More from the Ecotone

I am a fan of the conceptual parti of the 'ecotone' as seen from the Integrating Habitats competition award winner 'Urban Ecotones' from 2008. The use of this landscape ecology principle, which is defined as a transitional zone between distinct plant communities, offers a lot of mileage as an evocative strategy within it's original sphere of influence, as well as being re-purposed as a metaphor in urbanism and more developed strategies.


:: image via InfraNet Lab

The recent announcement (via InfraNet Lab) of 'Ecotone Hydro Park' by McGill University student Tania Delage uses this theoretical concept of 'ecotone', along with Lebbeus Woods' more politically defined idea of 'borderline', "...the site where various systems collide, superimpose, or react to create a new condition," to develop a proposal for a project in the Great Lakes region.

"At an ecological scale, the site is the Great Lakes basin and Saint-Lawrence River, the largest freshwater system of the world. The watershed is home to many ecological systems and provides important migratory routes for fish that spawn in fresh water only to return to their salt water habitat. Ringed by areas of intense urbanization, the watershed represents a major transportation artery for commercial navigation and provides a source of hydro electric power to the surrounding areas. The waterway also serves as an open sewer to cities along its shore, as it simultaneously supplies their drinking water."




:: image via InfraNet Lab

"The two water levels present in the site offer opportunities for a changing landscape, atune to the cyclical hydrological variations. Floating filtering gardens, located on the high water level sway back and forth with the currents produced by the dam to reminding visitors of the inner-workings of the facility itself. At the lower water level, an extension of the nature park is created, allowing visitors to experience the filter housing sequence."

Cool project, great ideas, and simple, effective graphics. Student work is alive and well. Read and see more images at InfraNet Lab, Design Under Sky, Urban Logic, and probably many others.


:: image via InfraNet Lab

Reading List: Healing Spaces

In an attempt to give back to all of the fine publishers that send me review copies of books, I'm striving for a couple of weeks of posts in the spirit of the 'Overdue Book Report'. First on the list is a great book that I just finished this morning, "Healing Spaces: The Science of Place and Well-Being" by Esther M. Sternberg, MD (published by Harvard University Press).



I have a keen interest in the healing dimensions of space, and in particular the role of landscape architecture and exterior spaces to provide this function. This comes from doing a lot of work and research in the realm of therapeutic garden design over the years in hospital, hospice, and eldercare facilities. I first became interested in the phenomenon while doing my undergraduate final project related to a cemetery design that utilized physical space design to aid in the bereavement process, and was fascinated by the connection between environmental design and health. There is an innate connection between space and health - but sometimes the connections, both physiologically and spatially, are a bit fuzzy. There are a number of successful examples in literature and design, but often there is either dismissal of designs as unscientific by the medical community, or by inadequate application and understanding of scientific concepts and mechanisms by designers - resulting in poor or partially realized applications.

That's where Ms. Sternberg's book shines. It is not neccesarily a 'how-to' (there are a growing number of resources out there in this genre), but more aptly a bridge between the scientific research of the concept of healing and how this work in the design of spaces. The book spans the available research, starting with some of the more intuitive architectural concepts of Wright, Aalto, and Neutra, touching on the pioneering work of Ulrich, and expanding on the growing design-science connections being made by collaborations between space design and health research, and looking specifically at both the microcosm of hospitals, and the macro-scale of cities, and the range of designs that this thinking can inform.

Discussing the intimate connection of space and physiology, Sternberg summarizes the interactions: "There are many things that can influence the release of these chemical signals from the brain, and our surroundings play a very important part. How we percieve the world around us, its features of light and dark, sound and smell, temperature and touch, feed into the brain through all our senses and trigger the brain's emotional centers, which make us react. These emotional centers release nerve chemicals and hormones that can change how immune cells fight disease. In turn, through this communication, our awareness of space and place changes when we are ill, and changes yet again when we begin to heal." (p.20-21)

By examing the physiology (loosely constructed in chapters 2-4 aligned with the senses of sight, smell, hearing, touch, and taste) - we gain a medical understanding of the body's cause and effect relationships between disease, medical intervention, and space. I found this at times more difficult to understand, but it was in no way overly technical - just requiring a bit of slowing down to soak in the information. This is really the meat of the book, and offers a valuable resource to return often for review.

The next sections discuss more spatial related connections, including mazes and labyrinths (the ideas of both confusion/stress vs. meditation/relaxation. This continues into the concepts of how our brains work in relation to memory and wayfinding of place - including imprinting of patterns and landmarks - and investigates the loss of this ability in patients with Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia. The concept of topographic memory was an interesting concept - and the ability to visualize and represent a space, even when not being able to physically navigate one, being a powerful idea of the brains connection to space.

