Globalization and Cities, a working bibliography
And there will be also about a billion people, new billion urbanized folk around the world that were not urbanized before. For the first time in the history of the world, more than 50 percent of the people living on our planet now live in urban areas. So those two factors, urbanization, rapid urbanization, and rapid entry into the middle class are going to cause, again, a higher plateau of food and commodity pricing with scarcity. – Muhtar Kent (Chairman and CEO of the Coca-Cola Co.) Excerpt from a conversation on the Charlie Rose Show, Tuesday, June 9, 2009.
The modern age is the urbanization of the countryside, not ruralization of the city as in antiquity. – Karl Marx, The Grundrisse
I’m getting ready to teach some courses coming up and to do so, I started to prepare a working bibliography on globalization and cities. Thought I’d share it, but with the caveat that it is, as anything about globalization and cities would be, incomplete. I will be adding more books soon and I am also in the process of adding many more journal articles. A section or future post will also be specifically for other resources, including websites and movies. Take the jump for the whole list. (more…)
Vieques, Puerto Rico paper
Quick note to log that I have uploaded a PDF of my article on ”Vieques, Puerto Rico: From Devastation to Conservation and Back Again”, published in Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review. It’s old but I was just re-reading it as I prepare a fellowship application, and realized that given the current Puerto Rico government’s drive to commodify all that the military has constructed as pristine tropical nature, especially at the site of Roosevelt Roads, there could be some newfound interest. Besides, it’s been published for so long that it’s time that it show up on the web. Here it is: 17.1 TDSR_Arbonafinal
• Citation Info:
Arbona, Javier. “Vieques, Puerto Rico: From Devastation to Conservation and Back Again.” Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review. Volume XVII, Number 1. 2005. (Berkeley: The International Association for the Study of Traditional Environments.)
From the Bezoar of the Belly
A Bezoar is “a mass found trapped in the gastrointestinal system,” and as Google Health (who knew?) adds, it’s “swallowed foreign material (usually hair or fiber) that collects in the stomach and fails to pass through the intestines.” It’s also the provisional title I gave to a tumblelog: bezoar.tumblr.com. As the name suggests, this quick and dirty tumblelog (see kottke for clarification of “tumblelog”) collects an amalgam of disparate ephemera that somewhat tangentially relate to my interests, such as the video above. It’s kind of a multimedia mixtape.
I haven’t posted much here lately, but do head over to the Bezoar for lots of interesting stuff. For the curious, things have been a little slow around here while I have been developing an article for an upcoming number of Architectural Design, guest-edited by David Gissen (Spring 2010 issue; Architectural Design, Territory: Architecture Beyond Environment). The article is about the work of François Roche/R&Sie(n), and, broadly, about eco-materialism in architecture as an alternative to sustainability. Just to print a little teaser, one of the early paragraphs reads as follows (note that this might change throughout the editing process):
François Roche’s work fits, albeit uneasily, into the production of a milieu of artists and architects (several featured in this number) united by an inquiry into the contradictions of modern nature: a partly-human artifice upon which we materially depend, extending our being and life, but also foreign and strange, not to mention privatized in myriad forms.[2] (Water systems are the classic example of this). The creations of Roche, along with Stéphanie Lavaux and various other design partners over the years—most recently operating under the “R&Sie(n)” monicker—seesaw between attempts at overcoming alienation (the condition of being expropriated from our own means of laboring in and with the earth), and also heightening it.
Needless to say, I’m excited for this article because it touches upon a lot of subjects I have been interested in the recent past (some of which begin to be addressed in this older post).
In addition, I have been in the process of getting a draft of my dissertation prospectus ready (Yes!). For the heck of it, I’ll share an intro paragraph here. Again, the caveat applies that this is an early draft and could change after my committee takes a whack at it. In this “nutgraph” I am referring to California cities and their proposed or established post-military parks.
In this project I propose that a number of these neo-Picturesque parks overlaid onto former military spaces create a mutually-supporting geography of private economic gain and imperial power. These parks seductively employ symbolic references to military heroism in a purportedly public landscape, situating memories of by-gone place and faux montages of Arcadian nature. This new geography is opportune and opportunistic. The zones I want to study are cleavages where visitors might get the thrill of stumbling upon something that they interpret they weren’t supposed to see—Cold War secrets lost amidst a ruinous landscape, for example—and yet it was planted there for them all along. How ideological landscape features and visitors come to find one another, while boosting private investment, will make up the substance of this study.
