Author: Geoff Manaugh

[Image: Photo by Ryan Collerd for The New York Times].

Riding zip lines through the autumn tree canopies of rural Pennsylvania is something of a growth industry, it seems, exploring ski resorts during the off-season by speeding downhill at 50 mph in a roped-up harness.
From The New York Times:

Some zip lines are basically thrill rides that follow the cut of ski slopes and at this time of year offer expansive views of the autumn blaze of colors, along with an adrenaline rush.

Other courses (like the one we were on) are marketed as canopy tours, designed with a challenging combination of swaying sky bridges, cable traverses and zip line pathways cut through the deep forest. Once we climbed a cargo net to reach our first tree platform, we were literally amid the autumn foliage, not quite in the canopy of fully grown oaks and poplars but close enough to squirrels to guess their sex as they scampered from limb to limb just above us.

This kind of vertical immersion in an otherwise inaccessible overhead landscape is incredibly interesting, in and of itself – but 1) it also reminds me of a 2007 project by artists Steve Lambert and Packard Jennings in which they reimagined the city of San Francisco as a city of roller coasters, wildlife preserves, underground libraries and health clubs installed inside BART cars, and, of course, zip lines across the San Francisco Bay.

[Image: Riding zip lines to Oakland; by Steve Lambert and Packard Jennings].

And 2) the two of these together seem to imply a new kind of urban tourism, where you don’t talk guided walks or buy tickets for double-decker buses: you ride zip lines above Notre-Dame cathedral and down Fifth Avenue, getting up close and personal with architectural ornament at a level of detail you would otherwise never have seen.
Sky Tours of Manhattan.
In the same way that you can take, for instance, Entourage-themed bus tours of Los Angeles, you could take Spiderman-themed zip line tours of New York.
You call up Canopy Tours and ask them to price-out the entirety of Chicago. Or Istanbul. (At the very least, they could map it).
Zip lines through the London financial district.
Zip lines through the sandstone arches of Utah.
Zip lines through Angkor Wat.
A Zip Line Olympiad across the domes and spires of central Europe.
Or don’t use zip lines for humans at all; attach plants to them for the hanging zip line gardens of the 21st century. Flowering plants and ferns and oak trees go whizzing by in an aerial gardenry that defies belief.
And if zip lines could realistically open up a whole new world of spatial volume in the modern high-rise metropolis, what new architectures and city surfaces might result?

[Image: (Untitled) by Priscilla Monge, photographed by Alexandra Wolkowicz. Part of the 2006 Liverpool Biennial].

A post earlier this week here on BLDGBLOG raised the question of whether or not an urban candidate might be inherently better suited for the job of U.S. president than a rural one – but what exactly do we mean when we say “urban”?
When we read that the world is rapidly urbanizing, for instance, and that more than 50% of the earth’s human population now lives in cities, what do we mean by “cities” and how can we tell when a dense assortment of buildings becomes a truly “urban” experience?
What if we are surrounded by more buildings than ever before – but there isn’t a single real city in sight?

[Image: The Garston Embassy, of the Artistic Republic of Garston, part of the Liverpool Biennial International 08].

This summer I was commissioned by the recently opened Liverpool Biennial International 08 – the theme of which is MADE UP – to write an essay about the idea of “made-up” cities. That essay, called “The Game,” was just published in the Biennial’s gigantic, 300-page catalog alongside stories and essays by Haruki Murakami, Bruno Latour, Jonathan Allen, Rana Dasgupta, Brian Hatton, and many others.
“The Game” explores the idea that we might not actually know what it means to be urban, using a remark by Ole Bouman as a jumping-off point. In an essay of his own called “Desperate Decadence,” published in Volume magazine #6, Bouman writes: “We have come to take for granted that those locations with large congregations of architecture must be cities.”
I’ve re-posted the complete essay below.

• • •
[Image: The Liverpool Biennial International 08].

The internet briefly lit up two years ago with the story of Gilles Tréhin, an autistic savant, artist, and amateur urban planner who had invented a city that he calls Urville. Urville, imagined as an island metropolis for 12 million inhabitants, begun when Tréhin was only five years old, is a triumphant example of a city made up almost from nothing. Tréhin’s own guidebook to the city includes hundreds of perspectival pencil drawings; these depict, in often astonishing detail, recognizable buildings and building types that have been combined to form a cityscape that itself exceeds recognition.

With imaginary spaces like the Square des Mille Astres, the Gare d’Italie, and the Place des Tégartines, Urville’s visual appearance could perhaps be described as a kind of Belgian Venice, crossbred with Chicago, as master-planned by Baron Hausmann for an upstart hotelier in Las Vegas. In other words, the city is derivative; it is a collection of landmarks. One can make out the Sears Tower, the Rialto Bridge, the Grande Arche de La Défense, and what could easily pass for New York’s World Trade Center towers—among many other sites on the global tourist circuit—but what Urville lacks is a human face. Although the jacket of Tréhin’s book explains that the city comes complete with “cultural anecdotes grounded in historical reality,” including the long-lasting spatial effects of Vichy France, World War II, and what is broadly referred to as globalization, the city is something of a void, an open-air museum of unchallenging urban artifacts.

