[What with the final and all, today is an excellent day to check out a bit of Rasmus Norlander’s photography; above is one of his photographs of the Soccer City stadium renovation in Johannesburg — site of today’s final — but I recommend continuing on to his website and looking at the extraordinary photographs in the “Landscape” series: “Pipe”, “Forest”, “Two piles”, etc.]
Serial Consign has posted an excellent short essay on the overlap between representations of cities in video games and representations of cities in architecture:
Exactly what common ground do the modular megastructure of Plug-In City and the instrumentalized cityscapes of Civilization share? Both of these frameworks propose that urban growth is an algorithmic or procedural operation whereby “the city” (rather than a singular edifice) embodies the essence of Le Corbusier’s technophilic proclamations that architecture should function as a “machine for living”. These examples encapsulate systemic thinking in paper architecture and game design by suggesting the possibility of an instrumentalized, “plug and play” urbanism founded on the notion of homogeneous citizenry and the possibility of infinite expansion. These reductionist approaches to reading the city are equal parts utopian and monomaniacal – one need only look as far as McKenzie Wark for some sage advice regarding such totalizing thought: “The delusion of God games is that the gamer is in control when at the controller … But it is the game that plays the gamer … the gamer who is an avatar, in the sense of being the incarnation of an abstract principle.” While Wark is levying this warning at the players of strategy games it could well be heeded by urban planning firms who find themselves enmeshed in the market forces and legalities that dictate the scope of most city-scale projects.
If you enjoy the essay, note that Greg has posted a handful of additional thoughts here.
[Readers of mammoth will recall that this — particularly the parallel between the god-like control assumed by the gamer and the fetishization of control in modernist urbanism — is a topic which we have occasionally discussed.]
Soccer City stadium, site of Sunday’s World Cup final, is the largest stadium in Africa — though it seats a bit under ninety thousand spectators in its current configuration, which sacrifices spectator seating in favor of “reserved seating” for the press, FIFA officials, and other “Very Important Persons” — but even its bulk is relatively tame in comparison to the slag piles (“massive dumps of crushed rock discarded after gold extraction”) that sit just to the west of the stadium.
[Via NASA Earth Observatory]
Just quick note to let you all know that last week’s chapter, Cell Structure by Ted Kane and Rick Miller, and the upcoming week’s Counting (On) Change by Roger Sherman have been rolled into a single post, which should go live sometime in the next several days.
Polis have published their take on Cell Structure (which you can see here), postulating that advances in communication and transportation technologies may serve to benefit society by marginalizing illogical borders. Also, be sure and check out Peter Nunns and Nam Henderson for a set of posts on chapters past, if you haven’t already: Invisible City and Invisible City + Landscape: Tree Huggers, respectively.
FASLANYC has posted an excellent collection of landscape-related projects which readers of this blog will surely enjoy. Highlights include Tryptyque’s “Vegetable Machine”, which is a couple years old but always worth a second look; Camilo Restrepo Arquitectos’ “Interfacephyta Multicapacitaceae”, whose capable fusion of the technological and the ecological one suspects would equally delight the authors of Quiet Babylon and Pruned; and Santiago Cirugeda’s “Urban Prescriptions”, which are a set of directions (as well as sample projects executed by Cirugeda) on how one might go about productively circumventing and subverting the norms and bureaucratic rules governing cities. One of those “Urban Prescriptions”, “Scaffolding”, is pictured above; if I follow it correctly, “Scaffolding” uses the relatively loose rules governing the construction of scaffolding as an opportunity to build a small addition with much greater ease than if it were legally classified as “architecture”. This is exactly the sort of move — developing an architecture through what amount to assembly instructions rather than blueprints — which I referred to at the end of “future forests of the infrastructural city”, and so it will be no surprise that I agree with FASLANYC‘s effuse praise:
This idea of specific, free, “prescriptions” that allow for quick, agile participatory projects holds great promise for the future of our cities. Just as now one can search how install a new bottom bracket on your bicycle or pour a concrete foundation for your dog pen, a future of extensive wikis with specific directions on how to navigate bureaucracy and account for socio-economic and environmental factors could empower groups who seek to mobilize to an effect change in the built environment. Considering the amount of work to be done rebuilding our cities, we will need all types of intervention, and [“Urban Prescriptions”] offers a tantalizing glimpse of one new way forward.
After a rather exciting series of quarter-finals, and in anticipation of the semi-finals: the last fifteen minutes of the 1982 World Cup semi-final between France and Germany, transposed onto urban landscapes near Lyon by the artists collective Pied La Biche:
[Seen at Polis; Pied La Biche were last spotted playing three-sided anarchist-rules soccer on a hexagonal field.]
[A “feral house” in Detroit, via Sweet Juniper, who has many more pictures; houses and porches, of course, cannot be mowed, and so one often finds early successional plants such as Ailanthus taking advantage of that fact while their brethren a few feet away are easily suppressed by even the most sporadic of maintenance regimes; you might also enjoy Sweet Juniper’s flickr set “Life on the Urban Prairie”]
Running with Techentin’s speculation about future cybernetic forests, DPR-Barcelona catalog a series of “Performative Organic Machines”: telephone wire parasites, “eco-boulevards”, free-roaming mechanical colonies composed of plants, bacteria, and robot.
Relatedly but not identical, spy upon your suburban neighbors in the Terrestial Shrub Rover.
At Free Association Design, Brett Milligan contributes a pair of posts, the first a slideshow of “spontaneous urban vegetation” in Portland and the second looking at a particular example of a constructed urban forest, San Francisco’s Mount Sutro.
We’ll be back later this week with a post on chapter eight, “Cell Structure”, which looks at the impact of the proliferation of privately-funded, owned, and operated cellular infrastructures.
