SPAZIO

Keep following SPAZIO at www.spaziomilano.org

noreply@blogger.com (SPAZIO) — Fri, 08 Sep 2017 13:50:00 +0000

The circles of Hell

noreply@blogger.com (SPAZIO) — Tue, 25 Apr 2017 13:24:00 +0000

Men leave no stone unturned when in pursuit of "progress". The consequences rarely matter, even if well documented. In Behemoth (2015), Zhao Liang masterly depicts the working conditions in a coal mine in Inner Mongolia and the destruction of a land that used to be inhabited mainly by nomadic herders. Explosives uncover precious rocks while hundreds of trucks build up new Death Valleys. The hellish noise of the factories plays against the rattle of the many workers dying of occupational lung disease.

Q: Where will we go when no trace of grace is left in the world?

A: What about ghost towns?

Love your neighbour

noreply@blogger.com (SPAZIO) — Mon, 06 Mar 2017 14:27:00 +0000

In 1952, Canadian film-maker Norman McLauren wrote and directed Neighbours. The documentary was produced by the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) and it lasts just eight minutes and six seconds. It won an Oscar and in 2009 was added to UNESCO's Memory of the World Programme, an international initiative launched in 1992 to safeguard the documentary heritage of humanity against collective amnesia, neglect and deliberate destruction.

Norman McLauren, Neighbours, NFB, 1952.

Into the real world

noreply@blogger.com (SPAZIO) — Mon, 20 Feb 2017 09:40:00 +0000

Dear friends and colleagues,

Spazio is getting ready to venture into the real world and start addressing spatially some of the topics discussed here. It is still very much a work in progress but I will soon disclose all the details.

Spazio, new gallery, photographs Mariana Siracusa

Wonderland Vrin

noreply@blogger.com (SPAZIO) — Tue, 10 Jan 2017 17:23:00 +0000

Vrin, Val Lumnezia, Switzerland (46°39'18.7"N 9°05'55.4"E). Photographs, Mariana Siracusa

Vrin is the farthermost municipality in the Val Lumnezia (Valley of Light), Switzerland, at an altitude of 1448 meters. Getting there is not as difficult as you may think. Once in Chur, take the RegioExpress train to Ilanz (35 min) and there the Bus 441 to Vrin (45 min). We got to Vrin quite late in the afternoon. It was already dark but the people at the Pez Terri Pensiun were very welcoming: we tasted the traditional Maluns, a specialty of the Graubünden's cuisine prepared from boiled potatoes which are grated, mixed with flour and roaster in butter, and served with Alpine cheese and applesauce.

In 1998, the Swiss Heritage Society awarded the village the Wakke Prize for the masterful integration of modern agricultural buildings into its historic fabric. The terrific work by Gion Caminada is well known to architects.

"Vrin. A Village in the Alps." Filmmaker, Marc Schwarz

What impressed me the most when walking around on a cold Sunday morning was the spatial quality that results from carefully siting one building close to the other. The space between has a perfect human scale. Maybe because it was cold and snowing it reminded me of the way animals stand close to each other to stay warm during the winter.

Gion Caminada, House Caminada, 2000

In the 1980s, the municipality purchased all the available building land in other to prevent speculation. It was partly used to build communal offices, a multipurpose hall, a butcher's shop, a telephone booth, agricultural buildings, and a mortuary.

Gion Caminada, Stiva da morts, Community Mortuary Building, 2002

Gion Caminada, Bus Stop, 2015

It is surprising how even the smallest buildings (bus stop and telephone booth) have been perfectly detailed to shelter from and react to snow and wind. During the summer these same buildings will probably reveal a different face.

Photographs, Mariana Siracusa

Further reading

Bettina Schlorhaufer, ed. Cul zuffel e l'aura dado. Gion A. Caminada. Luzern: Quart Verlag, 2008.

A few more books before the end of the year

noreply@blogger.com (SPAZIO) — Sat, 31 Dec 2016 16:53:00 +0000

Silke Langenberg. Das Marburger Bausystem. Open as a matter of principle. Sulgen: Niggli Verlag, 2013.

It is always such a pleasure to open a Niggli book. The layout is impeccable, the photographs are well printed. They get right the weight, the format, the paper, the font, everything. Their books even smell good. The object is as important as the content. Chapeau!

Felicity Scott's latest book is all about the content. I especially enjoyed the chapter about Kevin Roche and the Ford Foundation Headquarters which sets the tone for the whole book.

Felicity D. Scott. Outlaw Territories. Environments of Insecurity / Architectures of Counterinsurgency. New York: Zone Books, 2016.

Also fascinating is the topic chosen by Clare Lyster: logistics. In the book she reads urban spaces according to operation systems and procedurals flows. Ryanair route network, FedEx network operations, Amazon storage spaces... and movement: movement is the key.

Clare Lyster. Learning from Logistics. How Networks Change Our Cities. Basel: Birkhäuser, 2016.

With The Space Between the trilogy that Alison and Peter Smithson started when they published The Charged Void (check out their 1976 lecture) is completed.

I believe the books on Herzog and de Meuron do not need any explanation.

Jean-François Chevrier. From Basel. Herzog & de Meuron. Basel: Birkhäuser, 2016.

The photographs of Richard and Cherry Kearton taking photographs in the landscape are quite unique and allow the reader to understand the labor behind their images.

John Bevis. The Keartons. Inventing Nature Photography. Axminster, Devon: Uniformbooks, 2016.

Content-wise I would certainly recommend The Apparent Marginal Activities of Marcel Duchamp. The author makes such an excellent point on the artist that makes you wonder why nobody thought about it before. If you are interested in curatorial practices you will be compelled to read it cover to cover. Together with Appearance Stripped Bare by Octavio Paz, this is the best book on Duchamp that I have read.

Elena Filipovic. The Apparently Marginal Activities of Marcel Duchamp. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016.

Spazio recommends: Ecologies of power

noreply@blogger.com (SPAZIO) — Wed, 14 Dec 2016 16:18:00 +0000

Pierre Bélanger and Alexander Arroyo. Ecologies of Power. Countermapping the Logistical Landscapes & Military Geographies di the U.S. DOD. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2016.

Pierre Bélanger and Alexander Arroyo chose a scary and difficult topic: the logistical landscapes and military geographies of the U.S. Department of Defence. The research they present in this book is very compelling, especially that of the first three chapters.

Taking as an example the Diego Garcia atoll, the first chapter shows how logistics islands can reconfigure the Strategic Islands Concept. Logistical islands cannot remain isolated and this is ensured by a massive maritime logistical apparatus. "77 percent of international trade moves via container ship [...] perhaps more importantly, more than three-quarters of this daily maritime traffic, including half of petroleum and crude oil imports and exports, is squeezed through a handful of manufactured and highly maintained waterways surveilled and managed by military engineers like USACE, and security forces like the Coast Guard. [...] It is precisely the addition of an information stratum woven into the topologics of force projection that allows for the unprecedented flexibility, precision, and coordination of logistical operations."

The second chapter deals with Improvised Explosive Devices (IED), the perfect asymmetric weapon, in relation to the urban field and its infrastructure. "The weaponization of the road, both topologically and materially, suggests an open relation between power and infrastructure that may be appropriated through antagonistic organizational structures, strategies of domination, and tactics of seizure."

The third chapter is to me the most interesting, perhaps because of its historical precedents: "An army marches on its stomach," remarked Napoleon. "To successfully feed the hundred of thousands of troops and personnel at hundreds of bases around the world, around the clock, 365 days a year, the logistical operations and systems supplying high quality provisions in such high quantity are not merely technical affairs, but an integral part of a national culture of defence." Modern methods of food preservation (canning and refrigeration) are analyzed and compared to contemporary nutritional politics and economies. The authors show how milk and dairy products "prove as thick as blood and oil in determining processes of territorialization, patterns of occupation, and flows of resources and populations through the emergent ecological and economic matrices of the modern food regime entwined with contemporary projections and counter-practices of power."

