asides excluded – mammoth // building nothing out of something

August 28, 2010 – 8:00 am

reading the infrastructural city: chapter eleven index

[The Studio Zone, a 30-mile radius in Los Angeles which serves to determine the "rates and work rules for workers in the entertainment industry"; the majority of Los Angeles' prop houses are located within the Studio Zone; image via the California Film Commission]

Robert Sumrell’s “Story of the Eye: Props”, noted elsewhere:

DPR-Barcelona skip between prop houses, “The Red Violin”, Reynar Banham, and the Smithsons to land on the assertion that today we collect links as immaterial props may be superseding material props:

Consumption has evolved and even it is still outrageous; we are moving to a scenario where services not products are more and more demanded. And in our hybrid cities some kind of immaterial prop houses have emerged to keep our virtual belongings safe. Although Kazys Varnelis pointed that today we collect nothing, we think that today we collect links and information through a del.icio.us or Pearltrees account and also exchange information and services via facebook or twitter. In this sense we are keeping outside our homes a important part of our life. These data are kept safe in servers far away from our physical location and those servers as prop houses provide them a physicality. While having physicality they are exposed to the same kind of “dangers” of our material possessions, they can be lost, damaged by fire, or even stolen.

[The intersection of Beverly Boulevard and La Cienega Boulevard is the exact center of the Studio Zone; image via Wikipedia]

Free Association Design focuses on self-storage facilities, a peculiar and closely-related typology which Sumrell briefly mentions:

The architecture of public storage facilities is as pragmatic and minimal as the retail industry’s big boxes, and both are designed to facilitate a similar and limited prescribed program (maximized cubic footage, climate control, ease of access and security). The linear assembly of roll up doors mimics the retail distribution centers from where most of the objects likely came; only smaller and with a nebulous chain of retail operations, logistical geography, job transfers and other life changes between them. The resemblance sublimely illustrates a conservation of product volume that is distributed across virtually unlimited user space. In the consumer-retailer network, more and larger big boxes beget more big boxes.

Most of the time the extensive footprint of the double-entendred ‘self‘-storage facility is uninhabited by the living. The glorified sheds provide shelter only to inanimate assemblies of stuff and its combined exchange and symbolic value. And just like Hollywood’s prop houses, there is no prescribed order for how the objects within are arranged or what those objects may be. Behind each brightly colored roll-up door (typically the only design flair applied to the architecture) is an eclectic and mysterious collection of cargo that has been amassed via unknown histories.

You’ll want to read on as Brett explains why self-storage facilities are like the remote Pacific Islands that played host to indigenous ‘cargo cults’ in the wake of World War Two.

While “Props” is the last chapter of the Infrastructural City, we did say that we would — and still intend to — post on Varnelis’ Introduction as a means of conclusion. (FASLANYC has already done so.) In the meantime, you should be sure not to miss our interview with Lateral Office.

By rholmes | Posted in mammoth book club | Tagged film, props, reading-the-infrastructural-city | Comments (0)

August 27, 2010 – 11:53 am

props

[Omega/Cinema Props' C.P. Three, at the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and Bronson Avenue; via bing maps]

At some point, presumably, continuing to open our commentaries on The Infrastructural City by noting that the chapter of the week — in this case, Robert Sumrell’s “Props” — reads significantly different from the other chapters will ring false. But, once again, it’s the obvious place to begin.

Where each of the previous chapters described an aspect of Los Angeles that is reflected in many other cities — cellular networks, property, ubiquitous landscapes of material extraction, post-natural hydrologies — “Props” circles around an infrastructure, the “prop house”, which is essentially unique to Los Angeles, at least in scale and ubiquity. (One suspects that Mumbai, for instance, might rival Los Angeles in density of prop houses, but that is a similarly exceptional case.)

Noting the uniqueness of the prop house to Los Angeles, though, is rather getting ahead of myself, as I’ve neither described what a prop house is nor explained why it might be considered an infrastructure. Very quickly, a prop house is a warehouse that rents objects to the entertainment industry, but the best way to answer these questions is to quote Sumrell, who, after opening with a very specific anecdote about a single prop house — C.P. Three, pictured above — says:

“…no single prop house can claim anything close to a complete material survey of the world. Instead, a variety of prop houses offer highly specialized and themed fragmented utopias, each catering to different needs and subject matters…

There are no standard methods of operation or organization for prop houses. Some are rigorously organized, others are more haphazard. Nonetheless, all prop houses are logistics centers for the storage and circulation of objects. They allow art directors to compare a variety of similar goods to make selections, place the items on hold until final approvals are determined, let the objects out for an agreed upon rental period, and then retain the objects after the transaction is completed in case they should be required again…

Prop houses and film locations are one of the many networks of entertainment support services essential to the survival of Hollywood. While films can be made in any city, the concentration of camera rental facilities, lighting companies, film stages, agents, entertainment lawyers, trained labor, and celebrity talent that are unique to Los Angeles ensure that the region maintains its dominance. If Hollywood specializes in the production of immaterial culture, prop houses and locations are its largest material substrate in the city, grounding it in a prosaic, if extreme, reality.”

Further separating “Props” from the chapters before it is that while the previous chapters told us a great deal about the construction of Los Angeles — infrastructure as sinew — but “Props” is less interesting for what it tells us about the production of urban fabric (the prop house being a relatively rare and unremarkable component of that fabric, even in Los Angeles) and more for what a peculiar piece of that fabric tells us about ourselves.

“Props” accomplishes this by, in addition to relating a history of these peculiar warehouses, also situating the object housed — the “prop” — within a series of architectures, whose scope expands to explore the general cultural significance of the prop: first the prop house, but also passing through the televised dreamland of the commercial, and into the home (and the self-storage unit), which, Sumrell argues, can be understood as a prop house itself. The commercial is the key intermediary in this cultural process, as it is the valuation of the consumer good in advertising as a “purely symbolic” prop which causes goods taken into the home to perform in the same manner. “Once purchased and taken home, the consumer good has to serve both as the symbolic prop that seduced us on television while also performing the function it was ostensibly purchased to accomplish.”

When consumer goods are seen through this lense — as props which import symbolic value into our homes — the prop house can be understood not merely a fantastically odd iteration of warehouse typology, but also a distilled and concentrated architectural moment representative of the sort of broader cultural trends that The Infrastructural City has repeatedly sought to situate infrastructure within:

“The Protestant ethic of thrift and production that Max Weber observed in American culture is long gone. Instead, we have radical abundance propped up by massive debt. Even though consumption is still rampant, we have passed the point of needing to produce more things as a society. Our homes are still prop houses, filled with useless consumer goods that exist primarily to provide a context that we can react to. Our growing relationship to our objects, or props, is that of a programmer to bits of code. As programmers, we assemble these pieces of code into a context, or language, that builds a program to execute a series of actions. Network systems are the infrastructure on which these programs run and interact. No network is essential, just as no single node is vital — all that matters is movement within the network. What we are left with is a constant circulation of bits, like the elements and molecules in chemistry that create a living ecosystem — it is this constant cycle of change that keeps the system vital.

Prop houses provide a utopia for this condition. Not only do they suggest that our Long Tail desires might one day be valuable, they promise that objects can endlessly circulate in an infrastructural condition, provide context and meaning to produce momentarily perfect settings.”

If you’d like to read further about the physical geography of prop houses, I recommend Stefano Bloch’s UCLA thesis, “Properties and Prop-House Geography” (PDF; via DPR-Barcelona).

By rholmes | Posted in mammoth book club, urbanism | Tagged props, reading-the-infrastructural-city, robert-sumrell | Comments (0)

August 20, 2010 – 1:09 pm

“what to do when there is nothing to do”

["Weather Field"; Lateral Office + Paisajes Emergentes for Land Art Generator Initiative]

As we have nearly reached the conclusion of our collaborative reading of The Infrastructural City, we thought it would be interesting to discuss some of the lessons of the text with one of mammoth’s favorite architectural studios, the Toronto-based Lateral Office. In a series of emails, mammoth spoke with Lateral’s Lola Sheppard and Mason White about why the Economist is more essential reading for architects than Wallpaper, what an “expanded field” for architecture might look like, how to evaluate the performance of a speculative proposal, and, of course, The Infrastructural City.

Readers of mammoth are likely also familiar with Lola and Mason as two of the founders of research-group-slash-blog InfraNet Lab; in addition to Lateral and InfraNet, Lola teaches at the University of Waterloo and Mason at the University of Toronto. The awards that Lateral have received include Canada’s Professional Prix de Rome in Architecture, selection for Pamphlet Architecture 30, finalists in the WPA 2.0 competition, the Young Architects Award from the Architecture League of New York, and the Lefevre Fellowship for Emerging Practitioners from Ohio State University.

[A.I.R. Unit; Lateral Office with artist Sara Graham]

mammoth: The reason that we thought an interview with Lateral might be particularly appropriate at this time is the overlap between the text that we’ve been reading and discussing this summer — The Infrastructural City — and your work, which has largely been about imagining new typologies for and relationships to infrastructures. Even those projects, like the A.I.R. Unit, which concern more traditional architectural programs like spaces for dwelling show a clearly infrastructural way of thinking about architecture. How did you become interested in infrastructure?

Sheppard: I’m not sure that, initially, we would have identified our work specifically as being about infrastructure as a category. But we would say that we began, even when dealing with single building or public space, with a desire to unpack the systems which underlie a given site or condition. I’d say we were more interested in format than form. There were two early projects which probably changed the way we thought. One was a competition for a dock in Memphis, TN, where we looked at harnessing changing water levels and seasonal flooding to drive the project — and produce sounds. And the second was a research project from 2003, entitled “Flatspace”, which we pursued as Lefevre Fellows at Ohio State University. We were researching the reformatting of expansive retail corridors and ended up generating nine proposals, three driven by program, three by landscape and three by mobility networks. That project sowed the seeds for the strategies and approaches in our later work.

I think also that we have always been interested in rethinking the overlooked parts of our built environment — and much of what organizes these environments seems to fall under the category of logistics and infrastructure.

White: Those early projects, though naive and more searching than strategic, were foundational to our approach to current work. And I really only wanted to add that, regardless of the term infrastructure, we are seeking the limits of an extrinsic architecture, and this often circumstantially addresses infrastructure(s).

[Models from Flatspace; Lateral Office]

mammoth: We’re glad you brought up “Flatspace”, as it has been on our minds this week — the chapter of The Infrastructural City we read this week deals with the same exurban landscapes of distribution and consumption as “Flatspace”. (It also happens to be how we first learned of Lateral, after it was published in 30 60 90.) We’ll return to it shortly.

But, first: what is ‘an extrinsic architecture’?

White: This is something we are asking ourselves as well. We are finding it to be an architecture that is very aware of its external influence, and maybe more importantly, any opportunities afforded by that awareness. Really, with our work we are seeking an understanding and incorporation of the ever-ricocheting effects and potentials of a work of architecture. Asking ourselves: how deep into its region or environment does a project reach? And quite often, this has taken us out of architecture, and into economics, ecology, energy, and others.

mammoth: An interesting question this raises is the issue of expertise: obviously, as architects, we are not specialists in economics, ecology, energy, and so on. What about being an architect enables us to make useful decisions about the interactions between architecture and these other fields? More specifically, how has Lateral approached investigation into territories — like, say, the logistics of big-box operations you investigated in Flatspace — where you do not have specific expertise?

Sheppard: It’s a good question, and one I’d say we grapple with often. We increasingly begin projects with broad and open initial research, to get a sense of the range of issues. For instance in the Flatspace research, we looked at a whole host of issues – the role of GIS, aerial photography, site targeting and the entire militarization of site identification, the notion of ‘branding the land’, the role of zoning regulations, the construction of big boxes…

In this scenario, armed with at least initial knowledge, I think the role of the architect is to read the opportunities. Specialist will have deeper but narrower readings of a specific site or context. As in tunnel vision – it can be sharp but narrow, potentially overlooking issues that aren’t categorizable. I think we try to have 270 degree vision. The architect in this scenario is not simply problem solver, but cultural, environmental and spatial detective, bringing to light the forces (geographic, economic, and cultural) at work within a given geography, and able to look for synergies between issues and opportunities.

[Flatspace; Lateral Office; "the expanded field of retail corridors"]

White: The specialization issue is a prickly one – but I think worthwhile to expand upon a bit. And here I am always reminded of the fox versus hedgehog debate that Isaiah Berlin illuminated. (The fox being an expert generalist, and the hedgehog being an expert specialist.) I think this debate is also one that made us more sheepish about our work in the beginning – thinking that it was not a methodology we should be pursuing for the very reasons you just mentioned, and that we should specialize in something overtly architectural–forms, materials, fabrication. But over time, our position has solidified more as a specialization on phenomenon and opportunities that is between categories and disciplines. For example, I still think the most important magazine to subscribe to as an architect is the Economist, not Wallpaper. Reading the Economist as an architect, you can see things before they become relevant in architecture, with Wallpaper or Dwell you are seeing it after the fact, as a trend.

Really we are most interested in questions of architectural typology and spatial format, and these are often promiscuous interrogations.

mammoth: It’s interesting that you say that, at the outset of your work, you thought you “should specialize in something overtly architectural”, but you’ve since been pulled towards more “promiscuous” work. Was there a particular moment — or project, or set of projects — that produced this shift?

White: It is hard to say that there was a specific moment, but probably some combination of the Flatspace research project at Ohio State University as Lefevre Fellows and a general skepticism of our own professional experiences, as well as the education that brought us to that. More optimistically, it was likely a reaction to a broader position and potential for architecture that lay latent in early work and approaches as students. But, probably hard to identify a particular moment. From early on, we were very influenced by the work and thinking of Keller Easterling, Bucky Fuller, Cedric Price, Constantinos Doxiadis, and others, such as Georges Perec, Paul Virilio, and Luis Fernández-Galiano.

