loud paper

department of building and power

Loud paper contributor Alexis Bhagat sends over a call for submissions for Anarchitecture / Building / Power, an issue of the Perspectives on Anarchist Theory journal. The issue is guest edited by Alexis Bhagat, Francesca Manning and Etienne Turpin:

The editors of Perspectives on Anarchist Theory are seeking essays, photo-essays, project documentation, interviews and book reviews for an issue of theoretical, practical and activist engagements with architecture and urbanism.

Theory & History: ANARCHITECTURE We are seeking anarchist reflections on the relationship between social change and the built environment, the peculiar relationship of modern construction to capitalism, and aphorisms that fumble towards an anarchist theory of the city.

Practice: BUILDING We are seeking documentation of alternative practices in the built environment, detailed discussions of alternative models of property or the architecture of anarchist communes, discussion of vernacular architectures and practical examples of autonomous construction.

Struggle: POWER Domination unfolds in space: How have people challenged domination in space? We are interested in everything here from professionals engaged in combating Eminent Domain / displacement and grassroots organizations challenging the spatial agenda of the War on Drugs/Terror to collective efforts to reimagine the city and private spatial experiments in freedom.

We welcome finished essays as well as proposals for new work. If you are interested in writing for this issue, but do not have a specific topic, please send us a statement of interest and we may provide you with a project to respond to. We also welcome suggestion of projects / actions that we should consider.

anarchitecture@nadalex.net

This issue will be published in Spring 2009. Statements of interest, suggestions and proposals for new essays should be submitted by July 15th, 2008. A statement of interest is not required for submissions of completed works: Completed works may be submitted before September 15th, 2008. (Please inform us if any submissions have been published previously.) Final drafts of all submissions will be due in December 2008.

Perspectives on Anarchist Theory is the publication of the Institute for Anarchist Studies (IAS), a nonprofit foundation established in 1996 to support the development of anarchism. The aim of the IAS is to promote critical scholarship that explores social domination and reconstructive visions of a free society. Primarily, the IAS is a grant-giving body, supporting work by radical writers. To date, the IAS has funded almost sixty projects by authors from countries around the world, including Argentina, Canada, New Zealand, Lebanon, Chile, Ireland, Nigeria, Mexico, the Philippines, Germany, Uruguay, South Africa, the Czech Republic, and the United States. Additionally, the IAS annually organizes the Renewing the Anarchist Tradition (RAT) conference in Vermont and the Radical Theory Track at the National Conference on Organized Resistance (NCOR).

fwd: thinking

Braulio of Architect magazine just wrote in to say that his new blog, Fwd: Architecture, is finally live. I've been on the receiving end of his link-filled emails for awhile, so I know that he's got great, broad taste in architecture, music, and tech.

And I am totally biased, since Fwd: Architecture's second post links to an article I wrote on 4-D Cities. That piece covers research going on at Georgia Tech. The team's developing software that creates a 4-D virtual model of the urban environment out of historic and new photographs. If it resembles Photosynth, that's because both spring from the same research department and have similar core code. But 4-D Cities adds a snazzy timeline to the program making it possible to time travel the model.

mouthy motor city

Quick props to my friend Kirsten Palm who's new book, The Straits, was just published by Palm Press. Kirsten is a Detroit native who now lives in San Francisco.The book is two narrative essays on her hometown.

The jacket copy reads:

In The Straits, Kristin Palm presents us with a portrait of the mythological city of Detroit. By tracing its construction and destruction, Palm invokes the glory and tragedy of America in the 20th century. Among Palm’s lyric narrative of the names and places, the ruins of Detroit represent promise and possibility as a model for urban landscapes.

I can't wait to get my hands on a copy.

puckered veneer

I don’t really have a good bead on Veneer Magazine. From what I can tell, it is somewhere between Vice and Granta, perhaps with some Cabinet thrown it for good, artsy measure.

That said, Flint Jamison’s post on the Denver Art Museum is an inspired entry into the chic world of architectural slogging. I was at the Denver Art Museum in December after the big snow storm and all the skylights were leaking. The building is really desperate. To get at the meaning of Libeskind's creation, Flint transcribed an SMS conversation between himself and Steve Kado, an “architecture-school-drop-out-turned-semiotician colleague.” Picking out a favorite line isn’t easy.

Choice one, Kado on Libeskind:

12:45:10 PM SK: His writing reads like Bono on African poverty. But less charismatic.

Or, choice two, regarding structural details:

12:52:51 PM SK: The design he submitted to be built had to be modified because there were all these glass panels hung by psychokinesis.

Or, read the whole meghilla and try to hold back the tears.

reading glasses

My cousin Ari, aka Archie Zimmer when the mood strikes, is a writer and artist living in LA. Knowing that as a relatively new Brooklynite I recently tore through a couple Jonathan Lethem novels (my brain buzzed for days with Lethem's descriptions as I walked across Atlantic Ave or down Dean or Bergen Streets), Archie recommended I read a slim volume of essays, The Disappointment Artist. The first piece, Defending The Searchers, picks up a thread familiar to readers of Fortress of Solitude—the awkward, urban outsider acting arty at Bennington. In that first paragraph there's a line about wearing glasses. About the hows and whys of wearing glasses:

...I chose my heavy black-rimmed glasses, the ones I wore when I wanted to appear nerdishly remote and intense, as though to decorate my outer self with a confession of inner reality.

I'm particularly drawn to this quote because a few weeks ago I became a proud owner of my first pair of l.a. Eyeworks Fiction frames. They are big and chunky, bigger and chunkier than anything I wore in the eighties. And they are the color of raspberry sorbet, kinda striped in red and dark pink. I've been wearing them to events in the same way Lethem wears his Elvis Costellos: part fashion accessory, part defensive barrier. I wore them to the launch party in May for the second edition of Pin Up, where through them I oggled shirtless bartenders, but couldn't get an issue because Editor-at-Large Alex, aka Pierre-Alexandre de Looz, had ran out of comp copies. Thankfully, the vodka was still in supply. And to the much-blogged Postopolis, where I was spotted adjacent to Bldgblog's balabusta, Geoff Manaugh. Lots of verbage, but sadly, no free cocktails or hardhated hardbodies at Storefront.