Thresholds 40: Socio—

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JOURNAL OF THE MIT DEPARTMENT OF ARCHITECTURE

Editorial Policy Thresholds, Journal of the MIT Department of Architecture, is an annual, blind peerreviewed publication produced by student editors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Opinions in Thresholds are those of the contributors and do not necessarily reflect those of the editors, the Department of Architecture, or MIT. Correspondence Thresholds—MIT Architecture 77 Massachusetts Ave, Room 7–337 Cambridge, MA 02139 thresholds@mit.edu http://thresholds.mit.edu

Published by SA+P Press MIT School of Architecture + Planning 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Room 7–231 Cambridge, MA 02139 Copyright © 2012 Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The individual contributions are copyright their respective authors.

Figures and images are copyright their respective creators, as individually noted.

ISSN 1091-711X ISBN 978-0-9835082-1-2

Book design and cover by Donnie Luu www.donnieluu.com Printed by Puritan Press, Hollis, NH 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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Socio—

Edited by Jonathan Crisman Cambridge, MA

Contents

5 Editorial: Socio-indemnity and Other Motives

— Jonathan Crisman

67 Tuktoyaktuk: Offshore Oil and a New Arctic Urbanism

— Pamela Ritchot 75 Boundary Line Infrastructure

11 Conjuring Utopia’s Ghost

— Reinhold Martin

— Ronald Rael 83 Dissolving the Grey Periphery

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21 Le Corbusier, the Brise-Soleil, and the Socio-climatic Project of Modern Architecture, 1929-1963

— Daniel A. Barber 33 Move Along!

There Is Nothing to See

— Rania Ghosn 39 Flow’s Socio-spatial Formation

— Nana Last 47 Collective Equipments of Power: The Road and the City

— Simone Brott 55 Collective Form: The Status of Public Architecture

— Dana Cuff

— Neeraj Bhatia and Alexander D’Hooghe 91 Park as Philanthropy: Bow-Wow’s Redevelopment at Miyashita Koen

— Yoshiharu Tsukamoto 99 Mussels in Concrete: A Social Architectural Practice

— Esen Gökçe Özdamar 105 Participation and/or Criticality? Thoughts on an Architectural Practice for Urban Change

— Kenny Cupers and Markus Miessen 113 The Sluipweg and the History of Death

— Mark Jarzombek

Contents

121 Extra Room: What if we lived in a society where our every thought was public?

— Gunnar Green and Bernhard Hopfengärtner 127 Sculpture Field: From the Symbolic to the Tectonic

— Dan Handel 135 On Radiation Burn

— Steve Kurtz

— Christian A. Hedrick 175 Hush

— Steven Beckly and Jonathan D. Katz 189 NORCs in New York

— Interboro Partners 209 Uncommon Ground: Aether, Body, and Commons

— Zissis Kotionis

— Amrita Mahindroo 225 The Prince: Bjarke Ingels’s Social Conspiracy

— Justin Fowler 233 Beyond Doing Good: Civil Disobedience as Design Pedagogy

— Hannah Rose Mendoza 237 Aid, Capital, and the Humanitarian Trap

— Joseph M. Watson 245 The End of Civilization

— Daniel Daou 255 Toward a Lake Ontario City

— Department of Unusual Certainties 263 Sociopaths

— Jimenez Lai

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163 Cairo di sopra in giù: Perspective, Photography, and the “Everyday”

217 Edens, Islands, Rooms

Editorial:

Socioindemnity and Other Motives Jonathan Crisman

Jonathan Crisman

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“ Gone are the days of black and white and here is the time of grey. As social linkages have become wildly complex, the normative positions that might bring them order have evaporated. What if, for a moment, the rules were put on hold? What if you could stand up for what you believe in without losing your cool?”

terms), as well as an oblique way of talking about cultural practice achieving social change.

By interrogating what art and architecture can do, we hope to somehow expand our power in the world while simultaneously appearing objective, disinterested, and cool.

If environmental determinism is out, well then we can at least figure out how far out it went.

And this mode of operating is technically legal on the terms of postmodernity—despite an absence of Big Truths, cultural practice is still seen as capable of making little changes.

So the quest for agency happily proceeds on decidedly small terms: performance, covert ops, and opportunism have become its buzzwords.

But what if, rather than lingering on agency, we broke the rules and approached the social head on? The authors in Socio— do so in a variety of ways, none of which are shy, tacky, or, most importantly, disinterested. If their motives have moved past a freedom from social responsibility, they have also moved beyond agency’s subtle discursive claim that it operates without personal gain. As we deal with the possibility of a socially conscious project, we do so with an understanding that society’s gain is our gain. My discussion with Reinhold Martin on the thoughts he lays out in his recent book Utopia’s Ghost serves as an apt introduction to this mode of thinking: it is one that simultaneously embraces the social while acknowledging our decidedly postmodern state of affairs; it is one, in Martin’s words, “where the further inside you go the further outside you get.”

Grounding such a possibility in the history of modernism, Daniel A. Barber describes the social aspect of Le Corbusier’s climatic project. Situating what has been thought to be a well-trodden history on this new basis, Barber demonstrates that there is more still that we might learn from modernism’s foray into the social, a point especially pertinent in light of contemporary environmental concerns. Rania Ghosn, in an unpacking of Rancière’s writing on circulation,

I opened the call for submissions for this issue of Thresholds by mentioning a certain set of “rules.” They are mostly unspoken and chiefly reside in architectural discourse, but they also rear their head in other forms of cultural practice. The rules say that you cannot really achieve social change through cultural media and to even talk about such a silly thing is tacky, taboo, toxic. A key strand of modernism operated with utopian aims and— particularly in the architectural realm—has been accused of failing spectacularly, ushering in a new era of postmodernism. What can form accomplish, anyway? This story, told

by Charles Jenks and subsequently re-told so many times as to become a Truth, is itself ironic considering the supposed evacuation of “big truths” within postmodern thought. The smokescreen of cool inability, however, covers a more sinister fact: by denying the ability to operate on social terms, one is effectively indemnified from social responsibility at the onset. And so we happily went, right up until the economic crisis of the past few years, when most around the world realized that something had gone terribly wrong.

As the age of the icon evaporates, modes of cultural production have scrambled to rediscover ways to operate on terms other than form. Agency is both a conceptual construct through which one can unearth non-formal tools (or re-learn how to use form in political 6

Socio-indemnity and Other Motives

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infrastructural object that itself mediates our fractured public.

Participation is intrinsically linked to the social, and as such prompts further interrogation. An interview with Yoshiharu Tsukamoto of Atelier Bow-Wow

by Casey Goodwin lays out a project that examines notions of participation in practice. Esen Gökçe Özdamar, through examination of a project in Turkey by Arzu Kuşaslan with Antoni Muntadas, presents a argument favorable to traditional notions of participation, particularly within contexts that lack even a basic understanding of this notion.

Kenny Cupers and Markus Miessen, on the other hand, present a critique of conventional notions of participation and argue for a “conflictual” mode of participation.

Diving further into art criticism, Mark Jarzombek examines a question that has haunted humankind since its inception: how we, as a society, deal with death and the afterlife. In his study of both the history of cemeteries within the Dutch context, and a striking work of art by Hans van Houwelingen composed of exhumed tombstones, he touches upon the subject of the “citizen,” UNESCO and it’s theater of the absurd, and, ultimately, the role of death within contemporary society. In a similarly uncanny speculative design project, Gunnar Green and Bernhard Hopfengärtner ask: What if we lived in a society where our every thought was public? Through a projective methodology, they suggest that by interrogating notions of publicity, we can begin to reflect with greater clarity on ourselves.

And Dan Handel’s history of Israeli artist Ezra Orion reminds us of cultural production’s capacity to reflect on society by placing itself outside our frame of reference and into environmental, geologic, and even galactic perspectives.

The next four contributors cast the art tropes of fear, gaze, and sexuality in a fresh, social light. Steve Kurtz of Critical Art Ensemble discusses CAE’s tactical performance art piece, Radiation Burn and, in doing so, provides a means through we can

argues that the social project of architecture is bigger than service provider, be it technical or otherwise. Rather, in Ghosn’s words, it “disturbs the socialized consensual order of solidified social categories by opening the domain of relevant spatial concerns,” operating to reconfigure our very society. Nana Last expands this conversation on circulation, providing a heady rumination on the theory of flow, placing it within historical, political, and spatial terms. Ultimately, she presents flow as a tool through which we can mediate the social and allow architecture and design to act out on their critical instincts. And Simone Brott provides continues this interrogation through new scholarship on a heretofore little known group of French thinkers known as Le CERFI. In the minds of this group led by Felix Guattari, “collective equipments” are what offers potential in modulating social concerns—namely in today’s context, this means infrastructure.

This line of thinking is both prescient and relevant, and several authors in this issue rightly ground their foray into the social within infrastructural terms. Dana Cuff, writing on collective form, demonstrates how infrastructure is, in fact, a latter day res publica and pairs this argument with some of the ground-breaking work coming out of her cityLAB group at UCLA. Pamela Ritchot conjures a future-oriented scenario for the oil-oriented development in the Arctic, suggesting a particularly social solution for the often-overlooked confluence of crises in the farthest North. Moving southwards, Ronald Rael deliberates on a decidedly current issue within the US context: that of border security. Rather than take a theoretical and antagonistic approach toward such a contested problem, Rael jumps into propositions for a social architecture that embrace the dirty reality of border security while aiming to ameliorate some of its most harmful effects.

And Neeraj Bhatia and Alexander D’Hooghe provide both a compelling argument for and design project of a “plinthesis”—an

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Jonathan Crisman

As one of three closing reflections, Daniel Daou places a timeline of what could be called “limits theory” in the direct path of sustainability, that straw man which has recently played such a prominent role in architecture and other modes of cultural production. Through asking what, precisely, humankind’s ends are, he provides a background to the sustainability debate which must be dealt with before all else.

Brendan Cormier and Christopher Pandolfi of Department of Unusual Certainties provide a hallucinatory look into what a new kind of socio-regional urbanism might be within the Great Lakes area, projecting into the future what seems like an uncomfortably plausible reality. And finally, as an apt closing, Jimenez Lai takes issue with the nature of this issue through Sociopaths, an architectural rumination, that begins to question our own perceptions of reality in relation to our fundamental capacity to do good.

In the end, Socio— is much like Ezra Orion’s use of holons: it is a reflection of society, a collective made up of individual pursuits. All of the contributors contained within this volume are artists in their own right, transforming messy realities of the social into poetics of their various media, be they scholarship, forms of art practice, or infrastructural propositions. In a moment where reality has become immaterial and where the horizon is all but grey, Thresholds aims to publish the work of contributors who perform this creative balancing act without equivocation—indeed, the work of those who dare to find a path through the socio-.

begin to “inoculate” ourselves from certain socially constructed untruths—such as the common fear of the “dirty bomb threat.”

Christian Hedrick examines the practice of photographer Randa Shaath with regard to protest in conventional verses “everyday” terms, as demonstrated in the Egyptian Revolution of 2011. His reading of Shaath’s work and its unique perspective of di sopra in giù provides a way to reframe notions such as “the gaze” as once again socially relevant.

Finally, photographer Steven Beckly shares with us his own revisionist history through a project titled Hush, with an insightful response by Jonathan D. Katz who operatively places the series within what could be called an LGBT socio-historiography.

Initiating a discussion within the realm of socio-political concerns, Tobias Armborst, Georgeen Theodore, and Daniel D’Oca of Interboro Partners share their project NORCs in New York, calling our attention to a typology that already exists—but could be improved upon—for aging communities in New York.

Zissis Kotionis provides a fascinating means through which one can unpack the nature of Athenian urban life, mathematically joining the built environment, the social, and what he terms the “deterritorializing aether.” Amrita Mahindroo gives both an alternative history of the Great Bombay Textile Strike and a typological study that effectively critiques neoliberal capital without straying from architectural discourse. Similarly, Justin Fowler reads the work of BIG, incriminating it with “Palin-esque” methodologies which, in the end, also offers a remarkable means of dealing with social issues on the terms given by cultural production.

Finally, Hannah Rose Mendoza provides an unwavering call to arms for those involved with design pedagogy to take issue with social concerns while Joseph M. Watson tempers many of these vigorous arguments with a meta-critique on certain fallacies within what aims to be humanitarian cultural practice.

Images are from Sculpture Field, 1968. Copyright Ezra Orion.

*** Jonathan Crisman is editor for Thresholds, Journal of the MIT Department of Architecture, and has written for the Los Angeles Review of Books and PLAT Journal of the Rice School of Architecture. He has a background in architecture, geography, and urban planning from UCLA and MIT, and is executive director for 58-12 Design Lab, a Los Angeles-based non-profit organization.

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Conjuring Utopia’s Ghost Reinhold Martin interviewed by Jonathan Crisman

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Reinhold Martin

Book cover copyright Duke University Press.

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Book cover copyright Rizzoli.

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Reinhold Martin

Historically, this has to do in part with the troubled afterlife of architectural modernism within many so-called postmodernist works.

This is one of several intended meanings of the book’s title. Without belaboring the point, my overall argument implies that architecture has only belatedly become “postmodern.”

Only today, when it is widely assumed that the affectations of that period have been left behind in favor of a more future-oriented perspective, can we say that architecture has acquired a full complement of properly postmodern characteristics. Especially in the sense that today’s various modernist revivals have finally succeeded in exorcising Utopia’s ghost—almost. That is partly what I mean by insisting that postmodernism is not a style but a discursive formation: a way of speaking about the world and a way of acting in it that makes certain statements possible while excluding others by making them, in effect, unthinkable. Among the latter is Utopia not in the sense of an ideal world, but in the sense of systemic change.

The book’s project is therefore transdisciplinary. It is not merely about architecture and its endgames, or even ways out of those endgames. Instead, I argue that disciplinary knowledge, and the internal debates that structure this knowledge, offers a productive entry point into much more broadly defined problems. So the book offers an architectural theory that is also a form of theory qua theory—that is, a type of discourse that moves across the humanities and social sciences while retaining its particular referent, hence recognizing (indeed, requiring) the specificity of individual disciplines.

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Jonathan Crisman

Your book Utopia’s Ghost1 builds on and, in some sense, attempts to supersede and resynthesize much of what might be considered “canonical” scholarship on postmodernism within architecture—I’m thinking of Jameson, Jencks, and so forth. Does this re-working of existing scholarship—what some might perceive as a subtle attack—come out of a perceived need for a newly performative understanding of postmodernism, the desire to construct a contemporary project in a disciplinary landscape of post-criticality, or something else entirely?2 Reinhold Martin

Well, I would say that the book’s approach is fairly straightforward. It had always seemed to me that there was a distinction to be made between theories of cultural postmodernism and the architectural discourse gathered together under the same name. So first, we must differentiate emphatically between Jameson and Jencks.

It is unfortunate that Jameson and others had to rely on Jencks as a source for postmodernist “theory” in architecture, though Jencks particularly suits Jameson’s symptomal reading. The resulting characterization of architectural works and writings from the 1970s and 1980s as clear-cut symptoms of postmodern dissolution remains quite revealing; nevertheless, it is somewhat premature.3

JC

So the idea of learning to live with Utopia’s ghost—allowing the specter of “systemic change” to live among us—is one you argue would be beneficial for not only architecture, but cultural practice in general and, perhaps, even society at large? If this is so, one such “diviner” might be the Yes Men and their art practice of large-scale pranks that imagine a different world—say, one in which Dow would repair the damage done by Union Carbide in Bhopal,4 a topic also covered

1 Reinhold Martin, Utopia’s Ghost: Architecture and Postmodernism, Again (St. Paul, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).

2 This exchange between Reinhold Martin and Jonathan Crisman occurred via email over a period from January 25, 2011 to May 26, 2011 predating a variety of current events that could relate to notions of “conjuring Utopia’s ghost,” not the least of which is the Occupy Wall Street movement.

3 Postmodernism as a question has recently surfaced in other milieus as well. See Charles Jencks et al., eds., “Radical Post-Modernism,” special issue, AD 81, no. 5 (Sept 2011); Institute of Classical Architecture & Art, Reconsidering Postmodernism, conference proceedings, November 1112, 2011; and Glenn Adamson et al., eds., Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990, London: Victoria & Albert Museum, 2011, exhibition catalog.

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Conjuring Utopia’s Ghost in Utopia’s Ghost regarding the subject of postmodern architecture. Are there other such successful diviners that come to mind?

almost the sole province of the markets, assisted by the state. Or, such a demand may seem pater-nalistic. After all, the welfare state, so well-serviced by architectural modernism, was also a laboratory for working out the sorts of biopolitical protocols and techniques that have since been taken over by multinational capital to administer the global lifeworld.

And yet, what we need is the intelli-gence and imagination to work out systemic alternatives to the status quo. Architecture can help with that, rather directly, by demonstrating possibilities that operate on different premises than those operating a hegemonic system of systems in which life and death are variables in a great game.

JC

Let’s return to housing. In the final chapter of your book, you begin by calling for the revisiting of the “housing question.”5 Similarly, in a recent lecture,6 you called for the reinsertion of the “public” in public housing.

Though the notion of demanding the state to adequately house its population is ridiculous in that it illuminates the state’s inability to do so and, simultaneously, “hopelessly naïve” within a neoliberal framework, it appears to be precisely the type of “unthinkable” thought that the conjuring of Utopia’s ghost entails.

In a parallel train of thought, on the topic of mapping power flows in relation to Union Carbide, your larger narrative appeared to be about the shift from a modern “population” subject toward a postmodern “mass

4 The Yes Men, posing as representatives from Dow Chemical in 2004, distributed a fictitious press release that took responsibility for the disaster in Bhopal and offered reparations for the damage done by Union Carbide. This caused a subsequent $2 billion dip in Dow’s stock, forcing the company to rescind the press release, emphatically stating that they did not take any responsibility for the disaster and would have no part in reparations. See http://theyesmen.org/hijinks/ bbcbhopal.

5 Martin, Utopia’s Ghost, 147. See also, Frederick Engels, The Housing Question (New York: International Publishers, n.d.).

6 Reinhold Martin and Jeffrey Kipnis, “What Good Can Architecture Do?” The Harvard GSD Symposia on Architecture, Nov 16, 2010.

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RM

The chapter in the book that deals with the architecture of Union Carbide in relation to the biopolitics of the Bhopal event was meant to demonstrate certain types of discursive connections through which power flows. Though provocative, one unintended consequence of the intervention by the Yes Men was that some Bhopal victims and their relatives were misled into believing that their claims had been settled. After all, one does not simply speak on behalf of others in unproblematic ways. So yes, agit-prop art practice can be effective in identifying a crisis, pointing out hypocrisy, and even transforming expectations. But I don’t think that any one approach adequately matches the scale of challenge. Systemic change is just that— systemic. And in order to think it, you have to have something like a map of the system.

That is what I have tried to provide.

It is a truism to say that the contemporary world system is composed of linkages and connections. What might be less evident is the nature of the power networks that, in this case, connect Bhopal, India to Danbury, Connecticut. The relations are not causal or linear; the architecture of Union Carbide’s Danbury headquarters did not produce the gas leak. But it contributed to far-reaching networks of subject formation. These networks helped to maintain an international division of labor predicated on the unequal value of “life” in different but mutually dependent accounting regimes. That is why the chapter is about computation, in the end.

To your question, then, of other resistant practices—yes, they abound. That is not the problem. The problem is that the fragile solidarities between regimes of knowledge and practice that would enable a scaling up of alternatives have become largely unthinkable.

Imagine today demanding that the state—any state—adequately house its population. This kind of demand may seem hopelessly naïve in a neoliberal age. Housing, one of modern architecture’s core problems, has become

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customized individual” subject. Could you elaborate on who—or what—might compose the “public” in a newly conceived visit to “public housing” and map its topology in relation to the shifting form of the subject?

Most notably, this architectural “type,” one of the great—if problematic—innovations of modernism, is haunted by a utopian aspiration that is not reducible to neoliberal shibboleths like “public-private partnerships,” which is an oxymoron when viewed from a perspective that emphasizes conflicts between nominally public and private interests rather than some mystical synthesis.

The terms “public” and “private” are themselves artifacts of a modernist sensibility that is clearly inadequate to describe contemporary realities. Yet such apparently outmoded terminology highlights the cultural narratives and norms that are inseparable from these realities. To insist on reimagining public housing is therefore to insist on retaining the category of the public, and with it of collectivity more generally (others speak of a “commons”), as a locus for the development of counternarratives and with them, new mixtures of politics and practice.

Which brings us to the second part of your question. Rather than being outmoded under postmodernity, the modernist public, with its connotations of universality and standardization, has been multiplied, made plural. But this new plurality brings its own dilemmas, not the least of which is its proximity to the forms of life elicited by mass-customized consumerism. Here, the standardization of the modernist masses is replaced by a sort of micro-individuation, whereby subjectivity is divided internally along potentially conflicting lines of desire.

Rather than being liberating, the everexpanding rainbow of choices enabled by mass customization represents a new turn of the historical screw. Its corporate master signifier is Apple instead of IBM. Which, again, is not to say that liberation cannot be sought in digitally produced forms of differentiation, only that these techniques tend to reproduce hegemonic narratives and practices, such as those that oppose the individual to the collective rather than seeing individuality as a function of collectivity.

It would be quite different to think of the hyper-individuated postmodern subject as inherently collective, bound by solidarities of various kinds, rather than as a sort of

RM

It would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that public or social housing and the programs and policies supporting it were a sine qua non of modern architecture in Europe, Latin America, parts of Asia, and to a lesser extent, the United States. That is one reason why the demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe public housing complex in St. Louis in 1972 was received so symbolically by postmodernists. Yes, there were massive, complex problems. But the seemingly incessant repetition of that image, of a “public’s” housing being demolished, and the smug pleasure so many have covertly derived from it, is one of the aesthetic obscenities of our time. It even became national policy in the HOPE VI public housing demolition program, which reflects the influence of the New Urbanism. Still, even in 1972, it did not seem at all ridiculous to expect the state to take responsibility for housing its population, despite the evident failures. That thought only became widely accepted later, with the definitive waning of the welfare state, as the narratives driving privatization were naturalized.

I am not suggesting that the modern welfare state was some kind of utopia. On the contrary, as so much critical social thought has demonstrated, state-based programs for the care and management of populations were notorious disciplinary sites. From housing to prisons to schools to hospitals, such sites were recognized as arenas for the reproduction of institutionalized norms that managed desire, suppressed dissent, and propagated a whole host of unfreedoms. Still all of these institutions, distant progeny of the Western Enlightenment, remain contested sites for the enactment of social justice, as the debates over universal health coverage in the United States have testified. So in that sense, public, or social, housing is fraught with ambivalence and contradiction.

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Book cover copyright University of Minnesota Press.

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meta-consumer. Imagined as a new public for public housing, this collective would emphatically include those who do not live there, as well as those who do.

scholars who have now begun to rewrite the history of architectural postmodernism in its many aspects. It urges them to find ways of taking into account their own historical position. I know that some already have. But what will it take for “postmodern architecture” to be historicized in a way that thoroughly denaturalizes the cavalier attitude toward history that is among its defining characteristics? It will be insufficient to demystify its misnamed “historicism.” Nor will it be adequate to apologize for its supposed formalism. Nor, finally, will it be convincing to break it down into its constituent parts and deal with them one by one without reference to larger processes, or simply to ignore the whole thing entirely in favor of some supposedly less treacherous alternative.

I deliberately refer to postmoder-nism as something like a monolith here, not because anything like that has ever actually existed, but as a way of naming its hegemonic character as a discourse. Postmodernism, understood as a discursive formation, was and remains the name we can give—with all due apology for its reductiveness—to the congeries of cultural practices that step outside of history in order to evade its challenges. By stepping outside of history, I mean backing oneself into a corner, stripped of political agency and left only with a historical imagination grasping at straws, scouring the recent past for overlooked clues, underappreciated precedents, rather than looking right there on the surface of things.

And, again ironically, sometimes the best way to evade the challenges of history is to write history books.

Among the questions posed by the mirror is that of writing a materialist history of so-called dematerialization, including the dematerialization of “the public,” which is one of postmodernism’s alleged hallmarks. I have tried to suggest that, though this question can return into the chambers of historical materialism through the back door, it also

JC

The hegemonic narratives and practices that you mention are curious in that they oppose the individual to the collective while simultaneously espousing ideals of individualism at the expense of the collective.

As Dolores Hayden is fond of pointing out, every owner of a single family home is, in fact, a recipient of government-subsidized housing—the subsidy is simply once removed through tax credits rather than the directly provided through housing projects.7 The notion of imagining a new public as part and parcel of rethinking public housing seems to be crucial for moving beyond the narratives that perpetuate these sorts of practices.

Now, in Utopia’s Ghost, you discuss the mirror in depth—as a feedback loop, as a medium for revealing and obscuring the specters of Utopia, and, perhaps most importantly, as the paradigmatic object of postmodern architecture. Similarly, you discuss the liberation found in seeing the mirror, itself, rather than the image that it contains. Can we facilitate this act of seeing or should we, in fact, eschew the mirror altogether?

RM

It is ironic to think that one can discuss mirrors “in depth,” as you say, but that is indeed what I have tried to do. But I don’t really want to suggest to architects what they should or should not do with mirrors. I only want to suggest that this eminently enigmatic material (thinking of a mirror more as material than as object) deserves a closer look. So the question becomes: how to look at a mirror, rather than in it.

The mirror also poses certain historical questions that double back onto the present. Utopia’s Ghost does not narrate a history; instead, it asks us to think and work historically when we write our history books or, for that matter, when we do anything else. In part, it is addressed to those

7 See Dolores Hayden, Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000 (New York: Pantheon, 2003).

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JC

As a final question, I wonder if you could relate this materiality—and, indeed, the paradoxical historical construction of “postmodernism”—back to the notion of a “plural public.” It seems as though this concept may shed light on one means to unravel these problematic loops.

RM

Yes, we should certainly avoid idealizing “the” public. We are all split, inside and out. And setting aside such idealizations can certainly mean multiplying the body politic or pluralizing the public. But neither is postmodern pluralism—to each their own—an acceptable alternative. Not only are material resources unevenly distributed across any such plurality. As I have tried to show by recontextualizing mass customization, apparently benign pluralism or multiculturalism is often configured around power differentials that, for many, are matters of life and death. So the more urgent question may be one of how to form solidarities across such divides without presuming the a priori existence of something like shared values or even shared interests.

This is quite a burden to place on architecture. It may even be too much to ask of the historical interpretation of architecture, or of any other cultural processes for that matter.

But architecture is an important mediator; you can look at any building and learn something about the world that it imagines, so to speak.

In other words, architecture helps to structure the social imagination. That means that we should be able to analyze any building in terms of the publics, counterpublics, or other collectivities that it anticipates or makes visible, as well as those that it implicitly brackets out.

So when we speak about architecture’s materiality, we are actually speaking about a set of mediating infrastructures, artifacts, and processes. These include but are not limited to the materials from which a building is assembled, the economic factors and systems of production that shape it, the social bodies that pass through it, and so on. But I want to end on what may seem a counterintuitive

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opens onto other, perhaps less teleological, pathways. Consider the mirror’s materiality, its manipulation of light, as a sort of archetypal feedback loop. Interpreting such a loop as a paradigm of historicity, of this-then-thatthen-this-then-that, would mean overturning (or transvaluing) the whole set of values associated with transparency—whether optical, cognitive, or spatial—that channel the historical imagination down a one way street, from here to there, from this to that, and replacing them with a new set.

One way to see this is to look at materiality itself. Glass is not exactly transparent. Nor is its materiality restricted to what is actually visible. Likewise for mirrors, which are not entirely opaque. Similarly, I have tried to show that what we call oil is also an elusive complex of material relationships, some of which interact with supposedly more architectural materials like mirrored glass.

We can extend such an inquiry further, into the historical afterlife of transparent glass, by asking: What does transparency do today?

It divides, repels, excludes just as often as it welcomes, opens out, or includes. That is, it mirrors. Think of all the borderlines that are marked with transparent glass or something like it, as if to say, “welcome” even as the actual message to those defined as nonbelonging, conveyed by microphysical control mechanisms like passwords, card readers, or surveillance cameras, is unambiguously “keep out.”

Such double binds are basic to the type of historical experience we call postmodern.

Mirrored glass enacts transparency as a sort of paradox. Like the whole host of “postmodern” architectural devices with which it combines, mirrored glass does not hide anything. Nor does it mislead, except in helping to produce what I would call the illusion that there is an illusion—the illusion that what you’re looking at or thinking about is not real. But it is real, as real as the resulting double bind, which collapses reality and illusion, and with these, freedom and unfreedom, into a single surface, a sort of closed loop. Unraveling such binds is the principal challenge faced by historical work on the recent past today.

Reinhold Martin

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note, by emphasizing the need to take formal properties into account as well. Form is not a matter of ideology, as is so often said of architectural postmodernism’s language games. Nor does it reflect the autonomy of aesthetic practices. On the contrary, in architecture, form is a precondition for politico-economic immanence; it is among architecture’s ways of being in the world.

As a discourse, architecture mediates social and economic relations by translating or transcoding them into formal equivalents.

Analyze these forms and you are analyzing the world.

*** Reinhold Martin is an architect and Associate Professor of Architecture at Columbia University, where he directs the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, and the PhD program in Architecture. He holds a PhD from Princeton University, as well as degrees from the Architectural Association and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. A founding co-editor of the journal Grey Room, he is also the author of The Organizational Comple: Architecture, Media, and Corporate Space.

20

Le Corbusier, the Brise-Soleil, and the Socio-climatic Project of Modern Architecture, 1929–1963 Daniel A. Barber

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Daniel A. Barber

Le Corbusier’s “vernacular turn” in the 1930s has been a point of much discussion for architectural historians. Why the shift away from purism? Concerns about the climatic performance of a building, it turns out, were paramount—not only to Le Corbusier’s shift, but also to the direction modern architecture would take in subsequent decades. By emphasizing the place of climate in the historiography of Le Corbusier’s turn, we can also indicate that climate-based design methodologies, addressed to problems of shading, ventilation, and interior comfort, are an important and under-recognized aspect of the reception of modern architecture as a social project.

In order to analyze these developments, the historical significance of the brise-soleil will be traced—first, locating it in relationship to the historiography of Le Corbusier’s vernacular turn, second, connecting this discourse to interactions between architectural and climatic sciences in 1930s Brazil, and third, placing the brise-soleil and shading strategies in relationship to the “bioclimatic regionalisms” and “tropical architectures” of the 1950s. From this perspective, Le Corbusier’s vernacular turn initiated an important moment both in the interaction of architectural design with the expanding technological demands of modern living, and also in the contribution of design strategies to the cultural, technological, and bureaucratic regime of global environmental management—a socio-climatic project of modern architecture that has had long-lasting and multivalent effects.

formative years—from the influence of the regionalist painter Charles L’Eplattenier, through his 1911 travels in the Balkans and direct experience of a “pre-modern” culture, to his engagement with the German Werkbund in the late teens and twenties—Passanti writes: He had begun within a movement seeking to invent a regionalist style, and he had ended by arguing, with Loos and Muthesius, that modern culture is best described by the work of those anonymous people, notably engineers, who don’t try to invent a new aesthetic . 1

The integration of “found,” or vernacular, knowledge and of the practices of anonymous engineers, Passanti continues, was central to the modern architectural project: As a conceptual model this notion of the vernacular was important, because it could open architecture to redefinition. ...

The vernacular model insisted on connecting architecture to something external to it, the identity of society; and it further insisted that such a connection be not invented but found. ...

In the case of Le Corbusier, the vernacular model provided a conceptual structure for integrating the new inputs into the discipline of architecture and for broadening its vocabulary and responsibilities. 2

Conceptual Constants

In his essay “The Vernacular, Modernism, and Le Corbusier,” Francesco Passanti argues that the strength of early architectural modernism was its potential to integrate traditional design concepts with the new forms and materials emerging from the processes of industrialization. Tracing Le Corbusier’s

Passanti proposes that the “conceptual model” of the vernacular was “a constant, articulating the persistent hope for a natural and organic modern society, and for a natural relationship of modern society and architecture;” a constant, Passanti insists, because it persisted through his turn from purism.3 22

Le Corbusier, the Brise-Soleil, and the Socio-climatic Project

ambitions. At the same time, Porteous sees the contemporaneous Immeuble Wanner (19281929), an unbuilt project for Geneva, as even more innovative and transformative in this regard, organizing the five points in creative combination to productively address climatic impacts. The Wanner project led to a different design for the same client in the Immeuble Clarté (1932–1933), to which I will return.

The structure of this vernacular model is also significant to our understanding of the conceptual and methodological importance of the brise-soleil. The emergence of modern architectural shading techniques can be mapped onto Passanti’s model in three ways.

First, the brise-soleil was a “vernacular” object insofar that it followed on the use of overhangs and other methods of shading in folk or so-called primitive architectures— including, significantly, the pre-modern architecture of Brazil. Second, it was “found”

by Le Corbusier in Brazil and in other regions peripheral to the western European discourse as a “native” response to the twentieth-century problem of building multi-story concrete structures with glazed facades. Third, the quasi-scientific architectural and sociological discourse generated by the proliferation of the brise-soleil after World War II operated on Passanti’s terms—as a form of architectural integration of “new inputs.” Such inputs developed in concert with other concerns over climate, providing a mechanism for both the dynamic expansion of architectural vocabulary and for the delicate insertion of architectural methods into the new responsibilities of the economic, industrial, and environmental management of the post-colonial global South.

If the vernacular model is a constant in the development of modern architecture chez Le Corbusier, so is a general concern for interior climatic comfort. The development of the brise-soleil and the broader dissemination of shading techniques can be seen as part of a general concern with ventilation, light and air, and other health-related issues that framed the theories and practices of the early modern movement.4 Colin Porteous has recently emphasized that at least three of Le Corbusier’s “Five Points” of 1926 relate directly to producing a salutary relationship between internal and external climatic conditions.5 Porteous reads the Villa Savoye (1928) as central to Le Corbusier’s inter-war production because it realized his climatic as much as his formal and constructive

Climate and the Vernacular Turn

1 Francesco Passanti, “The Modern, the Vernacular, Le Corbusier” in Vernacular Modernism: Heimat, Globalization, and the Built Environment, ed. Maiken Umbach and Bernd Huppauf (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 153.

2 Ibid., 156.

3 Passanti continued: “As Mary McLeod has shown, what changed was the sense of where to seek the fulfillment of such a hope. During the 1920s, Le Corbusier sought it in the rationalist and abstract organization of industry and its products; later, disillusioned by them, he sought it in a more direct and holistic connection of people with people, and people and techniques.” Ibid., 155.

4 See Paul Overy, Light, Air and Openness: Modern Architecture Between the Wars (London: Thames and Hudson, 2008), which discusses the importance of these concerns to the Central European developments of modernism.

5 Colin Porteous, The New Eco-Architecture: Alternatives from the Modern Movement (London: Taylor and Francis, 2002), 51-55. For Porteous, the plan libre and façade libre enable spatial configurations that “promote routes for natural thermocirculation”; the fenetre en longeur and the related pan de verre allow for deep light penetration. The fourth point, the jardins suspendu, further amplified the salubrious effects of these various elements.

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Amidst these conceptual constants— of climate and the vernacular—there is nonetheless a significant shift in the treatment of form, materials, and building processes evident in Le Corbusier’s work of the 19291936 period. Kenneth Frampton proposes that the turn away from purism and the crystallization of a new direction was first evident in the unbuilt Maisons Loucher (1929). The Loucher project had a combined structural system of pilotis, a steel frame, and a local rubble-stone party wall, intended to be built by local masons. The trend continued in the Maison Errazuris (1930), a project for a coastal site in Argentina, which is cited by

Daniel A. Barber

Frampton as the point “in which Le Corbusier made a total break with the Purist machine aesthetic in that the double-height volume of the house was to be covered by monopitched roofs sloping inwards toward a central gutter.”6 As Frampton describes it, through these and other examples, Le Corbusier’s “turn” was conditioned by the possibility of integrating traditional practices and materials with modern methods and designs FIG. 1 .7 FIG. 2 — Le Corbusier, Cité des Refuges, Paris, 1933 (model).”

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to harness the materials, resources, and sites necessary to further the project of the modern office building as a climatic management object FIG. 2 .8 In both of these projects, Le Corbusier’s vision was focused on an active climatic strategy he called respiration exacte, one of the more prominent early proposals for a complete system of heating, ventilation, and air conditioning. As Frampton described it: A building was supposed to be heated and cooled by tempered air being distributed throughout via an allenveloping plenum, integral with its outer skin. These “neutralizing walls,” as [Le Corbusier] called them, were to be made up of an inner and outer glass membrane, with an airspace in between, constituting a jacket through which either warmed or cooled air would be passed through according to the season of the year. 9

FIG. 1 — L e Corbusier, Maison Errazuriz, Argentina, 1930 (unbuilt) and Maison de Weekend, Paris, 1934.”

Historians have also looked to the parallel emergence of the brise-soleil to understand the origins and significance of Le Corbusier’s turn. At issue is the purported climatic efficiency of the sealed glass curtain wall. The Immeuble Clarté in particular, as Frampton notes, was designed right after Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret—accustomed, as Frampton puts it, to “over-reaching themselves technically”—had come closest to realizing their “technocratic vision.” At both the Cité des Refuge (1929-1933) in Paris and the Centrosoyuz (1928-1936) in Moscow, that vision relied on the power of public agencies

Such a system was proposed in both Paris and Moscow, though bureaucratic budget cutting frustrated both attempts. The insulating curtain walls were built, hermetically sealing the buildings, but little or no mechanical ventilation or air conditioning was employed.

The result was in both cases a greenhouse box, cold in the winter and unbearably hot in the summer.

Frampton proposes that the technological and bureaucratic barriers that prevented Le 24

Le Corbusier, the Brise-Soleil, and the Socio-climatic Project

FIG. 3 — Le Corbusier, Immeuble Clarté, Geneva, 1930-32. From Le Corbusier, Oeuvre Complete, 1910-69.

The Brise-soleil in Brazil

As Banham also pointed out, Le Corbusier had an explicit internationalist program for the respiration exacte, intending to produce “one single building for all nations and climates.”13 From the ‘30s to the ‘50s, before the widespread use of mechanical HVAC systems, the brise-soleil operated on these terms—as a techno-cultural object able to mediate a variety of climatic conditions.

Following the Clarté experiment, the brisesoleil was proposed for the Maison Locative (1933) at Algiers. This project, a 12-story hillside tower, also called for the misconceived respiration exacte, but included a concrete 6 Kenneth Frampton, “Le Corbusier and Oscar Niemeyer: Influence and Counterinfluence, 1929-1965,” in Latin American Architecture, 1929-1960: Contemporary Reflections, ed. Carlos Brillembourg (New York: Monacelli Press, 2004), 37.

7 Other relevant examples include the Maison de Weekend (1935), the first Maison Jaoul project (1937), the projected Roq et Rob vacation houses (1949), and the second Maison Jaoul (1952-54). See Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1986), 224; and Kenneth Frampton, Le Corbusier (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2001), 130-149.

8 Frampton, Le Corbusier, 101.

9 Frampton, “Le Corbusier and Oscar Niemeyer,” 101. See also Porteous, The New Eco-Architecture, 67.

10 Frampton, Le Corbusier, 101.

11 Reyner Banham, Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 158.

12 Porteous, The New Eco-Architecture, 62.

13 Banham, Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment, quoting Le Corbusier in Precisions (1930).

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Corbusier from successfully implementing the respiration exacte system led to a lifechanging “loss of faith in the manifest destiny of the machine age,” and thus to a new approach to climate that would first develop at Immeuble Clarté.10 Reyner Banham is somewhat more ambivalent in summarizing these events, indicating that “Le Corbusier’s obstinate environmental misapprehensions” at the Cité des Refuges led to “the invention of the brise-soleil,” while conceding that “there can be no doubt that, however desperate its motivations, the brise-soleil is one of [Le Corbusier’s] most masterly inventions, and one of the last structural innovations in the field of environmental management.”11

At the Immeuble Clarté, Le Corbusier did not attempt a mechanically sophisticated system. The building deployed a collection of low cost, user intensive, and formally dynamic sun-shading devices—balconies, external blinds, retractable awnings, and interior shutters blocked and modulated solar incidence FIG. 3 .12 Though much more than a brise-soleil, the basic principle was established: as part of the turn away from his faith in the machine age, Le Corbusier proposed architectural elements to manage those interior climatic conditions that the mechanical systems approach had proven unable to engage.

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Daniel A. Barber

Designed by a team of Brazilian architects including Lucio Costa, Oscar Niemeyer, Alfonso Reidy, and others—and with extensive consultation by Le Corbusier—it established the international model for a climatically sensitive modern office building FIG. 5. The north (sun-facing) facade has three-fin modules of operable louvers in egg-crate frames, suspended from a balcony for heat dispersion. The south facade is unshaded glass, and the blind walls at each end are sheathed in pink marble.

In plan, the design proposed a simple rectangle for the tower, offset by a more organic volume for the theater.

Brazil in the 1940s, isolated from the world at war, saw what was likely the largest

FIG. 4 — O scar Neimeyer, Obra do Berço, Rio de Janeiro, 1937.

From Heinrich Mindlin, Modern Architecture in Brazil, 1955.

grid of protruding shading elements on the sun exposed facades.14

This basic formula was reproduced by a number of Corbusier-influenced architects in Brazil: by early 1936, MMM Roberto’s Associação Brasileira de Imprensa (ABI) and Oscar Niemeyer’s Obra do Berço, both in Rio de Janeiro, established the use of varied brisesoleil facades to manage internal climate.15 Whereas the ABI, like the Maison Locative, had uniform fixed diagonal slabs on the north and west facades, the more sophisticated Obra do Berço had independent, operable brise-soleil on each floor. This operability, as well as the capacity for different treatments for different orientation or programmatic conditions, established the model for sun-shading FIG. 4 .

The Ministerio da Educação e da Saúde (MES) building (1936–1943), also in Rio, was the culmination of this early period.

FIG. 5 — O scar Neimeyer, Lucio Costa, Alfonso Reidy, et al., Ministry of Education and Health, Rio de Janeiro, 1936-1943. From Victor and Aladar Olgyay, Solar Control and Shading Devices, 1957.

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Le Corbusier, the Brise-Soleil, and the Socio-climatic Project

make it possible to calculate accurately and solve any sunlight problem.”17

Mindlin’s second factor was “the development of an advanced technique for the use of reinforced concrete.” The industrial infrastructure of Brazil, he noted, already allowed for widespread use of concrete; additional concrete for the brise-soleil was thus an exceptionally efficient means to manage internal climate. Mindlin’s third factor touches on Passanti’s “conceptual constant”: “Reminiscences of and variations on the traditional colonial screens and shutters are frequently found in the details of the brisesoleil, [leading to] expressions of the past re-occurring in the vernacular now being formed.” This integration of the vernacular with contemporary demands of climatic management suggest how a formal approach could connect design methodology to economic and political concerns.18

14 The Greek-Brazilian architect Stamo Papadaki is seen by Jeffrey Aronin, Porteous, and others as the first to use the brise-soleil in his proposed Christopher Columbus Memorial Lighthouse of 1928. See Jeffrey Aronin, Climate and Architecture (New York: Reinhold, 1953).

15 Costa was appointed director of the Esquela Nacional de Bellas Artes in 1930, right after Le Corbusier’s first trip to Brazil, largely as a result of his allegiance to Corbusian modernism.

16 Mindlin, Modern Architecture in Brazil, 11. Mindlin initially wrote the book—with an introduction by Sigfried Giedeon—to accompany the 1943 Brazil Builds exhibition at MoMA. 17 Ibid., 11.

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sustained production of modern buildings up to that point. The brise-soleil was a necessary component of the work of Niemeyer, MMM Roberto, Luiz Nuñes, Paulo Antunes Ribeiro, and many others working in Brazil and gaining international attention FIG. 6 . Brazilian architect and historian Henrique E. Mindlin, in his Modern Architecture in Brazil (1955), is matter of fact about the centrality of both the brisesoleil and of Le Corbusier to the proliferation of modern architecture in Brazil from the mid-’30s. “The brise-soleil,” Mindlin wrote, “(in Portuguese quebra-sol or ‘sun-breaker,’ but that the French expression is commonly used indicates its direct derivation from Le Corbusier) has been applied in Brazil in the greatest variety of ways.”16 Mindlin argued for the importance of the brise-soleil according to three main factors. First, he described the importance of “research into the functions of sunlight” in São Paulo engineering schools at the turn of the century, and the consequent development of “a scientific basis for the orientation and sun-lighting of buildings” in architecture schools by the mid-’20s. As Mindlin summarized, “easily handled sunlight graphs and tables, in general use by architects for decades now,

FIG. 6 — M MM Roberto, Seguradoras Building, Rio de Janeiro, 1949. From Victor and Aladar Olgyay, Solar Control and Shading Devices, 1957.

