Urban Lab Global Cities (ULGC): Recent Episodes
The Architecture Post
My sincere apologies for not having posted anything since 2015. But as I announced 3 years ago, I've been very busy and finally have fallen into certain dose of exhaustion. But I am back on track.
So, Urban Lab Global Cities will no longer be hosted by blogger. This blog is clinically dead! I will keep it open a few while but will let blogger to close it.
I will be launching a new website. For now, I just posted its beta version. Tons of details are slowing me down but the link will provide the information you need to know about this new object of obsession. The blog (via wordpress) is online but, with patience and enthusiasm, the full website will be online very soon (still learning codes).
Farewell Blogger!
My sincere apologies for not having been productive over these months but I was particularly busy.
This following text is notes and ideas for a text that I submitted (finally rejected), days ago, for an American journal of architecture on correlation between side effects of resource territories and the pressing question of climatic changing contexts in the context of architecture. What interested me was not so much the relation of climate and resource extraction. With a strong evidence, this issue of toxic emissions strongly contributes to change the biosphere's climatic and geological conditions. One of the central themes of my text was the emphasis placed on the objects generated by spatial and material destruction for extractive and processing purposes. What type of objects are they? And why do they matter? These objects are derelict, abandoned buildings, crumbling infrastructure, put it simply ruins. These very discrete material traces cannot capture our attention but are as toxic as the emission of contaminants, pollution and toxic waste that extractive and processing activities generate.
| | | An abandoned well tested by researchers of the Princeton University, the Allegheny National Forest. Photo credit The Princeton University. Originally appeared on PhysdotOrg. |
I focused my submission on the transformation of Russian Arctic Circle's space during the Soviet era while I admit that I am not a specialist of this region (even of Russia). I view the Soviet era (in particular the Stalinist era in the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s) as a good example of the limit and contradictions of the production of space for economical and technical purposes, in particular in extreme environments. For these notes on this text, however, I'll be expanding on the entire resource territory, at the scale of the planet. Some examples: the Niger Delta, Sumgayit (Azerbaijan), parts of United States (Pennsylvania, for instance), parts of France (mining regions) to name a few. A very vast geography of resource production-related ruins at the scale of the planet.
| | | An abandoned, unplugged well near the Allegheny National Forest | Photo courtesy Scott Detrow/State Impact Pennsylvania. Originally appeared on State Impact, 2012 |
With regard to resource territories, as a technological space, we usually look at these spatial products, these platforms, tanks, storages, pipelines in activity. This, however, is a mistake to neglect those obsolete, crumbling infrastructures, those broken buildings, abandoned wells, destroyed pipelines due to lack of maintenance, to sabotage or as targets in warzones (we all know pipeline is a favorite target in war zones) since they provide us information of (1) the type, force, time, scale, and rhythm of spatial destruction related to the production of resource territories; (2) the lack of quality or, to put it simply, the obsolescence of many infrastructure as a legacy the 19th and 20th centuries; (3) as a result, they, simply, pollute soils, water and air affecting both environment and population.
| | | Discharge from an abandoned well killed an acre of vegetation in Oneida County. Originally appeared on Tom Wilber's blog |
The intention of my submission was not to deliver positive messages in the form of architectural scenarios to remediate these challenging issues. Neither was my intention — in the worse case — to formulate negative messages that would blame architecture for its contribution to the accelerating climate change. This submission situates within the following problematic: What can architecture do with the déjà-là? Indeed it poses the question of the negative déjà-là, these ruins that expand their territory into far beyond their location and beyond this, the role and position of design practices in creating these spatial products with lack of quality standards in such particular sites as extreme environments — the desert, the Amazon, the Arctic, the Ocean —, conflict-pattern regions, or primarily sparsely populated regions (villages or small-scaled human settlements) over the late 19th and the 20th centuries.
| | | Abandoned Pipeline, near The Headland, Hartlepool, Great Britain | Photo courtesy Alison RawsonAccording to Alison Rawson, "There are several of these rail topped pipelines heading out to sea. Once part of the now abandoned Steetley Magnesite Works."Originally appeared on Geograph |
With evidence these ruins pollute the territory they are shaping, the places where they have been erected in. But they also pollute the scale of the biosphere through the emission of toxic elements or oil and gas leakages. Most of these resource production-related infrastructures were built at a time when companies and governments did not take into consideration quality standards and, worse, side effects on both humans and nonhumans. In surveying these crumbling infrastructures, broken and collapsing buildings and factories, I attempted to look into the (in)direct correlation between the resource territories-related infrastructural space and climate change. It indeed is commonly admitted a direct correlation between resource extraction and climate change throughout emission of greenhouse gas, methane, sulfur dioxide, arsenic, oil leakage, and other negative by-products.
| | | Abandoned pipeline in Tarraleah Power Station, Wellington, Australia | Photo courtesy Simon Cullen/ABC. Originally appeared on ABC |
Yet what about those derelict infrastructures and buildings that are abandoned after mining and drilling operation shut down? My research led to state that the very political importance of these ruins has been neglected over decades certainly in order for capitalism not to confess its non-interest in detrimental impacts of this technological zone on space and bodies. Let me borrow this concept from Timothy Morton, wicked problem which strongly illustrates these ruins. A wicked problem, Timothy Morton writes, means "a problem that one can understand perfectly, but for which there is no rational solution. A super wicked problem, he continues, is "a wicked problem for which time is running out, for which there is no central authority, where those seeking the solution to it are also creating it, and where policies discount the future irrationally.[1] There is no rational solution to deal with these ruins because of the high price of their maintenance and upgrading programme. Yet these issues will be revealed to us as dangerous or, even, wicked as their toxicity will become more relevant, more vivid. It's just a matter of time.
| | | Abandoned gas well in high grass | Photo courtesy Steve Hillbrand, U.S. Fish and wildlife service, originally appeared on Public Domain Image |
In the world there are many abandoned objects in the forms creating their own zone and affect. Let's take for example, the extreme environment of Russian Arctic Circle with its numerous abandoned infrastructures, buildings, with industrial functions, many of them built in the Soviet era, next to, or part of the built environment. Images of crumbling infrastructures and buildings under snow and due to melting permafrost, broken or incomplete transport networks and factories, in Norilsk, Murmansk, and other Russian Arctic Circle's sites can easily be found on Internet. What these images show is the spatial and material traces as a factor of the destructive forces of the production of resource production-related space. Not only do these spatial products affect the natural processes generating viscous and violent phenomena — melting permafrost, rising land and water temperature, more frequent and violent cold storm, acid rains, boreal forest and tundra loss — and the population who lives there, but, and as a consequence, they also stick to us, are part of us[2]. The region has been suffering from some of the worst land and air pollution in the world with a population whose life expectancy is 10 years below the Russian average (which itself if particularly low)[3].
| | | An oil-pumping equipment standing abandoned at the oil well near Surgut in Siberia | Photo courtesy EPA/Vadim Rusakov |Originally appeared on New Europe |
Ruins obey their own logic, yet they interfere with us by disrupting the clear-cut rules of our logic (for instance to say it with Timothy Morton, the world in its entirety has since long evaporated, becoming a vast, planetary technological zone made up of clusters of technological zones)[4]. Given their toxicity, they also disturb the clear partition between their spatial and temporal inscription, and living and non-living bodies and space. Their discrete agency and power will reveal to us as we will be confronted with the question of climate change and its affiliated shifting contexts. In that respect, we will be forced to account not only for their presence as well as for their toxicity[5]. More precisely, these ruins, broken infrastructures and buildings are becoming "omnipresent planetary entities", or hyperobjects, to say it with Timothy Morton, 'vastly distributed agents' co-responsible for turning the surface, subsurface, air and water into dead land, waters and poisoned air at a dramatically accelerated pace[6].
| | | Abandoned Transpolar Railway in Salekhard-Igarka, Siberia, Russia. Originally appeared on Russia Trek |
| | | Another view of the abandoned Transpolar Railway in Salekhard-Igarka, SIberia, Russia. Originally appeared on Russia Trek |
For that matter, I convoked a series of texts that deserved to be read by architects interested in these industrial wastelands. These texts were a great source of inspiration to explore this critical issue of ruins within resource territories and see how they contribute to the accelerating environmental degradation, and by extension, climate change. I merely cite some of them. Henri Lefebvre unsurprisingly is on top of the list with his account of Production of Space[7] that I associated with Gaston Gordillo's excellent Rubble. The Afterlife of Destruction[8], in particular his concept of destruction of space. Gordillo, through the question of rubble, examines the destructive force of the production of space in the region of Gran Chaco, northern Argentine reminding us that the production of a new space for technological use — agribusiness, waste processing, resource extraction, military or scientific operations — or simply put, abstract space always results from the destruction of the original space which of course, in turn, generates tangible traces of former places. Henri Lefebvre, Gaston Gordillo reminds us, emphasizes that "this abstract space is inherently violent, a 'lethal' space that 'destroys these historical conditions that gave rise to it'". I was much interested in the material and spatial traces that the present abstract space produces as a factor of disruptive or side effects of this abstract space. These polluted, derelict, debilitating places, I repeat, are now living with us. As Timothy Morton forthrightly affirmed, "we are no longer able to think history as exclusively human, for the very reason that we are in the Anthropocene."[9]
| | | Cap of Kola Superdeep Borehole, Siberia, Russia | Photo courtesy Rakot13, 2012. Originally appeared on Inhabitat |
These ruins, which are the negation of negation given their toxicity and viscosity, are forced on us. They have their own agency and power. As I wrote above, these 'politics' obey their own logic. The awareness of the lethal effects of these ruins will appear as terrible shock for us. In that respect, we will no longer be able to ignore or deny their presence near us. What this imposed presence of resource production-related ruins makes explicit is that human existence is situated in a complex space of toxicity, contaminants and pollution at the scale of the planet, a reality witnessable only as the form of indirect effects, but that is not yet, at least immediately, noticeable. This negation of negation is inscribed in a very critical, odd context where ruins, built environment, industrial sites and networks, and nature are intertwined, a context that gives these resource production-related ruins a strong political signification. As by-products of the age of industry, capitalism, and technology, they now are, menacingly, part of our life. While we humans are trying to fix this environmental degradation that we have been producing over centuries with our current system — capitalism —, tools and technical knowledge, these ruins will force us to take into account that "[…] capitalism is reactive rather than proactive, it might contain a flaw that makes it unable to address the ecological emergency fully."[10]
While these ruins are conspicuous to us (if you go to an industrial expedition in these places like Pyramiden, Norilsk, Niger Delta, to quote a few, you'll be facing with their massive scale, their material presence on site, their lethal interaction with both humans, non-humans and space), their toxicity are invisible and very discrete. Yet they affect us: not only are the population who live in the site affected — many of them die of radiation sickness — but they expand their toxicity into the scale of the planetary. Put it differently, bodies are caught in the force field of intermeshed zones — zones emitted by these broken objects, zones that climate change is producing, zones that we create for economic and technical purposes, and zones that constitute the world.
If I go further than the simple presence and visibility of these ruins of infrastructure and buildings, I will take account of their material dimension but not of their spatial and toxic dimension and implication. Nonlocal things, Timothy Morton writes, on account of their invisibility, float around "in an infinite void, since there is strictly no 'around' in which these things float: one is unable to locate them in a specific region of spacetime."[11]
Why did I decide of looking at resource production-related ruins? Geologist Jan Zalasiewicz delivers one but very simple response: "At an ever-increasing rate, we are currently creating examples of the most amazing (and, in the far distant future, perhaps the most puzzling) trace fossils likely to appear in the history of the planet."[12] Put it differently, resource extraction is one example of many forms of production of human trace fossils. So the question that can be posed is as follows: what will the far future architect, urban chronicler, or whoever excavate? Ruins, but not simple ruins. Negative, toxic ruins, debris, as material or human trace fossils, factor of ever-increasing human footprint on the Earth.
Notes
[1] Morton Timothy, Hyperobjects. Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2013), 135.
[2] A walk on western ancient mining, oil and gas sites show thousands abandoned resource operation-related infrastructures many of them to be found to be leaking a certain amount of methane. An example can be found here. To have an idea of how such leakage can affect both natural process and living beings is the problem of arsenic as depicted in Mehrarg Andrew A., Venomous Earth. How arsenic caused the world's worst mass poisoning, (New York: MacMillan, 2005). Methane is added into the list of poisons as a proof that the Earth has evaporated. About this affirmation, see Morton Timothy, Hyperobjects).
[3] Sassen Saskia, Expulsions. Brutality and complexity in the global economy, (Cambridge: Belkamp Press, 2013) 156.
[4] Morton, Id., 101.
[5] When for instance poisons like methane will be clearly and officially detected in these derelict infrastructures and buildings.
[6] Morton, id., 53.
[7] Lefebvre Henri, Production of Space, (Bognor Regis: Wiley-Blackwell, 1991), 289.
[8] Gordillo Gaston, Rubble. The Afterlife of Destruction, (Durham: University of Duke Press, 2013), 79.
[9] Morton, id., 5.
[10] Morton, id., 21.
[11] Morton, id., 42.
[12] Zalasiewicz Jan, The Earth after Us: What Legacy will Humans leave in the Rocks, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 165.
The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of nature’s force to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization or rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground — what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labor?Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 1848No space vanishes utterly, leaving no tracesHenri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 2000 (1st edition: 1974) (French version), 1991 (English version)
| | | Verkutlag, or the Camp at Verkuta established in 1931 for coal miningCourtesy Photo: Stanislaw Kialka, Tomasz Kiznyoriginally appeared on RFE/RL |
In the coming weeks, I will be posting a series of essays that will be exploring three key-concepts regarding resource territories: contingency, control and accountability. With these concepts, I'll be attempting to address the interrelation between extractive activities (more precisely resource extraction-related apparatus ranging from extraction to resource urbanism) and the forms of violence that this apparatus produces. As I will repeat through this presentation and in the next essays, resource territories are matter of destruction of space in order to exploit its possibilities, what constitutes this space, that is its resources. Destruction of space is always followed by the building of new forms of space, or abstract space, space shaped by and for humans (Lefebvre 2000/1991, Gordillo, 2014). Hence this idea of spatial destruction as creative negativity. The space that predates the destruction contained historical conditions and information that are replaced by new historical conditions and information whether negative or positive. Spatial destruction generates social, political, economic, cultural and environmental modification that involve displacement, poverty, conflicts, violence, landscape degradation, radioactivity, biodiversity loss, and so on and on.
| | | Abandoned buildings in VorkutaCourtesy Photo: Tom Balmforth/RFE/RLOriginally appeared on RFE/RL |
For this matter, I'll be using a series of concepts that I borrowed from the field of military geography; this includes spatial proximity through contiguity or distance and spatial contingency, control over space, spatial destruction, environmental modification. I will also borrow from the field of philosophy —more precisely acceleration, negativity, abstraction, contingency.
I’ve been working on these essays for a long while and they are part of an ongoing long research on the contingent relationship between resource extraction activities, humans and the biosphere, and violence that this contingent relationship produces. These essays will mainly be engaging with the problem of violence at multiple levels and its instrumentalization for extraction purposes. I will focus on the Gulag camps’ activities in the mining zones and oil wells of the Far North as example of the establishment of resource territories and the forms of control over space and bodies, and even violence. The core point of these essays is that violence is part of the logic of resource territories. Violence produces and is produced by resource territories. It is declined at the scale of the living, the biosphere, the economic, the political, the cultural. What are the technologies, spatial arrangements, and artefacts that shape Resource territories? How does resource extraction affect beings and non beings? What does resource extraction do to the natural environment? What kind of spatial contingency emerges from the coupling of extraction and these specific territories of the far north?
Resource territories are matter of control over space and bodies, land claims, access, and sovereignty, contingency and uncertainty, as well as geography, geology, engineering, design, techniques, technologies, apparatuses, procedures and spatial arrangements. Remote areas, what we call the outside, because of their geographies, their localities, and their climactic features are sparsely populated, if not uninhabited, or on the contrary case, are economically blockaded. The lack of connectivity, of infrastructure, accentuates their geographic isolation. Yet, the age of the polar exploration over the the end of the 19th- and the 20th centuries has participated in dismantling spatial boundaries, and consequently, territorial expansions, industrialization and urbanization of the whole USSR territory. The Soviet interest for these regions is similar with that of Canada, Denmark, Great Britain and Norway. These regions concentrate a massive amount of natural resources which arouses interests and curiosity and provokes land claims, disputes or even violence for control over these spaces. They incarnate a politics of territorial expansion for the sake of a control over lands and seas, their components, namely natural resources, raising a series of intricate questions ranging from access, land acquisition, resource extraction-induced displacement, development-induced displacement, to forced and illegal labor, violence, torture and even murders for resource extraction purposes (Mitchell, 2014; Marriott and Minio-Paluello, 2014; Sassen, 2014; Gordillo, 2014; Watts and Peluso, 2001).
As said above, these essays will be exploring the formation of resource territories in the USSR through the implantation of the Gulag Camps, the development of oil and mining activities, and the integration of the Far North into the state territorialization ambitions. Murmansk, Norilsk, Kolyma, Pechora, Vorkuta were geographically landlocked places yet rich in natural resources. Access to these regions was limited to slow mobility due to a lack or inadequate infrastructure. There were no roads leading to these areas. The implantation of forced labor camps to support the Soviet Union’s Five-Year Plan played an important role in the Stalinist apparatus of territorialization of the whole USSR (Applebaum, 2003; Barenberg, 2014; Josephson, 2014). Today these cities are typical of resource urbanism which activities mainly rely on extraction and processing of minerals.
| | | Arctic Population Map | © Lola Sheppard and Mason White/Lateral Office | New Geographies No. 1, 2009 |
Most of these regions were uninhabited or sparsely inhabited with indigenous people until the construction of forced labor colonies. Yet, their fields are full of resources. These include large deposits of oil and coal as well as metals such as nickel, copper, and, apatites, ceramic materials, iron ores. Given their toxicity, raw material extraction have harmed local population, workers and environment. These affect soil and air, producing by-products, or waste; they also are invisible and nonlocal that can be spread in a very large scale, that of the biosphere (Morton, 2013).
The geography that these essays will be addressing is a precarious frontier resource field. The landscape consists of taiga (southern part) and tundra (northern part). Subsoils are permafrost which affects any form of vegetation like trees except pine trees in the southern areas (taiga). Grass and shrubs dominate these areas. Climate is very harsh with freezing temperatures typical in the Arctic territory and the extreme north of Siberia, with record lows reaching -50°c (-58°F), and windy conditions. After decades of resource extraction, engineering and construction, this extreme territory has been reshaped, transformed into an abstract space, more precisely, an urban space mainly dedicated to resource extraction and processing. Indeed, the landscape has changed dramatically with the construction industrial complexes, apartment blocks and equipment, roads, as well as mining and industrial activities. A part of these cities however is gradually disintegrating due to thawing permafrost, as for example the city of Norilsk.
| | | Norilsk from the serie Days of Night - Nights of Day | © Elena Chernyshova, 2012-2013 |
In spite of these barriers, these regions have occupied a central place in the apparatus of the USSR economy, mass industrialization and urbanization of the whole USSR. The formation of the camp system displayed in the whole territory of the USSR to people these landlocked areas, and exploit their resources (minerals, fishes, wood) for the needs of the country, and their shift into company towns are great examples of the acceleration of the process of urbanization and industrialization. As Benjamin Noys put it, the «lag between the reality of devastation and the desire to embrace new capitalist technologies as the means to create a new communist society produced a contradiction» (Noys, 2014). This contradiction, that Noys raised, is well-illustrated with a range of concerns including traces of human activities in these extreme territories in the form of spatial et material destruction (ruins, rubbles, toxicity, pollution), spatial proximity through contiguity between work areas and workers' barracks and, then, company towns that surround these industrial complexes.
| | | Norilsk Industrial complex, also known as Norilsk Nickel | © The Moscow Times, 2011Originally appeared on The Moscow Times |
Landscape degradation, toxic environment, building damage, cancers, and other harmful spatial products are the result of this spatial proximity and human activities. Spatial destruction leads to a new form of, better an abstract space, modeled by humans for human needs (Lefebvre, 2000/1991, Gordillo, 2014). In the case of these territories, precarious technological tools have become the tools of this machine of destruction that are territorialization and industrialization. This destructive process, to quote Gaston Gordillo, has degraded spaces, buildings and lives (Gordillo, 2014). Along with the physiographic and climactic conditions and the impossible requirements of the Five-Year Plan, this form of technology-induced violence has contributed to the destruction of thousands lives (Applebaum, 2003). In this list can be added most of workers’ lack of knowledge, skills and expertise in mining and drilling activities — most of them being political prisoners — as a form of handicap that, yet, did not concern the central government.What this list above shows is the political nature of space particularly patent in the Communist accelerated industrialization and urbanization. Gulag Camps were unsurprisingly political as they reveal the schizophrenic character of the Stalinist politics of productivity. The human labor, transformed into machines, was forced to make up for Soviet lack of technology (Josephson, 2014). The Soviet Union’s lack of advanced technology, and a degrading economy due to civil war, has forced the government to adopt a brutal form of process of production relied on labor and acceleration. The proletarian poet Aleksei Gastev «saw the destruction (…) as the possibility of a new beginning» (Noys, 2014).
