[Image: From the amazing Superheroes series by photographer Gregg Segal].
As many readers will no doubt know, the New York Times last week sent a "cease and desist" letter to Apartment Therapy, demanding that AT stop posting New York Times proprietary material on their website. Though the story has since undergone a few less confrontational developments – i.e. Apartment Therapy "reached both the NYTimes legal and marketing [departments] on Friday and they called off their take down notice pending our initial conversation" – the issue is still a very valid one, and it cuts to the heart of many financial problems now facing both print and online media. As but one example, it has always struck me as somewhat economically lopsided that in order for Dwell to run a photograph in the magazine, we have to pay the photographer a not inconsiderable use fee; but that I, as BLDGBLOG, can simply post that photograph – or Dezeen can post it, or materialicious, or Apartment Therapy – and, at least for now, no one has to pay a cent. (See further thoughts on this sentence in the comment thread, below). In this business model, magazines like Dwell and Wallpaper – or the New York Times – become a kind of unacknowledged production budget for architecture blogs (this site included). Metropolis pays for a photographer to fly to, say, Chicago or Melbourne or Eagle Rock... and an architecture blog then gets free photographs to post on their website, from which they can earn a constant stream of advertising revenue. From the perspective of an architecture and design blogger, it can't help but feel a bit like the easy money days of the derivatives market: you wait till someone else pays for a photographer to document something, and then you jump in and skim ad revenue off of that transaction. The value of your website is derived value; if the magazine photography economy were to collapse, so would your third-party ability to extract revenue from it. While I was Senior Editor at Dwell, this hit some particularly surreal notes, such as when an architecture blogger – whose entire visual content has been bought and paid for by other people – emailed me to accuse Dwell of stealing from architecture blogs because we had run images (at no small expense to us) of houses that once appeared on that person's website. In any case, my point here is not to argue, regressively, from the standpoint of magazines (after all, BLDGBLOG has been around for 5 years, hosting other people's photographs) or to advance a kind of 1990s-era model of intellectual property, but to point out that this conversation is far from resolved – and that I'm thus particularly excited to announce that Postopolis! LA will include an entire panel about this very subject. Catherine Ledner, Dave Lauridsen, Gregg Segal, Misha Gravenor, and Tom Fowlks, professional photographers who have worked for the likes of National Geographic, Wired, Newsweek, Dwell, Popular Science, Esquire, the New York Times Magazine, and countless others, will be joining us on Saturday, April 4, to talk about the financial and/or reputational pros and cons of blogs, magazines, online portfolios, Flickr accounts, and so on. It's interesting, for instance, in this context, that even mundane technical questions – such as whether to host your work online via a Flash website (which prevents bloggers from downloading your work) – are actually legally motivated decisions made to protect the financial integrity of your portfolio, not aesthetic or stylistic choices at all. So what do these photographers think of Flash as a form of self-protection? Or of seeing their work on architecture blogs – or, for that matter, of never seeing their work on architecture blogs? Does this result in more (or fewer) paid commissions? What is the ideal balance here between exposure and financial compensation? The questions are innumerable, and come as part and parcel of the ongoing implosion of the publishing industry, with newspapers and magazines folding (or laying off staff) left and right, and with no realistic new business model yet taking shape. Watch for this panel coming up on the evening on Saturday, April 4. It will take place in the context of an entire day themed about the future of media, with editors-in-chief, bloggers, journalists, and many more on hand to discuss the changing industrial landscape. By the way, the complete Postopolis! LA schedule will be announced shortly – so stay tuned!
[Image: Bookstore for Shibuya Publishing, Japan, designed by Hiroshi Nakamura; be sure to see the other photos at SpaceInvading].
Through a combination of publisher review copies and the slow-to-end fire sale at my favorite local bookstore, Stacey's – they've gone out of business and are selling everything at 50% off, including now even the furniture – BLDGBLOG's home office is awash in books. Since there literally is not enough time left in a person's life to read all of these, I decided that I would instead start a new, regular series of posts on the blog called "Books Received" – these will be short descriptions of, and links to, interesting books that have crossed my desk. Note that these lists will include books I have not read in full – but they will never include books that don't deserve the attention. Note, as well, that if you yourself have a book you'd like to see on BLDGBLOG, get in touch – send us a copy, and, if it fits the site, we'll mention your title in a future Books Received.
1)Oase #75 and #76 — Oase is an excellent architecture and urban studies journal published by the Netherlands Architecture Institute and designed by Karel Martens of Werkplaats Typografie. Oase #75 is the 25th anniversary issue, and includes essays from Jurjen Zeinstra ("Houses of the Future"), René Boomkens ("Modernism, Catastrophe and the Public Realm"), and Frans Sturkenboom ("Come una ola de fuerza y luz: On Borromini's Naturalism"), among many, many others. To be honest, there is so much interesting material in this issue that it's hard to know where to start; look for this in specialty architecture bookstores and definitely consider picking up a copy. Meanwhile, Oase #76 arrived just in time for me to quote part of its interview with photographer Bas Princen in The BLDGBLOG Book – but the entire issue, bilingually printed in both English and Dutch and themed around what the editors call "Context\Specificity," is worth reading. There's a whole section on "In-Between Buildings," itself coming between long looks at context, tradition, and the generation of architectural form. #76 also includes virtuoso displays of how to push the typographic grid. A new favorite.
