I’m happy to announce a new website davidgissen.org that will be the primary site for my work.

This will take some of the pressure off htcexperiments to be a blog, portfolio, news site, etc. Lately, this blog has shifted from what I intended it to be: a showcase for boundary-pushing historical work by others, and a place to publish writing outside the possibilities of contemporary publishing venues.

davidgissen.org runs on the Cargo Collective platform. Cargo’s platform uses visual forms of navigation and it blurs the distinctions between writing and more visual projects – perfect for my interests. It also enables me to show images from past books or essays that either did not make it into those writing projects or that were published in black and white. All of a sudden, an article in an academic journal takes on a visual quality that would be impossible in journal formats. I’ll be updating the images on the new site throughout the next month, and I’ll be removing images of my own work from the side columns on this site, and replacing those with links to interesting work.

*I could have titled this essay: “some of my closest friends are vitalistic animists, but the work still makes me cranky”.

Last week it was my turn on the stage, and the subject was Mayan architecture. If you’re trained in the intellectual history of architecture the Mayan are a challenge. Not only has the writing system been translated very recently, but very little of that writing touches on the network of ideas that form their spatial outlook.

More to the point, reviewing various scripts for teaching and discussing the Maya, I’ve noticed a pronounced focus on what they ate. This focus on agriculture and diet also figures into discussions of virtually all Meso-American and other indigenous American architectural practices.

Standing on the stage, in the very beginnings of a lecture that touched on maize and chocolate, I had a moment, a simple thought, and a medium-watt lightbulb went off over my head: do we analyze the diets of the builders of carolingian or renaissance space? Do we ask what Alberti and his circle ate and drank? Within five seconds the history of architecture flashed before my eyes, and I realized that the subject of diet almost only figures in discussions of pre-historic western Europe or any architecture produced by a civilization composed of people of color. I stopped myself.

Diet of course is a b-line to tying civilizations down with NATURE and the processes of naturalization. And when we discuss diet, we tend to imply that there is a naturalized link between food and the fabrication of culture. Yes, maize and chocolate appear in Mayan imagery, in their art and architecture. But grapes and wine barrels figure in the art-work of many contemporaneous European movements, and I can’t recall anyone who shows imagery of medieval viticulture when analyzing Carolingian space; or claims that the cultivation of the vine led to the Palace complex at Aachen.

At that moment, I called for a moratorium on discussions of diet in our class until we can sort this out. And in subsequent lectures the issue has come up again and again, if only to make us better think about this enterprise of the history of architecture. I’m not saying diet cannot appear in the survey course, I’m only stating that the subject is unevenly distributed in our analysis of architectural history.

thoughts?

You can nerd-out on the recording (above) of the presentations at the recent event on the future of architectural history and theory at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University. A terrific event, and it's amazing how quickly these things get posted.

Coverage of the event can be found here:

The event was organized by William Saunders and Timothy Hyde, who taught this interesting experimental history course on Philip Johnson

25 October 2011–1 April 2012

CCA, Montréal
Canadian Centre for Architecture
1920, rue Baile, Montréal, Québec  Canada H3H 2S6
T 514 939 7026
media@cca.qc.ca

Open on Wednesday–Sunday, 11 am–6 pm; Thursday, 11 am–9 pm

cca.qc.ca/imperfecthealth

The Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), Montréal presents Imperfect Health: the Medicalization of Architecture, on view in the main galleries from October 25, 2011 until April 1, 2012. Through a wide range of materials including photographs, publications, art and design projects alongside architectural models and drawings,Imperfect Health uncovers some of the uncertainties and contradictions in the idea of health and considers how architecture acknowledges, incorporates, and even affects contemporary health issues. The exhibition questions common understandings of “positive” and “negative” outcomes within the flux of research on and cultural conceptions of health.

At a time when health is a primary concern influencing social and political discourse across the globe, it also finds increasing resonance in an architectural debate that is becoming medicalized. However, much contemporary architecture, urban planning, and landscape design seem to uncritically address these issues, and may even look to health for a new mandate to be ambitious in familiar ways. This short-cut to restored relevancy has many side-effects, and it needs to be reconsidered.

Problems in everyday life are increasingly treated as medical issues and defined in medical terms. Within architecture, on the one hand, this medicalization largely takes two forms: on one hand, spaces themselves are being described with language such as “sick” or “healthy”; on the other hand, architecture increasingly incorporates solutions from the medical field to address issues of health. The exhibition includes projects and ideas with a range of programs—mostly non-medical—that nonetheless engage issues of health in ways that suggest new strategies and constitute an argument for the urgent demedicalization of architecture.

