For at least a decade the fashion world has been gathering cache from that most expensive, most outer layer of clothing, the bespoke work of named architecture. Prada's patronage of Rem Koolhaas and Herzog & de Meuron is virtually infamous. And where once the style mysters might have pictured girls draped over convertible cars, it is not cars but bikes they are now bringing into the fashion emporium and onto the catwalk. Many fashion houses actually have their own bike, accessorized as though they were ladies themselves with handbags and gloves—or do I mean panniers and stitched leather grips?
Now unless you would still wear stone wash denim (in which case you're a junkie) you cannot deny the catwalk's influence upon your own wardrobe. Fashion week runways really do tell us which clothes—and to some extent which acoutrements, like push bikes—can be worn to show others that we care about people's opinions, crave acceptance, and thus can be trusted to work the way social beings work. Like fashionable clothing, bicycles, since they have become so terribly fashionable, say: "I have savior faire, am responsible, and am worth that good wage that you will now pay me."
The bike was a natural heir to the car. Just like the car, the bike gets you to work—where you aught to be, say the powers that be. But where the car has become a symbol of waste, the bike stands for ecological concern. What else can symbolise ones concern for the planet—god love her—better than a bike, and be paraded from its owner's crotch, no less, for an hour or two every day! She, the bike, heralds one's green credentials more clearly than reusable shopping bags, hemp shirts, fair deal coffee, or even solar panels up on your roof.
With the facts laid out in that way, it also seems obvious that the bicycle would be on its way to becoming a paragon of beauty throughout the design world. Where Modernists like Le Corbusier said the car embodied everything one should strive for when designing buildings or furniture—efficiency, functionality, assembly-line bang for one's buck—an argument could be made I believe that late-modernist designers have turned to the bicycle as their principle yardstick for excellence. The above paintings by pioneer Modernist/Futurist artists Boccioni, Goncharova, Prampolini and Depero suggest the bicycle might well have remained the design world's leitmotif, had cars not stepped into that role. So let's consider ways architecture, fashion and furniture design might have become "bicyclish" in recent years.
Simple though it may seem, a bicycle frame is actually a mind bending three dimensional assembly of tubes. CNC routing, laser cutting, CAD and CAM (sheesk, so many acronyms!) mean this kind of complexity can now be conferred, without breaking the bank, onto whole buildings. Complex exoskeletons infilled with computer-cut glass can be, so are being, built. Does Melbourne's Fed Square not resemble a tracing of bike frames across the grey sky?
Bicycle design is characterised by fine materials, detailing and the relentless refinement of the tiniest parts. Whenever the design world returns from some foolhardy foray (pirate shirts, inflatable lounge chairs, whatever) it is to a position bicycle designers cannot help but occupy. We are talking a about design culture that is willing to experiment and prototype, but always with due reverence for archetypes. My suit and that table by Emu look pretty plain, but because they're so refined in their materials and detailing, they're both worth a monza. The same could be said of the most pricey bike frames.
Friday, May 7, 2010
What Pevsner Didn't Know About Bicycle Sheds
At the beginning of the twentieth-century the bicycle was as potent a symbol of speed as the car, and the subject of as many Cubist and Futurist art works. Yet by 1943, Pevsner could say bicycle sheds were not architecture, something he could not have said about buildings for cars, which by then had become symbols of what was being hailed as The Machine Age.
The past decade has seen a reversal in attitudes, with the prestige of cars being tainted by the size of their ecological footprints, and bicycles being catered for with award winning end-of-trip storage facilities. Referring to these and other examples, the paper argues bicycles are replacing cars as paragons that embody principles many architects are striving toward, such as irreducibility, frugality, and archetypal perfection. Strategies being used by architects to glorify cycling are illuminated here, by referring back to strategies previous generations used to glorify driving.
While the impact on architecture of the cultural ascention of cycling, calls for the machine age to be reconsidered, there is a sense in which nothing has changed. Architects’ interest in bicycles is consistent with their long standing preoccupation with time as a spatial dimension, something Sigfried Giedion first noticed.
Introduction
Architectural culture affirmed, and was inspired by, car culture throughout the twentieth-century. By showing that was the case in a variety of ways, like the way the functional requirements of buildings were expanded to accommodate cars, or buildings were made to be car-like, or people's heart-strings were pulled by architects who knew they loved cars so presented buildings in a way that evoked cars, this essay will set the ground for a consideration of an emerging new inspiration to architects: bicycles. Considering ways car love influenced architecture, makes it easier to see ways architects have started to lionize cycling.
A lot of research has been devoted to the impact urban design has had on car use and bike use. This essay takes an alternative tack, in that it only looks at individual buildings, not road and cycle path networks, or the issue of density. By drawing attention to the fact that architects designing individual buildings, could be as destructive as town planners and urban designers when it came to promoting car use, by for example creating an image of the good life where cars sat front and center, we can begin to see how architects today might be causing a shift, whetting people's appetite for a lifestyle that incorporates cycling.
Making Cars Part of the Architectural Program
There is no shortage of examples of well known buildings that glorified cars by making them a part of the architectural program. Giaccomo Matte-Trucco's Fiat Factory in Turin is a standout, having a banked oval test track where completed cars could race around on the roof. While Matte-Trucco was a naval engineer, his building owes something to the Italian Futurists' intoxication with the speed of cars, that they expressed in paintings, and manifestos. The factory also features a double helix spiral car ramp inside, for the movement of vehicles up, through and then out of the factory as they are assembled, tested, then sent out to be sold.
Albert Laprade and L. E. Bazin's Le Marbeauf Showroon in Paris (1929) did something similar, allowing buyers to drive their old car in one door, and their new Citroen out of the other. The centerpiece of Bazin's building was a 6 level display stack of cars surrounding an atrium, to dazzle passersby.
It is one thing to design the circulation of a car showroom or factory around the cumbersome turning circles of cars, but quite another to accommodate cars when designing the plan of the house, where traditionally the circulation needs agile human bodies were all that designers had to consider. Admittedly, Le Corbusier's The Villa Savoy does not accommodate car access to various levels in the manner of the examples above, but its plan nonetheless is distorted considerably for the sake of a car. The radius of a semi-circular wall at ground level, and the column grid running up through the house, are determined by the turning circle and width of a Voisin car that can be driven into the volume of the house-proper. When the car's steering is turned to full lock, it can hug that curved wall and turn through a full 180 degrees. Ostensibly the undercroft to this raised house, becomes one long porte-cochere. By bringing cars into the house, when they could as easily have stopped at the door, Le Corbusier created an image of modern living that speaks as loudly to driving, as it does human ambulation.
By the time of the post-war era of car fueled urban sprawl, hardly a house was featured in the architectural press where the roof covering the occupants was not extended or stylistically replicated to also cover their car. Pierre Koenig's Bailey House in car loving Los Angeles epitomizes the times, having an entrance itinerary that is purely vehicular. That is, the house is not designed to receive pedestrians, so much as it is designed to receive drivers. The carport is presented more like an edicule, flanked by a water feature, giving the car unquestioned pride of place.
The prevalence of this type of thinking in the post war era, effectively stigmatized any mode of coming or going to and from houses, other than via a car. Participation in the good life, as the good life was presented in the architectural press, demanded that one own a car and be licensed to drive it. Little wonder driving proved so symbolic to second-wave Feminists. Unless they could drive, women were excluded from the life to which the middle classes agreed all should aspire. Later we'll see how calls to bring bicycles into architectural programs, is legitimizing this more ecologically palatable mode of commuting, not to the point where driving is in turn stigmatized the way walking and cycling once were, but in a way that represents a profound move away from the thinking of post-war architects like Koenig, and Le Corbusier before him.
Others have written about ways urban design—specifically urban consolidation and the incorporation of cycling infrastructure—are being used to promote bicycle use. However, this particular inquiry is focused on a shift toward bike love, from car love, among designers of individual projects. Le Corbusier's Voisin plan for Paris, named in honor of the car maker Gabriel Voison, is only of passing interest therefore, while buildings that were designed to look like, or in deeper ways be like cars, can tell us something about ways bicycle design itself might now be inspiring some architects.
Car-Like Tectonics
The top of architect William Van Alen's Chrysler Building in New York (1930), looks like a car, having the same kind of pressed metal panels, giving it a streamlined and heroic appearance. Despite this, the building is out of step with most car-like architecture of the twentieth-century, insofar as those panels were each specially fabricated. Attitudes of most architects of the Machine Age were tied up with the promise of mass production, to provide quality mass produced buildings to all, in the manner of the Model-T Ford.
Emblematic of that thinking is Le Corbusier's Maison "Citrohan", which demonstrated an idea Le Corbusier had written about in Vers Une Architecture, that if the same approach to mass production were applied to building as was being applied to the making of cars, then it too could be liberating. The name "Citrohan" was a play on the Citroën car, France's answer to the Model-T Ford. Like the car, the house would not be an exquisite one-off. Quality and value would be achieved by offering clients less choice, especially where such fixtures as balustrades, window frames, and stair rungs would be concerned. Such items were all to be mass produced, making them cheaper, yet still very well made.
The fact that the analogy between car and house seems somewhat stretched, informing the making of fixtures, not the whole house, tells us Le Corbusier was probably as concerned with finding the right rhetoric with which to present his work to a car smitten populace, as he was concerned with literally assembling houses the way cars are assembled. All the talk about cars among architects of this century gone, was pitched at people's hearts. After all architects are usually very adept when it comes to zeroing in upon their clients' aspirations.
Car Loving Rhetoric and Deeper Ambitions
Nude Descending Bicycle Race, 1912, Lyonel Feininger Still Life, 1920, Le Corbusier,
a Staircase, No. 2,
Marcel Duchamp
Le Corbusier's catch cry about houses being ideal machines for living in, the way cars are ideal driving machines, reminds us that cars were a paragon in architects' aesthetic imaginations at least since the time of the poet Marinetti's Futurist manifesto. Marinetti heralded a new age of fascination with speed, time and flux, evidenced by numerous artistic movements throughout Europe in the early twentieth-century.
