“The slum-dwellers,” he adds, “are experts at live-work space design. They spontaneously do mixed-use! We just have to learn from them.” [1]

When homes are also considered places of work – either unpaid housework or paid industrial homework – then the industrial geography of the city assumes new meanings. [2]

Dharavi has been described as “Asia’s largest slum”. Between 600,000 and 1 million people live in 85 dense neighborhoods clustered on 2.4 square kilometers of low-lying, marshy land in the heart of Mumbai [3]. (Mumbai’s total population was estimated at 18.2 million in 2005 by UNDESA (2010).) It is one of the most overcrowded areas of Mumbai – and one of the worst-served by infrastructure. Dharavi contains an estimated 1,440 people for each toilet seat, meaning that “streets, lacking drainage, become channels for filthy water carrying human excrement” during the rainy season [4]. In many respects, it has become a byword for urban squalor and poverty.

It’s also a chunk of incredibly valuable real estate. The relaxation of foreign investment rules brought an influx of capital into Mumbai in the 1990s, and land prices skyrocketed [5]. The city’s central business district was “the most expensive in the world” in the mid-90s, while “residential real estate prices spiralled up as well, in part in response to the influx of money from nonresident Indians” [6]. Dharavi, which lies between two of the main rail lines, with close access to the new financial district and the international airport [7], has been describes as the “Opportunity of the Millennium” for developers [8]. Remaking Dharavi would open up new territory for foreign direct investment and globally-linked industries that would benefit from proximity to the international airport and CBD. In the words of Solomon Benjamin, it would exorcise the “spectre of cities besieged by cancerous slums” by putting a “modernist spin on attracting economic development: ‘Bangalore transforming into a Singapore, Bombay [Mumbai] into a Shanghai, and Delhi into a London’!” [9]

The Dharavi Redevelopment Project (DRP), first proposed in 1996 by Mukesh Mehta, an American-trained architect working in Mumbai and started in 2004, is the latest attempt to capitalize upon inflated land values. It is intended to mix slum upgrading with the development of new office space and housing for Mumbai’s upper and middle classes [10]. The $2 billion DRP [11] calls for Dharavi to be divided into five zones, each of which would be designed and constructed by a separate property development firm. Residents who could prove their occupancy prior to 1995 (later extended to 2000) would be offered apartments on the same sites or new locations in exchange for their land [12]. A portion of profits from the sale of newly-constructed housing and commercial space would be used to finance upgraded housing for Dharavi’s low-income residents, while the rest would be returned to the city government and private developers.

The purpose of the DRP is to globalize Mumbai; to create the sorts of “internationally competitive” living spaces and commercial areas required by globally-mobile businesses and workers in the “knowledge economy”. But this program ignores Dharavi’s actually-existing ties to the broader urban and global economies. The slum houses a wide range of informal enterprises that are integrated into globally disaggregated assembly lines through subcontracting arrangements. While we tend to think of slums as a form of low-income housing, Dharavi’s economic role is at least as important. Its living spaces often double as informal and unregulated production spaces – like many slums, it is a “spontaneous” form of mixed-use design [13].

Roughly 70 to 80 percent of Dharavi’s residents work within the slum – an unusually high ratio compared with many other Indian slums [14]. It contains at least 5,000 industrial enterprises, which produce textiles, pottery and leather, jewellery, food products, and so on and so forth [15]. Its southwest corner “has a major cluster of plastic recycling factories, with some estimates of well over 500 units,” while many streets are “lined with retailing, food stands, kiosks, taxis, small restaurants, some hotels, etc.” [16]. These industries “provide incomes and livelihoods for hundreds of thousands of Mumbai citizens who would otherwise have no employment” [17]. Because they also entail a number of negative externalities – low wages, unsafe conditions, and high levels of air and water pollution – they rely upon the existence of flexible, unregulated space in the city center.

Work done in Dharavi is a crucial part of the city’s economy [18]. Patel and Arputham observe that it “probably contributes far more to the Indian economy than most special economic zones.” Its annual turnover has been estimated at between $700 million and $1 billion [19]. And while Dharavi is somewhat unusual in the magnitude and diversity of its industries, it is part of a wider trend in India’s globalizing economy. According to Sudarshan et al, 30 to 40 percent of India’s exports now originate in the informal economy, which “includes entire industrial clusters making goods for export (metalware, machine tools, leatherware, textiles and garments, tools and equipment, and some IT services)” [20]. The expansion of India’s international trade is related to the growth of subcontracting networks and industrial homework.

Over the past two decades, the country’s manufacturing sector has undergone parallel processes of upgrading and downgrading: businesses in the formal sector have become more capital intensive, displacing labor-intensive work into the decentralized and more flexible informal sector [21]. According to Sanyal and Bhattacharya, “sub-contracting from large firms to small firms has been increasing and consequently numbers of homeworkers, to whom small firms in turn sub-contract, are also increasing” (see also UNIFEM 2000). In 1999/2000, there were approximately 28 million homeworkers in the non-agricultural labor force, 30 percent of whom were located in urban areas [22]. The bottom reaches of subcontracting networks are predominantly female. Rani and Unni found that in 2000/01, “home-based [production] workers constituted about 81 percent of all female workers and about 46 percent of male workers.”

As the case of Dharavi demonstrates, these production arrangements also rely upon certain spatial arrangements. Slums are often ideal locations for combining living and work space – a fact that is often not appreciated by redevelopment projects. Consequently, the DRP is doubly problematic for residents: it threatens both their shelter and their livelihoods. Many of the central issues of contention relate to the preservation of Dharavi’s informal industries and mixed-use spaces. As a result, “the Dharavi resistance qualifies more as a ‘labour’ mobilization than slum dwellers’ resistance” [23].

