mammoth: For readers who are not familiar with the larger body of your work, we thought we might begin by situating The Infrastructural City within that broader context. Besides editing The Infrastructural City, you’ve also edited two other books (Networked Publics and The Phillip Johnson Tapes), co-authored Blue Mondays with AUDC co-founder Robert Sumrell, and are writing another book, Life after Networks: A Critical History of Network Culture. Our understanding is that you are trained and typically describe yourself as an architectural historian, not an architect, though of course you have taught architecture at schools on both American coasts, as well as overseas. How do the “networked ecologies” that The Infrastructural City describes relate to this larger body of work — particularly your investigations of “network culture” and your training as a historian?

Varnelis: I did receive my primary training as a historian of architecture. Now that training took place within Cornell’s architecture department , as opposed to, say an art history program and I took studio—the sort of ultra-disciplinary, purely formal “Cornell and Cooper” studio that is virtually extinct these days—and worked in an office for a time. But it’s an important distinction to draw. More than virtually any other field, architects generally insist that only individuals trained (or even licensed) as architects are qualified to speak about it. This is endemic to the discipline and detrimental to it. Manfredo Tafuri would say that it forces every argument to be operative; another term for this would be instrumental. If a text doesn’t end with an uplifting little section on how architects can use it in their work, it’s not only damaged, its potentially damaging. That’s a common perception and it is a bad thing for criticism since it reduces it to a subservient role; it’s a bad thing for architects since it suggests that they couldn’t possibly be intelligent enough to think for themselves; finally, it’s a bad thing for architecture since it prevents its deepest assumptions from being called into question.

Some people have expressed confusion about what we were out to do since they wanted it to be a ringing endorsement of a direction. They wanted to see OMA-designed windmills and so on. That would have been a very different project and a very predictable one as well. But that was a misunderstanding. Our intent was to produce a book that would redefine how we understand cities, infrastructure, and Los Angeles. I wanted the book to be relevant decades later, the way that Banham’s Los Angeles: Architecture of Four Ecologies was (although by now, I’m afraid, it’s long since worn out its utility). Superficial readings that aim for endorsements of design decisions won’t work. One has to dig deeper to understand what our point is. Older forms of infrastructure are history: we say that on the back cover. We’re in a different condition in this country: you can tilt at designer windmills all you want, but unless things change radically at a sociopolitical level, they aren’t going to get built. Our current administration is more interested in supporting the ethereal structures of financialization than any sort of building. Let’s get that clear. Republicans will do even worse, unless perhaps, you are a fan of military technology. Either way, the cards are stacked against us. Under the boom, things looked mildly better in Europe, but the EU is unlikely to leave the recession behind anytime soon. The Infrastructural City might be a good guide to the near future of architecture there as well, even if we didn’t anticipate it would be. And please, let’s not chase the dream to China:  demographics are stacked against the Chinese. A decade of growth and they’ll in the same situation as we are, only without any kind of social safety net.

As far as how this book fits into my current work, I have always been much more interested in big picture investigations—the scale of the Annales school or of thinkers like McLuhan, Jameson, and Baudrillard—than in microhistories. Even my dissertation was an affront to accepted notions of what a Ph.D. in the history of architecture should be: I set out to investigate how architecture turned to a spectacularized design methodology in the postwar era (most notably that very “Cornell and Cooper” education that I was taught) and how that synced up with a general aestheticization of politics in the field. When I was doing this kind of work everyone else was focusing on the small scale, on miniaturesque accounts of noble architects toiling somewhere in obscurity.

With regard to the Johnson Tapes, he was a key player in this moment and I’m still fascinated by the postwar era. Modernism had lost its ideological impetus but continued on in its own way, zombie-like, unable to cope with the consequences of an increasingly complex, technological society. When Joan Ockman approached me about editing the Johnson Tapes for the Buell Center, of course I was glad to do it. Columbia’s been great to me and this was an opportunity to do something very direct for the school while also reviving my work on Johnson and late modernism. I think that a critical book on Johnson is necessary: Schulze’s bio is hardly that. And the field of late modernism is still wide open: I’ll be working on Kevin Roche later this year and that will give me the opportunity to revisit that work as well.

For the last decade, I’ve been interested in how cities, society, and culture are transforming at this very moment. It’s not just a matter of how network technology drives forms of inhabitation, it’s how society is changing, partly in response to new technologies  but also actively shaping those technologies in specific ways. With Robert Sumrell, I began exploring these questions both through conceptual design and through theory. AUDC continues to go strong and you’ll see work from us from time to time.

I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to work with the Networked Publics team during a year-long residency at the Annenberg Center for Communication at USC and, after I came to Columbia, we shaped that material into a book for Doug Sery at MIT Press. We’ve continued asking the question of how the public is changing throughout the spring of this year and are collaborating with Domus and with Joseph Grima on new projects related to the topic throughout the summer and fall.

My big project currently is a book on network culture. This is a theoretical reflection on our own time as an era distinct from postmodernism. I mean, surely we can’t operate with the idea that, a generation after it first came together, postmodernism is still a current theoretical model. The role of technology in everyday life is completely different, for example. It’s become a new dominant, a kind of horizon for our culture that it most emphatically was not back in those days. Meanwhile, financialization has risen to new heights and manufacturing has all but expired in the developed world. I’ve published stretches of the book already and am aiming to have a draft on my Web site by the end of the year. It’s a huge undertaking—and a shifting one—but it’s crucial to leaving behind the notion that analysis has nothing to teach us anymore. Instead of bemoaning our economic condition, let’s celebrate the fact that the unreflective scramble for shoddy work is over.

Let’s start thinking again.

mammoth: It seems to us that The Infrastructural City essentially does two things. First, it is aimed at a better understanding of the infrastructural city. We might call this mapping (in a more generalized sense that the mere production of graphical representations of urban conditions), you refer to “redefin[ing] how we understand” cities. That task clearly constitutes the bulk of the text. Second, it is also, at least occasionally, concerned with the question of how urbanists can operate — can pursue desirable change — in the infrastructural city. As it develops an understanding of the infrastructural city, it shows why the traditional tools of the urbanist (first and foremost, the plan) have become increasingly ineffectual, and argues that we need, in response, to develop new tools. Later, we’d like to return to this second concern, to suggestions about what might replace those traditional tools, because we think The Infrastructural City contains some valuable hints about those tools — such as your discussion of a “command line” architecture in “Invisible City”, or Roger Sherman’s argument for an architecture that interacts directly with property, risk, and the informal transactions that produce the form of the city. First, though, a question that relates to the task of understanding the infrastructural city, as well as the “different conditions” you allude to.

In the two years since the publication of The Infrastructural City, we’ve seen several major social and political events that are affecting the city and its infrastructures. First and foremost amongst these is the global economic decline. Prognostications for the future of that decline vary wildly, but it is indisputable that the bubble conditions in which the latest layer of growth in the infrastructural city was laid down — the cell networks, the vast ex-urban speculations, the “return-to-the-city” condominiums — have ended, and been replaced by economic uncertainty. (Though we doubt anyone would accuse you of having failed to anticipate this decline, it is one thing to anticipate it, and perhaps another to watch it play out.) One might also add to this the major political swing that you’ve just noted, from Bush to Obama, which corresponded to a fairly broad hope (amongst urbanists, at least) that infrastructure would have its day in the sun of federal funding, and the disillusionment that has followed as what infrastructural funding has been forthcoming has been largely concentrated on (admittedly needed) road repairs and (unnecessary) rural highway expansions, both prized for their ‘shovel-ready’ quality. Meanwhile, technological changes — and corresponding societal shifts in the use of technology — have continued. As Lane Barden anticipates in the text, the Nokia phone featured on an ad cascading down the side of an office tower in one of his photographs now looks virtually antiquarian, so distant is it in form and function from the smart phones which increasingly dominate the cellular market. And their adoption is not strictly limited to the wealthier technophiles one might expect. The Census Bureau, for instance, recently found that one of the most effective ways to reach impoverished Hispanic neighborhoods in Los Angeles is through downloadable apps and content.

Given these events, it seems quite possible to us that your reading of the infrastructural city has shifted in those two years. Is that true? How might you map the infrastructural city differently today? One way to think about this might be: is there a chapter that you would include in a 2011 edition of The Infrastructural City that you didn’t include in 2008?

Varnelis: I’ve thought a lot about what the new chapter would be. I think that the book holds out a bit more hope than the current situation really warrants and I needed to be more precise about the problems we face.

So many people today hold out this idea that technology is our horizon: anything that goes wrong, it seems, technology can fix. Design, in this sense, is technology’s right-hand. All of the pseudo-academics and critics who praised the “creative city” and the Bilbao-effect suggest that design can get us past any problems. Is your city a post-apocalyptic rust belt? Well, some clever design, say via a Muji Store and a couple of design museums, will solve the problems. Or heck, embrace the favela chic and just re-brand it as the Rome of the Rust Belt.

A new chapter would analyze how we got where we are and the impossibility of achieving the kind of change that we need through design. Specifically, this chapter would be on how the problems of complexity, over-accumulation, and diminishing returns in our society block the older idea of infrastructure as a form of commons.

There’s little question that over-accumulation produced both the boom and the crash (just why this is a mystery to so many economists is beyond me). We’ve seen, to put it in the simple terms that This American Life used, the growth of a giant pool of money that business has accumulated since the start of capitalism. It took centuries for the well-off and even relatively well-off to accumulate $35 trillion of investment money worldwide, but in the six years between 2000 and 2006 that giant pool of money doubled. All of these investors with all of this money wanted high returns; they looked at the performance of market indices like the Dow and saw unprecedented rates of profit (in the case of the Dow from 891 in 1980 to over 11,000 in 2000), considerably more than the historical rate of return from manufacturing (which historically speaking has been roughly 8%). After all, many of them had accumulated their money that way so why not expect the good times to continue? And of course rates of taxation that also were historically low helped all of this. The theory went that as long as tax rates were low, the economy would boom and the resulting growth would generate even more revenues than if taxes were at a higher, sustainable level. This was a great idea except that it was a little akin to taking speed to get you through a project: surely if it improves your stamina tenfold, it’s got to be good for you, right? Well, eventually your teeth will fall out, but if you keep at it you can always get out, right? Collectively, investors in the developed countries ceased investing in production and instead turned more and more to complex financial instruments that could produce high rates of return, even if these were based on  bubble economics. Manufacturing’s been gutted in places like the US or the UK. In our case, in 1980 manufacturing was about 25% of the GDP while financial services were about 12%. By the end of the bubble in 2006, manufacturing was down to 12% while finance had soared to over 20%. I hate to say that things have gotten worse since, but they have.

