By: Jonathan Meades
The Guardian: Sept 18, 2012 

Architecture talks about architecture as though it is disconnected from all other endeavours, an autonomous discipline which is an end in itself. Now, it would be acceptable to discuss opera or sawmill technology or athletics or the refinement of lard in such a way. They can be justifiably isolated, for they don’t impinge on anyone outside, say, the lard community – the notoriously factional lard community. To isolate architecture is blindness, and an abjuration of responsibility.

If we want to understand the physical environment we should not ask architects about it. After all, if we want to understand charcuterie we don’t seek the opinion of pigs. Architects make the error of confusing a physical environment with what they impose on it. Wrong. What is going on around us is the product of innumerable forces. Accidents – some happy, some not – clashes of scale and material, municipal idiocies and corporate boasts – these are some of the more salient determinants of our urban and suburban and extra-urban environments. Buildings are, of course, the major component of these environments. Some of those buildings will be the work of architects. But with the exception of those places where they have been granted the licence to do what they yearn to do – to start from zero – architects have less influence than they believe.

The places where those accidents don’t occur are salutary. The places where architects indeed had the opportunity to start from zero. We think of Bath’s crescents and circuses, of the successive Edinburgh new towns, of the exiled Polish court’s rebuilding of Nancy. At a higher level, Ledoux’s Arc-et-Senans and Le Corbusier’s l’Unité d’Habitation both instruct us in what genius is. The roof of l’Unité is a transcendent work: it is as though Odysseus is beside you. In a few gestures, it summons the entirety of the Mediterranean’s mythic history. It is exhilarating and humbling, it occasions aesthetic bliss. It demonstrates the beatific power of great art, great architecture.

‘Unité is absolutely atypical. So are the other places I mention. They are the exceptions to the rule that planned towns, tied towns, new towns, garden cities, garden villages, communist utopias, national socialist utopias, socialist utopias, one-nation utopias, comprehensive developments and wholesale regenerations that lurch between the mediocre and the disastrous. From Letchworth to Marne-la-Vallée, from New Lanark to Welwyn – the first provincial town in Britain, incidentally, to develop a serious smack habit – from the Aylesbury estate in south London to Seaside, Florida, from cuteness to high modernism, from beaux arts to new urbanism. It doesn’t matter what idiom is essayed, it is the business of attempting to create places that defeats architects. Architects cannot devise analogues for what has developed over centuries, for generation upon generation of amendments. They cannot understand the appeal of untidiness and randomness, and even if they could they wouldn’t know how to replicate it.

New buildings are simple: imagination and engineering. New places are not. It seems impossible to achieve by artifice the parts with no name, the pavement’s warts and the avenue’s lesions, the physical consequences of changed uses, the waste ground, the apparently purposeless plots.

It shouldn’t be impossible. One cause of this failure is architects’ lack of empathy, their failure to cast themselves as non-architects: architectYona Friedman long ago observed that architecture entirely forgets those who use its products. Another cause of failure is their bent towards aesthetic totalitarianism – a trait Nikolaus Pevsner approved of, incidentally. There was no work he admired more than St Catherine’s College, Oxford: a perfect piece of architecture. And it is indeed impressive in an understated way. But it is equally an example of nothing less than micro-level totalitarianism. Arne Jacobson designed not only the building, but every piece of furniture and every item of cutlery.

At macro-level, a so-called master planner will attend to the details of streets, avenues, drop-in centres, houses, offices, bridges. The master planner is almost certainly an architect, even though planning and architecture are contrasting disciplines. There are countless differences between a suburb and, say, a shopping mall in that suburb. We are all familiar with the hubristic pomp that often results when actors direct themselves. Appointing architects to conceive places is like appointing foxes to advise on chicken security.

The human ideal is to revel in urbanistic richness, in layers of imperfection. I got sick of Rome when I worked there: too much perfection, too constant a diet of masterpieces – the lumbering, sod-you-ness of Basil Spence’s British Embassy was peculiarly attractive. The only town in the Cotswolds that attracts me is Stroud, where the tyranny of oolitic limestone is ruptured by brick and slate.

