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.

History Versus Determinism

American Technological Sublime: The TRS-80 Color II 

I just finished reading Historian Jill Lepore's thoughtful piece on technological determinism from the May 12 issue of The New Yorker.  Technological determinism, for the uninitiated, is a belief that technology is a major historical actor.  Lepore, however, brings a much more focused meaning to the term, stating that "in its purest form technological determinism looks a lot like the nineteenth century idea of progress and holds that machines are the most important factors in human history, that they follow a fixed path through set stages, and they bring about social, political, cultural, and economic change."

Lepore's piece is ostensibly a review of two books: Maury Klein's The Power Makers: Steam, Electricity, and the Men Who Invented Modern America, and Robert Friedel's A Culture of Improvement: Technology and the Western Millenium.  However, these books are only background for Lepore's meditations on the idea of technological agency in the United States. Near the end of the piece, she identifies what she sees as the most pressing problem with Klein's book: a lack of historical context.  Lepore's piece, far from being a screed, thus becomes a type of corrective that gives us an idea as to how to counter technological determinism.

This, and other correctives are well known.  It is thus interesting how Lepore does not mention other histories of technology that do fairly well in avoiding issues of technological determinism (the work of William Cronon, Thomas P. Hughes, Merritt Roe Smith, and Wolfgang Schivelbusch immedately come to mind).  And because she is writing this piece from the point of view of an American historian, her invocations of Leo Marx and Lewis Mumford are totally apposite. 

And yet towards the end of the essay, buried in a paragraph dealing with, of all things, the TRS-80, Lepore brings forth a subtle call to arms.  She writes,

Measuring an invention only by its eventual effect obscures other possible outcomes and, finally, distorts the historical record.  That day in 1977 when my brother got a TRS-80, we thought it was some cross between a television and my sister's cassette tape recorder; we didn't shout, "Wow, the information age has arrived!"  Even the Tandy Corporation would have been hard pressed to see that coming.  It looks different now, of course; the TRS-80 wasn't a dead end; it was a big deal.  The challenge, in this case, would be to write a history that can explain both what we though then and what we know now.  A method that ignores our it-looks-like-a-television response will make it seem as if the information age were inevitable, headlong, and unstoppable (which might even be true) but will fail to prove it.

These are strong, quiet words that Lepore brings in defense of Friedel's book.  It's the first time since I can remember that I've ever seen historiographical and methodological issues in a mainstream publication.  But it does speak to an important, if not the solitary, charge in the writing of history. Lepore's statement is near-Benjaminian in its tandem evocation of past and present at the service of writing history.  But for those of us who struggle with making the writing of history more relevant, no words sound sweeter.   

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.

Canadian Prog Rock Power Trio Future Noir

In Yr. Landscape Pollutin' Yr. Goodz: Rush in the 1970s (Source: Lexrst Land)

Let's assume for a moment that there is a particular variant of Science Fiction writing out there that deals with "green" ideas about sustainability and the environment. Let's assume that this variant operates in a Marxian "middle landscape" somewhere between the techno-fetishist tropes of "hard" science fiction and the character-driven socio-environmental concerns of "soft" science fiction. Let's call this variant "Pastoral Science Fiction."

What, then, would fall under this variant? Certainly those novels, like Frank Herbert's Dune, or even Ursula K. LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness, that have a significant landscape component. I would even hazard that the origins of this type of science fiction lie somewhere in the works of Edgar Allan Poe, Harry Harrison, or H.P. Lovecraft (perhaps something like the latter's At the Mountains of Madness or The Whisperer in The Darkness).

I would also like to think that this fictional variant would provide something akin to an anti-technological impulse. A science fiction pastoral would thus give us overly green vistas, or even verdant fantasies of cities and landscapes overrun with flora and fauna. It would certainly remind us of a verse from Talking Heads' 1989 song, "(Nothing But) Flowers":

Here we stand
Like an Adam and an Eve
Waterfalls
The Garden of Eden
Two fools in love
So beautiful and strong
The birds in the trees
Are smiling upon them
From the age of the dinosaurs
Cars have run on gasoline
Where, where have they gone?
Now, it's nothing but flowers

For the sake of argument, let me offer a corrective to this and other visions of a sylvanic future. For the greatest critic of Science Fiction Pastoralia may not be a writer, but a band. And that band is none other than the Canadian prog-rock power trio, Rush.

