loud paper

the sweet spot

 
Tasting the Void, Group8

I've been lucky enough the past few weeks to have several articles hit the page and screen, so I thought I'd round them up in a single post. The subjects vary widely: GIS and Geodesign, Learning from Las Vegas, and some critical thinking about the nature of speculative architecture, both at the Guggenheim and at the MoMA, but what ties these piece together is that they all hit that sweet spot where I really enjoyed writing them, had to work my chops the process, and I was pleased with final results.

The round-up:

Meet the Geodesigner, Architect

GIS technology, long relied on by planners, is making inroads into architecture. What happens when data-rich map layers meet 3D building designs?

So, what happens when architects, and not just planners, embrace the potential of GIS and geodesign? Things get data-rich and complicated very fast. “It used to be that we were operating in the walled garden of architecture, but now we are moving from a place where it was hard to find information to where we are flooded with place-based data,” says Nicholas de Monchaux, an architect, urbanist, and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, comparing the old analog maps and tables with Google Earth. “That change will have a sweeping effect on the design profession.”

Letter from New Haven: Pop Rules, Architect
Weighing the legacy of the Yale Las Vegas studio.

"Well, ‘what happens in Vegas … ’?” began a Yale University professor, Emmanuel Petit, about halfway through the first day of the “Architecture After Las Vegas” symposium held at the New Haven institution in January. It was just a matter of time before someone invoked Sin City’s marketing slogan—such low-hanging fruit at a highbrow conference.

Contemplating the Void, Icon

Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic design – the tantalizing volume bounded by spiraling ramps – begs to be filled, but with what? Trees? Trampolines? Chocolate?...

But, as Contemplating the Void canvasses all these practitioners, what does it really ask? Is it a speculative free-for-all (speculations being in vogue at the moment) or something else? Under former director Thomas Krens, the museum spent the past two decades in expansion mode, creating fame for the Guggenheim brand across the globe. His departure two years ago coincided with economic contractions everywhere; this modest exhibition reasserts the New York Guggenheim as the main event.

[nb. My original version had ""umbilicus mundi," the navel of the world, instead of "main event"—a turn of phrase that meant to capture the big G's narcissism, which, IMHO, gets lost with the celebratory replacement.]

Two Feet High and Rising: On Optimism, Speculation and Oysters, Places Journal/Design Observer

Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront, the latest exhibition to open in the architecture and design gallery of the Museum of Modern Art, begins with a grim premise: that global climate change is making sea levels rise and powerful storm surges more frequent. Watch out, we’re gonna get wet. If we don't take action, we're in for catastrophe, with floods wiping out parts of Lower Manhattan, Brooklyn and northern New Jersey. To underscore the creek we are up, the exhibition designers have grafted water lines — two, four, six, eight, ten feet — on the dark gray gallery walls. Glub, glub....

Rising Currents comes at a time when scenario planning and disaster speculation have become part of the architecture and urbanism zeitgeist — an intellectualized way of coping with an onrush of crises. In previous decades, construction downturns were marked by a rise in paper architecture, in unrealized visions. Now, we trade in speculation. Neither science fiction, exactly, nor an architecture of the everyday, a speculative practice carefully chooses which realities to contend with, betting on which futures might come to fruition. The approach isn’t ironic; it’s truly sincere. Yet, as contemporary books, blogs, studios and gallery shows reveal, the desire to do good is complicated by methodologies charged up on risk, as if the energetic discussion of failing cities, displaced populations and wasted landscapes were a kind of extreme design sport — a chance for architecture to free climb to the very limits of the discipline.

where the wild things are

 
Earlier this month at the opening the Safari 7 Reading Room at Columbia University’s Studio X, a cross section of the city’s architecture, landscape, design, and urbanist ecosystem sipped from red plastic cups and milled around an oversized table map listening to podcasts. Meanwhile, from Midtown, Manhattan to Flushing, Queens other animal habitats were teeming with life: snakefish, squirrels, and worms twitching and writhing within the urban environment. Launched over the summer, Safari 7 is a self-guided podcast tour that narrates the wildlife and habitats along the No. 7 subway line.

