Hot off the presses, my new article "The Architecture of Hertzian Space" has just appeared in issue 2008:5 of A+U. It's my first time in A+U and I am absolutely delighted that it's the lead article. 

Above, Osman and Omar Khan's fantastic project "Fruits of Our Labor," which I discuss in the article.

The New York Times reports on a McKinsey & Co report that the greenhouse gases emitted to power data centers are becoming a major source of global warming. By 2020, McKinsey suggests, data centers will surpass the airline industry in that respect. 

Meanwhile, scientist James Lovelock, the inventor of the Gaia hypothesis, suggests that ethical consumerism and current green industry practices will do nothing to delay the inevitable world-changing climate and that this will occur by 2020 if we're lucky. 

And so, the real may yet be surpassed by the virtual, only not in the way that we always thought...

I'm behind again. The Infrastructural City is back in my lap for more finishing touches on the design so I've been working on that fiercely. One day you'll forgive me. I've also been working on new plans, which will be announced in detail here soon. Interested in a research-based internship on telecommunications and urban life over the summer?* Contact me. 

A week ago the New York Times carried this lengthy article "Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty?" focusing on Nokia researcher Jan Chipchase. Jan certainly seems like a fascinating figure doing real important work and I'd love to meet him one day. If you haven't read the article, go do so, now. 

The article also points toward a question I've been wanting to raise for a while: why is anthropology such a dominant model for apprehending contemporary culture? To be sure, anthropologists have long been an avant-garde of research, going out to study the unknown, their work sometimes applied for imperialist or corporate purposes. Anthropology's focus on the individual has also led to a political concern with preserving existing ways of life against the encroachments of top-down power and toward supporting everyday culture. More recently, anthropology has informed some of the best work in science and technology studies, demonstrating the radical transformations in life that are taking place today.

But anthropology is only one mode of understanding behavior and societal change. Sociology is another and has reacted in its own way, most notably by developing social network theory to deal with the vast changes in interpersonal relationships happening as these are maintained beyond simple propinquity.

What of history? To return to last week's theme, why is it that historians have ceded their need to understand the contemporary world to other disciplines? Where is the historiographic innovation needed to understand the contemporary? When will we begin the work on the theories of history necessary for understanding our world?  

This is not a complaint against other disciplines but rather one against my own. Other fields have responded to the changes in the world around us. History is a laggard.

For all of its departures from traditional method, Blue Monday was a first attempt to deal with these conditions from a historical perspective. Watch this space for more. 

* Disclaimer: Academe, I'm afraid, is a bit of a Franciscan venture or at least such has been my experience. Alas, we don't have any funding, but working at Studio-X is certainly cheaper than going to school and unlike a typical architect's office, I give my interns full credit on work they do and a lot of independence.

Last fall Mark Jarzombek sent me his Anti-Pragmatic Manifesto. To me the most critical passage of that insightful piece read as follows:

I predict a new fascination with carelessness, a new tolerance for “whatever” in a “whatever generation” - an architecture that prides itself on neither history nor theory, to put it bluntly. This generation will take over the mantel of the “avant-garde,” and demand that it vacuate itself of purpose and thought.  

At the time Mark asked if I might respond with my own assessment of the status of the discipline of history in architecture. It's been all too long, but here goes. 

I wish I could somehow be optimistic about the state of history, but I'm afraid that I can't be. History is already in a dire condition in the discipline and, as Mark suggests above, may soon wind up even worse off. 

So much of network culture seems to involve the shutting down of institutions created in the Enlightenment: the public sphere seems to have transformed into micro-clusters and micro-constituencies, newspapers are in free-fall collapse, the novel is giving way to a new fascination with realism, traditional markers of distinction seem obsolete. Perhaps then it should be no different for history.

Especially after Hegel, history operated under the principle of historicism, suggesting that an understanding of the past could be a guide for the present day. Whatever we may think about its problems, this gave a purpose to history writing (Manfredo Tafuri referred to this as "operative criticism"), making history vital and real for generations. For architects, key texts such as Nikolaus Pevsner's Pioneers of the Modern Movement or Siegfried Giedion's Space, Time, and Architecture grounded the present in the past.