This is week seven of our reading of The Infrastructural City; if you’re not familiar with the series, you can start here and catch up here. With our delayed posting of the previous chapter, we didn’t get around to posting an index, but you can read FASLANYC’s contrarian take on the chapter here and Peter Nunns’ look at telecoms, the future of air travel, and de-globalization here.
[Powerline pruning, photographed by flickr user Justin Berger]
In the seventh chapter of The Infrastructural City, “Landscape: Tree Huggers”, architect Warren Techentin discusses “landscape as a foundational infrastructure” in Los Angeles. (By landscape, it’s worth noting, Techentin means specifically ‘plants’, usually ‘trees’, and quite often ‘cultivated trees’, though “accidentally imported” plants make the occasional appearance, as well.)
Techentin begins by describing the initial entanglements of Los Angeles with trees: the council tree near which the Gabrielino Indians built the village of Yangna, Los Angeles’ immediate predecessor; the orange groves, which brought both economic vitality and the ever-increasing demand for imported water to the basin; and, most recently, imported ornamental trees.
The most iconic of these imported trees, the palm, was particularly vital in constructing the image of Los Angeles. Real estate developers — such as Venice Beach’s Abbot Kinney — planted rows of them to demarcate plots, botanical markers of future urbanisms. The palm was particularly valued for its exotic effect, which suggested to the prospective resident that Los Angeles was not just a place of economic opportunity, but a paradise of tropical (or, at the very least, Mediterranean) leisure.
LANDSCAPING
[Landscaping, idealized and extreme; photographed by flickr user Anna Verlet]
The palm, though, is only one early tool in the kit of plants used to alter the image of the city, a kit which has been refined and expanded as Los Angeles developed its extensive and signature car culture.
“After people moved in, so did businesses, and trees and plants were again used to raise the value of commercial properties. The front doors of many businesses in Los Angeles are accessed through parking lots so the effective use of landscaping to provide relief from the acres of asphalt is important for business. In a city built around cars, new forms of landscaping comprised of edging, hedging, containment, concealment, signage, embankment, topiary, and decor emerged simultaneously with the developing car culture. When the pedestrian space of the sidewalk disappeared amidst the spaces of strip malls and parking lots emerged between the street and the building, landscape again helped to soften the deleterious effects of the quickly erected, often bland commercial architecture. Particularly at fast food restaurants, new concepts of landscape were deployed exuberantly, often monstrously, to enhance the meal. Images of the pastoral suburban landscape of the Garden City, the exotic landscapes of Eden, and the topiary gardens of France and Japan were marshalled to screen the growing proliferation of urban artifacts: trash cans, electrical transformers, water meters, building edges, air conditioning condensers, and the sidewalk or roadway itself. All of these objects disappear through carefully selected plantings, thus allowing patrons to enjoy an authentic indoor-outdoor eating experience a few feet away from their automobiles. At any drive-through of a fast food restaurant, a country road is evoked as drivers circle their way between the speaker and pick-up window amidst plants that beautify the wait for food with a pleasing, planted environment that has grown over the stains, graffiti, garbage, insects, and dust of the city”
Landscaping — distinguished from other cultivated landscapes and gardens by its ubiquitous presence and banal qualities — is landscape as a real estate amenity. This is the landscaped iteration of the ‘equity urbanism’ that we described in our essay, “The Shelter Category”, that was published in MONU #12:
“…ownership culture [and ‘equity urbanism’ are] ultimately not founded on the rationales of personal responsibility, security, or stability, but upon the notion that the home is an asset for the cultivation of personal wealth. Architecturally, this is a strange notion —the home as a wealth generator, not shelter – but it does a great deal to explain the dominance of the primary architectural forms of contemporary America, the cheaply built urban condo and the even more cheaply built suburban home. The notable thing about both these architectural forms is how un-engaged architects are with them: both in that most critical discourse is unconcerned with mass-produced housing and in that mass-produced housing is produced with very little input from architects.”
Like architects who are essentially un-engaged with mass-produced housing, landscape architects are essentially un-engaged with car culture landscapes, even though, as many critics have noted, landscape is the primary medium constituting the automotive city. (We, at least in my experience, tend to shrink from the suggestion that there is any connection between what a ‘landscaper’ does and what a ‘landscape architect’ does.)
Techentin notes, though, that the palms are dying — many of old age, some of fungal and other diseases. The city, eager to replace these exotic trees with native species, has no plans to import replacements, indicating, to Techentin, that the era of landscape as image in Los Angeles is ending (though, it should be said, there is no apparent end in sight for landscaping as a mass amenity, and part of the reason that the city is not replacing palms is that their use in luxury developments in Florida and the southwest has driven up prices).
PERFORMATIVE URBAN FORESTS
[Mullein — Verbascum thapsussm — via Peter del Tredici]
The question we are left with, then, is: what are future urban natures like? Techentin argues that, as the palms die out — and, with them, perhaps also the idea that the landscape exists primarily to create an image — urban forests will become performative:
“While the city may be in the process of abandoning the palm as its foremost icon, trees continue to be enlisted as supplements to urban life… This relationship has become more symbiotic as we have come to an understanding of the importance of trees in the urban ecosystem. Taken in conjunction with plant life everywhere, trees collectively function like a giant machine — an enormous oxygen-producing and pollutant filtering infrastructure for the city. Urban forests generate oxygen, absorb airborne and ground toxins, beautify, shade, create privacy, reduce water run-off into storm systems, stabilize soil to prevent erosion, mitigate reflected heat off roads and sidewalks, produce “curb appeal” thereby increasing real estate values, provide wind control, animal habitat, and a source of food and flowers.”
“If, however, trees in the city have traditionally been appreciated because they were useless — removed from their non-urban cousins, which exist to provide us with lumber and fuel — they are increasingly becoming machines, bits of living infrastructure. The fall of the palm — that vapid, high-maintenance Hollywood starlet — is tied to this idea of trees moving from being merely ornamental to more performative organic machines — walling us in, generating the air we breath, shading our cities.”
