[Perhaps determined to echo BLDGBLOG’s call for a “J.G. Ballard of contemporary China” (or drive home Kongjian Wu’s repeated declarations about the material wastefulness of much of the contemporary building program in China), the New York Times reports from the “empty shells” of Beijing’s Olympic venues and features a slideshow of photographs by Susetta Bozzi; via @bruces]
1. Keiichi Matsuda‘s “Domestic Robocop” offers a glimpse of an augmented future which is part bliss and part nightmare:
Matsuda’s video is via BLDGBLOG, Serial Consign, @doingitwrong, and more or less everyone else.
2. In BLDGBLOG‘s brief entry on Matsuda’s video, he suggests that “augmented-reality drop-down menus are the Gothic ornamentation of tomorrow”; if that suggestion intrigues you, read Christopher Hawthorne on digital ornamentation.
3. And then, shifting in topic from display on architecture to display of architecture, Geoff Manaugh reviews “Museum of the Phantom City” in iconeye; obviously, it gets speculative.
4. Wired, on the next industrial revolution:
Today, micro-factories make everything from cars to bike components to bespoke furniture in any design you can imagine. The collective potential of a million garage tinkerers is about to be unleashed on the global markets, as ideas go straight into production, no financing or tooling required. “Three guys with laptops” used to describe a Web startup. Now it describes a hardware company, too…
The academic way to put this is that global supply chains have become scale-free, able to serve the small as well as the large, the garage inventor and Sony. This change is driven by two forces. First, the explosion in cheap and powerful prototyping tools, which have become easier to use by non-engineers. And second, the economic crisis has triggered an extraordinary shift in the business practices of (mostly) Chinese factories, which have become increasingly flexible, Web-centric, and open to custom work (where the volumes are lower but the margins higher).
The article frames this transition roughly as “watch manufacturing become more like the internet”, but I’m at least as interested in the new physical geographies generated by this shift (the “shanzhai” factories, for instance, as architectural manifestations of evolving global supply chains) as I am in the impressive virtuality of it all.
5. The City Project fires a broadside at architects and associated urbanists for obsessing over the potential of the digital city to the exclusion of political and “embodied” concerns. While I think the piece perhaps overstates the degree to which urbanists are exclusively interested in the digital and the networked, I agree that the issue of access which The City Project raises ought to be given great weight in any discussion of the digital city. Perhaps it is worth remembering that Gothic ornamentation was no marker of great social equality.
6. Finally, as one example of engagement between social aims for architecture (in particular, environmental justice) and the potential of the digital city, “Local Code: Real Estates”, which was one of the finalists in the WPA 2.0 competition:
“Local Code” engages urban systems digitally at both a macro level, through the deployment of GIS modeling to locate abandoned and unclaimed urban spaces, and at a micro level, as individual spaces are plugged into a model of the larger needs of the city and redesigned accordingly. The project was recently profiled by Allison Arieff for the New York Times:
…Using G.I.S. in conjunction with parametric design tools, Local Code suggests a set of individual landscapes for each site with the goal of mitigating larger urban performance variables like storm-water retention and heat-island effects — referring to the 1.8 to 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit temperature increase that occurs within densely built environments. (De Monchaux suggests that his intervention would most likely render redundant San Francisco’s current multi-billion dollar effort at increasing sewer storm-water capacity). Together, the aggregated sites project an alternative green infrastructure with potentially measurable benefits to safety and public health as well.
Looking through this lens also enables us to think about infrastructure in a new way. The era of massive, expensive, centralized projects like the Big Dig in Boston has passed. “Now, with the ability to model dynamic systems, we can show a much more decentralized collection of resources could provide greater benefit,” de Monchaux says. “If, in the 19th century, it was a biological metaphor that fueled the creation of Central and Golden Gate parks, the idea that a city needs hearts and lungs to grow, there’s now a networked metaphor. The city is a dense network of relationships. The best way to provide infrastructure is to not go in with a meat ax but to practice urban acupuncture, finding thousands of different spots to go into.”
Our intention for a while now has been to write a bit more about what we like to refer to as “landscapes in search of an architect”, or those places whose phenomenological, industrial, psychological, geological, and/or ecological (and that list could go on, and on) characteristics suggest to us the possibility of an exceptionally interesting architectural intervention. These posts are not a description of that intervention, but rather a running catalog of such places, fertilizing our imaginations.
Approximately four hundred million years ago, Detroit — situated then as now on the massive Laurentian craton, though at that point in geologic history, known as the Devonian period, Laurentia was part of the Euramerican supercontinent — lay within what is known as the Michigan basin, a shallow, arid expanse of land which was periodically filled by salt-laden ocean water as it sunk towards the center of the earth. These temporary saline lakes rapidly evaporated, leaving behind miles of salt beds, which now lie beneath four hundred million years of shale, limestone and sandstone.
One of the most remarkable things about geology, though, is that geologic forces convert time into distance, and so those salt beds lie a mere quarter-mile beneath the city’s surface. Around the beginning of the 19th century, the presence of these salt beds was discovered and miners — who are, in some very real sense, time travelers — began to translate four hundred million years into eleven hundred thirty-five feet of mineshaft.
But time travel is neither easy nor cheap, and the Detroit Salt and Manufacturing Company which began those excavations soon gave way to the Detroit Salt Company, which was acquired by the Watkins Salt Company and reorganized as the Detroit Rock Salt Company, before being bought by the International Salt Company. The Detroit salt mine has operated almost continuously since then, providing salt for industries — primarily food and leather in the early twentieth century — and winter road maintenance, the primary use of Detroit’s salt today.
Today, the salt mine spreads from it’s entrance at 12841 Sanders Street over fifteen hundred acres of Detroit, adjacent to Henry Ford’s famous River Rouge plant, and spider-webbed by over a hundred miles of subterranean roadway. The Detroit Salt Company’s website describes the contemporary layout and extraction processes:
Approximately 1,000 feet of rock lie atop the vein of salt. To safely extract the salt from the deep deposits, Detroit Salt employs the “room and pillar” system. This method creates massive pillars, which support the mine roof and the overburden separating the mine from the surface. Parallel galleries – or rooms – give the mine a checkerboard pattern, allowing machinery to easily move a design for future expansion and serves as an air course for fresh, ventilated air in worker-occupied areas.
The extraction process begins with undercutting the mine walls level with the floor. A self-propelled undercutter carves channels at the base of the deposit and across the entire room. This channel fosters efficient explosive blasting and creates a smooth mine floor. A special drilling machine then bores 40 or more holes into the salt face, which miners then prime and with pellets of explosive materials. Blasting-cap wires are spliced together, placed in the open ends of the hole and then attached to an electrical ignition cap. Miners ignite the explosives, creating a blast that dislodges 800 to 900 tons of rock salt in less than three seconds. The depth of the mine and cushion of the overburden absorbs the blast vibrations, preventing any surface damage to immediate and surrounding areas.
After the blasting, miners scale loose pieces of rock salt from the roof and side walls. Huge front-end loaders remove and transport the blasted rock salt to the primary crusher. Loaders dump 12-tons loads of salt into powerful spinning crusher, where large pieces are quickly devoured, emerging no lager then eight inches in diameter. The salt leaves the primary crusher via thousands of feet continuous conveyor belt. It is refined and crushed once again before being transported to the hoisting shaft where skip hoists bring 10-ton loads to the surface in a matter of seconds. Upon reaching the surface, the salt is sent to either a rail car for shipping or stacking conveyor to store for later use…
The exceptionally odd aggregate form of the mine — extending only westward from the mine shaft, and only beneath large agglomerations of property, avoiding small property owners — results from the inefficiency of the legal processes for securing the mineral rights for those properties, which produces a minimum acreage beneath which acquiring the mineral rights wipes out the relatively slim profit margin involved in such difficult sub-surface mining. The mine, then, is molded not just to the geology of the city, but to its legal morphology, property lines literally written in stone.
