Sam Jacob: Nostalgia as Representation

Though [nostalgia] may feel part of us - even welded to our core - these are often memories of externally provided images rather than internal experiences. They've been formed after the event, by consensus and communicated to us through media. Nostalgia is often as impersonal as the memories of the Nexus-6 replicant Rachel in Blade Runner. There are semi-memories that we've learnt from family Super 8 films, from endlessly repeated clips, and a media in constant state of historical revisionism. Never before has so much information been available with instant recall. The dividing line between our own memory and the capture and cataloguing of time that digital technology has allowed.

Its effect is so powerful - beyond logic or argument - that it is hard to see whether nostalgia is a subject or object, a technique or a mode of operation. Perhaps, like drunks hell bent on another shot, we're addicted to the sensation overpowering us and delivering us into oblivion. - Sam Jacob

Benjamin Edwards Paints Democracy

This deserves much more thought on my behalf. Bonus! He lives in DC.

Cabinet Magazine Online - A Minor History of / Giant Spheres

A Minor History of Giant Spheres and also, cities as represented in science fiction. It's a good day on the internet!

Flexible Figures

Flexibility in buildings is a question of patience. All buildings adjust or die, the question is how quickly and how gracefully they adapt. To a large degree, flexibility within buildings has been solved by technical flooring and the dropped ceiling. By insulating the actual floor plate with a technical DMZ at floor and ceiling, the vertical planes that define enclosure and the furniture which allows program to actually function may move at will- assured they will always have a jack to plug into and air-conditioning to cool them. That is to say, to watch an office building's internal arrangement in fast forward is to observe the building itself digesting program after program, each moving a wall here or there but otherwise gliding smoothly through the plenum of productivity stuffed so neatly between technical cavities. This is smooth capital at work in our architecture, much more so that any cartoon of fluidity.

A flurry of creativity in the 60s opened the dream of a truly flexible, movable architecture with the work of Archigram, Cedric Price, and others. Broadly, this era understood flexible architecture to be way of opening up new social possibilities rather than simply enabling changing programmatic usage. Price's intense collaboration with leftist theatre activist Joan Littlewood produced the Fun Palace which may be seen as the culmination of the era's interest in flexibility. The Fun Palace trades thingness for the possibility of a sustained optimization of usage: it has no stable image precisely because it's a system of occupiable volumes, media screens, and circulatory elements (pivoting escalators!) that may be reconfigured by overhead gantries. This desire to always have the right tool for the job seems to be a curiously British (or perhaps European) concern and stands in contrast to the American penchant for "souping up" their objects, to follow Wes Jones' lead, when a new performance is desired.

This is why James Bond has Q and MacGyver only has duct tape. Speaking also to the political differences between Europe and America, the British model awaits custom tools which fill highly specific needs. Thanks to MI5's infinite budget these tools may be created at will and benefiting from the fiction of film they may be produced in no time at all (this is the Fun Palace as lifestyle). MacGyver, on the other hand, lacks Bond's network of support. Standing on his own, MacGyver must assemble whatever he has at hand to get the job done. Whereas Q works within a relatively closed system- after all his gadgets were always some combination of weapon, personal accessory, and radio device- MacGyver must produce his work by opportunistically combining things into their own ad-hoc system. To pick up a previous thread, MacGyver's production is literal, unmasked, and yet spectacular in its inventiveness.

If such a title may be bestowed, MacGyver and the US Gypsum Company are the grandparents of Junkspace. Combining the will to assemble provisional enclosure and to accept this ad-hoc construction with blind eyes because it gets the job done, the sea of differentiation was calmed. With the introduction of speculative construction a cultural unwillingness to wait for space to be purpose built divorced the architect from his mandate to deal in efficiencies, instead leaving him build temples of efficacy. Ultimately, MacGyver's ad-hoc method of working is possibly too efficient in that it has written the architect out of the question and thus we turn to the A-Team for a conclusive example of the possibility of balancing ad-hoc systems and the drive towards figure.

As a matter of scale, the A-Team's need to soup up vehicles as opposed to objects necessitates that the balance of standard and custom will always favor the standard-issue because the starting point is too significant of an investment (of energy and material) to be subsumed completely. The mobility and enclosure of a vehicle are its key functions and these remain salient in all of the A-Team's productions despite being augmented by new weapons and features or improved performance. As a working model for the architect, the A-Team promises a synthetic balance of figural possibility (something that Fun Palace could never provide) and an essential willingness towards adaptability.

I would like to make the case for Paffard Keating-Clay's San Francisco Art Institute as a key example of the synthesis possible between a strong figure and enduring adaptability. Paffard's use of cruciform concrete columns provide just enough of an affordance, a term from product design describing features that hint at how to use the thing, to make it easier to follow his logic when modifying the interior than to create one's own. Visiting the SFAI today one will find new rooms enclosed by CMU which appropriately stem from the columns both logically and aesthetically. By acknowledging and accepting the fundamental impatience of the building's occupants, these columns unify the abstract logic of the building, its actual structure, and the implications of the building's future into one material thing.

James Bond & Q	crafted system	Fun Palace
MacGyver	ad hoc system	generic office building?
A-Team	synthetic system	SFAI?

