seven for 2007

It’s time to take one last look back at 2007. For AUDC, the Netlab, and myself it was a great year, as AUDC’s Blue Monday hit the bookstores and as the Netlab brought two books—the Infrastructural City: Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles and Networked Publics—to press. The latter contains my conclusion on the Rise of Network Culture, a text that I ambitiously crafted as being one of the first attempts to periodize this moment. The reaction to it has been incredibly favorable and I look forward to seeing what people have to say when it hits print this fall. In other news, the Netlab began working at Columbia’s Studio-X space in Soho as I spent more time blogging on this site than I have in a while.

But what about the wider world? What were the trends that struck me as significant this year in architecture and network culture? This list may strike someone who isn’t familiar with varnelis.net as Borgesian, but remember that the Netlab’s mission is to study the impact of digital technologies together with electronic and social networks on architecture and the city. These developments have a critical impact on the field: how (or whether) we choose to understand them is key.

Many of these are end-game scenarios, but this shouldn’t be surprising if the rise of network culture obsoletes earlier sociocultural forms.

1. The Decline of the City, the Rise of the City

So let’s start with a condition of closure. Nearly every time I go into the city, I lament its passing. In its stead rises a fabulous machine for consumption, a playground for the global élite. Banish any thought that this city is still the place to meet others unlike yourself—Louis Wirth’s great insight that urbanism was first and foremost a way of life. The result is that the global city is, more and more, a metropolitan version of American girl town. But if a lament is necessary, its also the symptom of an aging cultural critic. So let’s not go there. Closure brings new opportunities.

After all, Jean Gottmann re-mapped the city as megalopolis for us back in 1961. Today the suburb, not the inner city, is increasingly the first stopping point for immigrants, a new mixing-ground, the place where a new urbanism is emerging. What new cultural forms will this new city, writ large, produce? France seems ahead of us in this with le Parkour and French Democracy, What else might be out there?

2. The End of Privacy

Speaking of end-game scenarios, how about the utter and complete decline of privacy in our lives? We live in a world worthy of Orwell, in which every action in our lives is increasingly transparent while the government operates in a state of exception, shrouded in mystery, operating a war without end. Nor is this only a question of the individual’s relationship to the state. With the rise of social networking sites and blogs, the boundaries between public and the private are blurred. Make no mistake, this transition is as great as that from the bourgeois public sphere to the age of mass media and will have similar architectural implications. If transparency was one of the foundational principles of modernism and if it remains so in our own architecture, what of it when, like modernization, it is no longer a goal but a default condition?

3. The Return of Big Computing

How is all that information that we are leaving behind being processed? What does it mean that social networking sites pull our attention away from PCs and onto massive, centralized sites? How about the rise of networked applications such as Google docs together with online mail storage? Key software publishers such as such as Adobe suggest that in the near future they will be switching, at least in part, to an on-demand model of software in which users rent applications from on-line sources. One of the hottest trends in web browser development in 2007 was the rise of Site-Specific Browsers.

The result is the emergence of vast server farms and the erosion of the decentralized model of networked computation. Late Fordist computing was big and centralized around mainframes while digital culture focussed on the discreet PC. In its first phase, network culture promised a peer-to-peer model even if it never delivered that, but now this is giving way to big computing.

If so, what are the implications for urbanism? Remember that the growth of the global city has in many ways been the product of its role as a command-and-control center in flows of information and capital. This has been made possible by the decentralized model of large telecom hotels located near key financial centers. But if more centralized than the distributed model that the Californian ideology promised—and thereby ideal platforms for surveillance—telecom hotels still consisted of a multiplicity of individual servers. These too are likely to be replaced by cloud computing, in which virtual servers will be rented from the big players like Amazon or Google. The result is the impending end of the telecom hotel and the rise of utility computing in its stead. Utility computing isn’t a bad name for what this new model will be like. Demanding vast amounts of space and power of these server farms will likely be located far from city cores in places like the Dalles, Oregon.

Coupled with new technologies for bringing the net to the home or office—for example, Verizon FiOS—that are being deployed first in suburbs instead of in cities, the computational drive toward urban centralization may be fading.

One consequence could be that we’ll see a lot of the "creative industries" going suburban to take advantage of faster online speeds, lower rents, and a less exhausted urban condition over the next half decade.

4. Systems not Sites

2008 is the Web’s fifteenth anniversary. But the old Web is dead. We just don’t build Web sites from HTML anymore. If you have a site, it’s run by a content management system. Now some backwards sites still rely on Flash, but they’re easy to identify: they haven’t been updated in two years. Instead, most sites that people I know operate or own are either built on Open Source database-driven systems based on modularity and interoperability or hosted on server farms.

