What We Are Thinking About

Plastic-Profit Offices (Architects as Nerve-Workers)

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 11:00:00 +0200

How Resilient is your Organisation?

Melbourne University’s Paolo Tombesi’s fine-tooth comb through the rise and fall of Caudill Rowlett Scott (CRS) in Capital Gains and Architectural Losses: The Transformative Journey of Caudill Rowlett Scott (1948–1994) provides a relevant starting point when looking at the make-up of today’s profit-driven architectural office. It pieces together the beginnings of CRS and their initial attraction to school architecture, their diversification into wider disciplines, the effects of a Saudi petrodollar injection, its public offering and ultimately their collapse and buyout by HOK (formerly Hellmuth, Obata and Kassabaum).

CRS finding their place in 1950s unabashed American capitalism.

CRS’s evangelical quest for growth began with their early specialisation in schools, planned to coincide with America’s post-war (post-GI Bill) school-building program to rectify its shortage of public education facilities. Following these productive years, Tombesi (2006, pp. 156) says, CRS eventually found that ‘architecture had an intrinsic cash-flow problem that hindered the implementation of a proper self-funded business growth plan.’ Hence, their humble office that began above a grocery shop took to (2006, pp. 163) ‘finance-design-construct-and-operate infrastructural projects that … could provide a solid alternative to the fluctuations of the building industry’ because as the discussions within the partnership eventually concluded ‘…an external injection of capital was needed’ if growth was to occur.

Diversification of services and expansion into other industries is commonplace within the evolution of large multinational companies. Take HOK’s current counter-crisis motto “how resilient is your organisation?”. HOK’s resilience can be seen in telling keywords of their website metadata: ‘fast track global real estate facility advance strategies consulting corporate tower high rise education university government healthcare jail laboratory stadium high performance post occupancy evaluation business call center work’. All of them reserve an acute interest in expansion/diversification in general, four of them in particular (education university government healthcare) reveal their cognisance of the investments of government.

In what seems similar to CRS’s intimate knowledge of school building coinciding with Eisenhower’s progressivism of the day (and also their opening of a small branch in Washington entitled ‘Office for Government Affairs’), HOK use a “trend watch” (just their delicious account) to keep abreast of Obama’s legislative moves (such as this, this and this). (I wonder then--if policy and specialisation are by this means connected--why the Department of Defense isn’t a major provider for firms seeking to build capital muscle? If it is, it’s not publicised.)

Petrodollars for everyone! CRS partners in ‘74 at the Initial Public Offering of CRS, American Stock Exchange. (in ‘75 HOK too wins a $3.5 billion contract for King Saudi University in Saudi Arabia)

What this mercantile inclination risks is--as is the case with many privately held firms--the potential of design quality being subordinated to their search for surplus. Remember that HOK is not “public”, but CRS was, and yet one could be mistaken in believing that the old CRS mission (2006, pp.157) to ‘seek high levels of profitability as part of its responsibilities towards shareholders’, is now, to fulfill its responsibility towards HOK’s own bank account.

Plastic Humanisation

Click here to watch Life At HOK (tumblr. has not permitted video embedding yet)

Watch Life At HOK.

When asked what a typical day at HOK would entail, the…
man in the checked shirt says, ‘going to marketing, reading the paper’, followed by…
a suited-up man saying, ‘a clear agenda on my part’. Then…
Riccardo (blue-shirted and starched) enlightens us to the fact that he was welcomed with open arms (flown to Brazil after having started only two weeks earlier) after suggesting that the company should expand to the South American markets, because ‘things rise and fall’. [Suggesting that any proposal offered for the sole purpose of economic gain get you places around there]
Michelle (yet more evidence of why latent anti-American sentiment grows) says ‘at HOK, you get to run’ [an insulting joke to the sedentary architect]
Pam (down the back from interiors) is joyful of being given the “freedom” to use ‘any laminate colour’. Tagged on the end as it fades to under her breath, she adds ‘as long as it functions for the client’. [We presume she shared a laugh off camera with the interviewer].
Colin (as the world sits on his lap) says that, ‘a lot of really genuine work, that really is sustainable, is good to see.’ [Colin plays the urban green-collar hard sell]. It’s obvious as…
Jodi (a generic-looking advance strategies consultant, armoured behind a place-less business park) says, the ‘whole sustainability thing’ spearheads HOK’s design agenda: ‘A healthier planet, a healthier building (then with a strange pause, a quick breath and a guilty look to the side, she says), healthier people, better work-life balance, all those sorts of things…’ [One can’t help but notice that the pause is a recognition that ‘better work-life balance’ is perhaps the most difficult demand of a client’s brief to resolve these days]
Kate (a graphic designer), took delight in the completion of a community project. [Judging by the photos the work appears to be polar to the sorts of run-of-the-mill, client-driven projects HOK does]
Toby, whose taken a liking to Hong Kong, confesses that his ‘office is (his) mobile phone’.
Valery, under the title of The Culture of HOK reveals ‘that there are some core values that haven’t changed in 55 years’.
Bill (the president, who is forming his cult of personality with a pair of transparent glasses) uses the example of ‘mid-western values’ to explain how ‘everyone is pulling for everyone else’ in an environment that ‘can be tough’, and yet if you slide back the video a minute or so…
Larry (a design director) explains that there are ‘39 nationalities represented’ in the London office alone.

Reception with No Appointments Receiving Nobody for No-one, Nowhere.

This runs like a scripted marketing ploy where you forget your watching an architecture firm, and it becomes something more like a wee-hour infomercial, with a cast full over-selling pitchwo(men), for a product only the depressed/rich take interest in but you sit there, forgetting how you should be repulsed by this. Whatever happened to sensibilities or (dare I say) art (or better still dirt) in architecture? This reminds me of Gibson’s discourteous description of Singapore way back in ‘93 and how he says Changi Airport ‘seemed to possess no more resolution than some early VPL world. There was no dirt whatsoever; no muss, no furred fractal edge to things.’

And so if it is not ‘mid-western values’ drawn from the very beginnings of HOK in St. Louis in 1955, and if, as the interviewer says, ‘for such a large company I feel that there is very little beaucracy’, how then does HOK run itself? Surely there is, as Tombesi (2006, pp. 160) found at CRS (in ‘76) an ‘internal quality control entity to monitor production routines’, especially as there is such incessant attention on turnover and that even, as Valery revealed, its core values ‘haven’t changed in 55 years’.

Scientifically Arranged Nerve-Workers

Owen Hatherley’s incursion into the Aesthetics of Civil Enforcement somehow fills the middle of all of this--between the private structure of the “corporate” architecture firm and the plastic humanisation of their front-ends (ie. HOKlife, Populous formerly HOK Sport)--which is essentially the work they produce (eg. 1, 2, 3). Their work is all ‘glass and steel atrium(s), all criss-cross trusses and 24 colours/Blairite aesthetics/chrome armrail(s) and … streamlined grille(s)’/all today’s class war.

Infinite Reflections (Limitless/Bottomless-ness): The distorted Winter Garden at the World Financial Centre, New York City.

Graham, Dan. 1991. Two-Way Mirror Cylinder Inside Cube. Mirrored Glass, Wood, Stainless Steel (Photo by Dan Graham)

Dan Graham’s work could be described too as all “glass and steel”, yet this is precisely what forms his fascination with “corporatised” environments--in particular the corporate make-overs of open public spaces (using gardens and atria). His work claims that these spaces not only contribute to the slow suburbanisation of New York, but also attempt to have a supervised, semi-public green space, to keep the city occupied and “turning-over”. Thus Graham’s work investigates a triunity of “architecture, urban space and power”, the latter related to the corporation’s re-territorialisation of the urban landscape of New York.

