loud paper

tackling tactics

via Center for Tactical Magic

This week I hosted a Glass House Conversation, asking: "What tactics have emerged in architecture and design since the financial crisis? What’s the operational mode of the bust, or how do we work now?"

The answers were varied, personal, and for the most part went beyond the standard cliches of architectural practice. By looking at the tactical side of recessionary practice, the conversation re-evaluated the vocabulary architects and designers use to explain what they do. I was surprised at the acknowledgment of the messy issues of interdisciplinary practice and, even thought the term "expanded architect" is a bit overkill at moment, the variety of roles designers are taking on—entrepreneur, cultural capitalist, publisher, NGO— and the kinds of projects, small and large, they're tackling.

I was also surprised that at a point in history where cynicism would be forgiven, the answers were forward thinking, not nihilistic. Bryan Boyer wrote: "I look to skills such as negotiation, translation, and optimism as survival tactics in the post-2008 era. I’m taking tactics to mean skills or maneuvers that can be developed through practice. Even optimism needs to be practiced every now and then."

The question is one I lifted from the first Interventionist Toolkit piece over at Places Journal. And I'll be presenting the Interventionist Toolkit research to the Right to the City symposium in Sydney at the end of next week as part of a panel entitled "Tactics for DIY Cities." And the question from above plays a role as I look at how recessionary-era work employs tactics of DIY and arts activism to create urban change. I’m also very excited to share the panel with artist Marjetica Potrč. I can’t wait to hear more about her current projects that blend art installations with social justice and infrastructural thinking.
 
Finally, the second in my series is online: The Interventionist's Toolkit: Posters, Pamphlets and Guides. It highlights some great work from The Hypothetical Development Organization, Candy Chang, Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination (everyone should download A User’s Guide to (Demanding) the Impossible), the Center For Urban Pedagogy's Making Policy Public series, Studio X and Gavin Browning, and The Center for Tactical Magic, among others.

Here's a snippet:

...Or consider A User’s Guide to (Demanding) the Impossible, published by the arts group Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination to correspond with the Long Weekend, an action organized by Arts Against Cuts and held at Goldsmiths college in London in early December 2010. The event was held to protest Prime Minister David Cameron’s reduction of government funding for British higher education, a spending cut of nearly 40 percent that targeted arts, humanities and social sciences while protecting the budgets of science, technology, engineering and mathematics programs. Held just days before a major MP vote, the 48-hour event offered a series of resistance workshops. The downloadable user’s guide presented a history of art activist strategies. Included were interventionist examples such as The Tactical Ice Cream Unit; created by The Center for Tactical Magic, the TICU is an ice cream van that not only serves up scoops but also distributes radical literature to local communities and acts as a grassroots mobile communications hub. Another project profiled in the guide is the mid-1960s project, The Free Store; created in the mid-1960s by the Diggers (a group of San Francisco artists and actors, and later called the Free City Collective), the Free Store used tactics that we now see as familiar: it occupied an abandoned storefront, and inside, it distributed goods, food and health services for free or exchange. Recognizing the incendiary nature of the pamphlet, User's Guide authors Gavin Grindon and John Jordan write: "This guide is not a road map or instruction manual. It's a match struck in the dark, a homemade multi-tool to help you carve out your own path through the ruins of the present, warmed by the stories and strategies of those who took Bertolt Brecht’s words to heart: 'Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.'"

Read more here.

the interventionist's toolkit

Sit In, Toxteth, Liverpool, by What If. [photo via Canadian Centre for Architecture]

On Monday, Places Journal posted the first in a four-part series entitled The Interventionist's Toolkit: Provisional, Opportunistic, Ubiquitous, and Odd Tactics in Guerilla and DIY Practice and Urbanism. In the piece I ask "What is the operational mode of the bust?" and then track the different practices that have cropped up in the last few years. These are ways of working that combine design with activist and grassroots tactics.

