network architecture
network cities
network culture
columbia
netlab network culture studio review tomorrow
The Network Architecture Lab for fall 2007 invites you to our review tomorrow, from 2 to 6 in room 114 of Avery Hall at Columbia University.
This review is based on the model of the gallery. Students will display work in a variety of media—image, model, and text—but will present it primarily through brief videos that hopefully will be completed and uploaded to the Internet tonight. Videos willl also be shown alongside finished work in the review. Students will be available to discuss the work in the review. At 4.30 we will hold a round table discussion that we hope you can attend to talk about the trajectory of the work as a whole.
Review brief below:
Since the Renaissance, architecture has responded to new sociocultural eras (the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, modernity, postmodernity) with utopian and dystopian schemes (ideal cities, Piranesi’s Carceri and Campo Marzio plan, Boullee’s visionary architecture, Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse, Sant ‘Elia’s Città Nuova, Hugh Ferriss’s Metropolis of To-Morrow, Hilberseimer’s Metropolis, Archigram’s Walking City, Archizoom’s No-Stop-City, Rossi and Scolari’s drawings, Koolhaas’s Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture, City of the Captive Globe, Lebbeus Woods’s visions, and so on). Such fantasies have not only served to advance the discipline, they are a means by which architecture can research, analyze, and investigate society.
It is the Netlab’s contention that we are living in a new era defined by the network. During the last fifteen years, the Internet has joined us together and gone wireless; computing has become mobile while applications are increasingly network-based; the mobile phone has become the world’s most successful gadget; virtually any form of publication has become available to virtually everyone. But these technological changes are only part of a broader shift in society. If in Fordist modernity the individual was located in a hierarchical system and in post-Fordist post-Modernism the fragmented individual was in a system of flexible production and consumption, today we conceive of ourselves (and are conceived of) as networked dividuals, composed of a myriad of flows of people and things.
By and large, architecture has failed to deliver visionary proposals for this moment. This studio hopes to remedy that situation. Students will respond to our contemporary situation by studying an aspect of network culture in depth and producing schemes based on an exacerbation of that condition that could be utopian, dystopian, or both utopian and dystopian.
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urban models
The below image is courtesy of Mimi Zeiger, I'm at the end with head cocked, listening to Reinhold Martin.
I really have to stop trying to explain AUDC's work in 15 or 20 minutes. It just isn't possible. Other projects may work better as sound bytes, but you do what you can. So, you talk very, very fast.
We are planning a full-fledged launch party for Blue Monday in New York around 15 November. To get on the list, send an email to invitations@audc.org.
Speaking of urban models, Mimi also sent this link… To a very strange xBox commercial.
Xbox 360: Water Balloons
Posted Nov 28, 2005
Anything goes in this all out water balloon fight for the new Xbox 360.
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the city unplugged
On Monday at 6.30, I will be speaking at a Columbia event that looks at the role of urban models in three recent ACTAR publications.
The City Unplugged
Do urban models still exist? Three Columbia authors present three books on (urban) conditions, tales and trajectories that challenge what it means to talk about the "city" today.
Kadambari Baxi, Barnard + Reinhold Martin, GSAPP
Authors of: Multi-National City (ACTAR, 2007)
Daniela Fabricius (M.Arch 03), PennDesign/ Pratt
Author of: 100% Favela (ACTAR, 2007)
Kazys Varnelis, GSAPP
Author of: Blue Monday (ACTAR, 2007)
Moderated by: Michael Kubo, ACTAR
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labor day never ends
I'm exhausted.
I've been tired for days since returning from my vacation, but it's a good tired, the product of a burst of intense work as Leah Meisterlin (my amazing intern, working on the book's maps) and I continue to chip away at the Infrastructural City for ACTAR. Alas, it looks like it won't be on anyone's Christmas lists, but it's shaping up to be a great Valentine's Day present.
Today, I had an opportunity to present the Network Culture studio at school.
I had hoped to show one of favorite videos today, but alas Vista wasn't up to snuff. For anyone who witnessed it and still needs to see the video, here is the human slingshot in full glory.
