➔ Courtney Humphries, “The city is an ecosystem, pipes and all” — “Cities may strike us as the opposite of “the environment”: As we pave streets and erect buildings, nature comes to feel like the thing you find somewhere else. But scientists working in the growing field of urban ecology argue that we’re missing something. A city’s soil collects pollutants, but it also supports a vast system of microscopic life. Water courses beneath roads and buildings, often in long-buried streams and constructed pipes. And city ecosystems aren’t static; they change over time as populations grow, infrastructure ages, and different political structures and social values shape them. Seen this way, the city is a distinct form of “environment,” and an important one.”
The Marriage of Reason and Squalor: drawings by Pier Vittorio Aureli
➔ The Marriage of Reason and Squalor: drawings by Pier Vittorio Aureli — “Pieces of architecture-in-waiting that, despite rejecting a precise programme, are waiting sheet after sheet, to turn into something better defined, which is not necessarily architecture.”
Emma McNally — Choral Fields 1-6
Emma McNally’s Choral Fields 1-6 are the drawings I wish I was making right now. There’s a lot of time in one of those. ( via Archinect ) Heaps more images on Flickr.
Jet Engine Giblets Nat Chard
socks-studio: Rock Drawings, by Richard Long…
East-West Connections Submission
I just made a submission to NZTA on the East West Connections project. There are six proposals for improving traffic (particularly freight) movements between State Highway 20 and State Highway 1. The connection route passes to the north of the Mangere Inlet. The best options are A, B, and if we’re feeling spendy, C. D is a version of C that proposes the Te Hopua crater be finally obliterated in favour of easier on- and off-ramps for SH20. Options E and F are appalling and iredeemably bad proposals to run a motorway along the entire foreshore. They would obliterate Te Hopua, desecrate the Waikaraka Park Cemetery (currently quietly tucked alongside the water under mature pohutukawas, it would become an island between two noisy, smelly freight corridors), and sever forever any possibility of a connection to the water or the foreshore. The Council’s page linked above says the Options were developed out of a process that considered:
transport performance, cost and constructability, urban design, social, natural environment, human health, cultural and heritage.
It’s very hard to believe that anything but the first of these was considered in Options E and F. It doesn’t instil confidence in the process that these two options even reached the table.
The lunar frigidity of electric light: atmosphere and infrastructure in Haussmann’s Paris
In his Arcades Project (1999), Benjamin cites Georges Laronze:
“The visual effect was thus very striking, with the swirling branches of the fifty-six great streetlights along the avenue, the reflections from the surfaces below, and the flickering of flames from the five hundred thousand jets of gas” (128-29).
And Georges Montorgueil:
“A dreamlike setting, where the yellowish flickering of the gas is wedded to the lunar frigidity of electric light” (562).
Light exemplifies the relationship between atmosphere and infrastructure in Haussmann’s Paris. Atmosphere and infrastructure, while seeming to belong to two different worlds, are actually two sides of the same coin.
Benjamin, W. (1999). The Arcades Project. Harvard University Press: Cambridge.
Failed Architecture
Failed Architecture, with its studies of urban decay and quixotic hopes, has been on a roll recently. I’ve enjoyed Celeste Olalquiaga’s Tropical Babel on a helical tower in Caracas that became “a black sun, radiating inconspicuous state control, detention, and surveillance”; Barbara Prezelj’s description of Jože Plečnik’s abandoned Ljubljana stadium, which now hosts allotment gardens; and The Sudden Death of Cambodia’s Homegrown Modernism, in which Alexander Doerr visits Kep, where ruined villas in the jungle attest to an interrupted local modernism. And there’s plenty more good stuff in the archives.
Severe models — Le Corbusier and Addis Ababa, 1936
SEVERE MODELS — LE CORBUSIER AND ADDIS ABABA, 1936
At Failed Architecture, Rixt Woudstra writes about Le Corbusier’s sketch proposal for Addis Ababa. The drawing was sent to Mussolini in 1936, a manifesto for the modernist city:
“Le Corbusier’s sketch shows Addis Ababa literally as a tabula rasa: the rigorously superimposed plan cleared the land of all signs of humanity and centuries of urban culture. In his letter, Le Corbusier described his drawing perfectly by writing that he was attracted by “…models so severe, that one might think the colony was a space without time, and therefore, without history, and without any particular geographical meaning.” Further in his letter he added: “…the city is direct dominion; the city becomes the city of government, in which the Palace of the Governor must stand overall…””
The drawing is a perfect example of what I’m writing about currently as the ‘unified city model’, in which the city is treated as a single integrated entity, in keeping with an emerging “techno-cosmopolitanism… an understanding that society must be constructed, planned, and organised through art and science… the operationalisation of history, society, and culture” (Rabinow, 1996: 59). The allegiance between fascist ideas of governance and organic or unified models of the city is more than superficial. Once the city is imagined as a single entity, it’s not a big step to understand its purpose and ends solely in terms of the will of its rulers.
Rabinow, P. (1996). Essays on the anthropology of reason. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Corner Solutions of Mies Van Der Rohe’s towers
➔ Corner Solutions of Mies Van Der Rohe’s towers — Details from a 1972 issue of Architectural Review, via SOCKS Studio.
Options for the East West Connection
➔ Options for the East West Connection — NZTAs proposals for linking the Southern and Southwestern motorways through the Mangere Inlet area. Options E and F are particularly grievous: completely severing any possibility of connection to the water along the northern edge of the Inlet, and ignoring current uses.
The Tragedy of Enclosure, George Monbiot
➔ The Tragedy of Enclosure, George Monbiot — "The ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ is one of the modern world’s most dangerous myths… When communities own the land they make the laws, and develop them to suit their own needs. Everyone is responsible for ensuring that everyone else obeys them. As landlords take over, it is their law that prevails".
Infrastructures are the new commons
Infrastructure as a new commons
Frischmann proposes that infrastructures are resources that should be thought of and managed as commons:
Specifically, infrastructural resources satisfy the following criteria:
(1) The resource may be consumed nonrivalrously for some appreciable range of demand.
(2) Social demand for the resource is driven primarily by downstream productive activity that requires the resource as an input.
(3) The resource may be used as an input into a wide range of goods and services, which may include private goods, public goods, and social goods. (Frischmann, 2012)
This aligns with the idea that infrastructure is fundamentally an element of an industrial economy, but it takes a wider scope, allowing for forms of production, use, and value that may not be of immediate economic value. Treating infrastructure as a resource is interesting in itself, and the idea of linking this to the commons, a principle effectively eliminated by the rise of capitalism is also appealing.
Frischmann, B. M. (2012). Infrastructure. The social value of shared resources. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Drones set to guard NZ coast
➔ Drones set to guard NZ coast — I’m surprised the NZ defence forces, Department of Conservation and Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries aren’t already using UAVs.
Saint Sophia in Istanbul : an architectural survey.
➔ Saint Sophia in Istanbul : an architectural survey. — Beautiful drawing set by Robert L. van Nice (1965-1986). Personal favourites are pl. 1 ‘General plan at ground level’ and pl.29 ‘Plan of dome at cornice’.
Diffusive Architectures 
