Monthly Archive for June, 2010

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The Designer World Cup

Published by Charles Pickett 2 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

Image courtesy of Andy Jackson, FourFourTwo Magazine © all rights reserved

The imminent World Cup, kicking off on 11 June, attracts attention in many ways. For many fans the look of the game is almost as important as the way it is played. To some extent this aesthetic attitude is shared by FIFA, which bans advertising from the playing pitch as well as restricting the size and amount of advertising on players’ clothing (no advertising at all is permitted on national team strips).

Hence the media focus as sportswear manufacturers unveilled new playing strips for the 32 competing teams (also see here). Nike’s new home strip for the Socceroos attracted the full spectrum of reactions – it’s either an appealing item of retro with green credentials (its fabric is made from recycled plastic bottles). Or it would look naff in K Mart. Given the history of stylistic disasters produced by the uncomfortable combination of gold and green, I think we should allow Nike’s designers some slack.

Replica shirts are an important part of the football economy although club football, with its committed fans and lengthy seasons, is the main market. Contests of national teams are more intermittent but still provide a boost to the sportswear industry. The two largest sportswear companies, Nike and Adidas, each sold about $2 billion worth of shirts during the last World Cup. Design = $.

The other design focus in June and July will be the ten World Cup stadiums. Five of these are new while the others are renovations of existing venues, products of a vast building program arguably inappropriate for a poor and troubled nation like South Africa.

Stadiums are essentially functional buildings, but in recent decades their architecture has become more specialised, complex and expressive. The reasons for this include increased numbers of privately owned and financed stadiums with the need to accommodate a variety of sport and entertainment events. The Sapporo Dome at Hokkaido, Japan with its retractable football and baseball pitches, is an example of the possibilities. On the other hand, Munich’s Allianz Arena with its translucent, colour-changing exterior, typifies today’s architectural trend to ‘statement’ buildings.

The huge building investment made for World Cups and Olympic Games underlines the use of design for national image-making. The design statements have become as important a competition as that on the sports arenas. And in this contest, sensible functionalism is likely to miss out to the spectacular ‘statements’.

Water Cube Model. Collection: Powerhouse Museum

The Allianz Arena was designed by the Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, without doubt the outstanding sports designers of recent times. Among their work is the Beijing National Stadium, aka the Bird’s Nest. The Powerhouse recently acquired a sectioned model of another Beijing Olympics venue, the aquatic centre more generally known as the Water Cube. With Australia’s PTW Architects leading its design team, the Cube features a translucent skin similar to that of the Allianz Arena. Together, the Bird’s Nest and the Water Cube gave Beijing a new, design-savvy reputation. Or as The New Yorker’s Paul Goldberger observed:

‘If Tiananmen Square is a monument to the Maoist policy of self-sufficiency, the Olympic Green, ten miles and fifty years away, is an architectural statement of intent every bit as clear—a testament to the global ambitions of the world’s fastest-growing major economy’.[‘Out of the blocks’, The New Yorker, 2 June 2008]

Similarly, South Africa’s World Cup is designed to make a statement of African achievement and progress, a retort to the stories of poverty and conflict with which the continent is usually associated (also see here). Danny Jordaan, head of the South Africa organising committee, greeted the completion of one of the stadiums as follows: ‘Now we sit here and the world can see what we’ve built. Not just a stadium. A monument for this country.’ Although the contrast between the sparkling new stadiums and the nearby shanty towns is already attracting criticism in the foreign media, there is no doubt that Jordaan’s pride and optimism is widely shared in South Africa, especially among the black majority.

It’s interesting to look back at Sydney’s design statement of ten years ago. Design was a central part of the Sydney 2000 bid. The creation of new state of the art venues in a ‘green’ Olympic park was the most persuasive argument for Sydney. In 1997 I acquired a set of architectural models of the planned Olympic venues; the models had been used to promote the Sydney bid leading up to Sydney’s selection in 1993. The piece de resistance among the seven models is an Olympic Stadium design by Philip Cox, the leading Australian architect of sports venues. Cox’ CV includes Canberra Stadium, Sydney Football Stadium, the Showground arena at Olympic Park and the new Melbourne football stadium (aka AAMI Park). Cox believes that stadiums are ‘today’s places of worship’, creating some of the most intense communal experiences of contemporary society.

