architecture

Over at HTC Experiments, David Gissen is the latest to tackle architecture fiction. I like David's writing quite a bit, but this time I'm moved to the defense of architecture and to expand the concept further in the direction I would like to see it go. I won't rehash the idea of architecture fiction again as I've written about it here and here while Bruce Sterling originated the concept here. Go read those if you're unfamiliar with the idea.  

David is puzzled by how Bruce is fascinated with Archigram and sees it ironic that I understand architecture fiction as a way beyond green architecture since the language of Archigram informs much of green architecture today . Somehow (I'm not quite sure how), David understands that irony as fatal. If there's a fatal irony, i would say that's its in the contradiction that the green design movement is appropriating Archigram's imagery. After all, by the late 1960s, Archigram was detested throughout schools of architecture worldwide for their commitment to technology, in particular their commitment to planned obsolescence and building. This was anathema for the young radicals of the early 1970s. I remember teaching Archigram in the mid-1990s and they were still thought of as retardataire, and that was at SCI-Arc! So, although Archigram conveys the message well, it's an originary work not without its problems.

Second, David notes that Beatriz Colomina demonstrated that all forms of modernism relied on fictional devices. This is a more serious charge since he feels that if architecture is by nature fictional, it means that architecture fiction is nothing new and therefore boring. In its stead, he suggests his own re-definition of the term: "architectural fiction as a form of writing on buildings." 

I have to admit that this prospect scares me. It seems like a perpetuation of starchitecture, which I would like to bury as fast as possible. If a novelist is moved to write about a work of architecture, then more power to them. I'm certainly glad to see that Bruce is inspired by Greg Lynn's work, although I think if an shoe inspired Bruce, he could cook up something equally smart, witty, and literary. I think the last thing we need is our favorite starchitect bothering a novelist to say "Hey, since I can't get on the front page of the New York Times anymore [the NYT having gone under in this fictional scenario], I need you to write a novel about me."  Moreover, if we're trying to judge by novelty, then what about Victor Hugo? This interpretation of architecture fiction has been going on for a while now.

But I'm grateful to David for prodding me on with regard to this topic. I'm interested in something very specific, narrower than anybody else's interest here. Let me try to articulate it. 

Instead of being Utopian or imaginative, might it be possible for architecture to shape our experiences in such ways as to approximate the effects of films or fiction? Or better yet, video games? Please don't take this to mean that architects need to copy Doom or Quake (they've tried that already). But rather, could architecture fiction be something that re-shapes our subjectivity? Yes, this is awfully similar to some of the ideas that Peter Eisenman threw around in the past, but substitute the theoretical armature, which he seemed willing to discard with predictable regularity with deliberate invention? And yes, this is similar to what Koolhaas and Tschumi suggested in the 1970s, but would that be a bad starting point for the present day?

If I'm coming to architecture's defense, then you've guessed that there's probably a catch. I firmly believe that there's a huge opportunity for architects—particularly during the coming protracted recession—to think about what is possible with the built environment (as it already stands) and pervasive technologies (as they already exist). In other words, if architects are such experts at shaping space, who is to say they always need to work with the building trades? The Eameses made furniture and films. If they were around today, I think they'd be out in the city, finding ways to shape the environment through existing forms of locative media. Look at the work Mark Shepard does for example. He's one of the few people who've got it figured out. 

Anticipating protests about architects not being in the software business, I'll ask what, if anything, are architects doing in studios today besides using (and even writing!) software? Those aren't drafting boards on the desks anymore. And there's a caution: if architects don't do it, others will. There are plenty of super-intelligent people already working on this kind of material, such as the good folks at area/code, and I fully expect magic from that group, but there's lots of room spectrum out there for everyone to play. Will architects take up this challenge? 

Instead of writing novels on a cell phone, why shouldn't we be reading the city on our cell phones? 

In the new issue of Wired, Andrew Blum has an article entitled Air Repair about how consultants at the Mitre Corporation are rethinking the airspace above New York to alleviate congestion in the nation's most heavily travelled airspace. It was a great delight to read and this is precisely the kind of approach that new infrastructural initiatives will need to take. Not heavy construction or expensive technological retrofit, but rather applying intelligent thinking applied to making the most of out of conditions, hacking and social engineering what we've already got. 

It'd be great if there could be some kind of grand science of optimizing existing infrastructure, but I suspect that there's not going to be. There'll be some mathematical models, sure, but more than ever, I think we're living in an age of tactics, not strategies.    

When philosophy paints its gray in gray, then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's gray in gray it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.

In perhaps his most eloquent moment, Hegel was referring to the way that philosophy came to an understanding of topics precisely at the moment that they were no longer relevant.

An example of this would be the explosion of visual studies in the 1990s just at the moment when two centuries of the visual being a cultural dominant were being eclipsed by the rise of the non-visual, by the code and procotols of network culture. Nobody talks much about visual studies anymore.