Pictures at An Exhibition: Rush's Moving Pictures (1981)

The second track of Rush's most famous and popular album, 1981's Moving Pictures, is "Red Barchetta". This song is, in many ways, standard Rush fare. A near-perfect, Voltron-like assembly of musical prowess and technical sophistication (or in prog-rock parlance, "chops"), Rush's music is best listened while staring at laser beams in a room full of smoke, or marveling at day-glo images of Jimi Hendrix, marijuana leaves, or spacecraft under repeated exposure to black light. Red Barchetta begins with guitarist Alex Lifeson gently picking out major-key harmonics in his guitar's upper registers. Geddy Lee's fuzzed-out Rickenbacker bass follows, only to be accompanied by drummer Neil Peart's acrobatic percussion. The song alternates in a soft-to-loud progression that anticipates Pixies' and Nirvana's dynamic noodlings by, like, almost 10 years. Red Barchetta even features one of the most aggressive uses of roto-toms in a song: their tuneful, machine-gun progression follows in what is a swirling, manic pas-deux between Alex Lifeson's bridge solo and Geddy Lee's bass wranglings.

And then ... the voice. I remind you of slack-rockers Pavement, and their thoughtful invocation of Rush's must underappreciated and misunderstood element: Geddy Lee's voice. (In 1996's "Stereo", Stephen Malkmus thus sings, "What about Geddy Lee? / How did it get so high? / I wonder if he speaks like an ordinary guy?"). So, what exactly does Lee sing about?

"Red Barchetta" takes place in an alternative, not-so-distant future where cars are outlawed. In fact, the inspiration for the song's lyrics is a 1973 short story for Road & Track by Richard S. Foster called "A Nice Morning Drive". In that story, Foster writes,

It was a fine morning in March 1982. The warm weather and clear sky gave promise of an early spring. Buzz had arisen early that morning, impatiently eaten breakfast and gone to the garage. Opening the door, he saw the sunshine bounce off the gleaming hood of his 15-year-old MGB roadster. After carefully checking the fluid levels, tire pressures and ignition wires, Buzz slid behind the wheel and cranked the engine, which immediately fired to life. He thought happily of the next few hours he would spend with the car, but his happiness was clouded - it was not as easy as it used to be.

A dozen years ago things had begun changing. First there were a few modest safety and emission improvements required on new cars; gradually these became more comprehensive. The governmental requirements reached an adequate level, but they didn't stop; they continued and became more and more stringent. Now there were very few of the older models left, through natural deterioration and . . . other reasons.

The MG was warmed up now and Buzz left the garage, hoping that this early in the morning there would be no trouble. He kept an eye on the instruments as he made his way down into the valley. The valley roads were no longer used very much: the small farms were all owned by doctors and the roads were somewhat narrow for the MSVs (Modern Safety Vehicles).

The safety crusade had been well done at first. The few harebrained schemes were quickly ruled out and a sense of rationality developed. But in the late Seventies, with no major wars, cancer cured and social welfare straightened out, the politicians needed a new cause and once again they turned toward the automobile. The regulations concerning safety became tougher. Cars became larger, heavier, less efficient. They consumed gasoline so voraciously that the United States had had to become a major ally with the Arabian countries. The new cars were hard to stop or maneuver quickly, but they would save your life (usually) in a 50-mph crash. With 200 million cars on the road, however, few people ever drove that fast anymore.

The story continues, ending with an account of the narrator going head-to-head against gleaming MSV's (Modern Safety Vehicles). In a tale of obdurant technology winning over new-fangled hard science, the narrator's MG roadster is able to elude the MSV's, so much so that these high-tech vehicles end up as piles of crumpled-up aluminum thanks to an engineered head-on collision.

