Lunch10: Alien

Lunch

University of Virginia School of Architecture Campbell Hall PO Box 400122 Charlottesville, VA 22904 USA

10

T +1 434 924 3715 F +1 434 982 2678 www.arch.virginia.edu www.uvalunch.com

Alien

UVA

Alien

Lunch 10

Lunch is a design research journal printed in the United States by the School of Architecture at the University of Virginia University of Virginia School of Architecture Campbell Hall PO Box 400122 Charlottesville, VA 22904 www.uvalunch.com Editors Amanda Coen, Katherine Gleysteen, Amanda Goodman Design Taylor Hewett, Seth Salcedo, Ben Scott Team Batual Abbas, Rebecca Fornaby, Luke Harris, Laurence Holland, Jennifer Hsian, Karilyn Johanesen, Kaitlyn Long, Sam Manock, Mary McCall, Chad Miller, Margaret Rew, Matt Scarnaty, Scott Shinton, Jasmine Sohn, Emma Troller, Steve Wang, Chris Young Advisors Iñaki Alday, Sarah Brummett, Nicholas Knodt, Sarah Beth McKay Special Thanks Ghazal Abbasy-Asbagh, Rebecca Cooper, Nana Last, Louis Nelson Copyright © 2015 Lunch Journal Copyright © 2015 University of Virginia Cover image by Katherine Gleysteen Charlottesville, VA All rights reserved ISBN 978-0-9894453-2-0

Contents

11 Julie Shapiro Collaboration with “the Others”: unfinishedLAND Foundation Studio 19 Lucy McFadden A Free Plan for New Orleans: Domestic Rhythms, Public Ground 35 Shane Reiner Roth Strangely Familiar: A Study of Everything Between Every Single Thing 41 Taylor Hewett Metropolitan Ground: Staging, Hierarchy and Tectonics in the Critical Project 57 Joana Polonia Into/Borders 61 Juan Salazar The Map is Not the Territory: An Investigation into the Abandonment of Visual Sovereignty 73 Paul Golisz Me and You and Every[thing] We Know 79 Jenna Harris Alien Material: Waste and Landscape Surveillance 87 Melina Analyti & Eva Andronikidou ξένο Alien Locality 101 Nathan Burgess Mobilizing Community: A Residential Model for Rising Seas 111 Larry Bowne Play Perch: A Strange Object?

Or the Architectural Uncanny?

129 Colleen Tuite & Ian Quate I Love Extremophiles!

135 SPURSE Towards a Multi-Species Commons: A Call for a Post Nature/Culture Ecology 153 Katherine Cannella Queensway Catalyst 161 Youngjin Yi Surro[gate]: Conceiving Place 175 Lauren Ann Nelson The Necessity of a Transformed Public Space with the Rapid Urbanization of Developing Countries 183 Can Bui & Ann Lane Rick A Catalog of Chinatowns: Field Notes on Globalization and its Mistranslations 195 Felipe Orensanz Se Habla EspaĂąol 203 Marcela Gracia Acosta On the Road: A Proposition for the Uprooting of Place 209 Francisco Mesonero & JesĂşs Arcos I Have No Place, I Have No Landscape 219 Jon Piasecki Urban Forest: A Case for the Wild 225 Thomas Mical How Architecture Tensions Spatial Discipline and Alien Emergence 235 Giuseppe Resta SCPTIPMFLIPPES: A Device for Viewing the Maritime Landscape 241 Tom Bliska Transmission Cartography: The Lines 246 Contributors

Letter from the Editors

1 Adam Gopnik, “Iran, Inequality, and the Battle of American Norms,” The New Yorker, March 17 2015.

For the 10th issue of Lunch we ask you to consider the alien in all its varieties. The alien—the deviator from the normative, the invader of the condition—emerges from the spatial and linguistic practices of separation, definition and order. The alien is the product of boundaries. It upsets our relationships to systems, territories and selves. The word itself differs and multiplies—the alien is impenetrable because it is unknown.

This issue defines the alien not as an outsider but as a gleam of chaos. It defies embodiment. To communicate with the alien means to navigate beyond. To listen is to interpret.

As spatial practitioners, we coopt research and translate phenomena. We simulate and synthesize. The discomfort is in the disconnect.

The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik recently wrote, “norms are choices that somebody else made for you.” 1 But we do not inherit evolved truths from our predecessors. We are active mediators. And we continue to demarcate limits. We select the recipients and extents of our engagement. We self-consciously, apologetically alienate others and indirectly, unwittingly normalize ourselves.

Alien

Julie Shapiro

Collaboration with “the Others”: unfinishedLAND Foundation Studio A conversation with Teresa Gali-Izard

Teresa Gali-Izard is Principal of ARQUITECTURA AGRONOMIA and Associate Professor and Chair of the Landscape Architecture department at the University of Virginia. The following conversation was recorded in Charlottesville, Virginia on January 15, 2015. fig. 1 Hallie Miller, Virginia Geological Map, Fall 2014. Ink on paper.

Landscape architecture is, in its essence, engagement with the alien. This precept underlies the foundational “unfinishedLAND” studio in UVA’s landscape architecture curriculum.

Taught by Teresa Gali-Izard and Leena Cho, the course focuses on topography, geology, and hydrology—systems and landforms prior to, or outside of, human program and interpretation. Students are challenged to work with the logic of geology and ecology, stepping beyond the realm of experience and intuition to confront the essential “otherness” of their design media.

In the words of Teresa Gali-Izard, landscape architects are advocates for the natural world in the built environment; they moderate between the familiar and the foreign, negotiating and shaping the complex and vital interface between natural and human-made systems. By developing means of communication and constructive coexistence with the non-human world, landscape architects radically affirm the significance and importance of human relationships to the land and place.

The unfinishedLAND studio leads students to encounter the profound foreignness and autonomous meaning of the places they will manipulate, and to engage with alien (non-human)

11

systems through experimental and provocative practices of observation, analysis, and representation.

JULIE SHAPIRO: Why start the studio sequence with unfinishedLAND? How does this studio set the tone for the landscape architecture sequence at UVA? TERESA GALI-IZARD: This first studio is your childhood ... just discovering and understanding the immensity of inputs that the others, the “aliens,”can give us. And if we don’t know that, it’s impossible to be a good landscape architect, because we work with living material, which has its own logic and rules. If you don’t develop this attitude of learning and discovering without immediate design intent or objective it’s impossible to truly explore and work with the potential that we have around us.

The profession is young, and now with the “openness” of the world—we can travel and work everywhere—we have to learn to look at “the others” of each place, because in each place the biophysical systems are different. This is why the first studio is so open-minded, so students can learn how to discover these “others” and start playing and designing the performance of natural systems without initially focusing on human demands or categories of cultural program. A graduate program is a space for exploration, and I insist that we have this responsibility as a university—to facilitate experimentation and innovation. This program has no intention of producing common landscape architects—we want you to push the profession.

In the second studio, you will use the same type of approach, but within the context of an urban condition. The city is a human ecosystem that doesn’t currently allow natural systems much space or expression. But you’ll find that this is changing because we’re realizing that we want different cities, ones that genuinely engage with and integrate water and ecological systems.

JS: I remember when we first met, you described landscape architects as the representatives of natural systems in cities.

TGI: Yes, this idea is drawn from the work of Bruno Latour; the concept of democracy including trees, rivers, etcetera and involving them in decision-making. But how is this actually done? I’ve tried to apply the ideas of Latour to the UVA program in a very serious way. We talk about ecological 12

LAR6010_F14_YANG.Sheila_Virginia Map 02

fig. 2 Sheila Yang, Virginia Geology Map, Fall 2014. Ink and pencil on paper.

sustainability, but designers and policy-makers often know very little about the actual workings of natural systems, the real media of sustainability, so it is our responsibility to convey these concepts and their bearing on urban design.

JS: Sometimes it seems like we get stuck on certain technologies or ways of thinking regarding sustainable design and lose some of that ongoing alertness or sensitivity to natural systems. Could you comment on this problem?

TGI: We have to take a step back and look with a more open mind, with new eyes. We can work with the inputs of living systems to inform the process of evolving the city. We (landscape architects) need to have as strong a voice as engineers, planners and architects in designing cities, and we need to communicate the importance of natural systems within urban environments. It can be hard to quantify our work, our media, to say how many trees produce a certain level of “performance,” but we have to start producing numbers, being assertive, and taking risks.

All the forms of urban infrastructure—power lines, buses, trains, cars—make a strong mark on the form of the city, and it’s clear to us that for the city to work, these elements must be present. But what about the amenities of trees, plants and the urban forest? Can we add this layer of intelligence onto the existing complexity of the urban system? This makes the city super complex, but much more interesting!

The performance of water is of course getting more and 13

fig. 3 Kathleen Adams, Virginia Map, Fall 2014. Ink on paper with CAD.

more important, especially with the problems that storms and rising water levels are causing for coastal cities. Up to this point, we’ve waited until water is a danger or a liability before we start working with urban hydrological systems. We wait until it is a problem to deal with it, but this is shortsighted and ultimately ineffective. The imperative is not to solve problems as they arise, but to avoid the conflict of urban and natural systems altogether by genuinely accounting for natural systems in city design. The others, the “aliens,” have to be there from the start, integral to the function and identity of the city.

ALAR6010_F14_ADAMS.Kathleen_001

JS: In this foundation studio we were consistently pushed to think in new ways, to engage primarily with form and process, rather than to define landscape in terms of historical meaning or emotional association. Why such focus on the non-cultural aspects of landscape?

TGI: Sometimes I get the critique that I haven’t included the emotional aspect enough. This is a discussion I’ve had with Beth (Dean Elizabeth Meyer). But that part is easy; it’s something you’ll do automatically for your clients in the future, this emotional connection and communication, the translation of landscape process into cultural terms. This is something we do naturally—appealing to an audience’s feelings and senses to promote our ideas—but the studio is a venue for studying other aspects of the design process. This studio in particular focuses on rigorous, innovative analysis; it 14

offers an opportunity to deal with landform, material and systems directly, and to explore the inherent tension within our practice: collaborating with natural systems while making design decisions that serve human social and cultural interests.

I also want to point out that this studio was not a style. We were experimenting, working on new languages and modes of analytical representation. Observing and translating, taking the time and space to explore and experiment and encounter the essential character of the landscape media—rock, water, wind, sun, plant communities.

JS: Do you want students in this studio to engage with theoretical problems of human/nature relationships? How do you see it connecting to the history and theory coursework in the landscape architecture course sequence?

TGI: The idea was to avoid the pressure of focusing on ecology. We are not trying to be ecologists, but to negotiate the boundaries between ecology and culture. Designers experiment and take risks and change parameters. If you know the media without having a preexisting objective, you have the freedom to explore a range of design options with different ecological, social, and artistic benefits.

How can we as landscape architects negotiate between ecological vitality and people’s needs and interests? I’m currently working on a project in Afghanistan, which offers a good example of this process. In Afghanistan, garden plantings have traditionally differed dramatically from native plant communities. People want the opposite of the native desert flora in their own gardens. They want relief from the desert climate and landscape—oases, sanctuaries—and these sanctuary gardens have ultimately changed their local ecosystems. Is this wrong? Of course it’s not wrong. Humans are transforming the ecology of the site to create an emotionally fulfilling garden landscape. It is an ecosystem geared toward human interests, but still a vibrant system. And of course humans would have been modifying their ecosystem just by living in the region and sustaining themselves physically, let alone artistically and spiritually. This is the definition of a garden—a statement of human presence and freedom to design as we want, to make a totally new, unprecedented place.

JS: This studio seems to deal strongly with the role and identity of the landscape architect. Are we, the students, being asked to redefine the discipline?

15

fig. 4 Luke Harris, Virginia Geological Map, 2014. Ink on paper.

LAR6010_F14_HARRIS.luke011

TGI: It’s difficult to find someone who understands and loves natural systems and also has the mind of a designer. Being a naturalist doesn’t make you a landscape architect. Usually people who enjoy studying the natural world end up pursuing careers in the natural sciences—they become biologists, ecologists, geologists and so on. And many design-minded people situate themselves within the paradigms of architecture, a discipline that has often defined itself as separate from natural systems. But it is possible and exciting for architects and other designers to make a personal connection to landscape and natural systems thinking and to integrate these modes of understanding and engaging with the built environment.

JS: How do you see this studio’s conceptual framework continuing through other studios and courses?

TGI: The most important lesson is to design in systems. This is critical. If you have a system, you can modify it, experiment, and play. It can be dynamic and flexible, and won’t lose relevance or become obsolete. Consider where we currently design—cities, airports, campuses—places that grow and change rapidly. Work that depends only on aesthetic style, or a specific historical context may not remain meaningful.

Projects based in systems come from a larger logic and

16

fig. 5 Claire Casstevens, Virginia

ALAR_6010_F14_CASSTEVENS.Claire_002

Geological Map, Fall 2014. Ink on paper.

justification. Ideally designers discover what each unique site is “asking for� and enact a design that connects ecology and culture, and ultimately reveals them as parts of a whole.

17

Lucy McFadden

A Free Plan for New Orleans: Domestic Rhythms, Public Ground

19

fig. 1 (previous) Plan A mosaic of private-public rights of way and public ground.

alien was the Creole long lot positioned to extrapolate success off the meandering Mississippi alien was the transposed USGS grid alien was draining a cypress swamp and filling it with concrete alien was slavery alien was the tropical wave that disturbed the twelfth cyclone of 2005 and the wind, and the rain, and the floods alien was the exodus alien is the ruptured sidewalk alien is the mowed vacant parcel alien is the un-mowed vacant parcel alien is an urban block gone to seed alien is the encroaching vegetation along streets bucolic life in the city finding the alien is finding the value in fallow land what we consider to be alien becomes familiar upon observation alien is the homeowner the mower alien is the ritual aliens are us alien is the american dream alien is our paranoia regarding (losing) ownership and exhibiting success alien is the paranoia encompassed in ownership and success alien is what emerges when we shift from owning to sharing from disturbing, mowing, corrupting, to recognizing, keeping, and tending we are custodians of the land we occupy we are players in the land grid, contributors to a matrix, a mosaic, a house-and-yard pattern domestic life that defines us

20

fig. 2 Concept Diagram Using circulation and planted form to dissolve the grid and reorganize the block.

Paul Klee, Castle and Sun, 1928, oil on canvas, 50 cm x 59 cm, Private Collection.

fig. 3 (next) City Plan Analysis of fallow land types in New Orleans.

Designs for cities spur visions of renewal that will take decades to realize. Learning from our overarching misreadings of the past, we can take new readings of the city, understanding its discords and unions, its inanimate and animate, its rituals and rhythms that exist in-between houses and on street corners. We can see and touch and feel the aliens that may emerge from these encounters. We can offer a series of responses, scenarios, choices, based on the calls we live and know. We must embrace aliens, celebrate their oddities, and make space for them in our plans. Aliens are the disturbances to our equilibrium, necessary components of our reading of the city, if not drivers of our designs altogether. Aliens ground us; they are generational; they transgress boundaries and redefine limits.

After a close reading of the neighborhoods, blocks and clusters of vacant parcels in New Orleans, it is clear that American rituals rooted in ownership have impeded the evolution of the contemporary vernacular landscape. There is a source of potential, abounding heat, light, and water. But there are also confines – visible and invisible – hemming in this potential. The line of ownership, a parcel line, laid out by a surveyor, is a symbol in our culture and a prized piece of our American dream. The parcel manifests itself in the fence line, the edge of the driveway, the ecotone from one yard to the next. There is a new type of edge: the meeting of a mowed lot and an unmowed lot. This edge reveals the obsessive cutting of fescue – the disturbance that has arrested succession on this land indefinitely – next to an unmanaged tangle of grass. This contrast creates unintended barriers between neighbors and antagonizes growth of vegetation.

This proposal is about broadening the definition of ownership; valuing domestic and private space; and finding

21

1 Garret Eckbo, Modern Landscapes for Living (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 153-157.

new public space. Scholars and designers have long mused over the promotion of collective, communal land, social gathering spaces, shared domestic duties, and organization of cultural tasks. Designers have experimented with new types of suburban living to bring amenities and culture from the city into the domestic realm. Radburn, founded in 1929 and designed by Marjorie Sewell Cautley, Clarence Stein, and Henry Wright connected neighbors with hedge-lined paths in the front and cul-de-sacs in the back. By articulating private-public ground with planted form, a hierarchy of spaces can exist, and previously undervalued public land can be incorporated into the domestic domain, articulated and used for gatherings.

Garrett Eckbo explored the free plan in the garden, notably in his landscape and planning work for migrant labor settlements under the Farm Security Administration in 1946 in Southern California. Eckbo used planted form to guide circulation and to create figures, fields and spatial hierarchies.1 He embraced the vagueness of public and private space as a way of uniting the individual and the collective in unexpected ways. He worked to integrate architecture, private and public space, and to prioritize pedestrian circulation over automotive throughout the cooperatives in the San Fernando Valley. He wrote at the time, “Cooperatives are successful if only the need is real and close to the member’s personal security. They atrophy or are vegetative when interest is passive or intellectual.”1 The backbone of the development was a rigorous tree plan with vertical formal accents and a grid organization, which alleviated weight off the borders of the property parterres and freed the plan of the community.

One strategy for mitigating high crime rates in neighborhoods of New Orleans with large numbers of vacant parcels is to address the vacancies as opportunities for unexpected communal spaces that emerge from desires and needs and span the hierarchy of public to private types. By selecting path types and maintenance regimes, homeowners can choose different amounts of responsibility and ownership beyond their parcel line. The boundary has been pushed; this is alien territory.

The proposal is the New Orleans free plan—no load-bearing parcel lines, no patriarchal divisioning of space, no American dream as we know it. In 1927, physicist Werner Heisenberg stated that the more precisely the position of an particle is determined, the less precisely its momentum can be known. Uncertainty is found in the measurable quantities 24

fig. 4-6 Master Tree Plans for Cooperative Housing, San Fernando Valley, CA from Eckbo, Modern Landscapes for Living, 238.

25

fig. 2 Site plan (1:2000) Sentence describing the image.

fig. 7 Diagram Phase 1: Establish private coops.

to the jolt-like disturbance triggered by observation. As we observers allow for more jolt-like disturbances, more blended edges, and ambiguous communal spaces, we are letting the aliens in our own American rituals emerge and play out, reclaiming land and revealing value. We are letting our domestic life spill out from our backyard into the next, allowing a wake from our daily rhythms to emanate through the block.

Time is rhythm: the insect rhythm of a warm humid night, brain ripple, breathing, the drum in my temple-these are our faithful timekeepers; and reason corrects the feverish beat.2

2 Vladimir Nabokov, Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969), 572.

fig. 8 Diagram Phase 2: Enable passage.

fig. 9 Diagram Phase 3: Make new public ground. fig. 10 (next) Section Perspective fig. 11 (next) Section A ‘missing-tooth’ parcel, Holly Grove. fig. 12 (next) Section Blocks gone to seed, Lower Ninth Ward.

The project is comprised of an explanation of the prototypes, the implementation, the test fits, and the making of the mosaic.

Residents adjacent to vacant parcels can choose to adopt and plant a ‘coup’ by choosing their most private window of their home and measuring 20 feet into the vacant lot. Then, by drawing back to the corners of their parcel, they are left with a triangular piece of public land that they can plant and maintain if they choose. This coup will provide a threshold between them and the subsequent private-public rights of way through the blocks. These rights of way follow desire lines of neighbors through blocks and along sidewalks, connecting people to places of work, school, or to friends and family.

Corner lots provide direct pathways for shortcuts, and create highly visible public space due to their location. The resulting hierarchy of private to public space maintains privacy while allowing articulation and care of currently fallow, unsafe territory.

Within the patriarchal evolution of planning, from the interpretation of benefit from the topography of the Mississippi River through Creole forms and French long lots, to the urbanizing and radial grid formation dictated by canals built for the harvesting of bald cypress trees from swamps along the Louisiana coast, to the post-Katrina fallow land condition that pervades the low lying land, there is an overarching problem: the parcel line. Created through residual allotment post-Creole plantation era, and now, an arbitrary form-maker for homes and gardens, the rectilinear parcel line bears too large a burden. Imagine them gone.

fig.13 (next) Perspective Semi-public right of way, Bywater.

27

mowed side yard

front yard Cajun prairie short grass seed mix

coup phase 2 private

coup phase 1 adjacent resident chooses Cajun prairie grass, pine, or hardwood public

original parcel line

gathering

pine mulch path

mowed cared for by neighbors

the coup - phase 1

the coup - phase 2

g space behind coup

original parcel line

fig. 2 Site plan (1:2000) Sentence describing the image.

Shane Reiner-Roth

Strangely Familiar: A Study of Everything Between Every Single Thing

fig. 1 The simple act of a head turning can be the site of a countless number of renegade inbetweeners.

1 Fantasmagorie, directed by Émilie Cohle (August 17, 1908; Société des Etablissements L. Gaumont).

Sitting at your desk, you may grow bored of the objects you recognize and define without description: cup, scree, lamp, speakers, trees, buildings, birds and so on. Borges felt this way when he claimed that while the stone eternally wants to be a stone and a tiger a tiger, he wished to see himself in other things. It seems that there is nothing left with which to be unfamiliar, nothing left on this Earth to approach with a vague grasp. But if one can imagine the forms and functions in between two familiar objects – any two – the recipe for astounding feats of unfamiliarity quickly make themselves present. These “inbetween” forms - elusive, innumerable, and traditionally neglected – are one way to reveal the alien in the landscape of domestic objects and their importance for the field of architecture can be considered anew when studying their presence in the history of cartoon animation.

In 1908, Emilie Cohl created Fantasmagorie,1 largely understood as the first cartoon animation. In just under two minutes, a clown deals with frantically morphing objects while traversing twitching landscapes. In one scene, he is

35

fig. 2 The logic inherent in this transformation yields strange inbetweeners: not quite beds, and not quite cats.

2 Koko the Clown, (Fleischer Studios, 1919).

3 Betty Boop, (Fleischer Studios, 1930).

standing on a flower, which readily becomes an elephant’s trunk. He lunges off the trunk and runs into the elephant, which becomes a house with a door waiting for his arrival.

The frames in between these elements are rough, but the potential of animation is clear at the very beginning: with cartoons, anything can become anything, and most of the elements between one object and another are unaccounted for. The relationship between two objects in the process of inbetweening can, for a cartoon animation, be very loose and independent of the number of surfaces that make up those objects.

Yet unlike the misdirection tricks Georges Melies developed in his films of the same era, early animators drew out the relationship bewteen two objects based on their respective configurations. The number of frames between the objects determined its ‘behavior,’ so that, for example, a lower number of frames might imply an instantaneous chemical change (such as water turning into steam), while a higher number of frames might imply a smooth biological change (such as a caterpillar turning into a butterfly).

Max Fleischer experimented with these behavioral techniques in his animations fifteen years after Emile Cohl’s innovation. Originally in Koko the Clown2 (1922) but more fully in Betty Boop3 (1930) Fleischer constantly pointed to the fluidity that animation allowed him. Norman Klein writes,

36

4 “She Wronged Him Right,” Betty Boop, (Fleischer Studios; January 5, 1934).

5 “The Mysterious Voyage of Homer,” T he Simpsons (January 5, 1997; Fox Broadcasting Company).

“In ‘Koko the Cop’ a rock “metamorphoses” into a doorflap, like a stage scrim helping Bimbo run away from Koko. That gag was possible because the rock was essentially only a line drawing, so why not a flap?” In cartoon animation, a line can ‘become’ not only another line, but multiple lines. If it can be drawn, it can be transformed. Remarking on Fleischer’s use of animation’s potential, Klein wrote, “This is the Fleischer signature: an image transmutes, as if by alchemy, into many others; its atomic structure seemingly comes unglued.”

In another Betty Boop episode entitled “She Wronged Him Right,”4 (1934), a mother cat hastily turns into a bed for her kittens in only six frames (fig. 2). Her body becomes a bed frame, ears and tail curl into bedposts, eyes become pillows, the bottom of her face becomes a blanket, and a scarf becomes a bed sheet. It is important to note here that this transformation is slightly topographic, in the sense that all elements of the cat (except for the pupils and mouth) are accounted for in the elements of the bed. The ontological relationships between the shared units (the body becoming the bed frame, eyes becoming the pillows) seem correct without argument. The scarf the cat is wearing, however, was only drawn in order to become the bed sheet – there would simply be no other reason for the scarf to be there. The logic inherent in this transformation yields strange inbetweeners: not quite beds and not quite cats. On can imagine different terms, such as bcets, cbats, beatds, cads, and so on.

Even the simple act of a head turning can be the site of a countless number of renegade inbetweeners. In an episode of The Simpsons entitled, “The Mysterious Voyage of Homer”5 (1997), Homer ingests hallucinogenic peppers and dematerializes throughout the episode (fig. 1). When turning his head, for instance, his facial features sink into his gelatinous skull and pop out the other side rather than maintaining their stationary composition in rotation. As the sequence approaches the middle, we are left with a head without organs, a truly surreal inbetweener. The facial features throughout are parading as themselves, but in a new and novel performance, without the aid of a secondary set of objects to ‘become’ as its precedences have before it. In themselves, they are constructed of lines which escape geometry by a fugitive mobility, single frames of action which must be read contingently.

While inbetweeners are the wondrous result of a common trope, they have generally been the least sought after frames of many animations, described by many as the ‘weak forms’ relative to the strong ones. Yet a diagram reveals that the 37

6 Sanford Kwinter, Architectures of Time: Toward a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture (Boston: MIT Press, 2002), 38.

strangest things are in the middle. It is this territory which should be mined for critical content.3 The Vanna Venturi House is drawn into the series to exhibit what can happen to an iconic piece of architecture when thrown into a sea of generic objects. Following the principles of cartoon animation, the transformations of objects are not limited to their character. Consequently, the focus shifts away from any single composition and toward the wealth of objects. “The tendency toward lightness and plasticity,” Sanford Kwinter wrote, “allows the research of forms to give way to an emphasis on configurations.”6 The process of inbetweening conjures architecture both as an alchemical image and an unglued atomic structure. It becomes softer than the software used to produce it. It replaces plane geometry with architecture that is fleeting, innumerable, incalculable, plural, disposable, transient, infinitesimal, and often imperceptible.

The inbetweeners are in-beee-tween every single thing, and they are perpetually becoming.

38

fig. 3 The strangest things are in the middle, and it is this territory which should be mined for alien content.

Taylor Hewett

Metropolitan Ground: Staging, Hierarchy and Tectonics in the Critical Project

Would now the wind but had a body[?] 1

fig. 1-3 Fictions of ascent 1. Paley Park 2. Bryant Park 3. West Side Hwy What does it mean for a building to touch the ground? What are the absolute limits of contact?

Images by author 1 Herman Melville, Moby Dick (Boston:

Argument The diverse regimes through which architecture constantly unfolds, reveals and establishes itself as a critical practice can be assessed insofar as the architectural project deals with issues of ground/datum/land (site and plan) and poché/ facade/void (section and elevation).

Houghton Mifflin, 1956), 645.

The mystery surrounding the origin and motives of wind lead Ahab to

Dom-ino

suggest it “crawl somewhere to a

The hour is truly here. For 3 to 4000 francs we will build one house and exhibit in the rooms all of the models, a frame model, the types of joinery; the system of formworkless floors, the system of entire streets, entire cities, etc. See whether the choice is good.2

cave,” where its distortion of space and time may be rendered impotent.

How can wind rightly join­—through experience—the institutions of man to something as blameless as the sea? What are the implications of bearing such a connection through space and time? Would now the wind but had a body? The quote resonates with the novel’s larger themes of power, hubris, fate and free will. Architecturally, it evokes questions of agency, semiotics,and professional ethics.

In 1914, Le Corbusier introduced a building system for the reconstruction of Belgian and French towns damaged by fighting during WWI. While there is little or no physical evidence

41

fig. 4 Le Corbusier, Maison Dom-Ino, 1914. Crayon on paper, unsigned, undated. Copyright FLC/ARS, 2015.

2 (previous) Jean-Louis Cohen, “The Dom-ino Intrigue,” Log, no. 30 (2014): 133.

3 Peter Eisenman, “Aspects of Modernism: Maison Dom-ino and the Self-Referential Sign,” Log, no.

30 (2014), 144.

4 Peter Eisenman, “Aspects of Modernism: Maison Dom-ino and the Self-Referential Sign,” Log, no.

30 (2014), 148.

fig. 5 Rem Koolhaas and Joshua PrinceRamus/OMA, Seattle Central Library, Seattle, Washington, commissioned 1999, completed 2004. Model photograph copyright OMA.

of the “Dom-ino” prototype, we owe our understanding of its theoretical ambition, in part, to Peter Eisenman’s 1979 essay in Oppositions 15/16. He argues that an architectural conceptualization of Dom-ino is predicated on the building’s construction system revealing itself as a choreographed series of intentional signs, each independent yet fundamentally related to the other.3 For example, Le Corbusier intended Dom-ino to be arranged and serialized along its short axis based on the apparent setback of the columnar grid along the opposite (long) axis. The absence of a setback on the short axis creates an awkward (yet intentional) proximity between column and slab edge, as if “the ends of the slab have been cut off, implying the possibility...of horizontal extension.”4 Thus, the datum formed along the front and back edges of Dom-ino takes on a much different character owing to the intentional relationship between column and slab edge; the datum carries the weight of the architecture’s simultaneous expression of infinite possibility and immediate denial.

In Eisenman’s analysis, intentionality breeds self-referentiality. Take Le Corbusier’s treatment of the ground. Unlike his later Villa Savoye, Dom-ino does not sit on a field of piloti, nor do any one of its six columns rely on a sub-surface foundation system. Further, Dom-ino does not simply rest on its lower slab (why not!?); rather, the columns meet the lowest slab at the same time that they become something entirely different: exposed, structural footings. The result is a building system diagram entering the critical realm. Would now Domino but had a body? Le Corbusier’s building system, through its treatment of the ground as something “other” than land or site, transcends values and ideologies and adopts the task of framing possibilities for human life: acts of assembly, inhabitation/domesticity, and production. Interpreting these fundamental qualities of architecture through the referential nature of Le Corbusier’s drawing is precisely the critical function of Dom-ino.

Seattle Central Library Twenty-five years after Eisenman’s essay, OMA completed the Seattle Central Library (SCL). Led by Rem Koolhaas and partner-in-charge Joshua Prince-Ramus, the SCL is a critical project that radically configures its relationship to site.

Like Dom-ino, SCL disestablishes itself from the ground through a series of vertical, structural elements. It also carefully distinguishes this move from the formation of subsequent horizontal data, not unlike Le Corbusier’s design.

42

fig. 6 Cloud A bystander observes the cloud’s inner workings, where steam, communication cables, elevator shafts and water treatment lines

Where Dom-ino relies, for example, on the tension between footing/slab/column to call attention to its critical mode of operation, SCL employs a volumetric device, achieving the greatest affect between the first and second levels:

tether the architecture to its dubious

Where is the ground of this building? The ground is not the street. It’s that little wedge near the bottom, which the building is sitting on as if it were a tentative podium. The fact that the building on top of this is bigger than it is at the bottom makes this a provisional ground…5

site.

