infrastructure

networking empire

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Wired carries an article on "The NSA’s Lucky Break: How the U. S. Became the Switchboard to the World," pointing out how international tariffs make it more economical for many countries to route their communications lines through the United States. That Central Asia remains politically unstable and that satellite communications are too slow for regular communication amplifies this condition.

As the article points out, this allows the government easy access for monitoring this delightful fountain of global information.

telecoms map


Of course I’ve been saying this all along.

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infrastructural city prospectus

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Little by little my summer book projects draw nearer to completion. Here, as a teaser, is the text that ACTAR is publishing in the next catalog, together with some photos I took to accompany it.

Los Angeles: Infrastructural City

Kazys Varnelis, editor

Once the greatest American example of a modern city served by infrastructure, Los Angeles is now in perpetual crisis. Infrastructure has ceased to support architecture’s plans for the city and instead subordinates architecture to its own purposes. This out-of-control but networked world is increasingly organized by flows of objects and information. Static structures only avoid being superfluous when they join this system to become temporary containers for the people, objects, and capital. Featuring a provocative collection of research through photography, essays and maps, Los Angeles: Infrastructural City uses infrastructure as a way of mapping our place in late capital and the city, while remaining optimistic about the role of architecture to understand it and affect change.

A project of the Network Architecture Lab in collaboration with the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design.

 

cell phone tower

long beach oil wells

super-warehouse

beach with oil refinery

 

[note oil wells off the coast of Long Beach in second photo from top]

 

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los angeles, the infrastructural city

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chevron refinery, el segundo
I am back after a five day research trip to my old base of Los Angeles.
I took hundreds of digital photos and slides (with my Contax G2) for Los Angeles, Infrastructural City, a Netlab project done in collaboration with the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design.
This will be my second book with ACTAR and is slated to be published late this fall or early in the winter. Read more about it at the Netlab site here.

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Second Life Client is Open Source

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It seems like the big news of today””?prior to whatever Steve Jobs has cooked up at the Apple keynote””?is the release of Second Life client under the GNU public license. Is this going to give virtual architecture the kick in the pants its always been looking for?

I'm not sure. On the one hand, I think that MMORPGs have tremendous potential. On the other hand, Second Life just never grabbed me whereas World of Warcraft which has virtually no persistence and no ability to create within the virtual world kept me playing to level 60. I suppose that I'm just a more goal-oriented person. But we'll see. This could be interesting.

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how spam works

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Why are you getting so much spam these days? eWeek has an interesting piece on how a spam operation works [via Slashdot ]. Precisely why is a mystery to me. Is there really that much money in spam? Who is so stupid to think that their penis will grow if they respond to these ads or that their penny stock advice is sound? Apparently plenty of people are, as this 2003 piece from Wired shows. Still, it seems to me that there is something almost religious about spam. Spam, above all, is a desire to submit to Ether, both by spammers, who speak into the void and spam-responders, who must certainly number among the true children of God in their desire to believe.

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commuting and class war or, lead us not into penn station

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The New York Observer reflects on the great class war between Grand Central Terminal and Penn Station. Connecticut vs. Jersey and Long Island, Bon Jovi vs. Mozart, the Sopranos vs. Philip Johnson.

I, of course, am partial to the last stomping ground of Louis Kahn which after two months of commuting from Montclair to Columbia is beginning to make some sense to me.

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Trading Sites. Destroyed, Revealed, Restored

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We’re in the midst of the big move across the country so postings will be sparse, but this morning, I received an email from Daniel Beunza, who is a sociologist teaching at the Columbia Business School. A little research led to Trading Sites. Destroyed, Revealed, Restored, an insightful paper that he and David Stark of the Russell Sage Foundation , Columbia, and the Santa Fe Institute co-wrote on how one firm in Lower Manhattan reconfigured itself in New Jersey after 9/11. A must read for anyone interested in place, architecture, and network culture.

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