Which reminds me of the recommendation, seen at Super Colossal, made by a committee involved in the planning of the new urban area in Singapore, that there should be an “underground master plan”, involving the development of “subterranean land rights, a valuation framework, and… a national geology office”. Perhaps it’s time to open an Office of Subterranean & Geological Urban Planning in Detroit, in anticipation of a Cappadocian future — whatever the psychological implications of living below ground might be (and there’s certainly a valid argument to be made that they wouldn’t be entirely positive), it is astonishing to think that the cities of the future could lie beneath our sidewalks, factories, and abandoned lots.
The title of this post is quoted from the Detroit Salt Company’s webpage; John Nystuen’s 1999 article, Metropolitan Mining: Institutional and Scale Effects on the Salt Mines of Detroit, is a fascinating (if slightly academic) study of how economic and legal constraints interact with geology and mine operations to produce a subterranean landscape, and the source for all the images of the Detroit salt mine in this post; if I were allocating grant funds, I’d be sure to get thenorthroom to survey the Detroit salt mine as they did the tunnels of Guanajuato (link via F.A.D.); finally, Atlas Obscura has an entry on the Detroit salt mine, which includes a handful of images of the 12841 Sanders Street site.
My apologies to our readers for the (almost) week which has passed with nary a peep about the Apple iPad, as an iPad post or article is apparently de rigueur if you write about… anything. The problem is, we have had nothing interesting to say, and I’m pretty sure I still don’t. Instead, here is Daniel Beunza, of the fantastic Socializing Finance, with my favorite bit of mulling over the iPad:
Before going into details, let me clarify why I laugh at the tablet skeptics. Essentially: because we cannot judge a new technology by how it fulfills our present needs. “No-one we know takes photos with the cellphone… who needs one?” Such was the reasoning by Nokia back in 2003. And thus Nokia got stuck with camera-less phones for too long, giving away part of its market to the Asian manufacturers. What Nokia missed was that people would take tons of photos with the phone if they had the ability to do so. New affordances create new needs. The challenge is to imagine those needs before they arise.
Interestingly, Steve Jobs does not get this simple point. Or at least that’s what I got from watching his presentation of the iPad. For the tablet to be justified, Jobs said, it should let you browse the web better than a computer and a phone. Actually, it’s the opposite. The tablet should focus on new things that only a widescreen mobile wireless device can do. Social web browsing, for instance. Or situated problem-solving. Marrying mobility and Excel, flicker and pubs. (It is also puzzling, by the way, that Jobs presented a social, mobile device sitting by himself on a comfy chair).
This is followed by an example of the sort of revolution he has in mind, regarding the potential effect of the iPad on financial exchanges. Beunza’s argument that the point of a new technology being the new features it has, not the existing ones which are missing, is well stated, but it doesn’t allay my fear that Apple is moving toward closed computing systems. Do I wish the iPad could support multitasking? Sure. But far more troubling is the fact that it can’t run Flash on its native browser (because Apple decided they don’t want you to), and you have no ability to install a different one with the functionality you like. Computers ought to be able to do whatever you can figure out how to instruct them to do, and seeing that potential artificially limited is frustrating.
Thanks to Kazys Varnelis for introducing me to Socializing Finance in a recent post; for further iPad contrarianism, read Alan Jacobs’s post at Text Patterns.
This post was originally written for inclusion in our list of the decade’s best architecture, but then excluded, both for fit and because we realized the novel it references — Darwinia — was published in 1998.
[We haven’t got any images of the Large Higgs Field Galatic Archive, for reasons that will become obvious, so this fantastic and mathematically-precise digital drawing by Andy Gilmore is standing in. Ably.]
A nasty prediction: in somewhere around one thousand billion years, sentience will, unfortunately, still be dealing with climate change. Unfortunately, that climate change will not be global, but universal, in the form of heat death, the entropic decay of energy as it spreads ever more distant from itself and is increasingly-evenly distributed over expanding space-time.
Robert Charles Wilson’s novel Darwinia speculates about the forms that existence might take in such a future:
Noospheres, huge constructs which housed the remnants of planetary civilizations, had drifted for eons among the fossil stars of the galaxy’s spiral arms. They had re-complicated and segmented themselves, meeting in million-year cycles to exchange knowledge and to create hybrid offspring, metacultures embedded in infant nooshperes dense as neutron stars…
In this distant future, Wilson suggests, death has been abolished. Sentiences at the end of their lifespans are absorbed for the duration of the universe into noospheres — but the duration of the universe grows short.
[The heart of our galaxy in false-color, seen through the Hubble]
In response to this threat, Wilson’s sentience constructs the Large Higgs Field Galactic Archive, a self-aware Seed Vault for life itself, which confronts heat death as an architectural problem:
…the noospheres gathered above the ecliptic of the dying galaxy, their immense new labors fed by plumes of antimatter that seethed from the pole of the central singularity. The Archive, when it was finished, would contain all that the galaxy had been… Age by age the archive grew, a physical object as wide as a dozen stellar systems, braced against the tides of its own mass by systemic distortions of local space, A machine operating at stellar temperatures, it radiated a burnished amber light into an increasingly lightless void — even this sparse radiation a residual inefficiency that would be eliminated over the next several million years.
The archive was a temporal telescope, a recording, a memory — in essence, a book. It was the ultimate history book, fed and refreshed by temporal discontinuities built into its matrix, a record of every known sentient act and thought since the dawn of [the universe]. It was unalterable but infinitely accessible, aloof and anti-entropic. It was the single largest act of engineering ever attempted by galactic sentience.
As a piece of speculative architecture, the Galactic Archive is unmatchably large. One could also produce an argument for it as an example of architecture fiction — though in the comments of our Best-Of list, Tino makes a compelling suggestion that The Wire is a better candidate, and I agree with him.
The Transport Politic reviews the distribution and impact of this week’s high-speed rail funding announcement in a cautiously optimistic fashion, with the important caveat that “eight billion dollars of spending won’t be enough for even one true high-speed line”, while Infrastructurist explains why the prioritization of the Orlando-Tampa line, which is slated to receive $1.25 billion, makes sense.
[The Large Hadron Collider]
The end of a decade inspires a lot of list compiling; in that spirit, mammoth offers an alternative list of the best architecture of the decade, concocted without any claim to authority and surely missing some fascinating architecture. But we hope that at least it’s not boring, as this was an exciting decade for architecture, despite the crashing, the burning, and the erupting into flames.
The unfortunate thing about year-end lists is that they often devolve into self-congratulatory displays of one’s good taste. With that in mind, allow us to state at the outset that the purpose of this list is not to preen the superiority of our taste (we’re well aware that the critics who pen those boring lists have visited far more of the relevant architecture constructed this decade than we have), but rather to share a handful of the reasons that we’re genuinely excited about the future of architecture, and to hopefully engender a bit of that excitement in a reader or two. To that end, the items on this list have been selected to represent some of the most hopeful trends which impinge upon the territory of architecture (and, occasionally, landscape architecture, as the constant and intentional conflation of the two disciplines which is a mammoth trademark continues). You’ll discover that our criticism of boring lists consists primarily in their being confined to (a) buildings and (b) things built by architects, though our list includes both buildings and things built by architects.
