mammoth // building nothing out of something
June 29, 2009 – 5:30 pm

re-engineering the earth

An article in the most recent issue of the Atlantic Monthly explores aggressive “geo-engineering” projects:

“Humans have been aggressively transforming the planet for more than 200 years. The Nobel Prize–winning atmospheric scientist Paul Crutzen—one of the first cheerleaders for investigating the gas-the-planet strategy—recently argued that geologists should refer to the past two centuries as the “anthropocene” period. In that time, humans have reshaped about half of the Earth’s surface. We have dictated what plants grow and where. We’ve pocked and deformed the Earth’s crust with mines and wells, and we’ve commandeered a huge fraction of its freshwater supply for our own purposes. What is new is the idea that we might want to deform the Earth intentionally, as a way to engineer the planet either back into its pre-industrial state, or into some improved third state. Large-scale projects that aim to accomplish this go by the name “geo-engineering,” and they constitute some of the most innovative and dangerous ideas being considered today to combat climate change. Some scientists see geo-engineering as a last-ditch option to prevent us from cooking the planet to death. Others fear that it could have unforeseen—and possibly catastrophic—consequences. What many agree on, however, is that the technology necessary to reshape the climate is so powerful, and so easily implemented, that the world must decide how to govern its use before the wrong nation—or even the wrong individual—starts to change the climate all on its own.”

“If we were transported forward in time, to an Earth ravaged by catastrophic climate change, we might see long, delicate strands of fire hose stretching into the sky, like spaghetti, attached to zeppelins hovering 65,000 feet in the air. Factories on the ground would pump 10 kilos of sulfur dioxide up through those hoses every second. And at the top, the hoses would cough a sulfurous pall into the sky. At sunset on some parts of the planet, these puffs of aerosolized pollutant would glow a dramatic red, like the skies in Blade Runner. During the day, they would shield the planet from the sun’s full force, keeping temperatures cool—as long as the puffing never ceased.”

A permanent fleet of ships sails the globe, churning the ocean with special propellers to spray seawater into the air and make clouds whiter and fluffier.  A battery of twenty electromagnetic guns, “each more than a mile long and positioned at high altitudes”, that would fire tens of millions of ceramic frisbees at the gravitational midpoint between the earth and the sun, putting “the Earth in a permanent state of annular eclipse”.  Hovering zeppelins spew sulfur dioxide into the air, turning the sky red at sunset.  Forests of Freeman Dyson’s genetically engineered trees hungrily suck carbon out of the air.  Vented structures, similar to industrial cooling towers, are filled with grids coated in a solution that captures carbon; the captured carbon is then scrubbed off the grids and sequestered deep below ground in exhausted oil wells.  Antarctic waters are seeded with iron, producing massive plankton blooms that cool the globe.

Didcot Power Station cooling towers., via Wikipedia.

Perhaps the most unexpected (and frightening) turn in the Atlantic article is the suggestion of a worst-case scenario in which a “rich madman… obsessed with the environment” or “a single rogue nation” sets one of these plans into motion unilaterally, with potentially disastorous global side-effects — in the case of the sulfur aerosols, for instance, it is quite likely that any interruption of the supply of aerosols would produce immediate and catastrophically rapid climate change.  An appropriately sobering possibility to consider, for though the scenarios seem outlandish(ly exciting) and the risks are real, they are being given hearing not just at the fringes of scientific debate, but at bodies like the National Academy of Sciences.

By rholmes | Posted in engineering | Tagged , , , | Comments (2) | Permalink
June 27, 2009 – 9:57 pm

Don’t look now, but there’s an ant on your Southeast leg.

This is an endlessly fascinating article about the role language plays in cognition. Forgive me for quoting at length:

Follow me to Pormpuraaw, a small Aboriginal community on the western edge of Cape York, in northern Australia. I came here because of the way the locals, the Kuuk Thaayorre, talk about space. Instead of words like “right,” “left,” “forward,” and “back,” which, as commonly used in English, define space relative to an observer, the Kuuk Thaayorre, like many other Aboriginal groups, use cardinal-direction terms — north, south, east, and west — to define space. This is done at all scales, which means you have to say things like “There’s an ant on your southeast leg” or “Move the cup to the north northwest a little bit.” One obvious consequence of speaking such a language is that you have to stay oriented at all times, or else you cannot speak properly. The normal greeting in Kuuk Thaayorre is “Where are you going?” and the answer should be something like ” Southsoutheast, in the middle distance.” If you don’t know which way you’re facing, you can’t even get past “Hello.”

