Game Space_2: Mirror's Edge

(See my previous post on this topic). EA is bringing parkour to a gaming console near you.



I suppose this was inevitable, given the media attention given to parkour. One wonders, however, if this game is better played in third person as opposed to in first. That way, the way a body moves through the city is better appreciated.

The Anti-Architecture of H.P. Lovecraft

H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937)

Literary works are especially pernicious when deployed as instruments of architectural criticism. So much so that even that most revered of writers, Leo Marx, is often taken to task for using the 19th century novel as a type of spatial critique. More recently, art historian W.J.T. Mitchell alluded to the spatialization of narrative as a new frontier in the annals of literary criticism. And yet he claims that the spatialization of narrative has been a consistent part of literary history: "[S]patial form is a crucial aspect of the experience and interpretation of literature in all ages and cultures. The burden of proof, in other words, is not ... to show that some works have spatial form but ... to provide an example of any work that does not" [1]

That being said, it does not bring us any closer to understanding how a novel can help us better understand issues relating to architecture and urbanism. While some may will still invoke the works of J.G. Ballard or Samuel R. Delany as examples of writers who tackle buildings and cities as the object of their narrative, we still are at the initial conundrum that informs this post: these, and other works are primarily representational in nature. The authors of the Concrete Islands, Dhalgrens, and Make Room, Make Room's of the world provide very little guidance as to how to operationalize their critique.

One way to approach this problem is via the architectural metaphor. Thus, some critics will deploy the language of architecture critique to analyze a narrative. The word "architectonic" is often use to understand a novel's expansive length, or perhaps even its materiality. On the other hand, an author's biographical facts are brought to bear: an early interest in architecture or urban planning is thus made an important critical fulcrum on which arguments are carefully balanced.

The works of the famously misanthropic fantasy novelist H.P. Lovecraft provide an interesting and plausible take on this situation. And this is the case not only because Lovecraft is one of those writers who successfully deploys architectonics and materiality in service of profoundly architectural observations. This is so because Lovecraft lived a manic intellectual existence where an unabashed love for historic preservation was counterbalanced by a deep hatred for modern architecture.

Timothy H. Evans, an American folklore scholar, has written about Lovecraft's personal involvement in preservation issues in Providence and New York. This interest, he argues, is also reflected in Lovecraft's writings. A decisive, malevolent undercurrent thus connects his xenophobia and his anti-modernist inclinations. This becomes especially noticeable in Lovecraft's science fictions. Evans thus writes:

Lovecraft's stories about extraterrestrials also rely heavily on architecture. A familiar sense of place, embodied in Colonial New England architecture, was central to Lovecraft's sense of security; hence, an actual Italian Catholic church may be an abode of monsters, as it becomes in "The Haunter of the Dark" (1935). But if "foreign" architecture is frightening, the ultimate embodiment of fear is non-human architecture, which has no relationship to familiar forms or aesthetics. Lovecraft criticized modern architecture for rejecting tradition and believed that a new architecture, to be livable, must draw on traditional symbols (a rather post-modern idea); it follows that architecture lacking in such symbols would be a terrifying embodiment of cosmic alienage [...] Lengthy descriptions of non-human architecture are used to create such an atmosphere in "The Call of Cthulu" (1926), At The Mountains of Madness (1931), and "The Shadow Out of Time" (1935) [2]

Others have detected similar strains in Lovecraft's work. The novelist John Banville, writing in a 2005 issue of Artforum, even notes when Lovecraft moved to New York in 1924 with his wife, he "found the city a great and, despite an initial period of uncharacteristic uncheeriness, terrible shock; the baroque metropolises of his fiction, infested with monstrous beings, are his response to the spectacle of New York in the early years of the Roaring Twenties." Banville then quotes a particularly gruesome bit from Lovecraft's "He" (1939): "Garish daylight shewed only squalor and alienage and the noxious elephantasis of climbing, spreading stone ... the throngs of people that seethed through the flumelike streets were squat, swarthy strangers with hardened faces and narrow eyes" [3].

Michel Houellebecq (Source: New York Magazine)

But perhaps the greatest enthusiast of Lovecraft's architectural pretense is French novelist Michel Houellebecq. His strange meditation, H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life (2005), plays up the architectural musings in Lovecraft's fiction. Houellebecq is so fascinated by this most "anti-literal" of authors that he begins deploying Lovecraft's own persona into his writing. At the beginning of the second section, Houllebecq (or is it Lovecraft?) writes,

The surface of the earth today is overlaid with a irregular, dense web of fibres, entirely fabricated by humans.
In this web circulates the life-blood of the social. The transport of people, of commodities, of provisions; multiple transactions, orders to buy, orders to sell, facts to be believed, other, more intellectual or affective, exchanges ... This incessant flux continues regardless of humanity, absorbed in the lifeless convulsions of its own activity.
[...]
At the intersections of their channels of communication, men build giant ugly metropolises, where each, isolated in an anonymous apartment identical to all the rest, believes himself the centre of the world and the measure of all things. But, underneath the excavated earth with its burrowing insects, very ancient and very powerful creatures are waking slowly from their slumbers. They were there already during the carboniferous period, they were there during the Triassic and Permian; they have known the stirrings of the first mammal, and they will know the agonized cries of the last. [4]

For Houellebecq, this Lovecraft-inspired threnody deploys the forces of architecture for a deeply cynical purpose. Houellebecq continues, this time commenting on Lovecraft's fascination with the Gothic:

Because the dream-architecture which he describes is, like that of the grand gothic and baroque cathedrals, a total architecture. The heroic harmony of the planes and volumes are felt violently; but also, the bell-turrets, the minarets, the bridges overhanging great chasms are overloaded with exuberant ornamentation, in contrast to the gigantic smooth stone surfaces. Reliefs and bas-reliefs and frescoes cover the titanic vaults which lead from one inclined plane to another, in the bowels
of the earth. Many recount the grandeur and the decadence of a race; others, more simple and geometric, seem to evoke disquieting mystical suggestions [5].

