of this we are sure

Broadsheet Uploaded & A New Site

2008-10-16T11:31:00.000-04:00

Just a note that I've posted Shadows & Straws, the broadsheet newspaper I used this blog as a development platform for. You can see it in its entirety via a pan & scan interface thanks to Mike's handiwork.

Since this blog was project specific I've moved my regular writing to a new home where you are happy to follow along if you like.

Our Pursuit of Mega Lincoln Continues

2008-06-24T04:14:00.001-04:00

FFFFOUND!

Bryan's thesis helps me pack.

2008-06-15T19:12:00.001-04:00

Bryan's thesis helps me pack., originally uploaded by Katie Spence.

Braw

2008-05-21T22:39:00.001-04:00

Braw, originally uploaded by --Marcus--.

This may be relevant.

2008-05-14T05:23:00.000-04:00

Thesis Jury

2008-05-12T23:07:00.001-04:00

This Thursday:

Diana Agrest &
Wes Jones &
Joe MacDonald &
John McMorrough &
Peter Rose &
Robert Somol &
Sarah Whiting

Should be fun.

nyda.1000.001.00106.jpeg

2008-05-11T17:07:00.001-04:00

nyda.1000.001.00106.jpeg, originally uploaded by Kosmograd.

AB gives presentation advice

2008-05-08T18:01:00.002-04:00

i woke up one morning with the perfect defense of the triangles
and if i can come up with that, you can definitely rock totalitarianism

In these last days of thesis preparation your greatest enemy is yourself. The argument that you've carefully crafted all semester and the design moves that are evidence of those ideas become blurry, distant. It's as if time and clarity are mapped as an inverse function that pushes these simple necessities ever further from your grasp until a cocktail of anxiety and adrenaline shoots you forward to that horizon at the last possible minute. As a best case scenario, at least.

Providence in the FAIL of a Sparrow � Adam Greenfield’s Speedbird

2008-05-08T07:43:00.000-04:00

Mike Migurski makes a very important, if tangential, comment on one of AG's posts:

"Even as I plug jumper wires into my breadboard, I’m aware of how much more powerful and easy it is to do things in software, and how much more reach you get through a web browser. Olinda has physical slots for six “friends” on its hardware social unit - revolutionary for a radio, but a meh replacement for an iChat buddy list that *scrolls*."

Since software people always look at me as if I've uttered some terrible faux-pas when I reply "it's not that easy" to their questions of why people who build buildings can't just do things the same way as people who build software, I'm saving this quote from one of their own titans.

When I try to tell my inquisitors that architecture and information "architecture" are not the same thing, that physicality is a bitch, that 1:1 prototyping with real matter (!) tends to be prohibitively expensive given the way architectural practice is set up their eyes glaze over. Look, I'm as optimistic as anyone else, I love the web, I love software, I've been through those trenches. But if you want to start talking about some serious cross-disciplinary pollination then you better take both sides of that disciplinary divide seriously. When your ubi runs into my building with its boring HVAC, mundane load paths, typical finished floors, plain old foundations, etc etc the transformative powers of comp are bracketed pretty seriously by the realities of the physical world.

Lest I come off as being totally reactionary, I should note that the work of people like MY Studio, and the thinking of Neb, Molly, Adam, et al is very exciting and something I look forward to seeing more of. Just please, follow Mike's advice and give both sides of the physical/digital equal weight. For better or for worse, they're both inescapable.

* insert standard, obnoxious blog claimer about writing more about this later. After thesis... which is just 8 short days away.

Mighty Morphin' Power Lincoln

2008-05-01T01:43:00.001-04:00

Mighty Morphin' Power Lincoln, originally uploaded by Joe D!.

Not Mega Enough

2008-04-14T21:26:00.001-04:00

kill th moonlight, originally uploaded by [lígia.matos.ribeiro].

These dudes would only go up to Mega Lincoln's thigh.

Whiskey is the American Drink

2008-04-12T08:07:00.002-04:00

photo.jpg, originally uploaded by bryanboyer.

This week both Tim D. and Dorf reminded me that I have a blog. This blog. With about 32 days left until my thesis presentation I am, as they say, underwater. Or, perhaps more appropriately, under whiskey. Today I finally received a shipment of illegal* whiskey. One bottle of an old favorite and a bottle of something new that I've never tried before.

The Anchor Distillery pretty much had me at hello given that they're from San Francisco and they are committed to producing no-nonsense, stout alcohol. Their Junipero Gin is the juniper-lover's robust alternative to Hendrick's smoothness. Strong and herbal, this is no wallflower's gin. Whether you love or hate this gin will tell you if you actually like gin or if perhaps you should be drinking vodka instead.

Having enjoyed Junipero for a couple months, I was absolutely elated to find that the same shop makes a whiskey. The Old Potrero, pictured here, clearly comes from the same mind as Junipero: it's one of the stronger whiskies I've enjoyed, with a firey kick that falls into a burnt caramel descent. It's good on ice, it's nice alone, and it's great in an Old Fashioned.

The Hudson is a new drink for me but first tastings are positive, extremely so. Having these two show up on the same day is appropriate considering that the Hudson is perhaps as different as possible from Old Potrero. Where The latter is strong, even explosive, the Hudson is smooth and thin. It evolves from familiar shades of wood and earth to a surprising, tenuous ringing finish in notes of cherry. Usually I trade amber liquors for clear during the summer months, but with a whiskey like this I may have to revise my plans.

As this project comes to a close I am continually reminded that one of the things I set out to do was spend some time thinking about what makes up "american-ness." If there is to be an American Capitol, what makes it so? If there is to be an America that holds at its core some notion of resolved-difference, what are those things which bridge this difference to provide a common ground? The impetus for the project was an essential observation that rather than a resolved-difference we have slipped into a mode of differentiated resolve. The notion of "agreeing to disagree," which seems to be amongst the core of American political values (at least in the longterm sense of the word), is not possible in an environment where deliberation is replaced by defamation or deception. The exhaustion resulting from the staking and re-staking of claims that is central to both compromise and an agreement to disagree is absent in a political culture that forsakes rebuttal in favor of unilateral attack. With no effort expended to actually calibrate an ongoing dialog (D v. R, Clinton v. Obama, etc) the various parties at war with one another are able to continually lob new attacks over the wall without suffering setbacks or slowing down. Like launching a cruise missile at some geo-located target, one-sided attacks require none of the apparent effort that actually rebutting an existing assertion entails. These are not battles so much as a strong of isolated strikes.

What's an architect to do? Short answer: nothing. This is not our bag, it's a big issue. Long answer: everything. The playing out of politics is intensely spatial, as anyone can tell by looking at the daily reports of the candidates' positions. But beyond this fashionable catch-all term "spatial," political acts are directly influenced by the buildings that they play out in. The architecture that serves our government (oh, and us) has immense implications in terms of the meta-organization of the groups they house. To trot out a dead horse on this blog, the architecture of the Capitol Building-- yes, its walls, windows, and doors-- directly contributed to reversing the Constitution and limiting the representative efficacy of our House of Representatives. To test this idea another way, try asking your boss to trade offices with you.

What's this architect to do? My (naive) response to these larger political issues and the direct architectural issues that have been my preoccupation over the last 8 months is to think about the contest as a default mode of operation. What does it mean for something to be deliberated upon, to be argued over rather than simply mashed together in a state of congestion? More specifically, how can basic tasks of judgement about architecture be insisted upon as the price of entry to working on more important political issues? If the first question of our Congress was whether their meeting chamber was good enough to meet in, I am reinstating and highlighting that question as a fundamental prerequisite for the daily function of the institution.

This leads very quickly away from contemporary architectural predilections for generic spaces (shroud in spectacular skins as if they are embarrassed of their monotony) and towards a condition of differentiated interiors. This is an architecture that has winners and losers, that demands to be evaluated before it can be used, that is always adding its spatial metadata to the proceedings it houses. We must insist that however much a building like the Capitol will likely act as an outward symbol of the American nation, this symbolic chain should be able to be followed backwards, down into the building, and transformed into an instrument that may become useful in measuring (and thus judging!) the success and failures of the body that inhabits this shell.

To return to the whiskey before I drift off into an early morning nap, it seems especially American of me to have received not only whiskey, but rye and not only a bottle of rye, but two. With this apparent embarrassment of riches comes an essential necessity that Americans have always been addicted to: choice. So pick a side, pour a drink, and get to arguing.

* Puritans still run MA, apparently. Another reason to hate on New England.

On Data & Standards

2008-03-06T02:06:00.006-05:00

My desk is lodged between two bookshelves so, as you may imagine, the books that are close at hand tend to matter to me a bit more than the ones that stray to the outer limits of the shelf. It's this immediate access that brought to my attention the curious name of a book that I frequently refer to, Neufert Architects' Data. I've preferred it over Architectural Graphic Standards, the more common book here in the US, for some time but was never quite sure why.

In its own right this name is interesting for the fact that the architects are plural; this is a book for the use of a discipline. It's not an architect's book, it belongs to the whole lot of them. Can the simple title of a book bind a profession? But it's also revealing to compare this, the European standard for typical dimensions and other fundamentals of building design, to the North American equivalent, Architectural Graphic Standards.

By name alone¹ it would seem that the two contain vastly different information. While AGS claims an authority on convention, specifically to define the conventions of architectural drawing (and thus the specification of making), Neufert has decidedly more modest goals. Rather than proclaiming weighty standards, Neufert seeks to arm the reader with data, that most essential precondition for forming an opinion. This difference is borne out in the contents as well. Whereas AGS provides tables of standard dimensions, typical drawings for a number of generic conditions, and abstract guidelines, Neufert bookends the abstract and the typical with the microscopic and the built.

In addition to typical layouts for a dining room (p. 255) you will find seemingly superfluous drawings of four different place setting types and a guide to cutlery, all properly dimensioned. The very rawness, the exact quality that makes it seem extraneous, is what also makes it a powerful resource because it avoids assumptions about the problems its readers are trying to solve. Opposite these minutiae, one also finds examples from built work that serve to demonstrate the application of this data. With great efficiency, Neufert compresses abstract ideals, typical conditions, minutiae, and the messy contingencies of reality all into one volume.

I guess that's why I favor Neufert. It's a resource in the truest sense: stuffed full of data waiting to be resolved into answers rather than static solutions shopped from its pages.

1. In reality the contents are more similar than the names would imply, save the two notable qualitative exceptions mentioned above.

