Further Notes during Week 6

Laws/regulations: many different government subsidiaries  follow their own laws + legislation and differ from state to state. eg. motor vehicle licensing
 - inconsistent legislation compromises national unity
 - indicates a lack of clarity, consistency, uniformity with enforcement of government regulations

Perception: the average voter buys the image of the candidate, including the symbol they use to represent themselves.
Politicians perceived as: distrustful, adversial, confrontational, insincere, inaccessible
Formalised politics associated with: conflict, cynicism, distrust, and a lack of political authenticity

Traditional ideals vs. contemporary outlook: changing Australian social and cultural landscape
> changing everyday politics
> Indigenous history awareness
> changing demographics - family structure, age structure, demographics
> emergence of information/communication technologies
> labour market, housing affordability, the rise of the individual
> perhaps change nature of 3 tiers of government  - need to acknowledge the local governments, and reform the role of the state governments
> formalised political proceedings lack relevance to the lives of young Australians
> contribute to political decision-making - encourages transparency, articulates relevant principles, reflects perspectives outside political circles to address long term issues (eg. climate change)
> accountability
> nature of formal political institutions is hierarchical and stagnant

Notes during Week 6

Problems:

• ·         Values: Politicians are heavily influenced by their own personal values and ideology. Unfortunately this follows an outdated, socially conservative system.
  Solution: Remedied if politicians’ viewpoint was more contemporary: aware of and understands climate change and sustainability, tolerant of cultural divesity and same sex marriage, untiedto unions or the church, secularist.

• ·         Accessibility (Relationships): There is a disconnection between the everyday person and parliamentary officials. This could be due to not understanding political jargon, not being told the correct information, not being able to communicate (directly or indirectly)with government – the average person does not have a say. What if a citizen had a good idea? How can we enable them to share it with the leaders of our country? How can we make them listen?
  Solution: Removing social boundaries, physical boundaries (creating an inlet for public knowledge, public opinion); creating a media network in which political proceedings can be better understood by the public, that explains how a person may be affected by changes

• ·         Power: the distribution of power is too singular, whereby an individual (Prime Minister) has the final say. The splitting of government into two major parties means that the members of those parties have loyalty to agree with the proposals of fellow party members, and the party with themajority of seats has the majority of votes
  Solution: highest power is a council in which every member has equal say. There are not two parties, and each member does not have a loyalty to another member. The public votes not for an entire party but for individual members 

Notes for Week 5

RE-PLACE
(recreating place)


Creating a 'what if' scenario:
What is the world we imagine?
Tell the story of the hypothetical worl.
If the world was that way, what does it mean in terms of
          - government
          - infrastructure
          - architecture
CONCEPTUAL
How do we interpret it?
What happens in the society we imagine

WORLD - place, event, memory:
First you have a place (within the world)
An event happened, and the place changed (as human beings, how does this affect us?)
How do we rebuild to come back to the memory?
     The first thing that comes to mind is to recreate (remake) the idea, the memory, the place.
What if it was not firstly there, or what if it had not been destroyed? (interpreted differently)
How do we interpret in a way that is not physical? What would it then imply?
Memory, dream - hypothetical world/situation.

Society would remain the same, as would parliament - how could we rebuild it based on the same intentions as the original designer?
How does it need to be changed to accommodate the sorrow and grief of memory? Is it the right solution?

What if history was different? What would today look/feel like?

Team 'What ifs'

What if...?

• democracy was different (eg. more committee based)
• federal government was not the highest level, or was abolished
• Canberra was relocated
• Parliament House was attacked and fully or partially destroyed - how to rebuild it (based on memory)
• we became a republic
• there was more bureaucracy (ie. decisions need to be approved at more levels)
• the morals of our society changed and became less individualistic
• Parliament House was never built
• parliament was run by the people
• the library was destroyed - archives and records lost
• sea levels rose enough to encompass Canberra
• the Millenium Bug actually happened
• money didn't exist (money is virtual)

What is the philosophy?
What is the idea?
What is the ideal?

Great Toons

Reflection: Voting

In looking at the way the voting system works, several problems arose that gave thought to how a better model might be introduced.

Perhaps if it were not compulsory to express more than one's top preference, or top two, or three, or however many preferences you'd prefer. What if you didn't like any other parties? I find that after I've voted for my favourite party I then work backwards, starting with the party I dislike the most until the ballot sheet is filled. Then I read what I have written as my number 2 preference and think Really? That's the next best thing? I then realise that there's a rather large gap between my top two preferences. The next best thing is really just the party I hate the least out of all the others. Perhaps this kind of optional preferential voting will give the smaller parties more of a chance to compete?