Too much is destroyed, much destroyed to the point of madness, to the point that chronology is wiped out, but even more is begun, begun with open naiveté and faith. We have to accept all that, accept it without conditions, accept it as the emotional-political manifesto of the times and give ourselves up to the whirlpool of the new epoch, where the general platform must be bold rationalism (Carden, 1987, Noys, 2014).
The lack of technology, again, has been filled with the integration of living labor into the machine characterized by the ‘zeal of labor’, a form of robotization of humans — or ‘man-machine’ — for the sake of Communist productivity. As Noys put it, «rather than being reduced to the ‘mere appendage’ of the machine, the worker will control and direct the machine, reworking capitalist technology to communist ends» (Noys, 2014). Workers’ lack of skills and knowledge, their naiveté or inexperience, was viewed as a form of positive, if not creative, negativity as it could make living labor more flexible in accordance with Marxism:
while in communist society,…, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic (Marx, 1845; Noys, 2014).
Anne Applebaum, in her very long research on the Gulag System, has depicted the way in which workers operated in the mining fields using precarious tools, such as hand tools, to dig the frozen soil and extract minerals and drill oils. They also built their own needs and services, their settlements, consisting of wooden or concrete barracks and other basic infrastructure to support their labor, Watchtowers, all closed with barbed wires, or open in the case of the implantation of camps in islands (Applebaum, 2003).
So was the lack of concerns on the environmental impact that the formation of these Russian resource territories for military and industrial purposes would have produced. Destruction of space should be understood as political. It resulted of this accelerated process of production promoted by Stalin, a lack or absence of knowledge, skills, and expertise, at least at the beginning, on the geological, physical and climactic conditions of the Far North. These wooden or concrete buildings, we will see, have been constructed on a permafrost soil that are not adapted to such constructions. In the same way that these mining and oil activities have been operated on this type of soil which accelerated the thawing of permafrost and the toxicity of the landscape with metals. These high impact activities contributed to rising temperature and ice melting. As architect and co-founder of Lateral Office, Mason White, put it, the shifting conditions of these areas, in particular the Barents Sea, make «previously inaccessible areas thought to be resource fields now developable» (White, 2009).
Resource territories require knowledge, specific skills, expertise, and fields ranging from geology to engineering and construction. The building of roads, railways to link these strategic points to the Russian main cities, of apartment blocks, airports, industries, and other infrastructural networks including pipelines necessitate specialists’ skills and expertise including architects, engineers, and planners. Architecture and planning cannot be dissociated with the setting of the labor camps and resource territories. Stalin understood it when he decided to convoke architects, engineers, planners and other specialists to build these territories. Of course, most of them were arrested for sabotage and counter-revolutionary act and sent to the Far North, Siberia and other colonized territories including Kazakhstan. The actual Norilsk, Vorkuta, or Murmansk, these company towns, are the result of a long process of trials and errors, of failure characterized by Stalinist accelerationism. Material evidence of this failure can be seen with damaged abandoned buildings, apartment blocks sinking because of the thawing permafrost soil on which they have been implanted, because of the ignorance, or lack of interest in the danger of building on this type of soil. This is the case of Norilsk, mentioned above, a closed and toxic city. People and buildings have been severely impacted by toxicity, contamination and pollution owing to their spatial proximity to industrial complexes and mining sites.
The presence atmospheric pollution of heavy metals leads to a drop in the immunity of city residents, which is so vital in our climactic conditions… we are falling sick and dying.» (Sassen, 2014).
Traces of this machine of destruction, can be found with ruins and rubbles of gulag camps and industrial and mining complexes and derelict infrastructure near the city of Norilsk. Images of these previous gulag camps and damaged buildings mirror the process of transformation from a sparsely territory, or historical conditions of this place, to an urban space, or resource-related urban space that challenges contamination, toxicity and pollution. These ruins, rubbles, damaged objects, waste, derelict industrial industries, contaminated land, lakes and rivers are part of this abstraction of space. These abstract objects are also characteristics of past, present and future because of their nonlocality and atemporality. Their are the heritage of mining and oil activities of the 20th century and pose the question of how these places can be designed in the 21th century that tackle these political, social, cultural and environmental impacts.
| | | Derelict buildingsNorilsk City, from the series of Days of Night - Nights of Day | © Elena Chernyshova, 2012-2013 |
This globally is what the next essays will be exploring. I do not speak Russian. My research consequently (and unfortunately) is limited to English-written documents. This said, the aim of this series of short essays is to apprehend resource territories in the scope of resource extraction control over space and bodies, contingencies, accountability and violence. I am particularly interested in addressing the spatial, political, social, biospheric implication of the fact that resource territories have long been viewed as closed territories, with their own legal, ethical, political, social, and cultural frames. Put it simply, as I mentioned above, resource territories must be understood as social, political, economic, and biospheric. As Saskia Sassen stated in her book Expulsions, much of the 21st century will be concerned with the social, political, economic, and (and I stress the ‘and’) biospheric situations and conditions (Sassen, 2014). It will be requiring another approach to design, namely, no longer at the scale of the site but at the scale of the territory. It also will be requiring to take account of the by-products, wastes, or hyperobjects, that we, humans, are creating within our activities and that will affect us for a long time on (Morton, 2013; Byant 2014). Such issues should be regarded as an opportunity for the architect, the landscape architect, and the planner to develop, implement an adaptive ecological design that encourages a resilient, scalable process of use, extraction, and remediation. Resource territories, as zone-like-enclaves or extraterritorial zones, are indicative of 20th-century model of human domination on nature, and industrialization and urbanization at the scale of the planetary, to limit to two examples. These remote areas also are the location of what some observers call petro-violence (Watts, Peluso, 2001), that is petro-violence on bodies and environment.Another issue to discuss when challenging such northerly territories is to rethink how buildings and infrastructure should operate in this context. In another part of the Arctic circle, the Canadian Arctic, Lateral Office is questioning these complex situations and conditions that this region imposes. The Canadian Arctic also is subject to a landscape transformation under the extent of industrialization and urbanization. The agency calls for a reconsideration of the status of the architect as no longer an architect as problem-solver but an architect as opportunity-seeker. This approach opposes to the 19th- 20th-century engineering and construction based on the domination of geography, of nature.How can architecture contribute to new conceptualizations of alternative formats for these petro-landscapes and petropolises? How can designers and planners tackle the specificities and inequities of this space of contradiction to propose something new? In the present case of the Polar North, how do we learn to live in the North?
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Watts Michael, Peluso Nancy (eds.) (2001), Violent Environments, (Ithaca: Cornell University).
Weizman Eyal (2011), The Least of All Possible Evils. Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza, (London, UK/Brooklyn, US: Verso Books).
White Mason (2009), 'Resource Fields. Gas Urbanism and Slick Cities', in Knechtel John, Fuel, (Cambridge: MIT Press), 70-93.
White Mason, Sheppard Lola (2009), 'Meltdown: Thawing Geographies in the Arctic', in New Geographies, Vol. 1, 130-137.
This recent article written by The Guardian's critic of architecture Oliver Wainwright about Zaha Hadid's Baku Prize winner for the Heydar Aliyev Center raises a range of questions and concerns from land acquisition by dispossession for extractive operations, pipeline corridors, urban development, to the ethical stance of architecture. The aim of this text does not concern the Heydar Aliyev Center itself which, in my view, is a beautiful building, very Zaha-Hadid signature. I, however, will retain one but very essential question: land acquisition by dispossession. This issue of land acquisition by dispossession along with displacement and proletarianization of the very population that live in peripheral, remote locations is at core of the formation of frontier zones. Below is some hints, or short reflections on this practice.
Land acquisition by dispossession poses the question of the place and status of the body, those who live in these areas and are, consequently, affected by oil activities. Along with affected local residents is the question of land at issue illustrated by dispute, protests, sabotage or compromises as well as deterritorialization, reterritorialization in these exclusive territories. What I propose below is some glances from my ongoing research on urbanism, infrastructural design related to resource extraction — part of Contingency, the first volume of Uncertain Territories —, more precisely on operationalized landscapes with this question in mind: what design opportunities for such peripheral regions? What can architecture do to tackle these complexities?
| | | Re-Rigging. 2010 | © Lateral Office/Infranet LabImage originally appeared on Fei-Ling Tseng's website |
"The government has pursued a programme of illegal expropriation and forced eviction across the city, without proper compensation of its residents," Oliver Wainwright writes. On May 10, 2013, it has been reported that more than 3.641 apartments and private properties have been demolished in the center of Baku, a zone named as 'zone of illegal demolition.'
Shocking though this can be, land acquisition by dispossession, along with displacement and proletarianization of local populations, is a common practice in extractive regions. Extractive activities demand huge amounts of land for extraction, production and distribution of oil via the pipelines and other transportation networks.
Allow me for engaging in a more technical analysis of land acquisition before going any further. In her recent book Subtraction, Keller Easterling has proposed this term 'subtraction' to explain the act of building removal. Land acquisition by dispossession can be associated with 'subtraction' as shown in regions affected by conflicts as well as in frontier zones. To limit the discussion to the frontier zones of resource extraction, this practice of subtraction consists in scraping buildings in order to acquire lands for, mostly, operationalization and reorganization of landscapes for corporate profits. In our case, this practice of land acquisition by dispossession provides a large amount of lands available for oil activities in which local residents are disallowed to live or cultivate. To facilitate such practice, the 'Resettlement Action Plan' has been implemented in order to compensate to the affected local landowners for the construction of pipeline corridors. If many landowners have received compensation, some complained to have lost their land by force or live near the pipelines. James Marriott and Mika Minio-Paluello have met many residents who have lost their lands accusing local authorities and multinational operators for having illegally purchased or forced people to sell their lands with no compensation despite the 'Resettlement Action Plan'. In some cases, corruption and lack of transparency can be a deep problem in frontier zones. The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline is an example among many others. Its function is to link three countries Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Turkey to allow for the circulation and distribution of oil to terminals. A report notes that the construction of the BTC pipeline has affected about 4,100 households in Azerbaijan, about 1,800 in Georgia. In Turkey, approximately 296 villages and 13,000 parcels have been affected by the pipeline corridor (Starr and Cornell, 2005).
The 'Resettlement Action Plan' has been developed to cope with the population of these three countries affected by the construction of the BTC pipeline. The principle is to purchase or lease parcels of land for the project. In many cases, as have been said, tenants and land users have received a three-year compensation for the loss of their land. Yet, in some cases, local inhabitants living in Baku, Tbilisi, Ceyhan and along the pipeline share with the authors of The Oil Road the same statement of having been evicted from their land.
Another but significant factor is these enclaves are marked by poverty and unemployment. In the case of Azerbaijan, 42% of the population is below the poverty line. Moreover, labor protests increased with workers employed at the construction of the BTC pipeline, to continue with this example (but examples of poor labor conditions in oil regions are numerous), who have complained of being mistreated in terms of working conditions, inadequate housing and medical treatment (Mitchell, 2013).
As Marriott and Minio-Paluello show, the BTC pipeline is a fascinating example in terms of transparency and corporate social responsibility (CRS) (Barry, 2013, Marriott and Minio-Paluello, 2014). Allow me for a short moment to define this corporate social responsibility so that we will more easily attest its importance in frontier zones. A corporate social responsibility is an interesting tool for oil governance actors and institutions insofar as it allows to compensate and pacify affected communities and to scale up any concerns — environmental, countries, financial — related to oil production (Bridge and Le Billon, 2013). It is broadly employed everywhere a zone is constituted for exclusive operations.
| | | Re-Rigging. 2010 | © Lateral Office/InfraNet Lab"Project for a multifunctional offshore oil platform in the Caspian Sea. Can we learn from the Caspian Sea's non-human occupants to extend the momentum of oil operations into the post-oil future?"- Maya PrzybylskiImage originally appeared on e-flux |
The construction of pipeline corridors should be considered in terms of their environmental and social impacts, more specifically, how these pipeline corridors affect local populations and environment. The small village of Qarabork, 187 kilometers along the pipeline from Sangachal Terminal is an example. Marriott and Minio-Paluello state "along the pipeline's route through Azerbaijan and Georgia, there were only two places where its construction would involve destroying houses; Qarabork was one of them." A solution for the oil multinational BP, one of the oil firms very active in this region, consists in running pipelines underneath the homes of local populations, in order, on the one hand, that the pipeline be 'safe, secure and unseen' (Barry, 2013), on the other hand, that they avoid eviction and resettlement (or simply compensation). In this context, it is important to deal with such critical issues, namely affected communities, in such exclusive territories of operation. Indeed, Pipeline affected communities are defined by their distance from the pipeline route and workers' settlements, namely: "within a 2 km corridor either side of the route or are within 5 km of a potential worker camp or pipeline yard" (BTC/ESIA 2002a, Barry, 2013). The book The Oil Road provides material and spatial evidence in relation to oil operations, including the construction of road, railways, of course, pipeline corridors, oil rigs, and so forth, their impact on local communities with the transformation of daily lives, changing patterns of settlements and landscapes marked by a unclear urbanization.
Above is presented a series of hints and ideas not exclusively on petropolis, but more largely, on operational landscapes and their material and spatial consequences. I received many books related to oil that I think can be very informative for architects, landscape architects, and planners to tackle this problematics. As I wrote earlier, this is an ongoing, long research part of another but large-scale research for the first volume of Uncertain Territories. I'm working on two more short papers, this time, on 'technological zone' that I find very significant and fascinating in relation to oil, and the interdependence of corporation and urbanism for oil activities.
() About 'affected communities' see Andrew Barry, Material Politics: Dispute along the Pipeline* (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013).
Some suggestions:
Barry Andrew, Material Politics: Dispute Along the Pipeline, (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013)
Barry Andrew, 'Technological Zones', European Journal of Social Theory, May 2006, 239-253
Barry Andrew, Political Machines: Governing a Technological Society, (Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd, 2001)
Bhatia Neeraj, Casper Mary (eds), The Petropolis of Tomorrow, (Actar Publishers, 2013)
Bridge Gavin, Le Billon Philippe, Oil, (Polity, 2013)
Brenner Neil, 'Urban theory without an outside', Harvard Design Magazine (37), 2014, 42-47
Brenner Neil, Schmid Christian, Implosions/Explosions. Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization, (Jovis, 2013)
Elden Stuart, The Birth of Territory, (University of Chicago Press, 2013)
Easterling Keller, Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and Its Political Masquerades, (The MIT Press, 2008)
Easterling Keller, Subtraction, (Sternberg Press, 2014)
Ghosn Rania (ed.), New Geographies, 2: Landscapes of Energy, February 2010
Labban Mazen, Space, Oil and Capital, (Routledge, 2008)
Lefebvre Henri, The Right to the City, Writings on Cities, eds. and trans. Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas, (Blackwell, 1996 [1968])
Lefebvre Henri, Le Droit à la ville (suivi de) Espace et Politique, (Seuil, 1974)
Marriott James, Minio-Paluello Mika, The Oil Road: Journeys from the Caspian Sea to the City of London, (Verso Books, 2014)
Milligan Brett/Free Association Design, A Corporate landscape urbanism, July 2010
Mitchell Timothy, Carbon Democracy, (Verso Books, 2013)
Przybylski Maya, "Re-Rigging Transborder Logics Across The Bounded Site", in Bhatia Neeraj, Casper Mary (eds.), The Petropolis of Tomorrow, (Actar Publishers, 2013)
Reed Chris, Lister Nina-Marie, Projective Ecologies, (Actar Publishers, 2014)
Rees Judith, Natural Resources. Allocation, Economics and Policy, (Routledge, 1990 [1985])
Starr S. Frederick, Cornell Svante E., The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan Pipeline: Oil Window to the West, (Central Asia-Caucasus Institute & Silk Road Studies Program, 2005)
Watts Michael, 'Crude politics: Life and death on the Nigerian oil fields', 2009, (pdf)
White Mason, Sheppard Lola, Coupling: Strategies for infrastructural Opportunism, (PAP, 2011)
My apology for this long absence. With these recent busy weeks, I, shamefully, have not been able to find a moment to share my research.
I recently wrote a short piece for the 93rd issue of the excellent little publication Fulcrum edited by the very prolific Jack Self (co-editor of Real Estates: Life without Debt with Shumi Bose). Neither will I discuss this short piece. Nor will I post an abstract as you can download it on Fulcrum. I let you read it and that of Oscar Johanson Battersea Recuperated that composed this Fulcrum #93 Transformations.
I, however, will merely share the books that helped me write this essay.
I have been engaged for a long while in a very long research on what is related to operational landscapes, precisely negative impacts marked by the extent of the industrialization and the urbanization of the Earth: wasted landscapes, toxic materials, pollution, resource extraction, and so on. There is a long list of books that can help the architect, landscape architect, planner as well as the historian of architecture, the critic, the editor, the curator and the theorist to pave her way for a better understanding of and developing new methods and techniques to apprehend these landscapes .
This shorter essay was an opportunity to explore, albeit rapidly, one of my great interests, namely Levi Bryant's account of machine. A very complex concept that, in contrast with that of object, allows for more precision to what things are doing and how things interact. Two books, as precious help, are The Democracy of Objects and Onto-Cartography. I include Levi Bryant's blog Larval Subjects in which you can find loads of texts that illustrate his research and interests from onto-ecology, science to ethics. Bryant's account of machine helps me to build an understanding of toxic materials' characteristics, their timescale, how toxic materials, as nonhuman beings, interact with other beings, humans including. Should we learn to live with them? Or would we be able to recalibrate these toxic landscapes? Two questions that will dominate this new era.
With a strong evidence, Timothy Morton's hyperobject reinforces my study of Levi Bryant's machine. His three books Ecology without Nature, The Ecological Thought and Hyperobject are three important guidances. Not to mention other books such as Stacy Alaimo's Bodily Natures, Jane Bennett's Vibrant Matter, Lateral Office's Coupling, and The Petropolis of Tomorrow edited by Neeraj Bhatia and Mary Casper. The Petropolis of Tomorrow, for example, includes two series of photographs, namely, on the one hand those of filmmaker Peter Mettler's Petropolis, or aerial pictures of the Alberta Tar Sands and, and on the other, those of Photographer Garth Lenz's The True Cost of Oil, again aerial photographs of the Alberta Tar Sands, have guided our steps in our research.
This energy we can find in the field of philosophy, in particular ecological philosophy, ontology or onto-ecology, but also the field of science, provides new trajectories and perspectives for the ecological theory and design. I'm working on two large-scaled research. The first one, as you know, is Uncertain Territories' first volume titled Contingency programmed for 2015. The second one is a series of events in the form of conversations part of Uncertain Territories that will be exploring consequences of operational landscapes and the role of ecological and infrastructural design in problem-forming these shifting environments. This includes wasted landscapes, resource extractive territories, extreme territories, ocean-turn. Consequently, these authors, mentioned above, are, in my view, of great importance to mobilize the production of knowledge we need to gain in understanding of this ecological turn.