2. On a whim I decided to cross post this to Archinect. My apologies to all 3 people out there who read both this website and Archinect school blogs.

Duck Bills

2008-03-05T23:12:00.001-05:00

From an otherwise somewhat misplaced lecture, this perfect line by Dave Hickey about the lack of joy in public American architecture:

I'd rather pay my parking tickets in the bill of a giant duck.

Deign Envelopes

2008-03-05T23:07:00.003-05:00

This was an excellent competition and the entries, just a few shown here, are fascinating.

Of Plates, Ornaments, Nick Nacks, &c.

2008-02-25T22:12:00.010-05:00

"Susan is one of the most talented legislative directors on Capitol Hill and a very hard worker," Wicker said. "Of course, none of us knew she was competing in the pageant, but we were not surprised by her success."

I've been obsessed with the mechanisms through which symbolic buildings become possible- the way that we accept the specific, idiosyncratic details of a particular building into our lives as a thing that is imbued with the iconic power to represent abstract ideas. Why do we let the Capitol stand for American democracy? Why a dome and not a spire, a column, a pyramid?

Propaganda, basically.

While Washington, DC was still mostly a mix of forest and swamp and before the Capitol was even completed, maps of the fully developed city were being printed in the major cities of America and Europe replete with views of the Capitol-to-be. These multiplying images of the burgeoning capital & Capitol served to develop a certain understanding of the dome as symbol for the nation. And this was before the much larger, current dome was even built.

The dome is now a ubiquitous image in the United States as it can be found on most of our state capitols. As the second dome ever built in the US (the first was the MA Statehouse) and the first to be of significant scale, the US Capitol became a symbolic stub. Sufficient volume of printed matter depicting the Capitol helped satisfy a cultural need for a representative symbol of the new nation. These flat representations of the Capitol allowed it to ascend from a thing (building) to a representative thing (building that stands for America). But it wasn't until the typology of the US Capitol was replicated in numerous state capitols that its basic form was catapulted from a representative thing into a symbol and thus it gained the ability to survive much more significant physical alterations without losing its symbolic recognition. In other words, the state capitols' participation in wide-building-with-dome-cap-ness promoted their model, the US Capitol, to a sort of prototype status retroactively. This, we must accept, is the power of the image economy.

Lessons learned:

Step 1: produce as many 2d representations of your building as possible. Step 2: convince other people that your building is actually a prototype that they should copy blatantly. Step 3: world domination.

Which one is your Capitol?

Latour: What does an Aesthetics of Matters of Concern Look Like?

2008-02-22T15:03:00.002-05:00

Last night the Barker Center at Harvard hosted a lecture by Bruno Latour entitled Mapping Controversies: A Political Architecture of Knowledge. Previously Latour has fought ardently for the place of objects, things, in our discussions of politics and this lecture is an extension of those thoughts.

"If you can, with a straight face, maintain that hitting a nail with and without a hammer, boiling water with and without a kettle, fetching provisions with or without a basket, walking in the street with or without clothes... are exactly the same activities, that the introduction of these mundane implements change 'nothing important' to the realization of tasks, then you are ready to transmigrate to the Far Land of the Social and disappear from this lonely one."

The discussion last night focused to the tools needed to make the parliament of things more possible. A central part of Latour's argument is that up until very recently we have existed primarily in a world that centers on quantitative matters of fact. Lately, however, facts are becoming more and more contested. The realm of facts is being blurred by matters of concern. In the US this is something that we are all too familiar with in the form of the creationism vs. evolution debates. Evolution was considered a fact until the concerted efforts of religious extremists developed a body of "scientific evidence" contesting its factuality and this issue is now up for grabs, currently the object of heated rhetorical battles. Concerns have worked their way ever deeper into our lives to the point that even the primal act of eating is a matter of concern. Is this beef creating excess methane, is this fish over-fished, is my coffee fair trade? Indeed, coffee is no longer simply coffee and fish are not just fish, the things of our world are now bound into a much longer chain of issues.

Latour suggested very eloquently that arguments of facts are simply the "residue of statistics" and the way that those statistics are visualized. Here the designer is called to action. What we do, how we represent the world, shapes the discussions we have about it. So here's the question: if we are used to a world of facts how can we begin to cope with these matters of concern as they become the default? As Latour put it last night, "what does an aesthetics of matters of concern look like?"

Michael Hays, noted architectural historian, chimed in to suggest that the 20th century was largely an era of collage, both politically and aesthetically. This seems like an apt description: in the palatable pluralism of contemporary politics when we "agree to disagree" and always resolve conflicts of interest in a binary way, there are always just winners and losers. But what of contemporary politics and current-day image making? Hayes further suggested zooming, that critical ability of visualizations as diverse as Google Earth, video games, Photoshop, CAD and others, would become the defining factor of our contemporary aesthetics. In a zooming environment you enter into discussions of scale and resolution, highlighting the thresholds between various zoom levels as key sites of decision.

Latour claims to be unhappy with smoothness but I think this stems from the fact that smooth zooming is a relatively new phenomena and we are still grappling with its implications. Smoothly zooming between one view of a map and another, I argue, is primarily a user interface shortcut and a way to help link two things cognitively rather than a thing in itself. The zoom levels are the data and the smoothness the metadata.

But for this argument to hold water we have to already acknowledge that two different zoom levels of a map are actually two different maps. At every level of zoom a chain of decisions about what to show and what to leave out must be made. The tools that we use to zoom in and out of data, be it maps or CAD drawings or whatever, make specific decisions about what to show and how to depict it at each zoom level because it's not feasible (or productive) to represent all levels of detail all the time. Testing this assertion is simple: what does the street level view of Google Maps do for you? What does the global view do for you? The latter will certainly not help you navigate a vehicular path from A to B and the former will not do a very good job of articulating your position relative to the entire planet.

In other words, perhaps the problem is not smooth navigation between states but the lack of statefulness that many smooth interfaces suffer from. In architecture we name these various levels of zoom: urban plan, site plan, floor plan, detail. Although each of those drawings is ostensibly representing the same bundle of ideas, a particular building, they are each the result of very specific decisions about what to show and what to withhold. As a profession architects benefit by being able to teach each other what details are appropriate to a site plan and what may be more appropriate to a floor plan. The discourse of architecture is built upon this kind of basic knowledge and so it's not necessary to explicitly state what has been excluded or included in any particular drawing and why because that comes with your professional understanding.

In the public arena, as scale becomes a more and more prevalent way to understand the world, we (the big we) need to do a better job of revealing the metadata with the data. Although metadata is always useful, it's particularly important to articulate this information in a zooming interface because the default appearance is one of full disclosure but in actuality a small portion is being articulated at any one time. One of the benefits of smooth zooming is to help articulate the thresholds between one particular zoom level and another as data fades in and out of the visual field or increases and decreases in resolution with the change of scale. Here the very act of fading, a visual effect, helps call attention to the change of state.

Near the end of the discussion Latour claimed for himself the title of Compositionist, which I like quite a lot. He chose this word in contrast to a position of the multiplicity of post-modern hypertext where many and multiple views occupy the same plane. Can there be such a thing as informed relativism? Is it possible to be objective or even mostly objective without tethering oneself to absolutes? Like data selected revealed or hidden at each individual level of zoom, can we use composition as a tool that is neither deterministic or relativist?

If we are indeed entering an era of concerns rather than facts we had better hope that resolving our conflicts in a careful, non binary way is possible. We had better hope that the various sides of a conflict may be composed in such a way as to resolve the conflict without simply bludgeoning one side out of the matter by default. It should be exciting for many readers of this blog to note that composition, the primary act of judgment executed by the designer, is gaining new currency outside the realm of points, lines, and planes.

Lulu reads the paper

2008-02-18T21:32:00.003-05:00

Lulu Bodoni Pig knows how a bill becomes a law, yes she does.

What it is we are doing here (short answer: we're redesigning the US Congress)

2008-02-14T23:47:00.001-05:00

It occurred to me recently that perhaps I owe you an explanation. I've been writing here about various topics ranging from foam to curtain walls to congress and never once stopped to state more explicitly where all of this is leading. I'm currently doing my thesis in architecture which is a two part project. I spent the fall preparing a body of research that would form the underpinnings of the actual design project (a building) that I am designing right now¹. This blog was a pool of words, ideas, and images that I used to gather up and refine my thoughts in anticipation of producing the dreaded "thesis prep document." Traditionally, the GSD prep document should be as lengthy as possible, contain as many references as possible to post Deleuzian socio-economic mitigation translation fold factors, be chock full of provocative but vague images, and be bound in an elaborate fashion. For bonus points it's recommended that you apply a silver-leafed emboss to the cover. I turned in an eight page broadsheet newspaper, a format I chose because because of its importance in the early history of this country and the general challenge² of designing for press.

That document is finished, printed, turned in, and I now have a stack of ~~500~~ 450 or so sitting in my apartment (Want one? email me). But the newspaper was the prep, the work I did to set up a problem for myself that I could address this spring, now, as I design my thesis project. Based on some of my previous posts to this site it may be obvious, but the design project I've chosen for myself is to redesign the US Capitol building.

The short version of the pitch is that the Congress is broken, evidenced in recent years by the strident expansion of executive powers by the Bush II administration while the Congress fails to act as any substantial check or balance. That is to say, now matter how much we dislike the current administration, they're playing by the rules of the game, more or less. The American system of government is set up as a network of loosely defined powers and is designed to force its actors to continually refine, test, and reinforce their relationships to one another while defending their autonomy. When one branch, say the executive, becomes power hungry it's the job of the other branches to restrain them and maintain a Constitutional balance. As a matter of politics this could be argued ad nauseum so we'll simply take it as a given: we're redesigning the US Capitol.

In the course of my research I discovered an interesting coincidence in the history of the US House of Representatives. Intended to grow with each uptick of the census and maintain something of a parity with the population, the House of Representatives actually stopped growing in 1911. The date has no significance, but it's interesting to note that 435 is about as many people as can comfortably fit into the chamber of the house as it stands today (the current chamber was first occupied in 1858 with 262 desks). In other words, the House's membership stopped growing because of architecture, not politics. By interfering with the political process of the country, in 1911 the US Capitol changed from monument to memorial.

