It’s a proposal to reuse multistory carparks as mushroom farms until they are demolished and replaced with something more usefull than inner city parking.

There is more detail on the VEIL site about the project.

“The Mushroom Carpark”  – Ben Doherty
This exploration offers an innovative approach to redesigning car parking stations into transitionary resources which could be used for mushroom production. Ben suggests that in the short-term future there will be reduced car use due to high fuel prices and the subsequent uptake of car-sharing schemes and cycling. The ensuing reduction of car use will provide a new wasted space – car parks.

The talk was filmed, and I’ve been promised that it’ll show up on Google video at some point in the future if you want to see what I have to say about blind darts playing pirates and their relevance to heuristic algorithms.

Acrobat butchered some of the text when I exported, but otherwise it’s all fine. There are 2 live demos that aren’t in there, but they’ll show up in the video and I’ll publish the code soon.

The culmination of this semester’s hard work from all the students that have been involved in the current incarnation of the Generative Components university program will be at UTS on the 27^th and 28^th of this month (November)So far it’s shaping up to be a fascinating 2 days, mainly because unlike last time, I won’t be the main presenter!!

We’ve got a great lineup of speakers from LAB, Arup, Woods Baggot, University of Sydney and a few others TBC.The first day will be presentations of the work that the five universities have produced this semester (nearly all of it very very impressive, and I’m grumpy cynical these days). So that’s work from UTS, QUT, university of Queensland, university of Melbourne and Auckland university.

The second day will be split up a bit more. The morning will be 2 parallel streams, I’ll be running a more advanced workshop where the focus will be on working in teams and very quicky taking bits of the pool of work that the individual team members have produced over the semester, and mashing them together and making a new project.

The other stream will be a bit more of a gentlemen’s club type affair where the tutors from each university get together and pick over the good and bad bits of the program, and work out ways to improve it next semester.

The afternoon will be a chance to kick back and see how the ‘pros’ do it, and then for the ‘refreshments’.

If you are a student, come along because it’s a great chance to meet the people that you’ll run into again and again for the rest of your career, get a huge chunk of inspiration, and show off your wares (it’s got serious job getting potential!!).

If you are a ‘real person’ then come along, there is a massive pool of enthusiasm and talent that is just overflowing with possibilities to enrich your company! There is also a world of inspiration and new techniques for you to take a critical look at.

If you’d like to present, or have any other questions, leave a comment or email me directly ^ben _at^{notionparallax}_dot^co_dot^uk

here’s the print quality poster

this is a collection of the pics i took yesterday at the crits. i’ll do a full post when i’ve had a look through the work properly after the show tonight!

Here are the first images from the class that I’ve been teaching with Bharat Dave at Melbourne Uni.

Everyone has worked amazingly hard, and there are some really great outcomes so far.

here are a few of them.

There are real physical models of all of these in the pipeline, so check back soon for the latest!

Brounge is a design methodology coined by Barnaby Bennett, watch the video for a bit more info!

There have been plenty of examples of people using multi touch displays for useful and interesting things, but the idea behind this totally ignores the practical things like the cost element of having hundreds of beamers and a server farm to rival Google, and just goes for the hope that something cool might come from the thought experiment (such is the nature of architectural education)

so what’s going on?

1. when you first arrive, the floor’s inactive
2. initially, ‘things’ (in this case little flowers) flock around your feet
3. then once you stop moving some colour gradient announces your arrival as a platform dweller
4. a menu of possible destinations pops up, and you can select one by stomping on it (this is actually quite intuitive)
5. on selection, information related to that destination pops up, i.e. “move back, this next train is not yours”
6. to kill time, news stories from a standard feed appear (these ones are from today’s age)
7. when your train is due, the distractions fade
8. and you are prompted by a moving line move to where the doors will open
9. disembarking passengers are allowed passage as there is an organised group ready to board
10. you board.

it’s that simple!

There are plenty of other things that could be done with it, but that’s a story for another day children.

this might need captions, but we can’t decide on the font, so they are in my head at the moment…

this is another of my design studio writings, it’s a little off topic, but I’ve only just got the internet at home, so I’ve been drinking coffee and sitting at my kitchen table without a connection and battering my keyboard. I might go back over this and put in some pictures and  references, but then again…

This is an incredibly complex issue, and I’ve spent hours debating it with numerous people. Each of whom have had incredibly different views on the current position and future direction of the profession.

