ON BRIDGES

. . . . for John, who asked why no one had.

Brisbane has a new bridge.

On 4 October 2009, the Kurilpa Bridge opened across the Brisbane River in Queensland, Australia. The new greenbridge is a multiple-mast, cable-stay structure based on the principles of tensegrity. It is also the largest tensegrity structure in existence.

This entry in Wikipedia (possibly posted by the designers of the bridge – Cox Rayner Architects / Arup - or the government public relations office, as ‘Wiki’ things usually are) refers to the new bridge over the Brisbane River that again joins the art gallery precinct on the south to the CBD/north side of the river. Perhaps the word ‘bank’ should be added here – south bank/north bank - as it reminds one of London and Paris? The article uses some unusual words to describe this ‘world’s-largest’ configuration of its type that is a new pedestrian link: ‘greenbridge;’ ‘multiple-mast;’ ‘cable-stay;’ and ‘tensegrity.’ These terms make the bold claims for this apparently audacious structure look impressive, while suggesting that it might have a colourful nautical theme to it. Brisbane must be proud to have such an iconic structure on its river. But what do these words mean? What is this new wonder? It exists, but there has been very little discussion on it since its opening beyond journalistic hype and blurb. This last word is interesting. As David Astle noted on Letters and Numbers (SBS TV), ‘blurb’ is a word that was invented early last century to describe the descriptive summaries found on the back cover of books – words that seek to entice one to purchase the book. It remains a word that we use today to cover a similar sense of text that babbles on self-consciously in a hyper-promotional, self-interested manner: like much of the journalism in our media.

‘Greenbridge’ can be assumed to be a fabrication used to describe something environmentally positive – or that seeks to be seen as such. In this context one can guess that it has to do with walking and cycling rather than driving, and perhaps to some efficiencies in the making. But what is tensegrity? This word is more obscure and its deconstruction is not so obvious. Buckminister Fuller fashioned this word to describe his idea of creating structures using members with only pure compression or pure tension. These structures were preloaded or prestressed tensionally – intentionally - with the cables always maintaining their rigid tautness, forming a system that was mechanically stable. All elements in the assembly remain in pure tension or pure compression even as stresses on the structure are increased. This design concept meant that no member in the system would experience a bending moment requiring an increase in size to cope with these added stresses. Fuller was interested in these structures because they produced exceptionally rigid structures for their mass and for the cross section of the components. Harvard physician and scientist Donald E. Ingber explains (in Wikipedia):

The tension-bearing members in these structures - whether Fuller's domes or Snelson's sculptures - map out the shortest paths between adjacent members (and are therefore, by definition, arranged geodesically) Tensional forces naturally transmit themselves over the shortest distance between two points, so the members of a tensegrity structure are precisely positioned to best withstand stress. For this reason, tensegrity structures offer a maximum amount of strength.

A different word is again used in this explanation – ‘geodesically.’ It is yet another word - one of many - coined by Fuller. His ‘synergy’ is the one most abused, usually by bureaucrats and managers who seek to sound important when saying very little about anything significant. ‘Geodesic’ has similarly become a part of our general language and understanding of things like different domes, even if few know exactly what the term really involves. Its explanation in this text leaves one with the impression that the Kurilpa Bridge is a crisp and efficient, light-weight assemblage that might prance effortlessly across this River City’s serpentine waterway with a supreme elegance and astonishing wonder.

Fuller’s own simple diagrammatic models used to explain tensegrity are indeed as beautiful as crystals with their intense rigour and efficiency of organised internal relationships and stresses – simply exquisite. The basic models of tensegrity made during one’s student years for class experiments come to mind. There was always a surprise at how a shambles of a few pieces of dowel, some pins and a short length of nylon fishing line could make such surprisingly complex and elegant mathematical forms after a bit of fiddling. This was indeed a marvellous manner to make things minimally – efficient, lightweight and mystically beautiful beyond words. The images that accompany the Wikipedia explanation quoted above show, by way of example, refined and elegant structures with geometric forms shaped by floating, visually disconnected struts held magically in a web of fine tension – effortless weightlessness, as astonishing and intriguing as a hummingbird’s hovering.

In the 1951 Festival of Britain, tensegrity was used to provide the avant-garde sculptural Skylon Tower centrepiece to highlight the possibilities for a bright, post-war future for this country. It was the morale-booster for a saddened, tired people. Fifty-eight years later, this structural concept appears in Brisbane as a bridge to highlight the cleverness of this sunshine capital, of what the Government promotes as ‘The Smart State’ – Queensland, Australia.

The characteristics of tensegrity structures that can be seen in these examples are, sadly, not readily revealed in Kurilpa Bridge. The bridge has no obvious weightlessness; the achievement seems to have required far too much effort; and the size and number of members have a quality that is difficult to read as a rigorously refined and minimal outcome for any organisation of pure stresses. It appears to be overdone. Is this why others have not made such structures? The bridge displays little of the organised clarity exhibited in the models or the 1951 sculpture. Its appearance lacks what reads as a certain precision and wonder in these examples. It has what can be seen as a heavy, over-busy presence that confuses the eye and brain, and allows the wandering mind to give rise to a variety of strange interpretations instead of being otherwise engaged in pondering the surprises of internal necessities.

Some see Kurilpa’s complexity of crisscross struts and zigzagging cables as being somewhat like the masts and rigging of a sailing ship, expanding the idea of the previously suggested nautical theme in the description ‘multiple-mast.’ Some see it as a brash and unusually cheeky, spiky form that reminds them of a Mohawk haircut, complete with its linear symmetry. Some choose to talk about it as a random arrangement of ‘pick-up-sticks’ falling - or knitting needles - but with the distinctive colours of the game pieces missing. This is a grey structure where green is used metaphorically - in its cliché mode. Others commenting on the bridge simply struggle to identify any analogous relationship but say safely – lazily- without any commitment, that the bridge is ‘interesting’ and is liked; or, with equal emphasis and lack of dedication, disliked, depending on the point of view taken or perhaps the tolerance or safe manners chosen to be displayed at the time. Some say things that are best not recorded.

It is difficult to see this bridge as a crisp, crystalline form made with refined minimal structural elements as might be expected of things using the principles of tensegrity. Indeed, some have said that the struts look too fat - awkward and too numerous - and that the rigging is too messy - randomly muddled and chaotic; that the bridge looks grossly over-designed. Surely not? It was expensive, but why would any extra or over-sized elements be included? One is left wondering why these comments arise. Is a bridge a natural tensegrity structure? Is a tensegrity structure naturally a bridge? Perhaps the problem lies here? Tensegrity may be better for domes and sculptures – for spanning - enclosure - without having to accommodate loads of horizontal, linear traffic, be these from pedestrian or vehicular movements.

Bridges link – they ‘go between;’ they span. It is their necessity. So it is that one wonders why the new vehicular traffic bridge nearby upstream has been called the ‘Go Between Bridge,’ even if it refers to a local rock band of another era. It all sounds like an overstated understatement of the very obvious. The success of bridges depends not only on their name, appearance or style, but also on what they join. Unfortunately, the Kurilpa Bridge starts at the crowded, freeway-obstructed end of Tank Street, in an area of Brisbane remote from the CBD and distant from any density of necessary pedestrian movement or thoroughfare. It is the ‘backwater’ of central Brisbane. The bridge lands on the other side of the river in front of the new Gallery of Modern Art complex, (GOMA – ‘Modern Art Gallery’ would have given a less catchy ‘MAG’), but with an awkward detour that looks like a large circular corkscrew ramp reaching and stretching only because it has to. This extended path delivers one down to the edge of the river that has just been crossed when walking from the city-side. The worry here is that the bridge links little that has any civic necessity. It is just there bridging from what looks like a randomly chosen point A to another location, B on the opposite bank, the only determinants seeming to be that the bridging can be achieved in this vicinity. There is no obvious civic enhancement here; nothing essential that is connected by this new bridge that is promoted as using the principles of tensegrity - at a ‘world’s-largest’ scale - as if this outcome alone might be the ambition of this exercise: an exhibition of a structural possibility.

London has a new bridge too - The Millennium Bridge. It is the first new bridge across the river Thames in London since Tower Bridge opened in 1894. Like Brisbane’s, it is a pedestrian bridge and would probably also seek ‘green’ credentials. It was designed by Foster + Associates in collaboration with the sculptor, Anthony Caro and structural engineers Arup, the same engineering firm that was involved in the Kurilpa Bridge. This engineering firm investigated and solved the well-publicised problem that the Millennium Bridge encountered – it swayed more than anticipated with cumulative pedestrian movement. Unlike chooks on a perch that can stabilize the swinging movement of their suspension, the movement generated by pedestrian corrections seeking to counter the swaying and to stabilize bodies, only enhanced the structure’s movements. Special buffers were detailed and installed under the bridge to overcome the problem with another piece of subtle engineering by the bridge’s designers. The bridge opened initially on Saturday 10th June 2001, but in order to fully investigate and resolve the swaying issue, the decision was taken to close the bridge on 12th June 2001. After the extensive investigations and corrective work, it was re-opened on 27th February 2002.