Finally, allow me to go back to the Introduction's first sentence. It is a disclaimer which I find quite problematic: "This book is not about war, nor a history of war." The note explains it a bit better. It is a book about the process and logistics of militarization and militarism. Infrastructure as the equipment and expression of power is its underlying foundation. "Without advocating or admonishing the practice of war or military operations, [...] this book avoids the common, mid- to late-century views that conflate and confuse the necessity of war for economic development, growth, and industrial progress, which have shaped further opposition across the divide between left wing and right wing views." As I said, the research the authors have presented is compelling but somehow I wish their take on it was more clear and explicit, not so neutral. Can we assume that the final pages, titled Residuum, are a first step in this direction?

Film

noreply@blogger.com (SPAZIO) — Wed, 23 Nov 2016 10:56:00 +0000

It’s a movie about the perceiving eye, about the perceived and the perceiver – two aspects of the same man. The perceiver desires like mad to perceive and the perceived tries desperately to hide. Then, in the end, one wins.

Samuel Beckett, in The New Yorker, 8th Aug 1964.

Film, written by Samuel Beckett, starring Buster Keaton, 1965

Wonderland Potosí

noreply@blogger.com (SPAZIO) — Thu, 17 Nov 2016 10:12:00 +0000

The mythical source of silver known as Sierra de la Plata [Silver Mountain] is somehow linked to the history of Cerro Potosí, or Cerro Rico (4,782 m). A city with the same name was founded by the Spaniards in 1545 to host the Spanish colonial mint and soon became the largest and wealthiest city of the Americas. It is the highest in the world permanently inhabited (4,090 m) and the capital of one of the richest areas in the world with gold, silver, copper, tin, bismuth, zinc, lead.

Cerro de Potosí, Pedro Cieza de Leon, La Chronica de Peru, 1553. John Carter Brown Library, 0840-010

Veduta della Città e della Montagna del Potosí, Giuseppe Maria Terreni, 1777. John Carter Brown Library, 35878-8

If we look closely at the early plates representing the area we can always see men climbing to the top and into the mountain, miners presumably. Centuries have passed since then and from this point of view not much has changed: thousands of men still walk up every morning.

19°36'27.8"S 65°44'22.6"W

People still walk into the rabbit hole in search for precious metals. These dark plates from the Eighteenth Century perfectly illustrate the kind of environment that one may find inside.

El Secreto de la mina de Potosi se descubre à Villarroel, Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas, 1728.

John Carter Brown Library, 07376-39

Mines de Potosí, Voyage de Marseille a Lima, et dans les autres lieux des Indes occidentales, 1720. JohnCarter Brown Library, 02437-1

What comes out are trucks of soil and rocks that are ready to be smelted, sorted and traded. But all that digging has created a sinkhole that started collapsing in 2011.

19°35'37.5"S 65°44'19.9"W

When zooming out for a moment we still see the same barren landscape that European explorers saw when they first arrived. It is traversed by roads and pipes, it is degraded and stained, but for many it is still symbolic of inexhaustible riches.

Plateau et cerro de Potosi, (Bolivia) relevés en 1835 par Mr. Alcide d'Orbigny. John Carter Brown Library, 02-15-078

19°38'05.2"S 65°44'19.0"W

Epiphany in Tokyo II

noreply@blogger.com (SPAZIO) — Wed, 16 Nov 2016 15:44:00 +0000

Tokyo. Photograph Mariana Siracusa

Spazio recommends: The structure

noreply@blogger.com (SPAZIO) — Thu, 03 Nov 2016 09:57:00 +0000

Mahendra Raj (Gujranwala, 1924) graduated in civil engineering from the Punjab College of Engineering and Technology (Lahore) in 1946. Soon after, he joined the Punjab Public Works Department and was attached to the Soil Stabilization Department to learn the art of using stabilized soil in buildings and roads. After Partition, he moved to Shimla where he was in charge of maintaing all government properties and the Shimla-Kalka road. By 1952, he was transferred to Chandigarh where he became Executive Engineer and worked both on the High Court and Secretariat buildings by Le Corbusier. "Every day was a day of learning something new, which I enjoyed considerably. It was a delight to study the American codes and design aids of Portland Cement Association, and apply this knowledge to the design and detail of one part of the High Court or the other and prepare construction drawings." After the work in Chandigarh was completed he moved to the US and in 1956 he obtained a Master degree in Structures at the University if Minnesota and a CE at Columbia. In New York he worked for three years at Amman & Whitney to gain expertise in large-span structures.

The Structure. Works of Mahendra Raj. Zurich: Park Books, 2016.

"The construction of large-span structures was a carefully staged process and meant analyzing the different structures that emerged due to changing forces and shifting loads at different stages of construction." When he moved back to India in 1959 and started his own firm "the construction of these complex and large buildings, with no previous precedence and with the rudimentary and manual construction technology of the early 1960s to 1980s, required instilling courage and confidence in the contractors, which was done through detailed communication. The notes helped analyze and resolve issues such as economy of time, material and construction resources, and reduce the use of scaffolding and other materials while ensuring the required strength for the setting concrete."

Raj's drawings resonate the words of Pier Luigi Nervi: "The pattern of steel should always have an aesthetic quality and give the impression of being a nervous system capable of bringing life to a dead mass of concrete."

"Engineering is not an exact science. As a structural engineer, you try to idealize the structure, understand its behaviour and then make some assumptions on your own. You can never be sure that the properties will, in fact, follow the assumptions, and you are not sure of the loads, the placement of materials and the strength; yet you are required to design a building and put reinforcement in it - very accurately. Analysis and design have a large number of grey and dark areas, but you can't say that you won't design something or the other for this reason; you have to decide upon some strength and materials on the basis of assumptions and experience."

For an overview of Mahendra Raj's work see also MRC.

Some reflections on domestic spaces

noreply@blogger.com (SPAZIO) — Thu, 27 Oct 2016 14:45:00 +0000

A Greyhound bus driver and his family eating Sunday dinner. Photograph: Esther Bubley, 1943.

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USW3- 037502-E.

Interior spaces become obsolete at paradoxical speed. Well-established habits can be reinvented in a few years time but often the spaces we inhabit remain unchanged for decades. Alberto Giacometti wrote: “The art of the past rises before me, the art of all ages and all civilizations, everything becomes simultaneous, as if space had replaced time.” Art is emotion, a sudden and almost involuntary reaction, and thus outside of time. In architecture, on the other hand, time is always very important. While primary functions such as sleeping or eating remain unchanged, secondary and tertiary functions define our contemporary mode of inhabiting a space in a way that can be clearly identified in time.

On the phone. George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-B2- 5952-5

A couple watching television in their living room. Photograph: Warren K. Leffler, 1968.

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-U9- 18633-25

The interiors of the 1940s, 1950s,1960s and so on until today are immediately identifiable. It is like turning back on a mobile phone from the year 2000 after using for a while a brand new smartphone: the old device is slow and no longer adequate. The same thing happens with interior spaces. We find in these images those things that people grow attached to and that demand specific routines. They belong to a different time, when even people’s dreams were different: a stable job, material well-being, a nice house and car. These desires found expression in elegant and formal living rooms, dining rooms good only for Sunday meals, freestanding televisions, and super-accessorized kitchens.

Silver tureen. Photograph: Elio Elisofon, 1951. LIFE, TimeLife_image_728038

I'll now refer to domestic spaces in the metropolitan context of highly developed Western countries. The metropolis is the place of unpredictable encounters among singularities coming from elsewhere, singularities that have different cultures, languages, mentalities and knowledge (Hardt and Negri, 2009). The vitality of these urban centers depends precisely on these differences, absorbed and transformed into creative energy. Without a heterogeneous “outside” that fuels creativity the “center” dies.