[Farming Salton; Lateral Office for cityLAB's WPA2.0 competition.]

mammoth: The very first chapter in The Infrastructural City, Barry Lehrman’s “Reconstructing the Void”, is about Owens Lake, which is an extraordinary post-infrastructural, post-natural landscape north-east of Los Angeles. South-east of Los Angeles, of course, there is a larger and more famous, but similarly post-natural body of water, the Salton Sea. Your entry to the 2009 WPA2.0 competition, “Farming Salton,” takes the devastated condition of the Salton Sea as an opportunity, proposing a series of new infrastructures to be overlaid onto the Salton Sea and surrounds, with the aim of generating new sustainable ecologies, new economic generators, and new recreational opportunities.

One of the things that you suggest in the project is that these new infrastructures should be “coupled” — that “multiple processes [should be bundled] with spatial experiences”. (Given that “Coupling” is also the title of PA30, it seems fair to say that this is a common theme in your projects.) Why is this important?

Sheppard: We’ve been huge fans of The Infrastructural City because it has served as an original medium for outlining the scope and potential of readings of infrastructure.

The question of ‘coupling’ is interesting to us, because if you look at the history of most infrastructure, it has tended to be mono-functional. It typically consists of engineering projects designed to address a single problem. We’ve recently been talking about “landscapes on life-support,” where infrastructure, in the current condition, serves to simply maintain a failing ecological state. (Owens Lake is such an example, where the state of California spends upward of $415 million on the Dust Mitigation Project simply to prevent toxic dust from spreading.) In projects such as Salton or Icelink, we ask: can infrastructure be more pro-active or more catalytic? Can it serve to support other conditions — ecologies, economies, and public realms?

Our interest in infrastructure really began with an interest in expanding the scope and territory of architecture’s realm beyond the singular building, to include more mutable or contingent conditions. We wanted to embrace questions of economy, logistics, ecology, etc. Infrastructure emerged as a basic precondition for all these questions. Alone, it remains a purely logistical operation. However, in coupling or bundling multiple functions that operate like epiphytes, an expanded territory of intervention emerges. An architecture which responds to opportunities of contingency manifests itself in atypical spatial formats. In a sense, what we’re exploring are these new formats for architecture ‘in an expanded field’.

(We are hosting a topic session at the 99th ACSA Annual Conference next March in Montreal, entitled Architecture’s Expanded Territories, on many of these questions.)

[Icelink; Lateral Office]

mammoth: One theme that recurs frequently in The Infrastructural City is a certain pessimism about new infrastructures on the scale of California’s aqueducts or Los Angeles’ freeways. The primary factors that are pinpointed in being responsible for this are not a lack of architectural interest but deep structural issues: both economic — the current global malaise — and political — a combination of NIMBYism with legal gridlock. This might be described, broadly, as a crisis of “traditional infrastructure”.

Do you share this skepticism about the future of traditional infrastructures in North America? It seems to us that some of your recent work — thinking in particular of Farming Salton, but perhaps also the Emergent North research — could be partially construed (though you may disagree) as a response to this problem, in so far as it is an attempt to describe alternatives to “traditional infrastructure”, where infrastructure might retain its capacity to generate and guide the growth of human settlement patterns, but also become more flexible, more distributed, less mono-functional.

White: We certainly share that pessimism, and much of this came up in a panel session with Kazys earlier this summer as part of the series of discussions on “networked publics.” The discussion led to several questions that we are often preoccupied with: what scale(s) does infrastructure operate at, what does infrastructure respond to, and what form might it take? And we are quite partial to the position of infrastructure as soft, scalable, and market-responsive. And, yes, that is a critique of “traditional infrastructure,” which is hard, big, and a product of its market-time.

Infrastructure should also be entrepreneurial — something that both the Salton Sea project demonstrates and our ongoing work in the Canadian Arctic will seek. The combination of public and private investment is an emerging market (of which the PPIAF is an interesting real-world precedent). But we also share a degree of skepticism about infrastructure as a catch-all realm of practice. The term has increasingly expanded to stand-in for any architecture serving as a process or a system — and this mirrors the post-economic collapse return to function after the heady days of exuberant cultural projects. The attention that infrastructure is getting is further evidence of a shift to processes over objects. Though maybe what we are seeing and how we are positioning our work, is not an abandonment of architecture or a naive fascination with infrastructure so much as a renewed interest in an emergent territory of practice that is between these. We are finding that many of the questions that architecture could be asking are being picked up by others. Architecture is slow.

Through the research at InfraNet Lab, with colleagues Maya Przybylski and Neeraj Bhatia, we are trying to position and qualify our understanding and forecasting of architecture’s potential as influenced by and integrated with infrastructure. Maya brings an interest in computational infrastructure, and Neeraj an interest in social infrastructure. The Lab gives us a space to intersect these interests. Much of this position will be evident in Pamphlet Architecture #30 and the first issue of our collaborative journal with Archinect called Bracket.

We were asked recently if we were a “trans-disciplinary practice,” and although it would be convenient to say yes–and likely with much evidence in the work–I think our preferred answer is that we are anti-disciplinary … or maybe un-disciplinary. The only time I would say being undisciplined is intentional and productive.

mammoth: This contention that “infrastructure should be entrepreneurial” is intriguing — both in and of itself, and also because arguments for a renewed commitment to infrastructure (whether general, like Krugman’s recent op-ed in the New York Times, or specifically architectural, like Nancy Levinson’s editorial piece for Places) so often are explicitly arguments for public work over and against private work.

That said, it’s an assertion that we are broadly in agreement with.

Part of the in-and-of-itself interest is that ‘entrepreneurial’ implies an evaluation of performance — process, not just object, as you noted. This is true of much infrastructural design generally: you need to be able to simulate performance (of economies, or hydrologies, or traffic flows, or structure), and simulating performance is a much bigger component of the design process that it would be for a more ‘typical’ architectural project (like a house).

So maybe the interesting question that arises then is — particularly in a research-oriented context like your work on Salton or the Canadian Arctic — how do we test the validity of the entrepreneurial qualities of our proposals? Do you have a particular example of how the development of entrepreneurial qualities (or some other objective tangentially related to a project’s explicit function or performance) fed back into the design process as a whole in a given project?

Sheppard: It’s interesting — this question of how does one evaluate performance. In most cases the economic and ecologic proposals we are leveraging are common, even proven models, such as job creation or remediation. Maybe what makes them unique for us is that they can be positioned in tandem rather than as oppositions.

Large infrastructure projects, such as those of the WPA 1.0, created jobs during their construction that ceased once the projects were built. (Although one could argue that long-term benefits were skills training, and the creation of large arts and literacy projects.) The TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority) is perhaps the more interesting model. It too was a major employer during the depression, on the construction phase of projects. However, it continues its relevance today through economic development, job creation, education, and research. Rather than simply providing an energy resource, its role is more diverse, tentacular and long-term.

In the example of the Salton Sea, there are existing (engineered) proposals that are coming with price tags of over $8.9 billion, with an additional $140 million each year. And this is largely to maintain a status quo, and prevent further decline. Something is going to be built there, and the question is what does the public get in return for that bill? In our proposal for a project that could be built incrementally, the intention is to engage a different thinking about investment. But more importantly, the project seeks to generate ongoing economic benefits, through new industries that might dovetail into the infrastructure, and through restored ecologies that in turn reinvigorate recreation and tourism (once the lifeblood of the region). The intention is that entrepreneurial economic returns have a much longer life.

In a project such as the augmented Ice Roads (near Yellowknife, Canada), our criticism is that the engineered ice roads have a short operational season and serve one use for an average of 67 days a year. We’re asking how can one extend the operating season, stimulate the ecology (through fish hatcheries), and aggregate other programs — in this case recreational fishing and adventure camping — to generate increased returns.

In all these projects, the underlying question is how might design address the integration of these various operations.

[Project map (top) and augmented ice roads (bottom), from Emergent North; Lateral Office/InfraNet Lab]

mammoth: We very much like this idea, that explicitly describing the various tangential economic benefits of a proposed infrastructure becomes a part of the design itself — rather than, as is probably too often the case, being seen as something that is extrinsic to the work of design. A close parallel to this might be the research of Roger Sherman, whose chapter in The Infrastructural City (“Count(ing) on Change”) seeks to demonstrate that the negotiations required for the implementation of a project not only do not necessarily detract from the project, but can often be a productive enterprise leading to otherwise unforeseeable solutions. In both cases — you, integrating and aggregating programs, particularly economic; Roger Sherman, exploring the possibilities produced by processes of negotiation — something which is often thought of as prior to and even antagonistic towards the process of design is wrapped into design, enriching it.

In a recent interview at Places, the landscape architects Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha were asked to describe their model of practice, which they have referred to as “activist practice”. For them, this means that, rather than pursuing clients and commissions, they have sought to do projects — often taking the form of publications and exhibitions — which question cultural understandings of landscape, which provoke questions. They break “conceptual ground”, rather than physical ground. This idea — that practicing landscape architecture or architecture means much more than just building buildings or planting landscapes, as obviously important as those things are — is not new, but it does often seem to be perennially lost in the distinction that is made between “real” and “paper” architecture.

One kind of “conceptual ground” that Lateral is explicitly engaged in breaking is this work of developing an “expanded field” for architecture, which would obviously include the sort of additions to the process of design that we’ve been discussing. But, more broadly — yet thinking specifically of things architects do — what does “practicing architecture” mean to Lateral? Since we’ve already been dancing around this question (and phrased that way, it’s perhaps a bit broad), perhaps one way to think about this might be to tell us about what you think or hope the future might hold for Lateral.

White: We are not very good at forecasting in the mirror, but I can say that the combination of writing, research and design has helped to chart our thinking within the field. As for how this might define a practice, we are willing to let this take place naturally as and when opportunities arise. But I think we are ultimately interested in reformatting an architectural practice – we aspire to the design of ideas and idea of design, though we don’t think this precludes building. However, we have turned down the model of a boutique practice in order to pursue projects in the public realm from the outset, rather than ‘graduate’ into that kind of work.

As for your comment on the expanded field, architecture will continue to oscillate between bouts of autonomy and transdiciplinarity for some time. This has been evident in the last decade or so, and we have made our allegiances to transdisciplinarity apparent. But as this debate has swung internally, there continues to be a lack of practices and design strategists that have staked a claim at the seams of where architecture meets environment. This is where we would align ourselves (and Bracket has become a useful venue for curating practices and thinkers within that position).

And just to qualify a bit, we don’t see ourselves as (nor would we want to be) economists or ecologists. We prefer being architectural strategists – only we sometimes radiate outside traditional notions of the profession to more fully understand a context or a condition. And in that process, we don’t limit ourselves to a superficial treatment of the subject.

To return back to your reading, we are certainly sympathetic to Roger Sherman’s criticism of planning’s inability to respond to certain urban change, his call for architects to assume risk, and the power of entrepreneurial local anomalies to catalyze successive development. And being sympathetic to design incorporating new models of planning, we share his claim that “design strategy operates hand-in-hand with a business plan” (from Sherman and Dana Cuff’s forthcoming Fast-Forward Urbanism). For us, this is the difference between operating tactically and operating strategically. We like chess player Savielly Tartakover’s saying that “tactics is knowing what to do when there is something to do. Strategy is knowing what to do when there is nothing to do.” This ‘nothing to do’ can be interpreted as either 1) seemingly nothing possible to do; or 2) seemingly nothing needed to do. Both interpretations necessitate a more expanded understanding of the brief or context that precedes architecture. We prefer working when there is nothing to do.

By mammoth | Posted in architecture, infrastructure, interviews, mammoth book club, the-expanded-field | Tagged infranet-lab, lateral, reading-the-infrastructural-city | Comments (3)

August 17, 2010 – 10:11 pm

“global hubs and mega-cities”

[Housing in Hong Kong, from photographer Michael Wolf's series "Architecture of Density"]

In the latest Foreign Policy, Parag Khanna argues that the city is increasingly becoming a more important geopolitical entity than the nation-state:

The 21st century will not be dominated by America or China, Brazil or India, but by the city. In an age that appears increasingly unmanageable, cities rather than states are becoming the islands of governance on which the future world order will be built. This new world is not — and will not be — one global village, so much as a network of different ones…

Time, technology, and population growth have massively accelerated the advent of this new urbanized era. Already, more than half the world lives in cities, and the percentage is growing rapidly. But just 100 cities account for 30 percent of the world’s economy, and almost all its innovation.

Neither 19th-century balance-of-power politics nor 20th-century power blocs are useful in understanding this new world. Instead, we have to look back nearly a thousand years, to the medieval age in which cities such as Cairo and Hangzhou were the centers of global gravity, expanding their influence confidently outward in a borderless world. When Marco Polo set forth from Venice along the emergent Silk Road, he extolled the virtues not of empires, but of the cities that made them great. He admired the vineyards of Kashgar and the material abundance of Xi’an, and even foretold — correctly — that no one would believe his account of Chengdu’s merchant wealth. It’s worth remembering that only in Europe were the Middle Ages dark — they were the apogee of Arab, Muslim, and Chinese glory.

While the article is too brief and too wide-ranging to treat its thesis (really, theses, as Khanna makes a host of relatively provocative claims through pure assertion) as thoroughly as it deserves, it is an interesting read. Perhaps his forthcoming book will explore the ideas outlined in the article in more depth? (I have to admit that I am, predictably, partial to his earlier assertion that “independence without infrastructure is futile”.)