Image by author

5 Jeffrey Kipnis, “Discrimination,” Presentation at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Cambridge, MA, 2013.

I would argue that both Dom-ino and SCL are about staging hierarchies. The major difference arises from their particular places in time, their programmatic strategies and their material compositions. Dom-ino cannot be divorced from the social, political and economic aspects of domesticity (the household), nor can it operate in the discourse without its tectonic privileging of assembly, scalability and ad-hoc usability. Similarly, any critical discussion of SCL cannot ignore its formal/ material gesturing and its relationship to the contested idea of public space. In both cases, operations to ground/datum/land are exploited to create the effect of staging (performance), and operations to poché/facade/skin are exploited to suggest new forms of social organization (hierarchy).

43

Manhattan

Geometry substantiates matter.6

6 Jesse Reiser, Atlas of Novel Tectonics (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006).

This singular, essentialist notion has governed the evolution of Manhattan since the 1811 proposal of its gridded occupancy. Modernist indifference to matter and the eventual globalization and inflation of real estate markets engendered the prioritization of tectonic efficiency and economy. Plastic materials such as steel, concrete and glass dominated the grammar of expanding urban environments where the origins and forms of capital and the rights of ownership were becoming increasingly difficult to pin down and define.

The flattening of our world correspondingly flattened our architecture (fig. 7-8). In an early manifesto on tectonics and logics, Jesse Reiser and Nanako Umemoto refer to this essentialist phenomenon as “the constraint of Mies:”

The legacy of the essentialist approach to architecture, which elevates rationality (mainly in the lineaments of geometry) above matter, precludes the productive and rich capacity of matter to define or influence geometry.

Allowing this dynamic to operate is especially important not so much in the realm of new materials for architecture but as a way of reconceiving tectonics and organization.7

fig. 7-8 Planes of Modernism The tectonic assembly of major parts in the modern office building can be explained through the juxtaposition of two-dimensional symbols.

Illustrations by author 7 Jesse Reiser, Atlas of Novel Tectonics (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006), 74.

8 Peter Eisenman and Rem Koolhaas.

Supercritical, Edited by Brett Steele.

London: AA Publications, 2010.

Robert Somol comments on a similar issue, recalling that, “the problem of Modernism...is that it became an elevation; it was simply about the articulation of building systems on elevations, when it really needed to be a more dialectical, thicker condition. Even though we don’t need poché as we did during Classicism we have to conceptually reproduce poché.”8 In other words, Classical poché was matter substantiating geometry. In today’s Manhattan, however, poché is not an agent of its own creation but rather an asterisk hovering between notions of efficiency and economy. Once these notions have dictated a facade that is properly treated and sufficiently illustrative of the horizontal freedoms of perimeter occupancy, poché is relegated to the bounding constraints of a structural grid at the figurative as well as essentially physical core of the built object.

Manfredo Tafuri offers a supporting claim in his analysis of Wassily Kandinsky’s Der Gelbe Klang (The Yellow Sound).

In the theater piece, “giant” actors draped in yellow fabric 44

orchestrate abstract and expressive movements, often uttering or contorting their bodies at will. In the finale, light and sound reach a crescendo before extinguishing, reminding the audience that the yellow-clad giants, like lamps, must negotiate a duality of utter presence and inevitable absence. Tafuri writes,

The finale of Der Gelbe Klang represents, in tragic form, the annihilation of value in the flux of monetary currents—which the people of Manhattan could register…using such real giants as the Woolworth or the Equitable Life Insurance buildings. Moreover, such giants, in reality, despite their linguistic clothing that is just as paradoxical as the yellow color with which Kandinsky clothes his “new angels,” also give off a flash of light. But here we are already dealing with…‘the fleeting gleams of static motion.’9

fig. 9-10 Top: horizontal section of a cloud Bottom: cloud renderings Images by author 9-10 Manfredo Tafuri, “The New Babylon: The ‘Yellow Giants’ and the Myth of Americanism.” In The Sphere and the Labyrinth: Avant-Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s, edited by Manfredo Tafuri (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 171-189.

11 Manfredo Tafuri, “The New Babylon: The ‘Yellow Giants’ and the Myth of Americanism.” In The Sphere and the Labrynth: Avant-Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s, edited by Manfredo Tafuri (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 174.

Completely reified and dubiously aware of its own power, the skyscraper is a complete “zeroing of form” induced “as a corollary of its own domination of the laws of the economic growth of...American downtowns.”10 Notably, the German typology implemented by Mies van der Rohe and Ludwig Hilberseimer had a tremendous influence in the United States and abroad. Their skyscrapers, like Kandinsky’s yellow giants, struggle with identity—they are nothing and everything at once. Zeroed out as pure, pragmatic form responding half-heartedly to the limits and opportunities of material identity and structural governance, and at the same time fully embodying the corporal desires of Floor Area Ratio analyses, Transfer Development Rights and columns of unadulterated air hollowed out above the existing stratification of the city, promising profit and—more importantly—perpetuity. Tafuri rightly asks: Why should these giants be clothed at all? Angels don’t wear yellow robes, so why should a skyscraper, which is both nothing and everything at once, purport to rationalize and unequivocally justify the presence of its own facade, which we can interpret offers only “fleeting gleams of static motion”?

The question is one of language. As an instrument of synthesis, the skyscraper, “by upsetting the order of the stratified city, succeeds in recuperating a “symbolical-ness, a communicative structure, a genius loci.”11 Without a facade, a skyscraper that employs the pancaking of floor plates as a response to the value implications of density and verticality, 45

fig. 11 Cloud sections

is approaching something close to Dom-ino, a complete reduction of architectural form to structure. In a sense, the genius loci of the skyscraper (and the Dom-ino) is its ability to respond to ad hoc intervention and thus the richness of staged performance. Koolhaas’s library, which could arguably exist in any other dense metropolis, summarizes these issues as a diagram of stacked data (hyper-thick floorplates), separated by voids (metropolitan fields), wrapped in a thin membrane of glass. In each case (skyscraper, Dom-ino, SCL) the application of a building envelope may either complicate or elucidate the architecture’s relationship to site.

46

Proposal The following project is an attempt to re-align architecture and the metropolis. With the malaise of the grid, a new typology demands attention: an architecture at the scale of the neighborhood. By occupying new ground, re-staging density and liberating architecture from the essentialist governance of geometry, the project hopes to frame the critical issues of ground/datum/land (site and plan) and pochĂŠ/facade/void (section and elevation).

47

fig. 12-13 Top: Plan of World Trade Center building 35th-40th floor, copyright Minoru Yamasaki & Associates Bottom: Imaging moisture content of cloud

fig. 14 Horizontal sections (from top) 1. Site 2. Ground Vectors 3. +200m 4. +207m 5. +223m 6. +240m

fig. 15 Section perspective

common/leisure

private

common/productive

private/productive

fig. 16 Infrastructure Tether (typical) 1. Freight 2. Steam 3. Reinforced Structure 4. Service Core 5. Storage 6. MEP 7. Waste Return 8. Data Storage

fig. 17 (next) City perspective

fig. 18 Rendering View from rooftop fig. 19 (next) Section perspective (2)

language is the house man lives in

Joana Polonia

Into / Borders

fig. 1 Jean-Luc Godard, dir. 2 ou 3 Choses

Preposition \ in-(ˌ)tü, -tə \

Que Je Sais d’Elle. New Yorker Films,

Expressing movement or action with the result that someone or something becomes enclosed or surrounded by something else; expressing movement or action with the result that someone or something makes physical contact with something else; used as a function word to indicate entry, introduction, insertion, superposition, or inclusion; used as a function word to indicate a period of time or an extent of space part of which is passed or occupied.

1967. Film.

Image by author

We permanently experience new logics on how to approach communication and encounter. In fact, the emergence of virtual relationships never fails to reveal and encourage new ways of living, wandering and relating in/to the city. The maximization of the information’s range, scale, and access motivates indirect contact between people, as the dilution of physical proximity/increment of progressive spacing between the citizens and the public domain take place.

The growing importance of virtual links also affects how

57

fig. 2 Image by author

we reach out to one another and how we subconsciously embrace hospitality and hostility on a daily basis. This proposal aims to explore the invisible borders that surround us in our day-to-day lives. Into/Borders questions distance as a border itself, both physical and emotional, and aims to raise awareness on how we spontaneously manipulate distance.

The growing individualization of lifestyles triggered the idea of Into/Borders. The project defies the symbolism attached to doors as emotional and physical borders. As the settling of controlled public spaces question semantic restraints, Into/Borders proposes an exploration of the intermediate state between interior and exterior, individual and collective experience, and memory and existence.

The exploration of overlappings, interferences, and infiltrations from one side of a border to the other allows us to question their meaning and position in the realm of interspace.

Into/Borders aims to promote a discussion about the meaning of the public space experience through a device that rethinks the cloudy dynamics of subject/container/content. The doors spread throughout public spaces raising awareness to how we face hospitality, privacy, occupation, and belonging. More importantly, they bring to light how we find comfort and meaning in the diffuse and complex contemporary city.

59

Juan Salazar

The Map is Not the Territory: An Investigation into the Abandonment of Visual Sovereignty

We say the map is different from the territory. But what is the territory? Operationally, somebody went out with a retina or a measuring stick and made representations which were then put on paper. What is on the paper map is a representation of what was in the retinal representation of the man who made the map; and as you push the question back, what you find is an infinite regress, an infinite series of maps. The territory never gets in at all. Always, the process of representation will filter it out so that the mental world is only maps of maps, ad infinitum. – Gregory Bateson1

fig. 1 Site Plan

1 Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, (San Francisco: Chandler Publishing Co., 1972), 460.

2 Ibid, 460.

Bateson argues that the importance of a map, a representation of reality, is not necessarily its literal truthfulness, but its structure analogous, for the purpose at hand, to the territory.2 Polish-American scientist Alfred Korzybski’s dictum the map is not the territory proposes that individuals do not have access to an absolute knowledge of reality, but rather only have access to a set of beliefs they have built up over time.3 The map-territory describes the relationship between an object and its representation. He suggests that an abstraction derived

61

3 The map–territory relation describes the relationship between an object and a representation of that object, as in the relation between a geographical territory and a map of it. Polish-American scientist and philosopher Alfred Korzybski remarked that the map is not the territory, encapsulating his view that an abstraction derived from something, or a reaction to it, is not the thing itself.

from something, or reacting to it, is not the thing itself. In his view, people’s beliefs about reality and their awareness of things—the map—are not reality itself, but rather everything they could be aware of– the territory. Thus, by the definition of subjectivity, we can never expect one individual to relate in exactly the same way as another. Intuition and introspection are inherently flawed when used to produce a rationale for a purposefully created experience. Additionally, due to the complex and varied nature of human beings, one must also establish that perception is not analogous amongst individuals.

The following investigation operates within this context, in which the use of pattern and contrast are exploited to camouflage spatial conditions and distort the perception of form in space. The project, a public cultural park in the Hollywood Hills (fig. 1), is characterized by an exaggerated landform landscape that signifies the organization of programmatic elements. Rejecting the idea of introducing a central mass to the already encumbered terrain, I propose the distribution of the programmatic requirements over the entire site, generating high and low points of programmatic density. Deconstruction of the program into areas and points of varying activities allows for maximum movement throughout the site, and presents users with a diversity of experiences. Diagrammatically, this deconstruction is organized into the superimposition of three autonomous yet logical structures: the programmed landscape (surface), corridor axes (lines), and reference objects (points). The project is formed by the meeting of these three autonomous systems, each with its own logic, idiosyncrasies, and limitations. Because each layer is a hermetic system that operates within itself, it does not take into account any influence from another system. Rather than these structures working to create a sense of totality, they negate each other.

The independence of the three superimposed systems thus avoids all attempts to homogenize the park into a coherent whole. What results is a distorted landscape (the territory) defined by artificial canyons and ridges that distinguish the division of programmatic elements within the project (fig. 2).

This landscape is further abstracted by projecting the map, a simple two-dimensional pattern characterized by harsh contrast, onto the landform without bias towards any volumetric elements. What results is a type of phenomenological transparency in which the reading of space is obscured.

Perspective and procession throughout the project is distorted, rendering misunderstanding of the landscape’s form in space, 62

fig. 2 Programming

not unlike chiaroscuro, where high contrast distinguishes an object from its context. Here, contrast is used to mask these forms from their frame of reference, creating visual plays such as false shadows and seemingly flattened edges. This creates a heightened incoherency in the user’s understanding of the object and space being viewed. In a kind of pseudo-schizophrenia, perceptual functions of the individual are frequently disrupted, further creating a disconnect between perception and reality.

A critical example in the analysis of visual plays in modern architecture is Colin Rowe and Roman Slutzky’s 1956 text, “Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal.” It defines transparency as a visual tool used both physically (e.g. the use of transparent material) and phenomenologically (e.g. a cognitive reading of transparency as a result of the organization of space.) Rowe and Slutzky write:

If one sees two or more figures overlapping one another, and each of them claims for itself the common overlapped part, then one is confronted with a contradiction of spatial dimensions. To resolve this contradiction one must assume the presence of a new optical quality. The figures are endowed with transparency: that is, they are able to interpenetrate without an optical destruction of 63

each other. Transparency however implies more than an optical characteristic, it implies a broader spatial order.

Transparency means a simultaneous perception of different spatial locations. Space not only recedes but fluctuates in a continuous activity. The position of the transparent figures has equivocal meaning as one sees each figure now as the closer, now as the further one.4

fig. 3 Floor Plan

4 Colin Rowe and Roman Slutzky, “Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal,” The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and Other Essays (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1982), 160–161.

In this passage, Rowe and Slutzky define transparency as the physical translucence inherent in a material property or structure. There results no ambiguity as to the form which lies behind the plane of transparency. Despite this definition of a physical transparency, which allows passage and transmission of visual understanding, the notion of layered transparent planes suggests further interpretations. Phenomenal transparency occurs when space is deliberately abstracted, not through a material property, but through the reorganization of the spatial conditions that would normally define a transparent plane. This type of seeming or implied transparency, that is an interpretive transparency, is distinguished.

According to Rowe, Cubism marks the beginning of this new spatial awareness. Initially, a composition was understood from a single point of reference. The simultaneous representation of an objects from multiple viewpoints diminishes 64

fig. 4 Map

fig. 5 (next page) East-West Section

fig. 6 (next page) North-South Section

ambiguity in spatial understanding. Elementary examples of this technique resides in the works of Amédée Ozenfant and Le Corbusier. Credited as leaders of the Purist movement, their works portray seemingly austere objects in still life in an attempt to regularize the daily life of post-World War I France. Despite the single point of view in which these objects are depicted, the flattened parallel perspective removes the sense of depth in the scene. These works suggest a reorganizing of the various spatial planes as each object occupies and repels its adjacent spaces. In Ozenfant’s Still Life With Glass of Red Wine (fig. 8), rectilinear, horizontals give the work a sense of balance, typical of the Purist movement. The vertical and horizontal lines of the wine bottle and guitar neck contrast with curvilinear elements, which make up the majority of the paintings lines. These curved lines contribute to the appearance of various geometric shapes, whose shared edges form the assorted objects. It is this composition of curved lines amidst a backdrop of vertical and horizontal lines that generate an ambiguous reading in the placement of these objects.

The modernist historian Sigfried Giedion credited the ability to obscure a viewer’s understanding of form in space through the creation of a geometric planar spatiality and the reordering of its various planes as one of the major achievements of the Cubists and Purists in painting. He writes, 65

fig. 7 Perspective views 5 Siegfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture; The Growth of a New Tradition, (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1954).

fig. 8 Amedee Ozenfant, Still Life With Glass of Red Wine, 1920, oil on canvas.

6 Robert Wiene, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Decla-Bioscop, 1920.

fig. 9 Robert Wiene, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1920, film still.

“Space is needed for composition; space means three dimensions. Therefore we think of the painting not as a surface, but as a space.”5 The layering of form and texture in space allows the Hollywood Hills park project to translate this painted spatial ambiguity to the physical dimension. Through the user’s perspective, the park site’s canyon edges dissipate into one another, only revealing themselves from a certain distance, while specific austere (in both form and material) elements, untouched by this emphasized formalism, hint at the layering of different systems. The creation of both false and real shadows obscures the eye’s understanding of form in space. Simultaneously, the site’s existing drastic slope is visually masked in the use of the mapped texture. The varying directional grains of this map create the visual perception of a landscape that moves in multiple directions. Like a Cubist painting, phenomenal forms are suggested, not stipulated.

The viewer defines what he or she sees.

Perhaps a variation on Cubist perspective is film set design.

Here we see not only an exercise in the composition of space within a frame, necessary to portray a convincing interaction between a film’s characters, but its intentional impact of the space on its viewers. Notable in German Expressionist films, is the emphasis on the abstracted sets that lead the viewer into an ambiguous understanding of the space. However, a highly geometric abstraction is neither fundamental nor required

by Expressionists. The underlying importance is the use of different perspectives for a single object. The set design for the 1920 film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari6 (fig. 9) exemplified the use of exaggerated perspectives. Most of the film is seen through the eyes of the protagonist. However, the epilogue reveals that we have not been experiencing the protagonist’s recollection of the plot, but rather a hallucination. We can see the film as an exploration of the protagonist’s madness from within. Its set evokes madness through a dizzying array of pointed lines and intense contrast. The set is an abstraction— an amalgamation of pointed roofs and triangular mountains in a distorted perspective—of the town in which the story takes place. Diagonals replace orthogonal and angles replace curves. The everyday architecture of doorways and windows is distorted. We see locations and characters in a constant state of movement, negotiating passageways that lead to places they should not. The a set develops a life and a mobility of its own.

Viewers are never completely aware of the setting. The 69

fig. 10-11 Materializing the Map

set blends real locations: places that can exist (a home, city streets, a town fair) with a pattern and look that are anything but normal. The film is effective because of this contrast between the standard and the surreal, seen through extremely distorted perspectives.

In the Hollywood Hills park project, the visual strategies of Cubism and Expressionism create perspectives that are incomprehensible at first glance. The exuberant forms and the mapping come together to create an environment that is obscured in its understanding. Distorted forms are masked by perpendicular pattern lines. At the same time these pattern lines generate the illusion of false edges. The understanding of the composition of space is ever-changing as users navigate the space and its forms. Users are never completely aware of their environment; whether their perception of form is created as an illusion of the map, or the form itself.

71

Paul Golisz

Me and You and Every[thing] We Know

We returned to our places, these-Kingdoms, But no longer at ease here, in the old-dispensation, With alien people clutching their-gods.1

fig. 1 Things in Common The meaning of the object is not limited to physical solid things, but must include performances, events and shared knowledge.

Image by author 1 Eliot, T. S. Selected Poems (New York : Harvest Books, 1964), 98.

2 Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed.

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Our world is increasingly uncanny. It is becoming a place of intimacy and coexistence. But not in the sense of peace, love and happiness, rather the coexistence we are experiencing is strange, disturbing and alien. The landscape we enjoyed as a background is pressing forward and has arrived, here, denying any distance or separation. The condensed world has revealed our category mistake, believing that there is something called nature.

The discipline of architecture is not immune from this mistake. It is common for the architect to look towards nature, either as a source of inspiration or as the default space filler for what is not building. Unfortunately, its ubiquity has done very little in locating or articulating its meaning. The formal definition of nature can range from the innate character of an individual to the senses relating to the material world.2 Often it becomes the suggestion of something “over yonder;�3 something that needs to be protected and maintained; an

73

4 The term black box has been defined

by Bruno Latour as any actant so firmly established that we are able to take its interior for granted.

Graham Harman, Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics (Victoria: re.press, 2009), 33.

5 Preston Scott Cohen and Erika Naginski, The Return of Nature : Sustaining Architecture in the Face of Sustainability (London: Routledge, 2014), 2.

6 David Gissen, Subnature: Architecture’s Other Environments (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2009), 22.

7 A hierarchical reality is premised on the gap between the world and the human that exists within traditional realism. Harman, Graham. 2009.

Prince of Networks : Bruno Latour and Metaphysics (Victoria: re.press, 2009), 75.

8 Morton, Hyperobjects, 102.

9 Tristan Garcia, Mark Allan Ohm, and Jon Cogburn, Form and Object : A Treatise on Things (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 66.

10 Morton, Hyperobjects, 4.

11 The plane of equality is concerned with the possibility of what is real, possible, non-existent, past, impossible, true, false, or bad.

Tristan, Form and Object, 30.

ideal of purity that should be emulated. Nature has become a black box4 – a social construction accepted without question.

The result of the lack of articulation is an accepted distance, a distance which has allowed nature to be set apart and made distinct. It is separated from what is not natural and the product of human agency, in other words the artificial.

Architecture, landscape architecture and the many forms of urbanism fall into this category. The consequence is a gap between the natural and the artificial. A bridge is then required to connect the two and is usually constructed through methods and means which strive for the natural.

We end up with solutions that range from biomimicry to organic architecture. These solutions only highlight the problem and produce “devitalized ornament, of rhetorical form.”5 Conversely, attempts have been made to avoid the problems of mimicry in exchange for an expanded definition of nature.

Prefixes of sub-, super-, un- have all been used to address the less desirable forms of nature in relation to “seemingly central and desirable forms of nature—e.g., the sun, clouds, trees, and wind.”6 These attempts encourage a broader definition but are grounded on a false belief in nature.

Accepting nature without question maintains a distance between the natural and the artificial. This distance is positioned as unavoidable and inevitable. More importantly, the categorization creates an ontological distinction and a hierarchy of reality;7 the result is a foreground and a background. The problem with this outcome is the background, which serves its role by operating “in our peripheral vision.”8 The background provides a place to put what we deny, a place to put what we do not want. But the existence of this place is quickly becoming an illusion. “We no longer have anywhere —outside the world—to deny what is not, what is impossible, what prevents the world’s functioning, what we must abandon so that there is something, so that this open world is possible.”9 Recent catastrophes and their effects on the landscape illustrate this quite clearly.

There was no nature that was immune from the radiation released during the Fukushima disaster; no nature was exempt from the effects of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Perhaps even more telling is that the Earth “contains throughout its circumference a thin layer of radioactive materials, deposited since 1945.”10 Regardless of belonging to a perceived foreground or background, it is apparent that everything is equally subject to the same consequences. The task is to show that a “plane of equality”11 can be established.

74

12 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 55.

13 Tristan, Form and Object, 66.

14 Our decisions have significant consequences for vast spatial and temporal scales. Addressing this understanding in our environment is critical. Timothy Morton expands upon this through his discussion on the Hyperobject.

15 Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2009), VIII.

16 Henri Matisse, and Jack D. Flam, Matisse on Art (New York: Phaidon, 1973), 81.

17 Robin Evans, Translations From Drawing to Building (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), 154.

The necessary outcome of such plane will be the collapse of the natural and the artificial. A condition will emerge in which things “are much more social, much more fabricated, much more collective than the ‘hard’ parts of nature [while being] much more real, nonhuman and objective than those shapeless screens on which society – for unknown reasons – needed to be ‘projected.’”12 As the clear dividing line erodes, the sense of intimacy and coexistence will increase.

We end up with environment; the conditions which surround one. An environment does not discriminate against the natural or the artificial as all things are compressed within an intimate shared space. A flatness emerges.

Flatness in this context is not the absence of dimensions; rather it is the absence of privilege and hierarchy. Since there cannot be a background, “where what we deny is thrown, we must make do in our world with what must be denied for this world to be possible.”13 What is required in this understanding of environment is not the revealing of processes; what is required are disturbing encounters with the denied.14 Environment has no choice but to account for vast spatial and temporal scales. This will inevitably challenge what warrants consideration in the planning and organization of space. The boundary of consideration will be referred to as social space. Social space is concerned with “the practices of interaction, care and cohabitation in a common world,”15 among all participants (fig.1). Because we know that our actions have global consequences spatially and temporally, social space cannot be limited to humans or sentience.

Architecture needs to deal with this awareness and participate in the defining of social space. The first obstacle will be the paradox inherent to the discipline: the drawing of boundaries. While boundaries can be abandoned ontologically they are quite real architecturally. The most critical boundary will be the one of social space. A more rigorous approach to its delineation will be advantageous.

“Once my emotive line has modeled the light of my white paper without destroying its precious whiteness, I can neither add nor take anything away.”16 Drawing is the first act of construction, it comes prior to building. Architecture is “brought into existence through drawing. The subject-matter (the building or space) will exist after the drawing, not before it.”17 The architectural drawing claims built form as a dependent therefore giving the drawing both significance and responsibility.

Drawing must be seen in direct correlation with 75

18 The architectural drawing as an object is irreducible and should be conceived as an act of construction.

19 Henri Matisse is explicit about his ability to modify the different parts of the white paper in his drawings even without touching them. This is achieved through their relationships with the line.

Matisse, Matisse on Art, 43.

20 Matisse, Matisse on Art, 43.

21 Matisse, Matisse on Art , 81

22 Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 61.

23 Derrida, The Truth in Painting, 61.

24 For a recent international project I was provided with a site survey which lacked sufficient information pertaining to site boundaries, roadways and building footprints.

However, the survey included accurate information regarding multiple anthills on the site. It may be possible that this was the more important information.

environment to take full advantage of its importance.

Conceived as environment, the drawing in its totality is something.18 It requires that a responsibility and an account must be taken for every inch of the page. And it requires an understanding that different parts of the paper will be modified even without touching them.19 Drawing as environment necessitates equal consideration for the foreground and the background (fig. 2) .

Acknowledging the construction of the foreground and background simultaneously raises an awareness of what could be included on this side of social space from the beginning of the process. This puts drawing in a unique position to test the boundary of consideration. Two devices will be irreplaceable: the line and the frame.

The line distinguishes territories. When a line is drawn the result is not an isolated form, “it always brings a companion along.”20 This companion is the ground it stands against. In order for the line to take shape it must stand in relation to the absence of line. The line not only describes itself but also requires the form of what it is not, the blank of the page, or what was once considered background. And the precision of the line in representing these forms is unmatched. One must only look to Henri Matisse, who considered his line drawings to be the purest and most direct translation.21 It is important that the absence of line be constructed with the same vividness as the line.

The frame relates and separates the foreground and the background. A frame occupies a unique position because it “stands out against two grounds, but with respect to each of those two grounds, it merges into the other.”22 Therefore it is part of the milieu which supports the limit and gives shape to both the inside and the outside. For example the “presence of the limit is what gives form to the beautiful.”23 When the frame is defined a certain privileging of an inside occurs, but the outside is equally necessary. Because the frame determines the two grounds it will tell you more about the subject than the subject itself.

Inevitably limits must be drawn. As a drawing develops, so too must the location of the boundary of consideration. Using the line and the frame as tools will be tremendously valuable.

Just as the existing condition is composed of a complex set of parts and relations, so too will the proposed condition. Is it important to extend the limit of a site plan to include ant hills,24 radiation and smog, in addition to building footprints and street outlines? Do plans and sections need to be limited 76

fig. 2 Appropriation and Obsolescence Once the traditional relationship between foreground and background is dissolved a new frame is possible.

to conditioned space, or is it appropriate to consider pollen and pollution? Perhaps it is better to draw architecture in isolation, such as in Piero Della Francesca’s Ideal City.

Regardless, the critical question will be what to frame, what deserves a mark and what deserves the absence of a mark.

A better understanding of how limits and territories are defined will provide the proper ground to negotiate the physical boundaries of architecture. Drawing is well positioned to deal with our arrival at a flattened environment. It will serve us well to leverage drawing as an act of construction.

77

Jenna Frances Harris

Alien Material: Waste and Landscape Surveillance

Contrary to what many say, humans did not invent waste; nature did. The squirrel eats a nut and dumps the shell. In some places the ocean floor leaks oil and pollutes marine habitats. Guano, the excrement of seafowl, kills plants and renders the birds’ own habitat sterile.

Lava and ash spewed from volcanoes can destroy whole ecosystems. As part of nature, humans are no exception to this pattern. We throw away what we do not use; we pollute, sterilize, and destroy. The difference, however, is that nature has mostly perfected its “waste management system.1

fig. 1 Detritus Overlap Detail view.

1 Mira Engler, Designing America’s Waste Landscapes (Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 1.

Landscapes create waste. As the spatial experience and physical manifestation of processes over time, landscapes are whole, independent systems of decay and regeneration. The living medium of landscape material constantly changes, rotating dramatically from overabundance to nonexistence. However, as humans design, experience and maintain landscapes, we understand waste material as foreign matter—unwieldy, unnecessary, disregarded, profane. When perceived as incompatible with human use and maintenance, waste from

79

PROPOSED SLOW DECIDUOUS LEAF TWIG SLOWPRUNING DECIDUOUS MIGRATING FELLED TREE

AREA OF OPERATION

TWIGDETRITUS PRUNINGOVERLAP PROPOSED

FAST D

EXISTI PROPOSED FAST DECIDUOUS LEAF FAST DECIDUOUS MIGRATING EXISTING TREE TRUNK

EXISTI

EXISTING CONIFER NEEDLES

CULL TREE

EXISTING DETRITUS OVERLAP EXISTING TREE TRUNK

SENSING DEVICE

HIGH GROUND DIVERSITY ZONE

EXISTING SLOW DECIDIOUS LEAF LITTER

EXISTING FAST DECIDIOUS LEAF LITTER

PLANTED TREE

DECAYING WOOD GRID

PROPOSED CONIFER NEEDLE LITTER MIGRATING CONIFER NEEDLE LITTER PROPOSED SLOW DECIDUOUS LEAF SLOW DECIDUOUS MIGRATING

FELLED TREE

PROPOSED FAST DECIDUOUS LEAF FAST DECIDUOUS MIGRATING

TWIG PRUNING EXISTING CONIFER NEEDLES

EXISTING TREE TRUNK

fig. 2 Key Map key describing symbol meanings on the waste material site plan. fig. 3 (opposite) Detritus Overlap Detail view of overlap of layers of waste within areas of surveillance.

EXISTING SLOW DECIDIOUS LEAF LITTER

landscapes becomes alien.

Deemed landscape waste in an urban context, alien site EXISTING FAST DECIDIOUS LEAF LITTER material like plant detritus—leaf litter, dismembered branches and felled trunks—is “deported” and moved from lawns to landfills. This waste exists between states of living vegetation and decay, definitively contributing to the formation of the ground. Through layers of decomposition, plant detritus forms soil, regulates nutrient cycling, supports diversity of life and physically changes the ground surface, providing fodder for site organization and design.

Surveillance of the Alien Waste is, quite simply, the wrong material in the wrong place at the wrong time. If we could monitor, understand and track these natural “waste” materials, would we consider plant detritus waste at all?

