on battle suits

Over at io9.com, Matt Jones writes a blog post entitled “The City is a Battle Suit for Surviving the Future.” It’s a provocative piece, the child of bldgblog (or at least a euphoric interpretation of it) plus Dan Hill’s polemics at the City of Sound and has received a bit of attention in the networked urbanism/urban computing blogosphere of late.

Jones traces a history of visionary future architectures as a means of guiding designers through the proximate future of networked urbanism. The origin point, for Jones’s history, is provided by Archigram, the British visionary architecture group of the 1960s and 1970s and their canniness in exploiting contemporary technology. In particular, he is intrigued by Archigram’s vision of a future in which urban technologies make the city more of an agent in our lives. Jones calls for designers to envision an activated urbanism, shaped by the invisible forces of networked computation.

Now I’ve argued as much myself, see for example my essay years ago in Future City. i’m sympathetic to this call for designers, but let’s back up here for a minute and, as we breathe deeply, put Archigram into its context a little.

Archigram’s work was all too easily instrumentalized by neoliberal ideologues and the corporate world. Take the first major built eruption of high tech, Rogers and Piano’s Centre Pompidou, which Jones cites as a direct descendent of Archigram. Now, it’s hard not to get inspired by Centre Pompidou, just as its hard not to get inspired by Haussmann’s Grands Boulevards or the Paris Opéra. But all are the products of a long war successfully waged against the Paris’s poor and its history. Pompidou was a sop for the destruction of the markets at Les Halles, but it was also the first great exemplar of the ability of architecture to cement a cultural turn in urbanism, e.g. the  Bilbao-Effect, thus insisting that the new Paris was nothing more than a defanged capital of culture. Jean Baudrillard would later call it “an incinerator absorbing all the cultural energy and devouring it…” The structure, he explained, was “a monument of cultural deterrence,” standing in for the disappearance of any culture of meaning, a disappearance that the building didn’t so much usher along as erase (an erasure of an erasure). At the Pompidou, culture became absorbed into the postmodern hypermarket, forever reduced to a flow within the endless circuits of capital, with architecture as a conduit for that flow. The next great monument of high tech was, of course, Rogers’s Lloyd’s of London, the British insurance market where the future, as risk, was traded as a financial instrument.

By the time that ground was broken on the Pompidou, the neo-avant-garde had left high tech far behind and Archigram was being slow-hand-clapped off stages by students who felt more bored than provoked. The Italian radicals Superstudio and Archizoom had displaced Archigram, their ambiguous, immutable, solitary objects countering Archigram’s techno-utopia (to take a term from Felicity Scott). Archigram were fundamentally modernist at heart, eager to see their visions realized in a capitalist utopia but the Italian radicals set out to critique the system, exacerbating its operations in works that were more dystopian than utopian.

Thus, when Jones invokes Warren Ellis’s comic series The Authority to conclude that cities are the best battle suits we have, I wonder if his rhetoric hasn’t revealed this fundamental problem with networked urbanism. Critique is a thing of the past for most of us, as antiquated as Archigram and its earnest modernity might have seemed in the early 1990s. When I began teaching at SCI-Arc, fifteen years ago, slides of Walking City raised chuckles among my students and I would have to explain its historical importance. How times have changed. But the research being done into networked urbanism is tied very closely to industry and even to military operations (how distinct are these under network culture anyway?). As we cheer on the latest (literal) battle suit, do we ask how these technologies will be deployed in the Iraqs and Afghanistans of the future? Or how the devices with which we activate the city control us and allow us to be tracked? Projects that critically interrogate the sentient city, as for example Mark Shepard’s Hertzian Rain does, are precious few.

i’m finishing this post while riding in a bus hurtling through a tunnel under the Hudson and it’s great to have the possibility to do this. But my fear is that some theorists have argued against critique and self-reflection for so long that a new generation doesn’t even have an inkling of how to practice it. I don’t mean we should head back to the early 1990s, but just as intelligent thinkers like Matt Jones can recapture Archigram as a model, I hope that we can recapture critique as well.

