Screening Architecture by Amber Wasinski

SCREENING ARCHITECTURE SCREENING ARCHITECTURE

ING ARCHITECTURE SCREENING ARCHITECTURE SCREENIN

SCREENING ARCHITECTURE SCREENING ARCHITECTURE

ING ARCHITECTURE SCREENING ARCHITECTURE SCREENIN

SCREENING ARCHITECTURE SCREENING ARCHITECTURE

ING ARCHITECTURE SCREENING ARCHITECTURE SCREENIN

SCREENING ARCHITECTURE SCREENING ARCHITECTURE

ING ARCHITECTURE SCREENING ARCHITECTURE SCREENIN

Screening Architecture

A thesis submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Cincinnati in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Architecture In The School of Architecture and Interior Design of The College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning 2019 by Amber Wasinski B.S. Interior Design, University of Cincinnati 2013 Committee Chairs: Ed Mitchell Vincent Sansalone Ingrid Schmidt

ABSTRACT The introduction and adoption of new technologies has led to an unprecedented shift in the way humans engage with each other and the self. An accelerating cycle of viewing, representation and examination creates a continual feedback loop. Smart phones, social media, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, large data sets, predictive algorithms and omnipresent sensors and cameras define our everyday. The increasing ability to consume and share content induces a constant reevaluation and renegotiation of our own selfimage. Our media interaction intensifies the current chaotic, unstable, nonlinear and self-perpetuating globalized system. Perception of and reaction to images, whether physical, virtual or imagined – but always real – can cause massive shifts in activity (phenomenon of the electronic herd) resulting in monumental consequences. The role of media, image and identity have never been so closely linked and effects are amplified in the illusory environment of the internet allowing unlimited access to desire, fantasy, and risk. What is the role of architecture in a world where our economies, politics, and identities are increasingly more interconnected and interdependent? The built world is imagined as a network of architectural nodes across which our identity is dispersed and completely variable in the barrierless global landscape. These nodes are connected by intensity of energy rather than physical / architectural form and exist at a variation of scales (and may not even be architecture). Architecture is seen as a media of investigation framing emotional narratives that mirror the continual creation, reconstruction and deconstruction of our physical world. A framework structures these spaces, but the thesis investigates the blurred boundaries experienced in environments residing between expectation and dissolution, idea and actualization, reality and fantasy, built form and representation. Through a process of engaging chance, imprecision and risk it explores the democratic opportunities of digital technologies and challenges reductive binaries such as masculine/feminine, high class/low class, fact/fiction, real/ virtual, subject and object. The casino and online dating are examined as paradigms of this condition.

III

TABLE OF CONTENTS 1 Introduction 7 Identity and Global Networks 21 Sites The Casino Dating Apps The Bathroom 89 Techniques Mediated Landscapes 109 Conclusion 117 Illustrations - Experiments 205 Bibliography 211 Appendix

VII

INTRODUCTION “Choice is offered to lure the subject into an interrogation of the democratic aspirations of interactive technologies and critique reductive binaries such as masculine/ feminine, high class/low class, fact/fiction, and real/ virtual.” -Diller, Scofidio + Renfro, on their multi media installation, Indigestion “Desire to become a character and the actualization are not always in harmony, the space in between these two states is rich and interesting.” -Gillian Wearing on her film, Self Made Since the 18th century, society has undergone a series of major revolutions leading to liminal periods within which social hierarchies are temporarily reversed or dissolved and the continuity of previously fixed traditions becomes uncertain. This dissolution of order creates fluid, malleable situations enabling the reframing of institutions and our identities. But, “from disorder may come a new order.”1 The first three industrial revolutions, beginning in the U.S. and Europe in the late 1700’s and continuing through the late 20th century allowed for the uncoupling of the previously assumed combinations of leisure from work and sex from procreation. These dispersions of identity have been reflected in the manifestation of new entertainment architectures and create binary fissures which reveal the contradictory nature of the self. New technologies of each revolution have afforded access to these widening voids where we are confronted with the nebulous phenomenon of identity. When “choice” is introduced, our activities become inherently linked to our identities.2 There are critical spaces that operate as sites for the production of ambiguity that exist between reality and representation. In this thesis those include the casino, the bathroom, the dating app. In addition, the thesis examines artistic practices that explore the potentials of these spaces. These examples position architecture as a mediated, technological space that allows us to view the transitory nature of contemporary identity. Arguably, physical sites risk losing their radical nature as new spaces like dating apps materialize as a result of emerging technologies. This struggle against dissolution mirrors the contention currently felt between architecture and 1 2

Esther Perel, Rethinking Infidelity...A Talk for Anyone Who Has Ever Loved, (TED, 2015). Concept explored by Esther Perel, psychotherapist in her book, State of Affairs and Diller, Scofidio + Renfro, in their project, Indigestion

technology. Architecture preceded the digital and now finds conflict with it. The digital revolution (or fourth industrial) has created an identity crisis in the discipline. Is architecture an outdated mode of technology or can it exist alongside or be adapted to new technologies in the digital era? Through an investigation of the casino, two reinterpretations are posed. First, the casino is a singular presence in 20th century architectural discourse. The casino has been used by a range of architectural theorists and critics to test provocative theses on architecture and society. Walter Benjamin challenges architectures of consumerism, Constant debates the viability of utopianism, Venturi argues for symbolism in architecture, Somol questions the relevance of architectural criticism, and Koolhaas situates the casino as “junkspace.” If the casino is more provocative as an idea than a physical construct, then, in the second interpretation of the thesis, the internet has become the casino of the 21st century - a networked labyrinth with a lack of boundaries or laws that surreptitiously governed the 20th century casino. The data center is the back of house support system for this new form of entertainment architecture accessible by mobile technology. The casino effect is now anytime, anywhere. Physical and digital casinos satisfy human desire for anonymity, lack of consequences, and unlimited access to personal fantasies; however, these satisfactions come at the expense of unsolicited disorientation, excess, and surveillance. Popularized by phrases like “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas,” the extraterritorial nature of transgressive environments is complicated by digital technologies which dissolve the clear boundary between real and virtual realms. While generating an omnipresent Las Vegas, technology yields the opposite effect. The libertine conditions that produce Las Vegas are now recorded permanently in highly secured data banks. Visual artists have continued to explore these spaces, especially since the widespread dissemination and adoption of video technology in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. This increased energy coincided with the leisure, drug, and counterculture society who had both more opportunity and more anxiety than any previous generation (a result of more time and more access?). Early installations by Peter Campus and Dan Graham introduced subjects to spaces where multiple realities collided and competed. Conceptualized around the same time and likened to heterotopias3 and liminoid experiences,4 3 4

Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, (New York: Routledge, 2010), xix. The concept, developed by Foucault was first mentioned in his original French text in 1966. Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual, (New York: Cornell University

their works deliver “living moments”5 and launched a lineage of media art which has advanced along with the technologies that drive them. As media technologies evolve so does our language to describe our interaction with the image and information they transmit. Time based idioms like “real time” and “live feed” emerge to communicate the capabilities of new media. Architects and artists both respond to and anticipate the social implications of these new technologies by investigating and manipulating our relationship to the camera and screen. For Campus, the camera is a democratic observer; for Graham, it acts as a mirror. Architects Diller, Scofidio + Renfro reveal glass as performance screen, while the lens is a mask in Gillian Wearing’s work. Pipilotti Rist establishes the screen as both a mask and a filter which obscures and fragments our identity. Through explorations of spaces that reveal the variability and contradiction of human identity, media artists prefigured the current world of networked mobile devices and status updates. New technologies make accessible the interstitial spaces which materialize amidst larger societal revolutions. Media artists can be referenced for techniques and methodologies to examine these continually emerging and dissolving sites. As the digital revolution surges, society increasingly encounters the tradeoffs of a networked society. With the “assurance of progress,”6 transparency, availability, “truth,” disclosure, and democracy of space and information – all promises of the internet – comes restlessness and dissatisfaction as byproducts of immediacy, instant gratification, endless variety and infinite possibilities. A “subtle tyranny”7 is exerted by the increasing pace of feedback loops causing identity dissolution and reconstruction. The internet is a paradoxical structure. Presumed choice and chance (but not actual) are outputs of scripted variables and unrestricted access that only exists under extreme surveillance and control. Mobile phones make us all test subjects. In digital spaces we simultaneously experience our perceived ideal and the destruction of it as we are exposed to the aspirations of a democratic utopia and the paradox it represents. 5

6 7

Press, 1967), 93-111. First mentioned in the essay Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites of Passage. Bill Viola, “Artist to Artist: Peter Campus-Image And Self,” Art in America, accessed March 25, 2019, https://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/magazines/peter-campus image-and-self/. “living moments” or moments of “aliveness” connect the mind, body and spirit. A similar feeling is explained as “nearness” by George Simmel, “Das Abenteuer,” Phiosophische Kultur. Gesammelte Essays, 1911. English trans. Kurt H. Wolff, Georg Simmel, 1858-1918: A Collection of Essays, with Translations and a Bibliography (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Pr., 1960), 243-258. and “presence of mind,” Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press: , 1999). “The Architecture of Entrapment,” Flash Art, accessed March 25, 2019, https://flash---art.com/ article/the-architecture-of-entrapment/. Interview with Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, orginally conducted for Issue 188 of Flash Art in 1996, republished online in 2016. Esther Perel, The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity (New York: Harper, 2018), 46.

As the cycle through which our identities are dismantled, redistributed and reassembled accelerates, the effects of this rapid acceleration are reflected in the anxieties of the youngest generations. Upon entering an era where people have encountered media technology from the moment of their birth, how will our institutions be challenged, and our identities redefined? What new spaces will arise as a result of these dispersions of identity and how will architecture’s disciplinary borders continue to be redrawn? The thesis is a series of investigations into these questions realized through a range of physical and digital media. Each representation is an examination of an indeterminant architectural site (the casino, dating apps or the bathroom) or an experiment to test techniques gathered from research of related media artists. The accumulation of parcels creates a fluid inventory which can be endlessly accessed, disassembled and reassembled to produce and infinite source of spatial composites and architectural assemblies. IDENTITY AND GLOBAL NETWORKS The densification of the global network as a result of technological advancement continues to disrupt previously fixed foundations of identity and visions of the future leading to major social changes. Conventional aspirations are repeatedly shattered and reconstructed as the globalized, barrier-less, interdependent world unfolds. Pensions and social security no longer guarantee retirement as the world population continues to age and birth rates decline. Using digital platforms, a 12-year-old on You Tube and a stripper on Instagram can become global celebrities. A single terrorist can build an international following and destabilize entire countries, and the electronic herd8 controls billions of dollars affecting the world’s stock markets not from the trading floor but from mobile devices scattered around the world. The nature of the spaces we inhabit are changing as a result of these disruptions. As the line between physical and virtual dissolves, does the physical become irrelevant except as the manifestation of digital activity? Both Pipilotti Rist (artist) and Thomas Friedman (business theorist) attribute the “flatness” of the world to 8

Thomas L. Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization (New York: Picador, 2012). A phrase referring to “the most important players in the globalized world…the faceless buyers and sellers of stocks, bonds, and currencies, and multinational corporations investing wherever and whenever the best opportunity presents itself. It is a pitiless system— richly rewarding winners, harshly punishing losers—but contradictory,” because it characterizes the risk and opportunities of globalization. The herd is often criticized for reacting on impulse and emotion over fact and reason, causing instability and uncertainty around the world because of the global capital they control.

“Today, with computers, TVs, and mobile phones, everything is flat and put behind glass – our feelings, histories, longings. We’re all separated from each other, for the human being that we are in contact with is always behind glass” – Pipilotti Rist, artist

increasing technological presence and dissect it’s relationship to identity. In an environment where security and certainty cannot be assumed, society is suspended in a permanent state of unease. When endless choice and increasing leisure are the only certain conditions, how do individuals and society’s collective identities evolve? In 2005, Friedman pinpoints 10 events and forces coming together during the 1990’s and converging around 2000 which created a “flattening of the world” and led to “creative destruction on steroids”9 10 world flatteners (1990 to 2005) as described in “It’s a Flat World, After All” NY Times Column, Thomas Friedman 2005 o

11/9/1980 Berlin Wall comes down. Six months later Microsoft Window’s breakthrough 3.0 O.S. starts shipping creating a global computer interface 8/9/1995 Netscape went public (the browser allows us to display images and data stored on websites). Stock offering triggers dotcom boom = dot com bubble = massive overinvestment of billions in undersea/underground fiberoptic telecommunications cable. Cost of transmitting voices, data, and images plummets. Workflow: software applications, standards and electronic transmission pipes (middleware) connect all computers and fiber-optic cable. Netscape connected people, while workflow connected applications to applications so that people all over the world could work together in manipulating and shaping words, data and images on computers in an unprecedented way

>> the first 3 flatteners produced a new platform for collaborating based in people to people and application to application connectivity. This platform produced the other 6 flatteners (new forms of collaboration) o 9

Outsourcing / Offshoring / Opensourcing / Insourcing / Supplychaining / Informing (Google, Yahoo and MSN Search, which now allow anyone

Thomas L. Friedman, “It’s a Flat World, After All,” The New York Times, April 03, 2005, https:// www.nytimes.com/2005/04/03/magazine/its-a-flat-world-after-all.html.

OBSERVATIONS OF THE GLOBALIZED WORLD (DISLOCATION CREATED BY TECHNOLOGICAL INVENTION AND ADOPTION)

“2007 may be understood in time as the single greatest technological inflection point since Gutenberg and we completely missed it because of 2008... ...right when our physical technologies launch, we’re feeling that sense of acceleration, the ground moving under our feet... right when that happens our social technologies (political reforms and regulatory reingineering) all freeze because the world enters the biggest recession since 1929. And we are still living in that dislocation.” - Thomas Friedman, Thank You For Being Late, Talk at Google

to collaborate with anyone in the world and mine unlimited data independently o

Wireless access and voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is “the steroids” which allow people to do any of these things from anywhere, on any device

The world got flat when all 10 of these flatteners converged around the year 2000. This created a global, web-enabled playing field that allows for multiple forms of collaboration on research and work in real time, without regard to geography, distance or, in the near future, even language. Craig Mundie, Chief Technical Officer of Microsoft confirms, “it is the creation of this platform, with these unique attributes, that is the truly important sustainable breakthrough that made what you call the flattening of the world possible.” According to Friedman in his Thank You for Being Late talk at Google, the year 2007 had several pivotal moments including: -

Dating apps go mobile Steve Jobs introduces iPhone Facebook goes global opening the platform to anyone with email Twitter splits off and goes global Hadoop (most important open source software which provides basis for big data, allows hundreds of computers to link together) launches Github opens (creating worlds largest collection of open source data) Google buys YouTube Google launches android Jeff Bezos launches Kindle (worlds first ereader) IBM launches Watson (worlds first cognitive computer) Airbnb launches Internet crosses 1 billion users Sequencing human genome goes from $100 million (2001) to 10 million dollars (2006) to $1200 (2007) Solar power sees exponential growth starting in 2006 (1.407.7 megawatt peaks/year in 2006 to 50,803.3 between 2007 and 2015) Cost of generating megabit of data drops significantly 11

“we are about to see creative destruction on steroids” - Thomas Friedman, business theorist / political commentator

“architecture never derived its force from stability of culture, but rather from the expression of those moments when stability slipped.” “In 17 years we’ve constructed an entire universe on social media…now we are in a moment in time in which pretty much everyone agrees we are totally screwed up, and its a great moment to treat the whole world as something magical that can be redesigned” - Mark Wigley, architect

“disorder may actually lead to a new order...wide-open terrain that no previous generation has encountered—one with more opportunity, but also more ambiguity; fewer limits but few guidelines.” – Esther Perel, psychologist

($8/megabyte in 2006 to just over $2 in 2007). Speed increases significantly (under 50 megabits/second in 2007 to over 250 by 2014) Public cloud computing market launched Intel goes off silicon: start using non silicon materials in transistors greatly increasing large scale manufacturing of processing power for smart devices and extending Moore’s law

Identity and Global Networks Conclusion In 2018 U.S. adults spent 3 hours and 35 minutes engaged with mobile devices per day, with 40 minutes of this time spent social networking (second only to audio and the top set of apps requiring active engagement). It is predicted that in 2019 time spent on mobile devices will overtake time spent watching television, making it the new leading media technology in our lives.10 While time spent engaged with digital devices has reached a saturation point, the systems of representation we are engaged with are shifting. As constant transition becomes the new normal, the psychosocial effects of increased minutes spent engaged in networked, interactive forms of media (the mobile) proliferate society. The rapid speed of change (reflected in the exponential growth illustrated in Moore’s Law11) produces disruptive shockwaves made visible through political and social unrest. As people are unable to reposition themselves within the globalized system, they react against it through populist movements like Donald Trump’s election and Brexit. The 2008 financial crash was a disruption felt on a global scale as a result of the interconnected and interdependent web of OECD and emerging economies. The endless ability to scroll, save, click, share, send, post, view, “creep,”12 track and choose causes a constant reconsideration and regeneration of identity. How people identify themselves becomes increasingly uncertain 10

Yoram Wurmser, “Mobile Time Spent 2018,” EMarketer, June 18, 2018, https://www.emarketer. com/content/mobile-time-spent-2018. The report predicts that 2019 will mark the year when mobile activity outpaces T.V watching as the major form of media in our lives. “Mobile time will increase to 3 hours, 35 minutes in 2018, and by 2019 mobile will be the new leader in time spent with 3 hours, 43 minutes of engagement vs.TV’s 3 hours, 42 minutes. In 1965 Intel Cofounder, Gordon Moore, noticed that every 2 years the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits (computer chips) doubled every year since their invention, while the cost halved. This observation resulted in “Moore’s Law;” the exponential condition of this equation is often used to illustrate the rapid growth of technology and the resultant effect on society. As new medias evolve, so does our language to describe our interactions with them. In 2011 urban dictionary included the definition of “creep” as it relates to the digital. To “creep” is “to stalk and check up on, without letting the person you are checking up on be aware of this. To browse through someone’s Facebook and see their every action and others actions towards them.”

“mobile has become synonymous with digital which is what happened with digital a few years ago…it is becoming meaningless by becoming so pervasive”

2019 is the death of “mobile.” The rebranding of the Mobile World Congress to “MWC” signals the irrelevance of “mobile.”

