DAVINA JACKSON

George Freedman: Remembering a virtuoso voluptuary

George Freedman (left) with Michael Threlfo at Danesbank, George’s farm near Milton.

George Freedman (1936–2016) used the term ‘voluptuary’ to describe people with bright personalities who enjoy luxurious living—especially fine dining, drinking, the arts and design. Because he was a virtuoso voluptuary himself, he flowed smoothly around the highest circles of Sydney society—and because his bold atmospheric strategies were appreciated by restaurateurs, he designed many of the city’s favourite hospitality venues of the 1980s and 1990s. 

Within hours of his arrival in Sydney from New York in 1969, George was welcomed warmly by Marion Hall Best, the city’s then queen of society rooms, Rajahstani paint glazes and imported modern furniture. After she retired in 1974, he naturally succeeded her as Sydney’s most respected interior designer and colourist of the late 20th century. He was promoted frequently by the top home design magazine, Belle, and especially by its head stylist, Babette Hayes, and her flock of protegés.

His childhood with a paint colourist father, architectural education in New York and London, and talent as an ingenue painter exhibiting in Europe formed the platform upon which he built his outstanding professional career in Sydney. He was remarkably skilful at magnetising finishes and furnishing commissions from most of the top architects of his heyday. While most architects resisted aligning with ‘inferior desecrators’, they seemed to recognise that George’s sophisticated furnishing talents added highly photogenic singularity to their late-modernist and postmodernist structures. At this time, architects were not taught much about interior or lighting design—the techniques for generating emotional responses from occupants of interiors.

As well as working with the best architects of his own generation, George employed two younger generations of talented young architects and designers. Their fresh eyes and drafting training helped him to win professional recognition as an ‘interior architect’ worthy of commendation from the notoriously designer-dismissive Royal Australian Institute of Architects. His several lectures at Tusculum, the institute’s Sydney headquarters, were well-attended and his international scholarship was appreciated. For example, he introduced younger architects to the sophisticated spatial concepts, optical tricks, and antiquities wonders of Sir John Soane’s house-museum at Lincolns Inn Fields in London. Its curators kindly provided George with a sample for one of his favourite paint colours: a subtle shade of yellow mixed for Soane by the maritime painter J.M.W. Turner. Many Sydney architects and connoisseurs made pilgrimages to Soane’s house after hearing about it from George, or one of his staff.

George’s social success stemmed from his exceptionally handsome and casually elegant appearance (Latino meets the Ivy League). Although naturally reticent in conversation, he was appreciated for his sophisticated cultural knowledge and sardonic, sometimes saucy, remarks. He dined regularly with restaurateur client-friends and some of Sydney’s most opinionated influencers—including Paul Keating, Leo Schofield and John Alexander during the 1990s. His city homes were glamorous, yet he lived with a simple domestic routine of walking the dogs, cooking delicious meals and teacakes for visitors, and celebrating any excuse with a classic American-modern cocktail (negronis were a favourite).

He also enjoyed occasional turns of self-irony and doses of retro kitsch. For example, in the early 1990s, he cooked a three-course lunch with 40-year-old recipes from the 1954 Alice B. Toklas Cookbook (many using canned vegetables). Spoofing his reputation as one of Sydney’s most fashionable gourmands, George prepped this spread at Danesbank, his farmhouse near Milton, for publication as a Belle lifestyle article. It was a typically marvellous shoot … ending not with Toklas’s famous hashish fudge but with flaming amaretti wrappers evaporating in the twilight as we shared spiked coffees and happy vibes in the planters’ chairs on his verandah.

Sprezzatura schizzi: Luigi Rosselli’s adroit expressions

Luigi Rosselli exhibits an ‘intelligent hand’, a genial disposition and romantic values from both classical and Wrightian humanism in his architectural renderings across butter paper. To commemorate three decades of practice in Sydney, his LRA team has scattered multiple facsimiles of his graphite, felt pen and Tipp-Ex design schizzi across a biomorphic Paper Arch occupying the Mils Gallery in Surry Hills.