Langlands and Bell, 1990. Logo Works: Unilever, Hamburg Wood. Paint, Lacquer Glass. 90 x 90 x 15cm. “I think I see a pagan symbol”

In a similar way, Langlands and Bell’s, Logo Works dissects corporate headquarters revealing what they call a ”super logo”--a public image strategy that also reveals corporate intentions to employees. Even aside from the artist’s intentions, the works leave an open-endedness where one is propelled to ask, “is that a coded message I can see in there (or is that a pagan symbol that is revealing to me system riddled with ritualistic behaviours and a work-life disfigured)? If the conditions in these spaces are advanced applications of what Ford laid out in 1922 (ie. Ford (2004, pp.80)…the reduction of the necessity for thought on the part of the worker and the reduction of his movements to a minimum. He does as nearly as possible only one thing with only one movement.’) then the inside of “super logo’s”--these “corporate intentions”--have given way to what Kwinter (2008, pp.115) calls the new, more refined, “invasive reality of nerve-work.”

Nerve-work, it seems, is becoming more prevalent when materialising architecture as Building Information Modeling packages make their way to every privatised personal computer. What BIM software does is further ground the sedentary architect to the point, as Kwinter (2008, pp.115) describes, where they do “what the majority of humans do now…, essentially watch, discern, correct and respond…” This anatomic-tyranny of the workplace (“from muscle-work to nerve-work”) would remind Will Self of his aim to rekindle humanity’s lost affair with space (‘We don’t know where we are’). Most specifically his explanation that it was through the exertion of corporeal forces that the counterchange of place occurred (he uses the example of horse-back riding), and that “changing places” today (from post-steam locomotive onwards) means that we are mediated by barely any physical exertion (if none at all).

Caudill, Bill, 1971. “The Architect is a Team” from Architecture by Team. The Architect is a (“scientifically arranged”) Team.

The following is an intriguing look at the lengths capitalists go to optimise environments (something like CRS’s (or HOK’s [If it is, it’s not publicised]) “internal quality control entity to monitor production routines”)--from 1922:

Ford (2004, pp.118) ’One point that is absolutely essential to high capacity, as well as to humane production, is a clean, well-lighted and well-ventilated factory. Our machines are placed very close together--every foot of floor space in the factory carries, of course, the same overhead charge. The consumer must pay the extra overhead and the extra transportation involved in having machines even six inches farther apart than they have to be. We measure on each job the exact amount of room that a man needs; he must not be cramped--that would be waste. But if he and his machine occupy more space than is required, that also is waste. This brings our machines closer together than in probably any other factory in the world. To a stranger they may seem piled right on top of one another, but they are scientifically arranged, not only in the sequence of operations, but to give every man and every machine every square inch that he requires and, if possible, not a square inch, and certainly not a square foot, more than he requires. Our factory buildings are not intended to be used as parks.’

Fridays

It could be said that today’s profit-driven architectural office operates with a number of devices to maintain expansion and to fulfill missions. The problem is that this plastic humanisation of the front-end, contradicts the scientific arrangement that underpins the office out the back. Soft-bureaucracy is the means by which core-values can stay the same and old regimes can evolve to more profound levels. Now, doing architecture means just doing nerve-work.

Yet still employees are forever non-reactionary. Why? Because as Koolhaas (2004) admits, labour-theft architects are all just “…marooned in a never-ending casual Friday…”

Bibliography
Ford, H., 2004 [1922]. My Life and Work. Whitefish: Kessinger Publishing.
Koolhaas, Rem, 2004. “Junkspace” in Content. Köln: Taschen. pp.162-171.
Kwinter, S., 2008. Far from Equilibrium: Essays on Technology and Design Culture. Barcelona: Actar.
Tombesi, P., 2006 “Capital Gains and Architectural Losses: The Transformative Journey of Caudill Rowlett Scott (1948–1994)” in The Journal of Architecture, Vol. 11, No. 2. London: Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) and Routledge, pp.145-168.

Restricting Through (Re)defining

Sun, 27 Sep 2009 03:56:00 +0200

I can’t help but think that Jameson’s “cognitive mapping” of the world system of capital relies entirely on the self to process its complex organisation. For example, just thinking about the profundity of calculating labour-value--with its many social and geographic parameters (and each parameter having another organisation)--it seems beyond human grasp (and if that’s not enough: how capitalism can be understood not only as a “history of crises”, but also as a history of adaptive reforms. Thus any evolvable ability makes it even harder for a holistic mapping on the part of the individual).

The moment when the credit-card was introduced is something that added more complexities but poignantly, more world market liquidity. The natural thing then is to think of life post-credit-card--where money nor credit no longer serve as the abstract “symbols” to exchange with, something we never see, ever liquefying the “engine”.

The “Chase Freedom Card”: “Freedom” from seeing physical money and to lubricate the “engine”.

When a method of exchange becomes redundant(/invisible) and propels to a new abstraction, further liquidity occurs. Too, in signifying a reconfiguration of capitalism, one is called to imagine a more complex cognitive map (Just as space too will become more complex, ie. new layers of spatial manifestations, superimposed [related to “loose” zones of capital accumulation], over what is now the post-industrial baggage that is the city--a highly exciting turn of events). And yet, humans (cognition) have individual life spans, capitalism changes lives and reincarnates, after dying (if only a little).

So, in thinking of achieving a human-scale total cognitive map, key, is the need for optimised communication (in the same way articulation of space is imperative to the functionality of capitalism). Hence, what space is to capitalism, communication is to its dysfunction.

For art, an attempt to “map” it visually may see its static nature render it as limitation. Architecture, well that too is problematic (albeit, thoroughly interesting). [Has anyone thought of an architecture as a means to hinder capital generation.]

Barney, Matthew, 2003. Drawing Restraint 8: Natal Cleft. Drawing (Detail). Here Barney restricts the self in the process of creation, to redefine the act of painting.

The mental centre (armed with language, which is too, adaptable) is left standing to keep up with the adroitness of capitalism.

So is Steven Shaviro’s call for a renewed “economism ” just another trend of reformism (re)adapting to the perpetual changing of capitalism? Maybe he’s right to want redefine it, and maybe he’s just fulfilling a task we should always have borne in mind.

(Advanced Capitalistic) 'Planned-Neglect'