Foster's Not-So-Red Barchetta, from a 1973 Issue of Road & Track (Source: MG Experience)

The image to the Road & Track story is consistent with the idea of Sci-Fi Pastorals. Here, an MG is seen cradled in a technicolor thicket of deciduous leafiness. In the background, two MSV's, strangely rendered as 30s-era gangster cars, collide amidst a wall of evergreens and a plume of noxious smoke.

As Rush's evocation of Foster's short story, "Red Barchetta" carries forth an even more anti-environmental theme. The song's protagonist uncovers the gleaming red hot rod stored in his uncle's garage. Geddy Lee sings,

I strip away the old debris, that hides a shining car
A brilliant red barchetta, from a better, vanished time
I fire up the willing engine, responding with a roar
Tires spitting gravel, I commit my weekly crime...

The lyrics paint a compelling image. Into the pristine landscape of an environmentally-correct future, a red gasoline guzzler vomits exhaust, rubber, and gravel. The end result is a near-Ballardian hybrid of human and automobile. Lee sings again,

Wind in my hair ---
Shifting and drifting ---
Mechanical music ---
Adrenalin surge ---

Well-weathered leather
Hot metal and oil
The scented country air
Sunlight on chrome
The blur of the landscape
Every nerve aware

Though Geddy Lee would certainly not rank up there in the highest echelons of speculative fiction, "Red Barchetta" nevertheless paints an urgent image -- an image that anticipates the machine's reentry into the garden.

Two Skulls

Phineas Gage's Skull and Tamping-Iron (Source: Neurophilosophy)

On September 13th, 1848, sometime around 10:30 a.m., Phineas Gage, a foreman on the Rutland and Vermont Railroad, was the hapless victim in one of the best-known accidents on record. The story goes something like this: Gage, who was in the process of filling a freshly-bored rock with explosive, accidentally struck the powder charge with the end of a tamping iron. A tamping iron was a piece of metal, around three feet long, with a point on one end and a crowbar lip on the other. The purpose of the tamping iron is not unlike the rod used to pack the magazine of a muzzle-loading weapon, such a flintlock rifle. Gage was using the tamping iron in such a manner when an accidental explosion caused the tamping iron to fire backwards .... straight through Gage's head. The pointed end of the tamping iron entered underneath the left eyeball. The errant projectile flew backwards and was found about 30 yards away from the site of the accident. A report filed on 27 November 1848 by John M. Harlow, a physician attending to Gage's wounds, states that the explosion,

[drove] the iron against the left side of the face, immediately anterior to the angle of the inferior maxillary bone. Taking a direction upward and backward toward the median line, it penetrated the integuments, the masseter and temporal muscles, passed under the zygomatic arch, and (probably) fracturing the temporal portion of the sphenoid bone, and the floor of the orbit of the left eye, entered the cranium, passing through the anterior left lobe of the cerebrum, and made its exit through the median line, at the junction of the coronal and sagittal sutures, lacerating the longitudinal sinus, fracturing the parietal and frontal bones extensively, breaking up considerable portions of brain, and protuding the globe of the left eye from its socket, by nearly one half its diameter.

The rest of the story is well-documented. Gage apparently, and slowly, recovered from this wound and lived for another 12 years. During the time, he succumbed to various motor and neurophysiological difficulties. In fact, the strange case of Phineas Gage is often used to illustrate the effects of a severe brain injury.

Images of Phineas Gage's Injury (Source: Malcolm Macmillan, "Restoring Phineas Gage: A 150th Retrospective, Journal of the History of the Neurosciences 9:1 [2000]).

But for the purposes of this piece, its not the the strange circumstances that hold our interest. Rather, it is the hole caused by the errant tamping iron. In fact, it is only a series of representations -- a photograph of Gage's skull (see above image), and drawings showing the tamping iron in mid-trajectory through the head -- that give us any sense of the physical consequences of Gage's injury. These representations of damaged crania are necessary, for the subsequent medical records are apparently ripe with contradictions and errors.

