Radical architecture

From Mark Dow, "Span: A Remembrance" (NYTimes, Opinionator, Dec 22/10):

Louis Sullivan (1856-1924) believed the pier, the lintel, and the arch to be the basic elements of architecture. He called these “the three physical facts, the three symbols, I might say the three letters, which constitute the alphabet of our art.” One might imagine pier and lintel to have come first, and the arch to have followed, but Sullivan felt that all three arrived together as the result of a single imperative: span.

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Proposition: One has no right to move until one can say why, why what, or at least account for it all, from the chair one was sitting on to the floor underneath it, back in time to the beginning, and forward from his getting up, if I ever did, into all contingencies. Can each thing depend on the preceding and on the subsequent thing, and be independent of them, too? The same sound will sound different according to the notes that follow and precede. Goes something like this. Preceding one: one: one subsequent to. Till eventually, after pursuing philosophy a ways into its own willful removal from what supposedly mattered to it, or had, and where it did, in my mind, do me well, I realized I was always left wanting. Needed to try to articulate the underneath of the mattering, of which I felt more certain than of anything, though I didn’t have exact words for it, or did I. Now I think I must have been paralyzed first, and that the philosophy only came afterward to justify or bind or slip me down its rope-ladder toward exactitude and escape.

Late into the early morning, in the red brick of Connecticut Hall, a student sat scrutinizing each clause’s passage of Aristotle in English out of the preceding one into the next. Metaphysics doesn’t mean esoteric or philosophical. It means “after physics.” It was called that because it came after his chapter on physics and there was no other name for the stuff. The building, oldest in New Haven, its construction financed in part by the colonies’ sale of a captured French ship, floated on the illusion of a rectangle of lawn inset into a larger lawn. Sidewalks joined at right angles, passed under stone archways into which steel gates had been set. Unsupported assumptions and flawed links, tiny knots in the grain planed flush by repeated but abandoned curiosity, hiccuped in the passageways. The student had no way of seeing that teasing the tiny knots to the surface and scratching at them until they came undone would set nothing free, or did he. He picked at his fingernails to minimize himself and get the damn world aligned.

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Space and utopia

Curious that more hasn't been made of that connection -- space as in "outer space" as a venue for utopia. There's Robinson's Mars trilogy, of course, and there's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, but what else? The Soviet-era Andromeda hardly counts, since it makes no real use of space, and the same point rules out LeGuin's The Dispossessed, though both are certainly utopian. The point of space as a utopian locale is that, like any frontier, it represents the possibility of making a "fresh start", a possibility that the Mars trology exploits quite openly, and that Heinlein's novel obviously uses as well. In that sense, there might be a few other Heinlein books that are fringe utopian candidates as well, such as Farmer in the Sky, which (as best I can recall) does use the idea of creating a new society. And, for that matter, that's part of the appeal of apocalyptic fiction too, no? The idea that, having cleared out the social/cultural/political deadwood, we now have a chance to start over and do it right. But in general, though it's common enough to locate utopia in far off islands or lost valleys, and very common to locate it in the future, we don't often see them in space.

Well, but then I remember the spate of non-fiction books like Gerard K. O'Neill's The High Frontier, or T.A. Heppenheimer's Colonies in Space, certainly utopian tracts if they're anything -- e.g., the prominent blurb on the O'Neill cover: "Space colonies -- hope for your future", and on Heppenheimer's: "Take an expedition to dream cities in the stars!".

     

Something sad in those blurbs, isn't there? Not just their earnest naivete, or, more likely, their blatant hucksterism in attempting to appeal to people desperate for hope and dreams, but also, now, in their obvious failure. In all that, though, they're not unlike the architectural utopianism of modernism, as in Le Corbusier's "ville radieuse" or Hugh Ferriss' Metropolis of Tomorrow.

This too now just seems dated and silly, as, sadly, Metropolis itself does. Still, the point of fictionalizing utopia may well be to protect it from reality's dash of cold water.


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Floating cities

See  Float!: Building on Water to Combat Urban Congestion and Climate Change by Koen Olthuis and David Keuning

Reviewed in BLDGBLOG:

A remarkably stimulating read, Float! falls somewhere between design textbook, aquatic manifesto, and environmental exhortation to explore architecture's offshore future. Water-based urban redesign; public transportation over aquatic roadways; floating barge-farms (as well as floating prisons); maneuverable bridges; entire artificial archipelagoes...

... Float! is an excellent resource for any design studio or seminar looking at the future of floating structures in an age of flooding cities.

So, a start.

10 trillion human beings could have 10 times the surface space per capita of the average urban environment today and leave most of today's land surface clear of human occupation, but only by occupying perhaps as much as half of the current sea surface (double the total land area) with a global city extending below the surface at least a mile on average and rising perhaps two miles on average -- i.e., we'd need to layer human occupation. And, in order not to swamp the existing land with the water displaced by the city, would need to excavate the equivalent of half the ocean to an average depth of a mile -- big job! But perhaps just an aspect of finding the building materials with which to construct the city over the course of a millennium anyway.