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 23:40:00 +0200

The behavioural patterns of the rural and the city have now been reversed. Rural land is now meticulously organised, perpetually executed/exploited beyond what could have been imagined when the industrialisation of agricultural land began. Today, as Jameson (2004, pp.49) puts it, ‘it is the city and the urban that grows wild like the state of nature… whereas it is nature which has, in late capitalism and the green revolution--but perhaps all the way back to the original neolithic revolution itself--been subject to careful planning and engineering.’ Thus, it is not ironic that there increasingly exists places, at the centres of cities, that ‘appear’ as explicit cases of ‘non-design’, or deliberate dilapidation or as manifestations of what Lacaton & Vassal might say as spaces that are ‘better-left-alone’. It is strange though that this phenomena sometimes represents the pertinent sites on any tourists’ agenda, for example Berlin. Yet when you look at it closely, these contradictory territories make a mockery of places in which neglect of a central is the only answer to solve other real and pressing economic problems. I can’t help but see a link here between these (advanced capitalistic) spaces of ‘planned-neglect’ (see images below) and the way Hollywood stars ‘dress-down’ and don a pair of jeans like something miners would wear in Harlan County, USA, Come Back, Africa or from deep down the limitless caverns of Coober Pedy. Why then--even in cities where tourism represents a large portion of its own economic condition--do these sites remain as ‘non-designed’? Similarly what motives do the Hollywood mega-stars have to ‘dress-down’ to appear more say ‘of the working class’? Only in this highly commodified landscape/existence we live in, can the ‘non-designed’ be itself a commodity: it represents the frontier of the commodity spectrum which, after so much market/spatial diversification, can the mimetic spatial/bodily accoutrements of poor/decay become accepted (like the Beuysian quest for a Gesamtkunstwerk). Fashion trend-setters, West Virginia’s Finest. Stars in Miner’s Jeans. Incidently the jeans are put through a labour-intensive “enzyme wash process, giving them the authentic look and feel of the jeans”. Advanced capitalistic space of planned-neglect 1: Forte Prenestino, Rome. Advanced capitalistic space of planned-neglect 1: Forte Prenestino, Rome. Advanced capitalistic space of planned-neglect 2: Kunsthaus Tacheles, Berlin. Left: Tacheles three years after the fall of European communism. Right: Now. Coincidently, this site is off Oranienburger Straße in Mitte (the bearer of Berlin’s tourism core). Advanced capitalistic space of planned-neglect 2: Caledonian Lane, Melbourne. Left: This highly contradictory space at once appears as urban residue, a site of state/commercial neglect, however this area is directly abutting Melbourne’s ‘main street’ and serves as a cove for a muddle of those whom determine the covert embourgeoisement of the space itself. Right: The new renovation of Myer department store next to Caledonian Lane. The project promises a “state-of-the-art shopping environment, inspired by some of the world’s great retailers in London, New York and Paris”. This is the architectural moment Caledonian Lane seeks to resist but actively participates in as it struggles to ‘appear’ critical of its captialistic subsumption. Bonus (irresistible) image: Marxian-capitalism-space-vortex: circulation | money-as-engine-fluid (credit-as-nitrogen-oxide). The finiteness of space = maxed-out credit-card. An early artist’s impression of the renovation of Myer department store. A romantic Koolhaas (2004) on ‘Junkspace’--his self-exclusionary rationale for architecture’s defecations--“…enforced derives, we meekly submit to grotesque journeys past perfume, asylum seeker, building site, underwear, oysters, pornography, cell phone - incredible adventures for the brain, the eye, the nose, the tongue, the womb, the testicles…facism minus dictator…” Jameson, F., 2004. “The Politics of Utopia” in New Left Review 25(272), pp.35–54 Koolhaas, Rem, 2004. “Junkspace” in Content. Köln: Taschen. pp. 162-171.

Passive Consumerism to Counter-Intelligence

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 17:00:00 +0200

The explanation of the nature of speculation and the bogus decision-making that governs prices/values clearly forms a logical argument for rejecting such powers of subjectivity. The worst we can do is be passive consumers. If the system can form a presiding subjective ‘intelligence’, we have to form a ‘counter-intelligence’. The sellers may have (we can call it) ‘speculative powers’ but, lest we forget, we too, the consumers, have ‘purchasing powers’. Classically this term is meant similarly as ‘bang-for-your-buck’, but it also contains our basic right of what to buy, value for money is an added extra. To buy (without a counter-intelligence) is to agree and submit. If one is armed with such a ‘counter-intelligence’ they need not be told of destructive forces of Laissez-faire capitalism--the two go hand-in-hand. Harvey outlines that (2000, pp.76) ‘much of the extraordinary transformation of the earth’s surface these last two hundred years reflects precisely the putting into practice of the free market utopianism of process and its restless and perpetual reorganisations of spatial forms.’ Our decisions of what to buy, we can therefore extrapolate, directly influence these transformations and as we are a collective of consumers, changes to the decisions of what to buy will affect (but not necessarily reverse) these transformations powerfully--more so than what industry transforms. Perhaps it is this compliance to buying that is one of the great tragedies of the industrialised masses, that we have fallen to the fallacies of these speculations: we too have taken part in it all. If we imagine capitalism had never grown up, never gone global, it might give us an idea of an achievable future--one that accommodates nature also. The problem is that consumers have released it from its cage (governments have had a hand in too), and now slowly a ‘counter-intelligence’ (through a technological easing of communication) is not merely imposing a stricture, but putting it back where it came from. We are not alone using platforms like these to communicate ideas like this, and yet I don’t believe that a social-networking platform that truly encompasses the masses has been developed (in a generation or so we will begin to see the fruits of the internet). Just imagine the poor had ‘true’ access to on-line social platforms? It could be an amazing thing, but it might just mirror the injustices of the ‘real-world’. As with with what occurs with capitalism/crises, we must not suffer from a case of amnesia. When the internet is attainable from all corners of the globe we must be careful about how it is managed. It we must not reproduce what happened in the promising early days of the internet, as danah boyd (in Penelope, 2007) recalls, ‘the unbelievable frustration with me about the online world is that there is that 1990s utopian dream about how the internet was going to save us because on the internet no one would know you were a dog, race wouldn’t matter, class wouldn’t matter, you could talk to anyone around the world, we would get rid of all the language barriers, get rid of the cultural barriers, great,’ she says. ‘Well that’s not what happened. What happened is that we have projected the same segregated culture into the internet.’

Palace, 2009. Passive-Consumerism-Counter-Intelligence.

I know this is a profound ideal to suggest the dismantling of Capitalism through the our future of far-reaching social platforms (albeit well articulated platforms), we can use these spaces (as we are doing now) to start to dissect and recalibrate our realities (you only have to see Ushahidi, a mobile phone-based [as mobile phones are still the most ubiquitious communication technology] service that maps reports from citizens regarding poignant political, social events ie. swine flu). Notate Bene The history of Capitalism is a history of crises. ‘Compulsive buyers’, ‘passive consumerism’, ‘Material Girl’, ‘retail therapy’ are some of the saddest terms we can utter. How can architecture fit into this?

Penelope, D., 2007. A space of her own. The Age. [Online] 4 August. Available at: http://www.theage.com.au/news/in-depth/a-space-of-her-own/2007/08/03/1185648141385.html [Accessed 27 May 2009].
Harvey, D., 2000. Possible Urban Worlds. Amersfoort: Twynstra Gudde Management Consultants

The Commands of (Architectural) Language

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0200

Speaking about the constructed reality is made easier because there is physics embedded within language and language has the flexibility and innateness of becoming reduced to simple forms to just “consist of language and the actions into which it is woven” (Wittgenstein, 1953/2001, pg. 7). Success of the process of construction is based on communication and the dialogue learned by the partakers of its success. We naturally deteriorate macro-languages by relating our own syntax and the “vernacular of the milieu of the space” (Goh, 2001, pg. 13).

Because “semantics is (not only) about the relation of words to thoughts, but it is also about the relation of words into other human concerns” (Pinker, 2007, pg. 6), there are conflicting ways to see points of view or reasons for taking actions in certain circumstances. The language of thought - conceptual semantics - “provides … the dramas of social life. And sets the stage in countless arenas of human disputation” (Pinker, 2007, pg. 5). The way we construe events might reflect our alignment with select political party or to an ideal be it individually developed or a hand-me-down. “Is the American military incursion into Iraq a case of invading a country or liberating a country? …Are high tax rates a way to redistribute wealth or to confiscate earnings?” (Pinker, 2007, pg. 6). Is a belief in the Book of Genesis a disillusioned view of the world’s beginning, a trap for thinkers not to find pragmatic evidences or a divine event that justifies the world’s beginning? Is sustainability a “a foreign currency, the joker in the Oriental pack… an incorrectly catalogued fetish” (Chinchilla, 2006) or a responsibility?

Thankfully there is rarely confusion in such basic/reduced vernacular used in the construction industry, as this is indicated in the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations. Wittgenstein describes a simple language game (Sprachspiel) a concept intended “to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or a form of life” (Wittgenstein, 1953/2001, pg. 23).

Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1889-1951). Sourced from the homepage of Tony Bellotti.

This is a universal deconstruction of Wittgenstein’s Builders, not merely an attuning to the industry I so align.

“Let us imagine a language for which the description given by Augustine is right. The language is meant to serve for communication between a builder A and an assistant B. A is building with building-stones: there are blocks, pillars, slabs and beams. B has to pass the stones, and that in the order in which A needs them. For this purpose they use a language consisting of the words ‘block’, ‘pillar’, ‘slab,’ ‘beam’. A calls them out;—B brings the stone which he has learnt to bring at such-and-such a call…” (Wittgenstein, 1953/2001, pg. 3)

The important point is to realise that the builder’s language is an activity - the orders given by the builder and the executions of those orders by the assistant - into which is woven something we would recognise as language, albeit in simpler form. When the builder says ‘pillar’ a certain type of act is performed. Success is judged if the assistant passes the a ‘pillar’ to him.

Wei-wei, Ai. “Table and Pillar” 2002 (background) “Table and Beam” 2002 (foreground). Sourced from Galerie Urs Meile.

There is a direct connection here between words and extra-linguistic reality. The builder sends the command, as in a command-line software and the worker reacts through a number of stored, predetermined and accessed movements, as in a macro, combining two or more events.

Deleuze & Guattari report of the order-word, a procedural, seemingly void of expression, interpretation of language, that utilizes a sequence of instructions to achieve the retrieval of information. “The elemental unit of language - the statement - is the order-word. Rather than common-sense, a faculty for the centralisation of information, we must define an abominable faculty consisting in emitting, receiving, and transmitting order-words. Language is made not to be believed but to be obeyed, and to compel obedience.” (Delueze-Guattari, 1987, pg. 76)

This account, raises the question, could a language exist which consists entirely of commands? All art forms have been churned through the reduction machine, stripping back Baroque to Breuer to Pawson, Shakespeare to Hardy to Hitchens, Banquets to Burger King to vending machines. Is it possible that the information age will consume creative writing however passively informative creative writing can be. Consumed by command-line requests that spill to conversation and human interaction - to live is to request both virtually and physically.

Garnier, Charles. Opéra Garnier. 1875. Sourced from Gay Paris.

Pawson, John. Set design for Chroma at the Royal Opera House. 2008. Photo copyright of Richard Davies. Sourced from Dezeen.

Command-line. Sourced from Wikimedia.

If we dive further in the understanding of linguistics moving from Wittgenstein we find that in reality objects are 3-dimensional arrangements of matter, but language idealises objects as essentially 1, 2 or 3-dimensional. For example the word ‘line’ indicates something as 1-dimensional, the word ‘road’ indicates something as 1-dimensional (+ width), the word beam indicates something as 1-dimensional (+ having a finite thickness), the word ‘surface’ indicates something as 2-dimensional and the word ‘slab’ indicates something as 2-dimensional (+ a finite thickness). (Pinker, 2007, 5:07 mins)

The boundaries of objects are treated as objects themselves; ‘edges’ which define the 1-dimensional boundary of a 2-dimensional surface. ‘The patron walked along the edge of the parapet’, and ‘end’ which is the boundary of a 1-dimensional ‘road’ or a 2-dimensional ‘beam’). It can be summarised that space exists in our prepositions, matter exists in our nouns, naturally time exists in our tenses and is causality exists in our verbs. (Pinker, 2007, 7:00 mins)

However uncanny is the relationship between the interpretation of the structure of language to the built environment, it is a functioning language and armed with intrinsic language-games/order-words that allow for the materialisation of our realities.

Pinker, Steven. The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, Viking Adult; 1 edition, 2007
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations, Blackwell Publishing, 1953/2001
Goh, Irving. Promising “Post-Colonialism”: Delouse-Guattari’s “Minor Literature” and the Poetry of Arthur Yap, Genre; vol. 22, California State University, 2001
Authors@Google: Steven Pinker, 2007, Producer, Google; director, Google. s.l: Authors@Google. 1 online video (Flash Format) (75 mins). [Video recording]
Chinchilla, Izaskun, Sociopolis, Public Issue, 2006
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix, A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. London and New York: Continuum, 1987/2004

Voluntary Common Land

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0100

Kibbutzim were created before the first Jewish settlement in the 1950s by Zionists that were mainly Russian-Jewish emigrants. The first funded community was called ‘Degrania’ in Israel, 1909. Kibbutzim became independent-social, economic and cultural units, somewhat like cooperative-socialist islands in capitalist seas.

A community can not be free if does not produce resources to be itself.

On small plots, farmers grow vegetables and fruits for their household and for a common market. Regional cooperation in agriculture saves expenses by common use of farming equipment, warehouses, other facilities, schools, clinics, communal halls, shops etc., located centrally. The aim is to reduce the running costs of diversified farming and increase production of industrial crops such as cotton, sugar beet and ground nuts, which could be processed at the central point; and as a consequence, a reduction in transportation costs results.

Nahalal moshav, Israel. Established by the Women’s International Zionist Organization as a Girls’ Agricultural Training Farm in 1929. The inner-most circle contains the communal buildings and resources, which are surrounded by individually owned farms. Contrary to the collective kibbutzim, farms in a moshav tended to be individually owned but of fixed and equal size. Sourced from Sourced from J. Robertson McIlwain [dot] com.

Kibbutzim originated the first building blocks of modern day Israel. Most, if not all of Israel’s main industries grew out of the Kibbutz environment. Most of the nation’s income is created by agriculture whist still using classic traditions established in productive agriculture (although there is present the use of high-technology to the achieve the level of ‘laboratories for research’; aiming to experiment with growth methods while increasing the production of crops without jeopardising quality). They are desirable places to test experimental agricultural techniques and many of them are adopt environmental approaches (see Green Kibbutz movement). The Algatech and the Geshem projects are large-scale projects designed for on-site production whilst managing natural resources.

Alga Technologies (Algatech), Kibbutz Ketura, mass-produces algae for cosmetics, nutritional supplements and for energy conversion and production. Sourced from Israel Export and International Cooperation Institute.

Kibbutzim also exist in the urban context: they are a means to resolve conflicts and social problems. There are more 75 Kibbutzim nationwide in which over 129,300 Israelis reside and collaborate. The Zionists defined the organization of Kibbutzim not only as a necessity but also the new Jews in Palestine (the founders of the Kibbutz movement), felt that they couldn’t rely on others only themselves - belonging to a Kibbutz was a form of societal identity.

Kibbutzim are seen as the most effective way of taking control over land in Palestine - a tool for any Zionist. Sourced from Google.

Kibbutzim are miniature communal societies wherein the principle that all wealth is common property presides. The inhabitants usually are allowed some notion of private property, however all inhabitants are provided for, with all necessities such as: food, housing, clothes and social and medical services. The inhabitants cook and dine together - normally adults and children do not form standard families, even if the adults have private quarters. The raising of children, is also a common task of the Kibbutzim.

The Ideal Settlement: the Utopian settlement behavior. Kibbutzim, for the past 80 years, have been concurrently reflecting the changes in ideology that take place in society and consequently reconfiguring their layout and evolving the aesthetics. Sourced from Google.

Notes on Arabic Adoption

Sat, 14 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0100

Dubai is a double-edged sword. At once there is an encounter with tarnished terrain – a lucid, lagoon of baroness propagated into hard-scaped, impenetrable reality of unprecedented scales. The other, a more global and serious reality, deals with the question of the fixed, temporary and the permanency of architecture now. Dubai garners the wealth to exploit construction at a never-before-seen rate – bypassing values like craftsmanship (the lack of which is a ubiquitous problem), tactility, durability and poignantly, adoption.

