Issue23 Hungry by dichotomy udm

23 Hungry

mission Editor Enrique Vicente Ledesma Business Manager Kurt Hilton Staff Kelly Buczniewicz Riley Rinnan JosĂŠ Arturo Joglar-Cadilla Nicole Fricke Evon Yousif Zach Rathwell Aleksia Bogdanovic Jamie Georges Faculty Advisors Professor Tadd Heidgerken Professor Noah Resnick Cover Images: figure 1 and Intaglio Prints series by William Hanagan williamhanagan@gmail.com

PRICE $20.00 US University of Detroit Mercy School of Architecture 4001 W McNichols Rd Detroit, Michigan 48221 313.993.1523 Our digital archive can be found at: http://dichotomy.arch.udmercy.edu

Printing: Heath Press, Royal Oak, MI Copyright ÂŠ 2016 by Dichotomy | University of Detroit Mercy All rights reserved. No part of this issue may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from Dichotomy. ISSN # 0276-5748

Dichotomy, a student-published journal of the University of Detroit Mercy School of Architecture, strives to be the critical link to the discourse on design, architecture, urbanism, and community development. Like the institution, Dichotomy focuses on social justice and critical thought concerning intellectual, spiritual, ethical, and social development issues occurring in and outside of Detroit. The aim of Dichotomy is to disseminate these relevant investigations conducted by students, faculty, and professionals.

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Enrique Ledesma: Editor’s Note

Jeannine Shinoda + Lex Morgan: (m)eat Florence Twu: Dark Ethics

Tasting: Kuzzo’s

Noel Juan Ledesma: Chicano Cravings

Tasting: Dessert Oasis Coffee Roasters

Tasting: Pollo Chapin

Francis Grunow, M. Hall: When Hunger Creates Void In the Heart of Motor City

Tasting: El Rancho

Stephen Vogel: SOA News

Emily Staugaitis and Ali Lapetina: 100 Seeds

Tasting: Rose’s Fine Foods

Gregory K. Serweta, Kaz T. Yoneda: SOCIETY OF INSATIABLE CONSUMPTION

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Andrew Sturm: Introduction

Tasting: Taquería El Rey

J. Nguyen, S. Baik, Z. Luo, S. Lamb, Q. Luchen: A SOCIAL REINTEGRATION PROJECT

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Tasting: Ottava Via

Joyce Hwang: A Brush With Death

Tasting: Cass Cafe

F. Philip Barash: FORT / DA

Tasting: Brooklyn Street Local

Dichotomy 24: Call For Entries

editorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s note

Ladies and gentlemen, I am honored to present to you the dichotomous nature of the few, the many and the outcasts. Limited not by imagination, but the capacity to let ideas overcome the otherwise boring and rudimentary. Issue 23 Hungry represents the satisfaction to the dormant and otherwise neglected ambitions of the creative individual, tamed and harnessed only by the pages you hold before you. Beyond that, this issue is meant to spark and inspire the reader with content designed and executed only to realize those cravings within ourselves. To be Hungry is to desire without cease until we have satisfied that which we lust over. Focused and steady at hand, this team of student editors curated and crafted this issue without neglecting the discourse we hold as valuable to Dichotomy. This issue is filled with a diversity of professional content riddled with a dash of content written by the staff inspired by the topic. Bound only by the pages, we cannot rob you of your fridgeâ&#x20AC;Ś but we can do the next best thing; abduct you of your comfort and challenge you to both discover and feed your temptations. Showing you that being Hungry in this sense is no less a choice then the decision to reject this plate put in front of you. Your Editor,

Enrique Vicente Ledesma Editor

introduction Hungry for Undoing As has been the case in years past, the articles collected here are diverse in position and rich with speculation: - Is the modern architect now more akin to Vampire than Angel? - Can architects transcend traditional client / professional structures to propose solutions which can end homelessness? - How might a deeper understanding of those living in the margins inform the new Detroit to be a more inclusive and successful city going forward? - If we better understand the impact of past mistakes can architects project new models and strategies for age-old urban challenges that will not further deteriorate Detroit? - Are we ready to take a hard look in the neoliberal capitalist mirror and face the role that architects play in the culture of mass consumption? As you read on through the pages of Dichotomy 23: Hungry you will not find reinforcement for the voices of the Old Guard; you will instead find the voices of their undoing. We hope you enjoy it.

Dichotomy 23: Hungry has come to life in a very distinct historical moment. It is a time when the “other” is once again being held up as scapegoat, the lie has become “post-truth” and the air is filled with the sounds of white supremacists and neoliberal CEOs, arm-in-arm, beating the drums of war. With the ink still wet on the newspapers announcing the winner of the presidential election; AIA National’s CEO, Robert Ivy, rushed to release a statement embracing the incoming administration—even though their platform is in direct opposition with almost all of the AIA’s stated values . Architects around the country responded by calling Ivy out as tone deaf, out of touch and not representative of the architectural community; but before a few months had passed it was revealed that the entire 2017 National AIA Convention had been planned without a single woman architect Keynote Speaker . Worse yet, it seems this blatant gender disparity went unnoticed until the slate of speakers was announced publicly, causing a mad scramble to rearrange the panels to avoid a call for boycott. All of this points to a problem that goes way beyond Robert Ivy to something deep and structural about the culture of architects in the United States—particularly the old boys’ club—-the Old Guard. This is still the norm in a profession which was sternly lectured by civil rights leader Whitney M. Young Jr. almost 50 years ago, referring to architects then as a profession that is, “…most distinguished by your thunderous silence and your complete irrelevance.” in the realm of social and civic contributions. The AIA has since named an award after Mr Young but has obviously failed to structurally address his critique at scale. Theodore Parker and Dr. King tell us that “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” It would seem that even in comparison to that elongated measure, architecture has been slow to progress, but this Dichotomy offers us hope that the current generations aim to hit the accelerator. Andrew M. Sturm ‘99 Author Sub-info

010 012 014 016 018 Jeannine Shinoda Lex Morgan

(m)eat Lex Morgan Lancaster is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where they are completing a dissertation on queer abstraction in contemporary art. Their related article, “Feeling the Grid: Lorna Simpson’s Concrete Abstraction,” was published in ASAP/Journal (2017), and “The Wipe: Sadie Benning’s Queer Abstraction” is forthcoming in Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture. Lex as worked at the Cleveland Museum of Art, The National Gallery of Art, and has curated two exhibitions in Madison, Wisconsin around the concept of queer domesticity. Jeannine Shinoda is an artist and architect living in Los Angeles, CA. She is an adjunct professor of architecture at Woodbury University – Burbank. Her current work in installation and sculpture is performance based and regionally specific. (m)eat is a project that has been exhibited in Madison, WI and Chicago, IL. The work included in this publication was made with the cooperation and support of the University of Wisconsin, Madison – Meat Sciences and Muscle Biology Laboratory and the Department of Art. “After a Cook, Smoke Cook, Cook and a Cold Shower” / Frankfurter and Casing

(M)EAT

(m)eat Jeannine Shinoda The project (m)eat began as a simple idea to create a flip book using bologna as a medium. The aim was to insert a short narrative into a lunch time staple. What I discovered in the process of creating this work was that the story of the bologna was equally if not more interesting than the stories inside the bologna. Via (m)eat, I began to investigate bologna’s material complexity and my own location within a system of consumption. Let us first begin with the whole animal. When the body becomes architecture – we are prone to see this corporal room as an empty space. The metaphor leads us to visualize a building using the skeleton to generate proportions (structure) or spatially arranged around bodily functions (adjacencies and program). What if instead of imagining a hollow form, we envision a live body, full – of liquid, muscle and organ? What if we made form of not the solid and rigid, but the soft and the flesh? Using the meat that is separated from the bone and the organs cleaved from the body, what would happen if the deconstructed solid rather than the void became the volume generator? When making bologna or frankfurters, you must combine ice water with raw meat(s), pureeing the mixture until the texture of the muscles is no longer distinguishable and the proteins are left un-tethered by the chopping and the salt. This highly sticky and malleable material, which

is more liquid than solid, is full of possibilities but lacks a distinct form. At this point, the form potential of this semi-liquid material is defined only by the mold that can carry it.

020” / Cow Ear

Historically, the internal organs (stomach, rounds/small intestine, caps/caecum, middles/ large intestine, bungs and bladders) of animals were used to encapsulate products using the blood, brains, liver and smaller bits of muscle meat. When we think of the shape of meat beyond the constructed cut of the butcher, it is often the roundness of a meatball or a sausage stuffed into an intestinal casing. A meat emulsion can act much like concrete, plaster, cake batter, or Jell-o. Homogeneous and stripped of its directionality, the anywhere-ness of these materials in their liquid state means that shape is defined by gravity and the container. The parameters of liquids or emulsions create

opportunities to explore the potentials of container forms as well as the imperfections of a vessel (joints and leaks) and the transitions between the controlled and unrestrained (surface tension and meniscus). The transformation of a meat emulsion from liquid to solid – begins with addition of heat and the binding/solidification of the proteins caused by the cooking process. To create a juicy and consistent bologna, the meat must be degassed before being stuffed into a casing and warmed until the internal temperature reaches 158 degrees Fahrenheit. The combination of emulsifying agents, the removal of air, the consistent pressure exerted by the casing materials and the modulation of temperature extremes keep the fat and water molecules evenly dispersed. Any deviations such as a fast rise in temperature or failure to degas the emulsion can result in a heterogeneous product: a tougher meat with pockets of fat, air and gelatin. Thus bologna’s casing must be a closed container that distributes pressure evenly and stretches with the expansion of the meat caused by cooking. While this brings to mind pneumatic structures and balloon forms, modern meat innovations have broken the typology of the amorphously soft meat form with the standardized circles of sandwich meats, cuboids of SPAM and tear drop shapes of canned ham. Processed meat’s aim for consistency has led to a normative of rigid geometries and branded shapes. Today the major distinction between a modern beef hot dog and a slice of beef bologna lies solely in the diameter of the cylinder. Unlike other

“O_S_C_A_R” / Inkjet on Watercolor Paper, Frame, Bologna and Nail

products that are characterized by the type of meat used to produce them, the individual and/ or combinations of proteins used in bologna are far less important than the familiar flavor profile and texture of this distinctly American product. For me, this external constraint and internal freedom meant that multiple proteins could be used simultaneously while still maintaining the bologna-ness of the product. The section of a bologna loaf became an opportunity for image; the length of the loaf, the limitation of a story; each protein, a color in a palette. Change happened in the 1/8” of a slice and the shapes evolved with the pace of consumption. Imagine going to the deli counter to get a few pages of a book. What story would you like to see in your bologna sandwich?

(M)EAT

“An Unexplicable Coincidence” / Beef and Chicken Bologna

Documentary Images by the artist

“After a Cook, Smoke Cook, Cook and a Cold Shower” / Frankfurter and Casing

Documentary Images by the artist

(M)EAT

Process in (m) eat Lex Morgan Lancaster The performative power of oscillating terms—of nouns becoming verbs, of a static material yielded by live active processes, of bodily ingestion (eat) that also sounds like social interaction (meet)— signals another kind of play at work in the exhibition (m)eat; the playful tension between the formal or material concerns that prompt sustained investigation of an object and the interpersonal relationships that form when our conceptual trajectories lead us through another kind of process. This particular process is one that implicates both art making and economic systems of production, for which the circular form of the bologna provides a generative medium. This is a cyclical, repetitive process of both industrial systems and human consumption. After the turn to abjection in contemporary art of the 1980s and 90s, it is not unusual to see works that deal explicitly with bodily processes, or to see conceptual art objects themselves that are made of animal substances such as lard. After “relational aesthetics,” it is not necessarily surprising to view food as art, and serving or eating as a creative process or performative catalyst. Inspired in various ways by artwork of recent decades, and extending some older concerns around commodity culture in sixties art, (m) eat conveys no clear political or moral stance about its own content. This might prompt us

to ask, again, whether creating a spectacular example of consumerist production can also enact a critical reflection upon these same systems. Is there power in complicity? The answer might come to us in the deceptively simple design of the bologna medium: the circle that reflects upon the repetition of food processing and the movements of human ingestion, of insidiously catchy jingles, and the cultivation of tastes that develop through habits of consumption that are intimate but never entirely personal. These are the repetitious patterns of a political-economic system from which we cannot discharge ourselves. But within this system, as the objects and actions in (m)eat remind us, there are opportunities for poaching and interventions that yield repetition with a difference.(m)eat supplies both the congenial space of the deli as an interactive performance and the altered

Documentary Image by Amy Cannestra

Documentary Image by Jim Escalante

material objects of the meat industry served up in a white gallery cube. Both forms of display are exposures of consumer exchange processes: we meet them with acceptance as well as wonder at the overlooked spectacles of violent production and sweet nostalgia. Without the didactic claim that something is amiss, that things could be different, (m)eat asks that we approach the tedious everyday exchanges of an industrial animal/object with a new awareness of our own complicity at the end of the production line. With all of the hopes and wishes we invest in the products we buy and ingest, is it possible that this processing, packaging, and serving of animals as food is already reflective of what we want, of how we consider our own lives; that our values of “purity” are already

undermined in the production of nothing less than mid-western tradition? After all, there is nothing more natural and American than a bologna sandwich, we assume. But when put on display in a gallery, removed from the deli aisle, that which is ordinary becomes very strange. There is a disjunction between what the bologna represents, and how it is rendered in various forms as a conceptual art medium. (m)eat denaturalizes a loaded and significant consumer food product, returning us to some of the most critical concerns of contemporary art and life. And if we are complicit, it is within the systemic activities and relationships of production and consumption that we find small measures of intervention; the alterity that is already there, implied in the circular patterns of the product itself.

(M)EAT

Endnotes 1) Loughborough University, School of Civil & Building Engineering, UK 2) Chongqing University, School of Urban Construction and Environmental Engineering, China 3) Rural land is different as it’s actually owned by individuals or rural collectives. This land should be purchased or compensated for by the local government. The land value of rural land is a fraction of urban land; however, local governments have the authority to change the land over which immediately increases its value (up to 40x). 4) The tier labelling system for Chinese cities is an unofficial system that represents a city’s economic development which includes GDP, infrastructure, transportation systems, etc. The tier system is often used to help companies prioritize key markets. 5) Within the last two years construction of villas has been made illegal by the Chinese government as a wasteful form of housing. 6) The home on the left did a refit prior to moving in, but didn’t have enough money to refit the windows. Two years on now, they have money to refit the windows and the lower panels while living in the home. 7) It’s worth noting that a law was passed in 2007 that provides owners with a level of reassurance that the government will not take the land away from them at the end of the lease period; however the owner is likely to have to pay to lease the land from the government again.

References 1) Bosker, B. 2013. Original Copies: Architectural Mimicry in Contemporary China. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press & University of Hawaii Press. 2) Campanella, T. 2008. The Concrete Dragon: China’s Urban Revolution and what it means for the world. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. 3) Han, S. and Wang, Y. 2001. Chongqing. Cities 18 (2): 115-125. Miller, T. 2012. China’s Urban Billion. London: Zed Books. 4) Ren, X. 2013 Urban China. Cambridge: Polity Press. 5) Shepard, W. 2015. Ghost Cities of China. London: Zed Books.

Every time I drove on Livernois Ave, passing the Historic Avenue of Fashion. I see a large line out the door of Kuzzo’s, I knew I’d have to stop by one day and give it a try. Kuzzo’s is surrounded by beautiful art galleries, boutiques and other businesses worth checking out. The place is always full for a reason. The food is awesome, when you walk in you greeted with two parts of the restaurant. One side is a long bar and some seating area. One of its walls has an incredible painting of the late Tupac Shakur. The main dining area also has beautiful paintings adorning the walls. Walking into the place and feeling the friendly and welcoming environment is very pleasure. We were seated within few minutes and our server was extremely nice. The service was great, food came quickly, and the restaurant had a fun vibe. I enjoyed my colorful salad and the friendly environment of the community and I will like to go back to try their colorful refreshing drinks.

Evon Yousif at Kuzzo’s

022 024 026 028 030 032 Florence Twu

Dark Ethics

Vampiric Realities In Contemporary Film Florence Twu is a Taiwanese-American architect and writer based in Chicago, Illinois. She engages with issues of knowledge, space, and power in our contemporary political economy. Her recent written work has been featured in MONU, Bartlett LOBBY, Dichotomy, and MAS Context. In design practice, she has contributed to projects ranging from multi-media installations to supertall buildings. She currently teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the department of Architecture, Interior Architecture, and Designed Objects (AIADO).

