Proposal and Panel Development

I feel that we have developed a clear direction for our strategy which we can all use as a base point to develop a more concrete architectural solution in the second stage of this project.

We have chosen to concentrate on one of the areas of the panels each with continual communication between us all to make sure our transition between panels is a smooth one.

Anthony and I will look after the last 2 panels. After discussing our understanding of the requirements for these panels, we decided that the areas to be communicated are overlapping and could best  be represented through graphical renders which illustrate the presence of the architectural solution and explain the proposed services.

I have drawn up a layout to incorporate the central principles of our proposal through as few words as possible..

NATIONAL IDENTITY of Australia

The development of an architectural solution to modify or add to the existing 'capital' must involve consideration of the National identity of Australia.

History part of identity:

• Artistically rich  culture of the Aboriginal people
• Transferred culture of Britain
• Younger culture of Australia independently

Identity is about how we perceive ourselves and how others perceive us.

Australia today :

Strong connection to the land, outdoors, active

Laid back, social.

Freedom, rights.

Most liveable cities: Australian cities, Melbourne.

Video: TED TALK: Tom Mayne on architecture as connection

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/thom_mayne_on_architecture_as_connection.html

"Building elements became part of a connective fabric, the social, cultural, and the landscape recreational fabric of the city"

 INTERESTING POINTS RAISED:

As designers we try to give coherence to the world. 

As architects we synthesis the way the world is perceived. We must  be involved at beginning of generative process.

Buildings that come together through the multiplicity of systems.

Dynamic envelope! Fold out and brought back together. Skin of a building. Differentiate the skin and the body. Morph.. indoor/ outdoor. Activating the city.

Engage buildings as part of the public tissue of the city.

APPLICATION:

This talk raises some very relevant points about how architecture is integrated to become a part of the existing fabric of the city. For me the issues that Tom Mayne is talking about supports the idea that a capital cannot be designed as a completely separate entity from the cities we live in.

The talk also raises the idea of starting at the beginning of the generative process which reinforces the ideas raised in the talk of Joshua Prince-Ramus also, about the importance of going back to first principles and allowing the design to evolve from here. Although I have found the seeming ambiguity of this project frustrating I can understand better now that what we are in effect doing is going back to first principles, investigating the very idea of a capital city and of a parliament as a platform to develop an architectural solution that responds to this.

Responsive architecture is about buildings that come together through the multiplicity of systems. The planned city of Canberra on the other hand involves architecture and design which has attempted to simplify these systems as much as possible (and in a way cull the systems of anything considered unnecessary for the capital to function at the time) in effect losing the complex life of a energetically rich city.

The skin of a building idea is very interesting and relevant to our idea we have discussed in tutorials for our architectural investigation. We are looking towards a solution to distribute the parliament throughout the cities of Australia and for the architectural space to take a form which is able to morph and move around, a strategy to activate the cities.

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Our Proposal

Our team discussed and further developed our proposal in more detail today. We also met Kat Aland who joined our group.

Our proposal identifies the main issues with the existing parliament as its isolation (in both a physical sense and also in a systems sense) from the people.

We have addressed the need to distribute the parliament through all of the cities of Australia, and in such a way that the people are invited to participate and become part of the process.

I created a graphic that illustrates our main idea of the decentralisation of the parliament. Rather than having a centre of power and the people on the outside of that, the parliament is distributed among the people.

Our architectural solution will distribute parliamentary meetings, cabinet meetings, with the potential to add another, more interactive layer to the system for the people. They will have an opportunity to interact and get involved with these events that are held in our proposed architectural spaces, whether it be through digital or other means.

Our proposal has the potential to facilitate a transformation from a tree structure to a semi-lattice structure, not only in the physical distribution of the parliament but in the government systems themselves and the distribution of power to the people.

Design towards a NEW capital and a NEW Government

THOUGHTS:

The right balance of elements between: maintaining the simpler aspects of lifestyle and embracing the ever-advancing resource efficient technology.

A modified system of politics and policy/law making → to better represent the people

The first step is to invite interest and involvement of people!

As Yasu raised in the Strategy lecture.. the challenge with ‘Flexible’ architecture is: How do you encourage people to interact with the architecture? Applied to this design challenge..

How can a new capital be designed which encourages people to get involved?

Integrate into the architecture of daily life!

But to what level should the peopel be involved? Is it a naïve whimsical idea to place our trust in the people of Australia, who don’t know politics, and possibly can’t predict the future consequences of what we think that we need now? I think it is a problem if Australians are not educated about the issues they are impacting, which is exactly where we stand currently with our: No participation for 364 days per year, VOTE OR YOU WILL BE FINED once a year approach to involving the people in the decisions made by Government.

If there was a way to invite the participation of all people in the government, integrate it into the way we live our lives, the education process would begin spontaneously and exponentially, and the decisions made as a country would begin to reflect the ideals of the people as a majority. We can start to eliminate the short-term survival strategies of political representatives, and the short term demands of the people obliging this behavior due to our indifference and lack of long-term aware education on issues.

READING: Architecture, Power, and National Identity

CHANNELS of distribution

I have collected information and developed ideas over the past few weeks that have reinforced the need for our solution to be integrated into the built and social fabric of our cities.

The first step in this process is to start thinking about which elements of infrastructure could potentially support a distribution of a parliament or some elements of a parliament.

The public has regular access to:

 

Public institutions: Libraries, governmental institutions/ organisations

Public or commercial architecture: Shopping centres, malls, markets

Public transport infrastructure

Cityscape (built and landscape)

The latter 2 avenues strike my interest for further consideration are:

PUBLIC TRANSPORT INFRASTRUCTURE

Opportunity to take time in many people’s lives that is spent waiting or killing time.. instead of disconnecting from the world around them they can connect to the government and participate.