In fact, “favorite” might be a better way to describe this list than “best”, but we’ve stuck with “best” because it’s more fun, as you can’t argue about “favorites”. With those disclaimers out of the way (and hopefully conveniently forgotten), in no particular order, mammoth‘s best architecture of the decade:
ORANGE COUNTY’S GROUNDWATER REPLENISHMENT SYSTEM
[Image of the reverse osmosis cylinders, which remove “viruses, salts, pesticides and most organic chemicals” from water being treated by Orange County’s wastewater reclamation plant, via Wired’s photo gallery]
With apologies to Matt Jones, whose piece for io9, “The City is a Battlesuit for Surviving the Future”, spawned great conversation last year, you might say that the Groundwater Replenishment System is a small step towards a new way of thinking about urban hydrology: the city is a stillsuit for surviving the drought. Intended to halt the traditional mass flush of urban effluent and wastewater into the ocean, Orange County’s latest addition to its wastewater infrastructure is “the world’s largest, most modern reclamation plant”, capable of turning “70 million gallons of treated sewage into drinking water every day”, according to the LA Times.
This capability, a staggeringly futuristic feat of engineering and technology, has unfortunately been derided as “toilet-to-tap” by opponents of wastewater reclamation, who fear the contamination of drinking water supplies. As a result of this short-sighted political opposition, the plant’s treated water is injected into the bedrock beneath the county, counteracting saltwater intrusion and replenishing underground reservoirs, rather than forming a closed loop of water use and reuse, but the potential for that closed loop is there, and there’s no doubt that the closing of water use loops will become an increasingly central infrastructural tactic for municipalities and governments facing decreased water supplies and rainfall in the coming decade. Closed water loops may even become as integral and expected a part of architecture as air conditioning is today (as a recent article in Landscape Architecture said, in what I thought was an unexpectedly beautiful phrase: “buildings are the new aquifers”); until then, we have the Groundwater Replenishment System.
Watch an eight-minute explanation of the function and purpose of the GWR System from the Orange County Water District, or scan the Orange County Water District’s headquarters in Fountain Valley on google maps; read a short overview of global efforts to utilize recycled sewage, at National Geographic.
LARGE HADRON COLLIDER
[images of the LHC and CERN via Wired Science]
This recent Vanity Fair feature provides a succinct overview of the reasons that the LHC was the first and most obvious candidate for this list:
The L.H.C., which operates under the auspices of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known by its French acronym, cern, is an almost unimaginably long-term project. It was conceived a quarter-century ago, was given the green light in 1994, and has been under construction for the last 13 years, the product of tens of millions of man-hours. It’s also gargantuan: a circular tunnel 17 miles around, punctuated by shopping-mall-size subterranean caverns and fitted out with more than $9 billion worth of steel and pipe and cable more reminiscent of Jules Verne than Steve Jobs.
The believe-it-or-not superlatives are so extreme and Tom Swiftian they make you smile. The L.H.C. is not merely the world’s largest particle accelerator but the largest machine ever built. At the center of just one of the four main experimental stations installed around its circumference, and not even the biggest of the four, is a magnet that generates a magnetic field 100,000 times as strong as Earth’s. And because the super-conducting, super-colliding guts of the collider must be cooled by 120 tons of liquid helium, inside the machine it’s one degree colder than outer space, thus making the L.H.C. the coldest place in the universe.
The Large Hadron Collider is an excellent example of a theme that runs through this list, ably described by BDLGBLOG‘s Geoff Manaugh in his book (and quoted here with apologies to dpr-barcelona, who I borrowed the use of this quote from):
“Architecture schools and publications today seem almost desperate for a new avant-garde –even for a “new Archigram”– but they seem only to be looking within the field of architecture to find it. For the sake of argument, let’s say that BP, with its offshore oil rigs, or the U.S. military, with its rapidly deployed instant cities, or private space tourism firms are the new Archigram. They, too, are experimenting with spatial technologies and structures. Is it possible that the “new Archigram” won’t involve architects at all –but will be, say, rogue engineers from the construction wing of an international oil-services firm?”
As we see it, the LHC falls easily into the long tradition of Architecture without Architects, but with scientists, engineers, and miners standing in for, say, traditional Saharan construction technologies and the vernacular architecture of the Mediterranean coasts; instead of timeless ways of building, a building that may have altered time itself.
Various blog coverage of the Large Hadron Collider of note includes Pruned’s post on the descent of the last of the LHC’s more than seventeen hundred magnets into the subterranean complex, BLDGBLOG’s speculations generated by the necessity of freezing an underground river in place in order to construct the complex, and the Large Hadron Collider tag in Wired Science‘s archives, which covers the birth and life of the LHC in exhaustive detail.
SVALBARD GLOBAL SEED VAULT
[images via SEED magazine slideshow]
A doomsday vault for when it all goes terribly, terribly wrong? Well, yes, but that’s not all the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is. Located in the Norwegian village of Longyearbyen, one of the world’s northernmost towns, the vault is a bank dedicated to the preservation of variety and dynamism, itself a seed for the regeneration of complexity in ecosystems. Ironically, given that mission, everything about the structure strives toward stasis: political and geographic locale; ownership and maintenance of the seeds; interior and exterior climate conditions; technology and construction. Like the LHC, Svalbard’s Seed Vault is sublime because of purpose and engineering, not aesthetic or theoretical vision — though the structure, again like the LHC, does not lack in aesthetic wonder.
Norway owns the Vault, but not the seeds it contains. The majority are varietals of staple crops from around the globe, sent by local seed banks across the globe to take advantage of the Vault’s offer of free storage. Unlike these local banks, the Vault is not meant for regular access. These seeds will only be reclaimed in situations of dire need. But those situations are not post-apocalyptic scenarios in which survivors begin a trek to Svalbard to salvage seeds, as rebuilding after catastrophic collapse, while perhaps a romantic scenario, is not the primary disaster which SGSV guards against. Rather, the Vault stands as a bulwark against the creeping (and probably inevitable) extinction of various crop strains and their valuable genetic data – perhaps even before we have had time to examine their potential.
Cary Fowler, director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, identifies Svalbard’s mission in an interview with C-Lab in Volume 17, “Content Management”. He describes a crop called ‘Lathyrus,’ or Grass Pea, which is easy to grow, requires little water and fertilizer, and could “easily be the only crop you need to provide food for yourself and your family.” However, it is also toxic, and if you eat enough to ward off starvation, you have also eaten enough to paralyze yourself:
It’s an awful choice that the most unfortunate people on earth have, which is to starve to death or become paralyzed. That is where I think the seed vault comes in. Within this crop there is a fair amount of diversity, and some varieties have less toxin than others. We use the collections to breed new varieties that have all the great qualities I just mentioned without the bad quality. If we can do that, we can provide the poorest people on earth with a great insurance policy. In a sense, I know the attraction of the doomsday vault is doomsday, but I really see the whole see vault as something remarkable and positive
iPHONE
[Image from Urban Omnibus’s write-up on the “Museum of the Phantom City”, a fantastic iPhone application which lets the phone owner navigate the history of architectural proposals for the (paleo-)future of Manhattan as an extension of their experience of the physical city]
Much has already been written about the iPhone as an extension of both city life and architecture, by persons with better understanding of both the technology and its import, but we’d be extremely remiss if we failed to include a device with the capacity to so thoroughly transform the urban experience. Perhaps the most fundamental aspect of that transformation is the capacity of the smart or ‘app’ phone to serve as a window into additional layers of data on the city — often described as ‘augmented reality’ — while tying smart phone users into the network that maintains those layers of data. Smart phone users are not merely passive observers of the augmentation of the physical infrastructure of the city by networked data, but participate in the active construction of that data.
