Drowning In Culture

A horrible thing happened a few weeks ago.  John Chase, accomplished West Hollywood City Planner, witty writer, and die-hard urban advocate died of a heart attack on August, 13th.  In a region not known for smart planning policy, or reliable urban advocacy, John’s observational anecdotes and passionate criticisms of L.A.’s dysfunctional city fabric were renown in architectural circles both in Southern California and beyond.  John’s writing, simultaneously causal and poignant, was always written in loving homage to his adopted city.  His books, “Exterior Decoration:  Hollywood’s Inside-Out Houses” and “Glitter Stucco & Dumpster Diving:  Reflections on Building Production in the Vernacular City” were particularly inspiring to me in the development of my thesis at SCI-Arc, which focused on the impact of visual culture on architecture and urban space.  I recall my thesis advisor giving me “Inside-Outside Houses” as a gift, and telling me that it was going to change my understanding of aesthetics and how we over-prioritize them as designers.  He was certainly right, and while I doubt John would’ve liked my final proposal, he would have most certainly understood exactly what it stood for and why it was a necessary.

But I didn’t know John.

I never had the pleasure of meeting him face to face, and I regretfully missed my last chance to hear him speak at a recent panel on “Dingbats” held by the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design this summer.   I do know that his writing will always inspire me as a scholar of Los Angeles, and that for those of us who’ve made L.A. our home and refuse to be passive inhabitants of our visually messy, but nevertheless delightful patch of sun-washed urbanism, John will live on through his writing and remind those of us who care, to look beyond the surface and embrace the visual glitter and complex cultural richness that lies beneath.

Sitting here in the studio listening to P.I.L.’s Second Edition on a sweltering L.A. summer afternoon  my mind drifts back to the past three equally atmospherically miserable summers I’ve spent in China working with my students from Los Angeles on exploring the cut-throat realities of Chinese urbanism.  While not technically a research studio, I have gleaned a great deal of insight into the nature of the Chinese urban phenomena and one day might actually cobble my observations into something projective.  For the time being however, I’ve limited myself to “sniping” and casual conjecture.

A recent NY Times photo essay on Chinese “new towns”by Christoph Gielen as well a the June issue of Dwell (see above) have prodded me into a bit of mental noodling about the possible dystopian future that awaits not just China, but other emerging Asian cities whose influx of urban inhabitants have resulted in an unprecedented building spree of high-density housing, resulting in the inevitable displacement of the existing working class populations from the center to the underserviced periphery.  What makes both the piece in the Times and Dwell’s decidedly myopic “Megacities” issue ripe for criticism, is their overt fetishization of the early 21st Century megacity, without regard towards the traumatic sociological impacts that are the result of poor civic and planning policy.

While certainly representative of a fascinating agglomeration of capital and ad-hoc infrastructuralism, the contemporary megacity is like a fashion model strutting the runway- it exudes aesthetic pheromones while rotting away on the inside from too many diet-pills and purging sessions in order to keep itself fit (The Fall’s track “Eat Yourself Fitter certainly applies here).  In the end the rot will explode out of the new gleaming peripherial “new towns” in the form of civil unrest as working class populations are displaced to the edges of the megacity, where little consideration towards job creation and economic diversity is evident.

In the end, perhaps Dwell got it right.  Their issue features several single-family homes,  and not the high-density tower flats one might have expected.  For in Dwell’s mind the megacity of the future will be a suburbanites low-density paradise.   Cocooned in surveillance and complex webs of security and shielded by economic stratification, the city center will become the sterile urban performance that planners and architects have always visualized in their renderings since the Industrial Revolution.  The city has long been deemed a theme park by critics such as Michael Sorkin, and Margaret Crawford.  If we are to believe Dwell and the Times, perhaps the megacity is the newly emergent variant of the urban theme park, and one that certainly has no shortage of freaked out carnies and frightening rides.

The problem is that unlike the Disneyland so often fetishized by Postmodern theorists, the frightening machinic assemblage of the contemporary megacity endures, and unlike the innocent warbling of Mickey or Donald Duck, it’s satirical tyranny outlasts the temporal experience of the visit, spreading like a virus beyond its physical borders and retarding the evolution of urbanity for future generations to come.