The most interesting chapers, for me at least, were those discussing 'Hospitals and Well Being' (Ch. 10) and 'Healing Cities, Healing World' (Ch.11) which discuss the worlds of evidence-based design in medical facilities, and looks at the connections between urbanization and public health. Both of this tracks of inquiry discuss both historical underpinnings and modern usage, offering both background and inspiration of how this can be applied. From a hospital specific perspective, the work of Roger Ulrich, the idea of Fable Hospital, and the integrated Pebble Project amongst other examples all will be familiar to those interested in the concept - and offer a good primer on design concepts for healing and therapeutic environments that can guide designers.

From a city-scale there was an interesting conceptual framework that included the dual interesting ideas of the 'urban penalty' (issues associated with poor city conditions on health in early urban zones) and the subsequent 'rural penalty' (issues associated with suburban form and and how they impact public health due to sprawl). There is also interesting work on urban epidemics and the search for causes in both the water and air.

There are definitely some strange examples and quirks - such as using Frank Gehry as an example of an architect that is tapping into these mechanisms of biophilic design (i'm not buying that one bit), the constant and annoying (to me!) descriptions of people, or references to Harry Potter (ugh) to describe certain points. These are more than made up for with a wide range of interesting case studies, including some of my favorites, the healing properties of Lourdes, Charles Jencks and the work dedicated to his late wife, the transformation of musician and recording engineer Daniel Levitin into a neuroscientist , and the CDC evolution of obesity trends maps over time.

This book should be required reading, and remain close at hand, for any designer attempting to delve into the difficult terrain of healing spaces. The ability of Sternberg to connect research, physiological response, and spatial concepts will provide designers not necessarily with ideas for implementation, but an understanding of, and justification for, the design concepts that they propose. It's imminently readable and engaging - meaning short-attention span designers won't lose interest in too much technical jargon - but get an education in the process.

As a bonus, a video of Sternberg discussing the book in her own words.

Design Observer + Places

A heads up from @Space2Place on Twitter (i'm sorry I just can't for the life of me us the word 'tw@et' in a post) offered a couple of great resources. First, I don't know how I had missed this one, but a great site called Design Observer offers a fantastic array of writing on a wide range of design topics. You can also follow them at @designobserver.



In addition to some great content, I was pleased to see that portions and excerpts of one of my favorites, Places Journal and news that they have abandoned (sadly) their print exoskeleton and will be existing in the future as an online journal. From the site: "This spring we published our last print issue. This fall we will make a full transition to the web and launch our new, open-access site. Places online will feature a mix of refereed scholarship, topical essays, timely reviews, and project portfolios. Until then, we are pleased to offer selections from the archives."



While I bemoan any printed journal no longer occupying physical space (although the $15 per issue price tag was a bit steep), I think it's probably one of those inevitable trends... It is pretty great to be able to access all of the fine writing and scholarship online - in downloadable PDFs... for instance, one of my favorite recent issues 'The Future Metropolitan Landscape' which is full of great information on some recent landscape urbanist theory. Check it out.

Island of Future Airships

As the previous post suggested, a number of great projects came out of this year's Urban Islands.

[Image: The front and back of an architectural trading card, designed by Mitchell Bonus for Urban Islands 2009].

I've mentioned it before, of course, but Urban Islands is a biannual architecture studio hosted out on Cockatoo Island in Sydney Harbor. For two weeks, students and their visiting international instructors – I had the huge pleasure of serving as an instructor this year – explore the spatial possibilities of Cockatoo's abandoned landscapes.
For now, focusing solely on the work of my own students, I want to highlight five or six particularly interesting responses to the design brief (a brief I'll describe in a later post).
The previous post was one project; the following project is by Mitchell Bonus.
Tongue firmly in cheek, Mitchell has called for Sydney's apparently much-needed second airport to be built out on Cockatoo in the form of a solar-powered zeppelin field.
The style of his pitch, however, was strategically ingenious, well worth both study and emulation elsewhere.
Acting on the assumption that, if you want to see a new building or project take shape, then you have to stop relying on design competitions, architecture blogs, or industry publications to get the word out – that is, you need to find another way to convince the public that your design should exist, making its material realization seem more like an afterthought – Mitchell created a series of trading cards, modeled after sports cards.
He then sealed, laminated, and stuck the cards inside bags of potato chips, cigarette packs, and boxes of morning cereal.
The idea was thus that people would open up a bag of smoky bacon-flavored chips and find an architectural proposal awaiting them.
Inside their morning oat bran would be a trading card-sized vision of the future. Falling out of the cigarette box as they light up on the sidewalk would be a portrayal of some strange island future yet to come.

[Image: The fronts and backs of four architectural trading cards, designed by Mitchell Bonus].