The girl resists

DARK ETHICS

Dark Ethics Florence Twu

Introduction During a tumultuous period much like our own, architect Jeremy Till proposed that architects consider themselves “angels with dirty faces,”1 in order to address what he saw as the profession’s collusion with 1980s Thatcherite capitalism. The angels he looked to for his model of ethical architectural engagement exist in the filmic world of Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire (1987). Set in West Berlin before the fall of the Wall, the film depicts a socially-alienated society watched over by angelic beings who intently observe every thought and action. Unable to intervene in human affairs because of their angelic status, the angels nevertheless wonder what it would be like to be human. “To blacken.. fingers reading the paper,” one muses, and then to “absent-mindedly rub a cheek,”2 Till adds. One angel, Damiel, crosses into the human world when he falls in love with a trapeze artist. In his exceptional movement between worlds, Till saw the ability to dissolve intractable binaries plaguing both the profession and world at large. Damiel’s crossing underscores the need for architects to engage in “a continual movement between retreat and immersion in the world,” a movement that is necessary because, following Merleau-Ponty, “one must be able to withdraw and gain distance in order to become fully engaged.”3

Angels with dirty faces, “at times hovering like light doves, at others returning to grounded, messy experiences – androgynous dreamers of worlds full of flaws and contingencies.”4 Are they still appropriate models for architects today or have times changed beyond the effects of their divine spirits? Faraway, So Close! (1993), Wenders’ sequel to Wings of Desire, provides potential insight. Set in now post-Communist Berlin shortly after reunification, the film focuses on an angel named Cassiel. In Wings of Desire, he peered into the mind of a young man contemplating suicide but was unable to intervene as the man fell to his death. In Faraway, So Close!, Cassiel is redeemed, miraculously joining the human world just in time to save a young girl from falling to her death from a balcony. As a member of the mortal world, however, Cassiel’s driving desire to both do and be good are repeatedly sabotaged or revealed to be morally questionable. Tricked into drinking and gambling away all of his money, a destitute Cassiel laments, “Why can’t I be good?” Later on, Cassiel takes on what appears to be a respectable valet position, only to discover that his employer is dealing in weapons and pornography.

Reporting from the Front As critical architecture came back into vogue at the 2016 Venice Biennale – so recent, yet already so distant – a vocal contingent of the architectural profession seemed to be shouting, “Look, look how we can be good!” In doing so, the gothic realities of architectural practice were brought to the fore. As the curator of an exposition focused on addressing urgent issues of housing, climate change, and violent conflict, architect Alejandro Aravena curiously dismissed any attempts to apply “dove-like” intentions to his actions, however. Commenting on his low-cost housing model, he said, “We’re [Elemental] not particularly good people, we’re not generous, we’re not going for a romantic

Figure 1: The girl

Has Cassiel become Walter Benjamin’s Angelus Novus, able only to stare in horror after realizing the futility of acting with good intentions?

“But I’m.. hungry.” - Ava, Only Lovers Left Alive Figure 2: The girl

hippy approach. The project started from a very pragmatic, cold-blooded reading of the facts.”5 Aravena embodies a figure simultaneously less divine – but more effective – than that of angel with a dirty face.6 The world he belongs to has other answers for Cassiel’s pleading question.

DARK ETHICS

Vampiric Realities Prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall, global political and moral realities were largely polarized into Communist versus Democratic camps. Inserted into such a simple dialectic, the demolition of the wall is easily interpreted as a victory for an eternal democratic system – “the end of history,” as Francis Fukuyama and others hoped. Nearly three decades later, democracy has hardly flourished world-wide as had been hoped for. Established democracies manipulate the meanings of “good,” “evil,” and “truth” to justify endless small-scale wars under the guise of “humanitarian intervention.” In spite of well-meaning intentions, “rescued” peoples reignite hatred against their “saviors” in endless feedback loops of brutality and dysfunction. Financially, non-democratic nations in the

Figure 3: Girl playfully mirroring an old man’s movements

Middle East and China have sustained the global architectural community through major economic downturns. As such, our current world has more similarities to that of Bad City, the imaginary setting of Iranian-American director Ana Lily Amirpour’s film A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014). Like a classic Hollywood film noir, Amirpour presents an ambivalent moral reality, but in Bad City, distinctions between good and bad are even more thoroughly confounded. The lonesome Girl of the title is revealed to be a strikingly beautiful vampire, who, unlike her Romantic predecessors, attempts to act with good intentions. [Figs. 1, 2] Shortly after she is introduced, she maims a local pimp in an act

of vigilante justice. In later scenes, however, we watch as she mirrors the motions of an old man walking home in the dark, terrorizing him primarily for her own amusement. [Fig. 3] Another main character, Arash, dutifully cares for his drug addicted father while indulging in Ecstasy himself. Subversively taking after the rule-less quality once attributed to Western frontier towns, Bad City becomes a place where even vampires can be compassionate and self-aware. Even when presented the perfect opportunity, amidst a romantic interlude, the Girl resists the urge to feast on Arash’s blood [Fig. 5] because he demonstrates kindness towards her. In another scene, the two of them discuss music and

Figure 4: Girl walks

hamburgers while sitting outside. Talk peters out and as Arash moves in to kiss the Girl, she stops him, saying, “I’ve done bad things. I’m bad.” Arash laughs and says, “Obviously.” She persists, “You don’t know the things I’ve done.” He returns, “And you don’t know the things I’ve done.” [Fig. 4] Both recognize that they have dirty hands, of different orders, simply through the day-to-day motions of existing in Bad City.

DARK ETHICS

Hunger American director Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive (2013) brings the motive and reality of hunger to the fore. Adam and Eve, an elegantly cosmopolitan vampire couple, have learned to control their bloodthirsty urges over the many centuries they have lived among human beings. Both hundreds of years old, they spend their time indulging in culture [Fig. 6] – primarily literature and music – having established socially-acceptable systems for procuring human blood. Adam, posing incognito as “Dr. Faust,” regularly visits “Dr. Watson”

Figure 5: The girl resists

at a local blood bank to purchase thermosfulls of O-negative. Eve, too, has her source. When they feed, blood is sipped neatly out of glass goblets rather than with bared fangs out of human throats. [Fig. 7] In Jarmusch’s world, vampires have learned to master – though not transcend – their primal natures, further refining and civilizing their image. Their extraordinary hunger replaces the “greed, revenge, lust, and craven fear” of traditional film noir as “the most powerful and effective human [passion].”7 The emphasis on

hunger, as a basic need, further complicates the previously central role of crime, typically that of cold-blooded murder. The film is also pointedly set in Detroit, site of the Second Industrial Revolution and victim of vampirism of another sort. Less referenced, but also relevant, is Detroit’s place as an epicenter of cultural production and commodification. Motown mogul Berry Gordy began his business with the goal of adapting Henry Ford’s assembly line model to the music industry. Now a star burnt out, Jarmusch’s film lingers on signs of the slow decline of the American empire: decrepit houses, vacant lots, climate change evident in the untimely emergence of mushroom caps, a city with coyotes running in its streets. The figure of the vampire has been associated with the mechanisms of capitalism since Marx’s Capital. The literary quality of his work involves a consistent vampire motif in addition to gory language. Most directly, Marx writes, “Capital is dead labour, that, vampirelike, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.”8 This opportunistic animation of capital is a far cry from the vampire’s first appearance in John William Polidori’s 1819 story, “The Vampyre.” Polidori transforms the feral creatures of southeastern European lore into the intellectual and aristocratic predecessors of Jarmusch’s Adam and Eve. Anti-Enlightenment

creatures, Polidori’s vampires feed on the blindly enlightened who cannot see beyond the confines of their rational world to acknowledge other less rational possibilities, such as the existence of the undead. Outside of Western contexts, vampire figures have appeared in cultural imaginaries during times of political and economic crisis, manifesting as beastly chupacabras in Latin America and acting as accomplices in governmental conspiracies in Africa.9 Marx’s desirous, unprincipled, and insatiable creature appears in the character of Ava, Eve’s younger sister, whose arrival in Detroit brings only increasing chaos to the film. Ava feeds with an undisciplined appetite driven more by romantic desire than physical need. She kills Adam’s sole human friend, Ian, in a fit of amorous misjudgment by drinking too much of his blood. The murder forces Adam and Eve to hastily retreat to Eve’s home in Tangiers where they find that the source of her sanitized blood supply, Lord Byron himself, is on his deathbed. The two famished lovers wander the streets of Tangiers, deliberating their fate. [Fig. 8] Rather than solve their problem, however, Eve uses the remainder of their money to buy Adam an oud, a musical instrument that can feed his senses but not his stomach. As hunger – and the accompanying instinct to survive – overtakes them, they set their sights on a young couple to feed on, musing “What choice do we have?”

DARK ETHICS

Terrain A fallen angel wonders, “Why can’t I be good?” A famished vampire muses, “What choice do we have?” What both have in common is that, unlike the angels of Wings of Desire, there is no longer any way to retreat from the world. Inextricably immersed in unresolvable moral and ethical entanglements of capitalism, Reinier de Graaf contends that “Architecture has now become a tool of capital, complicit in a purpose antithetical to its social mission.”10 The form of this messy human world of moral ambiguity and thwarted good intentions that

necessitates complicity is well-illustrated by philosopher Tim Morton’s notion of “dark ecology.” What a dark ecological awareness, there is no neutral ground from which to act or think ecologically. Also invoking film noir, he writes, The form of dark ecology is that of noir film. The noir narrator begins investigating a supposedly external situation, from a supposedly neutral point of view, only to discover that she or he is implicated in it.11

Figure 6: Eve elegantly drinking blood from a delicate glass

Morton’s ethical actors traverse the endless moral terrain of a strange loop or Möbius strip, epitomized in film by Cary Grant’s dilemma in Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief (1955). What is at stake in Hitchcock’s film is luxurious, inessential, and excessive: the jewels of the conspicuously wealthy. What grounds a more visceral, fundamental model? The universal need of hunger, perhaps, and what better character than that of the vampire to illustrate the inescapable loops of need, desire, survival, and hunger that drive our world? Referencing Augier, Marx writes, “If money, according to Augier, “comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek,” capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.”12 Compared to Wenders’ newsprint-dirtied faces, the vampires discussed indicate that there is much more at stake.

Figure 7: Description

“What choice do we have?” - Adam, Only Lovers Left Alive

Figure 8: Eve amid her beloved books

DARK ETHICS

End Notes 1. Jeremy Till, “Angels with Dir ty Faces,” 1995, https://jeremytill.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/post/ attachment/43/1995_Angels_with_Dir ty_Faces.pdf. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. “Refugee Tents Are a Waste of Money, Says Alejandro Aravena,” Dezeen, November 30, 2015, http://www.dezeen.com/2015/11/30/alejandro-aravena-humanitarian-architecture-refugee-tents-waste- money-emergency-shelter-disaster-relief/. 6.

See Dichotomy 22, “Slouching Towards …”

Pippin, 7.

Marx, 163.

Luise White, Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa, Studies on the History of Society and Culture (Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press, 2000).

10. Reinier de Graaf, “‘Architecture Is Now a Tool of Capital, Complicit in a Purpose Antithetical to Its Social Mission,’” Architectural Review, April 25, 2015, http://www.architectural-review.com/rethink/viewpoints/architecture-is-now-a-tool-of-capital-complicit-in-a- purpose-antithetical-to-its-social-mission/8681564.fullar ticle/. 11. Mor ton, Timothy. Dark ecology: for a logic of future coexistence. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. 12.

Marx, 538. Marie Angier: “Du Crédit Public.” Paris, 1842.

As the waitress first approaches there is always an awkward moment when neither of us know whether to talk in Spanish or in English. In either case, the customar y chips and salsa always makes its way to the table. As all the hanging posters of Mexican beer adver tisements stare at you from the wall, we all feel the need to order a Mexican bottled Coke seeing as it has a “more natural taste” than those produced locally. While mariachi music is playing on the radio and a telenovela is displayed on a TV screen in the backg round, ever yone orders the same, yet different tacos. Once the tacos ar rive we begin to question which taco is who’s as they hand a larg e tray with ever yone’s tacos mixed up. As we finish eating our tacos we begin to question whether or not it is a nostalgic environment. Seeing as it is located within Mexicantown in Southwest Detroit, it attempts to create a nostalgic environment for those longing for their own culture. As I look around I find myself alone in the restaurant, eating alongside an oriental tourist who seemed lost and a constr uction worker having lunch.

José Arturo Joglar-Cadilla at Taquería El Rey

CHICANO CRAVINGS

036 038 040 042 044 046 048 Noel Ledesma

Chicano Cravings I remember when I was a kid, waking up to the tune of “La Cucaracha” coming from the air-horn of a beat up, Nissan pick-up truck. The guy it belonged to was a friend of the neighbor across the street. He would pick up the neighbor for work every morning. And every time he pulled up, he would hit his horn, playing that song. That neighborhood was never quiet. I can remember hearing all the stereos. In the 90’s, you would hear Spanish music, Rap music, Freestyle Dance music, and then all of the different ice cream truck songs mixed in there. You would hear all the people, all of the life; driving, talking, laughing, crying, children playing. Whenever I am asked, “What do you remember the most about growing up in Southwest Detroit,” that is one of the first things that comes to mind; the sounds.

CHICANO CRAVINGS

Borders & Cages Blood is thicker than water Still waters run deep We roll deep Roll with it It’s not enough Enough is enough Is it ok? Okay Already Already the majority of the minorities We will be the majority Be By any means

I Dropped Something Naw, Man... Like I was sayin’... Hold on... What was I sayin’... Oh yea. So we was talkin’ in class about this shit on God is dead. I forget OL’Boy’s name but he was talkin’ some real shit. He said God was dead because people gettin’ too logical, too serious, like they be lackin; creativity and imagination, cuz people, even nowadays, just be looking for facts; you know, shit you can prove. I mean, why? You know? You know? Check it, you can’t prove the spirit exists, there ain’t no “spirit x-ray.” I dropped something.

CHICANO CRAVINGS

The arctic winter air rushes through the door as another person seeks escape from the frigid elements. Behind me is what I would descried as a low key industrial space, not unlike what you find scattered though out the city. The free floating island serves as shop for the baristas accompanied by a typical chalkboard menu. A stage fashioned with a minimalist drum set can be seen in the back of the room tucked into a nook surround by what can be describes as eclectic objects on the walls. Yet the draw isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t the space, rather my attention is focused outside, the energy of capital park during lunch has me entranced. The businessman, young hipsters, construction workers and hustlers all flow in and out, almost seeming to be in one large performance, people darting between traffic, angry taxi drivers, and all. The Desert Oasis plays the secondary role nicely, drawing off capital park, heedful to not be in the way. The minimal obstructions also allow natural light to pour in anchoring this connection to Capital Park. The spell is only broke by the rushing winter air as my someone else enters, my friend, whom I meet at the counter to refresh an average latte only to return and revel at flow of energy, now with better company.

Zach Rathwell at Dessert Oasis Coffee Roasters

050 052 054 056 058 John Nguyen Stephen Baik Ziyang Luo Sean Lamb Qian Luchen

A Social Reintegration Project John Nguyen, Stephen Baik, Ziyang Luo, Anh-Duc Nguyen, Qian Yuchen and Sean Lamb, are Master of Architecture students at the University of Toronto’s John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design. They come from different architectural backgrounds, but share a common interest in design thinking. * A special thank you to Prof. Prof. Mauricio Quiros for all the

Facing: Plate from Owen Jones’s “The Grammar of Ornament”, 1856.

Ted Kesik and Asst. assistance and advice.