Here is an architecture of urgency. An architecture realized by Houellebecq's and Lovecraft's oscillations between the monolithic and microsopic, the decaying and the verdant, the dead and the living. This interplay of extremes is "An effect of scale, effect of vertigo. A procedure borrowed, once again, from architecture" [6].

The words "once again" betray Houllebecq's belief in the essential architecture that is Lovecraft's fiction. It is as if, in reading this most cryptic of authors through the critical lens of an unabashedly unpleasant French anti-liberal, one must admit that the darkest literary impulses carry forth an architectural imprimatur.

Lovecraft's literary predilections certainly echo the works of earlier avatars of the Gothic. In fact, his musings on style would no doubt remind a student of architecture of the strange, proto-modernist musings of Eugene Emmanuel Viollet-Le-Duc (who, in a particularly Lovecraftian take, signed all his documents with an ink rendering of a bat's wing). What is fascinating, if not totally convincing, is that architecture springs forth from a most unlikely of sources: the work of H.P. Lovecraft.

Notes:

[1] W.J.T. Mitchell, "Spatial Form in Literature: Toward a General Theory", Critical Inquiry, Vol. 6, No. 3 (Spring, 1980), p. 541

[2] Timothy H. Evans, "A Last Defense against the Dark: Folklore, Horror, and the Uses of Tradition in the Works of H.P. Lovecraft" Journal of Folklore Research, Vol. 42, No.1 (2005), p. 118

[3] In John Banville, "Futile Attraction: Michel Houellebecq's Lovecraft" Artforum (1 April 2005) (available at http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Futile+attraction:+Michel+Houellebecq's+Lovecraft-a0131433355)

[4] Michel Houellebecq, H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, Robin Mackay, trans (2004), p.10 (accessed at http://blog.urbanomic.com/dread).

[5] Ibid., p. 18.

[6] Ibid., p. 23.

Get Your Expectations On!

Yep, we've seen this before. For more on the film, go here.

Hyperbolic Rooms

Technician adjusts wood model of North American B-25 Mitchell inside a wind tunnel (source: Library of Congress)

There may be a future project, one that looks at research facilities and laboratories not just as places where knowledge is produced, but also as places where the most extreme conditions are manufactured. A good example is a return-flow wind tunnel (above), which uses condensers and other equipment to simulate high or low atmospheric pressures. The two following examples, however, I find fascinating for the types of extreme architectural conditions they represent.

The first example I can think of is an anechoic chamber. Anechoic chambers are rooms designed to curtail, shape, or even prevent sound propagation. Typical examples contain some type of foam or cork sound baffling. The example below, from the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough, England, is interesting as it is a room for testing radar equipment. This particular room, dating from the 1980s, is shielded from RF waves. The foam bafflers look menacing, almost like teeth. It is as the room were designed to literally eat soundwaves.

RF-Negative Anechoic Sound Chamber at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, Farnborough, UK (NMR.Crown Copyright)

The next example comes from NASA's Project Fire, a testing program from 1964-1967 designed to simulate the re-entry of an Apollo Command Module in the Earth's upper atmosphere. The idea was to understand the conditions of extreme heat, pressure, and friction a capsule would experience upon its descent.

Project Fire documentation (source: National Aeronautics and Space Administration)

The image below shows a section diagram of the Project Fire re-entry vehicle. It is, in essence an Apollo capsule crammed with telemetry equipment and various other sensors. The vehicle was launched from Kennedy Space Center , entered low Earth orbit, and descended in the vicinity of Ascension Island.

Project Fire II Re-entry Vehicle (source: National Aeronautics and Space Administration)

The below image shows a static test of a Project Fire vehicle. Here, technicians adjust the testing model inside a small, metallic room. On either side, large metallic perforations channel and radiate the incoming flames. Farther off, in the center of the picture, a concrete aperture provides a peek into a barren landscape. Presumably, some type of rocket booster would be placed inside the aperture and fired inside the room.

Project Fire static test preparation (source: National Aeronautics and Space Administration)

The above buildings are not of the type usually featured in architectural surveys. They are of special architectural interest, however. These are rooms, if not for habitation, but for silence and incineration. It is an odd affirmation of Steve Shapin's dictum about entering the spaces of science in 18th century England: "We can, it is true, make the occasional trip to places where scientific knowledge is made. However, when we do so, we come as visitors, as guests in a house where nobody lives."

It's Beginning To And Back Again

William James , Waterfall Illusion (1890) (Source: Harvard Gazette)

A couple of weeks ago, I presented a paper at a two-day conference and workshop hosted by MIT's Department of Architecture. As part of the event, we were given a personalized tour of Harvard's Scientific Collection by none other than Peter Galison. He drew our attention to one of the most well-known optical machines from the collection: William James' Waterfall Illusion.

The instrument was used by German psychologist Hugo Münsterburg at Harvard's Psychological Laboratory (affiliated with, of all things, their Philosophy Department) for various well-documented trial experiments. Yet the Waterfall Illusion illustrates an important point about the relationship between the eye and the brain. The Dictionary of Psychology thus describes this relationship as,

An example of a negative after-effect. It is an illusion of apparent movement that occurs as a result of steady visual fixation on any portion of a waterfall. When the observer's gaze is shifted to the surrounding scenery, it appears to move in an upward direction. May be demonstrated in the laboratory with a waterfall illusion device such as one described by William James in his Principles of Psychology (1890).

I find the idea of an "illusion of apparent movement" fascinating. So much so that I was thinking about the waterfall illusion as I heard Mark Cousins speak at the Princeton University School of Architecture only a couple of nights ago. In a lecture entitled "History vs. The Past," Cousins (head of the Theories and Histories Program at the Architectural Association) bemoaned the current state of history in architecture school curricula. "History" was quickly put as a straw man, but only when understood in particular temporal frameworks, and under the dangerous rubric of "influence." Put another way, Cousins finds fault in the Wölfflinian approach of breaking down stylistic periods according to various attributes, and determining how those attributes were transmitted from from architect to architect.