Summer is always a slow time for exhibitions.  While L.A. doesn’t clear out like New York or shut down like Europe, the gallery scene takes a noticeable dive between June and August.  Thus it was a pleasure to come home from Berlin (a post on the trip is in the making) and catch the The Artless Drawing:  Neil Denari 1982-1996, curated by Sylvia Lavin of UCLA’s School of Architecture and Urban Design.  I’ve always had a bit of a fan crush on Neil and his work since I was an undergraduate.  I recall a lecture he gave at the University of Florida that sent those of us in attendance scurrying back to our studio desks to re-calibrate our Rapidiograph pens and buy out the local supply store’s stock of mylar and Zip-A-Tone.  Back in 1995 U.F. was still largely an analogue institution and my colleagues and I spent endless hours drafting with ink-on-mylar, and using a wide variety of poche techniques, including Denari’s favorite medium, Zip-A-Tone.  He was part of the reason I came to L.A. and to SCI-Arc to earn my MArch in 1999, and his purported collection of Punk Rock records was legendary amongst the students, thus making him seem far cooler than the average practitioner.

Unlike many of his Pritzker’d contemporaries who’ve gone on to pollute cities around the world with their visually glamorous, yet culturally vapid work, Neil Denari has committed his career thus far to select acts of architectural perfection, producing a respectable portfolio of perfectly crafted projects (I did say I had a fan crush!) which never cease to amaze the visitor in both their adroit techno-minimalism, as well as their phenomenological and metaphysical complexity.  That there are only a  small number of NMDA (Denari’s firm) projects and interiors that exist in physical form, is evidence of a calculated, mapable evolution of his conceptual identity as an architect, and one which only enhances his legacy as a designer.  Like Mies, who it is said worked on the same building for his entire career, Neil Denari’s hand-drawn work from the late 80’s and early 90’s demonstrate  his mastery of representational mechanisms which hold both intellectual and artistic rigor,  and express a decidedly “digital” feel that is timeless in its approach to form and spatial articulation.  Thus to understand his drawings is to realize both his projective conceptualization of the world and his creative process simultaneously.

The show is in the ground floor of the Ace Gallery and was designed on a minimal budget for maximum effect.  Each set of drawings are mounted on a back-lit wooden frame allowing one to closely examine every line and texture in extraordinary detail.  All of the Denari classics there- The Kansai-kan Library, the AMF Comp, the Solar Clock, the West Coast Gateway, and the NYC Monastery, to name a few.  For fans like myself, the show was pure architectural pornography, and it’s doubtful we’ll see such a masterful collection of drawings presented in such a simple way like this again.  It’s not that they don’t exist, or that curators aren’t up to the task, but Denari’s early work marks a pinnacle in late-Twentieth Century architectural representation in that it marks the last moment when digital aesthetics were still produced by hand and drawings were constructions, and not simply produced as renderings.  In reflecting on the show, I recall in Greil Marcus’ review of the last Sex Pistols concert, held at the Winterland in 1978, in San Francisco, wherein he summed up, not just the Sex Pistols career in music, but the essence behind Punk Rock (which by that time was quickly becoming No-Wave and New Wave), in this statement:

“The Sex Pistols left behind more history than music, but on their final night the music lived up to the history.”

This is equally true of the early work of Neil Denari exhibited in The Artless Drawing.   Denari’s early projects on paper may never be realized, but their visual and technical acumen coupled with their visionary spirit will be hard to match through software.  What’s more they’ve steered more than a few of us into paths, which while never certain, will always be more interesting than the status quo.

The show is on the ground floor of the Ace Gallery on Wilshire Blvd. and has been extended till mid-August.

Ace Gallery

5514 Wilshire Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90036-3877
(323) 935-4411

Develop and enjoy… billboards around the CCTV construction site.

I’m leaving L.A. soon to teach a studio in Berlin for a couple of weeks and I thought I’d close the file of China for this year.  China’s been in the news more than usual this week  with some developments that sparked immediate recollection of my recent visit.  What is fascinating about my trips to the country over the past few years is the consistent feeling of awe, coupled with dread, at the Chinese and their determination to modernize their country in what appears to be a quarter of the time it took Western countries to make the same leap.  This is especially apropos  as the Chinese government finishes yet another high-speed rail line linking Shanghai with Nanjing, while here in California we are still 10-20 years from realizing anything half as useful.  This is itself will not come as any surprise to anyone who has visited emergent global hot spots (no pun intended) like India and the Arab Emirates, but what is remarkable about the Chinese is their unified focus and what up to this year appeared to be nationalistic unity.