Gage's injury reminds us of another famous head injury, this one from Bram Stoker's Dracula. In Chapter 20 of the novel, Renfield, the insane asylum inmate who eats vermin and other small animals, falls victim to Dracula's powers of hypnosis. Dracula, who has the power to control animals, offers Renfield an endless supply of food, provided that Renfield worship him in return. He capitulates, yet when he understands Dracula's real motivation for this bargain (to possess the innocent Mina Harker), Renfield refuses. Some type of altercation occurs, and in Chapter 21, Renfield is discovered with a bloody, suppurating wound to the head and a broken back.

Van Helsing and Dracula Square Off in Lobby Card for Universal's 1931 Adaptation of Dracula (Source: Waffyjon)

Van Helsing is called in, and after quickly ascertaining the situation, realizes that he must trepan Renfield's skull at the "motor area", presumably Broca's Area, the part of the brain that deals with speech. In a ghastly bit of surgical prowess, Van Helsing removes part of the skull, and Renfield is able to give the doctor some vital information about Dracula's shape-shifting abilities, as well as his ulterior, and deeply sexual motives. Unfortunately, Renfield dies. But some good has come of this, for Dracula has burned all written records regarding his visit and his affairs, and there would otherwise be no possible way to hunt down the murderous Count.

So here we have two skulls -- each bears its own type of testimony ... a testimony brought about by blunt force trauma. In the case of Phineas Gage, the actual injury to the skull (as shown by the entrance trauma underneath the zygomatic arch), corrects what has been a faulty record of this horrific injury. On the other hand, as Friedrich Kittler has remarked in Draculas Vermächtnis (Dracula's Legacy) (1993) Van Helsing's cutting into Renfield's skull with a toothed saw is an instance of data and information retrieval. He is literally accessing Renfield's data storage "port". The access to this information leads ultimately to Dracula's demise.

I echo Laurie Anderson's dictum, "It's not the bullet that kills you ... it's the hole", and only point out that holes in Gage's and Renfield's skulls provide a type of evidence that can meet the most stringent burdens of proof.

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.

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.

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.

The Art of Notation (Pt. 2)

(see my previous post on this topic)

From John Cage, Williams Mix (1952-3), the composer's first work composed for audiotape (Source: Newton Armstrong)

Faust, Faust IV, Virgin Records UK (1974) (Source: Faust-Pages)

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 ....

Faraway (So Close)

Trevor Paglen, "Chemical and Biological Weapons Proving Ground, Dugway UT", Distance 42 miles, 10:51 a.m. (Source: Trevor Paglen)

Trevor Paglen's photography is fascinating not only for its content but for its technique. As self-styled "experimental geographer", Paglen's work "deliberately blurs the lines between social science, contemporary art, and a host of even more obscure disciplines in order to construct unfamiliar, yet meticulously researched ways to interpret the world around us." This operation is evident in Paglen's use of limit-telephotography.

Limit-telephotography relies on astronomical equipment to capture subjects that are dozens of miles away. Large telescopes with focal lengths ranging from 1300 to 7000mm thus reveal aspects of the landscape not ordinarily seen with the naked eye. This constraint is quickly transformed into a rhetorical device: Paglen uses limit-telephotography to capture images of military installations that are otherwise inaccessible to the public. The same techniques used to photograph deep-space objects light years away are thus turned inward -- they become the preferred method of documenting military activity in the American landscape.

Paglen's photographs are taken from a variety of distances. A photograph of the barren landscape at Dugway Proving Ground, Utah (above) was taken from 42 miles away. The details are faint and grainy, giving the photograph an eerie Gerhard Richter-like quality. Blotches of vegetation resemble horizontal streaks, as if Paglen were photographing something that was moving quickly across the landscape. The photograph, though taken at a very high magnification, reveals nothing.

Trevor Paglen, "Illuminated Hangars, Tonopah Test Range, NV", Distance 18 miles, 9:08 p.m. (Source: Trevor Paglen)

The same could be said of his photograph of a set of illuminated hangars at Tonopah, Nevada. Although taken from a distance of 18 miles, this photograph reveals very little. Light pours out from two hangars, bathing the tarmac in an immediate and sterile glow. Foregrounded structures only register as mysterious black masses. As with the photograph of the chemical and radiological testing site at Dugway, this photograph also reveals nothing. Yet the absolute mystery that veils these photographs is admittedly tantalizing: you know something is going on there, but you just can't see it.

