Learning from Glas Vegas an AJ Urban Design Charrette and Philips

Learning from Glas Vegas

An AJ urban design charrette and Philips Lighting Livable Cities workshop, Glasgow 2013

32 Philips Livable Cities 34 Introduction 38 Participants 42 The charrette workshops 66 P hilips Livable Cities lighting workshop 72 Peter McCaughey Livable Cities

Philips Livable Cities enables professionals in urban development to discuss, explore and anticipate the future of European cities from the socio- cultural, outdoor environment and urban lighting perspectives. The programme has brought together more than 150 architects, urban planners and theoretical thinkers in totally different settings – from interviews in their offices in Turin, Hamburg, Helsinki, Glasgow, Wrocław and various locations in The Netherlands, to high-pressure and tight schedules of co‑design workshops in Bratislava, Copenhagen, Turnhout, Dubrovnik, Wrocław and Glasgow. Philips Livable Cities included primary research and applicative workshops, ending with prototype design and the practical realisation of these designs in workshops. It found its purpose by enabling us to build a composite, coherent picture of the future of urban Europe as seen through the eyes of European ‘city makers’. Glasgow concluded the Livable Cities programme with a workshop on 1 October. The Old Fruitmarket in Glasgow, where 40 architects, landscape architects and urban planners gathered from The Netherlands, Poland, Serbia, England and Scotland, provided a unique setting. The participants worked on two assignments. The first assignment was co-ordinated by AJ deputy editor Rory Olcayto. The second was headed by sociologist Marco Bevolo and lighting designer Tapio Rosenius. Here the challenge was to envision, create and implement a lighting concept responding to a focused selection among the 16 urban future scenarios. Both workshops resulted in many new ideas, vibrant debate and intense teamwork, which led to specific visions and solutions. Jaap van der Linden, senior manager business segment marketing, Urban Inspiration, Philips Lighting

32 theaj.co.uk 13.12.13 Learning from Glas Vegas

Welcome to the Glasgow Central Hotel, where the participants met Charrette, or, as we have for dinner. Later that evening we walked the dubbed it, Learning from Glas site the architects were asked to transform. Vegas, a three-day urban On the Tuesday morning we held design and lighting event held seminars in Glasgow City Halls, which in Glasgow this past October. informed both the Philips-led lighting This is the third time we have worked with workshop and the AJ charrette taking Philips Lighting to produce design events place that afternoon in the neighbouring centred on urban design and lighting. Our Fruitmarket. We ended the day with crits – strong working relationship began with last and a meal altogether in the Merchant City. year’s Peckham Charrette, in which we The next morning we met in the paired six architects with lighting designers – Lighthouse, Glasgow’s centre for design and and Southwark Council – to create a lighting architecture, to reflect on the previous day’s strategy for the neighbourhood and new work and listen to Peter McCaughey – our buildings for empty plots. on-hand artist and charrette facilitator – Our second collaboration was Lightshots discuss alternative approaches to how we in July this year, a short film competition for can make the places we live even better architects focused on capturing the effect than they already are. of artificial light on the built environment. As ever the architects and consultants we Both projects were a roaring success, invited went further than we ever thought so the pressure on the AJ and Philips they could. We may have provide the stage, Lighting to come up with something special but they sprinkled the stardust. The result, for Glasgow was intense. This time, Philips of course, was magical. asked the AJ to devise a charrette-style Rory Olcayto workshop which would engage architects to consider lighting as a spur for great urban design. Our idea was to ask 10 free-thinking studios to consider the townscape alongside the venue Philips had chosen for its lighting workshop – the Old Fruitmarket in Glasgow’s Merchant City – and create a lighting strategy for it that would link it to an adjacent impoverished neighbourhood. Another strand was that it should celebrate ‘northern-ness’ and the dark winter townscape of Scotland’s biggest city. The event began on a Monday night in the

