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)

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):

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.

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

Case Study List ROUND 1

A no-holds-barred, no promises, compilations-style list of potential case studies:

CASE STUDY LIST:

Gitmo Mobile Court . DMZ . Zeebrugge Terminal . Yokohama Terminal . Offshore / Iron Mountain Data Haven . Google Pages . Baghdad Green Zone . Antarctica / The Moon . The High Seas (historical, privateers v pirates) . West Berlin / Marshall Plan . Big Ports (HK, Singapore, Denmark (BIG), Rotterdam, Bayonne) . Airports (Beijing, Hong Kong/Osaka, Manhattan Heliport). North Korea Tourist Zone . Cruise Ships . Disneyworld (w celebration) . CCTV Zones in London . Downtown Manhattan Security Zone . Dubai FTZ's . Military Bases (US, Germany, Diego Garcia, Uzbekistan/Azerbijan) . UN ICC . UN Refugee Camps . UN Yugoslavia / War (NGO's) . Insurgency Zones (Terrorists) . No-Fly Zones. National Refuge Zones . Ellis Island . National Parks / Wildlife Refuges / Coastal Public Zone . Oil Platforms . Tiny, Retarded Wannabe countries and Utopian Projects . Apec/Davos Summit Areas . Protest Pens . Google Earth Resolution . Phone / Data / Satellite Free Zones . Cell Phones and Data in Public Places / Google 700 MHz . Hudson Tards / High Line / (Special) Economic Development Zones . Syrian-Jewish Community and Jewish 'Property' zone in Manhattan . Ghettos (historical and current) . Favelas . Yakuza / Mafia . Cite Soleil . Mexico City . Kowloon Walled City . Cyprus and Belfast. Chernobyl / Three-Mile Island . Historical Modernist: TVA, Chandigarh, Brasilia . Nazi Germany (Speer) . Japanese-American Internment Camps . Shenzen . Vatican City and that country within a country within a country in one of the Emirates . Roche & Lavaux, exp. the Dust Bunny Building .

Notes Prepping for Meeting with TH on 10_05_07

For the purposes of summarizing where I stand today, it would be best to first begin with a list. This list is a breakdown of ideas. These ideas are all interrelated somehow.

1. State of Exception
   
1. Agamben
2. History in relation to democracy
3. History in relation to the 2 world wars
4. Power and lacunas
   
2. Power and Architecture (The TVA)
1. The TVA as an architectural example of state of exception (not technically, I think, but we are getting there)
2. The state of exception placing specific demands on architecture
   
3. The TVA as infrastructure
4. The TVA in relation to Corb
5. The TVA in relation to modernism
6. Utopian projects, infrastructure, and power relations
3. Disciplinarity, Agency, and Power
   
4. Contemporary issues of power
1. States of exception as legal lacunas
2. Other types of legal lacunas
3. Architecture as relating to defunct powers
   
4. Specific, interesting lacunas
5. Operators within these lacunas
6. Easterling, Counterinsurgency
   
5. My thesis is (a nice closed loop...):
1. Restoring agency to architecture
2. Agency through large-scale speculation
3. Realistic speculation through real relationships with power
4. Political action through realistic power
5. Meaningful architecture through politics
   

And dont forget Kant and public works...and Deleuze...

- 4 types: executive (government), military (increasingly anti-terro, counterinsurgent), corporate (multinational, nomadic), informal (lawless)
- need a technique/set of issues/goal of presentation to approach these studies and organize them....what am I trying to learn from them.
- today, my thesis is about combining the refugee problem with the abandon ftz/shipping zone

Ok, so the first big problem for me is to how to arrange/choose/get into these dossiers/case studies. What to have in 3 weeks...

THESIS PROPOSAL DRAFT

This is a copy of the Thesis Proposal (rough...) I submitted a little while ago.