There are similarities and differences with Brisbane’s bridge. London’s bridge is held up by tension and lies on a direct axis with St. Pauls – London’s great landmark (well, one of them), linking the City of London near St Paul's Cathedral with the Tate Modern art gallery on Bankside. Kurilpa Bridge uses tension in tensegrity and links the city-side of Brisbane to the art gallery precinct for pedestrians too. The Millennium Bridge stretches from a small, undistinguished pedestrian precinct that meanders through to St. Pauls and, at Bankside on the opposite side of the Thames, splits and comes to an unexpected end in front of Tate Modern’s side wall where the mirrored ramps return to take one back on axis down to the river’s edge. This abrupt termination is somewhat similar to that of the Brisbane bridge. Kurilpa Bridge comes to a point where one is directed off the bridge down a large curved ramp to reach the riverbank below. The explanation for the Millennium Bridge’s abrupt cessation and reversal of pedestrian movement is that here the designers have cleverly redirected pedestrians to look back at St. Pauls. The experience seems to suggest that the reason may have more to do with overcoming an awkward transition defined by some requirement involving levels and structure than anything else, as it does with Brisbane’s bridge. Both bridges feel as though they should be otherwise, perhaps by leading more directly to a predetermined civic location that would allow a less self-conscious and more effortless transition to the art galleries. There seems to be no ‘arty’ explanation for the Brisbane bridge detour – but it may be coming.

Where London’s bridge has a critical necessity in its marvellous location, Brisbane’s seems to have an unresolved anxiety. The Millennium Bridge is anchored with its St. Pauls’ axial precision that overcomes the perceived weakness of the Bankside termination. Brisbane’s bridge seems to have ignored any similar essential placement. Why did it not land between the library and gallery of modern art where it might have gathered location and function together nicely into a civic space that both welcomed and connected city place? Why did it not link with a more vital part of Brisbane’s city side? Maybe it aims to revitalise this rather backward-feeling, uninviting area that holds a sense of being somewhat derelict, lacking in civic energy – shaped, as it feels, by a collection of relics that might be replaced, refurbished or revitalised in the future. How? When?

There is another critical difference in these bridges. Foster wanted the pedestrian to have the benefit of no superstructure interfering with the pedestrians’ enjoyment of the river and the aspects of the city. And it works marvellously – the pedestrian floats over the river, high in open space that might scare the agoraphobics, with the low, tension cables stretching out from the bold ‘Y’ base supports forming the foundation for the huge void of vistas for all to enjoy. In Brisbane, one is again high above the river, but has what looks like a surplus of structure and weight held, looming ominously above and leaning unusually on each side. Here, with a closer inspection of the detail, the sailing ship analogy is tested to the limits. Memories of sailing boats are recalled as an organisation of finer elements with what looks like a more rigorous arrangement of functioning parts and careful connections. Cables never crisscross so much in a ship without one being able to read their sense of having to be there. Their necessary logic and essential patterning becomes self-evident. Here, puzzlingly, tensegrity does not seem to have the readily understood logic that Fuller’s examples display. Is this why it seems ‘messy’? What would Fuller make of this? His examples are so rigorously specific and crystal-clear in their organisation that one has to ask the question. The eye seeks to trace the stresses of this structure that sometimes seem to be those of a familiar suspension bridge - but more unusually complex, while at other times they do fit a pattern that has a quality similar to traditional tensegrity images. Is this bridge a mix of both systems because of the requirements of the bridging functions imposed on tensegrity?

One’s sense of appreciation is challenged by the bridge’s platform. How does the platform fit into the resolution of tensegrity principles? Does it divide the natural stresses in these forms to give a right and a left scaffold, like that in a traditionally-framed bridge? Is this deck in compression or tension – or is it just being held up? How? By what? Is it free of bending moments? What is its role in the philosophy of things geodesic? It becomes a puzzle when, at places, a compressive element seems to be standing on it, or supported by this planar element when we know it cannot or perhaps, should not be so. It is here that the image of the traditional suspension structure appears, leaving one to ask if things might have been more minimal and efficient had this structural system been employed without the added challenges and complications of tensegrity. The lower ends of the compression struts that appear to rest on the deck have cables supporting these extremities that look as though they could support the platform without many of the members above. Has the effort - the commitment - to use tensegrity been so great as to overcome the consideration of the benefits of any possible alternative structural systems?

From the distance the long plank of the pedestrian path looks like a smart, high-tech aerofoil that somehow slots into the equally potentially-slick elements of tensegrity as a sophisticated part of the whole. But as one is swept below the bridge onto the southern bank, it becomes clear that the platform is framed traditionally with fairly basic steel detailing that has an added set of curved forms planted on to each side to provide an illusion of aerofoil elegance, leaving one feeling a little cheated by this charade in much the same manner as one feels on reading the ‘tensegrity’ elements of this bridge, knowing what elegance and refinement geodesic principles can make possible.

The words ‘clumsy’ and ‘awkward’ come to mind. Why? How is it than the wonder of tensegrity seems to become a little disabled or confused here? Is it that tensegrity principles have been used in this bridge, but only in part? Can one identify the pure tension and pure compression in this scheme without any detailed description or analysis? Unfortunately it looks as though this admirable effort has become just too much of a struggle to achieve without compromise. One must admire the determination, but is left perplexed by the question: why were the potential problems and awkward complexities not addressed during the design stage by changing tack rather than merely beavering on with the aim to achieve a world first? – for, sadly, this is what appears to have happened. Instead of adding to Queensland’s effort to be the ‘Smart State,’ the bridge exhibits an uncertainty of resolution – what looks like a less-than-smart mix of elements seeking to be promoted as Fuller’s dream of an exceptionally rigid and efficient, elegant, light-weight structure using members with a minimal mass and cross-sectional efficacy. The possibility was of an assembly of components that could be really ‘green’ in every way beyond and including colour. This bridge seems to lie in a truly grey area both in relation to any purity of concept and to its simple hue. Sadly, it fails to address the possibilities of colour, and like our other pedestrian bridge – oddly-named ‘Goodwill’ (because most bridges promote goodwill) –  fails to explore how colour can transform and enliven elements; how colour can add life and spirit to even the proverbial grey of the battleship. Here one brings to mind the marvellous dazzle camouflage created for the World War 1 allied ships by the Vorticist group of artists established by Wyndham Lewis and others – one of the few joys that war has ever brought to our world. One is just left imagining how a strategy to use colour and an assemblage of pure geodesic stresses might have danced between necessities to become Brisbane’s different Kurilpa Bridge. But is this an impossible dream? Was it?

P.S.

A word similar to those coined by Buckminster Fuller now comes into play. It is Carl Jung’s ‘synchronicity.’ Wikipedia explains the concept as:

the experience of two or more events, that are apparently causally unrelated or unlikely to occur together by chance, that are observed to occur together in a meaningful manner. The concept of synchronicity was first described by Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung in the 1920s.

A few days after completing this piece on bridges with these questions, a copy of Martin Pawley’s Design Heroes: Buckminister Fuller published by Grafton, London, 1992, was discovered in a second-hand bookshop in Inverell. A quick perusal of the pages revealed some interesting comments, as if to clarify the terminal doubts. Martin Pawley writes:

Unlike the early masterpieces of his architect contemporaries Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe and others, Buckminster Fuller’s designs – the Dymaxion House, the Dymaxion Deployment Unit, the Wichita House, the geodesic and tensegrity domes, and the giant projects of the 1960s – were all steps towards the ephemeralization, or rendering insignificant, of the problem of shelter, rather than works of architecture. In this sense they were simply tools, but in another sense they transcended the timescale of mere usefulness and attained another scale of value altogether. Today they are in a literal sense anachronisms – timeless achievements in an age of continuous technical development that ruthlessly gives a shelf-life to even its finest manufactures. (p.172)

Is Kurilpa Bridge an anachronism? It may be. Fuller’s aspiration was described in his concept of ‘ephemeralization’ –

‘the process . . . whereby doing more for less can lead to an implosion of functions, one into another, until only a gossamer thin but steely strong multifunctional envelope takes the place of separate ‘cultures’ of architecture, building and aesthetics.’ (p.152)

Over fifty years have passed and Kurilpa Bridge seems to have made little development with this integral theme of Fuller’s amazing ‘Dymaxion’ world. One might assume the vision is just a far-fetched dream and dismiss it, but there remains a more blatant, latent irony in this tensegrity bridge. Pawley notes of Buckminster Fuller:

His purpose in creating this structural system (tensegrity) was, he (Fuller) wrote in the lucid language of the patent application, ‘to bring the slenderness, lightness and strength of the suspension bridge cable into the realm previously dominated by the compression column of building.’ (p.148)

A new question arises: why, given what looks like the ad hoc patterning of a less-than-refined outcome, has the concept of ‘tensegrity’ been used to supplant the elegance of its inspiration - ‘suspension’ - in Brisbane’s new crossing? The more gracious possibilities of suspension can be seen in London’s new bridge. What has happened in Brisbane – in the ‘Smart State’? Is the tensegrity claim overstretched?