Olympic Stadium designed by Philip Cox. Collection: Powerhouse Museum

Cox’s Olympic stadium was not built because the NSW government was aware that Sydney’s fractured sports market had only occasional need for an 80,000 seat stadium, and was anxious to privatise the design, construction and likely losses of the new stadium. This proved a prescient judgement, with the resulting venue now forced to hire itself below cost in a bid to attract tenants.

However Cox’s proposal shares some features with his later design for the Khalifa Stadium at Doha, completed in 2005. The Socceroos played Qatar in this stadium during their qualification campaign for this year’s World Cup. And the PHM also holds a model of the Khalifa roof structure, donated by Arup, engineer of the building. The model demonstrates the principle of erecting and pre-stressing the stadium’s cable net roof. It’s also an example of Philip Cox’s talent for creating elegance out of functional structures.

Roof model of the Khalifa Stadium, Doha. Collection: Powerhouse Museum

Qatar, like Australia, is bidding for the 2022 World Cup and this tiny oil-rich principality is using a spectacular series of new stadium projects as its main selling point. In contrast the stadia promised in Australia’s bid book are primarily upgrades of existing venues, although some of these renovations would be extensive enough to effectively create new buildings.

Sydney 2000 was a design-focused bid yet among the local design cognoscente, it’s widely believed that Sydney played it safe, producing venues that are competent rather that exciting. Our Olympic (ANZ) Stadium is typical. Although serious design work will only happen if our bid gets the FIFA thumbs-up in December, I suspect that the World Cup approach will be similar.

After all, Australia arguably has less need to make statements of architectural or urban modernity than do ‘emerging’ economies such as China, Qatar or South Africa. Australia’s bid, in contrast, is founded on our location in the booming (in both economic and football terms) Asian region. Given that the Australian sporting world is not exactly united in support of the Australian bid, a bid promising ten stadiums conforming to FIFA’s standards is an achievement in itself. Design statements may have to wait.

In the meantime, you can enjoy another World Cup/design crossover here. Since Guillermo Laborde designed the official poster for the first World Cup, the posters have formed a brief history of graphic design since 1930. Laborde’s poster was an instant Art Deco classic, while Joan Miro’s effort for Spain 1982 is another standout.

Beginning Electronic Music- Tristram Cary part 2

Published by Stephen Jones 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

Please note this post is part of a series. For part one of the Tristram Cary story, see here.

By 1962 Cary was not the only composer including electronic and concrete sounds in their work. In 1957 Daphne Oram and Desmond Briscoe began developing what they called “Radiophonic” sound for broadcasts of drama from the BBC Third Programme. Their works included Samuel Beckett’s All that Fall and Giles Cooper’s The Disagreeable Oyster (both 1957).[1] Then in 1958 the BBC established their Radiophonic Workshop at Maida Vale, London, where the main technique at this stage was tape manipulation and editing. Oram left the BBC in 1959 to set up her own studio and develop a synthesiser that used hand-drawn waveforms on film to control the oscillators.[2] The BBC proved to be one of Cary’s main employers and he produced several commissions a year for them. From 1960 he contributed to several BBC educational programmes on contemporary music for which the Radiophonic Workshop produced some of the music.

In 1962 Delia Derbyshire joined the BBC. About this time there were Ferrograph tape-recorders, a WWII period outside-broadcast (O/B) sound mixer, a reverberation chamber and a wobbulator which (although originally mechanically swept) consisted in an oscillator swept by a second oscillator. It was an engineering test instrument but here will be the beginnings of voltage control. Another batch of tape recorders (now Philips machines) with editing blocks and remote start controls were added about this time. There was also a set of 12 oscillators, each of which could be independently tuned, and whose outputs were switched by a 12 key “keying unit” that fed the selected oscillator to a type of valve amplifier known as a “variable-mu pentode” in which the gain (amplification) of the valve was controlled by an external voltage source which had adjustable attack and decay timing and thus functioned as a voltage controlled amplifier (VCA).[3] Cary built himself a Transient Waveform Modifier which was a set of four amplifiers based on similar devices, [PHM: 2009/83/2]. To be discussed in a coming blog.

