on site review 41 : infrastructure

ON SITE r e v i e w

41 : 2022

i nf ra st r u c t u re

l e ad p e n c il s tu di o

Roadside utilities, invisible unless noticed, photographed, at night, with a long exposure, at which point the elements become strangely communicative: a small symphony of unattractive things.

See Lead Pencil Studio’s proposal for what to do with all our excessive, redundant roadways on p34

$18 print copies: www.onsitereview.ca

Nikhil Anand, Akhil Gupta, Hannah Appel, editors

The Promise of Infrastructure

Raleigh: Duke University Press, 2018 ISBN: 978-1-4780-0018-1 From U.S.-Mexico border walls to Flint’s poisoned pipes, there is a new urgency to the politics of infrastructure. Roads, electricity lines, water pipes, and oil installations promise to distribute the resources necessary for everyday life. Yet an attention to their ongoing processes also reveals how infrastructures are made with fragile and often violent relations among people, materials, and institutions.

While infrastructures promise modernity and development, their breakdowns and absences reveal the underbelly of progress,

https://www.dukeupress.edu/ the-promise-of-infrastructure liberal equality, and economic growth. This tension, between aspiration and failure, makes infrastructure a productive location for social theory. Contributing to the everyday lives of infrastructure across four continents, some of the leading anthropologists of infrastructure demonstrate in The Promise of Infrastructure how these more-than-human assemblages made over more-than-human lifetimes offer new opportunities to theorize time, politics, and promise in the contemporary moment.

read the introduction: https://www.dukeupress.edu/Assets/PubMaterials/978-1-4780-0018-1_601.pdf

Kyle Devine and Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier,

Audible Infrastructures: Music, Sound, Media Oxford University Press, 2021 ISBN-10 : 0190932635 ISBN-13 : 978-0190932633 Audible Infrastructures takes readers to the sawmills, mineshafts, power grids, telecoms networks, transport systems, and junk piles that seem peripheral to musical culture and shows that they are actually pivotal to what music is, how it works, and why it matters.

Organized into three parts dedicated to the main phases in the social life and death of musical commodities — resources and production, circulation and transmission, failure and waste — this book provides a

https://global.oup.com/academic/ product/audible-infrastructures9780190932640?cc=ca&lang=en& concerted archaeology of music’s media infrastructures. As contributors reveal the material-environmental realities and politicaleconomic conditions of music and listening, they open our eyes to the hidden dimensions of how music is made, delivered, and disposed of.

In rethinking our responsibilities as musicians and listeners, this book calls for nothing less than a reconsideration of how music comes to sound.

much of this book appears to be readable online at Oxford Scholarship Online here: https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/oso/9780190932633.001.0001/ oso-9780190932633 Joseph Heathcott, editor

The Routledge Handbook of Infrastructure Design Global Perspectives from Architectural History New York: Routledge, 2022 ISBN 9780367554910 This is an exploration of the multifaceted nature of infrastructure through the global lens of architectural history. Infrastructure holds the world together, yet even as it connects some people, it divides others, sorting access and connectivity through varied social categories such as class, race, gender, and citizenship. This collection examines themes across broad spans of time, raises questions of linkage and scale, investigates infrastructure as phenomenon and affect, and traces the interrelation of aesthetics, technology, and power.

Contributors from South and East Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, South America, North America, Western Europe, the Middle East and the former Soviet Union, pay close attention to the materials, functions and aesthetics of infrastructure systems as they unfold within their cultural and political contexts, conceptualizing, studying, and understanding infrastructure as a worlding process.

https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Handbook-of-Infrastructure-Design-GlobalPerspectives-from/Heathcott/p/book/9780367554910

ON SITE r e v i e w 41 : 2022 infrastructure On Site review is published by Field Notes Press, which promotes field work in matters architectural, cultural and spatial.

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N O T E S For any and all inquiries, please use the contact form at https://onsitereview.ca/contact-us ISSN 1481-8280 copyright: On Site review. All rights reserved.

The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopied, recorded or otherwise stored in a retrieval system without the prior consent of the publisher is an infringement of Copyright Law Chapter C-30, RSC1988. back issues: https://onsitereview.ca these are listed in the website menu in three groupings: issues 5-16, 17-34 and 35-39. editor: Stephanie White design: Black Dog Running printer: Emerson Clarke Printing, Calgary subscriptions: libraries: EBSCO On-Site review #3371594 at https://ebsco.com individual: https://onsitereview.ca/subscribe

This issue of On Site review was put together in Nanaimo on unceded Coast Salish territory, specifically the traditional territory of the Snuneymuxw Peoples, and in Calgary under Treaty 7 comprised of the Kainai, Siksika, Piikani, Tsuut’ina and Stoney Nakoda First Nations,whose descendents continue to live on this land.

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on site review 41 :: infrastructure

Stephanie White

2

introduction

Photolanguage

3

a billboard of infrastructural imaginaries

Shai Yeshayahu

4

be∙spec·ta·cled

Gabriel Fries-Briggs

8

air

Katherine M Boles

12

guest room: multi-species condensers

Jonathan Manzo

20

Hunters Point remediation

Roger Mullin

26

almost invisible

Daniel Milhayo+Annie Han

32

when the road ends

Christian Stewart

34

locating Monck Road

Bradford Watson

38

deliberately slow

Alexa MacCrady

41

street work

Ruth Oldham

42

the subtle poetry of French electrical substations

Simon Shim Sutcliffe

48

dams

Lejla Odobasic + Anisa Glumcevic

52

re-adaptive infrastructure as survival

NIRSA

58

wier man seit

calls for articles

60

42: atlas of belonging 43: temporary architecture

i nfr astru ctu r e stephanie white

Just as we sent out our call for articles for this issue, Routledge's magisterial Handbook on Infrastructure Designs: Global Views from Architectural History, edited

by Joseph Heathcott, was published. He sent me the introduction in which he outlines infrastructure in an expanded field: 'not only the immediate artifacts of infrastructure - the dams, bridges, water pipes, fibre optic cables - but also the materials of which they are composed, the processes that produce them, the labour that animates them, the human affects that they reflect and engender, the landscapes and ecologies that they transform and the stories within which they are enmeshed. ' 'Rather than view infrastructure as a taken-for-granted element of modernity, this volume approaches infrastructure through Bruno Latour's assertion that modernity is itself a multiform narrative. Infrastructure, then, consititutes a historically contingent element in the construction and dissemination not of modernity, but of the story of modernity – that contradictory knot of dreams, aspirations, and values that shape how we narrate the world.'1 I re-read Rosalind Krauss's 1979 essay 'Sculpture in the expanded field', written as epistemological categories were losing all definition: she warned that the new was being critically historicised rather than being recognised as a true break with past movements. 2 Sculpture, in the 1970s, was borrowing from architecture, agriculture and mining; land art was one result – for example, Nancy Holt's concrete culverts in the desert, aligned with movements of the sun, were both ancient and modern – fragments of infrastructural materials as sculptural as stone. Land art did not aestheticise infrastructure as much as borrow its inherent grandeur while politically undermining it. We realise, forty years on, that the seemingly a-political, un-commodifiable and critically innocent materials of infrastructure are actually deeply implicated in political and cultural processes.

Infrastructure Designs: Global Views from Architectural History tells the back-stories of dams, power stations, roads and canals. Projects are described by narratives that expand and expand to reveal the sheer complexity of any infrastructural act which literally and figuratively encompasses the world.

h ttps :/ / w ww. r ou t l e d ge . c om

h ttps :/ / bu lg ari a.po s ts en. c om / wor l d / 3 0 8 2 4

Which leads us to our present startled dismay at how easily vital infrastructure with all its history, connections and inter-dependencies, can be demolished by eight well-placed HIMAR shells: Antonivskyi Bridge across the Dnipró in Kherson: broken, irreparable.

And the targeting of housing blocks: empty shells, service infrastructure blasted to bits. One way to decide whether something is infrastructure rather than structure, or metaphor, or a narrative, is to think of one's world without it. Infrastructure, no matter what its story, is the essential, little thought-of facilitator of habitus.3 Without infrastructure, we have nothing. p

h ttps :/ / ww w. ne w s w e e k . c om

1 Joseph Heathcott, editor. Handbook on Infrastructure Designs: Global Views from Architectural History, London and New York: Routledge, 2022. p6 2 Rosalind Krauss. 'Sculpture in the Expanded Field' October Vol. 8, pp. 30-44 Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 1979 3 Pierre Bourdieu. Habitus and Field: General Sociology, Volume 2. Lectures at the College de France 1982-1983. Cambridge, Oxford, Boston, New York: Polity Press, 2020 h tt p s : / / w ww. nd t v. c om

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on site review 41 :: infrastructure

a b i l l bo a r d o f in frastru c tu ral i m agi n aries photolanguage

:

nigel green and robin wilson

Commissioned by Tempo Arts Hastings, UK, a 2 x 5m billboard occupies a derelict space previously owned by Network Rail. The image juxtaposes a history of social protest with local themes of modern infrastructural heritage and contemporary, speculative redevelopment.

It re-situates one of the 1930s coastal shelters and car park vents of the Hastings and St Leonards seafront by Borough Engineer Sidney Little, re-categorising it as a proposed 'Pavilion of Insurrection and Pleasure'. The aim of the work was to activate a site-specific, poetic and utopian space of visual play, whilst critiquing the often vacuous nature of the contemporary developer’s digital render and the weakness of institutions to propose alternative urban futures.

The image involves a direct sampling of details from the surrounding environment (such as the nearby office block, Ocean House and the site’s colony of buddleia), and postures as a proposed architectural intervention, alluding to the billboards of proposed redevelopment projects of the contemporary townscape: ‘Coming Soon’. A fake planning notice accompanied the billboard, recording an initial rejection of the proposal and then the altered specification of its accepted form. ph o to la ngu a ge

The naming of the pavilion aligns it with the utopian infrastructural architectures of Nicholas Ledoux in eighteenth century France. It invokes radical forces that are suppressed in the contemporary city, announcing their imminent manifestation in this hinterland space, the terrain-vague of the billboard site. A restless host gather about the pavilion: a utopic intersection between historical periods. African and Chinese migrant workers from Paris of the 1920s associate with student protesters from May 1968 — a composite crowd of demonstrative figures, the ‘ideal’ operators of this hybrid object of existential utility. p

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on site review 41 :: infrastructure

Photolanguage (Nigel Green & Robin Wilson) is a collaborative art practice documenting and reimagining the legacies of modernity in urban and landscape sites. It is currently working on a new book on Parisian Brutalist architecture. https://photolanguage.info

be ·s p e c· t a · c le d | b ’spe k tekeld by ima g e s e e

e

s h a i y e s h aya h u

A tech-driven life collapses our perception of time, habits and habitats. We can now stitch together the frames made for livestock, plants, pipes, wires and roads that gradually turned into a series of transactional infrastructures across the globe.

In record time, flying machines, rocket ships, and artificial satellites invented during WWI, WWII, and the Cold War spread so far – so fast that we can feel, in real time, how signals and images exponentially infiltrate our thoughts, ideas, and imagination. Yet, in a remarkable inversion of power, characteristically reserved for military might, NASA’s CubeSat Launch Initiative deploys your personal satellite into space. Like superman, we can expand our eyesight, flying above the troposphere at an increased pace.

time travel Long before the aerospace race came into existence, Hera, the goddess of the sky, had an all-seeing giant named Argus Panoptes.

He was able to selectively turn on or off any of his one hundred eyes at will. Such power amplified his ability to stay abreast of information even when one or a few of his eyes napped. In the twenty-first century, that ancient mythology has come to fruition.

A multitude of transistors on microchips turn currents on and off; they activate a series of artificial eyes and sensors across every atmospheric stratum surrounding earth. These instruments are now humans’ supernatural eyesight; millions of panoptic eyes proliferate information that aid in discerning the past, present and future of human design.

explained, ‘the tight economy of space in the airplane gave him ideas for his projects, just as the ocean liner and the car had once been the source of inspiration’.ibid Unquestionably, Colomina positioned the plane as a tool to ‘craft’ the mobility of ideas, concluding that: The AA generation that circulated ideas through teachers and books would form the core of a new generation of global practitioners. Some of the best and most mobile teachers, such as Rem Koolhaas and Tschumi, and their students, for example Zaha Hadid and Steven Holl, would lead an international avant-garde with major projects throughout the world. A generation that grew up trafficking in ideas is now trafficking in projects.ibid

craft At the Design of the In/Human Symposium in Germany, Beatriz Colomina dates this evolution from the invention of the aircraft.

Flying, she said, ignited a resurgence for architectural practices and educational praxes. She explained the phenomenon by citing a post from Le Corbusier’s sketchbook, dated January 5, 1960, quoting, ‘In 50 years we have become a new animal on the planet.’ She reflects on his text, This posthuman is an animal that flies; the airline network is its ‘efficient nervous system’, its web covering the globe. The hypermobile architect is a symptom of a globalized society in which humanity will be necessarily transformed.1

4

habits from space

Colomina built on Le Corbusier’s flying agenda to declare that air travel did not simply represent a metamorphosis for his practice but also for how he learned, reimagined and redistributed ideas about his spatial thinking and modes of building. In essence, she

Over the decades since Le Corbusier’s pronouncement, humans gained access to visual sensor systems, telescopes, space stations and many communication satellites. This access enabled them to receive, deliver and alter all kinds of information regardless of distances and without the gruelling schedule Le Corbusier endured.

Trafficking in ideas increased exponentially, particularly for design thinkers engaged in the digitisation and digitalisation of earth.

Digits, as it turns out, allow designers to model and simulate a representation of the real world using satellite signals and images2, an occurrence that begins to blur the micro- and macro-scales of real and artificial infrastructures enabling life.