The result is a profound difference in navigational ability and spatial knowledge between speakers of languages that rely primarily on absolute reference frames (like Kuuk Thaayorre) and languages that rely on relative reference frames (like English).  Simply put, speakers of languages like Kuuk Thaayorre are much better than English speakers at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes or inside unfamiliar buildings. What enables them — in fact, forces them — to do this is their language. Having their attention trained in this way equips them to perform navigational feats once thought beyond human capabilities. Because space is such a fundamental domain of thought, differences in how people think about space don’t end there. People rely on their spatial knowledge to build other, more complex, more abstract representations. Representations of such things as time, number, musical pitch, kinship relations, morality, and emotions have been shown to depend on how we think about space. So if the Kuuk Thaayorre think differently about space, do they also think differently about other things, like time?

via sullivan

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June 26, 2009 – 8:23 am

eroded camps at chatham

Summer cottages, despite migrating inland, lose out to the tide and erosion:

Thayer, 46, who estimated his family had spent $35,000 to move the camp twice, huddled with his three brothers recently to weigh their options during a 50th birthday celebration.

But that was before the storm.

The camp had been in the family for a half-century, and distant summer memories of gas lanterns, the lighthouse beacon, the sound of surf, and the Red Sox on the radio still conjured a warm, heartening glow.

The article includes a nice photo gallery, particularly the images of the erosion of the beach over several years.

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June 25, 2009 – 1:57 pm

readings (3)

1. Fantastic Journal’s post Lines of Defense, which I would cheapen if I summarized it.  More nostalgia, I suppose.

2. The NYTimes on Brussels, “traumatized” by the “dreadful architecture” of the European Union headquarters, and how planners hope to rectify the rift between bureaucrats and residents.  What a direct metaphor for the conflict between the old and the new political arrangements, complete with lack of obvious villain or saint:

“They were drilling for piles, about a year ago, and they failed to shore up the neighboring homes,” said Alexandre Smets, 32, whose dental laboratory is in a home now held up by massive steel buttresses. Reflecting Brussels residents’ phlegmatic side, neither he nor the building’s other tenants plan to move out.

3. sevensixfive has a great post entitled “Port Covington: The Ghost of the Masterplan in Tinkerer’s Paradise”, part of his continuing series of ruminations on spaces in Baltimore’s Middle Branch.  Lost railroads, a forgotten Cigar Ship, and abandoned big box retailers share psychic and physical space with banal New Urbanist development plans; the conflation of the fantastical and the mundane that permeates the Middle Branch series is not only good, but necessary, as it is true.

4. Transport Politic compares a proposed high-speed rail line between St. Louis and Chicago with the massively successful route between Lyon and Paris and concludes that a few well-funded projects are better than many half-hearted efforts.

5. Via Landscape+Urbanism, Kent State University’s Shrinking Cities Institute, particularly their Vacant Lot Re-use Pattern Booklet.

6. Varnelis speculates on the death of the suburbs, as caused by the accumulation of small deteriorations in infrastructure.

By rholmes | Posted in asides, readings | Comments Off on readings (3) | Permalink
June 24, 2009 – 9:50 am

elementary school hydrological investigations

While researching the history of the Buffalo Bayou for a forthcoming post, I came across this fascinating series of lesson plans prepared by a Houston elementary school teacher, which would introduce students to the history of flooding, emphasize the dual value and danger of waterways to cities, teach the children to access and utilize real-time water flow data, include field trips to anticipated flood sites during rainwater events, instruct them in the appropriate preparations for and actions to take during major floods, perform hands-on experiments testing the processes of erosion, and challenge them “to identify locations in the… area that are most prone to flooding”.

This crash-course in disaster hydrology for schoolchildren culminates in the selection of topics for individual investigation, such as “visiting storm water detention/retention basins in our area”, “interviewing senior citizens about their experiences with flooding in our area over the years”, or “building a model dam that would demonstrate some of the problems relating to the Johnstown, PA Flood”.

Wish I had had Calvin in third grade.

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June 23, 2009 – 2:20 pm

anniversary optimism

Yesterday was the fortieth anniversary of the 1969 Cuyahoga River fire.  I had always assumed that fire was notable because it marked the peak of an era of careless industrial polluting, but the truth is apparently that the fire was notable because it demonstrated the persistence of an era that Americans thought they had left behind:

While the Cuyahoga River was hopelessly polluted in 1969, river fires by this point were largely a thing of the past. Indeed, river fires had once been common on the Cuyahoga and other industrialized rivers. Throughout the late 19th and 20th century, combustible material on industrialized rivers ignited somewhat frequently. By 1969, this problem had been largely solved. By that time, the Cuyahoga River had not burned in over 15 years, and the once-common problem of river fires had been largely forgotten. Water pollution remained a serious concern, but not because rivers threatened to burn.

