Urban Lab Global Cities (ULGC)

Making the Geo-Biological Turn. Alive/En Vie. Aux Frontières du Design, at Espace EDF, Paris

annicklabeca@gmail.com (The Architecture Post) — Mon, 13 May 2013 05:49:35 PDT

Architecture may no longer function as a sump of resource consumption but rather as a site of production for useful substances such as food, biofuels or precipitates that enable materials to self-repair.

The sterile, inert surfaces of our modern cities provide a site and an opportunity for transformation of architectural design practice — to generate a common life-sustaining project aimed at the production of urban soil in which other systems can thrive.

A collective exhibition at Espace EDF (also known as EDF Foundation), Paris 7th arrondissement, explores the nuanced relationship between nature and architecture, industrial design, and art. The title: Alive/En Vie, aux frontières du design. From Philip Beesley, Rachel Armstrong, Vincent Fournier to EcoLogicStudio, Terreform One, Botanical Fabrication, CITA, and Carole Collet, to only limit to these participants.
First, the thematic behind this exhibition our changing notion of nature.

The Radiant Soil | Philip Beesley | installation view at the Espace EDF, Paris, 2013

I decided to focus on the architectural part of the exhibition letting other but very interesting projects voluntarily aside. A first point about this exhibition we can formulate is that these projects want to confirm that our relationship, which has long being ambiguous, if not conflictual, is changing, and that the boundary between the engineering system and the natural system is becoming finer. It is obvious that these tensions, caused by unpredictable disturbances we cite at length — and we will merely sum up into categories: the world's mutation, genetic modification, climate control, on the one hand, climatic, ecological uncertainties, on the other hand —, have forced us to reconsider our approach to nature, "to reconsider the divide between Nature and Culture" (Next Nature, Actar Editorial, 2012). The 35th issue of Volume, an issue entitled Everything Under Control that addresses the relation between synthetic biology and architecture, fast-emerging technology and architecture, states that we are reconsidering our relationship with the ecosystem, or, what we have already noticed two decades ago and that becomes more relevant, the increasing awareness of environmental crisis. Indeed architects, designers, and engineers study nature as means to problem-form unstable contexts that pose the climatic-ecological-engineering system.

The Radiant Soil | Philip Beesley | installation view at the Espace EDF, Paris, 2013

On the one side we are facing a set of issues — population growth, urban expansion, financial mutation; climatic, ecological issues, water, food and resource shortages; — on the other side, we will be benefiting from advances in technology, genetics, biology, robotics and cybernetics. These challenges are evident in this exhibition. Philip Beesley and his project the Radiant Soil, an impressive meshwork installation suspended from the ceiling. If you are already familiar with Beesley's research on evolutionary ecology, material agency, fabrication, robotics, and their relation to user, an approach he defines as "responsive architecture", the Radiant Soil will remind you Hylozoid series, a massive, physically interactive installation he has been developing since 2007. Here, with the Radiant Soil, Beesley pursues his research on the linkage of the biological, the ecological and the artificial. Robotic, chemistry and prototypical architecture are central to this installation. Thus, according to Beesley,

[t]he word 'soil' might speak quietly of secure mass and compression and resource for framing human territory, but this contemporary soil seethes with a myriad of seeded viscera, miniscule fragments gathering and efflorescing, redolent with chorusing oceans of growth to come. The soil covers, and retreats. Soil consumes space, erasing and consuming daily circumstance within its unspeakably silent, primal fertility. The ambivalence latent within soil makes it a monstrous doppleganger for architecture.

Put it the simplest way: soil is seen "as a kind of standing reserve." (Seth Denizen in discussion with Etienne Turpin, Organs Everywhere, issue 4).
In an article Soil and protoplasm: The Hylozoic ground project he co-wrote with Rachel Armstrong, he denotes soil as

made of structurally repetitive organic and inorganic material that possess heterogeneous properties. Similar to the complex assemblies of tissues and organs in living systems, soil contains functions that are supported by an orchestrated variety of cells. The various elements of a soil matrix are spatially arranged in a way that provides suitable surfaces for self-organising and evolving biochemical exchanges. The chemistries self-regulate and interact and they confer the various molecular species with behaviors of living systems such as growth and sensitivity to their surroundings.

In a time of scarcity, the accelerating speed of material change will be modifying the relation to soil. As Seth Denizen stated (Making the Geologic Now, Punctum Books, 2012),

[t]he world becomes defined not by a time, but by a speed. This is the point at which the world can no longer be merely an extension of our own, a difference in degree, but rather something which takes on a difference in kind: another sea, another wind, another world at right angles to our own.

The parallel with Seth Denizen's research on soil can be explained with this sharing statement regarding shift in the material conditions of our society (Etienne Turpin in conversation with Seth Denizen, in Organs Everywhere, issue 4; Martin Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology," in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Thus, as Denizen says,

There is absolutely nothing of human habitation on the planet that does not, at some point, pass through the soil because, and this is very important to understand, the soil is the filter through which all material production must pass.

The Radiant Soil is made up of inert materials and a 'living' technology composed of adaptive chemistry — organic 'protocell' technology, inorganic 'protocell' technology and inorganic chemical cell (iChells) membranes:

interlinking clouds of industrial design biomimetic components of polymer, metal and glass, arranged in suspended filter layers contain a near-living carbon-capture metabolism. Frond-clusters fitted with shape-memory alloy mechanisms react to viewers as they approach, flexing and setting off bursts of light that stimulate the protocells and trigger chains of motion that ripple throughout the environment. Scent-emitting glands attract viewers and encourage interaction with the system, providing stimulus that increases air circulation and protocell formation.

Or an immersive environment defined as an evolutionary system of a synthetic ecology; A geotextile mesh that interfaces with the visitors. The Radiant Soil is made up with proximity sensors that detect movement and respond with motions. A particular point here is the concept of interface that makes architecture act as enabler. A concept related to this idea of adaptive capacity, adaptability, or… responsiveness that characterize Beesley's design research. In a discussion with Omar Khan for the fourth issue of the editorial project Situated Technologies Pamphlets, Beesley argued: "I like to think of these material exchanges as being the first stages of metabolic interactions where living functions might take root within the matrix." Or thinking architecture as facilitator to link the user and its environment to a certain extent. But this also raises the question of vulnerability, of fragility of architecture, as Beesley stated in his discussion with Omar Khan, and I will add, more broadly of the engineering system. It is however important not to understand vulnerability as negative, but as creative force for architecture to deploy new opportunities to building, as well as to thinking. As Omar Khan forthrightly writes, "fragility provides a strategy for allowing an architectural structure to embrace multiple openings in the fact of its own demise."
Overall, the Radiant Soil tries to bridge these opposed world of the man-made and the natural. It also attempts to reveal the transition from a distinction between born and made to a distinction between controlled and beyond control.

Fab Tree Hab Village | Terreform One | installation view at the Espace EDF, Paris, 2013

Collaborating with nature is the starting point of projects of Terreform One, and of EcoLogic Studio. Terreform One, first, with Fab Tree Hab Village, a project consisting of the ecological design of a prefabricated home humanity, poses a double question, that of fabricating, and that of material agency. In an essay entitled Hackerspaces and the act of making published in the 35th issue of Volume Magazine, Mitchell Joachim invites us to reconsider two points, among the four axes developing in his essay, the act of making and the relationship between material and biodesign. The act of making first. Taking hackers and their spaces, he called hackerspaces, he states that the particularity of hackerspaces is their innovative quasi-professional methods and practices that "generate areas that connect unobvious cross-disciplinary activities." In so doing, this sharing space allows for an "understanding of invention" and generates an interface "that emphasizes open source knowledge through sharing." These fast-emerging technologies, he mentioned in his text, desktop 3D printing/additive manufacturing, biohacking, urban farm/food production, open source design, Do-It-Yourself (DIY) fabrication, scripting/freeware, Arduino electronics, crowd-sourcing, alternate energy strategies, and citizen science, are changing the way we fabricate objects, and in a very nearing future the way we fabricate buildings. The second point well illustrated in his Fab Tree Hab Village is the reconsideration of material agency. Like Philip Beesley, as has been said above, Joachim explores actual material conditions but the comparison stops here. Joachim is interested in synthetic biology, genetics, and other biological disciplines. According to him,

[a]pplying the tools of synthetic biology, alongside other biological disciplines, such as micro-biology and medical tissue engineering, will allow us to create products that are a hundred percent organic, with minimal waste and energy expenditure.

Fab Tree Hab Village, and another project in this exhibition, Gen2Seat, are examples of Terreform One's research whose aim is

to use grown materials to reshape the way people think about manufacturing products genetic engineering.

This is what Terreform One calls biodesign, a "field of design that incorporates living organisms in the creation of new materials and products that can enhance our living." Biodesign can be a similar approach to protocell, a research defended by Philip Beesley and artificial-life chemistry researcher Rachel Armstrong, whose project Saving Venice is also presented in this exhibition. Biodesign, Mitchell Joachim writes in Volume, denotes a "field of design that incorporates living organisms in the creation of new materials and products that can enhance our living."

Hortus.Paris: The Machinic Harvest | EcoLogicStudio | installation view at the Espace EDF, Paris, 2013

These projects show us new environments and new thinking on man-made and natural systems. EcoLogicStudio with Hortus.Paris: The Machinic Harvest, invites us to pick a straw and blow air into the bioreactor tubes to feed the algae and grow the Hortus garden. The user then can scan the QR codes on the photo-bioreactors to learn about the various algal species. In so doing, the user becomes an active agent to this bio-technological environment.

Hortus.Paris: The Machinic Harvest | EcoLogicStudio | installation view at the Espace EDF, Paris, 2013

Immatters | Ann-Kristin Abel | installation view at the Espace EDF, Paris, 2013

Two more projects from my selection are French designer Vincent Fournier's Post-Natural History and Rachel Armstrong's Saving Venice. Post-Natural History, first, consisting of a series of images in very large format in which he imagines animals synthetic-biologically programmed to maximize their adaptive capacity to a changing environment. This synthetic-biologically manipulation creates a very intelligent rabbit, a inorganic-sensitive fly, a mimetic lizard, a beetle with adaptive capacity that allows continuous tracking, a drought- and frost-resistant ibis, and a great grey owl with predator-resistant feathers. And… another fascinating project, as part of Post-Natural History, shown in this exhibition is this robotic agricultural drone, a drone capable of self-activating above 30°C to transport freshwater from rivers to dry remote agricultural areas.

Post-Natural History | Vincent Fournier | installation view at the Espace EDF, Paris, 2013

A common denominator to these works displayed at Espace EDF is a desire to understand the present by speculating, borrowing from an uncertain, unpredictable but emergent futures by producing objects, ideas, systems that do not exist in the present. These genetic-manipulated animals of course do not exist but let us speculate about living species with adaptive capacities to an environment in mutation. The agricultural drone, then, illustrates the growing interest in UAV technology. While UAV raises policy, legal and ethical issues, there is room for specific uses of UAV technology outside military technologies as Vincent Fournier suggests with his agricultural drone. Liam Young, co-founder of Tomorrows Thoughts Today, states that the physical environment is dissolving, leaving a mainly mobile, nomadic infrastructure. A recent article, on the Daily Beast, notes that the agricultural sector can expect to benefit from drones: "Every farmer will benefit. [Drones] will allow small farmers to [farm] economically and it will allow large farmers to acquire data when they want it." Indeed, drones offer a large range of possibilities for farmers such as steering water, pesticides to crops with precision. An example: Vincent Fournier's self-activating agricultural drone. Artists, architects, designers' unlimited imagination allows them to go beyond frontiers, explore new opportunities, design and fabricate new objects, new ideas that do not exist yet, but with a high certainty in a very near future.

Robotic Jellyfish Drone ı Post-Natural History | Vincent Fournier | installation view at the Espace EDF, Paris, 2013

Finally, Rachel Armstrong, who collaborates with Philip Beesley on the Radiant Soil, also shows her latest research on Venice, a research entitled Saving Venice. Her installation consists of a medium-scale computer visualization of the Venice Reef, a collaboration with Christian Kerrigan, and a jar full of protocell oil droplets. In her latest short book Living Architecture: How Synthetic Biology Can Remark Our Cities and Reshape Our Lives, Armstrong discusses possibilities of living technology in redefining materials and fabrication. It is difficult to sum up Armstrong's take into one sentence, but to put it simply, Armstrong encourages a constant dialogue between cities and their surroundings.

Saving Venice | Rachel Armstrong in collaboration with Christian Kerrigan | installation view at the Espace EDF, Paris, 2013

She also invites architects, engineers and designers in reconsidering their discipline by integrating adaptive, soft and responsive structures, ecologically artificial systems. Saving Venice explores capacities of new materials described as 'living technology'. Take protocell oil droplets, or dynamic oil in water droplets, this chemically-based technology is capable of moving around their environment, modifying it and allowing complex behaviors. Armstrong argues that these protocells "can be 'programmed' chemically to achieve particular outcomes."

Protocells can therefore produce a limestone like substance and artificially extend the development of this material (created by the accretion of the skeletons of tiny marine organisms), which can continue to grow, self-repair and even respond to changes in the environment.

In this context, these chemistry-based materials can work like primitive metabolisms. The aim is clear: with protocell technology, as has been said, Armstrong posits a redefinition of new architectural design, material and manufacturing principles with 'living' inorganic technology that possess adaptive capacities to respond to internal and external factors. It is certain, she notes in an article published in Next Nature, that protocell technology however is as part of a large range of possibilities to problem-form fragile environments such as Venice:

The issues involved with the reclamation of Venice are complex and this particular protocell-based approach addresses just one aspect of a large range of factors that threaten the continued survival of the city. However, other metabolic materials besides the protocell technology may have further potential to address other significant issues in this multifactorial situation, such as the very pressing problem of rising damp in the fabric of Venice's buildings where functional 'seaweed wraps' may be able to extract water from waterlogged traditional building materials and attenuate the ongoing significant damage caused by this process.

What I retain here beyond the synthetic-biologically charge of these projects, is the transformation of architecture throughout new design protocols, materials, and fabrication. Architecture is capable of self-modifying in accordance with changing contexts. But what is certain is that this transformation requires new tools, new design and manufacturing protocols, new engagement. And a shifting role of the architect. As Mitchell writes in Volume magazine, "the profession has to restructure its investigative goals, particularly assuming a balance and responsibility of giving aspirants a sufficiently bona fide command of environmental studies and adaptable technologies." Or a new but adaptive business model. Allow me for suggesting that in regard with these projects at Espace EDF, architecture is progressively incorporating contingency. Architecture attempts to reveal positive, creative forces from vulnerable conditions. It is not merely focus on building and site. On the contrary, architecture is becoming an interface with its surrounding, more scalable, responsive with its environment.

Saving Venice | Rachel Armstrong | installation view at the Espace EDF, Paris, 2013

As a last point, allow me for expressing some regret about the exhibition. The overall exhibition, however, fails because of a lack of curatorial consistency. When dealing with topics like this one, synthetic biology and design, it is a very difficult task to avoid pitfalls that could lead to a catalogue of projects and a lack of meaning. Indeed this requires a certain distance with the general topic or the formulation of a problematic that constructs a dialogue between the works, and between the works and the viewers. It seems to me that while Alive/En vie encapsulates an overview on synthetic biology and design, the absence of a clear problematic however weakens this exhibition. Put it simply, the exhibition lacks of consistency, a coherent meaning that would have gone beyond the simple topic of synthetic biology. This is the disappointing part of this exhibition. Curating exhibition cannot merely show or display a work, an idea. It requires a dynamic that generates meaning, new understanding of what is being represented.

Through 1 September 2013
Alive/En Vie: Aux frontières du design
Espace EDF, 6 rue Récamier, 75007 Paris.

Call-For-Projects | IABR 2014 ı Urban by Nature

annicklabeca@gmail.com (The Architecture Post) — Wed, 01 May 2013 07:19:14 PDT

A happy mayday to all. Many of you may have seen this tweet by Volume Magazine announcing IABR 2014 Call for projects.

The sixth edition of the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam (IABR) is announced to open in the Kunsthal Rotterdam in May 2014.
Curator of this edition Dutch landscape architect Dirk Sijmons, as for the theme, Urban by Nature.

This being said, architects, landscape architects, urban planners, cities, universities and organizations, you are invited to participate in a call-for-projects. Your projects must address the relationship between man, nature and city, reflecting this edition's theme.

Your application must be sent by June 9, 2013 mentioning IABR-2014-Call For Projects.

Further information on IABR.

Good luck!!

Event | Apply: Conflict of Interests

annicklabeca@gmail.com (The Architecture Post) — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 11:06:12 PDT

The place of research in architecture is back as recent publications have demonstrated. In the following post on Alejandro Zaera-Polo's book The Sniper's Log, we have seen the importance of research in the discipline that, for those who encourage research, will have a strong impact on architect's practice and — for those who write, — writing.
I encourage those, who have not read it yet, to read this free publication AArchitecture edited by AA School. It is a pdf format. Thus, I suggest the AArchitecture 18 entitled Architecture as Research for a global vision on this question.

This being said, tomorrow, there will be a conversation-based symposium titled Apply: Conflict of Interests whose purpose is to address the place of

applied research in architecture. Nestled in an intersection between practice and theory, applied architectural research can potentially work as a space for overlap and negotiation.
This event will formally make explicit the opportunities for architectural research to bridge the gap between the archive and the laboratory.

Participants will be David Gissen, Thomas Keenan, Janette Kim, Mpho Matsipa, Sarah Whiting, Mabel Wilson, Kazys Varnelis, and Mark Wasiuta. In addition to the preceding list of names, this includes Ernesto Silva, Reinhold Martin, Janette Kim, Emanuel Admassu, Mark Wigley, Carolina Ihle, Lluis Alexandre Casanovas.