1 Colomina, Beatriz. ‘Towards a Posthuman Architect’ Design of The In/ Human. November 19-21, 2009 http://www.design-in-human.de/symposium/colomina.html

2 Longley, Paul A, Michael F Goodchild, David J Maguire and David W Rhind.

Geographic informationsystems and science. John Wiley & Sons, 2005

on site review 41 :: infrastructure

Historians see this conditioning as a transfer outside the ‘posthuman animal that flies’ and closer to a ‘god-like animal that designs and engineers life’.3 Oddly, in this superhuman state, data mining and processing through digits scapes the specificities of a site, creating a physical separation from reality rendered by ‘pseudorthography’: Pseudorthography is orthography after simulation: a mobile army of skeuomorphism in which the world appears just enough as it used to. Immediately beneath those appearances is another world, ‘produced from miniaturized units, from matrices, memory banks, and command models-and with these, it can be reproduced an infinite number of times’. 4

The discourses that May and Easterling are forwarding lie within a plethora of research work concerned with the mass production of images availed by digital equipment. They are part of a broader design discussion circulating among academic forums and private practices that define digital models as either final renditions or modifiable models. Complex bodies of data, such as digital models, are like sets of instructions calibrated precisely for computer to computer communication and dialogues between computers and printers or robotic processes. These models can also yield diverse outcomes due to their editable potential and numerical condition, enhancing their capacity to resize, adopt and adapt in response to commands.

Based on architectural practices and John May’s writings for SIG-NAL. IMAGE. ARCHITECTURE, design is without choice ‘mummified in stunning resolutions’.5

For this reason, digital models are never final; they are intellectual weapons with endless opportunities and consequences. As an example, consider The Slow House. In 1989 it was a design-built commission, and now it is part of MOMA’s architectural collection and Diller-Scofidio+Renfro’s unbuilt archives. Like other digital models, it is a spatial entity exposing the ability to exist in different locations at any given time. It can appear and reappear as an original piece in prominent exhibits across the globe. In its transformative state, it is more valuable and resourceful than any built rendition would be.8 Rebuilt with different instruments, a digital home defies traditional expectations for curators, educators and researchers, who can record, assess, store and retrieve its content according to its immediate locality. Like all digitalised information, The Slow House is not fixed on-site and does not travel on a vessel; instead, it can travel as a packet from one machine to another. Models of this kind introduced novel modes to redefine the functions and performances of architecture as reproducible, active and evolving objects tailored by codes and transactional agreements.

This idea stands within a 2D–3D tug of war based on a 2D–3D dilemma first spun by anime slang, where 2D is beautiful, and the physical tangibility of 3D is a condition now known as ‘three-dimensional pig disgusting [3DPD]’. 3DPD indicates that 2D experiences are superior to 3D experiences.6 Keller Easterling, architect and theorist, expressed concerns for this spatial reconditioning, noting that in the absence of gravity, this dematerialization of physical information represents a shift in perception where ‘the light, the blizzard of photons coming from everywhere is blinding and ugly’.7 3 Bratton, Benjamin H. The stack: On software and sovereignty. MIT press, 2016 4 Harari, Yuval Noah. Homo Deus: A brief history of tomorrow. New York: Random House, 2016 5 May, John. SIGNAL. IMAGE. ARCHITECTURE (Everything is already an image).

Columbia books on architecture and the city, 2019 6 giantparakeet. ‘3DPD’. Know Your Meme. 2007. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/3dpd 7 Easterling, Keller. ‘IIRS’. e-flux Journal. April 2015. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/64/60837/iirs/

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8 Latour, Bruno and Adam Lowe. 'The Migration of the Aura Exploring the Original Through Its Facsimiles' in T. Bartscherer and R. Coover (editors) Switching Codes. Thinking Through Digital Technology in the Humanities and the Arts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. pp 275-297.

s h ai yesh ayah u

the scale of HOME In the opening monologue of Alfonso Cuarón’s 2013 film Gravity, five sentences set on a black backdrop convey the hostile conditions humans would encounter in the Thermosphere and beyond: 1 At 600km above planet earth, the temperature fluctuates between +258 and -148 degrees Fahrenheit.

2 There is nothing to carry sound.

3 No air pressure.

4 No oxygen.

5 Life in space is impossible. 9 Artificial satellites are not living organisms. They thrive without air pressure or oxygen. On low orbit [LEO], Middle orbit [MEO], and geosynchronous [GEO] zone, their positions ensure that daily blizzards of data would reach home. But, if ‘a massive solar storm disrupting satellite communications, a cyber attack partially disabling the GPS system, and debris knocking out Earth-monitoring satellites’10 occurred, it could cause total disruptions to our way of life.

Transport, energy, and computer services will be affected and fear will engulf our sense of existence. People would start to believe that life without artificial satellites would be impossible to sustain.

Then, bespectacled by digits and microchips, it would take days for our analogue processes of design to respark. p 9 Cuarón, Alfonso, director. Gravity. Warner Bros. Pictures, 2013. 91 min. https://www.warnerbros.com/movies/gravity 10 Hollingham, Richard. ‘What would happen if all satellites stopped working?’ BBC. June, 9, 2013. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20130609-the-day-without-satellites

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image sources for the graphics ESA - Analysis and prediction https://www.esa.int/Safety_Security/Space Debris/ Analysis_and_prediction Clker.com, Airplane silhouette/icon, 2012, Pixabay, CreativeCommons 1.0. susannp4, Hot Air Balloon Silhouette, March 4, 2019, Pixabay, CC0 1.0.

NatuskaDPI, Deep Sea Life Illustrations & Clip Art, Getty Images/iStockphoto Adobe Stock, vegetable silhouette, 2022, stock.adobe.com A-Digit, Fertile Ground stock Illustration, December 21, 2012, Getty Images/ iStockphoto Manga, George, Drone Silhouette, May, 13 2015, Stock Illustrations

RF-Pose,'uses artificial intelligence (AI) to teach wireless devices to sense people's posture and movement.

By analysing the part of your genetic code determining susceptibility to nutrition-related health conditions like diabetes, DNANudge tells you which foods are best for you and which you should avoid.

Whenever Van Es (who is he?), throws something in the trash, he runs the wrappings through a barcode scanner connected to an online database using his laptop.

He says: the robots will scurry in the cool shade beneath a wide variety of plants, pulling weeds, planting cover crops, diagnosing plant infections, and gathering data to help farmers optimise their farms.

Biohacking is the art and science of giving users more control over their own biology.

My toilet is fitted with technology that can detect various disease markers in stool and urine, including cancer markers such as colorectal or urologic.

HEY SIRI, can you ask ORI to make my bed?

s ha i y e s ha y a hu

Shai Yeshayahu is the co-founder of VerS +, an international research and design practice responsive to how ancient, emerging and local knowledge and data informs making. He is an assistant professor at the Creative School, Metropolitan University of Toronto. quotes inside graphic strip Adam Conner-Simmmons and Rachel Gordon, 'Artificial Intelligence Senses People Through Walls.'MIT CSAIL, June, 12, 2018. https://news.mit.edu/2018/ artificial-intelligence-senses-people-throughwalls-0612 Broom, Douglas, ‘This wristband tells you what food to buy based on your DNA', Freethink, April 25,2022. https://www.freethink.com/health/food-dna Van Bergeijk, Jerden. 'Public Viewing of a Private Life.' WIRED, November 16, 1998, https://www.wired.com/1998/11/public-viewing-of-a-private-life/ Sigal Samuel, 'How biohackers are trying to upgrade their brains, their bodies and human nature,' Vox, November 15, 2019:

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https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/6/25/18682583/biohackingtranshumanism-humanaugmentation-genetic-engineering-crispr Hanae Armitage, 'Smart toilet monitors for signs of disease,' Stanford Medicine, April 6, 2020, https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2020/04/smart-toilet-monitors-for-signs-ofdisease.html Dani Deahl, ' I would spend $10K to furnish my apartment with MIT’s robot furniture,' The Verge, June 6, 2017, https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/6/15746884/ mit-ori-systems-automated-furniture-preorder (accessed December 1, 2020)

a ir

gabriel fries-briggs To condition a substance is to bring it into its desired state for use. Matter, conditioned through infrastructure, is frequently categorised according to functional criteria: government funds are earmarked for transportation infrastructure, water infrastructure, telecom, waste, power generation, and so on. These categories often overlap – we need roads to get to the power plant. Or we couple infrastructures – stormwater ditches and train lines provide linear easements for bike paths. However, the infrastructure of air cuts across categories because air is and goes everywhere.

With air it is difficult to distinguish between ‘natural’ and humanmade infrastructure. The geologic effect of human actions (the anthropocene, the capitalocene) seen through the quality of air make this distinction particularly blurry. Air is a precondition for our ability to live in the world so the condition of that air is germane. Difficult to contain, channel or direct, infrastructures of air can be hard to see, yet they are in every pollution source, climate regulation, policy decision, and in the formation of ‘interior’ atmospheres. Air is a direct link between local conditions – weather, and global phenomena – climate change. It is also a system of scalar relations. In the multitude of designs for air tempering, one can see the infrastructures of being and cultural conditioning, of street design, public spaces, social habits, of buildings and their range of permeability – all ways of living in one’s climate.

Conditioned air ranges from a respirator to the planet. In a constructed interior, systems for conditioning air trace a history of building mechanisation and the standardisation of comfort. While there are regional differences in conditioning systems, the projects of modernisation, industrialisation and globalisation work towards generic levels of temperature and humidity. Ideals of mechanicallyproduced comfort remain relatively stable across geographies, obscuring differing cultural relationships to comfort and climate.

The ubiquity and design of air conditioning systems is symptomatic of mechanical inertia and a cultural-reliance on the technologies of comfort, despite their implication in the climate crisis: a major consumer of energy, primarily from fossil fuels, the stock of global air conditioning units is projected to double by 2040. Unlike water treatment or power generation, infrastructures of tempered air are located at the site and scale of the individual building, reducing the scope of public intervention and resulting in extreme disparities in atmospheric composition. While it may go everywhere, the quality of air is highly unequal.

If the material artefacts of infrastructure elude governmental control, they can be conditioned by policy – laws and legislation that attempt to control the quality or inequality of air. In the United States, the Clean Air Act of 1963 regulates emissions from stationary and mobile sources and establishes National Ambient Air Quality Standards. These, however, have not prevented concentrations of polluting sources, legal and illegal, in under-served areas and near communities of colour, partly due to historical practices

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on site review 41 :: infrastructure

J os hu a W hi t e

such as redlining and a lack of political representation to control zoning. Poor air quality, sensed in real-time by our bodies and recorded in long-term health disparities, is scientifically monitored by networks of connected sensors. In the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency requires permanent air-pollution monitors in metropolitan areas with populations greater than 200,000. If sensing networks can be understood as a distributed infrastructure of air, the Air Quality Index is its central delivery system. Rendering air as a scientific object, the Air Quality Index has moved from a position at the margins of attention, guiding policy and climate modelling, to a metric governing daily habits.

Over the past few years, Air Quality Index has been integrated into the weather apps for both iOS and Android mobile devices where public data is available. For smartphone users, Air Quality Index displays alongside forecasts for temperature and precipitation.

Infrastructural networks for sensing airborne particulate-matter tell us when to close the windows and turn on the air conditioning, when to avoid going outside, and what to talk about when we talk about the weather.

J os hu a W hi t e

While we can locate many sites of conditioning air – the mechanical assemblies producing interior climates, policy and regulation, pollution sources, and sensing – others remain more elusive, historically and culturally contingent. We also condition air by telling stories about it. Architecture and allied disciplines propel technological narratives about comfort, passive and active ventilation, air-exchange rates and systems integration. These are narratives about performance, understood both quantitatively and qualitatively; as energy use and space-making. However building performance is increasingly linked to the conditions of our planet; climate is regionally specific yet globally situated. A pluralistic conditioning entails tempering air while considering the network of relations it forms, the stories that link bodies, ducts and environments across scales.

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above and left: installation of Dune Ducts in the Perloff Gallery at UCLA in Los Angeles, October - December, 2019

this page – top: the profile of an aeolian dune middle: the methodology: dune morphology formed by angles of repose, air direction, crests and slip faces is translated to the constraints of metal duct manufacturing. left is the aeolian plan, right the section. bottom: section of the dune ducts installed; a ventilation landscape facing page – dune ducts installed, and the reflected ceiling plan showing the installation in the gallery context.

G a b r i e l F r i e s - B r i ggs

dune ducts

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An assemblage of entities, ventilation threads together a socialecological-technical system. The project here, Dune Ducts, is a narrative of air reflective of these systemic origins, linking comfort, mechanical ventilation, landforms, climate and daily experience.

Installed in a gallery in Los Angeles, it adapts the industrial techniques of sheet metal fabrication to construct a ventilation landscape.

in a distribution of small gusts. Expanded ventilation and its uneven release of air calls attention to a varied set of environmental conditions. Shifting expectations away from a uniform, idealised climate to one of difference makes the relationship between air quality and climate change less a demand for uniformity and its high environmental price, and more a specific response to a place and time.

It considers the sand dune as an example of air as built form: assembled by aeolian processes, these are forms outside the traditional built environment. The erosion, transportation and deposition of sediment by wind manufactures a common profile of a long shallow angle, or stoss, facing the wind, a crest, and steep lee side. Looking to geology and meteorology, this installationas-building system overlays multiple categories and narratives of ventilation. Suspended in the ceiling plenum, the ducts-as-dunes act as a prosthetic device extending the existing diffusers. Air escapes at gaps or breaks in the dunes, injected across the space

How we sense infrastructure visually, how we sense its presence in a space, landscape, or territory, how we sense its relationships to other forms, or how we sense the way it conditions us might heighten our awareness of its vitality. Exhibiting air brings it to the foreground of experience and makes visible its precondition for being. Air can be conditioned categorically as a symptom of global warming, a metric of comfort or discomfort, as central to health as is engineering or building science. Threading these readings together and putting them on display is one step in building new relationships to our life-supporting systems. p

on site review 41 :: infrastructure

J os hu a W hi t e

G a b r i e l F r i e s - B r i ggs

Gabriel Fries-Briggs is a designer, educator, and Assistant Professor at the University of New Mexico School of Architecture and Planning. His work examines architectural intersections of land, labour, technology and the environment.