A distinction was made between "history" and "the past." And Cousins advocated the latter rather than the former. When asked by an audience member how one would ever operationalize this idea, Cousins used the terms "relationship" and "engagement." In other words, the task is not to learn how ideas relating to the design of the Parthenon were communicated from generation to generation. Rather, the charge should be how individual architects dealt with the past. To use the Parthenon example, then: Cousins would opt for meditations and exegeses on how Le Corbusier "digested" the Parthenon in his writings and designs, or, to move on to more recent examples, how Peter Eisenman "made" Guiseppe Terragni.

The trouble is, the differences between "historical" methods and Cousins' interrogation of "the past" may be too subtle. They may be so subtle that the actual work of history -- the Blochian project of "crafting" history -- may fall by the wayside. The strange thing is that though the Q&A session was heated, Cousins and his critics were actually fighting the same fight. For two hours, people actually talked about "history", its guises and its pratfalls.

Yet for all the semantic wrangling between "history" and "the past", such distinctions can make for some confusion. But is this confusion good? Moving forward, in Cousins' pedagogical framework, means looking back. And one wonders if this wholly Benjaminian take is really just another version of Henry James' waterfall illusion. Do we think that our careful analyses and theoretical investigations move forward, when in reality we are mired in "the past"? Or is it the other way around: does our seeming reliance on precedent, influence, and any other deployment of concepts that require us to look backwards in time, in fact, move us forward? I'll leave it to James:

All currents tend to run forward in the brain and discharge into the muscular system and the idea of movement tends to do this with peculiar facility. But the question remains: Do currents run backward [?] (1918: 69).

The National Park Architecture Sourcebook (A Review)

San Francisco Maritime Museum

The National Park Architecture Sourcebook
Henry H. Kaiser
Princeton Architectural Press
608 pp / 500 B+W
Paperback
$40.00
Publication Date: May 1, 2008

Our Federal Government is a large, expansive entity. Staffed by thousands, with millions upon millions of everyday objects, and with an immense archive of documents and work-related bric-a-brac, the U.S. Government takes advantages of its own economies of scale to produce stuff ... and lots of it. It is thus interesting how few ever consider our Government in terms of the sheer quantity of its architectural production. Sure, plenty of books and architectural monographs describe familiar objects: monuments, Capitols, banks, highways, courthouses ... but such descriptions rarely give anyone the sense of the absolute scale of our Government's building and design efforts. Put another way, our Government makes stuff. And lots of it.

This is precisely what makes Harvey H. Kaiser's The National Park Architecture Sourcebook (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2008) such a fascinating document. Weighing in at a hefty 600 pages, Kaiser's book provides a regional, state-by-state account of all architectural objects (buildings, monuments, piers, etc) that fall under the aegis of the United States National Park Service. And if we look at the content, we quickly note that Kaiser provides a brief, refreshingly pithy essay for each of the 216 buildings covered in the book. This is, in many ways, reminiscent of the old Shell or AIA guides that lead us through the various tangles and conurbations of our built environment. And yet again, it is not overwhelmingly encyclopedic (nor extravagantly demonstrative, like Robert A.M. Stern's New York books). Here, we are told everything straight-up and poker-faced.

It is a fascinating read, to boot. Covering a wide swath of buildings, from the ruined villages at the Chaco Culture National Historical Park in San Juan County, New Mexico; to the Springfield National Armory Site in Massachusetts; to the Isle Royale National Park in Michigan. Each park is mined for its architectural and landscape offerings. And in some cases, the results are stellar. Consider, for example, the San Francisco Maritime Museum (see above image). Kaiser writes:

The San Francisco Maritime National Historic Park contains a superb example of streamline moderne architecture ... The park's centerpiece is the bathhouse, a gleaming white moored ocean liner. Now the Maritime Museum building, the four-story reinforced-concrete structure designed by the William Moosers, Sr. and Jr., is banked into the slope of land as it gradually descends into the bay. The main entrance is on the second floor at the foot of Polk Street. An oval plan, recessed upper stories, porthole windows, tubular steel railings, air vents shaped like ship's funnels, and historic white color add to the building's illusion as an ocean liner. The nautical theme is carried out in the interiors by murals, statues, and other artwork by artists Hilaire Hiler, Sargent Johnson, RIchard Ayer, John Glut, and Benjamin Bufano. The artwork is significant for its surreal and abstract forms not commonly found in WPA projects (46-47).

This is not cutting edge architecture theory. Nor is Kaiser's book a radical re-versioning of history. On the other hand, it is a thoughtful, remarkable collection that brings to light works which would otherwise be overlooked in the history of the American built environment.

Suck (or Vacuuming as Military Intelligence)

Buying a piece of intelligence in Carroll Reed's Our Man in Havana (1959). L to R: Alec Guinness as Wormold, Noel Coward as Hawthorne (Source: DVD Beaver)

I am a huge, unabashed fan of Graham Greene's Our Man in Havana (1958). But I would even say that I am bigger, more unabashed fan of Carroll Reed's subsequent film version from 1959. The story is the same: Wormold, a vacuum cleaner salesman in pre-Castro Cuba, is mistaken for a British intelligence operative. He opts for the MI-6 paycheck, the only caveat being that he has to provide other Field Agents with intelligence.

Poster for Reed's Our Man in Havana (1959)

As one of Greene's "entertainments", Our Man in Havana certainly is not lacking in its comic moments. Although it is not quite as funny as the stitch-inducing Travels With My Aunt, Reed's film version makes up for this through its brilliant casting. As the delicate, phlegmatic Wormold, Alec Guinness plays the part brilliantly, echoing the brilliant charm of his Ealing comedies as well as The Horse's Mouth. Noel Coward gives Field Station Chief Hawthorne a necessary and comic taciturn flair. Burl Ives' tragic and teutonic Hasselbacher becomes the film 's urgent, humanistic center.

