Geoff used his presentation to deliver a breathless synopsis of the books main subjects which seemed almost randomly plucked from a grab-bag of architectural relics and speculative modern day concepts. These are not their official titles but some of the main subjects from the talk included:
Layered civilisations and structures
The way architecture is influenced and constrained by the layering of structures and systems. Geoff talked of farmland sewn over burial grounds, an anti-nuclear bunker which was thought to hinder the London IMAX's construction and how Manhattan's grid of skyscrapers needed particular positioning so that they rested on the islands bedrock.
Phantom Closets & Connections
This segued into a conversation about phantom spaces and connections - Spatially starved Manhattanites who dreamt of finding secret rooms extending in a Narnia like fashion from their shoe closets. A freak called William Little aka 'the moleman' who lives in Hackney and has structural endangered houses through digging an extensive network of tunnels and emerging in people’s gardens.
Meteorological Engineering & Nostalgia Weather
There was some interesting stuff about using decommissioned military equipment to change weather systems too - pulling the aurora borealis over Rome to make it a more profitable / idyllic tourist location and even modifying the weather to re-create weather systems from the past - or 'Nostalgia Weather' as Geoff entitled it.
[Image: An illustration by Brendan Callahan, from The BLDGBLOG Book].
My favourite part of the evening was the guest speaker slot from Kevin Slavin - a cross-media games designer from New York based consultancy Area/Code. I should say that Alternative Reality Game design is a discipline I never really held much interest in, Slavin's presentation definitely shook me out of my ambivalence. The background he gave and his reasons for creating augmented reality games it were utterly illuminating.
Bad War -Hans Holbein [Photo credit: Wikipedia]
This began with a dissection of what we mean by the word nostalgia. Slavin talked of the homesickness Swiss_mercenaries having been displaced from their homeland from their homeland in battle and how this gave rise to Heimat (a German concept describing the way in which people are bound by their birth, their childhood, their language and their earliest experiences). Whereas once nostalgia or heimat described the longing for places which we no longer inhabit - now as we live longer it is the rapid transformation of culture which becomes the most disorientating factor. In other words we've moved into an age of spatial rather than temporal dislocation - and it is this form of spatial displacement to which nostalgia has come to imply.
We travel more than 16th century man did, but we know the places where explore and settle in infinitely more detail, electronic mapping technologies have brought the intimate spatial parameters of our environment to us at the press of a button (or the swipe of an iPhone screen). Mapping technologies also nurture a supremely self-centred worldview - in which we always locate ourselves right under the crosshair - at the centre of the map and at the centre of the world.
[Photo credit: Matt Jones]
Area/Code's projects are driven by an ambition to counterpoise these prosaic certainties through purposefully ambiguous experiences which encourage participant’s to re-orientate and rediscover the boundaries of urban life. One such experience - a game called Crossroads takes a simple Pac Man like concept but situates the player in the city streets. Players move their sprites by walking from place to place holding their mobile phones, with points awarded every time they cross an intersection. As they do so they are pursued by Papa Bones - a skull-like avatar who kills them if they cross his path. This situates the city dweller/game player in a surreal situation - sprinting across real lower east side blocks - yet from an illusionary creature.
Perhaps the uncannyness of this situation is emblematic of our future relationship with urban environments. As pervasive technologies become more embedded in our lives surely we will find ourselves forming increasingly personal and idiosyncratic relations to the space around us - gradually moving away from national and civically conferred manners of acting within the environment. In the process we will return more closely to the core meaning of Heimat.
Associated links:
AA School of Architecture
BLDG Blog Book
BLDG Blog
Area/Code
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