Chapple, Boo, 2003, Close for Comfort. Sourced from Residual Soup.

The fate of architecture is to become ‘pillar-less’ cages of fragility, non-dependency and un-attachment, suspect to Warhol’s fame but rapidly forced into the shadows of its newer, more ‘world’s biggest’ successor on some other terrain vague in another part of the city with a function that nobody really cares about. The landscape and its migrant labourers that set stone upon it have to admirably and muted, like the deterioration of the value of architecture, handle the changes to their existence, to the point that what really is at stake is survival.

Dubai “Another World”. Sourced from Photobucket.

The constructed conclusion, is a non-linear array of impersonalities, that change their function over time, not by choreography, but through definition by the State, relocation of resources, flip-sides to economic prosperity and the pressures of the success of capitalistic endeavours. What remains is the mechanical, rhythmic motion of the worker, and the memory of the architect aiming to recreate another masterpiece.

Dubai workers behind a UAE national. Sourced from Asia News.

Until the 1950s and the discovery of oil, Dubai was predominantly empty, home to Bedouins and open sand plains. The construction methods were textbook examples of Frampton’s “critical regionalism”; materials hard-packed from the earth, courtyards so as to keep the heat out, intelligent, breathable buildings and clusters allowing sheltered lane ways. It was a workers town, this was the silent vernacular that existed, world’s away from Simmel’s Metropolis. The acceptance of concrete in the 70s as the preferred material terminated any possibility of Dubai having an honest identity and pastiche development thereafter proceeded.

It is the validity of surface and the strength of program/locale that serves as indicators of the sustainability of an architecture’s adornment. The validity of surface is naturally achieved given the age of building, its defiance against ecological circumstance and wrong treatment in the militaristic sense. Dubai is not an old city (The Al Fahidi Fort, built in 1787 is believed to be the oldest building in Dubai) and does not possess architecture of artefactual significance compared to that of nearby Mashriq.

The Al Fahidi Fort, Dubai, 1787. Sourced from Trekway.

The strength of program dictates that, for example, a building of religious importance is more likely to be widely adorned than that of a hotel or banking institution. The reproduction of the ‘same-old’, a visible by-product of the industrial revolution and pre-fabricated age, may fight against fiscal pressures but greatly reduce the chances of public adoration. Success stories of modern public adoration in architecture can be found in the youthfulness of the Pompidou and the early works of Lacaton and Vassal – they speak wholeheartedly, honestly and beg for adoption. The pity is the infrastructure of Dubai relies on the tourist turnover. Perhaps the issue is not of the pastiche, copy-paste language of Dubai, but simply that the city is a transient one.

Lacaton, Anne, Vassal, Jean-Philippe, 1984, Straw matting hut, Niamey. Sourced from Lacaton and Vassal.

Continue reading in the Texts section (If not, soon).

Semiotic Mythologies and the Green Agenda

Mon, 02 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0100

The frontier of the post-icon era, brought about by the downward-spiralling economy/ecology, has formed a new breed of architect of less moral stature than the capitalist’s ‘building designer’. Previously embedded as part of the marketing strategy of a brand, the architect today is tailored for a token green agenda. Governed by state dictation, most buildings today require efficiency attributes, some without a trace of carbon-emission; a nominal paradigm shifts exists in this newly created responsibility in which there appears to be two serious issues with the deployment of the ‘green icon’.

Semiotics:
The contemporary icon is conceived by a marriage of a successfully marketed entity and the established architect. The aim of the icon is to manifest a physical representation of the identity of the brand - the most potent example being Bank headquarters. Early 19th Century mercantile architecture resembled important civic institutional buildings; fortresses, allowing little light to permeate. Today they represent more than they are; transparent, readable, attainable, reflective, open and with a green agenda, certainly not the model modern banking stipulates. The misdemeanour of specifying sustainability as corporate identity wreaks of tokenism and fallibility. What best represents a banking institution today? A trough.

The image of banking institutions today. Sourced from Poor William.

The advent of green architectural marketing are second-order signs where buildings have fallen victim to Barthes’ Red Wine analogy. The bourgeois’ full, dark bottle is to signify healthy, robust, relaxing wine. The reality is that this image contains subtle embedded semiotic manipulations with the desire to sell the product and the simple desire to maintain the status quo (Barthes, Mythologies, p. 60). Sustainability is the bottle in this case.

Roland Barthes. Sourced from Islakotero.

Palace, 2009. Banking institutions then and now. Left: Former brank of the Royal Bank of Scotland, Edinburgh (1847). Right: Cook+Fox Architects. Bank of America Tower, New York (2009).

Mis-education:
Architects are caught in the Green agenda, speculating merely as no-man’s-land designers, in the same way Government tries to regulate emerging technologies or the internet, albeit on a nominalistic scale. The thinking stops at the formulation of infrastructure embedded in the building and green baton is passed to environmental engineer/consultant/designer/specialist. This is merely a problem of specialisation, the age-old ‘jack-of-all-trades’ debate, which is why architects should choose their friends wisely. The issue is in the presentation of the design being flawed, superficial and let alone misconceived, however fulfilling the market appeal of the brand.

The running joke is that apparently today, icons are sensitive too.

The noble orientation of our established architects today is that of an architectural iconoclast.

Interview with Junya Ishigami Recorded at the Japan...

Sun, 18 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0100

Interview with Junya Ishigami

Recorded at the Japan Institute of Architects, Tokyo on 23rd of October 2008 (07:46 mins)
Junya Ishigami. Sourced from In Interest.

Ishigami, Junya. Japanese Pavillion, Venice, 2008. Sourced from flickr.

Ted Nelson: Social Architecure's Future

Sat, 10 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0100

On Sun, Apr XX, 20XX at 2:00 PM, XXX XXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXX@hotmail.com wrote:

Hi Ted,

I am just laying the groundwork for my XXXXX project at XXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXX. And I came across your work. Like you I am not a tekkie. Nor am I attached to the physical form of architecture. Cities, like cyberspace are full of rubbish and the constructed environment has enough physical construction for me not to produce a building for the project.

I am more interested in the future: the fact that architecture can play a role in the connectivity ofsocialstructures or ideas like transclusion in the built context. One way is that a piece of architecture is just the skeleton, with floor plates - allowing as much freedom as possible (see Le Corbusier’s plan libre).

The other way to see it is that we don’t need building anymore…we are mobile and perhaps it’s just nature, perhaps gridded and divided - with rules of cultivation (see REX). Or perhaps I could design a giant jail the size of Mt. Everestin each major city andincarcerate the city’s inhabitants for crimes to the earth. The building could just use the surrounding, useless fabric.

I’m not a morbid person - perhaps my question to you is that, because you foresaw many of the components that the web has today, what do you now see it becoming, technologically and probably more poignantly, socially and if you have some hints, architecturally?

I hope you have time.

XXX XXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXX, XXXXXXXXX

From: Ted Nelson
Sent: Thursday, April XX, 20XX 9:22 PM
To: XXX XXXXXXXX
Cc: Ted Nelson
Subject: :gbg:arx:artx: Architecture, Art, Web 2.0 (wuz Re: Social Architecure’s Future)

Thanks for your kind words.

I am afraid I don’t have time to answer all the essay questionspeople send me.

I haven’t the foggiest idea what junk or fads will come nexton the Net. ‘Web 2.0’ nonsensically conflates a bunch ofvaguely related stuff under a misleading title.

Architecture? I loved it as a kid but I’m a cynic now.Like “Art,” look at who profits and why. The art establishment(critics, galleries…) mediates between public, collectorsand would-be artists. If those emperors have no clothes,it would all fall down.

