Posts Tagged: architecture

General bits — No Comments
5
Jan 10

City parking

Multi-storey car parks aren’t commonly beautiful places. They usually sit as ostracised blocks in the city, rough and slitted concrete walls facing the outside like the those of a gaol; an ugly and barely tolerated necessity of urban life.

How to redefine the multi-storey car park? If you’re stern Swiss architect Herzog & de Meuron, you try to invite the city into its structure, rather than close it off. 1111 Lincoln Road is a newly opened car park in Miami, situated on the border of its social downtown heart and its suburban sprawl.

Its angled concrete columns support floors uncharacteristically open to the balmy climate; inside lie parking spaces and an enclosed shop, with retail units layering the ground level, and condos at its side. If you’re inside, the structure’s geometry ascribes inclusive views of the city, according to Financial Times architecture writer Edwin Heathcote. And he says that it works the other way, too:

“The idea is to create a series of layers that extend the public realm up into the building, to attract events, parties and life into the structure. Both architects and developer see the structure as an experiment in a new kind of downtown transport architecture, a building as exciting to enter as to emerge from, blinking into the Miami sun. This may be optimistic, but it’s a good story.”

Not that this ideal hasn’t been attempted before. Gateshead’s Trinity Square was built with a restaurant on its top. Now it seems an incredible – and doomed – gesture of pride at the ideal of harmony between the motorist and the city. Its top levels have been closed since 1995, a decline that’s due in part to changing car access in the city centre. But the seed of its demise was surely more deeply planted – it was featured at the end of Get Carter in a scene in which it was implicated in the activities of a corrupt local businessman. That’s the usual image of the multi-storey – an embodiment of the unethical and sinister side of the city.

1111 Lincoln Road presents a different reading of the role of a multi-storey car park, even though it’s an idealistic if not fantastical one for most urban realities. It requires additional height to accommodate the numbers of spaces most car parks require and desirable shops to act as conduits between itself and the social, cultural and economic life of the city. But then, it’s also good to see a celebration of something otherwise so shunned.

Work — No Comments
21
Jul 09

Architecture and videogames panel

For those interested, we made an mp3 of the panel discussion I chaired last week at Develop about the relationship between videogames and architecture available on Edge’s website. You can pick it up here – sound quality and the fact I only remembered to switch on my dictaphone a minute or so into my intro aside, I’m pretty pleased with the way it went.

By the way, you can find a couple of write-ups of the session at Gamasutra and Pixel-Lab.

Work — 4 Comments
13
Jul 09

Games = extreme architecture

I’m doing a panel session at Develop on Wednesday about the relationship between architecture and videogames with Viktor Antonov, the art director behind Half-Life 2 and (the unfortunately on-hold) The Crossing, Rob Watkins, an architect-trained artist on Fable 2, and Rory Olcayto, features editor from The Architect’s Journal and an artist at developer Inner Workings in the late 90s.

Following are my introductory thoughts on the theme to get my head properly working on it all.

A lot is said about videogames’ closeness to film. But I’d like to suggest that another art form is much closer to videogames than that: architecture.

Just as games do, architecture influences behaviour and emotion, provides for certain needs and can be used to tell stories. It’s non-linear, too – unlike film. An architect I know once told me that he saw videogames as an extreme form of architecture, and I think he was right.

Look at the Natural History Museum, for instance. It’s a superbly practical place to show off huge skeletons and glass cases filled with stuffed animals to thousands of people a day. But it also subtly steers its visitors through its spaces, is suitably grand for a national museum and is a physical representation of Darwinian principles – with terracotta tiling that’s banded to look like stratified rock and featuring carved animals crawling up its columns.

Now think about a multiplayer map in Team Fortress 2 or Halo 3. Their forms are engineered to be fun killing grounds, designed for specific game types and to facilitate players to flow through their spaces in general patterns. Their decoration, meanwhile, is designed to extend their host games’ fictions or, in TF2’s case, tell their own.

And think about Super Mario 64, whose world is the game. Or Grand Theft Auto, in which a game is placed on top of an entire, credible city. Or Red Faction: Guerrilla, whose buildings have to have structural integrity because of the game’s physics system.

Think also about the way both videogames and architecture are germinated with a grand idea and a sprinkle of available technology before the practicalities take over – of working window seals and regulatory balustrade heights, graphics optimisation techniques and platform certification.

It’s time to stop thinking so much about the cosmetic similarities between games and film and look to architecture instead. [Insert panellists going into more depth with incredible insight and sparkling examples here.]

More themes:

  • The effect of the grim futures depicted in games on the imaginations.
  • Players becoming architects through The Sims and Far Cry 2’s map editor.
  • How to create dread though spatial design.
  • Architects’ jealousy of Halo 3’s heatmaps.
  • How architects can teach game designers how to design a fun game in an open world.