Moreintelligentlife.com is the website of Intelligent Life magazine. Articles about Arts, Lifestyle, Travels, and Ideas

~ Posted by Robert Butler, February 2nd 2012

Visitors to Makkinga, a northern village in the Netherlands, are greeted on the outskirts by a nice joke. After a road sign that announces the 30kph speed limit, and another that says "Welkom", there's a third that says "Verkeersbordvrij". That translates as "free of traffic signs". It’s a sign that tells you something you can work out for yourself.
 
As Tom Vanderbilt explains in his book "Traffic" (2008), the sign captures the philosophy of Hans Monderman, a Dutch traffic engineer, who overturned years of bossy thinking by arguing that the fewer road signs there were in social settings, the safer those places would be. (Motorways were another matter.) When car drivers use their own intelligence, and interact with others who are sharing the same space, they slow down, and there are fewer accidents. 
 
The latest example of this counter-intuitive thinking was unveiled in London yesterday. Exhibition Road runs half a mile from South Kensington tube station to Hyde Park, and passes entrances to the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Natural History Museum and the Science Museum. It has cost nearly £30m to redesign this stretch of road and the best bit about it is the stuff that's not there.  read more »

Over half of the world's population lives in cities. There are more, and bigger, cities than ever before. Why, then, are we so wary of them?

Alastair Donald and Austin Williams are two architecture critics who wanted to respond to critics of urbanisation. Their book, "The Lure of the City", is a collection of essays that seeks to explore the role cities play as engines of social change and creativity. Their work celebrates cities as places of uncertainty where great things can, and often do, happen.

“Seldom is there an unabashed hymn of praise to the progress, development and transformational dynamics that urbanisation brings,” says Williams. “Even those who nominally assume that cities are good or efficient places to live and work are somewhat troubled by the pace of change, the numbers involved, the 'damage' caused to the environment.”

Here Austin Williams explains some common misconceptions about cities and looks to the future.

In your book you argue that instead of worrying about the unsustainable growth of cities we should embrace urbanisation. Why?

People are not the problem, they are the solution, but sadly we seem to have conceded that humans are the cause of the planet's imminent demise. Sustainability has become a cloak for this misanthropic attitude. It suggests that we are a drain on resources, a harmful influence.  read more »

Michael Pawlyn is a British architect with an affinity for the natural world. So he is passionate about biomimicry—a discipline that looks at nature’s best ideas to inspire solutions to human problems. The Eden Project in Cornwall (pictured bottom), where Pawlyn worked as a lead architect, is probably the best-known example of this approach. The pillowy and interlocking design of these biomes was influenced by dragonfly wings. 

Since leaving Grimshaw, a British architecture firm, in 2007, Pawlyn has concentrated exclusively on environmentally sustainable projects that are influenced by nature. One of his goals is to turn linear consumption models into cycles, whereby waste is used to fuel something else, much like the interdependency of ecosystems.  

Having noticed that the boundaries of deserts shift over time, Pawlyn’s latest scheme is to help reverse desertification in arid regions by growing vegetation. His Sahara Forest project (pictured below) is an ambitious attempt to use concentrated solar power and seawater-cooled greenhouses to produce renewable energy, crops and water. Its success thus far has inspired new feasibility studies in Jordan and Qatar.

Earlier this autumn Pawlyn published his first book, "Biomimicry in Architecture". In a conversation with More Intelligent Life, Pawlyn talks about his latest enterprises and his plans for the future.

Why were you drawn to biomimicry?  read more »

Every year hundreds of buildings in London open their doors to the public for one weekend in September, allowing visitors a glimpse under the skin of the city’s architecture. Open House London, which takes place this weekend (September 17th and 18th), will grant access to over 700 offices, homes and civic monuments. The entirely free event also includes dozens of neighbourhood walks, boat and cycle tours, talks and debates all over London. Giovanna Dunmall offers her top-five picks for where to go:

1. The former Commonwealth Institute building (pictured above), a Grade II-listed structure on High Street Kensington, is renowned for its curvaceous green copper roof. The Institute is a prime example of 20th-century modernism, designed by Lord Cunliffe in 1958. It is about to be renovated by John Pawson and Rem Koolhaas, so this is the last chance for the public to see the original project before it re-opens as the new Design Museum in 2014.

2. Make a trip to the Hermitage Community Moorings in Wapping for a glimpse of what it is like to live on the water. HCM provides berths for historic vessels that have all been painstakingly restored and converted into homes. These boats now make up a permanent moored community, but the boats are navigable and can explore other waters. There is also a Pier House, a floating space for local events.  read more »

Making your home a temple is gaining new meaning in the Netherlands, where churches are being repurposed as living spaces. Since 1970 more than a thousand churches have been closed in the country, as the largely atheist population has little use for them. More than a third was demolished. The rest are simply in need of a clever architect. 

This morning brought an interesting announcement about a new initiative that is meant to consider the changing needs of urban life. BMW and the Guggenheim Foundation have come together for something called the BMW Guggenheim Lab, a six-year initiative to "engage a new generation of leaders in architecture, art, science, design, technology, and education, who will address the challenges of the cities of tomorrow by examining the realities of the cities of today." The Lab is ultimately an attractive mobile unit for sharing ideas and solutions about urban environments, which will start in North America in late summer 2011 before moving on to cities in Europe and Asia. The plan is to promote a multidisciplinary forum for exploring new approaches that balance our desire for "urban comfort" with our need to be more environmentally responsible.

