Paying a Premium Not to Mingle at Sea - New York Times

Paying a Premium Not to Mingle at Sea - New York Times: "Over the past few years, Norwegian Cruise Line has been rolling out a new category of luxury cabins called Garden and Courtyard Villas that offer a private-access pool, sun deck, steam room and gym. A few of these rooms, billed as a “ship within a ship,” have their own hot tubs and garden terraces. Guests can even order room service from any restaurant onboard and stay holed up in their own little enclave, away from hoi polloi, if they so choose.

And Cunard, which operates the Queen Mary 2, is taking the class divisions further. The ship’s top dining rooms are already reserved for guests in the so-called Queens and Princess Grill Suites. For its latest vessel, the Queen Victoria, scheduled to debut in December, guests staying in those top suites will get their own elevator to take them to dinner, so they won’t have to rub elbows with the underclasses."

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

BLDGBLOG: The bridged architecture of adjacent peaks and "the fallen man of letters"

BLDGBLOG: The bridged architecture of adjacent peaks and "the fallen man of letters":

"Awesomely, sci fi author and war correspondent H.G. Wells even did some reporting on the matter. For The New York Times, back in 1916, Wells wrote:

Mountain surfaces are extraordinarily various and subtle. You may understand Picardy upon a map, but mountain warfare is three-dimensional. A struggle may go on for weeks or months consisting of apparently separate and incidental skirmishes, and then suddenly a whole valley organization may crumble away in retreat or disaster.

Describing the Italy-Austrian mountain war as 'among the strangest and most picturesque [battlefields] in all this tremendous world conflict' –

– in fact, he adds, the "fighting in the Dolomites has been perhaps the most wonderful of all these mountain campaigns" – Wells goes on:

Everywhere it has been necessary to make roads where hitherto there have been only mule tracks or no tracks at all; the roads are often still in the making, and the automobile of the war tourist skirts precipices and takes hairpin bends upon tracks of loose metal not an inch too broad for the operation, or it floats for a moment over a dizzy edge while a train of mule transport blunders by. (...) Down below, the trees that one sees through a wisp of cloud look far too small and spiky and scattered to hold out much hope for a fallen man of letters. And at the high positions they are too used to the vertical life to understand the secret feelings of the visitor from the horizontal.

One more long quotation – come on, how many of you knew that H.G. Wells was also a war correspondent? – because his descriptions of these mountain landscapes are just great:

The aspect of these mountains is particularly grim and wicked; they are worn old mountains, they tower overhead in enormous vertical cliffs of sallow gray, with the square jointings and occasional clefts and gullies, their summits are toothed and jagged; the path ascends and passes around the side of the mountain upon loose screes, which descend steeply to a lower wall of precipices. In the distance rise other harsh and desolate-looking mountain masses, with shining occasional scars of old snow. Far below is a bleak valley of stunted pine trees, through which passes the road of the Dolomites.

In any case, it's the idea of the Alps being riddled with manmade caves and passages, with bunkers and tunnels, bristling with military architecture, even self-connected peak to peak by fortified bridges, the Great Moutain Wall of Northern Italy, architecture literally become mountainous, piled higher and higher upon itself forming new artificial peaks looking down on the fields and cities of Europe, that just fascinates me – not to mention the idea that you could travel up, and thus go futher into history, discovering that the past has been buried above you, the geography of time topologically inverted. "

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.

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."

BLDGBLOG: N.A.W.A.P.A.

BLDGBLOG: "In any case, at one point, Reisner describes something called N.A.W.A.P.A.: the North American Water and Power Alliance. N.A.W.A.P.A. is nothing less than the hydrological fantasy project of a certain class of U.S. water engineers. In fact, Reisner talles us, N.A.W.A.P.A. would 'solve at one stroke all the West's problems with water' – but it would take 'a $6-trillion economy' to pay for it, and 'it might require taking Canada by force.' He quips that British Columbia 'is to water what Russia is to land,' and so N.A.W.A.P.A., if realized, would tap those unexploited natural waterways and bring them down south to fill the cups of Uncle Sam. Canadians, we read, 'have viewed all of this with a mixture of horror, amusement, and avarice' – but what exactly is 'all of this'? Reisner:
"Visualize, then, a series of towering dams in the deep river canyons of British Columbia – dams that are 800, 1,500, even 1,700 feet high. Visualize reservoirs backing up behind them for hundreds of miles – reservoirs among which Lake Mead would be merely regulation-size. Visualize the flow of the Susitna River, the Copper, the Tanana, and the upper Yukon running in reverse, pushed through the Saint Elias Mountains by million-horsepower pumps, then dumped into nature's second-largest natural reservoir, the Rocky Mountain Trench. Humbled only by the Great Rift Valley of Africa, the trench would serve as the continent's hydrologic switching yard, storing 400 million acre-feet of water in a reservoir 500 miles long."
And that's barely half the project!
The project would ultimately make "the Mojave Desert green," we read, diverting Canada's fresh water south to the faucets of greater Los Angeles – thus destroying almost every salmon fishery between Anchorage and Vancouver, and even "rais[ing] the level of all five [Great Lakes]," in the process.
After all, N.A.W.A.P.A. also means that the Great Lakes would be connected to the center of the North American continent by something called the Canadian—Great Lakes Waterway.
But N.A.W.A.P.A. is an old plan; it's been gathering dust since the 1980s. No one now is seriously considering building it. It's literally history."

