HTC Experiments

If you are in the Toronto area, here are two events that may be of interest:

The conference, Architecture Therapeutics Aesthetics, organized by Rodolphe el-Khoury at the Daniels School of Architecture, University of Toronto, and the University of Waterloo, School of Architecture Spring lecture series, organized by Lola Sheppard on “Post-Natures” Poster below.

Hope to see you at either event.

Within a context of mass mediation, I think it is fair to say that many of the most enduring architectural images from the past ten years were violent, destructive, and profoundly somber. “Our” architectural, critical media concentrated as much on these sites as the so-called “star architecture” that many believe marked a vapid decade of architectural production. What follows is not a cheery post, by any means, and I refrain from using images, but it’s short, and ends with a thought that I hope… is hopeful.

The history of architecture in the “aughties” begins with the destruction of the World Trade Center. It does not begin with a building by a star architect, his/her museum, or pavilion. The anger of architecture critics at star architecture is like a late-19th century liberal who is angry at a factory building, without understanding the deeper tragedy that the factory illustrates. The tragedy of the aughties was that “tragedy” (the Benjaminian rubble heap of history) kept rising and architects simply did not have anything substantial to say [about a disciplinary relationship to tragedy].

If our architectural reflection on 9/11 was to be found in a tower, designed by a “deconstructivist” architect that was 1776 feet tall (did that deconstruct anything? did it make anyone cry, emote, or think about anything that happened on that site?), the destruction of New Orleans also displayed the current representational and techno-cratic limits of our discipline: A city’s core neighborhoods were essentially lost, and many architects responded with either a renewed and folksy “architecture for the poor” (a la Mockbee) or a new technification of architecture as an ecological and infrastructural system.

A 2005, “studio 360″ online podcast debate over the future of New Orleans (avant-garde (Reed Kroloff) versus New Urbanist (Andres Duany)) appeared to miss the point. Architects and urbanists desperate to do something let the crisis of destruction come to the edge of architecture as it stood pre-crisis. Crisis – a state that might rework our disciplinary agenda did not enter the discipline in any enduring way. In the end, an artist, Paul Chan, staged one of the most poweful spatial events: He realized that by adding something disturbing on top of a place disturbed, he could offer some type of solace: Chan restaged Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” in the city’s most battered ward; in the end Duany was on to something with “re-creation,” but for Duany “recreation” was measured in siding and walking distances. In many ways that earlier debate about the future were two sides of the same coin.

And we could go on about Gaza, Lebanon, Iraq (the lost mosques); and many did, sometimes in powerful ways, but mainly with a neo-Harveyesque or Davis-esque orthodox Marxist distance. It was as if all the smart and “radical” architects [writers, in particular] of the last decade were divided into the ecstatic and the angry! some subtlety of emotions was lost between those states of mind.

But firmly within our discipline, another destruction (the burning of the CCTV hotel) was to mark a new moment in architecture – “the end of starchitecture.” But as a brilliant review of twitter (in, of all places, the most recent issue of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians) makes clear, the endless twittering about the burning CCTV only affirmed the media techniques of starchitecture, the circulating of famous names and images. The constant twittering about Koolhaas’ end only increased his fame. It was the end of nothing.

Finally, we have the tragedy in Haiti. Already, architects “for humanity” (People: if you’re an architect, I really and truly hope you are (de facto) for humanity!) have explained the proper architectural response. Once again technocracy and simple representational ideas dominate the brief and recent discussion.

In the face of the literal and analogical rubble heap of the aughties, It is finally time to call out the “monument builders” of crisis. Lurking somewhere in our discipline are those that can make us think about these spaces and events without resorting to simple technological and representational schemes. A truly crisis-oriented architecture cannot be measured in feet: whether it’s “1776″ feet tall; the walking distance to the local grocery store; the number “housed”; or even the length of barriers or territories settled.

A truly crisis-oriented architecture produces a complex array of thoughts and, if it can be measure at all, it’s in the number of tears for the lost ([and that which was lost] in all its meanings).

It’s about a historical, not a mathematical, effort.

Somehow missed this completely entertaining and useful exchange on Kazys Varnelis’ site. The original post by Varnelis, spawned a debate between different philosophies of architectural inquiry/writing, and was authored by several of the most-read architectural bloggers. Of course, the entire exchange would be characterized as “critique,” even when particular arguments are positioned against critical analysis. But that’s a minor detail.