A SOCIAL REINTEGRATION PROJECT

A Social Reintegration Project John Nguyen, Stephen Baik, Ziyang Luo, Sean Lamb, Qian Luchen Shelter-seekers1 encounter significant social and financial difficulties that often go unnoticed by the general population. In particular, prejudices based on socio-economic status stigmatize people living in shelters. The need for robust housing strategies has become more pressing within the last few years as people had lost their hoWmes during the recession. According to the Canadian Homeless Research Network, an estimated 200,000 people are homeless in Canada in any given year; 30,000 on any given night, of which 5086 are based in Toronto, Ontario (Gaetz, 2013). Covenant House Toronto 2 estimates that there are as many as 1000-2000 homeless youth a night in Toronto. An annual estimated 300 babies are born to mothers who are homeless in the city of Toronto3. In the city, there are shelters that provide acute services for the homeless such as food, medical services and around-the-clock mental health care. These shelters are necessary and vital services, however, in their narrow mandates they do not address larger issues of stigma and social integration of shelter-seekers with the sheltered. As emphasized by “Housing First” homelessness advocates, shelter-seekers are no different in their “readiness” or ability than the sheltered; but nonetheless they encounter daily challenges that could be resolved primarily through shelter and work. Social integration and rehabilitation are addressed in our proposal through a facility

that houses shelter seekers and provides all necessary facilities including a medical centre, room and board resources, and classrooms, while normalizing social interactions between the sheltered and shelter seekers. The facility incorporates a spectrum of gardens providing benefits to its population: vegetable gardens maintained by the residents’ year round defray food costs while engendering a sense of responsibility in residents, while healing gardens provide a space of refuge to destress and step away from the more activity based zones on the street level. Central to the proposal is a reintegration program that emphasises personal autonomy and responsibility in the form of employment and aid in finding permanent residence. For some long- term members of the facility these programs may primarily provide therapeutic benefit; for others is may serve as a bridge to full-time employment and self-sufficiency outside the facility. A variety of programs are made available to members, allowing them to live comfortably at the facility, while providing opportunities to work and take responsibility in managing and maintaining vegetable gardens. In addition, the program provides job support and employment services that aid members in finding permanent employment and a permanent residence outside of the facility. Produce garden act as a source of income for residents, allowing them to build management and team working skills. Residents working in

the garden grow and produce fresh vegetables to be used in the facility’s restaurant front. The inhabitants manage and maintain the store as part of the reintegration program. The homeless encounter many hurdles in finding employment that the well-sheltered may have never imagined; Nick Adolfo’s documentary The Homeless highlights these employment barriers: in addition to a difficult economy, the homeless are at a significant disadvantage to the sheltered as they must have a permanent mailing address, a social insurance number, and an identification card. The assistance provided by workers in the reintegration program allows members of the facility to not only receive basic employment aid services such as resume writing,

but also homeless-specific aid in obtaining the proper paperwork and identification needed to gain employment or receive financial support from the government such as a personal mailing box, giving residents a fixed address. The overall goal of reintegration will be to create a sense of autonomy and community for the residents thereby destigmatizing their lack of permanent shelter, as well as a sense of living stability the less fortunate in today’s society. There exist precedent programs with similar structures discussed in Rae Bridgman’s StreetCity: Rehousing the Homeless (2005). The success of the StreetCity development project has provided insight into the issues and problems that are typically encountered and how they are resolved.

A SOCIAL REINTEGRATION PROJECT

The key elements of success to the project was that to, a degree, shelter seekers had the opportunity to contribute to the operations and developments of the project; “it represents a living example of what can happen when those who have been perceived as a problem have been able to step forth and out of their own behalf ” (Bridgman, 2005. p 188). Summarized by a resident: “I can be seen or I can see. I’m not invisible. I’m part of the world” (Bridgman, 2005. P 110). Hence, the proposed reintegration project for shelter- seekers will help in creating a sense of belonging within the community.

Beyond providing amenities and resources for shelter-seekers, the project aims to bolster the mental health of residents. Environmental psychologists and community organizations have spoken to the social and psychological benefits of horticultural therapy (Kaplan and Kaplan 1989, Devlin and Arneill 2003). Employment, such as in the proposed produce garden, can provide opportunities for increased interaction, which is known to promote “social inclusion among vulnerable and isolated groups” (Sempik and Rickhuss, 2014). Experience in an active working environment serves as a model for outside employment, where social skills

and etiquette can be modelled. Inhabitants can also work closely with other members of the facility, community, and the general public. Regular light physical labour in the garden and store front provides routine and exercise. In working at the facility, the opportunity to interact with others is naturally encouraged, decreasing residents’ sense of exclusion. Gardening work in particular is known for its therapeutic benefit. According to Horticulture Therapist, “horticultural therapy is a formal practice that uses plants, horticultural activities, and the garden landscape to promote wellbeing for its participants” (Taylor, 2008). By

working outdoors, the members of the facility will be able to connect with nature, which is an inherently therapeutic practice recognized by salutogenic designers known to create a sense of calm and well-being (Kaplan and Kaplan 1989, Devlin and Arneill 2003). Maintaining a horticultural practice also builds social skills by encouraging people to work as a team and learn to communicate with each other. Beyond the benefits of housing and socialization, the inclusion of horticulture therapy in the reintegration program is a unique way to motivate and soothe (Haller & Kramer, 2006. p 360).

A SOCIAL REINTEGRATION PROJECT

This project prioritizes sheltering and encounter on a day-to-day basis, while making reintegration as the first steps in restoring use of well-known therapeutic principles. dignity and autonomy to local shelter-seekers. Though the facility is seen as a typology that may In providing shelter and work first, our be replicated elsewhere, we propose a site-specific proposal is consistent with “Housing First” intervention replacing the existing shelter, Seaton models to ending homelessness which posit House, on George Street, south of Gerrard that shelter-seekers gain the most when we Street East. The property is approximately 1 acre, eliminate their barriers to work and lodging which allows adequate space for boarding rooms, so that they may feel autonomous and capable gardens, restaurants and extra utilities. In keeping (Gaetz, 2013). In doing so, the project moves with our aim of a realistic, pragmatic project, beyond the traditional role of homeless shelters the estimated cost of this property will be by tackling fundamental issues of stigma and comparable to that of City of Toronto’s current societal barriers the shelter-seeking population study proposal for a new shelter at the same site.

A SOCIAL REINTEGRATION PROJECT

Acknowledgements Bridgman, Rae. StreetCities: Rehousing the Homeless. Peterborough: University of Toronto Press, Higher Education Division, 2005. Devlin, Ann S. and Allison B. Arneill. “Health Care Environments and Patient Outcomes: A Review of the Literature.” Environment & Behavior 35, no. 5 (September 1, 2003): 665–94. doi:10.1177/0013916503255102. Gaetz, Stephen, Fiona Scott, and Tanya Gulliver. Housing First in Canada: Supporting Communities to End Homelessness. n.p.: Canadian Homelessness Research Network Press, 2013. Kaplan, Rachel and Stephen Kaplan. The Experience of Nature: A Psychological Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. NickAdolfoProductions. “The Homeless.” YouTube. November 18, 2012. Posted December 15, 2016. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=LqRgXeXVqYk. Sempik, Joe, Cathy Rickhuss, and Alex Beeston. “The Effects of Social and Therapeutic Horticulture on Aspects of Social Behaviour.” The British Journal of Occupational Therapy 77, no. 6 (June 16, 2014): 313–19. doi:10.4276/03080221 4x14018723138110.

1 Shelter seekers refers to abused women and children, victims of domestic violence, people lacking a fixed address and elderly that cannot support themselves and/or have anyone willing to assist them. 2 Covenant House Toronto is a homeless shelter for youth within the City of Toronto 3 J. Bernstein, “Creating a System to Record the Number of Children born to Under-Housed Mothers in Toronto” http://www.homelesshub.ca/sites/default/files/Under%20housed%20newborns2012.pdf Accessed (11/18/2016)

In a dark corner of Southwest Detroit, there lies a decrepid shack off the main road with a gravel driveway filled with cars for sale. Atop the shack stand two cartoon chickens like sentinels beaten by the elements. In a patch of dirt beside the parking lot is a garden growing peppers. The whole place feels as if you are in a scene out of an obscure film from the 70s. This is Pollo Chapin- a restaurant established by Guatamalan immigrants that specializes in you guessed it- chicken. This is a place that forgoes decor to create a fried chicken that speaks to the homeliness of your surroundings. We ordered two pieces of chicken which comes with a bun a chicken noodle soup and a unique take on coleslaw featuring cilantro as the main ingredient. On the walls are scenes of people and places from Guatamala. The television streams spanish language channels and there is all manner of trinkets for sale. Perhaps this is the reason for running a restaurant in a house and serving food that feels like a home-cooked meal. This is a place that is intended to be home away from home for people yearning for home.

Kurt L. Hilton at Pollo Chapin

WHEN HUNGER CREATES VOID IN THE HEART OF MOTOR CITY

076 078 080 082 084 086 088 090 092 094 096

Francis Grunow Mark Hall

When Hunger Creates Void in the Heart of Motor City Francis Grunow is an urbanist who studied city planning,

architectural history, and law. He currently works as a writer and consultant, with a focus on housing policy and parade making. In previous lives, he ran Detroit’s historic preservation organization, coowned a small retail business, and has had stints as a City Planner in New York City, a community activist, and documentary filmmaker.

Mark Hall is a currently student at College for Creative Studies earning a degree in Interior Design. Mark is working on restoring three historic homes in Detroit’s North Woodward and Herman Kiefer Neighborhood. Since 2009, Mark has spent a considerable amount of time photographing Detroit’s built environment.

Surface Parking West of Woodward, near Foxtown, 2017.

WHEN HUNGER CREATES VOID IN THE HEART OF MOTOR CITY

When Hunger Creates Void In the Heart of Motor City Francis Grunow Hunger and parking are related. Two sides of the same coin. We eat till we’re sated. We drive till we’re parked. As Americans, we tend to overindulge because we have access to excess. Bad things can happen. We get fat. We get lazy. We rationalize our behavior. Our unreasonable expectation to easily park in our urban landscape is akin to overeating, without being able to control our hunger. The physical needs can spin into an unquenchable desire that can become a terrible look for both our waistlines and for our cities. The hunger for parking has robbed us of beautiful structures, interesting streetscapes, and wreaked havoc upon entire urban districts. What is most ironic about this relationship is that hunger for more parking creates more void. More emptiness. Less reason to stay. The opportunity to both research and help address the impact of rampant surface parking, in downtown Detroit, at the epicenter of the U.S. auto industry, is both personally compelling and fundamentally needed. Moving the needle, even a little, through public awareness and outlining progressive policy proposals can afford our historic buildings, streetscapes, and districts with a new lease on life.

Background For one hundred years, the historic built

environment of America’s cities has been on the losing end of our unrelenting desire for parking. Few places display this tension with as much poignancy as downtown Detroit. In a widely circulated graphic depicting the erosion of Detroit’s built environment at four points in time during the 20th Century, we see the sharply defined solids of dense urban building highlighting Detroit’s unique layout of Augustus Woodward’s Washington D.C.-inspired street grid at the center of Detroit’s Central Business District, as it softens and sloughs off over the years to resemble something more ghostly. Spectral as the outline of a city. A place as much defined by its voids as by what is left behind.

Yamasaki, who designed the World Trade Center in New York, and the Coleman A. Young Municipal Center, flanked by the iconic Spirit of Detroit statue, that resembles a smaller version the International-style United Nations Headquarters, with its cool, spare lines, and sleek, white Vermont granite face. In recent years, many of downtown’s great old buildings have been, are being, or are slated to be rehabilitated. There has been well over $1 billion in new investment downtown over the last decade, much of it taking place in historic structures such as the Book-Cadillac Hotel, the David Whitney Building, Broderick Tower, Book Tower, David Stott Tower, among others—all 1910-20s gems worth a google—and wonderful examples of what is happening downtown.

And yet, Detroit is worth fighting for.

In what, strangely, may be something of a saving

Just over one mile square, downtown Detroit is small and compact. The squared off Central Business District is hemmed in by freeways—M-10 (Lodge) on the west, I-75 (Fisher) on the north, and I-375 on the east, with the Detroit River creating the southern edge. Downtown Detroit’s existing stock of historic structures, especially those of its early 20th Century heyday, still defines the core, which is made up of many examples of first class commercial architecture, representing some of the best of American urban design from the 1890s through the 1920-30s. There are many excellent structures from midcentury, too, including an early tower Minoru

Surface Parking West of Woodward, near Foxtown, 2017.

Data Driven Detroit parking analysis, 2013.

WHEN HUNGER CREATES VOID IN THE HEART OF MOTOR CITY

grace, not many new developments were built in the second half of the 20th century, largely because of rampant disinvestment during that time. Only in the last 10-15 years, have large footprint mega structures feasted on the land at the edges of downtown. This recent historical condition has “saved” much of the downtown’s urban bones, its wonderful architecture and “in-between” spaces begging for high density infill. And in those spaces, in and amongst the remnants of the largely historic built environment, exists the future of downtown Detroit, which currently, largely, takes the form of surface parking. Surface parking plagues downtown Detroit in an almost laughable way. So much of the surface area in the core is dedicated to this use it is sometimes barely recognizable as a “city” for people. In this sense, cars have truly become the flesh and blood of Detroit, occupying the spaces where buildings once stood, moving through streets and avenues as if they were aisles of a shopping center parking lot. The “mall,” or what’s left of downtown, fighting for survival. Today, about 40% of downtown Detroit is surface parking, according to a 2013 analysis by Data Driven Detroit, that features a map showing how tremendously devoted Detroiters are to prioritizing their vehicles over the built environment. In the history of the City of Detroit, never has there been as much parking as there is now. Yet,

for many, it is still not enough. And as Detroit emerges from its historic bankruptcy with many, many bright spots, and a growing sense of hope and momentum building for its downtown, it is vital to address how unbridled and unmanaged parking will impact one of downtown Detroit’s most important assets—its remaining historic structures. These, the very things so much of the new investment revolves around. It’s time for new ideas, a new path forward. The demolition of two vacant, but structurally sound, and recently occupied commercial buildings from the early part of the last century spurred this article. The first, a handsome, three story, white terra cotta building, with a wonderful leaded glass transom running along the street frontage, and beautiful, subtle mosaic tile work at its threshold, was demolished for about 30 parking spaces in the fall of 2013. It was located directly across the street from the BookCadillac Hotel, a $170+ million renovation, and one of the nation’s most elaborately financed historic preservation projects. The second, a two story, simple brick structure, that had been used for a variety of commercial uses over its hundred-year lifespan, including a restaurant bar and comedy club more recently, where it then acquired a tasteful “New Orleans” style façade upgrade, was demolished, along with its smaller, garage neighbor, for about 30 parking spaces in the fall of 2016. Standing alone, the loss of these two buildings may not seem significant. Although eligible for designation on the National Register of

Historic Madison-Lenox Hotel ca. 1920, National Trust for Historic Preservation Most Endangered List, 2004.

Madison-Lenox Site, 2017. Temporary home to 0-40 cars.

Exhibit A.

Exhibit B.

Historic Places, neither were. Both were vacant and becoming blighted. In relation to other preservation battles, these structures were down the list. They lost out. However, they are exemplary of the greater issue downtown, and, like hundreds and thousands of other structures in Detroit, their loss to serve the maw of Detroit’s insatiable need for more parking need not be in vain. They serve as a point of inspiration, and departure from the status quo. Others will fall if nothing is done to stem Detroit’s hunger for parking. This article is an attempt to highlight examples of how Detroit’s hunger for parking impacts its Central Business District at three spatial levels,

including through the: • Loss of unique high-quality structures; • Change in character of urban streetscapes; and, • Clearing of entire districts to be used for surface parking. These conditions are explored, below, as well as an outline for how a comprehensive parking control policy might unfold in downtown Detroit. Especially helpful in telling the story are building histories from a wonderful online resource, www.historicdetroit.org, historic photos from the online collection of the Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University, as well as Google Earth.

WHEN HUNGER CREATES VOID IN THE HEART OF MOTOR CITY

Empire Building ca. 1920.

SE Corner of Clifford and Washington Boulevard, 2017. Parking Spaces: 25.

Quality Structures Downtown Detroit lost thousands of structures over the decades to surface parking. What is particularly striking about the nature of the loss, is that many of the buildings demolished over the last century were notable pieces of architecture, built during Detroit’s period of incredible growth, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Many of these structures were designed as art objects, constructed with the finest materials, and were built to stand indefinitely. Their loss is especially poignant today, as Detroit’s downtown real estate market

grows hotter, and its architectural heritage is becoming more well known nationally, and internationally. The relatively small, unique floor plans, architectural details, and multi-story design readily lend themselves to residential and small office conversion, which is the backbone of the growing downtown live-work marketplace. One can only speculate what state of rehabilitation any one of these structures might be undergoing today, or near future. Instead, these sites are utilized as parking lots, their immediate “highest and best” use.

Hotel Ste. Claire ca. 1920.

NE Corner of Monroe and Randolph, 2017. Parking Spaces: 14.

Empire Building

Hotel Ste. Claire

At the corner of Clifford and Washington Boulevard once stood the Empire Building, a wonderfully florid example of commercial architecture from 1908. Bathed in finely articulated terra cotta that featured ornament in the style of the Renaissance and Gothic revivals, the ninestory structure boasted an immense cornice that was later removed. Designed by architect John Scott, who also designed the Beaux Arts 1897 Wayne County Building, the Empire Building was used primarily for offices by the Detroit City Gas Company. The structure stood into the mid 1990s efore being demolished for a surface parking lot.