Meanwhile, other things are in store, like a book review for Historical Geography. I am also beginning to prepare a summer (yeah, summer!) course for 2010, provisionally titled Cities for Sale: Global Real Estate and Urban Politics (with apologies to Chester Hartman for cribbing from his book City for Sale). Needless to say, the months ahead look pretty busy! Stay tuned for new material… Just add the RSS feed to your reader. New updates will also be announced via Twitter (just ask to follow and I’ll unlock it for you — if you’re not a marketing bot) and, of course, Bezoar…
For now, I’ll leave you with something else from the Bezoar collection: an index of national pride.
Fabricating the Digital Contemporary Moment: A Book Review
Going through the projects in Lisa Iwamoto’s newly published survey, Digital Fabrications: Architectural and Material Techniques (Princeton Architectural Press, 2009. 144 pages) gives me the impression that much of the contemporary outlook in architecture, especially in its schools, has a lot to do with the rediscovery of Gottfried Semper. Here you have a frenzied revelry in the assembly of various independent components into elaborate skins, an exploration of the textile and foldable properties of materials, and a recovery of surface as something wanting a glorious independence from mundane structures.
The book publishers, on their part, quietly present this book in a small note before the index as a part of the Architecture Briefs series, which means “basic principles in design and construction.” But Iwamoto rightfully went further than this directive.
Iwamoto, along with her partner Craig Scott, have been one of the most ambitious young practices of recent years (IwamotoScott).* So, almost in a manifesto voice, Iwamoto makes the case that today’s design approach could (perhaps should?) be conceived out of a rich interplay between digital files and on-site fabrication. This encounter, we’re led to believe, makes it possible to, in fact, close the gap between the textile and the structural—not separate them—sometimes intermixing the two without any distinction.
However, it’s hard to purchase that part of the claim when so much of the work featured existed in the safety of a gallery space or as a temporary pavilion (and usually both), without major seismic, climate, or equipment loading concerns. True, as Iwamoto is quick to point out, the installation scale and the one-to-one experimentation going on in offices and schools of architecture affords students experiences with unprecedented construction difficulties and provides a petri dish of sorts to test structural limits. The driving logic of digital fabrication, according to Iwamoto, is one that brings the design mind and the ultimate product closer. And it’s been amazing to see this going on. But the ambition is to go out and up in scale—and do so faster and cheaper than if working primarily with manual labor. Whether that’s technologically or administratively possible—or economically feasible—is still very questionable.
Although the book is divided into five chapters that separately focus on an overarching logic of making (i.e. folding or tessellating), what unifies these works is their surface property and their smoothness. In short, this outlook is about domesticating a project, no matter what sort of programmatic thorniness, into a strong clarity of unit aggregation. Be they ribs, bricks, folds, polygons or whathaveyou, these projects promise to sweep you away with their unquestionable beauty and order. It might sound like I’m resisting that sweep, but I must plead guilty to really liking it—in some contexts and with certain caveats.
Time and again, projects like Tom Wiscombe’s Dragonfly or IwamotoScott’s own InOut Curtain drive the point home (maybe too hard) that any number of design considerations can be sieved through a software and amalgamated into a self-supporting surface. At the same time, this loose cohort of architects and their disciples is taken by instinctive explorations of lattices, cellular patterns, and self-similar repetition, to name a few—and there should be no shame in that. If this book is to serve practitioners and students, as the publisher promises, interested in these lines of experimentation—or perhaps in being seduced by them—then the book clearly succeeds, and does well in introducing some of the principles behind all this.
But, what if you’re not sure you want produce architecture in this way, yet still are interested in digital fabrication? Indeed, there still is quite a bit of instructional material in here. However, it’s one thing to adopt the mechanism, and it’s entirely different to end up with something that resembles the wing of a dragonfly or some gorgeous Alice-In-Wonderland-derived pattern. It’s yet another issue to take many of these projects into a more permanent, programmed, urban scale. Are these projects actually about the directness of their constructability and a control of material economy—the so-called streamlining—as seems to be insisted upon? (Actually, if we take a glimpse at the work of still-small studios like Machinehistories outside the covers of this collection, we start to note that not all has to be so peaceful and direct in the translation from file to material. Besides, could this total-building agenda be recalibrated? Need architects shy away from the legitimate decorative potential in this work, bifurcated from the overall structural system of a building?)