NOTE: 14 September 2016

For more on architecturally designed bridges, see: Exploding the Myths of Modern Architecture by Malcolm Millais, published by Francis Lincoln Limited, London, 2009: Chapter 11 - BRIDGES BECOME SILLY.

22 February 2014 - see: http://voussoirs.blogspot.com.au/2014/02/tensegrity-bridge.html

LIVING DESIGN

It was described as a luxurious place that had won an architectural award. We were to stay in this refurbished house in the older part of Georgetown during our time in Penang. The address held a certain quaint and magically naive mystique - Love Lane. The name of this narrow road on local maps held an aura of onomatopoeic charm - Lorang Love. The Google Earth image spied the residence at the end of a row of similarly planned homes opposite a school and behind a cathedral. The reputation of this residence and the aerial view of the ad hoc brown roofs of this old town made it difficult to guess just what form this luxury might take. Two bold white stripes of what one assumed to be common walls marked this place as different even from above.

Arriving late in the evening only highlighted the uncertainty of our expectations with the ‘taksi’ weaving through the narrow, dim, almost grim, Dickensian lanes of what appeared to be neglected, grimy terrace houses covered with a jumble of graphics interspersed with ‘AWAS’ signs to highlight the caution required at the tight and cluttered places, and blind corners. Even the driver seemed to be in a state of disbelief as I explained where we wanted to go. There was certainly no Hilton or G Hotel in this area. It looked as though it was a backpacker’s paradise – cheap and makeshift. After confirming that the looming form to the right was the cathedral; that the terracotta-tiled roof illuminated in the near distance by our headlights was the convent; and that the classic ‘O&E’ of Somerset Maugham and Noel Coward fame was up the road to our left, I told the driver that this was the place. One can gather a lot of information from travel guides and the Internet. The ‘taksi’ stopped and let us out. So astonished was the driver – well, I put it down to this rather than laziness or carelessness as I had told him it was our first trip here – that he just stood there watching me remove our baggage from his boot. He drove off as the front door was opened by our anxious friend who was pleased to see us at this late hour. We had missed an earlier flight, a delay that only gave her more time to worry about the accuracy of the information she had given us.

Moving from the humid, still, tropical evening air into the air-conditioned interior was refreshing: but it was the white light and newness of this place that was most welcoming after the dim and doubtful trip through this World Heritage town illuminated with a droll yellow haze. We entered what we would call a small terrace house. The interior was indeed all smart and new – white, bright, crisp and clean, and extensively decorated with things oriental. Although tired, we lugged our luggage over the fish pool, up the stairs and into the upper level bedroom allocated to us and went down to the kitchen for tea and chat, to relax in the joy of arrival – happy being there after a tiring journey, at what would be home for ten days.

So this was the award winner. It was immediately clear that this old shop-house had been stripped out completely and fitted with a new exposed steel structure that supported three levels on freestanding circular columns set out as a grid offset about 1200mm from the thick sidewalls. The concept was clear. This arrangement of the vertical structural elements framed central spaces for living, sitting, dining and kitchen areas and gave long narrow edge zones for passage ways, storage spaces, and service areas - a laundry, a toilet, a kitchen and general cupboard spaces - on both sides of this linear slot-cum-house. The bedroom and study areas on the second level were located at either end of the building, separated by the main stair and the void over the fish pool with its timber bridge linking the lower living and kitchen areas. These upper private spaces were articulated within the structural grid in the same manner as those on the lower floor.

On the ground floor, the matt dark grey metallic paint of the exposed steel framing contrasted with the glow of the glossy, white terrazzo floor and the stark matt white walls and high ceiling. The upper levels were similar in expression with lower ceilings, but were less austere with their warm, polished teak floors. The only other colours in the building, apart from that of the decorative objects and wall hangings, were those of the dark green tiles in the fish pool and the bathrooms, and the black kitchen cooking/dining benches. I say ‘fish pool’ deliberately, as it was a large square mass of water self-consciously designed with a skimming border where water constantly overflowed from a perfect, ripple-free reflective surface into a lower, hidden wet recess that secreted pipes feeding pumps and filters all cleverly concealed under a display shelf below the stair. This was clearly a designer’s pool, lined with glass mosaic tiles, fitted with an extravagance of four underwater floodlights and occupied by the cliché eight carp, (I was told that nine was more auspicious), that swam in monotonous circles, possibly wondering just what these strange underwater objects were. One was unsure about what the fish thought of these lights, especially their blaze when switched on. There seemed to be a certain lack of any concern for the habitat that fish might prefer. There were no dark hiding places to rest in or to play around or through. Perhaps this is why these carp had discovered the enjoyment of surfing the edges, a risky ride that, a few days later, left one of the smaller, maybe less experienced fish in the lower perimeter pond for two days until it was captured and replaced with its colleagues – a tricky task that took three people a frustrating fifteen minutes to complete. The experience made one think that, what looked like the missing ninth fish, may not have been so lucky with its, perhaps, less than auspicious end.

The two, third-storey loft areas at each end of this thirty metre by five-and-a-half metre house were different in character. One had the true feeling of a loft with an open barn-like space complete with exposed old roof beams in its ‘cathedral’ ceiling. This mezzanine was accessed via a stepped stair that one had to stride up awkwardly and carefully, one riser at a time across split treads – a compact but less than comfortable solution for access to this level. The other space was fitted out as a bedroom approached via a steel circular stair with triangular teak treads. This space had its own ensuite that opened out to a roof terrace filled with potted plants. Air conditioning units and water tanks were discretely tucked away on roofs and behind screens. These are essentials for this hot humid tropical region – maximum 31 degrees, minimum 31 degrees - with a questionable water supply that travel guides issue warnings about.

Though narrow, it was indeed a very large home. It referenced the traditional shop-house by placing the pool in the location of the customary air well, with an open space above that was framed with internal wooden louvre shutters on three sides at the upper level, and a full height, Renzo Piano-styled louvred, external glass wall on the side street. As with the traditional house, this air well zone was a core central area that flooded the place with light and ventilated the adjacent areas on all levels. There was a feeling of space and depth in this tiny terrace house. The added details of the scary glass floor under the steep loft stair, the airy risers of the main stair, and the large sliding interior partitions all subtly facilitated the openness of the interior with its long vistas up through the three floor levels and along each of them. One felt that the jury had been rather harsh in its comment that the place was ‘cold’, but it did have the nous to recognise the quality of the design concept and detailing by awarding it what looked like a reluctant meritorious mention.

Yet living in this place involved something else that jarred. While one could appreciate the idea and the fineness of the parts and their careful articulation and references, the experience of these things seemed to relate more to one’s own sense of cleverness – and that of the architect - than anything to do with the enhancement of ordinary living. One was always self-conscious about this recognition and the reading of the place and its parts. The ideas and their resolution were clever and refined in an elegant manner but they did not reverberate with the body in any way that could enrich. One felt like a performer – with qualities of an intruder/observer - climbing the stair and admiring the structure of its truss-framed stringers (and other details), but there was nothing more. One was left ‘appreciating’ things in this house – feeling knowledgeable for recognising or decoding the intent. While the brain was always active, a void remained between body and soul that left feeling stranded in a misguided nothingness. Why was this?

Maybe the shower /toilet arrangement in the main bedroom (the one we occupied) could help us understand the circumstance. This bedroom was large and spacious with a freestanding bench fitted with two hand basins dividing the area for the bed from the bathroom zone. Cupboards stretched endlessly with flush anonymity (where did I hang my shirt?) along the western sidewall in conformity with the broad concept of the structural articulation. The wall on the opposite street side behind the cathedral had openings for light and ventilation. These faced east and required heavy screening to avoid an early rising. The southern (the sunny side in the northern hemisphere) wall was full-height glass that opened out to a small plant-filled courtyard with a chuckling feng shui water trickle that could be equally enjoyed from the dining area below. This eating area had a similar full height glass end wall. The tiny piece of green space was a refreshing break from the whiteness of the enclosed, narrow house and overcame any potential claustrophobic feeling.