Modernist projects often saw a deterministic relationship between the environment and health; they tried to be curative, and their history of unexpected consequences is a one of the sources for the nuanced and more complex notions of health in some contemporary projects. Rather than aiming to eradicate or avoid negative factors, certain projects now actively incorporate such issues as dust, garbage, and disease management.

Many architects and designers understand the limits to what architecture can accomplish, acknowledging that efforts towards ideal solutions will achieve mixed results because of the inherent complexities and contradictions in architecture. As Machiavelli pointed out, “it is found in ordinary affairs that one never seeks to avoid one trouble without running into another.”

Thematic research has uncovered examples of projects related to health issues like allergies, asthma, cancer, obesity, epidemics, and aging. These are attractive targets in an age of anxiety for an abstract conception of health that transfers concepts between professional discourses fraught with their own contemporary ambiguities, and appears to restore architecture to a place of importance. But these projects ultimately face the resistance of an imperfect world. New strategies are required and some are already being attempted.

Could demedicalization restore architecture to a more appropriate relation with its social surroundings?

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

Imperfect Health: the Medicalization of Architecture is curated by Mirko Zardini, CCA Executive Director and Chief Curator, and Giovanna Borasi, CCA Curator for Contemporary Architecture.

The continuous flow of long glass walls through the exhibition explores specific projects and research by an international group of artists, designers, and architects in relation to broader health issues including allergy and asthma, obesity and movement, cancer including its causes and treatment, disease and epidemics, and aging. Providing context and evidence of our preoccupation with these issues are studies, publications, television monitors, and photographs. Works from the CCA’s extensive collection alongside loans from other individuals and institutions collections include images by photographers Robert Adams, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Robert Burley, Lynn Cohen, Geoffrey James, Alfred Stieglitz, Ezra Stoller, among many others.

A book accompanying the exhibition and extending this research will be published in Spring 2012 by CCA with Lars Müller. Edited by Mirko Zardini and Giovanna Borasi, it includes essays by Carla Keirns, David Gissen, Hilary Sample, Linda Pollak, Deane Simpson, Margaret Campbell, Sarah Schrank, and Nan Ellin.

Alongside the exhibition, the CCA will host a number of special events and lectures aiming at framing a discourse on the spatial and physical implications related to health issues.

Imperfect Health: The Medicalization of Architecture

[check out my essay: "An Architectural Theory of Pollution" which is in the exhibition catalog, along with an image of the Pittsburgh Reconstruction.]

Going to Occupy proved the theory. Once you get through the sprawling tent city – yes, of mostly white, middle-class kids – you enter into a collective area that reflects the diverse make-up of Oakland. The entire movement is much more diverse than I’ve been led to believe. Last evening the General Assembly introduced a number of speakers that addressed problems of race in and through the more general economic protest. Speakers also addressed the violent police dispersal of the square. That was my own, personal, and second motivation for coming to Occupy. The dispersal was meant to intimidate future gatherings in the square – by not attending the protest, we simply reinforce the municipality’s acts of intimidation. How could we stand for that? How could we not go down there to simply say with our own fragile physiques, that people belong in this space? Again, the affect of protest produces a more complex gathering of people.

One theme dominated the evening’s speeches (and this is why I’m posting this on a blog about architecture and history): Housing. Virtually every speaker demanded a right to housing – the economic crisis comes full-circle. Most speakers argued that housing provided a pathway to economic security, public safety, and a way out of the police/prison system that seems to gobble up the lives of working people of color in US cities. Several speakers depicted a contrast between being properly housed in their city versus a life of daily police intimidation or imprisonment – stuck in a jail outside of the city they call home. Speaker after speaker: Housing, housing, housing; autonomy from the policing of everyday life. A clear, easily intelligible demand: “house us,” and then stay out of the way: we can take care of our everyday lives.

As a professor in an architecture school I find that we often talk about housing as a problem to be solved, without discussing housing as a conduit that connects architecture to basic human rights. Housing is an urban problem in architecture schools, without a larger consideration of the problem of the city – again as a right. My impression after this evening is that our obligation in a design course on housing is to express a more basic foundation for housing. The presence of housing as a site of rights has not necessarily had its expressive due.

I couldn’t help but think of Aldo Rossi’s Gallaratese during the speeches. That great monument to opening up a line – a setting for life – in the city, but one that also acknowledges the sadness of living in a world in which states have to “supply” housing for its poorer classes. Within the Gallaratese Rossi built an architectural language for getting out of the way – a location for life versus the manipulation of peoples’ lives into a more overt symbol.