Looking to turn-of-the century movements in art, can help us see beyond Modern architects' car love, to a deeper concern. The architectural commentator Sigfried Giedion noted that cubist painters—Le Corbusier among them—sought to represent time as the fourth dimension, along the lines of ideas circulating in the wake of Einstein's discoveries. Cubists did this by painting objects from multiple view points, that the viewer could not have occupied at the one time. In this way The Cubists could capture in the plane of one painting, the time taken to progress from view point to view point. The Futurists meanwhile were looking for their own ways of capturing the idea of time in an image. To paint objects that embodied time and motion—like nudes descending staircases, moving cars, and moving bicycles—was to become an habitual quest for the Futurists.
Why, if their deeper concern was a new cosmology in which time was an actual dimension—like forward and backward, up and down, and side to side—did Architects of Giedion's "new tradition", run so enthusiastically with just one of the moving subjects of their artist contemporaries' paintings and photos, namely, the car? As many images had explored the dynamics of fast moving runners, horses, and cyclists, as had captured cars motion. Why go to lengths Le Corbusier went to with his Villa Savoye to accommodate moving cars, and not not similarly distort houses to accommodate running, horse riding or cycling? It is not as though cars had made these modes of transportation invisible. Until the later half of the twentieth-century bicycles, for instance, remained a more common means of commuting than cars, horses were ubiquitous, and running was being glorified through The Modern Olympics.
It seems reasonable to speculate, that architects were more smitten by cars, because cars were more powerful. Only now is consideration being given to where cars' power actually came from, non-renewable sources, and where some of it goes when it is spent: the atmosphere as greenhouse gasses. The power that attracted society to cars, is the power society has become reluctant to squander.
A Contemporary Paragon
Now that the prestige of driving is tainted by the environmental damage entailed, and cycling has become an expression of so many people's concern for the environment and their health and wellbeing, bicycles would seem to provide a more fitting paragon for architects, than cars. Instead of saying the house is a machine for living in, in the resource hungry way that cars are machines from getting around in, we could well imagine ecologically concerned architects viewing the house as a tool for the optimization of frugal living, in the way the bicycle optimally coverts stored calories into propulsion. It would be less fitting today to think of houses as "machines", dragging in non-renewable energy for heating or cooling, than to think of the house as a piece of equipment of sorts, making as frugal a use of limited resources as bicycles do with their riders' limited wattage. Like cycling equipment, we can imagine bike-like houses being highly refined. We can imagine them being stripped back to essentials, as bicycles are. They might all be quite similar, or "archetypal", the way bikes tend to be with their subtle variations on the diamond shaped frame.
Cars and buildings of the Machine Age, could afford to be more energy hungry than bicycles, or buildings whose architects look to bicycles as yardsticks of excellence. By extension, the Machine Age could tolerate more superfluity than The Bicycle Age might tolerate when it comes building design. In the Machine Age, a little superfluity could be powered along with cheap fossil fuel energy. In the Bicycle Age, every gust of wind works with or against what little energy users can deliver from their own legs.
The argument taking shape here, that bicycles are the natural successor to cars as yardsticks of excellence in the architectural imagination, would fall down entirely if there was no evidence of a shift taking place. Perhaps architects no longer need paragons, or maybe other philosophical agendas have become much more important. We'll see with the remainder of this essay that signs of a shift, admittedly, are slight. However, in the 1930s when the car was just taking hold, signs that such a thing was taking place would not have been obvious either, given hardly a car-inspired building had been built at that time. The examples presented below have been selected because something about their underlying thinking can be related back to examples of car-loving architecture given above. That is so attention may be drawn to the way an image promoted through the design of one building, can shape peoples' desire for one mode of transport over another. We'll see that similar architectural strategies to those that helped popularize driving, are being used to glorify cycling as a the new, ideal way to commute.
Making Bicycles Part of the Architectural Program
Perturbed by the cost of building more roads and/or train lines, planners worldwide are looking at making their cities more conducive to cycling, like Amsterdam, where 28% of journeys are taken by bike, as opposed to figures in the order of 1-2% in cities dominated by individual car use. Lower densities though, mean longer, sweatier commutes, on faster and thus more expensive bicycles. End of journey secure bike parking stations, often with public showers and changing room areas, are being seen as one answer.
bike parking station
Bike stations are a new building type where the cultural ascension of cycling is being manifest architecturally, the way peoples' fascination with the automobile was manifest with buildings like the Fiat Factory in Turin, or the Le Marbeauf Showroon in Paris. Unlikely though it may seem, one city spearheading their building, is Chicago, where one could hardly imagine car culture yielding to bike culture. Yet it is in Chicago where architects Muller & Muller were recently commissioned to design a parking station in Millennium Park for 300 bikes, plus showers and lockers and a bicycle parts shop where repairs can be done. The project had a fabulous budget of USD$3,000,000, or $10,000 per bike! Whichever way those figures are viewed, the symbolic aspects of this building cannot be denied. It was commissioned not only to accommodate cycling, but to glorify cycling as a publicly sanctioned, indeed noble, means of commuting.
Chicago's other facility of this kind belongs to a nation-wide franchise, Bikestation. Having a duty to the prominent location beside Union Station, and a duty too to cycling as a cause, architects KPG Design Studio have responded with a kind of cathedral, having a form that recalls Coop Himmelblau's Rooftop Office in Vienna, realized in etched tempered glass, polished concrete, steel cabling and other cues that this is to be read as a work of contemporary architecture, as culturally invested and formidable as any museum. According the to designer, Donald Paine, an oblique reference to the arc of a bicycle wheel is supposedly made by the arc of the roof.
When Nikolaus Pevsner said, "A bicycle shed is a building; Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture,” (An Outline of European Architecture, 1943), he might have called car sheds mere buildings, had so many buildings for cars not been raised to the status of architecture by the time of his writing. Today Pevsner would be forced to find some other example of "building", other than bike sheds, which have clearly attained the status of an architectural type, having aesthetic and symbolic intent. One indication of the cultural impact upon Chicago of buildings like these, is that since their construction the new bike market there has expanded to embrace high end European city bike brands not available elsewhere in the US, like Abici and Velorbis. Given the role architecture has played in promoting Chicago's bike culture, it is most likely not a coincidence that these prestigious brands, as well as Danish cargo bikes and other signs of a vibrant bike culture, are sold in Chicago by an architectural firm, Norsman Architects, with a bike store as a sideline.
In Britain, interest in the new type peaked in 2006, with an international design competition, “Reinventing the Bike Shed”, ran by New London Architecture. Towers hoisting bikes out of thieves' reach were popular solutions. The bike shed has since emerged as a type in England, one celebrated example being Sarah Wigglesworth's Bermondsey Bike Store, shortlisted for the AJ Ramboll Whitbybird Small Projects Award 2009 for its architectural merit. Cities with already high rates of bicycle use, not surprisingly, have the best facilities of all. Groningen in Holland has a sculptural concrete station for 4000 bikes, while in the Dutch town of Apeldoorn there is an elevated station for 600 bikes sheathed in translucent glass.
Bike-Like Tectonics
Insofar as bicycles are generators of programs now, for works of high architecture, it can be said a relationship exists between cycling and architecture, akin to that which architects have traditionally fostered with cars. But while the aforementioned bike-sheds are sophisticated, and thus architectural, there is no explicit sense in which they celebrate the elegance of bicycle making the way, for example, Le Corbusier claimed his Maison "Citrohan" would celebrate the way cars are manufactured on assembly-lines.
When Moots, manufacturers of high performance titanium frames, commissioned Johannson Architects to design new headquarters and display rooms, they got a building their architects describe as analogous to the Moots bikes. Exposed steel tubular trusses are the most obvious cue, followed by materials used in bikes Moots make, like teflon coatings for window canopies, and door hardware made from titanium. Their bikes' decals meanwhile are the pattern for the building's bold signage. Granted, this is a building the architectural world will ignore. What it reflects though is an appropriation of imagery from a design field with greener connotations than car design, paralleling something the Pittwater School of Australian architects have been doing with buildings informed by sailboat design for about 20 years now.
After cars, Modernism's next great fascination was with ocean liners: huge, fossil fuel driven machines, inspiring buildings criticized in recent decades as being dislocated from the urban fabric of the cities in which they've been built. If the car's modest counterpart is the bicycle, then the green answer to the ocean liner would be a yacht. Thus we find Richard Leplastrier speaking of a timber boat he's designed as though it were part of his architectural portfolio, and Peter Stutchbury adapting hardware manufactured for yachting for use in his buildings. The cross over is so thorough, that sailing hardware suppliers Ronstan, now also have a whole range of architectural products.
Bike Dispenser Bigloo Biceberg Video on Japan bike parking machines
The architectural bike sheds mentioned above, are among the larger examples of this emerging new type, and tend not to be bike-like in the way they're produced. Where tectonic synergies between architecture and bicycle design are being witnessed, is in the design of smaller, mass-produced bike sheds. The Bike Dispenser, for example, is a long bike shed that automatically dispenses rental bikes via a bike shaped opening. These bike sheds of sorts, have a mass produced, industrial design aesthetic, much like the bikes they dispense. The bigloo stores users' bikes on a carousel and returns it to them when they identify themselves using a smart card and key pad. This bike shed too has mass produced high gloss components achieved via the logic of industrial design. The sheds are dominated by bold lettering, not unlike decals on a bicycle down tube. The same company build the biceberg, a chic version of much larger bike silos beneath Kasai Station in Tokyo. Again, large letters like bike decals, and a mode of construction owing more to industrial design thinking than the creation of one-off buildings, creates what is arguably a bike-like aesthetic.
