Week 3: Workshop on Describing the City

Different ways to analyse and map a city; not just the streets and where they go, but so much more; the way a city has evolved over time, a conceptual representation, the relationship of open to closed spaces, and so on.







A site section



A street section



 



Regional Analysis



Mobility Analysis





Functional Analysis



Valley Plan - beginning



A street analysis


 

Lecture 10 - Musings

City and Memory

Good music today, an Australian classic, Skyhooks’ "This is my city", released in 1976, by Mushroom Records. Took me back to high school, or just after anyway.

Today, Mirko elaborated on how memories (and people) are involved in the making of place, therefore, a city. He also spoke about heritage conservation and how this practice help or hinder a place and its memories.

People recognise a place because of what they experience within the space and the memories created from that experience. To follow on from that, city dwellers build memorials to remember a certain time or person and these memorials are the reminders of what went before. Sometimes these memorials can only be significant for a particular group of people, but it does not make the memorial any less significant. Anzac Square and the Shrine of Remembrance has great significance to the people of Brisbane and Australia, but a newly arrived visitor or immigrant from anywhere outside of a British settled country would have no idea.

Every place has a history, whether we know it or not is irrelevant, and that history is what makes a place, a place, somewhere memorable for some reason, as stated above. Just because we don’t know a place’s history does not make a place ‘null’. It’s like the crashing tree in a forest, if no-one is there to hear the sound, is it a sound? It still happens, and who is to say that it does not register with the birds, animals, insects etc.

The same thing with a place’s history, just because no human with writing ability is there to record it, does not mean it has not happened.

Architecture itself goes a long way to creating and reinforcing people’s memories; as a place to experience and a lot of it being so long-lasting, e.g. the Coliseum. It takes something three dimensional and makes it fourth dimensional due to the added aspect of time.

I’d like to add another dimension here, that of sense, especially smell and my partner often mentions the ‘presence’ of a building. The feeling a building evokes within your body. I know that sounds weird, but I have experienced it myself, especially in places of great suffering, such as a jail. Maybe it is a ‘sixth sense’ or maybe I am just going crazy.

With regard to the heritage question, it looks like it has been going on for quite some time, in one form or another. Sometimes the form is a quarry, such as the Pyramids, where ancient peoples used the stone to build elsewhere. This practice has greatly affected our ability to recreate what has gone before, therefore, heritage practices have needed to be modified and legislation enacted to prevent this destruction by ‘stone robbers’.

Over the last century or two, different countries have enacted charters and other legislation to protect the building or area in question. I totally agree with the practice of preservation rather than restoration. The shoring up of walls, the use of new material where there is no idea of what was there before or cannot be recreated, Old Government House in the QUT grounds is a good example of this type of preservation, mostly interior.

We must always remember that cities are for people and people have their memories ‘embedded’ in the architecture of a city. Treating this architecture carefully, no matter what its age, goes a long way to establishing a ‘platform’ for these memories.

Presentación final

Music:
Chilean Pipe Music clip - Rite of Strings

Chumbeque Recipe:
Biscuit:
250g soft unsalted butter
120g caster sugar
1/2 tspn vanilla essence
375g plain flour
90g rice or corn* flour

Pre-heat oven to 150C.
Using electric mixer, beat butter, sugar and vanilla until light, fluffy and creamy in colour.
Sift flours together.
Mix into butter/sugar/vanilla mixture until you have a crumbly textured dough.
Turn out onto a sheet of baking paper and and roll into a ball, kneading gently along the way.
Press or roll out to approx 5mm thick, thinner if you  can.
Using a square or oblong biscuit cutter, cut the dough and place onto buttered and floured or baking paper lined trays.
Refrigerate for minimum of 15 minutes to allow dough to rest.
Bake for approximately 20-25 minutes or until light golden colour. Do not allow to brown too much at all.
Let cool before filling with lemon butter.

* If using corn flour, make sure it is REAL CORN flour, not just very finely ground wheat flour.

Lemon Butter/Cheese/Curd:
2 whole eggs
3 egg yolks (whites can be used to make a meringue case for leftover lemon butter.)
3/4 cup caster sugar
60g unsalted butter
Juice and zest of one lemon

In a double boiler*, over simmering water, whisk the sugar, whole eggs and egg yolks until creamy and the sugar has dissolved.
Add butter, juice and zest.
Continue to stir in double boiler until thickened.
Cool a little and pour into sterilised jars.
Mixture will thicken further on cooling.

Makes about 2 cups or 500mls.
* If you don't have a double boiler, a ceramic or glass mixing bowl sitting snugly in a saucepan of simmering water is a good substitute.

To assemble:
Spread a portion of lemon butter onto a biscuit and place another biscuit on top, squeeze together slightly.
Spinkle with extra caster sugar.

Something else that is delicious as a spread for the Chumbeque:

Dulce de Leche

(Latin American caramel spread - from my Uruguyan friend, Sabina Espinoza)
Dulce de leche, is a sweet caramel spread popular throughout Latin America and used as a spread for bread, pastries, cakes, crepes and cookies like Argentinian alfajores cookies. It is known as cajeta in Mexico, manjar blanco in Peru, Chile and Bolivia, and arequipe in Colombia.
Makes about 3 cups.

