The following books are required for my Soft City course. Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). Castells, perhaps the foremost urban historian of our time, examines the dramatic changes in the city over the last thirty years in this, the first of an epic, three volume work, The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture. Castells discusses the information technology revolution, globalization, along with recent changes in corporate structures, employment, and the development of the space of flows and timeless time. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). Although older than Castells’s survey, Harvey’s book anticipates it by diagnosing the transition from a Fordist to a Post-Fordist society. Harvey’s focus is ultimately more on the cultural ramifications of this shift and his primary interest being in how the meaning and perception of time and space have been altered during this century. Harvey’s book also serves as a good introduction to the theoretical issues of modernism and postmodernism.

Also recommended is 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, 2000).

For anyone new to Los Angeles, the Thomas Guide to Los Angeles County is crucial.

For the last twelve years or so, I have been using Microsoft Word on some incarnation of the Mac. During that time, I have amassed a large custom dictionary of words related to architecture and theory. I am making this available on the web @ kazys.net It will work with Microsoft Word 98 for the Mac and should work with other versions of Word for the Mac and for Windows. As expected, I take no responsiblity and can’t help you if it doesn’t work. If it does, you’ll find that the usual suspects – e.g. Corbusier, Denari, Deleuze, and so forth, no longer trip up your spell checker.

Check out scenes from Israel Kandarian’s thesis project @ archinect and scenes from Chip Minnick’s Nike Housing thesis @ kazys.net. I was co-advisor for both of their thesis projects. Lebbeus Woods called Chip’s project “cynical” while Tarek Naga called Israel’s project “bourgeois.” You be the judge.

These projects may best be read in conjunction with my articles The Caress of the Commodity and Postmodern Permutations.

The Metropolitan Research and Design program, run by Michael Speaks starts today at SCI-Arc. A key component is the Soft City, a course taught by Jeffrey Inaba of the Harvard Graduate School of Design and myself. The summer will also feature courses taught by Joe Day of Hedge Design and Dayware and Michael Speaks together with a studio by Neil Denari and Mark McVay.

A description of the MR+D program is provisionally located here.

Welcome to kazys.net, the weblog for architecture and network culture.

Static web sites are dead. By this we don’t mean that clever animations are the new rule. On the contrary. Clever animations are attractive but take a great deal of time to create. The network society doesn’t have this sort of time. Instead of window dressing, we demand fast culture, fast architecture, and fast web sites.

The next wave of web sites is the weblog. A weblog – often blog for short – is a fast web site, frequently and repeatedly updated, often once a day or more than once a day. Some of these sites – such as macintouch are devoted to news and content. Others are zine-like public diaries and venting boards, for example the rather sublime www.restless.org.

Come back and tune in often.