The real issue is what architectural questions we can address with the Capitol as our vehicle. The primary issue at stake here is how one may develop a sense of monumentality without fixity. Perfect static environments, little capsules of space preserved for future generations, are memorials that purposefully mark a certain moment in time. They are designed to stay that way until eternity (or at least revolution). Monumentality, on the other hand, is a quality that we may seek to bestow upon even a living building. Is Grand Central Station monumental? Was it once? Are airports? What about MOMA? SFMOMA? Answering these questions is especially difficult because constituency has been shattered. What you consider monumental and important may not be so to your neighbor. In 9 Points on Monumentality, largely considered to be the last significant tract on architectural monumentality, Sert, Leger, and Gideon argued that only "periods in which a unifying consciousness and unifying culture" can produce monuments. We can easily say that there's little to unify our difference except difference itself; does this mean that monumentality is an extinct quality or did S&L&G have it wrong?

As the preeminent symbol of the US government, the Capitol building provides an excellent opportunity to address the question of architectural monumentality, a subject which has been laying dead under a rock for the past 50 years (Sorry, Dan, I don't think too highly of Canberra's parliament bldg from 1988). What qualities does a building have to have to appear on money? How can a building be both monumental and alive, current with the times?

My project is addressing these dual issues of the Capitol. The Congress is a space-hungry entity currently consuming some 7 million square feet of surface area spread out across about 10 buildings. Having grown relatively slowly into the behemoth that it is now, this expansion was never planned per se. What gains are to be had by considering the totality of the problem from the point of view of performance? Concurrently, can the Capitol building itself provide a home for this most important branch of government that is satisfyingly monumental while able to grow, even expand, without repeating the mistake of 1911?

I'll let you know after May 15th.

¹ Yup, right now as I type this I am designing.

² Underestimated that one a weensy bit. I am now pretty decent at copyfitting, however.

From Mass to Mess

2008-02-14T23:30:00.006-05:00

In 1978 the Claritas corporation introduced a market segmentation index called PRIZM that breaks down the country’s population into a total of now 66 codified character types. These types, given names like “Young Digerati” and “City Roots,” articulate the nation’s population as a collection of target demographics broken down by age, race, purchasing habits, media preferences, and income level all located in spatial concentrations pegged to zip codes.

While Claritas was hard at work segmenting the population, credit card companies, consumer products manufacturers, and service industries began teaching consumers on an individual basis to demand customization on an increasingly personal level. From venti-soy-nonfat-double pump lattes to blue iMacs, choice is offered as market option but increasingly mobilized also as part of our individual identity.

Whereas the immediate post-WWII market was dominated by relatively few corporations, thanks to the deregulation of key industries the competitive landscape is increasingly dense. Instead of accepting the inward flow of customers, contemporary companies must now actively seek out consumers. In something resembling an autocatalytic loop, the targeting of consumers has slowly allowed individuals to seek increasingly minute commercial differentiation, which eventually demands more refined targeting, which starts the loop all over again.

Through this reciprocal mechanism the broad concerns of the population are specialized and compartmentalized, making an understanding of national unity on a basic level more and more difficult. Combined with advanced production capacity and expanded media markets, the PRIZM system has transformed “we the people” into “we the peoples” - no longer will a catchall collector suffice in a nation of consumers that stand divided.

Photograph by Arthur Mole of 30,000 soldiers standing in formation.

As the early euphoria of nation building now wears off (after all, Hawaii was added to the union just a generation ago) the unifying power of abstract ideals is being put to the test by a nation of citizens which, from the start, have prided themselves on individuality. While participation in the project of the United States may still hold sway with some people, the definition of this project is slippery, as witnessed most recently by the great divide caused by the current presidency. The personalized consumer attention described above serves to further complicate regional and cultural differences in an already vast country by teaching the individual that choice, not compromise, is the primary act. Rather than receiving the masses which may be differentiated upon closer inspection, a public architecture that is specific to the United States accepts mess: the multiple, conflicted and conflicting citizenry of individuals from which it must seek to coalesce temporary forms of coherence.

Spotted Part 3

2008-02-14T17:06:00.002-05:00

A small DIY student publication at the GSD called "Hey You" has borrowed some of my thesis research work and a tiny snip of my paper.

Curious, Indeed.

2008-02-10T15:53:00.001-05:00

Curious, originally uploaded by sevensixfive.

More pet incidents with the paper, please. I'm still waiting for pictures of Ms. Lulu Bodoni Pig nesting in shredded Shadows & Straws.

Spotted

2008-02-05T14:55:00.001-05:00

photo.jpg, originally uploaded by Erika Hall.

Do you have a pic of the paper in action? send it to me!

I'm especially excited to see the copies that Rena and Derek give to their pigs as bedding.

State of the Union Live blog

2008-01-28T20:50:00.000-05:00

After such fun with the opening of Parliament, how about a little live blog action on the State of the Union too?

Where is it: House chamber, which is larger, but I still don't know exactly how many people it seats with the galleries full. Maybe 700?

Who is in the room: Members of both houses of congress, the Washington diplomatic core, supreme court, cabinet minus one member (for continuity of gov't), and apparently after 2001 "key members of congressional leadership" are also offsite.

An escort committee of some 30-40 people are elected to bring the President into the chamber. Split evenly between house and senate. They should have a theme song and burst through a taught American flag. That would be a great way for Bush to end his term.

"Madame speaker, the dean of the diplomatic core!" is announced and then a few people walk in. Unclear what exactly this is.

"Madame speaker, the chief justice and the associate justices of the supreme court!"

The first lady and the daughters sit in the gallery. Laura is wearing a red pant suit. Whoa.

"Madame speaker, the president's cabinet!"

I wonder if there are rules about not upstaging the President's dress at an event like this, like the way women are not supposed to wear white to a wedding in case they upstage the bride. It looks like if you're a guy you have to wear a navy or gray suit and if you're a woman your choices are red or white pantsuit.

"Madame speaker, the president of the united states!" He's five minutes late.

Laura and the Bushettes look happy, a little bored. Nancy Pelosi looks like a rawbawt.

Bush sports a cornflower blue tie. Maybe he got the Blue Iris memo?

It looks like two rows of chairs have been added at the very front of the room. Condi & Co. are sitting on smaller, less formal chairs.

Clapping is totally partisan. Split down the aisle.

Surprising Few, Italy’s Government Collapses - New York Times

2008-01-24T22:17:00.000-05:00

Surprising Few, Italy’s Government Collapses - New York Times

How happy was that copy editor?

Almost

2008-01-24T19:46:00.001-05:00

this must be boring to anyone but me, originally uploaded by bryanboyer.

Picking up the finals stack (500!) tomorrow

IDEAS IN FOOD: Custard Spheres

2008-01-23T15:35:00.000-05:00

From IDEAS IN FOOD

We had the opportunity to revisit the honey custard. In this case we opted to cast them as spheres rather than cubes. We have also refined the olive pop rocks a bit. We now grind the olives, lemon zest and neutral pop rocks in the Pacojet. The result is a fine, relatively uniform crumble of effervescent olives.

2008-01-23T10:11:00.003-05:00

Suggested Reading Order, originally uploaded by bryanboyer.

This is how to read the newspaper, when it finally comes to you.

The Ratios of Congress

2008-01-23T10:11:00.001-05:00

The Ratios of Congress, originally uploaded by bryanboyer.

Pledge of Allegiance

2008-01-17T17:59:00.000-05:00

Pledge of Allegiance, via yk & BoingBoing

2008 Storefront / Control Group White House Redux Design Competition

2008-01-16T14:19:00.000-05:00

2008 Storefront White House Redux Design Competition:

"What if the White House, the ultimate architectural symbol of political power, were to be designed today? On occasion of the election of the 44th President of the United States of America, Storefront for Art and Architecture, in association with Control Group, challenge you to design a new residence for the world's most powerful individual. The best ideas, designs, descriptions, images, and videos will be selected by some of the world's most distinguished designers and critics and featured in a month-long exhibition at Storefront for Art and Architecture in July 2008. All three winners will be flown to New York to collect their prizes at the opening party. Register now and send us your ideas for the Presidential Palace of the future!"

Yes, "what" indeed. Perfect timing, guys.

Needs a new name

2008-01-14T15:38:00.001-05:00

need a new name, originally uploaded by bryanboyer.

This name was cribbed from turn of the (20th) century AIA Journal where it was the title of an op-ed column. I have no clue what they intended it to mean, but I'm taking it to stand for the dual modes of representation: shadows, like Plato's cave and straw, as in voting by.

Anyways, glad that's turned in and more or less done...

2008-01-07T18:59:00.001-05:00

This just in, from AM. "like darth vader's helmet encased in jello..." Guess the building?

Domes

2008-01-07T17:05:00.000-05:00

Brasilia 1958
Chandigarh 1963
UN 1950

By the time anyone calling themselves a Modernist thought about placing a dome atop their building, the inherited form was Baroque: most typified by an elongated or raised dome on the exterior hiding a double dome on the interior. Owing to the presence of large bearing walls, the plan footprint of the Baroque dome marks out a contained silo of space that happens to be standing in the middle of a building mass while wearing an extravagant cap.

This is the style of dome at both Christopher Wren’s St. Paul’s Cathedral and the US Capitol, which used the former as its model. Resolved as a single, aggregate figure on the exterior, the iron skin of the Capitol’s dome actually hides two stacked volumes on the interior. This technique allows for a larger interior volume than would otherwise be possible on the available footprint while retaining a capping surface that may be painted with minimal distortion. Using poche to escape the construction realities of the period, the interior and exterior surfaces of the dome are each developed to their experiential best. For visitors to the Capitol’s rotunda a view to the upper, spherical cap is framed by an elongated and truncated dome in a way that optically merges the two back into a single figure.

Afforded new possibilities by cast-in-place concrete and anxious to gain the civic anointment* that a domed space offers, Niemeyer’s design for the Congress in Brasilia features two domes: one a low spherical cap and the other an inverted, saucer like form. Formally, twin domes appear to be poised carefully on top of a plinth. Despite these diverging exterior appearances, the space of both domes is similar in that the chambers, belonging to the base, extend vertically into the volume afforded by their respective domes. To prove the material advances of the modern age, the plan is liberated and the structural footprint of the dome is no longer self-same as the ceremonial space that it contains. Ancillary spaces tucked into the volume of Niemeyer’s domes remain as a ghost of the poche so dreaded in the Baroque.