Also, single member constituencies in the lower house make it possible for parties to win with less than 50% of the vote (Black 1949, 158). This in no way represents the majority of voters, and results in the "safe" and "marginal" distinction between seats. Parties then concentrate their campaigns on the marginal, undecided voters, and do not respond to public opinion in the safe areas despite the fact that less than half of the voters are represented. This intensifies party factionalism. Would multi member constituencies fix this? Perhaps we should aim for a more proportional representation of voters. Or, if voters only had to vote for their first preference, then it can be assumed that the party member with the highest number of first preference votes is deserving to win (Black 1949, 159).

Black, D. 1949. The Theory of Elections in Single-Member Constituencies. The Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science 15 (2): 158-175.

Reflection: The Capital as a Symbol

After some deliberation on the purposes of Parliament, it was found that Parliament House is not a service building, in that it offers no services, as such, except to act as a meeting place for parliamentary officials to discuss parliamentary-type stuff. Mainly how to spend the national budget.

Rather, it acts as a symbol for national identity. Personally, it does seem wasted to have this "symbol of national identity" in Canberra, as although the city is identified as the capital of Australia by Australians, if a foreigner came to this country it is not likely they would choose to visit Canberra and see this monument. When asking people from other countries who had not yet  been to Australia what our capital city was, they all said Sydney. What does this say about our national identity? That we should locate it in a place no one knows, or cares to know, about?

Poster Planning (with Alana)

Alana and I had the first team meeting on Monday and planned and discussed what would be needed for each poster.

 

 

 

 

National Identity

"Australia needs sudden shocks of reorientation within its society that will divorce it from the largely irrelevant problems of the British, make it possible to speed necessary changes and to develop some new sense of identity, some public feeling of being a people who can be described - even if incorrectly - as such-and-such a kind of nation, and act at times as if it were so. Australians are anonymous, featureless, nothing-men. This modest anonymity reveals itself in the argument that Australia does not run to the kind of person we could turn into a president." Donald Horne - 1964

Reflection: Political Ideology

What is wrong with parliament?
It seems that the most logical approach is to first define what it is I want to change about the existing parliament. I came to the conclusion that, in a nutshell, it is IDEOLOGY and VALUES that are most skewed with contemporary parliament. Basically, contemporary parliament generally adheres to the outdated and old-fashioned mindset of parliament that existed 100 years ago. If you think about it, their values have remained as static as the Parliament House itself - they are both reflections of the era in which it was created. (Here's a thought: by updating the architecture of Parliament, could we update their mindsets? In a perfect world, yes. In the real world?)
Our two major parties are socially conservative, but in essence, we do not live in a socially conservative society. (Correction, we have to choose between a socially conservative party and a socialist party, although at present the difference is minute.) But what if we had a socially progressive party? Rudd's penchant for embracing market economy was refreshingly contemporary, although this is such a small element in redefining political values towards contemporary society's ideals.

There is a DISCONNECTION between the everyday person and parliament officials.


We need a parliament with a contemporary mindset. One who is aware and in understanding of sustainability and climate change, and who is willing to actively employ and encourage innovation to solve these problems. A parliament that is tolerant of cultural diversity and same sex marriage. Not tied to unions. Secularist (because, let's face it, religious conflict largely dictates the government's adherance to traditionalist values).

Which brings me to thinking, VALUES are VIRTUAL. They are closely tied to PHILOSOPHY and CULTURE. They connect philosophy and culture. And they dictate LAW.

Where previously I had thought there to be two facets of the strategy VIRTUAL (DIGITAL and EXPERIENTIAL), I now feel as if there is a third: SOCIETAL. This third facet encompasses values and ideology, philosophy, culture, and law and order.

Drawing styles and techniques

Drawing inspiration from http://infranetlab.org/blog/

Notes for Week 4

BREATHING. EATING. MAKING. MOVING. DWELLING.
 - New York/Amsterdam Glimpses 2040
    Creating vibrant and sustainable urban environments, contemplating 'the future of the future'
http://glimpsesnyams.blogspot.com/

New York: large quantity of people don't have cars due to being a pedestrian friendly city (plus successful subway). HighLine Public Park (2km disused railway line). Whitney Museum (Renzo Piano).

Dwelling, working and recreation are connected by transportation - but what if the interconnections for transport were integrated?

Virtual Diagramming

We contributed towards a diagram which Megan had begun during the tutorial, to map the facets and deviations of the "VIRTUAL" construct. It explores the experiential side of virtual.

Reflection: What is Virtual?

Today we formed our teams in our new tutorial group "Virtual 1: Hypothetical", in which our tutor wasn't present but hopefully it won't be too much of a setback. My group is made up of myself, Alana Kowalczyk, and two other girls whom I'd never met before, Megan Stewart and Bryoni Swan.

We began by defining virtual, and decided upon two categories that we believed to encompass all facets of the term: DIGITAL and EXPERIENTIAL.