Instead of mounting or framing each work on paper, to be spaced formally around the walls, Rosselli presents his ‘scribbles’ as the tattered, yellow mantle for a lantern-lit portal-passage. With this self-subversive strategy, he reboots Baldassare Castiglione’s sixteenth century courtly ideal of sprezzatura: ‘that certain nonchalance that shall conceal the art and show [it] is done without effort and almost without thought’.

Cover of Luigi Rosselli’s Perspectives book.

In sculpture and architecture symbolism, Rosselli’s glowing yellow arch represents the torso or carapace of some primeval mammal, and we are invited to enter its skeletal void. This provides a memorable encounter with both front and reverse views of his oeuvre but it obscures our chances to deduce each design in detail. To repair that absence of clarity at the venue, this book catalogues Rosselli’s crucial sketches for 128 projects, listed in chronological order from the launch of his Sydney studio in 1985 to this fifteenth year of the third millennium. Each is highlighted in the architect’s own words … including second-language phrases which hint at curious insights.

Surveying these drawings, we see a generally luminous manner of expression; bright white masonry highlighting another foreigner’s pleasure with this city’s scintillating sunlight and aerated culture. Increasingly we recognise rejections of orthogonal geometries in favour of organic flows – and in 2009 he was experimenting (again) with extreme hull-shaped cantilevers for houses on waterside sites. Also we notice stronger line and tone techniques as he gained independence, the trust of affluent clients, and international recognition as an expert architect of large residences and small commercial premises.

Rosselli’s Australian clients include cosmopolitan achievers in commerce, politics and the arts; some introduced through his wife, artist Juliet Holmes à Court. He relaxes naturally in elite circles; eased by his privileged childhood in 1960s and 1970s Milan and Varese, where he lived in a house inspired by Finland’s Alvar Aalto and appreciated the Giorgio de Chirico-influenced local architect Aldo Rossi.

Moving to French Switzerland in 1975, he studied architecture with professors Umberto Riva, Alvaro Siza, Rafael Moneo and Kenneth Frampton at the École Polytechnique Federale in Lausanne (EPFL), and prematurely won student intern stints at a Mario Botta bank project office in Fribourg (1979) and with Romaldo Giurgola’s Australian Parliament House teams in New York and Canberra (1980-81).

Rosselli’s imagination has been pollinated by often conflicting influences from the three Swiss cultures, and some of his key Australian buildings interpret concepts from Botta, Rossi, Luigi Snozzi, Paolo Portoghesi and other architects from the Ticino-Milano-Roma region. Their crafted (and often striped) brick and timber homages to Filippo Brunelleschi and Francesco Borromini exemplified the 1970-80s theoretical challenge to ‘become modern and return to sources’.

Rosselli’s advent as a delineator began around 1979, when he subversively ruined 30 major architectural monuments via sepia and blue ink paintings fired onto white porcelain dinner plates for his sister’s wedding.

More melancholy, and proficient, were his black wax crayon etchings on thick cartridge stock for two EPFL student design projects. One showed a mythical catacomb, with three Étienne Boullée-style spherical chambers (dedicated to Jorge Luis Borges’ 1941 book The Library of Babel, Icarus and Fury) stacked inside the giant rock beside Lausanne’s suicide-magnetic Paul Bessières Bridge.

His 1984 thesis project proposed a luxury spa hotel majestically surmounting a sheer rock cliff above the Venice-Simplon-Orient Express railway track. He exhibited this speculative resort with meticulous drawings in multiple styles, each depicting a unique indoor or outdoor scene. Some sketches demonstrated classical European interior design concepts that were jettisoned from futuristic architecture courses after the Paris student riots of 1968. The paradoxical title of that formative (prize-winning) presentation was Eclecticism Theory. In retrospect, this suggests an attempt to find clear air beyond Europe’s then-ferocious arguments among writers identified as neo-classicists, late modernists, structuralists, post-structuralists and post-modernists.