The discussion of housing at the Occupy protests also included a discussion of environment in the city: Today many architecture schools, architects and writers explore what we might term “extreme” environments. These activities address things like climate change, changing shorelines of cities, sea-level rise, and toxicity, among other things. Not my own area of specialization, but interesting stuff. I think of the activities of firms such as the Living or the Infranet Lab as being good examples of this type of work. But listening to these protests, you quickly realize that everyday life in the US has become an extreme environment. And this more everyday, extreme environment cannot be expressed in the languages that architects use to typically depict “environment” – fluid dynamics and network theories. It can’t be expressed in the language of science or architecture. But architecture can open up a space of environmental calm and, like Galleretese, express a bit of the melancholy in having to do this.

I hope you have the chance to attend one of these events; at the very least it will make you think. And after you leave, you feel this tremendous urge to go back, hatch plans, do work, and think some more.

Now the exhibition is being transformed into a book with Actar, and I’m thrilled that one of my contributions to the exhibition – the Florence image from Museums of the City – is front-and-center.

In addition to this book project, I also spoke about Museums of the City at a recent event on current architectural scholarship at Harvard. That event was co-organized by Timothy Hyde, Associate Professor at Harvard’s GSD and William Saunders, the editor of the Harvard Design Magazine.

1. An afterword that appears in the new book Landform Building edited by Stan Allen and Marc McQuade

2. Another afterword for the latest issue of Spanish Architecture Journal, Quaderns — on the topic of infrastructure.

3. And the “middleword” (is that a term?) for Pamphlet Architecture 30, “Coupling” written and developed by Lateral Office.

Florence, David Gissen, 2011 (project renderer, Victor Hadjikyriacou)

I’m very happy to announce — and give a small preview of — my contribution to an upcoming exhibition curated by Geoff Manaugh for the Center for Art and Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art. Manaugh has developed the exhibition over the past two years, and it includes the work of architects, landscape architects, and artists, such as David Benjamin & Soo-in Yang (The Living), Mark Smout & Laura Allen (Smout Allen), Mason White & Lola Sheppard (Lateral Office), Chris Woebken, and Liam Young. I’m excited to participate, and I am even more excited that I am the one architectural historian invited to produce work for this exhibition.

Manaugh describes the exhibition — “Landscape Futures: Instruments, Devices and Architectural Inventions” — as an exploration of how:

“planetary landscapes, and our perceptions of them, can be utterly transformed by technology and design. Specifically, it will investigate the shifting terrains of architectural invention, where the construction of new spatial devices on a variety of scales, from the inhabitable to the portable, can uncover previously inaccessible aspects of the built and natural environments. The devices on display—and the traces they reveal—will thus demonstrate that the landscape around us is like sheet music: an interpretive repository of bewildering variation that can be captured and made visible (even audible) through the perceptual instruments and recording devices that we invent.”

Central Park, David Gissen, 2011 (project renderer, Victor Hadjikyriacou)

My contribution, titled “Museums of the City” investigates how the type of lights, vitrines, podia, stanchions, and scaffolds used to protect, maintain, and visualize historical objects within museums might migrate out into the city at large. I believe that what we understand to constitute material history is very often the “stuff” (art, objects, nature) that we carefully illuminate in a museum, prohibit people from touching in public space, place in controlled environments in archives, and conserve in often highly visible ways. To provide a simple comparative example, the difference in an American urban zoo between a parrot and a pigeon is very often that one is behind glass and one is not. Both are significant to natural and social history, but only one is imaged in this way, within this particular context. “Museums of the City” examines the potential power embedded in the architectural formations that make matter into objects of history, and how this can be turned into a more public, monumental, and external form.

Thames, David Gissen, 2011 (project renderer, Victor Hadjikyriacou)

Within four images we witness the repositioning of the inconspicuous interior architecture that one finds within a fine art, history, or natural history museum in the urban outdoors. Out in the city, we see these frameworks oriented towards a variety of important human made and natural urban landscapes. Surrounding these sites we see the type of spot-lit, vitrine-encased, light controlled, and scaffold laden environments that visualize and maintain important objects, protect them from people and time, and that situate them as opportunities for reflection. What matters as much as the sites I focus on in the city (urban rivers, highways, monuments, verdure), is the apparatus that transforms urban stuff into objects of our interest.

Cross Bronx Expressway, David Gissen, 2011 (project renderer, Victor Hadjikyriacou). Background photograph "Cross-Bronx Expressway, View East at the Jerome Avenue Overpass at Night, 2006" used with the kind permission of Andrew Moore

The exhibition opens on August 13, 2011 to February 12, 2012. I hope you can make the trip to Reno to see this and the other works on display.

The “Museums of the City” contribution was generously sponsored by the Nevada Museum of Art’s Center for the Art and Environment and the California College of the Arts Chalsty Fund.