By rholmes | Posted in futures, geography, urbanism | Tagged geopolitics, parag-khanna | Comments (3)

August 14, 2010 – 3:41 pm

reading the infrastructural city, chapter ten index

[Bird's-eye view of "Wal-(medley mixed-up mélange montage mash-up shopping)mart", an absurdly-titled (but also somewhat light-hearted) proposal for a Wal-Mart on the Gowanus Canal, drawn by (then?) Yale architecture students Alexander Maymind & Cody Davis; read an in-depth interview regarding the project at Archinect.]

Catching up (post-viral and sister-visiting-from-Mongolia break) on the Infrastructural City, with two posts regarding “Distribution”: Brett Milligan contributes “The X-Ray of Retail”, which discusses the internal landscape of big-box stores as a microcosm of regional distribution, while Nam Henderson discusses both Lane Barden’s photo-essay “The Street” (on Wilshire Boulevard) and “Distribution”.

Nam also recently posted on two of the earlier chapters, “Cell Structure” and “Count(ing) on Change”; while reading his post, you might pay particular note to the video Nam dug up of a panel discussion from Michigan’s “Future of Urbanism Conference” this past March. The discussion, on “urban and regional ecologies”, features panelists Alan Berger, Chris Reed, Edward Soja, and Kazys Varnelis; while I haven’t had a chance to watch it in full yet, my suspicion, given the panelists, is that it’d be worth the half-hour to do so.

By rholmes | Posted in mammoth book club, readings | Tagged alan-berger, chris-reed, distribution, kazys-varnelis, reading-the-infrastructural-city | Comments (0)

August 10, 2010 – 8:50 pm

public landscapes of distribution

[A model from SITE Architects' series of projects in the seventies and eighties for BEST Products Company; I don't think this particular one was built (I'd like to be told I'm wrong about that), but those that were built are also rather entertaining, and early examples of attempts to modify the architecture of big-box stores.]

I thought that, having discussed distribution in a relatively abstract manner, it might be interesting to look at some particular architectural proposals for distribution. (To be clear, these are quick looks, not careful readings.)

If there is a common thread here — and I don’t know that it is necessarily particularly important to find one — it might be the effort to re-program, to seek new typologies that might negotiate between the desire for a healthy public realm (which is something these architects bring to distribution) and the spatial demands inherent in the logic and logistics of distribution.

A. DUCK-AND-COVER
Roger Sherman Architecture and Urban Design

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Those who have been reading the Infrastructural City along with mammoth will probably recognize Roger Sherman as the author of the chapter before “Distribution”, “Count(ing) on Change”. In “Duck-and-Cover” Sherman proposes both an architecture and a business plan, aiming to create a series of new identities for Target stores — “Target Green”, “Target Town”, and “Target Play” — which bundle public spaces with specialized big-box architectures which cater to more narrowly conceived audiences than the traditional Target store. Each aims to offer something to the surrounding community which is missing in its context — thus “Play”, for instance, is situated on an “infill site in open-space starved Brooklyn”.

B. FLATSPACE
Lateral

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Many of mammoth’s readers are presumably familiar with Lateral (Mason White and Lola Sheppard); “Flatspace” is one of their earlier projects, circa 2003. (Some of the images above are taken from Lateral collaborator Neeraj Bhatia’s The Open Workshop.) I’ll let text from Young Architects 7 describe the project:

“As exurban growth is increasingly consumed by agglomerating retail corridors, its single-use status begins to systematically redefine public space at the margins of cities. This assembly of highways and paved planes is dominated by big boxes and retail power centers, conflating an ever-evolving consumer culture with public space. In this environment, public space as an indeterminate open system has been supplanted by a highly controlled environment of familiar homogeneity. The possibilities of intervening in this exurban condition, what we call “flatspace”, on its own terms remain overlooked.

Detached from a larger, complex spatial network, flatspace is comprised of autonomous adjacencies of selfsame components–big box, parking lot, landscape lining. Accessed or linked only by stretches of asphalt within the confines of an automobile, flatspace limits the physical contact of bodies. In its subordination to the car and the ease of mobility, flatspaces are places of sterile transit, or nonplaces. The potential for design in flatspace is less about inserting a foreign program or form and more about positing that the system can recalibrate existing elements and agitate encounters of the public without altering its capitalist dependency on efficiency and geoeconomics.

A typical retail corridor in Columbus, Ohio, served as a case study. Three filters–program, parking, and landscape–are used to test alternate organizational strategies. Each contains three strategies of recalibrated protocols for organization. The nine networks are not intended as design proposals but as strategies or tactics for emergent relationships already at work within exurban corridors.”

When we talk about expanding the territories that we consider in designing a work of architecture (as mammoth often does), one interesting question that is raised is whether we respond with tactics that are seeking to accommodate these influences in a more expansive way, or with tactics that seek to use the act of architecture as an opportunity to alter the processes influencing that territory.

What makes “Flatspace” such an interesting project — and different from many architectural proposals for big-box stores and ex-urban landscapes — is that it is an example of the latter. It emgages the spatial logics which define those architectures and landscapes, and in doing so shows a series of ways in which the logic (and extended context) of the ex-urban landscape becomes an opportunity to re-configure that landscape.

You can watch videos explaining in depth three of the nine networks — “Pixelscape”, “On-Off Ramps”, and “Confetti” (the same three included in the slideshow above) — at The Open Workshop.

C. STUDY FOR WAL-MART
University of Arkansas Community Design Center

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The UACDC’s “Study for Wal-Mart” aims to construct “viable civic expressions” within the “generic development protocols” of the big-box landscape, focusing on the zones of transition between different components of that landscape — “from public street to store checkouts” — which the Center refers to as “ecotones”. For larger images, click through to UACDC’s site.

D. THE SUBURBAN GENERAL STORE
R&DAR

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The R&DAR team (which, in another connection to The Infrastructural City, includes Frank Ruchala, who wrote “Crude City”), like Sherman’s team, proposes both a set of architectural elements and a business plan — though, in comparison to Sherman’s proposal, their proposal probably emphasizes the business plan more heavily and the (traditional) architectural elements less heavily (which is not to say anything about the relative merits of the proposals). Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the proposal is the attention that R&DAR paid to how a typical existing zoning code might be artfully modified to support the viability of their proposal — a small hack, perhaps, but one which suggests just how fruitful a willingness to carefully read and think through the impacts of such dull legal texts might be.

For further reading: Free Association Design brings up RTVR’s “Post-Carbon Highway”, which focuses on another landscape of distribution, transport corridors. Check out Brett’s post, and read more at Alphabet City. Also: we’re testing a new capability here — slideshows — and I’m guessing there’s a bug or two we haven’t encountered yet. If you see something (or don’t see anything), let us know.

Pixelscape
The pixel scheme begins by ‘lowering the resolution’ on the current landscape, in order to read it as a series of patches. In digital terms, a pixel is, in fact, composed of three colors that oscillate between varying degrees of purity. Here, pixel types correspond to surface types of building, parking and landscape. Zones of pixel corruption are introduced, and hybridized pixels emerge. The resolution is then ‘turned up’ again, revealing a new ‘impure’ landscape. It is in these ‘impure’ landscapes that hybrid conditions emerge – a mixing of programmes and modes of transport. These hybrids encourage unlikely encounters which contribute to the public sphere.

By rholmes | Posted in architecture, mammoth book club, the-expanded-field, urbanism | Tagged big-box, distribution, lateral, r&dar, reading-the-infrastructural-city, roger-sherman, site, uacdc | Comments (10)

July 27, 2010 – 2:00 pm

reading the infrastructural city, chapter nine index

“Once a vast carpet of healthy vegetation and virgin forest, the Amazon rain forest is changing rapidly. This image of Bolivia shows dramatic deforestation in the Amazon Basin. Loggers have cut long paths into the forest, while ranchers have cleared large blocks for their herds. Fanning out from these clear-cut areas are settlements built in radial arrangements of fields and farms. Healthy vegetation appears bright red in this image.” NASA, via but does it float

A pair of posts related to Roger Sherman’s “Count(ing) on Change”:

DPR-Barcelona relates the logic governing urban development described by Sherman to informal streetfront shops and transient markets in Los Angeles and Mexico. One of my favorite tidbits was this description of a failed attempt by Los Angeles to formalize some such arrangements:

[There is evidence] of some kind of hidden agreements in between legal commerces and illegal vendors whom arrange a kind of rent to use the portion of sidewalk in front of the legal store. Researchers indicate that a program to incorporate street vendors into the formal economy has already been tried in LA, and failed. Special Sidewalk Vending District Ordinance of 1994 authorized the creation of 8 vending zones in the city, but only two pilot programs were launched—one in MacArthur Park and the other in San Pedro: both were out of business by 2005.

Free Association Design has me convinced that Monopoly and The Wire ought to be taught in architecture schools, and reminds us of Gordon Matta-Clark’s Fake Estates project.

As both the playful abstraction of Monopoly and Counting On Change demonstrate, the aggregated collection of these fuzzy, interpersonal negotiations are integral processes of the city and are potentially underutilized by designers. Returning to the HBO series The Wire (another inseparable meshwork of reality and imagination) the show can be construed as a visual, dramatized thesis in support of Sherman’s ideas.

Part of what made The Wire so fascinating was the overt revelation of how an entire city is built, and evolves upon the collective of such informal (and non-law abiding) dealings, rather than a single or autonomous masterplan.

You’ll have a hard time convincing me that these demonstrate less important lessons than the latest Francis Ching book, at least.

By Stephen | Posted in mammoth book club | Tagged counting-on-change, informality, los angeles, reading-the-infrastructural-city | Comments (1)

July 26, 2010 – 6:00 am

distribution

We’re reading The Infrastructural City. This is week ten — after this, we’ve got Robert Sumrell’s “Props” next week and a brief return to the introduction the following week. Fill yourself in, if that’s necessary.

[An aerial shot of the Alameda Corridor amidst warehouses and distribution centers, from Lane Barden's photo-essay "The Trench", which follows "Distribution" in the text]

We’ve now reached the next-to-last chapter of The Infrastructural City, Deborah Richmond’s “Consumers Gone Wild: Distribution”. Richmond begins the chapter with a description of the “super-distribution centers” which dot the I-5 corridor between Los Angeles and San Francisco. When goods arrive at the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach — and vast quantities of goods arrive at those ports, which together “receive more than three times the cargo volume of the next largest American port, the port of New York and New Jersey” — they are often quickly shipped north up the Alameda Corridor:

“Running adjacent to Alameda Boulevard, the $2 billion, 23-mile-long open trench of the Alameda Corridor conveys trains from the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach to rail yards near the city’s downtown and on to points beyond in Kern County and the Inland Empire. Allowing double-height, stacked trains to pass while eliminating traffic conflicts at over 200 intersections between the ports and downtown, the corridor mitigates many drayage problems such as unfortunate collisions between passenger vehicles and trains full of televisions, blouses, and microcomputers… Roughly 60% of the goods coming through the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are distributed to the Southern California region, while only one-third make their way onto local railroads (most notably via the Alameda Corridor) for distribution to the Midwest, South, and East Coast.

It is this character as a throughput city that has ultimately marked the landscape of Los Angeles more than water, more than cars, and more than movies. The transfer of shipping containers from ships to trains, trucks, container transfer buildings, retail outlets, and even homes, has been supported by a particularly voracious and narcissistic consumer whose ideal home is the city of Los Angeles itself, but whose influence radiates outward along truck routes and rail lines to the rest of the country.”

1 In order: the Ports, the Alameda Corridor, “super-distribution centers”, freeways and eighteen-wheelers, warehouses and “big box” retail outlets, and finally to the home as a warehouse for consumer goods

Unlike many of the previous chapters in the book, such as “Owens Lake” or “Gravel”, which were more strictly constructed as guidebooks to the infrastructural conditions of Los Angeles, “Distribution” continues to flit back and forth in this manner between descriptions of the spatial constructs of distribution¹ and diatribes against the consumerist society that produces such spatial constructs. Those diatribes do over-reach in places — as in the case of the above claim that distribution has been the most significant marker on the landscape of Los Angeles, which seems an unnecessary claim in a text that serves as a single, long argument for the diversity of the infrastructural forces shaping Los Angeles. However, they are also often relatively cogent, as when Richmond argues that “the movement of consumer goods through the city” produces competition between humans and their future possessions, both “for open space on roads” (where relatively tiny passenger vehicles must navigate between “heaving eighteen-wheelers”) and in the genericization of the public realm (into a “transitory space of blind facades and low, blank walls”) in favor of private “control spaces of consumer constructs”.

[Wal-Mart distribution center in Porterville, CA, via Google Maps]

Perhaps the most interesting discussion in the chapter is the discussion of warehouses and “big box” stores, which, like the recent research on Wal-Mart presented at Places by architect Jesse LeCavalier, notes that these typologies are a peculiarly contemporary iteration of “architecture without architects”, guided not by vernacular building practices, but by spreadsheets and the demands of logistics:

“As William Mitchell observed, there exists in addition to all manner of “retail fronts,” a corresponding “architectural back” consisting of the supply chain infrastructure that allows goods to arrive on demand at specific, physical locations around the world. This architectural back has surpassed in cost and architectural importance any notion of a “front” for big box buildings. It is evident that more money is spent on the building envelope in terms of dock doors, special materials handling equipment, and site access to the rear of these buildings than is spent on the architecturally mediocre storefronts and office lobbies tacked onto the front of such buildings. One has only to pass along the loading-dock side of a warehouse or retail building to observe the subtle details that connect buildings to the supply chain. Attached by a weather-sealed gasket to the roll-up doors of the building, shipping containers come to rest.”