This conversation-based symposium will consist of five panels articulated by five questions: What is applied research in architectural pedagogy?; What is applied research in the context of a changing city?; What is applied research in reconstructing the past?; finally Can applied research account for what is outside of systems?

I am personally concerned in this question of research, its place in the discipline, how research is shaping architecture, etc. Research in architecture raises lots of questions… But unfortunately I won't — not to say 'I can't' — attend this symposium. If you are near New York, and tomorrow Friday 26 April at 2:00pm you are free, add this date in your calendar.

The address: 200, Fayerweather 1172 Amsterdam Ave, New York, New York 10027.

Those who, like me, can't attend this symposium but are interested in this question of research, read this issue of AArchitecture #18, as a first step and I will warmly and naturally recommend to read these little publications as instruments for research, from Bracket to San Rocco, to Pidgin, to Thresholds, to New Geographies, to Organs Everywhere (webmagazine with pdf of each issue), to Architectural Design, and you know the list is far from reaching a closure…

Source: suckerPunch and GSAPP

Book Review | The Sniper's Log. Architectural Chronicles of Generation-X, Alejandro Zaera-Polo

annicklabeca@gmail.com (The Architecture Post) — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 05:37:09 PDT

First of all this message is addressed to all these 200 readers who love my facebook page as I just reached 200 'likes'. I am very grateful for your support. I will continue to do my best to satisfy you and all those who don't like my page yet as I consider all of you very important for this blog to improve its quality. I confess to write recently less as I do loads of research. Moreover I'm working on related projects that I hope to be online this year or next year.
An important reminder: Be free to take part to my first call for submissions (essays and project) — one of my related projects mentioned above, I am looking forward to reading you. I am sure I have more things to say but here comes the blank again. So once again thank you all, all my readers, for your very kind support.
By the way, I am working on two interviews and I'm considering of including transcriptions of these interviews. I need a better organization for more flexibility.

This being said,

Today's book review is The Sniper's Log. Architectural Chronicles of Generation-X, a collection of essays written by architect/theoretician/Professor Alejandro Zaera-Polo, founder of Alejandro Zaera-Polo Architecture, and former director of FOA. This so long expected book is highly recommended from the architect to the historian of architecture (architecture theory included). I enjoyed reading (re-reading as the review below will demonstrate) even though many of these essays were already known as been initially published in magazines. The book is well shaped which makes these essays new again. The Sniper's Log should be inscribed into the long and increasingly rich tradition of architecture theory. A tradition that includes Peter Eisenman, Rem Koolhaas, Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Keller Easterling, Jeremy Till, Stan Allen, Robert E. Somol, Colin Rowe, Sanford Kwinter… let's the list open.
The Sniper's Log is subsequently a highly-recommended document if you are interested in issues from computation to digital fabrication to globalization. Each reader will get his/her satisfaction with this book.
Now my review, very long as usual. I apologize for its length but I truly and highly enjoyed reading it. The Sniper's Log, as you will see, raises many topics that cannot be summarized in a review. As the book has many points of entry, I decided to focus on topics relative to my current research.

Next will be followed by Bracket, volume 2 [Goes Soft].

Book information
Alejandro Zaera-Polo | The Sniper's Log. Architectural Chronicles of Generation-X || Actar Editorial, Barcelona, 2013 (592 pages, $39,95, 34€)

A very long and expected book, theoretical, critical, projective and political in many ways, The Sniper's Log. Architectural Chronicles of Generation X, written by Alejandro Zaera-Polo.
Born in Madrid in 1963, co-founder and director of Foreign Office Architects (FOA) with Farshid Moussavi from 1993 to 2011, then founder and director of Alejandro Zaera-Polo Architecture (AZPA), internationally renowned Alejandro Zaera-Polo started as a critic of architecture in the 1980s for "writing has been a parallel activity present throughout my professional life." This information is very helpful to examine his trajectory including his practice, his writing and his academic activities from FOA to his new agency AZPA. He published his first article in 1985 when he "started to indulge in occasional writing engagements for various publications." At this time, he was a student at Harvard Graduate School of Design. He regularly writes for El Croquis, Harvard Design Magazine, Volume, ANY, Quaderns, Log, El Pais, Hunch, A+U, Architectural Design, Verb, 2G, Arch+, AA Files. He also contributes to many books among others Phylogenesis: foa's ark, Foreign Office Architects (Actar Editorial, 2003), The Endless City: The Urban Age Project (Phaidon, 2010), Living in the Endless City: The Urban Age Project (Phaidon, 2011).

The Sniper's Log. Architectural Chronicles of Generation-X | Alejandro Zaera-Polo || Actar Editorial, 2013. Front cover

The Sniper's Log assumes some general background knowledge of the intellectual and political history of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, mostly from philosophy, social geography, biology, and politics. As we will see, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari prevail in his intellectual background. This is not surprising as both thinkers' influence prevails in the architectural discourse, at least with this generation born between 1961 and early 1980s, and the following generation — the Millennials. But the intellectual background is not limited to these two names: Manuel DeLanda, Peter Sloterdijk, David Harvey, Henri Lefebvre, Paul Virilio, Sanford Kwinter, R.E. Somol, Greg Lynn, Manuel Castells and Stan Allen. This intellectual indication will guide this review as it plays an important role not only in his work but also in his writing and academic activities as The Sniper's Log shows.

The Sniper's Log. Architectural Chronicles of Generation-X | Alejandro Zaera-Polo || Actar Editorial, 2013. Page detail
> Each section is designed with a different color ink from black to violet, a different page layout.

Before, I propose to stop for a short moment to present the architecture of the book, its design. The assemblage of these collected essays is central to the book: "[d]uring the collection and editing of these materials I became aware of the link between various documents and the situations for which they had been constructed." The aim of this agencement (to take a concept, voluntarily in French, from Deleuze and Guattari) is to "perform in specific occasions and under certain circumstances, adressed to multiple and contingent targets." Zaera-Polo opts for a particular methodology that he calls sniper's log (I suggest to watch the conference Towards a Theory of Misbehavior at Storefront for Art and Architecture on April 27, 2012). To understand what is behind the sniper's log, this collection of essays "became a register of actions and their attachments to the world outside a register of events for tactical analysis rather than the construction of a consistent worldview."
The Sniper's Log is organized according to four sections: Global Positioning Systems, Breeding Sciences, Nomad Practices and Material Politics. Most of these texts have been published in numerous publications; these include El Croquis, ANY, Hunch, Log, Volume, Quaderns, Arch+, 2G, or A+U. The first section, Global Positioning Systems (or G.P.S.) discusses the question of location — geographical, temporal, technical, and cultural. It gathers early texts published in El Croquis and AD Monographs to texts written in 2004. Beyond these writings on established architects (let's say starchitects), these essays address various but important topics: emergence of computation and new design protocols, growing number of high-rise buildings, new techniques of manufacturing, globalization, market-driven economy, and so on.

The Sniper's Log. Architectural Chronicles of Generation X | Alejandro Zaera-Polo || Actar Editorial, 2013. Page detail
>Texts are set in a background of images in duotone.

I was particularly interested in the three other sections Breeding Sciences, Nomad Practices, and Material Politics since they collect essays that deal with topics corresponding to my current research. A second section explores Alejandro Zaera-Polo's interest in breeding knowledge, practice, and education. A third, then, goes on with the shifting status of the practice of architecture. The reader interested in Zaera-Polo's research on the façade, material organization, patterns, but also high-rise buildings and their impact on the built environment, and representation will appreciate these essays. A four section poses the question of the power/potentials of architecture, its representation within the question of material agency.

The Sniper's Log. Architectural Chronicles of Generation-X | Alejandro Zaera-Polo || Actar Editorial, 2013. Page detail

Three topics relative to my own research on the future of the discipline will prevail in this review. One will examine Alejandro Zaera-Polo's relation to theory. A Second will focus on his method or regime of methods he has co-elaborated with his former partner Farshid Moussavi within Foreign Office Architects over two decades before the agency split up, a regime of methods that over years has involved with the interrelationship of practice, theory and education. A third will discuss, briefly, the current status of the discipline with an emphasis on these three axes: theory, education and practice. Three intertwined axes that I think prevail in The Sniper's Log, three axes that confirm the importance of Zaera-Polo as a theoretician, practitioner and educator.
The Sniper's Log is a collected writings that ponders, investigates, surveys the evolution of the architect, his practice and thought over three decades and so. It is a thick and dense book of over 592 pages made of essays, papers for conferences, interviews and conversations that shape an insightful, and magnificent document of a member of the generation-X, a witness of changes, advances and doubt — of the society, the discipline… — at multiple scales.

The Gen-X
Alejandro Zaera-Polo belongs to the Generation-X (Gen-X), a generation between that of the baby-boomers and this generation named Millennials, precisely a generation born between 1961 and early 1980s. A pragmatic generation as we will see further. What differs the Gen-X from the preceding generation is that: 1) while being formalist, the Gen-X's approach to formalism contrasts with that of the preceding generation; 2) the Gen-X, then, "grew up with the idea of being mediated, surging and using forces that are coming from outside." In other words, Zaera-Polo is more interested in "inventing, growing and breeding something new by manipulating with certain parameters that are already known and without necessarily having to produce and entirely new paradigm and new world which would be a more utopian idea." He is a pragmatic and pragmatics supposes productive strategies.
Over three decades, this Gen-X has witnessed a set of complex and interlinked issues — globalization, urban growth, population growth, market-driven economy, awareness of environmental issues (let's say climate change), information-based society, Internet (digital era), technology-driven changes, namely emergence of computation, new design protocols and digital fabrication. In other words, new expertises and toolsets. While being trained in non-computational architecture by professors who were very building-oriented, the first part of this generation — those born between 1961 and 1966 — shares a strong interest in emergent technologies and computation: IwamotoScott, R&Sie(n), Farshid Moussavi, Greg Lynn and naturally Alejandro Zaera-Polo.
The same generation, that, now, is to add new challenges: economic, social, cultural, political shifts, energetic, climatic, and ecological crises, water and natural resource shortage, obsolete infrastructure as well as social networks, fast-emerging technologies, advances in biology and computation. How to visualize, to diagrammatize, to operate these changing contexts? How have these changes affected the discipline, practice, toolsets, and thinking?
First, one will understand at the outset that The Sniper's Log discusses, problematizes critically, often polemically a range of questions that animate the architect's daily practice as well as writing attempting to redefine architectural dicourse, practice and education, architectural contours, representation, to reveal new engagement, and shift of the status of the discipline. A huge and daunting task that the author has been engaging to achieve for now two decades.
The book is published in a very specific period: 1) his first office Foreign Office Architects (FOA) he co-founded in 1993 with Farshid Moussavi split up in 2011; 2) due to a depressed economy, the market collapsed. Personal first, he opened his new agency Alejandro Zaera-Polo Architecture the same year FOA split up. General, then, behind practice, education and writing, one will notice a political, architectural and theoretical charge. In this context, The Sniper's Log has various possible points of entry. As has said above, my entry is focused, on the one hand, on his regime of methods, his theoretical work, his practice, and role in the architectural education, on the other hand on the status of the discipline, the shifting role of the architect.
In what Alejandro Zaera-Polo's architectural practice and discourse lie? What does he appropriate from philosophical corpus and how does he integrate, translate it to form his thought and practice? What is his place in the history of the architecture theory?

The Sniper's Log. Architectural Chronicles of Generation-X | Alejandro Zaera-Polo || Actar Editorial, 2013. Page detail

Hermeneutic practice: The architect as theoretician
Perhaps his practice lies precisely in his ability to mediate the tension between the theoretical and the practice. His writing activities have strengthened his creative positions. Still today, Alejandro Zaera-Polo writes. He has been writing for three decades and so. This interest in theory finds its starting point while being student at GSD Harvard, for El Croquis in the 1980s. The theoretical work progressively embeds in his practice. And, FOA is an example of how deep is the linkage of theory and design work developed by both Zaera-Polo and at that time partner Farshid Moussavi.
And there is this debate on the particular, some will say troublesome, relationship between practice and theory. As Stan Allen, who, like Zaera-Polo, has developed an embedded relationship of writing, practice, and education, writes in his book Practice: Architecture, Techniques and Representation (2000): "[t]heory tends to envelope and protect practice, while practice excuses theory from the obligation to engage reality. Design is reduced to the implementation of rules from the obligation to engage reality. Design is reduced to the implementation of rules set down elsewhere. (…) Theory imposes regulated ideological criteria over the undisciplined heterogeneity of the real, while the unstated assumptions of conventional practice enforce known solutions and safe repetitions. In both cases, small differences accumulate, but never add up to make a difference." Allen's opinion on the relationship between theory and practice is similar to that of Zaera-Polo for whom theory is linked with practice:

I have never viewed writing as an instrument for producing a comprehensive doctrine or a definitive truth; rather, I see it as a model for engaging with subjects that have attracted my attention in the course of other practices. I believe we theorize because we need to bring order to the realms we operate within, to hypothesize how reality works, and to create a re-interpretation of facts that may alter reality. Rather than in an internal truth or virtue, theory is ultimately grounded in the contingencies of a certain situation, which often lie outside the practice in question. It may optimize operative protocols, or establish a polemic; what is important is that it does something to the world out there.

In other words, theory occupies a similar role to practice and education for Zaera-Polo. The Sniper's Log states the position of Zaera-Polo towards theory and ponders how the shift from Zaera-Polo as a writer into Zaera-Polo as a practitioner and educator has been operated alongside his projects and writings. I take the risk of positioning Zaera-Polo in regard to practice, theory, and education, as after Stan Allen's "material practice" and "hermeneutic practice":"[o]ne primarily textual, bound up with representation and interpretation: a hermeneutic, or discursive practice; and the other concerned with matter, forces, and material: material practice." If adding education, three practices being embedded within consistency. It seems to me, examining Zaera-Polo's practice calls for the consideration of a threefold but nested angle: theory, education and practice.
This relationship of theory, education and practice has been possible within an active engagement in contributing to independent publications. These independent publications from Quaderns, ANY, Log, Volume, Pamphlet Architecture, but also Pidgin, San Rocco, Praxis gave continued the task, started in the 1960s, to open architecture theory to other disciplines. The relationship between independent publications and architecture should be analyzed with an emphasis on how the one has nurtured the second and vice versa. At least The Sniper's Log provides a clue.
Zaera-Polo belongs to an intellectual lineage that includes Peter Eisenman, Manfredo Tafuri, Denise Scott Brown, Colin Rowe, Robert Venturi, Bernard Tschumi, Anthony Vidler, Rem Koolhaas, Sanford Kwinter, Stan Allen, Felicity D. Scott, Keller Easterling, Jeremy Till, and so on. The list is long. Some are architects and writers; other are only critics.

As has been seen earlier, Zaera-Polo has been influenced by other disciplines, from politics, to semiotics, to philosophy, to biology, to computation. In contrast with the preceding generation —Peter Eisenman, for instance, reads Jacques Derrida, Clement Greenberg, Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Michael Fried, Colin Rowe, Michael K. Hays, Robert Venturi, Manfredo Tafuri, Fredric Jameson, Theodor Ardono —, Zaera-Polo's generation(-X) is a reader of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Paul Virilio, Michel de Certeau, Gilbert Simondon, Jurgen Habermas, Bruno Latour, Manuel Castells, Toni Negri, Saskia Sassen, Peter Sloterdijk, and so on.
From philosophy, mostly from Deleuze and Guattari, Zaera-Polo has "transcoded" concepts ranging from machinic process, diagrammatic practice, phylum, phylogenetic, surface, system, organization, power, consistency, pragmatic. From computation, he has developed a computation-aided practice started in the 1990s with FOA. He has explored technological and material possibilities, manufacturing culture and techniques, and more recently digital fabrication. FOA, we will see, has been established like a phylogenetic tree. The question to pose is whether or not AZPA will follow the same path.
Biology associated with computation is a good instrument to examine bleeding edge material technologies, material organizations. From mathematics, he has examined topology and advanced geometries. Associated with biology, he is interested in genetic algorithms. Geometry, we will see, is crucial in his practice, for "geometricizing programs is providing them with particular material performances, without defining a priori the envelope in which they have to perform." Like the preceding generation, semiotics helps Zaera-Polo to connect architecture with the built environment: the way the urban has been shaped, transformed by layers of products — for example, high-rise building (See for this matter the excellent text High-Rise Phylum).
Now let's see how the theoretical has affect his practice.

The Sniper's Log. Architectural Chronicles of Generation-X | Alejandro Zaera-Polo || Actar Editorial, 2013. Front Cover

Phylogenetic architecture as paradigm
I was particularly interested in an articulated set of concepts he has used within his projects, the strategic choice that has allowed him to "transcode" these concepts in the discipline. The first concept I would like to present here is Phylum. The first essay that analyzes Phylum is an essay written in 1994 The Material Organization of Advanced Capitalism, published in AD Monographs, in which he borrows a set of concepts from philosophy, mostly from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to explore the impact of technology-driven changes on the discipline among other topics discussed in this essay. Phylum, a concept that, in biology, is, it is known, one of the seven categories to classify living organism. It describes a set of unformed matters, as posited by Deleuze and Guattari. In a note inside this essay, Zaera-Polo writes that the concept denotes:

the evolution of a material culture, the series of singularities and traces of expression and the processes of transformation associated to a given state of evolution of nonorganic matter. The term inaugurates a purely materialist, nonhumanistic history of technology.