These are some of the hanging questions that this otherwise luscious book has in store, at least from my perspective. But then, I also have a suspicion that there’s something else beyond these surfaces, and may also lead the reader to ask: How did we get here? Answering that question is beyond the scope of the Architecture Briefs series, and also might go against the streamlining impetus, but it shouldn’t escape the mind of these designers or those who come after. It’s not just Semper’s ghost that lurks around these projects, but also the accumulated discussions of the past decade or two about, for instance, “landscapes of intensities” (as Stan Allen called them), the Deleuzian “fold”, and the “smooth and striated.” Bringing in these intellectual histories into the process might disrupt the clarity and directness of the work, leading one to question whether the “scalability” of these works, though maybe technically possible, might even be objectionable on other bases. It may very well be unavoidable and advantageous to add some measure of political interference in the transmission line as these techniques get broadcast out of the screen and beyond the summer pavilions and gallery installations. - JA
*[full disclosure: I have frequented Iwamoto and Scott's academic panels at Berkeley and CCA respectively, and know them both professionally and socially].
• Note to Publishers: Book submissions are gleefully accepted for review, under the stipulation that time usually doesn’t allow me to review everything submitted, nor can I promise to feature a book on this blog just because. Please email me for more information (hola AT javier.est.pr).
Collages for Jen and Juan
A set of collages by Bernice and Javier that they made for tables at Juan Calaf and Jen Soriano’s wedding. These are approx. 5″ x 7″ and were made over the course of two weeks with paper collected during travel in Spain and Puerto Rico.
Reading: Has New York Lost Its Great Chance With Frank Gehry? — New York Magazine by Justin Davidson
The mention of the word “starchitect” triggers a tirade. “It suggests an egomaniac trying to flaunt his wares at the expense of the public.” NYMAG: The Unbuilding of Frank Gehry
Gehry, much like other architects, doesn’t get that it’s not that simle. It’s not that architects are willy-nilly expoiters of the public (as if they had that much power!) It’s that “star architects” are often pruned into celebrities and then brought-in precisely when the public seems to be a particularly formidable foe, and that is what happened at Atlantic Yards.
Now it’s too late and Gehry realizes (again, too late) that he was treated like Lau in Infernal Affairs. Ratner is like the crime boss Sam who tricks Lau into revealing the location of police boss Wong and execute him, keeping him out of the way of a large coke shipment. Alas, like Lau, Gehry realizes at the end that he was loyal his whole life to the boss but in the end, the crime boss was willing to throw him under the train.
(reposted from my tumblelog, bezoar) | model photo: Gehry Partners LLP
DUTTY ARTZ: UPROOT ANDY MIX FOR DIESEL U:MUSIC RADIO
‘Nother one from the Annals of DJ Geographies:
DUTTY ARTZ » Blog Archive » UPROOT ANDY MIX FOR DIESEL U:MUSIC RADIO.
Take a jaunt through the sounds of Jamaica, Quisqueya, DF, the US…
Once and Never High Lines
The High Line in New York City, the once-abandoned rail easement, has partially re-opened to the public as a linear park. And the internet is aflare with amazing photos. So to celebrate, let’s take a look at some of the high lines that were or were never-to-be. Click on the images to travel to other websites where we can revisit these alter-places.
Bluejake: The High Line, August 2002
The view of the High Line from Chelsea gallery window on 19 January 2002 on Wired New York Forums
Nathalie Rinne, once an architecture student in Vienna, proposed a swimming pool in 2003.
A portion of a proposal by Gisue Hariri. See more also at Archi Dose.
Prison Park Pool, by Misha Sklar and Yevgeniya Plechkina, a really interesting counternarrative to the seemingly benign beautification of other proposals.
Zaha Hadid Architects with Balmori Associates, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP, and studio MDA. (more from the four finalist master planners on archinect and curbed)
“Not content to stop there, (Steven) Holl plays on fond Christmas memories with this hypnotic red/green neon underbelly for another portion of the High Line.” Said Curbed.