Again as far as “solutions” go, the case of China is a special one: capitalists are investing in an area with tremendous inequalities and inefficiencies and able to reap huge rewards from low wages and massive productivity gains. That’s how you can make good money on a $40 DVD player that cost a dollar or two to produce. But that won’t last forever.

And then there’s housing. Architects were eager to participate in that boom and it was quite stomach-turning to see them plunge headlong into a mad system. And housing did well, for a time, returning the necessary rates of investment, but again, it was based on something from nothing. Even now, in so many places—including the countries that I know well, the US, UK, Lithuania and Ireland—the bubble still has some 20 to 40% to fall to return to reasonable rates based on long-established historical relationships of what kind of real estate wages can support. Architecture became virtual in the last decade, but it did so in “luxury” housing, not in cyberspace. Moreover, just how economies that have no more real industrial base are supposed to produce the wages to pay for this inflated real estate is beyond me.

I mentioned it in my introduction to the book, but now I’d be more emphatic about the role of neoliberal economy policy in all this. Low taxes means little investment in infrastructure. Railroads are literally falling apart. Gutted by underinvestment, average train speeds have been declining for years. Refineries and the electric grid are stressed to a breaking point as deregulated industry avoids tying up capital in rapidly-depreciating physical things whenever possible. So it’s no surprise that, when Obama picked Larry Summers to come up with an economic policy for him, the former Harvard President who once said that women weren’t smart enough to be scientists or engineers chose bailing out financial services and handing out stimulus checks to consumers instead of investing in infrastructure.

That’s the reality we’re up against and the Zaha Hadid-designed windmills that critics are upset with me for not going ga-ga over are little more than Potemkin Villages masking a world continually collapsing.

The economy is infrastructure. I should have been more clear about that.

I also think it would have been helpful to talk about complexity in the way that Joseph Tainter discusses it, yoking it to the framework that I’ve developed above. We’ve become so incredibly adept at routing around our problems that a topological map of our world—if it were possible—would be something like a map of the infrastructure in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. So to keep this increasingly convoluted and highly bureaucratized system going, we have produced intense levels of complexity that require greater and greater amounts of energy to keep going. This energy is quite literal and we’re seeing diminishing marginal returns on energy invested even as peak oil looms (and of course oil is our major source of energy). At a certain point, the system becomes unsustainable and the result is collapse, which Tainter defines as a greatly diminished level of complexity. Tainter suggests that the way out is innovation, by which he means technological innovation although I think that the financial innovations that I described earlier are similar. The problem is that these systems are unsustainable in a fundamental deep way. The Infrastructural City isn’t just a condition, it’s a bellwether for a long-term culture of crisis.

In that light, although I’m tremendously sympathetic to projects like Roger Sherman’s game theory urbanism as a way of operating within such highly complex environments, the lack of a larger approach within the book suggests the lack of a larger solution within design per se. Rick Miller and Ted Kane’s piece is brilliant in its unpacking of the problems that “light,” privatized infrastructure produce in cities. It’s not so much a question of AT&T not extending its coverage enough, it’s a question of how mobile phone companies lead cities to conceive of themselves as entrepreneurs. That’s not an appropriate role for cities: what happened to ideas of the Commons? That’s a failure point for the imagination and redevelopment of infrastructure today. Other pieces are like Calvino stories, unmasking the unsustainability that underlies the infrastructural city: a town that excavates itself turning into a series of giant holes, a river that will disappear if its restored to its natural state, the re-watering of a desert lake, and so on. The book’s value in my mind—and what I am trying to do through my current writing—is to make people go out and uncover the deep madness underlying our society. People talk about the irrelevance of academics. Maybe that’s because we got too busy talking about obscure theory and weren’t willing to focus on the deeper issues that, frankly, it was our duty to take on.

mammoth: How peculiarly American are these problems? While financial upheaval is clearly a globalized and interconnected phenomenon, one gets the impression that, as a political and cultural matter, the “idea of the Commons” remains relatively healthy in, say, continental western Europe. And that perhaps corresponding advantages accrue to design culture: there is a greater quantity (and quality) of public work to be done, critical infrastructures are more likely to be designed by public teams which include architects and landscape architects (rather than by private corporations). There, the odd, ad-hoc semi-publics that control American local, urban politics — NIMBYist neighborhood associations, our individualist distrust of the very idea of expertise, etc. — do not appear to have such a stranglehold on planning processes. Or, for that matter, even with all the governmental dysfunction and systemic poverty, the situation seems less deadlocked in South America, where young designers are thriving, backed by governments, institutions, and individual leaders who are arguing for the importance of a commons, and, critically, backing that argument up with targeted spending. We’re thinking, for instance, of the celebrated case of Medellin, where architecture has been treated as social and economic infrastructure.

Varnelis: These problems aren’t just American. We’re dealing with global problems endemic to an aging capitalism. The idea of the commons is certainly more popular on the continent, but if you listen to the response to the economic crisis there, it’s that this is the end of the European welfare state. In other words, the crisis will make Europe is going to be more like the US/UK/Ireland, not less. I hate to say anything bad about the unions in a country where unions are all but dead, but unions were part of the problem in the US and are a bigger part of the problem in Europe. Rather than working to build a more just system across the board, unions have instead turned to protecting entrenched membership. This is a major problem in America, whether it be the collapse of NASA or the collapse of cities and its increasingly the problem in Europe too. Watch for a European PATCO crisis soon. Don’t expect much building anytime soon, unless it’s done with funny money.

Now when we look at Medellin, certainly there’s a lot to applaud. But you’re also looking at a condition where capital has moved to a place that has been underproductive for too long. There’s no question that it’s easier to do more in places that are growing.

mammoth: You mention that the loss of the “idea of the Commons [is] a failure point for the imagination and redevelopment of infrastructure today.” But here in America, has there ever been a strong culture of the idea of the Commons guiding the development of infrastructure? Certainly, there have been select examples — Eisenhower’s freeways — but many of the infrastructures that have been most influential in the development of our cities, such as Los Angeles’ own streetcar networks and New York City’s subway, were privately funded and planned. Should architects be working to reclaim (or construct) the idea of the commons? Or do we — architects, landscape architects, designers, urbanists, who all presumably hold out some hope of remaining relevant to the future of the American city — need to find ways, like Sherman’s approach, to design around the absence of the commons? Or perhaps this pair of questions sets up a false dichotomy, and the way to continue working while not ignoring the “deeper issues” is to hold seemingly Sisyphean tasks like reclaiming the idea of the commons in tension with flexible and approaches which are aimed at small, tactical acts of productive architecture?

Varnelis: Let’s be careful about one thing: neoliberalism—coupled with Ameriphobia overseas—has been highly effective at depicting this idea of the US as having always been the same. There’s been a radical rewriting of history to make it seem like the frontier myth is all there is. There’s always been a back and forth and many of those infrastructures were turned public rather rapidly only to see much greater success. Often, of course this has been in service of real estate, as the case of the LADWP  shows too clearly.

As far as design: I agree with you. Architects have been too enthralled by neoliberalism for too long, e.g. public/private partnerships (don’t even get me started: bad loans for bad private projects are a major source of fiscal crisis in cities today), the market, etc. We need to advocated for policy change, toward greater shared resources. I think it’s obvious to anyone that the current political and economic system is massively dysfunctional and will come to an end. Just when, none of us know. Will it be replaced by a happy form of fascism? Just possibly. Architects need to advocate for positive political change, but as they do so, they’re going to need to find a way to make do and, in general, it is going to be tactics like Roger’s that are going to make a difference on an individual level.

mammoth: A consistent argument mammoth makes is that the value of architecture and architects lies in much more than just the design of buildings. Which is not at all to say that we find buildings uninteresting or unimportant, but rather that architecture as a discipline ought to think of itself more as a way of thinking than as a discipline that — like, say, structural engineering — is primarily concerned with developing a unique kind of technical expertise and defending that ‘turf’ from the encroachment of other disciplines.

You make a similar comment in a recent interview published in Triple Canopy, saying that “architecture doesn’t teach you how to regurgitate knowledge, rather it teaches you how to deal with problems. Architecture has always been about much more than just building buildings”.

This is a particularly relevant position, we think, in a climate where “building buildings” is, as you note, something we should expect to see relatively much less of. (Kenneth Frampton, writing in Steven Holl’s new monograph Urbanisms, notes that Holl literally had to go to China to find the regulatory and financial freedom to build the sort of “megaforms” that he had been drawing. Setting aside whether those buildings are necessary or not, it seems an instructive lesson in the difficulty of realizing what might traditionally be considered ‘significant’ architecture.)

Do you think, though, that architecture schools are really producing architects who are prepared to be thinkers rather than technicians?

Varnelis: Absolutely. The longstanding recession that started in the early 1970s and lasted until the mid-1990s led many architects to investigate radically different methods of production. Unfortunately, the building boom led the field astray, back into a disciplinarity of the most conservative kind just at the same time as it egged them on to build pretty much the worst buildings since the mid-nineteenth century. It was a colossal failure of a decade, a model of everything we shouldn’t have done. “Make it new!” So few of us were asking why, why should we make it new? Even fewer were asking why make it at all. Education, which could have paved the way for a new century of architecture, has been devastated. Most schools have either retrenched into a nostalgia for the hand or a fetish for parametric fantasies. Doesn’t anybody think about how these people will be employed?

But this is the reason that I’m at Columbia. Dean Wigley set out to create what he calls the “expanded architect,” building a school in which you get an architectural education, but you also employ the methods you learn in nontraditional venues. It’s a big enough school to easily accommodate such efforts.  The sort of work that the Spatial Information Design Lab, or C-Lab, or the Netlab is doing is, generally speaking, unlike what’s produced in architecture schools or in the typical office, but it’s essential for pushing the boundaries in the field. I’m optimistic that other schools will follow our lead to do the same in the future. Imagine what sort of students you might produce if a school decided it wasn’t necessary to deal with the accreditors anymore. People have been asking why teach history and theory. Well, why teach structures or professional practice? Maybe not everyone needs these classes. I think it’s a radical experiment that’s well worth pushing.

Robert Sumrell’s “Story of the Eye: Props”, noted elsewhere:

DPR-Barcelona skip between prop houses, “The Red Violin”, Reynar Banham, and the Smithsons to land on the assertion that today we collect links as immaterial props may be superseding material props:

Consumption has evolved and even it is still outrageous; we are moving to a scenario where services not products are more and more demanded. And in our hybrid cities some kind of immaterial prop houses have emerged to keep our virtual belongings safe. Although Kazys Varnelis pointed that today we collect nothing, we think that today we collect links and information through a del.icio.us or Pearltrees account and also exchange information and services via facebook or twitter. In this sense we are keeping outside our homes a important part of our life. These data are kept safe in servers far away from our physical location and those servers as prop houses provide them a physicality. While having physicality they are exposed to the same kind of “dangers” of our material possessions, they can be lost, damaged by fire, or even stolen.

