TWO MODERNITIES IN ONE: CARBON FORM AND THE REDUCTION OF ECOLOGICAL SPACE
NON-EXTRACTIVE ARCHITECTURE VOL. 1 ON DESIGNING WITHOUT DEPLETION
ELISA ITURBE
ECOLOGIES OF THE ARTIFICIAL MEDIA archive MA-BA TRANSVERSAL WORKSHOP ETSAM-UPM
UDD 24 SORIANO SPRING TERM 2021-2022 P6-7-8 + MHAB
TEXTO
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Although there are many patterns and timelines of modernity, there is one of particular interest at a moment in which energy transition is our civilization’s most pressing task: carbon modernity. Arising with the widespread adoption of fossil fuels and the concomitant revolution in industrial productivity, carbon modernity has undergirded various permutations of political thought and architectural discourse since the first adoption of coal as a primary energy source in eighteenth-century Europe. To reveal the persistence of carbon modernity throughout these discursive breaks is to confront the fact that the cultural and material foundations that gave rise to the modern condition have remained largely undisturbed—despite discursive ruptures—and that, furthermore, they have been cemented and strengthened by the architectural thought and practice of the past two hundred years. Yet these foundations and their attendant economies and socio-spatial structures must now be questioned, as vast ecological disturbances—the most sweeping and dangerous of which is climate change— have rendered them immediately untenable. In this effort, architecture has a specific role to play, for there is a distinct spatial paradigm that arises from carbon modernity—carbon form—which, as a spatial phenomenon, offers architecture a specific avenue to intervene against carbon modernity.1 However, although it is clear enough that this intervention is necessary, the question of is not obvious, and finding the answer is made difficult by the nature of carbon form itself. As a spatial or formal configuration that arises from the energy density of fossil-fuel sources, the concept of carbon form implies that form follows energy and, consequently, that changes to our energy system must precede changes to our spatial structures. Yet the next energy transition has not come, and the most promising innovations—solar and wind generation— feed electricity into a largely unchanging energy grid, as well as a seemingly immutable culture of energy consumption. As such, the current deployment of renewable energy sources does not necessarily portend an energy transition, since their use continues to support the same patterns of energy consumption that have shaped the built environment for over two centuries. We hardly know a different way to build. The roots, then, of an alternative spatial paradigm that can counteract carbon form are not yet known. To find them will require deepening our understanding of how carbon form comes into being; otherwise, we will lack the necessary tools to challenge the foundational character of carbon modernity. The presence of carbon form within the architectural thought of two opposing political ideologies—capitalist and Soviet modernity in the early twentieth century—reveals the broad reach of an anthropocentric discourse on economy and civilizationbuilding that exists across cultures, geographies, and seemingly contradictory projects of modernity. This is particularly important today because capitalism, as the dominant
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global economic system, plays a central role in global environmental destruction and is positioned at the center of much environmental discourse. However, although a critique of capitalism is central to mitigating the worst effects of the climate crisis, the roots of carbon modernity can be found beyond its limits, in the tendency of human society to extract in excess in order to achieve its civilizational goals. To explicate how carbon form arose equally within opposing ideologies is to reveal the broader ecological and energetic systems within which sociopolitical activity occurs, providing an essential vantage point from which the roots of the climate crisis can be better examined. More specifically, to focus on the building of modern cities reveals twentiethcentury architecture and urban thought as a central pillar in the construction of carbon modernity itself. Without this admission, it will be impossible for architecture to disturb carbon modernity in a fundamental way.