Untitled (Fachada IV). Photograph: Anna Malagrida, 2002. COLECCIONES FUNDACIÓN MAPFRE / Fernando Maquieira

In Italy in the 1980s, the big city was still considered a dehumanizing, unnatural space. Renato Pozzetto’s tiny apartment in the film Il ragazzo di campagna [The Country Boy], presented to him as the result of careful human-scale research, is an emblematic example. With its cooking nook, privacy nook (wc), shower nook with dressing area, recreation nook, tv nook, telephone nook with built-in seat, fold-down dining table with collapsible chairs, and fold-down bed, the room/apartment is a functionally antagonistic space. At the end of the movie the protagonist returns to his “normal” life in the countryside.

My Micro NY, Typical floor plan, nArchitects, 2015.

If we look at the plans for the micro apartments recently completed in New York and promoted by Michael Bloomberg, we see similar features. Here too we have a one-room apartment, measuring approximately 25 square meters containing everything one might need. But it is the city that has completely changed in the meantime. Since the 1980s, birthrates have fallen and the percentage of adults and elderly who live alone has significantly increased. And the quantity and quality of round-the-clock services has also increased.

Corner Store, Troy, New York. Photograph: Brenda Ann Kenneally, 2008.

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ppmsca-39887

The construction industry has fully embraced the idea of the minimal house and consequently regulations have changed. Architects have revised their standards. Interior domestic space was reduced to the point that people were forced to go out onto the street. And the urban space had to keep up.

“The street and shops were crammed with people. The whole of the commercial sector and services were overcrowded. People were meeting, sniffing and greeting one another and making gestures of natural understanding. One of the paradoxes which automation engendered on a social scale consisted in the great development of the human interface within society and in public spaces. This has given rise to a gigantic migration of people from the industrial suburbs to the commercial centers.”

These apartments are very small and it’s not just a matter of square meters. The ceilings have been lowered, ranging between 2,7 m in the living areas (living room and bedroom) and 2,4 m in utility areas (kitchen, bathroom, hall, closets), with utility areas taking on more importance than the living areas. These low ceiling are made bearable by full-height windows that make the interior seem bigger, projecting it out into the infinite urban space. These interiors are designed to give people just a minimum of privacy. An ethnologist would point out that today even the most intimate, private activities are deliberately on view and become of public domain, but that is another story. I’ll only point here to the many activities that we used to do at home and that now we do outside, in the city.

Deerhead Diner, Manhattan Laundry Center, Park Slope Wash Center.

Photographs: Bill Barvin, 1992-1998. Bill Barvin Location Photograph Archive, New York Public Library.

These interiors are not suitable for a nuclear family, only for an individual. They cost the dweller, who spends there a little under one third of the day, one third of the salary. It is essentially a utility space, a room (with kitchenette) where you can sleep and takes care of yourself, where you might occasionally have a guest, make tea or heat up some soup. We find this type of apartments everywhere in the world and, like Coca-Cola, Starbucks cappuccino or IKEA furniture, the spaces are always the same, they look familiar. There is a small square table, two chairs, a sofa, a bed, a shower, a kitchenette, and a small balcony. There isn’t room for much else. It is not a space where one “lives” and the only reason it can work is that there is plenty of places in the city that can be shared: the gym, the public park around the corner, the cafés where you have breakfast every morning and the diners where you eat every evening. These too are familiar and informal places where one feels at home.

New York City. Photographs: Lee Friedlander, 2015.

The idea that the house should be reduced to mere equipment is certainly nothing new. One of its most eloquent proponents was Reyner Banham, who in 1965 wrote about an un-house as an equipped shelter, a non-architectural anti-building, a warm and dry Lebensraum. Banham claimed that men have exercised control over the environment in two ways: building a shelter or interfering with the local meteorology. He also realized that American architecture tended towards the open space. He had in mind Philip Johnson’s Glass House (1947) with its solid roof, radiant floor slab and service core. Johnson had seen the design of the Farnsworth House by Mies van der Rohe (1945). There is nothing monumental about these houses: Banham stated that America’s monumental space was the great outdoors, Whitman’s plains and Kerouac’s infinite road. And indeed, these are not city houses. In both case a carefully designed landscape ensures the necessary privacy, keeps the occupants safe from prying eyes. Banham did not failed to point out that this architecture was made for the suburbs and that this is where America wanted to live. As emphasized by Alison Smithson, Mies could still afford to ignore cars and noise.

“Mies could take quietness for granted in the first half of the century. He could be sure of the individual rights of the undisturbed, inhabited place situated away from industry until almost at the end of his life, when the new state highway was built directly opposite to his last pavilion, the Farnsworth house. A mobile home camp grew on the other side of the river; the tree screen had to be left so dense one is barely conscious of the river when in the house or on the property… Starting to work in the 1950s we never could make the innocent assumptions available to the Heroic Period of Modern Architecture. In the American magazines of the 1940s and 1950s we could foresee the consumer-oriented society that would, through advertisements, change all our lives… World War II had acted as the great divide between ourselves and our grandparent architects, who built for the few tall cars and for the genteel who shopped for rarely replaced objects.”

To protect their privacy the Smithsons always surrounded themselves with walls, making the interior invisible from the outside, as is the case with the House of the Future or the Solar Pavilion. The former was a super equipped house, a sort of impenetrable bunker, designed to protect the family from pollution, noise, dust, cold, hot, germs. It was intended as a shelter against all threats but the result was a “tomb”. The latter was once again a country house in an idyllic setting. There was still a protective wall but inside the equipment and furniture are reduced to a minimum to encourage a casual lifestyle. Both scenarios are incompatible with metropolitan life. In the metropolis isolation makes less and less sense and it is precisely the elements once considered negative to create a certain degree of privacy around the individuals. Take for example the background noise that allows for a private conversation in a crowded room. In the city people are bombarded with information and content at all types, and most of the times this allows us to slip by unnoticed. We live in very dense spaces: dense with information, activities, services, products, and possibilities. And it doesn’t all necessarily have to belong to us. We are getting used to sharing our workspace, out car and bicycle, our resources both material and immaterial.

Outdoor shopping center in Los Angeles, California. Photograph: Carol M. Highsmith, 2012.

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-highsm-22058

Furthermore, under economic pressure leisure and work time have progressively intermixed. People are not forced to work all the time must be constantly ready to do so, they have to be always reachable. And technology makes this possible.

It is partially for this reason that we work less and less in offices and more and more in informal, almost domestic spaces. Many companies encourage their employees to work from home, thus reducing the number of desks and the operational costs at the office. The recent real estate crisis is proof that office buildings are currently not the best investment. To work all one needs is an electronic device and a network connection. We spend our days in front of a screen, interacting remotely with people we have never met. We experience physical contact during work breaks, when we step outside for a cigarette, take the dog for a walk, go out for lunch… This character of informality is one of the most interesting aspects of contemporary interior spaces. The open-plan kitchen and the sofas where to lounge barefoot are clear signs of the trend to do without formalities. The same trend is seen in public spaces.

Picnic, Trinity River. Photograph: Terry Evans, 2013.

If it is true that the act of inhabiting consists in creating routines to counter the unforeseen circumstances of day-to-day life and that the acquisition of new habits is a response to the emergence of the new and unexpected (Teyssot, 2013), we also have to look at emerging extraordinary situations and non-customary events. In this regard films have always been an excellent barometer: among those released recently we see that climate change and related natural disasters, epidemics, the collapse of oil pries and the recession, wars and associated mass migrations are part of those aggravating circumstances that worry people the most.

Workers cleaning up chemical spill after refinery explosion in Los Angeles Harbor, October 1992.

Photograph: Allan Sekula, from the series Fish Story.

Allan Sekula, Waiting for Tear Gas, 1999-2000.

