Drowning In Culture

I noticed this phrase on the back of a T-shirt whilst walking to dinner here in Nanjing one evening.  The studio is over now and we’re spending the last few days here enjoying the sights and catching up on neglected work (I’ve got an article for MONU, a journal on design and urbanism due in a few hours and am feeling lucky that Europe is several time-zones behind Nanjing).  The students worked extremely hard, and produced some exceptional work dealing with field conditions in the city.  Our site was a rural island in the middle of the Yangtze and presented several challenges to the students.  We were focusing on Stan Allen’s concept of how field conditions shape the contemporary city and what constitutes a plausible augmentation or intervention in these fields.  The student came through with flying colors and I suspect are now recovering from too much beer and hotpot the night before.  Normally in this program we spend the last few days in Shanghai and Beijing, but due to the quarantine restrictions, the students went at the beginning of the trip.  As the prior post mentioned, I was in Beijing a little over a week ago and had several observations of note regarding the “Post-Olympic hangover” that has a grip on the city.

What I found to be most intriguing was the lack of inherent complexity to be found in the programmatic systems embedded within the Olympic structures.  I did not bother to tour the entire park, as the expansive size and lack of shade structures made crossing the Olympic Green a trepidatious affair and so I can only comment on the project’s highlights- the Olympic Stadium or the “Birds Nest” by Herzog De Meuron and the Water Cube by PTW Architects.  But first, some notes about the site- As several journalists have already pointed out in articles leading up to the Olympics as well as during the 2008 Games, the buildings in the Olympic Park are served up on an uninspiring mall that is more akin to a military parade ground than the kind of balance between hardscape, circulation, concessions, infrastructure, and landscape one would hope for.  On the particular day I was there, a hot wind was blowing out of the steppes of Mongolia and it made spending time on the Olympic Green uncomfortable to say in the least.  I can only imagine what it must have been like during the Olympics where the crush of people and the summer heat turned the space into a veritable frying pan.

The other problematic aspect about the Olympic Green space is that it does not appear to really ground or attempt to augment the architecture of the Olympic complex in any way.  The Olympic structures present themselves as if they were models on a table, and this is because they are conceptually tethered to what in all appearances is really a giant parking lot.  When one examines the layout of the park, it is obvious that the shear scale completely flummoxed the planning team.  The only real grounding elements that exist are the subway, with it’s collection of oddly Post-modern Chinese “gardens” and “hutong”, and the sublimely banal hotel and office towers that ring the parks edge.  These are mostly empty and seem to employ only security personnel whose job it is to keep the street people, and Olympic souvenir-hawkers off the private property.   Oddly enough, I walked the entire length of one of these structures looking for an ATM and found it no less unpleasant than my experience in the Olympic park, however, at least there was some shade to be found.

The Bird’s Nest, whose name is somewhat suspect since it was leaked that the team at Herzog De Meuron only named it as such after concerns arose that it did not reference Chinese culture, looms on the horizon when one exits the escalator from the subway.  It is immensely popular with Chinese tourists who seem to be content either wandering about the Stadium’s massive sports-floor or, in an even stranger Post-modern twist, spending most of their visit sitting in the stands, where one suspects that they are mentally reliving the original event they saw on the television.  This obvious mass-nostalgic impulse fascinated me almost as much as the floor show of Olympic mascots who paraded about the stadium green until the heat sent them packing back into the air-conditioned locker rooms in the bowels of the stadium.

Stranger still was the Water Cube with it’s lacking entrance hall and almost high-school gym-like quality bleachers.  Most of the budget had obviously been spent on the glamorous exterior structure, which utilizes a structural space-frame wrapped in an ETFE skin.  Pollution had already begun to erode the plastic of the ETFE which was coated in a noticeable layer of dirt.  Closer examination of the interior showed obvious construction errors such as the running of HVAC ducting up an interior wall that was in plain sight, as well as the poor sight-lines within the hall itself.  With a structure this ornamental, one would think that more attention would be paid to how that it performed visually on the interior.  There was no continuity in how the roof and walls of the frame meet, nor was there any concern for how the internal program of the hall might respond to this intricacies of the structure itself.  The building is almost as popular with the Chinese as the Birds Nest and even has it’s own Website.