The Literal and the Spectacular

After the rapid development of visual effects, from early experiments with maquettes and optical effects to seamless digital animation and manipulation, the notion of a basic truth to the visual world as experienced through media has been obliterated and viewers, by default, no longer believe their eyes. This is a protective behavior: without being able to tell the difference between "real" and manufactured images the only other option is the exact opposite, to believe everything, to be at home in a world of walking robot cars and resurrected pirate ships captained by octopus-men. The added popularity of reality television in recent years has further exacerbated this condition such that even unlikely situations in real life, away from any media device (if such a thing is even possible), are questionable. Am I on camera?

This is the scarred battlefield of imagery that forced Fallon, a London-based ad agency, to drop 250,000 actual bouncy balls down an actual street in San Francisco, CA in an attempt to create a remarkable "visual celebration of color" for Sony. That viewers are so skeptical of the reality of anything seeming even slightly spectacular forced Fallon and Sony to buttress the ad itself with a website describing the actuality of the production. In the same vein as the pyramids at Giza, this commercial is both a stunning visual experience and a logistical feat. Indeed, a sense of wonder develops out of the combination of the two: this is why the "Pyramid of Las Vegas" doesn't have quite the same ring to it and the bouncy balls would not have developed nearly as much interest if they were merely another digital particle system.

The success of Sony's bouncy balls commercial and its two follow ups, using paint and claymation bunnies respectively, belies a current cultural interest in the intersection of the literal and the spectacular- a handful of physical bouncy balls would have been just as uninteresting as a million digitally simulated balls. Yet despite being fantastic orchestrations of material, to accept these commercials as literal representations of reality (even if we temporarily excuse the weighty artifice of commercial film) is to overlook the extent to which digital and physical have fused in the production of contemporary media. Removed from all of the shots is the equipment of the fantastic, the armatures that allow these spectacular material formations to occur in the world. Rather than leave them as trace or rely on the use of camera angles to hide the methods of production, Fallon digitally removed mortars shooting bouncy balls, canisters containing paint awaiting explosion, and wire stands allowing bunnies to hang perpetually in mid-leap. These three commercials are a kind of worked-over reality: not an additive product of augmentation so much as un augmented or- to reverse time temporarily- un-touched. This digital retouching of armatures (wire removal, as the industry calls it) is the process of creating visual foam: real matter artificially inflated.

What is an architecture of "real matter artificially inflated?" Quickly the mind scans from the literally ballooning, to hollowed spheres, and to the hidden space of poche. On the other hand, histopomo's flattening of traditional building elements into a compositional skin that hangs on an otherwise contemporary structural frame is a kind of forced inflation as well. I'd like to propose that a more subtle definition of the term would mobilize the spectacular and the literal to create a tentatively supported condition: space on the verge of popping.

Mies' expansive, echoing lobby plan at the Neue Nationalgalerie, for instance, is too open, too materially refined, and too self-supported. Although the space inside Mies' pavilions is tentative in that it may be reconfigured at will, the container itself is heroic, commanding, and singular. One need only travel a few blocks to find Scharoun's alternative in the Philharmonie. Here the fractured planes of the main listening hall itself form a space which is already bursting at the seams. The primacy of this one room in the building has allowed its supporting functions such as stairs and columns to fall freely into neighboring spaces. That is to say, the logic of the lobby is not revealed until one has already entered the listening hall.

Scharoun, MVDR, OMA.

While Scharoun's more expressive formalism does create spaces which oscillate between being provisional and stately, the rest of the building is made to suffer. In contrast to Scharoun and Mies, the Casa Da Musica by OMA provides a satisfyingly foamy building through its combination of affect and geometry. Porto presents a simple formula: where the spaces are simple, go crazy with material and where the spaces are crazy, stay simple with material. Spatial continuity is provided between the hall, its support spaces, and the outside through the clever use of materials which results is a concert hall so punctured by instruments of affect (mega-scale corrugated glazing, gold leaf walls, an acoustic balloon) that the otherwise dead simple geometry of the space cannot help but vibrate.

OMA myth describes the Casa as the result of subtractive operations, but it's actually full of hot air.

Porto inverts the relationship between oblique and cartesian but everyone is so caught up in materiality that this goes unnoticed. By casting the concert hall as the single cartesian space in the building, the rest of the program is left to fend for itself in a mesh of pocket spaces caught between the hall and the oblique exterior. The sheer formal variety of these left over spaces produces its own oblique subjectivity, a religion of the boulder that erases any complaints about the original contrivance of the exterior. Whereas Corbusier mobilized his free plan to allow irregular forms to sit inside a regular grid, he did so by giving these irregular objects a wide berth, tending to let them effect the circulatory tissue of large buildings and thus focusing on their sculptural presence more than space making potential. OMA's inversion of regular and irregular as they exist in the Corbusian model gives the honorific space of the building functional priority while mobilizing the affect of the oblique to save the support spaces from becoming undifferentiated cells.

