My First UN Visit

The pictures are nowhere near as informative as the visit was, but I figured I would post them nonetheless:

Programming (the UN etc)

Ok, so the last few days have been considering program. To cut to the chase:

I had a brainstorming session (with AB) about program. I came up with 5 or 6 interesting ones. The big caveats were:
- "You are using the UN etc. to make arguments about architecture and agency, not about world peace and the like."
- "I should be able to distill program (that is interesting/important to me) from these, the arguments themselves are not the only things that matter (ie program is more important than argument/scenario)

Images of the blackboard (being as transparent and candid as possible here):


Based on this, I thought about 6 programs for a while. So far, the UN is the only one that has really gone anywhere fast. So in the spirit of ruthlessness and expediency, here is a slideshow ruminating on the UN as program, and Hong Kong and New York as sites. Its sort of all over the map and and loosely structured, but its doing something.

PLUS, ITS EXCITING! I am actually very into all this, and it dovetails really well with all my previous research. So, ruminations on other programs will proceed and summaries will be forthcoming, but for now,

HERE ARE SOME THOUGHTS ON THE UN AS OFFERING A THESIS (Including Proposal-ly things)

One Last Columbia Studio Brief

One last Columbia studio brief:

Ed Keller

'WORLD GAMES' for a GENERAL ECONOMY of Information and Energy


In the broadest sense, our studio program will be to design an infrastructure, a game, buildings, or even a city within an inclusive general economy that we describe in this brief. We will look to the way that energy & information are stored in the landscapes of the world- cities, highways, airports, deserts- and attempt to inflect the paths they flow along.

Dynamic systems in relation to each other condition not only the basics of interaction in the world, but also the very structure of time itself. The project of architecture, of design- is by its very nature, the construction of 'time machines'.

'"information and form always appear in association with historic development. In a world already endowed with a certain structure, any interaction between matter and energy- which signifies increased entropy- alters the structure and makes future changes more predictable..." In urban development, or in a building's construction, every decision- tracing a roadway, situating a facility, distributing a floor plan- conditions subsequent building episodes, rendering them more predictable; the energy necessary to materialize each of these decisions is accumulated in physical structures that on the one hand condition future construction, and on the other hand can be used to interpret past construction. The energy stored in construction- both in the materials themselves and in the significant order in which they find themselves as a result of transport and installation- is therefore projected toward the future, which it helps form, and toward the past, which it interprets.'
Fire and Memory, Fernadez-Galiano pp. 63/64

We will use this idea of energy, information, form, and time in the studio to develop a program in relation to contemporary problems of infrastructure and territory. We will add to it the model of general economy offered by Georges Bataille in his volumes The Accursed Share, and we will place Bataille's thinking against the 'World Game' concept proposed by Bucky Fuller.

'World Game is a continuing scientific research and physical prototyping development. It is devoted to progressive discovery of how most efficiently and expeditiously to employ [1] the total world-around resources, [2] total accumulated knowledge, and [3] the total already-produced technological tooling of Spaceship Earth, all three to the ever advancing equal advantage of all its present and future passengers.'
Critical Path, B. Fuller, p. 202

One of the strengths of Bataille's model in The Accursed Share is his ability to think through cultural, infrastructural and ecological energetic systems using an inclusive model. This addresses one of the basic limitations of Fuller's World Game, which emphasizes the fundamental survival of humans. I won't deny that our basic survival is indeed at stake today; however we will propose that factoring informational systems into the energy equations is necessary. One of the possible weaknesses of Bataille's model is an insistence on the unavoidable expenditure of energy. Whether this is seen as a waste, or a use of the energy for previously incomprehensible gains- c.f. potlatch, which Bataille cites, for example- will be one of the themes the studio tests.


'On the surface of the globe, for living matter in general, energy is always in excess; the question is always posed in terms of extravagance. The choice is limited to how the wealth is to be squandered... Solar radiation results in a superabundance of energy on the surface of the globe...living matter receives this energy and accumulates it within the limits given by the space that is available to it... real excess does not begin until the growth of the individual or group has reached its limits.'
The Accursed Share, Bataille, pp23-29

We will ask how architecture and urbanism can participate in a game within a general economy and general system of the world. What possible futures can be accessed by the time machines we develop?

We will visit several case study locations on our Kinne trip, which will include airports, highways around LA, the city of LA, and the Owens Gorge and Salton Sea desert areas near LA. In our visit to the Owens Gorge area, we will be guided by Matt Coolidge, working with CLUI [The Center for Land Use Interpretation], based out of LA. We will also visit their LA headquarters.

SPEED, TERRITORY, COMMUNICATION
Considering the project of architecture within this model of a general economy suggests the need for a wider net which can compass the 'invisible conspiracies' that theorists like Jameson have suggested we live surrounded by, in today’s unescapably geopolitical world.

The factors of mediation and migration described by Appadurai in his Modernity at Large parallel ideas that Foucault unpacked some 40 years ago, when he called the great variables of the post-modern and post-industrial world 'speed, territory, and communication'. These domains are not inherently part of the previous paradigm's vision of what an architect manages in their practice; however, one could argue that our current paradigm, shifts in technology, the sciences, global culture, politics and communication are indeed all vectors for a redefinition of what an architect or urban designer does, and in fact all those disciplines partake in the realms of mediation and migration- in the realms of 'speed, territory, and communication'.

The territories that architecture can establish- not just lines on the ground, or geometric composition, but networked energetic and material flows- the new speeds by which urban programs emerge, evolve, and propagate worldwide through social practices that are not part of buildings, but are nonetheless inseparable from space as a practice- the communications systems which are increasingly part of architecture- not in a semiotic process but in the ways that the construction of buildings increasingly offers the opportunity of construction within an intelligent system of manufacturing, financing, and use; these are all reasons why architecture as it has largely been practiced must undergo a paradigm shift on the practical and conceptual levels if it is to maintain or increase is value.


MEDIATION and MIGRATION
Appadurai's terms mediation and migration can impact design thinking on a very practical level. Much as Foucault changed the way we understand the work of language itself, in his text Archaeology of Knowledge, which redirected our attention away from a search from meaning, toward a search for the AFFECT of assemblies of words and concepts- similarly we have to consider the affect of mediation in today's world. This affect has little to do with the meaning or semiotic of architecture and space, and much more to do with the ways that space mobilizes ideologies, economies, cultures, and subjectivities. In this mode of thinking, it is irrelevant to argue about the meaning of a building, a facade, an urban space, a technology. The primary question leaps up in scale to ask how the design works, where it is relevant, what it moves. Affect addresses this issue.

Affect mediation is linked to MIGRATION. Migration of cultures, ideas, economies, information and energy. But also, migration of biomass and power. The biopower issue as engaged by thinkers like Foucault, Negri and Hardt, et.al., is key here, and today's architecture needs to address this fully.

Cities can inflect the massive flows of human bodies- by some accounts, in China alone hundreds of millions in the floating population, and worldwide some billions squatting on land they do not own- with entire nations depending on these 'illegal immigrants' to power economies, industry, agriculture. If cities can acknowledge, integrate, and inflect these masses, then they will be participating in an unprecedented manner.


PROGRAM , SITES

The site for this studio will be a generic, extended global landscape of migratory
infrastructures, highlighting the contrast from the open energy fields of the desert,
through the channels of the highway and the airport, to the energetic reservoirs of the city.