One possible way in which forests might become performative, suggested by Techentin, is that they may be “hybrid mechanic-organic systems”:
“With the Frankenpine [cell phone towers which mimic tree forms] thriving, it is possible to speculate on an urban future in which thousands of artificial trees might be deployed throughout the city: on streets, in malls, and in our office landscapes. In the next generation of office or mall equipment, we may see new tree-machines proliferating amongst this landscape–providing wireless communication, video monitoring, air filtration, security, and space for storage, digital or otherwise. One can imagine a whole forest of imitative, performative, and embedded artificial “trees” deployed amongst real trees or, for that matter, prosthetic systems that would augment living trees, providing necessary features that we otherwise would find disagreeable to look at, some of which may provide a solution for some of today’s urban ills such as the reintroduction of animal habitats, methane gas venting, hazmat, and security monitoring systems, and so on.”
This, I suppose, might seem far-fetched and a stretching of the ‘tree’ metaphor until it becomes very thin indeed, but I’m not so sure that it is entirely ridiculous. What are these carbon storage structures, if not cybernetic trees (the engineers even refer to them as “artificial trees” configured in a “forest”), and what are the Voltrees (elaborated upon here by Pruned), if not prosthetic trees?
[Fall Panicum grows in pavement, via Peter del Tredici]
But, I would add (and this seems much more important to me): the rise of the performative tree will also be seen in the acceptance and valuation of “crypto-forests”, “cosmopolitan” plant communities, and invasive species. Techentin says: “Wild nature, or what may be left of it, seems all but removed from collective experience.” Despite this collective remove, though, there is wild nature in the city, only it is invasive and post-human, growing in legal and physical spaces of abandonment: a fence on property line, a sliver of land between two properties deemed to have no value as real-estate, the concrete bed of a channelized river.
I’m reminded of the fantastic new field guide, Wild Urban Plants of the Northeast, which is written by Peter del Tredici, who is both a botanist and researcher at the Arnold Arboretum and a lecturer for Harvard’s landscape program. Wild Urban Plants, though it is first and foremost a guide to the identification and characteristics of what del Tredici calls “cosmopolitan plants” — those plants which are adapted to the contaminated soils, frequent disturbance regimes, and harsh growing conditions which characterize urban ecologies, and so are able to survive and even thrive without maintenance or care in cities — is also an opportunity for del Tredici to make the argument that we ought to begin to value these plants (many of whom are often lumped together under the derogatory rubric of “invasives”) and the communities that they form, because they provide ecological services at a uniquely low cost.
Quoting at length from del Tredici’s recent article in Natural History (PDF):
“The ecology of the city is defined not only by the cultivated plants that require maintenance and the protected remnants of natural landscapes, but also by the spontaneous vegetation that dominates the neglected interstices. Greenery fills the vacant spaces between our roads, homes, and businesses; lines ditches and chain-link fences; sprouts in sidewalk cracks and atop neglected rooftops. Some of those plants, such as box elder, quaking aspen, and riverside grape, are native species present before humans drastically altered the land. Others were brought in intentionally or unintentionally by people, including chicory, Norway spruce, and Japanese knotweed. And still others, among them common ragweed, path rush ( Juncus tenuis), and tufted lovegrass (Eragrostis pectinacea), arrived on their own, dispersed by wind, water, or wild animals. Such species grow and reproduce in many American cities, especially cities with faltering economies, without being planted or cared for. They can provide important social and ecological services at very little cost to taxpayers, and if left undisturbed long enough they may even develop into woodlands.
There is no denying that most people consider many such plants to be “weeds.” From a utilitarian perspective, a weed is any plant that grows on its own where people do not want it to grow. From the biological perspective, weeds are opportunistic plants that are adapted to disturbance in all its myriad forms, from bulldozers to acid rain. Their pervasiveness in the urban environment is simply a reflection of the continual disruption that characterizes that habitat—they are not its cause. [Emphasis mine.] …
In general, the successful urban plant needs to be flexible in all aspects of its life history, from seed germination through flowering and fruiting; opportunistic in its ability to take advantage of locally abundant resources that may be available for only a short time; and tolerant of the stressful growing conditions caused by an abundance of pavement and a paucity of soil. The plants that grow in our cities are a cosmopolitan array of species that somehow managed to survive the transition from one land use to another as cities developed. The sequence starts with native species adapted to ecological conditions before the city was built. Those are followed, more or less in sequence, by species adapted to agriculture and pasturage, to pavement and compacted soil, to lawns and landscapes, to infrastructure edges and environmental pollution—and ultimately to vacant lots and rubble…Based on the extensive literature on the ecosystem services provided by native and cultivated plants, one can easily generate an impressive list of the ways spontaneous vegetation makes cities more habitable for people as well as animals: temperature reduction, food and habitat for wildlife, erosion control on slopes, stream and riverbank stabilization, excess nutrient absorption in wetlands, soil building on degraded land, improved air quality, noise reduction, and, of course, carbon sequestration.”
LANDSCAPING AS INFRASTRUCTURE
[CMG Landscape Architecture’s “Crack Garden” — unfortunately planted rather than spontaneous, but you get the idea.]
Each of these possibilities involves a common element: the expansion of the agency of the landscape architect. (Expansion, though, should not be an egotistical moment, but an opportunity to engage in new forms of collaboration.)
Those two primary possibilities (the rise of the performative urban forest and the engagement of landscape architects in the design of ‘banal’ landscaping) might even merge, not in landscape infrastructures, but in landscaping as infrastructure. To borrow the terminology of Stephen’s previous post: landscaping is currently culturally and financially performative, but it could become ecologically and infrastructurally performative. (To do so, though, may involve difficult re-framings of the cultural expectations it performs for.) This, I think, begins with prosaic shifts like the introduction of curb-side rain gardens or front lawns that are variously xeriscaped and edible, but I don’t think it can end there.