But my favorite character in the whole movie is a household appliance. One of the story's high comedic points occurs when Wormold is asked to provide MI-6 with proof that the Cuban army (in an eerily prescient collaboration with the Soviets) is building a missile base.

Wormold's Sunday-Morning Comic from Reed's Our Man in Havana (1959) (Source: DVD Beaver)

Inspired by a pulp Sunday morning comic depicting an airplane crash in the mountains, Wormold concocts a tale of a downed pilot seeing what he thinks is a missile base (see above). He delivers a "picture" of the base: a vacuum cleaner.

Wormold draws his Cuban missile base, from Reed's Our Man in Havana (1959) (screen capture by author)

This vacuum cleaner is an exquisite architectural specimen. In what looks like a sectional perspective or cutaway drawing, we see the interior of the vacuum cleaner. It features a fairly standard architectural vocabulary: floor plates, monumental scale, HVAC systems. And even more impressively, it becomes a high-tech object.

Wormold's vacuum cleaner/missile base, from Reed's Our Man in Havana (1959) (screen capture by author)

We need only remind ourselves that the very same year that Reed directed Our Man in Havana, Banham published his influential Theory and Design in the First Machine Age. Wormold's vacuum cleaner does not make it onto the pages of Theory and Design. Yet we also recall an article Banham wrote in 1959 for The Architectural Review called "Neoliberty: the Italian Retreat from Modern Architecture." In that piece, Banham reminds us of the importance of Wormold's own pop icon:

[T]he domestic revolution that began with electric cookers, vacuum cleaners, the telephone, the gramophone, and all those other mechanised aids to gracious living that are still invading the home, and have permanently altered the nature of domestic life and the meaning of domestic architecture.

It is thus interesting how, in Wormold's drawn universe, the vacuum cleaner has transcended its role as architectural representation. For him, the vacuum cleaner is architecture.

What is Your Object?

What is your object? This is a question that historians will ask those who are being trained as historians. If not a tricky question, then it is one that does play on semantic subtleties. So if an architecture historian is asked, "What is your object?", wouldn't it be plausible to equate that question with "What is your objective?" In other words, "What is your project?"

I post these curious semantic wanderings only in response to a great discussion that Kazys Varnelis initiated weeks back. This discussion, which was in itself a response to historian Mark Jarzombek's so-called "Anti-Pragmatic Manifesto", remains with very few comments. And this is a shame because Kazys put forth a brilliant question:

What of history? ... [W]hy is it that historians have ceded their need to understand the contemporary world to other disciplines? Where is the historiographic innovation needed to understand the contemporary? When will we begin the work on the theories of history necessary for understanding our world.

I offer a slightly different take on the question, and I hope that this gloss will help stimulate more discussion about this particular issue. When Kazys asserts that historians "ceded their need" to analyze to other disciplines, one must remember that he is first and foremost talking about architecture historians. With this in mind, I wonder if one reason for this is that, perhaps, architecture historians have guarded the objects of their own study -- buildings and cities -- too closely. It is, of course, more complex than this. After all, historians like Jarzombek continuously raise the importance of critical historiography. Others have pointed to architecture history as a curious amalgam of three separate, yet interdependent realms: theory, material culture, and "straight up architecture history."

But back to architecture history's "object" and "objective." A holistic approach to Kazys' comments would certainly involve looking at architecture's object status a little differently. Instead of looking at architecture and urbanism as the subject of myriad monographs and biographies, perhaps it is best to operationalize buildings and cities ... to use architecture to make bigger, more important claims about our world, our societies, our histories. These are the types of scholarship that I admire. And though it is true that examples of such scholarship sometimes occurs outside the ambit of architecture history and theory, there are plenty of texts (and upcoming dissertations ) that deploy this instrumentalist approach.

But I also see another more latent problem with the practice of architecture history, one that Kazys does not allude to (at least not to my knowledge). The discipline of architecture history and theory -- as one distinct from art history -- is a relatively new field. The original intent of these programs was to train architects to teach history at architecture schools. In many ways, this is still the objective. Take a look at the various catalogs for top-flight Ph.D programs, and you will encounter the proviso that "candidates should possess a master of architecture degree or its equivalent."

I'll put myself out on the line and say outright that this model is broken. The majority of applicants to Ph.D programs in architecture are not architects. In fact, one soon-to-be finished Ph.D candidate remarked to me that during the time that he worked on admissions, only a small number of the total applicant pool under consideration had an M.Arch or B.Arch degree. Applicant pools feature a interesting swath of interests: from art history, urban planning, anthropology, literary theory, computer science, and even law.

A distinction between "those with architecture backgrounds" and "those without" will forever be made within schools whose charge is to train architecture historians. This only harms the practice of architecture history ... for if our discipline is to acquire meaning in this world, it must exist beyond design studios and juries. And for this to happen, the expertise of those outside the realm of architecture is necessary.

I note that this is a different situation from what Kazys paints, that of architecture "ceding" its interests to other disciplines. To avoid what Raymond Williams famously referred to as a "problem of perspective", I think that we have to articulate this notion of "ceding" a little differently. In other words, architecture history must not "cede" its interests. Rather, it has to "embrace" these other interests and incorporate them into its own methodologies.

Whether one chooses to frame this "embrace" under the banners of "interdisciplinariness" or under the rubric of hot-off-the press historiographic "transnational approaches", it is important to note that, at the very least, these methods and aspirations offer something that architecture history sorely lacks: dialogue. This is what I think Kazys worries about ... and it is something we all should worry about as well.