PS

Yesterday a blog post inadvertently leaked to the published side of the site. It’ll be back, just as soon as the other 3/4 of the post are written.

Fall 2009 Appearances

Some of my appearances this fall.

September 21. “The Infrastructural City.” With David Fletcher and Ila Berman, The Studio for Urban Projects and SFMOMA Architecture and Design Forum. 6.30pm SFMOMA, San Francisco

October 13. “Network Culture. A Changing Context for Design.” Design Criticism MFA Department, School of Visual Arts, 136 West 21st Street, New York, 2nd floor, 6:00–8:00 p.m.

October 26. Keynote Address, “Pipes and sponges, Reconceptualizing Mobility Infrastructures” IUAV Venice.

October 28. “The Infrastructure of Urban Ecologies” 6.30pm Columbia University, Graduate School of Architecture Planning. 6.30pm

November 20-21. “Infrastructure and the Future: Assessing the Architect’s Role,” School of Architecture, Northeastern University, Boston

I hope to see you at one of these.

Strange Harvest on Infrastructural City

Over at Strange Harvest, Sam Jacobs has a review of the Infrastructural City. The review is great: perceptive as always, Sam gets what we set out to do with the book. Thanks, Sam! In other news, it looks like Amazon will carry the paperback edition for a shade over $20 when it becomes available, making it much more affordable than before, but for some reason the book is still not in stock. Sadly, the infrastructure of books seems to be subject to the same negative conditions we observed in Los Angeles.

Network Culture at Columbia Fall 2009

I will be teaching my course on Network Culture at Columbia this fall in addition to the studio I am teaching. The syllabus is below.

Description
The purpose of this seminar is to come to an advanced historical understanding of our networked age. We will explore how the network is not merely a technology with social ramifications but rather serves as a cultural dominant connecting changes in society, economy, aesthetics, urbanism, and ideology. As a history of the contemporary, the seminar is organized around a series of topics tracing a genealogy of present-day culture.
 
Requirements
Participation: 20%
Each class will consist of a presentation by the instructor on selected themes, followed by an in-depth discussion in seminar. Students are expected to prepare all readings in order to facilitate a discussion in which all students participate. Active participation by all students in each session is required. 
 
Tumblr: 20%
Each student is expected to maintain a tumblelog on tumblr.com and to post at least twice a week. Beyond mere reblogging of information pertinent to the course, the tumblelog will form a record and commentary upon their research during the semester.
 
Curatorial Project: 60%
The term project will be a curatorial project, exploring a cultural topic related to the subject matter with a written and visual component.  
 
Both design and scholarship are integral to the term project. A carefully curated and designed work will be accompanied a 3,500 word essay on the curated material. Plagiarism of any sort will result in immediate failure
 
Reading
There is one textbook. Kazys Varnelis, ed. Networked Publics (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2008).
 
Other readings will be available separately on-line.



 
01
09.11
Introduction
 
Mizuko Ito, “Introduction,” and Kazys Varnelis, “Conclusion: The Meaning of Network Culture,” Networked Publics, 1-13 and 145-163.
 
02
09.18
Network Theory
Manuel Castells, “Informationalism, Networks, and the Network Society: A Theoretical Blueprint. In Castells, ed. The Network Society: A Cross-cultural Perspective (Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2004), 3-45.
 
Albert-László Barabási, “Six Degrees of Separation,” “Small Worlds,” and “Hubs and Connectors,” Linked: The New Science of Networks (Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 2002), 25-63.
 
Nicholas Carr, “From the Many to the Few” The Big Switch: Rewiring the World from Edison to Google (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), 127-149.
 
Optional:
 
Mark S. Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties,” American Journal of Sociology 78 (May 1973), 1360-1380.
 
