mammoth // building nothing out of something
April 23, 2010 – 12:00 pm

marsh experiments


[A model built by Alan Berger, Harvard graduate student Gena Wirth, MIT professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering Heidi Nepf, and CEE graduate student Jeff Rominger, to test for the optimum design of pollutant-removing vegetated channels, as part of Berger and P-REX’s Pontine Systemic Design; image via MITnews.]

I love this:

[T]he Pontine Marshes project constitutes an engineering problem with two key challenges. First, the water flowing through the wetlands must move slowly enough so that the plants can absorb the pollutants; second, the pattern of the water flow must give all water molecules equal opportunity to encounter the vegetation.

Berger’s solution is to have the water move through an S-shaped course that slows it down to a speed well under one mile per hour. The Italian engineers of the 1930s built perfectly straight canals, since they were simply concerned with transporting water efficiently. But forcing water to meander through winding channels in a wetlands gives more water molecules the best chance of being purified. ”Inefficiency is how environmental systems work,” says Berger.

[The team] built multiple models from Berger’s plans, featuring variations of S-shapes and alterations in the density and placement of the wetlands vegetation.

To scrutinize the designs, the researchers sent water injected with an fluorescent dye called Rhodamine WT through the models and used a fluorometer to measure the intensity of the light as the water exited, which indicated how broadly the water had spread. Test results indicated that the optimum design was one featuring relatively wide S-shaped channels with lots of vegetation underneath and small “islands” of earth to help the water disperse evenly.

“Heidi’s and Jeff’s work gave us a scientific understanding of how these plans functioned, and allowed us to push the design envelope,” says Berger.

This is an experimental landscape architecture.  Not experimental in the usual sense within architectural disciplines — where it is more or less a synonym for radically avant-garde (though this is by no means a condemnation of such architecture) — but experimental in the scientific sense, rigorously testing the performance of various forms, to design a landscape which incrementally advances away from its predecessors.  If we’re going to move beyond talking about designing post-natural ecologies towards actively constructing them, then developing modes of practice that incorporate experimentation will be essential.  (Next: peer-reviewed landscape architecture.)

[seen via @bldgblog; the Pontine Systemic Design previously on mammoth here and here.  Read the full article at MITnews, which also contains a gallery of images.

Update: You may also ask: if this is an experimental landscape architecture, what does an experimental architecture look like?  Rather like Sam McElhinney’s fascinating “switching labyrinth”, which BLDGBLOG has coincidentally posted this same afternoon.]

By rholmes | Posted in infrastructure, landscape-architecture, the-expanded-field | Tagged , , , | Comments (13) | Permalink
April 22, 2010 – 8:00 pm

transit disparity

The infrastructurally-obsessed will appreciate the Transport Politic‘s summary of the Chinese boom in local rapid transit, prompted by the observation that Shanghai now has the longest metro network in the world, despite having begun the first tracks merely fifteen years ago.  The local transit boom parallels the Chinese investment in high-speed rail which mammoth previously discussed, and which Freedmark notes is further evidence that, while major American cities are “not making much of an effort to prepare for their increasingly urban futures by building new transit links”, Chinese cities, with the support of the national government, are.

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April 22, 2010 – 7:00 pm

faslanyc interviews kate orff

For various reasons (vacations, other projects, et cetera), I have failed to direct readers of this blog to the interview with Kate Orff (of SCAPE) that FASLANYC posted about a month ago.  The interview touches on, among other things, SCAPE’s “Oyster-tecture” project for the Rising Currents exhibition, strategies for expanding the engagement of (landscape) architects into new terrains (which is, of course, a continual object of interest for mammoth), and a project for a “super toxic zone” in Mississippi which sounds fascinating.  An excerpt related to the need for those strategies for expansion:

Another big problem is there is a dearth in the ability to create a compelling narrative about the environment. One of the things that drives me completely bonkers is that I passed these tests that show I know how to drain water to catch basins and make ADA guardrails but I’m not asked to engage with things that are really dangerous like “can I dump hazardous waste in this pit and just cover it with clay”? I think that we have to be much more radical, coming at it not as landscape architects but as the cultural custodians of the environment. It drives me to a furious state that there are massive toxins in the environment, but they are at a different scale and we’re not even in the room.  It is totally frustrating. I would say the same thing with the pattern of development. That is the trouble with being in the box, with providing design services for the capital project, working within the market economy; we are limited in our ability to address policy and the way that land is organized. We are definitely caught in this constrained, powerless way of operating.

If you share our interest in thinking about alternative engagement strategies and practice models, you’ll probably also enjoy the series that FASLANYC is writing on public agencies and landscape architecture, which begins here.

By rholmes | Posted in asides, landscape-architecture, the-expanded-field | Tagged , | Comments Off on faslanyc interviews kate orff | Permalink
April 21, 2010 – 10:40 pm

recreational volcanism


[The Moscow Pool, built on the site of Stalin’s abandoned Palace of the Soviets, via Polis.]

As volcanism is, for obvious reasons, in the news at the moment, perhaps this is the right time to think back to an article posted a few months ago at English Russia which suggests that Moscow is a city built not on ordinary, stable hills, but on volcanoes:

“Moscow city stands on the top of the giant ancient volcano”, says scientist, “we call often Moscow – the city on the seven hills (as well Rome and some other cities) but just a few know that those seven hill actually are the ancient volcano structure. It doesn’t matter that it is not active for thousands of years already, still there are so called ‘fluid streams’ gases from the center of the Earth comes to surface through ancient volcanoes, they cause the tremors of the surface and ruining the roads and buildings in Moscow.”

1 A quick scan around the internet — including this document which discusses the “geodynamic stability” of the Kremlin — suggests to me that Moscow’s collapsing streets result from karst, not volcanism.

Regardless of whether English Russia’s article reflects the actual geological conditions of Moscow (and I don’t think that it does, though I’d like to1), I do think that its fair to say that this is an extraordinarily rich symbolic image: a Dantean metropolis, constructed on the metaphorical gates of hell, its streets continually poised and ready to collapse into subterranean caverns like an igneous Miami.

The Moscow Botanical Garden at Ostankino, in 1948, via Polis

Meanwhile, at Polis, Peter Sigrist has been writing a series which traces the history and evolution of that same city’s public parks, using — and I think this is a fantastic idea — the parks as a lens for registering the effects of shifting political and cultural ideologies on the city, from the importation of Western European landscape architects by Peter the Great in the late seventeenth century to park-heavy, green-belted regional master plans adopted in the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras.  According to the figures that Sigrist has found, Moscow is extremely densely populated by parks, having between three and four times the ratio of public parks space to citizen that comparable cities — New York, London, Paris — do.

The edge of the Grand Prismatic, at Yellowstone; photographed by flickr user Alaskan Dude.

Lava flows in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, via wikipedia.

While that series deserves a more careful and serious reading than this flippant post allows, the obvious result of the mental collision of these two reports about Moscow — one fantastic and unbelievable, the other substantiated and historical — is to imagine a Moscow whose many public parks are more Yellowstone or Hawaii Volcanoes National Park than Central Park. That image, in turn, leads me to a third recent post elsewhere, Pruned‘s entry on flood hunting.  Flood hunting is apparently the practice of “traveling to sites of inundation”, an activity situated somewhere between (natural) disaster tourism and, as Pruned suggests, the occasionally-thrilling itineraries of flood-control-apparatus inspectors, who typically must inspect their bulwarks and levees and dams without the visual aid of surging floodwaters, but might, on occasion, have the opportunity to “gauge how the built environment reacts in the face of total systemic failure”.

Sublimely decaying systems of access: El Caminito del Rey, near Malaga, Spain; image via wikipedia.