Phylum is an important concept in Zaera-Polo's research. From Deleuze and Guatarri, he interprets the urban space as, I borrow this citation from Manuel Delanda, a machinic phylum "divided into many phyla", that is "the different 'phylogenetic linkages' corresponding to different technologies" (De Landa, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines). Some examples appearing in the book: urban phylum: "[t]o initiate a redescription of the processes of urban production and to propose models of distribution, capturing the orders of the emerging urban phylum, identifying organization and geometries that rule contemporary urbanity in the search for material and formal determinations suitable for the transformation of the urban"; "Each state of the material culture — or phylum — implies specific traits of expression, spatiality, and temporality"; "The unexpressive could well become an appropriate description of the technological and sensorial phylum that nurtures [Jean] Nouvel's work: the assemblage of enunciation for the disorganized spatial and temporal sequences characteristic of the network paradigm." Or, again: The High-Rise Phylum, published in Harvard Design Magazine (Spring/Summer 2007) and in The Endless City (2010), a text that identifies, investigates new technological and innovative tendencies and opportunities in design and construction, the ecology of high-rise profiles and advocates the paradox posed by the relation between the 'semi-automatic' mode of planning of high-rise buildings and the slowing economies of the 21st century. Phylum as well as the related concept of phylogenetic are employed to generate a research that examines the behavioral organization and the interconnection of each component that constitutes a building, its components, the building and its site, the building and the build environment.

Phylogenesis, as convincingly described by Sandra Knapp (See Phylogenesis and the Tree of Life, in Phylogenesis: foa's ark) puts forward hypotheses about the relationships of living things in the form of a diagram — the phylogenetic tree. Used by FOA, it has allowed the agency to formulate hypotheses that, then, as we know it, led to numerous projects. But not only. As has been said, it has permitted the agency to examine the interrelationships between building components, buildings and their surrounding, human and buildings, and so on. In this respect, the concept of phylogenetic has served FOA in various projects and research over a decade (1993-2003). In Phylogenesis: foa's ark, Alejandro Zaera-Polo and Farshid Moussavi write: "[o]ur objective (…) has been the development of generic strategies that will activate the relationship between the local topography and infrastructure, with the requirements of this kind of infrastructure as a generator of the project." And: "[t]hese links are of topographical nature, but they also relate to rainwater management, continuity of ecosystems, underground water levels, and other existing systems that are usually interrupted by the introduction of heavy infrastructural elements." Such as a rhizome. The function of the phylogenetic tree allows identification, analysis, and developments of traits, features or species — components, geometry, envelope, — in each projects. In this context, these concepts of phylum and phylogenetic have functioned as instruments of representation and operation within FOA's works. They have diagrammatized FOA's approach to building. As both architects advocated: "[p]rojects are not something designed, but a breed of particular species." (see Phylogenesis: foa's ark). The Sniper's Log contains one of texts published in Phylogenesis: foa's ark, precisely that of written by Zaera-Polo entitled Phylogenesis: FOA's Species, in which he establishes the structure, context and function of FOA as a laboratory, and the importance of the concept of phylogenetic in constituting a research over a long period. In short, as Sandra Knapp argued, phylogenesis is "only a hypothesis, it is not static or fixed, nor it is linear".

But this can be possible with consistency, another but important concept frequently used in The Sniper's Log either to discuss his practice or on a broader level the discipline of architecture. Again, this concept is taken from Deleuze and Guattari. Consistency or consistence (in French), as both thinkers have written, defines a characteristic of intensive territorial assemblages, or a grid that describes the ability to protect the heterogeneity of components of these assemblages, then, generate new assemblages, and finally expand their affect. Zaera-Polo understands the concept in "its most general sense" as he said to Peter Macapia in the The Material Grain of Geometry: A Conversation with Alejandro Zaera-Polo:

I believe that to devise arguments of consistency has become critical contemporary question, on a political, social, and cultural level. This is a paradigmatic problem of our time, between cultures, geographies, populations… A similar problem appears in space between a whole and a singularity, not only in terms of performance but also in terms of physical organization. And geometry plays a primary role in establishing consistency across spatial domains at every scale. I would claim that geometry is related to the specific and to the solution of specific questions, but always as an argument of consistency with larger domains.

Another meaning of consistency articulated by Deleuze and Guattari concerns not only complex forms — hence the important role of geometric form (advanced geometry, genetic algorithms, topology) — but also the most elementary cell or particle. See the unpublished but surprisingly text Abstract Matters on contemporary music, Zaera-Polo wrote in 1999, a text that examines the concepts of consistency, indetermination and diagrammatism taking from the musical work of John Cage and Pierre Boulez as example. He concludes with:

Composition is for [Pierre] Boulez fundamentally a process of construction and internal consistency, and despite his-multi-disciplinary texts, his work is always concerned with problems of strictly disciplinary nature.

The purpose is to "identify the consistency of the practice, to construct a kind of fingerprint, or DNA, of FOA's practice." And more broadly, of architecture. A seek for consistency that also be applied to architectural education:

The difference between this model and a master class is that the consistency that establishes the framework is based on an area of research and an objective, not on the reproduction of a master's style or procedure.

Geometry, now. For a project titled The Crib Sheets Publication, Sylvia Lavin has chosen a selection of terms: diagram, geometry, practice, and process. Geometry, for Zaera-Polo, in a Deleuzian way, is "the most promising contemporary domain of architectural theory and the most operative region of contemporary architectural practice." More precisely, geometry (see The Material grain of geometry),

is a device that enables us to construct the project, construct the form, to generate the form. And I think this is in some ways similar between the two phases, and the idea, for example, of using a single geometry to generate consistency across the project also continues between the competition stage and the construction stage.

Geometry versus composition:

for me the idea of geometry has always been the same, the vigorous constraints that geometry gives you: I like the feeling that you cannot move a lot. Composition, for example, doesn't allow for similar forms of research.

Here comes topology. In contrast with geometric space, topological space, he wrote on Jean Nouvel in an essay titled Jean Nouvel: Intensifying the Real: "has the advantage of being able to solve one of the fundamental problems of contemporary experience: incommensurability." Topology is "geometry without scale or measure and, therefore, it is a useful tool for designing structures requiring a high degree of flexibility."
Thus, his interest in material system leads him to investigate the question of patterns. As he states: "our work is very much based on patterns." As it is argued, patterns have been the core element to FOA as it is to AZPA. The Sniper's Log contains a certain number of texts that deal directly and/or indirectly with material organization and patterns such as Patterns, Fabrics, Prototypes, Tessellations, Generative Processes and New Material Agencies and Processes, Materials, Prototypes. In Processes, Material, Prototypes, he writes: "[i]t is therefore a more interesting aim within this practice to produce consistency in the process of construction and material organization rather than in the plastic effects." Once again, he has transposed the Deleuzian theory, in particular Differentiation and Repetition into his research on patterns: "[o]ne of the qualities of material is repetition; every material has a certain structure that repeats in space. And also differentiates. It's kind of a play between that repetitive and the way it differentiates through space and maybe through time." As he has translated Henri Lefebvre's Rhythmanalysis to investigate relations and rhythms of patterns within a consistently computational language. Thus, this interest in patterns, Zaera-Polo states:

is likely to be an effect of the cultural necessity to embody complexity through consistency rather than through contradiction (Venturi's legacy), this tendency has been reinforced by the availability of new technologies that enable architectural practices — for example, Foreign Office Architects (FOA), Greg Lynn Form, Reiser + Umemoto, OMA, Herzog & de Meuron, and UNStudio — to develop increasingly sophisticated patterns on different scales of operation.

What I find interesting in this text — and in most of the texts of The Sniper's Log — is his approach to the question of patterns, but also of materials, as intertwined with the political:

Linking directly quantitative analysis with a graphic output, and the consistency and exactness that calculating engines introduce in this process, has enabled new practices to address some of the crucial problems posed by globalization: namely, the dichotomy between tabula rasa and contextualism, and the articulation between local and global.

Or:

Beyond the solution to environmental concerns, there are questions of representation that the patterns of the envelope need to address now. One such challenge is the production of identities for an increasingly inconsistent and mobile community, while insulating and immunizing its population against the abrasive global atmosphere. Another is the representation of the emerging heterarchical orders that increasingly construct their power by both producing and using diversity, while simultaneously trying to produce consistency.

Moments like these quoted above are many that reflect a political charge of The Sniper's Log. Then the impact of the technological changes: "These new technologies have expanded the limits of urban context to include other dimensions of space and time." Or:

Having virtually disappeared from the technical arsenal of truly interesting architecture for two decades, the geometrical structure of the project — tracé regulateur — has regained relevance and become a commonplace of architectural experimentation. If the presence of a regulating mesh in the structuralist approach seemed to throw into question the system's capacity for integration and flexibility, the new possibilities of operating directly in a vectorial space enable us to retain internal and external consistencies without resorting to a rigid grid or reference system.

As important as consistency is diagram. Diagrammatic practice is a key methodology and theoretical concept to Zaera-Polo. You cannot understand his research on patterns, material systems without coming back over the diagram. The essay Mediating Between Ideas and Matters: Icons, Indexes, Diagrams, Drawings, and Graphs is inscribed into a theoretical tradition, which addresses this concept of diagram, from Peter Eisenman to Sanford Kwinter. This essay, such as all the essays that deal directly or indirectly with diagram, has very much to share with Sanford Kwinter, Manuel DeLanda, and Stan Allen. Influenced by Deleuze and Guattari, pragmatic Zaera-Polo envisions diagram not as a "representational system," but as a "logic of sensation," or as "a field of intensities." Or again:

One of the great potentials of diagrams, statistics, notations, and all the tools of abstraction that come together with informational technology is that they allow us to produce alienation within reality, without having to resort to a discourse external to the discipline.

There is no question here of entering deeply into the analysis of FOA's, then AZPA's approach to diagrams. Rather, what is interesting is the theoretical use of diagrams, the way, as Kwinter, DeLanda and Allen did before him or at the same moment, he discusses diagram as an operative device to "synthesize new materials and develop the project as a process of material transformation." A definition similar to that of Deleuze and Guattari: "The diagrammatic or abstract machine does not function to represent, even something real, but rather constructs a real that is yet to come, a new type of reality. Thus when it constitutes points of creation or potentiality it does not stand outside history but is instead always 'prior to' history." To the text I cited above, Mediating Between Ideas and Material Agency, I will add Processes, Materials, Prototypes…, in fact a paper presented at The Good, Bad, and the Beautiful in the framework of the Symposium at UCLA, Los Angeles, in 2002, in which he defines diagrams as "the instrument that permits us to construct new, composite material agencies." I deeply recommend to read — or re-read — Eisenman, Kwinter, Allen, DeLanda, and Somol's texts on diagram to situate Zaera-Polo's thought.

The Sniper's Log. Architectural Chronicles of Generation X | Alejandro Zaera-Polo || Actar Editorial, 2013. Page detail

Material practice: Architect as pragmatic
As has been repeated, Alejandro Zaera-Polo is a pragmatic who envisions practice and theory as productive and consistent, and who conceives architectural education as research-based. In addition, he is part of the Gen-X who, at least for many, is "more interested in pragmatics". A pragmatic whose interest is in

making of a building, running a project, running an office. (…) [W]e are generally much more realistic and mediatory generation. We are deliberate and more aware of the real possibilities and open to explore more potential in technology.

he says to Vladimir Belogolovski.
This brings us back again to the concept of consistency. Consistency is one of the core elements of his practice and thinking. For him: "[t]he most interesting debate on architectural theory today is (…), about how a new pragmatic approach may become the most productive in generating alternative forms of practice." (See Methodological Proposal) and: "[i]n our practice, our main concern is to produce consistency in the process of construction and material organization rather than in its plastic effects." In this context, based on this notion of consistency, with the aim of a regime of methods implemented as a phylogenetic tree, he defines practice as productive, operative and pragmatic, as a processus (in French): "[w]e have tried to put the emphasis of our practice on the architectural construct, on the materiality of the project, and on its organizational qualities." Thus: "[g]eometry, construction, organization, materiality, technique, and pragmatics have become an alternative to a temporary suspension of the exclusivity of cultural analysis." Let's move back to Sylvia Lavins AZP Crib Sheets Glossary. Architecture for Zaera-Polo is no more than the engineering of material life. Practice as autonomy: "[a]utonomy implies the capacity of a practice to develop such a level of consistency on an abstract level as to extend its potential effects beyond its mere efficiencies and into a regime of excess." Process as paradigm:

Processes are far more interesting than ideas, which are linked to existing codes, operating critically or in alignment with other, preexisting systems of ideas. Rather than turning a project into the implementation of an idea or the scaffolding for an image, I am interested in construction differing engineering-based processes.

More precisely: "[w]e can synthesize the historical processes in a kind of accelerated motion, integrally adding information to the assemblage."

I will conclude with three important points: the research-based agency, a methodology illustrated with the concept of phylogenetic tree; the architect as educator. These two points highlight the shifting role of the architect as it has been stated in increasingly essays and books like Rory Hyde's Future Practice.

The Sniper's Log. Architectural Chronicles of Generation-X | Alejandro Zaera-Polo || Actar Editorial, 2013. Back cover

The Agency as a laboratory

Let's reconsider the concept of phylogenetic. The phylogenetic research has put the function of architecture firm, and more broadly the role of the architect and the practice of architecture in a position similar to the laboratory:

As an organization grown out of the speculative and academic milieu, FOA spent its first ten years in the development of a technical arsenal for the implementation of a certain approach to the practice of architecture. This approach, and its instruments, has been explored through a series competitions, speculative commissions, and, as of 2002, some very real projects, some of them completed, as of the time of this revisitation, while others are still under construction.

He envisions practice as a "consistent reservoir of architectural species to be proliferated, mutated, and evolved in the years to come: a genetic pool."

Issues of globalization, market-driven economy, urbanization, sprawl, or growing awareness of global change and its consequences are treated with an architectural scope in The Sniper's Log. These new challenges require a more flexible approach that only a research-based practice can address:

[a] laboratory is not constituted by a closed series of techniques or an infinitely open series of possible individual positions, but by an infinitely open field of technical and theoretical positions with a specific purpose.

Further:

The objective of a laboratory is to produce a solution for a problem; any technique or position is legitimate as long as it serves to achieve the purpose that is targeted.

It seems to me that the nested condition of theory, education and practice, or hermeneutic practice and material practice, as it is forthrightly established in The Sniper's Log, is the result of a research-oriented practice that has long attempted to gather all the instruments available to architecture to problem-solve internal and external issues from the building, to the societal, or from the discipline of architecture to the political. See for instance the Politics of the Envelope or Localizing Networks: Physical Terminal for Web 2.0 Engines as example.

The Sniper's Log. Architectural Chronicles of Generation-X | Alejandro Zaera-Polo || Actar Editorial, 2013. Back cover

The Architect as Educator

In an interview for The Architect's Newspaper, Alejandro Zaera-Polo states that his "career has been linked to education or academic practice." Since two decades and so, he has been teaching in prestigious schools of architecture from Berlage Institute to Princeton School of Architecture. This academic experience has led him to interrogate in depth architectural education. Thus, providing new toolsets to the next generation of practitioners requires a new form of school, a new approach to teaching, new design protocols, and better understanding of new challenges. Two interesting texts and a conversation (with Roemer van Toorn) put a light on his position towards architectural education. One example is Methodological Proposition for the Staedelschule, an unpublished paper written in 2001. In this paper, he defines his vision of the 21st century architectural school which requires adapted design tools and new teaching methods for the future practitioners:

The approach to architectural education that I will try to implement for Steadelschule Frankfurt, is an intermediate to the polytechnic model that predominates in Continental Europe and Asia and the liberal-arts model that characterizes the Anglo-American schools. This new model would attempt to articulate the relationships between education and research and theory and practice into a more operative assemblage.

In addition to the necessity for new toolsets and consequently a new methodology, architectural education also faces a crisis of methodology. For him, a research-based model capable of "rendering the disciplinary techniques truly productive" is needed to cope with new problematics. An architectural school as a laboratory:

The focus on the development and problematization of architectural operativity will not be sufficient without the constitution of a true laboratory, where every member will have to develop independent research within a common framework.

This idea then reformulated for the Berlage Institute:

I am interested in reality as a field of research that is able to offer a certain level of friction to the research and that can provide certain accountability to the work in the institute.

More recently he pointed to that:

architectural education now more than ever has to be linked to research. I think that the most important thing you can teach an architectural student is to investigate, to be inquisitive, to research.

But in his view, "[a]rchitectural research has to deal specifically with the tools and matters of architecture, and has to be fundamentally aimed at architecture as a product." Put it simply: identification of a concrete architectural problem; and establishment of consistent multidisciplnary techniques, inclusion of specialists — anthropologists, economists, filmmakers, musicians, or sociologists — to enlarge potentials of architecture. His vision of a school as laboratory has been nurtured by his phylogenetic tree-based practice established for FOA, as has been seen earlier.
The integration of computer-aided design tools has occupied the 1990s even though their implication was very slow, if not put in jeopardy. Schools of architecture were engaged in retooling technological infrastructure and teach methods (Stan Allen). The 2000s was the decade of cross-disciplinary research, architecture borrowing from aviation, robotic, genetics, biology and film offering even more opportunities. According to Zaera-Polo,

Rather than focusing the postgraduate studies on theorizing other disciplines and trying to make a translation into architecture, a research program primarily applied to the production of architecture and the problematization of its techniques will offer an alternative to the current proliferation of fuzzy, multidisciplinary approaches. Rather than looking for architecture in other disciplines, a retreat into architectural materials and techniques would explore how to look at everything from an architectural perspective and how to search for architectural instruments in other disciplines.

What he attempts to say is that it is counterproductive for architecture to borrow from other disciplines without a critical survey on the discipline itself, its content, its techniques. In short, a redefinition of its content, its boundaries, its skillset to generate new teaching methods:

Today it seems perhaps more adequate to find consistency in the production of architectural effects and the instruments used in their production, or to research the instrumental; that is, to make the discipline grow toward integration with emergent economic, cultural, and social structures versus retreat to the suspect ground of autonomous production.