Even the photos often attributed to the 1969 fire are actually of previous fires, as the 1969 fire was put out before photographers arrived.  How quickly we have forgotten that our rivers used to burn.

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June 22, 2009 – 5:49 pm

sea-based x-band radar

The Sea-Based X-Band Radar, recently deployed to the coast of Hawaii in response to the threat of North Korean ballistic missiles.  National defense as exquisite functionalist sculpture, or the American military’s response to the Statoil advertisements.

[see also this older post at eatingbark on the eglin fps-85 radar building]

By rholmes | Posted in architecture, asides | Tagged , | Comments (1) | Permalink
June 17, 2009 – 11:52 am

svalbard seed vault

SEED Magazine has a slideshow of images from the recently completed Svalbard Seed Vault, coverage of which is especially timely in light of the rather apocalyptic report (short version: in 2080 DC will feel like South Florida, and might be just as underwater) issued yesterday by the US Global Change Research Program.

The accompanying article, discussing the geopolitics of seed collection, the place of the Seed Vault in The Global Crop Diversity Trust’s globalized network of genetic preservation, and the potential role of crop seeds and genes in mitigating the impacts of climate change, is well worth a read.

[BLDGBLOG coverage of the seed vault from 2007 here and here.]

By rholmes | Posted in asides | Tagged , , | Comments (1) | Permalink
June 17, 2009 – 9:53 am

readings (2)

1. BLDGBLOG on the singing ruins of our suburban fever dream.

2. Lewism links Nokia’s plans for mobile phones that would recharge themselves by harvesting electromagnetic radiation out of the air with Nikola Tesla’s derelict tower.

3. Worldchanging reviews the film Garbage Dreams, which tells the story of the Zabbaleen, a community composed primarily of minority Coptic Christians who have traditionally been the informal garbage collection system of Cairo, but have recently faced pressures from multinational corporations seeking to modernize Cairo’s garbage collection.

4. Infranetlab offers a few brief descriptions of strategies against desertification showcased in a recent exhibition at the University of Toronto, Out of Water.  Hopefully the publication they mention will be produced, as the projects look fascinating.

5.The New York Times on the evolution of Sarkozy’s planned transformations for Paris from glitzy to gritty:

His answer was … infrastructure. In a speech at the end of April, Mr. Sarkozy said he would leave the dreams of reform to another generation. He said that the state would provide around $50 billion for what he said were complementary proposals for extended subway service that would allow people in the suburbs to travel between them without having to enter Paris, improve existing and saturated subway and train lines, tie some of Paris’s most marginalized and poor neighborhoods into the grid and finally connect all three Paris airports to efficient public transportation.

6. This is a bit older, but I really enjoyed Mario Ballestros’s post on digital urbanism at Where.  Mario discusses, among other things, the web canon, networked urbanism, and a digital bazaar in Mexico City known as Plaza Meave.

By rholmes | Posted in asides, readings | Comments Off on readings (2) | Permalink
June 16, 2009 – 3:45 pm

interstate traveler

Interstate Traveler: proof that you should never let anyone tell you that you can’t build your offbeat megaproject (complete with Equestrian Explorer and Triage Traveler), particularly if you have a friend skilled in the production of vintage Popular Mechanics diagrams.  Or else proof that the Michigan state legislature is completely nutty.  Do watch the video, though as the Interstate Traveler website is a throwback to an earlier era on the internet, you’ll have to download the .wmv file to do so.

[via Transport Politic]

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June 16, 2009 – 10:01 am

to the heights of the clouds

Wired comments on a topic — high-altitude wind power — that mammoth explored a couple years ago while developing a competition entry:

The wind blowing through the streets of Manhattan couldn’t power the city, but wind machines placed thousands of feet above the city theoretically could.

The first rigorous, worldwide study of high-altitude wind power estimates that there is enough wind energy at altitudes of about 1,600 to 40,000 feet to meet global electricity demand a hundred times over.

The very best ground-based wind sites have a wind-power density of less than 1 kilowatt per square meter of area swept. Up near the jet stream above New York, the wind power density can reach 16 kilowatts per square meter. The air up there is a vast potential reservoir of energy, if its intermittency can be overcome.