I hope you will like this short piece.
Two weeks ago or so, Matteo Pasquinelli, a theoretician, shared via facebook a video entitled Google and the World Brain. Visiting the website Thought Maybe, for further information, I found another documentary entitled Petropolis: Aerial Perspectives on the Alberta Tar Sands produced by filmmaker Peter Mettler:
Canada's tar sands are the largest industrial project ever undertaken-spanning the size of England. Extracting the oil and bitumen from underneath unspoiled wilderness requires a massive industrialized effort with far-reaching impacts on the land, air, water, and climate. It's an extraordinary industrial spectacle, the true scope of which can only be understood from an aerial view. Shot primarily from a helicopter, Petropolis: Aerial Perspectives on the Alberta Tar Sands offers an unparalleled view of the world's largest ever industrial project…
Peter Mettler has shot Petropolis: Aerial Perspectives on the Alberta Tar Sands from a helicopter. The Alberta Tar Sands area is located in the Canadian boreal forest occupying a large area of 141,000 sq. km (54,000 sq. mi.). These deposits comprise Athabasca Oil Sands, Peace River and Cold Lake. This area is the primary locus of oil sands extraction in Canada and one of the earth's largest reserves of fossil fuels. A petropolis, then, is defined by a high dependence on natural resources — oil, natural gas, coal — marked by a political-economic system. Other examples of petropolis are Macaé (Brazil), Baku (Azerbaijan), among others.
What this video shows is nothing less than a pressured environment through surface mining activities. Guilty, toxic landscapes. These images force us to reconsider our position toward resource extraction, and more broadly energy. Guilty or not guilty? Shame or not shame? Consider accountability. As Brendan Cormier rightly puts it in his essay 'Accounting for guilt', the acceleration of environmental issues through industrial activities will contribute to more accountability. Resource extraction is a "strong generator of guilt." These images pose the question of ethics and its relation with industrial activities within the (re)configuring of, and the becoming-unstable of territories for industrial purposes. Allow me for convoking physicist and philosopher Karen Barad for a better understanding of the role of ethics towards these extreme landscapes. As Barad writes:
The point is not merely that there is a web of causal relations that we are implicated in and that there are consequences to our actions. We are a much more intimate part of the universe than any such statement implies. If what is implied by 'consequences' is a chain of events that follow one upon the next, the effects of our actions rippling outward from their point of origin well after a given action is completed, then to say that there are consequences to our actions is to miss the full extent of the interconnectedness of being. Future moments don't follow present ones like beads on a string. Effect does not follow cause hand over fist, transferring the momentum of our actions from one individual to the next like the balls on a billiards table. There is no discrete 'I' that precedes its actions. Our (intra)actions matter — each one reconfigures the world in its becoming — and yet they never leave us; they are sedimented into our becoming, they become us. And yet even in our becoming there is no 'I' separate from the intra-active becoming of the world.
How to measure our responsibility in these shifting landscapes? What is to be done?
| | | Syncrude Upgrader and Tar Sand © Garth Lenz> "The refining or upgrading of the tarry bitumen which lies under the Tar Sands consumes for more oil and energy than conventional oil production and produces almost twice as much carbon. Each barrel of requires 3-5 barrels of fresh water from the neighboring Athabasca River. About 90% of this is returned as toxic tailing into the vast unlined tailings ponds that dot the landscape. Syncrude alone dumps 500,000 tons of toxic tailings into just one of their tailings ponds everyday." | Garth LenzOriginally appears on National Geographic |
I'm reminded of these aerial pictures taken by Garth Lenz (see the 31st issue of Volume Magazine and The Petropolis of Tomorrow). Garth Lenz documents how the boreal landscape has been transformed through resource extraction. The point of view is similar to Mettler's video: aerial views providing a panoramic view of the damaging landscape. Mettler's video Petropolis and Lenz's images do not show the before-and-after but the process, the changing environment of the Boreal Forest.
| | | Tailings Pond in Winter, Alberta Tar Sands | © Garth Lenz> "Even in the extreme cold of the winter, the toxic tailings ponds do not freeze. On one particularly cold morning, the partially frozen tailings, sand, liquid tailings and oil residue, combined to produce abstractions that reminded me of a Jackson Pollock canvas." | Garth LenzOriginally appeared on National Geographic |
The architect Kelly Nelson Doran has made a great contribution to our understanding of these changing landscapes of the Alberta Tar Sands, examining the mechanism of oil sands extraction, the accelerating landscape transformation through this method of extraction. As Kelly Doran argues, the "future of this landscape is the unfortunate byproduct of blame." Indeed, oil sands industries, he continues, "have developed an orchestrated set of landscape behaviors based on emerging hydrological, logistical, technological and legal parameters." Oil sands or tar sands are a mixture of sand, clay, and water, saturated with viscous form of petroleum, also known as bitumen. This is based upon a specific technique of extraction consisting in strip mining:
Initially, while constructing the massive upgrading facilities required to separate bitumen from sand, the boreal forest is gridded off; its land clear-cut; its soil drenched, drained and dried; and its roughly ten-meter-thick layer of overburden (musked, soil, gravels, rock) is removed and stocpiled before any mining can occur. Simultaneously, massive embankments for holding and tailings ponds are constructed adjacent to the future mines to provide the necessary fluids to lubricate the transportation of the crushed sand, which will then have steam pumped into it to separate the oil.
This method, however, has a cost: the deterioration of these landscapes producing "more carbon" and "a major source of airborne toxic pollution." The territory around the extractive site is becoming a landscape-level disturbance that transforms, accelerates biodiversity decline — exhausted rivers, habitat fragmentation and degradation, endangered and threatened species, deterioration of wetlands. These sites, or extreme sites, now are left physically, environmentally, and economically for someone else's problems. As an example of this, as Garth Lenz puts it, the use of pipelines, seismic lines, and pumping stations "impacts a far larger area than the mines and contributes up to ninety percent reduction of key species, including the Grizzly Bear and Woodland Caribou." Not to mention health risk occurring at a very large scale.
| | | Petropolis | © Peter MettlerOrignally appears on InfraNet Lab> "A tailing pond is a toxic lake so dangerous that air cannons and scarecrows are used to deter wildlife." | Peter MettlerOriginally quoted in The Petropolis of Tomorrow |
What will the geologist or, more simply, the urban explorer of the distant future be seeing? In a recent conference entitled Environments of Extraction that brought together architect Neeraj Bhatia (The Open Workshop, InfraNet Lab), Dr Paul Fennelly, Rob Holmes (mammoth) and Justin Fowler (Manifest Magazine) at Storefront for Art and Architecture, Rob Holmes states that "humans are acting as geological change agents." In other words, humans participate in a radically and accelerating changing environment made out of industrial waste, carbon dioxide concentrations, contaminating radioactive materials. I'm reminded of this text written by the author of science-fiction Paolo Bacigalupi The People of Sand and Slag, in particular this dystopian future of damaged landscape and posthuman alienation. Humanity, Paolo Bacigalupi writes, "has transcended all the things that require us to partake of what we might call ecosystem services. They live off sand and mine waste and don't notice the loss. They don't need nature, and that has implications for how they interact with their world."This may be this kind of future landscape the geologist and the urban explorer will be living in.
| | | Petropolis | © Peter MettlerOriginally appeared on InfraNet Lab> "A giant earth mover transports earth mined at an open pit for processing to separate the bitumen." | Peter MettlerOriginally quoted in The Petropolis of Tomorrow |
With a strong evidence, our accelerated activities and change of our world will be increasingly difficult to ignore, leaving traces on the planet's land surface. These disturbances can be ranged from toxic materials, oil residues to mining leftovers, sand, liquid tailings. Let me borrow this notion of hyperobject from the philosopher Tim Morton to translate these disturbances.
| | | The Petropolis | © Peter MettlerOriginally appeared on InfraNet Lab> "Open mine pits in the tar sands are often fifty metres deep" | Peter MettlerOriginally quoted in The Petropolis of Tomorrow |
An hyperobject, as Tim Morton defines, is an object that is massively distributed in spacetime relative to humans. It could be global warming, radioactive materials, planets. It could be "a black hole, […] the Lago Agrio oil field in Ecuador, or the Florida Everglades, […] biosphere, or the Solar System, […] the sum total of all the nuclear materials on Earth; or just the plutonium, or the uranium." Hyperobject, he continues, is "so vast, so long lasting, that [it] def[ies] human time and spatial scales." These hyperobjects will outlast our lifetime. In my view, this concept of hyperobjectcan be an interesting concept in order for ecological design to investigate, address such extreme territories as Alberta Tar Sands.
| | | Tar Sands at Night, Alberta Tar Sands | © Garth Lenz> "Twenty four hours a day the Tar Sands eats into the most carbon rich forest ecosystem on the planet. Storing almost twice as much carbon per hectare as tropical rainforests, the boreal forest is the planet's greatest terrestrial carbon storehouse. To the industry, these diverse and ecologically significant forest and wetlands are referred to as overburden, the forest to be stripped and the wetlands dredged and replaced by mines and tailings ponds so vast hey can be seen from outer space. | Garth LenzOriginally appeared on National Geographic |
I would argue that Peter Mettler's video and Garth Lenz's photos bring to the forefront important questions of accountability, guilt, and agency. In few words, these images highlight the ethical value of industrial activities, here extractive activities: reclamation, land degradation, pollution, toxic soils and water issues (polluted rivers). The physical inscription of extractive activities and its affiliated infrastructures reveals three key points: impact, scale, and investment. As first the question of impact of extractive activities as an irreversible wound on the land's surface and below the land's surface of the Canadian boreal landscape.
| | | Petropolis | © Peter MettlerOriginally appeared on InfraNet Lab> Water taken from the local watershed ends up in toxic lake called tailing ponds | Peter MettlerOriginally quoted in The Petropolis of Tomorrow |
As second is the issue of scale. It is to operate at a wide range from the local to the planetary and from minutes to thousands of years. It has been demonstrated at length that these scales are defined as ecosystems.
| | | Petropolis | © Peter MettlerOriginally appeared on InfraNet Lab> "Giant deposits sulphur sit next to Syncrude's Mildred Lake facility" | Peter MettlerOriginally quoted in The Petropolis of Tomorrow |
Extractive activities, themselves, are a very large system that absorbs a set of scales and deploys itself from the micro to the macro, the local to the global. What affects here has a strong impact there. In her essay for Bracket Almanach [Goes Soft], Lola Sheppard evokes a new approach to understanding territorial operation, she names epigenetic territory, claiming that architecture is to operate at "the scale of the broader territory, a space expanded and thickened with environmental data, competing social and political claims, economic forces, systems of mobility, ecological systems, and urban metabolisms."
| | | Tar Sands Upgrader in Winter, Alberta Tar Sands | © Garth LenzOriginally appeared on The National Geographic> "The Alberta Tar Sands are Canada's single largest and fastest growing source of carbon. They produce about as much carbon annually as the nation of Denmark. The refining of the tar-like bitumen requires far more water and energy than the production of conventional oil and produces twice as much greenhouse gas." | Garth LenzOriginally quoted in The Petropolis of Tomorrow |
The integration of the territorial will provide new opportunities for landscape-architecture-urbanism in tackling problems at multiple scales. For example, the operation of extraction does not limit to extract natural resources, rather, participates in an entire logistic network involving extraction, production, distribution and consumption. But the new approach is to integrate what will follow this second point: re-calibration of these landscapes, or, more simply, ecosystem as investment.
| | | Confluence of Carcajou River and Mackenzie River, Mackenzie Va | © Garth Lenz> The Carcajou River winds back and forth creating this oxbow of wetlands as it joins the Mackenzie flowing north to the Beaufort Sea. This region, almost entirely pristine, and the third largest watershed basin in the world, will be directly impacted by the proposed Mackenzie Valley National Gas Pipeline to fuel the energy needs of the Alberta Oil Sands mega-project. | Garth LenzOriginally appeared on The National Geographic |
Third, investment. Considering landscape as investment is, as we mentioned earlier, to take account that toxic byproducts will outlast our lifetime. They will be our long-term issues. In this context, it is to pose exploration, extraction, production, distribution, consumption and re-calibration of affected landscapes as central in order we, first, to implement a strategy for the productive reuse of these decommissioned, damaged areas, second, to rethink or inscribe the scale of waste management and treatment into the oil industries' agenda.
| | | Boreal Forest and Wetland, Athabasca Delta Northern Alberta | © Garth Lenz> "Located just 70 miles downstream from the Alberta Tar Sands, the Athabasca is the world's largest freshwater delta. It lies at the convergence of North America's four major flyways and is a critical stopover for migrating waterfowl and considered one of the most globally significant wetlands. It is a threatened both by the massive water consumption of the tar sands and its toxic tailings ponds." | Garth LenzOriginally appeared on The National Geographic |
What productive strategies can be implemented to respond to this specific situation of extreme territories? Can we make waste as resources? These territories have been manufactured in response to human demands for energy. The following questions are: what would we do with these exhausted territories? Would we leave them physically, legally, ecologically and economically to become someone's else problem?
| | | Dry Tailings, Alberta Tar Sands | © Garth LenzImage originally appeared on National Geographic> "Shells atmospheric fine tailings drying field demonstration project at their Muskeg River mine. This has the potential to accelerate the reclamation of tailings in the future." | Garth LenzOriginally quoted in The Petropolis of Tomorrow |
I, again, make reference to Kelly Doran. It seems that oil sands companies are implementing strategies to "transform the entire region into a constellation of engineered endorheic basins incongruously designed to sustain ecosystems that perform at pre-development levels". The aim of this closure-planning is to produce a post-extraction landscape, say, an "equivalent land-use capability, optimizing the value of the watershed, timber, wildlife habitat, fish habitat, recreation potential or other resources and taking into account stakeholder preferences," the oil industry Suncor reports. If efforts to remediate the boreal landscapes are undeniable, the risk of permanently disturbing the pre-existing ecosystem is to take into account. Kelly Doran points out that this approach "masks the reality of a dramatic habitat shift," including a population growth (from roughly 50,000 to 125,000 over the past 20 years. It may reach at 225,000 by the year 2040) that will occur an accelerating urbanization of the region. Put it simply, this closure-planning seems much more respond to urban pressures.
| | | Tar Pit | © Garth LenzOriginally appeared on The National Geographic> "Trucks the size of a house look like tiny toys as the rumble along massive roads in a section of a mine. The largest of their kind, these 400-ton capacity dump trucks are 47.5 feet long, 32.5 feet wide, and 25 feet tall. Within their dimensions you could build a 3,000 square foot home. The scale of the tar sands is truly unfathomable. Alberta Energy has reported that the landscape being industrialized by rapid Tar sands development could easily accommodate one Florida, two New Brunswicks, four Vancouvers, and four Vancouver Islands." | Garth LenzOriginally quoted in The Petropolis of Tomorrow |
What can we learn from these extreme territories? That a landscape is a network, an assemblage of human and nonhuman actants (Bennett, Latour) or machines (Bryant) — trees, habitats, species and their constructions, energy, rivers, wind, minerals, forest, soil, humans and their social constructions, oil, sands, tailing ponds, toxic water, bitumen, stockpiles, toxic waste, electromagnetic field, pipelines… More importantly, an assemblage should be considered an ecology within which all the elements are interconnected, pluripotent, contingent rather than fixed, static, linear. Moreover all these objects, whether humans or nonhumans, are sensitive to internal and external flows and fluctuations, as Jane Bennett rightly stated. It is not too far from our three points mentioned above, and I repeat here: impact, scale, and investment. What you modify here affects there and there. In this context, the tangled contribution of these objects constitutes an assemblage, an ecology, a landscape.
| | | Black Cliff, Alberta Tar Sands | © Garth LenzOriginally appeared on The National Geographic> "Tar sands pit mining is done in benches or steps. These benches are each approximately twelve to fifteen metres high. Giant shovels dig the tar sand and place it into heavy hauler trucks that range in size from 240 tons to the largest trucks which have a 400-tons capacity Black Cliff, Alberta, Canada." | Garth LenzOriginally quoted in The Petropolis of Tomorrow |
This concept of assemblage offers a great occasion to widen the angle of vision in rethinking the agency of ecological design. But prior to this, it may be relevant to revisit the very concept of agency in integrating nonhumans in acknowledging the importance of nonhuman agency, here landscape, there toxic waste, there again species, habitats, as the same level as human agency. It is to admit the existence, the acknowledgment of what Jane Bennett promotes, that is, an agency that doesn't restrict itself to the simple human agency. Agency, rather, enlarges its sphere, its boundaries in including nonhuman bodies. To go further, human bodies and nonhuman bodies are parts of an assemblage within which they interact with each others within larger networks of agency.
| | | Aspen and Spruce, Northern Alberta | © Garth Lenz> "Photographed in late autumn in softly failing snow, a solitary spruce is set against a sea of aspen. The Boreal Forest of northern Canada is perhaps the best and largest example of a largely intact forest ecosystem. Canada's Boreal Forest alone stores an amount of carbon equal to ten times the total annual global emissions from all fossil fuel consumption." | Garth LenzOriginally appeared on The National Geographic |
What is at stake, finally, is the role and implication of design in rethinking a more adaptive approach that would recalibrate, re-program, reshape at a territorial scale whilst maintaining the ecology, biodiversity's patterns in place. What kind of ecological design can we elaborate that would tackle this issue of industrial waste, these damaging landscapes, from the smallest scale to the planetary scale? An ecological design is, by definition, an approach that demands the capacity for resilience, responsiveness, and adaptability to change, internal and external disturbances. Rob Holmes proposes an approach, he names generative capacity of extractive landscapes capable of absorbing issues occurring through extractive activities, of coupling human economy (logistics and infrastructural formats), geologic activities with ecological efficiencies (natural landscapes). In other words, the tangled contribution of objects, that is, social construction and natural construction, problem-forms, reshapes these extraction-related landscapes.
| | | Tailings Pond Abstract, Alberta Tar Sands | © Garth Lenz> "So large are the Alberta Tar Sands tailings ponds that they can be seen from space. It has been estimated by Natural Resources Canada that the industry to date has produced enough toxic waste to fill a canal 32 feet deep by 65 feet wide from Fort McMurray to Edmonton, and on to Ottawa, a distance of over 2,000 miles. In this image, the sky is reflected in the toxic and oily waste water of a tailings pond." | Garth LenzOriginally appeared on The National Geographic |
The discussion Environments of Extraction which addresses the peculiar relationship between urbanism and resource extraction provides key questions to rethinking these human-impacted landscapes.
| | | Petropolis | © Peter MettlerOriginally appeared on InfraNet Lab> "Air emissions from the tar sands include 300 tonnes of sulphur a day" | Originally quoted in The Petropolis of Tomorrow" | Peter MettlerOriginally quoted in The Petropolis of Tomorrow |
Neeraj Bhatia, the co-editor of the book The Petropolis of Tomorrow with Mary Casper (Plat Journal), asks us to examine the fitness or suitable of our tools to solve resource extraction problems. The Petropolis of Tomorrow is also a design investigation, directed by Neeraj Bhatia, into an alternative approach to designing oil-related cities. This hyperfunctional, resilient petropolis proposes the integration of waste and garbage management and treatment as key question to extractive landscapes, namely a detoxi-city which purpose is to challenge environmental pollution, toxic waste, and other industrial byproducts in "co-opting and coupling […] hydrological flows to oil refinement and processing in order to both contain, cleanse, and reintroduce waters that have been used and affected by the industrial processes proposed for the site," Rodney Bell, Julia Gamolina and Zuhal Kol, three architecture students participants in this design The Petropolis of Tomorrow, write. To say it differently, what is at stake is to propose hyperfunctional infrastructures of industrial waste, contamination management and treatment, again scalable, responsive to ecological, environmental, climatic, economic and social flows and fluctuations. I would argue that the inclusion of such task of treating these hyperobjects, these industrial waste, pollution, greenhouse gases and water issues is a great opportunity to enlarge decision-making of architects…
For those interested in this subject, a further reading, that I hope, will enlarge your knowledge on this topic:
Bacigalupi Paolo, Pump Six and Others Stories, Night Shade Books, 2010.