Conversely, Le Corbusier’s, at the Palace of the Assembly in Chandigarh, has sunken the dome into the building entirely. Like the Baroque model, Corbusier’s dome is embedded into its host. However, instead of raising the dome on piers or walls, and thus protecting the spaces below from its oblique geometry, Corbusier’s sunken dome strategically acts against the large orthogonal container it sits within, animating the large public volume of the building with its presence. The economy of this move is further emphasized by the fact that the form and interior volume of the dome are the same, described by a thin line of concrete. Here, poche has been banished and the dome itself restored to a level of antique purity.

* So Convinced was the US Congress that a legislative building must have a dome that they held up funding for the UN complex until a dome was added to the General Assembly.

Faraday and Other Adventures

2008-01-05T19:50:00.000-05:00

Signal blocking is apparently in danger of becoming a fad in Britain. Who could resist a room as cool as this, kitted out with spike tiles forming a signal-blocking wall of ferrite pyramids?

Or the pocket version, available for the low price of $40, capable of enshrining your teenager's thumbs-of-fury in a bubble of respectable dinner conversation with no risk of under-the-table texting and giving you, the beleaguered parent, an aire of Bond-esque cool?

Owing to the fact that such jammers are illegal in the US and UK (France has recently declared them A-OK), intrepid jammers must look to questionable sinosalespeople who offer their wares with instructions such as this gem:

"Slow start-up circuit can avoid sparkling caused by mechanical switch."

Which is a pity, because I can imagine the teenagers, who may actually drop $40 on one of the portable jammers just to mess with their friends, really getting a kick out of the free sparkling that their equipment comes with. After all- in the style of Cicero- when all else fails to entertain, we can watch it burn.

Government Enters Fray Over BlackBerry Patents

2008-01-05T19:18:00.000-05:00

Government Enters Fray Over BlackBerry Patents:

"There are more than 3 million BlackBerry users in the United States, approximately 10 percent of whom are state and federal government employees who use the devices to keep in contact when out of the office."

I love conflicting numbers. Always take the larger of two sums!

Feds jump into BlackBerry patent dispute

2008-01-05T19:17:00.000-05:00

Feds jump into BlackBerry patent dispute:

"the U.S. government, with as many as 200,000 BlackBerry users, could be harmed if a federal judge in Virginia issues an injunction against Research In Motion Ltd. to stop selling the device and accompanying e-mail service."

This is from 2005. I wonder what the figures are now.

Google Reader (823)

2008-01-05T16:15:00.000-05:00

David Foster Wallace

"Or let's not even mention the amount of research, background, cross-checking, corroboration, and rhetorical parsing required to understand the cataclysm of Iraq, the collapse of congressional oversight, the ideology of neoconservatism, the legal status of presidential signing statements, the political marriage of evangelical Protestantism and corporatist laissez-faire ... There's no way. You'd simply drown. We all would. It's amazing to me that no one much talks about this -- about the fact that whatever our founders and framers thought of as a literate, informed citizenry can no longer exist, at least not without a whole new modern degree of subcontracting and dependence packed into what we mean by 'informed.'"

wrapping up 2007 (28 December 2007, Interconnected)

2007-12-28T20:07:00.000-05:00

wrapping up 2007 (28 December 2007, Interconnected):

Note that this is like the present day legal system. In most situations between two companies, a contract will exist but never be used: because each company can see what a contract says about a decision, the contract will inflect that decision without being run. In some situations a contract is ambiguous, and the legal system will compile and run it. In that case it cannot be known ahead of time what the result will be, otherwise there would be no point in running the legal system over the problem.

It is not possible to know what the king will say without asking the king; the king is only asked for a decision in cases where the answer cannot be known ahead of time. The king is the only source of unknowns in the society. In our world, it is the free market which is the only source of unknowns.

What the Magna Carta did - or rather, what the process that the Magna Carta was part of did - was turn the king into a thing. The thing-king is the king revealed. The important feature of the document isn't the constraints put on the king, but rather the fact that it is possible to bind to the king at all. It's like suddenly leaping above the ocean and realising that the ocean is there at all... and therefore tides! and therefore currents! and therefore the possibility of other bodies of water that aren't this ocean! Or it's like the way that air pollution revealed the atmosphere as something that could have varying parameters over its volume. Once the king is a thing, it is possible to bring the king into society, and constrain and rule him. That was the big deal.

So when I look at the economic imperatives of the free market, and the way the invisible hand is swiping us into situations that are frankly fucked up, I wonder: is it possible to make the free market a thing? Rather than complain about it and make laws about it (which of course won't work, because they're inside a system in which the only source of 'truth' is the free market (and by 'truth' I mean those facts which can't be known without computing them)), is it possible to describe the market to such a degree that the next steps will naturally be to internalise and constrain it?

wrapping up 2007 (28 December 2007, Interconnected)

2007-12-28T19:44:00.000-05:00

wrapping up 2007 (28 December 2007, Interconnected):

"The metaphor Beer uses, and the one I remember my friend Andrew using, is Le Chatelier's principle. This is from chemistry. It says that a system in equilibrium which is given a prod will change internally to counteract that prod and move into a new equilibrium. So let's say we're attempting to measure domestic violence by putting cameras in houses. Of course this method will change the nature and frequency of the violence, but rather than stopping at 'it changes,' Le Chatelier leaves open the possibility of figuring out what sort of change has occurred. What happens in other situations where we've used cameras?, we would ask. How have reports changed over time, to reach this new equilibrium? By acting on the system and looking at the responses, we can learn about its internal mechanics, which is a form of science I'm much happier with than the very Zen but not particularly helpful Uncertainty Principle."

Brutality Gradient

2007-12-21T14:18:00.001-05:00

Brutality Gradient, originally uploaded by bryanboyer.

Take Me To Your Leader

2007-12-16T22:50:00.001-05:00

Take Me To Your Leader, originally uploaded by bryanboyer.

I'm sure that just by posting this you know what I'm thinking.

2007-12-15T02:01:00.000-05:00

From AM (thanks, dude): Bruno Latour as quoted in the Koolworld Wired issue:

As a result, contemporary scientific controversies are emerging in what have been called hybrid forums. We used to have two types of representations and two types of forums: one, science, representing nature - here "representation" means accuracy, precision, and reference - and another, politics, representing society - and here "representation" means faithfulness, election, obedience. A simple way to characterize our times is to say that the two meanings of representation have now merged into one, around the key figure of the spokesperson.
In the global warming controversy, some of those spokespeople represent the high atmosphere, others oil and gas lobbies, others nongovernmental organizations. Still others represent, in the classical sense, their electors (with President Bush representing at once his electors and the energy lobbies!). The stark difference, which seemed so important, between those who represented things and those who represented people, has vanished. What counts is that all spokespeople are in the same room, engaged in the same collective experiment, talking at once about imbroglios of people and things.

Container Problem

2007-12-14T20:18:00.000-05:00

A British-made earthenware pitcher commemorating the first official population census of the United States in 1790:

Containers hold things.

Containers have the potential to shape their contents, often providing an evocative representation of what they hold. The typical form of the jug, for instance, has sides bowing under the pressure of the liquid it contains- a phenomenal representation of the battle between container (rigid-inwards) and contained (liquid-outwards).

Containers also have surfaces which may be used for further representative tasks. This jug, in particular, is both evocatively representing the liquid forces it contains and explicitly celebrating the nation's first Census in 1790. These two forms of representation coalesce into a message of constructed solidarity or constitutive identity: There is a thing (jug/nation) that is realizing its potential to purposefully shape its contents (liquid/population).

Containers are not compatible with infinitely or extensively growing contents. They have specified limits. When containers become full, their shaping potential becomes a problem that leads to overflow and uncontrolled spillage.

Buildings are containers.

Buildings, unlike jugs, may be extended, renovated, and reconfigured. However, representative buildings are limited in their ability to be modified because the legibility of the building, its image, begins to be just as important as its ability to contain things. Conversely, buildings with no legible image are unsatisfying symbols of the things they contain. Important public buildings require legible images: they have to be potent enough to appear on money.

Buildings that are trapped by the success of their image begin to negatively effect the organizations that they house. These organizations either leave or suffer the pain of increasingly difficult spatial compromises. If McDonald's corporate headquarters is stiffling their business it's their problem. If the successful branding of our government's buildings is inhibiting the daily function of the government itself, this is our problem.

Public buildings are containers that must have a potent image without losing their ability to contain new things and more things. Public buildings must relentlessly surf the waves of potential without succumbing to the riptide of representation.

OMG

2007-12-14T19:21:00.001-05:00

Multimedia message, originally uploaded by arikan.

Speechless!

Reagan & Snavely (unrelated)

2007-12-14T03:38:00.000-05:00

Power is social, oh yes. (and funny.)

Today was John's final review at MIT and it was interesting to have a bit of a sneak peak of what lays in store for me 6 months from now. The jury included Kwinter, Betsky, Jarzombek and some others I didn't recognize (MIT faculty?) in an awkward mix.

What I appreciated most about the review and John's work was the way in which it divided the jury. One of the critics was left to meekly insult the work and ask "what's your value system?" As contrast he offered Rockwell's practice as one that has a clear value system (cash money) but then claimed that since John is trying to be both high and low culture at the same time that he has no value system. What happened to nuance, dick? What happened to both/and? The more I thought about the review and the project the more I realized how spectacular it was because the critics were basically unable to respond, left withering in the face of something that is self-consciously not forged in the hellfires of criticism and also clearly not a thoughtless, lazy construction.

Later, over cocktails, "thesisness" comes up as a topic of conversation. REX is offered the model of the perfect thesis: everything provable, decisions explicit, logic clear. While I'm a huge fan of rational thinking (hello, modern world!) it is encouraging to see some glimpses of hyper rational fatigue. Not that I want to slip into an atmosphere of total fantasy (can we get over Walking City, already?) but being a little loose, a little associative, even a little nuanced never hurt anyone (except the conservatives, to whom nuance is like kryptonite).

Anyways, this is a long way of saying congratulations, John.

Cooling Things Down

2007-12-13T00:03:00.000-05:00

Anecdote of Washington and Jefferson:

"There is a tradition that, on his return from France, Jefferson called Washington to account at the breakfast-table for having agreed to a second chamber. 'Why,' asked Washington, 'did you pour that coffee into your saucer?' 'To cool it,' quoth Jefferson. 'Even so,' said Washington, 'we pour legislation into the senatorial saucer to cool it.' "

The Rostrums of Congress

2007-12-10T19:21:00.001-05:00

The Rostrums of Congress, originally uploaded by bryanboyer.