I also suspect that, if landscape architects are involved in such a change, it will require assuming a somewhat different set of roles and design methodologies than those we have traditionally employed: there may be some amount of employment to be found in designing edible estates and cosmopolitan succession regimes for a mass market, but first that mass market must be persuaded of the value of such landscapes.
The need for such persuasion — a change in what might be termed vernacular landscape norms — reminds me of an article in the April issue of Metropolis, which described the recent work of Build Change, a non-profit organization that works in areas affected by earthquakes to help locals build in ways that are more seismically sound. “Careful seismic engineering”, author Karrie Jacobs notes, “can be broken down into simple rules that can be followed at relatively low cost”. In Haiti, Build Change designed sample housing plans and built a pilot house that meet those criteria using local materials and building techniques, but — most interestingly for our discussion of landscaping norms — “also distilled their design into ‘six simple rules’, which appeared on posters as dos and don’ts”:
“… at least 6,000 homes in Indonesia and China [which Build Change worked in after earlier earthquakes]… have been built following the rules developed… What [Build Change] does is exactly the opposite of an architectural competition. It’s not about coming up with a signature solution but disseminating a set of rules that if truly effective, disappear into the venacular.”
The posters that Jacobs describes are a fascinating architectural act. Architecture, here, is not a building, but a viral meme, infecting the genetic code of a country’s building practices. This, obviously, is relatively necessary and efficacious after a disaster, when the traditional practices of architecture may be ineffective, too expensive, and too slow, but it also suggests something about how landscape architects might look to induce a shift towards ecologically and infrastructurally performative landscaping. The employment of such alternative practices — I’m thinking of a landscape-centered design advocacy organization, for instance, akin to the Center for Urban Pedagogy, publishing pamphlets of landscape tactics akin CUP’s Making Policy Public series — may yet offer the opportunity to influence the future forests of the infrastructural city.
At Action!, Rory Hyde has written a great review of ‘extra/ordinary’, the national conference of the Australian Institute of Architects. Framed around a description of work presented by Elemental, Teddy Cruz, and F.A.T., the post raises some of the same issues we’re discussing in mammoth’s recent post on The Infrastructural City.
On the necessity of a command-line architecture:
Architects presented innovative (and often idealistic) approaches to complex problems, while not afraid to go beyond the discipline to engage with the pragmatics of financing, policy or public engagement in order to see them executed […] If we continue to hitch our future on offering rarefied aesthetics instead of participation in the complex mechanisms of the city, our days are surely numbered.
On the lack of any singular, linear relationship among formal styles, purpose, and instrumentality:
Aravena showed his teeth (when I provoked him), claiming that ‘I don’t buy from that presentation that that is the taste of the people, it was extremely exaggerated, a bit ironic, and I don’t think you can play with these kinds of issues, [social housing] is a serious thing.’ This comment – and other backchat from delegates to the same effect – seemed to capture a major rift in the reception of the ideas presented; namely that social ambitions ought to be expressed with a corresponding language of earnestness. Has our Modernist training led us architects to measure authenticity and honesty by image not impact?
You should go read the whole thing.
[The massing of “Sliced Porosity Block”; image via Evolo]
Having previously mentioned Hugh Ferriss’s drawings of the forms of Manhattan zoning ordinances (and having then speculated on the possibility that architects might design by sculpting ordinances), I think it worth mentioning Steven Holl’s “Sliced Porosity Block”, which is sited on an urban block in the Chinese city of Chengdu. In Holl’s recent monograph-cum-essay-collection Urbanisms, we learn that “its sun-sliced geometry results from required minimum sunlight exposures to the surrounding urban fabric, prescribed by code and calculated by the precise geometry of sun angles” — it, in other words, is an ordinance sculpture.
[Iconeye goes inside the World Cup stadium in Cape Town, Green Point, ignoring facades and roofs in favor of spaces we rarely see: changing rooms, holding cells, offices, and, above, the pre-match warm-up room; photographs by Justin McGuirk.]
This is week six of our reading of The Infrastructural City; if you’re not familiar with the series, you can start here and catch up here. It takes me a bit to get to discussing the chapter, but seeing as this post is already over a week late (sorry!) I hope you’ll indulge a few extra paragraphs.
In “Invisible City,” Kazys Varnelis compares three buildings in downtown Los Angeles: John Portman’s Bonaventure hotel, Gehry’s Disney Concert Hall, and One Wilshire Blvd. By demonstrating a shift in architectural purpose from representative reflection of global financial and communicative networks to a vital performative node in those same networks (yet one which resists interpretive reading and urban spectacle), these buildings provide an opportunity to reflect on the relationship between architecture and the infrastructural city. It’s also an opportunity to draw distinctions between cultural performance, programmatic performance, and technological performance; to reflect on the search for novelty in architecture (especially novel form-making); and to ask why these are often conflated.
interior of the Bonaventure Hotel, source
the Walt Disney Concert Hall, source
exterior of One Wilshire, home to over 300 global telecommunications companies, source
(1) A brief description, sans judgement, of some of the projects to convey a sense of what was being discussed. Apologies for the lack of images, Princeton hasn’t published these on their website yet:
– an extension of the aviary at Flushing Meadows. Program: migratory bird habitat. Architecture: a tall inflatable skyscraper with a core of scaffolding and a series of nets, bags and plenums at different heights. Performance: platforms at various heights support the flora and fauna of different habitats, and the quality of air created by the architecture determines the programming of these habitats. A variety of air quality arising from architectural form.
– hospital. Program: massive hvac and filtration demands, strictly linked to complex hospital program. Architecture: took 4 primary types of mechanical HVAC + filtration systems and associated programmatic spaces, and tried to re-accomplish that using expressed architectural techniques and passive systems, re-configuring programmed space as needed to match. Thorough analysis of hospital systems, and what sort of demands different procedures and diseases placed on HVAC design.
