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...