Could there be any connection here at all to architecture? Well, if our virtual spaces operate on such principles, why are our real spaces still based on handicraft, low-quality labor, and thoroughly proprietary (the more so, the more "advanced" they purport to be)?

Sure, scripting is all the rage now (having taken over from parametrics), but for the most part this has aimed at producing "cool" design without taking any responsibility for it. Nothing new about that since Eisenman’s House series in the early 1970s. Is there any chance that architecture can figure out network culture before its shown the door?

5. Goodbye, Bilbao

On a related note, one of the most pernicious influences in architecture over the last decade has been the Bilbao-effect, the idea that architecture could effect urban change simply by looking cool.

Sure, it worked for Bilbao—maybe everybody was just so shocked by Gehry’s only decent building in thirty years—but 2007 was the year in which it became clear that this idea was thoroughly played out. Just who is going to go to Toledo to see SANAA’s Glass Pavilion, let alone Roanoke to see Randall Stout’s Art Museum of Western Virginia?

There’s no question that the Bilbao-Effect has been bad for architecture, validating long-obsolete practices and putting the focus on visibility precisely at a moment when invisibility should have been the focus. Take scripting again, its painfully retardataire, obsessing with form rather than program.

Remember the 1960s, when Philip Johnson museums sprouted everywhere from Utica to Lincoln, Nebraska? Or the 1980s, when every city thought it needed a stadium and convention center to attract businesses until Richard Florida encouraged them to think what that they really needed was an art museum and a gay district?

So too, this fad will pass. Watch the Bilbao-Effect take on water as the real estate bust continues into the next year and begins to negatively affect tax rolls. Architects better make sure they’re not so thoroughly identified with cool form that the discipline suffers heavy damage. After all, the alliance of big architecture, big business, and big government has gone awry once twice—in 1929 and 1968—and it nearly meant the end of the discipline the second time.

[Interesting historical note: 1968 – 1929 = 38. 2007 – 1968 = 38. Meaningless no doubt, unless perhaps you believe in Kondratieff waves but interesting to think about how when we refer to 1968 as our formative cultural moment, we are referring to something as distant in time from us as Black Friday was from 68.]

6. The Bust

Which bring us to… the bust in residential real estate. Like the Economist, I have been predicting this for a while and it’s finally here. And like anything that’s been around too long, the boom bred all sorts of badness as it lasted too long. As a consequence, it may well be harder to pull out of this one than it was to pull out of the great recession of the early 1990s.

It’s going to be tricky for the profession not to take on heavy damage in the next year, even with China and Dubai (themselves not very stable propositions) offering work to many. I hope everyone has their paper architecture skills honed. For a short time, at least, paper architecture could be a good thing. The boom has been going for so long that its exhausted the profession thoroughly.

Take Rem, for example, I suppose it’s nice that he’s building the CCTV tower and all, but during the 1990s he was one of the great thinkers in the field. He hasn’t had anything interesting to say since Junkspace and that was pre-9/11 and while Porto was certainly a great building to visit, what happened to immensely intelligent urban plans like Melun-Senart or Yokohama? I was talking to one colleague. In his view, this was no surprise. Rem is going to be able to collect social security a year from now and he’s said everything he would ever say. Could be. But there are plenty of thinkers who do great works in their sixties, unless of course they’re off chasing their retirement dollars in China and Dubai. And Rem is only one example. Architecture needs practice from time to time to thrive, remember when Praxis (a journal I greatly admire) was founded as a counter to the world of paper architecture and bad theory? But architecture needs down time too and its state of continuous partial attention is, well, increasingly irritating and pointless. The same can be said of culture as a whole. Let’s have a good recession and get some good music and art out of it for a change, ok?

7. The iPhone

It’s hard to deny the impact of the iPhone. Even with all of its faults—the most awful network in the country, a locked-down interface, and an interface that has its quirks, such as no cut and paste—its a remarkable achievement. For now it unites the iPod and the cell phone, but what’s more interesting is that the iPhone is roughly as powerful as a 2002 vintage iMac.

Nor is it unimportant that even as Apple and AT&T proved themselves to be part of the old economy, locking down the platform not just once but repeatedly, a guerilla army of developers successfully broke Apple’s code. Among the programs already available for the iPhone are a Last.FM scrobbler, Navzon’s simulated-GPS locator that works by triangulating your distance from cell phone towers, and a program that uploads photographs you take immediately to Flickr.

Hundreds of thousands (and just possibly over a million) users have jailbroken their phones, downloading programs onto them and something like one in six went a step further to unlock them to use non-AT&T SIMs. For comparison’s sake, Apple only sold 4 million iPhones. This means that hacking firmware is no longer only for the elite anymore. If you haven’t done so yet, it’s easy… just click this naughty link. Whether Apple gave in or whether this was their canny intention all along, they are releasing a developer kit and opening the iPhone for third-party applications in February.

