Tag Archives: cities

Infectious architecture

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Visiting Small Spaces in the City at ROCA London Gallery for New Scientist, 12 February 2024

“Cook’s at it again,” reads one Antarctic station log entry from the 1970s. “Threw a lemon pie and cookies all over the galley… then went to his room for a couple of days and wouldn’t come out… no clear reason… probably antarcticitis catching up…”

And now it’s not just the behavioural challenges of small spaces that give designers pause, as they contemplate our ever-more constrained future. There’s our health to consider. Damp, mould and other problems endemic to small spaces are not so easily addressed, especially in cities where throwing open the windows and letting in air filled with particulates, spores, moulds and pollen can make matters measurably worse. In February 2013, nine-year-old Londoner Ella Kissi-Debrah became the first person in the UK to have air pollution listed as a cause of death. (Meanwhile a report by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors published in 2017 reckons the average new home in London has shrunk by 20% since 2000.)

How are we to live and thrive in tiny spaces? Curator Clare Farrow’s new exhibition at ROCA London Gallery brings together ideas amd designs from around the world. She’s arranged an interview with Hong Kong-based Gary Chang, whose 32 square metre apartment currently boasts 24 different “rooms”, assembled by manoeuvring a system of sliding walls, and commissioned a film in which William Bracewell, a principal with London’s Royal Ballet, performs (somehow) in the tiny dressing room-cum-costume store he shares with two other dancers.

She’s also, for at least a couple of days (dates to be announced), got Richard Beckett, an architect based at the Bartlett School booth at the centre of the exhibition, to bring attention to the health challenges of “studio living”.

Beckett reckons we should be using microbes to make our buildings healthier. As he explains in a forthcoming paper, “As the built environment is now the predominant habitat of the human, the microbes that are present in buildings are of fundamental importance.” Alas, contemporary buildings are microbial wastelands: dry, nutrient poor and sterile.

In 2020 Beckett won an award from the Royal Institute of British Architects for embedding “beneficial bacteria” into ceramic and concrete surfaces. At ROCA he’ll be sitting in a booth dosed with this material, while Matthew Reeves, an immunologist at University College, London, uses regular blood samples to measure whether tile-borne pro-biotic species can survive long enough, and spread easily enough, to become part of Beckett’s personal microbiome.

“The official study will have to take place in a more controlled way after the exhibition’s finished,” Beckett admits, “but at least my spell in the booth is a bit of theatre to demonstrate what we’re up to.”

Explaining the work is vital, since it runs so counter to prevailing nostrums concerning hygiene and cleanliness. “One immediate application of our work is in hospitals and care homes,” Beckett says, “where super-sterile environments have ended up providing ideal breeding conditions for antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Of course the first question we’ll be asked is, ‘How do you clean them?’”

Beckett’s booth is tiled with what look like worm casts: these are 3D printed ceramic tiles, lightly baked and designed to shed bacteria into the air with every passing motion. Their peculiar surface texture is tantalising on purpose: touching them helps spread the healthy biota, filling sterile interiors (this is the plan) with sustainable microbial ecosystems.

“There’s still much that we don’t know about how microbes interact with each other and with our environment,” says Beckett, who is realistic about the time it will take for us to abandon the twentieth century’s wipe-clean aesthetic, and embrace the stain. “This work will prove its worth in small interiors first.”

A baffling accident of history

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Watching Shaunak Sen’s All That Breathes for New Scientist, 28 September 2022 

“Hundreds of birds are falling out of the sky every day,” complains Nadeem Shehzad, by far the grumpier of the two cousins whose life’s work is to rescue the injured raptors and waterbirds of Delhi. “What amazes me is that people go on as if everything’s normal.”

People, in Shaunak Sen‘s award-winning documentary, aren’t the only ones making the best of things under Delhi’s polluted skies. The city is also home to rats, pigs and frogs, mosquitoes and turtles, cows and horses and birds, and especially black kites, who have come to replace vultures as the city’s chief recycling service, cleaning up after the city’s many slaughterhouses and meat processing plants.

The film follows Nadeem, his brother Mohammad Saud and their young cousin Salik Rehman as they struggle to turn their family obsession into [https://www.raptorrescue.org] a fully fledged wildlife hospital. No sooner is yet another funding bid completed then their meat mincer breaks down. No sooner is a wounded bird stitched up than there’s a power cut and all the lights go out. What happens to the family’s sewer connection when the monsoon arrives does not bear discussing.

These struggles are compelling and yet this is not really a film about humans. It’s about, quite literally, “all that breathes”. The humans are just one more animal trying to eke out a living in this alien place called Delhi: not a bad place, but not a human place neither: more a baffling accident of history.

The cousins compare notes on the threat of nuclear war between India and Pakistan while, barely two kilometres away, religious riots tear up the streets. Feral pigs cross a nearby stream. A millipede eases itself out of a puddle, even as a passing aeroplane casts its reflection in the water. The film’s first shot is a sumptuous pan across a rat-infested rubbish dump. Filmed at a rodent’s eye level, bare inches from the ground, a fascinating, complex, dramatic world is revealed. Later, we hear how Hindu nationalists are presenting the city’s muslim population in terms of disease and hygiene. Any European viewer with an ounce of historical sense will know where this thinking can lead.

Whether or not one picks up on all the film’s nested ironies is very much left to the viewer. Sen’s method is not to present an argument, but rather to get us to see things in a new way. Of the film’s main subject, the black kites, Sen has said, “I want audiences to leave the theater and immediately look up”.

Achieving this requires a certain amount of artifice. Viewers may wonder how it is that a tortoise reaches the top of a pile of garbage just in time to watch a motorike career around a distant corner. Individual shots took days to capture; some took much longer. The human conversations are a little more problematic. After consuming so many slipshod hand-held documentaries, I found the conversations here a little too on-message, a bit too polished to be true.

But why cavil at a powerful and insightful film, just because its style is unfamiliar? Filmed between 2020 and 2021 by German cinematographer Ben Bernhard, supported by Riju Das and Saumyananda Sahi, All That Breathes inhales extreme close-ups and cramped interiors, exhales vertiginous skyscapes and city skylines.

The story of Delhi’s black kites, regularly injured by the glass-coated threads used to fly paper kites — one of Delhi’s favourite leisure activities — might have been better served by a more straightforward story. But then the kites would, in the same breath, have become a small, contained, even inconsequential problem.

The whole point of Sen’s film, which won a Grand Jury prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, is that the kites are a bell-weather. We’re all in this emergency together, and struggling to fly, and struggling to breathe.