The current master plan “entails building the rehabilitation housing zones on less than half of the original land, and allocating only 2 percent of the land to retain ‘‘non-polluting’’ industries” [24]. On the one hand, this would either increase density to an unsustainable level, or displace many of Dharavi’s residents. The project “would likely create additional homelessness, as some estimates suggest that about a quarter of the existing residents would not be eligible for rehabilitation based on the residency requirement,” which provides for resettlement only for households that can prove residency prior to 2000 [25].

On the other, the DRP proposes to replace existing shelters, which often mix domestic and industrial uses, with small residential spaces in high-rise buildings. As a consequence, the “entire business district as Dharavi is under threat because most of the enterprises do not have licences and so cannot find any place in the new redeveloped Dharavi [26]. Although “non-hazardous and non-polluting” workshops can potentially be rehoused, this will still mean closure of several important industries, such as pottery, leather goods, and recycling, and the loss (or displacement to the urban periphery) of tens or hundreds of thousands of jobs.

Two community organizations have contested the DRP, moving it into a “zone of negotiation” between inhabitants and city government. In a series of articles published in the academic journal Environment and Urbanization, the leaders of the Alliance have provided regular updates on political negotiations over the project [27].

To date, residents’ activism has secured several important gains. First, proposed densities have been lowered significantly. New guidelines issued in October 2008 specified a maximum building height of eight or ten stories, as opposed to original plans for 20 to 30 story apartment buildings [28]. The size of rehabilitation apartments for eligible slum-dwellers has also been increased, from 225 square feet to between 250 and 300 square feet [29]. This will, of course, make them more livable – but it will also provide additional space for home-based industries. Likewise, there have been incremental improvements to the space available for work in Dharavi. The original plans called for 50 percent of the floor space offered for sale by developers to be used for upper/middle-class housing [30]. Guidelines released in 2008 specify that 80 percent be available for commercial use – although there are wide variations between the five proposed sectors [31].

The fate of Dharavi is likely to set a precedent for future slum redevelopment projects in India. Activists and developers are closely watching the case of Dharavi: if such a large, economically important space can be redeveloped without significant consultation with residents, it will open the door for similar efforts elsewhere. In their latest update, Arputham and Patel note that the DRP is already being considered as a model for the redevelopment of a 1.1 square kilometre slum adjoining the Mumbai International Airport, which currently houses 85,000 or more households on commercially-valuable land.

I suppose that I’m alluding to two different types of outcome here. The first is a social one – the DRP would make many current Dharavi residents worse off, or at any rate reduce their ability to make choices about the city in which they live. But leaving that aside (and it’s a large thing to set aside!), the DRP may be a flawed project even on purely macroeconomic terms. It’s an attempt to develop Mumbai as a global city that completely runs roughshod over the actually-existing globalization occurring there. In a sense, it’s a struggle over whether a type of informal mixed-use design, and a certain mode of global integration, is allowed to continue within Mumbai.

[On the topic of the DRP, this old Airoots post, which makes a similar argument for understanding Dharavi as a "self-generating post-industrial city", is also worth a read:

The inhabitants of Dharavi have a fantastic capacity to solve their own problems. For many, Dharavi has been a platform for social mobility to middle-classdoom. However, one problem the inhabitants cannot get their head around is the threat of a top down redevelopment plan backed by the state. This burdens the residents of Dharavi more than anything else. Not only does the state not help, it even comes in the way of self-development. Why would anyone invest in their homes or business if it risks being bulldozed in a few months or years?

What seems to separate Dharavi from the DRP more than anything else is a generational gap. In the age of user-generated content, open-source and P2P, the net generation connects intuitively with the archetype of the squatter, who, just like the hacker in another realm, delves in and strives to overcome loopholes leftover by the system, and uses community and social networking as its modus operandi. In fact, it makes total sense to understand Dharavi as a self-generating post-industrial city...

More than a master plan, Dharavi needs a liberation of the imagination. Lets drop the heavy CAD maps and GIS surveys and zoom in to the street level. All Dharavi needs is some creative photoshoping and less of a patronising colonial gaze. If allowed to develop through their own internal skills, if provided for with basic infrastructural and amenities, the hundreds of enclaves, will keep improving their conditions, as they have always done. While no one can imagine what the neighbourhood may look in a couple of decades, it is certain to represent the city’s spirit like nothing else.

Click through for the references for Peter's post.]

References

Arputham, Jockin and Patel, Sheela. 2010. “Recent developments in plans for Dharavi and for the airport slums in Mumbai.” Environment and Urbanization 22(2): 501-504.

Benjamin, Solomon. 2008. “Occupancy Urbanism: Radicalizing Politics and Economy beyond Policy and Programs.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 32(3): 719-29.

Chalana, Manish. 2010. “Slumdogs vs. Millionaires: Balancing Urban Informality and Global Modernity in Mumbai, India.” Journal of Architectural Education ?(?): 25-37.

Fernando, Valerie. 2009. “In the Heart of Bombay: the Dharavi Slum.” Available online at esp.habitants.org. Accessed 20 June 2011.

Frenkel, Stephen and Kuruvilla, Sarosh. 2002. “Logics of Action, Globalization, and Changing Employment Relations in China, India, Malaysia, and the Philippines.” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 55(3): 387-412.

Grant, Richard and Nijman, Jan. 2003. “The Re-Scaling of Uneven Development in Ghana and India.” Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie 95(5): 467-481.

Harriss-White, Barbara. 2010. “Globalization, the Financial Crisis and Petty Commodity Production in India’s Socially Regulated Informal Economy”. In Bowles and Harriss.

Harriss-White, Barbara and Sinha, Anushree, eds. 2007. Trade Liberalization and India’s Informal Economy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Mason, Paul. 8 August 2011. “Slumlands — filthy secret of the modern mega-city.” New Statesman. Available online at http://www.newstatesman.com/global-issues/2011/08/slum-city-manila-gina-estero.