Architecture could be cheapo modules. Who prevents?The contractors (working through the Building Codes). Soleri told me that the building codes had killed him.And the big firms that want to build screwy-lookingconcert halls. (Note: I’m hoping to build a good oldQuonset hut on our family farm. Beautiful space inside.)

Quonset hut. Sourced from Texnrails.

(And how come nobody’s selling the Usonian houseas a prefab? Surely the rights have expired by now.THERE’S a money-making suggestion for you.)

Palace, 2008, Frank Lloyd (I’m) Right..

Enough! No time.

TN

—
- FIRST ROCK MUSICAL RECALLED— See
http://hyperland.com/A&E.AnnivBlurb-D10.txt
- NEW XANADU SOFTWARE— See xanarama.net
- MY SPECIAL LECTURE on 14 non-computer topics—
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/podcasts/seminars.php

Theodor Holm Nelson
Founder, Project Xanadu
Visiting Fellow, Oxford Internet Institute
Visiting Professor, University of Southampton

The Garden in the Machine

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0100

Topographical contours. The body belongs to the earth as the building belongs to the earth..

Reinsertion of local landscapes into the city:

Looking to different neighbouhoods in any city, mean activities could be mapped and linked to open plazas, skeleton infrastructures and aerial gardens (forests). The idea is to generate new identities inside the city, between the citizens, the traditional natural species and cultivations, and the education that the local knowlegde and the global media can bring. In each neigbourhood, could be implemented new structures with the funtion of becoming a body (building-garden) inside of a body (city-machine).

From left clockwise: 1.The new catalysts are bodies with tubes. 2. With skin wrinkles. 3. They belong to the earth, incrementing the earth surface.

The idea of the multifuntional garden: Ecological Niches (Gills Clement)

Utopia is linked with ecology: If there is one only specie of any plant in your garden, the opportunnity of growing a bean is impossible. Diversity is linked not only in the diversity of species, but too in their behaviours. Mixture. A tree is not an individual, it is a linked community. One tree alone is a gardens that doesn’t need maintenance, without watering. In abandoned places is where diversity is, not in the mono-cultivations. These are the genetic pools where life is generated. “The horse is generating a mint garden, because he doesnt like the mint” (Gilles Clement: From the Garden in Motion to the Third Landscape, AAIR, February 20, 2007). Diversity is surprise.

We should liberate as much space as we consume through the material construction of the project, making compatible the program with the preservation and multiplication of the landscape (social and/or natural landscapes). We should abandon the romantic relationship between looking, nature and space, and realise that the landscape is not what is in front of us, but what is around us.

Nature Restauration: Permaculture (Bill Mollison)

To let the building be a part of the machine, we inject new natural elements that fertilise the soil of some plots in the city, generating valleys. We re-source the energy from above: electricity from the roof and facades (solar energy), and water from rain that is collected through the valley. Never again do we have to re-source our elements from under the cities, but rather from the sky.

Palace, 2008. Funnel collectiors and pot cultivations (non-digging): When the plants have grown to their point-of-sale size, they can be removed in their pots and sold immediately. The larger pots remain in the field to be reused. This system allows growers to offset labour costs associated with planting and re-planting in the field with a significant initial investment..

Palace, 2008. Fertilising valleys: Filtrations of water excess, pots on ground, hanging pots and funnels. Pilars from the sky to the ground..

Another solution for cultivating:

“A growroom: A growroom, or grow room, is a room of any size where plants are grown under controlled conditions. The reasons for utilizing a growroom are countless. Some seek to avoid the criminal repercussions of growing illicit cultivars, others simply have no alternative to indoor growing. They can be grown with the use of artificial light, sunlight, or a combination of the two. A grow room will often become excessively hot (relative to temperature range ideals for plant growth), due to the heat generated by the high power lamps; the use of supplemental ventilation fan is often necessitated.” (Sourced from Wikipedia).

Typical Growroom. Sourced from Wikimedia.

Hydroponics: Hydroponics or agricultural hydroponics is a method used to cultivate plants using mineral solutions instead of agricultural land. Plants can grow with only the mineral solution or in a neutral medium such as sand, gravel or tissues.

The Notion of Building

Mon, 08 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0100

Our intentions now are have a clear objective of placing no hierarchy between any media, tools or space to complete a task. The choice and use of each media, tool or space must pass contemporary criteria of sustainability and functionality. As with navigating through the commercial landscape or the democratic/anonymous web, a rigorous process of filtering, selection, concentration and personal export will follow.

Tom, Dale. Western Negative. Sculpture. Still image burned into screen of monitor. TV Broadcast monitor. Dim: 60cm x 80cm x 80cm. 2007. Sourced from Dale Tom.

There are several discrepancies about which, it is that should be investigated architecturally - or whether the investigation into building is something that needs to happen at all. A paradigm shift is occurring within the occupation of architecture and catalysed with the unenviable economic trough we are all faced with, architects - ‘cast-ers’ of indestructible stone are now bequeathed with a profession somewhat dormant. The shift is an extension of science, where architects conduct most of their work as research, some never building, or as a guise for youth to developing a pre-building catalogue.

Sutherland, Peter. Acid Rain. Sourced from IANN Magazine.

Peter Cook denounces this sort of investigation as a construction to provide virtual parameters for the constraint of building, but where the relevance is in this work, our focus’ must be poignant and sustainable as it is on a scale of mass-investigation. The investigation in the algorithmic process has its limitations: it has the unfortunate circumstance of being dictated by technological development, and the technological development is governed by capitalistic gain (by slow inch-by-inch releases: there is the analogy that once a extra-terrestorial ship crashed and the military stole, preserved and recreated all the of the technology on-board - now, month by month they are releasing updates and ‘breakthroughs’ for commercial access acting as the leather belt on the arm of the techno-addicts). There also is grave irresponsibility in the frivolous act labeled ‘scripting’, an uncanny name, as though it performs architectural pantomime (virtuality), it is so virtual that the production, labour and materialistic value is totally disregarded. Any contextual relationship is uprooted.

Palace. Overrated - Scripted (Rhino Model), 2008.

The analogy that architecture should be built as a reflection of its age is however fulfilled by this dalliance. With graciousness and with a stringent effort to avoid the sickening and prevalent copy/paste blogosphere we cite Sam Jacobs, “This unreality has infused architectural production, often finding resolution in hysterical, liquid, fluid form at audacious scale - the kind of thing recently dubbed ‘Parametricism’. Displays of beyond-human formal complexity drop out of the computational design systems employed in the search for exoticism and difference - a difference that was demanded by the market pluralism of ultra capitalism. Appropriately, these projects seem to use the very same kind of tools that has maximized, magnified, and deepened our current financial crisis.” (The Ruins of the Future, Stange Harvest, 6/12/2008)

One responsible building definition of our age is to access the highly developed data mining abilities we have on our silver platter. The formal resolutions existing in scripting could be re-hashed (while still holding all of the profound complexities) into works investigating geo-spatial analyses, web-based feedback, responsive spaces and other humanist approaches. Furthering that, we are staring straight into the face of an energy crisis and every move the architect make is of instant negative consequence. The notion of building is now in question.

Occupying Voids

Thu, 27 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0100

Urbanity asks us to add function to void space. A space which superficially might need little design concentration - by natural selection it is the body and chance that are the vessels to perform this request. Why is it that voids occur? In some cases they seem to be architectural devices paying homage to the built, or dead-space for alternate foci, or purely for transience - similar to the relationship of a catalogued search-engine and the exclusive web. Being the chance-relationship spaces they are, they might be better left alone.

Shibata, Toshio, Untitled #6, 1986. From the series: Night Places. Sourced from Tepper Takayama Fine Arts.