We got used to living in the metropolis by accepting diversity, working everywhere, and adopting “informal” behaviors. We have witnessed the definitive establishment of the immaterial world and we are aware that it has radically changed how we live. But what have we inherited from the past? Are things that we want to keep or simply debris that we have a hard time getting rid of? Certainly we got better at choosing among thousands of possibilities. And this holds for every aspect of our lives: from our morning coffee (tall decaf, 2% milk, honey) to the type of lighting on our bedside table (dimmable soft white led). We try to do without red meat and sugar, plastic bags, bottled water, and all the stuff that tends to accumulate. We fight pollution and chemicals by surrounding ourselves with plants. We go to the gym twice a week for yoga and Pilates lessons. We are in favor of scent-free environments. We eat organic. We are aware that virtually nothing of the enormous quantity of neglected history can be erased for being insignificant and that most things have the tendency to resurface. But we cannot live without personalities and have replaced the consumption of material goods with that of immaterial ones.

Mathiew Lehanneur, Andrea Air Purifier, 2009.

An extended version of this post was published on Rooms. Novel Living Concepts. Venezia: Marsilio, 2016.

Nine million items and counting

noreply@blogger.com (SPAZIO) — Wed, 12 Oct 2016 09:14:00 +0000

Jeffrey Schnapp, inspired by Toute la mémoire du monde, tells us about the Harvard Depository.

Cold Storage, metaLAB(at)Harvard, 2015. Concept, producer, writer, narrator: Jeffrey Schnapp.

Spazio recommends: Landscape as urbanism

noreply@blogger.com (SPAZIO) — Fri, 30 Sep 2016 14:15:00 +0000

Charles Waldheim. Landscape as urbanism: a general theory. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2016.

In this general theory of landscape architecture Charles Waldheim mentions all the contemporary usual suspects: Rem Koolhaas and Bernard Tschumi (Parc de la Villette Competition), James Corner/Field Operations (Fresh Kills Landfill), Adriaan Geuze/West 8 (Eastern Scheldt Storm Surge Barrier), Chris Reed/Stoss (Lower Don Lands Competition), Eric Miralles and Carme Pinós (Igualada Cemetry), Alejandro Zaera-Polo and Farshid Moussavi (Yokohama Port Terminal and Barcelona Amphitheater), James Corner and Diller Scofidio + Renfro (High Line), West 8 and DTAH (Toronto Waterfront), Luis Callejas/Paisajes Emergentes (Caracas Airport Park), Kongjian Yu/Turenscape (Qunli Stormwater Park).

These landscape architects work in the shadow of infrastructural objects - the abattoir, the landfill, the rail track, the waterfront, the airport - and interweave natural ecologies with the social and cultural layers of the city. Landscape is examined "as the medium through which to conceive the renovation of the postindustrial city".
The author traces landscape in the West back to the crisis of Fordist economies and chooses Detroit as a canonical example (here he makes an interesting link to the Disabitato in Rome between the fourteenth and the nineteenth century). He also reconsiders Lafayette Park by Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig Hilberseimer and Alfred Caldwell and its effective use of landscape as the spacial and organizational media to construct urban order.

Waldheim also mentions all the right books: Ian McHarg's Design with Nature, James Corner's Taking measures across the american landscape and Recovering Landscape, Mohsen Mostafavi and Gareth Doherty's Ecological Urbanism, Denis Cosgrove's Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape, Charles Waldheim's The Landscape Urbanism Reader, W.J.T. Mitchell's Landcape and Power, Ludwig Hilberseimer's The New Regional Pattern, Dramstad, Olson and Forman's Landscape Ecology Principles in Landscape Architecture and Land-Use Planning.

After all this is a general theory so why does it feels like a BUT should follow? Maybe I was expecting that the final chapter would point at something new. Waldhein does recognize that the intellectual agenda of landscape urbanism is two decades old. He also asserts that the discourse on landscape urbanism, while hardly new in architectural circles, is rapidly being absorbed into the global discourse on cities.

For a general history of landscape architecture I also recommend ten lectures by Christophe Girot, Chair of Landscape Architecture at the ETH, Zurich.

Stanley Kubrick's Boxes

noreply@blogger.com (SPAZIO) — Thu, 22 Sep 2016 14:10:00 +0000

Directed by Jon Ronson, 2008

The Stanley Kubrick Archive is held by the University of the Arts, London.

Booksellers

noreply@blogger.com (SPAZIO) — Tue, 20 Sep 2016 09:48:00 +0000

Have you ever wondered where rare architecture books – the ones that you can only find in the vaults of Avery, the RIBA, the CCA, or the Getty; the ones that are preserved in dark rooms with controlled temperature and humidity; the ones that are kept close to the door so that they could be more easily pulled out in case of a catastrophic event – come from?

Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Design SOM/Gordon Bunshaft, 1963

There is a market for everything, even for rare books. Booksellers like Lucien Goldschmidt, Ben Weinreb and Paul Breman, John A. Vloemans, and more recently Julia Elton, Hugh Pagan, and Charles B. Wood III have published essential catalogues. If he was still alive, the crown would probably go to Weinreb: his fifty-nine catalogues are per se a collection must. The authors mentioned go from Vitruvius, Alberti, Serlio, Palladio, and Scamozzi up to more contemporary authors. In 1968, he sold his entire stock to University of Texas and closed the shop. Later, he met Phyllis Lambert and contributed to the formation of the CCA Library. Further research on their collaboration is long overdue.

Walter Gropius. Internationale Architektur. München: A. Langen, 1927.

Weinreb Architectural Collection, University of Texas

These precious items are collection objects, often exhibited behind glass. As such you will be required to use gloves and book cradles to handle them. They are being digitized - check for instance Il Primo Libro d'Architettura by Serlio at Columbia University Libraries on archive.org - which makes scholars' life much easier. These books are acquired by institutions or great collectors mainly to be admired, not read.

Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Design SOM/Gordon Bunshaft, 1963

Internet-based retailers have completely changed the way books - both new and out of print - are sold, forcing bookstores like Rizzoli in New York, Hennessey + Ingalls in LA, Walther König in Köln, RIBA in London, the CCA in Montreal, Pro qm in Berlin, or Hochparterre in Zurich to open up to new activities that engage and "entertain" their clients: presentations, apéro with the author, small exhibitions. Here the book is also a social facilitator.

Do researchers and scholars still rely on university press catalogues? I certainly do, at least twice a year (Spring and Fall). They give you an overview of what others are working on. Content, content, content: these are the books that you can actually read, underline, use. They have notes, useful bibliographies and allow advancing the thinking. In this case the bookseller is of little help.

Photographs EF

But their business does not end here. Allow me to enter a grey zone and refer to display books: they are sold or rented by the meter according to specific stylistic characteristics.

An Italian Design furniture company that want be promote a new bookshelf at the Milano Design Week orders a hundred meters of art books, with 28-30 cm black-white-red spines. The books are ready in a week and cost eighty euros the meter.

A set designer orders twenty meters of historical books, with 22-24 cm beige spines, preferably Gallimard, for a photo shoot. The books are ready in a couple of days and transportation is by and paid by the customer.

Photographs EF

An esteemed lawyer sends the bookseller a photo of a corner office. The image shows an imperial desk, a leather armchair, a Persian carpet, a big window on the back, two plants and two libraries, one on each side of the window. The bookseller will provide sixteen meters of leather books for a perfectly symmetrical composition.

An elegant lady may orders ten meters of books with aubergine and silver spines, and other ten with sage spines to decorate the newly renovated living room.

A store may get forty meters but request that the bookseller rips the covers and exposes the bindings (it takes about fifty meters of books).

All these books are set up for purely decorative and representative purposes. They will never be open and will go to waste as soon as the event ends or they no longer serve the purpose.

Collection books, rare books, books that entertain, scholar's books, display books and their respective book dealers: it is a very interesting and diverse business, isn't it?