You already have their time and proximity.. now all you need to do is to install a device that invites their participation.

Invite participation..

Evoke discussion..

CITYSCAPE (BUILT AND LANDSCAPE)

An opportunity to integrate with the aspects of our lifestyle that are identifiably Australian. Is it possible that a system of architectural spaces could be distributed through, say, our parks to offer alternative opportunities for socialising whilst simultaneously participating in our parliament? An truly interactive, outdoor embracing solution?

Video: TED TALK: Joshua Prince-Ramus on The Seattle Library

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/joshua_prince_ramus_on_seattle_s_library.html 

MAIN POINTS RAISED:

Seattle's library

Hyper rationality, no authorship

Compartmentalised flexibility

Book is a technology

Library has a secondary responsibility : social roles (equally important as media) 2/3 dedicated to social functions.. back to first principles and recombined.

Typical flexibility: Generic so every activity.

Very discreet thing happening in each compartment and separate compartments for indeterminate functions of the future.

Living room / Mixing chamber :Technology / Reading Room/ Book spiral: Continum stepping up levels

Dallas Theatre Company

Breaks down functions and rearranges, traditional back and front of house become top and bottom of house, creating a new realm of possibilities for the actors.

(In this case the flexibility granted to the architecture is not hindered by the human condition of its users to look for boundaries and restrictions to dictate how the space should work. Because it is designed for a theatre company, it encourages the actors and directors to challenge the possibilities and be creative with the space.

Ability to rent out space in off season, so it is always utilised.

APPLICATION:

Joshua Prince Ramus uses the examples here to illustrate the importance of returning to first principles to design high quality architectural solutions. He looks at the very fundamental functions that the architectural space is required to perform, breaking down any preconceived ideas of how the space should typically work, and reorganizes his findings to create an innovative solution. It involves a systems approach, it considers the problem in its entirety rather than focusing solely on the architecture  as merely the physical entity of the solution. It goes beyond architecture as a requirement into architecture as a device, a facilitator to optimize the systems and functions to be performed in/using the space.

Week 4 ARCHITECTURAL TYPES AND PURPOSES Distributed

READING: A City is Not a Tree: Christopher Alexander

Author: Christopher Alexander (Architect, mathematician)

“when a city is endowed with a tree structure, this is what happens to the city and its people”

 

 ‘The reality of today’s social structure is thick with overlap’

MAIN POINTS:

The city is a semi-lattice, but it is not a tree.

What is the inner nature, the ordering principle, which distinguishes the artificial city from the natural city?

“Natural cities”: have arisen spontaneously over many years. Organisation of natural city: semi-lattice. Contain overlapping units.

“Artificial cities”: Deliberately created by designers and planners.

Organisation of artificial city: Tree. Individual parts either wholly contained in others or disjointed.

Subdivision after subdivisions of each other.

Zoning (such as in Canberra).

THOUGHTS:

This reading clarified for me why it is that planned cities sometimes miss something in the life of the cities and gave me some concrete reasoning behind the feeling that when we try to organise things too much we lose something crucial.

 EXAMPLES OF SEMI LATTICE STRUCTURES:

Social networking groups… they overlap but are not subdivisions of each other. Maybe this is why they are growing in use so rapidly. They co-exist and link into each other to allow people to use them as a wider network, but they are not controlled by each other. 
 

Universities.. traditional American models isolate. Those evolved naturally eg Milan.. the university is a multitude of buildings spread throughout the city centre, with no clear distinction between those buildings which are part of the university and those which aren’t. It is physically a campus distributed throughout the city. We didn’t travel between uni and the city each day.. we simply went about our plans for the day, including classes, and everyday.

‘The reality of today’s social structure is thick with overlap’… I think this is partly due to our accessibility and rapidly diverging avenues of opportunities and speed of decisions.

 

APPLIED TO OUR GOVERNMENT:

Our whole government system is a tree, in a hierarchical sense. The people cannot participate in the national level of government without going through State, or on the State level without going through local (electorate). The whole system of representation of the whole country through the people who sit in the House of Representatives, or of the State by the States government representatives…….. the whole problem with the tree like structure. As a typical run-of-the-mill Australian, we cannot access our national government without plowing back through the tunnels of subdivided power and we hit a blockade very early because to progress any further we must resign our power to the next line of power to represent us until they ultimately must resign in turn to those standing between them and the center of power.

The visual and conceptual power of architecture needs to be recognised here. Subliminally, when we isolate the processes and the architecture of the government from the rest of our lives we are in effect convincing ourselves that it is completely separate from our lives, and it becomes something we…"really need to learn about one day". But if we integrate it with our lives the connection will be clear and we will participate in our government processes and live our lives simultaneously.

In the same token, architecture also has the power to open our minds and broaden our perspectives. If we can lose some of that restriction that space can put onto people and replace it with architectural solutions which invite an personal interpretation, and continual reinterpretation.

Distributed 2 TRANSPROGRAMMING

TUTORIAL:

Today we were introduced to our theme group and theme tutor Cameron.

Our discussions introduced the concept  of trangot out of the first 2 tutorial exercises and our thoughts regarding the theme. It was a challenge at first and somewhat unclear as to how we are expected to approach the first task, but we raised some interesting points of discussion in any case.

As a group we determined that we developed a direction and determined that:

Distribution is an important strategy to apply to any new addition to the current Australian parliament. 

The current parliament is isolated on multiple levels and is void of an activity (as is Canberra in its entirety).

The people of Australia are not able to participate enough in the government.

The power of the parliament needs to be decentralised in order for it to be better distributed to the people.