However, with progress, things change, and it would appear that the new China is experiencing its first real bouts of growing pains.

While China’s technological prowess is embarrassing to us stuck in the mires of NIMBYism here in the West, it’s socially callous approach to city-making is not.   Schadenfreude abounds as two recent articles in the LA Times illuminate the friction that is building up in China’s previously unimpeded rush into the jungles of contemporary consumer culture.

Owned but probably empty.  Move here and you’ll have no one to enjoy your Devo records with.

The first article outlines the strain rampant real estate speculation is beginning to have on the economy.  In my trips to Beijing and Shanghai, the hubris within the local development community was palpable to the point of decadence and represented by the thousands of newly finished, but still empty condo projects that dot both  skylines.  From what I was told by a local architect, developers have been so adept at building new projects and selling them before the banks catch up that no one actually has been able to keep tabs on the feasibility of new projects since their appearance within the city fabric outpaces local government data.

Shoppers on a newly re-modeled shopping street around the corner from Tiananmen Square.  Complete with an operational street car, and couched in nostalgia, this development closely resembles Rick Carusos Grove and Americana projects here in L.A.

This was painfully apparent during an evening that I got to spend at Steven Holl’s Linked Hybrid housing project in Beijing where most of the units have been sold by not occupied, giving the project  the feeling of a living ghost town.  What makes matters worse is that the neighborhoods that these developments replaced were once teeming with life and allowed even the poorest of inhabitants to eke out a living through micro-commerce.  That these localized industries were replaced by Subways and Pizza Hut (Yes, Wing Street does exist everywhere) is testament to the growing homogenization facing developing cities beyond the West.  While everyone deserves access to a BLT somewhere close to home, the effect that Western urbanization practices have had on China’s social fabric is depressing and possibly the only hope for more intelligent calculated redevelopment of China’s cities lies in the bursting of the very bubble that has made “Wing Street” want to relocate to those cities in the first place.

Compounding the problems facing China’s housing sector are the emerging labor disputes that have managed to make it into the press, both within China and abroad.  The LA Times featured an article this week outlining the most recent strikes that have surfaced in China’s powerhouse of an industrial sector.  That many of these strikes and walkouts have happened at Japanese company Honda, is no coincidence, since China’s own domestic car brands are struggling to find a competitive footing in the country, and the government would probably not look kindly on workers striking at those plants.  However, as more and more Chinese workers drop their tools and pick up picket signs, the pressure on the Chinese government to make changes to their domestic policy will only increase, forcing a new series of problems to the surface.

A recently demolished neighborhood in Nanjing.
Social strife has always played a role in city-making, usually to the detriment of the working class.  Cities like Manchester and Chicago all faced dramatic changes in their urban identity once conditions within the citys and factories became too obvious to ignore.   However, with income gaps in China beginning to become noticeably wider between the urban and rural populace, the crisis facing the contemporary Chinese is due to reach a boiling point.  When the collapse comes, it will most likely be swift and horrific to witness, but will teach us another valuable lesson about the fragile complexity of the contemporary city.

2010 Expo Chinese pavilion:  Chinese urbanism at its finest.

World expositions hardly seem to matter these days.  I would go so far as to suggest that their continued presence seems to accentuate the irrelevant, while at the same time miming the static structures of global politics and chanting the tired mantras of global economic expansion to the point of exhaustion.  Nevertheless, when one finds themselves in a country that is hosting an expo, one goes, if only to witness the spectacle of a ghost.

The 2010 Exposition in Shanghai marks the conclusion of a particularly active (and expensive) period of China’s largest societal expansion since “The Great Leap Forward” of the late 1950’s.  The Expo marks their final demonstration that not only can they purchase and successfully orchestrate the worlds most prestigious events, but that they can hire the worlds top Western architects to design a contemporary architectural spectacle for those events as well.

With the permeation of the Internet into all things social, having a world exposition seems to be more than passé.  In fact one might argue that expositions in general have ceased to exemplify the expressive demonstrations of capitalist production that they once did in the late-Nineteenth and early-Twentieth centuries.  In digging through the sediment of history, one realizes that what began with Sir Joseph Paxton’s pre-fabricated Crystal Palace in 1851, died in 1939 at the Worlds Fair in New York in it’s World of Tomorrow, and was later to be embalmed forever in the Disney Corporation’s Epcot Center and it’s zoo of corporate-sponsored amusements.  Thus the Utopian ideology that architecture and technological spectacle can bring a global people together, while strengthening national pride hardly seems relevant, and as one wanders about the Shanghai Expo grounds a striking sense of apathy towards the humanitarian nature of global diversity seems to permeate the humid atmosphere.