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on site review 41 :: infrastructure

guest room: m ulti spe cies co n den s er s k at h e r i n e m b o l e s

We are in the Sixth Extinction.1 Biodiversity, critical for functioning ecosystems, is threatened worldwide. In an era where both human population growth and nonhuman species loss are exponential, a design paradigm shift such as the Nonhuman Turn2 which decentres humans and prioritises cohabitation between humans and nonhumans is essential to our mutual health and survival. The Chihuahuan Desert Ecoregion, one of the most biodiverse arid regions in the world, is an example of significant loss but also a place of hope that many species call home. Major threats to biodiversity include overgrazing, increased water use and urbanisation that damages or destroys habitat. Effects of climate change – increased temperatures and decreased precipitation – threaten life. Multispecies climate migrants seeking more suitable conditions will relocate, as will the desert itself in time.

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on site review 41 :: infrastructure

In a sense, we are all companion species interlocked through cohabitation on Earth. When we design spaces for humans, we are also (often unintentionally) designing or destroying spaces for nonhumans. Thinking about who we design for, the concept of a guest room is helpful – a welcoming space of temporary shelter with a flexible program, it becomes what it needs to be for its occupants. We can expand the concept of a guest room to nonhuman species as a multispecies condenser.

In this project, each guest room is constructed with an expanded wall: typical functional layers (thermal protection, water protection, sun protection) expand as spatially habitable microclimates. The basic elements of an expanded wall act separately, but in concert with each other to make a multispecies condenser for a particular climate.

An expanded wall is the productive tool for thinking about space as a series of different microclimates that form the multispecies condenser. Climate shelters extend the range of species that each condenser supports.

What follows here are details of the expanded wall system of a multi-species condenser, a building system that provides refuge and regeneration for vulnerable species of the Chihauhuan Desert.

Grassland, aquatic and urban systems interweave, support and interact to provide refuge over at least a 75-year time frame.

A note about the structure of the project – these designs were conceived in section as infrastructural cyborgs with an emphasis on systems thinking and performance.3 These designs exist somewhere between typology and singular design project, as conceptual slivers intentionally without the context of a larger building plan or program. The site is not a parcel but instead a specific ecological community to which the project is attuned.

Grassland, aquatic and urban systems interweave, support and interact to provide refuge over at least a 75-year time frame.

This project develops an architecture of adaptive cohabitation where, in recognition of our mutually intertwined existence, design improves conditions for nonhumans as well as humans. Within architecture is the potential to restructure the relationship between humans and other species.

1 Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin, The Sixth Extinction: Patterns of life and the future of humankind, 1995 and Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An unnatural history, 2014, explore the Sixth Extinction, (alternately the Anthropocene Extinction or Holocene Extinction) as the most recent and ongoing mass extinction in the series: Big Five mass extinctionsn – periods in geologic history where there was a significant loss in biodiversity.

2 The Nonhuman Turn, 2015, came out of a 2012 conference, 'The Nonhuman Turn in 21st Century Studies'. Richard Grusin writes in the introduction, “… to name, characterize, and therefore to consolidate a wide variety of recent and current critical, theoretical, and philosophical approaches to the humanities and social sciences … engaged in decentering the human in favor of a turn toward and concern for the nonhuman …”

3 Landscape theorist Elizabeth Meyer, in 'The Expanded Field of Landscape Architecture' 1997, proposes the landscape cyborg as a hybrid of human and nonhuman natural processes (p53) within the context of questioning problematic binary pairings such as man and nature.

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grassland Large-scale land change, such as the conversion of more than 70,000 acres of grasslands near Janos to crop rings in a five-year span leads us to ask – what if human practice instead generated grassland refugia? Not a 1:1 replacement of agriculture with refugia but an augmentation of how life dwells in this environment. As happened with the species retreat to Pleistocene refugia during the last ice age, grassland species by 2090 should have been able to retreat to grassland refugia focused on surviving, albeit with population decreases, until a time with more favourable conditions arrives. The structure and systems of a refugia generate the conditions, a range of microclimates and habitats, for heterogenous grassland community pockets to grow and adapt.

Let's say it is 2090, 65 years after the last grasslands of the Chihuahuan Desert Ecoregion disappeared. An infrastructural system of grassland refugia are all that remain to support grassland species, at least until the climate changes again. As with ice-age refugia, soil composition plays an important role in determining the matrix of grass and forb-based plants, and by extension other associated species such as migratory birds – certain plants adapted to soils too harsh for others. Keystone species, such as the Black-tailed Prairie Dog further increased the biodiversity of the grasslands by creating habitats and food sources for numerous other organisms.

Speculative image of refuge through bird ultraviolet vision.

Crumbling adobe seed bank walls provide materials and shelter.

Janos irrigation circles, overlaid with multispecies condenser refugia (the small black dots) provoke a different land use approach. They are spaced to provide an overall regeneration of the Chihuahuan Desert eco-region.

90% of grassland birds that breed in the US Great Plains, winter in the various Chihuahuan Desert grasslands. In the Janos Grassland Priority Conservation Area, the six most common migratory bird species each prefer a different type of grassland habitat – for example, the Horned Lark prefers bare ground near prairie dog colonies, the Chestnut-Collared Longspur avoids grass taller than a foot.

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Surrounding the building and reaching into the landscape, seed bank adobe walls – located to block strong winter winds – erode, regenerating grassland.

When a wall is built, a shrub hedge that will eventually replace it is planted. The walls are seed banks. Spaces between bricks provide shelter and perches and allow wind and water access to the wall to speed erosion. After the walls erode, the soil supports prairie dog burrows.

The main component of the sun protection layer is a wood shade structure.

At times it is covered in cholla pieces, edited for increased or decreased light transmittance, or used to shade roof waffle garden soil pockets. Daylighting through south-facing glazing and small skylights support a vegetable garden and a climate extension garden, respectively. Bird nests made from repurposed skeletons of cholla cactus, an indicator species of grassland degradation, provide shade and nesting locations for non-migratory birds.

The water protection layer is made of structural concrete arches that transition from convex (water shedding) on the roof to concave (water collecting) underground.

Rainwater collected in the V between arches waters roof plants before draining into a narrow, but deep, underground pond. Shallow steps at the pond’s edge provide safe drinking water access for small species such as skinks, mice and birds while the depths provide habitat for aquatic species. Any overflow is drained by culverts to irrigate grasslands; municipal water piped to the building is recycled after use to provide additional irrigation An air space functions as the building insulation layer. Earth tubes precondition incoming air and hot air is exhausted via a solar chimney. Although operable glazing layers allow adjustments, in the main the design takes advantage of natural air stratification and evaporative cooling. A semi-conditioned building space acts as a climate shelter for sensitive species and extends the range of species the refugia supports.

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aquatic It’s 2051, 30 years after the first Replenisher was powered up, and there has since been only minimal loss of aquatic habitat and biodiversity within the Cuarto Cienegas Basin of the Chihuahuan Desert Ecoregion. Aquifers have stopped decreasing and have even started to rise. Replenishers, which remediate agricultural practices that deplete aquifers, are arrayed along rivers, plugging into historic acequia long-lot agricultural systems and protecting aquifers which have held water and bacterial life since the Precambrian.

The aquatic ecosystem of Cuatro Cienegas Basin is fed by runoff from a ring of surrounding mountains. Water saturates marshes on the basin floor and is exposed at the surface as springs. Small rivers drain the springs; some eventually feed the Rio Saldado and others terminate in no-outlet playas that drain by evaporation only. Each of these habitats (the marsh, spring, river and playa) support distinct species communities. Although much the same fish species live in the different habitats, the relative abundance of fish is inverted between the springs and the harsher habitats of the playas/ ephemeral pools/marshes. A heterogenous mix of habitat important to the overall biodiversity of the system.

Replenishers (black dots) in existing lots along rivers in the Cuatro Cienegas Basin

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Fish species abundance relative to aquatic habitat type

Seen from a fish’s perspective, the replenisher is an oasis within a drying world. Shade structures reduce evaporative loss while simultaneously providing protective cover for fish. Shallow areas provide a smooth transition between marsh and deeper pools, or poza, facilitating access to the water for many species. Beneath the elevated acequia is a favourite hang-out for many fish. Catfish are especially fond of deeper water areas. Schools of open-water fish dart about, stopping to feed on an algae-encrusted textured ECOncrete retaining wall.

The building, elevated above the water on piles, shades water surfaces and acts as a distillation machine and aquifer replenisher. River water flows into the marsh via dry-stacked rock seeps and an elevated acequia. During flash floods, the banks overflow and the project acts as a large detention basin. Overflow crosses weirs in the concrete retaining wall and evaporates in the playa habitats.

A sun protection layer harvests solar energy to run a passive solar still on the roof.

Diffuse daylight enters the building from the water storage tube south wall and tubes under the skylight. A rebar grass stalk screen shades the building from low sun angle west and east light. Dead grass, replenished seasonally as an act of building maintenance, is woven across the rebar for additional shading and nest and cover material.

A water protection layer is fully integrated with the water systems of the site. The upper surface of the solar still clear arched covers is sloped to drain rainwater north off the roof and into the poza. A structural set of lower arches are sloped to drain collected condensate the opposite direction into the south façade before feeding aquifer injection wells housed in the building’s structural piles. To feed the still, water from the poza is sucked up by steel tube straws powered by wind turbines.

Water systems double as the thermal layer. South-facing thermal water storage tubes provide passive conditioning. On the east and west ends, walls of water treatment tanks act as a thermal buffer layer. Below the building, the water body buffers temperature change and provides evaporative cooling of air entering the building through floor vents.

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urban It’s 2031,ten years into the City of Chihuahua’s Agave Acupuncture program, an incentive-based municipal strategy to pair the reintroduction of desert scrub species with an urban social program. The sustainable urban agriculture economy has increased concurrently with populations of traditional species of the Chihuahuan Desert Ecoregion.

The desert scrub ecosystem – shrubs such as tar bush, mesquite and sagebrush as well as a staggering diversity of cacti, yuccas and agaves, dominates the Chihuahuan Desert Ecoregion. In fact, the range of one desert scrub succulent, Agave lechuguilla, is sometimes used to define the edges of the ecoregion. How might living with this regional landscape enrich human and nonhuman lives?

Condensers (black dots)spread urban acupuncture across Chihuahua

Imagined bat echolocation view of bat roost Plant-pollinator specificity resulting from coevolution is a form of heterogenous habitat; many diverse species are needed to support a diverse array of associated species. This exists on a species level (such as yucca and yucca moths), and at a genera level (one species of bat can pollinate many different species of agave, above).

These designs are a family of related ideas, seeds to inspire a diversity of solutions engaging the complex entanglements of human and nonhuman survival. Adaptive cohabitation design iterations, taken together and paired with policy change, have a chance to affect meaningful large-scale change. The project suggests a shift in design focus to value nonhuman species, and perhaps nonhuman entities in a broader sense, as clients is an important step toward ecologically net positive design. p

Katherine M Boles, MArch (UNM), is a Lecturer at the University of New Mexico and a licensed landscape architect. Her research focuses on developing an adaptive architecture for cohabitation.

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Habitecture features support the revival of desert scrub species within a humandominated context. Here, using echolocation, bats return after a night of foraging to roost in bat boxes under a cholla trellis. Their guano stains the concrete arches.

Some bats still swoop above the roof garden and its buffet of agave nectars while native bees rest in bee boxes embedded in soil on the roof. Nearby, pollinator insects swarm around their nests within the hollow clay brick habitat wall.

Following the practice of urban acupuncture, urban multispecies condensers are strategically inserted into existing lots. To respect existing patterns of development, buildings can line the sidewalk or are set back with a front yard. The back yard becomes a shared alley city-community farm and safe play space to expand economic and social infrastructures.

A sun protection layer wraps the building; bookended hollow clay brick habitat walls shade the road and alley sidewalks while supporting a lightweight wood lattice structure that shades the soil on the roof. A flexible system of cholla skeleton pieces is added seasonally over places that require additional shade and on doorway gates. This building layer also provides security and privacy within the urban context.

As in the previous two designs, high-tensile concrete arches form a water protection layer. The roof slopes toward the street; rainwater is captured and transported by gutter and pipe to a pumice wick in the alley. The high side of the roof curves down to an arcade of bat guano flush storage columns: wastewater from the columns is combined with street stormwater runoff, treated and stored in the alley pumice wick before being used as irrigation and fertiliser for corn and other more water- and fertiliser-intensive vegetables.

Continuous thermal insulation forms a thermal envelope: an earthen floor, adobe walls and a planted soil roof. Large earth-filled columns help buffer indoor temperatures; they also provide much deeper soil than a typical green roof and structurally support the added roof weight. A wind scoop on the roof brings in fresh air (cleaned somewhat by roof plants) and exhausts hot air.

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r em ediation an d r edempti o n Hunters Point Power Plant j o n at h a n m a n z o , u r b - i n

When infrastructural systems put in place in the early twentieth century have reached the end of their operational lives, new methodologies must be devised to decommission the existing systems and conceptualise how new systems and facilities should be designed, built and operated. Hunters Point Site demonstrates a new attitude towards infrastructure, containing many moving parts and projects. At first glance, it is a straight brownfield remediation story; close up it is a complicated and nuanced narrative.

background The former PG&E Hunters Point power plant was located in the Bayview-Hunters Point district of San Francisco. The power plant operated for 77 years (1929-2006). The district is known for its large tightly-knit African American community, and as the most diverse district in San Francisco, with a higher proportion of recent immigrants and Latino and Asian residents than the rest of the city.

In addition to residential neighbourhoods, Bayview-Hunters Point has traditionally been characterised by industrial uses, from food production to shipbuilding to power generation. It is the former home of San Francisco Naval Shipyard (1940-1994), a sprawling 866-acre facility which functioned as a dry dock and repair facility for the United States Navy’s Pacific Fleet. At its peak in 1945, United States Navy was the largest employer with a labour force of 18,235. 1 The post-war era brought significant changes to US cities, and to San Francisco and the Bayview-Hunters Point specifically. At the national scale, there was a massive shift away from legacy cities to newly built and often segregated suburban enclaves, as home ownership was made attainable through government-backed mortgage programs and the benefits available to returning soldiers.

Unfortunately, many returning African American GIs were denied access to these benefits through systemic and discriminatory practices, such as redlining.