Even better, the best high-altitude wind-power resources match up with highly populated areas including North America’s Eastern Seaboard and China’s coastline.

“The resource is really, really phenomenal,” said Christine Archer of Cal State University-Chico, who co-authored a paper on the work published in the open-access journal Energies. ”There is a lot of energy up there, but it’s not as steady as we thought. It’s not going to be the silver bullet that will solve all of our energy problems, but it will have a role.”

…

During the energy shocks of the 1970s, when new energy ideas of all kinds were bursting forth, engineers and schemers patented several designs for harnessing wind thousands of feet in the air.

The two main design frameworks they came up with are still with us today. The first is essentially a power plant in the sky, generating electricity aloft and sending it down to Earth via a conductive tether. The second is more like a kite, transmitting mechanical energy to the ground, where generators turn it into electricity.

We thought that it would be fantastic to coat the sky above the city with thousands of these shimmering kites, the massed arrays glittering on sunny days and hidden — but for the long stalks of their slender tethers — above cloudy banks on others.  As their tethers furl and unfurl to hold the kites’ positions in the windy altitudes, the kites would form a fluctuating map of the vectors and velocities unfolding above the city, perhaps also pierced by and hence revealing the aerial roads traced by the flight paths of jetliners and corporate helicopters.  It might even be possible to program the surfaces of the kites, whether by adjusting the angle of the kites and altering reflection patterns or through some malleable and colored surface treatment, to serve as a massive, one-to-one diagram of the energy use patterns of the city.  Like Positive Energy’s neighborhood report cards, but at an immense scale.

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June 14, 2009 – 8:59 am

nytimes magazine: on infrastructure

The New York Times Magazine annual architecture issue is here. This year’s theme? Infrastructure.

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June 13, 2009 – 2:13 pm

bulwarks and flux

Louisiana senator Mary Landrieu, returning from a tour of the Netherlands’ coastal armaments, says America needs to “rethink its entire approach to low-lying coastal areas and adopt an integrated model of water management like that of the Netherlands.” Here at mammoth, we (of course) think that this is a fantastic idea, and not only because (as Americans) we are intensely jealous of the Delta Works and Zuiderzee Works.

Weir Hagestein, near Utrecht [via Flickr user gvbarneveld]

Much as Landrieu’s enthusiasm for the reconstruction of America’s coastline stems from the catastrophic landfall of Hurricane Katrina, the Dutch system descends from a traumatic national encounter with the sea. The North Sea flood of 1953 caused severe damage in both England and the Netherlands, killing nearly 2000 in the Netherlands alone as tens of thousands were forced to evacuate their ruined homes. Nearly a tenth of the Netherlands farmland was inundated, while “icy waters turned villages and farm districts into lakes dotted with dead cows”.

In response, the Dutch devoted themselves to the construction of a systematic series of barriers and accomodations that would protect the land and the people: the integration of water management into urban planning, “taking into account parks and other open spaces that could function as safety reservoirs in case of floods”, incorporation of barrier islands and wetlands into the flood management system, and a sprawling system of 8,060 miles of outer-sea dykes, river dykes, and canal walls. The largest component of this system, the Delta Works, is a series of dams, sluices, locks, dikes, and storm surge barriers which required forty-seven years to complete.

The most recent large-scale additions to the Deltaworks are the giant gates known as the Maeslantkering, two arms as long as the Eiffel Tower laid on its side and four times as heavy. They take four hours to move from fully open to fully closed, protecting Rotterdam’s harbor but allowing unimpeded shipping in calm weather.

Landrieu explains that the Dutch system is superior both in its integration into the landscape — as mentioned above, parks and open spaces serve as flood reservoirs, while the more modern portions of the Dykeworks are designed to allow the mixing of fresh and salt water that sustains fragile estuary habitat — and sheer weight of structure dedicated to firming the line between sea and land. Perhaps this seems slightly paradoxical, as this implies at once acknowledgement of the necessity of accepting the ambiguity of the relationship between land and water at the coast (which is not so much a line as an average drawn from unstable data points) and a far more serious effort at crystallizing that line through the construction of megastructures. But the flexibility to hold these two contradictory stances in tension maybe exactly the flexiblity that the Army Corps of Engineers needs to develop. The Dutch example may even suggest that an architecture of flexible insertions that reprogram the radical flux of natural systems and an architecture of mammoth bulwarks against that radical flux are not wholly incompatible.