Dendritic systems of access: the Roman Quarry in St. Margathen, Austria, designed by AllesWirdGut Architektur ZT GmbH, and seen at Landezine.

2 I had a very clear image in my mind of what this looks like, but I couldn’t find the video I’m thinking of.  I think that it’s a commercial (for running shoes?), shot in first person, on scaffolded walkways which are precariously perched on the sides of cliffs in (or to access) an abandoned mine, which I have the impression is in either Iberia or southern France.  If anyone knows this video, I’ll be grateful if you can remind me of its location.  (Update: in the comments, Lockwood points us to El Caminito del Rey, a walkway associated with a hydroelectric powerplant — not a mining project — which is the walkway I was trying to remember.  The video I recalled is not a commercial, but can be found here.)

Flood hunting is, of course, quite fascinating as practice; but it is also interesting as a program: a landscape architect might quite plausibly design a coastal levee strung with scaffolds, walkways, and viewing platforms2 for watching floods from just above the 500-year flood line, or — as the recently-opened Rising Currents program at MoMA suggests — a systemically-engineered marshy barrier against rising sea levels, which also doubles as recreational space and parkland.  In the same way, its not quite impossible to imagine a city who, being built atop dormant volcanoes, has reserved the most unstable districts of the city as municipal parks.  Whose landscape architects have been called upon to design access systems for these geological freakologies, these unstable geysers, mud pots, fumaroles, and hot springs which sit between broad avenues, kvartals, dense clusters of towering buildings, and whose citizens frequent its public parks not for bucolic relaxation but for sublime thrills.

By rholmes | Posted in futures, landscape-architecture | Tagged , , | Comments (8) | Permalink
April 19, 2010 – 10:26 pm

reading the infrastructural city: reminder


[Owens Lake, via google maps]

A quick note: our discussion of The Infrastructural City will kick off next Monday, here and elsewhere, with posts and comments related to the first chapter, “Reconstructing the Void”, which looks at the relationship between Los Angeles and Owens Lake.  If you commented on the first post, you should have received an organizational email from us tonight — if you didn’t, but would like to be on the mailing list, let us know.  And, of course, everyone and anyone should feel free to join in the discussions (hopefully helpfully enabled here by our shockingly late implementation of a threaded commenting system tonight), signed up or not.

By rholmes | Posted in asides, mammoth book club | Tagged | Comments Off on reading the infrastructural city: reminder | Permalink
April 16, 2010 – 5:00 am

the delhi nullahs project


[A “nullah” in Delhi, via the Delhi Nullahs Project]

I ran across the Delhi Nullahs Project — launched by Indian architecture firm Morphogenesis, and, in particular, Manit Rastogi, one of the firm’s principals — a few days ago, via @namhenderson.  The “nullahs” were originally constructed as drainage channels by the Tughlak dynasty in the 14th century, and are now open sewers draining that modern megacity into the Yamuna, in such poor condition that the city government is contemplating a plan to fully entomb them beneath concrete slabs, so that the stench and filth of the sewage is hidden as it travels the nullahs towards a massive new wastewater treatment plant on the Yamuna.


[A revitalized nullah weaves through East Delhi, offering public space, recreational opportunities, and a pedestrian/cycle corridor uncontested by motor traffic, via Delhi Nullahs Project]

The project proposes instead that the nullahs could serve both as a decentralized wastewater treatment system — using bioremediation and source-point treatment facilities to cleanse wastewater before it enters the nullahs, while distributed rainwater collection cisterns feed into the system through the estimated fifteen thousand subsidiary channels, and the increased flow of cleaned water is infiltrated to recharge depleted aquifers — and as an alternative transportation infrastructure, by providing pedestrian and cycling routes along the nullahs to connect neighborhoods and business districts to public transit corridors.  Ideally, this network would then become a space for recreation, making the city at once healthier ecologically and more liveable for its inhabitants, regardless of economic status.


[A nullah carrying clean water, re-vegetated, and used as a pedestrian/cycling corridor, via Delhi Nullahs Project]

While the plan strikes me as eminently reasonable and practical — Morphogenesis is not proposing anything particularly outlandish, and working entirely with established technologies towards goals that seem virtually indisputably positive — the difficulty, of course, which the team and project has encountered is gaining leverage in disinterested political and bureaucratic systems for a plan which deviates, however slightly, from established civil engineering norms (PDF article).

By rholmes | Posted in infrastructure, landscape-architecture | Tagged , , , , | Comments (6) | Permalink
April 15, 2010 – 11:38 pm

waste-to-energy plants

An article in the New York Times discusses Europe’s waste-to-energy plants (which are key components of a successful closed-loop manufacturing process) and why no such plants are under construction in the United States:

The lawyers and engineers who dwell in an elegant enclave here [in Horsholm, Denmark] are at peace with the hulking neighbor just over the back fence: a vast energy plant that burns thousands of tons of household garbage and industrial waste, round the clock… such plants have become both the mainstay of garbage disposal and a crucial fuel source across Denmark, from wealthy exurbs like Horsholm to Copenhagen’s downtown area. Their use has not only reduced the country’s energy costs and reliance on oil and gas, but also benefited the environment, diminishing the use of landfills and cutting carbon dioxide emissions… With all these innovations, Denmark now regards garbage as a clean alternative fuel rather than a smelly, unsightly problem…

…a 2009 study by the E.P.A. and North Carolina State University scientists came down strongly in favor of waste-to-energy plants over landfills as the most environmentally friendly destination for urban waste that cannot be recycled. Embracing the technology would not only reduce greenhouse gas emissions and local pollution, but also yield copious electricity, it said…

[However], waste-to-energy plants have not caught on nationally [due to] the relative abundance of cheap landfills in a large country, opposition from state officials who feared the plants could undercut recycling programs and a “negative public perception.”

By rholmes | Posted in asides, infrastructure | Tagged , , | Comments (5) | Permalink
April 13, 2010 – 12:00 pm

pathological geomorphology


[Russian thermokarst near Nova Zembla]

I’ve been tremendously entertained lately by Pathological Geomorphology, a blog run by “a loosely defined and unified group of geobloggers” which catalogs “images of extreme landscapes, landforms, and processes”.   April is “delta month” (or, as one of their bloggers put it, “April deltas bring May fold and thrust belts”), so far encompassing a paleo-delta in the African Rift Valley, a river in Botswana which vanishes into the desert as it feeds into a basin so dry that it runs out of water without encountering any other waterbody, the “wave-influenced” “single-channel” morphology of the Danube delta, the gorgeous geometry of the Volga delta, a Madagascaran delta whose reddish waters are evidence of upstream deforestation, and many others.  My personal favorite is perhaps the Las Vegas Wash, “an ephemeral drainage that has ‘gone all perennial on us’ as a persistent conduit of treated wastewater and an intermittent conduit of copious amounts of storm runoff from mall and casino parking lots” — ‘Anthropocene’ pathological geomorphology, in other words.

You’ll find much more (educational!) entertainment in their archives, from Brazilian contrasts between coastal dune formations and sweeping rivers to Algerian sedimentary folds exposed as modernist land art by aeolian processes, all of it clear fodder for landscape experiments to be run by budding architects.

[link to Pathological Geomorphology via @bldgblog]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, landscape, landscapes-in-search-of-an-architect | Tagged , , | Comments (3) | Permalink
April 11, 2010 – 8:00 am

I was the only one there

By Stephen | Posted in urbanism | Tagged | Comments (4) | Permalink
April 1, 2010 – 12:00 pm

a preliminary atlas of gizmo landscapes


[A water tank stands in Brooklyn, festooned with cellular antennas, photographed by flickr user Dreamer7112.]