The precision of digital surveillance tools and parametric modeling allows us to begin using previously discarded “alien” material as a driver of design (fig. 3). In contrast to typical models of surveying, we can now gather data at a finer time-scale, consequently tracking and identifying alien materials on a daily or even hourly basis. In processes such as soil formation, scientific observation permits us to increase the timescale by which we understand long-term, generative landscape activity. Parametric modeling allows us to map plant material migrations through real-time data of wind

81

EXISTI

N

W

E

S

LITTER-FALL, ROOT & WOOD TURNOVER

FOLIAGE, ROOT AND WOOD LITTER POOLS

SOIL TEMPERATURE

ORGANIC MATTER BREAKDOWN

SOIL MOISTURE

RESPIRATION CO2 OXYGEN

OXYGEN LIMITED DECOMPOSITION MICROBIAL CARBON MICROORGANISMS SOLUBLE

CELLULOSE

DETRITUS SHADOW

MICROBIAL DECOMPOSITION RATE

LIGNIN DECOMPOSITION RATE FOR POOL

MATTER

HUMUS

OUTPUT

INPUT

CHANGEABLE CONTROLS

METHANE

fig. 4 (previous page) Photo of surveillance device that allowed for continual digital monitoring of site.

Photo by author fig. 5 (above) Decomposition Diagram Diagram demonstrating the decompositional algorithm in process.

2 Lawrence Halprin, Cities (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1963).

gust and direction (fig. 4). When coupled with the creation of algorithms that relate wind data and tree architecture, designers can draw the “detritus shadow” at the scale of a single tree or an entire forest (fig. 5). The increased frequency of this data allows people to bridge the gap between scientific exploration and spatial representation, and to reconsider their relationship to material previously understood as incompatibly alien.

Complex ecological processes such as decomposition are difficult to visually represent without the precise data afforded by these tools. Lawrence Halprin wrote, “In order to design for movement, a whole new system of conceptualizing must be undertaken. Our present systems of design and planning are invariably limited by our techniques and our methods of symbolizing ideas. We know only how to delineate static symbols, so that is all that we do.”2 From this obstacle arises the enormous potential for landscape architects to utilize scientific inquiry and emergent technology to drive experiments in spatial and experiential design.

Reimagining Landscape Waste: A Decaying Carpet Through limiting the subtraction and addition of planted forms, as well as through observing wind, temperature, light and moisture on site, the process and rate of naturally decomposing detritus creates a wide variety of ground conditions. It generates a distinguishable organic carpet that changes over time and can be used to catalyze the site design, becoming a

84

fig. 6 Detritus Separation Diagram of detritus separation in an analysis of fast decomposition data.

3 Teresa Gali-Izard, Los Mismos Paisajes: Ideas e Interpretaciones (Barcelona: GG, 2005), 139.

Fast Decomposition - Detritus Separation “‘continuous flooring’ that is soft, ideal for walking, pleasant and made up of organic remains from the site.”3 Typically, landscape architects select plants based on their physical characteristics and environmental tolerances; however, using the lens of the surveillance of plant detritus, planted form may be selected based on its naturally experiential and performative effect on the ground plane. Designers can apply this logic to create zones of differing decomposition rates, high detritus material diversity, or high ground texture resulting from detritus separation, overlapping it with exposure to environmental factors such as sunlight and moisture.

Ultimately, through the use of digital surveillance tools and parametric modeling, designers can draw and project how these complex processes change overtime. Processes such as soil formation no longer have to be drawn as a static GIS layer, relying on a 20-year soil survey. Instead, digital tools make it possible to understand how soil changes within a year, revealing the dynamic role of alien material accumulation in this process.

Observing landscape waste material changes the way we perceive decay, transitioning its meaning from simple, unusable waste to a potential for soil regeneration, topsoil formation and site design and organization. Unwieldy, incompatible and alien material that would have previously been dismissed becomes the driver of design, building the ground and shaping human experience.

0’

The Decaying Carpet: Plant Detritus Surveillance Jenna Frances Harris

85

20’

40’

Melina Analyti and Eva Andronikidou

ξένο Alien Locality

fig. 1 The Site The river, the dikes and the most fragile zones.

In this discourse we will describe a new way of reading and dealing with the alien by first understanding the word and then understanding it within the context of a site. We will manage it as a dynamic concept that is part of an evolving system. ξένο We began by investigating the word ξένο (xeno), which means alien in Greek, our native language. We wanted to understand its etymology and characteristics so that we could use it in a multiple ways. The word alien comes inevitably in dialogue with the occasional locality, creating a dynamic bipolar system that demands a resolution with the ability of continuous adaptation over time.

A. Origin ξένο (xeno) 1. (n.) He who originates or comes from another location.

2. (n. ) A foreigner, immigrant, unknown. He who is not a citizen of the city that he is in. In ancient Greek he who comes from another country. O xene- my friend (addressing

87

fig. 2 The dike provides sweeping views of the area.

1 Center for the Greek Language, www.greek-­language.gr.

2 George Babiniotis, Dictionary of Modern Greek (Athens: Lexicology Center, 2012).

3 Aris Konstantinidis, May 2013, Cosmoidioglossia Blog, http:// cosmoidioglossia.blogspot. gr/2013/05/blog-post_4710.html.

4 Dimitris Pikionis, “Emotional Topography,” The Third Eye Magazine, November - December (1935): 2-3, 13-17.

someone with unknown name and origin).

3. (n.) He who has no connection to something and who is unaware of it.

4. (adj.) Something that is unusual, paradox.1 The ancient word has evolved semantically in two directions; one that is negative (an unknown and sometimes dangerous stranger) and a positive one (a visitor from another city of country that is worthy of respect and hospitality).

The ancient words filoxenos (hospitable) and xenodohos (hotelier) demonstrates the attitude of ancient Greeks towards strangers. Filoxenos implies a friendly stance and honor towards the stranger. Xenodohos is the reception and acceptance of the stranger that ended up at someone’s home. The composite word paraxenos on the other hand, means strange.

Finally, ancient word “host” evolved in ancient times from “he who gives hospitality” to a modern scientific term that means an “organism that hosts a parasite.”2 B. ξένο (xeno) vs Locality The word alien automatically poses the question of locality.

The characteristics of an individual locality is determined by its field of expression. Greek architects consider nature as the archetypal structure through which all begins.

“Architecture is local, it is structured with the earth onto which it stands, hence an architectural structure ‘grows’ onto the earth, like trees, plants, bushes, flowers,” writes Aris Konstantinidis.3 To the same point, Dimitris Pikionis in his article, “Emotional Topography,” speaks on the whole of the landscape, the air and the light as the birth place of architecture.4 The city has a more complicated origin than architecture considering it emerges from a long evolution of architectural elements. From the beginning of this phenomenon, the minimal city structure, starting with the domicile unit to the small

88

5 Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York, (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1978), 21.

group of domiciles (ie. houses, settlements, villages, small towns) is the xeno that appears in nature. The city multiplies and eventually dominates the area. The next finding is that the green areas in a city that function as an “embalming conservation of nature,” as mentioned by Rem Koolhaas in Delirious New York,5 eventually become xeno in the city. They become rare, non-continuous and fragmented. The local is not a static condition but is constantly redefined to create a series of different localities, one following the other. The alien is a motivational factor of this evolution.

Broadly speaking, the city is the field of maximum succession as human presence constantly adapts it to new needs, conditions, technologies and daily routines. This process sometimes occurs with the slow expansion of the alien element. The alien wins ground by shrinking the local and finally taking its place. Both the alien and the local are dynamic conditions that define and are defined, simultaneously creating a cohesive dynamic system. Therefore two seemingly contrary concepts are potentially stages of the same evolving reality.

The rate of the interchange is something that changes according to certain circumstances and eras. Nowadays, this process unfolds at tremendous speeds with new networks redefining the concept of locality.

Case Study As landscape architects, we looked for this dynamic coexistence in nature. We chose a case study and developed a proposal to locate the dynamics that develop between the alien and the local. This process is a starting point for extracting conclusions in other fields and possibly creating increasingly complex compositions.

A. The Methodology We analyzed a typical cultivation zone and followed its stages of generation: 1. Nature/indigenous vegetation (local).

2. Appearance of one or fewer cultivated areas (ξένο).

3. Expansion of cultivation (new delineation). The locality is now characterized by the coexistence of the two.

4. Domination of the cultivated areas and gradual shrinking of the vegetation (ξένο).

In the last stage the indigenous locality is no longer recognizable. It gives its place to a new reality, where the alien becomes local and functions just as a parasite on its host.

89

_0

closes

_3

rice agriculture dike

river dike

_1

_0

closes

_0 _0 closes_0 closes

_2

motas de los espacios agricolas

closes

river dike

_4

dunes / high level spots

_1 _3

rice agriculture dike

_5

streams/channels

_1 _1 river dike _1 river dike

_2

motas de los espacios agricolas

river dike

motas de los espacios agricolas motas de los espacios agricolas

_2 _2 _2

_3

rice agriculture dike

motas de los espacios agricolas

3

4

1

2

_4

dunes / high level spots

_5

streams/channels

3

4

1

2

5

_4

dunes / high level spots

_3 _3 rice agriculture dike _3 rice agriculture dike

rice agriculture dike

_5

streams/channels

_4 _4 _4

dunes / high level spots dunes / high level spots dunes / high level spots

_5 _5 streams/channels_5 streams/channels streams/channels

fig. 3 Topographic Elements of the Site

6 Analyti, Melina, Andronikidou, Eva, Franceschini, Roberto, Song, Wooseop, “Rooms,” 2012.

“The Coastal Room” was our personal contribution to a wider project called “Rooms.” It started in 2012 as a four-person effort at the U.P.C. (Master of Landscape Architecture, Barcelona, Spain) under the supervision of professor Maria Goula. All images used in the current article are made exclusively by Melina Analyti and Eva Andronikidou.

The aim of the research and of this project specifically is to 3 4 1 2 5 recognize the fragments of the lost locality and create the conditions for a new localized framework, onto which they are redefined, functionally as well as conceptually. The difficulty in identifying the fragments of the locality makes it an ideal field for this particular issue.

Therefore, methodologically we pursue the following steps: 4 1 1. We recognize 33the local and the alien of the area in22 a 4 1 3 4 1 2 particular moment in time.

2. We define the lost localities as stages of evolution in different time stamps of the past.

3. We suggest a new dynamic in the relationship of the local/alien by creating circumstances for a new balance.

4. We evaluate in relation to the evolution of the new dynamics in depth of time. ξένο is the dominant tool of this process.

B. The Project: “The Coastal Room”6 The aim of this project is to allow for basic infrastructures for regional tourist development while regenerating and protecting the natural landscape and its distinct ecosystems.

The site is located on Spain’s Costa Brava (fig. 1). The region consists of dunes and marshes, historic cities, tourist and urban developments, the Ter River, a mosaic of cultivated areas, and the Montgri and Begur Mountains.

The vast area is relatively flat and difficult to walk. Aside from the dike (fig. 2), which is the most prominent feature and provides sweeping views of the site, the area is difficult to visually conceive. The Ter River estuary sits on one side and an old river bed onto which a kind of a glade has been formed

90

5 5 5

A

pedestrian movement water flow (habitats)

interchange between systems of saltwater

sand

direction of the sand

wind

B

fig. 3a Diagram Existing topography and wind direction. fig. 3b Diagram of Flows

(agua molls) sits on the other. The site gives the impression of a closed room or structure. The wind and “fences” further create a sense of enclosure (fig. 3). The “fences” are a series of tall pine trees that protect sensitive, cultivated areas from strong winds. The top of the site borders agricultural areas, a campground and a partially built urban development. (The development was a part of a seafront planning scheme that was abandoned. Today only traces of the urban framework grid remain.) The micro-topography is morphed by mounds, small recesses and depressions. Of interest is an exceptional land morphology known as closes. Closes are usually areas enclosed by low topographic elevations. They measure between 0.5 to 1.2 acres. We usually come across closes in groups.

The ecosystem that has developed is intermittent and

91

the changing landscape

the labyrinth

the ancient patterns

the traces

the wind landscape

the wet landscape

the ground split

toroella port

fig. 4 Types of structure that define enclosures or rooms. fig. 5 (opposite) Site Plan

the ecological coherence is discontinuous. The constructed elements (camping, settlement and old urban grid) subject pressure on the protected areas (marshes and dunes). Traces of the urban grid interrupt the natural continuity of the marshes and its connections to the dunes.

C. The Lost Locality Drawing on the region’s history (old vineyards that characterize production with shapes that resulted from the division of land during wars) and the characteristics of cultivated areas, we define limitations to create thematic “rooms” using the enclosed structures that dominate the area (fig. 4).

We estimated the maximum quantity of water that the river can transfer during 100 years. Using this number we moved the river elevation and expropriated when necessary and/or dangerous, according to the shape of the trail of the river. The river is a central “room” and a basic movement axis that ends at the seafront zone. We give it space and form the landscape to create circumstances for the development of natural riverside activity.

92

2 We apply the water phytodepuration system at the camping site, using the structure of the “closes” so it returns clean to the marshes.

The water flows in a central channel and feeds the water surfaces, which are surrounded by dikes.

The park is well connected with the city,the zone of the port and the camping site.

2

We set the parking in a “room” 2 m below the ground level.

1

We organize camping sites in “rooms” differentiated by level changes (-1m, until + 2m) and vegetation.

1 The systems of salt marshes and wetlands are permeable along the beach. natural - protected part Restoration of the littoral section (coastline).

Proposed incipient (movable) sand dunes

3

Existing incipient (movable) sand dunes Proposed foredunes (semi-permanent sand dunes) Proposed hind dunes (permanent sand dunes) Interdunal depression

3

Wooden pedestrian exits to the beach, located above the ground level to avoid affecting the marsh system and permit the sand to circulate without obstacles.

Pine-zone filters, set in depressions, accompany the longitudinal route and create the boundary between the coastal zone and the agricultural area.

The dike that surrounds the river opens with a weir and feeds the wetland system.

COASTAL ZONE

The longitudinal route remains on the ground (soil) level and continues until it forms the front of the city towards the beach and connects with the port.

Parking = 1.5 ha = 1.5 Units

Water Phytodepuration System at the Zone of the “Closes�

Camping 1 ha + 1 ha = 2 units

Li m i t s a n d m o v e m e n t s

D

A

B

E

C

F

G

fig. 6a (opposite) Section through Campground fig. 6b (opposite) Section through Parking Lot fig. 7a-g Limits of Treatment and Pedestrian Axes

Design Objectives: Redefining of the Dynamic Relationship Between Alien and Local By using natural methods we try to reinstate the damaged structures of the Mediterranean Coast—pine forests, shrubs, marshes, dunes (fig. 5).

A. ξένο that is Incorporated into the Local The camping ground maintains its function but is redesigned to cover less space. The design is based on the concept of the room. The rooms are delineated by height differences (1m to 2m) and vegetation (fig. 6a).

B. ξένο that Appears B.1. The parking lot is created next to the campgrounds and the beach (fig. 6b, 7b). It is designed as a room that sits two meters below ground level. The space is delineated by height and vegetation, which further protect and separate the artificial from the natural zones.

B.2. Plants cleanse the camping water in the closes zone before returning to the marsh (fig. 6b, 7d). The design is based on the closes and the closed topography of the swamps. The swamps (local fragments) are restored. The water runs into a central channel that feeds the natural basins of water which are encircled by dikes. These have cracks in their walls so that water is transferred from one to the next and is gradually cleaned.

95

pine set shrubs in depression

pedestrians’ route

agricultural area shrubs pines

beach

PRIMARY DUNE INCIPIENT DUNE 80% vegatation cover 20% covered with Barron, Ammophila Agropyron arenaria junceiforme

INTERDUNAL DEPRESSION saltwater concentration

SECONDARY DUNE less salty, total vegatation cover

shrubs

after 2-3 years : elements are completely covered by sand and vegetation

1st year : the elements acts like collectors of the sand - vegetation begins to appear

timeline of the project

Disposition of orthogonal grids of saltmeadow cordgrass collectors, for the fixed and semi-fixed dunes, and wooden sheet piles for the incipient (movable) dunes.

s y s t e m

setting of the new elements

t h e s a n d d u n e

system of salt marshes

r e s t o r a t i o n a n d p r o t e c t i o n o f

fig. 8 Restoration and protection of the dune system and evolution of the project over time.

C. ξένο that is Removed to Give Room to Local-Nature Traces of the urban grid and buildings are removed or expropriated so that the linear connection is achieved on a human and ecological level (fig. 7).

D. Local Fragments are Reinstated D1. The dune ecosystem is reinstated and a new topographic elements are created (fig. 7, 8, 9). A dune ecosystem can be defined as variable, semi-variable and/or constant and stable.

In a constant and stable ecosystem, variable characteristics may appear as fragments or be destroyed.

In order to reinforce the dune ecosystem, we restore the variable characteristics and create circumstances so that semi-variable and variable characteristics can develop. We place bunches of reeds in a rectangular shape for semi-variable and stable characteristics and we place vertical stakes for the variable ones.

The ground is primed for the new sand dunes. In two or three years, these formations are covered with sand and take the shape of natural sand dunes.

The part of the dunes that is protected from wind is covered with vegetation. The variable sand dune (incipient dune) is 20% covered with Agropyron junceiforme. The semi-variable sand dune (primary dune) is 80% covered with Ammophila arenaria. The stable dune (secondary dune) is covered with the most vegetation because less salt can reach it. Between the semi-variable and the stable sand dunes, a topographic depreciation is created, where salt water is collected. These depreciations are rich in flora and fauna.

The formations of the topographic elements are positioned according to wind direction for the best sand movement.

Bare spaces are prepositioned to connect the sea and the back swamp zone.

D2. By removing remnants of the old grid, we redefine swamp boundaries and re-instate the swamp ecosystem (fig.

7d, 7e, 7f). By using the natural elevation, new penetrable boundaries create a continuous ecological system. The swamp ecosystem extends along the length of the beach, over the stable dune and ends at the natural border of the Ter River estuary. At this point, the dike that engulfs the river opens with the use of a river fence. Based on the slope, a certain amount of water is diverted and feeds into the swamp ecosystem. On the other side, the swamps are connected to the phytodepuration area which supplies the ecosystem with clean, filtered water.

97

new topographic degradation

new element - collector of the sand

fig. 9 New Topography Elements Different angles from 45 to 90 degrees to the wind direction are used to obtain maximum functionality and variety.

E. ξένο with the intent to remain ξένο.

A protection zone between the cultivated areas and the “natural” protected zone is created (fig. 7a, 7c, 8). This zone extends across the length of the Ter River and up to its former river bed, agua molls, which is now a wetland. This zone creates a protective layer between the sheltered area and the cultivated areas. By planting groups of pine trees, a protective layer between sheltered and cultivated areas is created. At particular moments we incorporate slight elevation variations.

In this intermediate zone, a pedestrian area is included.

This basic connection has smaller lateral walkways that connect to the seafront. The walkways are wooden decks, that are elevated and designed so that they do not affect the salt water ecosystem. They allow free movement of sand and wind. This route ends at the seafront tourist development of Estartit.

This intervention creates circumstances for an autonomous system with a greater chance of long-term survival.

99

Nathan Burgess

Mobilizing Community: A Residential Model for Rising Seas

fig. 1 Sections Note: This work builds on a graduate design thesis completed from 2012 to 2013 at the University of Virginia with Jorg Sieweke and Brian Osborne. Additional work in 2013 explored the utilitarian and experiential dimensions of this proposal on one prototypical residential lot and one existing beach cottage moved to the lot.

This work was distinguished as a “visionary project” in the James Rose Center’s Suburbia Transformed 3.0 competition.

1 Some have pointed to the name “barrier island” as evidence of this confusion—suggesting stable walls at the ocean’s edge, rather than shifting, ephemeral features.

Some have even suggested that, for this reason, these features should instead be referred to as “ephemeral” or “migrating” islands. See Feagin, R.A. et al., “Barrier islands: Coupling Anthropogenic Stability with Ecological Sustainability,” Journal of Coastal Research 26 (2010).

Undeveloped barrier islands and back-barrier marshes are always on the move. Storm overwash, inlet formation, and wind-born sand transport processes move sand from the front to the back of these islands, allowing the system to move landward with rising seas (fig. 1). Ever-changing geometries, textures, sounds, and views are by-products of these processes, and fundamental to a barrier island’s unique beauty. One of the tragedies of the twentieth century is that developers, drawing little distinction between solid-ground and shifting sand,1 have pinned many of these islands in place with seawalls, bulkheads, and infrastructure. By limiting the movement of barrier island sand, hard infrastructure prevents barrier islands from moving landward and upward—speeding the submersion of these areas in a time of human-induced climate change and rising seas.

This project proposes a model neighborhood embedded within a rarely used sea-level rise adaptation approach: engineered retreat.2 Engineered retreat has been unpopular because it challenges property-ownership and environmental-management laws and norms, and is confused with “giving up.”3 This work takes a leap of faith and imagines an existing

101

0

15

30

miles 60

low density development net longshore transport

project site VIRGINIA NORTH CAROLINA

fig. 2 (opposite) Site plan (1:2000) 2 Many of the assumptions and ideas in this project are heavily influenced

by Jim Titus’ research and writing at the EPA and independently on rolling easements and the “engineered retreat pathway” for barrier islands.

This work is compiled on the following website: http://papers. risingsea.net/index.html.

3 Multiple options for sea level rise adaptation on barrier islands have been widely recognized and

barrier island community that accepts moving and mutable, rather than static and inflexible, property rights. It assumes that property development rights become transferable from the front to the back of an island and that some mechanism, such as a rolling easement or setback, requires this move in increments.4 With these assumptions, the work demonstrates how a neighborhood could, using a combination of current and common technologies, become increasingly compact, storm-resistant, and oriented towards more fully utilizing sand-transport and shore-front ecological processes in order to move landward and upward.

implemented over the last several decades, including levees/shoreline armoring, island-raising, and retreat.

However, island raising and levees draw a “line in the sand,” focusing on fighting back against the sea without substantially changing the way that we inhabit or utilize barrier islands.

From a physical standpoint, even in cases where such approaches protect property and the main area of the barrier island, they tend to leave habitat in the back barrier and marsh/lagoon area vulnerable to submersion. Even more significantly, they leave unchallenged the notion that people have a right to inhabit

The Site Sandbridge Beach, Virginia is a year-round residential community on a barrier island at the northern end of North Carolina’s Outer Banks, just south of the Chesapeake Bay (fig.

2). The eroding salt marsh behind Sandbridge Beach, known as Back Bay, still shows the traces of high ground produced by never-realized mid-20th century wetland filling and development. The stratigraphy of Back Bay marks the retreat of several ancient barrier island systems. On-going development of the barrier island has pinned sand in place with bulkheads and seawalls.5

this shifting ground in the same way as stable inland soil. See James G. Titus, “Greenhouse Effect, Sea Level Rise, and Barrier Islands: Case Study from Long Beach Island, New Jersey,” Coastal Management 18 (1990).

4 Titu, Rolling Easements, (Washington, D.C.: U.S Environmental Protection Agency, 2011).

5 Titus, Rolling Easements.

6 Julie Rosati,, Concepts for Functional Restoration of Barrier Islands, (Vicksburg, MS: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 2009).

Island Migration This proposal does not advocate for the development of barrier islands or thoughtless filling of wetlands. Rather, it proposes a sea level rise adaptation strategy that recognizes both the important processes at work building land on barrier islands and the rights of existing land owners to enjoy ownership of a dynamic coast. It demonstrates a way of making barrier island development increasingly compact and defensible against storms while gradually facilitating the natural migration of dunes and marshes (fig. 3).

In the proposal, beach nourishment ceases. Instead, new wetlands and narrow sand points are extended via human and non-human processes on the backside of the existing barrier island, providing a platform for sand accumulation.

Precedents and methods for this scale of intervention were developed and tested by the Army Corps of Engineers in wetlands created/restored behind Mississippi Delta barrier islands after Hurricane Katrina.6 Back Bay also has a history of large-scale human manipulation in the name of ecological management (though admittedly with mixed success).

Throughout the 20th century, Back Bay was a site of on-going 103

CONVENTIONAL CONVENTIONAL

ISLAND RAISING ISLAND RAISING

F

conventional shoreline hardening and shoreline hardening and conventional living shoreline adaptation strategies living shoreline adaptation strategies

natural channel widens natural channel widens marshes drown, unable marshes drown, unable to keep pace with increasing to keep pace with increasing lagoon depth lagoon depth

open water increases

infrastructure and buildings infrastructure and buildings rebuilt in place after storm rebuilt in place after storm damage until they are damage until they are abandoned to rising seasabandoned to rising seas

open wa increa

nourishment volumes must increase tovolume nourishment accomodate faster shoreline change and accomodate faster sh additional dredge sand needed raising additional dredge s property elevations

BARRIER ISLAND MIGRATION BARRIER ISLAND MIGRATION FIGURE 5 IMAGES ISLAND RAISING

FIGURE 5 IMAGES

ISLAND RAISING

marshland drowns, unable to keep pace with increasing lagoon depth

ardening asing and n strategies

CONVENTIONAL hannel widens

drown, unable VENTIONAL

ace with increasing epth open water increases

ISLAND RAISING

marshland drowns, unable to keepRAISING pace with ISLAND increasing lagoon depth conventional shoreline hardening and living shoreline adaptation strategies conventional shoreline hardening and natural channel widens living shoreline adaptation strategies

community resp F retreat rather tha

FIGURE 5 IM

natural channel marshes widens drown, unable to keep pace with increasing marshes drown, nourishment volumes must increase to lagoon open water remains the open water remains the unabledepth accomodate faster change and to keep pace with increasing same shoreline or is reduced same or is reduced lagoon depth open water additional dredge sand needed raising propertyincreases elevations

marsh unabl increa

nourishment volumes must increase to accomodate faster shoreline change and additional dredge sand needed raising open water more than 3x more marshmore created elevations infrastructure and buildings increases than 3xproperty more marsh created than filled by relocated development open water rebuilt in place after storm than filled by relocated development structure and buildings increases nourishment volumes must increase to damage until they are uilt in place after storm to rising seas accomodate faster shoreline change and abandoned Barrier island migration, the proposed alternative, provides more protected dune nourishment volumes increase to needed raising damage until they are additional dredge sand Barrier island migration, the proposed alternative, provides more must protected dune accomodate faster shoreline change and andoned toand risingmarsh seas land while allowing development to shift to a more property elevations and marsh land while allowing development to shift to a more additional dredge sand needed raising compact, ISLAND less vulnerable form. property elevations BARRIER MIGRATION compact, less vulnerable form. community responds and adapts to natural shoreline retreat rather than fighting this process RIER ISLAND MIGRATION

community responds and adapts to natural shoreline retreat rather than fighting this process

community responds and adapts to natura retreat rather than fighting this process community responds and adapts to natural shoreline retreat rather than fighting this process open water remains the same or is reduced open water remains the same or is reduced more than 3x more marsh created than filled by relocated development more than 3x more marsh created than filled by relocated development

otected dune

es more protected dune more

alternatives alternatives

MAGES

fig. 3 (opposite) Parcels

7 This project illustrates the following scenario: by the year 2015, a series of new lots are constructed on the bay side of the barrier island. Beach front land owners have their property rights transferred to these new lots by local planning authorities.

Small existing cottages capable of moving are moved to new lots and reoriented to maximize bay and marsh views. Others must be rebuilt.

From this point on, whenever the shoreline retreats to within a given distance of the front row of houses, development rights for those parcels are then transferred to the back of the island. By the year 2125, the retreating shoreline and dune system has again reached the first properties moved. Local planning authorities again initiate the cottage

hland drowns, le to keep pacemoving with process. This time, the move goes smoother because these asing lagoon depth residents have had 75-100 years to come up with a plan for moving. The light infrastructure is mostly removed from the site, leaving structures that help mark the passage of time and frame views.

8 For a lively introduction to a real community as it is reconfigured through cottage relocation visit the Roy Carpenters Beach Association Facebook page: https://www. facebook.com/pages/RoyCarpenters-Beach/153025181663

restoration attempts, including a failed program in the midto-late 20th century that pumped seawater from the ocean into the bay to increase bay salinity.

Neighborhood Migration At the scale of the neighborhood, existing houses are moved, row by row, to new parcels created on the back side of the island (fig. 4a, 4b). This movement occurs every 75 to 100 years, corresponding with the natural erosion of the shoreline.7 This process might seem inordinately dramatic or costly to the uninitiated. Yet cottage movement was historically a commonplace approach to managing the shifting barrier island landscape along the mid-Atlantic and New England, particularly for landowners who owned large swaths of barrier islands from ocean to bay. Today, the practice continues in more modest ways: during my fieldwork in 2013, I spoke to several residents of Sandbridge, VA, who pointed out cottages that had been relocated in the last few years. In Sandbridge and similar communities, existing cottages are typically moved to new lots facing the beach or bay as a cheaper alternative to building new houses on prime real estate. U.S. Roy Carpenter’s Beach in South Kingstown, Rhode Island is an example of a more systematic mass relocation of cottages that is also occurring.8 After Hurricane Sandy, the community moved two rows of shore-front cottages inland to cope with retreating shorelines.

Lot Migration What might this kind of process look like for an individual property owner? The transition from static to dynamic property ownership would require the use of a combination of techniques and technologies. One of the most obvious and dramatic would be movement of houses. After Hurricane Sandy, many people on the New York/New Jersey coast became familiar with the costly process of house raising and relocation, along with the heavy equipment and specialized labor required for this operation. Many sought relief from several state and federal programs that provided money for this sort of retrofit. In Roy Carpenter’s Beach, the cost of house movement is undertaken by the owners of the community and shared by renters in their lease cost. Moving houses comes with a cost, but this also provides important opportunities for owners. Cottages could be relocated to better resist prevailing winds and surf, to frame views, and to provide more favorable solar orientation. The cyclical process of house 105

106

biodegradable, seeded geotextile tube

public fishing area

geotextile tube bank stabilization

modular unit

dredge lot construction

MODULAR HOME CONSTRUCTION

constructed wetland “overwash parks”

moving existing cottage $12-16 per sq. foot

COTTAGE RAISING + MOVEMENT

relocated beach cottage

35’ road right of way allows cottage movement

existing development

At the scale of the barrier island, cottage relocation and lot building allows for a gradual retreat landward

small boat docking

dredge placement wetland grass plugs

WETLAND CONSTRUCTION

public waterfront access

water taxi wait area

NEIGHBORHOOD PIER AND LANDING

c. 2100 (~100 years of retreat)

107

biodegradable, seeded geotextile tube

public fishing area

geotextile tube bank stabilization

modular unit

dredge lot construction

MODULAR HOME CONSTRUCTION

neighborhood

FIGURE 6

moving existing cottage $12-16 per sq. foot

COTTAGE RAISING + MOVEMENT

35’ road right of way allows cottage movement

At the scale of the barrier island, cottage relocation and lot building allows for a gradual retreat landward of buildings and infrastructure. This proposal does not advocate for more development of barrier islands or thoughtless filling of wetlands. Rather, it is a sea level rise adaptation strategy that recognizes both the important processes at work building land on barrier islands and the rights of existing land owners to enjoy a dynamic coast. It demonstrates a way of making barrier island development increasingly compact and defensible against storms while gradually facilitating the natural retreat of dunes and marshes.

small boat docking

dredge placement wetland grass plugs

WETLAND CONSTRUCTION

water taxi wait area

NEIGHBORHOOD PIER AND LANDING

h sand

ash builds surface

compact

108

constructed wetland platform

vegetation speeds sand accumulation

occupiable overwash

OVERWASH LAND BUILDING

resident required to pay for septic field and hazardous material removal

beach goers watch house collapse

resident chose not to move

OPTING OUT OF THE SYSTEM

Besides cottage movement, the other important process in this proposal is building land using blown and overwashed sand. Today, barrier island asphalt roads are continually covered with sand and then “cleaned” of this material. In this proposal, roads and driveways are constructed with sand, rather than degraded with sand. This is accomplished using existing technology for temporary roadways. A plastic/geotextile web is

cellular geotextile road base

35’ road right of way allows cottage movement vegetation/fencing facilitate deposition

OVERWASH ROAD CONSTRUCTION

FIGURE 8

fig. 4a (previous page) Axon Plan fig. 4b (opposite) Details

9 Nathan Kelly, Rhode Island Transfer of Development Rights Manual, (Providence: State of Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management, Sustainable Watersheds Office, 2015).

moving also opens up opportunities for landscapes to allude and respond to change over time.

