The National Organization for Minority Architects (NOMA) recently published its magazine for Spring 2010. The issue focuses on African architecture and they published separate articles by DK and I (Quilian).
Dk's article is titled AfricentriCITY:How to Use Existing System to Improve Livelihoods. Based in part on this blog post in his blog.
The article I wrote details a project a group of Harvard GSD students worked on in South Africa's Khayelitsha township. The article was first published in Archinect. The article included a variety of interviews with the students that worked on the project and the client organizations: Art Aids Art and Monkeybiz.
The magazine includes many other great articles, including an interview with architect David Adjaye.
1. If you follow me on twitter, you may have noticed that a while back the photograph Aurora in May, over North America by Japanese astronaut @Astro_Soichi (JAXA page) blew my mind. A single image that captures the scalar relationship of human settlements to planetary super-ecology... @Astro_Soichi regularly uploads to Twitter his photographs of planet earth from the International Space Station's new observation portal. (e.g. the BP oil spill, Cinco de Mayo, Shanghai world expo grand opening, and otherworldly shots like spacewalks and the Atlantis shuttle undocking). @PC0101 is a citizen doing remarkable analysis of this image collection.
Aurora in May reminded me of the effect that the first earthrise photographs had in helping situate ideas of "the planetary" within the last half-century's politics, especially environmentalism. Stewart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog (more history here) -- which featured NASA's first pictures of the whole earth on the catalog's cover -- has described the impact of that image:
It is no accident of history that the first Earth Day, in April 1970, came so soon after color photographs of the whole earth from space were made by homesick astronauts on the Apollo 8 mission to the moon in December 1968. Those riveting Earth photos reframed everything. For the first time humanity saw itself from outside. The visible features from space were living blue ocean, living green–brown continents, dazzling polar ice and a busy atmosphere, all set like a delicate jewel in vast immensities of hard–vacuum space. Humanity's habitat looked tiny, fragile and rare. Suddenly humans had a planet to tend to. The photograph of the whole earth from space helped to generate a lot of behavior—the ecology movement, the sense of global politics, the rise of the global economy, and so on.
However, @Astro_Soichi's photographs of earth from space are part of a real-time conversation with other citizens of planet earth. It is a more advanced level of connectivity and cooperation between earth-bound humans and their extraterrestrial social network.
2. Semi-recently on his blog Radio Open Source, Christopher Lyden had a choice conversation with environmentalist Bill McKibben; an excerpt:
Bill McKibben wrote the first popular warning about climate change, The End of Nature, 21 years ago. These days he spends relatively less of his boundless energy writing than he does organizing a global grassroots mission, 350.org, to bring the carbon content in the atmosphere back down to a sustainable 350 parts per million. In key dimensions Bill McKibben and 350.org are mirror opposites of Tom Friedman and Hot, Flat and Crowded. The Friedman drumbeat is for a competitive corporate super-tech and, of course, super-profitable American-led greening of a global economy. It sounds to McKibben like “butch environmentalism.”
Look, it’s a nice fantasy that we would just keep the machine going as it’s going, but rip out the internal combustion engine and toss in a solar panel. And on we would fly. I don’t think it’s a realistic one. I think among other things it just completely ignores the physical difference between fuels. Fossil fuel was the most important thing about modernity. It’s what modernity was. It describes why we live the way we live. It’s dense, rich in BTUs, concentrated in a few places, easy to get at and easy to transport…
That’s not the world we’re moving into. The kind of energy we can afford to use, sun and wind and such, is very different. It’s omnipresent but it’s diffuse. It’s dispersed. The logic that goes with it is almost exactly the opposite logic.
We need a farmers’ market in electrons, and a farmers’ market in food… We need to figure out how to spread out and become stable and resilient, and part of that’s being smaller.