Digital: objective, shared, independent, universally adaptable framework which can be personalised, communication, media (infrastructure for communication), social networking, servers (infrastructure), telephones + satellites
Experiential: subjective, personal, dependent (reliant on another thing to be created), relationships, light + shadow, sound + music, colour, atmosphere, mood, ambiance, ideology + values, power, culture, accessibility, memory, imagination, family (infrastructure for relationships)

I found that there was some overlap between the two, or that one may assist or create or form the other. For example, a social networking site like Facebook is an element of digital virtual, as it operates within the digital realm of computing, and one can create alternate personas within it (although this is not it's intended use). However, it is also a platform for the experiential virtual, providing infrastructure for relationships.

After discussing what area of Parliament House we might look at re-creating, we decided upon the National Archives, or Library,  or both. We found they are generally overlooked when it come to importance despite the fact that they are so valuable. Constitutions and laws, rules and regulations, historical documents and  are all stored in the archives.

Notes for Week 2

FLEXIBLE:
Think about how it is going to be demolished: design for disassembly - how easy will it be to take apart (LIFE-CYCLE) eg. Fun Palace (Cedric Price); Centre Pompidou (Renzo Piano + Richard Rogers) with moveable floors.
Vernacular - adapted slowly (manually) according to needs
- what if architecture is altered by machines? Robots building, changing - rapid prototyping (and able to be disassembled)
disaster aids

Not relying heavily on tangible materials (to construct architectural entity) - placing layers on top of tangible layers.
REX: AT&T Performing Arts Centre

What can occupants do with a space?
What can a space do for its occupants?

MOBILE (+ DISTRIBUTED):
What is mobile?
Cars, buses, trains, space ships, planes, helicopters, cranes (crane arms), boats, submarines, subway (underground transport - mine carts etc) 
SATELLITES

Transport, infrastructure (allows mobility), assembly + disassembly
Technology - internet [all different places at once], mobile phones, virtual conferencing [holograms, feeling like you're actually there]
Construction materials - shipping containers
Increasing mobility by activating existing infrastructure
Using Canberra as embryo
Will parliament exist? Is the Government's role still necessary?
One big parliament house - physically or digitally dispersed, rather than having parliament houses in each city
Our cities are coastal: cargo ships?

VIRTUAL:
What is virtual?

The human mind, imagination, relationships, the internet (digital), physical effort
NOT ABLE TO BE TOUCHED OR GRASPED... BUT EXPERIENCED.
"that which is not real, but displaying saliant qualities of the real", colloquial "almost"
"Having essence or effect but not appearance or form."
Virtual reality - mind, computer simulated. Creating alter egos (WOW, Sims, avatars) - people still interacting,  earning money.
eg. a painting is virtual - evokes memories, experiences, feelings, emotions
music, stories EFFECTIVE


Politician's personality affects decisions - WHAT IF the personal element could be removed?
Virtual not just computer generated (digital) - anything intangible.
Define what it is to be Australian - contemporary
What is Australian society? define this in the brief


Printer = virtual to reality
Scanner = reality to virtual

Kiosks to plug into rather than travelling to parliament (shouldn't have to travel so far to visit a government body). Local councils already provide us with a means (location) to distribute virtual kiosks for public use.
Creating a personalised experience for users - will this lead to isolation? (if all users are experiencing it differently).

FLEXIBLE:
What is flexible?
ADAPTABLE - susceptible of modification or adaptation. Pliable.
Multiple functions - designate more than one group of people to use it

Changing ambience or mood of space
Changing volume - inflated/deflated
Skins - transparent, opaque
Modular - change spatial arrangements
Organic - grow buildings from materials (recycled?)
DYNAMIC vs. STATIC

Separate building into two parts: Rigid vs. Flexible
> Rigid: the part of the project which is known,  unlikely to be altered
> Flexible: the places not really sure what to do or how to do it, or what the requirements may be
What is rigid? What is flexible?


What separates adaptable, universal, moveable, transformable, responsive?


Light, sound, smell, scale (boundaries may diminish/disappear)
Changing experience, atmosphere, mood, ambience, colour, music/sounds, light/dark/shadow.
Concepts - flexible virtuality
Think about other parliaments/government systems


We follow the general rules of society and don't challenge the space we have been given.
Even if we give people the ability to adapt a space, they can't imagine it to be different from what it is, therefore it remains unchanged.


Changing scale (virtual - changing scale within the mindset of users/architects)
Protect but be open (openness, transparency)
What is a boundary? physical, emotional, mental, moral
What can new materials do? (nanotechnology)

Reading: Parliament under Challenge and its Response

The reading opens by referring to the revival of parliament as a tool for the peoples' collective decision making for the country. It mentions the strengthening of parliament and it's increasing acceptability of innovation and change "Members of parliament have found new and affective ways of pursuing political agendas." (Halligan 2007, 2) after the decline of parliament throughout the mid-twentieth century. While indeed there is an increasing acceptibility of innovation, I believe that the level has not nearly kept up with contemporary society, as parliament still follows an outdated traditionalist structure.