Another, more abstract way to ask if a building is bike-like, is to ask if it adheres to similar design principles to those guiding designers of bikes. One preoccupation of many designer of bikes, is weight, and how to shed it without sacrificing power transfer or durability. First by butting tubes, then by developing alloys, and now by using nano carbon fiber construction, each year designers have shaved more grams from the diamond shaped frame. The obsession is a result of the pitifully low energy inputs coming from even the strongest of riders, if compared to the power motors can generate. The nearest corollary in architectural thinking, is structural rationalism, an idea generally credited to Viollet-le-Duc, which states that structures attain beauty and elegance as they approach a point where no material could be taken away and not cause the structure to fail. Many buildings are informed by the principle, which Le Corbusier viewed in relation to aeronautical engineering, but which could be viewed in relation to bicycle design if the building in question were a velodrome.
Ryder sjph Architects boast that their dome for the Sydney Olympic Velodrome weighs only 40kg per square meter, despite its very large 150x100m span. The roof provides a spectacle of minimum mass engineering like the one taking place on the track. Just as wind tunnel and fluid dynamic computer modeling go into making bikes and their riders aerodynamic, engineers Ove Arup devised a buoyancy driven heat stack to generate airflow past seating areas. With the building, as for the bikes it contains, a big investment of brain power during design, means a more efficient use of power during operation. The building's beauty resides in its frugal use of material and energy, qualities valued by designers and buyers of bikes.
The most conspicuous way that buildings are becoming like bikes, is entirely coincidental. Simple though they may seem, the angles at which tubes are welded or braised to each other in bike frames, vary considerably and are in fact very complex. A bottom bracket, for instance, has lugs for a down tube, seat tube, and two chain-stay tubes, of different diameters and precise angles in three spatial planes. The joints are not unlike those architects are pursuing with complex exoskeletal steel structures, such as those designed by LAB at Federation Square, Melbourne. For architects, joining lengths of steel at complex and varying angles is being achieved via computer aided manufacturing, where frame builders have been joining tubes this way for decades, thanks to companies who supply them with an enormous range or lugged brackets, capable of receiving tubes of all sizes from every possible angle. To a frame builder, Federation Square might resemble a tracing of bike frames over the sky.
Fashion
When historians look back at design trends of a decade, they rarely avoid the locus of fashion. The decade just past, is the one that saw fashion houses all having their own brand of bike (Binachi bikes at Armani, for instance), displayed in shopfronts carrying the cache, in many cases, of big name architects, Rem Koolhaas ideally. In that sense the 2000s were when bikes and named buildings were contrived as the new black, through a series of cross marketing deals. Meanwhile, frugality, or "sustainability" as it is branded, attained the status of an architectural orthodoxy, subscribed to by architects generally. These alliances are consistent, of course, with a cultural turn toward anything healthy, natural and green, and away from anything which might smack of a big carbon footprint, like driving.
While there is no direct, cycling and architecture are linked by their association with fashion.
Conclusion
From a broad art history perspective, the emergence of bicycles as a prospective yardstick and motif, can be seen as a fresh start to a trajectory set in motion by the Futurists and early Modernists. If we understand architects' broader mission as one of embracing time as a spatial dimension, rather than designing car-like buildings befitting an age of energy hungry machines, we might notice how artists of their time not only painted pictures of automobiles, freeways and aircraft. They were concerned with anything moving, or having some inherent attachment to the notion of time. Bicycles were a common motif. Understanding that radical changes associated with Modernism were afoot before cheap oil and cars steered in architects in that particular direction, and thus understanding that bicycles could well have been emblems for progress, opens the way for considering bicycles as a new, frugal, green kind of alternative paragon for design principles architects are now more concerned with.
The past decade has seen a reversal in attitudes, with the prestige of cars being tainted by the size of their ecological footprints, and bicycles being catered for with award winning end-of-trip storage facilities. Referring to these and other examples, the paper argues bicycles are replacing cars as paragons that embody principles many architects are striving toward, such as irreducibility, frugality, and archetypal perfection. Strategies being used by architects to glorify cycling are illuminated here, by referring back to strategies previous generations used to glorify driving.
While the impact on architecture of the cultural ascention of cycling, calls for the machine age to be reconsidered, there is a sense in which nothing has changed. Architects’ interest in bicycles is consistent with their long standing preoccupation with time as a spatial dimension, something Sigfried Giedion first noticed.
Introduction
Architectural culture affirmed, and was inspired by, car culture throughout the twentieth-century. By showing that was the case in a variety of ways, like the way the functional requirements of buildings were expanded to accommodate cars, or buildings were made to be car-like, or people's heart-strings were pulled by architects who knew they loved cars so presented buildings in a way that evoked cars, this essay will set the ground for a consideration of an emerging new inspiration to architects: bicycles. Considering ways car love influenced architecture, makes it easier to see ways architects have started to lionize cycling.
A lot of research has been devoted to the impact urban design has had on car use and bike use. This essay takes an alternative tack, in that it only looks at individual buildings, not road and cycle path networks, or the issue of density. By drawing attention to the fact that architects designing individual buildings, could be as destructive as town planners and urban designers when it came to promoting car use, by for example creating an image of the good life where cars sat front and center, we can begin to see how architects today might be causing a shift, whetting people's appetite for a lifestyle that incorporates cycling.
Making Cars Part of the Architectural Program
There is no shortage of examples of well known buildings that glorified cars by making them a part of the architectural program. Giaccomo Matte-Trucco's Fiat Factory in Turin is a standout, having a banked oval test track where completed cars could race around on the roof. While Matte-Trucco was a naval engineer, his building owes something to the Italian Futurists' intoxication with the speed of cars, that they expressed in paintings, and manifestos. The factory also features a double helix spiral car ramp inside, for the movement of vehicles up, through and then out of the factory as they are assembled, tested, then sent out to be sold.
Albert Laprade and L. E. Bazin's Le Marbeauf Showroon in Paris (1929) did something similar, allowing buyers to drive their old car in one door, and their new Citroen out of the other. The centerpiece of Bazin's building was a 6 level display stack of cars surrounding an atrium, to dazzle passersby.
It is one thing to design the circulation of a car showroom or factory around the cumbersome turning circles of cars, but quite another to accommodate cars when designing the plan of the house, where traditionally the circulation needs agile human bodies were all that designers had to consider. Admittedly, Le Corbusier's The Villa Savoy does not accommodate car access to various levels in the manner of the examples above, but its plan nonetheless is distorted considerably for the sake of a car. The radius of a semi-circular wall at ground level, and the column grid running up through the house, are determined by the turning circle and width of a Voisin car that can be driven into the volume of the house-proper. When the car's steering is turned to full lock, it can hug that curved wall and turn through a full 180 degrees. Ostensibly the undercroft to this raised house, becomes one long porte-cochere. By bringing cars into the house, when they could as easily have stopped at the door, Le Corbusier created an image of modern living that speaks as loudly to driving, as it does human ambulation.
By the time of the post-war era of car fueled urban sprawl, hardly a house was featured in the architectural press where the roof covering the occupants was not extended or stylistically replicated to also cover their car. Pierre Koenig's Bailey House in car loving Los Angeles epitomizes the times, having an entrance itinerary that is purely vehicular. That is, the house is not designed to receive pedestrians, so much as it is designed to receive drivers. The carport is presented more like an edicule, flanked by a water feature, giving the car unquestioned pride of place.
The prevalence of this type of thinking in the post war era, effectively stigmatized any mode of coming or going to and from houses, other than via a car. Participation in the good life, as the good life was presented in the architectural press, demanded that one own a car and be licensed to drive it. Little wonder driving proved so symbolic to second-wave Feminists. Unless they could drive, women were excluded from the life to which the middle classes agreed all should aspire. Later we'll see how calls to bring bicycles into architectural programs, is legitimizing this more ecologically palatable mode of commuting, not to the point where driving is in turn stigmatized the way walking and cycling once were, but in a way that represents a profound move away from the thinking of post-war architects like Koenig, and Le Corbusier before him.
Others have written about ways urban design—specifically urban consolidation and the incorporation of cycling infrastructure—are being used to promote bicycle use. However, this particular inquiry is focused on a shift toward bike love, from car love, among designers of individual projects. Le Corbusier's Voisin plan for Paris, named in honor of the car maker Gabriel Voison, is only of passing interest therefore, while buildings that were designed to look like, or in deeper ways be like cars, can tell us something about ways bicycle design itself might now be inspiring some architects.
Car-Like Tectonics
The top of architect William Van Alen's Chrysler Building in New York (1930), looks like a car, having the same kind of pressed metal panels, giving it a streamlined and heroic appearance. Despite this, the building is out of step with most car-like architecture of the twentieth-century, insofar as those panels were each specially fabricated. Attitudes of most architects of the Machine Age were tied up with the promise of mass production, to provide quality mass produced buildings to all, in the manner of the Model-T Ford.
Emblematic of that thinking is Le Corbusier's Maison "Citrohan", which demonstrated an idea Le Corbusier had written about in Vers Une Architecture, that if the same approach to mass production were applied to building as was being applied to the making of cars, then it too could be liberating. The name "Citrohan" was a play on the Citroën car, France's answer to the Model-T Ford. Like the car, the house would not be an exquisite one-off. Quality and value would be achieved by offering clients less choice, especially where such fixtures as balustrades, window frames, and stair rungs would be concerned. Such items were all to be mass produced, making them cheaper, yet still very well made.
The fact that the analogy between car and house seems somewhat stretched, informing the making of fixtures, not the whole house, tells us Le Corbusier was probably as concerned with finding the right rhetoric with which to present his work to a car smitten populace, as he was concerned with literally assembling houses the way cars are assembled. All the talk about cars among architects of this century gone, was pitched at people's hearts. After all architects are usually very adept when it comes to zeroing in upon their clients' aspirations.
Car Loving Rhetoric and Deeper Ambitions
Nude Descending Bicycle Race, 1912, Lyonel Feininger Still Life, 1920, Le Corbusier,
a Staircase, No. 2,
Marcel Duchamp
Le Corbusier's catch cry about houses being ideal machines for living in, the way cars are ideal driving machines, reminds us that cars were a paragon in architects' aesthetic imaginations at least since the time of the poet Marinetti's Futurist manifesto. Marinetti heralded a new age of fascination with speed, time and flux, evidenced by numerous artistic movements throughout Europe in the early twentieth-century.