Rosselli’s sketches were diversely influenced by his supervisor Riva (himself a disciple of the sensual modernists Alvar Aalto and Carlo Scarpa) and by his occasional lecturers Botta and Siza. He also is strongly influenced by the picturesque perspectives of Karl Friedrich Schinkel (interpreting sunny Mediterranean classicism while building Prussian Berlin’s post-Napoleonic monuments), Frank Lloyd Wright (who is scantily credited for delivering the prototypes informing all twentieth century modernist houses) and Hugh Ferriss (pioneering delineator of  New York’s 1920s-30s skyscrapers).

Arriving in Manhattan with his promising portfolio, he won a contract from Aldo Giurgola to become ‘Chief Inker’ for the winning submission to Australia’s Parliament House competition. Giurgola needed a European pens expert because most American architects drew with pencils, which had been banned by Australia’s competition organisers.

However, Americans tended to be ‘scientific’ with precise junctions of line ends at corners, while Rosselli’s ‘Germanic’ supervisor for detail drawings of Rossi’s State Bank of Fribourg had demanded precise line crossovers to represent artistic exactitude. Such were some of the feeble vestiges from twentieth century modern architecture’s ‘battle of the styles’ – initiated in the 1920s by young Europe-educated architects updating radical 1906-1909 building prototypes by Adolf Loos in Vienna and Frank Lloyd Wright in Chicago. Rosselli decided to go with the flow preferred by each employer; a propensity which partially explains his apparent ease in business dealings with clients.

Also, one of his first supporters in Manhattan, designer Massimo Vignelli (1931-2014), encouraged him to enjoy ambiguity, especially in matters of scale. Vignelli has said:

For us [Italians], ambiguity means plurality of meanings, and that’s what makes it very exciting. For the Anglo-Saxon, it is something that seems neither here nor there. … Ambiguity brings another level of richness, but it’s very very dangerous as well...it’s not for everybody.

Ambiguity of scale was satirically epitomised in Sir William Hogarth’s 1753-54 engraving for a London treatise on linear perspective. Updating the meandering, multi-scene, pictorial narratives of the Middle Ages, Hogarth broke all the rules on vanishing points that Filippo Brunelleschi proved in Florence in 1420. Hogarth’s caption noted: ‘Whoever makes a Design without the Knowledge of Perspective will be liable to such Absurdities as are shown in this Frontispiece’.

Rosselli is no satirist but his architecture often includes subtle arrangements of planes, spaces and masses at unexpected scales and proportions. Compared with ruled and measured perspectives, his freehand lines often foreshorten, elongate and otherwise distort key elements of his buildings. To exaggerate his design impulses, horizontal layers appear more tightly stacked than seems possible for the corresponding terraces in real life; cantilevered platforms and enclosures may seem to project beyond familiar laws of gravity. Yet when Rosselli’s original sketches are compared with post-completion photographs from the same points of view, his visions and realities seem remarkably congruent. That is one of the mysterious zones of aptitude shared by most brilliant architects.

How should Rosselli’s designs be interpreted in Sydney’s relatively brief history of architecture? Like other migrant architects, he has gradually adapted his a priori concepts to suit the tastes of another audience. And he has absorbed the spirits and achievements of talented predecessors who worked the same territory. Most obviously, he seems to have abandoned his early tendencies to design cubic buildings as neo-classical symbols of the human body (dividing facades into a distinct base, torso and head). Since 1998 he has been gradually strengthening a more horizontally layered approach to his facade compositions (inspired by Wright’s sprawling precedents on the US mid-west prairies); even when dealing with tight sites around Sydney’s coastal hills.