2)Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon's Secret World by Trevor Paglen (Dutton) — Trevor Paglen is an "experimental geographer" at UC-Berkeley, well-known – perhaps infamous – for his successful efforts in tracking unmarked CIA rendition flights around the world. Using optical equipment normally associated with astronomy, Paglen has managed to photograph the goings-on of deep desert military bases and has even been able to follow US spy satellites through what he calls "the other night sky." This book serves more or less as an introduction to Paglen's work, from Afghanistan to Los Alamos.
3)The Thief at the End of the World: Rubber, Power, and the Seeds of Empire by Joe Jackson (Penguin) — Jackon's book, new in paperback, explores the industrial implications of monopoly plantlife, telling the story of Henry Wickham, who "smuggled 70,000 rubber tree seeds out of the rainforests of Brazil and delivered them to Victorian England's most prestigious scientists at Kew Gardens." This led directly to the "great rubber boom of the early twentieth century," we read – which itself resulted in such surreal sites as Henry Ford's failed utopian-industrial instant city in the rain forest, Fordlandia. Here, Jackson describes that city, now in ruins and like something from a novel by Patrick McGrath:
The American Villa still stands on the hill. The green and white cottages line the shady lane, but the only residents now are fruit bats and trap-door tarantulas. The state-of-the-art hospital shipped from Michigan is deserted. Broken bottles and patient records litter the floor. A towering machine shop houses a 1940s-era ambulance, now on blocks. A riverside warehouse built to hold huge sheets of processed rubber holds six empty coffins arranged in a circle around the ashes of a small campfire.
4)Ghettostadt: Łódź and the Making of a Nazi City by Gordon J. Horwitz (Harvard University Press) — By choosing the historical experience of Łódź, Poland, during its political assimilation and ethnic ghettoization by the Nazis, Gordon Horwitz shows how a long series of seemingly minor bureaucratic decisions can radically alter the normal urban order of things, paving the way for something as nightmarish as the Final Solution. This latter fact Horwitz memorably describes as "a phenomenon so unexpected and outrageous in design and execution as to exceed the then-understood limits of organized human cruelty." About Łódź itself, he writes: "Secured by German arms, reshaped by German planning and technical expertise, the city was to be remade inside and out." Horwitz shows how property confiscation, spatial rezoning, and literal new walls transformed Łódź into a Ghettostadt.
5)Condemned Building by Douglas Darden (Princeton Architectural Press) — The late Douglas Darden's work seems both underknown and underexposed (perhaps because so little of it can be found online). This book, published in 1993, collects ten speculative projects, including the Museum of Impostors, the Clinic for Sleep Disorders, and the Oxygen House, complete with plans, models, elevations, and historical engravings. Darden's work is an interesting hybrid of narrative fiction, visual storytelling, and architectural design – and so naturally of great interest to BLDGBLOG. For instance, his "Temple Forgetful" project weds amnesia, flooding, and the mythic origins of Rome. Good stuff.
6)Architecture Depends by Jeremy Till (MIT Press) — Architectural theory written with the rhetorical pitch of a blog, Architecture Depends is a kind of from-the-hip philosophy of "rogue objects," construction waste, massive landfills, "lo-fi architecture," and the fate of buildings over long periods of time. As Till states in the book's preface, "Mess is the law."
7)Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the Twenty-first Century by P.W. Singer (Penguin) — An extremely provocative look at the future of war in an age of robot swarms and autonomous weaponry, Singer's book is nonetheless a bit too casual for its own good (reading that Singer wrote the book because robots are "frakin' cool" doesn't help me trust the author's sense of self-editing). Having said that, there is so much here to discuss and explore further that it's impossible not to recommend the book – eyepopping micro-histories of individual war machines come together with Singer's on-the-scene anthropological visits to robotics labs and military testing grounds, by way of Artificially Intelligent snipers, drone "motherships" forming militarized constellations in the sky, and even "mud batteries" and automated undersea warfare. Like Singer's earlier Corporate Warriors – another book I would quite strongly recommend – the often terrifying implications of Wired for War nag at you long after you've stopped reading. For what it's worth, by the way, this book seems almost perfectly timed for the release of Terminator Salvation.
8)Sand: The Never-Ending Story by Michael Welland (University of California Press) — This book is awesome, and I hope to draw a much longer post out of it soon. Only slightly marred by an unfortunate subtitle, Welland's book is disproportionately fascinating, considering its subject matter. On the other hand, "it has been estimated," he writes, "that on the order of a billion sand grains are born around the world every second" (emphasis his) – so the sheer ubiquity of his referent makes the book worth reading. From the early history of sand studies to the aerial physics of dunes – by way of the United States' little-known WWII-era Military Geology Unit – the interesting details of this book are inexhaustible.