Another important element of this proposal is building land using blown and over-washed sand. Today, barrier island asphalt roads are continually covered with sand and then “cleaned� of this material. I propose to construct roads and driveways with sand, rather than degrade with sand. This is accomplished using existing technology for temporary roadways. I placed a plastic/geotextile web is placed in the sand and covered and I compact and wet additional sand to create a simple, yet continually accreting road surface.

Mobilization Of course, this model necessitates a number of large assumptions. Most notable is the political will for and acceptance of a planning mechanism that relocates properties from the front to the back of a barrier island. In cases of condominium complexes, campgrounds, and cottage communities like Roy Carpenter’s Beach, centralized ownership facilitates a straightforward mechanism for large scale relocation of houses. However, similar property relocation/modification strategies, such as conservation development and transfer of development rights for agricultural and wilderness protection, have demonstrated that private land buyers and sellers can be persuaded to share land with other buyers or provide denser development.9 With sea level rise threatening so many communities, we desperately need to work with new methods.

We need to adjust our planning policies in order to live with shoreline processes. Imagining alternative development scenarios provides concrete models to evaluate and to inspire these methods. With ingenuity, we can change the way we inhabit barrier islands, so that these beautiful features of the coast can continue to provide pleasure to future generations.

109

Larry Bowne

Play Perch: A Strange Object? Or the Architectural Uncanny?

fig. 1 Play Perch, Looking South.

Alien Phenomenology

Site work surrounding Play

The alien might not be life, at all. . .The alien is not limited to another person, or even another creature. The alien is anything—and everything—to everything else.1

Perch included clearing the land, constructing a switch back trail and constructing egg-shaped concrete basins.

Image by Play Perch student team 1 Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, Or What’s It’s Like to Be a Thing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 34.

2 Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, 32.

In Alien Phenomenology, Or What’s It’s Like to Be a Thing Ian Bogost summarizes the work of contemporary thinkers who collectively have come to be known as Speculative Realists.

Bogost develops a sort of primer for engaging in the practice of his version of phenomenology, which he defines as that “area of metaphysics concerned with how stuff appears to beings.”2 For Bogost, a computer gaming designer and professor of digital media at the Georgia Institute of Technology, the most useful thinker for his new phenomenology is Graham Harman, who works to upend philosophy’s reliance on human subjectivity. Harman argues that all objects relate to all other objects (whether or not we homo sapiens are capable of witnessing their inter- relations). Object Oriented Ontology (OOO or “Triple-O”) posits that all things exist equally and that to arrive at any understanding of reality beyond our

111

fig. 2 Play Perch, Looking North.

The perforation patterns on the self-weathering steel panels are derived from digitized images of bird feathers. Photograph by Susannah Sayler

3 Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, 58.

4 Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, 92.

sensory awareness, we can at best speculate.

In the second chapter of Alien Phenomenology, Bogost initiates a three-part manual for the deployment of his new metaphysics, in which he eschews the writing of academic books as the sole or even principal mode of engaging in OOO. He advocates an ontography, a sort of textual and/or graphic description of the way things exist for other things, revealing what he calls the “hidden density” of an object.3 But because the inner life of things must be speculated upon (rather than fully known), and the essential complexity of objects and their relations “withdraw” from our scrutiny, metaphor allows us temporary access to the elusive nature of objects. Even as we develop or deploy a metaphor, that analogy is of course a fabrication: it is a fiction, offered to better delineate some quality of a thing we deem important, but it is also a mental construction, something crafted. The metaphor is therefore both a thing made and a thing made up. Bogost gives “the name carpentry to this practice of constructing artifacts as a philosophical practice.”4 Play Perch is a constructed artifact, an architectural object. This paper speculates on the nature of that object.

112

5 Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, 38.

Ontography In the section of the book “Ontography: Revealing the Rich Variety of Being,” Bogost defines ontography as “a general inscriptive strategy, one that uncovers the repleteness of units and their interobjectivity. From the perspective of metaphysics, ontography involves the revelation of object relationships without necessarily offering clarification;”5 the alien phenomenologist might begin by making lists.

Play Perch is a community service project, conceived and realized by students and faculty at Syracuse University School of Architecture during the 2012/2013 academic year. The client, Jowonio School, is a recognized world leader in innovative education for students with special needs, aged from 3 to 6 years old. Jowonio is guided by the philosophy that students with special and traditional needs should be educated in an inclusive setting. Up to 30 percent of the preschoolers have some physical or mental disability, including autism, impaired vision and limited mobility. The school provides an environment where all students may take part in as many class activities as possible, consistently balancing risk with opportunity. Jowonio stakeholders collaborate to educate each other in the need for all preschoolers, including the disabled, to fortify their minds and bodies in a safe and nurturing environment.

Play Perch, in other words, is a tree house for students who under normal circumstances cannot themselves climb trees.

Play Perch is an outdoor learning environment, sited on a nature trail in the woods abutting the school playgrounds.

Play Perch consists of a platform built around a mature tree in a relatively open clearing (fig. 1). The steep slope makes it possible to have a horizontal ramp into the structure from the trail side while having an 8ft clearance between ground and the floor at the other end. The project allows all students to experience natural forces of wind, sun, rain, and gravity in an elevated, 250-square foot structure clad in perforated self-weathering steel. Interior features allow for teaching, study and play beneath a translucent ceiling.

In other words, Play Perch is a device for coding and recording environmental phenomena, even when there are no school children present.

Play Perch is the result of design/build initiative, led by faculty from the architecture and engineering departments, working with students majoring in architecture, art, engineering and industrial design. The project was administered outside any course structure. For the first semester, faculty 113

fig. 3 This axonometric drawing shows the relationship between loadbearing framing members and the surrounding enclosure. The frames were fabricated off-site, attached to metal panels in the basement of Slocum Hall to form modules that could be carted to the site. Once there they were tilted up into place.

A translucent roof of polycarbonate panels was installed above the framing.

Drawing by Play Perch student team.

6 Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, 42.

fig. 4 This drawing shows a detailed taxonomy of the project, with each component of the design ascribed to a singular organ or appendage of bird anatomy.

Drawing by Play Perch student team.

7 Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, 64.

8 George Lucas, Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back, directed by Irvin Kershner (Lucasfilm Ltd./ 20th Century Fox, 1980).

advisors Larry Bowne (the author) and Sinéad Mac Namara worked with student leaders and school administrators to set up an independent study 3-credit-hour course, taught by professors beyond their standard course load. For the second semester, faculty worked with student volunteers.

Play Perch, in other words, is a design/build project for a school without a design/build program, a studio project realized outside studio, and a volunteer effort by professionals working for hire on a fixed salary.

Play Perch, of course, cannot be reduced to a summary of its provenance, performance or pedagogy. For the alien phenomenologist, this rhetoric of enumerated quantities becomes a sort of litany. The list has the power to make the object at once familiar and strange.

The enumeration of factual data enforces a sort of inherent partition not just between things but among the qualities that are being enumerated, abandoning “narrative coherence in favor of worldly detail.”6 But eschewing holistic descriptions need not be merely textual or verbal; our graphics themselves can emphasize the singularity of parts and the gaps existing between any pair of components. Bogost advocates for the use of the “exploded view diagram,” familiar to anyone who has ever put together IKEA shelving or a Lego kit (fig. 3, 4).

For architects, exploded axonometric drawings and their kin, cut-away perspectives, have the ontographic quality of belying objective unity and prioritizing component distinctions.

Metaphorism The colorful shapes and lines of figure 4, identifying elements such as beak and wing, situate Play Perch squarely within the bounds of Bogost’s second tactic. In Chapter 3, “Metaphorism: Speculating about the Unknowable Inner Lives of Units,” Bogost claims, “[un]like objective phenomenology, alien phenomenology accepts that the subjective character of experiences cannot be fully recuperated objectively.” Moreover, he notes (and the italics are his) “the only way to perform alien phenomenology is by analogy. . . .”7 For Play Perch, students presented initial design ideas to the Jowonio board early in the Fall 2012 semester for feedback and evaluation (fig. 5). From the outset, students developed and devised an identity for the project inspired by both the Eastern Blue Bird and the AT-AT Imperial Walker from Star Wars.8 The state bird of New York has blue, orange and white-hued plumage, a trio of colors that happens to be used on the uniforms of the Syracuse University athletic 115

fig. 5 (previous) Play Perch study models. The scheme is derived from the New York State bird, the Eastern blue bird, and the AT-AT Imperial Walker from Star Wars.

Photograph by Play Perch student team. fig. 6 Section Perspective.

Drawing by Play Perch student team

9 David Ruy, “Returning to (Strange) Objects,” in Adaptive Ecologies: Correlated Systems of Living, ed. Theo Spyropoulos (London: Architectural Association Publications, 2013)

teams. The AT-AT Imperial Walker gave access to the project for both the student designers and their young clients.

In the completed project, the design features a level platform that encircles the tree trunk and extends out into the air above the hillside. The 250-square foot platform cantilevers laterally as well as beyond the column line. From below, six pairs of rough-hewn black locust timber columns support the platform. Custom steel splines connect these V-shaped posts to poured-in-place concrete footings and the platform undercarriage. The concrete of the foundation piers, along with a strip footing at the entry, are pigmented with iron oxide.

We encounter here a bit of conflict between Bogost’s advocacy of metaphorism in alien phenomenology and the ways in which many architects consider the relevancy of Graham Harman and other object-oriented philosophers to their own design processes.9 For Harman, Speculative Realism serves to avoid the twin foibles of object description: the first, which he calls “undermining,” has its roots in scientific naturalism, holding that any object must be considered the amalgamation of some smaller components, be they quarks or quirks. The second, which Harman calls “overmining,” stems from the social relativist imperative to understand all objects in terms of political agency, social framework or cultural contingency.

Prior to OOO, objects, including architectural objects, could be considered important only in so far as they represent some a priori idea or concept, and matter only in so far as they achieve some social good or advance some ideological position.

118

10 See, for example the Association

The student and faculty creators of Play Perch are guilty of both undermining and overmining. The rationale for the project inevitably includes deference to the metaphor of a composite blue bird and Imperial fighter. This simple combination of more fundamental objects serves as a sort of alibi for design decisions that could be defined in other, more particularly architectural, terms. Metaphorism may help Ian Bogost explain how, for instance, a digital sensor might perceive a puppy, but for architects like David Ruy, metaphor serves to obscure the actual autonomy of the architectural artifact. Maybe worse, Play Perch is frequently, and perhaps exclusively, described in terms of its agency: what it does with and for the small student clients who make regular use of it. The (often salutary, even self-congratulatory) descriptions of the project in most articles in the popular and academic press note its impact on the lives of disenfranchised, disabled children.10

of Collegiate Schools of Design 2013-2014 “Architectural Education Awards Book,” describing the Design/Build faculty honor given to Play Perch advisors Larry Bowne and Sinéad Mac Namara in 2014: “A wonderful combination of design-build and community engagement, this submission is held up for the compelling nature of its outreach purpose. The project, making architecture for children with special needs, is a particularly good example of an appropriate setting for architecture students to be volunteering their knowledge and efforts in a community.”

11 Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, 93.

Carpentry After somewhat dismissing the production of books by academics (in a book by an academic), Bogost exhorts meta-physicians interested in pursuing alien phenomenology to put down their laptops and practice philosophy. It is worth quoting him here at length:

Some people become writers, others jewelers, others motorcycle mechanics. Similarly, philosophical creativity can take many forms, and each philosopher’s approach to carpentry will differ. In addition to increasing the variety, playfulness, and earnestness of discourse, carpentry has the added benefit of inviting thinkers to exercise and develop their natural talents. . .

In the context of alien phenomenology, “carpentry” borrows from two sources. First, it extends the ordinary sense of woodcraft to any material whatsoever—to do carpentry is to make anything, but to make it in earnest, with one’s own hands, like a cabinetmaker. Second, it folds into this act of construction Graham Harman’s philosophical sense of “the carpentry of things,”. . . refer[ing] to how things fashion one another and the world at large. Blending these two notions, carpentry entails making things that explain how things make their world.11

During the construction phase, students and faculty optimized the execution of the project, assembling a team of

119

off-campus local artisans and small shops to facilitate on-campus modular panelization in the wood and metal shops; on-site construction was minimized as far as practicable. An industrial design student with a welding license deployed his expertise to fabricate custom steel splines for connections between the pier, columns and platform framing. The students sourced producers and installers with expertise in the Rust Belt economy of Upstate New York, including laser-cut self-weathering steel sheeting, baked-on ceramic coatings for metal fittings, and digitally driven water-jet ceiling panels.

The students collaborated with a local artisan to source lumber; they selected black locust, which is naturally weatherand termite-resistant. The project accommodates the severe Syracuse winters, accepting the aging of materials: exterior rusted steel panels will weather to orange before being waxed to minimize transfer of rust to users’ hands, while copper sheets on the cantilevered overlook will develop a green patina.

The interior design features a blue tile floor suitable for playground use that continues over the top of two furniture pieces, a pair of hybrid seats-and-tunnels that students came to call “the caterpillar” and “the slug.” On the caterpillar, the tunnel is lined with green high density polyethylene panels etched with the footprints of local animals. A specimen table from the same color HDPE sits atop a yellow powder-coated mini tree-shaped steel base, similarly etched with local leaf varieties and inset with magnifying glasses for the children to closely examine their findings along the trail. Overhead, a translucent polycarbonate roof rests on galvanized steel purlins, softly illuminating the interiors. Along the inside face of the perforated exterior steel modules, linseed-rubbed locusts posts support a wood trellis, providing a cove for LED strip lighting. The brilliantly colored interior contrasts with the subtle hues of the exterior materials.

Remember, however, that “carpentry entails making things that explain how things make their world.” Remember as well the environmental performativity of Play Perch: rain splashes on translucent roofing panels, which refract sunlight that is itself dappled through leaves, limbs, and branches. The precipitation rolls down the polycarbonate, collecting in an extruded steel channel. The moisture runs along the gutter where the beam becomes a cantilevered outrigger, projecting beyond the limits of the cladding. A rock, set into the soil beneath the cantilever, serves as a splash block.

120

fig 7 Play Perch interior. A specimen table sits in the corner. A custom climbing rope encircles the trunk, which rises up through an oculus in the roof. A small seating area allows teachers to

When centipedes and cicadas are the sole witnesses to the scene, the rain falls, the roof gathers it, the rock receives it.

Objects, strange to each other but connected by events and circumstances, relate to each other. Or so we speculate.

bring an entire class into the space.

Photograph by Play Perch student team.

Site Rain, centipede, rock: in OOO terms, these are objects worthy of contemplation and consideration. But David Ruy, in “Returning to (Strange) Objects,” notes that when we aggregate such isolated elements, and begin to call them “world” or “nature,” we cease to refer to real objects but rather to some “hypothetical super-container” of such objects:

In this respect, Harman’s object-oriented ontology opens up a unique possibility of rethinking the peculiar problems associated with the problem of nature. A return to the object would have to be understood as a turning away from a mythological or sentimental understanding of nature and a turn towards the particularities and the essential strangeness of the objects themselves.12

12 David Ruy, “Returning to (Strange) Objects,” in Adaptive Ecologies, ed.

Theodore Spyropoulos (London: Architectural Association, 2013), 273.

Let us look at the essential strangeness of one such object, our outdoor classroom in Central New York. The Jowonio preschool lies at the base of a low glacial drumlin. Behind the school’s playground, a nature trail loops along the crest of

121

fig. 8 Site Plan This plan shows projected improvements along Sarah’s Path, the nature trail north of the Jowonio Playground. Indicated in red are two projects already completed: Play Perch (Larry Bowne and SinÊad Mac Namara, faculty advisors) and Mouse House (Roger Hubeli, faculty advisor). Drawing by Play Perch student team

the hill, follows a ridge a bit below a bluff above, and winds through woods before heading back down the slope (fig. 8).

Students consulted with a geotechnical engineer and the city arborist, and chose to construct Play Perch around a tree rather than in one. They opted to locate Play Perch where they could avoid unstable slopes and facilitate foundation design and project construction. The selected site features an old-growth tree standing in an open clearing, with a slope that made it possible to enter a horizontal ramp at one end but overlook an eight-foot drop at the other. Through bare winter trees, the site has fine views of the school and its playground.

The rise of the slope, along with the cantilever of the platform above, allowed the students to design a child-sized outdoor room underneath Play Perch, which became a space of discover and exploration. To maximize the use of this outdoor area, students fabricated a dropped ceiling of cementitious fiberboard, scribed with a constellation of backlit openings. Surrounding Play Perch, the design team cleared brush and debris to construct a new switchback path, enhancing accessibility for disabled children. Students wove fallen branches and twigs into a nest-like lining for the paths, forming a perimeter to the site that they then dotted with concrete eggs for the children to encounter during their play 122

13 Richard Louv, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder (New York: Algonquin Books, 2005).

(fig. 2).

Our problem here is turning away, in Ruy’s terms, from “a mythological or sentimental understanding of nature.” Can we as human subjects even do so? We could quantify, in our fact-laden method described above, solar heat gain on the roofing panels, the annual precipitation shed by the roof, and the volume of wind permitted by the laser-cut openings in the self-weathering steel wall modules. Or we could conjoin sun and rain and wind and call them “nature” or, better, “natural phenomena.” Doing so is diminished by neither myth nor fancy; the wall panels genuinely do capture summer breezes and the roof truly diffuses the intense summer sun.

Even if it were our imperative to treat the strange object that is Play Perch as a Triple-O “Strange Object,” chances are good that our human subjects—our clients, that is—would continue to see the object in terms of its agency and practicality. At Jowonio, teachers, therapists, and administrators collaborate in redressing what is known as “nature deficit disorder.” Educators and researchers who study early childhood development have, relatively recently, discerned that reduced outdoor playing time and restricted access to woods, fields, lakes, and streams have negatively contributed to students’ behavior and health. In particular, students with ADD improve significantly when exposed to the calm and quiet of an outdoor setting.13 Some classes at Jowonio visit the nature trail every day that temperatures exceed 20 degrees Fahrenheit, and all children are encouraged to explore the grounds of Sarah’s Path. If sections of the trail are inaccessible to wheelchairs, classroom attendants will carry children to outdoor activities.

Designs for Play Perch emphasize this multivalent reading of “nature,” incorporating sun, wind, water management and the like to educate young children about environmental conditions and phenomena. The building envelope is permeated and perforated throughout, resisting weather rather than sealing against it. Timber-framed walls lined with laser-cut self-weathering steel panels forming the perimeter have incisions patterned after bird feathers. The holes vary in size to create viewing apertures. Overhead, galvanized steel struts support polycarbonate panels, lapped like shingles.

Steel channels, welded to the frame, act as gutters which cantilever beyond the building facades. A splash block below the outrigger allows children to observe rainwater draining off the steeply pitched roof. At the peak, an oculus opens onto the trunk of the tree, allowing children to look up into the 123

14 Anthony Vidler, “Unhomely Houses,” in The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1992), 23.

15 Vidler, “Unhomely Homes.”

branches. At the entry, roof panels pitch upward to mimic the tail feathers of a bird. The alibi continues to the opposite end of the volume, where the beak, a large copper-clad cantilevered window, tilts out to maximize the children’s view over the escarpment. A customized climbing net wraps around the trunk both above and below the platform, stretching across an opening in the decking.

As much as alien phenomenology has assisted us in understanding the peculiar presence of our tree house for children who cannot climb trees, perhaps we would be better off relying on Anthony Vidler’s The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely. The uncanny, the familiar strangeness of the unfamiliar, becomes for the witness, in Vidler’s words, “disturbing, suspect, strange . . . deriving its force from its . . . lurking unease.”14 Play Perch is, after all, a tree house, which of course is like a house but not a house at all. In that likeness, there comes something unalterably alienating.

Picture the setting: a visitor wanders through a thickly wooded path, up and down a hill of loose glacial moraine.

Suddenly, in the distance, an object appears. Steel panels, seemingly caked with rust, attest to a withdrawal back into the hillside from which the building rises, yet the steel is characterized by hundreds of precisely inscribed apertures; the object evinces industrial processes of cutting and bending.

The perforations afford views through the volume, so that the patterns on the metal surface merge with those made by sunlight and tree branches until the whole becomes indistinguishable from its parts or from its context (fig. 2). We match now the definition of what Vidler calls the uncanny (“literally, ‘beyond ken’—beyond knowledge”).15 I am less concerned here with the uncanny in its forebod­ ing, proto-horror-story guise; the project is, after all, built for small children, who scarcely need their play spaces to offer a sense of menace or doom. Rather, we can turn to Vidler’s chapter “Vagabond Architecture” in which he describes John Hedjuk’s small, seemingly animal-like proposals for Vladivostock and other cities. In these projects:

Hedjuk seems self-consciously to activate . . . roles that derive from the confrontation of a fixed context with an unfixed and roving subject . . . Hejduk’s constructions literally construct “situations” from the part-random, part-preconceived intersec­tion of objects and subjects, insistent provocateurs of the . . . unconscious.16

16 Vidler, “Unhomely Homes,” 210.

124

fig. 9 Play Perch, Looking West.

Sited within a clearing on a nature trail in the woods abutting a preschool campus, the building is framed by surrounding trees.

Photograph by Susannah Sayler

17 Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, 134.

18 Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, 134.

19 Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just, (Princeton: Princeton University, 1999).

The fantastical profile of the thing, seeming to rise up around the trunk of a tree even as the trunk climbs out of the ocular peak of the roof, is perhaps the single strongest aspect of the work.

Wonder Bogost encourages a kind of wonder as we approach the potential encounter with what he calls “the awesome plenitude of the alien everyday,”17 which neatly parallels the uncanny aspect of Play Perch described above. Indeed that which we might call familiarly strange is remarkably akin to Bogost’s assertion that “[t]he true alien recedes interminably even as it surrounds us completely. It is not hidden in the darkness of the outer cosmos or in the deep-sea shelf but in plain sight, everywhere, in everything.”18 All we have to do is look.

But we have been encouraged to look by writers long before Speculative Realists goaded us into doing so. Elaine Scarry, in On Beauty and Being Just, notes that “at the moment we see something beautiful, we undergo a radical decentering.”19 Citing Simone Weil, Scarry argues that “Beauty requires us ‘to give up our imaginary position as the

125

20 Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just.

21 Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just.

center . . .’”20 Even more, “it is not that we cease to stand at the center of the world, for we never stood there. It is that we cease to stand even at the center of our own world.”21 Objects can do that for us. They remove us from our privileged position as the unitary and unifying surveyor of all that lies before us. Instead, we stand in awe. There, before us, a strange, bird-like building, built by emerging architects as a tree house for the disabled, may indeed be alien or uncanny.

Or it may be merely beautiful.

Acknowledgments I wish to thank my faculty colleague Sinéad C. Mac Namara for our Play Perch collaboration. Professor Mac Namara, with me and solely, has authored numerous articles about Play Perch and has greatly assisted me in preparing this essay. The project could not have been realized without the incredible efforts of our students designers: Ford Bostwick, John Cardone, Jeffery Cheung, George Guarino, Zachary Harwin, Christina Hoover, Brian Luce, Sean Morgan, Sally Morrow, Doug Moskowitz, Steven O’Hara, Michael Palmer, Michaelle Williams, and Mark Zlotsky (Fall 2012); Ben AndersonNelson, Tom Arleo, Jessica Borri, Gabriel Boyajian, Charles Brock, John Coleman, Mark Hernandez, Daniel Hopkins, Tyler Holdren, Dong Min Shin, Winnie Tu, Emily Wutz and Sherina Zheng (Spring 2013). I appreciate all the additional student volunteers from Syracuse University. Susannah Sayler has generously shared her photographs.

126

Colleen Tuite & Ian Quate

I Love Extremophiles!

The only alien plant is Earth - JG Ballard

fig. 1 Image from GRNASFCK’s solo exhibition I Love Extremophiles!

In the future, the Ego becomes the Eco, as our cultural and survival practices become fused with biology and technology.

We look to the strategies of ancient life as a method of adaptation to the Anthropocene Epoch.

Extremophiles are nature’s original metabolic organisms, flourishing in extreme conditions, utilizing unusual sources of energy including ammonia, metal ions, petrochemicals, and hydrogen gas. Currently, mining and gas industries are domesticating extremophiles for resource extraction by the mining and gas industries. Meanwhile, within the urban environment, they remain feral and unstudied, colonizing post-industrial and contaminated sites, slowly but surely metabolizing petrochemicals and other introduced toxins.

Understood as such, extremophile microorganisms can be seen as stewards and agents of change within the industrial landscape. They can also be a model for considering hyper-adaptability and site-specificity as comparable design tools within an ecologically destabilized future.

129

fig. 2 Photo from Summit on Invisible Urbanism by Nate French.

Participants are shown clockwise from top David Fletcher, Nicholas Korody, Colleen Tuite, Ian Quate, Andrew Cal, Geneva Travis and Murphy Stein

The Summit on Invisible Urbanism took place in October 25, 2014 at StoreFrontLab Gallery in San Francisco, as a part of GRNASFCK’s solo exhibition I Love Extremophiles! I Love Extremophiles! and The Summit on Invisible Urbanism were produced with support from a StoreFrontLab grant and co-curated by Arianne Gelardin and Jacob Palmer. For an afternoon, this cross-disciplinary panel discussed and debated contaminated sites, microorganisms, and the place for humanity in a post-human epoch: NICHOLAS KORODY, artist and theorist: The experience of biological awareness is kinda like waking up in one of those dreams that is so rich and elaborate that you mistake it for reality. One of those dreams when you wake you find yourself momentarily sitting back, suddenly pausing when you’re brushing your teeth, and put on your clothes as you re-live moments from the dream. And then your alarm goes off, and you realize you’ve sleptwalk, and you’re really late for work. What’s even worse is that you’ve set the house on fire; it’s actually burning all around you. The dream exists in modernity, but its actually much older.

GENEVA TRAVIS, resource management consultant: From a resource management perspective, the first question we ask are: What are the tools on hand? On site?

DANIEL FLETCHER, landscape architect and principal of Fletcher Studio: Our office did a theoretical project called The Museum of Entropy, which asks human beings, collectively as extremophiles, to begin to learn how to collaborate with

130

fig, 3 Critical Research Station with Assorted Extremophiles, microscopes, critical texts, specimen

catastrophe. Paul Virilio posits that catastrophe is the new norm. Society will not simply adapt, but must learn to collaborate and become resilient in this new reality.

slides, assorted extremophiles 55 x 55 x 40�, 2014.

COLLEEN TUITE, co-director of GRNASFCK: And it’s worthwhile to note that the site and the tools have changed dramatically in the past twenty years or so, we are now directly confronted with the byproducts of the industrial age, accessible technology, and the slow horror of climate change.

DF: Urban development is always a brownfield site. So with this in mind, we need to abandon the idea that a project can be fully realized within a human timescale.

IAN QUATE, co-director of GRNASFCK: How would design and architecture change if we surveyed microorganisms just as we survey utilities and trees?

MURPHY STEIN, futurist and robotics developer at Google: The virtual is the tool to explore non-human environments. Considering contaminated sites, use of the virtual is a really interesting method for taking people where they otherwise cannot safely go.

GT: So, yes, we have unwittingly created extremophile habitat, such as brownfields and cooling ponds, but we have also generated the technology to identify and quanitify these opportunistic invisible populations. I think the next step would be to learn how to work with these new sites and tools, as opportunities to design for us, as humans, as well as to confront bio-catastrophe.

131

fig. 4 March for Invisible Urbanism, pine with printed cardstock, 11 x 72”, 2014.

fig. 5 Recommended Reading (San Francisco Edition), books with pedestal, 14 x 14 x 60”, 2014.

1 Mango Materials is a San Francisco based startup that produces biodegradable plastics from methane.

ANDREW CAL, molecular geneticist: While our methanogens at Mango are not technically extremophiles, some people think that eating gas seems extreme.1 NK: . . . Waking up from the dream requires the understanding that the house that we burnt down wasn’t ours to begin with, we are renting, subletting, maybe just AirBnB-ing. Even more frightening, the actual building is haunted, its literally alive . . . looking at the walls we can see they are crawling with biological life. . .

MS: Is it possible to empathize with non-humans? Bacteria?

132

SPURSE

Toward a Multi-Species Commons: A Call for a Post Nature/Culture Ecology

0. It’s About Systems 0.1 Everything is part of an ecosystem. There is nothing that is not part of a system. The divide we make between the “natural” and the “artificial” (or “cultural,” i.e. human made) is not a divide between two discrete systems. Everything is entangled in many ecosystems that cross all scales. Ecology is a field of engagement that necessarily ignores (and even actively refuses) any claims of a Nature-Culture divide (and more critically, the very concepts of Nature+Culture).

0.2 Systems are never singular. More than one is always at work. We need to be able to switch across incompossible systems, scales and perspectives in a rapid and creative fashion.

1. It’s a Dynamic World 1.0 Ecosystems are dynamic—they evolve and change. They are not stable or static over long historical periods. Succession between states of ecosystems is not preordained, linear or orderly. Systems are open, dynamic and have multiple stable states. (“Nature” is not “in balance.”)

135

1.1 Understanding the dynamic nature of our world does not mean either that everything is in total flux or that we should celebrate change for the sake of change. Far from it. It means that we have to study how dynamic systems operate, how they change states and identify their patterns and regularities to work within this reality (punctuated equilibrium is a useful concept in this regard).

1.2 Our classical framework for ecological understanding and action is far too focused on stasis, balance, essence, linear change and discrete objects. We need to focus on continuing to develop thoughtful frameworks that focus on systems, fields and non-linear and emergent processes.

1.3 A system is not simply a “thing” writ large. An ecosystem is not just a larger object. Systems have unique logics of feedback loops, meta-stability and unique modes of individuating that have little to do with our thing-centric models of thinking.

1.4 The evolution and development of actual systems make a mockery of conceptual paradigms of reality that uphold the categories of nature and culture, environment and organism, self and other, and technology and biology in their absolute refusal to correspond/entangle. These categories do not merely need to be blurred or hybridized—their status as the singular overarching framework is a fundamental part of the problem.