13.12.13 33 Glasgow Charrette Learning from Glas Vegas

Hawkins\Brown London’s Ronnie undertook the design Philips Livable Cities Scott’s or New York’s charrette, the other David Bickle CBGB, musos get all a lighting design lighting workshop glassy-eyed when you workshop. I barely mention Glasgow’s know my ohms from finest.S o when invited my amps, so I thought to participate in a the lighting workshop design charrette and would be at the very lighting workshop that least instructive. Our This workshop, run by lighting designer took in both the Barras team, consisting of a Tapio Rosenius and sociologist Marco (neighbourhood city planner, a local and venue) and The architect and a Philips Bevolo, combined theory and practice to Mention Barrowlands Lighthouse, Glasgow’s lighting philosopher, improve our understanding of cities and to any boomer into centre for design and quickly got to grips rock music and they’ll architecture, I jumped with the brief – pick make them better places to live using wax lyrical about the at the chance. a space in the Old creative lighting design. legendary Scottish Spilt into two Fruitmarket, design music venue. Like groups, one half a lighting scheme A theory-led seminar in the City Halls and then deliver it. introduced the concept behind the Philips We quickly staked our claim for what initiative: the Urban Futures Matrix designed would be the site of for Philips by Bevolo. The matrix provides our project. Curious and contradictory, 16 alternative ways of looking at and it consisted of three components comprehending the urban design of the – the first a cities we live in. These were used as guiding decommissioned cast-iron staircase narratives for the workshop, held in the cloaked in a heavy neighbouring Old Fruitmarket. Because curtain; the second, a door that led to it retains its market-hall character – the the toilets; and third, signage of the old market stalls are still in a newish off-the- peg galvanised place, as is much of the original ironwork steel spiral stair structure – the potential was there for the that replaced its cast-iron brother to five lighting teams to transform its darkened meet fire regulations. corners and consider the real-world All were connected by a common challenges posed by urban darkness. Here, theme of passage three participants recount their experiences and threshold. Kicking off the of the day-long session. design, conversations started with Kubrick (the bloody lift Lighting Design Marco Bevolo scene from The Collective Consulting Shining), which then lead to Spielberg Tapio rosenius marco bevolo (the blinding white light from Close Encounters) on to Berlin-era Bowie via Dan Flavin, throwing in a healthy dose of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet along the way. The trinity of objects

66 theaj.co.uk 13.12.13 led to a healthy discussion about Dante’s Inferno and soon we were communicating a language of light that was as far from lumens and lux as you could get. Next we were let loose in a stack of flight cases brimming with light fittings and control gear, given free rein to plunder the Philips portable lighting laboratory that also came with an obliging technician. Armed with reels of gaffer tape and a tangle of cable ties, we rigged our fittings. Heaven was created with a halo of blue lights beneath the galvanised stair. Hell was conjured by concealing red LED spots to make a bloody pool beneath the cast-iron stair’s curtain, while Purgatory was a back-lit white sheet stretched behind a propped-open door to the toilets. Finally we set about writing our pitch, a presentation to our fellow delegates. This took the form of what can only be described as performance art. Narrative and cultural reference points colluded to create our set piece and, with a liberal application of smoke and mirrors, we had completed a lighting design scheme to be proud of.

13.12.13 67 Glasgow Charrette PhilipsLearning Lighting from Glas project Vegas

68 theaj.co.uk 01.11.13 01.11.13 69 Glasgow Charrette Learning from Glas Vegas

ZCD Architects

Cordula Weisser

Our group used the Old Fruitmarket as a testing ground for urban scenarios. Our ambition was to use light as a ‘material’ and explore its place- making capacities. We were interested in how sizes, intensities and shapes of lit areas might encourage particular social interaction, which could ‘activate’ the nocturnal urban space. Urban lighting tends to either be utilitarian or spectacular but rarely at the human scale. We chose a bonfire, as the most archaic social gathering tool, as reference. It took a while to achieve the desired colour – we programmed a mix of LEDs from one RGB light fitting. We tested different positions and made cardboard contraptions to achieve the right-sized circle for people to congregate around. We tested it on the willing audience at the end of the workshop and everyone did indeed gather around, with that distinctive orange glow on their faces – it even started to feel warm after a while.

70 theaj.co.uk 01.11.13 Reiach and Hall balcony area, to help intrigue. The second focus our experiment. experience was on laura kinnaird We worked with the balcony itself, three topics: light, where we concealed shadow and detail the lighting source and used a variety of and encouraged the Philips technologies to detail of the building explore the changes to transform with a in lighting and effect. colour-changing effect We tried a number on the balcony floor. of lighting situations to The technical help re-think the history aspect was difficult to Groups were mixed and detail found in the execute but the Philips and then divided up to building’s interior. In specialist helped pick find their own site in the end, we developed the proper luminaires this impressive venue. two scenarios. One and explained how This was followed by was seen from the to achieve the an intense concept market floor, where desired effects. Most development guided we illuminated the importantly it was by Marco Bevolo. upper balcony, a fun experiment, We focused on the transforming its transforming a concept ‘re-purposed city’, unwelcoming façade vision into reality a concept that re- into a place filled with and re-imagining contextualises past light, bringing it back the architectural icons into cutting- to life and creating language of the site. edge contemporary experiences to help generate meaning in the future. Rather than sidestepping our surroundings, we decided to use the detail of the Old Fruitmarket, specifically the