– infrastructural housing for desertification mitigation. Location: the outskirts of beijing vs the gobi desert. Ambition: “air can be designed as an architectural element at all scales”. Performance: the project seeks to design multiple scales of flow for occupiable and ecological effect. Buildings filter out sand, and attempt to harness wind and slow it to various speeds for different programmed spaces in the housing.
Last January I attended the reviews of Princeton’s Fall 2009 thesis class. Each class is assigned a collective theme which is meant to frame the students’ research – ‘Air’ was that year’s chosen topic. The student work (1) was suitably impressive, but what I found more fascinating was the discussion among the panel of critics after all the projects had been surveyed.
They seemed awfully dismayed at the lack of formal novelty. Paraphrasing their commentary: An over-saturation of blogs and architecture media is evident. The theme of air is as close to ‘starting from zero’ as you can get, and many projects embraced it. They tried to create new affects and environments using architectonic form. They tried to work in novel types of program and programming strategies into their buildings which took advantage of this. Yet, the projects remained direct formal progeny of various recent ‘it’ buildings or styles: we saw Steven Holl, the Yokohama Port Terminal, Preston Scott Cohen, and Asymptote presented. Is it possible for architects to start from zero, from a purely technological or scientific point of view?
The implication is that, because the projects developed bear formal similarities to things we’ve seen before, they were directly influenced by them, and that this influence is precluding the development of a novel formal language – some unexpected result which may emerge from strict adherence to empirical data. I think this is misguided, for a couple of reasons:
we’ve seen that rendering before
At a certain point, it becomes practically impossible to escape formal precedent, especially with the explosion of experimentation over the past 20 years. Having projects in conventional formal models is inevitable at this point, because even the most outrageous form-making has become conventional and institutionalized. In this environment, what matters is the utilization of form, the logic guiding its deployment, and the phenomenal, affective, and cultural performances it attempts to engender. This is where these thesis projects were attempting to head – if they failed, they failed nobly.
form, style and performance
What the critics were longing for was a new architectural style, identified through some as-yet-undrawn set of forms. The search is on (as it has ever been) for a new language – something which can be read as generationally distinct from what came before. The mistake was in assuming that Air, with all its promise of new phenomenological and technological performances, would result in such a thing.
Thinking about ‘starting from zero’ and taking a scientific approach has to disassociate itself from an expectation that experimental, empirical architecture will produce novel formal patterns and aesthetics. It is not, on it’s own, enough to generate a new language, just enough to manipulate existing languages with precision and sophistication to produce desired performance. This is obvious when we look at examples of empirical architecture, such as the labyrinth project highlighted by BLDGBLOG, Berger’s landscape experiments for his Pontine Marsh project, or One Wilshire Blvd, subject of this week’s chapter. In the labyrinth and marsh projects, we see a causitive relationship between the formal composition of the structures and the researched performances which are meant to be achieved by application of the scientific method to the building process. Yet, if one were to look at them without any knowledge of this application, it would be easy to mistake them as merely evolutionary descendants of modernist or contemporary parametric design aesthetics. The science did not engender a clear stylistic break.
One Wilshire takes this even a step further.
What is striking about One Wilshire is how little the formal characteristics of the architecture matter to the performance it is meant to enable (that of a critical global telecommunications switching point). It looks like your bog standard office building, with a bunch of servers shoved in.
a glimpse inside One Wilshire, source
The shimmering, ghostly computer-generated shapes of recent architecture only detract us from the invisible city, the less visible, but more real, work of programming and organizational processes. One Wilshire’s form doesn’t matter: what matters is how it’s been re-programmed.
As noted in the introduction to this post, One Wilshire is one of three buildings compared in the chapter, which begins with a discussion of the Bonaventure Hotel.
Portman’s Bonaventure lacks aspirations to a better world, reflecting the city, as a given, back upon itself […] the hotel’s complexity is an analogue for our inability to understand our position in the multinational, decentered network of finance and communication that comprises late capitalism
As Varnelis notes, one would expect the successor to the Bonaventure in LA to be the Disney Concert Hall – “a product of the further penatration of culture by capital, embodying the contemporary city’s role as a site of culture through visual display” – but Gehry’s building is actually an architectural dead-end. It is cultural performance without purpose beyond its own iconic presence, and doesn’t try to leverage this performance into any greater agency or action on its urban context. Varnelis: “But in its relentless need to appear, the Concert Hall is a red herring. The visible is no longer a prime determinent of the urban. Visible form is merely an interruption of other forces, a graphic user interface for a more powerful command line below.” The future of architecture isn’t finding a worthy formal successor to modernism, post-modernism, or parametricism, it’s learning to manipulate the command line.
What was allegorical in the Bonaventure has become real at One Wilshire. In our own era, the task of cognative mapping lies at the point in which media and cities, network and economy, substructure and superstructure become inextricable. The real operating system, not the graphic user interface are our concern. Only by engaging the code below can we remain relevant to future cities.
This is central to why, at mammoth, we rarely if ever engage in architectural criticism in a traditional, formal sense. Rather, we find ourselves obsessed with discovering the limits of and strategies for architectural agency. We like command-line architecture much more than stylistic innovation for innovation’s sake. I wouldn’t say there is no interest in the formal qualities of architecture and infrastructure – just that we miss the most vital potentials of infrastructures and architectures if we limit investigation to the formal, and especially when we are concerned with aesthetic novelty at the expense of performance.
However: style and taste are not anti-performance, or even incidental to performance – they are a different sort of performance, one which is cultural, theatrical. There exists enormous value and excitement in architects who can compose these sort of performances. The London-based firm F.A.T. (Fashion Architecture Taste) come to mind as master manipulators of precedent and cultural expectations, able to create lyrical structures and environments which engage context and occupant. Their architecture attains programmatic performance while playfully remixing style and taste, and is just as valid and important a set of tactics for operating in culturally saturated urban environments as Berger’s hydrological experiments are for the Pontine Marshes.