As Charlotte Moore wrote for the Guardian back in May 2006, Urville is “curiously timeless, swept clean of the detritus of human lives.” She suggests that the city even has “no sense of character.” Indeed, Urville is a strange sight. It is vast, referentially comprehensive, and visually detailed—but, outside of its sheer curiosity, there is very little there that might recommend a visit. It is Brussels or The Hague. One might even say that Urville is framed to avoid the emotional vicissitudes of everyday life.

Urville has plenty of buildings—but there is no real city.

[Image: (Untitled) by Matej Andraz Vogrincic, photographed by Alexandra Wolkowicz. Part of the 2006 Liverpool Biennial].

In a short essay called “Desperate Decadence,” published in Volume magazine #6, Ole Bouman quips: “We have come to take for granted that those locations with large congregations of architecture must be cities.” When I later asked him about this comment during an interview, he added: “If you don’t distinguish between those two—if you think that applying urban form is the same as building a city, or even creating urban culture—then you make a very big mistake.” The question, then, in this context, is: Is it possible to invent—to make up—a city that isn’t simply a collection of buildings? Is it possible to create a genuine city from nothing—or can we only construct large congregations of architecture?

We’ve all heard by now, for instance, that for the first time in history the majority of our species—more than 50% of the Earth’s human population—lives in an urban environment today. We’ve been told, by journalists intoxicated with the superlative, that this a moment of great Darwinian consequence, an evolutionary point of no return. More urbanized than we have ever been before, have humans have apparently changed the very nature of the species: Humans are now animals that live together in cities. We are builders, dwellers and thinkers of towers and streets.

But for all the talk of the ancient hunter-gatherer finally succumbing to the bright lights of the big city, it is not at all clear that we even know what cities really are. Can we be certain, for all of the buildings currently under construction in places like Dubai, Shenzhen, and even Dallas-Ft. Worth, that it is cities we are creating? We are surrounded by more buildings than ever before, but perhaps this observation alone is not enough to say that human life has been thoroughly urbanized.

[Image: Air-Port-City by Tomas Saraceno, photographed by Adatabase. “Since 2002,” we read in the Biennial’s pocket guide, “Saraceno has continued, in sculptures, installations and experimental flights, to make a series of incremental steps towards his ultimate goal of cities built in the air.” From the Liverpool Biennial International 08].

An interesting analogy comes to us here from the history of videogame design. In her 2001 pamphlet called Utopian Entrepreneur, published by MIT, author Brenda Laurel describes what she calls an “ugly” time in the corporate career of videogame super-firm Atari. In 1984, Atari’s sales figures, reputation, and game quality all began to nosedive. “So began the great videogame darkness of 1984 that lasted until almost the end of that decade,” she writes. But what exactly happened—and how does it relate to urban design?

“The Atari corporation paid very little attention to designing for computer games,” Laurel diagnoses. After all, “no one except a few isolated programmers who actually built the games was looking at the requirements for good interactivity, play patterns, or design principles.” Worse still, “There was no market research on what players liked in a game.” In other words, entire games and game worlds were being produced from scratch, without any real grasp of what might make a game work.

At the same time, hordes of Harvard MBAs began churning out business plans, and transplants from aerospace middle management drew up elaborate production schedules, and Procter & Gamble veterans happily began planning marketing and distribution. Great commercials were produced. Except for the programmers, however, no one was in the business of creating great videogames.

Atari had a stellar business plan and a first-rate marketing team—but, for all intents and purposes, it had nothing interesting to sell.

Following the logic of this example, it is easy enough to see Dubai—or even Tucson, Arizona—as a failed videogame in the desert, ironically under-designed and over-promoted. One could even say that we have perfected the art of the anti-city—that we have made up anything but truly urban environments. Dubai, for instance, is famously difficult to navigate on foot, requiring a ten minute car ride down six-lane motorways, complete with frequently lethal U-turns, simply to get to the hotel across the street. The city has a sum total of eleven pedestrian bridges—and twenty-five percent of the world’s cranes. While pedestrian-friendliness is by no means the only marker of ‘good interactivity, play patterns, or design principles’ in a future metropolis, it is nonetheless worth highlighting the disjunction here between the city as a dense, somewhat autistic collection of buildings and the city as a user-friendly environment.

It’s as if Dubai has perfected the art of construction, but in securing a market niche it has forgotten what needed to be built. Paraphrasing Brenda Laurel, perhaps Dubai did not do enough “market research on what players liked in a game”—only here the game is a city.

[Image: Opertus Lunula Umbra (Hidden Shadow of Moon) by U-Ram Choe, part of the artist’s “archaeology of undiscovered futuristic organisms,” photographed by Adatabase. Part of the Liverpool Biennial International 08].

But cities today are well known for popping up in the middle of nowhere, history-less and incomprehensible. There are slums, refugee camps, army bases—and Dubai. That’s what cities now do. If these cities are here today, they weren’t five years ago; if they’re not here now, they will be soon. Today’s cities are made up, viral, fungal, unexpected. Like well-lit film sets in the distance, staged amidst mudflats, reflecting themselves in the still waters of inland reservoirs, today’s cities simply arrive, without reservations; they are not so much invited as they are impossible to turn away. Cities now erupt and linger; they are both too early and far too late. Cities move in, take root and expand, whole neighborhoods throwing themselves together in convulsions of glass and steel.