Adriel Mesznik

Thesis Proposal

Advisor: Timothy Hyde

9-7-07

My thesis project will address the contemporary global proliferation of lawlessness. I will propose an architecture and a way of architecting that can effectively engage this lawless context. I will arrive at this proposal through the research of agents, productions, and techniques that are already engaged, successfully or not, with such lawlessness.

Lawlessness thrives in/on lawless zones. Zones explicitly beyond the reach of civil law. Zones outside of state control, or no longer exclusively or effectively under state control. Emerging or decaying, fleeting or permanent, conscious constructions or haphazard byproducts.

Warzones represent one extreme of lawlessness, zones outside the control of civil law, with their own complex legal structures, created by states outside of (but perhaps overlapping with) the territory of states themselves. Other examples might include: private security zones, airports, international waters, the internet, multinational corporations, megacities, gangland, no-man’s land…

In the end, though, I am interested in the architecture, the structures, of these zones. Structures that might define, comprise, support, conceal, locate, describe, choreograph, influence, coexist with, emerge from these zones of lawlessness. Architectures unique to a particular lawless zone or common to all. I am interested in the physical entities (and attendant processes and techniques) that are the definition, corollary, product, or byproduct of a particular lawless context or to lawlessness in general.

Currently, these architectures of lawlessness are considered unknown, irrelevant, or incidental to contemporary architectural discourse and practice. Architectural discourse and practice have become dangerously complacent in ignoring (willfully or otherwise) the proliferation and subsequent importance of such zones and their architectures (existing, emergent, implied, or potential). As a result, discourse is unable to successfully consider such zones, and practice unable to engage them. Architecture (as discipline and practice) remains locked in an increasingly anachronistic relationship with aging, ineffective powers that hold little or no purchase over or effectiveness within the expanding lawless zones. Architecture is becoming increasingly powerless and irrelevant, unable to recognize, much less engage, an increasingly large percentage of the world’s spaces.

This situation must be remedied if architecture is to remain the primary means of shaping the world around us.

The contemporary conditions of lawlessness are neither new nor unique. Nor are they uncharted or unnavigable. I will therefore turn to cotemporary and historical scenarios as precedent from which architecture can learn. I will be researching groups that engage such lawless zones and exercise agency within or over them, the techniques and practices they use to do so, and the results or products of their engagement that have some impact on or relationship with these zones.

I might observe the example of the US military as it restructures itself to function in newly redefined warzones, outsourcing to paramilitary corporations such as Blackwater and cooperating with non-governmental organizations such as Medecins Sans Frontieres. Research might involve looking at a Field Manual, a piece of hardware, a strategy, or an ideological shift. I might investigate pirates and privateers, terrorists and mercenaries, missionaries and explorers as agents that operate with varying degrees of efficacy or success within lawless zones…

The intent is to find precedents that will allow for the assembly of an architecture of lawlessness, a means for architecture as a discipline to exist within, engage with, and ultimately influence the structures of these zones of lawlessness.

Random helpful quotes-of-the-week:

“If organization, as reflected in architecture and urbanism, possesses disposition, the means to aggress or collude, it may also be an adversary or a competitor. It may be brittle or stretchy. Its software or hardware is capable of political manipulation or violence, and also capable of storing or unleashing this agency in its inception, planning, and building as well as its occupation. As it mixes with overt or covert lawlessness, architecture possesses the means to war.”

“…effective activism will now rarely look like classic resistance. Rather resistance may come cloaked in its opposite, just as capital can be cloaked in the costumes of resistance…the various masquerades of resistance need not correspond to those of a tragic counterculture with its principled self-valorizations – righteous dispositions they share with war.”

“Political practices often gravitate to one of several well-rehearsed roles: the earnest public servant, the political theorist, or the strident activist…”

“Piracy is a useful construct here – one that yields a continuum of characters from the privateer and military entrepreneur to the terrorist and murderer: enough variations on the confidence game to provide reflections of diplomats, viceroys, orgmen, and elected officials.”

Keller Easterling, Enduring Innocence, pgs 7-11