The Hotel Ste. Claire was built in 1893 with an elaborate Dutch gabled roof that gave the building a distinctive flair. Due to its location near Greektown, and proximate to both Detroit’s entertainment district and municipal buildings, Hotel Ste. Claire was a popular place to stay for business and pleasure, and its ground floor bar was known as a place to make deals and be seen. Unfortunately, due to its relatively small size, Hotel Ste. Claire eventually lost out to bigger hotels and it was demolished for parking in 1934, after standing only 40 years.

WHEN HUNGER CREATES VOID IN THE HEART OF MOTOR CITY

Empire Building ca. 1920.

SE Corner of Clifford and Washington Boulevard, 2017. Parking Spaces: 25.

Detroit Times Building The 1929 Detroit Times building was an art deco masterwork by Detroit’s most famous architect, Albert Kahn. After designing landmark structures for the Detroit Free Press and News, Kahn was commissioned by the Times parent company, Hearst Newspapers, to create an icon for Detroit’s third big daily newspaper, known for its sensationalist stories and raucous newsroom. The odd shaped lot created a “wedding cake” corner which ran the length of the façade, made of smartly proportioned stone, metal and glass, and provided a pleasing

Empire Building ca. 1920.

SE Corner of Clifford and Washington Boulevard, 2017. Parking Spaces: 25.

Real Estate Exchange Building backdrop to the triangular Times Square park across the street where thousands of reporters and press workers no doubt ate quick lunches and snagged smoke breaks before running back to make deadline. After the paper closed in 1960, the building stood for another 18 years before being demolished in 1978 for a parking lot.

Though never as prolific or widely known as Albert Kahn, Louis Kamper was responsible for designing some of Detroit’s most wellknown buildings, including the Book Tower and Book Cadillac Hotel, Broderick Tower, as well as the Real Estate Exchange Building, built in 1918, at the tail end of WWI. This elegant and refined high rise office building had wonderfully wrought gothic details, culminating in lancet windows and cathedral like finials at the roofline. After serving a number of tenants, the building was renamed

the Cadillac Square Building, and was used by the State of Michigan for its Detroit offices before repairs and deferred maintenance had it transferred to the City of Detroit, where it languished until being demolished in 1976, along with several adjoining structures, for a parking lot.

WHEN HUNGER CREATES VOID IN THE HEART OF MOTOR CITY

Streetscape Surface parking has eroded the streetscape in downtown Detroit. Active street corners built up over years, with a variety of human scaled structures and ground floor retail uses have been lost to the ease of automobile access. The void created is perpetuated by lack of pedestrian interaction. Many downtown block fronts and street corners seem to ache without the connectivity and intimate visual elements— signage, stoops, steps, picture windows—that make cities interesting places and give them life.

North side of Gratiot at Beaubien ca. 1960.

Cass Theatre - Lafayette and Washington Boulevard Demolished in the 1970s, the Cass Theatre was built in the 1926 as an addition to the adjacent Board of Commerce Building. Several storefronts ran along Lafayette, including a Savings and Loans, a Central Cigar shop, and the theater’s entrance and marquee.

North Side of Gratiot at Beaubien Several of Detroit’s great radial roads—Michigan, Grand River, and Gratiot avenues—shared similar characteristics in the vicinity of downtown Detroit. They were developed with a mix of commercial and mixed use structures, easily accessible to the streetcar system, and walkable to adjacent areas. On Gratiot, pawn shops and loan offices took root near the Detroit’s courts, jailhouses, and police headquarters, on the near east side. Huge swaths of these structures were cleared in the second half of the 20th century for parking, curb cuts replacing sidewalks.

North side of Gratiot at Beaubien, 2017. Parking Spaces: 200.

Cass Theatre ca. 1950s.

NW Corner Lafayette and Washington Boulevard, 2017. Parking Spaces: 100.

WHEN HUNGER CREATES VOID IN THE HEART OF MOTOR CITY

Griswold at Clifford ca. 1920.

Griswold at Clifford, 2017. Parking Spaces: 20.

Griswold at Clifford

East Side of Woodward at Columbia

Downtown Detroit’s unique street plan, with its trapezoid and triangle-shaped lots forced creative choices for floorplans, resulting in flatiron-shaped structures, and a more interesting streetscape. This little mixed use building contributed to downtown life, with a lunch counter on the ground flood and rooms for offices and living above. The ubiquitous Central Cigar Co. was across Griswold. Today, instead of lunch, the lot serves cars for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Bustling, dynamic Woodward Avenue has long experienced the churn of change. Buildings come and go. The road gets widened and rebuilt, with brick and concrete, and rail, and asphalt, and rail again. Here we see a wonderful mix of buildings, the 200-foot spire of the Woodward Avenue Baptist Church, barely visible, St. John’s Episcopal Church, Dave’s Corner, a “whole acre” of floor space for sporting goods, and auto parts, and a delightful mix of storefronts, including the Fox Restaurant, which served “good food at the lowest price.” Only St. John’s survives from this scene, along with surface parking for about 250 cars.

East Side of Woodward at Columbia ca. 1920.

East Side of Woodward at Columbia, 2017. Parking Spaces: 250.

WHEN HUNGER CREATES VOID IN THE HEART OF MOTOR CITY

Aerial photograph, 1929.

Google Earth, 2017

Scope of Loss (as Revealed by Aerial Photographs)

“Upper East Side”

The net effect of surface parking lots played out over time on a dense urban landscape is often startling when seen from the air. Whole neighborhoods in Detroit’s downtown have been lost, mangled, and shredded to the void of parking, especially at the downtown district’s edges. Here we can see an erosion of urban fabric, huge seas of parking, punctuated by holdout vestiges from earlier eras. These are the zones where the mega structures and uses –

surface lots, stadiums, casinos, parking decks, and waterfront open space program – have established themselves and create a powerful sense of urban homogeneity. We have tried to find historic aerial photography in four quadrants of downtown Detroit— upper east side, lower east side, lower west side and upper west side – and have married them to Google Earth images showing approximately the same elevation and perspective.

Within the last hundred years, the area west of Grand Circus Park was filled with hundreds of structures, residential, mixed use, and commercial, filling neat rows of regular blocks north of Grand Circus Park, as well as on the irregular shaped blocks south of Grand Circus that bled into the neighborhood known as Black Bottom, Detroit’s storied African American district that was leveled for I-75, and its southern extension I-375. In the 1960s, the Fisher Freeway (I-75) cut a path east to west and completely redefined the north side of

downtown Detroit. Today, Comerica Park and Ford Field define downtown Detroit’s on the upper east side, and surface parking lots that surround and serve those facilities, as well as the institutional buildings that serve Detroit’s criminal justice system.

WHEN HUNGER CREATES VOID IN THE HEART OF MOTOR CITY

Aerial photo, 1950.

Google Earth, 2017.

Waterfront – “Lower East Side”

“Lower West Side”

Uses in downtown Detroit’s “Lower East Side” were historically linked to the Detroit River, and consisted of countless warehouses and manufacturing facilities serving Detroit’s many industries, including shipbuilding, engine works, pharmaceuticals, and later, automobiles. Blocks south of Jefferson Avenue have been completely recast in recent decades, with the clearance of hundreds of acres of land that is now devoted to Hart Plaza, the Renaissance Center, and parking spaces for thousands of vehicles in sprawling lots and parking decks. North of Jefferson Ave., the pattern is similar, though not nearly as destructive, with some historic structures remaining, interspersed among surface parking.

Downtown Detroit’s “Lower West Side” abuts the Financial District, centered at Congress and Griswold. High rises and banking halls from the 1900s – 1920s pushed up against Detroit’s industry, warehouses, and smaller commercial buildings. North lay Washington Boulevard, with its Book Tower, Book Cadillac, and high end retail, as well as a more economically depressed “Skid Row” that reached to the west, to Corktown, and to the north, to the Lower Cass Corridor. While many of the larger, more significant structures have remained to this day, the vast majority of smaller structures that gave the district variety have vanished, replaced by numerous surface parking lots.

Aerial photo, 1929

Google Earth, 2017

WHEN HUNGER CREATES VOID IN THE HEART OF MOTOR CITY

“Upper West Side”

Aerial photo ca. 1930s-60s.

The “Upper West Side” is possibly one of the most well defined and startling portions of downtown Detroit ravaged by hunger for parking. The area north of Grand River, and west of Woodward Avenue, roughly triangularshaped, is often known as “Foxtown” today, and historically, has been a transitional neighborhood. Originally developed with larger homes in the mid 19th Century, the area quickly became densely populated in the early decades of the 20th Century, with dozens of rooming houses and small apartment building constructed to cater to Detroit’s rapid industrialization. The second half of the 20th Century saw a great hollowing out of the neighborhood, which accelerated as the Fox Theatre, Comerica Park, and other entertainment venues cleared land for more parking. Today, this area is being rebranded “Columbia Park” and “Columbia Street” as part of the “District Detroit,” a 45-block redevelopment zone, surrounding the new Events Center to the north, home of the Detroit Red Wings and Pistons. Time will tell if parking will continue to define this part of downtown Detroit. A Prescription: Parking Policy in the Motor City

Google Earth, 2017

So, what? Do Detroiters even care that so much of their downtown is missing? Erased over time for to park their vehicles on? It’s hard to tell. One thing seems clear. Even more parking is clearly not the answer.

Downtown districts can never compete with their suburban commercial counterparts for access to easy parking. To compete regionally, and with other cities nationally, downtown districts must work to position themselves as unique destinations, embracing their qualities of urban density, proximity of uses, interesting and dynamic streetscape, and access and walkability for pedestrian users. Cities have long wrestled with this condition and the question of parking, and can come out better for it, creating progressive policy that takes head on the American hunger for parking. One such place is Pittsburgh, PA, a rust belt relative to Detroit, and a city that saw similar negative impacts on its historic core, a downtown district approximately the same size as Detroit’s. Pittsburgh implemented three simple, but noteworthy policies that have had an incredible impact on downtown Pittsburgh’s streetscape. First, Pittsburgh imposed a moratorium on surface parking lots, meaning that no new surface parking use could be created in the downtown, meaning that no additional historic structures would be lost for surface parking. Second, Pittsburgh chose to tax existing surface lots at an effective rate of 40%, which provides little incentive for property owners to maintain surface lots. Third, Pittsburgh effectively consolidated, monitors, and manages its municipally owned parking facilities under a single authority, and then markets these spaces to users

WHEN HUNGER CREATES VOID IN THE HEART OF MOTOR CITY

along with promoting alternative modes of transportation. Detroit could easily follow suit. A complimentary path forward follows the research and findings of Donald Shoup’s well regarded treatise on parking in the United States, The High Cost of Free Parking, which also posits three market-based lessons worthy of mention. These ideas could easily be applied not only to downtown Detroit, but considered more holistically as an approach citywide. 1. First, eliminate the parking requirement found in the zoning code. This would sever the costs of development from the costs for fulfilling the parking requirement. Developers—who don’t want to build failed development projects—would work to ensure adequate parking is available, but could choose how to it is achieved, through sharing facilities, offering alternatives or other incentives to their tenants in lieu of providing a space. 2. Second, promote dynamic priced street parking. The City of Detroit is piloting a version of this concept with its new Pay-ByPlate Zone System. The idea here is to create a financial cost model for street parking that ensures 10-20% of parking spaces are always available. This means that drivers will “cruise” less and waste less time if there are parking spaces expiring at a constant rate. Drivers will pay a premium if there is a reasonable expectation that some spaces are always available.

3. Third, any parking fees collected by the city should be used to improve the quality of life and public space in the district in which the fee is collected. The fee should not be subsumed to the city’s general fund, but should rather be controlled by the surrounding neighborhood and local businesses to garner buy in for coordinated street parking policies and rates. Individually, much less collectively, it’s possible these ideas would be dismissed in a place like Detroit, which has so much of its and pride identity rolled up into the idea of being the Motor City. The fact that the City of Detroit is actively pursuing aspects of Shoup’s second idea is noteworthy, and should supported and built upon. But how can we effectively push for more? Another important step to effect change in Detroit is to engage the public at large as well as local elected leadership about the deleterious effects parking has had on downtown Detroit. More carefully documenting how parking has impacted downtown historic built environment is one way. Further definition of the Central Business District’s geography is needed to conduct a full inventory of structures from the “high point” of downtown Detroit’s built environment, ca. 1900-1920, using resources such as Sanborn and Baist atlases, to create an online baseline GIS resource. Then comparing that inventory to what remains today will further highlight

how parking-related excessive.

uses

have

become

Additional levels of information, such as structures currently protected by historic designation, and those that are eligible, can be noted. Using the baseline data, further research can be conducted on important buildings that have been lost over the years to parking, highlighting their history, both from social and architectural standpoint for a public installation to build awareness could be a way to provide Detroiters with a multifaceted understanding of what parking has done to downtown. The documentary phase could lead to a second phase of advocacy, focusing on a strategy to shift public policy, based on one or more of the Pittsburgh or Shoup ideas, or other strategies, that target substantive changes for Detroit that may be championed by Detroit elected officials and policymakers. Findings could be presented to the Mayor, members of the Detroit City Council, Detroit Planning Commission, and Planning and Development Department, among others, with the hopes that they enact a new path forward to better manage parking in Detroit, especially if we move to an era of integrating driverless vehicles into society, and more shared ownership models. It could be a more hopeful, enlightening path, that has us choosing to create a downtown that caters to people more than cars. Ultimately, cities are what we make them.

And great cities tend to choose people first, giving people quality places and spaces to engage with one other, and their built and natural environment. Our unbridled hunger to create places for cars has never, and will never transcend the greater value we can realize for our cities if we choose to build them for people first. It would be a tremendous statement to world if Detroit chose to lead the way.

Mexican food is something that is not hard to come by in Detroit. Blinded by what Mexican food should be, we are often not attuned to what Mexican food actually is. Mexican food is strong, it is heavy, and it is eaten with tortillas not in them. South-west Detroit is adored for its Mexican cuisine but, if it is true authenticity you seek, then you must find the less touristic places. You need to find a restaurant where they have designated English speakers. But most of all you need to find a restaurant in which you can find yourself with your family. An experience immersed in meaningful connections over a great dinner is a necessity to the perfect Mexican restaurant experience. This restaurant comes with classic dishes as well as ones for the American culture as well. In this restaurant you can easily find yourself eating food which takes you back to simpler and happier times. To me, these flavors remind me of home, family and the importance of family.

Enrique V Ledesma at El Rancho

062 064 066 068 070 072 Emily Staugaitis Ali Lapetina

100 Seeds Minara Begum is a gardener, cook and mother. She moved to Detroit from Bangladesh in 2015. In Bangladesh she helped her family to grow and manage large agricultural acreage including tea, rice, mustard seed, jackfruit, coconut, mango, as well as many vegetables. For large celebrations, she would cook for hundreds of people at a time with pots and pans large enough to hold an entire cow. Emily Staugaitis is a gardener, educator, researcher, occasional Doula and Auntie to Minaraâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s children. Her friendships in the neighborhood have led to learning to speak Bangla and working to connect Bangladeshi women in Detroit with the larger food scene through vegetable sales and cooking events, through Bandhu Gardens. Ali Lapetina is a photographer and educator based in Detroit, Michigan. Her work explores stories of transition - focusing on immigrant and refugee integration and longtime residents living within a postindustrial city. She is the founder of Women of Banglatown, an allwomenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s community space offering free art activities for young girls and income generating activities for Bangladeshi women in Detroit. Image Credit: Ali Lapetina

100 SEEDS

Introduction The kinetic energies of summer - growing plants, twining vines and daily harvest - balanced by the potential energy of seeds- dreaming, speculation, preparation. On a winter afternoon Emily Staugaitis interviewed and Ali Lapetina documented conversation with three generations of Bangladeshi-American gardeners in Detroit Salima (73 years old), Minara (35), and Moriym (9) and Fatima (7) Begum. In this family, the women do most of the gardening. Each year, they save their seeds from the South Asian varieties that they grow to preserve culinary traditions and nourish their families. As we talked together, in a mix of English and Bangla, about their gardens here in Detroit and the ones they left in Bangladesh, we played, making arrangements of seeds representing the layouts of the gardens for the coming seasons. We imagined and repositioned and questioned and compared as we worked, able to talk through time and space through moving seeds on the table.