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."

Axe Murder Incident / Operation Paul Bunyan

Axe Murder Incident / Operation Paul Bunyan - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "Altogether, Task Force Vierra consisted of 813 men, almost all of the men of the United States Army Support Group, of which the Joint Security Force was a part, a ROK reconnaissance company, a ROK Special Forces company which had infiltrated the river area by the bridge the night before, and members of a reinforced composite rifle company from the 9th Infantry Regiment. In addition to this force, every UNC force in the rest of South Korea was on full battle alert with all weapons loaded, ready to fire if needed."

"The engineers in the convoy disembarked from their vehicles once the convoy arrived, and immediately started cutting down the tree while standing on the roof of their truck, while the 2^nd Platoon truck was positioned to block the Bridge of No Return. The remainder of the task force dispersed to their assigned areas around the tree and assumed their roles of guarding the engineers."

Lacuna Force 5: Landscaping Tactics



"Except in the area around the truce village of Panmunjeom and more recently on the Donghae Bukbu Line on the east coast, humans for the most part have not entered the DMZ in the last fifty years. This isolation has created as a byproduct one of the most well-preserved pieces of temperate land in the world. Environmentalists hope that if reunification occurs the former DMZ will become a wildlife refuge. However, there will be significant obstacles to maintaining the site because of the high concentration of landmines across the area."

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."

cityofsound: The Anti-Fun Palace: APEC Fence, Sydney lockdown

cityofsound: The Anti-Fun Palace: APEC Fence, Sydney lockdown: "As Marcus points out, this design work now also include a tightening of the informational grip on the city, by deliberately eroding data services over strategic locations. He describes as a 'lo-fi-ing of Sydney, resolution as security measure', in which Google Earth/Maps high-resolution imagery of the Sydney CBD is subtracted, such that it becomes temporarily blurred over the Opera House and other related places. One speculates as to how that happened. (Of course, Google wouldn't want to be held responsible if anything terrible did happen, as will no doubt have been pointed out to them. Though it's a little ludicrous to suggest that their service offers the potential plotter anything over the many readily accessible, detailed paper maps of Sydney apparently still in existence.) It's also strange to note just how overly precise the blurring is. In this image below, of Google Maps on my phone taken on Wednesday, note how the edge of the Opera House (left) is the exact point at which the blurring/sharpening occurs. A curiously limited definition of the danger zone."








So...a virtual zone of exception, huh? I'm not sure I totally buy it because the blurred zone follows a neat line between sat-photo angles and resolutions that you can track along the landforms to the east. Here's the link. Nonetheless, its a fascinating idea.

The World's Largest Anechoic Chamber

The World's Largest Anechoic Chamber"The architecture, engineering, and construction support services for this major complex have been provided since 1987 by DMJM (DBA Holmes & Naver, Inc.). The anechoic chamber supports ground testing of electronic warfare systems on full-scale aircraft and is a massive 250 x 264 x 70 foot steel plate box enclosed in a metal hangar building. The walls, ceiling, and floor are covered in 816,000 pyramidal foam cones designed to absorb radio frequency signals, and the chamber is RFI shielded to over 100dB. The center of the chamber is equipped with a 160 foot diameter turntable capable of rotating a full 360 degrees while holding objects with a mass of over one million pounds!"











Crazy...it's like a tiny state of exception...just an audio-state instead of a legal state.