From the Franklin Stove, and the Stetson Hat, through the Evinrude outboard to the walkie-talkie, the spray can, and the cordless shaver, the most typical American way of improving the human situation has been by means of crafty and usually compact little packages, either papered with patent numbers, or bearing their inventor’s name to a grateful posterity…

True sons of Archimedes, the Americans have gone one better than the old grand-daddy of mechanics.  To move the earth he required a lever long enough and somewhere to rest it — a gizmo and an infrastructure — but the great American gizmo can get by without any infrastructure… The quintessential gadgetry of the pioneering frontiersman had to be carried across trackless country, set down in a wild place, and left to transform that hostile environment without skilled attention.  Its function was to bring instant order or human comfort into a situation which had previously been an undifferentiated mess…

At this point we have seen enough of the basic proposition to formulate some generalized rules for the American gizmo, and examine its consequences in design and other fields.  Like this: a characteristic class of US products — perhaps the most characteristic — is a small self-contained unit of high performance in relation to its size and cost, whose function is to transform some undifferentiated set of circumstances to a condition nearer human desires.  The minimum of skill is required in its installation and use, and it is independent of any physical or social infrastructure beyond that by which it may be ordered from catalogue and delivered to its prospective user.

– Reyner Banham, “The Great Gizmo”

A handful of recent posts (Life Without Buildings, Markasaurus, Robert Sumrell) have noted that the iPhone may be the single industrial product which best exemplifies both the continuance and the evolution of Banham’s notion of the peculiarly American gizmo.  Perhaps the most important piece of that evolution is the move away the independence of the gizmo, which Banham’s repeated definitions, quoted above, hammered home as one of the defining characteristics of this class of industrial products.

The iPhone, however, is not only dependent upon highly developed systems in its production, as Banham acknowledges all such objects have always been, but is also now equally dependent in its operation upon a vast array of infrastructures, data ecologies, and device networks.  Even acknowledging this, though, and realizing that its operative value comes from its ability to tap those data ecologies and attendant socially-constituted bodies of knowledge, it is still possible to miss the landscapes that it produces. Until we see that the iPhone is as thoroughly entangled into a network of landscapes as any more obviously geological infrastructure (the highway, both imposing carefully limited slopes across every topography it encounters and grinding/crushing/re-laying igneous material onto those slopes) or industrial product (the car, fueled by condensed and liquefied geology), we will consistently misunderstand it.

Take a single instance of iPhone use — Jimmy Stamp’s afternoon of coffee-shop sleuthing in Brooklyn, for example.  Think what a vast array of landscapes are tenuously tethered to that single moment:

A. PRODUCTION: THE GIZMO AS A GEOLOGIC EXTRACT

First, we might consider the iPhone as a geologic extract, tracing backwards from the gizmo-in-hand to the direct effect of the gizmo on the surface of the earth, using two of the most prominent links in that chain of effect, mines and factories.

MINES (EXTRACTION)

Red Dog Mine and Airport, which are located near Kotzebue in northwestern Alaska, via google maps.

Red Dog Mine, photographed by flickr user brodie lee.

The Teck smelting facility in Trail, British Columbia, via google maps.

A single iPhone is composed of 135 grams of material, including stainless steel, plastics, glass, a lithium-ion battery, and, perhaps most crucially for the tactile experience of iPhone ownership, a touch-screen display weighing in at 12.5 grams, just under one-tenth of the total weight of the device (PDF).  To capture the motion of the user’s fingers, that touchscreen employs a technology known as “Project Capacitive Touch” sensing, which registers movement and pressure with electrically-charged strips of the transparently conducting solution indium tin oxide (In2O3 and SnO2).  The key and most expensive component in that solution is the rare metal indium, which is not mined directly, but typically produced as a valuable by-product during the processing of zinc ores (though, owing to increasing demand and limited supply, it is increasingly recycled from manufactured products).

Canada is one of the world’s leading producers of indium, producing approximately fifty tonnes a year, a quantity which is exceeded only by China (330) and Japan (60).  Within Canada, the single facility producing the greatest quantity of indium is Teck Resource’s refinery in Trail, British Columbia, which processes zinc ores hauled from the Red Dog pit mine in northwestern Alaska.  Such mines and refineries, scattered across the globe in the aforementioned countries, as well as South Korea, Belgium, Russia, and Peru, are the iPhone’s landscape of extraction.

FACTORIES (ASSEMBLY)

Hon Hai’s facility is at the center of the image, bounded by waterbodies to the north and west as well as a major highway to the east, as indicated on this diagram; image via google maps.

Employees relax on a basketball court inside the compound; photograph by Jason Dean.

While Apple is notoriously secretive about the iPhone’s supply and manufacture chains, reports from both Reuters and the Wall Street Journal indicate that the iPhone is manufactured in Hon Hai Precision Industries’ enormous Shenzhen plant, the Longhua Science and Technology Park, which employs over a quarter of a million people behind its walls and security gates.  The facility’s factories, dormitories, hospital, restaurants, bank, basketball courts, executive offices, and cafes cover a square mile of terrain, at once company town and infrastructural city.

B. OPERATION: THE PHYSICAL TRACE OF INVISIBLE INFRASTRUCTURES

1 It is probably worth noting here that these infrastructures are no more and no less the ‘real’ landscape of the iPhone than the socially-constructed overlays of data, opinion, and anecdote which the iPhone, through these infrastructures, acts as a window onto.

Second: while the act of locating a trio of Brooklyn coffee-shops does indeed depend on the operative ability of the iPhone to tap what Life Without Buildings describes as a series of “invisible infrastructures — locative data, telecommunications networks, reviews, news, images, information” — these invisible infrastructures do not lack traceable landscape impacts1.

SERVER FARMS (COLLATION)

Google’s data center in The Dalles, Oregon, photographed by Melanie Conner for The New York Times.

Google’s first server farm, in The Dalles, Oregon, via bing maps.

Image from a video tour Google put together of its server containers, screen capture by Stephen Shankland/CNET.

It’s nearly impossible, of course, to say which servers caught those mapping requests for Cafe Pedlar, Marlow & Sons, and Blue Bottle Coffee.  But we can query representatives.

As Google is, like Apple, quite secretive about the details of the physical loci of its immaterial product, the locations of less than half of Google’s American data centers are known, with those known centers spread between California (five centers), Oregon (two), Georgia (two), Virginia (three), Washington, Illinois, Texas, Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina, Oklahoma, and Iowa.

The first of these data centers to be constructed is in The Dalles, Oregon, and “includes three 68,680 square foot data center buildings, a 20,000 square foot administration building, a 16,000 square foot ‘transient employee dormitory’ and an 18,000 square foot facility for cooling towers”.  Like Google’s other data centers, the Dalles facility consumes enormous quantities of electricity (estimates range from 50 to 100 megawatts — somewhere between a tenth and a twentieth of the capacity of an average American coal-fired power plant), generating similarly large quantities of heat, which necessitates locating the centers by significant water sources for the chillers and water towers which cool the servers.

Inside, the data centers are filled with standard shipping containers, each container packed with over a thousand individual servers running cheap x86 processors: anonymous, modular data landscapes, the nerve centers of America’s conurbations, their standardization and dull rectilinearity indicating extreme placelessness, but contradicted by the logistical logic of water bodies, energy sources, and transmission distances which governs their placement.

CELL TOWERS (TRANSMISSION)

A camouflaged cell array in Brooklyn, photographed by flickr user drewva.

One of Brooklyn’s most common cellular typologies, the array attached to a watertower; photographed by flickr user erikthered.

The Crown Atlantic company’s cell tower, one of the closest registered towers to the coffee shops, at center in the satellite image, via google maps.

2 However: only seven of those towers are “tall” towers, the sort which one thinks of as cell towers. The vast majority are attached to buildings, as in this instance, located near the Gowanus canal.