This also serves the reinforce one of the themes of Kazys Varnelis’s chapter, “Invisible City”: the importance of the architecture of the big box building as a cultural or formal performance pales in comparison to the importance of the building as a conduit for flows of materials and goods. These flows, and the logics of distribution and logistics that order them, are the “command line” of the infrastructural city. If architecture has something to say to the big box, it must be spoken in that language, as Richmond notes in reflecting on the (perhaps now thankfully dying?) trend towards architectural re-use of empty shipping containers:

“As a matter for architects to consider, the container itself is hardly interesting as an object retro-fitted for human habitation; rather, it is the extent to which more and more building types are being formatted with the specific aim of integrating fixed sites into the intermodal supply chain, or the extent to which buildings are already intermodal containers that pique our interest.”

As in the case of the container, the former tactic — considering the big-box as an object — is unfortunately the more common community tactic for dealing with typologies related to distribution. As laudable as the desire to reformat the big-box for urban locations is, reformatting alone may very well be futile, so long as it is practiced without interacting with the “capitalist dependency on efficiency and geo-economics” (Lateral, from their “Flatspace” project) so ably described by LeCavalier. (See, for instance, the way in which Vermont’s attempts to keep out Wal-Mart on the grounds of local preservation were circumvented and rendered irrelevant.) In that same piece, LeCavalier notes that focusing on new forms for the big box building or the strip mall without interacting with the logics of distribution and logistics that produced the original forms may not only be insufficient, but also missing more powerful opportunities:

The unintended result [of a community demanding purely formal modifications to new "urban" Wal-Marts] is a tacit endorsement of Walmart’s larger operations. But if communities and critics focused less on what the stores look like and more on what they do — less on form and more on performance — it’s possible that genuinely new formats might emerge, formats that would optimize urban settings in their handling of public space, infrastructure access, program mix, and so on.

If you’ve been following the Infrastructural City discussion and actually wading all the way through our extended ramblings, you’ve probably reached the end of this post and thought to yourself “well, that was mercifully brief”. You’re right, but you’re also wrong, because we’ll be back later in the week (well, probably this week) with posts on recent proposals for the architecture of distribution and a brief bit of commentary on the phenomenal flatness of Terminal Island.

By rholmes | Posted in architecture, infrastructure, mammoth book club, the-city-we-have, urbanism | Tagged big-box, distribution, reading-the-infrastructural-city, suburbia | Comments (8)

July 18, 2010 – 11:41 am

“anchors in a mutable field”

["City Market", a photomontage of the negotiated space of flower market in Bangalore, from Mathur and da Cunha's 2006 book and exhibition Deccan Traverses; image via Places]

In addition to describing a theory of the transactions that govern the interactions between property owners, Roger Sherman’s “Counting (on) Change” also makes the broader argument that architects have incorrectly prioritized stability over flux:

Cities today develop at a rate that outpaces architects’ and planners’ efforts to shape them. Political and economic circumstances change so rapidly that by the time a plan is realized, it is already obsolete; a mere election or market downturn can radically alter the assumptions and objectives of a project or master plan. In this milieu, the path of least resistance for urban development calls for action rather than reaction–to develop not in comprehensive wholes, but in realizable chunks or increments, placing an emphasis more on augmentation than on organization. For architects, the time has come to recognize, finally, that contemporary urbanism is better rethought around conceptions of progress and potential — via design strategies for unfolding the future — rather than another utopian horizon…

Rather than assuming stability and explaining change, this means that architects must learn to assume change and explain stability. Fortunately, for all their complexity, cities — like self-organized systems — are not entirely unpredictable. Their ability to adapt to change is related to simple behaviors, or rules-of-thumb… Those environments must be strategized not just in terms of how they are intended to work today, but also how else they might work at another time or under different circumstances.

This — the need to develop design processes that accommodate flux first and offer structures of stability second — is one of the major themes of the work of landscape architects Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha. In a recent interview published at Places, Mathur and da Cunha were asked a question about this issue of stability:

SS + NP: Does your emphasis on change, your efforts to design for mutability, make it hard to find clients in the so-called real world, where both public and private clients tend to favor or at least expect stability?

AM + DD: To seek stability — to settle — is a human condition. For design practice it is important to respond to this need as a negotiated tension between the desire for settlement and the inevitability of change. One way is to construct boundaries, material or representational, and aim to separate, control, predict and manage what’s within. Another way is to construct what we call anchors in an open, mutable field — a process that begins with material specificity but extends in ways we cannot entirely predict. Today, sadly, the former approach dominates design and planning, and we are reminded of its limitations by disasters — like the flood in Mumbai — which are often intensified precisely because of our efforts to control them.

Mathur and da Cunha suggest their entry to the Fresh Kills competition, “Dynamic Coalition” (which mammoth described and discussed previously, near the middle of this post, which is concerned with larger questions of stability in design), as an example of a project that seeks to construct such “anchors in an open, mutable field”:

In our project we explored the role of the designer as the creator of starting points, of anchors for the staging of social and ecological processes over time. Rather than interpreting our responsibility as the delivery of an end-product, a “place” that the public is allowed to enter and use, we developed a strategy which started with various publics — not one generic public but diverse groups, including educators, ecologists, artists, city authorities, garbologists (people who study garbage), etc.

That’s why we called our project “Dynamic Coalition.” We aimed to generate design by working with these various publics on multiple initiatives. And rather than doing a final master plan, which would have formally reconciled the value of each initiative, we developed a strategy that would have played out in time. Some projects might take off, others might not, depending on which agency or group has more power, more funds, more energy. We chose to suspend the idea of a final product that is “phased” in time, and instead focus on where and how a design initiative begins and on how it might evolve and extend in time.

The entire interview is worth reading, branching off into such topics as the importance of landscape representation and what Mathur and da Cunha term “activist practice”.

By rholmes | Posted in landscape-architecture, mammoth book club, urbanism | Tagged counting-on-change, mathur-da-cunha, reading-the-infrastructural-city, roger-sherman | Comments (2)

July 17, 2010 – 1:07 pm

risk

These are chapters eight and nine of The Infrastructural City; if you’re not familiar with the series, you can start here and catch up here.

Thinking about the new urban landscape and public space and wondering where to start, I suddenly remember how, as a boy, I built my first crystal receiver [...] You would put the headphones on, turn the potentiometer and you could hear all kinds of more-or-less vague noises from different radio stations. They would become clearer and then fade away again. This produced a mysterious effect and it suggested that the sources were far away. The most stunning aspect of the experience was that “they” had always been there and that “they” had been there simultaneously. There were so many of “them” that the crystal receiver worked best at night, when most of the stations were off the air. In the dark, intimate space under my blankets I would scan the air. It made clear that public radio, public space was everywhere, and that you just had to plug in.

Bart Lootsma, “The New Landscape” from Mutations

This space has gotten a little more complicated since Bart Lootsma’s childhood. The multivariate public commons composed of broadband spectra has become increasingly contested, mirroring an evolving bureaucratic complexity in contemporary cities. Much of The Infrastructural City up to these chapters has mapped the development of this complexity, tracing how the humble beginnings of roads, gravel pits, and aqueducts gave rise to the Los Angeles we know today. By confronting infrastructures initiated early in the city’s history the text investigates the interdependence among (variously) the urban landscape, city politics and culture, and the infrastructures themselves. These two chapters – Roger Sherman’s Count(ing) on Change, and Ted Kane and Rick Miller’s Cell Structure – represent a slight shift in focus, presenting us with a set of infrastructures wholly developed recently, in a more congested urban sociopolitical landscape.

Before we go any further, I’d like to second FALSANYC in noting that Cell Structure’s implication that private development of infrastructure is a new demon, ignores history:

In fact many of our great urban and regional infrastructures have begun as private ventures. The railroads were originally private enterprises, the New York City subway/interborough rapid transit system was privately funded, and the electric grid in much of the northeastern US is under the auspices of the private-but-heavily regulated Con Edison. But we live in a decade when all design writing is hyperbolic [gentle tease: note the irony here] and rather than building on the past, seeks to break with it and launch the world into the future based solely on the brilliance of this or that practitioner/theorist.

This is not to imply Cell Structure is incorrect arguing that the private development model which created the cellular networks is without shortcomings, or in need of comparison to public infrastructural endeavors. But the strict public versus private dichotomy is an oversimplification. The grey area between ‘public’ and ‘private’ is magnified from both sides: by cities which behave like businesses; and by heavily regulated yet privately held companies (like the example of Con Edison above), as beholden to the public who vote in their regulators as they are the shareholders who vote on their board. I don’t mean to contend that the difference between public and private is unimportant, just that it masks a more important distinction brought to light by Cell Structure, which is development for constituencies vs development for markets.

Historically, infrastructural developments [by federal, state and regional interests] reacted to the urban needs of both private and public constituencies, addressed localized real estate interestes, responded to the need for commercial links between disparate communities, and implemented cold war defense logistics [....] Private infrastructure flourishes in [a] vacuum of myopic jurisdictions, taking advantage of gaps in oversight to create new, private realms unburdened by the equal access that has historically been the obligation of utilities operating in the public realm.

We learn public infrastructure projects are usually beholden to the demand of constituents (voters, special interest groups, chambers of commerce, etc). This generally leads to comprehensive (‘fair’) coverage, yet often inefficient or unreliable operation, as there isn’t much redundancy built into the system because its goal is to cover the most possible constituents at the lowest cost. In contrast, privately developed infrastructures are virtually always in response to market demand (though they may transition to constituent control at some point in their future). Competition among providers will often result in redundant, more reliable networks (as seen in the layout of New York’s subway system, and the overlapping cellular networks in Los Angeles), but access can spread more slowly, with increased coverage occurring in sync with profitability.

These results are more obviously rational when correlated with the milieu of risks and incentives faced by responders to constituent demand and/or market demand. Because competing telecommunications companies could control the size and location of their infrastructural investment (tailoring it to certain markets), numerous players fought over the same lucrative market population, leading to redundancy for that market, and gaps elsewhere in the city. Limiting size and scope of investment to the most promising markets was a risk management strategy, and creating cell phone towers which execute a singular function with a high degree of efficiency wasn’t a risky approach to infrastructural development.

In contrast, the property developers, land owners, and various other invested parties catalogued by Roger Sherman in Count(ing) on Change don’t have this same flexibility – the location and population they have to work with is fixed. Because of this, they managed risk while maximizing their ability to earn incentives by capitalizing on their rights and engaging in negotiated deals which engendered many possible scenarios for success. They made due with what they had, with what was around them:

In the northeastern corner of Hollywood, for instance, a property has been assembled out of three lots to construct a virtual urban ecosystem. It is “habitat” to four entities: two by right (a car wash and a juice bar), and two by adjacency (an apartment building and a public right-of-way). Though each use attracts a different audience, the structures and territories they occupy connect to one another spatially in a way that at the same time articulates their socioeconomic interdependency.

One of four couplings among the above stakeholders was the de-facto transition of a wedge-shaped piece of Hollymont Car Wash’s property into an addition to the public right-of-way:

Why would the owner of the wash willingly cede a portion of his own property? Simply put, the car wash, realizing that it could not use that odd sliver of land for its operation, recognized the value it possessed as a tool with which to construct a “clean” public image for itself. That the wash also uses its grey water to irrigate this landscape further underlines their awareness of the collateral benefits that could accrue to them through a seeming unselfish gesture.

Sherman’s excellent chapter (subsequently expanded into a book, which just arrived at mammoth HQ yesterday) describes three more increasingly-complex negotiated urbanisms-in-microcosm, arguing that game theory (far more than any masterplan) is the true protocol by which our cities persist.

The field of Game Theory, which studies the dynamics of negotiation, lays out similar bargaining strategies players (in the case of the city, these include property owners, neighbors, merchants, city agencies, etc.) use as they cross their own political and economic objectives with a finite set of available options. [...] Even if never precisely predictable, the endgame is nearly always the same: to settle upon an equilibrium enforced by each player’s self-interest. More than any other single logic, it is the nature of how this inevitable quid pro quo, or tradeoff is settled that offers the greatest potential as a productive instigator of change-by-design: where design is nothing less that a strategy of both staging and creatively working out the causal relationships that comprise the city-as-ecosystem, and in so doing not only makes evident but actually constitutes the tie that binds the system

Of course, to be able to confidently engage with cities at this level requires the ability to accurately estimate risk and reward – capital, political, social, etc. – not only as applies to one’s own interests, but also to persuade other invested parties. It’s intriguing to hypothesize about what would happen if this model of risk management – one which maximizes paths toward success instead of developing one model and limiting it to the most promising markets – was applied to privately developed infrastructures, like Los Angeles’ telecommunications networks. But then we remember that surely, it already is, and the results just aren’t always what we had hoped for. Whether this is because developments at that scale simply aren’t nimble enough to engage at the level of the examples Sherman describes, or because they have made attempts but found the incentives insufficient, I don’t know – but occasionally, the negotiations are successful, as demonstrated by the multiple projects in Count(ing) on Change which engage oil drilling companies, the Department of Water and Power, and LA Department of Building and Safety.

[I scarcely knew where to begin writing this post. There is so much more going on in these chapters that I barely touched on: the use of embodied urbanism urbanism techniques (to borrow the term from Free Association Design), sometimes accidentally or serendipitously, which instead of legal or financial agreements is the bond of many of these agreements; the notion that some infrastructural networks (like cell phone towers) are useful from a very early stage, while others (like subways) require a greater critical mass, and the impact this has on developing new type of infrastructure in the city; the expanding role of private developers creating public infrastructure (check out this law which Arizona just passed, for example). I'm sure we'll find plenty to talk about during the extra week we gave ourselves.]