Looking to turn-of-the century movements in art, can help us see beyond Modern architects' car love, to a deeper concern. The architectural commentator Sigfried Giedion noted that cubist painters—Le Corbusier among them—sought to represent time as the fourth dimension, along the lines of ideas circulating in the wake of Einstein's discoveries. Cubists did this by painting objects from multiple view points, that the viewer could not have occupied at the one time. In this way The Cubists could capture in the plane of one painting, the time taken to progress from view point to view point. The Futurists meanwhile were looking for their own ways of capturing the idea of time in an image. To paint objects that embodied time and motion—like nudes descending staircases, moving cars, and moving bicycles—was to become an habitual quest for the Futurists.
Why, if their deeper concern was a new cosmology in which time was an actual dimension—like forward and backward, up and down, and side to side—did Architects of Giedion's "new tradition", run so enthusiastically with just one of the moving subjects of their artist contemporaries' paintings and photos, namely, the car? As many images had explored the dynamics of fast moving runners, horses, and cyclists, as had captured cars motion. Why go to lengths Le Corbusier went to with his Villa Savoye to accommodate moving cars, and not not similarly distort houses to accommodate running, horse riding or cycling? It is not as though cars had made these modes of transportation invisible. Until the later half of the twentieth-century bicycles, for instance, remained a more common means of commuting than cars, horses were ubiquitous, and running was being glorified through The Modern Olympics.
It seems reasonable to speculate, that architects were more smitten by cars, because cars were more powerful. Only now is consideration being given to where cars' power actually came from, non-renewable sources, and where some of it goes when it is spent: the atmosphere as greenhouse gasses. The power that attracted society to cars, is the power society has become reluctant to squander.
A Contemporary Paragon
Now that the prestige of driving is tainted by the environmental damage entailed, and cycling has become an expression of so many people's concern for the environment and their health and wellbeing, bicycles would seem to provide a more fitting paragon for architects, than cars. Instead of saying the house is a machine for living in, in the resource hungry way that cars are machines from getting around in, we could well imagine ecologically concerned architects viewing the house as a tool for the optimization of frugal living, in the way the bicycle optimally coverts stored calories into propulsion. It would be less fitting today to think of houses as "machines", dragging in non-renewable energy for heating or cooling, than to think of the house as a piece of equipment of sorts, making as frugal a use of limited resources as bicycles do with their riders' limited wattage. Like cycling equipment, we can imagine bike-like houses being highly refined. We can imagine them being stripped back to essentials, as bicycles are. They might all be quite similar, or "archetypal", the way bikes tend to be with their subtle variations on the diamond shaped frame.
Cars and buildings of the Machine Age, could afford to be more energy hungry than bicycles, or buildings whose architects look to bicycles as yardsticks of excellence. By extension, the Machine Age could tolerate more superfluity than The Bicycle Age might tolerate when it comes building design. In the Machine Age, a little superfluity could be powered along with cheap fossil fuel energy. In the Bicycle Age, every gust of wind works with or against what little energy users can deliver from their own legs.
The argument taking shape here, that bicycles are the natural successor to cars as yardsticks of excellence in the architectural imagination, would fall down entirely if there was no evidence of a shift taking place. Perhaps architects no longer need paragons, or maybe other philosophical agendas have become much more important. We'll see with the remainder of this essay that signs of a shift, admittedly, are slight. However, in the 1930s when the car was just taking hold, signs that such a thing was taking place would not have been obvious either, given hardly a car-inspired building had been built at that time. The examples presented below have been selected because something about their underlying thinking can be related back to examples of car-loving architecture given above. That is so attention may be drawn to the way an image promoted through the design of one building, can shape peoples' desire for one mode of transport over another. We'll see that similar architectural strategies to those that helped popularize driving, are being used to glorify cycling as a the new, ideal way to commute.
Making Bicycles Part of the Architectural Program
Perturbed by the cost of building more roads and/or train lines, planners worldwide are looking at making their cities more conducive to cycling, like Amsterdam, where 28% of journeys are taken by bike, as opposed to figures in the order of 1-2% in cities dominated by individual car use. Lower densities though, mean longer, sweatier commutes, on faster and thus more expensive bicycles. End of journey secure bike parking stations, often with public showers and changing room areas, are being seen as one answer.
bike parking station
Bike stations are a new building type where the cultural ascension of cycling is being manifest architecturally, the way peoples' fascination with the automobile was manifest with buildings like the Fiat Factory in Turin, or the Le Marbeauf Showroon in Paris. Unlikely though it may seem, one city spearheading their building, is Chicago, where one could hardly imagine car culture yielding to bike culture. Yet it is in Chicago where architects Muller & Muller were recently commissioned to design a parking station in Millennium Park for 300 bikes, plus showers and lockers and a bicycle parts shop where repairs can be done. The project had a fabulous budget of USD$3,000,000, or $10,000 per bike! Whichever way those figures are viewed, the symbolic aspects of this building cannot be denied. It was commissioned not only to accommodate cycling, but to glorify cycling as a publicly sanctioned, indeed noble, means of commuting.
Chicago's other facility of this kind belongs to a nation-wide franchise, Bikestation. Having a duty to the prominent location beside Union Station, and a duty too to cycling as a cause, architects KPG Design Studio have responded with a kind of cathedral, having a form that recalls Coop Himmelblau's Rooftop Office in Vienna, realized in etched tempered glass, polished concrete, steel cabling and other cues that this is to be read as a work of contemporary architecture, as culturally invested and formidable as any museum. According the to designer, Donald Paine, an oblique reference to the arc of a bicycle wheel is supposedly made by the arc of the roof.
When Nikolaus Pevsner said, "A bicycle shed is a building; Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture,” (An Outline of European Architecture, 1943), he might have called car sheds mere buildings, had so many buildings for cars not been raised to the status of architecture by the time of his writing. Today Pevsner would be forced to find some other example of "building", other than bike sheds, which have clearly attained the status of an architectural type, having aesthetic and symbolic intent. One indication of the cultural impact upon Chicago of buildings like these, is that since their construction the new bike market there has expanded to embrace high end European city bike brands not available elsewhere in the US, like Abici and Velorbis. Given the role architecture has played in promoting Chicago's bike culture, it is most likely not a coincidence that these prestigious brands, as well as Danish cargo bikes and other signs of a vibrant bike culture, are sold in Chicago by an architectural firm, Norsman Architects, with a bike store as a sideline.
In Britain, interest in the new type peaked in 2006, with an international design competition, “Reinventing the Bike Shed”, ran by New London Architecture. Towers hoisting bikes out of thieves' reach were popular solutions. The bike shed has since emerged as a type in England, one celebrated example being Sarah Wigglesworth's Bermondsey Bike Store, shortlisted for the AJ Ramboll Whitbybird Small Projects Award 2009 for its architectural merit. Cities with already high rates of bicycle use, not surprisingly, have the best facilities of all. Groningen in Holland has a sculptural concrete station for 4000 bikes, while in the Dutch town of Apeldoorn there is an elevated station for 600 bikes sheathed in translucent glass.
Bike-Like Tectonics
Insofar as bicycles are generators of programs now, for works of high architecture, it can be said a relationship exists between cycling and architecture, akin to that which architects have traditionally fostered with cars. But while the aforementioned bike-sheds are sophisticated, and thus architectural, there is no explicit sense in which they celebrate the elegance of bicycle making the way, for example, Le Corbusier claimed his Maison "Citrohan" would celebrate the way cars are manufactured on assembly-lines.
When Moots, manufacturers of high performance titanium frames, commissioned Johannson Architects to design new headquarters and display rooms, they got a building their architects describe as analogous to the Moots bikes. Exposed steel tubular trusses are the most obvious cue, followed by materials used in bikes Moots make, like teflon coatings for window canopies, and door hardware made from titanium. Their bikes' decals meanwhile are the pattern for the building's bold signage. Granted, this is a building the architectural world will ignore. What it reflects though is an appropriation of imagery from a design field with greener connotations than car design, paralleling something the Pittwater School of Australian architects have been doing with buildings informed by sailboat design for about 20 years now.
After cars, Modernism's next great fascination was with ocean liners: huge, fossil fuel driven machines, inspiring buildings criticized in recent decades as being dislocated from the urban fabric of the cities in which they've been built. If the car's modest counterpart is the bicycle, then the green answer to the ocean liner would be a yacht. Thus we find Richard Leplastrier speaking of a timber boat he's designed as though it were part of his architectural portfolio, and Peter Stutchbury adapting hardware manufactured for yachting for use in his buildings. The cross over is so thorough, that sailing hardware suppliers Ronstan, now also have a whole range of architectural products.
Bike Dispenser Bigloo Biceberg Video on Japan bike parking machines
The architectural bike sheds mentioned above, are among the larger examples of this emerging new type, and tend not to be bike-like in the way they're produced. Where tectonic synergies between architecture and bicycle design are being witnessed, is in the design of smaller, mass-produced bike sheds. The Bike Dispenser, for example, is a long bike shed that automatically dispenses rental bikes via a bike shaped opening. These bike sheds of sorts, have a mass produced, industrial design aesthetic, much like the bikes they dispense. The bigloo stores users' bikes on a carousel and returns it to them when they identify themselves using a smart card and key pad. This bike shed too has mass produced high gloss components achieved via the logic of industrial design. The sheds are dominated by bold lettering, not unlike decals on a bicycle down tube. The same company build the biceberg, a chic version of much larger bike silos beneath Kasai Station in Tokyo. Again, large letters like bike decals, and a mode of construction owing more to industrial design thinking than the creation of one-off buildings, creates what is arguably a bike-like aesthetic.