Spazio recommends: Treacherous transparencies

noreply@blogger.com (SPAZIO) — Tue, 13 Sep 2016 15:25:00 +0000

Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron

Treacherous Transparencies. Thoughts and observations triggered by a visit to the Farnsworth House

Chicago: IITAC Press, 2016

In Treacherous Transparencies Jacques Herzog (through text) and Pierre de Meuron (through photographs) record a few critical thoughts about the Farnsworth House by Mies van der Rohe. Herzog discusses the complete exposure of the interior, the spectral non-space under the building, and the decorative romantic landscape that surrounds the property in relation to a few works by Bruno Taut, Ivan Leonidov, Marcel Duchamp, Dan Graham, and Gerhard Richter. The framed views by de Meuron show quite faithfully that the "users of the Farnsworth House are surrounded by uncertainty".

The architects visited the house on the occasion of the Mies Crown Hall Americas Price in Fall 2014 and again in Spring 2016. Check also the 2015 RIBA Jencks Award lecture.

Looking In, Farnsworth House, 2013. Photographs: Mariana Siracusa

Toute la mémoire du monde

noreply@blogger.com (SPAZIO) — Tue, 06 Sep 2016 16:03:00 +0000

"Because their memory is short-lived, humans accumulate an infinity of memory aids."

Alain Resnais, 1956

There's plenty of room at the bottom

noreply@blogger.com (SPAZIO) — Wed, 31 Aug 2016 16:48:00 +0000

In 1959, physicist Richard Feynman gave a lecture titled There's plenty of room at the bottom, which eventually altered the thinking of a whole generation of scientists by changing their focus to thinking "about the problem of manipulating and controlling things on a small scale." Small is, of course, a relative concept and I'm not interested in venturing into physics and nanotechnologies. I want to talk about small scale in relation to landscape, more precisely about mountain footbridges.

I have been an admirer of Jürg Conzett's work for a long time but had never seen personally any of his bridges until very recently. The once on the Veia Traversina and on the Trutg dil Flem certainly live up to the highest expectations. The twelve kilometre trail between Zillis and Thusis is marked white-red-white (difficulty T3) and requires between five and six hours. It is a demanding hike with difference in altitude of +640 / -470 m, but the Pùnt da Suransuns, the Viamala Gorge and the Traversina Bridge are worth the effort.

Pùnt da Suransuns, Verein KulturRaum Viamala, Design and construction: Conzett, Bronzini, Gartmann AG, 1999

Photographs: Mariana Siracusa

Viamala Bridge, Graubünden Department of Transportation, Design and construction: Christian Menn, 1966-67

Photograph: Mariana Siracusa

Pùnt da Suransuns is designed as a stone (local Andeer gneiss) and stress-ribbon system.
"The bridge was to be made from stone as a contrast to the timber structures of the Veia Traversina in the northern part of the Viamala Gorge. It was to be a material manifestation of the cultural divide between the north and south [...]." The bridge is exposed to salt-spray from the road above (A13): stainless steel and duplex steel were used to avoid corrosion. The stone slabs are joined by 60x3 mm aluminium strips, a substitute for mortar. The concrete abutments were poured with great precision. Note also the surface treatment of the eastern side. "The range of surface treatment for concrete has by no means been exhausted. For instance, concrete can be granulated for about the same cost as an exposed concrete formwork."

Viamala, 1895 ca., ETH-Bibliothek Zürich, Bildarchiv / Photographer: Unknown/ Ans_09194-FL

Viamala, 1925, ETH-Bibliothek Zürich, Bildarchiv/Stiftung Luftbild Schweiz / Photographer: Walter Mittelholzer / LBS_MH01-004439

The cliffs of the Viamala Gorge rise for three hundred meters and are only a few meters apart at the narrowest points. The waters of the Rhine rush in and produce a deafening sound. The Viamala Visitor Center building was designed by Iseppi/Kurath.

Second Traversina Bridge, Verein KulturRaum Viamala, Design and construction: Conzett, Bronzini, Gartmann AG, 1999-2005

Photographs: Mariana Siracusa

The Traversina bridge is an angled narrow walkway in the form of a long stair with a fairly wide substructure that prevents a direct view down into the ravine. It drops for twenty-two meters from the northern to the southern end. A diamond-truss system carries the loads up to the abutments rendering the bridge stiff to vibrations. The structural parts are made of splinter-free larch glulam beams, whereas the stair treads and railing are of weather-resistant heartwood fir. Cables, connections, cross girders and railing posts are all of galvanized steel. The cables terminate at the apex of concrete pylons which were poured monolithically together with the anchors. The inbuilt redundancy of the system facilitates the individual replacement of damaged elements over time.

All mountaineers know that proceeding downhill is scarier than proceeding uphill. The upper pylons - broad enough to accommodate hydraulic jacks alongside the anchors - are an assertion of permanence and are designed to hide the stair to the visitor until the very last moment. It is only when you are safely standing between these massive volumes of concrete that you are able to see the steps ahead. On the contrary, the lower abutment is designed as a bench where you can gather strength before climbing up. Midway up/down you will feel on your skin the full force of the wind. The Traversina bridge certainly lives up to the local geography.

The seven footbridges on the Trugt dil Flem in Flims are even smaller in scale. The trail - marked white-red-white (difficulty T3) - is thirteen kilometres long and requires around five hours. You can chose whether to proceed uphill to Naraus and take the cable back to Flims or the other way around. In any case the ever-changing view will keep you scrambling over the rocks. What you see - surprising small-scale natural scenes - will balance the fatigue.

The bridges grant access to private land and transform the landscape into an attraction.

This space is never quiet, neither visually nor acoustically. There are moments when both the place and the structures will disappears in sound. Along the trail you will realize that walking is not just movement but also experience. Also, space is a matter of distance from people: the scenes are unpopulated. You are alone or so it seems.

The landscape never looks the same coming and going, so turn around periodically.

Trugt dil Flem, Design and construction: Conzett, Bronzini, Gartmann AG, 2010-2012, Photographs: Mariana Siracusa

This unique Alpine landscape was shaped and staged by human interventions, and the bridges by Conzett are a constitutive part of it. "The appearance of such artful constructions in the midst of a massive mountain environment always involves an aspect of miniaturization. Something is pinned onto the mighty landscape, something that is intended as a rare jewel." It is important that we learn to preserve this man-made landscape.

Flimserstein, 1954, ETH-Bibliothek Zürich, Bildarchiv/Stiftung Luftbild Schweiz / Photograph: Werner Friedli / LBS_H1-018187 / CC BY-SA 4.0

Flims, 1971 , ETH-Bibliothek Zürich, Bildarchiv/Stiftung Luftbild Schweiz / Photograph: Swissair Photo AG / LBS_P1-715529 / CC BY-SA 4.0

Flimserstein, 1960, ETH-Bibliothek Zürich, Bildarchiv/Stiftung Luftbild Schweiz / Photograph: Werner Friedli / LBS_H1-022380 / CC BY-SA 4.0

Further reading

Chiorino, Mario Alberto, ed. Jürg Conzett. Architettura nelle opere d'ingegneria. Torino: Allemandi, 2007.

Conzett, Jürg. "Notes on Dealing with Construction". In Marcel Meili, Markus Peter 1987-2008. Zurich: Scheidegger & Speiss, 2008.

Conzett, Jürg. "A Commentary onStructural Aspects of the Community Halls in Duvin and Vrin". In Bettina Schlorhaufer, ed. Cul duffel e l'aura dado. Gion A. Caminada. Luzern: Quart Verlag, 2008.

Dosch, Leza. Kunst und Landschaft in Graubünden. Bilder und Bauten seit 1780. Zürich: Verlag Scheidegger & Spiess AG, 2001.

Landscape and Structure: a Personal inventory of Jürg Conzett. Zurich: Scheidegger & Speiss, 2010.