McKibben is correct in arguing that true sustainability demands different forms of lifestyle. The classic example: conversion of combustion engines to electric motors does not eliminate use of planetary resources that are material and limited. We ultimately have no choice but to 'do more with less'--according to metrics of energy, economics and environmental inputs. However, what is fascinating to me is the degree to which the newest iterations of 'planetary' social movements and interaction are inherently more global/ized than at any preceding moment of human existence. In the era where people use their mobile phones to converse with GPS satellites and even people living in outer space, sustainability as an agenda is developing new structural capacity for agency.
Student/authors: Geoffrey Hackett, Michael Modoono, Ian Downing, Rebecca Connors, Julie Beach Scheel, Michael Holmquist, Aidan Lindh, Benjamin Guertin, Bob Williamson, Valeri Tzvetkov, Matt Christiani, Rebecca Leroux, Michael Paganetti, Nikolas Pappastratis, Nicholas Greene, Stephanie Rogowski, and Timothy Stewart.
I highly recommend downloading the pdf and reading the essays. In them the students struggle with some basic and prescient contemporary issues: unsafe and informal urban sprawl, climate change, economic inequity, political instability, etc... While speculating on the changing role of architecture (and the architect) in the context of all these challenges.
While in the panel we spoke a lot about 'bottom-up' vs. 'top-down' processes and infrastructures as rigid opposites. During the conversation I said that this dichotomous way of looking at urban infrastructures is not helpful. New urban infrastructures, such as the ones that Robert and the students look at in Medellin, Colombia, try to work within larger systems (the metro and cable carts) while allowing and even encouraging flexibility and change over time.
Mass-production advertising is establishing our whole pattern of life - principles, morals, aims, aspirations, and standard of living. We must somehow get the measure of this intervention if we are to match its powerful and exciting impulses with our own. But Today We Collect Ads - Allison and Peter Smithson, 1956
Richard Hamilton, Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?, 1956
The Smithsons and Richard Hamilton collected ads. They went to their magazine stands, took their scissors, and began to collage carefully produced images meant for mass consumption. The Smithsons used them to learn about domestic desires while Hamilton collaged those desires into perspectival space.
The advertising business just does not have it that easy anymore. As TV viewership and magazine circulation numbers dwindle the advertising world needs new ways to reach eyes and ears. One way is by creating advertising that does not look like advertising, such as the ad for Reebok featuring Heidi Northcott and Chuck Lidell working out nude. The advertiser, Reebok in this case, puts out media that looks home-made and amateur but that, because of its uniqueness, many media outlets and regular people may want to, inadvertently, distribute on their own. They trust that the force of the network will be powerful and in that way cut through the clutter of visual information each of us face daily. The mass as media.
Heidi Northcott and Chuck Liddell nude workout - part of a viral marketing campaign by Reebok
In this way the advertiser seeks to embed itself in the general culture, turning us into mini-conduits of their message. They count that we will use email, facebook and twitter profiles, blogs, etc... to tell our friends. However, our inadvertent labor for the advertiser does not end there. Once we post it to one of the many social-media outlets we are continuing our free labor for those that seek to sell us something. Our information is collected and used to send us increasingly more tailored commercial information. Daily life as commodified data.
As even our social interactions become part of larger obfuscated economic systems, one question arises: can we do anything about it? It seems that the first task is to find tools to visualize the invisible yet pervasive control systems. Then, we hack them. But, today ads collect us.
DATA LANDSCAPES AND THE VIRTUAL GIZMO
The quintessential gadgetry of the pioneering frontiersman had to be carried across trackless country, set down in a wild place, and left to transform that hostile environment without skilled attention. Its function was to bring instant human comfort into a situation which had previously been an undifferentiated mess... The Great Gizmo - Reyner Banham, 1965
Were it not for a macbook pro, a verizon wireless router, and many many servers hidden in generic buildings all over the world I would not be writing this, proving that the physical gizmo still matters. But equally as important to this text is the virtual infrastructure that blogger.com has created, allowing me to easily share information. In this way blogger.com acts as a gizmo that helps me, without technical skill in website coding, to begin to colonize an otherwise hostile data landscape. If we think of a gizmo, as Banham does, as a tool that brings human comfort undifferentiated messes, could blogger.com be thought of as a virtual gizmo?
