RV Perspective #2
Skanska STUDIO, Flux.io, Apple Watch, Living Building Challenge// ‘Epic Eco-Fails’, Open Data, Economics 1, 3D Printing
WELCOME TO RV PERSPECTIVE
This is the second weekly-and-more update and comment on important things happening in architecture, technology, and sustainability by John Manoochehri of Resource Vision, and guests. Focus is international, with examples and links to work in the US, Sweden and the Nordic region.
RV Perspective is divided into the Short View and Long View sections, and will appear on Monday each week, with occasional extra editions. It will take between 5–15 minutes to read depending on how interested you are, and how fast you read.
Link / send this to other interested folks, and scroll below for more on how to interact: challenge the content, suggest other stuff, share your work, propose collaboration. Thanks! NB — highlight some text and a comment function pops up.
THE SHORT VIEW
HEADLINE NEWS
A couple of weeks ago the roof went on to one of Sweden’s most innovative buildings, Studio Malmö by Skanska. Skanska has the idea that it will create more value for itself, and contribute more value to Malmö, by reworking the concept not just the shape of the office block. Rather than whoever pays, sitting unconnected, in static space, the office becomes: interesting people (who can pay), interacting diversely, in a dynamic space.
Will it work? No-one knows. But all the big office actors in Sweden are experimenting right now with ‘activity-based’ ‘creativity houses’: AMF Fastigheter (Epicentre), Akademiska Hus (A House), Vasakronan (Kolonien). Their willingness to invest is probably inspired by existing, specialist flavours of mission-driven co-workspaces: including social enterprise (Impact Hub Stockholm), tech startups (SUP46), creative entrepreneurs (Entreprenörsslottet), researchers (OpenLab).
STUDIO Malmö opens in October — with its inevitable cool hotel partner, Story. If it works out, and if any of these others work out, the question the becomes: how did workplaces get so dead in the first place — and who will dare to design or build dead ones ever again?
THINGS TO WATCH
The single most ambitious, and one of the best funded (40m USD / 350m SEK), companies taking on the computation of the built environment is Flux.io, a spin-out from Google X.
Long-story-short, it plans to compute spatial and material choices in real time: reorient the roof <> decrease temperature and shrink HVAC plant; etc.
The core of the tool, is a compatibility engine, running data between the Autodesk (Revit/Dynamo) and McNeel (Rhino/Grasshopper) software citadels, via open spreadsheets, and online viewing tools.
This is the birth of truly algorithmic, data-driven design. It looks and feels geeky now, but it will reinvent your job — if it doesn’t eliminate it.
Apple Watch is not a watch. Apple Watch is not even primarily a communications or notifications device either.
There’s 10 million of them roving around the world, already 1% of all global watch sales. So what are they? They are an anchoring point for massive change in three existing categories — payments, health, security. And they will enable more change through two-additional features — universal positioning, mood-monitoring.
The spatial implication of this — for design of retail, hospitals, building access, and the potential for placemaking — is currently, inconceivable. So what time is it? Time to conceive all that. And if, you don’t, someone else will: just don’t be surprised when your employer, health insurer, holiday tour operator gets one for you.
THE SHORT EXPLAINER
The Living Building Challenge (LBC) is a next-generation of environmental certification system for architecture and urban design, similar in principle to the LEED and BREEAM systems, but different in three ways.
Firstly, LEED and BREEAM are certifications of aspiration, whereas LBC is a certification of performance, granted only after a year of monitoring in real-world conditions.
Secondly, LBC also has a system of categorisation like LEED and BREEAM — LBC has 20 ‘imperatives’ divided into 7 so-called ‘petals’ — but where LEED offers points for green features in almost any combination you choose, the LBC certification requires that all imperatives must be honoured to some degree.
Finally, LBC is not a suite of pre-configured solutions, it’s a set of performance goals: in this way, it becomes much more native to a design process, and inviting of creative integration, than LEED / BREEAM which pre-define outcomes.
Some of the greenest buildings in the world are LBC certified: this is the current state of the art of sustainability certification.
THE LONG VIEW
COMMENTARY
‘EPIC ECO-FAILS’—ENJOYING GUILTY PLEASURE
As the saying goes — when something seems too good to be true, it probably is. So has it turned out to be for what was planned as the world’s largest, most lavish, and most ambitious eco-city: Masdar in the United Arab Emirates. Rather than 50,000 high-value residents, it has an seasonal population of 300 students; rather than 1500 sustainable companies, it has a single institute of sustainability. When something fails at this scale, it’s makes little sense to ask what went wrong — it is more about asking, did anything work at all?