Since it’s now buried below a mini-avalanche of posts and I doubt anyone will notice the updates unless I point to them, I’ve added a few things to the chapter five (“Blocking All Lanes: Traffic”) index below. To further ease your reading experience, the links added are: contributions to the traffic discussion from Nam Henderson and Barry Lehrman (Barry finds a traffic control manual lying in the street), an article on the design history of traffic lights at Design Observer, and a policy piece on the future of transit in Los Angeles at Urbanophile.
This is officially the off-week for the Infrastructural City discussion, but we’re a bit behind on posting for chapter six (Kazys Varnelis’s “Invisible City” — still coming soon! — but go ahead and read FASLANYC‘s post on the chapter), so we’ll be forging ahead next week with chapter seven (Warren Techentin’s “Tree Huggers”).
An excellent post at Kosmograd, “The Ballet of iPod City”, ably connects two items that mammoth has recently written about, the iPod (and iPhone) factory-city in Shenzhen and Benjamin Schwarz’s critical essay on post-Jacobsian urbanists in the Atlantic Monthly:
…Jacobs founded a powerful myth of urbanism, that the sine qua non of urban form was to found in the ‘ballet of Hudson Street’, and with it created such as narrow definition of what represents vitality in cities that it can only be achieved with the values that Jacobs proscribed, and that conversely, anything that ignores any of these principles must be doomed to failure. The New Urbanists have taken a set of observations from Death and Life of Great American Cities, and turned them into design guidelines, a form of environmental determinism that in many ways is the exact opposite of what Jacobs wrote and stood for…
Such a narrow depth of field seems increasingly less relevant in today’s globalised economy and accelerated culture. The forces of gentrification move ever faster. The city districts that Jacobs wrote about so evocatively/cringingely can now be seen as a mirage, or at least a frozen moment in the evolution of a neighbourhood. Even New York, arguably the definitive city of the 20th Century, seems increasingly irrelevant as the hothouse for urbanism for the 21st Century. For this we need to look beyond Greenwich Village, outside the western cities of Europe and the US, and look at Asia and South America. Jane Jacobs’ principles seem increasingly irrelevant to the raging economic and urbanising forces at work in say Shanghai, Dubai or Sao Paulo.
Read the entire post.
The following is a guest post from Tim Maly — of the excellent Quiet Babylon — concerning the topic of traffic and The Infrastructural City.
About a year ago, a business trip found me camped out with my laptop in the top floor lounge of a hotel in LA, overlooking the San Diego Freeway. There were windows on all sides affording an excellent view of the road. When I wanted a break, I watched traffic.
As the laconic afternoon gave way to rush hour, the density of cars increased and speeds fell until traffic stopped. Four lanes of southbound commuters were ground to a halt. More cars piled into the back of the traffic jam and it grew northwards. I watched this for awhile, grateful that I didn’t have anywhere I needed to be.
Then the most amazing thing happened.
The jam moved.
I don’t mean that the cars got unstuck and everyone proceeded on their merry way. I mean that the jam itself was a structure in motion. From my window, I could see a zone of total congestion where cars were literally parked. On the upstream end of that zone, new cars were being added all the time as commuters caught up with the stopped vehicles. On the downstream end, cars were being freed up to drive again. It takes time to accelerate and you have to wait for the car in front to start moving. That delay was long enough and the cars in the rear were arriving fast enough that the structure was perpetuating itself.
The traffic jam I could see from the window existed despite the road ahead being completely clear.
What I’d mistaken for the growth of the traffic jam was actually the leading edge of a pulse. It’s called a shockwave jam. It isn’t just congestion, it’s a wave of information, traveling upstream against the flow of cars, carrying with it news about some incident that happened perhaps miles away. Hapless commuters become an unwitting medium, electrons on the wires of the freeway.
This is a truly bizarre emergent phenomenon. To get a sense of how bizarre, take a look at this video released by Japanese scientists, showing the problem reproducing itself on a clear circular track. This should be the canonical demonstration of chaos theory. It should replace the butterfly flapping its wings.
How do you fight that?
There are folk solutions about changing your driving style and a variety of proposed systems that involve handing control of the car over to the road or to ad hoc networks of other vehicles.
The main message here is that you don’t know how to drive your car in traffic. It’s not your fault; you are part of a network of events that spans vast stretches of geography where the slightest perturbation can cause massive sprawling disruption. To have the chance to succeed at this, you’d need to see beyond yourself. You’d need super powers.
It’s impossible to say where the first traffic jam was, but the origin of modern traffic control was probably in 1722 in response to “the great inconvenience and mischiefs which happen by the disorderly leading and driving of cars, carts, coaches, and others carriages over the London Bridge, whereby the common passage there is much obstructed.” To fix matters, the Lord Mayor of London ordered that three able-bodied men be appointed as public servants to keep traffic to the left and keep it moving.
Sean Dockray, Fiona Whitton, Steven Rowell – Blocking All Lanes – The Infrastructural City p.106
I’m reminded of the first surgeons. Unlike our contemporary steady-handed fine-incision-making heroes, they were brutes. They had to be – in order to save someone’s life by sawing off a limb, they had to be quick enough so the patient didn’t die from shock during the procedure. It takes a real butcher’s strength to force your way through bone.
This image of rough and ready public servants manhandling traffic chaos into some semblance of order continues with New York’s first traffic cops in the 1860s. In order to be seen, they were the tallest men in the force. Each of them over 6′, towering over the confusion of the crowd, barking orders and waving traffic along with their hands.
By choosing officers who could literally see further than the crowd and arming them with rules and the ability to enforce them (the ability to think further than the crowd), traffic cops were endowed with the super powers necessary to at least unsnarl local conditions, if not improve the flow of traffic overall. At the risk of stretching a metaphor, they became cybernetic entities. Locally cognizant real-time control systems, inserted to regulate a network that could not regulate itself. I’m thinking here of James Watt’s steam engine with a governor that turned irregular bursts of steam into a smooth flow of power.