As we head into spring I'll add more thoughts and examples to the Toolkit. But here's a taste of the first installment:

...Previous economic crises have offered up examples: paper architecture, the growth of theoretical and artistic practice, in the 1970s and '80s; the lost generation, young designers leaving the architecture for virtual realms, in the '90s; and paperless architecture, the rise of formal digital experimentation, in the early '00s....

Our current recession is inspiring its own strategies and tactics: It's increasingly a catch-all for a host of urban interventions. This is a trend that I like to describe with a mouthful of a title: Provisional, Opportunistic, Ubiquitous, and Odd Tactics in Guerilla and DIY Practice and Urbanism. With this verbaciousness, I hope to capture the tactical multiplicity and inventive thinking that have cropped up in the vacuum of more conventional commissions. These days vacant lots offer sites for urban farming, mini-golf, and dumpster pools. Trash recycles into a speculative housing prototype (see the Tiny Pallet House). Whether it’s The Living’s Amphibious Architecture or Mark Shepard's Serendipitor, the built environment speaks through mobile devices. Retail spaces hit by the recession are fodder for reinvention, as the art organization No Longer Empty transforms unleased storefronts into temporary galleries. Even the street itself is reclaimed. REBAR’s annual initiative, Park(ing) Day, urges global participants to use a pranksters wit to turn parking spaces into pocket parks, one quarter at a time.

Driven by local and community issues and intended as polemics that question conventional practice, these projects reflect an ad hoc way of working; they are motivated more by grassroots activism than by the kind of home-ec craft projects (think pickling, Ikea-hacking and knitting) sponsored by mainstream shelter media, usually under the Do-It-Yourself rubric. (Although they do slot nicely into the imperative-heavy pages of Good and Make magazines.) They are often produced by emerging architects, artists and urbanists working outside professional boundaries but nonetheless engaging questions of the built environment and architecture culture. And the works reference edge-condition practitioners of earlier generations who also faced shifts within the profession and recessionary outlooks: Gordon Matta Clark, Archigram, Ant Farm, the early Diller + Scofidio, among others....

....Still, there’s a tendency to dismiss these kinds of projects as simply whimsical — to smile at their authenticity or their expression of clever détournement, but at the same time to suppress any uncomfortable restive rumblings. But these projects hold at their heart a belief that change is possible despite economic or political obstacles, or disciplinary or institutional inertia. And the prospect for real change builds as more and more works accumulate in exhibition catalogues and digital venues. Broadcast via Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter and design blogs, these new temporary or provisional projects can be read relationally to each other without explicit contextual concerns. By aggregating and focusing upon these small-scale interventions, my hope is to reveal a larger framework — a network that makes nimble use of social networking and Web 2.0 technologies to transform local episodes into global outreach. Thus The Interventionist’s Toolkit — a series that will light upon Places from time to time this winter and spring — is not necessarily about featuring projects, but about finding new ways to practice and provoke within the fields of architecture, urbanism, and design.

Keep reading.

manifested

Last night, for the launch of the publication of InfraNet Lab/Lateral Office's Pamphlet Architecture 30+, Coupling: Infrastructural Opportunism, Storefront staged Manifesto Series 02: Infrastructural Opportunism.

Many thanks to Mason, Lola, and Eva for inviting me to participate.

The awesome infrastructural lineup was:

MIMI ZEIGER on manifestos

INTERBORO on exclusion

DIANA BALMORI on realignments

JASON VIGNERI-BEANE on stripping down

LYDIA KALLIPOLITI on remedies

ANDREW BLUM on tubes

JOYCE HWANG on interventions

MAMMOTH on expanding fields

To kick off the night, I presented An Infrastructure for Manifestos. AKA, a framework for manifesting built on pastiche. Here's the cheat sheet:

1. REJECT all previous MANIFESTOS 

2. DESPISE 

“Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to infrastructure, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking designers only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the urban realm.”