A writer, at least this writer – and I am hardly alone – sees entropic beauty, roads to nowhere whose gravel aggregate is that of ad hoc second world war fighter runways, decrepit Victorian oriental pumping stations, rats, supermarket trolleys in toxic canals, rotting foxes, used condoms, pitta bread with green mould, polythene bags caught on branches and billowing like windsocks, greasy carpet tiles, countless gauges of wire, flaking private/keep-out signs that have been ignored since the day they were erected, goose grass, shacks built out of doors and car panels, skeins of torn tights in milky puddles, burnt-out cars, burnt-out houses, abandoned chemical drums, abandoned cooking oil drums, abandoned washing machine drums, squashed feathers, tidal mud, an embanked former railway line, a shoe, vestigial lanes lined with may bushes, a hawser, soggy burlap sacks, ground elder, a wheelless buggy, perished underlay, buddleia, a pavement blocked by a container, cracked plastic pipes, a ceramic rheostat, a car battery warehouse constellated with CCTV cameras, a couple of scraggy horses on a patch of mud, the Germolene-pink premises of a salmon smoker, bricked-up windows, travellers’ caravans and washing lines, a ravine filled with worn car tyres, jackdaws, herons, jays, a petrol pump pitted and crisp as an overcooked biscuit, a bridge made of railway sleepers across duckweed, an oasis of scrupulously tended allotments.

That’s what I see: layers of urban archaeology. It’s what painters such as Carel Weight and Edward Burra would have seen, what George Shawand Julian Perry still see. A site of richness and multiple textures which feeds curiosity. It is obviously decaying. But decay, as anyone who has watched meat rot knows, possesses a vitality of its own. Such vitality is infinitely preferable to sterility and stadia.

What an architect sees, blindly and banally, is not richness and severality. But, rather, something that is crudely classified as a brownfield site, that is tantamount to being classified as having no intrinsic worth. It is a non-place where derivative architecture can gloriously propagate itself with impunity. A brownfield site is a job opportunity, a place where the world can be physically improved. The architectural urge doesn’t acknowledge the fact that it’ll all turn to dust.

SEOUL — Most mornings, when the slanted dawn light hits the nearby Tower Palace luxury high-rises, Cho Su-ja can’t help but stare, struck by their grandeur.

The 72-year-old grandmother lives in a two-room shack with plastic flooring, sandwiched between other shacks built from planks of wood, corrugated tin, castoff door frames and bamboo screens, like a jumble of shipwrecks.

But Cho doesn’t envy her wealthy neighbors, not one bit.

She’s proud to be one of the original inhabitants of Guyrong village, a ramshackle shantytown sprawling alongside the exclusive Gangnam area, the highest-priced real estate in South Korea.

And she’s fighting efforts by Seoul officials to bulldoze her community of 1,200 shacks and move her and 2,000 others into low-income apartments that will be part of a new mixed-use community to be built on the same site.

“I love it here, to get on my hands and knees and plant my flowers in the spring,” she said. “I open my door to the sweet smell of acacia flowers. This area may not look like much, but to me it’s heaven. And I’m not leaving it for any matchbox apartment.”

For decades, the village has been a catchall for South Korea’s down and out, a collection of outcasts that turned no one away. There are women whose husbands died suddenly, leaving them to raise their children alone; couples who lost jobs and businesses and had nowhere else to turn; men without work, homes or families because of alcohol or bad luck.

Here, homes and people crowd on top of one another. In the summer, when the windows are open, coughs and conversations next door are easily heard. There is little rhyme or reason to the place, just shack after shack taking on the haphazard form of words in a Scrabble game.

Some people are surrounded by concrete; others, like Cho, are lucky enough to have a patch of dirt for a garden. Pity the poor souls who live next to the outhouses.