Although a general range of sites is given- Deserts, Highways, Cities, Airports- this site is extremely open. This studio will ask the students to formulate a thesis in response to the challenges offered by the studio brief. Students will develop their own programs and choose specific locations in the global 'site' to design their projects. It is suggested that the design solution is positioned approximately ten years in the future.

Our travel will take us to several locations on our Kinne trip to do case studies in Los Angeles, several airports in transit and in LA, the highways we can study around LA, and the Desert south and east of LA: the Salton Sea and Owens Valley areas. We'll pass infrastructural and energy accumulation sites: the Windfarms near Palm Springs, the many power plants, irrigation networks and infrastructures outside of LA.

There will also be an optional hop to Seattle to investigate further airport infrastructures, and the recently completed Seattle Library.


PROCESS

Methodologically, we will begin with an analysis process and develop a predictive model .
This will involve the conversion of data from dynamic, analytical models which simulate
systems behaviors, into a set of rules for designing architecture, infrastructure, and urban space. This process also will demand the conversion of these models into a set of rules for
playing the game. In this world game, the dynamic models should tell us something about the flow of energy and information through that world system.

REQUIRED READING [excerpts]
Fire and Memory: Fernandez-Galiano
Taking Measures Across the American Landscape: Corner & Maclean
Crying of Lot 49: Pynchon
Critical Path: B. Fuller
UBIK: Philip K. Dick
The Accursed Share: G. Bataille
City of Quartz, Dead Cities: Davis
Empire + Multitude: Hardt and Negri
A Thousand Years of NonLinear History: M. DeLanda
Structural Stability and Morphogenesis: R. Thom
Geopolitical Aesthetic: F. Jameson
Diamond Age: N. Stephenson

REQUIRED SCREENINGS
Koyanisquatsi: Reggio
Lessons of Darkness: Herzog
Once Upon a Time in the West: Leone
Mamma Roma: Pasolini
Chinatown: Polanski
Easy Rider: Hopper
Beau Travail: Denis
Playtime: Tati
Crash: Cronenberg
Lost Highway: Lynch
Paris, Texas: Wenders
Man With a Movie Camera: Vertov
Passenger, Zabriskie, Point, Red Desert: Antonioni
Repo Man: Cox
Until the End of the World: Wenders
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: Gilliam
Polygraph: LePage



ADDITIONAL READING
Shockwave Rider: J. Brunner
Electronic Disturbance, other texts: Critical Art Ensemble
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: Thompson
Organizational Space: Keller Easterling
Tomorrow Now: Bruce Sterling
Anabasis: St Jean Perse
The Invisibles: Grant Morrison
Transmetropolitan: Warren Ellis
Lipstick Traces: Greil Marcus
Out of Control: Kevin Kelly
Smart Mobs: Howard Rheingold
Modernity at Large: Arjun Appadurai
Double Game: Sophie Calle
TechGnosis: Erik Davis
Watchmen: Alan Moore
A Thousand Plateaus: Gilles Deleuze + Felix Guattari

Peabody Air Slideshow

This is Peabody Air. A brief photo-documentary looking at air and its infrastructure in a Peabody Terrace apartment (mine). Almost identical to the one on the left:



I am attempting to bring together:
1) Modernism
2) State of Exception (?)
3) Peabody Terrace
4) Infrastructure
5) Air
6) Google
7) Tactics

Ambitious? I think not.
Let the images do the talking (composition does matter):

Yosemite Grid

Thoughts and Columbia

Once again proving that it's all been done before, I sampled recent Columbia studio briefs and found outcroppings of my thesis interests under the surface everywhere. Or I'm just reading in to things. Either way, innovation is lame, so lets just consider this a confirmation of intelligence and a commitment to mastery. Perhaps excerpting some snippets will help me situate myself against alternate theses.

One big divide that seems lurking under the surface (if I may paraphrase and exaggerate a little, these things are probably mostly coming from my head anyway), is the split between:

(1) Briefs that put architecture in service of a de Certeau-like agenda of expanding room for free play within the product world of capitalism. The exercising of biopower as a tactical political move. This idea exacerbates the feelings of frustration I encountered on reading a chunk of de Certeau last night. While I think his conception of the world is elegant, captivating, and most importantly evidencing truth, or at least the image of it along with correctness, his conclusion that tactics must take the form of play seemed deadening, at least for architecture.
It seems like we are either on the side of the generic system (the side of production, the man), or we are forced to minimize our role in the interesting (at least per de Certeau) side of consumption, to disappear, leaving everyman as his own, kinda lame, spatial manipulator.
So, in order for this to work in such a way that interests me, the architect would need to increase agency such that, first, we actually increase the room for play, and second, we actually improve, expand, alter the definition of play to increase its potential effects. We make the biopower stronger and better. So architects could either (1) design the tactics of de Certeau's politics (designing them might already be a contradiction), (2) or they could willingly provide an infrastructure (his iambic pentameter analogy) that increases constraint to encourage creativity (but then aren't we still on the production/man side), (3) or they could open up intentional holes in something that doesn't at first seem like infrastructure, or even within existing infrastructures, which allow biopower to flourish in and capitalize on, and even expand.
One would be a strategy of designing consumption itself, one of designing an infrastructure of consumption, and one of producing holes for consumption (through parasitic, corruptive, deceptive, erasing, altering, hiding/revealing, making hackable etc moves within existing infrastructures (or architectures).
At first blush, the first seems somewhat tedious, with a scale too small for architecture (or maybe for me, thats what frustrated me when reading de Certeau, at least). The second seems to embody contradiction, and be somewhat pompous. The third seems the most immediately appealing. Not just because the quality of the architectural responses it seems to trigger for me sound cool, but because it also seems to actually define a role, an agency, for the architect within a given conception of the world. We are not the man, working on products. But we are also not just the people, working on our tiny zone in a sea. Rather we are a new agent that seeks to operate with the relevant techniques in favor of the people (and to some degree the man, by keeping some focus on production as well) with systems that are relevant, on the systems' own terms. This allows us to slowly encourage play, and then modify it as an appropriate architecture as it/we develop...

(2) Briefs that paint a roughly similar picture of the world, but respond not with biopower but with new network connections. They return political power and agency on a large scale, they believe it. So while some of the rhetoric in these studios sounds correct in framing a scenario, the approach, at least for now, seems less appealing to me. Still useful as oppositional framing devices.

Note: A lot of these also espouse a worldview of increasing statelessness, global-everything, and diffuse something-or-another that seems not so right. I prefer to think that these spaces are within relatively conventional definitions of the world (states, borders, etc) and rather can make a footprint through states of exception. There are weird parallel and/or overlapping conditions, but I don't think that the world is yet turning into a homogenized soup. I think. At least not at the scale I am interested in.

Ok, for fun, interesting (for better or for worse) snippets from Columbia's recent studio briefs. After writing all this the connections to below seem flimsier and less necessary, but have interesting smells and feels within little moments or ideas. The language is peppered with relevancies, which probably means either I have cast my net too wide and vague (surely a truth), or that my topic is super-awesome (also inevitable), or that my project is all-consuming in terms of its ability to materialize in my eyes, to change the forms of things (yup).
So here goes:


Reinhold Martin, Fall 2005
Governor’s Island, New York. In the spring of 2005, Governors Island Preservation and Education Corporation (GIPEC) issued a “Request for Expressions of Interest” to develop the island.

