Auckland Domain gates, Gummer & Ford, and Richard Oliver Gross, 1936, with the former Wallace Block of the Auckland Hospital. Photographer unknown, c1940. Via Lisa Truttman of Timespanner.

Liam Young (of Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today and the Unknown Fields Division) is interviewed by Alexander Philips of URBNFTR:

The infrastructure that drove the development of the city was once large permanent networks of roads, plumbing and park spaces but are now nomadic digital networks, orbiting GPS satellites and cloud computing connections. Cities are being planned around the speed of electrons, satellite sight lines and big data. Connection to wifi is more critical than connection to light. The city must be planned around the mobile phone not the automobile.

Comments by mammoth here, endorsing an “expanded field of practice” for architecture. My question is whether it’s really architecture that needs to expand into a meta-practice, or whether a new, more general field of spatial design would be better. Architecture, as a discipline and a profession, is very heavily freighted with assumptions about what is important in the human environment.

Alejandro Zaera-Polo:

The notion that politics and economics can be neatly divided into polis and oikos — either in the sense that the markets should be entirely freed of political intervention or that political action can be effected without careful consideration of economic inputs — is ludicrous.

As I wrote previously, Pier Vittorio Aureli’s distinction between the city and urbanisation, which rests on differentiating polis and oikos, seems absurd to me, too. It’s an intensely contestable and political distinction that Aureli tries to pass off as the very ground of politics.

Richard Sennett:

The cities everyone wants to live in would be clean and safe, possess efficient public services, support a dynamic economy, provide cultural stimulation, and help heal society’s divisions of race and ethnicity and class. These are not the cities we live in (324).

Claiming to know what everyone wants sets off alarm bells in my head, but  is Sennett actually wrong here? Certainly the order he puts these in could be debated, and we could historicise each factor (pointing out how urban hygiene is a particularly nineteenth-century concept, for example); but neither of these make him wrong. 

BRAINSTORMING AND BUILDING 20

Brainstorming doesn’t work, writes Jonah Lehrer:

Keith Sawyer, a psychologist at Washington University, has summarized the science: “Decades of research have consistently shown that brainstorming groups think of far fewer ideas than the same number of people who work alone and later pool their ideas.”

What does work? An intellectually-diverse team of the right people, and a spatial context that encourages interaction and permits modification. Lehrer compares brainstorming with Building 20 at MIT; a cheap, decrepit building which housed a Nuclear Science Lab, the Linguistics department, a machine shop, a particle accelerator, an office for training military reserves, a piano repair facility, a cell-culture lab, an acoustics workshop, an Ice Research lab, and the Tech Model Railroad Club. People were constantly brushing up against the intriguing things other people were doing, and had the ability to remake and shape their own spaces to suit their needs.

Building 20 and brainstorming came into being at almost exactly the same time. In the sixty years since then, if the studies are right, brainstorming has achieved nothing—or, at least, less than would have been achieved by six decades’ worth of brainstormers working quietly on their own. Building 20, though, ranks as one of the most creative environments of all time, a space with an almost uncanny ability to extract the best from people.

THE SUBJECT / OBJECT DISTINCTION FAILS

In Reassembling the Social, Latour offers a beautiful satire of theorists who divide the world into subjects and objects:

To get the right feel for ANT, it’s important to notice that this has nothing to do with a ‘reconciliation’ of the famous object/subject dichotomy. To distinguish a priori ‘material’ and ‘social’ ties before linking them together again makes about as much sense as to account for the dynamic of a battle by imagining a group of soldiers and officers stark naked with a huge heap of paraphernalia—tanks, rifles, paperwork, uniforms—and then claim that ‘of course there exist some (dialectical) relation between the two’. One should retort adamantly ‘No!’ There exists no relation whatsoever between ‘the material’ and ‘the social world’, because it is this very division which is a complete artifact. To reject such a divide is not to ‘relate’ the heap of naked soldiers ‘with’ the heap of material stuff: it is to redistribute the whole assemblage from top to bottom and beginning to end. There is no empirical case where the existence of two coherent and homogeneous aggregates, for instance technology ‘and’ society, could make any sense. (2005: 75-6)

The ridiculous picture of a crowd of embarrassed soldiers separated from all their material ‘supports’ is made even funnier, to my mind, by the additional of an earnest scholar in the scene, pointing to the ‘relationship between’ the two heaps. The attempted division fails. How, for example, can the soldiers’ training be separated from their bodies? And it’s a completely hopeless way to understand an actual military engagement, because what matters is not only what is present, but how each element—human or nonhuman—acts in that assemblage. The tactics, reactions, and secondary effects of battle remain completely incomprehensible.

The object/subject dichotomy is a completely synthetic artefact of analysis, and it has no place in urban thinking. A city is not a sprawling mass of houses, asphalt, pipes, grass, signs, wires, food, rats, bacteria, radio transmissions and billboards on the one hand, and a collection of raw human subjects on the other; the two heaps ‘relating’ to one another. Any understanding based on this distinction (and I think particularly of the phenomenological perspective that foregrounds the character of an individual human subject’s experience), is going to be of limited use in designing with the myriad agencies and linkages of an actual city.

INVENTED SCENARIOS IN STUDIO

Patrik Schumacher, in The Architectural Review, objects to the recent flourishing of “improbable narratives”, allegories, and dystopias in British schools of architecture:

The (best?) students of the current generation as well as their teachers seem to think that the ordinary life processes of contemporary society are too boring to merit the avant-garde’s attention. Instead we witness the invention of scenarios that are supposedly more interesting than the challenges actually posed by contemporary reality.

He lists examples including an acoustic lyrical mechanism in a Bangalore quarry, a retreat for Echo from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and a sci-fi movie about rebellious worker robots in Brixton; constrasting these with “systematic research and serious design experiments”. He could have a point—some of these projects might be better if they were confronted with a few more design restrictions. And I have only slight reservations in agreeing with him when he writes:

‘Critical architecture’ commits the fallacy of trying to substitute itself for the political process proper. The result might be a provocation at best, but often ends up as nothing but naive (if not pompous) posturing.

But he goes on to say:

Architects are called upon to develop urban and architectural forms that are congenial to contemporary economic and political life. They are neither legitimised, nor competent to argue for a different politics or to ‘disagree with the consensus of global politics’.

I don’t get this. I think he’s saying that, because architects serve the existing economic and political context, they’re not capable of arguing for a different political situation. But this doesn’t follow at all: a person working within a system may be in the best possible position to criticise or modify it. (The phrase “consensus of global politics” sticks in my throat: no matter how dominant western-style consumer capitalism is, neither it nor any other system deserves the name “global politics”).

Léopold Lambert responds with an open letter:

By affirming that architects are not legitimized, nor competent to argue for a different politics, you are, in fact, calling yourself for a different regime, an aristocratic one, in which experts owning a sacred knowledge have the exclusive legitimacy to debate and rule cities and nations. Architects, to the very same extent of bakers, workers, bankers (sic), waiters, lawyers, unemployed people etc. are absolutely competent and legitimized to  argue for a different politics for the good reason that they are concerned by it as citizens and share with other the res-publica (the public thing).

In the ensuing discussion at The Funambulist, everybody’s pet hates get aired: algae farms, CG animations, parametricism, impracticality, big firms, students who become teachers without working in the industry, topicality, atopicality. See if your favourite makes an appearance.

What interests me most, however, is a particular axis around which the discussion turns: the opposition between the realistic and the fantastic. Neither the idea that bland or offensive reality needs to be made more fantastic, nor that fantastic speculations should be eschewed in favour of concrete reality, give enough credit to the strangeness and complexity of reality.