The making the Game of Housing rubicon model required a certain amount of last minute improvisation. Innovation begs for greater spontaneous performativity. Design deadline stresses produce the live clarity of ‘making it up as you go along’. If architecture is really frozen music, then it would appear to lack this spontaneity. Yet the first time film was scored to jazz it produced the ‘Elevator Musak’ of Miles Davis improvising to Louis Malle’s Ascenseur pour l’Echafaud (Elevator to the Gallows). The rest is history…  

The America’s Cup is the pre-eminent international spectacle of boatmanship, so why should the attendant architecture remain landlocked and ground-based? Urban regeneration doesn’t happ en through a pair of binoculars. OO. Embracing the same desire for radical innovation as that evident in the Emirates Team NZ boat, our stage for watching sailing refreshes nautical spectatorship. This is the Royal NZ Yacht Squadron leading the development of naval architecture. By re-cycling an offshore platform, NZ once again demonstrates global innovation through a sustainable yet memorable ‘grandstand-on-the sea’ experience! Fuller ferries dock onto Pirelli pontoons, leading you to glazed elevators that rise up through hotel panoramas, liquid bars, kiwi seafood eateries, and, of course, a helipad for those that come in ‘heels’. The location of the #ACC36 Platform is floated. Anchor nearer the Rangitoto or closer to the City of Sails? Either way we can triangulate the televised backdrop. Gin palaces frame the course. NZ, oil well and truly, on the world map. After ACC is Auckland City Council in the American Cup Class. 

The elevator as a crime space. The elevator has long been aestheticised by architecture. As in the Louis Malle film ‘L’ascenseur pour l’échafaud’ scored by Miles Davis. This aesthetic is however a long way from the aesthetic of lifts in social housing, which are less jazzy soundtrack and more piss bouquet, and so are typically an uneasy compressed social encounters due to the diaspooric nature of the building occupants to which the lifts serve. 

Autostadt / elevator car stacking system carturntable elevator

The number of public toilets in London dropped 40 percent from 2000 to 2005, leaving 415 loos to serve a population of 7.5 million (or 1 lav per 18,000 inhabitants), government figures show. That’s not including the 28 million people who visit the U.K. capital each year. Compare this with Beijing, where the average salary is a 10th of London’s, there are 7,700 toilets, or one for every 2,000 people (9x more). The shortage belies London’s history as an exemplary provider of public toilets. Its first public lavatory was built in the 12th century at the site of what is now the Royal Bank of Canada’s offices. During the Victorian era, public bathrooms multiplied, and often boasted mosaic tiling and copper pipes. Such facilities have sometimes fallen afoul of new laws. The Disability Act, which came into force in 2004, requires that public toilets be accessible to wheelchair users or have suitable alternatives nearby. Rather than invest in ramps and elevators, some authorities have shut or sold older restrooms. talloway@bloomberg.net Performing urban acupuncture, could architecture’s most modest space – the WC – save the city? The redeeming feature of this site is, as the Metropolitan Police remind us – Urination!