A remark that clearly summarizes his position towards architectural education. Be this consistent or not, today's architectural schools are integrating coding, robotics and parametric design, as Stan Allen stated: "[W]hereas the first generation of digital designers repurposed available software to generate novel formal effects, contemporary designers are going beyond the interface. Writing code is now mandatory for advanced academic work. While this appears to counter the trend to democratization and naturalization described above, it is, in fact, a complementary phenomenon. The thrust of this research is practical and result-oriented, and much of it is widely available, distributed on the internet as open-source material. Intimately engaged with construction logistics and material performance, it draws as much from engineering culture as from architecture."
What these texts underline is the shifting role of the architect towards new territories, new engagements. The role of the architect-teacher, as Liam Young said to Rory Hyde (See Future Practice: Conversations from the Edge of Architecture), is "to equip the students with the skills to be able to" practice in a time of mutation. In this respect, this is what Alejandro Zaera-Polo, their elder, proposes, but with a different approach.

The shifting role of the architect
The last point to briefly discuss concerns the status of the discipline. In my view, The Sniper's Log reveals a new engagement of the discipline in a range of layers from internal questions (fast-emerging technologies, new design protocols, new representation, and the like) to external questions (changing contexts, advances in biology and other disciplines with which architecture has developed dialogues over decades). In this context, it is very important to read Alejandro Zaera-Polo's The Sniper's Log and to situate it as a insightful, relevant collection of essays in the history of theory, between the baby-boomers' legacy — I will merely cite only two names I mentioned above: Michael K. Hays, Manfredo Tafuri — and the Millennials — Jeremy Till (See Architecture Depends), Rory Hyde (Future Practice). Rory Hyde, for instance, belongs to the Millennials, a large generation still to be identified, as Zaera-Polo writes. Why did I compare The Sniper's Log with Hyde's Future Practice? We have seen how these issues of globalization, market-driven economies, information age, urban age, sprawl, technology-driven changes, Internet, slowing economies, awareness of the environmental have deeply transformed architecture's thinking, practice and education. As The Sniper's Log attempts to demonstrate, architecture has managed to incorporate, translate, articulate and problem-solve a set of internal and external issues. However new issues are rising with new demands, new expertises, new protocols — post-conflict issues, social and economic mutation, obsolete infrastructure, fast-emerging technologies, water and natural resource shortage, advances in biology and sciences, climatic, energetic and ecological crises. Likewise, some of these issues are particularly complex to be addressed with the existing methodology and design tools. In this period of doubt, the complex nested question of the local — the Arctic's shifting condition, sea-level rising, housing shortage, for instance — and the global requires new approach to building, to city-making, new materials, new design tools, new techniques of construction, as well as new educational methodology. And a new engagement. The fast-emerging technologies — (synthetic/developmental) biology, genetics, digital tools, 3D-printing —, then, contribute to a deeply transformation of the discipline.

What The Sniper's Log has showed is a desire for re-empowering architecture. Practice, theory, and education, three cross-categories central to Zaera-Polo whose purpose is to re-empowering the discipline. These essays, for instance: Hokusai Wave, Rethinking Representation, Disciplines, The Politics of Envelope and Architecture and Power. The common denominator to these texts is that not only they raise the question of representation but also they go further by questioning the status of the discipline. In Rethinking Representation, Zaera-Polo writes:

For nearly two decades, the architectural debate had been moving away from the subject of representation (for example: politics, meaning, identity and language) toward those of organization, production, and technique as primary means for the production of architectural form.

But the 2000s have their new problematics that have put once again the question representation on the table:

In this new phase of global capitalism, as we inevitably reengage with the critique of power and new-found, potential forms of transformation, representation becomes a crucial subject to address, however difficult it is to find worthwhile content — or means — for leveraging its ahistorical agency.

Early in The Sniper's Log, precisely in the essay Hokusai Wave, still about representation he states,

Representation has been a contested subject for a whole generation of architects (my generation); that is, those of us who have focused on experimenting with material organizations and factual data as an escape from the discursive predominance of representation, meaning, identity, and language that characterized earlier generations.

This text Hokusai Wave has been appreciated as an important essay that summarizes FOA's practice. What interests me in this text is the distance between the practitioner and the audience — the user — and, how, here with a diagram, architecture is engaged in a new relationship with the audience.

The tale of the Hokusai Wave is the history of how the engagement with clients and public media — in the other words, the very sources of power at play in all commissions — substantially altered FOA's projectual methodology, moving us toward an incorporation of iconography and meaning. Having come to our own fairly precarious professional niche out of a more or less speculative and academic practice, we spent a long time in advance of building theorizing about building technologies and crafts, a most pressing endeavor for a young practice. As our work evolved toward a more professional output, my role has become less involved with crafting and more engaged in acquiring and explaining projects, theorizing and communicating the practice to a variety of agents, in order to make the practice economically sustainable. As the most interesting speculation generally happens out of necessity, my subject of research has moved consistently with the new requirements of my role.

Put it the simplest way, the architect as facilitator, who with the techniques of architecture, its potential, enables a new relationship, or engagement, between the discipline and the audience:

Faced with a full press conference in Yokohama City Hall, circa February 1995, we had to explain what it was we were trying to do in our newly awarded Yokohama Ferry Terminal Competition project. Faithful to our doctrine, fine-tuned through years of academic practice, I proceeded to explain the circulation diagram, the geometric transformations, and the construction technologies that were involved in the project, hoping that the audience would have enough patience to wait for the emergence of the project. Halfway through the presentation, I started to notice the blank expression on the faces of those assembled in the room — that is, a clear indicator that the message was not getting across (this was to become a very common experience during this evolution toward a marketing performance). After a few minutes of cold sweat, an image that was carefully edited from the project' discourse — but still floating somewhere in the back of our minds — suddenly came to my rescue. It was the Hokusai Wave, a drawing from a local painter [Katshushika Hokusai*] that we had been toying with while we indulged in geometric manipulation and construction hypotheses during the design phase of the competition entry. In a sudden (and risky) burst of inspiration, I terminated the factual, process-driven narrative to conclude that what really inspired us was the image of Hokusai's Wave. The room exploded in an exclamation of sincere relief — a collective "Aaaaaahhh…!" — and we left the room, still sweating and grateful for that moment of lucidity, with the clear realization that something wasn't quite working in our carefully crafted discourse.

This is certainly what Zaera-Polo calls consistency and coherence. Beyond this pleasant situation, the text underlines Zaera-Polo's call for re-empowering architecture. Power should be understood, as Deleuze and Guattari put it, as potential. Power, as Brian Massumi wrote in the foreword of A Thousand Plateaus, means puissance and pouvoir. It also has to do with potential as puissance "refers to a range of potentials", Massumi rightly goes on. Thus, architecture, Zaera-Polo writes: "has always had a peculiar relationship with power." Here, Zaera-Polo is not too far from what the Millennials claim ( see for instance Rory Hyde's Future Practice, or Jeremy Till's Scarcity contra Austerity). This raises a set of questions that re-engage architecture with the society on multiple scales — infrastructure, economy, energy, ecology and buildings. For him, this is possible by re-interrogating the discipline, in other words, to start with architecture itself, its contours, its contents, its boundaries. In the Politics of the Envelope, he claims:

Within this context it is vital to produce an updated politics of architecture in which the discipline is not merely reduced to a representation of ideal political concepts, but conceived as an effective tool to produce change.

As Zaera-Polo opened a new agency AZPA in 2011, I am curious of reading him again on new challenging issues. For instance, as he sees opportunities in new instruments such as digital fabrication, I am particularly looking forward to hearing him on these advances 3D-manufacturing, smart materials —hybrid materials, or material ecology —… among many other topics…

The Sniper's Log. Architectural Chronicles of Generation-X | Alejandro Zaera-Polo || Actar Editorial, 2013. Back cover

* Note of the editor

Bibliography

Alejandro Zaera-Polo, The Sniper's Log. Architectural Chronicles of Generation-X, Actar Editorial, 2013
Foreign Office Architects, Phylogenesis: foa's ark, Actar Editorial, 2003.
Manuel DeLanda, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, Zone, 1991. (Sold out)
Stan Allen, The Future that is now, Design Observer, 2012
Stan Allen, Practice: Architecture, Techniques and Representation, Routledge, 2009
Rory Hyde, Future Practice: Conversations from the Edge of Architecture, Routledge, 2012
Jeremy Till, Architecture Depends, The MIT Press, 2009
Jeremy Till, Scarcity contra Austerity, Design Observer, 2012
Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaux, trans. Brian Massumi, University of Minnesota Press, 1987
Sanford Kwinter, Far-From-Equilibrium: Essays on Technology and Design Culture, Actar Editorial, 2007
Detlef Mertins, Modernity Unbound: Other Histories of Architectural Modernity, AA Publications, 2011 (* see AA Bookshop, if you're interested. It's sold out on Amazon… Or your local bookshop, if any chance)
Peter Eisenman, Written into the Void: Selected Writing, 1990-2004, Yale University Press, 2007

Call for Submissions | Kerb Journal issue 21

noreply@blogger.com (Annick Labeca) — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 10:51:53 PDT

I am currently working on the review of Alejandro Zaera-Polo's The Sniper's Log. I hope it will be online this Friday (or this week-end). Two other projects on which I am working on are two interviews: Lateral Office and a new webmagazine on urbanism, Urbanista founded by Lucy Bullivant, a renown critic of architecture who regularly contributes to Architectural Design, to quote only this magazine. I am certain that many of you are familiar with her essays and lectures on architecture and urban design. I hope again to propose these interviews very soon.

For now, Kerb journal, an annual landscape architecture publication produced by the RMIT University School of Architecture and Design, calls for submissions for their 21st year of publication. The theme is Peripheral Processes: Adapted Modes of Practice. This edition is due for launch in August 2013.
Below the guidelines in jpeg format.

All submissions should be sent by midnight Sunday 5th May 2013.

Go to Kerb Journal website for further information.

ULGC | Lateral Office representing Canadian Pavilion at Venice Architecture Biennale 2014

noreply@blogger.com (Annick Labeca) — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 04:17:29 PDT

Update: Yesterday Lateral Office announced Arctic Adaptations' website. You'll find first information on the proposal. Note that the project, then, will travel in Canada in 2015-16. An extensive publication titled Next North will be launched for this occasion.

Map of Canada | © Lateral Office Team/ Arctic Adaptations
Originally appeared on Arctic Adaptations

Toronto-based Lateral Office/InfraNet Lab, also founder of the little publication Bracket, has been chosen to represent the Canadian Pavilion at Venice Architecture Biennale 2014, as you know, an edition that will be curated by Rem Koolhaas. Lateral Office/InfraNet Lab is one of the agencies I have been following for, probably, 6 years or so. I am working very hard on an interview that I would like to request to them to discuss a series of topics related to their practice, to Bracket, and also new orientations and roles of architecture.

For this new edition, Lateral Office will present Arctic Adaptations a project that will be articulating five themes: northern health, recreation, housing, education and arts.

To have a first overview of their proposal for this edition 2014, two (first) articles announcing Lateral Office's participation I suggest to read: Canadian The Globe and Mail and a webmagazine of architecture Azure. Below two abstract.

Map of Nunavut | © Lateral Office Team/ Arctic Adaptations
Originally appeared on Arctic Adaptations

First The Globe and Mail. The title of this article written by James Adams is Nunavut Project wins Canadian Spot at Venice Biennale in Architecture:

In an interview, White called Koolhaas's theme "fortuitous" and "a pretty powerful one for us since [with Arctic Adaptations] we're dealing with such a new territory [Nunavut was created in April 1999], a new government and such a youthful population [33 per cent of its 32,000 residents is 14 years and under. Average age: 25]." The theme's a fit, too, in that Inuit knowledge has been "so resourceful and intelligent" over the centuries in adapting to fundamentals, "extreme ones," of climate, geography, mobility.

The White/Sheppard presentation will be housed in the Canadian Pavilion in Venice's Giardini di Castello June 7 through Nov. 23, 2014. Diplomatically described by White as "a quirky and unique space," the rather small glass-and-wood pavilion was built in 1958, ostensibly in the spiral shape of a nautilus shell. It's Lateral Office's intention t recast the pavilion, often castigated as a "frustration" for artists, installers and curators, as a kind of "ice-floe landscape… to make it seem more spacious, to push things to the perimeter… to get a little more quietness in there" so as to create "a sense of coolness, atmospherically speaking, and the vastness of the actual landscape."

The following abstract is that of Nina Boccia entitled Lateral Office to Curate Canadian Pavilion in Venice for Azure. An article quite short offering complementary aspect of Lateral Office's proposal:

The proposals will derive from collaborations among five design teams, each of which will pair an architecture school with a firm that has worked in the region, and five Nunavut-based organizations. Besides Lateral Office, the firms include Stantec and Kobayashi + Zedda Architects, while participating schools include Dalhousie University and the University of Manitoba. They will come up with solutions for the sectors of health, education, housing, recreation and the arts, while considering the impacts of climate change and population growth on the region.

Pamphlet Architecture offers a good understanding of Lateral Office's work with the 30th issue Coupling. Strategies for Infrastructural Opportunism. This issue shows a part of Lateral Office's project. And with evidence another occasion is Bracket: On Farming (sold out) and Goes Soft…

Render. Aerial view | © Lateral Office Team/ Arctic Adaptations
Originally appeared on Arctic Adaptations

If I can have them for an interview, I will of course let you know…

Source: The Globe and Mail and Azure.

ULGC | Event | Atlas of The Conflict at Studio-X NYC

noreply@blogger.com (Annick Labeca) — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 09:31:23 PDT

I wish I could attend this lecture: author of Atlas of The Conflict: Israel-Palestine, Malkit Shoshan will lecture April 25 at 6:30 pm at Studio-X NYC on Seamless Territory (visit their facebook page for further information). If you're in New York City and its area on April 25, I encourage you to attend Shoshan's lecture. Comments (on the lecture) are welcome.
As announced in the facebook event, another project will be presented ZOO, or the letter Z, just after Zionism. This project focuses on the Gaza Strip reflecting on the two words that are categorized under the letter 'Z' in the Atlas's lexicon — "Zionism" and "zoo". It examines these seemingly unrelated themes within the context of the Gaza Strip, tracing them both back t the Age of Reason, the epoch of the classification of nations and animals.

The book maps and tackles processes and mechanisms that shape the relation of Israel and Palestine throughout the medium of territory over the past 100 years. The book reveals, questions interlinked issues: borders, walls as well as typologies of settlements, land ownership, demography, water, archaeological and cultural heritage sites, control of natural resources, landscaping, wars and treaties, all articulated on and with personal stories, traumas, resistance, etc.

Below an abstract of the introduction:

The Atlas of the Conflict maps the territorial aspects of the relations between over the past 100 years. I started this research 10 years ago as an architecture student in Israel. During my studies, I was confronted with a fundamental necessity to understand, at first, the events that led to the formation of Israel and, later, to take a personal and professional position it. In my third year of study at the Technion (the Israel Institute of Technology), I was assigned to design a new program, preferably a shopping mall, on an empty plot near Tel Aviv. During the preliminary site research, I discovered it to be a ruined Palestinian cemetery. My reaction was to stop designing. I felt the need to delve into the past and to learn the history of my country. A history that is not directly told. Driven by a genuine sense of curiosity, I started collecting illustrations, maps, photographs , diagrams and other visual materials. Textual testimonies, although very important, simply weren't tangible enough, as they cannot have a sense of scale.
(…)
Israel's dynamic spatial maneuvers are tied to fluctuations in borders and to patterns of settlements. They result in a unique and ever evolving spatial practice of temporarily, which can be detected in settlements typologies, from a Wall and a Tower (1930s) to Caravilla's (2005). The settler is, until this day, used as an occupying power, creating a fact on the ground, a living wall, a keeper of the land and of its natural resources: always placed strategically, according to a national agenda. The constant intensive movements in space and time of the Zionist project have no precedent.

Another book, if you are interested in these questions of weaponized architecture (and urbanism) at larger scales, is Leopold Lambert's Weaponized Architecture: The Impossibility of Innocence published by Barcelona-based dpr barcelona, that I have already mentioned in this blog.

ULGC | Thresholds calls for submissions for issue 42 on Human

noreply@blogger.com (Annick Labeca) — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 08:17:04 PDT

Thresholds, a little publication, produced by editors in the Department of Architecture at MIT, calls for submission for its 42th issue. This issue will explore, discuss, address critically (and certainly polemically) the theme of human, "the past and present changing notion of 'the human' with regards to its physical, virtual, and psychological habitat.
Below the presentation originally from Thresholds' website:

In the last decade innovations within cognitive imaging, computer interfaces, communication technologies, surrogate natures, sensory mediators, and global tracking have reshaped our understanding of the Self. This shift can be seen, on one hand, as a revolution of sensibilities while, on the other hand, still pushing towards an enlightenment-based, rationalist perspective of the human as a neurobiological mechanism. No matter which way this 'human' is being reshaped, indeed formed new gateways of artistic and architectural possibility or have we forced ourselves into a deterministic and mechanistic view of both occupants and design? Humans are different than machines, after all, but how has the human/machine duality been rethought in our current age? How does art, architecture and film envision, critique, or challenge this 'new human'?

Due: 30 April 2013

Here you will find the pdf with further information.

Indeterminacy and Architecture (On Determination ı The Sniper's Log | Alejandro Zaera-Polo)

noreply@blogger.com (Annick Labeca) — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 04:32:07 PDT

I was posting quotes and abstracts from Alejandro Zaera-Polo's The Sniper's Log, when I read this passage On Determination. I have a strong interest in notions of indeterminacy, contingency, and their integration within the architectural practice and thinking, what they can bring to the practice of architecture.
As expected, Alejandro Zaera Polo's book offers a large array of interesting, critical, or polemical topics to discuss on architectural practice, past, present and future.

Below is the random ideas, notes and other reactions I was about to post on tumblr before deciding to post here. My comment is on the passage On Determination (p.325-327).