Barad Karen, 'Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter comes to Matter', Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28(3), 2003: 801-831, (pdf).
Barad Karen, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Duke University Press Books, 2007.
Bennett Jane, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Duke University Press Books, Series: A John Hope Franklin Center Book, 2010.
Bhatia Neeraj, Casper Mary, The Petropolis of Tomorrow, Actar Editorial, 2013.
Bryant Levi, The Democracy of Objects, MPublishing, University of Michigan Library, 2011.
Cormier Brendan, 'Accounting for Guilt', Volume, 31(Spring), 2012: 19-22.
Doran Nelson Kelly, 'Europe's Oil Sands - Dirty of an Offshore Appetite', Volume, 31(spring), 2012: 122-125.
Doran Nelson Kelly, 'Operational Alternatives: (Re-)Configuring the Landscape of Alberta's Athabasca Oil Sands', 306090, 13, 2009: 40-43.
Doran Nelson Kelly, 'After Extraction,' Topos, (82), 2013: 37-41.
Ellsworth Elizabeth, Kruse Jaimie (eds), Making The Geologic Now, Punctum Book, 2012.
Lenz Garth, 'Exposing the Oil Sands', Volume, 31(Spring), 2012: 91-95.
Lenz Garth, 'The True Cost of Oil', in The Petropolis of Tomorrow, Actar Editorial, 2013: 32-63.
Morton Timothy, 'Zero Landscapes in the Time of Hyperobjects', Graz Architectural Magazine, (7) 2011: 78-87.
Mettler Peter, Petropolis, in The Petropolis of Tomorrow, Actar Editorial, 2013: 352-383.
Morton Timothy, The Ecological Thought, Harvard University Press, 2010.
Morton Timothy, Hyperobjects. Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, University of Minnesota Press, 2013.
Morton Timothy, 'Guilt, Shame, Sadness: Tuning to Coexistence', Volume, 31(Spring), 2012: 16-18.
Morton Timothy, 'Environmentalism', Romanticism: An Oxford Guide, 2005: 696-707.
Sheppard Lola, 'From site to territory', in Bracket Almanach [goes soft], (2), Actar Editorial, 2003: 175-180.
Podcast
Morton Timothy, Hyperobjects, lecture, 2010
A very intriguing symposium is Post Planetary Capital Symposium. This symposium will be held on March, 24th, 2014 at The Center for Transformative Media, New York. As I couldn't access The Center for Transformative Media's website — certainly a server error —, I merely propose this link. Below the presentation:
As the dull glow of nationalism and cold war politics has faded from governmental space programs it is little surprise that space exploration has undergone widespread privatization.
Yet it is only recently that potentially massive profitability has accelerated off-planet projects, replacing narrower and perhaps unrealistic dreams of space tourism with asteroid mining (purportedly a multi-trillion dollar industry) and long term Mars colonization. Such projects present an odd combination of new technologies (especially advanced robotics) and lower cost older technologies (rocket propulsion) deployed in unfamiliar and lawless territory.
While much has been said regarding the internal limits of capital, much yet remains to be said about how capitalist imperatives can be taken off-world, questioning whether capital[ism] has external limits as it begins to spread across the solar system and out into space. Is the fact that asteroid mining extends an old logic of environmental degradation rendered moot by its non-terrestrial location? Does off-world colonization by non-governmental entities lay troubling ground work for the advent of mega-corporations and unregulatable capitalism?
Furthermore, the complicity between capitalist expansion and space exploration which centers upon large-scale collective action potentially questions stock oppositions between capital and ecological betterment, technological progression and radical politics, as well as space travel and non-national collectivity. This one day symposium aims to address the potential strategies and claims surrounding these issues.
Post Planetary Capital is organized by Ben Woodard, and Ed Keller. Ben Woodard is the author of this book I've already mentioned On an Ungrounded Earth: Towards a New Geophilosophy. As for Ed Keller, he is the co-editor of Leper Creativity: Cyclonopedia Symposium with Ed Keller, Nicola Masciandaro and Eugene Thacker. Two years ago, his lecture Massive Addressability and Post-Planetary Design at The Bartlettdiscussed this notion of addressability: "a defining characteristic of our rapidly accelerating global network of connections, and emerges when cities, buildings, materials, objects, creatures, sites, books, words, molecules, all act as agents in a global, reciprocal ontology of things that can find each other. Across longer timeframes- decades, centuries or millennia- this set of relations inevitably scales up to the post-planetary. We cannot think of design a century from now without taking it off planet. The consequences of this leap are profound. What could be more disruptive to a human-centered model of ecology than this reframing of the agency of things? What new economies, what new modes of individual and collective sovereignty, will emerge as design goes beyond geopolitics and comes to grips with an increasingly urgent cosmopolitics?"
He is also the editor of this tumblr Post-Planetary Design. If you are interested in his research, visit his tumblr.
As for the participants, Benjamin Bratton, Ed Keller, Kai Bosworth, Carla Leitao, Geoff Manaugh (and Gizmodo), Rory Rowan, Keith Tilford, Ken Wark, Ben Woodard, and Kazys Varnelis. A very great panel!
I'll be following this conference. I hope to have further information soon including a livestreaming, hashtag…
Post Planetary Capital Symposium will be held at The Center for Transformative Media, New York, Monday, March 24, 2014 from 9:00 am to 6:30 pm.
In order to patiently wait for this conference, I recommend this round-table Google/ Arctic/Mars at Studio-X NYC/ GSAPP Columbia on May 8th 2012. This round-table gathers Ed Keller, Benjamin Bratton and Geoff Manaugh on the emergence of a new geography — from the virtual to the off-world — and speculating a to its future political organization.
Credit video: Google/ Arctic/ Mars Round Table | © GSAPP Columbia
My deepest apology for not having posted for a long while. I'm working on a draft on designing coastal regions in the age of technology, storms, flooding, and sea level rise. It's less a post on the topic of designing water-related regions than a point of view on four design research I found particularly relevant.
I profit to suggest two books that you may already have read. If not yet:
Spoil Island: Reading the Makeshift Archipelago by Charlie Hailey. I don't remember whether mammoth, Free Association Design, Landscape Archipelago, or maybe bldg blog talked about the book. Anyway, I warmly suggest its read. A spoil island is an "overlooked place that combine[s] dirt with paradise, waste-land with 'brave new world,' and wildness with human intervention" as the author describes. I found this book very interesting. In particular this statement: "to examine the marginalized topography of spoil islands is to understand emergent concerns of twenty-first-century place-making, public space, and natural and artificial infrastructure." An abstract:
On our passage along the chain of spoil islands, we are able to read the topographic record of their formation. Islands closer to the shore, and consequently in shallower water, are higher because dredging was deeper. Vegetation on the islands diminishes along with contour, and the last is marl and sand. From above, you would see the clarity of the tapering archipelago's plan, with islands larger in area closer to land, and the last seaward mark visible as a spectral bank or reef just below the water's surface. Angled a few degrees south of due wet, the datum that controls this island chain's incipient logic is the channel that also hints at this area's unlikely history as an industrial landscape. The channel is the terminus of the Cross Florida Barge Canal, partially dredged between 1964 and 1971. The consistency of its controlling depth and width yields greater volume of excavated material in she shallower waters closer to shore. History is made legible in topography.
The second suggested book is Out of Mountains. The Coming Age of Urban Guerrilla by David Kilcullen, an Australian strategist, counterinsurgency expert, and founder of Caerus Associates, a strategy and design consulting firm. If you want a longer review on the book, I suggest to readGeoff Manaugh's article on Gizmodo.
As I wrote on Goodreads, I read Out of Mountains in the light of landscape-architecture-planning. While I admit I have no knowledge on military strategy, this book nonetheless is worth reading. Out of Mountains is on future conflicts and future (coastal) cities. With a population growth, a littoralization of the world and a displacement of conflicts toward coastal cities, Kilcullen calls for a new approach to designing coastal regions. Rapid urbanization of coastal regions, if not well-planned, well-controlled, could trigger a series of interlinked complexities from urban poverty, floodings, through other anthropogenic and natural pressures. In particular in low-income countries, but not only. A particularity, given these factors I mentioned, lies on the connectivity of these areas: each house is equipped with satellite TV, cell phone and the Internet generating a complex network of coastal cities. As the author argues, these three trends, that is, population growth, littoralization and connectedness, will be making our world more complex as well as more open, more unpredictable as well as likely more violent with an increase in tension at small scale but with a global repercussion. I am certain those with a strong interest in military strategy will appreciate this book.
Needless to say that the active agent/landscape-architect-urban designer-planner-infrastructuralist has a precious role to play in proposing a more holistic, resilient, integrated approach to designing coastal regions. This is one of the messages that the book delivers, at least the message that concerns my interest. An abstract:
Thus, just as climate projections don't say much about tomorrow's weather, projections of current trends say little about future wars. But they do suggest a range of conditions — a set of system parameters, or a 'conflict climate' — within which those wars will arise. This because, as the anthropologist Harry Turney-High suggested more than thirty years ago, social, economic, political, and communications arrangements influence war making so profoundly that "warfare is social organization." Thus, the specifics of a particular war may be impossible to predict, but the parameters within which any future war will occur are entirely knowable, since wars are bounded by conditions that exist now, and are thus eminently observable in today's social, economic, geographic, and demographic climate.
If we accept this idea, along with the fact that war has been endemic to roughly 95 percent of all known human societies throughout history and prehistory, it follows that warfare is a central probably a permanent human social institution, one that tends (by its very nature as a human activity) mainly to occur where the people are. This is especially true of nonstate conflicts (guerrilla, tribal, and civil wars, or armed criminal activity such as banditry and gang warfare), which tend to happen near or within the areas where people live, or on major routes between population centers. And it follows that since the places where people live are getting increasingly crowded, urban, coastal and networked, the wars people fight will take on the same characteristics.
We can summarize the conflict climate in terms of four drivers, sometimes called megatrends, that are shaping and defining it. These are population growth (the continuing rise in the planet's total population), urbanization (the tendency for people to live in larger and larger cities), littoralization (the propensity for these cities to cluster on coastlines), and connectedness (the increasing connectivity among people, wherever they live). None of these trends is new, but their pace is accelerating, they're mutually reinforcing, and their intersection will influence not just conflict but every aspect of future life.
This book could be an interesting subtopic for Conditions Magazine's discussion on architecture in this new era, as is proposed in its 13th issue 'The End of the Beginning'.
As I announced several months ago, I wrote a piece, an editorial for the 13th issue of this Norwegian magazine. My piece discussed architecture's vulnerability to the techno-culturo-climatic-ecological shift. I will post an abstract of my piece later this week. This issue 'The End of the Beginning" is more like an open issue, a platform to discuss architecture's reaction to future, to uncertainty and, of course, the status of architectural practice today and in the future. I've not read the other contributors' piece yet. Conditions Magazine has gathered a set of editorials by Neyran Turan, José Vela Castillo, Rebekah Schaberg, Anna Ulak (see also her blog The Architecture of Villains), Rachel Armstrong, dpr-barcelona (and of course their blog), Superpool, Marco Vanucci, Thomas Mical, Brendan Cormier (and Volume Magazine), Ole Moystad, NTNU, Johanne Borthne, Davide Tommaso Ferrando, Dan Handel, Philippe Rahm, Patrik Schumacher (and of course), Arno Schlüter and Sasha Cisar, Clark M. Thenhaus, Pavlina Lucas, Rutger Huiberts, Edgar Gonzalez, Joanna Grant, Julia Sedlock, Ylva Frid, Martin Abbott, Mauro Gil-Fournier, and me (Annick Labeca).
This said, a call for competition for 'Designing for Free Speech. Re-imagining spaces in New York City as Places for Free Speech, Assembly, and Creative Expression' launched by Theatrum Mundi, in partnership with the AIA New York. The aim is to transform New York City spaces into places for public demonstration, "to re-imagining and idealizing existing spaces that have the potential for animating the public, especially spaces that are not traditionally considered in this frame". This call for competition is not limited to architects, landscape architects, urban designers and planners. It concerns other fields: activism, performers and "any other perspectives that have a relevant impact on the new design approach."
Below four items that may help you:
Is the space publicly-owned or privately-owned?
Is the space flexible for many public uses?
Is it open 24 hours a day?
Is it anchored by uses that attract movement throughout the day?
Well, if you're inspired by this call for competition, if you want to participate, you can have further information on their website Designing for Free Speech.
And this call for competitions reminds me another call, this time, for submissions.
Bracket has launched a call for submissions for its fourth issue Takes Action. Starting from Markus Miessen's quote: "When humans assemble, spatial conflicts arise. Spatial planning is often considered the management of spatial conflicts." In this sense, Kilcullen's book Out of Mountains could be a very productive inspiration for this call for submissions.
Visit the website for a longer presentation of this call for submissions. This issue poses a series of questions that reinforces its political 'touch': what are the collective projects in the public realm to act on? How have recent design projects incited political or social action? How can design catalyze a public, as well as forums for that public to act? What is the role of spatial practice to instigate or resist public actions?
I'm not sure if this edition is particularly interested in the tight relation between architecture and activism or if it poses the question of criticism within design practice.
I, then, am reminded of Miessen's installation for the Biennale de Lyon, France, in 2007 (unfortunately the page is in French for those who don't speak French), a design-as-politics-typed of installation, entitled The Violence of Participation. His installation was a discursive space to allow a heterogeneous group of participants — from those accustomed to the public discussion — critic, politician, architect, social actors — to the 'unsolicited' participant (the people) — to trigger conversations on concepts of participation, the inconsistence between democratic concepts (agonism, for instance), and what it means to live in Europe today. This installation was prolonged with a book The Violence of Participation published in 2007 by Sternberg Press. From what Position is One Talking? (a discussion between Markus Miessen, Ingo Niermann, Ralf Pflugfelder, Tirdad Zolghadr, in The Violence of Participation) can be a good point of departure to participate to Bracket 4's Takes Action…
This fourth edition is looking for design work and papers that "offer contemporary models of spatial design that are conscious of their public intent and actively engaged in socio-political conditions."
If you want to submit your piece, visit Bracket's website for further information, deadline, etc.
My apology for being very unproductive these last weeks since I am particularly busy with projects in which I'm directly or indirectly involved including the interview with Neeraj Bhatia (here and here) which, as I wrote in a previous post, may go to another platform. Again, when official, I will let you know where and when to read the interview. However, I may post not-selected questions/responses in this blog.
Another project on which I am working is my first guest-posting but again I may content merely with posting abstracts as I'm thinking of publishing them. If so, this will be by 2014.
Last week-end I was in Lisbon for the triennial whose theme is Close, Closer. This was my first-ever trip to Lisbon, a very beautiful European city with its port, its very lively streets, and colored buildings, and its famous tramway.
The Lisbon Architecture Triennial has been founded in 2007. For this third edition, the committee has elected as Artistic Director a young and notable British curator Beatrice Galilee who has co-curated the Gwangju Design Biennial 2011 with Helen Hejung Choi. For this Triennial, she teamed up with three curators Liam Young, co-founder of Tomorrow Thoughts Today, Unknown Fields Division and Under Tomorrow Sky, Mariana Pestana and José Esparza Chong Cuy, and co-curator Dani Admiss. The curatorial team's aim was to draw on a political manifesto that claims that a new form, (rather new forms), of architecture practice is emerging out. Of what? The 21st century? Multifaceted crises? As the curatorial team states, Close, Closer tackles "the political, technological, emotional, institutional, and critical forms of global spatial practice." At issue is new forms of practice. New forms of practice, still stammering but seething, still fragile but resolute (see here and here).
Close, Closer is presented as "an intense and multiple debate network on 'what architecture can be,'" says José Mateus, Chairman, also founding Director of José Mateus Arquitecto at a moment when Portugal, but many European countries a well, is struggling against a profound economic and identity crisis. Seven months or so ago, I interviewed the curatorial team for a first look at the curatorial content, strategies — even at a primary stage — and goals behind Close, Closer. Remember the website. The curatorial team regularly posted new questions about what architecture could be: What else can architecture do? When does produce architecture? What answers should architecture be giving today?, and so forth. This website, particularly dynamic since based on a participative mode, invited us to reply to these questions, be you architect or not. Beatrice Galilee said that:
The premise of this event is not to give answers, but to position questions about the condition of architectural practice today. These questions — pregnant with meaning or innocent in their simplicity — contain both a statement and a call to action. They resonate on a public stage beyond traditional discourse in order to find their way to a conversation between disciplines of culture and structures of real power.
The theme — a generation of young architects in the face of an ever-changing world— reveals architecture's position today.
This, the third Lisbon Architecture Triennale, has been commissioned and procured in the midst of the yo-yoing economic fortunes of a faltering Eurozone country where, currently, unemployment for graduates stands at 40%. This is the generation of young architects who may ask themselves if they should be designing the architecture of networks and systems, of societies or conversations, rather than buildings.
What interested me in this third edition is the curatorial function of architecture, how architecture can tackle these complex, multi-faceted issues within curating, or what position, role or function curating can play within the architectural apparatus. At stake is the potentiality that curating can offer to architecture in going out of its ivory tower, just as some of the participants of Close, Closer said, to push the architectural practice to be more engaged with the world from the smallest scale to the extra-largest scale. For that matter, I decided to focus on one of the exhibitions programmed there, namely Future Perfect. I will profit from this occasion to discuss the contingent trait of architecture.
As an evidence what is at issue, albeit partly, in this third edition, at least in accordance with my interest, is the relationship of the architect and his discipline, and, beyond this, the world. A unquestionable fact: The architect cannot content merely with the scale of building, or, to push further, the very act of building. On one hand, the architect is now extending his skillness in operating at a larger system — not necessarily the scale of the city, but that of the regional, the territory, the planetary — I'm speaking of infrastructure. On the other hand, the architect, more politically-engaged, uses other forms of practice, that is to say, curating, writing and publishing. Although many of them do not build, their influence on architecture is strong. Other build but use these extra activities as a means of leveraging their built projects. But what is common is that they aim to repurpose the architectural practice.
An example, present in Close, Closer: Andrés Jaque and his firm the Office for Political Innovation, for instance, examines "the potential of post-foundational politics and symmetrical approaches to the sociology of technology to rethink architectural practices," as he states in his website. He participated in a three-day event 'Super Power of Ten' at the Triennial including two talks 'Radical Pedagogies: A conversation', and 'Phaidon Atlas Talks'. He also took part in 'Definition Series/OLD: from elderly to lateness' at Storefront IS Lisbon, a project curated by New York-Based Storefront for Art and Architecture, which was also part of Close, Closer. The list of the participants is long. And you should have been there at the opening days to profit from the program: exhibitions, talks, performances, etc.
For those who couldn't be present, other events were scheduled within these four months including Spatial Agency composed of Jeremy Till, Tatjana Schneider, and Nishat Awan, who curated a two-day event (17-20 October), The Institute for Radical Spatial Education, an event part of the Institute Effect. The event's ambition was to re-imagine professional and pedagogical agendas for architecture through a series of 'actions' that will alter the space within the gallery and beyond, the curators said. If you have read Jeremy Till's Architecture Depends, you certainly are familiar with the purpose of this event. In his book, he defends a new contingently educational methodology for a better — or real — engagement of architecture with the uncertainties of the world.
Not far away from Spatial Agency was Design as Politics, another two-day event (20-23 November) curated by Wouter Vanstiphout and Marta Relats. The event is declined as an exhibition "of the work undertaken at the institute and through a series of talks." The participants were invited to vote in the line of participative exhibitions.