In response, we propose that:

1. The island be renamed Utopia (an island second in fame and influence only to Manhattan), and that all subsequent development be expected to live up to that name.
2. The new island’s urbanism be one of islands—individual units of space arranged to maximize programmatic mixture—of which Guggenheim: Utopia will be the first.
3. The resulting islands within islands be designed as an escape—“Escape to the Islands.”

Guggenheim: Utopia is therefore conceived as a beautiful object whose primary function is to attract visitors and investment capital to Governors Island through the public display of art and culture.

In particular, we will take notice of—and attempt to neutralize—their shared organicism. As a backdrop for the understanding of architecture as a self-referential aesthetic object...

Enigma/Entropy

The aesthetic model we will pursue will privilege enigma over communication and entropy over order.

Utopian Realism

The overall challenge of the studio will be to explore the architectural and urban potential of an approach that can be called Utopian Realism, which asserts that:

1. The further inside (architecture) you go, the further outside (the city, the world) you get.
2. Every building imagines a city.
3. Every building can imagine a better city, and a better world.


Laura Kurgan, Fall 2005
No such permanent institution -- with the ability to prosecute and jail individuals for crimes outside the jurisdiction of a single nation-state -- has ever existed in the history of humanity.

its spatial definition (as an institution with global reach and borderless jurisdiction. but housed in a particular place in built structures) is still being debated.

The institution can be interpreted architecturally, then, as part archive, part courthouse, part stage or broadcast studio, part research center, or as a complex hybrid of existing programs, some of which are not easily compatible, and one whose reach and public extends automatically beyond its temporal and physical location.

Your work should take into account the fact that the courtroom is always a built diagram. Do not confuse the minimal elements of the ICC courtroom's program (interpretation booth, robing chambers, etc.) with the basic diagrammatic structure of any courtroom -- it is the latter on which you should concentrate here, and hence distinguish between the diagrammatic and its programmatic aspects of the courtroom.

Consider what happens to these courtrooms-as-diagrams once inserted into the larger context of the ICC as an institution, and once the ICC is itself active in even larger contexts, i.e. networks of power, information, and ethics. As an institution (not a building), what is the ICC, what might it do or become, and what forces is or will it in turn be subjected to?

Although the building is made of a series of rooms, it is also constructed of a series of networks and remote locations, both visible and invisible, and looks backwards and forwards in history.


Scott Marble, Spring 2006
...we will consider the ubiquitous portable classroom that results from the chronic problem of fluctuating enrollment and general overcrowding of public schools. While they are always intended to be deployed temporarily as an interim solution to space needs, portable classrooms are very often used for many years becoming part of the permanent landscape of public schools. And while they are universally seen as architecturally inadequate and symbolically negative, they continue to expand in use.


Marc Tsurumaki, Spring 2006
At once a space of regimentation and control, the hotel is conversely a site of pleasure, play and social experimentation. In this sense, the hotel approaches an architecture of ludic excess, a technical and bureaucratic apparatus whose primary function is diversion. A provocative assemblage of itineraries, functions and performances, it offers an incubator for emergent forms of collective experience and new techno-social assemblages. Viewed opportunistically, the paradoxical mix of efficiency and excess provides a rich ground for intervention, revealing the complimentary relation between play and order, between the productive and the transgressive, between the conventional and the radically inventive.


Fred Levrat, Spring 2006
Geopolitical investment and brilliant marketing has allowed the small city of Dubai to recently become one of the major metropolitan players in the world. Fantasy and marketing has become a way to attract capital, generating a city not based on “demand” or “necessity” (there is absolutely no local population need) but on the satisfaction of the materialization of a “virtual environment.”

In Rem Koolhaas retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan “Delirious New York” the main reference for the iconography and driving force for the constitution of Manhattan is fuelled by the fantasy of Coney Island and the concept of New York as an attractor of new population and capital. If the Chrysler Building or the Empire State building are to be labeled as subconscious association to the Coney Island land of pleasure, one has to recognize the entirely conscious and meticulous planning of operations such as the Palm, the World or the Burj Dubai.

The double physical condition of the tabula rasa, on the desert sand and on the water has been quite helpful for this construction of dreams. The other tabula rasa is happening socially, where international capital and an imported “slave” labor allows almost any materialization.

Arab investors are not anymore interested to invest in the US stock market, and are looking for an outlet to develop their own “progressive” environment.

The role of the architect is not just to solve problems but to invent new environments. To constitute a package of virtual materialization – with the name, the design, the product, the materials, etc. Even invent the type of user that should use it. Not at an object level but on an environment level, on a neighborhood level…


Leslie Gill and Tina Manis, Spring 2006
the first studio focused on the formation of the Department of Homeland Security and the housing of its workforce in a regional outpost in the American Southwest. The following semesters examined a federally mandated agenda to increase security in the form of sanctioned programs to build barricades along the border. This year, we extend our focus to examine the role of the American Embassy in Mexico City and/or the role of a Mexican Office of Consulate Affairs in San Diego; both programs have historically represented two scales of the domestic and international identity at home and abroad.

The State Department’s mission for embassies is clear, yet the identity and presence of the embassy remains in a state of flux becoming increasingly a fortress of secrecy rather than that of a house of entertainment. The world’s perception of the US Embassy extends the country’s image abroad and is at once a symbol of American vulnerability and one of arrogance and excess.

Conversely, the role of the consulate is less directly tied to national identity and politics. Its smaller scale and flexible mandate provide for a nimble, bottom-up, organizational structure. As a result the consulate has been less architecturally emblematic, more accessible, and better integrated into the local environment. Ultimately its obscured status is more accessible than its larger sibling.


Ed Keller and Moji Baratloo, Spring 2006
Control of water, protocols for its treatment and distribution, and an evaluation of the overall influence on urban morphology will be a key factor for socio-political formations over the coming decades. The impact of these factors on urban use patterns, as well as developing architectural, urban and political morphologies will be the focus of this studio.

As we enter the second decade of the twenty-first century, one thing is clear: a general economy and scarce natural resources ever more powerfully dominate global relations, and this economy subsumes all political, passional, and imaginative systems. A set of constraints with water, energy and resource management as their prime concern dominates global discourse, which still relies on the residual artifacts of an old school geopolitic, one that represents nation states are the primary arbiter for both global, political and personal agency. As global citizens we are facing a potential crisis of unprecedented dimensions, but also the opportunity for rapid response, growth and change at a pace never before possible.

recent actions by individual cities to adopt the Kyoto Protocol independent of their host nation’s actions on Kyoto point to a new kind of global association emerging that dissolves previous fixed relations and repositions cities as networked mini-states with global agency. [eg. the dozens of US cities connected through ‘Local Governments for Sustainability’.]

will investigate this new relationship between water, networks, and bio-power management and suggest emergent social, political, and economic bodies that can affiliate literally overnight, thus developing new tactics for program invention, landscape control, and indeed resource use.

By engaging in this project, we imply that the new, global, networked city is more than just a disintermediated cultural field that individuals can coopt for new forms of ‘play’, but indeed offers unprecedented opportunities - if cities such as Brisbane and the Gold Coast in Australia can prepare- to channel water and resource use such that they become real organs for social and political equity.

