The real post-modernism

5 Feb ’07 – 11:28 pm

We’ll confess we’d like to be corrupted and this post is a straight out attempt at getting some payola. Admittedly the subject, the Dutch designers Meesters & Van Der Park, deserve all the praise we can give them but unfortunately they have just announced the split up of their partnership.

So we’re saying nothing but the nicest things in the hope we will be rewarded with one of these for free, surely they’ll find a surplus one as they work out their property settlement?*

We’d been saving up the link to them so we could write a post where we talked about the sheer beauty of their design which, like much recent Dutch design,

combines a nostalgia for the old with a surface of the contemporary,

an aesthetic of adaptive reuse, eg this carpet made of blankets

or this sand blasted and perforated cupboard.

They have adapted the aesthetic of archaeological repair (with added windmills and big Mac signs).

And they’re even into social knitting, having designed new products for Eindhoven Red Cross volunteer knitters. In other words they are the very model of the modern cool young designers. And we’re not just saying that because we’d love to have ……

No, the real reason is because we wanted to write about them as a perfect illustration of the developing post-hydrocarbon aesthetic, as defined in this very interesting essay by Richard Heinberg in Energy Bulletin

At first thought, aesthetics might seem utterly incidental, given the survival challenges imposed by Peak Oil, climate chaos, mass extinctions, and so on. However, art is part of the necessary process of cultural adaptation. People inevitably find ways not just to endure, but to enjoy — to find happiness in the midst of change. We are, after all, environment shapers. As birds build nests, we build campsites, fashion clothing, and (if we are civilized humans) build cities. But as we shape our environments, those environments in turn mold our perceptions, our judgments, our expectations, our very consciousness.

After analysing the aesthetics of the industrial revolution and the Arts and Crafts movement followed by “the tragic interlude of cheap abundance” and “hydro-carbon: big, fast and ugly” he goes on to list a number of likely characteristics. Now if there is one thing you can say about art history it is that it can take extraordinary and unpredictable turns, but his predictions are very convincing. The work of Meesters & Van Der Park and many other contemporary designers undoubtedly display some of the characteristics of the transitional era he describes (forgive the long quote)

8. Because the transitional era (i.e., the coming century) will be one in which species will continue to vanish, and because people will find themselves having to adapt to weather and other natural conditions (since they will no longer be able to insulate themselves from these with high-energy buildings and machines), workers will probably be inspired to incorporate themes from nature into their products.
9. In their efforts to identify aesthetic themes appropriate to hand labor and natural materials, workers will likely end up drawing upon vernacular design traditions.
10. Because people living in the transitional era will be witnessing the passing of the fossil-fueled machine culture of their youth, they will probably be inspired to incorporate occasional ironic or nostalgic comments on that passing into their artistic output.
11. Beauty may to a certain extent be in the eye of the beholder, but there are universal principles of harmony and proportion that perennially reappear; and, given that workers will be required to invent much of their aesthetic vocabulary from scratch, they will no doubt fall back upon these principles frequently.
12. Since we are entering an era of declining availability of raw materials, the new aesthetic will by necessity emphasize leanness and simplicity, and will eschew superfluous decoration. The Zen architecture of Japan may serve as an inspiration in this regard.

Now go and read the whole essay, it’s worth it.

*We should explain that the reason we haven’t posted much in the last few weeks is because we’ve had the excavator in ripping up our garden, again, for about the tenth time now in the last three years. It’s all because we have about an acre of land that has in its time been everything from a general store to a car wreckers yard and a bus depot so it is now more than a metre deep in buried car wrecks, road fill, kerosene shale, endless contaminants etc.

We took on the project of fixing it up and turning it into a contemporary garden, ie one that combined remediation with food production. It’s been great fun but the excavator is now a machine burned indelibly into our subconscious.

By Ian Milliss | Posted in art, furniture, gardening, household, ideas | Comments (1)

There’s only one Silver Bullet

4 Feb ’07 – 4:36 pm

The Silver Bullet Cafe at Alice Springs in outback Australia is like a pattern book of adaptive reuse and recycling projects.

In fact it has more than 90% recycled materials. Consisting of several 4.2m x 15m Silver Bullet caravans once used as remote area schoolrooms it also incorporates the remains of a WWII ordnance depot.

It’s all set within an arid zone garden furnished with buses, trucks, recycled oil drums,

clothes hoists, road sign tables and more. They’ve even got a tyre swan – bliss! Is this the Mad Max future as heaven rather than hell?

