Sabarmati River Front Development

Posted on November 13, 2012 by Pallavi

Most of the urban developments ideally anchor on one central idea of a public space and that can be ecological or economical driven around which then subsequent developments spin off, setting the rhythm of what may arrive. Mumbai is devoid of such centrally thought out single anchor and thus it gives you multiple, scattered and non-cohensive entities in urban forms. Sabarmati River Front Development is in sharp contrast in what is happening or rather not happening in Mumbai’s urban development mumbo-jumbo. I had the opportunity to learn about Dr. Bimal Patel’s Sabarmati River Front work in Mumbai during World Architecture Day. It is socially relevant and inclusive which is evident in several examples he showed of completed work and what he envisages in time to come.

River Sabarmati is important to the city’s urban ecology and has been long acknowledged that appropriate development of the riverfront can turn the river into a major asset; improving the quality of environment, ecology and life in Ahmedabad.

HCP Design Planning and Management Pvt. Ltd.

The Environmental Planning Collaborative (EPC) was commissioned to prepare a comprehensive feasibility study to develop a 9 km stretch of the city’s riverfront. EPC provided development management services to Sabarmati River Front Development Corporation Limited (SRFDCL) until 2002. During this period its mandate was to direct and monitor all the preparatory work. Since then HCP Design Planning and Management Pvt. Ltd. (HCPDPM) headed by Bimal Patel has been responsible for the project’s urban, master plan and architectural design.

Public spaces cannot be privatized. Public spaces cannot be exclusive. Mumbai, with certain convoluted system, managed to do both, pretty ruthlessly.

Thus, Sabarmati River Front Project due to its very nature and aspiration remains multi-dimensional public asset which will not only create thriving citizen-centric networks of parks, promenades, bazaars, cultural hub but also work as a structure that will ecologically enhance the city and its people’s relationship to the river. It is one of the most robust urban renewal project that India is witnessing, keeping context and local culture intact without walking all over it.

HCP Design Planning and Management Pvt. Ltd.

The ongoing process of the project is premised on these following steps methodically. Firstly, it is to reclaim land, cleaning up existing contamination to the river and then on to build flood protection wall and laying grid of sewage interceptors that will prevent any further contamination. The sewage lines will carry untreated mass to augmented treatment plant and slum dwellers have been relocated to built communities of modest housing.

Next, the project provided 11.5 km long pedestrian promenade at the edge along the banks of the river. The promenade is very well connected to proposed streets with wide sidewalks inclusives of bicycle paths which both encourage walking and cycling, basic of basic amenities which have been stripped away from Mumbai residents.

Ongoing and future work includes promise of culture centre, museums, sports facilities, trade fair grounds and open air markets. All of this will enhance Ahmedabad’s local living conditions for residents and experience of tourists. The simple joy of being able to walk along the river bank, to sit in a garden and enjoy the serene beauty of the river is now a reality through Sabarmati River Front. The project is currently ongoing, but several parts of the projects are open and being used by the public and the reclaimed space is home to events such as the kite festival.

Transformation through urban renewal in a cohesive manner is possible and only way forward if we were to avoid fragmentation and isolated growth spurts and communities can thrive and benefit from inspirational project like Sabarmati River Front and that is the lesson Mumbai cannot turn oblivion to.

HCP Design Planning and Management Pvt. Ltd.

Project Details:

Client: Sabarmati River Front Development Corporation Ltd., Ahmedabad

Site Area: 200 hectares

Year of completion: 1997 – Ongoing

Images: HCP Design Planning and Management Pvt. Ltd.

 

World Architecture Day Mumbai

Posted on November 7, 2012 by Pallavi

You will always stumble on inspiration when you least expect it and somehow that inspiration will revive your eroding faith and will turn you hopeful again. Unexpected, my experience was exactly that, when I attended World Architecture Day on Monday 8 October here in Mumbai. All the speakers talked about a city of the past when Mumbai was Bombay, a city of hope, vibrancy and opportunities which has come to degrade in such ways that somehow hope has gone missing. I came back satisfied and rejuvenated, with an urge to do more.