At this mature point in Rosselli’s career, he is solidly plaited into more than one lineage of distinguished Sydney predecessors, including the city’s first architecture professor, Leslie Wilkinson (bringing Mediterranean climate responses from Britain), the Canberra and Castlecrag planners Walter and Marion Griffin (trained by Wright in Chicago), and the town’s early ‘white modernists’, Sydney Ancher and Arthur Baldwinson, who introduced splendid late 1930s (Aalto-influenced) designs for houses styled like cruise liners.

Rosselli’s early Sydney projects included neo-Renaissance themes and treatments, contradicting Sydney’s 1990s avalanche of Scandinavian-Japanese minimalism. Ambitious young minimalists and smug old-schoolers jointly tagged him with Melbourne architect Robin Boyd’s warnings against ‘featurism’. However these criticisms evaporated as Rosselli matured and made friends (and were obviously fuelled by envies about his prompt access to beau monde clients.)

Rosselli’s first important Sydney house was the neo-Baroque revision of a four-square block of red brick flats at Cammeray (1987), for INXS muso Kirk Pengilly. Echoing Borromini via then-new triumphs by Portoghesi in Rome, it instantly placed Rosselli ‘out there’ as a unique architect for Sydney: one with ‘other integrities’[ beyond local precedents and politics. During council approval delays, he discovered that new perspective sketches could charm and inform his clients and other stakeholders. In the Vogue Living cover article, he said:

It’s a difficult process, making architecture …You have to help your clients believe in what you’re doing. They must be able to visualise the final composition.

One jaunty black ‘squiggle’ which crystallised his convex-concave facade elaborations was later shrunk and line-reversed to become his firm’s red and white logo. This emulates Wright’s famous miniature trademark, inspired by Oriental red ink calligraphy stamps, which autographed the approved perspectives (many on butter paper).

Wright straddled and led architecture’s key responses to the massive technology and socio-economic changes which ruptured twentieth century creativity from previous history. Rosselli’s cusp decades of practice in Australia have coincided with another transformation of technologies and paradigms in art and architecture. Like every other transmillennial architect, he has been unexpectedly required to deliver new kinds of drawings, generated with increasingly sophisticated computer design programs. In corporate contexts, traditional Beaux Arts sketches been eclipsed by virtual reality and engineering simulation videos. The conceptual foundations of architecture – structural stability, social signifcance and permanence – now are being questioned, by architects who think it may be possible for buildings to actually dance. As always, drawings precede the realities.

Rosselli is smoothly and pragmatically using digital drawing and geospatial imaging systems. While he does not personally draw parallel perspective axos or tinker with physics engines in Rhino or Kangaroo, he takes his iPad to meetings with clients to pinch-zoom around 3D aerials of their houses in Apple Maps. As a declared eclectic, his impulse is to welcome and synthesise various ideas to suit each purpose. But he has found it much easier to engage his clients via hand sketches rather than computer realism:

Most clients don’t want to suddenly ’fly through’ a digital rendition of a fait accompli. They would like to gradually get to know the different challenges and options and the architect is not always ready to illustrate exact finishes and colours for the proposal.

In 1959, around the time that Jørn Utzon revealed his Opera House for Sydney and Wright died while building New York’s Guggenheim Museum (both white monuments juxtaposing rectilinear and spherical geometries in different ways), Danish architect Steen Eiler Rasmussen argued for integrated design strategies that enhanced users’ ‘experience’.

Architecture is something indivisible, something you cannot separate into a number of elements. … Architecture is not produced simply by adding plans and sections to elevations. It is something else and something more.

Rosselli’s multi-faceted career seems to be a quest towards enlightened cohesion. His goal appears not so much the illusion of spezzatura, but what he calls ‘character’ … the entirely balanced constitution of a being.

This essay, with illustrations and footnotes, was published as the foreword to the 2015 exhibition catalogue Perspectives: Thirty Years of Architectural Drawings by Luigi Rosselli 1985–2015.