Calls for papers from editors of architectural history and theory journals are fascinating; it’s exciting to see what is considered issue-worthy. Unfortunately, in this blog’s current format, there’s not enough time to publicize all of these as they appear. Curiously, the publishing speed of blogs, aggregators, etc. are techniques that one might use to influence the thoughts of those that submit and edit these themed print-journals — yet another way the instantaneous world of online publishing might intersect with the slower and more considered speed of print.

That said, in the back of the current Future Anterior journal there appears a call for papers themed around the “Future”. The call is from MIT’s journal Thresholds – a great place for new and established writers to gain an academic audience.

A “Future” issue is important because we have clearly entered an era in which a certain type of futurism has overtaken virtually every facet of architectural thought – e.g. essays and blog post on sci-fi, abandoned futuristic cities, apocalyptic “near” futures; fantastical forms of futuristic weather nets (a la Star Trek), the urban underground, etc. But the Future issue could offer much more than a sample of the “best” of this type of architectural thought out there.

The future (as a type of method of thinking) is where the politics of the present are concretized into historical facts. This function of the future extends back to the nineteenth century, but its probably most intelligible in the late-1950s and 1960s.

For example, recall the futuristic fantasies of this time — homes were imaged as laced with fantastic technologies: women cooked in futuristic kitchens and vacuumed floors with futuristic devices; men read newspapers with techno-gadgetry. The whiz-bang gizmos of the future were exciting, but the domestic politics were of a particular conservative and class-based image. The devices spoke of the future and its objects of desire but they instantiated the gender-economies of the then-present as well. These were many of the defining and populist futuristic images of the time; played with by several key architectural writers and designers.

The future envisioned today is still bound by the same traps as the above; but the conservatism is much less obvious. If we focus on one type of image in particular – the apocalyptical imagery that imagines a future without a future, so to speak (without a functioning life as we know it, but nonetheless the future) we see similar problems taken to an entirely new scale.

The futuristic apocalypse, illustrated in contemporary films, images of abandoned Mcmansions or “art” images of the abandoned streets of downtown Manhattan or a flooded London, is another futurism of middle class life. (I’m not convinced that it’s some type of leninist apocalyptic brushing away of the world, despite some suggestions to the contrary.)

The current apocalyptical loss of a future that’s the future is the lost world of the contemporary city. It’s a twist on that famous Marxist adage that the ruling class mistakenly imagines the end of its world to be the end of the world. Nothing is a better illustration of this than the images circulating in contemporary architectural-culture in which the downfall of the current economy is imagined as the end of anything we might recognize as functioning urbanism.

If the future of popular media in the 1950s was one in which the home-economy must be maintained; the future of the latter is one that cannot be realized in anything other than apocalyptic form unless the operations of a particular political economy are maintained. That is… solid mortgages paid on time, a rising stock market, the steady supply and maintenance of natural resources.

It’s hard to believe that the photo-shopped images of futuristic flooded cities are solely about climate change or nature-city interfaces. Rather, they appear to also be illustrations of the “horror” of water as a non-resource, a non-commodity in either consumable or touristic form. They are not comments on Katrina; they are comments on the recession. After all, most of these appeared after 2008, not after 2005.

I think we can position a better use of the future for the future. Consider taking a shot at it in Thresholds. The call is not yet up, but having seen it in print, I assume it will be posted to their site soon.

And may we all have a happy and healthy 2010.

More posts in the coming year, and a much promised site redesign.

Thank you again for visiting this site.

For those of you in Europe or interested in the events circulating around the UN Climate Conference, the Royal Danish Academy of Art is hosting a symposium on the aesthetics of climate in architecture next week, December, 10th. Organized by Philippe Rahm, the conference “seeks to integrate the climatic mission of architecture not only as the purpose of contemporary architecture but also as the process.” Rahm asks “Can a new aesthetic be born out of our environmental awareness? Can space be inhabited like a climate? Can we envisage meteorological architecture?” I’m very happy to be one of the invited lecturers.

Following this event I’ll be speaking in a public event — an informal seminar on Subnature at UCL in London, December 14. The seminar is sponsored by the Bartlett’s HT wing and also the new UCL Urban Laboratory, headed by Matthew Gandy. Thus far, I’ve discussed the Subnature project solely in terms of its content and imagery; the London seminar will involve a more methodological discussion. Subnature came out of (more literally fell out of!) a PhD thesis conducted at UCL. In this context I want to position the book as a new type of “not-my-dissertation” book. This is a book composed of what was not ultimately used in a thesis, but that still emerged from the research spirals that entail doctoral-level research. Such an idea has a curious relation to the actual content in Subn — an idea explained in a bit more detail below.