Two things interest me about this video. First, that this is what you might do in a culture of relative affluence and total boredom and second, that this kind of YouTube production is a successor to reality TV.
While I'm posting youtube videos, I discovered this the other day on Underworld Live
I am really excited about seeing Underworld in Central Park next Friday, although a little sad too, since I would have enjoyed them at the Hollywood Bowl. I've never seen them, and I've pretty much listened to nothing else for years... (not kidding).
Oh and the underworldlive site? It looks like a blog, but it's not. The top posts seem to disappear. (compare with google cache while it is still there) What kind of site is it if it isn't a blog then? Interesting...
Regarding that post… The videos is of a Schneider TM song. Underworld recalls hearing Schneider TM on John Peel's farewell show. That brings up a string of memories for me. In studio presentation, I showed the following image:
(click on the image to read the text)
Even though I've come relatively late to the impact of computation on architecture (just what was I thinking until 2003?), I have always been fascinated by digital technology and by the Internet.
I must have first accessed a network (Tymnet) in 1982 or 1983, 25 years ago. My first encounter with email would have been in 1983 or 1984 in an army sponsored high school program called CRESS at North Carolina State University (incredibly enough, enshrined in an archive here). By 1990, I kept in touch with some of my friends via email and used FTP and USENET daily at Cornell's University libraries. I remember the day when I first accessed a site overseas, it was in Finland and thought how strange it was that somehow a hard disk was being according to my instructions.
What ties this episode of Connections together is that at the same time I had a purchased a shortwave radio to listen to non-U. S. news (again: memories of listening to the ouster of Gorbachev immediately just two weeks after my first visit to Lithuania and being terrified that it would all end badly and listening to the first Gulf War because NPR was just far too in favor of it, as usual) and had discovered John Peel and his incredible radio show. Even with all the interference, this was a little hint of the up side of the globalized world we would soon live in, as well as the immense richness of the Long Tail. After a hack that I shouldn't have made, the shortwave radio never worked right again and, in any event, the Internet had captured my interest.
I should have gone back to John Peel after he was on the net, but I was preoccupied with other things. Stupid.
Still, two things to carry away from this long post…
1) Although it can be very difficult to tell at the time, your world already contains the future within it.
2) Here's to John.
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the city unplugged
Along with Kadambari Baxi, Reinhold Martin, and Daniela Fabricius, I will be speaking at The City Unplugged, a book launch event at the Columbia GSAPP on October 15. (for Blue Monday, Multinational City, and Informal, all ACTAR publications). Michael Kubo, of ACTAR, will moderate. Together, we will be addressing the question "Do Urban Models Still Exist?" It'll be a great privilege to share the stage with these authors, who I greatly admire.
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Sighted at Columbia
Sited at Columbia's spring 2007 exhibit a couple of weeks ago.
With all due respect to all the fabulous work we saw there, ACTAR's Michael Kubo and I agreed that this was the single most memorable image.
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Network City 2007
Besides running the Netlab this spring at Columbia, I will be teaching my Network City course there as well. I taught this class for years at SCI_Arc and am excited about updating it for Columbia. Lots of new ideas, from a retooled syllabus that will feature more material on the megalopolis of the Northeast seaboard to, just possibly, podcasts.
Click here for the syllabus.
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NetLab Logistics Studio Exhibit, 8 December, 12-6
The NetLab's first studio at Columbia's GSAPP concludes this Friday with an exhibit in 200 Buell Hall from 12-6. Students will be presenting pamphlets they have designed. The topic of the research studio was to explore a logistical network in considerable depth. The studio brief is located here. A roundtable discussion will be held at 4pm followed by a reception. All are welcome.
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david reinfurt
David Reinfurt of O R G and Dexster Sinister came in to talk to my seminar on the Architecture Machine Group today to discuss his work with the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT and his research on designer Muriel Cooper, the first designer for MIT press and the Founder of the Visible Language Workshop at the MIT Media Lab. Cooper is responsible for the MIT Logo as well as for the first edition of Learning for Las Vegas among many other projects. All of the preceding links go to David's work and are well worth following up.
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