Masdar is only the biggest so far of epic eco-fails. Dongtan was a Chinese eco-city-to-be, this time with Arup engineers as the sexy credibility engine, but it fared even worse than Masdar: not a single brick was laid, despite extensive plans to create a city of 500,000 people. Caofedian, another Chinese eco-boondoggle (this time with archi-engineers Sweco as the media front-man), has failed. There are more such fails — in China, and Europe, and the US.
In most of these cases, the excuse given for the failure is that the ambition did not, in the end, match the scale of the ambition. But in Masdar’s case, this argument is not possible. The enduring success of Masdar will likely be the actual level of ambition it reached — both at the political level, because it was a government-backed priority project, and the financial level, because it had basically a blank-cheque budget from the government (initially committing 15bn USD), hiring one of the world’s top architects to make it look good.
Actually, what will turn out to have been the root problem is actually the vision itself. Gathering a catwalk of eco-all-stars (smart vehicles, clean energy, waste management, etc), and throwing them, together with a bundle of money, at a blank plot of land — and imagining a functioning city will materialise — is not a viable urban planning methodology.
But this lesson — abstract visions of artificial cities failing in the real world — is not a new one. It is simply the latest stage of schooling for politicians and planners that still resist the concrete (literally) failings post-war modernist planning adventures.
The new lesson, for eco-planning at least, that Masdar’s failure could inspire is that failure is actually ok, and that enjoying eco-failure is a guilty pleasure planners and architects should accept and share, rather than ignore or hide.
It’s beyond true that cynicism, corruption and glib marketing — which characterise all these failures — are not good grounds for launching a sustainable city revolution. But at the same time, not all well-meaning eco-projects succeed, and far from all large urban developments are grounded in anything that looks like good planning.
And what’s also true, but less obvious, is that the lessons we are supposed to learn from the supposed failure of modernist planning are far from clear, and not universally accepted even when they are clear. We aren’t even sure where we should start, or what questions we should ask.
Should we have more collaboration? More expertise? More data? More technology? Less? Smaller cities? Bigger? Multi-centric? Local food? Nature? How many goats? To Uber or not to Uber? Etc.
So if we can’t be sure of the planning lesson from Masdar, we can take away the classic process and psychological teachings of failure — it’s good to try, but pride will have a fall. Planning and architecture could catch up with the world of start-up enterprise which has internalised these, preaching the merits of humble persistence and learning-by-doing.
Some of this is about the different scale of costs when failures happen: a broken city is vastly more traumatic outcome than a broken website. But there is probably something about the way planners and architects like to see themselves as well: as special, the ones with the plan — and above all not wrong.
Failed Architecture is fascinating catalogue of unsuccessful architecture and once the strange, vicarious embarrassment of witnessing misfired ambition has washed over the viewer (or voyeur), the work there is genuinely and calmingly instructive. A special category, or separate project, that lists eco-fails in architecture and urban design would be very useful.
Eco-fail-watching should not, in fact, be just about cautionary tales and avoiding misadventure. It’s can also be a kind of quiet reminder and incentive to get up and do stuff, even and perhaps particularly when we aren’t sure of the outcomes.
The skateboarder we watch on YouTube, flying through the air before wiping out, didn’t just wipe out: she also flew through the air. Cynical and hubristic eco-city megaprojects are easy to criticise, but the positive response cannot be nothing at all or further rehearsal of slow-moving planning theory debates. Not all large projects fail for bad reasons: not all eco-fails are ego-fails.
THINGS TO STUDY
If we work with the emerging principle that all things are computable, and whether we like it or not will be computed, at least what we should hope that everyone has the same chance to control and compute data. This is the principle of open data, and there is a movement to apply to as much data as possible, above all to government-produced data, which in theory everyone should own because everyone paid for it.
Few people in the built environment professions understand that this movement is surprisingly well advanced. There’s already a detailed comparison of open data performance by national governments. (Sweden is shockingly very low in this comparison, unusually for a country that prides itself on being high up on almost any any country-comparison table, in particular those about government and technical standards.) The UK is in second place, although this is perhaps less surprising because one of the government’s advisors happens to be Tim Berners-Lee, the founder of the world wide web.
The relevance of open data to architectural design and urban sustainability is considerable. To make the best design choices, we need as much spatial, social and environmental data as possible, and this data needs to be available online, up-to-date, in the right format, and in high quality and large quantities — and preferably for free. This is what open data promises.
Partly this is understood already: to design the best leisure spaces, outdoor areas that are sheltered, illuminated, and have good views and access are ideal, and we use data to tell us which ones they are. But now we are starting to get new forms of data, and this can guide design choices in more and richer ways.
