The Design Line: 27 August – 2 September
Is that a crisp autumnal breeze in the air? Or is it just the ice cold takes of Design Line come to freshen up your Friday? This week, Japan tries to forcibly retire the floppy disc, architects unite in NYC, Twitter’s Red Team calls a code red, Moshe Safdie secures his legacy, semiconductor chips get super political, and the curse of Thatcherism comes for the Stirling Prize.
Platforms just can’t get it together over porn, it seems (image: Exotic Cancer from Disegno #31).
The fall of SexyTweets
OnlyFans is projected to make $2.5bn in revenue this year, which must be pretty attractive to any platform looking to make a quick buck from adult content creation. Step forward Twitter, which in spring 2022 launched a “Red Team” to investigate a plan to develop a new project called ACM (Adult Content Monetization): basically, a scheme to enable paid-for SexyTweets from which Twitter would then take a cut. It emerged this week in a report from The Verge, however, that the plan was scuppered after the Red Team sounded the red alert on Twitter’s ability to “accurately detect child sexual exploitation and non-consensual nudity at scale”. While all social media platforms struggle to a degree with detecting child sexual exploitation (CSE), internal reports highlighted the fact that Twitter’s efforts were particularly woeful, stymied by underinvestment and the fact that its RedPanda enforcement software was, in the words of one Twitter engineer, “by far one of the most fragile, inefficient, and under-supported tools we have on offer”. It’s grim news, particularly seen in light of Twitter’s efforts to monetise adult content, so god bless the Red Team for putting the kibosh on the whole thing. Until Twitter has the tools to keep people safe, it’s best they keep it clean.
Architects, unite!
New York studio Bernheimer Architecture made history this week as it recognised its union – the first private architecture firm in the US to do so. After years of campaigning from grassroots organisations such as Architectural Workers United and the Architecture Lobby, a precedent for an organised architects’ workplace has now been set. Studio founder Andrew Bernheimer recognised the union voluntarily and has vowed to keep working hours below 50 per week. “Architecture is a discipline and profession that has a legacy of exploitation,” Bernheimer told The New York Times. “[We must] show that [we] value the people who make all of our architecture happen.” The industry has become notorious for long hours and low pay despite the long and expensive educator required to qualify as an architect. The good news comes after another New York union drive was aborted earlier this year at SHoP after pushback from management. The upcoming Disegno #34, which is available for pre-order from 6 September, includes a report from the frontlines of architects and organisers at the sharp end of the burgeoning union movement in the industry. It’s going to be one expertly designed picket line.
Selling off Stirling
A council house in Goldsmith Street, the Stirling Prize-winning housing scheme by architects Mikhail Riches, is being sold off under the UK’s controversial Right to Buy scheme, reports the Architects’ Journal. The 100-home development was the first council housing scheme to win the prestigious RIBA award, but now a house is being sold off to private buyers and there is nothing Norwich Council can do about it. The right for council tenants to buy their home – with the majority of the sale going to central government coffers – was passed into law by the 1980 Housing Act under Conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher. As rental homes are sold off, local authorities struggle to build more as they have strict caps on borrowing set by central government, leaving them unable to make the initial outlay to build housing. Instead, they are forced to rely on private developers tacking on a handful of social rent homes (if said developers don’t manage to find a way to wriggle out of their Section 106 obligations entirely). The current Conservative government is extending the scheme to housing association tenants, something local governments have warned is entirely unsustainable. It’s a nonsensical system in a country facing a deep housing crisis where homes are funnelled into the hands of private landlords, leaving councils without a vital source of income in the form of affordable rents that could be put towards community infrastructure and services. That the Stirling Prize will be no doubt be used as a selling point is an extra sting in the tail.
Japan wants to put its floppy disc workhorses out to pasture (image: Pixabay).
Death to discs
Disegno was shocked this week to learn that Japan’s digital affairs minister Taro Kono had “[declared] a war on floppy discs,” ruling that the nation’s government would begin phasing them out and moving its various administrative processes online – they were still using floppy discs? As part of his ambition to accelerate Japan into the distant future of the early 1990s, Kono said that the antiquated storage format would no longer have a place in the near 2,000 government-related procedures for which it is still used, including systems through which businesses can submit applications to government. As bizarre as it is to learn that Japan is still partly run on floppy disc (although apparently the US air force was still using them to manage the nation’s nuclear arsenal as recently as 2019 – they’re probably now running it over Dropbox or something), there are things to be said for the format, particularly when you consider the environmental impact of cloud storage systems. “C’mon, there is no analogue thing left in our remarkably advanced society,” Kono said when appointed to his role in August. He’s clearly right, but that doesn’t mean the analogue phaseout isn’t a little bittersweet too – goodnight our floppy disc friends, your watch is at an end.
Moshe’s legacy
Grateful alumni often bequeath gifts to their alma mater, but Canadian-Israeli architect Moshe Safdie has gone one step further and donated his entire house to McGill University. The apartment is his personal residence in Habitat 67, the landmark brutalist building he designed for Montreal at the age of just 23 by adapting his final thesis on reinventing the apartment block. “I have always valued the great education I received at McGill,” said the architect, who has also donated his personal archive of some 100,000 documents to the school. “Canada has embraced and supported me,” he continued, adding that it would be fitting for the country to be “the home of my life's work.” Safdie has disavowed the brutalist label attached to the building, but with its angular concrete blocks the 354-unit complex of homes and terraces certainly walks and quacks like a very brutal duck. Built for the 1967 World Expo, Habitat 67 was inspired by both the Japanese Metabolist movement and the work of Le Corbusier. Like many experimental projects of the time, the concrete had problems with damp and mould, and the original units have been knocked through to create fancy expensive apartments in a city that is, like many, experiencing a deep housing crisis. But it is an undeniable part of architecture history and the donation will hopefully see it preserved for future generations of architecture students.
Hands off our chips
The Biden administration is getting tough, opening up new semiconductor battlefields in its bid to stay ahead of its rivals in fields such as supercomputers and artificial intelligence. This week brought the news that the US government had restricted sales of high-end graphics processing units (GPUs) to Russia and China, ostensibly in a bid to stop the chips being used by foreign governments in applications such as weapons development, surveillance and intelligence gathering. Major producers such as Nvidia and Advances Micro Devices confirmed that they would now require export licenses to sell certain chips (and they seem to expect that few will be granted), while other producers have also received letters informing them of restrictions on the sale of such technologies. It’s the latest step in a growing technological cold war between China and the US, with China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs decrying the move as “typical of scientific and technological hegemonism”, while the US’s Commerce Department declared it necessary to prevent the nation’s rivals from being able to pursue “military modernization efforts, […] human rights abuses and […] other malign activities.”