In short, what both buildings give you is a pleasant wrapper worthy of a post-card, but not a visit.  They are as spatially vapid as the worst of architectural trash, and with the exception of the structure-to-circulation relationships to be found in the upper levels of the Birds Nest, are only imaginative, not innovative in their “objectness”.

Remarking on the quality of these projects, one would expect a higher degree of craft considering the Arup designed structural systems appear so expressive.  However, the Chinese simply do not seem up to the task.  Not being exceptionally concerned with details myself, I can cut them some slack, but when you have a building the size of the Olympic Stadium rusting away less than a year after it’s completion, you have to wonder what the future longevity of these structures might actually be.  A prime example of this is the Olympic Data Center.

Designed by Studio Pei-Zhu architects, the structure was designed to mimic what the designers projected was a visual diagram of information flows.  The façade uncomfortably recalls the datascapes from the Matrix and if the deficiencies of it’s visual appearance weren’t enough, the building had lost several panels off it’s façade when I visited, confirming my suspicions that the entire Olympic Park was merely a stage-set, forgotten by it’s makers now that the production was over.  The fact that the transfer point for the Olympic Park on the subway contains this same flow façade in it’s station platform design only seems to reinforce the reality that there is no conceptual rigor in the design of the architecture of the 2008 Olympic venues.  They are more media-scape than true architectural works, beckoning with an empty siren’s call that never delivers physical satisfaction.

The entire Olympic Park seems doomed to go the way of the famous “White City” of the Columbian Exposition or the burning Bucky Dome of the New York Worlds Fair.  Its architecture is largely useless now that the Olympics are over, and the tragedy lies in the expense, and the waste involved in such a folly.  Considering that contemporary China faces larger problems, such as exploding urban migration, housing shortages, and job cuts brought on by the powerful “correction” rendered to the global financial system in 2008, one might hope for more utopian solutions to the adaptive re-use of the park rather than the current plans, one of which includes a shopping mall.

The fact that the 2008 Opening Ceremony was purportedly enhanced by CGI effects for the television audience around the world leaves one wondering if the Olympics of the future might be simply presented in a digital environment, with teams competing on their own tracks at home.  Architecture could be left behind and the true culture of the games could present itself in it’s honest form- as a media-spectacle designed to enhance the prestige of nations who can afford the expense.

The possibility of this condition might reinvigorate the concept of the Olympics and present some truly wonderful possibilities in the realm of architecture and design, allowing architects to experiment with new ideas of programming space digitally.  This might lead to some truly wonderful solutions of how people share mass experiences on the Web and possibly reinvigorate the discussion surrounding the transformation of architectural program and how it responds to media-driven environments.

After all, we all want to make wonderful, don’t we.

I couldn’t help quoting Neville Mars, whose book The Chinese Dream:  A Society Under Construction (NAI Publishers, Rotterdam, 2008).  I’ve assigned as required reading to my students while here in Nanjing.  He of course is riffing on the real translation of the Olympic slogan from last years Summer Games which were held here in China.  The “One World One Dream” mantra couldn’t be closer to illustrating the spread of Capitalism here in China and I’m sure the larger irony of this slogan is not lost on Mr. Mars and his fellow contributors in the book.

I was sitting in my favorite Starbucks in Nanjing today and it dawned on me that I haven’t posted in a while and that I ought to comment on the situation here in China.  For those who don’t recall my experience last year, I teach a summer studio over here on behalf of Woodbury University.  Last year my colleagues and I were witness to the pre-game fervor of the 2008 Summer Olympics and I was anxious to return to observe what I predicted was going to be a rather large hangover.

While the financial effects of the Olympics have yet to be fully analyzed (or released by the Chinese government for that matter), the social impacts have begun to trickle to the surface like that “sour stomach” feeling you get after a long night of drinking.  Beijing itself remains seemingly un-phased, and the Olympic Park has possibly eclipsed the Forbidden City as the number one tourist destination for Chinese Nationals (Westerners, it seems, have not yet lost their obsessive fascination with history).  The one thing I noticed about the city was that “no picture” signs have popped up in some of the more popular hutong.  If I have learned anything from the Chinese during my visit last summer, it’s that they are impeccable hosts and generally willing to put up with almost all kinds of bad behavior from their Western guests.  So I can only imagine that the acts committed by Olympic fans last year had to be truly heinous to warrant the erection of the signs.