Duncan J. Watts, “The Connected Age,” Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age, (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003), 19-42.
03
09.25
Freedom and Control
Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on Societies of Control ,” October 59 (Winter 1992), 73-77.
 
Michel Foucault, “Docile Bodies,” Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 135-156.
 
Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, “The Californian Ideology,” https://www.hrc.wmin.ac.uk/theory-californianideology-main.html.
 
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, “Capitalist Sovereignty, Or Administering the Global Society of Control,” Empire (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 325-350.
 
Optional:
 
Alexander R. Galloway, “Physical Media,”Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 29-53.
 
04
10.02
Postmodernism and History after the End of History
 
Jean Baudrillard, “The End of the Millennium or the Countdown,” Economy & Society 26 (1997): 447-55.
 
Jean François Lyotard, “Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?” Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1984), xxiii-xxv.
05
10.09
Postfordism and Postmodernism
 
David Harvey, “Fordism” and “From Fordism to Flexible Accumulation,” in The Condition of Postmodernity, (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1989), 125-172.
 
Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review 146 (July/August 1984): 53-92.
 
Optional:
Hal Foster, “Postmodernism: A Preface,” in Hal Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Townsend, Washington: Bay Press, 1983), ix-xvi.
 
06
10.16
Place, I. Non-Place to Networked Place
 
Kazys Varnelis and Anne Friedberg, “Place: The Networking of Public Space,” Varnelis, ed. Networked Publics (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008), 15-42.
 
Marc Augé, “Prologue” and “From Places to Non-Places,” in Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, (London; New York: Verso, 1995), 1-6. 75-115.
 
Hans Ibelings, “Supermodernism,” Supermodernism (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 1998), 55-102.
 
Kazys Varnelis, interview with Hans Ibelings, to be posted online.
 
Ignasi de Sola-Morales Rubió, “Terrain Vague,” Cynthia Davison, ed. Anyplace (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), 119-123.
 
07
10.16
Place, II. Maps and Things

Kazys Varnelis and Marc Tuters, “Beyond Locative Media: Giving Shape to the Internet of Things,” Leonardo 39, No. 4 (2006): 357–363.

 
Jordan Crandall, “Operational Media,” Ctheory, https://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=441.
 
Bruno Latour, “On Actor Network Theory: A Few Clarifications,” Soziale Welt 47 (1998): 360-81,translated version, https://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9801/msg00019.html.
 
08
10.23
Culture, I. Networked Publics and Cultural Work
 
Adrienne Russell, Mizuko Ito, Todd Richmond, and Marc Tuters, “Culture: Media Convergence and Networked Participation,” Networked Publics, 43-76.
 
Yochai Benkler, “Chapter 1. Introduction: A Moment of Opportunity and Challenge” and “Chapter 4. The Economics of Social Production,” The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 1-28 and 91-127.

Geert Lovink, “Blogging: The Nihilist Impulse,” Eurozine (2007), https://www.eurozine.com/articles/2007-01-02-lovink-en.html

Alan Liu, The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), excerpts.
 
09
10.30
Culture, II. Power Laws and Influence
 
Chris Anderson, “The Long Tail,” Wired, October 2004, https://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html
 
Clay Shirky, “Power Laws, Weblogs and Inequality,” Clay Shirky’s Writings About the Internet. https://www.shirky.com/writings/powerlaw_weblog.html
 
Bill Wausik, “My Crowd. Or Phase 5: A Report from the Inventor of the Flash Mob,” Harper’s Magazine (March 2006), 56-66.
 
Optional
 
Selections from Michael J. Weiss, The Clustered World: How We Live, What We Buy, and What it All Means About Who We Are (New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 1999).
 
Malcolm Gladwell, “The Coolhunt,” New Yorker (March 17, 1997), 78-88, https://www.gladwell.com/1997/1997_03_17_a_cool.htm
 
Grant McCracken, “Who Killed the Coolhunter?” https://www.cultureby.com/trilogy/2006/06/who_killed_the_.html
 
Duncan J. Watts and Peter Sheridan Dodd, “Influentials, Networks, and Public Formation,” Journal of Consumer Research (December 2007), 441-458.
 
