Re: HRH Design

Responding to msg by dsucher@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx (David Sucher) on


>I have asked this here before...what is an 'innovative
>and challenging'  urban design form that one might
>propose in lieu of the one offered by  another amateur,
>Mr. Windsor?


   David,


   The uranistic elements you cite are dress on the hidden
   services below or behind, put there most often by public
   funds, or via other benefits for the private constructors,
such
   as monopoly markets for power and telephone or tax
   incentives for developers.


   There is great expense in concealing these systems, many of
   which did not exist, or were much simpler, in the days of
   quaint architecture and villages, hiding them, we are told,
   to achieve the masterfully placid architectural and urban
   design so easily drawn by simple-minded desktop graphics
   systems (compared to the sophisticated programs on souped-
   up workstations that design pertrochemical plants, off-
   shore rigs, space shuttles and other true icons of the age
   -- hello, Randolph).


   You will observe the additional expense, also usually out
   of governmental funds, to maintain, repair, upgrade,
   replace and extend these distincitve products of the
   industrial and high technology age.  Porkbarrel heaven.


   No serious technological designer would waste money on such
   amazing ineptness to achieve dumb-downing effect, except
   product packagers for the mass market.


   Rather than waste valuable tour time on looking at hokey
   landmarks I suggest taking a walk on the gritty wild side
   of any culture, from souk to the TVA to toxic swamps.  You
   will see far more aesthetically challenging ways to deliver
   the necessities to villages than to dress them in out-of-
   date fashions, usually cheap knockoffs of the haute latest.


   I spent years hiding new services in "distinguished" old
   properties, going to great expense and technological
   derring-do to make the outcome look like nothing modern had
   happended.  What a sham, what a cruel misuse of scarce
   funds for stylistic artifice.  Just what they are doing at
   Grand Central Station and royal dumps and imitators around
   the globe.  And, many of my former teachers and students
   are successes at this, god have mercy.


   But in the last 15, after seeing the consequences in vast
   slums of misapplied private and public wealth to
   showplaces, we've (Urban Deadline) made every effort to
   escape the stylistic conceits and fraud and cowardice and
   irresponsibility of high-minded  historic preservation,
   and, more lately, historicism.  But kept the hard-earned
   knowledge of the history of technology and low-cost design
   and working the fringes away from the mainstream kleigs.


   When I started, HP was a kooky fringe of mainstream
   architecture and planning.  Mostly run by volunteers with
   modest budgets and unlimited time, most architects were
   usually seen as enemies.  Not a bad position, on the
perilous
   edge.


   A few wealthy patrons threw their weight around but only
   through hired architectural guns from Philadelphia or
   England or France.  They didn't know shit themselves beyond
   a purchased pre-packaged sack of preservationist stylisms
   and didn't want to learn, just pump money at what their
   dinner companions brayed as the hottest way to disgorge the
   never ending stream of income -- and keep it away from the
   diabolical tax collector -- while getting exclusive media
   adoration.


   Think PJ and Jackie and Brooke Astor and Rockefellers and
   the National Trust of UK and USA, and in Red Man Texas, Ima
   Hogg, and all that unbelievably unoriginal international
   gang of layabouts and their empurpled passion for
   architecture and fine art and the exquisitely low-key,
   high-profile, over-fed-and-drugged life.


   So the same way these patrons, who, I've found, hate their
   coporeal limitations -- out-of-shape, sickly, ugly,
   morbidly death-pondering -- constantly search for
   divertissements in culture and social meddling, so they try
   to hide their sordid lives with dress, cosemtics and public
   relations, and they promote a style of architecture and
   urbanism to deny the basic life necessities that make
   them equal to us all.  Bizarre and baroque and
escapist-elitist to
   the rotten core.  Nice people, except bonkers about their
   paganish savage religion of money.


   Brian Carroll's work interests me not least for the way he
   has identified a technology that links us all, portending
   other technolgies of communication and convenience.  It is
   these covert architectural elements, that were once exposed
   and now stylistically over-hidden, that may point to a  new
   architecture and urbanism.


   So I say get them back in view, not as they once were, but
   as we want them to be for understanding, for maintenance,
   for repair, upgrading, changing, sharing.  Not like
   Beaubourg cheating, not like "high-tech" Norman Foster,
   those are high-style conceits passing for the other, aping
   the haute courture world.


   We should all know how to make this amazing new
   architecture and community, not just the technological
   wizards who are our new power-brokers behind the scene.
   Architects and urbanists have a lot of catching up to do --
   especially a lot of walking the sites of in-your-face
   technology and less perusing the mags and monitors.


   We can discuss the built forms and technology of this new
   "civil architecture" but I suspect they will take totally
   unexpected shapes and configurations, say, like Brian's HUD
   proposal and e-musings, Stephen Perella's meta-nets, David
Reddy's
   cyberdesign and Randolph Fritz's hard and squish wares, have
   suggested.  Sidewalks, streets and facades are not going to
   be the same.  The importance of property lines is going to
   diminish as these shared systems proliferate.  Back and
   front, roof and cellar, are bye-bye, all this as aptly,
creatively,
   anticipated by the benighted deconstructivists and lesser
knowns.


   Just look at any construction site, yours for example, to
   see what's coming, that is, see it before it's stripped of
   the truly innovative apparatus -- scaffolding, lifts,
   elevators, hoists, safety and warning devices,
   communication wiring and radios and computers, "temporary"
   facilites of all kinds for eating, resting, hygiene,
   staging, administration -- a small village thriving on its
   own, squatting is a self-built shell then moving on like
   gypsies.  All the good stuff is going to the dump as debris
   or back to the contractor's yard to await the next sidewalk
   show and tell.


   For more on how this is developing in unknown offices, it's
   time for the investors to cough up.  What will be your
   contribution, my dear fellow, gadfly on the cheap or sugar
   daddy big bucks?


   Note:  HRH is not limited to Bonnie PC, it's meant
intergalactically.
   No need to millstone that priapic nice guy alone with that
mark of the
   demon seed.