Nanjing has been a slightly more obvious case.  The night-vendors are gone from the streets at the gate of South-East University where our studio is based as is the local “taxi market” when I enjoyed several informative lessons in Chinese street-cuisine.  The pirate bookseller is gone as well and so for those of you expecting cheap, hacked copies of the most recent El Croquis- you’ll have to pay full price at home.   The Chinese are less excited about meeting Westerners on the streets and it would appear as though the novelty on both sides has worn off.

From my conversations with my hosts here at the university I gather that the true effects of staging the Olympics are yet to be felt.   A larger concern seems to be the Swine Flu epidemic, as was evidenced by the seven-day quarantine measures that almost every traveler must undergo upon landing at the airport.  I myself was given a box of masks, a thermometer, and a bottle of iodine wash when I arrived at the University last week and was instructed by a doctor to monitor my condition daily so as to ensure that I wasn’t a carrier of the flu.   The thought of being shipped back home in a bubble due to  a faulty temperature reading or even the slightest sign of flu does not interest me in the least, and I am happy to have emerged from my quarantine period in good health.

But back to the Olympics…

The most remarkable impact of the Games on life here is the increasing prevalence of “pay-to-play” Wi-Fi connections around the city.  Last year one could flip open their iPhone, Blackberry, or laptop and find a plethora of free Internet (most of which was faster than the LAN in the hotel where we were billeted).  Since arriving last week I have encountered almost no free signals outside of the normal venues- tea houses and restaurants.  The Starbucks where I get my breakfast occasionally, has traditionally provided free Wi-Fi, but now seems to be charging for it like they do in the U.S. and Europe.  Luckily the café below them does not and so I can still enjoy my croissant and cappuccino while scanning the NY Times on my Mac.  The diminishing points of free access are yet another example of how China is embracing the Capitalist principles of the West.  Log on to the Wi-Fi at the Starbucks or the Beijing airport and you’ll be directed to the national phone company’s site and prompted to enter a user name and password.  I don’t know Chinese so I can’t decipher the text, but I imagine one must enter a credit card number to sign up for an account.   This is troubling since even though the government censors most news sites, one can still access a lot of Western news agency sites like the New York  Times.  The fact that Internet portals are now being more carefully controlled by merchants only means that the average Chinese, who was before able to access the Web for free, must now cough up a hefty fee to log-on, thus closing off the Internet to many working class Chinese.

One of the inherent principles of the digital age is that information is the key product of capital.  While companies still make “things”, Western corporations are increasingly shifting their focus to generating and selling information.  As a recent New York Times article on data centers suggests, this is already having dramatic effects on the role architecture plays in society.  Here in China, the new buildings going up are merely stage-props, as evidenced by the Birds Nest and Water Cube at the Olympic Park.  They suggest progress by their appearance, yet do not perform in a progressive way.  From the outside these structures look stunning, and have become cultural icons that surpassed their original function.  On the inside however the buildings are banal representations of the programmatic requirements handed to the architects by their client.  There is no innovation in the social space created and much of the new architecture of modern China is formulaic at best.  This seems to be less the fault of the Chinese and more the result of too much being built too quickly.  Western architects have reveled in the building boom that has gripped pre and now post-Olympic China.  It has allowed many large offices to prosper, even as their U.S. and European operations fold under the weight of the global financial crisis.  The tragedy from my perspective is that an entire society is erasing it’s unique social-construct and embracing a Westernized view of space that is neither democratic nor progressive.   It has only allowed the “pirates of capital” to keep their slowly sinking ship afloat by grafting onto the insecurities of the new China and exploiting the chaos embedded within it’s current level of dynamic growth.