Theorizing the American City

"One of the major problems between architecture and urbanism today," so declares Italian architecture theorist Pier Vitorio Aureli," is that ... the contemporary city is constantly researched, but it is no longer theorized." This quote, from Aureli's lecture at Yale School of Architecture this past fall, seems to act as a corrective (or tonic) to the current state of thinking that permeates architecture schools. Formalism and politics are linked together in Aureli's world view -- a point made more poignant by his observation that site has lost importance in the "recent history of architecture."

And before arm-chair critics invoke the hallowed banner of "context", consider how the "c" word has very little relevance for Aureli. Site is not context. Siting (the act of creating a site) is the "establishing of appearance within the public space of a project." These are highly-charged and provocative statements, to be sure. Yet Aureli's opening statement -- that cities are no longer theorized -- is a little too conclusive for this writer's own taste.

This is precisely what makes Fred Scharmen's eloquent and passionate "love letter" to Baltimore so refreshing and so poignant. Here, in this short, sweet feature for Archinect entitled "Baltimore, Place of Yes and Yes", Scharmen does much more to resuscitate what Aureli sees as lacking in current architectural thinking. Here is a vital piece of writing that theorizes the city. Not Dubai. Not Beijing. But Baltimore.

Scharmen begins his piece with a Molly Bloom-esque affirmative:

Baltimore is Postindustrial, Multilayered, Patinated. It's made of brick. Cold in the winter, hot in the summer, Baltimore is full of colleges, nonprofits, art schools, universities, bars, but also, according to the 2000 census, over 40,000 vacant housing units. There's a lot of crime and rent is cheap. The contradictions are there in the slogans: 'Bodymore Murdaland' aka 'The City that Reads' (or 'Bleeds'). 'Stop Snitchin' or just 'BELIEVE.'

What's the proper reaction to these conditions? Resignation? Hope? Irony? Is it possible to appreciate the aesthetic consequences of Urban Decay while decrying the socio-economic forces that have produced it? Is it possible to make a living city that retains its Authenticity without producing a Generic Monoculture?

As my first studio critic used to say, whenever we asked him an either/or question: 'Yes and Yes'.

Scharmen then takes us through a photographic tour of his city. We see abandoned water fronts, dilapidated brick curtain walls, and various other ephemera that we normally associate with the (now here's a term) postindustrial. We even get to know Baltimore through the critically-acclaimed TV series, The Wire. It's all there: networked urbanism, infrastructural reckoning, and architecture. Yes, architecture.

But I cannot do the article justice. Kudos to Fred, and to Bryan Boyer, for instigating what promises to be a fantastic piece of architectural and urbanistic thinking. And be sure to check our Fred's photostream. You see, the city is being theorized.

Laredo is The Reason

I've just come up for air from a prolonged excursion to the Texas-Mexico border with my family. It was hot, dusty, and windy (yes, 60+ mph winds only a couple of days ago). I also witnessed a couple of things I had never experienced before, such as a Mexican illegal hiding in my parents' property, en route to Houston, and even bobcats. Several nights ago, I was out on the deck, and noticed a strange, infernal glow coming from the southwestern sky. A brush fire. It looked as if the horizon was aflame.

I also spent a long afternoon in Laredo, Texas. The last time I was there was back in 1986, when we crossed the border to take my grandfather to see a dentist in Nuevo Laredo. This goes without saying, but Laredo's transformation has been equally alarming and stunning. Now known as a locus of Cormac McCarthy-esque vioence, Laredo is one of the United States' most important ports of entry. Taking these two aspects into consideration -- it's bordertown woes and infrastructural significance -- one wonders why writers on urbanism and infrastructure have neglected this very important city along the Rio Grande River.

Take this, for example, from a report published by the U.S. Department of Commerce:

[T]he port of Laredo is ranked first among ports along the Southwest border and fourth among all U.S. land ports for the value of goods that are shipped through the area. In 2004, $130.8 billion worth of goods and merchandise passed through the port of Laredo, an increase of 13 percent over the previous year. Over 40 percent of northsouth traffic that crosses our international border with Mexico drives across one of the international bridges in Laredo.

Laredo’s primary industry is transportation and warehousing. In 2003, these industries contributed 16.2 percent of the total earnings of the area. Crossing the Rio Grande River into Nuevo Laredo, one finds numerous maquiladoras. The Delphi and Sony manufacturing plants are the top two employers for all the maquiladoras in Nuevo Laredo.

And even this snapshot of the Port of Laredo, taken after a momentary glance through Google Earth, gives an idea of the sheer amount of truck traffic exchanging through this city:

Port of Laredo Trailer Docks (intersection of Bullock Loop and Interstate 35)

And for those of you of have an interest in the prehistory of cybernetics, consider that the old Laredo Army Air Field (now known as Laredo International Airport), was the site where the U.S. Army Air Force calibrated their computerized gunsights.

AAF Gunnery Crews test nose turret configurations in Laredo, Texas (source: LiberatorCrew)

Driving north along the Bullock Loop, I even noticed some windowless DC-9 aircraft. These are freight forward aircraft operated by Kalitta Air that fly directly to Willow Run, Michigan. Yet the ones I saw bore no markings, and in fact, bore a striking resemblance to the red-flashed Janet aircraft Trevor Paglen often writes about (see previous post on this very topic). That Laredo International Airport is a site with bustling DHS aerial operations is no surprise, as it is one of the facilities used to ferry illegal aliens and other personae non grata to various locations throughout the hemisphere.

A series of articles (and perhaps a book) needs to be written on different types of urban and infrastructural phenomena in Texas. Perhaps it will begin here.