We love it because it looks a mess and where we live “tidiness” is regularly used as an excuse to destroy heritage sites. We think messiness is next to genius – as Einstein once remarked “If a cluttered desk signs a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?”

All photos by jogaroopy

By Ian Milliss | Posted in architecture, building, gardening | Comments (0)

This printed life

4 Feb ’07 – 12:55 pm

If there is one thing we are looking forward to this year it’s the test run of Behrokh Khoshnevis’ Contour Crafting 3D House Printer in April 2007. You could call it printer technology adaptively reused but it’s more a case of evolved.

So, print yourself a house then pop out to your shed where you keep your Acme MakesEverything

(evolved from the Fab@Home fabber) and print out anything else you need.

You could even print a plane.

And in a different way you can already get printed furniture. O brave new world, even if it does at times resemble a Goon Show dystopia.

PS It is worth persisting with this valley girl interview with Khoshnevis to hear him talk at the end about his course in creativity – he’s our sort of guy!

By Ian Milliss | Posted in architecture, building, furniture, household | Comments (2)

The return of the dispossessed

4 Feb ’07 – 12:43 am


(Photo Sean Hemmerle)

You will have noticed that we’ve been updating our links since new year. While trawling our bookmarks we noticed a thread of links about apocalypse that we discussed in our last post but also about attempts to adapt to catastrophes/war/dystopias, providing visions of a future that is all too possible.

Beirut seems to be the test bed of cataclysmic adaptation. The most interesting Beirut link, because of its clear personal tone, is the unbuilt architecture blog, the source of this image

which did the blog rounds recently.

After destruction through war or any other inhumane deployment of technology, capital and energy, we are left with sites, minds and societies unbuilt. Leveled to the ground. Making room for denial, doubt and a divided society. Understandable but unacceptable. This condition needs those who dare to envision perspectives beyond the ruins…

Bullet holes adaptively reused as art or lighting? or their public space project?

Unbuilt do their public space project in Beirut’s dysfunctional public spaces but the lack of public space is common throughout the developed world, a physical reflection of the atomised social pathology. First world cities increasingly consist of private spaces pretending to be public where you are welcome only if you have money to spend,


(Photo helixblue)

places like Boca Raton, Florida where the only genuinely public spaces are the roads.

ArtAfterCrisis, ” a weblog reporting on the role of art in crisis areas” also visits Beirut. Author Chis Keulemans describes his mission to document creative adaptation

I am interested in the ability of artists and intellectuals to reinvent society after the peace has been signed or the dictator has been toppled. How does their work reflect the horrors of the past? How do they reclaim public space in their cities? Do they contribute to or criticize the new collective identity of their society? How do they communicate with the world outside?

Talking about Hassan Choubassi’s map

of the (fictional) Beirut Metro he says

Riëtte, my girlfriend and photographer, spent hours with Choubassi visiting several of the most prominent stops on his fictional Metro Map: places that were crossroads on the demarcation line between the Christian East and the Muslim West parts of town during the civil war of 1975 to 1990.

How do these places look today, and what were the stories behind them?

Adaptive reuse is the only possible way to live in a war torn city.

In the book Traces of Life (2003), the result of a research [Tony Chakar] did with colleague Naji Assi and their students of architecture into the maze of a poor laborer’s neighborhood called Rouwaysset, he describes how densely populated slums like these create their own urban space. ‘The relationship of a building in Rouwaysset with the surrounding buildings and spaces is a relationshiop of mutual and continually renewed violence – a violence that both defines the shape of these buildings and spaces and is defined by them.’

What strikes me is the use of the word violence. Building places for people to live, eat and make babies in is not usually associated with violence. And he is not talking about the violence that may come with the razing down of whole neighborhoods to create spaces of power (like in Ceausescu’s Bucharest) or commerce (like the Jakarta shopping malls), he uses the word to describe the day-to-day push and shove of new additions to existing infrastructure, the perpetual festering of concrete, glass and iron that goes on so stubbornly in Beirut, that it makes it seductive – here more than in many other cities – to compare it to a living organism. Layer upon layer, it grows into a never-ending palimpsest of histories.

Finally, there is a section about Beirut in Worldview,

a web-based project of the Architectural League of New York that invites architects from around the world to present reports on what is new and interesting in architecture and urbanism in their cities, with a particular focus on cities and regions that are not adequately reported on by the mainstream architectural press.