(via Valerie Solanas, S.C.U.M. (Society for Cutting Up Men) Manifesto, 1968)

3. COMBAT

“Infrastructuralism succeeds modernism as a new wave of systematic innovation. The style finally closes the period of uncertainty engendered by the crisis of modernism, marked by a series of short-lived episodes including postmodernism, deconstructivism, and minimalism. The new style claims universal relevance for all architectural programs, on all scales from architecture and interior design to large-scale urban design. Infrastructuralism is also uniquely geared to engage with the ecological challenges that architecture must address. Both in terms of techniques and in terms of sensibility, Infrastructuralist architecture is eager and able to elaborate adaptive responses to diverse environmental parameters.”

(via Patrik Schumacher, The Parametricist Manifesto, 2010)

4. REFLECT

"Literary establishment? Art establishment? Forget it. Infrastructural opportunists wear each other's experiential data like waves of chaotic energy colliding and mixing in the textual-blood while the ever-changing flow of creative projects that ripple from their collective work floods the electronic cult-terrain with a subtle anti-establishment energy that will forever change the way we disseminate and interact with the city."

(via Mark Amerika, Avant-Pop Manifesto, 1993)

5. RADICALIZE 

"Our infrastructure is the building material of a revolutionary period, simultaneously the reaction of a world going under and the herald of a new era. For this reason it does not conform to the ideals of the first, while those of the second have yet to be formulated. But it is the expression of a life force that is all the stronger for being resisted….

The old infrastructure is too stale to serve as a drug any longer. The chalkings on pavements and walls clearly show that human beings were born to manifest themselves…. A bridge, a highway, a cell tower, or a digital network is not a composition of color and line but an animal, a night, a scream, a human being, or all of these things together. … Every natural or artificial form possesses for the active onlooker. This suggestive power knows no limits and so one can say that after a period in which it meant NOTHING, infrastructure has now entered an era in which it means EVERYTHING."

(via Constant Nieuwenhuys, COBRA Manifesto, 1948)

6. INSERT a TANGENT

"The last boss of Europe walked the streets without bodyguards."

(via Rem Koolhaas, Icon Manifestos, 2007)

7. DEGENERATE

"Good is a known quantity. Good is what we all agree on. Infrastructure is not necessarily good. Infrastructure is an exploration of unlit recesses (sewers, canals, tunnels) that may or may not yield to our research. As long as you stick to good you'll never have real infrastructure.

(via Bruce Mau, An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth, 1998) 

9. EMERGE

"By the grace of Heaven and in rare moments of inspiration which transcend the will, architecture may unconsciously blossom from the labour of his hand, but a base in infrastructure is essential to every urbanist."

(via Walter Gropius, Bauhaus Manifesto, 1919)

8. REDEFINE

“We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will sing of the multicolored, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals; we will sing of the vibrant nightly fervor of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents; factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts, flashing in the sun with a glitter of knives; adventurous steamers that sniff the horizon; deep-chested locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks like the hooves of enormous steel horses bridled by tubing; and the sleek flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd.”

(via Marinetti, Futurist Manifesto, 1909)

10. PROCLAIM

“Seeking opportunistic associations between economy, ecology, politics, and information, coupling is not simply a combinatory exercise so much as a typological investigation into new spatial formats for the 21st century. “

(via Lateral Office, Coupling: Infrastructural Opportunism, Pamphlet Architecture #30, 2011)

all that glitters

The buildings were packaged objects, just as much as album covers or cologne bottles, and the name was the label that signaled how to read the rest of the accouterments.

It is terribly sad to hear that John Chase, a planner for the City of West Hollywood and crackin' good writer, died yesterday. John was my thesis adviser at SCI-Arc when I started loud paper. You can see his influence all over those first three issues. Not only was I riffing on similar topics as John—Las Vegas or  dingbats (pardon, stucco boxes, per John's brilliant books Glitter Stucco and Dumpster Diving and Exterior Decoration)—but his smart, personal, and sly perspective on the city helped shape my voice as a writer. He encouraged me to enjoy the snap and crackle of language in service to architectural journalism.