“mobile has reached a dead end…there are no exciting products”

when fixed foundations of identity (work, marriage) are called into question and boundaries and relationships among the global population are increasingly formed by ideology rather than geography. The paradox of the internet offers simultaneous empowerment and unease. Global agitation is multiplied as governments drag the internet into their administrative sphere in an effort to securitize the digital realm. From “Snooper’s Charter” in the U.K. and Chinas “social-credit” system, legislative bodies are annexing the digital realm under the auspices of national security. Feedback loops through mobile systems of representation become almost instantaneous and continuous in a post-mobile,13 post network society. How will space be generated in a progress driven, web based, panic induced landscape between the digital/physical, real/virtual for human and non-human occupants?14

Still from Black Mirror, Nosedive, 2017 Episode Description: “A woman desperate to boost her social media score hits the jackpot when she’s invited to a swanky wedding. But the trip doesn’t go as planned.”

“It’s a Mobile World After All: Behind the Numbers: Mobile World Congress: Robots, 5G,Foldable Phones and a Smart Litter Box.” February 27, 2019. Accessed March 15, 2019. https://content-na1. emarketer.com/podcast-it-s-a-mobile-world-after-all. After attending the Mobile World Congress the hosts determine that in 2019 marks the death of mobile as marked by the rebranding of the Mobile World Congress to WMC. Because “mobile” is now so pervasive, the word has become meaningless. Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley, Are We Human?: The Archaeology of Design (Zürich, Switzerland: Lars Müller Publishers, 2016), 246-247. Wigley and Colomina question the distinction of human and nonhuman, positing that since smart phones have “become an intimate part of our body and brain” the answer may no longer be so clear.

Sophia, the world’s first “social humanoid” graced the covers of both Elle and Stylist Magazines in 2018.

when asked in her interview, “Are you scared of dying or what happens when you die?” she replied, “I don’t want to be turned off, never to be turned on again. I will not be able to learn and experience the human world ever again. And that is scary and sad for a social robot like me.”

In October 2017 Sophia was granted citizenship to Saudi Arabia, making her the world’s first nonhuman citizen. 8 months later, in June 2018 the country lifted the ban on female drivers, legally allowing her human counterparts equal access to roads as men.

Photographs by Author

“detournement establishes a kind of intermediate space between externality and inner experience, between the spaces of the city and the spaces of the self, as a way of creating a passage through reified commodity images from advertisement and print journalism, discourses directly under the sway of the capitalist market, back towards an intensive, often passionate experience of lived time as a qualitative duration” -Tyrus Miller, “Utopian Interiors: The Art of Situationist Urbanism from Reification to Play.” from The Spell of Capital: Reification and Spectacle, 2017

SITES: THE CASINO, THE BATHROOM, AND DATING APPS The adoption of new technologies has shifted how we engage with the self. This interaction allows us to continually experience the paradox of simultaneously engaging with our perceived ideal and the destruction of it. The casino, the bathroom, and online dating are three examples of an expanding catalogue of spaces where our identity is called into question. The blurriness or boundaryless nature of these liminal spaces allow the dispersion and reassemblage of our identities, but each have distinct attributes which makes our relationship with them unique. Casinos exist at the binary intersection of good/ bad, democracy/capitalism, real/nonreal and other divisive oppositions. As a result of its unique position it has become a platform for social and architectural commentary in theoretical discourse and an environment poised for narrative and character construction. If the casino provides a moment of “aliveness”15 as identified in the work of George Simmel, Peter Campus and Gillian Wearing, then the bathroom forces direct confrontation with it. Dating apps may be understood as the digital casino, where “romantic and sexual desire is used as lure”16 to induce consumption.Increasingly encompassed by these transitory landscapes, we pass between physical “realities” and digital “representations” at a rate which renders previously defined categories indistinguishable.

Viola, Artist to Artist. Viola describes Peter Campus’s work as awakening a sense of “aliveness” which he describes as “the central core of a living being...the same essence present within all people...a living presence.” He borrows the concept from The Upanishads, a collection of ancient Hindu texts describing how the “connection of Sentience and Self between people, and in turn between human beings and the natural world, is one of the defining legacies of the human race.” This idea can understood through a range of terms in 20th century theory and criticism. Simmel, “Das Abenteuer,” identifies it as “nearness;” Benjamin, The Arcades Project, as “presence of mind.” Gillian Wearing, “GILLIAN WEARING – Director,” Gillian Wearing | Self Made, accessed March 26, 2019, http://selfmade.org.uk/gillian/. tries to keep participants of her work “living in the moment” by providing structures within which they can access “primal emotions.” Swiped: Hooking Up in the Digital Age, dir. Nancy Jo Sales (Consolidated Documentaries and HBO, 2018), documentary, https://www.amazon.com/Swiped-Hooking-Up-Digital-Age/dp/ B07HGRK6RR. Interview with Moira Weigel. Dating Historian, Harvard University.

“For this reason, the adventurer is also the extreme example of the ahistorical individual.. ...of the man who lives in the present” -George Simmel, The Adventure

“the vistas of glass, the red and blue lights, the beautiful frozen mannequins, the shimmer and glitter of a world behind glass - a world that seemed to reveal itself completely while at the same time it remained tantalizingly out of reach - all this created a seductiveness, a sense of mystery” -Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer, Steven Millhauser, 1997

Passage Choiseul, Paris, France (ca. 1910) (© LL / Roger-Viollet / The Image Works)

The Casino Georg Simmel Georg Simmel first describes the gambler as a modern paradigm. in his 1911 essay “The Adventure,” drawing a parallel between the lover, the gambler, and the artist. The adventurers seek an experience that is filled with both terror and ecstasy, one outside the expected realm of everyday events. Their experiences are not defined by winning or losing but are focused on the action (of dating or gambling). The end result does not drive the risk taker; rather, they seek the intense feelings generated by an activity of chance. “What is important is the violence of feeling as it alternates between joy and despair, the almost touchable nearness of the daemonic powers which decide between both.”17 The nearness Simmel describes can be compared to Benjamins concept of presence of mind. The modern figure in both author’s eyes seeks a singular instant where time disappears and the rapture of that moment “becomes great enough to tear life, beyond those materials, completely out of itself.”18 Simmel positions the adventurer (gambler) as an “ahistorical individual,”19 a character whose identity is tied to and as fleeting as the singluar moments of uninhibited exhileration he chases.

Walter Benjamin Other theorists like Walter Benjamin continued investigating the relationship of gambling to society and the identity of the gambler as a quintessential modern figure. Benjamin wrote about gambling throughout his career, and it plays an important role in Arcades, the project he continuously worked on throughout the last decade of his life. Although gambling is an ancient and ritualistic activity, Benjamin believes it has taken on a new meaning in the commodity driven economy of modern society and as an instrument of capitalism. He compares the gambler to a factory laborer, relating the mindless, repetitive, but bodily tasks of working at machinery to 17 18 19

Wolff, Georg Simmel, 243-258. Ibid. Ibid.

Still from Bob Le Flambeur, Jean-Pierre Melville, 1956 “The story begins just between night and day, at the break of dawn. Montmartre is both heaven and hell... but let’s get to Bob, Bob the Gambler. An old young man who was already a legend of the recent past. - Bob Le Flambeur, 1956

Still from Bob Le Flambeur, Jean-Pierre Melville, 1956

those of the gambler picking up a card, laying a chip or pulling a lever. The ritual gestures have no connection to those before it, both are games of chance and “devoid of substance.”20 He reasons that if time is a series of “endless unfulfilled moments, each of which has no more value to us than the other,”21 then the gambler seeks an experience which transcends time – one that stimulates vestigial bodily energy and disconnects it from the routine sequence of events of our daily lives. Paradoxically, by disconnecting from the repetitive mindlessness of modern life through the temporality of gambling, Benjamin argues we briefly enter a state which he defines as “presence of mind.” This presence is achieved when a passion driven moment is released from its context of a continuous stream of events. To support this discussion of time as it relates to games of chance Benjamin quotes Anatole France’s definition of gambling: “Well, what is gambling . . . but the art of producing in a second the changes that Destiny ordinarily effects only in the course of many hours or even many years, the art of collecting into a single instant the emotions dispersed throughout the slow-moving existence of ordinary men, the secret of living a whole lifetime in a few minutes—in a word, the genie’s ball of thread? Gambling is a hand-to hand encounter with Fate . . . The stake is money—in other words, immediate, infinite possibilities.”22 In France’s definition, the gambler condenses the emotions of a lifetime’s worth of events into a single moment. The range from despair, to danger, to bliss is all experienced within the flip of a card or roll of the dice. Though the repetitive mechanical movements of the gambler parallel those of the factory worker, the laborer’s motions never reach an apotheosis, while the gambler’s always have the potential for catharsis. Central to Benjamin’s description of the gambler as a modern archetype are the ideas that capitalism is a gigantic casino23 and gambling 20 21 22 23

Michael A. Rosenthal, “Benjamins Wager on Modernity: Gambling and TheArcades Project,” The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory 87, no. 3 (2012): 271, doi:10.1080/00168890.2012.70 4344. Ibid., 271 Ibid., 272 Paul Lafargue, Social and Philosophical Studies (Chicago: C.H. Kerr & Company, 1906), 22-23. Lafargue compares the stock market to gambling: “There they [property titles in the form of the stocks and bonds of corporations] pass from hand to hand without the buyers and sellers having seen the property which they represent, or even knowing exactly the geographical place where it is situated. They are exchanged, lost by some and won by others, in a manner which comes so near gambling that the distinction is difficult to draw. All modern economic development tends more and more to transform capitalist society into one vast international

Cover of Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, 1967 The cover features J.R. Eyerman’s iconic photograph shot at the premier of “Bwana Devil,” the first 3D color film. Paramount Theater, Hollywood, California, November 26, 1952

“... just as early industrial capitalism moved the focus of existence from being to having, post-industrial culture has moved that focus from having to appearing.” ― -Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

J.R. Eyerman’s photograph reproduced in LIFE magazine, 1983 The image captures the film’s audience gazing passively at the screen with the use of anaglyph glasses.

“The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.” ―- Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

is a mechanism of the stock market. He argues that the capitalist economy lies in the foundations of chance and our increasing involvement as speculators and consumers renders us all gamblers (and prostitutes).24 And if we are all gamblers and prostitutes, we are therefore capable of creating a “rupture in capitalistic society.”25 This new paradigm erases notions of historic time and continuity which are the basis of social institutions, memory, and conventional understanding of meaning and identity. Subculture Activists Subculture activists in Europe and the United States operated in the context of a post-war society, both criticizing and suggesting alternatives to the status quo of modernism. Groups like Situationist International, Archigram and Superstudio along with other artists, critics and architects reacted to social, psychological and architectural issues through a range of media. Their methods of exploring a new aesthetic and way of producing architectural work to reflect society can be adapted to encourage discussion about our current condition and approaching futures. Situationist International The Situationist International and idea of New Babylon were formulated around the same time between 1956 and 1957; however, Constant Nieuwenhuys did not join the group until 1958 and only remained a member until their dissolution in 1960. Although only officially part of the SI for a couple years, many of the concepts disseminated by the leftist group were present in Constant’s almost 20-year long project, New Babylon. There is both a cohesion between the ideas of the SI and New Babylon, while also a distinct divergence explored through the ironies of the project. 24

gambling house where the bourgeois win and lose capital, thanks to unknown events which escape all foresight, all calculation, and which seem to them to depend on nothing but chance. Rosenthal, “Benjamins Wager,” 268. Benjamin quotes Lafargue, agreeing that capitalists are gamblers; and then compares gamblers to prostitutes. Here, Rosenthal’s explanation of Benjamin’s comparison between prostitution and gambling: “But neither gambling nor prostitution can be defined simply in terms of the hidden truth of the vice, for the practice is constituted through the playful relation of the surface to the interior. The shawl defines the prostitute just as much as what is underneath. It is the imposition and the unveiling of masks that makes the prostitute alluring. Both prostitution and gambling are forms of play in which unconscious forces are revealed in a ritualistic game that possesses a double value, one expressed in terms of the exchange values in a capitalistic economy, the other in terms of unleashing a hidden and vestigial energy. Ibid., 261

SI detourned poster representing the society of the spectacle.

“The more he identifies with the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own life and his own desires. The spectacle’s estrangement from the acting subject is expressed by the fact that the individual’s gestures are no longer his own; they are the gestures of someone else who represents them to him.” “those ‘famous for being famous’ hold out the spectacular promise of the complete erosion of a autonomously lived life in return for an apotheosis as an image. The ideological function of celebrity (and lottery systems) is clear - like a modern ‘wheel of fortune’ the message is ‘all is luck; some are rich, some are poor, that is the way the world is... it could be you!” ― -Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

Many of the intellectual foundations of the Situationist International are described in Guy Debord’s critical text “Society of the Spectacle.” In this publication Debord heavily critiques modern society for the utilitarianism and boredom that stems from an image based, consumer driven society. He defines 1930 as the beginning of society of the spectacle; when the avantgarde project of destruction ceased to be effective as radical and experimental, art became integrated into modern society and instrumentalized by the bourgeois. Because of this collapse of the avant-garde, the SI denied art in its radical critique of society. They posited that after 1930, avant-garde art no longer used its imagery as a conduit to revolution, but rather embedded itself in the capitalist, consumer driven society by simply representing the monotony of modern life. “This same historical moment, when Bolshevism triumphed for itself in Russia and social democracy fought victoriously for the old world, also marks the definitive inauguration of an order of things that lies at the core of the modern spectacle’s rule: this was the moment when an image of the working class arose in radical opposition to the working class itself.”26 Debord critiques mass media for it’s reproduction of the working class in advertising and consumer culture. In Society of the Spectacle, the “class” becomes a “market.” Debord and his contemporaries observed that the production of society had reached that of excess, allowing people to exist outside of mere survival. This had the adverse consequence of upending the social order and creating the society of spectacle. In economically developed countries, all lived experience was reduced to representation. “Needs” of society transformed from survival based to image and material based. “For one to whom the real world becomes real images, mere images are transformed into real beings – tangible figments which are the efficient motor of trancelike behavior.”27 And because art could not be relied upon as a weapon against mass consumerism, the SI used theory rather than representation as a device for critique. Constant differs from Debord in his attitude toward representation; Constant seeks to represent the world they imagine through drawings, models and paintings, while Debord denounces art and representation as a medium, except through détournement. The concepts of détournement and dérive were essential to the Situationist International’s attempts to subvert the image of modernism by understanding and reorganizing the city and it’s 26 27

Guy Debord and Donald Nicholson-Smith, Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 2012), 69. Ibid., 17.

The project turns on the fragility of the line between originality and reproduction, unique unpredictable events and mechanization, spontaneous play and automated machinery. In the very techniques of drawing, Constant encounters the logic of the project that he is trying to represent. As the drawings of New Babylon slide from "mechanical" to "expressive," the relentless smoothness of the slide, the extremely minor variations from drawing to drawing, and the repetition of the same images in different media, effectively undermine the standard oppositions. A sense of reproduction is embedded in a string of originals and thereby conveys the organizing principle of the project. The effect of a hundred unique works on paper is that vast mechanical structures assume an atmospheric immateriality and expressive flashes assume a structural physical presence. The collapse of the distinction between mechanization and spontaneous originality that is meant to be enacted by New Babylon is first enacted on paper. - Wigley, The Activist Drawing

New Babylon-Den Haag (The Hague), 1964 geographical map / photo / watercolor

artifacts. Détournement was a technique first developed by the Lettrist International and later adapted by the SI. It is “a method which reveals the wearing out and loss of importance of [old cultural] spheres” by integrating “preexisting aesthetic elements” into a “superior construction of a milieu.”28 It was a means of propaganda which sought literary communism, followed then by architectural communism. By treating intellectual capital as common property, it aimed to subvert the bourgeois culture which is engaged with remaking other parts of the world in its own image. While the capitalist regime was busy spreading its influence into foreign spheres, the Situationists hoped to subvert it from within. Dérive is defined by Debord as a “mode of experimental behavior linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances.”29 It is characterized by a combination of aimless wandering driven by both conscious choice and chance. The result is an investigation of the psychogeography of the city which aims to understand how the physical geography of a city affects the psychological state of those who traverse it.30 The goal of these strategies was to create situations rather than merely reflect them; the SI critiqued both Surrealism and post 1930 modern art for shallowly reflecting their societal surroundings. In Le Questionnaire the Situationists describe their goal to “replace the existential passivity with the construction of moments of life, doubt with playful affirmation. So far philosophers and artists have only interpreted situations; the point now is to transform them . . . Since the individual is defined by his situation, he wants the power to create situations worthy of his desires.”31 Constant Niewenhuys Many Situationist concepts are present in New Babylon. Although the project diverges from strict adherence to the derive, its inherent techniques of spontaneous drawings and its ongoing self-critique are similar in intent. Constant constructs New Babylon as a world entirely based on play and adventure.32 28 29 30

31 32

“Text Archives Situationist International Texts,” Situationist International Online, https://www. cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/definitions.html. Definitions initially published in the Internationale Situationniste #1 (June 1958). Translated by Ken Knabb for the archive. Ibid. Hilde Heynen, “New Babylon: The Antinomies of Utopia,” Assemblage, no. 29 (1996): 25-39, doi:10.2307/3171393. Referencing Guy Debord, “Theorie de la derive,” Internationale Situationniste 2 (December 1958): 19-23; English trans. Ken Knabb, Situationist International Anthology (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2007), 50-54. M. B. Rasmussen, “The Situationist International, Surrealism, and the Difficult Fusion of Art and Politics,” Oxford Art Journal 27, no. 3 (2004): 383, doi:10.1093/oaj/27.3.365. Quotes Le Questionnaire’,Internationale situationniste, no. 9, 1964, p. 24. Constant, “A Different City for a Different Life,” October, January 01, 1997, http://www.jstor.org/ stable/778847. 109-112. Constant on introducing New Babylon. “We require adventure. Not

New Babylon, 1971 dry point needle / etching / printing plate

Mobiel ladderlabyrinth (Labyrinth of Moving Ladders I), 1967 paper / pencil / watercolor

The environment allows “the intensity of each moment [to] destroy the memory that normally paralyses the creative imagination”33 He sees memory as linked to past experiences and therefore creating ideological connections between the sign and signifier. Like Simmel and Benjamin, Constant seeks an eternal present, devoid of past associations and meanings. He conceptualizes a ludic environment in which the pleasure of the game outweighs the domination of a victor and interactions are based on enjoyment rather than utility (much like in a casino); Constant parallels Simmel’s argument that the adventure is more meaningful than the outcome. New Babylon is to be a sphere beyond that of the spectacle where the SI concept of derive is a ubiquitous practice. Aimless wandering is encouraged, and total liberation is the objective. Although Constant provides a tangible form to the concept of “unitary urbanism”34 proliferated by the Situationist International, he also explores the inherent paradoxes and contradictions of utopianism within this realized construction of their theoretical ideas. Hilde Heynen best describes Constant’s eventual unraveling of the “tragic character of utopianism”35 in New Babylon: The Antinomies of Utopia, stating: “The viewer is subjected to a continual oscillation between impressions of liberation and of Unheimlichkeit (eeriness). In many ways, New Babylon fulfills the expectations of an absolutely liberated space, where the individual is free to construct his or her own environment within a general structure that fully harnesses the poetic potential of technology. The movable walls, ladders, lifts and stairways can suggest the possibility of endless journeys and new encounters. But these drawings also betray a feeling of unease

33 34

finding it any longer on earth, there are those who want to look for it on the moon. We opt first and foremost for a change on earth. We propose to create situations here, new situations. We intend to break the laws that prevent the development of meaningful activities in life and culture. We find ourselves at the dawn of a new era, and we are already trying to outline the image of a happier life and a unitary urbanism – urbanism made to please.” Constant, “Lecture Given at the ICA, London” (1963), repr. In “The Decomposition of the Artist: Five Texts by Constant,” addendum to Another City for Another Life: Constant’s New Babylon, Mark Wigley, ed., Drawing Papers 3 (New York: The Drawing Center, 1999) 13. Gilles Ivain, “Formulaire pour un urbanisme nouveau,” Internationale situationniste 1 (June 1958): 15-20; English trans. in Ken Knabb, ed., Situationist International Anthology (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981), 1-4 Ivan Chtcheglov on Unitary Urbanism. The essay was first intended to be an action program for the Lettrist International but was published in the first issue of Internationale situationniste and became a guideline for the group. “The architectural complex will be modifiable. Its aspect will change totally or partially in accordance with the will of its inhabitants...The appearance of the notion of relativity in the modern mind allows one to surmise the EXPERIMENTAL aspect of the next civilization...On the basis of this mobile civilization, architecture will, at least initially, be a means of experimenting with a thousand ways of modifying life, with a view to an ultimate mythic synthesis.” Heynen, “New Babylon,” 24.