The Huangpu River, one of China’s busiest waterways, chops the siting of the 2010 Exposition up into two large zones.  In using the Huangpu as a conceptual datum, the Exposition planners have cunningly separated the grounds into two dominant hemispheres, one of commerce and one of culture.  That the commercial side of the Expo is closest to the connective nodes of Shanghai’s business district is no accident, and as one moves from the corporate pavilions which include several Chinese and multi-national companies, and across the Huangpu, the immense urban model of this year’s Expo becomes apparent.

Dominating the southern coastline is the flying saucer-like form of the Expo Cultural Center as well as several other Chinese entertainment and exhibition spaces that dwarf the multi-national pavilions beyond.  Like the dehumanizing two-dimensional glamor associated with emergent Chinese urbanism (fast, cheap, and certainly out of control), infrastructure and “objectness” reign supreme.  Sprawling roads and elevated pathways (a future post-Expo freeway perhaps?) slice and dice the grounds into a fractured field upon which pavilions almost collide with the functional programs of the fair.

The interior of  “Urbania”, a cross-section of domestic urbanism.

The spatial parti of the exposition creates a clear circulatory and connective fabric between the Chinese buildings, their domestic cultural additions, and the corporate zone on the North bank, while spatially isolating the rest of the Expo’s participants from China and it’s commercial interests.  To get to the international zones one is forced to move through varyied layers of shopping, infrastructure, and vehicular circulation, resulting in a tangled series of truncated vistas, many of which end with the back-of-house functions of the pavilions themselves.  The multi-national pavilions are arrayed in a hodge-podge of objects, though occasional moments of clarity are to be found.

BIG’s Danish pavilion.

Borrowing from Venturi and Denise Scott Brown here, I would suggest that the individual country pavilions themselves fell into three distinct categories:  1) Ducks, 2) Decorated Sheds, and 3) Ducks enclosed by Decorated Sheds.  Amongst the bigger Ducks was the UK Pavilion, or Seed Cathedral, designed by Heatherwick Studio, which sat astride a folded platter of terrain that successfully isolated it from the surrounding pavilions.  The Seed Cathedral’s form is composed of hundreds of tiny acrylic rods, whose tips each hold a different seed (to be given to Chinese Kindergartens around the country post-Expo), and whose delicate construction causes the entire mass to quiver seductively in the Shanghai summer breeze.

U.K. pavilion, Heatherwick Studio.

Also worthy of note is the Danish Pavilion, designed by BIG architects.  With its cunningly executed intertwined looping circulation, this was by far the most clever spatial execution of a pavilion at the Expo and it’s no surprise that Bjarke Ingels trained for a bit under Rem Koolhaas.  With Denmark’s iconic Little Mermaid in a pool at it’s center, the pavilion has all of the familiar tricks of an OMA project, even though it’s creator has managed to create a unique voice for himself since leaving Rem’s office in 2002.  The pavilion was originally supposed to provide bikes to visitors so that they could ride to the top and then back down the sloping circulation ramp which took one in and out of the pavilion’s interior.  While this ramp was separated from the main circulation by bollards, it must have proved to be too much for the Expo docents to handle, so the bikes are on display at the top and bottom as a conceptual reminder of the architects intent.

The Little Mermaid transplanted into BIG’s Danish pavilion.

Spain had perhaps the best shed-duck form with its steel structural grid warping and folding under a canopy of wicker baskets.  This was followed by Germany whose pavilion warped and twisted, hiding a completely different formal agenda underneath.  That the European and Arab pavilions seemed to have the most aesthetic glamour is not surprising.  At the time of the Expos planning phase the Greek financial crisis had not yet brought the Euro-zone’s currency value into question and the Arab countries, it seems, are enjoying the last halcyon days of “big oil”.

Spanish pavilion.