We need to develop alternative frameworks that refuse not only the divide between Nature and Culture, but the totality of the Nature+Culture framework. (This is a call for both a careful and systematic laying out of the existing paradigm, and an inventive curiosity to explore alternative models and develop new models).

2. Humans are Part of the World 2.0 Long before the industrial era humans began to have a significant role in the shape of most/all global ecosystems.

This makes it difficult to talk about the modern era as the Anthropocene with any accuracy (never mind the problematic mix of arrogance, crisis thinking and thing-centrism inherent in such a term).

2.0.1 None of this is to deny that humans—in the form of rapid climate change for example—are imposing enormous negative effects on contemporary ecosystems. Rather it is to 136

stress that we have always been part of the world and that the methodology/goal of environmental efforts should not be to remove humans from the world or to return the world to some pre-human eden. This is a dangerous and misguided way to frame our pressing ecological matters of concern (see Section 1.4). Moving to a new entangled framework is precisely to effectively and pragmatically come to terms with our place in the world, and to address concerns like rapid climate change from an integrated systems perspective.

2.1 Ecosystems could also be called “eco-social systems” to stress the full human embeddedness in such systems.

However, this might give one the false impression that today there are non-human embedded ecosystems. To say “ecosystem” is to talk about an assemblage of human and non-human actors and their practices.

2.2 The shape of all existing historical ecosystems in North America are significantly co-shaped by human practices.

There is at least a 10,000 year history of significant human co-evolving ecosystems that cannot be captured by terminology like “balance,” “harmony” or “oneness.” Indigenous communities are not caricatures of our desires for a pure harmonious people. They do not utilize our frameworks (Nature+Culture). They have been active, transformative agents that played significant roles in shaping the ecosystems that we now understand to be “Nature”. Early European explorers and biologist saw “wilderness” where they should have seen novel (to their eyes) forms of agroecosystems.

2.2.1 Migration, colonization, conquest—the meeting of peoples is really the meeting of distinct eco-social systems or assemblages. Humans always travel as an ecological assemblage—interdependent plants, animals, insects, bacteria and fungi.

2.2.2 All existing ecosystems have, in their composition of species, the history of these eco-social meetings of migrating human groupings/ecologies (much like the genetic trace of differing human cultures found in each one of us). Look closely at your lawn and you can quickly trace the movement of human-entangled multi-species assemblages—earthworms from Europe, Lambsquarter from Central America, plantain from Asia...

137

2.3 Non-human species utilize humans for their own ends.

When we plant or eat something we are doing its bidding as much as it is doing ours. Agency is distributed across systems and systems themselves have agency beyond the agency of their components.

2.4 All species manage or co-manage their ecosystems. We need to develop a better understanding of how systems self-manage. (We need to develop an expanded set of options beyond restoration-centric forms of ecological management.)

2.5 Restoration as management. Restoring an ecosystem is considered a human action that involves the deliberate choosing of one of many possible historic states. There is no single obvious state to which to return. Any historical recreation (which may be neither possible nor desirable) almost always comes at great long term cost in terms of resources and ecological impact. The choices are in no sense obvious or “natural”—restoration is an intensive act of sustained human intervention in an evolving ecosystem with very uncertain outcomes. “Restored” is always a term that needs scare quotes and a great deal of footnotes. While “restored” ecosystems can appear “wild” (i.e. unmanaged by human practices), they require rigorous and costly maintenance procedures that rival those of a classical French formal garden.

2.6 Co-management strategies should avoid defaulting to restoration—or arguments relying on an endorsement of “Nature”—and rather take into account/develop a host of possible ways to work within and move toward multiple and often differing ends. (None of this precludes restoration as an option or a strategic goal).

2.7 We need to develop ways to see the novelty, creativity and human embeddedness in all ecosystems. These will emerge from direct practices of engagement (see Section 5).

3. On Worldly Creatures and Environments 3.0 Species do not adapt to landscapes and come to “fit” where they live. Rather species and environments mutually inflect and shape one another (creatures are complex environments). Environments, as much as species, are the outcomes of evolutionary processes. The relation of organism to environment is intra-active. “Place” does not pre-exist as a container/ challenge for organisms to figure out how to fit into. Place 138

and organism are outcomes of processes of mutual inflections across multiple scales. Earthworms make soil and then they dwell in it (as new insects, plants, fungi and bacteria join them).

3.1 “Native species” and “invasive species” are anything but neutral terms. The concept of the ideal fit of a native species to a unique environment has direct and troubling genealogical links to 20th-century political movements (Nationalism + Fascism) that stressed the unique destiny of a people, their soil and the removal/eradication of those who do not belong. We need to be cautious about our willingness to continue these practices if “only” in the non-human world (see Section 2).

3.1.1 Native and invasive are concepts that attempt to stop history, dividing those that have always belonged from new-comers—refugees, migrants, drifters. Instead, we need a careful study of (1) actual dynamics (see Sections 1 and 2), and (2) how we understand ecosystemic “harm.” Two brief things are worth noting: the overwhelming majority of recent arriving species have no negative impact on existing ecosystems and the blaming of specific species for harm is to simply misunderstand the systemic nature of the issues that an ecosystem faces.

3.2 To move away from the problematic logic of native versus invasive does not mean we are forced to adopt an “anything goes” approach to (co-)managing ecosystems. Rather, we propose a pragmatic goal of cautiously negotiating the meetings and transformations between different dynamic human entangled multi-species assemblages towards new resilient eco-social systems. This will always be a complex negotiation, fraught with unexpected developments and setbacks, as well as the potential for astonishing surprise.

3.3 Let us test out new terms and logics to understand our dynamic ecosystems (without the terms Native or Invasive): rapid colonizers, recent adaptors, historically established communities/assemblages, historical species, recent ecological immigrant species, novel ecosystems, eco-social systems...

3.4 Understanding how we came to develop the Native/ Invasive framework for ecology is of critical importance.

Both of these binaries have a deeply problematic history that has it genesis in the development of the “Essence Ontology” bequeathed to us by Greek philosophy (fig. 1; see Section 4.3).

139

fig. 1 The Essence Procedure: The First Division

1 Such a claim can certainly be effectively made as Steven Jay Gould proves in his famous critique. See Steven Jay Gould, “An Evolutionary Perspective on Strengths, Fallacies and Confusions in the Concept of Native Plants,” http://arnoldia.arboretum.harvard. edu/pdf/articles/483.pdf

4. Science, Art and Nature 4.1 Our criticism of the Native/Invasive logic is not an argument for a “pure” science separated from value claims. We are not making the claim that the Native/Invasive framework is bad because it cannot be defended as “scientifically factual.”1 All scientific practices inherently involve value claims and these need to be part of the debate. This is not an argument for a form of cultural relativism. Our world is in-the-making, and we need to be cautious and pragmatic co-creators. This is an art—a new artistry of co-composition of the real in all its forms—that we should be striving to learn. (Perhaps this is a useful working definition of art for our times.)

4.2 The debate about the status of truth-claims in regards to these issues necessarily operates at the level of historical practices and conceptual frameworks (which might be loosely referred to as paradigms).

4.3 Classical environmentalism uses the historical model of the Nature+Culture paradigm. These concepts are unique

140

fig. 2 Metadiagram The underlying logic of essence ontology.

2 Anthropologists have been unable to find corresponding concepts in any non-western culture. Philippe Descola, Beyond Nature Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).

to the West, and are of relatively recent provenance.2 This paradigm operates via a process of division (immaterial vs material, changing vs unchanging, human vs non-human) and purification (truth is purely immaterial, timeless and non-human) in which humans and their practices (culture) are understood to be fundamentally distinct from the practices of non-humans (nature) (fig. 2). Note: this is an extension of the underlying logic of what we are calling “essence ontology.”

4.4 We argue, contrary to many environmentalists and conservationists, that the answer is not to fuse these terms (e.g. “we are all nature”). That would be to simply let one side of this duality supersede the other, leaving the duality and its logic firmly in place. The conceptual baggage of this “nature” is far too problematic to uncritically accept (after all it is part of why we use the dangerous logic of “native/invasive”). We need to develop an alternative framework and set of practices.

We need to put aside this paradigm.

4.5 The Nature/Culture paradigm operates as a sorting and purifying system which we call the Hygiene Procedures (fig.

3).

141

fig. 3 The Hygeine Procedures

5. Co-making New Forms of Place 5.0 Critical to an alternative ecology is the rethinking of place and our place in the universe. All of the above concepts and issues are about place—What are the dynamics of ecosystems?

How do species and environments meet? What belongs in an environment? Who gets to decide who gets to be in an environment?

5.0.1 Our current practices of place pull us in two seemingly opposite directions: towards free-floating placedness and towards a militant desire to purify places. They have resulted in a logic that disembeds us, allows us to operate in an eco-consumer logic and understands care for place as the purifying of place. We wish to leave this paradigm behind and develop multiple serious alternatives (including pursuing existing ones that are outside of western metaphysics (essence ontologies)—here we look especially to contemporary forms of animism).

142

5.0.2 While there is a general intellectual recognition and understanding of our intra-dependence on the environment, this most often takes on a highly abstract form that firmly sits within the problematic Nature+Culture framework (it is problematic insofar as it sees humans as intrinsically separate but needing to join nature). This makes it impossible to see the inherent actualities of intra-dependence.

5.1 The first step towards an alternative model of place is an understanding of the human as a fully collective being that is always part of an environment. We are embodied, embedded, extended, enactive and affective.

5.1.1 This entangled mode of being of an environment means that one’s senses (one’s sensorium) evolve as a totality and are co-shaped/shaping an environment. We have a historical cultural and environment based sensorium (fig. 4; note: see Cultural Sensorium). These are connected to distinct modes of being (cosmologies/ontologies).

5.2. Co-shaping is another term for co-making. This means a renewed focus on creativity (we are co-making/co-creating).

This requires a redefinition of creativity removed from a human attribute and from being a “thing.” Creativity is a fundamental quality of reality (from the big bang to earthly evolution). It is a distributed and relational practice that crosses scales, temporalities and species.

5.2.1 Other concepts that need to be carefully transformed: composition and craft (crafting). These are terms to be “rescued” from the arts and brought back into general practice. All life involves questions of composition and crafting.

These are necessarily aesthetic questions about the sensible, seeable, sayable and doable. These are multi-species questions of multiple cosmologies meeting.

5.2.2 These questions are best taken up by beginning with the composition of actual concrete local dependencies that can be felt and have meaningful real repercussions. This would be the beginning of a new sense of being-of-a-world.

5.3 We need to shift our thinking from a model of being-inthe-world to a model of being-of-the-world. We propose that 143

fig. 4 Self + Commons 1

one of the most accessible, direct and powerful ways of doing this is through foraging.

5.3.1 Foraging—the practice of gathering spontaneously growing edibles from your immediate environment—is a practice that can develop just such new visible, active and felt dependencies. When you pick and eat what is growing directly under your feet, what has happened to it now happens to you. You have a new form of responsibility to this plant and its immediate environment.

5.3.2 Foraging is thus not necessarily the answer to feeding the world’s hungry. It is a simple, deeply pleasurable form of engaged curiosity that helps us shift our most basic and fundamental understanding of being of a place. It is this shift that is so critical to many larger shifts in our culture that are prerequisites to real environmental change.

5.3.3 Foraging—eating other species—might at first seem like a contradictory way to promote a new ecologically sensitive paradigm. Should we not be preserving and giving species space to thrive on their own? The key is that we are interested 144

in producing a dependency (really an intra-dependency). In our current reality if one resource becomes scarce we shift to the next. This involves no dependency—at best it is mere commodity stewardship. But if you are reliant on rabbits or dandelion then you need to become part of co-making a world in which you all thrive (the multi-species commons).

This involves inventing new shared communities with thresholds, boundaries and limits. As many evolutionary theorists have pointed out (and as Michael Pollan popularized in The Botany of Desire), non-human species are not passive participants in our shared relationships. They are, in fact, getting us to care for them, spread their seeds and control their rivals. To eat something is an ethical act of care. This ethics is less about categorically saying no (to eating animals for example) and more about saying yes to eating with ecosystems into a shared intra-dependency.

5.3.4 Generalize the practices of foraging for food to the rest of one’s life.

6. Where We Live (Urbanism) 6.0 For many good reasons, the environmental movement has focused its efforts far from our cities. But today, with a good deal more than half of the world’s population living in urban environments, the ecology of cities needs to become a pressing issue. Classically, we have understood cities as degraded or destroyed versions of the ecosystem that existed before humans arrived. But urban environments are functioning, novel ecosystems. They cannot accurately be classified or understood as failed states of earlier historical ecosystems.

6.1 In urban ecosystems, even species that have been so poorly termed invasive (and seen as the most pernicious of the invasives) serve to spontaneously generate many important ecological practices, from sequestering toxins, to breaking up concrete surfaces, building and retaining soils, and promoting heat and drought tolerance. These species are perhaps better thought of as highly successful early colonizers that set into motion a process of succession (they would not be the dominant species forever) that allows a new dynamic ecosystem to emerge in stages/phases.

6.2 Most species that are recent migrants are not dominating highly successful early colonizers. We need some nuance to consider the effects of these recent immigrants.

145

fig. 5 Self + Commons 2 & 3

6.3 Urban ecosystems have a surprising level of biodiversity that often exceeds the biodiversity of the surrounding countryside. We should not assume the impoverished environmental state of urban ecosystems.

7. On the Commons 7.0 The commons, in classical political parlance, is, speaking generally, all of those things (understood as “resources”) that exceed individual ownership, usually because of their extreme size. The idea is that because of this size they exist as being common to all (and thus should not/cannot be privatized).

The standard examples are things like air and water.

7.0.1 From an economic perspective, many of our classical actions begin with the assumption that the world is composed of resources (and scarce resources at that—scarcity after all is a concept that is built into resource thinking). “Air,” “Water,” “Knowledge”—the great resource abstractions. But resources do not pre-exist. They must be made. And they must be made for or with someone or something. They must be made from some shared/entangled perspective. This making is always a relational (shared/common) activity.

7.0.2 Thus we offer a new speculative definition of the commons: being of a shared relation. “Being” here understood as a collective/collaborative becoming (a becoming something).

And “shared relation” understood as an emergent (semi-stable) environment in which properties/affordances/resources emerge (such as “air” or “water”).

7.1 We need to understand the processes by which properties emerge (if they are not pre-given objective qualities). Our speculation (following the Gibsons and others) is that properties are best understood as “affordances.” An affordance is an actionable possibility. Liquidness is an actionable possibility for a human body diving into water head first from twenty feet. The property of liquidness in water is relational (neither fully in the water, nor in the subjectivity of an agent). Water is liquid for certain types of bodies under certain circumstances; try jumping from 800 feet into water and it will have the relational properties of a solid. Properties (affordances) are for some subject in some particular circumstance. To say “water” or “air” as an abstraction is to ignore the specific emergent relational actualities that allowed forces to stabilize into something, say, “being liquid.” This liquidness is a specific 147

achievement. Another simple example: “oil” is only a (specific form of) resource if you have a system that activates it as such (e.g. cars, plastics, industry, etc). “Oil” is common to a shared relationship. It is a relationship that we are of in the same way we are of air and water (thus its constructedness and its subject-specificity go unnoticed).

7.1.2 “Liquidness” or any other affordance/property is made and held in common in the process of its coming into being (after which it is most often privatized and abstracted into a stable fixed universal resource that can be bought, sold and traded). We wish to draw attention to the process of emergence and to stress the need to refuse the “resourcification” (privatization) of affordances.

7.1.3 Being of a relationship (being common) is always a process that involves many active agents (beyond humans). These extend beyond the living—we need to consider the agency of materials. But even without going so far, to consider an affordance requires that we consider for whom this affordance emerges differently. Water emerges for us (as particularly embodied divers) as a liquid, but for a water skimmer (the insect) it is a tensile surface. How can we take into account that water is thus many contradictory things? We need to refuse the law of the excluded middle. This is why we are interested in the speculative generation of a “multi-species commons.”

7.1.3.1 Multispecies affordances. We have to consider the event of the commons from the perspective that each species/ environment/cosmology will have a radically different set of affordances while being engaged with the same “things.”

What shows up for each species/environment/cosmology is quite a different world. This is what we mean to consider with the term “multi-species commons.” It is not something that can be understood from the outside. We need to become active participants in these shared relational and emergent dynamics of making common. We need to become active co-makers (we are not currently not-makers; we are just silent or distant or passive co-makers). This returns us to the practice of foraging as a way to begin. Not as a solution—more a probe to activate possible emergent new experiments, what we like to call “pirate projects”—in contra-distinction to “pilot projects.”

148

7.1.2 “Things” (resources) are best understood as events—relational events that exceed their “being” at any given moment.

This is a not because some aspect of the thing is hidden.

Rather as relations change (as entanglements change, i.e. as “place” changes), the thing itself will co-emerge (see Section 2.7).

7.2 This moving “backwards” from resources/things to states of open (ontologically unknowable) possibility is key to this redefinition of “The Commons”—the shared un-ownable openness of reality.

7.3 We need to develop new methods—procedural techniques—for engaging with ecosystems. Make things (common)—their emergence refuses the passage into scarcity/ commodity. And remake existing things/practices common (transformatively remove things/practices from scarcity/ commodity).

7.4 Multi-species foraging is a commons-making act (being of a shared relation). And this is the beginning of much that we can evolve together.

An Introductory Bibliography 0. It’s about systems Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems Stockholm Resilience Centre, “Feedbacks in SocialEcological Systems,” http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=sOmRob-7xM4 Stockholm Resilience Centre, “The Best Explanation to Resilience,” http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=tXLMeL5nVQk 1. It’s a dynamic world Hobbs, Higgs, & Hall, Novel Ecosystems Susan Oyama, Evolution’s Eye: A Systems View of the BiologyCulture Divide 2. Humans are part of the world John Protevi, Life War Earth Charles Mann, 1491 Socio-ecological concepts and tools: http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol11/iss1/art13/ 149

Design framework for sociecological systems: http://www. ecologyandsociety.org/vol9/iss1/art18/ 3. On Worldly Creatures and Environments: Steven Jay Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory Mary Jane West-Eberhard, Developmental Plasticity & Evolution Steven Jay Gould, “An Evolutionary Perspective on Strengths, Fallacies, and Confusions in the Concept of Native Plants,” http://arnoldia.arboretum.harvard.edu/pdf/articles/483.pdf Anna Bramwell, Blood and Soil: Richard Walther Darre and Hitler’s “Green Party” Anna Bramwell, Ecology in the 20th century: A History Karl Ditt, “The Perception and Conservation of Nature in the Third Reich” Raymond Dominick, “The Nazis and the Nature Conservationists” Franz-Josef Brüggemeier, Mark Cioc, Thomas Zeller, How Green Were the Nazis?: Nature, Environment, and Nation in the Third Reich Zygmunt Bauman, “The Holocaust and Modernity,” http:// www.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/opinion/03Raffles. html?_r=0 Hugh Raffles, “Speaking Up for the Mute Swan,” http:// www.nytimes.com/2014/02/18/opinion/speaking-up-forthe-mute-swan.html?_r=0 4. Science, Art & Nature Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope Philippe Descola, Beyond Nature Culture Marshall Salins, On the Western Invention of Human Nature 5. Co-making new forms of place Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus Evan Thompson, Mind in Life Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage Samuel Thayer, Natures Garden Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics 6. Where we live (urbanism) Peter Del Tredici, “Urban Ecologies & Plants,” http://landscapeurbanism.com/article/peter-del-tredici/ Stewart Pickett, “Urban Ecosystems,” http://www.britannica. com/EBchecked/topic/1719572/urban-ecosystem/296791/ Urban-ecology 150

7. On the Commons Bollier & Helfrich, Th Wealth of the Commons Elinor Ostrom, Sustainable Development and the Tragedy of the Commons,� http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=ByXM47Ri1Kc J.J. Gibson The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception E. J. Gibson The Ecological Approach to Perceptual Learning and Development Jacob von Uxekull, Theoretical Biology

151

Katherine Cannella

Queensway Catalyst

fig. 1 Found site conditions

1 Forever Urban Wild is my proposal for a new initiative within the NYC Parks Department’s Forever Wild

Approaching an abandoned railroad corridor one feels like an explorer of a new world filled with traces of the familiar—is that an old turn signal over there?—but also so much of the novel. This landscape does not fit into the existing narrative.

The adjacent parkland is hailed as native and protected as Forever Wild. So the designer must create her own language, must craft a new mode of communicating to the public that this place is special.

Queensway Catalyst learns the laws of this territory and exploits them so that the rampant runaway Norway Maple is no longer a threat, but a tool. That electric tower is no longer obscured, but highlighted. Leave alone. Edit. Clear. Uproot.

Plant. Five simple operations yield complexity so that this landscape welcomes the public into its future while remaining Forever Urban Wild.1

program, which restores and protects historic, native ecologies.

FUW expands the existing program by highlighting the cultural effects on natural systems and protecting the novel ecologies that have emerged within urban landscapes of infrastructure and industry. The Queensway is a pilot project.

153

fig. 2 Catalog operation: clear Time-lapse drawings comprise a catalog of operations that illustrate the design process, from demolition to construction and the effects of disturbance over time. fig. 3 (opposite) Site plan detail The operation of “clearing� along the proposed bike path is deployed with the anticipation that the cleared Norway Maples will return.

154

fig. 4 (opposite) Site plan detail The boundaries of an area around a felled tower “left alone” are disturbed by growth and seed dispersal of surrounding planting. fig. 5 Catalog operation: leave alone.

The catalog operation to “leave alone” allows ecological processes to continue in designated areas. fig 6.

Section With community input, the designer assigns operations across the site. Editing around a standing rail tower creates an intimate room surrounded by a wild garden. Plants are specified according to modes of reproduction. Over time, growth moves beyond the initial limit-ofwork.

157

Youngjin Yi

Surro[gate]: Conceiving Place

fig. 1 Panama Canal Gatun and Miraflores Locks Photo by author

1 Thierry De Duve, “Andy Warhol, or The Machine Perfected,” translated

by Rosalind Krauss. October, Volume 48 (Cambridge, MA & London, UK: MIT Press, Spring 1989), 3.

Introduction: Technology & the Phenomenon of Place Frequently the alien condition is identifiable as a dystopian hope for humanity, unfamiliar and menacing, but simultaneously sophisticated, sleek and seamless—a manifestation that Andy Warhol once claimed as an innate human desire in society “to be a machine.”1 In casting the condition in this particular way, popular culture has captured an essence of architectural design: that the alien, here defined as the universally recognizable sensation of unknowing and unfamiliarity, is crucial for the production of human confidence in the current physical environment. Moreover it is crucial in a phenomenon with which architecture will and should always be concerned: place.

Place is not just a physical location, but a phenomenon resulting from a specific constructive interference of memory, physicality, temporality, and a resilient strangeness that distinguishes it from other instances of place. Architecture can be positioned as a catalyst for this phenomenon, a provisional environment to stimulate the simultaneously individual and collective processes of contextualization, synthesis and association towards the eventual conception of place. It is

161

fig. 2 Panama Photo by author

2 Steve, Pile, “Spectral Cities: Where the Repressed Returns and Other Short Stories,” Habitus: A Sense of Place, 2nd Edition (United Kingdom: Ashgate Publishing Co., July 2005), 235.

3 Tazi, Nadia, “Fragments of Net Theory,” Mutations (Barcelona: ACTAR, 2000), 45.

therefore within the imperative of architectural designers to pursue the creation of alien-ness: the critical perceptible gap between comfort and fear, hot and cold, familiar and unfamiliar that produces the thrill of uncertainty and possibility right before the instant of recognition. Though the phenomenon of place is different for each individual, there is undeniably a collective, common recognition of it, and “being haunted draws us affectively, sometimes against our will and always a bit magically, into the structure of feeling of a reality we can come to experience, not as a cold knowledge, but as transformative recognition.”2 It is this thrill of the strange and expansive space of unfamiliarity that enables us to exact the belief in the existence of its opposite: a palpable assuredness of familiarity.

In an era of increasing physical and ephemeral densification with highly populated urban centers and the invisible prevalence of media networks, the significance of the physical environment and its effects has diminished, becoming textural background rather than actively stimulating or activating.

It can be argued that since the Industrial Revolution, technology has had a trajectory of eroding perceptible thresholds and boundaries. The resolution of the contemporary society has been refined beyond the limits of our own perception, and the prevailing environment to which we react is an ephemeral network, or a “utopia [placeless place]…a permanent, machinic tabula rasa”3 within which physical orientation, intuition,

162

4 Mark, Wigley, “The Architectural Brain,” Network Practices: New Strategies in Architecture and Design (New York City, NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 2007), 30.

and impulse is muted. In the age of suburban sprawl, urban densification and a societal structure of unbounded topology, events that once oriented us and forced points of self-recognition and spatial determination dissipate. The individual’s processes of contextualization and synthesizing are allowed to continue endlessly without perceivable points demarking passage and arrival. Relegated to achieving fluidity and continuity within an infinite vastness, these crucial events recede, pushed aside for an empty promise of arrival never to be fulfilled.

This contemporary condition of pervasive technological infrastructures is deemed successful in the very moment that it disappears from our consciousness (a condition of seamless functionality), and failure is marked by its acute presence (a discontinuity of provision and experience).4 The alien is an acute presence, a definitive and certain sensation of unfamiliarity, that is ironically one of the defining characteristics of place. Alien-ness becomes a psychological boundary that is specifically drawn to imbue realization. Successful infrastructure is at odds with the phenomena of place. This paper will pursue place by studying the eliciting of alien-ness of a location that is primarily defined by its infrastructure.

The Site: In Pursuit of Identity Surro[gate] and the identification of the unfamiliar as a design imperative stemmed from an interest in the pursuit of identity and its relationship to architecture. Panama and the Panama Canal, recently highly publicized for its multi-billion dollar expansion scheduled for completion in 2015, naturally lent itself as a site rich with potential for exploring. As a location, Panama is abundant with explicit dichotomies. As a small county in the world, its strategic positioning at the narrowest point between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans gives it global impact and influence. Largely a lush, tropical, rural landscape, the country’s natural environment is historically and currently overshadowed by the Panama Canal. The Canal first opened to international trade in 1917, transforming the timescale of contemporary global sea shipping by expediting interoceanic trade and allowing unprecedented sizes of long-sea shipping vessels safe passage. Small to large, rural to industrial, this paradoxical landscape shared between machine and nature both at their extremes becomes apparent as one passes through the country, moving from vast horizontal, manifest-destiny-type nature to excavated earth and construction of an astounding scale (fig. 1, 2).

163

fig. 3 Gatun Locks Photo by author

5 Francisco J. Montero Llacer, “The Panama Canal: Operations and Traffic,” Marine Policy (Elsevier Ltd., 2004), 1.

6 Reagan, Brad, “The Panama Canal’s Ultimate Upgrade,” Popular Mechanics, October 1, 2009, Accessed January 4, 2015. http:// www.popularmechanics.com/ science/4212183.

The Panama Canal is physically divisive, splitting the country into roughly north and south halves. It has been considered historically divisive as well, as politics subjected the Canal to multiple claims of ownership throughout history. After various periods of ownership and operation by France, Colombia, Spain, and America, Panama finally gained complete operational ownership of its infrastructure in 1999 after full execution of the Torrijos-Carter Treaty with the United States.5 With a nearly century-long history of fluid ownership and relegation of the natural (nature) part of its identity to the machine, Panama has become an incredibly successful infrastructure. Despite its apparent success, its phenomenon of place (by my definition) has diminished. It operates as a massive machinic conduit, a concentrated instance of infrastructure with an acute presence in global activity and influence, while remaining locally inaccessible to the intimate human body and experience.

Despite the physical and historical tumult the Panama Canal may have caused its surrounding conditions, there is an optimism and excitement associated with it that is not condemned by Panamanians. The recent multi-billion dollar expansion of the Panama Canal was overwhelmingly approved and supported by Panamanians at voting polls.6 With its sometimes polarizing history and finances, the Canal remains an undeniable part of Panama’s identity. To mute its existence or to deny its positive effects would be counterproductive in the pursuit of this particular place. Yet to claim that architecture could neatly discretize, consider and respond to every part of the rich and complex environment within Panama is futile; the sheer permutations of situation and site to be considered make it impossible.

The architectural challenge here is not to further discretize

164

fig. 4 Dam at Gatun Lake Digital photo by author, 2013.

7 Smout, Mark & Laura Allen.

“Augmented Landscapes,” Pamphlet Architecture:28, Augmented Landscapes (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2007), 6.

and itemize design from reaction to consideration but rather, quite simply, to reinvest in the value of intuition in design. In a site of such magnificent scale as the Panama Canal and with a complex history and context full of dichotomies, the site’s welcome unruliness and inherent inability to be neatly encapsulated lends itself to the exploration of architecture’s ability and role to elicit the certain uncertainty of the alien sensation, and its undeniable role in concretizing the phenomenon of place in the human psyche.

The Design: Eliciting the Alien The alien is ironically a very specific sensation. Upon experiencing it, the individual immediately reacts, investing in it to assure oneself of what is real. The immediate physical and scale dichotomies between man and nature within and around the Panama Canal are evident, and Surro[gate] considered the site as a “hybrid environment,” defined by Smout Allen as “a utilitarian topography, a sustained artifice” that has “taken on an artificial patination” where “alien materials interrupt the processes of growth and decay.”7 At the site, six particular conditions of intimate codependency between garden and machine were identified: Site A (fig. 3) - When the Canal gates close for a brief moment multiple times a day, the massive gates become a bridge reconnecting halves of otherwise separated land.

165

fig. 5 (opposite) Gabions at the edge of Gatun Lake Photo by author

Site B (fig. 4) - A massive dam transforms into a rushing waterfall at the command of minuscule tidal shifts on the order of inches.

Site C (fig. 5) Man-made beaches of stone gabions are stacked along the shoreline to encourage natural underwater growth, lifting the volume of water by increments and giving larger ships more buoyancy to pass through the Canal.

Site D (fig. 6) Fog from humidity builds up on the window of a bypassing train, allowing speckled moss and other more transient natures to grow and take hold.

Site E (fig. 7) Railway ties lie in anticipation of us, but slowly become overgrown, instead transforming into a scaffold for low-growing brush.

Site F (fig. 8) At the horizon, smaller islands and large cargo ships that await their turn to pass seem similar at a distance and are almost indistinguishable from each other.

fig. 6 Panama Canal Railway Car Window Photo by author 8 Neil, Denari, “The (City) Context of the Machine,” Pamphlet Architecture 12, Building; Machines (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1987), 14.

9 Lystra, Margot, “The Analogue Condition,” CC: Convivium (Ithaca, NY: Cornell AAP Publications, 2014), 88.

The man-made and machine in all of these instances is not simply “a re-actionary tool, it is a heuristic tool. The resonation of its energy and incipient output…forces an action of positive communication”8 with its surroundings and rather than deny it, should continue to be productively grafted into the already hybrid eco-industrial landscape. In each of these instances however, the desire to be a part of this intimate interaction as they existed remained unfulfilled. The potential for producing the alien, for enabling a significant relationship of unfamiliarity and subsequent certainty of place, resides in this particular curiosity.