Elie Haddad edits the section on Beirut and he comments

Some historians have attributed the destruction of the city to a latent hatred for what Beirut had come to represent for many of those living on its margins, i.e. an exclusive concentration of economic and political powers that reduced the rest of the population to a condition of subservience. In one post-war documentary, a militiaman candidly recounted the feeling of satisfaction that he and his comrades felt as they entered one of the grand hotels, heretofore a symbol of those in power, and violently took their sweet revenge on the place and all that it symbolized.

Therein lies the warning that cities like Beirut pose, that the exploited and dispossessed will have their revenge. The most immediate and effective solution to global warming would be the immediate and complete destruction of western industrial consumerist society. The disastrous consequences of consumerist greed are now being visited unfairly on the vast majority of the planet’s population who never received any of its benefits. Who could blame them for the most violent retaliation, especially as the destruction of our industrial economies would put an immediate end to the source of all emissions?


(Photo Abdallah Kahil)

Anyone who believes that would be impossible has not learned the lessons of Vietnam, Afghanistan and now Iraq, that a low tech society can always ultimately defeat a high tech military. And a low tech society will be best adapted to survive the next few centuries of chaos.

By Ian Milliss | Posted in activism, architecture, building, ideas, planning, transport | Comments (0)

The joy of apocalypse

27 Jan ’07 – 11:17 pm

Recent announcements by Exxon-Mobil and George Bush indicate that we are now moving out of the climate change denial phase and into the sabotage-and-delay-by-spurious-solution phase (with a good dash of solutions-that-are-worse-than-the-problem like nuclear power and sunlight blocking). It all means that serious catastrophe looks increasingly likely.

We don’t really believe it will end in apocalypse but it’s worth thinking about complete apocalypse if only to get the full range of possible consequences clear in your head. After all, right now much of the developed world, particularly the US, is behaving as if the slightest change (eg less cars, more public transport) will be equivalent to apocalypse.


(Havana. Photo unpeuplus)

The reality is that even genuine and enormous catastrophe is not the end, humans are amazingly adaptive and some places have already had to face the problems that still lie ahead for the rest of us. Cuba has already had its peak oil crisis with the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early nineties. Ironically, almost 40 years of US economic embargoes may have made it the society most likely to survive intact, with lots of empty highways ideal for cycling.


(Photo Lauras512- check out her Cuba cycling holiday)

Culture change discusses the Cuban example and suggests Plan B for survival where adaptive reuse will be the order of the day

Depaving is a vast opportunity to free up land. There is more paved land in the U.S than officially designated wilderness. There is unused pavement even with the vast numbers of unnecessary motor vehicles today. Driveways and parking lots are easiest to remove. Tearing up roads is harder because of the deeper and harder road bed. However, trees can still be planted in roads and former roads.

On the other hand Dmitry Orlov is grimly hilarious on the lessons the US might learn from the Soviet experience of national collapse and the adaptation necessary to survive.

In all, I expect drugs and alcohol to become one of the largest short-term post-collapse entrepreneurial opportunities in the United States, along with asset stripping, and security.

And while we are talking about hilarious, the Anthropik Network‘s advocacy of primitivism and survivalist tribalism is whacky if not downright sinister but their 30 Theses make for a thought provoking read. One bit we can agree with is their catchcry that “First, civilization is fragile, and second, humans are not”. Of course, as they point out, we all see these things through our own prejudices

He isn’t alone in seeing what he wants to see of course – the Viridian camp sees a shiny green future awaiting us in the post oil world, old school oil guys like T Boone Pickens see a exploration and drilling bonanza, energy industry investors like Matt Simmons and Henry Groppe see soaring energy prices, gold bugs see rampart inflation and soaring gold prices, ferals and hippies see a return to living closer to nature, socialists see the revival of marxism, conspiracy theorists see government/elite conspiracies and the rise of the new world order, primitivists see the collapse of industrial civilisation and human dieoff, libertarians see an opportunity for the market to bring new energy sources and technologies to us, fascists see an opportunity for a return to authoritarianism and some of the uglier approaches to population control used by their ilk in the past, economists see supply and demand issues being resolved by energy prices, military-industrial complex members see the need to militarily dominate the energy rich regions of the planet, end-times Christian fundamentalists see another symptom of the impending rapture and survivalists see an opportunity to say “I told you so” and finally get to use the skills and tools they’ve spent their lives practicing for.

You’ve just got to remember that whatever you are being sold

it can sometimes be hard to tell if it’s a joke

or if they are serious (from the National Atomic Museum, Albuquerque, New Mexico, photos by Life on the Edge). Have a happy apocalypse!