In the bedroom, the shower and toilet spaces in a recess opposite the basin bench, were lined with the same dark green glass-mosaic tiles used for the fish pool. These service spaces were separated by a full-height, frameless glass wall, with each space having a full-height, frameless glass door opening out into the rear bench portion of the room. It was an unusual arrangement that might have looked spectacular in a magazine, but one felt rather odd when using these areas. Was it the same experience as the carp in their sparse, flash pool? Who knows? All one can say is that there seemed to be more attention given to being smart and different than to understanding how folk might feel in these spaces when being used for the necessities of normal daily life that do not seek out any unique pose or special self-conscious re-enactments for the benefit of others.

Architectural minds have been brought up with the understanding that things hold qualities. One might assume that the frameless glass walls are interesting perhaps just because they can be like this in their unusually different application. Perhaps this is why they can be seen to be good, or can be rated as such by others who are stimulated by this unusual, perhaps unique, divergence. But is it just too smart; too clever? The question for us is: is something right or good just because we can do it? Should we do it? This is the better question. Architects can be just too intellectual in their search for what is seen as the struggle for originality. More attention needs to be given to how people feel in places rather than to how different things can be. Frank O. Gehry comes to mind here – oh! My experience of, let us say, a door, places me in a relationship with the door. Something happens between me and the door – or window, or space. Architects have been taught to dismiss such things as an individual’s private feelings – as purely subjective, speculative and untrustworthy. Science and rationalism appears to have made this aspect of life an unreliable guide – too personal, random and unique: not able to be proved; illogical. So it is that when confronted with the door, we prefer to use words that give all of the qualities we feel to the door itself, putting the individual’s feeling to one side as irrelevant and emotive nonsense. Is this why the clever manipulation of things is seen as the designer’s task?

The qualities of the renovated shop-house in Love Lane can all be appreciated on the level of the thing itself holding quality. One can sense how the architect’s mind has laboured over ideas, concepts and details. All of this is admirable and praiseworthy; but the experience of this outcome is hollow - shallow. The work is academic in approach, leaving one to reminisce on outcomes rather than enjoy any resonance within the living depth of the body. One might be puzzled here and ask: what are you talking about? It is that feeling of being at home in a strange, never-before-entered place; of sensing a rightness, a comfort and fit for the body – a natural ease – all without knowing. This experience is not only one of domesticity. Gaudi’s work has it. Cathedrals have it, but this does not make it special or uniquely different, for great things only. Tiny cottages can have it; streets can have it too. It seems to have something to do with the attitude of how things have been made - intention.

While one is sneered at in the profession for using such language, one might dare to say that it has to do with the love and care that has gone into the shaping and making of a place or an object for others to use. Understanding qualities as residing in things alone directs an architect ‘s (designer’s) attention to the thing and its logic and articulation. This strategy may indeed give beautiful pieces that are all very carefully made and resolved; but it ignores how one might feel in this place or with an object. Federation Square in Melbourne comes to mind here. Is this the enigma the jury sensed when it said the Love Lane house was ‘cold’ - emptiness? Until feeling is again the core of a designer’s attention, it seems that we will be left like the carp in a void of cleverness, sitting stupidly in a glass-walled bog wondering about the mind that made this place – wondering just what one is supposed to do in this situation, sitting as it were recklessly on display in a shop window. Showering has the same challenge in this approach too. Why? The very odd thing is that both of these spaces appeared to lack the very basic ventilation they require. It looked as though there was so much self-praising pleasure taken in the effort of using frameless glass, glass tiles and slatted-teak floorboards in this different context that the simple basics seemed to have been overlooked.

Living design needs to become more than stylish and distinct. Struggling for the unique outcome does not make someone or something creative or original – just different. The context of things original lies in knowing their origins and working with an understanding of what these mean. It is just too easy to be flash and slick in an unusual manner, displaying diverse images to glossy advantage for the admiration of a quick, coffee-table perusal. This style of design leaves one as an actor performing in the glow of a stage-like place. The promenade down the corridor; the stroll across the bridge; the recognition of the detail and the reference; the rocking up the loft stairs that pass over the glass floor; and the rising up the open main stair that glides over the light and space above the pool - all of these become a private delight to be cleverly aired in dinner-table boasting as name- or experience-dropping. These encounters all encourage one to feel special – ‘How great I art!’ – rather, one might hypothesize, like the feeling of driving in a blazing new red European convertible – open - through a crowd of gob-smacked admirers; or indeed, quite the opposite: making one feel foolish and inappropriate as one struggles with awkwardly-sized and heavy luggage, sweating, up what is asking to be seen as a set of singular delights. One is left feeling just not good enough for such special places – or too good for outsiders to be seen as equals – as ordinary fellow human beings.

We have much to learn. It is too easy to bestow apparent meaning onto things and then to play with these as though we are playing with meaningful meaning meaningfully. We are certainly playing with ideas and outcomes, but by ignoring the body in all of its complexities and emotions – its feeling and sensing and more – we force our selves apart, outside of any field that can easily and happily accommodate these subtleties and their unique sensitivities. We need design, but a design we can live with and be enriched by. Design that makes us feel smart and special only plays fashionable games with our egos, encouraging us to feel unique, better than others, as a star; a hero who can look down on others – or as the one looked down on, just out of place in the design. Our age is one of super heroes and lustrous stars, with special places shaped for them – distorted and different in a unique way that can be published to enhance their separateness in all things, leaving outsiders to pander for such luxuries and to feel less relevant in this unquenched desire or in the enforced presence of a superior self-consciousness. The twin-edged sword of alienation creates either heroes or vassals.

It is the sense of contentment and humility that needs to become sought for in our work, an inclusiveness of things special and ordinary that can make us feel at ease, at home, not constantly struggling to be something else. The biblical (gosh, in an architectural text!) sense of always being content needs more attention and care in our work (as does just how this might be achieved) that should dismiss things smart, clever and different for their own sake (art for art’s sake – well, the artist’s sake?), for it is in this way that we can once again find our own origins remote from things that are cleverly entertaining and amusingly distracting, removing one’s attention into the field of fantasies and dreams and of endless and unobtainable whims. At the centre of this issue lies the core wish to be rational, to dismiss things emotional and spiritual – to be objective, ‘scientific.’ We can only continue to do this at our own risk. Placing qualities onto things to avoid the challenge of the recognition of our feelings engages us in that quirkiness of the cliché circular question: if a tree falls in a forest when no one is there, does it make a noise? If a door is left unseen, does it have any qualities? Qualities arise amid things and people – in the space between. Each brings something to the encounter that is neither one nor the other. We can rattle on rationally about many things, and win arguments too – like politicians who can always be right even when obviously wrong – but if we neglect the subtle and emotional, vague and logically uncertain parts of ourselves, then we will be less. Our bodies know this. Why do our brains ignore it? Possibly because it requires rigour, care, love and honesty – qualities that are rarely seen in our competitive, protective, indulgent and self-interested profession.

Stepping outside in the morning light on our walk through Georgetown to breakfast at a street corner, the example of other possibilities was before us. Row after row of identical shop-houses used for all differing purposes stood gathered together to form the street, with each house participating in its civic duty to provide a portion of the network of public covered footpaths - the five-foot ways - that make Georgetown so attractive, certainly not slick or smart. There is co-operation here, and humility, rather than egocentric competition. It gave richness to this place that felt familiar when seen for the first time. Divergent uses oozed contentment and ordinary, happy satisfaction. It held meaning with a resonant depth and significance recognised as World Heritage. Strolling down the lane the contrast with the alternative architecture was blatantly obvious. Here, boldly raising their distant heads above the modest, friendly – some might say ‘grubby’ - patina of the repetitive shop-houses were the tall buildings of modernism, each trying to reach higher than the other; each seeking a bolder, smarter presence than the other; each seeking to be more clever than the neighbour. Here difference was highlighted in the new as something tangible and stark that contrasted with the gentle, cerebral and emotional qualities of the old. We do need to attend to matters subtle and caring before we destroy every existing example of what is possible when these concerns are properly attended to – with buildings that stimulate us to sense what things ‘original’ really mean and how this experience can change place and people. It involves things personal and private – things, (dare one say it?), spiritual.

Louis Kahn spoke of the way intimate immaterial visions become manipulated as material hard facts to eventually be experienced by others as things intimate and immaterial. The Buddhists tell the tale of rational man who sees only the finger that is pointing to the moon, never the moon. Is this our material game that seeks only material gain, where we see our challenge only as the manipulation of things and never the vision that lies beyond in origins – in meaning? Ours has become a demeaning world.