Two Modernities in One
As the heart of Soviet steel production, the Magnitogorsk Metallurgic Complex and its surrounding settlement can unequivocally be classified as a carbon form. Shaped by the necessities of industry and located in the remote and unpopulated steppe, the settlement could never have come into being without fossil fuels. Yet its nature as a carbon form is more complex than its industrial output and energy consumption. Magnitogorsk arose from the Russian steppe through force of will—a will that was rooted in an unwavering faith in two things: the Bolshevik revolution that aimed to reorganize Russian society from the ground up, and the transformative capacity of carbon energy. The former was explicit, stated as such in Soviet propaganda and treatises of Soviet planning. The latter was implicit: the quiet foundation for a new world order, across both East and West. Evidence of the Soviet will to produce a city against all odds can be found in the selection of the site. Despite its incredible abundance of iron ore, the site lacked the energy source needed for the metallurgic process—coal—which had to be transported a distance of almost two thousand kilometers, from a mine in Western Siberia. While this distance almost deterred the Soviets from selecting the massive mountain of iron ore as their site, they ultimately reframed the endeavor as a massive territorial development that would unite the Urals and Siberia through large-scale industrial production.2 The region was mapped and measured, transformed from a vast uncharted steppe into an interconnected territory of extraction. In Western modernism, industrialization produced similar modes of territorialization, with the adoption of carbon energy facilitating a paradigm of urban form in
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which the territorial characteristics that had once circumscribed the city and limited its capacity for growth were supplanted by one of infinite expansion. In published in 1949, Ludwig Hilberseimer proposed a series of arterial settlement belts for Europe and the United States. These projects imagine vast linear networks of production that have, in themselves, no boundaries or edges. The proposal for Detroit not only extends far past the city limits, but actually expands north-south across the entire eastern side of the American continent. The ribbons bend and curve over an indifferent black ground, devoid of topographical specificity. The sole connection to the land occurs at nodes that correspond to sources of coal that provide the energy necessary to run the system. Otherwise, once the point of extraction is located and the source of energy acquired, no further connection FIG. I.1.1 LUDWIG HILBERSEIMER, EASTERN UNITED STATES. to land is necessary (see ).3 For Le Corbusier, the work of displanting the previous urban paradigm with a new territorial logic was an explicit project for modern architecture to undertake. In his 1935 treatise , he presents the pre-carbon city as stagnant, in need of a new spatial concept that would break the old city open and replace a pre-carbon cellular structure with infrastructural openness: linear organizations that could tie into broader territorial networks. This city as carbon form would be horizontal and open, infinite and clean. With abundant energy readily available, there would be no obstacles in the way of this new organization. Speaking directly to the city of Buenos Aires, he writes, “Your city is choking? Give it its vital axes, of deep and distant origin, in the hinterlands and the provinces. You have no land left at the critical point of concentration? Then take to the sea, build on the water:
FIG. I.1.2 LE CORBUSIER, SELECTION OF PROPOSALS FOR SOUTH AMERICAN CITIES..
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there’s nothing to it, it’s easy.”4 To Montevideo, he writes, “Your topography is against you? […] get rid of it.”5 For São Paulo, he provides a sketch of the old city crosscut by a new cruciform megastructure of highways meant to drain the traffic from the city, setting the traffic free to flow, indifferent to the existing topography and urban structure (see ). A new anatomy of the city was latent, and the modernists sought to claim this emergence as an architectural project. To do so, both Hilberseimer and Le Corbusier operated on the city and region as though it were a tabula rasa, an attitude that is important not only because the projects presume an ability to subjugate vast territories of land for productive ends—a position shared by almost all civilization-building endeavors, even before carbon energy—but also because the scale of territorialization newly made possible through carbon energy profoundly affected concepts of space. The dynamics of industrial production presented what seemed like endless opportunities for new urban form. This was no different in the Soviet context. In 1930, Ivan Leonidov drew a proposal for Magnitogorsk in which the city, a linear grid, acted as “an infinite spatial whole, a conception of space as a nonmaterial coagulant which was nevertheless endowed with a dimensionality of its own, a continuous potential for architectural formalization.”6 In other words, the city was a new spatial field, a zone of potential energy from which architecture could emerge without friction. This frictionless spatiality was made possible by fossil fuels, and the city itself—emerging brand new from an empty landscape and extending infinitely into the distance—magnified the illusion of infinite energy. Furthermore, repeated linear elements—intended to bring order to a new social structure, a society of workers—also revealed the belief that the city was drawn upon a submissive, empty ground. Nature appeared as circumscribed within the grid, reinvented as leisure space, with no ecological connection to the IVAN LEONIDOV, PERSPECTIVAL space beyond the grid, which is drawn as blank. In its FIG. I.1.3VIEW OF MAGNITOGORSK, 1930. place arose the grid of the city—a new sphere, a new space, that would extinguish the possibility of isolated architectural objects and annihilate the alienation of any individual man. As architect Vieri Quilici writes, “The believed in the city as he believed in nature. For architecture, extension in space constituted the natural condition of growth, while for the city the recuperation of nature implied the acquisition of an unlimited quantity of space available for its own structuring” (see ).7
