"...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.
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