While the 2010 Exposition favored G8 and oil-rich nations, the decorated sheds of the Third World (read former European colonies and Eastern Block countries here), did their best to compete visually with the geometric circus around them, but were hopelessly out-funded and out-classed by their wealthier global siblings.   Lines in these exhibitions were non-existent, and as one wandered from Libya to the Czech Republic one was struck by the impression that, aside from tourism and dwindling natural resources, these countries are seen as irrelevant as players in the global game of finance, and know it.  The G8 countries spent their Expo funds on a glamorous cultural spectacle, either in the conceptual design of the pavilions themselves, or the contents inside.  That the Danes and the French had trotted out their most precious cultural art works rather than plastering their walls with literature about tourism, history, and trade gave off an air of smugness that spoiled the effect of the shared cultural experience one might imagine to be part of a World Exposition.  To think that Denmark sees itself through clichéd national icon, or that France is only known for it’s Impressionist art seems evident of a remarkable sense of hubris by the G8 and their close partners.  What’s more, their juxtaposition with the lackluster boxes of the African pavilions seemed to be an unfortunate reminder of reigning geo-political prejudices and the past exploitation of these former colonies by France, England, and Germany.

The Axis of Evil, together at last.
This physical manifestation of geo-politics is only calcified by the inclusion of North Korea and Iran into the expo, thus exemplifying China’s political ambivalence towards these two renegade regimes.  The infamous “Axis of Evil” seems even more irrelevant and out of touch with global affairs than they do in the press, with the Iranian pavilion touting domestically grown, but poorly designed communications satellites and domestically-grown AIDS medicines on one floor, while hawking cheap Persian carpets on another.

Interior of the DPRK.

The North Korean Pavilion is perhaps the most disconcerting out of the two rogue states, with a fountain in the middle of it’s sparsely designed interior, around which statues of smiling children danced, their outstretched arms reaching for the Dove of Peace.   Rainbows and endless displays of happy North Koreans frolicking with Anglo visitors permeate the interior while a large sign proclaims that North Korea is a “Paradise for People”.  This odd bit of blatant propaganda adorns a wall above which another promotional tourist film exults the hard working folks in the DPRK, serenaded by the Peoples National Chorale.  The entire experience was akin to what it would’ve been like if the Nazi’s and Hallmark had gone into business together to promote the concentration camps as holiday getaways for the rest of Europe.

Sinopec pavilion.

Having never been to a World Exposition, I wasn’t sure what to expect. But my impression is that expositions have always been grounds for bringing the world together in a techno-cultural celebration of our species, in as much as they have also been sinister reminders of the Western worlds exploitation of indigenous societies around the globe.  With “Better City, Better Life” as the motto for the 2010 Exposition in Shanghai I had at least hoped to see some promising developments in the realm of city-making, or optimistic forays demonstrating an novel bent on architecture’s role in the contemporary city.  However, there were hardly any exhibitions on the challenges facing contemporary urbanism, and what I did manage to see in the day I spent at the Expo were clichéd examples of global diversity at it’s most pedestrian.  I found the most critical aspect of the exposition to be it’s conceptual planning and organizational parti, which only seemed to reinforce existing global stereotypes and popular impressions about China and the way it sees itself and the world. However, that’s hardly a satisfactory take-away, so perhaps I should have reveled in the global spectacle of this temporary theme park.  But, as my colleague and I made our way to the exit via the shimmering corporate pavilions on the North bank of the Huangpu, the dazzling light displays of late capital’s folly burned an image into our retina’s that seemed to flash in a thousand colors one word over and over again:

“Why?”

Tomorrow my co-instructor, Kelly Bair, and I will have the pleasure of watching our 5th year thesis students present their final projects at Woodbury University.  Their efforts are the product of a years-worth of research, conceptual refinement, and if the tired looks we got yesterday when we dropped in on the studio are any indication, a lot of rigorous production.

The studio’s work, which began with a thesis prep class in the Fall of 2010,  was centered on the idea of “collapse”.  Interestingly enough, the doomsday scenarios I was predicting as the course began in August, quickly evolved into a collection of very savvy design proposals that sought to mend the problems associated with the 2008 economic crisis and it’s effects on L.A.’s urban ecology.  There was no stone left unturned and the students should be commended for their dogged optimism.  For those of you looking to hire for the summer, I suggest coming by tomorrow to see the presentations.  You may just walk away with a couple of highly qualified junior designers.

The reviews will commence at 9 AM tomorrow morning at the Woodbury Campus in Burbank, CA.  If you’re in the area, please stop by and have a look at the work.