Except, as Mike Davis memorably points out in his recent book Planet of Slums, the “cities of the future, rather than being made out of glass and steel as envisioned by earlier generations of urbanists, are instead largely constructed out of crude brick, straw, recycled plastic, cement blocks, and scrap wood. Instead of cities of light soaring toward heaven, much of the twenty-first-century urban world squats in squalor, surrounded by pollution, excrement, and decay.” This is “pirate urbanization,” he writes, and it consists of “anarchic” anti-cities on the fringes of “cyber-modernity.” We might be making up new cities everywhere around the world today, but very few of them look like Norman Foster’s eco-metropolis of Masdar, that well-rendered city constructed from nothing but petrodollars atop the sands of Abu Dhabi. Davis writes, or example, that, in “an archipelago of 10 slums” outside Bangalore, India, “researchers found only 19 latrines for 102,000 residents.” There is thus what Davis calls an ‘excremental surplus’ to these rapidly expanding environments—yet these are the landscapes to which we refer when we say that humans have become an urban species.

These are not cities in any recognised infrastructural or legislative sense; they are, rather, dense collections of buildings. In contrast to Dubai’s Atari–like desert failure, with its arid combination of over-thought business plans and an absolute lack of content, these super-slums compress far too much content into a radically unplanned space.

[Image: The Gleaming Lights of the Souls by Yayoi Kusama, photographed by Adatabase. Part of the Liverpool Biennial International 08].

On the other hand, sometimes a made-up city does not even require acts of construction. That is, what might appear simply to be a field of cloned single-family houses, buffered by vast tracts of manicured green space, can be transformed into a city with the stroke of a pen. Cities are thus created everyday, in other words, within the administrative guidelines for managing inhabited landscapes—and no new ground need ever be broken. These made-up cities are, in fact, boomburbs, according to Robert Lang and Jennifer LeFurgy, two sociologists with the Washington D.C.-based Brookings Institution.

In their 2007 book, Boomburbs: The Rise of America’s Accidental Cities, Lang and LeFurgy explain that many of the largest cities in the United States today are simply hypertrophied suburbs—they are boomburbs. The mayors of established cities have had a hard time adjusting to this fact. Mesa, Arizona, for instance, an otherwise anonymous tumescence on the air-conditioned desert edge of Phoenix, is a “stealth city”: Its population, incredibly, is larger than both Minneapolis–St. Paul and Miami. The authors also describe how the mayor of Salt Lake City once “dismissed the idea” that his city might have anything in common with suburban North Las Vegas, “despite the fact that North Las Vegas is both bigger and more ethnically diverse than Salt Lake City.” What these boomburbs have, in lieu of historic centrality and international name-recognition, is a flexible legal and financial infrastructure. They have water rights boards and waste disposal networks, even local schools and sales tax—and though they don’t necessarily have mayors (though some do), they have “landscape management” committees and homeowners associations. These are cities made up less by buildings than by tax codes and the law.

The mayor of Salt Lake City’s widely shared cognitive dissonance, being somehow unable to see that Mesa, Arizona, is bigger than a city like St. Louis—with its Eero Saarinen-designed Gateway Arch along the banks of the Mississippi—is part of what the authors call “a national ambivalence about what we have built in the past half century.” This featureless landscape of low-rise retail parks and residential cul-de-sacs—of video shops, hockey moms, and 24-hour supermarkets—has become the dominant architecture of American urbanism, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that it remains critically invisible. One could even say that this landscape is all life and no landmarks—an almost exact inversion of Gilles Tréhin’s Urville, with its tapestry of landmarks and no signs of life. From boomburbs to Urville, via super-slums and Dubai, these instant cities take shape in less than a single generation and cross a fantastic landscape of competing urban forms.

[Image: An installation by Sarah Sze, photographed by Adatabase. Sze’s installations “are like highly organic ecosystems, colonizing the space they inhabit.” Part of the Liverpool Biennial International 08].

Is it really possible, though, that we could continue to make up and construct the wrong kinds of cities? One could perhaps be excused here for concluding that successful cities cannot be made up at all, that there is something fundamentally unthinkable or excessive to this process, something that simply cannot be planned in advance.

But that doesn’t stop us from looking for what we believe is the secret recipe—for exactly the right balance of marketing plans, water laws, historic monuments, public spaces, and so on. A thriving subsidiary industry has thus arisen in these cities’ shadows, forming a new, deliberately carnivalesque genre of international reportage. We are city-hunting. Writers fly halfway round the world to describe their newest adventures in Middle Eastern air-conditioning. These are new sights in human history, we’re told, and they’re meant to dazzle the modern mind. Every urban day is remarkable, we read, for it is different—and somehow bigger, more extreme—than the last.

So if we continue to get so many things about our cities so wrong, then the only thing to do is to keep looking—to track down Zaha Hadid’s newest building, to host design competitions for skyscrapers in St. Petersburg, to commission private islands, domes, and pyramids. We experiment with Olympic Villages. Amidst all of the dust and the eye-popping budgets, it seems impossible to believe that we won’t get at least one place right.