9)A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir by Donald Worster (Oxford University Press) — Donald Worster has written a long biography of John Muir, the naturalist and writer who once famously climbed as high as he could into the canopy of a Californian forest during a lightning storm so that he could see what it was like to experience nature firsthand. At its most basic, Worster's book explores the natural landscape of the American West as "a source of liberation."
Going into wild country freed one from the repressive hand of authority. Social deferences faded in wild places. Economic rank ceased to matter so much. Bags of money were not needed for survival – only one's wits and knowledge. Nature offered a home to the political maverick, the rebellious child, the outlaw or runaway slave, the soldier who refused to fight, and, by the late nineteenth century, the woman who climbed mountains to show her strength and independence.
10)Le Corbusier: A Life by Nicholas Fox Weber (Alfred A. Knopf) — I'm strangely excited to read this, actually – and I say "strangely" because I am not otherwise known for my interest in reading about Le Corbusier. But Nicholas Fox Weber's approximately 765 pages of biographical reflection on Corbu's life look both narratively satisfying, as a glimpse into the man's daily ins and outs over eight decades, but also architecturally minded, contextualizing Le Corbusier's spatial work within his other political (and libidinal) interests. I hope to dive into this one over the summer.
(Books Received is a regular series of posts about books that have crossed the BLDGBLOG radar; if you'd like to see your own book in a future Books Received list, please get in touch!)
Postopolis! LA has been gathering pace over the past few weeks, despite the silence, so it seemed like high time for an update. Although we're still finalizing both the schedule and the list of speakers, it's looking amazing so far.
The whole thing kicks off in less than two weeks, running from Tuesday, March 31, to Saturday, April 4, and from 5pm-11pm everyday. The venue has finally been announced, as well: we'll be up in the sky, watching the sun set every evening from the rooftop pool, deck, and bar of the Standard Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. The event is free and open to everyone, with a cash bar and free wifi, so come on down for some landscape and architecture, bring your favorite wireless device, and wear your Speedo or bikini if you want to use the pool (it's more like a wading pool, FYI). And, of course, we'll be keeping our fingers crossed for no rain. The list of speakers, as it now stands, includes unbelievably interesting people. Here's a glimpse:
[Image: So good you can't see it: a hunter wearing a Ghillie suit].
For some reason I found myself looking at Ghillie Suits last week, and I couldn't resist writing a post about them. Manufactured under the tagline "It's what they don't see that's important!" Ghillie suits are made for paintball – but they are an amazing example of fashion design and landscape simulation together in one. Less a style of dress, they use garments to represent – and thus blend into – the earth's surface.
[Images: Two more examples of Ghillie suits – the visual effect of the suits are somewhat undercut by the model's posture].
You might say that these suits are mobile, replicant earths – minor terrains on the move – a statement seemingly backed up by the incredible "HUMUS® Cover Scent," marketed by the same firm. HUMUS® is an "oil based product that gives off the smell of decaying leaves and allows you to smell like a part of the forest." I'm embarrassed to admit this, because it now seems obvious, but I had never actually thought of hunting as a local repertoire of earth-replication techniques, techniques through which you can become as much like the surface of the earth as possible. This then distracts and fools other organisms – and allows you to step in for the kill. Looked at this way, hunting becomes a kind of planetary pas de deux – which is just a pretentious way of saying that if you act like the planet, you can kill that which lives upon it most efficiently. Or, to put it one other way, well-camouflaged hunters are masterful practitioners of the landscape arts – but their contributions to any potential conversation about landscape design have been overlooked for ideological reasons (i.e. they're hunters, not academics, and never the twain shall meet).
[Image: This suit apparently only weights 2.25 lbs. Photo courtesy of Ghillie Suits].
Whatever you might think of wildlife slaughter, though, how unbelievably interesting would it be to get Ghillie suit designers, deep wilderness hunters, and some landscape theorists together for a long afternoon of spatialized discussions. Throw in some anthropologists studying hunter-gatherer tribes and maybe some military camouflage field testers – and, at the very least, you've got yourself an interesting book proposal. After all, what Deleuze has to say about landscape is meant to be interesting; but what about the guys who run Ghillie Suits? Or the editors of King's Outdoor World or Predator Xtreme? Invite them to your next landscape architecture conference. In any case, the instructions for how to build your own Ghillie suit are an amazing, if unintentional, act of sartorial landscape criticism, turning clothing into hyper-accurate representations of the local plantlife. Finally, for a few more images don't miss the Ghillie suit product slideshow.