For those of you who may be challenged by distance or prior commitments, you can view the process work for the projects and the research associated with them at  www.waitingforarchitecture.net .

Things have been rather crazy as of late and thus I’ve decided to do a bit of shameless recycling on the site.  The following is a lecture I recently gave at Woodbury University contesting the recent obsession with “parametric urbanism” that has been sweeping both schools of architecture and the profession as of late.  Computation, while a powerful modifier in the ever-changing game of urban analysis, lacks sustainable protocols when it comes to understanding the human condition and how it manifests itself within urban culture.  Despite the predictions (and some very convincing data scripts), I doubt that designers will be able to fully rely on parametric scripting to design Western cities, though I expect we will see it’s awkward effects in Asia over the next few decades.  Countries such as the United States and those in Europe have morphed from nation states, controlled by a few  omnipresent power-structures, into complex agglomerations of social agency, financial cartels, and the stagnant remnants of Fordist-era capitalism.  Because of the lack of developable open space within Western cities, urban designers will be unable to realize new urban space with the tools offered up by parametricist shamans like Patrik Schumacher and his ilk, whose distinctly modernist approach to to city-planning presents itself as cynical and vain.   But I’m giving too much away already.  Read on…

OMA, CCTV, Beijing, China 2009.

Looking beyond Rem Koolhaas and his theory of Bigness (architecture’s answer to Frederic Jameson’s spatial imagining of postmodern hyper-space after the Bonaventure Hotel), we must recognize that the contemporary reality facing urbanism is that architectural form and material composition will matter much less on a socio-cultural level, but matter much more on a socio-spatial level than ever before.

Times Square, NYC, NY, 2010. 

Therefore, one should also understand that as digital devices increase their presence in the daily operations of our culture, architecture’s material appearance will continue to decrease in importance.  However, its ability to maintain programmatic flexibility and seamless technological augmentation throughout a building’s lifespan will become an essential metric of its performance.

Zaha Hadid Architects, Kartal-Pendik Masterplan, 2006.

While some of the digitally-seductive environments currently espoused by many members of the architectural academy will come to fruition, albeit with nascent cultural effect, extreme instances of tactile materiality and phenomenological sensation will eclipse physical architecture as evolutionary litmuses of culture.  These “spatial grafts” will augment a social environment driven by digital devices and software platforms.

Digital Cities, Neal Leach, ed. 2009. 

This is not to be confused with the recent infatuation with “parametric urbanism”, a visually seductive, yet very familiar notion of urban intervention.

Le Corbusier, “A Contemporary City”. 

First though, to dispel some misconceptions about computational aesthetics…

Annie Chan & Yikiai Lin, Ant Urbanism, 2009.

“Modernist architects are employing parametric tools in ways which result in the maintenance of a Modernist aesthetic, using parametric modeling inconspicuously to absorb complexity.  The parametricist sensibility, however, pushes in the opposite direction, aiming for maximum emphasis on conspicuous differentiating logics.  Aesthetically, it is the elegance of ordered complexity and the sense of seamless fluidity, akin to natural systems that constitute the hallmark of parametricism. “ -Patrik Schumacher

Eero Saarinen, Bell Labs, Homdell, NJ, 1962. 

Be that as it may, aesthetics have done little to soothe the crisis facing late-capital in the contemporary metropolis.  As we learned with the rise and fall of high-modernism, aesthetics only reify existing capitalist structures by reinforcing capital’s territorialization of the spatial environment that surrounds us.

Zaha Hadid Architects, One-North Master Plan, Singapore, 2003.

Shumacher’s premise is that complexity and seemingly chaotic urban systems can now be mapped or redeveloped using parametric software. He cites Corbusier’s anecdote of the *“pack-donkey path” as an ideal opportunity ripe for parametric analysis.
*”Man walks in a straight line because he has a goal and knows where he is going; he has made up his to reach some particular place and he goes straight to it. The pack-donkey meanders along, mediates a little in his scatter-brained and distracted fashion, he zig-zags in order to avoid larger stones, or to ease the climb, or to gain a little shade; he takes the line of least resistance.” – Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow and its Planning, (New York, NY, Dover, 1987), p. 5.

Zaha Hadid Architects, Post-Shanghai Expo Site Competition, 2010.