With the materials extracted, the object assembled, and the data collated, the final step in this abbreviated tour is the transmission of that data from the server farms to the individual gizmo, a step which is enabled by ubiquitous cell towers and antennas.  A quick query at AntennaSearch.com, a database of transmission tower and antenna permits and registrations, locates six hundred and seven antennas and seventy-nine towers within two miles of the neighborhood (Park Slope) where this particular search began2.

Again, it is nearly impossible to say which of these transmitters served as the “base station”, or central transmission point for the cell the search occurred within — all cellular coverage areas are divided into mapped cells, with the low power and range of transmission of the cellular phone allowing many phones in differentiated cells to occupy the same frequency without interference, by the extraordinary means of a legal fiction which compartmentalizes the air itself — but it is not difficult to pick out the sort of structures which might have done so: prosthetic antenna arrays, clinging to rooftops and water towers, or (much more rarely within Brooklyn) the tall and familiar standard cell tower, its silhouette looming over baseball fields.

By rholmes | Posted in infrastructure, landscape | Tagged , , , | Comments (31) | Permalink
March 29, 2010 – 12:00 pm

a “cyborg planet”

At the excellent Human Landscapes, Erle Ellis (you may know him from his Wired Science article from last May, “Stop Trying to Save the Planet”, which you should stop and read right now if you have not) suggests that we need to start thinking about (and, presumably, constructing) a “cyborg planet”, where machines can feed us data directly from nature (“clouds twitter and the forests all have facebook”), allowing us to understand ourselves and natural processes as part of a singular, networked planetary ecology — which already exists and which we are already conducting mass experiments on, whether we understand the web of connections or not.  It’d be sort of like following @pothos (see Pruned‘s write-up of that experiment) or texting the fish in the Living Architecture Lab’s “Amphibious Architecture”, but at a mass scale, with, as Ellis suggests, satellites and social networks and smart grids and climate models integrated and then exploded back outward as a panopticon of data streams and feedback mechanisms.

By rholmes | Posted in asides, landscape | Tagged , | Comments (4) | Permalink
March 29, 2010 – 5:00 am

reading the infrastructural city: proposal


[A portion of the Alameda Trench, a cut in the surface of Los Angeles which runs “ten miles long, fifty feet wide, and thirty-three feet deep”, carrying over $200 billion in cargo each year, as photographed by Lane Barden for The Infrastructural City; image via a Places Journal slideshow]

—

UPDATE: this book club is underway and merrily chugging along – please visit this link for an index of all posts written thus far, in reverse-chronological order. Feel free to jump in at any time, as although the chapters are all related, they don’t need to be read in order.

—

Over the course of the next several months, mammoth will be coordinating an online discussion of The Infrastructural City: Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles (edited by Kazys Varnelis and published last year by Actar), as an experiment in the cooperative reading and discussion of a text.

As Varnelis explains in the introduction to The Infrastructural City, Los Angeles is perhaps the American city most fully indebted to infrastructure for its existence and survival:

“If the West was dominated by the theology of infrastructure, Los Angeles was its Rome. Cobbled together out of swamp, floodplain, desert, and mountains, short of water and painfully dependent on far-away resources to survive, Los Angeles is sited on inhospitable terrain, located where the continent runs out of land. No city should be here. Its ecological footprint greater than the expansive state it resides in, Los Angeles exists by the grace of infrastructure, a life-support system that has transformed this wasteland into the second largest metropolis in the country. Nor was this lost on Angelenos. They understood that their city’s growth depended on infrastructure and celebrated that fact. After all, what other city would name its most romantic road after a water-services engineer?”

Yet despite that history and the continued role of infrastructures such as the Alameda Trench and the Pacific Intertie in shaping the physical, social, and economic form of Los Angeles, the city has also developed an extraordinary resistance to the planning of new infrastructures.  A myriad of factors, including ferocious NIMBYism and empty state coffers, make it increasingly difficult to implement new infrastructures or expand existing systems.  Furthermore, the city’s infrastructures are increasingly inter-related and co-dependent, interwoven into what Varnelis terms networked ecologies — “hypercomplex systems produced by technology, laws, political pressures, disciplinary desires, environmental constraints and a myriad other pressures, tied together with feedback mechanisms.”


[Terminal Island, photographed by Lane Barden]

Designing in this environment is correspondingly complex, as networked ecologies resist and frustrate the planning mechanisms which served the design of twentieth-century metropolises.  Though The Infrastructural City is structured as a survey of the infrastructural components of a single American city, that series of descriptive fragments begins to coalesce into a manual for the design of infrastructures embedded into networked ecologies, a manual which is relevant to almost any designer operating in almost any contemporary urban environment:

This book is an atlas, but it is also a manual, something that might be found on the floor of a yellow pick-up truck parked next to the Los Angeles River channel, next to some rubber boots… it also might be for another audience, for a future kind of urban planner, designer, architect, or resident.  This new kind of urbanist might very well resemble a hacker, in the best sense, re-imagining how to appropriate the codes, rules, and systems that make up the contemporary city and manipulate them so as to create not a plan but a new kind of urban intervention, more appropriate for this century.

Within this manual, chapters (each written by a different contributing author) discuss the infrastructural sinew of Los Angeles: the consumer goods distribution network which is relied upon by not just the region and state, but by all of the United States; car traffic, and trafficking data; the highly channelized Los Angeles River as a “Flood Control Freakology”; Owens Lake, a desiccated playa which is a “silent victim of the city’s thirst”.  An analysis of property development in Los Angeles argues argues architects must embrace risk and assume change in order to regain their capacity for agency by referencing Game Theory and a wiffleball court.  Another chapter, contributed by the Center for Land Use Interpretation, describes the neighboring city of Irwindale, the source of much of the gravel which, as aggregate used in the mixture of asphalt and concrete, has been transplanted through industrial process to form the literal ground of Los Angeles.  These disparate topics (which we’ve only mentioned half of) provide a fascinatingly varied study of the city, which we believe will prove a stimulating starting point for a discussion of the relationships between cities, global economies, social networks, architects and landscape architects, citizenry, natural and artificial ecologies, political actors, bureaucracies, and whatever other diverse components of urban systems we find ourselves interested in.


[The channelized Los Angeles River, photographed by Lane Barden]

For each of the twelve chapters, mammoth will post a piece summarizing and commenting on that chapter as a conversation starter, but we hope that a rich discussion will spiral out from that central hub, through comments, through other participating blogs (currently including dpr-barcelona, faslanyc, free association design, Nam Henderson, Andrew and Peter of the polis blog, and quiet babylon – we’ll provide links to posts at other blogs discussing each chapter as they’re posted), and into other corners of the internet (twitter, etc.).  To that end, participation in this discussion — this “book club” — is open to any and all interested readers.  In order to join us, all you need is a copy of The Infrastructural City, a bit of time to read along, and an interest in discussing landscape, architecture, and infrastructure.

If you’re using twitter, you can follow the conversation, announcements, and so on using the hashtag #mammothbook; you may also care to join or follow the “twub” which the folks at dpr-barcelona have been kind enough to set up for the group, and which will serve as an archive for all #mammothbook tweets.

We won’t start discussing the first chapter, “Owens Lake”, until Monday, April 26th, in order to give all interested persons an opportunity to pick up the book and start reading (and writing, if you’re so inclined) before the discussion gets started.  After that, we’ll be discussing one chapter a week, taking a break on every fourth week.  In the meantime, we’d love to hear from everyone who is interested in participating, in the comments of this post.  If you’d like to participate, be sure to leave your email address — we’ll be sending out reminder emails a little bit in advance of each week’s discussion.

[Click through below for the full schedule; read reviews of The Infrastructural City at Places Journal, Archidose, and We Make Money Not Art.]