In an earlier post, I mentioned that there will be at least one more big event coming up in New York City that I'll be a part of; the information for that is now available (at least on Facebook!). On Monday, April 13, from 7-9pm, the New York Institute for the Humanities will be hosting a celebration of David Maisel's recent, beautiful, and widely praised book Library of Dust. This will take place at the Angel Orensanz Foundation, housed in an extraordinary, blue-ceilinged synagogue at 172 Norfolk Street, and it will be led by the indefatigable Lawrence Weschler. Here's a map. The list of participants looks absolutely amazing, and I'm thrilled to be a part of this group. In addition to Maisel and Weschler, there will be writer, professor, and historian of photography Ulrich Baer; author Rachel Cohen; writer and historian Jennifer Michael Hecht; art historian Karen Lang; novelist Jonathan Lethem; photographer Joel Meyerowitz; novelist Ted Mooney; filmmaker Bill Morrison; Magnum photojournalist Gilles Peress; president of Wesleyan University and historian Michael Roth; author and critic LucSante; and poet Vijay Seshadri. It sounds like an unbelievably interesting evening – and I hope to bring something to the table myself, as author of one the essays in Maisel's Library of Dust. So if you're in New York that night, please come check it out – and more information about the event, including ticket pricing and availability, should hopefully be up on the Orensanz Foundation's site soon, or on the website of the New York Institute for Humanities. Also, on a tangent, should you be in Philadelphia, Lawrence Weschler will be speaking tomorrow night at the Penn Humanities Forum. If you don't know Weschler's book Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder, then you need to pick up a copy ASAP.
I started reading Nina Burleigh's recent book Mirage on the flight over to New York this afternoon. Burleigh's book is a review of Napoleon's 1798 invasion of Egypt, during which "more than 150 French engineers, artists, doctors, and scientists – even a poet and a musicologist – traveled to the Nile Valley under the command of Napoleon Bonaparte and his invading army." Burleigh's descriptions of 18th century Cairo stand out. She writes that the city was "a labyrinthine metropolis that frustrated and confused the invaders." It was "a city of doors, mostly closed."
Massive gates opened into the city, and the winding streets themselves often ended abruptly at smaller doors that defined neighborhood and community boundaries... Whole neighborhoods might be walled off, accessible only by a single door in a narrow street.
She writes that "The city frustrated Europeans. To their eyes, there was no logic to its street plan, and less order. Claustrophobic alleys ended at walls, or dwindled into walkways and disappeared." When an imperial cartographic project is kicked off a few months into the occupation, it "was deemed so daunting that at first the engineers hoped the order [to map Cairo] would be rescinded" – but, of course, "it was not." Edme-François Jomard, the cartographer in charge of the project, wrote: "The city is almost entirely composed of very short streets and twisting alleys, with innumerable dead-ends. Each of these sections is closed by a gate, which the inhabitants open when they wish; as a result the interior of Cairo is very difficult to know." Jomard, Burleigh writes, would spend his time "knocking on gates that hid whole neighborhoods." How interesting to think of the Manhattanized equivalent of this – where, for instance, a small door at 1st and 13th Street might seal off an entire subdistrict of the island, a kind of undiscovered private archipelago of walled neighborhoods that maze outward in small streets barely wide enough to walk through. You knock two or three times – and then crawl through a small circular door in the middle of a brick wall that could just as easily have been the entrance to a building. And then you're gone, hiking through a part of the city you'd never even heard of before. Of course, the Napoleonic approach to Cairo was, in the end, a military one; Burleigh adds that "These doors inconvenienced the French, and eventually Napoleon committed one of his most offensive acts – in the eyes of the Arabs – when he ordered them removed." And so those old neighborhoods, previously sealed apart as if by airlocks, were made open for soldiers to pass through, the city remade for its military occupiers.
It's nice to see a friend (and coworker) get an opportunity to discuss his work: Dwell's Design Director, Kyle Blue, talks to Arkitip about why we make Dwell the way we do, in this short video shot just the other day in the office. Congrats, Kyle! Also visible in the background of the video are Brendan Callahan, illustrator of The BLDGBLOG Book, Michele Posner, Ryan Nelson, and Dakota Keck – as well as some spreads from our forthcoming May 2009 issue, my second third-to-last as Senior Editor.
I was excited to see that BLDGBLOG made it onto the Guardian's list of recommended architecture blogs this weekend, along with Pruned, Archidose, entschwindet und vergeht, Architecture List, and Arcilook. It seems notable that four of those, if you count BLDGBLOG, are written using Blogger. Also, I'm hugely pleased that were able to include a brief mention of Pruned in the new (April 2009) issue of Dwell magazine – so take a look on p. 120 if you stumble on a copy. "Alexander Trevi's Pruned offers readers a wild adventure into landscapes both real and imagined," Dwell says. "At once practical and visionary." While we're on the topic, don't miss Dwell's new website, launched last week.
(Thanks to John Coulthart for pointing out the Guardian list!)
The new exhibition Ai Weiwei: Four Movements opened today in London at Phillips de Pury & Company, and it will remain on display until March 28. I'm proud to have contributed an essay to the show's catalog, alongside a text by Arthur I. Miller. My essay, "Ai Weiwei: Surgeon of Space" can be read in full online – and I have to admit that I like it! I don't often write about furniture design here on BLDGBLOG, so it was particularly fun to be able to do so. I suggest that "furniture for Ai Weiwei exists in a very interesting space, so to speak, and it comes with compelling conceptual possibilities."
Furniture doesn’t just ornament a given space; it remakes and redefines the internal boundaries of the space itself. If furniture is something that breaks up space, offering punctuated moments of rest and stoppage and giving rhythm to a room, then it can also be deliberately misused. It can be contrapuntal and off-kilter, designed against the grain of the space it appears within. Furniture can interrupt, challenge, and deform.