Mostly all the talks, especially the ones by Professor K.T.Ravindran, Vikas Dilawari, Bimal Patel and Christopher Benninger tackled some of the most basic issues plaguing Indian cities.  But they all have, through their exemplary work, tackled these problems head on, fearlessly. They all talked about reincarnation of the city with urban renewal and regeneration.

Dr. Bimal Patel’s work on Sabarmati Riverfront in Gujarat is etched in my mind. He has changed the paradigm of public space and continues to do so with his exemplary work. Its enduring, inclusive and socially relevant with the context very much in forefront.

Architect Vikas Dilawari’s conservation and preservation in the built environment of several communities in Mumbai has rightfully earned him many accolades, with examples of years of persistence and dogged determination.

Architect Christopher Benninger is now working very closely with the Government of Bhutan in having a feasible urban plan which will be worth its while in facing forces and challenges in coming years while going through urbanization. He remained utmost humble, extremely funny yet profound all the way.

Almost all of the speakers spoke of major issues of decongestion, affordable housing, open spaces and public spaces, inclusive slum rehabilitation while keeping them within the context of the city realities with respect to rapid urbanization of India.

The coming together of architects and built environment fraternity without a commercial aspect attached to it was the first of its kind in Mumbai. There was passion, honesty and only true speaking of their minds. It was truly a celebration of architecture and aspirations that all of us carry and will continue to do so to claim our cities. It was a day to remind us that architecture is one of the core professions and architects will remain key drivers in economic growth, supporting aspirations and nurturing the innovation of city dwellers. World Architecture Day left me inspired in more ways than I can explain in words and I hope to carry this message forward to others in days to come.

BE | X-Section Real Needs | Imagined Solutions

Posted on November 6, 2012 by Sydney Correspondent

Anuradha Chatterjee, Sydney Correspondent

As the curator of BE | X-Section Real Needs | Imagined Solutions, the UNSW Built Environment’s Exhibition for the Sydney Architecture Festival, it was interesting to showcase student projects from a range of Built Environment discipline degree programs that demonstrate shared awareness of social responsibility, collaboration, innovation, and most importantly an interdisciplinary knowledge base. These qualities, orientations, and attitudes contribute to the making of the UNSW Built Environment design students as intrepid graduates of global citizenship who understand and engage with the complexities of working with others in seeking creative solutions to real needs and issues identified by communities.

Real World

BEOutThere! electives capture the Interdisciplinary Service Learning in the Faculty of Built Environment, as they are carried out in collaboration with community partners with the expressed aim of exposing students to challenging social issues and considerations. In 2011 and 2012, key projects included: North Penrith Plaza – Designing a Digitally Enabled Public Domain; Northcott Project; Schools Project (Crown Street Public School, Ungarie Central School, and Tullibigeal Central School). The outcome and merit of these electives is the discernible and compelling nature of the interactions and the engagement evidenced in student reflections. Likewise, the significance of real world, industry-linked projects also informs Integrated Low Carbon Living Project. Delivered as a team based collaborative project between students from BE and Faculty of Engineering students, the studio presents the opportunity to design the Material Science and Engineering Building, UNSW with attention to low energy, passive design strategies design with zero net-energy and zero net-water consumption as the goal.

Southern Cross Packaging Awards, Musa Noor

Social Inclusion

Student works in the Socially Responsible Packaging demonstrate a range of approaches to packaging – the liminal and the most intimate threshold between the user and the product. The projects address contemporary issues of safety, convenience, and access by synthesizing aesthetics, functionality, and ethical response. Inclusive Architecture progresses a similar argument that inclusive design (also known as universal design, design for all, user-centred design, human-centred design) “is no longer a niche or unimportant endeavour”. Student projects which suggest inclusive redesigns of key twentieth century buildings demonstrate that architectural merit is not irreconcilable with these goals.