Tristram Cary in the Fressingfield studio, operating his double ring modulator.

It was Derbyshire who realised Ron Grainer’s original visual score for the title music for Dr Who, developing the sounds that so many of us grew up with, and thereby introducing electronic music to the generation for whom it was all so influential. Cary’s role in Dr Who was in making some of the incidental music for several early episodes, including the introduction of the Daleks. The Dalek’s voices were made by Brian Hodgson using a ring modulator built from a pair of transformers with a ring of four diodes between them.

Also in 1962 Cary decided to move out of London. He bought a farmhouse, “Wood Farm”, in Suffolk, where he stayed until 1974, and around mid-1963 re-established his Fressingfield studio in an out-building. He abandoned the disc cutter for more tape-recorders and assembled the studio from devices that he eventually built into a wall of electronics in racks and a minimal patching and switched selection control panel with a six channel mixer. There he built several pieces of equipment that the Powerhouse Museum now has in its collection. These are a voltage controlled oscillator and an envelope shaper, and will be discussed in following blogs.

The main oscillators, control panel, and tape-recorders in Cary's Fressingfield studio.

Around this time (c.1960) Peter Zinovieff, the son of Russian émigrés to Britain, and whose hobby was electronic music, began to buy waveform generators, noise generators and other stuff from the war surplus electronics stores in London. He also bought a couple of tape-recorders and started making electronic sound with this gear, building a crude sequencer using telephone relays.[4] He had met Daphne Oram and she taught him how to assemble sounds into music. He later worked with Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson of the Radiophonic Workshop forming the group Unit Delta Plus who played live electronic music at the Roundhouse in London, among other activities.

Around 1965-6 Zinovieff met David Cockerell an electronic designer who had already designed a ring modulator and a voltage controlled oscillator.[5] In 1967 Zinovieff bought a pair of DEC PDP8s which he intended to use to make computer music. As the PDP8 was not in itself powerful enough to do direct tonal synthesis it was coupled to a variety of analogue devices (VCOs, VCFs, etc) which could produce tones, thus creating a hybrid system in which the computers generated control voltages for the analogue components.[6] With Cockerell’s technical support, Zinovieff began to assemble the PDP8s into a computer-driven sequencer to control the proposed system for the production of sampled sound (an idea that came from the ideas of musique concrete) which was to consist in a block of filters and oscillators. Cockerell took charge of the engineering in Zinovieff’s studio in 1968. Meanwhile in 1967 Zinovieff met Tristram Cary and in 1968 the three of them set up Electronic Music Studios (EMS) to run the PDP8 lab and build the instruments necessary with which to compose electronic music.

Cary had been appointed director of the Electronic Music Studio at the Royal College of music in 1967 and had a studio built, which was ready to use in September 1968.[7] Cary’s students at the RCM included Laurence Casserly and Howard Davidson. Earlier that year (January 15, 1968) Cary and Zinovieff produced what may have been the first electronic music concert in Britain.[8] As well as works by Cary and Zinovieff it included compositions by Ernest Berk, Delia Derbyshire, Daphne Oram and Ivor Walsworth, George Newson, Jacob Meyerowitz and Alan Sutcliffe.[9] Sutcliffe had written a stochastic music composition on an ICL computer and recorded it to paper-tape, which he and Zinovieff then realised as ZASP on Zinovieff’s PDP8 in this concert.[10]

A little earlier Robert Moog had proposed the use of voltage control in a paper to the 1965 Audio Engineering Society (AES) convention in New York.[11] It wasn’t actually a new idea, for example a wobulator or sweep frequency generator could be built using voltage control, but Moog used an exponential control ratio and this meant that a change of one volt in control voltage produced an exponential change in the frequency and thus you had a one volt per octave control system. From there, a keyboard controlling the frequency of the oscillator was a simple thing. Not that many of the early electronic composers were at all interested in using keyboards. But that option did make Moog’s synthesisers trendy in popular music.