TWO MODERNITIES IN ONE
While it would be false to say that, before fossil fuels, humans lived in harmony with nature, within the broader view of energy transition, the supplanting of nature with human artifice during the fossil-fuel era occurs at a different register from the preceding agricultural and nomadic paradigms. Fossil fuels transformed mobility, changing the surface of the Earth from a contoured, heterogeneous, and often perilous landscape into easily traversable space. Space had opened in a new way, not only for the individual traveler, but also for the city itself, which could suddenly adjust itself to its own internal logic rather than respond to external constraints. As such, carbon form— although undoubtedly a territorial phenomenon—through its indifference to spatial and topographical constraints, allowed human settlements to be conceived as decoupled from natural phenomena and from larger ecologies operating at a regional scale. In other words, one territory subjected the other to a process of erasure. If nature remerged, it did so as urban program (see ). The desire and ability to subject a landscape to a totally new organization was not only about the effacement of an ecological context. It was accompanied by a policy of dispossession. In the young USSR, existing agricultural communities were considered backward and were to be immediately “mobilized” and assimilated into the new industrial paradigm. At the time, the Ural region was home to many , or seasonal peasant workers, who would leave their villages to find temporary work in timber, mining, and construction. The Bolsheviks, however, were interested in eliminating the seasonal nature of their work, seeing year-round employment as central to the new Soviet social structure. The Bolshevik commitment to massive social transformation, then, involved the erasure of a way of life attuned to ecology and weather, to be replaced by year-round labor. A form of life that was changing and unpredictable would be replaced by one bound by a grid and a clock. In this sense, the history of Soviet modernity mirrored the origins of Western capitalism, which harnessed labor for its own industrial needs through a series of enclosures. These processes of relocation, different from each other yet systematic and top-down in both cases, reveal dispossession to be a necessary element of early carbon modernity. Furthermore, the forced relocation camps that provided construction and industrial workers in cities such as Magnitogorsk were a means of reorganizing energy in a landscape. Harnessing labor, whether forced or waged, was an act of harnessing energy for industrial FIG. I.1.4
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ends.8 Through a process of internal colonization, energy harnessed from bodies was embedded into an industrial imaginary removed from any ecological context. As long as coal and ore were abundant, and as long as the state could guarantee stable, year-round jobs, there were no natural obstacles that could not be overcome. With nature out of the way, the task was to build a new economy, and the lives of workers were to be shaped accordingly. In this context, the task of architects was to house these workers and give form to a new way of life. In other words, through its form and juxtapositions of program, the city itself would embody and propagate an . This belief was consistent throughout the urban thought of this era, as inherited from the Futurist concept of byt and the Constructivist interest in —meaning the construction of everyday life9—and embodied in the new typologies developed by radical groups such as the Association of New Architects (Asnova), the Association of City Planning Architects (OAU), and the Association of Contemporary Architects (OSA).10 In particular, workers clubs, social condensers, and collective housing were sources of intense experimentation and presented a discursive position from which the rugged individualism of capitalism could be contested. However, the new urban FIG. I.1.5 DNEPROSTROI DAM, BUILT IN 1929. subject would have to be shaped first by the conditions of industry—before the worker could engage in the collective, the peasant had to be transformed into a worker. Industrial processes, then, served as the springboard from which architectural experimentation was made possible and a totalizing context within which this new architecture would operate. Furthermore, for Soviet leadership, the need to maintain production quotas and keep the national economy afloat was paramount. In the end, it was more often the factory that served as the “social condenser” and the principal instrument for urbanization. Industrial centers were blossoming across Russia, making industrial and infrastructural construction a central focus of building activity. Specialized agencies were set up to execute this construction, with architects on staff from the onset, and competitions were held to select architects for massive infrastructure projects, such as the Dneprostroi dam and hydroelectric complex (see ).11 The design of these industrial complexes, however, did not fall outside of the experimental architectural discourse of the time. Not only was the design of the Dneprostroi dam greatly admired, but factories, mines, and power plants appeared in experimental projects
