It is often said that the most lasting effect of globalization won’t be economic, but biological. As Alfred W. Crosby stated in his 1986 book ‘Ecological Imperialism,’ the European expansion has closed the seams of Pangea; ecosystems that had been isolated for millions of years have been connected again, and the result is a massive ecological disturbance as species leave their original habitats. What does it then mean to see a milk thistle, an evening primrose and a hollyhock growing side by side on a sandy field somewhere behind a fence in a small town in the Netherlands?

The thistle was a Roman potherb kept for its nutritional and medicinal qualities. The evening primrose is a plant that originates from central America, which spread and retreated across the continent with the coming and waning of several ice ages. Its roots were once the staple crops of tribal people across the Northern American hemisphere. The hollyhock originates from Turkey, and travelled to Europe and China along the silk route. Plants have stories, and the story never ends. The hollyhock can be purchased at the local plant market (three saplings will set you back ten euro), but it is also a persistent and prolific weed that grows through cracks between the walls of houses and the street. Two types of evening primrose have hybridized into a new species that is unique to the Netherlands and Belgium. Together, these plants evoke the consequences of centuries of travel, trade, colonization, opportunity, plunder, subsistence and also of the joy of natural beauty.

Read the full piece at The State, and check out Wilfried’s blog here.

The Guardian reports on new research that quantifies the contribution of aquifer depletion (primarily through the artificial conveyance of water to the surface via deep wells) to sea level rise — “five times bigger in scale than the melting of the planet’s two great ice caps, in Greenland and Antarctica”:

“Trillions of tonnes of water have been pumped up from deep underground reservoirs in every part of the world and then channelled into fields and pipes to keep communities fed and watered. The water then flows into the oceans, but far more quickly than the ancient aquifers are replenished by rains. The global tide would be rising even more quickly but for the fact that man-made reservoirs have, until now, held back the flow by storing huge amounts of water on land.

…

The new research was led by Yadu Pokhrel, at the University of Tokyo, and published in Nature Geoscience. “Our study is based on a state-of-the-art model which we have extensively validated in our previous works,” he said. “It suggests groundwater is a major contributor to the observed sea level rise.” The team’s results also neatly fill a gap scientists had identified between the rise in sea level observed by tide gauges and the contribution calculated to come from melting ice.

The drawing of water from deep wells has caused the sea to rise by an average of a millimetre every year since 1961, the researchers concluded. The storing of freshwater in reservoirs has offset about 40% of that, but the scientists warn that this effect is diminishing.”

It is worth noting, as one of the scientists consulted by the Guardian does, that where many of the defining trends of the Anthropocene are accelerating (so commonly that one might be tempted to say that acceleration is the defining characteristic of the Anthropocene itself), the contribution of groundwater withdrawal to sea level rise appears to have held steady over the past fifty years or so, suggesting that the relative contribution of groundwater withdrawal will decline as other contributors accelerate.  Despite that, the picture the study and article paint remains utterly fascinating to me: a world where the aggregate suction of a global economy’s worth of groundwater wells is contributing meaningfully to a massive phenomenon like sea level rise.

[Link via Anson Mackay and Erle Ellis on twitter; risings seas and gravitational flux on mammoth, previously: "the ambiguity of seamelt and landrise".]

Going Viral explores the impact that social media, technology and device culture are having on ourdesign process, and ultimately the way we practice. How do we shape a global conversation? How are we changing the relationships between academia and the profession? What is the impact of hyper-information sharing and critique? Throughout the evening, the topics of communication, research, collaboration, and data distribution will be addressed and debated. Bjarke Ingels of BIG, Toru Hasegawa of Morpholio and Columbia University, Carlo Aiello of eVolo, and David Basulto with David Assael of ArchDaily will come together for a lecture and panel discussion moderated by Ned Cramer, editor-in-chief of Architect.

Further details can be found at the AIANY Global Dialogues website.]

OMA is famous for two things: its astounding output, and the extent to which its operations chew through the majority of the human capital that walks through its doors. As an office that had already made a name for itself and was lucky to enjoy a steady flow of applications from aspiring young interns, OMA could organize around a workflow that depended on the maximum variety and quantity of design explorations before electing one to carry forward. Like Turing 60 years prior, OMA’s operations are based on brute forcing through the search space. Whereas Turing relied on something that would later come to be known as computing power, OMA relies on employees who willfully work long hours to be part of the magical machine.