[The intersection of Beverly Boulevard and La Cienega Boulevard is the exact center of the Studio Zone; image via Wikipedia]

Free Association Design focuses on self-storage facilities, a peculiar and closely-related typology which Sumrell briefly mentions:

The architecture of public storage facilities is as pragmatic and minimal as the retail industry’s big boxes, and both are designed to facilitate a similar and limited prescribed program (maximized cubic footage, climate control, ease of access and security).  The linear assembly of roll up doors mimics the retail distribution centers from where most of the objects likely came; only smaller and with a nebulous chain of retail operations, logistical geography, job transfers and other life changes between them.  The resemblance sublimely illustrates a conservation of product volume that is distributed across virtually unlimited user space.  In the consumer-retailer network, more and larger big boxes beget more big boxes.

Most of the time the extensive footprint of the double-entendred ‘self‘-storage facility is uninhabited by the living.  The glorified sheds provide shelter only to inanimate assemblies of stuff and its combined exchange and symbolic value.   And just like Hollywood’s prop houses, there is no prescribed order for how the objects within are arranged or what those objects may be.  Behind each brightly colored roll-up door (typically the only design flair applied to the architecture) is an eclectic and mysterious collection of cargo that has been amassed via unknown histories.

You’ll want to read on as Brett explains why self-storage facilities are like the remote Pacific Islands that played host to indigenous ‘cargo cults’ in the wake of World War Two.

While “Props” is the last chapter of the Infrastructural City, we did say that we would — and still intend to — post on Varnelis’ Introduction as a means of conclusion.  (FASLANYC has already done so.)  In the meantime, you should be sure not to miss our interview with Lateral Office.

At some point, presumably, continuing to open our commentaries on The Infrastructural City by noting that the chapter of the week — in this case, Robert Sumrell’s “Props” — reads significantly different from the other chapters will ring false.  But, once again, it’s the obvious place to begin.

Where each of the previous chapters described an aspect of Los Angeles that is reflected in many other cities — cellular networks, property, ubiquitous landscapes of material extraction, post-natural hydrologies — “Props” circles around an infrastructure, the “prop house”, which is essentially unique to Los Angeles, at least in scale and ubiquity.  (One suspects that Mumbai, for instance, might rival Los Angeles in density of prop houses, but that is a similarly exceptional case.)

Noting the uniqueness of the prop house to Los Angeles, though, is rather getting ahead of myself, as I’ve neither described what a prop house is nor explained why it might be considered an infrastructure.  Very quickly, a prop house is a warehouse that rents objects to the entertainment industry, but the best way to answer these questions is to quote Sumrell, who, after opening with a very specific anecdote about a single prop house — C.P. Three, pictured above — says:

“…no single prop house can claim anything close to a complete material survey of the world.  Instead, a variety of prop houses offer highly specialized and themed fragmented utopias, each catering to different needs and subject matters…

There are no standard methods of operation or organization for prop houses.  Some are rigorously organized, others are more haphazard.  Nonetheless, all prop houses are logistics centers for the storage and circulation of objects.  They allow art directors to compare a variety of similar goods to make selections, place the items on hold until final approvals are determined, let the objects out for an agreed upon rental period, and then retain the objects after the transaction is completed in case they should be required again…

Prop houses and film locations are one of the many networks of entertainment support services essential to the survival of Hollywood.  While films can be made in any city, the concentration of camera rental facilities, lighting companies, film stages, agents, entertainment lawyers, trained labor, and celebrity talent that are unique to Los Angeles ensure that the region maintains its dominance.  If Hollywood specializes in the production of immaterial culture, prop houses and locations are its largest material substrate in the city, grounding it in a prosaic, if extreme, reality.”

Further separating “Props” from the chapters before it is that while the previous chapters told us a great deal about the construction of Los Angeles — infrastructure as sinew — but “Props” is less interesting for what it tells us about the production of urban fabric (the prop house being a relatively rare and unremarkable component of that fabric, even in Los Angeles) and more for what a peculiar piece of that fabric tells us about ourselves.

“Props” accomplishes this by, in addition to relating a history of these peculiar warehouses, also situating the object housed — the “prop” — within a series of architectures, whose scope expands to explore the general cultural significance of the prop: first the prop house, but also passing through the televised dreamland of the commercial, and into the home (and the self-storage unit), which, Sumrell argues, can be understood as a prop house itself.  The commercial is the key intermediary in this cultural process, as it is the valuation of the consumer good in advertising as a “purely symbolic” prop which causes goods taken into the home to perform in the same manner.  “Once purchased and taken home, the consumer good has to serve both as the symbolic prop that seduced us on television while also performing the function it was ostensibly purchased to accomplish.”

When consumer goods are seen through this lense — as props which import symbolic value into our homes — the prop house can be understood not merely a fantastically odd iteration of warehouse typology, but also a distilled and concentrated architectural moment representative of the sort of broader cultural trends that The Infrastructural City has repeatedly sought to situate infrastructure within:

“The Protestant ethic of thrift and production that Max Weber observed in American culture is long gone.  Instead, we have radical abundance propped up by massive debt.  Even though consumption is still rampant, we have passed the point of needing to produce more things as a society.  Our homes are still prop houses, filled with useless consumer goods that exist primarily to provide a context that we can react to.  Our growing relationship to our objects, or props, is that of a programmer to bits of code.  As programmers, we assemble these pieces of code into a context, or language, that builds a program to execute a series of actions.  Network systems are the infrastructure on which these programs run and interact.  No network is essential, just as no single node is vital — all that matters is movement within the network.  What we are left with is a constant circulation of bits, like the elements and molecules in chemistry that create a living ecosystem — it is this constant cycle of change that keeps the system vital.

Prop houses provide a utopia for this condition.  Not only do they suggest that our Long Tail desires might one day be valuable, they promise that objects can endlessly circulate in an infrastructural condition, provide context and meaning to produce momentarily perfect settings.”

If you’d like to read further about the physical geography of prop houses, I recommend Stefano Bloch’s UCLA thesis, “Properties and Prop-House Geography” (PDF; via DPR-Barcelona).

As we have nearly reached the conclusion of our collaborative reading of The Infrastructural City, we thought it would be interesting to discuss some of the lessons of the text with one of mammoth‘s favorite architectural studios, the Toronto-based Lateral Office. In a series of emails, mammoth spoke with Lateral’s Lola Sheppard and Mason White about why the Economist is more essential reading for architects than Wallpaper, what an “expanded field” for architecture might look like, how to evaluate the performance of a speculative proposal, and, of course, The Infrastructural City.

Readers of mammoth are likely also familiar with Lola and Mason as two of the founders of research-group-slash-blog InfraNet Lab; in addition to Lateral and InfraNet, Lola teaches at the University of Waterloo and Mason at the University of Toronto.  The awards that Lateral have received include Canada’s Professional Prix de Rome in Architecture, selection for Pamphlet Architecture 30, finalists in the WPA 2.0 competition, the Young Architects Award from the Architecture League of New York, and the Lefevre Fellowship for Emerging Practitioners from Ohio State University.

[A.I.R. Unit; Lateral Office with artist Sara Graham]

mammoth: The reason that we thought an interview with Lateral might be particularly appropriate at this time is the overlap between the text that we’ve been reading and discussing this summer — The Infrastructural City — and your work, which has largely been about imagining new typologies for and relationships to infrastructures. Even those projects, like the A.I.R. Unit, which concern more traditional architectural programs like spaces for dwelling show a clearly infrastructural way of thinking about architecture. How did you become interested in infrastructure?

Sheppard: I’m not sure that, initially, we would have identified our work specifically as being about infrastructure as a category.  But we would say that we began, even when dealing with single building or public space, with a desire to unpack the systems which underlie a given site or condition.  I’d say we were more interested in format than form.  There were two early projects which probably changed the way we thought.  One was a competition for a dock in Memphis, TN, where we looked at harnessing changing water levels and seasonal flooding to drive the project — and produce sounds. And the second was a research project from 2003, entitled “Flatspace”, which we pursued as Lefevre Fellows at Ohio State University. We were researching the reformatting of expansive retail corridors and ended up generating nine proposals, three driven by program, three by  landscape and three by mobility networks. That project sowed the seeds for the strategies and approaches in our later work.

I think also that we have always been interested in rethinking the overlooked parts of our built environment — and much of what organizes these environments seems to fall under the category of logistics and infrastructure.

White: Those early projects, though naive and more searching than strategic, were foundational to our approach to current work. And I really only wanted to add that, regardless of the term infrastructure, we are seeking the limits of an extrinsic architecture, and this often circumstantially addresses infrastructure(s).

[Models from Flatspace; Lateral Office]

mammoth: We’re glad you brought up “Flatspace”, as it has been on our minds this week — the chapter of The Infrastructural City we read this week deals with the same exurban landscapes of distribution and consumption as “Flatspace”. (It also happens to be how we first learned of Lateral, after it was published in 30 60 90.) We’ll return to it shortly.

But, first: what is ‘an extrinsic architecture’?

White: This is something we are asking ourselves as well. We are finding it to be an architecture that is very aware of its external influence, and maybe more importantly, any opportunities afforded by that awareness. Really, with our work we are seeking an understanding and incorporation of the ever-ricocheting effects and potentials of a work of architecture. Asking ourselves: how deep into its region or environment does a project reach? And quite often, this has taken us out of architecture, and into economics, ecology, energy, and others.

mammoth: An interesting question this raises is the issue of expertise: obviously, as architects, we are not specialists in economics, ecology, energy, and so on. What about being an architect enables us to make useful decisions about the interactions between architecture and these other fields? More specifically, how has Lateral approached investigation into territories — like, say, the logistics of big-box operations you investigated in Flatspace — where you do not have specific expertise?

Sheppard: It’s a good question, and one I’d say we grapple with often.  We increasingly begin projects with broad and open initial research, to get a sense of the range of issues. For instance in the Flatspace research, we looked at a whole host of issues – the role of GIS, aerial photography, site targeting and the entire militarization of site identification, the notion of ‘branding the land’, the role of zoning regulations, the construction of big boxes…

In this scenario, armed with at least initial knowledge, I think the role of the architect is to read the opportunities. Specialist will have deeper but narrower readings of a specific site or context. As in tunnel vision – it can be sharp but narrow, potentially overlooking issues that aren’t categorizable. I think we try to have 270 degree vision. The architect in this scenario is not simply problem solver, but cultural, environmental and spatial detective, bringing to light the forces (geographic, economic, and cultural) at work within a given geography, and able to look for synergies between issues and opportunities.