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Daniel A. Barber

Beyond Mindlin’s mid-century analysis, the MES has been regarded recently as central to another “conceptual constant” that weathered the vernacular turn: Le Corbusier’s investment in the bureaucratic elite as the ideal client for modern architecture. In the post-war period, this tendency allows for connections to be drawn to the thenemergent bureaucracy of global environmental management. Le Corbusier had always been interested in engaging figures of authority— politicians, technocrats and bureaucrats, engineers, and civic leaders—on his travels.

Yonnis Tsiomis has recently proposed that this was especially the case during the 1936 visit to Brazil, due in large part to Le Corbusier’s frustration with the conditions in Europe.19 Such interest was no doubt encouraged by the near-direct invitation to Brazil extended by the client of the MES, the Minister of Education and Health Gustavo Campanema. Much like Raoul Dautry and Eugene Claudius-Petit, Ministers of Reconstruction et Urbanisme in France right after the war and Le Corbusier’s clients on the well known Unite d’Habitation (1952), among other buildings, Capanema was a high-ranking official devoted to modern architecture on cultural terms, and supportive of it as a public representation of his own modernization initiatives and strategies. If Le Corbusier had lost faith in the manifest destiny of the machine age, he had not lost his interest in architecture as a technobureaucratic device for managing industrial growth and shaping social conditions. In this context, the brise-soleil came to be a provocative formal and technological response to the climatic, political, and economic pressures encountered by architects working in tropical regions.

Post-war Proliferations

After the war, the brise-soleil­was central to two innovations of the modern architectural discourse: the “bio-climactic

regionalism” codified by Victor and Aladar Olgyay, and the “tropical architecture” approach summarized by Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew. Both developments were modeled on the Corbusian use of the brise-soleil. The Olgyays summarized their method through a comparative analysis of Mies’s 1951 Lake Shore Apartments (reliant on a large mechanical ventilation system); Harrison & Abramowitz’s 1954 Republic Bank in Dallas (an aluminum “breathing wall”); Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill’s 1952 Lever House (with custom tinted glass effective for deflecting summer radiation but not for keeping winter heat in); and finally, Le Corbusier’s 1953 Unité d’Habitation. As the Olgyays explained, “The last example illustrates a radiation control solution with shading devices. The method is fundamentally sound. Interception of the energy happens at the right place—before it attacks the building. ... Here, by shaping the devices according to the changing seasonal sun-path, both summer shading and utilization of winter energies can be performed.”20 Noting that Le Corbusier—at least at the Unité—did not carefully consider all of these climatic elements, especially as regards the building’s orientation, they nonetheless saw themselves following Le Corbusier by using the brise-soleil as an architectural solution to climatic challenges.

The Olgyays’ method was based on using diverse shading devices on different facades in combination with operable louvers to provide heating, cooling, and ventilation amidst numerous climatic conditions. A “bioclimatic” building, they proposed, organized an “interlocking field of balance” between regional climate, technological possibility, biological knowledge, and architectural technique.21 Their method involved analyzing suncharts to identify potential “overheated” and .

18 Ibid.

19 Yonnis Tsiomis, “Introduction,” in Le Corbusier, Conferences de Rio: Le Corbusier au Bresil, 1936 (Paris: Flammarion, 2006), 67.

20 Victor Olgyay and Aladar Olgyay, Solar Control & Shading Devices (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), 7.

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Le Corbusier, the Brise-Soleil, and the Socio-climatic Project

mediate betweenpolitical, social, and climatic complications.

In conclusion, it is important to note that the globalization of the environmental discourse, occurring in this same period, also depended heavily on the conceptual formulation of “the tropics” on the part of Western European and American industrialists and bureaucrats.24 The Olgyays interest in climate converges with a broader interdisciplinary effort, involving the natural and social sciences, to articulate a socio-political concept of the environment. The tropical architecture discourse further suggests an intertwining of formal, technological, and bureaucratic histories in managing the ecological and economic conditions of industrial development.

The point here is not to invest architectural strategies with explicit political import, but rather to indicate the continuing impact of the architectural discourse on tropes of modernity and modernizaton. At the limit, an expanded history of modern architecture can engage the socio-climatic legacy of inter-war innovations for their implications—intentional or otherwise—in the production of cultural, technological, and bureaucratic regimes of global environmental management. This brief history of the brise-soleil suggests a vital connection between the formal implications of Le Corbusier’s vernacular turn, and the geopolitical and geoeconomic significance of climatic management—one that is inflected anew amid the current concern over a warming climate.

21 Victor Olgyay and Aladar Olgyay, Design with Climate: Bioclimatic Approach to Architectural Regionalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963), 12.

22 The contemporary building performance modeling software Autodesk Ecotect appears to be based directly on the Olgyays’ method.

23 Ibid., 25.

24 Although tropical rainforest deforestation is only a small piece of the environmental crisis, the “rainforest connection” has since the 1950s “been central in the scientific and popular construction of global-change knowledge.” See Peter J. Taylor and Frederick H. Buttel, “How Do We Know We Have Environmental Problems? Science and the Globalization of the Environmental Discourse,” Geoforum 23, no. 3 (1992): 410.

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“underheated” periods; testing site-orientation against sunlight modeling systems; determining the contextual “sky-vault” conditions of existing shading elements; and calibrating it all to determine an appropriate “sun-mask” shape which correlated to a specific shading device strategy FIG. 7 .22 Through this complex system, the Olgyays participated in a dramatic re-conception of the internal environment of a building, directing their efforts towards producing an optimum zone for human activity.

Somewhat ironically, their careful method to determine “thermal comfort” would be rescripted to fit the specification parameters for mechanical HVAC systems as the ‘50s progressed FIG. 8 .

Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew’s Tropical Architecture in the Dry and Humid Zones (1956), the 1953 conference it summarized, their 1947 Village Housing in the Tropics, and their involvement with the planning of Chandigarh in the 1950s also reflected the influence of Le Corbusier and of the brise-soleil on the postwar discourse of climate and architecture. Their work is also explicit about how the climatic facility of modern architecture led to a regional approach of managing industrialdevelopment after the collapse of colonial regimes.

The argument in Tropical Architecture in the Dry and Humid Zones is tied to narratives of economic development. Following the dissolution of direct British control of former West African colonies, Fry and Drew advocated for design principles that facilitate economic and infrastructural management FIG. 9 . “The act of building,” Fry and Drew wrote, “must probe deeply into the productive possibilities of a country... leading to a more complete and more secure mastery over circumstances.”23 Passive climate mitigation, they argued, provided better conditions for economic growth in areas removed from infrastructure: it both improved the living conditions of the worker and provided comfortable accommodations for western agents of industry and government.

Tropical architecture’s innovations can be seen as attempts to use architecture to

FIG. 7 — Victor and Aladar Olgyay, Vocabulary of Shading Devices. From Victor and Aladar Olgyay, Solar Control and Shading Devices, 1957.

FIG. 8 — Victor and Aladar Olgyay, Schematic Bioclimatic Index. From Victor and Aladar Olgyay, Solar Control and Shading Devices, 1957.

30

FIG. 9 — Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, British Petroleum Building, Lagos, 1960. From Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, Tropical Architecture in the Dry and Humid Zones, 1964.

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Daniel A. Barber

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Daniel A. Barber

*** Daniel A. Barber is an architectural historian analyzing affinities between the history of architecture and the emergence of environmentalism in the 20th century. Daniel received a BA in Comparative History of Ideas from the University of Washington, and a PhD in Architecture (History and Theory) from Columbia University. He also holds a Master of Environmental Design from the Yale School of Architecture, and an MFA in Studio Art from Mills College.

32

Move Along!

There Is Nothing to See Rania Ghosn

Rania Ghosn

“ The police say there is nothing to see, nothing happening, nothing to be done, but to keep moving, circulating; they say that the space of circulation is nothing but the space of circulation. Politics consists in transforming that space of circulation into the space of the manifestation of a subject: be it the people, workers, citizens. It consists in reconfiguring that space, what there is to do there, what there is to see or name.

It is a dispute about the division of what is perceptible to the senses.” thresholds 40

— Jacques Rancière 1

In a meditation on the French revolt of May 1968, the philosopher Jacques Rancière established a theoretical framework, presenting “the political” as an unremitting confrontation in the name of equality between police and politics. Rancière defines the notion of police as “a symbolic constitution of the social,” which defines society as parts by naming an order of intelligible bodies and sensory experiences. Politics, on the other hand, is distinguished from this notion as the partaking in the “common.” It is the manifestation of dissensus from those who have no part in the police’s “distribution of the sensible,” and the subsequent rupture of the normal distribution of roles, places, and occupations within.

What is the significance of space in the unremitting confrontation between police and politics? The distinctive spatiality of Rancière’s thought makes it compelling for addressing the politics of the socially conscious project, and distinguishing between a police project, which reproduces a consensual space of communitarian interests, and a project that constantly interrogates already-defined social projects

in the name of equity. According to Rancière, the police operate to reproduce consensus by the adulation of “communitarianism,” which reduces the social to the closure of identity politics. The police further contain politics by defining and appropriating a “space of flows,” which inherently prohibits a subject-position. The verbal intervention to break up demonstrations, “Move along!

There is nothing to see,” illustrates how the organization of space operates toward the consolidation of police order. For Rancière, the police intervention is less about interpellating individual demonstrators in public space (i.e., the “hey, you there” of the interpellating cop in Louis Althusser’s staging2 of how ideology functions). Rather, the police seek to parcel out places and forms of participation in a common world. They are concerned with the definition of a domain of the sensible, a partition between what is visible and what is not, what is say-able and what is not, within that order.3 “Move along!

There is nothing to see” seeks to control the sensible by establishing certain modalities and ranges of perception while denying others. The impossibility of the witness is a necessary apparatus of the police. Political beings whose politic the police do not wish to acknowledge are denied a voice “by not understanding what they say, by not hearing that it is an utterance coming out of their mouths.”4 Similarly, political spaces whose politic the police do not wish to address are externalized to the banlieue, the hinterland, or the underground. They are dropped into black holes of representation or blurred by the speed of moving along.

Rancière’s thought provides a reading of the social as an anti-political apparatus of

1 Jacques Rancière, “Ten Thesis on Politics,” Theory and Event 5, no. 3 (2001).

2 Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: New Left Books, 1971), 163.

3 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics (London: Continuum, 2004), 84. See also, Jacques Rancière, “Politics, Identity and Subjectivization,” October 61 (1992): 58-64.

4 Rancière, “Ten Thesis on Politics,” 8.23.

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Move Along! There Is Nothing to See

unimpeded growth of complex networks of flows. To favor the predominance of a frictionless space of circulation, urbanization implied a contract of non-violence, which tended toward the reinforcement of consensus.

However, denial by the police of a surplus of “community parts” inevitably produces remainders from within, against which politics arise. The contours of disagreement, for Rancière, emerge as those who are denied a part in a given order embark in a process of de-classification as a function of an injustice that needs to be addressed. Whereas identification is a reproducible difference at the service of consensus, subjectivization is the process by which the part-with-no-part “extracts itself from the dominant categories of identification and classification.”10 This struggle necessarily entails a “clash between two partitions of the sensible,” a noise that the unacknowledged part makes in an embodiment of a capacity of enunciation that was not previously articulated.11 Such political action is neither conflict between one who says white and another who says black, nor a transformation of the processes of exclusion to include those who are discriminated against. Disagreement, for Rancière, is “the conflict between one who says white and another who says white but does not understand the same thing by it or does not understand that the other is saying the same things in the name of whiteness.”12 The politics of subjectivization is thus less resistance within particular divisions, and more dissensus around the partitioning and control of the sensible.

5 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1991), 41.

6 Ibid., 319.

7 Jacques Rancière, “Dissenting Words: A Conversation with Jacques Rancière,” Diactrics 30, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 113-126.

8 Rancière, “Ten Thesis on Politics,” 8.22.

9 Erik Swyngedouw, “Circulations and Metabolisms: (Hybrid) Natures and (Cyborg) Cities,” Science as Culture 15, no.

2 (2006): 105-121; Matthew Gandy, “Rethinking Urban Metabolism: Water, Space and the Modern City,” City 8, no. 3 (2004): 363-379.

10 Rancière, Politics of Aesthetics, 92.

11 Rancière, “Ten Thesis on Politics,” 8.25.

12 Jacques Rancière, Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans.

Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).

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rule that disciplines disagreement in terms commensurate with an order of intelligible bodies, a distribution and counting of the parts of society. The police, according to Rancière, is the structured embodiment of the common through the process of identification, which, in the name of consensus, categorizes every individual into specific identifiable “profiles”—such as “populations,” or “communities.” Identification is further reinforced with the conflation of social and spatial formations, which tames and naturalizes difference to reinforce consensus.

Henri Lefebvre, another protagonist of the ‘68 events, emphasizes the spatiality of the police by arguing that the exercise of the social is fundamentally a spatial project, for “what is an ideology without a space to which it refers, a space which it describes, whose vocabulary and links it makes use of, and whose code it embodies?”5 The space of the police, or what Lefebvre refers to as abstract space, dissimulates the violence of its ordering behind a homogeneous appearance which subsumes distinctions into specialized spaces, “subdivided into spaces for work and spaces for leisure, into daytime and nighttime spaces.”6 The dead end of the political lies precisely in the identification of politics with the body of the community as consensus becomes “the suppression of the litigiousness constitutive of the political and identitarianism the flip side of this suppression.”7

“Move along! There is nothing to see” is the assertion that “the space of circulating is nothing other than the space of circulation.”8 The police parcel out the common in terms of social groups and their respective identities and places. This act, and the carving out of the space of circulation, are an exclusive domain for the police’s reinforcement of the distribution of parts. The space of circulation divides into the dynamic and static, into the moving and the still, to ensure a continuous flow. When William Harvey promulgated his ideas on the double circulation of blood in the vascular system of the human body in 1628, the concept began to permeate and infiltrate urbanism and intellectual thought.9 The “ideology of circulation” associated the modern city with efficient organization and

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Rania Ghosn

Published by Duke University Libraries, in The Emergence of Advertising in America: 1850 –1920, 1913.

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Move Along! There Is Nothing to See

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Published by Duke University Libraries, in The Emergence of Advertising in America: 1850 –1920, 1912.

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Politics consist of transforming the space of circulation into a space for the manifestation of a subject.13 In a divided, streamlined space, bodies move away from their designated parts. The part-with-nopart stands still to assert multiple possible meanings of whiteness. In the process, space is no longer the domain for the reinforcement of a social order but, rather, the apparatus through which politics are engaged. While the space of flows requires protestors to clear the streets, to move along, the act of standing still refigures what there is to do in the streets, what there is to see or to name. The demonstration of rights opens up the politics of the formations of the common, away from the closure of defined social categories.

If the social is, above all, a certitude about what is not there, then May ‘68 was, above all, a massive refusal to see in the social what we usually see: nothing more than the narrowest of identity categories and the reproduction of consensus. In May ‘68 and its Afterlives, Kristen Ross argues that the identification of the events with the identity or interests of the “students,” obscures the broader political significance of the uprisings: the events were only loosely tied to a “youth revolt” and were more concerned “with displacements that took people outside of their social identifications, with a disjunction, that is, between political subjectivity and the social group.”14 The protestors refused the closure of assigned categories—be it based on generation, class, or nationality—and their identification with spatial spheres.

So how can Rancière’s reconfiguration of the political be significant to architecture’s political project? Can architecture disrupt the closure of social symbols by interrogating the construction of solid social concepts and of fixed or defined subject positions? Can it look precisely into where “there is nothing to see” to differently represent the common? Michael Hays proposes architecture as a “socially symbolic production whose primary task is the construction of concepts and subject positions,” a way of “negotiating the real, [of] intervening in the realm of symbols and signifying processes at the limit of the social order itself.”15 In his call for the “science of

the imaginary,” Reinhold Martin presents two particularly urgent tasks of the aesthetic and the territorial: the first, which “makes the invisible visible,” the second which “breaks open the enclosure and enclaves that disposes these outside or inside of both political and cultural representation.”16 As the propositions by Rancière, Hays, and Martin suggest, architecture can be a process of declassification that disrupts the social significance of places and their correspondence with identity-communities.

Architecture can interrogate the assumptions and representations that sustain circulatory flow. Thus, a socially conscious project does not seek to solve inequalities or promote a social character for spaces. It is not caught in the socially relevant categories as defined and reproduced in political circles. Rather, it seeks to challenge existing categories as a process of continuous intervention in the name of equality. This project is fundamentally political at the moment it disturbs the socialized consensual order of solidified social categories by opening the domain of relevant spatial concerns. It brings spaces that were previously erased as insignificant matters of fact into focus as matters of concern.17 Architecture is political when it engages in a quarrel on perceptible givens, calling into question nothing less than the spatial and perceptual organization of our world.

13 Rancière, Dis-agreement, 30.

14 Kristin Ross, May ‘68 and its Afterlives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 3.

15 K. Michael Hays, Architecture’s Desire: Reading the Late Avant-Garde (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010): 1.

16 Reinhold Martin, “Moment of Truth,” Log 7 (Winter/Spring 2006): 15-20.

17 Bruno Latour, “Why has Critique run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry 30, no. 2 (Spring 2004): 225-248.

*** Rania Ghosn is an architect, geographer, and currently Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Michigan. She completed a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Boston University, and holds degrees from American University of Beirut, University College London, and Harvard University. She has taught at a number of schools and has written for a variety of journals, including New Geographies where she is Founding Editor. Her research explores nature, technology, and power, highlighting the territorial domain of infrastructure, particularly that of energy.

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Flow’s Socio-spatial Formation Nana Last

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Nana Last

Emerging at the confluence of order, agency, and socio-spatial formation is the architectural question of flow. Invoked from the genetic and molecular levels to wide-scale socio-economic processes, material logics, and natural formations, flow is at once formal, material, operational, environmental, and experiential. It is seen to arise in various formations and systems, ranging from building and climatic to environmental and informational.

In the dictionary, flow is defined as a continuous stream of something, or as a being swept along according to some set of forces. In discussions of capitalism’s operations, flow is invoked to describe the movement of information, money, and trade. In psychology, flow is defined as an energized focus, or the mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing. In a state of flow, the emotions are not simply contained and channeled, but positive, energized, and aligned with the task at hand.1 In architecture, flow is described in opposition to rationalized or stable forms, producing, instead, non-stable geometries that are difficult to pin down or solidify. Following this thinking, flow is invoked in a range of architecture practices as overcoming entrenched dichotomies including those between object/field, container/contained, and nature/culture.

Whereas psychology has clearly defined flow as a mental state, the complex positioning of architecture as process, design, material manifestation, spatial organizer, form of inhabitation, and so on, compounds the ambiguities in flow’s architectural use. To begin, what is it that flows? Is it the material or the inhabitants that are flowing? Is it that which directs and structures space or the space itself? Or is it the experience of the space? These unanswered questions arising around the construct of flow leave it unclear whether architecture’s materiality forms flows, or forms channels and markers of flows.

Free Speech

To unpack these issues, consider an idea that became apparent during an architecture review where the concept of “flow” was invoked pertaining to people, space, buildings, and landforms.

Much of the discussion hinged upon the projects constructing, enacting, and ordering flows. However, people do not necessarily flow in accordance with designs, and furthermore, beyond the specific disciplinary concerns of architecture, there are important instances where flow’s spatial or architectural application was invoked, yet unrecognized. For example, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s 1919 Supreme Court opinion in which by declaring that “the most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing panic,”2 he implicitly tied together the limits of free speech to spatial ordering and human behavior.

Flow enters here as at the seat of Holmes’s thinking is the image of an ordered mass audience who upon hearing the call “fire” do not necessarily proceed to flow smoothly and orderly out of the rows of seating. Instead, they potentially erupt in all directions, perhaps crushing others on the way. In this example, the architectural space imagined as a prop for the decision combines with the issue at stake—that of the limits of free speech—to define associations between action and space of action. This is not merely coincidental as, along with the Holmes decision’s reliance on flow and architectural space, one of the hallmarks

1 Proposed by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, the positive psychology concept has been widely referenced across a variety of fields.

2 In this case, the limitation on free speech was employed to deny the petition of John Schenck who had been arrested for distributing pamphlets disputing the legality of the draft during the First World War. 3 See Jesse Reiser and Nanako Umemoto, Atlas of Novel Tectonics (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006).

They are not alone in this, as other architecture practices that employ flow insist on maintaining such distinctions by contending that architecture is—and needs to be—engaged in “real” material flows and not what are deemed to be mere representations of them.

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Spatial Formations

The Holmes opinion was rendered during the same period in which the rise of the masses began to be theorized in terms of their spatial, aesthetic, and socio-political implications.

Holmes’s issuance itself codifies and responds to the development of the masses within a socio-spatial system. Socio-spatial images appear in the critical theory discourse of the period, including Georg Lukascs’s History and Class 41

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tion, ordering, occupation, and experience. In order to rethink how boundaries are formed, navigated, and functioning, architectural models of flow oscillate seamlessly between what had been previously conceived as dichotomous positions, as between being container and contained, between director of space and operations, and being directed and operated.

In Atlas of Novel Tectonics, Jesse Reiser and Nanako Umemoto highlight this potential by pointing to a series of dichotomies traditionally germane to the definition of architecture that are dismantled through flow, including that between container and contained, and between object and field. Yet while Reiser and Umemoto employ flow to subvert this set of dichotomies, they uphold associated ones— notably that between the “real” and the metaphorical.3 This, however, opposes the thrust of flow’s processes by locating and delimiting architecture to previously conceived, clear compartments that hide or suppress inherent contradictions. If unleashed, such dismantling brings with it the potential to mix materiality with form, materiality with behavior, and materiality with representation. Consequences of this intermixing are apparent—if not always acknowledged—in the past decade’s preoccupation with new forms of mass production, hybrid categories, and monsters. Through such processes, flow sets the stage for architecture to enter into a range of broader socioepistemological constructs that follow in and through its spatial and systematic ones.

of it and other free speech decisions is the distinction drawn between speech and conduct, or action. Into this the decision, Holmes tacitly—but fundamentally—adds space, transforming the speech-action dichotomy into a speech-action-space trichotomy.

Approached this way, the Holmes example brings to the fore architectural constructions that have been collapsed within practice.

In particular, it highlights distinctions between the understanding of architecture as physical form or material presence, and architecture as container and director of space and action.

This duality becomes apparent in two strategies repeatedly used by architecture practices that develop flow. In both strategies, the construct of flow aspires toward the development of order. The first strategy entails importing outside models of flow—frequently from nature and the sciences—into architectural design. In addition to the transfer of materials and disciplines, the imported models harbor complex dialogs between physical and social processes. While such dialogs are inherent to architecture, when articulated through the interchange with outside models, they provide an explicit basis for architecture’s critical relations to society. This is to say that by explicitly incorporating outside models of flow, architecture makes manifest social and epistemological formations along with material and spatial ones. This occurs, for example, in the work of Zaha Hadid when parametricism is related to natural systems such as swarms and avantgarde styles are seen as analogous to scientific paradigms.

The second strategy frequently implemented is to employ flow to turn back on architecture and dismantle its own entrenched dichotomies. While flow’s channeling of materials and energies suggests containment, its ability to transmute and transform boundaries (i.e., to make boundaries fluid) simultaneously harbors the potential to dismantle the strict boundaries constitutive to dichotomies.

Flow achieves this dismantling by connecting components of architectural space: its forma-

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Nana Last

Consciousness in 1922 and Sigfried Kracauer’s coining of the term “the mass ornament” in his similarly titled essay of 1927. In “The Mass Ornament,”4 Kracauer focuses on an example of a synchronized dance group, the Tiller Girls, to diagnose the import of modernism’s developing spatial formations, specifically emphasizing the disjunction between spatial formations that the group produces with their bodies and a lack of individual subjectivity and agency possessed by those very same bodies. “These products of American ‘distraction factories’ are no longer individual girls, but indissoluble female units whose movements are mathematical demonstrations. ... The regularity of their patterns is acclaimed by the masses who themselves are arranged row upon ordered row.”5

Repeatedly, Kracauer posits that responsibility remains with the viewer noting, “nobody would notice the pattern if the crowd of spectators, who have an aesthetic relation to it and do not represent anyone, were not sitting in front of it.”6 Crucial to the efficacy of Kracauer’s analysis, thus, is the mirroring of the dance group in the audience’s organization into the “row upon ordered row” that readily emerges as the unseen—but not un-theorized—image behind Holmes’s opinion rendered several years earlier.

Kracauer finds something profoundly inhuman in how human bodies are made into the geometrical spatial images definitive of the mass ornament. This discordance between a living body and geometric form led him to declare that the “thinking” behind the mass ornament is that of capitalist rationality which subsumes humans into a formal complex of moving units. He positions their mass bodily formations beyond their perception despite their participation: “Even though the masses bring it about, they do not participate in conceiving the ornament. ... In this it resembles the aerial photographs of landscapes and cities for it does not emerge from the interior of a given reality, but rather appears above it.”7

Diagnosing mass ornament as a spatial image indicative of the functioning of capitalist 44

society makes apparent the external structuring of the human and the obliteration of the individual under capitalism. Yet left open is the question of what mechanisms generate the ordering. This question of the relation between internal and external structuring recalls Adam Smith’s abiding image of capitalism’s free market optimization. Written in the same year as the Declaration of Independence, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations puts forth the now-common image of capitalism’s optimal functioning: [The individual] generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. 8

Describing a set of emerging relations among individuals coming into being as discrete capitalist agents acting in concert, Smith’s notion of the “invisible hand” raises fundamental spatial questions. The invisible, leading hand is a spatial structure that Smith employs to show how workings of capitalism are organized at once from without and within. Such ambiguity and duality is central to flow’s socio-spatialization.

Although Smith describes the workings of capitalism as the product of individual self-organization—suggestive of flow—that assumption comes into question as the hand simultaneously produces and usurps agency. Through such ambiguous constructs, the question repeatedly emerges as to what guides and produces flow,

Flow’s Socio-spatial Formation

construct. Yet the image of smooth functioning is complex. “Going with the flow” is a form of smoothing over underlying issues. Smith’s invisible hand is an instance of such a smoothing over of agency and of a plurality of views, both of which later reemerge in the multitude.

Holmes’s ruling implies that a socially defined smooth functioning is upset when the limits of free speech are surpassed and speech becomes action. Flow, while frequently defined within design as a formal/material process, is necessarily tied to various social orders. It both socially and spatially entails an acting in accord (i.e., an alignment) with spatial containment; some of these acts manifest and others are smoothed over or blanketed. While flow is a method of interaction that produces an interface to tear down conceptual boundaries and simultaneously reinforces operations of directionality and alignment, its wider operations are at times masked by the smoothness of its own spatial formations and projected associated behavior.9 Flow, then, cannot be reduced to a single system, whether that be formal, material, or operational. Rather, its coming into being necessarily entails complex interactions as those between physical and social models.

Enacting flow’s formal aspects—alignment or smoothing over—plays a critical role in this manifestation.

Surfacing through the spatial dichotomies around flow, then, is the question of formalism, a topic typically associated with aesthetic practices. Philosophy has frequently assigned to aesthetic practices a unique, mediating role between forms of thought and action. In his

4 Sigfried Kracauer, “The Mass Ornament,” New German Critique, no. 5 (Spring 1975): 67-76. The opening ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympics offer an excellent contemporary example of mass ornament.

5 Ibid., 67.

6 Ibid., 69.

7 Ibid.

8 Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (New York: Bantam Dell, 2003), 572.

9 This recalls psychology’s characterization of flow as not just containing and channeling emotions, but aligning them with the task at hand.

Smooth Functioning

Smooth functioning holds a privileged place in our society as an unquestionably rational 45

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and its relations to space, action, and behavior.

Against modernity’s spatial defining of the masses from without, the opening decades of the twenty-first century have increasingly involved the emergence of socio-spatial formations based on the construct of flow that allow for an order at once without and within. Most notable is Michael Hardt and Antoni Negri’s construct of multitude, which posits an emerging form of collectivity in which both groups and individuals can combine in fluid matrices of resistance that defy the silence of the masses. Inherent in the distinction between the masses and multitude is the construct of agency. The multitude produces flows that do not demand absolute conformity, but are able to admit agency. This suggests that fluid constructs modulate between individual agency and absorption into the masses, situating flow within the realm of spatial politics.

Through the crossing and reconfiguring of spatial boundaries, flow is able to challenge both absolute agency and absolute absence of agency. In response to ambiguity over the guiding forces of flow, architectural models of flow regularly fill in this blank with imported models of growth—animated, environmental, and informational models that take on the role of agency even as they seemingly relinquish it. In an act that reimagines what is internal or self-produced, practices producing flow regularly import an outside agency, such as a scientific model of growth, to act as an internal guiding force. In so doing, they make the issue of what guides apparent, even as they work to smooth over distinctions and spatial divisions.

The resultant smooth surfaces and spatial connections either commute across what had previously been thought an impassable boundary or align action, such as circulation, with the spatial and formal container.

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History and Class Consciousness,10 for example, Georg Lukács diagnoses a crisis emerging for Kant’s philosophical system in its analysis of the antinomies of pure reason.11 Lukács finds that this crisis leads Kant to necessarily turn, in his Critique of Judgment, to a notably formalist aesthetics to perfect his system. It is there that Lukács sees Kant assign to art the role of mediator between otherwise irreconcilable opposites, something Lukács believes can only happen within aesthetics to the extent that the content itself becomes aesthetic.12 The construct of flow, however, allows otherwise. Flow, in its very smoothness and in its absorption of dichotomies and conflicting positions, threatens at one extreme to cover or smooth over other issues. This potential is not best dealt with by downplaying flow’s strong formal implications, but rather by using its productive interchanges to rethink formalism’s typically impassable boundaries. This allows flow to be poised between what smoothes over dichotomies, mediums, and other distinctions—yet when its social, cultural, linguistic,

and political aspects are acknowledged, it realizes new potentials to interact with the wider spheres implied by and through its constructs and operations.

Returning to my original questions, it becomes increasingly clear that attributes of flow make it difficult to separate what is flowing from what causes or carries flows— as of necessity, they work together. Yet agency demands at least a consciousness of those separations, of those various acting forces and relations between them, even as they reach a critical mass to all but subsume agency within and become a smooth, fluid order. Architectural models of flow can lay that ground as when, for example, they transfer processes developed in one material or practice into another in ways that highlight the questions of agency and of defining order. It is in this intermixing that flow’s socio-spatial formation can employ processes of inclusion and association to articulate a modulating and critical role for architecture and design in broader socioepistemological constructs.13

10 Lukács sees these contradictions arising in modern critical philosophy beginning with Kant and the attempt to universalize and compartmentalize the world into a formal system of rationalism that refuses “to accept the world as something that has arisen (or eg. has been created by God) independently of the knowing subject and prefers to conceive of it instead as its own product.” Lukács finds that this situation alienates subject from object, resulting in a reified structure of consciousness. Such alienation is nowhere more apparent for Lukács than in Kant’s concept of the thing-initself which is, by definition, unknowable as it lies outside of the conceptual framework of rational systems. See Georg Lukács, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat” in History and Class Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990).

11 The antinomies are particularly germane to our discussion as they include issues of the containment or limits of space; the limits of causality, order, and freedom; and the question of the existence of a necessary being or first mover, either in the world or outside of it. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

12 For Lukács, Kant’s realm of the aesthetic ends up only providing another domain for the capitalist, fragmented self.

See Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 140. See also, Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2007).

13 Traditional formalisms institute categorical dismissals that are not unique to art and architecture, but represent a much wider social strategy. The constitutional scholar Laurence H. Tribe has described formal legal decisions—such as those made between speech and conduct—as being regularly employed by the courts. Such distinctions, Tribe notes, frequently ignore the actual free speech and property interests involved by invoking formal distinctions to provide a neutral facade that masks the issues behind it. This brings us back to the smooth, potentially neutral facade presented by flow.

Image reproduced by permission from Iwan Baan, Maxxi, Rome, 2010.

Copyright Iwan Baan.

***

Nana Last is Associate Professor at the University of Virginia School of Architecture where she teaches courses in architecture theory and design. She received a PhD from MIT and a MArch from Harvard University. Her research covers contemporary architecture theory and practice, and their connection to art, philosophy, and cultural studies. She has been published in a number of anthologies as well as Any, Assemblage, Harvard Design Magazine, Thresholds, Praxis, Art Journal, and Visual Resources.

Her book Wittgenstein’s House: Language, Space and Architecture was published in 2008 by Fordham University Press.

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Collective Equipments of Power: The Road and the City Simone Brott

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Simone Brott

A meeting of CERFI in 1974. Photograph from Wikimedia Commons by Parislundi, used under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Collective Equipments of Power

1 François Fourquet, “L’accumulation du pouvoir, Ou le désir d’État,” Recherches, no. 46 (1982). Translation by the author.

2 Anne Querrien, interview with the author, September 18, 2010; Anne Querrien, “Cerfi 1965-1987: Centre D’etudes, de Recherches et de Formation Institutionnelles,” Critical Secret. com, no. 8-9 (2002). Until recently, there was almost no literature on CERFI apart from the journal Recherches itself— as Anne Querrien revealed, “this story is largely oral.”

3 Liane Mozère, “Foucault et le CERFI: Actualité et instantanés,” Le Portique: Revue de philosophie et de sciences humaines (2004).

4 For the quotations from this paragraph, see Fourquet, “L’accumulation du pouvoir.” Translation by the author.

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was able to achieve what other institutions, according to Fourquet, with their “customary devices—the politburo, central committee, and the basic cells—had failed to do.”4 The decentralized institute recognized that any formal integration of the group was to “sign its own death warrant; so it embraced a skein of directors, entangled, forming knots, liquidating all at once, and spinning in an unknown direction, stopping short and returning back to another node.” Allergic to the very idea of “party,” CERFI was a creative project of free, hybrid-aesthetic blocs talking and acting together, whose goal was none other than the “transformation of the libidinal economy of the militant revolutionary.” The group believed that by recognizing and affirming a “group unconscious,” as well as their individual unconscious desires, they would be able to avoid the political stalemates and splinter groups of the traditional Left. CERFI thus situated itself “on the side of psychosis”—its confessed goal was to serve rather than repress the utter madness of the urban malaise, because it was only from this mad perspective on the ground that a properly social discourse on the city could be forged.

A year ago, I became aware of the historical existence of the group CERFI— Le centre d’etudes, de recherches, et de formation institutionelles, or The Study Center for Institutional Research and Formation.

CERFI emerged in 1967 under the hand of Lacanian psychiatrist and Trotskyite activist Félix Guattari, whose antonymous journal Recherches chronicled the group’s subversive experiences, experiments, and government-sponsored urban projects. It was a singularly bizarre meeting of the French bureaucracy with militant activist groups, the French intelligentsia, and architectural and planning practitioners at the close of the ‘60s.

Nevertheless, CERFI’s analysis of the problems of society was undertaken precisely from the perspective of the state, and the Institute acknowledged a “deep complicity between the intellectual and statesman ... because the first critics of the State, are officials themselves!”1

CERFI developed out of FGERI (The Federation of Groups for Institutional Study and Research), started by Guattari two years earlier. While FGERI was created for the analysis of mental institutions stemming from Guattari’s work at La Borde, an experimental psychiatric clinic, CERFI marks the group’s shift toward urbanism—to the interrogation of the city itself. Not only a platform for radical debate on architecture and the city, CERFI was a direct agent in the development of urban planning schemata for new towns in France.2 CERFI’s founding members were Guattari, the economist and urban theorist François Fourquet, feminist philosopher Liane Mozère, and urban planner and editor of Multitides Anne Querrien—Guattari’s close friend and collaborator. The architects Antoine Grumback, Alain Fabre, Macary, and Janine Joutel were also members, as well as urbanists Bruno Fortier, Rainier Hoddé, and Christian de Portzamparc.3 CERFI was the quintessential social project of post-‘68 French urbanism. Located on the Far Left and openly opposed to the Communist Party, this Trotskyist cooperative

Simone Brott

an entranceway, a courtyard.” Yet, “in and of itself, there is no such thing as an equipment: there is a constellation of equipments: just as, in and of itself, there is no such thing as a city, but a constellation of cities.” Collective equipments in the plural form, given by the English translation of Lysa Hochroth, captures Guattari’s and Deleuze’s notion that the city is always multiple; it consists in aggregate structures such as highways, schools, and city buildings. But with Guattari’s caveat, an equipment of power is irreducible to spatialized form. What determines an equipment of power is the production of subjectivity obtained, the “personologization of fluxes,” or in other words, the production of subjects under the reign of equipments.

The title “Genealogy of Equipments” comes from Foucault’s “genealogical method,” borrowed from Nietzsche.8 Foucault divorces himself from Hegel’s instrumental model that links historical institutions to an inevitable metaphysics of progress by refusing to assign the birth of a thing, a body, or an institution to its utility, to the fulfillment of a need. Rather, Foucault believed that an institution is born by “the takeover by force which generated it, the

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Genealogy of Collective Equipments In 1972 CERFI held a seminar, Généalogie des équipements collectifs: les équipements du pouvoir, as part of its contract with the Ministry of Urbanism to investigate urban questions such as, What is urban? What is desire in the city? What are power relations in public services in cities? A transcript of the intoxicating, four-way discussion between Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, François Fourquet, and Guattari appeared in Recherches 13, and was later published as “Equipments of Power: Towns, Territories and Collective Equipments.”5 Foucault was central to this little-known, anarchic dialogue which is said to have directly contributed to the culture of politique de la ville (urban policy) for deprived neighborhoods in Paris.6 In this philosophers’ studio, “collective equipments” is a refrain always on one’s mind, a song which each philosopher sings in a different key. But more than this, “equipments of power” was an important philosophical model for the city which contributed to the imaginaire urbaine of France after ‘68. Of the four, Foucault is the most lucid. Guattari and Deleuze contribute their anti-oedipal concept of the city as a corps-sans-organes— the very year that Anti-Oedipus was published, giving rise to the enduring model of the decentralized city-state and of postwar capitalism itself.

Fourquet emerges as the outsider.

Deleuze is the first to speak: collective equipments constitute “structures of investment, structures of public service, and structures of assistance or pseudo assistance” which antagonistic relationships may obtain.7 The highway, as the equipment of power par excellence, is an investment structure that requires police assistance, but that is policed itself (for Deleuze the “pseudoassistance” of equipment conceals its primary function of surveillance). Guattari adds further examples: “a thoroughfare, rooms facing a director’s office, the conception of

5 Michel Foucault, Félix Guattari, Gilles Deleuze, and François Fourquet, “Equipments of Power: Towns, Territories and Collective Equipments,” in Foucault Live: Michel Foucault Collected Interviews, 1961-1984, ed. Sylvère Lotringer and trans. Lysa Hochroth and John Johnston (New York: Semiotext(e), 1996), 105-12; Lion Murard and François Fourquet, “Les équipements du pouvoir,” Recherches 13 (1973).

6 See Mozère, “Foucault et le CERFI.” 7 For the quotations from this paragraph, see Deleuze in Michel Foucault, “Equipments of Power,” 105-106.

8 There was also the Geneology Group which included Foucault, Fourquet, Querrien, Murard, and others. See Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Horace Barnett Samuel (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2003).

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Collective Equipments of Power

9 Mozère, “Foucault et le CERFI.” 10 For the quotations from this and the subsequent six paragraphs, see Michel Foucault, “Equipments of Power,” 106-111.

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mode that nonetheless sustains equipments.

Obversely, in the case of fiscal disobedience, tax evasion, or securities fraud, equipments of power and their codes are hacked by a subject who is no longer a Foucauldian “abnormal,” or accidental outsider, but a willful agent for the reversal of equipments.

Foucault finishes with the third function of the road, which is to “normalize subjects” in order to control production and demand. “The highway ‘consumes’ the cars whose production it ensures” and it thereby installs a chain of stupefied subjects caught in the overall circuit of production. “At one end of the roadway, there is the engineer from Public Works—a regulator, agent, and subject of normality,” represented by the engineering school—“and at the other end, the one who is cut off or ‘offcircuit,’ either because he is ever on-the-move, the vagabond who goes nowhere, or because he is the ‘laggard,’ immobile in his spot, an archaic and wild relic predating the roadway: in both cases, abnormal.” Ergo, the road as equipment divides subjects into normals and abnormals, instituting the line separating the human and the nonhuman, which for Foucault is the real purpose of equipments of power.

The separating “line” in Foucault’s terminology does not refer to eviction from the road—in fact, the vagabond’s entire existence is given over to the line. The irony of equipments of power is that by their very discursive mechanism, they project what might be called a posthuman architectural subject, who even in his or her privative mode wages a vain yet definitive war against equipments.

takeover by force which breaks with all the prevailing systems of use up to that point.”9 It is by the processes of subjugation that begin with the christening of a category of rebuts sociaux (social rejects), or “les outsiders”— thus separated from a population and from normative subjectivity—that a city and its equipments of power take shape.

In Foucault’s soliloquy, “the road” as a collective equipment of power in extremis holds urban subjects as prisoners of its signifying regime, defining who will be legal and who will be illegal. The first function of the road, he states, is to ensure a profit or a surplus of production, which it accomplishes by staging a dangerous face-off between two characters. The first of these is “the agent of power, the tax collector, the payment agent or ‘fiscal agent.’ Facing him, like an antithetical character is the bandit, someone who also subtracts fees, but against the agent of power—the looter.”10 These are the hostile subjectivities that populate the road as equipment.

The second function of the road is to produce maximum demand in response to the surplus of production. A road leads to the bazaar, it begets a market place, it transports buyers, sellers, and merchandise. All the rules of sale for Foucault are connected to this function: the location of sale, the prices of commodities, and most importantly, what can be bought and sold. Here again, two actors face off: on one side “the inspector, the controller, the customs and tollbooth agent,” and “on the other side, the smuggler of contraband goods, the peddler.” We could extend this to the violation of borders in other equipments, such as the delivery of goods and persons into or out of a prison or a building, or across an international border. Evidently, the figure of the pirate or smuggler is not marginal but, rather, essential to Foucauldian equipments. The road emerges as the social borderline incarnate. What quickly manifests is that equipments of power can and must be reversed, and thus activated in this perverse

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Foucault’s statement on “the road” in 1972, stands in stark contrast to the parallel American architectural discussion surrounding the Venturis’ iconic study of the highway in Learning from Las Vegas published the same year. Both texts ostensibly pursue structuralist semiotics but their methods could not be more different. While the Venturian highway parades on the postmodern surface of empty signifiers (i.e., ducks and billboards), for Foucault it is the grim subject, rather than the road, who has to wear the signifying coat.

And while the American rides the highway in a dream-like, cinematic vessel, locked out of reality—capitalism’s weary spectator—the French group-subject is inseparable from equipments. The contribution of Foucault and Guattari-Deleuze to this discussion is the violence and logic of equipments in which subjects are physically encoded and embedded within capital itself. Concrete affects and corporeal fluxes are the very substance of Foucauldian equipments and not merely linguistic signifiers to be decoded by a subject.

Equipments such as the Road turn humans into code to service (i.e., hold up), and not merely serve, state capitalism.

Fourquet, silent until now, says the city “joins all these fluxes,” as if it was a film editing machine, and “cuts them and re-cuts them every which way.” In his mind, the function of collective equipments is to record and fix, and therefore paralyze the fluxes: “There is no other social machine.” In Guattari’s mind, however, only in the “despotic city” are equipments anti-productive in an “overcoding” that seeks to master or freeze the productive fluxes. The anti-productive politics of the despotic city, Guattari adds, “soon explode into a thousand pieces which are productive entities, collective equipments.” Antiproduction, in other words, is still production, because the reterritorialization of power is always reversed by these micro-subjectivites that deterritorialize the center.

Fourquet describes the insatiable hunger or “excess of the despot who measures the fluxes. ... After the emergence of the city, we only see the monstrous body of the State (Egypt, Sumeria) and its military bulimia.”

For Guattari, it is indigestion rather than bulimia: “the city is a spatial projection, a form of reterritorialization, of blockage. The original despotic city is a military camp where soldiers are enclosed to prevent the flux of soldiers from spreading out.” As we learn from Guattari, the city always fights back: “the activated fluxes begin to function, to turn around. These are collective equipments.

They start working all by themselves. They disperse and swarm about. The collective equipment is there to hold something that, by its very nature, cannot be held.” The repressive regimes which attempt to convert the fluxes into equipments backfire because under the despotic rule of subjects, equipments take revenge on the system, liberating a non-sentient subjectivity irreducible to the despot, the socius, the architect, or the philosopher—that lies in the newly deterritorialized equipments.

Three positions on urban subjectivity can be identified from this genealogy. For Foucault, it is a duel between the normative, capitalist subject who respectively pays or collects

Act Two: The City The second act of “Equipments of Power” opens, “Is the City a Productive or AntiProductive Force?” Guattari proffers, “the city is a point in time where there is a density of equipments ... it is a body-without-organscity.” At a certain threshold of equipments, the fluxes, flows of capital, and bodies crystallize in an economic center (a “capital”) or a “citymilitary town,” these being the first two organizing types and purposes of cities. The city-military town is reached at a threshold of territoriality wherein equipments are realized; it is what Guattari calls the reterritorialization of fluxes in the making of political power. For Guattari, “collective equipments are the social unconscious” of the city.