This maximum variety is the direct output of the bloodshot eyes and over-caffeinated bodies of the legion workforce pushing themselves to create just a few more iterations before calling it quits…

The sum of this way of working is one where the search space of ideas is exhausted seconds before the individuals doing the searching. If so, success has been achieved. If not, the office collapses under its own entropy. So far OMA has been able to keep the lights on, but at significant cost. Particularly to the lower ranks who put the “brute” in “brute force”.

OMA has been singled out because their contribution has been so definitive to the last couple generations of professional practice. Although the offices of Renzo Piano, Zaha Hadid, and others are on similar or perhaps even higher levels of success in terms of productive output, none have had as large an impact on the practice of architecture as OMA.

…

The pervasiveness of OMA’s habits in other offices are so extreme that one is tempted to ask whether this way of working is a logical outcome of globalized practice, but the dearth of competing operational models hints that perhaps this is not the case. At a moment when formal, tectonic, and material diversity are at the extreme, we as a community of architects lack a healthy discussion of operational models. OMA’s model trundled into a second generation with firms such as MVRDV, BIG, and REX but who else has proposed a coherent idea about how to operate an architecture firm?

Part of what makes the piece so excellent is that, like much of Boyer’s writing, it refuses to needlessly distinguish between design and business operations within the architecture firm, preferring instead to treat all (or at least most) operations as components of a whole with both architectural and economic ramifications. As Boyer says, the piece is “a mythology of the habits of organization, production, and decision making that one office has pursued”, which demonstrates in fascinating fashion how Koohhaas’s theoretical work provided the framework for a configuration of roles and responsibilities among project team members that had key differences from the standard atelier design studio model. This altered the process for initiating, iterating, and editing design options, as things like specific prototyping methodologies (think blue foam) and work attitudes (think bleary-eyed interns) aggregated into the OMA methodology.

Thus Boyer shows how, at OMA, theory, design methodology, and business practice interact as a unified whole, in which theory determines the possibility space for design and design methodology determines the possibility space for business practices and business practices determine the possibility space for design (and so on, in repetitive feedback), instead of (falsely) bifurcating business decisions from design decisions. This integration, of course, is in fact present in every firm, but the cliche understanding of the atelier studio model, which characterizes business decisions as a distraction from the real work of the architect, obfuscates that integration. The implication of Boyer’s argument is that the operations of a firm (any firm) can and should themselves be designed, and in fact are — whether consciously or unconsciously.

[Coincidentally (or not), you can catch Bryan in conversation with Rory Hyde, Martti Kalliala, and Jenna Sutela at Studio-X NYC this Friday at 1 pm, talking about alternative design practices; details here.]

Joining us will be architect Ed Keller; Benjamin Bratton, from the aforementioned Center for Design and Geopolitics; Tom Cohen, co-editor with Claire Colebrook of the Critical Climate Change series from Open Humanities Press; novelist Peter Watts; architect and urbanist Adrian Lahoud, author of Post-Traumatic Urbanism; and Dylan Trigg, author of, among other things, The Aesthetics of Decay.

This moderated round-table discussion will also explore a joint research project underway this spring for which Ed Keller, Benjamin Bratton, and Geoff Manaugh have been looking at what they call Google/Arctic/Mars, analyzing the emergence of a new geography—from the virtual to the off-world—and speculating as to its future political organization.

It sounds like things get started around 6 pm; full details at the Studio-X facebook page (or at BLDGBLOG). (Word is that there may even be a live stream; if there is, I would imagine you could find a link at that page.)

NPR reported this morning on a traffic jam in California caused by an algorithmic glitch “accidentally summon[ing] 1,200 people to jury duty on the same morning”. An excellent reminder of the tendency of algorithmic dysfunction to manifest as physical dysfunction, and (at a relatively small scale) of the potentially disproportionate impact of glitches when they are translated from dataspace into an infrastructural system. The glitch may be as simple as having accidentally swapped the 0 indicating “do not come in” for the 1 indicating “come in”, but the resulting jam is rendered in aluminum autobodies and on asphalt corridors where it is much more difficult to clear than it was to create.