[Flatspace; Lateral Office; "the expanded field of retail corridors"]

White: The specialization issue is a prickly one – but I think worthwhile to expand upon a bit. And here I am always reminded of the fox versus hedgehog debate that Isaiah Berlin illuminated. (The fox being an expert generalist, and the hedgehog being an expert specialist.) I think this debate is also one that made us more sheepish about our work in the beginning – thinking that it was not a methodology we should be pursuing for the very reasons you just mentioned, and that we should specialize in something overtly architectural–forms, materials, fabrication. But over time, our position has solidified more as a specialization on phenomenon and opportunities that is between categories and disciplines. For example, I still think the most important magazine to subscribe to as an architect is the Economist, not Wallpaper. Reading the Economist as an architect, you can see things before they become relevant in architecture, with Wallpaper or Dwell you are seeing it after the fact, as a trend.

Really we are most interested in questions of architectural typology and spatial format, and these are often promiscuous interrogations.

mammoth: It’s interesting that you say that, at the outset of your work, you thought you “should specialize in something overtly architectural”, but you’ve since been pulled towards more “promiscuous” work. Was there a particular moment — or project, or set of projects — that produced this shift?

White: It is hard to say that there was a specific moment, but probably some combination of the Flatspace research project at Ohio State University as Lefevre Fellows and a general skepticism of our own professional experiences, as well as the education that brought us to that. More optimistically, it was likely a reaction to a broader position and potential for architecture that lay latent in early work and approaches as students. But, probably hard to identify a particular moment. From early on, we were very influenced by the work and thinking of Keller Easterling, Bucky Fuller, Cedric Price, Constantinos Doxiadis, and others, such as Georges Perec, Paul Virilio, and Luis Fernández-Galiano.

[Farming Salton; Lateral Office for cityLAB's WPA2.0 competition.]

mammoth: The very first chapter in The Infrastructural City, Barry Lehrman’s “Reconstructing the Void”, is about Owens Lake, which is an extraordinary post-infrastructural, post-natural landscape north-east of Los Angeles. South-east of Los Angeles, of course, there is a larger and more famous, but similarly post-natural body of water, the Salton Sea. Your entry to the 2009 WPA2.0 competition, “Farming Salton,” takes the devastated condition of the Salton Sea as an opportunity, proposing a series of new infrastructures to be overlaid onto the Salton Sea and surrounds, with the aim of generating new sustainable ecologies, new economic generators, and new recreational opportunities.

One of the things that you suggest in the project is that these new infrastructures should be “coupled” — that “multiple processes [should be bundled] with spatial experiences”.  (Given that “Coupling” is also the title of PA30, it seems fair to say that this is a common theme in your projects.) Why is this important?

Sheppard: We’ve been huge fans of The Infrastructural City because it has served as an original medium for outlining the scope and potential of readings of infrastructure.

The question of ‘coupling’ is interesting to us, because if you look at the history of most infrastructure, it has tended to be mono-functional. It typically consists of engineering projects designed to address a single problem.  We’ve recently been talking about “landscapes on life-support,” where infrastructure, in the current condition, serves to simply maintain a failing ecological state.  (Owens Lake is such an example, where the state of California spends upward of $415 million on the Dust Mitigation Project simply to prevent toxic dust from spreading.)  In projects such as Salton or Icelink, we ask: can infrastructure be more pro-active or more catalytic? Can it serve to support other conditions — ecologies, economies, and public realms?

Our interest in infrastructure really began with an interest in expanding the scope and territory of architecture’s realm beyond the singular building, to include more mutable or contingent conditions. We wanted to embrace questions of economy, logistics, ecology, etc. Infrastructure emerged as a basic precondition for all these questions. Alone, it remains a purely logistical operation. However, in coupling or bundling multiple functions that operate like epiphytes, an expanded territory of intervention emerges. An architecture which responds to opportunities of contingency manifests itself in atypical spatial formats. In a sense, what we’re exploring are these new formats for architecture ‘in an expanded field’.

(We are hosting a topic session at the 99th ACSA Annual Conference next March in Montreal, entitled Architecture’s Expanded Territories, on many of these questions.)

[Icelink; Lateral Office]

mammoth: One theme that recurs frequently in The Infrastructural City is a certain pessimism about new infrastructures on the scale of California’s aqueducts or Los Angeles’ freeways. The primary factors that are pinpointed in being responsible for this are not a lack of architectural interest but deep structural issues: both economic — the current global malaise — and political — a combination of NIMBYism with legal gridlock. This might be described, broadly, as a crisis of “traditional infrastructure”.

Do you share this skepticism about the future of traditional infrastructures in North America? It seems to us that some of your recent work — thinking in particular of Farming Salton, but perhaps also the Emergent North research — could be partially construed (though you may disagree) as a response to this problem, in so far as it is an attempt to describe alternatives to “traditional infrastructure”, where infrastructure might retain its capacity to generate and guide the growth of human settlement patterns, but also become more flexible, more distributed, less mono-functional.

White: We certainly share that pessimism, and much of this came up in a panel session with Kazys earlier this summer as part of the series of discussions on “networked publics.” The discussion led to several questions that we are often preoccupied with: what scale(s) does infrastructure operate at, what does infrastructure respond to, and what form might it take? And we are quite partial to the position of infrastructure as soft, scalable, and market-responsive. And, yes, that is a critique of “traditional infrastructure,” which is hard, big, and a product of its market-time.

Infrastructure should also be entrepreneurial — something that both the Salton Sea project demonstrates and our ongoing work in the Canadian Arctic will seek. The combination of public and private investment is an emerging market (of which the PPIAF is an interesting real-world precedent). But we also share a degree of skepticism about infrastructure as a catch-all realm of practice. The term has increasingly expanded to stand-in for any architecture serving as a process or a system — and this mirrors the post-economic collapse return to function after the heady days of exuberant cultural projects. The attention that infrastructure is getting is further evidence of a shift to processes over objects. Though maybe what we are seeing and how we are positioning our work, is not an abandonment of architecture or a naive fascination with infrastructure so much as a renewed interest in an emergent territory of practice that is between these. We are finding that many of the questions that architecture could be asking are being picked up by others. Architecture is slow.

Through the research at InfraNet Lab, with colleagues Maya Przybylski and Neeraj Bhatia, we are trying to position and qualify our understanding and forecasting of architecture’s potential as influenced by and integrated with infrastructure. Maya brings an interest in computational infrastructure, and Neeraj an interest in social infrastructure. The Lab gives us a space to intersect these interests. Much of this position will be evident in Pamphlet Architecture #30 and the first issue of our collaborative journal with Archinect called Bracket.

We were asked recently if we were a “trans-disciplinary practice,” and although it would be convenient to say yes–and likely with much evidence in the work–I think our preferred answer is that we are anti-disciplinary … or maybe un-disciplinary. The only time I would say being undisciplined is intentional and productive.

mammoth: This contention that “infrastructure should be entrepreneurial” is intriguing — both in and of itself, and also because arguments for a renewed commitment to infrastructure (whether general, like Krugman’s recent op-ed in the New York Times, or specifically architectural, like Nancy Levinson’s editorial piece for Places) so often are explicitly arguments for public work over and against private work.

That said, it’s an assertion that we are broadly in agreement with.

Part of the in-and-of-itself interest is that ‘entrepreneurial’ implies an evaluation of performance — process, not just object, as you noted. This is true of much infrastructural design generally: you need to be able to simulate performance (of economies, or hydrologies, or traffic flows, or structure), and simulating performance is a much bigger component of the design process that it would be for a more ‘typical’ architectural project (like a house).

So maybe the interesting question that arises then is — particularly in a research-oriented context like your work on Salton or the Canadian Arctic — how do we test the validity of the entrepreneurial qualities of our proposals? Do you have a particular example of how the development of entrepreneurial qualities (or some other objective tangentially related to a project’s explicit function or performance) fed back into the design process as a whole in a given project?

Sheppard: It’s interesting — this question of how does one evaluate performance. In most cases the economic and ecologic proposals we are leveraging are common, even proven models, such as job creation or remediation. Maybe what makes them unique for us is that they can be positioned in tandem rather than as oppositions.

Large infrastructure projects, such as those of the WPA 1.0, created jobs during their construction that ceased once the projects were built. (Although one could argue that long-term benefits were skills training, and the creation of large arts and literacy projects.) The TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority) is perhaps the more interesting model. It too was a major employer during the depression, on the construction phase of projects. However, it continues its relevance today through economic development, job creation, education, and research. Rather than simply providing an energy resource, its role is more diverse, tentacular and long-term.

In the example of the Salton Sea, there are existing (engineered) proposals that are coming with price tags of over $8.9 billion, with an additional $140 million each year. And this is largely to maintain a status quo, and prevent further decline. Something is going to be built there, and the question is what does the public get in return for that bill? In our proposal for a project that could be built incrementally, the intention is to engage a different thinking about investment. But more importantly, the project seeks to generate ongoing economic benefits, through new industries that might dovetail into the infrastructure, and through restored ecologies that in turn reinvigorate recreation and tourism (once the lifeblood of the region). The intention is that entrepreneurial economic returns have a much longer life.

In a project such as the augmented Ice Roads (near Yellowknife, Canada), our criticism is that the engineered ice roads have a short operational season and serve one use for an average of 67 days a year. We’re asking how can one extend the operating season, stimulate the ecology (through fish hatcheries), and aggregate other programs — in this case recreational fishing and adventure camping — to generate increased returns.

In all these projects, the underlying question is how might design address the integration of these various operations.

[Project map (top) and augmented ice roads (bottom), from Emergent North; Lateral Office/InfraNet Lab]

mammoth: We very much like this idea, that explicitly describing the various tangential economic benefits of a proposed infrastructure becomes a part of the design itself — rather than, as is probably too often the case, being seen as something that is extrinsic to the work of design. A close parallel to this might be the research of Roger Sherman, whose chapter in The Infrastructural City (“Count(ing) on Change”) seeks to demonstrate that the negotiations required for the implementation of a project not only do not necessarily detract from the project, but can often be a productive enterprise leading to otherwise unforeseeable solutions. In both cases — you, integrating and aggregating programs, particularly economic; Roger Sherman, exploring the possibilities produced by processes of negotiation — something which is often thought of as prior to and even antagonistic towards the process of design is wrapped into design, enriching it.