After all, why not skip Archinect, ArchDaily, Inhabitat, and Dezeen altogether and simply mass-produce trading cards of your own speculative building plans?
Then just hide those cards inside cereal boxes and wait till the ideas trickle out, burning into the collective cultural consciousness.
Gradually, it will dawn on people that, of course, there should be a new airport for zeppelins out on Cockatoo Island – or of course there should be aerial gondolas traversing Manhattan, or of course there should be a vast wheel of glass rooms, fourteen hectares in diameter, rotating over the rain forests of Papua New Guinea.
It's like subliminal advertising for a parallel future.
Why not slip these architectural speculations into pop culture at large? Why not bypass clients and experts and just bring your vision to everyone?
Isn't that what Hollywood set designers and concept artists have been doing all along?

[Image: Four more architectural futures cards, designed by Mitchell Bonus].

Mitchell's project – executed in less than one week (as with all the projects that came out of my studio) – was thus presented simply as a bunch of sealed chip packets, cigarette boxes, and so on. Viewers of his presentation were handed a bag, some cigarettes, or a cereal box and, as they opened up their personal booty, they found not just an edible lunchtime snack but a well-produced act of architectural speculation.
How incredibly interesting would it be to find that, in every box of Total or, hiding at the bottom of every canister of oatmeal you open, new visions of the cities around us are patiently hiding...?
A whole new urban redesign of Tokyo awaits anyone who buys a bucket of popcorn at the start of 2012.

[Image: The front and back of one card by Mitchell Bonus, from Urban Islands 2009].

It's a genuine challenge: publish your next architectural project not as a short article in Log, or as a press release on Dezeen, but as a series of trading cards hidden inside popular consumer goods all over the world.
Slip your vision of the future into mass consciousness both slowly and subliminally.
See what happens.

Today's archidose #339

Here are some photos of the Banco Sul Americano do Brasil building in São Paulo, Brazil (1960) by Rino Levi, photographed by pedro kok.

To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just:

:: Join and add photos to the archidose pool, and/or
:: Tag your photos archidose

Suburban Fantasies

These visualizations of suburban patterns by Ross Racine offer "...fictive urban patterns, mostly suburbias, surrounded by a desert or agricultural looking environment." (via Landezine)


:: image via Landezine

This is definitely a compelling idea to both elucidate and satirize the ubiquitous suburban patterns, and offers some commentary about the drivers of these forms. I thought at first these were some interesting photoshop-montage, but the post shows that these are originals: "All artworks are produced freehand, no scans or photos are included in the process. Drawings are printed on high-end inkjet printer."




:: images via Landezine

The Missing Buildings of Cockatoo Island

[Image: Playing Tristan Davison's Missing: Cockatoo Island Edition].

I'm excited finally to look back at some of the work produced by my students at Urban Islands last month in Sydney, not only to bring them much deserved attention but to show how the course itself worked out.
So, with the caveat that it has been extremely difficult for me to find reliable internet access here, and that this will only get worse over the next ten days as my wife and I head north into Daintree National Park, I wanted to take advantage of some blazing wifi to start a review of the studio's most stimulating projects.
Here, then, kicking things off, is an entire board game, called Missing: Cockatoo Island Edition, invented, painted, and produced in less than a week by Tristan Davison.
Missing uses Cockatoo Island – the abandoned industrial site, former shipbuilding yard, and derelict prison in the Sydney Harbor that formed the site of Urban Islands – as its primary setting and game-play environment.

[Image: Missing: Cockatoo Island Edition by Tristan Davison].

The object of the game is to re-assemble the missing buildings of Cockatoo. Players progress by strategically accumulating Action Cards and Building Cards, with the game concluding atop the island's central sandstone plateau.
Cockatoo, for those of you who have not visited the site, is an island somewhat famously denuded of many of its former historic structures. Indeed, the island's lost buildings are some of its most conspicuous features, their interiors still framed with a grid of iron rails in the flattened ground.

[Images: Building Cards from Tristan Davison's Missing: Cockatoo Island Edition, produced in less than one week].

If it's not visibly obvious, by the way, I should say that Tristan is jaw-droppingly talented, producing this entire game and many other pieces over the course of Urban Islands right there in the studio, using watercolor and ink. I was able actually to watch as many of these were outlined and colored.

[Images: Action Cards from Missing: Cockatoo Island Edition].

The board itself is incredible, for instance, layering the pathway of the game atop an aerial view of Cockatoo Island and including various safety zones that can be exploited by players along the way.

[Images: The board of Tristan Davison's Missing: Cockatoo Island Edition].

Over the coming weeks, expect to hear more about the basic interpretive mechanism at work behind the studio, which will help to explain why Tristan produced a board game in the first place. For now, the sheer handiwork on display here, and the rapid evolution of what were basically improvised game rules, continues to amaze me.
Stay tuned for more student projects from Urban Islands!