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both as objects of design and as organizing forces in the lives of the new urban denizen. For example, the “supercollectivist” T. Kuzmin pushed the communal house to a barracks-like existence, with a strict schedule for inhabitants that hinged on an eight-hour workday at a mine. The rest of the day was specified down to three-minute increments, distributed between bodily maintenance, family time, culture, and leisure.12 The factory, then, was a metric against which the architectural construction of a new life could be measured and the logic within which new building typologies would emerge. In the early years of Soviet industrialization, the deliberate integration of urban life with industry seemed to offer a point of departure from the capitalist city because the primary reference for the capitalist city at that time was the chaotic industrial centers that had developed during the previous hundred years. The crowded and dirty streets of Manchester and London could easily be held up by the Soviets as a model of unplanned and undirected market chaos that made for an uneasy relationship between industry and urban life. By the beginning of the twentieth century, European and American modernity had to contend with over a hundred years of carbon form. In contrast, Soviet modernity would attempt to move directly from an agricultural to an industrial paradigm, with no intermediate stages, producing carbon form entirely from scratch—a condition that allowed Soviet leaders and urban thinkers to engage carbon form as an explicitly architectural project from the outset. Ultimately, though, European modernism would also be characterized by a rejection of the disorder and chaos of early carbon form,13 and this divergence in their respective urban conditions dissipated as both Soviet and capitalist modernity brought into architectural discourse the concept of total planning. For European architects, the aim was to use total planning to resolve the anarchic first phase of carbon form. In the Soviet case, total planning was deployed as the means to accomplish an unprecedented mobilization that would bring carbon form into being from scratch, forcing an energy transition and social transformation to occur at an unprecedented speed. In both cases, architectural modernity sought to give form and bring order to an industrial paradigm. And, in both cases, architecture served as a powerful tool to subjugate land, harness the productive activity of workers, and forge a new urban subject. Through the lens of carbon modernity, the Soviet and capitalist efforts to modernize ran parallel to each other. FIG. I.1.6 ARTHER MCKEE & COMPANY, ADVERTISEMENT FOR ENGINEERING SERVICES.
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The Role of Energy
The parallel between socialist and capitalist modernity is made stronger with a closer look at energy itself. While the urban proposals discussed above would be largely impossible without carbon energy and petromobility, energy was rarely addressed directly by architects and urban thinkers, but rather treated as a given condition of a new world, enabling energy to be perceived as both politically and ecologically neutral. There is no better example than the steel industry as a key focus of production for both East and West. The production of steel is highly energy-intensive, and steel itself is the material backbone of carbon form. While the Soviet Union had an abundance of raw materials in the form of both iron ore and coal, they lacked technical knowledge. For this, they turned to the American steel industry, ultimately hiring Arthur McKee & Company, an engineering services company, to design the Magnitogorsk steel plant and train Soviet engineers to build it. This crossing of ideological lines by an explicitly anti-capitalist government reveals that industry itself was not the ground upon which the ideological battle between capitalism and socialism was to be fought. Furthermore, it shows the transposability of carbon form from one political system to another and the way in which an industrial economy would serve as the shared ground upon which carbon modernity would develop on both sides of the Iron Curtain. An advertisement by Arthur McKee & Company is particularly revealing in this regard, depicting a scale model of a power plant handed across the blank space of the page, offered by a confident pair of white male hands sporting a wedding band and crisp white-cuffed sleeves—presumably the engineer himself. Beneath, the text reads, “Where do you want your new plant shipped?” The power plant is shown with no context, no landscape, and seemingly no ideological content—simply reduced to a commodity. Energy is seen as removed and removable from its natural context, denying, despite the territorializing tendency of industrialization, any sense of relationship between energy and land, and serving as an analogy to the political transposability of technology across ideological barriers (see ). Despite the depicted ease of this transaction, however, this conception of energy ignores the material basis of energy production, bringing to light what Georges Bataille identified as the disjuncture between political economy and general economy, the latter of which is named “general” for its refusal to isolate productive human activity from its broader energetic context. While political economy produces intellectual frameworks that ignore the fact that all economic activity appropriates the