The above image was a way earlier (1981) proposal by the same architect, Steven Holl. This was, in the architects words, a “pragmatic” entry. It is perhaps one that best conforms to periods of high demand in housing, which also indirectly shows how improbable the current project for the High Line was.
Finally, at least one person thinks the best proposal for this line would have been to, well, either turn it back into a hard-working industrial rail line, or tear it down and reconnect the grid. He—James Howard Kunstler–sees the brainy, DIY-ish, loungy retrofit as decadent. (More on the Infrastructurist.)
Oh, but…
Then of course, this other person wanted to leave it as it was, “wild” as you might be able to read if you squint at the board. Though seemingly contrarian in the context of submitting it to the initial ‘ideas’ competition, it did seem to be awarded a prize in order to implicitly lend support to not tearing down the line itself.
[Updated w/ more images and links]
Floating museum on The Functionality
Captivating project spotted at The Functionality on Tomás Sarceno at the Walker Art Center.
32SW stay green/Flying Garden/Air-Port-City (2007), consists of inflatable, self-sustainable spheres, which sustain the growth of grass through irrigation powered by solar panels that capture energy from existing light sources.
Floating museum – Day to day – The Functionality. Will make note of it and add it to sources related to a previous post here, Architecture Imagined as Ecological. Am reminded of the careers of people like Allora y Calzadilla, and Mark Dion.
Exploring the City in Google Earth
Tom Wu, MArch II Studio Project: BEATTY FORD ISLAND, 2007 "In gleaning/scanning, unintentional disturbances inevitably occur, thus at unpredictable, but site-specific conditions there emerge moments that manifest a reversal of intentionality."
This just in… Surface Cities presents experimental projects in digital video and still images of the city as understood through simulated environments, namely Google Earth. The experimental images of the city begin with the premise that we increasingly navigate through real environments by first encountering them in fictive representations. The projects have a clairvoyant proclivity. They propose that: “Exposing the city’s unique structure and patterns of use in Google Earth’s gravitationless, layered environment is, like Kevin Lynch’s studies in the Image of the City, not only a necessary precondition for manipulating its image, but in fact can already reveal existing alternative images.” The web site is maintained by [full disclosure] my friends and former colleagues John Zissovici and Yanni Loukissas, the latter of whom was mentioned here before, in a somewhat related post. The projects include work by them as well as by their students.
Some of the projects are more straightforward than others. In one, the image of the city revealed is that of the extreme commuter. In another, a “continuous line that changes and transforms on its path through the Bronx, Manhattan and Brooklyn following one of the favorite graffiti artists’ subway lines.” A third looks at golf driving ranges. And on the more rarefied side, take a look at the “extra dimensionality (…) harvested from interference patterns, derived from the procedure of paired scanning, as the means to generate the manifold of an atlas.” (Whew). The magnum opus may be the 8 min, 33 sec Angel Dust, 2009, by Zissovici and Loukissas themselves, an exploration of the space implied by the cross-Manhattan expressway fantasized by Robert Moses but never built, suggesting that by knowing the spaces that never were, there is something to learn about the city that is. Take a look (but be patient if the Quicktime movies take a few minutes to load). Highly recommended: Surface cities.
Maiko Muranaka, MArch II Studio Project: A TOUR OF WASHINGTON D.C., 2007 | Instructors: John Zissovici and Paul Soulellis
Something in the Air
In the Air was a project by Nerea Calvillo and collaborators that was shown earlier this year at the Prado MediaLab and I just heard about it from @mediavisual. One part of this project is rather mundane to me. According to the team of architects and artists, “In the Air is a visualization project which aims to make visible the microscopic and invisible agents of Madrid’s air”. Another visualization, I thought to myself. So what?
But what really captivated me about this project is that the team then made a prototype and, in effect, made an atmosphere, or what they call a “diffuse façade”, in which tinted particulates and pollutants become parts of a building:
The cloud brings to mind several other experiments, most famously the Diller+Scofidio Blur building. In that case, though, the objective was to make a building that challenged the materiality of buildings. It still was…a building. In this case, I think, there’s the possibility to really push something else altogether, perhaps allowing for users to ‘make’ new atmospheres and/or environments (and make interesting distinctions between the two) based on various agendas.