When I was putting Subnature together (btw, latest extremely thoughtful, interesting review here), lurking in the back of my mind was the critique of Manfredo Tafuri against “operative criticism”. Subnature, provocatively (if not dangerously) tries to form some contemporary rapprochement with the blend of history, theory and criticism, that Tafuri would ultimately label “operative”. Tafuri was suspicious of histories that naturalized (or reified) the present; that is, a history that makes the present appear as inevitable. The “operative” aspect of operative criticism is the alignment of history with criticism of contemporary work — alignment is the key concern.

Many historians utilized Tafuri’s critique to open a new path in historical work — a disentanglement of history from the concerns of contemporary practice (what might be termed an “autonomous” historical project). In some practices this led to a new freedom and intense criticality in historical inquiry, and in others a type of anti-design, micro historical form of writing. Curiously, autonomous history often contained more oblique entanglements with practice: For example, many “autonomous” historians practice architecture, so the remnants of operative history are replaced by practice itself. Within these practices, the connections between history and practice are more abstract, but they’re there to be identified by historians in the future! More directly, Tafuri himself promoted architects such as Rossi or Gregotti, just not within his actual historical work; he even protested (successfully) the construction of certain buildings; so in practice, he was deeply involved in the realization of contemporary architecture. The above forms of contemporary engagement are certainly not “operative” but they nonetheless keep the historian within contemporary practice debates.

Many of the experimental works on this site, by myself and others, seek out new “operations” for history within practice, keeping the misalignments (that mark critical, autonomous history) in place. But within Subnature, I thought I would butt up against that operative edge (I often find unsaid rules to be the most irritating). In many of the chapters, I attempted to replace the tissues (“practice” or “architecture”) that once held history, theory and criticism together with geographical methods. That is, by performatively identifying certain forms of matter — dankness, debris, etc. — lurking within the writing and imagery that form history, theory, and criticism, I could momentarily hold dispersed forms of inquiry together. I think the “Debris” chapter is the most successful in this regard. And a few other chapters show how history, theory and criticism can be briefly aligned in a type of architectural inquiry that deserves continued exploration and enhancement — a discursive architectural geography that I hope to pick up in future projects.

Ronald Rael, the author of Earth Architecture, and someone who is quickly becoming one of my favorite contemporary architects and theorists, wrote some very nice words about Subnature. Among his thoughts, he wrote that “[t]he book is not about fashionable topics surrounding sustainability and ecology. With chapters on smoke, dankness, debris, exhaust, weeds and other counter-architectural conditions, Gissen seeks to expand one’s perception of truly alternative materials in a positively original way.”

I’m appreciating all of the great reviews; but I wonder if the dazzling and weird contemporary projects in the book overwhelm some of the textual arguments (particularly those in the beginning and conclusion) that are key to an understanding of the subnatural.

For example, at a recent lecture someone asked how Subnature intersected with earlier ideas about abjection or modernity. This book is not a return to alterity via the ejected and gross; it’s a concept of nature that’s ultimately less binary, and more subversive and unwieldy: nor is the book simply about ironic inversions of nature. One of the things I appreciate about Subnature is how it appears in various social liberatory movements (from the debris piled into a revolutionary’s street barricades to forms of post-national expression, as in the Niemeyer and de Paor projects linked above); it is afunctional (it cannot be appropriated into buildings instrumentally, except with enormous distress) and it’s also a type of nature laced with social history. Unlike a tree, the subnatural mud (that, for example, a critic such as Rael describes so well), will always appear historically mediated in ways that more normative forms of nature cannot. These ideas of social agitation, anti-instrumentality, and history, make my idea of subnature laced with Marxist and various post-structural concepts; it not an easy way to see nature; but it’s key and makes the reader’s absorption into the ideas of this book rewarding. Consider bringing this book into your thought world.

“Gissen’s book is a timely and important text in shifting our attitudes towards more holistic, interdependent, and pluralistic views of nature”-A daily dose of architecture (John Hill)

In case you missed a Daily Dose of Architecture’s review of Subnature, it’s a genuinely thoughtful review. It’s interesting that Hill sees Subnature as part of a broader concept of sustainability. This comment came up again at a recent lecture about the book. I more than welcome those interested in sustainability to find something in this book that extends the arguments of an earlier book such as Big and Green. I’m not certain that the technical aspects of sustainability are entirely compatible with the representational and historical problems of Subnature, but I welcome the effort to provide another rapproachement here. That’s an interesting thought project.