Myra Warhaftig's Forgotten Architects

Harry Rosenthal (1892-1966), Arnold Zweig Residence, Berlin 1929-30 (Source: Forgotten Architects)

The first half of the twentieth century could very well be considered a type of design diaspora. Much has already been written about how architects and designers were displaced by authoritarian, nationalist, and anti-democratic regimes. We know about the Bauhaus exodus, for example. The United States became a fertile ground for the likes of Herbert Bayer, Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius. The same could be said for England, where designers like Arthur Korn and Erich Mendelsohn became influential figures within expatriate design communities. Lesser-known artists, such as the Catalan anti-Franco graphic designer Josep Renau, are slowly becoming the subject of proper historical treatment. However tragic the individual stories may be, these designers are known.

There is another history to be written, one that considers the work of designers and architects that did not fare as well as Mies, Gropius, and scores of others. And this is precisely what makes Myra Warhaftig's thoughtful compendium of the work of 43 Jewish German architects so compelling. This document is soon to be published by Pentagram, whose weblog describes the project in greater detail:

In the 1920s and early 1930s, German Jewish architects created some of the greatest modern buildings in Germany, mainly in the capital Berlin. A law issued by the newly elected German National Socialist Government in 1933 banned all of them from practicing architecture in Germany. In the years after 1933, many of them managed to emigrate, while many others were deported or killed under Hitler’s regime. Pentagram Papers 37: Forgotten Architects is a survey of 43 of these architects and their groundbreaking work.

The paper is based on the extensive research of architect Myra Warhaftig, who sadly passed away last Tuesday, 4 March at age 78. Warhaftig spent twenty years investigating the fates of these architects and only recently published her findings in her book German Jewish Architects Before and After 1933: The Lexicon. An exhibition based on her work is set to open at the Jewish Museum Berlin later this year. David Sokol has written about Warhaftig and her project in an article published today in the Jewish culture blog Nextbook.

Game Space_1: Portal/Fez

At SXSW this past week, Bryan and John both alerted me to some interesting games out there. The first is kokoromi's Fez. Think Mario Bros. on X-Y-Z gimbal axes. The result is, to say the least, pretty awesome.



The second is Valve's Portal. The online entry for the game tells us that

The game consists primarily of a series of puzzles that must be solved by teleporting the player's character and other simple objects using the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device ("Portal Gun" for short), a unit that can create an inter-spatial portal between flat planes. The player character is challenged by an AI named "GLaDOS" to complete each puzzle in the "Aperture Science Enrichment Center" using the Portal Gun with the promise of receiving cake when all the puzzles are completed. The unusual physics allowed by the portal gun are the emphasis of this game, and is an extension of a similar portal concept in Narbacular Drop; many of the team from the DigiPen Institute of Technology that worked on Narbacular Drop were hired by Valve for the creation of Portal.

These games are fascinating in that they involve some type of spatial manipulation. Specifically, Portal reminds us of the work of Israeli architect Eyal Weizman. In a 2006 essay, Weizman describes the IDF's theoretical approaches to navigating hostile urban spaces. He writes:

During the battle soldiers moved within the city across hundreds of metres of ‘overground tunnels’ carved out through a dense and contiguous urban structure. Although several thousand soldiers and Palestinian guerrillas were manuvering simultaneously in the city, they were so ‘saturated’ into the urban fabric that very few would have been visible from the air. Furthermore, they used none of the city’s streets, roads, alleys or courtyards, or any of the external doors, internal stairwells and windows, but moved horizontally through walls and vertically through holes blasted in ceilings and floors. This form of movement, described by the military as ‘infestation’, seeks to redefine inside as outside, and domestic interiors as thoroughfares. The IDF’s strategy of ‘walking through walls’ involves a conception of the city as not just the site but also the very medium of warfare – a flexible, almost liquid medium that is forever contingent and in flux.

All in all, these two games are evidence of practices that fall outside architecture's more normative realms.

Architecture at SXSW Interactive

Less than a week has passed by since SXSW Interactive 2008 came to an end. I was fortunate enough to participate as a panelist this year. Our panel -- comprised of Mimi Zeiger (Loud Paper), John Szot (Brooklyn Digital Foundry), Molly Steenson (activesocialplastic), Bryan Boyer (sorry, Bryan - my bad) and me -- was called "Meet the Architects", and it must have seemed out of place in what has become a very web- and technology-heavy conference. According to the SXSW website:

A new kind of digital practice has emerged. We see it in our buildings and our cities: new architectural interfaces, new communities, new ways of thinking about the physical world around us. In "Meet the Architects," we'll take on these ripples in physical architecture and urbanism. This panel tracks new directions in architecture culture at the intersection of digital, film and urban environments; architecture zines, blogs and communities; and architectural and urban research.

The response, however, has been uniformly good. And this is no doubt because of the superior caliber of my fellow panelists. I would like to think that we brought something different to SXSW. Something more interdisciplinary and compelling than the usual SXSW fare.

Overall, it was a thrilling experience. Being the aprocryphal "fish out of the water" at this conference meant that I could think about my own work within a larger context. Molly, Mimi, John, Bryan and I have some more conference-like things to hammer out in the future. Stay tuned.

Image Source: Mr. Biscuit

(p.s. I'm the one in the grey sweater)

MidWeek Roundup

Website for SVA's Where The Truth Lies

Just a brief summary of things round the web that have me interested of late:

1) Molly Wright Steenson's new site, Active Social Plastic has a very interesting post on the bluff as a type of architectural gesture. The only thing missing is a Toblerone Bar.

2) Websites can be the site of recovery for architectural esoterica -- of the written variety of course. Check out The Honeywood File, a website dedicated to republishing a long-forgotten architecture text from pre-World War II England.

3) Although this event has long passed, the website for the SVA's Where The Truth Lies conference deserves some careful attention. Although the conference was ostensibly about propaganda, the use of a polygraph machine here is fascinating, to say the least.

4) The website for the current MoMA exhibit, Design and the Elastic Mind, is sure to draw ire from webgeeks out there. Although it is as cluttered and messy as the "real" show, this site is quite fun, in my own opinion.

5) a456 was reviewed in The Architect's Journal. Apparently the author of the review, Sutherland Lyall, thinks that my name is a pseudonym.