TECHNE- Tectonic and Organizational
The New York Waterfront: ed. Kevin Bone
City of Quartz, Dead Cities: Davis
Organizational Space: Easterling
Critical Path, B. Fuller
Once Upon a Time in the West : Leone Manhatta : Sheeler + Strand

CONCEPT
Means Without End: Giorgio Agamben
Geopolitical Aesthetic: Jameson
Practice of Everyday Life: deCerteau
The Accursed Share: Bataille
Fire and Memory: Fernandez-Galiano
A Thousand Plateaus: Gilles Deleuze + Felix Guattari

Psychogeographies of Water and Landscape
Taking Measures Across the American Landscape: Corner + MacLean
Crying of Lot 49: Pynchon
Red Desert: Antonioni The Return : Zvyagintsev
The Kingdom, Element of Crime: Lars von Trier Repo Man : Alex Cox
Delicatessen, City of Lost Children : Caro + Jeunet Fitzcarraldo : Herzog
Mulholland Drive: Lynch Beau Travail : Denis
Stalker: Tarkovsky The Last Wave : Weir
Apocalypse Now : Coppola Bright Future: Kurosawa

Systems Behavior, Material Controls
1000 Years of Non Linear History: Manuel DeLanda
Emergence: Johnson
Hypersea: McMenamin and McMenamin
Smart Mobs: Howard Rheingold
Empire, Multitude: Hardt and Negri
Cymatics, Hans Jenny
Syriana: Gaghan Lessons of Darkness: Herzog
Chinatown: Polanski Videodrome, Crash: Cronenberg
Heat: Mann

Scenarios: Past, Present and Future
Modernity at Large: Arjun Appadurai
Electronic Disturbance, other texts: Critical Art Ensemble
Diamond Age: N. Stephenson
UBIK: Philip K. Dick
Transmetropolitan: Warren Ellis
Shockwave Rider: J. Brunner
Dune : Frank Herbert
Koyanisquatsi : Reggio Playtime : Tati
Apu Trilogy : Satyajit Ray The Day After Tomorrow : Emmerich


Jeffrey Inaba, Spring 2006
The term 'Bubble City' is used to describe the explosive development of urban areas throughout the world that we have experienced in the past three decades. Bubble cities have been of interest to planners and architects for revealing new professional conditions they must or will soon encounter, such as accelerated economic investment and divestment, fast-track planning, and 'instant' construction processes (e.g., Tokyo, Houston, Barcelona, Berlin, "Holland," Shenzhen, Beijing, Shanghai, Dubai, Mumbai, etc.).

or every contemporary city that is hot, now there are several that are not. This studio explored the conceptual situation bubble cities face after the apex of rapid growth. With the growing number of major world cities that have recently hit a plateau, it is possible to examine the efforts of these bubble cities to re-bound in ways that previous cities have not, fueled in part by the not-so-distant experience of irrational prosperity.

The studio used Hong Kong as a case study. Students proposed new directions in light of its 1990s growth, its reunification with China, the 'Asian Economic Crisis,' and SARs. The 'One Country, Two Systems' mantra has effectively shifted from a policy to use Hong Kong as a laboratory to 'learn' from the market economy, to one largely limiting Hong Kong's economic power, expertise, and infrastructure. Hong Kong is an example of a major world city that must invent its future where the advantages of location and advanced infrastructure have been minimized.


HERE'S ONE BIG POOPER, I ALMOST DON'T WANT TO WRITE IT. Its really just the term, the rest seems undeveloped, even malformed. But still.
Ed Keller and Douglas Diaz, Summer
Historically unprecedented relationships emerge today as the centuries-old idea of a 'state of exception' finds increasingly networked channels of operation. The contemporary boundaries of global institutions create utterly new forms of territory, and these require a different range of urban and architectural solutions.

Today an emerging space of freedom and agency may have a chance to install the sociopolitical intensities envisioned by Constant in his New Babylon schemes; fully activated and responsive to Bataille's general economy, for better or worse: catalyzing unexpected transitive relationships in the world system of politics, culture, capital, energy, and information.

The studio began with a four-week project, analyzing precedent models of insurrections (historical or imaginary). A range of filmsâ€"Battle of Algiers, Code 46, Passenger, etc.â€"were screened and discussed to provide a theoretical framework for the design process. After the mid-review, the studio divided into two general camps: either anti- or pro-insurrection.

Projects operated at multiple scales and questioned how they might promote notions of control or freedom at the level of the city, crowd, or individual, through landscape, media, urban design, and architectural intervention. As the nation-state fades as a meaningful construct, the tectonic plates of sociopolitical drift govern all systems, behaviors and interactions. The studio tactically intervened within this geopolitical system to test the limits of architecture.

Ok, tomorrow I will go through last year, but frankly it is not getting that much more helpful. Writing that paragraph at the top was much more helpful.

Today's Radical Proposal

Today's Radical Proposal (after digesting the revelatory introduction of de Certeau's "The Practice of Everyday Life" (which I am only beginning, for now, to scan, appropriate and assimilate (good words)), which also happens to further frame Peabody Intervention as an observation test case: The thesis prep document becomes a tactical manual for resistance for the Allston community in the face of Harvard's expansion, a tactical assemblage for "renting" and therefore exerting political control over its geographic (maybe no longer legally...) space, and The Thesis becomes either the exercising of these tactics in a war-game mock scenario to create seeds/holdouts, or better (maybe) the provision of the infrastructure for such operations to utilize ("a body of constraints stimulating new discoveries, a set of rules with which improvisation plays") as a complement to the manual, or maybe better even the deployment of a parasitic architecture that leeches off the existing architecture/infrastructure to improve the conditions to nourish such new modes of consumption.

Web Giants Angle for Spectrum

Web Giants Angle for Spectrum: "Google and company wants to tap what they call the 'white spaces' of unused spectrum within the frequencies of TV channels 2-51 that the Federal Communications Commission has set aside for traditional broadcasters once the digital switch-over is complete in February 2009. Google and company then would transmit to a plethora of devices."

Unique US home with Cold War Ambiance

Unique US home with Cold War ambiance

BBC News

For those of us who remember the destruction of the Berlin Wall more clearly than the Cold War that preceded it, it is a chilling lesson in just how real the fear of nuclear annihilation was.

The Cold War warriors did not do things by halves. These Titan 1 missile bases took two-and-a-half years to build and were the most extensive, complex and costly ever constructed by the US Air Force that ran them.

...

Built to withstand a nuclear blast as close as 1,000m away, every room was either mounted on springs or a cushioned floor to protect from vibration.

In the domed control room, there are still springs on the ceiling, from which the early computer equipment was once suspended.

Vast black tanks loom in side chambers. They held diesel fuel for the generators and drinking water for the staff of about 25 who lived underground for days at a time.

They would have been sealed in for weeks after a nuclear attack. The round surface air vents in the ceilings could be snapped shut at the flick of a switch. The escape tubes, sealed at the bottom by heavy iron lids, were filled with tons of gravel to slow the progress of any invasion force.

The atmosphere is cool down there, regardless of the temperature on the surface. The drab green and cream paint is peeling in places; pipes and vents snake everywhere.

...