Where are cars being used most? What kind of shopping takes place in what part of town? Which streets are busiest at which times of day? What are the projected trends for density across a city? What real-world stuff are people searching for online? Where are they and what are they feeling at what times of day? How much time do they spend in which parts of a building?
If this kind of information is known — and in most modern cities it is increasingly known — architects, for both design and business development purposes, ought to be demanding of governments to make it available, and responsive and creative in integrating it into their work, when it is. Some of this information is in the hands of businesses, but really ought to be defined as public information, and should be made open for that reason.
So, if you are ready for the anything computable era, here’s the Monday job: write a list of the public data that government and business has that you want, and what you want it for. Then ask for it, for free.
ECONOMICS 1— CONSUMPTION MODELS
Architects and urbanists, in quiet moments, probably all agree that they don’t, um, agree on the theory of built design. They don’t agree on which theories are good, they don’t agree on how the theories should be applied or be tested, they don’t even agree on how they should be researched or taught or corrected. In this, they are not alone. Economists are just as bad. Architects ought to study the basics of economics for cautionary instruction on how bad things can get when no-one takes theory seriously — but also because of how it deeply the lack of theory influences their own profession.
This is not just about avoiding the worst of instability in the real estate sector — such as preventing further global economic meltdowns based on bad mortgages. It’s about being able perceive opportunities that exist but are hidden from view, or can be made to exist, even though theory is not really helping.
The alpha and omega of economics is the study of the market — what it is, what it does, and how it works. It turns out that how it really works, and how it should and could work, are not so well known or obvious — theory-fail, again. With the rise of the data and computation age, these weaknesses cause new risks but also create new opportunities for redefining economic potential.
For this edition, we can focus on a one theme of how the economy actually works, and could work better: consumers. Or in business language: customers. Who are they, who could they be, and how should we relate to them? Here’s a few considerations.
Design Direct to Buyer — Conventionally architects do not deal with large groups of individual property buyers — they trade with property developers, who deal with the end users. But there is no theory that makes this a good idea, it’s just how things work. In the digital age, it becomes perfectly possible for citizen groups to co-ordinate around a housing concept and project, and become the client for designers — and it is already starting to happen. The economic potential — cutting out the middleman of developers — is huge.
New Monetisation Models — In the digital realm, we we live in a world where a huge amount of the products and services we consume are in part paid for, are ‘monetised’, through advertising. It might not be at all attractive, but in economic theory terms, it is hard to understand why there is so little advertising inside houses and apartments. If this is hard to stomach, then there are other ways to commercially support housing, such as exclusive deals with third-party suppliers of services such as energy, water, furniture and supplies: these are well established in hotels and conference centres but are not part of how architects and urbanists view the market.
Design for Up-sell — A related consumer concept is the up-sell: an add-on purchase that can be bought as an optional extra during the initial sale, or added at a later point. For example, housing might be designed so that individual balconies can have a glass enclosure added, but also function sufficiently well without them. Rooms could be split and combined with a focus on modular walling features, and many other features of housing and offices could be adapted with small modular interventions that could be designed at the time of initial drawing. Developers and real-estate agents would even be able to act as brokers for these choices without increasing costs for themselves either, so it is hard to understand why they are not a big part of the built sector’s economic concept.
Equity — Finally, why do architects and urbanists have no further relationship with their customers and their projects after they have finished designing them? Apple designs and sells great phones — but also stays in a close and complex revenue relationship with the phone owners through the lifetime of the phone. Architects and designers could, and perhaps should, do this in many ways. They could retain equity in the buildings using their designs: meaning that they would own part of the building, in return for some portion of the fees they would otherwise have received. They could receive benefits, or incur costs, according to the performance of the building over time, or its resale value, or its ease of deconstruction and disposal.
All of these are ways in which architects and urban designers, enabled in particular by technology, can reimagine their revenue propositions by a small amount of study of consumer economics. It’s probably worthwhile.
THE LONG EXPLAINER
3D printing is extremely trendy in discussions of design and manufacturing and innovation. You could be excused for thinking that space rockets — in fact all cool stuff — is already 3D printed, and that everything else was made with inefficient old-timey techniques.
Nope. 3D printing is still what it always was: a broad group of machines and techniques which enable rapid, cheap prototyping and modelling; and a slowly expanding set of machines and techniques which can custom manufacture industrial components.
The conceptual and practical beginnings of 3D printing are compelling and attractive: printing available to everyone (in the way that desktop printers are), offering products in 3D rather than just in 2D. What’s not to like?
The problem is that the difference between producing something in 3D and visualising it in 2D or 3D is precisely the difference between imagining something and actually making it. 3D printing is still stuck at that boundary, despite the cacophony of enthusiasm around it.