By Stephen | Posted in economics, infrastructure, mammoth book club | Tagged equity-urbanism, iphone, los angeles, reading-the-infrastructural-city | Comments (9)

July 13, 2010 – 10:23 pm

reading the infrastructural city, chapter eight index

[Image via flickr user Grahamko]

Yes, we’ve fallen a bit behind with The Infrastructural City. But we’ve got a plan to remedy that — we’re pushing back the schedule. This is actually less because of our lag (this week was supposed to be an “off” week, so we’d be caught up with Stephen’s hybrid “Mobile Phones”-”Property” post this week and my post on “Distribution” next Monday), and more because we want to make sure that Roger Sherman’s “Count(ing) on Change” (the “Property” chapter) gets the full discussion it deserves. If you read John Hill’s Daily Dose of Architecture, you may have caught his review of Sherman’s book-length treatment of the same topic, L.A. Under the Influence; if not, that review (and accompanying Google StreetView tour) may whet your appetite.

Right: the remaining schedule, adjusted:

July 12 Mobile Phones
July 19 Property
July 26 Distribution + The Trench
August 2 Props
August 7 Introduction (as conclusion)

Meanwhile, our fellow readers have picked up the slack in our output, contributing several posts on Mobile Phones which are worth your while.

Free Association Design suggests that the cellular networks Kane and Miller describe are an exemplary instance of “corporate landscape urbanism” — “which both precedes the [landscape urbanist] movement and is far more advanced in its operations”.

DPR-Barcelona ask what parallels might be drawn between the cellular organization of airspace and the physical organization of present, future, and speculative cities.

FASLANYC speculates about what sort of organizational and financial clues urban interventionists might take from the structures and practices of cellular corporations.

Finally, we’ve already linked to Andrew Wade’s post at Polis, but in case you missed it, there it is again. Wade asks: “if the processes of corporate decision-making and their impacts on urban infrastructure were creatively mapped and demonstrated, could it influence a recalibration of [city and regional planning]?” We say: most definitely.

By rholmes | Posted in mammoth book club | Tagged reading-the-infrastructural-city | Comments (1)

June 29, 2010 – 9:23 pm

reading the infrastructural city: chapter seven index

[A "feral house" in Detroit, via Sweet Juniper, who has many more pictures; houses and porches, of course, cannot be mowed, and so one often finds early successional plants such as Ailanthus taking advantage of that fact while their brethren a few feet away are easily suppressed by even the most sporadic of maintenance regimes; you might also enjoy Sweet Juniper's flickr set "Life on the Urban Prairie"]

Running with Techentin’s speculation about future cybernetic forests, DPR-Barcelona catalog a series of “Performative Organic Machines”: telephone wire parasites, “eco-boulevards”, free-roaming mechanical colonies composed of plants, bacteria, and robot.

Relatedly but not identical, spy upon your suburban neighbors in the Terrestial Shrub Rover.

At Free Association Design, Brett Milligan contributes a pair of posts, the first a slideshow of “spontaneous urban vegetation” in Portland and the second looking at a particular example of a constructed urban forest, San Francisco’s Mount Sutro.

We’ll be back later this week with a post on chapter eight, “Cell Structure”, which looks at the impact of the proliferation of privately-funded, owned, and operated cellular infrastructures.

By rholmes | Posted in landscape, mammoth book club | Tagged reading-the-infrastructural-city, tree-huggers | Comments (1)

June 22, 2010 – 2:27 pm

future forests of the infrastructural city

This is week seven of our reading of The Infrastructural City; if you’re not familiar with the series, you can start here and catch up here. With our delayed posting of the previous chapter, we didn’t get around to posting an index, but you can read FASLANYC’s contrarian take on the chapter here and Peter Nunns’ look at telecoms, the future of air travel, and de-globalization here.

[Powerline pruning, photographed by flickr user Justin Berger]

In the seventh chapter of The Infrastructural City, “Landscape: Tree Huggers”, architect Warren Techentin discusses “landscape as a foundational infrastructure” in Los Angeles. (By landscape, it’s worth noting, Techentin means specifically ‘plants’, usually ‘trees’, and quite often ‘cultivated trees’, though “accidentally imported” plants make the occasional appearance, as well.)

Techentin begins by describing the initial entanglements of Los Angeles with trees: the council tree near which the Gabrielino Indians built the village of Yangna, Los Angeles’ immediate predecessor; the orange groves, which brought both economic vitality and the ever-increasing demand for imported water to the basin; and, most recently, imported ornamental trees.

The most iconic of these imported trees, the palm, was particularly vital in constructing the image of Los Angeles. Real estate developers — such as Venice Beach’s Abbot Kinney — planted rows of them to demarcate plots, botanical markers of future urbanisms. The palm was particularly valued for its exotic effect, which suggested to the prospective resident that Los Angeles was not just a place of economic opportunity, but a paradise of tropical (or, at the very least, Mediterranean) leisure.

LANDSCAPING

[Landscaping, idealized and extreme; photographed by flickr user Anna Verlet]

The palm, though, is only one early tool in the kit of plants used to alter the image of the city, a kit which has been refined and expanded as Los Angeles developed its extensive and signature car culture.

“After people moved in, so did businesses, and trees and plants were again used to raise the value of commercial properties. The front doors of many businesses in Los Angeles are accessed through parking lots so the effective use of landscaping to provide relief from the acres of asphalt is important for business. In a city built around cars, new forms of landscaping comprised of edging, hedging, containment, concealment, signage, embankment, topiary, and decor emerged simultaneously with the developing car culture. When the pedestrian space of the sidewalk disappeared amidst the spaces of strip malls and parking lots emerged between the street and the building, landscape again helped to soften the deleterious effects of the quickly erected, often bland commercial architecture. Particularly at fast food restaurants, new concepts of landscape were deployed exuberantly, often monstrously, to enhance the meal. Images of the pastoral suburban landscape of the Garden City, the exotic landscapes of Eden, and the topiary gardens of France and Japan were marshalled to screen the growing proliferation of urban artifacts: trash cans, electrical transformers, water meters, building edges, air conditioning condensers, and the sidewalk or roadway itself. All of these objects disappear through carefully selected plantings, thus allowing patrons to enjoy an authentic indoor-outdoor eating experience a few feet away from their automobiles. At any drive-through of a fast food restaurant, a country road is evoked as drivers circle their way between the speaker and pick-up window amidst plants that beautify the wait for food with a pleasing, planted environment that has grown over the stains, graffiti, garbage, insects, and dust of the city”

Landscaping — distinguished from other cultivated landscapes and gardens by its ubiquitous presence and banal qualities — is landscape as a real estate amenity. This is the landscaped iteration of the ‘equity urbanism’ that we described in our essay, “The Shelter Category”, that was published in MONU #12:

“…ownership culture [and 'equity urbanism' are] ultimately not founded on the rationales of personal responsibility, security, or stability, but upon the notion that the home is an asset for the cultivation of personal wealth. Architecturally, this is a strange notion —the home as a wealth generator, not shelter – but it does a great deal to explain the dominance of the primary architectural forms of contemporary America, the cheaply built urban condo and the even more cheaply built suburban home. The notable thing about both these architectural forms is how un-engaged architects are with them: both in that most critical discourse is unconcerned with mass-produced housing and in that mass-produced housing is produced with very little input from architects.”

Like architects who are essentially un-engaged with mass-produced housing, landscape architects are essentially un-engaged with car culture landscapes, even though, as many critics have noted, landscape is the primary medium constituting the automotive city. (We, at least in my experience, tend to shrink from the suggestion that there is any connection between what a ‘landscaper’ does and what a ‘landscape architect’ does.)

Techentin notes, though, that the palms are dying — many of old age, some of fungal and other diseases. The city, eager to replace these exotic trees with native species, has no plans to import replacements, indicating, to Techentin, that the era of landscape as image in Los Angeles is ending (though, it should be said, there is no apparent end in sight for landscaping as a mass amenity, and part of the reason that the city is not replacing palms is that their use in luxury developments in Florida and the southwest has driven up prices).

PERFORMATIVE URBAN FORESTS

[Mullein -- Verbascum thapsussm -- via Peter del Tredici]

The question we are left with, then, is: what are future urban natures like? Techentin argues that, as the palms die out — and, with them, perhaps also the idea that the landscape exists primarily to create an image — urban forests will become performative:

“While the city may be in the process of abandoning the palm as its foremost icon, trees continue to be enlisted as supplements to urban life… This relationship has become more symbiotic as we have come to an understanding of the importance of trees in the urban ecosystem. Taken in conjunction with plant life everywhere, trees collectively function like a giant machine — an enormous oxygen-producing and pollutant filtering infrastructure for the city. Urban forests generate oxygen, absorb airborne and ground toxins, beautify, shade, create privacy, reduce water run-off into storm systems, stabilize soil to prevent erosion, mitigate reflected heat off roads and sidewalks, produce “curb appeal” thereby increasing real estate values, provide wind control, animal habitat, and a source of food and flowers.”

“If, however, trees in the city have traditionally been appreciated because they were useless — removed from their non-urban cousins, which exist to provide us with lumber and fuel — they are increasingly becoming machines, bits of living infrastructure. The fall of the palm — that vapid, high-maintenance Hollywood starlet — is tied to this idea of trees moving from being merely ornamental to more performative organic machines — walling us in, generating the air we breath, shading our cities.”

One possible way in which forests might become performative, suggested by Techentin, is that they may be “hybrid mechanic-organic systems”:

“With the Frankenpine [cell phone towers which mimic tree forms] thriving, it is possible to speculate on an urban future in which thousands of artificial trees might be deployed throughout the city: on streets, in malls, and in our office landscapes. In the next generation of office or mall equipment, we may see new tree-machines proliferating amongst this landscape–providing wireless communication, video monitoring, air filtration, security, and space for storage, digital or otherwise. One can imagine a whole forest of imitative, performative, and embedded artificial “trees” deployed amongst real trees or, for that matter, prosthetic systems that would augment living trees, providing necessary features that we otherwise would find disagreeable to look at, some of which may provide a solution for some of today’s urban ills such as the reintroduction of animal habitats, methane gas venting, hazmat, and security monitoring systems, and so on.”

This, I suppose, might seem far-fetched and a stretching of the ‘tree’ metaphor until it becomes very thin indeed, but I’m not so sure that it is entirely ridiculous. What are these carbon storage structures, if not cybernetic trees (the engineers even refer to them as “artificial trees” configured in a “forest”), and what are the Voltrees (elaborated upon here by Pruned), if not prosthetic trees?

[Fall Panicum grows in pavement, via Peter del Tredici]

But, I would add (and this seems much more important to me): the rise of the performative tree will also be seen in the acceptance and valuation of “crypto-forests”, “cosmopolitan” plant communities, and invasive species. Techentin says: “Wild nature, or what may be left of it, seems all but removed from collective experience.” Despite this collective remove, though, there is wild nature in the city, only it is invasive and post-human, growing in legal and physical spaces of abandonment: a fence on property line, a sliver of land between two properties deemed to have no value as real-estate, the concrete bed of a channelized river.

I’m reminded of the fantastic new field guide, Wild Urban Plants of the Northeast, which is written by Peter del Tredici, who is both a botanist and researcher at the Arnold Arboretum and a lecturer for Harvard’s landscape program. Wild Urban Plants, though it is first and foremost a guide to the identification and characteristics of what del Tredici calls “cosmopolitan plants” — those plants which are adapted to the contaminated soils, frequent disturbance regimes, and harsh growing conditions which characterize urban ecologies, and so are able to survive and even thrive without maintenance or care in cities — is also an opportunity for del Tredici to make the argument that we ought to begin to value these plants (many of whom are often lumped together under the derogatory rubric of “invasives”) and the communities that they form, because they provide ecological services at a uniquely low cost.

Quoting at length from del Tredici’s recent article in Natural History (PDF):

“The ecology of the city is defined not only by the cultivated plants that require maintenance and the protected remnants of natural landscapes, but also by the spontaneous vegetation that dominates the neglected interstices. Greenery fills the vacant spaces between our roads, homes, and businesses; lines ditches and chain-link fences; sprouts in sidewalk cracks and atop neglected rooftops. Some of those plants, such as box elder, quaking aspen, and riverside grape, are native species present before humans drastically altered the land. Others were brought in intentionally or unintentionally by people, including chicory, Norway spruce, and Japanese knotweed. And still others, among them common ragweed, path rush ( Juncus tenuis), and tufted lovegrass (Eragrostis pectinacea), arrived on their own, dispersed by wind, water, or wild animals. Such species grow and reproduce in many American cities, especially cities with faltering economies, without being planted or cared for. They can provide important social and ecological services at very little cost to taxpayers, and if left undisturbed long enough they may even develop into woodlands.

There is no denying that most people consider many such plants to be “weeds.” From a utilitarian perspective, a weed is any plant that grows on its own where people do not want it to grow. From the biological perspective, weeds are opportunistic plants that are adapted to disturbance in all its myriad forms, from bulldozers to acid rain. Their pervasiveness in the urban environment is simply a reflection of the continual disruption that characterizes that habitat—they are not its cause. [Emphasis mine.] …

In general, the successful urban plant needs to be flexible in all aspects of its life history, from seed germination through flowering and fruiting; opportunistic in its ability to take advantage of locally abundant resources that may be available for only a short time; and tolerant of the stressful growing conditions caused by an abundance of pavement and a paucity of soil. The plants that grow in our cities are a cosmopolitan array of species that somehow managed to survive the transition from one land use to another as cities developed. The sequence starts with native species adapted to ecological conditions before the city was built. Those are followed, more or less in sequence, by species adapted to agriculture and pasturage, to pavement and compacted soil, to lawns and landscapes, to infrastructure edges and environmental pollution—and ultimately to vacant lots and rubble…

Based on the extensive literature on the ecosystem services provided by native and cultivated plants, one can easily generate an impressive list of the ways spontaneous vegetation makes cities more habitable for people as well as animals: temperature reduction, food and habitat for wildlife, erosion control on slopes, stream and riverbank stabilization, excess nutrient absorption in wetlands, soil building on degraded land, improved air quality, noise reduction, and, of course, carbon sequestration.”