The postwar period was also characterised by deindustrialisation.

Activity at the San Francisco Naval Shipyard dropped significantly in the immediate postwar years as demand for ship repair diminished and the military realigned from a war in multiple theatres to the relative stalemate of the Cold War. The San Francisco Naval Shipyard scaled down operations in 1974, was declared a Superfund2 site in 1989 and finally closed in 1994.

The district experienced a long slow decline as well-paying jobs left and opportunities for social advancement were limited. What remained were communities impacted by an exclusionary social order and a legacy of industrial practices that bore significant environmental and health impacts.

1 During World War II, the Naval Shipyard’s labour force increased from 8,024 in 1943 to 18,235 in August 1945 2 a US federal government program designed to fund the cleanup of toxic wastes.

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Golden Gate Oakland

San Francisco Bay

Hunters Point southern city limit

San Francisco's southern waterfront completed, or substantially complete:

in progress: entitled or under construction

1991 Embarcadero Freeway removal

Mission Rock: under construction 28 acre mixed use district 2100 new residences (524 affordable) 8 acres of open space

2000 China Basin New residential and mixed use district San Francisco Giants stadium opens.

Pier 70: under construction 69 acre mixed use district 2000 new residences, 30% affordable 9 acres of open and recreational space

2000s- today Mission Bay Build out of Mission Bay Mixed Use District including: Extension of Muni LIght Rail A new hospital and academic campus for UCSF Sports & Entertainment 6 404 housing units 4.4 million sq.ft of commercial space

Potrero Power Station Site: under construction 29 acre mixed use district 2000+ new residences 7 acres of open and recreational space

India Basin: phased entitled ~38 acre mixed use district 1575 new residences 24.5 acres of open and recreational space

2005-2017 Hope SF Hunters View This project built 600 units of housing, replacing the 268-unit public housing project initially constructed for temporary workforce housing in 1966

Hunters Point Shipyard: under construction ~240 acre mixed use district 10 672 units (31% affordable) 26 acres of open and recreational space planning stage: PG&E Hunters Point Site ~32 acre site

M a nu a l M i r a nd a P r a c t i c e

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2010

remediation and site strategy On May 15, 2006, after more than two decades of community activism and struggle, Hunters Point Power Plant closed. Pacific Gas & Electric had committed itself to remediating most of the site to residential standards.3 Urb-in joined the team just before the start of the remediation process in 2010. I had recently finished a graduate degree in architecture and re-entered the workforce during the great recession. In 2010, PG&E had no capacity, or desire, to think about long-term plans for the site. They simply wanted to remediate the site and move on. Any substantive site planning would be addressed once the remaining substation was replaced. 4 Understanding that the utility was simply in a holding pattern, we looked at the projects that the utility was compelled to complete and offered solutions that we felt might advance the eventual site redevelopment. I was hired to consult with the remediation and public affairs teams on short- and long-term strategic planning. In my naïveté I thought that the path to eventual redevelopment of the site would follow a linear and logical trajectory. Instead I learned that the actual remediation was simply one, albeit critical, step toward eventual disposition. The path was not clear – in fact many hurdles would need to be overcome from operational imperatives, bureaucratic inertia and budgetary constraints.

The closure of Hunters Point Power Plant in 2006 and the shuttering of the Potrero Power Plant in 2010 had left San Francisco without power generation; all sources of electricity came from outside the city, from the south or east. The utility’s key imperatives were to remediate and shore up its existing infrastructural systems, which meant replacing the aging transmission and distribution substation remaining on three-acres of key waterfront site.

Power Generation Plant remediation, from 2010 to 2017, spanned the tail-end of the 2007-2009 recession and a long period of growth fuelled, in large part, by the technology sector. As San Francisco emerged from the recession, the redevelopment of the southeastern waterfront accelerated as large portions of the southern waterfront transformed into new mixed-use districts, and others moved into planning stages.

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Bayview-Hunters Point too was changing. San Francisco had embarked upon an ambitious program, Hope SF, to rebuild the district's crumbling public housing. The Hunters Point Naval Shipyard began a long and troubled remediation and redevelopment process.

Despite the heated real estate market of San Francisco, a quick sale was logistically not feasible; the site was encumbered with operational assets, transmission line easements, paper streets,5 public trust claims and unresolved title issues. The property was expected to remain vacant as these various matters were cleared and the substation modernisation project completed. Given the project timelines, it would be the mid-2020s before the site would be available for redevelopment.

The operational focus of PG&E revealed that the old way of doing business was increasingly less suited for cities and communities in this post-industrial era. Districts which had traditionally sponsored these facilities had changed. Facilities and systems that supported heavy industry (armaments construction, shipbuilding and power generation) were being replaced with a civic infrastructure of the commons – a reclaimed waterfront, open space, health care and educational institutions.

This shift was not solely the result of the changing land-use patterns of a post-industrialised economy but also the product of years of community activism. As a result, the siting and operation of infrastructure began to be critically examined for its impacts on surrounding communities.

approach Planning the next chapter of the Hunters Point Power Plant property was, and remains, complicated. On its surface, it is a victory – a polluting power plant is closed after years of community struggle and agitation. A closer examination revealed that moving quickly to redevelop the site did not align with the company’s operational priorities, nor was it feasible.

Instead, we re-framed the discussion around site disposition.

What followed was not a traditional planning process per se; rather, it was an effort to coordinate the primary areas of work – remediation, land planning and substation modernisation, into a cohesive site strategy.

A key tactic was the proposal of a series of built and programmatic interventions that, when aligned with required remediation processes, reconnected the community to the site, changed perceptions and catalysed future development. Each discrete intervention, NOW Hunters Point, Hunters Point Shoreline, Substation Modernisation and Hunter's Point Vision Document, was meant to be greater than the sum of its parts, laying the foundations of a redevelopment strategy.

3 https://sfenvironment.org/news/press-release/pge-shuts-down-hunterspoint-power-plant 4 PG&E’s approach to buying, selling and holding property focused on fulfilling operational functions. Once a property or facility had reached the end of its working life, it went through a bureaucratic process to 'surplus' the property before being warehoused or sold. The utility had no strategy to oversee the decommissioning of an infrastructural asset and the eventual return of a property to the public realm 5 A 'paper street' has been planned and appears on official maps but has not been built. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_street

NOW Hunters Point, 2013-2021

Hunters Point Shoreline, 2017

The initial idea was to use temporary site activation to engage the community, build stakeholder investment and collect community feedback to inform the planned restoration of the shoreline. In collaboration with PG&E, we crafted an a request for proposal and hired the design firm Envelope A+D and Studio O to lead this effort.

The interim use program began in 2013 and ran through Autumn 2021 producing 319 events and exhibitions both on-site and in the surrounding neighbourhood, 66,000+ visitors to the site, partnerships with twenty local Bayview-Hunters Point community organisations and more than 300 job training recipients.

The events, training, educational programs, exhibitions and community gatherings transformed perceptions of the 32-acre site.

Instead of barren land, the property was evolving into a place of well-being, pride, fun, and connection.

The NOW Hunters Point program served as a critical agent in the strategy to leverage community engagement, explicitly informing the community-centred design process that engendered the Hunters Point shoreline.

The restoration of the shoreline as a social and environmental resource began in 2012; in September 2016, after several years of planning and outreach to stakeholders, government agencies and residents, shoreline remediation happened in just five months.

Design process and engagement took several forms, including NOW Hunters Point event meetings with residents, civic organisations, and city and state leaders.

The design acknowledges and transforms the site's industrial legacy, showcases a restored native habitat shoreline ecology and gives opportunities for active and passive recreation.

Tom F i t z ge r a l d

Urb-in put forth the idea that the shoreline path could not simply be a replacement of 3' wide path and the restored shoreline should be built in line with comparable shoreline parks in San Francisco. Specifically, we referenced an effort by the San Francisco Port called the Blue Greenway which had developed standards for a series of shoreline parks along San Francisco Bay. Additionally, we proposed setting aside a portion of the remediated site for temporary community-serving uses. The idea is that we could use these events to engage with the community around the creation of the shoreline and the eventual site re-uses.

Anne H ame rs ky

In 2012, we wrote a design brief and with PG&E ran an request for proposals for Hunters Pont Shoreline and the Interim Use project (later called NOW Hunters Point) This contract was awarded to RHAA, Envelope + Studio O. above: Envelope + Studio O's NOW Hunters Point event space on the cover of Architect, The Journal of the American Institute of Architects.

Vol.107, no. 5, May 2018.

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Hunters Point Substation Modernisation, start summer 2022 The substation project is an opportunity to redefine how PG&E delivers vital infrastructure to communities. The new facility had to meet its core program while achieving a high degree of performance, design and cohesion in the urban fabric.

The most critical piece of work we did was in the project’s siting.

Our team worked with land use attorneys at Sheppard Mullin to advocate for decommissioning the existing station on the waterfront parcel and the building of a new station.

The old station would be removed once the new station was operational, and in turn the shoreline parcel would be freed up for redevelopment.

The new station, designed by Tatiana Bilbao Estudio with TEF Architecture, is adjacent to the old one, but located on higher ground. Older equipment is replaced with a modern environmentally friendly and efficient system. The new zero-net energy substation has a public plaza and various sustainable features including photovoltaic panels, a façade optimised to capture the prevailing wind to provide for passive cooling, and the elimination of SF-6 gas from the GIS high voltage electrical equipment.6 Stakeholder engagement has been a central part of the design process. Community meetings and outreach between 2017 and 2019 solicited feedback, directly informing the design of the station and the integration of a public plaza.

Tat iana B il ba o E s tu di o an d T E F

The proposed, modernised Hunters Point substation

Hunters Point Vision document, 2018 The team, including Tatiana Bilbao Estudio and Studio MLA, assessed the site’s potential, explored various redevelopment scenarios and articulated an evolution of the PG&E Hunters Point property from a fenced-off contaminated site into a viable new district along San Francisco’s southeast waterfront.

This document is a resource for the redevelopment of the PG&E Hunters Point Property; its goals drawn from community input, city and regional planning efforts, and existing laws and regulations.

Its basic tenets are a socially-responsible and engaged design process, human-centred design and a readiness to adapt. It focuses on equity, affordability, community-serving features and a pedestrian-oriented public realm.

Release of the document to the community was disrupted by PG&E’s 2018 bankruptcy.

Tati an a B i lbao E s tu di o a nd M i a L e hr e r G r e e n

Hunters Point vision document: conceptual massing

6 SF6 or sulfur hexafluoride is one of the 'most potent greenhouse gases with a global warming potential 23,500 times greater than that of CO2'. https://www.eaton.com/gb/en-gb/markets/utilities/tomorrowsgrid/airinsulated-switchgear-sf6-free-eaton.html

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epilogue The neighbourhood surrounding the site has changed; the power plant site will eventually be redeveloped and reconnected to the community and the city. The question is not if it will happen but how it will happen.

My role was to conceptualise an overall strategy for the site. The process was intended to be a test case for a system-wide approach that proposed new ways of working and conceiving infrastructural space. The conventional practices that situate infrastructure, as Pierre Belanger writes, 'a background process of essential services',7 seemed no longer appropriate as the process of urbanisation had upended this dynamic.

The steps taken at Hunters Point were intentionally designed to reconnect the site to the community, to lay the foundations for redevelopment, and to propose new ways of designing and implementing the next generation of infrastructure. The process crafted for Hunters Point was meant to be replicable system-wide.

Twelve years on, the effort continues, with apparent successes and misses.

The NOW Hunters Point project, which ran for eight years and directly informed the design and construction of the Hunters Point Shoreline, was a platform where the team could connect with the community, build capacity and host events that have had a lasting impact. The sustained presence on the site provided a new model for engagement that was less transactional than project-based outreach methodologies which typically target stakeholders on an intermittent basis for specific feedback. The community wanted to be an active partner providing guidance and input to the developments and projects taking place in their neighbourhood, rather than simply being a box to be checked to satisfy regulatory requirements.

It is too soon to evaluate the success of the Hunters Pont Substation project since as it is still in progress The most ambitious piece, the Vision Document that provides a framework for the equitable redevelopment of the site, has not yet made any meaningful impact, seemingly lost in the shuffle as the utility rebuilds from its 2018 bankruptcy. Despite this, the document is a tool that demonstrates the future potential of the site and how this informs remediation and the disposition of properties. PG&E has taken some of the lessons learned and developed a working group to rethink how properties are wound down at the end of their operational lives.

Today, at Hunters Point, the power plant is gone, the site is remediated, a new substation is scheduled to be built, and most of the thirty-two-acre site sits empty. p

2022

7 Pierre Belanger, 'Redefining Infrastructure', Ecological Urbanism. Baden, Switzerland : Lars Müller Publishers, ©2010. p 344

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Jonathan Manzo runs a small practice called urb-in based in San Francisco. https://urb-in.com

a lm ost in v is i bl e i n k:a br i d g e , a c orridor a n d a s h el t er roger mullin A path. Drive it, walk it, take it to be somewhere. When you’re on a path, you’re in the place you’re in. There’s no distinction between the path and the place itself. The path’s a minor clearing, a simple parting. But it’s a complex thing because it takes the shape of each place, intimately. A path in sand is more sand, sometimes rustled up; a path in earth is compressed earth; a path in stone is a slight leveling of the stones. Sometimes a path is nothing but an indication on a map, the reality having been blown or washed away. The path goes through places usually the most beautiful way so that when you’re on this way you can see beautiful things. Sometimes the path wanders about and you wander about with it.1

1

— Roni Horn, 'Roads lack dedication'

infrastructure as bridge

Inverted King Post Bridge, Ward Falls, Nova Scotia Imagine the marvel of Roebling’s span over the East River in New York or a series purple planks, a wet and supporting passage across a stream; an order of business.

In 2018, on the Bay of Fundy between the Minas Channel and the Minas Basin, in Spencer’s Island, in a workshop we grappled with spanning principles and many imaginative ideas. The building (that I'd built with a previous summer workshop group some years earlier) became an ideal classroom, near where we were camping and a 15 minute drive to the trailhead that leads to Ward Falls. Over 2 days we built several large-scale models of pre-cambered stress-skinned decks, tensegrity trusses and trestles for the 30-foot river span on our site, and presented them to a board member of the Cumberland Trail Head Association.