In a recent interview at Places, the landscape architects Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha were asked to describe their model of practice, which they have referred to as “activist practice”. For them, this means that, rather than pursuing clients and commissions, they have sought to do projects — often taking the form of publications and exhibitions — which question cultural understandings of landscape, which provoke questions. They break “conceptual ground”, rather than physical ground. This idea — that practicing landscape architecture or architecture means much more than just building buildings or planting landscapes, as obviously important as those things are — is not new, but it does often seem to be perennially lost in the distinction that is made between “real” and “paper” architecture.

One kind of “conceptual ground” that Lateral is explicitly engaged in breaking is this work of developing an “expanded field” for architecture, which would obviously include the sort of additions to the process of design that we’ve been discussing. But, more broadly — yet thinking specifically of things architects do — what does “practicing architecture” mean to Lateral? Since we’ve already been dancing around this question (and phrased that way, it’s perhaps a bit broad), perhaps one way to think about this might be to tell us about what you think or hope the future might hold for Lateral.

White: We are not very good at forecasting in the mirror, but I can say that the combination of writing, research and design has helped to chart our thinking within the field. As for how this might define a practice, we are willing to let this take place naturally as and when opportunities arise. But I think we are ultimately interested in reformatting an architectural practice – we aspire to the design of ideas and idea of design, though we don’t think this precludes building. However, we have turned down the model of a boutique practice in order to pursue projects in the public realm from the outset, rather than ‘graduate’ into that kind of work.

As for your comment on the expanded field, architecture will continue to oscillate between bouts of autonomy and transdiciplinarity for some time. This has been evident in the last decade or so, and we have made our allegiances to transdisciplinarity apparent. But as this debate has swung internally, there continues to be a lack of practices and design strategists that have staked a claim at the seams of where architecture meets environment. This is where we would align ourselves (and Bracket has become a useful venue for curating practices and thinkers within that position).

And just to qualify a bit, we don’t see ourselves as (nor would we want to be) economists or ecologists. We prefer being architectural strategists – only we sometimes radiate outside traditional notions of the profession to more fully understand a context or a condition. And in that process, we don’t limit ourselves to a superficial treatment of the subject.

To return back to your reading, we are certainly sympathetic to Roger Sherman’s criticism of planning’s inability to respond to certain urban change, his call for architects to assume risk, and the power of entrepreneurial local anomalies to catalyze successive development. And being sympathetic to design incorporating new models of planning, we share his claim that “design strategy operates hand-in-hand with a business plan” (from Sherman and Dana Cuff’s forthcoming Fast-Forward Urbanism). For us, this is the difference between operating tactically and operating strategically. We like chess player Savielly Tartakover’s saying that “tactics is knowing what to do when there is something to do. Strategy is knowing what to do when there is nothing to do.” This ‘nothing to do’ can be interpreted as either 1) seemingly nothing possible to do; or 2) seemingly nothing needed to do. Both interpretations necessitate a more expanded understanding of the brief or context that precedes architecture. We prefer working when there is nothing to do.

Catching up (post-viral and sister-visiting-from-Mongolia break) on the Infrastructural City, with two posts regarding “Distribution”: Brett Milligan contributes “The X-Ray of Retail”, which discusses the internal landscape of big-box stores as a microcosm of regional distribution, while Nam Henderson discusses both Lane Barden’s photo-essay “The Street” (on Wilshire Boulevard) and “Distribution”.

Nam also recently posted on two of the earlier chapters, “Cell Structure” and “Count(ing) on Change”; while reading his post, you might pay particular note to the video Nam dug up of a panel discussion from Michigan’s “Future of Urbanism Conference” this past March.  The discussion, on “urban and regional ecologies”, features panelists Alan Berger, Chris Reed, Edward Soja, and Kazys Varnelis; while I haven’t had a chance to watch it in full yet, my suspicion, given the panelists, is that it’d be worth the half-hour to do so.

[A model from SITE Architects' series of projects in the seventies and eighties for BEST Products Company; I don't think this particular one was built (I'd like to be told I'm wrong about that), but those that were built are also rather entertaining, and early examples of attempts to modify the architecture of big-box stores.]

I thought that, having discussed distribution in a relatively abstract manner, it might be interesting to look at some particular architectural proposals for distribution.  (To be clear, these are quick looks, not careful readings.)

If there is a common thread here — and I don’t know that it is necessarily particularly important to find one — it might be the effort to re-program, to seek new typologies that might negotiate between the desire for a healthy public realm (which is something these architects bring to distribution) and the spatial demands inherent in the logic and logistics of distribution.

A. DUCK-AND-COVER
Roger Sherman Architecture and Urban Design

B. FLATSPACE
Lateral

“As exurban growth is increasingly consumed by agglomerating retail corridors, its single-use status begins to systematically redefine public space at the margins of cities.  This assembly of highways and paved planes is dominated by big boxes and retail power centers, conflating an ever-evolving consumer culture with public space.  In this environment, public space as an indeterminate open system has been supplanted by a highly controlled environment of familiar homogeneity.  The possibilities of intervening in this exurban condition, what we call “flatspace”, on its own terms remain overlooked.

Detached from a larger, complex spatial network, flatspace is comprised of autonomous adjacencies of selfsame components–big box, parking lot, landscape lining.  Accessed or linked only by stretches of asphalt within the confines of an automobile, flatspace limits the physical contact of bodies.  In its subordination to the car and the ease of mobility, flatspaces are places of sterile transit, or nonplaces.  The potential for design in flatspace is less about inserting a foreign program or form and more about positing that the system can recalibrate existing elements and agitate encounters of the public without altering its capitalist dependency on efficiency and geoeconomics.

A typical retail corridor in Columbus, Ohio, served as a case study.  Three filters–program, parking, and landscape–are used to test alternate organizational strategies.  Each contains three strategies of recalibrated protocols for organization.  The nine networks are not intended as design proposals but as strategies or tactics for emergent relationships already at work within exurban corridors.”

When we talk about expanding the territories that we consider in designing a work of architecture (as mammoth often does), one interesting question that is raised is whether we respond with tactics that are seeking to accommodate these influences in a more expansive way, or with tactics that seek to use the act of architecture as an opportunity to alter the processes influencing that territory.

What makes “Flatspace” such an interesting project — and different from many architectural proposals for big-box stores and ex-urban landscapes — is that it is an example of the latter.  It emgages the spatial logics which define those architectures and landscapes, and in doing so shows a series of ways in which the logic (and extended context) of the ex-urban landscape becomes an opportunity to re-configure that landscape.

You can watch videos explaining in depth three of the nine networks — “Pixelscape”, “On-Off Ramps”, and “Confetti” (the same three included in the slideshow above) — at The Open Workshop.

C. STUDY FOR WAL-MART
University of Arkansas Community Design Center

D. THE SUBURBAN GENERAL STORE
R&DAR

For further reading: Free Association Design brings up RTVR’s “Post-Carbon Highway”, which focuses on another landscape of distribution, transport corridors.  Check out Brett’s post, and read more at Alphabet City.  Also: we’re testing a new capability here — slideshows — and I’m guessing there’s a bug or two we haven’t encountered yet.  If you see something (or don’t see anything), let us know.

A pair of posts related to Roger Sherman’s “Count(ing) on Change”:

DPR-Barcelona relates the logic governing urban development described by Sherman to informal streetfront shops and transient markets in Los Angeles and Mexico. One of my favorite tidbits was this description of a failed attempt by Los Angeles to formalize some such arrangements:

[There is evidence] of some kind of hidden agreements in between legal commerces and illegal vendors whom arrange a kind of rent to use the portion of sidewalk in front of the legal store. Researchers indicate that a program to incorporate street vendors into the formal economy has already been tried in LA, and failed. Special Sidewalk Vending District Ordinance of 1994 authorized the creation of 8 vending zones in the city, but only two pilot programs were launched—one in MacArthur Park and the other in San Pedro: both were out of business by 2005.

Free Association Design has me convinced that Monopoly and The Wire ought to be taught in architecture schools, and reminds us of Gordon Matta-Clark’s Fake Estates project.

As both the playful abstraction of Monopoly and Counting On Change demonstrate, the aggregated collection of these fuzzy, interpersonal negotiations are integral processes of the city and are potentially underutilized by designers. Returning to the HBO series The Wire (another inseparable meshwork of reality and imagination) the show can be construed as a visual, dramatized thesis in support of Sherman’s ideas.

Part of what made The Wire so fascinating was the overt revelation of how an entire city is built, and evolves upon the collective of such informal (and non-law abiding) dealings, rather than a single or autonomous masterplan.

You’ll have a hard time convincing me that these demonstrate less important lessons than the latest Francis Ching book, at least.

[An aerial shot of the Alameda Corridor amidst warehouses and distribution centers, from Lane Barden's photo-essay "The Trench", which follows "Distribution" in the text]

We’ve now reached the next-to-last chapter of The Infrastructural City, Deborah Richmond’s “Consumers Gone Wild: Distribution”.  Richmond begins the chapter with a description of the “super-distribution centers” which dot the I-5 corridor between Los Angeles and San Francisco.  When goods arrive at the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach — and vast quantities of goods arrive at those ports, which together “receive more than three times the cargo volume of the next largest American port, the port of New York and New Jersey” — they are often quickly shipped north up the Alameda Corridor:

“Running adjacent to Alameda Boulevard, the $2 billion, 23-mile-long open trench of the Alameda Corridor conveys trains from the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach to rail yards near the city’s downtown and on to points beyond in Kern County and the Inland Empire.  Allowing double-height, stacked trains to pass while eliminating traffic conflicts at over 200 intersections between the ports and downtown, the corridor mitigates many drayage problems such as unfortunate collisions between passenger vehicles and trains full of televisions, blouses, and microcomputers… Roughly 60% of the goods coming through the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are distributed to the Southern California region, while only one-third make their way onto local railroads (most notably via the Alameda Corridor) for distribution to the Midwest, South, and East Coast.

It is this character as a throughput city that has ultimately marked the landscape of Los Angeles more than water, more than cars, and more than movies.  The transfer of shipping containers from ships to trains, trucks, container transfer buildings, retail outlets, and even homes, has been supported by a particularly voracious and narcissistic consumer whose ideal home is the city of Los Angeles itself, but whose influence radiates outward along truck routes and rail lines to the rest of the country.”