If Apple opens up the iPhone enough and if Navizon allows hooks into their system from other applications, then the era of mass locative media will be upon us very rapidly in 2008. And if that doesn’t happen, then the upcoming Google Phone likely will do that too.

But in this interesting post, Chris Messina suggests that there’s something disappointing about this situation. Messina, an advocate of web-based applications, suggests that the iPhone could have been the first real web-driven platform. Now I think there is something interesting here since web apps are in many ways easier to code for (at least for me). There are rumors that the next iPhone update will allow Safari bookmarks to be saved as icons on the iPhone, something that relegated web apps to second-class citizens thus far. If, I differ with Messina in thinking that a forced march into web apps was a bad idea and if I’ve suggested that there are problems with the web apps model (see #3 above), there is potential here that could be exploited. Of course, I’ve also said things about web apps in item #3, so exercise some degree of caution as you throw away the CDs for your software.

Alright, enough of 2007. More than half of its last day has passed. Time to pay my final bills of the year, grade my final essays of the year and hope that the former will be smaller, the latter much better in 2008. Stay tuned tomorrow for a surprise or two on the blog.

No doubt there’s much more to say about this past year. As always, I’d love to hear about it. Comment away.

Read more

on architecture’s relationship to the city

So I am listening to a particularly beautiful version of one of a songs by my favorite band, Underworld (Rick’s Down Ambient Mix of Born Slippy.nuxx to be precise) and began the usual Internet-dérive, drifiting about to look at different things on the net. 

I ran across this description of how Karl Hyde comes up with his lyrics. Underworld’s lyrics are, in a certain sense meaningless. Trying to find what the words mean will generally result in madness, but in fact they are out to convey affect, in the case of Born Slippy.nuxx, to get across the feeling of being completely plastered, reduced, as Karl says, to a piece of meat and absorbing little snapshots of the city. An excerpt:

Where do you get the inspiration for your lyrics from, Karl?

For me, there is an inherent beauty in the city. I see the city as a very very beautiful place. Even the underside of it. There’s a beauty even in the kind of… the forceful presentation of something. As long as it’s meant with no malice or anger or violence, there’s a beauty in its energy.

What is ‘Born Slippy’ – a dream? A dream come true? Or is it your view of reality?

In the simplest form, it’s me walking through the streets of Soho trying to get back home to Romford in Essex. I was referring to myself reduced to a piece of meat, due to the fact that I’d drunk too much. The bigger story is that I’m fascinated by the kind of snapshots that one retains when you’ve had a couple of drinks. These kind of very precise snapshots one has of a little piece of street, or of a rubbish bin, or of a tape-recorder… I’m talking about being like a hoover, hoovering up all the images and the sounds and the smells of the city. Because after all it’s cities that would inspire me.

But that gets me to why I’m writing this…of all the arts architecture is unique in that it seems largely unable to embrace the world as found. Instead, captivated by luxurious finishes and new materials, this field seems to be stuck in the creation of utopian fantasies best suited for Wallpaper* magazine. Now I don’t want to retread the well-worn ground of everyday urbanism, which set out not to recapture the as found as much as to find the beauty in the everyday, the little miracles. Instead, I want to ask if there is any way to capture the roughness of the street just at the moments in which it seems to be leaving us…

Certainly AUDC is interested in these qualities, but we aren’t out to build are we? What about the New Brutalism? What about some of Venturi’s best work (e. g. the Lieb House)? The Gehry House? Or is polish (real or phenomenological) mandatory for architects today? 

 

Read more

merry christmas 2007

It wouldn’t be Christmas in 1970s Chicago without the following slightly disturbing video:

Wishing all of you a Merry Christmas.

Read more

Categories Uncategorized

out with the old

Design cycles faster and faster these days. See the New York Times for Flash in the Can: Designs Soon Forgotten. If you have a wall for of antlers or resin deer heads, trade it in quick, or be as hip as a proud owner of a Michael Graves teapot in the supermodern era.

Which begs the question, how can architecture continue to avoid fashion? To be sure, there are mini-fashions, but the blob remains with us a decade after its rightful death. And what is parametric design, after all, then the newest version of Bucky-Fuller-speak? Has architecture even caught up with what I wrote about fashion back in 2001? Maybe instead of less fashion, we need more fashion? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this…

Read more

Goodbye to the Mall

Remember mall studies the part of the cultural studies movement in academia? Like so many things studied in the academy, it turns out that the Owl of Minerva spread her wings at dusk yet again.

This week’s Economist carries a lengthy story on the end of the indoor shopping mall. The Economist reflects on Victor Gruen’s role in the creation of the mall and suggests that malls are dead, offering the rather surprising statistic that there will be not one new indoor mall constructed in the country before 2009 at the earliest (in comparison to some 1,104 malls in existence in 2006, a year that saw the construction of only one mall…for the source, see the Mercer Business article below). Instead, it’s open-air urban lifestyle centers like the Grove that rule the new retail landscape.