Another, more abstract way to ask if a building is bike-like, is to ask if it adheres to similar design principles to those guiding designers of bikes. One preoccupation of many designer of bikes, is weight, and how to shed it without sacrificing power transfer or durability. First by butting tubes, then by developing alloys, and now by using nano carbon fiber construction, each year designers have shaved more grams from the diamond shaped frame. The obsession is a result of the pitifully low energy inputs coming from even the strongest of riders, if compared to the power motors can generate. The nearest corollary in architectural thinking, is structural rationalism, an idea generally credited to Viollet-le-Duc, which states that structures attain beauty and elegance as they approach a point where no material could be taken away and not cause the structure to fail. Many buildings are informed by the principle, which Le Corbusier viewed in relation to aeronautical engineering, but which could be viewed in relation to bicycle design if the building in question were a velodrome.
Ryder sjph Architects boast that their dome for the Sydney Olympic Velodrome weighs only 40kg per square meter, despite its very large 150x100m span. The roof provides a spectacle of minimum mass engineering like the one taking place on the track. Just as wind tunnel and fluid dynamic computer modeling go into making bikes and their riders aerodynamic, engineers Ove Arup devised a buoyancy driven heat stack to generate airflow past seating areas. With the building, as for the bikes it contains, a big investment of brain power during design, means a more efficient use of power during operation. The building's beauty resides in its frugal use of material and energy, qualities valued by designers and buyers of bikes.
The most conspicuous way that buildings are becoming like bikes, is entirely coincidental. Simple though they may seem, the angles at which tubes are welded or braised to each other in bike frames, vary considerably and are in fact very complex. A bottom bracket, for instance, has lugs for a down tube, seat tube, and two chain-stay tubes, of different diameters and precise angles in three spatial planes. The joints are not unlike those architects are pursuing with complex exoskeletal steel structures, such as those designed by LAB at Federation Square, Melbourne. For architects, joining lengths of steel at complex and varying angles is being achieved via computer aided manufacturing, where frame builders have been joining tubes this way for decades, thanks to companies who supply them with an enormous range or lugged brackets, capable of receiving tubes of all sizes from every possible angle. To a frame builder, Federation Square might resemble a tracing of bike frames over the sky.
Fashion
When historians look back at design trends of a decade, they rarely avoid the locus of fashion. The decade just past, is the one that saw fashion houses all having their own brand of bike (Binachi bikes at Armani, for instance), displayed in shopfronts carrying the cache, in many cases, of big name architects, Rem Koolhaas ideally. In that sense the 2000s were when bikes and named buildings were contrived as the new black, through a series of cross marketing deals. Meanwhile, frugality, or "sustainability" as it is branded, attained the status of an architectural orthodoxy, subscribed to by architects generally. These alliances are consistent, of course, with a cultural turn toward anything healthy, natural and green, and away from anything which might smack of a big carbon footprint, like driving.
While there is no direct, cycling and architecture are linked by their association with fashion.
Conclusion
From a broad art history perspective, the emergence of bicycles as a prospective yardstick and motif, can be seen as a fresh start to a trajectory set in motion by the Futurists and early Modernists. If we understand architects' broader mission as one of embracing time as a spatial dimension, rather than designing car-like buildings befitting an age of energy hungry machines, we might notice how artists of their time not only painted pictures of automobiles, freeways and aircraft. They were concerned with anything moving, or having some inherent attachment to the notion of time. Bicycles were a common motif. Understanding that radical changes associated with Modernism were afoot before cheap oil and cars steered in architects in that particular direction, and thus understanding that bicycles could well have been emblems for progress, opens the way for considering bicycles as a new, frugal, green kind of alternative paragon for design principles architects are now more concerned with.
The subcultures behind the cultural ascension of cycling
From studies into the physical factors effecting bicycle commuting, we know cities with comparable terrain, density, bicycling infrastructure and deterrents to driving, can have varying numbers of cyclists. Given cultural factors must be at play, what social advantage belongs to that tiny fraction of commuters, who by choice cycle when they could easily drive?
The topic cannot be approached from the hegemonic standpoints of environmentalists, health policy makers, traffic engineers or others with agendas extrinsic to those of actual cyclists, as cyclists can’t be presumed to care for the planet, morbid illness, or the fact they are abating congestion for drivers. Neither can the topic be understood by studying cycling culture in atypical cities like Amsterdam, where retrofitting for driving proved difficult, and cycling thus flourished. Likewise, reasons why the poor cycle don’t count here, as increasing their numbers is not something governments are planning to do!
From the premise that cyclists seek what Bourdieu terms "Cultural Capital", the paper examines the connection between cyclists' motivations and messages conveyed through their choice of equipment. As a prosthesis, fashion statement and emblem of taste, bicycles are the status symbols cars can no longer be. Cultural aspirations, pretensions, and tribal affiliations can be relayed by what one commutes on, be it a "fixie", "Dutch" bike, road bike, “training” bike, mountain bike (further divided by degrees of suspension), utility bike, or a bike from the emerging minimalist art niche. Understanding these choices, is key to understanding how cycling subcultures might be fostered and grown.
It would be disingenuous not to make clear from the outset, that this work has grown out of the author's enthusiasm for cycling. Cycling has been my primary means of transportation since around 1990, when living on Austudy meant even bus fares were more than I could afford. Pride in my growing fitness steered me into the club road racing scene. A desire to "keep my miles up" in order that I might be race fit on the weekends, motivated me to always commute on a bicycle, often via decidedly indirect routes.
In 2000 I moved with my young family into a house near the surf, only to watch our "rust-protected" Subaru rusting to bits. Rather than replacing it with the Mercedes my wife and I always said some day we would buy, only to watch that rust as well, I am in the process of collecting a bike for every occasion—shopping, nights out, commuting, racing, touring, overseas trips—so in time I might demonstrate to my wife that we don't need a car. Documenting this mission via my blog (http://behoovingmoving.livejournal.com/) has led to some fun tangents, like a weekly bike polo match, plus some meaningful discussion with a core group of regular readers, via emails and comments posted after blog entries.
The central question arising, is how can a collection bikes, provide not only the convenience, but the esteem one enjoys through owning a new German car? I am a middle class man, with too entrenched a liking for clothes, imported beers, and international travel, to hope I would ever earn esteem, much less credibility, as a champion for the environment. I am out to show off my bike collection and leg muscles, not some concocted zealotry with regards to ecological footprints and so forth. I want a stable of head turning, prestigious bicycles, not a bank of solar cells on my roof, a worm farm and a beard—stereotypes purely in the interest of humour.
Searching the web for the world's best and thus most prestigious cargo bike, city bike, tandem, etcetera, quickly immersed me in a range of the cycling world's subcultures. As an academic whose PhD and subsequent research has been in the field of architectural history and theory, I was struck by similarities I kept seeing between the messages people were conveying with their bikes, and those architects attempt to convey for their clients when designing their buildings. High end bicycles and works of architecture, like fashion, prestige cars, art, and various other symbols of status, embody what the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu calls cultural capital. Key to Bourdieu's thinking, is the way cultural capital can be exchanged for economic capital, and visa versa. A familiar example in my field, is the sophisticated well spoken architect, perhaps with publications and awards to his or her credit, exchanging their cultural capital for fees from a client, who may have money but no sophistication aside from what they can buy, through being a patron.
Bianchi is a brand with a great deal of cache, which they are able to translate into high prices and a high volume of sales. Thanks to clever ventures like teaming with a fashion label to make the Emporio Armani Sportbike, and sponsoring the champion climber Marco Pantani, for whom a light weight bike was essential to win, Bianchi can produce bikes that to buyers connote qualities that are quite remote from most of their range. Bianchi's Milano Cafe Racer, for example, is a Taiwanese made town bike, with low end Japanese components by Shimano. Yet Bianchi decals and the company's trademark turquoise (or "bianchi green", as it is called) mean these bikes retail for $800 in Australia, where a comparable Mongoose or Giant would sell for $500. $300 buys the sense that this bike rolled from the factory that helped Pantani to victory, when in fact the closest a Milano Cafe Racer bought from a shop in Australia, has ever been to Italy, is Taiwan, where it was made.
Are we to be critical of this though, if the end result is more people cycling? If allusions to an Italian fashion label, and the glamour of The Tour de France conferred on a Taiwanese piece of aluminium tubing, succeeds in getting a few people to take trips with their bikes, that they otherwise might have taken by car, then surely we shouldn't object, even if some of our leftist suspicions are piqued. The danger though, is that ideologues among us would use our political power, and access to funding for research, to promote a narrow vision of cycling, and in the process make cycling even less attractive to those who will continue to drive, while ever driving serves their pride more.
This leads to a key point I would like to make with this essay, and that is that cycling stands to be hindered by researchers coming at the subject with ideological or political agendas extrinsic to cyclists' own motivations. Sure, some people cycle out of a concern for the planet. Some people cycle to fend off morbid illness. (Nobody cycles to relieve congestion for drivers). However, cyclists who stick with it long term, tend to be the ones who find the cycling itself, in some way, rewarding. The elegance and quite often the cultural capital embodied in their expensive equipment, for many cyclists, is integral to that enjoyment.
A guiding principle for historians, comes from poststructuralism, and tells us to be leery of the influence of hegemonies when doing research. While environmentalists, health policy makers and planners might find it frustrating that their advice is not always heeded, they are nonetheless better organized to get funding, convene conferences, and influence policy makers, than are cycling commuters. In car dependent cities as we find in Australia, less than 2% of all trips are taken by bicycle. That tiny minority who choose to cycle, when they might otherwise drive, are further divided into tribes with horizontal rivalries. Cyclists are the epitome of a voiceless minority. Their concerns can easily be buried beneath those of groups whose interest in cycling, is purely to do with what cyclists can be doing for them: relieving congestion, reducing morbidity, saving the planet, etcetera. Researchers with these kinds of agendas are prone to forget that cyclists themselves may feel no personal debt to global warming or public health, and certainly not to the problem of traffic congestion.
So what does motivate cyclists? Taking clipboards to the street and asking them would be methodologically fraught. Cyclists are all too aware of the polarizing debates that they are frequently asked to take sides on. Should they ride slow or fast? Sit up or lean forward? Where lycra or jeans? Always wear helmets? Be licensed? Pay road tax? Often debates of this kind have such gravity that new lines of inquiry get drawn in and subsumed. Just knowing they are speaking to an interviewer, and that these debates are still being contested, would skew cyclists' responses.