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The End of CERFI Querrien describes CERFI as having “exploded” by the mid-eighties, heralding the death of the radical micro-institution—and the end of ‘68 and its social project as epistème— not only in France, but in North America and the world over. The span of CERFI coincides with that of the New York Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS)— both began in 1967 and ended in 1985, and both were premised on concrete urban and architectural activism.11 “Equipments of Power,” however, never made it across the Atlantic.

In March of 1982, Skyline, IAUS’s serial, published the landmark interview of Foucault on architecture and power by American anthropologist Paul Rabinow.

The role of IAUS in introducing European theorists and architects to an American audience is well known, as is the architectural

11 Nevertheless, they were still very different institutions.

For more on IAUS, see Sylvia Lavin, “IAUS: Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies,” Log, no. 12/13 (Fall 2008): 154-58.

12 Michel Foucault and Paul Rabinow, “Space, Knowledge, and Power,” trans. Christian Hubert, Skyline (March 1982).

13 For a history of Autonomia, see Simone Brott, “Deleuze and the Intercessors,” Log, no. 19, (Winter 2010).

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circulation of Foucault’s ideas in the North American academy. The reception of the concept “heterotopia” from “Des espaces autres: Hétérotopies” in 1967, subsequently analyzed by Georges Teyssot, gave voice to Foucault’s radical philosophy on architecture and urbanism, and its complicity in the statecontrol of subjectivity. Yet the translation of Foucault via IAUS contributed to the dominant Italophilic American version of Foucauldianism, with its connections to the Venice School of Manfredo Tafuri and the Italian Marxists. Their efforts to deconstruct architectural history and its utopian fantasies were largely sustained by semiotics and language, as manifested in the pages of IAUS’s journal Oppositions.

Foucault was aware of this dialectic that his work generates: in the Rabinow/Skyline interview, he states that in his theory of the “spatialization” of knowledge and power, architecture is not a signifier for power but the technè—a set of techniques for practicing “social organization.”12 This elaborate architectural enactment, the betrayal of Foucault’s radical project in the dominant American reception, not only eclipsed the French work of CERFI, but also the other lesser-known Italian Autonomia movement.

In Italy, Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari were developing the idea of architecture as “equipment” and substituting the prevailing postmodernist discourse of architecture as “the space of representation” with agencements collectif—collective arrangements or “machines” for the creative generation of subjectivity.13

money in relation to an equipment (like the road), and the vagabond who we might imagine both sleeps under and has fallen off the road, thus becoming pathological.

To these we add the smuggler on the wrong side of the state who is engaged in a daily code war. For Deleuze and Guattari, urban subjectivity is a multitude of troops, each molecule of the army captured within its military container, its equipment. But at a certain density of troops, equipments begin to mobilize against the state, permitting the fluxes to circulate unobstructed. It is at this point that a city establishes itself: its citizens are former troops. For Fourquet, the citymilitary town is a carnivorous extension of the city-state in which equipments are ineluctable, and the fluxes irretrievable. Deleuze’s and Guattari’s alternate vision encapsulates both these processes in the city’s circuitry: territorializations in the formation of the state, and deterritorializations by the reversal of flux, toward a decoded subjectivity.

Simone Brott

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The question is as relevant now as it was twenty years ago with the contemporary evacuation of the question of subjectivity.

The hegemony of digital formalisms, and the neo-Darwinian, architectural strains based on Deleuze emptied of the subject makes all the more pressing the enterprise of architectural subjectivization begun by Foucault. If the iconic project of the last ten years is a mirror for the dominant subjectivities of twenty-firstcentury capitalism, on the other side of the mirror are nonhuman equipments of urban surveillance, incarceration, and biological control, whose sinister genealogy is not only the military takeover of cities and civilian life, but the terrifying Deleuzo-Guattarian agencies of the equipments themselves as they self-actuate, propelled, like a selfish gene. Under the thrall of liberalism now and in the haze of a resurgent modernism, violent urbanism and its equipments thrive.

***

Simone Brott lectures in architecture at Queensland University of Technology. She completed a Masters in the History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture and Urbanism at Yale and a PhD on Architecture and Deleuze at The University of Melbourne.

She has written for Log and her book Architecture for a Free Subjectivity was released in 2011.

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Collective Form: The Status of Public Architecture Dana Cuff

Dana Cuff

“ When the courthouse square disappears, I don’t see how the res publica can survive.”

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— Colin Rowe

In 1955, Colin Rowe and John Hejduk ventured out of Austin, Texas, traveling 30 miles south to the town of Lockhart. There, they found a form of public architecture that today seems touchingly nostalgic. In Architectural Record two years later, they described an unpretentious yet formally distinct courthouse, library, and prison aligned to create a civic realm that was markedly— if modestly—aspiring to be more urbane.

Together, the public buildings, the courthouse square, main street, and small town grid offered a “diagrammatic coherence” to the town.1

Something about the scale of these turn-of-the-century buildings, miniaturized versions of their precedents, was worthy of remark by Rowe and Hejduk. Collections of similarly small artifacts created civic enclaves in courthouse-square towns across Texas. “Here it is the law which assumes a public significance; and it is around the secular image of the law, like architectural illustrations of a political principle, that these towns revolve. In each case, the courthouse is both visual focus and social guarantee; and in each square the reality of government made formally explicit provides the continuing assurance of order.”2 It was as much the hubris as the everydayness of small-town America that struck Rowe, asserting a res publica, or public sphere, from the vast landscape of Texas by deploying a smattering of little buildings over the street grid.

But where is the res publica outside of Lockhart, in towns without courthouse or square? New Urbanists have tried to replicate such formal fashionings, but the results are less public and more pretentious.

The argument forwarded here regards public architecture as an unstable and thus ambiguous construct. Over the last half century, coincident with postwar urban dispersal, the public has been reformulated as varied “communities.” Counter to romantic

ideals and common wisdom, “communities”— particularly those located in suburbs— undermine anything resembling a coherent, cosmopolitan expression of collective identity. In contrast to these fragmented, local associations, designers must now try to wring a form of public architecture from those lowly infrastructures that transcend the local— sewers, storm water channels, power grids, highways, and rail lines.

Expressing Collective Identity

Typically, three criteria qualify a thing as public: use, access, and identity. The democratic dimension of public space, embodied by its use and accessibility, is intrinsic to its definition. These two criteria reflect important socio-political concerns that have been relatively well studied.3 The question of identity is more complex, bearing directly on architecture and the thingness embedded in the res publica. As Bruno Latour notes, even the thinkers most occupied by questions about the public offer little help: “It’s not unfair to say that political philosophy has often been the victim of a strong objectavoidance tendency. From Hobbes to Rawls, from Rousseau to Habermas, ... their res publica does not seem to be loaded with too many things.”4 Any notion of public architecture concerns things, or built forms, which symbolize entities that can be described—such as the national identity that capitol buildings exude—but also those that cannot. The public itself is a phantasm, an ideological and historical imaginary that

1 Epigraph, Colin Rowe as interviewed by Richard Ingersoll in 1989; republished in Colin Rowe and Alexander Caragonne, As I Was Saying (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 3:326.

2 Rowe, As I Was Saying, 1:57.

3 See, for example, Evan McKenzie, Privatopia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994); Setha Low, Behind the Gates (New York: Routledge, 2003); and Anastasia LoukaitouSideris and Tridib Banerjee, Urban Design Downtown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

4 Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik, or How to Make Things Public,” in Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 16-17.

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forms of public architecture.8 These models that sought to reformulate both an idea of the public and the space it would inhabit have already been reconstructed in virtual and post-human terms that abandon physical space given the prevalence of social media and the imminent internet of things. There, material space is displaced by accessibility, speed, convenience, customizable information sources, and new forms of intimacy. The material place of common ground in turn has relocated to the networks of efficiency and utility: public infrastructure.

Physical infrastructure is a victim of the present economic conditions from Europe to North America, characterized by an impoverished public sector at federal, provincial, and municipal levels. Construction in the US is a complex indicator of economic health but also of the nation’s physical condition. Thus, while recent increases in construction spending are primarily infrastructure-related, private construction spending for non-residential construction is down almost 40% below its peak in 2008, and residential construction is down 65% since its peak in 2006.9 The most recent class of state governors claimed austerity as their watchword. All this suggests that the foreseeable future includes little public architecture in the traditional, if idealized, sense. Today “pure” public spaces like plazas and parks are likely to be historical

5 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991); Henri Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, trans.

Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996); Maartin Hajer and Arnold Reijndorp, In Search of New Public Domain (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2001).

6 Rafi Segal and Els Verbakel with Stan Allen, Marcel Smets, Sarah Whiting, and Margaret Crawford, “Architecture and Dispersal,” in “Cities of Dispersal,” ed. Rafi Segal and Els Verbakel, Architectural Design 78, no. 1 (January/February 2008): 102-107.

7 See, for example, the 1980s New Left Review debate about postmodernism between Jameson and Davis using the Bonaventure Hotel atrium as their case in point: Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review, no. 146 (July-August 1984): 53-92; Mike Davis, “Urban Renaissance and the Spirit of Postmodernism,” New Left Review, no. 151 (May-June 1985): 106-113.

8 Marc Augé, Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (London: Verso, 1995).

See http://www.census.gov/construction/c30/c30index.html.

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shifts imperceptibly, thus complicating an “aesthetics of the collective,” or how we present ourselves to ourselves. At stake for architects is their very history, since public and institutional structures are the building types that advance both the discipline and individual careers.

In terms of collective identity, Rowe and Hejduk promoted a well-established political notion of public space. With the courthouse and the prison as urban anchors, a social and spatial construction of justice is manifest.

The godfather of this perspective is Jürgen Habermas, whose model of the public sphere depends upon political debate in the open, as if situated in some hybrid between a Roman forum and a Parisian café. In this view, the crux of our collective sphere is the sociology of difference and when located in public space, we confront others unlike ourselves.

Only then do tolerance, collective identity, shared values, and social norms evolve.

Marxists like Lefebvre describe a related “right to the city,” while Dutch urbanists Hajer and Reijndorp call for urban cultural friction.5 But since when might we imagine that face-toface political debate is our collective medium?

This theoretical view has outlasted our spatial realities.

It also begs economic reality. As Sarah Whiting argues, “Lament-drenched, postlapsarian narratives about a lost public sphere ... invariably feed futile ‘retrieve and recover’ missions that share success/failure rates with other contemporary missions based on myths. The public sphere in the US has, from its inception, been tied as much, if not more, to business than to its presumptive origin in government or some variant of public organisation.”6 The privatized public sphere to which Whiting alludes was made up of the kind of places that Fredric Jameson and Mike Davis loved to hate in the ‘80s and ‘90s.7 Postmodern spaces of consumption preoccupied debates about the decline of the public sphere. Non-place arguments by people like Marc Augé, the broadly adopted but uninspired “transit-oriented district,” the international McDonaldization of places, and the global competition among cities have grown more widely recognized as dead-end

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Scenario 1: D isneyrail, a networked system of five park-development interventions along the High Speed Rail, including one at the Angel Stadium. Courtesy of cityLAB-UCLA.

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Mid-Century Mutations

In 1955 when Rowe and Hejduk worried about the disappearance of the courthouse square, it was actually already gone, an artifact of an earlier era. In small towns across the US, however, broadly scattered rural and vaguely urban populations still contain common ground. The space of collectivity is visible wherever we find what Albert Pope calls the “city of form,” the gridiron urbanism of the nineteenth century that carved out blocks for squares, courthouses, and civic centers.10 Where the Texas Rangers’ concern would have been warranted was in the cotemporaneous postwar explosion of the suburbs. Outside Austin and other cities across the country, the new city of dispersal had taken root.

Indeed, in the expanding postwar suburbanity, the courthouse square had already disappeared. In the early suburbs of the late ‘30s and ‘40s, collections of land, houses, and residents were built on greenfields, with few architectural illustrations of collective aspiration. Instead, the individual house was made formally explicit. In these early, postwar residential developments, Habermasian public space devolved into a more local, less formal community center, strip development, or neighborhood primary school. Consider two of the very first modern

10 Albert Pope, “From Form to Space,” in Fast Forward Urbanism, ed. Dana Cuff and Roger Sherman (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2011), 143-175.

11 Dana Cuff, “Enduring Proximity: The Figure of the Neighbor in Suburban America,” Journal of Postmodern Culture 15, no. 2 (2005).

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suburbs, one from each coast: At both Levittown on Long Island and Westchester in Los Angeles, forms of community foreshadowed the fragmentation of the public, however idealized. While the focus was fixed on the single-family house, a new idea about the collective was shaping up in peripheral view.

The early history of Levittown captures how the public was changing in the suburban context. First, in Levittown’s initial phases between 1947 and 1951, the only private space was inside the house. Residents were not allowed to fence their yards to permit the Levitts oversight of deviant practices that they feared former slum and apartment dwellers might bring. Among those fearful behaviors, nothing was more emblematic than drying laundry. In fact, although laundry blew intimately in the breeze during the week, as soon as the men came home from work Friday evening, women had to bring it inside. Played up as the space of private life, the Ur-form of single-family dwellings actually involved a notion of “neighborly” surveillance. Collective lives depended upon each neighbor acting as a block warden to guard against misbehavior.11

At Levittown, “the public” underwent a subtle shift from its cosmopolitan predecessor to “the neighbor,” an intimate social and geographic construct. Rather than a hierarchical public institution situated as a spatial hub, Levittown was organized around multiple “community” centers. In Levittowns and their equivalents across the US, there would never again be a Lockhart courthouse square or a San Francisco Union Square. Instead, there would be a reccenter, a church or two, and an elementary school. These formed the new collectivity, with local audiences that were far more homogeneous than the term “public” implied with its liberating anonymity coupled to civic responsibility. At Levittown, the town breaks down into communities; the architecture of the collective is rooted in local services; the shared landscape is surveilled, pushing everyday life to the interior. And just in case the interior becomes too remote, the picture window allows the gaze from and to the street.

In this landscape, the terms “public” and “private” are no longer legitimate.

artifacts from an earlier century. Similarly, the dignity of public buildings that were built with significant investment contrasts with the anonymous, leased space that government offices now occupy. The retronym “public park” is necessary since new open space is likely to be provided as an amenity within private enclaves, whether at an open air shopping mall or new housing development.

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This new postwar order, a collective identity rather than Habermasian citizenship, evolved even further on the other side of the nation. Slightly earlier than Levittown, a more commercial form of suburb was taking shape in Westchester at the hands of Southern California’s homebuilders. No land was set aside because it was all real estate and thus all for sale. The dominance of the automobile brought not only sprawl, as is widely understood, but also the further individuation of the landscape itself: even movement through it, particularly in comparison to mass transit, was the purview of the individual. The formal patterns at Levittown and Westchester differ enough to see this mutation. At Westchester, boulevards defined groups of houses that turned their backs to the wider world, facing a labyrinth of local streets. Public and private are replaced by regional and local, and the infrastructure of streets becomes the physical material worthy of government funding and representative of the collective.12

Westchester is an early exemplar of another significant development in the collective landscape: Lockhart’s courthouseprison-square and Levittown’s community centers are supplanted by a retail strip.

Physically organized like everything else in Westchester—that is, by principles of traffic management—the shopping district sits between the superblocks. Within this diagram, towns that had citizens and publics are transformed into communities of neighbors and consumers. The fundamental segregation of the suburban landscape is etched into an economic maxim: those who can shop together, live together. Because of the strong ties between race and socioeconomic status, spatial segregation was mapped neatly by racial differences.13

By the mid-fifties, in both Levittown and Westchester, the suburban landscape was characterized not by public and private, but by localities sharing grocery stores and schools.

There was, however, a larger sphere of things the collective shared: a utilitarian backdrop of streets, sewers, power lines, phone lines, and storm water systems. Yet when the common ground is rendered as infrastructure,

communities are left with an identity crisis: infrastructure is variously buried, invisible, at the margins, or ill-attended. The street may be the clearest exception. Where the house is the symbol of self, the street is the figure of the neighborhood. Occasionally, as with a cul-de-sac, the street can provide symbolic identity, but more often the road, street, and highway function as mere service connectors. In the ‘60s and ‘70s, this tacit and troubling collective locus triggered studies like Bernard Rudofsky’s Streets for People, Donald Appleyard’s Livable Streets, and Jane Jacobs’s manifesto to reclaim the prewar city’s streets and sidewalks for the neighborhood.

But none of these authors took on the tougher and more prevalent condition; none cruised the streets of sprawl where cars dominated.

Stepping back from Levittown and Westchester, three interrelated postwar trends have been alluded to that influence a contemporary notion of the public with regard to architecture and urbanism. The first is a change in subjectivity, captured by the citizen’s transformation into the consumer; the second is a change in scale, by the contraction of the civic into the local or the city into the neighborhood; and the third is a change in form, with the shift from a city of form into a city of space.14 Each of these and their corollaries have profound effects on public architecture.

Citizens qua Consumers

Economists, sociologists, and cultural critics locate the onset of “consumer society” at the end of WWII. When market demand is viewed as voting-by-pocketbook, commercial success is a new measure of democracy. This

12 The Westchester research is documented in Dana Cuff, The Provisional City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000).

13 Early legislation against segregation was enacted in 1948 when the Supreme Court ruled against racially restrictive housing covenants, and more followed, but according to Massey and Denton, it was no more effective. See Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 186.

14 Pope, “From Form to Space,” 143-175.

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Scenario 2: T rain to Training, linking the largest network of US Olympic training facilities with the High Speed Rail.

Courtesy of cityLAB-UCLA.

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“public” is no longer a collective citizenry but, instead, independent consumers aggregated into market sectors by their consumption choices. While it is often assumed that these trends mark the rise of the individual, they may also be viewed more fatally, as the death of the subject.15

For architecture, the expanding consumer culture produced well-known changes in the material environment, some of which by now are cliché: shopping malls are the new collective arena; architecture is complicit in the production of desire; and disinvestment killed the traditional public sphere. In addition, when architecture’s clients, occupants, and owners self-identify as consumers, they seek speculative, short-term economic value over other objectives such as programmatic fit, symbolic expression, or durability. When economic logics of expediency and efficiency prevail, individual projects and even clients are less important than effective management.16

Under these circumstances, what becomes of the public building that defined the urban collective and drove the discipline of architecture? Of course, there are still city halls, parks, courthouses, libraries, and schools, and these continue to materially render what we share. Today, these buildings are portraits of efficiency and utility, dressed in an aesthetic that could be called “thriftwashing,” a thin coat of architecture that expresses a priority on economizing, whether or not the building is actually cost-effective.17

Scaling Back: Civic to Local

At the same time that citizens mutated into consumers, the conceptual scope of “the public” scaled down from a civic ideal to something much more geographically local. As Levittown and Westchester demonstrate, when the city fragments into clusters of neighborhoods, the public becomes a community. The latter is used for collectivities of every stripe—from interest groups (the animal rights community) and demographics (the elderly community) to spatially coherent clusters (the Ocean Park

community). Since Toqueville’s nineteenthcentury characterization of American communitarianism, the force of the local has been strong. But when social policy scholars like Robert Putnam argue that “community bonds” or “generalized reciprocity” have weakened in recent decades, the difference between civic and communitarian is elided.18 The history of this distinction is apparent in the history of public building.

The role of public architecture has been debated since the origins of the architecture profession in America. A formal notion of public space reached its apex in the US during the City Beautiful movement, retreating to our present ideas about the death of the public sphere. In the same year as the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, the young American Institute of Architects successfully argued for federal regulations concerning “public architecture,” particularly that commissions for the design of federal buildings be decided by competition.

Since neither landscape architecture nor urban planning existed as professions at the time, architecture willfully shaped its own conception of public space and public design. From the mid-1800s to the early 1900s, men with no formal training in architecture designed the public realm: Fredrick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux made urban open

15 Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” in Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (London: Pluto Press, 1985), 111-125.

16 One consequence is the creation of gigantic multi-service operations like AECOM and Stantec. These mega-firms gain “experience” by purchasing specialty firms in different locales, aggregating a resume that can fit target commissions.

17 “Thrift-washing” is a play on white-washing and “greenwashing” in which environmental concerns are symbolic and expressive rather than substantive. This is not a new phenomenon: when the first public housing act in 1937 authorized construction of subsidized apartments, it steered far from any sign of luxury. Closets went without doors, interior plumbing was left exposed, and finishes were minimal. Such details symbolized that public housing was not meant to be permanent or even well-liked; it would satisfy as a form of existenzminimum until the occupants could pay their own rent elsewhere.

18 Generalized reciprocity refers to the practice of helping others with no expectation of gain. See Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Shuster, 2001), 505.

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orientations. By contrast, postwar suburban growth evidenced no such order but was, instead, a horizontal expanse for speculation.

Infrastructural linkages between tracts comprised utilities, roadways, and commercial strips, representing the minimal connections between them. While architectural notions of urban dispersal were formalized, as in Wright’s Broadacre or Saarinen’s “organic decentralization,” neither architects nor planners had enough power to redirect the interests of the real estate industry. In the purest cases—Phoenix, Houston, or Los Angeles—the postwar housing boom produced an urban agglomeration that had neither center nor edge. Leap-frogging across farmland and pushed up against the limits of topography, the population fled the city and abandoned the res publica. The dispersed residential landscape left no room for the visible public.

Unsurprisingly, the increased dispersal of cities into their hinterlands parallels the rise of neighborhood associations. As cities grow to scales beyond geographic manageability, and areas within cities come to see themselves in competition with other areas, the public in the public good shrinks to fit. Not-in-my-backyard is a euphemism for a contemporary version of civic interest, highly local and reactionary.

While a lingering ideal of the public can be discerned in architectural and urban studies writing, the changes above are part of a continuous evolution that was particularly marked in the mid-twentieth century. “The public” is a historically specific construct that can be monitored in the material culture of our environment—our public architecture.

From Order to Expanse

Lastly, changes in city form parallel the dynamic notion of publicness. The order of the nineteenth-century city, the gridiron, set a formal pattern for urban activity and development. While the grid itself is without hierarchy, the built and open spaces that filled the grid established a continuity of centers, districts, relational distances, and facade

19 Mary Woods, From Craft to Profession (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 43.

20 Putnam documents that the percentage of parents joining the PTA doubled between 1945 and 1960, followed by an equally steep decline thereafter. This is consistent with a decline in active involvement in all sorts of local organizations in the last decades of the 20th century. See Putnam, Bowling Alone, 56-62. Similarly, over half of all schools are now more than fifty years old, suggesting that the majority of these schools were built in the ‘40s–’60s.

See Thomas D. Snyder and Charlene M. Hoffman, The Digest of Education Statistics (Washington DC: National Center for Education Statistics, 2001).

21 Cathleen McGuigan, “Starchitecture: A Modest Proposal,” Newsweek, June 10, 2010.

Res Publica Reboot “ The trophy building is so over.

Welcome to the era of design on a diet.” 21

In June 2010, Newsweek proclaimed that the exuberance of the previous era’s architecture had met the recession and was chastened. Compared to the private

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space; Haussmann in Paris or Ebenezer Howard in England laid out streets and urban plans. In 1897, AIA President George B. Post recommended broadening the profession’s agenda to focus on “public architecture and urban planning.”19 The design of the broader city—its public space, streets, and buildings—was to belong to the architect.

With the Chicago’s World Fair, architects like Daniel Burnham sought to turn the city into an aesthetic project. What distinguishes this initiative is its focus on the whole rather than the fragment or component.

The courthouse, whether it is in Lockhart or Chicago, is a symbol of society at large whereas the school is a symbol of the neighborhood.20 The postwar surge in school construction coincides with what I suggest is the postwar scaling back of collective identity, when the modifier “neighborhood” displaces “public,” as in “neighborhood park.” Thus, as cities with citizens are fragmented into communities, public buildings shift from those that are typically found downtown to those— like schools—found in the suburbs.

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Dana Cuff

Scenario 3: P ark, Shop N’ Ride, solving parking requirements through the opportunistic use of neighboring vacant land and development opportunities in Orange. Courtesy of cityLAB-UCLA.

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Collective Form

The potential to create new identities for localities is visible in New York, where bike lanes as well as impromptu and more permanent seating areas have been wrung from the city streets. Named New York City’s Transportation Commissioner in 2007, Janette Sadik-Khan stated “We are looking at our streets differently, and treating them as the valuable public spaces that they are. With 6,000 miles of streets, that’s a lot of real estate to work with.”23 Projects like these that reimagine service networks as amenities are not without controversy. To be implemented, they require tactics that vary from those common to architecture: infrastructure sites have indefinite boundaries; the time frame is mercurial; master plans or end-states are inadequate; hybrid programs can be invented.

Perhaps most importantly, the infrastructural intervention is conceived as a catalyst for further economic and urban development. The designer needs to think through the possible scenarios, with contingencies in mind.

One of the best test sites for this way of working will be the proposed national high speed rail network, the largest public infrastructure investment since the Interstate Highway system. Although station design is the standard architectural component of this new infrastructure, our research at cityLAB-UCLA suggests that neither station design nor station-area design will produce urban consequences. The “build it and they will come” model has not worked along other rail lines.24 Based on the experience in

22 The concept of “terrain vague” is discussed in Ignasi de Solà-Morales, “Terrain Vague,” in Anyplace, ed. Cynthia C. Davidson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 118-123.

The WPA 2.0 competition is discussed in Dana Cuff, “WPA 2.0: Working Public Architecture,” Harvard Design Magazine, no. 33 (Fall/Winter 2010): 36-44. See http://www. vanalen.org/lasr/ for more information on the Van Alen Institute initiative.

23 Sarah Goodyear, “Taming the Mean Streets,” Grist, December 21, 2010, http://www.grist.org/article/2010-1221-Taming-the-mean-streets-of-new-york-a-talk-with-nycdot.

24 For example, twenty years after the construction of BART in northern California, the expected development around stations has not occurred. See Robert Cervero, “Rail Transit and Joint Development: Land Market Impacts in Washington, D.C. and Atlanta,” Journal of the American Planning Association 60, no. 1 (1993): 83-90.

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sector’s “trophy building,” public buildings had been quieted far sooner. In 2010, the federal government was funding courthouse and border station construction, but little else. Public funding of design is increasingly miserly, demonstrated by a scaling back of the GSA design excellence program. While it is unquestionably important to continue to advocate for the strong design of our public buildings, there is a revanchist ring to that cause. With few private and governmental architectural opportunities available, what possibilities remain for a contemporary public architecture in the material world and where are the most interesting design opportunities located?

The most provocative site to construct a contemporary public and its architecture is all around us if we remember that the res publica, beyond the dome and the square, contains the street. Infrastructural space is the terrain vague where design may opportunistically reengage the collective. There are signs of design attention to infrastructure, including the broad, enthusiastic response to cityLABUCLA’s ideas competition, WPA 2.0: Working Public Architecture (2009), and to the Van Alen Institute’s initiative, Life at the Speed of Rail (2011). Both competitions asked architects to bring focus on that which had rested in their peripheral vision: the networks of utility and mobility.22

With transit and infrastructure spending that exceeds other publicly funded efforts, architects and urbanists are clamoring to be involved. The funds authorized by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 included some $150 billion for infrastructure-related construction. The ARRA appropriation resembled Works Progress Administration spending at the end of the Great Depression, with one primary caveat: while both funding programs expressly prioritized jobs, WPA projects were expected to contribute to the federal government’s built legacy. Designers and communities will need to insist that ARRA spending bring an aesthetic other than thrift if projects from the Bay Bridge in California to the Denali National Park facilities in Alaska are to express shared values other than economy.

Dana Cuff

The potential of a systemic intervention like high speed rail will only be realized if architects and urban designers work in more opportunistic and strategic ways. This holds whenever infrastructure is the starting point of public architecture. The zones of storm water, power, and circulation have resisted design attention, but as experiments take place in cities across the country, it grows easier to understand how this form of res publica can take shape. After all, there was a Main Street between the courthouse and the prison in Lockhart. Now that the infrastructural interstices have captured our concentrated focus, we need to demonstrate that we can make something of them.

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other countries with high speed rail, we are exploring scenario planning that identifies local potential capable of tipping the scales of urban design toward particular solutions.

In the examples shown here FIGS. 1, 2, and 3, the Anaheim station area is imagined according to three unique catalysts: the need for parking, the expansion of the city’s sports facilities, and a new transit connection between the rail station and Disneyland. The design of staged interventions foreshadows subsequent components, taking into consideration economic, programmatic, and policy drivers. Each scenario leverages a res publica from two sources: the initial public investment in infrastructure, and the subsequent growth it sparks.

*** Dana Cuff is Professor of Architecture, Urban Design and Urban Planning at UCLA where she is also director of cityLAB, an urban design and research think tank. Her work focuses on affordable housing, modernism, suburban studies, the politics of place, and the spatial implications of new computer technologies. Cuff’s research on postwar urbanism was published in a book titled The Provisional City (MIT Press, 2000), and she recently edited Fast Forward Urbanism with Roger Sherman (Princeton Architectural Press, 2011). Since founding cityLAB in 2006, she has concentrated her efforts around issues of the emerging metropolis.

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Tuktoyaktuk: Offshore Oil and a New Arctic Urbanism Pamela Ritchot

Pamela Ritchot

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FIG. 1 — Tuktoyaktuk at the gateway to the Canadian Arctic. Courtesy of author.

In 2008, the Canadian Government accepted BP’s $1.18 billion bid for the largest block of offshore oil exploration licenses in the Beaufort Sea. As climate change continues to lengthen the ice-free open water season, oil companies like BP, Exxon Mobil, and Imperial Oil have gained access to previously inaccessible Arctic waters, finding lucrative incentive to expand offshore drilling in its remote territories. Thus the riches of the Canadian Arctic are heightening its status as a highly complex territory of global concern at the nexus of several overlapping geopolitical, environmental, and economic crises, and are placing the construction of its landscape under the auspices of offshore oil development. At the edge of the Beaufort Sea, the hamlet of Tuktoyaktuk is geographically positioned as the gateway to these riches, and politically positioned to face this unique confluence occurring across four streams of issues: first, the global crisis of climate change as it rapidly reshapes a oncefrozen landscape; second, the massive development potential under oil and gas exploration that is only possible through big industry; third, the history of cultural and geopolitical struggle of the indigenous Inuvialuit people; and fourth, the wielding of national sovereignty through aggressive federal plans for Arctic development FIG. 1 . By maximizing the development potential of each issue, and mitigating their possible harmful effects in this fragile context, the various players in this confluence can position Canada’s Arctic territory for a future of urban and architectural opportunity.

Typically imagined as a land of eternal ice, an impermeable frozen landmass nine times the size of California and bounded by the sea, the Arctic coast is actually experiencing some of the most significant effects of climate change. While Tuk’s economic and physical challenges already make it a sort of “Arctic slum” in terms of the conditions of its built infrastructure, by 2050 the situation will worsen as significant permafrost melt will succumb nearly 61% of its remaining karst landmass to inundation FIG. 2 . Concurrently, the increasing volatility of a rapidly rising sea is significantly eroding Tuk from its edges. The destruction of the land also threatens the Inuvialuit’s access to the complex ecologies to which their subsistence economy and recreational livelihoods remain vitally linked. As the Canadian Arctic declines at the hands of a climatic crisis, it must seek radical architectural and infrastructural intervention to defend its ecologies and to reconstruct its landscape.

As global hydrocarbon discoveries are beyond their peak and current production accounts for only half of consumption worldwide, oil exploration has expanded into the deepwater reserves beneath the rapidly diminishing armor of the Arctic 68

Tuktoyaktuk 1 According to the USGS, the Arctic Circle holds an estimated 90 billion barrels of undiscovered, technically recoverable oil and 1,670 TCF of natural gas. This is about 13% of the world’s undiscovered oil, 30% of the undiscovered natural gas, and 20% of the undiscovered natural gas liquids. See http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/article. asp?ID=1980.

2 As the 1970s OPEC oil crisis dropped the price of oil to $9.60 per barrel in 1986, southern oil investors ended their costly, non-conventional endeavors and companies including Dome Petroleum and Gulf Canada went out of business, folding their Arctic pursuits in the Beaufort Sea in 1988.

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FIG. 2 — P rojections of Tuktoyaktyk in 2050 without and with infrastructure to protect against sea level rise. Courtesy of author.

icecap. As Canada’s Beaufort-Mackenzie Basin holds the largest oil reserve north of 60º, the race for icebound oil will focus on the coastal communities of which Tuktoyaktuk is the most prominent.1 As the number of exploration licenses in the basin increase, the community of Tuk can draw upon recent memory to intuit the threat of unfettered oil development and its subsequent economic and infrastructural desertion.

At their extreme, these boom-bust cycles typically exploit a community’s minimal onshore resources and geographic position to bolster a period of productivity that quickly dies as industrial operations close. In the 1970s and ‘80s, the oil industry’s rapid development, exploitation, and eventual retreat expanded Tuktoyaktuk, only to desert the community when the economic viability of offshore development fell Fig. 3 .2 The economic, ecological, and territorial damage wreaked 69

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Pamela Ritchot

FIG. 3 — The urban corpse of previously abandoned ‘70s-era oil infrastructure in Tuktoyaktuk. Courtesy of author.

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“ As long ago the Mediterranean was the most important Sea in the world because the ruling nations—Rome, Carthage and Egypt— were on its shores, so today the Polar Sea is gaining importance because the three big powers of the world—Canada as a member of the Commonwealth, U.S.A. and U.S.S.R.—are facing each other over this ice- and islandfilled ocean. ... The growing importance of the Polar Sea air route is influencing the development of [the North].”

— Canadian Department of Transportation Press Release, 1957

As big industry races to find oil in ice, the Canadian government has shown its own spike in Arctic concern.

Canada’s “Northern Strategy” has established a national imperative for increased frontier development—one that is internally unprecedented in its dedication to the economic, infrastructural, and social growth of its Northern territories.4 Canada’s extensive Northern commitments are only now 71

3 Signed by both the Inuvialuit and the Canadian government, the goals of the IFA were to “preserve the Inuvialuit cultural identity and values within a changing Northern society and enable the equal participation of the Inuvialuit in the northern and national economy and society that was taking shape.” See Zoe Ho et al., eds., Inuvialuit Final Agreement: Celebrating 25 Years (Inuvik, NT: Inuvialuit Regional Corporation, 2009), 23.

4 In his 2010 Speech from the Throne, Prime Minister Stephen Harper identified various territorial, research, and development projects—such as a high Arctic research station—to exert Arctic sovereignty under its Northern Strategy. Harper also highlighted oil exploration as a crucial opportunity for northern development.

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by this phase of development mobilized the ratifying of the Inuvialuit Final Agreement (IFA) in 1984, which defined the local Inuvialuit land claims and strengthened their control over natural resources.3 This forthcoming era of Arctic urbanism will thus be a litmus test for decades-old policies, as they empower the Inuvialuit to control the infrastructural development on their land while strategizing Tuk’s long-term, post-oil growth.

As the owners and operators of the land within the Inuvialuit Settlement Region, the Inuvialuit have the opportunity to lead the future exploration agreements that will determine whether these reserves will in fact be tapped, and how both offshore exploration and onshore production will take shape. This empowerment thus affords them potential for real partnership with the oil companies as both parties will negotiate the provisions of development. As the entropic Arctic landscape slips out from under its communities, these partnerships help to establish the defensive infrastructure needed to stabilize the Inuvialuit’s coastal community.

Moreover, as infrastructural development is vitally linked to a region’s economic progress, ensuring that industry develops flexible infrastructure could provide their coastal economy with the necessary foundations upon which to transition from one that is oil-dependent to a post-oil one with a secure position in the global economy.

Pamela Ritchot

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5 The utopian plan of Frobisher Bay, a proposed Arctic new town in Nunavut, intended to exude sovereignty through its dominating urban forms and architectural symbols alone. What it did instead, however, was propose a scheme that was incompatible with the Arctic landscape and the settlement practices of its Inuit population. See Andrew Waldron, “Frobisher Bay Future: Megastructure in a Meta-Land,” Architecture and Ideas 8: 30.

6 “Arctic Sea Ice Shatters All Previous Record Lows: Diminished Summer Sea Ice Leads to Opening of the Fabled Northwest Passage,” National Snow and Ice Data Center, October 1, 2007, press release.

7 See “Breaking the Ice: Everyone Wants a Piece of the Arctic,” Economist, August 19, 2004.

8 Canada’s 1921 motto, a nation “from sea, to sea,” changed in 2006 to acknowledge its Arctic population.

9 Anthony Roberts, “Design for the North,” Canadian Architect, November 1958.

emerging after decades of neglect. Historically crippled by the geographic and economic strife common to insufficiently serviced, remote communities, the region has faced extreme socio-economic lows across a range of issues such as housing, access, and high costs of living. Past attempts to right these wrongs and exude Northern sovereignty over the land led to earlier federal projects focused on utopian urban plans that ended in failure, omitting the territory from the rest of the nation’s progress.5 However, with the climate crisis progressing and global interests in remote resources on the rise, the Northern territory may see a reversal of this pattern when these Arctic conditions demand the government’s close attention.

For instance, summer sea ice has receded by nearly 50% since the mid-1980s suggesting that previously unnavigable Arctic waters will be completely open within five to fifteen years.6 The opening of Canada’s Northwest Passage—an international marine route—will expose Canada’s northernmost coastline, the longest coastline in the world, to new levels of commerce, tourism, and military expansion.7 Under its Northern Strategy, Canada will truly be positioned to identify itself as a nation “from sea, to sea, to sea,”8 and join this Northern alliance with industry and the Inuvialuit. Together they will each play a role to catalyze a more stable future for the Arctic economy.

Anthony Roberts has optimistically commented on this timely moment for Arctic urbanism, stating: Canada has a greater opportunity than any other country to provide a distinctive national architecture. It will be an architecture based not on a superficial style or on a tradition, but a new and pure form which to be successful, is bound to be unique. Its originality will stem from design based on a social pattern and a series of physical and economic and political conditions which are not found collectively 9 elsewhere in the world today.

Foreseeing the finite economic opportunity afforded by big industry, the nation’s imperatives align with the development capacities of the oil industry in a way that could reposition Tuktoyaktuk for a scale of urban growth that the Inuvialuit could not otherwise execute on their own.

Big industry has the capacity to redefine the nature of urbanization as it tears through the local economies, cultural practices, and fragile ecologies constructing company towns in remote territories worldwide. The concept of oil urbanism 72

Tuktoyaktuk

describes company town development where a community’s growth booms under the economic and infrastructural support of the oil industry. Consequently, when this urban infrastructure is not developed in concordance with local practices and land uses—including subsistence hunting and fishing—then the local population left to manage it on their own can feel disharmony with its new, unfamiliar, and abandoned urban morphology: an urban corpse. Prior to discussions of oil urbanism, Patrick Geddes’s Valley Section demonstrates how human settlements have evolved through connections between economy, commerce, and the surrounding terrain Fig. 4 —contrary to the urban corpse concept. Geddes demonstrates how urban fabric and form must be vitally linked to the traditional practices and land uses specific to that region, thus implying that the abandoned company town—if not wholly adopted by its local community—will not survive.

Presently, however, such geographies of oil urbanization are expanding under conditions that are decentralized, nonphysical, and diffuse. Soja describes this post-metropolis city

10 Edward W. Soja, Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2000).

11 Saskia Sassen described the role of the global city to function as a point within the global economy while developing as a local site of production, innovation, and finance. See Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).

12 Robin Block, “The Metropolis Inverted: The Rise and Shift to the Periphery and the Remaking of the Contemporary City” (PhD dissertation, UCLA, 1994), 225.

13 Mason White, “Resource Fields: Gas Urbanism and Slick Cities,” in Fuel, ed.

John Knechtel (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 72.

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FIG. 4 — Patrick Geddes’s Valley Section, modified by author.

to be facing contemporary urban phenomena in which the prescriptive models of regional urban form no longer relate to local challenges.10 Instead these geographies take on global challenges such as environmental, transportation, and energy issues, whose local causalities are difficult to chart and whose long-term community impact becomes unclear.11

Arctic urbanism will face oil urbanism in Tuktoyaktuk as it implicates a global economy whose demand for offshore resources “[raises] the stakes for, and may very well demand 12 changes in the way we think about urban planning itself.”

Mason White identifies this post-metropolitan discourse as an Arctic reality, noting that the global quest for hydrocarbon exploitation has led to hyperactive economic and geographic development across Northern regions.13 This frantic urban development will uphold weakened national boundaries as global corporations aim to link even the most remote of communities in a network of global cities. This oil urbanism is giving shape to some of the world’s most imposing 73

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FIG. 5 — P ost-oil Tuktoyaktuk with a retrofitted infrastructure to support new industries. Courtesy of author.

FIG. 6 — A new Arctic urbanism. Courtesy of author.

***

structures, such as the infrastructural megaprojects of the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline, company towns such as Inuvik in the Northwest Territories, and offshore structures such as the Molkoya artificial island in Norway’s Snohvit Oil Field.

Given that the presence of resource wealth has a tendency to evoke economic upheaval, cause political unrest, and launch communities into capitalist-driven eras of development, we can expect the Canadian Arctic to be upon a phase of significant change. At Tuktoyaktuk, the contemporary form of the company town will resemble the global city, a new Arctic urbanism at the nexus of highly influential agents of change.

More than a century of conflict has shaped the narrative of the North and, undoubtedly, a resolution must be found between big industry’s structures of permanence and the finite lifespan of their operations. To take advantage of this timely nexus of opportunity, the huge capital investments of onshore and offshore development could incorporate the phased transition of these complex oil infrastructures into new occupations and programmatic uses for the Arctic community Fig. 5 . Economic and architectural opportunity will then mitigate this infrastructure’s abandonment as design innovation will bring urban revitalization through the extension of both its programmatic and operational flexibility and its structural permanence. At Tuk, one possible plan of action might be facilitating its transition from a seasonally-frozen ice economy into a productive harbor economy as the open-ice season grows increasingly long and the mobility of the Northwest Passage brings considerable marine traffic to this Northern gateway.

In this scenario, Tuk’s local population is left with a solid, infrastructural fabric upon which its future can thrive and accept new growth as the conditions of the North continue to change. By acknowledging the potential of these unique contextual challenges and finding syntheses between each of the key players’ demands, the Canadian Arctic can enter into a period of strategic development to maximize immediate opportunities and ensure self-sufficiency Fig. 6 . As it transitions into a future well beyond the lifespan of offshore oil drilling, Tuktoyaktuk can be a model for oil urbanism’s capacity to foster a new Arctic urbanism applicable to such contentious sites around the globe.

Pamela Ritchot received her MArch from MIT in 2011 where her design thesis looked at the infrastructures and operations of offshore oil drilling in the Canadian Arctic. She is currently working in Toronto on a regional infrastructure plan and economic development project for a mining town in Northern Canada.

Pamela holds a BED from the University of Manitoba.

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Boundary Line Infrastructure Ronald Rael

Ronald rael

“ But when one draws a boundary it may be for various kinds of reasons. If I surround an area with a fence or a line or otherwise, the purpose may be to prevent someone from getting in or out; but may also be part of a game and the players be supposed, say, to jump over the boundary; or it may show where the property of one man ends and that of another begins; and so on. So if I draw a boundary line that is not yet to say what I am drawing it for.”

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probes, and heat sensors. The concept of “national security” governs and militates construction and design of the wall as the success of the wall has been measured in the numbers of intercepted illegal crossings. I suggest that the wall, at such prices, should be thought of not only as security, but also as productive infrastructure—as the very backbone of a borderland ecosystem. Indeed, coupling the wall with viable infrastructure, focusing on water, renewable energy, and urban social infrastructure, is a pathway to security and safety in border communities and the nations beyond them. This proposition is for a wide array of retrofits and new schemes for the US-Mexico border wall that build on existing conditions and seek to ameliorate problems created by the physical divider.

Over 700 miles of barrier have been constructed since 2006 at a cost of $3.4 billion. Additionally, the new wall has already been breached over 3,000 times, incurring $4.4 million in repairs. The construction and maintenance costs are estimated to exceed $49 billion over the next 25 years and there are several hundred more miles of wall construction recently proposed.4 While recent statistics show a 50 percent drop over the past two years in the number of people caught illegally entering the United States from Mexico, human rights groups put the number of deaths during attempted crossings at its highest since 2006—almost 6,000 deaths have occurred since 1994.5

— Wittgenstein 1

The US Secure Fence Act of 2006 funded the single largest domestic building project of the twenty-first century. It financed approximately 800 miles of fortification dividing the US from Mexico at a cost of up to $16 million dollars per mile.2 Known as the Mexico-United States Barrier, the Great Wall of Mexico, Border Fence, and Border Wall, the construction of this wall has transformed large cities, small towns, and a multitude of cultural and ecological biomes along its path. The wall is envisioned for a tabula rasa defined by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. Chertoff was given the unprecedented power by President George W. Bush to waive any and all laws to expedite the wall’s construction.3 Ultimately, 30 laws were waived or suspended for the construction of the wall, including important environmental, wildlife, and Native American heritage protections. Ignoring the diverse contexts found along the border raises critical questions of ecology, politics, economics, archaeology, urbanism, and eminent domain, and radically redefines the territories of the frontera.