An optimistic interpretation of this re-instatement of modernist dogmas might be that Schumacher is in favor of exploiting seemingly complex or random urban systems as a premise for generating formal complexity or aesthetic cohesiveness.  However, as the previous images demonstrate, there seems to be a complete detachment from real conditions, as they exist, “on the ground”.

Andreas Gursky, Cairo Intersection, 1993.

What parametric urbanism advocates have conveniently chosen to ignore is that the
metropolitan condition is unpredictable and therefore cannot be scripted or master-planned.
At best, it can simply be analyzed and synthesized through localized maneuvers that
aggregate over time.

Le Corbusier, Plan Voisin. 

“The great city of today as it exists in actuality is an absurdity. But, in actual fact, it is using up and slowly wearing out millions of human beings;
and the surrounding country on which it feeds is doomed to decay.  Statistics are merciless things”
-Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning (New York, NY. Dover Inc.1987), p.126.

Minority Report, 2002. Steven Spielberg, Director.

Indeed, there have always been suppositions about the role technology will play in architecture, or vice-versa.

“Today, institutions generally are supported not only by buildings and their furnishings, but also by telecommunication systems and computer software. And the digital, electronic, virtual side is increasingly taking over from the physical.”

-William J. Mitchell, “Recombinant Architecture”, in City of Bits, (Cambridge, MA., MIT Press, 1996), p.49.

Minority Report, 2002. Steven Spielberg, Director.

Written over fifteen years ago, Mitchell’s observations about the relational aesthetics between the “real” and the “virtual” seem frozen in time. They are predicting a world that has not yet come to pass and, and probably will manifest itself in an all together different medium than the one imagined. Rather than a virtual “city of bits” espoused by Mitchell and other techno-futurists at the time, we have instead evolved into a hybrid world where the digital and the real co-exist, and largely in the service of capital.

House with telecommunications equipment concealed behind a soffit.

Because there is no real separation of these environments as of yet, an uncomfortable relationship has developed between architecture and technology, one that is becoming increasingly unstable. This instability expresses itself through the awkward merger of physical architecture and the virtual computational “cloud” that surrounds it.

Steven Hoefer, Rock/Paper/Scissors Playing Glove, 2010.

Often the resulting physical resolution is far from pretty and demonstrates that we as practitioners are unable to conceptually resolve the dislocations caused by emergent software platforms, telecommunication networks, and the eclipse over architecture by a myriad of digital devices and social-networking “apps”.

A potential “Keitai” user. 

“The telecocoon maintains intimacy at a distance, facilitating private encounters in public spaces. Instead of an architectural plan or spatial design, the telecocoon relies on networking technology to create private space, thereby overcoming the problems that distance introduces into our lives.”
-Kazys Varnelis and Anne Friedberg, “Place: The Networking of Public Space” in Networked Publics, Kazys Varnelis, ed. (Cambridge, MA, 2008), pp.23-25.

H5 Studios, “Logorama”, 2009. 

While the prevalence of digital devices and telecommunications networks have been suggested by Varnelis and Friedberg to be a partial transformation of the “placelessness” described in Marc Auges text, Non-place: An Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, one might suggest that the “ether” so often used to explain the presence of the telecocoon that currently surrounds us, might actually be a kind of physical architecture itself…but one that like architecture is largely in the service of consumption.

Benjamin Bratton, iPhone City. 

If this is the case, and the physical and the digital merge into a socio-spatial hybrid, it will be up to architects and designers to develop a toolkit and representational language in order to communicate and construct buildings or spatial environments which successfully navigate the confusing terrain between tactile experience and the socio-spatial needs of the newly emergent networked society, without simply relying on material affect or overly fetishized formal maneuvers.

Pillow Fight Club from boston.com by Boston Globe. 

This has already been accomplished by our perspective clients with the help of mobile telecommunications networks and software-packed smart phones which allow users to reconfigure their socio-spatial and socio-cultural realms at will.

While this does not require material culture, it does require substantive architectonic space, as well as public space, where capital’s grip on territory is muted.

Architects, with their predilections towards material affect in its traditional mode, are still operating in the prior century.

Pink Motel Pool, San Fernando Valley, CA. 2008.  