Liane Rossler’s Sweet Nature

Liane Rossler remains a prodigy in sculpting almost-perfect small forms that share the monumental qualities of mountains and boulders. More than 30 years after she began hand-shaping plasticine moulds for cast resin jewellery and homewares, her dexterity now is being expressed through a more earthy and recyclable medium: clay.

Her latest exhibition, at the Annette Larkin Fine Art gallery in Sydney’s Paddington, continues her Sweet Nature project and reveals her finesse in forming gritty Australian terracotta stoneware into elemental containers which might be used as plant pots, beehives, bowls, platters, vases or display objects. The graceful forms and grainy surfaces of some of her bowls and platters are further contrasted by thick applications of an opaque, black, low-sheen glaze; producing a raw, minimal aesthetic which echoes precedents from 1960s-70s studio potters in Japan, Britain and Sweden. These works are stamped with the number 8 as a maker’s mark; representing infinity and good fortune.

As one of three founder-directors of the Dinosaur Designs atelier (until 2010), she was inspired by the sculptural forms of early and mid-20th century European minimalist artists, including Matisse, Brancusi, Morandi and Arp—and their influences still seem evident in her new medium. Following earlier experiments with earthenware, carved pumice and sandstone, and hand-blown glass, these recent wheel-thrown containers place her as a significant new protagonist evolving Australia’s history of ceramic arts. She offers today’s collectors rare intuition, authenticity—and skilful, organic imprecision—in her elegant homages to Nature.

Liane Rossler’s Sweet Nature exhibition runs 22 November–17 December 2016 at Annette Larkin Fine Art, 4/8 Soudan Lane, Paddington NSW 2021.

LAVA flows towards amazing futures

LAVA’s crystalline scheme for an ice hotel and mixed uses complex in Harbin, China’s 10th largest city.

Where to now? For architecture’s next generation of artistic visionaries, there are two obvious avenues for expression: optimism or pessimism.

LAVA – the Laboratory for Visionary Architecture – is a multinational team led by German optimists.

All three directors – Chris Bosse (based in Sydney), Tobias Wallisser (in Berlin) and Alexander Rieck (in Stuttgart) – are visualising exciting future environments and structures to support human life in a century of accelerating climate change crises.

This latest publication of LAVA’s first five years of independent practice serves a feast of 21st century architectural fantasies – all potentially and practically deliverable via highly precise building information modelling and computer-controlled manufacturing systems. The precision and accuracy of today’s engineering and construction technologies – combined with novel materials only now made possible by digital technologies (that enable recycling for example) – brings unprecedented efficiencies for architecture.

Parametric modelling of building designs also expands the parameters and potentials for architects’ creativity. Architects espousing ‘simple boxes’ – a mainstream mantra against algorithm-empowered  ‘blobbists’ of the early 2000s – are simply ignoring the technological capacities of our time.

LAVA’s 40-something directors are the second generation of architects to be educated using computer-aided design and building information modelling systems – and the first generation to be regulated to design ecologically ethical buildings and environments.

Creatively and intelligently integrating natural, constructed and virtual environments is a basic platform of their practice – as are thinking and operating at both global and site-specific scales.

Night lighting of public spaces under the ETFE bubble dome of LAVA’s proposed Future Home rootop pavilion in Beijing.

There is no doubting the exceptional talents of LAVA’s principals. They are internationally exhibited and accepted as one of architecture’s most brilliant conceptual teams of the early 21st century.

Their challenge is how to compete or collaborate with many commercially pragmatic large international practices: to not only win design competitions but remain employed on their projects during the financially and politically ruthless documentation and stakeholder consultation phases.

Good luck to Chris, Tobias and Alexander – and their many collaborators and supporters around the world – in navigating the death throes of the baby boomer era and their own ‘paper architecture’ years of independent practice. Let’s see more of LAVA’s remarkable visions translated to solid form.

—Jackson Davina. 2013. ‘Where to Now?’, a foreword for the practice monograph LAVA: Laboratory for Visionary Architecture. Sydney, Berlin: LAVA.