The interface between place and network appears likely to grow stronger, as the linking of network participation with location which first gained mass effect through the iPhone is strengthened and deepened by hardware and software advances, such as hyper-local trending topics on twitter, google goggles, wikitude, collective memory models, and the tools being developed by MIT’s Fluid Interfaces Group. Public utilities can utilize the collective intelligence of a city’s citizens to detect system malfunctions; citizens can develop tools to gather reports of failure within the urban system, collate those failures geographically, and pressure government to react using the collected data. And as the network becomes increasingly tactile, immediate, and geographically relevant, it can be expected to develop more direct interfaces with buildings.
If you doubt that the iPhone is appropriately considered an act of architecture, we suggest considering the argument discussed our recent post object fixations: urban systems are “defined most fundamentally not by structure and infrastructure, but by practice, action, and thought-process”; what act has more signficantly altered the practices and thought-processes of urbanites in the past ten years than the mass distribution of smart phones?
QUINTA MONROY
[images via Elemental]
Quinta Monroy is a center-city neighborhood of Iquique, a city of about a quarter million lying in northern Chile between the Pacific Ocean and the Atacama Desert. Elemental’s Quinta Monroy housing project settles a hundred families on a five thousand square meter site where they had persisted as squatters for three decades. The residences designed by Elemental offer former squatters the rare opportunity to live in subsidized housing without being displaced from the land they had called their home, provides an appreciating asset which can improve their family finances, and serves as a flexible infrastructure for the self-constructed expansion of the homes.
The first challenge that Elemental faced was a strict budgetary limit of $7500 (USD), the standard Chilean per-family housing subsidy. This subsidy would have to purchase the land, architecture, and infrastructure of the development, yet is only enough — at market-rate construction costs in Chile — to buy thirty square meters (322 square feet) of built space on such a center-city site. Because of this, social housing in Chile tends to be produced as outlying sprawl, where land can be bought more cheaply, allowing a greater percentage of the subsidy to be devoted to the architecture. Unfortunately, for reasons that are not fully elucidated in Elemental’s project description (though I am led to believe those reasons are the low value of the land social housing is usually built on and the low quality of the construction), social housing in Chile tends to depreciate in value, rather than appreciate, further miring families in poverty, as the housing subsidy is the largest single sum of aid that most impoverished families will receive from the Chilean government. If that movement could be altered — if the housing could be designed so that it appreciates rather than depreciates — it might be the difference between long-term poverty and a gradual climb towards sustainable familial self-sufficiency.
[The Quinta Monroy site in urban context, via google maps]
Elemental’s first decision was to retain the inner city site, a decision which was both expensive and spatially limiting: there is only enough space on the site to provide thirty individual homes or sixty-six row homes, so a different typology was required. High rise apartments would provide the needed density, but not provide the opportunity for residents to expand their own homes, as only the top and ground floors would have any way to connect to additions. Elemental thus settled on a typology of connected two-story blocks, snaking around four common courtyards, designed as a skeletal infrastructure which the families could expand over time:
We in Elemental have identified a set of design conditions through which a housing unit can increase its value over time; this without having to increase the amount of money of the current subsidy.
In first place, we had to achieve enough density, (but without overcrowding), in order to be able to pay for the site, which because of its location was very expensive. To keep the site, meant to maintain the network of opportunities that the city offered and therefore to strengthen the family economy; on the other hand, good location is the key to increase a property value.
Second, the provision a physical space for the “extensive family” to develop, has proved to be a key issue in the economical take off of a poor family. In between the private and public space, we introduced the collective space, conformed by around 20 families. The collective space (a common property with restricted access) is an intermediate level of association that allows surviving fragile social conditions.
Third, due to the fact that 50% of each unit’s volume, will eventually be self-built, the building had to be porous enough to allow each unit to expand within its structure. The initial building must therefore provide a supporting, (rather than a constraining) framework in order to avoid any negative effects of self-construction on the urban environment over time, but also to facilitate the expansion process.
Finally, instead a designing a small house (in 30 sqm everything is small), we provided a middle-income house, out of which we were giving just a small part now. This meant a change in the standard: kitchens, bathrooms, stairs, partition walls and all the difficult parts of the house had to be designed for final scenario of a 72 sqm house.
In the end, when the given money is enough for just half of the house, the key question is, which half do we do. We choose to make the half that a family individually will never be able to achieve on its own, no matter how much money, energy or time they spend. That is how we expect to contribute using architectural tools, to non-architectural questions, in this case, how to overcome poverty.
[Quinta Monroy shortly after construction of the initial framework and living space, but before the families have begun self-construction, via Elemental.]
Elemental, in other words, have exploited the values and aims of ownership culture (which mammoth has suggested understands the house to be first a machine for making money and only second to be a machine for living) not to support a broken system of real estate speculation and easy wealth, but to present architecture as a tool that can be provided to families. While the project is embedded with some of the assumptions of the architects (such as that faith in the potential of ownership culture, for better or worse), this tool is primarily presented as a framework, a scaffolding upon which families are able to make their own architecture. This seems like an important step — made visually apparent by the strong contrast between the simple lines of the initial framework and the colorful and varied familial additions — in the direction of what Lebbeus Woods describes as offering architecture as “the rules of the game”, or, the thinking he described behind a “capsule” which could offer architectural aid to people living in slums:
From the side of the slum dwellers, it might seem an unwelcome intrusion from outside, just another quick fix imposed by the economically advantaged on the desperately poor, serving the interests of the rich by transforming the slum according to their well-intentioned but—to the slum dweller–necessarily opposed values. It is especially important, then, that the transformative capsule enables the slum-dwellers to achieve their goals, serving their values, and does not reduce them to subjects of its designers’ and makers’ will. Inevitably, the values, prejudices, perspectives and aspirations of the designers and makers will be imbedded in the capsule and what it does. Therefore the slum-dwellers should, in the first place, have the right of refusal. Also, they must have the right to modify the capsule and its effects as they see fit. It cannot be a locked system, capable of producing only a predetermined outcome. The implication of these freedoms is that the capsule, whatever its capabilities, could be used to work against the intentions of its designers and makers. Because the effects of the capsule would be powerfully transformative, its possession would involve risk for all the groups, and individuals, involved.
Take a video tour of Quinta Monroy or watch a documentary about Quinta Monroy (in Spanish); construction photographs of a similar project by Elemental in Monterrey, Mexico; a brief article at Dezeen; a bit of commentary on the project as well as the stories of two of the inhabitants of the houses, at The Incremental House, a research blog by one of the 2008 Branner fellowship recipients.
PONTINE SYSTEMIC DESIGN
[Perspective view of P-REX’s proposed “wetland machine”, the regional master plan, and a factory and agricultural land within the watershed of the masterplan; images via P-REX, Pruned, and Google Maps, respectively]
The IBA Emscher Park — most famously symbolized by Peter Latz’s Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord, a fantastic recreational park that recycles the industrial past for contemporary recreation without losing the melancholy charm of the “natural decay and dilapidation of the site”, but as a whole, “[embraces] more than 120 distinct projects” scattered through out the Ruhr — is perhaps the exemplary global example of how a systematic program of landscape and architecture can combat regional decline in the wake of de-industrialization. If this list were a list of the best architecture of the previous decade, the Emscher Park would be the first item on the list. However, while the Emscher Park is a good and kind way of dismantling an industrial region in response to global economic trends, incorporating the repair of the damaged ecology of that region into the construction of new spaces for recreation and provision of the physical infrastructure for cultural programming, it is nonetheless fundamentally a deconstructive program. It is only intended to preserve the industrial infrastructure of the past as museum, not to re-purpose that infrastructure as the foundation of new production economies and new industries.
Which is why projects such as P-REX’s Pontine Systemic Design, a regional master plan which proposes the transformation of a portion of Italy’s drained Pontine Marshes into a wetland machine which serves to repair and maintain ecological balance in an industrial and agricultural region while that industry and agriculture remains vital, are so important. A 2008 NYTimes article explains the intentions of Alan Berger, the landscape architect who founded P-REX:
[Berger] is recommending a radical solution: not so much to restore the environment as to redesign it.