It never came. But the last base commander, Colonel Clyde D Owen, told me they were constantly aware of just how much destructive power they had.

He said he would never forget the first time he was brought through the tunnels to see a giant Titan missile in its silo, describing it as "an awesome sight".

...

Eventually, hundreds more silos would be built, scattered across America's quiet backwaters.

...

Some of these underground warrens are now owned by water companies and storage firms. Others have been turned into homes.

Of the rest, many were abandoned with their silo doors open and have slowly filled with water, prompting illegal night-time visits by extreme scuba divers.

Bari Hotchkiss, who is selling Larson Site A on internet auction site eBay, says he has been approached by a company interested in turning one of the 160-foot missile silos into an artificial reef.

An entrepreneur and amateur historian, he bought the complex on a whim in 1998. Ideally, he would like to see it turned into a children's summer camp and educational facility.

It is an admirable aim - though for the moment the base still feels haunted by the ghosts of Armageddon.

Talk about reprogramming.

Peabody Intervention - Inspirational Source Material (Tactical Situational Awarerness)

So, in the tactical spirit of my next exercise - Peabody Intervention - I am proposing that as far as "source material" goes for thinking up something, I am only allowed the first two informational things I could find quickly and spontaneously about Peabody Terrace (less than 5 minutes on Google). You go to war with the army you have. Right. Also, there are things we know we know, things we know we don't know, and things we don't know that we don't know. Thanks Donald.

I will attempt to use them as starting points. Or I will summarily dispose of them. Whichever is quicker and more effective. No mercy.

Situation Briefing
Contextual Intel

(1) Harvard Workers Respond As a Team to Peabody Terrace Emergency
see article highlights below
The first is an article concerning a fire/evacuation at Peabody Terrace in 2000. I think its most salient aspect is its indication that a series of scripted responses by agents of the surrounding networks, of which Peabody Terrace is a node, demonstrate the connectedness of the Peabody Terrace enclave to wider the University System.

A scripted event-response revealing a hidden condition of differentiation (Is it really legible? To whom?). Procedures exposing underlying rules. It momentarily highlights Peabody's extreme difference from its immediate surroundings. Its enclave-ness. A situation of unusual occurrence, responded to with pre-prepared tactical force, revealing a difference in underlying structures (legal, property, social), enabling awareness (is awareness capital, convertible to power?). I guess one real meaty question to ask would be, what if a similar electrical fire were to happen in a surrounding area? More importantly, how can I understand this architecturally. Can I?

The fire starts in architecture, because of a faulty network component within the architectural enclave. This sends a shockwave, an alert, through the networks. They send agents to respond, to protect the architecture. Ok, this is a little much I realize, but the closest analogy I can come up with is the the electrical fire was 'probing the defenses' of the enclave. Forcing it to reveal its tactical significance through momentarily leveraging its strategic value in order to protect it. In exploiting its state of exception status, it is also revealing it.

The following image comes peripherally to mind, which would seem to somewhat illustrate this concept through analogy in a purely visual manner, by deploying a representational device - the cut section axo. It is from an article on the TVA by William Jordy (recommended by TH). It harks to the seam between a surrounding context and a deployed infrastructural enclave that seemed interesting from my previous looks at/readings about the TVA. In this case, it illustrates the complexities of the boundary between nature and machine.



In the case of Peabody Terrace, the architecture is dependent on its state of exception status in order to maintain its function. It must be Harvard to survive. Scale matters, and this complex is a product of subtle connections with a much broader, more powerful and multiple context, without which it could not survive, function, be inhabited.

However, in order for it to function fully as Sert intended, the boundaries between it and its context must also be minimized. It cannot broadcast its status as an enclave, its edges are blurred and porous, paths are sutured within its fabric. A delicate balance is maintained. Complaints about Peabody Terrace don't seem to focus on its functional/spatial difference from its surroundings (problem solved?), but rather its formal/material differences. The balance might be altered significantly, for example, if the formal and material properties were more directly identifiable with the broader Harvard network (ie if Harvard was concrete modernism, or Peabody was pomo colonial funk). There are subtle reversals going on, oscillations which maintain balance.

The fire serves a similar function to the section axo of the TVA damn. It momentarily reveals the connections and problematizes the seams. Only I suppose that in the case of Peabody, the situation is further complicated by the fact that there is no formal and material continuity between the enclave and its host networks (whereas the damns are a satellite formal gesture, a node in an architectural network as well, and therefore in that case the drawing is more ideological propaganda than revelatory gesture). But there is programmatic and functional continuity to be sure. It is a mutation of the dorm/cloister type, pried open and wrought urban. There is a slip between Peabody's formal and programmatic structures. And between the structures of those and its sustaining networks. Perhaps we can exploit these slippages, reveal the connections (perhaps in an ideological complex manner, rather than a simplistic revelation or assault) beneath through a tactical activation, a probing of the defenses. Ok, that's what we are taking from this article.

The article (excerpts):
""The University has this infrastructure for support in operations like this. We didn’t have to call an outside environmental unit to help. We didn’t have to call an outside bus company," said Susan Keller, director of residential real estate for Harvard Planning and Real Estate. "Those relationships were key in making things work."

On the scene Sunday were personnel from the Harvard University Police Department and several University Operations Services units, including shuttle bus drivers, fire group and university operations center personnel, electrical engineering and utilities workers, and building operations staff. Public Affairs staff were also on hand to manage media interest in the incident.

Harvard Planning and Real Estate (HPRE), which manages Peabody Terrace for the University, took a lead role in managing the situation. HPRE had its own managers on the scene providing critical assistance to those who were evacuated and important information about the building’s physical setup.

Dining Services also pitched in, creating meals for the 300 to 400 Peabody Terrace residents who were temporarily housed at the Gordon Track. University Health Services Director David Rosenthal helped obtain medication for those whose prescription drugs were left behind. And Kathy Bray, manager of freshman dormitories for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, had extra mattresses and bedding trucked over to Gordon Track in case an overnight stay was needed.

Environmental Health and Safety personnel were also at Peabody Terrace, working side-by-side with Cambridge firefighters to test the air for carbon monoxide. University Information Services also offered help, providing cell phones to workers and residents to help keep communication lines open ."


(2) Why Don’t the Rest of Us Like the Buildings the Architects Like?
see article highlights below
The second is an article which is a speech by Robert Campbell (grumpy old man?) of which only really his descriptions of Peabody Terrace are even somewhat relevant. He gives them within the context of asking the eponymous title question. Though I guess he suggests the idea of enclave as critical as well, vis a vis utopia and modernism. Nothing surprising here, for sure. Generic background problems and information.

I think it is relatively obvious how this is just sort of appropriate critical-architectural background noise for my intervention. The correct architectural waters from which to pull my Intevention-calibur from.

The article (excerpts):

No building could have had more praise heaped upon it by the architectural community than Peabody Terrace. It’s still greatly admired by architects, including myself. But more or less everybody else did, and does, hate it.

It does have a number of qualities. First, it is porous to the neighborhood. When he designed it, Josep Lluis Sert said that he didn’t want it to be like Dunster House and the other Harvard houses, which created a barrier between the neighborhood and the Charles River. And, in fact, you can walk through Peabody Terrace. What Sert didn’t foresee is that the people
in the neighborhood would act as if they’re wearing electronic dog collars. When they step onto Harvard land, they feel uncomfortable."