Mezzalira, Luca and Michel Carlana. Jürg Conzett, Gianfranco Bronzini, Patrick Gartmann: Forms of Structure. Milano: Electa, 2011.

Mostafavi, Mohsen, ed. Structure as Space. Engineering and Architecture in the Works of Jürg Conzett and His Partners. London: AA Publications, 2006.

Nicolson, Marjorie Hope. Mountain Gloom, Mountain Glory. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1959.

Saussure, Horace-Bénédict de. Voyage dans les Alpes. Neuchâtel, 1796.

Schama, Simon. Landscape and Memory. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995.

Solnit, Rebecca. Wanderlust. A History of Walking. New York: Penguin Books, 2000.

Wilfried Dechau. Trugt dil Flem: Seven Bridges by Jürg Conzett. Zurich: Scheidegger & Speiss, 2013.

Uphill

noreply@blogger.com (SPAZIO) — Mon, 29 Aug 2016 11:02:00 +0000

Col des Roux, Hérémence,Switzerland, photographs: Mariana Siracusa

Song of the Open Road

by Walt Whitman

Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,

Healthy, free, the world before me,

The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.

Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune,

Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,

Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,

Strong and content I travel the open road.

The earth, that is sufficient,

I do not want the constellations any nearer,

I know they are very well where they are,

I know they suffice for those who belong to them.

(Still here I carry my old delicious burdens,

I carry them, men and women, I carry them with me wherever I go,

I swear it is impossible for me to get rid of them,

I am fill’d with them, and I will fill them in return.)

You road I enter upon and look around, I believe you are not all that is here,

I believe that much unseen is also here.

Here the profound lesson of reception, nor preference nor denial,

The black with his woolly head, the felon, the diseas’d, the illiterate person, are not denied;

The birth, the hasting after the physician, the beggar’s tramp, the drunkard’s stagger, the laughing party of mechanics,

The escaped youth, the rich person’s carriage, the fop, the eloping couple,

The early market-man, the hearse, the moving of furniture into the town, the return back from the town,

They pass, I also pass, any thing passes, none can be interdicted,

None but are accepted, none but shall be dear to me.

You air that serves me with breath to speak!

You objects that call from diffusion my meanings and give them shape!

You light that wraps me and all things in delicate equable showers!

You paths worn in the irregular hollows by the roadsides!

I believe you are latent with unseen existences, you are so dear to me.

You flagg’d walks of the cities! you strong curbs at the edges!

You ferries! you planks and posts of wharves! you timber-lined sides! you distant ships!

You rows of houses! you window-pierc’d façades! you roofs!

You porches and entrances! you copings and iron guards!

You windows whose transparent shells might expose so much!

You doors and ascending steps! you arches!

You gray stones of interminable pavements! you trodden crossings!

From all that has touch’d you I believe you have imparted to yourselves, and now would impart the same secretly to me,

From the living and the dead you have peopled your impassive surfaces, and the spirits thereof would be evident and amicable with me.

The earth expanding right hand and left hand,

The picture alive, every part in its best light,

The music falling in where it is wanted, and stopping where it is not wanted,

The cheerful voice of the public road, the gay fresh sentiment of the road.

O highway I travel, do you say to me Do not leave me?

Do you say Venture not—if you leave me you are lost?

Do you say I am already prepared, I am well-beaten and undenied, adhere to me?

O public road, I say back I am not afraid to leave you, yet I love you,

You express me better than I can express myself,

You shall be more to me than my poem.

I think heroic deeds were all conceiv’d in the open air, and all free poems also,

I think I could stop here myself and do miracles,

I think whatever I shall meet on the road I shall like, and whoever beholds me shall like me,

I think whoever I see must be happy.

From this hour I ordain myself loos’d of limits and imaginary lines,

Going where I list, my own master total and absolute,

Listening to others, considering well what they say,

Pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating,

Gently, but with undeniable will, divesting myself of the holds that would hold me.

I inhale great draughts of space,

The east and the west are mine, and the north and the south are mine.

I am larger, better than I thought,

I did not know I held so much goodness.

All seems beautiful to me,

I can repeat over to men and women You have done such good to me I would do the same to you,

I will recruit for myself and you as I go,

I will scatter myself among men and women as I go,

I will toss a new gladness and roughness among them,

Whoever denies me it shall not trouble me,

Whoever accepts me he or she shall be blessed and shall bless me.

Now if a thousand perfect men were to appear it would not amaze me,

Now if a thousand beautiful forms of women appear’d it would not astonish me.

Now I see the secret of the making of the best persons,

It is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.

Here a great personal deed has room,

(Such a deed seizes upon the hearts of the whole race of men,

Its effusion of strength and will overwhelms law and mocks all authority and all argument against it.)

Here is the test of wisdom,

Wisdom is not finally tested in schools,

Wisdom cannot be pass’d from one having it to another not having it,

Wisdom is of the soul, is not susceptible of proof, is its own proof,

Applies to all stages and objects and qualities and is content,

Is the certainty of the reality and immortality of things, and the excellence of things;

Something there is in the float of the sight of things that provokes it out of the soul.

Now I re-examine philosophies and religions,

They may prove well in lecture-rooms, yet not prove at all under the spacious clouds and along the landscape and flowing currents.

Here is realization,

Here is a man tallied—he realizes here what he has in him,

The past, the future, majesty, love—if they are vacant of you, you are vacant of them.

Only the kernel of every object nourishes;

Where is he who tears off the husks for you and me?

Where is he that undoes stratagems and envelopes for you and me?

Here is adhesiveness, it is not previously fashion’d, it is apropos;

Do you know what it is as you pass to be loved by strangers?

Do you know the talk of those turning eye-balls?

Here is the efflux of the soul,

The efflux of the soul comes from within through embower’d gates, ever provoking questions,

These yearnings why are they? these thoughts in the darkness why are they?

Why are there men and women that while they are nigh me the sunlight expands my blood?

Why when they leave me do my pennants of joy sink flat and lank?

Why are there trees I never walk under but large and melodious thoughts descend upon me?

(I think they hang there winter and summer on those trees and always drop fruit as I pass;)

What is it I interchange so suddenly with strangers?

What with some driver as I ride on the seat by his side?

What with some fisherman drawing his seine by the shore as I walk by and pause?

What gives me to be free to a woman’s and man’s good-will? what gives them to be free to mine?

The efflux of the soul is happiness, here is happiness,

I think it pervades the open air, waiting at all times,

Now it flows unto us, we are rightly charged.

Here rises the fluid and attaching character,

The fluid and attaching character is the freshness and sweetness of man and woman,

(The herbs of the morning sprout no fresher and sweeter every day out of the roots of themselves, than it sprouts fresh and sweet continually out of itself.)

Toward the fluid and attaching character exudes the sweat of the love of young and old,

From it falls distill’d the charm that mocks beauty and attainments,

Toward it heaves the shuddering longing ache of contact.

Allons! whoever you are come travel with me!

Traveling with me you find what never tires.

The earth never tires,

The earth is rude, silent, incomprehensible at first, Nature is rude and incomprehensible at first,

Be not discouraged, keep on, there are divine things well envelop’d,

I swear to you there are divine things more beautiful than words can tell.

Allons! we must not stop here,

However sweet these laid-up stores, however convenient this dwelling we cannot remain here,

However shelter’d this port and however calm these waters we must not anchor here,

However welcome the hospitality that surrounds us we are permitted to receive it but a little while.

Allons! the inducements shall be greater,

We will sail pathless and wild seas,

We will go where winds blow, waves dash, and the Yankee clipper speeds by under full sail.

Allons! with power, liberty, the earth, the elements,

Health, defiance, gayety, self-esteem, curiosity;

Allons! from all formules!

From your formules, O bat-eyed and materialistic priests.

The stale cadaver blocks up the passage—the burial waits no longer.

Allons! yet take warning!