Perhaps the twentieth century Corps of Engineers and James Corner do not present so divergent a set of futures for infrastructure? Could the “integrated model of water management” that Landrieu refers to mean not the merely the adoption of a new paradigm that sees storm and water as a resource (or essential component of the whole), but the integration of that paradigm with the old paradigm of opposition between human and nature, creating a new perspective neither reductive nor naive?

The Oosterschelde estuary and the Eastern Scheldt Storm Surge Barrier, which has gates designed to allow the uninterrupted mixing of salt and fresh water during normal conditions.

I don’t mean to imply that the Dutch have found the perfect balance between paradigms. The building of the Deltaworks has involved its fair share of missteps, such as the collapse of shad populations in the Rhein and the obliteration of the shellfish population of the Grevelingen sand flats. But the semi-accidental production of wetland habitat in the Oostvaardersplassen or the relative stability of biological community of the Oosterschelde estuary suggest that, even if there is no static and permanent balance point to be found, infrastructures that would tower over Louisiana’s current defenses may be able to coexist with more flexible flood management strategies. It may even be, as Mary Landrieu suggests, essential that they do.

[Guardian article on Sen. Landrieu’s visit to the Netherlands via lewism]

By rholmes | Posted in infrastructure, landscape | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (11) | Permalink
June 12, 2009 – 7:26 pm

edward burtynsky




Eat your heart out Richard Serra.  http://www.edwardburtynsky.com > ships > shipbreaking.

shipbreaking_09a

After reading this post I was referred to here by a friend:

http://www.edwardburtynsky.com/

It turns out to be doubly relevant to recent posts: not only containing beautiful images of manufactured landscapes, but also absolutely stunning images of shipbreaking in Chittagong, Bangladesh.

via Nico Sy, who doesn’t have a blog but probably should.

By Stephen | Posted in architecture, asides, geography, landscape | Tagged , , , , | Comments (3) | Permalink
June 12, 2009 – 12:04 pm

field guide to standpipes (infrastructurist)

I’ve mentioned my love for Infrastructurist’s field guides before; the latest, A Field Guide to NYC Standpipes, teaches you to read the relationship between standpipes and the fire control systems embedded in the buildings they serve.  So much fascinating information is encoded on and in the built environment, if we know how to read it — often through structures so commonplace that they become invisible.

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June 10, 2009 – 12:03 pm

tommy manuel interviews harald finster

Tommy Manuel has a very interesting interview with photographer Harald Finster, who specializes in the industrial.  Points of discussion which obviously cross-pollinate landscape/architecture ensue:

“Let me give an example: Essen and the Ruhr area will be “Kulturhauptstadt Europa 2010″ (Capital of Culture 2010). The official pamphlet says “Die Identität dieser Metropole ist nicht mehr geprägt von Arbeit, sondern von Kultur” (the identity of this metropolis is no longer characterized by work, but by culture). This statement declares an antagonism between work and culture. It expresses the arrogance of the authorities and the powerful who feel themselves superior to the working class, if you permit me to use this old-fashioned term. They deny the merits of millions of people, who laid the ground for our welfare. These are the sorts of people who abuse industrial installations as vehicles. They cannot deny the existence of industrial architecture (although they do the best to wipe out as much of it as possible), but they try to pervert the original meaning of the installations. They add futuristic architectural elements, they pull out historic machinery to make the interior look “nice and modern” and they turn former workplaces into meaningless Disney-Land like amusement parks. They paint a distorted image of our history. My photographs attempt to correct this image.

Using the documentary form underlines my attempt to communicate a correct and undistorted image. Politicians and their handymen turn authentic monuments into something different. It is important to underline the ambiguity of the word, different. The transformation of the industrial landscape into something different has no recognizable goal, no direction, no roadmap. I don’t denounce transformation, but transformation requires a goal, an underlying concept, which must be more than, “we want change.” What I call the “pseudo intellectual elite” disregards the historic roots of our industrial society. They want to make a change, but they can’t offer new concepts leaving us [uprooted]. My photographs are intended as a contribution, perhaps a small one, to preserve an authentic image of our industrial roots.”

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June 9, 2009 – 1:26 pm

recent reading

1. A post on Human Transit points out the “old habits of urbanist thought” that were built into the structure of SimCity. Would be interesting to not only expose the fallacious assumptions embedded in the game, but to ruminate on the ways in which the game, being a particularly late-arriving artifact of modernist urbanism, is a peculiar window into an impossible reality, in which those assumptions are not fallacious but foundational. [via City of Sound]

Conceptual collage of what we called ‘vegetative homesteading’ from a project based in Baltimore which Stephen and I worked on together; we were inspired by Baltimore’s rather successful and fascinating ‘urban homesteads’.