Second, it’s a much denser development than anything around it, but it steps down in height to match the heights of lower buildings along the street. The towers are in the center; at the edges, Peabody Terrace comes down to the scale of the neighborhood. I don’t think it’s overwhelming. The towers are very slim.

And the whole complex is ingeniously organized. There’s a corridor only on every third floor, which means that the apartments above and below the corridor run all the way through the building, so that you can enjoy ventilation and views in both directions. And the corridors are lined with windows. They’re not the usual so-called double-loaded corridors, running in darkness down the middle of the building. The balconies double as fire escapes: Sert was particularly pleased by that because he realized that if there were a budget problem, nobody would be able to cut the balconies. The pattern of balconies, sunshades, and brightly colored, operable panels, set against the raw concrete of the walls, makes for a very rich façade in the modernist manner. Sert loved Paris and liked to talk about it as “elephants and parrots”: long grayish buildings enlivened, at street level, by the bright color accents of the shops and cafes. Peabody Terrace is inventive and fun; to me, it seems to handle the issues of scale–of putting a big building in a small place–very well. But its architectural language remains, for most people, unfamiliar and offensive.

The rads and the trads are the same. They’re much more like each other than they are different. That’s because they both seek to substitute a utopia of another time for the time we actually live in. The trads find utopia in the past; the rads find it in the future.

Avant-gardism usually rides on some new wrinkle of technology, whether it’s the speeding cars of the Italian futurists in the early twentieth century, or the public health and hygiene movement that underlay so much of early modernism. Now it’s computers.

What both the rads and the trads ignore, in their love of utopias of the past and the future, is the present. They both try to elbow aside the real world we live in and substitute a world of another era. It’s a lot easier to design a utopia than to deal with the complex reality of a present time and place. You don’t have to deal with the tension between memory and invention. You just take one or the other.

I think he got that exactly right. If you think of a teenager learning for the first time about baseball or rock music, that’s how you move into any new subject, by admiring what’s familiar and by labeling and classifying. Lewis Mumford said that what he valued in architecture is what he valued in life itself: “Balance, variety, and an insurgent spontaneity.” But you can’t have insurgent spontaneity unless there is some stable frame against which to be insurgent.

- And he detests the avant-garde technique:
Here is a contrasting quote from another architectural theorist, Charles Jencks: "The architect proceeds as the avant-garde does in any battle, as a provocateur. He saps the edges of taste, undermines the conventional boundaries, assaults the thresholds of respectability, and shocks the psychic stability of the past by introducing the new, the strange, the exotic, and the erotic.

The conventional language did reinforce a sense of place and of time at Harvard, just as does the conventional language of all those little red Veritas emblems. Harvard is a stage set, just as is any city. Now it is so into its brand image–red brick, Georgian, all that kind of iconic imagery–that every time Harvard renovates the Faculty Club, it looks older.

At Princeton, the board of trustees and its planners have divided the campus into four quadrants. The old part of the campus is brand-image Princeton, where they’re building a Gothic Revival dorm. Princeton existed for 150 years before it ever did any Gothic Revival; that didn’t come along until about 1900. Gothic Revival was seen as the Anglophile tradition that America should be following, instead of all those other foreign things. That’s brand-image Princeton. Then they’re doing another quadrant that opens to the future with buildings by Frank Gehry and other current stars. So at Princeton, the rad-trad conflict is now immortalized by stylistic zoning. It’s a new invention.

What I’m arguing is that the same thing has happened to architecture. It has become frameable and signable. We’ve found a way to rip the building out of its context in time and space. And that, of course, is the result of the arrival of photography and other visual media. Photography is the removal of context. You can’t define it any better than that. A photograph of a work of architecture frames it off from the world and freezes it at a single moment in time; it frames it in both time and in space. We now live in a media culture so pervasive that we barely notice it. It is a world of framed visual images in our magazines, on our screens, and increasingly in our imaginations. We have come, therefore, to think of buildings as we think of paintings, not as existing in a specific time and place but in the worldwide stream of images.

- Yes yes, its stale and tired, but its in the context of my Peabody research, and therefore its nice, basic points and implications will serve as my other basis for intervention. Enough research, onto speculation...

Mobile Sweatshop

Just to agitate before bed:

Why would it be controversial for, say, Nike to set up a fleet of mobile sweat shops that can capitalize on the needs of the global refugee crisis, and either
(1) act as a basis for a new society (think of the ads!)
(2) withdraw and relocate under threat

Headline: Nike Pod 4C Workforce lands in Lebanon

Notes from Meeting with TH: 10_05_07

VERY HELPFUL:

in response to the relationship between the TVA and Modernism, between a State of Exception and modernism, between state power and tabula rasa as an ideal design condition/goal:

- Modernism as always needing a Tabula Rasa (one that was always gridded)
- Is the Green Zone modernism?


other historical examples (related):
- Brasilia (something about 10 old sheets of paper???)
- UN Headquarters
- Laws of preservation
- Chandigarh

Talk to AD about exploring this connection between modernism and state power/state of exception for my paper topic.


Use case studies to explore didactic states/types of exception:

- Basic questions: what was intention, what is the product/outcome
*object, organization - noun & verb, is it consciously representational or not?

- Make a 50-case matrix, 1 hour each, looking for salient issues to start actually making connections/groupings/deductions/assumptions

- for example, TH had a nice little blurb for the TVA case: It was intended to always increase potential.


In relation to my mention of the Roche & Laveaux article:

- Scripting vs. scripts
- 'scripting' as tactic (or strategy?)
- vs. a field manual
- assemble a set of case studies on TACTICS [and perhaps another one on OPERATORS] within these case studies of states of exception

- start thinking of small interventions that reverberate (as opposed to modernism); small scale but city wide

TACTICS

- Francois Roche: Dust Bunny Building (also garbage collector thing?)

- Things become infrastructure when they are controlled (see: Air after Pollution)

- Law/Code as soft infrastructure
'Negative' or opposite of infrastructure

- Matter is what is being controlled

- Maybe architecture can produce a state of exception rather than just build on one. This has huge potential for agency, no?

TACTICS

- Sophie Calle - artist - w/Paul Auster (Maybe talk to MM?) (Total Recall??)

- understand scripting as a contemporary architectural tactic. Like:
D+S Blur
Rem doing Wired


- Jameson, "Enclaves..." in Assemblage (Zeebrugge, "seeds of time" (?))

- Hans Hollein - later interventions/happenings (tactics...)

Involuntary park - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Involuntary park - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "Involuntary park is a term coined by science fiction author and environmentalist Bruce Sterling to describe previously inhabited areas that for environmental or political reasons have, in Sterling's words, 'lost their value for technological instrumentalism' and been allowed to return to an overgrown, feral state. Discussing involuntary parks in the context of rising sea levels due to global warming, Sterling writes:

"They bear some small resemblance to the twentieth century's national parks, those government-owned areas nervously guarded by well-indoctrinated forest rangers in formal charge of Our Natural Heritage©™. They are, for instance, very green, and probably full of wild animals. But the species mix is no longer natural. They are mostly fast-growing weeds, a cosmopolitan jungle of kudzu and bamboo, with, perhaps, many genetically altered species that can deal with seeping saltwater. Drowned cities that cannot be demolished for scrap will vanish wholesale into the unnatural overgrowth.[1]"

Examples include:
* The Green Line separating Greek and Turkish Cyprus
* The Korean Demilitarized Zone
* The Zone of alienation around the area of the Chernobyl disaster
* The White Sands Missile Range U.S. government military reservation. Location of the Trinity test site."