But residents of Guyrong — whose name translates as “three dragons rising to the sky” — say they have worked hard to build a community. A volunteer force patrols the narrow alleyways, and every year there’s a spring festival in which children offer the elderly red roses as a sign of respect. Neighbors collaborated to install a fire extinguisher at nearly every shack. They built churches, stores, a barbershop and a beauty salon.

The first residents arrived in the 1970s, a time of military rule and no social safety net. Back then the village was isolated, its shacks climbing a wooded hillside at the southernmost reaches of Seoul.

Then something new began to buffet these people who had already seen their fair share of bad luck: Rich people moved in nearby.

High-rises sprouted as the area south of the winding Han River became the Beverly Hills of Northeast Asia’s newest tiger economy. The area became home to tycoons and actors. Auto industry titans Hyundai and Kia opened their headquarters just down the road.

The Tower Palace high-rises sit across a busy four-lane road that serves as a security wall for the wealthy. There is no interaction between the two sides; neither would dream of crossing into the realm of the other.

To the north, past Tower Palace and out of sight of Guyrong village, sprawls Gangnam, with its riches and fantastic lifestyles that the poor can see only on their daily soap operas.

For years, as Guyrong residents watched the havens for the rich spring up, they rejected talk by officials about possibly being shooed off the state-owned land as squatters. But last April, the Seoul government finally put its foot down, announcing plans to have a state-controlled firm develop the area.

For those in Guyrong, the decision was devastating. Residents have strung banners that read: “We’ve been here for decades. We’ll die before we’re pushed out.”

Officials are just as resolute. They say they worry about the welfare of residents, citing floods each spring and a recent fire that burned a dozen shacks but miraculously killed no one. The new units, they say, will mean a better life.

“I’m surprised these people have stayed this long. I couldn’t live a month in this place, not a week,” said Kim Jin-kuk, a Seoul housing official who mans a trailer here to ensure that no one else moves in. “The city wants to help, but they’re fighting us.”

The debate exposes South Korea’s vast wealth inequality, a widening gulf between rich and poor in a society that prides itself on providing for everyone. A recent government report said that disposable income among the poorest 20% of families fell 5.6% last year, but increased 23.3% among the richest 20%. The poorest receive a small government handout, but the rest are in the ranks of the working poor who exist on less than $10,000 a year.

Although Seoul has its share of the have-nots, the most destitute end up in Guyrong, where families burn coal for heat, sending up black plumes of smoke. Until a few years ago, residents carried water from a well. Without indoor plumbing, they still use outhouses and portable toilets.

By Leon Neyfakh | BOSTON GLOBE, JUNE 24, 2012

A finished basement can be a beautiful thing. With the right accoutrements and enough effort, what might otherwise be a damp, empty space lined with concrete can be turned into a cozy playroom, or a den, or an office and gym. Properly planned, the basement can become an integral part of a household, even a kind of engine that powers it from below.

The same is true for the far larger basement that all of us share: that vast space that exists under our feet wherever we go, out of sight and out of mind. Those of us who are city-dwellers already keep a lot of stuff down there—subway stations, sewer pipes, electrical lines—but as our cities grow more cramped, and real estate on the surface grows more valuable, the possibility that it can be used more inventively is starting to attract attention from planners around the world.

“It used to be, ‘How high can you go up into the sky?’” said Susie Kim, of the Boston-based urban design firm Koetter Kim & Associates. “Now it’s a matter of, ‘How low can you go and still be economically viable?’”

A cadre of engineers who specialize in tunneling and excavation say that we have barely begun to take advantage of the underground’s versatility. The underground is the next great frontier, they say, and figuring out how best to use it should be a priority as we look ahead to the shape our civilization will take.

“We have so much room underground,” said Sam Ariaratnam, a professor at Arizona State University and the chairman of the International Society for Trenchless Technology. “That underground real estate—people need to start looking at it. And they are starting to look at it.”

Read on.