As Alejandro Zaera-Polo (we will continue with AZP) writes, indetermination (and arbitrariness) has become an important concept in the architectural discourse, in particular the discourse of the architectural avant-garde, from the post-war period up to the end of the '60s. What can indetermination bring to architecture? AZP states: "indetermination is an unlikely model for a discipline that is aimed at the ordering of the environment." He goes on with the following,

The notion that architecture can be produced by indetermination, to remain contingent for the sake of openness is a peculiar one and runs the risk of undermining the role of architecture as a profession.

According to AZP, a reason why architects are often not taken seriously is that for some architects, architecture can be produced by indetermination. For him, however,

Even if we cannot predict a priori the form that a system of cellular automata will produce, it does not mean there is not a moment of determination involved: once we have a material domain, some behavioral rules and some agents with certain objectives, the form is virtually determined. Mere selection of the automata is a form of determination.

He proposes diagram as a determinate tool, a strategy that allows practitioners

to construct a project without eliminating the possibility to incorporate changes in the environment through the project, or, conversely, without declining the possibility to control it, by determining partially and sequentially the adequate domains of control.

Put it the simplest way, "[d]iagrammatic practices enable architects to apply determinations while allowing local structures or contingencies to inform the final result."

Interesting take. However: I might misunderstand AZP, but if I follow his take, he posits determination can act as medium. If so, my question is: what to do when you can't predict future, an unpredictable, fictitious future? How, in the age of digital when nonlinearities become the norm, can determination problem-form emergent yet uncertain ecologies including natural, cultural, social, economic, environmental, energy and political? How can determination be "contingent", "non-linear", "improbable" whilst being the opposite sense of contingency, flexibility, nonlinearity? How does determination allow for adaptability, feedback loops? How can determination help or become an "instrument" to cope with, absorb, transform unexpected situations, complex linked dynamics across multiple scales?

It seems to me that architecture should, rather, integrate the concept of indeterminacy (a philosophical and related concept to indetermination). Indeterminacy and indetermination are related to uncertainty, nonlinearities, contingency. Both articulate differentiation, absorption, behavioral organization. Both can allow architecture for problem-addressing these new ecologies mentioned above. Allow me for focusing on the concept of indeterminacy for a short moment. There is an embryonic research on architecture as expanded field (an expanded architecture influenced by Rosalind Krauss's sculpture in the expanded field), an architecture, beyond its site, that integrates other fields. This research has been started by Mason White, Lola Sheppard, and Neeraj Bhatia of Lateral Office/InfraNet Lab, and Mark Smout and Laura Allen of Smout Allen. I am looking forward to reading more.
Indeterminacy allows architecture to expand its site into new opportunities. Theater, for instance, is at ease with indeterminacy, as Keller Easterling writes in The Action is the Form quoting Bruno Latour's use of the word "actor" in social studies: "It is not by accident that this expression, like that of 'person', comes from the stage… Play-acting puts us immediately into a thick imbroglio where the question of who is carrying out the action has become unfathomable." (See: Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social, An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory; and Keller Easterling, The Action is the Form). Architecture, such as theater, can also become indeterminate. Nicholas Negroponte, who is regularly quoted by a certain architecture that includes Lateral Office/InfraNet Lab, MAP Architects, Smout Allen, Tomorrows Thoughts Today, or R&Sie, wrote in his seminal The Architecture Machine: "Any environmental design task is characterized by an astounding amount of unavailable or indeterminate information." Determinacy vs. Indeterminacy, as Neeraj Bhatia writes in his essay Resilient Infrastructure (Bracket [Goes Soft]). Indeterminacy referring to 'soft', flexible, scalable; determinacy meaning 'hard', static, inert.

Related publication
Field Journal of Architecture | Architecture and Indeterminacy | edited by Renata Tyszcuk and Doina Petrescu, Volume 1, September 2007.

Let me go back to diagram, precisely to diagrammatic practices. Quoting AZP, I wrote above, "Diagrammatic practices enable architects to apply determinations while allowing local structures or contingencies to inform the final result". Diagram seems to be more than a simple mode of representation in AZP's practice and thinking. It acts as a strategy, an instrument, a tool, precisely a design tool that is able to both problem-form and problem-solve. Still better, a design tool that contains, integrates information about material, site, tectonics, specific contexts, and so on. I'm curious of AZP's take on diagrammatic practices. His diagrammatic practices raise questions. It seems to me that what AZP discusses is a paradigmatic shift and a redefinition of the practice of architecture. Diagram remains diagram. Yet it now incorporates new possibilities as well as new emergencies, expandable parameters, to quote Neeraj Bhatia and Lola Sheppard — material agency, spatial organization, program, economics, politics, and ecology. Diagram adapts to, or, to follow AZP, contains adaptive capacities to address these complexities that architecture is facing.

Hadspen House - rendering | © FOA, 2007
Originally appeared on The New York Times, 2007
> "Foreign Office Architects' scheme for the new garden at Hadspen House in Somerset, England." (NYT, 2007)

Hadspen House - diagram | © FOA, 2007
Originally appeared on e-architect

According to AZP, determination should be integrated within diagrammatic practices. AZP proposes two interesting examples from contemporary music — if you have already read (or are reading) the book, you certainly have noticed AZP's interest for contemporary music —, two important names: French Pierre Boulez and American John Cage. Both having practice-based experience in alienation (about alienation. Describing the sense and the role of diagram in his practice, AZP describes alienation as a "powerful instrument for displacement from a closed state of conventions or orders, and the possibility of triggering virtualities in a project, generally excluded by a historical construction of tools or response. (p.237)" As AZP states, alienation has been examined by the architectural practice and discourse over the 1980s "destabilizing the objects by resorting to other disciplines, or destabilizing the subject by embracing automatism, randomness, or chaos. (p.237)") as a productive state, as AZP states, a productive state that enables the "exploration of the sound space left aside by the musical forms of the past." But two opposite approaches. Cage has opted for indeterminacy as methodology to "produce openness, and the unexpected". Boulez's approach however explores determination "as a way of triggering the virtual". I suggest to read these two approaches. What I retain here is that while being opposite, Cage's and Boulez's approach to musical composition lies in a diagram-based methodology: "[t]hey are both good examples of a diagrammatic operation". Furthermore, while being opposite, as AZP points to, "neither Boulez nor Cage had full knowledge of the piece's sound beforehand. It was only in the performance that the piece would take its final form, and it would be a form that would change across the different interpretation." The difference between Boulez and Cage in their approach to diagrammatic practices, however, resides in their approach to (in)determination:

While [John] Cage was a kind of mystic who prayed an all-embracing credo, [Pierre] Boulez is a craftman who constructs structures of such complexity that are able to open new acoustic effects without renouncing to precision and determination. His extraordinary proliferation or rigorously constructed material aimed towards the subversion of the traditional musical experience is a wonderful model for diagrammatic practices in architecture.

… [to be continued]

Information
The Sniper's Log ı An Architectural Perspective of Generation-X | Alejandro Zaera-Polo || Actar, 2013, 592 pages
pages quoted: pp.325-327.

ULGC announcing new birth: Dziga Press

noreply@blogger.com (Annick Labeca) — Sat, 16 Mar 2013 14:02:36 PDT

I'm taking the advantage of updating the previous post on the call for submissions for my first editorial project Uncertain Territories to announce that I just established a new but bigger project: Dziga Press. I just launched the beta version of Dziga Press's website. Some pages are still empty… I, in fact, am hardly juggling with the business plan, the website, and other plans for communication, and so (not the easiest and funniest tasks but very important). The website will be officially launched by 2014 and so I will use this website as a beta version.

Let me outline this project on which I have been working for two years now.
Dziga Press is a new project, precisely an independent publishing and printing platform for architects, designers, urbanists, curators, and writers.

This little platform will publish titles on architecture, landscape, engineering, urbanism, geography, geology, urban anthropology…

We specialize in traditional work including theoretical essays, writings, catalogues, and monographs. We will be also exploring other forms of writing including neo-traditional literary genres… architectural fiction, pamphlets.

The first project that will be published by Dziga Press will be Uncertain Territories as an annual publication.

I am presently working on a first collection that will explore architectural fiction. This series will invite architects, designers, engineers, strategists, urbanists, and writers to speculate, write about… future, a blurry, gloomy, uncertain, unpredictable, improbable future. This series will consist of short essays (maximum 60 pages) in digital and printed formats. For the printed format, we will use a… stencil duplication process (and this is of course… the riso) but also other printed processes.

I hope to launch the first publications by the end of this year, if not by 2014, who knows…

Anyway, last but not least Uncertain Territories will be published by Dziga Press by 2014.

The Editor's read | In progress ı The Sniper's Log by Alejandro Zaera-Polo and everything else

noreply@blogger.com (Annick Labeca) — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 10:56:16 PDT

This year of 2013 starts with a series of books from architecture to geopolitics, of course highly recommended. First, Bracket. I let the publication aside since I will go back to the second volume [Goes Soft] very soon.
Then Landscape Futures: Instruments, Devices and Architectural Inventions edited by Geoff Manaugh/BLDGBLOG, so long expected book presented as a collaboration between Actar and the Nevada Museum of Art. I suppose many of you regularly follow Manaugh's blog and know the book will be on sale later this month. As Manaugh writes on his blog:

Landscape Futures both documents and continues an exhibition of the same name that ran for a bit more than six months at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno, from August 2011 to February 2012. The exhibition was my first solo commission as a curator and by far the largest project I had worked on to that point. It was an incredible opportunity, and I remain hugely excited by the physical quality and conceptual breadth of the work produced by the show's participating artists and architects.

Those who share a strong interest in architectural fiction and other speculations will certainly purchase this book. In my case, I will. Contributors are David Gissen, Smout Allen, Lateral Office/InfraNet Lab, Chris Woebken and Kenichi Okada, Liam Young, among others.

The same Liam Young will be releasing the first volume of Close, Closer Catalogue (Lisbon Architecture Triennial 2013), a volume entitled Future Perfect (the project that Young will present at Lisbon in September) by May or June. This, then, will be followed by other volumes edited by Beatrice Galilee, Mariana Pestana and Jose Esparza the three other members of the curatorial team over the year.

A reminder for the book lovers: Nina Rappaport will also be launching her Vertical Urban Factory, again published by Actar. I also have announced the forthcoming book of Chris Reed and Nina-Marie Lister entitled Projective Ecologies (Actar).

Interboro Partners' The Arsenal of Exclusion/Inclusion (see also MAS Context's new issue Boundary (issue 17). You will find an outline of the book, published by Actar) is coming up soon.

I haven't yet got my copy of MOS Office's Everything All at Once ı The Software, Architecture, and Videos of MOS (PAP). Another book included in my wish-list is Petrochemical America co-edited by Richard Misrach and landscape-architect Kate Orff.

In the field of theory, Kenneth Frampton will be launching a new book Genealogy of Modern Architecture by July (Lars Mueller Publishers).

In Geophilosophy. The excellent Punctum Publishers (albeit unfortunately hard to find in Europe. They seriously need a distributor) just launched On an Ungrounded Earth, a book written by Ben Woodard, a researcher at the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at the University of Western Ontario. I will urgently read this book.

Of course, my strong interest in drones brought me recently to Drone Warfare by Benjamin Medea (Verso Books)…

In short, this semester is rich of books and this certainly will be increasing as we are entering in warmer seasons…

But, at the present time, I am reading so-long expected Alejandro Zaera-Polo's The Sniper's Log ı Architectural Chronicles of Generation X (Actar). I will review the book here or in another platform. I haven't decided yet. I will let you know when the review will be available.

The book is quite thick: 592 pages of chronicles — I will rather say writings and I will explain why — on architecture, but not only. An example: I have discovered that Zaera-Polo has also written on music (serial music, to give you an idea if you haven't yet bought the book). Don't look for the essay as it is unpublished. It is consequently a chance to read it, especially if you like music — the contemporary music not rock, or folk, or metal (for that matter, let me borrow the French term of musique savante to be clear).

At halfway of the book ( the 200 first pages I read), The Sniper's Log indicates that Alejandro Zaera-Polo plays a consequent role not only as an architect — this is obviously not the greatest news we learnt so far — but as a critic and a theorist — as convincingly confirmed in the book. The readers of The Architectural Design, Harvard Design Magazine, Quaderns, Log, and Volume have eventually noticed that Zaera-Polo's frequent contributions published in these magazines are more in the theoretical than the… journalistic (I however do not denigrate the journalistic). Indeed, this book can be tagged with a theoretical pedigree — this is why, in my view, I should have rather preferred the term of 'writings' rather than that of 'chronicles' which appears to be too much 'journalistic'. For example, I will take the risk to compare this book with… Robert Smithson's Collected Writings with the risk of being too-much or fussy. My challenge will be to convincingly demonstrate my position, why I propose to compare these two books.
Allow me for taking an example to outline my forthcoming review of the book. One notion, very important in Zaera-Polo's architectural practice and thinking is the notion of Consistency as it frequently appears over the book. Alejandro Zaera-Polo says to be interested in consistency in a very large sense as "[p]robably this is a reaction to the architectural culture where we were educated, which was more interested in questions of fragmentation, disjunction, juxtaposition, etc." (p.193) According to Zaera-Polo, "to devise arguments of consistency has become a critical contemporary question, on a political, social, and cultural level. This is a paradigmatic problem of our time, between cultures, geographies, populations… A similar problem appears in space between a whole and a singularity, not only in term of performance but also in terms of physical organization. And geometry plays a primary role in establishing consistency across spatial domain at every scale. I would claim that geometry is related to the specific and to the solution of specific questions, but always as an argument of consistency with larger domains." (p.193) Or "Architecture is not a plastic art, but the engineering of material life. In our practice, our main concern is to produce consistency in the process of construction and material organization rather than in its plastic effects." (p.237)

Another aspect to be discussed in the review is that the book suggests a changed status of architecture, a shift of the architect's role in the era of the digital and… energy, economic, and ecological disequilibrium. He is not the only one who underscores this shifting role if you have read Rory Hyde's book Future Practice. And this can be interested to explore Zaera-Polo's point of view through or in comparison with Hyde's Future Practice as the first is part of the Generation X — a generation that came just after that of the Stararchitects, though Zaera-Polo is a stararchitect too — the latest is part of the new generation of architects, namely Generation Y, a generation established in a era of digital, social networks as well as an era of difficulties to open and develop a practice as money is lacking, and job offers are stagnating, if not diminishing, while, at the same time, obsolescence, scarcity, crises at multiple scales, advance in technologies and science, and the like, urge us to address, re-calibrate, transform the existing. In few words, the book suggests new opportunities arising from the shift from the age of the production — Stararchitects and Generation X — to the age of the digital — Generation X and Generation Y (some may notice I did not include the Starchitects and this is a voluntarily and polemically choice. And I will attempt to demonstrate my take, albeit a big challenge).
In short, with evidence, this turn supposes a rethinking of the architectural practice, and education (you have essays and an interview on this topic) and thinking: process, context, modes of operation, modes of representation, etc.

Below an abstract of the book, precisely a Selection of Alejandro Zaera-Polo's Term Definitions by Sylvia Lavin for the Crib Sheets Publication (p.237-241). The selected passages is from p.239-240:

…My practice has concerned itself with the exploration of typological conditions as fields of emergence, in contrast to the common understanding of typology as an entity loaded with historical significance and verification. Typologies are material assemblages loaded with generic solutions, already charged with a disciplinary content and belonging to a history of architecture. I am concerned with exploring these conditions as fields of research, trying to make something generic out of the specificity of the project — but through a breakdown of typological operations rather than the proposal of such a paradigm. Typological assemblages constitute an ideal articulation of the history of the discipline, assemblages of a material, or a programmatic, social, or political nature connecting the factual environment where architecture must perform with a necessary disciplinary autonomy to grant its validity.
It is probably more appropriate to call this operation prototypical rather than typological. Both the type and the prototype operate in similar ways, but a prototype is not bound to a particular field, and does not claim, a priori, any condition of pertinence or validity. A prototype can be deployed in alternative conditions rather than remaining exclusive to a project or to a site. It is essentially an experimental tool that does not develop from existing material complexes to a particular location, but on the contrary, always tests an external organization in relation to a particular situation. Prototypes are technical and material mediators: they "mediate" information into form; they constitute responsive devices for internal and external transferral of information. As such, the prototype contains in itself the potential to absorb interference, the capacity to adjust to local contexts, and the potential to embody as much as it is to virtualize and export information into other material composites, other sites, other conditions, and other projects. In a prototypical operation, real localized data perform as an index of specific opportunities, while external models of organization operate as manifestations of different degrees of analogous global processes. A prototype does not operate in closed domains, but incorporates the notion that organizations are virtually generic and yet specific in their actualization.
A project develops from a prototype according to an operative frame, recognized and constituted as a principle, rather than literally derived from local data. That principle becomes the material mediation and the core of the organization of data. Specific technical and functional constraints may be imported and applied to infuse prototypical raw material with potential. This is the difference between a prototypical operation and emergent generation from the bottom-up, if this latter is possible at all within an architectural process: data is not the origin of organization, the core of the material, but the vector of differentiation of the prototype. Specific processes and performances are diagrammed according to the requirements of the material activation and organization of the prototype. Models for internal differentiation, responsiveness, and proliferation constitute the core, relevance, and interest of the prototype.
A prototype has an "associated fabric" and develops from a diagram that processes specific information into an architectural organization. This "associated fabric" is the result of the proliferation and differentiation of the prototype across the space of the project, reacting to the different conditions. A prototypical approach is most effective when a practice is forced to operate in many different conditions, becoming the vehicle that links different projects.