Notably, that list of ecosystem services is virtually identical to that Techentin recites for ‘landscape’ in general. This does not mean that every ‘invasive’ plant needs to be welcomed in every context, of course, but it does suggest, as mammoth has argued before, that this derogatory classification can prevent us from rationally weighing the relative ecological merits of species.

LANDSCAPING AS INFRASTRUCTURE

[CMG Landscape Architecture's "Crack Garden" -- unfortunately planted rather than spontaneous, but you get the idea.]

Each of these possibilities involves a common element: the expansion of the agency of the landscape architect. (Expansion, though, should not be an egotistical moment, but an opportunity to engage in new forms of collaboration.)

Those two primary possibilities (the rise of the performative urban forest and the engagement of landscape architects in the design of ‘banal’ landscaping) might even merge, not in landscape infrastructures, but in landscaping as infrastructure. To borrow the terminology of Stephen’s previous post: landscaping is currently culturally and financially performative, but it could become ecologically and infrastructurally performative. (To do so, though, may involve difficult re-framings of the cultural expectations it performs for.) This, I think, begins with prosaic shifts like the introduction of curb-side rain gardens or front lawns that are variously xeriscaped and edible, but I don’t think it can end there.

I also suspect that, if landscape architects are involved in such a change, it will require assuming a somewhat different set of roles and design methodologies than those we have traditionally employed: there may be some amount of employment to be found in designing edible estates and cosmopolitan succession regimes for a mass market, but first that mass market must be persuaded of the value of such landscapes.

The need for such persuasion — a change in what might be termed vernacular landscape norms — reminds me of an article in the April issue of Metropolis, which described the recent work of Build Change, a non-profit organization that works in areas affected by earthquakes to help locals build in ways that are more seismically sound. “Careful seismic engineering”, author Karrie Jacobs notes, “can be broken down into simple rules that can be followed at relatively low cost”. In Haiti, Build Change designed sample housing plans and built a pilot house that meet those criteria using local materials and building techniques, but — most interestingly for our discussion of landscaping norms — “also distilled their design into ’six simple rules’, which appeared on posters as dos and don’ts”:

“… at least 6,000 homes in Indonesia and China [which Build Change worked in after earlier earthquakes]… have been built following the rules developed… What [Build Change] does is exactly the opposite of an architectural competition. It’s not about coming up with a signature solution but disseminating a set of rules that if truly effective, disappear into the venacular.”

The posters that Jacobs describes are a fascinating architectural act. Architecture, here, is not a building, but a viral meme, infecting the genetic code of a country’s building practices. This, obviously, is relatively necessary and efficacious after a disaster, when the traditional practices of architecture may be ineffective, too expensive, and too slow, but it also suggests something about how landscape architects might look to induce a shift towards ecologically and infrastructurally performative landscaping. The employment of such alternative practices — I’m thinking of a landscape-centered design advocacy organization, for instance, akin to the Center for Urban Pedagogy, publishing pamphlets of landscape tactics akin CUP’s Making Policy Public series — may yet offer the opportunity to influence the future forests of the infrastructural city.

By rholmes | Posted in infrastructure, landscape, landscape-architecture, mammoth book club, the-expanded-field | Tagged flora, hacking-infrastructure, invasive-species, reading-the-infrastructural-city, tree-huggers | Comments (7)

June 17, 2010 – 9:00 pm

starting from zero

This is week six of our reading of The Infrastructural City; if you’re not familiar with the series, you can start here and catch up here. It takes me a bit to get to discussing the chapter, but seeing as this post is already over a week late (sorry!) I hope you’ll indulge a few extra paragraphs.

In “Invisible City,” Kazys Varnelis compares three buildings in downtown Los Angeles: John Portman’s Bonaventure hotel, Gehry’s Disney Concert Hall, and One Wilshire Blvd. By demonstrating a shift in architectural purpose from representative reflection of global financial and communicative networks to a vital performative node in those same networks (yet one which resists interpretive reading and urban spectacle), these buildings provide an opportunity to reflect on the relationship between architecture and the infrastructural city. It’s also an opportunity to draw distinctions between cultural performance, programmatic performance, and technological performance; to reflect on the search for novelty in architecture (especially novel form-making); and to ask why these are often conflated.

interior of the Bonaventure Hotel, source

the Walt Disney Concert Hall, source

exterior of One Wilshire, home to over 300 global telecommunications companies, source

(1) A brief description, sans judgement, of some of the projects to convey a sense of what was being discussed. Apologies for the lack of images, Princeton hasn’t published these on their website yet:

- an extension of the aviary at Flushing Meadows. Program: migratory bird habitat. Architecture: a tall inflatable skyscraper with a core of scaffolding and a series of nets, bags and plenums at different heights. Performance: platforms at various heights support the flora and fauna of different habitats, and the quality of air created by the architecture determines the programming of these habitats. A variety of air quality arising from architectural form.

- hospital. Program: massive hvac and filtration demands, strictly linked to complex hospital program. Architecture: took 4 primary types of mechanical HVAC + filtration systems and associated programmatic spaces, and tried to re-accomplish that using expressed architectural techniques and passive systems, re-configuring programmed space as needed to match. Thorough analysis of hospital systems, and what sort of demands different procedures and diseases placed on HVAC design.

- infrastructural housing for desertification mitigation. Location: the outskirts of beijing vs the gobi desert. Ambition: “air can be designed as an architectural element at all scales”. Performance: the project seeks to design multiple scales of flow for occupiable and ecological effect. Buildings filter out sand, and attempt to harness wind and slow it to various speeds for different programmed spaces in the housing.

Last January I attended the reviews of Princeton’s Fall 2009 thesis class. Each class is assigned a collective theme which is meant to frame the students’ research – ‘Air’ was that year’s chosen topic. The student work (1) was suitably impressive, but what I found more fascinating was the discussion among the panel of critics after all the projects had been surveyed.

They seemed awfully dismayed at the lack of formal novelty. Paraphrasing their commentary: An over-saturation of blogs and architecture media is evident. The theme of air is as close to ’starting from zero’ as you can get, and many projects embraced it. They tried to create new affects and environments using architectonic form. They tried to work in novel types of program and programming strategies into their buildings which took advantage of this. Yet, the projects remained direct formal progeny of various recent ‘it’ buildings or styles: we saw Steven Holl, the Yokohama Port Terminal, Preston Scott Cohen, and Asymptote presented. Is it possible for architects to start from zero, from a purely technological or scientific point of view?

The implication is that, because the projects developed bear formal similarities to things we’ve seen before, they were directly influenced by them, and that this influence is precluding the development of a novel formal language – some unexpected result which may emerge from strict adherence to empirical data. I think this is misguided, for a couple of reasons:

we’ve seen that rendering before
At a certain point, it becomes practically impossible to escape formal precedent, especially with the explosion of experimentation over the past 20 years. Having projects in conventional formal models is inevitable at this point, because even the most outrageous form-making has become conventional and institutionalized. In this environment, what matters is the utilization of form, the logic guiding its deployment, and the phenomenal, affective, and cultural performances it attempts to engender. This is where these thesis projects were attempting to head – if they failed, they failed nobly.

form, style and performance
What the critics were longing for was a new architectural style, identified through some as-yet-undrawn set of forms. The search is on (as it has ever been) for a new language – something which can be read as generationally distinct from what came before. The mistake was in assuming that Air, with all its promise of new phenomenological and technological performances, would result in such a thing.

Thinking about ’starting from zero’ and taking a scientific approach has to disassociate itself from an expectation that experimental, empirical architecture will produce novel formal patterns and aesthetics. It is not, on it’s own, enough to generate a new language, just enough to manipulate existing languages with precision and sophistication to produce desired performance. This is obvious when we look at examples of empirical architecture, such as the labyrinth project highlighted by BLDGBLOG, Berger’s landscape experiments for his Pontine Marsh project, or One Wilshire Blvd, subject of this week’s chapter. In the labyrinth and marsh projects, we see a causitive relationship between the formal composition of the structures and the researched performances which are meant to be achieved by application of the scientific method to the building process. Yet, if one were to look at them without any knowledge of this application, it would be easy to mistake them as merely evolutionary descendants of modernist or contemporary parametric design aesthetics. The science did not engender a clear stylistic break.

One Wilshire takes this even a step further.

What is striking about One Wilshire is how little the formal characteristics of the architecture matter to the performance it is meant to enable (that of a critical global telecommunications switching point). It looks like your bog standard office building, with a bunch of servers shoved in.

a glimpse inside One Wilshire, source

The shimmering, ghostly computer-generated shapes of recent architecture only detract us from the invisible city, the less visible, but more real, work of programming and organizational processes. One Wilshire’s form doesn’t matter: what matters is how it’s been re-programmed.

As noted in the introduction to this post, One Wilshire is one of three buildings compared in the chapter, which begins with a discussion of the Bonaventure Hotel.

Portman’s Bonaventure lacks aspirations to a better world, reflecting the city, as a given, back upon itself [...] the hotel’s complexity is an analogue for our inability to understand our position in the multinational, decentered network of finance and communication that comprises late capitalism

As Varnelis notes, one would expect the successor to the Bonaventure in LA to be the Disney Concert Hall – “a product of the further penatration of culture by capital, embodying the contemporary city’s role as a site of culture through visual display” – but Gehry’s building is actually an architectural dead-end. It is cultural performance without purpose beyond its own iconic presence, and doesn’t try to leverage this performance into any greater agency or action on its urban context. Varnelis: “But in its relentless need to appear, the Concert Hall is a red herring. The visible is no longer a prime determinent of the urban. Visible form is merely an interruption of other forces, a graphic user interface for a more powerful command line below.” The future of architecture isn’t finding a worthy formal successor to modernism, post-modernism, or parametricism, it’s learning to manipulate the command line.

What was allegorical in the Bonaventure has become real at One Wilshire. In our own era, the task of cognative mapping lies at the point in which media and cities, network and economy, substructure and superstructure become inextricable. The real operating system, not the graphic user interface are our concern. Only by engaging the code below can we remain relevant to future cities.

This is central to why, at mammoth, we rarely if ever engage in architectural criticism in a traditional, formal sense. Rather, we find ourselves obsessed with discovering the limits of and strategies for architectural agency. We like command-line architecture much more than stylistic innovation for innovation’s sake. I wouldn’t say there is no interest in the formal qualities of architecture and infrastructure – just that we miss the most vital potentials of infrastructures and architectures if we limit investigation to the formal, and especially when we are concerned with aesthetic novelty at the expense of performance.

However: style and taste are not anti-performance, or even incidental to performance – they are a different sort of performance, one which is cultural, theatrical. There exists enormous value and excitement in architects who can compose these sort of performances. The London-based firm F.A.T. (Fashion Architecture Taste) come to mind as master manipulators of precedent and cultural expectations, able to create lyrical structures and environments which engage context and occupant. Their architecture attains programmatic performance while playfully remixing style and taste, and is just as valid and important a set of tactics for operating in culturally saturated urban environments as Berger’s hydrological experiments are for the Pontine Marshes.

By Stephen | Posted in architecture, mammoth book club, the-expanded-field | Tagged los angeles, reading-the-infrastructural-city | Comments (15)

June 12, 2010 – 12:41 pm

driving blind

The following is a guest post from Tim Maly — of the excellent Quiet Babylon — concerning the topic of traffic and The Infrastructural City.

About a year ago, a business trip found me camped out with my laptop in the top floor lounge of a hotel in LA, overlooking the San Diego Freeway. There were windows on all sides affording an excellent view of the road. When I wanted a break, I watched traffic.

As the laconic afternoon gave way to rush hour, the density of cars increased and speeds fell until traffic stopped. Four lanes of southbound commuters were ground to a halt. More cars piled into the back of the traffic jam and it grew northwards. I watched this for awhile, grateful that I didn’t have anywhere I needed to be.

Then the most amazing thing happened.

The jam moved.

I don’t mean that the cars got unstuck and everyone proceeded on their merry way. I mean that the jam itself was a structure in motion. From my window, I could see a zone of total congestion where cars were literally parked. On the upstream end of that zone, new cars were being added all the time as commuters caught up with the stopped vehicles. On the downstream end, cars were being freed up to drive again. It takes time to accelerate and you have to wait for the car in front to start moving. That delay was long enough and the cars in the rear were arriving fast enough that the structure was perpetuating itself.

Still confused? This animation gives a pretty good demonstration of what’s going on.

The traffic jam I could see from the window existed despite the road ahead being completely clear.

What I’d mistaken for the growth of the traffic jam was actually the leading edge of a pulse. It’s called a shockwave jam. It isn’t just congestion, it’s a wave of information, traveling upstream against the flow of cars, carrying with it news about some incident that happened perhaps miles away. Hapless commuters become an unwitting medium, electrons on the wires of the freeway.

This is a truly bizarre emergent phenomenon. To get a sense of how bizarre, take a look at this video released by Japanese scientists, showing the problem reproducing itself on a clear circular track. This should be the canonical demonstration of chaos theory. It should replace the butterfly flapping its wings.

How do you fight that?

There are folk solutions about changing your driving style and a variety of proposed systems that involve handing control of the car over to the road or to ad hoc networks of other vehicles.

The main message here is that you don’t know how to drive your car in traffic. It’s not your fault; you are part of a network of events that spans vast stretches of geography where the slightest perturbation can cause massive sprawling disruption. To have the chance to succeed at this, you’d need to see beyond yourself. You’d need super powers.