I just saw John in LA at the Dingbat 2.0 panel hosted by the LAForum in July and was giddy when he raised his hand from center of the crowd and started peppering us panelists with questions. This is the guy who knows a thing or two about the lowly, but glittery, besmirched, but beloved, stucco box. His queries and critiques came with a generous dose of warmth and humor. We emailed after I returned to the East Coast and John shared his excitement at getting close to retiring from the city (with a pension!) and devoting himself to writing and teaching. I was looking forward to seeing what he'd produce next. With humility he wrote, "I may or may not conceive a unified mission statement and focus efforts or it might just be a diffuse cloud of gas." Gassy? Never. Insightful, researched, and stylish, always. He will be missed.

now on view

Filed under "community," Michael Maltzan's recent project, the Carver Apartments, is included in the latest National Design Triennial that opened on May 14. I have yet to tour the exhibition, but I wrote about Maltazan's building in the current issue of Architect magazine. Designed for Los Angeles' Skid Row Housing Trust, the project raises provocative questions about the visibility of needy population. Both Maltzan and Molly Rysman, the Trust’s director of special projects and external affairs, argue for architecture that isn't subsumed by its context, but rather stands out and makes a statement while serving a community.  It's a fine line to tread: a misstep can lead into architectural boosterism and back slapping while the client and neighborhood remain under served. 

....The New Carver Apartments is farther afield, sited in South Park, a rapidly developing neighborhood near L.A. Live and the Staples Center.

The location is strategic on two levels. It houses residents in an area with access to transit and grocery stores, and it is a statement to Los Angeles: Affordable housing is not a blight that needs to be hidden away.

“It is a controversial concept. When we first showed [Maltzan’s design] to the investors, they wondered why we were making such a dramatic building,” says Molly Rysman, the Trust’s director of special projects and external affairs. “We had to convince them that it doesn’t need to be bland. Affordable housing improves the neighborhood and creates an anchor in the community. It’s not about blending in, but about having an impact.”...

However, it takes a lounge and laundry room on the third floor to see Maltzan’s design at its most polemic. A window looks out over the freeway, and L.A. drivers can see through the thick, acoustic glass into the all-yellow space where the formerly homeless fold laundry, check e-mail, and watch TV. “The excruciating irony of the homeless is that because they are so much in the public view, they are shut off from the world. The building creates opportunities for public interactions, and gives them a chance to re-emerge,” explains Maltzan. “It is important that people see that [the residents] are part of the greater community—it’s not to put them on display, but to see them as real.” It’s a charged, eye-to-eye situation, a risky attempt to humanize an outcast group.

Read the entire piece here.

dingbat redux

The LA Forum sends news of a competition ready to change the plucked, powdered, and withering face of LA housing: Dingbat 2.0. I'm happy to spread the word, not only because a piece I wrote for ReadyMade magazine years ago is cited as source material, but because there's a terrific jury ready to cull through forward thinking proposals for Los Angeles' future.

Dingbat 2.0:

The Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design proposes DINGBAT 2.0, an open, single-stage, international design competition, reconsidering Los Angeles’ ubiquitous dingbat apartment building for the 21st century. All designers, architects, artists, engineers, students, and other interested parties are fully eligible for participation in this competition.

Final Jury:

Barbara Bestor (Principal, Bestor Architecture)
John Chase (Author / Urban Designer, City of West hollywood) 
Dana Cuff (Director, cityLAB -UCLA/AUD, Los Angeles)
Teddy Cruz (Principal, Estudio Teddy Cruz, San Diego)
Neil Denari (Principal, NMDA, Los Angeles)
Joshua Prince-Ramus (Principal, REX, New York)

Dingbats:  

The Dingbat grew out of Los Angeles’ rapid postwar expansion period and defined a pervasive vernacular that still weaves through the space of the city’s neighborhoods and the decades of their development. For more than half a century, this idiosyncratic typology has been vilified, praised, studied, and often misunderstood – as much for being ugly and ordinary as for being innovative, iconoclastic, and distinctly “L.A.” As a housing type, the Dingbat has aided the sprawl for which L.A. is infamous while simultaneously creating a consistency of urban density achieved by few other cities. Beyond its role as an alternative to L.A.’s traditionally single-family planning focus, the Dingbat allowed millions of immigrants to arrive in Los Angeles and find their shared piece of paradise. The Dingbat offered the tropes of the singly family house minus the mortgage – a consolation prize to the American Dream.