I decided not to attend the opening week despite the fact that a large number of events were scheduled in September. I decided to go to the Triennial the last week.
| | | Future Perfect ı Close, Closer, 2013, Image credit: ULGC, 2013 |
| | | Future Perfect ı Close, Closer 2013. Image credits: ULGC 2013 |
Which brings me to one of the strongest points. Of great interest, indeed, was Future Perfect, an installation curated by Liam Young with a large panel of contributors, mostly scientists, technologists, designers, artists and science fiction authors, including Rachel Armstrong, Marshmallow Laser Feast, Bruce Sterling, Bart Hess, Tim Maly, Cohen van Balen, Factory Fifteen, and Warren Ellis, among others. As the curator presents
| | | Future Perfect ı Close, Closer, 2013. Image credit: ULGC 2013. |
Emerging in the shadows of the decaying towers of a post-oil Dubai, geo-engineered by climatologists and influenced by the imminent economic boom of the Indian subcontinent it is a terraformed urban island. A city is grown rather than built, a creature, living, breathing and computing, a seething ecology that has become a new metropolitan megaform. A speculative urbanism, an exaggerated present, where we can explore the wonders and possibilities of emerging biological and technological research and envision the possible worlds we may want to build for ourselves. For the future is not something that washes over us like water, it is a place we must actively shape and define. Through fictions we share ideas and we chronicle our hopes and fears, our deepest anxieties and our wildest fantasies. Spend time in the districts, read the fictions of those who live there, meet friends and strangers, listen to their stories and share their lives. Some of us will be swept up in what the city could be, others will be reserved and look on with caution. We have not walked these streets before, what things may come, in a Future Perfect.
More explicitly,
| | | Future Perfect ı Close, Closer, 2013. Image credits: ULGC 2013 |
Future Perfect is trying to present a vision of the future that is somehow ambiguous. I don't think it is completely utopian or positive, but neither is a classical dystopian vision of the future with dark skies and endless rain. It is somewhere in between. Right now we are in a really interesting moment where there are so many unknowns about the future: biotechnology, climate change, failing economies. All these things are massive issues, which as a culture we just don't know how to deal with.
We began the projects with a think tank of scientists, technologists and futurists — these individuals are actually in the process right now of making the future. They are in labs and in companies and are building the things that we are going to be faced with in the next 20 or 30 years. And I think engaging them is a really unique thing to be doing — putting them in direct collaboration with artists, designers and visualizers, to communicate those ideas broadly. We have created an entire fictional world with all the subtleties of a real city, with characters and stories that describe their lives. This is an imaginary place but it is built out of the cutting edge research that is happening right now in places such as MIT Media Lab, or in the bio labs of Michigan University, a leading proponent of biotechnology, where extraordinary world class coders, digital artists and scripters are working. These practitioners, industries, companies and universities, are really shaping what our cities are going to be.
| | | Future Perfect ı Close, Closer, 2013. Image credits: ULGC 2013 |
The installation was housed in the Museu Da Electricidade (the Museum of Electricity) occupying two spaces. In the first space, two installations: a Quarantine zone composed of lightning, and a model of a speculative, terraformed, land or decaying city. In the second room a large installation composed of five zones including The Looms, The Wilds (a forest including a video installation), the Supercomputer, The Garment District (prosthetic bodies), and The Lookout (a video installation).
| | | And Nowhere a Shadow | Cohen van Balen | Future Perfect ı Close, Closer, 2013. Image credits: ULGC 2013 |
The common denominator of these speculative projects lies in the transformation of the individual body, or the collective bodies (the city) in the face of emerging technologies, climate change, ecological and economic crisis. How can human beings adapt to this transformation?
| | | And Nowhere A shadow | Cohen van Balen | Future Perfect ı Close, Closer, 2013. Image credits: ULGC 2013 |
For the youth tribes of Future Perfect the body is a site for adaptation, augmentation and experimentation. They celebrate the corruption of the body data by moulding within their costumery all the imperfections of a decaying scan file. Shimmering in the exhibition landscape is a network of geometric reflective pools of molten wax. Their mirrored surface is broken by a body, suspended from a robotic harness, plunging into the liquid. A crust of wax crystallises around its curves and folds, growing architectural forms, layer by layer, like a 3D printer drawing directly onto the skin. Slowly the body emerges, encased in a dripping wet readymade prosthetic. It is a physical glitch, a manifestation of corrupt data in motion, a digital artefact. They hang from hooks like a collection of strange beasts and frozen avatars. Body prints, imperfect and distorted and always utterly unique.
Chupan Chupai, a film produced by British Factory Fifteen, showed a group of children playing, running around the city. As Jonathan Gales and Paul Nichols, co-founders of Factory Fifteen, stated: "through their play the children discover how to hack the city, opening up a cavernous network of hidden and forgotten spaces, behind the scenes of everyday streets."
| | | Chupan Chupai | Factory Fifteen | Future Perfect ı Close, Closer, 2013. Image credits: ULGC 2013 |
One may be attracted by the color of the images: yellow, blue, red, orange, green in contrast with brownish-colored buildings unfolding the fast-urbanization of the Indian society that will absorb tradition… or human contingency.
| | | Chupan Chupai | Factory Fifteen | Future Perfect ı Close, Closer, 2013. Image credits: ULGC 2013 |
Watching this film, I was reminded of Zygmut Bauman's Wasted Lives: Modernity and its Outcasts, in particular this sentence "the birth of the new requires the death of the old." The children are innocently confronted with "an emerging technology and economic superpower." Put it simply, they are facing or will be swallowed by the machine, the interlinked facets of urban growth and globalization.
| | | The Garment District | Bart Hess | Future Perfect ı Close, Closer, 2013. Image credits: ULGC 2013 |
| | | The Garment District | Bart Hess | Future Perfect ı Close, Closer, 2013. Image credits: ULGC 2013 |
| | | The Garment District | Bart Hess | Future Perfect ı Close, Closer, 2013. Image credits: ULGC 2013 |
Another video-based installation is And Nowhere a Shadow produced by Cohen van Balen, part of Future Perfect, consisting of a woodland including metal structures whose functions are to feed blueberry plants. Cohen van Balen describes this woodland as follows:
| | | And Nowhere a Shadow | Cohen van Balen | Future Perfect ı Close, Closer, 2013. Image credits: ULGC 2013 |
We are wandering a new kind of wilderness, where the line between biology and technology is becoming increasingly indistinguishable. Through genetic modification, engineered meat, cosmetic surgery and geo-engineering we are remaking our world from the scale of cells to the scale of continents. The woods, wild and mysterious from afar, appear as a stage on which every element is considered. Genetically engineered plants, artificially sustained, are hanging from the trees, embedded in the ecology yet detached from it. Their scaffolding systems of gleaming steel and neon light sway in the wind, waiting. Grey wolves approach the structures during the night to scratch their body on the steel branches. In an intricate arrangement of devised symbiosis, the contraption takes on the role of host organism. The wolf's movements generate electricity for the system, while the blueberries are engineered to contain rabies vaccine in its fruit to protect the animal from self-destruction. Cameras transmit footage of the wolf's presence around the globe, adorned in invisible garlands of electric display, to be enjoyed by those whose passion for the spectacle of wilderness sustains its survival.
Again, this reminded me R&Sie(n)/New Territories's Lost in Paris, in particular this fern, a plant that grows around the house. Not surprising since R&Sie(n)/New Territories develops a speculative architecture. In this project, and just like van Balen's And Nowhere a Shadow, technology is interconnected with nature. The plant is fed with an engineered nutrient mixture combined with harvested rainwater. This system, then, is monitored by the inhabitants to prevent the fern to decay and, in doing so, to protect the building and its dwellers from externalities.
| | | The Supercomputer/Pushing Boundaries | Marshmallow Laser Feast | Future Perfect ı Close, Closer, 2013. Image credits: ULGC 2013 |
A disappointment, however, was another installation, the Supercomputer/Pushing Boundaries by Marshmallow Laser Feast. Not the project on its own but its curatorial approach. It seems to me that another curatorial strategy would have been more appropriate for this installation. Indeed, I nearly missed it. It is because I noticed a visitor intrigued by a wall that I raised my head and finally saw the projection on the wall. The room likely was too dark for that installation. Such curatorial decision raises the question of grouping a complex set of micro-projects with their own context when one of them probably would have required another option. Indeed, it seems to me that the other installations have overwhelmed the Supercomputer, unless it was intentional.
Here lies the Triennial's conceptual center: architecture's agency. What position, what role can architecture play in an ever-changing world, when everything goes fast causing unpredictable, irreversible turbulence? What methodology? What is the architecture's agency in the face of this shift? Or, better, what could we do?
The common denominator of these micro-installations resides in the exploration of bodies across a shifting society, technological apparatuses, connectivity, and uncertainty creating new potentials for design. Liam Young wrote in his statement that "Our familiar infrastructure of roads, buildings and public squares are giving way to ephemeral digital networks, biotechnologies and cloud computing connections." This paradigmatic shift is profoundly transforming our perception and relation with others, with space as well as time. It is also redesigning us. Transformation is going too fast to be controllable calling into question design's potentiality, say, what is design's agency in the face of this transformation? How design can tackle it? For my perspective, this is the message that this set of curatorial projects attempted to convey. What ifarchitecture reconsiders its relationship with contingency? That architecture is bound to contingency, as Alisa Andrasek forthrightly wrote in the 25th issue (summer 2012) of Log Journal of architecture, this is an indisputable fact. And no-one will contest her statement. She, then, is right to claim that architecture, however, has not integrated contingency. In this context, this is indisputably that architecture must cope with contingency to problem-address a set of uncertainties. And no! Not everything is under control except if we, happy nihilist, continue to view our changing world as a… continuation (I am thinking of Timothy Morton's excellent essay "Same as it ever was"for the 35th issue of Volume Magazine.)
Speculative architecture allows for trials and errors to stimulate creativity. An object, for instance, is too unstable or irreversible to be finished. It must be capable of absorbing contingency to adapt and respond to uncertainties. This is one of the characterists of speculation: never allow for finite product, accept processual, becoming. Second, society, as a large, contingent and complex system, becomes a laboratory to explore, or speculate a set of scenario that could leverage new ideas, new potentiality. Neither cannot its contours be fixed. Nor cannot they be hard. So are its structures. Society must be understood as fluctuating all the time. Remember what scientist Ilya Prigogine said about fluctuations: "[T]hese fluctuations are sometimes amplified on the macroscopic level and lead to non-equilibrium structures, to biological structures, and so on." Now failure. Failure is at the core of society. Society is based on trial and errors like nature. And yes, not everything is under control, once again in that you have to deal with contingency, indeterminacy, instability, fluctuation and change. See these hyperobjects like radioactive decay, weather, biological cell, the Earth, they are some examples of irreversibility. It seems to me that Future Perfect attempts to unfold the importance of integrating this very fact that we no longer must consider our modern world (or architecture, or nature, or city, or any object) stable, finite. It also reveals that future should not be comprehended as something too blurry or, on the contrary, too predictable. Future is fluctuant and ever-changing, consequently creative and innovative. So must be urban space. As Liam Young explains
In Future Perfect the city is being avidly redefined. For instance, I live in London and my friends live in London, but I spend most part of my time on Facebook or on my twitter network, therefore my experience of London is actually an augmented one. It is one distributed across luminous rectangles scattered around the planet. The city as a physical place is starting to disappear as a notion altogether. In this sense, the Future Perfect city isn't necessarily just about a place, but about a community, and this community is connected through technology. The Future Perfect city is an assemblage of devices, servers, proxy locations, IP addresses and of people positioned at the end of fiber optic cables and circuit boards, scattered across the world. And, in the end, the physical place that we describe is just one place. I wouldn't necessarily call it a city in the traditional sense — it is a community that is formed through technology. In general Future Perfect is interested in the idea that emerging technologies are fundamentally changing the way that we live and interact with each other. They are fundamentally changing the idea of what a community is or what a city is.
Imagining the future allow for tackling the present. Liam Young continues
We take emerging trends and we exaggerate them, we play them out in a series of different scenarios so that we can test them and access them. We can talk abstractly about something like climate change, we can see it on the news, we can hear scientists talk about how many degrees the temperature is rising or how many meters the ocean level is rising, but it is not very tangible.
Hence the critical function of speculation, or science fiction:
Science fiction has a great capacity to communicate these urgent ideas and present them in a way that generates a conversation. And that allows us to be more active in thinking about what our future is what futures we want. We can all collectively try and get to somewhere preferable, exciting and positive as opposed to just waiting for us to have the future thrust upon us by forces larger than ourselves.
Let me put these fascinating problems aside for another moment. Back to the Triennial, and more explicitly to the curatorial function of and its articulation with architecture. How does architecture articulate curating?
The reason why I have gone too far with my analysis of Future Perfect is that I wanted to stress a possible articulation of fiction, speculation, contingency and curating within the notion of potentiality. Fiction and speculation first (allow me for putting these two notions at the same level for that matter). Let me go back to Liam Young's statement about the potentiality of science fiction as a tool to "communicate these urgent ideas and present them in a way that generate conversation." Curating is a form of fiction or speculation. It lies in "critically examining the present". Curating can allow architecture for testing, experimenting as François Roche said about the role of exhibition in his design practice. I'm thinking of Une Architecture des Humeurs, this design research/exhibition for instance. For the architect, the exhibition can be "a suite of visual indices," as François Roche said, or a result of a research, this is, at least, how it seems to be articulated in R&Sie(n)/New Territories. In the case of Roche, the exhibition is part of his practice, like research, a process, or a speculation.
First, the architect extends his role into a curator. Second, the exhibition elaborates, experiments, tests a scenario-based project that deploys, a "constantly mutating sequence of possibilities", to paraphrase François Roche. An approach not very different from Future Perfect to a certain extent.
What interested me in this Triennial, beyond the theme of future practices as elaborated by Close, Closer, is the way the curator, Beatrice Galilee and her associated curators have articulated the potentialitythat curatorial function can offer to architecture. Of course Future Perfect is not the only exhibition that stresses this potentiality. Other exhibitions and events have done it but differently. Galilee and her curatorial team have used curating to investigate the state of architecture practice in this new and intricate era, how the discipline of architecture is challenging this very complex mutation that is transforming architecture profoundly (and, in turn, how this mutation is challenging architecture). In this context, Close, Closer is an example of the potentiality of curatorial practices in enabling a discussion about architecture's agency in tackling these issues presented by the show.
With an evidence, this form of curating may have not seduced everyone. Some critics have complained the lack of coherence or the dizzying problematic of the edition or, worse, its puerility. To the contrary, it seems to me that these critics reveal a misunderstanding of the potentiality of curatorial practices within architecture. Such criticism, in fact, is itself too accustomed to pre-codified exhibitions — the solo show, or the mid-career survey or the group show. Or, it also is possible that the format of the biennial itself should be clarified in its distinction from the Venice Architecture Biennial model and its national pavilions. The field of art has already engaged a reflection on it. Given the growing number of exhibitions, biennials as well as other forms of curatorial practices like lecture, conversation, or even, publication, it won't be a surprising if architecture is confronted with this task of engaging a serious reflection of the potentiality of curating as an expanded field, at least to avoid such misunderstandings.
| | | The Institute Effect ı Close, Closer, 2013, Image credit: ULGC. |
| | | The Institute Effect ı Close, Closer, 2013, Image credit: ULGC. |
Neither did I find Beatrice Galilee and her associated curators' curatorial approach to this edition the best curatorial approach architecture ever has. Nor, on the contrary, would I say another curatorial approach would have been better, or something has not been deepened enough for a better understanding of the curators' statement.
| | | The Institute Effect ı Close, Closer, 2013, Image credit: ULGC. |
Beatrice Galilee is neither the first nor the only one to break with the tradition in curating architecture in this manner — I'm wondering, for instance, what curatorial methodology Think Space's curators will establish for their exhibition Money — a hint: the curators have opted for a competition-based curatorial strategy. These curators are no longer willing to merely fill up an available space. As I attempted to demonstrate, they aim to project their own ideas, their research into the space.
| | | The Institute Effect ı Close, Closer, 2013, Image credit: ULGC. |
| | | The Institute Effect ı Close, Closer, 2013, Image credit: ULGC. |
| | | The Institute Effect ı Close, Closer, 2013, Image credit: ULGC. |
| | | The Institute Effect ı Close, Closer, 2013, Image credit: ULGC. |
| | | The Institute Effect ı Close, Closer, 2013, Image credit: ULGC. |
| | | The Institute Effect ı Close, Closer, 2013, Image credit: ULGC. |
| | | The Institute Effect ı Close, Closer, 2013, Image credit: ULGC. |
| | | The Institute Effect ı Close, Closer, 2013, Image credit: ULGC. |
| | | The Institute Effect ı Close, Closer, 2013, Image credit: ULGC. |
| | | The Institute Effect ı Close, Closer, 2013, Image credit: ULGC. |
Close, Closer was curated by Beatrice Galilee, and co-curators Liam Young, Mariana Esparza, José Esparza Chong Cuy, assisted by Dani Admiss as the third edition of the 2013 Lisbon Architecture Triennial, from September 12 to December 15, 2013.
Notes
All subsequent quotes by the curatorial team and architects in this blog are drawn from their writings in the triennial catalogue.
- Liam Young (ed.), Expect Everything and Nothing Else, Booklet for 2013 Lisbon Architecture Triennial/Close, Closer, 2013
- 2013 Lisbon Architecture Triennial, Close, Closer ı Os Lugares Estão Para As Passoas e Vice-Versa, Catalogue Guide, 2013.
- Thinking in Practice, Future Perfect ı An Interview with Liam Young, 2013
- Zygmunt Bauman, Wasted Lives: Modernity and its Outcasts, Polity, 2003.
- Jeremy Till, Architecture Depends, MIT Press, 2009.
- Jeremy Till, "Scarcity contra Austerity", Design Observer, 10.08. 2012
- Scott Timberg, "The architecture meltdown", Salon, 4. 02. 2012
- Alisa Andrasek, "Open synthesis// Toward a resilient fabric of architecture", in Log journal of Architecture, Issue 25, Summer 2012.
- R&Sie(n)/New Territories and Caroline Naphegyi, "Protocols & Process ı in Cahier Spécial du magazine Mouvement, pdf (in French. in English).
- Timothy Morton, "Same as it ever was", in Volume Magazine, Issue 35 "Everything is Under Control", 20-22.
- Catherine Rampell, "Want a Job? Go to College, and Don't Major in Architecture", The New York Times, 5.01.2012
- Asada Akira, Prigogine Ilya, Time and Creation ı An Interview with Ilya Prigogine (pdf).
First, my apology for being less productive these last weeks. The reasons? A huge volume of works and… a leg in a cast due to a severe injury.
And I'll be again less productive the following months given that I'm working on projects I've already discussed here: Dziga Press,including Uncertain Territories's first volume.
I'll be visiting Close, Closer (Lisbon Architecture Triennale) early December (note that the event will close its doors December 12, or I may be wrong). I hope my left leg will recover before December. My apology for this aparté (private information).
There is also this interview with InfraNet Lab's co-director Neeraj Bhatia, and also director of The Open Workshop. The interview, I announced in previous posts, may go to another platform. Whether it goes to another platform or not, I'll let you know as soon as it will be clear and official.
And again I present my apology as I will merely propose for today another announcement. Yet, along with a previous post on Think Space's call for competition for this new edition Money, this announcement seems particularly interesting.
The 36th issue of Volume, Ways to be Critical, examined two important points in the age of social networks: 1) the value of criticism; 2) the crisis of publishing. The question this 36th issue poses is how these crises impact the discipline of architecture from practice to writing.
Critic|all will pursuing the theme with the 1st International Conference on Architectural Design & Criticism. I'm reminded of a series of conferences on the same theme but in the field of art. It was in the 1990s. Over the past two decades, a group of critics, theorists, curators and artists has examined the transformation of criticism from the scale of writing to that of the exhibition in the age of globalization, and then the Internet. To a large extent, The Exhibitionist, this excellent little journal devoted to contemporary curatorial practices and exhibition making, constitutes a very good example among others. The journal, founded in 2010, continues the discussion producing a critical platform to polemically discuss, evaluate debates , research, exhibitions and books on the topics of curating.
