Citizens of No Place by PA Press

Princeton Architectural Press 路 New York

Published by Princeton Architectural Press 37 East 7th Street New York, NY 10003 For a free catalog of books, call 1-800-722-6657. Visit our website at www.papress.com. © 2012 Princeton Architectural Press All rights reserved Printed and bound in China 15 14 13 12 4 3 2 1 First edition No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the publisher, except in the context of reviews. Every reasonable attempt has been made to identify owners of copyright. Errors or omissions will be corrected in subsequent editions. Editor: Linda Lee Designer: Paul Wagner Special thanks to: Bree Anne Apperley, Sara Bader, Nick Beatty, Nicola Bednarek Brower, Janet Behning, Fannie Bushin, Megan Carey, Carina Cha, Russell Fernandez, Jan Haux, Diane Levinson, Jennifer Lippert, Gina Morrow, John Myers, Katharine Myers, Margaret Rogalski, Dan Simon, Sara Stemen, Andrew Stepanian, and Joseph Weston of Princeton Architectural Press —Kevin C. Lippert, publisher

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lai, Jimenez, 1979– Citizens of no place : an architectural graphic novel / Jimenez Lai. – First edition. pages cm ISBN 978-1-61689-062-9 (pbk.) 1. Architecture–Comic books, strips, etc. 2. Graphic novels. I. Title. PN6733.L35C58 2012 741.5’971–dc23 2011052899

Contents

Preface

Introduction by John McMorrough

01 Conversations with a Developer

02 Noahâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Ark in Space

03 Point Clouds

04 Babel

05 The Obsession Accelerator

06 Drifting Cities of a Past

07 Plan V Section

08 On Types of Seductive Robustness

103

09 Primitives

119

10 The Future Archaeologist

131

Acknowledgments

143

Preface

Cartoon is an enticing way to convey complexity; it is more than just a rendering technique. If we distill the attitude of the collection of stories in this graphic novel into two words, they would be calibrated superficiality. It is the idea that something difficult does not need to rely on effects of obscurity; it is a celebration of impressionable thoughtsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;a visual impact that contains many layers to be unpacked and explored. This book also pursues the ongoing tradition of paper architectureâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;best exemplified in the work of John Hejduk, Daniel Libeskind, Bernard Tschumi, among othersâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;that was practiced during difficult times (when a troubled economy limited job availability or in order to explore ideas too fantastical to be realized). Existing in a world of the unrealized or the fictional is the nature of such a practice. Dancing between the line of narrative and representation, cartooning is a medium that facilitates experimentations in proportion, composition, scale, sensibility, character plasticity, and the part-to-whole relationship as the page becomes an object. More importantly, this drawing medium affords the possibility of conflating representation, theory, criticism, storytelling, and design. Citizens of No Place imagines alternate worlds and engages with the design of architecture through the act of storytelling. It offers narratives about character development, through which the reader can explore relationships, curiosities, and attitudes, as well as absurd stories about fake realities that invite new futures to become possibilities.

Introduction

The Architecture of No Place and Eutopia, Infinite Earths, and Elseworlds John McMorrough

What do we have here? Addressing first the issue of format, a constant dilemma for the architectural exhibition is the nature of what is on display: never the original—too big, too heavy, and too inert—it is always a representation; a portion, a fragment, an aspect by which one is to envision the whole. The architectural exhibit is itself a “no place”; what is on display are also representations. But there are differences, as the large-scale images on the wall are drawings of a particular type that are also read, but in another manner. The reading of a drawing or model is through the abstraction of a depersonalized viewpoint whereas a comic is experienced through the narrative—in the former, one is a viewer of the architectural drawing, and in the latter, a participant (a citizen?) of the architectural comic.