Listen to this next passage as traffic cops experience their own micro-singularity.
Problems with this system arose immediately. It was difficult enough for any single officer to coordinate his activities with another officer, one block away, but it was practically impossible for that officer to synchronize his signals with officers at the four adjoining intersections, each of whom might be coordinating with three more intersections, and so on, throughout the urban grid. Over time, the traffic cop was slowly transformed: his hands took on white gloves for visibility; his voice was replaced by a whistle; and eventually, he was elevated in a tower and communicated with the traffic via signs or coloured lights. The police officer slowly vanished, his body evolving into mechanical and electrical devices. His hands were replaced by standardized, colored signals. His eyes were replaced by sensing actuators, such as microphones, pressure sensors, electromagnets, or video cameras. All that was left was to replace his brain.
Sean Dockray, Fiona Whitton, Steven Rowell – Blocking All Lanes – The Infrastructural City p.106
We find ourselves in traffic (never of traffic) buffeted by a system prone to irrational seizures, ordered around by a sprawling network of machines whose decisions are unknown and unknowable. Worse still, we’re sitting in devices that – when they were sold to us – made some very explicit promises about the open road. We were promised independence and instead we got this weird pseudo-freedom where we get to control the car but we are severely limited in where it can go.
So we try to cheat. Aggressive drivers push along shoulders and try to muscle their way back into the flow. Frustrated law-abiding commuters respond by pulling close together to keep them out. We try side streets and alternate routes.
A whole folklore of tricks is passed around. If you flash your lights, it can fool the sensors into thinking that an emergency vehicle is coming, giving you the green. The pressure plate is two car lengths back from the intersection so that a line will form before changing the light. If you stop early, you won’t need to wait for another car. If you have a mannequin, you can take the carpool lane. This route is better on Tuesdays, that route is better on Wednesdays.
The impulse to optimize and the impulse to maintain control are put at odds here. The mythological freedom of the open road gives way to nominal control rendered irrelevant by factual helplessness. Drivers lament that things would be better if only there were less cars on the road. Or more lanes. Both of these wishes are myopic.
The Los Angeles depicted in The Infrastructural City is unwilling to move in either direction. Caught between individualists demanding the freedom of the car and individualists expert in maintaining their property values, the age of heroic infrastructure has ended for LA.
Today’s freeways are clogged in perpetual gridlock. Fixing them is impossible. Any new freeways would be fought by NIMBYist homeowners, but more than that, traffic planners recognize that if new freeways were built, motorists would choose to live further out. After a brief period of time, the freeway would, once again, be jammed hopelessly.
Kazys Varnelis – Introduction – The Infrastructural City p.14
The intriguing possibility is that heroic infrastructure may not be needed to unsnarl LA’s freeways. In a paper called The Price of Anarchy in Transportation Networks: Efficiency and Optimality Control physicists Hyejin Youn, Michael T. Gastner, and Hawoong Jeong discovered that under certain circumstances, traffic conditions can be improved by blocking roads.
We then compare the costs of the Nash flow on the original network with those on networks where one of the 246 streets is closed to traffic. In most cases, the cost increases when one street is blocked, as intuitively expected. Nonetheless, there are six connections which, if one is removed, decrease the delay in the Nash equilibrium… If all drivers ideally cooperated to reach the social optimum, these roads could be helpful; otherwise it is better to close these streets.
Hyejin Youn, Michael T. Gastner, and Hawoong Jeong The Price of Anarchy in Transportation Networks: Efficiency and Optimality Control
There are two intriguing ideas in that passage. The first is the idea that infrastructural problems can be solved in some cases by having less infrastructure. This is an experiment that would be easy to carry out and cheap to do, even in LA.
The second is the idea that the infrastructure problems can be solved not with changing the infrastructure but changing how it’s used – optimizing the network. This idea has been covered before on mammoth. In their best architecture of the decade, Rob and Stephen included the CityCar.
While the technology behind CityCar is interesting in and of itself, architecturally the most interesting aspects of CityCar are the dynamically-priced markets for electricity and roadspace which Smart Cities envision developing around the second, shared use model. Through GPS systems embedded in the cars, congestion pricing could be altered in real-time in response to the flow of traffic through a city’s streets, achieving a far more perfect market reflection of the urban condition than could be imposed by any top-down model… The CityCar, then, is not merely a vehicle traveling across fixed infrastructures (or a smaller version of today’s cars), but is itself a distributed infrastructure, resilient, flexible, and responsive to input from the city.
Rob Holmes and Stephen Becker the best architecture of the decade
Rob and Stephen are quick to acknowledge the pragmatic and regulatory hurdles that these cars (let alone any automated driving system) face in seeking mass adoption. But these sorts of things can proceed piecemeal. Car makers are already putting sensors in their vehicles for collision safety, OnStar assistance etc. And it doesn’t seem like such a big leap to go from automated toll systems like E-Zpass to highly granular congestion pricing schemes.
Besides, if traffic cops can experience a micro-singularity, why not drivers?
Over time, the driver was slowly transformed: her hands took on a steering wheel for better maneuverability; her voice was replaced by a horn; and eventually, she was sealed in a cabin and communicated with the traffic via honks or coloured lights. The driver slowly vanished, her body evolving into mechanical and electrical devices. Her hands were replaced by high precision steering mechanisms, her feet by networked cruise control. Her eyes were replaced by sensing actuators, such as GPS chips, proximity sensors, local mesh networks, or video cameras. All that was left was to replace her brain.