It’s impossible to say where the first traffic jam was, but the origin of modern traffic control was probably in 1722 in response to “the great inconvenience and mischiefs which happen by the disorderly leading and driving of cars, carts, coaches, and others carriages over the London Bridge, whereby the common passage there is much obstructed.” To fix matters, the Lord Mayor of London ordered that three able-bodied men be appointed as public servants to keep traffic to the left and keep it moving.

Sean Dockray, Fiona Whitton, Steven Rowell – Blocking All Lanes – The Infrastructural City p.106

I’m reminded of the first surgeons. Unlike our contemporary steady-handed fine-incision-making heroes, they were brutes. They had to be – in order to save someone’s life by sawing off a limb, they had to be quick enough so the patient didn’t die from shock during the procedure. It takes a real butcher’s strength to force your way through bone.

This image of rough and ready public servants manhandling traffic chaos into some semblance of order continues with New York’s first traffic cops in the 1860s. In order to be seen, they were the tallest men in the force. Each of them over 6′, towering over the confusion of the crowd, barking orders and waving traffic along with their hands.

By choosing officers who could literally see further than the crowd and arming them with rules and the ability to enforce them (the ability to think further than the crowd), traffic cops were endowed with the super powers necessary to at least unsnarl local conditions, if not improve the flow of traffic overall. At the risk of stretching a metaphor, they became cybernetic entities. Locally cognizant real-time control systems, inserted to regulate a network that could not regulate itself. I’m thinking here of James Watt’s steam engine with a governor that turned irregular bursts of steam into a smooth flow of power.

Listen to this next passage as traffic cops experience their own micro-singularity.

Problems with this system arose immediately. It was difficult enough for any single officer to coordinate his activities with another officer, one block away, but it was practically impossible for that officer to synchronize his signals with officers at the four adjoining intersections, each of whom might be coordinating with three more intersections, and so on, throughout the urban grid. Over time, the traffic cop was slowly transformed: his hands took on white gloves for visibility; his voice was replaced by a whistle; and eventually, he was elevated in a tower and communicated with the traffic via signs or coloured lights. The police officer slowly vanished, his body evolving into mechanical and electrical devices. His hands were replaced by standardized, colored signals. His eyes were replaced by sensing actuators, such as microphones, pressure sensors, electromagnets, or video cameras. All that was left was to replace his brain.

Sean Dockray, Fiona Whitton, Steven Rowell – Blocking All Lanes – The Infrastructural City p.106

There’s a whole genre of car ads that are for small sort-of-sporty cars, aimed at late-twenties urbanites. Hallmarks of this series are people having fun, enjoying the ups and downs of life, city streets, parties in interesting urban spaces, and (of course) no traffic. My favourite is this Scion ad that wants you to associate parkour with owning a car. This Toyota ad is pretty good too. Finally, this VW ad which doesn’t imply but actually says that their cars make you more polite (this might be a uniquely Canadian advertisement).

We find ourselves in traffic (never of traffic) buffeted by a system prone to irrational seizures, ordered around by a sprawling network of machines whose decisions are unknown and unknowable. Worse still, we’re sitting in devices that – when they were sold to us – made some very explicit promises about the open road. We were promised independence and instead we got this weird pseudo-freedom where we get to control the car but we are severely limited in where it can go.

The BBC has a great visualization showing taxis in rush hour pushing out of the main arteries in a vain attempt to find a faster route.

So we try to cheat. Aggressive drivers push along shoulders and try to muscle their way back into the flow. Frustrated law-abiding commuters respond by pulling close together to keep them out. We try side streets and alternate routes.

A whole folklore of tricks is passed around. If you flash your lights, it can fool the sensors into thinking that an emergency vehicle is coming, giving you the green. The pressure plate is two car lengths back from the intersection so that a line will form before changing the light. If you stop early, you won’t need to wait for another car. If you have a mannequin, you can take the carpool lane. This route is better on Tuesdays, that route is better on Wednesdays.

The impulse to optimize and the impulse to maintain control are put at odds here. The mythological freedom of the open road gives way to nominal control rendered irrelevant by factual helplessness. Drivers lament that things would be better if only there were less cars on the road. Or more lanes. Both of these wishes are myopic.

The Los Angeles depicted in The Infrastructural City is unwilling to move in either direction. Caught between individualists demanding the freedom of the car and individualists expert in maintaining their property values, the age of heroic infrastructure has ended for LA.

Today’s freeways are clogged in perpetual gridlock. Fixing them is impossible. Any new freeways would be fought by NIMBYist homeowners, but more than that, traffic planners recognize that if new freeways were built, motorists would choose to live further out. After a brief period of time, the freeway would, once again, be jammed hopelessly.

Kazys Varnelis – Introduction – The Infrastructural City p.14

The intriguing possibility is that heroic infrastructure may not be needed to unsnarl LA’s freeways. In a paper called The Price of Anarchy in Transportation Networks: Efficiency and Optimality Control physicists Hyejin Youn, Michael T. Gastner, and Hawoong Jeong discovered that under certain circumstances, traffic conditions can be improved by blocking roads.

We then compare the costs of the Nash flow on the original network with those on networks where one of the 246 streets is closed to traffic. In most cases, the cost increases when one street is blocked, as intuitively expected. Nonetheless, there are six connections which, if one is removed, decrease the delay in the Nash equilibrium… If all drivers ideally cooperated to reach the social optimum, these roads could be helpful; otherwise it is better to close these streets.

Hyejin Youn, Michael T. Gastner, and Hawoong Jeong The Price of Anarchy in Transportation Networks: Efficiency and Optimality Control

There are two intriguing ideas in that passage. The first is the idea that infrastructural problems can be solved in some cases by having less infrastructure. This is an experiment that would be easy to carry out and cheap to do, even in LA.

The second is the idea that the infrastructure problems can be solved not with changing the infrastructure but changing how it’s used – optimizing the network. This idea has been covered before on mammoth. In their best architecture of the decade, Rob and Stephen included the CityCar.

While the technology behind CityCar is interesting in and of itself, architecturally the most interesting aspects of CityCar are the dynamically-priced markets for electricity and roadspace which Smart Cities envision developing around the second, shared use model. Through GPS systems embedded in the cars, congestion pricing could be altered in real-time in response to the flow of traffic through a city’s streets, achieving a far more perfect market reflection of the urban condition than could be imposed by any top-down model… The CityCar, then, is not merely a vehicle traveling across fixed infrastructures (or a smaller version of today’s cars), but is itself a distributed infrastructure, resilient, flexible, and responsive to input from the city.

Rob Holmes and Stephen Becker the best architecture of the decade

Rob and Stephen are quick to acknowledge the pragmatic and regulatory hurdles that these cars (let alone any automated driving system) face in seeking mass adoption. But these sorts of things can proceed piecemeal. Car makers are already putting sensors in their vehicles for collision safety, OnStar assistance etc. And it doesn’t seem like such a big leap to go from automated toll systems like E-Zpass to highly granular congestion pricing schemes.

Besides, if traffic cops can experience a micro-singularity, why not drivers?

Over time, the driver was slowly transformed: her hands took on a steering wheel for better maneuverability; her voice was replaced by a horn; and eventually, she was sealed in a cabin and communicated with the traffic via honks or coloured lights. The driver slowly vanished, her body evolving into mechanical and electrical devices. Her hands were replaced by high precision steering mechanisms, her feet by networked cruise control. Her eyes were replaced by sensing actuators, such as GPS chips, proximity sensors, local mesh networks, or video cameras. All that was left was to replace her brain.

By tmaly | Posted in guest post, infrastructure, mammoth book club, urbanism | Tagged automobile, cybernetics, emergence, reading-the-infrastructural-city, traffic | Comments (7)

June 11, 2010 – 9:32 pm

as-built on the pitch

['Alan Ball -- full match', working drawing (ink on trace); artist David Marsh]

Just in time for the World Cup, English architect-turned-artist David Marsh has executed a fantastic series of drawings based on England’s (sole) World Cup finals appearance, their 4-2 victory over West Germany in 1966. Using archival footage played back at quarter- and half-speed in combination with a coordinate system derived from the markings on the pitch, Marsh traced the movements of each of the twenty-two players involved in the game (substitutions were not allowed in the World Cup until 1970) onto sheets of trace.

As I’ve previously talked about my interest in sport as a representative diagram of urban space — noting that the soccer field can be read both as an abstracted embodiment of a particular village landscape (a map) and as the site for the deployment of spatial strategies which mirror urban processes (a canvas) — it should not be surprising that I am fascinated by Marsh’s drawings, which essentially offer an architectural reading of a soccer match.

["B. Charlton v. F. Beckenbauer", David Marsh]

In strong contrast to the abstracted linearity of the live passing diagrams produced by the New York Times for South Africa or the Guardian’s (exceptionally informative) chalkboards, the resultant diagrams are willfully organic, being the strict record (their strictness and literal quality reminds me of record drawings and as-builts) of compromise between the wandering dictates of each player’s attention and the geometry of the soccer match.

Interviewed at Umbro’s soccer blog, Marsh suggests the obvious next step for his drawings, which is to apply the technique not just to the production of a record of a single match with historical significance, but to construct a library of games translated into ink strokes. Combined with a previous suggestion that Marsh has produced an architectural reading of sport, this suggests the possibility that there might be comparative architectural sports analysts, commentators and scholars who specialize not in narrative (or even tactics, though the English tactical analyst Jonathan Wilson is probably the most architectural sports analyst I’ve ever encountered), but in space and relationship and construction. (Here it might be worthing noting — as evidence for the validity of such an approach, or at least the existence of parallels between the endeavors — that, like architecture, sport has an ambiguous relationship with ‘art’, sometimes easily allowing itself to be read as ‘art’, and yet at other times just as thoroughly resisting that categorization.)

["England only", David Marsh]

I’d love to know what new insights into (and tools for understanding) sport such analysts might develop: we might learn, for instance, that — seen as a whole, like a finished building — the coordinated movements of Dunga’s Brazil possess a crystalline beauty to rival or even exceed the individual brilliance of the classic Brazilian squads of the seventies (a brilliance whose absence is consistently bemoaned in contemporary commentary); we might discover hidden threads of historical congruence like those that Wilson untangles in Inverting the Pyramid; or, a rogue Eastern European coach — formerly trained as an architect at the Cooper Union — spending caffeine-fueled nights pouring over countless overlays of matches played by each of his squad’s Champions League opponents, might spot hidden complexities in those opponents’ patterns of play which even their own coaches are unaware of and, exploiting that knowledge to maximize the effectiveness of his own team’s positioning, lead a Latvian squad of middling journeyman to the most unlikely of European titles, as they bewilder opponents by trotting out new and bizarre formations in each match.

By rholmes | Posted in landscape | Tagged diagramming, soccer, world-cup | Comments (2)

June 6, 2010 – 11:22 pm

reading the infrastructural city: chapter five index

A quick editorial note: while my blogging may be sporadic in the coming weeks — though there’s a good and pretty exciting reason for that, who weighs approximately six pounds and thirteen ounces — Reading The Infrastructural City will continue more or less unabated and as scheduled, not counting the slight delay in the compilation of this set of links.

Free Association Design links traffic to logistics — including Jessie Cavalier’s brilliant piece Logistics, Territory, and Wal-Mart, which you should really read if you haven’t already — and suggests (correctly, I think) that it is appropriate to read many of the chapters of The Infrastructural City as descriptions of the “varied material expressions of contemporary urban logistics”.

Peter Nunns reviews the development of traffic in Los Angeles and offers a pair of examples of transit “hacks” in New Zealand.

Relatedly, FASLANYC follows up on comments he made on our original post, and pivots to a discussion of Broadway and “tactical urbanism”. It is well worth clicking through his link to architects Ersela Kripa and Stephen Mueller’s practice, AGENCY, and reading the material they have collected under the rubric of “hackable infrastructures”.

Following the lead of the chapter authors, Nam Henderson looks at traffic as embodied and cybernetic.

Barry Lehrman digs into the manual of Strobecom II — “a state of the art, optical, traffic preemption and priority control system” – a fascinating subset of the infrastructure of traffic control.

Finally, a pair of posts elsewhere that are not part of the Infrastructural City discussion, but are intimately related to the issues discussed in chapter five:

A post at Design Observer explains the history of and design thinking behind the tri-colored traffic signal.

At the Urbanophile, Human Transit’s Jarrett Walker contribute a guest post which argues that Los Angeles is, contrary to popular assumption, actually well prepared to become “America’s Next Great Transit Metropolis”. While such a development (which I would cheer) would present an entirely different kind of solution to traffic than the “hacks” we’ve discussed, mammoth has continually argued that the complexity of urban systems demands multiple kinds and scales of solutions (rather than uniform or ideologically-pure proposals), and we suspect that, if Los Angeles does develop an advanced transit network, it will be complementary to rather than replacing the sort of “hacks” we’ve been discussing.

By rholmes | Posted in mammoth book club, readings | Tagged reading-the-infrastructural-city, traffic | Comments (7)

May 31, 2010 – 10:05 pm

jam, hack

This is week five of our reading of The Infrastructural City; if you’re not familiar with the series, you can start here and catch up here.