He traveling with me needs the best blood, thews, endurance,

None may come to the trial till he or she bring courage and health,

Come not here if you have already spent the best of yourself,

Only those may come who come in sweet and determin’d bodies,

No diseas’d person, no rum-drinker or venereal taint is permitted here.

(I and mine do not convince by arguments, similes, rhymes,

We convince by our presence.)

Listen! I will be honest with you,

I do not offer the old smooth prizes, but offer rough new prizes,

These are the days that must happen to you:

You shall not heap up what is call’d riches,

You shall scatter with lavish hand all that you earn or achieve,

You but arrive at the city to which you were destin’d, you hardly settle yourself to satisfaction before you are call’d by an irresistible call to depart,

You shall be treated to the ironical smiles and mockings of those who remain behind you,

What beckonings of love you receive you shall only answer with passionate kisses of parting,

You shall not allow the hold of those who spread their reach’d hands toward you.

Allons! after the great Companions, and to belong to them!

They too are on the road—they are the swift and majestic men—they are the greatest women,

Enjoyers of calms of seas and storms of seas,

Sailors of many a ship, walkers of many a mile of land,

Habituès of many distant countries, habituès of far-distant dwellings,

Trusters of men and women, observers of cities, solitary toilers,

Pausers and contemplators of tufts, blossoms, shells of the shore,

Dancers at wedding-dances, kissers of brides, tender helpers of children, bearers of children,

Soldiers of revolts, standers by gaping graves, lowerers-down of coffins,

Journeyers over consecutive seasons, over the years, the curious years each emerging from that which preceded it,

Journeyers as with companions, namely their own diverse phases,

Forth-steppers from the latent unrealized baby-days,

Journeyers gayly with their own youth, journeyers with their bearded and well-grain’d manhood,

Journeyers with their womanhood, ample, unsurpass’d, content,

Journeyers with their own sublime old age of manhood or womanhood,

Old age, calm, expanded, broad with the haughty breadth of the universe,

Old age, flowing free with the delicious near-by freedom of death.

Allons! to that which is endless as it was beginningless,

To undergo much, tramps of days, rests of nights,

To merge all in the travel they tend to, and the days and nights they tend to,

Again to merge them in the start of superior journeys,

To see nothing anywhere but what you may reach it and pass it,

To conceive no time, however distant, but what you may reach it and pass it,

To look up or down no road but it stretches and waits for you, however long but it stretches and waits for you,

To see no being, not God’s or any, but you also go thither,

To see no possession but you may possess it, enjoying all without labor or purchase, abstracting the feast yet not abstracting one particle of it,

To take the best of the farmer’s farm and the rich man’s elegant villa, and the chaste blessings of the well-married couple, and the fruits of orchards and flowers of gardens,

To take to your use out of the compact cities as you pass through,

To carry buildings and streets with you afterward wherever you go,

To gather the minds of men out of their brains as you encounter them, to gather the love out of their hearts,

To take your lovers on the road with you, for all that you leave them behind you,

To know the universe itself as a road, as many roads, as roads for traveling souls.

All parts away for the progress of souls,

All religion, all solid things, arts, governments—all that was or is apparent upon this globe or any globe, falls into niches and corners before the procession of souls along the grand roads of the universe.

Of the progress of the souls of men and women along the grand roads of the universe, all other progress is the needed emblem and sustenance.

Forever alive, forever forward,

Stately, solemn, sad, withdrawn, baffled, mad, turbulent, feeble, dissatisfied,

Desperate, proud, fond, sick, accepted by men, rejected by men,

They go! they go! I know that they go, but I know not where they go,

But I know that they go toward the best—toward something great.

Whoever you are, come forth! or man or woman come forth!

You must not stay sleeping and dallying there in the house, though you built it, or though it has been built for you.

Out of the dark confinement! out from behind the screen!

It is useless to protest, I know all and expose it.

Behold through you as bad as the rest,

Through the laughter, dancing, dining, supping, of people,

Inside of dresses and ornaments, inside of those wash’d and trimm’d faces,

Behold a secret silent loathing and despair.

No husband, no wife, no friend, trusted to hear the confession,

Another self, a duplicate of every one, skulking and hiding it goes,

Formless and wordless through the streets of the cities, polite and bland in the parlors,

In the cars of railroads, in steamboats, in the public assembly,

Home to the houses of men and women, at the table, in the bedroom, everywhere,

Smartly attired, countenance smiling, form upright, death under the breast-bones, hell under the skull-bones,

Under the broadcloth and gloves, under the ribbons and artificial flowers,

Keeping fair with the customs, speaking not a syllable of itself,

Speaking of any thing else but never of itself.

Allons! through struggles and wars!

The goal that was named cannot be countermanded.

Have the past struggles succeeded?

What has succeeded? yourself? your nation? Nature?

Now understand me well—it is provided in the essence of things that from any fruition of success, no matter what, shall come forth something to make a greater struggle necessary.

My call is the call of battle, I nourish active rebellion,

He going with me must go well arm’d,

He going with me goes often with spare diet, poverty, angry enemies, desertions.

Allons! the road is before us!

It is safe—I have tried it—my own feet have tried it well—be not detain’d!

Let the paper remain on the desk unwritten, and the book on the shelf unopen’d!

Let the tools remain in the workshop! let the money remain unearn’d!

Let the school stand! mind not the cry of the teacher!

Let the preacher preach in his pulpit! let the lawyer plead in the court, and the judge expound the law.

Camerado, I give you my hand!

I give you my love more precious than money,

I give you myself before preaching or law;

Will you give me yourself? will you come travel with me?

Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?

Spazio recommends: Beyond the City

noreply@blogger.com (SPAZIO) — Mon, 25 Jul 2016 15:04:00 +0000

Felipe Correa. Beyond the city: resource extraction urbanism in South America. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016.

In this engaging book, Felipe Correa studies – through five relevant case studies – the regional impact of the industry of resource extraction in Latin America.

Introduction

Shaping Resource Extraction

Chapter 1 _ A Regional Capital: Belo Horizonte

Chapter 2 _ A Mining Town Constellation: María Elena

Chapter 3 _ Petrol Encampments: Judibana and El Tablazo

Chapter 4 _ A New Industrial Frontier: Ciudad Guayana

Chapter 5 _ Pioneering Modernity: Vila Piloto

Epilogue

The Legacy of Resource Extraction Urbanism and the Future of the South American Hinterland

Correa shows how the modernist plan of Belo Horizonte was used as a device for reorganizing the productive hinterland of Minas Gerais in Brazil. He points to the role played by topography in the siting of major public buildings and civic open spaces, and addresses the importance of a constructed nature in the overall organization of the plan. He also recognizes that “it was only with the investment in rail infrastructure that the city gained geographic relevance in the region”, as the rail infrastructure facilitated the export of massive quantities of iron ore.

Nitrate extraction sites in the Atacama Desert

In the second chapter, the author studies the spatial requirements of nitrate extraction, processing, and export, which have defined a network of interdependent settlements in the Atacama Desert. “A private nitrate-extraction town was strategically located between a western port city that served as the nitrate gateway to the world and an Andean oasis that served as a source of food and water for the industrial town”. These oficinas salitrales – see María Elena – have drastically altered the pampa.

In the mid-1950s, American oil companies in Venezuela built new company towns following partially implemented plans by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM). They were conceived initially as citadels and later as integrated communities. The author presents drawings and photographs of Judibana, La Salina, and El Tablazo. “These full-service enclaves, organized primarily as buildings dispersed in the landscape, embodied a new lifestyle that exercised a significant social and cultural change in the region”.