Read More »

By mammoth | Posted in readings | Tagged , | Comments (54) | Permalink
March 22, 2010 – 8:00 pm

clui spring newsletter


[Part of the James River ghost fleet, one of the three remaining floating stockpiles in the National Defense Reserve Fleet, via wikipedia]

CLUI’s spring Lay of the Land surveys the American landscape of ship breaking (which is largely fed by the Congressionally-mandated dismantling of the ghost fleets), develops a linkage between Kodak Park (“said to be the largest industrial complex in the northeast”) and Kodachrome Park (which “remains one of the few, if not the only, State Parks named after a trademarked product”), and catalogs “the geometric terrain of helipads” in Los Angeles, among other (terrific) things.

By rholmes | Posted in asides | Tagged , , , , | Comments (5) | Permalink
March 19, 2010 – 12:30 pm

geodesign

In an article at Architect, Loud Paper‘s Mimi Zeiger explores the growing entanglement of GIS and BIM applications, and the potential impact of this relationship for architecture:

Loosely defined as the integration of geographic analysis and tools into the design process, the term “geodesign”… as Dangermond [the president of ESRI, makers of ArcGIS] sees it, is shorthand for the complex interrelationship of spatial data and architecture. It is the interface between land use, census blocks, traffic patterns, air quality tables, and any other data set, on the one hand, and the process of building—site planning, conceptual design, programming, and construction drawings—on the other…

Ray and Charles Eames’ 1977 short film for IBM visualizes both macro and micro systems; beginning with a couple on a picnic blanket, the film zooms exponentially outward from a distance of 1 meter to 100 million light years. This is GIS: It offers a grand, global scope. The film then reverses itself and plunges deep into cellular and atomic structures. Here, the parallel is to BIM; programs such as Revit contain the innermost workings of buildings—steel structure down to door handles and screws. “BIM/GIS integration promises the replacement of abstract zoning standards with building … performance that can be tested and modeled for not only the building site, but … the city on the whole,” explains de Monchaux [a professor at the University of California, Berkeley].

By rholmes | Posted in asides | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (3) | Permalink
March 16, 2010 – 8:00 pm

geologic helium machine


[A portion of the Cliffside field snakes tentacles across flat pasture concealing ancient anticlines.]

Just outside Amarillo, Texas, the Cliffside field stores much of the nation’s helium reserves in a naturally-occurring geologic dome. It is part of a complex of partially-privatized fields, mines, domes, and pipelines which extends nearly two hundred miles north-south, from the Texas Panhandle to Oklahoma. A recent article in Seed Magazine describes the complex, whose helium stockpile is by far the world’s largest, and its role in the increasing global scarcity of helium, which is a critical element in a number of industrial and scientific processes, yet relatively easily escapes the earth’s atmosphere for outer space.

This industrial landscape is only possible due to the particular geologic conditions of the region: beds composed primarily of “Brown dolomite” are sufficiently receptive to helium (having been discovered because they contained natural — though less concentrated — helium reserves), while the “Panhandle lime formation”, which is layered immediately on top of those beds, provides a natural “caprock”, penetrated only by the airtight injection wells (PDF). With those wells, production plants, maintenance roads, and pipelines running across the surface of these formations to prosthetically adapt bedrock to use in industrial process, the ground itself has assumed a hybridized and mechanical nature, comprising a very literal landscape machine.

I’ve noted before Pierre Belanger’s predictions about the bio-physical landscape as infrastructure, which he describes as having been “historically suppressed”, but ripe for resurgence as “a collective system of essential services, resources, and agents that generates and supports urban economies”. While the helium industry may not have a very long future, perhaps the geo-physical landscape has also been overlooked, and may also be useful to the development of such a system.

By rholmes | Posted in futures, infrastructure, landscape, landscape-architecture | Tagged , , | Comments Off on geologic helium machine | Permalink
March 16, 2010 – 6:00 am

places on architectural criticism

While mammoth by no means aspires to fit within the category of architectural criticism (though we do occasionally have something to say about it), Nancy Levinson’s recent meta-criticism of the genre in Places strikes me as essentially correct:

By now the rules are so familiar they seem almost inevitable. We’ve come more or less to accept that architecture criticism is a form of art critique; that as such its proper focus is the important output of major architect-artists; and that because the major architect-artists work on an international scale, the scope of criticism is necessarily global. Clearly this isn’t the only critical modus operandi, but it’s the main one, exemplified for decades by the powerful and pace-setting Times, and emulated by any organization with aspirations and a travel budget.

And yet this critical set-up, this art-critique model, is hugely problematic; and its dissatisfactions have been a contentious issue for years (witness the outpouring of comments inspired by Lange’s essay), for it’s a model that’s highly reductive of a complex field. As Lange and others have noted, it tends to view works of architecture almost entirely as objects and hardly at all as environments. It values formalism over experience, aesthetics over function, technology, comfort or performance. It’s about how the building looks more than how it works (which is why you will not learn, in Ouroussoff’s recent pan of the proposed U.S. Embassy in London, by Kieran Timberlake — he dismisses it as a “bland cube” — that the building is designed to be carbon neutral). And the art-critique m.o. is deeply implicated in the increasingly claustrophobic and boring star system, in which critical validation leads to major commissions which in turn receive more critical validation, and so on, creating an ever-constricting favored circle…

This is quite similar to the implied critique present in our recent list of our favorite architectural projects from the past decade.

By rholmes | Posted in architecture, asides, meta | Tagged , | Comments (7) | Permalink
March 15, 2010 – 6:00 am

the shelter category

Magazine on Urbanism‘s twelfth issue, Real Urbanism, was released last Thursday; mammoth is quite pleased to have had the opportunity to contribute to this consistently provocative publication.  For this issue, MONU called for entries which “explore how people in the real estates business perceive and conceive cities”:

“What do cities look like in the eyes of real estate investors, property managers, and urban developers?  What is a good and what is bad city according to real estate agents?  [Real Urbanism aims] to illuminate the hidden forces that ultimately establish the physical reality of cities.

But this issue is not meant to be merely polemical and critical of financial forces and economic power that are related to real estate in cities – no Don-Quixotean anti-capitalistic battles shall be fought – but rather attempts [are] made to reveal the particular interests of people involved in the real estate sector and their consequences on the built environment.  What concerns [MONU] most is to put those topics on the agenda and to understand their impacts and dependencies.”

The resultant collection of research interrogates the effect these forces and interests have on the shaping of our cities.  Some of the topics discussed include the role of the Solidere development corporation in reshaping post-civil war Beirut’s central business district, the possibility that architects should become developers (a suggestion which is almost always received positively here at mammoth), and the negative consequences of exclusively profit-oriented development in both Shanghai and Central Europe.  In addition to many more articles, the issue also includes interviews with Bjarke Ingels and Magriet Smit (a Rotterdam-based developer).

Mammoth‘s contribution to the issue, “The Shelter Category”, is reproduced below.  In it, we suggest that the primary function of the home in America is, ironically, not shelter but wealth creation, and use the Home and Garden Television Network as a vehicle to investigate and critique this culture of ‘equity urbanism’.

You can order a copy of Real Urbanism here, and you can watch a preview of the issue here.

A Machine for Making Money Le Corbusier was wrong: the home is not a machine for living. It is a machine for making money. Though romanticized as an American emblem of personal responsibility, security, and stability, the true impact of home ownership is derived from its utilization for the cultivation of personal wealth (1). American homeowners understand this. Architects, by and large, do not.

1 The historian Thomas Sugrue has argued this thesis regarding the cultural origins of American home ownership culture in a number of places, including an article published on 14 Aug 2009 in the Wall Street Journal, entitled “The New American Dream: Renting”. We first explored the connection between Sugrue’s thesis and suburban architecture in a blog post entitled ownership culture.
2 Net Revenue and viewership figures cited here are from Scripps Networks Interactive, Inc quarterly SEC filing form 10-Q (submitted 11-06-09).