Nijman, Jan. 2009. “A Study of Space in Mumbai’s Slums.” Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie 101(1): 4-17.

Patel, Sheela and Arputham, Jockin. 2007. “An offer of partnership or a promise of conflict in Dharavi, Mumbai?” Environment and Urbanization 19(2): 501-508.

Patel, Sheela and Arputham, Jockin. 2008. “Plans for Dharavi: negotiating a reconciliation between a state-driven market redevelopment and residents’ aspirations.” Environment and Urbanization. 20(1): 243-253.

Patel, Sheela, Arputham, Jockin, Burra, Sundar and Savchuk, Katia. 2009. “Getting the information base for Dharavi’s redevelopment.” Environment and Urbanization 21(1): 241-251.

Patel, Shirish. 2010. “Dharavi: Makeover or Takeover?” Economic and Political Weekly 45(24): 47-54.

Rani, Uma and Unni, Jeemol. 2009. “Do Economic Reforms Influence Home-Based Work? Evidence from India.” Feminist Economics 15(3): 191-225.

Sanyal and Bhattacharya. 2010. “Beyond the Factory: Globalization, Informalization of Production and the Changing Locations of Labour”. In Bowles and Harriss, eds. Globalization and Labour in China and India: Impacts and Responses.

Sudarshan, Ratna, Vekataraman, Shanta and Bhandari, Laveesh. 2007. “Subcontracted homework in India: A case study of three sectors”. In Mehrotra and Biggeri: 173-209.

UNIFEM. 2000. A Preliminary Study on the Productive Linkages of Indian Industry with Home based Women Workers through Subcontracting Systems in Manufacturing Sector. New Delhi: United Nations Development Fund for Women.

United Nations. 2006. Human Development Report 2006. New York: United Nations Publishing.

United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA), Population Division. 2010. World Urbanization Prospects: The 2009 Revision. New York: UN-Habitat Urban Info.

[An image from Mehmet Ali Gökçeoğlu's mayoral campaign.]

This past summer on Places, Rob Walker, one of the artists behind the “Hypothetical Development Organization”, penned a brief history of architecture fiction and discussed the even-briefer history of that organization.  (The Hypothetical Development Organization was, if you are unfamiliar with it, a brief initiative which produced “hypothetical futures” for each of ten selected sites in New Orleans, with the proposals unbound “by rules relating to commercial potential, practical materials, or physics”.)  My favorite thing that Walker does in the essay is tracing the essential vein of weirdness that links the fiction produced by the Hypothetical Development Organization to the ordinary and common development signs that inspired the project:

“One day I went for a routine walk. My wife and I live in Savannah, GA, in an area that’s mostly residential, but interspersed with commercial and public buildings. It’s a nice stroll to an excellent bakery, my bank, a convenience store, the main branch of the public library.

Our neighborhood is the sort that people describe as “transitional,” and some of the property, both residential and commercial, is vacant. On one nearby commercial structure, vacant for the four-plus years we’ve lived in the area, I noticed a sign during this particular walk. You’ve seen similar signs, and I’d seen this one probably a hundred times, without ever really thinking about it. It was a rendering of a development, a future, involving a small, empty building. It suddenly struck me that, given how long this sign has been here, what it depicted was, at best, a hypothetical future — and arguably a fictitious one.

Since whenever this sign was first posted, the real estate market has collapsed, the old go-go economy has evaporated, and as it happens this building has been put up for sale. Any development that may take place some day would depend on someone buying it, and on what that party might want to do. Until then, it’s just another empty building that happens to have a sign on it. The disparity between the rendering and reality is considerable: In the rendering, in fact, the actual extant structure has been folded into a much bigger building, which in point of fact exists nowhere besides that rendering. In real life, it’s a vacant lot.

It further struck me that there are vacant buildings much like this one, with no definitive future, all over town — all over lots of towns. In a sense, then, our city streets are full of fiction, or something very much like it. The stories, mostly visual, are told in the form of colorful signs attached to drab or neglected structures, presenting speculations about how the very same physical place might look in some unspecified future. The abandoned office tower could house airy condos. The long-shuttered auto shop might morph into a gleaming boutique. The factory built for some bankrupt enterprise will, perhaps, burst with life again, its cheery mixed uses enjoyed by stock-image people representing a cross-section of pleasant citizenry. Sometimes these ideas are punctuated by the name of a development company and its Web address. But the story flows mostly from the beguiling picture, showing what could hypothetically happen, right here.”

This seems both fantastic — recognizing the strangeness of ordinary things examined closely — and exactly right to me — recognizing the fundamental similarity in genre between Archigram and Forest City, regardless of the massive differences in how they work within that genre.

It also reminds me of the story of the Turkish real estate agent Mehmet Ali Gökçeoğlu, who we read about in Emre Alturk’s contribution to Al Manakh 2, “Dubai, Copied and Pasted”.  You might say that, like Walker, Gökçeoğlu recognized something of the unrealized potential of the development sign as a fiction.  And, also like the story of the Hypothetical Development Organization, Gökçeoğlu’s story indicates the power of telling stories not as “a series of words”, but through “plans, schematics, models, renderings”.

Unlike Walker, though, Gökçeoğlu was not satisfied to let his pictures simply tell a story.  He ran for office on them:

“In January 2009, Mehmet Ali Gökçeoğlu, a local real estate agent running for mayor of Cesme, Turkey, publicized his campaign throughout the town in billboards and pamphlets.  His vision for the future of this Izmir borough was to make it the Dubai of Turkey, literally.  The imagery he deployed constituted aerial pictures of this touristic peninsula, fashioned with many projects previously proposed for Dubai including; an identical replica of the Palm Island, along with a tower of independently rotating floors to be the tallest in the world; a yacht marina, similarly to be the largest in the world; and an UFO shaped restaurant hovering meters above the ground.  It wasn’t long before the ‘most eccentric campaign of the elections’, as it was called by the media, made it to the national newspapers accompanied with snide remarks.  The imagery of the campaign circulated via email for weeks.  Eventually Gökçeoğlu wasn’t even close to securing the candidate post in his party — the ruling Justice and Development Party.  Enjoying a brief media attention, the campaign lived a short life in the absence of an endorsing sheik, money, public support, legislative basis and tax policies to attract desired foreign investment, or any substantial program for that matter.