My approach with this paper has been to examine the market niches represented in specialist bike stores, and accompanying advertising material, and use that as my primary data. An unaffected and clear picture of numerous motivations to cycle, quickly emerges.
The picture can't be seen though, until a few prejudices and debates are pushed to the side. First, the idea that certain styles of cycling are not really commuting, has to be jettisoned from our thinking entirely. A rider kitted up as though for a downhill mountain bike world record attempt, if he or she is riding to work, or to pick up some milk at the shop, is making a trip they might otherwise have made using a car. On the main bicycling corridor into my city (Honeysuckle Drive, Newcastle), every style of bike is represented in the rush hour procession—save perhaps trick bikes and trials bikes. As well as upright city bikes with components ideal for city commuting, I see people on mountain bikes, road bikes, fixies, beach cruisers, and so on, essentially doing the same thing: pedaling a pushbike to work.
On many fronts the motivations for cycling would be the same for all of these people. All of them are saving considerable money, especially if their decision to cycle means their household can own one less car than it otherwise might. Any of them with an interest in fitness, is saving time in their day, by marrying their exercise time with time they would have needed to spend getting to work anyway. Most are enjoying the invigoration that comes with being outdoors. What the multitude of bike styles is telling us though, is that many too are indulging a mental image they have of themselves.
Some probity can be gained here by referring to the concept of hyperreality, as the sociologist Jean Baudrillard has explained it. As Baudrillard sees it, the physical world from which our ancestors reaped crops, or walked in the rain, has been so thoroughly overlain with media images and associated fantasies, that the "real" world of our ancestors is barely perceived. It is the hyperreal world that we inhabit. To be sure, cyclists' bodies are quite often accosted by nature, their physical legs feel real aches, and they skirt very real dangers that really could kill them. Yet there is overwhelming evidence of a hyperreal dimension to what cyclists are doing.
We can start with the example above, of The Bianchi Milano Cafe racer, and how it can sell for $300 more than a comparable bike with a different brand name displayed on the down tube. The $300 is the value of associations with The Tour de France, the romance of Italy, and for those who know of the link, the fashion designer Giorgio Armani and his glamourous lifestyle. Someone riding along a suburban street in Australia, can imagine they are racing to a cafe in Milan, on a Milano Cafe Racer. For $15000, the price of a Bianchi 928 with top of the range components and wheels, they might imagine they're racing on the pro circuit.
In some respects, the mechanics of branding and evocation I'm describing are as straight forward as Michael Jordan being paid to wear Nike. Like Nike, the three main manufacturers of race worthy components, SRAM, Shimano and Campagnolo, pay pro teams to use group sets designed to a price point. Components that sell for thousands less, perform just as well. The ranges only exist because one sector of the recreational market is prepared to pay triple for components they saw on TV, another double for penultimate gear, and the remainder a sensible price for components fit for the task. The beauty of the top of the range gear, for the rider who is immersed in a hyperreal world, is its ability to transform their daily commute into a stage winning breakaway. The hill between their home and work, can be a peak somewhere in the French Alps.
Granting them their fantasy, even fostering it, is consistent with our overall aim of encouraging cycling. Below I will offer suggestions as to how the joy which cycling brings, to the imagination, could be fostered in a sports loving country like Australia. First though, I need to expand my discussion of cyclists' various motivations, beyond those Baudrillard might have observed, and the obvious ones I have mentioned, like the desire to keep fit, or to save money.
Eros
Sigmund Frued identified at least three profound motivating forces for humans, that I can see corresponding to three modes of cycling. He related each to a figure from Greek mythology: Eros emblemises the drive to have sex; Thanatos stands for our death wish; and Narcissus represents our love of ourselves. A study of advertising images used to sell European town bikes, suggests a strong connection between this style of bike, and Eros. Observers of body language know that when a person walks past someone on the street who they find attractive, they will stand taller with their shoulders back and chest out. Upright bikes encourage this pose. Images used to advertise town bikes focus as much on attractive riders and their clothes (or lack thereof) [ref Kronan's underwear range] as on the bikes being sold. Traditional geometries and detailing betrays sensibilities more commonly associated with fashion design. One can even indulge a leather fetish with certain town bikes. Velorbis, for example, makes bikes with leather seats, grips, mud flaps, optional leather coat guards and a hook to secure ones leather brief case! Bells with novel tones, for eliciting smiles and for flirting, are standard inclusions. The fact that upright bikes don't go as fast isn't an issue, as the purpose of riding them is to go slow enough to be seen.
Thanatos
Advertising used to sell mountain bikes appeals to what Freud called our death drive, which is related to Thanatos. Photographs of riders freewheeling down very steep tracks, or flying through the air after jumps, are commonly used to extol the advantages of the latest drive train technology. Yet the riders in these kinds of photos are being captured at moments when drive trains are most often inactive. A rider would not be pedaling, or changing gears, while in the air or free falling down some embankment. The advertises' aim though, is not so much to explain the equipment, but to show how close that equipment can bring riders to the precipice between life and death.
Narcissus
I would not be the first to say that cyclists who shave their legs and wear lycra are somewhat narcissistic, though I would like to take the charge a step further. Magazines and advertising targeting road racers show us just how obsessed we can be with looking back at our bodies. We keep training diaries, review data collected with heart rate monitors, consult sports physicians and massage therapists, and can talk about our red blood cells using medical jargon. On the one hand our aim is to make that state of being "in form" coincide with particular races that we are aiming to win. On the other, the obsession with bio feedback from whatever source possible, is an end in itself, an end that like leg shaving, or putting on lycra nicks with no underpants, is plainly to do with self love.
Public money should be invested to gratify all the above pleasures of cycling. Any strategy that encourages people who would otherwise drive, to ride bikes instead, serves the community as a whole, because, as we know, cycling reduces energy needs and greenhouse gasses, and frees up hospital beds and space on our roads. Of course, it brings direct joy to cyclists as well.
To date, initiatives designed to get more people cycling, have mostly been aimed at reducing physical impediments, danger for instance. Some of these initiatives have been very successful.
In Amsterdam, drivers are automatically at fault in any accident involving a car and a cyclist. The burden is on drivers to prove otherwise, which is often impossible. A similar law in Manhattan, in that case protecting pedestrians, has had a similar effect: drivers slow down in built up areas. This is only fitting, in the sense that built up areas were developed before cars were invented. Our ancestors could never have imagined the streets they were planning would some day be overran by machines capable of outrunning a horse.
Secure bicycle parking stations, with shower facilities, lockers and bicycle shops, are becoming a common response to physical impediments facing cyclists at the end of their trips. These make particular sense in low density cities, where longer commutes call for bicycles that are too expensive to simply chain to a pole, and also leave riders in need of a shower when they arrive. It behooves cyclists too, that such facilities are winning architectural awards. The Royal Brisbane Women's Hospital Cycle Centre, designed by architects Bligh Voller Nield, is an excellent example. Another, that looks more like a contemporary museum than a bike shed, beside Union Station in Washington D.C., is even more ennobling for cyclists. The inspiration for its structure comes from a wheel rim and spokes. Much has changed since the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner could say bicycle sheds were mere buildings, not works of architecture (Pevsner, 1943).
Architect designed bicycle stations, that are infused with cultural capital, elevate cycling in a way that makes it appealing to the middle classes. Granted, people who cycle because they are poor, are unlikely to pay a few hundred dollars for a yearly subscription to use such a station. However, no one is planning to promote cycling by swelling the ranks of the poor! The point of architect designed bicycle parking stations, with showers, club memberships, fresh towels and so forth, is to make cycling more appealing to middle class commuters, who might otherwise drive.
Cycle paths, shared paths, and safer on-road conditions, plus secure parking and showers, address cyclists' physical needs. Suggestions I am about to offer, address some cultural and psychological motivations for cycling. My recommendations are in the grain of motivators evidenced by advertising material produced by the bicycle industry, where it is freely acknowledged that cycling can be prestigious, hyperreal, sexy, thrilling and narcissistic—excesses, I should add, that car buyers may freely indulge, without raising an eyebrow.(1)
One of the joys of riding European style city bikes, is these bikes give riders an opportunity to sit up, and display themselves, sexually. It follows that owners of bikes of this kind would be happiest riding beside alfresco dining areas, along waterfront promenades, through pedestrian malls, or any place where people might see them. From one stage-set to the next, they would no doubt appreciate a fast cycle lane, but when they reach the next populated zone, they would want to slow down. Neither would they be bothered if bollards were placed in their way, forcing them to ride closer to walking pace when near potentially admiring pedestrians.
For the mountain bike enthusiast, the opportunity to take in some trails between home and work, could be relished. Expediency of course, would see many use sealed routes where available, but if jumps, berms, drops, water challenges, and other thrills were provided, we can easily imagine mountain bike riders taking unsealed side routes, purely for fun. A network of mountain bike specific cycleways, through gullies, providing shortcuts and/or excitement, could increase the uptake of cycle commuting by mountain bike. The risk to life posed, is no different to the risk mountain bike riders seek on their weekends regardless.
Increasing the number of people who race road bikes on the weekend, and who would thus want to commute rather than drive, to keep themselves race-fit, could be as simple as providing public support for the sport. At present, virtually no assistance is given to bicycle road racing clubs, beyond granting them permission to use semi-redundant public roads for their races. One kilometer bitumen loops are all such clubs need to run criterion races. Every oval could have such a loop wrapped around the outside. More substantial loops could be built on crown land and large parks. Government funds could help chambers of commerce host early morning criterion races along main shopping streets. Universities could be rewarded, via funding, for hosting weekend bike races on roads on their campuses. Every new rider attracted to the sport by these measures, is someone who will now seriously consider commuting by bike.