It’s as if, hovering there in the future possible tense, at the imaginative vanishing point of urban design itself, is the perfect city, sending ripple effects back into the spaces of today—and we can trace the outlines of its utopian arrival in the empty streets and construction sites of the spaces that now surround us.

Because it no longer matters if we are wrong about our cities; we will always be right if we just make up more.

[Image: Duncraig Castle, Scotland; photo by Margaret Salmon and Dean Wiand for The New York Times].

There was a great article in The New York Times this weekend about an English family from Nottingham who purchased Duncraig Castle in Scotland, “set on 40 acres of forested land with its own train station, boathouse and two private islands.” It is “a storybook maze of stone-clad turrets, square towers and steeply peaked gables set on a promontory at the edge of the woods overlooking the loch.”
The article adds that the castle is “so large – 80 rooms – that a tour takes more than an hour, and it is impossible to remember where you’ve been or where any of the rooms are in relation to one another.” Indeed, the building is “a warren of rooms – a design meant to help ward off drafts. In one room, you can actually squeeze behind a wardrobe and end up in the school addition.”
As a brief aside, could you build a maze of outdoor rooms, each of them hoisted up on stilts throughout the northernmost extremes of the UK, so that they might interfere with, and thus stop, inclement weather? It’d be “a design meant to help ward off drafts” by trapping winds in little stop-boxes: like wind-shades, they’d help prevent certain storms from forming.
In other words, could you apply the internal climatic lessons of architecture – windows and doors like valves that stop drafts – to outdoor landscapes, using folly-like structures to control the weather?
You stumble on strange wooden folk-constructions in the forests of Bavaria and, not knowing what they are, tear them down; fierce storms begin that very evening, and you never – literally never – figure out what’s the cause.
But those were anti-storm constructions, built over six hundred years ago, and the climate you’d been living in was manmade.

[Image: Duncraig Castle, Scotland; photo by Margaret Salmon and Dean Wiand for The New York Times].

In any case, the couple who bought the castle went on to bring their entire family there with them:

When the family moved into Duncraig in the summer of 2003, the castle had no sewage system. Everyone used portable toilets outside the castle. Seventeen people made do with one washing machine and two kitchens. Hot water ran only to Sam and Perlin’s apartment. When winter arrived at Duncraig, which is farther north than Moscow, the days shrank to a mere six and a half hours. Without streetlights or any large town for dozens of miles, the long nights were disorientingly dark. The castle’s stone facade allowed the ever-present Highland moisture to seep right in. Without central heat, it was impossible to get warm. ‘‘We all got used to wearing damp clothes – there was no way to dry them,’’ says Duncan Dobson. ‘‘You’d get into bed at night, and your bed was damp. All the clothes at the back of the wardrobe went rotten with mold.’’

The specifics of the ensuing breakdown make for a fascinating read, but, in broad strokes, everything falls apart: they actually pay part of the family to leave, buying out their initial share of the investment; a court order against opening a day school inside a leaky side-building full of broken electrical equipment is obtained; and the parents are, incredibly, evicted from the property without compensation. Asked why he evicted his parents, the husband simply says: “I thought the family had descended into madness.”
Meanwhile, “black mold that covered the plaster wall so completely it looked like wallpaper” continues to grow in the unused rooms of the castle, as the couple – who still live there – sink nearly a million and a half dollars into renovations.
Read the rest if you get a chance.

(Thanks, Nicky!)

[Image: The population density of the United States, ca. 2000, via Wikipedia].

If you’ll excuse a quick bit of landscape-inspired political speculation, I was reminded this morning of something I read last year on Boing Boing and which has stuck with me ever since – and that’s that there are more World of Warcraft players in the United States today than there are farmers.
Farmers, however, as Boing Boing and the original blog post it links to are both quick to point out, are often portrayed in media polls as a voice of cultural and political authenticity in the United States. They are real Americans, the idea goes, a kind of quiet majority in the background that presidential candidates and media pundits would be foolish to overlook.
If you want a real cross-section of Americana, then, you’re supposed to interview farmers and even hockey moms – but why not World of Warcraft players? This is just a rhetorical question – it would be absurd to suggest that World of Warcraft players (or architecture bloggers) somehow have a special insight on national governance – but, as cultural demographics go, it’s worth asking why politicians and the media continue to over-prioritize the rural and small-town experience.

[Image: A street in Columbus, Wisconsin, the small and, at the time, semi-rural town in which I grew up, photographed under a Creative Commons license by Royal Broil].