“It is so ecologically out of balance that if it goes on this way, it will kill itself,” said Alan Berger… who was excitedly poking around the smelly canals on a recent day… You can’t remove the economy and move the people away,” he added. “Ecologically speaking, you can’t restore it; you have to go forward, to set this place on a new path.”
Designing nature might seem to be an oxymoron or an act of hubris. But instead of simply recommending that polluting farms and factories be shut, Professor Berger specializes in creating new ecosystems in severely damaged environments: redirecting water flow, moving hills, building islands and planting new species to absorb pollution, to create natural, though “artificial,” landscapes that can ultimately sustain themselves [emphasis ours].
The Pontine Systemic Design represents exactly the sort of “reformulation” of the “historically suppressed” “biophysical landscape” “as a sophisticated, instrumental system of essential resources, services, and agents that generate and support urban economies” which Pierre Bélanger called for in his recent article in Landscape Journal, “Landscape as Infrastructure” (PDF). P-REX’s website describes the elements of the wetland machine which lies at the heart of the regional master plan:
Choosing a gigantic, consolidated wetland site will likely be more viable in the complex patchwork of land ownership. Given Latina’s situation, distributed treatment areas would be both enormously complex to purchase and ineffective to manage. The Wetland Machine’s dimensions are directly related to the amount of wetland area needed to treat the amount of water in the Canale Aque Alte—the major collector for this highly polluted zone. At 220 l/s, with a load around 50+ mg/l of N, at least 2 square kilometers of treatment wetland will be required. The design retro-fits and widens existing canals to serve as flow distributors. Furthermore, soil cut/fill operations are used for terraforming shallow ridges and valleys to hold/treat water and make raised areas for new public space and program. At 2.3 sq. km., the new wetland machine will drastically improve the regional water supply and provide needed open space for recreation. At only 6 km from Latina, the site could house programs and environments almost completely lacking in the region—large open landscapes with diverse vegetation. Extensive edge habitat diversity or programs—shallow shoals for juvenile fish and swimming, starker edges for fishing and water storage.
The landscape, in the form of a constructed wetland, becomes the central hydrological infrastructure of this polluted agricultural and industrial watershed, a transformation firmly situated within the understanding of landscape infrastructures as the key component of “urban ecologies”, which Bélanger delineates in “Landscape as Infrastructure”:
Endogenous and exogenous processes, such eutrophication, combined-sewer overflow, sediment contamination, invasive flora, exotic fauna, depleted water reserves, and seasonal floods can no longer be perceived as isolated incidents, but rather as part of large, constructed hydrological ecolog that is entirely and irreversibly connected to the process of urbanization. The slow, yet large-scale accumulated effects of near-water industries and upstream urban activities once considered solely at the scale of the city, are now more effectively understood at the scale of the region.
Insofar as the P-REX’s design represents a step in the direction of this regional consideration of landscape infrastructures, it provides hope that architecture and landscape architecture may yet have some agency in addressing in what Berger has described as “the larger-scale environmental issues that are currently affecting urbanized regions”.
Though the project is not yet built, as far as I am aware P-REX and the provincial government are still collaborating on the planning and design of the project, with every intention of seeing it through construction; and, at any rate, mammoth has no distaste for entirely speculative projects. Pruned has an excellent summary of the project, which includes higher-resolution images of the project provided by P-REX. I wrote a brief piece two years ago attempting to situate Berger’s design within the cultural landscape history of the Agri Pontini, though the efficacy of that effort was surely inhibited by my lack of knowledge of Italy; at any rate, I still think the contrast/parallel between the early 20th century pump machinery which drains the Pontine Marshes and the wetland machine proposed by Berger is fascinating. Abitare did an excellent recent interview with Berger touching on the Pontine Marshes but dealing primarily with Berger’s research techniques, methodologies, and thoughts on the discipline of landscape architecture.
CITYCAR
[Images via CNET]
Developed by MIT’s Smart Cities group, headed by William Mitchell, CityCar is:
…a foldable, electric, two-passenger vehicle for crowded cities. It uses Wheel Robots—fully modular in-wheel electric motors—that integrate drive motors, suspension, braking, and steering inside the hub-space of the wheel. This drive-by-wire system requires only data, power, and mechanical connection to the chassis of the vehicle. Wheel Robots have over 120 degrees of steering freedom, allowing for a zero-turn radius and 90-degree parking (sideways translation); they also enable the CityCar to fold by eliminating the gasoline-powered engine and drive-train. Folded, the CityCar is very compact (roughly 60” or 1500mm), with an on-street parking ratio of at least 3:1 to traditional cars. It is also lightweight (1000lbs) and modular, and automatically recharges when parked, reducing battery needs and excess weight. The CityCar has two use models: private (traditional ownership), and shared (Mobility On Demand, high-utilization, one-way shared systems like Paris’s Vélib’ bicycle-sharing program).
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. Similarly, CityCars — being essentially mobile batteries — would be tied through their recharging stations into a city or region-wide smart grid, purchasing electricity at cheap rates during off-peak hours from the grid and selling it back to the grid at higher rates during peak hours, at once exploiting the market potential of the smart grid and becoming an essential component of the grid. 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.
A Boston Globe article highlights some of the pragmatic and regulatory difficulties that will be faced in attempting to bring the CityCar to mass realization; interestingly, this CNET article notes that Hawaii — where residents often travel from island to island without their cars — has shown interest in CityCar as a mass transit system; read a roundtable conversation between William Mitchell and Robin Chase (founder of the car-sharing service ZipCar) at the Next American City; read a feature on Chase at Urban Omnibus; this Places article discusses the notion of “fracture critical” infrastructures, and how their potential for disastorous failure suggests the necessity of resilient and flexible infrastructures.
FRESH KILLS
[images via Metropolis slideshow]
There was a lot of talk in the past decade about how landscape architecture — whether in the slightly older guise of landscape urbanism, or in the more fashionable and current guise of landscape infrastructure — would come to dominate urban design practice. Both architects and landscape architects, from Koolhaas to Corner, noted that the contemporary city is dominated by flatness, that the singular architectural object is powerless to overcome the conditions of that flat city, and that landscape architects are seemingly well-equipped, being situated at the boundaries of ecology (with its emphasis on process and flow), architecture, and urban planning, to operate on flat yet incestuously complicated cities.
Yet that potential has been largely unrealized. Designers, even in competition and academic endeavors (to say nothing of what has been built) stuck with what they knew: overtly formal, often beautiful, but ultimately stale master-planning exercises. The influx of data-based and algorithmic methods of indexing has done little to shift this paradigm; if anything, it has reinforced the tendency to resort to the beautiful drawing because of the ease with which it can be created, and the veneer of systemic complexity they grant a project. What use is the diagram when the plan is indistinguishable from it?
New York City’s Fresh Kills competition and the on-going work by Corner’s Field Operations, the competition winners, is one of the few examples that buck that trend, demonstrating the ability of an office led by a landscape architect to produce a synthesis of ecological, urban, social, and infrastructural processes on a large scale within an extremely complicated urban system. This kind of work, of course, operates intentionally on long time scales, and so it is perhaps not surprising that even Corner, probably the best-known of the landscape architects who joined the first wave of landscape urbanists, has only completed one major landscape (at least as far as I’m aware), the rather disappointing High Line.