4 cups whole milk
1 1/4 cups Sugar
1 teaspoon Vanilla
1/4 teaspoon Baking soda

Add all the ingredients to a heavy-bottomed saucepan and stir well to dissolve the sugar completely.
Set the saucepan over medium heat and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to very low and simmer, stirring frequently, until thickened and caramelized, about 1 to 1 1/2 hours.
Transfer to a clean glass jar and refrigerate. Will keep for 1-2 weeks.

Enjoy with coffee,  or even put a dollop of lemon butter or dulce de leche on your icecream or sandwich for a decadent treat.

Adios!

Lecture 7 - Musings

Cities and Desire

Of the two speakers, Chris Schofield, and his look into surrealism, hit a chord with me.

I have always liked surrealism; fantasy and anything that can make the mundane either disappear or change in some way.
 The Modernism movement of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries started looking forward for its design inspiration, rather than backward. I know that sounds weird, but to my mind, was a movement that brought back the “delight” into design, in particular the Arts and Crafts/Art Nouveau/Jugenstihl period, and some extent, Art Deco, by looking to nature and imagination, for inspiration. 

Gaudi

Montaner

Jujol

I have a real love of Barcelona and all things Gaudi, Jujol and Montaner and the Modernismé movement in northern Spain. Would love to live there sometime in the not too distant future.

 I do sometimes wonder whether I have been born into the wrong century.

Chris Rawlinson, on the other hand, I found to be rather dry in his presentation. His idea that architecture is a mediator between our desires and fears and it is shaped by our desires made me think of the medieval castles built because of a fear of attack from somewhere. I had a similar thought regarding cathedrals of the same period, built because of a desire to honour and praise God, as well as showing other cities that their faith was more than theirs. Ego wasn’t a dirty word in those days.

http://gaudiallgaudi.com/AA002.htm

http://www.gaudiallgaudi.com/images/jujol.jpg  

http://www.gaudiallgaudi.com/images/Lluis_Domenech_Montaner.jpg 

Lecture 5 – Musings

The Design of the City

Morphology is a linguistics term to describe words and their structure, therefore, urban morphology is the study of city structure.[1] It probably goes further than that, also covering people and how they inhabit a city over time.

Overtime, different configurations for a city have evolved, based on; a grid, a utopia (a perfect city?), a view or where the powerful people lived, such as a palace. Sometimes you get a city that can encompass several configurations, including the organic “just happen” mode.

Iquique & Law of the Indies

Romanae Castrum

The Spanish “Law of the Indies” and the Roman Castrum Layout[2] was a partly successful attempt to organise the layouts of new towns and cities to take best advantage of the terrain and the environment. York has evidence of this Roman layout and the Chilean city of Iquique, the Law of the Indies.

When I was in the UK, York in particular, a city originally built by the Vikings, was developed further over time through the different eras such as Tudor and Elizabethan, ending up with an organic city centre, with a sprawl from that point. You can see where people once walked everywhere because the streets are narrow and the buildings almost meet above your head. [3]

The Shambles, York

What I found interesting was the way you could determine a certain amount of history from the way a city evolved overtime, i.e. Berlin. The buildings before WWII and what was built after WWII showed there was some major catastrophe sometime in the last 100 years, because of the radical change in building style, in some areas.

What I also found interesting was the way cities “grew up” over time based on where the people went and then later, where vehicles could go, sometimes completely neglecting the inhabitants, US cities like San Francisco or Chicago, with their suburban sprawl. Many Australian cities have suffered the same sprawl.

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[1] http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/morphology.html

[2] http://castrumandquonset.blogspot.com/2010/01/castra-design.html

[3] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e5/York_Shambles.jpg

Lecture 4 – Musings

Urban Analysis

To analyse something properly, a certain amount of data is needed so you can draw reasonably useful conclusions or recommendations. For urban analysis, mapping data supplies this quantity of data and the development of satellite imaging has expanded this field immensely, therefore, supplying massive amounts of data for this type of analysis.

I can see where this subject fits in with architecture as no building exists in isolation, it can’t. There will always be something around it, even if it is space.

Buildings exist in relationship to the other buildings, streets and spaces around it and this relationship is one that is everywhere and has existed in time as well.

The three schools of thought, French, English and Italian have developed in an attempt to create a framework around which we can further analyse cities and their development. To some extent they have been successful.

BUT, from further research, I found that there are further “schools of thought”, in particular, the Chicago School,[1] and the LA School,[2] about urban analysis, so it makes me think that there is no one “best” way to analyse our urban areas, it most likely depends on what you want to prove, like statistics; you can make the numbers say anything you want to.

I know that is a negative point of view, but urban analysis is a dynamic, evolving field and has a long way to go, but it is going to be an interesting ride.

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[1] http://what-when-how.com/social-sciences/urban-studies-social-science/

[2] http://dornsife.usc.edu/la_school

You wouldn't think it was Iquique, Chile.

Video - It could be a town in Queensland