I just returned from the University of California Santa Barbara’s Humanities Center event on environmentalist thought in architecture (where I spoke about the Subn) — a very enjoyable group of speakers and locale. In particular, the work of Kennedy Violich Architecture (KVarch), presented by Sheila Kennedy, demonstrates how certain fundamental architectural theoretical concerns (at their most raw) can be absorbed into an environmentalist practice. The constant turn to the Semperian dressing/scaffold concept in their work, as the site for an environmentalist expression, is extremely intriguing. And, if that particular concept was not played out in project after project, this firm often literally works with textiles in metabolized forms. It’s just another example of how the technology/autonomy divide may be morphing into something else right now, via a qualified return to 19th century theoretical conceptions.

Well, it appears that my essay “Architecture’s Geographic Turns”, a fairly straightforward critical overview of the history of geographical thought in architecture and its appearance in today’s various post-critical and research practices, has perturbed everyone.

Various research architect colleagues don’t appreciate it very much. They think of their work as marking a break with “architecture” proper, which in some ways is true. Therefore a history of cartographic imagery in architectural theory simplifies their work into a larger narrative. Admittedly, absorption is often an after-effect of narrative history. But, mind you, the historical information in my essay was based on secondary sources – by various authors also examining the reach of the geographical image in architecture.

In addition to the above, friendly email banter, a more biting piece of criticism — “In defense of design” (by Mark Foster Gage in Log, but available here online) attacked my essay and the type of work explored in my essay, calling it the “virus” that “mutated the red blood cells of architectural design”. If you thought architectural theories of aesthetic degeneracy were a thing of the distant past, you really need to read this essay! He understands research architecture as a pervasive and threatening influence in architecture schools. One would think the often difficult and critical work of an Eyal Weizman or Laura Kurgan was everywhere around us, threatening the architecture of “wonder” that Gage ultimately argues for. Anyway, it seems the author of this essay truly misunderstood my piece, which was ultimately a CRITICISM of research architecture practices, not a defense.

Finally, and ironically, the most recent criticism of Geographic Turns appeared from an editor who is publishing it in a collection of recent projects and theory writing. The editors of this particular publication asked if the criticisms of geographical imagery in architecture in the essay could be toned down, lest they offend those who map and diagram the environment.

So, you see the binds of writing subtle criticism: on the one hand you’re criticized for defending the thing you’ve actually criticized; and on the other you’re asked to soften your criticism.

“Architecture’s Geographic Turns,” which was great fun to write, ends with a proposition: What if architects stopped turning to geography as a source from which to interpret the world empirically, and instead projected concepts of architectural thought into cartographic worlds? In other words, what if they rewired the historical relation between these fields and architecture entered a new aestheto-cartographic narrative (recall Fredric Jameson argued for something similar at the end of his pomo essay).

Rather than answer that question (or the details of specific criticism) with an essay; I took on the above question in a more ambitious and total form: I just guest-edited an issue of AD that includes writings by some of my favorite geographers, historians and architects. In that issue, which will be out later next spring, we will see work that attempts to craft geographical “Territory” (versus site or autonomy) with architecture.

As always, once that issue is out, criticism is welcome.

The CCA event was terrific. And thank you to everyone who came out — what a crowd! And thanks for buying so many copies of Subnature too (much appreciated). The best part about the lecture was explaining the historical concepts within the book to so many non-architects. I’m very excited about this book’s appearance at this particular moment of debate regarding cities and nature.

Up next, a lecture at the University California Santa Barbara where I hope to expand on some of the ideas from Subnature for a conference on “Design After Oil”. The event is sponsored by the UCSB Humanities Center — a research unit that’s generated some of the most interesting critical interpretations of contemporary culture. I look forward to that.

Following this, I’ll be speaking in Copenhagen about the book at an event sponsored by the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Art and the City of Nantes, given in concert with the UN Conference on Climate Change. Some terrific people are involved, so I’ll send along more about that as it develops.

Finally, the book Design Ecologies is out — a collection of essays on architecture and environment edited by Lisa Tilder and Beth Blostein. It contains my essay “Ape”, a reflection on, among many other things, 19th century street barricades in revolutionary Paris. Check it out.

Tonight at the California College of the Arts (CCA), I’ll be speaking about two recent projects of mine — the exhibition Anxious Climate (curated in 2005/2006) and the book Subnature. The former just opened at CCA (in the “nave” space); and the latter was just published by Princeton Architectural Press. The fun starts at 7:00p. If you’re in the San Francisco Bay Area, please stop by.