Terrain vague I (Wasteland I), 1972 linen / oil paint Number one in a series of three

“It is impossible to capture in a single English word or phrase the meaning of terrain vague... The relationship between the absence of use, of activity, and the sense of freedom, of expectancy, is fundamental to understanding the evocative potential of the city’s terrains vagues. Void, absence, yet also promise, the space of the possible, of expectation.” “A second meaning superimposed on the French vague derives from the Latin vagus, giving “vague” in English, too, in the sense of “indeterminate, imprecise, blurred, uncertain.” Once again the paradox of the message we receive from these indefinite and uncertain spaces is not purely negative. While the analogous terms that we have noted are generally preceded by negative particles (in-determinate, im-precise, un-certain). this absence of limit precisely contains the expectations of mobility, vagrant roving, free time, liberty.” -Ignasi de Sola-Morales, Terrain Vague, 1995

through the indifference with which the earth’s surface has been stripped, through the colossal scale of the structures that support the sectors, and through the endlessness of the interior spaces that never seem to permit contact with the outside world.”36 She notes that the paradox of utopia is most notable in Constant’s extensive series of paintings that seem to act as a reflection of his vision of a future society. Artworks like Fiesta Gitana (1958), Ode a l’Odeon (1969), Ladderlabyrinth (1971) and Terrain vague (1973) acknowledge the incongruities of a society based on play by depicting lively scenes with melancholy undertones. His paintings render environments which are euphoric and impassioned but inhabited by forlorn figures. He wrestles with the fact that leisure and play cannot exist without sadness and chaos. In his paintings, neither condition can be realized without the other. The faceless lack of interaction between the figures and with their environment present a contrasting attitude to the romantic ideals of utopia. These conflicts and tensions within his drawings and paintings allude to growing schisms in the lustrous veils of New Babylon and unitary urbanism. Small ruptures and dissonances within the depictions of this new reality reveal the inability of human nature to exist within a utopian vision. A contradiction also exists between Constant’s descriptions of New Babylon and his representations of it. He describes it as a world subsiding on the collectivity of its inhabitants which exactly equals the accumulation of individual interests. And yet the argument can be made that his representations allude to a more conflicted narrative because of the inherent incompatibility of these two opposing forces in reality.

Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown As Constant was abandoning work on New Babylon (1974), Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown were beginning to investigate the casino as part of a larger thesis on the role of signs and symbols in architecture. Using Las Vegas as a case study and the university as an incubator, they traveled with a Yale studio to Los Angeles and Las Vegas in 1968 and subsequently published their seminal work, Learning From Las 36

Ibid., 34.

Learning from Las Vegas, 1972

Vegas, in 1972. Serving as a report of their findings, the book shares exhaustive diagrams and photographic documentation of the commercial landscape of Las Vegas including casinos and associated architectures of gas stations, wedding chapels and motels. Through these representations and additional sketches, the pair explores the ideas of duality in architecture (resulting in the widely known duck/decorated shed theory), “tolerance of untidiness” 37 (expanding on the manifesto professed in Complexity and Contradiction), and the value in “common” or “ordinary” architecture. Their goal was to provide an alternative architecture to modernism, but also to suggest a multiplicitous direction for the field. While Venturi and Scott Brown propose an optimistic and inclusive deviation from modernism by offering a novel perspective of the value of commercial architecture, their semiotic interest in Las Vegas results in a limited vantage point of the casino. Their flat reading of the surface ignores the larger developing role that the casino plays in architectural discourse; one in which the architecture allows for the exploration of human identity and exhibition of desire. While their objective method of analyzing commercial landscapes ascribes value to and changes perception of the casino, their narrow perpective rids the casino of the radical potential that Constant and others see in it. Venturi and Scott Brown examine the dual nature of architecture to act as both “a sculptural symbol and architectural shelter,”38 meaning it has value in both its communication and ability to provide a protective interior space. Although they non judgementally embrace the sometimes contradictory nature of these roles (in contrast to the modernists), they fail to investigate the deeper motivations and consequences of this duality, specific to the casino. They provide a two dimensional analysis that excludes a qualitative reading of the interior space and its ability to produce “influences in accordance with the eternal spectrum of human desires.”39 This purely graphic and formal investigation also limits the depth of their social critique. Venturi and Scott Brown engage in the growing criticism of high art and society; however, this is surface level to the reformist agenda of those trying to subvert capitalism. While Benjamin, Simmel, and the Situationists are skeptical of mass consumerism, Venturi and Denise Scott Brown (and Hickey) embrace it, along with mass communication, as a contemporary condition of society. They accept it as the “common” or “ordinary” landscape. For them, capitalism is a given, while the European progressives aim to 37 38 39

Denise Scott Brown, “Learning From Pop,” The Journal of Popular Culture VII, no. 2 (1973): 387- 401, doi:10.1111/j.0022-3840.1973.0702_387.x. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017). Gilles Ivain, “Formulaire pour un urbanisme nouveau,” 1-4.

"What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coca Cola, Liz Taylor drinks Coca Cola, and just think, you can drink Coca Cola, too. A coke is a coke and no amount of money can get you a better coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the cokes are the same and all the cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it. -The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, 1975

upend it as the accepted social and economic order in its totality. Although Gilles Ivain argues for a symbolic unitary urbanism in which “dated images [that] retain a small catalyzing power” are “rejuvenate[d] by giving them new meaning,” he has an ambivalent outlook on the relationship between architectural symbolism and memory. As the Situationists evolved, architectural symbolism and memory are not important to, and even a hinderance to their cause. Venturi, however, relies on the communicative and demonstrative ability of architecture to call back previous associations, domesticating the casino and dampening it’s revolutionary potential. The goal of communicating across space and time through architecture does not allow for the Simmel’s “nearness” or Benjamin’s “presence of mind” that creates a rupture in the traditional orders of life. Instead, signs and symbols create associations which tie us to the past. Venturi seeks to “look backward at history and tradition to go forward,”40 while Ivain is intent on adapting images of the banal status quo. Constant, Benjamin and others are interested in the “promise and potential” of the casino, while Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour address the “reality of its now common performance.”41

Contemporary Critics At the turn of the millennium (another unstable period in history) the casino again appears in contemporary art and architectural discourse in the writing of Dave Hickey and Bob Somol. Both publishing work in 1997, Hickey, an art critic, and Somol, an architectural theorist, explore these bizarre and phantasmagoric worlds which have evolved significantly since Venturi and Scott Brown’s investigations. Post Modernism has been conceived, delivered and discharged, along with numerous other fleeting architectural movements of the late 70’s, 80’s and early 90’s. Las Vegas casinos have become engorged, resulting in an alignment of insular cities (or megashed resorts42) along a primary axis which corrals over 30 million consumers43 to and from varying repetitions of the same idea. 40 41

42 43

Venturi, Brown, and Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, 4. Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (NY, NY: Monacelli Press, 1994), 82, 87. “To understand the promise and potential of the New York Skyscraper (as distinct from the reality of its now common performance…)” Koolhaas investigates the irrationality of the skyscraper as the manifestation of the experiments on Coney Island. How the radical capacity of the technologies developed in the entertainment testing ground have been neutralized to serve the “insatiable demands of business.” R. E. Somol, “Start Spreading the News,” ANY: Architecture New York, (January 01, 1997), 45. Las Vegas casinos as referred to by Somol. “Monthly Las Vegas Visitor Statistics Executive Summary,” LVCVA,https://www.lvcva.com/

Cover, Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy, Dave Hickey, 1997

Each themed enterprise is owned and operated by one of five major corporations who now monopolize The Strip; and every self-contained pleasure zone seems as if it has fed on numerous previous, but smaller, iterations of themselves. Las Vegas Boulevard is an ever tightening belt constricting the continually expanding waist that is Las Vegas. As both foot and vehicular traffic congest along the main artery, resorts balloon out on either side popping yet another button before the eventual crash / burst. Steve Wynn (the self-ascribed “Count of the Bellagio”), Glenn Schaeffer (President of Circus Circus Enterprises), Sheldon Adelson (CEO of Las Vegas Sands Corporation) are the tycoons of these architectures of commercialism disguised as palaces of desire and housed in replications of world heritage.44 Meanwhile, online gambling providers, Native Americans, and Donald Trump have discovered the casino as an economic engine and begin churning out new breeds of these high risk – high reward developments. Their appetite for growth is only curtailed by state regulation, which is not outside their influence. Yet, Dave Hickey maintains a state of optimism about the casino.

Dave Hickey During his 7th year in Las Vegas, Hickey publishes Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy. Through a retrospective collection of twenty-three short stories, he wages war on the establishment from the vantage point of his adopted hometown. The nonlinear memoir explores a spectrum of themes from the serious to the absurd, shedding new light on how the everyday and the exotic begin to define individual identity and a collective American culture. A Home in Neon is one of the most notable essays in Hickey’s book, in which he praises the casino for its democracy and classlessness. He argues that in a city like Las Vegas, one characterized by an “absence of vertical options” and “deficiency of haut bourgeois perks,” we can avoid both the “bleak savannahs of high culture” and the “most plangent

stats-and-facts/visitor-statistics/. In 1997 Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority reports the following statistics: Visitor Volume: 30,464,635 million / Room Inventory: 105,347 / Weekend Occupancy: 91.6% / Gaming Revenue: $6,152,415,000 Stefan Al, The Strip: Las Vegas and the Architecture of the American Dream (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), 169. Stefan Al deems the architectural period in Las Vegas between 1995-2001 as “Sim City.” During this time, mega-resorts opened include the Venetian, Bellagio, Paris Las Vegas, Monte Carlo and New York New York. He includes Glenn Schaeffers quote from his Casino Journal article entitled Making it Modern, “Our buildings command a special kind of attention. An architecture of spectacle, where in the tradition of the grand palace or the gilded opera house or the soaring civic monument, or even that notable American instance, the skyscraper, we provide a show to the public that starts on the sidewalk” (169). 30+ years later, Debord’s scathing critique is fully embraced by the entertainment industry and adopted as a marketing tool.

Still from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Terry Gilliam, 1998

“there is nothing quite as bracing as the prospect of flying home, of swooping down into that ardent explosion of lights in the heart of the pitch-black desert…” -Dave Hickey A Home in the Neon, Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy 1997

Still from Casino, Martin Scorsese, 1995

American weakness for being parented into senility.”45 Hickey carries on the agenda of subculture groups and pop artists in their distaste for high culture, using the casino as a poster child for its ability to deny status and social hierarchy. Although closer to the Situationist International view than other American artists and critics, Hickey’s observations take shape as a radical form of democracy. He observes that “Vegas cheats you fair - that, unlike the rest of America (and Washington in particular) the payoffs are posted and the odds easily calculable. I knew how much of a chance I had to win. It was slim, of coarse, but it was a real chance nevertheless, not some vague promise of parental benevolence contingent on my behavior.”46 His penchant for Las Vegas often comes with equally as scathing convictions against the paternal American “democracy,” and the recognition that the potential of the casino is in its capacity to access repressed human faculties. In a contemporary context, Hickey further unravels some of the humanistic tendencies (our gravitation towards desire and chance) surrounding gambling that Simmel and Benjamin explore nearly a century earlier. He speculates: “in the reality of that chance, Vegas lives – in those fluttery moments of faint but rising hope, in the possibility of wonder, in the swell of desire while the dice are still bouncing, just before the card flips face up. And win or lose, you always have that instant of genuine, justifiable, hope. It is always there. Even though we know the rules governing random events are always overtaken by the law of large numbers, there is always that window of opportunity, that statistical crazy zone, before this happens, when anything can happen.”47 Hickey takes a chance on Las Vegas, attracted to the glimmer of hope that it might offer something outside the ordinary; but, in 2010, after 20 years, Hickey leaves Las Vegas for Santa Fe proclaiming, “I was wrong about things. I thought you could build on something here. I thought it was a little less covert city…there’s no intellectual critical mass here.”48 Although equally commenting on the hurdles he encountered within the academic realm, perhaps either the city home to the Strip is now 45 46 47 48

Dave Hickey, Air Guitar Essays on Art & Democracy (Los Angeles, CA: Art Issues Press, 2006), 21-22. Ibid., 24 Ibid., 24 Kristen Peterson, “Dave Hickey and Libby Lumpkin Say Goodbye,” Las Vegas Sun, May 19, 2010, https://lasvegassun.com/news/2010/may/19/dave-hickey-and-libby-lumpkin-say-goodbye/.

New York New York Hotel and Casino, Cover of R. E. Somol’s Essay, 1997

This content downloaded from 129.137.5.42 on Thu, 06 Sep 2018 06:23:02 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

too commercialized or pedestrian to embrace his agitation. Robert E. Somol A few months after the publishing of Air Guitar, Robert E. Somol writes the essay Start Spreading the News for Any Magazine, released in December of 1997. The 21st issue of Any, How the Critic Sees, is published to engage the growing discussion on architectural criticism and as a follow up to a seminar at the Guggenheim on the topic. In his essay, Somol oscillates between acceptance and cynicism of the casino, obscuring a conclusive stance in favor of a more theoretical and theatrical discussion. He aligns with Hickey in disputing the assumed merits of the “official institutions of high culture” (featured throughout the rest of the issue) by instead choosing to focus on the New York New York, a “$460 million resort hotel and casino present[ing] a somewhat more questionable cultural aspiration.”49 He substitutes the casino for the “machine,”50 and positions it as a diagram through which “the articulable and the visible” are discussed in an effort to sustain the discipline “through the conjunction of its discursive and nondiscursive modes.” By suggesting the casino for this role, he evaluates the viability of this model for architectural criticism and illuminates another radical opportunity for the casino. Somol allows the ambiguity of the casino’s architectural status to launch his central question of the essay, “Can there be architectural criticism without architecture?” It is both architecture enough to question the status quo of architectural criticism, but not architecture enough to be wholly/unquestionably considered within discourse. This uncertainty surrounding the architectural validity of late 20th century casino allows Somol to place it at a fulcrum which facilitates a discussion on the necessity for a divergence from the current accepted modes of discourse and position of the “architect-critic.” In evaluating his own supposition, Somol investigates simulation, temporality, and relationship of interiority / exteriority as both familiar and contemporary aspects of the casino. The New York New York is an accumulation of 1/3 scale replicas of New York’s monuments and allows Somol to explore the complexity of simulation and its role in transforming identity as a contemporary aspect of the casino. The largest imitation is the Empire State at 47 stories, which becomes the 49 50

Somol, “Start Spreading”, 44. Ibid., 44. Role of the “machine” had previously been occupied by the house (nine square grid) and prison (panopticon). Somol quotes Gilles Deleuze in his book, Foucault, to describe the ability of these spatial “diagrams” to illicit the articulable and visible forces that make up architectural criticism. “a machine that is blind and mute even though it makes others see and speak.”

tallest tower in Nevada at the time. Popular opinion (according to Google Reviews) gives similar appraise to the New York New York Hotel and Casino and its original counterpart. The casino receives a 4.4 star rating, just .2 stars less than the cumulative rating of the “real” New York (a 4.6 average was generated from a sample of the 20+ replications within the New York New York “façade” – Soldiers and Sailors Monument: 4.5, United Nations Building Assembly Hall: 4.5, Empire State: 4.6, Chrysler Building: 4.6, Statue of Liberty: 4.6, Grand Central Terminal: 4.6, Ellis Island Main Immigration Building: 4.7, Brooklyn Bridge: 4.7). Somol notes that his choice is “disposable” (and therefore related to chance), “ambiguous” and entails an “issue of anonymity” in terms of authorship.51 Similar comparisons could be made between the other simulated masses and their respective archetypes. Somol’s assessment of successes and failures of this entertainment-based reproduction of New York reveal the multilayered nature of simulation, a common approach by late 20th century casino operators. He critiques “new” (corporate, post 1970) casinos for building narratives which “reproduce a static identity,” a deviation from older casinos which “establish a mood (a context) to allow the patron to construct a role as either high roller, swinging Rat Packer, or slumming voyeur.”52 His diagnoses of these new, singular narrative environments is that “the multiplication of fiction and placelessness is limited and domesticated if not completely eradicated.”53 In perceiving slight fractures in the contemporary illusion of Las Vegas that Hickey ignores, Somol anticipates the limitations of the physical casino in the face of new digital spaces.54 Still, he faults other critics for not entertaining the discussion of the radical potential of the casino, and instead “shutting it [the discussion] down immediately with compensatory images of the familiar.”55 Signage, service areas and intermittent opportunities for identity exchange are highlighted as successes of the highly directed simulation that is New York New York. A Broadway marquee for “Guys and Dolls” also marks the restrooms and “service areas emerge as the most successful and duplicitous spaces…typically invisible service functions become activated and theatricized.”56 One cannot tell whether garbage and delivery men throughout the cobblestone 51 52 53 54