In a related vein, it’s often said in the U.S. that certain politicians simply “don’t understand the West”: they’re so caught up in their big city, coastal ways that they just don’t get – they can’t even comprehend – how a rancher might react to something like increased federal control over water rights or how a small-town mayor might object to interfering rulings by the Supreme Court. Politicians who don’t understand the west – who don’t understand the rugged individuality of ranch life or the no-excuses self-responsibility of American small towns – are thus unfit to lead this society.
But surely the more accurate lesson to be drawn from such a statement is exactly the opposite?
One could even speculate here that politicians from small towns, and from the big rural states of the west, have no idea how cities – which now house the overwhelming majority of the American population – actually operate, on infrastructural, economic, socio-political, and even public health levels, and so they would be alarmingly out of place in the national government of an urbanized country like the United States.
If the United States – if the entire world – is rapidly urbanizing, then it would seem like literally the last thing we need in the White House, in an era of collapsing bridges and levees, is someone whose idea of public infrastructure is a dirt road.
Put another way, perhaps coming from a ranch or a small town is precisely why a certain candidate might be unable to govern a nation that is now 80% urban.
It’s a political collision of landscape management strategies.

[Image: Urban areas in the U.S. Map courtesy of NASA].

On the other hand, perhaps this juxtaposition would be exactly why a rural or small-town candidate could be perfect for the job – fresh perspectives, thinking outside the box, and so on. After all, a good rancher is surely a better leader than a failed mayor.
Or, to take an even more aggressive stand against this argument, surely the administrative specifics of your previous professional life – you were a doctor, a minister, a novelist, a governor, a business owner, a soccer dad – are less important than your maturity, knowledge, clarity of thought, and judgment?
Even having said that, though, I can’t help but wonder if a candidate might “understand” one particular type of settled landscape – a small town, a thinly populated prairie, an icy state with a population one-fifth that of Chicago – but not another, more heavily urbanized type of landscape (i.e. the United States as a whole).
So I was reminded again of the opening statistic from Boing Boing – a statistic that I have not researched independently, mind you, but that appears to be based on this data – when I read that President Bush had stopped off this morning to speak about the credit crisis “with consumers and business people at Olmos Pharmacy, an old-fashioned soda shop and lunch counter” in San Antonio, Texas.
The idea here – the spatial implication – is that Bush has somehow stopped off in a landscape of down-home American democracy. This is everyday life, we’re meant to believe – a geographic stand-in for the true heart and center of the United States.
But it increasingly feels to me that presidential politics now deliberately take place in a landscape that the modern world has left behind. It’s a landscape of nostalgia, the golden age in landscape form: Joe Biden visits Pam’s Pancakes outside Pittsburgh, Bush visits a soda shop, Sarah Palin watches ice hockey in a town that doesn’t have cell phone coverage, Obama goes to a tractor pull.
It’s as if presidential campaigns and their pursuing tagcloud of media pundits are actually a kind of landscape detection society – a rival Center for Land Use Interpretation – seeking out obsolete spatial versions of the United States, outdated geographies most of us no longer live within or encounter.
They find small towns that, by definition, are under-populated and thus unrepresentative of the United States as a whole; they find “old-fashioned” restaurants that seem on the verge of closing for lack of interested customers; they tour “Main Streets” that lost their inhabitants and their businesses long ago.
All along they pretend that these landscapes are politically relevant.
My point here is not that we should just swap landscapes in order to be in touch with the majority of the American population – going to this city instead of to that town, visiting this urban football team instead of that rural hockey league, stopping by this popular Asian restaurant instead of that pie-filled diner (though I would be very interested to explore this hypothesis). I simply want to point out that political campaigning in the United States seems almost deliberately to take place in a landscape that no longer has genuine relevance to the majority of U.S. citizens.
The idea that “an old-fashioned soda shop” might give someone access to the mind of the United States seems so absurd as to be almost impossible to ridicule thoroughly.

[Images: From the fascinating series of electoral maps produced by M. T. Gastner, C. R. Shalizi, and M. E. J. Newman after the 2004 U.S. presidential election].

Of course, I understand that there are electoral college strategies at work and so on; but what I think remains unchallenged throughout all of this is the idea that small town voters somehow offer a more authentic perspective on the political life of this country – and not, say, people in West Hollywood or the Upper East Side or Atlanta or even Reno. Or World of Warcraft players. Or people who eat sushi. People who read Harry Potter novels.
“President Bush stopped off today with a group of people who read Harry Potter novels – the eleventh-largest demographic group in the United States – to discuss the ongoing financial crisis…”
Which group is larger, more important, more likely to vote, more demographically representative of the United States?
Call them micro-niches or whatever new marketing term you want to invent, but it seems like American politicians are increasingly trapped in a kind of minor landscape, a geography that is demonstrably not that within which the majority of Americans currently live.
“Barack Obama campaigned today in the early 1960s by visiting a small pancake house near Springdale…”
In any case, the entire political premise of the last eight years seems to have been one of landscape: big city dwellers near the Great Lakes and the ocean coasts simply don’t understand small town communities, and they’re embarrassingly out of touch with the everyday big skies of lonely ranchers on the plains. But while this might be true – and I don’t think it is, frankly – reversing this belief is surely even more alarming: the idea that someone whose background includes ranches and small towns should go on to lead an urban nation in an urban world seems questionable at best – and potentially dangerous in actual practice.
Again, though, there seems to be no adequate way to measure how political exposure to certain settled landscapes might affect a candidate’s ability to govern – and so this post should simply be taken as a kind of geographic speculation about democracy in the United States.
But it does raise at least one interesting group of questions, I think, including: what are the real everyday landscapes of American life, if those landscapes no longer include old-fashioned soda shops and small-town hockey arenas – or do such everyday landscapes simply no longer exist?
And if there are no everyday landscapes, then surely every landscape we encounter is, by definition, extraordinary – so we should perhaps all be paying more attention to the spatial and architectural circumstances of our daily lives?
Further, if political candidates have managed to discover – and to campaign almost exclusively within – an American landscape that seems not yet to have been touched by the trends and technologies of the twenty-first century, then why is that – and is it really a good indication that those candidates will know how to govern an urbanized, twenty-first century nation?
Finally, if urban candidates – or coastal candidates, whatever you want to call them – “don’t understand the west,” which is simply cultural code for not understanding small town life and for being out of touch with the moral hardships of the American countryside, then surely that’s not altogether bad in a country that is 80% urbanized?
Put another way, it would certainly be frustrating to think that a candidate doesn’t understand how a cattle ranch or an alfalfa farm operates, or that a candidate has no experience with a small town and its parent-teacher associations and so on – but it is extraordinarily troubling to me to think that a candidate doesn’t understand how, say, New York City functions – or Chicago, or Los Angeles, Miami, Boston, San Francisco, Denver, Seattle, Atlanta, or Phoenix – let alone the globally active and thoroughly urbanized economic networks within which these and other international cities are enmeshed.
Surely, then, it is small town candidates and politicians with ranching backgrounds who are demonstrably unqualified for the leadership of an urban country?
Surely we need urban candidates for the twenty-first century?