Frank Lloyd Wright knew about origins and it shows in his work in the way that Kahn has described above:

The artist is in no trance. His dream finds its work and finds its mark in the Eternity that is Now. Life is concrete – each in each, and all in all although our horizon may drift into mystery. In harmony with principles of nature and reaching Life-light, only so are we creative. By that Light we live, to become likewise. And all that need ever be painted or carved or built – are significant, colourful shadows of that Light.

Frank Lloyd Wright - from his essay accompanying the Wendingen publication of his work (quoted in Roger Friedland & Harold Zellman The Fellowship Harper Perennial New York, 2007: p.110).

P.S.

We did go to the G Hotel on the tourist-crowded northern beaches of the island, just a few kilometres out of Georgetown. The hotel was explained to us as a ‘designer-hotel’ – worth seeing. Its smart, double-height, overly-self-conscious lobby space with crafty languid lighting and superficially sensational detailing, had split-levels defining sitting areas that were filled with designer benches, designer chairs, designer tables and designer lamps, all assembled to look like a showroom attended by uniformed stooges, with guests and visitors parading and performing for each other’s benefit that was never recognised or acknowledged. On my way out I noticed on the directory board one bar space called – well, what else: The G Spot. I noticed some couples seeking this out, or hoping to. G-whiz! It says it all. We returned to Georgetown with a sigh of relief. Home again – a phrase that has become almost a cliché as words, but remains rich in meaning as an experience. Experience is the core of living design – its quality is the measure of all making.

STREETS

Khoo Su Nin, Streets of George Town Penang  An Illustrated Guide to Penang’s City Streets & Historic Attractions, Areca Press, Penang, 2007 (4^th edition).

The concept of ‘addressing the street,’ of considering the impact of the public edge of a project on its precinct, has almost become a planning cliché. Architects often tell how their projects have been cleverly shaped by this strategy, and developers are frequently hassled by local authorities to go away and do more for ‘the street.’

But what is ‘the street’? Rarely do we consider this strip anything but another place adjacent to our building – its annex or necessary forecourt as it were: the path to ‘my place’ - the public thoroughfare - and a boundary that demands statutory design responses. Anything beyond these rudimentary understandings is seen as being polite – neighbourly. One can claim ‘brownie’ points with a self-conscious response to an access way - for being ‘well mannered,’ as the jargon explains it. The idea of manners in architecture is something Trystan Edwards wrote about many years ago in his book Good and Bad Manners in Architecture - 1924. It is a book that became an embarrassment to have on the shelves in our post-modern era, like Howard Robertson’s Principles of Architectural Composition treatise - also published in 1924. Like all ideas, they tend to disappear and then, sometime later, to resurface to gasp for fresh air in other times when they are again ‘rediscovered’ by otherwise distracted minds, to be reconsidered enthusiastically as being relevant. Rarely though does a street get considered as a street for its own character. Outstanding streets like Union Street in Aberdeen grab one’s attention, but ordinary streets fade away to be remembered as crude functional necessities. Usually a street’s qualities are seen as an ad hoc collection of those things around it – a collaboration or an otherwise forced aggregation of the works of perhaps ‘well-mannered’ architects and bold builders. In ‘Streets’, Khoo Su Nin has revealed a place, a town - Georgetown, Penang - by looking at it street by street. It is an unusual approach and an interesting strategy to peruse.

Georgetown is an admirable subject. That Khoo Su Nin chose to write about this colonial settlement is explained by its World Heritage listing. It is indeed a beautiful and stimulating town with a complex cultural heritage – an inclusive variety frequently described as eclectic, that is alive and well today. One is told that there is no need to go to China or India because what one experiences in Georgetown differs very little from the aboriginal encounter. Francis Light established Georgetown in 1786 – just 16 years after Cook saw Australia. Fifty years later, in 1836, the free settlement of Adelaide was founded and designed by Francis Light’s son, Colonel William Light, who chose the site by the Torrens and laid the city out. His father chose the present site of Georgetown as a trading post for the East India Company. A strategic base was required to challenge Dutch supremacy in the Straits and to further expand trade with China. It was not until 1957 that the British withdrew from Penang as the colonial ruler. Australia’s old defence base was located directly opposite Georgetown, on the mainland peninsular of Malaya at Butterworth.

‘Streets’ is methodical. Each street is listed alphabetically and its history is outlined: how it was laid out, when and by whom; and who lived there; how it has changed; how it has been used; and what it is now. The cultural issues involved in the street, its myths and narratives, are portrayed along with the names of surveyors and occupants - and their life stories too. Only once these have been attended to does the author look at the buildings - well, those that are most noticeable. Georgetown is formed by an array of almost identical shop houses, so selecting a building to write about usually involves a unique quality in its history, personalities, cultural significance or physical difference. ‘Mansions’ are identified, as are quirky attributes of other structures, their locations, details, decorations and their past. Different uses are outlined. Alterations in plan and form are noted as are changes in use.

The approach highlights a quality that streets have - they are inclusive and conglomerate public voids. This little book is about cultural heritage as well as heritage buildings, and includes aspects of the history of this settlement. It is a general account, a collection of stories, a travel guide, a heritage guide and more. It highlights the complex quality of a street that by its very nature gathers – collects, congregates, assembles. It is an excellent example of how a place can be approached integrally – indeed, of how we often approach a town and come to know it bit by bit through its streets. The book shows us how important thoroughfares and lanes are just as ‘streets,’ not merely things to play around with as leftover space or zones for vehicular movement. Streets have an organic existence that needs to be recognised and appreciated.

Yet this is the most frustrating book I have read for a long time. While enthralling with it complexity of interrelated information and interesting images, its graphic layout and collation of this material aggravates annoyance. There is an awkward physicality in this publication that is not helped by its commitment to an dictionary-like alphabetic arrangement. We know and come to understand places by their proximity to one another - their interrelationship - which we comprehend as associations on the map - both the mental map and the paper map. This book has a map of Georgetown at two scales, as the cover declares, but both are tucked away at the back of the book and are unable to be viewed without turning to them – thus breaking the rhythm of reading and disturbing the poise of body and book. The more detailed street map is printed across two pages of the book and it divided by the deep chasm of the binding, offering no ease for continuous and frequent reference or for any co-joined reading of this diagram. Then there is Murphy’s law that inevitably has the location you are searching for located right on the zone in between. These problems could have been solved by an extended fold-out map that could be referenced when reading any portion of the book. This larger-scaled map is coded numerically – a useful device – but the explanatory schedule called the City Map Index is located on the previous page opening and, like the map itself, is spread over two pages. This juxtapositioning needs more page turning and distractions as one goes from the reading page in the body of the book to the rear map and then backwards and forwards to check numbers of the locations, at the same time as one is trying to keep the reading location held open with any spare fingers or thumbs that might be available. Then one might have to refer to the smaller-scaled map that is located just before the City Map Index. At least this regional image fits one page and has its index on the page opposite. The disturbance in needing to look at these maps breaks any continuity in understanding that is being searched for and becomes a major distraction.

In the same way, the alphabetic organisation throws important relationships into chaos. While there is, for example, a Chinatown and a Little India in this municipality, the various streets that frame these cultural centres are scattered willy-nilly throughout the book in the same way that a library places its books on shelves – but here the organisation gives no consideration to category, merely to the rigor of the order of first letters. So one is left spinning, trying to piece together information that could have reshaped this book into a delight if it had addressed this subtlety. Reading would have been a much more enriching experience if matching relationships, proximities and juxtapositions had been the strategy for organisation rather than the alphabet.

But there is more that adds to this confusion. The listing of streets, and buildings in these streets is set out in two columns per page. Each section is appropriately titled and has relevant illustrations scattered throughout. These are useful and necessary – and are usually located where the text refers to them, as László Maholy-Nagy always recommended for book design. But the small text in fine italics that explains which photograph is which, and what is where, is located across the bottom of the page. The reader’s eye is attracted to the image and searches out its correspondence with the subject described in the general text – and vice versa - but to make sense of the photographs one has to look at the bottom of the page when the image or images might be at the top and or the middle or lower edge, on either side. Once the italic text has been deciphered and the lines fragmented to pair off the words and the images – the descriptions are all run together into a set of lines - one has to then interpret the organisation: top right; middle left; etc., as it is only these directional words that define the associated image. This is yet another task that interrupts the ease of understanding. The eye is forced around just as the mind is, then the brain has to allocate italic text to its matching image before anything in the printed information can be reinforced by the image. This correlation then has to be understood in the context of the general body of the book that may require a revisiting of all of these moves just to confirm a misunderstanding or to overcome any doubt: and the maps might have to be checked too. The whole graphic approach displays a most frustrating lack of understanding of just how information needs to be organised to make things easy – comfortable and comprehensible - for the reader to readily grasp.