100 SEEDS

“I don’t have to take medicine, but my parents do. The plants can help with so much, bitter melon for the blood sugar, hibiscus leaf for the blood pressure, amaranth stems for strong bones.” Minara Hoilfa fata (Hibiscus leaf), Kitra (Cucumber), Begun (Eggplant), Lal saag (Amaranth leaf), Nali saag (Jute leaf), Karella (Bitter melon), Ghagra saag (no English name), Shishinda (Snake Gourd), Lai fata (Mustard greens), Kasa morich (chili pepper), Loobu Uri (Long bean), Denga (White amaranth stem)

100 SEEDS

Fatima is laying out a patch of amaranth seeds. She told me “all the seeds in the corner would climb up on top of the garage, where the sun will keep the squash warm.” Moriym and Fatima are arranging seeds how they would plant the garden plot. Each year, they watch their mother, grandmother, aunts and neighbors make these decisions, factoring in the direction of the sun, how shade will fall, what plants grow well together. I wonder, by the time they are adults here in America, will they still plant these vegetables?

“The bean seeds have to stay in the fridge over the winter, or they won’t sprout. You have to plant them with plenty of room between the seeds so that the plants can spread out and be strong.” Minara

“Hibiscus won’t grow to flower here, it is too cold, so we plant it for the leaves. Friends send seed from Bangladesh for us each year.” Salima

“I started to learn in the garden at the same age as Laki [her 3 year old daughter], just LOOKING LOOKING LOOKING, then watering, then weeding…” Minara

100 SEEDS

Three generations of a family, three varieties of seeds in the same family; cucumber, bitter melon and sweet squash. â&#x20AC;&#x153;The cucumber and the sweet squash thrive in Michigan, but the bitter melon is not nearly as productive as it would be when grown in Bangladesh.â&#x20AC;? Salima

Nali saag seed husk, after all the seeds have fallen out.

100 SEEDS

Endnotes The aim of this photo essay is to create loose ends, to open potentials, to spark curiosities, to introduce fragments that the reader can follow and build upon or further deconstruct. I endeavor to infuse the personal into the academic, because I believe community planning and urbanism are at their best when they are responsive to the intimate and particular human elements of the city. All text in italics was spoken in Bangla and translated by Emily into English.

References For additional thinking about potential, variables and play as world-making strategies: 1) Simon Nicholson’s Theory of Loose Parts 2) Anna Tsing’s Polyphonic Assemblages 3) Donna Haraway’s String Figures

Rose’s Fine Foods aka “The Ultimate Diner” is located in a low density area of East Village that is within close proximity to Belle Isle, historic Indian Village, and the Detroit waterfront. With its under the radar location, it undeniably provides a community driven space whose mission is to give back through charity as well as to serve a one of a kind breakfast and lunch. The menu takes an activist stand towards waiters and waitresses receiving a living wage by including gratuity into its listed prices. This leaves zero possibility for a patron to abuse the servers’ efforts and time, and is a reflection of the larger message of Rose’s. The message insists that their employees are appreciated and this is crystal clear in the spaces overall ambiance. Rose’s staff feels like a community within itself, a home away from home. Foods made from scratch from local ingredients tend to the overall foodie, soup lovers, and vegetarian community. The interior is suggestive of a woven historical time line with a familiar intimacy. When entering, it is impossible to not notice the toast everyone is enjoying; a house toast lathered in ricotta cheese and jam. East Village is currently a neighborhood emphasizing a concentration on small businesses and rehabilitating the residences that exist, and Rose’s presence is prominent within this.

Riley Rinnan at Rose’s Fine Foods

100 102 104 106 108 110 112 Joyce Hwang

A Brush With Death Joyce Hwang, AIA, NCARB, is the Director of Ants of the Prairie, an office of architectural practice and research that focuses on confronting contemporary ecological conditions through creative means, and an Associate Professor of Architecture at the University at Buffalo SUNY. Currently Hwang is developing a series of projects that incorporate wildlife habitats into constructed environments. She is a recipient of the Architectural League Emerging Voices Award (2014), the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Fellowship (2013), and the MacDowell Colony Fellowship (2016, 2011), among other awards. She is a coorganizer of the Hive City Habitat Design Competition and a co-editor of Beyond Patronage: Reconsidering Models of Practice, published by Actar. Hwang is a registered architect in New York State. She has practiced professionally with offices in New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Barcelona. Hwang received an M.Arch degree from Princeton University and a B.Arch degree from Cornell University. Facing Plate by Joyce Hwang, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Porous Foundation.â&#x20AC;?

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Introduction In efforts to convey “good intentions” within the realms of socially-engaged or environmentallydriven design, I would argue that architectural representation has become too smooth, placid, and excessively eager-to-please. There is, of course, a clear reason why architects strive to create and showcase “agreeable” renderings and drawings – especially in the context of meetings in which clients and stakeholders need to be assured of a project’s agreeability. However, the reality of our world is far more jarring, tainted, and contentious. Architectural renderings are ubiquitously full of green, lush vegetation, but hardly do we see a scene rendered with overgrown weeds. In renderings, we see birds in the sky, but never the mess of bird droppings. In our images, we find humans and dogs walking in harmony, yet it is rare to find rats as part of our rendered world. Conflicted perceptions of our realities are typically not represented in the images we project to the world.

Fig. #: ‘Image Title’: description (left) description (right)

Figure 1: Green Mice

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While it can be argued that representations are only a projection of desire, I contend that representation needs to move beyond pastoralized desires and also grapple with the dirty vitality and inevitable horrors of life. If we construct a world for our imagination that only consists of what we want to see, we put ourselves in danger of becoming complacent, ignoring the grisly realities of what exists. This is especially dangerous today, in the face of our current political climate. The charge of actualizing “good intentions” demands that architects rethink strategies of representation, toward an agenda of confronting disgust, fear, and heartbreak. Like a work of fiction, representation should not be seen merely as a form of documentation, but rather as a medium through which to reveal and struggle with the unseemly, and in doing so, navigate possibilities to project more hopeful

futures. Representation needs to reawaken us – not just by rationally presenting us with beauty – but also by urging us to decidedly confront the ugly. And in this encounter, representation wields the possibility to provoke our imaginations in unexpected ways, not only through visions of the fantastical, but also by presenting life as inextricably bound to death.

Truth is Stranger than Fiction Research in biotechnology already blurs the distinction between nature and artifice. “Model organisms” in labs – such as mice and rats – are already being mutated, cloned, and in a sense “designed by the genetic/genomic scientist. It is not uncommon in science research, for example, to see glowing, florescent green mice (or other animals) as part of an experiment. While glowing animals might seem to belong to the world of science fiction, green fluorescent protein (GFP) is actually used commonly as genetic markers in research with transgenic

mice. Given the ubiquity of this technology (and its surprising visual effect), we now see many instances of its deployment, even in nonscientific uses. Artists such as Eduardo Kac, for example, have been exploring uses of GFP in his art practice for nearly two decades. Today, even citizen science groups are experimenting with fluorescent proteins in Do-It-Yourself, and “Makers’” workshops for both adults and children alike.

Drawing Fiction from Truth Within science laboratories, model organisms and organism by-products are typically (and strategically) hidden from view and isolated from possible contamination. The “model” mouse, for example, arrives by truck to the lab’s loading dock and lives its life in the sterilized confines of the Vivarium. After being used as a test subject, the mouse is then “sacrificed” while its “data” continues to sequence machines for analysis. But what if these processes were simply

A BRUSH WITH DEATH

made visible? What if genetic breeding, experimentation, production, were all exhibited as part of an expanded laboratory? How would this intensification of activities produce new adjacencies between humans, animals and machines? How can the notion of public spectatorship introduce the production of visual relationships and effects in a laboratory? How can the visualization of model organisms propagate the development of an aesthetic which both reveals and normalizes the ‘strangeness’ of the

model organism’s life cycle? The images shown here are vignettes from a speculative project titled “Zoological Laboratory,” which explore the architectural implications of rendering ‘life’ visible in a context where it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish the differences between organism and machine, natural and artificial, life and death. The desires we project onto the capture and manufacturing of animals speak of the implications of what we ultimately envision for our (future) selves. Figure 3: Thermal Imaging of Bats (Collage)

Figure 2: Zoo Lab

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Figure 4: Bat House

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Drawing Visibility through Mediated Observation The use of visualization technologies in the biological sciences extends far beyond the lab as well. Field scientists frequently deploy motiontriggered cameras (“camera traps”), as well as thermal imaging devices to capture the presence of warm-blooded fauna “in the wild.” For example, since 2002, biologist Thomas Kunz has been instrumentalizing thermal cameras in efforts to census bats. With the advancement of visual surveillance tools over the past decade, today we find an increasing number of biologists and ecologists working with thermal imaging for different purposes, from studying bats emerging

Fig. 5: Camera Trap images of Rats

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from caves, to observing the behavior of bats around wind turbines. Given the near ubiquity of implementing mediation devices in scientific field studies, what if we simply imagine that these tools become a more visible part of our constructed world? What might a bat house look like if we could see the presence of life within it through thermal imaging? Could we implement these visioning tools within our built urban structures to better understand how animals are already occupying these spaces? How might these mediated traces of life start to render our world differently and perhaps shift our notion of the aesthetics of “nature?”

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Tactics of Maintenance: From Arresting to Facilitating Life Lawn-mowing, tree-trimming, leaf-blowing, weeding, fumigating: These are familiar activities of maintenance that usually indicate a high degree of care and attention to the wellbeing of a place. In other words, they are signs of good intentions. Yet, many of these wellmeaning routines have propagated unintended, deleterious consequences on the environment. While fumigation and pesticides might remove certain forms of nuisance as well as vectors of disease, they are also factors in eliminating more “desirable” flora and fauna. For example, consider the role that rat poison played in the deaths of New York City’s red-tailed hawks– known to serve as a form of ‘natural pesticide’ due to their tendencies to prey on rats and other smaller animals. In contrast, we find varying, diverse forms of life in abandoned areas and

decaying structures. A poignant example lies in the status of Chernobyl. Disastrously impacted by a nuclear accident in 1986, Chernobyl has been largely abandoned by humankind. Yet, biologists are finding that it is an area that is teeming with healthy animals and vegetation – and at a higher population density. “The Chernobyl exclusion zone is arguably a nature reserve,” headlines the BBC. National Geographic concurs: “It may seem strange that Chernobyl, an area known for the deadliest nuclear accident in history, could become a refuge for all kinds of animals—from moose, deer, beaver, and owls to more exotic species like brown bear, lynx, and wolves— but that is exactly what…scientists think has happened. Without people hunting them or ruining their habitat, the thinking goes, wildlife is thriving despite high radiation levels.” Fig. 8: Santa Maria del Fiore, Florence, Italy

Fig. 6-7: Wall of Staircase leading to San Miato al Monte, Florence, Italy

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This condition raises significant conflicts of interest in thinking about how we “maintain” and “care for” our environments. Is the solution to simply resist maintenance and let the material world decay and “return to nature?” Certainly, there is a Romantic sensibility in the notion of decay, which we find in the etchings of Piranesi, in landscape paintings of the Romantic movement, and even in the beautifullycomposed photographic documentation of crumbling, vacant buildings today in the “Rust Belt” (sometimes dubiously called “Ruin Porn”).

Indeed, there are some instances in which weathering, aging, and other signs of material decay contribute to evoking a “richer” character of place, by rendering the layered passage of time. Think, for example, of structures that you encounter in historically rich cities such as Rome or Florence, and how traces of decay are often romanticized (by tourists especially) as signs of “authenticity.” And of course, some contemporary architects have worked to induce aesthetically controlled processes of “weathering” to more proactively grapple

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with the effects of time on buildings. Yet, to romanticize the course of architectural aging is to tread on dangerous territory. When glimpsed from afar – whether through the distance of time or space – the aestheticization of decay is a powerful force that wields the possibility to overshadow the socio-economic desperation and is often behind the abandonment of vacant structures. In these instances, the overpowering force of the natural world is therefore seen not as a desirable form of “nature” but rather as a condition of urban blight. This perception does very little to shift the public’s imagination toward productively imagining a world that we share with multiple species.

unpredictable conditions. Once that “skin” is ruptured, however, the external elements that enter our space are immediately rendered as nuisances, or “problems” to address. And while we may think of these ruptures as exceptions to the rule, one could argue that they occur more frequently than we like to admit. As we well know, it is not uncommon to find bats and other small animals in attics, while mice and rats are found to burrow under basement floors, in walls, and so on. But let’s imagine a different scenario. Rather than thinking of buildings as a defensive shield against urban wildlife, can the exterior “skin” become a thickened zone, made habitable to such an extent that it would deter animals from even entering the interior environment in the first place? The tactic here is to displace the opportunities for animal inhabitation from the building’s interior (where they are often found) to the building’s

Cultivating Life (and Death) through Architecture If urban maintenance – as we conventionally know it – is in fact a mode of arresting life within a biological milieu, how might we begin to transform notions of “maintenance” to something that is less reactive, and more ecologically proactive? Here, we need to consider how the built environment can be shaped to accommodate forms of non-human life. This is not to suggest that we should cohabitate with wildlife in the same, enclosed space. Rather, I am arguing for a fundamental reconceptualization of the physical boundaries that we build between our delineated space of human inhabitation, and the expanded space of the external world. We now tend to think of building envelopes as thin, defensive shields that are engineered to protect us from Fig. 9-11: Porous Texture

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Fig. 12: Porous Foundation.

boundaries. In assuming a different role, the building’s boundary, therefore, also takes on a very different aesthetic disposition. Instead of choosing a smooth, clean exterior surface, we are now more inclined to imagine one that is rough, dirty, and porous, full of crevices and openings that would be welcoming to small animals. This type of construction could perhaps even become a new form of “ground,” or a foundation that is both structured to support the human-occupied space above, but simultaneously thickened and generous enough to enable animal occupation below. It is only by inviting life (and therefore death) into the way we imagine and build our environment that we can provoke ourselves to confront and wrestle with our own vulnerabilities in this world.

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Acknowledgements:

Endnotes:

Figure 1: Green Mice. Author: Joyce Hwang Figure 2: Zoo Lab. Author: Joyce Hwang Figure 3: Thermal Imaging of Bats (Collage). Author: Joyce Hwang Figure 4: Bat House. Author: Joyce Hwang Figure 5: Camera Trap images of Rats. Images were produced from a research project titled “Habitat Mapping” by Joyce Hwang/Ants of the Prairie, developed and commissioned as part of the “Outside Design” Exhibition at the Sullivan Galleries, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, curated by Jonathan Solomon. Figure 6: Wall of Staircase leading to San Miato al Monte, Florence, Italy (Photo by Joyce Hwang) Figure 7: Wall of Staircase leading to San Miato al Monte, Florence, Italy (Photo by Joyce Hwang) Figure 8: Santa Maria del Fiore, Florence, Italy (Photo by Joyce Hwang) Figure 9: Porous Texture. Author: Joyce Hwang Figure 10: Porous Texture. Author: Joyce Hwang Figure 11: Porous Texture. Author: Joyce Hwang Figure 12: Porous Foundation. Author: Joyce Hwang Figure 13: Porous Wall-Foundation. Author: Joyce Hwang

Genome News Network, “Transgenic Bunny by Eduardo Kac,” March 29, 2002, http://www. genomenewsnetwork.org/articles/03_02/bunny_art.shtml (accessed February 13, 2017). For example, see: Make, “Cheap DIY GFP (Green Fluorescent Protein) Illuminator,” March 4, 2011, http://makezine.com/2011/03/04/cheap-diy-gfp-green-fluorescent protein-illuminator/ (accessed February 13, 2017) and Meetup, “Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP) Transformation Workshop,” March 19, 2016, https://www.meetup.com/ The-Wet-Lab-a-DIYBio-maker-community-for-algae-enthusiasts/events/229507585/ (accessed February 13, 2017). “Zoological Laboratory” is the author’s Master of Architecture Thesis project, completed at Princeton University in 2003. Many thanks to my Thesis Advisor, Laura Kurgan. Infrared Thermal Video Analysis of Bats, “Detection, Tracking (2D, 3D) and Censusing,” http://www.cs.bu.edu/~betke/research/bats/ (accessed February 13, 2017). Paul Cryan and Marcos Garresen, “Watching the Dark: New Surveillance Cameras are Changing Bat Research,” BATS Magazine, Vol 32, Issue 1, Spring 2014, Bat Conservation International, http://www.batcon.org/resources/media-education/bats-magazine/bat_ article/1177 (accessed February 13, 2017). James Barron, “In Mystery of Hawk Deaths, Rat Poison Emerges,” The New York Times, April 11, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/12/nyregion/rat-poison-is-found-in bodies-of-3-dead-hawks.html (accessed February 13, 2017). Colin Barras, “The Chernobyl exclusion zone is arguably a nature reserve,” BBC, April 22, 2016, http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160421-the-chernobyl-exclusion-zone-is-arguably a-nature-reserve (accessed February 13, 2017). John Wendle, “Animals Rule Chernobyl 30 Years After Nuclear Disaster, National Geographic, April 18, 2016, http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/04/060418-chernobyl wildlife-thirty-year-anniversary-science/ (accessed February 13, 2017).