I’m also pleased to announce that I’ll be on the jury for a design competition hosted in Chicago next month, brought to you by the Chicago Architectural Club. The purpose of the competition is to rethink – and redesign – Chicago’s Union Station, updating it for an era of high-speed rail travel in the United States.
Unfortunately, it’s a bit late in the game to be announcing this: designs are due by October 15!
But I’ve uploaded the competition brief to my Flickr page, so check it out �– and hopefully it’s not too late for some of you to participate.
I’ll be meeting with the jury to announce our decision on Sunday, November 9; you can read more about that here.
But if our transportation options change, and high-speed rail does become an infrastructural fact of American life, then how can the design of our cities keep pace? What will Chicago – indeed, what will all metropolitan forms in the American midwest – look like in the year 2020, if high-speed rail becomes a viable option? Will we see future super-cities hot-linked one to another across the plains – or simply well-made train stations plunked into existing cities here and there?
While I’m in Chicago next month I will also be hosting an amazing panel with Jeffrey Inaba, Sam Jacob, and Joseph Grima, easily three of the most interesting people working in architecture today – but I’ll be posting more about that soon.

A quick note before I hit the highway: I’ll be interviewing Vito Acconci on Saturday, live in Reno at the Nevada Museum of Art. This will be part of the Museum’s 2008 Art + Environment Conference, previously discussed here.

[Image: Vito Acconci, Blinks, Nov 23, 1969].

From an article about Acconci’s work in The New York Times:

”My biggest fear is that architecture is necessarily a kind of totalitarian activity, a kind of prison, in that when you design a space you’re probably designing people’s behavior in that space,” he says. ”So the goal of our work is to make a mix, a mix of possible routes, a mix of alternate routes, alternate channels.”

Be sure to read Shelley Jackson’s interview with Acconci in The Believer, take a look at his work courtesy of Azure, and stop by another profile of the artist-architect over at designboom.

[Image: An artificial island in Austria, designed by Vito Acconci].

I’ll report back with details next week (and hopefully with a transcript or recording of the event), and I hope to find the time to do some blogging from the event itself.
Of course, if you’re anywhere near Reno, please stop by!

[Image: Vito Acconci, from Following Piece, 1969].

(Note that the title for this post – “A mix of possible routes” – comes from the profile of Acconci written by Aric Chen for The New York Times).

I picked up a few books yesterday afternoon at a store in Pacific Heights, in the midst of assembling my “Further Reading” list for The BLDGBLOG Book, and so I’ve got books on the brain. I thought I’d take a minute or two to stroll through my bookshelves and call out a few of the titles I happen to be reading right now or have recently finished.
So yesterday I bought Coal: A Human History by Barbara Freese. Coal tells “the fascinating history of a simple black rock that has shaped our world – and now threatens it.” Freese writes, and I quote at great length:

To grasp the magnitude of coal’s global impact, we must try to picture history without the momentous, high-intensity pulse of industrialization that started in Britain and then swept the world. The mainly agrarian world would have stayed in place for decades or centuries longer, with slower technological progress, less material wealth, and more gradual social change. Mass-production capitalism would not have soared to prominence, industrial working classes and places like nineteenth-century Manchester would not have mushroomed, and the Communist Manifesto would never have been written. The North might have lost the American Civil War, or it might never have started, and the transformation of the American West would have happened slowly by wagon rather than quickly by rail. The World Wars might never have exploded without the industrial rise of coal-rich Germany. Colonial conquests would have been far less sweeping, dramatically altering the history of all the societies that were dominated by foreign industrial powers, including China’s (whose ancient history would have been altered as well). The labor and environmental movements, if they had existed at all, would have taken very different forms. In short, none of the defining and epic struggles of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would have played out as they did.