The book will be reviewed soon…

New Editorial Project: Uncertain Territories ı Call for Submissions

noreply@blogger.com (Annick Labeca) — Sat, 16 Mar 2013 10:55:44 PDT

I am particularly busy these weeks which explains this painfully slow pace of posts. A reason: I am particularly delighted to announce my first call for submissions.
I have been working on a new editorial project entitled Uncertain Territories based on call for submissions for 6 month or so. In September, I announced I wanted to launch a first guest-editing or a call for papers. Here is this first call for papers. Now, the format. I haven't yet decided between the online and the printed format. However printing or digital the format will be, this is a new adventure on which I will be setting off. With evidence, and that is the rule of the game: I don't have any Plan A as I will adapt to a series of nonlinearities (budget, advices, etc.). I clearly don't know where I am going, where this project will lead me but, for sure, I'll be enjoying it.
I hope many of you will take part to this project and I warmly encourage you to join me in this new adventure. So be free to send your submission if you're have a keen interest in this project.
This now been said,

The Project
Uncertain Territories is neither a journal nor a book, rather an undefined publication, a platform for ideas. As new protocol emerge, architecture will be encouraged to redefine its site, its boundaries, its skillset to integrate, problem-form, and adapt to multiple, indeterminate forces.
Uncertain Territories aims at examining the intersection of architecture and other fields, including anthropology, geography, economy, geology, to address new and linked questions related to infrastructural, cultural, social, energy, economic, geological, and ecological issues on the agency of design.
The first volume will be focused on Contingency.

The topic
Contingency, like design, Mason White, co-founder of Lateral Office/ InfraNet Lab writes in his essay Disciplinary Thievery, is a "anticipatory act, and is often devised as a response to an eventuality." While being a contingent discipline, architecture has long denied contingency privileging consistency, order and beauty.
Contingency theory, as defined by Paul Lawrence and Jay Lorsch, both specialists in Organizational Behavior at the Harvard Business School, suggests the anticipation of nonlinearities and adoption of an open system engaged in a continuous interaction with and adaptation to its environment.
As new problematics raise, integrating contingency within architecture permits a redefinition of architecture from a static, hierarchical, inert, to a dynamic, adaptive, responsive organization. Contingency encourages designers to reconsider their tools, their methodology, and develop new strategies to anticipate, re-calibrate and transform in uncertain and unstable conditions. Contingency enables architecture to critically address new protocols, linked dynamics across scales including technologies, infrastructure, human and ecological systems.

Uncertain Territories seeks for papers and projects that critically discuss the relations of architecture and contingency across scales, technologies, infrastructure, ecology and actors.

Please the visit Dziga Press to send your submission.

Uncertain Territories accepts only unpublished papers including, but not limited to, interviews, drawings and photos. Please send abstracts in English limited to 200 words, and formatted in accordance with The Chicago Manual of Style. Images should be included separately at 300 dpi print quality. Submissions should include a short biography (up to 150 words) and contact info. All manuscripts should be sent in digital format, with texts as MS Word or RTF files and images as uncompressed TIFF files with proper supporting apparatus (image credits, captions, and endnotes). Please announce your submission in the subject line.

Selected submissions will be contacted within 50 days of submission deadline (02 September 2013).

Little Publication | Paper Magazine

noreply@blogger.com (Annick Labeca) — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 14:05:49 PST

Dear readers, dear friends,

Maybe some of you know this little publication, maybe not. Paper or Platform for Architectural Projects, Essays & Research, an independent and cross-disciplinary little publication actively run by students from the University of Westminster.

Paper Magazine issue 7 "White Tower of Ireland, an interview with Jamie Young"

I discovered this little publication while googling information, articles and other essays for a new post.

Paper Magazine has already launched 9 colorful issues (while you will only access to the 8th first issues on the website) including interviews from Iain Sinclair to David Garcia (MAP Architects), to Patrik Schumacher (Zaha Hadid), to Geoff Manaugh. Paper Magazine, however, is not just a little publication about interviews, or conversations; it collects essays, too, from students to architects.

I am deeply delighted to have discovered this little publication. Paper Magazine also runs a blog. They may have just started it and I will definitively follow it.

Video | Under Tomorrows Sky ı Rachel Armstrong

noreply@blogger.com (Annick Labeca) — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 06:38:23 PST

Rachel Armstrong lectured several months ago at Under Tomorrows Sky Think Tank, a think lab founded by Liam Young of Tomorrows Thoughts Today.

Suggested podcast
Interview with Rachel Armstrong (along with Anna Tetas and Albert Ferré of Actar) | ULGC/ The Architecture Post, February 2012

For those who had not the occasion to attend this lecture series, Liam Young invited scientists, literary astronauts, digital poets, speculative gamers, mavericks, visionaries and luminaries to sketch a fictional, future city, including the same Rachel Armstrong, Bruce Sterling, Warren Ellis, Daniel Dociu, Paul Duffield, Factory Fifteen, ARC Magazine, and Centre for Science and the Imagination.

© Daniel Dociu
"In response to the Under Sky brief concept artist Daniel Dociu has developed a series of visions of our future city. In this 'Urban Tectonic' series Daniel is exploring the city as a constructed geology." | Under Tomorrows Sky
Go to Dociu's website, it's worth visiting!

Another image from © Daniel Dociu's portfolio not included in Under Tomorrows Sky.
His entire work is available in his website.

Note that Liam Young, as curator of the Lisbon Architecture Triennial 2013, will pursue his investigation on this topic of future city — his project named Future Perfect — with the same mad team: Rachel Armstrong, Warren Ellis, Bruce Sterling, Daniel Docius, ARC Magazine, Paul Duffield, Centre for Science and the Imagination, and Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG who is working — if not already achieved — on a so-long-expected book Future Landscapes, as usual published by Actar — the book may be available in few weeks. And more participants may be added to this list…

Suggested Podcast
Close, Closer ı An interview with Beatrice Galilee, Liam Young and Mariana Pestana on Lisbon Architecture Triennial 2013 || ULGC/ The Architecture Post, February 2013

If you visit Under Tomorrows Sky, you will access to a series of videos from this lecture series: Oddone, Liam Young, Bruce Sterling, Simon Ings among others.

Under Tomorrows Sky Think Tank Introductions: Rachel Armstrong from liam young on Vimeo.

Symposium | Under the Influence ı MIT Architecture, Feb 22-23, 2013

noreply@blogger.com (Annick Labeca) — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 11:47:45 PST

February 22 and 23 2013, the MIT Architecture organizes Under The Influence, a two-day symposium with scholars and practitioners of architecture to discuss influence.

As announced in the MIT Architecture website, the aim is

to expand [the] disciplinary tools for thinking appropriation beyond anxiety or ecstasy (…) by placing issues of individual and collective authorship, of precedent, originality and reproduction, under a magnifying glass. The symposium invites each of the participants to illuminate a single term — a disciplinary synonym for appropriation — and through that term, the specific strategies, historical, and disciplinary circumstances in which it is enmeshed. Under the influence participants will examine: Affinity, Allusion, Cliché, Collection, Doppelgänger, Replica, Revision, (Color)Sample, Side Effects, Signature, Thing Rights and Vapor.

With the participation of: Mario Carpo who will talk about "Self-Organization, indeterminacy, and the crisis of modern authorship in contemporary digital design theory" at 6:30pm, Friday 22 February.
Then, Saturday 23 February, you will hear: Alexander D'Hooghe, Florian Idenburg, Enrique Walker, Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample, Sam Jacob (Strange Harvest), Cristina Goberna and Urtzi Grau, Amanda Reeser Lawrence, Ines Weizman, John McMorrough, Mariana Ibañez and Simon Kim, Timothy Hyde, Eric Höweler and Meejin Yoon.

Where: Long Lounge 7-429

When: Day 1: Friday, February 22, 2013, 6:30pm;
Day 2: Saturday, February 23, 2013, 10:00am - 6:30pm

Further information: MIT Architecture.

ULGC | The Architecture Post | Fourth Edition: Close, Closer, a conversation with Beatrice Galilee, Liam Young and Mariana Pestana

noreply@blogger.com (Annick Labeca) — Sat, 09 Feb 2013 06:31:20 PST

Fourth edition of The Architecture Post Conversation. I am delighted to share with you a conversation I had yesterday with three of Close, Closer's curatorial team: Beatrice Galilee, Liam Young, and Mariana Pestana.

Coming from the art area, I have a strong interest in curating and architecture. How does architecture examine the format of large-scale exhibition like biennial/triennial? How to curate architecture? In short, curating affects the architectural thinking, discourse and practice. The medium of exhibition is a tool that allows for examining issues from the discipline, its practice, its modes of representation and operation, but also social, economic, political, ecological contexts, and other topics that are relevant (or not) to architecture.

Exhibition, in a very large sense, is a system to vehicle critical ideas but also to test new ideas to the great public. This is the very definition of this device as it has been discussed in the art area over decades if not history. There is an interesting tool, a journal for curators and exhibition-makers, The Exhibitionist Journal co-founded by Jens Hoffmann, a renown independent curator and critic in the contemporary art. This magazine is by curators for curators (art, design, architecture,…), in which the most pertinent questions on exhibition making today would be considered and assessed. I warmly recommend this publication to all my readers, in particular (but not exclusively) to those who share an interest — or whose position is curator — in curating and architecture.

Back to what we are concerned: the fourth edition of The Architecture Post.
For this new edition, I talk with three of The Lisbon Architecture Triennial's curatorial team: Chief Curator Beatrice Galilee, the two curators Liam Young, and Mariana Pestana about The Triennial 2013 with a focus on the working process, the methodology employed for this edition. Among other topics we talk about curating and architecture. I am planning a second phase to this conversation, probably during the show, or after the show to continue and close the discussion.

The theme of this third edition of The Lisbon Architecture Triennial is Close, Closer. Close, Closer explores global architectural practices with the specific context of economic depletion, social, cultural, political, and ecological shifts as well as the architect's shifting role (among others). How does architecture instrumentalize these shifting and challenging contexts? In the format of three exhibitions, associated projects, a website, e-books series, a student award and Début award for young practitioners, the Triennial is also engaged in redefining the boundaries of curating and architecture.

Close, Closer will open on September 12th and will run up for three months (up to 15 December).

Note that you can participate as Close, Closer proposes Open Calls, among others Crisis Buster with a deadline for applications for the 18 February. Check out the website for more details, and the podcast that provides further information about the Open Calls.

Below the podcast of our conversation recorded Friday 8 February.

Chief Curator: Beatrice Galilee, a internationally renown curator, writer and lecturer. She was the curator of the Gwangju Design Biennial 2011. Beatrice Galilee writes for international magazines from Domus, to Harvard Design Magazine. She also co-founder and director of the Gopher Hole, London.
Curators: José Esparza, a critic and curator whose contributions are published in international magazines (Domus); Mariana Pestana, architect and curator, co-founder of the art and architecture collective The Decorators. She is the editor of Design Exchange Magazine; and Liam Young, architect, educator, curator and writer (Volume), co-founder and director of Tomorrows Thoughts Today and Unknown Fields Division.
Close, Closer's visual identity: Zak Group
Location: Diverse venues, Lisbon
Website: Close, Closer

ULGC | The Architecture Post | Conversation with Robert Schmidt III on Adaptable Futures

noreply@blogger.com (Annick Labeca) — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 17:09:29 PST

Today, for the new edition of The Architecture Post, I talk with architect Robert Schmidt III about the project Adaptable Futures, the concept of adaptability, today's built environment, the architect's shifting role.

Adaptable Futures is a series of collages about the notion of adaptability. This project is directed by Adaptable Future with the collaboration of Chris Berthelsen from A Small Lab.

Robert Schmidt is a Tokyo and Loughborough-based architect and Senior Research Associate on the Adaptable Future project at Loughborough University.

Further information on Adaptable Futures.

Update: Event | Waterproofing NYC

noreply@blogger.com (Annick Labeca) — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 09:16:15 PST

Update:
According to an anonymous reader, Waterproofing NYC has been rescheduled to March 2, 2013. I thank him or her for this information.

New York-based readers may be interested in this symposium Waterproofing NYC, this March 2, 2013. As written in the website, this symposium will address storm protection opportunities that incorporate multiple infrastructure systems.

After experiencing two destructive tropical storms in as many years, New York City finds itself forced to adapt to the reality of catastrophic weather events resulting from climate change. However, it cannot rely on simple fixes. Rather, it needs to create new urban landscapes with the capacity to negotiate social, cultural, and environmental forces, argues Denise Hoffman-Brandt, associate professor of landscape architecture in City College's Spitzer School of Architecture.

Participants are Jeannette Compton, Paul Mankiewicz, Lydia Kallipoliti, Kate Orff, Frank Ruchala, Bryan Stigge, Chris Reed, Miguel Robles Duran, Petra Todorovick Messick, Kevin Foster, Denise Hoffman-Brandt, Georgeen Theodore, Dennis Burton, Erika Svendson, Catherine Seavitt Nordenson, Gullivar Shepard, Thaddeus Pawlowski, Mark Gunsburg, Lance Jay Brown, Deborah Gans, Hilary Sample, and Michael Sorkin.

To a certain extent, in my view, this event is not too far from the previous post on Bracket [Goes Soft].

The Editor's reading in progress | Bracket Goes Soft, and everything else

noreply@blogger.com (Annick Labeca) — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 14:31:36 PST

Two new books I received two days ago: Bracket [Goes Soft] and Alejandro Zaera-Polo's The Sniper's Log. A review on both books is forthcoming. I will start with Bracket, which I am currently reading. A so long-awaited little publication — albeit rather thick — co-published by Archinect, InfraNet Lab and Actar. As always, I am sharing my reading in-progress.

This volume of Bracket [Goes Soft] is edited by Lola Sheppard (Lateral Office/ InfraNet Lab) and Neeraj Bhatia (InfraNet Lab/ Petropia), with contribution of Benjamin Bratton, Julia Czerniak, Jeffrey Inaba, Philippe Rahm, Charles Renfro and Geoff Manaugh.

A rapidly scanned Bracket's cover…

This volume deals with landscape-architecture and infrastructure (a first impression before the book review: I noted a unified approach to landscape-architecture-urban-infrastructure[*]), precisely a series of fundamental notions for a better understanding of the shifting contexts: soft systems, adaptability, non-linear, multivalent, interface, contingency, flexibility, remediation, among many others. To a certain extent, I may be wrong but I noted some similarities with Nina-Marie Lister and Chris Reed's research on Projective Ecologies (another long-awaited book announced to be published by Actar), Smout Allen's approach to landscape-urbanism or MAP Architects/David Garcia, SCAPE, mammoth, and as normal this can be, both Petropia and Lateral Office. This is not a surprised as these agencies share the same interest in what Pierre Bélanger as well as Stan Allen — to limit to these two researchers — call, namely landscape as infrastructure — simply known as landscape infrastructure. Note that mammoth has a proposal in this second volume.

Below an excerpt from this publication. A proposal by Leigha Dennis titled Be Alarmed (49-56). Leigha Dennis is a New York and architect interested in the intersection of technology, infrastructure and buildings.

The communities that are located close to the chemical industries in Louisiana's industrial corridor are afflicted by forces that transcend human perception. While the presence of harmful dust, noise and the subjugation of space are apparent at many levels, and leave these communities vulnerable, it is the power of the unseen and the unknown that are the subject of this investigation.

The industries' intent to withhold information that is necessary for the public safety has left an overriding sense of uncertainty and anxiety. Chemicals are released into community environments and nearby ecologies, rendering the consumption of air, food and water toxic. Deposited deep below the homes of many communities lie containers for dormant toxic waste whose shelf lives and stability are unforeseeable. Similarly, underground, geological salt caverns are often used for the storage of chemicals and crude oil, leaving ground water at the risk of contamination. While the air above the ground is subject to invisible, harmful pollutants, the ground below equally conceals the existence of a corresponding precariousness.

Attempts at providing systems of security and alarm for nearby communities have been benign and otherwise unsuccessful, resulting in moments of panic and confusion. Alarm speakers, functional or not, dot the landscape, while intercoms have been installed in homes — asserting a latent paranoia of surveillance and potential disaster. As the chemical companies have grown, acquired farmland and sometimes entire communities, their expansions has subsumed the landscape — leaving homes within unsafe proximities from toxic sites sometimes only feet away. Industries build directly up to property lines as a not-so-passive warnings to leave, yet some homes remain — either in resistance, or simply because there is nowhere else to go. For those homes that are bought out, swaths of pastoral green-scape are left in their place — a visual illusion that everything is fine.

In many ways, these attempts have both succeeded and failed in achieving illusions of safety. The security systems that are implemented often act to secure the plants themselves, rather than the vulnerable residents in close proximity. Alarms are sounded when danger is eminent, leaving the final and only option of fleeing. The events that are alerted are extreme, such as explosions or massive spills. However, communities are exposed to varying levels of toxins in the air, water, food, and ground on a daily basis. These quantities of contamination are equally alarming, yet go unknown and unnoticed.
For the communities that remain, this project aims to provide methods for monitoring, revealing and alerting the daily conditions of toxicity. Designed as a type of public service announcement and kit-of-parts, it provides a transparency of information that does not currently exist for the public. Through a network of devices dedicated to seeing the unseeing, this alarm system will reveal levels of ground water, river water, and air contamination through recognizable and decipherable forms of display: a new kind of public utility. Personal kits to test vinyl chloride levels within homes, in drinking water, and in the body enable the residents to actively improve and keep their communities safe. By establishing trending in data, concentrations of contamination can be identified. The subterranean will be mapped above, while the air will be inscribed. The aesthetic of infrastructure is transformed into an active response system. Through the use of phyto- and sensor-technology, passive and active systems will alert to latent and harmful toxic levels, as well as provide the infrastructure for improvement in an altered and augmented landscape. Over time, the devices will improve contamination through remediation and awareness, resulting in their own optimistic obsolescence.

A deep pleasure to read since it is right on my current investigation on networked ecologies, contingency, infrastructure.

For anyone at all interested in infrastructure, adaptive design, landscape urbanism, this publication is more than essential. I will go back with a review in a couple of weeks. I am even considering organizing a Skype conversation with the editors along with a traditional review format. This can be an enjoyable occasion to go further, or — who knows — to discuss my point of view on this volume.