The enfilade in and out of feeling uncertainty always challenges the individual, preventing the “normalization of the body” and forcing one to engage convincingly with the “messy tangle of life that is the complex, living world.”9 Acknowledging this, Surro[gate] asks these simple questions: Where can the body not go? What can the body not do? It investigates this inquiry with a formal, representational, and narrative strategy. The formal strategy grafts local machines into the site and re-purposes and rescales them for human interaction, creating a haunting familiarity of context that is suggestive of a realizable, particular bodily action. Design and representation of the devices are further refined by the practice of locating the body in impossible places at the edge of 167

fig. 7 (opposite) Panama Canal Railway Ties Photo by author fig. 8 Gatun Lake from Observation Point Photo by author

existing physical comprehension, permitting the imagination to question or consider the feasibility of each intervention. An accompanying objective and appropriable narrative allows for mental interpolation between these discrete yet open-ended designs to develop, creating a spectrum of possibilities and implanting the convincing, complex, endless environment of a new nature—a surrogate landscape.

Surro[gate] Gate (fig. 10): The sliding, separating gate is appropriated and instead becomes a device of connection.

Dam (fig. 11): A traversable, massive tool of measurement amplifies the recording of imperceptible tidal change that determines the circadian rhythm of water through dam, canal, and body.

Shore: Alongside heavy gabions, light catwalks allow meandering and extension of the fluctuating edge and surface.

Supporting, aerating spikes encourage the arable landscape to breathe.

Channel (fig. 9): A glass channel connects shoreline to shoreline, materializing only when fog and rain begin to texture the translucent surface.

Train (fig. 12): Excavated earth parts for the passage of the diligent train, passing under taut, delineating cables that allow removed mass to reclaim its place in memory.

Horizon (fig. 13): Relentless horizon and the constancy of lateral operations is visually softened and broken by moving spires that flex and sway with the undulating surroundings.

169

fig. 9 Channel Drawing by author fig. 10 (opposite) Gate Drawing by author fig. 11 (opposite) Dam Drawing by author fig. 12 (opposite) Train Drawing by author

10 Scott McQuire, The Media City: Media, Architecture and Urban Space (London: SAGE Publications Ltd., 2008), 30.

11 Nadia Tazi, “Fragments of Net Theory,” Mutations (Barcelona: ACTAR, 2000), 49.

12 Bernard Tschumi, “The Pleasure of Architecture,” Architecture and Disjunction (Cambridge, MA & London, United Kingdom: MIT Press, 1996), 96.

Conclusion At its core, the sensation of unfamiliarity is a personal one, too much so for rigorous and precise testing and calculation.

The pursuit of these effects of architecture, though difficult to control and regulate, are critical for understanding the nuances of unique experience as technology moves us farther from understanding ourselves in the physical environment and closer to a fluid, fluctuating environment.

Preserving the sensitivity of design to human desire and the demystification of its relationship to technology and design will continue to be invaluable. Scott McQuire writes in “The Media City: Media, Architecture and Urban Space, “imagination and desire continually outstrip technology, despite – or perhaps because of – extraordinarily rapid technological development.”10 With the evocation of the unfamiliar, tangible architecture can continue to harbor and transmit immaterial potential, excitement, and optimism through its programmatic ambiguity and multiplicity. In doing so, it can resist giving way to the homogenization of necessary dualisms and the eventual “general equivalency, to calculation, to an absolute indifference which would spell…the destruction…of identity.”11 Architecture can maintain its potency and critical role as a generator of place in an increasingly immaterial world.

Our immeasurable spectrum of desires and the need to verify our own concreteness will always continue to offer us infinite permutations of design, more so than metrical approaches that will always be bounded by the very systems of measurement that permit its existence. As Tschumi writes though, architecture “is not a dream…It cannot satisfy your wildest fantasies, but it may exceed the limits set by them.”12

170

fig. 13 Horizon Drawing by author.

Acknowledgments Dillon Pranger, Master of Architecture I - Cornell University, 2015 Ema Yamamoto, Project Manager - City of Philadelphia Mayor’s Office of Transportation & Utilities.

Andrea Simitch, Associate Professor - Department of Architecture, Cornell University Nahyun Hwang, Founding Partner - NHDM Insu & Inkyung Yi, Youngmin Yi, Jennifer Yi, John Yi

173

Lauren Anne Nelson

The Necessity of a Transformed Public Space with the Rapid Urbanization of Developing Countries

fig. 1 Image of Yamuna River Photo by author.

1 World Urbanization Prospects: The 2014 Revision, United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, (United Nations, 2014).

Today’s urban challenges, related to the environment, infrastructure and public health, parallel the challenges of western rapid urbanization in the 1900s. However, rates of growth compound the problems that arise from underdeveloped infrastructure and unimplemented or unenforceable policies. Public space takes on a transformed meaning as informal settlements and slums occupy what was once open space. Public space for these countries demands to be rethought, not as a typical typology based on historical precedent, but as a radical reinterpretation. Only then will public space become a citizen that supports democracy and provides utilitarian resources within the city to promote both human and environmental health.

Rapid Urbanization and Its Effects on Health 54% of the world’s population lives in urban contexts.1 Rapid urbanization is expected to occur at unprecedented high rates and the number of mega-cities is expected to increase in the coming decades (fig. 2). Of this future growth, the highest rates are expected in developing countries in Asia and Africa. This level of growth will compound the existing

175

DISTRIBUTION OF MEGACITIES (2014) megacities (10 million +)

DISTRIBUTION OF MEGACITIES (2014)

large cities (5-10 million)

fig. 2 Map

megacities (10 million +)

environmental and human health challenges that these places already experience due to the lack of necessary infrastructure and policies in place.

Breaks in the systems of the city cause developing countries to be especially challenged by environmental concerns that greatly impact the health of the human population and have contributed to sub-standard living conditions for the urban poor. The World Health Organization reports:

large cities (5-10 million)

Distribution of megacities and large cities in 2014. Information from World Urbanization Prospects: The 2014 Revision, United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, (United Nations, 2014).

From longstanding to emerging hazards, environmental factors are a root cause of a significant burden of death, disease and disability—particularly in developing countries. The resulting impacts are 25% of death, and disease globally…this includes environmental hazards in the work, home and broader community/living environment.2

2 “Environment and Health in Developing Countries,” World Health Organization Health and Environment Linkages Initiative (HELI), January 1, 2014, accessed November 30, 2014, http://www. who.int/heli/risks/ehindevcoun/en/.

3 “Environment and Health in Developing Countries.”

4 “Environment and Health in Developing Countries.”

5 “Environment and Health in Developing Countries.”

The primary negative health impacts of unplanned growth within developing countries include poor water quality, availability, and sanitation, vector-borne disease, poor ambient and indoor air quality, toxic substances, traffic injuries, and extreme weather events.3 Health impacts associated with water create substantial fatalities globally every year. For example, poor water sanitation and poor water quality, associated with diarrheal disease, kill 1.7 million people annually.4 Additionally, vector-borne diseases that arise from poor waste disposal and water management significantly impact global fatalities.5

176

fig. 3 Chart New Delhi’s urban growth, within the context of the developing world.

Information from World Urbanization Prospects: The 2014 Revision, United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, (United Nations, 2014).

6 “Resilient Cities Through Public Spaces and Placemaking in Urbanization.” Project for Public Spaces, September 25, 2014, accessed November 30, 2014. http://www.pps.org/blog/fromgovernment-to-governancesustainable-urbandevelopment-theworld-urban-forum/.1, 2014.

These environmental and human health challenges necessitate a push for sustainable and systemic development that addresses environmental, social, and economic factors. To achieve healthier public spaces, the city must simultaneously tackle solutions to multiple health challenges through an integrated, systems-based approach and design of an accessible, utilitarian public space.6 A Transformed Public Space for New Delhi, India Public space in New Delhi, India, including the streets and the Yamuna River, have become a tragedy of the commons due to an increasing strain on public space that arises from rapid population growth (fig. 3). An emphasis has been placed on cleaning up certain areas within the city: private spaces, gated monuments, and personal property. Meanwhile, the neglected streets oftentimes form barriers to pedestrian circulation. For example, Ring Road and the railroad separate pedestrians visiting the Humayun’s Tomb monument (a major draw for New Delhi tourists) from the Yamuna River.

The Yamuna River has the potential to be a great resource for the city, but is currently polluted to toxic levels. The effects of pollution are exacerbated by an extremely low water table.

Public space must be reclaimed to emphasize pedestrian connectivity and to give transparency to the city’s water system.

The following studio project investigated the potential of conceptualizing a new typology for public space in New Delhi. The studio was led by Peter Waldman in the Summer of 2014. A web of broken, unoptimized, and underdeveloped city systems contribute to poor health conditions. Public space must become a nexus of natural, infrastructural and 177

HEAT

LIGHT

AIR

WATER

SOCIAL

POLITICAL

ECONOMIC CULTURAL $

ENERGY

SEWER

WATER

MOBILITY

EC (RIP

fig. 4 Section, plan, and rendering Public space as a nexus of exchange. fig. 5

MILLENNIUM PARK RAIL AND POWER EDUCATIONAL AND ECOLOGICAL PARK

Proposed “Utilitarian Public Space.”

RING ROAD

Site section

CAPTURE

RECHARGE RECHARGE

fig. 6 Site plan Proposed connections from Humayun’s Tomb to the larger city.

human systems that are optimized to serve as a catalyst and a utilitarian resource to address urbanization and promote human and environmental health. The public space transforms into something that is more than a destination.

It must engage with New Delhi in a productive way to encourage the systems and flows of the city through sitespecific design interventions (fig. 4).

This project builds on the current revitalization efforts of the Aga Khan Foundation to unwrap the inaccessible zone around the Humayun’s Tomb and create a utilitarian public space. The utilitarian elements of the intervention include an urban façade, an ecological park, an education center, and a promenade. The new urban façade opens the walled street and claims much needed public space for the city, opening north-south and east-west connections across the proposed site. The ecological park links adjacent green spaces to the site and provides a location for storm-water at this barrier in the city. Both the roof of the façade and the storm-water system collect, filter, and recharge the groundwater supply.

The education center is designed as the new headquarters for the Aga Khan Foundation with classrooms for students in the surrounding communities to learn about the ecological systems and challenges of New Delhi. The promenade connects pedestrians from Humayun’s Tomb north towards the zoo, south towards the train station, and east towards the Yamuna River. Parking is provided for visitors from Noida and some existing and planned parking sites in the area also contribute to create a pedestrian corridor through the site.

180

The proposal provides resources for the community and becomes an urban catalyst. It strengthens and improves the flows and connections from the precinct adjacent to Humayun’s Tomb to the greater city. To do this, the project claims the area surrounding the monument as public space and breaks through barriers that restrict connectivity from Humayun’s Tomb to the Yamuna River. Spaces within the urban façade are programmed as resources, incorporating public drinking water stations, public restrooms, classrooms, community rooms, as well as a restorative landscape (fig.

5). The public space typology is redefined to address the environmental and human health challenges of the water system in this rapidly urbanizing city. The area around Humayun’s Tomb becomes a prominent urban structure that serves visitors and residents alike (fig. 6).

As populations increase in developing countries, it is imperative that urban, architectural, and landscape design engage with complex human, health, and environmental systems. By rethinking and expanding the role of public space within the city, there is a great opportunity to address the breaks in city systems, while also providing healthy environments for the daily human experience.

Acknowledgments Research Advisor: Bill Sherman ARCH 8010 Re-Centering Delhi Studio Professors: Megan Suau, Iñaki Alday, Pankaj Vir Gupta ARCH 8100 Design Research: Matthew Jull SARC 5559 Built Environment & Public Health: Local to Global: Schaeffer Somers, Wendy Cohn

181

Can Vu Bui and Ann Lane Rick

A Catalog Of Chinatowns: Field Notes On Globalization and its Mistranslations

fig. 1 Chinatown, New York City Photo Credit: Youngjin Yi

As cities shed their cultural origins—some more willingly than others—and adapt to the new paradigm of the globalized world, characteristics emerge, are translated (and sometimes mistranslated) licentiously, producing a wholly new expression. From Chinatown, Paris to Chinatown, New York; from American ethnoburbs to Italian garment cities, these urban mistranslations of cultural diaspora simultaneously draw from both their distant homeland and their immediate, foreign surroundings. They belong neither here nor there, producing a third expression, alien to both.

The genesis of these idiosyncratic phenomena varies, but certain trends and tendencies inevitably emerge from these developments. An urban language of globalization coalesces as these byproducts of cultural and human diaspora mature.

The study of Chinatowns and the means by which they fit this narrative is the first in an ongoing investigation into these urban mistranslations, the fallout of our globalized age. Here, the focus is on “Chinatown” and the duality of East and West, in part because of the striking foreignness between the two, but also the captivating fixation each has for the other.

These field notes will provide a cipher through which we

183

can begin to understand the nature of cultural forces as they act upon each other and express themselves. They will provide us with a catalog to chart the future of new cities that are increasingly defined by mutual influence and variant narrative, rather than a unified history.

1 Wei Li, Ethnoburb: the New Ethnic Community in Urban America (Honolulu: University of Press, 2009).

2 Christian Berthelsen, “Frederic Hsieh, Obituary,” The New York Times, August 19, 1999.

3 Hua Hsu, “Death Star,” Lucky Peach Fall, January 1, 2012, 85-96.

4 Chinatown, Film, directed by Roman Polanski (1974, Hollywood, CA: Paramount Pictures).

34.0492° N, 118.1356° W Monterey Park: Anchor Baby/Anchor City If the past two decades of globalization and accumulated wealth have contributed any new discourse on the suburbs of North American cities, it is the ethnoburb which was extensively documented by Wei Li.1 The ethnoburb is a decades old phenomenon of the progression of the urban ethnic enclave (i.e. Chinatown, Little Italy); as the socioeconomic status of new immigrants ascends, they arrive with more clout and the suburbs offer a more desirable home than the densely packed neighborhoods of urban living. The American Dream thus becomes attainable to a broader echelon and is quickly adopted.

Monterey Park was the first such dream, envisioned by Frederic Hsieh, who bought property in this suburb and placed ads in Chinese newspapers with overseas readership, advertising “Chinese Beverly Hills.” With rising tensions between mainland China and Taiwan and Hong Kong, Hsieh’s ads presented a well-timed alternative for alienated citizens, a new home for the affluent Chinese.2 As the wealthy Chinese presence in the suburb grew, it attracted Chinese restaurants and shops, and developed into a thriving, economically diverse community. In 1990, Monterey Park was the first city in the continental U.S. to have a majority Asian population; since then, ethnoburbs have appeared across the country—a successful melding of the ethnic enclave and the American Dream.3 34.0500° N, 118.2500° W Los Angeles: Cinematic Sino-Mysticism “Forget it, Jake; it’s Chinatown.”4 No urban ethnic enclave has been as (re)defined in Hollywood as Los Angeles’ Chinatown. Its depictions in 1970s cinema gained their own momentum, propelling a fictitious version of the enclave into popular culture. In Hollywood’s Chinatown, criminal networks and drugs were rampant, shops were run by wise, bearded and supernatural elders, and shadowy opium dens were the backbone of a black market economy controlled by conniving gangsters and their 184

5 Chinatown, Film, directed by Roman Polanski (1974, Hollywood, CA: Paramount Pictures).

6 Year of the Dragon, directed by Michael Cimino (1985, Universal City, CA: Dino De Laurentiis Company).

7 Big Trouble in Little China, directed

by John Carpenter (1986, New York: SLM Production Group).

8 Wong, Bernard P., and Tan CheeBeng, Chinatowns around the World: Gilded Ghetto, Ethnopolis, and Cultural Diaspora (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 247-62.

9 Eric C. Han, Rise of a Japanese Chinatown, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).

unscrupulous women. This parallel and hyperbolic image of Chinatown was in many ways its mainstream debut in North America.

Significant films like Chinatown,5 Year of the Dragon,6 and Big Trouble in Little China7 have major scenes in their respective Chinatowns, opening these crowded alleys of the city to a larger audience while skewing the public perception of Chinese culture and community. In many ways, the alternate universe of Hollywood’s Chinatown helped to define an aesthetic expectation, encouraging developers to build enclaves that feed visitors with a satisfying preconceived image: life imitates art. Even more perverse? These fictions now inform how the West engages with distant Chinese cities, culture and people—placing fictitious perceptions on the real.

35.4442° N, 139.6381° E Yokohama: Yokohamites Chinese immigrants to Japan began establishing Chinatowns in port cities during the second half of the 19th century.

Today, many families are fourth generation immigrants and have strong roots in Japanese Chinatowns, the largest of which is in Yokohama.8 As war and political strife agitate Sino-Japanese relations, the Chinese community must navigate a delicate conflict of identity. Especially since WWII, conflicts over China’s legitimate government, territory disputes, accusations of historical wrongdoing between Japan and China, and other perceived offenses have been politely meted out among the residents of Yokohama. At war, many families are split, as sons divide their allegiance between Japan and China. In an unlikely turn of events, divided factions of the community generally stand together despite the manifold conflicts, preferring to convene over common ground than fight over differences.

These Chinatown residents, neither Chinese nor Japanese at heart, have come to identify themselves as “Yokohamites.”

The name is revealing in that it emphasizes the local rather than the national; it does not claim Japanese identity or renounce Chinese heritage, but stresses a third identity: that of Yokohama.9 36.1215° N, 115.1739° W Las Vegas: Copycat Chinatown Chinatown Plaza did not develop organically. Amid the sprawling strip malls and shopping plazas of Las Vegas’ 1990s building boom is America’s first master-planned Chinatown, 185

10 Bonnie Tsui, American Chinatown: A People’s History of Five Neighborhoods (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2009), 200.

11 U.S. Census Bureau. Accessed January 19, 2015. http://www. census.gov/.

as its developer James Chen refers to the mall.10 Typologically, it is a typical suburban shopping plaza: a two-story ring of shops encircles a central parking lot, with periodic access points to an indoor mall. The entry is marked by a gaudy Chinese gate and bronze statues of characters from the classic Chinese tale “Journey to the West” sit prominently in the middle of the parking lot. Big rocks and dragon murals fill the interior spaces, a constant reminder that this is indeed Chinatown.

As such, the development has inspired Eastern-themed plazas to open nearby, and has become a sprawling Asian district.

The development thrives, not because of the local Chinese community, but due to bus loads of tourists, mostly Chinese and Chinese-Americans, who arrive via a free shuttle from the nearby Strip, opting for Chinese buffet meals and family style dining over the swanky Western meals in the casinos.

Like many of the micro-cities in Las Vegas, this Chinatown has been reduced to its iconography; symbols and signifiers that point to an absent reality. Unlike the Vegas copies of the Eiffel Tower or the Rialto Bridge, the symbols of Chinatown lack an authentic origin—its signifiers are already replicas. In a way then, doesn’t Chinatown maintain the closest tie to that which it references, making it the most authentic structure on the Strip?

37.3333° N, 121.9000° W San Jose: Political Refuge Almost half of the total overseas Vietnamese population lives in the United States. As of 2010, the Vietnamese population in the U.S. was around 1.8 million people, with over a third of the population residing in California.11 Beginning in the late 1970s, the end of the Vietnam War produced a massive anti-communist diaspora that fled the country as the American presence pulled out. For nearly a decade a steady stream of Vietnamese refugees sought resettlement in Europe and North America. They named their communities ‘Little Saigon,’ a poignant homage to the fallen capital of South Vietnam, and a strong political statement against the communist party that remains in power in the country. Though the largest such enclave is in Orange County (the Los Angeles suburb boasts the largest Vietnamese population outside of Vietnam), San Jose’s Little Saigon made headlines over a naming dispute in 2008. San Jose City Councilwoman Madison Nguyen proposed changing the name of her district’s Little Saigon to the less politically symbolic ‘Saigon Business 186

12 Ira Glass, “Episode 381: Turncoat,” This American Life, NPR, May, 22 2009, Accessed January 18, 2015, http://www.thisamericanlife. org/radio-archives/episode/381/ turncoat.

13 Richard Gonzales, “Rebuilding Chinatown After the 1906 Quake,“ Morning Edition. NPR, Apr. 12, 2006, Accessed January 6, 2015. http:// www.npr.org/templates/story/story. php?storyId=5337215.

14 Kirk Semple, “Korean-Americans Seek Boycott after an Attack in a McDonald’s in Queens,” The New York Times, December 30, 2014, Accessed January 14, 2015, http:// www.nytimes.com/2014/12/31/ nyregion/korean-americans-seekboycott-after-an-attack-in-amcdonalds-in-queens.html?_r=0.

District.’ Her efforts sparked outrage, and the Vietnamese community quickly vilified her, deeming her a traitor and communist.12 With the passage of time, Americans have shed Cold War era anti-Communist fervor, but the same cannot be said for the residents of Little Saigon. The enclave is built upon a strong foundation of political associations that keeps the disenfranchised community intact, stoking the continued relevance of the ardent political bias.

37.7833° N, 122.4167° W San Francisco: Mistranslated Architecture San Francisco’s Chinatown grew organically in an existing neighborhood as the city’s demographics shifted throughout the mid-19th century. The buildings in Chinatown were mostly Mission Revival, and except for the proprietors and products in the shops, would have blended in with the rest of San Francisco. The earthquake of 1906 flattened Chinatown and provided an opportunity to rebuild the entire enclave.

After the earthquake, and in the face of increasingly anti-Chinese sentiment across the U.S., the residents of Chinatown rebranded their enclave through its reconstruction. The community hired local non-Chinese architects to design Chinese-looking buildings, including the iconic pagoda-like towers of Sing Fat Company and Sing Chong Company.13 The buildings do not actually reference Chinese architecture, but the curlicued roofs, dragon motifs, and abundance of red paint have become inextricably linked to the architecture of Chinatown. Other Chinatowns have followed suit, propagating the hodge-podge of Chinese-looking gates and roofs across the world.

40.7658° N, 73.8331° W Queens, New York: Un-Public Space Here is something one doesn’t read often: A McDonald’s franchise, “called the police to remove older Korean men and women who had turned the restaurant into a de-facto clubhouse.”14 In the absence of an adequate community center, a Flushing-based McDonald’s unwittingly served as ground zero for a community of elderly Korean men and women who gathered in the dining area to gossip, read and play games on a daily basis. Why? The existing community centers and elderly homes of the area lacked the spatial and social capital of this McDonald’s: a central location, the natural light from large storefront windows, the bustling sounds of passersby, the 187

reliable exchange of social interaction.

So, for the price of one small coffee per table, the grandmothers and grandfathers passed their days at McDonald’s, transforming the private restaurant into a public space, a community hub. However, the management of McDonald’s did not embrace its new community service role and months of tension throughout 2014 escalated into a series of incidents, ultimately leading to a boycott and an assault lawsuit by the year’s end. These events underscore the tension between an establishment’s commercial and communal roles, especially amid the changing dynamics and laws that govern public space. As the nature of the creation and re-appropriation of the public realm shifts, communities are forced to adapt their new environment to fit old habits and expectations.

15 Lauren Hilgers, “The Kitchen Network,” New Yorker, October 13, 2014.

40.7903° N, 73.9597° W Manhattan: Destination Chinatown In the late 1990s, Chinese-American bus services began to operate out of the east side of Manhattan’s Chinatown.

Significantly cheaper than competing bus lines operating out of the Port Authority, these buses became a secondary network of transportation in the tri-state area for Chinese residents and low-income travelers. It also served Chinese workers traveling between the Chinatowns of New York, Boston and Philadelphia. Notably, Chinese cooks (mostly from Fujian Province) would arrive in Manhattan and find jobs around the U.S. through Manhattan-based employment agencies. To get to their new jobs, the Chinatown buses quickly became an indispensable mode of travel and an informal network especially well-suited for those who could not speak or read English, and understood little of their new surroundings.

Today, there are more than 40,000 Chinese restaurants in the United States,15 and they are connected by this informal bus system. Especially on the east coast, the Manhattan transportation hub is a gateway for Chinese immigrants arriving to New York and traveling to the rest of America. Inadvertently, this transportation system has become the circulatory system to a far-reaching body of Chinese cuisine throughout the United States.

43.7000° N, 79.4000° W Toronto: Ethnoburb and the Shopping Mall Translation As ethnic enclaves move outside of the urban city centers, ethnoburb communities have begun to transform the landscape of the suburban city. One unique result of the ethnoburb’s 188

formation is the renewal and transformation of the shopping mall typology. Scattered across Canada, where the climate demands indoor spaces, shopping malls have transformed: while retaining its inherent inward looking structure, the mall has become less a commercial space and more a multi-purpose community hub, a place where immigrants can meet among a familiar community.

Toronto’s Pacific Mall is one such ethno-mall, now designated as an official tourist destination. The interior of the towering and generic building adopts a street grid (complete with street names) over three floors of densely packed spaces.

Program is freely mixed (restaurants, dentists and clothing boutiques share corridors). Families spend hours here, booking doctor’s appointments, buying groceries and dining out in one epic trip to the mall. The malls themselves provide open spaces for local events: pageants, concerts and the requisite Santa Claus photo-ops. A typology invented to maximize capitalism has transformed into a social space, a shopping mall turned into a community center.

16 Rachel Donadio, “Chinese Remake the ‘Made in Italy’ Fashion Label,” The New York Times, 12 Sept. 12 2010, Accessed January 14, 2015, http://www. nytimes.com/2010/09/13/world/ europe/13prato.html.

17 Nina Burleigh, “Italian Jobs, Chinese Illegals.” Bloomberg Business Week, November 3, 2011, Accessed January 14, 2015, http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/ magazine/italian-jobs-chineseillegals-11032011.html.

43.8800° N, 11.0983° E Prato: Legalized Illegal Long before the Chinese arrived in Tuscany, Prato hosted a major textile industry. Globalization over the last half century has done little to change that particular foundation, though it has completely transformed the substructure on which it stands. As of 2010, the streets of Prato have the largest concentration of Chinese in all of Europe,16 who unsurprisingly, have begun to transform the socio-economic and urban fabric of the walled city. Within this space emerges a curious paradox, perfect for the age of a globalization that drives cultural collisions, the “illegal legal”: a government-granted residency permit status for those already with jobs and housing and whose nature of arrival is willfully ignored. They blend in among the 40,000 Chinese immigrants in Prato, only half of whom are legal residents.17 By working at speeds and efficiencies of China (not to mention a seven-day work week), the Prato textile industry, and subsequently the city too, has experienced a booming economy—a stark contrast to the rest of Italy. Now, nearly two decades later, the Chinese population has provided a lifeline to Prato’s historic identity, making it possible to retain its textile heritage, but at the price of changing the Italian city into an international city. Along Via Pistoiese, where one can find “Chinatown,” Chinese characters adorn shop 189

fig. 2 (opposite) Chinatown Bus station, Manhattan, New York Photo Credit: Youngjin Yi fig. 3 Chinatown, Paris

signs, replacing Italian. Grocery stores now shelve Chinese delicacies, and restaurants and gambling halls cater directly to the foreign community, both expanding the range of their enclave, but also displacing resentful Italians; the small city is turning Chinese. All said, we can evaluate Prato as a possible harbinger of the new world’s fluid global production and supply chain, where role reversals, cultural exchanges and mobile labor forces are common factors.

48.8567° N, 2.3508° E An Immigrant Revivalism: Les Olympiades In the mid-twentieth century, France took on an ambitious modern building project to house its growing population.

Using the principles of the Athens Charter espoused by Le Corbusier, 1960s Paris built Les Grands Ensembles, major housing blocks in the outer arrondissements. One such project was Les Olympiades in the 13th arrondissement. It was built with the intention of housing a new demographic of young modern professionals to Paris. However, Les Olympiades failed to attract a critical mass of inhabitants and much of the building’s plinth and underground programming were left vacant.

Several years later, the complex found new life from a community of Southeast Asian political refugees. Cheap rents, abundant vacancies, and a huge underground space gave way to a self-organized hub of commerce. Restaurants and markets opened, workshops and places of worship followed, and the 191

18 Dubalin, Y., P. Mantziaras, and J.L. Violeau, “Paris Subversions.� In USE: Uncertain States of Europe: A Trip Through a Changing Europe (Milan: Skira, 2003), 81-87.

large subterranean space became a warehouse for importing and exporting goods. The residential quarters filled up, and the complex finally came to embody the elusive modern ideal, a city in a building.18 While the exterior of Les Olympiades has changed little in the 50 years since it opened, an unimaginable internal transformation has re-appropriated the architecture as a now-iconic symbol for the Asian community.

192

Felipe Orensanz

Se Habla Español

fig. 1 Mexican & American food sign in New Mexico.

Photo by Quinn Dombrowski

1 The U.S. Census Bureau defines Hispanics or Latinos—terms it uses interchangeably—as people “of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin regardless of race.” This highly disputed definition excludes Brazilians, Haitians and other Latin American population groups that nevertheless tend to consider themselves part of the Latino or Hispanic community. I will use the term Latino throughout the article to include all the groups mentioned above.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, by the year 2042 the total number of U.S. residents currently self-described as minorities—Hispanics, Blacks, Asians, American Indians, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders—will have surpassed that of [non-Hispanic] whites, making the United States a predominantly non-white country. This radical demographic shift not only adds a whole new set of layers to the increasingly controversial debate over both legal and illegal immigration in the U.S., but also forces us to question the very notion of what we mean by alien.

At the core of this internal reconfiguration lies the United States’ closely-knit geographical, cultural and demographic relationship with Latin America. According to the 2010 Census, over 50 million people of Latino/Hispanic descent1—16.3% of its total population—were residing within the U.S., outnumbering both Blacks (12.2%) and Asians (4.7%). Boosted by the country’s highest immigration and fertility rates, Latinos have become not only the largest minority within the United States, but also the fastest growing population group overall. Between 2000 and 2010, Latinos accounted for more than half of the nation’s population growth, and by the year

195

60.1 - 80.0% 40.1 - 60.0% 20.1 - 40.0%

20.1 - 30.0%

10.1 - 20.0%

5.1 - 10.0%

0.0 - 20.0%

20.1 - 40.0%

40.1 - 60.0%

60.1 - 80.0%

80.1 - 100.0%

100.1 - 150.0%

Data for2011. maps was obtained from the 2010 census brief “The Hispanic Population: 2010” prepared by Sharon R. Ennis, Merarys Ríos-Vargas, and Nora G. Albert for the United Data for maps was obtained from the 2010 census brief “The Hispanic Population: 2010” prepared by Sharon R. Ennis, Merarys Ríos-Vargas, and Nora G. Albert for the United States Census Bureau,

Map 002. Hispanic or Latino Population Change, By State (2000 - 2

0.0 - 20.0%

80.1 - 100.0%

30.1 - 40.0%

0.0 - 5.0%

100.1 - 150.0%

40.1 - 50.0%

Map 001. Hispanic or Latino Population, By State (2010)

196

fig. 2 Hispanic or Latino population change by state (2000-2010) Data for maps was obtained from the 2010 census brief “The Hispanic Population: 2010” prepared by Sharon R. Ennis, Merarys RíosVargas, and Nora G. Albert for the United States Census Bureau, 2011. fig. 3 Hispanic or Latino population change by state (2010) Data for maps was obtained from the 2010 census brief “The Hispanic Population: 2010” prepared by Sharon R. Ennis, Merarys RíosVargas, and Nora G. Albert for the United States Census Bureau, 2011.