Teleological in nature, such texts came under justifiable criticism from younger scholars, often bringing with them the anti-historicist methods developed by Karl Popper. But a second, perhaps more modernist meaning to historicism saved history at this point. This new history pointed to the past to suggest appropriate ways of operating within one's own time. Thus, the work of Palladio would be valued as an example of an architect who engaged with the forces around him and wrestled his structures out of that condition while the work of the Futurists could be resurrected in order to prove how banal modernism had become.

This form of historicism had an enemy: postmodernism. When I first went to school, the best historians argued that their work was a bulwark against postmodernism, that a modern approach was still the only appropriate response to the time. Postmodernism, which merely revived antiquated forms, was nothing more than a zombie form of architecture, misunderstanding the work of earlier architects, misusing it, and thereby threatening the legitimacy of the discipline. 

Soon after came the theory wars. As some theorists argued that history was outdated, now the best historians (Mark among them) argued that theory and history were deeply intertwined and that one should both historicize theory and theorize history. Slowly, history and theory reached a rapprochement.

Alas, this was just in time for the rise of computation. In a prescient text in 1992 entitled "Has Theory Displaced History as a Generator of Ideas for Use in the Architectural Studio, or (More Importantly), Why Do Studio Critics Continuously Displace Service Course Specialists?" Stanley Tigerman predicted that as architects began to dabble in history (as a consequence of postmodernism) and, thereafter theory, specialists in history and theory would be displaced from architectural education by more flexible personas who could also teach studio and the all-important new service courses in digital technologies.  

As this happened, historians began to reintrench into their own professional roles. Newly read in critical theory and particularly concerned about the dangers of operative criticism (as this of course could be so easily replaced by practitioners dabbling in theory). Thus empowered, historians turned back to the old process of academic distinction and discipline. No longer would history make pronouncements about the present. Instead, as Ph.D. programs were founded left and right (just what people would do with all these dissertations is a mystery to this writer, who sat jobless for two years in the mid-90s…maybe two or three programs are necessary at most in the entire country), historians turned toward research that would often be tangentially relevant. The handful of historians who did otherwise, can, I'm afraid, be counted on just a few fingers. 

Having turned to purposeful irrelevance, history now finds itself facing death by a thousands cuts. One course here, one course there. As the demands of accreditation grow, history slowly finds itself squeezed into a narrower and narrower slot in the curriculum. 

Simply put, this is a disaster. Our time would make the most bold of Futurists proud. We have little capacity for understanding historically anymore or even for understanding how others understood their times and reacted to their histories. 

I recently asked a historian about why we don't periodize anymore, he basically laughed at me, suggesting that I was naive for asking such a dumb question…after all, we all know periodization is bad, right. But is it? Mark calls for a reinvigoration of a Utopian imagination in architecture. Well what about a similar spirit in history? How about putting away our microhistories for a minute and making broad claims about culture, not just in the past, but today?

I recently observed that there were no more common texts in architecture. Ibelings' Supermodernism was the last one. And if the students and I found flaws in his argument sitting around the table in seminars at SCI_Arc (wasn't that our job after all?), we still recognized it as keenly intelligent, an attempt to explain the architecture and urbanism of that day historically. Operative criticism it was, but it was still a crucial historical argument, a signpost in a foggy field. And if it is outmoded today due to developments in telecommunications, that's fine too. Such is the nature of these kind of projects.

But wait, there are no more signposts in our foggy field. Just fog. And we continue to hurtle through it at breakneck speed. This is not a good condition and with the building boom about to implode, we seem likely to run into a massive pile of debris.  

So let's be naïve. Let's risk our careers. Let's make broad, sweeping observations. Let's make mistakes. Historians need to think big. They need to take stances and even condemn where such a condemnation is due. 

The alternative is more and more about less and less, until finally the accreditors and the administrators pull the plug on our life support system. And at that point, it seems to me, they will have done the right thing.  

At the New York Review of Books, Nicholson Baker examines the Charms of Wikipedia and raises concerns not about spurious information—something easily corrected—but about the deletion of entire articles by various individuals and groups. 

One month ago, I announced that I'd re-introduce the Networked Publics book to my readers, chapter by chapter. In the meantime I've been hard at work on that book, the Johnson Tapes, and the Infrastructural City. Networked Publics achieved another milestone yesterday as MIT finished my corrections to the copy edits that they made to the text. So far, my experience with the press has been stellar. I'm a big fan. 