What is particularly exciting about Field Operations’s Fresh Kills for landscape architects is that this massive new park isn’t being built so much as it is being grown and cultivated, thereby realizing a firm reliance on the flow and flux of ecologies as not just inspiration for design, but as the tool of design, as is explained in Andrew Blum’s 2008 article for Metropolis on Corner:
Corner saw [Fresh Kills] as a proving ground—not just as a park but for landscape architecture as a whole. It stacked up all the challenges he had been wrestling with: contaminated lands, exhaustive environmental reviews, competing community interests, glacially slow (if not totally absent) funding, and the opportunity to create an aesthetic unencumbered by Romantic landscapes. (In all of this, Corner was influenced by the landscape architect Peter Latz’s Landscape Park Duisburg-Nord, which was mostly completed by 1999.) “It was: Look, this is a landfill, it’s a regulated landscape, the soil is atrocious, how can you imagine a park here?” Corner says, describing his initial thought process. “It’s not an exercise of trying to design a fantastic park; it’s an exercise of trying to design a method to get from what it is now to something that is green, public, and safe. And that process would then produce a park that had very unique spatial and aesthetic experiences and properties.”
Corner called his scheme Lifescape, and the notion at its heart, part ecological and part poetic, came out of the earlier thinking: to grow the park, to reengineer the site as a “self-sustaining ecosystem,” an “autopoetic agent”—like a cell. One of the biggest challenges at the site was covering the mounds with at least four feet of soil, to make them safe for picnicking; Lifescape imagined the park growing that soil. “It’s easy to sit and dream up fantastic things,” Corner adds. “The trick is to dream up fantastic things that are smart with regards to the realities at stake.”
There’s still a lot to prove in this, um, proving ground — but mammoth suspects that landscape architecture will need more projects like Fresh Kills, not less, if it is to flourish in the next decade.
Of further interest might be this critique of Fresh Kills from Mario Ballestros, as well as this response to that critique from the official Fresh Kills blog and another response to the same critique which I posted a while ago at Eatingbark.
CHINA’S HIGH SPEED RAIL NETWORK
[image via Wikipedia]
The massive network of rail-lines, including conventional rail but particularly high speed rail, now spanning vast portions of China (and growing exponentially through the coming decade) is perhaps the best example of the continued relevance of the infrastructural “superproject” to emerge in the past decade. Nonetheless, we debated whether or not it belonged on this list and, rather than assemble our points into a coherent argument, thought we’d share that debate directly. You’ll note that we’ve entirely skipped over the question of whether a rail network can or should be considered architecture at all.
Stephen: I’m not yet convinced China’s high-speed rail belongs on the list. It’s not terribly different from any other high speed rail system in how it affects the country, how it came to be, or (as far as I know) any particularly impossible engineering condition which needed to be overcome. It’s not a triumph of project management or marketing, of building a massive infrastructural project despite difficult political or economic circumstances, because China is $loaded$ and, as a single-party state, doesn’t face the sort of political entanglements which make rail so difficult to build in the United States.
You mentioned earlier that it is an example of the continued relevance of the infrastructural superproject… in what way? As economic stimulus? As a nation-building ‘look at us’ project? Some other fashion? I am concerned all we learn from this project is that China can do whatever it wants – at which point, its just a Pretty Cool, Really Big Project.
Rob: I think that definition of “continued relevance” is too narrow. Sure, it’s most definitely not an example of an infrastructural building program which could be duplicated in a modern western state – but most states aren’t modern western states.
Stephen: Most states aren’t China either.
Rob: No, but it’s tremendously relevant to the future of China, and one in five people in the world lives in China.
Stephen: True. You know I’m as big of a high-speed rail supporter as anyone, considering its ability to act as both near-term and sustained economic generator.
Rob: And while it’s true that most states aren’t China, there are other big, functionally-single party regimes – Russia, for instance.
Stephen: This project serves largely the same function as other HSR networks around the world. Does it qualify as a best-of project just because it exists? Does China building the rail system prove a massive infrastructure project is relevant to Russia?
Rob: If it proves that it is (a) possible and (b) will have important effects on urbanization in that country, then, yes.
Stephen: Maybe a new, enormous pipeline is more relevant to Russia… so the question is, what exactly is China’s HSR proving? That HSR projects in particular are worthwhile, or that any large infrastructural project is – as long as it is fine tuned to the needs of a region, with the political and economic conditions present to enable its creation? And if it’s the latter, I’m inclined to say “Well, of course that’s true!” But then, maybe you and I operate in a bubble where the value of the Big Infrastructural Project is taken as a given, and outside that bubble, reinforcing the relevance of the Big Infrastructural Project isn’t a bad idea, however disappointing it may be that they are only possible in select conditions.
Rob: I’m more convinced now than I was at the beginning of the conversation that it belongs. At the beginning I was ready to throw it out, but now I’m convinced it represents a major trend in infrastructure which we’re otherwise ignoring. I think the last point you make as a devil’s advocate is key: while the acceptance of the continued value of large infrastructural projects may be a current idea within our circles, I doubt that it is so widely agreed.
[Map of China’s current and proposed high-speed rail connections via the excellent Transport Politic]
Stephen: Right. China’s HSR is a best-of-decade project because of its function as a signifier for the relevance of many types of large infrastructural projects, even if they are only possible in select areas. It’s in because it’s important in defining the urban future of China, as other sorts of projects might be for their respective countries. I think it’s instructive to contrast it against some other projects on this list which are better able to integrate themselves into areas without the benefit of a powerful centralized authoriy, like the Orange County Wastewater system or CityCar. Projects which are smaller, lend themselves toward incremental expansion, and minimal disruption of current systems, especially land-ownership. Those projects are often geared toward the remediation of damaged or obsolete infrastructures, whereas the Chinese HSR system is being introduced in as near a blank-slate condition as is possible in the twenty-first century. Not only do projects in non-authoritarian regimes need to be smaller and nimbler, but they are generally reactive. The fear of a broken system must exceed the fear of an angry mob of NIMBYs before action is taken. Appealing to the prospect of a better future is — unfortunately — quite often impossible.
Newsweek has an article about China’s High Speed Rail network here; images of the network can be found here at Treehugger; map of existing rail lines here; discussion of the scale and importance of this project relative to China as compared to HSR endeavors by other countries, here.
PARQUE BIBLIOTECA ESPANA
[images via Architectural Record]
Parque Biblioteca España is one of a number of notable projects built in the past decade in Medellin, Colombia, whose exceptionally progressive mayor, Sergio Fajardo, is using infrastructure, landscape, and architecture to spark renewal and combat systemic poverty. Much as Elemental’s Quinta Monroy made architecture a legible toolset for the residents of one city block in Iquique, the program of infrastructural development in Medellin has deployed architecture and landscape across the entire city, providing the city’s residents — and the inhabitants of the mountainside “comunas”, in particular — with an infrastructural toolset to rebuild their city and neighborhoods. Once the headquarters of Pablo Escobar, wracked by corruption and violence, and described as “the murder capital of the world”, Medellin has been transformed by an emphasis on public culture, shared spaces, and transparency. The Metro de Medellin was extended into the comunas by the construction of Line K, a public-transit cable car which replaced tedious and slow two-hour bus rides down the steep mountain side with a fast and comfortable twenty-minute ride, sparking the growth of community businesses in the comunas. A botantical garden located in the dangerous neighborhood of Moravia was renovated to remove walls, symbolically opening the garden to the community, and upgraded with a striking new central pavilion under which cultural events are organized and attended. The additions are both as small as the introduction of staircases connecting mountainside homes and as large as the system of five library parks, which includes Biblioteca España, providing safe and open places for meeting, playing and learning in the heart of the comunas.
