Month: January 2011

An assertion of edge and boundary

[Image: One of the corners of Lebbeus Woods’s drawing room, courtesy of Lebbeus Woods].

Lebbeus Woods kicks off 2011 with an in situ glimpse of several wall-sized drawings including an explanation of the work that went into producing them.

“The impulse,” he explains, “to make these large drawings—they are, with one exception, 74 inches high by 120 inches wide (188 by 305 centimeters)—came first from my desire to make drawings at the scale of a room, that is, at an architectural scale. The reason for this is rather simple: to see if one could physically and not only mentally inhabit the space of a drawing. The second driving force was to see if drawing at that scale would produce something different than I’d imagined or drawn before.”

The drawings themselves are spectacular—and there are many more in the original post—but it’s particularly compelling to read the technical details of their realization.

(Earlier: Without Walls: An Interview with Lebbeus Woods, an expanded version of which appears in The BLDGBLOG Book).

Microplot

[Image: “CSI” by Florian Tremp, from Tremp’s series No Country for Small Men].

I think I’m the last person to see Florian Tremp’s amazing series No Country for Small Men—a collection of 48 narrative dioramas constructed and photographed by the artist, loosely inspired by the Coen Brothers’ film—but I’ll point it out nonetheless. Most of the images are just fantastic (the second page best of all).

Cryptoforests and Spatial Folklore

[Image: Photo by Gary Warner, from the cryptoforestry Flickr pool].

In his ongoing exploration of “the forest in the city,” Wilfried Hou Je Bek has produced a voluminous quantity of writings worth exploring in more detail, and so it is somewhat arbitrary to lead with this link; but the title of a recent post, “If the forest is empty so is the mind,” compelled me to point your attention to his blog Cryptoforestry (previously mentioned here).

Cryptoforesty, as Wilfried describes it in that post, emphasizes “the psychological effects of a forest” rather than the forest’s pure ecological function; indeed, he writes, “The point is not that wolfs and bears are needed to fulfill ecological functions that are now null and void, the point is that a forest with such animals fuels the imagination and adds zest to life, even to those who would never visit such a ‘full’ forest.” And, thus, he quips, “If the forest is empty,” devoid of its animal sentience, “so is the mind.”

Further, his point that European forests are now actually “being replenished from the east” with wild creatures is both politically symbolic and environmentally interesting.

[Image: Photo by Gary Warner, from the cryptoforestry Flickr pool].

The “What is a Cryptoforest?” essay is a virile and spirited defense of landscape ferality. Quoting at length and hoping to give a rhetorical sense of the writer’s interests, which range from the poetry of Gary Snyder to pre-Columbian rock art:

Cryptoforests are those parts of the city in which nature, in “secret,” has been given the space and the time to create its own millennia-millennia-old, everyday-everyday-new order by using the materials (seeds, roots, nutrients, soil conditions, waste, architectural debris) at hand. Cryptoforests are sideways glances at post-crash landscapes, diagrammatic enclaves through which future forest cities reveal their first shadows, laboratories for dada-do-nothingness, wild-type vegetable free states, enigma machines of uncivilized imagination, psychogeographical camera obscuras of primal fear and wanton desire, relay stations of lost ecological and psychological states. Cryptoforests are wild weed-systems, but wildness is equated not with chaos but with productiveness at a non-human level of organization. What starts with weed ends with a cryptoforest, and in between there is survivalism, with plants eking out a living against all odds, slowly but determinedly creating the conditions for the emergence of a network of biological relationships that is both flexible and stubborn, unique and redundant, fragile and resilient. Cryptoforests are honey pots for creatures that have no other place to go. Animals live there, the poor forage there, nomads camp there and the cryptoforester who has renounced the central planning commission re-creates there (free after Henri Thoreau). In the future, young people will no longer want to play in bands and they will become guerrilla gardeners and cryptoforesters instead.

“What starts with [a] weed ends with a cryptoforest”—the cryptoforest is a nearly all-encompassing botanical category for vegetation untamed. “The cardinal rule of cryptoforestry is that you can’t search for a cryptoforest,” we read. “You stumble upon them, they are already right in front of you.” Further, becoming sites of spatial folklore, cryptoforests are “always larger on the inside than they appear from the outside.”