For instance, the oft-cited David Gissen, in considering the reconstruction of historical air above Pittsburgh, thought the actual realization was impossible. But is it, now that we hear of this prototype?
Reconstruction – Smoke, 2006 by David Gissen
In the case of In the Air, the authors imagine a time when:
Assembly instructions will be posted on the web and each user will be able to make a unit for their balconies or windows. This will generate a distributed net of visualizations, representing the data collected throughout the city.
An individual can “tune” their unit to select the pollutant they are interested in tracking – this will allow for the construction of a collective map of personal environmental interests.
In the Air - future?
Personally, I’m more interested –not in the mapping possibilities of this air, which is an elusive reality to map at best, and actually more politically fraught than the team has realized– but in the further inventive possibilities, which of course can actually be more charged than mere visualization.
A step in a related direction is put forth by the work of Bompas & Parr, who’ve made cocktail air and cinematic air. These loosely related ideas suggest that these emerging techniques can be put to work in other creative ways. With In the Air’s instructions perhaps one could single out the air made by a polluter, and even re-situate it in a different location, a gallery perhaps. Or, colorize and let pollutants hover over a prohibited landscape–depleted Uranium over the closed Vieques “wilderness refuge” (a clever American government hoax)–only to be seen by tourists from afar. Maybe a very patriotic artist makes a bizarre monument to “air war”–to chemical warfare, that is–as would maybe be of interest to readers of Sloterdijk’s Terror from the Air. Or we might hear of Inigo Manglano Ovalle, using this technique for historical inquiries. The work of Sean Lally/Weathers also comes to mind in this context.
In short, what is most thought-provoking about the possible direction of this project, at least to me, has to do with the new natures that could be created or otherwise objectified and displayed. Or the spaces of natures that are alien to humans and that remain to be seen. It’s involuntarily related to that incident of “aerosolized pig brains”, a seemingly un-natural material that’s nonetheless manufactured from nature. Maybe in a swirl of the sublime at its most terrifying, one could walk into a cloud of pigbrains in a biohazard suit–a dystopic take on D+S’s Blur building–or create a house, a la R&Sie(n), where aerosolized pig brains become building envelope?
Map of Disputes
The WTO has posted an interactive map that guides you through disputes brought up in that body. Not surprisingly, the USA has the most in both directions.
Back Support
It’s been a few days since I posted. Lately I have been having a ball in an undisclosed location sifting through sources in a library, taking notes, and writing a dissertation prospectus. Meanwhile,I have also started to do some reading for an upcoming essay that will be due by the end of the year. Tired…
But as if that weren’t enough, I also am getting more and more interested in questions that were raised a few weeks ago here (2 much blog, 2 little arch).
I have been pondering how is it that supposedly participatory systems, such as twitter, tumblr, and ffffound! also demand certain forms of discipline in order to demonstrate personal taste and thus belong to a social user group. I wonder what the new stylistic modes of conformism and innovation are within the apparent arbitrariness of tumblelogs (of which some of my favorites are pootee, uuiuu!, dtybywl, and pblks). In a way, I am reminded of the work of my friend Yanni Loukissas, who studies how ‘design’ is conceptualized within cultures of simulation (such as Arup). Partly seen through the collective work in this new book, Simulation and its Discontents (2009), brought together by Sherry Turkle, we are forced to think about what it means to be ‘immersed’ in a technology, be it of modelling or of networking.
Inspired in this reading, I wonder how the incessant circulation of images amongst these addicts of the visual reshifts notions of the past, of reuse and remix, of nostalgia and tastes, of “intellectual property”, and even of matters so commonly glossed over as color and surface. In fact, the activities of these rebloggers, who very often turn to what we could identify as architecturally-flavored images, really call into question the oft-debated and fantasized “autonomy” of architecture.
As a reblogger you can’t afford to allocate architecture any primacy above anything else. In a sense, both the reblogging personae and their images are immersions into an imagination of space that I personally find at times much more hybrid, artistic, social—and provocative—than a good percentage of stuff architects are making out there… Or the purist objects in many archi-blogs. Here are some random examples of circulated images:
Not to imply that the impact of these social networks is wholly good. I often find myself uncomfortable with disturbing and problematic representations of race, gender and class within these streams, but the bottom line is that this trend is ripe for further investigation with eyes and minds wide open. Hopefully there will be more opportunities to look further into this matter…
Meanwhile, in case you’re interested, I have been sharing links on Twitter (@javierest). An interesting new development is that now, thanks to twitmark, I can use Twitter to automatically save bookmarks onto delicious (javierarbona), which is a fantastic development.