The wall is fabricated from steel, wire mesh, concrete, even re-purposed Vietnamera Air Force landing strips Fig. 1 .

It makes use of high-tech surveillance systems—aerostat blimps, subterranean

1 Ludwig Wittgenstein quoted in Judith Genova, Wittgenstein: A Way of Seeing (London: Psychology Press, 1995), 122.

2 For a previous version of portions of this research, see Ronald Rael, “Commentary: Border Wall As Architecture,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29 (2011): 409-420.

3 While there are a number of architectural definitions for “barrier,” Chertoff describes the intervention as a “tool.”

See Michael Chertoff, Homeland Security: Assessing the First Five Years (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 42.

4 See Tyche Hendricks, “Study: Price for Border Fence Up To $49 Billion,” San Francisco Chronicle, January 8, 2007.

5 See Spencer S. Hsu, “Border Deaths Are Increasing,” Washington Post, September 30, 2009.

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Under Construction

Virtual Wall

Vehicular Barricade

13’–16’ Steel Mesh

10’ Steel

18’ Steel

Double Wall

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FIG. 1 — Map of fence typologies. Courtesy of author.

Boundary Line Infrastructure

Ronald rael

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For the most part, architects and designers have stayed away from the border security issue. Ricardo Scofidio said about architects involvement in a border fence project, “It’s a silly thing to design, a conundrum. You might as well leave it to security and engineers.”6 Rem Koolhaas, who studied the Berlin Wall, described the peculiarities of the issue:

border. Removed from the market economy, this land in between the political boundary of the United States and the security barrier loses its productive value. By my own estimates, there are approximately 40,000 acres of US land that will lie on the Mexican side of the border wall—an area equal to twice the size of Manhattan. To counter this economically neutralized land, the security infrastructure must be put to work through contextual engagement and investment. I propose a productive border through site specific and modular solutions focused on water infrastructure, renewable energy, and social infrastructure. This proposal will also highlight some of the potential benefits these productive improvements can engender.

The border wall has already proven to be an effective, if accidental, water collection system. Water from desert rains typically drain across the border—yet in areas such as the port of entry at Sonoyta and Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, or in the Ambos Nogales, the fence acts as a dam, causing flooding and environmental damage

I had hardly imagined how West Berlin was actually imprisoned by the Wall. I had never really thought about that condition, and the paradox that even though it was surrounded by a wall, West Berlin was called “free,” and that the much larger area beyond the Wall was not considered free ... [and that] ... the Wall was not really a single object but a system that consisted partly of things that were destroyed on the site of the Wall, sections of buildings that were still standing and absorbed or incorporated into the Wall, and additional walls some really massive and modern, others more ephemeral all together contributing to an enormous zone. That was one of the most exciting things: it was one wall that always assumed a different condition . 7

FIG. 2 — F looding in Nogales. Sean Sullivan, Courtesy of Customs and Border Patrol.

Fig. 2 .8

When water collection is considered proactively, it can become a system with transformative consequences for the desert communities along the border. For example,

The US-Mexico wall has created a similar territory of paradox, horror, transformation, and flux, but at a much larger scale. It divides rivers, farms, homes, public lands, cultural sites, wildlife reserves, and migration routes, and is planned to cut through a university.

While the wall is always constructed on US soil, in many places it is constructed as far as two miles away from the actual territorial

6 William Hamilton, “A Fence with More Beauty, Fewer Barbs,” New York Times, June 18, 2006.

7 Hans Ulrich Obrist, “Part 1: On Berlin’s New Architecture,” in Interviews, vol. 1, ed. Thomas Boutoux (Milan: Charta, 2003), 507-528.

8 See “Report: Faulty Design Turned Border Fence Into Dam,” Arizona Daily Star, August 15, 2008.

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Boundary Line Infrastructure the city of El Paso levies storm water fees on all landowners based on the amount of their property’s impervious surfaces. They plan on raising $650 million for a system of storm water catchments to ameliorate the consequences of flooding. Dividing El Paso from Juarez is a large concrete basin defining the location where the Rio GrandeRio Bravo River once flowed. By locating these catchments along the basin, a linear park and riparian ecology could once again

FIG. 3 — Water catchment in El Paso. Courtesy of author.

flow through the two cities Fig. 3 . Locating additional rainwater collection shed roofs along the existing wall would increase the amount of water collected and create cool, well-shaded places where performances, markets, and events could take place.

Creating a linear water park in the space where the Rio Grande-Rio Bravo once flowed also has security implications. The purpose of wall construction is not to stop the flow of immigrants from the south, but to slow it down.

According to the Department of Homeland Security, the wall gives border patrol agents only a few more minutes time to stop an illegal crossing.9 The department also sees rivers as natural obstacles that offer five minutes of added time to the border patrol’s advantage.

A linear water park that reintroduces water 9 David McLemore, “Texas To See Border Fence Construction Next Year Despite Opposition,” Dallas Morning News, December 5, 2007.

10 George B. Frisvold and Margriet F. Caswell, “Transboundary Water Management Game-theoretic Lessons for Projects On the US-Mexico Border,” Agricultural Economics 24 (2000): 101-111.

11 George W. Bush, “Introductory Speech at the Signing of the Secure Fence Act,” Washington DC, October 26, 2006.

Fig. 4 — W astewater treatment wall in Calexico, California.

Courtesy of author.

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into the existing basin along the wall that meanders on both sides of the border can create a doubly-secure linear tactical, social, ecological, and hydrological infrastructure.

The New River is considered the most polluted river in the United States.10 It flows north from Mexicali and crosses the border at Calexico. New River toxicity is comprised of chemical runoff; pathogens like tuberculosis, hepatitis, and cholera; and fecal coliform bacteria, which at the border checkpoint far exceeds US-Mexico treaty limits. The New River then flows through the Imperial Valley, which is a major source of winter fruits and vegetables, cotton, and grain. While the Secure Fence Act of 2006 was enacted, according to President Bush, to “help protect the American people” from illegal immigration, drug smuggling, and terrorism, the New River represents a far more dangerous flow north from Mexico in need of containment.11 A wastewater treatment wall located in the two-mile-long wasteland that buffers Mexicali from the Imperial Valley is a solution to the “illegal entry” of toxins to the US. The pollution problem is expected to worsen as Mexicali’s population, already at 1.3 million, continues to expand without adequate infrastructure. For $33 million, the same cost as the wall that divides Calexico and Mexicali, it is possible to construct a wastewater treatment facility with the capacity to handle 20 million gallons per day of effluent from

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Ronald rael

the New River Fig. 4 . This proposed facility is composed of a linear pond filtration and purification system, creating a secure border infrastructure. The by-product of the wastewater treatment facility would include methane and water, a combination that could power a series of lit, green corridors, creating a healthy, social infrastructure that could join these growing border cities.

Next, the most untapped potential for solar development in the United States lies along the US-Mexico border. Solar farms, in turn, are highly secure installations. Reallocating funds used to construct and maintain the border wall for the construction of energy infrastructure along the border creates scenarios that, in many instances, are more secure than the existing wall, and simultaneously provide solar energy to the Southwest. The stretch between Nogales and Douglas saw 87 miles of border wall construction at a cost of $333.5 million, while the largest solar farm in the world, the Olmedilla Photovoltaic Park in Spain, cost $530 million. For $333.5 million, 54 miles of profitgenerating solar farm could be constructed at

between people with common interests are formed. Social capital, a concept that refers to the value of social relations and the role of cooperation and confidence to achieve collective or economic results, can be produced by such networks and is a core element in the fabric of communities: social capital can produce safety and security, friendship and community, civic identity and economic value. Over time, social capital builds “social infrastructure,” in the

Fig. 6 — F amily time through the fence. Courtesy of Sandy Huffaker.

form of parks and other civic amenities—a key element in the health of communities. One of the most devastating consequences of border wall security is the division of communities, cities, neighborhoods, and families— the erosion of social infrastructure Fig. 6 . Even so, sports have served as a way to cope with the realities of the wall.

Volleyball is played using the fence as a net in several sites along the border, and bi-national yoga classes have been held through the border wall Fig. 7 .

Using the border as an armature for a linear urban park through certain urban geographies could offer pedestrian and bicycle routes through the city Fig. 8 . The linear park, in turn, could increase adjacent property values and the quality of life on both sides of the border while providing an important green corridor through the city.

Fig. 7 — B order yoga. Courtesy of author (photographer unknown).

40 feet wide, powering 40,000 households Fig. 5 .

While most of this work has been focused on public utility-style resources, the importance of social improvements along the border should be stressed. Sports, for example, are social activities where networks

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FIG. 5 — S olar wall. Courtesy of author.

Fig. 8 — Bike and pedestrian wall. Courtesy of author.

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of World War II with a vision of hemispheric security that was not beholden to a limited view of border fortification. He said, “What I seek to convey is the historic truth that the United States as a nation has at all times maintained opposition—clear, definite opposition—to any attempt to lock us in behind an ancient Chinese wall.”12 Yet, the border fence in its current form recalls the inflexibility and ancient strategy of a wall as a singular means of security. Chertoff has stated that “a fence by itself is not going to work, but in conjunction with other tools, it can help.”

There are many reasons to think that border security can be achieved—and will only be achieved—by employing a more multivalent and flexible tool: a border infrastructure that has yet to be imagined.

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The infrastructural improvements under consideration here are designed to respond to the complex and often labyrinthine fiscal, cultural, and political realities of the border. Border towns lack the infrastructure that allows them to be sustainable, healthy cities and a border wall that integrates social, water, and energy infrastructure could have the potential to provide needed amenities.

Infrastructural elements are highly secure facilities and profits from infrastructure development projects can contribute to increased national security and immigration reform through the creation of jobs through the manufacturing of the vital components that make up infrastructural technologies, which could also be located along the border.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt set out a course for US-Mexico relations at the onset

12 Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Four Freedoms,” in Great Speeches, ed. John Grafton (New York: Dover Publications, 1999), 93.

*** Ronald Rael is an architect, an author, and Assistant Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his Master of Architecture degree at Columbia University in the City of New York. His practice, Rael San Fratello Architects with Virginia San Fratello, works at the intersection of architecture, art, culture, and the environment and has won numerous awards and accolades.

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Dissolving the Grey Periphery Neeraj Bhatia and Alexander D’Hooghe

Neeraj Bhatia and Alexander D’Hooghe

“ Los Angeles is fine in many respects, but it lacks legibility—that factor which ultimately involves identity and the whole business of the city as an extension of oneself, and the necessity for comprehension of this extension.”

— Alison and Peter Smithson 1

“ As in the large monochromatic works of Mark Rothko, mass society was seen as an endless ocean, free and mellow, with neither a centre nor frontiers.”

— Andrea Branzi 2

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A Grey Synthesis 1 Alison and Peter Smithson, Ordinariness and Light (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970), 182.

2 Andrea Branzi, No-Stop City: Archizoom Associati (Orléans, France: HYX, 2006), 151.

In their critique of Los Angeles, Allison and Peter Smithson witnessed an emerging territory of urbanization that lacked legibility and differentiation, threatening the civic consciousness of the city. They might say that this spatial condition was grey—an indistinct piece of terrain without difference or limits. Not distinct enough to be deemed a color, grey is often defined as neutral or dull. Its neutralizing effect is evident when it emerges as the synthesis from a stew of various paint colors. Grey is perhaps to the suburban condition as water is to fish. It is neither offensive nor attractive to anyone— it is just there. The Smithsons’ spatial critique is intriguing because it linked legibility of the formal configuration of a city to the identity of the city’s constituents. Simultaneous to the Smithsons’ critique, the artist and architect Andrea Branzi was coming to terms with a mass society without limits, distinction, or hierarchy. The socio-political condition described by Branzi (and hinted at by the Smithsons) framed a new public that we could say was also synthesizing into grey. Branzi’s realization occurred at a moment of evolving identity politics, wherein group identities began to fragment at an accelerated rate into various niche audiences, instigating notions of tolerance and compromise between interest groups. The endless ocean of mass society without centers or limits contained a similar dilemma to the one observed by the Smithsons—the inability to provide identity to a “grey” city and its publics. Yet at this very moment, Los Angeles’s audiences and cultures already 84

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began expressing themselves explicitly in the public realm.

So, while composed of several competing and often irreconcilable groups, the city public began to realize all the possible differences called for by liberal pluralism and, in the end, only produced a grey synthesis. Is there a manner to transform the notion of grey by staging such irreconcilable values?3 Starting with the spatial condition of grey, we forecast the sociopolitical ramifications of a new formal organization in the urbanized field.

From Grey to Colors

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The notion of grey is easily witnessed in the contemporary metropolis, and perhaps most apparent in the periphery of North American cities that now resemble mid-twentieth century Los Angeles. These vast territories are characterized by homogeneous and unplanned sprawl without formal limits, legibility, or identity. Scarborough is one such landscape of grey, located on the eastern periphery of Toronto. Scarborough Town Centre, a “failed” project for a modernist civic core, was to provide identity to the periphery as well as connect this territory to the rest of Toronto. Without attacking the entire periphery of Scarborough, we focus on this intersection as the catalyst for the separation of grey and the emergence of distinct identities.

To erode the notion of grey in Scarborough, we propose a reexamination of Isaiah Berlin’s concept of “agonized pluralism,” an approach argued for by Richard Sommer. For Berlin, the conflict between divergent beliefs, despite their individual justification, is the root of pluralism.4 Accordingly, Berlin’s proposed pluralism would not allow for a synthesis of such competing identities but, rather, stage an uneasy coexistence. Moreover, Berlin, quoting Schumpeter, calls for the “civilized man” to differentiate himself from the “barbarian” through understanding the relativity of one’s convictions (in the light of the equal value of other, opposing positions) while simultaneously standing for them unflinchingly.5 By way of addressing “grey” at large, we propose that a spatial reconfiguration of this core could in fact yield the template evoked by Berlin’s concept of agonized plurality. Transforming grey into a series of colors, we employ Berlin to reinforce pluralism’s divergent values without synthesizing liberal pluralism into a field of grey.

3 According to political theorist Hannah Arendt, pluralism is the dialectic relationship between our distinction and equality, and is the most integral component to a thriving public sphere. It is distinct, in that we all have a unique and subjective viewpoint that provides richness to the public sphere, and equal, in that we are all humans and share common goals. For Arendt, without plurality and the public sphere, we cannot affirm our subjectivities into a form of reality.

A reexamination of the dialectic within an agonized state of plurality offers clues on how to transform the grey into a grouping of colors. See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 175-176.

4 Isaiah Berlin, “The Lasting Effects” in The Roots of Romanticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 146-147.

5 Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty” in Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958).

Neeraj Bhatia and Alexander D’Hooghe

Crystallizing Formal and Typological Differences

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The development of Scarborough’s core emerged from generic suburban planning and resulted in a grouping of unfinished developments that contain no boundaries or limits.

Nevertheless, the center has the potential to be a major civic node for eastern Toronto as it is tied to regional infrastructure lines including the highway, rapid transit, and major arterial streets. Upon closer examination of the site, however, almostdistricts that share a formal-typological identity appear— commercial, high-rise tower, institutional, industrial, mixed-use, and open space Fig. 1 . While each of these districts contains a clear building type and associated demographic, the project of the district was never completed in its entirety. This resulted in a site with no apparent logic and an equally confused network of redundant roads Fig. 2. What if these districts of “almost-identities” could be clarified and made into legible entities Fig. 3 ?

Fig. 1

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Fig. 2

Dissolving the Grey Periphery

Fig. 3

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Fig. 4

An Infrastructural Object to Connect All the Exacerbated Difference

A neutral void lingers and is framed between these legible districts. Unclaimed, the void belongs to no one and everyone, enabling it to define the public sphere in Scarborough while also connecting the various districts Fig. 4 . Currently, this void features a rapid transit stop, bus drop-off, and automobile routes. If all of the surface parking and flows of the site were consolidated into this space, it would begin to link the districts and their diverse users Fig. 5 . Flow infrastructures define the form of the transfer station, while soft programs colonize the 87

Fig. 5

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Neeraj Bhatia and Alexander D’Hooghe

Fig. 6

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parking platforms to take advantage of moments of commuter inactivity. These informal programs include markets, theatres, bingo halls, and recreational activities that reaffirm the diversity of the publics existing within the islands Fig. 6 . The infrastructure and users are united on a collective platform of plurality, the “plinthesis,” while also being connected to the larger region of Toronto through a transfer station Fig. 7 .

While separation and fragmentation have allowed these distinct islands to have coherent yet competing identities, how should these districts be connected to each other and to the regional network of infrastructure?

The Mall Atrium as Glue

While conventional “good” urbanism—as proposed by the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU)6—involves the continual attempt of animating the street, this approach is no longer tenable in Scarborough. The walking street is dead in Scarborough and we do not see any realistic argument that can revive it in such peripheral sites. In fact, the only “public” space that functions on the site is the existing mall—a romanticized version of the street, complete with weather control. What if the mall atrium is the template for connection in the suburban context? Liberated from commercial interests, atria could be used as an internalized connective network. Five distinct atria connect the various districts internally as well as to the transfer station and its associated infrastructure. These climatically controlled spaces are liberated to be unconditionally open to all. The mall is thus reconfigured into a micro-city, the compacted public realm of Scarborough, and is connected with the world at large through the plinthesis.

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Fig. 7

6 Congress for the New Urbanism, Charter of the New Urbanism (Chicago: released by the author, 2001).

Neeraj Bhatia and Alexander D’Hooghe

Irreconcilable Utopias

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These grouped islands each contain their own irreconcilable utopia, standing with unflinching conviction in contradistinction to the ubiquitous sprawl of the metropolis.

Each utopia contains a distinct identity, an extension of its constituent user group. The neutral collective infrastructures of flow, atria, and parking platforms connect them into a coherent whole without compromising their individual identities Fig. 8.

This uneasy coexistence of pluralism acknowledges both the individual and collective, and ultimately, the public sphere.

Only by creating boundaries for each island can we understand difference within the grey and form an identity. Without such edges, we are condemned to swim without purpose in the grey goo of suburbia.

This project was produced as part of the Cities Centre Workshop: Build Toronto carried out at the University of Toronto, John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design.

Team Directors: Alexander D’Hooghe and Neeraj Bhatia with Shelagh McCartney and Francesco Martire Design Team Phase 2: Nathan Bortolin, Dave Freedman, Han Liu, Salome Nikuradze, Mahtab Oskuee, Sanford Riley, Kristin Ross, Steven Socha, and Celina Yee

Fig. 8

Design Team Phase 1: Nathaniel Addison, Justin Cheung, Song Deng, Gaston Fernandez, Robert E Fiorino, Andria Ya-Yu Fong, Zachariah Elan Glennon, Meagan Donkin Gumbinger, Darius Gumushdjian, Martin Hogue, Man Yee Stanton Hung, Negar Jazbi, Ada-Nkem Juwah, Zeena Hashim Kammoona, and Mandy Allison Wong

***

Neeraj Bhatia is a director of InfraNet Lab, founder of The Open Workshop, and the Visiting Wortham Teaching Fellow at Rice University.

Alexander D’Hooghe is Associate Professor in Architectural Urbanism at MIT, and director of the Organization for Permanent Modernity (ORG).

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Park as Philanthropy: Bow-Wow’s Redevelopment at Miyashita Koen

Yoshiharu Tsukamoto, interviewed by Casey Goodwin

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Yoshiharu Tsukamoto

Built on a narrow plot of artificial ground, Miyashita Park, one of the few green spots in Tokyo’s Shibuya Ward, occupies the rooftop of a 1960s low-rise parking structure within this urban sub-center that combines business, commerce, and leisure. Extending 330 meters in length and averaging 25 meters in width, this tree-covered expanse had long been underutilized due to poor upkeep and crowding by a large number of illegally camped homeless persons.

In 2010, Miyashita Park was fenced in order to implement a privately funded refurbishment plan sponsored by the Japanese subsidiary of the international sportswear giant, Nike.

In the arrangement between Nike Japan and Tokyo’s Shibuya Ward, naming rights were purchased through 2020, granting permission for the name “Miyashita Nike Park.” This was to be the first case of a Japanese local authority and a publicly held company collaborating to upgrade a park.

Yoshiharu Tsukamoto, principal of Tokyo-based design firm Atelier Bow-Wow, first noticed Miyashita Park in the early ‘90s and the park was eventually featured in the architect’s breakthrough publication Made In Tokyo, with the punning title “park on park.” 1 Ten years later in 2008, a representative from Nike Japan approached Atelier Bow-Wow to request a scheme for the subsidized redevelopment.

With local residents and business owners favoring the intervention, a countermovement backed by anti-Nike activists and support groups for the homeless emerged. Beyond the dispute over the sale of park naming rights lay the heart of the controversy: differing interpretations of the civic role of public park space.2 The project opened on April 30th of 2011.

— Casey Goodwin

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Park as Philanthropy Casey Goodwin

What initially sparked your interest in Miyashita Park? Describe your earliest encounter with this rumpled public space.3

CG

In 2004, Shibuya Ward officials moved to cleanup Miyashita Park, and that would eventually lead to the privately funded refurbishment effort. At what point did Atelier Bow-Wow become involved?

CG

In a project with so many diverse stakeholders—both public and private—how did you come to see your role as “Architect”?

Conversely, what makes a project socially conscious for Bow-Wow?

YT

A representative from Nike Japan came to Bow-Wow to discuss the project in 2008, some ten years after our guidebook inclusion. What they had in mind was a new framework for improving the quality of public space through a joint public-private collaboration.

Today, the gap between citizens and public authorities is wide yet people believe public spaces must be built and maintained

YT In the beginning, the schematic for Miyashita Park was handled by my seminar at Tokyo Tech. Invariably our students’

1 Yoshiharu Tsukamoto, Momoyo Kaijima, and Junzo Kuroda, Made In Tokyo (Tokyo: Inax, 2001), 64-65.

2 For details on the controversy surrounding the refurbishment plan, see http://www.ourplanet-tv.org/?q=node/489.

3 This interview occurred March 2011 in Tokyo.

4 Tsukamoto et al., Made In Tokyo, 64-65.

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I first became interested in the park as a student. I saw an intriguing but mostly vacant space, over an existing parking structure in the middle of Shibuya, one of the animated commercial subcenters of Tokyo. A green roof is common today but twentyfive years ago, it was not. The shape of the site is extremely FIG. 1— Photo of Miyashita Park from Made in Tokyo. long and narrow. That made using taxpayers’ money. At the beginning it appear as an interstitial, or of the twentieth century in Japan, private leftover space in the urban scheme. philanthropists helped finance and create

Also, the park is not an “A-Grade” new cultural facilities. For example, Tokyo’s public building—such as a library, museum, National Museum of Modern Art received or concert hall. Under Japan’s planning law, major funding from Japan’s Bridgestone it’s a “B-Grade” public space serving daily Corporation following World War II. requirements. As most of Tokyo’s “A-Grade”

What Nike Japan attempted is a joint public facilities have been designed by venture between philanthropy and marketing. architects of an older generation, I feel that Finally, it became pure philanthropy, since my generation needs to work on “B-Grade” they opted not to invest their naming rights. typologies, and I wanted to define our role and So the park will henceforth remain Miyashita mission. So I included Miyashita as one of the Park, as before. examples in my guidebook Made In Tokyo Fig. 1 .4

Yoshiharu Tsukamoto

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FIG. 2 — Drawing of proposal for redeveloped Miyashita Park.

most important task is achieving a real and supportive framework, with the actual components remaining secondary. In this sense, the role of the “Architect” is to oversee the achievement of a framework that allows the project to take shape and to happen.

Therefore, a socially conscious project is one that analyzes the nature of the project itself. To do this, you must think about society.

Buildings are always socially produced.

They reflect the society that makes them. So my approach to building is anthropological, calling into question first where and how we live in relation to history and community.

CG

Please talk about the program and proposed upgrades for Miyashita. Also, do you envision any loss or compromise vis-à-vis the park’s original state?

YT

When I was a student, no homeless people occupied the park, but by the time Bow-Wow started work, the situation had changed. The space was overrun and had also grown dark due to poor upkeep of the zelkova trees. Our initial intention was to create greater transparency by pruning these trees, and we eventually collaborated with a landscape designer in order to reestablish sight lines. Our client, Nike Japan, also wanted to add two new sports facilities—a skateboarding park and a climbing wall—to supplement the two existing futsal 5 courts, but for that we needed more space. Our resolution was to expand the park on all sides to the full structural limits. We gained

1.5 meters on every side, allowing us to augment circulation and include a number of concrete benches along the perimeter where onlookers can now sit. Another brief was to enhance access-ibility, so we proposed a broad staircase facing the street crossing and a new elevator Fig. 2 . Such practical issues were mandates from the city, which owns and maintains the park as a public facility.

Nike Japan originally hoped for a new clubhouse but this was an architectural addition, requiring a building permit. The existing substructure lacked the requisite strength. We negotiated with the authorities to reestablish our ground line at park level, rather than at street level. This redefined the parking facility as infrastructure, a feature normally situated sub-grade. Technically speaking, the new clubhouse could now be undertaken with greater freedom.

It took three years to design the new clubhouse and during this time, the building permission officer in Shibuya Ward was replaced. His replacement insisted that the existing parking structure didn’t meet seismic standards and would therefore have to be retrofitted. Nike Japan, however, wanted to get on with the project. So we put the new clubhouse on hold, and are enhancing and upgrading the existing one.

The surroundings of the existing clubhouse are all park. There is no roof or floor element—just walls or reset boundaries.

The elevator is the only structure we needed a building permit for and is constructed at street level, quite separate to the garage. Moreover, any soil we excavated from the garage rooftop was replaced with new materials6 equal in

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Park as Philanthropy weight. Thus, no additional weight has been imposed on the infrastructure below.

CG

You have maintained the existing zelkova trees in the skatepark area, carefully sculpting the ramps around them. Can you discuss the presence of these trees in light of the added skateboarding activities?

YT

A skatepark is very noisy, so it shouldn’t be close to apartment or residential buildings.

Railway tracks and commercial buildings flank this end of the park so, despite the trees, we felt this was the best place to put the skatepark. The trees, in turn, became the starting point for our design. I believed that protection of the trees could be integrated with skateboarding obstacles, such as banks or quarter-pipes. Having visited several skateparks before starting work, I noticed the lack of any shaded space. So I thought skating under and in-between the trees could provide shade while adding a new feature to the game Fig. 3 .

CG

In Tokyo Subdivision Files,7 you categorized different behaviors, belongings, and garments of building users Fig. 4 . What did you learn from this study and how did it influence your design process at Miyashita Park?

YT

It was 2002 when I collected that research with graduate students. Tokyo is not a single society; rather, it is a collection of very diverse groups sharing common traits. Each individual belongs to several component communities, and the resulting agglomeration represents today’s society. At that point, I thought about composition of the city, building the hypothesis that its origins reside in the bodies of people—as everyone has their own history and background.

For example, before the collapse of the “bubble economy” we had lots of Iranian guest workers at construction sites. Every weekend, they gathered at Yoyogi Park, which 5 Futsal is a reduced variant of European soccer and is played on a hard, small-scale surface often indoors. The name derives from the Portuguese futebol de salão and the Spanish fútbol de salon, both meaning “indoor football.”

6 In order to minimize the load imposed by the skatepark on the existing substructure, a novel construction technique making use of polystyrene foam was used. The material is an ideal alternative to dirt backfill because it is lightweight, easily cut to shape, and neither compacts nor retains moisture. For details, see Casey Goodwin, “Foam Follows Function: The Making of a Skatepark,” ARCADE 28, no. 1 (2010).

7 Yoshiharu Tsukamoto et al., Tokyo Subdivision Files (Tokyo: Inax, 2002).

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FIG. 3— Photo of Miyashita Park from Made in Tokyo.

FIG. 4 — S ample catalog entry from Tokyo Subdivision Files.

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Yoshiharu Tsukamoto was transformed into an instant market.

There were barbers and halal butchers.

There were people selling shish kabobs, medicine, illegal phone cards, and electronic gadgets. I discovered that while they were lower-class laborers in Tokyo, they had formerly been highly skilled professionals.

They used their weekends to share older skills and knowledge. No one had planned this makeshift market; instead, it sprouted spontaneously. Could this be how cities began? Soon, I became fascinated with other Tokyo areas, observing behaviors and documenting types of clothing and accoutrements specific to each group.

This furnished us with important ideas about how to work on the city and use public space. We initially tested these ideas through art installations—such as oversized furnishings and mobile structures FigS. 5, 6 .

By trial and error we arrived at the notion of a “Micro Public Space.” We always start working with materials and resources in a

specific locale, then transform and adapt them based on human use.

For Miyashita, we had to be cognizant of the cultures involved—such as Nike Japan and Shibuya Ward—as well as the communities of skaters, climbers, and futsal lovers Fig. 7 .

We interviewed them and considered their preferences and modes of thinking. The new facilities will invite these various communities both to perform and to draw spectators Fig. 8 .

Fig. 7 — Futsal court as redeveloped in Miyashita Park.

FIG. 5 — W hite Limosine Yatai installation as a Micro Public Space.

FIG. 8 — Spectators at rockwall as built in Miyashita Park

FIG. 6 — D rawings for Furnicycle installation as a Micro Public Space.

CG

Professor Jonathan Hill of the Bartlett School in London classifies users into three categories. “Passive users” merely inhabit space and show no other concern for it; “reactive users” modify space to suit their needs; and “creative users” often discover ways of using space unanticipated by architects, and hence confer new meaning

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Park as Philanthropy upon existing places.8 In what ways do you envision these user types interacting with your design for Miyashita?

space, then, as reflecting each and every intervention. The moment we [in an open society] start to observe and touch social space, it transforms itself.

YT

For us, there are no passive users, since a park is not a business site. There is no service being provided. You need to import your own skills to perform there and enjoy the place.

For instance, being on the same level as the railway tracks, someone might start running and compete with passing trains. This could be a new sport! So the park is geared toward Hill’s “creative users.” Others, for example, may enjoy having a picnic on the north side, which has fewer facilities. Yet, for us, this is not just “reactive.” It too is a “creative” use of space.

CG

As an architect practicing in Tokyo, how do you view the mission and role of parks today?

YT

One big role of parks in Tokyo is to provide vacant space in case of an emergency, such as a big earthquake. In this event, parks would be the most important facilities in the city, providing post-disaster relief. Another role is daily use. So the structuring of parks must be thought of in terms of this double context. Yet, just being vacant space for evacuation is not enough. Parks should be a robust lifeline as well. A project of ours, PKO (Public Kitchen Operation), is an example of this new type of park structure Fig. 9 .

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CG

In The Production of Space, the late French Marxist sociologist and philosopher Henri Lefebvre indicates three activities responsible for spatialization: “spatial practice,” that guarantees a certain continuity and cohesion, along with actual lived “representational spaces” and ideological “representations of space.” These constitute “a tool of thought and action” thus “a means of control” and therefore of “domination.” 9 Can these relate to Atelier Bow-Wow’s more unified way of thinking about shakai kukan, or social space?

YT

For me, it’s a question of subjectivity.

Users normally determine the representation of a given space, while historically architects and planners have tended to dominate the space of representation itself. Yet, in reality, “spatial practice” has no dominant subjectivity. I believe spatial practice, by its nature, invites all subjects to participate.

I’m interested in Lefebvre’s “espace sociale” because it emphasizes a wish for the production of space, rather than casting users as mere bystanders, let alone “objects” of spatial practice. For us, social space is inherently deficient: not stable, always changing, continually depending on its users for completion. We must think of social

Fig. 9 — Model for PKO (Public Kitchen Operation).

There are many jido koen (children’s parks) in Tokyo’s residential neighborhoods.

Using a master plan, the location and size were determined based on the number of inhabitants living in each area. Today,

8 Jonathan Hill, Actions of Architecture: Architects and Creative Users (London: Routledge, 2003).

9 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1991), 38-39.

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these parks usually contain mundane play structures as a result of product liability laws.

Some authorities have altogether removed such equipment. So jido koen have become generic and vacant spaces.

Bow-Wow has speculated on ways to create interest within and variety among these parks. For instance, in our contribution to the Tokyo Recycle Project, we made several propositions for thematic elements—like a gigantic jungle gym or huge sand dunes. With Japan’s decreasing birth rate, it’s also time to transform public spaces with older users in mind. Hopefully, our work on Miyashita Park will encourage more companies to take up this genuinely new model of community redevelopment.

*** Yoshiharu Tsukamoto, JIA is principal, along with partner Momoyo Kijima, of Atelier Bow-Wow. Their books Pet Architecture Guide and Made in Tokyo have led to exhibitions around the world, along with a number of commissions for houses, museums, and commercial buildings. Tsukamoto is also Associate Professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology, and has taught at Harvard, UCLA, and the Barcelona Institute of Technology.

Casey Goodwin earned a BA in Architectural Studies from the University of Washington in 2008. He is currently a postgraduate Japan Ministry of Education Fellow in the Department of Architecture at Tokyo Institute of Technology and his writing has been included in Column 5 Journal and ARCADE Magazine.

98

Mussels in Concrete: A Social Architectural Practice

Esen Gรถkรงe ร zdamar

Esen Gökçe Özdamar

Play in the District, an installation by architect Arzu Kusaslan exhibited in Antoni Muntadas’s “Istanbul In-Between” workshop, addresses questions of public involvement in the urban transformation of Zeytinburnu County, Istanbul.1 Kusaslan states that one of her primary objectives was to explore the artistic possibilities arising from community involvement.2 She proposed to transform the neglected ground within the county by the re-activation of textile workshops and the transformation of a neglected alleyway into a playground, revealing the unforeseen potentials of these spaces Fig. 1 . With the use of tactile materials in the designated playground street, the textile workshops can recall the former identity of Zeytinburnu as the center of the leather and textile industry as far back as 1453.3 This aimed to produce urban regeneration as part of Kusaslan’s project.

According to Muntadas, the state of “in-between” in Istanbul was to be approached through individual encounters between the artist and the city. As Kusaslan lives and works in the community, her familiarity with the dynamics of the area enabled her to work closely with the residents to test the effects of the county’s rapid urbanization—and her transformation of an alleyway into a playground compelled participation of neighborhood residents. In the urban landscape of Istanbul, the project showed a promising means to break the static relation between public space and architecture Fig. 2 . Kusaslan’s project was an act of architectural social organization that FIG. 1— View from the back entrance of the street. was new to Turkey.4 Its use of participation could be a prototype for planning in Zeytinburnu County, and serves as a model for urban transformation in Istanbul at large.

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1 Play in the District was also installed as a documentary film in exhibitions InBetween-Arada-Tra and Lives and Works in İstanbul. See Ayşe Orhun Gültekin, ed., In Between = Arada = Tra (Istanbul: Visual Arts Directorate, 2010).

2 Arzu Kusaslan, interview with author, 2010.

3 Gültekin, In Between = Arada = Tra. 4 Although participatory methods in architecture and urban planning at both the individual and institutional level have been applied in many Western countries since the 1960s, few projects in this tradition have been realized in Turkey.

Zeytinburnu County The first migrants came to Zeytinburnu in the 1950s, and the county became one of the first and largest squatter areas in Istanbul.

Even though legislation was passed to prevent gecekondus, or slum buildings, in 1960, their rate of construction continued to rise.

Additionally, with a rapid population increase from the 1970s onwards, gecekondus were

FIG. 2— The video installation of Play in the District, in Tophane-i Amire, Istanbul.

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replaced by multi-story, concrete apartment blocks. Erected on informally subdivided land, these blocks lacked infrastructure and public open space. During the construction of these newly erected buildings, speed over quality resulted in the use of materials that could be found easily in the existing area. Mussel shells from the coast of the Marmara Sea were incorporated into the cement mixture to satisfy demand. Despite poor structural capacities, “musselled” buildings became increasingly common. The typical building consisted of a textile workshop on the ground floor and several residences above, and the county was transformed into a bustling, semi-industrial area.

Already a dense and congested region, Zeytinburnu was heavily damaged in the 1999 Istanbul earthquake and became a pilot region for the Earthquake Master Plan of Istanbul.5 During execution of the plan, reinforcement and destruction of buildings occurred simultaneously. Due to the lack of a proper relocation scheme, low-income groups from the region were relocated to other parts of the Marmara Region without infrastructure or means of livelihood.6 This situation was further exacerbated by the 2003 economic crisis, ultimately affecting more than 300,000 residents.

5 According to the plan, 14% of buildings and heavily damaged housing units in the county are to be demolished over a 20 year span.

See http://www.ibb.gov.tr.

6 Ibid.

7 One of the dweller-rights activist groups is Sokaklar Bizim Platform which aims to increase conciousness on urban life, improve conditions on streets, and support walkable communities.

Kusaslan negotiated the feasibility of the project with the Zeytinburnu Municipality Consultant, Vice Mayor, and Mayor. They were enthusiastic about the idea and offered to conduct a poll in collaboration with a sociologist. Kusaslan worked closely with the sociologist as well as a historian, a city planner, and a dweller-rights activist group7 to design the poll.

Along with assistants from the Visual Arts Directorate, Kusaslan presented the project to 287 dwellers in the county Fig. 3 . This group constituted a representative sample of Turkish society, including minority groups, making the survey an effective means to understand the effects of urban transformation on Zeytinburnu’s residents.

The Visual Arts Directorate provided a space in their offices for community meetings, FIG. 3— A participant encountering the project. but the residents felt uncomfortable in the government setting due to a common fear of urban transformation and relocation regulations.

Ultimately, meetings were held in a bakery.8 In this comfortable setting, those whose voices are often silenced by fear were able to speak publicly through models, drawings, and debates on 101

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The Participation Process

Esen Gökçe Özdamar 8 Bakeries, as well as coffeehouses, have a historical social importance for meetings in Turkish society.

9 Feyzan Erkip, “Global Transformations Versus Local Dynamics in Istanbul Planning in a Fragmented Metropolis,” Cities 17, no. 5 (2000): 374.

urban and housing issues Fig. 4 . Despite independent funding, the process was interrupted by the Municipality’s decision to withdraw from the project. The Mayor rejected the project based on a 10% abstaining group—which consisted mostly of homemakers who based their decision on influence from their spouses. About 2% of the abstaining group had no children and their decision was based on possible noise from the children in the proposed playground. The remaining 8% was unable to take the poll as they were hesitant about their future. There was speculation, however, that this group, in actuality, was afraid of breaking advantageous connections with the Municipality.

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Art, Architecture and Social Change

FIG. 4­— Community charrette meetings.

Kusaslan attempted to link dwellers to their environment through political dynamics of the city, and ended up succeeding in exposing a political and cultural narrative on the boundary between the urban and class isolation.

Migration and poor planning tends to change urban space, and the processes of relocation tend to exacerbate changes such as class isolation. As Feyzan Erkip states, the 1980s saw the development of these sorts of new narratives in the urban landscape: “When controlling power over land development and use was transferred to greater and district municipalities, this change was expected to give way to the participation of planning professionals at the local level. Now, it is clear that the new distribution of power between central and local governments made urban land more available for big construction companies instead of squatters.”9 The retraction of the Zeytinburnu Municipality exhibits this narrative, as those with political power voiced support for the project, yet their actions proved contrary.

These narratives demonstrate that the public and, in particular, architects can be marginalized with nonparticipatory government decision-making. They are not included in the process but, moreover, they do not desire to be included in the process. Getting involved is regarded as a loss of time for a hopeless struggle against rules. Here, only a small group of architects become interested in these issues, such as the participants of Play in the District. In order to challenge 102

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10 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984): 117.

11 Aykut Köksal, “İstanbul: Hazır Bağlam,” Sanat Dünyamız 78 (2000): 91-94.

12 Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (New York: Les Presses Du Reel, 2002): 26.

Consider also Bourriaud’s notion of “spector participation” as theorized within art group Fluxus’s happenings and performances.

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the slow, top-down relocation process, which has historically resulted in a lack of space for debate, of exchanges of ideas, and of productive friction, architects and artists have installed transient, participatory spaces for gathering as an artistic methodology. In line with Michel de Certeau’s notion on the development of a city through its social activity, movement of people, and experience of creative practice,10 the narrative of “the urban” is shaped by the elements of the urban entity itself.

Similarly, as Turkish architect and art critic Aykut Köksal suggests, the city is not designed and finished but, rather, transitory and temporary. He argues that the city in these circumstances is a non-place,11 due to variable spatial contexts and multiple realities. The city dynamically reconstructs itself through these flows between autonomous entities, and transforms its elements by articulating them with their changing relation to the whole. Barriers between the autonomous art object and urban space are broken down with contemporary artistic methodologies and with urban modernity. Art has become a tool for interrogative architectural practice. Kusaslan’s project demonstrates the diminishing barriers between the built and the unbuilt environment.

The roles of planner and dweller blur, reflecting Nicolas Bourriaud’s idea of transitivity as the “tangible property of the artwork.”12 The transitivity of the art project creates a more reliable background for approaching the dweller, since it is not perceived as a concrete architectural project. This idea of approaching the spectator by demolishing the boundaries between art and architecture is intrinsic to Kusaslan’s project.

In Play in the District, the government’s legitimating of the lack-of-land protection laws is forced to reconcile with the dwellers observation of irrational urban planning in the county.

The contradiction between the government’s declaration that an abstaining group opposed urban transformation and the fact that the majority of those living in the area are ignored becomes evident. The project suggests that one way architects and artists can react or oppose abuses of power is through linking art, architecture, and urban planning.

Today, the construction of housing is viewed as the most important tool toward the reconstruction of Istanbul as a global city. Through the construction of housing, the government and developers try to give an identity to new areas. Shortcomings that might be addressed through participation, however, still appears to be politically unfeasible. Furthermore, the city requires more than housing development—it requires a fundamental shift in sociocultural understanding. Urban transformation, detached from social structure, needs to be taken as a new transdisciplinary strategy where the participants

Esen Gökçe Özdamar

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are transformed into perceivers. Activist projects, such as Play in the District, a beginning for revealing social issues from multiple perspectives—that of the dweller, the planner, and urban authorities. Here, participation is more than an exchange of the roles, but one in which dwellers have the capacity to take a fundamental role in changing their environment.

The project is used courtesy of Arzu Kusaslan and the İstanbul 2010 European Capital of Culture Visual Arts Directorate. Financial support for the work was provided by the İstanbul 2010 European Capital of Culture Visual Arts Directorate. All images are by the author. The author would also like to thank Jonathan Crisman and Irina Chernyakova for their comments and guidance.

*** Esen Gökçe Özdamar is Assistant Professor of Architecture at İstanbul Arel University. She received her PhD in Architectural Design from Istanbul Technical University in 2011. Currently, her research areas are transdisciplinarity, contemporary paradigms, visual art and culture, and correlations between social sciences, art, philosophy, and scientific knowledge.

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Participation and/or Criticality?

Thoughts on an Architectural Practice for Urban Change

Kenny Cupers and Markus Miessen

Kenny Cupers and Markus Miessen

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Kenny Cupers

If an increasing number of commentators declare both partici-pation and criticality as having run out of steam, how then are we to rethink social and political engagement in art and architecture today? Public participation over the past half-century has been mobilized by ideals with almost universal attraction: democracy, social justice, self-determination.

Who can claim to be against such basic principles? But because of its apparent universality, many have recently argued that participation is acutely flawed—both conceptually and practically. The “tyranny of participation” has been critiqued in fields as diverse as development studies and the visual arts.1 In a similar way, the notion of criticality has been found in crisis. With the demise of the once fashionable Critical Theory in cultural production, some have claimed that the main tools of criticality have been crippled.2 The question, then, is how to harness the concepts of participation and criticality in a contemporary practice that wishes to be socially and politically engaged.

Markus Miessen

I propose a post-consensual practice— one that is no longer reliant on ill-defined modes of operating within politically complex and consensus-driven groups, but instead calls into question the innocence of participation. The notion of participation is at a point of transition—within politics, within the Left, within spatial practices, and especially within architecture as its tangible and most clearly defined product. Participation has typically been read through romantic notions of negotiation, inclusion, and democratic decision-making. However, it is precisely

1 See Uma Kothari and Bill Cooke, Participation: The New Tyranny? (New York: Zed Books, 2001). See also, Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October 110 (2004): 51-79.

2 See Robert Somol and Sarah Whiting, “Notes Around the Doppler Effect and Other Moods of Modernism,” Perspecta, no. 33 (2002): 72-77; Michael Speaks, “After Theory,” Architectural Record (June 2005): 72-75; George Baird, “‘Criticality’ and Its Discontents,” Harvard Design Magazine, no. 21 (Fall 2004/Winter 2005): 16-21; and Reinhold Martin, “Critical of What? Toward a Utopian Realism,” Harvard Design Magazine, no. 22 (Spring/Summer 2005): 1-5.

this unquestioned mode of inclusion—used by politicians as one of never-ending retail politics—that precludes critical results. I am instead promoting a conflictual model of participation: one that opposes the herd mentality of consensus and that has to assume—at times—non-physical violence, dissensus, and singular, first-person decisionmaking in order to produce change. This is an ongoing project. I am attempting to open up a new language of practice by essentially presenting architectural thinking as method.