[Image: Photo by Gary Warner, from the cryptoforestry Flickr pool].

Cryptoforestry offers fives diagnostic categories for this marginal terrain:

1) Feral forests (Planted tree zones, for instance along motorways, that have been allowed to become wild to the point that their wildness is outgrowing their manmadeness.) 2) In limbo forests (Tree-covered plots that feel like forests but technically probably aren’t; states of vegetation for which lay-language has no name.) 3) Incognito Forests (Forests that have gone cryptic and are almost invisible, forests in camouflage, forests with a talent for being ignored.) 4) Precognitive forests (Lands that are on the brink of becoming forested, a future forest fata morgana.) 5) Unappreciated forests (Forests regarded as zones of waste and weed, forests shaming planners, developers, and the neighbourhood. NIMBY forestry.)

These are less climax ecosystems than purgatorial ones, we might say—false gardens beyond cultivation, in which a different sort of nature is discovered growing “already right in front of you.”

The whole blog is worth bookmarking for later return.

(Consider joining the cryptoforestry Flickr pool).

Swimscape

[Image: Courtesy of ifonlyhecouldswim].

ifonlyhecouldswim (IOHCS) is currently working on a project called Oxygen is Overrated, “a photography-based publication on swimming pool culture” coming out this summer/fall, with open submissions accepted until 15 March 2011. “There are no thematic guidelines,” the editors write, “as long as the swimming pool subject is clearly defined.”

IOHCS describes itself as “a research agency investigating the relationships among hydrology, spatiality, and culture.” Citing J.G. Ballard, they refer to the swimming pool as “a natural world redesigned as inhabited, imagined and inhaled environment,” a next nature achieved by means of closely regulated hydrology. “Let us visualize this existing man-made landscape.”

Visual and textual explorations of the pool’s sociological mise-en-scène and its attendant microclimate are welcome; check out the publication’s website and Flickr page for more info.

As a random aside, I worked as a poolboy in North Carolina one summer when I was 16.

Drift Deck

[Image: From the Drift Deck by Julian Bleecker and Dawn Lozzi].

The Drift Deck, produced in 2008 by Julian Bleecker and Dawn Lozzi, is “an algorithmic puzzle game used to navigate city streets,” offering “instructions that guide you as you drift about the city.”

Each card contains an object or situation, followed by a simple action. For example, a situation might be—you see a fire hydrant, or you come across a pigeon lady. The action is meant to be performed when the object is seen, or when you come across the described situation. For example—take a photograph, or make the next right turn.

The deck has a tendency to sound a bit like a human behavior manual for urban residents suffering from Asperger Syndrome—”Uh Oh…” one card reads, “An awkward moment. Pause and take a photograph,” as if talking to Rain Man, or “Ugliness,” another card says, “Avoid it noticeably, gesturing and registering disgust,” as if the city would be more interesting if only we could be as flamboyant as RuPaul—rather than serving as a genuinely diagonal guide to the city.

But I love the Drift Deck‘s premise, combining as it does the Oblique Strategies of Brian Eno with the chance operations of John Cage, by way of Situationism and perhaps even the “let the dice decide” tactics of Luke Rhinehart.

[Image: From the Drift Deck by Julian Bleecker and Dawn Lozzi].

A non-sentimental Drift Deck, intended not as a way to emotionally enrich the urban experience but simply to densify the number of personal actions taken during a given span of time, would be an interesting thing to develop and explore. Basic, analog instructions (turn left, enter that shop, buy something, slow down) would, in the end, I’d suggest, generate at least as many random encounters.

This could also quite easily be turned into a mobile app: tap the screen at every intersection (or every hour on the hour) and random navigational options are generated. Combine this with Foursquare (“the mayor of turning-left at 44th Street”), Twitter, etc., and you could leave automatically generated traces of unique drifted paths for others to see. Repeatable experiments of random acts through the city.

