Comments on: total service delivery

By: the blind watchmaker - mammoth // building nothing out of something

the blind watchmaker - mammoth // building nothing out of something — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 02:54:32 +0000

[...] when understood in terms of decisions than in terms of forms. My suspicion — though I remain interested in experiments such as the EDAW/AECOM merger which attempt to compensate for increasingly complex [...]

By: namhenderson

namhenderson — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 19:25:11 +0000

Well F.A.D. had a post here
http://freeassociationdesign.wordpress.com/2009/12/08/infrastructure-and-corporate-design-pierre-belanger-interviews-joseph-e-brown-of-aecom/

and a couple of others i would have to go back and look for.. Plus all the comments on the original posting.

By: rob

rob — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 16:19:36 +0000

Any particular posts I should read (maybe not, but I’ve been mostly off the internet for a couple days, despite the posting, so I thought I’d ask)?

The approach Brown was outlining seemed to me definitely “capital M Modernist” — though the focus on infrastructure first is a slight shift, the methodology sounds thoroughly modernist (technocratic, comprehensive, we’ll assemble a team large enough and be able to plan for every eventuality). I agree that it’s seductive — and if it can be pulled off, great (except for the part about only a handful of firms doing it; that has eerie similarity for me to the way the financial system got in trouble, with only a handful of companies large enough to meaningfully interact with the system).

But it certainly runs counter to the general move in landscape architecture towards embracing uncertainty, which is a move that I generally approve of. I think that was what was a bit jarring about Brown’s comments — he seemed so certain of AECOM’s ability of design with certainty.

By: namhenderson

namhenderson — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 13:32:39 +0000

Seems like this interview generated a lot of posts in the internets…

Personally, maybe it is the contrarian, Capital M Modernist in me but there is something exciting about the idea of such large groups of design intelligence brought to bear on projects.

I sure don’t I subscribe to the idea that only super large firms can handle this scale or have the know how. However, it does make me optimistic to see that there are organizations with the technical know how that are out there thinking about these sorts of landscale regional infrastructural issues. Especially since AECOM/EDAW and their now announced architectural unit are they types of firms that tend to actually get these sorts of contracts.

However, maybe that is a problem, for as you note it has flavors of corporate dystopia…