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LSE: Public lectures and events
Episode 8: Architecture and Design: Framing the urban experience
00:29:18
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- [00:09]
A
This is the LSE Review of Books podcast. I'm Amy Mollett. In this podcast we set out to explore how design and architecture can enhance and manipulate our everyday experiences. We first talked to architect David Conn, co designer of A Room for London, a unique one room hotel perched high above the River Thames, modelled on the Belgian riverboat which took writer Joseph Conrad up the Congo river in 1890. David discusses how design can influence the way we experience everything from time to the urban experience.
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B
This episodic character to the architecture, I think is also an invitation to actually dwell there. So that is how it is being architecture, and that's what also liberates you from the kind of tyranny of having to look at it in one way and then leave.
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A
Also on this program, Fran Tonkis, LSE Reader in Sociology and Director of the LSE Cities Program, talks about her latest book on the social life of urban form and why the devil gets all the best designs. In our final segment, Hyun Bang, Sin, LSE Associate professor in Geography and Urban Studies, talks about reading Marx under South Korea's strict national security laws and how that has influenced his own work on displacement in urban neighbourhoods. All that and more coming up. You're listening to the LSE Review of Books podcast publishing twice daily, the LSE Review of Books brings you the latest in academic book reviews covering social science topics from IR to media studies research methods. You can visit us@lsereviewofbooks.com in July of this year, the LSE Review of Books team checked into A Room for London, a unique hotel which has caught the attention of many tourists and day trippers on London's south bank, offering panoramic views of the city to those lucky enough to win an overnight stay. A key part of the project, as its architect David Kahn explains, was to facilitate a new way of seeing this most iconic and well trodden part of London. In 2010, an ad ran in the Architecture Press detailing a design competition for a single bedroom hotel that would sit on the roof of the Queen Elizabeth hall with a panoramic view of the River Thames in London. The ad left room for interpretation, principally asking for the space to serve as a place for reflection so that guests could use its rooftop vantage point to think about London in its Olympic year. Architect David Conn and artist Fiona Banner took up the challenge, turning to an unusual source for inspiration, Joseph Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness.
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B
We wanted it to be something that would be both beautiful and perhaps really encourage you to think more deeply about the city and your place within it and we looked at stories about boats. And then Heart of Darkness, about a journey from London to the Congo, is actually narrated on the banks of the Thames by Marlow sitting on a boat.
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C
The sea reach of the Thames stretch stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway. In the offing, the sea and the sky were welded together without a joint. And in the luminous space, the tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red clusters of canvas, sharply peaked with gleams of varnished spit. A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was dark above Gravesend and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest and the greatest town on earth.
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B
We realized that this could be a kind of perfect foil to give the project not only some depth in terms of a story of travel and displacement, but also a connection to the 19th century and the economy of the city, and also to this kind of slightly darker underbelly. Of the reason this city has become the kind of center of power that it has is a lot to do with the empire of which the novel is this kind of extraordinary expose.
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A
Heart of Darkness, was inspired by Conrad's own journey to the Congo in 1890 on a boat called the Roy de Bels, which took on a new life in his novel as the Nelly. Excited by the multiple narratives this approach offered, David and Fiona's conversations quickly turned to design.
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B
We knew, for example, that it had this heavily riveted hull because Marlow, when he arrives in the Congo, needs a vessel to get further in on his journey. And there's this sunken paddle steamer. And so that became integral to our scheme. We imagined that our boat could be called the Roi des Belges, and so it would both refer to the novel, but also to the experiences that the author had that inspired the work. So there's this constant layering of narrative possibilities for the project, which also would allow people to interpret it as they chose.
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A
For David, artists are all too often only a token part of the design process. Working with Fiona, from the beginning, they established an equal partnership between artist and architect.
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B
It had the effect of making the project much, much more challenging. And I think the stakes were much higher because I think for Fiona, it had to have the integrity that she would find in her work, and for us, it had to have the resolution that we would find in ours. That kind of led to this kind of pressure cooker, which probably the success of the project as a result of.
- [06:32]
A
The team received Notice of their success in 2011, with major coverage in the international press following soon after. Although some critics felt that the project might not deliver on its promise of an intimate setting, David maintains that far from being a fishbowl, the public on the south bank and Waterloo Bridge, in fact, barely notice the guests high above them. The project balances inner city pace with the river's quieter moments.