KC

In order to chart new ways of how participation can produce critical alternatives, perhaps we should begin by asking how it became the new tyranny. Why can participation be so easily explained as the oil of a democratic political machinery that also happens to work remarkably well with global capitalism? Are architects to blame, who sniff dismissively when they hear calls for participation, pointing at the unimaginative architecture it has proven to produce?

I think it is a mistake to cast participation solely as the emancipating response “from below” to the evils of authoritarianism. This myth overshadows the historical forces that gave rise to participatory processes in architecture and urban planning. The rhetoric of participation was hardly born on the barricades of May 1968. By that time, it had already become a mainstream political idea in the context of postwar economic development and of a budding consumer culture in the social-democratic West. It was fostered “from above,” by state policymakers and technocrats as much as by the social movements subsequently idealized by leftist intellectuals. If it is true that power cannot be given, then the institution-alization of participation since the 1970s—certainly in the French context—hardly amounts to the distribution of power its advocates claim it to be. Yet, in architecture, calls for participation actually did correspond to a critical rethinking of the discipline. It was at a point in time when professional ideologies and ruling beliefs were being dismantled and architecture’s social and political role came

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to be fundamentally questioned. And it is precisely at this opening up of architecture’s critical potential where the importance of participation lies today.

FIG. 1 — ­ W ebsite of The Winter School Middle East, founded and directed by Markus Miessen with co-director Kuwait Zahra Ali Baba. See www.winterschoolmiddleeast.org.

3 For more on these interventions, see The Winter School Middle East, http://www.winterschoolmiddleeast.org; Vanessa Joan Müller and Astrid Wege, European Kunsthalle 2005 2006 2007 (Cologne: European Kunsthalle, 2007); Markus Miessen, East Coast Europe (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2008); Shumon Basar, Antonia Carver, and Markus Miessen, eds., With/Without: Spatial Products, Politics and Practices in the Middle East (New York: Bidoun, 2007).

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I would also like to touch upon the experience of institutionalizing myself in formal political settings on a governmental scale, through East Coast Europe,a project commissioned by the Govern-ment of Slovenia during Slovenia’s presidency of the European Council in 2008, and through a research project commissioned by the Dubai government think tank Moutamarat that resulted in the publication With/Without: Spatial Products, Politics and Practices in the Middle East. Both of these projects attempted to understand space as something that is inherently imagined and, consequently, produced and acted upon as a result of this imaginary. In the case of East Coast Europe, this was proposed through a fictional territorial shift, and in the case of With/Without, it was through producing a counter-reading of spatial practices in the Middle East to that of Al Manakh. We were interested in a narrative approach on the scale and level of the street, to understand everyday practices and how they formulate and shape change. Rather than prescribing a recipe, this opens up a field of potential departures for participants. Indeed, this is what sets the architect’s approach apart from other fields of knowledge: models are seen to be a platform for operation, for moving beyond those very models, rather than findings or truths in and of themselves. We are providing a common starting point from where we can begin to disagree —a theory of how to participate, without squinting at constituencies or voters but, rather, instigating critical change.3

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MM

This was one of the starting points of my inquiry into contemporary forms of participatory practice—and, especially, politicians’ love affair with it. As demonstrated by the UK’s New Labour and the Dutch Polder Model, participation has produced a very comfortable situation in which politicians have managed to withdraw from their responsibility as elected representatives of the general public.

I would call this process the outsourcing of responsibility. I am not advocating for this format of participation, based on the idea of bottom-up democratic principles of an all-inclusive congregation around a table.

Rather, I am trying to understand the opposite: a first-person approach to critical engagement in which the individual—in our case, the architect—acts upon an urge for political and social responsibility in one’s practice.

Nothing confounds me more than that over the last decade everyone started claiming to be some sort of participatory architectural social worker. There are, however, a few examples that demonstrate this critical participation that interests me.

There is the Winter School Middle East and the European Kunsthalle, which serve as de facto cases in which some of these issues have been scrutinized in their respective contexts. These cases exemplify a mode of practice with an end toward the building up of independent, small-scale institutions as alternatives to public art institutions and franchised regional academies Fig. 1 .

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KC

agency can be involved, in what quality, and to what effect. In the context of widely accepted xenophobia and increasing economic precariousness, the design of new vending carts—which has been architects’ first instinctive response—appears as an almost laughably impotent gesture.5 A better response is to ask where design should enter into such contested spatial conditions.

Meanwhile, a new generation of middleclass entrepreneurs and gourmet chefs have begun to alter the dominant cultural perception of street vending with their upscale treats—from organic ice cream to Korean-Mexican fusion. In the same way, the arrival of New York’s “Vendy Awards”—a yearly awards event for street food—in Los Angeles is another occasion promising to lift some of the stigma that tends to categorize Latino food vending as dirty or poor. By developing forms of cultural production and consumption that creatively destroy the dominant public perceptions of street vending as “out of place,” designers might locate openings for transforming vendors’ urban FIG. 2 — S treet vending in Los Angeles. Photo courtesy of and copyright Kenny Cupers. imaginary altogether. This fundamentally superficial Latin-American, this everyday urban practice approach, ironically, is able to cut across the is as much about the “right to the city” very core of some of the city’s social issues. as it is about the contested nature of the It is at once aesthetic and political, superficial city’s identity.4 Compared to the organized and transformative, critical and participatory. regulation of vending in New York City, LA

MM vendors’ exceptional mobility—at once urban and transnational—renders traditional

I absolutely agree with you. When it notions of engagement, such as stable comes to participatory approaches, one needs community organization or struggle based on to be aware that they are often based in a conventional notions of citizenship, largely certain romanticism. Such nostalgic longing obsolete. Not surprisingly, participatory is very dangerous as it is neither pro-active planning attempts have thus far failed to nor propositional. It does not produce or make free vendors from the plight of enforcement.

Vendors’ mobility makes it impossible to assume an a priori political project or 4 See Henri Lefebvre, Le droit à la ville (Paris: Anthropos, 1968). participatory process in which design can 5 See John Chase, Margaret Crawford, and John Kaliski, Everyday Urbanism (New York: Monacelli, 1999). be involved. We need to first ask whose

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Both as a political theory and a spatial practice, participation implies a series of fundamental preconditions: a neutral ground for participants to meet; the definition of a community, constituents, or interest groups; a shared place; a common project. None of these apply in the volatility of contemporary urban space. Take for instance the mundane case of street vending Fig. 2 . In cities like Los Angeles, where street sales are banned outright and the majority of the more than ten thousand vendors are Central- and

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KC

I would not characterize our current condition at all as “Harmonistan.”7 In any newspaper on any given day, I see extremes of confict and opposition—the only exception is the culture section. It is disappointing to see how pacified cultural production is today in the face of global conflict and catastrophe, and in this sense, I do agree with you about the need for dissensus. I am still surprised at how inviting your friends for pad thai in an art gallery has been celebrated as a participatory, progressive, or critical form of art.8 This retreat from the social world by mimicking it in the art gallery has parallels in architectural production. Despite the rise of sustainability as a new promise for architecture’s societal relevance, architecture culture continues to shy away from negotiation with complex realities for, instead, the solitary games of form. This threatens to perpetuate the fallacies of architectural autonomy while undoing it of even the last remnants of critique. Rather than simply inserting

participation as the redeeming element in such a practice, we need to come up with alternative ways of doing and thinking about architecture. As much as the past generation has theorized architectural autonomy—the ghost of which is more than alive in the elite academic institutions of the Northeast US—current architectural thinkers should theorize conflict, mediation, negotiation, and compromise. That said, I am not proposing to replace outright the architect-as-formmaker with the architect-as-mediator. We need to ask how experimentation is both an architectural and a social process. It is remarkable how little the discipline is currently interested in the interrelations of spatial form and social dynamics. My current research attempts to provide a historical and theoretical perspective to such concerns by looking at architecture’s encounter with the social sciences in the construction of mass housing and new towns, and the emergence of paradigms such as programming, participatory planning, and user-oriented design in the era of the postwar welfare state.9 I think we can change architectural production today by offering tools for rethinking architecture’s historically situated social agency.

What we have not touched upon so far is the distinction between architecture and art in this critical and projective practice. Art is often said to offer more potential for criticality as it seems more free than architecture from the depend-encies and compromises of intervention. At the same time, some strands of socially engaged or political art today offer little more than a set of allusions whose ultimate effect is a surplus of art market capital. Markus, your practice inscribes itself in what has been called “critical spatial practice”—which is neither easily subsumed within the categories of art or architecture,

6 See Markus Miessen, The Nightmare of Participation: Crossbench Praxis as A Mode of Criticality (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2010).

7 Ibid.

8 See Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics.”

9 See Kenny Cupers, “Designing Social Life: The Urbanism of the Grands Ensembles,” Positions: On Modern Architecture and Urbanism/Histories and Theories, no. 1 (Spring 2010).

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decisions, but simply reflects the status quo.

While we still need critical reflection, I strongly believe that in order to practice, one also needs to be projective.

My proposed model of the “crossbench practitioner” encourages an uncalled participator who is not limited by existing protocols, and who enters the arena with nothing but creative intellect and the will to generate change.6 I am arguing here for an inversion of participation, a model beyond modes of consensus. Instead of reading participation as the charitable savior of political struggle, I prefer to reflect and act upon the limits and traps of its real motivations. Rather than breeding the next generation of consensual facilitators and mediators, I argue for allowing conflict as an enabling force. Through a conflictual mode, participation is no longer a process by which others are invited “in,” but becomes a means of acting without mandate, as an uninvited irritant, a forced entry into fields of knowledge that might benefit from exterior thinking. Sometimes democracy must be avoided at all costs.

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nor within social or cultural activism. Would you agree that it is more fruitful to position yourself still more in the visual arts and new cultural industries, than in the traditional outlets of architectural production? Do these more fluid realms have more critical potential than that of architectural culture?

Or is “critical spatial practice” ultimately less powerful than architecture because it is often more about media than about actual intervention in the spaces of everyday life?

MM

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I would not position myself more in the visual arts than in architecture. I find this distinction fairly problematic. It raises the issue of interdisciplinary or “transdisciplinary” approaches, which I think, by now, we are beyond.10 We should think about architecture more as an open field or a territory of tools which one can access through collaborative practice. We are facing what I would call a

post-disciplinary form of spatial practice, one which no longer understands itself as a form of cultural activism as in the ‘60s or ‘70s, but also one which understands the plethora of tools available in order to apply them in an appropriate context. What you are describing here is precisely the conservative view of architecture that often prevents it from generating change: that architecture, by default, is understood as a physical practice.

I do not believe this holds true—I actually think it never did. An alternative practice must acknowledge this—and this is, for the lack of a better word or term, what I would call critical spatial practice Fig. 3 .

Architecture is not a discipline that necessarily has a scale or professional body but, rather, is something that one does—it is a practice. Most architects, from my point of view, do not produce architecture at all.

They produce buildings, sometime lame, sometimes otherwise.

FIG. 3 — M arkus Miessen, The Nightmare of Participation: Crossbench Praxis as a Mode of Criticality (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2010). Photo by Hannes Grassegger.

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KC

I agree with the need to move beyond these often outmoded distinctions, but it is wishful thinking to generally say we are facing a post-disciplinary form of practice.

Rather than dividing these realms in a normative way, I am interested in understanding the mechanisms of distinction that actually exist and the politics they set up.

Divisions between art and architecture— and between architecture and the built environment—continue to structure not only our ways of thinking but also practice itself.

Who benefits from these distinctions, or benefits from transgressing them? There seems to be an inherent ambiguity in what you call critical spatial practice, which on the onehand opens up architecture to the multitude of social or spatial practices that make up people’s lives, while on the other hand continues to celebrate authorship and intentionality in a neoliberal and entrepreneurial manner. While it threatensto dress these conservative notions in a more fashionable cloak, this notion of critical spatial practice is most promising when it is able to allow new forms of collectivity to emerge.

This is where the real politics of contemporary practice lie—not in the mimicry of the political served up by the Biennale industry, but in the messiness of the contemporary city.

MM

Sure, at the end of the day, critical spatial practice is simply acknowledging the fact that architects are not the only actors or protagonists in a vast territory called “the production of space.” 11 Critical spatial practice attempts to undo this myth and tries to open up a field for debate, which hopefully will unpack different sets of knowledge.

To be honest, I don’t think that this way of working is any more individualist, neoliberal, or entrepreneurial than any other job-description

within the territory of the production of space—it is just that it is transgressing its former professional borders. In fact, this act of opening up practice beyond artificial borders may be the very essence of critical participation.

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10 See, for example, Mark Linder, “TRANSdisciplinarity,” Hunch, no. 9 (2005).

11 See Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1991).

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Kenny Cupers and Markus Miessen

Markus Miessen with Kenny Cupers conducting the Urban States “The Space of Politics” workshop and symposium at USC, Los Angeles, August 2011.

*** Kenny Cupers teaches architectural history, theory, and urban studies at the University at Buffalo, where he was the 201011 Reyner Banham Fellow. He received his PhD from Harvard University. Forthcoming books include The Social Project: Modern Architecture, Social Science, and the Postwar Suburbs in France, Paris: Life Forms, and Use Matters: An Alternative History of Architecture (Routledge, 2013).

Markus Miessen is an architect, spatial consultant, and writer, operating from his practice Studio Miessen. He is also Visiting Professor of Critical Spatial Practice at Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Städelschule. He received his BArch from Glasgow School of Art, DiplHons from the Architectural Association, MRes from the London Consortium, and is currently a PhD candidate at Goldsmiths College.

Both have been published in collaboration and individually in numerous journals and books.

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The Sluipweg and the History of Death Mark Jarzombek

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Mark Jarzombek

itineraries that pointed out the cemetery’s

Before the nineteenth century, people architectural features and the tombs of in Europe were buried in church plots if illustrious personages.2 On Sunday afternoons, they could afford it; otherwise, they were consigned to pauper’s graves or charnel families would stretch out a blanket for a houses. Napoleon, in his effort to exalt the picnic. The following lines, found penciled on idealism of the empire and garner support the cemeteries terrace wall in 1813, convey among the military, changed the rules. His the sentiment: 1804 Imperial Decree on Burials ordered that each At this peaceful site, amid trees and flowers, person be buried separately. Sorrows and laments come to cry their tears: A coffin was mandatory, Here they can find a sympathetic shade: and everyone had the Death hides from their eyes its hideous scythe. right to erect a tombstone As it spreads its subjects throughout a vast garden: over a loved one’s grave.

For the home of the dead has become a new Eden. 3 If a soldier fought for the nation, the nation would provide for the burial But there was a Faustian deal. Graves and cemetery plot free of charge. Death was were to last only five years unless the plot was in essence democratized and secularized; bought by the relatives of the deceased. In it was also ennobled. Soldiers were seen as other words, the body that began its journey heroes, and their caskets were draped with to the hereafter as a part of the public sphere the national flag. Père Lachaise, a garden was thrust back into private hands. And necropolis in the hilly suburbs of Paris that worse yet, if no family members showed was laid out in the same year as the decree, up to claim the body, it and its grave were was the prototype of the new cemetery design. unceremoniously made to disappear. With It was envisioned as an Elysian Field, the the stroke of a clock the body changed from mythological resting place of heroes and the a glorious metaphysical proposition evoking virtuous. Trees which were once frowned upon the grandeur of civic participation to a dusty in cemeteries as they were thought to restrict burden. All this meant that there were two the circulation of air were now introduced deaths; the first one guaranteed a mixture of to serve “as a somber and religious veil” over public acclaim and heavenly bliss; the second the grounds.1 Tombstones were no longer one—five years later—promised, or at least threatened, total obscurity. Eternal dignity, as decorated with skull and bones indicating the it turned out, was a short-lived affair. immanent and perhaps not all too pleasant

First at Père Lachaise then in places day of reckoning, as had been the case for across Europe, the dual—and one should say centuries, but adorned with smiling angels. bizarre—nature of modern death slowly came By 1825, guidebooks published maps with into shape with its strongest legacy today in Germany, France, Sweden, and Holland. In Germany, plots are usually rented for twenty, sometimes thirty years, with the possibility of an extension. In the Netherlands, the dead are usually buried for ten years and after that 1 Richard Etlin, The Architecture of Death: the Transformation the family must rent the plot if they want it of the Cemetery in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1984), 300. to be preserved. If the rent is not forthcoming 2 Margaret Fields Denton, “Death in French Arcady: Nicolas in either country by the period’s expiration, a Poussin’s The Arcadian Shepherds and Burial Reform in France c. 1800,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 36, no. 2 (Winter 2003): backhoe is brought in, the remains removed, 195-216. and the process starts over again for a new body.

3 Etlin, Architecture of Death, 303.

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re-enactment of death is not associated with sorry and personal grief. There are no tears.

Houwelingen’s project is, therefore, much more than just a salvage operation. The peculiarities of the site play a critical role for the fortification system—this is not just any public space. The Defense Line, which extends 135 km around the city and consists of a series of dykes, canals, and forts, and which was initiated by King William I in 1815 to defend Holland against invasion, became a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1996. It was found to have what UNESCO calls “Outstanding Universal Value,” which means that it has, according to the official definition of that term, a “cultural and/or natural significance which is so exceptional as to transcend national boundaries and to be of common importance for present and future generations of all humanity.”5

Lurking behind this statement is the destruction during WWII of cathedrals, palaces, and monuments, the shock of which produced a movement that, beginning in the 1950s, culminated in the 1972 Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage which established the idea of “Outstanding Universal Value.” One by one, monuments came to be added to what is now called the World Heritage List. Over nine hundred monuments are currently on the list, monuments which have a protective bubble around them that all parties to the United Nations are expected to respect. In a world of fractured political, national, and religious identities, these sites, in theory at least, represent the only places were the universal ideal of “humanity”—such as it is—can still be championed. World Heritage sites are islands of permanence, both physically and legally.

4 Greg Roumeliotis, “Do What You Like With Your Tombstone,” Reuters, January 31, 2011.

5 Matthias Ripp, “Outstanding Universal Value,” Worldheritage Forum, January 13, 2006.

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Hans van Houwelingen’s Sluipweg— a path made up of tombstones laid flat on the ground—is a poignant critique of this cultural phenomenon. The full title of the construction is Sluipweg, waarlangs de dood heeft weten te ontsnappen which translates into something like “Secret path, along which death was able to escape.” I will try to unravel the meaning of this enigmatic phrase, showing that we have to understand Sluipweg as a puzzle created out of an exchange between old and new epistemological regimes. What it represents can be summarized best as a postmetaphysical practice of commemoration that challenges the lingering tendency to put death in the pretend landscape of a garden cemetery.

Hans van Houwelingen, born in 1957, is a Dutch artist who has realized various high-profile art projects within the public domain, each distinguished by intense sociopolitical concern. Here his focus is on the cultural construction of death. On the surface, the project seems very much like a repeat of the Elysian cemeteries of old: it is located along the top of an embankment inside a Defense Line of Amsterdam fort that is about thirteen kilometers to the west of the city.

Here, however, there are no bodies. Those have long since disappeared from the public cemeteries. The tombstones that make up this path were all donated by individuals who kept the stones of their relatives in a basement or garage once they had been removed from the cemetery. This reuse was made possible because of a recent Dutch law clarifying that tombstones were the property of those who commissioned them, allowing family members to do whatever they wanted with them.4 In essence, Houwelingen’s project saves these stones and returns them to the public domain.

The body may not have found its final resting place, but its tombstone has, laid flat on the ground as a semiotic reference to the absent body. By laying the stones flat on the ground, Houwelingen decommissioned the stones as grave-markers. Thus even though the site is park-like, and a military ground to boot, the

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The Sluipweg and the History of Death

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Placing the Sluipweg within this political, temporal environment is the first step to understanding the inner logic of Houwelingen’s project. The ultimate impermanence of modern death—defined by a state-imposed boundedness—is here seemingly rectified. What the modern cemetery promised but would not deliver, namely eternal rest, is finally being provided. It is a complex form of eternal rest, for death has been placed within the realm of a concept of humanity that is just as abstract, placeless, and vacuous as it supposedly “permanent.”

Again, there was a quid pro quo: the tombstones, in order to be embraced by UNESCO’s alternate metaphysics, are stripped of their memorial status. They are no longer “monuments” but alienated memories of a disembodied reality. The fact that one is supposed to walk on the stones reinforces this condition and, indeed, the more that people traverse the path, the more the wear on the surface will erase the names etched in the stones, leaving only the most ghostly of traces. The final condition is when the physical residue of memory is fully dematerialized.

The slow erasure of memory stands in contrast to the brutal punctuation of time when the stones were cast off of the public cemeteries as just so much excess baggage.

The irony lies in the fact that by the time the fortifications came to be completed, they had become obsolete and were in fact never used militarily. This point was lost on the UNESCO committee who celebrated the defenses as an example of the “Dutch genius” for hydraulic engineering:

6 Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage, Report WHC-96/CONF.20l/21 (Paris: UNESCO, March 10, 1997), 71-2.

The site is of outstanding universal value as it is an exceptional example of an extensive integrated defence system of the modern period which has survived intact and well conserved since it was created in the later 19th century. It is also notable for the unique way in which the Dutch genius for hydraulic engineering has been incorporated into the defences of the nation’s capital city. 6

It would be more accurate to claim that the Defense Line should be preserved as a folly commemorating nationalist pretenses. There was never any real death associated with the site, only a type of nation-sponsored longing for death. In that context, as the messages on the tombstones slowly wear away, the Defense Line becomes the perfect place to meditate on the thematics of erasure in the modern post-Enlightenment, post-WWII world. What at first might seem a simulation of death turns out to be the production of deathlessness.

What is being constructed for the visitor by the Sluipweg is, therefore, not a conventional commemoration. If the modern idea of death is built around the memorial placed within the domain of human history and if the postmodern idea of death is built around the principle of loss placed with the domain of human emotions, we have here a construction that undoes both. It is a project that brings into awareness the complex processes of death-making in both the modern and postmodern world. Death is restored and evacuated; it is returned to the temporal present and allowed to point to an otherworldly future. It is dematerialized into a philosophical abstraction and materialized into the form of stone rubbed smooth by passers-by.

There is yet another twist in Sluipweg’s slippery logic. Because this is not Dutch 118

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or her government, the civilian has, at least conceptually, the protection of international law.

But whereas a civilian death is by definition marked as a tragedy, the Sluipweg provides an alternative: though death is “civilianized,” it is not part of any particular tragedy. It remains poignant nonetheless, in that this death is released from the conceptual tyranny of citizenship.

There is an obvious historical parallel between the post-WWII creation of “the civilian” and its subsequent protection by international law, and the post-WWII creation of the World Heritage List and the protection of monuments whose value ostensibly transcends national boundaries. At UNESCO property 759, the official designation of the Amsterdam Defense Line, these two vectors intersect. Just as the people who are memorialized on the stones of the Sluipweg are being eternalized and “protected” within the conceptual enclave of a monument that represents all of humanity, they are no longer Dutch citizens but civilians freed from the universal obligation to be, in death, a national citizen. In turning the stones flat, the artist is not only returning the stone from private to public and from metaphysical to temporal, but also shifting the political ground on which the stones rest, from national to universal.

It is clear that this multifaceted act of constructing—and perhaps deconstructing— the concept of death is both intimate and historically poignant.

Though the institutions of the state and of religion still need their monuments as tokens to their long-proclaimed association with metaphysics, it is clear that Sluipweg is different. This is neither a memorial that yet again elevates death onto the plateau of cultural memory, nor a counter-memorial that focuses on the darker modalities of death in the modern world. It is a rare example of a post-metaphysical practice of commemoration for it does not seek out the standard duality of hero and victim. Instead, as the names wear away, the stones give up their ghost. Dust to 119

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ground, but a United Nations quasidemilitarized, international zone that is preserved in the name of “humanity,” the tombstones cannot represent Dutch citizens.

So what type of person do they represent, at least in the period before their names become illegible?

The word “civilian” came into currency during the English colonial period in the midnineteenth century to refer to the Englishborn administrative personnel generally referred to as “civil servants,” including their families who often lived permanently in India.

Even so, it was a relatively rare word until the second half of the twentieth century. It was given its modern definition at the Fourth Geneva Convention (1949-50) in the wake of the horrors of WWII. The implicit hypothesis of the convention was that the military and the civilian worlds exist in two different plains of reality. The military produces a disruption in the fabric of history, whereas the civilian embodies social continuity and as such needs to be protected during war as much as possible. “Civilians” were viewed as society’s constitutive fabric existing in a natural state of peacefulness. After hostilities were over, civilians were, therefore, to be the essential component of a return to normalcy.

The post-WWII concept of a “civilian” challenged the traditional concept of “the citizen” that arose after the Napoleonic era when the rights and obligations of citizenship concomitant with the newly emerging nationstate required that a member of that state take a stance as to wartime participation. Whereas a citizen was by definition a soldier, whether in spirit or reality, a post-WWII civilian was seen as a non-combatant living within the nation-state but outside the reach of its ideological claims. Whereas the nation-state as it was understood in the nineteenth century implicated all its citizens in its activities, the contemporary nation-state, from the point of view of the UN, is split between its military and non-military populations. Furthermore, whereas the citizen is protected only by his

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dust, stone to stone. Their position as semiotic stand-ins for the universal is thus transitory.

Memories that have been disembodied and dislocated are ultimately “disappeared,” and as such the Sluipweg holds the inevitable metaphysics of death within the framework of quotation marks. What is, after all, the “universality” of death when body and memory have been separated each in their own way along different historical vectors? Sluipweg does not answer the question but it does force us to think through the terms by which death is produced and understood. Sluipweg is thus a path where death is finally given at least a chance to make its escape.

Photos courtesy Hans van Houwelingen.

*** Mark Jarzombek is Professor of the History and Theory of Architecture and Associate Dean in MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning. He received his Diploma from the ETH in 1980 and his PhD from MIT in 1986. He was a CASVA fellow (1985), Postdoctoral Resident Fellow at the J. Paul Getty Center (1986), a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study (1993), at the Canadian Center for Architecture (2001), and at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute (2005), and has published numerous books and articles in a variety of journals.

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Sculpture Field

Extra Room: What if we lived in a society where our every thought was public?

Gunnar Green and Bernhard Hopfeng채rtner

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Gunnar Green and Bernhard Hopfengärtner

How will the scientific discoveries about the workings of the human brain affect the way we perceive ourselves? Will we fall back into a more functionalist understanding of the human, as developed in the nineteenth century? During the past several years, cultural implications of neuro-technologies have been widely discussed in the press Fig. 1 .

In 2009, Wired published an article about a conviction for murder in India based on brainwave patterns. Detectives showed photographs of the crime scene to the suspect and claimed that the brainwaves produced proved the suspect’s experiential knowledge of the images.1 At the same time, a story about the usage of MRI scanners for job interviews spread across blogs. A Dutch scientist claimed that using this technique would be possible and practicable within five years.2 How will neuro-technologies transform our culture and the way we think about ourselves and about others?3 And how can we approach and explore this topic as designers? Extra Room investigates the very extreme of possible developments and asks: What if we lived in a society where our every thought was public?

Extra Room is a design project combining scale models and narrative elements, that reflects on how advances in neuroscience and technology might affect our self-perception.

The Extra Room exists in an imaginary world where technology has been developed to “read” the human mind. As the mind becomes transparent in this world, a new necessity of protective self-discipline emerges. Utilizing the effects of sensory deprivation and methods of military interrogation, the room enables subjects to adjust their thinking and beliefs.

The Extra Room, a reverse-disciplinary architecture, is built into the basement of a multi-story building where it is shared by the house’s inhabitants Fig. 2 .

The dimensions are three meters by four meters; it is soundproof, carpeted, windowless, and has only one door.4 The surfaces are tilted—such that there are no horizontal floors or vertical walls—to prevent any spatial

orientation and to induce mental unrest Fig. 3 .5

Extra Room also includes a process people that would subject themselves to, in order to achieve desired psychological alterations. Using the Extra Room’s sensory deprivation unit, interrogation room, and prison cell, the process itself is inspired by experiments on sensory deprivation. As shown by Jack A. Vernon, after spending 24 hours in a completely dark and soundproof room, people who were subjected to propaganda showed to be eight times more susceptive compared to a control group.6 This result leads to the possibility of using the effect, mildly exaggerated, for the purpose of self-induced mind control. The procedure would be as follows: A person starts their session in complete darkness Fig. 4 .

During the whole time, liquid nutrition can be accessed through The Valve on the wall inside the room Fig. 5 . Liquid nutrition is chosen to eliminate the experience of time, a consequence discrete food items such as sandwiches would have. The Extra Room also has a toilet Fig. 6 . After 36 hours with no stimuli, the room lightens, and at this stage the person’s mind would be hungry for new input. A speaker, The Prompter, cites the desired alterations that have been programmed in the room before entrance. This process of repetitive recitation lasts for 12 hours and ends with the opening of the door.

Extra Room is neither a prediction nor a proposal for a psychological strategy for the scenario of omnipresent mind reading technologies. It aims to create an analogy that refers to modern attempts to control the individual in psychological experiments by the military or through architecture. Architecture provided an adequate visual language, expressing the structural violence that would emerge in a situation where technology becomes potent enough to dissolve barriers between one’s internal processes and the representation of one’s self to others. Distorted in shape, the Extra Room is hidden away in the basement of a multi-story building and is both a shared space for all the inhabitants and 122

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Fig. 3 — Tilted surfaces to prevent spatial orientation.

Fig. 4 — Complete darkness, sensory deprivation.

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Fig. 1 — The mediatization of neuro-technologies.

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Fig. 7 — Physical model: the Extra Room.

Fig. 8 — Physical model: the Extra Room’s interior.

Fig. 9 — Physical model: the Valve.

Fig. 10 — Physical model: the Extra Room’s toilet.

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a space that plays a role in but does not belong to daily life. As Michel Foucault writes:

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There are also, probably in every culture, in every civilization, real places ... which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites ... are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.

Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality. 7 Many of these spaces exist and sometimes they become cultural icons like the garden shed in England, the fallout shelter in Switzerland, or the sauna in Finland, all of them Extra Rooms telling specific stories about the cultures in which they exist.8

Endnotes

***

Gunnar Green holds degrees from the Royal College of Art in London and the University of the Arts Berlin, and is a partner at TheGreenEyl with Willy Sengewald, Dominik Schumacher, Frédéric Eyl, and Richard The. He has been published and exhibited in Ars Electronica, Wired, and others.

Bernhard Hopfengärtner holds degrees from the Royal College of Art in London and the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. His work has been exhibited at the Wellcome Trust in London, MoMA, and the National Museum of China in Beijing, among others.

1 Angela Saini, “The Brain Police: Judging Murder with an MRI,” Wired UK, June 2009.

2 Adriana Stuijt, “Brain Scan Replaces Job Interview in 5 Years?”

Next Nature (Blog), February 24, 2009, http://www.nextnature. net/2009/02/brain-scan-replaces-job-interview-in-5-years/.

3 See Ervin Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (London: Penguin, 1990), 244.

4 See Tom Blanton, “The CIA in Latin America,” National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book, no. 27, March 14, 2000, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB27/ index.html. In particular, see Document 3 from the same site, CIA Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual (1983).

5 See Matthew Murphy, “Glimpses of a Future Architecture,” in Did Someone Say Participate? ed. Markus Miessen and Shumon Basar (Frankfurt: Revolver, 2006), 77.

6 See Jack A. Vernon, Inside the Black Room (New York: C. N. Potter, 1963), 39.

7 Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16, no. 1 (Spring 1986): 22-27.

8 Extra Room consists of a video, scale models, and photographs. The video is accessible online at http://vimeo. com/5564531. Through these media, it has been exhibited as part WHAT IF... at the Science Gallery in Dublin and Designed Disorder at the Center for Urban Built Environment in Manchester. It is ongoing and, currently, a one-to-one scale model of the Extra Room is in development. All images reproduced herein are courtesy of and copyright the authors.

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Sculpture Field: From the Symbolic to the Tectonic Dan Handel

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Dan Handel 1 In the short war, fought in June 1967 between Israel and its neighboring states of Jordan, Syria, and Egypt, the Israeli army led the way to what was considered a decisive victory, tripling the territory held by the state. This was also the point at which Israel came to hold the occupied territories against UN resolutions.

2 The military achievements of the war radically transformed the political discourse in Israel to result in new settler movements that conceived of the acquired territory as parts of the biblical Promised Land. In architectural culture, this moment also signaled a shift from a secular, modernist discourse into a postmodern search of an “architecture of the place,” curiously inspired by a mix of Palestinian vernacular, biblical, and Mediterranean sources.

3 Ezra Orion, Sculpture Field (Israel, 1968), 1.

4 Throughout the 1950s, Israeli artists, inspired by the works of Mexican muralists, set to redefine the relationships between art and the public in a highly socialistic political context.

5 Orion, Sculpture Field, 1.

To resist the universalist assumptions of modernity. This became the central task of a society left amidst the ruins of alienating reconstruction and renewal efforts. The struggle of artists to formulate nuanced conceptions of the human environment from these ruins reached an apex in the volatile 1960s, challenging the role of abstraction and its capacity to communicate meaning. One way of overcoming this impasse, crystallized as the city and its artistic institutions, was to simply leave them behind. In 1967, as Israel was adjusting to its new boundaries following the Six-Day War,1 and was reformulating its national consciousness to oscillate between spiritualist occupation and politics of euphoria,2 Ezra Orion moved to Sede-Boker in the Negev Desert to work on his Sculpture Field. Fresh out of London’s Royal College of Art, Orion was convinced that sculpture in the big cities—that is, of the artistic institutions—was hopelessly ineffectual and had to be rejected. For him, these works of modern art, having to fit through doors and being positioned in low-ceiling gallery spaces, were nothing but miniatures that could not move people to spiritual experiences of “more than limited intensity.”3 This impotence, in his thinking, was caused by the city and its structures, which mold sculpture in their form.

The correspondence between building and art, attempted and argued for in the works of Israeli muralists several years before,4 was no longer an option for Orion. In lieu of their imagined publics, he envisioned a collection of individual epiphanies that could only take place once a sculpture becomes big enough to contain people in a total environment that would operate “around, above, and beneath them ... large spaces sinking, rising... bursts of light into high masses of darkness. Darkness enveloped by concrete walls.”5 128

Sculpture Field

Sculpture Field Fig. 1, Orion’s unrealized proposition for such an environment, was designed as a complex of units, orchestrating the visitor’s experience through a series of underground spaces, monumental elements, and calibrated desert lookouts. What might seem

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to resemble other artistic inquiries of the same decade should, in fact, be understood as aiming toward radically different outcomes. This becomes clear when Sculpture Field is seen against Dani Karavan’s Negev Monument (1963–1968) near Beersheeba Fig. 2. While both offer a compositional array of concrete elements and various ways of navigating through the site, Karavan’s environment is immersed in explicit literalism— from the entrance wall imprinted with names of 129

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Fig. 2

Fig. 3

fallen warriors, through the concrete passage that reproduces wartime trenches Fig. 3, to the vertical element perforated with “bullet holes.” Karavan, who was experimenting a decade earlier with wall painting as a realist alternative to both abstract and didactic art, is here joining both under the auspices of a nationalist agenda. Karavan’s work cuts itself from the ambition posed by socialist realism to intertwine with society and thus imagine communities from within. His environments function merely as artistic illustrations of the institution’s will to mold publics on their terms. In contrast to this approach, Sculpture Field refuses to succumb to interpretation. The elements do not represent but, rather, enable a continuous formation. Their names—“column,” “suspended structure,” or “main pit”—suggest nothing more 130

Sculpture Field 6 Robert Smithson and Jack D. Flam, Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).

7 Heizer also provided a cultural interpretation of Edward Teller’s initiatives when declaring at one point, “The H-bomb, that’s the ulti -mate sculpture.”

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than a classification of their qualities, never implying their function.

At the end of the 1960s, mainly in North America, appearances in deserts as an art form were beginning to take hold. Michael Heizer’s experimentation in Nevada and Robert Smithson’s “earth art” in Utah used the desert as a canvas on which they could become both monumental and enigmatic. However, as influential as these works were to become, their point of departure was always the omnipresence of the human factor.

Smithson famously declared, “the best sites for ‘earth art’ are sites that have been disrupted by industry, reckless urbanization, or nature’s own devastation.”6 Heizer borrowed the scientific terminology of the nuclear age, speaking of “earth-moving” while exploding his way through the desert in works such as Five Conic Displacements in the Mojave or the spectacular Double Negative in Utah Fig. 4.7 For his purposes, the desert was more the negative space of civilization than an environment of its own. As such, it worked according to human terms; the scale and ambition of the works were the sheer result of combining man and technology. “The rental system,” writes Heizer, referring to the easy access to earth-moving machinery, “allows the

Fig. 4

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Dan Handel 8 Michael Heizer, “The Art of Michael Heizer,” Artforum 5 (December 1969): 35.

9 The larger context in which these artists operated can be framed between the techno-optimism of the space race, the discontents of consumer capitalism which found their expressions in social upheavals and counter-culture, and the decline of industrialism that exposed the shadow sites of human progress.

10 Orion, Sculpture Field, 2.

11 Orion’s Dust Hill (1984), located in the Sede Boker airfield base, posed an ambivalent monument to human endeavors and their ephemeral nature in the context of geological time.

12 Orion’s scheme for intergalactic sculpture, developed since the ‘80s in collaboration with NASA, envisioned the simultaneous launch of parallel laser beams from dozens of stations on the northern hemisphere to create a onebillion-kilometer-tall “Super Cathedral.”

Speaking at one such launch in 1992, former Artforum editor Philip Leizer, described the moment as “consistent... with the greatest aspirations of modern art from the earliest moments of its conception. It is as if this vision shared

by Malevich, Kandinsky, and Mondrian has finally come into existence: the dematerialized work of art, at last.”

13 Ezra Orion, Sculpture—Beams of Processes (Tel Aviv: Modan Midreshet Sede Boker, 1995).

14 Arthur Koestler, The Ghost in the Machine (London: Hutchinson, 1967).

15 Ellen Ginton, “The Eyes of the State: Visual Art in a Borderless Country,” in Ha-Enayim Shel Ha-Medinah: Omanut Hazutit Bi-Medinah Le-Lo Gevulot, ed.

Ellen Ginton (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 1998).

artist practically any application he desires. It is now possible to rent a nuclear explosion.” 8 It was a similar conception, deeply rooted in the state of American postindustrial culture,9 which allowed Smithson to articulate a correspondent structure between sites and non-sites. The former was a type of art—integral to and inseparable from its environment—that could be captured and isolated in the latter through documentation or framing and, subsequently, displayed in the convenient setting of East Coast art institutions. For Orion, this duality was invalidated with the desire to detach his work from the dynamics of civilization.

Galleries—and institutions in general—became irrelevant in the context of sculpture that was to exist in geological time “like mountains, slopes, planes.”10

Politically, Orion’s tectonic art was predicting liberalization of the social order: once the frame of reference comes to encompass thousands of years, the immediate realities of geopolitical conflict on the one hand and Israeli culture on the other are but minor irregularities in a much bigger process. This scale of operation would later materialize in dust mountains11 Fig. 5 and intergalactic laser monoliths12 Fig. 6. Retroactively, Orion would speak on his concept of the field as a four-dimensional space in which power sources affect an environment, leading to the creation of holons and autonomous men.13 His choice of words is far from coincidental: using Arthur Koestler’s pseudo-philosophical terminology for describing societies as collectives made of individual pursuits14 fit squarely within the ambition to enable unmediated, high-intensity spiritual experience through art. Curiously, even as Orion and his work could not be properly framed in the received historiography of 1970s Israeli art, relating either to dematerialization (as in Ellen Ginton’s account of the period15) 132

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16 Sarah Breitberg-Semel, Dalut Ha-Homer Ke Eihut be Amanut Israelit (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 1986).

or the poverty of materials (as in Sara BreitbergSemel’s influential thesis16), it reflected and, in some ways, anticipated processes that would tear down the homogenizing ethos of Israeli society.

After the 1973 Yom Kippur War and ensuing energy crisis, a period of untamed optimism gave way to an economic downturn and political upheaval. For a growing part of the population, it was becoming clear that the way forward had to pass through a radical rethinking of the collective nature of the Israeli nation-state and, then, an individualization of its prospects. They were now, in many ways, new holons in a new reality.

FIGS. 1, 5, 6 Reproduced by permission from Ezra Orion, Sculpture Field, 1968. Copyright Ezra Orion.

FIGS. 2, 3 Reproduced by permission from Dani Karvan, Negev Monument, 1963-1968.

Copyright Studio Dani Karvan.

FIG. 4 Reproduced by permission from Michael Heizer, Double Negative, 1969. Copyright Triple Aught Foundation 2011.

*** Dan Handel is an architect, a Ph.D candidate at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, and the 2011 Young Curator at the Canadian Center for Architecture. He holds an M.Arch II from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and a B.Arch from Bezalel Academy of Art and Design. He has written for Block, Conditions, Bracket, and the Journal of Landscape Architecture. He is also editor of Bezalel Papers, was assistant editor for Invention/Transformation: Strategies for the Qattara/Jimi Oases in Al Ain, and coauthor of Arizona Report (forthcoming).

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On Radiation Burn Steve Kurtz of Critical Art Ensemble, interviewed by Jonathan Crisman

Steve Kurtz

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Radiation Burn was a tactical media performance by Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) at the 2010 Werkleitz Festival in Halle, Germany. The project is part of an ongoing interrogation by the group into notions of media, fear, security, and the military-industrial complex. Simulating the “dirty bomb” scenario described by the Federation of American Scientists, 1 Critical Art Ensemble detonated explosives, and subsequently brought in police, emergency services, and radiation detectors. Amid the chaos, a nuclear physicist stands at a lectern, describing why the events surrounding him are unlikely ever to occur as he is roped off by cautious hazmat-suited investigators. Ultimately, their stance is a critical one: phantasms of an imagined doomsday scenario dominate our perception of the world, transforming an otherwise benign reality into something controlled by those who purport to keep us safe.

Jonathan Crisman — Critical Art Ensemble pioneered the use of “tactical media”—a sort of art activism at the confluence of new media, critical theory, and semiotics.

With roots in Claude LéviStrauss’s bricolage and the Situationists’ detournment, tactics were perhaps best described by Michel de Certeau as an opportunistic way of using, manipulating, and subverting the material and media culture imposed upon us.2 How does Radiation Burn—and the methods and means used to produce the project—fit within this lineage?

Steve Kurtz — CAE had two purposes for this project: The first was to make an iconic propaganda image (i.e., the dirty bomb emergency) sign in a manner it was thought unable to—that is, as something other than an emblem of and justification for the security state—and second, to empty this spectacle of its motivational affect. To accomplish these goals, we placed the voice of reason (a nuclear physicist) at the center of the spectacle, rather than on the margins, to be given a sound bite after the dust had cleared. This spatial

arrangement of discourse transformed the spectacle into an image of waste, rather than necessity, and changed the explosion in a public park from a dramatization of an overwhelming and probable threat into an experience that was completely underwhelming and perhaps a touch absurd.

In a Barthean sense, through this performance, CAE was able to inoculate the crowd to be resistant to this form of scare tactic. For CAE, this project was a great example of recombination to produce an inversion of meaning in an everyday life setting—the perfect storm for subverting propaganda.

JC — While the group has stated its own shift away from a line of work dealing with biotechnology, Radiation Burn seems like perhaps a small step to the side—different, but only just so. Can you describe the thought process behind how Critical Art Ensemble’s work is categorized and why this shift is both very much present, as well as very much within the group’s historical trajectory—perhaps this is related to the changing object of the group’s critique?

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SK — You are correct in your observation that while this project addresses a different issue, it’s not so different from the biotech projects.

Both utilized theater (in the broadest sense of the term) as the fundamental form of discourse production, and were concerned with a critique of biopolitics BothRadiation Burn and a number of the biotech projects sought to replace panic with reflection, and reveal the exploitive latent imperatives of the neoliberal economy that frame the representations of products and processes to the non-specialized public.

The shift away from the biotech initiative in particular had more to do with CAE’s place in the art world. We thought we were becoming too much associated with the bioart movement—a movement for which we have little sympathy. We have no interest in the aesthetics of science, nor do we want to appropriate scientific methods, processes, products, or knowledge bases in order to transform them into tools of the arts. The revolution in biology and its applications in biotechnology over the past two decades was profound in

On Radiation Burn

JC— Beyond the obvious relation of the group’s intentional social activism, Critical Art Ensemble’s work engages “the social” in a number of ways. There is the semiotic means through which the group aims to transform socially constructed understanding; in the case of Radiation Burn, there is the milieu in which the performance was staged; there is the very fact that Critical Art Ensemble is a group of five “tactical media practitioners” rather than a solo artist; and so on. Could you unpack the notion of “the social” further with regard to the work that the group has done, and the way in which this work was produced?