It’s the intrusion of geology into human history – a kind of economic batholith – the interaction between a fragment of the earth’s surface and the political development of the modern nation.
I also picked up a copy of The Slave Ship: A Human History – note the identical subtitles – by Marcus Rediker. Here, Rediker looks at the “floating dungeons” of the world’s earliest stab at transatlantic globalization:

For more than three centuries, slave ships carried millions of kidnapped Africans across the Atlantic in a “wooden world” where crew and captives alike lived with the ever-present fear of shipwreck, epidemics, and hungry sharks. As a cruel instrument of war and commerce, the slave ship helped to shape the Western world. Yet until now, it has remained a mystery.

Aside from being a social and economic history of the slave ship, the book also explores the ship’s technical structure – the mobile architecture of confinement.
I’ll hopefully start reading them both soon.
Books I’m currently in the process of reading, or have just finished, and that I’d recommend, include Kitty Hauser’s Bloody Old Britain: O.G.S. Crawford and the Archaeology of Modern Life. Crawford was an aerial archaeologist in England in the early 20th century, his “new skills of interpreting the earth from above,” discovering previously unknown landscape details, learned while flying reconnaissance missions during World War I.
Crawford and his colleagues, Hauser writes, “thought prehistory should be approached not through texts (as many archaeologists preferred) not through fetishized ‘finds’ (like those collected and admired by antiquarians), but through the spatial logic of geography. It made sense to think about the distribution of particular kinds of objects or sites over geographical space, rather than looking at them in isolation.” This was “a way of spatializing prehistory, restoring geographical connections and the materiality of the landscape to a subject that was too often reduced to disjointed objects or texts.” After all, she adds, “It was not just where ancient sites were to be found that interested him; it was how they related to each other, what constellations they formed, and how the siting of those constellations related to topography – geology, vegetation, trade routes, sources of water.”

[Images: O.G.S. Crawford and his aerially archaeological airplane; a view of the countryside from above, where remnants of history cast long shadows].

Though I haven’t finished Hauser’s book yet, I’m enjoying it immensely. Hauser also sent me an essay called “Revenants in the Landscape: The Discoveries of Aerial Photography,” from her recent book Shadow Sites. On a casual skim here, that essay appears to deal with the trigonometry of shadows as seen from the air and what these shadows might indicate about unexplored – and abnormal – features in the English landscape. As she writes in Bloody Old Britain, “at certain times of day, when the sun is low in the sky, the outlines of ancient fields become visible over Salisbury Plain, as shadows throw their ridges and dimples into sharp relief; these are known as ‘shadow sites’.”
Speaking of Stonehenge, a few months ago I read Stonehenge, author Rosemary Hill’s excellent contribution to the Wonders of the World series edited by Mary Beard. While it might seem like the world can’t possibly need another book about Stonehenge, Hill’s approach is consistently interesting and deliberately written for a general audience. Throughout the book she describes the imaginative, political, artistic, and historiographic influence of the ancient monument, from William Blake’s engravings and the architecture of Inigo Jones to the Led Zeppelinized druidry of the late twentieth-century. I read a British copy of the book, published by Profile, but Harvard University Press – whose publicity blog is worth a read – has their own version coming out this fall.
For a monument of a different sort, we turn to Glen Canyon Dam. Just last week I finished reading James Lawrence Powell’s forthcoming book Dead Pool: Lake Powell, Global Warming, and the Future of Water in the West. I’d say more about that book here, in fact, but I’m reviewing it for another publication and so I’ll save my thoughts for that article. But it is an interesting book, if imperfect, and it presents some very large questions quite early on in the text.
Powell writes:

Why did our government dam nearly every river in the West, some a dozen times or more? Why were dams built even though the associated irrigation projects were obvious money-losers? Why, within a decade or two of the launching of the United States Reclamation Service in 1902, were every one of its founding principles betrayed?

More evocatively, he asks: “What do we do when across the West are spread not beautiful blue-water lakes, but a hundred million acre-feet of mud, some of it laced with toxins? Where then will our successors get their water?”

[Images: The cover of, and spreads from, Ant Farm: Living Archive 7 by Felicity D. Scott].

The idea of speculative futures for otherwise unanticipated monuments brings me to Felicity D. Scott’s recent book Ant Farm: Living Archive 7, published by ACTAR. Scott’s book is a graphically inspired but sluggishly written exploration of Ant Farm, a 1960s/70s American architectural avant-garde, whose projects included mobile educational facilities, “investigations into the psychedelic and environmental potentials of electronic technology,” inflatable parachute-buildings and “moment villages” in the American desert, and a bewildering variety of other experimental structures, almost all of which, Scott adds, were “portable, ‘instant,’ temporary, cheap, and high-tech.”
It’s Archigram-meets-NASCAR amidst inflatable polyethylene megastructures in the California desert – high on LSD and powered by cheap oil – prefiguring today’s ongoing experiments in rogue instant-urbanism, like Burning Man.
The book is beautifully designed and it includes an awe-inspiring 120-page Timeline of the group’s output; these images alone – really only about two-thirds of the book’s total eye candy – make it a rewarding and memorable resource.
I’ve been reading a load of other books lately, from Reza Negarestani’s future cult-classic Cyclonopedia to Robert MacFarlane’s outstanding The Wild Places, but I hope to post more about those titles soon.