So ‘Streets’ is an interesting publication, not only for revealing the positive quality of, and relation between streets and place, and their experience and expression, but also because of the awkward tasks it sets for the reader. The book highlights just how important graphic organisation and the arrangement of information and codes really are. We should not be asking for things just to be beautiful or tidy or well organised. If the experience of reading is to be as rich and informative as possible – in this case, as rich and informative as the subject is - then we need to know how this delight and interest can be maximised. Reading ‘Streets’ will show why this matter is so essential, in the same way that it wonderfully highlights just how streets can become the prime reference for the gathering of qualities and stories that define place. They are more than what we usually see them as - functional thoroughfares. Their primary core role lies in the making of settlement into place – in this case, World Heritage place.

Yet there is a strange irony to this review that raises the logic of the design of this book. While one might prefer a graphic design strategy that could enhance the reading experience, ‘Streets’ actually feels like Georgetown with the organised chaos of its eclectic presence. Here things are all the same while all being different; here familiar things are used differently; here, there are no rules operating within a broader framework of a very strict order, a circumstance that compares with the alphabet being used to organise a complex and complicated set of very interesting stories and pieces of information. Is this the experience that Ananda Coomaraswamy wrote about as being ‘the bugbear of literacy’ where the certainty of printed letters takes over from the mysterious source of feelings through naming?

DESIGN CONTROLS

I sit with the object in my hands. It is rectangular, long and thin with less thickness. It has symmetrical ends on the short sides that curve down with a full radius, wrapping a silver metallic facing as a shroud over a dark-grey plastic base. One end of this object has a ruby-red window insert sitting flush with the curve, on its centre. Looking underneath, there is a small swelling at one end with a larger one at the other that has a removable cover to access batteries. This cover has instructions printed on it in a fine white text. The space between these swollen ends is moulded with a central recess into a simple, longitudinal extruded waveform. This curvaceous matt underside has the pleasant ‘grippy’ feel of hard rubber, yet it is not.

The silver upper surface is covered with an array of forty-three buttons that gives it an appearance similar to Pirelli rubber flooring. Each small, silver button is labelled in fine, uppercase black text. In the centre of this array is a larger double concentric button with an ‘OK’ in the middle, complete with N, S, E & W arrows on the outer ring that make this dual circular form look like a compass. A fine polished outer edge highlights and confirms the central presence and significance of this dish shape in the overall pattern of buttons. Adjacent to this centrepiece, just below it on either side, are two buttons - they mirror one another -  that have been made slightly larger than the standard array. Each has been designed to fit into the general pattern of things by joining pairs of buttons up into oblong, single forms printed with small arrowheads and with + and – signs beside them, again in mirrored setout. Below this unique pair, three otherwise standard buttons stand out as being different by their related text that has been placed onto shaded backgrounds that form three stark, dark but small rectangles, each a slightly different size to adjust to the length of the word it envelopes.

The object looks attractive - slick and smart - with the sheen of its high-tech facing speckled with the pretty pattern of the matching silver buttons; and it feels good in the hands when the fingers discover the smooth friction-feel shaping of the underside. It gives the impression of being a very attractive piece of design as it sits on the side table elegantly poised as a floating blade with its soft, rounded identical ends terminating its presence; but it is the most frustrating thing that I have ever used. It is cursed at whenever I try to use it. It is the instrument that is meant to control the radio/DVD/CD player. It is the remote control, the bane of my life.

Why is this elegance so infuriating? The first thing that one needs to identify when such an instrument is picked up is the end that emits the infrared signal – the end with the red window. Here the identical twinned ends only confuse as the subtle, flush inclusion of the infrared opening into the shroud makes it invisible to the eye that is not searching for this detail. This plastic piece is tucked in just beyond the bold gleam of the radius, invisible to the ordinary glance. So one is left juggling the tool as Murphy’s Law comes into play – without thinking, one nearly always seems to choose the wrong end. Once this is sorted out, one then has to find the button that switches the unit on. It seems that the designer was so impressed with the sophistication of his/her design, that the identity of the ‘ON/OFF’ button has been downplayed, fitting into the suave pattern of things but made different only by its being marked by the red international symbol that is so fine it is almost impossible to read. The eye catches the radius shading beside this graphic marking before it finally reads this identification. But why should one have to look so carefully to discover this button every time the control is used? After more juggling, and perhaps some correction for wrongly pushed buttons, one can eventually get the player switched on. Then the struggle continues.

Inevitably, with Murphy playing his games yet again, the radio blares on when the CD player function is required. The first challenge becomes the lowering of the volume so that the radio noise does not confuse with its distraction. One has to concentrate to use this instrument. After a search and several trials and errors, one might get the volume down. One discovers that the designer has located the volume controls centrally between the more dominant oblong buttons and just below the core compass image, making it one of the last places to be scrutinised, even though it is labelled in tiny text with ‘VOLUME’ between two buttons, one marked with a fine +, the other with an almost indistinguishable ‘–.’ To achieve any reduction in volume might mean a few detours to correct outcomes from wrongly pushed buttons, but we will leave this aspect here for now as one does settle down a little once a task has been achieved. Indeed, one stars to feel a trifle clever, much like the experience of solving a puzzle.

But I still have to get to the CD function. I search and search and search again all the namings of the array of controls. Nothing. I look again at every piece of text and finally discover ‘DISC’ in one of the dark rectangles, so murky that one would categorise the text as illegible with its background acting as a blindfold. It is one of a set of three labels that try to identify: ‘DISC’; ‘TUNER’ and ‘AUX’ – codes that are only revealed when the unit is taken across into good, natural light and held at the correct angle. Strangely, this discovery only raises more questions: What is ‘AUX’? What is TUNER’? One assumes that ‘DISC’ refers to both CDs and DVDs, but holds no certainty in this interpretation. One is left wondering: why are such important, critical controls so hard to read? Why are they the last names a person sees on this gleaming silver surface, buried as they are in black holes? Once found, the button is pressed, but nothing obvious happens. So, as frustration grows, other buttons are pushed, making an untold and uncertain mess out of the instructions being given to the instrument when it was only needing one. By this time, one is tempted to throw the thing away but gives in to this annoyance and starts again with the ‘OFF’ switch that was eventually found again after rediscovering the first fumblings.

So I start again – ‘ON’. Good. The volume has already been turned down so something is working. Now I go to press the ‘DISC’ button and discover to my alarm – after many pushes and no results - that the designer has placed the text on the top set of buttons below the buttons, and that on the lower set of buttons above the buttons. One guesses that this is all part of the enhancement of the concept of axial symmetry that this design seems to have taken as its central concept. It is an unbelievable strategy, one that has such a subtle impact on the user that one continually forgets the ‘above/below’ articulation and falls for the trap generated by the expectation that there is some order in the location of the text - time and time again. Simple logic would have it that instructions might be consistent in one instrument – but not here. So the correct button is finally pressed – wonderful! I am a genius; but do not gloat.

How do I put the CD into the DVD player? I have already studied the controls on this piece of equipment and I know that there is no ‘OPEN’ button on the player: so I search the buttons – all 43 of them. Nothing. So I experiment and finally get the button with the small arrow (yet another one of them) to work. Bingo! But close? Yes, one discovers that it is the same button as ‘open.’ Why does it not have a double arrow? Now, how to play? ‘OK’ seems a good start because of its central significance, but no. I eventually discover, buried away in the mass of buttons, one that looks like all the others apart from the very fine text that says ‘PLAY’. So we are away, so agitated that the music can barely be appreciated; but I know where the volume is now and can adjust it.

When the music is finished, I want to listen to the news, so I search for the radio function. Is it ‘TUNER or ‘AUX’ or something else? What? Trial and error give the answer, but I need another station – on FM. The challenge becomes a dual one: how to change from AM to FM and how to change the station? There is no simple dial on this instrument, just the buttons on the control. One is left feeling like a dill, utterly hopeless in a sea of frustration without any life support. There is no FM/AM button; there s no radio setting button. The guessing approach only buggers up everything once again, so the ‘OFF’ is used to gain instant gratification and the manual searched for. After looking in ten different places for this booklet that one was sure was in each of the locations identified, the manual is found elsewhere, but it is found. “Be thankful for little things,” mother used to say.

The manual is flicked through, hoping that the section might be easily recognised – if only. The index is searched. Nothing under radio or AM/FM, so the whole listing is reviewed with every likely-sounding reference being looked up until the information is found under the most obscure naming. And, by gosh, once one is able to decipher the coded text, the answer is so simple – just press ‘TUNER’ and the ‘+’ and ‘-‘ markings on the oblong button mysteriously coded ‘TU’ a few times and bingo!! News for me.