Straining for continued relevance and agency within today’s multi-billion dollar construction industry, designers and theorists expend significant effort attempting to understand tactics and politics used by the agents of real urbanism, including developers, real estate agents, and financiers. But what good is this understanding if we do not comprehend the ownership culture at the foundation of that industry?

The Shelter Category Media Home and Garden Television (HGTV) is a lifestyle media brand that unapologetically caters to American home ownership culture. We can learn from HGTV in two ways: by studying the consumer demand to which HGTV responds and by studying the demand which their programming fosters. With content focused exclusively on the ‘shelter category’ — the industry-insider’s term for expertly presented opinions on residential real estate, decorating, and lifestyle options — HGTV produces and broadcasts over 7,000 hours of television into 99 million U.S. and Canadian households annually. The success of parent corporation Scripps Networks Interactive quickly dispels any remaining doubt about their capacity to assess and shape consumer demand: this publicly traded media company generated $268,851,000 during the first three quarters of 2009. (2)


[Figure 1: shelter category media – represented here by graphs of the populations reached through magazines, websites, and television channels by nine of the largest corporations which own shelter category media – represent an incredibly large and influential catalog of ideas about the built environment, yet are rarely studied by architects.]

The success of HGTV and other populist shelter category media, ranging from the pop eco-modernist Dwell to the staid and formal Architectural Digest, reflects both the existing market demand and cultural values to which they respond as well their ability to create additional demand and shape those values. Figure 1, which illustrates the size of the population reached by the media properties of the largest corporations within the shelter category, indicates the extent of that success. Profitably meeting and conforming to values institutionalized in shelter category media have become dominant incentives driving development in certain North American urban typologies, particularly in suburbia, but increasingly also in urban centers. And the core value so institutionalized — equity creation — is value itself.


[An image from Designed to Sell, a show which takes homes not ready to be on the market, gives designers a $2,000 budget, and applies pastiche in the form of paint, textures, accessories, and re-arranged furniture to maximize its selling price. At the time of this shot, the designer remarked “And you know what? All of these things add value – so we’ve done them.” ]

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Equity HGTV simultaneously creates incentives that drive development, while providing a means for understanding existing incentives. By indexing key tactics and trends promoted by HGTV, investigating their effect on city and suburb, and tracing demographic data about home expenditures, we can critically examine the demand HGTV creates and exposes. This equity-urbanism, an urbanism constructed around the cultural valuation of home-ownership, is at its core a relentless appropriation of ‘home’ as ‘wealth creator’. If Gottfried Semper updated his Four Elements of Architecture to accurately represent the contemporary American condition, hearth, roof, enclosure and mound would have to be supplemented by a fifth: ATM.

Tactics and Trends The effects of HGTV, shelter category media, and equity urbanism on architecture and cities are best understood in terms of tactics and trends. Tactics are architectural methodology, while trends are both produced and reinforced, occurring in both architectural and urban manifestations. The tactics and trends described here are all promoted, produced, and reinforced by HGTV in particular, though most are shared by shelter category media in general and driven by the American culture of home ownership and its pursuit of equity.

3 HGTV program: Bang For Your Buck; episode on ‘Great Rooms’

1. Pastiche The central architectural tactic promoted by HGTV, as well as many other shelter category media outlets, is pastiche. As an architectural methodology, pastiche consists primarily of exploring how cosmetic alterations and retail purchases can be optimally arranged in, added to, and subtracted from a home. A good home does not necessarily support the lifestyle of its occupants: a good home shows well. Indeed, custom touches, like a built-in sushi bar (3), are strongly discouraged, because the most important resident of a home is the next one. And if he and his wife want to see tray ceilings, built-in closets, built-in cabinets, more accessories, framed mirrors, real stone veneers, fake stone floors, new furniture layouts, an outdoor fireplace, a new swimming pool or matching towels, as HGTV assures you they do, then you’ll provide them, or risk falling behind in the equity arms race.

Pastiche seems innocent enough, if somewhat superficial, but implicit in this methodology is the notion that the ordinary single-family home on a suburban tract is a perfectly adequate, even desirable, starting point. It may need to be properly decorated and presented, but both the structural and organizational architecture of that home, as well as the dominant patterns of suburbanization which it lies within, are sheltered from substantive critique by a wall of rapid-fire superficial criticisms. HGTV experts like Mike Aubrey or Antonio Ballatore may slam the tile choices in your second bathroom, but they’ll never question your need for a second bathroom, or ask you to consider the impact of your lifestyle choices on the city in which you live.


[Figure 2: An analysis of HGTV’s programming demonstrates the emphasis placed on programs which discuss, to varying degrees, the effect of their recommended renovations and techniques on a home’s equity. Programming is broken down by: the point at which HGTV becomes involved in the project, the scope of the work, the purpose of the project or show, and the extent to which equity was discussed during the program.]


[Figure 3: This map indexes the location and intensity of expenditures on home improvement in most major cities in the United States, using data from 2007. California, Florida, and the Northeast are the regions with the greatest concentration of such expenditures.]

4 Witness the list of rooms HGTV’s Dream Home 2010 can check off on a realtors sheet: master suite, 2 bedrooms, 4 bathrooms, Casita (guest house), office, media room, 2 laundry rooms, 2 patios + 1 private master-suite patio, butlers pantry

2. More bathrooms! More bedrooms! This tactic is straightforward, but vital to the creation of equity. Despite the love for open floor plans professed by virtually all of HGTV’s experts, those same experts are — contradictorily — equally fond of subdividing the interior of the home. Subdivision adds tick marks to indexed categories — number of bathrooms, number of bedrooms — in a real estate ad on the Multiple Listing Service (MLS), one of realtors’ primary resources for finding comparable homes, and pricing accordingly (4). As the home is subdivided, its floor plan comes to reflect not the logic of living, but the logic of the real estate ad. The desire to optimize the floor plan for the MLS directly challenges the modernist ideal of configurable, multi-purpose space. The value of that ideal is difficult to quantify and sell, unlike the long list of subdivided and highly specific spaces (media rooms, bonus rooms, offices, etc) favored by realtors.

3. Standardization In an equity-dominated urbanism, standardization is encouraged at both an urban scale and an architectural scale. To be an efficient moneymaking machine, the home must conform to the neighborhood price range. Homes too far below the local median reduce the value of surrounding homes; homes too far above it see their own values degraded. So-called comparable properties (‘comps’) enforce standardization on an urban scale. At an architectural scale, standardization produces reliability, a key marker of a valuable investment. Standardization thus produces the remarkable ubiquity of the standard neo-traditional suburban home across vast distances (from Long Beach to Long Island) and staggeringly disparate terrains (from the limestone sinkholes of Florida to the deserts of Arizona and back to the temperate pine forests of North Carolina), which would seem to call for unique and varying architectural responses.

An interesting relationship also exists between standardization and pastiche. Standardization brackets a range of values between which a homes fluctuate in a market. But within this range, home-ownership is an exercise in increasing value, and pastiche is the tactic of choice, precisely because its superficial character prevents it from pushing homes outside the bracketed range.


[Before and after images of a home on Curb Appeal, a program which re-designs only the front exterior of a home in order to raise its ‘curb appeal’, and thus its potential re-sale value.]

4. Suppression of Novel Agendas Standardization is accompanied by the suppression of dissident styles, ideas, ethos, and technologies. Why wasn’t Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome house, for instance, widely adopted? Is it because no one wanted it, or is it because everyone thought no one wanted it? When the faceless and unknowable next resident is a silent partner in any home purchase or improvement project, it becomes extremely difficult to integrate any novel agenda into the culture of home ownership. Options which increase equity are tightly bracketed: you might fervently believe in the worth of a novel architectural idea or new technology, but can you count on your home’s future buyer having an equal valuation?