With ten days left to finalise and build our design, as we set out on our first hike to this beautiful and remote waterfall we realised how arduous it would be to bring materials over a 3.5-kilometre foot path. Our workshop concepts now seemed heavy; our approach shifted to combine logs felled on site and a metal strut and cable assembly prefabricated at a shop twelve kilometres away in Parrsboro.

On this site a previous bridge had failed during a spring melt, swept off its footings by a rush of water and ice from the canyon above. A partnership between the Harrison Forestry Company that grants public access to this part of their lands, and our group, allowed both access to the site and an improved bridge design.

1 Horn, Roni. Island zombie : Iceland writings Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020

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R o g e r M u lli n

right: site visit, the previous washed-out bridge far right: workshop/classroom built in Spencer's Island in 2009 and 2010 Tay lo r R e dmo n d

Community collaborators: Taylor Redmond, Laurie Currie, Sam Fields, Cheryl Leask, Brian Fields, the Harrisons, Dwayne MacGillivary, Bill McLellan, Cumberland County Hiking Association Students: Brooks Roche, Montague, Andrew John Gilmour, Caleb McGinn, John Follett, Liam Logan, Alexander Crosby, Maddi Fraser, Françoise Grandmaison, Fiona Hamilton, Gillian Wilson, Shane Karkheck Maddi Fraser

Harvesting logs (primary spanning elements) from the project site, we avoided transporting of bulk of our materials in on the trail – the concept itself detoured to meet a physical short-cut! When time expires the soundness of the logs, they can, with equal amounts of effort, be replaced.

The imperative result is a high/low-tech hybrid that spans 30 feet – a middle ground between Roebling’s suspension bridge and a humble plank.

We installed the deep v-shaped compression strut and cable assembly two thirds along the length, closer to the smaller ends of the tapering tree trunks. Like a bowstring, the braided steel cables were directed back to the end supports at either bank and tightened to push the sagging self-weight of the trees into an upward arching camber; delightfully firm underfoot. The steel components are thought to be durable enough to be reassembled and fit with new trees in replacement bridges in the future.

. L aw re n ce R N i co ll

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all i mag e s by R o g e r M u lli n u nl e s s ot he r w i s e not e d

If There Was a book About This Hallway It would start, There is a road within the home some pine slats in the corner and lamps along the walls that give the path an endlessness at night.

I remember the day I left the meterman standing in the hall.

In my room I drew his hard apple face as he waited in the cold shade.

No matter how slight, it is a scene from history.

A scene from the book.

Are dreams set in hallways because the perspective is screwed?

Or because they are the long, open, unused stages in our homes?

The hallway was a dry riverbed I dreamed one night, an Indian turnpike on another.

(And it may have been those things before the house was here.)

I never heard the meterman leave but saw he was gone when I went out to hang his sketch on the wall.

Sour furniture-polish winds rolled down the dark corridor.

Once a fir where each door now stands.

If Christ had died in a hallway we might pray in hallways or wear little golden hallways around our necks.

How can it still be unwarmed after so many passings?

An outdoors that is somehow indoors.2 —David Berman

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infrastructure as corridor/portal

The Third Obstruction, Spencer’s Island, Nova Scotia In 1860s Nova Scotia there was a pier and lighthouse that connected the small village of Spencer’s Island to the rest of the world via the Bay of Fundy and Atlantic Ocean. The pier, then surrounded by shipyard and now a ruin, sits in a public space amongst the remaining lighthouse, a restaurant and a campground.

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built on piles parallel to the shore extending out from the shore

built on fill

wharf

quay

pier

jetty

above: the taxonomy of docking structures below: this pole marked the high tide mark where the outermost bouys were to be positioned. It also allowed the calibration of the guy-ropes down to the anchor boxes (lobster traps filled with stones) lower left: the original nineteenth-century pier

the water flow in and out of the bay (110 billion short tons) is twice as much as the total flow of all the rivers of the world over the same period.3 Whilst camping on an adjacent re-purposed road, our workday collaborated with the moon, nesting into the cycle of the tides. Our primary structure was a channel of water, present and then absent every 6 hours.

In 2019 the outline of the original 350-foot long structure was re-enacted by a cast of ten, the shape and dimension of the pier emerging and reemerging with the tide over a series of days. Over a 12-hour tidal cycle,

Over a decade ago, I started to work in the beautiful, and decentralised village of Spencer’s Island, completing community-based projects focused on an infamous ghost ship, the Mary Celeste, built on this same beach in 1861. Long since fascinated with the monumental scale and character of the

2 David Berman. Actual Air. New York: Open City Books, 1999

3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_of_Fundy

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all i mag e s by R o g e r M u lli n u nl e s s ot he r w i s e not e d

pier, I was keen to complete a project in water space. In the dimension of the high tide we were able to delineate the pier that once was, bringing the Spencer's Island community together to dwell in our connection to history and the world via the wonder of the ocean.

At low tide a kind of non-site emerged, of the kind described by Robert Smithson as, “the site is where a piece should be but isn’t. 4 Some 300 feet from the wrack line, working not so much in littoral space but rather the ocean floor – a benthic zone of the depths, felt uncanny. Surrounded by a horizonless fog-blanketed space we implemented what we previously rehearsed the night before, the moon having worked all the while to pull the mass of the ocean out and away and the sun, slowly replacing the dark of night.5 There, at the shoulder of the tidal change, with the sea around us,6 we set up anchors and guy-ropes that would later tighten as the sea slowly set the rising floats into the outline of the pier. We staged our production in the six hours we had until high tide. Walter de Maria’s 1977 project, Lightening Field, sings when lightning strikes and similarly, the shape of our pier is most clear just when the rising tide begins to fall.

At 6am on our final day we began by setting a fire high up on the beach along a rim of seaweed left from the last high tide. We had publicised the event, inviting community members from Spencer’s Island and all along the shore to join us to tell stories of the pier and share in a late morning campfire coffee. With the beach as our stage we became actors, comingling with our audience while we worked.

Around noon, the beach fire we set six hours earlier was extinguished, the tide was at its highest and with the floats aligned our project was complete.

4 Liza Bear and Willoughby Sharp, 'Discussions with Heizer, Oppenheim, Smithson', Avalanche 1/1 (1970). Reprinted in Holt, ed., The Writings of Robert Smithson, p. 177.

5 Ocean’s Tides Explained. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RdkXs8BibE 6 Rachel Carson. The Sea Around Us. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951

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Community collaborators: Laurie Currie, Devin MacGillivary, Paul Callison.

Students: Charles Bourne, Chelsea Kinnee, Cameron Edwards, Kelly Doleman, Brennan Jelinski, Branden Schick, Adryn Galambos, Paulette Cameron, Yuqi Zhong, George Grant, Kevin Mockford, Rita Wang

John Berger pointed out a relationship between creativity and politics and the revolutionary potential of art. Braque stated, 'The things that Picasso and I said to one another during those years will never be said again, and even if they were, no one would understand them anymore.

It was like being roped together on a mountain'.7

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infrastructure as place

Forest Cave / Vettvangur, Mógilsá, Reykjavík, Iceland In Iceland, it does feel as though one might slip into Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth. New and strange phenomena reveal themselves around each promontory. In the years between 2015-2019, I travelled there with students of architecture for several weeks, camping and completing large format plein-air orthographic sketches. Going to Iceland was initially the idea of Winnipeg- and London-based architect, Tanis Paul. We continue to go and we continue to settle differences on what constitutes suitable accommodations, seemingly a concern since the second half of the ninth century.8 Our studies observe the relationships between landscape as foundarchitecture,9 natural phenomena, coastal patterns, outpost shelters and infrastructure such as Iceland's ring road and the harnessing of hydro and geothermal energy. We pause to draw distinctions, building on the same landscapes that William Morris wrote about in his journals while visiting the island in the 1870s.

In 2015, we were invited to work with a sculpture group and the Reykjavík Forestry Association to build what I refer to as a forest cave. In 2019 we built it. The shelter is three kilometres up a hillside in Mógilsá, just outside Reykjavík, and built with round wood timbers from the site and rough sawn lumber transported on a nearby service road. In a land scarce of trees we felt honoured to selectively use a few, to provide a simple pause along a path that blocks the wind and hosts the sun.

7 John Berger. Landscapes: John Berger on Art. London: Verso, 2016 8 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlement_of_Iceland 9 Found architecture, a concept credited to architects Carmen and Elin Corneil

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M a x P or t e r

Community collaborators: Reykjavík Association of Sculptors, Reykjavík Forestry Association, SÍM (The Association of Icelandic Artists), Tanis Paul, Hildigunnur Sverrisdóttir, Gustaf Jarl Vidarsson, Halldór Úlfarsson, Eva Isleifs Students: Celina Abba, Alice Bardos, Andrew Falls, Yangyang Jiao, Sara LeBlanc, Caleb McGinn, Karen Mills, Max Porter, Chris Sahagun, Natalie Steele, Ryan Vandervliet, Jialin Xie, Sarah Yoes

The Reykjavík Association of Sculptors conceived of the shelter project as one that would be added to by other groups. A preexisting nearby path supports our project and in turn the path and our work will support an indeterminacy of future events and multiple authors. With this in mind the project is a form of infrastructure in dialogue. As travellers we had to equip ourselves with borrowed tools and time, working simply and together, each day walking up and down the hillside – bound together by that path and the wandering freedom that it afforded.

It was a good path and one that I hope never becomes a road.

all i mag e s by R o g e r M u lli n u nl e s s ot he r wi s e not e d

Ordinary exploration begins in the juiciest sort of indecision, in deliberate, then routine fits of absence of mind... Exploring requires the cloak of invisibility bicyclists and walkers take for granted.10 — John R. Stilgoe

Cognisant, dreaming, or somewhere in between, we are at any time in dialogue with the things that make up our environment. Each day threads a path that collects a spectrum of events. But what events and what things?

Is a highway a reasonable framework to hang your experiential hat on? To Rome, all roads led, but the closer the approach, the more those same roads postured to afford defensibility of the empire. Access and access denied.

Strategic planning. What underlies any plans for our surroundings and what do they support?

The projects here exist on a path; each use existing within a broader experiential narrative that expands conventional understandings of architectural program. Part of a design-build praxis, they each were completed over two-week periods with community members and groups of 10-12 students of architecture from Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova

10 John R. Stilgoe, Outside Lies Magic: Regaining History and Awareness in Everyday Places 11,12 Martin Hogue, 'The Site as Project, Lessons from Land Art and Conceptual Art'. Journal of Architectural Education, Vol. 57, No.3 (Feb 2004), pp. 54-61

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Scotia. Each project engages with remoteness and a limited palette of materials, tools and skills. Pragmatic, they also navigate a broader field that reveals the sometimes-latent qualities of site or a situation11. Like land and conceptual art projects from the 1960s and 70s, the margin as site is conflated with the effort to access it. Imagination, location and time take on significant roles.12 These projects are cast as a kind of proto-infrastructure – sharing the motives, conditions and timeframes of their installation. They demonstrate both a considered function and an instrumental approach for future work and thought.

Humble things, models that suspend disbelief. p Roger Mullin teaches design, construction and representation at Dalhousie University School of Architecture. He is concerned with material investigation and material culture through modes of design-build and architectural representation.

when th e ro ad en ds a n n i e h a n a n d d a n i e l m i l h ay o , l e a d p e n c i l s t u d i o

l e a d p e nc i l s t u d i o

ROADS You who have made the ancient road of turf, That my feet might pass over it Into the level evening— Make now the ancient road of tears That my song may pass over it; Make the ancient road of song That my ghost may pass over it, Coming with the new earth.

Sarah Unna1 If you have ever found yourself in the woods and more or less lost at dusk, you may know the comfort of coming across a linear depression of worn foliage suggesting another creature has passed this way with regularity. The only decision is whether to follow the path or not. If you take the path, you stand a good chance of coming across a sign leading toward civilisation, but even if you don’t, the travel will at the very least be easier and most likely lead to somewhere other than oblivion. Of course, some paths lead intentionally to ruin in one direction or another and this possibility should not be ignored. Caution must always be taken as any unmarked path might just as well lead to a cliff, boxed canyon, predator’s den or further afield.

1 Sarah Unna. 'Roads', Poetry, Vol XIX, No VI, March 1922

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If a path grows in width or depth through frequent use, and is accompanied with signs or symbols suggesting direction or destination, then this path has begun the transformation into a road. A road, whether paved or not, is something of real consequence and suggests an unequivocal intentionality and route between two points. A road represents the collective will of hundreds or millions who have travelled the same direction. Latent is the collective time it is has taken to construct a road even if only through the invisible investment of footfalls and willful travel along its length. Through repetition, the motion in-aggregate is far more than just a way out of the woods. A road and a corresponding intentionality is nothing short of the defining characteristic of civilisation. We may call it simply a piece of infrastructure, but no physical destination or constructed ambition can follow without a road – the same cannot be said of any other piece of infrastructure, whether it be a dam, pipeline, bridge, town, grain silo, railroad, airport runway or launchpad. All of these begin with a path that becomes a road.

Roads are foundational to human activity, difficult to comprehend — a diffuse object that is beyond vision. If a road was short enough to see both the beginning and end simultaneously, from a single

vantage point, then it would be completely intelligible as a cohesive object. Instead, roads exist as an abstraction upon the land, operating in our mind more as works of collective imagination than a thing that that can be quantified. We’re told that if we take a particular road, it will lead to a specific destination; we can’t typically see the destination and so we embark on roads in faith that the builders, surveyors, mapmakers and satellite images are correct – that the road actually does lead to where we need to go. In this, the road is beyond individual comprehension, much like the faith and assumption we grant to the atmosphere of the planet – we know it exists even if our understanding of it is not concrete. We know that life cannot exist without it, but we don’t think about it as a medium that we swim in all the time. A road represents an animal faith inherited from the others who’ve travelled it despite that we cannot understand its totality. Even if we travel from end to end, by the last mile, we can’t really be sure that the first mile is still there or if it has been altered in our absence to a different destination.