This is all well and good. I'm all for big corporations to spend money on thought experiments that may ultimately, one day, far off into the future, have a positive effect on how we live our lives. Despite all of the vague language and the promise of much hot air to come (tell me: has anything ever been accomplished at a forum?), it is churlish to complain about these Labs, which are innovative and full of good intentions.   read more »

Minimalism tends to be seen as something that takes over your life—all of nothing. But if you have a creaky old house, full of the flotsam of family life, all is not an option. Round us, in north London, many families manage one minimal room: the kitchen.

We’ve been in our house long enough for our children, who are 16 and 12, to have spent their lives there. On the material front, my wife and I are a classic mismatch—one hoarder, one sorter, no winner. To look at my stuff, you’d never guess I was an editor. The house is nice, but it is Victorian and narrow. The kitchen we inherited was poky, so you either crashed into each other or lugged everything into the playroom. The house seemed to be saying: you can have kids, or guests, not both. 

So we found an architect (young and cheap) and a builder (neither young nor cheap), to knock out a wall and extend the kitchen out the back. Our daughter was a bookworm, so the architect turned a fireplace into a reading booth. Our son loved painting Warhammer figures, so she put in a cupboard with sliding drawers for his tiny warriors.

We made a makeshift kitchen upstairs, fled the basement, and joined the tedious ranks of people who choose to get builders in and then complain about them. The work sailed over budget and took five months, just long enough for our son to grow out of Warhammer. But we got our slice of minimalism: white walls and cupboards, glass worktops, stone floor, lashings of space and light.  read more »

Works of art often rely on support, financial or otherwise, to reach the public. Tony Fretton, a partner in Tony Fretton Architects and best known for designing arts buildings such as the Lisson Gallery, and Mary Beard, a professor of classics at Cambridge and author of “It’s a Don’s Life” (Profile), continue our Intelligent Life mini-series on classics that might not get a green light today.

ALVARO SIZA’S  SWIMMING  POOL

The public swimming pool on the beach at Leça da Palmeira in Portugal, designed by Alvaro Siza in the 1960s, is a great work that perhaps could not be made now. It is a public pool for the working people of Oporto, set in an industrial landscape, and redolent of a time when people were in contact with the world through physical work on land and sea, and less pre-occupied by ideas of public safety.

There’s an understanding of how different groups of people—children, adolescents, adults and older people—can co-exist. It is fantastically enjoyable, with places to sunbathe between the rocks, a children’s paddling pool on the beach and a swimming pool between boulders in the sea. Like all great architecture, it combines pragmatism with blatant poetry. The sea here is wonderful with crashing waves, but is a shipping lane and very polluted. The pools let you enjoy the sea from without, and at a deeper level their relations to the natural and industrialised surroundings are holistic and non-judgmental. ~ TONY FRETTON

THE COLOSSEUM  read more »

The High Line is one of very few places in its fashionable New York City neighbourhood where a person can stroll alone and in generic clothes without
feeling awkward. The 1.45 mile-long path covers a distance beginning on
Gansevoort Street near 10th Avenue and running up to 34th Street in the Meatpacking district. Given the High Line's upcoming one-year anniversary on June 8th, I spent a recent weekday revisiting the park to see whether there were still lines to get in (no) and funny German tourists wandering about (yes).

The park's entrance takes pedestrians up a flight of stairs onto the rails, the first section of which overlooks a trio of actual meat-packing plants: Quality Veal, Weichsel Beef and John W. Williams Inc. Veal & Lamb. Trucks move in and out of a nearby parking lot while helicopters hover above the Hudson River overhead. The wind and city white noise combine into a whir that feels quiet, and the whole area smells like a grilled-cheese sandwich mixed with sea breeze. I watched a photo crew ascend the park's staircase and set up shop near a clump of sedges: stylists in leather leggings, a photographer, and a model in terrycloth robe and Ugg boots. The model shed her robe to reveal a blue mini-dress, and soon the photographer was lying on the ground like GI Joe, shooting upwards. "Good. Nice. Use the railing," he said. I asked a staffer if a permit was required for photo shoots, and she nodded. "They don't have one," she added. A film crew shot b-roll twenty yards away. The High Line paths are lined, in May, with violet wood sorrel, chokecherry, wild geranium and grey birch trees.  read more »

Tony Candido's resume includes a roster of legendary mentors. After studying at the Illinois Institute of Technology under Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Ludwig Hilberseimer, he worked as an architectural designer for I.M. Pei and contributed to Konrad Wachsmann's groundbreaking Air Force airport hangar design. But Candido has also pursued his own vision. He began painting professionally in the early 1950s, using sweeping brush strokes to create abstract explorations (as with "Night Paintings", from 1956), figural studies ("Asahikawa Heads", in 1988) and conceptual, architecturally driven works, such as his continuing "Cable Cities" series (pictured), which depicts structures embedded in the landscape. Now aged 85, Candido paints regularly and teaches at Cooper Union's Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture. Students in his studio class tackle the idea of the urban farm, a concept Candido pioneered in the 1990s that intersects ideas of farming, architecture and urban planning. This month Cooper Union has mounted "The Great White Whale is Black", a retrospective exhibition honouring five decades of Candido's work. The day the show opened Candido took a moment to speak with More Intelligent Life about his approach to painting, his fascination with spatial relationships and the relationship between cities and their surroundings. More Intelligent Life: You've worked with some huge names in the architecture world, including Mies van der Rohe and I.M. Pei.  read more »