While the architect is not allowed the freedoms of digital wire removal, they may trade special effects for the power of affect to color our perception of a space. The spectacle of the Sony commercial is concerned with this balance between expectations of reality and the possibility of the spectacular exception. Even if the actual hand is unseen, the presence of the hand that set these systems in motion is critical to the reception of the commercials as real, valid, not digital manipulation. Thus only a building that hosts spectacular spatial experiences while simultaneously articulating the forces that shape these spaces may be considered foamy. No dough without a vessel to form it in. At the Casa Da Musica, oblique geometry is employed to erase the traditional, more banal conception of support spaces. With the cartesian geometry of the main hall actively contested by its material reality, and subsequently the support spaces forced to become oblique (and thus provisional c.f. Virilio), the totality of the building is agitated into a lively, foamy whole both literal (observable) and spectacular.

StrangeHarvest.com::Hollow Inside: Starbucks Foam and the Rise of Ambiguous Materials

Hollow Inside: Starbucks Foam and the Rise of Ambiguous Materials:

"The patron saint of aeration is Margaret Thatcher. In the 1950s, way before she entered politics, Thatcher was part of a team of chemists working for Lyons investigating methods for preserving the foamy quality of ice-cream. They experimented with injecting air into ice-cream until the point of collapse and found that substituting vegetable oil for the animal fat naturally occurring within the dairy cream improved the emulsifying quality of the mix. The improved ice-cream could hold more air, and long enough for it to freeze. This swirled up, foamy, frozen mixture of fat and sugar squirted out of machines as a premium product made with less material - an ingenious sleight of hand.

"It is sorely tempting to draw parallels between Thatchers chemical and political legacies. And if one were to, perhaps one would be making comparisons with the atomisation of society, or perhaps one might speculate that Mr Whippy ice cream represented a proto- privatisation where air is transformed into commodity. " -Sam Jacob

American lawbreaking: Illegal immigration. - By Tim Wu - Slate Magazine

American lawbreaking: Slate Magazine:

"What's going on here is that the parties all know the law is being broken, accept it, and—while almost never overtly saying so—both the 'criminals' and law enforcement concede that everyone likes it better that way. The law in question thus continues to have a formal existence, and, as we shall see, it may become a kind of zoning ordinance, enforced only against very public or flagrant behavior. But few, except sometimes a vocal minority, actually think we'd be better off if the law were fully enforced."

When was the last time you went a week without a rationalization?

Why I love my thesis advisor:

As for instrumentalizing history/theory, as long as you know when you're doing it (and therefore not creating false legitimations of your work) I pretty much believe that's an activity otherwise known as 'thinking'. As Jeff Goldblum's character in The Big Chill memorably put it: 'When was the last time you went a week without a rationalization?"

A Hidden History Of Comfort?

Let it be known: if you missed the Bouroullec lecture tonight you probably missed one of the best lectures that the GSD has seen in years. Their work synthesizes the "logic of nature," an innate understanding of digital manufacturing, and unabashed cheekiness into objects of extreme aesthetic refinement. Not only is the work amazing but, in the tradition of the Eames, the documentation of the work is equally gorgeous (and telling).


According to Erwan, we are taught in a general sense how to appreciate things from an aesthetic point of view but rarely in terms of experience. There is, as he put it, a "hidden history of comfort" which is the accumulated knowledge of what feels good to the body. It occurs to me that there is a similar and equally perplexing hidden history of comfort that defines the most basic aesthetics of a culture like America. Although some countries have a clearly defined self image ranging from the scale of the abstract symbol to the specifics of architecture, America has only the abstract. There are things like the skyline of NYC, the suburban enclave, perhaps even the rowhouses of San Francisco which are somehow American, but they are not America. The comfort-aesthetic of America is a collection of stars and stripes and soaring eagles. Little else holds true as you test it against the far reaches of the country.

Can the term "comfort-aesthetic" replace "populism?" Like a crystal shattered into a hundred 67 pieces, there can be no populism in the age of We The Peoples. If populist desires tend to lean heavily on literalism, perhaps an aesthetics of comfort could be released from the need to be truly literal and instead must be simply comfortable (but not necessarily plush!)

note: I'm going to try not to write like this anymore. It's not productive for me.

The Secret Service Bubble: Triumph of Geometry

In a week of Google searches that I'm hoping what will not result in a rendition flight, I've been researching the protection of the president after reading an odd news story about some WWII era war planes being escorted out of the skies by F-16 fighter jets.

When the president travels around the country he is protected by temporary flight restrictions that clear the skies above him. In the case of his visit to Emmitsburg, MD last week, the president was afforded a zone of 30 nautical miles with a ceiling of 18000 feet above ground, the height at which commercial jets are allowed to fly. This invisible line in the sky forms the uppermost boundary of a multi-layered security "bubble," the crowning achievement of the US Secret Service (USSS).

Expanding in both time and space, this bubble around the president is meant to provide security by preemptively removing threats and making undetected attacks difficult. Using sensor and surveillance technology in advance of the president's arrival, teams establish a baseline of security and then maintain observation to ensure that this baseline is sustained. Once hidden threats (buried, camouflaged) have been removed, protection is a problem of geometry.