I just finished reading “Architecture and Techno-Utopia” (after having read many of the chapters in Grey Room); in one of the many excellent chapters, the author refers to — this brief lecture by Jean Baudrillard written in 1970. JB delivered this address — “The Environmental Witch Hunt” — at the Design and Environment Conference in Aspen (Baudrillard pictured above at left in attendance at the conference with Jean Aubert of Utopie). I recalled how I read a transcription/translation of the address about five years ago; and how significantly it influenced my thought on the architecture/environment interaction. Enjoy.

It’s now available (!)

Today, the New York Times published an olfactory map of Manhattan — “Smells of New York City.”

The map (above) is a more ironic version of the olfactory cartographies that first emerged in Victorian London and Second Empire Paris. One of the most interesting of these is Hector Gavin’s “Pestilent Disease Mist of Bethnal Green,” his map of the odors in that struggling area of London from his book Sanitary Ramblings (1848).

In 2005 I viewed an original edition of Gavin’s map (slightly unfurled below) in the majestic Peabody Library at Johns Hopkins University. The reddish brown areas illustrate his perception of the odors of feces and undrained sewerage.  It’s an incredible work of documentation, individual curiosity, and olfactory paranoia. It’s also an interesting work of history, as Gavin understood the odors to be products of this particular neighborhood’s past (and this, of course, moves through the New York Times cartography).

Excellent histories of the map, and the history of olfactory cartography include Robin Evans “Rookeries and Model Dwellings” (in Translations from Drawing to Building) and  a terrific book by Erin O’Connor Raw Material. You can also read a bit about the map (with one of the finest reproductions we could find) in the chapter on gas inSubnature: Architecture’s Other Environments.

It’s one of those truly under-rated odors. It seems very old books always have it, but in new books it’s a more volatile smell and must be savored quickly. This past week I’ve been enjoying smelling (reading, looking, and holding) an advance copy of my new book — Subnature: Architecture’s Other Environments. If you missed my description of the book from earlier posts; you can read a little about it here and here. The book will be released in October, so please pre-order and hold tight; I promise, it will arrive soon.

A quick post to tell you to check out this animated history of the Parthenon. It’s quite good, and having recently written about the Parthenon, I enjoyed the dramatic (and saddening) depiction of its bombardment by 17th century Venetian mercenaries. But the biggest tragedy depicted in this film is the dismantling of the remaining statuary by teams hired by Lord Elgin. “She” (the Parthenon) speaks towards the end. Oh, and it’s directed by none-other than Costas Gavras

After writing the earlier post on artist-designed traffic jams, I just remembered one of my favorite projects by the Dutch architect Wiel Arets — his “Boulevard Domburg” (1990). In this masterplan, Arets designed a bottleneck-producing, z-shaped stretch of road, set within a larger highway scheme that incorporated housing.

In many ways “Boulevard Domburg” recalls the early Obus Plan proposal by Le Corbusier for Algiers. But unlike the much more famous Obus Plan (that also incorporated housing and highways), Arets’ project challenges the concepts of circulation driving Corbusier’s and many other modern city planning schemes.

Aret’s project involves something we might term “anti-circulation.” Arets purposely includes a bottleneck, a detour that forces cars to slow to a standstill. Within this zig/zag detour Arets brings the existing town and the seaside into the view of the driver. It enables a driver and their passengers to consider their particular location within the slipstream of an automotive environment. Arets not only brings a new appreciation of a highway’s particular context, he opens up a space, a very interesting space, for other forms of knowledge to enter the experience of driving.

As anyone knows from driving in the United States, there’s a certain direct and palpable relationship between speed and historical knowledge. Zipping through a town not only limits our ability to understand it; the highways and roads of the United States are dotted with historical markers and signs that are comically unreadable at the speeds most people drive. I often recall particular detours — due to accidents, sudden natural hazards, or road work — that led to fantastic discoveries — an old mill town, the site of a famous battle or event, basically something I had driven by many times but never knew.

Arets designed his detour as a critique of modern efficiency, but perhaps his detour represents some larger project that we can harness to better relate speed and history. In turn, one imagines that the detour becomes an aspect of a historical project.

“Can we preserve a traffic jam?” After I spoke at Postopolis LA! on experimental forms of history, BLDG BLOG’s Geoff Manaugh asked me this question. The question was meant genuinely, and also as a provocation, testing the limits of the experimental forms of spatial history that I had just discussed.

Just a few weeks ago, We make money not art, posted a review of the traffic jam created by artist Maider López. López asked a large group of people to drive their cars into a well choreographed  jam within a hilly area of Spain (below). The traffic jam looks suspiciously like the traffic jam (above) that stretched from the Catskills into lower New York State during the Woodstock music festival of 1969. This recent project suggests that — yes — it is now possible to preserve a traffic jam.