But it isn't just philosophy and theory that operate this way. It's a phenomenon we see in culture over and over. Milton Friedman (and Time Magazine) declared We are all Keynesians now just as the long postwar boom expired.

Or look at how stores like Barnes and Noble appeared, carrying huge amounts of books and magazines just as print began its terminal decline. Or the appearance of the SUV right before peak oil (I have friends who bought those things and used them for everyday driving…crazy!).

So what about Starchitects? There has certainly never been an explosion of interest in Starchitects like there has been today. But when the economy recovers (and I think that will be a long, long time from nunless the government comes up with another unhealthy quick fix), I'm not so sure we'll have starchitects anymore.

The reason is simple: newspapers made starchitects. It's common knowledge that recent construction by major cultural institutions was driven by the desire to make it to the front page of the New York Times. This could only be guaranteed if the architect was Gehry, Herzog and de Meuron, Koolhaas, Hadid, Nouvel, and Foster (some of these names may change a little, a second tier includes Piano, Morphosis, Sejima, Ito, and I'm sure a couple of others that I forgot). I have friends who work with such institutions and they were commonly told that the project had to be on the front page.

This is not surprising. Newspapers are key institutions for the growth machine (see more here). They seek to drive growth, making it seem natural and promoting it, generally regardless of the cost. They are where the growth machine sees itself and celebrates itself.

But now, eviscerated by bad financial models and online publications, newspapers are dying. Certainly blogs have encouraged Starchitecture a bit, but in many cases—such as at Archinect—they did so in part because they are in the business of linking to content from newspapers. In many cases bloggers are more critical of starchitecture than newspaper critics are. Blogs are bottom-up, newspapers are top-down. Thus blogs are snarky, newspapers are proper. Blogs also have comments so when a blogger gets something wrong, a reader can call it out.

As you may read on twitter, the media is dying. As big papers start to shut down or go to online-only formats in the coming years, will starchitects disappear as well? I can't imagine that the heads of major cultural institutions will insist on architects who will ensure their buildings be mentioned on Archinect.

If they do, what will take their place, a Warholian YouTube-style culture of young architects being famous for 15 minutes? Or will architects begin to specialize toward niche audiences, much as blogs do?

Back in 2006, I questioned the reality behind the skyscraper boom in places like Dubai. In 2007 I suggested that there was a coming storm in Dubai, while as late as last spring the New York Times was confident that it was time to party in Dubai like it was 1999 (or perhaps 1929).

Now, feeling a bit hung over not to mention behind other media outlets, the Times is realizing they can't perpetuate the building boom anymore, not even in Dubai. Sobering up, they are forced to deal with the cold reality and so the Times coughed up the following today: Laid-off Foreigners Flee as Dubai Spirals Down.

I'm not sure where the lights should go off first: in the Arabian nights wonderland of Dubai, rapidly turning into a debtor's prison or at the Foster building located across the street from the Port Authority station? Both are parodies: the first of capitalism and architecture, the second of responsible journalism. It's a bad year for both of them, perhaps only to be outdone by the bad year to come in China, which has managed to combine both into one at the CCTV complex and is off to a great start for the year of the Ox, as I'm sure you know by now, a story that not only broke but was reported best not via traditional media outlets, but via Twitter.

Soon Dubai will abandoned to sink back into the sands. I think it'll be much more interesting that way, with feral animals running wild, Chernobyl-style, in the ruins. As for the Times, at a symposium last Saturday at Columbia someone said "What if the Times closed, they have dozens of reporters in the Baghdad bureau… How could bloggers replace them?" Yochai Benkler stated "But they are responsible for the war! Remember Judith Miller?" He is so right. What if our news from Baghdad came from actual Iraqs, people who understand the context and speak the language?

Oh tired, old Grey Lady, maybe it's time to shut the doors on the Piano building and call it a day? The face-lift didn't work, it just made things worse. Your structural function as an enabler for the growth machine has been a non-stop embarrassment for all involved and now its time to pay the price.

During Monday's Network Culture class, we are dealing with freedom and control. Much of this class is going to revolve around Deleuze's essay on control societies and I've been pondering something. Maybe I've been dead wrong about the lack of significant new architecture in this decade.

Maybe the interminable pursuit of smooth form, which has occupied so much of architecture's interest during this decade, as well as the interest in autonomous form, produced seemingly without human intervention IS significant.

Maybe my mistake is in thinking of it as "good." Good to me, seems somehow progressive, offering spaces that might resist the space of flows, offering new ways of thinking outside of it or even redirecting it. 