"by stripping our rank and file politicians of continuing responsibility in parliament, particularly in the House of Representatives, the proceedings have generated into a continuous and elementary election campaign." (Reid in Halligan 2007, 3)

 The following quote emphasises my belief that a multi-member council rather than hierarchical formal structure could be beneficial to parliamentary governing.

"A committee system can be seen to have distinctive advantages through reducing overload on the chambers; allowing for a different operating style and less partisan discussion; offering scope for members to make concrete contributions and facilitating communication with citizens." (Hallidan 2007, 4)

Halligan, J., & Informit. 2007. Parliament in the Twenty-First Century Institutional Reform and Emerging Roles. Carlton, Vic: Melbourne University Publishing.

Capithetical Brief

The following is the brief taken from the CAPITheticAL website (http://www.capithetical.com.au/), edited for relevance. 

The Competition

CAPITheticAL invites you to review the debates, influences and processes that led to the competition in 1911–12 for the design of Canberra as Australia’s national capital and imagine how an Australian national capital might be created in the 21st century.

THE TASK

CAPITheticAL invites responses to many questions, including:

• Would you build a new capital today or could the Australian Federation be expressed in a different way?
• Would it be a city in the conventional sense or not? If not, what form might it take?
• What ideas would drive its design and development?
• How would 21^st century social, political and environmental factors influence the nature of the city?
• Of what should our national capital consist?

KEY PROPOSITION

Between Federation in 1901 and the selection of the national capital site in 1908, various pressures particular to the concerns and conditions of the time influenced Canberra’s establishment and growth. Today, those ‘pressures’ seem less compelling.This competition, a hypothetical, invites participants to re-imagine the task faced by those whose job it was to decide how the capital would be created. What kinds of pressures and influences would there be if the city were being planned today?

• Are there relevant security concerns that would influence the location and design of a national capital today?
• Can the design and location of a city influence clarity, compassion and productivity in the thinking of Governments and political representatives?
• What influence would climate change have?
• Can the design of a city influence the life and work of its residents?

PROVOCATIONS

The following provocations are prompts, potential ways of creating a space for thinking through the consequences of bringing Canberra’s past history into our present and very different world. What kind of national capital would we imagine now?
National versus Local: The architecture of a capital is imposing as an expression of nationhood and heritage, values and aspirations. How then should such a city express itself as a place where people also live, work and play? 

Size: Australia is the world’s most urbanised nation, with 57% of its population living in the five largest cities. This figure is close to double that of Europe and the USA. Should a hypothetical capital have ambitions as a sixth metropolis?
What: What is a city?

• event?
• infrastructure?
• home?
• market?
• government?
• landscape?
• object?
• experience?
• commerce?
• community?
• communication?

Is a capital city different?
Whose: Does our changing demographic influence the shape, substance or style of the city?
How: Do social, political and environmental pressures and expectations influence how an Australian capital might be created today?

Notes for Week 1

CAPIThetical: hypothetical Australian city.

The capital of a country should be the place that draws people to it - the place where everybody wants to be (not just citizens/residents, but visitors to the country).

Parliament and/or its Agents (interpret what this means) for the 21st century:
   > not just one building, but any combination of buildings
   > doesn't necessarily have to be a building, can include other spaces/places

Do not recreate another Parliament House, be imaginative about what services we need, what technologies we have at our disposal that we didn't have 100 years ago.

What does the current Parliament House offer?

Develop a strategy for dealing with the situation:
 > Flexible (multipurpose? changing for different applications?)
 > Mobile (physically mobile, philosophically mobile, moveable architecture)
 > Distributed (what new  things can this provide?)
 > Virtual (what does this mean: accessible/inaccessible, tangible/intangible)

Flexible: Who can build it? eg. Street Museum built by children
Doesn't necessarily need new buildings, just need the buildings to be activated eg Archigram Instant City
Cedric Price Thinkbelt - classes for university distributed over city
Superstudio Continuous movement - architecture does not exist in a tangible manner, but all technology is available

Tangible layer should work well with virtual layer.

Infrastructure: do not isolate own building from everything else,  integrate with existing infrastructure or create a new one that integrates with existing city.
 > Support Infrastructure
 > Transportation Infrastructure
 > Communication Infrastructure
 be up-to-date with what's possible
infrastructure might be enought to create architecture, but whether or not it will be comfortable or create delight is the question

Presence and Identity - must retain existing presence/identity, but also create and expand on it
Architectural Type and Purposes - what does it provide (function, services)