You wouldn't expect it, but this information is not so easy to track down. The senate posts a map of the chamber which outlines where everyone sits, but the House map was nowhere to be found... until I visited the law library and looked through books intended to teach lobbyists. How's that for scary / unfortunate?

The Old World's Tallest Buildings

2007-12-08T11:19:00.000-05:00

Very nice page from Cram's World Atlas showing tall buildings of yore, coded by color. The Old World’s Tallest Buildings, 1884.

2007-12-05T07:26:00.000-05:00

Gone to Washington, DC. Back this weekend.

Chambers

2007-12-03T15:34:00.001-05:00

, originally uploaded by bryanboyer.

To be added: Chandigarh and Canberra. Oh, and I need to figure out how to fit back in there the Saynatsalo and Security Council plans. It was interesting to draw all of the church plans, but I'm not sure they're helping my argument. Their organization's strength is in network dispersion and redundancy (e.g. cell groups) and not in the architecture.

In the garden grows...

2007-12-03T03:25:00.001-05:00

In the garden grows..., originally uploaded by bryanboyer.

Architects: 1. Congress: 0.

2007-12-02T01:45:00.000-05:00

Interesting... the Architect barely outranks congress people in a survey of prestigious
occupations.

OJ

2007-11-28T18:10:00.002-05:00

In 1948 When the White House was found to be in danger of structural collapse, an emergency "reconstruction" was engaged to redo the building's interior both in soundness and layout. The construction images are striking: seen here is a comparison of SANAA's Zollverein cube and the interior of the White House with its floor plates removed. Both spaces are large, empty, and charmingly awkward. Elsewhere, thanks to the construction process we find decidedly complex spaces in these images. In fact, as a building in the throes of decomposition and resurrection, the White House is quite contemporary. If Junkspace is a world of perpetual renovation, the Capitol, as discussed previously, and the White House are OJ: Original Junk. Here the stasis of the neo-classical facade hides an evolving interior of intricate, provisional spaces caught between minimal armatures of construction.

Junkspace needs the idea of "done" to protect the sanctity of its subjects in their pursuit of perfection. Even if Junkspace feeds on a relativist understanding of the world, it does so grudgingly, always still aspiring to the perfect composition, the perfect state of doneness to be complete now and for eternity. Monumentality was still the concubine of Modernity. While appearing to rely on classical ideas of static perfection, OJ aspires to timeless Truth and thus forsakes the possibility of predicting the future. OJ is refreshingly straightforward in its pragmatic dispatching of the issues at hand. By only attending to the problems of the moment when expansion or renovation is begun, OJ marks the passing of time with specific solutions to specific problems. Junkspace gazes through the crystal ball to produce spaces of abstract possibility, but OJ is the crystal: an idiosyncratic thing that may be broken later, re-set, polished up, or otherwise transmitted to future generations of problem-solvers as both a coherent historical idea and a literal collection of matter that will productively resist any alterations.

Goodbye Supermodernism | varnelis.net

2007-11-28T00:11:00.000-05:00

Goodbye Supermodernism | varnelis.net:

"Non-place, then, is only a brief transitional entity and Supermodernity only a way-station on the way to a network culture. As the vast collective reading/net surfing room of OMA’s Seattle Public Library or the tubes that reveal the infrastructural underpinnings of Toyo Ito’s Sendai Mediatheque begin to suggest, the new architecture for the twenty-first century will be less concerned with sensation and affect, less obsessed with either the box and the blob, and more concerned with a new kind of place-making, enabling us to dwell more creatively in both “real” and network space."

Time-full-ness

2007-11-26T02:38:00.000-05:00

An acknowledgment of building as bellwether in a letter from William Lee to Charles Bulfinch on October 1, 1817:

That superb pile ought to be finished in a manner to do credit to the country and the age.

Monies

2007-11-24T20:23:00.001-05:00

One of the students in the studio that I TA for sent me this image.

Latour on Globalization, the continued importance of The State, and the Parliament of Things

2007-11-23T21:32:00.000-05:00

First of all, Bruno Latour has an awesome voice for lecturing.

The most salient parts of the lecture were two paragraphs towards the end. The first about the still-very-loose definition of globalization and the second about the concept of the State as adapted from John Dewey, pragmatist hero:

"Is it not obvious that those who talk about the great winds of globalization, of opening to the world, of taking risk are blatant hypocrites? Globalizers have a very provincial view of what the whole world is. What they write about is not the global at all, but a lot of globaloney."

We don't know what the state is, and what sort of protective envelope it should compose. [Yet] the alternative is certainly not between an archaic, national attachment to the land and the great winds of the global current. The state has to be re-discovered.

The basic argument of the lecture is that the "public good" is not a natural, self evident thing and in fact must be continually composed and re-composed by politics. And that those who are in the business of attempting to compose this provisional definition of the public good must be held accountable. This trashes both (Adam) Smithian and Rousseauian definitions of a-priori goodness in favor of a constructivist, provisional public good.

Calculating, the act of tabulating or assessing something already existing in the world, is offered as the instrument of contemporary politics as matter-of-fact. Since calculations may only be verified against an empirical source as true or false, composition is offered as an alternative. By focusing on composition, politics is transformed from a science that is conducted with self-evident material to one that allows a more nuanced dialog of matters-of-concern. Since the "we" of "we the people" is always in flux, these concerns are always shifting as well. Latour's model thus attempts to have it both ways: to make calculations (as a technology of observation) more linked with the physical world but, instead of ending politics with observation, to also make the evaluation of those facts a decisive, deliberative, and ultimately constructive act of composition.

No small feat.

Unrelated: Tights Are Not Pants

2007-11-21T19:44:00.000-05:00

Tights are not pants, a stunning video of urban lawlessness enacted to good effect, also has a manifesto.

The Geometrical Conclusion of the Capitol

2007-11-21T16:57:00.000-05:00

I've been corresponding with a man who has proposed repealing the limit of 435 members on the House of Representatives. The founders intended for each rep to represent no more than 30000, 50000, or 60000 depending on which source you look at. In 2000 simple arithmatic shows that each member of the house is responsible for representing the interests of 571766 citizens. If the limit of 435 reps was repealed, the house would grow 1900% to around 8200 members. Sounds like quite the challenge for the Architect of the Capitol; no wonder they capped it at 435. Below is a part of my email describing some interesting coincidences of timing:

The old house chamber (now Statuary room) was the subject of some debate when it was built. The original plans by Thornton called for an elliptical room but Latrobe changed it to be two semicircular end caps connected by parallel lines. Although this seems like a minor change, it implies that Latrobe was at least partially concerned with the possibility of future expansion of the chamber. Simply put, an ellipse is a singular shape and cannot be modified or added to without losing its purity; in contrast, the connected semicircles that Latrobe built (I believe the Statuary room is one end of this previous room, still digging for drawings to prove this) are already aggregated figures and thus may be added on to further without destroying the geometric integrity of the room.

Indeed, it's curious that the founders of the country were so concerned with ensuring that no single Rep would represent too many citizens and yet the original 1792 competition for the capitol showed little or no interest in the need for future expansion. Jefferson, who one assumes would be very aware of both the political and architectural implications of the representative structure, even sketched a captiol of elliptical chambers set inside of a large circular structure. The Thomas Ustick Walter wings (the cap and base of the "I") that began construction in 1851 similarly trapped the capitol in a geometric dead end. Without the wings, the building can expand symmetrically on either side and still maintain geometric integrity but with Walter's additions in place the possibilities of expansion are limited, the geometric disposition of it leaving much less room for expansion. [Note: this is in distinct opposition to the AIA carbonite mentioned in a previous post.]

At any rate, the question of why 435 and its timing are quite intriguing. In looking at the timeline of additions and renovations to the capitol itself, it's interesting to note that the first House office building (Cannon) was built in 1908 with the first Senate office building following a year later. By 1913 an additional floor would be added to the Cannon building to accommodate the expanding needs of the House. While I don't want to downplay any political issues at work around the time of the 435 decision it is highly coincidental that this choice was made within 10 years of congress feeling such significant growing pains that they had to expand into a new office, transforming the capitol from a single building to a complex. Could it be that the expense and hassle of this first expansion was too much for the body to handle? That the decision to limit the size of the house to 435 reps was partially motivated by a desire to curtail an infinite expansion of members and offices? As it turns out, even if the number of reps is fixed (for now) this does not keep the size of the congress from expanding. The numbers of staff, standing committees, and the size of offices required to serve these people has continued to expand.

best regards,

-bryan

Congress As Architecture Critic

2007-11-21T04:10:00.000-05:00

On the morning of Monday September 5th, 1774 fifty-five individuals formed the very first meeting of the Continental Congress. They began their revolutionary work not as politicians but as architecture critics. Before politics there is architecture.

"The members met at the City Tavern [in Philadelphia] at ten o'clock and walked to the Carpenter's Hall, where they took a view of the room and of the chamber... The general cry was, That this was a good room, and the question was put, whether we were satisfied with this room? and it was passed affirmative." John Adams as quoted in The Nine Capitals of the United States by Robert Fortenbaugh.

Over the next 26 years the capital would be moved 14 times, conducting official meetings in places as diverse as taverns and private homes to court houses and other state buildings before settling into its official home on the Potomac in 1800. The result of a contentious public competition, the capitol building that the 6th Congress moved into would be a partially completed, noisy, brick and limestone affair in the middle of a backwater city. Over the next 167 years the capitol was a live entity undergoing numerous changes as spaces were adapted and expand to meet contemporary needs until the AIA itself suggested that no further changes be made for fear of ruining a historical treasure. With the capitol building now frozen in AIA carbonite, 1967 would mark the end of Congress' critical engagement with architecture- a hobby of necessity that began in 1774 with a simple evaluation: This is a good room. That the story of congressional architecture ends just as a new wave of political questions began washing over society hints to us that a disconnect between the political and cultural lives of our nation is a dangerous gap to foster.

Scratching the Surface

2007-11-16T13:03:00.001-05:00

That is all for now.

Productive Congestion

2007-11-16T03:48:00.000-05:00

The State of the Assembly

The fever pitched verbal slurry of an auction attempts to unseat reason through an onslaught of pure speed. Forced to bid quickly if they are interested, customers in an auction suffer a reduction in their ability to think matters through. Lacking the drag co-efficient of thought, the logic goes, sale prices will escalate unimpeded as buyers seek to secure their purchase.