This aside, I will post this Saturday, the conversation I had two weeks ago with Tokyo and London-based Robert Schmidt III of Adaptable Future. You will probably note a similarity in the approach, in particular, his research on adaptability, non-linear, contingency. I hope to finish the audio editing tomorrow.

Then, as mentioned in a previous post, I wrote a piece for the Scandinavian magazine Conditions Magazine, a piece not to far from a series of topics related here and other platforms (Facebook, mostly) on future practices. The new issue supposedly will be available in March or April. As usual, I will go back to this news very soon.

[*] On the unification of building and infrastructure, see Pope Albert, "The Unified Project", Architectural Design, Vol. 82, Issue 05, September/October.

Symposiums | Urban Ecologies 2013, Toronto ı Strange Utility, Portland

noreply@blogger.com (Annick Labeca) — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 09:15:53 PST

First a great news that I will confirm in the following weeks including an article for a magazine on architectural future practices, the architect's shifting role, etc… I'll confirm it when it will be printed (and in our local bookstore, the most important part for any editor who works hard on his/her project).

Now,
A call for proposals for Urban Ecologies 2013, Toronto, Canada. This is for a 2-day conference in June: June 20-21, 2013. The aim is to discuss the impact of five intersecting themes that are shaping the future of design in our cities.
Urban Ecologies is organized by OCAD University, Toronto, Canada. The themes are:

Visualizing information: Using advanced visual strategies to improve our understanding of data-intensive human and non-human urban activity;
Regenerating cities: Developing regenerative urban design strategies to create restorative relationships between cities and their surrounding environments;
Building Health: Bringing integrated concepts of human health, quality of life and inclusion to the design of the urban environment;
Creating Community: Fostering design partnerships between grassroots and professional communities to co-create sustainable urban places;
Thinking Systems: Applying knowledge of the urban environment's complex and dynamic patterns of exchange to design stronger communities.

Note that the deadline is February 8, 2013. You can download the call for proposals (with further information, presentation abstract proposals, workshop proposals, registration and fees).

Then,
If you are in Portland, Oregon the 26 and 27 of April, at Portland State University, this symposium titled: Strange Utility: Architecture Toward Other Ends:

The discipline of architecture has always been linked to the idea of utility — albeit in a variety of ways and to different degrees. From architecture's putative origins as a primitive form of shelter made of foliage to the Modernist dictum that form follows function, architecture, from the beginning, has been required to perform a "useful" function. Not Surprisingly, utility remains a central concern within contemporary architectural practice, but alongside some of the obvious benefits — the development of more energy efficient materials and processes and the economic incentive to redevelop existing buildings before building anew — have come some strange, if understudied effects. With contributions from 14 extraordinary scholars and architects, Strange Utility: Architecture Toward Other Ends recognizes the contemporary currency of utility, and seeks unexpected ways of defining this term within and with respect to the built environment.

Participants are Jimenez Lai (Bureau Spectacular), Philippe Rahm (Philippe Rahm Architects, Paris, France) and Jill Stoner (University of California, Berkeley).

A cloud as an archive ı Landship

noreply@blogger.com (Annick Labeca) — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 13:14:05 PST

Next week, I will post a conversation — for The Architecture Post Conversation — with a young architect currently based in Tokyo Robert Schmidt III I had on a project he developed within the agency Adaptable Futures, titled… Adaptable Futures . We talked about the notion Adaptability, central to this project and other topics that, for me, behind this project: the architect's shifting role, the division between building and the built environment, among others. I am currently working on the audio edit. I hope to finish the end of this week. This aside…

Parts of the 2012 edition of Think Space, an edition titled Past Forward 2012, are these two projects: A Cloud As An Archive and Landship. All information (few information, I should admit) can be found on the website. However, if you followed the first edition titled Borders, curated by Eva Franch i Gilabert, you have a broad idea of the guidelines of this platform which proposes a cycle of competition each year.
Past Forward 2012, curated by architect Adrian Lahoud (you can watch a video in which Adrian Lahoud presents the guidelines of cycle of competitions) consists of three competitions, that, according to Lahoud, have contributed to the transformation of the architectural culture over the last 50 years: The Peak (1982), Yokohama Port Terminal (1994), and Blur Building (1999). In short,

The last three decades saw significant change across social, political, and environmental registers. The conjunction of capital flows, mass urbanization and increasingly interconnected cultural and financial networks have reshaped the way we understand, produce and discuss architecture resulting in a breathless cycle of formal and aesthetic transformations. This restless appearance of change conceals an increasing sense of inertia or perhaps even of confusion. This restless appearance of change conceals an increasing sense of inertia or perhaps even of confusion, in that an intellectual project has yet to accompany the overiding sense of technical virtuosity.

I selected two projects among these entries, with few details — except a succinct description of the project (but it's a competition and the aim of this competition is not to analyze these proposals). The first was awarded with the first prize; the second receives a honourable mention: A Cloud as an Archive, and Landship. These two projects are parts of Blur.

If you remember, Blur was Diller, Scofidio + Renfro's entry for the Swiss National Expo 2002, in Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland, a suspended platform such as a cloud (note that Charles Renfro and Ricardo Scofidio were logically members of the jury in this 2012 edition along with Zaha Hadid and Patrik Schumacher (Peak) and Alejandro Zaera-Polo (Yokohama).
A Cloud as an Archive is designed by Andrei Olaru (Romania) with the contribution of Anna Gulinska (Poland), Elena Romagnoli (Italy) and Pablo Roman (Spain). The project is described as follows:

Located along the coastline, 450 m structure of the Archive confronts as with an experience of encountering something that we already know. A new point of departure re-organizes and de-composes spatial memory of the Cloud. It brings us to the point where we can study it. Once we are inside we can go into details, research its fear of the rescue and erasure of the traces.
Generating structure of the Cloud is designed as movable machinery which travels along the sectors of the Archive. It is equipped with nozzles producing the Cloud and movable platform on which the Visitors can travel to the level 02 of the structure. The machinery moves from sector 01 to 10 one day interval, constantly producing the Cloud, taking its resources from the lake water.
Moving machine intervals allow the Visitors to select specific date and accessible sector from which the exploration of the Cloud begins. Along 450 meters of possible maneuvering along the structure they can perceive different instances of the Cloud. Starting from an instance on level 02 — which is an observatory level where the Cloud is visible only, captured in archival wall — they can decide on going lower, on level 01 of the structure. Walking on level 02 they are not only seeing the Cloud, it is all around them, and it is present and touchable. They can walk on multiple suspended bridges which all soaked in the changeable atmosphere Cloud. There are several of the bridges going to the water level with one walkway. Level 00 states for the Origin of the Cloud. That is where the travel through the Cloud ends, on both ends of the 450 structure.

Now the project proposed by Gauthier Duthoit, a French architect whose proposal, Landship, explores a series of concepts, including past/present/future, process, innovation, speed, technique. Highly influenced by Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Paul Virilio, and Gaston Bachelard (quite common when talking with French architects), the project is described as follows:

The great obsession of the nineteenth century was, as we know, history: with its themes of development and of suspension, of crisis, and cycle. (…) We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed." (M. Foucault). The conception of progress makes the future seem like a goal or an accomplishment, which leads to the thought that time is the path to perfection. The idea is based on the premise that the best is yet to come. Future as an accomplice to human initiative seems more and more uncertain. Indeed in the past, the future worried us because we were powerless; today it frightens us because of the consequences of our actions that we have no way to clear apprehend. We feel helpless confronted with our power. Technique has become one of the main instruments of progress, omnipresent in our society; it has become our environment. This phenomenon distances technique from human control, making him subject to a certain point of determinism. In an imperceptible way, technique has been sacralised. "It is not technique that enslaves us but the sacred transferred to technique" (J. Ellul) The transfer has generated an expansion of thought allowing mechanised time to dominate human reflection time. The acceleration of reality (P. Virilio) inhibits the sensation that time flies, when associated with efficient consumerisum, the world is unable to find any form of rest. The idea is not to resist progress but to take a break in order to assimilate it. It is necessary to question the philosophical and political notions concerning progress. What is progress today, on an environmental, economic and political level? It is important to raise awareness of the impact of progress, which leads us to search for clever endings or a limit to things. Landship intends to become a break point, in the visitor's exponential acceleration of time. Like the Blur building, Landship disappears, one image is missing, the one of the building itself. Anti-image and anti-object. Landship disappears, one image is missing, the one of the building itself. Anti-image and anti-object. Landship is a remote and isolated object surrounded by water. Built in the way of a boat hull, the structure insures water tightness and its ability to float. The complete absence of urban fabric becomes the context of the project, which differs from the context as much as it is a part of it. Landship is not an object lost in an endless extension of a uniform element as would be an oceanic island. (G. Deleuze), neither is it a "New world" but an alternative critique of the existing world. It is an artifice, part of a larger ensemble: the lakes borders, the continents borders… Unlike Diller and Scofidio's construction maintained in a constant cloud, Landship has well defined limits. It's the perimeter that embodies the limit and allows the visitor to experience and play a part in the limited and closed environment. The tangle of borders put the vessel in relation to different scales and different places. It becomes the consecration of utopia, a heterotopia as defined by Michel Foucault: a real place where other spaces are connected around it. This "topia" is defined in contrast with the context through a basic figure that insures the projects' clarity. The grid is used as the main architectonic structure; its geometry is altered by its relationship with other basic architectural elements that appear to be an exception to the uniform grid. These entities tend to bring environment and architecture together, as the observatory tower brings horizontality and verticality together. It is the garden contained in the center of Landship that becomes a variable to the grid. Apart from romantic contemplation, the garden allows an active relationship with nature. Here, the garden becomes a microcosm, being the smallest plot in the world and at the same time the world in its totality. "Since ancient times, the garden is some kind of successful and universal heterotopia." (M. Foucault). Through its composition and its combination of limits, Landship appears as speculative fiction with a poetical dimension: a piece of land balanced under the water level by an archaic technique. The simplicity and the architectural abstraction leaves room for interpretation and imagination. Too often imagination has been considered as a secondary force or as a way of evasion. "The importance of imagination on the human psyche has not been emphasized enough. Generally, we tend place reality in first position, but how can Man create if he doesn't feel what we could call the "possibility function". To take action we must first imagine" (G. Bachelard).

It seems to me that both Olaru's Cloud as an Archive and Duthoit's Landship reflect new trends.

They raise a series of questions (that have been evident over a decade or two. Yet these questions still need to be discussed in depth), let me cite two amongst them: redefinition of architecture, integration of the concepts of contingency, uncertainty, soft, and interface within architecture as well as the idea of considering time of architecture as fundamental. Probably an architecture more inclusive, less in the role of the solver, to a certain extent.

Landship | Gautier Duthoit, 2012
Originally appeared on Think Space

Visit Think Space for better information on these projects here and other interesting entries for this year's competition. Then, those who are around New York and its areas, The Storefront for Art and Architecture hosts Think Space's exhibition, an exhibition which explores the politics behind the architecture competition. The exhibition is open until February 15 2013.

Book Review | Future Practice. Conversation from the Edge of Architecture by Rory Hyde

noreply@blogger.com (Annick Labeca) — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 16:06:31 PST

We look for sights that offer a new perspective by which to

understand the emerging conditions we are designing for,

landscapes where we find the future in the present tense.

Liam Young, Tomorrows Thoughts Today

appeared in Future Practice. Conversation from the Edge of Architecture

Rory Hyde, Routledge, 2012

Future Practice. Conversation from the Edge of Architecture, a book published in the second semester of 2012, alongside two major events, The Venice Architecture Biennale and the Istanbul Design Biennale, surveys the rise of new architecture practices. New, maybe not. But different from the 20th-century architecture practice, certainly so.

His author, Rory Hyde, is an architect, born in Australia, a long-term resident of Amsterdam — he recently announced to go back to Australia. He also defined himself as a researcher, writer and broadcaster — he and the Architects on Triple R (with Stuart Harrison, Simon Knott and Christine Philipps) broadcasted live during the first week of the latest edition of Venice Architecture Biennale. He is also on the editorial team of Volume Magazine.

Rory Hyde | Future Practice. Conversation from the Edge of Architecture || Routledge, 2012, 280 pages.
Available in paperback and kindle edition.

Rory Hyde knows his milieu; he works with, speaks with (as an editorial member) practitioners. He is himself an example of the rise of new forms of architecture practice.
But what is practice? This should be the first question one may ask when opening and turning the first pages of Future Practice. What does an architect mean with practice? On his blog — the new generation of architects is, for the most, also blogger —, Rory Hyde defines practice as a context for production. The architect might be mumbling that he knows this already. But, and this is partly what makes his book informative for not only those who work in the architectural-urban field (architects, critics, historian, et cetera) but also those who are not practitioners (we should probably redefine the term of practitioner) while operating on the built environment.
Based on a series of conversations with practitioners, Dan Hill's foreword aside, Rory Hyde undertakes a meticulous survey on new forms of architecture practices. Hyde justifies his choice for interviews:

Where Potential Futures pieced together the various roles largely from others' descriptions of their own work, to get closer to the reality of these people and practices necessitated speaking to them directly. An edited book of contribution by each of these people may have also worked, but it's important to note that — with some exceptions — these are all doers, not critics or writers. And doers are, by definition, busy doing stuff, not writing about doing stuff. In this sense, I also saw it as important to get these (busy) voices on the page, to discuss their work in a way that they might not feel compelled to write down themselves.

Note, however, that some of the interviewed also write while not being officially writers or critics or theorists.

Various profiles, backgrounds, point of views are gathered in Future Practice: from Bruce Mau to Wouter Vanstiphout; from Steve Ashton/ARM to Marcus Westbury/Renew Newcastle; from Jeanne Gang/Studio Gang to Natalie Jeremikenko/xClinic. Architects, Editors-Architects, Educators-Architects. In addition, artists, historians and activists. Renew Newcastle (Marcus Westbury) is an example. Marcus Westbury, one of his members, is not an architect. We learn that he was a director of arts festivals and a cultural commentator. And yet his role is as (if not more) important as that of the architect in his contribution to re-think, improve a public space in Newcastle. He "illustrate[s] the potential of nonarchitectural strategies in achieving very architectural outcomes", writes Hyde. Hence the Community Enabler who "deploys the ample resource of people as a catalyst for change, where spatial improvements may be ineffective."

He is not the only one not being architect but whose role is as important and (not to say identical) as that of architect: Camila Bustamante described as the Urban Activist and Natalie Jeremijenko as the Environmental Medic. Considering the Environmental Medic. Jeremijenko is an artist and associate professor of art (at the New York University) with a background in science, engineering and art. Considering the Environmental Health Clinic, a service which function is to provide "individual "prescriptions" for changes to personal environments, and the potential for widespread, aggregated change." She calls her work as being socio-ecological systems design,

I actually think my work is quite specific, although it does look it comes from all over the place. It's really socio-ecological system design. I don't know if this is a prescription for all designers, but I certainly think that part of the work of problem-forming — as opposed to problem-solving which designers pride themselves on — is really about thinking through the challenges that we face in the 21st-century: re-imagining our urban infrastructures, promoting biodiversity, getting beyond 19th century hygiene myths. We need to further apply ideas of biodiversity and complexity — not towards LEED points or awards, but towards possibilities that are very specific, particular and local, and that can aggregate for significant effect.

Or x-design, or o-design, very difficult to seize but quite significant of this new form of practice, that is "very opportunistic in the sense that it's about framing the problem". And here we are back to the the definition of practice that Rory Hyde proposed. It seems to me that, beyond the practitioners in this book, the common denominator to the 21st century practice is that its role is to "frame the problem". The core element to these new forms of practice is that the architect, now, will be problem-forming (or problem-addressing) rather than problem-solving. He will no longer have the solution…, but will cope with the issue. To a certain extent, this can be a form of adaptation in a time of economic crisis and to an uncertain future.

A new form of business model, as Dan Hill wrote in the foreword. For, an evidence: architecture needs a new business model. We are reminded of a few sentences of Jeremy Till's essay Scarcity contra Austerity published several months ago on Design Observer (an essay that needs to be read again and again):

For the large majority of the profession — let's say the 99% — the wider context of economic leanness is profoundly influencing every stage of the process. In architecture, this has meant that the choice of architects is largely determined by procurement managers making crude calculations that effectively exclude smaller practices and those who produce value through design rather than spreadsheets. Once selected, architects are then increasingly asked to take the hurt during the early stages by working on speculation; if the job lands, they are then paid at ever-reduced free levels, set against projects costs that are continually pared down through value-engineering. When the job goes on site, the contract is endlessly subdivided in order to pass risk down the contractual chain, and there is ever increasing reliance on off-site and standardized construction. Nor is the architectural academy exempt from the drive to austerity, given the ever more strident demands for market-ready students, often conveyed in terms of the irrelevance of theory or experiment, and revealing an anti-intellectualism that threatens the very basis of educational values.

No, Rory Hyde's Future Practice does not spotlight this new generation of architects' hidden daily reality, this generation confronting with current crisis and lack of opportunities. Not directly. But if you read it twice, or more, it is not too far from what Till wrote in this passage. Both say the same — with different approach and point of view — that, as Hill smartly noted, architecture is in need of a new business model. Indeed, Future Practice "provide clues as how to back out of the cul-de-sac that architecture has partly built."

Hyde's book resides in the fact that it capture this vulnerability that characterizes architecture. Yes architecture has been marginalized. And yes architecture needs recalibrate its field which supposes a new look at innovative forms, approach to building, city-making. A collective practice can be a strategy. The case of Tomorrows Thoughts Today is an example. As Liam Young co-founder of Tomorrows Thoughts Todays (and co-founder of Unknown Fields Division) stated in the book:

For us, Tomorrows Thoughts Today is more like a music producer who marshals different people together; we bring in people from science or from technology to build a team depending on the nature of the problem or project, allowing us to be dynamic. It's a kind of "post-bust' office model that is less connected with the economy of building, but more connected with industry, technology, ecology or development at different times. And instead of operating as a service, producing optimistic views of things to clients in order to get paid, we develop self-initiated projects and operate more resilient forms of practice and this is our attempt to do so.