By Ian Milliss | Posted in activism, people, planning, transport | Comments (3)

Magic carpet ride

24 Jan ’07 – 12:39 am

A few months ago when we did a post on the Cambodian norry railway we searched high and low for similar DIY railways but all we found were high tech/high capital experimental projects. But we had something like this in the back of our minds,

and because it seemed such a good idea we knew someone would have done it already, somewhere. Well, here it is (via Cory Doctorow and BoingBoing), the Tapis Volant, part of the Train project by HeHe (artists Helen Evans and Heiko Hansen)

Seen above in Istiklal, Istanbul in 2005, they describe the mechanics of its magic.

Tapis Volant appears as a rectangular red cushion with beaded tassels dangling down from each of its sides. It runs along a single tram track, using it as a monorail, its wheels propelled by an electric motor. The cushion lies on top of a mechanical system that allows the driver to balance when seated in the Lotus position. This posture not only mimics the operation of a ‘real’ flying carpet, but also links body posture to movement in a way that driver has to be Zen to operate

We were interested to find that the underlying impulse for the project was a conscious understanding of adaptive reuse:

The TRAIN project shares the fascination for a personalised automated travel experience, however, its inspiration did not derive from a system of vehicles, but from the idea of using an existing architecture, The Petite Ceinture (The little belt) in Paris. The Petite Ceinture is a magic site: an industrial monument, a rail track that encompasses the city of Paris, abandoned in 1934 due to the extension of the metro lines towards the Paris suburbs.

As well as the Istanbul and Paris version (here seen near Basilique St Denis)

they have produced variations for events in Slovakia,

Valenciennes,

and a surfing version for San Jose.

The artists describe themselves as follows:

HeHe reverse cultural engineers the technological systems that surround us: From transport design to pollution monitoring, from public advertisement to meteorology, from architecture to public lightning. Their work seeks to go back in time, re-work past and as a result, re-phrase the existing into a new critical usage, a social function, with the spectator in its epicentre. At a time of ongoing technological expansion, progress starts to fray on its edges. How can we use and re-use, not only as a semiotic resistance against those who prey on the new, but also to return back to original invention, which have become clouded by recursive innovations. In this way, the work of HeHe is a process of reduction and subtraction until they find a point of departure, from which they can develop a usage with a plain functionality.

Translating the slightly clumsy artspeak, we think that means they are on about exactly the same thing as us, a back-to-fundamentals approach to adaptively reusing heritage and technology to bring about cultural change. Its always comforting to find a few more out there.

By Ian Milliss | Posted in art, Artists, ideas, transport | Comments (0)

Liberated

17 Jan ’07 – 9:33 pm

The history of prefab buildings is long and honorable (even the First Fleet sent out to set up a British colony in Australia in 1788 brought prefab buildings), and the importance of old prefab buildings cannot be understated for they are among the most vulnerable elements of the built environment. It is especially true of commercial prefabs. That makes this a real gem, a beautifully restored and reused porcelain enamel metal panel prefab garage from the 1950s now beautifully adaptively reused as a frozen custard shop.

Starting life as a gas station, it was moved from a location near Minneapolis/St. Paul International Airport in the 1970s and turned into an auto repair shop, complete with an “updated” look of fake brick and a mansard roof. The new owners Steve and Vicky Uhr realised the underlying classic nature of their building and employed KKE Architects to restore and modify it for their Liberty Frozen Custard business.

The brick and wood was removed and the original gas station was discovered mostly intact underneath.

Essential elements in the restoration were exposing the building’s original porcelain panels and incorporating the original red, white and blue patterns. The existing garage doors were used as functional architectural elements, opening up the indoor dining area and connecting it with outdoor seating. A complementary 500-square foot addition was constructed, and the interior was modified to its new use.

What can we say, it’s beautiful

and it fully deserved the Preservation Alliance of Minnesota‘s Adaptive Reuse Award it received in August 2006.

There is more on their flickr site.

By Ian Milliss | Posted in architecture, heritage | Comments (1)

Big sustainability ain’t hard

17 Jan ’07 – 5:56 pm

One of the main arguments for adaptive reuse is sustainability, by extending a building’s life you save its embodied energy, and the bigger the building the more you save. If the building is in the US and you can achieve Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification as a sustainable building you gain other advantages as some US states now provide additional tax incentives.

The Montgomery Park adaptive reuse of a 1925 Art Deco style warehouse is a typical example. The 1.3 million square foot Baltimore building had been abandoned for 15 years when it was purchased by developers Himmelrich Associates and converted to offices. The State of Maryland came to the party with tax credits worth 40 cents in the dollar that ensured its financial viability.