Ciudad Guayana was designed at the Joint Center for Urban Studies, a multidisciplinary venture by Harvard University and MIT funded by the Ford Foundation to study postwar urbanization. It was the opportunity to test the notion of “growth pole” by giving a spatial dimension to an abstract economic model. It was conceived as a linear city that tied clearly zoned nodes with a continuous mobility infrastructure. “Ciudad Guayana was part of a much larger Cold War agenda that involved a growing interest, among non-governmental organizations like the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations as well as the US government, in advancing development through urbanization in many parts of Latin America”.

In the final chapter, Correa studies the cities built to house the temporary worker that built the chain of dams and hydroelectric power plants along the Paraná River basin in Brazil. VilaPiloto, Ilha Solteira, and Porto Primavera were the opportunity to conceive a new form of urban development. “What was traditionally a riparian environment with cities sprinkled along its edges is now transformed into a "metapolized" landscape that is neither urban nor rural in traditional terms […]”

Notes and bibliography are also of great interest.

Spazio recommends: Bulldozer

noreply@blogger.com (SPAZIO) — Thu, 21 Jul 2016 12:40:00 +0000

Francesca Russello Ammon. Bulldozer: Demolition and Clearance of the Postwar Landscape. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016.

In this exemplary study of the Bulldozer, Francesca Russello Ammon asked how the US came to embrace and implement widespread destruction as a means to achieving progress between 1945 and the mid-1970s, with demolitions reaching their zenith in the name of urban renewal in the 1960s.
Though the army formally established the Corps of Engineers in 1802, it was only during World War II that Naval Construction Battalions (Seabees) members utilized heavy equipment for the large-scale land-clearance practices required by the hundreds of new bases that were being built across the world. From 1942 through the end of the war, 85 percent of Caterpillar's production went to the government. The author showed how the implementation and representation of clearance elevated both the bulldozer and the men operating it into powerful American heroes.

Navy Seabees operating a Caterpillar, June 1945, The Life Photo Archive, photographs by J. R. Eyerman

When these men and methods came home after the war, "the domestic landscape became their new enemy, and profit - rather than victory - was the new goal".
Clearance of nature and large-scale earthmoving made way for new suburban development, while demolition of existing city buildings implemented state-sponsored slum-clearance programs and urban renewal. Though "on the ground demolition proved slow, dirty, difficult, and environmentally and socially damaging", it was initially accepted as progress. But the physical and social devastation upon the land turned the Bulldozer, once a symbol of progress, into a symbol of destruction. This transformation began in the 1960s, and it was complete by the mid-1970s.

The author presented three case studies - namely the suburban land clearance in Orange County, California; the urban renewal demolition in New Haven, Connecticut; and the postwar highway boom - to show the physical capability of large-scale destruction and to introduce the opposition that soon followed.
"Although no clear moment marks the demise of the culture of clearance, America's withdrawal from Vietnam in 1973 marks a suitable endpoint. [...] Just as the earthmoving Seabees helped glamorize the bulldozer in the 1940s, military clearance in Vietnam helped tarnish it a few decades later. [...] The environmental damages were brutal, ranging from erosion to the long-term depletion of vegetation and wildlife".

The last two chapter are devoted to children's book, model toys and the Earthworks by Land Artists. For further readings on the topic don't forget to check out the book's thorough notes.

Plunging into the archive: ten years of industrial design

noreply@blogger.com (SPAZIO) — Thu, 14 Jul 2016 14:35:00 +0000

The magazine Stile Industria was founded in 1954 by Alberto Rosselli on the conviction that architects and designers should be concerned with the form of all things industrial. It was the only Italian magazine dedicated solely to industrial design and it run for forty-one issue, almost ten year. At the time when Domus (Gio Ponti) was still publishing objects that were crafted by artisans in small numbers, Rosselli chose to discuss only mass production.

Next to chairs, tables, and kitchenware he presented toilets, cars, measuring instruments, and truck tires. He invited people like Max Bill, Gillo Dorfles, Angelo Tito Anselmi, Angelo Mangiarotti and Ettore Sottsass to write about how industries could condense beauty and function into objects capable of changing the way we live our everyday lives. He pushed to establish organizations like the ADI (Italian Association for Industrial Design), and was on the selection committee of the Compasso d'oro.

Stile industria introduced to the italian public the work done at the Institute of Design in Chicago, at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm, and at the Royal College of Art in London. Rosselli reported back from Aspen between 1956 and 1959, from the 1958 Work Exhibition in Brussels, and 1960 World Design Conference in Tokyo.

Nothing was too big or too small: prefabricated elements were given the same space as precision objects, graphic design and packaging. All content was carefully dissected on the double page so that the reader could grasp every detail. Thanks to Rosselli and Stile Industria we learned to look closer and differently to ten years of industrial production.

Albe Steiner, Bruno Munari, Pino Tovaglia, Giovanni Pintori, and Michele Provinciali among others designed the beautiful covers that for a decade promoted a cultural take on industrial objects. And even though it is a selection of a larger production, it is a significant one.

Many of the industries presented on Stile Industria did not preserve complete records of their work. Designers and architects sometimes kept the drawings and we can use their archives to piece together a fragmented overview of the industry. The magazine is a useful sample, a condenser of the many cultural inputs that surrounded this ten years of bustling production.

The magazine was too consistently sophisticated to be turned into a medium for selling publicity. According to the revealing text on Rosselli by Giovanni Klaus Koenig this was the main reason for the publisher to shut it down after ten year of loyal service.

Architecture in the Age of Radio

noreply@blogger.com (SPAZIO) — Tue, 14 Jun 2016 14:49:00 +0000

I seek to develop my artefacts with ample anticipatory time margins so that they will be ready for use by society when society discovers - through evolutionary emergencies - a need for them. R. Buckminster Fuller

In Buckminster Fuller Inc. Architecture in the Age of Radio (Zurich: Lars Müller, 2015) Mark Wigley traced Fuller's work back to the discovery of radio waves. Fuller anticipated that broadcasting would become an imperative in the future and that radio would inspire and allow global mobility. The existence of radio waves would eventually call for a “radionic” house where the very solidity of physical rooms would be undone by the possibility of tuning in on simultaneous but unseen realities. According to Wigley, Fuller's ultimate target was to free people's mind to receive all possible forms of knowledge about the world and to transmit all possible ideas to the world. For this reason the house had to be detached from the city grid and turned into a two-way communication system.

The houses designed by Fuller were relatively light shelters. They revolved around bathroom units with tub, toilet and sink forming a single metallic (later plastic) fitting. Everything else in the interior was thought in plastic. Physically detached, the shelter was connected via wireless to the rest of the world. His hyperexpanded homes were not static points of withdrawal but the site of active engagement with the world, with radio, tv, and the computer as windows onto that which cannot be seen. But as Wigley pointed out, the traditional house is a very slowly evolving and understudied phenomenon. Fuller's mobile plastic buildings never achieved mass production as houses but were instead installed beyond the limits of conventional urbanization to house the continental radar defense system in 1955.

The geodesic dome as an image of the world was also used to gradually encode its surface with layers of information and produce a hyper-map, a comprehensive data display. Fuller anticipated that computers would augment the human brain while communication networks would produce a single planetary society. These “world men” would not be confused by information but would be able to conceptualize it into comprehensive pictures.

Wigley described the Geoscope as the most sophisticated window possible, meant to “interface” the audience to incoming information by enveloping them in a “hypervisual” presentation. Human’s externalized tools have eventually become second nature, "as unconscious as the automated operation of internal organs".

The books is also a helpful contribution for those who are interested in piecing together Fuller's personal network. Lee de Forest, Serge Chermayeff, John McHale, Gene Youngblood, Charles and Ray Eames, Sigfried Giedion, Jacqueline Tyrwhitt, Costantinos Doxiadis, and Marshall McLuhan are just some of the people mentioned.

Epiphany in Tokyo

noreply@blogger.com (SPAZIO) — Tue, 14 Jun 2016 09:22:00 +0000

Tokyo, 35°41'47.4"N 139°44'50.4"E - Photograph Mariana Siracusa