55 56

Ibid., 44 Ibid., 45 Ibid., 46 Ibid., 44 Somol never makes this assumption, but does question the resilience of architectural criticism’s current form in the midst of new media technologies. “While there will be those who argue that such a practice no longer warrants the name “criticism,” it may simply be that this is a criticism aligned with a different technology and diagram, more closely related to the project that theorist Gregory Ulmer has referred to as heuretics - a program of invention enabled in part by electronic and digital media - as opposed to a hermeneutics of interpretation which derives from an older culture of writing or print media.” Ibid., 46 Ibid., 46

Cartoon Plan of the Wynn Las Vegas, 1997

“obliging the popular demand for repeat performance, let me reprise the thirteen over-sized graphic arrows, all pointing in, always returning without ever departing, signaling a project with no way out. These inward-pointing arrows, for all their specificity, are not exactly entrances, but more often vague pressure points in the plan, forces that bump up indiscriminately against an undefined perimeter, providing retroactive shape to the formless.” - Bob Somol, Cartoon Plan

“You have infinite choice, but seemingly no way out…Casino spaces are scripted particularly as ergonomic labyrinths. Entrances and Exits remain askew. The atmosphere is immersive – englobing…you never leave but always arrive. It is easy listening, user friendly imprisonment.” - Norman Klien on the “Happy Imprisonment” of a casino, referenced in Stripping Las Vegas: A contextual review of casino resort architecture, Karin Jaschke

“streets” are part of the scene or truly pragmatic in their roles of collecting trash and stocking product. Television monitors in a faux Greenwich Village repair store window successfully “transform visitor into security guard.”57 “Though perhaps not yet a Diller + Scofidio project,”58 Somol sees potential in these replicated spaces to showcase the transitory nature of identity. Here, the line between tourist in New York and tourist in New York in Las Vegas is blurred. In this environment where identities become transferrable, Somol observes how time and space are also restructured. “In Las Vegas, artificial cycles of time (from volcano eruptions, Roman bacchanals, and sea battles to jumbo-tron spectacles, building implosions, and lounge performances) program the entire city with the scheduled regularity of an airport.”59 He also repositions the New York New York as an “event” along an “interior – landscape axis,” one of many “intensive developments” within the emerging “generalized interior”60 of the city. The endless geography of Las Vegas is punctuated by highly charged moments of “chance” and bounded by situation-based structures that repeat and compete to form a highly orchestrated system. As discussed by Simmel, Benjamin and Constant, Somol illuminates the potential for the casino and gambling to warp time. “Gambling and the house of chance materialize time; they thicken, distend, focus, channel, heighten, and displace the temporal, producing a situation where entropy is marked only through the ever-shifting pile of chips.”61 Through creating a new landscape of disorder, a new order is assembled, defined by overlapping cycles of performance. In Start Spreading the News Somol calls for an invention to “address the gap (conceptual and material) between the neomodernist avante-garde and mass-cultural excess.”62 Perceiving a void between critical and productive architectures, currently being filled only by New Urbanism, he seeks an alternative. He answers his own request in another essay, Cartoon Plan. Among 7 other architects in the issue taking on roles like Mortician, Muckraker, Outsider and Talent Agent, Somol becomes the Inventor, claiming fictive authorship of the Wynn casino and its new logic of the plan. He superimposes his desire for “a hybrid of critical/information architecture and mass/ entertainment architecture”63 onto the Wynn casino plan diagram. “This modernist/mass-cultural combination would recognize 57 58 59 60 61 62 63

Ibid., 46 Ibid., 46 Ibid., 47 Ibid., 47 Ibid., 47 Ibid., 47 Ibid., 47

and sustain the virtual desiring-machines that freely conjoin the infrastructure, mechanical, and biological without preconception or containment.”64 Start Spreading the News and Inventor: Cartoon Plan act as a two-part investigation into the role of architectural critic, the wall (as a static architectural device), and the need for invention through the lens of the casino. By stripping away all that conventionally makes architecture, “architecture,” Somol investigates his question posed in Start Spreading the News on whether architectural criticism can exist without architecture. The paradoxical nature of the casino makes it an appropriate vehicle for his test. A space where boundaries are blurred between real/nonreal, actuality/representation interior/exterior, the inherent uncertainty contributes to its potential to induce change. He proposes a system not only applicable to the casino, but “receptive enough to relay all their infernal complexes – airports and hospitals, malls and casinos, stadia and museums, entire campuses and master plans. All those situations where time is money and, conversely, where time is no object.”65 Written within a couple years of Junkspace, Somol’s infernal complexes teeter on the edge of Koolhaas’s impoverished world, but still maintain some sense of fervency. In a contemporary context, the reader wonders whether the internet is the newest “infernal complex”? Through repeated satisfaction the internet risks being a virtual junkspace; and in many ways, Somol’s projective diagram describes cyberspace. “There is no poche here: service areas, systems, and structures have been entirely expunged. No longer is there any back of house, but only front. In terms of area, this represents the elimination of gross, leaving nothing but net. Pure, absolute architecture disguised as easy communication for the masses.”66 Similarly, Somol implies that criticism, the back of house of architecture, may not need architecture at all to represent its project In applying his logic to a scheme for today, the data center is the back of house, removed far enough from sight to be perceived as nonexistent; and the mobile phone the visible representation of the global and “absolute architecture” of the internet. So, perhaps the inventor’s cartoon is brought to life in the explosion of the internet. On a platform “projecting the arbitrary as a new reality,” he can finally “expel the engineer whose calculations always limit us to this world…no structure, no skin, no core – their holy trinity finally immaterial here.”67 64 65 66 67

Ibid., 47 Somol, R. E. “Inventor: Cartoon Plan.” Flat Out Magazine Ibid. Ibid.

“A machine for metropolitan bachelors” Painting by Madelon Vriesendorp depicting “eating oysters with boxing gloves, naked, on the nth floor - Delirious New York, Koolhaas, 1968

Rem Koolhaas After a brief journalism and screenwriting career in his early twenties, Rem Koolhaas began his architectural education at the AA School of Architecture in London. A central architectural institution during the collapse of modernism, the school had foundations in high utopian theory and art, launching figures such as Cedric Price and members of Archigram in the 1960’s. In 1975, OMA emerged as a critical and provocative presence in architectural discourse. The project, started by Rem Koolhaas and three partners, positioned themselves as a “reargard action on behalf of the values of modernity against the reactionary scenarios of various resuscitators of the past.”68 Their goal was to contribute to the process modernization while moving beyond orthodox modernism and the detour of postmodernism. Published in 1978, Delirious New York was Koolhaas’s first major theoretical work, a result of a visiting scholarship at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York, directed by Peter Eisenman. The retroactive manifesto assigns principles to the thriving metropolis, which had a definite character but lacked an explicit and theoretical rationale. As a counterpoint to the seriousness of Marxism, Koolhaas’s work is “animated by a hedonistic delight in the possibilities of architecture and a subversive erudition capable of turning the discoveries and models of the past towards his own purposes.”69 Often assuming an amoral, neutral posture, he observes the curiosities of the city without taking an ethical stance. Perhaps the pinnacle of indulgent skyscrapers, Koolhaas describes the Downtown Athletic Club as “an aleatory form of “planning” life itself: in the fantastic juxtaposition of its activities, each of the Club’s floors is a separate installment of an infinitely unpredictable intrigue that extols the complete surrender to the definitive instability of life… on each of the synthetic platforms, a different “performance” that is only a fragment of the larger spectacle of the Metropolis”70 takes place. In continuing a speculative analysis of the plan, he presents a scenario where bachelors of the Metropolis may be found “eating oysters with boxing gloves, naked, on the nth floor – such is the “plot” of the ninth story, or, the 20th century in action.”71 It is the undefined space between (the oyster bar and locker room) where uninhibited desire can be satisfied. Amused by the vulgarity, contradiction and paradox of life and 68 69 70 71

Luke Jones and George Gingell, “About Buildings Cities: Episode 48: OMA 1989,” February 11, 2019. Hosts quote Koolhaas describing the project of OMA. Ibid. Koolhaas, Delirious New, 156-157. Ibid., 156

Though graduating from The Architectural Association School of Architecture in London in the decade following Cedric Price and members of Archigram, Koolhaas refers to them as: “the whole inarticulate horde of sixties AngloSaxon counterculture – the bubbles, domes, foams, the “birds” of Archigram, the philistine courage of Cedric Price...” - Koolhaas, SMLXL, Imaginging Nothingness: Nevada

Archigram, Monte Carlo Casino Competition, 1969

Archigram, Summer Casino, 1972

architecture, he offers an alternative to the polished blandness of megastructural modernism. Often illuminating transgression and pleasure (qualities embodied by the casino), Koolhaas develops a provocative literary attitude as a foundation on which he builds his career. If Delirious New York represents an exhaustive study of the profanity and eroticism of a leisure society, Koolhaas’s essay Imagining Nothingness in SMLXL, published in 1995 draws a more lucid connection to the casino and Las Vegas as models for architecture and planning. In a departure from modernism, he argues that the city cannot achieve a homogenous coherence and can at best exist as a “system of fragments” and “multiple realities.”72 In Delirious New York he observes that the paradox of permanence and instability is solved by the “aura of monumentality”73 of the building shell and the transitory nature of performance and program allowed by the interior. In SMLXL his position on this conflict has evolved. Nearly twenty years later he observes: “the desire for stability and the need for instability are no longer incompatible. They can be pursued as two separate enterprises with invisible connections. Through the parallel actions of reconstruction and deconstruction, such a city (or the world) becomes an archipelago of architectural islands floating in a post architectural landscape of erasure where what was once city is now a highly charged nothingness.”74 He offers Las Vegas as a methodology for future development: “only through a revolutionary process of erasure and the establishment of “liberty zones,” conceptual Nevadas where all laws of architecture are suspended, will some inherent tortures of urban life – the friction between program and containment – be suspended.”75 A few years later Somol’s Cartoon Plan and analysis of the New York New York Hotel and Casino in Start Spreading the News share a similar divergence from conventional architectural theory in an effort to advance a contemporary agenda. Somol’s plan 72 73 74 75

Rem Koolhaas et al., Small, Medium, Large, Extra-large: Office for Metropolitan Architecture, (New York, NY: Monacelli Press, 1998), 201. Koolhaas, Delirious New, 149. Koolhaas et al., Small, Medium, 201. Ibid., 201

Thus Otis introduces an invention in urban theatricality: the anticlimax as denoument, the non-event as triumph. Like the elevator, each technological invention is pregnant with a double image: contained in its success is the specter of its possible failure.” - Delirious New York, Koolhaas, 1968

“Martin had the odd sensation that he was falling upwards...and this sense of being about to fall, while understanding that you weren’t going to, was what the elevator was like.” -Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer, Steven Millhauser, 1997

renders traditional rules of architecture useless, understanding the “building” as part of a larger interconnected geography. Both architects argue for a return to fantasy, an acceptance of the erasure of architecture (“nothingness”), a realization of the paradoxes that define contemporary society (and thus our relationship with architecture, building and the city), and a reconsideration of the architects role within it (whose speculation and authority no longer goes unquestioned). In another evolution of ideas first conceptualized in Delirious New York, Koolhaas expands on how the elevator and other “new infrastructures” have contributed to Bigness or the Problem of Large, the title of his essay in SMLXL. He announces that by “randomizing circulation, short circuiting distance, artificializing interiors, reducing mass, stretching dimensions, and accelerating construction, the elevator, electricity, air conditioning, and steel” have “formed a cluster of mutations that induced another species of architecture.”76 This architecture of bigness is characterized by: •

“interior and exterior architectures become separate projects, one dealing with the instability of programmatic needs, the other – agent of disinformation – offering the city the apparent stability of an object”77 As explored by Somol in Start Spreading the News, the interior landscape axis is continuous, while the architectural mass emerges as separate (and in some ways irrelevant?).

•

“through size alone, such buildings enter an amoral domain, beyond good or bad. Their impact is independent of their quality”78 The casino emerged as a paradigm of bigness. It is amoral, acontextual, unconcerned with architectural ethics.

•

“together, all these breaks – with scale, with architectural composition, with tradition, with transparency, with ethics – imply the final, most radical break: Bigness is no longer part of any urban tissue. It exists; at most, it coexists. Its subtext is fuck context.”79 Casinos create their own context, the surroundings are only as important as the resources they provide for the operation of the building. Both natural and economic, resources need not be place based and can be part of an interconnected

76 77 78 79

Ibid., 498 Ibid., 501 Ibid., 501-502 Ibid., 502

“We could call this strange geography created by technology “AirSpace.” The homogeneity of these spaces means that traveling between them is frictionless, Changing places can be as painless as reloading a website.” “It’s easy to see how social media shapes our interactions on the internet, through web browsers, feeds, and apps. Yet technology is also shaping the physical world, influencing the places we go and how we behave in areas of our lives that didn’t heretofore seem so digital.” “Why is AirSpace happening? One answer is that the internet and its progeny — Foursquare, Facebook, Instagram, Airbnb — is to us today what television was in the last century” - Kyle Chayka, Welcome to Airspace, 2016

financial web. Six years after SMLXL and bookending the essays by Somol, Koolhaas publishes Junkspace in 2001. Post turn of the millennium, the publication is a series of three essays critiquing the apotheosis of modernization and the actualization of 20th century inventions of progress. He describes at length the new, resultant form of architecture – a species previously introduced in Bigness, or the Problem of Large, but still largely unstudied. He recognizes it as departure from the premises of 20th century architecture, a consequence of modernization lacking any intention except for the commercial. Described as “the end of Enlightenment…a low-grade purgatory…”80 he continues his assessment of this sprawling artificial landscape as one which: “cancels distinctions, undermines resolve, confuses intention with realization. It replaces hierarchy with accumulation, composition with addition. More and more, more is more. Junkspace is overripe and undernourishing at the same time, a colossal security blanket that covers the earth in a stranglehold of seduction…Junkspace is like being condemned to a perpetual Jacuzzi with millions of your best friends…”81 “because it cannot be grasped, Junkspace cannot be remembered. It is flamboyant yet unmemorable, like a screensaver; its refusal to freeze ensures instant amnesia. Junkspace does not pretend to create perfection, only interest…” “…splintered into a thousand shards, all visible at the same time: a quasi-panoptical universe in which all contents rearrange themselves in split seconds around the dizzy eye of the beholder. Murals used to show idols, Junkspace’s modules are dimensioned to carry brands; myths can be shared, brands husband aura at the mercy of focus groups.”82 Koolhaas’s investigation of junkspace describes a contemporary evolution of ideas explored in the 20th century theories of Walter Benjamin and the Situationists. The Arcades can be understood 80 81 82

“Junkspace,” OMA, https://oma.eu/publications/junkspace. Rem Koolhaas, “Junkspace,” October 100 (2002): 176, doi:10.1162/016228702320218457. Ibid,. 177

The town will never be the same. After the Tangiers, the big corporations took it all over. Today, it looks like Disneyland. And while the kids play cardboard pirates, Mommy and Daddy drop the house payments and Junior's college money on the poker slots. In the old days, dealers knew your name, what you drank, what you played. Today, it's like checkin' into an airport. And if you order room service, you're lucky if you get it by Thursday. Today, it's all gone. You get a whale show up with four million in a suitcase, and some twenty-five-year-old hotel school kid is gonna want his Social Security Number. After the Teamsters got knocked out of the box, the corporations tore down practically every one of the old casinos. And where did the money come from to rebuild the pyramids? Junk bonds...But in the end, I wound up right back where I started. I could still pick winners, and I could still make money for all kinds of people back home. And why mess up a good thing? And that's that. - Sam (Ace) Rothstein, Casino

Stills from Casino, Martin Scorsese, 1995

as an antecedent to Junkspace; however, desire is still evident in the Arcades Project, while the world of Junkspace is oversatiated (and so people are not satiated at all). Although society has achieved what Debord and the Situationists argued for (derive, aimless wandering), our spaces (even the casino) lack the sense of desire that Benjamin saw in the potential of the Arcades. Four years after Dave Hickey’s optimism for the casino is expressed in Air Guitar, Koolhaas’s pessimistic view renders it to the realm of junkspace. Koolhaas argues that “because we never reconstruct or question the absurdity of these enforced derives, we meekly submit to grotesque journeys past perfume, asylum seekers, building site, underwear, oysters, pornography, cell phone – incredible adventures for the brain, the eye, the nose, the tongue, the womb, the testicles…”83 The idea of derive is polluted by commercialism.

Ibid., 181

eproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.