The project brings together infrastructure, communications, ecology, and participatory design. Produced as a collaboration between Janette Kim and Kate Orff of The Urban Landscape Lab research group at Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, and Glen Cummings of graphic design studio MTWTF, the reading room is not a library in the traditional sense, but a spot where you can take the time to read the nature around the 7 line, listen to a narrative, pick up a map, and plan your own eco-commute. 

You can read my Q&A with Janette, Kate, and Glen over at the Architect's Newspaper.

How did you first conceive of the project?

Janette Kim: Safari 7 started when the three of us—Kate, Glen, and I—started collecting our research on the National Parks Service. The parks provide rangers, maps, and even self-guided cell phone tours that provide access and interpretation of parklands. We began to discuss what would happen if we could provide ranger tours of New York City as a layered urban ecosystem, and started to imagine that this tour could be more hands-on, more exploratory, and follow the notion of a citizen scientist—someone who doesn't just take in information from an authoritative source, but produces it through the process of exploration.

Was the 7 subway line a natural fit? Does Queens County lend itself to ecological study more than the other Boroughs?

Glen Cummings: The 7 line wasn't just a good fit, it was the inspiration. The 30-minute ride from Times Square to Flushing or visa versa is the perfect time to connect to the micro events that are happening right outside the train windows.

JK: We've received suggestions already to do the G and 6 lines, but the 7 train is especially fascinating. We like the fact that it traverses so many different types of neighborhoods and people, and runs through neighborhoods that offer a fascinating history of combined natural and social influences.

Bryant Park is a product of varying interpretations of public investment, from its stint as the Croton Reservoir to the home of the New York Public Library. Jackson Heights is one of our nation's only examples of the Garden City movement and Sunnyside Gardens is one of the nation's first planned communities after World War I. Flushing Meadows is famously the result mass dumping of tons of ash from the city's garbage incineration, the transformation by Robert Moses into a major transportation corridor and the site of two world's fairs, and the ever-encroaching return of a neglected wetlands.

GC: Diversity is a defining characteristic of the borough of Queens: More types of people from more countries, living in more types of places, with an eclectic grouping of creatures and plants around them, than anywhere else in the U.S. The 7 line helped us narrow down this discussion by acting as a natural transect, that is, a line along which you can examine differences.

In addition to urban explorations, what more about our built environment can Safari 7 participants take away from the project?

GC: We are definitely interested in connecting a wide range of people with the urban nature in their own backyards by using mass transportation the means of travel, and by offering up a model for how people can connect to the environment in an active rather than passive way.

Our hope is that viewers and participants become interested and therefore more attuned to the world around them. Most city infrastructure is constructed in a brutal way because government didn't really understand how interconnected environment, health, and commerce were and are. It is the overlaps and intersections between these infrastructures, housing fabrics, human animal and plant habitats that tell the story.

One example is U Thant Island, just south of Roosevelt Island. The construction of the Steinway Tunnel produced a pile of soil that was dumped at the closest high point in the East River floor. The pile emerged from the river as an impromptu island and now has a flock of cormorants nesting there.

We see the 7 line, as well as the whole MTA system, as a tool for urban exploration and a tool to connect with the built natural environment. Robert Moses’s view of connecting the city to nature is to connect the city with the parks and beach as recreation destinations, but we're interested in the inter-connections and micro-environments all the way along the line, and how they are experienced in peoples daily life, not just at the end points.

Above ground trains offer you a spectrum of less-spectacular environments, whose range and impact are even more interesting, because these are the environments we live in. Understanding what lives there, what grows there, how they relate, is what it is all about.

Does a growing awareness of habitats and biodiversity dovetail with trends in sustainability and green building design?

Kate Orff: Sustainable development is inseparable from robust habitats and global biodiversity. Who could imagine living in a world of smooth, glassy, high-tech, supposedly “green” skyscrapers in a world with no bees or bats—surrounded by silent forests and empty seas? How would our crops be pollinated? What would we eat?

Growing awareness of habitats probably reflects a growing understanding of the less superficially technical and more emotional and compassionate side of the sustainability question. We've modified the globe to create human (and as the exhibit shows, deer and geese) habitat all over the world and people are beginning to expand the view and see that in some cases human habitat excludes animal life. In some cases, like we've pointed out in the exhibit, along the 7 line—they co-exist in surprising and unexpected ways.

What is your favorite stop?