The Smithson’s (Peter (Brutus) and Alison) use their architecture as a means to charge the void. Their works appear as kind of egalitarian additions to what is already the homogeneous conobation of the city. These additions allow for new “movement patterns” different to those made on the same domain - giving the city new circumstances and possibilities. Within their ‘charge’ an occupant invents and experiences new ways about his or her own city. The works are forever successful because their prescribed and conscious aim is not to make the best arrangement of the site, however they recognise that they are but one of many built re-incarnations - a part of a long line of uses where the only difference is in the contemporary state that they built.

Smithson, Alison and Peter, The Economist Building, 1959-64. Sourced from Flickr.

Smithson, Alison and Peter, The Economist Building, 1959-64. Sourced from Hugh Pearman.

The work of the prematurely felled Yves Klein saw the void as a commodity, likened to that of a canvas. If Klein was the creator of the void (Le Vide), it was a space he owned. His capitalistic approach to his art contemplates this idea of ownership - from his signature in the sky, frivolously defying real-world constraints (Leap Into the Void, 1960), legally patenting IKB and leasing his voids - ‘his’ inhabitants were “literally impregnated by the sensible pictorial state that was specialized and stabilized by (Klein) before hand in the given space” (Sidra Stitch, Yves Klein. Stuttgart: Cantz Verlag, 1994, 133). Klein’s zen-like understanding of the void forced users to be “feel” and “understand” such a state.

Klein, Yves, Saut Dans le Vide (Leap Into the Void), 1960. Sourced from Shane Lavalette.

Claude Lorrain (1600-82) inventively sewed neo-classic spatial improbabilities to counter horizons of reality into the mythic. Voids were filled with false brilliancy rendering utopic landscapes - a firey Ivan Chtcheglov wrote in 1953: “Many of the latters admirers are not quite sure to what to attribute the charm of (Lorrain’s) canvases. They talk about his portrayal of light. It does indeed have a rather mysterious quality, but that does not suffice to explain these paintings ambience of perpetual invitation to voyage. This ambience is provoked by an unaccustomed architectural space. The palaces are situated right on the edge of the sea, and they have “pointless” hanging gardens whose vegetation appears in the most unexpected places. The incitement to drifting is provoked by the palace doors proximity to the ships.” (Ivan Chtcheglov, Formulary for a New Urbanism, Paris: Allia, 2006)

Lorrain, Claude, The Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba, 1648. Sourced from Wikimedia.

The planning of occupancy of a void deals only with positive possibilities, its context and sustainability are the determinants of its success.

Interview with Tezuka Architects (Takaharu Tezuka) Recorded in...

Sun, 16 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0100

Interview with Tezuka Architects (Takaharu Tezuka)

Recorded in Todoroki Setagaya, Tokyo on 21st of October 2008 (35:39 mins).

Tezuka Architects. Sourced from designboom.

Fuji Kindergarten. Sourced from Business Week.

Interview with Atelier Bow-Wow (Yoshiharu Tsukamoto)Recorded in...

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0100

Interview with Atelier Bow-Wow (Yoshiharu Tsukamoto)

Recorded in Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo on the 22nd October 2008 (30:54 mins).

Atelier Bow-Wow. Sourced from Atelier Bow-wow.

Landscape of Ambiguous Spaces vs. Built Form

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0200

Junya Ishigami

Daily life, artifacts, minimum uses, are related independently in an environment. What is actually happening is transparent to the view. The building skyline, the apartments, all existing windows, every wall, tell stories. The system of objects provides and generates the scenario for the stories. The container for the action is dissolved - the walls are dissolved.

Garden City. Sourced from Edgar Gonzalez

Paraphrased from Ishigami: The city is a formation of little plots distributed throughout a simulated town, The Generic Town, each with a woodland and hill. The same attention is given to designing the shape and the volume (biomass) of these lots and how they gather together as to designing the buildings. A new way to think about the relation between the buildings and lots and roads and plaza commons.

Satellite Cities. Sourced from Edgar Gonzalez.

Micro-cosmos’ of relations on earth and out-of-space are drawn without a hierarchy of scales. It hybridises nature with daily-life, housing projects, neighbourhoods, cities and furniture. The connections are generated throughout them.

Leah Beeferman

She imagines the internal lives of architecture and buildings, and speaks about architecture with strong personalities and developing and dreamt technologies. The inspiration for her comes from imagining and drawing the universe that a building ‘sees’. The idea that “a building would dream of being something more”.

She focuses in the built-form, the building as a character, and looks to the built pieces one-by-one and thinks of them as isolated beings, not so much as belonging to a system. Satellite buildings about to leave the Earth, as structural spaceships, that travel out of space. Flight Factories, Evaporating Landscapes, Helicopter Archipelagos. Always with the sense that not everything might start and finish on Earth.

Eglin FPS-85 radar. Sourced from Global Security.

“Imagining the Universe as seen by a Building used to track Orbital Debris.”
“Dedicated sensoring/how to hear with clarity” 2008, ink, graphite and medium on paper, 42” x 36” Sourced from Leah Beeferman.

Beeferman is inspired by the Great Idea of the Super-Conducting Super-collider, of building a miracle machine that can replicate the Big Bang, help treat life-threatening illnesses, and maybe even unfold the mysteries of the universe. “Housed in a 54-mile underground tunnel beneath Waxahachie, Texas, the Super-Collider was designed to accelerate beams of subatomic particles to fantastic speeds and then crash the particles into one another, purportedly generating huge amounts of energy. The machine would be able to simulate the conditions present during the Big Bang, thus allowing scientists to gain new insights into the very nature of matter.”

Super-Conducting Super-Collider. Sourced from Neat-o-rama.

“Satellited” 2008, ink on paper, 9” x 12”. Sourced from Leah Beeferman.

Related to the idea of architecture and interiors in films, and how they contribute to the story psychologically, metaphorically, atmospherically, she understands that architecture can begin a character in a story, not just being the container for the story. The buildings are shells that remain always the same, however the character of the buildings change from inhabitant to inhabitant. What the walls have heard throughout time, which stories remain in the Collective Imaginary, what one once cooked inside, the plants that the neighbour forgot at home when he left, each of these give a different personal imprint to the lasting character of the built form.

Beeferman deliberately leaves people out for the focus to be on the structures and the places. Its important that the drawings suggest real space, but never actually become real.

Suburban Survival

Sun, 17 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0200

The plight of the traditional American way of life will lead to a reassessment of one’s way of being, the regulation of consuming, a new urban infrastructure and a civil war. The genesis of the suburb was a by-product of the Industrial Revolution of 1850s America. In it’s original form, the suburb was considered relief from the industrialised city, complete with it’s factories and production plants. It offered a rural setting with access to the city as a place of work - the city, the machine, the suburb, the relief. This was the suburb without the sub-division we know today: it comprised of farm-style living, manor houses, light-rail (streetcar) connection to the city - this was the American Dream. It took nearly 100 years for the rest of the population to realise that this was indeed the form of living most comfortable. This comparison between what the suburb was to suburb-dwellers of the 1850s and the failed attempt to recreate this ideology today is laughable perhaps pitiful, on many levels. This way of life is now an outdated infrastructure.