[1] Darren Giddings, “Concrete Mixers, The story of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop”, 2003. [http://www.mb21.co.uk/ether.net/radiophonics/mixers.shtml]. See also Wikipedia on Desmond Briscoe [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desmond_Briscoe] and Wikipedia on the Radiophonic Workshop [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Radiophonic_Workshop]

[2] This is described in Steve Marshall, “Graham Wrench: The Story Of Daphne Oram’s Optical Synthesizer,” Sound On Sound, February, 2009. Available at http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/feb09/articles/oramics.htm     

[3] See “Derbyshire Electronic Music Pioneer” http://www.delia-derbyshire.org/index.php , and Ray White (2004). BBC Radiophonic Workshop: An Engineering Perspective, chapter 2 [http://whitefiles.org/rws/r02.htm]

[4] Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco, Analog Days: The invention and impact of the Moog synthesizer, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002, pp.280ff.

[5] Ibid., p.285.

[6] Tristram Cary, Illustrated Compendium of Musical Technology, London: Faber & Faber, 1992, p.100.

[7] Lawrence Casserley, “Reflections on Ten Years of Electronic Music at the RCM,” RCM Magazine, vol.75, no.3, 1979

[8] Francis Routh, Contemporary British Music: The Twenty-five Years from 1945 to 1970, chapter VI, The Contemporary Scene. Available at http://www.musicweb-international.com/routh/Contemporary.htm

[9] Ibid.

[10] Michael Kassler, “Report from Edinburgh,” Perspectives in New Music, vol.7, no.2 (Spring, 1969) p.178. Kassler is reporting on the IFIP ’68 conference.

[11] R.A.Moog, “Voltage Controlled Electronic Music Modules,” Journal of the Audio Engineering Society, vol.13 (1965), pp.200-206.

Romance in the Museum

Published by Rebecca Evans 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

Shoes decorated by Esme Timbery for Romance Was Born, Spring/Summer, 2009/2010

Platform shoes covered in lace, glitter and shells! Surely that’s a crime against fashion?

In this blog I’d like to introduce you to a rather spectacular pair of platform shoes recently acquired into the Museum’s collection. They were shown as part of Sydney design label, Romance Was Born’s Spring/Summer 2009/2010 collection at Rosemount Australian Fashion Week and are currently on display in Frock Stars: Inside Australian Fashion Week.

This pair of platform shoes are a wonderful example of a collaboration between fashion designers and an artist. In 2009, Anna Plunkett and Luke Sales of Romance Was Born collaborated with Bidjigal woman Esme Timbery from La Perouse in the creation of these fabulous shoes. Esme is a renowned shell artist. In 2005, she won first prize for her shell worked Sydney Harbour Bridge in the Parliament of New South Wales Art Prize. For this pair of dazzling shoes she has used shells, glitter and lace to create something slightly eccentric, but ever so stunning.

Timbery’s shell work and Romance Was Born’s fashion design aesthetic is complementary with the creation of rich surface textures. Their 2009 collection included an abundance of lace, glitter, sequins and beads used in the hair design, makeup, styling and collection pieces. It included everything from an ‘Iced-VoVo’ inspired biscuit dress and a one-shouldered crocheted dress made by Luke Sale’s mum, Janelle. Both of these outfits have also been acquired into the Museum’s collection. Romance Was Born’s style is whimsical and flamboyant – they don’t seek to follow or copy trends, but create something new, breath taking and awe-inspiring in their collections.

This was further confirmed during their Spring/Summer 2010/2011 show for Rosemount Australian Fashion Week. Based on dinosaurs and 16th Century Europe, Luke Sales said, ‘[It's about] time travel and forming a portal between the Jurassic era and the birth of the Renaissance; dinosaurs coming back and the lower class rising up and being able to wear what they want’ (source: Marie Claire). Perhaps a curious combination, but I think that even if you don’t like contemporary fashion, you just have to appreciate the work of Romance Was Born for their sheer theatre and brilliance.