Sydney CBD, Local Government and Shires Associations Photo Database Project

Urban Orientations

The Intersection: Redevelopment of the SEU School of Architecture Building and its Landscape brings together students from three programmes (architecture, interior, and landscape) to make sense of the tectonic, landscape and interior conditions of the Southeast University and the School of Architecture as a cultural and historical phenomenon, to inform redevelopment proposals. In contrast, it is the post traumatic urbanist lens that informs the Landscape Urbanism for the Shattered Garden City: Christchurch. The fractures caused by natural disasters insert not only irreconcilable ruptures but also the opportunity for the new. Fittingly then, the students explore possibilities for city’s open space system and for vitalizing that with the proposals for an urban arena with sport or performance facility, facilities for both having been extensively damaged across the city. Interior projects in the City of Sydney need to maintain an orientation to urbanism. Taylor Square Bicycle Hub is one such project, and the student projects demonstrate unique and meaningful approaches that seek translations of the figure of the bicycle as 1) a mechanical assemblage and meticulous orchestration of parts; 2) bicycle as generative of movement systems, motion, travelling, and energy; and 3) bicycling as a social sport that not only activates the urban area but also highlights the uniqueness of the site.

Dust rising from collapsed buildings immediately after the earthquake

Generated by students in undergraduate and postgraduate programmes, the exhibition demonstrates shared commitment, knowledge systems, and capabilities. BE | X-Section reveals that unlike the technological, formal ingenuity and production orientation enabled and rewarded in many architecture and design schools across the globe, socially responsive design and architecture in its attention to authenticity emerges out of vital creative engagements between built environment designers and many people – it emphasizes intent over form, process over outcome, shared knowledge over individualistic expertise and action over representation.

Interactive Surfaces and Modelled Environments: Sydney Architecture Festival at Customs House in Sydney

Posted on October 16, 2012 by Sydney Correspondent

Anuradha Chatterjee, Sydney Correspondent

This year I have had the chance to guest curate Inter-Action – the Sydney Architecture Festival event at Customs House Sydney, opening on 24 October 2012. The exhibition builds upon Customs House’s profile in nurturing explorations in the fields of digital visualization and technologies evidenced in past exhibitions such as Form to Formless, Remodelling Architecture, Transclimatic, and the Green Void, to name just a few. However, Inter-Action is not one but six exhibitions – Hypersurface Architecture [Redux] by Bachelor of Architectural Computing Students and Staff; Sydney from all Angles by Tim Vyse and Sam Westlake of Jane Irwin Landscape Architect; Virtual Warrane II by Brett Leavy; Real/Virtual by Peter Murphy and Real Serious Games; Model City by Frasers Property Australia and Sekisui House Australia, and UTS; and Open Agenda featuring winning proposals by Sibling, Tina Salama, and Robert Beson.

Draft Design of Euphonious Mobius Wall with Customs House in the Background: Rebekah Jo Araullo, University of New South Wales

The focus is on many disciplines (beyond architecture) that contribute to the making of the built realm. These include architecture, performance, art, and installation (Open Agenda, Hypersurface Architecture), architectural computing (Hypersurface Architecture), landscape architecture (Sydney from all Angles), web interface design (Sydney from all Angles), urban design, (Model City), digital visualization, and virtual environments (Virtual Warrane II, Real/Virtual). The curation of the exhibitions needed to attend to the agendas and practices shared by these different disciplines. What emerges as the key strands are: 1) Collaborative creation of knowledge, space, and experience; 2) Response to the city and its urban environment; 3) Crafting spatial and formal representations, both physical and virtual. The six exhibitions engage these strands in distinctive ways.