Put it simply, the ambition to Tomorrows Thoughts Today is to "break that cycle, and to operate in a more dynamic way with a new business model", said Liam Young.

In the same way does architecture need a new approach in terms of education. Put it simply, even architecture school needs a new business model. What toolkits, instruments, methodology to educate strategic designers? This does not necessarily limit to building or city-making but to provide the future architect knowledge enough to operate in the world, Liam Young said. "[W]e try to use the studio as a place to develop strategies by which they can work independently as designers when [the students] leave us". Studying architecture does not spontaneously lead to the profession — if you consider the act of building as the unique way of being architect. You can become a writer, an educator, a publisher, a curator.
And, allow me for formulating a critic, this is probably what is missing from this book. With the emergence of a new profile that of the curator — see Pedro Gadanho, Geoff Manaugh, in the United States, or Beatrice Galilee, Ethel Baraona Pohl, in Europe (to limit to these two continents) as examples of curatorial practitioners — who brings up new modes of representation in the architectural field, it would have been great to have the inclusion of the Curator in this book. But this is my personal view…

Rory Hyde's Future Practices argues in favor of elaborating new architectural trajectories, new forms of architecture practices, new modes of operations and in urgent need of analysis and debate.

Note: I warmly encourage to read Rory Hyde's post Potential Futures for Design Practice, and the comments that follow.

News | Lecture and seminar series Spring 2013

noreply@blogger.com (Annick Labeca) — Mon, 14 Jan 2013 08:54:57 PST

In your calendar, a series of lectures and seminars:
We start with Benjamin Bratton. If you are in London and its areas, January 24th, 18:30-20:00, at Bartlett University, Faculty of the Built Environment, Benjamin Bratton will be giving a talk. I include below the advertisement:
2 or 3 Things I know About the Stack: Projects and Projections Toward the Acceleration of Integral Accidents

As a regime, planetary computation operates at multiple scales, from cloud computing to addressable nanobots. Instead of thinking of this heterogeneity as a unstructured proliferation of incommensurable technologies, they should be understood as layers of an emergent hardware/software stack. The Stack is a megastructure built out of far-flung data centers, embedded urban applications, universal addressing schemes, weird quasi-sovereign geographies, and maniacal self-quantification. How might the emergent geopolitics of this architecture be designed? Each layer generates its own productive accidents: Westphalian geometries of State sovereignty are augmented by an emergent Cloud Polis, even Cloud Feudalism. Cities and mobile software spin out new rights and restrictions to a global hypercity based as much on the capitalization of gestures as the acceleration of mobility. IPv6 and other universal addressing schemes link objects and events into abyssal fields of information exchange. Monotheisms rush in to invest new interfaces with primodial scripts. Augmentation of skin with nanosensors introduces new genres of epidermal media and biopolitical securization. How to intervene? Designing for the post-Anthropocene requires working across multiple scales at once, working backwards from catastrophic virtualities, and testing the breaking points of provisional totalities.

Where: UCL Faculty of the Built Environment, Ground Floor, Royal Ear Hospital, corner of Huntley Street and Capper Street, London,
When: 24 January 2013, 6:30pm-8:00pm

For details: here.
Note that Benjamin Bratton's next essay The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (this lecture supposedly will give an outlook of his book) is upcoming from MIT Press (visit Benjamin Bratton's website for more info)

Those based in Houston, will be interested in this lecture series New Commons: Between Aesthetics and Engagement. Participants are Pedro Gadanho (Curator of Contemporary Architecture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York), Luis Callejas (Principal, LCLAOFFICE, Medellin, Colombia, and Cambridge, USA), David Gissen (Associate Professor, The California College of the Arts, San Francisco), Xaveer de Geyter (Principal, XDGA Architects, Brussels, Belgium). Below, the advertisement:
New Commons: Between Aesthetics and Engagement
The lecture series brings together architects and scholars who redefine the capacity of architectural aesthetics in engaging with the world.
Recent examples of architectural engagement frequently reduce the architect's role to that of a problem solver. Offering an alternative to this role, this series will investigate new practices within architecture that showcase the architect as not merely a respondent, but as an active agent capable of building new ideas and languages as they relate to the city, the environment, and geography. By focusing on the work of these architects and thinkers, the series will establish a new commons — that is, a ground for forging new and more productive relationships between aesthetics and engagement.

This lecture series will be starting with Pedro Gadanho, Wednesday, the 16th. It then will be followed by Luis Callejas, (Wednesday, January 23), David Gissen (Wednesday, February 6), and Xaveer de Geyter (Tuesday, February 19).
Where: Brown Auditorium, Caroline Weiss Law Building, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
When: Lectures starts at 7 p.m. with a pre-lecture reception at 6 p.m.
More info: here.

Rice School of Architecture, again, with other events including Sébastien Marot (École d'Architecture, Marne-La-Vallée, France, and Harvard Graduate School of Architecture) who'll be discussing The Present Environmental Predicament: Design and the Limits to Growth; Gregg Pasquarelli/SHoP Architecture, on Out of Practice, March 5; Atelier Bow Wow on Architectural Genealogy, April 4; and Jeanne Gang/Studio Gang on Moving House, March 26.
More: here.

Wednesday 16 January at Robert Reich School of Landscape Architecture, Louisiana State University, 5PM, Mason White of Lateral Office and InfraNet Lab, will be lecturing on The Space of Logistics.

I, unfortunately, don't have much more information about this lecture. I, thus, warmly recommend to contact directly the University for details.
When: Robert Rech School of Landscape Architecture Louisiana State University
When: Wednesday 16 January 2013, 5pm

More on m.ammoth.

Relational Boundaries, Landscape-Architectural-Urban as Mediator, Producer of Network Ecologies

noreply@blogger.com (Annick Labeca) — Fri, 11 Jan 2013 16:59:53 PST

Last Monday, the BBC has posted a series of pictures of uncontrolled sand mining activities in Sierra Leone, in West Africa. A post-conflict country confronted with a set of intertwined complex realities, including lack of economic opportunities, political instability, inequalities, destruction of infrastructure (due partly by a ten-year of civil war), rampant urbanization, population growth, housing shortage… To this list, we must add natural resources shortage and growing ecological issues.

Sand mining in Sierra Leone | photo © Tommy Trenchard
Originally appeared on BBC
"Once synonymous with a brutal civil war, Sierra Leone was forecast to be one of the world's fastest growing countries in 2012. On the back of the rapid economic growth, it is enjoying a construction boom, with new roads and buildings springing up in and around the major towns." BBC, January 2013.

These complex realities can be the cause of growing uncontrolled sand mining activities.
Mining sand provides materials for construction or industrial uses. The reasons to high exploitation of not only sand, but mangrove forests, estuaries and seagrass beds, are mainly due to urban growth and concentration of human activities along the coasts. With a population of 5,245,695, and 41,7 % being under 15, Sierra Leone is hit by a high unemployment rate of around 70%, as the BBC reported. The miners justify the act of sand mining as a response to a lack of jobs offers:

The onus is on the government to provide them with jobs, otherwise they will have to continue digging sand.

wrote the BBC. Sand mining, then, becomes a source of funding, a lucrative option not only for the local workforce but also for the construction industry.

Sand mining in Sierra Leone | Photo © Tommy Trenchard
Originally appeared on BBC.
"The coast, stripped of its natural protection, is now being eroded at a rate of up to 6m (yards) per year in places, according to Kolleh Bangura, director of Environmental Protection Agency" BBC, January 2013.

What consequences will be resulted from exploitation of coastal sand? Now that I have presented the starting point to this post, let me enlarge the discussion into four points closely related to the the issue of sand mining in Sierra Leone (this being an example of the focal point of this post). First, coastlines all over the world concentrate 60% of the world's population now or within 100km of the seashore. The relationship between environmental systems and human activities have always been conflictual since here the landscape-architectural-urban, the economic, the political, the social, the cultural, and, there, the geological and the ecological have been envisaged as mutually exclusive entities, the one dominating the other. The consequences to this critical relationship can be summarized into 10 issues: land use and land ownership competition, rapid coastal erosion, climate warming, sea-level rise, air and water pollution by manmade waste (industrial, agricultural wastes), landscape degradation, forest loss, wetlands and wildlife habitat destruction, natural resource shortage, and destruction of coastal communities.

As the BBC reported:

In the village of Lakka on the Freetown peninsular, crumbling ruins dot the shoreline. This building was destroyed by coastal erosion in 2004, a year after the village's pristine golden beach became the site of intensive sand mining operation.

The second point focuses on the population-environment nexus. The landscape-architectural-urban should account for the complexity of the population-environment nexus when problem-addressing such areas. Coastal areas having their own complexities, their own geological characteristics, their own ecological features. An area where two systems attempt to co-exist: the ecological system and the engineering system. Population expansion in coastlines has led to growing demands for housing and activities as well as ecological disequilibrium. Back to Sierra Leone, but also other countries in West Africa were the question of sand mining is particularly sensitive, agricultural change should be added to the list of critical causes. A large number of observers has put on the table that the population-environment nexus has contributed to waste as well as environmental degradation.

Sand mining in Sierra Leone | Photo © Tommy Trenchard
Originally appeared on BBC.
"On Hamilton beach the scale of the operation is staggering. Sand is mined here two days a week, during which up to 40 trucks can be working simultaneously, each with a team of diggers." BBC, January 2013.

The third point, closely related to the second, concerns the question of boundary, which is occupying a central place in landscape-architecture-urbanism. There is a lot of literature on the topic of boundary, including ecological boundary, political boundary, urban boundary, moral boundary. What is a boundary? It seems to me that it is urgent to (re-)interrogated boundary but in the landscape-architectural-urban matter. Considering sand. Sand constitutes the boundary that separates water and land; it preserves land from rising sea level. More broadly, a boundary is a zone that separates the natural and the cultural, the ecological system and the engineering system. A boundary separates two or more elements. Many ecologists define boundary as human constructs, like a line that separates countries, areas, disciplines. For example, a boundary that separates population and environment. A boundary can also be tangible structures identified in nature. Another approach is to consider boundary as the result of discontinuities between patches, namely consequential boundary (sand or rocks in coastal areas, forest, wetland) or as the cause of discontinuities between patches, namely causal boundary (a fence to protect a herd of cattle).
Yet, as said earlier, the division between here, the landscape-architectural-urban, the economic, the social, the cultural, the political, and, there, the geological and the ecological, along with population growth pressure, has caused critical issues. As this event in Sierra Leone has showed, an uncontrolled mining sand will impact the boundary that separates water and land having been destroyed by internal and external conditions as well as landscape patterns, coastal communities, and at a broader scale, all the levels of the society, including socio-economics, politics, and environment.

Sand mining in Sierra Leone | Photo © Tommy Trenchard
Originally appeared on BBC.
"The mining is supposed to be restricted to just one beach as part of a rotation system designed to make the practice more sustainable, yet the ban is widely ignored, with intensive mining occurring in broad daylight on other beaches. Even when local bans are enforced, the mining simply goes ahead at night." BBC, January 2013.

Activities in coastal areas should be considered as infrastructural, self-reliant, non-linear. Considering another dimension of boundary. Boundary, in terms of ecology (but not only), could be a carrier of resilience, of network, of information; it could be relational (the relational is always information). Re-thinking the boundary between patches as been relational is to admit that the natural system is itself relational, that it is information (I particularly appreciate the idea of the infrastructure space as being information, as Keller Easterling has pointed and consider informative and precious to apply her idea here). The landscape-architectural-urban can learn a lot from the natural system. Exchanges between ecological system and engineering system can be innovative for both as it can be multivalent and adaptable at various scales, from the smallest scale (the boundary) to the broadest scale (building in coastal areas). A boundary is a form as well as a result of exchanges between patches. It can also be a mediator, a producer between patches. Considering boundary as relational, mediator, as information, as a form and a product as well as producer of exchanges provides a better understanding of the ecological system, its function, its behavior in response to internal and external elements. In this context, it is urgent for the landscape-architectural-urban to foreground ecological systems (here boundary, there landscape, there again, natural resources), here, as relational, information, non-linear when problem-addressing ecological issues (landscape recalibration in coastal and non-coastal zones). But not only: the landscape-architectural-urban should reintroduce ecological systems inside the definition of landscape-architecture/urbanism practices. In this instance, the stubborn behavior that consists in dividing the political, the economic, the cultural, the social, and the geological and the ecological could be replaced by an approach based on relational, on information, on a fusion of these spheres.

Suggested book
Keller Easterling | The Action is the Form ı Victor Hugo's TED Talk || Strelka Press, 2012

Four, we learnt from the BBC's article on sand mining that the human and non-human boundary result in natural-cultural network, or, namely, network ecologies. It is not too far from Bruno Latour's idea of ANT (for Actor-Network-Theory) which argues, if I put it simply, that socio-technical networks have been created by both human and non-human technologies. We particularly learnt from this article that the interplay between engineering systems and ecological systems should be central to the landscape-architectural-urban if we want to problem-address landscape restructuration, or when building coastal cities and towns (for example, wetlands in the North-Eastern Japan, the Tohoku, having being mostly swallowed against land use and land properties competition). Indeterminacy, for example, is bound to the concept of network. Better: it is what makes network functional and flexible. Allow me for importing here Keller Easterling's statement quoting Bruno Latour, and adapting it to our concern: To determinate the human and non-human boundary, to erase this boundary is to contradict it or to contribute to landscape destruction (another but interesting path, we can explore, is the relationship between landscape-architectural-urban and ecological boundary mediated by the concept of accountability).
This relationship can provide new instruments, new toolkits, as well as new modes of operation, new modes of representation, new forms of landscape-architecture and urbanism. Envisaging the human and non-human boundary as relational is to envisage it as active, self-sufficient, indeterminate, multivalent, and responsive as network.

Sand mining in Sierra Leone | Photo © Tommy Trenchard
Originally appeared on BBC.
"[T]he construction brings with it increasing demand for sand, an essential building material, and much of this sand is coming from the country's beautiful beaches." BBC, January 2013.

And we are back to the translation of boundary (that served us to understand the cause-effect of sand mining in Sierra Leone's coastal landscape, but that we partly interrogated): a boundary is also an indeterminate zone between patches, here between land and water…
This indeterminate zone and the engineering matter, then, should be articulated as unified. The landscape-architectural-urban can help achieve the unification of boundary, ecological system and engineering system providing that it, at a first but fundamental stage, re-interrogates itself, thus, plays the role of mediator, of interface…

Source: BBC News

A response from Maurits Ruis about my review on Special Economic Zones

noreply@blogger.com (Annick Labeca) — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 06:20:49 PST

I received an email from Maurits Ruis, the author of Special Economic Zones, the ebook I reviewed yesterday. I sent him an email to discuss the origin of the ebook, a possible continuation, etc with him. He kindly responded to my questions and I decided to share his response with you as a response to my review.

Dear Annick Labeca,
The Anatomy of Special Economic Zones is not as much an eBook as it is a report, which explains the concise nature of the document. It was written for a private investor that was so kind as to grant me permission to publish the report independently. The report is a briefing document that seeks to identify best practices for the development of Special Economic Zones. The focus thereby naturally gears towards China, which has been most successful in the application of SEZs worldwide.
The report pays little heed to the architecture and urbanism of Special Economic Zones. There is little information available on the conceptual drivers behind SEZ masterplans, but at face value it seems no distinctive typology is being used, and SEZ masterplans pretty much seem to follow the trends as in masterplan developments worldwide. In that sense they are very much a product of the International Style, or if you prefer, a representation of [Rem] Koolhaas' Generic City.
In terms of typology, the Special Economic Zone seems not to have evolved much from the Export Zones it started out to be, i.e. a single enclosed factory with an exempt legal status. In effect, the modern-day Special Economic Zone is nothing more than a factory on steroid that continues to serve the only goal it has ever served: the generation of foreign direct investment.
As is the case with any investment in the urban hemisphere today, SEZs entirely depend on the 'trickle down effect' for their success. This concept states that money invested in established and dominant market players (read: the rich and the powerful) will eventually trickle down to the masses through the generation of jobs. The validity of the "trickle down effect" however is "supported neither by economic theory nor by empirical evidence", says for example Cornell scholar Robert H. Frank.
The result of this approach are SEZs that only answer to one-dimensional reality of the financial market, a reality that reduces the places where people work and live into spreadsheet exercises, made in financial centres far away. These developments have little to do with the sustainable environments that architects and urban planners traditionally pursue; environments that include not only economic considerations, but also social, cultural and environmental ones (remember the sustainable adagium of people, planet, and profit). Hence the devaluation of architecture as a profession.
The evolution of the SEZ has shown that a one dimensional approach driven by profit has led to health hazards, social unrest and political unrest, among other things. It has also shown that a consideration for locality has produced a greater profitability, and better returns in the longer term. As urban developments worldwide are driven by the same principles you could say that a study of the Special Economic Zone is also a case study of the city at large.
Attention to urban and architectural typology seems futile when a brief has not yet been established that all parties can subscribe to. Investor, developer and designer first need to be in accordance of the principles underlying any development before proceeding with design and construction, form follows function after all. This report hopes to present evidence that can establish such a brief, build consensus and persuade investors to not only focus on short term returns, but also take into consideration the wider picture, as it ultimately contributes to their ultimate goal of return on investment.
The report thus is a critique as well as an analysis. There are many avenues yet to explore that branch off from this study, and urban and architectural typology certainly is one of them. My immediate aim however is to understand how our cities were hijacked by market forces, and how they were turned into financial instruments to generate a profit for the few, rather than into tools in the pursuit of happiness for the many.
Maurits Ruis

I recommend to read my review of Special Economic Zones posted yesterday.