SK — CAE’s social relations begin in non-rational connectivity. We like being with each other in a multiplicity of ways. One of those relations consists of inventing possible solutions to social and political problems, and concretizing those solutions in our projects.

The process gives us pleasure.

We don’t agree with Socrates about much, but he nailed it with the idea that explorational learning experiences tend to produce pleasure. How else could we have done this for 25 years? Topics seem to emerge without a tremendous amount of searching, as in this case when we saw some dirty bomb simulations on TV and heard the ridiculous alarmist rhetoric that accompanying them, and began thinking that this theater of the absurd (or the security state) has to be addressed.

It’s not that difficult to then get to, “You know what someone should do...” Then comes the hard part: We have to determine what is the hierarchy of who, where, how, and what.

In the case of Radiation Burn, the most important question was, “What can we do about this misinformation campaign?”

Simply due to logistics the next question was, “Where can we do it?” And finally, “Who will be there and how do we best speak to them?”

Clearly, a tremendous amount of room for miscalculation exists—which does happen more than we would like. In order to shrink that space a little, we have to speak to as many locals as possible to get a reasonable idea of the physical and social geography.

In the case of Radiation Burn, that included our fellow performers, the producers, the festival staff, the police, emergency services, some

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politicians, and of course, park-goers. Finally, during the performance itself, we had people walking through the crowd discussing issues around terrorism and the militarization of radioactive material.

To do the work we do, sociality is a key component; our work can’t be done locked in a studio.

The map is not the territory.

JC — The full title of the piece is Radiation Burn: A Temporary Monument to Public Safety.

The idea of a “temporary monument” is both paradoxical and amusing, but it also very much fits into the notion of tactical media as ephemeral and temporally constrained.

Why a “monument”? The word suggests a particular spatial quality to the project that might not necessarily exist in other work by the group, as well as a hijacking of a particular idea of civic architecture.

SK — This is the perfect followup to what I was just saying.

Monumentality has always been the sworn enemy of tactical media practitioners.

It is the ultimate strategic weapon of dominant culture, as its function is to lock down the meaning of a territory in perpetuity in order to better homogenize the experiences of the territory and thus more effectively eliminate difference.

In addition, CAE has always hated the category of scale.

Nothing is less imaginative then trying to make a work impressive by making it big. CAE has always been interested in quality over quantity. We like making work that really gets into the heads of a few rather than yet another bit of spectacle in front of the many (Stendahl syndrome aside).

Having said this, why temporary monuments?

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the development of biopower in an era of global free-market capitalism, and that is what drew us to the this area of investigation. CAE did not care if the projects we did were perceived as art or not (and most of the time they were not unless the audience was told they were by the authority of a space, such as a museum, or a managerial, cultural authority).

We were determined to maintain our position as cultural activists, but knew if we kept doing what could be framed as bioart, we would be neutralized in that capacity. One of the disciplinary tricks of the art world that aids in keeping cultural space smooth is to insist that its subjects fit into tidy pigeonholes. A material or a topic is made to define the totality of the subject. CAE did want to become the “bacteria guys” or “the eugenics guys.”

We wanted tobe able to move where we could confront the authoritarian crimes of culture wherever they might be, as opposed to establishing a niche in a popular movement.

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Steve Kurtz We came to point where we needed to address some problems of scale, so we had to engage the category of scale but without territorializing. The “temporary” solved the latter problem of territorialization.

We always deterritorialize when our speech act ends, so the next person can appropriate the space for their own ends.

The problem of scale became a necessary evil. In Radiation Burn, the scale of the spectacle we were appropriating was huge, so we had to do something roughly comparable if we were to perform this inoculation and construct an association between large bio-spectacles and anticlimactic affect.

Currently, we are working on another temporary monument—this one, to global economic inequality.

Here we have an abstraction (class differentiation) on such a profound scale that we have to go big in order to concretize it with full impact.

Our challenge here is to see if we can embody in individuals a sweeping statistical abstraction and not just leave it as a

visual impression. The point of amusement for CAE is to monumentalize the actuality (inequality) instead of the ever-elusive ideal (equality).

JC — This seems to be a strength of tactical media— it is lucid in a way that other media are not. While the, say, critical avant-garde of the postwar era filtered much of their cultural production through a filter of abstraction, contemporary tactical media are powerful because they lack these aesthetic gymnastics. As you said earlier, whether your projects are perceived as art or not is less important than CAE’s capacity as cultural activists.

Even the repeated goal of “inoculating” a population seems to point toward this.

Could you speak a bit more about these goals—what is the endgame? Could you foresee a point where CAE might need to abandon a co-opted “tactical media” medium for another form of cultural intervention?

SK — CAE has no endgame.

We do not accept a principle of universal utopia. However, as

All images are video stills from Radiation Burn footage, courtesy Critical Art Ensemble.

***

Steve Kurtz is Professor of Visual Studies at SUNY Buffalo. He holds a PhD in Interdisciplinary Humanities and is a founding member of the art and theory group Critical Art Ensemble (CAE). CAE is a collective of five tactical media practitioners of various specializations, who focus on the exploration of the intersections between art, critical theory, technology, and political activism. The collective has performed and produced a wide variety of projects for an international audience at diverse venues ranging from the street, to the museum, to the Internet. CAE has also written five books, their most recent being Marching Plague (Autonomedia, 2006).

Endnotes 1 See Jonathan Medalia, Terrorist “Dirty Bombs”: A Brief Primer (Washington DC: Congressional Research Service, 2004).

2 See Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1966); Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black & Red, 1977); and Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California, 1984).

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we look at history, there seem to be specific times and places that appear to be more desirable than others.

Our question is, “How do we call utopian moments constructed within specific contexts into actuality?”

Or, to put it negatively, “How can we reduce the intensity of authoritarian tendencies within a given place and time?”

Cultural and political struggle is a permanent condition of existence for anyone compelled to engage the given social reality.

CAE does not worry about cooptation either. A tactic may be recuperated and turned against us, but the beauty of tacticality is its mobility. We assume recuperation, and are always prepared to change-up and move elsewhere. Moreover, we steal far more ideas from those who benefit from the status quo then they can ever take from us—they either own or control the engines of production, after all. Recuperation is multidirectional. Once this fact is understood and acted upon, co-optation becomes a nonissue.

Cairo di sopra in giù: Perspective, Photography, and the “Everyday”

Christian A. Hedrick

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Christian A. Hedrick 1 Nadia Kamel et al., Randa Shaath: Under the Same Sky, Cairo (Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies; Rotterdam: Witte de With, 2003). I would like to especially thank Randa Shaath for her generosity in providing me with permission to reprint her photographs in this essay. I would also like to thank Ijlal Muzaffar for his comments on the early version of this text as well as the comments provided by the anonymous reviewers of Thresholds. This essay was written on the eve of the Egyptian Revolution.

2 The Roman philosopher and author Pliny the Elder in his Naturalis Historia recounts the story of the painting competition between the Greek painters Parrhasius and Zeuxis to see which of them could paint a scene closest to nature. According to the story, at the moment of truth, when the curtain is removed from Zeuxis’s painting, it reveals a scene of grape vines which birds swoop down to try to eat. Then Zeuxis atttempts to pull aside the curtain on Parrhasius’s painting and realizes that the curtain itself is the painting and that he had been beaten because it deceived even him.

3 As The Oxford Companion to Art indicates, “Illusionistic painting and decoration were well known in the Hellenistic age and were highly esteemed in imperial Rome.” However, “most of the forms of illusionism [were] later developed [during] the Renaissance and Baroque periods.” Also see Rudolf Wittkower, Art and Architecture in Italy 16001750, vol. 1, Early Baroque 1600-1625 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1958), 35. He states here that it first appears as early as 1516 but that it did not become established until later in the century.

“ Am I a photojournalist or a photographer? I’m not quite sure. Of late, people from the art world have been approaching me more often.

This has not really changed my style.

I am a documentary photographer and photography for me is a way of expressing my ideas. In the islands of Cairo project, for instance, I have not simply focused on the beauty of the islands. I have a point in taking and exhibiting those photographs. These people were about to be expelled so that a hotel could be built and I told their story in pictures. I do not photograph in countries that I don’t know and about which I don’t have a point of view. In these cases, a postcard would do better.”

—Randa Shaath 1

One of the most celebrated examples of a representational technique dependent upon—but also exploitive of—a very specific subjective viewpoint is the Renaissance painting technique di sotto in sù, meaning seen from below. While still acknowledging the theoretical implications of Pliny’s anecdote of Parrhasius’s curtain,2 we are nonetheless generally able to locate the moment of origin of this technique of illusionistic ceiling painting to somewhere in late sixteenth-century Italy.3 Painters utilized this technique in order to create a trompe l’oeil upon the surface of a flat or domed ceiling, representing the fictive space of the sky. This often included depicting putti and a variety of otherworldly motifs represented naturalistically and foreshortened through fresco or paint. One of the most famous examples of this technique can be found in Andrea Mantegna’s Camera degli Sposi of the Palazzo Ducale in Mantua (1465–74) Fig. 1 . As Erwin Panofsky remarked on the development of perspective during the Renaissance, in his seminal text Perspective as Symbolic Form, “The picture 164

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4 Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, trans. Christopher Wood (New York: Zone Books, 1997), 60-61.

5 Henri Lefebrve, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1991), 97.

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has become a mere ‘slice’ of reality, to the extent and in the sense that imagined space now reaches out in all directions beyond represented space, that precisely the finiteness of the picture makes perceptible the infiniteness and continuity of the space.”4 Technically and conceptually, di sotto in sù is more than just a trompe l’oeil or a “misleading of the eye”; rather, it depends on an individual’s point of view—not any point of view, or any space, but specifically from below looking up at what was usually an allegory represented on a ceiling, which relied upon developed techniques of perspective. The priority of a subject’s viewpoint therefore became a pervasive trope in the history of art and architecture. More specifically, “looking up,” as well as the importance placed on the “point of view,” has a long and detailed history with empyrean associations. Moreover the moment that perspectiva artificialis acknowledges the space of viewership and the position it occupies, perspectiva naturalis, the agency for the viewer is configured in a dialogue with the painting allowing specific moments in real space to affect the perspective of the representation. This theoretical significance, with its litany of associations in Western art beginning well before the Renaissance, can help us explore its modern obverse: di sopra in giù. In other words, what are the theoretical implications of looking down? I would therefore like to use this concept, di sopra in giù, as a starting point to consider the work of the American-born photographer Randa Shaath, both in its social implications in understanding and recording the urban space of Cairo’s inhabitants in terms of theories of “the everyday” as well as its relationship to art.

I will consider the following questions as I frame this brief inquiry of Randa Shaath’s series Under the Same Sky: The Rooftops of Cairo (2003) in light of her self-described position between art and journalism: What effect does a photographer’s physical position have on a photograph and its meaning, especially when photographing people in an urban context? Who are the subjects of her photographs and why were they photographed in this way? Can one make use of the images to elucidate these urban spaces and their meaning(s), or is the image simply, as Lefebvre suggests, an “incriminated ‘medium’ ... where the error consists in a segmentation of space”?5 What do these photographs say about the sociopolitical conditions and photographer that have created them and what do they mean for the relationship between the social project and art? The sociologist Asef Bayat, whose work has previously been paired with Shaath’s, has provided an analysis that begins to set up a useful context within which we can reexamine her work in terms of its subject matter. However, theories of “the everyday” remain absent from the discourse on

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Fig. 1 — Andrea Mantegna, Fresco in the Camera degli Sposi in the “Palazzo Ducale” in Mantua scene: vault fresco detail, 1473. Illus. from The Yorck Project: 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei.

DVD-ROM, 2002. Distributed by DIRECTMEDIA Publishing GmbH. Fig. 2 — C airo Rooftops (1). Courtesy of and copyright Randa Shaath.

Fig. 3 — C airo Demonstration, 2003. Courtesy of and copyright Randa Shaath.

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6 Asef Bayat, “The Quiet Encroachment of the Ordinary,” in Tamáss: Contemporary Arab Representations, vol. 2, Cairo, ed. Catherine David (Rotterdam: Witte de With; Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 2004), 41.

7 Ibid., 40.

8 For a variety of recent explorations on this topic, see Jeffrey Hou, ed., Insurgent Public Space: Guerrilla Urbanism and the Remaking of Contemporary Cities (New York: Routledge, 2010).

9 Bayat’s “passive network” is described in part by the “possibility of atomized individuals with similar positions brought together through space.” See Asef Bayat, “Un-Civil Society: The Politics of the ‘Informal People,’” Third World Quarterly 18, no. 1 (March 1997): 64ff.

Shaath’s photography. It is therefore essential first to establish what is involved in Shaath’s photographic technique, which complicates her work and how the viewer perceives it.

In contrast to the Renaissance technique of di sotto in sù, which attempted to reveal the idealized space of heaven through its representation, and depended solely upon an architectural context such as a church in order to enhance its effect, its obverse is a subject that is often quite the opposite of notions relating to heaven. Randa Shaath’s technique of photographing in her series Under the Same Sky: The Rooftops of Cairo, which for the purposes of this essay I will refer to as di sopra in giù or seen from above, depicts scenes of the city of Cairo from her high-rise apartment building. The subject of this black and white photo series is Cairo’s roofscape and its inhabitants. Shaath’s photographs capture what appear to be the “ordinary” people of Cairo. Her oeuvre ranges from photos of vendors in the street and people in the market, to protesters in Tahrir Square, poor inhabitants of the Nile Islands, and scenes on Cairene rooftops Fig. 2 .

The subjects of Shaath’s photographs include the downtrodden and marginalized—people who Bayat has largely described as “the migrants, refugees, unemployed, under-employed, squatters, street vendors, street children, and other marginalized groups, whose growth has been accelerated by the process of economic globalization.”6 Bayat argues that this group is engaged in a “quiet encroachment” of contemporary Egyptian society, specifically in larger cities like Cairo. For him, this notion of the “quiet encroachment ... describes the silent, protracted but pervasive advancement of the ordinary people on the propertied and powerful in order to survive and improve their lives.”7 His concern is primarily with how this large component of society, living under an oppressive regime, negotiates a place for itself within the urban space. He highlights a variety of actions taken by “agents of encroachment”—such as siphoning off water or electricity from the city’s main supplies instead of from one’s neighbor—that are essentially direct resistance to the State.

Another form of this “everyday resistance” is the appropriation of spaces for dwelling such as empty rooftops through the construction of artificial or temporary walls as dwellers search to create more meaningful spaces within an urban context specific to their needs.8 His work also argues for the existence of so-called “passive networks,” which are coordinated efforts between individuals of various populations.9 It is through this approach of what Bayat terms “tactical retreats”—such as bribing officials or inhabiting less strategic, peripheral spaces (e.g., alleys and rooftops)—that these ordinary individuals carve 168

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10 James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985). Also see Ranjit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), xi. The outcome of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, however, still remains to be seen as Cairo’s poor majority continues to struggle within the “new” framework of the military regime.

11 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984), xi-xii.

12 Ibid.

13 Asef Bayat, “Cairo’s Poor: Dilemas of Survival and Solidarity,” in “Cairo: Power, Poverty and Urban Survival,” Middle East Report, no. 202 (Spring 1997): 5.

14 It is important to note here that despite the Egyptian Revolution, which involved a fairly large segment of Egypt’s urban society, these forms of daily resistance continue and in some cases have intensified.

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out a daily existence. It is important to note here that these “forms of resistance” within this context differ significantly from James Scott’s theorized techniques of organized opposition and could in fact be seen as “a new landscape of resistance.”10

Bayat’s theories on the “disenfranchised” urban inhabitants and their socio-political struggle provide a text to Shaath’s depictions of urban conditions, and can also be situated within the broader theoretical framework of the French social theorists of the last century. Indeed, these theories of “the everyday” should be brought to bear on the discourse of Shaath’s photographs whose content and style make these theories decidedly relevant. In particular, Michel de Certeau’s theories on the everyday are applicable to these relationships and build upon Henri Lefebvre’s seminal work Critique of Everyday Life. Certeau argues that his goal is “to bring to light the models of action characteristic of users whose status as the dominated element in society (a status that does not mean that they are either passive or docile) is concealed by the euphemistic term ‘consumers.’ Everyday life invents itself by poaching in countless ways on the property of others.”11 And while we cannot consider the subjects of Shaath’s photography “consumers” in the arena of a hyper-capitalist system (the primary subject of Certeau’s study), they are no doubt a presence, as well as a “dominated element in society.”12 They are, as Bayat explains, “ordinary people ... without clear leadership, ideology, or structured organization” and he distinguishes them from participants in organized social movements, emphasizing how they carve out a daily existence “distinct from survival strategies or ‘everyday resistance’ in that the struggles and gains of the agents are not at the cost of their fellow poor or themselves, but of the State, the rich and the powerful.”13 Certeau’s theory, in this case, falls short in that it maintains the existence of the idea of an everyday that resides outside of existing structures of power rather than something that operates within them. Nonetheless, his theory affords us an opportunity to consider how the everyday might operate as a type of resistance strategy as articulated by Bayat and revealed in Shaath’s photographs.14

Within Shaath’s body of work are a series of people and spaces above and within Cairo’s streets. The subjects of Shaath’s work range from photographing public gatherings such as in First Day of the Iraq War, Cairo 20 March 2003 Fig. 3 , to the poor inhabitants of the Nile islands just south of Cairo Fig. 4 . These photos of “everyday life” attempt to capture the presence of these “silent actors” within Cairo’s public spaces. Shaath, however, leaves us without an ability to construct a narrative as to who we are actually looking at and what their story might be. Her photographs depicting rooftop scenes demand more inquiry with regard to the everyday Fig. 5 .

Through her Rooftop series, Shaath often highlights the situation of a “disenfranchised” community or, in the words of Certeau, their

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Fig. 4 — C airo Islands. Courtesy of and copyright Randa Shaath.

Fig. 5 — C airo Rooftops (2). Courtesy of and copyright Randa Shaath.

Fig. 6 — C airo Rooftops (3, 4). Courtesy of and copyright Randa Shaath.

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15 The photos in this series were published without titles.

16 Asef Bayat, Street Politics: Poor Peoples Movements in Iran (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 13.

lived tactic within a regime’s power structure. Shaath, at the very least, begins to reveal the complexity and multiplicity of social and spatial layers present within Cairo and, if nothing else, highlights the condition of these anonymous “silent actors” by photographing them.

If we consider Shaath’s rooftop photographs as art (as they increasingly are), they convey conflicting messages and arguably run the risk of cliché when they cross into a gallery space due to the possible reading of them as an attempt to give a “voice” to the disenfranchised, but this is often a problem of photographers who embrace the downtrodden as an aesthetic. Are these photos depicting some kind of struggle against the State through their subject matter by revealing a condition normally unseen, or are they simply to be read as neutral formal expressions of photography regardless of their content? Where is the viewer and what are we observing? Who are the people in these photographs and do they know they are being photographed? If we briefly look at an example of these images we can begin to discern possible explanations. In a pair of photographs Fig. 6 taken of the same place at different times of the day, we see a scene of rooftop dwellers (possibly a family?) gathered on the roof.15 The first image shows a group of four people, two men and two women, sitting on a carpet, casually drinking what looks to be coffee or tea in the midday sun. They are surrounded by a striped patterned cloth or blanket fixed to vertical poles, which creates a temporary “roofless room” on the roof of the building. The second photo shows two individuals (a man and boy) taking the cloth down from its posts and folding it up, having just rolled up the carpet, returning the rooftop to its more open state.

The dilemma with these photographs is that Shaath, while at the same time revealing the condition of the urban dweller by “documenting” their activities, subsequently contravenes their private domain. That is to say, the roof dwellers probably put the blanket up as a visual barrier for a reason, yet through her technique of di sopra in giù, she has subverted their efforts as a surveillance camera that relies on this technique might, to capture their pattern of everyday ritual. The idea of transgressing the subject’s “private” space, despite the fact that it is created out of what was once a public space, is applicable here because, as Bayat explains, there are a variety of culturally based privacy issues regarding many of these families.16 Their interest is in protecting their own family’s privacy as well as maintaining a clear division between the public and private sphere. In this example, as in the rest of this series, it appears that these individuals are 172

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17 Certeau defines a strategy as “the calculation (or manipulation) of power relationships that becomes possible as soon as a subject with will and power (a business, an army, a city, a scientific institution) can be isolated.” See Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 35-36.

18 Kamel, Randa Shaath, 9.

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unaware that they are being photographed, unaware that their private lives have been exposed. Shaath’s vantage point from above then becomes controversial because a rooftop maintains a unique position of privacy, while only partly in the public realm. Therefore Shaath’s elevated vantage point approaches Certeau’s concept of a strategy in order to record the spaces of the tactic.17

Thus, through this technique of di sopra in giù as employed by Shaath, a dichotomy emerges. The photo appropriates at once the language of surveillance in order to reveal this hidden urban condition of the everyday, while a documentary narrative is constantly woven around her work through publications and gallery shows. It is precisely because of this dichotomy that Shaath’s photographs have gone from being considered journalism to art. Shaath makes these disparate moments upon the rooftops, and the situations captured by her camera, appear as a collective entity. She calls it “a new kind of community,”18 suggesting the existence of Bayat’s “passive network”; however, her technique remains controversial due to its “non-artistic” associations (i.e., surveillance).

Shaath’s photographs do not provide a reductive graphic depiction of the everyday, but rather a provocative look into how these different layers of society coexist with one another revealing the heterogeneous context of the urban milieu where a great diversity of people struggle to survive. Reading Shaath’s photographs as journalism, which attempts only to reveal an “authentic” urban condition, is somewhat misleading due to her careful and methodical photographic compositions and educational background in visual communication.

However, at the same time, her photos do reveal an aspect of these marginalized classes of urban poor throughout the city, as well as offer a social critique as discussed. But reading her work as art is more problematic. Whatever message Under the Same Sky: The Rooftops of Cairo conveys in the end, it reveals the conflicting nature of attempting to capture the story of this marginalized group through the medium of photography.

While Shaath does not claim her work to be art per se, but rather it is considered so by “people from the art world,” the classification becomes significant due to the work’s pervasive social commentary. It is her chosen medium of photography and the use of the non-conventional di sopra in giù technique—which is typically employed by those who are accused of subjugating these marginalized groups—that gives her work an aura of something more than just documentation, something appealing to curators and galleries. These issues continue to resonate throughout much of her work. An essential point remains: instead of the

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more common accusation leveled at an artist’s work becoming increasingly associated with socio-political causes, such that the status of their art as art becomes questionable, we have here an example of the art world pulling Shaath into its circles to claim her work as art. In whatever way one ends up reading her work, this difficulty of classification is precisely because the di sopra in giÚ technique situates her series Under the Same Sky squarely between documentary journalism and art.

***

Christian A. Hedrick is an architect and a PhD candidate at MIT. His dissertation is tentatively titled German Architects and the Encounter with Egypt in the Nineteenth Century. His work utilizes the drawings and buildings generated by these architects and their experience with Egyptian and Islamic architecture to identify the relationship between different modes of representation from the historiography of architecture to its formal expression as a cultural and political identity. He received an MArch from the University of Michigan and a BA in History from John Carroll University.

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HUSH

Steven Beckly, with a response

by Jonathan D. Katz

Steven Beckly and Jonathan D. Katz

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“ Hush is collection of military images examining contemporary notions of queer identity and relationship through the recontextualization of old photographs.

Using found images collected from vintage stores, antique dealers, and the Internet, the surfaces of past relationships are extracted and reconfigured to establish a new and common meaning through a variety of digital methods.

Some photographs are strategically cropped, shifting the focus of what was originally documented; other photographs are digitally stitched together, merging disconnected identities to form new relationships; finally, other photographs are left unaltered, simply presented in this new context. By such means, unknown identities, relationships, and histories are re-worked and represented as commentary on the former US military policy of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.’”

—Steven Beckly 1

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HUSH irrelevant, but it’s hardly the point. We know well that their histories, unbound by any ethic of truth in the first place, have long had the power to make their falsehoods true, reconfiguring our gayness as their “confirmed bachelorhood” and the like. Claiming thus also becomes an act of disclaiming, a performative refusal of history’s innumerable lies, big and small.

In Hush, Steven Beckly claims and reclaims history through the appropriation of old photographs.3 He’s a happy liar, and the violence he performs on historical truth is the inverse of the kind done to us, for it is in the service not of repression, but liberation. His work makes self-evident the malleability of the past in the hands of the present, and does it in a way few historians dare to acknowledge. He plunders and speculates, mirrors and insinuates. It’s cheeky, but more than that, it offers up the prospect that we can not only reverse our erasure from history, but also make up new histories of our own, unconstrained by truth claims. And in this grab bag version of history—which is really the only history we have—to universalize queerness does something consequentially different from the usual universalization of straightness: it holds up the possibility, glimpsed fleetingly in these photographs, of a world without sexual categories, without policed boundaries and judgments of appropriate and inappropriate behavior.

Beckly offers up a vision of a queer future molded to the contours of our past; it’s not only ahead of us, it’s also behind us, and there is much comfort in realizing that we are now doing what we have already done.

1 Steven Beckly, “Hush,” artist’s statement. All images are courtesy of the artist and copyright Steven Beckly.

2 For more on this, see Scott Bravmann, Queer Fictions of the Past: History, Culture and Difference (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

3 For additional work in this vein, see David Deitcher, Dear Friends: American Photographs of Men Together, 18401918 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001).

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Queers often have either a tenuous or a conflicted relationship to history—a generalization, to be sure, but as generalizations go, a persuasive one. Queers understand that history—the dominant culture’s account of itself—has repeatedly lied about us, buried or obscured our divergent communities and cultures, hushed both the celebrated and the anonymous among us, denied existence to our heroes and our traitors, our triumphs and our tragedies. This is the story of our past, but it’s also of our present. As we watch it happen today, again and again, our faith in other people’s accounts of us, attenuated to begin with, is frayed beyond repair.

On those rare occasions when histories deign to acknowledge our presence, too often queerness is made a mundane aspect of biography, like being born in Poughkeepsie, and not the determining force it so often is. This is the new homophobia, the kind that denies queerness any purchase on our being, as if being a member of the last minority that can be legally discriminated against leaves no marks on individual lives. The genius of homophobia has long been these pervasive attempts to isolates the individual queer as exceptional—an outlier within a world of happy heterosexuality—interrupting the formation of political solidarity and community, one with a texture, a nuance, a culture all its own.

Since history has so often lied about queerness, queers often have little compunction in returning the favor. We rummage through history, actively on the look-out for self-reflections. Upon finding them, we then claim these silent signs as evidence of a repression we know only too well. We claim and reclaim, fashioning an alternative history, grandiose and plausible in equal measure, with that passion that comes from seeing oneself reflected in a mirror for the first time.2 That this claiming can so often turn out to be true (cf. Ellen DeGeneres or Ricky Martin) only underscores how gaydar and gossip can be reframed as unauthorized history, denied only authoritativeness, not truth, because of its manifest ideological dissidence. But in the final analysis, truth stands to the side in this act of claiming and reclaiming—it’s not utterly

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Steven Beckly and Jonathan D. Katz

*** Steven Beckly is a photo-based artist living and working in Toronto, Canada. His practice explores the complexities of identity, relationships, intimacy, and sexuality. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally.

Jonathan D. Katz was the first tenured professor in gay and lesbian studies in the US, working at the intersection of art history and queer history. He was recently co-curator with David C. Ward and Jenn Sichel of the exhibition “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture� at the National Portrait Gallery and is currently Associate Professor of Visual Studies at SUNY Buffalo where he is Director of the PhD program.

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NORCs in New York Tobias Armborst, Georgeen Theodore, and Daniel D’Oca of Interboro Partners

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Interboro Partners

NORC is a funny word, but we didn’t make it up. On the contrary, the word is recognized by the local, state, and federal government, and has been in use since 1986. Actually, NORC is an acronym. It stands for “Naturally Occurring Retirement Community.” Basically, a NORC is a place (a building, a development, a neighborhood) with a significant elderly population that wasn’t purpose-built as a senior community.

What counts as a “significant elderly population” varies from place to place (and from one level of government to the next), but that’s the basic definition. NORCs are important because once a community meets the criteria, it becomes eligible for local, state, and federal funds to retroactively provide that community with the support services elderly populations need (for example, case management and social work services, health care management and prevention programs, education, socialization, and recreational activities, and volunteer opportunities for program participants and the community).

As it happens, there are 27 NORCs in New York City, located in four boroughs. NORCs are a national—even international— phenomenon, but the NORC movement began right here in New York City, when a consortium of UJA-Federation agencies established the Penn South Program for Seniors in 1986.

Let us say a few words about why we’re so interested in NORCs:

First of all, the “naturally occurring” part is intriguing. We’re interested in these sorts of bottom-up dynamics, and have explored them in previous projects.

Second, we’re interested in NORCs because we like what they do for New York City. Of course, one of the greatest things about New York City is its diversity. New York City is a city that is supposed to tolerate—and maybe even encourage and engender—difference. New York is supposed to be a city where people of different races, classes, and lifestyles coexist.

Generational diversity is an important part of this ideal: just as NYC would be undermined by racial homogeneity, so too would it be undermined by age homogeneity. (This threat of age homogeneity is a very real one: Manhattan, for example, is becoming whiter and younger. In fact, in New York City, the percent of the population that was 60+ decreased from 17.5% 190

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in 1990 to 15.6% in 2000—lower than both the New York State percentage, and that of the US. We might criticize Florida for being a geriatric ghetto, but in some ways, Manhattan is in danger of becoming a youth ghetto.)

Third, we like what NORCs do for the elderly. People grow old, and instead of moving to a purpose-built retirement community in the suburbs or the sunbelt, they stay in the home and the community that they always lived in. “Aging in place,” as some people call it, poses some challenges, but to NORC advocates, the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. As the UJC states, “by all accounts, the vast majority of older Americans want to, or by necessity, will remain living in their own home, even as they grow frail.”

Fourth, we’re interested in the fact that almost all NORCs are “towers in the park”—that much maligned mid-century planning typology. While observing NORCs, we quickly discovered that the so-called “tower in the park” is the ideal architecture for a community of seniors: a combination of elevators, wide hallways, communal green spaces, shared facilities, and shopping and services typically on the same block serve the community very well. In recent years, many tower projects have been maligned or taken down because of the belief that such architecture creates estrangement and social problems. When we looked at NORCs, however, we found just the opposite. Could it be that NORCs provide a new “calling” for this modernist housing typology?

Fifth, we’re interested in the fact that 19 of the NORCs are in limited-equity housing co-ops, built mostly in the first half of the twentieth century by unions to house their swelling ranks of workers. Because homeowners are forbidden from selling their units on the open market (limited-equity housing co-ops sell units to homeowners for below-market prices in exchange for an agreement that the homeowner will sell his or her unit back to the co-op for only slightly more than he or she paid for it), they have little incentive to sell as the sales price of this type of apartment will not yield enough money to buy a comparable apartment on the market. This combination of homeowners having no economic incentive to leave combined with the fact that the homeowners, as union members and organizers committed to cooperative living and working, were a very “lefty” group, helps explain the emergence of the NORC movement.

While social scientists have produced many important studies on NORCs, architects and urban planners have generally paid NORCs very little attention despite their many architectural, planning, and social implications.

Visit any tower-in-the-park in New York and you are likely to find seniors making good use of the ample green space.

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Vladeck Houses Amalgamated/Park Reservoir Parkchester Preservation Big Six Towers

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Jonathan Crisman

Describe the first moment you realized you were experiencing a NORC.

Interboro Partners

In 2006, we were invited to do an exhibition at common room 2, a space on the Lower East Side headed by Lars Fischer, Maria Ibañez de Sendadiano, and Todd Rouhe. The exhibition space was in the lobby of common room’s office, a commercial building in the Seward Park Cooperative complex. As we started planning the exhibition, we noticed that the lobby, which was used by all the people associated with common room—cool architects, designers, and artists—was also inhabited by elderly people with heavy New York accents and canes. It turns out that the building is the epicenter of Seward Park’s senior culture: a large-windowed second story office that houses the Seward Park NORC Supportive Services Program, or NORC-SSP. The NORCSSP is a gathering place for Seward Park’s seniors: a place to organize transport to the doctor, sign up for meals on wheels, get a flu shot, play bingo, take a yoga class, and so on.

We saw this ground floor lobby as a space of encounter among the building’s different constituents: the architects and designers who worked in the building, exhibition visitors who came to see common room 2 shows, and the NORC-SSP seniors who used their community room to take care of their health needs and to socialize. We built our exhibition around trying to increase the interaction (positive friction?) among these groups, and in particular, the NORC-SSP people and those who came to the exhibition.

In many ways, this space embodied ideals of “the good city.” As an urban space in which people of difference have chance encounters, it is just the sort of space that the homogenization of Manhattan is endangering. Believing that there is a value to having different types of people rub shoulders in the same space, we started to investigate how this group of seniors—in that face of a meteoric rise in real estate values and increased living costs—managed to stay

put among their friends on the Lower East Side. That was the start of this project.

JC

What kind of closed-loop or endogenous phenomena have you observed in these social systems? Are there any kind of otherworldly perceptions, interactions, or spatial appropriations that occur in these habitats that might seem strange elsewhere but seem right at home within the NORCs? IP

One thing that’s great about NORCs is that they are integrated with the city around them. Sure, when you’re sitting in the park of one or another tower-in-the-park you can forget that you are in this dense, crowded city, but for the most part, what’s great about NORCs is that they aren’t islands. Despite the fact that there are delivery services, senior shuttles, and on-site entertainment, most of the seniors who live in the NORCs make use of neighborhood services. We spent a lot of time in NORCs, but we also spent a lot of time around NORCs, mapping interactions between NORC residents and the surrounding neighborhoods. We were very busy! Visit northern Chelsea between Seventh and Ninth Avenues and you’ll see it for yourself: lots of senior citizens at the pharmacies, movie theaters, delis, and so on.

The most exciting thing is when a NORC-SSP forms a relationship with a neighborhood institution, like when students from FIT came to Penn South to work with seniors on their apartment interiors.

JC

What is happening to these developments as residents, for lack of a better term, move out? What kind of constituency is moving in?

IP

What happens to the developments when residents move out really depends on the development. Unfortunately, many of the limited-equity housing co-ops that house NORCs have opted to go market. What this means is that when a unit becomes available,

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NORCs in New York the unit goes to the highest bidder. However when an apartment becomes available in Penn South—whose tenants have opted to remain a limited-equity co-op market—it goes to whoever is next on the waiting list.

As Penn South—like other limited-equity coops—have income limits, the unit is likely to go to someone who wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford to own an apartment in Chelsea. The challenge for NORCs is to retain their elderly population, since they risk losing their NORC status (and hence their funding), once they go below 50 percent senior. As very few people ever leave limitedequity co-ops, this is less a problem for them; however, it is a major concern for places that have gone market.

JC

Do you have any kind of design agenda or projective thoughts on how to approach the NORC? Or is this purely an incidence of seeing something interesting and wanting to give it attention?

JC

Your work has tended toward what one might call “everyday urbanism”—and along with it, tended toward participatory, bottom-up approaches. What would you say to someone critical of participation—say, Markus Miessen (who is also in this issue)— or some skeptical as to whether things are as rosy as the images you present?

IP

We’re working on a book called The Arsenal of Exclusion & Inclusion: it’s far from rosy. The book is a sort of dictionary of 101 “weapons” that segregate and integrate.

What’s depressing is how much easier it has been to identify the former. The amount of creativity that our architects, planners, policy-makers, developers, real estate brokers, and neighborhood associations have put into keeping “undesirables” out of communities that have good schools, good jobs, escalating property values, clean air, and all the other things that we all want and deserve equal access to, is nothing short of astonishing. The result is metropolitan areas with twenty-year life expectancy differences between the poorest, blackest neighborhoods and the wealthiest, whitest neighborhoods. The result is cities whose high school graduation rates are 40 percent lower than those of the suburbs that surround them.

We do believe in bottom-up, participatory approaches, but obviously, such approaches aren’t all that is needed to address some of the larger problems that we face. To make our metropolitan areas more

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IP

NORCs help the elderly age in place, and thus help maintain the city’s generational diversity, which we also think is a good thing. But NORC funding has decreased significantly in recent years. So on the one hand, we see our work as advocates, where we make the case for NORCs by using easy-to-understand storytelling techniques.

Visualizing the history of NORCs and illustrating the values they bring to both their residents and the city at large is a design project itself and is definitely part of our agenda.

Of course, there are plenty of physical design opportunities, ranging from increasing accessibility to developing more flexible unit arrangements. With regards to accessibility: a lot of NORCs and a lot of the neighborhoods where you find NORCs have some work to do here. It could be as simple as replacing stairs with ramps (stairs tend to be a problem in some of the older NORCs, such as Parkchester), redesigning intersections to slow down cars, or increasing the time a senior has to

cross a street. Another interesting issue is the relationship between the unit and the household. Many units were first inhabited by families, and over time, the households shrank, as children moved away and spouses died. Nowadays, a single elderly resident could be joined by a child moving back or a care-giver living part time in the unit. Thinking about how the residential units might be retrofitted or adapted to flexibly accommodate these changes is a yet to be fully investigated design opportunity.

Interboro Partners

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equitable, we’re not averse to big, top-down, non-participatory policies. Wealthy, white suburban communities like the ones you find in Westchester County, NY aren’t going to participate in “affirmatively furthering” fair housing, not without the threat of penalty.

That is to say, there’s a time and a place to be rosy, and a time and a place to be mad as hell.

Images, drawings and text courtesy Interboro Partners.

*** Interboro Partners is a New York City-based architecture, planning, and research firm. Interboro has won many awards for its innovative projects, including the MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program, the Architectural League’s Emerging Voices and Young Architects Awards, and the New Practices Award from the AIA New York Chapter. Interboro’s forthcoming book The Arsenal of Exclusion & Inclusion will be published by Actar in 2012.

Interboro is Tobias Armborst, Daniel D’Oca, and Georgeen Theodore.

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UNCOMMON GROUND: Aether, Body, and Commons Zissis Kotionis

Zissis Kotionis

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Urban Ground

We understand ground as something that sustains and supports human life. With human development, this ground has manifested as concrete slabs, evident in dense, supranational urban networks, as noted by Michel Serres. 1 Given the concrete slab density over the Athens Basin, the extensive constructed surface of the modern city along with the earthly substrata that support it should also be considered integral parts of the city’s “thick ground.” Therefore, the thick ground of Athens encompasses a few tens of meters in the light, to the height of an average apartment building, and a few meters in the dark, to the depth of the earliest human traces. Below the current surface are older ground levels that due to archaeological digs, constant construction, and subsequent re-filling, go down to minus ten meters. Above stands an urban mass that usually does not exceed 20 meters, composed of a few floors of concrete slabs—in cross section, a total of 30 meters. Postulating a “ground fraction,” the constructed urban mass in central Athens would be located above the fraction bar, while archaeological sites would be located below.

they are deterritorialized. However, according to its political definition, deterritorialization means taking away control and order from a land or territory already established and politically organized. In this sense, Athens has already been undergoing a phase of intense deterritorialization due to continuous interventions of the global financial system in the past few years. One might say that the seat of the political system in Athens is being unseated and transferred to global air space, above the city and beyond national borders.

Urban Ground Cross Section

A topological model of the urban ground can be symbolized in a straight line, which separates the world of appearances to an above and a below it the form of a fraction Fig. 1. The topology of above and below

Deterritorialization Fig. 1

Air space between and above the apartment buildings in cross section could be overtaken by dense networks bearing heavy flows of information. Via these networks, language and code-based human activities are transferred to a “space” beyond the ground:

1 Michel Serres, The Natural Contract (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1995).

defines a space of light—the space of terrestrial life—and a dark space beneath, resistant and unapproachable. The space below, along with the ground’s crust, could be called the common, referring to collectively shared surface and subter-ranean resources.

In Athens, the common includes history by means of buried artifacts brought to light by archaeology, and fair weather which allows for extended stays outdoors. As common ground contains both history and knowledge, both ancient culture and modern cultivation, it can be perceived as both a literal and metaphorical 210

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cultivation ground. The thickness of the common can be symbolized as “C” and placed in the denominator of the “ground fraction” Fig. 2

C common

Fig. 2

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In the space above the ground line, the city represents terrestrial activity. Within the city, human bodies and their objects, such as buildings and cars, are in constant interaction. The bodily is inherent in both these human bodies and their objects. We could, therefore, refer to all terrestrial activity taking place above ground as the bodily, symbolized as “B,” placing it in the numerator of the ground fraction Fig. 3. Additionally, common characteristics of its buildings could be used to define a city’s bodily uniqueness.

A polykatoikia (typical apartment building) in Athens, for example, demonstrates a distinctive physicality.

involved in, but also exists above, all human activity. Aether is not only a conveyor of weather but also a vector of communication, potential, language, ideas, and even illness, and as such can be considered an artificial common. It remains, however, the region where cross-territorial power (i.e., global or deterritorialized) is exercised. There is a fundamental distinction between the bodily element of humans and buildings and the fluidity of aether: the bodily is material while aether is not. A line of materiality—like a slab of concrete— vertically separates terrestrial from celestial, bodily from aethereal. The aethereal is defined as hyper-ground and placed in the numerator of the fraction as “A” Fig. 4.

B aethereal / bodily

Fig. 4

Thus, the complex fraction “A/B/C” is proposed where the line of the ground is the fraction bar, the common is the denominator, and the numerator is a fraction with the aethereal as numerator and the bodily as denominator Fig. 5.

A

C

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bodily / common

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In an attempt to dissociate the sky from its metaphysical dimension, the term aether will be used for the element that is both

Fig. 5

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This complex fraction is used to represent an archaeological cross section of the thick ground of modern-day Athens.

By intersecting the vertical plane of the A/B/C fraction with a horizontal plane representing the people—permanent and temporary residents of the city—or, in other words, by further investigating the bodily, we can there locate a historic transition from the concept of the people to that of the multitude 2 Fig. 6.

buildings, the coincidence of apartment building and family, in terms of the bodily, emerges Fig. 7.

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This combination of the horizontal flow of multitude with the vertical A/B/C will provide a basis for examination of the thick ground of Athens and its potential reformation.

People, Family, and the Apartment Building

In Athens’s recent history, certain three-word political slogans have been repeatedly used. These political triptychs can be construed through the A/B/C topological triptych. During the years of the military dictatorship (1967-1974), the slogan used by the junta was “Country, Family, Religion.”

The term “country” constitutes the common ground strata (C), the second term “family” involves the “bodily” (B), and the third term “religion” refers to the elusive aether (A). If in terms of location we assume the bodily to represent the thick stratum of apartment

Family is often seen as the social and ideological nucleus of Athens. Single-family units have been the basic social content of the polykatoikia. However, recent findings challenge this notion: in demographic terms, Athens and its extended center are rapidly diverging from the traditional threegeneration nuclear family model. Single senior citizens, students, single parent families, and single immigrant populations are adopting communal residential schemes (i.e., multitudes) that comprise social groupings that differ from the typical family now residing in more privileged environs on the city’s periphery. As a result of this shift, the apartment building is separating from the family at the same time that the people are retreating and giving their place over to the metropolitan multitude. And while the antithesis between the concept of the people and of the multitude is expressed through major disparities in Athens’s interior, building shells and their typologies resist, demonstrating a paradox: while apartment vacancies are increasing, so are homelessness numbers.

Multitude

Following the 1974 political changeover in Greece, the military dictatorship’s slogan 212

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“Country, Family, Religion” was replaced with “Bread, Education, Freedom” which has dominated since. In this new triptych, the close association of the common (C) with the country is diminished. The bread as “common,” though it encompasses the territoriality of cultivation, does not establish any type of land possession. Moreover, the term “education” replaces the family as an element of the fraction (B), reminding us that education is the main communal aspiration of the new urban body. Finally, in terms of the aethereal (A), the potential of religion is replaced by enlightenment’s call to freedom Fig. 8.

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was “Cops, Pigs, Murderers.” As opposed to “Bread, Education, Freedom” which expresses an aspiration, all constituent parts of this new triptych convey rage and an obsession with the bodily. A three-part topology of the bodily, it coincides with the belly in the previously mentioned cross section of the city (B), Fig. 10.

Fig. 8

In December 2008, the riots in central Athens resulted in significant damage to the city which remained beyond political control for a few hours. Moreover, for the first time, a large number of resident immigrants participated along with the local population.

This conflagration signified a radical transformation of the city’s political subject. In the disposition of power, it was not the native population—as was common until then—that played a leading role but, rather, the multitude.

Toni Negri defines the multitude and its dynamic through references to the body noting, “the multitude is a multitude of bodies; it expresses power not only as a whole but also as singularity.”3 Indeed, in the arrangement of those that took part in the uprising, one can note both the total and the individual action of the singularity as an activation of

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The multitude’s demonstration constitutes a grounding in the purely corporeal. On the other hand, the frenzied deterritorialization of financial and political sectors is symbolically

2 See Toni Negri, “Pour une définition ontologique de la multitude,” Multitudes, no. 9 (May/June 2002): 36–48.

3 Negri, “Pour une définition ontologique de la multitude,” 36–48.

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the unique body of the demonstrator, in contrast to demonstrations where action is the result of a collective effort and is controlled by the whole Fig. 9. The slogan then coined

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expressed in the tripartite name of its foremost champion, the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The international domain of this organization, in combination with the potential of the monetary power it wields, consigns the I-M-F triptych to the domain of the aethereal (A), Fig. 11.