While roads are the necessary mechanism underlying the delivery and transit of everything required for civilisations great and small, they are hardly benign. Their general invisibility and ubiquity perverts our ability to understand their consequential impact, both good and bad. Since the wilderness battles of the Clinton-era Roadless Rule in the 1990’s, we have begun to accept, if not tacitly acknowledge, that any newly-proposed road is an opening for human-led destruction. Aside from the trampled and trammeled plants, spilled chemicals, synthetic granules, asphalt, crushed rock, silica, cement, steel, suffering water quality and herbicides, the first act of modern paved road building involves a ravenous act of destruction: mass deforestation, heavy equipment, trenching, grading, ramping, culverting and terraforming to straighten nature’s contours into low-sloped smooth expanses. Paved roads drive a hole through the natural landscape and disfigure everything within several miles of their divisive fence lines and splinter roads that perpetuate yet greater human-led change.

Despite a surface lifespan of only 30 years, roads appear to be a forever piece of infrastructure that necessitates perpetual reconstruction. If the recently passed bipartisan US $1 trillion infrastructure bill is any indication, enormous resources will continue to flow toward repairing every tattered piece of asphalt and cracked abutment – even if these elements served their purpose long ago. Occasionally roads get removed, it’s just difficult to recall any that were abandoned but not replaced by a larger road.

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miles2 of road and somewhere between 13-30 million cubic yards of pavement that will need replacement on a rolling basis A careful observer will find that any city contains hundreds of lane miles that are either needlessly wide or orphaned from topographic dead ends or accidental grid collisions. Many of these blocks would make excellent opportunities for reassignment as a public good — if just ten lane miles of right-of way were reassigned to public housing (average four stories tall), a city could locate space for 5,000 one-bedroom apartments or enough land for 30 parks at 30,000 ft 2 each. The civic gain of such a quantity of new open space or housing would be significant by any measure and greatly alleviate pressure to build further out into the woods. Given the untenable cost for market-rate land that cities encounter when shopping for new park space and housing sites, this proposal makes good use of a resource that is both low cost and available throughout the entire civic fabric. This is not to underestimate the difficult work required by city councils and mayors to dislodge designated right-of-way lands from their engineer-minded DOT’s and no-growth neighbours.

Fortunately the formal mechanism to reassign public land is already executed regularly on behalf of developers in the form of street and alley vacations which typically occur when large institutional projects are allowed to purchase right-of-ways to combine tax lots.

Other examples of infrastructure reassignment include the Rails to Trails programs (the Highline), parklets, pandemic in-street seating, NYC’s Neighborhood Plaza Partnership program, and, at a larger scale, recent western dam removals in favour of salmon habitat restoration.

The twin problems of not enough open space and lack of affordable housing is a spatial and physical problem, and yet our approach to date has been to tap regional budgets to purchase private land.

With recent increase of rents and homelessness, the issue has grown to be painfully acute. This comes at a time when nations are experiencing generationally high inflation rates and skyrocketing property values. The money needed to buy enough land to match the need of the unhoused is inherently at odds with the financial ability for the taxpayer to fund. Alternatively, if your city is like Seattle, there is at least 33 square miles of pavement to look into, a portion of which could be repurposed as a more impactful public good than the current use as a road. While this land wouldn’t be free of development costs, it would be a fraction of market price.

In light of the outsize consequence to the environment of these carbon-intensive pieces of infrastructure, roadways offer those concerned about climate change several inspiring opportunities, but first some statistics: •The average North American city is 40% right-of-way pavement •The Hoover Dam contains 4.36 million cubic yards of concrete •An average city like Seattle contains approximately 4,000 lane

Paradoxically, the overabundance of the very thing that made cities successful is also the primary cause of land scarcity, eroding both affordability and quality of life in ways that appear to be intractable.

An obvious place to find enough undeveloped land to meaningfully address these issues is the road – and since these interlace the entire city, the potential is everywhere and in every neighbourhood – an elegant distribution, regardless of income or property value. All that is needed is a willing municipality to implement a demonstration project to prove a path forward is possible. p

2 Generally, a single lane mile is a one-mile long one-lane road, 12' wide — 63,360 ft 2. Here, we take it to be 17' wide (half a lane of parking or sidewalk will be reassigned), thus our lane mile is 89,760 ft 2.

Annie Han and Daniel Milhayo, Lead Pencil Studio, are artists exploring spatial conditions in Seattle, Washington. https://www.leadpencilstudio.org/

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there loc atin g Mo n ck R oad c h r i s t i a n s t e wa rt The construction of Colonization Roads in eastern Canada during the 1800s began, very broadly, from a slow but deliberate push for a liberal mode of governmentality in support of social and political engineering (i.e. the creation of ‘responsible political subjects’1) and in opposition to American influence in terms of military threat and outmigration, primarily in Quebec.

This photographic study is of a section of Monck Road, one of a constellation of routes planned and built in the 1860s and 1870s in central and eastern Ontario to encourage new settlement. This network of roads speaks to an ‘infrastructural colonisation’; tnew ways to demarcate, categorise, and disperse the population, to create a population of 'good citizen' participants — the roads supported this social process and are a reflection of it, in their materiality. These roads gave access to Crown Land, dividing it for settlement, completing another step towards the ultimate dissolution of common Indigenous lands. Over time, Colonization Roads of Ontario continued to demonstrate, and to be an active field for, the ongoing processes of colonization through reworked and shifting needs relocating, some disappearing into the bush, and many losing their intended infrastructural value.

As one of the oldest roads north of Toronto, Monck Road, named after the first Governor General of Canada, Sir Charles Stanley Monck, was a military route between the Ottawa Valley and the Upper Great Lakes, a route never actually used for military purposes. Surveyed in the mid-1860s and finished by 1873, it originally ran between Bancroft, where it connected with the Hastings and Mississippi Roads, and Lake Couchiching near Orillia. Most of the land Monck Road opened up to new settlement was not suitable for farming, something that applies to the vast majority of the colonisation roads in this particular network, instead settlers fished, hunted and trapped. Later, the road’s primary function as a connection between towns and regions was supplanted by roads that supported faster travel with motor vehicles.

What is there now? A loose inventory of the stretch of road photographed for this project reveals a landscape defined by a few old homesteads, drives that veer and dissolve into the bush, the odd small lake, some well-kempt properties assuredly carved from the topography, and trees that rise to hug the meandering road. It is missing many of the obvious landscape symbols of the area, boat-able lakes dotted with cottages, recreational trails and the service-oriented topographical fabric of the cross-roads of Bancroft. While the Monck Road is undoubtedly part of a network of dispossession, its history and presence, its thereness, is superseded by the marks of commonplace function, typical of rural routes found almost anywhere.

Colonisation roads of the backwoods of Ontario2, noting the location of the Monck Road, on a Google Earth aerial

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The section of the Monck Road on that was photographed for this study. The highlight shows the meandering unchanged alignment of the road connecting Bancroft with Cardiff

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Even if many know it as a Colonisation Road it is not often interrogated as such. I chose to document the Monck Road, and my being there, because it most represents what I call infrastructure blindness – where the roads we use for daily communication become a flat neutral background where car travel is the event, not the supporting infrastructure. This leads to a knowledge gap in the meaning of roads, especially Colonization Roads. The origins of Monck Road are lost, but the road itself continues to be defined by processes of status quo maintenance, a constantly reworked and re-materialised landscape in support of quotidian vehicular travel. Construction, maintenance and use defines the Monck Road as an example of the ubiquity of infrastructure and the normalisation of processes of colonisation. You are there, and under foot or under wheels, is the material of an infrastructural colonisation project.

The images – portraits, context and details – map my perspective as I travelled back and forth between Cardiff and Bancroft. The portraits locate myself there, isolating my position in the landscape, grounding me there. Context images are recordings, if fragmentary, of my perspective, fixing the location of the view. Detail images are a sharpened crop of ground, gradients and material make-up of the road and its adjacencies. Context, portrait, detail; locating, grounding, there.

You may not know your particular coordinates, but being on the road gives you a sense of locational value in place and time. The confines, convention and act of conveyance that a road prescribes to its user might conceal its origins, however what it does provide is a material situational experience. A road can be there, sited in the landscape, and you can be there, too. p

1 ​Primary documents and a general body of research is difficult to come by on the topic of colonisation roads, however if it is to be found and discussed it most likely is mentioned in​Rhys E. Steckle's great dissertation on road development in Ontario and Quebec in the 1800s in their contemporaneous political and social contexts. Steckle analyses this particular period in the process of colonisation that inspired the push for roads and road networks stitching together areas that previously lacked in settler communication infrastructure. I use it here to introduce the topic. Rhys E. Steckle, 'Rule of the Routes: Infrastructure, Colonization, and ‘the Social Science’, in the Canadas from Conquest to Confederation series. Carleton University, 2020.

2 The overlays of the colonisation road network​on a Google Earth aerial image is adapted from a map found in the three-volume series, Men and Meridians. Men and Meridians is an unironic (but informative) look at the triumphs of surveying and mapping technologies used in the Canadian colonisation process. Don W. Thomson, Men and Meridians: The History of Surveying and Mapping in Canada. Volume 1. Toronto: Thorn Press Limited, 1966. p 240

Christian Stewart is a landscape designer in Guelph, Ontario, where he lives with his partner, son and dog. Amongst many interests he especially enjoys capturing the processes of landscape with a camera when he can.

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d elibe rate l y s l o w b r a d f o r d wat s o n We find ourselves in the epoch of the Anthropocene, marked by our impact on the global ecology. The most discussed aspect of this is climate change. However, there are many other unnoticed aspects of the Anthropocene that are so common that they have become the given context. This is seen in a prosaic way through the massive road cuts that allow interstates and rail lines to travel through otherwise difficult or impossible mountain terrain. It can also be seen in our global connectivity via high speed travel or through technology that allows us to be anywhere and in multiple places simultaneously.

When this epoch began is debated, with some arguing for the Trinity Test in 1945, while others argue that it began 12,000 years ago with the Agricultural Revolution — the Holocene. Clearly the creation of Trinitite, a new mineral created by the plutonium-based nuclear explosion, is an easy marker of our significant change to the environment. However, perhaps the anthropo-geomorphological condition we currently find ourselves in, a by-product landscape created by industrialised sorting regimes, did begin with the Agricultural Revolution, for it is from this point on that we have manipulated and dictated the environment to serve our needs.

Geology or geological time, is a critical element within this context as it records and marks the transformation we have wrought in a very slow manner. While our impact on geology fluctuates in intensity, geology provides a certain resistance requiring an exponential growth and development in technology to overcome both its momentum and inertia. The inscription on the the Engineering Building at the University of Wyoming is 'Strive On The Control of Nature is Won, Not Given', a quote that became the title for a collection of essays by John McPhee who described his book 'as not an editorial. It is a description of people defying nature.

They may have no choice.' This distinction frames the condition in which we find ourselves; one that is reactionary, trying to keep up.

Perhaps a consideration of geological thinking and pace, a complement rather than a counter to urgency, would allow us to reveal latent potential for change. Perhaps being deliberately slow could give a new agency to design. Perhaps slowness can reveal things that we cannot see because of our current frantic pace.

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Within our constructed environment there are things that have been lost to our perception. We have either abandoned them because they no longer serve a purpose, or we have never taken the time to consider them. This phenomenon exists from the small artefact (a broken chair) to the scale of the city (poché) to the hyper-object (global warming). It exists within the context of representation, an architectural drawing being only intention, not considered actual.

It also exists in a material sense, where one does not consider the inherent properties that can be discovered to manifest something new. Material is not limited to the physical, but also is to be considered within the virtual context. Policy, desire and economics have significant influence on our physical space and therefore have a materiality that can be examined. I am interested in these hidden conditions that stem from the sense that all space, all places have a material consciousness.

If we take Plato’s description in Timaeus of prima materia as 'invisible and formless, all-embracing, possessed in a most puzzling way of intelligibility, yet very hard to grasp', then one, if capable, should be able to shape any form out of this material. Plato describes a place of human creation and participation. Alberto Perez-Gomez writes about Plato's three components of reality: being – 'unchanging form, uncreated and indestructible, imperceptible to sight or the other senses, the object of thought', becoming – sensible form which has come into existence, apprehended by the senses, and thirdly, chora –the space in which everything exists, which must exist, but is actually nothing at all.

It is this chora, a space or place, that we overlook. We have lost the ability to see material, in all its forms, as a space or place for occupation. It is within this framework that I situate my inquiry into our built environment, specifically, a method of delaying the artefact in order to reveal its latent capacity, its inherent potential.

2 x 4 slices from 60" to 62.875" Bradford Watson. 2 x 4 x 96, video, 2012

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This delay prompts an armature that allows a reclamation of the chora. The armature may manifest itself in physical form or may assert its influence through an action or the subversive revealing of information. This armature calls attention to the artefact (causing the delay or slowness), letting it take its next breath, all the while still cognisant of its former state, both being and being invisible.

A designer can be handed any set of criteria (program, site, material, budget, politics, ambitions) and must be able to strategically think and respond based on the parameters of examination and an understanding of the systemic processes at work. One must understand the interconnected nature of decision and action and the causality that brings. It is through a refocused thinking, a deliberate slowness, that one is able to understand the slippages that are necessary to create work. Whether they are construction tolerances, program adjacencies and overlap, zoning parameters, political agendas or migration patterns, one learns how to establish these slippages through an understanding of the capacity of the chora. Through this process we can move beyond representation and intention, language and style, and develop a way of thinking that creates agency and opportunity for emergence.

The twist in a 2 x 4, the fatigue point in steel, the minimal surface, the gerrymandering of political boundaries, economic edges, the grey space of policy and other conditions, when when examined with slowness, shows us how material research can shape and inform more than just material choice. It becomes a way to examine the condition we find ourselves in. It establishes investigation within a systemic context and focuses us on any project's latent potential. One is no longer able to draw a line without understanding that it has weight, is subject to both gravity and time, is interconnected to the larger systemic global organisation and is never innocent.

In the relationship between the material and a situation or event, I seek to measure, calibrate and develop hypotheses. The work is more than seeing, it reveals and understands those things that are buried; it is a process of excavation.