Hypersurface Architecture [Redux] is the design of an interactive media wall installation (composed of two walls – Halo Wall and the Euphonious Mobius) based on physical pixels, working thereby between the virtual and the real, attempting to generate an ‘infusion of form with media and media with form to work between the two’. The interactive aspect in Sydney from all Angles is achieved by embedding QR codes into a graphic map of Sydney highlighting recently designed key public domains, linked to a website, which allows a continual and democratized engagement with as well as the curation of the experience of the public realm. Virtual Warrane II uses gaming techniques and technologies (complemented by solid archival research) to provide a way of inhabiting the past and participating in the landscapes of the Gadigal people, demonstrating constructed and built occupations prior to and underlying European settlement.

Sydney from All Angles Draft of Graphic Maps: Tim Vyse and Sam Westlake, Jane Irwin Landscape Architect

The theme of modelling is explored further in Real/Virtual which compares miniaturization (city model), wire frame visualization, and stereo videos and panoramas of the city, highlighting technologies of visualization and different ways of creating navigable worlds. Model City is a display of physical models of key public precincts (under construction) in the City of Sydney, and it allows people to interact with the emerging public domains. Open Agenda (initiative of the School of Architecture, UTS) is an ‘annual competition aimed at supporting a new generation of experimental architecture. Open to recent graduates, Open Agenda is focused on developing the possibilities of design research in architecture and the built environment’. The winning entries this year by Sibling, Tina Salama and Robert Beson explore other ways of conceptualizing architecture from participation to performative spatiality to the architectonics of atmosphere.

What started off as a challenge (bearing the risk of becoming eclectic), worked out to be a genuine opportunity. Inter-action sustains the identity of each exhibition, allowing the spatial opportunities inside Customs House to suggest rather than emphasize synergies. In deploying different forms of interactive installations; modelled realities, pasts, and futures; and the speculation of the futures of architectural thinking, Inter-action celebrates the anticipation of the post-disciplinary in architectural thought. This is the emergence of new ways of knowing and doing, which is more than a simple convergence of different disciplinary knowledge systems.

For more information see: www.sydneyarchitecturefestival.org

Carrot or Stick? If everyone wants to achieve the goal why isn’t it smoother getting there?

Posted on October 9, 2012 by Guest Contributor

William Poole-Wilson, Principal at Pringle Brandon Perkins+Will

Most people in the architecture and design industry will agree that sustainability is important. More than half of the world’s population live in urban areas and more than a million people move to cities across the world every single week. With this said, cities already use around 75% of the world’s energy and emit up to 80% of harmful greenhouse gases. Even climate change deniers (ever-dwindling in number) don’t deny that the earth’s natural resources are finite.

So if everyone wants to achieve the goal of better sustainability, why isn’t it easier to get there? It’s certainly not down to lack of incentive. We have carrots dangled before our eyes in the form of better public reputation and recognition, kudos among peers and stakeholders, and even the possibility of a speedier journey through the planning system , not to mention long-term financial benefits and the rather less tangible but extremely real opportunity to help preserve our planet. Meanwhile sticks are often brandished to force companies to comply with building regulations and compliance codes, while instituting penalties for low performance. Examples range from the Kyoto Protocol and the government’s 2020 carbon reduction targets to more elaborate schemes like the CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme.

There are three main reasons why we’re not progressing as quickly and smoothly as we hope: lack of communication, ignorance about the possibilities, and ignorance about the financial cost. I touched on communication in my previous post about Occupant Engagement and here I’d like to talk about a highly ambitious attempt to address the ignorance issue.

Through education we can achieve behavioural change, and behavioural change is a fundamental necessity in addressing not only sustainability issues at design and build but also in on-going operation. The most sustainable building in the world will fail to perform to expectation if it isn’t used as intended.

On 29th September, The Crystal opened to the public. Undertaken by Siemens with Pringle Brandon Perkins + Will as the lead consultant and interior architect, the awe-inspiring building is London’s newest landmark and the world’s first centre built with the sole purpose of developing urban sustainability knowledge.