There is hardly much to take seriously about the campaign.  But, wildly unfounded as it is, it does bring two things to mind.  First of all, it is striking that it caught a wide public attention at all.  Gökçeoğlu’s vision would have hardly found any audience beyond the small crowd that he is probably able to gather in a political rally, if it weren’t for the images.  It took him a — probably cracked — copy of Photoshop, some images pulled off the net, some hours of labor, and a modest capital to render this speculative agenda visible and palpable, thus mobilizing more attention and reaction…”

[Also on Places, the second installment in Mimi Zeiger's "The Interventionist's Toolkit" looked at the Hypothetical Development Organization as one of a series of "posters, pamphlets, and guides" occupying one niche in the world of "Provisional, Opportunistic, Ubiquitous, and Odd Tactics in Guerilla and DIY Practice and Urbanism".  (This niche is not unrelated to the nascent genre of the urban field manual.)  In BLDGBLOG post entitled "Urban Hypotheticals", Geoff Manaugh both describes the Hypothetical Development Organization and discusses more generally the potential uses and abuses of such speculative architectural projects.]

“Secret Servers”, an article by James Bridle originally published in issue 099 of Icon magazine, looks at the relationship between architecture and the physical infrastructure of the internet. I found Bridle’s last few paragraphs particularly provocative:

“What is at stake is the way in which architects help to define and shape the image of the network to the general public. Datacenters are the outward embodiment of a huge range of public and private services, from banking to electronic voting, government bureaucracy to social networks. As such, they stand as a new form of civic architecture, at odds with their historical desire for anonymity.

Facebook’s largest facility is its new datacenter in Prineville, Oregon, tapping into the same cheap electricity which powers Google’s project in The Dalles. The social network of more than 600 million users is instantiated as a 307,000 square foot site currently employing over 1,000 construction workers—which will dwindle to just 35 jobs when operational. But in addition to the $110,000 a year Facebook has promised to local civic funds, and a franchise fee for power sold by the city, comes a new definition for datacenters and their workers, articulated by site manager Ken Patchett: “We’re the blue collar guys of the tech industry, and we’re really proud of that. This is a factory. It’s just a different kind of factory then you might be used to. It’s not a sawmill or a plywood mill, but it’s a factory nonetheless.”

This sentiment is echoed in McDonald’s description of “a new age industrial architecture”, of cities re-industrialised rather than trying to become “cultural cities”, a modern Milan emphasising the value of engineering and the craft and “making” inherent in information technology and digital real estate.

The role of the architect in the new digital real estate is to work at different levels, in Macdonald’s words “from planning and building design right down to cultural integration with other activities.” The cloud, the network, the “new heavy industry”, is reshaping the physical landscape, from the reconfiguration of Lower Manhattan to provide low-latency access to the New York Stock Exchange, to the tangles of transatlantic fiber cables coming ashore at Widemouth Bay, an old smuggler’s haunt on the Cornish coast. A formerly stealth sector is coming out into the open, revealing a tension between historical discretion and corporate projection, and bringing with it the opportunity to define a new architectural vocabulary for the digitised world.”

Though Bridle does not make this link explicit in the article, the idea of a potential “new architectural vocabulary” is clearly related to the “New Aesthetic” that Bridle began talking about this past May.  (I’ve always liked Matt Berg’s description of it as a “sensor vernacular”, and Robin Sloan’s “digital backwash aesthetic”.  I’m not sure either of those capture exactly what Bridle’s been talking about — more like pieces of it — but they all dance around the same set of things, or at least similar sets.)  Here’s Bridle’s original description, pinched together:

For so long we’ve stared up at space in wonder, but with cheap satellite imagery and cameras on kites and RC helicopters, we’re looking at the ground with new eyes, to see structures and infrastructures.

The map fragments, visible at different resolutions, accepting of differing hierarchies of objects.

Views of the landscape are superimposed on one another. Time itself dilates.

Representations of people and of technology begin to break down, to come apart not at the seams, but at the pixels.

The rough, pixelated, low-resolution edges of the screen are becoming in the world.

And when that — a new aesthetic vocabulary — gets linked to a “re-industrialization”, pulling together aesthetics, culture, economics, and politics, you’ve got a pretty significant project.  I’d like to talk about this at more length later, but for now I will just quote from Dan Hill’s fantastic 14 Cities project.  (Independent of the concerns in this post, the whole project is worth a read.)  This is the fourth of the fourteen fictional future cities Hill describes, “Re-industrial City”:

“The advances in various light manufacturing technologies throughout the early part of the 21st century — rapid prototyping, 3D printing and various local clean energy sources — enabled a return of industry to the city. Noise, pollution and other externalities were so low as to be insignificant, and allied to the nascent interest in digitally-enabled craft at the turn of the century, by the early 2020s suburbs had become light industrial zones once again.

Waterloo, Alexandria and the Inner West of Sydney through to Pyrmont once again became a thriving manufacturing centre, albeit on a domestic scale, as people were able to ‘micro-manufacture’ products from their backyard, or send designs to mass-manufacture hubs supported by logistics networks of electric delivery vans and trains. Melbourne had led the way through its nurturing of production in the creative industries and its existing built fabric.