10
11.06
Infrastructure
 
François Bar, Walter Baer, Shahram Ghandeharizadeh, and Fernando Ordonez “Infrastructure: Network Neutrality and Network Futures,” in Networked Publics, 109-144.
 
Joseph A .Tainter, “Introduction to Collapse,” The Collapse of Complex Societies, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 1-21.
 
Tom Vanderbilt, “Data Center Overload,” The New York Times (June 8, 2009), https://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/14/magazine/14search-t.html

Nicholas Carr, “World Wide Computer” The Big Switch: Rewiring the World from Edison to Google (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), 107-127.

 
11
11.13
Subjectivity
 
Nicholas Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?,” Atlantic Monthly, July/August 2008, 56-63.
 
Kenneth J. Gergen, “Social Saturation and the Populated Self,” The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 48-80.
 
Brian Holmes, “The Flexible Personality. For a New Cultural Critique,” Transversal, https://transform.eipcp.net/transversal/1106/holmes/en
 
Warren Neidich, “Resistance is Futile,” Artbrain. Journal of Neuroasthetic Theory 4, https://www.artbrain.org/neuroaesthetics/neidich.html.
 
12
11.20
Politics, Urbanism, and Globalization
 
Saskia Sassen, “On Concentration and Centrality in the Global City,” Paul L. Knox and Peter J. Taylor, eds., World Cities in a World-System (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 63-78.
 
Saskia Sassen, “Electronic space and power,” Journal of Urban Technology 4 (1997): 1-17.
 
Stephen Graham, “Communication Grids: Cities and Infrastructure,” in Saskia Sassen, Global Networks. Linked Cities (London: Routledge, 2002), 71-92.
 
13
12.04
Conclusion
 

Evil

AUDC is again teaching a studio at Columbia this fall. This time our topic is evil.

Evil

Advanced Studio V
Fall 2009
Kazys Varnelis
Robert Sumrell
AUDC
Columbia University
Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation

Arguably the entirety of architectural production in the last forty years has been dominated by the problem of complexity. Whether architecture that wears the difficulty of complex programs and requirements of contemporary society on its sleeve, that tries to reduce such complexity by providing a neutral background, or that aims toward resolution through a complex but smooth multiplicity (be it a folded or bloblike), complexity is the main problematic facing architecture since high modernism.

This should come as no surprise. As a political project, modernism ran aground on complexity, its processes of abstraction unable to adequately describe the multifarious conditions of modern culture. Our society may well follow it. As archaeologist Joseph Tainter describes, complexity is a toxic by-product of advanced societies, slowly choking them as it demands such societies invest ever-higher levels of energy to maintain their structures. Our daily experiences with bureaucracy, jammed infrastructure, and failing technology serve as clear evidence of this.

Tainter offers two solutions to the problem of complexity. The first is collapse. Once societies can no longer provide sufficient returns, individuals make the choice to leave the complex society, to “walk away” from it all. As the society sheds layers of complexity, it reverts to a more primitive order. To a minor degree, last year’s stock market crash was an example of that, as society strove for a “reset” against the surreal complexity of financial instruments such as derivatives and credit default swaps. More dramatically, the collapse of the Soviet Union demonstrates a condition where individuals left an intolerable condition en masse. Or in the case of the fall of the Roman Empire, for many of the individuals involved, the collapse seemed to be progress. The second solution is more optimistic and is the one that the majority, but not all, of the members of this school would support: technological innovation. Technologies that allow for greater efficiency or new sources of energy allow complexity to endure, even when it would have produced collapse under an older condition.

But collapse is hardly a model for a studio and endless promises of technological innovation lead to boredom. A third option, perhaps more potent option presents itself: evil.