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B
The city just seems to go about its business, oblivious to your presence, so that you both have this sense of, I suppose, the power of this gaze over it all. But then also, it's slightly humbling that in the end, for that extraordinary view, you seem to be completely detached.
- [07:19]
A
The Boat also functions as a space for artists and writers in residence. It is designed to encourage contemplation and to offer respite.
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B
We want it to feel like a much slower serial experience, like many different experiences one after the other, as a complete contrast to seeing this single thing on the horizon. And we did that by making several small rooms inside, and each has its own identity and character and form. What it also allowed was for the guests, the writers and residents, to then daydream too.
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A
The LSE Review of Books team visited the boat in summer 2013 after taking a very slow and jolty private lift to the top of the Queen Elizabeth Hall. The Boat and the stunning view greet visitors at the top through the door. Past the small but perfectly formed wet room and kitchen comes the bedroom and living space with views on all sides from the city, the Shard and St Paul's to the east and to the London Eye, Big Ben and the palace of Westminster to the west. A selection of books on architecture, Cities and rivers, are yours to read, and the viewing deck offers more space. I asked Cheryl Brumley, our producer and fellow shipmate, what she thought of the experience.
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D
Yeah, I felt really strangely displaced there, because here's a city that I've spent six years in, and I'm sitting above this space where I can look at a road that kind of takes me halfway to my house. But I didn't feel like I was anywhere near where I lived, and I didn't feel like I was looking down at a city where I had layers and layers and layers of all these memories. It was like I was looking at.
- [08:59]
B
It kind of anew, this episodic character. The architecture, I think, is also an invitation to actually dwell there. So that is how it is being architecture, and that's what also liberates you from the kind of tyranny of having to look at it in one way and Then leave.
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A
Since the project, David Conn has been asked to think about the role of the Thames in London's future.
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B
I, for one, and I'm, you know, and some of the mayor's policies are clearly promoting this, see the Thames as becoming increasingly central to the identity and life of the city. So, for example, river transport has massively increased since the Olympics, with a lot more ferry trips and docks and piers opening up. And so one future scenario we've been trying to think about is what happens if at every ferry point there is a new sense of arrival and departure, a new public space. A bit like going to St. Mark's in Venice.
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A
On a recent trip to Shanghai, David gazed down at the city from a towering hotel and was left bewildered at the infinite spread of skyscrapers. A city seemingly without reference points.
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And then a day later arriving at the Bund and seeing the river and feeling this relief. Reencountering the original geography of this city. This was in fact the way in which I would still choose to understand the topography of the city.
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A
And so the RUY de Belge is almost like an extension of this greater interest in waterways and the city. By bringing a fictional anchoring point to the the city's concrete, David Conn and his team have in some way brought the Thames back to the centre of London's public and cultural life.
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B
As life in cities becomes ideally more and more about the kind of complex overlapping between working, living, playing. A site like the river does offer all those things in close proximity, it can create these kind of very rich microcosms that also retain nature.
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A
That was architect David David Kahn. To read essays from the Room for London writers in residence, including Com Toybean and Camilla Shamsi, check out a London address, the Artangel Essays, out now in paperback from Granta Books. Now we move on to think about how much a city can be designed and what influence its residents truly have on the layout of new spaces. Cheryl Brumley has more.
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Global warming, water shortage, food shortage, rising seawaters, inequality, sectarian violence, industrial waste, carbon buildup. Are cities the problem or the solution?
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Cities in all these different kinds of contexts are so often seen as both problems and solutions, and of themselves, they're neither. It all depends, of course, how cities are used and lived in and governed, and questions of distribution within them.
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D
That's Fran Tonkis, sociologist and director of the LSC Cities Program. In her latest book, Cities by the Social Life of Urban form, she argues that this ambivalence about cities, that is whether or not they generate or Ameliorate the world's problems stems from the complexity of their design.
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E
Cities are being built not by architects, engineers, planners. In the main they're being built by ordinary people in their efforts to find shelter, to develop their livelihoods. Cities intensify processes, they intensify benefits, but they also intensify risks and they intensify conflicts. There is, I guess, an urban effect that reinforces and makes more urgent certain kinds of problems.
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Design itself is a contentious term. Designed for whom? And by whom? Fran says we can't put all the onus on the professionals.