[Images: Object 02, including two interesting wire studies for the project, followed by a “light object,” all by Jeroen Molenaar – who also took this amazing photograph. Object 02 is on display now at the Cultuurwerkplaats R10 in Zwolle, Netherlands. The structure seems to visually exemplify the idea that a work of architecture could double as a cantilevered lighting fixture installed on its site in the city. Or what if small, inhabitable lamps dotted the urban field? You climb into your lamp at night – and turn it off to sleep. Residents who have gone to bed form a dark constellation of unlit structures against the illuminated backdrop of those who’ve stayed awake; the city becomes a burning signage that graphs sleep].

The White House Redux competition results have been announced!

First Prize: #834
J.P. Maruszczak, Ryan Manning (assistant), Roger Connah

Second Prize: #1485
David Iseri, Jefferson Frost, Justin Kruse, Laura Sperry

Third Prize (Shared):
#198
Grant Gibson, Chris-AnnMarie Spencer
#1369
Wayne Congar, Arrielle Assouline-Lichten

Honorable Mention: #892
Pieterjan Ginckels, Julian Friedauer

Congratulations to all the winners – and a gigantic thanks to everyone who participated.
It was a lengthy, but very, very fun jury process, as partially documented in the video, below, and I have about half-a-million things I still want to add to the discussion, but I’ll wait until the popular vote is announced on October 3 before putting up a longer post.

[Image: The White House Redux jury meeting for a quick breakfast on the Die Hard-like unfinished 45th floor of World Trade Center 7 in New York; photo by Marty Hyers].

Meanwhile, watch the jury deliberate at the end of the day (it was dark outside before we all left the building):

It’s interesting to watch this and the vox populi poll back to back:

More soon.

A new exhibition called Forest, curated by Cécile Martin, opens up tomorrow night in Montreal. For the show, “artists and architects have joined forces to propose a new vision of the forest.”

There are three pavilions in all: “three installations that invite one to penetrate and explore the movements and dangers of the canopy, soil and hidden dangers of the forest.” They include the poetically named “From Chernobyl to Montreal, the Incandescent Zen Garden,” whose creators note that “the natural phenomena of radioactivity and sound waves are amplified,” with part of the installation “illuminated night and day by a red light, the same one that made the forest – the Red Forest – adjacent to the Chernobyl nuclear reactor vibrate.”
This slightly unclear image nonetheless leaves me wondering what the biological effects might be if you could cause a several-acre test-forest to vibrate constantly: what strange roots and branches would grow? Would constant vibration cause radically new tree structures to grow – or just make for some very happy plants?
It’d be like the sound farm, only more tactile – and far stranger.
A perpetual earthquake as a lab for cultivating the unnatural.
The other two pavilions, meanwhile, are “The Macrocosm of Fiber or the Filtering Pavilion” and “The Mobile Branch, A Forest of Hypnosis and Vertigo.” The latter project, a collaboration between architect Philip Beesley – whose work was explored here a few years ago – and artist Patrick Beaulieu, is described a kind of animatronic thicket: “A raised three-dimensional flooring and a cover propelled at 300 rotations per minute form a vibrating dance of branches and twigs, constituting a human-sized space of the in-between from which humans are nevertheless excluded.”
You wander into a forest – only to realize that it’s not a forest at all, but a vast machine…
There are a series of workshops on Friday and Saturday, as well – so if you’re anywhere near Montreal, check it out! Tell them you heard about it on BLDGBLOG.

The White House Redux competition – discussed earlier this summer on National Public Radio – will soon be a book:

With almost 500 submissions from 42 countries around the world, White House Redux, a competition launched by Storefront for Art and Architecture and Control Group last January, became one of the most talked-about architecture competitions in 2008. The brief was simple: what would the residence of the most powerful individual in the world, the White House in Washington, D.C., look like if it were designed today?

Published to coincide with the opening of an exhibition of the competition’s results at Storefront for Art and Architecture, White House Redux—The Book contains a compendium of documentation related to the competition and an overview of the results. It includes essays by Joseph Grima (Storefront for Art and Architecture) and Geoff Manaugh (BLDGBLOG and Dwell Magazine), a history of the existing White House and 123 selected projects as well as the four winning submissions. A jury assessed the submissions in the spectacular setting of the 45th floor of the World Trade Center Tower 7, a process documented in the book’s 30-page photoessay by Marty Hyers.

The book is to be available for pre-order and will ship on October 2, 2008, to coincide with the prizegiving and opening of White House Redux at Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York. White House Redux was printed in a limited edition of 500 copies.

734 pages, color and black & white (7.8” x10.5”)
$39 USD Shipping: $5 (USA), $12 (Rest of the world)
Discounts available on shipping for multiple copies

With a print-run of only 500, the book should go fast – so order a copy before they all disappear.

(Note: This might be my last post here for a few days, as I’m going away for a quick – but much-needed – family vacation).