One thing that I have noticed is that the views tend to group themselves into three distinct camps.

Those outside the profession seem to take the view that nothing has change, and that architects do what architects do what they always do. I still frequently encounter the idea, spawned in the postwar period of frantic rebuilding, that architects make the ‘ideal husband’. Although the gender bias has levelled off a little, the idea is still perpetuated by Hollywood portraying architects as sensitive and artistic, but respectable and with a steady job.

The other two camps are divisions from the inside. The pragmatic view that ‘not much has changed’ keeps up with the regulations and is kept contentedly busy doing ‘real’ work, and the other group tends to be more theoretical, or spend more time interfacing with other groups, and they seem to be in a state of blind terror that the ‘profession’ is facing an imminent collapse.

My own viewpoint has been oscillating between the two camps for some time now, but with a definite bias toward the terrified. In order to try and substantiate these positions I’ll expand on my view of them. I don’t imagine that anyone is entirely within either of these groups, but more that these attitudes are mixed in for both

The pragmatic group seems to be the realists. The practice of architecture is no different to the practice of accountancy or dentistry, and that there will always be a need for someone to design buildings and administer contracts. All occupations face threats from the unstoppable force of modernisation and technological replacement. As far as I’m aware though, the world of accountancy is not reduced to a gibbering wreck every time a new edition of Quicken is released. Engineers embrace new analysis tools rather than rejecting them as a force of evil removing their design abilities. It’s difficult to generalise about this groups attitude to the threats of other professions ‘moving in on their turf’ but mostly it seems that they are happy to go along with the evolving flow of their roles. With the vastly more global market, there is currently a huge body of work available, and this shows no sign of slowing during the foreseeable future. (Other than potential effects of the looming global warming crisis.) This group considers itself safe.

The other group considers the subdivision of the roles traditionally performed by architects as a destructive force. A team of specialised consultants now collaborate on projects, slowly taking edging their circles into the circle of the architects in the Venn diagram of project responsibilities. In an increasingly risk averse world, architects are more than happy to allow this. this group’s chief fear is that very soon the roles that reside inside the architects will be duplicated entirely within the overlapping remits of the other members of the project team, therefore rendering them obsolete.

This leaves the profession in an interesting situation. The ‘Architect’s’ position from a traditional point of view is threatened, but there is a new opportunity to practice in collaboration with interesting people from a fascinating pool of backgrounds.

In a retrospective talk about his incredibly diverse career Ted Nelson (one of the founding fathers of the internet and the co-inventor of Hypertext) described his insatiable thirst for knowledge, and how when one finds out about a new subject that one of the things that becomes most apparent is how much more there is to learn. His phrase was “knowledge is fractal” to describe these never ending, self similar boundaries to our ignorance.

As the regulatory pressures on buildings become more stringent, and therefore the knowledge required to fulfil them becomes more specialised, the possibility of one person being able to be expert in all of these issues becomes less and less likely. (especially when one must convince an insurance company of competence in everything!)

In the kitchen of an upmarket restaurant, the head chef never actually does any cooking during service. They stand at the hotplate and assemble the dishes and direct the service. They have previously designed the dishes, and have an overall knowledge of the service, but the deserts will most likely have emerged out of a discussion with the pastry chef, and the sauces will have resulted from a collaboration with the saucier. The fact that they don’t actually ‘cook’ during service doesn’t diminish their standing in the kitchen, and their role as the conductor in the kitchen puts them in a position where they can stay in control of their team, and by being at the hotplate, they control what goes over the interface between the kitchen and the floor.

This analogy quite aptly describes the position of the architect from my perspective. The kitchen is the ‘design space’ where the architects job is to coordinate the consultants (the common language issue) and control the interface between the design space and the client. This position as the universal interpreter sounds as if it could be reduced to the position of pure management, but as proved quite conclusively in the health service management without knowledge of what each part of the managed does is doomed to failure.

The ‘T shaped person’1 seems to be the ideal for how recruitment agencies see candidates. A very broad but superficial knowledge of almost everything, and then a very specific are of knowledge that marks that person as unique. This diagram probably oversimplifies the situation, and a more accurate diagram would probably look like a plant root system.