As an example, sustainability and energy efficiency have only recently begun to strongly impact residential architecture with the emergence of a reliable market for them. You might value the $50,000 photovoltaic system you’ve just installed in the house, but unless you plan on living in that house for the quarter century it will take to recoup that investment through energy savings, you are dependent on the next buyer agreeing with your valuation of that system in order to maintain your equity. HGTV’s representative realtors advise homeowners to make purchases and additions with the clearest, highest, and most certain return-on-investment, not those which have potential social or environmental benefits but are riskier financially.

Furthermore, many novel architectural agendas may in fact reduce the economic value of homes. While some agendas — such as the “New Urbanist” movement — have explicitly promoted their functional compatibility with building equity through home ownership, others — such as the “small house” movement — are equally explicitly incompatible. Whether a novel agenda is actually incompatible with equity-based urbanism or merely perceived by the home-buying public as such, the effect — suppression — is the same.

5. Citizen Realtors Another trend produced and reinforced by HGTV is the de-professionalization of the real estate occupations — realtors, developers, interior decorators, etc. — and the corresponding rise of the amateur realtor. Shows such as Bang for Your Buck and Curb Appeal feature rotating casts of professional realtors who tour the homes featured on the show, dispensing commentary on what will “show well”, seduce buyers, and improve market value. As they do so, they inculcate viewers with professional lingo and tactics, training homeowners to react to homes like realtors. While it is easy to assume that the arrangement and architecture of the typical suburb is the fault of risk-averse, profit-hungry developers, this forgets that every homebuyer is a developer.


[An image from the show Income Property, which pairs an HGTV designer, Scott McGillivray, with a homeowner who wishes to convert an unused attic, guest house, or basement into rental space. McGillivray develops 2-3 alternative designs at various price points, and evaluates them with the owner in terms of initial cost, expected rental value, and increase in home equity.]

5 A point reinforced by the location of Dream Homes past and present, including: The Colorado Rockies, the Florida Keys, the New Mexico desert, Napa Valley in California.
6 For the floor plan and a walkthrough of 2010’s Dream Home, click
7 Companies which had products placed in the home as well as commercial time purchased for this year’s Dream Home included: Ethan Allen Furniture, Subzero, Wolf Cooking Equipment., Lumber Liquidators, Intuit Business Software, Omni TV, Dawn, Shermin Williams, Belgard, Disney, Welborn Cabinets, and Silestone.

6. The Dream Home Once a year since 1997, HGTV designs, builds and gives away its ‘Dream Home’. This house – essentially the embodied Platonic form of HGTV’s architectural tactics — is more than just a home, it is an architectural wrapper for aspirational resort living (5). Though it is covered by the finest pastiche HGTV’s top designers can muster, the dream home has the same structural and organizational architecture as an average suburban home (6). This makes a great deal of sense, as the aim of HGTV is not to push architectural boundaries, but to provide an appealing platform for the home’s product and advertising sponsors (7). The Dream Home is an extended infomercial, so it is critical that viewers be able to envision themselves within it, that only the quality of the pastiche (the Wolf kitchen appliances and the Silestone quartz countertops) distinguishes the Dream Home from their homes.


[HGTV Dream Home 2010 floorplan, courtesy of HGTV.com]

The premium HGTV places on meshing the Dream Home with viewer expectation makes it an instructive window into the culture of home ownership. The 2010 Dream Home, which was first revealed in a marathon broadcast on New Year’s Day, echoes many of the themes that run throughout HGTV programming. Turning the home, particularly the master suite, into a personal retreat is described as a defining quality of the home’s dreaminess, as are open floor plans and ample window area. Whirlpool tubs with candle-holders, custom-tiled kitchen backsplashes, and (of course) ample closet-space abound.

But, the Dream Home is just as instructive for what it is not. First, it is not appropriate for people who don’t work from home, as it is located too far from New Mexico’s major employment centers for reasonable commuting. Viewers of HGTV do not dream of carless lifestyles, but of secluded resorts. Second, despite what those in the building industry describe as a sudden and massive demand for ‘green building’ and ‘sustainability’, there is no effort to engage those movements. Given the high cooling bills typical of New Mexico, it is surprising that there was no discussion of energy efficiency, electrical bills, cooling — not even a nod toward the insulating properties of the floor to ceiling windows. A cynic might suspect that this is because a window manufacturer interested in sponsoring the home could not be found, but the absence of such discussion is notable regardless of the reason for it.

8 “Census Bureau Reports on Residential Vacancies and Homeownership“, 26 Oct 2007.

An Embedded Feedback Loop These six tactics and trends — dependence on pastiche, the subdivision of the interior of the home, standardization, the suppression of novel agendas, the rise of citizen realtors, and aspiration towards the Dream Home — all reflect the intimate relationship between HGTV and the cultural forces which inform the American ideal of home ownership. There is, it should be said, nothing particularly new about this ideal. Walt Whitman wrote that “a man is not a whole and complete man unless he owns a home and the ground it stands on”, and Americans have taken Whitman’s advice to heart, as over two-thirds of Americans are homeowners (8). HGTV and other Shelter Category media reflect this deep, underlying cultural stance, but they also enforce and expand upon that valuation. They are both a consequence of America’s ownership culture and a producer of the values of that ownership culture, in an embedded feedback loop where cause and effect can’t easily be pried apart.

9 Witold Rybczynski’s Last Harvest, published by Scribner in 2007, provides an excellent overview of the typical process by which an American subdivision is planned, designed, and built, notable for the near-total absence of architects from that process.

As the tactics and trends of HGTV reveal, ownership culture is 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 unengaged 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. (9)

HGTV and other shelter category media ultimately present a direct challenge to the relevance of architecture. Though the very title of this media category — “shelter” — would seem to reinforce the importance of shelter as the central function of the home, the media content consistently undermines that understanding. If homes now exist to generate wealth, not to provide shelter, then architecture, whose most fundamental disciplinary territory has always been the provision of shelter, faces an identity crisis.

Thus the shelter category’s unending focus on consumer goods, simple do-it-yourself fixes, and faux finishes challenges not the artistic integrity or the theoretical stances of architecture, but the usefulness of architects to a mass culture which no longer understands the home in the same way that they do. Architects shouldn’t be afraid of HGTV because of what it gets wrong, but because of what it gets right. It signals a chasm between what architects do and what people care about.

10 Ruth Mantell, “Home Prices off record 18% in past year, Case-Shiller says”, MarketWatch, 30 Dec 2008. Link.

Crash In December of 2008, Standard & Poor’s Case-Shiller Composite Ten price index, the premier tracker for American residential real estate sales, which tracks market performance in Boston, Chicago, Denver, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, South Florida, New York, San Diego, San Francisco, and Washington, reported the most severe annual fall in its history, an astonishing 19.1%. (10) Looking back from December of 2009, that market — now understood to be a bubble fueled by cheap credit and unsustainable speculation — had peaked between 2005 and 2006, depending on the measure used, and entered a death spiral that has yet to relent.

This crash, accompanied by an equally severe implosion within the shelter category media, as indicated in Figure 1, presents a direct challenge to the foundational assumptions of equity-urbanism as well as a clear opportunity for critical engagement with the assumptions and tactics of the shelter category. If we believe that an equity-focused “real urbanism” is bubble urbanism, founded on unrealistic expectations about real estate appreciation and incapable of sustaining the kind of growth in real estate prices which fueled the growth of the shelter category at the beginning of the decade, then this is the moment in which an engaged and honest critique of those assumptions and tactics will find the most fertile ground and the most open minds.