Downtown NY Security Zone

Downtown Security zone (Outside the Stock Exchange, Etc) with Will.

Portable Halls of Justice Are Rising in Guantánamo

Portable Halls of Justice Are Rising in Guantánamo - NYTimes
But in the five-year effort to prosecute Guantánamo detainees, very little has gone according to plan. So, to be ready for all eventualities, the Pentagon’s new judicial complex is portable — a prefabricated but very high-tech court building surrounded by trailers, moveable cells, concertina wire and a tent city — all of which has been shipped here in pieces that could be unplugged, disassembled and put back together somewhere else.

This year, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates rejected as “ridiculous” a plan to erect a $100 million permanent federal-court look-a-like here. The $12 million “M*A*S*H” set for the age of terror was born.

The centerpiece will be the courthouse, a squat, windowless structure of corrugated metal. Though it will hardly be much to look at, it will be outfitted with the latest in trial technology: a computerized system for digital document display; wiring for hidden translators working in as many as five languages; and a 10-camera automated system to beam video of the proceedings to a press center in an aging aircraft hangar nearby.

One new feature for trials expected to involve classified evidence is a plexiglass window separating the small press and spectator gallery from the floor of the courtroom. At the touch of a button, the military judge will be able to cut off the sound in the spectator section.

The tent city, complete with military cots and a recreation tent, is where some 550 court officials, lawyers, security guards and journalists from around the world are to live for weeks at a time once military commissions get under way, perhaps as soon as this spring.

“If you’re an avid camper, it’ll be great,” said Maj. Chad Warren, the operations officer of the construction unit, the 474th Expeditionary Civil Engineering Squadron.

If and when the trials begin, they will be held under a set of rules created especially for trying terrorism suspects. And now they will be held in a setting created especially for terrorism suspects.

Architecturally, it is beyond state of the art. “It’s something new,” Professor Lederer said. “We do not normally design courtrooms that can be folded up and shipped.”

Joint Security Area - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Joint Security Area - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "The Joint Security Area currently has around 100,000 tourists visit each year through several tourism companies[6][7] and the USO[8] (through the various U.S. military commands in Korea). Before being allowed to enter the DMZ, tourists are given a briefing during which they must sign a document which states, in part, 'The visit to the Joint Security Area at Panmunjom will entail entry into a hostile area and possibility of injury or death as a direct result of enemy action.'[9][10][11] Primarily tour companies from South Korea, Japan and the USO conduct tours. North Korean citizens are not allowed access on the tours, but citizens of other nationalities are."


"The tunnels were dug by North Korea and are likely for use by the military as an invasion route. The tunnels are each large enough to permit the passage of an entire division in one hour. All the tunnels run in a north-south direction and do not branch off. The planning for the tunnels got progressively more advanced (for example, the third tunnel slopes upward slightly as it progresses southward, so that water does not stagnate). The orientation of the blasting lines within each one indicate that North Korea dug the tunnels. Upon their discovery, the North claimed that they were for coal mining; however, no coal can be found in the tunnels, which are dug through granite, but some of the tunnel walls were at some point painted black to give the appearance of coal."

Kijong-dong/Daeseong-dong - DMZ Cities

Kijong-dong - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "Kijŏng-dong (sometimes romanized as Gijeong-dong) is a village in Panmun-gun, North Korea. It is also called Peace Village (평화촌) on the northern side of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). [1][2] By contrast, in South Korea it is known as Propaganda village (선전마을).[3] It is situated 1.8 kilometers from the South Korean village of Daeseong-dong, the only inhabited village in the southern side of the Korean DMZ. A guidebook published in the north states: 'In this village located in the Demilitarized Zone is the Panmun Cooperative Farm embracing over 200 households. The village has a kindergarten, creche [day care], senior middle school and a people's hospital.'[4] At various times field workers and building workers are seen in Kijŏng-dong. However, many in the south believe that Kijŏng-dong was built within the DMZ purely for the purpose of propaganda. The village reportedly has no residents except soldiers. At night lights come on in some of the buildings, but they turn on in the same buildings every night at the same time. The world's highest flag tower[5] stands at the entrance of Kijŏng-dong (160 meters tall) flying a North Korean flag. This tower was not originally as tall as it is now, but when the flag pole in Daeseong-dong was extended, thus making it taller than the Kijŏng-dong pole, the North again quickly extended their pole taller in what some have called the “flagpole war” (깃대 전쟁)."

Daeseong-dong, "South Korea, is a town in South Korea close to the North Korean border. It lies within the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). The village is about one mile south of the Bridge of No Return towards the North and 7.5 miles from the city of Kaeseong, North Korea.

Daeseong-dong belongs administratively to Josan-ri, Gunnae-myeon in Paju. It is the only civilian habitation within the Southern portion of the DMZ with Panmunjeom 0.6 miles northeast, with the actual Military Demarcation Line (the de facto border between South and North Korea) only 400 yards north of the village.

Daeseong-dong is only one mile opposite of Gijeong-dong, a propaganda village in North Korea's portion of the DMZ. Here is the very place that an observer can see Korea's division, seeing the different national flags fluttering on gigantic flagpoles in Daeseong-dong and Gijeong-dong respectively.

While the DMZ is under the administration of the Allied Control Commission, the residents of Daesong-dong are considered South Korean civilians and subject to South Korean government law. Residents of Daesong-dong have both benefits and restrictions. For example, the residents have the same rights to vote and be educated, but they are exempted from national defense duties (conscription) and taxation. However, there are restrictions on many matters including the freedom of residence and change of residence, as well as an 11pm curfew."

Tim Culvahouse, The TVA: Design and Persuasion - Initial Summary

"...the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) was chartered by Congress in 1933 at the urging of President Franklin Roosevelt to create "a corporation clothed with the power of government but possessed of the flexibility and initiative of a private enterprise." p.15

Infrastructure as an architectural engine of ideology. Its all about you catching (sometimes intentional) glimpses of architecturalized fragments, below the skin of nature, of a suggested/imagined/hinted/perceived broader network. Its glory-ful and fascistic but also bouncy and populist...

Architecture as/is no longer a machine for living but an enclosure/system-bus for other machines for living.

Because its (the TVA) a corporation, its particular skill is advertising its presence, making itself essential, but carefully not drawing unwanted attention.

"It was novel in at least three ways: it was modern, it was international, and it was - literally - electrifying." - p.17

How is this different, at least legally speaking, from what Halliburton is doing in Iraq? And the Army Corps of Engineers?