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apartment unit can be inset through vertically infilling the slab structure Fig. 12.4

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Fig. 11

The absorption of the multitude’s political expression by the bodily (B) and the subordination of political processes by the aethereal (A) compress urban life into solid wholes that continuously move away from each other. As they become increasingly polarized, “the public” as a fundamental constituent of urban life withdraws into the dark of the earth. The thick ground becomes solid and single-layered. How can this ominous shrinking of the political topology be reversed?

At the same time, withdrawal of the family leaves a void in the city’s space, similar to an apartment being vacated, between individual and society. Which structure in place of the apartment building can host the bipolar singularity-multitude social construct? To answer these questions, we must review and transform the structure of the apartment building to find a suitable tectonic housing model.

Fig. 12

The dwelling, free of internal partitions, is essentially a large room. This single space is able to receive all of the micro-programs from singularities, which can be individuals or evolving cohabitation schemes adopted by the metropolitan mass. As the outline of the housing unit slips from the slab/base, the slab hangs in mid-air among the units, seeking a new role Fig. 13. It finds that role by establishing common or intermediate levels

Multistructure

In the apartment building, equidistant slabs according to the dom-i-no tectonic system define intermediate spaces in which an Fig. 13

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between the units. These are the levels of the common (C) that hang between units, vertically transposing common ground. In this case, the common, beyond being private or public, can be allotted for urban gardening, outdoor living, or the production of clean energy. Construction of common slabs results in the creation of a hyper-ground, expanding the urban ground and reconstituting it with the bodily and the aethereal.5

And so, an axiom emerges: The more that Athens’s building structure recombines and increases the complexity and co-existence of A, B, and C, the more that the multitude appropriates the city in terms of biopolitical integration Fig. 14.

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(B), and the aethereal (A). The objective is to multiply fractional relations of A/B/C vertically to produce a complex urban porosity. This porosity refers to the bioclimatic dimension of architecture, as well as to the political dimension of cohabitation. Moreover, the common underground of Athens also falls within its terms of reference. An increase of porosity downward results in expanded archeological digs with simultaneous freeing of the ground: multistructure gains height as it frees up ground, archaeo-logical and otherwise FigS. 15, 16.

B Fig. 14

Conversely, the more that mono-cultivation of the bodily or the aethereal dominates, the more that the multitude’s estrangement increases.

In research regarding a structural formulation for the multitude, a syntactic principle of maximum intermingling for A, B, and C takes primacy. The structure that can maximize intermingling is one able to foster maximum vertical amalgamation of these three factors. A new formulation, multistructure, can reformulate ground relations and is proposed in place of the apartment building formulation. Under the topological terms of the A/B/C urban cross section, this new structure allows intermingling of the common (C), the bodily

Fig. 15

4 Here, if we consider apartment cavity walls wedged between the concrete slabs and observe the cross section up close, we notice a structural motif of alternating structural units (the bricks) and interspaced slabs.

5 For a video demonstration, see http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=EXvUZ1QTn40.

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FIG. 16

*** Dr. Zissis Kotionis is an architect practicing in Greece and is Professor and Head in the Department of Architecture at the University of Thessaly. He has published five books on architectural theory and urban culture, and his projects and buildings have been published and award winning in Greece and abroad. He is also involved in artistic performances and installations in public art practices.

In 2010 he was Commissioner of Greece in the Venice Biennale.

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Edens, Islands, Rooms Amrita Mahindroo

Amrita Mahindroo

“ All at once, they were the hollow mold from which the image of ‘modernity’ was cast. Here, the century mirrored with satisfaction its most recent past. Here was the retirement home for infant prodigies.”

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—W alter Benjamin, The Arcades Project

1 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans.

Rolf Tiedman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 874.

2 David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2005), 76.

3 Jonathan Ablett et al., The Bird of Gold: The Rise of India’s Consumer Market (London: McKinsey Global Institute, 2007), 8.

4 John Harris, “The Onward March of the Great Indian Middle Class,” Hindu, August 15, 2007.

5 Simon Cox, “The Fastest Lap: India’s Economy Is Racing with China’s,” Economist, November 22, 2010.

6 The “privately-owned public interior” is defined here as an enclosed urban space accessible to the public, but owned by, a private entity.

7 Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976), 46-48.

8 Neera Adarkar, “The Lost Century: How the Textile Workers of Mumbai Got Short Shrift,” in The Mumbai Reader: 2007 (Mumbai: Urban Design Research Institute, 2007), 137.

9 Mark Crinson, Empire Building: Orientalism and Victorian Architecture (London: Routledge, 1996), 230.

10 Nauzer Bharucha, “From Mills to Malls, The Sky Is the Limit,” Times of India, November 24, 2003.

11 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 49

1

Grow, Asia, Grow

In contemporary economic development literature, Asia’s middle class is exalted as a savior of global capitalism.2 Today, the size of India’s middle class hovers around 50 million people, and this figure is expected to grow tenfold by 2025.3 By the end of these 13 years, India is expected to rank fifth as a world consumer market, coming in just behind the United States, Japan, China, and the United Kingdom.

However, what has been offered up as the “middle class” is by no means a sociological category. Rather, it is an aspirational standard whereby India’s various publics are unified solely through their increasing capacity to consume goods and services. Consequently, we must ask a critical question: Can the neoliberal economics that are encouraging Asia’s middle class to ”grow, grow, grow” be critiqued as a type of neo-colonialism?

While it implies a new variety of unity, this “middle class” in fact encompasses a broader spectrum of publics than its predecessor.4 The state, which would otherwise provide its various publics with political unity, is seen as a hindrance to their progress and is therefore encouraged to take an increasingly peripheral role in the country’s development.5 Implications from the state’s lack of interference are becoming most apparent in the evolving form of India’s cities. The spatial counterpart to this “aspirational standard” is thus tainted by the reality that it exists as a privately-owned public interior.6 In recent years, neoliberal economics have enabled individual 218

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developers to swallow enough terrain for the production of micro-cities whose forms exist somewhere between big architecture and small city. These urban enclaves develop outside the state’s auspices and, despite the presence of a democratic political structure, they escape public control. The city, which was according to Manfredo Tafuri’s late-twentiethcentury, liberal democratic definition an architectural enabler of urban diversity,7 is thus homogenized by the scale of contemporary architectural developments. In this manner “the city” is reduced to a handful of variables largely contingent on the profitability of a terrain. A dangerous byproduct of this formal homogeneity is that it stipulates a singular vision of “public,” created by few and aspired to by many.

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January 1982 The Great Bombay Textile Strike begins.

Trade union leader Dutta Samant brings 250,000 mill workers into conflict with the Bombay Mill Owners Association, causing the textile industry to shut down for almost 18 months.

1983 After a prolonged and destabilizing confrontation, the strike collapses with no concessions obtained for the workers.

The majority of the over 80 mills in Central Mumbai close during and after the strike, leaving more than 150,000 workers unemployed.1 1984 Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s appointees make a budget provision of $89.2 million for mill owners to modernize mills, but mill owners have already begun considering the real estate value of their lands.2 1991 As mill closure parallels government reforms towards liberalization in the early ‘90s, Finance Minister Manmohan Singh pushes to end government investment in manufacturing industries.

The government, under the Development Control Regulation (DCR), allows mill owners to apply for permits to change their land from “Industrial” to “Commercial and Residential”3 if one-third of the mill land be surrendered to the Maharastra Housing and Area Development Authority (MHADA) for public housing and onethird be given to the Bombay Municipal Corporation (BMC) for public open space.

Through a number of loopholes, mill owners are able to forgo the one-third rule, resulting in the demolition of a number of mills and the sale of all land for real estate development.

1994 The Bombay First Initiative4 advocates deregulation of land development for the improvement of the business environment in Mumbai and the increase of foreign direct investment.

1990–1995 The skyline of Parel changes rapidly with the opening of Phoenix Towers, Kalpataru Towers, and Belvedere Court. The situation expands beyond the mill workers to a general issue of gentrification in the area.

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Following the 1982 Great Bombay Textile Strike, the collapse of the textile industry in Mumbai resulted in the vacating of many mill sites in the neighborhoods of Parel and Lower Parel. As the city rode a great wave of development, it mobilized a sizeable managerial class and left unemployed a large working class. This was one public which found itself without a métier as the city chose to build itself on the exploitation of a different resource. While the abandonment of the working class has been attributed in part to the “lengthy” demands of the trade unions, the root of the problem was the rising value of the mills’ land.8 Many mill owners found that selling mill compounds for real estate development was significantly more lucrative then rehabilitating the mills for continual use. So began the great mill monopoly.

In 1992, the first of the “islands”—created out of the Phoenix Mills Compounds—was boarded up with “coming soon” billboards as the city anticipated its arrival. It marked the beginning of a heated battle between two distinct publics: the displaced working class and an economically powerful urban elite. At one point in history, the imposition of form and of a certain aesthetic was considered to be an act of imperialism.9 Now, to deny the developing world the Western image of progress was also rendered an imperial imposition. The skyline of Parel thus emerged in a form consistent with that of any other megacity in the developing world. While the skyline was much discussed and applauded10, the ground plane, that most valuable terrain upon which two publics might face one another, remained ignored.11 Instead, these publics were firmly re-categorized as those who met the city’s future aspirations, and those who had yet to do so.

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Amrita Mahindroo

The largest remaining island in the neighborhood is laden with Mumbai’s economic history. Located in Lower Parel, it has for decades fed Mumbai’s economy through the India United Textile Mill Fig. 1 . This 72–hectare island presently employs over 5,000 people whose voices will not be invited into a conversation about its future development. To make these voices audible, their argument needs to be grounded by a public space which would stand as a beacon of democratic power. This “state space”12 would level the playing field with a monumental void, a maidan Fig. 2 . Long heralded as one of the most important types of public space in the Indian city, the maidan is a space so firmly defined by the absence of an aesthetic that it can be nothing but democratic: its power lies in the sheer scale of its emptiness and lack of embellishment.13 Yet the state of twentieth-century capitalist development is such that the building of these dramatic urban voids has not been entertained since the early nineteenth century. Mumbai’s existing maidans are considered lungs in the hyper-density of the city; they host a series of different programmatic functions, ranging from the cricket pitch to the political rally to the communal prayer space. They Fig. 1 — P arel Mills. Courtesy of and copyright Swapnil are embedded within the city’s culture as the Bhole Pukar. prime spaces of civic proprietorship.14

According to the logic of neoliberal economics, the creation of this void on terrain ripe with developmental potential would require the concomitant construction of a walled enclave funded by private enterprise. These walls would represent the sad reality by which the contemporary Indian city is increasingly forced to barter territory in order to achieve many of its infrastructural goals. And yet in light of this reality, a new ground plane could take shape as a Fig. 2 — O val Maidan, Mumbai, January 2011. Courtesy of and copyright the author. space of possibility. This room, defined as much by the freedom of its void as by the financial power behind the walls which define its enclosure, is the simplest module of both urban and architectural space Fig. 3 . It would become politically charged should it initiate the integration of a broader public into an enclave by mere cause of its design, subsequently revealing an irony latent within neoliberal logic: that the production of the room forces the city to pay for the absence of development.

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12 “State space” is here defined as designed public space for recreational use, as opposed to consequent public space such as footpaths.

13 Anuradha Mathur, “Neither Wilderness nor Home: The Indian Maidan,” in Recovering Landscapes: Essays in Contemporary Landscape Architecture, ed. James Corner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999), 58.

14 Ibid., 61.

Fig. 3 — M aidan as Room in Parel. Courtesy of and copyright the author.

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Rooms

1996 Under pressure from the public, the MHADA Chief Minister Manohar Joshi announces the decision to suspend the DCR and appoints a conservation committee headed by Charles Correa to design an integrative development plan for mill lands.5

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The room as a concept thus opens a dialogue about the relevance of public space in today’s Indian city and the conditions under which it is to be produced. While the maidan typifies “state space,” its opposite would be for the privately owned public interior manufactured to act as a mechanism 1996 The Correa Report is a collective effort for upward mobility. The interior spaces therefore reinstate by architects, planners, and mill activists an alternative trait of “publicness”: the shared use of space that to create a redevelopment strategy for the allows for a variety of projections—for some this is marked neighborhood. This report is intended to provide strategies to protect the rights by aspiration and for others by the ambivalence of economic of mill workers as the area undergoes conquest. Typologically, the synthesis of this micro-city as gentrification. an idea is most evident in the museum Fig. 4 . It is composed of two planes: the slab and the urban mat. A greatly misunderstood monolith of architecture’s recent past, the slab is here exploited for its formal properties as various typological conditions fuse along its length. The slab gives the walls the thickness within which the curated public of the enclave is housed. The urban mat, on the contrary, is a porous ground Fig. 4 — Museum. Courtesy of and copyright the author with floor belonging to a much broader Luca De Gaetano. local public. The mat thus serves as a mechanism by which the detached interior of the enclave can be contaminated with a little “Mumbai-ness.” The perverse interiority of these walls, which have an anti-urban past both formally and socially, further allow for a re-structuring of the city in the interest of protecting the sanctity of the void.

The void therefore anticipates a heterogeneity of uses and publics which the object alone would not have been able to create. A microcosm of enfiladed rooms, the museum resembles a hallowed exhibition space as much as it does an Fig. 5 — Museum Type. Courtesy of and copyright the author.

Ikea Fig. 5 . It exemplifies the

Amrita Mahindroo

contemporary predicament in which the traditional datum of the city finds itself added to the list of nostalgia-laden theme parks as economics insist on a more dramatic scale of building. These datums nevertheless humanize the voids and enable a form of urbanism wherein differences in publics (and the socio-economic categories they embody) are nested within one another as a series of concentric urban scales. With the abolition of corridors and passageways, each space, from the smallest antechamber to the largest salon, becomes a destination of its own. The implications of the reductive, aesthetic homogeneity of an enclave are thus avoided not by creating forms which physically embody difference, but rather by creating the voids within which social and economic difference can emerge. As each room aggregates (each typifying a different urban condition), they collectively retain the aesthetic coherence of a larger form while allowing for negotiation between the absolute form of the architectural object and the formlessness of the liberal, democratic city.

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15 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 877.

16 Rem Koolhaas, “Bigness or the Problem of Large,” in S,M,L,XL, ed. Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau (New York: Monacelli Press, 1995), 494-516.

17 This malaise is defined here as such because it enables the architect with a variety of the “God Complex,” which is the source of utopias. This is a cause of regression in architectural thought because it goes against the grain of the liberal democratic formation of the city—wherein many forms have to co-exist, and therefore cannot be authored under the umbrella of one political opinion. See Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, 134-137.

18 Stanford Anderson, “Quasi-Autonomy in Architecture: The Search for an In-Between,” Perspecta 33 (2002): 30-37.

Fig. 6 — Rooms on Island. Courtesy of and copyright the author.

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In stark contrast to the excesses of this collective lies the maidan Fig. 6 . This space, characterized by a generous, untended field, creates a type of utilitarian void in the center of the dense, urban fabric of the city. It is a state space of civility, which has the capacity to collect a public that is as undefined as the void itself. The maidan’s sudden interiority also points to the extreme market-friendly measures that the achievement of this simple outcome requires. It stands as both a manifesto to voids and a critique of their new price tag.

What Benjamin saw in the Parisian arcades,15 and Koolhaas in suburban bigness,16 was the expression of economy manifest in the culture of a society at a particular point in history. These rooms, Edenic islands of much-desired voids in the city, would represent an emerging expression of economy within the culture of Mumbai. They plead, perhaps too idealistically, for a kind of quid pro quo between private enterprise and the state, revealing the absurdity of neoliberal economics. Nevertheless, as each is nested within its successor, they seek to provoke the collision of two distinct planes and of the respective publics they embody.

When Tafuri lay bare the fundamental disjunction between utopian formal visions of the city and liberal democratic processes, he hoped to cure the architectural discipline of the malaise which comes with the naive belief that forms are an unproblematic medium for social engineering.17 Tafuri’s anti-participatory approach, which later came to be defined as the project of autonomy, found a great following in the last 30 years and its increasing popularity has comfortably paralleled global economic reforms towards liberalization as socio-political concerns have been left to the periphery of the discourse. While the reign of the autonomous project has been powerful, its durability is questionable.

Following a major economic collapse, the West’s recent, conscious shift in priorities towards social responsibility may forecast a similar turn in the developing world. As the ivory tower collapses around “the architect,” we are all too aware of the discipline’s struggle for relevance.

In the shadow of this looming future, this argument insists on the importance of political participation through formal discourse. Allegoric utopias and manifestos aside, today participation seems dependant on how well one can bypass the rules of neoliberal economics unnoticed. Quiet participation, or what has been theorized as quasi-autonomy,18 223

2001 The DCR is revised in favor of the private textile mills, allowing them to officially ignore the one-third rule for the purposes of real estate development. This results in the forced eviction of a number of mill workers living in the chawls, or tenements, on the former mill sites.

February 2005 Of the 170 acres of private mill land sold for development, the BMC and MHADA receive a combined 6%, or 10 acres, as a concession for the plight of mill workers based on the revised DCR of 2001.7

May 2005 The Bombay Environmental Action Group (BEAG) files a petition under the Supreme Court to stop all construction of mill lands pending investigation of issues such as ownership and validity of the 2001 DCR.8

June 2005 The National Textile Corporation’s Mumbai Textile Mill is sold for a staggering $160 Million to the Delhi-based real estate giant DLF Group.9

March 2006 On March 7th, the Supreme Court rules in favor of the property developers, stating that all changes which were made to the DCR in 2001 are constitutionally valid.10 2011 The average three-bedroom apartment in Parel is today valued at $2.2 million, comparable with Midtown Manhattan.

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Voids

1998 Following the report, the government finally assures the textile workers’ union that regulations are being modified to include their demands. In the end, however, only a fraction of the MHADA housing is reserved for displaced textile workers. The remainder is made available for general sale.6

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Endnotes for Timeline 1 Shiv Kumar, “Maharashtra May Give More Mills’ Land for Public Use,” Tribune, May 5, 2005.

2 Adarkar, “The Lost Century,” 139.

3 Ibid., 141.

4 The Bombay First Initiative is a government organization affiliated with the Bombay Chamber of Commerce and Industry responsible for generating public-private partnerships for development and infrastructure.

5 Peter Winch, ”From Girangaon to Planet Godrej—How the Mill Lands Got Away,” in Mapping Mumbai (Mumbai: Urban Design Research Institute, 2005), 30.

6 Adarkar, “The Lost Century,” 149.

7 Ibid., 150.

8 Winch, “From Girangaon to Planet Godrej,” 32.

9 Kumar, “Maharashtra May Give More Mills’ Land for Public Use,” 5.

10 Winch, ”From Girangaon to Planet Godrej,” 32.

is a category of practice which re-engages the sociological conditions that the architectural discipline has so comfortably ignored for the past 30 years from within the constraints of the market. While the project of autonomy may have found its urban counterpart in the clustering of introspective object-like icons, quiet participation may well attribute new value to the absence of development through typological conditions, which glorify the idea of a collective space. For this kind of political action, the void itself is the new icon.

*** Amrita Mahindroo is principal of Droo Projects, which explores the changing role of the architect from delivery of a service to delivery of developments as products. This has taken on the form of several projects that sit at the intersection of architecture and real estate development. She holds a Masters in Architecture and Urbanism from MIT and a BArchHons from the University of Melbourne, and was formerly project architect at Atelier Seraji and Shigeru Ban Architects. Amrita has lectured and been published at UCLA, University of Oklahoma, UNC, and MIT, on her research on the nexus between emerging technologies, economics, future building typologies, and urban form.

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The Prince: Bjarke Ingels’s Social Conspiracy Justin fowler

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Justin fowler

“ Our world could be much more accommodating, ecological and enjoyable than it is; our cities could be more fit for human life, more adaptive to the specific climates where they are located. The reason they’re not is that there are interests that are unconcerned with the common good, and not invested in creating the best world possible. By claiming that these interests have formed an unholy alliance and are systematically killing architecture’s protagonists, perhaps it’s possible to get a bigger audience interested in understanding the challenges faced by architects. There’s nothing like a good old fashion conspiracy theory to get people’s attention; whining architects do not exactly make a bestseller.”

—Bjarke Ingels

1

“ S udden and relentless reform never sits well with entrenched interests and power brokers. That’s why true reform is so hard to achieve. But with the support of the citizens of Alaska, we shook things up. And in short order we put the government of our state back on the side of the people.”

— Sarah Palin

2

Few architects working today attract as much public acclaim and disciplinary head-scratching as Bjarke Ingels. Having recently arrived in New York, this selfproclaimed futurist is undertaking his own form of Manifest Destiny, reminding American architects how to act in their own country.

While his practice is often branded by the architectural establishment as naïve and opportunistic, such criticism is too quick to conflate Ingel’s outwardly optimistic persona with the brash formal agenda it enables. In the current economic climate, there are any number of gifted purveyors of form languishing in New York City. Despite this, Ingels has somehow managed to get away with proposing a pyra-midal perimeter block in midtown New York Fig. 1, a looped pier in St. Petersburg Florida Fig. 2,and an art center in Park City, Utah massed as torqued log cabin while maintaining a straight face. How, then, is his mode of operation considered uncritical by so many within the discipline? Clearly, Ingels has figured something out about harnessing and transforming “the social” and American architects would do well to identify what that happens to be. In this search for a method, it might help to be a little paranoid. So, in the manner of any good conspiracy theorist, let’s go to the chalkboard, or rather, the diagram...

“ a wise prince should establish himself on that which is in his own control and not in that of others; he must endeavour only to avoid hatred, as is noted.”

— Niccolo Machiavelli

3

Part of the answer may lie with Ingels’s brand of populism, which is as much about

1 Bjarke Ingels, “Bjarke Ingels: Interview by Jeffrey Inaba,” Klat, no. 4 (Fall 2010): 89.

2 Sarah Palin, “Acceptance Speech at the Republican National Convention,” September 3, 2008.

3 Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. W. K. Marriott (Costa Mesa, CA: Plain Label Books, 1952), 92.

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Fig. 1 — BIG, West 57th, New York City. Image by BIG and Glessner, courtesy of BIG.

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Fig. 2 — BIG, St. Petersburg Pier. Image by BIG and MIR, courtesy of BIG.

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Justin fowler being social as it is about the social. From his “archicomic” monograph (now published for the iPad) to his recent appearance in a number of glossy, culture magazines, Ingels is cutting out the middleman and bringing his message directly to the people. Bred as an insider (first at OMA, and then at Columbia and Harvard), he has since gone rogue by positioning himself outside of the elitist currents that make up avant-garde practice.

The message is that Ingels is of the people and therefore his work has the people’s best interests at heart. This Palin-esque sleight of hand is not only powerful as a means to attract clients, but also to provide him with tactical agility. Architects have always tried to slip design elements past their clients through flattery, but Ingels goes beyond the timid hide-the-medicine-in-the-applesauce approach. His is one of radical transparency, quite literally telling the client everything in order to free his forms from political oversight and its requisite headaches. Ingels’s mentor, Rem Koolhaas, remains a critical darling because despite all of his fashionable rhetoric, architectural insiders consider him a sinister figure. While the most straightforward reading would suggest that Ingels has jettisoned the schizophrenic attitude of the latter in favor of a singular, wide-eyed deliriousness, one might also view his project as being far more complex in its coupling of populism and Machiavellian exceptionalism— the two seemingly opposite poles of American political thought.

Ingels’s paean to optimism, Yes is More, opens by suggesting a direct parallel with Obama’s campaign slogan, “Yes we can.” While Obama’s phrase served as a stand-in for his goal of consensus-building

4 Bjarke Ingels, Yes is More (Cologne: Evergreen, 2009), 14–15.

5 R. E. Somol, “Green Dots 101,” in Hunch, no. 11 (Winter 2007): 29.

6 Bjarke Ingels, “Bjarke Ingels,” 94.

pragmatism, Ingels’s slogan suggests excess over compromise, or perhaps excess via the rhetoric of compromise. Demand to resolve the impossible and something interesting might emerge: “What if design could be the opposite of politics? Not by ignoring conflict, but by feeding from it. A way to incorporate and integrate differences, not through compromise or by choosing sides, but by tying conflicting interests into a Gordian knot of new ideas.”4 While the Gordian allusion may be apt, it seems that Ingels is simultaneously playing the roles of both Gordius and Alexander, weaving difference into a coherent formal puzzle while cutting through “politics” with a decisive stroke.

In Taming the Prince, Harvey Mansfield locates this political ambivalence as a latent Machiavellian thread inherent in the executive branch of the US government. Unlike an authoritarian ruler who exerts power based solely by claiming the right to do so, the executive executes decisions on behalf of the sovereign who have elected to abide by such rulings. Being of the people allows a leader an exceptional capacity to take decisive actions while remaining distanced from their outcomes. This rhetorical latitude is a doubleedged sword, being both extra-constitutional (outside) and grounded in its formal provision (inside). For Mansfield, the ambivalence of the executive is the position’s greatest strength. It is absolute formal power in a populist guise.

Curiously, such power can also be considered “performative” which, as Robert Somol suggests, “operates in such a way that the saying of it makes it so.”5 Ingels’s “pragmatic utopian” brand of the performative is its own kind of Tea Party Express—that undeniably revolutionary platform that somehow manages to reconcile such outwardly incommensurable positions as tax reduction and increased military spending into one loud, populist leviathan. It remains to be seen whether Ingels’s desire to have his cake and eat it too, or “BIGamy,”6 is more closely related to the Tea Party’s brand of cognitive dissonance or some imagined urban win-win scenario brought to bear through sheer force of will.

But, then again, does it even matter so long as the strategy pays off?

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“ The logo can slip from foreground to background as the situation warrants.”

— R. E. Somol

7

“ The unity of the office [of the President] implies the possibility, though a remote one, of an ideal executive. Such a person would combine in himself the ambivalence inherent in the office, ducking out of sight and leaping into view when necessary and appropriate.

And his knowledge... would encompass the doctrine of executive power, uniting its two aspects while justifying their separation.”

— Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr. 8

As with BIGamy, the disruptive potential of the Tea Party, like so many populist movements before it, lies in the directness of its attitude rather than the consistency of its positions. Its ideological diversity is kept in check through cults of personality and patriotic displays. Likewise, one could say that the seemingly irreconcilable sociopolitical issues that Ingels seeks to absorb into his work are held together through the use of shape. His projects straddle the gulf between the scale of the building and of the urban master plan. Unable to exert buildingscale control over his projects, and conversely

7 Somol, “Green Dots 101,” 33.

8 Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., Taming the Prince: The Ambivalence of Modern Executive Power (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 15.

9 Somol, “Green Dots 101,” 37.

10 Ibid., 34.

Fig. 3 — BIG, West 57th Massing Diagram. Image courtesy of BIG.

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unwilling to relinquish formal control over the design of the larger plan, Ingels uses the bluntness of shape to broker a tenuous peace and gain some degree of maneuverability within this scalar high-wire act. Shape, then, corresponds to attitude, a mode of operating that covers for ideological ambivalence.

Contrary to Robert Somol’s largely depoliticized conception of shape in which the “non-necessitarian possibility”9 of the graphic allows it to disappear into the background, Ingels’s work demonstrates the efficacy of shape as an insurgent socio-political force. Somol perhaps unintentionally hints at this capacity when he suggests that “the graphic can only be artificially asserted and subsequently played out.”10 In the context of American executive power, however, the exceptional assertion is permissible only through an appeal to necessity and to the extraordinary circumstances that force a leader to go beyond the normal call of duty.

For Ingels, the necessity of materializing his projects requires the construction of a receptive audience, primed to believe that the abstraction of the diagram somehow corresponds to their experience of the city.

Whether post-rationalized or generative, BIG’s diagrams project an attitude of inevitability, suggesting that the final form is the necessary result Fig. 3. While such alibis are not new to the architecture profession, Ingels takes it a step further, actively working to shape the social environment within which the final project is judged—placing himself in the world, so that his forms retain a degree of autonomy.

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“ Government has the ambivalent task of bringing necessity home to the people, so that they survive, while concealing it from them, so they are happy and innocent.”

— Harvey C. Mansfield Jr. 11 “ Bjarke Ingels is a ‘Yes Man.’ He rises to the challenge of just about any demand, be it reasonable or otherwise, with an unqualified ‘Yes.’ This fuels his ambition to absorb all the political interests surrounding a project and to turn them into backbending forms that disarm the opposition.”

— Bjarke Ingels 12

From the image of a mountain screenprinted onto the side of his housing complex in Copenhagen known simply as “The Mountain” Fig. 4, or the projection of the face of Princess Victoria onto the façade of the Arlanda Hotel, to the use of Lego people in “Lego Towers” Fig. 5, Ingels constructs a graphic social ecology that is as hermetic as it is self-serving. For all the rhetoric about embracing a diversity of socio-political and economic forces, Ingels’s work is relational only within the autonomous social context that he has rendered for himself. Within this framework, there is little tangible embrace of the contingency of urban life. Rather, the value of the work lies in the reductive and monolithic fiction of the world he presents, and its quality as a plausible alternate reality only just removed from the conditions it recasts in such a positive light. Ingels’s craft is in acting as though this gap doesn’t exist. The apparent straightforwardness of his work

Fig. 4 — BIG, The Mountain, Copenhagen. Photo by Carsten Kring, courtesy of BIG.

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belies the articulation of his negative critique.

In our world, yes is great but no means no.

By subverting the necessity of trade-offs in a zero sum game, Ingels is offering an internally coherent conspiracy theory and seeking converts to share in the BIGamy.

By reframing how we see our world through the presentation of an exuberant alternative, he is insuring that we cannot return from exposure to his visions without having unwittingly undergone some form of attitude adjustment that prefigures our subsequent experiences. It is interesting, then, that someone who claims to have the capacity to “absorb” all differences within a project can also claim that he has an “opposition” to “disarm,” as the idea of opposition seems foreign to his win-win conceptual narrative. The critical potency of Ingel’s work, however, comes from this very project of making the impossible into a viable alternative through the seeding of an attitude within the public imagination.

“ t his idea of the paranoid— of noticing aspects of the world that other people don’t see—is a very powerful tool for the architect.”

— Bjarke Ingels 13

One of the defining features of any conspiracy is its internal coherence.

Irrespective of the ends, conspiracies perform, yet how well they perform is a function of the skill with which these autonomous Gordian constructs are planted within the collective consciousness. Such skill underwrites the soft power of influence. While architects’ desire for influence is not new, the strategies for achieving it have varied widely. They

11 Mansfield, Taming the Prince, 145.

12 Bjarke Ingels, Yes is More, author’s note.

13 Bjarke Ingels, “Bjarke Ingels,” 86.

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Fig. 5 — BIG, Lego Tower. Image courtesy of BIG.

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often entail an appeal to the architect’s ability to manage material and economic efficiency, effectively abandoning the excess inherent in any architectural act. Ingels, however, engages the social so as to justify this excess, using his own personal brand as a sideshow to secure autonomy for his exuberant formal agenda. The bi-polarity of this maneuver reflects at once a profound sympathy for Koolhaas’s appropriation of the Paranoid-Critical method in Delirious New York as well as an intuitive understanding of the ambivalence that underwrites American power structures. If, paradoxically, Ingels has conspired to pry open a space for division, or disciplinary autonomy, through a social project of unity and consensus-building, then an evolution in his work will emerge when he moves to free his shapes from the lingering rhetorical vestiges of populism and examine the role that form plays in relation to the irreconcilable political necessities that drove him to conjure such an ambivalent knot from the start.

*** Justin Fowler received his MArch from Harvard University and previously studied Government and the History of Art and Architecture at the College of William and Mary. He is an assistant editor of Invention/Transformation: Strategies for the Qattara/Jimi Oases in Al Ain (Harvard GSD, 2010) and his writing has appeared in Volume, Pidgin, Speciale Z Journal, Scapegoat, PIN-UP, Topos, and Conditions, along with book chapters in The New Urban Question: Urbanism Beyond Neoliberalism (TU Delft, 2009), Urban Interventions (Slovart, 2011), and Material Design: Informing Architecture by Materiality (Birkhauser, 2010). He has worked as a designer for Dick van Gameren Architecten in the Netherlands and currently manages research and editorial projects at the Columbia Lab for Architectural Broadcasting (C-Lab) in New York.

232

Beyond Doing Good: Civil Disobedience as Design Pedagogy

Hannah Rose Mendoza

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Hannah Rose Mendoza

While homeland security in the US has become a 200 billion dollar enterprise, support for education, social services, and justice have been chiseled away.1 The safety that Americans purchase is not just protection from immediate threat, but also insulation from even the mildest of discomforts; from panhandlers to the possibility that a neighbor might paint their house a distasteful color.2 The anxiety present in confronting the unknown, even in activities as seemingly mundane as trying a new restaurant, is reinforced by the ever-present sameness that continually spreads across the American landscape. In a modern variation on the 1928 campaign promise for stability and progress represented by “a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage”3 we now have a Burger King at every highway exit.

As capital continues to be accumulated by a shrinking circle of individuals, their tendency to remake the world into a system for the transfer of wealth meets with less resistance. Design includes processes through which paradigms are exposed to strict and critical scrutiny.4 In this sense, each act of design is either an act of compliance with existing systems or an act of disobedience to those systems. Thus, design education is uniquely positioned to create a culture in which future practitioners learn to utilize the lessons of design and civil disobedience to inform each other, such that the advancement of justice becomes fully integrated into everyday practice.

There are two forms of decision-making that take place in a democracy: voting and consensus.5 In a voting democracy, decisions are made in numbers; in a consensus democracy, decisions are made through dialog.

Some argue that the peaceful transformation of conflict through dialog rather than power is democracy.6 In order for that transformation to occur, however, the conflict must first be recognized, and then engaged. Public space provides the platform for interaction among parties and issues. In the US, public spaces

have been increasingly removed in favor of purchased expression, inserted into private spaces on a public scale. Those with the means to purchase expression at such massive scales control the issues presented and the discussion that surrounds them. Therefore, the conflicts that are addressed either are not those of the marginalized or do not include their voices in the process.

Designers play active roles in the disruption and destruction of public space through the unquestioning acceptance of the mandate to create mechanisms for surveillance, control, and restriction without careful consideration of the impacts those mechanisms have on the quality of the spaces that they have created.7 The combination of expanded rule sets with the incorporation of social surveillance technologies acts to discourage participation by marginalized members of society. Efforts to create greater security by preventing homeless from sleeping in public parks has led to the design of benches that are oddly angled and highly exposed, concrete slabs that discourage use of any kind.8 Only those who have no other choice occupy spaces that do not support a humane experience. These spaces become 1 Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, 1st ed. (New York: Picador, 2008).

2 Edward Blakely, Fortress America: Gated Communities in the United States (Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1999); Nan Ellin, “Shelter from the Storm or Form Follows Fear and Vice Versa,” in The Architecture of Fear (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1997), 13-45.

3 Richard Florida, The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work (New York: Harper Paperbacks, 2011), 130.

4 Nigel Cross, Designerly Ways of Knowing (Basel, Switzerland: Birkhaeuser—Publishers for Architecture, 2007); Bryan Lawson, What Designers Know (Burlington, MA: Elsevier/Architectural Press, 2004).

5 Arend Lijphart, “Democratic Political Systems: Types, Cases, Causes, and Consequences,” Journal of Theoretical Politics 1, no. 1 (1989): 33-48.

6 Michael Katz, Susan Verducci, and Gert Biesta, eds., Democracy, Education and the Moral Life, 1st ed. (Berlin: Springer, 2008).

7 Steven Flusty, “The Banality of Interdiction: Surveillance, Control and the Displacement of Diversity,” International Journal of Urban & Regional Research 25, no. 3 (2001): 658664.

8 Steven Flusty, “Building Paranoia,” in The Architecture of Fear (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1997), 46-59.

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practice and praxis led industrial designer and educator Victor Papanek to lament that, “designers have become a dangerous breed.”10

However, this paradigm can be shifted in design education. As Felicity Scott has argued, “the discipline’s utopian or progressive potential could only ... be realized on the level of revolutionary praxis.”11 Design, though, has become a domain of the plausibly deniable or for the casual do-gooder, but not the revolutionary. One of the great difficulties of imagining how design might affect positive change lies in our failure to question capital.

Efforts to enact change are undertaken within the existing, market-driven framework, requiring fantastic mental acrobatics during even its broadest phase of conception. We have incorrectly assessed the parameters and possibilities of design by imagining capital to be a part of the natural universe, like gravity or photosynthesis, rather than a human-made system for regulating interactions. Once the fracturing, competitive, and elitist capitalist system is removed from the equation, however, the landscape before us begins to open up.

Design is a process that allows us to move beyond addressing a problem as presented.12 Rather, it is the ability to rework problems in their entirety—to directly question and address their motives—that allows designers to envision previously inconceivable solutions. This is not an exercise in ivory-tower Pollyannaism. We live in our conceptualizations of reality and rethinking the world actually changes our experience of the world. Design transforms what is into what could be through repeated attempts at the unprecedented. This creativity, original ideas and acts of value, requires space in which failure can occur, as well as changes 9 Louis Menand, The Marketplace of Ideas, 1st ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010).

10 Victor Papanek, Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change, 2nd ed. (Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 2000), ix.

11 Felicity D. Scott, “On Architecture Under Capitalism,” Grey Room, no. 6 (Winter 2002): 46.

12 Cross, Designerly Ways of Knowing.

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areas to move through, or to avoid, rather than experiential destinations. This failure to appeal makes it difficult to advocate for their maintenance and they are allowed to deteriorate in a continuous cycle of neglect and avoidance.

A further instance of design’s servitude to capital lies in post-disaster “reconstruction.”

For example, the disastrous tsunami in Sri Lanka resulted in villagers surrendering their beaches to developers rather than rebuilding.

This “development” required an army of architects, engineers, and designers, who competed to participate in this activity. PostKatrina, post-9/11, post-Fukushima, and so on, include stories of clean-slate opportunism and the re-allocation upward of resources previously unavailable because of the original inhabitants. Disaster reconstruction has become a market in its own right. The elimination of those who previously stood in the way of construction of, and profit from, these gleaming cities are, in fact, acts of social violence. The fact that in committing these acts of social violence, designers are doing exactly what they have been trained to do is evidence of a structural problem. The privilege given to profit over justice is not only present in practice, but also in education.

Education has been reimagined as a business, and academic capitalism creates students as customers and faculty as service workers responsible for delivering what students believe to be the most valuable content: that which most directly prepares for entry in the workforce.9 Despite the design disciplines’s increased focus on the commitments designers should make to social justice, the curriculum and course content of university courses across the country often focus heavily on the transfer of graduates to employers.

In an educational paradigm that equates success with consumption, commitments to justice are lost. This failure to move beyond a detached understanding of the power of design and integrate the “high social and moral responsibility from the designer” into

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in what failure looks like.13 Of primary importance is recognition that what is called for is not gentle modification but rather a radical shift. Acts of civil disobedience—the deliberate violation of rules as a means to advance justice—have a power to reveal and delegitimize an unjust system.14 The ability to recognize claims are not valid simply because they have been issued by authority is vital to the continued pursuit of a just society. A viable means to truly change the world is to prepare a generation for sustained civil disobedience.

Artists have, at least in ideals, rejected the allure of the market. This deviance from education as workforce development is chosen in direct contradiction to the social directive to participate in the cycle of consumption.

Artists and art students are not always freed from the pandering required of business, but they do emerge from a culture in which they are actively encouraged to practice disorder; to rebel against the impositions of societal goals. Each piece of work is potentially an act of civil disobedience.

Design, on the other hand, has focused on product novelty as a means to an end; a planned obsolescence that ensures continued consumption. Novelty for its own sake is superficial; the process is seen as something to be overcome.15 The rapid pace at which style can change means that there must be continual reaffirmation of social and selfacceptance through consumption.16 This commodity fetishism is magnified by a culture 13 Ken Robinson, Out of Our Minds: Learning to Be Creative (West Sussex, UK: Capstone, 2001).

14 Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, 1st ed.

(New York: Vintage Books, 1991).

15 Eva Zeisel, Eva Zeisel On Design (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 2004).

16 Mona Domosh, American Commodities in an Age of Empire (New York: Routledge, 2006).

17 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, ed.

David McLellan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

18 As comedian Maria Bamford noted, “Holding myself to an impossible standard of beauty is the only thing that keeps me from starting a riot.”

19 Tony Fry, “Against an Essential Theory of ‘Need’: Some Considerations for Design Theory,” Design Issues 8, no. 2 (Spring 1992): 41-53.

of competition that is a mechanism that supports capitalism’s basic requirement for a continually expanding market.17 The time that we spend remaining vigilant to changes in fashion that require new purchases, keeps us too busy to realize the need for structural change.18

In the West, we believe in the need to own.19 This cult of ownership keeps our attention focused on acquisition and directs our concerns toward what is necessary in order to acquire more. Leading a moral life grants the individual “nice” things; poor choices are responsible for destitution and vagrancy. The reward for good behavior is not passage to a heavenly kingdom after death, but the things needed to make this current life as good as possible. The measure of a human’s worth is marked on a scale of ownership.

An integrative approach in which justice is not just an isolated topic that young designers are sporadically asked to consider is needed. It isn’t that we must think about different things or more things, but rather that we must think differently. It is possible to refuse to legitimate the structure of injustice by declining to participate in the perpetuation of social violence performed in the name of market advancement. In acts of civil and social disobedience lay the mechanisms to set aside the existing rules and practices that calcify the conflation of economic viability and standards of human behavior. Allowing for the creation of a new disorder is the first step in perceiving a new pattern.

It is time to move beyond awareness and assessment. We must begin to ask ourselves: what am I not willing to do?

*** Hannah Rose Mendoza is Assistant Professor of Interior Architecture at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Her research interests include design for the disenfranchised and the disassembly of imagined boundaries. Mendoza received her BA in Art History from Rutgers University and an MFA in Interior Design from Florida State University.

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Aid, Capital, and the Humanitarian Trap Joseph M. Watson

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Joseph M. Watson 1 Mary McLeod, “Architecture and Politics in the Reagan Era: From Postmodernism to Deconstructivism,” Assemblage 8 (1989): 25.

2 A representative sample from the architecture field might include individuals such as Shigeru Ban, who has been at the forefront of many relief efforts with his paper tube structures, Bryan Bell of Design Corps, Emily Pilloton of Project H, and Cameron Sinclair of Architecture for Humanity; notfor-profit organizations Habitat for Humanity, Make It Right, and MASS Design Group; and academic programs like the Rural Studio at Auburn University and the Vlock Building Project at Yale University. Exhibitions include the National Design Triennial: Why Design Now? and Design for the Other 90%, both at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, and Small Scale, Big Change: New Architectures of Social Engagement at the Museum of Modern Art. 3 Cameron Sinclair and Kate Stohr make use of socially conscious design and social design to variously describe their own organization, Architecture for Humanity, and the broader movement. See Architecture for Humanity, Design Like You Give a Damn: Architectural Responses to Humanitarian Crises (New York: Metropolis Books, 2006). Stohr even uses the curious phrase, “humanitarian, or social, design,” (35) which seems to incorrectly conflate the terms.

For Sinclair and Stohr, as for humanitarian architects in general, humanitarian is understood to modify crises, causes, issues, and, occasionally, design but never architecture per se. Strictly speaking, however, humanitarian as an adjective describes those “concerned with or seeking to promote human welfare” (NOAD), so the humanitarian crises alluded to in Design Like You Give a Damn’s subtitle would imply crises to which no one responded.

4 Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2001), 4ff.

Design trends, while not parallel with social, economic, or political trends, are certainly influenced by them and cannot be adequately considered apart from them. Regarding the relationship between architecture and its sociopolitical contexts in the modern and postmodern eras, Mary McLeod observes that “just as architecture is intrinsically joined to political and economic structures by virtue of its production, so, too, its form—its meaning as a cultural object—carries political resonances.”1 It then seems inevitable that after a generation during which society was (and continues to be) governed by neoliberal economics and neoconservative politics, and the design disciplines were dominated by corporate firms and celebrity figures, the turn of the 21st century would witness the emergence of a new trend. While the movement is relatively young, its protagonists are numerous and include individuals, not-for-profit organizations, for-profit companies, and academic programs for which every decision carries social, ecological, and political weight. It has gained immense popularity in recent years, becoming the subject of major museum exhibitions and significantly altering both the general cultural landscape and the language of the design professions.2

Settling on a name, at least for the architectural manifestation of this movement, is however quite confusing.

Its proponents prefer socially engaged design, socially conscious design, or even, simply, social design, but since design and especially architecture are by necessity social, these are at best redundant if not essentially meaningless. While the term humanitarian design is frequently used within the design community generally, the social- terms are typically preferred by architects (both individuals and organizations) and are often used interchangeably.3 The most appropriate term might be humanitarian architecture, concerned as this movement is with providing shelter for and improving the material conditions of those affected by global crises—from the victims of environmental catastrophes to the refugees of political upheavals.