More forthcoming ....

Big to Huge to Small (A Visual Essay)

Top: Konrad Wachsmann aside a model of his Space Frame system. Bottom: Maquette of Wachsmann's USAF Space Frame (Source: Axxio)

Konrad Wachsmann's most famous project is the space frame hangar system he designed for the United States Air Force in the 1950s. The literature devoted to this topic is exhaustive, and the space frame is often used as an example of Wachsmann's postwar experiments with joint-based modular construction.

Top: Drawing of Patent of Wachsmann's Space Frame, 1949, entitled "Building Construction" (Source: Google Patents). Bottom: Later USAF Space Frame elevation (Source: Axxio)

Nothing, however, seems to mention what the hangar was going to be used for -- housing what was then the world's largest airplane: the Convair B-36 Peacemaker.

Convair B-36 Peacemaker in flight over San Francisco (Source: YourZagi)

There is little doubt that Wachsmann's infinite-space construction was viewed as an optimal solution to house these gigantic bombers. As this image below shows, even moving a brand-new B-36 out of its manufacturing facility was a dangerous procedure. Here, the aircraft has to be elevated and moved out sideways and nose-up so that tail section and immense wingspan could clear the factory floor.

Production model B-36 moved out of assembly line hangar (Source: CleTrac)

Even at the conceptual model stage, Wachsmann's space frame was intended to house large several B-36's under one roof. The image below, for example, shows three B-36's parked side by side. Since each aircraft had a wingspan of 230 feet, the flow structure would have to be at least 690 feet wide and 162 feet tall.

Maquette of Wachsmann's USAF Space Frame with model B-36's inside (Source: Axxio)

And to get a sense of the B-36's immense size, of the massive hangar needed to house such an aircraft, consider this image: part of a B-36's fuselage is being stood on its end for structural static testing. One need only look at the small figures on the hangar floor to appreciate the B-36's size.

B-36 in static test (Source: Wikipedia)

Yet the B-36 was a megastructure of sorts. In addition to its being capable of delivering nuclear ordinance around the world, it was also designed to carry small aircraft inside its bombbay. This fanciful image from a 1948 issue of Popular Mechanics depicts a B-36 in flight, releasing small yellowish aircraft from its belly.

1949 Popular Mechanics magazine depicting B-36 and XF-85 in flight (Source: Airborne Aircraft Carriers)

Yet this small yellow jet was an actual aircraft: the McDonnell XF-85 Goblin, the world's smallest aircraft. There is a comfortable irony at work here -- the world's largest aircraft could be modified to house the world's smallest aircraft.

Top: McDonnell XF-85 Goblin (Source: National Air and Space Museum), Bottom: XF-85 on test flight underneath Boeing B-29 aircraft (Source: National Museum of the United States Air Force)

These images thus show how the XF-85 could be retracted into the B-36's bombbay: via a piece of equipment looking like a trapeze artist's bar.

Top and Bottom: XF-85 retracted into B-36 aircraft (Sources: Wikipedia and Goleta Air and Space Museum)

Reyner Banham, that most outspoken enthusiasm of architecture's own interminglings with technology, offers a sober assessment of Wachsmann's space frame. In "1960 - Stocktaking" (from a 1960 issue of The Architecture Review), Banham claims that the space-frame was "evidence of a fanatical watchmaker ingenuity on the solution of certain problems within the given context of built structure" yet fraught with banality as it lacked a "radicalism of approach."

Wachsmann can be forgiven for this, especially when one considers how the B-36 program operates at every conceivable architectural scale. Wachsmann's hangar, with the potential to be infinitely expandable, exemplifies the largest scale possible. Inside this hangar, of course, are myriad aircraft of staggering size. And inside these aircraft are even smaller aircraft, no bigger than a small two-passenger sedan. When looking at the space frame as part of this system, perhaps Wachsmann's hangar seems more innovative than before. If not, at least more interesting.

The Bligh Cosmos

Plan and Section of the H.M.S. Bounty's Stern (Source: Project Gutenberg)

Way back in the day, many careers ago, I actually studied maritime law. It was a specialization in the truest sense of the word: its tangled skein of laws and lore were esoteric enough to sustain my interest. It was a simple choice, really. Should I bog myself in the minutae of corporate and securities law, or should I read about naval battles, perilous salvage operations, sunken treasures, and hot pursuit across international waters?

I quickly learned that the field of admiralty had some very interesting peculiarities. For example, ships have juridical power in American maritime law. A sloop, steamer, tugboat, frigate is chattel that not only merits a special type of jurisdiction, but that also has "rights". In other words, a ship can have the same legal status as a person. A chance look at an admiralty docket thus reveals a type of poetry in which ships with wonderfully evocative names sue each other in Federal court.

It thus follows that as a piece of chattel, a vessel is subject to the same matrix of property laws that would extend to real estate. A ship was literally a floating piece of property, a mobile island, so to speak. These rights also extended to the arena of public international law, where a ship enjoyed a certain amount of territorial sovereignty. A ship was therefore governed by the laws of its flag of convenience. A ship flying an American flag was covered by U.S. Law, a French by French law, and so on.

Hans Hollein, Aircraft Carrier City in Landscape (1964) (Source: MoMA)

What my law professors failed to convey was that a ship was a place. A vessel's riggings, superstructures, et cetera all comprise a spatial configuration addressing a particular programmatic need. In other words, a ship can be thought of in architectural terms. It is no surprise that when the Austrian architect Hans Hollein declared that "Everything is Architecture", he chose to depict a gigantic nuclear-powered aircraft carrier in the middle of a grassy landscape in service of his point.