For those of us who first saw “Blade Runner” in theaters, the first nighttime street scene –Harrison Ford, as the blade runner Deckard, wandering through acid rain in a wrecked,  neon-lit downtown Los Angeles–is forever etched in our brains. The street life of the future is chaotic, a babel of advertising slogans–”a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies!”–music and images such as a smiling geisha on a gigantic screen. Scurrying through the rain and smoke are a lot of Asians. Neon signs in fake kanji advertise shops and services. Deckard fights his way through the crowd to order a bowl of ramen from a Japanese at an outdoor stall, only to have his meal interrupted by two heavily armored policemen who take him away in a flying car. One of the cops, played by Edward James Olmos, speaks a strange hybrid language (actually mostly Hungarian) that the Japanese noodle vendor interprets. These elements add up to a dystopian Los Angeles, one inhabited by humanoid “replicants” as well as the human drones of a sinister controlling industry, the Tyrell Corporation. 

The process of bringing this world to life was detailed last Thursday night at Bonhams & Butterfield. A panel discussion benefitting the Los Angeles Conservancy brought ”Blade Runner” conceptual designer Syd Mead and producer Michael Deeley together, along with Frances Anderton of KCRW’s ”DnA,” to discuss the film’s design. Mead was hired to create the overall look of the film, a role that got larger as the production design grew more detailed. It helped that Ridley Scott got his start as a designer and spent years directing commercials. It was Scott who encouraged Mead to keep dressing the street on Warner’s backlot until it reached its ultimate state of visual overload. 

At some point during pre-production, what was supposed to be a generic city became Los Angeles and a decision was made to go Asian rather than Latino.  The resulting look combines elements of Hong Kong and Tokyo in the 1960′s, when both cities boasted acres of lively neon but hadn’t yet attained their present levels of opulence. (For me, a childhood resident of both cities, the downtown of “Blade Runner” actually inspires nostalgia–murderous androids, acid rain and wrecked infrastructure notwithstanding.)   

Significantly, the film introduced many viewers to the architectural highlights of Los Angeles. The Tyrell Corporation occupies a Mayan pyramid whose interior resembles Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis House. The Million Dollar Theater, a Broadway movie palace, is a prominent part of the downtown street scene. The police station is located in Union Station, a 1939 Mission/Art Deco gem. Deckard travels by car through the Second Street Tunnel. He hunts replicants in the Bradbury Building, a 1893 cast iron masterpiece whose use in this strange future–rain pouring through its broken skylight–is nothing short of inspired. 

As Michael Deeley reminded us, “Blade Runner” had an unsuccessful theatrical run, becoming a hit only after it was released on video. Nevertheless, its title soon entered the vocabulary as a pejorative for a certain urban atmosphere. In 1990, my boyfriend used to complain that the Beverly Connection–then brand-new–was too ”bladerunner.” (He had a point: that mall aged so ungracefully that it received a major renovation four years ago and now looks completely different.) In time, “Blade Runner” became a classic not only for its design but for its skillful adaptation of the Philip K. Dick novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Many consider it one of the best science fiction films of all time. 

It’s hard to believe nearly three decades have passed since its release–and that 2019 is just around the corner. Mead suggested that the film’s vision of the future influenced positive change in Los Angeles. Whether or not it did, no one can deny that downtown has been transformed in the years since ”Blade Runner” came out. After years of new construction–including major public buildings such as the Disney Concert Hall, Staples Center and Our Lady of Angels Cathedral–loft renovation and burgeoning residential population, it’s safe to say downtown Los Angeles won’t look like it does in “Blade Runner” nine years from now. On the downside, we still don’t have flying cars. But on the upside (along with the aforementioned), the Bradbury Building has been restored to its original glory, having undergone a major renovation in 1991.

Newsweek Magazine: Aug 28, 2011 10:00 AM EDT

Beijing is two cities. One is of power and of money. People don’t care who their neighbors are; they don’t trust you. The other city is one of desperation. I see people on public buses, and I see their eyes, and I see they hold no hope. They can’t even imagine that they’ll be able to buy a house. They come from very poor villages where they’ve never seen electricity or toilet paper.