For those interested in this subject, I suggest to read (again) Nicolas Bourriaud's Relational Aesthetics and Postproduction, Liam Gillick: Proxemics Selected Essays, 1988-2006, Maria Lind: Selected Writing, Daniel Birnbaum's Chronology, The power of Judgement: A Debate on Aesthetic Critique co-edited by Christoph Menke, Daniel Loick, Daniel Birnbaum and Isabelle Graw, of course Hans Ulrich Obrist's essays and interviews, the unfortunately hard-to-find In the Place of the Public Sphere? edited by Simon Sheikh… The list is long. Note that these books are published by independent publishers, many of them from Germany such as (my favorite) Sternberg Press. I will include (two other favorite) American Dexter Sinister, and French Les Presses du Réel and Paraguay Press.
Back to our field. Architecture is taking the same road with a real enthusiasm as it has been unfolded in the Volume's latest issue. Below a short presentation of Critic|all:
Trying to go beyond debates between pragmatism and utopia, the conference calls for criticism and reflects on the ambiguous area where the concepts of utopian pragmatism and pragmatic utopianism cross. To do so, three main topics have been defined: what position can today' architect adopt and how have others done it before? What are their methods? What are the new formats in architecture?
These two large-scale events The Oslo Architecture Biennale and Lisbon Architecture Triennale can constitute a good basis for an evaluation of the debate on the value of criticism in the discipline of architecture. As mentioned above I'll be in Lisbon from December 7th to 10th. It will be an occasion to measure this enthusiasm as mentioned above. What ideas, provocative positions will arise from Critic|all? It is obvious that this conference will attempt to generate, encourage, foster the diversification of opinion, debate and, at least I hope, disagreement on criticism in architecture. I also hope that curating will be added as an important topic since curating seems to occupy a much more critical place, I would say, similar to writing and publishing. Curating architecture can no longer merely play the role of communication. It now acts as a manifesto. It must actively provide, provoke, stimulate debate, disagreement, assessment, be it positively or not, provocative or not, politically or not. Critic|all will be at the Escuela Tecnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid from June 12 to 14, 2014. Abstract submissions must be sent before November 30, 2013. Please go to Critic|all for further information.
This video entitled Drift and Drive is part of The Petropolis of Tomorrow, a project designed by InfraNet Lab. For this project, the team is composed of principal architect Neeraj Bhatia, with Joanna Luo, Weijia Song and Alex Yuen.
I'm currently editing a very long interview with Neeraj Bhatia on The Petropolis of Tomorrow, and Recon-Figure, a project he designed with his another firm The Open Workshop. We also will be talking about other topics related to land-based urbanism, water-based urbanism, infrastructure, territorial operations, Bracket and of course InfraNet Lab and The Open Workshop.
InfraNet Lab is positioned as Lateral Office's lab. It is defined as a research collective exploring the spatial byproducts of contemporary resource logistics. I'm looking forward to knowing more about InfraNet Lab as well as The Open Workshop, in brief, about Neeraj Bhatia, who regularly collaborates with Mason White and Lola Sheppard.
For the most impatient readers, I recommend a look at Petropia the official website of The Petropolis of Tomorrow, or… more simply, the best is to wait patiently (let's say within two or three weeks).
Drift and Drive is part of the first phase of The Petropolis of Tomorrow, entitled Floating Frontiers. I won't say more.
I will merely post this video of the project Drift & Drive that explores a new method of building with water, also known as water-based urbanism adapted to resource extraction areas. The project is located in Macaé, Brazil, a shipping village-turned into a booming slick city.
As described in this video, one of The Petropolis of Tomorrow's ambitions is to reconfigure the spatial organization of Macaé by establishing an archipelago city composed of a network of floating islands to facilitate the mobility of workers and storage materials as well as the worker's living condition on site.
I'll go back to the project with the interview very soon.
Credits: courtesy of © InfraNet Lab. The video originally appeared on Petropia.
Zagreb-based Think Space announced last week the new curators for the 2013/14 cycle. Barcelona-based dpr-barcelona will be in charged of the curatorial development of this year. The publishing and curatorial platform has chosen Money as main topic to this new edition. What if our cities were able to evolve without money? How economic flows reflect in the configuration of cities? How would it look like a "right of the city" initiative in a tax haven state? Can we design new territories that operate outside the traditional economic guidelines? Which is the role of the architect within this scenario (if there's one)? are a few questions that the curators will be exploring.
The whole presentation can be read on Think Space for further information.
Tonight will be the launch event and you are invited to participate in the discussion by submitting questions, or comment, to the curators, team, guests at 6:00 pm either at Think Space — if you are in Zagreb and nearby — or right in their Facebook page.
As usual, this edition is articulated around two parts: competition and call for papers. These call for submission will be examined by a jury composed of Keller Easterling, David Garcia and Pedro Gadanho.
Money 2013 Competition consists of three themes: Territories (curated by Map Architects' founder David Garcia), Culture and Society (not yet announced), and Environment (not yet announced).
Territories is the first competition to be launched earlier today. An open call for a design competition to discuss, address the economic and geopolitical future of the Arctic lands. As presented on Think Space — and I merely summarize the outline of this call for submission — Territories looks for a design proposal that tackles the present economic and territorial challenges in the present and future of the Arctic lands.
How can these seemingly antagonistic fields of action and clear political strategies be engaged via a clear design proposal? In communities where everything, except fish, has to be flown or shipped in, what alternatives can be devised to cur down on subsidy dependence? Is there a strategy that can circumnavigate natural resource exploitation, alternate sea routes to the economic advantage of each of the Arctic lands? In a land where 65% of the territory is protected, who owns the territory, polar bears, scientists or other future tenants?
About the competition general guidelines, I encourage the future participant to check out Think Space where she will find the information she needs for her submission including fees. Registration will be opened October 1 to December 3, 2013.
Any questions should be sent before September 30. Then, submission deadline is by November 4. Finally results will be announced December 3.
If you are interested or have any questions to the curators, go to Think Space's website. I will go back to this cycle in the near future, at least, when I'll have more information on the two other competitions.
San Francisco Fire Department Headquarters is a proposal by The Open Workshop for the Fire Department Headquarters Competition, San Francisco.
The Open Workshop is a multidisciplinary architecture firm that aims at exploring the concept of an open work, first coined by Umberto Ecco, through the intersection of architecture, urbanism and landscape design. I'm planning an email conversation with his founder Neeraj Bhatia, also founder of Petropia, member of InfraNet Lab (with Lateral Office's Lola Sheppard), author of the forthcoming book The Petropolis of Tomorrow (co-edited by Mary Casper), and co-editor (with Lola Sheppard) of the second volume Bracket.
I am curious about Bhatia's practice within these structures and his research on infrastructure, more specifically on social infrastructure, and related topics. As we will see, Neeraj Bhatia elaborates a new form of practice based on the integration of architecture, landscape, infrastructure and urbanism. In addition, he addresses the interrelations of the human system and the ecological system, the local and the global, the transformation of territories for industrial purposes. The conversation will be focusing on two projects among his growing projects within respectively Petropia and The Open Workshop: Oil Endpires and Recon-Figure.
Below The Open Workshop's entry he just shared on archinect for the San Francisco Fire Department Headquarters Competition:
Inflected Frontality
A fire station typically has two distinct zones — one that reaches outwards to the city and acts as a monumental symbol of protection, and one that contains the hidden inner workings of the station. In a large headquarters, with a diverse set of programs each with their own unique spatial requirements, such a strategy untenable. Instead this proposal divides select components of the fire station and arrays them onto the pier to activate two zones — a surface and a voided room. Seeking definition in an expansive site, the pier's rectangular depression, which was originally a slip, offers a formal and organizational axis around which all built form oscillates. These zones are separated by a manifold façade that inflects its form to establish an understanding of the site as always in the bound to the center, reaching both outwardly and inwardly, and challenging a clear understanding of a 'front' façade. Instead, our proposed façade inflects to reveal the inner workings of the fire station as well as its monumental civic image the create a multifaceted headquarters that involves the city's residents into the life of the station.
And a few images of The Open Workshop's entry:
| | | San Francisco Fire Department Headquarters, Competition, 2013 | Courtesy of © The Open Workshop> Rendering of the Station from EmbarcaderoImage initially appeared on archinect |
| | | San Francisco Fire Department Headquarters, Competition, 2013 | Courtesy of © The Open Workshop> Birdseye/ Wormseye AxonometricImage initially appeared on archinect |
| | | San Francisco Fire Department Headquarters, Competition, 2013 | Courtesy of © The Open Workshop> Building PlanImage initially appeared on archinect |
| | | San Francisco Fire Department Headquarters, Competition, 2013 | Courtesy of © The Open Workshop> Inflected Space vs. FormImage initially appeared on archinect |
| | | San Francisco Fire Department Headquarters, Competition, 2013 | Courtesy of © The Open Workshop> Pier PlanImage initially appeared on archinect |
| | | San Francisco Fire Department Headquarters, Competition, 2013 | Courtesy of © The Open Workshop> Program vs. Facade DiagramImage initially appeared on archinect |
| | | San Francisco Fire Department Headquarters, Competition, 2013 | Courtesy of © The Open Workshop> Rendering of Interior inscribed zoneImage initially appeared on archinect |
| | | San Francisco Fire Department Headquarters, Competition, 2013 | Courtesy of © The Open Workshop> View looking NorthImage initially appeared on archinect |
| | | San Francisco Fire Department Headquarters, Competition, 2013 | Courtesy of © The Open Workshop> Concept DiagramImage initially appeared on archinect |
Source: archinect
An exhibition among a long list of events for this fall: Airport Landscape: Urban Ecologies in the Aerial Age at Harvard University Graduate School of Design.
Below a few examples of research projects by the architects selected for this exhibition.
| | | Health Hangars, Nunavut, Canada, 2010 | Courtesy of © Lateral Office> Proposed new network of air travel and airports for medical care in these Nunavut communities with no roads and insufficient health clinics. |
| | | Health Hangars, Nunavut, Canada, 2010 | Courtesy of © Lateral Office> Axonometric showing relationship of roof to 'ice courtyards' as well as separation of airport and health clinic. |
| | | Casablanca ANFA Airport, Casablanca, Morocco | Courtesy of © Agence Ter |
Curated by Charles Waldheim and Sonja Dümpelman, the exhibition will be displaying research projects by Agence Ter, Gross. Max., Hargreaves Associates, James Corner Field Operations, Lateral Office, LCLA, Mosbach Paysagistes, Office of Landscape Morphology, OpSys, Stoss Landscape Urbanism, Topotek 1, West 8, and Workshop: Ken Smith Landscape Architect:
Airport Landscape claims the airport as a site of and for landscape. Airports have never been more central to the life of cities, yet they remain peripheral in design discourse. In spite of this, landscape architects have recently reasserted their historic claims on the airfield as a site of design through a range of practices. Airport Landscape presents these practices through projects for the ecological enhancement of operating airfields and the conversion of abandoned airfields.
In addition to the exhibition is a two-day conference on the airport as landscape, on November 14 and 15, 2013. The discussion will feature sessions on airport cultures, infrastructures, and ecologies. Participants include Peter Galison, Adriaan Geuze, Christophe Girot, David Pascoe, Henri Bava, Philippe Coignet, Eelco Hooftman, Mary Margaret Jones, and Ken Smith.
| | | Quito 3Km Airport Park, Quito, Ecuador, 2008 | Courtesy of © LCLA> Lake park international competition to transform Mariscal Sucre airport in a Metropolitan Park. |
| | | Caracas Airport Park, Caracas, Colombia, 2012 | Courtesy of © LCLA> Competition La Carlota. Transformation of an aerial platform into a metropolitan park |
If you're around Harvard University, visit this exhibition. Airport Landscape starts on October 30 to December 19, 2013 at Harvard GSD. More information on Airport Landscape: here.
The second volume of Bracket entitled [Goes Soft], a publication co-founded by InfraNet Lab, archinect and Actar Editorial, addresses the topic of Soft Systems, including the contribution of Benjamin Bratton, Geoff Manaugh, Neeraj Bhatia, Philippe Rahm, Jeffrey Inaba, and Lola Sheppard. The publication is organized into six sections: sensing/feedback, interfacing/enveloping, subverting/hijacking, formatting/distributing, contingency/resilience, and diffusing/generating. The common denominator of these essays and research projects resides in their speculative approach — the editors believe “in truth, not the truth, but an unexpected truth”. Bracket [Goes Soft] looks at a series of questions that ranges from obsolete infrastructure to forces that are re-shaping our society: ecological crisis, economic globalization, the digital revolution, climate change, natural resources shortage, population expansion, technological and scientific advances.
| | | Bracket [Goes Soft], cover |
The central idea of this volume lies in the notion of 'soft'. Soft means smooth, flexible, agile, malleable, shock absorbing, responsive, non-linear. Unlike hard, soft talks about indeterminacy, performance, contingency, uncertainty, proposition. The legacy of the 1960s, in particular, soft architecture strategies, is relevant in this second volume. Reyner Banham, for example, encouraged postwar architects to look at research including cybernetics, environmental studies, science, technological progress, and disciplines focused on human behavioral systems, as Chris Perry, co-principal of Pneumastudio, convincingly writes in his article Fast Company: Architecture and The Speed of Technology. Today, as illustrated in these projects, architects are engaged in elaborating a new language borrowing from science fiction, robotics, Internet, social networks, information technologies, ecology, specific technologies (neuro-technologies, synthetic biology, genetics, cybernetics).
| | | Bracket [Goes Soft], spread |
These projects and essays — including proposals of rvtr (Colin Ripley, Geoffrey Thün, Kathy Velikov), Dan Handel, Bionic, m.ammoth (Stephen Becker and Rob Holmes), Tim Maly and Free Association Design (Brett Milligan), or Mariela de Felix, among many other fascinating proposals — account for the interconnection of infrastructure, energy economy, politics, and ecology, that ecological system and engineered system are articulate, and that an articulated cohabitation of cultural, social, political, climatic, ecological, energy, economic, and landscape-architectural-urban is required to engage architecture in a society that will be facing a range of uncertainties.
| | | Bracket [Goes Soft], spread |
Bruno Latour has convincingly posited a shift from a time of time to a time of space, in his discussion with New Geographies in 2009. The time of time, he said, consists of “you destroy the past and then you have something else” while the time of space implies that “cohabitation of all of things that were supposed to be past are now simultaneously present.”
| | | Bracket [Goes Soft], spread |
In this current era of time of space, the shift from site to territory, namely, from a specific field — architecture/ science/ politics/ ecology — to an articulated collective — transdisciplinarity — can be a possible means of problem-forming this avalanche of challenging contexts. Lola Sheppard, in her essay From Site to Territory, posits that “architecture can no longer define its parameters and responsiveness at the scale of its immediate site, but rather, must operate at the scale of the broader territory, a space expanded and thickened with environmental data, competing social and political claims, economic forces, systems of mobility, ecological systems, and urban metabolisms.”
| | | Bracket [Goes Soft], spread |
Or, to put this statement more simply, architecture must operate at the scale of an articulated collective, as Neeraj Bhatia states, that supposes to re-evaluate the role of the architect as an active agent, an enabler, as all the authors attempt to demonstrate in this second volume.
| | | Bracket [Goes Soft], spread |
All these design proposals ranging from Dredge, Soft Goes Hard, Arctic Opening, Aqua_Dermis, to Soft House, Estuary Services Pipeline and Swamp Thing emphasize this paradigmatic shift of architecture as becoming an interface with the environment. Architectural boundaries are becoming flexible, soft.
Now, as Lola Sheppard forthrightly mentions, in the current epoch of globalization, social, ecological and technological changes, the concept of territory, which seems to be more appropriate, more accurate than that of site, «has become the necessity scale required to register and engage the complexity of networks and information at play in a given physical environment».
Enlarging the boundaries of its site allows architecture for a better understanding of, or better, an engagement in the changing world. To say it with Lola Sheppard, «to represent the territory is to understand it, is to operate within it, is to (re)design it» but in the very softest way.
Book: Bracket Goes Soft
Editors: Lola Sheppard and Neeraj Bhatia
Publishers: Actar Editorial
I'm finishing the preparation of an interview on the questions of resource extraction infrastructure, geo-energy space, among others, that I hope for the two following weeks of September.
I was in search for articles for this interview and I found this call for papers: Operationalizing the geo-energy space. This call for papers is for the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, 8-12 April 2014, organized by Stefan Bouzarovski of the University of Manchester and Narmiye Balta-Ozkan of the University of Westminster. Below is the details of this call for papers.
Recent years have seen a resurgence of efforts to provide novel
perspectives on the ways in which nature and society are interlinked via
multiple and vibrant materialities (Bennett 2010). The notion of the
‘geo-social’ has been used to explore some of the connections that can be
identified in this context, emphasizing the need for a new politics of
responsibility and justice. At the same time, the emergence of ‘energy
geographies’ as a distinct disciplinary field is helping foreground new
explanations of the hydrocarbon circulations and consumption practices
that underpin planetary challenges such as climate change and resource
scarcity.In this session, we hope to connect these two distinct developments inorder to scrutinize the materially contingent nature of contemporarycirculations and assemblages in the energy domain. Following on from MañéEstrada (2006) we use the notion of ‘geo-energy space’ to interrogate thespatial and territorial embeddedness of energy flows. While Mañé Estrada’soriginal conceptualization primarily refers to large-scale geopoliticalrelations, this session aims to extend the idea to a wider range ofspatial scales and material sites, so as to highlight the diverse ways inwhich anthropogenic energy flows are both predicated by, and themselvesshape, the geophysical environment. Papers in the session can include, but are not limited to:
- Energy landscapes: using the framework to explain relations beyond itsconventional origins – in spaces such as the home, community ortrans-national organisations;- Low-carbon technologies: how do differences between, for example, urbanand rural locations, account for different social practices and patternsof energy use (both on the supply side – e.g. microgeneration and off-gridcommunities – and in terms of demand: heat pumps, electric vehicles etc.);- Energy infrastructure: what is the agency of non-human actors in shapingthe evolution of current patterns of energy delivery, as well as new developments such as unconventional oil and gas exploitation?
The deadline is the 15th of October. For further information: here.
By the way, Energy Geographies Working Group is composed of Stefan Bouzarovski, Stewart Barr, Danielle Gent, Andres Luque and Gavin Bridge, one of the authors of New Geographies Landscapes of energy.
David Garcia, founder of MAP Architects and the excellent — at least according to me — little publication MAP, will be lecturing at Studio-X NYC. Beyond North is a short survey of Arctic engagements.
Check out MAP Architects' website for detailed information on their projects in this extreme environment of the Arctic region: Polar Bear Alarm, Jossinghjord, Iceberg Living Station, Iceberg Living Station Animation, Mobile Arctic Unit, and Europan 10, Vardø, Norway.
The lecture will be held at 7:00pm on September, 13th. It will be followed by a Q&A.
In the imagination of the virtual visitor, both past and present, the Arctic often evokes romanticized scenarios on both sides of the utopian/dystopian discourse. In reality, the world's polar regions are sites of complex cultural, and ecological significance — particularly today, when their climate-changed landscapes are the subject of geopolitical and territorial conflicts, while at the same time posing new opportunities for transnational and intercultural cooperation.
In this presentation we will explore a series of exercises that aim to generate a palette of understandings of this often surreal landscape, based on expeditions and experiences in the Arctic. From Greenland to Iceland, via Svalbard, students and practitioners have created devices and shelters in an effort to chart, record, map, or otherwise engage with the realities of a context that on the surface seems almost beyond architecture.
And it's free. So if you're in New York…Check here for further information on Beyond North.
I am very busy with the second part of the previous post as well as interviews, two editorial projects including Uncertain Territories, and a post on a visit to a shale oil platform installed in Seine-et-Marne near Paris (Paris Basin) for a shale oil exploration Liassic drilling program in this region. More coming soon. Five announcements include four books that I will be discussing in the coming weeks, and a conference.
