The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces

Observation is one of the most important research tools in (human) science. When researching about behavioral patterns of people, its advantage lies in the fact that the research subjects, not aware of being "studied", can act naturally. Urbanist and sociologist William Whyte produced, out of his Street Life research project, a book (1980) and a movie (1988), both titled The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, focusing on how people interact with/in public space. This witty movie, shot New York, analyzes how relationship to the street, seating, sun, water, trees, food, and "triangulation" influence the success of urban spaces. Such a research cannot not remind of J. Gehl's Life Between Buildings...

Suburbia as a way of life

If Louis Wirth wrote his famous essay "Urbanism as a way of life", the following promo-video for the city of Redbook offers a portrayal of what we might call suburbanism. The short movie was produced in 1957 in USA and, even though we might already know a lot about the suburban dream, it is still stunning to hear, for instance: "The people who created the suburbs are young adults and the shopping centers are built in their image."
On the one hand, there is a continuous stress on the idea of a do-it-yourself house and family, on the other automatism seems to play a key role. Life is divided between family-care and the shopping center, parties take place at home rather than in clubs or bars...

The popularity of an architect

As you may already know, Google NGram Viewer is a tool that enables you to search for keywords in the whole corpus of books digitalized by Google (in 7 different languages), thus indicating the frequency of specific terms over the years. In this TED talk the creators explain the original idea and how they developed the software.

Playing around with NGram I had the idea to look for the importance of some worldwide known architects (i.e. the frequency in which their names appear in books. Of course, we have to infer that cases of homonymy do not influence considerably the results). I considered three architects (R. Koolhaas, P. Eisenman, M. Botta) in the period between 1960 and 2008. I searched first in the English-language body of literature, then in German. Here is what we get:

In English literature Koolhaas, Eisenman and Botta have roughly the same importance in absolute terms. Interest in Eisenman arose around 1970, in Koolhaas some 5 years later and other 5 years later in Botta. It seems that they already experienced their "peak of popularity". In this respect Eisenman and Botta reached it between 1990 and 1995 (I can imagine due to projects such as the Greater Columbus Convention Center and the San Francisco MoMA). Koolhaas, instead, topped between 2000 and 2005, so that we can say he is seen as half a generation ahead (he was born in '44, Eisenman in '32 and Botta in '43).

Let's now have a look at the German corpus:

The graphs have a more homogeneous pattern. Interest in the three architects arose at the same time in the late '70s, and, as with the previous search, they reached their "popularity peak" already, again at the same time roughly, between 1995 and 2000. What is interesting to note is that this time Koolhaas enjoys a popularity 2 times higher that his colleagues...
Now, what about a comparison with the godfathers Le Corbusier and Mies? Here their "behavior" in English:

Their popularity increased steadily roughly until 2000, then the curve became negative. In German, with more variations, the pattern seems comparable:

Here we might speculate about the different impact of media and the star-architect-system, or, in a more radical way, we could imagine a change in the interest architecture and urbanism. Or a growing disinterest? "What ever happened to urbanism?".

A tale of whales

What do have in common 2011 floods in Thailand and twitter? Well... whales! I always thought they were rather peaceful and simple animals, so it was interesting to note that an info-graphic broadcasted on national Thai-TV, in order to make population aware of the dos and donts in that situation, depicted them as a sort of nasty beings, who caused the natural disaster. I came across the videos while visiting an exhibition at the Bangkok Art and Culture Center.

The Thai whale reminded me of twitter's fail whale, which, if not ill-intentioned, is at least a naive animal needing a lift to deeper waters.

Twitter's fail whale. From yiying.com

Its designer is the Shanghai-born and Sydney-based Yiying Lu. Here you can find a long interview to know more about her.

Coney Island

For those of you who enjoyed Rem Koolhaas' depiction of Coney Island in Delirious New York, here you find the amusement in black and white (1940s).

Car-, kitchen-, house-of-the-future

1956. How does the future look like? I just realized that, in the same year (a coincidence?), two great previsions about the future of mankind were produced, namely a short musical titled Design for Dreaming and the Smithsons' House of the Future.

On the occasion of the 1956 General Motors Motorama, held in New York and other four American cities, new car prototypes (by Corvette, Cadillac, Pontiac etc.) and a high-tech, automatic kitchen were featured in an odd musical. The dancer Tad Tadlock wants to escape from her bored life and is able to join a mysterious and handsome masked man, who takes her to the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel to see the show. After having a look at the car models on display, she returns home to her kitchen of the future and bakes a cake, before rejoining her man on a drive on the "road of tomorrow". The film is as odd as funny, with a couple of memorable quotes, and I couldn't resist doing some comparisons with nowaday's China:

Man: "Girls don't go to motoramas, dressed in a pair of pink pajamas!" It is far too easy to imagine some people you meet in the older quarters in Shanghai dressed in their pajamas going to a car show!

Woman: "I'm a girl who happens to think that a brand new car is better than a mink." In a Chinese dating game show in 2010, a 22-year-old girl named Ma Nuo stated: "I'd rather sit and cry in the back of a BMW" than laughing on a bike!

Coming now to somehow less pop territories, in the very same year, Alison and Peter Smithson built their House of the Future, at the Ideal Home Show, a "one-bedroom townhouse with garden", made mainly of plastic with radiant heating in the floors, full of electronic gadgets.

Image via worksdifferent.wordpress.com

Photo by John McCann

View from patio to kitchen. Photo by John McCann

Dressing room. Photo by Daily Mail

View across living room. Photo by John R. Pantlin

Differences & similarities

How much has China changed in 70 years? And how much has it changed in the eyes of foreigners? Enjoy contemporary Chinese streets in the first video (by Ricardo Mendialdua), and then have a look at a 1940 depiction of everyday life in Chengdu, capital of southwest Sichuan province ("People of western China"). What is interesting, is that both videos portray, on one hand the persistent "chinese-ness" of China, and on the other the big impacts of modernization, foreign technologies and influence.