BAD FAITH

In an essay for Breakthrough Journal, Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus warn us about ecotheology, a hypocritical concept of environmentalism that, “like all dominant religious narratives, serves the dominant forms of social and economic organization in which it is embedded”. So far, so good. A concept of nature as pristine and in opposition to human activities is deeply flawed (Timothy Morton even says that “Nature” is a completely poisonous concept for truly ecological thinking). But then Shellenberger and Nordhaus claim that the solution is a renewal of faith in modernisation:

Today’s nihilistic ecotheology is actually a significant obstacle to dealing with ecological problems created by modernization — one that must be replaced by a new, creative, and life-affirming worldview… Let’s call this “modernization theology.”

Yes, new technologies can help us overcome some of the most destructive aspects of human activity, but the very last thing in the world we need is to make a theology of this. John Christensen, responding in the same issue also thinks its a terrible idea, writing:

Modernization is the vocabulary of power. Modernization is a totalizing agenda. It knows what’s good for you and everyone and everything else on the planet.

At the end of their essay, Shellenberger and Nordhaus recruit Latour via his interpretation of Frankenstein as a warning against abandoning our monsters, not a warning against creating them in the first place. As Christensen says, this is weird, since Latour can hardly be taken as a theologist of modernisation. Latour’s contribution to the issue, “Love Your Monsters” is here, and his argument is more nuanced than Shellenberger and Nordhaus’s. He points out that once you’re involved, you can’t just back away from something. God, he points out, didn’t do this:

If God has not abandoned His Creation and has sent His Son to redeem it, why do you, a human, a creature, believe that you can invent, innovate, and proliferate — and then flee away in horror from what you have committed?

Commitment to something doesn’t mean faith in it, necessarily (God doesn’t have faith in humankind). To observe that we’re in this now, and we can’t back out is very different from insisting this was the right way all along.

Bruno Latour and Albena Yaneva, offering an ANT’s-eye view of architecture, point out how problematic it is to see a building as primarily an artefact in Euclidean space. A building has many more dimensions than three:

We should finally be able to picture a building as a navigation through a controversial datascape: as an animated series of projects, successful and failing, as a changing and criss-crossing trajectory of unstable definitions and expertise, of recalcitrant materials and building technologies, of flip-flopping users’ concerns and communities’ appraisals. That is, we should finally be able to picture a building as a moving modulator regulating different intensities of engagement, redirecting users’ attention, mixing and putting people together, concentrating flows of actors and distributing them so as to compose a productive force in time-space.

I think Latour’s criticisms hold true of BIM systems, too. While adding a few more meagre dimensions to the three honoured in traditional descriptive geometry, BIM is even more committed to the idea that a total documentation is possible.

David Maisel, American Mine (Carlin, NV 2), 2007 — part of his series ‘The Mining Project‘, which looks at the industrial landscapes of resource extraction. “These sites are the contemplative gardens of our time”. Via Geoff Manaugh.

The Battle of Alexander at Issus, Albrecht Altdorfer (1529). Europe is in the sun (is it setting or rising?), rendered in brown tones. The east is in a bluish twilight, the zone between sky and Europe, a frame of otherness that made the Renaissance concept of Europe possible.

Paula Z. Segal and Quilian Riano demand that New York City require the corporate owners of Liberty Plaza, a Privately-Owned Public Space, to keep their side of the bargain.

This is some kind of Turing test, right? Well I’m not going to be fooled. The project description was clearly generated by a script thats been hoovering up generic project descriptions from eVolo competition entries:

a deployable system that can reconfigure into any environment… a new definition of a campus… proto-design agenda of the Design Research Laboratory… pursuing architectural distinctions and differentiation to have embedded cognitive intelligibility… dividing the tower into groupings of program and open space, core articulation, and by activating open spaces with horizontal connections… distinct hierarchy of spaces and their connections, thus allowing the micro to develop the macro. The spaces connect based upon circulation patterns, room adjacencies and student capacities…

It appears to be a project carried out at the Architectural Association under Patrik Schumacher, who stirred the pot with an op-ed for the Architectural Review complaining about excessively fictional student projects. Is this his idea of an alternative? It doesn’t seem to be any more connected to reality, and has the added demerit of being completely boring.

Lebbeus Woods:

Hangar 17 at the JFK International Airport in New York City contains some of the strangest objects we might expect to encounter under the description artifacts. Twisted steel beams; battered and burned cars and ambulances; odd personal items bearing the traces of violence; items from a mall once lively with customers but no more—this is the stuff of many possible memorials to the 9/11 terrorist attack on the United States, collected and preserved for that very purpose. The strangest thing is, this hangar, in all its unpretentious modesty may be the best memorial of its kind to the event that will ever be devised.

The images, by Francesc Torres show stacks of branching steel facade columns, merchandise from the WTC shops, business cards and drawings found amid the wreckage, and strange “composites”: disparate matter melted and fused into lumps. More images by Torres for National Geographic here.

Echoing Shades, Michael Johansson, 2011.

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.