There’s still the key question, though, of how to realize this without falling back onto a kind of Instabuddhism™, exhorting participants to appreciate their everyday lives with greater intensity. After all, the results could just as easily be disorienting and sharply alien—deliberately so—not instilled with a New Age sense of rejuvenated authenticity. Perhaps petty crimes could even be thrown in for good measure…

Symbolic, ornamental, and eclectic

Christopher Bisset recently produced a short film featuring the work of Portuguese-born Mozambican architect Amancio “Pancho” Guedes. “Set mainly in Maputo,” Bisset explains, “A Procura de Pancho (Looking for Pancho) is an experimental mix of animation, illustration and live action that follows the journey of a solitary student who has come to the city to explore the vibrant work of architect and artist Pancho Guedes.”

The film features some absolutely stunning buildings—buildings that, if I’m being honest, do well without the addition of animated drawings which begin to appear on their outer walls as the movie develops. But Bisset has put together a fantastic visual introduction to an architect far too people have even heard of.

An essay reproduced on Shrapnel Contemporary describes Guedes’s work as “effervescent,” adding that, “In its most exuberant and expressive character, Pancho’s architecture thus merrily escapes the moral task to which architectural modernism had consciously and diligently dedicated itself: the exclusion of the symbolic, the rejection of ornament, and the repression of the eclectic.” Symbolic, ornamental, and eclectic, the buildings seen in Bisset’s 10-minute film seem well worth exploring in person.

Weaponized Seismology

In a 1997 Q&A, Clinton-era Secretary of Defense William Cohen warned that terrorists might someday engage in “an eco-type of terrorism,” as he phrased it, “whereby they can alter the climate, set off earthquakes, [and] volcanoes remotely through the use of electromagnetic waves.”

I would love to see whatever “electromagnetic” weapons he was referring to—perhaps not unlike those found in one of these two games—and to wonder aloud what sort of test range such devices might require and what landscape architects might be able to do with such a place.

Feeding on Quakes

[Image: The USGS global earthquake map].

Five automated Twitter feeds to follow in the new year, if you’re on the trail of earthquakes, especially in Los Angeles and San Francisco, are @EarthquakesLA and @EarthquakesSF; @BigQuakesLA and @BigQuakesSF, if you’re only interested in earthquakes greater than 3.5 on the Richter scale; and @EarthquakeBot, for any earthquake, anywhere in the world, 5.0 or greater.

On the other hand, it would be interesting to see a feed that only notes so-called “slow earthquakes,” or earthquakes “that last days, weeks, or even months.” In fact, slow-earthquake Twitter feeds aside (@SlowEarthquakes? @SlowQuakesLA?), it could be interesting to write a novel set in a Los Angeles undergoing a months-long earthquake, with residents eventually so accustomed to the constant but subtle drone and shimmer of the planet’s surface, with dishes rattling and pebbles rolling off hills, that, when it all comes to an end and the city goes silent, there is widespread panic, dogs and cats begin howling, and a wave of emotion rolls through the city. People pass out in grocery stores and at least one man, living alone in Calabasas, has a catastrophic heart attack.

Talk of a sequel is dismissed as too unlikely to believe…

Future Strategies of Spatial Practice

[Image: C_Life by ARUP, Sauerbruch Hutton, Experientia, and Galley Eco Capital, via Rory Hyde].

What better way to start off the new year than to ask what the future role of the architect might be? Rory Hyde has posted an article, originally published last summer, asking what “potential futures for design practice” currently exist or have yet to be created.

Hyde himself offers eight possible roles for spatial practitioners: the community enabler (or “custodian of the built environment”), the visionary pragmatist, the trans-disciplinary integrator, the social entrepreneur (motivated by the “powerful narrative potential of architectural communication in catalyzing complex visions for the future”), the practicing researcher, the long-term strategist, the management thinker, and the unsolicited architect.

While “long-term strategist” sticks out more as an abstract category, applicable to all of the others, rather than a position in and of itself, the analytic impulse behind Hyde’s list has provoked an interesting conversation; Dan Hill, Marcus Westbury, MM Jones, and Gerard Reinmuth are just a few of the participants enlivening the post’s growing comments thread.