Homesense is ticking along nicely with Russell finishing up 2 projects this week while I was visiting this.
There’s stuff there I hadn’t seen in the past 10 years of Milan Furniture Fairs. Projects and depth of thought people don’t put into their work anymore. A slowness about it I liked. I will make something around this soon I think.
Giles Lane invited me to lead one of the days in the series of hands-on explorations called “City as Material” which resulted in Layered being published. I came into the Proboscis offices a few weeks later and decided to revise the Deep City talk I’d given at the Microsoft Social Symposium and put those thoughts down into a little e-book. Download and enjoy!
I went to a conference and a few days later my friend Michelle came up with “Twitter compliant” as a way of rating presentations. Today I walked around the beautiful new Maxxi museum of Modern Art and Architecture in Rome (another Zaha Hadid project) and thought that some 21st century compliance would really help.
The fact is that whether they like it or not, these types of museums have to compete with the Moma, Palais de Tokyo and Tate Modern, or more locally Triennale. That this is the first radically modern building in a while in Rome almost takes a back seat for the average museum buff. Modern Art museums compete internationally in terms of architecture, curation and services and this one, while succeeding fantastically on the first fails at every other level.
Just to name a few challenges that can be easily fixed:
- Lack of toilet seats (!!!!) and for such a huge space, not enough facilities
- Terribly small caffe that will very quickly be over capacity.
- No space to sit down inside, no benches unless you’re supposed to look at a movie, nothing. Makes the whole experience really exhausting as there are many long corridors in true Hadid style. You need the benches to get people to go: “wow what a great space”.
- Really bad artists info signage with clearly no real guidelines about how far away the signage is from the piece, making people look around for it.
- No signs on whether photography is allowed or not, meaning someone has to speak into a microphone occasionally to say to people not to take pictures, transforming the space into a mall or supermarket, and not a museum.
- The entrance and ticket desk becomes a nightmare when there are more than 20 people queuing. Good luck this summer.
- The book store is super tiny and not interesting. If anything is to be learnt from 21st century museums, is that its all about the book stores.
- Running your stuff on Macs means you’ll get this problem quite often and look totally stupid.
So there. Such a contrast to super-well organised events happening in the same city but clearly in a different century.
I’ve been thinking for a while about contributing to the latest design craze among my peers: cities. I’m not an architect but I like cities as a user, as a designer, and I thought I’d write very short bursts about what I like about them, having lived for years in some of the best and most beautiful cities: Paris, Montreal, Milan, Amsterdam and now London.
I also think there’s a huge distinction to be made between travelling a lot and relocating often enough. It makes you actually taste the culture, get a model in your head of a city, the experience you have in it and what makes it great, special or horrible. Cities have voices, personalities, habits, just like the people who live in them. Hopefully I’ll write a little about each of those elements, but for this one, I’ll concentrate on graffiti or “tags” as the French would say (funny the flavour that word has now).
My theory is that you can tell how well a city is doing creatively based on its walls. Graffiti sort of end up acting as a “creative industry barometer” of a more realistic sort for me.
Milan for example (and Turin for that matter) has some beautiful paper-based ones. Most of it happens organically as well, with no money involved, anonymous but known artists like Tuboy and Humen just keep popping up and it becomes the city’s signature.
This signature can be so strong, like in the case of Amsterdam-based artist Laser 3.14, that when I saw his work appear in London’s fashionable Shoreditch, I did a double-take and looked around for my bicycle.
Then there’s graffiti as historical tourism. Bruxelles takes advantage of its walls as canvases of communication and uses them to deliberately to showcase its long history and involvement in the comic strips / books industry in Belgium and France in the 60s to late 90s. There’s even a tour you can take in the city to visit all the different “paintings” and this is where the lines get blurry and you have to ask yourself if this even counts as graffiti. Is it still a graffiti if its been commissioned. I’m sure these kids would argue otherwise.
Then you have cities who try to organise creativity on their walls and deem genuine graffiti “dirty”, such as Montreal. Only the occasional building will have a piece of art that someone chose, got a permit for, made in broad daylight. Boring. A manufactured narrative of creativity.
And in the UK, graffiti take on a more political, news-relevant flavour, like an unofficial, slow newspaper. Only the events worthy enough make it onto the walls. Another way to own the city and its narrative. To own what stays and what goes. Manufactured democracy.
There are things about this type of criticism that makes me cringe. Things about this, that makes me feel like I’m not included in the city experience in the same way as my more testosterone-driven peers and that the entire point made in this article was obstructed by one simple statement:
“The next day I received an email from my, far more organised, girlfriend”.
Seems to me people help people go through stuff, life and things. Technology and infrastructures are not the only tool we have and social interactions count more in my opinion. When technology fails, you’ll still have to ask for directions whether you like it or not :) and whether you think your laptop is user-friendly or not is absolutely not related to your gender.
There. I feel better.
I’m moving to Brixton next weekend after more than 2 years in Hackney. That fact may seem banal to most of you but if you’re a Londoner, changing boroughs that dramatically almost means social hara-kiri. You might as well be leaving the country. It means that I become one of those people who live “saf of the river”, a sort of social outcast for those living north of the Thames. Its funny how we like our divides. North vs south, this team versus that, this part of the country versus London.
Hackney is fantastic and more recently I’ve discovered its hidden nightlife. But in the past 2 years it’s become the borough of the “well off mid-30 something with kids”. That’s not me. I went to walk around my new place and didn’t see anyone above 35, saw lots of people trying to sell you crack and lots of strange run down shops. That’s more me at the moment. And I’ll have a garden, a luxury I’d last experienced in Amsterdam. Excitement is in the horizon regardless.
But that’s not the challenge nor the point really.
The point is I’m leaving an area of town I know well, that I’ve also called home and so I’m filled with nostalgia I don’t know what to do with. I find myself wondering now: “how am I supposed to say goodbye”? Should I spend the next 2 weeks going to all the places I’ve ever been in or enjoyed knowing the likelihood of going back often will be very limited? Should I be trying to tell people I’m moving and having “one last drink” (nevermind the fact I hardly see them even if they live around the corner)? Should I say goodbye as if I were moving to Timbuktu?
It’s a strange feeling and I don’t think any social networking service could ever help. The city forgets us but we never forget it.
Some strange and loose notes taken during the workshop organised by Daniel Kaplan from FING and from Anne Galloway and Dan Hill‘s talk at LIFT 09.
- Things we ask of cities include:
- Make us safe
- Make us meet
- Make us green
- Make us equal
Maybe cities are a state of mind and I should be able to take it with me anywhere I go. What if I could pack up and leave, moving the city with me? If my city is my local café, my friends and family, my level of connectivity, my favorite shops, then could I take those with me? What is the city versus “home”? Which is more important?
Can I fragment myself across all the places I exist in, live in, travel to, and make these parts of myself accessible and published? Different facets that are only revealed in that space, like geo-located and centric Mymaps.
The fine line between nomads and sedentary people is the infrastructures, the plumbing you need to setup, the walls, the trash collectors, etc.
We’re thinking about data all the time in cities, but noone is thinking about the wires, the energy that it’ll take for these infrastructures to happen, the data centres that will be built…
If we’re developing infrastructures, will anyone use it, how will people receive this “gift”?
If countries fail us, will the city save us?
Nice links from Dan Hill’s presentation that I didn’t know about:
The City by Lewis Mumford
New movement in Cities by Brian Richards
Hands over the city by Francesco Rosi
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