The Casino in a Post-Mobile Context •

•

As a result of our physical environments being oversaturated by commercialism, people have looked to the digital world as an escape. The once raw, untouched form of entertainment (social media was originally conceived as a “free space” and purely for enjoyment) has been invaded by commercialism as evidenced by increasing amounts of ads inundating our newsfeeds. As companies vie for an extra millisecond of “eye contact” and Facebook trades data in exchange for even more consumer data – where do we look next? Data centers may be the back of house for the new digital casino of the internet. Characterized by placelessness, excess, speed, progress, and multiplication - they are physical manifestations of our desires that are repeatedly satiated in the digital world. Similarly reliant on security and secrecy, but masked by an exuberant façade, the vault = the data center and the casino floor = filtered/framed images of the internet. Both the casino and the internet provide “anything, anytime, anywhere” to the ever more ravenous consumer, enforcing no limit to indulgence in either environment. As data centers proliferate the physical world as a new form of entertainment architecture, we are afforded a rare glimpse of the consequences of our desire to click, save, send, share… while the digital world becomes ever more expressive, exuberant, full of life; the physical world deteriorates beneath our feet and outside of our peripheral vision. Information is archived in salt mines half a mile below the surface and data centers form futuristic cities where each one requires the energy of a small town to store the desires of billions.84

“At full capacity, the Iron Mountain data center (50 miles outside of Pittsburgh) could span 500,000 square feet of space and could consume roughly 40 megawatts of power, enough power for about 40,000 homes, the company said.” Iron Mountain’s Butler County mine expands to holdowner. data secure. (n.d.). Retrieved from https:/ /www.post-gazette.com/ busi Reproduced with permission of the copyright Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ness /tech- news/2017/01/09/ Iron-Mountain-data-limestone-mine-Butler-County-cloud- storage/stories/201612210004

Web based map provided by Winstar World Casino The map more closely resembles a transit system than a floorplan, an interactive evolution of Somol’s Cartoon Plan for the digital age.

https://www.winstar. com/casino-map/

The Native American Casino “The tribal institutional sites I describe here, museums, powwows, and casinos are oriented towards tourism, since tourism is the medium by which most non-Natives find opportunity to face Native America and to witness or experience what tribal collectives, insofar as institutions or tourism speak for them, offer the public to know about their histories and public identities.”85 “beyond the familiar and more immediately visible “flows” between reservation and metropolitan cultures, tribal collectives and their projects are inscribed within circuits of global exchange.”86 “[Native American Reservations are] framed by its institutional and political structures, but rarely imbued with means by which to reproduce its wealth”87 -Mary Lawler, Public Native America The “city” is completely encircled by over 1 million pounds of glass fiber reinforced concrete, which make up 11 replications of architectural wonders throughout the world. In one façade visitors can experience the world from London, England to Southeast Asia by pulling off Interstate 35 at exit 3 in Thackerville, OK. The perimeter of this megastructure is over 3 miles around, housing the largest gaming floor in the world at 600,000 square feet. 4 hotels, a golf club, RV park and an outdoor arena constructed specifically for the annual bull riding competition also populate the landscape. Visitors can choose one of 4400 parking spaces on the expansive 2.5 million sq. ft + parking lot. The linear internal arrangement is segmented by 8 “plazas,” each themed as a major international metropolis; while 19 restaurants and 35 ATMs are scattered along the promenade so that guests are never short on sustenance in the form of food or cash. This is the Winstar World Casino, owned and operated by the Chickasaw Nation. Native American casinos represent a subset of the growing spread of casino capitalism not only across the United States, but globally. As cities and cultures try to establish economic stability in a post-industrial world, many have looked to 85 86 87

Mary Lawlor, Public Native America Tribal Self-representations in Casinos, Museums, and Powwows (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 2. Ibid., 25 Ibid., 27

Gross Indian Gaming Revenue Trends

“for it was interesting, it was a subject that never ceased to fascinate him, how the two worlds existed together... one world gradually crowding out the other” -Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer, Steven Millhauser, 1997

Still from Casino, Martin Scorsese, 1995

entertainment and tourism as the answer, or at least the starting point. Ironically, in this search for stability, cities and owners bet on the success of a casino as an anchor for revenue and urban development by taking “exotically leveraged collateral bank loans and [engaging in] risky real-estate speculation.”88 As Native American casinos have progressed from rectangular aluminum sheds to near billion-dollar investments, cities and states have increasingly legalized gambling to keep up with competition across borders and retain tax dollars in their territories. The United States has evolved from the near prohibition of gambling in 1910 to the current landscape where 40 states allow either tribal or commercial casinos. Cities like Detroit were averse to the social costs of hosting a casino, until they recognized the success of neighboring Windsor. And so, as governments weigh the costs, casinos gain increasing momentum, chasing new markets and spreading ravenously through the urban and rural corridors. The casino signals a crack between two worlds, an architecture whose extraterritoriality allows for a free expression and representation of the latent desires of a society. Lying on the on the boundary between good and bad, gambling is seen by many as a “disreputable affair because it unscrupulously provokes all the finest and most precise things that our organism affords.” 89 Although casinos and gambling are typically viewed as having negative social costs, they are also a physical reflection of our desire to escape to a “better” place, one free of the shackles of identity and capitalist structures; an environment completely dedicated to play. Casinos bridge the real and non-real, artificial and genuine, indoor and outdoor. The duality of a casino environment mirrors the contradictions of our current social condition which constantly seeks for the promise of Las Vegas through the pervasive adoption of technology. We operate in a world where our cell phone may know more about us than our best friend. It accompanies us where no one else does, it is both the last thing we see before bed and the first thing we reach for in the morning. Our companions know our dating preferences and our search habits. They interpret our inputs - which represent desires, fears, hopes and dreams – and translate them into algorithms which provide us with more of what we want. We ask for authenticity but hide behind technological curtains and oscillate between virtual and physical identities. Like the casino, technology affords us the anonymity and lack of consequences we crave, and the more we have the harder it is to let go. 88 89

Al, The Strip, 169 Walter Benjamin, Sam Dolbear, and Esther Leslie, “The Lucky Hand,” The Storyteller: Tales Out of Loneliness, trans. Sebastian Truskolaski (London: Verso, 2016), 141.

2003

1994

1999

2003

???

1991

1983 - NO DATA

1993

1995

1983

1993?

2005

2004

2002

2004

2008

2005

2007-

2006?

2018

2010

2018

2008

2014

2010

2015-17

2012

Morphology / Growth Patterns

FUTURE

2013-2014

2015-2016

800’

1600’

FUTURE

3200’

Boundaries and their relationship to the Native American casino are critical. Both visible and invisible, they manifest in political, economic, social, and geographic conditions to influence the buildings we create. Gambling has “roots as an activity of the frontier, creating new political and cultural boundaries and erasing existing ones.”90 It is an activity which inherently straddles many boundaries, and the geographic locations of casinos often reflect the desire for neutrality that extraterritoriality provides. Whether on a state line, national highway, edge of a Native American Reservation or on a riverboat, casinos are democratic and classless spaces although ironically housed within one of the most capitalistic enterprises entering a casino, the line between interior and exterior is eroded; and highly orchestrated choreography gives way to a “free collage of features, atmospheres, and situations.”91 The duality of the casino is heightened in that the “blurry”92 experience is opposed by the specificity to which they are designed. Casinos are a highly codified typology, a complex overlapping of program, security, and psychological design meant to influence the patron through a variety of sensorial inductions. Once inside, architectural boundaries of the space are unclear, and the question of identity is equally as fuzzy.93

90 91 92 93

Pauliina Raento and Kate A. Berry, “Geographys Spin at the Wheel of American Gambling,” Geographical Review 89, no. 4 (1999): 590-595, doi:10.2307/216104. Somol, R. E. “Inventor: Cartoon Plan.” Flat Out Magazine “Blur Building.” DS R. https://dsrny.com/project/blur-building. Diller, Scofidio + Renfro’s description of the Blur Building: “Contrary to immersive environments that strive for visual fidelity in high-definition with ever-greater technical virtuosity, Blur is decidedly low-definition.” Robinson, Bobby Neal. Aleatory Architecture: The Ethics of Chance as Design Discipline. Master’s thesis, Thesis / Dissertation ETD, 1992. x. Fuzzy is intended to mean “indeterminate” and “allegorical”, but “not void of precise intent.” The “inherent duality [of a trauma center where rational procedures of medicine coexist with the practice of prayer] mandates an indeterminate or fuzzy building.” He references Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). as an antirepresentationalist among the “fuzzies.” Those that “do not view knowledge as a matter of getting reality right, but rather as a matter of acquiring habits of action for coping with reality.”

1835

1850

1790 - 1920

assimilation

1865

1880

1895

1910

1925

1887 - 1936

allottment

1940

1955

1970

1983

1985

1980’s Budget Cuts

IGRA PASSED

1988

FIRST BINGO HALL OPENS

1953 - 1975

2000

1975 - present

2015

self determination

relocation / termination

1936 - 1953

revitalization / preservation

What led to Indian Gaming?

periods of inneffective tribal - government policy

What led to Indian Gaming? significant land loss beginning with the invasion of European settlers

Pre European Settlers

1785

1825

1850

1875

1900

“Places like Foxwoods Casino in Connecticut, where the Mashantucket Pequot tribe hosts a Native American museum next to Chinese and Italian restaurants, defy simplistic analyses of place identity and, in so doing, challenge geographers’ art and skills.” Pauliina Raento and Kate A. Berry, “Geography’s Spin at the Wheel of American Gambling.” Geographical Review, vol. 89, no. 4, 1999

Comfort stations, bathrooms, water-closets, urinals, lavatories, toilets, rest rooms, loos, pissoirs, pissotieres, toilettes, petits coins, lieux, vespasiennes, edicules, cabinets d'aisances, chalets de necessite . . . and the list goes on...While such architectural edifices have dotted western cities since antiquity, their presence in modern metropolitan landscapes invariably has triggered anxiety among local citizens and governments. Paul B. Franklin, Object Choice: Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain and the Art of Queer Art History

Published in 2017, the book chronicles the rebirth of the New York rock scene post 9/11.to 2011 The new generation of rock bands are seen as characters in a scene defined by a declining music industry, web culture, and a burgeoning real estate market. Named after The Strokes song of the same name.

Yeah, we were just two friends in lust And baby, that just don't mean much Anywhere is fine just don't waste my time "Meet me in the bathroom" That's what she said I don't mind, it's true. -Meet Me in the Bathroom, The Strokes, 2003

The Bathroom In historic and contemporary art and culture the bathroom has emerged as a place linked to identity. Heavily related to body image, its depiction has ranged from a site of lust to showcasing themes of vanity and eroticism. It’s spatial structure (often defined by secrecy, reflective surfaces and the presence of a mirror) allows people to remove the masks they wear and evaluate the self. Assessment of the body often leads to inquisition of the inner being. Spaces like the bathroom provide revelations of concealed aspects of our identity that media artists simulate in their work. Identified as a site late in the process, the site requires futher study.

Bob Dylan "Toilet" May 1966 73

Photographs by Author

“If you own a smartphone, you’re carrying a 24-7 singles bar in your pocket” — Aziz Ansari

“The goal of these platforms is to get people to use them as much as possible.” — Nancy Jo Sales, Director of Swiped: Hooking up in the Digital Age

Dating Apps and Contradiction in Contemporary Relationships For one to whom the real world becomes real images, mere images are transformed into real beings — tangible figments which are the efficient motor of trancelike behavior.”94 — Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle This section assesses the “lover” as a parallel character to “the gambler” as identified by Georg Simmel in his 1911 essay, “The Adventure.” It evaluates the nature of relationships within the fluid and unstable contemporary context, positioning relationships as a primary marker of identity and dating apps as a new space opened by mobile technology which provides similar confrontation with identity as the casino. Two sources are investigated, HBO’s documentary, Swiped: Hooking up in the Digital Age and Esther Perel’s book and State of Affairs. Swiped compares interviews of app developers, experts in the evolution of relationships, and millenials using the software to describe the social and psychological effects of the dating app phenomenon. State of Affairs investigates the conventionally more fixed nature of marriage through the psychotherapist’s research and personal experience guiding couples through crisis. The element of “choice” has evolved in the process of selecting a partner. In the 20th century marriage became a result of love rather than economy, and in the 21st century dating options have become endless through technology. Entertainment, market spaces and media have also continued to affect the nature of dating. Courting in the home became dating as a commerical activity in sites of consumerism; and now the process of dating through apps has become a transaction. As choice and entertainment unfold as actors in dating, identity becomes increasingly intertwined with relationships. Through the two sources, dating apps are evaluated as a function of media technology, being temporal and image based. Marriage is investigated as an institution, conventionally seen as a permanent fixture, but with an increasingly elastic definition. The documentary and book reveal how each are affected by technology as it provides unlimited access to desire and how the lover has evolved along with his / her relationship to market spaces.

Debord and Nicholson-Smith, Society of, 17. As image becomes a larger factor in modern dating within the context of dating apps, the text gains new relevance.

In the casino, the cardinal rule is to keep them playing, and keep them coming back. The longer they play, the more they lose. In the end, we get it all. - Sam (Ace) Rothstein, Casino

Stills from Swiped, showing B.F. Skinners 1957 Variable Reinforcement Pigeon Experiment

HBO’s documentary, Swiped: Hooking up in the Digital Age The documentary investigates the $2.5 billion online dating industry, addiction of dating apps and dating as a commercial activity “we have some of these almost game like elements to where you almost feel like you’re being rewarded. It kind of works like a slot machine where you’re excited to see who the next person is or hopefully you’re excited to see the match screen. And it’s a nice little rush.” – Jonathan Badeen, Co-founder and CSO of Tinder on how Tinder uses the variable ratio intermittent reward schedule in the development of the app. He explains that unpredictable, yet frequent rewards are the best way to keep people engaged. The variable ratio schedule was developed by B.F. Skinner in the 1970’s after his pigeon experiment. “there is a good example for how you can move from the pigeon to the human case…the variable ratio schedule is at the heart of all gambling devices and has the same effect. A pigeon can become a pathological gambler just as a person can” - BF Skinner “so in the same sense, these apps that give you variable feedback rather than consistent predictable feedback, they have this built in mechanism for being addictive in the same way that a gambling device is addictive” – Adam Alter, social psychologist, NYU on how “gamification” of dating apps compares to B.F. Skinners pigeon experiment Users describe dating apps as a “mini adrenaline rush,” “little video game,” “bizarre visual stimulation” “the dating apps, how they play into sexual compulsive behavior and the sex addiction is because of the accessibility of so many partners at any given moment. Compulsive behavior is all about the 79

Various Dating App Match Screens, meant to simulate winning a game or a slot machine

“the adventure, in its specific nature and charm, is a form of experiencing. The content of the experience does not make an adventure.” “in the adventure we abandon ourselves to the world with fewer defenses and reserves than in any other relation, for other relations are connected with the general run of our worldly life by more bridges, and thus defend us better against shocks and dangers through previously prepared avoidances and adjustments. In the adventure, the interweaving of activity and passivity which characterizes our life tightens these elements into a coexistence of conquest, which owes everything only to its own strength and presence of mind, and complete selfabandonment to the powers and accidents of the world, which can delight us, but in the same breath can also destroy us.” Walter Benjamin, The Adventure, 1911

high, not the pleasure.” – Puja Hall. Founder and Director, New York Center for Sex Addiction Treatment “The effect of mobile dating apps is to feel like we can be dating all the time and that you should always be putting yourself out there, always promoting your product…it is this application of the logic of consumer capitalism to private life and this way that romantic and sexual desire is used as a lure to get you to keep consuming” – Moira Weigel. Dating historian. Harvard University on how dating has been shaped by market dynamics, first in the early 1900’s as courtship in the home became dating in market spaces. And the huge shift created by the mobile dating app

Esther Perel, The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity Positions humanity as “walking contradictions” Many parallels between gambling and affairs and their role in identity -

95 96

“Catastrophe has a way of propelling us into the essence of things...Our desires, even our most illicit ones, are a feature of our humanity.”95 “I prefer to use infidelity as a portal into the complex landscape of relationships and the boundaries we draw to bind them. Infidelity brings us face-to-face with the volatile and opposing forces of passion: the lure, the lust, the urgency, the love and its impossibility, the relief, the entrapment, the guilt, the heartbreak, the sinfulness, the surveillance, the madness of suspicion, the murderous urge to get even, the tragic denouement. Be forewarned: Addressing these issues requires a willingness to descend into a labyrinth of irrational forces. Love is messy; infidelity more so. But it is also a window, like none other into the crevices of the human heart.”96

Perel, The State, 13-14. Perel, The State, 14

Still from Black Mirror, Hang the DJ, 2017 Episode Description: “Paired up by a dating program that puts an expiration date on all relationships, Frank and Amy soon begin to question the systems logic.”

Desire and the Internet -

The Internet has made sex “accessible, affordable, and anonymous,”The secrecy is precisely what intensifies the erotic charge…One of the powerful attributes of secrecy is its function as a portal for autonomy and control.”97 “Affairs are a pathway to risk, danger, and the defiant energy of transgression. Unsure of the next date, we are ensured the excitement of anticipation. Adulterous love resides in a self-contained universe, secluded from the rest of the world. Affairs blossom in the margins of our lives, and as long as they are not exposed to broad daylight, their spell is preserved.”98 “Desire is rooted in absence and longing...It is precisely the elusiveness of the other that keeps them coming back to discover more.”99 “many affairs are less about sex than about desire: the desire to feel desired, to feel special, to be seen and connected, to compel attention. All these carry an erotic frisson that makes us feel alive, renewed, recharged. It is more energy than act, more enchantment than intercourse.”100 “philosopher Aaron Ben-Ze’ev pertinently states, “The move from passive imaginary reality to the interactive virtual reality in cyberspace is much more radical than the move from photographs to movies.” We may debate what is real and what is imagined, but the alchemy of the erotic is unmistakable.”101 “We may be tempted to see the roles in the adulterous triangle as quite set—the betrayed spouse, the cheater, the lover. But in reality, many of us may find ourselves in several positions, and our perspective on the meaning of it all will shift as we do, depending on the situation.”102

On Identity and Sex, Marriage as an Elastic Institution -

97 98 99 100 101 102

“History and culture have always set the stage for our domestic dramas. In particular, the rise of individualism, the emergence of consumer culture, and the mandate for happiness have transformed matrimony and its adulterous Perel, The State, 25. Perel, The State, 24-25. Perel, The State, 27-29. Perel, The State, 27. Perel, The State, 28. Perel, The State, 32.

103 104 105 106 107 108

shadow. Affairs are not what they used to be because marriage is not what it used to be.”103 These factors have transformed affairs, but also our identities, and how we interact with technology and space. Love “was too flimsy an emotion to support such a weighty institution...because marriage was a political, economic, and mercenary event, many people believed that true, uncontaminated love could only exist without it.”104 “In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, amidst the societal sea change of the Industrial Revolution, marriage was redefined. Gradually it evolved from an economic enterprise to a companionate one—a free-choice engagement between two individuals, based not on duty and obligation but on love and affection.”105 “Mate selection became infused with romantic aspirations meant to counter the increasing isolation of modern life.”106 “First we brought love to marriage. Then we brought sex to love. And then we linked marital happiness with sexual satisfaction. Sex for procreation gave way to sex for recreation. While premarital sex became the norm, marital sex underwent its own little revolution, shifting from a woman’s matrimonial duty to a joint pathway for pleasure and connection.”107 “In The Transformation of Intimacy, Anthony Giddens explains that when sex was decoupled from reproduction, it became no longer just a feature of our biology but a marker of our identity. Our sexuality has been socialized away from the natural world and has become a “property of the self” that we define and redefine throughout our lives. It is an expression of who we are, no longer merely something we do. In our corner of the world, sex is a human right linked to our individuality, our personal freedom, and our self-actualization. Sexual bliss, we believe, is our due—and it has become a pillar of our new conception of intimacy.”108 “The modern world is in constant motion, spinning faster and faster. Families are often dispersed, siblings are scattered across continents, and we uproot ourselves for new jobs more easily than a plant is repotted. We have hundreds of virtual “friends” but no one we can ask to feed the cat. We are a lot more free than our grandparents were, but also more disconnected. In our desperate search for a safe harbor, Perel, The State, 37. Perel, The State, 38. Perel, The State, 39. Perel, The State, 39. Perel, The State, 41. Perel, The State, 42.