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E
If we think of the word design, it implies a very intentional and conscious process. But so often the ways in which cities are made and remade is not about purpose or intention, it's about unintended consequences of actions. Or it's about processes in which your main objective is not to create space, but you need to make space in order to do what you want to do. A good example of this would be these fairly informal improvised centres of trading and exchange marketplaces are the best example of that. Informal markets in particular. But the ways in which people can find very tight spaces as places to set up a shop front.
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C
Come on, super size us now that beautiful is.
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E
And equally, the way in which people adapt their living spaces is not really about an intention to design a form, but is about making space for oneself in the city.
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So the good architect and politician know their limitations and they approach the task.
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E
Of city making not as a design problem in any technical sense, but as a more complex social system, social, economic and physical system where the social is primary. I'm of course a sociologist, teaching on a design program and working alongside designers. But I think all of us take this attitude that we have to understand the concept of design very, very broadly. We have to democratize the concept of design and think about demotic designs.
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D
On the. Many urban policies seek to promote diversity, which Fran argues is misguided. Take the mixed communities policy under the UK's Labour government. This aims to disperse concentrations of poverty in part by developing mixed tenured housing, which is the revamping of old housing estates or the building of new properties for buyers and low income renters to live side by side.
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E
What we find in many of these developments in London and other cities is, yes, people living alongside each other, but not interacting, not necessarily using the same local services and potentially seeing each other as problematic. And the kinds of stigma that were associated with mono tenure housing estates then being ascribed to people who are in social rent. I think rather than thinking about mixing and promoting Interaction. We need to think about creating non exclusionary spaces. You don't have to be friends with your neighbors, you don't have to speak with your neighbours. And this is something that can't and shouldn't be engineered. Those more sort of paternalistic and optimistic impulses behind that program I think are wrong headed because I don't think that that's something that anyone, architects, planners, politicians, social scientists can engineer.
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D
Instead of contriving diversity, she says, planners should design against segregation.
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E
Cities in Southern Africa and in South Africa in particular, have the highest measures of urban inequality globally. And that of course is a legacy of an apartheid system which carved racial inequalities into space in very, very stark ways. But cities in the United States also show very, very high rates of inequality, measured in terms of income. As legacies of segregation in the uk, those kinds of legal forms of segregation have played a less important role in creating inequalities in urban environments. And of course, the way that public housing policy has worked in many cities, and particularly in London, has tended to mitigate against really stark spatial inequalities because every local authority has had a responsibility to provide social housing at lower rents. And so you always have relative mix in different local areas. And I think that's one respect in which you can say that politicians and planners have a role to play in mitigating inequality. That I think is changing in London. We are seeing a sort of a resorting of population through the private housing market. So it's those two lines, I think, through which inequality has been produced historically and today. Explicit deliberate inequality and these other more organic, if you will, or market based forms of inequality.
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D
And these market forces can change huge swathes of cities in relatively little time.
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E
It's possible to live in very close physical proximity and maintain very great social distances. These spaces which are shared may be too strong a word, but are certainly proximate, but where lives don't actually touch and quite different services are being used, schooling and so on. And now subject to what Loretta Lees has called super gentrification. You know, it's no longer school teachers and social workers, you know, lower middle class or middle, middle class professionals. It's very, very rich people working in financial services, often foreign buyers coming into London's housing market. So it's a new sort of stage of the gentrification.
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D
There's another way to put this, and Fran borrows a phrase from American urban planner Kevin lynch, the devil gets all the best designs.
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E
More repressive designs are often more successful in built terms. If you want to realise your objectives, then it seems that more aggressive and repressive architecture is more successful. If we think about things like separations from gated housing through to security walls, we may not necessarily like them as design, either in aesthetic or in a social and an economic sense, but it can be hard to say that they're unsuccessful in their own terms in what they set out to do. I think another respect in which I'd say the devil gets all the best designs is of course, the the role of speculative investment in so much architecture in the city. So architecture and design that is geared to maximizing returns on investment and maximizing profits makes the most conspicuous and often the most spectacular insertions in the landscape.
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One almost has to get rid of this idea that any one design intervention can produce harmonious social interactions. Or as Fran puts it, in Cities by Design, the architect is no more a miracle worker than the sociologist.