—In September 2016, LAVA won the European Prize for Architecture, one of the world’s most prestigious honours for general superiority of a practice (rather than one specific project).

Sonic architecture. Illustrious soundscapes for cities

Illustrious soundscape synced with a light show, at the Tietgen student housing complex near Copenhagen, during the 2013 Strom Music Festival.

‘Frozen music’. That’s a classical fallacy which infers that viewing architecture is as thrilling as listening to a special song or symphony.

Another hypothetical notion is ‘sonic architecture’, where aural compositions seem to contain listeners, like physical structures.

Imagine these fantasies fusing as multi-sensory escapades – not just watched from a seat, but experienced while wandering.

Time to call sophisticated London musician Martyn Ware. With partner Vince Clarke, he leads Illustrious, a squad of electronics and harmonics gurus who transform urban spaces – plazas, intersections, courts, bridges and parks around the world – via a new hybrid art known as 3D soundscaping.

A brilliant example of this emerging creative discipline is the soundscape that Ware’s team created for a midsummer evening’s entertainment at the Tietgen student housing complex in Ørestad, near Copenhagen.

Performed for 2000 people during the Strom Music Festival in August 2013, their Panorama performance integrated a live 40-piece orchestra and studio-recorded music; with 16 channels of sounds mixed onsite and synced to coloured LED lights that illuminated the building windows like giant pixels.

Emphasising the audio-visual theatrics was the syncopated rhythm of the architecture. The Tietgenkollegiet (by Lundgaard and Tranberg, 2006) is a visually exciting doughnut stack of projecting and receding boxes (in timber and glass, with steel supporting the balconies, vertical claddings and cantilevered floor slabs).

Catch the whole event on video here.

Still on a high several months later – ‘it was the best thing we’ve ever done’ – Ware explains the soundscape concept as ‘hybridisation between theatre and experience, artistry and architecture, spatial entertainment, incorporating light and sound … not something that could be imagined on a timeline … not something predicated on the narrative concepts that prevailed in the 20th century … ‘

For most outdoor gigs, Illustrious uses custom mixing software (3Daudioscape.org) to visually program the sounds and locations of up to 16 speakers. This allows more precise and complex effects than quadrophonic or surround sound (using four or eight speakers arranged at one height around the sweet spot), and improves on the more recent ambisonics technique (using two layers of speakers).

Plotting a soundscape using 3DAudioScape modelling software.

While most concerts rely on banks of boxes to blast audio from the stage to the audience, 3D soundscapes are crafted via ‘spherical’ (more often cylindrical) arrays of speakers placed below, above and around the heads of the audience.

Mixing is done on screen, in a graphic display which shows locations and sonic links among the speakers. Channels can be programmed individually or in groups – and entire shows can be rehearsed with existing equipment in a recording studio.

Not all Illustrious soundscapes are one-night wonders. The UK team has delivered repeating and permanent works to London’s Olympic Park, Wembley Stadium and Millennium Bridge, as well as West Street in Brighton and the world’s first permanent soundscape at a key intersection in Workington. Illustrious also produced the ‘world’s largest’ ‘Sound Oasis’, which cycled over 24 hours for 10 days at Palacio di Belles Artes, Mexico City, and was experienced by more than one million people.

All of the company’s projects – including current discussions with the architects for Google’s new London headquarters – are informed by Illustrious’ quasi-monumental mission statement: ‘Building Dreams in Space’.

Diasynchronosity: You have to be there

A black acoustic cube is the central element of Stylus: a new kinetic sculpture by TROPE (Goldsmiths) and soundscape artist Martyn Ware.

What goes on in the computing department of one of the world’s leading art research institutions?

We could expect strange scenarios evolving in video realms, and surreal music exhaling from artificial instruments. But not all digitally sophisticated researchers at the University of London’s Goldsmiths College of Art (my new research base) are disconnected from reality.