By mammoth | Posted in architecture, finance, urbanism | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (12) | Permalink
March 13, 2010 – 9:39 pm

infrastructure construction as jobs stimulus

Free Exchange posted this chart emphasizing the challenge long-term unemployment poses in this recession. It seems to indicate that construction-based stimulus could be especially effective in reducing such unemployment, furthering the case for a stimulus program emphasizing the construction and repair of infrastructure.

But there’s just not that much room to cut unemployment by putting the short-term unemployed back to work in this latest recession. Only six percentage points of unemployment are attributable to those out of work less than six months. To get the unemployment rate down below, say, 7%, you have to take a big chunk out of long-term unemployment.

And that means putting back to work a lot of relatively low-skilled workers who were previously employed in construction, in manufacturing, and in retail and service industries. In an economic climate in which construction and personal consumption are likely to contribute very little to output growth for the next few years.

That’s a tall order. Not since the Depression has the American economy had to pull off anything like it.

Beyond the benefits which accrue to regions and economies from an infrastructure’s performance, their construction is an effective form of stimulus; during this recession, it would target a portion of the workforce having an especially difficult time finding jobs.

By Stephen | Posted in asides, economics, infrastructure | Tagged , , | Comments Off on infrastructure construction as jobs stimulus | Permalink
March 11, 2010 – 11:17 pm

future forests of the eastern seaboard


[Mapping the transference of botanical threats from Japan to the Midwest, from a video presentation on Japanese Knotweed (Polygonum cuspidatum) in the Great Lakes region]

From a recent article in the Guardian:

Biological warfare is to be declared on an alien invader, Japanese knotweed, that swamps gardens and rivers, with the release of an insect to eat the virulent weed.

The decision by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is the first allowing one non-native species, a flying insect resembling a miniature moth, to control the seemingly unstoppable spread of an alien plant…

The wildlife minister, Huw Irranca-Davies, said the fast-growing Japanese knotweed was estimated to cost £150m a year to control, and was able to grow through buildings and roads.

[Knotweed] has also been blamed for flooding, by causing erosion to river banks and clogging up streams with dead plants.

The decision is not without controversy, though, as some environmentalists worry that introducing an exotic predator — the chosen Aphalara itadori, a “plant jumping lice” — is potentially as disastrous as the original introduction of knotweed.  Given the history of predator introduction (in which the introduced predator has occasionally proven more harmful than the prey it was introduced to control), that worry is not wholly absurd, despite assurances from the British government that the introduced insects will be studied in tightly controlled environments before wide release.  But it’s probably worth noting that humanity has already spent the past couple centuries engaging in an unprecedented experiment in cross-species conflict at a global scale…


[The aftermath of a knotweed clearning operation; Invasive plant images via Invasive.org]


[A Japanese knotweed infestation in Ohio]

1I’ll note that I’ve made a rather half-hearted attempt to track down peer-reviewed articles on the topic, to no success.

I’m reminded of a conversation I had with a horticulturist recently.  She noted that, due to the extreme pest pressures North American native species now face, some horticulturists now think that the appropriately far-sighted practice is to only plant invasive species1.  This, of course, flies in the face of the prevailing dogmas of landscape and botanical disciplines, where the categories “native” and “invasive” are treated not as functional ecological descriptors, but as moral markers: to cultivate invasive plants is considered ecological violence, while planting and preserving natives is an indication of moral righteousness.

It is, of course, true that there are a number of good reasons to prefer native plants to exotics, and a corresponding number of good reasons to combat the spread of invasive plants, neither of which I have any intention of minimizing.


[A future forest of Norway Maple?]


[A future grove of Ailanthus altissima?]

2 Correspondingly, there is the possibility that protectionism is justified as a form of ecological containment:“Trade has become the main mode of transport for many invasive species including diseases and agricultural pests. Most species are brought to their new homes unintentionally, which constitute a market failure rooted in international trade. Unless it is practical to drive invasion risk to zero, the external costs may justify a tariff…”

But I’m still haunted (and not at all pleased, despite my fascination) by the thought that the decline of native species might be inevitable.  Native species may be adapted to climate and local ecology, but perhaps only invasives are adapted to free trade, and free trade’s attendant equalization of global pest regimes?2 Are the Native Plant Societies destined to be horticultural equivalents of the Institute of Classical Architecture, propagating an aesthetic preference which has certain pleasant associations for many people, but which is no longer derived from any functional process?

Moreover: are these the future forests of the Eastern seaboard?  Not Oak-hickory-pine nor Maple-beech-birch, but Mulberry-Ailanthus-Norway Maple?  If so, these future forests would have been constructed by the aggregate effect of human economies spread across several centuries, so that we might have even been said to have unintentionally cultivated them with shipments of insect-bearing fruits, the massive growth of the globalized horticultural trade in the nineteenth century, ballast-loads of exotic aquatics, and ornamental gardens which lurked on the edges of our cities like botanical time-bombs (or, perhaps, the unknowing seeds of the preservation of some forest — if not quite our forest — as strange and unnatural as it might be).  Free trade as a form of monumental gardening, with the entire biosphere its terra fluxus.  Profit-seeking corporations and capitalist nation-states as unwitting gardeners, container ships their trowels.


[A small future stand of Paper mulberry?]

And this is to say nothing of more radical but entirely possible futures, such as that bioengineering our crops might, through cross-pollination, produce fields of genetically-enhanced “superweeds”; yet would forests of incredibly adaptable invasive hardwoods and savannahs of superweeds not be preferable to genetically-pure but frail, choking, and dying landscape-museums of natives?  At some point, presumably, we would admit the evolutionary superiority of kudzu, a plant which is adapted not just to soils, rainfall, and temperatures, but to us and the disturbances we produce.

By rholmes | Posted in futures, landscape | Tagged , , | Comments (8) | Permalink
March 8, 2010 – 6:00 pm

landscapes of quarantine


[A portion of Cape Coral, Florida, which has been under citrus quarantine for much of the past decade, as the USDA attempts to prevent the spread of an invasive strain of Asian citrus canker to the remainder of the United States; though the quarantine zone initially included only relatively small areas such as the Cape Coral zone surrounding known infection sites, the entire state of Florida is now under indefinite citrus quarantine.  While the fruits themselves, which have been determined to not be an infectious vector after proper disinfection, may move freely since late 2009, “it is illegal to move live citrus plants, plant parts, budwood, or cuttings from Florida.” ]

Landscapes of Quarantine, an “exhibition exploring the spaces of quarantine, from Level 4 biocontainment labs to underground nuclear waste repositories” opens at the Storefront for Art and Architecture tomorrow evening (with a reception at Storefront which is free, open to the public, and features, thanks to Brooklyn Brewery‘s sponsorship, free beer), and will run through April 17th.  The exhibition is curated by Geoff Manaugh (BLDGBLOG) and Nicola Twilley (Edible Geography), and developed from the work of an independent, multi-disciplinary studio they ran last fall.  Mammoth dropped by the final session of that studio and, based upon what we saw then, we have no doubt that the work in the exhibition will be thought-provoking and of the highest quality.

A pair of mammoth posts written briefly after that visit (on quarantine theater and quarantine economies), as well as two posts more generally related to matters of quarantine (this place is best shunned and left uninhabited, on designing the landscape of nuclear waste repositories, and pueraria lobata, on invasive species, the cultural construction of nature, and hacking species range); you can read about Smudge Studio’s contribution, which explores deep geologic repositories for extremely long-term quarantine, at Friends of the Pleistocene; David Garcia Studio contributes MAP 002: QUARANTINE, which includes proposals for a zoo of infectious species, an instantly quarantinable farm, and more; Pruned curates a collection of quarantine-themed posts; more details at BLDGBLOG and at Edible Geography.

By rholmes | Posted in asides, landscape | Tagged | Comments Off on landscapes of quarantine | Permalink