In an ironic twist, former warehouses and factories are being partially converted from apartments back into warehouses and factories. Yet the domestic scale of the technologies means they can coexist with living spaces, actually suggesting a return to the craftsman’s studio model of the Middle Ages. The ‘faber’ movement — faber, to make — spread through most Australian cities, with the ‘re-industrial city’ as the result, a genuinely mixed-use productive place — with an identity.”

[For more on the New Aesthetic, read Rob Walker's recent interview with James Bridle at Design Observer.  It's also well-worth checking out the essay in Domus by Alexis Madrigal that the image at top is taken from.]

[Building 20 at MIT, a "250,000-square foot wood building [that] hosted the development of many important research disciplines from Chomskyan linguistics to the new style of computing promoted by early hackers”.]

1. Alexis Madrigal writes about “Low Road” buildings:

…startup lore says that many companies were founded in garages, attics, and warehouses. Once word got around, companies started copying the formula. They stuck stylized cube farms into faux warehouses and figured that would work. The coolness of these operations would help them look cool and retain employees. Keep scaling that idea up and you get Apple’s ultrahip mega headquarters, which is part spaceship and part Apple Store.

But as Stewart Brand argued in his pathbreaking essay, “‘Nobody Cares What You Do in There’: The Low Road,” it’s not hip buildings that foster creativity but crappy ones.

“Low Road buildings are low-visibility, low-rent, no-style, high-turnover,” Brand wrote. “Most of the world’s work is done in Low Road buildings, and even in rich societies the most inventive creativity, especially youthful creativity, will be found in Low Road buildings taking full advantage of the license to try things.”

Brand’s essay originally appeared in his book, How Buildings Learn, and has just been re-released as part of The Innovator’s Cookbook, a new Steven Johnson-edited tome of great essays about inventing stuff. It couldn’t come at a better time. The aesthetic of innovation now dominates the startup scene, but it’s like the skeleton of a long-dead invention beast. The point of a Low Road building isn’t that it looks any particular way but rather that you could do anything with and in them. “It has to do with freedom,” as Brand put it.

While Madrigal is writing for the Atlantic‘s Technology channel, and is consequently concerned with Low Road buildings as the places in which technological innovation happens, the thing that interests me here is what the Low Road building says about architecture. That is,  if Building 20 is where innovation happens, but Apple’s megaheadquarters are where architects get involved, then is architecture’s relationship to innovation merely that architects get involved with an organization after it has lost the capacity to innovate? Is architecture’s relationship with innovative organizations primarily that it instantiates their ossification?

2. Or is there a role for architects to play in the spatial structuring of innovative and vibrant organizations? If so, what does this architecture look like? Madrigal and Brand suggest that, whatever this architecture might be, it certainly doesn’t look like Norman Foster and Frank Gehry — whatever the merits of their work may be.

Dan Hill speculates about such an architecture in an old City of Sound post:

“Brand uses this point about the endless productivity of these old spaces to reinforce one of Jane Jacobs: that new ideas generally can’t come from new buildings (The Death and Life of Great American Cities). However, if the Smithsons had attempted to design Sheffield University – a defiantly new building – with the characteristics Brand was looking for in old buildings, perhaps the situation is more subtle than Brand and Jacobs suggest? One hopes so, as much as it makes good sense to reuse suitable old built environment. There are strong ideas in Gehry’s building, in terms of creating ‘trading zones’ forcing disciplines together (more on this theme in a forthcoming entry on Richard MacCormac’s new Broadcasting House building) and it’s important to resist forgoing innovation and modernity in such buildings in favour of simply lobbing up portakabins for the sake of ongoing adaptability. Adaptability and modernity surely needn’t be mutually exclusive.”

(Another City of Sound post from the same time period discusses the Smithson’s work at Sheffield University.)

3. Commenting on Madrigal’s piece, Bill Woods adds a quote from C. Northcote Parkinson’s Parkinson’s Law:

It is now known that a perfection of planned layout is achieved only by institutions on the point of collapse. This apparently paradoxical conclusion is based upon a wealth of archaeological and historical research, … A study and comparison of these [buildings] has tended to prove that perfection of planning is a symptom of decay. During a period of exciting discovery or progress there is no time to plan the perfect headquarters. The time for that comes later, when all the important work has been done. Perfection, we know, is finality; and finality is death.

Satirical or not, it seems that there is a useful lesson for architects in this, as it would be terrifically sad if we defined architecture so that great architecture is possible only in an era of decay.

4. Finally, I’m reminded of a comment that Bryan Boyer made in an extended discussion at Rory Hyde’s blog at the beginning of the year. Boyer described his thesis work (which proposed a new capitol for the United States) as being an investigation into “the organizational consequences of spatial decisions made without any spatial understanding”. It seems to me that, if there is a role for architects to play in the life of organizations or institutions which find themselves in “a period of exciting discovery or progress”, it will almost certainly involve understanding the organizational consequences of spatial decisions — and being able to demonstrate convincingly that architects bring a kind of understanding to those decisions that will improve them as they are made.

[Facade of Pharos Building, Hoofddorp, Vanessa van Dam, 2002 -- never realized.]

Given our recent thinking about the role of maintenance in urban design, I was quite interested when I noticed, in a couple-year-old copy of 306090, an article by Hilary Sample (of MOS) on the potential of maintenance in architecture.  The piece, “Towers, Maintenance, and the Desire for Effortless Performance”, is well-worth reading in full, but I’ll quote one section, which deals with the project pictured above:

“Architecture relies upon a never-ending regime of labor called maintenance.  The purpose of maintenance is to restore newness to architecture by offsetting the effects of climate, environment, and time — it is an ongoing and continuous act.  Within crowded urban environments, where maintenance is unavoidably public, it has become a spectacle in its own right, fuelled by new technologies and novel techniques.  This spectacle is especially evident at the site of large transparent exterior surfaces, where the distinct machines, apparatuses, materials, and techniques of maintenance have become part of the image of the city…

Artist Vanessa van Dam’s window washing installation at the Pharos Office Tower (2003) near Amsterdam by Kohn Pederson Fox Architects, offers one such critique on the anonymous glass office building.  To explore the relationship between architecture and maintenance, van Dam proposed the installation of 85 industrial-sized window wipers typically found on airplanes and lighthouses.  While the project was never built, the wipers were designed to respond to a programmed script activated by sensors in tune with shifting local weather conditions.  The synchronicity of the mechanical facade in action, ever vigilant against the effects of weather and dirt, embodies the modernist injunction of cleanliness in robotic hyperactivity.  The addition of the black and heavy arms on the light glass and aluminum facade brings maintenance to the foreground, revealed as an object of a mechanized fantasy that threatens to overtake the architecture itself.”