Insofar as present threats must achieve at least an approximate line of sight to issue an attack, a combination of restrictive security and active deterrents make this geometrically impossible. The outermost layers of protection such as flight restrictions and traffic routing operate restrictively in a passive manner: they keep things at a non-threatening distance and are enforced only when breeched. Active deterrence is provided by armed agents who may pre-empt attackers trying to gain geometrical access to the president while also acting as a clear signifier of a larger security apparatus. That Secret Service figures are enshrined as part of the White House at Lego Land is proof enough that the bubble has fused with the thing it is protecting.

We cannot escape bubbles. That the material reality of the USSS' protection plan- the accumulation of people, weapons, barriers, etc- is so distant from any real, literal bubble except at the most local scale is quite an accomplishment of design. By operating in a mode of active vigilance the bubble proposes a radical (if expensive) alternative to the protection of a passive defense. By mobilizing substantial effort, the USSS applies intelligence (of both meanings) to create a zone of protection that is still highly transparent. This is no fortress. It's not even a Pope Mobile.

Applying the bubble model to a building requires a move away from the default safety of a defensive fortress. The line of defense must be thickened and activated, allowed to react to threats as they develop and, importantly, retreat when they have been mitigated. This implies a system of variability along the lines of a WWI-era trench where the 'ownership' of a specific trench moved back and forth between sides as these lines were captured, lost, and re-captured. Protected by manned guns, these trenches represent a commitment of both budget line-item and constant human attention. If there is hope in the trench it's that someday it may be filled in and forgotten.

Sketching an API architecture

Note: One of the things this post is desperately missing is a definition of identity as it's used in the later, more speculative half. Umm, maybe later.

Kazys emails:

My sense is that if there is anything optimistic it is to recall that the web went roughly...

1. rough html -> 2. static sites by designers -> 3. flash and information architecture (parallel streams) approaches -> 4. template driven design hooked to massive databases (even for personal sites)/web 2.0 cross-site interactivity.

I see architecture at being at best in stage 3 (if not in stage 2) of this. If we can precipitate a stage 4, then I think things will be interesting.

This three line history of the web is instructive because it highlights the critical tectonic changes that have allowed the web to grow immensely in size and richness. As the methods of producing websites have evolved there has been a steady move away from the decoration of information and towards the handling and processing of large amounts of content.

Reminder: this is what the web used to look like.

Faced with an explosion in the consumer popularity of the web (and thus the amount of content it contained) about a decade ago, the response was to impose order through structure and organization. This saw the rise of information architecture, a problematic term in this context but one that aspires to literally structure information and interactions as clearly as possible for the user. The imperative to continuously integrate larger and larger data sources and to offer more complex interactions has brought with it specialization in terms of storing and processing information. This has created web applications which differ from websites in their ability to perform tasks as well as display information. Hotmail is an example of an early web application. Issues of user-centered design are still critical but now there is also a need to recognize the web as a thing and simultaneously its own infrastructure. A realization that brings with it implications on the interoperability between sites, standardization, and the 'typology' of websites.

Google Maps, for instance, is accepted as the central resource for maps. To end users it's quite straight forward: Google Maps offers the distribution of maps and some spatial data. However, due to the quantity and specificity of this information it does not make sense for each website that needs a map to maintain their own cartographic resources. In response, the web has adopted what's called an Application Programming Interface (API) model which turns a web application into infrastructure for other applications. The API is a predefined menu of machine-to-machine interactions that a web application offers to the world. Thus, while Google may offer you just a map it offers web applications the ability to "borrow" its resources to process and retrieve arbitrary spatial data.

For instance, an API is what allows Apple and AT&T to use Google Maps in the iPhone without duplicating all of the cartographic resources that Google maintains and without simply re-directing users to Google. This last point is quite important: an API is used behind the scenes. It allows an eponymous website to offer information services that it itself would never have the capability to deliver.

In the near future we are likely to witness an increasing amount of websites which are little more than a wrapper or bundler of multiple APIs- using the potential of sites like Google, Flickr, Amazon and others to release something new into the world. While the API may certainly be a commercial vehicle, it's also a profound public gesture that has spawned an entire subculture of mashups devoted to building new tools around these publicly-available resources. As more and more websites make use of the many APIs available the web melts ever more together.

Screenshot of Flickervision, a flickr/google maps mashup.

This means that the web paradoxically is serviced by a limited number of infrastructural sources (concentration of resources) and that services built upon this infrastructure are increasingly defined by the value that they add to that infrastructural baseline (differentiation of individuals). In other words, adding new content to a system already bursting at its seams is of little value. New potentials- new mechanisms for processing- must be introduced to create new effects. The implicit truth of the knowledge economy is that once information has been commodified, competition must occur on the basis of recombinant capabilities.

Let me now attempt to reclaim the title of the architect by making this discussion relevant to the designer of buildings and cities. The progression that Kazys outlines above finds its parallel in the design of buildings with something like this (though stage 4 as defined here is still problematic, I think):

1. Functional shelter (construction doc)
2. Shelter & aesthetics (sketch)
3. Shelter & aesthetics & instrumental organization (diagram)
4. Shelter & aesthetics & organization & processing (prototype, scenario?)