[Passengers ride Line K, via the NY Times]
I highly recommend this slideshow from Medellin, taken by Quilian Riano (formerly fruitful contradictions, now @quilian on twitter and one of the two people behind DSGNAGNC), as well as Riano’s post at his Archinect school blog after visiting Medellin; the New York Times ran an article a couple years ago on Fajardo and Medellin; an Architectural Record article describes Parque Biblioteca Espana.
KIVA
[Modesta Tabanao in her general store in the Philippines. She received a loan of $225 “to purchase additional inventory and working capital” and is on-track to repay the loan over its nine month term.]
If the recent flury of projects in Medellin shows how traditional infrastructure tactically deployed can revitalize a city, Kiva shows how a non-traditional monetary infrastructure can do the same:
In 2004, Matt Flannery and Jessica Jackley witnessed the power of microfinance firsthand while on a trip which would become a life-changing experience. Visiting East Africa – Jessica conducting impact evaluation surveys for Village Enterprise Fund and Matt filming interviews with small business entrepreneurs – they were able to see and hear firsthand how small grants of only $100 – $150 had been used to build small businesses which could then support a family. They heard stories of people who were able to sleep on mattresses instead of dirt floors, afford to take sugar in their tea daily instead of occasionally, and buy fresh fish for their families a few times every week rather than once a week. Instead of meeting the poor and helpless, they found themselves meeting successful entrepreneurs who had generated enough profits from their small businesses to create a real impact on their standard of living.
Kiva is an infrastructure for distributing relatively small amounts of money to entrepreneurs, particularly in developing countries. Its brilliance is the realization that people would rather give to individuals — other people — than to an organization. Rather than sell you on a particular charitable mission, Kiva’s website engages donors by encouraging them to become stakeholders in the economic future of specific recipients. It displays their stories and, importantly, their business and repayment plans. Kiva, like those networks of physical structures more commonly understood as urban infrastructures such as roads, sewers, and powergrids, is fundamentally characterized by the properties of connection and transmission, which enables it to have widespread effect on cities across the globe.
Mammoth has written frequently about the city as it is constructed by complex interactions between systems, economies and societies, and argued that architects should engage this context. If one accepts this set of relationships as not merely descriptive of the processes within a city, but as the fundamental material of the city, more basic to the nature of urbanity than skyscrapers or freeways, how can the invention and deployment of Kiva not be considered an act of urban design? Kiva is infrastructural urbanism at its purest: unconcerned with directing the formal evolution of the city, focused instead on generating the financial mechanisms which enable citizens to participate in reshaping the city. These qualities make it n effective agent in some of the most informal urban conditions on the globe, conditions which confound traditional architectural response.
[PLOT’s “Clover Block” scheme, an unsolicited proposal for public housing in the city of Copenhagen which generated enough public interest to provoke a competition for the design of public housing on the site, via rory hyde dot com blog]
Kiva also suggests hopeful and alternate models of architecture practice, perhaps beginning to incorporate or co-opt a similar infrastructure in place of the traditional financier-client-architect funding model. Studies like the Office of Unsolicited Architecture and this post by FASLANYC begin to hypothesize what such a model might look like. They compliment financial experimentation found in projects such as these documented by Rory Hyde, architectural outfits like Supersudaca, and practices like Parking Day. We’re not sure how (or even if) the infrastructure Kiva has developed for financing entrepreneurs is scalable to the development of an architecture or landscape project. But mammoth believes that the dynamic between client, financier, and designer provides fertile ground for experimentation, and we hope lessons learned from Kiva can be applied to architecture in the coming decade.
[This post was co-authored by Stephen and Rob; we’d love to hear what we’ve gotten wrong (and why!), as well as what we’ve missed; we’ve got a handful of near-misses for this list in hand that we’ll hopefully get around to writing about soon.]
While researching a forthcoming post last night (which I can assure you will live up to the site’s title, at least in length), I stumbled across this fantastic interview with Alan Berger conducted by Abitare. The interview deals first with Berger’s work in the Pontine Marshes, but expands to discuss his general working methodology (airplane reconnaissance), other projects, academic philosophy, and general thoughts on the future of landscape architecture as a discipline.
I’m particularly interested by two things in the interview. First, Berger’s Pontine Marshes project indicates the potential of design disciplines to contribute something — in this case, a designed ecology — to the organization of landscape infrastructures which those who have typically organized them (politicians, scientists, engineers) do not. This seems to me to be a question which is often left unanswered when landscape/architects make proposals for infrastructures: it’s clear what we get out of our involvement in the work (we get to do exciting projects and have the kind of influence the profession craves), but it is often much less clear what about our contribution to the project ought to convince a government (at these scales, one is almost always working with government) to hire a designer rather than an engineer as the project coordinator (shorter version of this question: why would you hire a landscape architect to design a sewer?). That Berger has been able to convince the provincial government to pursue the implementation of the project indicates that they’ve found real value in his approach to the remediation of the Marshes.
Second, I’m quite intrigued by the historical trajectory of Berger’s work, by how the cultivation of relationships with scientists (the EPA, in the case of the Breckenridge mine project) and politicians (the provinicial government, in the case of the Pontine Marshes) has allowed Berger to make a direct and linear transition between unfunded research projects and the funded implementation of landscape infrastructures. While it’s quite possible that this trajectory is only possible within an academic environment which provides the flexibility needed to pursue years of unfunded research and thus that this is not a plausible trajectory for more traditionally organized architectural firms, it nonetheless illustrates a clear path for developing the agency of designers in new fields.
Urban Tick has a review of a new publication, The Landscape of Contemporary Infrastructure, which catalogs a variety of (mostly high-profile) infrastructural projects designed by architects in the past couple decades. Though I haven’t read the book, the first point of critique that Urban Tick makes is quite astute and demonstrates a common problem in the architectural adoption of infrastructure as an aesthetic mode (regardless of whether it is an accurate critique of the book, though I have no reason to believe it isn’t):
The first [problem] is the conceptualisation of infrastructure in independent ‘objects’. This approach clearly follows the iconic presentation of architectural projects of the OMA or Herzog and de Meuron type… It fits the current, self promoted architectural ‘Zeitgeist’ of iconic, distinct, clean projects. However it misses the opportunity to establish infrastructure as something more than an ‘object’, but rather a collection of ‘objects’ or even better a network.
Or, to extend that line of criticism a bit, it misses that the most exciting and useful thing about infrastructure as an object of architectural design is the capacity of infrastructure to affect the urban system around it; read Urban Tick’s full review here.
[link via @ethel_baraona]
Jeff Maki writes at Urban Omnibus about New York City’s steam tunnels as a potential analog precursor to future mass civic participation in the maintenance of urban infrastructure, which may be an increasingly necessary tactic, given the massive repair deficit North America’s urban infrastructures face.
[update: thanks to commenter цarьchitect, a screen capture from a demo for SIM Building, a program of the sort which likely provides the underlying architecture for UrbanSim]
An unfortunately brief article in the latest Atlantic Monthly describes “SimCity Baghdad”, a video game developed for the US Army in order to train officers to navigate the intersections of local politics, Iraqi culture, infrastructure, urban social systems, and insurgent violence. It’s not exactly what I was thinking of when I described a hypothetical Infrastructure XL, but UrbanSim (that’s the actual title of the game) nonetheless represents a fascinating evolution of the traditional and staid genre of city-building video games, though it is obviously an evolution with sinister overtones.
[Your authoritative source for understanding military urbanism is of course Subtopia, but this recent BLDGBLOG post on Die Hard, the Israeli military, and the violent navigation of architectural space also springs to mind for its explication of the links between military practices and architectural practices. And I’d be negligent if I failed to mention the Archinect school blog of Nick Sowers (@soundscrapers), which is conveniently capped just today with a look back at his grand tour of military installations (and American bases in particular) around the world.]