First, I finally received my copy of Pamphlet Architecture 33 Islands & Atolls guest-edited by Luis Callejas and LCLA Office. I will come back to its review soon. This 33rd edition includes two interviews of Luis Callejas with Mason White/Lateral Office and Geoff Manaugh. In addition to these interviews, the very short book includes an essay written by Charles Waldheim.
At the top of my read-list, second, is Landscape Futures finally on sale. The author, editor and curator Geoff Manaugh announced its official launch several days ago. I am planning a review or better, why not, an interview with Geoff Manaugh by late September (or early October).
Third, by September, if your research focuses on or includes the question of infrastructure, Neeraj Bhatia founder of Petropia, will be launching The Petropolis of Tomorrow with essays from Luis Callejas, Geoff Manaugh, Rania Ghosn, Maya Przybylski and Clare Lyster to Albert Pope, Mason White, Brian Davis, and Carola Hein. The book examines fast-growing offshore cities along Brazilian coast and in the ocean. Petropia names these cities Petropolisesor Floating Frontier Towns as they arise from resource extraction associated with land-based urbanism. Three major topics: island urbanism, harvesting urbanism and logistical urbanism. I am looking forward to reading this 576-page book. If you are familiar with Lateral Office and InfraNet Lab, you are likely to be familiar with Neeraj Bhatia's research and work within Petropia and now The Open Workshop. Neeraj Bhatia brings interest in infrastructure, precisely social infrastructure. He also is the co-editor of the second volume of Bracket. I am planning to organize an email discussion with Neeraj Bhatia about his research, work and these spaces of collaboration mentioned above, and, of course, Bracket Goes Soft in the coming weeks (September if our schedule allows us a moment for that matter).
Fourth: by the way, the third volume of Bracket is announced by fall (or winter). Bracket [at extremes], this time, is edited by Lola Sheppard and Maya Przybylski and still published by Actar with contributions of Alessandra Ponte, Keller Easterling, Michael Hensel, Julien de Smedt, François Roche, Hashim Sarkis, and Mark Wigley.
Fifth, if you live in New York and its areas, you will probably save this date, September 21st in your calendar. LOG Journal of Architecture will be presenting a daylong conference In Pursuit of Architecture. A Conference on Buildings and Ideas at MoMA. This conference will be featuring recent built work selected from an open, international call for submissions from France, Belgium, UAE, Israel and Germany, to Italy, the United States and Albania. If you are familiar with this little publication, some weeks ago, LOG launched a call for submissions and received proposals from international practitioners from FAT, Reiser + Umemoto, MOS, to Office Kersten Geers David Van Severen, and LAN Architectes.
Last important point: It's free.
What: In Pursuit of Architecture. A Conference on Building and Ideas
When: Saturday, September 21, 2013, 10am-5pm
Where: MoMA, New York
Please contact the journal for further detail about reservations (strongly recommended), programme.
"I am an imposter. They told me so… finally… it's out… What am I to do now with the life of agreeable fakery that binds me, in claimed feebleness, to things and to people, to suspect humanity. We could wonder about this…, and wander… together… as if it were some new territory to discover… a blank map, some terra incognita… a Moby Dick on the move with Gregory Peck clutching at the ropes of the Harpoon, dead yet still alive at the same time… Step right up, Boys, Girls, and Androgynes, you'll get your money's worth… Log is so cheap… let yourself by what you're not, too, slip into a shizophrenic zone, a thick soup of contradictory desires emerging from the clay like the hydrocephalic Golem-Golum… that way you, too, can naively elude our unpredictable and irreducible conflicts, which are part and parcel of domination and slavery, destruction and the new, fusions of ugliness and beauty, obstacles and possibilities, garbage and fresh blooms, threats and various forms of protection, technicist prowess and forces of nature… Here everything comes together and interlocks…" writes LOG's guest-editor François Roche for the 25th issue Reclaim Resi[lience]stance //… R2.
(Science) fiction, or speculation — I will continue using both these terms — as tool for writing stories, or, say, architectural conjectures, to open architecture into time and… as a means of interrogating future. Last week I read a very interesting post in m.ammoth about futurism and architecture. m.ammoth's text reminded me this long editorial that François Roche wrote for the 25th issue of LOG Journal of architecture. The text is too long to be posted here, so if you have a chance, read it.
In this article, m.ammoth wonders whether or not the landscape-architect-urbanist is a very bad futurist. m.ammoth reacts to Studio-X blog's recent post about an article published in this new science magazine Nautilus (it is also an enjoyable occasion to discover this blog). In this article How to tell the Future(s), Adam Frank discussed what the integration of scenario planning as tool can bring to urban ecological research. He opens his article quoting this book The Limit to Growth, written in 1972 by Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jorgen Randers and William W. Behrens III. I haven't had yet the chance to read the book. I will merely depict this book in one sentence: The Limit to Growth develops a set of predictions to explore how exponential growth interact finite resources. This could be a great opportunity to read this scenarios-based research dealing with how human system adapts to finite resources.
As Adam Frank notes, this is the long-term-future that is at play. Indeed, in an era of climate change and natural resource shortage, to limit to these two challenges, the landscape-architecture-urbanism badly needs an upgraded approach to city-making: "For the boots-on-the-ground folks — urban planners must start planning and building now — something very different is needed", he writes. What this statement unfolds is that adaptation, envisaged as vital strategy, to these shifting conditions, as have been said at length, requires a new business model that takes into account this set of concepts, say, uncertainty, speculation, indeterminacy and contingency — notions that talk about fiction and speculation. A new, or at least another, approach that envisions differently contingent character of future. Frank and m.ammoth's respective articles raise a series of questions that can be summarized into speculative practice or scenarios-based practice. Both will lead on to territories that convoke a set of questions not very far from their articles.
Can the landscape-architect-urbanist predict future? Given the complexities of future, the question should be how to cope with an unpredictable future. Firstly, prediction can be defined as: "human mind can determine what will happen beforehand qualitatively and quantitatively." Prediction talks about determinism. Determinism talks about prediction. Classical science talks about determinism. Determinism talks about classical science. Without this capacity of predicting future based on past events, how humans would have adapted to cyclic or contingent events over centuries? Obviously, genetics offers us many responses. But not only: we would not have been able to build the world we live now. Put it simply, what happened in the past — cyclic changes, and so on — can happen in the future — even far-future. Indeed, as written in Arc 1.4 Forever Alone Drone, "we have accumulated a vast repository of imagined futures past." This vast repository of imagined futures past helps us to adapt to existing but weird, more and more uncontrollable situations. This is why humans, as dominant life-form on this planet, have been developing specific adaptive capacities to monitor ever-changing cycles and cataclysmic events ranging from diseases, wars, climatological and environmental transformation, population expansion, urbanization, cultural, economic and social evolution, to technology, and politics. Remember that "history is the means by which we wake up", Bruce Sterling states in Shaping Thing.
We learn from the past. We are not born just storysteller, we are ingenious, intelligent, self-aware, as geologist Jan Zalasiewicz and journalist Annalee Newitz state in their respective book. The landscape-architecture-urbanism owes the capacity to problem-form, dissect, assimilate past events and transformation that have been animating human race over centuries; how, we, humans respond to shifting conditions and situations, man-made disequilibrium, and contingently natural disequilibrium to build the modern world. In face of 21st century perspectives , say, population expansion, energy and water shortage, global warming and resource exhaustion, to limit to these examples, we, however, are aware of the fact that we are no more capable of problem-solving. If that's the case, why not abandon future? We could merely do with existing conditions, with the instant. We however must admit that what we solve today generates future (or even far-future) problems — some may object that this idea of every action has consequences is not fair if not contestable. A solved problem creates a set of new but more intricate problems, as problems usually feed themselves from data collected from preceding problems. Thus, for example: designing cities with green spaces, cycling paths, eco-buildings, limited car-access to cities (or fabrication of electric cars) might have impact in the short term but won't make urban and non-urban areas more resilient since global warming and resource exhaustion are too complex, too unstable to be entirely forecasted. This explains why a large number of observers in the field of science now admit that we can merely predict things we do not understand, or better or worse, it all depends, we will never understand. Otherwise, we do not have the required tools for solving future issues. Global warming, sea-level rising, ice-melting are previsible but what about their magnitude, their impact on humans and non-humans? Too dauntingly complex to forecast. Some will be preserved but not the whole. Traces of past life (our existence included) in the form of decaying buildings and infrastructures, drowned cities, or whatsoever will be treated as precious data by far-future visitors to indicate how we lived, what made humanity as dominant life-form, what made us vulnerable to externalities, and, finally, what destroyed us — if our civilization entirely disappear. In face of these complexities, we, our civilization, can no longer forecast future with our existing, limited — at least to cope with unpredictability — tools and methods. We obviously have a global idea of problems but not details or, worse, their magnitude. Hence scenario-based strategies as possible solutions? As Frank mentioned, many experts from the military, economics, to science, biology, and geology — the landscape-architecture-urbanism not included —, have been already using scenario-based strategies to forecast future events. They use simulation to design future issues and adaptive capacities to respond to these issues — note that simulation is now occupying a growing place in architecture.
| | | Observatory of UV and dark adaptation | The Building Which Never Dies, Austria + France, Les Andelys, 2009-11 || Image courtesy of © R&Sie(n) |
Our current system resides in the question of problem-solving. As Jeremy Till writes in Architecture depends, the landscape-architecture-urbanism "legitimized itself within problem-solving". With a practice relying on problem-solving, future issues however are misunderstood or simply ignored. It seems that m.ammoth and Adam Frank indirectly pose concerns the role of the landscape-architect-urbanist as expert, as solver. One would no doubt be confronted with the status and the role of the landscape-architect-urbanist as expert or solver in the question of changing issues. The question is how to free from solving-centered approach to endorse a new status, yet undefined, — can it be an interface or enabler? Indeed problem-solving has revealed its limits toward future-forecasting since, given a complex network of issues, future become too unpredictable. This however raises the major problem for the landscape-architecture-urbanism whose function depends on problem-solving. This shifting role forces us to accept that future is contingent as well as we, human beings, are contingent; objects we produce are contingent. In this context a building is contingent. Global warming, as an hyperobject, is contingent. So is nuclear-disaster. So is the landscape-architecture-urbanism.
| | | Things which necrose, Denmark, 2009, Sweden, 2010 || Image courtesy of © R&Sie(n) |
A scenario-based strategy requires a specific format. A speculative approach allows, enhances a new form of creativity, innovation. Some architects use speculation as methodology and scenarios as an operative tool in accordance with this related ambition to what Adam Frank pointedly says, "we need to begin thinking in terms of 'scenarios.'" This raises a question: how can scenario provide room for the landscape-architecture-urbanism to problem-forming future events and, to a large extent, as new form of engagement with the modern world?
| | | Toxic ı The garden so fearthly delights, Lopud, Croatia || Image courtesy of © R&Sie(n) |
| | | Sublimation ı script, Lopud, Croatia || Image courtesy of © R&Sie(n) |
French architecture firm New Territories/R&Sie(n) articulates three principles: Fiction as practice, practice as fiction; Research as speculations; and Practice as Lifespan. An example of a scenario-based project is this project IveHeardAbout for Le Musée d'Art Modern de la Ville de Paris, in 2005, entirely constructed as a (science-)fiction-based scenario. The focus is not on the story itself. Story constitutes the basis or the starting point to the project: "We don't consider the story, it's a fragment of the story. So we need to construct the story for before and after the construction of the building," he says to Geoff Manaugh and Warren Ellis. The scenario is a very crucial instrument to movie and theater. In speculative architecture, it also occupies a very specific position and role, we will see, in re-articulating knowledge. Contemporary artist, critic and curator Liam Gillick denotes this instrument as:
What's the scenario? A constantly mutating sequence of possibilities. Add a morsel of a difference and the result slips out of control, shift the location for action and everything is different. There is a fundamental gap between societies that base their development on scenarios and those that base their development on planning.
A scenario is a complex process capable of identifying moments of change, as Liam Gillick writes. It, then, constitutes a first phase of a script. Script as practice. Script as producing or reorganizing knowledge. Script as fiction-making: "In the script — we talk about scripting, we talk about following the scripts — it's very weak compared to your script. And if we want to force the complexity of our script we need a lot of knowledge," François Roche says. A script offers compilation, storage, and reconfiguration of data. Let's convoke a theorist whose forms of writing have been (or let's say contain) considered as fictional, or storytelling. Keller Easterling regularly uses the notion of script in her research. With a background in theater, she has long demonstrated how active or performative — in opposition with normative architecture —, architecture can be within the articulation of script, action with infrastructure and architecture can make architecture active or performative. In Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and its Political Masquerades, Easterling writes "[a]rchitecture has often adopted those cybernetic scripts that focus on recursivity and predictability in complexity, as well as those Deleuzian scripts that, drained of their politics, reinforce the preexisting attraction to geometry." New Territories/R&Sie(n) displayed a still intriguing scenario-based, unstable, scalable urban-typed biostructure IveHeardAbout that "no longer depends on the arbitrary decisions or control over its emergence exercised by a few, but rather the ensemble of its individual contingencies. It simultaneously subsumes premises, consequences and the ensemble of induced perturbations, in a ceaseless interaction. Its laws are consubstantial with the place itself, with no work of memory." The structure displayed in the museum was controlled by collectively reprogrammable Viabs by means of a set of growth scripts, open algorithms and human contingencies and modes of occupation, allowing adaptive behaviors of the habitable organism. As Keller Easterling writes in The Action is the Form, a script contains data collected for the project, use or application of an object: site, building, infrastructure — how the building functions, what it is doing. Easterling goes on: "[Bruno] Latour argues that this interaction between script and technology is indeterminate, like a flow of information or a flow of water." A script is indeterminist, unstable; it is fictional, questionable.
| | | _an architecture des humeurs, Paris, 2010 | Image courtesy of © R&Sie(n) |
New Territories/R&Sie(n) has integrated the notion of contingency into architecture — human contingency, contingent architecture, contingent future, contingent ecology and on and on — to unfold negotiation between objects — humans and non-humans — in real time. François Roche denotes contingency as follows: "there is a design, but the certainty with which it will be executed is questionable. There is a great fragility to the process." Contingency talks about speculation. Speculation offers the possibility for architecture to explore, reveal, even transform its contingent character.
The search for a new format reveals a profound desire of redefining or upgrading the discipline, that is, a redefinition of the paradigm of architecture that could take into account that future can no longer be understood with current human intelligence: "Like in science-fiction, you need to identify a format of something, the format is always different" or questionable, or contingent. Architecture as as a format must be questionable, never static, always mutable, active, or let's say, soft as Lydia Kallipoliti rightfully says. A normative format in search for stability, solutions to constraints is a static form that denies any sudden internal and external tensions. A scalable and contingent format, on the contrary, is a format that offers more room for expertise to stimulate innovation and to push as far as possible its boundary towards new territories. For Roche, this is also the case for other architects who use fiction as tool, fiction is seen as the adequate instrument for that matter: "Science (fiction) has shifted neither forward nor rearward, but into the here and now. The unfolding scenarios it follows to manipulate our reality are becoming true transformation tools and paradoxically strategic levers to grasp the wobbling of our post-digital societies: our choked mass-media culture." Future as well as present, or instant as operative tools to explore, problem-form, manipulate or transform. To a certain extent François Roche answers to our initial question: should we abandon future? Or to reborrow m.ammoth's question "are [landscape-]architect[-urbanist] bad futurists?": "We have to negotiate with the fold of the instant, the invagination of the thought of the future, and live in a present that is like an asymptotic bend in time, between back to the future and tomorrow now, between dream time and the day after." It is obvious that future forecasting is an urgent task to develop adaptive structures for us, now, but also for future human minds but as we have now integrated that our production are shorter than a human life, maybe we should address the instant while imagining the future.
| | | _an architecture des humeurs, Paris, 2010 || image courtesy of © R&Sie(n) |
The whole ontological dimension of the question of the discipline of architecture has been cast into new light with the integration of speculative strategies. This is not necessarily thinking of realization but of knowledge. Indeed New Territories/R&Sie(n) is concerned with the accumulation of knowledge and the integration of new forms of knowledge, produced by uncertainty, material conditions of human existence, and increases of external and internal conditions to understand coexistence between human and humans, humans and its environment, human and space, and so on. All these projects and research New Territories/R&Sie(n) has been developing illustrate this engagement in re-organizing knowledge with (science) fiction.
One would no doubt state that, just like mathematics or science a speculative architecture believes in the state of becoming, that it is an ongoing process. It is thinking future throughout the instant, the present, the becoming, the here and now as François Roche states: "Recognizing the new principles of reality, it is a space of confrontation, ceaselessly investing itself in new procedures for the reprogramming and rescripting of existence, here and now." This format, New Territories/R&Sie(n) establishes, generates a series of apparatuses that the agency articulates with scenarios. Stochastic apparatus associated with Olzweg; Testosterone apparatus associated with HybridMuscle; Darwinism and parasiting apparatuses associated with Broomwich; or Bacteriological apparatus associated with ImlostinParis. For New Territories/R&Sie(n), apparatuses "have to be considered as a few paradigms to approach and touch narrative and subjective protocols." Thus the speculative _an architecture des humeurs (2010), creates:
A kind of alphabet book of apparatuses, of knowledge strategies, to protocolise a counterproposal. It cannot be developed without re-evaluating all the tools, strategies, processes and the very raison d'être of technologies. As it navigates, it drifts from the psycho-methodology of collecting desires to the mathematics that interpret them as relationships, set-belonging situations, from psycho-chemistry to the logic of aggregation, from the physio-morpological computation of the multitude to C++ operators for structural optimisation as an artefact of a logic of discovery, from bio-knit physicality for the operation of a nonlinear geometry to a robotic design and G-code algorithms for automated manufacture.
_an architecture des humeurs ambitions to explore the notion of space, the articulation of body, structure and space by unfolding human contingencies, human negotiations with space and structure, in few words, "as a way to generate multiple singularities, a polyphony,
as a way to generate multiple singularities, a polyphony of multiplicity, a multitude, where architecture engages and generates empathy, sympathy and, naturally, antipathy as a factor in relationships, a transactional operator, a vector of negotiation between each of us and others to bring back together the 'elsewhere' and the 'here, and yet', the 'near and far,' stability and nomadism, the 'village' as secure sensation, a whispering Heimat, and at the same time to hear the scream of its intrinsic forces of transformation as it vitality overflows. (Roche, Next-Door Instructions, AD The New Pastorialism, May/June 2013).
Recorded in nanotechnology, _an architecture des humeurs detects physiological data from participants "to prepare and model the foundations of an architecture in permanent mutation, modelled by our unconscious." The biostructure reminds (of) IveHeardAbout, a project François Roche presents as the second leg — IveHeardAbout being the first leg — of a fictional architectural voyage "federating the skills of scientists from a host of disciplines (mathematics, physics, neurobiology, computations, scripts, nanotechnologies, robotics)."
| | | I've Heard About, Paris, 2005 || Image courtesy of R&Sie(n) |
What New Territories/R&Sie(n)'s projects highlight — this may be an evidence for many — is: 1) The discipline of architecture needs to be seen as a carrier of "speculations;" 2) Speculative architecture facilitates, if not encourages, interdisciplinary network ranging from computation, genetics, mathematics, and micro-biology, to science, robotics and nanotechnology; 3) Speculative architecture embraces this idea that mathematics = ontology as ontology = mathematics, and that architecture = ontology as ontology = architecture, as many defenders of speculative realism claim. For instance, mathematics for New Territories/R&Sie(n), precisely algorithms and scripting, allow of exploring new forms of relational modes between humans and humans and (I am thinking of other projects such as ImlostinParis, or Spidernethewood) humans and non-humans, to limit to both these examples.
Mathematical concepts borrowed from set theory and used as a strategic relational tool to extract from these 'misunderstandings,' a morphological potential (attraction, exclusion, touching, repulsion, indifference) as a negotiation of the 'distances' between humans and humans, humans and limits, humans and access that constitute these collective aggregates.