Today I'd like to turn to the text that Anne Friedberg and I co-wrote on Place. To introduce it, I'd like to recall a conversation I had with Mark Shepard last night. Mark is a brilliant professor with a joint appointment in architecture and media studies at the University of Buffalo. His Tactical Sound Garden is an amazing project that employs locative media while it avoids the kind of heavy-handed instrumentalism that so many locative media projects embrace (aside: I really hope it gets realized for a broad audience with the opening up of the iPhone SDK). Curiously, Mark and I were in architecture school together at Cornell, sitting two desks away from each other. But circumstances are just that, the milieu certainly did little encourage us in this direction, unless perhaps it provoked a counter-reaction.

In any event, Mark clarified my own framework to me when he suggested that the model of network culture that Anne and I lay out in the Place chapter of Networked Publics is spatially distinct from the one that Jameson lays out in Postmodernism, or the Logic of Late Capitalism. In that model, which was so crucial for us for so long, Jameson takes the Bonaventure hotel as his rhetorical object. Jameson sees the hotel's notorious interior as an analog to postmodern hyperspace, its bilaterally symmetrical interior simple in plan but impossible to navigate in reality. For Jameson, this condition represents the postmodern entanglement of the subject in a system that has no exterior, a system that the subject can no longer take an outside vantage point in order to map. But this is still a Euclidean space. Being inside it is the reason the subject can't map it. In contrast, Mark noted that the condition of spatiality that Anne and I describe is entirely different. In this model (even if this is an AUDC project and goes unmentioned in the Place chapter), my rhetorical object is One Wilshire (which has indeed been as important to me as the Bonaventure was for Jameson), a structure that seemingly defines in one plane but in fact defines many superimposed simultaneous environments. 

So, Mark pointed out, at the very core of Jameson's theory, we find a condition that is very different from ours. To be sure, we'll continue mapping, something I suggest in this essay, but placefinding is going to be a very different thing indeed under network culture. 

All that said, there have been some revisions to the text in the last iteration and I'm quite happy with the chapter and the voice that Anne and I developed during our year at Networked Publics. See here for Place.  

As the years have passed, many of the ideas that I felt were obvious before they existed (the Web, e-mail for everyone, content management systems, networked attached storage devices, iPhone, etc.) have become commonplace. So what is it that I think needs to exist today? What bugs me about the digital world today? 

Well, one of the things that bugs me is that we are still living in a very primitive world as far as access to the Internet goes. Why can't I send an e-mail message to a place (e.g. who's at the Studio-X labs…is anything planned for today?) Why can't I see the headlines from the newspaper without opening my laptop? How about streaming a podcast? 

If the AppleTV wants to be a modern day VHS player, I want a modern day kitchen radio. The Internet of Things isn't just going to consist of pigeons that blog your car ratting on you about the driving conditions its been driven under or refrigerators talking to toasters, it's also going to have to involve a lot more ways of accessing content that we're traditionally accustomed to getting on the PC. The iPhone, but even more importantly, the iPod Touch, are steps in that direction.

And now there's Chumby, which goes a good deal further as an information appliance. I'm not so convinced about the styling of the device or the interface. I'm not even sure that Chumby has got it right enough to succeed. After all, before the iPhone was the Treo and before Treo was Kyocera and before Kyocera Smartphone was Qualcomm. But I am sure that soon enough someone will figure, even if it takes a half decade. 

The last few years have been a whirlwind of projects. This week, I deliver to MIT Press  the final copy edits of the Networked Publics book, which they will print this fall. 

I want to turn to this project for a while so let's start with the inside scoop about the book. It came about as the product of a theme year at the Annenberg Center for Communication at USC. Initially, when I was brought on as a senior fellow, it was to coordinate a group of a dozen or so fellows, build and manage a group blog and write a book based on my Network City work.

With a new director at the Center, however, the rules of the game changed and we were asked to deliver some kind of joint product. After much deliberation, the group came to the conclusion that only a book project could rivet our attention enough. We divided up into four groups, each one devoted to one issue: Place, Culture, Politics, and Infrastructure. In turn, each group worked collaboratively, using social software such as Writely (now Google Docs) to produce the texts. As the leaders of the group, Mimi Ito and I framed the texts with an introduction and conclusion respectively. 