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It has been my observation, looking around at the work of architecture schools in, you know, in various places, that the physical design is considered often in the abstract, from who might use it and the context of in which it sits, what's around it, what kind of city is it in, and what is its impact going to be on that part of the city? This is a challenge that still needs to be taken further.
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A
That was Fran Tonkis. Her book Cities by the Social Life of Urban form was published this month in the UK by Polity Books and will make its North American debut in January 2014. In the academic Inspiration section on our blog, we ask prominent thinkers about the books that have inspired them into their subject. Karl Marx is a recurring figure in the series, having inspired a host of economists, sociologists and anthropologists early in their careers. LSE's Hyun Vang Shin, associate professor in geography and Urban studies, talks about the dangers of reading Marx in South Korea.
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F
I did my first degree in aerospace engineering, that was in South Korea, and my first degree was taking place in the early 1990s. So that was the kind of the time period when in South Korea, intellectuals or activists were losing the direction because a lot of inspirations came from those revolutionary movements in Central and Eastern Europe and to some extent in China as well. And a lot of people were actually seeking for alternative ways of thinking. And some people were also trying to look at going back to the basics. So that led me to think more about social issues. Books written by people like Karl Marx and Antonia Grimesci. And those are the classics for people who are thinking about progressive movement. Das Kapital, which came out in the mid 19th century and which has become sort of classic for many people trying to think of how to improve the world or how to make this society better. The other book, which is actually a collection of notebooks and memos written by Antonio Gramsci when he was in prison between 1929 and 1935, and those two books, plus a few others written by many of those former activists, were things that I came across in those years. If you look at the translated version at the time, those Korean versions, the covers are in red. And here the color red implies a number of things. Having and studying these red books intensely was coming with great risks. Because of the National Security Law that we have in South Korea for many decades and which is still in place nowadays because of the separation between the north and the south, and because of the historical legacy of having the Korean war in the 1950s. There's a fear of communism, fear of socialism, and fear of any kind of instability associated with radical thinking. One main area of my research is really about displacement, people's displacement from neighborhood. So I study East Asia cities in South Korea and China. And when you look at the history of displacement of people in cities, for example, in the 80s in Seoul, South Korea, before this 1988 Olympic Games, about 750,000 people were displaced. But if you also think of how this displacement was perceived by the ordinary people in these cities, there was some protest, of course, by people who are being directly displaced and directly affected by these redevelopment projects and beautifications, Haitian project. But ordinary people were not very much against it. And they didn't mind this displacement. They were to some extent indirectly participating in this process, facilitating displacement. Because they took the opportunity to become homeowners by, by investing their money in those new developments. And with the growth of the affluence in South Korea in the 80s and 90s, they were more or less indirectly agreeing to this process. And that kind of puzzled me why they were, despite the whole brutality associated with displacement. And there comes the whole teaching to some extent of Karl Marx and Ramsay. The Karl Marx work to understand the internal logics of capital accumulation, later elaborated by people like David Harvey, who are looking at how these logics of capital accumulation were playing out in a very uneven way, geographically speaking. And how this internal logics of capital accumulation were leading to not only the labor exploitation was occurring, but the way in which how various people speculative real estate industry can be formed and developed. But at the same time, in order to understand why these rising middle class populace was not very much opposing to this process of displacement the learnings that come from Antonio Grimes Prison Notebook can be very interesting because he talks about the importance of addressing the state oppression, the political oppression, as well as economic coercion. But at the same time, what he emphasizes further is the importance of understanding how the ruling class makes an ideological imposition upon the populace so the people reach a consensus to accept the ideologies imposed by the ruling class. So to some extent it's voluntary and involuntary acceptance of the ideologies, like home ownership, for example. Those books still become very important for my own research nowadays by means of contributing to the analysis of how such processes of displacement and radical changes in the building environment can be understood in a more critical way.
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A
That was Hyun Bang Sin. You can find more academic inspiration, essays and audio on the LSE Reviewer Books site. That's all for this month's episode. Join us in a few weeks for the first in our special series of podcasts on Brazil, a country undergoing enormous change at political, social and economic levels. Across three podcasts, we'll be asking how should cities best address large scale transformations spurred by sporting events? How are Rio's favelas being transformed through grassroots movements? And how much power does the left have in Brazilian politics? And for how long? This podcast was produced by Cheryl Brumley. For a full list of the music and sound used in this podcast, visit lsereviewofbooks.com I'm Amy Molatt. Until next time.