Not only is it not anything comparable to the genuine intention of the original suburb, but today’s quest for one’s own piece of land is not sustainable. The inception of the automobile in the early 20th century formed the first demanded change to the suburb in the form of designated access and expressways. At a time when oil and land was aplenty, there weren’t foreseeable problems to confining the city and solving expansion or growth issues. The possibility of owning your own land, customising your own home, having a family car was something of a democratised ‘luxury’. James Howard Kunstler is a straight-talker who is adamant about the downfall of the contemporary suburban life, “…the fabric of our daily life, the suburban cul-de-sacs, the strip malls, the parking lagoons, the commercial highway strips…all the stuff that Americans are familiar with as the daily setting of their lives, really does not lend itself to retro-fitting, for a different kind of future, for a more energy-efficient future.” He catagorises it as a mis-investment of resources. One could extrapolate that it is going to remain as that and require a more resource and labour-intensive future if it is going be improved.

The automobile is the all-American lifeblood of the suburb and is the instrument that it has become dependant on, it is also the major cause of the oil crisis that we are embarking on. Up until now there has been a constant, accessible level of crude oil distributable for requiring nations (the crisis of ‘73 was a controlled situation whereby oil was not distributed to the U.S as it was affiliated with Israel in its conflict with Syria, Egypt, and Iraq), …

Oilfields, California, 1938

Oil refineries and petrochemical factories, Texas City, 2008

… now however it is the latent demand of the resource to keep afloat the suburban lifestyle. Two important determining diagrams that outline what is demanded and what we ‘might’ have, paint a grim picture of our future. Fig. 1 is the diagram that represents all nations and their rate of oil imports by the billions of barrels per day.

Fig. 1: Global oil imports in bbl/day: The digram reveals that the top oil consumer is the United States (@ 20,680 bbls/day).

Fig. 2 is Marion King Hubbert’s diagram of peak oil. Basically, the peak oil diagram represents the global production level of oil against the year. The poignant information that this diagram illustrates is that at certain level the production level hits a peak and begins to decline because the rate the maximum oil being extracted is reached. It outlines that we are in this peak oil moment.

Fig. 2: Hubbert’s Peak Oil diagram of 1956..

Hubbard’s diagram is evidence for adopting a new suburban lifestyle - no longer living an existence mediated by the car. As well as the general population, it is the developers of these pastiche, new communities that elect not to recognise the crisis we are in. The crime lies in expanding on green space, and building stylised so as to recreate a lifestyle that existed in Victorian England.

Queen Victoria in 1887.

All is not lost on the Andalusian coast of Spain as the rate ruthless construction, considered a large contributor to the economic growth of the region, exhibits a paradigm that is becoming all to familiar to coastal regions globally (a comparable situation is in Abidjan, Ivory Coast where the population has gone from 400,000 in 1968 to over 1,500,000 in 1981). The southern coast of Malaga, the region that garners an international airport, consistently triplicates its off-season population. The remaining sections of the coast also tell a similar story: a homogeneous, hard-scape of housing, each attaining a view of the ocean, staining the coastline. The geological arrangement provides a barrier as it is mainly mountainous region, however it flattens just before it reaches sea-level - which explains the latitudinal expansion. The residents of these localities are well-off retired Spaniards, a large population of English expatriates and Russian mafioso. The land is now non-desirable.

The rectification of problems of oil, consuming levels and expansion is ubiquitous, the answer lies in the centres of large cities, particularly in Europe. This model is stacked apartments, shared cores, densely located, satellite commercial nodes and a lesser reliance on the automobile as everything is neatly connected with public transport or accessible by bike or foot. There is no sure-fire way of converting the American dream into this sustainable response. It will be a process of taking away the life that has been common to generations and blindingly easy to live in. It might just generate a civil uprising if running politicians promise the un-promise-able: that one can keep their SUV, and their double-story house, and the luxuries that come with it.

The lives of ordinary Americans will have to be re-evaluated and every measure to implement alternative energies will have to be considered following the reduction of oil extraction from the earth.

State of Play and the Illusion of Freedom

Sat, 12 Jul 2008 00:23:00 +0200

For some years now, Paul Virilio has spoken about the state of play in our technologically vexed context. He advocates that it is “interesting while maintaining a critical attitude”, that we should not just be the player, but rather play as if to know, or better still create the game itself. Virilio suggests that there are two ways to look at play, one pertains a likeness to playing cards which is a game that requires knowledge of how to play, but not to know the construct of the game itself. If so wished, one can find the combinations/permutations needed for success, however, it is not a requirement. The other is attributed to “the play of a mechanical part when it is loose in its housing” which Virilio remarks as “the play of today”.

This ‘type’ of contemporary play is simultaenously talking about the sophistication of what we are playing with, and also the complexities and the nearness to reality of the games themselves. “What is a game once the virtual invades reality?” says Virilio. “To play today, in a certain sense, means to choose between two realities.” There are obvious reasons why computer games are in epic demand, for example the market has understood that they allow a gamer to be in a position that they cannot attain with their own bodies and/or their environment - because of its limitations. Coupled with the imaginations of the developers and the sophistication of their engines, the realities of gamers can exist in any form. This is the catalyst for a vitual addiction. One can be a sports star, a war hero, or even a town planner as in the SimCity franchises, or even interact with other human beings on a IM program and claim they are in another reality than what is really the truth. One can use this portal to even engage in the act of love-making but not have bodily intercourse, commonly termed as the degrading act of cybersex. A sex without physical interchange, awkwardness, smells, sensational expolosions, all that is very human and real.

Narrative in storytelling allows readers to concoct their own “mental cinema” of what protagonist looks like, or even how soft the sand she is standing in. I see Camus’ Meursault as an intelligent being completely in touch with his surroundings, manipulating what could be a sorrowful existence into a romantic, sensual however existentialist dream - well-dressed but run down and slouched, from the sun, walking and sweating. But the Meursault represented by a virtual gaming narrative is pre-defined, stuck in a carved-out box, set in digital stone and a realisation of someone elses imagination - not yours or Camus’. The beauty of the novel comes in the thought-images of the individual.

When asked what game we should play, Virilio says to “play at being a critic. Deconstruct the game in order to play with it. Instead of accepting the rules, challenge and modify them. Without the freedom to critique and reconstruct, there is no truly free game: we are addicts and nothing more.” To the developer, we should ask the developers to resist pre-definitions, and allow users freedoms to infinite degrees. We should access resources to develop ourselves. Our virtual spaces should be accessible and flexible. There exists virtual spaces that allude to users being allowed to configure environments, but still there is a creation with primary tools to achieve this.

SIAL’s Greg More created Eureka a digital presentation environment that allows users “to navigate spatial collections of multi-media assets.” What appears to be a seamless navigating environment is just a re-alignment of an already known interface.

Phun is an inviting system that turns real-world physics virtual and for this very reason is highly addictive. It arrives closer to the point of simulating realities however abstracting the objects that appear within them. We can set up our own test or experiment with objects that we could not purchase or even construct in this world.

The third example brings closer the relationship between the body and the virtual space as well as being affordable, CamSpace.

And then there is Jeff Han and his VR empire.

Multi-Touch Sensing through Frustrated Total Internal Reflection. Image from Jeff Han’s NYU Homepage.

If you would like to read the full transcript of Jermone Sans’ interview with Paul Virilio, you can see it here at the Watson Institute’s Website.

We’ll leave you with the following, a picture of what Virilio believes the human will be in his own context, ” …a weightless individual in a little ergonomic armchair, suspended outside a space capsule, with the earth below and the interstellar void above. A man with his own gravity, who no longer needs a relationship to society, to those around him, and least of all to a family.” It seems scarily similar to the idea that Peter Sloterdijk holds (but we’ll leave that for another day).

Palace Launch

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0200

Welcome to Palace first edition. Now, in the early stages of its inception we form this as collections of imaginations and facts. We imagine Palace as kind of a universe of objects, thoughts and spaces that we explore and then combine to form and produce new commentaries and questions. Forums and discourse open it wider to allow for deeper investigations and cultivations.

NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard). Image from Wikimedia Commons.