This is all very wonderful, until next time, because the clues are so understated, concealed, confused with symmetries, blacked-out, misplaced, coded and/or just too fine and delicate that one is unable to easily interpret them; and one can never remember such an unintuitive process, meaning that the awkward shuffling and errors are repeated each time the unit is lifted from the table. Good design? It looks good to the eye but it is just a hopeless piece of design when considered in the context of the user’s body and mind – the experience. I still am at a total loss to know what the unused thirty-seven buttons on this object actually do other than confuse. One could suggest that good design might care more for people, with the operating (infrared) end of the control being self-evident in a form that one might casually pick up correctly every time, without thought or care; with an on/off button that is as clear and differentiated as the other essential controls should be. Why not conceal the 37 when they are so rarely used? Some manufacturers have solved these problems, notably Apple, but Philips – you need to do better, as do many of your colleagues.

I have four controls – they all suffer from the same problems: Pioneer – 33 buttons - is all black very much in the same manner as Philips – 43 buttons - is all silver. Sony –39 buttons – is black with six buttons in primary colours, but I have no idea what five of these are for! Sonix – 45 buttons – is silver with a large green standby button and a bright blue compass, as if the biggest and most unique button needs added special identification. I estimate that I use a total of six of these buttons on each: of/off; 3 channels (or alternatively start; pause; play); volume; mute. The remainder only confuse and confound. Of all of these buttons that I use, it is usually the most important one requiring quick attention that is located in the haystack of buttons or relegated to the extremities as an outsider – as if one has little need to use these, or perhaps should not use them.

It is a common tale that shows a lack of concern for the ordinary person - the consumer - in industrial design, in the same way as the manuals for these items do with their programmer’s language and categorisation. If one does not know the correct jargon or the method a programmer might choose to categorise things, then one is in the dark, left with the time-consuming and very frustrating trial and error process alone. It is simply astonishing that designers never seem to ponder how one knowing nothing might use the instruments they are shaping, in the same way that the programmer never seems to give a hoot for how an individual from another world might make sense of his/her gobbledygook. It is all something architects need to consider as our users are in the same realm of influence. Where is the entry? The lifts? The toilets? Do we really want to rely on signs that might look good in their pretty building? Signage is another matter too: a different subject with the same problems.

Remote controls need a greater design commitment that cares for the person, not just the indulgence given to the slick appearance of the object. Indeed, there is no reason other than neglect and carelessness, or perhaps a self-centred arrogance, that makes the design and its users so isolated - so remote. One can shrug and say, “Such is life,” but design must be better than this. The singular search for beauty aligned with the clever programmer’s mind leaves us with a muddled chaos of chance choice if the ordinary experience of the user is ignored. Numbers and aesthetics are not the only things involved here – feeling and a bit of nous is present too. If designers are not able or willing to respond to these needs, then perhaps design controls should be implemented. Sadly, we know that these never work. They only lead to 'check-box' outcomes that achieve goals, but rarely any integral beauty. The central issue is the designer who has a personal responsibility to engage ordinary people in ordinary life - everyday - in an extraordinary, almost imperceptible way. This should be the aim of all who shape things for others. Design is not a self-seeking, self-conscious performance to be pompously re-enacted by any user.

P.S.

In May 2013 I purchased a Bose Wave 111 unit. It came with a small remote control tablet, barely larger than a credit card, paper thin and featherweight. The unit itself has no controls that can confuse. Everything is operated from the remote. At last I have a remote control that is useful. It is possible - by design!

If one wanted to eliminate the six preset button options and the two alarm options, (it is a clock, a radio, a CD player with an auxiliary input for other systems to connect to), the remote control could be made even simpler. There is an on/off button that can be used when away from the unit that has a touch control. All operations are managed by pushing one button, e.g. RADIO for radio. The buttons are: Mute; Radio; CD; AUX. It is so obvious. Play/Pause; Stop/Eject; Seek/Track; Tune/MP3; and Time (+ -) are all self-evident in their functions. Play Mode and Alarm are the only other buttons. Changing stations or CDs means pressing the Radio or CD button again. It is a pleasure to use, just as much as the sound is to listen to.

Still, I would like to see it made simpler. There is no reason it cannot be done other than to accommodate some sundry whimsy for options and presets.

NOTE:
13 January 2015
A couple of years ago we purchased a smart SONY Bravia TV, one of those clever, 'do everything' digital pieces of equipment. We had to as the analogue signal was being permanently cut off. While recently holding the remote control in my hand, I noticed that the grime had started to build up around some buttons. Interestingly, the buttons that were regularly used were clean. I realized that I had real proof of the number of buttons that we frequently used on this control.

The remote had a total of 41 buttons. The number of buttons that were regularly used on this control was 10. Why has there been no improvement in these matters? The only change seems to be that the direction of use for this hand piece has been more clearly distinguished. Why is it so difficult to design a simple control? Why are there so many 'mystery' buttons?

At least one should note that all of the descriptive button codes, the lettering and diagrams, have been located consistently above the relevant buttons. This helps a lot. It is interesting to observe that the graphic for the MUTE button has worn off. This is evidence of much stupid commentary for sports - e.g. "If that ball had gone in it would have been a goal" -  and too many advertisements. Yes, the MUTE has been used a lot! It is the cleanest button of all.

NOTE:
26 February 2015
The new JVC 'smart' television shows that there has been no improvement in the design of remote controls. The buttons are numerically similar, (47 with text both above and below), but the 'start/stop' button on the top left is coloured red, while the 'mute' button opposite, with equal size and significance on the top right, is coloured green. This colour coding and placement of these buttons is the antithesis of the common expectation - red is 'stop' and green is 'go;' and the mute button is less significant than the 'start/stop' one. One finds oneself pressing mute for 'start' and getting nowhere, and closing down the television system when wanting to mute it. It is all more than confusing. It is just a silly, thoughtless design that has given no consideration to basic expectations. It reminds me of instructions that come with computers. These are written by programmers with specialist knowledge who have no idea how the 'average' person might approach matters.

12 March 2015
One soon realizes why the mute is so troublesome. It is not only that it is coloured green or used frequently. On the Sony, the on/off button is on the top right and it is coloured green. One has become used to pressing the green button on the top right for the on/off function. That the JVC control has a similar button with a different function only shows how some standardization would be useful. The whole matter of controls needs to be revisited and considered from the viewpoint of the ordinary user who has little time to be concerned with the inbuilt programming possibilities. Standardization in the electronics industry needs much more attention. Consider the number of different cables, batteries, and transformers that one accumulates for all of the different gadgets. Is it too difficult to ask that these might be designed to one standard where each might fit all?

SEX & SPIRITUALITY

THE FELLOWSHIP The Untold Story of Frank Lloyd Wright & the Taliesin Fellowship

Roger Friedland & Harold Zellman, Harper Perennial, New York, 2007.

REVIEWS

“A great contribution not only to Wright scholarship but also to our understanding of how even great artists depend on, and are in part defined by, the nameless standing just behind them.” Boston Globe.

“You can’t top the material for richness: genius, sex, spirituality, madness, money, mania.” USA Today.

“Just when you thought there was nothing new to be learned about the great American architect Frank Lloyd Wright, [this} massive, gossipy and yet compulsively readable new book proves you wrong.” Chicago Sun-Times.

“MESMERIZING” -Ken Burns.

Yet another book on FLW: when will they ever stop? Is there a sense of nostalgia lingering in the constant rebirth of interest in the past that we seem scared to let go of? What is it about our present that we need to look backwards? Are we so unsure of ourselves? So unhappy? Publications on Wright just keep appearing on the lower shelves of bookshops under ‘W,’ never the author. Sadly most of them seem to be collations of big, cliché, colourful coffee-table images introduced with large titles using the familiar FLW-style font and his red square. THE FELLOWSHIP looks to be yet another of these books cashing in on the popularity of this ‘bigger-than-life,’ self-promoting American architect of another era. The book is large enough, in thickness at least - 690 pages - and carries the iconic image of the man on its cover, the classic one taken from under the ground: the location of the camera preferred by little men. Australia’s Prime Minister John Howard comes to mind. It was his choice too.

But this book is indeed different. For once the reviews do not exaggerate. Here the usual promotional hyperbole that normally looks as though it has been scripted by the publisher only to cleverly cheat customers, is replaced by accurate analysis. The book is gossipy: the small hero wore platform shoes! It has a chapter on Taliesin’s ‘sex club.’ It clarifies the surprising role of the mystic Georgi Gurdjeiff and his followers in Taliesin – and that of Mrs. Wright: “The wicked witch is dead,” thought Diane Snodgrass when she heard the news of Olgivanna’s death. While not describing genius, the book spins a gossamer web around the experience of being Wright and living and working with him. It details the many money problems of the practice. It begins and ends with family madness and is filled with serial stories of mania in between. Open the cover and there is a full page of reviews that add to that on the front cover and those on the back of the book: so many, but each so true. The book is captivating; it does change the way one looks at and thinks about Wright, his work and his Fellowship, and adds to the record of this past, albeit at times extraordinary and disquieting.