Maybe the problem is that I've just misunderstood the point. My thesis: be it an architecture of icon or performance, in its shift to the post-critical, the field has become the handmaiden of Empire? Thus, my problem is one of misrecognition: that I should not expect architecture to advance anything new, but rather only embody the space of Empire. The smoothness of contemporary architectural form, alternatively the product of cynical reason or naïvité, is significant, in that it draws the coils of the serpent ever tighter around us.  

Frankly, I hope to promote even more vehement disagreement than my post asking where the good architecture is. And granted, there are architects who seem to have no interest in smooth form. Let's excuse them for a minute, but let's take the globe-trotting proponents of smoothness, the architectural ¥€$ men of our age. So the question that I'm going to pose to my students is: what about this work? How can it be explained except as an affirmation of Empire, as the aesthetic infrastructure of the society of control? Is that the significance of contemporary architecture?

I will be briefly presenting the work of the Network Architecture Lab at 6.30pm at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation on Monday, February 9 in Wood Auditorium and moderating a discussion about the state of architectural research.

Other lab directors presenting their work will be David Benjamin, Living Architecture Lab; Jeffrey Inaba, C-Lab; Jeffrey Johnson, China Lab; Laura Kurgan, Spatial Information Lab; Scott Marble, Fabrication Lab. The event is organized by Mabel O. Wilson, director of the Advanced Architectural Research Program.

Anyone interested in attending might want to look at my article Is There Research in the Studio?

Over at Bookforum, Terence Riley reviews the Philip Johnson Tapes. I am thoroughly delighted by the review. The Philip Johnson Tapes was fascinating to put together and its great that it's getting some attention. 

Two things are worth expanding on. I certainly appreciated Riley's point that at times the interviews "do little to make Johnson more accessible, underscoring instead how impossibly distant his life experience was from most of ours." Absolutely. As T. J. Clark has written, "modernity is our antiquity."  I am glad the book conveys the foreignness of that time to us.     

When Riley mentions that "the most rigorous of historians will have to look elsewhere" to fact-check certain information on Johnson, it's unlikely that people will find much more. The archives have largely been exhausted and the team of researchers at Stern's office did an first-rate job digging up what they could. Here and there, I'm sure we'll find something, but on the whole, great mysteries are going to remain barring the release of unseen archival material. For example, what was Johnson doing translating Werner Sombart's Weltanschauung, Science and Economy? What was his involvement with the Veritas press, which was, in part at least, sponsored by the Nazi government? How about his friendship with Viola Bodenschatz, wife of Major General Karl Bodenschatz, Hermann Goering’s top aide? Johnson's life falls in the inconvenient period in which people neither communicated primarily via letters (his chief letter-writing phase ends around 1931, or so it seems) nor via e-mail but rather via telephone. To address that difficult time, as I explain in my conclusion to the book, historian Allan Nevins developed oral history. And so it is, that with the oral history of Johnson's life in hand, we're unlikely to get a whole lot more. 

Once again, for emphasis: modernity is our antiquity. 

The news from Ireland is dim and grimmer. It looks like it's leading the way in the collapse. It's sad to think of all of the people who will lose their jobs and their homes there, here, and elsewhere.

But the missed opportunities are sadder to me. Instead of a bubble economy that produced the vertiginous architecture of emptiness that Sam Jacob so eloquently wrote about, a decade without significant work marked only by horrific mcmansions, the excess funds of the bubble could have been used for something far more interesting. The sacrifices were going to come, but for what? Then the sacrifices that people are experiencing now would have been worth something. 

If only we could agree that during the next moment of insanity, we will acknowledge its insanity and do things that have lasting significance and value, works that reflect our time. Maybe Dada Capitalism could be the next movement (an aside… this is what comes up on Google for "Dada Capitalism")? 

Instead of absorbing into itself, a Dada Capitalist architecture would look out into the world, creating architecture fiction, a term that Bruce Sterling coined after reading this brilliant piece on modernism by J. G. Ballard, to suggest that it is possible to write fiction with architecture.  

This is very much like what Robert and I developed for our AUDC studio last fall although sadly were ignorant of the theoretical work by Sterling and Ballard at the time. It might have explained what we were up to for our students although our approach was to turn not so much to science fiction as to ecstatic realism, taking Werner Herzog as our model. In the end, the work wound up being somewhere in between science fiction and documentary film. It'll be up soon, I hope.   

So in the future, lets ditch architect as pseudo-engineered performance, be it for form's sake or for an empty Whole Foods greenness. Instead take risks again, let's make ecstastic architecture and architecture fiction, let's re-imagine the world.

For inspiration, take this nest by Benjamin Verdonck, a Dutch artist. More here, including photos and video of Verdonck living in the nest. The last time I was in the Netherlands, in 2003 or so, there was a sense that the architecture movement of the 1990s was finished. I imagine little has changed since then.

What if the young Dutch architects had pursued something like this? I think they would be leading the way again.