01.11.13 71 Glasgow Charrette Learning from Glas Vegas

28 points Planning with playpower on playful masterplanning

Through my recent work, 1. A source: Glasgow’s fi rst Poet I have been exploring the Laureate Edwin Morgan’s poem contested role of the artist in A City, in which we the process of building and view Glasgow as an unfolding fi lm. From rebuilding ‘place’. I regularly Collected Poems collaborate with artists, architects, urbanists, (1996), published by Carcanet Press. You engineers, writers and community activists. can see a fi lm of its To do this as effectively as possible, reading at: Vimeo. com/15616905 I established WAVE/particle, a small 2. Various maps, organisation set up to support and direct a including my father’s team approach to large-scale arts projects. hand-drawn maps and Peter Turchi’s Maps of WAVE/particle employs artists, writers, the Imagination were fi lmmakers and others. WAVE earns money, shown in an appeal for a subjective, which particle spends. WAVE is grown-up, personalised city map. responsible and professional; particle is 3. Film still from wilful, underground and playful. I say that Forbidden Planet (1956), directed by WAVE exists to support particle (my self- Fred Wilcox. This was directed practice) but I sometimes suspect cited to raise issues of futurology, technology, that it’s actually the other way round. imagination and The following are notes to a talk I outcome. gave at the Glasgow Charrette. The talk 4. Blade Runner (1982), the American was to fellow participants: architects, dystopian science landscape architects, lighting designers, fi ction thriller, directed by Ridley key Philips staff, cultural contributors, Scott, emerged in and the team from the AJ. the charrette as an attractive dystopia, Peter McCaughey, artist and a future noir that still charrette facilitator shapes our desire for the city. Glasgow Barrowlands as Blade Runner’s fi sh market, anyone?

5. Images from Erwin Wurm’s One Minute Sculptures (erwinwurm.at) encourage the playful spirit of working together, testing,