Trevor Paglen, "Morning Commute (Gold Coast Terminal), Las Vegas, NV", Distance 1 mile, 6:26 a.m. (Source: Trevor Paglen)

The photographs of unmarked passenger jets at the Las Vegas International Airport's Gold Coast Terminal are equally mysterious. These images, captured from a mile away, show the noses of 737 and 727 "Janet" aircraft. Although these aircraft are recognizable (all have white fuselages with a single red stripe along the windows), their purpose has been the topic of frequent internet chatter. Their flightpaths, destinations, and cargoes are unknown. The term "Janet" ("Just Another Non-Existent Terminal") thus alludes to the secrecy surrounding these aircraft, many which are seen flying over Groom Lake and other parts of the now-iconic Area 51.

Trevor Paglen, "Unmarked 737 at Gold Coast Terminal, Las Vegas, NV", Distance 1 mile, 10:44 p.m. (Source: Trevor Paglen)

Paglen's photographs of the Gold Coast Terminal are bathed in shadows and granular barium lighting. People wearing bullet-proof vests and knapsacks are seen entering the aircraft, but we can only see them from behind. Another photograph shows a 737 bathed in darkness. The forward fuselage door is open, and yet the interior is pitch-black.

There is an obvious irony at work here. The closer Paglen gets to his subjects, the more mysterious they become. The photographs thus provide a glimpse of secret activity, and yet the activity remains secret. At first, this may seem to only confirm limit-photography as technique, and nothing mote. Yet this inability to provide any additional meaning is important, as the act of taking these photographs is significant. This is a slight qualification on the concept of apparatus theory: although Paglen's use of technology is a vital part of his method for constructing and depicting subjects, the photographer's physical location is a major contributing factor. Thus Paglen's relentless documentation of distance away from the subject takes on a new significance as it points to a rare combination of scopic voyeurism and territorial trespass.

(For other posts on Paglen, check out Bryan Finoki's articles for Archinect and Subtopia)

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.

Unseen Sun (or, Ten Notes on Chris Marker's Sans Soleil)

Digitized Footage from Sans Soleil (1983) (Source: DVD Beaver)

1. During the opening moments of Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983), three Icelandic children are walking along an ashen road. There is a moment of pause as they slow down and stare intently at the camera. The viewer only has a moment to look at their elfin features and white hair before everything turns to black. While all this is happening, a female narrator (whose name is Alexandra Stewart) begins reading a fictional letter from a mysterious Eastern European cinematographer named Sandor Krasna:

The first image he told me about was of three children on a road in Iceland, in 1965. He said that for him it was the image of happiness and also that he had tried several times to link it to other images, but it never worked. He wrote me: one day I'll have to put it all alone at the beginning of a film with a long piece of black leader; if they don't see happiness in the picture, at least they'll see the black.

From the footage of the ethereal children, the film moves deftly to show an A4 Skyhawk descending into the inner sanctum of an aircraft carrier, and finally to passengers sleeping on a ferry returning from the Japanese island of Hokkaido. One critic remarks that the whole world of the film resides in this juxtaposition of images. From light, to dark, and back to light.

2. Marker’s film consists of footage from Japan, Iceland, and Africa. The images match Krasnor’s letters. One gets the sense that they are watching footage taking by Krasnor. This mysterious cinematographer is Chris Marker’s alter ego. Some of the footage is from San Francisco.

3. The two chief frames of reference are Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo and Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker. The former is especially poignant. At one point, Sandor Krasna goes to those very same places that Jimmy Stewart's character visits in Vertigo. It is a pilgrimage of sorts. Strange how many of the sites from 1958 San Francisco (the year Hitchcock made Vertigo) still exist in 1982 San Francisco. The latter film becomes more important towards the end of Sans Soleil.

4. Most of the footage is unmistakably urban. Some of it is familiar. We see a high-traffic street crossing bearing a distinct similarity to Shibuya, for example. In others, the rusty spans of the Golden Gate bridge rise from a bank of mist. In another image, an Icelandic village is buried under meters of volcanic soot.