3D printing involves a one or more of a group of techniques that more technically are grouped under the heading of additive manufacture. The two dominant techniques for consumers and industry, are extrusion (in which a plastic substrate is extruded to form a shape layer by layer, and then set hard) or stereolithography (in which a shape is fixed layer by layer out of a liquid plastic bath, with laser light). The fusion of metal powders is a another, more industrial technique that is gradually making its way into high-volume, lower-strength consumer applications. All of these techniques use flexible material stocks contained within the fabrication machine itself.
This is all very well — but is it printing? And is it useful? 3D printing is like 2D printing on the basis that a self-contained, cheap feedstock is laid out in a meaningful pattern, and set in place. The analogue is only strictly correct, and useful, however, in the case of model building: something convenient for architects and urbanists, and others, that feel physical models are more useful than digital models. Beyond models, the difference between visualising and actually making something becomes more and more clear.
To make actual products, or parts of products, additive manufacture at all scales requires additional steps in the fabrication process. The most immediate additional steps, in incremental order of sophistication are:
finishing and assembly — the removal of artefacts and configuration of elements into a specific form
chemical, pressure, and temperature treatment — the refinement of material characteristics through special environmental transformations
multiple materials — the addition of and combination with other material types.
These extensions of basic additive manufacture create a much wider potential set of useful applications. But they can hardly be considered part of anything analogous to printing. Even with these, even more capacities are required to reach anything like a full production-quality process:
subtractive manufacture — most objects involve some negative space, and it is often more convenient to subtract this, rather than just ‘add’ around it
complex manipulation — most objects requiring non-’printing’ steps, need human or robot hands, legs, eyes.
3D printing is important and helps immensely to visualise and interact with physical models and non-working prototypes. But the more that 3D printing is required to be actually useful, i.e. anything like an actual manufacturing process, the less it is likely printing. Additive manufacture is actually on an evolutionary pathway of fabrication sophistication: from desktop printing of models and mockups to, complex, semi-automated, self-contained manufacture and assembly process. The name ‘3D printing’ however, doesn’t clarify this emerging power, nor even which users and what uses all this is really relevant for.
Before addressing the use-case question, let’s observe a final feature that semi-automated additive manufacture must deal with before it can truly take over from conventional supply-chain-based manufacture: materials science.
Materials science is the study of inherent and composite properties that materials have, beyond their physical and chemical characteristics. For example, steel is conventionally an isotropic material, that is, the same in all directions — whereas wood is not (it has a grain). And carbon fibre is not based on simply flattened carbon, it is usually carbon filament woven into a fabric, which is responsible for much of the final strength of the product.
This represent an Everest-sized hump that 3D printing has to overcome to become a serious contender for general industrial production is its inherently narrow set of material possibilities. Because to ‘print’ stuff requires material feedstock that is flexible, cheap, homogenous — i.e. printable — and this rules out almost all the treasurehouse of characteristics that human craft and ingenuity has detected and exploited in and cultivated in materials in their natural and developed states. Again, the closer 3D printing gets to replicating the totality of classical manufacturing and supply-chain capacity, the less it has anything to do with a printing analogy, and the less self-contained it is.
And so, the emerging successful use cases of 3D printing are not, it seems, 1-for-1 replacements of conventional manufacturing or the invention of a new consumer fabrication sector. Instead, the success stories are grouping in two categories where, without 3D printing, likely no manufacturing would take place at all: either custom fabrication of highly technical small parts and products, which would otherwise expensive machines and tooling; and the mobile fabrication of material elements, which would otherwise require access to a factory and logistics.
For example, the processing in a hospital of a specialist component, perhaps an orthopedic cast, or a bone element or other biomechanical part or scaffold: these become possible and cost effective using custom 3D approaches. And the extrusion of bricks or other components on a building site far from normal supply-chains is an example of the other use-category. So, the 3D future is really arriving. It’s just not that factory-on-your-desktop that people keep talking about.
RESOURCE VISION
This is a time of change. The opportunity has never been greater to create spaces, lifestyles and systems, at all scales, which enable quality living, for more people, with less resources.
Resource Vision is an architecture and urban studio reinventing structures, experiences and productivity, in an era of transformation, led by John Manoochehri.
We base our work on tools and knowledge developed through practice, research, and teaching. Work happens in four categories:
Design | Tech & Lifestyle| Learning | Engagement
Check out the website for skills available — mostly around the issues mentioned above — in particular see the Work and Collaborators pages for lists of projects and partners.
Get in touch at twitter.com/resourcevision or hello@resourcevision.se for more, including comments and requests for content in future editions of RV Perspective.