Unlike many of the previous chapters in the book, such as “Owens Lake” or “Gravel”, which were more strictly constructed as guidebooks to the infrastructural conditions of Los Angeles, “Distribution” continues to flit back and forth in this manner between descriptions of the spatial constructs of distribution¹ and diatribes against the consumerist society that produces such spatial constructs.  Those diatribes do over-reach in places — as in the case of the above claim that distribution has been the most significant marker on the landscape of Los Angeles, which seems an unnecessary claim in a text that serves as a single, long argument for the diversity of the infrastructural forces shaping Los Angeles.  However, they are also often relatively cogent, as when Richmond argues that “the movement of consumer goods through the city” produces competition between humans and their future possessions, both “for open space on roads” (where relatively tiny passenger vehicles must navigate between “heaving eighteen-wheelers”) and in the genericization of the public realm (into a “transitory space of blind facades and low, blank walls”) in favor of private “control spaces of consumer constructs”.

[Wal-Mart distribution center in Porterville, CA, via Google Maps]

Perhaps the most interesting discussion in the chapter is the discussion of warehouses and “big box” stores, which, like the recent research on Wal-Mart presented at Places by architect Jesse LeCavalier, notes that these typologies are a peculiarly contemporary iteration of “architecture without architects”, guided not by vernacular building practices, but by spreadsheets and the demands of logistics:

“As William Mitchell observed, there exists in addition to all manner of “retail fronts,” a corresponding “architectural back” consisting of the supply chain infrastructure that allows goods to arrive on demand at specific, physical locations around the world.  This architectural back has surpassed in cost and architectural importance any notion of a “front” for big box buildings.  It is evident that more money is spent on the building envelope in terms of dock doors, special materials handling equipment, and site access to the rear of these buildings than is spent on the architecturally mediocre storefronts and office lobbies tacked onto the front of such buildings.  One has only to pass along the loading-dock side of a warehouse or retail building to observe the subtle details that connect buildings to the supply chain.  Attached by a weather-sealed gasket to the roll-up doors of the building, shipping containers come to rest.”

This also serves the reinforce one of the themes of Kazys Varnelis’s chapter, “Invisible City”: the importance of the architecture of the big box building as a cultural or formal performance pales in comparison to the importance of the building as a conduit for flows of materials and goods.  These flows, and the logics of distribution and logistics that order them, are the “command line” of the infrastructural city.  If architecture has something to say to the big box, it must be spoken in that language, as Richmond notes in reflecting on the (perhaps now thankfully dying?) trend towards architectural re-use of empty shipping containers:

“As a matter for architects to consider, the container itself is hardly interesting as an object retro-fitted for human habitation; rather, it is the extent to which more and more building types are being formatted with the specific aim of integrating fixed sites into the intermodal supply chain, or the extent to which buildings are already intermodal containers that pique our interest.”

As in the case of the container, the former tactic — considering the big-box as an object — is unfortunately the more common community tactic for dealing with typologies related to distribution.  As laudable as the desire to reformat the big-box for urban locations is, reformatting alone may very well be futile, so long as it is practiced without interacting with the “capitalist dependency on efficiency and geo-economics” (Lateral, from their “Flatspace” project) so ably described by LeCavalier.  (See, for instance, the way in which Vermont’s attempts to keep out Wal-Mart on the grounds of local preservation were circumvented and rendered irrelevant.)   In that same piece, LeCavalier notes that focusing on new forms for the big box building or the strip mall without interacting with the logics of distribution and logistics that produced the original forms may not only be insufficient, but also missing more powerful opportunities:

The unintended result [of a community demanding purely formal modifications to new "urban" Wal-Marts] is a tacit endorsement of Walmart’s larger operations. But if communities and critics focused less on what the stores look like and more on what they do — less on form and more on performance — it’s possible that genuinely new formats might emerge, formats that would optimize urban settings in their handling of public space, infrastructure access, program mix, and so on.

If you’ve been following the Infrastructural City discussion and actually wading all the way through our extended ramblings, you’ve probably reached the end of this post and thought to yourself “well, that was mercifully brief”.  You’re right, but you’re also wrong, because we’ll be back later in the week (well, probably this week) with posts on recent proposals for the architecture of distribution and a brief bit of commentary on the phenomenal flatness of Terminal Island.

In addition to describing a theory of the transactions that govern the interactions between property owners, Roger Sherman’s “Counting (on) Change” also makes the broader argument that architects have incorrectly prioritized stability over flux:

Cities today develop at a rate that outpaces architects’ and planners’ efforts to shape them.  Political and economic circumstances change so rapidly that by the time a plan is realized, it is already obsolete; a mere election or market downturn can radically alter the assumptions and objectives of a project or master plan.  In this milieu, the path of least resistance for urban development calls for action rather than reaction–to develop not in comprehensive wholes, but in realizable chunks or increments, placing an emphasis more on augmentation than on organization.  For architects, the time has come to recognize, finally, that contemporary urbanism is better rethought around conceptions of progress and potential — via design strategies for unfolding the future — rather than another utopian horizon…

Rather than assuming stability and explaining change, this means that architects must learn to assume change and explain stability.  Fortunately, for all their complexity, cities — like self-organized systems — are not entirely unpredictable.  Their ability to adapt to change is related to simple behaviors, or rules-of-thumb…  Those environments must be strategized not just in terms of how they are intended to work today, but also how else they might work at another time or under different circumstances.

This — the need to develop design processes that accommodate flux first and offer structures of stability second — is one of the major themes of the work of landscape architects Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha.  In a recent interview published at Places, Mathur and da Cunha were asked a question about this issue of stability:

SS + NP: Does your emphasis on change, your efforts to design for mutability, make it hard to find clients in the so-called real world, where both public and private clients tend to favor or at least expect stability?

AM + DD: To seek stability — to settle — is a human condition. For design practice it is important to respond to this need as a negotiated tension between the desire for settlement and the inevitability of change. One way is to construct boundaries, material or representational, and aim to separate, control, predict and manage what’s within. Another way is to construct what we call anchors in an open, mutable field — a process that begins with material specificity but extends in ways we cannot entirely predict. Today, sadly, the former approach dominates design and planning, and we are reminded of its limitations by disasters — like the flood in Mumbai — which are often intensified precisely because of our efforts to control them.

Mathur and da Cunha suggest their entry to the Fresh Kills competition, “Dynamic Coalition” (which mammoth described and discussed previously, near the middle of this post, which is concerned with larger questions of stability in design), as an example of a project that seeks to construct such “anchors in an open, mutable field”:

In our project we explored the role of the designer as the creator of starting points, of anchors for the staging of social and ecological processes over time. Rather than interpreting our responsibility as the delivery of an end-product, a “place” that the public is allowed to enter and use, we developed a strategy which started with various publics — not one generic public but diverse groups, including educators, ecologists, artists, city authorities, garbologists (people who study garbage), etc.

That’s why we called our project “Dynamic Coalition.” We aimed to generate design by working with these various publics on multiple initiatives. And rather than doing a final master plan, which would have formally reconciled the value of each initiative, we developed a strategy that would have played out in time. Some projects might take off, others might not, depending on which agency or group has more power, more funds, more energy. We chose to suspend the idea of a final product that is “phased” in time, and instead focus on where and how a design initiative begins and on how it might evolve and extend in time.

The entire interview is worth reading, branching off into such topics as the importance of landscape representation and what Mathur and da Cunha term “activist practice”.

Thinking about the new urban landscape and public space and wondering where to start, I suddenly remember how, as a boy, I built my first crystal receiver [...] You would put the headphones on, turn the potentiometer and you could hear all kinds of more-or-less vague noises from different radio stations. They would become clearer and then fade away again. This produced a mysterious effect and it suggested that the sources were far away. The most stunning aspect of the experience was that “they” had always been there and that “they” had been there simultaneously. There were so many of “them” that the crystal receiver worked best at night, when most of the stations were off the air. In the dark, intimate space under my blankets I would scan the air. It made clear that public radio, public space was everywhere, and that you just had to plug in.

Bart Lootsma, “The New Landscape” from Mutations

This space has gotten a little more complicated since Bart Lootsma’s childhood. The multivariate public commons composed of broadband spectra has become increasingly contested, mirroring an evolving bureaucratic complexity in contemporary cities. Much of The Infrastructural City up to these chapters has mapped the development of this complexity, tracing how the humble beginnings of roads, gravel pits, and aqueducts gave rise to the Los Angeles we know today. By confronting infrastructures initiated early in the city’s history the text investigates the interdependence among (variously) the urban landscape, city politics and culture, and the infrastructures themselves. These two chapters – Roger Sherman’s Count(ing) on Change, and Ted Kane and Rick Miller’s Cell Structure – represent a slight shift in focus, presenting us with a set of infrastructures wholly developed recently, in a more congested urban sociopolitical landscape.

Before we go any further, I’d like to second FALSANYC in noting that Cell Structure‘s implication that private development of infrastructure is a new demon, ignores history:

In fact many of our great urban and regional infrastructures have begun as private ventures. The railroads were originally private enterprises, the New York City subway/interborough rapid transit system was privately funded, and the electric grid in much of the northeastern US is under the auspices of the private-but-heavily regulated Con Edison. But we live in a decade when all design writing is hyperbolic [gentle tease: note the irony here] and rather than building on the past, seeks to break with it and launch the world into the future based solely on the brilliance of this or that practitioner/theorist.

This is not to imply Cell Structure is incorrect arguing that the private development model which created the cellular networks is without shortcomings, or in need of comparison to public infrastructural endeavors. But the strict public versus private dichotomy is an oversimplification. The grey area between ‘public’ and ‘private’ is magnified from both sides: by cities which behave like businesses; and by heavily regulated yet privately held companies (like the example of Con Edison above), as beholden to the public who vote in their regulators as they are the shareholders who vote on their board. I don’t mean to contend that the difference between public and private is unimportant, just that it masks a more important distinction brought to light by Cell Structure, which is development for constituencies vs development for markets.

Historically, infrastructural developments [by federal, state and regional interests] reacted to the urban needs of both private and public constituencies, addressed localized real estate interestes, responded to the need for commercial links between disparate communities, and implemented cold war defense logistics [....] Private infrastructure flourishes in [a] vacuum of myopic jurisdictions, taking advantage of gaps in oversight to create new, private realms unburdened by the equal access that has historically been the obligation of utilities operating in the public realm.

We learn public infrastructure projects are usually beholden to the demand of constituents (voters, special interest groups, chambers of commerce, etc). This generally leads to comprehensive (‘fair’) coverage, yet often inefficient or unreliable operation, as there isn’t much redundancy built into the system because its goal is to cover the most possible constituents at the lowest cost. In contrast, privately developed infrastructures are virtually always in response to market demand (though they may transition to constituent control at some point in their future). Competition among providers will often result in redundant, more reliable networks (as seen in the layout of New York’s subway system, and the overlapping cellular networks in Los Angeles), but access can spread more slowly, with increased coverage occurring in sync with profitability.