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movement of energy across the surface of the Earth, a general economy acknowledges energy as a context within which all economic and ecological exchange occurs.14 As the emphasis on industry within modernity has shown, the evolution of carbon modernity operates within a framework of political economy across both capitalist and socialist societies, and can be situated within a normative ideology that severs economic and ecological systems from each other while giving economic relations precedence and subjecting pre-commodified natural systems to a process of erasure. In this context, carbon modernity yields a narrow view of energy. Yet energy is not only electricity or power for machines. It is not simply the means by which an economy is built. Energy is a property of matter manifested in the ability to work, move, grow. Energy undergirds the form that individual organisms and ecological relationships take, giving everything on Earth its particular contours. Energy moves and, as it does, all life exists in a perpetual state of transformation, taking on specific form in moments and then dissolving only to define a threshold—between species, systems, or spaces. In writing an environmental history of the Bering Strait, Bathsheba Demuth describes this phenomenon in the following way: It is from solar radiation that photosynthetic bacteria and algae and plants take sunlight and, with water and air and soil, turn it into tissue. The energy in that tissue can then pass through the metabolisms of other organisms, from sedge grass to hare into the body of a wolf or a human. The death of one living thing becomes life in another. An ecosystem is the aggregate of many species’ habits of transformation, their ways of moving energy from its origin in the sun across space and condensing it over time. To be alive is to take place in a chain of conversions.15
An ecological perspective provides a very different vantage point from which energy can be seen as shared, as a characteristic of life and movement that subtends all our sociopolitical and economic systems. Demuth continues: From these relationships of conversion, nineteenth-century authors from Karl Marx to Andrew Carnegie wrote new theories of time—theories in which objective laws moved human history from bare huntergathering life to the surpluses of settled agriculture, and onward to the possibilities for growth, freedom, and plenty unleashed by industry. This was the process of civilization, a telos of using ever more of static nature, ever more energy, to make things of cultural value.16
Across the political spectrum and throughout permutations of contemporary thought, this has shaped a way of life, yielding not only theories of time, but also theories of space. The possibilities of growth, freedom, and plenty described by Demuth are adopted in twentieth-century urban thought almost immediately, yielding a new spatial disposition for the city: unbounded, unlimited, and always expansive, whether dense or sparse. It is the linear city of Leonidov, the new grid of factories and power plants
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across the Russian steppe, the Ville Radieuse of Le Corbusier, the territorial network of linear production proposed by Hilberseimer for Detroit. Yet the extractive tendencies of contemporary society are rarely viewed through the lens of energetic transformation. In fact, our trajectory of nation-building and economybuilding of the past several centuries has offered an opposing view, one that Demuth, in her description of capitalism’s arrival in the Bering Strait in the form of commercial whaling, calls, “the reduction of an ecological space, in all its complexity, to a source of commodities.”17 That reduction, or flattening, is in itself a conception of space and, while Demuth makes her point by contrasting pre-capitalist whale hunting to commercial whaling, it is also possible to find this spatial thinking in architectural and urban thought, as is made evident in the evolution of carbon form, where the erasure of the ecological underpinnings of industrial cities allowed the patterns of extraction that gave rise to a modernist avant-garde to remain intact. The radical cities of early modernity gave way to the suburban landscapes of the Americas and the megacities of contemporary capitalism. Carbon modernity and the reduction of ecological space would continue, albeit in a different form. In order to disturb carbon modernity in a fundamental way, it will be necessary to see a broader ecological and energetic picture. As architecture tries to find a position and situate itself to face this epistemological brink, perhaps it would be useful to create a set of coordinates for navigating the emergence of this wider panorama. This set of coordinates might help visualize the broadening of political predeterminations—usually thought of as a left-right dichotomy of political ideology situated on an x-axis of sorts—to include the material foundations of exchange and productivity, potentially visualized as a y-axis that measures how much ecology and economy are counterposed within any given project or ideology (see ). Comparing Soviet and capitalist urban planning is useful in this regard, for one can see that relative to Western capitalism, the Soviet position on the x-axis is shifted to the left. However, like the West, industrialization served as the cornerstone for their particular social vision and the y-axis remained the same— Soviet patterns of settlement replicated the same patterns of extraction, and if anything, cemented carbon modernity by allowing it to become the roots of a very different economic system. The goal of these coordinates, then, would not be to de-politicize carbon modernity, nor to conflate disparate social systems, but rather to show a more complex set of coordinates for political positioning, helping to better locate the aspects of carbon modernity that must now be directly contested.
