infrastructure Archives

Network Architecture Lab Established

28 December 201818 July 2006 by kazys

Why has this blog been so barren lately? Am I giving up on the Net? No! Far from it. I have, however, been a little busy lately. Now that the project is safely established, we can announce that…

AUDC Establishes Network Architecture Lab

@ Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation

Formed in 2001, AUDC [Architecture Urbanism Design Collaborative] specializes in research as a form of practice. The AUDC Network Architecture Lab is an experimental unit at Columbia University that embraces the studio and the seminar as venues for architectural analysis and speculation, exploring new forms of research through architecture, text, new media design, film production and environment design.

Specifically, the Network Architecture Lab investigates the impact of computation and communications on architecture and urbanism. What opportunities do programming, telematics, and new media offer architecture? How does the network city affect the building? Who is the subject and what is the object in a world of networked things and spaces? How do transformations in communications reflect and affect the broader socioeconomic milieu? The NetLab seeks to both document this emergent condition and to produce new sites of practice and innovative working methods for architecture in the twenty-first century. Using new media technologies, the lab aims to develop new interfaces to both physical and virtual space.

The NetLab is consciously understood as an interdisciplinary unit, establishing collaborative relationships with other centers both at Columbia and at other institutions.

The NetLab begins operations in September 2006.

Networked Publics Book Draft On-Line

28 December 201821 June 2006 by kazys

As a culmination to the Networked Publics program, the faculty research group that I have been working at for the last year, we will be publishing a collaboratively written group book with the MIT Press. Three of drafts of our essays are finished (on place, culture, and politics) and available online at the Networked Publics site.

Throughout the Networked Publics program, we have tried to employ collaborative scholarship whereever possible and effective. Readers, colleagues, and friends are invited to to contribute by posting comments at the end of each essay (note that easier to read versions of the essays can be also be downloaded from the appropriate pages). Our hope is to take the comments that we receive and append them to the essay in a virtual symposium to follow each chapter.

The Next Googleplex

28 December 201815 June 2006 by kazys

Is exurbia the next frontier for massive digital infrastructure projects? The New York Times explores the construction of the Googleplex on a remote site in The Dalles, Oregon, on the banks of the Columbia River. Google paid $1.3 million for 30 acres! They’re going to be paying a lot more to hook up fiber to the grid out there. Is this a response to the concentrated nature of telecoms in cities? Of course, if you have sufficient means, any place can be made a command and control center for the global city. Silicon Valley was once farmland as well.

Electrical Substations and Central Offices

28 December 201813 June 2006 by kazys

Geoff Manaugh at BLDGBLOG ran a post today on Robin Collyer’s photographs of electrical substations designed as houses, a phenomenon worth comparing to the Central Offices of Los Angeles (the link is only a taste, 814 Central Offices here).

CLUI and Its Friends

28 December 201811 June 2006 by kazys

Critical Spatial Practice put together an impressive list of the various individuals (including yours truly and AUDC that move in and around the Center for Land Use Interpretation. I’d love to see a Mark Lombardi map of this information.

Annenberg Principles on Network Neutrality

28 December 201824 March 2006 by kazys

The Annenberg Center for Communication, where I am a resident fellow this year recently brought together a group of senior communication experts from industry, academia, and consumer groups to discuss how to begin to bridge differences over the issue of network neutrality. Together, this group developed the Annenberg Principles for Network Neutrality, a set of key points to serve as a base for discussions on the topic in the future.

Two books : AUDC and Infrastructure

28 December 201828 February 2006 by kazys

The last few days have been rather intense. After recovering from a cold that I got while at Yale, I wound up finishing the images for AUDC‘s first book, Blue Monday, to be published by ACTAR later in the year. It was a long haul, but the DVD-R went off to the press this morning and the project is looking very good indeed.

Amidst all that, I ran into Brian Hayes’s Infrastructure. A Field Guide to the Industrial Landscape at St. Mark’s books while in New York. Hayes spent some 15 years on this project and it shows. Beautiful, pristine photographs stud a remarkably informative text that addresses virtually all the aspects of contemporary infrastructure. If you’re an architect, engineer, or just interested in the city, don’t even think twice, just buy it now.
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