.. . . 28 points on playful masterplanning

failing, rebuilding, permission) from many works from the 12. Various lighting 21. How to approach specific and moment- that underscored wall to wall and roof hypothetical City As A interventions – and the wonder of fireflies specific works and the success of to floor, across the Work Of Art actually some balaclavas – illuminating the dark events that I didn’t want the charrette, and centre of the tunnel, got made, such as made with Ben Parry night, on the path to be forgotten. lamenting the time to at night. The screen Stephen Beddoes at the Architects to the village of play in the architect’s was hung in sections and Chris Stewart’s Association in April Carpineto, up from 24. The International and landscape so that citizens could lighting of Glasgow’s and May. See more at: Salerno, in Italy? Peripatetic Sculptors architect’s busy pass through it. As water towers. culturalhijack.org Society – another working life. they did so, they 22. In answer to how tool to free up our walked in front of 11. In addressing a 13. Alerting the to build participative relationship to living in 6. Images from the the projector and charrette on lighting charrette group that practice around and making up the city: charrette suggested their actual shadows a city, it seemed WAVE/particle has lighting projects, culturalhijack.org/index. that lamps used joined the projected appropriate to just been asked to I showed Speed php/participating- in streetlamps silhouettes. show The Festival devise an art and of Light by NVA: artists/149-ipss are swapped for of Borrowed Light lighting strategy for nvaspeedoflight.org.uk spotlights. Images 9. Who The Fuck Are (Peter McCaughey Laurieston. Over the 25. I have a great from Sans Façon We To Masterplan A and Stephen Skrynka, next five years, 23 23. My own practice commitment to the doing exactly this City? An attack on the 1996). Victorian railway arches will has been concerned idea of the artist as across the world tendency of strategy to glass paving lights become part of this with notions of site and an in-betweener, an (limelightontour. remove the body, and across Glasgow work. See more at: time specificity for over interpolator, translator blogspot.co.uk). The prioritise a few minds were activated with lauriestonlivingarts.com 20 years and I regularly and mediator between point being – look over the many. An light-switching argue for the temporal complex, specialised where play gets us advocation of an affinity systems, projected 14. Discussing place- and fleeting nature bodies of knowledge –trust those playful of tactics instead, image, sound and making, participative of such work (and – engaging, distilling instincts! where rhizomatic embedded objects. practice and opinion at length in a recent metaphors, creating design processes full This required access research, I often publication Cultural new ideas and 7. Images from the of consultation are to basements across remember the words Hijack, which charts enlightenment through lighting workshops the norm. the city – 36 sites, of friend, artist and and rethinks the role the ability to find and drawings, including bank vaults, designer Hugh Pizey, of artist intervention beauty, inspiration, joy exploring re- 10. For Wave (1993), cinemas, derelict on consultation: ‘You in our cityscapes). and humour. The more landscaping/lighting I organised the filming buildings, restaurants, take all the wonderful, But practice that has elements, the more the area around the of the demolitions of pubs and jewellery individual, iridescent transience at its heart, complex the system. famous Barrowland Basil Spence’s Queen shops were accessed. opinions and positions, places a lot of faith in The more complex Ballroom in Glasgow. Elizabeth Square Unannounced, the you put them in a our errant memories the system, the more Teams, banned from tower blocks in the work appeared street big pot and you mix and the political power spaces between. I look their computers, Gorbals, Glasgow, by street, and then them together. What and social reach of for these ‘gaps’. produced fantastic from 14 vantage stopped after two do you end up with? cultural osmosis. In drawings and collages. points. That evening, weeks. It was an Brown sludge. How rethinking my own 26. Polebender: Get back to drawing! 10 synchronised video integral aspect of do we move beyond assumptions as artist wherever I find myself, projectors relayed the the success of the stupid, statistical data and educator, I’m I keep an eye out 8. A memory of edited imagery from project that the work analysis that crushes driven to explore my for bent poles and my work, triggered the detonation, onto was unexpected, the nuance into a thinking about the damaged signs. When by Rory Olcayto’s the top windows of that it worked in generalisation?’ limitations of these I find one, I adopt the invitation to speak an adjacent derelict the liminal spaces systems and how Polebender pose – at this charrette mill, 300m from the between the ordered 15. To know a city, to negotiate new inserting myself into based on a workshop site. The work was and the chaotic and throw a dart at a map. process in relationship the narrative of the we did together occasioned by the the familiar and the Go to where it lands. to remembering, fucked-up city, as the at the Strathclyde publication The City unfamiliar; that the Apply an oblique re-activating, making vengeful destroyer of Winterschool in 1994. As A Work Of Art, whole impact had strategy as a research permanent the urban signage. That year, in response organised by Andrew to be greater than method. stoney.sb.org/ ‘Landscape of Memory’. to Cowcaddens Guest to place the sum of its parts. eno/oblique.html In response to this 27. My son is now 10 Underpass – a dark, architects and artists This was raised as a scratchy irritation, I and still reminds me forbidding tunnel in dialogue. In the talk, challenge to lighting 19. The Context Is proposed and made every day of how to be about 20m long – I I paused to underscore designers – how do Half The Work Psychic Dérive for a in the world. shot footage of people the relationship we imagine switching www2.tate.org.uk/ DIY Festival in 2009. passing through the between think labs, systems that are artistplacementgroup This was a process 28. Faced with such tunnel during the day like this charrette, iterative, intelligent, of negotiating a way serious concerns, can and projected the and publishing, as unpredictable, 20. The Naked City, of remembering and we ascribe serious footage onto a screen, the half-way house responsive, rather than a psychogeographic re-activating the playfulness as the installed (without to realisation – so static or lazily kinetic? map by Guy Debord. ‘experience’ of site- remedy? I argue: yes.

13.12.13 73 Viva Glas Vegas!

Editor Rory Olcayto Designer Tom Carpenter Production editor Alan Gordon Sub-editor Kate Williamson Photography David Barbour Reporter Paul Marsh Event management Stephanie Geisler Business development manager Nick Roberts

Thanks: Rinco van Rijn, Teresa Vallis, Rowena Preiss (all Philips Lighting), Cathy Johnston, Paul Kane (Glasgow City Council), Tapio Rosenius, Nich Smith, Jude Wylie (Do Architecture), Martin Baillie (Gareth Hoskins Architects) Alex MacKenzie (WAVE) Special thanks: Simon Smith (Glasgow City Council)