[‘Alan Ball — full match’, working drawing (ink on trace); artist David Marsh]
Just in time for the World Cup, English architect-turned-artist David Marsh has executed a fantastic series of drawings based on England’s (sole) World Cup finals appearance, their 4-2 victory over West Germany in 1966. Using archival footage played back at quarter- and half-speed in combination with a coordinate system derived from the markings on the pitch, Marsh traced the movements of each of the twenty-two players involved in the game (substitutions were not allowed in the World Cup until 1970) onto sheets of trace.
As I’ve previously talked about my interest in sport as a representative diagram of urban space — noting that the soccer field can be read both as an abstracted embodiment of a particular village landscape (a map) and as the site for the deployment of spatial strategies which mirror urban processes (a canvas) — it should not be surprising that I am fascinated by Marsh’s drawings, which essentially offer an architectural reading of a soccer match.
[“B. Charlton v. F. Beckenbauer”, David Marsh]
In strong contrast to the abstracted linearity of the live passing diagrams produced by the New York Times for South Africa or the Guardian’s (exceptionally informative) chalkboards, the resultant diagrams are willfully organic, being the strict record (their strictness and literal quality reminds me of record drawings and as-builts) of compromise between the wandering dictates of each player’s attention and the geometry of the soccer match.
Interviewed at Umbro’s soccer blog, Marsh suggests the obvious next step for his drawings, which is to apply the technique not just to the production of a record of a single match with historical significance, but to construct a library of games translated into ink strokes. Combined with a previous suggestion that Marsh has produced an architectural reading of sport, this suggests the possibility that there might be comparative architectural sports analysts, commentators and scholars who specialize not in narrative (or even tactics, though the English tactical analyst Jonathan Wilson is probably the most architectural sports analyst I’ve ever encountered), but in space and relationship and construction. (Here it might be worthing noting — as evidence for the validity of such an approach, or at least the existence of parallels between the endeavors — that, like architecture, sport has an ambiguous relationship with ‘art’, sometimes easily allowing itself to be read as ‘art’, and yet at other times just as thoroughly resisting that categorization.)
[“England only”, David Marsh]
I’d love to know what new insights into (and tools for understanding) sport such analysts might develop: we might learn, for instance, that — seen as a whole, like a finished building — the coordinated movements of Dunga’s Brazil possess a crystalline beauty to rival or even exceed the individual brilliance of the classic Brazilian squads of the seventies (a brilliance whose absence is consistently bemoaned in contemporary commentary); we might discover hidden threads of historical congruence like those that Wilson untangles in Inverting the Pyramid; or, a rogue Eastern European coach — formerly trained as an architect at the Cooper Union — spending caffeine-fueled nights pouring over countless overlays of matches played by each of his squad’s Champions League opponents, might spot hidden complexities in those opponents’ patterns of play which even their own coaches are unaware of and, exploiting that knowledge to maximize the effectiveness of his own team’s positioning, lead a Latvian squad of middling journeyman to the most unlikely of European titles, as they bewilder opponents by trotting out new and bizarre formations in each match.
While we’re working on getting this week’s Infrastructural City post up (it’s coming!), I thought it’d be worth noting that The Center for Land Use Interpretation has just launched a new online exhibition, “Urban Crude”, which explores the oil fields of the Los Angeles Basin in intimate and fantastic detail. Oil wells sprout like hardy Ailanthus from cracks in big box parking lots, are nestled within exclusive golf courses and country clubs (at the Hillcrest Country Club, “members once received oil revenue royalties instead of paying membership dues”), and sit side-by-side with residences in stereotypical Californian suburbs.
[The image above is from said exhibition; thanks to CLUI’s Karl Loescher for the tip.]
[An artist’s conception of a monorail system proposed for the LA Civic Center in the 1970’s, via a recent LA Times article, which discusses a series of alternate Los Angeles transit infrastructures that were proposed but never fully realized, including “the San Pedro-L.A. camel train, the Aerial Swallow monorail, the Pasadena Cycleway and L.A. River Cruises.”]
A quick editorial note: while my blogging may be sporadic in the coming weeks — though there’s a good and pretty exciting reason for that, who weighs approximately six pounds and thirteen ounces — Reading The Infrastructural City will continue more or less unabated and as scheduled, not counting the slight delay in the compilation of this set of links.
Free Association Design links traffic to logistics — including Jessie Cavalier’s brilliant piece Logistics, Territory, and Wal-Mart, which you should really read if you haven’t already — and suggests (correctly, I think) that it is appropriate to read many of the chapters of The Infrastructural City as descriptions of the “varied material expressions of contemporary urban logistics”.
Peter Nunns reviews the development of traffic in Los Angeles and offers a pair of examples of transit “hacks” in New Zealand.
Relatedly, FASLANYC follows up on comments he made on our original post, and pivots to a discussion of Broadway and “tactical urbanism”. It is well worth clicking through his link to architects Ersela Kripa and Stephen Mueller’s practice, AGENCY, and reading the material they have collected under the rubric of “hackable infrastructures”.
Following the lead of the chapter authors, Nam Henderson looks at traffic as embodied and cybernetic.
Barry Lehrman digs into the manual of Strobecom II — “a state of the art, optical, traffic preemption and priority control system” — a fascinating subset of the infrastructure of traffic control.
Finally, a pair of posts elsewhere that are not part of the Infrastructural City discussion, but are intimately related to the issues discussed in chapter five:
A post at Design Observer explains the history of and design thinking behind the tri-colored traffic signal.
At the Urbanophile, Human Transit‘s Jarrett Walker contribute a guest post which argues that Los Angeles is, contrary to popular assumption, actually well prepared to become “America’s Next Great Transit Metropolis”. While such a development (which I would cheer) would present an entirely different kind of solution to traffic than the “hacks” we’ve discussed, mammoth has continually argued that the complexity of urban systems demands multiple kinds and scales of solutions (rather than uniform or ideologically-pure proposals), and we suspect that, if Los Angeles does develop an advanced transit network, it will be complementary to rather than replacing the sort of “hacks” we’ve been discussing.