I ended the lecture here, and with some ridiculous statement that sounded like it came out of Corb’s Towards an Architecture.  The real point of the lecture was intended to discuss architecture’s inability to successfully merge with technology in a seamless way, though I made a detour in my disdain for parametric urbanism.  Given that the the result of technology’s integration into built space often looks like the Times Square model, I was tempted to dwell on my observations that technology will eventually make visually-stimulating buildings obsolete as the prevalence of computational devices surpasses the disciplines obsession with form and material composition (evidence shows that it has already done so on a sociological level).  However, no one loves a party-pooper, so I opted for the high-road and gave the attending students a psychological parachute.  However, my speculation is that architecture’s cultural irrelevancy will eclipse the current aesthetic discussion that has replaced post-criticality as the soup du jour.  My parting supposition to the students was that the design issues facing their generation will be much more about micro-conditions affecting local contexts rather than the large scale urban-planning innuendos that have permeated the discussion since the meteoric rise of Landscape Urbanism.  Scripting already seems to be leveling off as a academic armature for studios and no doubt will be absorbed by the profession as a means of streamlining production.  I imagine we will look back on all the  visual jet-wash that was the product of this recent fascination with computational aesthetics, and feel like we did when we walked into our local Starbucks for the first time and noticed that the shift-grid of the ceiling bore an uncanny resemblance to the seemingly overwrought stylings embedded in architecture’s brief affair with Deconstructivism.

Needless to say, disappointment would be getting off easy.

As Jameson noted in “Postmodernism, or the Culture of Late Capitalism”, contemporary society consumes and replaces cultural trends almost a quickly as they are created.  Lately, I’ve been so busy my own socio-cultural debris that I’ve not had much time to update the site.  Look for a post by the weekend.

After first seeing Herzog de Meuron’s Vitra Haus last week on some miscellaneous blog, and then again this week in Cool Hunting and Deezen, I cannot fathom why a cutting edge firm like H&dM would generate such a second-rate design for a client with such a rich history and avant garde  credentials in the field of furniture design as Vitra.  While the sectional qualities of the project are a minor saving grace, one  can’t shake the feeling that we’ve been here before…

Have a pleasant weekend.

Ah February!

This month is the social precipice that signifies the downward slide of New Year’s resolutions everywhere.  In February the futility of self-improvement becomes glaringly apparent- Gym memberships are canceled, floundering relationships implode, and people go back to being predictably imperfect.  However, for those of you who are still aspiring to greatness, I have some literary detritus to make you seem smarter at cocktail parties, and whose size and graphic lucidity will certainly spruce up your bookshelf during the coming year of predictably boring coffee table books and vanity slabs that have come to signify the first decade of the new millennium.

I have never been interested in form as a projective device and so I was delightfully surprised when I happened to pick up The Function of Form (Actar, 2009) a few months ago.  Written as a continuation of The Function of Ornament (Actar, 2007), Farshid Moussavi reiterates her interest in architectural affect and performative geometry through the exploration of several fascinating and notable case studies- many of which span hundreds of years across the architectural canon.  According to Mousaavi, the behavioral unity that joins the various typologies together is two-fold.  First, there is their geometrical evolution which she grounds in the transversal or “base unit” method of formal generation.  Here multiplicity is defined from a singular parent form, which then regulates and informs elements throughout the rest of the system.

The second characteristic cited by Mousaavi is the concept of creating novel forms through tessellation or the repetition and differentiation of virtual forms.  According to the books introduction, every project cited in The Function of Form contains inherent qualities found in tessellation, and that these qualities result in a kind of material or affective lexicon to be incorporated and exploited by designers interested in buildings with a certain kind of material affectation or formal nuance.

The Function of Form is a respectable guide on geometric morphology for both architects and students alike (though it does espouse a very particular kind of formal behavior).  The books beautifully minimalist diagrams and erudite text are perfect for those who wish to dabble or simulate expertise in the production of formal affect.  The problem with such books however, is that they inevitably fall prey to abuse in both the academic studio and beyond.  While I don’t expect to see Mousaavi’s text referenced in any professional articles, I am waiting for the moment when a student of mine cites the book in response to a studio problem.  I also have no doubt there will be entire fabrication seminars which may use it as a primary source in order to shore up their often elementary knowledge of performative structure and shape.  While I recognize that the “form-makers” who will praise Farshid Moussavi’s book tend to only hear their own scripted siren song, an alternative voice from an outside critic might have made the conceptual melody all the more pleasant in this text, and given A Function of Form the critical objectivity so often missing in the contemporary discourse of formal morphology and material affect.