LEED certification came through a range of strategies. The most important in adaptive reuse terms were

  • the redevelopment of an existing urban site.
  • it involved remediation of a brownfield site (although contamination was limited).
  • The site’s easy access to the city’s major bus lines enabled a public transport strategy.

Other sustainability techniques included retention of stormwater on site and some used in greywater system, partial green roof to minimise heat island effect, waterless urinals and energy efficient ice storage air conditioning system, recycling of building waste as paving, reuse of existing carpet tiles, insulated glazing with minimum perimeter offices to maximise daylight combined with energy efficient motion controlled lighting and low formaldehyde interior finishes and materials.

The finished building demonstrates how a considerable degree of sustainability can be achieved fairly simply.

The fact that the developer seem to have developed a taste for adaptive reuse projects is probably proof that sustainability pays. Montgomery Park is their second project, they have another smaller development nearby of Mt Washington Mill, Maryland’s oldest surviving cotton mill, dating from 1811, now housing retail and offices.

By Ian Milliss | Posted in architecture, building, business | Comments (0)

So ugly only a designer could love it

17 Jan ’07 – 2:01 pm

It’s the Venturi Eclectic and well maybe it’s sorta cute in a moon buggy sort of way although it does also look a bit like the Amish buggy redesigned. We’re posting it as a bit of a more serious footnote to our last post.

After being despised and vandalised by politicians for decades, mass public transport systems are in for a big revival real soon and the question of individual transport is also due for an overhaul. Only the soon-to-be-bankrupt big car manufacturers (like Ford) think that a few quick mods will solve the problem. Increasingly there is realisation that the whole mass transit meme is up for massive redesign and only parts of the existing infrastructure can be adaptively reused (for transport, that is, all those highways will make desperately needed public space and nature corridors when filled with soil and planted out eg The High Line)

There will still be a need for individual vehicles, however and even the Segway may have a place there alongside the bicycle – not everyone is physically capable of pedalling everywhere.

And the Eclectic is probably a good indicator of the new breed of vehicle.

Eclectic, the first autonomous vehicle in the history of the automobile, opens up a new era in the field of mobility: reserved for daily driving in urban areas, its low energy consumption makes it the most economical environmental vehicle ever built. Innovative and astonishing, Eclectic is much more than a simple vehicle; it is a production and storage plant for renewable energies, either solar or wind based. Charging of these energies, which is intermittent in certain regions, can also be complemented by electrical recharging.

Like climate change itself, (which is happening exponentially faster than you thought) it’s all happening fast.

Production of 20 pre-series vehicles has commenced. A limited version of 200 vehicles with specific equipment will be launched in June 2007 (colour : white) at a price of 24,000 € plus VAT (excluding State subsidies of 2,000 €). A higher level of production should see the light of day as from 2009 at an estimated base price of 15,000 € plus VAT (excluding State subsidies of 2,000 €). Eclectic targets two different markets: that of companies wanting to adopt an environment-conscious stance and that of a very avant-garde public at the top end of the range. A single-seater utilitarian version will also complement this production.

On the down side, it’s probably grimly realistic of them to present a police version in their publicity, given that the developed nations’ slide into fascism will probably get worse before it gets better as climate induced chaos breaks out.

And just in case you think that’s going a bit far and if you think some of the predictions are getting more and more hysterical read that linked Independent article again. I quote:

How far can it go? The last time the world was three degrees warmer than today – which is what we expect later this century – sea levels were 25m higher. So that is what we can look forward to if we don’t act soon. None of the current climate and ice models predict this. But I prefer the evidence from the Earth’s history and my own eyes.

And just remember, right now Big Brother is driving you.

By Ian Milliss | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (0)

Pimp my couch

16 Jan ’07 – 9:08 pm

At 3am in the dark night of the soul the thought often occurs “Why is Segway?” and you babble incoherently “Down there…those things…legs… for walking… or if I want to go faster, for cycling…” Now the news has come through that Segways have been banned in the Netherlands except when used in private by consenting adults.

The lurid late night raving is all caused by the inner gadget geek’s desire for a Segway while the more rational self suspects that every upright Segway user has a prone couch potato dark side. And we think that at last we have found the platonic ideal of the Segway, the guilty secret locked away in every Segway user’s heart.

These adaptively reused couches are available from Armchair Cruisers

By Ian Milliss | Posted in furniture, transport | Comments (3)