A more plodding customer base favors the flea market- realm of perpetual bargain. With a collection of vendors spread out in space, the flea market is a microcosm of the market at large: a sea of buyers and sellers ready to negotiate a purchase price that's agreeable to both parties. Here in the market, time is essential to price. Waiting out and arguing down your opponent are two critical tactics of bargaining. From a buyer's perspective, near-by vendors offering similar products for better prices transforms the spatial disposition of the market into a token of temporal pressure which may be exerted upon the preferred seller: "if you don't give me a better price I'm going over there. Think quickly!"

Democracy, like the market, is a task of patience. If fixed consumer prices are the element of efficiency that tethers the chaos of the auction and the flea market, rules of order play a similar role in democratic governments. Debate, voting, motions, and general procedures are introduced as methods of structuring human-to-human interaction. Ostensibly to maintain "order" in the conversation, these rules actually serve to carefully extenuate the proceedings and prevent them from devolving into a legislative auction. Through the wordy scripts of government and the weighty requirements of documentation, waiting time is breathed into legislative proceedings. Fundamentally, this discursive padding allows the formulation of better arguments from opposing parties and furthers the atmosphere of trial-by-fire that typifies competitive, argumentative, democratic proceedings. If competition is the operative mode of capitalism and democracy both, congestion is their healthy fallout.

This "boisterous sea of liberty," as Jefferson called it (Bernstein p. 121), promises to delivery higher quality products by congesting the drive towards completion just long enough to allow actors to competitively develop the most favorable solution. Too much congestion slows all progress to a halt and too little allows a tyranny of the minority to progress towards self-interested goals. Efficiency can be too much of a good thing. Conversely, the counter-intuitive logic of congestion forces all parties involved to maintain a state of vigilance and thus to also conduct themselves carefully. To further congest the proceedings of government is to force politicians to "prove their assertions against other assertions and come to closure without thumping and kicking," in Bruno Latour's words.

Assertions, not facts: these abstract building blocks of argument require the development of cares and concerns, positions, and even armatures of rhetoric. When facts cease to be facts this is evidence of more than a single lie; it identifies a systemic failure of the decision making apparatus to usefully evaluate the issues at hand. Forced by a drive towards transparency, Powell's presentation to the UN was a comic parade of images aimed at the broader public rather than experts. The proof is in the Powerpoint. By holding government "accountable to the people" in the name of "transparency" the terms of discussion are necessarily dumbed down to a level that no longer benefits from expertise. Because "complicated proof-giving equipment" (Latour) demands expert level understanding and brings with it opaque dialog such equipment has been banned from our assemblies. Yet, contemporary issues are sufficiently complex that assemblies must serve public desire with the benefit of disciplinary expertise. The congestive power of expert arguments bides time for analysis in a way that is diametrically opposed to the hotting-up of legislative dialog by psuedo-factual statements.

The Contemporary Assembly (This is painful)

Now a sort of black box brimming with expertise, the public building must take the radical step of favoring its own efficiency over the efficacy of its representative character. The myth of empirical assessment being wiped from the required qualities of a public building, its mass and urban presence are given symbolic imperative and thus the happenings of the interior are divorced from the outside image of the building. Instead of being a machine open for all to inspect, specific avenues are provided for the public to perform diagnostics. A further public interiority is developed through the addition of other (mundane) programs which benefit the city, weave the building into its context, and brings potential agents of diagnostic sortition into the building.

If waiting time is the currency of democracy, the public building should be able to represent the ephemeral as well as the stable. Paired with the dual demands of security and flexibility of the interior, this quality of ephemerality is the sole thing that links the building's representative exterior to its functional interior. Sloterdijk suggests that the "polis is a reservoir for symbolic objects that are to be given a longer presence in the shared community" (Latour p. 948) and while public buildings will always lag behind media, they should nevertheless keep a loose pace with the public who erected them. A little literalness never hurt anyone.

Floating around my head while writing this: The Federalist Papers (esp. 1-15, 85), R. B. Bernstein's Thomas Jefferson, Bruno Latour's Making Things Public, Sarah Whiting's dissertation The Jungle In The Clearing, and Rem Koolhaas' Delirious New York.

2007-11-15T00:33:00.001-05:00

I live in an 8-story modernist housing block designed by Hugh Stubbins that sails through a sea of turn-of-the-century New England residential complexes. Where the neighboring buildings are dense clusters of cellular apartments surrounding serpentine stairs- always detailed with tiles in ornate patterns- my building is hollow, a residential foam. A large chamber at the center of the building is ringed with circulatory balconies that preside over a platform of planters. Empty most days, when hosting bi-weekly meetings of the condo association the geometry of the platforms begins to shape a space of governance. Without closing anything off, the space between the planters is large enough to comfortably seat the condominium board without precluding the possibility of others joining when a particularly pressing issue is being discussed. Visible from 7 floors of balconies above, in this atrium dimensions, composition, and section are combined to create a space which vacillates between functional site of governance and spatial amenity for the inhabitants.

The history of parliamentary spaces begins with a wide open plain in the center of Iceland. From 930 onwards, the leaders of Iceland used the plains of Thingvellir to convene their government at a shared point in space that was central for all parties. Some 850 years later, the members of France's Third Estate found themselves locked out of the Séance Royal on June 20th, 1789 and commandeered a nearby indoor tennis court where they took the impromptu, ad-hoc oath that began the French Revolution. Getting down to business required sitting down in the wake of this oath, the young republicans would inhabit previously-royal spaces to begin building a governmental framework. This was going to take a while, so they needed tables and chairs, the furniture of civil argumentation. Inspired by the success of the French Revolution and having just escaped their own royal ruler, a burgeoning United States of America would commission the construction of a capitol building to be the centerpiece of a new capital city. With this final step, political representation was reflected back to the population (and the city) through the construction of a material symbol. The evolving concerns of interior, parliamentary space were exchanged for questions of symbolic form on an urban, even national level.

Using the example of the Concord Ave. apartment building in Cambridge, MA detailed above, an interesting alternative to self-consciously representative architecture is opened up. Here the formal presence of the building is undistinguished but the internal disposition has made the building a machine for citizenship: both enabling self-governance, and fostering the casual social encounters that help a community cohere. Since the atrium of the building is made to serve the double duty of being a seat of power and a site of spurious social connection, governance is turned into an event by the occasional re-arrangement of furniture. The extraordinary condition of the atrium when it's being used for a meeting and the fact that the atrium is the primary circulation space of the building combine to create congestive effects: residents and condo board members must both engage an altered subjectivity while they are temporary interlopers. Even as the board is debating the merits of interior paint colors one finds themselves speaking in a hushed voice out of respect, not for mauve* but for democracy.

*Democracy has its downsides too.

To do: A survey of parliamentary and congressional interior spaces would be very useful for this argument.

Dave Hickey on Politics and Culture

2007-11-14T19:51:00.000-05:00

Snipped from an interview in The Believer:

Sheila Heti: There are a number of artists I know who want to make art out of a political impulse, and this impulse seems kind of incompatible with art-making.

Dave Hickey: The political impulse is fine but moot. Art has political consequences, which is to say, it reorganizes society and creates constituencies of people around it. Miles Davis creates a constituency. Andy Warhol creates a constituency, and any object or occasion that organizes people in terms of what they want is a political constituency. The idea of political content is irrelevant. Content is irrelevant. I always tell my students, “Never forget you’re writing words! You know, word one, word two, word three, word four. The words have to be organized. Nothing else does."

SH: So if you eschew money from grants and from the government, then you’ve got to make money elsewhere—

DH: I wrote reviews of Porter Wagoner albums and squibs for titty magazines, but I fucking wrote them because I was trying to win and avoid all unavoidable compromises that presented me with the fantasies of comfort and security. I just like to write lucid prose. That’s my little thing. Why should it be easier for me than it was for Steve Tyler? Anyway, people don’t make literature, architecture, and art—the culture makes those things. We make books, buildings, and objects. We do our crummy little shit, and the culture assigns value to it, and I don’t think the culture needs government help.

I was also very excited to see that he will be lecturing at the GSD again next Spring.

Taking Power, Sharing Cereal - New York Times

2007-11-12T17:35:00.000-05:00

NYT: Taking Power, Sharing Cereal:

"The roommates then repaired to couches to watch [the football game] and to stuff their faces with Sichuan beef and kung pao chicken. [Congressman] Durbin began talking about meetings he had last month with the presidents of Bolivia and Ecuador on a Congressional delegation to Latin America. Then he and [Congressman] Schumer started arguing about Schumer’s refusal to make his bed."

Evidence, on an almost comic level, that power is social. Let us not forget that informal exchanges are a key part of any power structure. Chatting in the hallway between meetings, seeing people at dinner, serendipitous run-ins on the street: these are the moments where physical proximity and shared interests combine towards powerful effects.

If the political act may be representative, carried out under the steady eye of CSPAN, political action is equally well served by stealth, benefiting from the reduced congestion of private, personal communication to make small leaps before being re-committed to public discourse.

Not your average roommates: four congressmen, with their primary lives back in the home districts, share an apt. on Capitol Hill.

Why Space Rocks?

2007-11-11T18:47:00.000-05:00

I am cleaning files off my computer and so I wanted to preserve the introduction I drafted for Space Rocks! here on the internet webpage html site. Perhaps it's overly optimistic, but aren't all introductions?

What we are trying to do today is learn from our colleagues in other design and art disciplines: how do they communicate ideas about space? How do these methods of representation color the way that they conceive of space as a phenomenon?

Some of our guests work in 2 dimensions, producing comics, photographs, books and magazines, some produce installations, actual spaces, and objects in 3 dimensions and yet others are working fully in 4 dimensions, fusing space and time in the form of animations, film and motion graphics. The dialog internal to each of the disciplines represented here today is something we, as architects, are rarely privy to but it cannot be denied that we are influenced by these media of popular culture. Indeed, the zeitgeist of the youtube generation increasingly seeps into studio culture such that pop-savvy animations, complete with catchy soundtracks, are becoming a default part of our architectural presentations.