The most eloquent statement of a ship's architectural-ness comes from the Australian historian Greg Dening. In his 1993 book, Mr. Bligh's Bad Language: Passion, Power, and Theatre on the Bounty, Dening provides an in-depth look at the events leading to Fletcher Christian's 1789 uprising aboard the H.M.S. Bounty. Dening rightly portrays the insurrection as one with a particularly spatial origin. On the Bounty's fateful expedition, its officers' compartments (see above) were fitted to carry breadfruit and other plants -- a situation that surely infuriated the Bounty's subordinate officers.

Dening captures the Bounty's significance as a space of habitation in the following passage:

Space and the language to describe it make a ship. Space was inseparable from the authority it displayed and the the relationships it enclosed. The 'quarterdeck' in naval parlance was a place -- the upper deck abaft of the mainmast. It was also a social group -- those who had the privilege of walking the quarterdeck and and using the space associated with it, usually the great cabin and the wardroom. From the earliest times the quarterdeck had been a sacred place for shrines of the gods of the sea ans seamen. By the eighteenth century, the quarterdeck was sacred to the presence of sovereign power in displays of etiquette and privilege. It was the captain's territory -- his to walk alone, his to speak from but not to be spoken to unless he wished it. But the captain himself also owed the quarterdeck a deference. He too saluted this shrine as a sign that he was subordinate to the power that others saluted in him. The quarterdeck embodied this commission from the King. It was the space of his sovereign's power, and all its trivial gestures and etiquette were its geography. The quarterdeck, for officers of a fighting ship, was a space for very deep plays. It was there that an officer was expected to stand exposed, shielded only by his honour, when others on the ship might fight with more protection. The dread possibility but also the hope that any officer might have of treading where captains trod touched even the most trivial gesture with solemnity (1992: 19-20).

The H.M.S. Bounty was Captain Bligh's literal and figurative cosmos. It was also an architectural object freighted with power. This view is not uncommon with Herman Melville's passages describing the Pequod as a maritime abbatoir, a seagoing slaughterhouse plowing the mains in search of more ambergris -- all in service of a captain's maddening quest.

A Lazarus Taxon

Unnatural, divergent species: Borromini's Lantern at Sant'Ivo alla Sapienza (left) and Tatlin' Monument to the Third International (right)

Just a quick, speculative rumination. Can we think of the resuscitation of a particular architecture style as a lazarus taxon? The term (borrowed from the field of paleontology) describes an animal that disappears from the fossil record, only to reappear again. There are some well-known examples, such as the coelacanth and the ivory-billed woodpecker. These animals were thought extinct, but were subsequently discovered in their respective habitats. There is plenty of scholarship out there that considers how a lazarus taxon can appear to come back from the dead.

Can we apply such an idea, especially when writing and studying architecture history? The example that comes to mind is Reyner Banham's inclusion of Russian constructivism and Italian futurism in his important Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960). Prior works, such as Nikolaus Pevsner's Pioneers of Modern Design: From William Morris to Walter Gropius (1936), and Henry Russell Hitchcock's Modern Architecture (also 1936) exclude Russian and Italian experiments in modernism from their own polemical narratives. Siegfried Giedion's Space, Time, and Architecture (1941) does mention Tatlin's Monument to the Third International, but placing an image of Tatlin's Tower next to the lantern of Francesco Borromini's Sant'Ivo alla Sapienza suggests an unnatural interregnum.

On the hand, part of the magic of Banham's Theory and Design is its restorative function. Banham comments an issue of De Stijl that conflates elementarism and constructivism:

The conjunction of 'the mechanical aesthetic' with 'constructive sensibility' and of a 'new machine aesthetic' with a list of artists is symptomatic, if no more, of a growing feeling, which has much later been codified as a definite credo, that the art proper to a mechanical age is Russian Abstract art, loosely termed Constructivist (1960: 188).

For Banham, then, Russian Constructivism is a Lazarus Taxon: a species of architecture that though eradicated from previous historical records, reappears once again.

Complicated Modernisms

This past Friday, I attended the fabulous Return Emigrations conference at Columbia University. Featuring a distinguished group of German and American architecture historians, the morning and afternoon sessions provided a much-needed assessment of architectural modernism's travails in the United States and in Germany. The conference website alludes to a familiar narrative: we customarily think of modernism as a West- and Central European import. From MoMA's 1932 Modern Architecture show, to the influence of Bauhaus mandarins like Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and Josef Albers in American universities, modernism was a one-way current. There is plenty of scholarship and historiographic materials that contradict this claim (Gwendolyn Wright's brand-new USA is, for example, that looks at the development of architectural modernism in America in its own terms).

The conference, however, focused on a specific theme: the relations between "German emigre architects in the US and their German counterparts." The sessions outlined two basic themes. The morning session, featuring papers about Paul Bonatz and Rudolf Schwarz, considered a different narrative about modernism. The works of Bonatz and Schwarz thus showed modernism's inherent eclecticism, a rubric that included everything from Heimat wood construction to eschatological theories about the earth and built forms. The afternoon session considered, in the words of attendee Juliet Koss, the "after life of modernism." These papers focused on the return of people like Gropius, Martin Wagner, Mies, and Konrad Wachsmann to Germany in the 1950s and 60s. Whereas Richard Anderson's paper considered Martin Wagner's fall from grace as a symptom of his turn to "urban management", Lynette Widder's and Claire Zimmerman's papers focused on the reception given to Gropius and Mies upon their brief return to Germany. Widder's paper analyzed how Gropius was immediately embroiled in a dispute regarding the historical and ideological significance of the Bauhaus. Zimmerman's paper, on the other hand, considered the rehabilitation of Mies' career after World War II in the context of a flurry of published photographs of his buildings. Konrad Wachsmann's maniacal writings and designs became the focus of Jeffrey Harwood's presentation. Here, Wachsmann was presented as a design thinker who, in trying his hardest to find an architectural solution to his own ideas, pushed the limits of some as-yet-undetermined epistemological boundary.

An enlightening panel discussion at the end of the sessions pointed out that understanding the development of modernism in terms of pre- and postwar is unhelpful and counter-productive. A