5. A note on sound. Modest Mussorgorsky's Sans Soleil is played on different instruments. Sometimes it is a Moog. On others, it is a theremin. One can also hear curious, bubbly, reverb-saturated synth effects in the background. They give the film a science-fiction feel.

6. The name Unseen Sun may immediately recall the similarly-titled track, "Invisible Sun", from the Police's 1982 album The Ghost in the Machine. It is also the translated German title for Chris Marker's 1983 film, Sans Soleil (Sunless). That these two works -- an album and a film -- were released within a year of each other is coincidental. And to add to the coincidences, I only remind the reader that only three years later, in 1986, German media theorist Friedrich Kittler published his influential Grammophon, Film, Typewriter (Brinkmann & Bose Verlag, 1986). The introduction to this book, translated into English for the summer 1987 issue of October was one of the first English crossovers of Kittler's writings. It also features Kittler's famous "derivation" of the Lacanian real, imaginary, and symbolic "from the data channels of phonograph, cinema, and typewriter."

7. This is heady stuff, to be sure, but consider Kittler's invocation of one of Sans Soleil's many poignant moments. It is a scene where two dogs are seen playing in the sand. Kittler quotes the narrator:

Lost at the end of the world, on my island Sal, in the company of my dogs strutting around, I remember January in Tokyo, or rather I remember the images that I filmed in January in Tokyo. They have put themselves in the place of my memory, they are my memory. I ask myself how people remember if they do not make movies, or photographs, or tapes, how mankind used to go about remembering.

8. Sans Soleil features many images of television and urban screens. In a series of stills, celluloid images of television screens are depicted as lantern slides. These images feature ghostly circles of light radiating from within. The juxtaposition of media technologies is striking.

Lantern-Slide Deer, from Sans Soleil (source: DVD Beaver)

9. More on Kittler. What if Sans Soleil can be thought of in terms of data storage? Film footage becomes a repository of Sandor Krasna's memories about the various cities he visited (see #7 above). In another part, Krasna's letter reads:

I've spent the day in front of my TV set—that memory box. I was in Nara with the sacred deers. I was taking a picture without knowing that in the 15th century Basho had written: “The willow sees the heron's image... upside down.”

10. Why Sans Soleil? Think of the last couple of moments. Think of when Krasna's friend Hayao, a video game designer, begins digitizing the footage from Sans Soleil, and when that last digital footage becomes the film's coda (see above). Within the space of a 103-minute film, Krasna's memories suddenly become code. Stalker becomes the frame of reference:

He showed me the clashes of the sixties treated by his synthesizer: pictures that are less deceptive he says—with the conviction of a fanatic—than those you see on television. At least they proclaim themselves to be what they are: images, not the portable and compact form of an already inaccessible reality. Hayao calls his machine's world the 'zone,' an homage to Tarkovsky.

Herbert Marcuse on Claes Oldenburg

From Perspecta 12 (1969), pp. 75-76.

Other Forms of Primary Authority

George Inness, The Lackawanna Valley, 1856. National Gallery of Art, Gift of Mrs. Huttleston Rogers

I was thinking about this question this morning: if historians and critics can deploy Kant and Hegel in service of an argument, why are people loathe to consider novels and other literary works in the same light? A novel is not a primary source, the professor or Ph.D student will tell you. Okay, but ......

Consider this brief book review I wrote for a Historiography of Technology class taught by Emily Thompson:

Eloquent, energetic, and impassioned, Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden (1964) continues to resonate with contemporary audiences. The book’s enduring appeal has made it a staple in various disciplines, and yet the very methods underlying Marx’s arguments remain controversial for current generations of students and academicians.

The central idea behind The Machine in the Garden is that the introduction of technology in the 18th and 19th centuries transformed American society. This may seem a truism, but it is how Marx seeks to prove this idea that becomes novel. The author uses 18th and 19th (and to a certain extent, 20th) century American literature as evidence of the technological effects on American thinking. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short stories, as well as Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), and even F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) become source material. In his afterword to the 35th anniversary edition of the book, Marx himself even alludes to the problem with this approach: “Though poetry and fiction are not very helpful in establishing the historical record as such, they are singularly useful, I lea