Fig. 13: Porous Wall-Foundation. Author: Joyce Hwang

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Embedded into the development of Cass Corridor since 1993, Cass Cafe embodies community cooperation, which is emanated through endeavors like the cycling of local artists’ works, the availability of pin-up space, a lofted meeting area, and a large table filled with local fliers and promotions. The design of the restaurant was implemented under the owner’s construction background and I can best describe the environment as modest, warm, open and inviting. In an otherwise impeccably clean space, my eye was caught by the excessive radial scuff-marks across the floor, having been left by the cafe’s dozens of movable seats. With no fixed booths and no television, the restaurant’s greatest asset becomes non-distracting, intimate conversation, as even the tracklighting system is directed on the artwork, not the diners. Everyone, including myself, were paired off, with patrons diverse in all identifications and all involved in quiet, focused conversation. The house salad featured incredibly crisply croutons and a garlic balsamic dressing which was delicious but potent and I wouldn’t recommend it for smoochers.

Kelly Buczniewicz at Cass Cafe

116 118 120 122 124 126 Gregory K. Serweta Kaz T. Yoneda

Society of Insatiable Consuption Gregory Serweta is an architect in New York City and has been a visiting adjunct professor of architecture at the State University of New York, Buffalo. He has worked on projects in Japan and China, at asap/adam sokol architecture practice and Sou Fujimoto. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Architecture, Minor in History from the State University of New York, Buffalo and a Master of Architecture at Cornell University. Kaz Yoneda is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Keio University and Founder of bureau0-1 based in Tokyo. He holds B.A from Cornell University and M.Arch 2 (Hons.) from Harvard Graduate School of Design. Before founding 0-1, Kaz worked for Sou Fujimoto and as a director at takram design engineering. Through the practice, he has engaged in research and projects for architecture, urban, and speculative design.

Facing: â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Tempura simulacrum keychainâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;: photo by authors

SOCIETY OF INSATIABLE CONSUMPTION

Society of Insatiable Consumption Gregory K. Serweta Kaz T. Yoneda

Introduction Tempura is a Japanese dish, with medieval origins, whose technique of using a batter of flour and eggs was adapted from fritters brought by early European missionaries. It became Japan’s commercially-successful fast food favorite to be sold by street vendors in Tokyo since Edo period—as deep-frying with oil indoors in what were predominantly woodand- paper homes was dangerous and illegal. Its name, tempura, which has no meaning in Japanese, was an implicit misappropriation from the Latin for the fasting period during which those missionaries made their fritters.1 “It is said that tempura... has for its envelope nothing but time, which has solidified it… [R]efined by the... techniques of cancellation and exemption, it is the nutriment of another time… whose real name would be... the empty sign.”2 It is almost as tempura’s main ingredient within its vacuous superstructure, its name, and in its mode of sale, is the very denaturing, transfigural process of “time”. The act of denaturing, that is—the act of altering natural qualities, such as with rotting and deep-frying—also alters the state of cities and architecture.3 Take any of the great cities, Tokyo, Chicago, London, or Lisbon, and one can see the effects of denaturing, such as with fire and earthquake, which can easily give way to decomposition and discardment without expending energy to reconstruct what was lost

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or built anew and thereby replenishing lost energy. In many ways, denaturing is necessary to metabolize a city.4 However, increasingly the architectural denaturing process has become more artificial, characterized by dismemberment and disposition. Combined and accelerated by the forces of advertisement and commercialism, a shift occurred in how architecture was understood, from primarily a spatial experience to one based on the consumable superficies of images. Architects are complicit in a cycle of consumption by indulging on a quantity of empty qualifiers; in this case, a steady progression from producing consumable architecture to leading the charge in consuming the images of architecture. Increasingly, architects exist in this processing factory of images, both as sommeliers of empty consumerism and patrons anticipating the next scrumptious plate of image du jour to provide inspiration. This opportunistic or unscrupulous genre of hunger is ravenous and consumes embedded history, styles, or symbolism—regardless of their origin—as long as the consumption releases the encapsulated energy. In this case, hunger is the demand and consumption, the wants and needs, of energy in any form. This type of hunger transcends national limits, and can engender a new globalism, away from American-initiated efforts for a global society begun in the late 1940’s, towards a truly world mix. Consumption can ultimately devour the whole world and digest in the belly of humanity. This is the hypertrophic manifestation of the

‘Tempura simulacrum keychain’: photo by authors

fundamentally changed nature of architecture: the forces of globalization and capitalism in the latter half of the last century have transformed architecture into an object of consumption5, understood more in sense of perishable consumer items with an expiration date—here now, gone tomorrow. The post-war exacerbated the hunger, not for the actual space, but for the image of newfound economic prowess.

After World War II

With the end of World War II heralded a shift in how architecture was consumed. The postwar era brought an economic boom and new opportunities to build, with the quintessential typology of cookie-cutter architecture being the standard single-family residential house. In the United States, the return of the GIs from Europe brought an immediate demand to house them, which skyrocketed the US housing industry. Cities and suburbs such as Los Angeles, Phoenix, and San Francisco and especially

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their suburbs grew tremendously. It was the peak of home order catalogs, which provided numerous choices of housing plan for the consumer to purchase from, ranging in square footage, number of bedrooms, bathrooms, or à la carte additions such as a sunroom or a library. With programmatic arrangements, details, and materials within a house similar to each model, the standard suburban house transcended the need for an architect, commodifying the basic unit of architecture—the house. The advent of the Levittown model was made possible by New Deal financial instruments such as 30-year mortgages and amortization, fostering to a new consumerist-minded middle class.6 War-ravaged Europe and Japan also needed national rebuilding efforts. The abovementioned American system effectively became one of its lucrative exports, transferring its métier and capital with it. This brand of Pax-Americana or “Americanoiserie” would thrive in those war-torn countries’ reconstruction efforts. One place where this was acutely felt was in Japan, where the GHQ and the American occupation army remolded the host according to the ideals and aspirations of engendering a democratic stronghold in this corner of the world. However, there was a precarious paradox. While they were intent on restructuring another nation into a relative clone of themselves, they were unwilling to invest the capital. According to Akira Koshizawa,7 GHQ’s “Dodge Line” policy enacted austerity measures all the while attempting to reconstruct Japan, compared to the generous Marshall Plan.8 The

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superimposition of an American system,9 thus, was unequivocal yet untenable. This ambiguity left room for improvisation, adaptation, and ultimately, reappropriation. Incubated in the petri dish that is Japan, this reappropriation allowed for mutations and variations to run amuck. In the Greater Tokyo Metropolitan area, new suburbs such as Setagaya, Nakano, and Suginami sprouted from what were originally agrarian landscapes. Satellite cities such as Tsukuba New Town were built up with new infrastructure and railways to serve as new bedroom communities for Tokyo with a one hour commute, while existing neighboring cities, such as Yokohama, grew to the point that they physically merged with Tokyo to become a megalopolis. This urban growth came hand in hand with a building boom, causing many a house builder to create as many low-cost, lowquality wood-frame houses as possible.10,11 In Japan, the transformation of architecture into a disposable commodity began in the Bubble era. With the infusion of global capital, a new wealth, mixed with the promise of the ever-appreciating property prices, set the stage for a market where land became more valuable than the buildings on them. This constructed notion of Scrap-and- Build in Japan also begat a philosophy of “creative destruction”, with the influx of money pushing an artificial demand to create greater value and to build higher and higher on less and less ground.12 Older housing stock, now considered subpar and not worth the time or money to renovate, was typically demolished and discarded instead of improved.

Houses in Japan depreciate like fish at market: the less fresh, the less it’s worth. As noted by economists, Robert Koo and Masaya Sasaki: “Houses… last only about 30 years on average, effectively making them a durable consumer good, whereas in Western countries a house is a capital good that will retain its value almost in perpetuity as long as it is properly maintained. The market value of Japanese houses falls even faster than they can be depreciated for tax purposes; after 15 years the typical house is worth nothing.”13 Japan, in effect, figuratively and literally trashes about four percent of the annual total GDP on housing.14 As with the aforementioned sprawl of Tokyo’s aging suburbs, many houses become abandoned and the heirs of the properties are neither unwilling to live so outside the central city nor able to pay the cost of demolishing the homes. Though the quote, “Tokyo could end up being surrounded by Detroits” by a Japanese real estate expert can sound like hyperbole, in all, there are about 8 million unoccupied homes across all of Japan.15 Yet with its shrinking population and having three times fewer people, Japan builds as many new houses as the United States.16 In Japan there is a preference for having something brand new, not just because a previouslyowned house is worthless, no one wants to live in a “used” home.17 Instead, if it can be

afforded, Japanese tend to hire architects to design them their life-long, brand-new, and often novel-looking dream home. Or at a more competitive rate, there is always the catalog made-to- order pre-fabricated home. Japan’s own mass-produced residential housing industry also established itself after the war, provided by companies already part of larger keiretsu or conglomerate-type corporations.18 Japan, though being a nation of universal middle-class values, long ago dropped any pretense that a home is no more than a consumer item—“conventional, convenient, disposable”.19 The Kyoto- based firm, FOBA, tailored the winning formula to carry more “brand appeal” for a niche market of households desiring something between a generic house-maker’s unit and a boutique architect’s design, by not prefabricating the materials or construction, but through preestablishing and consistently applying the spatial and aesthetic concepts that would go into each order. “They are like products from a convenient store: there are no surprises in content or price, and everyone else is buying the same thing”.20 For the ultimate Sears catalog homes on bovine growth hormones, Muji, the Japanese-global minimalist superstore, has for more than a decade been leading the charge in premium ready-made homes, and “has become not only an internationally renowned company, but for many people is a way of life.&quot;21 Or in other words, “Less and less are we buying products (material objects) that we want to own; increasingly we buy life experiences, experiences of sex, eating, communicating, cultural consumption. ... We are becoming consumers

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of our own lives”.22 Within this mentality of consumption, architecture and urbanism that is consumed, used, and digested through and through ultimately became excrement to a society that values novelty and newness, while leaving a hunger for history and cultures.

Reactionary Intermittence of Post-Modernism Post-Modernism looked to history itself as a way to reclaim what was lost through the Modern movement. This sense of loss can be seen in many episodes from which such theorizations by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Colin Rowe emerged to fill that gap with an attempt to reconnect and form meaningful synthesis with history: “Its strategy constantly calls forth the ‘ruses of the imaginary’ in order to dismiss them: even though it is a process that both ‘unconscious’ and ‘without history,’ it must still account for the effects of knowledge and history by binding them into new configurations in the service of tasks that are always the same.”23 However, as far as we can logically concur, time is unidirectional. Time itself, encapsulating the history, can never be reclaimed without disturbing the spacetime continuum. The Post-Modernists were all too aware that images of history were indeed reclaimable, the phantom whisperings of time gone by; akin to how the stars we see today are constituted from light emitted many millennia ago. Here is a great discrepancy between the real and the actual. A star (the real) may have moved light years by the time its light reaches our

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oculus (the sensual-actual), but our cosmology based on the sciences and their tools depends on reproducible results and what can be observed to become a scientific truth. Against the postwar deprivation of a personal connection to a much larger context than oneself, in like fashion, Post-Modern syndrome fixated our attention onto something more actual than real 24 ; that no matter what we do, we can only reclaim the superficies of image to connect to history in order to legitimize design in all its guises. This trend also had a uniquely Japanese turn in as much as “...the young Japanese intellectuals conjectured optimistically that, insofar as some cultural theory was in existence, a new one would follow if they simply added the prefix post- to the existing one…[T]here were not a few young intellectuals who were stricken by a series of self-destructive impulses when they learned that the concept of “post-such- and-such” was in fact insubstantial and when, in turn, they learned that the “such-and- such” thoughts in themselves meant very little, if anything at all.” 25 This moment of theo-historical reflection and self-referential regression coincided with the rising capacity of technology, one such example being Moore’s Law. Soon, the increasing demand for images and the doubling production thereof will engender ample incubation for seduction camouflaging sedation and anaesthetics, to fill the inner void of substance.

Internet and Image Moore’s Law (itself not a scientific law, but a projection in which doubling cycle has constantly

‘Guggenheim Helsinki competition entries superimposition’: image by Ann Charleston

been updated) manifests our increasing appetite to consume information and rich images made possible by parallel growth in the number and size of pixels. Perhaps, the digital images are already the reality, beyond the actuality human senses can process. Architecture’s presence has been in an inverse relationship with technology: With the advent of personal computer, the Internet, and mobile technology, architecture has been driven by its own kind of Moore’s law in a combination of architecture’s own “slowness” with technological obsolescence and ever-present consumerist demand. Thus, the production of images that skims the ideal withdrew from the purview of architects and into the hands of digital delineators, or renderers.

Therein lies a peculiar antinomy. Where is all that energy going? Let us postulate that the doubling of transistors, according to Moore’s claim, also encapsulate the energy used in their production, due to the first law of thermodynamics. This would suggest that, then, the encapsulated energy would be transferred to objects that are further produced via the transistors. If the “object” in this case is an image, then the image itself would necessarily contain within it the encapsulated energy. Theoretically, when our sensorial faculties “consume” these images, that encapsulated energy must go somewhere. In the vapid consumer culture, in particular of Japan, where is all that energy going to? The object of production and the way energy is

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TITLE SITE PLAN

PLAN 1/2000 䯂䫹䯂䫹䯂䫹䯂䯂IMAGE 䯂CONCEPT 䯂DIAGRAM 䯂DETAIL etc..

ELEVATION 1/2000 SECTION 1/2000

PERSPECTIVES 䯂External view (Bird view) 䯂Internal view (Rugby mode ) 䯂Internal view (Track and field mode) 䯂Internal view (Concert mode)

IMAGE䯂CONCEPT䯂DIAGRAM䯂DETAIL etc..

From RFP Reference Package of ‘New National Stadium International Concept Design Competition Submission Guidelines’: image by Japan Sport Council, 2012

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encapsulated are increasingly metamorphosing from Hardware to Software. While consumer products such as automobiles, appliances, and later computers and mobile phones have their cycles of planned obsolescence and demands of novelty—beyond their introductory revolutionary impact on a market—most products have had only incremental changes to their Hardware. Cars still drive, blenders still mix, microwave ovens still... microwave. However the user interface and the user experiences with these products have changed, more so with the Internet of Things and Artificially Intelligent Interfaces. The demands on architecture have not been so great. Even with the emergence of the smart house, with self-adjusting thermostats and energy-efficient context-aware self-dimming lights, the promise of truly ubiquitously-upgrading homes has yet to come. But at the same time, the consumption of architecture at a mass scale switched to something to be seen, not built, or bought or occupied, or experienced in person, through the dissemination and popularization of the digital image and the Internet: “The spectacle cannot be understood as an abuse of the world of vision, as a product of the techniques of mass dissemination of images. It is, rather, a Weltanschauung which has become actual, materially translated. It is a world vision which has become objectified.” 26 With the technologies of the 21 st century, the digital image has found many media platforms for its dissemination and popularization in today’s always-wired,

always-on, always-tweeting society. From the nascent days of early websites and web search engines, into an explosion of blog platforms like LiveJournal and Wordpress, to social media like MySpace and Facebook, and ultimately to mobile with ubiquitous cameras inbuilt in smartphones and apps such as Instagram and SnapChat, the simple image has undergone mass democratization and dissemination in society, and has come to redefine the way we interact and experience the world. To note, the foil in this shift of consumption (and production) and in the very meaning of Hardware, played out as well in America’s industrial centers in the latter half of the 20 th century. Cities such as Detroit and Buffalo in the so-called Rust Belt that gradually lost its historically prominent manufacturing industries and factories of mass production—with its cathedrals of manufacturing empty and its neighborhoods depopulated—are now subject to renewed interest as photogenic subject matter, for their historical relics, abandoned houses, and empty lots. Niche genres like ruin porn and blogs such as Fuck Yeah Brutalism re-aestheticize architecture of the not-sodistant-past and out-of- fashion styles for the consumption of new-found audiences through photography. Architects themselves now use images of architecture as the supreme means to convey architecture’s value to a consumerist audience, who prefer the pleasure of nice-looking pictures over critical thinking. Surpassing the sexy,

highly-botoxed photographs, renderings reign supreme. Take one look at the recent strings of well-publicized international competitions, such as for the Guggenheim Helsinki Museum or 2020 Olympic Tokyo Stadium, and you will see not-so-inconspicuous ocularcentrism.27 The request for proposals issued by the Japan Sport Council’s Olympic stadium design selection committee,28 led by Tadao Ando and comprised of architects as well as politicians, was drafted mainly by bureaucrats who, according to Fumihiko Maki, had no firsthand knowledge of architecture whatsoever.29 The requirements for the competition posters exemplify this point more poignantly than the words can describe. Here, also, the “design seems to advance a new kind of narcissism, one that is all images and no interiority – an apotheosis of the subject that is also its potential disappearance.” 30 This is not a globally-isolated phenomenon. Tokyo is just the latest rendition of a fad running through the past few Olympics. That is to say, not only are the most important flagship facilities of the Olympiads decided by images, but precisely because of this, they are mere shells: “As the indispensable decoration of the objects produced today, as the general exposé of the rationality of the system, as the advanced economic sector which directly shapes a growing multitude of image-objects...” 31 Superficies offset, thickened, materialized to become structural, functional, and decorated shell all-at- once. The shell makes these stadia’s inner hollowness, both actually and figuratively, palatable. However, what happens in Tokyo

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hyperbolizes this epiphenomenon to a whole new level. An image is further comported in more layers of infinitely regressive images, proportional to the importance of the void within it—or the image of importance the object conveys—which becomes lost in the simulacra of value that it never had as a presentat- hand. By chance, here again, one shell (Zaha Hadid’s) was subsumed and wrapped into another shell (Kengo Kuma’s); from hard shell to a porous anti-object.