After all, the word gadget, often synonymous to gizmo, has already been appropriated as the data visualization mini-applications usually found in a PC's tool bar. Virtual gizmos could be more instrumental (tool-like) and critical, defined as digital instruments we can use to uncover and organize otherwise obfuscated and hidden information in the data landscape (not just digital thermometers and clocks).
By this definition virtual gizmos would include everything from social media platforms (revealing your friendships, tastes, and ideas) to more conceptual projects such as They Rule, a web platform that allows the user to visualize the relationships among the most powerful institutions in the United States. Another example is Bruno Latour's Paris: Invisible City. In the site Latour seeks to discover hidden relationships and itineraries in the physical city by mapping ordinary, forgotten objects.
This way of thinking is nothing new to architects, who traditionally develop a variety of intellectual tools to organize vast amounts of abstract information. The type of information we care about, however, has changed. In the essay Spatial Practices in the Margin of Opportunity architect Markus Miessen discusses the political social changes affecting practice today and concludes that:
Apart from simply opposing to a purely formal approach, they object to the idea that there are such terms as high and low culture. The social ambition of these practices is rooted in a much more heterogeneous understanding of society and consequently the city. The protagonists of such socio-political urban practice take popular and marginal cultures into account. They base their work on an urban sociology, which fits with the organization and experience of its citizen and propagates a much more direct relationship with the city. (Did Someone Say Participate, Page 286)
In other words, the new spatial practice is expanding its role to, like Latour, begin to uncover the hidden networks that compose a city, a region, a nation. The virtual gizmo used as a mapping tool becoming instrumental to uncover and understand networks and systems at many scales.
HACKING OUR WAY IN
We now face large neo-liberal systems and networks of commodification that are hard to see and, without accurate visualization tools, impossible to change. In that context hacking, or the re-configuration of systems to work in ways other than what they were intended to, has become the favorite tool of activists against the commodification of our digital and physical spaces.
The idea, however, could also extend to the larger political, social and economic systems that the virtual and physical gizmos are trying to organize. It is no longer enough to simply uncover relationships. Various practices, as different as Estudio Teddy Cruz and Toshiko Mori's nascent Vision Arc, are beginning to use the power of the virtual gizmo, or relational mapping tools, to find ways to hack systems at all scales. As Miessen puts it, "Today's spatial practice not only uses experimental research related to transient conditions of urban society, but also applies physical and non-physical structures in order to change and alter specific settings." (Page 288)
In this case the virtual gizmo reveals moments of opportunity for a designer while the physical gizmo can be deployed as a way to address the situation. As for those spatial physical gizmos they should, perhaps, look at their cousins in tactical gyzmology, described by the Tactical Media Crew as: "...what happens when cheap 'do it yourself' media made possible by the revolution in consumer electronics, are exploited by those who are outside of the normal hierarchies of power and knowledge."
DSGN AGNC (design agency) emerged from the political framework of work with SoCA (Social Change and Activism) at the GSD. In particular, it grew out of conversations that a group of us from SoCA had while organizing the April 2008 conference Systems for Inclusion, that was initially themed "Design Agency":
Design as a global effort to solve problems begins with agency—Design’s agency and the agency of design; advocacy by and for whom; the politics and power of design. Thinking across disciplines and neighborhoods suggests that affecting real-world change demands new models for (design) practice. To what extent are designers more effective with investors instead of clients, and what are best approaches toward stakeholder equity? (draft SFI-8 statement).
As design students and young architects, landscape architects and urban planners, we felt that design and designers have lost a degree of power (their personal agency, and on behalf of design), at the same time that design often does little to advance the interests of those who have less power (and are less likely to be clients). We found the concept of "agency" helpful because it captured the multiple dimensions of the problem:
a·gen·cy [ey-juhn-see] noun:
1. a condition of being in action; operation.
2. a means or mode of acting; instrumentality.
3. a business or service authorized to act for others.