A BIG Bailout
Some months ago I had some kind of email exchange with Geoff Manaugh about an interesting little article in Bloomberg. As Geoff summarized it in BLDGBLOG: “financially hard-hit homeowners in the Los Angeles area have begun temporarily renting out their houses as filming locations for TV commercials and pornos.” In a twist to the current events of foreclosure and crisis (which is still sliding downward), well, what if one of those rented locations was actually used to re-enact a home eviction in and of itself? In other words, a home on the brink of foreclosure becomes a movie set, and then becomes the scene of a feigned foreclosure, which then leads to—as anything in the collective mind of Porn Valley does—sex.
The actors (barely “acting”, of course) pretend to arrive at a foreclosed property to take it in the name of the bank, and the homeowner asks to see a “big” bailout… Or something to that effect. A threesome ensues. Homeowner rolls the camera. It’s a take on relational art. And so, in relational fashion, a porn impresario has indeed now made perhaps the first 21’st-century crisis scene in a porno movie (or any movie, for that matter).*
If this first that we’re reporting here is any sign of a culture shift, it might be somehow reflective of a focus on the wrong place. As Dante Chinni’s brilliant blog in the Christian Science Monitor speculates: “If Americans become more like people in ‘Tractor Country,’ the drop in consumer spending may last longer and fundamentally change how we live and spend.” What much of Chinni’s reporting seems to reveal is that the home as site of disruption and conflict at the hands of foreclosing banks (see above), has actually been so from day one–a site deeply at the mercy of capital flows and speculation.
The confrontational nature of foreclosure as played out in the scene has been seething under the surface all along, bursting now and then (perhaps finding a valve in the sexual act). What Chinni, with research from James Gimpel, says is that: “‘Tractor Country’ was the only community type to see a decline in foreclosures between November and April – a dip of about 7 percent.” And as such, it is perhaps in the spending and saving behavior of Tractor Country that most Americans will locate their north star, and reshift the rest of the culture along the way. In other words, the foreclosed homeowners who felt “suburban“, in many ways find themselves suddenly “ruralized” in place. Meanwhile, the NYTimes reports that U.S. Home Sales Remain Sluggish as Supply Soars.
*For the curious about the foreclosure scene, Google Search yields this text: “Gianna, Carmella & Marco from the bank come to evict Jules. He wants a “bailout”, but instead they ball-out his house!” Tread with caution.
Ernesto Neto at Park Ave. Armory
We went to see the Ernesto Neto installation (“anthropodino”) at the Armory drill hall last Saturday. Warning: photos, while I’ll offer some here for some context, are futile. What completes this piece is, for one, the smell of spices hanging from spermatozoa-like sacks, which also seem to correlate to different color zones in this gossamer being. Another dimension is the play spaces that the structure accomodates, although it seems more useful to children than anyone else.
Cooper Union Bldg by Morphosis: Almost Ready for School Year
For more on this Morphosis building under construction see Curbed and Dezeen, or the Cooper gallery.
(Small) Theses?
As I write this post, I’m frazzled and in a multitask fog. But there are so many exciting things coming across my screen that I thought I had to share and at the very least register before I lose track. I started with the title “theses” because most of these loosely related items hinge upon some kind of thesis in one way or another. But the title is really just suggestive.
The state of craziness right now has to do with the fact that I have just finished an intense semester at Cornell’s architecture department, where I co-taught an MArch I (second year) studio, and a nifty little seminar on what I like to talk about as “everyday architectures”, or the in-between states where design comes into play materially as part of a larger political and social millieu. Anyway, if I can get around to it, I might post a syllabus. Finishing a semester usually means doing the usual grading madness, and returning books, but for me it also means, once again, packing up my belongings and sending ‘em off to California, where they will await their owner’s return in August. Tomorrow morning I’ll jump on a bus to NYC, where more craziness awaits. Lots and lots of people to see and shows to catch…. (Columbia architecture show, Ernesto Neto’s Armory installation, ICFF-related stuff, 49 cities at Storefront, Dwell party?, Pin Up … It might be interesting to see how many things I can do in two days).