Conclusion Our society in the age of insatiable consumption can be indicted of neither producing nor consuming little of consequence. Just because energy is being encapsulated to produce something, does not mean that object is anything consequential. It is truly an object with all its realities withdrawn from our conventional litmus of values, morality, ethics, or knowledge. Like chewing gum, it is purely constituted by taste without sustenance. Bubble Gum Architecture emerges unbuildable, untenable, titillating, but in the end, calorically empty. The questions that architects must ask is where to go from here, towards shifting the criteria of judgment in architecture. Perhaps the clues can be found in Hansel and Gretel breadcrumbs left behind by tracing where the encapsulated energy is going to. Suspended from the normative datum of Western paradigm, Tokyo can be thought of as a giant black-hole. It is an endless pit of

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insatiable hunger into which images, and their encapsulated energies, are constantly being sucked in, condensed, and trapped. Only through occasional flares, when a corona shifts, is some energy allowed to be expelled; rare cases of novel works. It is a real-life, real-scale, realtime laboratory experiment unfolding before our eyes to test how much it can consume before self-implosion. Instead of being gloomy about this; rather, this can be seen as an overwhelmingly exciting opportunity to tap and unleash all that energy. There will be a tipping point from the unbalance of consumption and production, counteracted by a powerful reaction that will try to restore a systemic equilibrium. The definition of production will shift from one legitimized by capitalism’s so-called laissez-faire free market objectivity towards the production of protocols to consume the right blend of encapsulated energy. Soon, images alone will no longer be enough to satiate the palate as the craving for the hallucinogens will only grow stronger and stronger until the real and the actual either collapse onto each other in a truly cybernetic universe, or become a singular and new seamless totality of consciousness. In either case, the increasing craving will force the production of stuff that cannot be evaluated by the system we are currently entrenched in. This posits a new premise for our relationships to any and all objects—to society, to architecture, to oneself, to each other—that is not based on transaction and consumption, but by how one peels away the bundle of superficies and touch upon the

pure core of encapsulated energy. Then, and only then, can tempura become less about its addiction-inducing fatty yet fluffy skin towards a masterful inversion of inner ingredients’ effervescence permeating the vacuousness to reclaim its inherent taste. What, then, becomes paramount is the issue of taste. Like chefs, an architect is a kind of cultural agent who connects the raw product with the human consumer, to ensure that what is natural becomes cooked and undergoes a process of socialization. And like chefs, architects, from constraints inherent to ingredients, must produce novel ideas. To fulfill this role, architects need to position themselves as true producers and arbiters of taste, and shift energy towards producing ideas and building them, instead of flavorless images.

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Endnotes and References 1 Tetsu Okada, Etymological Dictionary of Foods (Tokyo: Tokyodo Shuppan Publication, 2003) pp.308 Tempura’s etymological root Quatuor Tempora. 2

Roland Barthes, The Empire of Signs (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983) pp. 25~26

Claude Lévi-Strauss, Book 1: The Raw and the Cooked, Mythologiques (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983) pp. 01 “Certain categorical opposites drawn from everyday experience with the most basic sorts of things — e.g. ‘raw’ and ‘cooked,’ ‘fresh’ and rotten,’ ‘moist’ and ‘parched,’ and others — can serve a people as conceptual tools for the formation of abstract notions and for combining these into propositions.”

Much like a pine forest requires a fire at times to clear overgrowth and trigger an environmental cue to release seeds from their serotinous cones.

Gerald L. Mandell, John E. Bennett, and Raphael Dolin, Mandell, Douglas, and Bennett’s Principles and Practice of Infectious Diseases 7th edition (Philadelphia, PA: Churchill Livingstone/ Elsevier, 2010) pp. 250 “The historical term “consumption” came about due to the weight loss.[2] Infection of other organs can cause a wide range of symptoms.”

Richard K. Green and Susan M. Wachter, “The American Mortgage in Historical and International Context.” Journal of Economic Perspectives, Volume 19, Issue 4, (Pittsburgh: American Economic Association, Fall 2005) pp. 97

7 Akira Koshizawa, Story of Tokyo City Planning (Tokyo: Chikumashobo Ltd., 2001) pp.324

Housing,” NRI Papers No. 137, December 1, 2008 (Tokyo: Nomura Research Institute, 2008) pp. 1 14

Ibid. pp. 9

Jonathan Soble, “A Sprawl of Ghost Homes in Aging Tokyo Suburbs,” New York Times, August 24, 2015, https://nyti.ms/2jSYxNI

Ibid. pp. 3

Shozo Fujita, “Culture of New Stuff: Apropos of PIka-Pika,” in Self-Reflection of Knowledge from the Psychoanalytic Perspectives (Tokyo: Heibonsha Library, 2003) pp. 272

Thomas Daniell, After the Crash: Architecture in Post-Bubble Japan (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 2008) pp. 69

19 Ibid. 20 Thomas Daniell, “Beyond Style: A Case Study in Contemporary Japanese Architecture” in Architecture and Identity, edited by Peter Herrle and Erik Wegerhoff (Berlin: Habitat - International, 2008) pp.107 21

MoMAstore, “MUJI at MoMA” (Available: https://store.moma.org/museum/moma/ CategoryDisplay_10451_10001_11476_26712_-1_Y_MUJI- at-MoMA, Retrieved: 13 February, 2017)

Slavoj Žižek, The Universal Exception (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2006) pp. 229

23 Harry D. Harootunian, “Visible Discourses/Invisible Ideologies,” in Postmodernism and Japan, ed. Masao Miyoshi et al. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1989) pp. 88 24

Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object (London: Zero Books, 2011) pp.60-75

Ōe Kenzaburō, “Japan’s Dual Identity” in Postmodernism and Japan, ed. Masao Miyoshi et al. ( Durham: Duke University Press, 1989) pp. 203-204

Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red, 1970,) pp. 5

Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin (West Sussex: Wiley-Academy, 2005) pp. 19

Japan Sport Council, “New National Stadium International Concept Design Competition Submission Guidelines,” (Tokyo: Japan Sport Council, July 20, 2012) pp. 15

Fumihiko Maki, “Re-thinking the New National Olympic Stadium in Historical Background of Jingu-Gaien,” JIA Magazine, August 29, 2013

“Milestones: 1945–1952; Marshall Plan, 1948” accessed January 31, 2017. https://history. state.gov/milestones/1945-1952/marshall-plan.

Hiroshi Miyake, “The Enactment Process of the Building Application Procedure in the Building Standard Law” Architectural Institute of Japan, Vol. 79, No. 698 (Tokyo: AIJ, April 2014) pp. 959-965

John Grimond, “The World Goes to Town”, The Economist (5 May, 2007) pp. 5

“Relaxation on Wooden Apartments in Quasi-Fire Protection Zones - The Japanese Ministry of Construction submitted the Building Standard Law revisions to the Japanese Diet on March 17, 1998. Info: John Powles, COFI or Hidehiko Fumoto, COFI Tokyo

Jorge Almazán Caballero and Yoshiharu Tsukamoto, “Scrap and Build: Alternatives to the Corporate Redevelopment of Tokyo”, MONU 4 (Kassel: Universität Kassel, 2006)

30)

Hal Foster, Design and Crime: And Other Diatribes (London: Verso, 2002) pp. 25

Richard Koo and Masaya Sasaki, “Obstacles to Affluence: Thoughts on Japanese

31)

Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red, 1970,) pp. 15

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Located in the heart of Corktown, you will fall in love with this rustic Italian themed escape. An open floor plan does not hinder the intimacy while dining. Quick service and reasonable pricing offers a great start to any date night while avoiding the chaos of downtown. Ottava Via provides more than a hard to pronounce name, they offer a home cooked Italian presence we all love with bocce ball, wine, and pizza. Dim lighting sets the stage as you are seated. Unfortunately, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s rustic country Italian style is challenged by a single television screen in the corner of the space. Conversantly engaging antiques litter the surroundings of your experience while, natural materials caress your stomach and mind. Delightful window mullions create a picturesque scene of the unexpected surrounding splendor of Irish influenced Corktown. Dark red colored ceiling, stucco imitation wall coverings and a three-foot marble base do not necessarily flow well. However, the attempt at creating a home style Italian dining experience is successful. Ottava Via is worth a visit.

Jamie J Georges at Ottava Via

128 130 132 134 136 F. Philip Barash

Fort / Da

Notes on Metonymic Desire, Object Permanence, and a Pair of Pleated Pants F. Philip Barash lives and writes at the intersection of design and cultural critique. He has contributed critical essays, reviews, and interviews to national publications that focus on the discourse and practice of design. As a curator and placemaking expert, Barash has worked with civic and nonprofit organizations including the Chicago Architecture Foundation, the Poetry Foundation, the Obama Presidential Center, and the National Public Service to articulate and promote a strong sense of place. Barash is an alumnus of the University of Detroit Mercy and the University of Chicago who currently lives in Boston with his partner and their cat.

FORT / DA

Fort / Da: Notes on Metonymic Desire, Object Permanence, and a Pair of Pleated Pants F. Philip Barash My family arrived in the United States as refugees in 1992. We settled in a drab apartment complex in a Detroit suburb and from there launched tactical sorties into American life. Our first summer, as LA burned with racial injustice, Chicago flooded, and Nirvana played on the radio, I got a job delivering newspapers. As the family’s shambolic Pontiac 6000 sailed past rows of modest postwar ranch houses, I leaned out the passenger door and aimed papers at their front doors. I have no memory of how I came into this line of work, or how this career in journalism concluded. Like everything else from those early months as an American, my recollection is wobbly, provisional. I entered ninth grade of an American high school that Fall. Throughout the first semester, I observed the patterns of native life, learning verbal cadences, habits of personal hygiene, and peculiar dress of suburban teenagedom. Though my grades suffered, as the new year turned, I had mastered material culture. I was at last ready to graduate from a patient observer to an engaged participant. And so, early in 1993, in spite of protests from my family, I withdrew the lion’s share of my newspaper earnings and boarded the Pontiac no longer as a laborer but as a passenger, bound for the shopping mall. At the mall, I would select my own pair of Z. Cavaricci pants, which were to young men as a plume is to

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a peacock, featuring roughly the same coloring and incongruous relationship to the owner’s body. Toxic in color and monstrously pleated, the pants materialized as if a vision from Arabian Nights. They ballooned at the thighs but by the time they reached the knee, the legs narrowed severely. The inseam continued another yard past the ankle, so as to be rolled and pegged to rest on a high-top sneaker. Z. Cavaricci spared no material, for these were luxury items made in years of prosperity. My longing for them approached the obscene. But if the pants were the nominal object of my longing, they were not its ultimate aim. To inhabit the pants was to inhabit the ranks of their wearers -- the people who, in the months of careful surveillance, were the most handsome, successful, and popular in school. The Z. Cavariccis did not merely carry meaning: they contained within them the promise of transubstantiation. Did they, however, spark joy? For Marie Kondo, whose The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up has become required reading for self-helpers and home-organizers, this question is at the heart of our relationship to the things we own. Kondo’s career as home consultant has convinced her that the homes and lives of her clients are full of stuff, most of which is meaningless clutter. The relentless accumulation of things exacts a cost on people with whom she works: some pay for their things in anxiety, some in failing personal relationships, some in poor health. The things

that clog our closets choke our lives. Plenty of self-help literature has attended to this crisis of subject-object relationships, attacking our horde with weaponized decluttering, cleaning, and organizing. But something sets Kando sharply apart. It has to do with the direct line she traces between our relationship with things and our selfhood. The magic of Tidying Up, hinted in its the titular equivocation, is that how you treat your things makes you who you are. An instruction manual in “how to put your space in order in a way that will change your life forever,” Tidying Up is simultaneously a rulebook of how to be yourself. The equivocation is between doing and being because the “method I describe in this book is not a mere set of rules on how to sort, organize, and put things away. It is a guide to acquiring the right mind-set for creating order and becoming a tidy person. [italics mine].” This is a pedagogy that sees action as a means to identity, with the implication that the work of tidying is autopoetic. The instructions are so simple, so matter of fact, that I had to reread them a few times to make sure it could be so: “When you put your house in order,” Kondo writes, “you put your affairs and your past in order, too.” But by what mechanism does this magic work? To a contemporary condition that treats objects with nihilistic glee – buying and selling, recycling and upcycling, storing and discarding -- Kondo brings a tight focus on the relationship between a single object and

its master. The central criteria of the subjectobject relationship is whether the relationship is marked with joy. (1) Our desires are superficial only on the surface, Kondo tells us. Meeting with her clutterbug clients, she asks them to articulate their desire for change. One client wishes for a “more feminine” lifestyle. Kondo presses until the desire crystallizes: listening to classical music and drinking herbal tea, practicing yoga and languishing on a beautiful bedspread. “Ask yourself why,” she insists. Why is it important to do yoga? To lose weight. Why is it important to lose weight? To “be more svelte.” Why? Every decision must finally lead to happiness. “Repeat this process,” – digging further into the depths of your desire – “three to five times for every item.” The objects that constitute us are those that bring us happiness, fill us with joy. Yet, why should I count on my socks to bring me joy? The joy that a pair of socks, or a pair Z. Cavariccis, brings us is secondary to the transformation we’ll experience by ridding ourselves of everything else. Clinging to the stuff we love proves to be merely a transitional stage of self-transformation. The magic is not in stuff we keep, but in the stuff we discard. The identity formation that Kando’s pedagogy presupposes is subtractive. Tidying Up assumes that beneath our clutter is our essence, that by removing the excesses that we have carelessly accumulated, we’ll discover the true contours

FORT / DA

of selfhood. The modern condition follows the predicament of Pygmalion, the sculptor of Ovid’s myth, who chisels away at ivory until he brings forth a woman so beautiful and compelling that he is overcome with desire, and through the intervention of gods, his greatest sculpture becomes animate. We, Pygmalionlike, chip away at clutter to reveal the object of our desire – except the object is us. Kando is a product – and unlikely prophet – of a generation preoccupied with identity politics. She voices a belief that deep beneath our junk is a lurking subject position, a subjectivity that is ours to begin with – our only true and meaningful possession. This coincides with a resurgence, across campuses and elsewhere, of young people struggling to define and express their identities, locating them at intersections of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and personal history. The recent battles over safe spaces and trigger warnings tested the boundaries of political belonging.(2) But what is perhaps more interesting is that the saft space / trigger warning debates trace a fault line separating a current generation of identity warriors (for whom in a way Kando speaks), and a previous generation of cautious optimists who, like me, spent the nineties and the aughts envisioning a very different process of identity-making. Back then, we thought that identities were constructed in a dizzyingly complex process that was part free will, part social pressures that bear heavily on our choices, and part alchemy. Selfhood looked more like a gradual becoming