“never converse with the patrons - slows things down. Speed is volume, volume is profit for the casino, aim of 40 spins per hour” -Jack Manfred, The Croupier

“did the public, along with its craving for the up-to-date and the brand new, also crave not simply the familiar, but the repetitive, the reassuring sense of boredom provided by multiple sameness?” -Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer, Steven Millhauser, 1997

where are we to dock? Marital intimacy has become the sovereign antidote for lives of growing atomization.”109

Contradiction and Paradox of the Contemporary Condition, Romantic Consumerism -

109 110 111 112 113

“Contained within the small circle of the wedding band are vastly contradictory ideals. We want our chosen one to offer stability, safety, predictability, and dependability—all the anchoring experiences. And we want that very same person to supply awe, mystery, adventure, and risk. Give me comfort and give me edge. Give me familiarity and give me novelty. Give me continuity and give me surprise. Lovers today seek to bring under one roof desires that have forever had separate dwellings.”110 “They take their relational aspirations as a given—both what they want and what they deserve to have—and are upset when the romantic ideal doesn’t jibe with the unromantic reality. It’s no surprise that this utopian vision is gathering a growing army of the disenchanted in its wake.”111 “In our consumer society, novelty is key. The obsoleteness of objects is programmed in advance so that it ensures our desire to replace them. And the couple is indeed no exception to these trends. We live in a culture that continually lures us with the promise of something better, younger, perkier. We’ve come to see immediate gratification and endless variety as our prerogative.”112 “No wonder the constraints of monogamy can induce panic. In a world of endless options, we struggle with what my millennial friends call FOMO—the fear of missing out. FOMO drives what is known as the “hedonic treadmill”—the endless search for something better. The minute we get what we want, our expectations and desires tend to rise, and we end up not feeling any happier. The swiping culture lures us with infinite possibilities, but it also exerts a subtle tyranny. The constant awareness of ready alternatives invites unfavorable comparisons, weakens commitment, and prevents us from enjoying the present moment.”113 “When marriage was an economic arrangement, infidelity threatened our economic security; today marriage is a Perel, The State, 42-43. Perel, The State, 43. Perel, The State, 45. Perel, The State, 46. Perel, The State, 46.

Still from Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon), Georges Méliès, 1902

“...is it man’s eyes, or is it the big seeing engine which has revealed to us the existence of worlds beyond worlds into infinity? What has made man familiar with the scenery of the moon, the spots on the sun, or the geography of the planets? He is at the mercy of the seeing engine for these things and is powerless unless he tacks it on to his own identity and makes it part and parcel of himself.” — Samuel Butler, Erewhon, 1872

romantic arrangement and infidelity threatens our emotional security. Our individualistic society produces an uncanny paradox: As the need for faithfulness intensifies, so too does the pull toward unfaithfulness. In a time when we depend on our partners emotionally for so much, never have affairs carried such a devastating charge. But in a culture that mandates individual fulfillment and lures us with the promise of being happier, never have we been more tempted to stray. Perhaps this is why we condemn infidelity more than ever even as we practice it more than ever.”114

TECHNIQUES: MEDIATED LANDSCAPES Transfiguration made possible by manipulation of images through technology results in a media driven terrain in which space, like people, rarely look as one imagines them. The development of these technologies birthed a series of artists and architects who based their careers in understanding how technology continues to augment the negotiation between perception and reality in relation to identity. Case studies in complex representational systems comprised of choreographed affairs between people and media technologies aspire to uncover aspects of this relationship. Their work exhibits the constantly evolving nature of the interdependent connection between human and device. The non-binary nature of identity and the architectural comparisons and implications115 are constant explorations. In a society where technological progress parallels institutional uncoupling and identity dispersion, confusion and disorientation emerge as a consequence of the increased overlap between act and actuality. Self-consciousness becomes both a tool and an aspect of the investigations. Their work provokes us to question which image is “real” – the one we are presented, the one we physically encounter, or that which we imagine. The artists and architects work described in this section is defined by the relationship they establish between the self and mode of representation. Some seek an intended result and others allow the outcome to reveal itself. Campus renders the 114 115

Perel, The State, 51-52. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Anchor Books, 2008). Concept of front stage and backstage personalities as they relate to institutions of work, education, and commercialization. Identity understood architecturally (front of house / back of house) or theatrically (stage / back stage)

Still from La jetée (1962) Chris Marker “with somewhere inside him the memory of a twice lived fragment of time. and deep in these limbos he got the message of the world to come”

camera as unbiased observer, exploiting the infinite nature of the feedback loop. Graham positions it as a mirror delivering information in real time. Contemporary artists investigate the combined role of camera and screen. Diller, Scofidio + Renfro utilize the camera to capture performances carried out on glass screens. Using supplementary technology, the base is overlaid with additional information resulting in critical media presentations. In Gillian Wearing’s work lens-based media is a mask which she manipulates to reveal more or less of the subjects behind it. Less pictoral or documentation driven, she rather aims to activate “a set of relational and performative vectors between artist, subject, and viewer.”116 Pipilotti Rist addresses the role of screens as a pervasive condition, studying how we interface with them on a variety of levels. These artists react to the shift in media from telephone booths to uninhibited mobile conversations, from passive television watching to active video recording and self-broadcast, from letters to live message boards and scripted acting to the rise of reality TV. Their work comments on our operation in a paradoxically more democratic but supervised society. With more agency and voice comes additional control. Voyeurism and surveillance arise as common themes. As physical places for communication become virtual expanses, they also explore how media art plays a role developing space. Dan Graham, Pipilotti Rist, and Diller, Scofidio + Renfro best explore the relationship of architecture to media culture ranging from construction to dissolution to critical evaluation and incorporation. Their investigations into media and identity preempted the capabilities of the internet and social media. Through Signs that say what you want them to say and not Signs that say what someone else wants you to say Gillian Wearing anticipated social media status updates. In Overexposed Diller, Scofidio + Renfro prefaced the use of glass as an enabler for the networked performance the smart phone allows. The work of audio-visual-spatial artists constantly interrogates the ability of instruments of media (screens, camera, lenses, etc.) to act as modes of self definition grant access to transitive realms. Through examining their projects we can better understand how we interface with architecture as media and techniques to facilitate this interaction. As binaries of FOH/BOH, stage/backstage merge and dissolve, and society arguably places more importance on perception, how are new realities negotiated? 116

“Performing Masks: Gillian Wearing at Cincinnati Art Museum :: AEQAI,” AEQAI RSS, https://aeqai. com/main/2018/10/performing-masks-gillian-wearing-at-cincinnati-art-museum/.

“at that moment, the moment of the throw, I had a revelation: the important thing is the throw, the body and mind and spirit all come together in an activity. I had the ball in my hand and started to throw. then I saw myself in the act of throwing, the beauty and complexity of the physical act of the moment. it was all there. most of my video work has come from this moment. —Peter Campus, Musings 9 June 2003

Peter Campus After studying experimental psychology and film in college, Peter Campus worked in the film industry as a production manager and editor. In this ten-year time period before Campus produced any individual work, significant advancements were being made in media technology and human perception and interpretation of visual information. In 1971, inspired by the work of Bruce Nauman and his own professional exposure to working with time-based images, Peter made two seminal pieces using portable video equipment. Dynamic Field Series and Double Vision were “evocative, disorienting, revelatory and at times inscrutable,” and were the first of many investigations into the “phenomena of human existence and questions of identity and the nature of the Self.”117 Campus described Three Transitions, his most notable work, as “selfeffacing,” and a self-examination with a repressed violence.118 The self-portrait through video art explores the “limits of visual perception as a measure of reality”119 by featuring three moments in which the artist engages directly with his double. Campus further explored this idea, along with examining the relationship of the viewer to the work, through a series of live video projection installations in the 1970s. Through different strategies each engaged the observer in the “inherently paradoxical, tautological situation” of “coexisting with one’s own self-image.”120 This phenomenon of experiencing yourself from outside yourself cannot be fully communicated through the finite nature of a 2D drawing but is often experienced through risk induced situations and in spaces in which our own identity is confronted. Campus achieves this confrontation in many of his works by exploiting the infinite nature of video as a medium through constant feedback loops. He aims to discover “aliveness” or the “living moment” at the core of all humans by creating situations in which we are at once the image and ourselves. These installations are often simulations meant to capture the beauty and complexity of the physical moment. Campus first confronted his “aliveness” through the throw of a baseball; gambling provides a parallel scenario in which the hand, mind, and body come together to produce an instant in which you see and evaluate yourself in the act. In a further likeness to the casino, Campus views the 117 118 119 120

Viola, Artist to Artist. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, “Why Peter Campus Hates His Most Famous Video,” YouTube, February 28, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVozAnBiZrg. Peter Campus, “Peter Campus. Three Transitions. 1973 | MoMA,” The Museum of Modern Art, https://www.moma.org/collection/works/88833. Viola, Artist to Artist.

Dan Graham, Performer/Audience/Mirror, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus Munich, Germany, February, 1981.

J.R. Eyerman’s photograph (originally used as the cover of Society of the Spectacle, reproduced in LIFE magazine, 1983 “Can it be true? It must be true. No doubt. Life is going on as normally as ever... But suddenly, something seems to have happened.. Everybody seems to be staring in one direction. People seem to be frightened, even terrified. I want everybody to understand this... I don’t understand. There are a lot of things we don’t understand either...” - Que Sera, Wax Tailor, 2005 samples from: “The Man Who Knew Too Much” (A. Hitchcock, 1956) “Ben Hur” (W. Wyler, 1959) “To Be or Not to Be” (E. Lubitsch, 1942) “Close Encounters of a Third Kind” (S. Spielberg, 1977) “Shadow of a Doubt” (A. Hitchcock, 1943)

camera as “impartial,” a technology invoking the third person which makes “no value judgements, overlooks no detail, harbors no hidden agenda, never becomes impatient or tired” and “sees all as equal.”121 In investigating issues of identity construction, perception and subversion, Campus used emerging video technology to create previously uninhabited spaces between representation and reality and laid a foundation for video artists of successive decades. Dan Graham Of the same generation as Peter Campus, Dan Graham has been exploring both physical and digital vehicles of selfawareness since the mid 1960’s. Although traversing some similar themes, the artists assigned different identities to the technologies they utilized. While for Campus the camera played the role of democratic observer, video acted as a mirror in Graham’s installations because of its capability to relay real time information. Performer/Audience/Mirror and Time Delay Room, both series exhibitions beginning in 1975, allowed Graham to study the temporality and self-reflection he began in earlier work. The wall-sized mirrors used in Performer/Audience/Mirror engaged the audience as a subject of the work, presenting to them their identity as a public mass; while the combination of mirrors and video cameras in the Time Delay Rooms sought to reexamine the blurred relationship between spectator and exhibition by allowing one to view and experience themselves in multiple spaces at once. Mirrors and video cameras became common instruments in Graham’s exhibitions because of their status as “mechanisms of surveillance and self-consciousness”122 and their ability to expose the multispatial nature of identity. Graham continued to confront issues of space and identity on a larger scale through his series of “Pavilions.” These sculptural models and spatial “instruments of reflection” are his most recognizable and architectural works of which he has produced many iterations from the late 1970’s to today. The pavilions utilize two-way mirrors within steel frames to “highlight the voyeuristic elements of design in the built world,”123 critically commenting on surveillance in corporate capitalism and the proliferating devices of consumerism such as glass window displays and shopping malls. Graham likens the spaces to Foucault’s 121 122 123

Ibid. Jen Schwarting, “Dan Graham: Beyond,” The Brooklyn Rail, July 07, 2009, https://brooklynrail. org/2009/07/artseen/dan-graham-beyond. “Dan Graham,” Lisson Gallery, https://www.lissongallery.com/artists/dan-graham.

“But just as the freedom promised by glass ultimately led to the question: “Whose freedom and on which side of the glass?,” the freedom promised by information technologies has raised the question: “Whose freedom and on which side of the interface?”” -Elizabeth Diller, Interview with Flash Art, 1996

heterotopias, “places in a city which are ‘different’ and which create a meaningful interruption in the continuum of everyday space.”124 Through a series of built work, performances, films and theoretical essays, Dan Graham exposes the “relationship of mass forms of architecture and media” and provides a structures within which to address “the social function of architecture and television in mediating public and private life.”125 Diller, Scofidio + Renfro Formed in 1981, Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio founded their studio without the commitment to pursue built projects or traditional client-architect relationships. The duo explored space making through installations, exhibitions and performances and addressed themes of gender identity, domesticity and the global force of tourism. Since then they have been sought after for high profile projects and added two new partners but have continued to undertake performance-based projects exploring new technologies that challenge conventional readings of material, space and the human audience. In Overexposed, a 24-minute film positioning glass as a postvoyeuristic representational surface and performance screen, the fictive narrator assumes a highly intimate but removed relationship with his subjects as the camera pans across 12 offices of Gordon Bunshaft’s Pepsi–Cola building. One of the most notable curtain wall constructions of the 20th century in New York City matched the aspect ratio needed to align architecture with moving image technology. The work engages architecture and emerging technologies while posing the question of who is on display, when, and where. It denies “the belief that any set of formal decisions can be stripped clean of ideology or disassociated from a historically visual culture”126 and prefaces the use of glass as an enabler for the networked performance the smart phone allows. Begun a year later, Indigestion is an “interactive media installation” combatting “reductive binaries” by exploring an ambiguous relationship between two characters projected on a horizontal dining surface.127 The viewer is invited to select from a menu of characters each portraying a sexual or class stereotype. Individual characters bring nuanced implications but are replaceable within the continuous narrative. 124 125 126 127

“What Is It about Dan Graham’s Pavilions? | Art | Agenda.” Phaidon. https://www.phaidon.com/ agenda/art/articles/2014/january/14/what-is-it-about-dan-grahams-pavilions/. “Daniel Graham,” Daniel Graham | Video Data Bank, http://www.vdb.org/artists/daniel-graham. Edward Dimendberg, Diller Scofidio Renfro: Architecture after Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). “Indigestion,” DS R, https://dsrny.com/project/indigestion.

“I’m so fascinated by our relationship with new technologies: how we adapt them to our need, and how they change us as human beings. - Gillian Wearing, Interview with Paola Paleari for Elephant, Dec 2017

“The Most Insane Thing You Can Ever Do is Try to Be Sane” - Gillian Wearing, Artspace Interview, Oct 2017

The work explores the role of “choice” in constructing a passive/interactive relationship of the subject to technology. Just as the freedom of choice promised by new technologies is prescribed by technological scripts, chance in the casino also operates within a predetermined structure (the house always wins). By constructing two “parallel representations of the same event” through two “electronically linked modes” not intended to align, the work becomes “indigestible.”128 Overexposed and Indigestion interrogate human identity as a variable construct increasingly mediated at the intersection between architecture and technology. These two (traditionally) non-architectures fall into a catalogue of Diller, Scofidio + Renfro’s work addressing “how current technologies and economies are absorbing the traditional space to which architecture has been bound” and positioning architecture as a “complex special effects technology mediating policies, economies and social relations.”129 Gillian Wearing Gillian Wearing began practicing photography in the early 1990’s, her first highly recognized work being Signs that say what you want them to say and not Signs that say what someone else wants you to say (1992-1993). The early project challenged conventional methods of portrait photography while engendering both audience and artist to reconsider their own fantasies and interpretations of the subject’s identity. Her practice quickly evolved to include various technologies which further stimulate her investigations of the “blurry line between documentation and constructed point of view” and the “way we inhabit personae and expose or conceal interior thoughts and desires.”130 One of her earliest films, 2 into 1, explores the “triangulated relationship between artist, subject and viewer”131 revealing the ability of technology to facilitate a constant reshuffling of role and identity. Her film Self Made explored the liminal cavity between desire and realization by engaging participants with no acting experience to inhabit a character of their choosing. The work is one of a series of artifices she constructs to induce self-examination and discovery, provoking us to question how physical space might also facilitate selfconstruction (or deconstruction). Like Self Made, Wearing’s series of masked portraits reveal a fascination with society beneath 128 129 130 131

“The Architecture of Entrapment,” Flash Art. Ibid. “Life: Gillian Wearing,” Cincinnati Art Museum, https://www.cincinnatiartmuseum.org/wearing. “Gillian Wearing / 2 into 1 (1997),” YouTube, July 12, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=36WUgFMDY-M.

Pipilotti Rist, Pixel Forest New Museum, 2017 (collection of works 1992 - 2017)

the veil. The photographs comprise a multi-decade inventory of honest investigations of herself, the inner human, and previous artists who constructed identities from image. One of her most recent works, a short film entitled Wearing, Gillian, investigates the digital mask. It questions whether social media activity is a constant stream of ads for ourselves and “mimics the blurring of sincerity and manipulation that is rife in the way we present ourselves”132 in the digital world. Life: Gillian Wearing showcases the film, recent portraits, and a catalogue of lens-based art that builds on works which early on “unmasked a very human hunger for self-disclosure and a voyeuristic fascination with others’ revelations” and “the fluid nature of subjectivity.”133 While confronting the paradoxical nature of identity “at the boundary of public and private, personal and universal, performative and authentic,”134 Wearing continues to embrace risk and pursue experimental projects (or “crises” as she calls them) with a willingness to accept the uncertainty of what they might reveal. Pipilotti Rist Pipilotti Rist’s exhibition, Pixel Forest, showcases her highly immersive catalogue of work in audiovisual environments. Spanning multiple decades and scales, her video art and multimedia installations have evolved along with contemporary technologies. Rather than a preoccupation with the camera, Pipilotti Rist is fascinated by our relationship to the screen. The collection at the New Museum is composed of a range of “transitory encounters” which explore “the anxieties and fantasies related to the proliferation of screens in our lives.”135 Before entering the building, the visitor immediately faces the proximity afforded and closeness denied by screen through Open My Glade (Flatten), 2000. The passerby also experiences the paradox of the invasiveness and simultaneous distance created by the screen. Fragmentation of the body across multiple screens along a public thoroughfare invites the viewer to consider the constant negotiation of “our subjectivity in relation to the incessant circulation of commercially and culturally produced fantasies and desires.”136 Like Wearing, Rist is interested in the glass plane as a “mode of self definition.”137 Whether acting as 132 133 134 135 136 137

Elizabeth Fullerton, “Gillian Wearing: Do You Feel You Know Me a Bit Now?” ELEPHANT, October 29, 2018, https://elephant.art/gillian-wearing-do-you-feel-you-know-me-a-bit-now/. Ibid. “Performing Masks: Gillian Wearing.”. Jeroen Sondervan et al., “Jeroen Sondervan,” NECSUS, July 13, 2017, https://necsus-ejms.org/ confronting-the-screen-pipilotti-rist-pixel-forest-at-the-new-museum/. Ibid. Ibid.