Of course, the relationship of maintenance to buildings and landscapes is potentially quite different.  Where, as Sample notes, maintenance has the potential to reveal architecture “at its most vulnerable: weak and prone to constant decay”, what has excited us about maintenance in relationship to landscape is just the opposite: the potential of maintenance, as an on-going act of intentional cultivation, to harness the capability of landscape to become more complex and more productive over time, rather than decaying inexorably.  (That the traditional landscape capital project typically follows, albeit at a slower pace — first building towards maturity, before entering decline — the same pathways as buildings is, in fact, entirely the point, because it is that trajectory that we set out find alternatives to.)  It is more difficult to imagine maintenance playing this role in relationship to buildings, but that does nothing to diminish the value of the investigations Sample suggests.

A recent report in the New York Times which looks at global marriage patterns from an economic perspective contains the following fascinating excerpt, which indicates that China’s one-child policy, “combined with a cultural preference for sons and technologies that permit selective abortion”, has indirectly produced a proliferation of phantom third floors on Chinese houses:

…evidence suggests that young Chinese women and their families have in fact become much more selective in recent years.

They appear, for example, to focus more critically on the earnings potential of prospective mates. Because house size is often assumed to be a reliable signal of wealth, a family can enhance its son’s marriage prospects by spending a larger fraction of its income on housing. (Other families can follow the same strategy, of course, but when all families do so, the resulting homes are still reliable indicators of relative wealth.) Such a shift appears to have occurred.

For example, when Shang-Jin Wei, an economist at Columbia University, and Xiaobo Zhang of the International Food Policy Research Institute examined the size distribution of Chinese homes, they found that families with sons built houses that were significantly larger than those built by families with daughters, even after controlling for family income and other factors. They also generally found that the higher a city’s male-to-female ratio, the bigger the average house size of families that have sons.

Mr. Wei reports that many families with sons have begun to add a phantom third story to their homes, one that looks normal from the outside but whose interior space remains completely unfinished.

“Marriage brokers are familiar with the tactic,” he reports, “yet many refuse to schedule meetings with a family’s son unless the family house has three stories.”

This — a kind of architectural extension of ritual courting displays — could be read as an odd corollary to the American predilection for viewing the home primarily as an investment strategy, which mammoth has previously written about.  In both cases, the home’s function as shelter (or machine for living) is subsumed by its financial potential, whether it serves to display wealth or produce it — and it would be quite interesting to learn if this shift in the function of the home has had the kind of bizarre side-effects in China that it has had in the States.

We recently wrote a brief piece, “Appeal”, for the excellent architecture journal Quaderns in response to their most recent issue, “Parainfrastructures”. We used this response as an opportunity to consider why we are so drawn to infrastructural landscapes like Blue Plains — not just as sites of logistical and technological operations, but aesthetically as well:

Let us suppose for a moment that the “Parainfrastructures” which Quaderns #262 concerns itself with are a class of things, that object-parodying helium balloons hovering around Heathrow Airport to block its expansion, inflatable “instant cities” powered by air compressors, “geodesic domes, parachutes, spray-foam dwellings, zomes, space frames”, “indoor built and ephemeral complexes” colonizing the open floor plans of abandoned airports, and architectural systems of “air control” can be read as a category of architectural objects called “parainfrastructures”. Even though we will be supposing in error—because “Parainfrastructures” never seeks to delineate its subject matter by so crude a means as a definition—this seems a productive error, because it permits us to see a pervasive weirdness.

This weirdness, in the context of architectural critique, is that parainfrastructures paradoxically gain their strength and appeal from having been designed with a certain disregard for aesthetics. Parainfrastructures are constructed out of the banal materials of twentieth-century industrial innovation like synthetic fabrics, geotextiles, and industrial plastics, not the refined and expensive finishes of high-corporate architecture. Structurally, they depend on ties, straps, bendable rods, and air compressors—temporary, flexible, contingent engineering.

Read the whole piece at Quaderns and, while you’re there, think about ordering the full issue; it’s well worth your time, as it features contributions from John May, Enrique Ramirez, Roger Sauquet, Javier García-Germán, and more.

[Image via photographer Steve Jackson on Flickr]

[Residue Treatment Center (or CTRV) in Vacarisses, designed by Batlle i Roig. While the CTRV is a municipal solid waste treatment facility, not a wastewater treatment facility (where flushed feces usually go), the two kinds of facilities are commonly linked by the need to dispose of solid materials separated out of water at wastewater treatment facilities.

Photographs by Francisco Urrutia via Quaderns #262 "Parainfrastructures", where you can read more about the project.]

“Instead of bringing together users through machines, what if interaction design were reconceived to foster positive friction between different design disciplines? What would interaction design look like if it wasn’t only (or even necessarily) digital, but if it genuinely melded architecture, industrial and product design, graphic design, art, video narrative, tiny technology, large scale networks, and so on? What would debates between the disciplines be like? What might win, and more importantly, what would they unearth about interaction design in general? What other disciplines might emerge and what new visions of the world might appear? The recognition that many other fields have dealt with these issues and continue to do so, may open up a larger conversation that reveals new relationships, isomorphisms, productive frictions—even interactions.”