The Crystal. Image: Edmund Sumner

Following £30 million in investment by Siemens, the 6,300 sq m facility is now home to Siemens’s global Center of Competence Cities, a team of multidisciplinary urban experts encouraging improved sustainability through research, partnerships and collaboration.

Standing proudly on the waterfront of Royal Victoria Docks in East London – the centre of London’s new Green Enterprise District – the Crystal is also the world’s largest exhibition space given over to the future of cities. There are 2,000 sq m of interactive learning covering building technologies, air quality, power and water supply, waste, healthcare and sustainable mobility.

It’s also a conference centre with a cinema screen and 270-seater raked auditorium. It is, in short, a huge think tank for a brighter, safer, more sustainable future. You can even recharge electric vehicles here too.

And a building to educate the world on sustainability needs to shine a beacon of fossil-fuel-free light itself. Originally intended to reach BREEAM Excellent, it became the world’s first building to attain both BREEAM Outstanding and LEED Platinum ratings over the course of the project.

Generating 20% of the building’s electricity, two thirds of the roof is covered in PV panels; the remainder is a green roof consisting of plant species proven to sustain local wildlife. Ground-source heat pumps supply 100% of the building’s heating needs and most of its cooling. Eighty-four percent of hot water is enabled through the PV and heat pumps. No fossil fuels are burned here at all.

The Crystal is also ready to be connected to the smart grid, and the BMS is central to all building operations (heating, cooling and ventilation; lights and blinds; sensors that detect occupancy levels; safety features; and even an outdoor weather station), collating data from 12,000 control points.

Not a drop of water is lost throughout the building. Rainwater is harvested and recycled or reused – 90% of potable water demand is technically possible through treated rainwater alone. One hundred percent of blackwater is treated and reused for irrigation and flushing lavatories. Of course, there’s a dedicated waste recycling area too.

The Crystal’s office space is designed to use on average 83kWh/m2/year (less than 50% of the energy use of comparable office buildings) and generate 65% lower carbon emissions too. And all this created on a tight schedule in a waterfront city location.

Buildings like this show what is possible – and can encourage us to think more sustainably across everything we do.

Tadao Ando’s Mumbai Visit

Posted on October 9, 2012 by Pallavi

Architect Tadao Ando had visited Mumbai a couple of months back and unfortunately, I had give his lecture a miss. But this event and the visits of architects from elsewhere have generated an interesting mix of debate in the architectural fraternity here in India. More on this a little later.

Tadao Ando is a Japanese architect whose work has been primarily in Japan and his volume of work carries a distinct style specific to him. He is highly regarded for his extensive contribution in the field of architecture and has bagged several notable prizes. His style of creative use of lighting and maintaining natural settings giving a Zen kind of outcome are hallmarks to his work.

The most unforgettable example that comes to my mind is of Church of the Light in the City of Ibaraki, Osaka which Paul Goldberger in Why Architecture Matters explained about as ‘a simple rectangle of smooth concrete, sliced through by a freestanding wall set a fifteen-degree angle to the rectangle, as if it were a huge panel that had been swung on hinge’.

He explains his reaction of being in Church of the Light as something transcending a spiritual quest. And while experiencing religious buildings he mentions something profound on the effect that Architecture and built environment can have: “Ultimately this is a space that has been created to tell us that for all we know, there is something we do not know, something that we will never be able to know.”

Church of the Light by Tadao Ando

Recently in India, few notable Indian architects have been opposing the entry of foreign architects as it threatens their work share which they think should ideally belong to them. Now, this is both disturbing and conservative in my view. Ideally, let there be a fair competition to strive what is best for India. We can’t claim ownership of territories in a globalized world. This also limits excellence.

Let the stakeholders have a sound process in place of deciding and ultimately figure out what is best for them. How can we force it top-down? I see it as a great opportunity for the built environment in India to improve and excel their local practices in terms of quality, process and outcome. We are currently sitting on a huge deficit of skilled workers in built environment and we cannot afford to reject the talent pool that is coming to India from other parts of the world. Instead, we have well laid out policies which are inclusive in job generation for Indians and foreign workers and drive towards quality.