Initially our ambitions were pretty humble. How could you take such a diverse group and create a coherent whole out of it? Since all of us were treading in the heady realm of interdisciplinarity, we all felt like fish out of water that year. I barely talked about architecture in 2005-2006 at all. Could we pull it off? If we did, could the book be anything more than an introduction to the material?

As the texts got finished, ambitions on all of our parts began to rise. After all, the book does have our names on it. My conclusion, it became clear to me, would form the basis of an upcoming book on network culture. In editing the work, I realized how timely and important this project was. Two years after the initial drafting, an eternity today, the book still defines the key issues in network culture and does so incisively. The peer reviews from MIT suggested the same. Of course the reviewers, as good reviewers should, provided comments that necessitated a good deal of rethinking and rewriting this summer. I worked with the chapter editors over the summer and turned in the text last fall. As I complete the final copy edits this week, I am uploading the chapters one at a time to the Networked Publics site. I will be adding some reflections on each text and featuring them on this site. Be aware that some of the texts are not yet updated. 

Over the last few months, I have reworked the Networked Publics site to focus on the content and bring new readers to the book and the blog quickly. It's looking rather nice although I have a bug or two in IE 7 that I still need to squash and I need to bring up the videos from our lecture series as well.

Of course the book will be far easier to read in print form and it will have certain features that don't appear on the Web, such as sidebars by noted thinkers reflecting on issues addressed in the book. If you read the Web site, make sure you buy the book too. Our ability to work with publishers to allow content from books to appear on the Web as well as in print is linked to good sales. If sales takes too much of a hit, presses will invoke more protective models about their property.

So, with that preface, start out today by taking a look at Mimi Ito's introduction to see how she frames the book. More than an introduction to this book, it lays out her models of thinking about the relationship of individuals and media today. For those of you who are architects, this introduction is especially important as it begs the question where is architecture in the ecology of new media? 

Mimi Ito, "Introduction," Networked Publics.

I was delighted to receive a copy of Far From Equilibrium: Essays on Technology and Design Culture, a collection of writings by theorist Sanford Kwinter the other day. A full review is to follow, but the book is an absolutely gorgeous object produced by my current architectural press ACTAR. Its seductive appearance aside, I was struck by how formative Kwinter's work has been in my thinking and in architecture culture as a whole over the last two decades. It's a must-buy.

I'm in Munich for the DLD-Conference, moderating a panel with Richard Saul Wurman, Patrik Schumacher, Charles Renfro and Bjarke Ingels. Yesterday we had the opportunity to visit the Anish Kapoor show at the Haus der Kunst. The intensity of works like his 1999 Yellow struck me. I had never seen these in person before and I was utterly overwhelmed by the power of color. I don't mean this metaphorically, I mean this literally. The color was so intensely saturated that I couldn't look at it for too long and when I looked away, I was still left with the after-effects of the color. It was like staring into the sun. 

This led me to thinking how the Kapoor relates to Network Culture. I am spending more time expanding on the argument in that essay this year and, if I had earlier pointed to a fascination with reality, in the form of remix and documentary, as the defining factor of art under Network Culture, how could Kapoor's Yellow fit into my framework? 

First, to mark off certain works as "art", artists under Network Culture are more obsessed than ever with technique. The idea that "I could have done that" is implausible in the best work, such as the salon-painting sized photographs in the incredible "On the Beach" exhibit by Richard Misrach or Kapoor. But more than that, in Kapoor (and indeed, in the abstract photos of that exhibit by Misrach), there is another level of reality introduced: a bodily reality that harkens back to the days of Op Art.

Kapoor is not representing reality, he sets out to control it. You are no longer a viewer looking at a discreet work in this space. In Deleuzean terms, this is affect, beyond representation or subjectivity. Instead, the work's impact is total as it delivers a knock-out punch. Saturation, it seems, is reality.

Should you be at DLD while you are reading this, go see the show which ends tonight. I hope to make it back at 6.30 for a special walk-through. Drop me a line if you intend to see it.