The rest of the text veers from David Cronenberg to geology, by way of Gerrit Rietveld and German tunneling machines, Stone Age tools and psychoanalysis. From the essay:
Ai’s "Furniture", subject to such interpretations, become not unlike allegories: small storylines in wood. They are narratives. "Tables at Right Angles", 1998, is really just one table that has misunderstood itself, reeling back from its own projected double. Mistaking its own eccentric solidity for the architecture that surrounds it, this table will never realize that the world it thinks it touches is just another part of itself.
Of course, it would be a cliché to say that these works, thus described, are like poems – so let us instead suggest that they are screenplays: symbolically rich and heavy with implication, they have character, destiny, and tension all at once. They have drama. They can be argued about and reenacted. They have plots. Perhaps someday we might even see a film directed by David Cronenberg – based on a table by Ai Weiwei.
Check it out if you get a chance – and stop by the exhibition itself if you're in London. Meanwhile, if you're looking for more of an introduction to Ai Weiwei's work, nearly three years ago Archinect published a feature-length interview with him called "Fragments, Voids, Sections and Rings," also well worth a read.
[Image: The basic platform; design your seastead atop this and win $1000].
The Seasteading Institute is sponsoring a design competition to see who can most interestingly visualize a permanent, microsovereign architectural state at sea. "A seastead," they write in the competition brief, "is a floating platform that allows people to permanently settle the ocean as they do land. Professional naval engineers have already designed a bare platform – a structure about 400x400 feet, roughly the size of a city block. What you build on the platform is up to you. It may be a hospital, a casino, a residential community, a cricket stadium, or something entirely different."
[Image: The sample design].
There are some basic engineering constraints that participants will have to heed, as explained both in the call-for-entries and in this forum, and a sample design has been supplied (see images above and below). But I think it'd be absolutely fascinating to annualize this, and launch a kind of eVolo competition for offshore platform design. The skyscraper designs that come out of eVolo might gravitate a bit too strongly toward the biomorphic/diagrid/arbitrary fractal tiling end of contemporary architectural design, but each year's results are always worth checking out. So if architects were asked to rethink the spatial design of offshore libertarian self-rule, and to do so as part of a high-profile annual competition, what sorts of structures might we see?
[Image: An illustrated variation of the sample design, from Wired magazine].
For a little more background, Wired's Chris Baker covered the Seasteading Institute last month. Baker wrote that the Institute "doesn't just want to create huge floating platforms that people can live on," they are "also hoping to create a platform in the sense that Linux is a platform: a base upon which people can build their own innovative forms of governance. The ultimate goal is to create standards and blueprints that can be easily adapted, allowing small communities to rapidly incubate and test new models of self-rule with the same ease that a programmer in his garage can whip up a Facebook app." Here, architectural design would actually help to catalyze new forms of political sovereignty. The cultural possibilities for these offshore spaces are effectively without limit – and they would be self-policed, falling outside the bounds of international law. This opens up a number of legal (not to mention moral) quandaries. Baker reports that Patri Friedman, the Institute's co-founder and executive director, speaking at a Bay Area conference held last fall, "notes that some enterprises – like euthanasia clinics – would incense local authorities, but almost all the ideas attendees [at that conference] come up with would capitalize on activities that skirt existing laws and regulations: Fish farming and aquaculture. Prisons. Med schools. Gold warehouses. Brothels. Cryonics intakes. Gene therapy, cloning, augmentation, and organ sales. Baby farms. Deafeningly loud concerts. Rehab/detox clinics. Zen retreats. Abortion clinics. Ultimate ultimate fighting tournaments." So what might these platforms look like? Submissions are due by May 1.
The project explores how new forms of habitable infrastructure might be extrapolated from a geopolitical agreement – in this case, materializing architectural form from the legal interstices of the Oslo Accords. The result is a fantastic example of architectural speculation: genuinely massive – and impossibly cantilevered – bridges used as transport links, aerial housing, and skyborne agricultural complexes, all in one.
While clearly defying security protocols, as the "continuous enclave" and its network of bridges cross through sovereign Israeli airspace, these structures would link the dispersed islands of infrastructurally underserved territory now under Palestinian control. From Ramos's own project description:
This thesis takes a formal approach to understanding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by studying mechanisms of control within the West Bank. The occupation of the West Bank has had tremendous effects on the urban fabric of the region because it operates spatially. Through the conflict, new ways of imagining territory have been needed to multiply a single sovereign territory into many. It is only through the overlapping of two separate political geographies that they are able to inhabit the same landscape.
One might say that these bridges present us with the staple as geopolitical form.
"The Oslo Accords," Ramos continues, "have been integral to this process of division."
By defining various control regimes, the Accords have created a fragmented landscape of isolated Palestinian enclaves and Israeli settlements. The intertwined nature of these fragments makes it impossible to divide the two states easily. By connecting the fragments through a series of under- and overpasses, the border between the two states has shifted vertically.