Yet despite its dominance for over 50 years, the original Dingbat no longer fulfills the changing needs of a new Los Angeles. The majority of new immigrants to L.A. no longer arrive from Middle America and instead they carry with them different traditions of individuality and family life. The car (and the development patterns it demands) is no longer sustainable in a metropolis whose very identity is synonymous with “car culture.” Today is an opportune time to revisit the Dingbat, its relationship to the identity of the city, and the unexploited possibilities it may yet offer the discipline of architecture.

Dingbat 2.0 asks designers to re-envision the Dingbat, and, in so doing, offer a revised vision for L.A. itself. In order to redefine the Dingbat, it is essential to understand what has made it so successful (or at least ubiquitous) and determine what form of Dingbat-ness will best define a new identity for an emerging 21st Century Los Angeles. In short, this is not Banham’s Dingbat. Instead, Dingbat 2.0 is a complete re-invention of the typology, one that could allude to L.A.’s residential future, rather than simply glorifying one of the many pop-cultural icons of its past.

For me it’s the sad, faded dignity of the apartment buildings that makes this plasticky City of Angels seem like a livable place. A place where names are no longer placeholders for a better tomorrow, but first editions of the American dream, executed in shades of turquoise and dusty rose.

 -Mimi Zeiger, Dingbat Culture

Design Challenge:

The competition calls for the consideration of two design issues regarding the Dingbat and it’s impact on the urban fabric of Los Angeles.  Two boards (digital-only submittal) will be required for the competition. One board will address the typology of the Dingbat at the scale of the individual building (are they to be retrofitted? replaced?), and the second board will consider the larger urban scale of an entire city block within a ‘Dingbat neighborhood’.  Three separate sites in three distinct Los Angeles neighborhoods will be considered for the competition.

......................................................................
Competition Schedule:
April 1: Competition announcement
April 12: Complete Competition Brief available
May 31: Registration period ends
June 4: Submission deadline
June 12: Jury
June 19: Winners announced + Exhibition
.......................................................................

Prizes and Entry Fees:

A total of $9,000 USD in prize money will be awarded in the following categories:

PROFESSIONAL:
1st place $4000
2nd place $2000
3rd place $750
Honorary Mentions*

STUDENT:
1st place $1500
2nd place $500
3rd place $250
Honorary Mentions*

ENTRY FEES:
Professional entry fee: $75 USD
Student entry fee: $25 USD (must provide copy of Student ID)
.......................................................................

Registration:

Click here for registration and payment information.

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.

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.

still billboarding

Rebeca Mendez, There Is No There, 2009. Triptych. Each Panel: 20h x 13.3w. Archival Inkjet print, plexiglass and matte white silkscreen ink.

Billboards, the classic meditation of text in space. Pop art darling, Decon construct, and NIMBY troublemaker. The digital age vies for click-thrus and little miss billboard just asks for your ad here. Pretty please. COA's Eric Kahn sends over news of a new show at Koplin Del Rio, plaintively named, Memory of the L.A. Billboard: Telepolis in the Archetype.


Wes Jones, Billboard Series 2, graphite on paper, 12" x 24" (love the ghosting Chrysler)

The group show presents works by artists and architects showing works based on the "Los Angeles billboard imagery landscape." The media is certainly mixed: Folks like Kahn, Sandow Birk, Neil Denari, Wes Jones (soon to be an A Few Zines panelist), Rebeca Mendez, and Marcelo Spina, all take a parting shot at the advertising icon.

And while I'm telling an LA story, I totally forgot to blog about Tiny Houses in the LA Times. You can catch the slideshow here.