Corb stealing the use of Beton Brut from the TVA Norris Dam (visited '46) and using it at Marseille ('47-'52) - p.19

"Functionally, electricity was the most obviously modern element of the TVA. Formally it was an enigma. Except in the jagged arcs of lightning or the miniature lightning of the Van de Graaf generator, electricity has no shape. The paraphenalia of its generation and distribution had shapes - some suggestive, perhaps, of a new aesthetic, but an aesthetic not yet fully coalesced. The physical boundaries of water containment made more powerful formal suggestions: the great bulk and breadth of the dams raised novel questions of scale and articulation" - p.18

"Each of these three principles - continuity with the landscape, forms derived from engineering function, and architectural form as a tool for social equality - complemented perfectly the ambitions of the TVA." - p.19

I should do drawings over a few photos such as p.74 pipe emergence, p.70-1 deck continuous to water, p.66-7 haha, representing natural flow p.78-9

"their [large projects] persuasive appeal deriving not from familiar forms but from a consistency of treatment - both in style and in quantity. Because every detail fits seamlessly into the whole, there is a sense if rightness, even inevitability, to the projects." - p.20

"the Culvahouse homeplace was no longer on a hill - it was on a peninsula." - p.21

"the TVA roads betray a different attitude, gentler and less abrupt. Their designers did not merely defer to the hills, they choreographed a partnership of automobile and landscape."
- p.21 - and it should make itself everpresent as immediately as possible.

Is the TVA a/the state of exception as an overlay, manifested on the urban, or the world, grid? It has a staying power, once manifested...

"the continuities of the designed landscape obscure innumerable dislocations in the preexisting landscape - of dwelling, commercial and agricultural buildings, fields, even cemeteries - but these dislocations were themselves assiduously coordinated. The visible choreography of designed elements holds throughout the reservation, from the scale of the landscape , through the scale of the damn itself, down to the detail of a light fixture or a door-handle." - p.22

"for them the goal was to bring the abrupt forms of modern engineering design into continuity with the natural landscape and then to develop a connection among the built forms themselves, making of the whole a new nature." - p.22

its like we could rewind and jump off again, right before modernism begins to go wrong. Then pull an innovation-through-mastery move. don't deny the embedded politics, but you gotta have some chunk of existing history to start the whole thing with. could a lot of this fall in the category of rapid insertion, guerrilla or delta-force style, then undercover cia style?

"the landscapes, buildings, details, graphic elements, and murals of the TVA form a unified ensemble, a completeness in the classical sense, in which nothing may be added or taken away without diminishing the whole. The comprehensiveness of this vision is perhaps as important as any of its explicit messages in asserting the value of the TVA' s unprecedented transformation of a region. In the work of the tva's first decade, design is persuasion." - p.23

"the design of the TVA holds an important lesson for architects and planners today. Its architects eagerly embraced the larger implications of their designs for social renewal, and they seized the opportunity to create a new world in the image of a better place..." - p.28

And now, a random segue into a Lebbeus Woods chunk from Bldgblog, available here: Lebbeus Woods Interview

Following is Lebbeus Woods, on the photo below. I'm thinking of it in relation to the description somewhere in the TVA book about how the infrastructure meets the landscape, and how that relationship is critical. Maybe infrastructure is the wrong word, but the physical manifestations of whatever larger, partially visible system of architecture, at any rate. Peeling the landscape back...revealing...blurring the line between the mechanical and...the organic(?). Forget the sappy authenticity, but what about the idea of peeling back to reveal another scale of structural complexity?

I think the main thought I had, in speculating on the future of New York, was that, in the past, a lot of discussions had been about New York being the biggest, the greatest, the best – but that all had to do with the size of the city. You know, the size of the skyscrapers, the size of the culture, the population. So I commented in the article about Le Corbusier’s infamous remark that your skyscrapers are too small. Of course, New York dwellers thought he meant, oh, they’re not tall enough – but what he was referring to was that they were too small in their ground plan. His idea of the Radiant City and the Ideal City – this was in the early 30s – was based on very large footprints of buildings, separated by great distances, and, in between the buildings in his vision, were forests, parks, and so forth.But in New York everything was cramped together because the buildings occupied such a limited ground area. So Le Corbusier was totally misunderstood by New Yorkers who thought, oh, our buildings aren’t tall enough – we’ve got to go higher! Of course, he wasn’t interested at all in their height – more in their plan relationship. Remember, he’s the guy who said, the plan is the generator.

So I was speculating on the future of the city and I said, well, obviously, compared to present and future cities, New York is not going to be able to compete in terms of size anymore. It used to be a large city, but now it’s a small city compared with São Paulo, Mexico City, Kuala Lumpur, or almost any Asian city of any size. So I said maybe New York can establish a new kind of scale – and the scale I was interested in was the scale of the city to the Earth, to the planet. I made the drawing as a demonstration of the fact that Manhattan exists, with its towers and skyscrapers, because it sits on a rock – on a granite base. You can put all this weight in a very small area because Manhattan sits on the Earth. Let’s not forget that buildings sit on the Earth.

I wanted to suggest that maybe lower Manhattan – not lower downtown, but lower in the sense of below the city – could form a new relationship with the planet. So, in the drawing, you see that the East River and the Hudson are both dammed. They’re purposefully drained, as it were. The underground – or lower Manhattan – is revealed, and, in the drawing, there are suggestions of inhabitation in that lower region.


So it was a romantic idea – and the drawing is very conceptual in that sense.

But the exposure of the rock base, or the underground condition of the city, completely changes the scale relationship between the city and its environment. It’s peeling back the surface to see what the planetary reality is. And the new scale relationship is not about huge blockbuster buildings; it’s not about towers and skyscrapers. It’s about the relationship of the relatively small human scratchings on the surface of the earth compared to the earth itself. I think that comes across in the drawing. It’s not geologically correct, I’m sure, but the idea is there.

The relation to Corb as a critic of New York and New York envisioned dramatically and infrastructuraly is interesting in light of my interest in the TVA, its historical moment, its relation to Corb, its relation to experimental modernism, even utopianism, and its systematic and political/legal frameworks. I need to start isolating common strands between a host of parallel cases, chosen from a larger pool to create a sort of balanced, selective portfolio of cases from which to find/synthesize a bunch of different architectural issues. These could be issues of politics, practice, philosophy or detailing. But they need to turn into real dossiers so i can put them on a big panel and start making connections between them. Its gotta go into that stage!

BLDGBLOG: That’s actually one of the things I like so much about your work: you re-imagine cities and buildings and whole landscapes as if they have undergone some sort of potentially catastrophic transformation – be it a war or an earthquake, etc. – but you don’t respond to those transformations by designing, say, new prefab refugee shelters or more durable tents. You respond with what I’ll call science fiction: a completely new order of things – a new way of organizing and thinking about space. You posit something radically different than what was there before. It’s exciting.

Woods: Maybe it will be great – but it’s not enough. I think architects – at least those inclined to understand the multi-disciplinarity and the comprehensive nature of their field – have to visualize something that embraces all these political, economic, and social changes. As well as the technological. As well as the spatial.

But we’re living in a very odd time for the field. There’s a kind of lack of discourse about these larger issues. People are hunkered down, looking for jobs, trying to get a building. It’s a low point. I don’t think it will stay that way. I don’t think that architects themselves will allow that. After all, it’s architects who create the field of architecture; it’s not society, it’s not clients, it’s not governments. I mean, we architects are the ones who define what the field is about, right? So if there’s a dearth of that kind of thinking at the moment, it’s because architects have retreated – and I’m sure a coming generation is going to say: hey, this retreat is not good. We’ve got to imagine more broadly. We have to have a more comprehensive vision of what the future is.