These results are more obviously rational when correlated with the milieu of risks and incentives faced by responders to constituent demand and/or market demand. Because competing telecommunications companies could control the size and location of their infrastructural investment (tailoring it to certain markets), numerous players fought over the same lucrative market population, leading to redundancy for that market, and gaps elsewhere in the city. Limiting size and scope of investment to the most promising markets was a risk management strategy, and creating cell phone towers which execute a singular function with a high degree of efficiency wasn’t a risky approach to infrastructural development.

In contrast, the property developers, land owners, and various other invested parties catalogued by Roger Sherman in Count(ing) on Change don’t have this same flexibility – the location and population they have to work with is fixed. Because of this, they managed risk while maximizing their ability to earn incentives by capitalizing on their rights and engaging in negotiated deals which engendered many possible scenarios for success. They made due with what they had, with what was around them:

In the northeastern corner of Hollywood, for instance, a property has been assembled out of three lots to construct a virtual urban ecosystem. It is “habitat” to four entities: two by right (a car wash and a juice bar), and two by adjacency (an apartment building and a public right-of-way). Though each use attracts a different audience, the structures and territories they occupy connect to one another spatially in a way that at the same time articulates their socioeconomic interdependency.

One of four couplings among the above stakeholders was the de-facto transition of a wedge-shaped piece of Hollymont Car Wash’s property into an addition to the public right-of-way:

Why would the owner of the wash willingly cede a portion of his own property? Simply put, the car wash, realizing that it could not use that odd sliver of land for its operation, recognized the value it possessed as a tool with which to construct a “clean” public image for itself. That the wash also uses its grey water to irrigate this landscape further underlines their awareness of the collateral benefits that could accrue to them through a seeming unselfish gesture.

Sherman’s excellent chapter (subsequently expanded into a book, which just arrived at mammoth HQ yesterday) describes three more increasingly-complex negotiated urbanisms-in-microcosm, arguing that game theory (far more than any masterplan) is the true protocol by which our cities persist.

The field of Game Theory, which studies the dynamics of negotiation, lays out similar bargaining strategies players (in the case of the city, these include property owners, neighbors, merchants, city agencies, etc.) use as they cross their own political and economic objectives with a finite set of available options. [...] Even if never precisely predictable, the endgame is nearly always the same: to settle upon an equilibrium enforced by each player’s self-interest. More than any other single logic, it is the nature of how this inevitable quid pro quo, or tradeoff is settled that offers the greatest potential as a productive instigator of change-by-design: where design is nothing less that a strategy of both staging and creatively working out the causal relationships that comprise the city-as-ecosystem, and in so doing not only makes evident but actually constitutes the tie that binds the system

Of course, to be able to confidently engage with cities at this level requires the ability to accurately estimate risk and reward – capital, political, social, etc. – not only as applies to one’s own interests, but also to persuade other invested parties. It’s intriguing to hypothesize about what would happen if this model of risk management – one which maximizes paths toward success instead of developing one model and limiting it to the most promising markets – was applied to privately developed infrastructures, like Los Angeles’ telecommunications networks. But then we remember that surely, it already is, and the results just aren’t always what we had hoped for. Whether this is because developments at that scale simply aren’t nimble enough to engage at the level of the examples Sherman describes, or because they have made attempts but found the incentives insufficient, I don’t know – but occasionally, the negotiations are successful, as demonstrated by the multiple projects in Count(ing) on Change which engage oil drilling companies, the Department of Water and Power, and LA Department of Building and Safety.

[I scarcely knew where to begin writing this post. There is so much more going on in these chapters that I barely touched on: the use of embodied urbanism urbanism techniques (to borrow the term from Free Association Design), sometimes accidentally or serendipitously, which instead of legal or financial agreements is the bond of many of these agreements; the notion that some infrastructural networks (like cell phone towers) are useful from a very early stage, while others (like subways) require a greater critical mass, and the impact this has on developing new type of infrastructure in the city; the expanding role of private developers creating public infrastructure (check out this law which Arizona just passed, for example). I'm sure we'll find plenty to talk about during the extra week we gave ourselves.]

[Image via flickr user Grahamko]

Yes, we’ve fallen a bit behind with The Infrastructural City.  But we’ve got a plan to remedy that — we’re pushing back the schedule.  This is actually less because of our lag (this week was supposed to be an “off” week, so we’d be caught up with Stephen’s hybrid “Mobile Phones”-”Property” post this week and my post on “Distribution” next Monday), and more because we want to make sure that Roger Sherman’s “Count(ing) on Change” (the “Property” chapter) gets the full discussion it deserves.  If you read John Hill’s Daily Dose of Architecture, you may have caught his review of Sherman’s book-length treatment of the same topic, L.A. Under the Influence; if not, that review (and accompanying Google StreetView tour) may whet your appetite.

Right: the remaining schedule, adjusted:

July 12 Mobile Phones
July 19 Property
July 26 Distribution + The Trench
August 2 Props
August 7 Introduction (as conclusion)

Meanwhile, our fellow readers have  picked up the slack in our output, contributing several posts on Mobile Phones which are worth your while.

Free Association Design suggests that the cellular networks Kane and Miller describe are an exemplary instance of “corporate landscape urbanism” — “which both precedes the [landscape urbanist] movement and is far more advanced in its operations”.

DPR-Barcelona ask what parallels might be drawn between the cellular organization of airspace and the physical organization of present, future, and speculative cities.

FASLANYC speculates about what sort of organizational and financial clues urban interventionists might take from the structures and practices of cellular corporations.

Finally, we’ve already linked to Andrew Wade’s post at Polis, but in case you missed it, there it is again.  Wade asks: “if the processes of corporate decision-making and their impacts on urban infrastructure were creatively mapped and demonstrated, could it influence a recalibration of [city and regional planning]?”  We say: most definitely.

Polis have published their take on Cell Structure (which you can see here), postulating that advances in communication and transportation technologies may serve to benefit society by marginalizing illogical borders. Also, be sure and check out Peter Nunns and Nam Henderson for a set of posts on chapters past, if you haven’t already: Invisible City and Invisible City + Landscape: Tree Huggers, respectively.

[A "feral house" in Detroit, via Sweet Juniper, who has many more pictures; houses and porches, of course, cannot be mowed, and so one often finds early successional plants such as Ailanthus taking advantage of that fact while their brethren a few feet away are easily suppressed by even the most sporadic of maintenance regimes; you might also enjoy Sweet Juniper's flickr set "Life on the Urban Prairie"]

Running with Techentin’s speculation about future cybernetic forests, DPR-Barcelona catalog a series of “Performative Organic Machines”: telephone wire parasites, “eco-boulevards”, free-roaming mechanical colonies composed of plants, bacteria, and robot.

Relatedly but not identical, spy upon your suburban neighbors in the Terrestial Shrub Rover.

At Free Association Design, Brett Milligan contributes a pair of posts, the first a slideshow of “spontaneous urban vegetation” in Portland and the second looking at a particular example of a constructed urban forest, San Francisco’s Mount Sutro.

We’ll be back later this week with a post on chapter eight, “Cell Structure”, which looks at the impact of the proliferation of privately-funded, owned, and operated cellular infrastructures.

[Powerline pruning, photographed by flickr user Justin Berger]

In the seventh chapter of The Infrastructural City, “Landscape: Tree Huggers”, architect Warren Techentin discusses “landscape as a foundational infrastructure” in Los Angeles.  (By landscape, it’s worth noting, Techentin means specifically ‘plants’, usually ‘trees’, and quite often ‘cultivated trees’, though “accidentally imported” plants make the occasional appearance, as well.)

Techentin begins by describing the initial entanglements of Los Angeles with trees: the council tree near which the Gabrielino Indians built the village of Yangna, Los Angeles’ immediate predecessor; the orange groves, which brought both economic vitality and the ever-increasing demand for imported water to the basin; and, most recently, imported ornamental trees.

The most iconic of these imported trees, the palm, was particularly vital in constructing the image of Los Angeles.  Real estate developers — such as Venice Beach’s Abbot Kinney — planted rows of them to demarcate plots, botanical markers of future urbanisms.  The palm was particularly valued for its exotic effect, which suggested to the prospective resident that Los Angeles was not just a place of economic opportunity, but a paradise of tropical (or, at the very least, Mediterranean) leisure.

LANDSCAPING

[Landscaping, idealized and extreme; photographed by flickr user Anna Verlet]

The palm, though, is only one early tool in the kit of plants used to alter the image of the city, a kit which has been refined and expanded as Los Angeles developed its extensive and signature car culture.

“After people moved in, so did businesses, and trees and plants were again used to raise the value of commercial properties.  The front doors of many businesses in Los Angeles are accessed through parking lots so the effective use of landscaping to provide relief from the acres of asphalt is important for business.  In a city built around cars, new forms of landscaping comprised of edging, hedging, containment, concealment, signage, embankment, topiary, and decor emerged simultaneously with the developing car culture.  When the pedestrian space of the sidewalk disappeared amidst the spaces of strip malls and parking lots emerged between the street and the building, landscape again helped to soften the deleterious effects of the quickly erected, often bland commercial architecture.  Particularly at fast food restaurants, new concepts of landscape were deployed exuberantly, often monstrously, to enhance the meal.  Images of the pastoral suburban landscape of the Garden City, the exotic landscapes of Eden, and the topiary gardens of France and Japan were marshalled to screen the growing proliferation of urban artifacts: trash cans, electrical transformers, water meters, building edges, air conditioning condensers, and the sidewalk or roadway itself.  All of these objects disappear through carefully selected plantings, thus allowing patrons to enjoy an authentic indoor-outdoor eating experience a few feet away from their automobiles.  At any drive-through of a fast food restaurant, a country road is evoked as drivers circle their way between the speaker and pick-up window amidst plants that beautify the wait for food with a pleasing, planted environment that has grown over the stains, graffiti, garbage, insects, and dust of the city”

Landscaping — distinguished from other cultivated landscapes and gardens by its ubiquitous presence and banal qualities — is landscape as a real estate amenity.  This is the landscaped iteration of the ‘equity urbanism’ that we described in our essay, “The Shelter Category”, that was published in MONU #12:

“…ownership culture [and 'equity urbanism' are] ultimately not founded on the rationales of personal responsibility, security, or stability, but upon the notion that the home is an asset for the cultivation of personal wealth. Architecturally, this is a strange notion —the home as a wealth generator, not shelter – but it does a great deal to explain the dominance of the primary architectural forms of contemporary America, the cheaply built urban condo and the even more cheaply built suburban home. The notable thing about both these architectural forms is how un-engaged architects are with them: both in that most critical discourse is unconcerned with mass-produced housing and in that mass-produced housing is produced with very little input from architects.”