In the following cross-section, you can see the internal stacking of the space – an inhabited borderzone that weaves through the lower atmosphere.
To my mind, the project avoids the most obvious and expected pitfall of such an approach – which would be to suggest, naively, that architecture can, in and of itself, lead to a more thorough and lasting peace in the region, as if the entirety of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would be eradicated if only they had better architecture. Ramos instead uses the Oslo Accords as a kind of spatial source-code from which unanticipated structural forms might be extracted. For those of you who have read Delirious New York, it's as if the Oslo Accords have been turned into a geopolitically active 1916 Zoning Law. That law, of course, established spatial guidelines – for instance, enforcing setbacks for buildings, leading to an era in which skyscrapers rose up like ever-narrowing ziggurats – from which the buildings of Manhattan would then be shaped. As Koolhaas himself writes, in the wake of the Zoning Law architects would "have to carve the final Manhattan archetype from the invisible rock of its zoning envelope in a campaign of specification." In Ramos's project, that "invisible rock" consists of disputed territorial claims hovering virtually over the geography of the West Bank. The distinct new form of spatiality "carved" from that rock is the bypass.
One feature of the Oslo Accords is the bypass road which links Israeli settlements to Israel, bypassing Palestinian areas in the process. These are essential to the freedom of movement for the settlers within the Occupied Territories. Extrapolating on the bypass, this thesis explores the ramifications of a continuous infrastructural network linking the fragmented landscape of Palestinian enclaves. In the process, a continuous form of urbanization has been developed to allow for the growth and expansion of the Palestinian state. Ultimately, this thesis questions the potential absurdity of partition strategies within the West Bank and Gaza Strip by attempting to realize them.
Thus creating what Ramos calls bypass urbanism, or a self-connected maze of new territories in the sky.
There are any number of other directions such a project could go, but I'm particularly excited by the idea of applying this same sort of analysis to other conflict zones, elsewhere, all over the world. Of course, the precedents for this are many. After all, what is the Berlin Wall but a piece of architecture pulled from the dreamscape of international legal infrastructure? In fact, I'm reminded here of Rupert Thomson's under-appreciated recent novel Divided Kingdom – especially because the basic premise of that book was at least partially inspired by Rem Koolhaas's own student thesis project, Exodus, or The Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture. As Koolhaas wrote:
Once, a city was divided in two parts. One part became the Good Half, the other part the Bad Half. The inhabitants of the Bad Half began to flock to the good part of the divided city, rapidly swelling into an urban exodus. If this situation had been allowed to continue forever, the population of the Good Half would have doubled, while the Bad Half would have turned into a ghost town. After all attempts to interrupt this undesirable migration had failed, the authorities of the bad part made desperate and savage use of architecture: they built a wall around the good part of the city, making it completely inaccessible to their subjects.
The Wall was a masterpiece.
The U.S.–Mexico border would seem an obvious place for any investigation of "bypass urbanism" to begin; just today, the New York Times looked at the decaying after-effects of the Dayton Accords and their spatio-sovereign impact on the future of Bosnia; and LebbeusWoods has long explored the architectural effects of political separation, from Paris and Berlin to Israel and Sarajevo, seeking out those fissures wherein geopolitics exhibits its own peculiar form of spatial tectonics. But what new kinds of space might we yet extract from territorial agreements between, say, India and Pakistan over Kashmir, or Turkey and Greece over Nicosia – or, for that matter, what strange infrastructures might we build in Baarle-Hertog, what pavilions inspired by the Akwizgran Discrepancy, and how might most interestingly extract architecture from the international date line?
Even with so many precedents, it would seem, such studies have still barely begun. You can see much, much larger versions of all of these images in this Flickr set: The Continuous Enclave: Strategies in Bypass Urbanism. They are incredibly detailed and well worth exploring in full!
(Viktor Ramos's Continuous Enclave was produced at Rice University. It was advised by Troy Schaum under the direction of Fares el-Dahdah and Eva Franch, with additional input from John Casbarian and Albert Pope).
BLDGBLOG has unexpectedly popped up on a list of The 100 Best Blogs, according to the Times. I'm there alongside some very distinguished company, I have to say, including Owen Hatherley's sit down man, you're a bloody tragedy, and many of the blogosphere's usual suspects, from Boing Boing, TreeHugger, and TechCrunch, to David Byrne, The Sartorialist, and so on. Alex Ross's excellent The Rest Is Noise also made the list (don't miss Ross's book). Of course, there are some very notable absences on the list, not least of which come from the vibrant architecture, cities, and landscape blogging scenes, of which I've always been excited to be a part. The complete roster of 100 blogs is divided up into parts one and two – so check it out if you're looking for new sites to read. And thanks, by the way, for continuing to read BLDGBLOG! It's frightening to say it, but the site's fifth birthday is approaching this summer.
Project H Design recently completed the installation of a "math playground," or Learning Landscape, at the Kutamba School for orphans of AIDS in rural Uganda. Part outdoor classroom, part spatially immersive lesson in arithmetic, the project gives students a place to study in at least two senses of the phrase. On the one hand, it's simply a forum for learning; on the other, it is literally a place to study: the space itself, if I've understood this correctly, serves as a model for play-based education.