To the architect this begs the question, "how can buildings process (things)?" The IA crowd loves to cite Stewart Brand's How Buildings Learn but his assertion that buildings "learn" by being violently reconfigured/retrofitted is a somewhat dismal prospect. While the recursive rebuilding of a shelter's guts allows it to adapt, the building is not learning. It's allowing the architect to learn from it. The book spiral of OMA's Seattle Public Library was designed to adapt to changes in its core program of organizing objects in space but this too is short of actual processing. Cedric Price's Generator proposal perhaps comes closest by using information processing and robotics to allow an artificial intelligence to reconfigure spaces but the result is a shell game: identical cubes of space tossed around in a slippery illusion. Is there any there there?

If the "processing" in question is similar to that enabled by an API we have to ask what are the inputs and outputs. Is the input program? Judging by the number of studio briefs requiring students to marry two or more unlikely functions into one building, program has had its vogue. If program is the input, then an architecture of multiple programs becomes a processing machine to create something new by symbiotically connoting its inputs. The combination of a private residence, architectural office, and museum collection in Sir John Soane's House & Museum, for instance, forced all three into a unique spatial relationship which required specific developments in plan, section, and the detailing of the building. If the endgame is merely hyper-specific combinations of program we've lost the potential- the agility- of the API.

Perhaps just as important what's being processed is the question of where this processing is occurring. I'm willing to accept that the API as a model for architecture contributes less to the design of individual buildings than to the function of the city, but it should effect both. The API, after all, is a form of structured communication and would seem to impact both the identity and programming of individual buildings, if not more. If Google Maps exists concurrently as an eponymous website and, through its role as a piece of the web infrastructure, an active part of many other websites then a similar logic should hold for API architecture. Rather than a synthetic project in the modernist sense where multiple systems are resolved into a singular entity, this new synthesis should allow multiple systems / programs / things(?) to exist simultaneously as individual and interwoven elements. The constant struggle between these chunks for preferential position in defining the identity of the project could go a long way towards producing a motivated mood or atmosphere: affect as a catalyst of effect.

Federalist re-print

ain't the Internet grand?, originally uploaded by bryanboyer.

Decided to spend the extra hour in InDesign to make these look good rather than just printing off 200 pages of courier.

This one's for Annie

In an interesting twist on steganography, this should be the presentation format for Annie's projects, some random images that the critics have to divine the histograms of before any discussion can happen.

From BoingBoing, a note about hiding a 2-bit image inside another. So, the historgram of the image on the left results in the graph on the right, the iconic NYC skyline. This is deliciously abstract and deceptive and interesting, but I'm sure is just one of those things you find on the internet that's totally meaningless.

Cappuccino Urbanism

This is not particularly relevant to my topic of research, but an offhanded use of the term Cappuccino Urbanism spawned some more thinking about growth of the city and the ways in which a neighborhood's identity is constructed.

In the fourth quarter of 2006 Starbucks opened an average of six new stores per day. In 2007 they opened an average of eight stores per day for a total of 728 new locations with just about a third of them being international. Thanks to a strategy of "cluster bombing," a technique of opening multiple stores in close proximity to a competitor they want to take out of business and subsequently accepting the cannibalization of their unnecessary ranks, it's hard to determine how many of these new stores are permanent additions to the roster. Starbucks' expansion is strategically foamy: it grows in multiples and benefits from spatial proximity by reducing costs. If there's an urbanism of foam, it's cappuccino urbanism.

As Saskia Sassen recently discussed at MIT, elements of the built environment are beginning to form a sort of spatial infrastructure whereby, once a vertical market has grown a sufficient foothold in a particular place, it sponsors the further encrustation of that locality with specific spatial and service amenities. Varick street in Manhattan is a perfect example of this with its concentration of architecture offices, print shops, and satisfyingly-trendy cafes and restaurants nearby. Perhaps one or two offices were attracted by the cheap rents and proximity to SOHO but now a critical mass has been reached. That Columbia University chose Varick street as the site of its Studio-X off-campus research laboratory is an indicator of the infrastructural quality of this part of the city. It's just easier- both physically and psychically- to set up shop. (A careful historical study of this area would make a great project for someone who is bored.)

As Sassen implies, this infrastructural architecture loses the identity of architecture and begins to melt into the city itself. It becomes a non-place, characterless coordinates (even if decorated). Starbucks' "cluster bombing" approach to expansion is thus the privatized, projective construction of infrastructure for that most trendy class of individuals, the knowledge worker. Redundancy is built in and standards are maintained as nodes in the system take on interchangeability. Compared to that other bastion of corporate expansion, McDonald's, the foamy model of Starbucks is infrastructural because it is primarily urban rather than suburban and thus explicitly recognizes the importance of proximity, of density. After all, disconnected infrastructure, that without regular use, is merely a relic- it gains its placeness back as it becomes discretized into the city.

That was fun, but now I better get back to reading the Federalist Papers.

Seen here is a map of all Starbucks locations in Manhattan as of 2005 compiled by media artist Cory Arcangel.