Despite its novelty and professed goals, humanitarian architecture—when viewed within its contemporary socioeconomic context—might be exaggerating its selfproclaimed transformative potential. French philosopher Alain Badiou views this resurgence in the West of concern for “the rights of man” and “fundamental liberties” as the only possible recourse for a society that can no longer imagine any real alternative to neoliberal economics and must therefore accept its Churchillian claim to be “the least worst option.”4 Humanitarian architecture must therefore be situated within the political and economic structures from which it has 238

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239

5 A July 2010 blog post by Bruce Nussbaum sparked an online debate that might have achieved this end, but Nussbaum’s intentionally provocative title—“Is Humanitarian Design the New Imperialism?

Does Our Desire to Help Do More Harm Than Good?”­—put humanitarian designers on the defensive. While Nussbaum’s original post and some of the responses attempt to deal with the social and political complexities of humanitarianism, a few simply exchange intelligent dialogue for finger pointing, and none of the pieces move beyond questioning the design professions’ role in providing aid to the poor and the dispossessed within existing political and economic structures. See “Humanitarian Design vs. Design Imperialism: Debate Summary,” Change Observer, accessed November 30, 2011, http://changeobserver. designobserver.com/feature/humanitariandesign-vs-design-imperialism-debatesummary/14498/.

6 See Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (London: Verso, 2009).

7 Ibid., 34.

8 Ibid., 35.

9 Lawrence H. Summers, quoted in Ivan Petrella, Beyond Liberation Theology: A Polemic (London: SCM Press, 2008), 16.

10 For a systematic defense of Summers’s economic logic, see Jay Johnson, Gary Pecquet, and Leon Taylor, “Potential Gains from Trade in Dirty Industries: Revisiting Lawrence Summers’ Memo,” Cato Journal 27 (Fall 2007): 398-401.

11 Summers, Beyond Liberation Theology, 17.

Habitat for Humanity’s 2007 Jimmy Carter Work Project in South Los Angeles (detail).

Altered by author, original photograph by Lyndsey Payzant Wells.

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arisen.5 In Badiou’s rendering, the origin of these concerns can be found within the collapse of really existing alternatives to the dominant, global capitalist economy. Without competing ideologies, the only remaining economic system, market capitalism, simply absorbed the role played by the previously antagonistic ideologies and a “socially responsible” capitalism emerged in its place.

Slovenian theorist Slavoj Žižek follows a similar logic but places the conflation roughly two decades earlier, when capitalism successfully absorbed the “legacy of ‘68.”6 By Žižek’s account, the free market system admits to its past and present exploitation and acknowledges its “catastrophic tendencies, [but] the claim is now made that one can discern the signs of a new orientation which is aware that the capitalist mobilization of a society’s productive capacity can also be made to serve ecological goals, the struggle against poverty, and other worthy ends.”7 By seeming to atone for its sins, capitalism aims to insert its own internal critique through the market, attempting to use market-based mechanisms to address market-caused ills rather than allow for true economic emancipation.

We need not choose between Badiou and Žižek’s chronology to sense the magnitude of this shift. By claiming, with the likes of Margaret Thatcher and Francis Fukuyama, that there is no alternative and we are therefore living in the end of history, it is seemingly impossible to level a systematic critique against the only remaining and now universal politicoeconomic ideology. This more inclusive capitalism that no longer has an antagonistic relationship to social and ecological responsibility can supposedly remedy the damage caused by its prior incarnation. According to Žižek, “The new ethos of global responsibility is thus able to put capitalism to work as the most efficient instrument of the common good.”8 Rather than an externalization or a burden, social responsibility and the common good are now at the heart of global capitalism.

Larry Summers’s infamous 1991 memo inadvertently demonstrates this new ethos. Written while chief economist and vice president for Development Economics at the World Bank, Summers’s memo argues that “the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.”9 Though the World Bank disavowed the memo and Summers has insisted that the language is sardonic and meant to provoke discussion on the policies behind liberalization, the economic logic does, in fact, remain impeccably sound.10 Summers goes on to explain that “under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDERpolluted” and, most importantly, that the consequences of dumping would only be felt in the long term.11 The population

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Haiti’s National Palace in Port au Prince after the 2010 earthquake (detail).

Altered by author, original photograph by Pamela Gordon.

Trahan Architects’s prototype house for Brad Pitt’s Make It Right Foundation in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans. Altered by author, original photograph by Michael Cobb.

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12 See Jeffrey Inaba and Katharine Meagher, World of Giving (Baden: Lars Müller, 2010).

13 Ibid., 152.

14 Ibid., 167. One could make the much more defensible argument that Habitat’s model provides housing for an often overlooked demographic of low wage earners that would not otherwise be able to obtain affordable housing, instead of simply focusing on the most visible demographic, but neither Habitat nor Inaba do.

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of developing countries can accept toxic waste from the developed world, accrue the economic benefits, and never live long enough for detrimental side effects such as cancer to settle in.

Under the logic of traditional capitalism, the value of human life is commodified based on one’s ability to contribute to the global economy—either through production or consumption. The poor, unable to contribute and, therefore, economically worthless, are sacrificed as nonpersons to ensure the smooth functioning of the market. Yet Summers’s logic, representative of capitalism’s new social ethos, is far subtler: he finds economic incentive for the market to rehabilitate these nonpersons. Instead of being abandoned as refuse, superfluous to the market’s functioning, they are reincorporated. It is clear, however, that the market’s new ethos has more to do with improving the lowest-wage countries’ way of thinking rather than their way of life (i.e., ideological rather than material inclusivity). Since the lowest-wage countries must remain poor in order to remain relevant to the market, their living conditions cannot be significantly improved.

Addressing the effects of economic scarcity through the logic of the market is codified for the design world in Jeffrey Inaba’s World of Giving, which develops a theory of philanthropic giving and humanitarian design.12 Extrapolating from French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s symbolic capital, Inaba’s concept of aid capital represents all of the various ways of giving, their component parts, and the relationships between givers, mediators, and receivers of aid. Aid, which might consist of accumulated individual donations, food, building materials, foreign government aid, or expert knowledge, travels between individual volunteers, philanthropists, not-for-profit organizations, non-governmental organizations, and sovereign governments, before ultimately reaching its intended recipients.

Antagonistic to the greed inherent in economic capital, aid capital functions as a check; it reorients economic capital’s exploitative tendency, encouraging it “to abandon the exclusive economies of scarcity and enter an intentional, participatory and affirming economy of plenitude.”13

Inaba’s description of Habitat for Humanity reveals the ideology at work behind the supposedly benevolent aid capital.

By providing housing based not on need but the ability to demonstrate potential stewardship through financial obligation and “sweat equity,” Habitat’s model divides the poor into those that are or are not useful to the market economy. Inaba defends this by allowing that Habitat “will never eradicate substandard housing, and thus ... its prioritization must be organizational longevity.”14 Habitat’s aid capital is accrued through its

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15 Ibid., 33.

16 Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, 35.

17 Inaba, World of Giving, 153.

reputation as a successful organization and mortgagepaying homeowners supply a steady source of additional reputation-building capital. Of equal importance is assuring volunteers that they will not waste their time constructing a house on which the owners might default. The logic is strikingly parallel to the Summers memo: while attempting to incorporate the poor, it is justifiable to sacrifice some for the sake of others whose relevance is determined by their ability to assimilate into and contribute to the market. Even with the new humanitarian ethos, the market still determines worth and will continue to exclude those that cannot actively contribute. Since the needs of the organization and its volunteers’ “warm glow that results from acting generously”15 trump the concerns of the people actually in need of housing, the resignation that “they will never eradicate substandard housing” is thus Habitat’s own self-fulfilling prophecy.

Inaba and the described humanitarian movement rely on a false dichotomy between greedy economic capital and benevolent aid capital. This is highly problematic because it presupposes that one can correct for greed inherent in the system through an internal check. So long as the humanitarian movement relies on the logic of market capitalism, it will never play a truly antagonistic role. Žižek explains that “the basic ideological dispositif of capitalism ... is separated from its concrete socio-economic conditions (capitalist relations of production) and conceived of as an autonomous life ... leaving those very capitalist relations intact.”16 In other words, the language but not the logic of the humanitarian movement is separated from contemporary neoliberal ideology, and the disproportionate relationships that allow those who control the flow of capital to define the type of world within which the rest of us must live are never questioned. The possibility for the humanitarians to make a substantial critique of the situation that necessitates their existence is reduced, and aid capital’s economic function suddenly seems less antagonistic: “In order for Aid Capital to flow back to the giver and accrue to the receiver, some element of the donor’s original intent needs to remain intact throughout the transformative procedure. As well, the particular aspects of the recipient’s need must help shape a donor’s original intent.”17 While the recipient’s need is considered, the donor’s concerns are privileged and, for the most part, the recipients are conspicuously absent throughout the consideration of aid capital’s movement between the two parties. Inaba’s aid capital is less a negation of economic capital’s exploitation than it is a transposition of this disposition into humanitarian terms.

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243

18 Badiou, Ethics, 106.

19 Cameron Sinclair, in Iconoclasts, season 4, episode 3, dir. Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky (New York: Sundance Channel, 2008). Sinclair’s full quote states, “We haven’t really talked about this, but some of our architects, including myself, has [sic] had death threats for what we do because we’re disrupting a system. We just sent a bunch of people to Sierra Leone and Liberia. This ain’t pretty, but it’s the right thing to do.”

20 Architecture for Humanity, Design Like You Give a Damn, 44.

21 A “thousand points of light” was a recurring allusion for George H. W. Bush during his presidency that emphasized the importance of individual stewardship in the face of diminishing government funds.

See “Inaugural Address,” George Bush Presidential Library and Museum, accessed November 30, 2011, http://bushlibrary. tamu.edu/research/public_papers. php?id=1&year=1989&month=01.

22 Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times (London: Verso, 2010), 4.

23 Ibid., xv.

24 Inaba, World of Giving, 151.

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Again, the market determines worth—and increasingly finds more creative ways to do so. For Badiou, the ecological movement provides a precedent for the humanitarian movement by demonstrating how, rather than being antagonistic to the market, these movements simply “provide capital with new fields of investment, new inflections and new deployments. ... So long as it can be transformed or aligned in terms of market value, everything’s fine.”18 This is why Cameron Sinclair, founder of Architecture for Humanity and one of humanitarian architecture’s most visible protagonists, is not “disrupting a system” as he claims,19 but closing the loop on the same economic logic that created the situation to which his organization responds; why, as with Summers, the poor are “seen no longer as a burden but as a resource;”20 why natural and economic disasters provide an expanding customer base and opportunities to expand into new markets; and why Architecture for Humanity’s current efforts in Haiti, funded by the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund, are essentially just cleaning up the damage compounded by the two presidents’ foreign policy. With no economic alternative to turn to, humanitarian architecture can at best reinforce the status quo.

More problematically, it provides a sheen for the very system that created the inequality, with no need to admit culpability.

Like “a thousand points of light,”21 it allows for the continued denial of responsibility by those with the ability to end the exploitation of the majority of the world’s population.

According to Žižek, this fits perfectly with the hidden ideology behind today’s post-ideological society. Instead of asking what created the crisis with which we are confronted, “the underlying ideological message is something like: ‘Don’t think, don’t politicize, forget about the true causes of their poverty, just act, contribute money, so that you will not have to think!’”22 The urgency with which we need to respond removes the situation from its economic and political context, precluding uncomfortable questions about how our own lifestyle might be complicit in the structural injustice that leads to these types of crises. Moreover, it reduces the act of response to consumer choice—we can simply text a five-dollar donation without ever setting down our cell phones. In essence, it avoids imagining anything truly creative, settling instead for a “liberal ideology of victimhood, ... renouncing all positive projects and pursuing the least bad option.”23

Returning to aid capital, Inaba explains that it “works against the system of imbalance that necessitates its existence. ...

It looks to short circuit the feedback loop that focuses capital into ever-tighter circles.”24 The problem is that it does not and cannot. In Badiou’s language, the only thing that would

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25 The precise formal definitions of situation, event, fidelity, and truth can be found in Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2005). For a more concise and accessible explanation, see Badiou, Ethics, 40-57.

26 Reinhold Niebuhr, Beyond Tragedy: Essays on the Christian Interpretation of History (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1965), 207.

effectively short-circuit the capitalist feedback loop would be an event, or the sudden irruption of a previously inconceivable logic that carries the potential to transform the dominant forms of knowledge in a given situation. Fidelity to the event marks the decision to think the situation in terms of the truth introduced by the event, which initiates a process by which new forms of thought are improvised and investigated.25

The logic to which Inaba and the humanitarian designers subscribe only re-presents that of the marketcapitalist situation. The donor maintains control and it is his, her, or the organization’s intent that must be respected throughout, ensuring that the asymmetrical capitalist relation (capital : labor :: donor : recipient) remains firmly in place.

Inaba’s world of giving presumes that the structures of injustice that necessitate the gift would remain intact; nothing about the system of imbalance is actually negated. Yet over seventy years ago, the preeminent social ethicist Reinhold Niebuhr rebuked anyone “who takes established injustice for granted but seeks to deodorize it with incidental philanthropies and with deeds of kindness, which are meant to display power as much as to express pity.”26 Occasional efforts do little without systematic overhaul; even more dangerous is the notion that the same logic that produced the injustice can be used to find a solution.

Today, Niebuhr’s incidental philanthropies have been replaced by a world of giving in which greed and giving are no longer distinguishable and in which the disparity between rich and poor has never been greater. With economic and ecological uncertainty looming, an architecture that does not rely on the logic of social injustice is an absolute necessity.

*** Joseph M. Watson is a Master of Arts candidate in Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary in the City of the New York. He received a BArch from the University of Tennessee Knoxville and has practiced architecture in Manhattan.

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The End of Civilization Daniel Daou

Daniel Daou

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The End(s)

I want to address the end of civilization.

Here I use “end” in both of its acceptations: end as limit and end as purpose. By “civilization,” I mean the result of the sum total of human activities on the planet in both its tangible (e.g., cities) and intangible (e.g., information) dimensions. Effectively then, I have two questions: Is there a limit to human existence, and is there a purpose to it?

My intention is not ontological, but epistemological. In other words, I will not attempt to provide an answer to such lofty questions. Rather, my purpose will be to offer a brief overview of the eclectic range of pertinent literature, to draw useful insights from it, and to use these insights toward a critique on sustainability.

Why sustainability? Philologically, sustainability can be traced back to the German nachhaltigkeit, a term that implied a certain “limitless” quality to the processes it was applied to.1 It is this never ending or perpetual dimension of the word what links it to the question about the “end.”

Thomas Malthus. Malthus theorized that rising numbers of humans would unavoidably trigger food shortages—a process that would lead to collapse.4 This scenario has come to be referred to as the “Malthusian catastrophe.”5 But like in Leeuwenhoek’s estimate, a fallacy can be teased out in Malthus’s. He assumed that his insights on animal populations could be applied to humans as well. This is a form of “appealing to nature,” a logical fallacy that assumes that correctness follows only from nature.6 The nineteenth-century economist Henry George summed this flaw best in a candid quote: “Both the jayhawk and the man eat chickens, but the more jayhawks, the fewer chickens, while the more men, the more chickens.”7 Faulty assumptions aside, Malthus’s case is useful because it illustrates epistemic conservatism—the conception that there are unmovable, universal limits set by nature. A contrasting position, one where human development potential is not constrained by nature, has been described by sociologist Ted Benton as “emancipatory.”8 These two positions are in fact commonly referred to as “Malthusian” (such was the influence Malthus) and “cornucopian.”9

The End as Limit

The first person in record to systematically estimate the limit of the planet’s human carrying capacity was the Dutch scientist Antoine van Leeuwenhoek in 1679.2 By extrapolating the population density of the Netherlands to the rest of the estimated habitable surface of the Earth, he set the maximum world population at 13.4 billion. Leeuwenhoek assumed that a mere extrapolation was enough to obtain an accurate answer. Today this assumption has been acknowledged as problematic and referred to as “The Netherlands Fallacy.”3

1 Nathan Thanki, “Sustainable: A Philological Investigation,” HumJournal (Bar Harbor, ME: College of the Atlantic, 2011).

2 Joel E. Cohen, How Many People Can the Earth Support?

(New York: Norton, 1995).

3 Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich, The Population Explosion (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990).

4 Thomas R. Malthus and James Bonar, First Essay on Population, 1798 (New York: A.M. Kelley, 1965).

5 Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).

6 Mohan Rao, “Abiding Appeal of Neo-Malthusianism: Explaining the Inexplicable,” Economic and Political Weekly 39, no. 32 (August 7, 2004): 3599-3604.

7 Henry George, Progress and Poverty, An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth; The Remedy (New York: The Modern Library, 1938).

8 Ted Benton, “Marxism and Natural Limits: An Ecological Critique and Reconstruction,” New Left Review 178, no. 1 (November-December 1989): 51-86.

9 John Tierney, “Betting on the Planet” New York Times, December 2, 1990.

Leewenhoek’s exercise inaugurated a long tradition within demographics from where perhaps the most influential work was produced by the English scholar Robert

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The End of Civilization

If Malthusians agree on unmovable natural limits, cornucopians share the belief that science and technological progress can always figure out a way to overcome these limits.10 The modern schism between Malthusian scarcity and cornucopian abundance can be traced back at least to Marx and Engels who attempted to disprove Malthus by reformulating his law.11 For them, a rising human population would not translate into a food resource problem but a sure boon for the scientific advancement that would increase food production, for “what is impossible to science?”12

But why have thinkers—economists in particular—found a need to argue in favor of growth in the first place? It would seem as if “existence” without “growth” was anathema.

This returns us to our original questions, to the second question of purpose. The limits to existence cannot be explored without questioning its purpose as well.

history.15 A variation of technological determinism introduces the concept of existential risk.16 Existential risk is defined as anything that threatens to drive civilization to extinction—a state which is, by principle, irreversible.17 Since existential risk is a form of a “black swan” and therefore unpredictable, the only way to ensure humanity will be able to cope with it is by an ever increasing problem solving capacity driven by technological progress.18

However, the actual crux of the debate is not whether the limits of our existence are determined by natural, social, or technological factors. If we reconsider the two groups described by Tierney (the “boomsters” and the “doomsters” as he called them), putting aside the traits that define them, we can see that both have in common the same goal: guaranteeing a prosperous future for humanity. What, then, is the root of their diametrically opposed views? socio—

The End as Purpose

There have been at least three proposed answers to the question of our purpose, of why we grow.

The first is determined by biological and environmental factors: Life expands on earth as molecules do in empty space checked only by environmental pressures; energy inputs in a system will increase the system’s internal order while excreting degraded matter and energy. Growth is, in other words, the intrinsic signature of life.13

The second reason is dictated by a social imperative: The right of humans to develop to their fullest potential through ever increasing health, education, affluence, and overall wellbeing. This is the precisely the emancipatory project described by Benton which is at odds with the epistemic conservatism of Malthus.14

The third reason is driven by technology: This line of reasoning sees in technology the main force behind development throughout

10 Julian Lincoln Simon, The Ultimate Resource (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981); S. Charles Maurice and Charles W. Smithson, Are We Running Out of Everything?

Series on Public Issues No. 1 (College Station, TX: Center for Free Enterprise, Texas A&M University, 1983).

11 K. J. Walker, “Ecological Limits and Marxian Thought,” Politics 14, no. 1 (1979): 29-46; Benton, “Marxism and Natural Limits.”

12 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1987), 3:444.

13 Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadskiĭ and Mark A. McMenamin, The Biosphere (New York: Copernicus, 1998); Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature (Toronto: Bantam Books, 1984); James Lovelock, Gaia, A New Look at Life on Earth (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1979).

14 Benton, “Marxism and Natural Limits.”

15 Merritt Roe Smith and Leo Marx Does Technology Drive History? The Dilemma of Technological Determinism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994).

16 Nick Bostrom, “The Future of Humanity,” in New Waves in Philosophy of Technology, ed. Jan-Kyrre Berg Olsen, Evan Selinger, and Soren Riis (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2009).

17 Nick Bostrom and Milan M. Ćirković, Global Catastrophic Risks (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008).

18 Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (New York: Random House, 2007).

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The End of Civilization

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Flowchart representation of the world system model used by Meadows et al., from the 1972 edition of The Limits to Growth.

Courtesy of Universe Books and The Club of Rome.

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The “base case” scenario of the world system model as depicted in first edition of The Limits to Growth (1972).

Courtesy of Universe Books and The Club of Rome.

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The “double resources” scenario of the world system model as depicted in first edition of The Limits to Growth (1972).

Courtesy of Universe Books and The Club of Rome.

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The Club of Rome meeting in Salzburg in 1972, the year The Limits to Growth is released. Courtesy of Algemeen Nederlands Persbureau.

Decoupling

Too easily we fall within stereotypes when we associate doomsters with the environmental movement and boomsters with economics, or when we characterize the doomster as a Luddite and the boomster as a techno-utopian.

Such divisions are not without exceptions, suggesting that the underlying differences are elsewhere. For example, not all “boomsters” have an uncritical faith in technology—indeed, some see technological progress itself as a form of existential risk. And not all economists are “boomsters” either; increasingly within the field, efforts are being made to develop viable models for a zero-growth steady-state economy.19 Complicating the issue further, there are environmentalists who make a strong case for technological progress.20

Even if conventional distinctions and stereotypes fail, there are still two sides to the debate. The crucial concept that differentiates all the positions within the discussion is decoupling.21 Here, decoupling refers to the separation of growth from prosperity.22 Couplers argue for growth because either they do not distinguish between growth and development or because they see the former as a precondition for the latter. Decouplers, on the other hand, argue against growth because either they find it unnecessary or at odds with long term prosperity. Both couplers and decouplers however are ultimately more interested in prosperity and less in growth.

Untangling these oft-linked notions allows one to see the debate with more clarity. The real question we have at our hands is whether we can enjoy prosperity without growth forever.

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I add emphasis to the last word as a reminder that ultimately this is an issue of perpetual sustainability—a pleonasm since no form of sustainability is sustainable if it cannot be carried on indefinitely.

Sustainability “ S ustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

— The Brundtland Commission

22

19 Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, The Entropy Law and the Economic Process (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971); Herman E. Daly, Beyond Growth: The Economics of Sustainable Development (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996).

20 Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto (New York: Viking, 2009).

21 Daly, Beyond Growth; Tim Jackson, Prosperity Without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet (London: Earthscan 2009); Richard Heinberg, The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality (Gabriola, BC: New Society Publishers, 2011).

22 Wolfgang Sachs, “Sustainable Development,” in The International Handbook of Environmental Sociology, ed.

Michael Redclift (Cheltenham, UK: Elgar, 1997).

23 Gro Harlem Bruntland et al., Our Common Future (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1990).

24 Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants (New York: Viking, 2010).

25 Lance H. Gunderson and C. S. Holling, Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2002).

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The Brundtland Commission’s definition of sustainable development as stated in Our Common Future is vague enough as to allow interpretations coming from both coupler and decoupler camps. As such, it does little to clear up the relationship between growth and prosperity. However, I argue that the mainstream interpretation of the Commission’s report has been with a decoupler slant.

A decoupler argument is characterized by its imposition of maximum acceptable limits.

For example, proposals such as polluting less (e.g., by flying less or consuming less),

curbing population growth, or eating locally grown organic food still seem intuitively like a good thing to do. This is because they assume that progress does not depend on growth to provide prosperity; in other words, they can be decoupled.

But there is a counterpart to the decoupler interpretation of sustainability.

A less intuitive coupler spin of sustainable development would see, for example, growing levels of energy consumption as necessary for the kind of technological progress that could allow us to push existential risk indefinitely into the future. In other words, the consumption of natural resources could be understood as a metabolic process that produces waste but also, more importantly, increased order in the form of more complex technologies that translate into a better capacity of humanity as a whole system to respond to risk.24

A good analogy of coupler and decoupler hermeneutic modes can be found in the distinction between ecological resilience and adaptability.25 Resilience is the capacity of a system to recover from disturbance (existential risk being the most extreme kind). Therefore, resilience is related to the concept of stability. Adaptability is the system’s capacity to change as a response to disturbance. In this sense, it is as important as resilience. Many environmental management problems arise from the partial understanding of the interplay between adaptability and resilience. For example, in the name of preservation, controlled fires were discarded from the repertoire of forestry management which led to a rise in dangerous wildfires from the great accumulations of biomass that needed purging. This illustrates how, paradoxically, change (i.e., energy transformation) is important in preservation. For their emphasis on correlating sustainability with achieving a steady state, decouplers could be associated with resilience. Similarly, for their arguments in favor of constant change, couplers’

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Daniel Daou ideas are more related to adaptability.

The reference to the resilience and adaptability as defined within ecology shows how important seemingly mutually exclusive approaches are toward preservation.

The polemic between couplers and decouplers is still a matter of debate. Until it is settled, the less obvious or even counterintuitive interpretations of sustainability coming from the coupler side of the debate should not be dismissed for the more readily accepted decoupler ones. It could be that growth, as a net increase in energy and materials processed, is inseparable from prosperity or even intrinsically unavoidable but, moreover, the ultimate implication of a coupler interpretation of sustainability is that both steady-state or de-growth scenarios put in jeopardy our capacity to cope with unexpected risk. Until it is settled we should not dismiss the less obvious or even counterintuitive definitions of sustainability. Even the nineteenth-century economist William Stanley Jevons, one of Malthus’s most eloquent successors, displayed some caution towards conservatism:

To disperse so lavishly the cream of our mineral wealth is to be spendthrifts of our capital— to part with that which will never come back. This might lead to the sudden collapse of civilization. Yet much of civilization, such as our rich literature and philosophy, might never have existed without the lavish expenditure of our material energy that redeemed us from dullness and degradation a century ago. To reduce consumption might only bring back stagnation. We have to make the momentous choice between brief greatness and longer continued mediocrity. 26 Today, it is less clear whether our choices are limited to those pointed by Jevons. But the coin is still nevertheless in the air.

26 William Stanley Jevons and Alfred William Flux, The Coal Question; An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, And the Probable Exhaustion of Our Coal-mines (New York: A. M. Kelley, 1965).

*** Daniel Daou (BArch ‘05, MArch II ‘06) obtained a Master in City Planning and a Master in Science of Architecture Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2011 thanks to the support of Mexico’s National Council for Science and Technology, the National Fund for Culture and Arts, and the Brockmann Foundation. He is currently a Doctor of Design student at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Under the title of Synthetic Ecology, his research aims to explore the convergence of ecological, economical and technological paradigms in the built environment.

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Toward a Lake Ontario City Brendan Cormier and Christopher Pandolfi of Department of Unusual Certainties

Department of Unusual Certainties

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Prologue

Shortly after the enviro-economic meltdown of 2012, an emergency meeting was held at an undisclosed location somewhere at the bottom of Lake Ontario. The meeting—affectionately dubbed by the press years later as “lacus mos servo” or “the lake will serve”—was attended by government officials from both Canada and the United States, business leaders, the intellectual elite, various unions, and a random selection of “regular” people. The decisions that came out of the meeting were described as fantastical by some and desperate by others. There were also the usual empty but threatening references to Hitler and Communism. But, a narrow majority of the assembly agreed that transformation was inevitable and that a certain regional view, centered on the shared resource of the lake, was the best approach.

Shortly after the meeting, a plan was released entitled “Lake Ontario City: A New Tomorrow.” The plan outlined how the lake would once again become the center of all natural systems, infrastructures, economies, leisure, and relationships—the lake would become life. Accompanying the plan was a series of vignettes which illustrated the major transformations that would occur within the region. Although vague in nature, these vignettes were seen as a necessary provocation for the full-scale implementation of the plan.

Lake Ontario City was the future, it was unrelenting and unforgiving, and most importantly, it became real.

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A Tale of Two Territories

The Lake Ontario Water Ecology

Research Lab (the “L.O.W.E.R. Lab”) has its headquarters on the Great Energy Reef, with several roving labs which set off to different corners of the lake, collecting samples and monitoring lake ecologies. The heart of the L.O.W.E.R. Lab sits beneath the Great Energy Reef on the lake’s floor where it can monitor deep-water ecologies as well as the intake mechanisms of several deep-water cooling systems. These have been installed to cool the central business districts of Lake Ontario City’s main hubs. An educational branch is also located here, where classroom fieldtrips give students a unique view of the Lake and its significance to the region.

As a result of the Great Energy Reef policy, Hamilton has become the leading center for wind turbine manufacturing and wind energy research. Its aging steel mills and army of unemployed and underemployed steel workers made it the perfect city for launching this now-burgeoning economy. The local university, McMaster, has also taken a leading role in refining the technology for future citizens of Lake Ontario City. Likewise, Rochester, another struggling rustbelt town, has become a primary manufacturer and developer of solar panel technology with the Rochester Institute of Technology engaging in solar energy research.

The Great Energy Reef

In the center of the lake lies the Great Energy Reef—a combination of energy produc -tion, aqua-culture, and water basin research units, housed in a loose assemblage of semiautonomous floating barges which reconfigure to meet the challenges of the day Fig. 2 . The lake once contained a wealth of fish species which supported several fisheries around the lake and the investment in fish farming is an attempt to revive this local fishing economy.

The Voluntary Prisoners of Prince Edward County

A county once known for its boomerfriendly gastro-tours, Prince Edward has transformed itself into a hybrid workers colony-leisure zone. Under the Plan for Lake Ontario City, every citizen is obliged to spend a year-long retreat, working the land.

Prince Edward County, with its picturesque setting and its exalted artisanal products, has become the favorite destination for voluntary 257

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The Plan contains one major organizing principle: the division of the lake region into two zones, East and West, that together encompass the entire territory surrounding the lake Fig. 1.

The West Zone stretches from the Darlington Nuclear Generating Station in Clarington, counter-clockwise to Rochester.

The zone is designated for the clustered growth of high-density settlements. In this sense, it is a continuation and extension of the urbanization process that has dominated the region for the last century, commonly referred to as the “Golden Horseshoe.” A high-speed rail loop connects the entire zone, traversing Lake Ontario from Rochester to Clarington, creating a North American Randstad. Whereas in Holland the empty center of the Randstad is a protected agricultural core dubbed the “Green Heart,” Lake Ontario City’s center is dubbed the “Blue Heart.”

The East Zone runs clockwise from Clarington to Rochester around the eastern half of the lake. The Zone is designated for low-density settlements, artisanal and agricultural production, and eco-leisure tourism. Development in this region is strictly monitored. Not only is density kept at a minimum but draconian environmental regulations restrict affordability in the region to the extremely wealthy and the die-hard environmentalist elite.

Department of Unusual Certainties

Cornwall Massena

Peterborough

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ed

Ra

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Niagara River

St. Catharines

Eighteen Mile Creek

s

ta in

op

David Mills

Hamilton HamiltonHarbour

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Mo

hS pe

ty

H ig

eM is

Mississauga Oakville

Adirondack Mountains

Oswego

Th

Great Energy Reef

Thousand Islands

Voluntary Prisoners of Prince Edward County

Ca

Toronto

Port Hope Harbour

Kingston

ite

Oshawa

Bay of Quinte

Un

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Brockville

east zone

ontario

Rochester Syracuse

Niagara Falls

West zone Ca

na

it Un

da

ed

S ta

te s

Ithaca

New York

Pennsylvania

FIG. 1

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GREAT ENERGY REEF OVERVIEW PLAN

Fry habitat Adult fish ready to be processed

Spawning and auxillary uses for aquaculture and Great Energy Reef

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Detachable battery from barge

Aquaculture

Main wind turbine barge

Solar panel barge

Detachable battery submarines

Anchors to stabailize barge

Elevator to surface Fish waste transformed into fertilizer

Underwater Reserach Centre

FIG. 2

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Department of Unusual Certainties

imprisonment Fig. 3 . There is a lengthy waiting list of volunteers, and other regions around the lake have now equipped themselves for this same program. Citizens can choose at what point in their life they want to spend the year or can choose to break up the year into several shorter stays. Thus the program is considered, to a certain degree, “voluntary.” Many citizens come back from the experience so invigorated from working directly with the earth that they choose to engage in the program multiple times.

The Voluntary Prisoners program allows organic and local production of food to flourish in the region because of the constant supply of cheap labor. This in-kind subsidy allows the region to compete against the larger industrial food producers that have dominated the global food economy. Volunteers are given free meals and lodging and, beyond that, are expected to live out an ascetic year absent of most of their possessions. In return, they gain a valuable education in natural ecology, artisanal practices, and sustainable living—some of which can be put to use back home and some of which is useful only to fill countless hours of cocktail conversation. Several ecoleisure programs are also included to make the volunteer’s stay more lucrative, including bog diving, horse riding in the sand banks, and grape stomping festivals.

people interested in cross-country skiing, it seemed unlikely that it would ever take off.

Seeing Toronto’s garbage conundrum, he suggested that Oswego begin a landfill project that would take the garbage from all of the cities around Lake Ontario to make their own mountains. Garbage is loaded onto specially manufactured trash barges from all points of Lake Ontario and shipped to Oswego’s port.

The project has just begun but already its first phase has managed to form a handful of bunny slopes and a cross-country trail. The new formation is called the “Misty Mountains” for the fog that rolls off the hills in the summer time Fig. 4 .

Beyond building a tourism economy and beyond the revenues from receiving the garbage, another spin-off economy has begun.

Avid eco-designers have moved to Oswego and started up a series of studios to adaptively reuse the refuse. Furniture designers, industrial designers, and fashion designers are using Lake Ontario City’s trash to make innovative new products.

The Misty Mountains of Oswego and South Shore Trash Couture

As the result of a political impasse, Toronto had been without a local landfill for several years, forcing it to haul its garbage over 500 kilometers to a landfill in Michigan.

With the Plan, a new land-forming project started across the lake near Oswego, one of the snowiest places in North America. The mayor of Oswego, an avid skier, wanted to promote a ski tourism industry. However, without a significantly hilly terrain and enough

260

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FIG. 4

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FIG. 3

Department of Unusual Certainties

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Epilogue

The Two Zones, The Great Energy Reef, the HighSpeed Rail Loop, the Voluntary Prisoners program, and the Misty Mountains were the first vignettes proposed in the “Lake Ontario City: A New Tomorrow” document. It was remarkable how quickly these proposals gained universal acceptance and were implemented.

Creating a dialogue based around a common resource had a way of creating clarity and unity. Creating synergistic trade-offs became an aggressive policy direction and an institute—the Department of Synergistic Efficiencies (DOSE)—was given the sole task of pursuing efficient, mutually supportive trading of goods, resources, and skills between cities and citizens.

Lake Ontario City has become so successful in coordinating regional goals that is has been used as a model for other Great Lakes cities. Lake Erie City was established next as an agreement primarily between Toledo, Cleveland, Buffalo, London, and Detroit. Lake Michigan City followed as an all-American pact between Chicago, Milwaukee, Grand Rapids, and Green Bay. Lake Superior and Lake Huron struck up agreements, respectively called Lake Superior Country and Lake Huron Country, focusing on rural synergies and safe, and renewable exploitation of resources. Eventually, a union of the five great lake cities was established—and it was good. Lacus mos servo. The lake will serve.

*** Brendan Cormier is an urban designer who has been published in Canadian Architect, Spacing Magazine, and On Site Review.

Christopher Pandolfi is a cartographer, urban designer, and visual journalist who also writes and teaches on these practices.

Together, they founded the Department of Unusual Certainties in 2010. DoUC is a Toronto-based research and design collective informed by one guiding philosophy—that the city is a physical manifestation of a long sequence of unusual certainties, each one more unusual and yet more certain than its predecessor. DoUC is also the Innovator in Residence at the Design Exchange, Canada’s national design museum.

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Jimenez Lai

264

Sociopaths

This case should be open and shut.

The Great Villa of the billionaire was burnt to the ground last night.

He was killed in the fire, unconscious at the time of his death. Blunt head trauma.

socio—

The Butler

The wife

Three witnesses, all suspects.

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The Classmate

But I’ve never heard such discrepant testimonials...

Jimenez Lai

The Butler’s Story

He loved hosting lavish suppers.

I spent the entire day to prepare.

Cleaning, cooking.

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My late Master invited his old schoolmate to the house.

Like he did many a time before, he loudly shouted from another room distant in the mansion.

“Hey lazy!”

“Hurry up, lazy!”

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Sociopaths

How hard I worked all my life.

Lazy?

Maybe this was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

267

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I set down my knife, picked up the bust and walked over to the mezzanine.

I could not endure his verbal abuse any longer.

Jimenez Lai

Yes.

I did it.

I dropped the statue on his head to watch him bleed.

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They tried to stop me.

I attacked them and chased them away. This was my time with him.

Minutes? Hours?

I cannot remember how long.

The stillness was shared in our finest moments together felt like eternity.

I stood over him as the night grew darker. Just watching.

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Sociopaths

I lived inside the walls for him. This was our relationship.

socio—

The mitt must have been on the grill.

I left the kitchen unattended.

The fire spread very rapidly.

Flames and smoke consumed his Villa.

I stayed with him for as long as I could.

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Jimenez Lai

But really, he was my only friend.

It occured to me I could still save him.

I could still save our friendship.

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I could still save me.

The smoke and heat finally grew too intense for me.

I left him in the fire and escaped alone.

270

Sociopaths

I witnessed as it crumbled to ashes.

Oh, the glory of his legacy.

socio—

Lock me up.

My dead Master deserves justice.

I murdered him.

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Jimenez Lai

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The wife’s Story

Just silence. It was the worst dinner.

Nobody spoke.

I might have glanced at his classmate.

Regardless, he abruptly ended the dinner party.

Or he may have thought I did.

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His way.

That’s him.

Sociopaths You see, my late husband was a very jealous man.

Still, I could not gain his trust.

I was never unfaithful.

He wanted to keep an eye on me.

Nothing escapes him. That’s him.

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The house was designed in a way he could see me from every corner.

Jimenez Lai

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Did I know?

Did I know that his classmate could see me from the guest bedroom if I undressed?

How could I not know?

Nothing escapes this house.

274

Sociopaths I did not stop his classmate.

Maybe I enjoyed the attention?

Maybe I knew he was gazing from behind the split-wall?

socio—

Maybe I wanted to aggrevate him?

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Jimenez Lai

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His attacks knocked over the candle.

I ran up the mezzanine, and took hold of the statue in his image.

I did it.

I aimed at his head.

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Sociopaths

But his last gaze will forever haunt me.

Was he gawking at me?

socio—

Or at himself?

Nothing escapes him.

I cannont live with myself.

His gaze still haunts me.

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I murdered him.

Jimenez Lai

The classmate’s Story

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My old classmate invited me to his house for dinner.

I think it was to show off after all these years.

“What do you think of my humble abode?”

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Sociopaths

There was nothing humble about it. It looked like a palace.

It’s amazing!

He ignored my question about the cost of his house.

How much did it cost?

“It’s not about money, purpose, or quantity.”

“I only appreciate the quality of things.”

socio—

“All this money really came from an idea we thought up together in school...

I don’t know what came over me, but I joked with this dangerous man.

so, technically, you owe me half!

Ha, ha.”

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Jimenez Lai

To my surprise, he whipped out his book and wrote me a cheque for 3.5 billion dollars.

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I suppose that would be half.

He conveyed the cheque to me with a fire-pit tong...

... but he struck me in the face with it...

... and he lit the cheque on fire.

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Sociopaths

He pushed me again and again, paying no attention to the burning cheque as it lit a curtain on fire.

“I don’t owe you anything!”

socio—

“HALF?!”

“You don’t know anything about quality!”

“And this is why you never could take ‘our’ idea anywhere!”

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Jimenez Lai

He was right.

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I didn’t know anyting about his quality.

Just like I always remember him doing, he pushed me to the brink again and again, into worlds I never knew possible.

Every room we fell into was a different world, a redefined reality. With or without purpose.

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Sociopaths

There was a statue of him in the last room of the house.

I threw it at him with all despair. I wanted to kill him with his own image.

socio—

I wanted to be liberated from our shared past.

I wanted to enter a future without his shadow.

So, detectives — I am a free man now.

I will be a free man whether you lock me up or not.

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I am glad I killed him.

Jimenez Lai

They all confessed to the murder.

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How do you reckon?

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Sociopaths

At least two—if not all three—are sociopaths, are liars.

But each time they indulge in their fictional world, they describe a completely different house.

Each house really only articulated their injured relationship with the victim.

socio—

A house, a confession, a plausible motive...

We are deep in the trenches between lies and bullshit, friendo...

To really appreciate architecture, you may even need to commit a murder (or three).

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Jimenez Lai

***

Jimenez Lai is currently clinical assistant professor at UIC and Leader of Bureau Spectacular. He received his MArch from the University of Toronto and previously lived and worked in a desert shelter at Taliesin, resided in a shipping container at Atelier Van Lieshout on the piers of Rotterdam, and worked at MOS, AVL, REX, and OMA. His drawings and projects have been featured at the New Museum, archinect.com, Materials & Applications, Extension Gallery, and Land of Tomorrow.

His Citizens of No Place will be published

by Princeton Architectural Press with a grant from the Graham Foundation.

286

THRESHOLDS 40 SOCIO—

Editor Jonathan Crisman Designer Donnie Luu Assistant Editors Ana María León Jennifer Chuong Antonio Furgiuele Irina Chernyakova Advisory Board Mark Jarzombek, Chair Stanford Anderson Dennis Adams Martin Bressani Jean-Louis Cohen Charles Correa Arindam Dutta Diane Ghirardo Ellen Dunham-Jones Robert Haywood Hassan-Uddin Khan Rodolphe el-Khoury Leo Marx Mary McLeod Ikem Okoye Vikram Prakash Kazys Varnelis Cherie Wendelken Gwendolyn Wright J. Meejin Yoon

Opposite: Intergalactic Sculpture, 1994.

Copyright Ezra Orion.

Patrons James Ackerman Imran Ahmed Mark and Elaine Beck Tom Beischer Yung Ho Chang Robert F. Drum Gail Fenske Liminal Projects, Inc. Rod Freebairn-Smith Nancy Stieber Robert A. Gonzales Jorge Otero-Pailos Annie Pedret Vikram Prakash Joseph M. Siry Richard Skendzel Special Thanks To my family, Mark Jarzombek, Sarah Hirschman, Adam Johnson, Donnie Luu, Nader Tehrani, Adèle Santos, Rebecca Chamberlain, Jack Valleli, Anne Deveau, Kate Brearley, Deborah Puleo, Michael Ames, and all of the authors, the editorial team, the advisory board, and the patrons.

This issue would not have been possible without you.

5

SOCIO-INDEMNITY AND OTHER MOTIVES

— JONATHAN CRISMAN 11

CONJURING UTOPIA’S GHOST

— REINHOLD MARTIN 21

LE CORBUSIER, THE BRISE-SOLEIL, AND THE SOCIO-CLIMATIC PROJECT

— DANIEL A. BARBER 33

MOVE ALONG! THERE IS NOTHING TO SEE

— RANIA GHOSN 39

FLOW’S SOCIO-SPATIAL FORMATION

— NANA LAST 47

COLLECTIVE EQUIPMENTS OF POWER

— SIMONE BROTT 55

COLLECTIVE FORM

— DANA CUFF 67

TUKTOYAKTUK

— PAMELA RITCHOT 75

BOUNDARY LINE INFRASTRUCTURE

— RONALD RAEL 83

DISSOLVING THE GREY PERIPHERY

— NEERAJ BHATIA AND ALEXANDER D’HOOGHE 91

PARK AS PHILANTHROPY

— YOSHIHARU TSUKAMOTO 99

MUSSELS IN CONCRETE

— ESEN GÖKÇE ÖZDAMAR 105 PARTICIPATION AND/OR CRITICALITY?

— KENNY CUPERS AND MARKUS MIESSEN 113

THE SLUIPWEG AND THE HISTORY OF DEATH

— MARK JARZOMBEK 121 EXTRA ROOM

— GUNNAR GREEN AND BERNHARD HOPFENGÄRTNER

127 SCULPTURE FIELD

— DAN HANDEL 135 ON RADIATION BURN

— STEVE KURTZ 163 CAIRO DI SOPRA IN GIÙ

— CHRISTIAN A. HEDRICK 175 HUSH

— STEVEN BECKLY AND JONATHAN D. KATZ 189 NORCS IN NEW YORK

— INTERBORO PARTNERS 209 UNCOMMON GROUND

— ZISSIS KOTIONIS 217 EDENS, ISLANDS, ROOMS

— AMRITA MAHINDROO 225 THE PRINCE

— JUSTIN FOWLER 233 BEYOND DOING GOOD

— HANNAH ROSE MENDOZA 237 AID, CAPITAL, AND THE HUMANITARIAN TRAP

— JOSEPH M. WATSON 245 THE END OF CIVILIZATION

— DANIEL DAOU 255 TOWARD A LAKE ONTARIO CITY

— DEPARTMENT OF UNUSUAL CERTAINTIES 263 SOCIOPATHS

— JIMENEZ LAI