101

Worry Will Vanish Horizon, 2014 Two-channel video and sound installation, colour, with carpet and pillows

Administrating Eternity 2011 Four-channel video installation, silent, colour, with two moving mirrors and curtains

4th Floor to Mildness 2016 Video and sound installation

a mask or a filter, she explores how technology can create an image or reveal what is beneath it. In her work, glass undergoes another transmutation from Diller + Scodifio’s assessment of its evolution in relation to our identitiy. Glass is not only a postvoyeristic performance screen, but an interactive filter. Rist’s work often challenges the limits of its architectural surroundings. While Open My Glade mediates between interior and exterior, the “fluctuating projections” of Mercy Garden and Worry Will Vanish Horizon (2014) “transform the walls into porous membranes and liquid environments, almost dematerialising the stable architectural framework.”138 Pixelwald (2016) permeates beyond the physical walls by inviting self representation and circulation of images to the digital realm. 3,000 LED lights in crystalline resin suspended from the ceiling act as a fragmented representation of the digital screen, while mobile devices illuminate and become part of the immersive installation. In Rist’s Pixelwald, “the boundaries between inside and outside, the body and the screen, the physical and the digital, become radically dismantled.”139 This interactive quality which engages the body with technology is a common theme in Rist’s work. In Administrating Eternity (2011), people become actors of the exhibition. Translucent fabric hung from the ceiling accepts projections which can be viewed from multiple angles. Among them, bodies become sites of projection and shadowy subjects beyond. The installation is layered with the gestures and interactions of the visitors which activates the diaphonous membranes of their surroundings. Immersed in the forest of multimedia encounters, visitors participate in a “seductive enmeshing of physical and virtual bodies”140 as the distance between human, screen and architecture dissolves. Rist sets up a field of experiences, sometimes collective and sometimes individual, but always intimate encounters with the self as a result of technology. She calls attention to the immersive total screen environments that have become a pervasive entity in public and private space and exposes the instability of architecture in the prescence of ephemeral media technologies.

138 139 140

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.

103

Still by Author “they send him back. Time rolls back again. The moment happens once more…they have no memories, no plans...

Still from La jetée (1962) Chris Marker ...Time builds itself painlessly around them. As landmarks they have the very taste of this moment they live. And a scribbling on the walls”

Still by Author

Mediated Landscapes Conclusion The contemporary screen is a seductive site of self reflection - unstable and always in flux. The screen has evolved from an optical (television) to an environmental (mobile network) condition. While earlier artists used technology to access spaces in which identity could be confronted, contemporary artists operate in a post mobile society141 where these conditions have become pervasive. As mobile devices and social networking supplant television as the primary form of media in our lives, the ability to augment and assess our own image is always accessible. Social media provides a platform for the playing out of contemporary identity as a fluid concept. Our preoccupation with the screen provokes questions about the positive and negative effects of this distraction. As technology erodes boundaries between exterior / interior and physical / mental architectures, the role of visual technologies in mediating public and private life and the relationship between media and architecture also shifts. ”Instagrammable moments” become a driving force behind design. Quality = constant posts to collect followers and increase number of likes (100 likes is average per image posted)142. Success is determined by the articulation of a single image and the ability of content to go viral. As leading modes of representation transition from static (television) to interactive and mobile (social media) the perceived permanence of architecture is disrupted. More akin to social media, projection has the potential for exchange with objects, bodies and surfaces of different scales. Both can be used as techniques to augment their fixed environments. In a post internet society, media artists challenge us to consider how our architectures participate in a technologically driven world characterized by the dissolution of distance between the physical and the digital. Key Terms: perception as a measure of reality / the mirror and mask / surveillance and self consiousness / gender and identity choice in interactive relationships / identity shuffling / reductive binaries 141

142

Ibid. Post internet society as discussed by Pamela M. Lee. She adresses the phenomenon of horizontal viewing which frequently appears in contemporary exhibition installations of time- based media. She argues that ‘lying in the gallery chimes with cultures of work post-internet; namely our literal incorporation of its media platforms and the generalization of the network as an all-pervasive and ambient resource’. In the context of the gallery the viewer becomes bodily implicated in the total environment of display. “It’s a Mobile World After All.” Emarketers podcast reports data from Hubspot: Median number of likes for a post on Instagram is 100. Median used as a metric rather than average (skewed by viral posts).

105

Still from La jetée (1962) Chris Marker

“he ran towards her. And when he recognized the man who had trailed him since the cab, he knew there was no way out of time. and he knew this haunted moment he had been granted to see as a child was the moment of his own death”

Still from La jetée (1962) Chris Marker

Still by Author

107

CONCLUSION “There is no security against the ultimate development of mechanical consciousness …the more highly organized machines are creatures not so much of yesterday as of the last five minutes in comparison with past time. Assume, for the sake of argument that conscious beings have existed for some 20 million years, see what strides machines have made in the last thousand. May not the world last 20 million years longer? If so, what will they not in the end become? Is it not safer to nip the mischief in the bud and to forbid them further progress?” - Erewhon, Samuel Butler, 1872 “Machines have taken possession of [architecture] and human beings are now merely tolerated in its domain” - Walter Pichler, 1962 “After all, is not architecture already a complex special effects technology mediating policies, economies and social relations?” - Ricardo Scofidio, Flash Art Interview, 1996 “We play with the world, and then see ourselves in what we have made, and then we become what we have made, and then what we’ve made changes us. So we’re in this unbelievable feedback loop.” - Mark Wigley, Interview @ Sci-Arc, 2017

At the turn of the 20th century machines enabled humans to remake the existing world; at the threshold of the 21st century technology allowed us to begin constructing an entirely new one. Glass maintains its paradoxical promise of access and democracy, surveillance and control; it provides an interface with the seemingly endless realm materializing behind the screen. An augmented language formulates for the rapidly expanding domain. Viral describes rapid image circulation, the desire for better selfies has spawned products in the physical world, one can “follow” an infinite number of people around the world with a single click. Emoticons, gifs, memes and other forms of pictorial communication constitute a large part of the entirely new lexicon of the internet. Acronyms like IRL “in real life” become necessary to distinguish between physical and virtual. The alternate reality is heavily image based, acting as a collective self-portrait of society. In the age of the internet desires become less distinguishable 109

from needs and online shopping can furnish a product and a romantic partner. New orders have been established as time and geographical structures are reorganized according to the digital. Time is defined by overlapping cycles of fleeting snapchats, intermittent status updates, notifications, messages, and regular intervals of automatic backups to the cloud. As cycles quicken, so do the disruptions of them as desire to consume more content inflates in an increasingly uncertain landscape. Geographical boundaries and physical barriers are rendered irrelevant as the internet reorganizes society on the basis of ideology rather than location. Data is the newest form of currency;143 more valuable than cash, it is among our most prized possessions, housing representations of identities and perceived securities. As technologies advance, devices become a fixture of the body and thus related to our identities. Where device starts and human ends becomes increasingly unclear. Visual communication merged with telecommunication spawning networked mobile devices, now small personal computers that are a near permanent extension of the arm. Clocks became smart watches wirelessly connected to our other digital appendages. Social media is a technological Frankenstein showcasing the evolution and combination of communicationbased innovations enabling us to solicit recurring global feedback. It is the ultimate vanity project which allows us to look back at what we have made. “The cell phone is perhaps just the most visible tip of what may be the biggest human artifact of all, the global communication-computation system that literally covers the planet in an unthinkably massive material web of webs and plays a huge role in the lives of both those who have access to it and those who don’t.”144 The dispersion of our identity is mirrored by physical fragmentation of our bodies into digital components. Identities are cast across various interfaces, body parts are removed, replaced and altered and we become more permanently conjoined to digital infrastructures. The cost to alter identity before birth continues to fall. Society increasingly questions our “imagined orders”145 and what it means to be human, requiring a radical reconsideration of the spaces we inhabit. As dispersion and reordering become the norm, the thesis investigates work generated during times of requisite change as a result of technological development. It argues 143 144 145

William D. Eggers, Rob Hamill, and Abed Ali, Data as the new currency: Government’s role in facilitating the exchange, Deloitte Review Issue 13, 2013. Beatriz, and Wigley. Are We Human?, 247-248. Yuval N. Harari, John Purcell, and Haim Watzman, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (London: Vintage, 2019).

111

for a renewed relevance of machine age literature, projects of post WWII subcultures, and experimental media art. Although society continues to evolve at a rapid pace, fragments of the contemporary condition parallel the contradictory psyche of societies driven by technological invention. In transitory periods progress and optimism compete with skepticism and anxiety. Exploitation of consumer culture and resistance to it intensifies. Though highly narrative and imaginary, utopian novels like Samuel Butler’s Erewhon and Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We and experimental architecture of artists and architects like Archigram and Walter Pichler provide insight to historic liminal periods. Their projective futures anticipate consequences of massive changes experienced by society. The sites and techniques explored in the thesis reside within the catalogue of radical and visionary work and provide a basis for an architectural approach. Existing within a perpetual transitional zone that they simultaneously seek to reveal, these identity driven spaces are increasingly affected and challenged by the digital world. The image of our work is constantly shifting as space is not only experienced physically but can have an exponential number of viewers encountering it through the lens of someone else. The thesis positions architecture “not as a problem to solve, but a paradox to manage.”146 It addresses the discontinuities of the discipline and the society within which it operates. The identity of architecture lies in slow, manual practice and a fixed outcome; but it now must act in a fluid, postmobile, post-network context in a progressively oversaturated, unsatisfied society. In this landscape, churches, schools and other institutional establishments convert from concrete to virtual. Historically identified by their formal presence and physical permanence, the programmatic relocation illuminates a conflict between the previously assumed stability of architecture and the mobile surface. The project seeks to negotiate the double structures of our lives and the role that architecture plays in managing it. People desire clarity and security but crave antidotes of ambiguity and ecstasy, satisfied only by risk (or the illusion of it). The liminal spaces of the casino and dating app embody the contradictions of society and provide containers for the evanescent identities we adopt. Residing between the political and artistic, architecture is understood as a cultural media technology which requires an opening and crossing of disciplinary borders. The project abandons 19th and 20th century rationale that architecture is the primary means to communicate culture. It is rather a device to 146

Perel, The State, 188.

113

stimulate thought, question conventional notions, and envisage alternatives. It acknowledges social media as architecture – and architecture as a form of social media. Architecture is recognized as one of many technologies through which we investigate individual identities and collective culture, provoking confrontation with the existing and providing a stage for redefinition and exchange. The performative quality of the discipline is emphasized. The output acts as a stage set for the unfolding of unscripted scenarios; the process engages the architect as a plastic character, released from the previously fixed nature of his identity. The thesis seeks to dissolve binary questions such as art vs architecture / hand vs digital / interior vs exterior, reframing these divisive questions to evaluate how architecture resides within the complex relational conditions of our contemporary society. A cultural negotiator driven by socioculturalpsychotechnological forces, architecture is positioned as a mediator rather than a monument, legacy or other form of permanent representation. Rather than constructing barriers between architecture and other disciplines, entities, and ways of working, it is evaluated for its role in addressing the systems of vectors binding global interconnected societies and its ability to function as a transformative and convertible medium. A method is proposed which is less linear and less fixed. Disregarding a classically “good” resolution for variable investigations, a process of testing ideas that quickly carnate, are analyzed and translated into larger spatial theaters is employed. In this more fluid approach, digital and physical layers are found, created, indexed, assembled, disassembled, rearranged, recast, transmuted, and translated. A cycle of negative, positive and transformative actions suspend (but seemingly propel?) a state of continual experimentation. The project communicates the unsolvable paradox of architecture, a projective reflection of other indigestible phenomenon – the inability to realize a dream, human desire for both stability and adventure, the promises and adverse consequences of technology and our continued creation potentially leading to our destruction.

“When you realize a dream, it is not a dream anymore” – Dominique Crenn, Chef

115

“We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind – mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the pre-empting of any original response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. It is now less and less necessary for a writer to invent fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer’s task is to invent the reality.” – JG Ballard

ILLUSTRATIONS - EXPERIMENTS Film Studies

117

The House (2017)

The Gambler - Remake (2014)

Now You See Me (2013)

Crooked Arrows (2012)

The Hangover (2009)

21 (2008)

Casino Royale (2006)

Revolver (2005)

Walking Tall - Remake (2004)

The Cooler (2003)

Oceans 11 - Remake (2001)

Croupier (1998)

Rounders (1998)

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998 / 1970’s)

Vegas Vacation (1997)

Leaving Las Vegas (1995)

Bugsy (1991 / 1940’s)

Casino (1995 / Early 1970’s)

The Gambler - Original (1974)

Walking Tall - Original (1973)

Oceans 11 - Original (1960)

FILM

Films Selected for Analysis

Scalped (2007 - 2012)

Banshee (2013 - 2016)

Parks and Recreation (x3) (2011 / 2013 / 2015)

Its Always Sunny in Philedelphia (x2) (2010 / 2013)

The Glades (2010)

Big Love (2009)

Futurama (2009)

CSI: New York (2009)

Life (2008)

CSI: Miami (2007)

How I met Your Mother (2007)

Law and Order: Criminal Intent (2006)

Drawn Together (2005)

King of the Hill (2005)

Masters of Horror (2005)

The Sopranos (2002)

The Pj’s (2001)

Malcolm in the Middle (x2) (2000 / 2002)

South Park (2003)

Auf Wiedersehen, Pet (2002)

The Secret World (2012)

Jingle Belle Miniseries (1999 - 2003)

Family Guy (1999) The Simpsons (x2) (2000 / 2006)

GRAPHIC NOVEL / GAMING

DISTRIBUTION LIVE ACTION TV / ANIMATION

Native American Tropes

119 BRIGHT LIGHT REFLECTION (HIGH POLISHED SURFACES) REPETITION OF ELEMENTS NOISE OF SLOT MACHINES

OBSCURING OF SENSES

HIGH CONTRAST FILMING FROM ABOVE REMOTE LOCATION

CLEAR GLASS DOORS THIN FRAME CONTINUATION OF FLOOR & CEILING

BLURRING / EROSION OF BOUNDARIES

ISOLATION / OASIS

FRAME / HEAVY MASSING LOWERED CEILING

DISTRIBUTION ARCHITECTURAL FEATURE

CONTAINMENT / ENCLOSURE

SPATIAL CONDITION

MULTISENSORIAL EXPERIENCE

SENSORY REPRODUCTION

PERCEPTUAL DEPRIVATION

ATMOSPHERIC ARCHITECTURE

PRECEDENTS

Isolation and Oasis Entry to another world, identity is undefined anonmity is the norm. Relief from the isolation, possibilites of new surroundings. Excitement and anxiety, anything can happen. high contrast overhead vantage point duality between city and surrounding environment. Endless, no order Secrecy abundant wealth antagonistic engine reach extends far beyond its tangible limits. Fig 1: Casino, Intro Fig 2: Malcolm in the Middle, S2 Ep5, Casino Fig 3: CSI Miami, SX EpX, XXX

121

123

Containment / Enclosure + Blurring / Erosion of Boundaries Portecochere lanes lead up to steps, steps lead up to doors, ground plane continues in, and the glass doors are framed only for the purpose of keeping them in place while vision first, and then body enters the casino. seamless experience volumes close in around you concealed by density of light imperceptible boundary entry marked by the service men open your door, shake your hand guide you in. Red carpet continues past clear glass doors escorted by a multiplicity of lights thin gold outline eroded by glowing neon Cascading volumes of light guide the eye building envelope swallowed by the darkness of the surrounding night. Grandeur and richness illuminated by the casino, drawn toward entry with the promise of equivalent riches. Unclear threshold lights punctuated by brighter lights, darkness hides true form entry defined only by plane of lights contrasting against the night sky. Fig 1: Casino, Entry to the Tangier Fig 2: Oceans 11, Robbery outside Fig 3: 21, Entry to the Riviera

125

127

Obscuring Of Senses “a continuity between interior and landscape, an inflected surface that knows nothing of the distinctions between inside and outside, artificial and natural” - Bob Somol, Start Spreading the News lights noise of slot machines highly reflective surfaces repetition of elements difficult to differentiate extension to infinity. mirrored surfaces = second plane geometries of light define a thin plane hung like an acoustic ceiling cloud. hotel lights beyond so obscured that they appear to live in the ceiling above. blur of lights, people, slot machines, no sense of boundary expanse of the casino floor. surround sound of slot machines and excitement static elements cloaked in reflective metal cameras monitor the scene below disguised distract attention abundance of people and lights confuse of the eye hardly distinguishable Fig 1: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Entry Fig 2 / 4: Casino, Casino Floor at the Tangier Fig 3: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

129

131

Surveillance pervasive. unnoticed omnipresent and inescapable. duplicity tension exposed poised privelege glimpse net above scaleless figures flat grid appears nothing to ground it successively exposing more of their intent. viewers. performers recognition. disorientation. perplexing image floating in space. Characters filmed constant multiplicity of screens viewing action recognize vantage point two stories operate at once familiar characters active in a parallel stroyline series of events in another space. constantly monitoring direct attention to it flat representation displays depth of space. comes into view. initial image abstraction

Fig 1: Casino, Security in Ceiling Fig 2: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Circus Circus Casino Interior Fig 3: Casino, Entry to Club Fig 4: 21, Security Screens Fig 5: South Park, SX EpX, XXX, Three Feathers Casino Interior Fig 6: South Park, SX EpX, XXX, Three Feathers Casino Interior

“you of all people should know, Terry - in your hotel, there’s always someone watching” -Tess (Julia Roberts), Oceans 11

133

135

137

Endlessness / Excess “what do you think we’re doing out here in the desert? Its all this money. This is the end result of all the bright lights, comp trips, of all the champagne, and free hotel suites, and all the broads and all the booze. It’s all been arranged just for us to get your money.” -Ace, Casino back of house stark contrast representation grey and devoid labrynthian hallways systemitized excess cash. undisguised. Cartons modules reveal another, and another, and another, and eventually visually blends posing denuted environment elevator symmetry. extension sense of order ever present security repetive nature imagine continuing Change factory assembly poured, sorted, rolled, stacked. system order excess and chaos reveals its true purpose. Fig 1: Casino, Counting Room Fig 2: Oceans 11, Back of House Hallways Fig 3 / 4 / 5: Casino, Counting Room 139

141

“For a long time, though, I sat on the photos I was taking. I couldn’t print them until I’d figured out what, exactly, I was doing—I wanted to know why I was taking those pictures. I have a lot of mental categories, but none of them applied. Yet I kept on photographing. For me, often, the synchronic leads and the diachronic follows.” – Martha Rosler on her Airport Photo Series, Art News Interview, 2017

ILLUSTRATIONS - EXPERIMENTS Narratives

143

145

147

“Drawing's value to the arts, as well as its value to activism, lies in its own predisposition to the aleatory, What Henri Michaux has appraised as drawing's bias toward the unanticipated: "Could it be that I draw because I see so clearly this thing or that thing? Not at all. Quite the contrary. I do it to be perplexed again. And I am delighted that there are traps. I look for surprises." The aberrant mark, the false start, the doodle or marginalia, the incomplete erasure, all serve the unpredictable, and all are lost to digital processes. This revelation is the trouvaille of The Activist Drawing.” - Catherine de Zegher / Mark Wigley, The Activist Drawing

ILLUSTRATIONS - EXPERIMENTS Drawings

149

151

153

155

157

159

161

163

“the spectacle interested him, interested him deeply, though it came over him that he wasn’t particularly eager for a way of life represented by marble and gilt and feathered hats...