Garlic, My Love

I'm out of yogurt this morning which means potato hash for breakfast- but I'm out of garlic and onions! Both are advised, but you need one or the other. Obligatory. I don't even have garlic salt and this is really killing me. The only salvation is crispy potatoes, texture in place of flavor. Well, that and chicken apple sausage.

Immunology, Filtration, & Deception

Splenda uses shape to deceive your body. The tongue's surface is a vast landscape of taste buds, each one a bundle of individual receptors programed to respond to one of the five tastes. Incoming molecules bind to these receptors which dissolve them and subsequently allow a neuron to be fired which creates the sensation of taste in the brain. The success of this binding (and thus the power of the flavor) is dictated by the shape and chemical properties of the incoming molecule but an entirely separate criteria are used elsewhere in the body to determine whether this material is metabolized or expelled. Splenda, the popular productized version of sucralose, effectively has the same shape as sucrose but is chemically distinct which results in an almost identical flavor without the caloric intake. Shape (flavor) has been separated from effect, as Somol and Whiting (and Rem!) would remind us.

The power of shape for the Projectivists is its clear identity yet ambiguous potential. Freed from the shackles of explicit reference, shapes may mean multiple things to multiple people leaving the architect as a "gambler" hoping that their bets pay off. The problem with betting is that it's singular. You make one bet and you hope for the best. This is why those who gamble at night manage their diversified portfolios during the day. As an overall strategy shape may be problematic, but on a finer grain level it can yield the same "informal potential" yet still contribute to a synthetic project.

Sloterdijk proposes the immune system as a more mature, if slightly menacing, metaphor for architecture (immunology is foam). An immune system works through defensive filtration and offensive antigenic response. That an immune system as we know it works concurrently on multiple scales with cooperation at different levels is obviously productive in Sloterdijk's adoption of the term, but he fetishizes the will towards isolation that bodies exhibit as an act of defense. In fact, an immune system primarily acts as a filter and it is this question of filtration which deserves more attention. (We're still wondering if this model is more productive than Tschumi's distinction between use and program. TDB.)

Leaving behind physically transgressive acts which allow new communications but do so by altering the material reality of a building (broken locks, demolished walls), we find that the physical components of a building allow an entire spectrum of communications. Furthermore, this variety of communicative intensities is important to the health of urban life where there are as many levels of interpersonal relationships as there are individuals.

The popular television show Home Improvement, for instance, featured a character by the name of Wilson who gave advice over the fence to his neighbor without either ever seeing the other. This heard-but-not-seen interaction was the result of an impulse towards isolation (the suburban dream) crossed with a deeply human need for communication (the main character was always seeking answers from wise Wilson) mediated by the physical reality of the fence. Without the fence these neighbors must confront each other face to face, an overwhelming breech of their isolation that would make it untenable.

On the other end of the spectrum, windows put their occupants on display often without allowing any verbal communication. Definitive aspects of private life are communicated to the outside world as the details of private interiors and private acts are exposed, as any Peeping Tom knows well. One may call this the ostrich effect: a feeling of privacy- of isolation- created when not being able to see/hear others, regardless of their ability to see/hear you. Without windows a room is uninhabitable but a feeling of enclosure may overcome these openings to provide an overall condition of privacy.

In each of these examples individuals are filtering their experience of the world by re-functioning parts of buildings, but the act is not without connotation. Shape and effect are loosely bound, but they're still bound. The representative quality of the fence and the window in these two examples are operative even if their communicative potential has been altered: the Peeping Tom is gratified by looking the wrong way through windows and Wilson's fence makes him wise because he remains unseen. Even if the operative elements of the building are important to their users, they are rarely a source of identity.

If Splenda creates representation without the expected effect, a new synthetic project would seek to create effects while holding open the possibility of a developed representative identity. Rather than deception, this would be an architecture of strategic nuance and pragmatic schizophrenia: each facet of the building allowed to contribute what it is capable of contributing without an obligation to be painfully consistent or the desire to be actively counter-intuitive.

It turns out irony can be exhausting. Perhaps this is why Venturi's project, as smart as it is, failed to produce a consistently interesting, popular architecture despite a thriving sense of irony in other areas of culture (namely literature and skinny jeans). When writing Complexity & Contradiction, Venturi bemoaned that architects had missed the "vivid lessons of Pop Art" which seems a bit dated in the wake of Silodam and the wave of other projects aspiring to Dutch Collage. A more careful analysis of how Venturi & Scott Brown's writing was perverted from a rallying cry against orthodoxy into a mandate to rummage through history will have to wait for later in the course of this study, but for now we can concern ourselves with a more fundamental question.

The manner in which a building communicates visually to the city is of prime importance to this topic of populism and for the moment we will limit ourselves to a discussion just of the surface. It's an unlikely mix, but I would like to use four projects to begin developing a catalog of ways in which buildings use their exterior surfaces to develop meaning within the city.

OMA's China Central Television building
Using image to explain the interior

Although Arup's clever articulated diagrid has been much debated, I've heard little discussion of the proposal to decorate CCTV with images and text that pertain to the contents of the building. The rhetoric of the project is based on a desire to unify the production of TV content into one continuous loop and to then expose this process to the people of China by inviting them on a tour through that loop. In a building of this scale the architects have given up any hope that the building may communicate its internal workings through means of actual transparency or abstract formal manipulations. Instead, the text and images on the exterior of the building would serve as a broadcasting version of what will always remain a closed, interior tour. Despite being consistent with their work, there is a slightly gross air of facetiousness in this approach coming from OMA. The building, looking now like a newspaper, is further than ever from being a clear read.