KO: I like Bryant Park—the maze of tunnels from different periods of time disorients even the most jaded New Yorker—and I like thinking that just a couple of feet above me someone is reading the newspaper and sunning on this thin lawn carpet. Second choice would have to be Willets Point and the experience of riding through the treetops on my way to US Open tennis match.

GC: Downtown Flushing. My family is from Flushing and I've always loved the bustle of the train station area. The noise, the food, people come from every direction and going in every direction all at once. What a beautiful mess!

Collaborators Glen, Kate, and Janette

 

green scheme

I wrote up a brief piece on Eve Moser's  Seeding the City for I.D. magazine. It is only in the print edition, but I've put the full text below to spread the work on her project. Eve's looking for participants to grow a rooftop patch. No green thumb needed.

You can follow the greenroof takeover on the Seeding the City blog.

Green Scheme

A New York artist harnesses social networking to build roof gardens.

Eve Moser is launching a pyramid scheme. The Brooklyn artist is no Madoff, however— rather than padding her pockets, she’s trying to spread environmental awareness, one roof garden at a time. Participants in her new public art project, Seeding the City, get a homegrown 2-by-4-foot green-roof module installed on their rooftop, but only after they’ve convinced friends and neighbors to join. “It’s about connecting people with their landscape and with each other,” Moser explains.

She conceived Seeding the City in 2007 while working on High Water Line, a chalk boundary that ran through New York waterfront communities 10 feet above sea level to demonstrate the impact of rising oceans. The culturati cheered the project, but Moser wanted to reach the “ecologically repressed”—her term for poor urban communities living with a legacy of industrial pollution. So last summer she began teaching teens at the youth shelter Covenant House how to build the green-roof modules. Once installed, the modules are marked with a rooftop flag and street- level signage to generate interest and word-of-mouth buzz.

Moser is also mapping each location on the project’s website, then using an application that monitors urban heat-island effect to track how much heat the new vegetation is absorbing. Moser hopes that the site, which also hosts blogs, forums, and information on environmental remediation, will foster a community that can spread to other cities. “The challenge is to keep it lively and engaged so it doesn’t die on the vine."

feeling sentient

It took awhile for my brain to formulate the words “science fair” as I walked through Toward the Sentient City, now on view at the Architectural League of New York, but once there I couldn’t shake them. The two words weren’t meant as derogatory or judgmental, quite the opposite. Curator Mark Shepard brought together five projects that embed the urban environment with the technologies of ubiquitous computing—sensors, RFID tags, and networks—and the result is a welcome familiarity.

Here, technology wants you to engage, not just with it, but also with the people and critters in the world around you. Amphibious Architecture, a collaboration between The Living and Natalie Jeremijenko, dunks an array of interactive tubes in the East River and the Bronx River. Equipped with sensors, the tubes collect water quality readings and monitor for fish. In the gallery, viewers are asked to text the fish a watery “What up?” and the fish report back on the state of their ecosystem. The architecture here is not just amphibious but anthropomorphic; I sent the fish a message and the fish wrote back “Underwater, it now loud,” signaling the presence of marine life, and urged me to text friends AhoyAnchovie and HeyHerring.

The National Science Fair, first founded in 1941, rose to popularity in the 1950s under the shadow of the cold war. Meanwhile suburban kitchens filled with appliances and ever more complex chemical solutions, science fairs served a double purpose. They trained American youth and offered the public a perceived transparency to the scientific and technological developments. If a high-schooler could build a crystal radio set, then the country’s future is in good hands. In many ways ubiquitous computing a similar model. The complex networks that provide the underpinnings of daily life are made visible; as seen in Trash Track that uses RFID tags to map garbage or Breakout! an experiment in co-working in the city’s café, parks, and public space. 

There’s comfort in that.

Or discomfort, if we use the street furniture developed by JooYoun Paek and David Jimison as an example. Capable of making vagrancy judgments, their Smart Bench uses movement sensors and a hearty robotic system to boot sitters if they lounge too long. Wall text describes all three of the Too Smart City projects (bench, trashcan, and street sign) as “overly enthusiastic”—a phrase that captures and critiques the blind deployment of computational technology in the urban realm. Are Paek and Jimison suggesting that we shouldn’t get too comfortable with these technologies? As our actions in public space are tracked and monitored is the correct response acceptance, awareness, or action?