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Artistic politics/Political art

"Decolonizing architecture" -- description of a talk:

Decolonizing Architecture seeks to use spatial practice as a form of political intervention and narration. Their practice continuously engages a complex set of architectural problems centered around one of the most difficult dilemmas of political practice: how to act both propositionally and critically within an environment in which the political force field, as complex as it may be, is so dramatically skewed.

The people involved (see the "imaginary denizens", overlaid on real people) :

Organized in conjunction with exhibition, a panel discussion co-presented by REDCAT and MAK Center for Art and Architecture will bring together Alessandro Petti, founding member and director of Decolonizing Architecture/Art Residency; Iain Boal of RETORT, the Bay Area collective of writers, activists and scholars, and co-author of Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War;architect and UCSD professor Teddy Cruz whose work centers around urban research/design within context of the U.S.-Mexico border; and Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG. Moderated by director of MAK Center Kimberli Meyer on Wednesday January 26 at 7:30pm at REDCAT.

Caption: "How to re-inhabit your enemy's house" (2009)

Thanks to BLDGBLOG

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Hugh Ferriss and "the vertical sublime"

From the nonist -- "Verticles on wide avenues":



The caption reads:

Verticals On Wide Avenues by Hugh Ferriss. From the post Hugh Ferriss: Delineator of Gotham, Or: Rendering “The Vertical Sublime” which features images from the preeminent architectural draftsman’s 1929 book The Metropolis of Tomorrow.

Here's "Technology":



"The science center":




Which came first, I wonder -- Hugh Ferriss or Metropolis?

And again, the rectilinear, this time with perspective in order to awe with space or scale.

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"The opaque civilization"

That's the name of an exhibition at the Guggenheim back in 1984, by a "theoretical" architect named Will Insley. From the review in the NYTimes:

''ONECITY,'' the chief project in the show, has, the artist says, ''very little to do with advanced planning theories of the present'' or with the ''utopias of the future, but rather with the dark cities of mythology, which exist outside of normal times in some strange location of extremity.''

An imaginary labyrinth 650 miles square, symbolized by a floor plan that paces off at about 30 feet, it is ''situated'' between the Mississippi and the Rockies and consists of many 2 1/2-mile-square structures, each divided into an ''Over-building'' and an ''Under-building'' and each containing nine arenas. Like the ''Star Trek'' scripts, the artist omits the logistical nuts and bolts, making paraphrase difficult.

It's clear, however, that the city's inhabitants are segregated into day people, wholesome types who study at home with their children by means of electronic devices, and night people. ''Tattered ghosts in phosphorescent clothing,'' the night people sound a lot like the more Felliniesque denizens of the Lower East Side, being given to masks and elaborate makeup; they ''mutter a lot'' and ''often carry around personal abstract structures'' that they exchange ''according to mysterious rituals.'' And while they have homes in the Over-building, they frequently sleep in the cubby holes of the Under-building, ignored by day people going about their business.

Alluding to New Yorkers' apparent obliviousness to bag ladies, Insley makes plain that while he himself may be without morals, his fantasy is replete with them as well as with ironic wit. Criminals, by the way, are sequestered in the ninth arena (Dante's?), where they are free to do what they will, including playing team sports like football.

Here's an example taken from the BLDGBLOG:



Which goes on to say:

Courtesy of a comment left a while back on the sorely-missed site The Nonist, we learn that Insley once quipped: "what was absent from the ruin is often less marvelous than we imagine it to have been. The abstract power of suggestion (the fragment) is greater than the literal power of the initial fact. Myth elevates.’"

And finishes:

ONECITY is a "masonite labyrinth," the article concludes, complete with "Wall Fragments" that have been "gridded with white or yellow lines and shaped like garment sections waiting to be sewn together." It's the city as dystopian clothing that we tailor to fit our future selves. Imagine a dusty third-floor walk-up in the Garment District of Manhattan, where precise plans for megastructures are produced on massive looms, needles and yawn moving to a hypnotic drone in semi-darkness. Architectural invention by way of sewing diagrams.

More images, expandable, are available at the nonist (a moribund blog/site).

Intrigued by the gridlines particularly -- the rectilinear characteristic of the architectural/engineering drawing, of the blueprint, the draught. These are not maps, partly in that they have a different purpose, partly in that they refer always to the made, the consciously willed, as opposed to the so-called "natural". But, like maps, they are a representation of information. (Contrast maps/blueprints with knowledge of any kind, which is not a representation of anything.)

With the Game, looking to fuse various forms of visual information, including both map-type and blueprint-type. Interesting to think of being able to adopt different forms or instances of forms as one would put on clothes....

Think too of the idea of an imaginary architecture overlaid on a real city -- an imaginary complete with imaginary denizens, like "day people" and "night people". Overlaid, themselves, on the real people? "Unreal city", mythical city, ....

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