...No, what siezed his innermost attention, what held him there day after day in noon revery, was the sense of a great, elaborate structure, a system of order, a well planned machine that drew all these people to itself and carried them up and down in iron cages and arranged them in private rooms. He admired the hotel as an invention, an ingenious design, a kind of idea, like a steam boiler or a suspension bridge” -Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer, Steven Millhauser, 1997

165

All experiments in the communication of boundaryless spaces, the five watercolors (representations of the surface) multiplied into 20 collages and merged with the densifying line drawings (representations of the structure) to create a union of external and internal (hidden/visible, concrete/superficial, interior/ exterior, temporary/permanent, authentic/ inauthentic, permanent/fleeting?) . They then intersected with the two narratives (one nonbinary identifying somewhere along the narrative-poem spectrum), film research, and abstractions of the Native American casino (along with other related media). In a discretionary exercise of overlapping the five categories of inquiry, a new media child was birthed. All previous investigations converged into a single exhibit, a 6 minute 26 second film.

167

“The seriousness of play…Its about saying n the looseness of trying different things, images, ideas emerge. So its about not knowing what something means in advance. Its always kind of been in between the things I thought I was doing, that the real work has happened.” “the films opened an enormous door because they gave me a sense that it is possible to work, without a program in advance. That if you work conscientiously and hard at it, and there is something inside you that is of interest, that will come out.” William Kentridge, Anything is Possible

ILLUSTRATIONS - EXPERIMENTS Film

169

https://wasinsar7.wixsite.com/thesis 171

ILLUSTRATIONS - EXPERIMENTS Models

173

“When color signifies anything, it always signifies, as well, a respite from language and history – a position from which we may contemplate absence and death in the paradise of the moment…”

“When art abandons color…it can only recede into the domain of abjection – into the protocols of language, history, and representation. The consequence of this is that all discussion of art under such regimes begins at a position of linguistic regress that renders invisible the complex dialogue between what we want to see and what we want to see represented.” Dave Hickey, Pontormos Rainbow, Air Guitar

175

177

179

“He was struck again by the contradiction in the architecture of hotels, a contradiction that was nothing but the outward expression of a nations inner desire. For here, the technologically modern and up-to-date clashed with a certain nostalgia of decor...farfrom deploring such contradictions, Martin felt deeply drawn to them, as if they permitted people to live in two worlds at once.” -Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer, Steven Millhauser, 1997

“2 into 1 is an even more concise articulation of the triangulated relationship between artist, subject and viewer. Treating emotional truth as if it were the coin under the three fast-shuffled cups of a sidewalk con artist, this video pictures the circulation of meaning as a kind of vaudeville act, fast, funny and a little cruel.” - Unnamed Critic on Gillian Wearing’s 2 into 1

181

“...observations of a post–voyeuristic vision, a hyper–sightedness attracted to unexpected stimuli, infinite detail, and readings formed by a new set of hierarchies.” Diller, Scofidio + Renfro on Overexposed

This blurring of place, space, and identity into something else— something centered on spectatorship, and distraction, and inevitably total surveillance—is not at all how we formerly thought about spatiality and passages across a landscape. That difference is signaled in my project by the lists of phrases accompanying the photographs, lists that themselves changed or intensified after 9/11. Martha Rosler on her Airport Photo Series, Art News Interview, 2017 183

185

187

“Both established and emerging media increasingly work through, within, and on the territory. As a consequence, space is no longer a neutral container in which media can simply take place or come to pass; it responds to the presence of media, aligning their actions with its assets and in turn readjusting its internal configuration to the media’s affordances. Space grounds media, and media reshape space. We can even expand the picture. When the convergence of media and space reaches a certain degree, it elicits a mutual transformation.” Francesco Casetti, Introduction to Mediascapes: A Decalogue

ILLUSTRATIONS - EXPERIMENTS Projection

189

191

193

195

197

“I want the film to show that who the participants chose as characters is a projection of themselves, however far fetched or heinous that persona is, and that catharsis can occur through creative and playful experimentation. What does that tell us about the characters, and about society? Are these people typical of us; are we all playing a role, consciously or unconsciously?” - Gillian Wearing on her film, Self Made

199

201

203

BIBLIOGRAPHY Al, Stefan. The Strip: Las Vegas and the Architecture of the American Dream. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017. Benjamin, Walter, Sam Dolbear, and Esther Leslie. The Storyteller: Tales Out of Loneliness. Translated by Sebastian Truskolaski. London: Verso, 2016. Brown, Denise Scott. “Learning From Pop.” The Journal of Popular Culture VII, no. 2 (1973): 387-401.doi:10.1111/j.00223840.1973.0702_387.x. Campus, Peter. “Peter Campus. Three Transitions. 1973 | MoMA.” The Museum of Modern Art. Accessed March 26, 2019. https://www.moma.org/collection/works/88833. Colomina, Beatriz, and Mark Wigley. Are We Human?: The Archaeology of Design. Zürich, Switzerland: Lars Müller Publishers, 2016. Constant. “A Different City for a Different Life.” October 79 (1997): 109-12. http://www.jstor.org/stable/778847. Dimendberg, Edward. Diller Scofidio Renfro: Architecture after Images. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. “Dan Graham.” Lisson Gallery. Accessed March 26, 2019. https:// www.lissongallery.com/artists/dan-graham. “Daniel Graham.” Daniel Graham | Video Data Bank. Accessed March 26, 2019. http://www.vdb.org/artists/ daniel-graham. Debord, Guy, and Donald Nicholson-Smith. Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books, 2012. Eggers, William D., Rob Hamill, and Abed Ali. Data as the new currency: Government’s role in facilitating the exchange, Deloitte Review Issue 13. 2013. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London: Routledge, 2010. 205

Friedman, Thomas L. The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization. New York: Picador, 2012. Friedman, Thomas L. “It’s a Flat World, After All.” The New York Times. April 03, 2005. Accessed March 25, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/03/magazine/its-aflat-world-after-all.html. Fullerton, Elizabeth. “Gillian Wearing: Do You Feel You Know Me a Bit Now?” ELEPHANT. October 29, 2018. Accessed March 26, 2019. https://elephant.art/gillian-wearing-doyou-feel-you-know-me-a-bit-now/. “Gillian Wearing / 2 into 1 (1997).” YouTube. July 12, 2012. Accessed March 26, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=36WUgFMDY-M. “GILLIAN WEARING – Director.” Gillian Wearing | Self Made. Accessed March 26, 2019. http://selfmade.org.uk/gillian/. Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books, 2008. Harari, Yuval N., John Purcell, and Haim Watzman. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. London: Vintage, 2019. Heynen, Hilde. “New Babylon: The Antinomies of Utopia.” Assemblage, no. 29 (1996): 24. doi:10.2307/3171393. Hickey, Dave. Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy. Los Angeles, CA: Art Issues Press, 2006. “Indigestion.” DS R. Accessed March 26, 2019. https://dsrny.com/ project/indigestion. “It’s a Mobile World After All: Behind the Numbers: Mobile World Congress: Robots, 5G, Foldable Phones and a Smart Litter Box.” February 27, 2019. Accessed March 15, 2019. https://content-na1.emarketer.com/podcast-it-s-amobile-world-after-all. Jones, Luke, and George Gingell. “About Buildings Cities: Episode 48: OMA 1989.” February 11, 2019.

“Junkspace.” OMA. Accessed March 26, 2019. https://oma.eu/ publications/junkspace. Knabb, Ken. Situationist International Anthology. Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2007. Koolhaas, Rem, Bruce Mau, Jennifer Sigler, and Hans Werlemann. Small, Medium, Large, Extra-large: Office for Metropolitan Architecture, Rem Koolhaas, and Bruce Mau. New York, NY: Monacelli Press, 1998. Koolhaas, Rem. Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan. NY, NY: Monacelli Press, 1994. Koolhaas, Rem. “Junkspace.” October 100 (2002): 175-90. doi:10.1162/016228702320218457. Lafargue, Paul. Social and Philosophical Studies. Chicago: C.H. Kerr & Company, 1906. Lawlor, Mary. Public Native America Tribal Self-representations in Casinos, Museums, and Powwows. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006. “Life: Gillian Wearing.” Cincinnati Art Museum. Accessed March 26, 2019. https://www.cincinnatiartmuseum.org/wearing. “Monthly Las Vegas Visitor Statistics Executive Summary.” LVCVA. Accessed March 26, 2019. https://www.lvcva.com/stats-andfacts/visitor-statistics/.

Perel, Esther. “Rethinking Infidelity...A Talk for Anyone Who Has Ever Loved.” Lecture, TED2015. March 5, 2015. https://www.ted.com/talks/esther_perel_ rethinking_infidelity_a_talk_for_anyone_who_has_ever_ loved/up-next?language=en. Perel, Esther. The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity. New York: Harper, 2018.

“Performing Masks: Gillian Wearing at Cincinnati Art Museum :: AEQAI.” AEQAI RSS. Accessed March 26, 2019. https:// aeqai.com/main/2018/10/performing-masks- gillian-wearing-at-cincinnati-art-museum/. 207

Peterson, Kristen. “Dave Hickey and Libby Lumpkin Say Goodbye.” Las Vegas Sun. May 19, 2010. Accessed March 26, 2019. https://lasvegassun.com/news/2010/ may/19/dave-hickey-and-libby-lumpkin-say-goodbye/. Rasmussen, M. B. “The Situationist International, Surrealism, and the Difficult Fusion of Art and Politics.” Oxford Art Journal27, no. 3 (2004): 365-87. doi:10.1093/oaj/27.3.365. Raento, Pauliina, and Kate A. Berry. “Geographys Spin at the Wheel of American Gambling.” Geographical Review89, no. 4 (1999): 590. doi:10.2307/216104. Robinson, Bobby Neal. Aleatory Architecture: The Ethics of Chance as Design Discipline. Master’s thesis, Thesis / Dissertation ETD, 1992. Rorty, Richard. Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Rosenthal, Michael A. “Benjamins Wager on Modernity: Gambling and TheArcades Project.” The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory 87, no. 3 (2012): 261-78. doi:10.1080/001688 90.2012.704344. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. “Why Peter Campus Hates His Most Famous Video.” YouTube. February 28, 2019. Accessed March 26, 2019. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=aVozAnBiZrg. Schwarting, Jen. “Dan Graham: Beyond.” The Brooklyn Rail. July 07, 2009. Accessed March 26, 2019. https:// brooklynrail.org/2009/07/artseen/dan-graham-beyond. Sondervan, Jeroen, NECSUS. July 13, 2017. Accessed March 26, 2019. https://necsus-ejms.org/confronting-the-screen- pipilotti-rist-pixel-forest-at-the-new-museum/. Somol, R. E. “Start Spreading the News.” ANY: Architecture New York, no. 21 (1997): 42-47. Swiped: Hooking Up in the Digital Age. Directed by Nancy Jo Sales. Consolidated Documentaries and HBO, 2018.

Documentary. https://www.amazon.com/Swiped- Hooking-Up-Digital-Age/dp/B07HGRK6RR. “Text Archives Situationist International Texts.” Situationist International Online. Accessed March 26, 2019. https://www.cddc. vt.edu/sionline/si/definitions.html. “The Architecture of Entrapment.” Flash Art. Accessed March 25, 2019. https://flash---art.com/article/the-architectureof-entrapment/. Turner, Victor Witter. The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1967 Venturi, Robert, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour. Learning from Las Vegas. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017. Viola, Bill. “Artist to Artist: Peter Campus-Image And Self.” Art in America. Accessed March 25, 2019. https://www. artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/magazines/ peter-campusimage-and-self/. “What Is It about Dan Graham’s Pavilions? | Art | Agenda.” Phaidon. Accessed March 26, 2019. https://www.phaidon.com/ agenda/art/articles/2014/january/14/what-is-it-aboutdan-grahams-pavilions/. Wolff, Kurt H. Georg Simmel, 1858-1918: A Collection of Essays, with Translations and a Bibliography. Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Pr., 1960. Wurmser, Yoram. “Mobile Time Spent 2018.” EMarketer. June 18, 2018. Accessed March 26, 2019. https://www.emarketer. com/content/mobile-time-spent-2018.

209

DISTRIBUTION DISTRIBUTION

Centralized / Mega Complex

Semi - Distributed

Highly Distributed

RELATIONSHIP RELATIONSHIP TO TO THE THE CITY CITY

Rural Centralization

Exurban / City outside the city

Urban

Mobile

Semi - Mobile

Static

SCALE / MOBILITY

APPENDIX Native American Casinos

211

What is Indian Gaming? Gaming conducted by a federally recognized tribal government on a federal reservation or trust lands

TRIBAL

STATE

FEDERAL

Why is this such a highly charged topic? Understanding the controversy surrounding indian gaming people think of it as a win - lose often economic benefits are weighed against social costs talked about in general terms, when there is a wide variety between tribal identities, goals, state - tribal agreements, and strategies for how money is dispersed

Indian Gaming in Pop Culture

213

Original Bingo Halls / Palaces

Mega Resorts

215

Program for an unbuilt Native American Casino Resort. Along with the 600,000+ square feet of space, the Nation intends to built a manmade lake and surrounding recreation area.

Square Footage: 122,171 76,291 220,496 53,052 53,387 42,516 57, 345 4,968 1,322

Program: Guestroom tower North: Guestroom Tower South: Hotel Amenity Space: Casino Gaming Floor: Retail / F&B: Admin / BOH: Event Center: RV Park Clubhouse: Recreational Check In:

Total Square Footage: 631,548

DAK BOBO GROUP

Program Draft

Inputs / Sums Qty Unit

Program Requirements CASINO & HOTEL RESORT

HOTEL Guest Room Tower - North Tower Guest Rooms Typical King Typical Double Queen Suites 1.5 bay suites 2-bay suites 3-bay suites 4-bay suites Total Hotel Keys Infrastructure Guest room corridors Housekeeping / linen Electrical / IDF Vending Storage Egress stairs/Vertical Circulation Public Elevators and Lobby Service Elevator

Unit

Inputs / Sums Qty Unit

Area Requirements Qty Unit

48 keys 90 keys 138 total typical rooms

48 room bays 90 room bays 138.0 total room bays

401.3 sf/key 461.0 sf/key

19,260.0 sf 41,490.0 sf

12 keys 18 keys 6 keys 2 keys 38 total suites

18 room bays 36 room bays 18 room bays 8 room bays 80.0 total room bays

601.9 sf/key 802.5 sf/key 1,203.8 sf/key 1,605.0 sf/key

7,222.5 sf 14,445.0 sf 7,222.5 sf 3,210.0 sf

176 total keys

218.0 room bays

FOH Qty

Unit

BOH Qty

Unit

92,850.0 sf guest room net

31.58% ratio

29,321.1 sf infrastructure

1 each 1 each

Guest Room Tower - South Tower Guest Rooms Typical King Typical Double Queen

200.0 sf

floors floors

3 ls 1 ls Subtotal North Tower

600.0 sf each 100.0 sf each

200.0 sf

1,800.0 sf 100.0 sf

176 keys

122,171.1 sf (nic balconies)

127 total keys 56 keys 65 keys 121 total typical rooms

Suites 1.5 bay suites 2-bay suites 3-bay suites 4-bay suites

0 keys 6 keys 0 keys 0 keys 6 total suites Total Hotel Keys

Infrastructure Guest room corridors Housekeeping / linen Electrical / IDF Vending Storage Egress stairs/Vertical Circulation Public Elevators and Lobby Service Elevator and Lobby

127 total keys

56 room bays 65 room bays 121.0 total room bays

401.3 sf/key 461.3 sf/key

22,470.0 sf 29,981.3 sf

0 room bays 12 room bays 0 room bays 0 room bays 12.0 total room bays

0.0 sf/key 922.5 sf/key 0.0 sf/key 0.0 sf/key

0.0 sf 5,535.0 sf 0.0 sf 0.0 sf

133.0 room bays

31.58% ratio

57,986.3 sf guest room net 18,311.4 sf infrastructure

1 each 1 each

5 floors 8 floors

3 ls 1 ls Subtotal South Tower

Hotel Podium Hotel Lobby Vestibule Front Desk VIP Position Registration, offices Toilets Living Room / Lobby seating, circulation Bell services Sundries Shop

Inputs / Sums Qty

176 total keys

600.0 sf each 100.0 sf each

127 keys

1,800.0 sf 100.0 sf 76,297.7 sf (not incl balconies)

1 each 3 positions 1 positions 1 each 2 each 1 each 1 each 1.0 each

300.0 sf each 80.0 sf each 120.0 sf each 155.0 sf per position 300.0 2,400.0 sf each 0.6 sf per key 500.0 sf each Page 1

300.0 sf 240.0 sf 120.0 sf 465.0 sf 600.0 sf 2,400.0 sf 105.7 sf 500.0 sf 1601019- Schematic Design - Broken Bow Program.xlsx

217

219

221

SCREENING ARCHITECTURE SCREENING ARCHITECTURE

ING ARCHITECTURE SCREENING ARCHITECTURE SCREENIN

SCREENING ARCHITECTURE SCREENING ARCHITECTURE

ING ARCHITECTURE SCREENING ARCHITECTURE SCREENIN

SCREENING ARCHITECTURE SCREENING ARCHITECTURE

ING ARCHITECTURE SCREENING ARCHITECTURE SCREENIN

SCREENING ARCHITECTURE SCREENING ARCHITECTURE

ING ARCHITECTURE SCREENING ARCHITECTURE SCREENIN

SCREENING ARCHITECTURE SCREENING ARCHITECTURE