Video games, music videos, graffiti... these are some of the arenas of cutting edge developments in space. Freed from the demands of habitability, gravity, and all those other tedious things which architects must balance out -- and driven by the market requirement of continual novelty, agents in popular media are increasingly turning to complex spatial arrangements to give them this something new. For instance, Echochrome, a new video game by Jun Fujiki is based on the premise of inhabiting Reutersvardian optical illusions. By rotating the illusion you help your character to navigate this impossible mess of lines and surfaces. By virtue of inhabiting this space through your avatar, the mind-bending power of Echochrome is catapulted beyond simple optical illusion and into an entirely new territory that demands a concomitant mental ability to process these signals. In other words, the graphics and movement of Echochrome are combined to imply a new condition of spatiality. This, precisely, is the kind of space that architects rarely even acknowledge, let alone know what to do with.

What has changed in our culture to allow video games of such spatial complexity as Echochrome to be conceivable as mass-market products? The premise of Space Rocks is that while architecture has been locked away suffering an identity crisis in the vacuum of Post Modernism, popular media has been reacting to an increasingly media-rich world. Part of this reaction has been to claim space, 3 dimensions, and the manipulation of space as an essential act of representation. Ironically, in an era when architects spend an unprecedented amount of their time concerned with surface, the rest of the cultural world is digging their heels into space.

People like our guests here today have quietly been developing spatially rich, visually compelling ways of communicating their ideas. And, importantly, the audience that our speakers address is much larger than the available audience for architecture with a capital A as we know it. When one accepts the facts, we are a very small minority and only a tiny part of all cultural production. This necessity for our speakers to address larger audiences, and especially those who don't necessarily have architectural training, is a productive constraint on their work. Although it's clear that the projects we will see today are informed by a great intuition and understanding of spatial conditions, we are particularly interested in the demand that these sophisticated ideas be translated to audiences that may not be processing the content with a disciplinary understanding.

What we will find in many of the things shown today is a built-in ability to degrade gracefully. In addition to the work of each speaker here being innovative in their own way, what binds all of our speakers together is a supremely high level of visual production. This is the result of talent and obsessive care not only for the content, but also for the qualities of the representative act itself.... a level of care which used to be at the core of architecture and has lately begun to wane. At a time when even 1st year graduate students can produce photo-realistic renderings, representation as a problem in architecture has mysteriously been put on the back burner again. Although this amazing leveling of skills should have produced an environment where representational exploration is as important as plumbing the spatial imagination, instead a deadly, banal standard has set in: every project must be issued into the world complete with beautiful renderings; a bright, airy walkthrough animation; and a pithy, simple diagram. Representation, as an architectural issue, has been outsourced as "Rendering," now left as a commercial necessity rather than a disciplinary compulsion. Although the twin revolutions of desktop publishing and desktop video have put the power at our fingertips to design the ways of explaining architecture with equally as much care as we design architecture, this desire seems mostly absent from our studios.

This is why Space Rocks has come to be. It is our hope that by bringing people who are expert at thinking about and representing space into the same room as a bunch of very clever and talented architecture students we can produce a dialog benefiting both sides of the equation.

P.T. Barnum - Weekend Explorer - New York Times

2007-11-11T15:41:00.000-05:00

NYT on P.T. Barnum:

"He transformed the five-story exterior into a giant, gaudy advertisement for itself, with painted animals, illuminated panels, banners and flags, then lit it all up with limelight, a recent invention. He hired the worst musicians he could find to play on a balcony above the entrance, on the theory that their terrible noise would drive customers inside. He vexed the vestrymen of St. Paul’s by hanging a line of American flags across the street from the museum to a tree in the churchyard. When they complained, he publicly accused them of being unpatriotic."

Via Annie.

Why Not?

2007-11-08T02:37:00.001-05:00

Interesting view of Washington.

Town Hall on Stilts

2007-11-06T22:39:00.000-05:00

Reviewing the proposals to renovate Boston's City Hall in Architecture Boston's September/October 2007 issue, it's interesting to note that half of the schemes propose opening the ground floor to establish continuity between the plaza, the interior courtyard, and, in one case, the street on the lower side of the building. This is either evidence of the architects being totally disconnected with the desires of the public, or it's a great case for pilotis on a site where the flood is not hydraulic, but popular. In other words, City Hall may be a rock in the middle of a stream running directly to Faneuil. Lifting it above this flow would then make a lot of sense.

Fortuitously, AB shared an image of the 'traditional English town hall', the example above from Leominster, at our lunch today. Astonishingly modern and yet quirky, almost zoomorphic, Leominster town hall verifies the desire to occupy the areas below governmental space- literally lifting these spaces of governance on a cushion of civic air. More than anything, this would seem to verify the importance of proximity: that the spreading out of retail and representation on the same plane results in distances which are untenable. Stacking solves this problem by representing the act of political representation, connoting the floating building with popular support thanks to its tentative perch above the town's commercial heart. Either that or gives it sinister panoptical vision. Leominster's closed space of governance and open space of commerce resonate with something Dave Hickey said at Loopholes:

There are only two kinds of primal buildings: the wall that surrounds a space-- a fort that connects the earth to the sky and keeps out everything outside of it-- and there is the souk. The souk is a really simple structure. It is a carpet on the ground with the stuff you're selling on it, it is four stakes and a ceiling and no walls because commerce is about no walls.

Yet the idea of wall seems to have vanished from contemporary architecture. Transparency, that most illusive of architectural qualities, begs for continuity and the direct exposure it brings. Unsurprisingly, in an era when mass subjectivity has been shattered (and thus symbolism is multiple and difficult to manage), direct, literal exposure is a last resort. The question for me is whether walls- opacity- are useless for us. The thing about black boxes is that we rarely care how stuff works inside but we really care about what comes out of them. For some programs, putting the focus on outcomes and letting the doing sort itself out may not be such a bad idea. Hickey continues:

[The souk] has no walls at all, it's got a ceiling to keep god from seeing you, it's got a floor to protect you from nature, and we may go on with the human endeavor of trading with one another and engaging with one another.

Since god has long been dead, perhaps what we need is less protection from a ghost and more protection from the weighty requirements of literalness.

The Sound of CSPAN

2007-11-06T19:01:00.000-05:00

Once a typical session of congress is over and the CSPAN cameras zoom out to show broad views of staffers shuffling papers and stenographers sitting with twitching fingers the most amazing calm comes over the chamber. The noise of this idle chamber is one of the best soundtracks to meditation (i.e. sleeping).

Beginning Notes On Public Interiors

2007-11-06T14:16:00.000-05:00

To do: begin categorizing the spaces of informal politics as well as the formal. What happens in airplanes, limos, between court rooms, in bars and restaurants, in shared apartments. Apparently Congress people often share shabby apartments in DC to allow their families back in the home state to live a representatively affluent life (need to find a citation for this). The condition is easy to identify, but it present something of a moral quandary for the architect: if informality is an important part of getting things done, how do you design for that without killing it?

Observation: the point of saying that I will design some sort of federal building in Washington, DC is to force the building into living up to extremely high standards, not in terms of design quality (since that's obviously not distributed equally in DC) but in terms of what the building must do if we are still to put any value whatsoever into the concepts of 'building' and 'government. '

The intense pressure that this site puts upon buildings to be representative, functional, and at least partially public is a trifecta of conditions which cannot be argued away. These requirements further render themselves into a thick stew when combined with the need for security and the expansion/change of governmental practice which both require some degree of flexible interior space.

From Gattaca to Gotham with one card swipe and a quick escalator ride.

While we're at it, perhaps it's useful to begin breaking apart the term "public." Disturbed already by the public/private opposition that is so popular at the moment, I'd like to further complicate this discussion by suggesting that we divorce public exterior spaces from those that are interior to buildings. The latter being a unique condition that introduces the question of security and drives issues of compunction and public conduct to an even higher, more critical level than in the out of doors. Interior public spaces do two things to varying degrees: they are representative and, for lack of a better term, functional. Foster's Hearst Tower in NYC accepts the public into a very small portion of the building to as a concession to publicness. In fact, even the main grandeur of the space is only hinted at from behind the line of security, one must pass into the secure zone to really 'get' the space. In contrast, the dense network of spaces that form Penn Station (or the Port Authority, for that matter) are incredibly functional at all hours of the day but no matter how much effort Amtrak puts into sprucing up the lounge they fail to have much representative character or, for that matter, any significant quality beyond Junk. In trying to think up a space that is intensely functional and still somewhat representative the best I can come up with is Grand Central Station or an airport like Chek Lap Kok.

(Inspired by this week's thesis lunch)

Mies Does Curtains

2007-11-06T14:15:00.001-05:00

3731-53.jpg, originally uploaded by Kosmograd.

From an unspecified Mies interior project (?) stumbled upon on Flickr. With all the weight drained out of them these walls are one step closer to nothingness.

Queen Speech

2007-11-06T05:30:00.000-05:00

I've been awake for hours without remembering exactly why- until my alarm goes off and reminds me that the State opening of Parliament is on CSPAN today. What better way to really wake yourself up than a little live blogging of Parliament? Here we (are) go(ing):

Yeoman(?) guards symbolically search the cellars before the events. Security and parliamentary power, buddies.

The queen reads a speech which the sitting gov't has prepared for her. Talk about a mouthpiece! This is Gordon Brown's chance to prove himself.

Americans wear flag pins on their lapels. One of the talking heads on this coverage has a... pineapple or ~~apple with a mohawk pinned to his blazer.~~ ~~I think this it's a yeoman hat.~~ A flower?

"At the palace there needs to be a series of accounts before the queen can leave" This includes a very formal procession for her crown. It "must be on display all the way" so that people may pay their respects to the crown on its way to Parliament. It arrives separately from HH.

"The sovereign's entrance" -- entire sequence of rooms for the queen that lead from entrance to "robing," through a gallery where guests are gathered to catch a view of her as she breezes through, into the prince's chamber, and then directly to the throne.

A montage of people on the street saying a variety of things randing from "I didn't even know it was going on," to it has no effect on me, I'm connected to it only through my television, makes no difference to me, I like the parade, waste of money. Optimistic bunch.

"I have to say, I think parliament has become very weak in its primary job of holding people in power accountable"

Crowns are so ugly.

The Union Jack is replaced with the Sovereign Standard when the queen arrives.

In the staged interviews (these are the parliamentary equiv. of Olympics human interest cut aways) there are an awful lot of stacked books used as decorations.

The dispatch box in the House of Commons serves to congest the floor of that room to the extent that those passing must walk sideways. Similar congestion in the House of Peers. Congestion is everywhere.

From there on out the ceremony is a little fuzzy because I was distracted (i.e. sleeping) but I seem to remember it ended quickly.