There is no nostalgia here – just the rawness of the story. It represents ten year’s research by the authors, one a cultural sociologist, the other an architect. Yet the text is not schizophrenic. Both authors considered each written word; each kept the other on track; each broadened the other’s understanding; and when both found themselves floundering, they sought out the help of those who knew. The book is an example of why we need to look back. History has a habit of being the summarised story as told by the promoter - and Wright was good at this. The words shatter his mythologies and reveal the experience of being there - as described by those who participated.

Knowing that everyday life is so much more complex than any description can expound, the book can only touch on a few highlights of the time, leaving one to ponder the depths of the enormous gaps around these events. The astonishing thought is that, if this book is merely a schematic overview - as it must be - then what on earth must the full Fellowship experience have really been like? Mesmerizing - yes. We need to look back from our present so that we can know more of the past - more accurately - as we come to face our future and consider how we might prepare ourselves for it, or else we live by a lie. Some quotes from the book can best illustrate why this is so:


MUSIC

p.226

Wright was always in a good mood when he arrived there (in the small studio – only eight drafting tables for twenty-three apprentices), often humming a tune. He was forever repeating one of his favourite jokes – some of them “’darky’ stories,” Howe recalled, “in the days before you didn’t talk down blacks.” Howe remembered how Wright “would mount the stairs leading to the areas above the vault in which the Japanese prints were kept, sit at the old Steinway piano that was there, and roll out a few bars of Bach-Beethoven-type improvisations” before going to work on a drawing.

Wright told the apprentices that he heard Beethoven in his head as he designed. “When you listen to Beethoven,” he told them, “you are listening to a builder. You are seeing him take a theme, a motif, a building with it. . . . Building is the same thing.” And indeed there are clear parallels between music his father had taught him to appreciate and the architecture he created as an adult. Beethoven composed in modular fashion, particularly his later works, building up from small units known as motives, rather than from a larger melodic or lyrical line. Similarly, Wright drafted up his architecture on a grid, using simple modular forms he repeated and varied throughout the entire edifice, achieving what he called a “symphonic” unity. From his use of what Wright considered “integral ornament,” to his rejection of the symmetrical balance of the symphony in favour of codas that were often rich in thematic content, Beethoven offered a rich vein of inspiration to an architect eager to transcend the old symmetries of classical architecture.

ORDINARY BEAUTY

p.236

. . the Wrights had no tolerance for aesthetic imperfection. For Frank Lloyd Wright, ugliness was a sin. He strove to make life’s every aspect beautiful, a compulsion he imbibed during his four years in Japan. The importance the Japanese put on beautiful form was to him a “song of heaven.” He was thrilled by the way they made mundane life beautiful, converted profane daily tasks into ceremonial rite. Every human practice, including an individual’s posture, held a possibility for pleasurable form.

INTENT

p. 286

Svetlana also pitched in to help Olgivanna train her putative replacement, the doe-eyed Kay Schneider, showing her how to clean the house and to make tea. Together they waxed the cypress floors, vacuumed the stones (of Taliesin East). “Kay,” Svetlana instructed, “it’s not what you do; it’s the way that you do it.” What was important was the purity of one’s intent, the banishment of negative emotion, feelings that would inevitably be projected into one’s work.

. . . . and architecture?

LOVE

p. 307/308

Wright saved his venom for America’s young modern architects. In a magazine article he wrote alone and published while he was still recuperating in Arizona, he condemned the typical young American modern architect as so ambitious and selfish “that he would not hesitate to kill his own grandmother with an axe” if necessary. These young upstarts, he wrote, had achieved premature recognition – acclaim that had taken him fifteen years to earn.

The title of that article was “What the Cause of Architecture Needs Most,” and given its hostile tone the answer he gave was startling: The cause of architecture, he said, needed love. Always sensitive to his age, particularly given his recent brush with death, he turned the tables on his younger colleagues, labelling their behaviour as “aged,” his own as youthful. While they hungered for fame and material success – drives, he implied, of the elderly – he operated out the spirit of youth, “the spirit of love.”

REFRESHMENTS

p. 329

To Wright, the greatest sources of “refreshment” were not contemporary trends in architecture, but the principles of civilizations far from the modern West – and, above all, nature itself, unspoiled and unravelled by denizens of the metropolis.

With its savage beauty and the remnants of a highly spiritual native culture, the Arizona desert had both these elements. And Wright believed that regular sojourns here would leads him to fresh architectural visions that would counter the degeneracy he saw around him – on the one side the architectural submission to the machine, on the other the modernist artists glorying in an animistic primitivism. “Now,” he told a friend about the Arizona camp, “mankind needs refreshment afforded by the conscious return to the verities of being – returning to Nature not only in that early obvious sense but with more prophetic understanding and appreciation.”

In the Arizona desert, Wright hoped to develop a new set of forms, one that would push architecture beyond the European modernists. All he needed was a chance to build something here – an opportunity he had been awaiting for decades.

WHITE FORMICA AND STAINLESS STEEL

p. 332

Despite his enthusiasm for Wright, Johnny (Hill) was apprehensive. “I knew so little about him that I was expecting just to learn to love white Formica and stainless steel and all these . . . things. And I gritted my teeth.” When he arrived with his parents at Spring Green in May 1938, though, Johnny looked around and did something he had never done before: He cried. “I had never let go and cried in my life,” he said. “But it was so beautiful and answered every kind of thing that I loved . . . I felt as though I had arrived home.”

VITAMINS FOR THE SOUL

p. 334

Johnny (Hill) learned interior decoration from the master. “One of the things that he did for relaxation,” Johnny recalled, “was putter around with the objects d’art in the house and rearrange them . . . And I would do that with him, sort of like a shadow.” “We must make little rhythms ,” Wright told him, “so each looks better because of its neighbors. Making pleasing assemblies can be vitamins for the soul.”

. . . .if only our art galleries and museums would take note.

SNACKS FOR REAL MEN

p.439/440

Homosexuality, in Wright’s view, was a forbidden and dangerous refreshment, a degenerative snack that could be fatal to one’s manhood. And modern art, at least Picasso’s and Duchamp’s branch of it, was a regression to primitive forms – of same-sex desire and childlike bodily attraction. Real modernism – his modernism, otherwise known as organic architecture – was an aesthetic for real men.

Frank Lloyd Wright cast himself as an image of American manhood –

QVQ

p. 478

“Quantity vanquishes quality.”

PROVINCIAL

p. 495

“The little Philly-Johnson pansy-bunch and apostates,” Wright wrote his new son-in-law, “are all the enemy in sight,” clinging to the “provincial notion that American culture comes from abroad. They are too damn near right – but for us.”

. . . it is something Australia knows of too.

TECHNOLOGY

p.507

The start of the museum’s construction (Guggenhein, N.Y.) in May (1956) revealed just what a ragtag affair Taliesin was. The only telephone at Taliesin West was in Wright’s private office, unavailable to the apprentices charged with fielding questions from the contractor. And if ever a project was likely to generate questions, the Guggenheim was it. Eventually, they worked out a system: When a problem arose, the contractor would notify Taliesin by telegram. After Western Union drove the message to Taliesin, a group of apprentices would roll up the drawings, drive to Scottsdale, park next to a phone booth, unroll the drawings on the hood of the , drop in a handful of coins, and call New York with the answer.

. . . those were the days! It just shows that technology plays no role in the quality of outcomes. It is something that we should remember every day as we sit in front of our computers, silently praising ourselves on our clever gadgets and their possibilities that we believe position us at the forefront of history – best of all - as if clever tools can change outcomes for the better.

HARRY EVERYDAY

Too communist to be a romantic, too romantic to be a communist, his oeuvre bewilders and bedazzles, defies pigeonholing and classification, and makes a mockery of the disciplinary border patrols now stifling corporate universities, University, Inc. Who could conceive Professor Henri fidgeting nervously at the next departmental research evaluation or getting the gripes about tenure when so much more is now at stake? “I am in essence,” he stated in La Somme et le Reste, “oppositional, a heretic. . . . I pronounce myself irreducibly against the existing order . . . against a ‘being’ that searches for justifications beyond judgment. I think the role of thought is to harry what exists by critique, by irony, by satire. . . . I refuse to condemn spontaneity, that of the masses and that of the individual, even when it tends to be thoughtless, humorous, and bitterly ironic. I merit the value of spontaneity; life shouldn’t fall from above and rest heavily; and everyday life and humanity aren’t the realization of politics, morality, the state and Party.”

Andy Merrifield, Henri Lefebvre  A Critical Introduction, Routledge, New York, 2006: p.xxiv/xxv