[Traffic cameras in Los Angeles, photographed by flickr user Puck90]

“Blocking All Lanes”, Sean Dockray, Fiona Whitton, and Steve Rowell’s contribution to The Infrastructral City, opens by questioning the various meanings of “traffic”:

“If Los Angeles evokes sunshine, flashy cars, and movie stars, it also instantly brings to mind traffic. But the word “traffic” is always a little slippery, one of those words that escapes us when we try to pin it down. For engineers and the dictionary alike, “traffic” refers to the movement of vehicles along a roadway. For the rest of us, however, traffic has come to mean the exact opposite: that phenomenon of vehicles crowding a roadway until everything slows down to a frustrating crawl…

…We are traffic… Of course, we don’t talk that way: we say that we are “in traffic”, but we never admit to being traffic… our need to remove our own culpability from congestion, our need to speak of being “stuck in a jam”, is an expression of our profound ambivalence to driving. The automobile, the capitalist vehicle par excellence, promises freedom while the often-frustrating experience of driving leaves us feeling quite out of control. We hold onto the idea that although we might be stuck now, there is a way out. But what if our agency were underpinned by an organizing, computational mechanism? We stop. We go. We turn. We yield. What if these were not simply rules to follow (code as law), but instructions to follow (code as program)…”

After detouring through a (rather fascinating) history of the evolution of traffic control (a history which reminded me of a recent tweet from the excellent Lost Angeles: “at the turn of the century, speed limits for the new cars were 8 mph in residential districts and 6 mph in business districts”), the authors turn to a discussion of the contemporary means of traffic control in Los Angeles, which they split into two categories, physical systems and virtual data. The former are described thusly:

“…over 50,000 buried loop detectors — the insulated wire loops that passively detect subtle magnetic field changes from vehicles — combine with over 700 weatherproofed video cameras, some of which are remotely controlled to pan and zoom, to monitor and control traffic flow. Loops automatically trigger software in switching boxes linked to intersection signals, but also send data to TMCs that allow traffic engineers to monitor flow patterns and adjust timings remotely. A simple click of mouse button [in the control centers "ATSAC" (Automated Traffic Control and Surveillance) and "TMC" (CALTRANS's Traffic Management Center)] can start or stop the flow of movement on the grid.”

Of course, as that description makes clear, the virtual and physical aspects of the modern traffic control apparatus are materially inseparable, as the data has neither host nor eyes without its physical appendages and the physical appendages are dead and useless unless the streams of information they host flows and is interpreted. If there is a real distinction to be drawn between the physical and the virtual aspects of traffic control, it is, as the authors note, that the physical appendages are persistent and static, moving only when maintenance workers crack open their housings, while the data the system hosts is “ephemeral and dynamic”.

[Inductive loops in Los Angeles pavement; photograph via CLUI]

The final portion of the chapter discusses “incidents”, which are described as the re-introduction of the corporeal and embodied into the virtual system of traffic control – the smooth flow that the virtual seeks to enable is interrupted, human errors literally pile up on freeways and in the streets. This feedback between traffic control system and human agents, though, is not at all one way. Traffic (remember, “we are traffic”) and traffic control systems are functionally cybernetic: the driver’s foot on the gas pedal moves up and down in rhythm with the dictates of a city-spanning central nervous system, communicating as surely with the driver through the code of yellow, red, and green as the brain does with the arm. The traffic control system is extraordinarily complex, existing as networked ecologies do, at a multiplicity of scales. At some scales, it is easily experienced directly — the traffic light — while others can only be experienced through mediating systems or summaries, such as the traffic diagrams the authors have drawn. An inductive loop, for instance, can be understood both as a series of strangely beautiful markings in hot-poured asphalt (above) and as a single neuron in a massively complex system. Stepping back further, that massively complex system only functions a part of the irreducibly complex urban whole: without pit mines to produce aggregate, there would be no roads for traffic to fill; or, without the individual people who commute on the roads, there would be no need to coordinate signal timings.

The interesting fact that arises from the complexity of these co-evolved systems (and, as noted in Varnelis’s introduction to The Infrastructural City, from the primacy of individual property rights in L.A.’s political culture) is that, “as the possibilities for adding new highways — or even lanes — dwindle in many cities, most new progress is made at the level of code”. This shift which the authors identify is a part of a systemic shift in the methodology of urbanism, from plan to hack, that we’ve been fascinated with for some time now. In a mature infrastructural ecology, like Los Angeles, the city has developed such a persistent and ossified physical form that, barring a radical shift in the city’s political culture, designing infrastructure becomes more a task of re-configuration and re-use than a task of construction.

[The interior of ATSAC, via Swindle Magazine's feature on ATSAC]

Initially, this may seem an extraordinarily frustrating condition for urbanists, who have of late been so interested in the possibility that the design of infrastructures might offer an alternative instrument for shaping cities, combining the intentionality and vision of the plan with the vibrancy and resilience characteristic of emergent growth. Infrastructures, we’ve noticed, can be a stable element which mold and manipulate the various flowing processes of urbanization which produce cities: economic exchange, human migration, traffic patterns, informational flows, property values, hydrologies, waste streams, commutes, even wildlife ecologies. Historically, governments and private developers have sought to harness this potential, whether by profiting from the sale of land along a new infrastructure or by supplementing existing infrastructure to reinforce growth and density in a locale (the initial growth of Los Angeles along privately-owned streetcar lines being one of the classic examples of the former sort of infrastructural generation). But if, as the authors of “Blocking All Lanes” suggest (and, I think it is fair to say, The Infrastructural City suggests as a whole), opportunities to plan and design new infrastructural frameworks are likely to be extremely rare in mature infrastructural ecologies, should urbanists abandon their interest in infrastructure as an instrument for shaping the city?

[Signal vaults in a traffic island, via CLUI]

1 I love, by the way, that the Beltline began a little over a decade ago as a student project — an excellent rebuttal to the trope occasionally trotted out that academic design is not real design.

I don’t think so, for two primary reasons.

First, the rarity and scarcity of those opportunities does not mean that they should not be seized when they are realistically presented. And when opportunities for the construction of new infrastructures within a mature city do occur, they are likely to appear in hack-like guises: concretely, like Atlanta’s Beltline, which utilizes a defunct rail right-of-way as the foundation for a new commuter rail line¹, or Orange County’s Groundwater Replenishment System, which redirects the flow of cleaned wastewater in Orange County from ocean to aquifer; speculatively, like Velo-City’s Toronto bicycle metro (which, as it happens, has a less-speculative southern Californian counterpart, the Backbone Bikeway Network). Go over, go under, re-deploy, tag along, piggyback.

Second, there are fantastic opportunities created by thinking about the architectural act as a hack rather than an object (whether or not the hack produces an object). These opportunities were one of the primary themes of our post on “the best architecture of the decade”, which included both examples of hacks that lack a traditional architectural object — the iPhone, Kiva — and architectural projects executed as hacks — Quinta Monroy, Parque Biblioteca Espana. Perhaps most relevant of the hacks cataloged there, given that the topic at hand is automobile traffic, is the MIT Smart Cities group’s CityCar, which utterly inverts the architectural methodology of the plan. Instead of designing a new form for cities, and then producing buildings which fit that form, the Smart Cities group has designed both a technology — the CityCar — and a series of ways in which that technology would interact with the city (as a battery in a smart grid, as a part of an even more advanced traffic control system that would adjust congestion pricing in real time to efficiently distribute traffic over time and space), confident that doing so will enable ways of life that will generate positive changes in the city. Notably, all these cases are new ways of utilizing existing infrastructures (the iPhone, Kiva, CityCar) or of thinking about architecture as an infrastructure (Quinta Monroy, Parque Biblioteca Espana). Infrastructure is not made obsolete by avoiding object fixation. Rather, it becomes increasingly important, as a material instantiation of non-corporeal forces and thus the potential physical locus of hacks.

In both cases — whether the hack is understood as a way of implementing a new infrastructure or as a new kind of architectural act — the key realization is that successful shifts in urban form will only happen when they are paired with successful alterations of the infrastructures, systems, and flows that generate those forms. Attempts to construct a new vision for the city that fail to grapple with the underlying systems that, like traffic, constitute and produce the city will ultimately either be ineffective or collapse catastrophically.

For additional reading on the physical infrastructure of traffic control, I recommend CLUI’s online exhibition, Loop Feedback Loop.

By mammoth | Posted in infrastructure, mammoth book club, the-city-we-have, urbanism | Tagged hacking-infrastructure, reading-the-infrastructural-city | Comments (7)

May 31, 2010 – 1:51 pm

a tertiary river

[Aerial photograph of sludge mats swirling in the Los Angeles River by flickr user Vision Aerie]

As we’re about to jump scales in our reading of The Infrastructural City — from the post-natural ecologies and mining operations of the first section of the book, “Landscape”, to the networks of cell towers and cable lines featured in the middle section, “Fabric” — I thought it would be worth excerpting a choice quotation from photographer Lane Barden’s essay “The River”, which closes that first section. In this excerpt, Barden discusses how the reality of the hydrological condition of the Los Angeles River — its “dry season base flow… consists almost entirely of treated sewage water” — differs from the image of the river constructed by the movement to restore the river (“the public is not yet fully aware that the movement to restore the Los Angeles River is a movement to restore a river that will consist primarily of recycled sewage”):

“Today, the San Fernando aquifer and adjoining aquifers in the Southern California region are depleted sub-surface reservoirs controlled and administered by the city. Because excessive storm water run-off from Los Angeles hardscape is swiftly funneled into the river, even heavy rains do little to recharge the aquifers, so ground water reserves are below capacity. This groundwater is monetized and can only be pumped out with a license and a fee. Pumping ground water into the river for restoration purposes is not an option and will not become an option. The authentic conditions of an endless supply of groundwater feeding the Los Angeles River are lost and will not be reclaimed.

Prior to 1913, the Los Angeles River and its massive ground water supply was the sole source of water for the city. After tapping the Owens Valley and the Colorado River with aqueducts hundreds of miles in length, Los Angeles was freed from its dependence on local aquifers. Water from the aqueducts that once flowed in the Colorado and Owens Rivers now flows into our sinks and toilets, then into the sewers, and onto three treatment plants located next to the L.A. River. There it gets scrubbed three times and is discharged into the river channel only to be polluted again with street runoff that includes various chemicals, oil products, hundreds of thousands of plastic bags, and coliform bacteria coming from kennels, stables, and the street.

That’s the contemporary Los Angeles River, a river that has been siphoned from outlying areas, has flowed through kitchens and bathrooms, treated before it goes into the riverbed as tertiary water, then polluted before going to the ocean. Robust community movements are now underway to clean up runoff and storm water before it enters the river to protect the tertiary base flow. Remarkably, this tertiary water, if it could remain unpolluted, is probably cleaner than the water in every urban river in the world.

Ideally, many years from now, the rain that falls in Los Angeles would be cleaned and diverted into the city’s aquifers for storage. Then, tertiary water could become the primary source for the river year round. With this in mind, a third, more adaptable image becomes possible, enabled by a constant, steady supply of clean tertiary water that could feed a linear public garden fifty miles long. It would provide as yet unimagined cultural interpretations, natural habitat, recreation, and green infrastructure for a city that has become so dispersed, park-starved, and focused on short-term problem solving that its inhabitants are hard-pressed to imagine anything beyond what the river once was and what it has become.”

By rholmes | Posted in infrastructure, landscape-architecture, mammoth book club | Tagged hydrology, infrastructure, los-angeles-river, post-natural-ecologies, reading-the-infrastructural-city | Comments (4)

May 27, 2010 – 5:00 am

reading the infrastructural city: chapter four index (updated may 31)

[Jake Longstreth's "Skybox"; while the pit mines and flood-control apparatus found in Irwindale are one particularly spectacular kind of marginal landscape, there are many other kinds, exhibiting varying degrees of marginality, including speedways -- such as the Irwindale Speedway -- and the ubiquitous suburban strip.]

DPR-Barcelona returns to a familiar theme for that blog, the utopian and architectural appropriation of unusual terrains for dwelling, by way of proposals from Archigram, Robert Smithson, and Aristide Antonas, noting that the pit mines of Irwindale are already occupied by industrial structures reminiscent of Antonas’s Crane Rooms or Lebbeus Woods’s High Houses.

Similarly, FASLANYC ties “Margins in our Midst” to the science-fiction classic War with the Newts, orquidearamas, and a vision of cascading pit-mine apartment buildings.

Free Association Design looks at Portland’s Ross Island Sand and Gravel Pit as an analog to the pit mines of Irwindale, but an analog in which the “networked mobility of landscape has come full circle”, “processes of construction excavation, industrial material sourcing, global shipping, dredging, and wildlife habitat formation [becoming] bound together in a fortuitous network of mutual dependence”.

Nam Henderson looks at Berkeley Pit, a former open pit copper mine in Butte, Montana, and, noting that the pit is breeding extremeophile micro-organisms that researchers are studying in search of cancer-fighting compounds, wonders if pit mines might have a future as pharmacological farms.

Peter Nunns notes that Coolidge’s observations in Irwindale — and, indeed, The Infrastructural City in general — serve as a useful reminder of the inescapable materiality of the city, a reminder which is often needed as technologies and thinkers tempt us to believe that cities can elude the gravity of material production.

This, I think, is part of what is so useful about The Infrastructural City as a guidebook for the contemporary city: it reminds us that, despite vast scalar differences, the demolition of a backyard pool deck that Nunns describes and the excavation of vast aggregate pits on the margins of the city are inextricably linked activities, occurring in the same networked landscape.

By rholmes | Posted in infrastructure, mammoth book club, readings | Tagged clui, gravel, reading-the-infrastructural-city | Comments (2)

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reading the infrastructural city: chapter eleven index

props

“what to do when there is nothing to do”

“global hubs and mega-cities”

reading the infrastructural city, chapter ten index

public landscapes of distribution

reading the infrastructural city, chapter nine index

distribution

“anchors in a mutable field”

risk

reading the infrastructural city, chapter eight index

reading the infrastructural city: chapter seven index

future forests of the infrastructural city

starting from zero

driving blind

as-built on the pitch

reading the infrastructural city: chapter five index

jam, hack

a tertiary river

reading the infrastructural city: chapter four index (updated may 31)

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