Bicycle polo is proving popular, especially among riders of fixies, but finding suitable hard courts to play on can be impossible. BMX circuits have appealed, to young riders especially, for thirty years now, though very few exist, and fewer still exist that aren't fenced. Secure bike parking at pools would give recreational triathaletes opportunities to swim, cycle and run all in the same training session. In all these cases, it is fair to assume that public funds spent to support sporting uses for bikes, would translate into more people commuting by bike. More people would have bikes to commute on, more would want to stay race fit, and more would have the fitness required to commute via bike.
That few of these recommendations will ever be rolled out en masse, should not be discouraging, given the vastness of the bicycling playgrounds being built, right now, in post industrial cities all over the world. I am talking about the harbour fronts, high lines, carriage yards, skip lines and other spaces which cities no longer need in their post industrial phase, that are being turned into parks. These are parks that are sometimes too vast, and almost always too long, be to be enjoyed terribly well by pedestrians; the doctrine that public space should not be developed guarantees pedestrians lonely times in these parks they demand. The undoubted winners are cyclists, the de facto heirs to spaces not intimate enough for pedestrians, not open to cars, but just right for a leisurely ride. A further step in exploring this topic, would be a study of spaces like these, as they are understood and experienced by cyclists, along the lines of Iain Borden's study of urban space as used by riders of skateboards.
(1) As is the case with persecuted minorities generally, higher moral standards are expected of cyclists than drivers. Cyclists who flout road rules are often accused of "not helping their cause", a specific charge that is not leveled at miscreant drivers. Criminals on bicycles tarnish cycling, in a way criminals using cars, to ram raid banks for example, do not tarnish driving. Falicitous assumptions about them are another tell tale sign that cyclists are a persecuted minority. Because some cyclists are environmentalists, does not mean all are, or that cyclists cannot tie plastic shopping bags to their panniers and not be betraying some cause. It would be a fallacy likewise to presume cyclists don't smoke. One need only look to Denmark, where large numbers do both.
(2) Iain Borden, Skateboarding, Space and the City: Architecture and the Body, Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2001.
The topic cannot be approached from the hegemonic standpoints of environmentalists, health policy makers, traffic engineers or others with agendas extrinsic to those of actual cyclists, as cyclists can’t be presumed to care for the planet, morbid illness, or the fact they are abating congestion for drivers. Neither can the topic be understood by studying cycling culture in atypical cities like Amsterdam, where retrofitting for driving proved difficult, and cycling thus flourished. Likewise, reasons why the poor cycle don’t count here, as increasing their numbers is not something governments are planning to do!
From the premise that cyclists seek what Bourdieu terms "Cultural Capital", the paper examines the connection between cyclists' motivations and messages conveyed through their choice of equipment. As a prosthesis, fashion statement and emblem of taste, bicycles are the status symbols cars can no longer be. Cultural aspirations, pretensions, and tribal affiliations can be relayed by what one commutes on, be it a "fixie", "Dutch" bike, road bike, “training” bike, mountain bike (further divided by degrees of suspension), utility bike, or a bike from the emerging minimalist art niche. Understanding these choices, is key to understanding how cycling subcultures might be fostered and grown.
It would be disingenuous not to make clear from the outset, that this work has grown out of the author's enthusiasm for cycling. Cycling has been my primary means of transportation since around 1990, when living on Austudy meant even bus fares were more than I could afford. Pride in my growing fitness steered me into the club road racing scene. A desire to "keep my miles up" in order that I might be race fit on the weekends, motivated me to always commute on a bicycle, often via decidedly indirect routes.
In 2000 I moved with my young family into a house near the surf, only to watch our "rust-protected" Subaru rusting to bits. Rather than replacing it with the Mercedes my wife and I always said some day we would buy, only to watch that rust as well, I am in the process of collecting a bike for every occasion—shopping, nights out, commuting, racing, touring, overseas trips—so in time I might demonstrate to my wife that we don't need a car. Documenting this mission via my blog (http://behoovingmoving.livejournal.com/) has led to some fun tangents, like a weekly bike polo match, plus some meaningful discussion with a core group of regular readers, via emails and comments posted after blog entries.
The central question arising, is how can a collection bikes, provide not only the convenience, but the esteem one enjoys through owning a new German car? I am a middle class man, with too entrenched a liking for clothes, imported beers, and international travel, to hope I would ever earn esteem, much less credibility, as a champion for the environment. I am out to show off my bike collection and leg muscles, not some concocted zealotry with regards to ecological footprints and so forth. I want a stable of head turning, prestigious bicycles, not a bank of solar cells on my roof, a worm farm and a beard—stereotypes purely in the interest of humour.
Searching the web for the world's best and thus most prestigious cargo bike, city bike, tandem, etcetera, quickly immersed me in a range of the cycling world's subcultures. As an academic whose PhD and subsequent research has been in the field of architectural history and theory, I was struck by similarities I kept seeing between the messages people were conveying with their bikes, and those architects attempt to convey for their clients when designing their buildings. High end bicycles and works of architecture, like fashion, prestige cars, art, and various other symbols of status, embody what the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu calls cultural capital. Key to Bourdieu's thinking, is the way cultural capital can be exchanged for economic capital, and visa versa. A familiar example in my field, is the sophisticated well spoken architect, perhaps with publications and awards to his or her credit, exchanging their cultural capital for fees from a client, who may have money but no sophistication aside from what they can buy, through being a patron.
Bianchi is a brand with a great deal of cache, which they are able to translate into high prices and a high volume of sales. Thanks to clever ventures like teaming with a fashion label to make the Emporio Armani Sportbike, and sponsoring the champion climber Marco Pantani, for whom a light weight bike was essential to win, Bianchi can produce bikes that to buyers connote qualities that are quite remote from most of their range. Bianchi's Milano Cafe Racer, for example, is a Taiwanese made town bike, with low end Japanese components by Shimano. Yet Bianchi decals and the company's trademark turquoise (or "bianchi green", as it is called) mean these bikes retail for $800 in Australia, where a comparable Mongoose or Giant would sell for $500. $300 buys the sense that this bike rolled from the factory that helped Pantani to victory, when in fact the closest a Milano Cafe Racer bought from a shop in Australia, has ever been to Italy, is Taiwan, where it was made.
Are we to be critical of this though, if the end result is more people cycling? If allusions to an Italian fashion label, and the glamour of The Tour de France conferred on a Taiwanese piece of aluminium tubing, succeeds in getting a few people to take trips with their bikes, that they otherwise might have taken by car, then surely we shouldn't object, even if some of our leftist suspicions are piqued. The danger though, is that ideologues among us would use our political power, and access to funding for research, to promote a narrow vision of cycling, and in the process make cycling even less attractive to those who will continue to drive, while ever driving serves their pride more.
This leads to a key point I would like to make with this essay, and that is that cycling stands to be hindered by researchers coming at the subject with ideological or political agendas extrinsic to cyclists' own motivations. Sure, some people cycle out of a concern for the planet. Some people cycle to fend off morbid illness. (Nobody cycles to relieve congestion for drivers). However, cyclists who stick with it long term, tend to be the ones who find the cycling itself, in some way, rewarding. The elegance and quite often the cultural capital embodied in their expensive equipment, for many cyclists, is integral to that enjoyment.
A guiding principle for historians, comes from poststructuralism, and tells us to be leery of the influence of hegemonies when doing research. While environmentalists, health policy makers and planners might find it frustrating that their advice is not always heeded, they are nonetheless better organized to get funding, convene conferences, and influence policy makers, than are cycling commuters. In car dependent cities as we find in Australia, less than 2% of all trips are taken by bicycle. That tiny minority who choose to cycle, when they might otherwise drive, are further divided into tribes with horizontal rivalries. Cyclists are the epitome of a voiceless minority. Their concerns can easily be buried beneath those of groups whose interest in cycling, is purely to do with what cyclists can be doing for them: relieving congestion, reducing morbidity, saving the planet, etcetera. Researchers with these kinds of agendas are prone to forget that cyclists themselves may feel no personal debt to global warming or public health, and certainly not to the problem of traffic congestion.
So what does motivate cyclists? Taking clipboards to the street and asking them would be methodologically fraught. Cyclists are all too aware of the polarizing debates that they are frequently asked to take sides on. Should they ride slow or fast? Sit up or lean forward? Where lycra or jeans? Always wear helmets? Be licensed? Pay road tax? Often debates of this kind have such gravity that new lines of inquiry get drawn in and subsumed. Just knowing they are speaking to an interviewer, and that these debates are still being contested, would skew cyclists' responses.
My approach with this paper has been to examine the market niches represented in specialist bike stores, and accompanying advertising material, and use that as my primary data. An unaffected and clear picture of numerous motivations to cycle, quickly emerges.
The picture can't be seen though, until a few prejudices and debates are pushed to the side. First, the idea that certain styles of cycling are not really commuting, has to be jettisoned from our thinking entirely. A rider kitted up as though for a downhill mountain bike world record attempt, if he or she is riding to work, or to pick up some milk at the shop, is making a trip they might otherwise have made using a car. On the main bicycling corridor into my city (Honeysuckle Drive, Newcastle), every style of bike is represented in the rush hour procession—save perhaps trick bikes and trials bikes. As well as upright city bikes with components ideal for city commuting, I see people on mountain bikes, road bikes, fixies, beach cruisers, and so on, essentially doing the same thing: pedaling a pushbike to work.
On many fronts the motivations for cycling would be the same for all of these people. All of them are saving considerable money, especially if their decision to cycle means their household can own one less car than it otherwise might. Any of them with an interest in fitness, is saving time in their day, by marrying their exercise time with time they would have needed to spend getting to work anyway. Most are enjoying the invigoration that comes with being outdoors. What the multitude of bike styles is telling us though, is that many too are indulging a mental image they have of themselves.
Some probity can be gained here by referring to the concept of hyperreality, as the sociologist Jean Baudrillard has explained it. As Baudrillard sees it, the physical world from which our ancestors reaped crops, or walked in the rain, has been so thoroughly overlain with media images and associated fantasies, that the "real" world of our ancestors is barely perceived. It is the hyperreal world that we inhabit. To be sure, cyclists' bodies are quite often accosted by nature, their physical legs feel real aches, and they skirt very real dangers that really could kill them. Yet there is overwhelming evidence of a hyperreal dimension to what cyclists are doing.