But more on that later…

Back at work now, it seems ages ago that I was ensconced in a chase lounge pool-side in Palm Springs.  Palm Springs is, for many Angelenos, a prime vacation spot for two very good reasons.  First, its 90 miles from Downtown L.A. putting it within easy reach of almost everyone, save for only the truly transit-retarded.  Second, it has got to have more pools per square mile than any other city I’ve been in, thus increasing one’s chances of actually being able to enjoy a relaxing dip.  I took several over the weekend in our Mid-Century suburban get-away.  The true beauty of staying in Palm Springs is that I do more reading in a 48 hour period than I can get away with at home.  This stems from the reality that during the teaching semester I tend to log more hours of heavy architectural theory than is healthy and you’d think I’d be ready to pick up the newest sci-fi or tawdry romance novel.  However, always a glutton for punishment, on this trip I brought along Richard Florida’s new book “Who’s Your City?”.  The general thesis behind the book is that where we live is as important who we’re with and what kind of field we work in.  Florida trots out several tantalizing diagrams and maps, all illustrate that the usual suspects of late-capital (New York, San Francisco, Tokyo, London, Los Angeles, etc…) are the prime movers and shakers of the global economy in both economic and cultural production.
I’m about half-way through the book and so far Florida seems to be rehashing the theories of Neo-Marxist researcher, Manuel Castells, albeit in a far more digestible package.  Castells, who argues that some places are more desirable for capital investment than others, mainly based on their logistical and infrastructural capacities, first spirited this thesis forward in the late 1980’s.  Being deeply interested in class issues and how capitalism shapes the contemporary urban environment, Castells expands his discussion to address the socio-economic impacts of these conditions.   Florida, as far as I can tell, does not.  This seems to be the largest flaw in the book so far.  What could be a very accessible read about global capitalism and its subsequent impact on socio-spatial environments ends up presenting itself as a self-congratulatory “pat-on-the-back” for Florida’s “Creative Class”, who because of their education and economic privilege can potentially live wherever they desire.
I’m not quite ready to put the book down yet.  Stay tuned for a follow up, or go buy the book yourself and send along a comment on what you think.

So this week I’m off to Boston to participate in a panel discussion on Zine culture and explore the city.  If you’re in town, come check the panel/party out on Friday night.  It’s at the Pinkcomma Gallery.   The panel starts at 7 and the party starts at 8.  Cheers!

This is what I imagine is the rallying cry emanating from pre-boom locals in Eagle Rock, Lincoln Heights, Mt. Washington, Echo Park, and of course my neighborhood in Silver Lake.  Being one of the “gentrifiers” myself, I’m sorry to inform them that while I’m not going anywhere, but local boutiques might.  As I mentioned a few months ago, one of the largest problems in transitioning neighborhoods is the proliferation of boutiques that do nothing other than raise commercial rents.  When the economy goes sour these businesses are the first to perish because, well to be blunt, they don’t sell anything anybody actually needs.  While I don’t want to see another auto body shop or panaderia in my hood, I would like people to think a little harder before opening a new business.  Prospective business owner, have you asked yourself “do I really need to bet my life savings on a shop that caters in indie-junk?”  I’ll answer for you. 

“NO!”

Oddly enough the businesses that seem to be in the most solid shape in my neighborhood are the ones that actually deliver services to everyone in the community.  We have a cobbler, a dry cleaner, a framer (pictures not houses), and a small drug store.  These are offset by a slew of restaurants that run from a taco shack to an upscale, fake French place.  Our corner cafe, while no longer my favorite, is used by everyone in the neighborhood because the management figured out long ago that working-class people buy coffee too and priced their coffee and baked goods accordingly.  No one’s getting rich, but unless you want to open a business for all of the “Yoga Moms” and “Surfer Dads” in Santa Monica, you’d best do some research before opening a shop in a transitioning neighborhood- They’re the first to go when the economy tanks.   

For a sobering view on this phenomena check out this article in New York Times piece on Eagle Rock.