Every year millions come to Beijing to build its bridges, roads, and houses. Each year they build a Beijing equal to the size of the city in 1949. They are Beijing’s slaves. They squat in illegal structures, which Beijing destroys as it keeps expanding. Who owns houses? Those who belong to the government, the coal bosses, the heads of big enterprises. They come to Beijing to give gifts—and the restaurants and karaoke parlors and saunas are very rich as a result.

Beijing tells foreigners that they can understand the city, that we have the same sort of buildings: the Bird’s Nest, the CCTV tower. Officials who wear a suit and tie like you say we are the same and we can do business. But they deny us basic rights. You will see migrants’ schools closed. You will see hospitals where they give patients stitches—and when they find the patients don’t have any money, they pull the stitches out. It’s a city of violence.

The worst thing about Beijing is that you can never trust the judicial system. Without trust, you cannot identify anything; it’s like a sandstorm. You don’t see yourself as part of the city—there are no places that you relate to, that you love to go. No corner, no area touched by a certain kind of light. You have no memory of any material, texture, shape. Everything is constantly changing, according to somebody else’s will, somebody else’s power.

To properly design Beijing, you’d have to let the city have space for different interests, so that people can coexist, so that there is a full body to society. A city is a place that can offer maximum freedom. Otherwise it’s incomplete.

I feel sorry to say I have no favorite place in Beijing. I have no intention of going anywhere in the city. The places are so simple. You don’t want to look at a person walking past because you know exactly what’s on his mind. No curiosity. And no one will even argue with you.

None of my art represents Beijing. The Bird’s Nest—I never think about it. After the Olympics, the common folks don’t talk about it because the Olympics did not bring joy to the people.

There are positives to Beijing. People still give birth to babies. There are a few nice parks. Last week I walked in one, and a few people came up to me and gave me a thumbs up or patted me on the shoulder. Why do they have to do that in such a secretive way? No one is willing to speak out. What are they waiting for? They always tell me, “Weiwei, leave the nation, please.” Or “Live longer and watch them die.” Either leave, or be patient and watch how they die. I really don’t know what I’m going to do.

My ordeal made me understand that on this fabric, there are many hidden spots where they put people without identity. With no name, just a number. They don’t care where you go, what crime you committed. They see you or they don’t see you, it doesn’t make the slightest difference. There are thousands of spots like that. Only your family is crying out that you’re missing. But you can’t get answers from the street communities or officials, or even at the highest levels, the court or the police or the head of the nation. My wife has been writing these kinds of petitions every day, making phone calls to the police station every day. Where is my husband? Just tell me where my husband is. There is no paper, no information.

The strongest character of those spaces is that they’re completely cut off from your memory or anything you’re familiar with. You’re in total isolation. And you don’t know how long you’re going to be there, but you truly believe they can do anything to you. There’s no way to even question it. You’re not protected by anything. Why am I here? Your mind is very uncertain of time. You become like mad. It’s very hard for anyone. Even for people who have strong beliefs.

This city is not about other people or buildings or streets but about your mental structure. If we remember what Kafka writes about his Castle, we get a sense of it. Cities really are mental conditions. Beijing is a nightmare. A constant nightmare.

Gentrification is a lot like art it seems; hard to explain but you know it when you see it. For those of you who would rather have the Dictionary.com definition of Gentrification: Gentrification: the buying and renovation of houses and stores in deteriorated urban neighborhoods by upper- or middle-income families or individuals, thus improving property values but often displacing low-income families and small businesses. Now, for those of you who would like to hear what Gentrification is like on the ground, where it is happening, in this case from someone who is experiencing it, please…pull up a chair. On Natoma Street, Gentrification is when the amount of Human feces on the sidewalk on a Friday or Saturday Night is less then or equal to the amount of vomit… Now, mind you, I am a friend of small business… and am all for a lively nightlife in this little corner of the SOMA. It is proven that a lively well established nightlife makes a community safer at night, but wouldn’t it be nice if EVERYONE, from every income level could evacuate their collective bowels and stomachs somewhere else? Just an idea…