With what the world is today, where major chuck of opportunities lie with developing nations, it will be quite natural for businesses to go towards the source of opportunities. Either the gates are closed or shut. Partially open gates are still open gates. And this is the message Indian Community of Architects is sending out to the world, ‘that we do see the need of your expertise but we feel threatened by your competence and hence our reluctant approach in welcoming you’. We are being tyrannical in our approach here.

Tadao Ando was in Mumbai looking for an opportunity in architecture and he will probably be working with Godrej Group on a residential project. But that is all there is to it so far.

But given the current architecture scenario, there is so much scope for architecture and design work that we don’t have to hoard and mark territories. There is room for local architects, foreign architects and hybrid architects much the same. Whatever those terms have come to mean. I say this because I do not understand their correctness in this architecture context in our eroded identity where we have come unstuck from our roots, for better or worse, we don’t know yet.

What we lack is a vision of a overall city, a holistic urban plan, our architectural aspirations. Once we have that cleared, the rest of the smaller pieces of this jumbled puzzle will be easier to put together.

New York gears up for a month-long architecture festival

Posted on September 25, 2012 by Sharon

 

TWA Flight Center copyright Nicolas Lemery Nantel

Next week marks the beginning of Archtober, the second annual month-long celebration of architecture with tons or activities, programs and exhibitions in New York.  This year promises not to disappoint with more than 180 architecture and design lectures, conferences and programs happening across the city, many of them free.  Guides and tickets are available at the Center for Architecture and will be distributed at the Archtober Visitor Lounge at the Center and at participating institutions during the festival.

Now on the good stuff.   Open House New York (OHNY) will host a weekend event beginning Friday October 5th that is chock-filled with an impressive line up of building tours including many buildings that are closed to the public.  Among the buildings on this year’s tour are The Pershing Square Signature Theatre (Gehry Partner with H3 hardy Collaboration Architecture), Philip Johnson’s Four Season restaurant in the Seagrams building, which has been magnificently restored by Belmont Freeman, Lakeside at Prospect Park (Todd Williams Billie Tsien Architects with landscape architect Christian Zimmerman), and hard hat tours of structures underway, like the New School: University Center by SOM.

More private residences than ever before will be on view, such as One Museum Mile by Robert A.M Stern Architects with interiors by Andre Kikoski, and Paul Rudolph’s Modulightor Building.  Last but not least and a definite must see is Saarinen’s TWA Flight Center, which is back by popular demand.  Check out the many things going on in the city in October at the Center for Architecture and at other places around New York at the following web sites. www.archtober.org and www.ohny.org.

 

Wikipedia Takes Mumbai III

Posted on September 25, 2012 by Pallavi

Inspired by Wiki Loves Monuments, Wikipedia has come to Mumbai by the name Wikipedia Takes Mumbai III, scouting for similar heritage sites in the city and capturing them in pictures. The first Wiki Loves Monuments competition was held in 2010 in the Netherlands. In 2012, the competition extends beyond Europe, with a total of 32 participating countries.

Wiki Loves Monuments is an annual international photography competition held during September in which participants take pictures of historical monuments and heritage sites in their region, and upload them to Wikimedia Commons. The aim of the event is to highlight the heritage sites of the participating countries.

Just a day ago I read about lawyer Gautam Patel’s take on conservation and preservation in a city like Mumbai. He is of the opinion that architecture which is dilapidated should be let go to make way for changes. He goes on to say that not every architectural detail and every ramshackle structure is worth keeping. And he further added that citizens’ participation in such decision-making should be well considered. Fine points although I must contest their validity in case specific to Mumbai. In the city of Mumbai where heritage protection laws are loosely formed and applied, where and how to draw a line of what appears worth saving to me is worth saving to you too?