2042, three out of every ten residents throughout the U.S. will be Latino/Hispanic.

This new cultural and ethnic landscape is in turn changing the face of cities nationwide. In a country where 80% of the population resides in urban areas, it is cities and suburbs that are for the most part absorbing and reflecting this burgeoning ethnic and racial diversity. As the country’s minorities continue to grow, so does the multiplicity and complexity of the dynamics that shape the nation’s urban environments.

In the case of Latinos, geographic and urban distribution patterns tend to follow two major, and somewhat opposing, trends. On the one hand, there continues to be a prevailing concentration of Latinos residing in regions, cities and locations with historically large Latino populations—California, Texas, and Florida continue to occupy the top three spots.

In fact, some U.S. towns and neighborhoods have such a strong presence of Latinos that they often bear a stronger resemblance to Latin American cities than to their American counterparts. In areas such as East Los Angeles, California, Laredo, Texas and Hialeah, Florida, nine out of every ten residents are of Latino origin.

Furthermore, many U.S. urban areas rank among the largest and most important Latino settlements even when compared to cities within Latin America. For example, Los Angeles’ Mexican and Mexican-American population is second only to Mexico City and outweighs that of major Mexican cities like Guadalajara or Monterrey. The number of Latinos residing in the Miami Metropolitan Area is larger than many Latin American capitals including San Salvador, El Salvador, La Paz, Bolivia, Asunción, Paraguay, Montevideo, Uruguay, Managua, Nicaragua, or Port-Au-Prince, Haiti; and New York is home to more Puerto Ricans (commonly referred to as “Nuyoricans”) than San Juan—Puerto Rico’s capital—itself. This has positioned certain U.S. cities as key centers for understanding and defining contemporary Latin American culture not only in the U.S. but throughout the entire continent.

This growing presence is gradually allowing Latinos to establish themselves as an effective force within the social, political and economic dynamics of the United States’ major cities. With the exception of Philadelphia, nine of the country’s ten largest urban areas—New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, San Antonio, San Diego, Dallas, and San Jose—are well-known and historically important hubs for Latino culture, and their Latino population, which

197

2 General data for this article was obtained from the 2010 census brief “The Hispanic Population: 2010” prepared by Sharon R. Ennis, Merarys Ríos-Vargas, and Nora G. Albert for the United States Census Bureau, 2011.

3 Christopher Hawthorne, “‘Latino Urbanism Influences a Los Angeles in Flux,” LA Times Online, December 6, 2014, http://www.latimes.com/ entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-latinoimmigration-architecture-20141206story.html#page=1.

ranges from 28% in New York to 63% in San Antonio, is significantly higher than the national average of 16.3%.2 As a result, Latinos are becoming important decision-makers in the processes through which the country’s major cities are being planned, designed and occupied.

But at the same time, Latinos are increasingly moving out of their geographically contained [and often ghettoized] ethnic enclaves and into territories occupied almost exclusively by the white majority. Conditions such as shifting labor opportunities and tougher anti-immigration laws have forced Latinos to relocate in new and sometimes unexpected places.

Between 2000 and 2010, for example, the three states with the highest increase of Latino population—South Carolina (147.9%), Alabama (144.8%), and Tennessee (134.2%)—were all states with historically low percentages of Latino residents (less than 3% in each at the beginning of the same period).

As Latinos move into predominantly white and non-Latino cities and neighborhoods, they introduce new ways of understanding and occupying urban space. The result is a unique and often violent clash between orthodox top-down American suburban planning and vernacular bottom-up Latin American place-making. This form of “Latino Urbanism,” as planner James Rojas has called it,is triggering a multilayered transformative effect on the traditional American urban landscape—a functional, morphological and aesthetic customization of the city that allows Latinos to adapt the built environment to an entirely new assemblage of social, economic and cultural requirements.3 With the introduction of foreign customs and habits, Latinos prompt U.S. cities to function in previously unexpected ways. The city’s user instructions are rewritten and the same urban components that used to serve the country’s suburbanized, car-oriented, and functionally segregated lifestyles are reclaimed in order to accommodate a completely new array of possibilities. Streets become markets, front yards become plazas, and parking lots become soccer fields; imported goods make their way into local supermarkets and business owners begin to put up “Se Habla Español” signs on their storefronts.

In addition, the combination of imported idiosyncrasies that begin to emerge in newly “Latinized” territories brings about a profound aesthetic transformation of the existing urban fabric. From the lavish and colorful imagery of Latino street art to the uniquely expressive graphic applications used by many retailers, Latinos create new syncretic landscapes 198

fig. 4 Chicano Park Murals in San Diego Photo by Kellinahandbasket

4 Pew Hispanic Center, “Unauthorized Immigrant Population: National and State Trends, 2010,” 2011.

strongly influenced by the amalgam of “South of the Border” cultural expressions. In turn, the hybridized aesthetics produced within U.S. Latino neighborhoods are constantly being exported back into Latin American countries, creating a permanent dialogue between the multiple and heterogeneous collectivities clustered together under the generalized notion of “Latino culture.”

Nevertheless, Latinos settled within the U.S. continue to be one of the most economically, politically, and socially vulnerable population groups in the country. Male Latinos, for example, make less than 66% of the median annual earnings of white men for the same job, while for Latino women this ratio drops to less than 60%. In 2010, 80% of all unauthorized or illegal immigrants living in the U.S. were from Latin American countries,which translates into more than nine million undocumented Latinos spread throughout the country’s cities without access to basic legal rights or equal opportunities.4 Meanwhile, U.S. Latino communities nationwide continue to reflect the alienation, instability and uncertainty that define this uphill struggle. Regardless of Latinos’ constant efforts to feel at home in the American city, most Latino neighborhoods are still haunted by a prevailing and unsettling sense of marginality and temporariness. The lack of adequate jobs, fear of deportation, racial or ethnic discrimination, language barriers, cultural differences and legal constraints all stand in the way of Latinos’ ongoing quest for belonging.

199

EMBEDDED IMAGE OPTION 2 (REFERENCE IN GUTTER AT LEFT, ALIGNED WITH TOP MARGIN)

fig. 5 Chicano Park Murals in Sand Diego Photo by Kellinahandbasket

Although Latinos continue to grow in number, they continue to lag behind in terms of social integration.

Despite these underlying disparities, Latinos have managed to become an indispensable part of contemporary American culture. The increasing presence of Latinos in the U.S. has introduced an entirely new palette into the country’s historically diverse cultural composition. In the face of the United States’ unfolding demographic rearrangement, Latinos and other minority groups are blurring the conceptual frontiers between the conventional notions of local and foreign, legal and illegal, formal and informal, top and bottom, alikeness and otherness, and center and periphery. Understanding the evolution of the American city in the 21st century requires understanding this deep and multifold changeover and the impact that contemporary Latino culture is having on the overall spatial and social dynamics of urban culture nationwide.

200

Marcela Gracia Acosta

On the Road: A Proposition for the Uprooting of Place

fig. 1 Perspective

As a direct response to the hyper globalized, novelty-centric building processes of the past few decades, architecture has reached out in search of tradition, continuity and historical relevance. Through the use and misuse of the concepts of sense of place, sense of belonging, rooted in place, the discipline has put forward propositions that claim absolute sociocultural legitimacy and have created a catalogue of curated and nostalgic visual cues.

The increasing emphasis on the constructs of the local through a sentimental rhetoric that longs for the ultimate genius loci and specific geographies of place discredits the identities of those that, by choice, embark on nomadic or unusual lifestyles. Following this line of thought, if identity is achieved through a process of grounding oneself in the physical and socioeconomic realities of a specific place, then communities born out of volatile and transient environments have no validity, meaning that the creation of form and space is solely reserved for definitive and highly specific sites.

Most of the time, narratives that accentuate and elevate the vernacular, the autochthonous, but mostly, the permanent, leave out of the conversation new sociocultural networks that

203

fig. 2 Map North American freight network.

1 “Radical Cartography,” accessed December 2014, www. radicalcartography.net.

2 Sang Woo, “A Study of Ghiselli’s Hobo Syndrome,” Journal of Vocational Behavior 79 (2011): 461-469.

produce and operate in spatial settings that do not follow the rules of the regionalist game, and hence, become relegated to second grade modes of living, incapable of producing an architecture with identity.

The physical environment informs how we operate in time and space, whether static or in flux. Static permanence does not equate stability, nor does transient living mean insubstance. With these new constructs, aliens become locals, embraced by the ever-changing and constantly intertwined socioeconomic apparatuses of present and future societies.

One of the most scrutinized transient communities are freighthoppers, riders of freight cars that move around an extensive railroad network that connects social, cultural, and economic geographical points. The North American Rail Network is a web of 146,445 miles of railroad connecting Canada, the United States and Mexico with infrastructure that moves people, natural resources and finished products throughout the territory.1 For many decades, freight trains served as the main transportation resource for hobos. The word hobo quickly became a synonym for opportunistic, parasitic, non-contributing practices, but its origin is much different. Hobos were transient workers that moved from one city to the other in search of better opportunities, tracing their lineage back to the Great Depression.2 Another group of freighthoppers were the Adelitas, women that during the Mexican Revolution accompanied the rebels and fighters through the country, helping in the fighting, 204

fig. 3 Diagram Reconstructing freight.

3 Elizabeth Salas, Soldaderas in the Mexican Military (Austin, Texas: University of Texas), 1990.

4 Coral Davenport and Peter Baker, “Taking Page From Health Care Act, Obama Climate Plan Relies on States,” New York Times, June 3, 2014, http://www.nytimes. com/2014/06/03/us/politics/obamaepa-rule-coal-carbon-pollutionpower-plants.html?hp& _r=0.

5 Fred Pearce, “Peak Coal: Why the Industry’s Dominance May Soon Be Over,” Yale Environment 360, June 19, 2014, http://e360.yale. edu/feature/peak_coal_why_the_ industrys_dominance_may_soon_ be_over/2777/.

raising and educating children, and promoting a sense of protection within their transient living configuration.3 While these communities represent conditions no longer latent in the present day, “On The Road” proposes an evolution of the concept of mobility and freighthopping, in which transiency is validated as promoter of place. Instead of rooting space and form through site-specificity, the project argues for grounding identities through sociocultural networks, mediating the transient and the permanent, the global and the local.

A surge of new types of nomadic communities that respond to actual and future events must adapt to current infrastructural networks. It is here that the railroad system, with its inhabitants’ history, comes into place. Artists, researchers, contingent workers, consultants, eternal tourists — people that travel by choice and conviction — will constitute a new set of nomads longing for a place to belong.

This uprising of new socioeconomic configurations will find its habitational parallel, its belonging, in a world where renewable energies become the norm, and not the exception, where existing energy-generating infrastructure goes out of fashion and out of relevance. In the next few decades, many countries will reach peak coal, where the use of coal for energy purposes will reach a terminal point as the resource gets harder and more expensive to extract. Likewise, governments around the world will continue to halt the existence of coal power plants,4 realizing that coal energy production is indirectly proportional to the ecosystems’ health.5 205

fig. 4 Perspective Freight cars. fig. 5 Section perspective Life on the road.

The vast infrastructural network dedicated to the coal industry will become obsolete unless it is retrofitted and evolved.

“On The Road” takes on these challenges and presents an alternative way of living. Unused coal freight cars with their distinctive container shape serve as main habitational spaces.

Regular freight cars become social and economic hubs where shops, pop-up stores and community halls emerge to provide points of encounter while on the road and in the various stops throughout North America.

The reconfiguration of the cars takes on the recent re-adaptation of shipping containers, where the individual units are extracted from the established infrastructural network and placed within a different context, whereas in this case, a reciprocal dialogue between users and infrastructure is achieved through the acceptance of existing infrastructure and adaptation of new modes of spatial play.

“On the Road” questions the validity of relative stable and permanent systems as sole generators of “place” through the proposition of spaces where communities move, flex, change and shed their foreign label and take their identity on the road.

207

Jesus Arcos & Francisco Mesonero Translation: Rhian Dunn

I Have No Place, I Have No Landscape

In … forgotten places, the memory of the past seems to predominate over the present. These are obsolete places in which only a few residual values seem to manage to survive, despite their total disaffection from the activity of the city. They are, in short, external places, strange places left outside the city’s effective circuits and productive structures. From the economic point of view, industrial areas, railway stations, ports, unsafe residential neighborhoods, contaminated places, have become the area where it can be said that the city is no longer.

They are its margins, lacking any effective incorporation; they are interior islands voided of activity; they are forgotten, oversights and leftovers which have remained outside the urban dynamic. Converted into areas that are simply un-inhabited, un-safe, un-productive. In short, these are places that are foreign to the urban system, mentally exterior in the physical interior of the city, appearing as its negative image as much in the sense of criticism as in that of possible alternative.1

fig. 1 View of the Triangle Ferroviari

1 Ignasi de Sola-Morales, “Terrain Vague,” Anyplace (1995): 118-123.

209

Terrain Vague Ignasi de Solà-Morales understands terrain vague as a site of absence within a contemporary metropolis. Terrain vague is found in abandoned areas, in obsolete and unproductive buildings and space, sometimes undefined and undetermined.

By reaffirming these places and refusing to incorporate them into the productive logic of the city, Solà-Morales insists on the value of unproductive spaces and ruin. In this way, estranged urban spaces collectively manifest themselves as an alternative to the anonymous reality of late capitalism.

Tiers Paysage Tiers paysage designates a leftover space. Therefore, it is neither an economic producer nor a natural reserve but instead an undefined landscape with a residual capacity to generate biological diversity. In Manifeste du Tiers Paysage, Gilles Clement states:

If we stop looking at landscape as if it were an industrial object, we would suddenly discover a great quantity of undefined spaces, removed of function, which we would find difficult to give a name. In this set we might find marginal places—the ends of forests, the sides of motorways and rivers, the corners most forgotten by culture, those places where machines can’t reach [ … ] In these fragments of landscape there doesn’t exist a common shape. There only exists one thing in common: each constitutes a refuge territory for diversity [ … ] This idea justifies that they are united under one mode.

I propose tiers paysage. A space that doesn´t express power nor submission of power.2

2 Gilles Clement, Manifeste du Tiers Paysage (Barcelona: Editorial Gustavo Gili, 2007).

Tiers paysage is interpreted and applied as more than a physical territory. In today´s world, where humans have physically touched practically all terrestrial surfaces except a very few reserves or places that are virtually uninhabitable, tiers paysage is potentially a refuge for diversity.

Context In April 2013, the Council of Barcelona’s Environmental Department, put forward the “Pla de verd i de la biodiversitat de Barcelona 2020” (Plan for Greenery and Biodiversity for Barcelona 2020) which envisions a re-naturation of the city based on large and small scale intervention strategies and promotes the growth of its ecological and social infrastructure.

210

3 Margarita Parés i Ribà is a biologist and head of the Biodiversity Program of Hábitat Urbà. She is coauthor of “Pla de verd i de la biodiversitat de Barcelona 2020” of the “Guía de Natura de Barcelona. Aproximació a la història de la natura a la ciutat,” November 2006.

Barcelona is a city limited by its geography, without the possibility for expansive growth, with a great social and cultural density and a growing demand to increase public space areas. This idiosyncrasy, in combination with the current economic climate, has halted large scale projects.

Therefore, the last few years have necessitated small scale and temporary interventions. According to biologist Margarita Parés,3 despite their size, these projects create diverse habitats and environments that contribute to the city’s unique ecology.

These sites are found where 19th century urban expansion patterns intersect rivers and mountains that once limited the city’s growth. Previously on the border of the city, these sites are now engulfed and forgotten.

They are terrains vagues that, not long ago, were enmeshed in a now obsolete industrial web. Major infrastructure is the principle configurator and articulator of this space. A space without identity, a forgotten landscape, to which no group or individual has an attachment.

Surrounded by the city, these spaces are persistent wild pockets, places where life makes its way through concrete and generates micro-landscapes with the succession of plant-fauna, only perceivable through a lens of a microscope, removed from the adjacent rhythms of the city, passers-by, cyclists and vehicles. They are opportune spaces, often in large suburban areas, where lower density provides space for buildings and nature to enter into a dynamic conversation.

The dichotomy between the interior and exterior of the city, the built and the unbuilt, the urban and the industrial, creates a tension that can animate a project. From a designer’s point of view, these forgotten landscapes to which no single group or individual is attached and where multiple conditions collide are prime sites for experimentation. These wild pockets have great value and form part of the ecological infrastructure, creating corridors of low urbanity within the borders of the city.

An Alien Place Considering the number of wild pockets, the Council of Barcelona commissioned the provisional development of a large residual space. It lies beneath the municipal “Triangle Ferroviari” building which marks the intersection between the train lines that arrive from the interior of the province and from the north coast of Barcelona.

This municipal building has two levels and is situated seaward of the main railroad, 30 feet beneath the neighboring 211

fig. 3 The site is temporarily used as a parking lot.

community on the opposite side of the train lines. The building was planned so that in the future it would be on the same level as Cami Comtal Park, which would be built on the cover over the railroad. It was to become an important connection between neighborhoods.

The building is a logistical island that shelters everything related to facilities management, parking and the maintenance of the municipal metro and buses of Barcelona.

Recently, part of the space has been temporarily given to the residents of the local neighborhood of Sant Andreu to use as an open air car park with a total of 362 designated parking spaces.

While the Cami Comtal Park above the rail lines has not been built, there exists a pedestrian pathway, no wider than 5 feet, which acts as a solitary umbilical cord connecting two neighborhoods. These areas, although very close to each other, remain separated by a topographic trench running between the infrastructure.

When you cross the pathway, you arrive at a new and temporary world where spaces are unintentional and lack a distinct identity. Though undefined, the space is large, which allows for the development of recreational, artistic and sports activities.

It is currently a residual space, semi-isolated, a concrete cover that is used only by residents to park their cars.

Nevertheless, the site has great potential. It is a balcony with views to architectural landmarks such as the Agbar Tower, the Besos Chimneys and the Church of Sant Andreu, providing 212

points of orientation within the larger city.

It supports activities similar to those that happen on the many community rooftops across the city. People hang laundry, sunbath, play, party, eat, barbecue and celebrate annual festivals in the summer months, especially on the night of San Juan and the solstice.

These rooftop activities give the space its name and identity: El Terrat de Barcelona (The Barcelona Rooftop).

Valorization

In this way, when architecture and urban design project their desire onto a vacant space, a terrain vague, it seems that they are incapable of doing anything other than introducing radical transformations, changing estrangement into citizenship and striving at all costs to dissolve away the uncontaminated magic of the obsolete in the realism of efficacy.

How can architecture act in the terrain vague without becoming an aggressive instrument of power and abstract reason?

Undoubtedly, through attentive concern with continuity. Not, however, the continuity of the planned, efficient and legitimated city, but by listening attentively to the flows, the energies, the rhythms which the passing of time and the loss of limits have established.4

4 Ignasi de Sola-Morales, “Terrain Vague,� Anyplace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 118-123.

The enhancement of these alien spaces is one of the most complex challenges for those who decide to intervene. It is first necessary to determine why low density spaces exist within a dense European city before responding to the demand for public space and attempting to reinsert the site into the city network.

An alien space is one that does not belong to any group or individual; it is part of the daily routine and is passed through but not recognized. A wild and wasted site, empty of public, social and cultural content, it neither belongs to us nor forms any part of us; it is invisible to our eyes.

The intervention should endow the site with a strong identity, so that the citizen or collective discovers it, empathizes with it and imagines it as a communal place that is part of the larger network of public space. At the same time, the site should maintain its value as a tiers paysage, an alive but hidden place, part of a corridor of low density linked throughout the city.

213

fig. 4 Panorama showing intersecting infrastructures.

This proposal will generate a legible landscape using an iconic language of architecture and landscape, constructed from ordinary elements that exist on many of Barcelona’s rooftops—clothes lines, billboards, planters, lounges, barbecues, tables— as well as objects such as a giant moon where films can be projected in the summer. These activities often have an exaggerated impact on the neighborhood and the city, but they are always legible and recognizable to the citizen.

Anything that aspires to have an identity must have a name. “The Barcelona Rooftop” is a clear and obvious name that identifies the constructed landscape and brands the space.

However, formal and iconic strategies which stir the collective imagination are not enough to generate empathy between the individual and the site. The citizen must use and experience the new public space so that it becomes imprinted in their memory and incorporated into their identity.

Currently, the alien space functions as an open-air, isolated car park which limits its use to certain hours of the day. Apart from those hours, it returns to its residual use; estranged to the passerby, it is appropriated by illicit activities that seek anonymity—drinking, sex, racing cars, buying and using drugs, etc.

Though part of the car park is necessary as many of the surrounding streets are under construction, if we want to minimize unsafe activities and transform the alien place into a public space, we need to do more than just create adaptable spaces. It is essential to take clear steps to revitalize and enliven the site early in the process.

The designer must develop a diverse variety of programs to inspire the public to make the space their own, thus transforming the site into a livable and democratic space. It needs to become a local meeting place for everyone, a place which will fill the existing deficit and promote new activities that before had no place.

Initially the city will need to play a large role in organizing and coordinating events. However, in the future, programming will be entrusted to small, local cultural and social organizations that will take responsibility on a day to day basis and make it their own, adjusting the program and the space to their needs and demands.

Barcelona has a lot of experience in the revitalization of its urban landscape. This was particularly true in the 1980s, in Spain’s first years of democracy, and was fully realized for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. The city remains committed 215

fig. 5 Graffiti depicting the chorus of “Nacíen Alamo” by Yasmin Levy.

to this model and The Barcelona Rooftop will continue this tradition.

Temporality The intervention must embrace time.

The council´s commission is for a provisional structure to transform this alien place, but considering the current socio-economic climate in Europe, the provisional timescale may not be so short. Regardless, it´s interesting to consider this project from the temporal point of view and to imagine it as something other than a static image. Any space in a dense city inevitably will evolve over time, whatever the conditions.

No one doubts that urban planning needs to speak to the times. One needs to think of the city before acting. This is especially true in Europe where investment in construction has decreased. The completion of large projects requires a structuring of time that obligates designers to complete projects in phases.

The designer should not see the necessity of working in small steps as an inconvenience. The temporality and provisionality of the project should be thought of as a leitmotiv and incorporated into the conception of the place, therefore generating greater possibility for success.

It is necessary that the site’s evolution is taken into account from its conception. Considering citizens’ demand for public space, designers cannot wait for major investments to drive projects. Instead, they must be resourceful and act quickly.

Conclusion On our first site visit, we were surprised to find the phrase, “I have no place, I have no landscape,” painted on the ground.

Later, we discovered that it is the chorus from a song. The phrase describes citizens´ feelings of estrangement and detachment from places that are part of their daily lives.

These alien spaces invite new approaches from across disciplines. It is important to observe and let them take their course rather than consider them as static containers awaiting the next phase of urbanization. One needs to foster awareness and appraise the territory. In this process, the cultural qualities of identity and a sense of community are created.

Ultimately, the intervention needs to balance the cultural and the temporal. It must no longer be estranged from the citizen. It needs to be given a place and a landscape.

217

Jon Piasecki

Urban Forest: A Case for the Wild

fig. 1 Dying Hemlocks Photo by author

There are few more complete embodiments of mystery, complexity and universality than the forest. From hardwood to coniferous, from tropical to temperate, across the globe and throughout cultures, no human is immune to the pull of the woods.

Add the prefix “urban” to the front of the term and an entirely new set of associations is born. Landscape architecture and landscape urbanism discuss the “urban forest,” attaching a civilized cachet and creating an inherently conflicting condition. The addition of this urban modifier positions us, the humans, as aliens within the context of the forest, simultaneously elevating the rationality and security of the city, and distancing us from the discomfort of our undeniable animal identity.

As discussions about resilience in design and urban ecology hang thick around each new proposal in this contemporary period of park making, a critical examination of this proposed and existing urban forest is in order. Time has repeatedly proven that there is nothing straightforward when our species, the ultimate invader, modifies the forest to improve our surroundings.

219

fig. 2 Walking the High Line Photo by Joel Sternfeld (Göttingen: Steidl, 2001)

When considering the concept of the urban forest, some of the most striking images are of the High Line before it was converted into the popular park we know today. The photographer, Joel Sternfeld, captured a wild, derelict place, where a faint line of foot traffic on trampled grasses wound resolutely between rusting tracks. The undeveloped High Line was a floating forest, forgotten by most, in the process of reclaiming the relic of our failed vanity and industry. It was a quieter place, a no-man’s land, and no doubt home to a host of pirate dramas unfolding below the radar. With no irrigation or real soil, an abundance of mostly invasive flora and fauna took back civilization’s toss-off. Sternfeld’s images captured the kind of urban forest that speaks to the poetry of our denouement, infused with the sense of loss and the return of something wild at the very heart of the metropolis. It was a poignant and sublime creation; a real, primal urban forest.

It was not long, however, before urbanism swept this wild urban forest away and left behind only tidy, evocative little references to the lost forest of grasses and rusted iron. The developed High Line is now an elegant and well-coiffed plant community, growing under irrigation between the train track inspired pavers and thriving in the city air on constructed soil.

Around these plants on extreme life support, the urban jungle beats with verve. The beats are syncopated to the time of the real estate market and profitable development; the color is certainly green, but it is in the hue of currency.

220

fig. 3 Touching Hemlock Photo by author

2 NYCEDC, Press Release: Section Two of High Line Opened (New York City Economic Development Corp, 2011).

3 Project for Public Space, Public Places: Hall of Shame (New York: Project for Public Spaces, 2010).

4 William S. Saunders, The Urban Landscaper (Cambridge: Harvard Magazine, 2013).

In this manicured version of the urban forest, green means money. Examine the cost of these spaces in one of the most quintessentially urban places in the world, and the bottom-line truth of this deep green emerges. At 6.7 acres, the final expense of the High Line exceeds $153 million.2 Tear Drop Park in lower Manhattan costs a comparably modest $17 million for its also comparably modest 1.8 acres.3 A peek at the wonderfully sited Brooklyn Bridge Park finds an 86 acre piece of real estate costing more than $380 million.4 Imagine the cost of one tree, one wildflower, a single blade of grass in this new urban forest, and it becomes clear that by any measure this forest is first a forest of cash.

The beauty, convenience, and monetary profit of these manicured parks are not an adequate replacement for a forest forged over millions of years and countless evolutionary events. Even the most gifted designer cannot come close to matching it. The forest exists beyond us, outside of our control, not subservient to our plans and desires. The complexity of the living, breathing super-organism that is a wild forest cannot be compared to even a million rows of street trees in their tidy little planting cages, filled with sterile, imported soil meeting exact nutritional specifications and supplied with plastic aeration tubes. We cannot will forests into being.

They will grow through their life cycles with or without our consent. We can only choose to not destroy them.

From this perspective, urban forests, like these aforementioned parks are not real forests at all. They are expensive 221

fig. 4 View of Hemlocks from Below Photo by author

make-believe spaces, invented for simplistic aesthetic improvement and monetary profit. This frivolity would not be so dangerous if they did not draw attention away from two pressing realities: they distract from the destruction and neglect of the existing forests and they put blind profit above the exclusion and displacement of poorer, nonpaying users. How better to remove disadvantaged people from a place than in the service of the green? Introducing plants to the area where their homes once stood and developing land for the paying population means that the space not only becomes greener, but whiter.

Trees act as stand-ins for money. The manicured urban forest and the lifestyle that accompanies it belongs to those who can afford it—remove the poor, plant it green, and they will come.

As we see the vibrancy and the green glossy leaves of the urban forests that only enormous amounts of money can buy, it seems that all is well in both the human and the natural world. How could it not be? If a tree dies it is replaced, nature regenerates and life goes on. However, two hours and thirty minutes from Times Square, multiple species of trees are dying of insect infestation. Hemlocks up and down the East coast are at risk and no number of dollars can save a dying tree.

Forests resonate with the past. They are for everyone, even the poor. They are wild. It seems as though landscape urbanism and landscape architecture are now in the business or erasing the past, displacing the poor and converting huge sums of money into verdure to make real estate developers and a few designers richer while the larger forest fails because of climate change and invasive species. If we wish to live in a world where “forest� means more than just commodified, manicured greenery, we must reconsider what we design and why we design it. We must be simultaneously critical of landscape urbanism and honest about our failure to protect the existing forest. A real forest reflects the powerful forces at work over time and has the capacity to grow wherever it must; it is immeasurably complex and beautiful. This must not be the last generation to experience it.

223

Thomas Mical

How Architecture Tensions Spatial Discipline and Alien Emergence

fig. 1 Dartmouth College Electron Microscope Facility, 2004.

1 The earlier “return of the real” in aesthetic production that also gripped architectural thought in the era of diagrammatics was clarified

by Hal Foster in The Return of the Real Cambridge, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999). Note the recent return to fundamentals in the 2014 Venice Biennale and the current international attention to design for the new austerities - all manifest this search for the “real” of architecture.

The formation and occupation of the produced spaces of modernity come as naturalized and open movements of bodies, air, and particles, preformatted for functional optimization involving spatial discipline. As the architectural design process is both the process of this spatial discipline as well as the methods that produced disciplined spaces, the use of increasingly precise theories of the real have had significant influence upon the history of modern thought in architecture.1 Once, modern architecture was alien. Today, we can take advantage of spatial discipline and its extension into pursuits of the real, in architectural analysis and representation, to seek and expose the very small and unnoticed elements, disturbances, conceptual dilemmas glossed over, and literally alien particles that both invisibly dwell in space, therefore offering multiple opportunities for divergence, distortion, and the emergence of alternative conditions of the real (alterity). The processes of naturalization of modern spatial discipline into the default lived spaces of the everyday in architecture can thus be seen to harbor “alien” spores, physical and conceptual.

These kernels are both produced and registered by spatial discipline.

225

2 The role of hygiene in modern architecture is a topic of recurring focus in Mark Wigley’s White Walls, Designer Dresses (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995) and Paul Overy’s, Light, Air and Openness: Modern Architecture between the Wars (London: Thames & Hudson, 2008) and to the persistence of the impurity in David Gissen’s Subnature (New York City: Princeton Architectural Press, 2009).

3 The assertion of the spatial logic of modernity is perhaps most well established in the Gropius Gideon trajectory - see the epochal Siegfried Gideon, Space, Time, and Architecture, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1941); a recent account is found in Jeffrey Saletnik and Robin Schuldenfrei (eds), Bauhaus Construct: Fashioning Identity, Discourse and Modernism, (London: Routledge, 2013).

4 The Marxist model of industrial alienation is actually a four-fold model (from the object of work, from working, from species being, and from others - see Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (Moscow: Economic and Philosophic Publishers, 1932). (see also the schema in http://pubs. socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj79/ cox.htm).