Read the full piece at Domus; though brief, it touches on many of mammoth‘s favorite corners of architectural academia, including the MIT Media Lab and Columbia’s Network Architecture Lab.

[A pair of projects by David Benjamin and Soo-in Yang (The Living); top, Amphibious Architecture; above, Living Light.]

The thirtieth anniversary issue of Metropolis has a number of great articles in it (and I hope to write at length shortly about one of those, Andres Duany’s apology for the New Urbanism), so I’d recommend picking up the entire issue, but, if you’re not inclined to do so, you ought to at least read Andrew Blum’s short piece on architecture, social media, and physical space:

“Our experience of the world around us has changed to a degree not seen since the arrival of trains and cars. The presence of “the Net”—by which I loosely mean all two-way, personal media—has become as much a factor in our experience of space as the play of light and shadow on a wall, or the cultural accretions that dignify local architectural styles…

…what if our screens engaged in that conversation? If our building facades didn’t just communicate information to us (à la the Jumbotron), but we communicated back, communally? After all, what makes cities vital are their color and diversity, the wild mix of scales, even the noise and confusion. This has been the defining sensation of modernity, from the Parisian boulevard to the contemporary aerotropolis. Social media has the potential to amplify this quality, making people feel disoriented and overwhelmed—but also focused and inspired. Great cities have always done both, and architecture’s role has always been to help make sense of it all. It took Mies to show how the lowly industrial I-beam could be transmuted into something as grand and symbolically profound as the columns of a Greek temple. What architect will turn the networked screen into a chapel?”

Read the full article at Metropolis.

The Highbridge Pool and Recreation Center is an invaluable place for kids to play and learn. Yet for several months every summer the Washington Heights community is denied this critical resource when the facility is converted into locker rooms for the Highbridge Park Swimming Pool.

We’ve designed Splash House, a new pool-deck pavilion for the Highbridge Park Pool in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City. It is a space where swimmers can change and safely store belongings, and we’re ready to construct it ourselves this summer.

We need your help!  All donations will go towards procuring building materials for Splash House; everything from screws to steel beams.

Although it’s probably not the first such attempt, it’s the first one I’m aware of.

[Splash House rendering by the students of the Design Workshop.]

Endeavors like this are exciting to see, and have a clear relationship to the current discourse in architecture concerning business models and future practices. I can’t get too carried away with the prospect of Kickstarter as single-source capital for a built project, because I’m yet to be convinced of its ability to fund projects beyond a couple tens of thousands of dollars (if that).  (And the fact that the Design Workshop students aren’t using it as single-source capital only reinforces this point.) Kickstarter wants to be a force multiplier for architectural projects, not a stand-in for a traditional (monied) client. When used in a way which recalls the literal significance of its name, I think tremendous possibilities for architecture and urbanism are present. A couple off-the-cuff examples of what I’m thinking:

- Propose an architectural product instead of an architectural object. This could be a study to create field manuals, or project like New York City’s recent effort to create a simplified version of their zoning code in a book designed with non-technical folks in mind. Efforts that aim for larger effects throughout a region by leveraging civic engagement which might otherwise be left latent, efforts which utilize a small amount of startup financial capital in order to mobilize a much larger amount of human capital.

- In a similar fashion to what Bryan Boyer proposes here [1], it’s not hard to see a situation in which a prospective builder or local entrepreneur could utilize the Kickstarter infrastructure and some grassroots community marketing to aggregate committed interest from future clients. This financial demonstration of interest could be used as a down payment on a construction loan, or as a proof-of-concept minimum viable product in tandem with a business plan to acquire a business loan.

This is certainly no knock on the Parsons Design Workshop team (who I am sure would welcome your support, and have a nice history of design-build projects in the public realm) — but I’m looking forward to a future where designers ask “if no client, then how?” instead of “if no client, then who?”

[Link via Federico Negro of CASE Inc.]

Approximately seventy-five miles due west of the gleaming towers of Chicago’s Loop, Union Pacific Railroad, the United States’ largest railroad company, operates the Rochelle Global III Intermodal Facility, twelve-hundred acres of switching yards, train tracks, loading facilities, and container-sized parking spaces.  Rochelle, a small Midwestern town with just under ten thousand inhabitants, has long been a significant crossroads for trans-continental infrastructures.  In 1854, the Air Line Railroad ran the first tracks through the town, tracks which are now owned by Union Pacific.  In the early 20^th century, east and west bound automobiles passed through Rochelle, as the town lies on the route of the Lincoln Highway, the first coast-to-coast highway dedicated in the United States.  The town recently commemorated this history with the incorporation of Railroad Park, which it claims is the nation’s first park dedicated primarily to watching trains operate².  Whatever the veracity of that claim, there is no doubt that there are many trains to watch in Rochelle, as every day over three thousand containers pass through the flat and linear landscape of Global III on an average of twenty-five trains.  Yet as impressive as the Global III’s scale and swiftness of operation is, it is only one of five Intermodal Facilities operated by Union Pacific in the Chicago area, and the Chicago area facilities are situated within Union Pacific’s much larger network of tracks, rail and hump yards, depots, terminals, and facilities which sprawls across mountains, deserts, plains, forests and coasts from New Orleans to Seattle to Los Angeles and back to Chicago.

Given the potent role logistical networks such as the one that Global III is a single node in play in shaping the form of cities, it is not surprising that contemporary architects, landscape architects, and urbanists of other varying stripes have developed a strong interest in the aesthetics and function of infrastructural landscapes like Global III.