That is, within the numbered arrangement of tires and benches is a spatial pedagogy: using the landscape itself, any number of spatialized games, such as "Around The World" and "Match Me," can be used to teach elementary mathematics.
I absolutely love the idea, though, that it might be possible to derive mathematical lessons from the built environment surrounding us. That, somewhere in the walls, roads, and buildings we find ourselves alive within, are equations waiting to be deduced, geometries to be studied, forces that we can isolate, graph, and understand. Whether through games or lectures, it is the spatial world itself that we study.
Of course, this is one of the most basic things you do when you first study engineering: you look at a bridge, tower, or other structure and you try to figure out how it stands or works. Or you stand behind Notre-Dame in Paris, staring at those stone cobwebs of intersecting buttressed supports, and you try to understand how it is that cathedrals gravitationally function. But how incredible would it be to realize that, say, your entire city had actually been organized by urban planners two hundred years ago as a kind of inhabitable lesson in mathematics or logical reasoning, like something from the early theories of Friedrich Froebel? Who? In an unbelievably interesting exhibition held two years ago in Pasadena, the Institute For Figuring explored the educational system of a now relatively under-known man named Friedrich Froebel and his influence on what we now call kindergarten. To quote from their online exhibition at length:
Most of us today experienced kindergarten as a loose assortment of playful activities – a kind of preparatory ground for school proper. But in its original incarnation kindergarten was a formalized system that drew its inspiration from the science of crystallography. During its early years in the nineteenth century, kindergarten was based around a system of abstract exercises that aimed to instill in young children an understanding of the mathematically generated logic underlying the ebb and flow of creation. This revolutionary system was developed by the German scientist Friedrich Froebel whose vision of childhood education changed the course of our culture laying the grounds for modernist art, architecture and design. Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright and Buckminster Fuller are all documented attendees of kindergarten. Other “form-givers” of the modern era – including Piet Mondrian, Wassily Kandinsky and Georges Braque – were educated in an environment permeated with Frobelian influence.
I don't mean to imply here that Project H's "math playground" in Uganda is an example of Froebelian education – because, as far as I'm aware, it is not – but I do mean to say that it would be amazingly cool if the spatial environments of modern life were organized more along educational lines.
[Images: A Froebelian garden for kids – that is, a kindergarten – brings spatial education to Los Angeles in this archival image, courtesy of the The Institute For Figuring].
Your every commute to work becomes part of a spatial curriculum, carving out education through space. One of the questions here would be: could you reverse-engineer mathematical lessons from the environment that already surrounds you? Or do you need to purpose-build pedagogic spatiality? In any case, read more about Froebelian education through the fascinating Institute for Figuring, and stop by Project H Design to find out how you can support the philanthropic construction of future Learning Landscapes elsewhere.
An exhibition called In Search of the Miraculous opened up last night at the Camera Club of New York. It runs till March 28th.
[Image: Two Structures, Death Valley, California, 2007, by Ian Bugaskas, from his series Sweet Water; courtesy of the Jen Bekman Gallery].
While the above image, by photographer Ian Bugaskas, one of the artists represented in the show, is not actually on display there, Baguskas will instead be exhibiting a series called Sansaram (Mountain People), which visually surveys a very particular landscape microculture in South Korea. According to the Camera Club:
Ian Baguskas's portraits made in South Korea of local mountain hikers depict the intersection of recreation and spiritual communion with nature. His project Sansaram from 2005, meaning "people of the mountain," combines landscape views with documentary portraits of native visitors to the Sobaek mountains, encountered on hiking trails. The popularity of this activity can be attributed to the indigenous religion, which is centered on the worship of nature and mountain spirits, and has come to be fused with Buddhism.
The series, visible on Baguskas's website (caution: resizes your browser and requires Flash), is a fascinating look at the intersection of geology and anthropology – in other words, how massive landforms can be appropriated by and incorporated into cultural movements and religious traditions. The human experience of the earth's surface here takes on the form of small picnics, ice cream carts parked on paved platforms, lone hikers gazing out over urban developments below, and families standing quietly in the sun. But behind all of that lies bedrock, a huge intrusion of solid, crystalline form that has pushed up from below into detectability and self-exposure. This reminds me, though, that if I could start a university – or, for that matter, simply teach at one – I would love to form a new department, studio, or program called Landscape Anthropology, a specifically and enthusiastically spatialized look at human culture. From the layouts of medieval villages to the floorplans of corporate bank towers, from national parks and monuments to the strange geotechnical rearrangements we force upon rock, digging tunnels, excavating mines, and installing towns and cities, how do human beings experience the earth? This would seem to be one of the largest and most important questions we could possibly ask. In any case, if you're in New York City between now and March 28, consider stopping by the Camera Club for a glimpse of In Search of the Miraculous.