5 The ontological reading of architectural space is identified in Gevork Hartoonian’s Ontology of Construction, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999; to explore how the discourse of architectural space has changed see the recent book Sean Lally, Zurich, Switzerland: The Air From other Planets: a Brief History of

For example, the outside air is naturally full of such particles, but on the inside even air scrubbers cannot achieve the purity anticipated in the compelling blank spaces captured in plans and sections. The desired purity forecast in ascetic representations calls attention to any such possible intruders, and this is generally one of the performative functions of modern architecture.2 The history of architecture is not the history of architectural space, but specifically history of the invisible precursors or imaginary relations of this space.3 One could also re-write a focused history of modern architecture as the history of such aliens within that space. Indeed, the alien itself is also a modern production from disciplined space, the noun form of the process of alienation manifest in modern forms of production.4 Modern architectural space emergences as a theory and a tool of analysis in the 19th c., resulting from a turn from the neoclassical tradition to a search for more scientific, biological, empirical, and psychological methodologies, as proposed by scholars such as Wöfflin, Semper, Panofsky, and Schmarsow.

The collusion of blocks of sensation to blocks of space within the unfolding notion of “universal space” allows for the production of divisible, extendable and programmable spaces (such universal spaces being both a form of production and sites of production). Modern space thus tends towards attributes including expansive, extensive, invisible, naturalized, uniform and continuous. The production of architectural structures and skins (increasingly dissociated in modernity) extend from a modern ontology of construction, which persists as a conceptual ground whose functions occur in the (apparently) empty air between.5 The irreconcilable tension of modernity, nominated by Baudelaire (and expanded by Benjamin), is the bi-valent demands of the simultaneous pull of the eternal and the ephemeral.6 This creates divergent demands upon modern architectural space, which further pressures the visible and invisible functional aspirations of designed architectural space.

To accomplish this, spatial presence and meaning operates between the engineered neutral surfaces and obscured support systems (from HVAC to cultural codes). Disciplinary expertise seeks to control all these forces, channeling them through the occupiable depth-of-volume of structured spaces. But the air is always charged with energies and particles, bristling with possibilities.

Architecture to Come, (Zurich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2014).

226

6 Baudelaire’s definition of modernity as “I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable” expanded by Walter Benjamin - see the anthology Walter Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006); see also Peter Buse; and Benjamin Arcades: An Unguided Tour, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 50. for insight on this bivalent condition.

Discursive Space Modern space, in its ascetic and abstracted modes, is potentially a plenum or conduit, an artistic or transmitting medium. Void or continuum, modern space is an ideal transmission medium: it harbors the naturalized invisible continuity forming the spatial logic of much modern architecture. All the tensions held together in disciplined space conceal or suppress that which potentially destabilizes, un-disciplines or erodes the infinite extensivity of this uniform spatial model.

But across the spectrum, from empirical scientific study to theatrical desires, the discourse of space is more accurately the discourse of the performativity of space – exceeding both the landmarks of functionalism and personal meaning – habitus and misrecognition, formality and duplicity, decisiveness and imagination, sense and suspense – all are possibilities of modern spatial activation. Within a singular space many conditions are anticipated, designed, and produced though the reciprocity of space and discourse, and all these eccentric binaries are inextricably bound to both space and discourse.

And there is always the possibility of the eruption of the unknown, the unthought-of, the purely alien within its realm of latencies / possibilities.

It is a clear advantage for practitioners of architectural thought (leading to spatial discipline) that the recent “spatial turn” in many parallel intellectual territories have increased the designer’s ability to locate invisible or abstract processes as they touch, imprint, or deform physical space. In equivocating many literal and metaphoric territories, we can now see and locate many invisible processes in space (“live” and “on location” as it were) and modulate them to some greater degree by discipline from attention. Simultaneously, in expanding this larger spatial turn, architectural spatial discipline can be sensitized to the great diversity of knowledge networks that form, inform and distort prior models of static spatial logic and re-animate the internal boundary conditions of inclusiveness (or exclusion). Space is now increasingly “in play” across cultural, biopolitical, and infrastructural debates.

Control Space The discipline allowing the subsequent production of modern architectural space has originated, developed, and often over-determined diverse spatial practices (urban, interiors, and the circuits between) – usually of necessity in a top-down manner of in(ter)vention. Today there are more sophisticated, but no less controlled, ways of stabilizing flows and fixing the 227

7 Older classics include the sequence of Manfredo Tafuri’s Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1976); and the indictments of utopianism in Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, Collage City (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1978); recent sorties into utopianism include Jean-Francois Lejeune, Cruelty and Utopia: Cities and Landscapes of Latin America, (New York City: Princeton Architectural Press, 2005); and Nathaniel Coleman, Utopias and Architecture, (London: Routledge, 2007; and also Reinhold Martin’s Utopia’s Ghost, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).

8 See the influential text Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1992; recent extensions of this multiplicity of spaces are traced in Lukasz Stanek, Henri Lefebvre on Space: Architecture, Urban Research, and the Production of Theory, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2011.

9 The extreme model of this is found in the telecopying principles of the real spanning Hegel Kojeve - Lacan - Zizek, as a trajectory of the realimaginary dialectic influencing the subject and their spatial context(s)where the real is itself an invisible field of contaminants. See the detailed explanation of this model of the real in Tom Eyers, Lacan and the Concept of the ‘Real’, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

traits and locations of micro-territories, even in time-shifting or cross-programming protocols. The functional control of disciplined “slippery” space ties into the larger systems thinking driving master planning, and such systems simultaneously harbor an often-identified utopian impulse.7 The nominated singularities of function and the nominated singularities of identity are systems of control that are tracked across spaces.

Indeed, behind the rhetoric of freedom and open access, often the perfomativity of modern space is a space that stabilizes and rationalizes (in the classical sense of proper ratios) a more pervasive (and productive) duality of chance and control. Like the ephemeral and eternal, this less obvious modern dialectic is foundational to the conceived and produced spaces of modernity.8 Control spaces are necessarily intertwined with control systems, co-dependent on an underlying rational-utopian scaffolding, any of which would register chance as merely noise in the signal. Architectural space is also controlled by devices and codes, sub-disciplines and reinforcements, a Kantian rudder sustaining most formations of disciplinary spaces. The abstract and concrete manifestations of determined functional use are also intertwined through professional discipline with spatial plasticity, resulting in instances of fixed “capture” and “clearing” (processural aesthetics of simplification as purification) within a narrow bandwidth of performance specifics. Discursive space, narrative closure, and visual continuity are the elements of discursive spatial discipline.

Modern blocks of space are susceptible to later subdivision along their near-invisible internal seams, from universal space to the micro-territories which situate the fine grain of everyday reality – change and transformations as operations in space are also thus processes of “cutting across the grain” of space. Here spatial plasticity is taken as a positive value at the beginning but much less so at the end. Control-spaces of corporate modernism within a believed universal spatial continuum required the removal of difference as a modus operandi – anticipating a virtue of emptiness. Otherness (alterity) as a latency / possibility thus becomes vaporous or evacuated form space, as attention is directed within spatial discipline towards reconciling tensions between the imaginary and the real.9 The strict control of line, surface, and field inculcated in the Bauhaus design pedagogy brought the ascetic (often spiritual) abstraction of modernism in close proximity to the tools and materials of the industrialized production of buildings.

228

10 The definitive text is Vaughan Hart, Nicholas Hawksmoor: Rebuilding Ancient Wonders (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008); the exhibition of Hawksmoors churches at the 2012 Biennale is captured in Moshen Mostafavi and Hélene Binet (eds), Nicholas Hawksmoor: London Churches (Zurich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2015).

11 See Anthony Enns and Shelley Trower, Vibratory Modernism, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

12 The writings of Virilio are clear examples of this instrumentalization of space into invisible forces see Paul Virilio, Vision Machine, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994) and Paul Virilio, Open Sky, (London: Verso, 1997).

Thus the implementations of disciplined spatial drawings contain and sustain these emerging invisible disciplinary practices and protocols from the patient rhythm and discipline of the archetypal assembly line. The discipline of the discipline is spatial and spatial practices sustain or recursively over-write visible and invisible codes of determination and control.

The aesthetic of refinement is a code of control, minimizing chance. The architectural apparatus contains variations of spatial discipline that in their entirety, and in their connection to other exteriors and interiors, function primarily as programmed spaces and secondarily as coding/de-coding devices.

Taking the cultural and invisible codes as mechanisms, the architectural apparatus can be reconsidered as a manifold of arranged valves, an active transformer of flows and forces (physical and invisible).

For example, in earlier architecture, such codes and spatial discipline would revolve around divine number or symbolic contents, opening up supernatural or otherworldly connections in disciplined space – connections which today would be considered alien. A recent resurgence in the works of Nicholas Hawksmoor calls attention to this early modern condition.10 Hawksmoor’s fashion in his London baroque churches was a new crisis-mannerism producing an alien aesthetic, generated from an unnatural set of codes and disciplinary practices.

This admixture of spatial conditions was created from obscure citations, aesthetic distortions, dislocations and eerie spaces, all organized and designed for deliberate supra-rational effect within their compacted urban relations.

Phase Space In the modernist avant-garde of the Italian Futurist movement, the generative invention of “lines of force” which dynamically animated accelerated modernist subject-positions (increasingly “outside” historical narratives as alternative trajectories) set modernist space on edge.11 Instead of object permanence and object relations in a codified perspectival field, the new movements and new forms of mechanized seeing opened up an alien world of movements, transitions and perpetual changes of state.12 Such a dynamic model of space, as visually captured in the tension of perceived spaces between trajectories (a condition found in the WW1 aerial dogfights), animated boundaries and identities. The missing representations of energy fields (as new models and processes) of transitioning spaces, and as spaces of emergence, was the Futurist lure. An object-less world would be one of pure 229

sensations and pulsations, a vibratory modernism.13 In this early 20thC premonition of our hypermodern present, the re-turn to field conditions and phase spaces replace timeless and eternal essences with a widening range of new postulates defining more flexible and agile spaces.14 Spaces are not their representations in map territories, but today are pressure gradients and phase states. The constructed and transitory nature of spaces today embeds the constructed-ness of subject positioning and identity shifting of spaces and users. Forms of flux are now part of the disciplinary matrix of decisions leading to the contemporary production of space – not identities, but minimum-maximum thresholds and tolerances assembled into spatial densities holding together latencies, divergences, and nested tensions. In such field conditions and phase spaces, the prospects of emergence are multiple. The inflection of movements, attributes, and identities within a disciplined space can arise from the presence of different scales and attributes of phenomena, the proximities of unrelated phenomena, and the dissonances created between different rates of change of different entities in space (sensate and conceptual, real and imaginary). The boundaries of designed phase spaces are more like limit-experiences defining the pull between accelerating and decelerating spatial tensors.

Architecture in this case is the over-arching thought structure bridging and capturing these complexes and transitive phenomena of (alien) emergence. fig. 1 Miscellaneous Pollen Image by Ernst Haeckel 13 See Bernard Leupen, René Heijne, and Jasper van Zwol (eds), TimeBased Architecture (Rotterdam: Netherlands: 010 Publishers, 2005).

14 On field conditions see Stan Allen, Points + Lines: Diagrams and Projects for the City (New York City: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999); on Phase Space see Manuel DeLanda, “Deleuze in Phase Space” in Virtual Mathematics: The Logic of Difference, ed. Simon B. Duffy (Manchester: Clinamen, 2006) 235-247.

Alien Entities & Emergence In the transition from Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus to the investigations of the X-Files, Weber’s diagnosis of the disenchantment of modern life has sublimated into an increase in alien sightings (over-writing prior angelic appearances) today.

The alien is both a fascination and threat, an intrusion from some nearby elsewhere, the recognizable alien which re-affirms the presence of the existing systems and codes, while also demanding an alternative reading of those very same systems and codes in a new constellation of forces, identities, and meanings. The extra-terrestrial alien, as cultural icon, arises from a larger context of a high-tech aesthetic of conspiracy theories, whereby the alien-fetish emerges from disbelief of the visible ordering / control-system, pointing to some unclear duplicity or conspiracy operating beneath or behind the explicitly visual presences and manifest control systems holding in plain sight. In such a dualist model, any aberration or anomaly activates the presence of this covert system. From 230

15 Rem Koolhaas articulated the modernist relevance for Dali’s “critical paranoia” in Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York, (New York City: Thames & Hudson, 1978); see the source in Salvador Dali, Oui: The Paranoid-Critical Revolution, (Boston: Exact Change, 2004).

16 See Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind E. Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide, (New York City: Zone Books, 1997); also see Ian Bogost’s recent Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to be a Thing, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012).

17 This is many of such situationistinspired claims in Bernard Tschumi’s “Advertisements for Architects” analyzed in Kari Jormakka, “The Most Architectural Thing” in Surrealism and Architecture, ed.

Thomas Mical (London: Routledge, 2004).

Koolhaas’ celebration of Dali’s paranoid-critical method (the surrealist fusion of the irrational into the rational) in this case we now have something like a paranoid-alien method.15 The recognition of alien elements in lived space, of any scale or appearance, would affirm the presence and meaning of spatial discipline as well as offer an alternative model of emergence.

Consider an alternative – within the processes of spatial discipline, in phase spaces and field conditions of emergence and transformation – where the architect could apprehend that which is likely alien as emergent or generative. From explorations of the aesthetic expression of the Formless, or the systems of relations arising from an Alien Ontology (perhaps hypothetically to over-write the modern ontology of construction), the alien as an untimely or unexpected initiation of new forms of emergence.16 Like a new question or a new model introduced into an iterative design process, this alien-emergence could generate a ripple effect: the resultant reconfiguration of the arrangements and relations tensioning spatial discipline and spatial flexibility could inflect (or infect) the existing / imagined control systems and codes disciplining spaces. Such an infectious moment of alien-emergence can also be called a micro-event, in that micro-events can be recognized through the almost imperceptible conditions (caprices) sometimes called tipping points, inflection points, glitches, minimal differences, chance appearances, contingency, or accident. The alien-emergence / micro-event is a small crack in the tempo of everyday life, one that opens up a chasm to walk into an alternate, a de-familiarizing interruption, a signal-jamming occurrence (perhaps a moment of positive-alienation) lurking in “even the most rational of spaces.”17 Beyond the modernist appropriation of alienation into aesthetic processes of de-familiarization, alien-emergence situates the alternative in disciplined spaces, where control masks the invisible presence of the alien. Beneath CONTROL-Space the processes of emergence summon an ALT-Space (alternative, alterity) as generative, as disruptive. These ephemeral, unnoticed conditions and effects of alien-emergence would render the atmosphere of modern architectural space as other than its rational a priori emptiness, its characteristic openness of a consistent singular space harboring mysterious others.

Proliferating the Alien Disciplinary spaces of modernity sustain the traces of alternative identity, and in this way the spaces of modernity are processes, not blocks. Architecture today would need to 231

continuously tension the processes of spatial discipline (as conduits and processes) and alien-emergence (as micro-events and divergence). Spatial discipline today would necessarily control (optimize) both Control-space and ALT-space productively and creatively to re-interpret the displacement of forms of life and modes of performance of everyday habit and routine, as an introduction or amplification of the spores of difference into these overt and covert spaces. The prospect of architecture between spatial discipline and alien-emergence requires a more robust reflexive thought process, parallel design methods, and subject-positioning systems to integrate two or more co-present worlds simultaneously. From alien-emergence we can expand to new spatial hybrids, new species of spaces, to a world with countless micro-worlds embedded and emerging within. Hidden and obscure worldswithin-worlds is only one common model – other blooms and outbreaks of the alien are always possible, even desirable. The prospect of spatial discipline tensioned with alien-emergence is actually a retroactive recognition of both statues already present in the conceptualization and appropriation of modern architecture, a re-activated tension that is both a premonition and dÊjà vu experience.

232

Giuseppe Resta

SCPTIPMFLIPPES: A Device for Viewing the Maritime Landscape

fig. 1 Axonometric view SCPTIPMFLIPPES as solid volume (Scale 1:2)

1 Stanley Kubrick, 2001: A Space Odyssey, directed by Stanley Kubrick (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1968), film.

The SCPTIPMFLIPPES—Strumento Cavo Per Traguardare Il Paesaggio Marittimo Fissando Labili Immagini Pronte Per Essere Sublimate—is a device for viewing the maritime landscape that explores the powerful concepts of origin and purpose. The coast is traditionally thought of as wild and pristine, but as activities and amenities from cities spread to the shoreline, a place that was once considered a refuge is becoming increasingly connected to everyday life.

The SCPTIPMFLIPPES creates snapshots of geometric forms by isolating portions of the maritime landscape. The device—black and sunken into the ground—appears alienlike and suggestive of an unfamiliar landscape. Visually, the device recalls the black lunar monolith that appears in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey.1 The film famously uses the monolith to conjure a sense of otherness through indirect representation of the alien.

The power of the SCPTIPMFLIPPES—a fake relic like the 2001 monolith—lies in the relationship it creates between geometry and context; its form is inert and dissipates energy, and its color absorbs all other colors. Because the device is unable to integrate into its environment, it is rendered indifferent to the passing of time.

235

fig. 2 SCPTIPMFLIPPES in Casatellana Marina, Italy Photo by Domenico Pastore

In the first scene in 2001, “The Dawn of Man,” a tribe of hominids encounters the monolith in a rocky desert crater, where the only hues are yellow and light blue. The camera angle points from the foot of the artifact towards the sky, the upper edge of the monolith creating the illusion of a second, new horizon.

The geometric cones inside the SCPTIPMFLIPPES represent the cones of the human eye, each a reference to an element of the maritime landscape, preserving 100 million year old insects like a piece of amber. The negative space inside the form is conceived of as a solid volume, flipping the figure-ground distinction.

The device is designed for portability and compatibility with a standard 3D printer. It displays three different visual cones: I. A monocular visual cone for watching the horizon line. Its rectangular base has a 10:1 ratio and tapers to a circle with a 40° horizontal field of view.

II. A monocular visual cone for watching isolated elements of the landscape. Its circular base tapers to a circle an eighth its size with a 20° field of view.

III. A periscope designed to allow the device to be used discreetly. The angle is designed to hold the mirror at an angle of 45°.

236

2 Vittorio Gregotti. “Recinti,” Rassegna n.1. 1979.

3 Paul Virilio, L’Espace Critique: Essai, (Paris: C. Bourgois, 1987).

Of the device’s six sides, one has a rough finish derived from a parametric honeycomb structure—perhaps the most unique aspect of the 3D printing process is that it enables users to create something by layering materials horizontally. Each layer of the honeycomb structure represents a different period in the Earth’s history, reproducing the formation of rock and telling the story of its creation.

Ultimately, the SCPTIPMFLIPPES is useless, since it does not contain equipment for recording images or enlarging details. Its function is simply to assist the user in focusing his or her eye on meaningful subject matter by narrowing the field of view.

18th century vedutisti (Venetian painters) used the camera obscura to simplify an overwhelming amount of visual information into lines and colors. The act of framing makes the vastness of nature more manageable. Drawing a fence around subject matter renders the space physical and tangible.2 The more this boundary is affirmed physically and conceptually, the more valuable it becomes.

The SCPTIPMFLIPPES’s low-tech functions challenge Paul Virilio’s 1984 L’espace Critique, which states, “the classical separation between position, instant, and object no longer exists. The new electronic surface flattens time and space and perception of a place in single points of view, namely frames.”3 The SCPTIPMFLIPPES identifies the value of a place before the site transforms.

Acknowledgments Volo Creativo_ADDLab, for promoting the 3D printing workshop and 3D Italy, for providing technical support.

fig. 3 (next) Matrix of Axonometric Sections

237

Tom Bliska

Transmission Cartography: The Lines

fig. 1 Illustration, Tom Bliska Transmission Cut

1. Ignasi de Solà-Morales Rubió, “Terrain Vague,” in Anyplace, ed.

Cynthia C. Davidson (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995). Terrain Vague is a French phrase imbued with specific urban meaning by Ignasi de SolàMorales; it refers to unproductive spaces outside the logic of the city, and their poignancy in our collective imagination.

First, acoustics. Standing underneath the parallel sets of transmission towers you can hear the unrelenting humming.

The jumbled buzz of electricity, of connectivity, of a hundred thousand ordinary appliances teething at power. On a humid day the vibrations pulse through your skeleton, foregrounding normally invisible flows, crackling with no discernible rhythm.

Second, vision. The lines cut through the landscape, the 200-foot right-of-way flattens fields, fells trees, laughs at topography. The new horizon appears abruptly, awakening a counterpoint to the sleepily curving Virginia roads. The towers register against the new vanishing point, gaining strength in numbers, marching lockstep.

Third, space. The first exploration off the road, the tentative trespass out of the public sphere into an autonomous incision. This is not terrain vague,1 it is terrain spécifique ordered to absurdity. It is the infrastructural sublime, territory inhabited vicariously through consumption.

The cut is violent, selfish, but it is also didactic, creating purely topographical transects. Environmental processes, ground covers, and landforms collapse into one framed view.

241

1

fig. 2 Site Plan Transmission line and cut .

fig. 3 Illustrated Section Topography .

fig. 4 Site Plans Site interventions .

fig. 5 Axon Insertions into new terrain .

The character of the land is rendered highly vulnerable – naked and punctured. The artifacts are placeless infrastructural objects, but in their actions they reveal site specificity.

This site represents hundreds of miles of high voltage transmission lines in Virginia that mediate between areas of energy production and consumption, minimizing energy lost to resistance. The higher the voltage, the lower the loss. Better to bundle, consolidate and make a single clear cut.

At first, this territory and its tethered inhabitants seem radically divorced from residents of the rural Virginia landscape.

But there are insurgencies, pockets of action that speak to an infiltration of the cut’s hard boundaries. Circles of parked cars create nomadic settlements, access roads poke obstinately out from under tree cover. When the lines make the leap over ponds and reservoirs, new edge conditions form. When they parallel fields, farmers immediately capitalize on the potential for extra storage space.

How little could be done to transition this terrain into the public realm? To augment this already hybrid territory with new programmable surfaces that encourage occupation, leisure, spectacle and event? Our working dimensions are 200’

by X. The first interventions must be distributed and democratic: an essay in patchwork reoccupation, suburban in scale, superurban in complexity and connectivity, negotiating both the economic demands of city infrastructure and the spatial obligations to surrounding communities. Start at the edge and follow the lines…

245

Contributors

246

JULIE SHAPIRO is a Master of Landscape Architecture candidate at the University of Virginia. She holds a bachelor’s degree in biology from Oberlin College. Her current research interest is the significance of “wilderness” as a concept in contemporary landscape architecture and the potential for wilderness-type experiences in urban environments.

LUCY MCFADDEN is a Master of Landscape Architecture candidate at the University of Virginia. She received the Howland Traveling Fellowship to research and document domestic landscapes in Havana and rural Cuba. She is interested in how socio-ecological systems materialize at the human scale as a way of understanding cultural landscapes at large.

SHANE REINER ROTH and Kyle Branchesi are TALL, a collaborative group based in Los Angeles. Their work challenges the role architecture can anticipate among the allied fields by confounding the presentation of the practice itself. Their writing and imagery have been published in journals including Log, LOBBY, The Oxford School of Architecture, Mas Context, Clog, and several others.

TAYLOR HEWETT is a Master of Architecture Candidate at the University of Virginia. He holds a bachelor’s degree in economics and English literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His current research interest is in the evaluation of building as a cultural practice through acts of representation that express form as a critical spatial as well as material concept.

JOANA POLONIA was born in Braga, Portugal. In September 2010, she commenced the architecture program at the University of Porto.

JUAN SALAZAR studied at Cal Poly Pomona where he received his Bachelor of Architecture. Currently, his work engages themes related to visual deceptions in architecture.

He resides and works in Los Angeles, California.

PAUL GOLISZ received his Master of Architecture degree from the University of Virginia and currently practices in New York City. Prior to attending architecture school, Paul received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design and worked as a furniture designer.

247

JENNA HARRIS is a 2015 Master of Landscape Architecture candidate at the University of Virginia. She graduated Magna Cum Laude with a BA in History from Macalester College in 2008. Her research interests include landscape waste, perception, change over time, and memory. This research stems from Brian Osborn’s Fall 2014 Surveillance Practices Studio.

MELINA ANALYTI graduated from the department of Architectural Engineering, UTH. She received distinction for her thesis on the 6th Greek architectural project exhibition, “WALLS” (2009). She holds a postgraduate degree in landscape architecture (MAP, ETSAB / U.P.C., Barcelona, Spain). She participated in the workshop “Sound Generators I & II” (2011-­2012) and the exhibitions “Urban Hide” (2003), “ARTISANS-Workshops of words, designs, images,”and “Exposicion Internacional de Proyectos Universitarios en Escuelas de Arquitectura y Paisaje” (6th Biennale Europea de Paisaje, 2011).

EVA ANDRONIKIDOU is a PhD student at the Architecture School of N.T.U.A., where she also received a degree in Landscape Architecture in 2008 ( U.P.C., Spain, 2012, scholarship by Bodossaki Foundation). As an architect, she has been awarded for her projects “Urban space in Kilkis” (2013) and “D.Areopagitou” (2008). She participated in the 6th Biennale of Landscape Architecture in Barcelona and has exhibited work in Spain, Portugal and Greece.

NATHAN BURGESS is an Associate at Dodson & Flinker Landscape Architecture and Planning. He holds a Master of Landscape Architecture degree from the University of Virginia and a Bachelors of Science from the College of William and Mary, with majors in Environmental Geology and English Literature. He is particularly interested in design opportunities resulting from the tension between processes of change (climatic or cultural, for example) and the human desire for preservation and conservation.

LARRY BROWNE merges teaching, design and research.

As an architect, he has designed commissions in New York City, upstate New York, Cushing, ME, Austin, TX, Zurich, Switzerland, and Buenos Aires, Argentina. Bowne has worked with students, colleagues and collaborators on several community engagement and design/build projects, including 248

projects in Syracuse, NY, New Orleans, LA, Washington, D.C., and Greensburg, KS. These projects have been featured, exhibited and/or published in several venues, including ArchDaily and “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition,” as well as exhibitions at the Venice Biennale and the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. He has received multiple awards for community engagement, including an ACSA Archive 100 honorable mention in 2011 and the ACSA Design Build Award in 2014.

COLLEEN TUITE is a writer, designer, and co-director of GRNASFCK, an experimental landscape architecture studio, operating along the margins of architecture and ecology. The studio is the collaborative project of Ian Quate and Colleen Tuite, based in New York City. Her work explores the psychic confluence of architecture, technology and ecology. She holds a Masters of Landscape Architecture from the Rhode Island School of Design and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Colleen’s writing has appeared in MONU Magazine, Manifest: A Journal of American Architecture and Urbanism, Whole Terrain, and LOBBY. She lives in New York.

IAN QUATE is co-director of GRNASFCK along with Colleen Tuite. He has a vested interest in gathering and manipulating information in the environment- from genetics to construction documents to geology. He has studied with academic institutions in North Carolina, New York City, Rhode Island, Ecuador and England. Ian works with Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects in New York City.

SPURSE is a creative design consultancy that focuses on social, ecological and ethical transformation. Bridging experience from the fields of science, art and design, the team utilizes unique immersive methods to co-produce new ecologies, urban environments, public art, experimental visioning, strategic development, alternative educational models, and expanded configurations of the commons.

KATHERINE CANNELLA graduated from the University of Virginia in 2014 with a Master of Landscape Architecture.

She currently works as a landscape designer in New York City.

YOUNGJIN YI was awarded the AIA Henry Adams Medal and Certificate upon receiving her Master of Architecture 249

from Cornell University in 2014. She graduated Magna Cum Laude with a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from Cornell University in 2010. Yi currently works at BuroHappold Engineering as a Mechanical Engineer specializing in high-rise residential buildings in New York City.

LAUREN NELSON graduated with a Master of Architecture from the University of Virginia in 2015. At UVA, Lauren taught the Foundations I studio for undergraduate first years as part of her Design Education Fellowship for 2014-2015.

Her research interests are at the intersection of architecture and urban design, where buildings meet public space.

CAN BUI & ANN LANE RICK are interested in the complexities and idiosyncrasies of the globalized urban environment. Both received Master degrees from the Yale School of Architecture. Lane is an artist and Project Architect at Ben Wood Studio Shanghai, and Can is a Project Architect at Adjaye Associates in New York. Their collaborative research and design operates in the liminal space between Shanghai and New York City.

FELIPE ORENSANZ is a Mexico City based architect and urbanist and is co-founder of Zooburbia. His work has been exhibited, among other places, at the Museum of the City of New York and the Storefront for Art and Architecture, and his writings have appeared in magazines and journals such as CLOG (New York), MONU (Rotterdam), Displacements (Madrid), Ground Up (Berkeley University), and Horizonte (Weimar). He received the Alfonso Caso Medal in 2010.

MARCELA GRACIA ACOSTA received a Master of Architecture from the University of Virginia in 2015. She graduated in 2013 with a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Arizona, and has practiced in Tucson, Arizona.

Her interests rely on questioning the role of architecture in place-making and culture, and explores her love for space and form through conceptual drawing and illustration.

FRANCISCO MESONERO is a landscape architect with a degree from ETSABarcelona Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC), Barcelona (2008). He also holds a degree as a Technical Engineer in Agronomy from EUITAMadrid Polytechnic University of Madrid (UPM), Madrid (2006).

250

He worked as a landscape and urbanism design consultant from 2008 to 2012 and joined aldayjover architecture and landscape in January 2012. In 2013, he assumed the role of Landscape Architecture Director of aldayjover Barcelona.

JESÚS ARCOS CORDÓN is an architect with a professional degree from ETSAVallès Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC), Barcelona (2004). From 2000 to 2005, he worked as a structural consultant and since May 2005, has worked as a member of aldayjover architecture and landscape, assuming the role of Architect in Charge of aldayjover Barcelona since August 2011.

JON PIASECKI is a registered landscape architect and an expert stonemason. His contact and firm information is available at www.goldenbough.net. He won the Prince Charitable Trust Rome Prize in 2004. His Stone River project received an honor award in design from the ASLA in 2011.

THOMAS MICAL is Associate Professor of Architectural Theory at the University of South Australia, in the School of Art, Architecture, and Design. After completing a M.Arch. thesis on Blade Runner at Harvard GSD, he has taught architectural theory, modernity, studio, and research methods at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Illinois Institute of Technology, Technical University of Vienna, Carleton University, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Currently he is a Visiting Senior Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science, Department of Media and Communications.

GIUSEPPE RESTA is a Ph.D. student in the “Architecture: Innovation and Heritage” program at the Università degli studi Roma TRE and Politecnico di Bari, Rome, Italy. He received his Master of Architecture from the Politecnico di Bari, focusing on contemporary mixed-use buildings and their figurative quality in the city. Resta is an architect at (dp) aSTUDIO in Bari, Italy and periodically writes for Artwort magazine and artwort.com. His published work has appeared in several architectural magazines.

TOM BLISKA is a second year Master of Architecture student at the University of Virginia. His work focuses on the material and construction of public spaces and the broader contexts that influence their success.

251