Just as mid-century science fairs’ optimism was colored by atomic fear, Toward a Sentient City has its own specter: the fate of the environment. Natural Fuse by Usman Haque, Dot Samsen, Ai Hasegawa, Cesar Harada, and Barbara Jasinowicz, comes across at first as a cheerful, hands-on learning station. Designed to call attention to carbon offsets, houseplants are hooked up to devices that tracks their CO2 output. That local system is then tied into a city-wide network of other houseplants which regulates energy usage and carbon absorption. Sounds friendly enough, the plants thrive when everyone in the network gets along. But, if not “then the network starts to kill plants, thus diminishing the network’s electricity capacity.” Users have the option of being “selfless” or “greedy.” Plants live or plants die on collective decision. It’s a grim opposition. But such darkness embedded in the brightly lit gallery is just as welcoming as any sanguine accessibility.

trip the elastic fantastic

Big props to Archinect's Aaron Plewke who managed to wrangle reviews of MoMA's Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition out of a bunch of ne'er-do-well architects, designers, and thinkers. My contribution (an extension of wig in a box) is included among a fine bunch: Brian Moroz, Rosten Woo (who nails review with the line "...being there feels less like stuffy MoMA and more like being at a world’s fair or Expo 86"), Michael Surtees, Adam Greenfield (blessedly barbed as ever), Addie Wagenknecht, and Fred Scharmen. The exhibit is kinda great and kinda muddled. Having seven reviewers wade through it doesn't exactly create a common consensus as much as it surveys the messy territory. On the other hand, since the show feels like it springs from Internet culture, it seems homey and appropriate to have multiple posts.

Everyone's featured here.

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.

grafting

Web meme as guerrilla marketing? PFSK recently posted a graph generated by a script that transforms HTML tags into lovely organic pattern: blue for links, violet for images, and orange for line breaks and block quotes.

Enter a site and let the graph grow. As it makes the rounds, pinged to and fro, the site spreads word of Salathe Marcel's art project 356specialdays.com. The concept is so sweet, it makes me feel cynical for calling attention to the self promotion.

365specialdays.com is a conceptual online and offline art project. If one day of the year is a special day for you, let me know and I will create a drawing of what made that day so special for you. You will then get the drawing by postal mail, and I will upload the drawing to this website (including your story - anonymously if you prefer). Over time, this website will be a collection of special days all over the world, and remind us just how special each and every day can be.

gone traipsing

"-Look at him, says he. Breen. He's traipsing all round Dublin with a postcard"
(Ulysses 12.257)
Via Aida Yared's incredible Joyce Images, an illustrated Ulysses using period documents and ephemera.

I leave tomorrow for a Glen Hansard-inspired trip to Dublin, Ireland. I look forward to a Joycean wander around the city punctuated by cups of tea and pints of beer. Surely, there will be a stop at the Guinness Storehouse. Remodeled by RKD Architects in 2002, it boasts an atrium shaped like a pint glass and topped by viewing/drinking deck with the best views of Dublin. Sláinte, indeed.

More reports in January. Happy New Year.

and visions of networks danced in their heads

Grant Miller, Untitled (UA-33), 2006

Friday night the Black and White Gallery in Chelsea opens Constructed Realities, a show by Kansas City-based artist Grant Miller. The work, seen here, certainly is an attempt to depict network culture in a colorful, party-like-it’s-1992 way. The paintings recall Julie Mehretu’s layered, map-like creations, but without the cultural and political critique. (Detroit Art Institute reopened November 23 with Mehretu’s show City Sitings.) Miller’s world is a multihued Tron.

Julie Mehretu, Black City, 2007

Networks are all the rage this week. The Living presented The Living City project at the Van Allen Institute. I am still not sure why coolhunter DeeDee Gordon was asked to be part of the conversation, but then I had to leave early. I must have missed that part of the puzzle. (She did look surprisingly sedate with long, dark hair and a black ensemble. I was hoping for some bling.)

More on Friday: The Architecture League launches the Situated Technologies Pamphlet series with Urban Computing and Its Discontents. Adam Greenfield, Mark Shepard, and Eric Paulos will gather for a panel, which hopefully will expand upon ideas brought up in last year’s conference.