An interesting article by Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley at The New Republic looks at how Detroit might recover from decades of decline; this includes looking at how Detroit might be re-industrialized (the re-industrial path is an even more fascinating proposition than the well-tread path to post-industrial health, though there’s nothing mutually exclusive about the two), the role of government in encouraging the development of new manufacturing which leverages old knowledge and institutions, Bilbao as an object lesson in the construction of infrastructure for revitalization (importantly highlighting that Gehry’s Guggenheim was a small piece in a much larger physical regeneration, which also included a new metro system, a waterfront tram line, modernization of airports, ports, and regional trains, and “a new water-sanitation system to keep untreated household and industrial waste out of the river”; the success of Bilbao’s regeneration being far more dependent on these infrastructures than on the draw of starchitecture), and why even a revitalized Detroit would require shrinkage.
(Yes, that’s all one sentence. I think I need an editor.)
[Another infrastructural landscape: Sosa Texcoco’s salt collector in Mexico City, via google maps]
I’m still catching up on my reading after the winter break; another bit of that reading that I’d particularly recommend is Alexis Madrigal’s post on visiting the SEGS, or Solar Electric Generating Stations, located in Kramer Junction, California. Alexis reflects on the scale of this infrastructural landscape, and its relationship to urban landscapes solar fields may power someday soon:
[This] country is big, mechanical, and fast. It cannot be located in a dense place: Land needs to be cheap and land regulations loose. But density requires these other desolate places to exist. If you live in a major city, you are excluded from this world. In fact, it’s been designed so that you don’t see it, won’t see it, except perhaps fleetingly from the highway or as you fly past and snap a photo. And there’s nothing wrong with all that, necessarily.
Read the whole post.
[A manhole near Halifax marks the Canadian arrival point for one of the eleven major cable lines carrying the bulk of trans-Atlantic Internet traffic; photographed by Randall Mesdon; from this excellent Wired slideshow on the physical infrastructure of the internet; the text accompanying that show is by Andrew Blum, whose forthcoming book on said infrastructure promises to be one of the most interesting books of, um, whatever year it will be released in.]
Daniel Hillis has an insightful answer to the World Question Center’s question of the year, “How has the Internet changed the way you think?”:
It seems that most people, even intelligent and well-informed people, are confused about the difference between the Internet and the Web. . . . The Web is a wonderful resource for speeding up the retrieval and dissemination of information and that, despite Wolfe’s trivialization, is no small change. Yet, the Internet is much more than just the Web. . . . By the Internet, I mean the global network of interconnected computers that enables, among other things, the Web. I would like to focus on applications that go beyond human-to-human communication. In the long run, these are applications of the Internet that will have the greatest impact on who we are and how we think.
Today, most people only recognize that they are using the Internet when they are interacting with a computer screen. They are less likely to appreciate when they are using the Internet while talking on the telephone, watching television, or flying on an airplane. Some travelers may have recently gotten a glimpse of the truth, for example, upon learning that their flights were grounded due to an Internet router failure in Salt Lake City, but for most this was just another inscrutable annoyance. Most people have long ago given up on trying to understand how technical systems work. This is a part of how the Internet is changing the way we think.
I want to be clear that I am not complaining about technical ignorance. In an Internet-connected world, it is almost impossible to keep track of how systems actually function. Your telephone conversation may be delivered over analog lines one day and by the Internet the next. Your airplane route may be chosen by a computer or a human being, or (most likely) some combination of both. Don’t bother asking, because any answer you get is likely to be wrong.
Soon, no human will know the answer. More and more decisions are made by the emergent interaction of multiple communicating systems, and these component systems themselves are constantly adapting, changing the way they work. This is the real impact of the Internet: by allowing adaptive complex systems to interoperate, the Internet has changed the way we make decisions. More and more, it is not individual humans who decide, but an entangled, adaptive network of humans and machines.
Hillis pictures human society as a cybernetic organism, in which individuals are but interchangeable constituent parts. We’re watching, in the memorable phrase from Ken MacLeod’s awkward-but-fascinating Star Fraction, the emergence of the blind watchmaker. One of the most striking things about this is the way that this reality — so intangible, so hard to understand in concrete terms — interacts with physical and visible reality; the exchange of light within servers in London and New York may determine who has enough to eat and who does not in remote villages. Increasingly, the physical infrastructure of the internet is not limited to server farms, wi-fi routers and trans-oceanic cables, though those direct infrastructures remain critical and yet poorly understood. Everything is becoming the infrastructure of the internet, or the internet is becoming the infrastructure of everything, and at either point the distinction between and order of the two collapses and becomes irrelevant.
Barring widespread societal collapse, managing patterns of emergent decision-making, which may be shaped even if they cannot be controlled, will likely become an increasingly central task for society, and so is incredibly fascinating as an architectural problem, as architecture is fundamentally more interesting when understood in terms of decisions than in terms of forms. My suspicion — though I remain interested in experiments such as the EDAW/AECOM merger which attempt to compensate for increasingly complex conditions by building increasingly complex design processes — is that this trend is another nail in the coffin of totalized design, another reason that we’ll never see a successful attempt at the sort of fully rational planning processes that last century’s modernists sought to deploy. Tomorrow’s architects have, as Lebbeus Woods recently said, “no faith in grand architectural plans to make a better world and especially not [the] best of all possible worlds”. But, as Kazys Varnelis noted in a piece mammoth recently quoted, this is more an exciting opportunity for new roles, design processes, and practices than it is an object of worry1.
[Hillis link via Alan Jacobs’ Text Patterns]
Lebbeus Woods has a fantastic piece, “Utopia Redux”, on the collages of Daniel Meridor, a student at the Cooper Union; the second paragraph, in particular, is a succinct summation of where young designers find themselves after the first decade of the third millenium:
Meridor’s generation—a younger one—has no faith in grand architectural plans to make a better world and especially not a best of all possible worlds. Yet a certain idealism remains. For some it takes the form of environmental consciousness and sometimes grand plans for healing the damage done to the planet by humankind—or, for more modest, ecologically sustainable designs. For others it takes the form of technological innovation using computers, the internet, and other electronic wonders. For only a relative few, however, does their idealism take the forms of isolated buildings that are the focus of the present generation of innovators—radical ‘new forms’ fail to inspire as they once did. The idealistic architects of Meridor’s generation are more critical and reflective than any in recent memory, which leads them to an emphasis on process rather than product, and into either direct engagement with communities in need or into teaching careers, which are not altogether unrelated activities.
Read the whole piece, which explains why it is nonetheless worthwhile to understand Meridor’s collages as architectural proposals. You’ll want to see Meridor’s collages, as well…
Today I finally got around to watching “Church Machine”, a short video project from a GSD studio run by Michael Meredith of MOS, which popped up just before Christmas. The video is the work of a student named Matt Storus and is well worth the sixteen minutes it’ll take you to watch it, as it embeds a clever critique of parametrics as an architectural medium within a rather nice piece of architecture developed using parametrics (or, perhaps it’s the other way around, and the project is embedded within the critique; the ambiguity is what’s so nice about it).
[Greg Smith has a nice bit of commentary on the video at Serial Consign; visit Storus’s blog for stills of the project and other work]
Read Quiet Babylon‘s recent post on the slow production of ruins, scrubbing post-boom projects from architectural portfolios, fifteen hundred years of adaptive reuse of the Coliseum in Rome, and more; Maly gets bonus points for including a Wittgenstein anecdote of dubious provenance.
Since I posted a link to Alec MacGillis’s piece on Richard Florida, it’s worth also posting links to Ryan Avent’s critique of the piece, MacGillis’s response, and Avent’s response-to-the-response-to-his-critique.
[update: see also the Next American City‘s commentary]