Then the point of citizen involvement is truly an inclusive thought but honestly for citizens of Mumbai whether saving heritage architecture is of priority is debatable. They are struggling for far more basic amenities like clean water, sanitation, affordable housing and sane commute for survival, so heritage conservation does appear like a lofty concept and will remain a coterie endeavor for a few more years in Mumbai.

That said, with events like Wiki Loves Monuments, it does generate people’s interest in the city’s precincts and architecture and its heritage, and more importantly the past that otherwise would have remained in a quite background of a declining city. Few will document through pictures and some will write about the experience, making it work as a passive awareness campaign whose benefits both tangible and intangible will be slow and organic but certainly positive in times to come. So, events like Wiki Loves Monuments work as quiescent catalysts and in less explicable ways for quantifying immediate benefits.

Hammer, Chisel, Drill: Noguchi’s Studio Practice

Posted on September 25, 2012 by Amy

Often described as a perfectionist, Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988) was a prolific and highly experimental artist whose sixty-year career ranged in output from sculpture, furniture, lighting and ceramics to gardens, set design, architecture and interior design. One of the most critically acclaimed sculptors of the twentieth century, no material or artistic discipline seemed beyond the limits of Noguchi’s capabilities – nor his intrigue.

An exhibition of his studio practice at The Noguchi Museum in New York next month will include more than sixty of his specialist tools, along with photos and film footage of the artist at work and an array of finished and unfinished sculptures. Opening on October 3rd, 2012, ‘Hammer, Chisel, Drill: Noguchi’s Studio Practice’ will be the first exhibition to reveal the working methods of this influential sculptor.

Born in the United States to a Japanese father and American mother, Noguchi lived in Japan for 13 years before moving to Indiana. He returned to Japan throughout his life and was deeply influenced by Japanese artistic traditions; an emphasis on simplicity, sensitivity to materials and a respect for craftsmanship were central to his practice.

Having set up studios around the world, with each culture embedding its impression on his development as an artist, the exhibition is arranged in relation to Noguchi’s working methods and phases of experimentation in his most important studios: in Greenwich Village and Long Island City in New York, Pietrasanta and Querceta in Italy and Kita Kamakura and Mure in Japan. But the exhibition begins with his time in Paris during the spring of 1927, when he became an apprentice to Constantin Brancusi. The famed sculptor encouraged the 23-year-old Noguchi to carve directly into stone instead of making preliminary clay or plaster models, and his distinctive form of abstraction permeated Noguchi’s approach to sculpture. He helped to carve Brancusi’s iconic ‘Birds in Space’ with a chemin de fed, a tool displayed in the exhibition along with two of Noguchi’s early abstract sculptures.

The next section features his stone carving from three studios ranging from the 1940s through to the late 1980s. During these four decades, Noguchi moved from the use of power tools on thin sheets of stone in the US, to a return to direct stone carving from the marble quarries of Monte Altissimo in Italy, to the employment of hard, igneous stones such as granite and basalt in Mure, on the Japanese island of Shikoku. Responding to the inherent inertia and heaviness of the latter materials, he allowed his sculptures to evolve slowly, their forms emerging organically from the stone in the vein of Michelangelo.

In the 1950s Noguchi collaborated with a number of young architects and later in life experimented with architectural and landscape projects, such as the Sunken Garden of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University (1960-1964), which is illustrated in the exhibition by his plaster models of the commissioned project, set around his drafting table. The extent to which Noguchi’s own space and surroundings were integral to his working practice is indicated by the fact that his studio in Kita Kamakura, with its primitive earthen walls, was constructed under his close direction.

The exhibition responds with due sensitivity to Noguchi’s work, not only in regard to the sculpture itself but in its attention to the intricate tools that helped materialise his incredible vision. Director of The Noguchi Museum, Jenny Dixon states that ‘by taking visitors behind the scenes into Noguchi’s studios, Hammer, Chisel, Drill provides a rare opportunity to appreciate the extraordinary technical prowess and perfectionism behind his artistic achievement.’