4) Another aspect to speculative architecture concerns what another field has also noticed, say, speculative realism, that is, the possible end of the human domination by exploring existing and new modes of coexistence, of friction, of dependence between humans and non-humans (once again thinking of other projects as for example those mentioned above as well as Broomwich). One will consider a shift into all = hyperobjects and;
| | | Symbiosis' Hood, 2009, Seoul, South Korea || Image courtesy of R&Sie(n) |
5) Finally, while developing a fiction as practice, practice as fiction, research as speculation or to put it simply, a speculative practice, while being interesting in the concept of utopia, New Territories/R&Sie(n)'s projects are buildable. However buildable their projects may be, it however seems that their ambition is much dauntingly complex: as have been said, it consists of pushing architecture's boundaries into new territories, territories that problem-form the instant, the existing and a certain future. Future here has nothing to do with fantasies as many science-fiction-type of movies or books depict — Avatar, for instance. Bruce Sterling in Tomorrow Now clearly argues that "science fiction can manage just fine without the future." In fact, what Sterling and New Territories/R&Sie(n) have in common is that they think future throughout the present, the instant. So in that case, should the landscape-architect-urbanist abandon future-forecasting?
| | | Symbiosis' Hood, 2009, Seoul, South Korea || Image courtesy of R&Sie(n) |
In a second part of this post, I propose to continue with this question. Our discussion will range over such speculative topics as machine, that is human engineering existence for the future including Unknown Fields Division/Tomorrows Thoughts Today. I'm planning to discuss new forms of threats that might arise within this 21st century. And, if so, this also would be a great occasion to go back to an essay written by Hilary Sample for VERB Crisis about a biomed city, an example of speculative architecture but not as fantasist as one may suppose.
Liam Young, co-founder of Tomorrows Thoughts Today/Unknown Field Division and also Lisbon Architecture Triennale 2013/Close Closer's curator, that I have already spoke about, is leading a workshop in the framework of Close Closer (listen to this conversation I had with Close Closer's curatorial team four months ago) from 29 July to 09 August.
| | | Image originally appeared on Quaderns |
The ambition of this workshop The Building of an Imaginary City is to "finalize the 40-square-meter hyper-real scale model that constitutes one of the key elements of Future Perfect."
This immersive exhibition will recreate tomorrow's city, departing from research currently in progress, in areas such as biosciences, robotics, multimedia and 3D design. Formed by areas or "districts," the exhibition will offer an intense sensory experience of the future urban habitat, which the visitor is welcome to walk through and explore. The model will be formed from extraordinarily intricate 3D printed and resin cast buildings, lighting systems, fiber optics, detailed painting and graffiti. It will be a hyper real cityscape that extends traditional architecture models into a world of fiction and popular culture. Miniature model making of this form has a long traditional in science fiction filmmaking.
| | | Under Tomorrows Sky Movie miniature model installed in MU, Eindhoven.Image courtesy of Boudewijn BollmannOriginally appeared on Quaderns |
The workshop will certainly outline Liam Young's curatorial project Future Perfect for Close Closer, which includes the participation of scientists, design mavericks, literary astronauts, speculative gamers, visionaries and luminaries. In short: ranging from Bart Hess, Factory Fifteen, Neri Oxman, to Bruce Sterling, Warren Ellis, Mashmallow Laser Feast, Vincenzo Natali, Revital Cohen & Tuur van Balen.What can be interesting in this kind of workshops that speculates a potential (or imaginary) city is the questions and key drivers that will surely be arising from. We have discussed here and there from the state and shifting role of architecture as contingent, that of the architect (no longer as an expert but as an enabler or whatever), to the capacity of architecture of problem-forming the co-implication of time and space, to repeat Swedish philosopher Martin Hägglund (and to a large extent French philosopher Jacques Derrida), or, to put it simply, increasing nested events produced by the articulation of internal and external patterns of 'disturbances'. In one word: the role of a workshop if understood as curatorial strategy is not to solve problems, rather to problem-address, discuss, transform (and sometimes, if not very often, raise problems of problems) these problems as, with evidence, a solved problem usually produces a set of new problems, etc. It will be interesting, again, to see, check, and why not discuss, outcomes of this workshop as the Triennale will open its doors in two months (12 September). Participate if you have the chance of participating in this workshop. If not, let's see in September what outcomes, what problematics this workshop and the forthcoming Close Closer's projects will be producing.Visit the Lisbon Architecture Triennale 2013 website for further information including registration fees, venue…Source: Quaderns
…Or probably the map of the week. This map is described as an interactive version of the U.S. Department of Energy's National Laboratories. It has been tweeted by Geographer Javier Arbona, one of the editors behind the excellent website Demilit.
The map originally appeared on Symmetry Magazine in an article entitled Around the US in 17 labs.
| | | U.S. Department of Energy's National Laboratories | Courtesy of the U.S. Department of Energy and SymmetryThe map originally appeared on Symmetry Magazine"The US Department of Energy has nurtured hubs of innovation in the United States for more than eight decades.Discoveries made at the national laboratories have saved lives, solved mysteries of nature, improved products, transformed industries and served as a training ground for students who go on to pursues careers in science and technology." - Symmetry Magazine |
The legend makes the map particularly easy to read: (1) in blue, the DOE Laboratories; (2) in red the DOE Office of Science Laboratories.
There seems to be several other maps that map out the Department of Energy DOE Laboratories such as these two examples below:
| | | Department of Energy National Laboratories | Courtesy of U.S. Department of Energy |
As seen, these two maps are a little bit too conventional in comparison with the interactive and quite ludic Symmetry Magazine's map.
I'm reminded of an interview of Michal Migurski, a (former?) Director of Technology and partner at Stamen Design, a San Francisco-based studio well-known for its data visualization and mapmaking.
| | | Department of Energy National Laboratories | courtesy of U.S. Department of EnergyOriginally appeared on Wikipedia |
In this interview with Meta Markets, Migurski said an interesting statement about the growing importance of visualization in the age of the web — and the apps. Indeed he pointed out that:
I think that visualization is going to get more and more normal and more and more expected as a part of just dealing with information. The way that we understand the word visualization to be used, often all it means is the next logical step in showing information. It's really more a future-focused word, whereas things that used to be called visualization become normal and day-to-day and aren't considered special anymore. You think about scatter plots, pie charts, colored heat maps, that kind of thing. All that stuff was incredibly cutting edge a decade ago, and then as the data and tools have become more available they become features of other things.
Visualization as an instrument to critically — or commercially — show, address, or to think with, is no longer to demonstrate. An example: Stamen Design's collaboration with NBC to design a real-time visualization of Olympics discussion on Twitter, known as NBC Olympics Twitter Tracker, as reported on a 2010's edition of the New York Times.At the very least, even serious information can be interpreted as ludic as Olympic Twitter data…
Source: Symmetry Magazine
A short post to remind my readers that you have few days to submit your abstract for the first volume of Uncertain Territories. The topic is Contingency. The deadline is Monday, July 01, 2013.
The selected authors, then, will be contacted within 15 days following the 01st July. Submissions can be essays (length varying from 500 words to 4000 words), or photographic essays, drawings, interviews, etc. The final deadline is 30 September 2013.
I then updated the related post dated of March announcing this first editorial project as it contained too many errors. Hoping that all have been corrected, my sincere apology about theses errors.
You can find here the presentation of the first volume of Uncertain Territories including the main guidelines of this first call-for-submission.
I wish you all good luck and I am looking forward to reading your proposals…
The latest issue of Architectural Design (May/June 2013), addressing the relationship of architecture and landscape within the concept of Pastoralism, gathers a range of authors from Liam Young of Tomorrow's Thoughts Today/Unknown Fields Division, Nic Clear to Geoff Ward and François Roche of R&Sie(n)/New Territories. I shall recommend all these essays, for they all pose, yet differently, the role and position of architecture in face of complexities. In one word, The New Pastoralism. Landscape into Architecture examines the recent contribution of technologies such as biomimetics, hydroponics, cybernetic feedback systems, micro ecologies to architecture as well as more traditional methods of constructions based on natural materials.
| | | Drift Drive ı Floating Frontiers | Courtesy of Petropia, 2012 |
The ambition is to reconnect architecture and landscape with these soft methods, however not in the naïve way of living with nature. Indeed, this is my point of view, these essays highlight a new position of architecture, or let's say, an emerging desire of rearticulating its agency, of integrating a certain dose of contingency, of uncertainty (see Young's and Ward's essays).
| | | Hypnosis Room | courtesy of R&Sie(n)/New Territories, 2005 |
It seems to me that this is what Michael Sorkin argues in his essay Origin of Species in which he explores the geneses and state of architecture. Starting with this basic but important question: "where does architecture come from?", he raises a series of questions, of topics, that architecture has articulated, articulates, and will be articulating in the future.
| | | Turtle Portable Theater | Courtesy of Sorkin Studio, 1995 |
Architecture has evolved. So have representation and human preoccupation. So has ecological system. Architecture is forced to confront, do with, negotiate, adapt to a swarm of crises that are articulated ranging from political crisis, economic crisis, social crisis, to climatic crisis, ecological crisis, and anthropological crisis.
Architecture always negotiates a terrain between its defining utility and expression, the frisson of some excess, including the excessive linkage of the two. But what more should a building say? We all speak in a language grounded in the grammars of modernity, the fantasy that meaning is 'objectively' produced, believe that architecture's effects can be measured and the dance and dancer distinguished. Yet we are bored by a trivialised idea of functionality that, claiming some higher rationality, grounds itself in the merely technical, and even the most 'objective' architecture seems invariably in thrall of something else's visuality, failing abjectly without the festive measure of the body.
The second part of the 20th century has been marked with architecture's relationship to technology, as Sorkin states, "derived from engineering's exponential formal evolution within architecture's terrestrial meadows". Parametricism is an example among others. So are computational design and emerging technologies, let me cite 3D Printing. In their editorial of the latest issue of Volume, issue 35 Everything Under Control, Arjen Oosterman and Brendan Cormier mention the "ambition of at least two architecture offices, in Holland alone, to be the first to print a full-scale building. One is pursuing a pavilion, the other an Amsterdam canal house, complete with gabled roof."
| | | Plugged-in Territories ı Icelandic Energy Master Plan | Courtesy of LCLA Office/ Harvard Graduate School of Design |
The same issue discusses architecture's recent interest in synthetic biology, biotechnology, and nanotechnology to examine notions of adaptability, responsiveness, scalability, and so on. What kind of contribution can biology bring to architecture? It is difficult to respond to this question as these cross-disciplinary research are emerging. These essays collected in this issue of Volume nevertheless give us a first glance at possibilities, opportunities for the practice — but also the discourse — of architecture even though one should be cautious and wait for these research showing first results…
Sorkin continues:
What we need more than ever now is both a theory and a practice of excess, the rampant particularities — small and large — to fight the great multinational culture machine as it seizes and markets every difference, creating a field of total abstraction in which no origin, no connection, no authenticity is left undiminished and remains truly vital. Against this, life must fight back both in terms of the glorious and inventive urgencies of building truly sustainable architectural culture that will help save the planet, and in the creation of artistic forms that do not simply shock but satisfy — an architecture of empathy.
What we can retain from this passage, from Michael Sorkin's essay, and more largely from these essays collected in this issue of Architectural Design is that beyond the important — if not urgent — task of defining a frank relationship between architecture and nature — one will notice that architecture is getting engaged in setting an articulation between manmade system and ecological system, hence these ideas of interface or active agent —, beyond the fact of inventing or reactivating new isms, beyond the fact of…, architecture, I will borrow from Elizabeth Diller's take, part of her answer in a conversation with Anthony Vidler in the 28th issue of Log — which poses the question of "what is the state of architecture today?" —, "has not yet discovered its agency". Or, to put it differently, architecture has not yet discovered its contingency…
| | | New Geographies_Control and Political Borders | courtesy of Liz Lessig, Thesis, California College of Arts, 2012 |
This may explain some hesitations, even some accusation of architecture as being guilty of today's issues. Put it differently, this may justify architecture's vulnerability to existing and future issues. Yet vulnerability is not necessarily negative. Yes vulnerability is a form of innovation, a driving force that architecture should explore…
You can read the full article at Architectural Design.
In my wish-list, this forthcoming book Divine Name Verification, by Noah Horwitz. Horwitz's Divine Name Verification will be published by the excellent Punctum Books this July. What will it be about? I'll be basing on Punctum Books's presentation of the book.
| | | Divine Name Verification | Noah Horwitz || Punctum Books, 2003 |
First, Divine Name Verification is not an essay on either architecture or art but an essay on philosophy. An essay that can be classified as or related to speculative realism and related movements such as Object-Oriented Ontology, a movement defended by French Quentin Meillassoux and Scottish Ray Brassier. However, the theme the books addresses is threefold: (1) Divine Name Verification is an essay on Anti-Darwinism — speculating that we should turn our back from Darwinism; it also addresses two important issues related to our matter of concern: architecture: (2) intelligent Design; and (3) the computational nature of reality.
I confess not to be familiar with Noah Horwitz's research. This will be an enjoyable occasion to read him. As indicated in Punctum Books' website, the essay defends intelligent design "by attempting to demonstrate the essentially computational nature of reality." The readers of computational theorists such as Wolfram, Chaitin, Friedkin, Lloyd, Schmidhuber, etc. will appreciate this book. Not only, those familiar with designers such as Neri Oxman, Biothing, R&Sie(n)/New Territories, to limit to these examples, will also be concerned.
Other topics discussed in the book are chaos theory (e.g., Brian Goodwin), contingency (I am looking forward to reading his Darwinism's Apotheosis: Quentin Meillassoux's Atheism of Radical Contingency), etc. It will be a good opportunity to read or re-read design theorists, let me cite only one William Dembski. It is not Punctum Books's first time to published books that concern the discipline of architecture as the publisher has published books related to architecture such as Making the Geologic Now (edited by Elizabeth Ellsworth and Jamie Kruse of Smudge Studio) and New-York-based French architect Léopold Lambert's The Funambulist Pamphlets: Volume 01_Spinoza and volume 02_Foucault. Or this must-read, at least for those interested in topics such as landscape futures, decay, etc., Ben Woodard's On A Ungrounded Earth.
This summer is announced to be rich in books…
My apology for this long silence. I was particularly busy on calls for papers these recent days. Not an easy task! These call for papers, however, drive you to new boundaries, new research. Furthermore, three weeks ago, I visited a site near the city where my parents live, a city located in the Parisian basin, a changing territory, known for being agricultural now becoming energetic territory with the presence of onshore shale oil platforms (or hydraulic fracturing facilities) in this contested territory. I'm planning to add one of two more next week. Consequently, I will be once again silent for a couple of weeks. I can't say more as I am currently working on a series of posts on this topic of landscape-energy.
Then I profit from this post to remind you this important information: two weeks left for sending me your abstract for Uncertain Territories' first volume Contingency. I will write a short post on this editorial project this weekend. I hope you all work hard…Good Luck!!!
Colombian architect Luis Callejas just launched the 33rd volume of Pamphlet Architecture, a volume entitled Island and Atolls. Some months ago, his office announced to have been awarded by Pamphlet Architecture for their 33rd volume.
Luis Callejas belongs to a list of architects including Mason White and Lola Sheppard of Lateral Office, Neeraj Bhatia of Lateral Office and Petropia, Smout Allen, to limit to these few names, I've been following for awhile.
Note that Luis Callejas regularly collaborates with Lateral Office — I cite a few of these projects: Hydroborders, Klaksvik City Center, and Weatherfield.
This Pamphlet Architecture will be a great occasion for me to have a better glance at his work.
I will order my copy rapidly, this week, (despite a two/three-week wait certainly due to a problem of distribution via Amazon France), and with evidence, will go back to this little publication as soon as possible. This being said, Luis Callejas is presenting a series of drawings at Storefront for Art and Architecture, in New York in the framework of the exhibition POP: Protocols, Obsessions, Positions, until July 26.
For those, me included, who didn't have the chance of visiting the first edition, POP: Protocols, Obsessions, Positions is Storefront For Art and Architecture's annual drawing show whose ambition is to discuss, transform our understanding of architectural drawings in the 21st century. This new edition gathers drawings of Amale Andraos of WorKAC, Adam Frampton, Ada Tolla & Giuseppe Lignano of LOT-EK, Eric Owen Moss, Fernando Romero of FREE, Form_ula, Gia Wold, Hayley Eber of EFGH, Filipe Magalhaes & Ana Luisa Soares of Fala Atelier, Lola Sheppard of Lateral Office, Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, Marcelo Spina & Georgina Huljich of P-A-T-T-E-R-N-S, Arturo Scheidegger & Ignacio Garcia Partarrieu of UMWELT, Bernard Tschumi, Caroline O'Donnell of CODA, Hedwig Heinsman of DUS, James Wines, Juan Herreros, Mark Shepard, Michel Rojkind, Michele Marchetti of Sanrocco, Neil Spiller, Norman Kelley, Odile Decq, Rafi Segal, Ryan Neiheiser, Giancarlo Valle & Isaiah King of Another Pamphlet, Stan Allen, Veronika Valk, Viviana Peña of Ctrl G, Yansong Ma of MAD and Luis Callejas & Melissa Naranjo of LCLA Office.
It's a good occasion to propose here a drawing of both Callejas and Naranjo for the moment when I will receive my copy. This drawing is titled Serrana and Quitasueño. Luis Callejas and Melissa Naranjo despict this drawing as:
| | | Serrana and Quitasueño ı part of Pamphlet Architecture 33. Islands and Atolls | Luis Callejas and Melissa Naranjo/ LCLA Office, 2013Hand cut collage on original mapsCourtesy of Luis Callejas and Melissa Naranjo/ LCLA Office |
two versions Storefront's facade as a 220 km long line extending over the degrees in latitude. The Sf's facade aligns with the newly redefined aquatic border between Colombia and Nicaragua in the currently redefined aquatic border between Colombia and Nicaragua in the currently disputed archipelago of San Andres and Providencia. What are the new scales of exchange between the small banks and Islands that are trapped in the legal battle for the sovereignty of the archipelago? What will be the new mechanisms of regulation that will affect the aquatic landscape that so many Colombian fisherman depend on? As in the beginning of making the drawing the two players could not agree on the answer, it was decided that each author would play the game of trying to depict the interest of each nation by representing the possible exchanges through opening and closing the 30 km long pivoting walls in different degrees. While the Colombian version (right) tries to leave more spaces for open international fishing routes, the Nicaraguan side (left) opens in specific point of intense exchange while isolating others for potential oil exploration by US and European corporations.
In addition to the POP: Protocols, Obsessions, Positions exhibition, Serrana and Quitasueño is a part of this 33rd volume of Pamphlet Architecture, a volume that includes an interview with Geoff Manaugh and Mason White, and an afterword by Charles Waldheim. For those of us who cannot visit this exhibition, we will have an opportunity to discover this series of drawings. I hope to go back over Luis Callejas' work rapidly, at least on this new Pamphlet Architecture. For the most impatient among us, I will merely say that Luis Callejas is regularly described as a landscape architect. If the scale of the landscape constitutes his medium, Luis Callejas's interest focuses rather on non-built phenomena, namely, "things one cannot easily control and design" than on the notion of landscape. What interests me in Luis Callejas and LCLA Office's matters of concern is this question of 'non-built phenomena' that convokes a set of problems ranging from scale, infrastructure, space, production, complexities, contingencies, and so on.
Natural phenomena are the raw materials used to generate a projected landscape. In this way architecture is not separated from Phenomena, it doesn't resist them or reject them, it lets them interact. When a given site has no expressive natural phenomena, or none that are appealing to us, we should consider the possibility of de-contextualizing a foreign phenomenon and artificially relocating it.*
Let's wait and read this new volume of Pamphlet Architecture.Those among my readers living in the North America, you can have your copy as it is announced available on Amazon. For the rest of us, let's be patient…POP: Protocols, Obsessions, Positions is open from June 19 to July 26, 2013 at Storefront for Art and Architecture.
- See: On Ash Clouds | Harvard Graduate School of Design, Department of Landscape Architecture