We understand the no-place evocation of this exhibition in two ways. First, this work exists in a fictional dimension—there is no place like this and perhaps could never be such a place in the Newtonian world in which architecture still operates. In this usage is a reference to the Utopia by Sir Thomas More, within whose famous work of a perfect imaginary island there is the irony that the perfection is not only imaginary but in a sense impossible (utopia means, literally, “not place,” from the Greek οὐ, “not,” and τόπος, “place”). The positive associations attributed to utopia are in fact the domain of the homophonic eutopia (as derived from the Greek εὖ, “good” or “well,” and τόπος, “place”), to which it is clearly related yet significantly distinct. The second way to understand no place is as a nod to

Introduction

spaces of homogenization and ubiquity. The citizens of no place are subjects of various manners of the totalizing forces—of megacities and global regimes—that come along with late capitalism and globalization. The work itself is not without precursor. There is, graphically, the clear influence of manga and anime, which are in turn echoes of the earlier work of Métal Hurlant (published in the United States as Heavy Metal). Architecturally, the tropes on display comprise a catalog of fantastical projects from the dust heap of history: the technologies of Archigram, the isotropic expanse of Archizoom, and the ecologies of Arcosanti. So are we to understand this redeployment of things we have seen before as references or citations, ripoffs or riffs? The answer may lie in the analogous history of the medium of comics themselves. Comics thrive on invention but with a conflicted desire to retain narrative order, or “continuity,” that ensures that everything within the totality of the comic makes sense unto itself (i.e., characters cannot be in two places at the same time), and not surprisingly, the goals of continuity are at cross-purposes with the inherent compulsion for comics to explore alternate scenarios—infinitely. The contradictions that came of trying to accommodate both tendencies ultimately yielded DC Comics’ Crisis on Infinite Earths series, in which the contradictions of these multiple overlapping alternative realities (described as the “multi-verse”) were wiped clean for a fresh start on a single reality and continuity. Even so, the momentary stability achieved by the conclusive streamlining singularity was short lived and unable to squelch the desire for an innovation that couldn’t help but overstress the limits of consistency. Rather than reenacting the same issues within an increasingly unruly multiplicity, the resultant “Elseworlds” provide the means of exploring stories entirely separate from the main narrative, and in which, according to its tagline, “heroes are taken from their usual settings and put into strange times and places—some that have existed, and others that can’t, couldn’t or shouldn’t exist. The results are stories that make

characters that are as familiar as yesterday seem as fresh as tomorrow.” What these Elseworlds offer is a space of rehearsal, a place to try out scenarios that work on possibilities in a way that sidesteps the conclusiveness of (the comic) reality. The work of Jimenez Lai offers an alternative view—an elseworld—that explores the relatively unlikely (which, though, might come to be) and addresses questions of how architecture is represented—its social context, its possibility, and, finally, its continuing resonance—in pocket universes where possibility is unregulated by the weight of history or, in some cases, even the weight of gravity. This is different from visionary utopian architectures of the past or versions of architectural make-believe in that these projects operate under a redeployment of architecture’s visionary repertoire in relationship to new circumstances and forces that may or may not be real. In telling stories of twelve-kilometer-high towers, or rooms without gravity or orientation, or of taking the possibility of teleportation seriously and envisioning the instantaneous transfer of goods globally (an internet of things indeed), Lai sets his architectural imagination to just the other side of plausibility. The desirability of these proposals is yet to be determined, and that is precisely the point: these cartoon architectures act as test cases for architecture’s capacity to organize existence. In the end it is not the character of the architecture of these wild speculations but the architecture of the characters that fascinates. Whether in the palpable distress of the skyscraper-naut and the prospect of spending a year in high altitude isolation or the ebullience of Grandpa and his little friend at the accomplishment of their project, it is a suggestion of an emotive architecture that is neither instructional (critical) nor seductive (disorienting) that comes to the fore. The citizens of no place, despite the enveloping nature of their circumstances, still find the means of articulating their existence. Amidst the pressures of totality, it turns out that there may be a place for architecture after all.

01 Conversations with a Developer

On Imagination Fiction is an impetus to architecture. Imagination is an upstream process toward making the fake become real. The fiction that architects writeâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;as an inspiration for and a response to cultureâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;forecasts the fabrication of cities, which marks history. To advance culture, architects must embrace the power of unrealized ideas and nurture wild propositions. By realizing the seemingly unimaginable, architects lay down a new milestone of tangible realities.

Conversations with a Developer