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.

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).

[Collection containers sit in the Roosevelt Island pneumatic system; photograph by Jonathan Snyder for Wired.com]

Wired’s Gadget Lab tours the Roosevelt Island pneumatic trash collection system:

In 1969, New York City granted the state a 99-year lease to develop the island, and the planning began. Ideas for the island included housing for United Nations workers, housing for doctors and nurses, one big park, a nuclear power plant, the New York Aquarium, an Egyptian museum, theaters, promenades, a new home for the bodies in Brooklyn and Queens cemeteries, casinos and a canal that would cut the island in half.

Eventually, planners settled on a utopian, car-free residential community for 20,000 New Yorkers. The narrow streets wouldn’t be fit for traffic, or for garbage collection, so a pneumatic trash system became part of the plans. In 1973, the island was dubbed Roosevelt, and construction of the system and the first residential towers was finished in 1975…

…A network of 20-inch tubes takes garbage from the island’s 16 residential towers, collecting from every floor, to a central collection point where it is compacted and trucked off the island.

Watch the entire slideshow at Wired.

More: Fast Trash was a recent exhibition about the same system, which argued “that service infrastructure plays a crucial role in cities and is even capable of inspiring the collective imagination”; watch a short film, “Nature Abhors a Vacuum”, at the Fast Trash website.

While the most important thing to note when correcting this sort of critique is, as Trimble says, that the generic quality of the architecture is true to the internal logic of the film (and a dreamlike architecture would not be), the demand for dreamlike architecture is quite consistent with a cultural predilection for evaluating the interest of architecture primarily in terms of its (visual) novelty.  (To me, questions that might arise from the suggested use of predictable architecture as a means for producing psychological comfort seem at least as interesting from an architectural standpoint as any questions that might be provoked by a CGI-enhanced tour of, say, a city populated by the MVRDV and FAT designs that Betsky suggests.  Which not to say that I wouldn’t enjoy the latter — I would — but that an architectural imagination which finds only the latter interesting seems very limited.)

Also pleasurable and speaking of Fashion Architecture Taste: Charles Holland on Inception: “It would be far better if the film had no ending at all and instead just carried on and on indefinitely until people finally grew bored and left the cinema”.

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.

Having mentioned Parag Khanna’s paean to a dawning age of mega-cities, I ought to also mention journalist Joel Kotkin’s article in the same issue of Foreign Policy, which argues — in near direct opposition — that (a) the coming dominance of mega-cities has been greatly exaggerated, (b) smaller cities are better positioned to succeed economically while providing a more liveable environment for their citizens, and (c) “the suburbs are not as terrible as urban boosters frequently insist”, but possibly even a better form of urban organization.  The linkage between (a) and (b) is relatively clear and the linkage between those first two points and (c) relatively opaque — Kotkin, for instance, spends a portion of the article making a case for the value of suburbs and then segues into Singapore as an example of how small cities are more successful than big cities, which seems an odd juxtaposition given the density of Singapore — but as a pair, Khanna and Kotkin’s articles at least demonstrate two of the major positions that might be staked out on global urban futures.

If there’s a particular part of Kotkin’s article I especially appreciate, it’s his discussion of the role of relatively unfashionable industries — “trade in goods, manufacturing, energy, and agriculture” — in driving “the world’s fastest-rising cities”; his discussion doesn’t dovetail perfectly with mammoth’s interest in re-industrialization (which we understand rather expansively, including much more than just the traditional industries whose value Kotkin calls attention to), but the appreciation for the economic act of production (in contrast to economies of service or knowledge) is similar.

The Nurbanist vision of carving up the city in this way is as diagrammatic and retrograde as Moses’ planning – and, similarly, it’s an assault on the complexity of the city, the city’s ability to generate its own fabulously complicated internal patterns that defy cursory inspection. The emphasis on little neighbourhoods, the stoop, local shops and walking distances, the “human scale” only tells part of the story of the city – after all, these things can be found in villages and small towns. All cities need sublimity, a touch of holy terror, a defiance of human scale that asserts connection to the greater urban whole. Elevated highways, crowds, tall buildings, interconnection and confusion – these things can be to some people dismaying and unpleasant, but the awe they strike is the overture of accepting the condition of living in a city. The Tube roundel is vaguely holy to Londoners – intensely reassuring – because it is a sign of connection with a system of vast complexity and importance. (The religious meaning of the Tube is a subject I keep meaning to write about at some point.) Nurbanism stems from a fear and hatred of the modern city as it is – a hatred that is ideological, that cannot and will not be shown that there are reasons to like the neon snarl of the cities we have, and their inner flows and surges.

Read Wiles’ entire post here.

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”.)

In A Preliminary Atlas of Gizmo Landscapes, mammoth briefly described the Google data center in The Dalles; in an excellent recent article, local The Dalles Chronicle reporter Theodoric Meyer investigates the relationship between Google and local public officials, the impact of the arrival of a second data center — for Facebook — in this rural Oregon town, and the surprising contrast between the willingness of the two internet giants to share information about these physical instantiations of the Invisible City.

[Via Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic; via Andrew Blum, commentary on Meyer's article at Data Center Knowledge.]

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.

[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

B. FLATSPACE
Lateral

“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

D. THE SUBURBAN GENERAL STORE
R&DAR

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.

Through Brian Finoki, I ran into the game-world “photography” of Robert Overweg (“Facade 2″ pictured above), who hunts the worlds of video games not to run up a body count, but for architectural fragments and broken landscapes, moments where the rough edges of programmed rules find visual expression.  I recommend “Glitches” and “The end of the virtual world”, in particular.

Regardless, you ought to read their argument for yourself.

“…Asking voters to nominate single buildings necessarily produces results that give a skewed view of the way architecture — and more important, the way we think and write about it — has evolved in recent years.

Among critics and architects alike, there has been a rising understanding that architecture is not just about stand-alone icons but is tied inextricably to urban planning, real-estate speculation, capital flows, ecology and various kinds of networks — and similarly that architecture criticism means more than simply writing about impressive new landmarks, green or not, produced by the world’s best-known firms.

…

Maybe, in other words, the most important achievement in green architecture over the last 10 or 30 years is not a single building at all. Maybe it’s a collection of schools or linked parks or the group of advisors brought together by a young mayor somewhere. Maybe it’s a new kind of solar panel, a tax credit or a zoning change. Maybe it’s tough to hang a plaque on — or photograph for a magazine spread.”

It’d be hard to come up with a better description of what mammoth is about than “maybe the most important achievement of architecture over the last 30 years is a tax credit or a zoning change”.

More frivolously: the Vanity Fair poll is well worth reading, if only for the unintentional hilarity that ensues as architects shamelessly nominate their own buildings.  (Mammoth congratulates every architect on the list who left off his or her own buildings on their tastefulness.)  The humor is particularly acute when those buildings fail to appear in any of the other architects’ lists.

(Also, it has not escaped our notice that both Ben van Berkel (UN Studio) and Rafael Viñoly are biting mammoth.  We congratulate them on their good taste.)