Klein Dytham's Heidi House
Using image to charm



The vitality of Klein Dytham's work stems from their unabashed use of cutting edge graphics. They are not ashamed of the two dimensional. Although the Heidi House is a rather clever formal and tectonic response to Japan's strict fire regulations, its most striking feature is the graphic treatment of the facade. Here, the Austrian motif cut into the facade is literally the only thing keeping the building from blending into an otherwise very skillful but undifferentiated collection of Japanese minimalist projects. The detailing of the facade is important in establishing the acceptability of the building. Had the cut panels formed the exterior surface of the wall assembly rather than the interior one the cuts would perhaps read as needless decoration. By swallowing the perforations into the depth of the wall they become mixed with the interior, the traditional realm of decorative indulgence, and thus inspire a sort of coy charm. In the architects' own words, "the important thing is everyone seems to smile when they walk past!"

Robert Stern's 15 Central Park West
Using image to blend in



As Goldberger points out, Stern is no longer in the territory of historical pastiche, he has moved on to something more akin to time travel. Regardless of the rhetoric he may use to defend the project, there are two things that the image of history achieves for Stern: his building blends in rather well with its neighbors and the sale prices are stratospheric. The price Stern pays for his time travel is that his building contributes nothing to architecture as a cultural endeavor. Even the plans are developed in a highly cellular manner that is foreign to contemporary ideas about domestic space. This is no bait and switch: it's a true historical artifact! Nevertheless, it's interesting to note that the sales video for the building discusses the historical quality of the building in terms of image and icon--how natural it will be in the central park skyline and how dignified the stone looks. Even the urban scheme (a low building on the park side of the block and a tower along the avenue separated by a courtyard) was driven by a desire to ensure that both masses would fuse into a phenomenal whole when seen from the park, akin to the optical flattening of the dome at Palladio's Saint Giorgio Maggiore in Venice, Italy.

FAT's Islington Square social housing
Using image to seem familiar



Familiarity is the most nuanced aspiration of those in question here. Eschewing mimesis, the familiar must parody, distort, multiply, abstract or otherwise evoke a known prototype. The happiness of Islington's residents attests to the fact that abstraction can be populist but the question is what makes this sort of abstraction palatable whereas VSBA's more graphic projects seems so lackluster? At Islington, the street elevation is comprised of various traditional housing silhouettes merged into one strip as if Marey had turned his eye to architectural evolution. Although there were certainly pomo experiments that attempted to merge multiple fragments into a new whole, what makes Islington successful is a level of formal abstraction and graphic savvy that creates an exciting ambiguity in the part-to-whole relationship. Elements like the thin concrete trim around the edge of the facade and consistent balconies and window boxes act as constants which reinforce the overall wholeness of the elevation while the variegated roof line and brick patterning are freed to lend differentiation to individual units. Although FAT's practice has clearly learned a lot from VSBA they are contributing a new level of graphic sophistication (a skill which architects, though they rarely admit it, seriously lack) which gives the work an integrity beyond the signboard experiments of their intellectual forbearers. Whereas VSBA lets the rest of their building be comfortably 'generic,' FAT favors a much cleaner, simplified architecture that allows the graphic elements to stand in higher contrast.

And then we come to this, which shatters our assumptions about FAT simply evoking familiar imagery. A box in a land of boxes; smokestacks that mark the skyline but also form part of an iconic representation of factory; abstract, iconographic, and real trees cohabiting; modernist allusion; a riot of color... what is it?

Overwhelmed, I attempted to neuter the image by de-saturating and flipping it so as to get a more objective look at things. Still, the transition of the floating, modernist sheet metal box into a skyline illusion, into an iconographic allusion, into a pragmatic announcement of identity is an extremely nuanced development. Beyond a simple both/and ambiguity, this roof line approaches a condition of multiplicity that refuses to settle into any condition of dominance. The autonomy of the architectural element's participation within the ensemble (floating box on top of grounded box) is deflated by being forced to operate in multiple modes at the same time. This has some nice resonances with foamspace and demands a new way of considering part-to-wholeness.

A brief and unexpected email exchange with Wes produced this nugget that will likely be useful when later evaluating the production of architecture as national symbol:

Judgement -> The Disciplinary -> Sophistication

Annie weighs in with an astute observation on the work of SANAA:

Nishizawa used the term 'atmosphere' over and over again. Maybe it was just a coincidence of misaligned translation, but between his use of that term and the inescapable figure of the bubble in every project I couldn't help but think about Peter Sloterdijk's whole the-future-of-architecture-is-foam position.