I just finished reading Tom Marble’s book After the City, (this is how we live) and was truly impressed with the work.  The book is a guide for deciphering the logic and processes behind real estate development and amounts to a fascinating topical study of the industry and sheds some light on how it, in part, helped to bring us the current real estate bubble.  Large land development corporations, like capitalism, are like sharks- they die if they stop swimming.  Therefore we are awash in a surplus of mediocre housing stock which pollutes the edge of cities in a shameful display of environmental hubris.   After the city, (this is how we live) lays bare this cynical approach to housing and the creation myth behind suburban communities.  Delivered in script format with an accompanying compendium of images, the book is both an entertaining and educational journey through the world of development.  You can read my review of the book on Tropolism. 

So far the 2009 is off to an exciting start.  First there was the inclusion of Sumoscraper into the A Few Zines show at Studio  X in New York City.  This was followed by the posting of my review of the new book edited by Kazys Varnelis on “urbanism gone wild”, The Infrastructural City on Tropolism.  And now Mimi Zeiger has emailed me to say that the new issue of Loudpaper is “in the mail”.  I’ve been a contributor for a long time now for Loudpaper and this issue features a review of Los Angeles Architect Barbara Bestor and her distinctive office building, as well as several reviews of new music.  The paper is in the form of a “’broadsheet”, and according to Mimi it will be available soon via Paypal.  I’m pleased to be part of all three of these projects and hope that the rest of 2009 is as fruitful as the last week has been.  I will be posting much of the content that I generate for my various collaborations in a special page on this site, but in the meantime check out the sites above for my newest written salvos.

I have two reasons to be cheery today. 

The first is the public debut of my architecture zine project Sumoscraper:  A Cultural Content Container.  Sumoscraper, which was produced though my architecture firm Urban Operations, is part of a larger exhibition on zines curated by Loudpaper editor Mimi Zeiger and hosted by Studio X in New York City.  While I originally imagined Sumoscraper as a project of and for Los Angeles, it’s nice to see it in New York.  I imagine that New Yorkers secretly lust for more parking and more storage space, and Sumoscraper would certainly satiate that desire.  For those of you in New York today, there will be a symposium about architecture zines and zine culture in general.  It is scheduled for this evening at Studio X and will feature some punditry as well as some gin after.  I only wish I could be there since I love both and I’m honored to be part of the show. 

The second reason for celebration is that after a long hiatus I am back to posting on Tropolism again.  My debut article is a review of The Infrastructural City, edited by Kazys Varnelis and published by Actar.  The book includes an insightful collection of articles by several of my colleagues here in Los Angeles and is a provocative thesis about the state of the contemporary city.  You can buy the book on Amazon, or if you live in Los Angeles, at Skylight Books in Los Feliz. 

Flipping through the New York Times over the past few weekends, I noted that the paper has been devoid of pieces on architecture.  Now, taking into consideration the holidays which normally result in a slow-down in content production, I chock this up to a lack of real architecture to write about.  Project cancellations and firm layoffs abound here in L.A. and it’s no doubt that the rest of the world is feeling the pinch of the economic downturn.  Some people believe that Obama’s infrastructural spending package will give a boost to the economy and the American jobless rate, but I sincerely doubt this will be the case.  History has proven otherwise.  Naysaying aside, I found an inkling of hope in this article from the New York Times Sunday edition:  Design Loves a Depression by Michael Cannel.  Cannel’s thesis is that in previous economic downturns or times of national crisis design has become more innovative and less focused on waste.  He cites the Eames furniture as his historical example, and while I’m not sure that a bent plywood chair was ever affordable to the working masses, his point about efficiency and innovation is very apropos. 

So does this mean 2009 will be the year architecture and design head to the gym to get back into shape?  I doubt it, but I do predict we’ll see a lot more interesting writing rather than building, and that sounds refreshing for a change.  However, don’t be fooled into thinking that Zaha Hadid or Jean Nouvel are going to pick up the pen and start creating new manifestos for designing  in a global recession.  They will no doubt be folded into a reader here and there in order to sell copy, but won’t be generating much more than a lot of hot air.  Big name “starchitects” like the two above have been so busy building and ignoring the critical aspects of the profession, it’s doubtful they’ll be able to keep up with all of the young turks, who without commissions, have been writing rather than building.  These lean times will hopefully also put back into the lime light all of the dedicated academics who’ve been putting pen to paper while starchitects have been creating visual junk. 

Is Criticality set to take the stage again?  We shall see.