It is also not surprising that the cover of a publication which aims to capitalize on and catalog architectural projects resulting from that interest, as Kelly Shannon and Marcel Smet’s The Landscape of Contemporary Infrastructure — the publication where I first encountered Global III — does, is adorned with the photograph of Global III from the top of this post, neatly rowed trains and splayed geometric parking spaces in the foreground, the facility’s stormwater detention ponds triangular in the background.  What is perhaps somewhat surprising, though, is that such a book features on the cover one of the few projects within its pages for which neither architect nor landscape architect is credited.  The authors have a rather full palette of projects to select from, including seventy-two “majors” – projects which receive detailed two-page spreads – and numerous “minors”.  Of the “majors”, only two – the Hangzhou Bay Bridge and the Qinghai-Tibet Railroad – lack a recognized architect or designer.  Global III is only mentioned briefly in the text, as a “minor”, included to serve, along with the Qinghai-Tibet Railroad, as an example of what the authors describe as infrastructures whose “mark of technological ability resides not so much in their expression of sophistication and stylishness, but in the raw force of technological advancement required to master the demanding objectives they were set to resolve”.  As the architectural professions are built upon the mastery of “sophistication”, “stylishness”, and “expression”, but not upon the ability to drive technological innovation, the selection of this rather unrepresentative infrastructure for this book’s cover perhaps unintentionally precisely locates one of the core dilemmas produced by the infrastructural turn in the architectural professions: while it is easy to understand why architects want to design infrastructures – as infrastructures are the bone and sinew of modern cities, those who design infrastructures design cities – it is much more difficult to explain why cities should want infrastructures designed by architects.

The reason this question is so difficult to answer is that the very form of these structures — the engineered purity that makes them so compelling aesthetically — arises directly from the spatial ramifications of raw numbers and patterns of logistics.  This is a particularly chilling point for architects interested in infrastructure, because, if form-giving is not to be our gift to infrastructure, what will?  The obvious response (which mammoth and others have discussed elsewhere) is that if architects want to be more than infrastructural decorators, we’ll need to learn to manipulate the performance-derived source-code that controls the spatial expression of infrastructures.  But that is much easier said than done.

So that wrapped up pretty neatly, and consequently I’m not sure how to fit this thought in, but I also suspect that the answer to this question — and other questions related to the involvement of the architectural professions in the future of cities — has a lot to do with the application of “spatial intelligence”, the strategic re-positioning of architecture as a discipline, and, perhaps a little bit less directly, our professions’ facility with what Bryan Boyer brilliantly calls “matter battles”.  (Boyer positions the matter battle roughly in opposition to the fluidity of digital design, but I think it could pretty easily be understood as a weakness in purely economic and political models of the city, as well.)

The middle link there, by the way, is to Rory Hyde’s piece from the end of last December on “Potential Futures for Design Practice”, which was not only a superb summary of some of those futures, but also sparked a discussion in its comments section which is not to be missed.  That discussion is really worth reading in its entirety, but if you’re looking for a one-sided (but excellent) set of Cliff Notes, Boyer compiled his contributions to the discussion on his own blog.

[Fantastic Norway's 2005 installation "Polar Night", built in the Arctic town of Bodø.  A total of 40 daylight lamps -- bulbs of the sort which are designed to simulate natural sunlight and used in therapy -- were attached to fiberglass panels, lighting a public square during the polar night, and producing an event which attracted citizens into public spaces which are usually abandoned during the lengthy darkness of the polar night.]

[Fantastic Norway's signature caravan is visible in the bottom right corner of the final image; for years, architecture school dropouts Håkon Matre Aasarød and Erlend Blakstad Haffner traveled Norway in their caravan, moving from town to town reading the power structures of municipalities, meeting with both key individuals they identified as well as interested members of the public, writing local newspaper columns to describe their intentions and utility to the community, and developing clients willing to finance their projects.  Though their practice has evolved away from its early itinerant character, their combination of public interface and the curation of clients remains, in the very best sense, unsolicited architecture.]

I hope everyone has watched the video of the Metrodome collapse.

The moment when the fabric tears and a inverted volcano of snow pours onto the field is incredible, like a roof giving birth.  (I tried to capture a still, but the wonder is all in the fluid motion.)

Parametrics should be the study of how to make more incredible roof collapse videos through incredibly complicated fabric roof designs. Imagine a series of collapses carefully cascading through some cavernous structure — a textile-roofed Boeing Everett Factory cross-bred with the Istanbul Basilica Cistern — with the whole roof having been structurally timed to produce this singular and ephemeral moment of destructive choreography.

The roof re-imagined as time-delayed fireworks by way of harnessed snowloads.

GM: …I guess if you’re trying to do a kind of trigonometric extension of the canon into the future, and to imagine where might we be in fifteen years based on how the canon currently exists, then you’re going to produce a very referentially limited type of architecture…

RH: I guess just to wrap up with one final thought on this ‘expanded discipline’ or expanded range of sources for the discipline, is that what’s always surprised me working in practice is that clients don’t bring with them the baggage of architectural training or architectural history, so to work outside of that is nothing shocking to them, and actually to work inside of that canon, to bring that baggage of references—of the seemingly arcane history lectures that are fed to us at school—is unusual in the real world. So to me the agenda you are both promoting through events like Thrilling Wonder Stories feels both at once like a challenge to the architectural tradition, but more like a correction.

LY: Architects are amazing self-censors. We put the parameters around our profession much more than anybody else does. Part of my teaching practice, when I get students in their final year of study, is very often about unlearning all the things they expect from their architecture degree, and opening up the possibilities of what it could be. And that’s part of the game, to try and subvert the idea of what they think they’re supposed to be doing, which is a culturally constructed form of what the architect is, and actually thinking on a project by project basis or thinking completely within a set of interests that the student might have to determine where they want to take their practice as an outcome of their own world view.

This seems like a potentially very powerful realization — that the directions we impose upon our work, even in the often-valid attempt to respond to an intradisciplinary discourse, can end up limiting the potential agency of our work in ways that might seem very strange to an outside observer or client, who is not burdened by the same disciplinary baggage.