To extend this observation, the materiality of the recent SANAA, Nishizawa, and Sejima projects enforces a 'connected-isolation' in some subtle ways. When not literally foaming in plan like the Toledo Pavilion or bubbling in elevation such as Zollervein, cells of space are made ambiguous through the use of material and light to dissolve spatial boundaries. Sloterdijk suggests the importance of architecture in the formation of a foam by noting, "no dough without a vessel to form it in; no mass without a hand that knows the purpose of its kneading" (Log 9). In SANAA's architecture we've found a vessel.

House A in Tokyo uses a combination of loose curtains and taut, scrim-like curtains to allow the inhabitants of the house to parcel the space according to their whims. Nishizawa spoke about this in very pragmatic terms: sometimes you go to the bathroom to go, but sometimes you use the room for any number of things that actually don't require as much privacy. In contrast to the bombastic re-building of rooms proposed by Cedric Price's Fun Palace, Nishizawa leaves the rooms intact but uses curtains (and the privacy they afford) to alter the effective definition of a space. This acknowledgment of the life of the rooms in a home actually frees the space that the room contains, as if dislocating it from its socket, and allows for slippage between the spatial and programmatic definition of each room/space in the house. Here, the figure may be mutable but the figure/ground relationship is clear at all times due to a rather small and narrow plan.

Quite the opposite, the Toledo Glass Pavilion is a radical play in composition where the academic fluctuation of figure/ground in plan is mirrored experientially by a constant dissolving and re-constitution of the vertical surfaces as reflections are caught between the multiple layers of glass. Curiously, although this building in its completed state is much more literally transparent than previous SANAA projects, and so employs reflection effects on an almost unprecedented level, the renderings were consistent with other SANAA projects.



The architects consistently choose to represent their world as a whitewashed wonderland of planar ambiguity where light pours in through openings to melt the contents of the model into a single whole. One knows that the thing in front of them is comprised of multiple spaces and planes, that forms are articulated, that difference exists, and yet this is drowned out by the mediating medium of light. So while Sejima describes the New Museum in NYC as "pearly-gray volumes piled with artful carelessness, each off-center to the one below," what she shows is a single volume of ambiguous definition.

The buildings of SANAA are the cap of a bone-dry cappuccino: foam existing without its progenitor. Whereas Koolhaas produces a destabilizing atmosphere by actively opposing his architecture to a known trope, SANAA avoids reference to prototypes. Rather than being destabilized or agitated by a constant variability in the way that we perceive the buildings, this ontological churning becomes the default mode for SANAA's architecture. This is an architecture of vacillation, of multiplicity, of foam.

In Toledo, the New Museum, and House A (as well as much of their other work), Sejima & Nishizawa develop a planning strategy that positions the building as an insulating medium for a foaming, active use and re-use, seeing and re-seeing of the building. At the same time, this academic understanding of the building is bolstered by the development of a rich experience with the careful use of materials to produce ambiguity through effects of light and reflection.

If Sloterdijk claims that an architecture of foam should allow for "both the isolation of individuals, and the concentration of isolated entities into collective ensembles of cooperation and contemplation" (Log 9), we've found the hint of such a condition in the work of SANAA. However, the question of agency remains. While these buildings produce the effects that Sloterdijk calls for, they do so in a way that is largely out of the control of the inhabitants, uncalibrated. Now then, where's that hand for kneading?

Unfortunately I had to leave early, but one of the more striking parts of the lecture on Brasilia this evening was a small side note about Costa's submission. While the other entrants submitted plans with a traditional north arrow, Costa's plan favored the symbology of the plan's layout and thus gave the main axis (itself perpendicular to the topography of the hill) preference, resulting in a perfectly upright 'bird' in plan but a north arrow at that sits obliquely on the page.

L'Enfant, by contrast, oriented the entire city of Washington, DC to ensure unity between the orientation of the Mall and the cardinal convention. Surely Washington benefits from a more or less flat site which allows it to be oriented as such, but the non-cardinal orientation of Brasilia hints also at the ability of the modern vocabulary to escape such literal approaches to planning by establishing its own relative system of meaning. It should also be noted that having a main axis which is oblique to the path of the sun ensures dramatic shadows the entire day-- an asset not to be underestimated when combined with the abstract formalism of Niemeyer & co.

If thesis research could consist solely of watching bad movies I would sign up to do this every semester. Michael Douglas explaining the power of negative-difference in The American President:

"America isn't easy. America is advanced citizenship; you've gotta want it bad. Because it's going to put up a fight... The symbol of your country cannot just be a flag. The symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest."

Maybe a better line is: "this is a time for serious people, Bob, and your fifteen minutes are up."

The Berlage launches a studio this winter to investigate Seoul as capital city. No doubt this will include some investigation into the preparations to move the Korean seat of gov't to a new town built from scratch.

"Not only are Capital Cities contested political sites, due their obvious role in hosting the political functions of the nation-state, but especially because they are highly charged symbolic manifestations of their social, political, and urban vicissitudes. It is this that makes them tangible representations of the idea of the city as endorsed, or simply supported, by the constituted power. With the embracement of liberal-democracy by many advanced “democratic” countries in the world, the urban logic of neo-liberalism seems to be the only current political vicissitude of most Capital Cities. Against this scenario the studio seeks alternatives which are politically challenging the urban and architectural manifestation of the neo-liberal logic of urban space." link