Hog Island - Global Security

Hog Island: "On 31 August 1917 contracts for the construction of three great Government-owned ship fabricating plants were awarded by the Emergency Fleet Corporation to the American International Corporation, the Submarine Boat Corporation, and the Merchants Shipbuilding Company, and orders were issued to exert every effort to rush the work. American International Shipbuilding was the largest single recipient of contracts awarded by the US government Emergency Fleet Corporation. The company signed substantial contracts for war vessels with the Emergency Fleet Corporation. The first contract called for fifty vessels, followed by another contract for forty vessels, followed by yet another contract for sixty cargo vessels.

Hog Island was a sizable piece of land -- about a thousand acres -- between Philadelphia and Chester, south of what was known then as League island, with a frontage along the Delaware River. The land was sold to the AIC in June 1917, well before the awarding of the Hog Island contract, after the transaction was in the government-business negotiation machinery in May], but well before public awareness [in August]. Hog Island landowners, jacked up the price to $2000 an acre, versus the $100 price that was previously the going rate.

Hog Island was built in just 10 months, under the shadow of scandal."


"The site was sold to the city of Philadelphia in April of 1930 for $3,000,000, a little less than twice what the Shipping Board paid for the land alone in 1920. It was scheduled to be the terminus of a major air, rail and water port, with most of the acreage occupied by the shipyard ways destined to be a 494-acre airport. This site is now occupied by Philadelphia International Airport."

I guess this clarifies most of the legal workings...this is pretty intense. Who knew?

Hog Island, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Hog Island, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "European settlers purchased Hog Island from the Lenape Indians in 1680. The settlers gradually developed the island by building log and earthwork dikes to minimize storm damage and convert the marshes into good grazing meadows. Hog Island supposedly got its name from the pigs which local residents left to roam free, as no fencing was needed.

In 1917, as part of the World War I effort, the US government contracted American International Shipbuilding to build ships and a shipyard at Hog Island. At the time Hog Island was the largest shipyard in the world with 50 slipways. The first ship (named USS Quistconck for the Lenape name for the site), was christened August 5, 1918 by Edith Bolling Wilson (wife of US president Woodrow Wilson). The shipbuilding process practiced on Hog Island was an early experiment in standardized construction of ships. The ships built there, known as 'Hog Islanders' were considered ugly but well-built. In all 122 Hog Islanders were built, mostly cargo ships, and a few troop transport ships. The shipbuilding continued until 1921, after which the facility was rapidly demolished. None of the ships were ready in time to participate in World War I, but many of them were involved in World War II.

The US Army Corps of Engineers filled in the creek separating Hog Island from the mainland with silt dredged out of the shipping channels so that Hog Island became part of the mainland. Starting in 1925, the Pennsylvania Air National Guard used a small part of Hog Island as a training field for its pilots. In 1927, the site was dedicated as the "Philadelphia Municipal Airport" by Charles Lindbergh, who flew in on the Spirit of Saint Louis. In 1930 the city of Philadelphia purchased Hog Island from the federal government for $3 million, in order to expand the airport. Because of the Great Depression, work on the airport did not actually begin until 1937, and the Airport was formally opened as Philadelphia Municipal Airport on June 20, 1940."

I guess this sort of answers questions about the legal status of Hog Island:
The federal government contracted a company to build a shipyard on the island.
It was filled in to connect it to the mainland by the Corps of Engineers.
It was eventually bought by Philadelphia from the federal government and turned into the airport.
Still, how was it federal government property first and not just a part of Pennsylvania, when it was an island?

BLDGBLOG: Hog Island

BLDGBLOG:
"Hog Island was a shipbuilding yard – in fact, we read, it was "the largest shipyard in the world" during WWI.

The yard covered 846 acres and comprised 250 buildings. It had 80 miles of railroad track; 3,000,000 feet of underground wiring; a hospital; YMCA, hotel, cafeteria, trade school, 12 service restaurants and 5 mess halls. Twenty locomotives, 465 freight cars and 165 motor trucks hauled material within the yard. Hog Island's telephone traffic was equivalent to that of a city of 140,000 inhabitants.

And though Hog Island is now barely known outside of war historical circles, it was a true industrial behemoth:

There never before had been conceived or executed a plan for the fabrication of ships on such an enormous scale. Every steel fabricating plant in America, 88 of them in all, from Montreal to Kansas City, funneled steel plate into Hog Island and machinery and gear from hundreds of manufacturing plants all over the country poured into the mammoth assembly plant.

It was "a sizable piece of land – about a thousand acres – between Philadelphia and Chester, south of what was known then as League island," but it was also something of a manmade artifact, an artificial terrain.
Partially constructed from dredged fill in a "glorified bog," the industrialized earthworks were then turned – as you can see in the image, above – into a kind of machine-island, built to order."

I wonder what the legal status of this island was?