But lately I’ve been pondering many issues related to the dreaded architecture thesis. Oh yes. That one. The so-called capstone to design where you prove you’ve made your bones. This past semester was an intriguing one, being my first seeing thesis reviews at Cornell–from the other side of the range, that is (thank god). It was mighty interesting and saw some good projects. Others, mmm, not so good, perhaps, though usually some salvageable ideas.
Well, here is an image from one of the better ones (just cus this student has posted it online and others haven’t, that I know of… I wasn’t on this review but got to see the project after). This was in intriguing proposal to design the ruination and occupation of the decaying space of a post-military landscape (surely a topic close to my heart!)
- By Garyhe33. click image for more.
Surely this student sticks to some Platonic forms in the landscape and perhaps consciously avoids prevalent trends in architecture (good for him!). Aside from the issue of vocabulary, it was also speculative –and detailed– at various scales, which was refreshing to see. Click the image for more.
But what worries me now is not so much an issue like the all-too-common incompleteness that made many potentially good projects not-so-good, in my opinion. For instance, if a student decides to design a building, then there’s gotta be some consistency from drawings to models and on to renderings. Perforations should be consistent throughout (not change in relative size from one mode of representation to the next), to name just one basic issue. And it’s galling what some get away with. But that happens every year.
What’s more serious is that I think we’ve gotten to a point, and Cornell is not the only one, where students have no position on what thesis itself can be. Maybe I am being romantic, but I think students should be able to explain why they had to do what they did. The thesis project would thus plumb the depths of a problem they conceptually should be able to frame. Yet there seem to be a series of trends going around — decoys, in a way. These are ways of getting away from justifying the scale(s) that the project intercedes in and the formats that were called upon to test the problem framed, if the student can frame it that is.
Another issue is a raft of quasi-scientific and “parametricized” projects shown unassailably as a thesis, just because of their seeming rigor. Also, then you have theses that show a building as a fait accompli… As if doing a building is automatically a thesis. Would the general spatial experience promised been accomplished with a few changes in grade or some kind of circulation system? Yes? Then why have a gigantic structure merely to “connect” portions of the city? That’s merely a simulation of a test, a test that actually has no strong variables.
But then on the other hand, there is also the issue of projects that promise to shift the very premises of architecture, only to then leave the jury deflated when there is no push to test it in some site or at the level of complexity of a program. Surely it seems the students can’t win no matter what, eh?… But then again, they can, if they take possession of what premises the thesis answers to and what it tests.
- Philippe Rahm’s Archimedes House, a thesis-building if there ever was one. click for related Metropolis article.
Somehow somewhere we need to discuss theses again. Maybe part of the problem is that the technology at the level of computation and at the level of outputs (laser-cutting, cnc milling) has made testing so easy, that it is even easier to forget, once again, these matters of the architectural scale of work. The multiples are so vast and the tests so endless that any size is seemingly possible. The screen space itself is subject to such a spectrum of scales of immersion (although often the students don’t understand them as such) that there is no longer a challenge of the basic assumptions. So, not to resolve the tensions brought up here… (no time for this today!)… But I just wanted to quickly scan a few projects that are small and have hit my inbox lately. just cus…
- Alex Mergold and Jason Austin’s House in a can
The small, as a thesis or as part of one, need not mean the ‘final’ or the complete somehow, but a scale all-too-often overlooked. The scale of this next project is also a means to succinctly test larger ideas of nature and sociability…
A bird house...where birds must work as a team to get into the food (by Nathalie Jeremijenko with Chris Woebken) one opening the latch while the other eats...or traps the other inside(!) Photo by CW.
Another interesting project is this award-winner spotted on Pruned. So simple… and yet, it’s the kind of thing you could imagine a thesis student doing on the fly, in the dead of night… to take an idea to its limits…
The Crack Garden, by CMG Landscape Architecture. Photo by Tom Fox.
Another aspect that really intrigues me about the small scale (of course, the important question is how small), is its possibilities to evade capture, it’s stealth potential… It can be a scale to be manipulated for maximum spatial effect, but operating at a scale that many-a-times might be increasingly unimportant to the capitalist, and therefore pregnant with opportunities for lateral movement, invading sites, or registering landscape from an angle not commonly allowed by hegemony (also a key part of the CCA Actions show). In that sense, I am reminded of another recent small project by Austin + Mergold…
A good reuse for insulation... A CNC Kite, a nifty and evasive, stealthy scale to work at.