If one simply does not care about playing by the rules of the game, but only about seizing power to further one’s own ends, it becomes possible to shed layers of complexity and thereby continue society.
The human cost, of course, is quite high, as Mussolini’s quest to get the trains to run on time in Italy demonstrates. Still, with the recent economic success of authoritarian regimes—and the open advocacy of such regimes as clients by notable architects such as OMA—evil is on the table again as an option for architects to pursue.

Nor is this new to architecture. The history of architecture is marked by numerous works for evil patrons, for example, the Tempio Malatesta, the Casa del Fascio, the Palace of the Soviets, the Zeppelin field at Nuremberg, the Glass House, Neverland, Ryungong, CCTV.

This studio is conceptual, aimed at developing arguments and polemics, but it sets out to do so using the tools of the architect. Dispensing with the prospect of realizing buildings as constructions of matter, we instead maintain that buildings can be constructions of thought, conceptual machines that produce arguments and state positions.

Although we expressly abandon any interest in construction, we nevertheless aim at designing buildings, or rather conceptual structures that look and perform very much like buildings. Our methodological inspiration is the radical architecture of the 1960s—e.g. Superstudio and Archizoom—but today we live in a world that has transformed more thoroughly than these architects could have ever predicted. Thus, we set out to seek other strategies and to look within architecture to seek what intelligence it still has to offer. To this end, this studio examines how architects can respond to evil. Irony, sarcasm, and direct complicity are too simple and are not options.

Against the dominant forms of architectural education today, this is not a scripting studio, nor a place for unbuildable Hollywood fantasy, nor by any means is it a last refuge of the real or its friend, tired from too many hours surfing the Internet, the hand. Against these outmoded positions, we propose architecture based on rigorous design, architecture as a system of thought that makes abstract knowledge experiential and conceptual thought objective, rigorous and understandable. In setting out to design buildings not diagrams, our goal is to see what the world is telling us, not what we are telling the world.

Bibliography

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———. State of Exception. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem; a Report on the Banality of Evil. New York,: Viking Press, 1963.
Arquilla, John, David F. Ronfeldt, and United States. Dept. of Defense. Office of the Secretary of Defense. Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy. Santa Monica, CA: Rand, 2001.
Badiou, Alain. “Fifteen Theses on Contemporary Art [Excerpt].”  https://www.lacan.com/frameXXIII7.htm
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Bataille, Georges. Literature and Evil. New York ; London: M. Boyars, 1985.
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Galloway, Alexander R. Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004.
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Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000.
Harris, Daniel. Cute, Quaint, Hungry, and Romantic: The Aesthetics of Consumerism. 1st ed. New York: Basic Books, 2000.
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Koolhaas, Rem, Bruce Mau, Jennifer Sigler, Hans Werlemann, and Office for Metropolitan Architecture. Small, Medium, Large, Extra-Large: Office for Metropolitan Architecture, Rem Koolhaas, and Bruce Mau. New York, N.Y.: Monacelli Press, 1995.
Liu, Alan. The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
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Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, and Marion Faber. Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. New ed, Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, and Douglas Smith. On the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic: By Way of Clarification and Supplement to My Last Book, Beyond Good and Evil, Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford ;: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Rorty, Amélie. The Many Faces of Evil: Historical Perspectives. London ; New York: Routledge, 2001.
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Sumrell, Robert, and Kazys Varnelis. Blue Monday: Stories of Absurd Realities and Natural Philosophies. Barcelona: Actar, 2007.
Varnelis, Kazys. The Infrastructural City: Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles. Barcelona: Actar, 2008.
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———. The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. New York: Random House, 2008.

The Infrastructural City in Paperback

I am delighted to announce that ACTAR’s reprint of the Infrastructural City is now in the U. S. and available in paperback for $10 less than the hardcover edition. Order yours at your favorite bookstore or at Amazon.

The first printing sold out in just four months, its great to have it back in stock.

In other news, I was sick for most of August, hence the dearth of posts, but I am feeling much better and am excited about the coming fall semester, returning to writing, and to the blog.