BLDGBLOG: Lights Among The Ruins

BLDGBLOG: "Based on an eyewitness account written by an Allied Air Commander, Sebald then refers to 'the terrible and deeply disturbing sight of the apparently aimless wanderings of millions of homeless people amidst the monstrous destruction, [which] makes it clear how close to extinction many of them really were in the ruined cities at the end of the war.' For some reason the next line just haunts me: No one knew where the homeless stayed, although lights among the ruins after dark showed where they had moved in. Which leads me to ask myself whether it's simply a factor of my age – I'm not exactly getting younger here – though I do drink a lot of orange juice – or if it's something more closely related to the weirdly militarized political climate in which we now live, but I've started to react to things like this with a kind of concentrated studiousness, as if reading – absurdly – for advice on how to survive my own generation's coming, perhaps even more calamitous, future. What 'monstrous destruction' of world war and oil shortages and global terror and climate change might we, too, have to face someday? In twenty years' time will I be out holding up some pathetic light among the ruins of a destroyed city, wondering where my wife is, dying of thirst, deaf in one ear, covered in radiation burns? Or is that just a peculiarly American form of pessimist survivalism? Or do I just read too much Sebald?"

Whoa.

Provinces Use Rebuilding Money in Iraq - New York Times

Provinces Use Rebuilding Money in Iraq - New York Times: "For a province whose entire 2007 capital budget is $112 million, $70 million is a stunning addition. In fact, the rate of spending has some authorities concerned that the push for provincial spending could drive a wave of corruption. They fear it could also unleash new centrifugal forces in a country already on the verge of breaking into semiautonomous regions.

But in Mr. Salih’s view, the degree of independence exercised by provinces like Babil in local rebuilding is consistent with Iraq’s Constitution, which envisions a federal system with substantial powers granted to regions.

Those moves were an indicator of the increasing uselessness of the old Iraqi apparatus of centralized government, Mr. Salih said.

“This central bureaucracy is broken,” he said. “The national ministries have proven incapable of spending their budgets.”

To illustrate his frustration, he related the case of a school in Babil that he said had been built with provincial money. But once it was built, the national education ministry proved so dysfunctional that it could not furnish it."

The Everyman Who Exposed Tainted Toothpaste - New York Times

The Everyman Who Exposed Tainted Toothpaste - New York Times: "The toothpaste had entered Panama through the Colón Free Trade Zone on the Atlantic side of the Panama Canal. One of the world’s biggest free zones, with 30,000 workers and 2,500 businesses, it is a place where billions of dollars in goods are unloaded, stored and either sold or reshipped free of tariffs. From there, 5,000 to 6,000 tubes slipped into the Panamanian market, without proper certification, mixed in with animal products, investigators said. A much larger number of tubes were reshipped from the free zone to other Latin American countries."

"As reports from around the world mounted, Chinese officials showed they were not immune to the criticism. When the makers of Sensodyne tracked counterfeit toothpaste through the Dubai Free Trade Zone to a factory in Shejiang Province in China, regulators there shut it down, a spokesman for Sensodyne said. The government also closed the chemical company that made the poison used in the toxic Panamanian cough syrup."


Wow: free trade zones were the blackmarket network that moved (and seemed to make possible) the chinese toothpaste debacle.

Blackwater Selling Weapons to Terrorists - NYTimes

NYTimes, September 22, 2007: "Feds Target Blackwater in Weapons Probe By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Filed at 12:21 a.m. ET WASHINGTON (AP) -- Federal prosecutors are investigating whether employees of the private security firm Blackwater USA illegally smuggled into Iraq weapons that may have been sold on the black market and ended up in the hands of a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, officials said Friday."

The Open-Source War By JOHN ROBB

The Open-Source War By JOHN ROBB: "Given this landscape, let's look at alternative strategies. First, out-innovating the insurgency will most likely prove unsuccessful. The insurgency uses an open-source community approach (similar to the decentralized development process now prevalent in the software industry) to warfare that is extremely quick and innovative. New technologies and tactics move rapidly from one end of the insurgency to the other, aided by Iraq's relatively advanced communications and transportation grid - demonstrated by the rapid increases in the sophistication of the insurgents' homemade bombs. This implies that the insurgency's innovation cycles are faster than the American military's slower bureaucratic processes (for example: its inability to deliver sufficient body and vehicle armor to our troops in Iraq).

Second, there are few visible fault lines in the insurgency that can be exploited. Like software developers in the open-source community, the insurgents have subordinated their individual goals to the common goal of the movement."