Total tangential relation to that kite, but thought I would just point you to an awesome pirate music vid: Windsurf – Weird Energy. Maybe it has nothing to do with the rest of this post, but it could…At least it’s representations of architecture with sound, and speaking of sound, I might as well also bring into this post what Nick Sower’s has been doing as a mode of spatial investigation: audio recording, which could very well fit into this theme of smallness. Check out his blog soundscrapers for samples…
One more example, just for the hell of it… The park cycle by Rebar:
An elusive park. Photo: Rebar
And finally, I thought I would also point you to what looks to be a very intriguing book going to press right now, though probably misplaced here, as it certainly may not be a small thesis: Subnature, by a frequent conversation partner, David Gissen. Check it out. Put it on your shopping list. More stuff to come soon…
Hand on Your Heart Video
And now a short interlude for some musical satiation. Some of my friends know how much I love the sounds of Jose Gonzalez. If you’ve followed this blog of late, you might have seen that I am also interested in sharing with you the musical tones of diasporas of all sorts. These are sometimes the sounds of the geography of labor flows, or of persecutions, or likewise, the musical chronicles of “uneven development”. They’re also the musical results of globalization forcing commercial aural geographies one way, but people down below reinventing it another way, so to speak. Anyway, enough rambling… (but feel free to peruse the music category here).
Himself a first-generation Swede of displaced parents from Argentina, one thing that Gonzalez is known for is how he mutates other people’s songs through his guitar. His style is said to be inspired by Cuba’s Silvio Rodriguez (who, by the way, was just denied an entry visa into the US for Pete Seeger’s 90th birthday; way to reform…)
Now take a look at this one… First, Australia’s Kylie Minogue bubbles through a plaintive break-up song (“put your hand on your heart and tell me it’s all over”)
But then see how Gonzalez transforms it into the melancholic song it probably had to be anyway.
Garden of Reverse Destinies Postscript
To add to the last post about Puerto Rico’s romantic ruins of a Moshe Safdie project, I’m tickled to find out that Canada has made Habitat 67 into a historic monument. How appropriate! What a collision of architectural proclivities. Puerto Rico should hurry and give historic status to its Safdie piece as well.
On the one hand, with Habitat 67, Safdie showed the world what is often said to be an alternative model for mass low-cost, prefab dwellings. Save us from ourselves, will ya? (I’ve heard that Habitat 67, far from housing the masses of displaced peoples is actually packed with, who else?, architects). For ages many in the development and architecture professions have upheld Habitat as a solution for ‘out of control’ cities. But, oh!, the irony… At the end of the day, the ruin, as I suggested in the past post, might prove to be architecture’s higher calling. (And Dov Charney seems to agree).
See also Safdie’s wikipedia entry.
Garden of Reverse Destinies
Lost Safdie project, a paradoxical inspiration to green architects everywhere?… According to a stubby entry in Archiplanet.org on Moshe Safdie: “Initially his ideas proved expensive and difficult to construct, but Safdie introduced the cellular scheme in several areas including New York and Puerto Rico where his ideas were successfully initiated.” Nonetheless, a chance encounter with a 2008 blog entry reveals something slightly less successful, but perhaps all the more thought-provoking: evidence of Safdie’s Puerto Rican project lost and abandoned amidst a jungle, located at the misnamed Berwin “Farm”. Or was that the success that was always envisioned? Is this a bit of accidental proof of how some architecture just so happens to be a fantasy about a deserted earth?
And I wonder…Did Minsuk Cho and Jeffrey Inaba go there, with fatigues and nightvision, for an inspirational visit as they planned this project? Or perhaps in this current era of overfertilized green architecture, all sorts of past forms of failed architectures get recast as disembodied lesson plans for the future. The new grand tour takes you to places like this one…
Safdie's module lost amidst Puerto Rico's vegetation. Photo by "Desayuno Calle", 2008.
See full entry with two more photos at Futriaca | To find out more about this project, and other Habitat experiments by Safdie, visit this matrix and this history.
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