In being deliberately slow I seek to understand and make a real time iterative process based on delay to create feedback loops. Intentional slowness makes space that can be democratic, giving agency to those who may not have a voice, or more importantly, identifying those that should be included in the chora.

Urgency and speed is needed for critical issues of global warming, rising sea levels, global poverty and inequity. However there must also be a slow down in other ways without delaying critical attention to these crises. We must find a space where we can be deliberate about our pace. A space where we can take a continuous long view, allowing for reflection and analysis at the same time as implementation. Being deliberately slow gives a new agency to design and reframes the capacity of how becoming enters the chora.

Slowness reveals those things that we cannot see at our current pace. Within this slow space we can determine a strategy for intervention, moving away from the 'solving' and 'improving' that has put us in our current condition. p

This investigation into the poché of the very familiar, takes an eight foot 2 x 4 as its subject. Through a process of sectioning the found object, one is allowed to travel through the thick space below the surface revealing organic desires within the orthogonal framework of our world.

This study cut the 2 x 4 by the width of the saw blade leaving only the sawdust.

Each cut was inked to produce a print revealing the fingerprint of the tree.

https://vimeo.com/36228278

Bradford Watson is an architect and assistant professor at the School of Architecture at Montana State University in Boseman. http://www.bradfordawatson.com/

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str e e t work alexa maccrady The scratching on the zinc and the sharp bite on the plate – the erosion of surface . . .

Figure with Pickaxe Uncovers A Clue 0557

Men At Work 0523

8 x 12 inches

8 x 12 inches, 2018

Alexa MacCrady is a New York painter, colourist, object maker MFA BFA who likes to get lost in a crowd. https://alexamaccrady.com

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t he su btl e poetr y of F r e n ch electr i c i ty su bsta ti o n do o r s ruth oldham

Each door (each substation) is identified by a name. Not a number.

The one across our old street was called GRAINDORGE. This made sense as 50 metres down the road was the rue Charles Graindorge.

In nearby streets were BAUDOT, HIRSCH, HURE, STOKVIS… names whose meanings were not immediately obvious. Walking one day in a far-flung suburb of northern Paris we went past one that was called INTELLO. This got me wondering. Why name a substation INTELLO – French shorthand for an intellectual? The internet threw up a link to Michel Recanti, a Marxist student activist who played a prominent role during the May ‘68 protests, and brother of a well-known philosopher. In 1978, following the death of the love

There was a deep blue metal door across the street from our old flat in an inner suburb on the eastern edge of Paris. On hot summer nights, when the windows were open, letting in the city sounds that travel fluidly through the dark, still air, we would hear a low hum.

Behind the door was a piece of public infrastructure (in this case contained within the building of a private Catholic secondary school): an electricity substation. Inside the substation, medium voltage 11kV electrical current is lowered to 230V - the level at which it can safely enter our homes. This happens by passing the current through a metallic coil, consisting of steel, aluminium and copper, within whose magnetic core the energy is dissipated. This process of energy transfer generates heat and sound. Ventilation grilles allow the heat to escape, and the sound travels with it.

As my musician partner got interested in the acoustics of the substation across the street1, and began making recordings and composing with them, I started to notice other similar metal doors, dotted through the city around us. Sometimes integrated into larger buildings, sometimes in standalone one-storey buildings. They all emit the same low frequency hum2. This becomes audible, quite suddenly, when you are about two metres away. It dies away again just as quickly as you walk by. The urban form of the location of each substation is unique, the variables are countless: street width, surrounding building heights, isolated building or integrated within a larger building, building façade materials, orientation, presence or not of trees and/or vegetation. All these factors lead to small differences in the acoustics around each door. The same source noise, a 50 Hz hum, seems amplified in certain situations, and rapidly dissipates in others.

On every door a blue (occasionally black) sign, screwed on at eye level, reads: ENEDIS L’ELECTRICITE EN RESEAU POSTE DE TRANSFORMATION HAUTE TENSION Then a second plaque is screwed on to the sign, indicating the name of the substation, in black capital letters written on small yellow rectangles, arranged as required, like scrabble letters or fridge magnets.

Underneath this is written: DANGER DE MORT. 1 This work would probably never have existed if it hadn’t been for my partner, Juan Guillermo Dumay’s interest in this sound. He made a sound art piece using recordings of the hum, and we co-wrote a text about the substations: https://theatrum-mundi.org/library/the-backgroundbuzzlistening-to-electrical-substations/, published in December 2021 by Theatrum Mundi.

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of his life through cancer, he committed suicide in the suburb in question, Goussainville, by throwing himself under a train. Is that the connection?

I’m not sure I will ever know, but I continued to spot more substation doors as I walked through the city and their names became an ever more absorbing source of intrigue, painting images and ideas in my mind. I found BAOBAB, BARBE, COMPLEXE, FLASH. Then ASTRAKHAN, DRAKKAR, FAUCON, MAMELOUK. Some have masculine first names, popular in France: ANTOINE, JULIEN, QUENTIN. Feminine first names do not seem common, though one chilly afternoon I spotted ASTER, a flower, but charged with meaning for me as it is the name of my daughter. I also found an ELEKTRASTAR, not a girl’s name but a wonderful, female sounding name for an anonymous piece of infrastructure.

2 The frequency of this hum is around 50 Hz, corresponding to the 230V alternating current (AC) that is the norm in Europe, Africa, and large parts of Asia. In the US, most of Central and South America, Japan and South Korea, the AC runs at 120V / 60 Hz.

There is plenty of humour to be found in the names. In the street in front of a major construction project a temporary substation has been installed in a portacabin type structure; it is simply named DEPENSE – expense. The wizard Merlin is evoked on a door named MAGIQUE, attached to the Rosny-sous-Bois branch of the DIY store Leroy Merlin. One grey, drizzly, morning I spotted the familiar cubic form of a small standalone substation, in the distance beyond a large carpark. I wove my way through the cars to discover its name and was rewarded with the joy of finding that the substation in this glum corner of the city was called JOIE. A grimmer sense of humour was evoked by the name of another: PANSEMENT, French for plaster or

band-aid, inducing a shiver at the words DANGER DE MORT written directly underneath.

Frequently, the name is that of the street, or a nearby street: BERLIOZ, DOMBASLE, REVOLUTION, SAVART (the naming of streets is another form of urban poetry, again sometimes obvious, sometimes not). Others are named after faraway places: ALSACELORRAINE, BOURGOGNE, PEROU; and quite a few after plants: CHENE (oak), GROSEILLER (redcurrant), SUREAUX (elderberry).

a l l i m a ge s R u t h O l d ha m

HACHIS

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PLACAGE

STOKVIS D

There was a MATERNELLE, an obvious choice as the substation was contained within the building of a nursery school (école maternelle), but in another neighbourhood I found a PATERNEL. Another, attached to a primary school was called PREAUX – school hall. I came across AMITIE (friendship), BRAVOURE (bravery), and FIDELITE (loyalty). Then ACTUALITE (current affairs) and ACTEUR, ACADEMICIEN, HSTORIEN and LIBERAL. Intriguingly, THEATRE was not on the theatre building, but about 200 metres away. The substation sign on the theatre building was named VARIETE COMEDIEN (variety, actor). Just as PISCINE was

not on the swimming pool building but at the end of the street opposite the swimming pool. The substation sign on the swimming pool building was named BRASSE (breaststroke). VITRIER (glazier) is situated in front of the headquarters of a glass and mirror manufacturer. ' The two shiny new substation doors on a recently completed housing complex near our old flat were called SPIRALE and COURBE (curve). These new buildings were unflinchingly rectilinear, though they are adjacent to a modern primary school made up of a series of curving, blob shaped buildings. A door near the Bois de Vincennes, a vast forested park in the east of Paris that was once a royal hunting

a l l i m a ge s R u t h O l d ha m

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MAGIQUE

PANSEMENT

ground and is the site of the Château de Vincennes, preferred residence of French royalty in the late Middle Ages, was named CAPET VIN. Presumably after the House of Capet, who ruled France from 987 to 1328. The word VIN isn’t so clear, but the substation in question was within the building of a supermarket.

had made the effort to find a slightly less obvious word. I began to wonder what was going on behind the scenes. Is a there a would-be poet amongst the electrical engineers working for ENEDIS? Or was I reading too much into what is nothing more than a rational process of generating a name through geographical association? Perhaps there is not even a real person behind the process, just an algorithm.

I found one very recently called PHALENE. Unsure what the word meant I looked it up, it is the name of a family of moths and butterflies. I then remembered that the street I had seen it in was the rue des Papillons – Butterfly Street. This struck me as quite beautiful. It could have simply been called PAPILLON, but someone

a l l i m a ge s R u t h O l d ha m

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GRAINDORGE

AUBIN

But this naming process has been going on for several decades, a long time before algorithms took over our lives; a rudimentary comparison of historic aerial photographs3 shows that the small standalone substations started appearing in the mid-1960s.

3 On the amazing “Remonter le temps” website run by the French Geographical Institute one can download every aerial photo ever taken of the French territory. https://remonterletemps.ign.fr/.

I could probably while away the rest of my life there if I wasn’t careful.

The metallic doors come in various forms. The older ones have a moulded relief forming rounded corners, giving them an almost nautical, certainly technical, aspect. The newer ones tend to be smooth and flat. They are frequently covered in posters for concerts or plays in local venues, or advertising political meetings. Many carry an extra sign advising how to help someone who has been electrocuted: NE PERDEZ PAS UNE SECONDE (don’t lose a second), PROTEGER (protect), SECOURIR (rescue), ALERTER (alert), accompanied by a series of drawings showing how to resuscitate someone and perform cardiac massage. Most of the doors are tagged. Some are entirely painted over, the name still decipherable

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ILOT

HISTORIEN

in relief. Sometimes there is no name, hidden by layers of posters and graffiti, or simply absent… one appears to be so new that it has not yet received its name). Sometimes there is no door, just a sign fixed to the building façade or perimeter fence, near a gate or other entrance. The signs are however clearly situated in the public realm.

They are standardised (more or less) and identifiable – the publicly visible face of a largely invisible web of electrical infrastructure.

Interestingly, in Paris itself, rather than the inner suburbs where I live, the names are barely names at all, just addresses – substations are identified by their street name and number. The suburban

system of names that I have tuned into is so much more interesting.

The names tell stories. They provide clues, sometimes obvious, sometimes obscure, about the places in which they are situated.

They shift between the prosaic and the dreamy and the puzzling.

This most essential infrastructure network, underpinning our entire way of life, plays host to an evocative web of poetry. p

Ruth Oldham teaches, designs, writes, and translates, within and around the field of architecture. She is from Kent, in the UK, but now lives in Montreuil in the eastern suburbs of Paris. @_rutholdham_

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ASTRAKHAN

PHALENE

top to bottom: Atacama Dam, 2020 Le Grande Dixence Barrage, 2021 Western Georgia Dam, 2021

all i mag e s Si mo n Shi m - S u t c l i f fe

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d a ms simon shim sutcliffe

My project is to photograph universal structures which show the resilience of the human condition and the fragility of heroic and monumental engineering projects such as hydro-electric dams. In a postwar world, these large, often national infrastructure projects held the promise of a better future by providing a valuable, reliable source of power for industry, for cities and for citizens.

Dams are often a country's most visible tools of control — the control of water becoming an ever increasing importance in climate crises. Canada has the highest dam capacity in the world with the majority built between 1945 and 1970. It was a period in which the promise of a better life was traded for the displacement of Indigenous Peoples, flora and fauna, and land. * This assortment of photographs of dams ranges from from 2016 until now, from Georgia to the United States, Switzerland to Scotland – photographic cuts in the cinematic river of time. Dams are lodged between the chance and uncertainty of the liquid and the determinacy of the mechanical. They destroy and create at the same time. They are an infrastructure which submerges both nature and human culture. They impose a global condition of twentieth-century modernity on the local and specific condition.

I was recently documenting the Leiden Rijksmuseum. In the central foyer is the temple of Taffeh, one of four Egyptian temples (the other three are at the Metropolitan in New York, the Parque del Oeste in Madrid, and the Museo Egizio in Turin) cut up and moved during the construction of the monolithic Aswan Dam in 1964 at the peak of the Cold War. Such dams are the remnants of the modern in our contemporary world.

Last summer, in Georgia working with Propaganda.network, a residency group in Tbilis, I spent time at the protest encampments of the Rioni Valley Defenders, photos below, where local winegrowers were protesting the construction of what would be the largest hydro dam in the region to provide cheap power to bitcoin miners and factories. The dam was only recently cancelled. Despite large business interests and national government support, these massive concrete structures are no longer automatically faits accomplis.

Existing dams are objective in their form and subjective in their content, they drown what's within and rise up what's beyond. They show the fragility of infrastructure and the fragility of nature.

They are sites of national importance yet they are not considered as aesthetic sites. To judge and aestheticise them allows one to criticise and problematise them. To look at dams is to look at how a photograph makes a world, how the banal can go beyond just a motif or form, into universal structure. p

Gutami 1 HPP, Georgia

all i mag e s S i m on S hi m - S u t c l i f fe

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top to bottom: Pitlochry Dam, 2022 Pitlochry Dam 2, 2022 Hoover Dam, 2016

all i mag e s Si mo n Sh i m- Su tcli f f e

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top to bottom: Harelaw Dam, 2022 Edersee Dam, 2020 Geissen Dam, 2022

Hoover Dam, 2016 Harelaw Dam, 2022 all i mag e s Si mo n Sh i m- Su tcli f f e

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Simon Shim-Sutcliffe is a Canadian artist living and working in Frankfurt, Germany.

He studied at the Staedelschule under Hassan Khan and Cyprien Gaillard, sculpture at the Glasgow School of Arts and art history at the University of Toronto.

r e -a daptiv e i n f r as t r uct ur e a s a mean s o f s ur vi val lejla odobašic novo and anisa glumcevic

During the 1992-1995 siege of Sarajevo, the city took on a new morphology as the citizens adapted both infrastructure and architectural spaces to the new-found circumstances of destruction. During times of conflict, where violence and destruction occur directly in an urban setting, changes of the infrastructure and the urban fabric become part of a warfare tactic and – at the same time – a part of survival strategy. In times of extreme violence, citizens find alternative modes of operation within the newly established social order by changing their patterns of movement, by repurposing existing infrastructure and buildings for new functions, and by reconfiguring interior space. They adapt to a new set of urban rules driven by patterns of military terror and destruction.