4. an administrative division of a government or international body.
This was around the same time that we read Michelle Provoost and Wouter Vanstiphout's article "Facts on the Ground: Urbanism Mid-Road to Ditch" in Harvard Design Magazine no. 25 (Fall 2006/Winter 2007). That article suggested that there is an emerging “ditch urbanism” model of designers as proactive problem-solvers. Based on bottom-up, grassroots effort from below, design(ers) can identify problems and then, as part of the design process, develop creative methods for realizing built results on the ground. We asked ourselves how we could learn from this targeted approach of design married with vaguely guerrilla tactics. We knew that design should not be exclusive. And we knew that traditional client-based models of practice can have a constrained power dynamic that renders architects as prostitutes, turning tricks for commissions and bigger budgets. In response, we argued that we could grow the space within the profession of architecture for an expanded movement to design greater equality into the global power structure's built environment. Hence we ultimately described the conference with the following language:
SFI-8 explores the interface of design and systemic social action: Can design(ers) challenge globally networked systems of exclusivity and inequality? What are the relationships between design and political power, economic and ecological sustainability, justice and community?
When the Spring 2008 GSD lecture series was released, it included an April 23 event called New Geographies: Design, Agency, Territory--along with lectures by Robert Neuwirth, Teddy Cruz, Homi Bhabha and Shigeru Ban (SFI-8 keynote). The April 23 event was to launch issue 0 of GSD's New Geographies journal. Hashim Sarkis, some-time head of the New Geographies editorial board, is also teaching a proseminar this year at GSD called "Architecture or Poverty: The Challenges of Social and Economic Development from 1945 to the Present. From that course website:
Is poverty an architectural question? When does it emerge as an ethical concern for the architect? How have modern architects historically addressed the problem of social and economic disenfranchisement? (e.g.: Le Corbusier, Hassan Fathy, John Turner, Giancarlo de Carlo)? Within their doctrines promoting social reform through architecture (e.g. "Architecture or Revolution", "Architecture for the Poor," "Technical Assistance"), what forms of agency have they assumed? How have they reflected back on the nature of poverty and how have they accordingly recast the formal concerns of architecture?
Working from a series of primary texts in philosophy and social development (e.g. Jacques Ranciere, Amartya Sen, Jeffrey Sachs), from architectural treatises on design and social engagement, and from a series of contemporary case studies, the course assesses the ways in which architects have been envisioning their role vis-a-vis poverty. Critical of the historical segregation of design from social development, this course proposes alternative ways in which architecture could engage the question of poverty more effectively without abandoning their disciplinary and professional positions.
(Hashim is said to be starting a center or research initiative at Harvard/GSD on architecture and poverty, while Toshiko Mori is launching a research branch within her firm to address complex global issues, such as climate change, through architecture.)
A year after SFI-8 and New Geographies 0, issue no.4 of TUDelft's journal Footprint was “Agency in Architecture: Reframing Criticality in Theory and Practice” (co-edited by Kenny Cupers, a GSD PhD). The issue featured articles such as “Agency and Architecture: How to be Critical?” a conversation between Scott Lash and Antoine Picon, Kenny Cupers and Isabelle Doucet; and “Beyond Discourse: Notes on Spatial Agency” by Tatjana Schneider and Jeremy Till. An excerpt from p.113 “Before and After AGENCY: 'The Agency' research group”:
The conference ‘AGENCY’, whose critical review constitutes the subject of this article, started with a research group called ‘The Agency’, initiated in 2007 in the School of Architecture at the University of Sheffield. It arose through the alliance of staff and researchers working in and around the subject of architectural practice and education, taking a critical view of normative values and standard procedures in this area, in order to propose alternatives. The focus from the beginning was how architectural practice and education might evolve.