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1. I INTRODUCE THE CONCEPTS OF CARBON MODERNITY AND CARBON FORM IN A GUEST-EDITED ISSUE OF LOG. SEE ELISA ITURBE, “ARCHITECTURE AND THE DEATH OF CARBON MODERNITY,” LOG 47 (FALL 2019): 10–23. 2. SEE STEPHEN KOTKIN, MAGNETIC MOUNTAIN: STALINISM AS A CIVILIZATION (BERKELEY: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS, 1995). 3. LUDWIG HILBERSEIMER, THE NEW REGIONAL PATTERN: INDUSTRIES AND GARDENS, WORKSHOPS AND FARMS (CHICAGO: PAUL THEOBALD, 1949), 137–82. 4. LE CORBUSIER, THE RADIANT CITY: ELEMENTS OF A DOCTRINE OF URBANISM TO BE USED AS THE BASIS OF OUR MACHINE-AGE CIVILIZATION (NEW YORK: ORION PRESS, 1964), 222–23. 5. LE CORBUSIER, THE RADIANT CITY, 222–23. 6. VIERI QUILICI, “INTRODUCTION,” IN IAUS CATALOGUE 7. QUILICI, “INTRODUCTION,” 5 8. FOR MORE ON SLAVE LABOR AS A PRECEDENT FOR ENERGY EXTRACTION AND A PRECURSOR FOR CARBON MODERNITY, SEE MIMI SHELLER, “THE ORIGINS OF GLOBAL CARBON FORM,” LOG 47 (FALL 2019): 57–68. 9. QUILICI, “INTRODUCTION,” 6. 10. ANATOLE KOPP, TOWN AND REVOLUTION: SOVIET ARCHITECTURE AND CITY PLANNING, 1917–1935, TRANS. THOMAS E. BURTON (NEW YORK: GEORGE BRAZILLER, 1970), 67–98. 11. KOPP, TOWN AND REVOLUTION, 152–59. 12. KOPP, TOWN AND REVOLUTION, 153–55. 13. HILBERSEIMER AND LE CORBUSIER ARE EXPLICIT ON THIS POINT. FOR MORE, SEE ITURBE, “ARCHITECTURE AND THE DEATH OF CARBON MODERNITY,” 13–20. 14. GEORGES BATAILLE, THE ACCURSED SHARE: VOLUME I, TRANS. ROBERT HURLEY (ZONE BOOKS: NEW YORK, 1991). 15. BATHSHEBA DEMUTH, FLOATING COAST: AN ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY OF THE BERING STRAIT (NEW YORK: W.W. NORTON & CO., 2019), 3–4. 16. DEMUTH, FLOATING COAST, 7. 17. DEMUTH, FLOATING COAST, 6. COVER IMAGE: ELISA ITURBE, NEW COORDINATES.
ELISA ITURBE IS A CRITIC AT THE YALE SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE, WHERE SHE ALSO COORDINATES THE DUAL-DEGREE PROGRAM BETWEEN ARCHITECTURE AND THE YALE SCHOOL OF THE ENVIRONMENT. SHE IS ALSO ASSISTANT PROFESSOR ADJUNCT AT THE COOPER UNION WHERE SHE TEACHES ARCHITECTURE STUDIO, FORMAL ANALYSIS, AND AN ENVIRONMENTAL COURSE ON THE HISTORY OF CARBON FORM. HER WRITINGS HAVE BEEN PUBLISHED IN LOG, PERSPECTA, DEARQ, AND PULP, IN ADDITION TO FORTHCOMING WORK IN AA FILES. MOST RECENTLY SHE GUEST-EDITED LOG 47 TITLED OVERCOMING CARBON FORM, AN ISSUE DEDICATED TO REDEFINING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ARCHITECTURAL FORM AND OUR DOMINANT ENERGY PARADIGM. SHE ALSO CO-WROTE A BOOK WITH PETER EISENMAN, LATENESS.