During the siege of Sarajevo, its infrastructure and architecture became direct targets of war, shifting the discourse of urban destruction during conflict from that of collateral damage to that of purposeful and calculated annihilation. Unfortunately, we have seen similar patterns of combat repeated since and are witnessing a similar scenario in Ukrainian cities at the moment. This act of destroying the architectural corpus affects the city’s physical appearance and sets into motion other forces that then shape a new environment. Thus, the meaning of material or physical space and infrastructure gets re-established through new patterns of usage.

sur viving by adapting During wartime cities become urban laboratories as not only does war-inflicted urban trauma suggest broken spatial and social networks, it also removes memory from space, putting both the city's history and future in jeopardy. Aquilué, et al., argues that ‘trauma defines the moment in which the urban system needs to reinvent itself in order not to disappear’.1 The example of Sarajevo under siege addresses an urban occurrence that often arises in urban conflicts: self-(re)organisation in all aspects of urban life, including infrastructure.

Armina Pilav, an architect and scholar, has introduced the term ‘unwar space’, both a literary and spatial concept wherein the prefix ‘un’ stands for redefining, reimagining and reconstructing, while war is defined as ‘to address conflict via military violence’. According to Pilav, war and un-war spaces resulted in transitional spaces of different scales and materials. Sarajevo was caught in a cycle of destruction and reconstruction, turning both the public and private spaces into self-programmed ones. Subject to constant destruction, the city was physically transformed at all scales: infrastructure, landscapes, streets, living spaces and building exteriors, but also practices of everyday life. 2

´ and Javier Ruiz Sánchez. ‘Urban Trauma and 1 Ines Aquilué, Milica Lekovic, Self-Organization of the City. Autopoiesis in the Battle of Mogadishu and the Siege of Sarajevo’. Urban 08-09, 2014. p63–76 2 Armina Pilav. ‘Before the War, War, After the War: Urban Imageries for Urban Resilience’. International Journal of Disaster Risk Science 3, no. 1, 2012. p23–37

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Repurposing building ruins became a daily practice, thus establishing transitory wartime interventions where living meant adjusting to the new spatial reconfiguration of the war. People’s movements were limited to underground and above-ground urban spaces, while most of everyday life remained underground and turned into a total emergency. The above-ground city was used solely for obtaining food and essential supplies. Many shops, schools, hospitals, and apartment and office buildings were uninhabitable, with walls penetrated by shells, windows shattered by blasts and rooms gutted and burned. Bricks from destroyed buildings were used to fill holes in walls. Many damaged buildings, once repaired, were habitable again, but some rooms were more dangerous than others. Walls and openings exposed to snipers and shrapnel, made them completely unoccupiable. The urban spaces were transformed into an enclosed ‘urban interior’ in which residents regained their right to move and access places of social encounter. Historical and inactive cemeteries, city parks and green arenas and stadiums were repurposed as war cemeteries. The city’s 40,000 trees were cut down for cooking and heating.3 Public transport was non-existent, and people moved by foot or bicycles; heavy supplies were conveyed in baby carriages, wheelbarrows and winter sleds.

3 Amra Hadzimuhamedovic, ˇ ´ ed. ‘Culture-Based Urban Resilience: Post-War Recovery of Sarajevo’. World Heritage Center web page, 2018.

FA M A

Because of its specific geography and urban configuration, and the position of the siege line, Sarajevo was extremely exposed to military attack, in direct and precise aim at its infrastructure, buildings and public spaces. In the Socialist part of the town, entire buildings were attacked, making it more difficult to seek shelter because of the large open and exposed areas between free-standing

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residential buildings. To shelter from snipers, new spatial strategies were employed. In a temporary pattern of urban resilience, the main element of contemporary fortifications was an urban wall – mobile, free standing or fixed onto the walls of opposite buildings, closing the space between them.

Hard sniper barriers and sandbagged doorways

Hard barriers against snipers’ shots were improvised from garbage and shipping containers, destroyed cars, tramcars, piled buses, cement blocks or sandbags. The only safe route across these areas would be behind the UN armoured vehicles. In the Grbavica neighbourhood, a strip of containers known as the ‘Road of Salvation’, offered shelter when crossing this most dangerous part of the town.4 The buildings of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman parts of Sarajevo, except for those along the riverbank, were somewhat sheltered by surrounding buildings whose roofs and front façades were fully exposed to the siege line. The denser morphology of this part of town was easier to shelter by hanging and stretching large pieces of fabric from building to building.5 Made from big sheets, curtains and canvas, these ‘soft barriers’ depended on their size, availability and the level of protection needed. They could hide passers-by from snipers’ gazes but not bullets. These canvases sometimes fell down in bad weather to suddenly reveal the street and anyone in it.

©M il o mir Ko v a c e vi c S t ra s ni

All of the barriers served as canvases for graffiti where residents channelled their messages often in self-deprecating humour: ‘Tito come back’, ‘I am not crazy’ and ‘Everyone is crazy here’. In this sense, the temporary infrastructural response to violence took on a very important role of communicating messages from the citizens of Sarajevo to the rest of the world as they were completely isolated during the entire duration of the siege.

´ Architecture, Urban Space and War: The Destruction and 4 Mirjana Ristic.

Reconstruction of Sarajevo. Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict. Cham, Switzerland, Springer International Publishing, 2018.

5 Ibid.

© K e m a l Ha d ž i c

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Soft visual barriers and defiant hard tank-obstructing barriers

Pa u l Lo w e

©M il o mir Ko v a c e vi c S t ra s ni

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Zoran Doršner, Bosnian architect, wartime studies of restructured housing units. 1994 Zo ra n D o rš n e r

Balconies during winter served as refrigerators. Since food supplies ran out soon after the war started, many persons exchanged valuable personal belongings for food. People made gardens in their southfacing rooms, they planted food in the flower pots on their balconies and exchanged produce for something else they needed.8 Balconies were also used as escape routes when there were fires caused by shelling. Sheets would be tied to the rail and one would climb down to balconies of unaffected apartments.

adapting the everyday Through the 44 weeks of the siege, not only were the public spaces affected, but the daily rhythm of residential life of the half-million citizens of Sarajevo was transfixed and overturned. Of the 71,000 homes in Sarajevo, 24,000 were completely demolished, 35,000 heavily damaged, while only 12,000 were somewhat spared.6 Adapting and re-designing homes to protect themselves, repairing damage and maximising the usability and liveability of spaces, citizens were suddenly forced to be architects of improvisation.7 ˇ Bosnian architect, Zoran Dorsner did a set of wartime studies which contain texts, articles and overlapping sketches of the changes and adaptations that occurred within residential units. He pointed out the distinctive functional zones of a prewar Sarajevo apartment: the living area, kitchen, dining room, and a balcony linked to sleeping rooms and the bathroom by a corridor. The wartime siege-adapted plan showed the living area storing bicycles, trolleys, water and firewood, while actual daily activities were all condensed in a pulledback corner of the apartment.

6 Ibid 7 Zoran Dorsner.

'Kad Gradove Ubijaju'. Osloboðenje, 1994. ˇ

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Shelling shattered the windows in all the buildings early on in the conflict. As a result, most windows had glued and hammered UNHCR1 plastic foil covering the bare openings, along with stacks of books, sandbags, mattresses and cupboards. This completely altered the acoustic properties of the interiors, which rendered all the exterior sounds very audible.

Homes also lacked utilities. Heating was fuelled by books, clothes and furniture, while chimneys had to be improvised by each household. Craftsmen came up with simple but efficient metal furnaces that could be fuelled by gas (when there was any), or coal, wood or any other available flammable materials.

Because of their central position, staircases of residential buildings became places of everyday social interaction; it was where tenants met, talked, hung out, played cards or chess, and exchanged supplies. Besides assuring safety and communal interaction, they were routes for emergency evacuations towards basements and shelters. Apartment buildings’ basements, used as bomb shelters, were where people most often socialised.

8 Armina Pilav. 'Before the War, War, After the War: Urban Imageries for Urban Resilience'. International Journal of Disaster Risk Science 3, no. 1, 2012. p23–3

Pa u l Lo w e

Hard barriers

conclusion From the example of the siege of Sarajevo, we have tried to illustrate the role that infrastructure, along with architecture, plays both in term of military tactics of destruction but also as a new means of adaptation by citizens in a form of survival strategy. By adapting to new urban rules dictated by military destruction, the citizens of Sarajevo found a way of infrastructurally adapting the city to create both physical and visual protective barriers at the city level, while they also adapted their everyday spaces in order to stay safe and survive. p

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¸ ¸

Anisa Glumcevic completed her undergraduate and graduate studies at International Burch University, Department of Architecture in Sarajevo. She is currently working on architectural projects in Bosnia and Herzegovina and internationally.

¸

Lejla Odobašic Novo is a Bosnian-Canadian architect licensed by the OAA. She is currently teaching as an Associate Professor at the International Burch University, Department of Architecture in Sarajevo.

Her research lies within the intersection of culture and politics, exploring how this junction manifests itself through architecture in contested spaces.

wie r man se i t nirsa

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Nirsa is an illustrator constantly on the move. The graphic renditions of the Psychogeographic Digest ponder on landscapes and symbols collected along the way that are often too familiar to recognise. https://www.nirsa.co

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c a lls f or ar ti cl es 42: atlas of belonging

43 :: temporary architecture

On Site review's mandate, a review of work on site, in situ, is inherently about maps: everything happens somewhere, on some piece of land. After that point of material reality, how work is developed, received, occupied, tolerated or reviled, allowed to stand or not, is all to do with its affiliations, and these start with how a project is mapped.

What is the acceptable durée for architecture? Is it found in construction, or form, or program? Is the temporary a material issue, or is it about occupation? Can a rental suite be considered temporary architecture, no matter how long the physical space has existed? The use of space might be temporary, or the construction of the space itself, such as a Oxfam tent, might be designed to be short-lived.

What is the base map? Is it geographic, the diagram of relative land mass adjacencies, distorted by projection, measured by statistics? Or is it political, full of lines indicating land ownership, coloured in ideologically? Or is it topographic, the physical shape of land measured by experience, full of demarcating landmarks, upon which wars occur?

Mapping, on the other hand, is not just an act of surveying, whether by hand-held transit or by satellite, but is increasingly used as a non-linear metaphor for networks and arrays of information that connect multi-dimensionally in conceptual space. Although eighteenth-century European explorers mapped their journeys as lines on a flat surface, their logs contained all the observations about those lines that the line itself is incapable of registering or communicating. Analyses of 'the voyage' through a variety of lenses –– visual, imperial, colonial, environmental, cultural, technological, ecological –– map motion and place very differently. Mapping is both analytical and the charting of a path (for clarity's sake) through a dense interconnected multi-dimensional world.

For On Site review 42: atlas of belonging we would like to look at maps of omission and commission, inclusion and exclusion, maps as tools of both domination and liberation (viz., the irredentist war in Ukraine), the maps that are not drawn but rather are dreamed, known and used in some other way than charts.

Send proposals for On Site review 42: atlas of belonging any time up to September 30, 2022. Final submissions will be due December 31, 2022.

Include a brief text description outlining what you wish to say, proposed illustrations/maps/images and how your submission addresses the overall theme of the atlas. Please use our contact form on the website: https://onsitereview.ca/contact-us

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How can we extend the limits of a temporary architecture so that it becomes a fluid, nimble, responsive typology not just a reactive condition to disaster, or crisis; not just a condition of poverty or charity. Can a temporary architecture be intentionally demountable and moveable, rather than thrown up for quick occupation and then bulldozed, as happens at Calais and every other informal refugee camp. Well, of course it can, but is this actually happening?

Sometimes a shoddy building stands on into its second century, beyond all reasonable expectations. How does this happen? Is its use, its symbolic function, part of its material persistence?

Sometimes a solidly-built building runs out of programmatic functionality and is let go, a ruin before its time.

So, what is the acceptable, or the probable, or the unfair durée for architecture?

Send proposals for this issue any time up to April 30 2023, final submissions will be due July 1 2023 https://onsitereview.squarespace.com/call-for-articles

R e m e m b e r, O n S i t e r e v i e w i s n o t an aca d emic jo urnal. It is an independent unfunded publication that sometimes enters into collaboration with other groups a n d g u e s t e d i t o r s , w h o m a y, o r m a y n o t, o f f e r h o n o ra r i a.

Excessive footnoting is not n e c e s s a r y : y o u a re t h e e x p e r t, you are telling us what we need t o k n o w, n o t p r o v i n g o r a r g u i n g a p oint.

Sophisticated ideas in accessible w riting is w h at we like.

forthcoming from Blue Crow —

Ni g e l G r e e ne

Blue Crow Media is an independent publisher based in London. Since 2015, we have published a series of close to thirty architecture guide maps, covering cities as diverse as London, Skopje, New York, Detroit, Tokyo and Pyongyang. The New York Times describes our maps as “part design manifesto, part urban architecture guide” and the Financial Times named one of our titles an architecture book of the year in 2018.

Brutalist Paris — the

first thoroughly researched English-language book about brutalist architecture in and around Paris. Drawing on over five years of research, interviews and photography conducted

by Photolanguage’s Robin Wilson and Nigel Green, Brutalist Paris represents a substantial contribution to the study and exploration of brutalist architecture.

above: Telecommunications Building 5 Avenue du Général Sarrail, Paris 16 e Completion date: 1970 Architect: Pierre Vivien Photographer: Nigel Greene (Photolanguage)

https://bluecrowmedia.com/blogs/news

ON SITE r e v i e w

41 : 2022 infrastr uct ure

FAUCON

R u t h O l d ha m

Signs taken for wonders: the naming of electrical substations in suburban Paris, poetic, complex one-word narratives of history and place.

See Ruth Oldham’s photo-essay and text on p44