The Economist draws the rather surprising conclusion that the mall has failed because of social issues, that the integration of the suburbs and the emergence of the mall as a hang-out place killed it. I’m not so sure about the former. Los Angeles’s Beverly Center seems to be thriving even though it attracts a racially diverse crowd and the Grove is far from lilly-white itself (what mall in Los Angeles could be?).

Another article on the future of shopping from Mercer Business suggests that shoppers no longer have the time to spend that the shopping mall required. In that article, Mercer suggests that shoppers are going for open-air power centers in which they can park directly in front of the store they want—for example, a Home Depot, Old Navy, or Wal-Mart—and then head in on a targeted mission. Once they’re lured in, however, customers take advantage of the center by visiting the other stores and restaurants. Still, this is on their own terms. Gruen’s shopping malls forced customers past stores and hoped to draw them in. With leisure time radically reduced since the 1950s, the shopping mall was doomed.

But how long will the power center last? As anyone driving around today will tell you, the problem with all of these places is parking and getting there. Moreover, the new omni-consumer who uses technology for shopping advice relies on networking technology to shop. Maybe cell phones will come to support this, but I wonder if we aren’t rapidly moving toward a two-tier system of shopping: commodity shopping that is handled online where consumers can search for the best product at the best price using online guides and specialty shopping for items that require highly-trained sales staff (Carlos, my incredible salesman at Barney’s in Los Angeles, for example)?

Read more

a present for the windows users

If you are running Windows and you haven’t enabled ClearType, consider this my Christmas present to you.

Go here to greatly improve your Windows experience.

Read more

Categories Uncategorized

site updates

I’ve made some behind-the-scenes changes today that I hope will make varnelis.net load faster and tweaked the css a little bit. If you encounter trouble as a result, please let me know!

With the New Year on us, it’ll be time for some pretty major changes to the site. We’ll see what you think, but I am happy with the way they look.

Read more

the coming storm in dubai

On the way back from Limerick, I did two things Dubai-related. First, I wound up helping a fellow returning from Dubai find his way around the JFK AirTrain. We talked a bit about that fabled city (cue descriptions of long-vanished cities from  One Thousand and One Nights) and he mentioned that 3/4 of the world’s cranes were now there. Later, on the way back to Montclair, I picked up a copy of the Wall Street Journal’s business section that someone had left behind on the New Jersey Transit train. More on Dubai. It seems that the massive construction is coming just as the city-state’s flow of oil has started to dwindle. Moreover, in comparison to the other states around it, at least, Dubai is undertaking some fairly massive debt financing. The article, together with a debate about it at the skyscraperpage’s forum.

Read more

clustering silicon valley

I’m back from a trip to see my parents in Vilnius where I had the opportunity to visit a great new project by Valdas Ozarinskas, one of the most interesting conceptual architects working today at the Contemporary Art Centre and from Limerick, where I was delighted to see three years of student work at the University of Limerick coming together nicely. So I’m a little behind with blogging, but hope to redeem myself over the holiday period.

This week the New York Times ran an article on the emerging industrial microclusters in Silicon Valley. Concentrations of engineers specializing in a technology, such as networks, form microclusters within the Bay Area, generally anchored by a large corporation such as Cisco, Google, or Intel. Thus, a new corporation would inevitably form in that same area. Moreover, shared ethnicity as well as contacts built up in universities such as Stanford, facilitate communication between engineers.

I’m fascinated by how narrow and focused such cases of clustering can be, to the point that identity becomes  the product of one’s context more than anything else. What are the architectural possibilties (and limits) in this?

Read more

the techno-utility complex or, the end of the distributed

I’m en route to Vilnius for the weekend and then to Limerick for final reviews but I thought I’d still manage to get a blog entry in. It’s a recurring theme of mine that the notion that the Internet is a distributed entity in which nodes communicate in a non-hierarchical manner is largely a matter of ideology. Still, take a look "Red Shift Meets Event Horizon" by Phil Waineright and "The Techno-Utility Complex" by Nicholas Carr. Boarding is in a few minutes so I don’t have time to recount the entire argument now (well, I tried and stupidly I closed the window, losing the text). We’re moving rapidly toward greater consolidation at the level of data centers.

What implications does this have for privacy and surveillance? For cities (remember that the emergence of the contemporary data center went hand-in-hand with the development of the global city…and, correct me if I’m wrong, but these new data will  largely be located outside of urban conditions)? For regions (what does physical and telematic distance from these data centers mean, what does it mean if a country doesn’t have access to them)?

Read more