2. A pair of entries at Next American City’s Daily Report address a pair of issues that Stephen and I have spent some (but not enough) time exploring the potential links between, vacant lots and community gardens. The first entry reviews the 2008 film The Garden, which chronicles the history of the 13-acre South Central Farm in Los Angeles, the largest urban farm in the U.S. for the twelve years between its inception and the eviction of the farmers who had created it. The second notes a study by University of Pennsylvania epidemiologist Charles Branas which demonstrates a strong correlation between vacant lots and violent crime, though I think the Daily Report goes a bit far in the lede in implying causation (“the rise of demolition as a response to foreclosure and abandonment carries implications that extend far beyond the realm of preservation, into the domain of public health”), as fascinating as a causatory link between a landscape of vacancy and criminal behavior would be.

3. Urban Floop collects a few satellite images of and comments on the ship-breaking beaches of India and Bangladesh, which I’ve been meaning to do for years since I read a passage describing them in William Langewiesche’s The Outlaw Sea and realized that Alang and its compatriots must be quite striking from above (I suppose never finding anything particularly useful to say about them is what held me back).

4. Finally, the Sesquipedalist with a late but well-written reaction to the Blueprint assault on blogging (my original posts on that here and here).

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June 8, 2009 – 2:23 pm

interlude: the dovemaster chronicles

I took a bit of the past week off to spend time with my sister, who is back in the states on vacation after completing her first year with the Peace Corps in Sergelen, Mongolia.  Saturday we found ourselves in Baltimore, which gave us the opportunity to check out the Visionary Art Museum, where I encountered the work of untrained artist Kenny Irwin, whose photoshop work is collated in a series of Flickr sets — the dOvemaster Chronicles, Pakistani Starfleet Explorers, Perfectlymadebirds Ongoing Saga, an integalactic dOve invasion.  You can also get a taste of the sort of destruction Kenny foresees by watching The Perfectlymadebirds Epic: dOvemaster Series One, which was looping endlessly on a television in one corner of the room housing Irwin’s work at the Visionary Art Museum.

While Irwin’s work includes its fair share of off-kilter sci-fi tropes (Meet My Microwave Powerdish…. dOvemaster or Their charging their commercial death ray, Pakistani Starfleet Command!!!), my favorites are those which apply the skewed logic of the dOvemaster Chronicles and Pakistani Starfleet universe to more prosaic situations, such as “Karachi Kickbots are a Family’s Best Friend“, “Harvesting Carbide Lava Crop on Gujranwala Five” or “Electrosonic Horseman of Peshawar“.

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June 3, 2009 – 11:41 am

time-lapse earth observatory

Time-lapse videos of the urbanization of Dubai, the draining of the Aral Sea, deforestation in the Brazilian state of Rondônia, the depletion and replenishment of southern Iraq’s wetlands, and drought in Utah’s Lake Powell, at Wired Science, compiled from NASA Earth Observatory imagery.

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May 31, 2009 – 2:21 pm

on finance

I found this project by Andrea Brennen, which Rob highlighted here, incredibly refreshing.  Considering the vital role money plays in Getting Stuff Built, discussion of financing and its repercussions is absurdly rare in critical discourse on architecture and urbanism.  This is problematic – it’s not as if designs are hatched in a capital vacuum, funding schemes developed absent the design process, and the two magically mate at some point.  There is sustained, substantial interplay between the two.  Or, to appropriate a classic Lewis Tsuramaki Lewis appropriation, finance fucks with form*.  Maybe it’s my own fault, and I’ve been negligent with what I have paid attention to; but the only firm or academic which springs to my mind as actively engaging with finance in any sort of a critical fashion is the cynically capitalist approach OMA has taken with some of their recent projects – for example, the tongue-in-cheek channeling of the extraordinary NYC market for views seen at their 23e 22nd Street project.

Capital flow is a critical component in the development of anthropogenic landscapes. The design of the mechanisms by which our tactical interventions (or unfortunate master plan extravaganzas) are funded has deep and profound implications, not just for the binary question of whether or not a project will happen, but upon all aspects of its design and realization. A truly post-modern urbanism (beyond master planned, formalist, big-bangist) – an incremental urbanism – will have to design, or at least explicitly consider, the financial machines integral to their tactics.

Read More »

By Stephen | Posted in architecture, finance, infrastructure, the-expanded-field, urbanism | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (11) | Permalink