment.
Chinese rapid economic growth has raised two major socio-environmental phenomena: an un-precedent consumption of energy and resources to supply current Chinese needs and an unbalanced distribution of GDP between cities and countryside.
The former phenomenon has placed huge pressure on global and local environments, in terms of ecological depletion and greenhouse gas emissions, with the result that the Chinese environment suffers from loss of integrity, and natural resources are exploited at unsustainable trends. China has recently overtaken the US to become the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases.
The latter phenomenon has widened the gap between rural inhabitants (57% of the population) low income and the higher income of urban inhabitants, which is three to ten times higher, depending on whether we focus on industrialised East-South China or on developing West China. Such uneven economical development has brought consequences in terms of poor quality of life, low infrastructural endowment and poor social services. If no actions are taken, both phenomena can become a synergic breeding ground for socio-environmental destabilisation and crises.
For this reason, the Italian Ministry for the Environment, Land and Sea, with its Sino-Italian Cooperation Program for Environmental Protection, is committed to co-operate with Chinese institutions to curb the environmental impact of Chinese built environment, which accounts for 1/3 of total energy consumption. Energy-saving and efficiency, environmental design and construction, integrated territorial planning, development of renewable energy source are some of the key elements of IMELS interventions to mitigate the environmental impact of the building sector and its reflections at social level. Technological transfer, technical assistance and capacity building are the principle means to contribute in the achievement of such an ambitious aim.
Some of IMELS ongoing projects for Chinese sustainable urban development will be presented during the Panel Session, showcasing a broad variety of possible applications to different urban needs at different spatial scales.
References:
A. Costa (2008) “Sustainable Urban Development in China: the Italian way”, in Urbanism and Architecture, incoming issue, Harbin (PRC)
IEA (2007), World Energy Outlook 2007 – China and India Insights
OECD (2007), Environmental Performances Reviews – China
Paul Pholeros - Sustaining the mix: place, people and change
Seeding sustainable projects in China; from luxury resort to village
When the Central Government in China wanted to the improve the environment on a national scale they engaged a number of developers to seed ‘small’ projects around the country, developing the culture and technical expertise of sustainable design. The Nankun Ecolodge project is an example of this recent policy direction.
The project involved over 70 buildings in a mountain setting where many aspects of sustainability were considered. Local bamboo was used in new structural ways, locally made bricks, stone, earth and the use of local ‘village’ technology reduced energy and developed local poorer villages. At the same time ‘higher’ technology lighting, energy production/reduction and monitoring and waste treatment were combined in the project.
Inequity in Nepal: toilets, energy and water
When a village of 450 people on the edge of the Kathmandu Valley has no toilets and their polluted water supply comes through nine village tap points for one hour each day the starting point for an architectural intervention begins with the villagers request to ‘build toilets’. What begins as an apparently simple task quickly becomes a complex mix of buffalo dung, daily energy needs, cooking smoke and respiratory disease, erosion and love. In building the prototype toilets for villager approval, all these parts of the design solution were revealed.
Crisis at home: Sustaining people; Housing for Health in Australia
Too often any discussion of sustainability excludes people. The wealthier the society the greater the assumption that people are automatically sustained.
In Australia, work with indigenous communities over 20 years shows how a section of Australian society has a daily struggle to sustain the simplest of living requirements. A safe electrical supply, working shower and toilet and a place to make a meal can be rare luxuries.
Housing for Health projects aim at improving peoples health through immediate improvement in their housing and day to day living environment. The lessons leant from the projects are universally adapted to all architectural projects where human well being and the environment are of concern.
Jury Session: Sydney Future Visions: Suburban Region
Date: Saturday 12 April
Time: 1615 – 1730
Location: Studio (Parkside110)
Using Sydney as an ‘urban laboratory’, this presentation and jury critique session will explore polemical visions for possible urban futures. A select group of emerging architects will present visionary responses to the critical issues of climate change, intensifying urbanisation, social inequity and cultural conflict. These contrasting visions will be reviewed and critiqued by a distinguished jury panel.
Jury participants: Chris Johnson (chair), Jill Garner, Qingyun Ma, Rachel Neeson, Brigitte Shim & Tod Williams.
Submissions by:
Choi Rophia
This is a speculation on the beliefs and systems that shape our cities.
In the short space of eighty years, the car has transformed the city. Its influence extends beyond movement with new economic and building typologies emerging such as shopping centres, large distribution networks, business parks and suburbs. Whilst the car promised unlimited freedom of movement, its influence has been more farreaching than ever imagined. Equally influential has been our belief that material, energy, water and farming land is unlimited.
In this context, our speculation leads us to the following questions:
- What if cities evolved from unlimited innovation rather than a belief in unlimited resources?
- What if limits were thought of as drivers of innovation and efficiency rather than as constraints?
Vector Guerrillas
The future is multiplicitous and unstable. Suburbs inevitably become dense regions of bio-informatic crawlers, filling the free continuum of greater Sydney with infinitely complex data permutations. A future vision is constructed from a series of assumptions that are opportunistic modulations of the informatic lattice. One future convergence emerges thus:
Assumption 7: Post-cartographic Complexity Net
Every object, environment, biological and artificial life form will continuously upload to the info grid.
Assumption 28: GPI_Global Planning Intelligence
All urban decisions will be tracked, analysed, and allocated via a pervasive systems intelligence.
Assumption 87: Hacking for Spatial Freedom
Architects will hack the GPI planning simulations to subvert the regime of environmental averages.
Assumption 34: Balkanisation of Energy
Islands of integrated energy technologies will sustain suburban regions.
Andrew Maynard
The Australian suburb was born out of its dependence on the car. With peak oil rapidly approaching, the epoch of the automobile will soon come to an end and with it the fringes of Australian suburbia.
Where will suburbanites live when there is no other means of transport to get home? Once the suburbs start to decay and are abandoned, what is to be done with them? And most importantly, what will we do with the 50% of Australians that are overweight due to car dependence and a sedentary lifestyle? Andrew Maynard Architects has the answer: the CV08.
The CV08 is a robot that consumes the abandoned suburbs through its two front legs. It processes the detritus and fires off compacted recycling missiles to awaiting recycling plants. CV08’s middle legs and one rear leg follow the front legs to terra-form the newly revealed earth with native flora and fauna which are stored within CV08 in carbonite sleep until they are required.
Keynote Panel Discussion: The Culture of Locale and the Architectural of Globalisation
Date: Saturday 12 April
Time: 1800– 1900
Location: Auditorium (Parkside)
Drawing from the presentations and discussion throughout the day, this session will explore the dialectic of the culture of locale with the expanding cultural globalisation of architectural production. The possibility of a meaning architectural response to the most pressing global challenges of climate change, unprecedented urban development, social inequity and cultural conflict within the context of contemporary international design ideology will be examined.
Panel includes: Richard Francis-Jones (chair), Gevork Hartoonian, Thomas Herzog, Qingyun Ma, Billie Tsien, Leon van Schaik AO & Brigitte Shim.