The Necessity of Expansion

2007-11-03T04:36:00.000-04:00

Construction of temporary war emergency buildings on the Mall, March 1942.

Dotted with monuments and museums, the Mall in Washington, DC remains largely open and flat, tamed. Stripped of any illusion of naturalism, the Mall belies its double role as representative center (in both senses of the word) and site of physical expansion. Our governmental structure enforces a loose coupling between branches, a relationship which floats between periods of intense congruency (usually war times) and relative distance that leads to deadlock.

As if to prove that even the most sacred sites cannot resist the allure of junkification, the Mall may operate in times of need as a temporary expansion space for whatever program is required. The urban figure of the empty Mall comes to represent a bet on the future and an acceptance that current conditions will not likely remain unchanged. As spatial breathing room for the physical residue of government, the Mall's emptiness is critical in allowing the smooth function of government when our country is short of breath and proximity becomes important.

The Mall is Washington, DC's temporary upgrade slot. Like any piece of technology, the Mall is made to host enhancers (a representative space is nothing compared to that same space filled with people), optimizers (rail yards used to take advantage of the mall's central location), and new capabilities like the War Department temporary facilities.

In a circular logic, it's the symbolic importance of the Mall that keeps it empty and this emptiness that allows it to host such varied programs precisely because it forces them to be temporary. The symbolic program of Washington can only sustain an occupied, functional Mall as long as its absolutely necessary. This space is always serving double masters: it must retain physical flexibility without allowing its formal clarity and aesthetic quality to be diluted.

With an empty, mutable center Washington returns us to the question of foam by suggesting the masters which this artificial inflation may serve.

Jarzombek Wants Utopia Back

2007-11-02T03:57:00.000-04:00

On Kazys' site, a relevant guest post by Jarzombek:

To get past the inevitable disillusionment - that will be the challenge of the immediate future, academe needs to open up the repressed values of pedagogy.... When are we going to reclaim the unmarginal spaces? When are we going to reclaim the center that is also rightfully ours! Where is our search for the impossible, for the impossibly big? ... The process of thinking big has partially begun forced onto us by the possibilities in China and elsewhere. But we can think big EVERYWHERE. Thinking big does no mean that one has to make big things. It especially does not mean that one is a problem solver. One must avoid the Siren Calls of the professionals and the pragmatists. Utopia can still excite!

Time Travel vs. Nostalgia

2007-11-01T05:37:00.000-04:00

In what must surely be a sign of a certain 'thesis fever' setting in, I watched National treasure this weekend. I must confess, in addition to faceted surfaces, mushrooms, matte black finishes on just about any object, and music with lots of bleeps and bloops I really like secret society myths. The specific breed of Illuminati/Templar story that has been so present in our culture lately is particularly interesting because each telling is a variation on a clear theme: a group of smart people leave clues spread out in time and space for someone to connect and find the treasure. The two key assumptions embedded in these myths are that the founders of the secret society were all knowing and that secrets don't become outdated (sounds disciplinary to me).

In these stories the present generally has very little to offer to the past. Limitless riches and the highest of technology are always employed on the quest to discover the secrets, but ultimately these modern accoutrements get the protagonist in trouble. Stranded, trapped, wounded, the hero must interpret the clues using only their mind- inevitably a cocktail of intellect, ancient languages, and factual recall. We begin to understand these stories as deeply nostalgic- not simply because the hero is looking to the past for answers to today's problems, but because every attempt to bring those historical solutions into the present day results in catastrophe. The ark always slips back into the sea, the path to the treasure room always closes, the guardians of the secret always prevent its complete unraveling.

Nostalgia, the longing for something now past, is a one way exchange which tethers objects through time, adding friction to an otherwise fluid progression and forming bridges between then and now. For this reason, nostalgia is the lazy person's time travel. Stern's building on Central Park West is not anachronistic, it's literally visiting from another world: it seeks to bring with it into our world all of the connotations, memories, quirks, and, ultimately, the subjectivity of a different time.

If nostalgia drops objects from the past into a foreign context, time travel does the opposite: it brings a foreign context (the mind of the time traveler) to existing objects. This question of time travel is interesting precisely because it offers a way of both discussing objective nostalgia (and by extension perhaps the desires that wrought histopomo) and issues of subjective awareness. The time traveler, as an individual in a new land, must both confront material differences and be curious about the mental framework (consciousness, subjectivity, design intentions) that put this material into that world.

Nostalgia is passive, time travel is active. Hijacking an object or aesthetic from another time is to rip it out of context. Fair enough. Time travel, however, as a mode of working requires that you move people (and their ideas) into a new time and then force them to adapt to their new setting. This is an active process that must evolve as a conversation between then and now. Time travel uses primary sources and thus tends towards literalness instead of abstraction. As a conversational, even argumentative method of working, it requires the resolution of multiple systems (then, now, tomorrow) into (approximately) one thing and thus also cannot be imitative. Time travel is an imbricative act that forces the time traveler to become an agent of synthesis.

Next: Open competitions as the pulse of architecture, time travel, the "just in time"
And then: Time travel as Constitutional understanding

Sam Jacob: Nostalgia as Representation

2007-10-28T14:24:00.000-04:00

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

2007-10-26T19:38:00.000-04:00

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

Cabinet Magazine Online - A Minor History of / Giant Spheres

2007-10-26T18:20:00.000-04:00

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

Flexible Figures

2007-10-24T18:14:00.001-04:00

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

2007-10-21T01:48:00.000-04:00

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

2007-10-20T01:42:00.000-04:00

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

2007-10-19T21:17:00.000-04:00

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?

2007-10-19T15:43:00.000-04:00

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?

2007-10-18T03:54:00.000-04:00

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

2007-10-17T00:36:00.001-04:00

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

2007-10-12T21:05:00.000-04:00

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

2007-10-08T23:09:00.001-04:00

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

2007-10-08T22:43:00.001-04:00

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

2007-10-07T14:56:00.000-04:00

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

2007-10-07T14:50:00.000-04:00

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

2007-10-07T05:11:00.001-04:00

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.

2007-10-04T09:18:00.000-04:00

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.

2007-10-04T03:49:00.000-04:00

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

2007-10-03T02:32:00.000-04:00

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?

2007-10-03T02:15:00.001-04:00

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.

2007-10-02T02:28:00.000-04:00

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."

2007-10-01T00:53:00.000-04:00

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

2007-09-30T17:33:00.003-04:00

The Rules Of Foamspace

There is an almost cute resonance between Sloterdijk's choice of foam as the metaphor for the globalized world and the block-by-block caffeine-drip infiltration of cappuccino urbanism that globalization has spawned. Still, in place of the word "society," foam offers us a way to conceptualize the configuration of individuals in the contemporary world that captures some of the ambiguities and contradictions thriving today. Gone is the air of Hopper's Nighthawks, thick with smoke and mechanical loneliness, to be replaced by a clearer medium, more personal and pervasive but less physical. This vacuum insulates individuals from casual contact but paradoxically creates the need for more invasive means of communication. One may no longer feel so willing to chat up a stranger in a bar, but they also shouldn't be surprised to suffer the ring of their cellphone in the middle of a tryst. This 'connected isolation' assumes a condition of multiplicity wherein individuals are "always co-isolated islands that are momentarily, or chronically, connected to a network of adjacent islands constituting mid-sized or larger structures."

Paralleling Foucault's transition from punishment of the body to discipline of the mind, individuals in contemporary society increasingly rely on mediated means of communicating their concerns to one another. Discipline no longer remains solely in the halls of institutions like schools and prisons, but leaks into smaller, supposedly more casual structures like condominium associations, hobby organizations, or online chatrooms, as each develop their own constellations of power to govern their subjects. This proliferation of subjectivity necessarily plays itself out in space rather than time, resulting in an increased importance of place. There is, in some sense, a real seat for each of these multiplied powers (even if it's not where we expect it to be) and the physical reality of these loci help to define how their power is exerted. Architecture, to summarize Sumrell and Varnelis, assists in creating these groupings by "articulating moods and milieus" that differentiate the city (p. 129).

If we accept that there is a networked public, to use the term of Sumrell & Varnelis, or Foam the question remains, what role does architecture play in this organization of individuals? Sloterdijk's own reading of the French Revolution becomes instructive as he articulates the demands that a new political body put on architecture and vice versa. Specifically, the celebration at Champ de Mar on July 14th, 1790 diffused architecture into the very identity of the national body by becoming a vessel to contain Sloterdijk's foam and allow its internal pressures and tensions to play out. Importantly, the architecture in question is not a temple or monument that wields the overwhelming over of an icon, but instead a careful development of the physical environment of the festival to create a milieu that generates its own mythology and persistent visual images.

Informal versions of this festival had occurred on a smaller scale across France in the year leading up to the fete, but this celebration outside Paris marked the culmination of the revolution. Champ de Mar was thus the site of a synechdotal celebration: both a lasting visual that would contribute to a burgeoning national identity and, through the dissemination of those visuals, become a stand-in celebration for all those who were not able to attend. The fete had to break with both the Ancien Regieme, for obvious reasons, but also with the festivals of the ancients which brought with them a conception of society too divided to satisfy the fraternal desires of the revolutionaries. An appropriate newness was achieved through manipulations to the proportion and scale of known types such as the ampitheatre and triumphal arch as well as the redefinition of existing formal tropes described by Etlin: "This altar rose, no longer to dominate men, but to approach the sky" (p.29).

Interpreting his analysis of the French Revolution in Foam City, we can glean from Sloterdijk a few important lessons about the architecture of foam:

Foamspace must "enable both the isolation of individuals, and the concentration of isolated entites into collective ensembles of cooperation and contemplation." It is both/and.
Foamspace is the recapitulation of previous spaces, rinsed and washed of their former structures but never completely evading them. It is historical.
Foamspace must allow "occasional assembly" even if society is so large that this assembly must always function as a synechdote. It is representational.
Foamspace creates the largest structures ("the masses", "the nation", or "the people") only when the physical assembly is elaborate. It requires affect.
Foamspace must degrade gracefully: it should make sense to those who can read it, entertain those who simply look at it, and command the attention of those who may only gaze. It is layered.

References:
Etlin, Richard. Architecture and the Festival of Federation, 1970. link
Funcke, Bettina. Against Gravity. link
Sumrell, Robert & Varnelis, Kazys. Blue Monday. link