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– a trying on of tactical, temporary identities, some of which fit as generously as a new pair of Z. Cavariccis, and others that did not. Long before Lady Gaga told us otherwise, we were not born this way, or that. In an ongoing project of becoming ourselves, we exercised the power of choice and had power exercised upon us, forming our identities by way by gradual accumulation. What we would become depended on a sum of ideas, beliefs, nervous tics, designer pants, sexual partners, allergies, mannerisms, superstitions, friends, and enemies that we were to collect in our lifetimes. Not only were we inseparable from our junk, this view held, but we were exactly contiguous with it. Such additive identity is rooted in the notion of performance: we act out roles that are required or desirable in specific situations. I may act like a fuddy-duddy around my colleagues and like a party animal around my fraternity pals, but neither of these identities defines me fully. Moreover, the way I perform does not correspond to the way I am, which is happy news. In other words, my behavior does not determine my identity, meaning that I may be liberated from the tyranny of self-identification: for example, that I perform sexual congress with someone of my own gender need not oblige me identify as gay. (And, ad absurdum, I am therefore free to identity as gay without having to suck a single dick.) (3) The emphasis on performative identity of the 1990s owed in some part to the resurgence of the Frankfurt School, a loose constellation of German intellectuals active in the 1930s. Though

their thinking was indebted to Marxism, unlike doctrinal Marxists who maintain the primacy of economic exchange, Frankfurt School scholars theorized that cultural exchange is equally vital to the production of social norms, class divisions, power, identity, and other dimensions of contemporary existence. Their research sought to understand the mechanisms by which culture is produced, disseminated, and lived. Had they reached a conclusion (which they did not), it would be that nothing about the way we experience culture is natural – or, today’s parlance, “authentic.” Our rituals and religion, like our attitudes and art, and like everything that we believe belongs to us isn’t “ours” in any recognizable sense, but a product of tense negotiations among institutions of power. To put it more bluntly, our selfhood doesn’t belong to ourselves, but is on loan to us from a vast industry that ranges from state propaganda to pop music. We are dispossessed by the culture that we take up. Walter Benjamin’s classic essay “Unpacking My Library” should be read by this light: as a meditation on a selfhood constructed through a myriad of transactions with cultural products – in this instance, books – and cultural producers such as printers, bookstores, and auctions. “Unpacking my Library” is a deceptively easy text. It’s charming in its frequent selfdeprecation and its asides. It begins with a generic statement of the nature of collection (it’s compulsive), proceeds with vignettes about prized items in the author’s growing book collection, and concludes with a gentle lament

about the disappearance of “true” collectors. But there are at least two complications: first, as I said above, the essay is as much a personal story as an exploration of an additive, or transactional, approach to identity formation. The second is that, much like Tidying Up, “Unpacking My Library” is intended as a lesson. Its purpose is as explicit as Kando’s, whose book mimics a how-to manual; Benjamin’s essay is subtitled “A Talk About Book Collecting,” as if advertising a lecture delivered to eager students. It proposes, beyond acquainting us with Benajmin’s library, to teach us something about subject-object relationships. Indeed the essay will lend insight into the relationship between a collector and his possessions, which is first characterized as a willful act of ordering the chaos of the universe. Yet the order of a personal library is an intimate, autobiographical order, a function of personal preferences. To a stranger entering such a library, the logic of the collection is impenetrable. Thus the life of a collector is suspended in a “dialectical tension between the poles of disorder and order.” As a collector orders his objects, he locks “individual items within a magic circle in which they are fixed as the final thrill, the thrill of acquisition, passes over them.” The period, the region, the craftsmanship, the former ownership – for a true collector the whole background of an item adds up to a magic encyclopedia whose quintessence is the fate of his object.

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There’s at least as much magic, judging by this description, in collecting as there is in tidying up. This brand of magic, however, lives in the provenance of a thing, its story. This is what Benjamin means by the uncharacteristically gushy term “fate”: the sum of everything that has been inscribed into an object in its lifetime. A collector coaxes the latent life of things out of them. It’s through his agency that the object becomes animate: “the most important fate of a copy [of a book] is its encounter with him, with his own collection.” So collecting does not work by accumulation alone. It requires that things have a life, but first they must have liberty and, for a collector, buying a book represents a rescue – “the true freedom of books” possible only on his shelves. The life-giving magic that the collector exercises is, on closer inspection, reciprocated by the collection. Ownership, Benjamin writes, “is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.” Assuming Benjamin isn’t suggesting that books are needed for physical survival, can it be that our selfhood hinges on our capacity to collect? A clue to the mystery of life-giving collections is Benjamin’s thought about their transmissibility. The proper posture of a collector is that of an heir, entrusted with the safekeeping of inheritance that will pass through him to the next generation. He lives with the knowledge that the objects in his collections are borrowed; the brief moment of his encounter with the object is the outcome of his desire for ownership, but in the final

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count, the object precedes and will outlast this encounter. Like the subjectivity they construct, our collections are, in this sense, borrowed. “Unpacking My Library” ends on a note of lament. (And in 1932 Germany, things must have warranted an uneasy mood.) The age of the collector is nearing an end, with public institutions assuming stewardship of a common archive. A collection doesn’t exist without a collector, Benjamin writes. But of course the corollary is also true: without our collections, we cease to exist. “Only in extinction is the collector comprehended.” Object relationships are fundamental to our selfhood. They may be modeled on ownership, as Benjamin offers. Or they may be a study in value and loss, as Kondo does. But the first subject-object relationship is inaugurated in a scene of an original separation from our mothers, during which, pre-consciously, we learn that we are distinct from the source that satiates all of our hungers, responding to our primal desires for food, security, warmth, comfort, love before we even know how to ask. Our lives may begin in oneness with our mothers, but our selfhoods begin at the moment of separation. And forevermore, from that moment, the moment of loss of a life-giving source, we become ourselves – autonomous subjects, desiring subjects. Subjects in search of objects that satisfy us. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Sigmund Freud describes a childhood activity, a perverse game

of sorts. He observes an eighteen-month old Ernst who throws a toy under furniture, out of sight. Ernst is despondent when the toy disappears and cries “fort!”: gone. Soon, Ernst gets hold of a reel attached to a string; again, he throws it of t of sight, accompanied by his usual expression of mourning. But now, the child pulls on the string, causing the toy to reappear. He greets the reappearance with “da!”, meaning that the object is “there.” Ernst is compelled to repeat this action over and over, performing a cycle of loss and reappearance. The game brings up a host of questions about masochism and pleasure. But it also has a pedagogical purpose: the child learns that objects have a degree of permanence contained within them. Freud notes that when young Ernst’s father leaves for army duty, Ernst is capable of coping with the absence. Ditto for his mother’s death: the child has rehearsed minor disappearances enough to process the big one. The contrast between Benjamin and Kondo is easy. You sense the tension as they tug at the opposite ends of desire, one wishing to complete an ultimate library, the other fantasizing a room free of material distractions. His magic is lifegiving. Her magic is life-changing. He is bent on ordering the world into a profoundly personal collection. She wants to free us from the urge to collect. But the contrast isn’t particularly satisfying. Maybe that’s because they have more in common than not. The fetish of the object, the equivalent obsession with having and not having, the grandeur of their vision – whether it ends in plenitude or famine – kinder Benjamin

and Kando to one another. Seen from a certain angle, though their paths appear to diverge, they are both moving along a parabola that asymptotically approaches an ideal but, alas, has no hope of reaching it. Neither the collection of objects nor their discarding can be final. (4) But that hardly matters. The pleasure is not in the conclusion but in the repetition. The Fort/Da game proceeds at once towards both goals, but even a toddler apprehends the basic condition of the game. As he throws the toy and retrieves it again and again, the child learns to associate the specific object with the generic. The toy’s function is metonymic, and it comes to substitute all objects of desire. Under late capitalism, things are neither necessities nor luxuries, but signifiers – floating and pure. Popular cultural narratives turn on mismatched identities and possessions: welfare mothers wheeling Mercedeses, millionaires darning their own socks. Our possessions have long been emptied of their straightforward utility; they have escaped from us into the carnivalesque, symbolic register. Here, princes and paupers are, at best, performative conventions and only fools, when they peer underneath a trucker’s cap, expect to discover the face of a longdistance trucker. Shifts in signification happen quickly and perilously for those who dare bet on meaning. Even teenage scholars of material culture, however diligent their research and certain their conclusions, learn firsthand of existential disappointment. The disappointment is all the

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more bitter when they trust the object, when they discern its meaning, when they manage to wrest from it a feeling of joy. I brought the Z. Cavariccis home from the mall, as triumphant as a liberator. Because the pants were sacred objects, I waited to wear them until a suitable occasion presented itself. It may have happened at a school dance or a sleepover for members of my theater club; my memories, as I said, are untrustworthy. Leaving the house dressed in fabulously billowing pants, I was royalty – a philosopher king to whom the meanings of all things were revealed. But like all those who toy with kingship, I was destined for a tragedy, albeit a minor one. As the year 1993 marched on, at theatre sleepovers and school dances, in locker rooms and lunch halls, in the farthest carrels of public libraries and at the tallest bunk beds in overnight camps, all across the teenage geography, Z. Cavariccis had by then become uncool. They retreated into the closet, profaned. Our things are not us, yet there is, as Kondo recognizes, a convergence between having and being. Having is fleeting and unsatisfactory; our desire for having is eternal and human. Objects are never quite ours, never permanent. The lesson Hans learns about object permanence is that it is not a developmental stage but a condition we are doomed to repeat, for every object holds in it already its loss, its return, and its replacement. In high school, a pair of pants was the object of my metonymic desire. They meant popularity, cool, sexual prospects, clear skin. They

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meant knowledge, access, cultural literacy, a community of fellow wearers. They meant everything. Everything except themselves. Though they had come into my ownership through the potency of desire, their meaning had been conferred upon them somewhere in the symbolic order, well beyond my reach. I returned to visit the Z. Cavariccis last year on the occasion of my high school reunion. The reunion was indifferent and I drank too much, but the morning after, I awoke in my mother’s house to a feeling that the pants were tugging at me. They had been kept for the past two decades in a cedar-lined basement closet where mother stores her fur coats out of season. Opening the doors, I expected to face a magical portal opening out of the wardrobe onto a world haunted by beasts and memories. But the closet had no magic. The pants hung inside a plastic bag; I exhumed them and brought them up the stairs, to the light of the kitchen, for examination. They appeared substantially as I remembered, the shock of their color untouched by age. The pleats on the front were numerous, but to my surprise the behind was devoid of pockets; wearers of Z. Cavariccis traveled unburdened, never having to look back. Despite initial misgivings, the pants fit. I spent the morning getting reacquainted in the mirror with a silhouette of my past.

Endnotes 1

The book’s subtitle of a “Japanese Art of Tidying Up” invites a reading as a culturally specific text. But the juxtaposition of an ascetic East and nihilistic West, even schematically, is misleading. Kando’s project is not really about bringing an Eastern sensibility to the West, but a method for uncovering an essential selfhood.

The University of Chicago, where I was once a graduate student, broke apart exactly along generational lines; many alumni of my generation and older adopted the “conservative” position of unrestricted public debate, no matter the disruption or offense such debate may cause. Current students and their national cohort argued for the “progressive” position of restricting certain speech in the interest of greater good.

A former classmate recently reminded me that not all of us saw performative identity as liberating. This model of identity formation was hardly available to everyone. The masquerade ball of shifting, fluid identities doesn’t admit everyone: bodies marked by otherness are unlikely to gain entry.

Polemics aside, must we adopt a single pedagogy? Or might there be other, medium or hybrid, positions we can occupy that do not force our desires to model either Kando or Benjamin? And why must we bend in either direction of Benjamin and Kando, who, incidentally, were both sabotaged by their own stuff ? The paradox is that for all of Benjamin’s eloquence on the subject of order in his collection, his greatest work is incomplete, fragmentary, and hermetic. And that, while Kando preaches minimalism, copies of her book serve as marketing props in at home goods stores.

A new kind of diner. Retro vibes to a hipster’s liking. Coffee that’s too hot. Parking that threatens your footing at each uneven footfall. Ads that situate the establishment as a local supporter while discretely ‘hiding’ a cracked storefront window. A promotional Band-Aid. Seating that’s quite quaint. A spatial call for intimacy. Yet no presence of group-shaming resonated. We are welcomed. Seated comfortably on top of one another, our eyes scan, intrigued by fixtures and systems, juxtaposed. Our mouths water as smells of brunch waft potentials of pleasure to our nostrils. A menu that prods curiosity; arouses taste buds from a deep slumber of the mundane, in anticipation. There is a kindness – an attentiveness – in a cup of too-hot-coffee. As it replenishes readily. Unapologetically. Portions that could easily feed two – assuming starvation is not imminent. A hash too large for one journeyed to the hands of one far hungrier than I. The food may not be the forefront. It pleasantly satisfies, but the experience is in the journey.

Nicole Fricke at Brooklyn Street Local

WHEN HUNGER CREATES VOID IN THE HEART OF MOTOR CITY

044 046 048 050 052 054 056 UDM SOA I News Will Wittig, AIA, Professor of Architecture and Dean Stephen Vogel, FAIA, Professor of Architecture and Former Dean

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WHEN HUNGER CREATES VOID IN THE HEART OF MOTOR CITY

Building Type: Education: Start Date 1994 | End Date 2017 In 1993 Steve Vogel was named Dean of the School of

to fruition: 1) raise the money; 2) create construction

Architecture, and he immediately set about a strategic

phases without knowing when subsequent phases might

planning process with the faculty, alumni and students.

be funded; and 3) complete the work without relocating

Through that process it became clear that the highest

the faculty, staff and students from the school.

priority of the SOA was to renovate the 42,000 square foot 1926 building in which the school had been housed since

The goals of the master plan can be summarized as

1972. The Beaux Arts/Eclectic building was functionally

follows: 1) respect the historic nature of the building

inadequate for the needs of a dynamic and thriving

by following the Secretary of Interior Standards for

architecture school and issues with the building abounded

the Rehabilitation of historic properties even though

including life safety code violations, inadequate mechanical

the building was not historically designated locally or

and electrical services, non-existent support spaces such as

nationally; 2) create a visual learning vocabulary so

computer labs and seminar rooms and a closed bearing

students can see first hand where walls were moved,

wall building that had no identifiable center of activity or

how mechanical and electrical systems function, and

architectural presence. In order to accomplish the task of

how new and old materials can co-exist in a pleasing

building renovation, a master plan and budget needed to

and exciting manner; and 3) allow for flexibility to make

be established and then fund raising had to take place to

changes for future educational requirements.

PC Lab Renovations

New Exhibition Space

finance the renovation of the building. The history of fund raising for the school was minimal at best. Although

Over the course of the last five years, we have been

$1,000,000 was raised in the first year, which was used

fortunate to complete three more phases of renovations

for immediate mechanical and electrical upgrades, new

that essentially complete the work of the original master

windows and the creation of a computer lab, the entire

plan. With renovations to the faculty offices in 2011,

process outlined by the master plan would ultimately take

most of the studios in 2013, and the remaining studios

twenty-two years and cost $8,500,000.

and workshops in 2016, all major work proposed in the master plan is now complete. We are especially grateful

Throughout those twenty-two years over eleven architects

to Warren Loranger ‘51, our leading benefactor, for

and designers, many of them alumni and faculty of the

whom the building is named, and Steven ’74, ’76 and

SOA, were actively involved in the various phases of the

Beth Jevitz Pagnotta ’74, who have provided significant

project.

Remarkably, the goals of the original master

funding for the two most recent renovations, along with

plan, as overseen by Dean Vogel, and then Dean Wittig,

Tom Blaser ’55, several firms, and dozens and dozens

were realized and consistently followed by each architect

of other alumni who have made this amazing work

while making adjustments for unanticipated programmatic

possible.

requirements and the restrictions of limited budgets. Three primary issues had to be overcome to see the project

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Peter Pierce Interactive Learning Center

Redesigned Facilty Offices

WHEN HUNGER CREATES VOID IN THE HEART OF MOTOR CITY

Replace Photo

Replace Photo Down Stairs Hall Pagnotta Studio Renovations

Office and Fish Bowl Renovation

Basement Renovation

Re-take Photo Replace Photo Downstairs Crit The Pit Remodel

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Basement Remodel

Replace Photo CNC New CNC Router

Out of Service represents the faults of the often used, required, and/or favorited amenities in an often inconvenient and adverse manner. A depression which despises the current, breeds the inspiration for intervention in the future, and assembles the broken pieces. Out of Service requires attention, and the outcome is often unintended and unexpected. Dichotomy 24: Out of Service invites youâ&#x20AC;Ś â&#x20AC;Śto CTRL+ALT+DEL and repair the damage done by the walls that divide the creative from the otherwise static. Submissions should consider Out of Service as a response to the faulty, inevitable, inadequate, and the otherwise obsolete, as well as its relation to the discourse of architecture, urbanism, design, and all the arts in between. Dichotomy is a student journal of the University of Detroit Mercy School of Architecture. Submit your 300-word abstract with 3 images by December 1, 2017 to Dichotomy.arch.udmercy.edu Illustration by Frank Zerilli