A number of people that I have spoken to share my belief that the future of architectural firms will evolve out of the position of employing people to work internally, but will rather become more of an enabling service that crystallises teams out of a nebula of ‘T shaped’ consultants. Each will speak a common language, but their specific knowledge will combine to fill the requirements of the project. In a sense each project will be organised as a separate company, and it will employ the consultants directly with team insurance, and team goals.

This leaves the role of the architect in an uncertain position. If they are to assume the position of conductor/head chef/recruitment agent, then that abstracted management position would probably be against the reasons that most people initially got involved in the profession. That leaves exploitation of the ‘long tail’ of the ‘T’ as the most plausible option, so a high degree of specialisation in one particular aspect of architecture is likely to become the norm. This could take several forms, but the two that immediately spring to mind are a specialism in a particular outcome, i.e. schools of hotels, where there is industry specific knowledge required. This branch will be predominantly client facing, and is already fairly well established in current practice. The other branch is for designers to have a specific knowledge of a particular consultant or specialist’s line of work. Given that a specialist is required, it is unlikely that the designer would be able to perform their role, but it is also unlikely that the specialist will be able to communicate effectively with a ‘non-indoctrinated’ designer. This is a double edged problem, the specialist may struggle with the designers lexicon, and the designer will not be able to take full advantage of the specialist due to not having an understanding of what it is they actually do. Those in the universal communicator role are also generally capable of performing small amounts of the work of the specialist, or count as specialists in their own right.

1The concept of the T shaped person was first introduced to me by Rob Woodbury at the 2007 Smart Geometry conference, but it was first coined;

The hunt for a new breed of computer manager is on. The British Computer Society, in a controversial report published last year, described the quarry as a ”hybrid” manager who would combine business expertise with IT skills. The hybrid manager, it said, would be distinguished by his or her ability to relate to ”the broad picture” and to people, understanding their motivation and aspirations; he or she would also be energetic, intuitive, a good listener, and (cryptically) would have ”an unusual set of interests”.

This type of rounded personality is also sought in other branches of the same theory, which prizes individuals known as T-shaped People. These are a variation on Renaissance Man, equally comfortable with information systems, modern management techniques and the 12-tone scale.
—David Guest, “The hunt is on for the Renaissance Man of computing,” The Independent (London), September 17, 1991

Mostly for the last few weeks I’ve been in my office, vaguely working, and doing a lot of peripheral stuff. I’ve been linking the stuff I do into the back of this blog (see the tabs at the top) and doing too much GC related work for my own good (to the detriment of my studies) but hopefully I have all that under control, and I have teaching material for the next few weeks of my classes, and a bit of a presentation to give.

I managed to turn up to a meeting today a spectacular 24 hours early, which I think is the least late I’ve ever been for anything. Oh well, it’s good practice for tomorrow.

I worked all night on Saturday to get the presentation done, and then tried to get the train to go surfing, but they don’t run much on Sundays, so I grabbed my bike and headed the 20km down the bay to nicks place. There is a bit of a culture of cycling around the bay early Sunday morning, and there are always hundreds of roadies out in full team kit giving it some, but I can honestly say that I wasn’t overtaken at all, and I got a lot of very funny looks as I passed people in my flip flops, rolled up jeans and a hoodie.

There is a café about half way there that has it’s entire front covered with bikes hanging up, so I grabbed a latte and carried on. Latte’s are stronger here, not the pansy milk-fest that they feed you in the UK.

The morning’s surfing was great, I was popping up quickly, getting good diagonal takeoffs and some quite long rides, I just need to get them all together and I’ll be fine!

Then in the afternoon, I slept on the beach and periodically played with a really friendly Staffordshire bull terrier who kept waking me up by licking my face.

I went to a great talk this evening by Peter Harper from CAT, he presented the new CAT suggestions for how far and fast we ought to cut carbon emissions. It’s pretty drastic stuff, but it’s all very well researched, and even though I’m a bit of a hippie when it comes to this stuff, I think it’s necessary. Take a look at the report and see for yourself!

I really need to get my sleep pattern fixed (more of it!) and do a bit more exercise. Sitting still all week and then thrashing myself for 8 hours can’t be a good way to live.