The exhibition lasts until April 28th, 2013.

Imagining Other Cities: Super Sydney

Posted on September 24, 2012 by Sydney Correspondent

Anuradha Chatterjee, Sydney Correspondent

Super Sydney, a project launched by Tim Williams and Andrew Burns, examines metropolitan challenges for the city by collating and interpreting the visions and aspirations of the community by conducting video interviews of about twelve interviewees from each of the forty one local councils in Sydney. The organizers note: ‘Through the democratization of Sydney’s voice, we will build a Metropolitan consciousness’. The findings and collated video interviews will be presented at the Sydney Architecture Festival in October. The process of hearing, understanding, and re-telling hundreds of individual narratives will build metropolitan consciousness and relevance as well as reveal the wealth of knowledge that is contained in the imagination of the citizens at large. A few things than can be said about the events and ideas surrounding this project are as follows:

Super Sydney, Tim Williams 2012

The first point is the variety and the number of people who are involved in the project. Besides the working group, which includes Sydney architects Tim Williams, Andrew Burns and Adam Russell, as well as Eva Rodriguez-Riestra, Gillian Redman-Lloyd from the Australian Institute of Architects and Penny Craswell, Editor of Artichoke magazine, there are volunteer animators (architects and designers from all over Sydney) who are conducting these video interviews, not to mention the Council members. In addition, the animators are being assisted by about forty architecture students from the Masters studio at the University of Sydney (Coordinator: Lee Stickells; Tutors: Anuradha Chatterjee, Tom Rivard, and Tim Williams). In other words, Super Sydney is firstly (and lastly) a collaborative and collective undertaking.

The second point is the speculative dimension to this project. Historically, studio projects (in addition to schemes for design competition and other unbuilt projects), have been the experimental ground for imagining urban utopias. University of Sydney architecture students have engaged in detail with ten councils to discern specific opportunities and challenges for housing, working, cultural experience, sustainability and transport. Students are then expected to synthesize these directions with the findings from the video interviews to present concept proposals for urban initiatives. The emerging suite of projects are as exciting as they are varied, and they include community markets, bridges and crossings, urban farms, new transport networks, virtual communities, affordable housing, programming parks for inclusive use, foreshore revitalizations, temporal and pop up urbanism, and so on.

Screenshot from Ted Talk Ellen Dunham Jones

The third point is that the focus on the ‘suburban’ domains as opposed to the City and Inner City is long overdue, refreshing, and well timed. Not only is Super Sydney informed by the recent success of The Future of Penrith, Penrith of the Future and the union of Councils in Paris called Paris Métropole (both utilizing the involvement of Tim Williams), but it is also coincident with trends in the US. Ellen Dunham Jones’s TED talk and her book Retrofitting Suburbia advocates densifying as well as adapting to new uses those areas which are severely underperforming. Dunham Jones discusses the need to redirect lot more of our growth into existing communities, build up and re-inhabitation of underused parking lots, and adaptation of dead malls as universities, nursing homes and so on. International Making Cities Livable Conference has just announced a similar premise with invitations to exhibit: ‘Successful Designs for Reshaping Suburbia’.

In Sydney, not only there is the real need to think along these lines (now that we have somewhat come to terms with the full extent of urban sprawl and lifeless suburban landscapes that promise no optimism or opportunity for public life), but there is a real opportunity. Each council area is marked by complex history, topography, cultural mix, geographical boundaries, and proximities, revealing issues and concerns that demand urban intervention, repair, or augmentation. It is this innate, endemic, and located opportunities for urbanism that Super Sydney aims to tease out. The lasting influence of Super Sydney, I suspect, will also be in providing a revised context for judging merit of architectural merit – as the sophisticated and thoughtful articulation of broader urban aims, and not mere formal and technological sophistry, or banal programmatic delivery.

Video: Super Sydney on Vimeo

Sources:
www.mca.com
www.twarch.com
www.supersydney.org
www.livablecities.org