We can start with the example above, of The Bianchi Milano Cafe racer, and how it can sell for $300 more than a comparable bike with a different brand name displayed on the down tube. The $300 is the value of associations with The Tour de France, the romance of Italy, and for those who know of the link, the fashion designer Giorgio Armani and his glamourous lifestyle. Someone riding along a suburban street in Australia, can imagine they are racing to a cafe in Milan, on a Milano Cafe Racer. For $15000, the price of a Bianchi 928 with top of the range components and wheels, they might imagine they're racing on the pro circuit.
In some respects, the mechanics of branding and evocation I'm describing are as straight forward as Michael Jordan being paid to wear Nike. Like Nike, the three main manufacturers of race worthy components, SRAM, Shimano and Campagnolo, pay pro teams to use group sets designed to a price point. Components that sell for thousands less, perform just as well. The ranges only exist because one sector of the recreational market is prepared to pay triple for components they saw on TV, another double for penultimate gear, and the remainder a sensible price for components fit for the task. The beauty of the top of the range gear, for the rider who is immersed in a hyperreal world, is its ability to transform their daily commute into a stage winning breakaway. The hill between their home and work, can be a peak somewhere in the French Alps.
Granting them their fantasy, even fostering it, is consistent with our overall aim of encouraging cycling. Below I will offer suggestions as to how the joy which cycling brings, to the imagination, could be fostered in a sports loving country like Australia. First though, I need to expand my discussion of cyclists' various motivations, beyond those Baudrillard might have observed, and the obvious ones I have mentioned, like the desire to keep fit, or to save money.
Eros
Sigmund Frued identified at least three profound motivating forces for humans, that I can see corresponding to three modes of cycling. He related each to a figure from Greek mythology: Eros emblemises the drive to have sex; Thanatos stands for our death wish; and Narcissus represents our love of ourselves. A study of advertising images used to sell European town bikes, suggests a strong connection between this style of bike, and Eros. Observers of body language know that when a person walks past someone on the street who they find attractive, they will stand taller with their shoulders back and chest out. Upright bikes encourage this pose. Images used to advertise town bikes focus as much on attractive riders and their clothes (or lack thereof) [ref Kronan's underwear range] as on the bikes being sold. Traditional geometries and detailing betrays sensibilities more commonly associated with fashion design. One can even indulge a leather fetish with certain town bikes. Velorbis, for example, makes bikes with leather seats, grips, mud flaps, optional leather coat guards and a hook to secure ones leather brief case! Bells with novel tones, for eliciting smiles and for flirting, are standard inclusions. The fact that upright bikes don't go as fast isn't an issue, as the purpose of riding them is to go slow enough to be seen.
Thanatos
Advertising used to sell mountain bikes appeals to what Freud called our death drive, which is related to Thanatos. Photographs of riders freewheeling down very steep tracks, or flying through the air after jumps, are commonly used to extol the advantages of the latest drive train technology. Yet the riders in these kinds of photos are being captured at moments when drive trains are most often inactive. A rider would not be pedaling, or changing gears, while in the air or free falling down some embankment. The advertises' aim though, is not so much to explain the equipment, but to show how close that equipment can bring riders to the precipice between life and death.
Narcissus
I would not be the first to say that cyclists who shave their legs and wear lycra are somewhat narcissistic, though I would like to take the charge a step further. Magazines and advertising targeting road racers show us just how obsessed we can be with looking back at our bodies. We keep training diaries, review data collected with heart rate monitors, consult sports physicians and massage therapists, and can talk about our red blood cells using medical jargon. On the one hand our aim is to make that state of being "in form" coincide with particular races that we are aiming to win. On the other, the obsession with bio feedback from whatever source possible, is an end in itself, an end that like leg shaving, or putting on lycra nicks with no underpants, is plainly to do with self love.
Public money should be invested to gratify all the above pleasures of cycling. Any strategy that encourages people who would otherwise drive, to ride bikes instead, serves the community as a whole, because, as we know, cycling reduces energy needs and greenhouse gasses, and frees up hospital beds and space on our roads. Of course, it brings direct joy to cyclists as well.
To date, initiatives designed to get more people cycling, have mostly been aimed at reducing physical impediments, danger for instance. Some of these initiatives have been very successful.
In Amsterdam, drivers are automatically at fault in any accident involving a car and a cyclist. The burden is on drivers to prove otherwise, which is often impossible. A similar law in Manhattan, in that case protecting pedestrians, has had a similar effect: drivers slow down in built up areas. This is only fitting, in the sense that built up areas were developed before cars were invented. Our ancestors could never have imagined the streets they were planning would some day be overran by machines capable of outrunning a horse.
Secure bicycle parking stations, with shower facilities, lockers and bicycle shops, are becoming a common response to physical impediments facing cyclists at the end of their trips. These make particular sense in low density cities, where longer commutes call for bicycles that are too expensive to simply chain to a pole, and also leave riders in need of a shower when they arrive. It behooves cyclists too, that such facilities are winning architectural awards. The Royal Brisbane Women's Hospital Cycle Centre, designed by architects Bligh Voller Nield, is an excellent example. Another, that looks more like a contemporary museum than a bike shed, beside Union Station in Washington D.C., is even more ennobling for cyclists. The inspiration for its structure comes from a wheel rim and spokes. Much has changed since the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner could say bicycle sheds were mere buildings, not works of architecture (Pevsner, 1943).
Architect designed bicycle stations, that are infused with cultural capital, elevate cycling in a way that makes it appealing to the middle classes. Granted, people who cycle because they are poor, are unlikely to pay a few hundred dollars for a yearly subscription to use such a station. However, no one is planning to promote cycling by swelling the ranks of the poor! The point of architect designed bicycle parking stations, with showers, club memberships, fresh towels and so forth, is to make cycling more appealing to middle class commuters, who might otherwise drive.
Cycle paths, shared paths, and safer on-road conditions, plus secure parking and showers, address cyclists' physical needs. Suggestions I am about to offer, address some cultural and psychological motivations for cycling. My recommendations are in the grain of motivators evidenced by advertising material produced by the bicycle industry, where it is freely acknowledged that cycling can be prestigious, hyperreal, sexy, thrilling and narcissistic—excesses, I should add, that car buyers may freely indulge, without raising an eyebrow.(1)
One of the joys of riding European style city bikes, is these bikes give riders an opportunity to sit up, and display themselves, sexually. It follows that owners of bikes of this kind would be happiest riding beside alfresco dining areas, along waterfront promenades, through pedestrian malls, or any place where people might see them. From one stage-set to the next, they would no doubt appreciate a fast cycle lane, but when they reach the next populated zone, they would want to slow down. Neither would they be bothered if bollards were placed in their way, forcing them to ride closer to walking pace when near potentially admiring pedestrians.
For the mountain bike enthusiast, the opportunity to take in some trails between home and work, could be relished. Expediency of course, would see many use sealed routes where available, but if jumps, berms, drops, water challenges, and other thrills were provided, we can easily imagine mountain bike riders taking unsealed side routes, purely for fun. A network of mountain bike specific cycleways, through gullies, providing shortcuts and/or excitement, could increase the uptake of cycle commuting by mountain bike. The risk to life posed, is no different to the risk mountain bike riders seek on their weekends regardless.
Increasing the number of people who race road bikes on the weekend, and who would thus want to commute rather than drive, to keep themselves race-fit, could be as simple as providing public support for the sport. At present, virtually no assistance is given to bicycle road racing clubs, beyond granting them permission to use semi-redundant public roads for their races. One kilometer bitumen loops are all such clubs need to run criterion races. Every oval could have such a loop wrapped around the outside. More substantial loops could be built on crown land and large parks. Government funds could help chambers of commerce host early morning criterion races along main shopping streets. Universities could be rewarded, via funding, for hosting weekend bike races on roads on their campuses. Every new rider attracted to the sport by these measures, is someone who will now seriously consider commuting by bike.
Bicycle polo is proving popular, especially among riders of fixies, but finding suitable hard courts to play on can be impossible. BMX circuits have appealed, to young riders especially, for thirty years now, though very few exist, and fewer still exist that aren't fenced. Secure bike parking at pools would give recreational triathaletes opportunities to swim, cycle and run all in the same training session. In all these cases, it is fair to assume that public funds spent to support sporting uses for bikes, would translate into more people commuting by bike. More people would have bikes to commute on, more would want to stay race fit, and more would have the fitness required to commute via bike.
That few of these recommendations will ever be rolled out en masse, should not be discouraging, given the vastness of the bicycling playgrounds being built, right now, in post industrial cities all over the world. I am talking about the harbour fronts, high lines, carriage yards, skip lines and other spaces which cities no longer need in their post industrial phase, that are being turned into parks. These are parks that are sometimes too vast, and almost always too long, be to be enjoyed terribly well by pedestrians; the doctrine that public space should not be developed guarantees pedestrians lonely times in these parks they demand. The undoubted winners are cyclists, the de facto heirs to spaces not intimate enough for pedestrians, not open to cars, but just right for a leisurely ride. A further step in exploring this topic, would be a study of spaces like these, as they are understood and experienced by cyclists, along the lines of Iain Borden's study of urban space as used by riders of skateboards.
(1) As is the case with persecuted minorities generally, higher moral standards are expected of cyclists than drivers. Cyclists who flout road rules are often accused of "not helping their cause", a specific charge that is not leveled at miscreant drivers. Criminals on bicycles tarnish cycling, in a way criminals using cars, to ram raid banks for example, do not tarnish driving. Falicitous assumptions about them are another tell tale sign that cyclists are a persecuted minority. Because some cyclists are environmentalists, does not mean all are, or that cyclists cannot tie plastic shopping bags to their panniers and not be betraying some cause. It would be a fallacy likewise to presume cyclists don't smoke. One need only look to Denmark, where large numbers do both.
(2) Iain Borden, Skateboarding, Space and the City: Architecture and the Body, Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2001.
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