Goldsmiths’ TROPE team – Carol Macgillivray and Bruno Mathez, with Professor Frederic Fol Leymarie – aim to synchronize human perceptions of physical 3D structures with digital surround sounds. Their laboratory is a black cell in a labyrinth of plywood corridors beside the New Cross train station and A2 motorway – in an old warehouse off the college campus on the south side of the Thames. This is Ground Zero for TROPE’s DiaSynchronoscope project.

In their intimate yet infinite domain, Carol and Bruno play with the minds of unsuspecting intruders. Like magicians, they use simple props: a set of small white polystyrene cubes threaded along a curve of steel wire. These appear to jump under strobe lights linked to speakers, all auto-controlled from a Macbook.

For TROPE’s latest performances of ‘hybrid marriages’ between digital and analogue audio-visuals, Carol and Bruno are using a much larger foam cube as the central element of their kinetic sculpture, and have collaborated with experimental musician Martyn Ware, one of the world’s leading innovators of soundscapes in urban environments. Ware says he has ‘never seen anything quite like this before’ and suggests it is ‘a signpost to the future’.

Their production, Stylus, uses diamonds and ice as conceptual themes suggesting cutting edge precision: listen to the TROPE audio track (composed by Mathez) here. Presented first at the Music Tech festival in Ravensbourne 17-19 May 2013, Stylus is being performed again at Studio 3, Goldsmiths Department of Theatre and Performance, during afternoons and evenings 19-28 July. Ware and his team are lending equipment and expertise to convert TROPE’s audio track into a 3D soundscape in physical space.

Mathez explains the concept with more technical detail. ‘The Diasynchronoscope employs a simple technique to create animation out of inanimate objects. Each sculptural installation is composed of objects arranged in space so as to represent the unfolding of an animation over time. The objects are then lit selectively and sequentially, unveiling one object at a time, thereby creating the embodied equivalent to an animated cartoon. The observer is placed inside the scene, and perceives a continuity in the interaction of the object with the environment.

‘It creates unmediated apparent motion that does not involve a lens or a screen. The perceived experience is of real objects moving in an ecological environment’, he says.

Global Earth observations: the end of privacy?

Al Gore.

Recent reports on the PRISM project – where the world’s largest telecoms providers supply the US Government with free access to their customer messages and location records – confirm advice circulating some years ago that ‘there is no privacy … get over it’.

US President Barack Obama has tried to quell the controversy by reminding us of the importance of spying on enemies of American democracy and Britain is celebrating 2013 as the 50th anniversary of the James Bond film franchise. But apart from public safety against sinister attacks, there is another important purpose for governments to know a lot of real-time detail about what is happening in (and affecting) their territories.

Governments everywhere must improve their systems for planning and managing our environments – including humans and other kinds of living beings.

To maximise clarity on how the Earth’s systems behave, scientists are collaborating to bring together a hugely ambitious project called the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS). Supervised by a small team called the Group on Earth Observations (GEO) at the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) building in Geneva, the GEOSS project is just starting to expand from monitoring the planet’s critical natural systems – atmosphere and climate conditions, oceans, geological and geographic changes – to start developing a system of systems to monitor the behaviours and performances of nations and cities.

Virtual Nations and Data Cities are the subset projects of Al Gore’s 1992 proposal to develop a ‘Digital Earth’. These concepts are already engaging land information surveyors and built environment engineers learning to use new dynamic and online geospatial information and imaging tools. And the discoveries and new practices of those professionals inevitably will change the education and practices of future urban planners and architects, government policymakers, property developers and financiers, and politicians.

Environmental and digital media lawyers will prosper from developing legislation and cases to test and evolve a new ‘3D spatial law’ system that can handle information that is precisely tagged with x-y-z location co-ordinates, time, and relative positioning in any of an infinite number of dimensions (ways of understanding circumstances).

These implications will take decades to decipher, let alone untangle! And the next generations likely to make a serious impact are the kids under 10 who are learning about built environments now … via Minecraft on their mobiles.