Like architects who are essentially un-engaged with mass-produced housing, landscape architects are essentially un-engaged with car culture landscapes, even though, as many critics have noted, landscape is the primary medium constituting the automotive city.  (We, at least in my experience, tend to shrink from the suggestion that there is any connection between what a ‘landscaper’ does and what a ‘landscape architect’ does.)

Techentin notes, though, that the palms are dying — many of old age, some of fungal and other diseases.  The city, eager to replace these exotic trees with native species, has no plans to import replacements, indicating, to Techentin, that the era of landscape as image in Los Angeles is ending (though, it should be said, there is no apparent end in sight for landscaping as a mass amenity, and part of the reason that the city is not replacing palms is that their use in luxury developments in Florida and the southwest has driven up prices).

PERFORMATIVE URBAN FORESTS

[Mullein -- Verbascum thapsussm -- via Peter del Tredici]

The question we are left with, then, is: what are future urban natures like?  Techentin argues that, as the palms die out — and, with them, perhaps also the idea that the landscape exists primarily to create an image — urban forests will become performative:

“While the city may be in the process of abandoning the palm as its foremost icon, trees continue to be enlisted as supplements to urban life…  This relationship has become more symbiotic as we have come to an understanding of the importance of trees in the urban ecosystem.  Taken in conjunction with plant life everywhere, trees collectively function like a giant machine — an enormous oxygen-producing and pollutant filtering infrastructure for the city.  Urban forests generate oxygen, absorb airborne and ground toxins, beautify, shade, create privacy, reduce water run-off into storm systems, stabilize soil to prevent erosion, mitigate reflected heat off roads and sidewalks, produce “curb appeal” thereby increasing real estate values, provide wind control, animal habitat, and a source of food and flowers.”

“If, however, trees in the city have traditionally been appreciated because they were useless — removed from their non-urban cousins, which exist to provide us with lumber and fuel — they are increasingly becoming machines, bits of living infrastructure.  The fall of the palm — that vapid, high-maintenance Hollywood starlet — is tied to this idea of trees moving from being merely ornamental to more performative organic machines — walling us in, generating the air we breath, shading our cities.”

One possible way in which forests might become performative, suggested by Techentin, is that they may be “hybrid mechanic-organic systems”:

“With the Frankenpine [cell phone towers which mimic tree forms] thriving, it is possible to speculate on an urban future in which thousands of artificial trees might be deployed throughout the city: on streets, in malls, and in our office landscapes.  In the next generation of office or mall equipment, we may see new tree-machines proliferating amongst this landscape–providing wireless communication, video monitoring, air filtration, security, and space for storage, digital or otherwise.  One can imagine a whole forest of imitative, performative, and embedded artificial “trees” deployed amongst real trees or, for that matter, prosthetic systems that would augment living trees, providing necessary features that we otherwise would find disagreeable to look at, some of which may provide a solution for some of today’s urban ills such as the reintroduction of animal habitats, methane gas venting, hazmat, and security monitoring systems, and so on.”

This, I suppose, might seem far-fetched and a stretching of the ‘tree’ metaphor until it becomes very thin indeed, but I’m not so sure that it is entirely ridiculous.  What are these carbon storage structures, if not cybernetic trees (the engineers even refer to them as “artificial trees” configured in a “forest”), and what are the Voltrees (elaborated upon here by Pruned), if not prosthetic trees?

[Fall Panicum grows in pavement, via Peter del Tredici]

But, I would add (and this seems much more important to me): the rise of the performative tree will also be seen in the acceptance and valuation of “crypto-forests”, “cosmopolitan” plant communities, and invasive species.  Techentin says: “Wild nature, or what may be left of it, seems all but removed from collective experience.” Despite this collective remove, though, there is wild nature in the city, only it is invasive and post-human, growing in legal and physical spaces of abandonment: a fence on property line, a sliver of land between two properties deemed to have no value as real-estate, the concrete bed of a channelized river.

I’m reminded of the fantastic new field guide, Wild Urban Plants of the Northeast, which is written by Peter del Tredici, who is both a botanist and researcher at the Arnold Arboretum and a lecturer for Harvard’s landscape program.  Wild Urban Plants, though it is first and foremost a guide to the identification and characteristics of what del Tredici calls “cosmopolitan plants” — those plants which are adapted to the contaminated soils, frequent disturbance regimes, and harsh growing conditions which characterize urban ecologies, and so are able to survive and even thrive without maintenance or care in cities — is also an opportunity for del Tredici to make the argument that we ought to begin to value these plants (many of whom are often lumped together under the derogatory rubric of “invasives”) and the communities that they form, because they provide ecological services at a uniquely low cost.

Quoting at length from del Tredici’s recent article in Natural History (PDF):

“The ecology of the city is defined not only by the cultivated plants that require maintenance and the protected remnants of natural landscapes, but also by the spontaneous vegetation that dominates the neglected interstices. Greenery fills the vacant spaces between our roads, homes, and businesses; lines ditches and chain-link fences; sprouts in sidewalk cracks and atop neglected rooftops. Some of those plants, such as box elder, quaking aspen, and riverside grape, are native species present before humans drastically altered the land. Others were brought in intentionally or unintentionally by people, including chicory, Norway spruce, and Japanese knotweed. And still others, among them common ragweed, path rush ( Juncus tenuis), and tufted lovegrass (Eragrostis pectinacea), arrived on their own, dispersed by wind, water, or wild animals. Such species grow and reproduce in many American cities, especially cities with faltering economies, without being planted or cared for. They can provide important social and ecological services at very little cost to taxpayers, and if left undisturbed long enough they may even develop into woodlands.

There is no denying that most people consider many such plants to be “weeds.” From a utilitarian perspective, a weed is any plant that grows on its own where people do not want it to grow. From the biological perspective, weeds are opportunistic plants that are adapted to disturbance in all its myriad forms, from bulldozers to acid rain. Their pervasiveness in the urban environment is simply a reflection of the continual disruption that characterizes that habitat—they are not its cause. [Emphasis mine.] …

In general, the successful urban plant needs to be flexible in all aspects of its life history, from seed germination through flowering and fruiting; opportunistic in its ability to take advantage of locally abundant resources that may be available for only a short time; and tolerant of the stressful growing conditions caused by an abundance of pavement and a paucity of soil. The plants that grow in our cities are a cosmopolitan array of species that somehow managed to survive the transition from one land use to another as cities developed. The sequence starts with native species adapted to ecological conditions before the city was built. Those are followed, more or less in sequence, by species adapted to agriculture and pasturage, to pavement and compacted soil, to lawns and landscapes, to infrastructure edges and environmental pollution—and ultimately to vacant lots and rubble…

Based on the extensive literature on the ecosystem services provided by native and cultivated plants, one can easily generate an impressive list of the ways spontaneous vegetation makes cities more habitable for people as well as animals: temperature reduction, food and habitat for wildlife, erosion control on slopes, stream and riverbank stabilization, excess nutrient absorption in wetlands, soil building on degraded land, improved air quality, noise reduction, and, of course, carbon sequestration.”

LANDSCAPING AS INFRASTRUCTURE

[CMG Landscape Architecture's "Crack Garden" -- unfortunately planted rather than spontaneous, but you get the idea.]

Each of these possibilities involves a common element: the expansion of the agency of the landscape architect.  (Expansion, though, should not be an egotistical moment, but an opportunity to engage in new forms of collaboration.)

Those two primary possibilities (the rise of the performative urban forest and the engagement of landscape architects in the design of ‘banal’ landscaping) might even merge, not in landscape infrastructures, but in landscaping as infrastructure.  To borrow the terminology of Stephen’s previous post: landscaping is currently culturally and financially performative, but it could become ecologically and infrastructurally performative.  (To do so, though, may involve difficult re-framings of the cultural expectations it performs for.)  This, I think, begins with prosaic shifts like the introduction of curb-side rain gardens or front lawns that are variously xeriscaped and edible, but I don’t think it can end there.

I also suspect that, if landscape architects are involved in such a change, it will require assuming a somewhat different set of roles and design methodologies than those we have traditionally employed: there may be some amount of employment to be found in designing edible estates and cosmopolitan succession regimes for a mass market, but first that mass market must be persuaded of the value of such landscapes.

The need for such persuasion — a change in what might be termed vernacular landscape norms — reminds me of an article in the April issue of Metropolis, which described the recent work of Build Change, a non-profit organization that works in areas affected by earthquakes to help locals build in ways that are more seismically sound. “Careful seismic engineering”, author Karrie Jacobs notes, “can be broken down into simple rules that can be followed at relatively low cost”.  In Haiti, Build Change designed sample housing plans and built a pilot house that meet those criteria using local materials and building techniques, but — most interestingly for our discussion of landscaping norms — “also distilled their design into ‘six simple rules’, which appeared on posters as dos and don’ts”:

“… at least 6,000 homes in Indonesia and China [which Build Change worked in after earlier earthquakes]… have been built following the rules developed… What [Build Change] does is exactly the opposite of an architectural competition.  It’s not about coming up with a signature solution but disseminating a set of rules that if truly effective, disappear into the venacular.”

The posters that Jacobs describes are a fascinating architectural act.  Architecture, here, is not a building, but a viral meme, infecting the genetic code of a country’s building practices.  This, obviously, is relatively necessary and efficacious after a disaster, when the traditional practices of architecture may be ineffective, too expensive, and too slow, but it also suggests something about how landscape architects might look to induce a shift towards ecologically and infrastructurally performative landscaping.  The employment of such alternative practices — I’m thinking of a landscape-centered design advocacy organization, for instance, akin to the Center for Urban Pedagogy, publishing pamphlets of landscape tactics akin CUP’s Making Policy Public series — may yet offer the opportunity to influence the future forests of the infrastructural city.

On the necessity of a command-line architecture:

Architects presented innovative (and often idealistic) approaches to complex problems, while not afraid to go beyond the discipline to engage with the pragmatics of financing, policy or public engagement in order to see them executed [...] If we continue to hitch our future on offering rarefied aesthetics instead of participation in the complex mechanisms of the city, our days are surely numbered.

On the lack of any singular, linear relationship among formal styles, purpose, and instrumentality:

Aravena showed his teeth (when I provoked him), claiming that ‘I don’t buy from that presentation that that is the taste of the people, it was extremely exaggerated, a bit ironic, and I don’t think you can play with these kinds of issues, [social housing] is a serious thing.’ This comment – and other backchat from delegates to the same effect – seemed to capture a major rift in the reception of the ideas presented; namely that social ambitions ought to be expressed with a corresponding language of earnestness. Has our Modernist training led us architects to measure authenticity and honesty by image not impact?

You should go read the whole thing.