If you could design a bridge across the Bering Strait, connecting the U.S. to Russia, what would it look like? Come up with something good and you could win as much as $80,000 ($20,000, if you're a student). From the competition website:
This project is a dream project attempting to connect two continents. In a wide sense, it includes building a tunnel or a bridge at both ends of the strait, extending [the] existing railways of the United States and Russia, and laying a world highway around the coasts of the world, which require a massive amount of construction.
Your only two requirements are to design "a peace park with a bridging structure using the two islands, Big Diomede and Little Diomede at the Bering Strait," and a "proposal of how to connect two continents." Of course, Russian engineers have already been considering digging a tunnel between the two continents, and the Discovery Channel has chimed in about how a bridge might actually be built across that "iceberg-swirled ocean near the Arctic Circle." But neither of those plans came with a total of $200,000 in prize money... There's a confusing clock ticking away on the competition website, but you appear to have until March 24, 2009, to register.
I'll be lecturing in New York City at the School of Visual Arts, as part of their fantastic new Design Criticism program, on Tuesday, April 14, in case any of you are in New York that night. I'm on a roster with some really fantastic people, in fact, so definitely check out the rest of the lecture schedule. I'm particularly excited about this talk, at the very least because it's a huge honor to be speaking at the SVA. But I'm also looking forward to discussing post-terrestriality, or the point at which the built environment supersedes the foundation it's based on to become planetary in both scale and implication. From genetically modified crops and artificial wetlands to wholesale plate-tectonic engineering – by way of on-demand weather, constructed reefs, and even ruined buildings mistaken for hills – there is a point at which design infiltrates so thoroughly into the workings of the planet that the Earth's unnaturality, so to speak, becomes impossible to detect. The talk starts at 6pm, is free and open to the public, and will take place at 136 West 21st Street on the 2nd Floor. Here's a map.
(You can read more about the Design Criticism course here).
Benjamin Bratton of The Culture Industry is lecturing tonight at SCI-Arc in Los Angeles, presenting his talk The Program Is Not on the Floor: Stories about Projection, Planning, and Partition. According to SCI-Arc, Bratton's "research, writing, and practical interests include contemporary social theory, the perils and potentials of pervasive computing, architectural theory and provocation, inverse brand theory, software studies, systems design and development, and the spatial rhetorics of exceptional violence." If you go, tell him BLDGBLOG says hello...
Could nearly 4000 oil rigs soon to be decommissioned in the Gulf of Mexico be retrofitted into an American Dubai of offshore luxury hotels? If so, would that really be a good idea?
There are approximately 4,000 oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico varying in size, depth and mobility that will be decommissioned within the next century. If a deck on one of these rigs is about 20,000 square feet, then there is potentially 80 million square feet of programmable space just off the coast of the United States. The current method for rig removal is explosion, which costs millions of dollars and destroys massive amounts of aquatic life. What if these rigs were recommissioned as exclusive resort islands? Could the Gulf be America’s “Dubai” and the rig the artificial island on which to build it? This project examines the possibilities of creating a self-sufficient, eco-friendly high-end resort experience in our own backyard – the Gulf of Mexico.
According to Curbed LA, the hotel rooms themselves "are pre-fabricated, designed to be transported out to the rig as a standard cargo container."
[Images: The rooms arrive by ship – before sliding open to form individual cabinettes. Courtesy of Morris Architects].
Once there, a new world of luxury interiors unfolds above the continental shelf – apparently an ideal environment in which groups of semi-nude women can watch James Bond films.
Of course, if the real Dubai is any model for what might actually happen with such a resort, then we'll probably see dozens of oil rigs partially converted to luxury hotels only then to be abandoned by their construction crews and investors. As the lands of southern Louisiana continue to disappear into the Gulf, heavily armed refugees on fishing boats will move out to sea, recolonizing the derelict structures. There will be campfires at night, burning driftwood, and specialty gardens. Within four or five decades of inconsistent contact, the Library of Congress sends out a new, 21st century Alan Lomax to visit those thriving offshore subcultures and record their folk songs and oral histories.
He discovers a sort of new Kalevala, written by dwellers of empty structures at sea, somewhere between creation myth and national folk history. The Kalevala of Abandoned Oil Rigs. Alas, it turns out to be a latter day Ossian – that is, he just makes the whole thing up.
Or, of course, the economy will recover, this plan will work, and within a decade you'll be suntanning on a platform in the Gulf of Mexico, reading Self.
[Image: "Not-ice! Wonderful phenomenon!" A flyer by the Proprietor of the London Glaciarium, 1844, from the National Library of New Zealand].
From the National Library of New Zealand, this flyer announces a "spectacular event," held in London's Covent Garden back in 1844, "in which a model of Lake Lucerne and a glacier of ice were to be thawed. There would be sledges available for women and children," we read, and "members of the Glaciarium Skating Club were to meet and 'perform their Elegant Evolutions.'" Strangely enough, "the event was to be held in conjunction with a four-day cattle show on adjacent premises." Reproducing the terrains of other nations through simulacra of ice in our streets.
BLDGBLOG ("building blog") is written by Geoff Manaugh. The opinions expressed here are my own; they do not reflect the views of my friends, editors, employers, publishers, or colleagues, with whom this blog is not affiliated. More.
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