We offered to host the fifth AHRA International Conference, giving it the theme of ‘agency’, hoping that the submissions would energise the relationships between the humanities, the architectural profession, and society.2 While agency might first be understood as the power and freedom to act for oneself, for the architectural profession and research community it also involves the power to act on behalf of others, bringing with it the question of responsibility. Architecture and architects have always tended to become embedded in existing power structures, usually at the service of those in control: this is manifest at various scales, from the body to the building, then on to the city, the continent, and even the globe. To remain in this position opens them to Antonio Gramsci’s accusation that they support and maintain the prevalent ideologies of the status quo.3 The role of architects and academics cannot be neutral: if played out uncritically it reverts to the interests of those in power.
More recently, the Sheffield School of Architecture now co-hosts the website spatialagency.net which “is an ongoing research project that aims to shift the of focus of architectural discourse from one that is centered around the design (= building) and making (= technology) of buildings to one where architecture is understood as a situated and embedded praxis conscious of and working with its social, economic and political context.”
These examples track a broader trend within the architecture profession and disciplinary community to rethink and retool architecture's agency. Today new global brands—such as Architecture for Humanity, Design for the Other 90%, Elemental, etc., and supported by new media platforms like TED talks and the social web—are supplanting community design centers and design/build studios at schools of architecture as the leading edge of the 21st-century project of social architecture. If a project of "social architecture" exists at present, it is increasingly global in scope, given that the overwhelming majority of remaining urban growth on Earth is in the Global South and developing world.
flag of the United Nations wikimedia, view of planet earth from the north pole
For the past millennium, citizens of the northern hemisphere of planet Earth have exploited southern populations and resources in order to finance the construction of cities, shrines and ‘universal’ theories in the North. Architecture has, ultimately, been among the prime mechanisms whereby this spatial transformation has physically occurred.
One decade into the 21st-century, the dominant geopolitical frame of globalization is homogenizing systems of standardization and organization that replace diversity with a flattened ‘global village.’ Architecture, meanwhile, has flat-lined: at once preoccupied with building temples for the wealthiest human beings (who are losing money) and tectonically telling the rest of humanity (who are gaining money) how to live.
Simultaneous with the election of Barack Obama and the indurate advent of hybridity and the multicultural--a point of inflection in US politics and world history--the (latest) global economic crisis brought into question the foundational logic of neoliberal capitalism. Given that the West has already been built, the future of humanity‘s economic game lies, similar to its past, in the control of territories outside the West. While the dominion of the multinational corporation challenges that of the nation-state, the rise of NGO culture renegotiates the meaning of public.
It is not often that designers get to hear that our field matters. Sometimes, however, you run into a headline like this: How Architecture Transformed a Violent City by Danielle Maestretti on Medellin, Colombia.
In a very short period Medellin went from being one of the most notoriously dangerous cities in Colombia to a worldwide case study on a new type of tactical urbanism. The changes happened mostly under the administration of mayor Sergio Fajardo, who is now running for president of Colombia. BOMB magazine, an arts journal, recently published a conversation between Fajardo and Giancarlo Mazzanti, one of the high-profile architects chosen to design for Medellin's troubled comunas (partial english translation).
During the interview the two men touched on two of the issues central to DSGN AGNC's research. First, Fajardo and Mazzanti discuss how architecture can be a tool of political change, but in order to do so effectively the architect has to become part of the political process listening to and working directly with communities and decision makers. Then Fajardo launches a critique of typical development work, cautioning against viewing anything that is done in a poor neighborhood as an automatic gain.
Continuing his critique, Fajardo argues that poor communities should not receive infrastructural 'crumbs' wrapped around claims of meeting basic needs. In short, these communities deserve the best from the professions that are serving them. In architecture that means, for Fajardo and Mazzanti, to be able to bring high aesthetic values to the comunas. The larger point, I think, is that architects are at their best when they work by closely looking at historical precedent and discourse, even in a context like Medellin. The challenge is finding ways that the constraints and challenges found in the comunas can become opportunities to further design ideas and the profession itself.
DSGN AGNC (design agency) is a research and design non-profit that translates through theory into new architectures, landscapes and urban forms for the world's growing urban peripheries. more about DSGN AGNC
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