Category Archives: bibliography

Sep 03 0 comments
bibliography, experimental geography

“In Two Directions: Geography as Art, Art as Geography”

By Nato Thompson, from “Experimental Geography”

Experimental geography is about asking questions rather than providing answers: a new field that broadens the frame through which we see our culture.

Artists at the CLUI serve as facilitators:

“each artist simply points to the phenomena that condition our lives.”

Guy Debord:  father of psychogeography.

How does our physical environment, not just our perception of it, shape our behavior?

“Cartography as a medium through which not only to reflect existing conditions of power, but also to produce new urban relationships, became an aesthetic and geographic endeavor.”

Maps have a bias, data is valued or devalued by the cartographer.

These individual perceptions and biases were valued by the Situationists; they advocated wandering without a destination, allowing yourself to be drawn to sites and encounters.

[Critique of psychogeography is that it values the experience of the individual over the collective.]

“…acts in space can be interpreted via the various forces that produce that space – whether it is walking, bus riding, interventions, or mapping, that is, an analysis of how culture is produced in space and, in turn, how those spaces produce culture.”

Importance of understanding infrastructure; the complexitiy of the systems that support the most mundane aspects of daily life.

Stratman’s Park: physical experiments in behavior modification through architectural means.  Political and social undercurrent in physical constructs.

Reciprocal relationship between cultural production and spatial production: gentrification.

Sep 03 0 comments
bibliography, taking measures

“Measures of Rule”

“… measures of rule are those that delineate and coordinate particular sequences of events.”

The marks of sequence, schedule, and timing are read in the landscape in the form of how people inhabit and measure place.  The deviations, typically out of necessity, from the ordering system stimulate invention and a deployment of new rules and marks.

Sep 03 0 comments
bibliography, taking measures

“Measures of Land”

“Measure… is as much a conceptual apparatus as it is a mode of representation, facilitating events while constructing a particular world.”

When people began migrating across America during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the vastness of the landscape created the need for surveys, inventories, and maps to be prepared.  Zoning and property allotments became the fundamental guidelines for a draped mesh over the land.

“Survey lines, roads, hedgerows, fences, farms, canals, levees, dams, bridges, buildings, and towns have been laid out as a means of optimizing human settlement and opportunity.”

The physical boundaries and definitions serve to organize the environment and communicate the uniquely American values of democracy, freedom, etc.  The imposition of man’s will on the environment is also met with resistance in the form of a never-ending weathering.

“… for what we actually find is only an illusion of human order, a screen behind which lies the unceasing cry of the world.”

Jul 15 0 comments
bibliography, mobile

“The Age of New Nomadism”

“Mobile architecture, ‘can be defined not merely in terms of movable structures, but rather as a way of intelligently inhabiting a specific environment at a specfic time and place in a way that better to increasingly frequent social shifts.” Archigram

The first documentation of the mobile typology was that of Noah’s ark – a portable and relocatable structure that served the purpose of self-sufficient housing.  Early nomadic cultures moved from place to place out of necessity  – needing temporary structures that were lightweight, flexible and [low-tech] transportable.  Examples are the tipi, yurt, “blacktent,” and the sheepherder tent/coat.

Mobility not of necessity first came to fruition in medieval Italy public performance art – staged in demountable theatres, “mansiones.”  The idea of temporary architecture was carried into modernity by exhibitions and expositions.  Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace of 1851 was designed to be deconstructed and repurposed for a new building type after an exposition.  The idea of economy was taken further by Buckminster Fuller’s focus on mass-production, lightness of materials, and minimal weight.

“Madam, do you know what your house weighs?”

Le Corbusier believed that with the boom of housing it was, “impossible to wait on the slow collaborations of the successive efforts of excavation, carpenter, joiner, tiler, plumber… Houses must go up all of a piece, made by machine tools in a factory, assembled as Ford assembles cars, on moving conveyor belts.”

America’s first mass-produced mobile dwelling was the Conestoga wagon – utilized by the pioneer family moving west.  With the boom of the automobile industry, the Airstream trailer soon followed.  With the advent of trucking, the concept of “flat-pack” delivery was developed – the Acorn House was the first house designed specifically for truck transportation.  The kit of parts was a series of factory-made pieces that assembled like a puzzle.

“The trailer has no attachment to place.” J.B. Jackson

The siteless nature of temporary architecture have placed it on the fringes of the design community.  The battle of how to bring importance to something designed for impermanence.  The trailer can be viewed as a piece of architecture disconnected from site, but its ability to move and not disrupt natural flows make it ideal candidate for today’s environmental concerns about about building construction and demolition.

“…portable and mobile architecture is not merely product design or a continued modification of the Conestoga or the Airstream.  Rather it is a recognition of the fluidity of circumstances – the mobility of demographics and information – and an increased capacity for architecture to respond to fluidity, whether through low-tech, ad hoc vernaculars or through high-kinetics and embedded computation.”

Jul 03 0 comments
bibliography, the black swan

“The Speculator and the Prostitute”

There are two categories that events/actions fall in: scalable and nonscalable.  Whether it is the small town musician before the advent of the sound recording, or the local storyteller before the advent of the printing press – scalability destroys the notion of an equal share.  A small number of people have a disproportionate amount of power and influence.

The nonscalable economy can only produce “more” with more time, while  the scalable economy can produce “more” with the click of a button.  The author does not have to rewrite his or her novel every time a copy is sold – the investment up front is on hopes of a larger payoff in the end.  The scalable economy is therefore quite succeptible to the Black Swan – it is based on the notion that the future is predictable.  This is true until an event occurs outside the bell curve – disturbing the normative condition.

Jul 02 0 comments
bibliography, the black swan

“The Apprenticeship of an Empirical Skeptic”

“History is opaque.  You see what comes out, not the script tat produces the events, the generator of history… The human mind suffers from three ailments as it comes in contact with history, what I call the triplet of opacity… They are [1] the illusion of understanding… the retrospective distortion… the overvaluation of factual information and the handicap of authoritative and learned people…”

After a catastrophic event occurs we tend to compartmentalize a select group of “facts” – looking to the simple solution.  Many scholars have looked back on the events leading up to World War II to demonstrate how “we” knew it was coming.  However, the journal of William Shirer proved the opposite – “the diary purported to describe the events as they were taking place, not after.”  the question must be asked:  What is more respectful of the “truth”, the diary of events or reflections on those events?

“Categorizing is necessary for humans, but it becomes pathological when the category is seen as definitive, preventing people from considering the fuzziness of boundaries, let alone revising their categories.”

Jul 01 0 comments
bibliography, the black swan

“Prologue”

The concept of a Black Swan was something that was deemed impossible until one was discovered.  It’s what we don’t know that is worth studying – events that deviate from the norm.  To learn we have to look at the information that exists outside the bell curve.

“The central idea of this book concerns our blindness with respect to randomness… Why does reading the newspaper actually decrease your knowledge of the world?  What you know cannot really hurt you.”

Learning from the past is not the solution – the Maginot Line shows how the failure to look outside the norm can prove disastrous.  Society tends to reward the status quo – forward thinking is only supported if there are instant financial rewards.  Think about a legislator that wanted to make all cockpit doors locked and bullet-proof on September 10th, 2001 – he;d be laughed out of office.  How do we create a system that applauds the long view?

“Platonicity… is our tendency to mistake the map for the territory, to focus on the pure and well-defined ‘forms,’ whether objects, like triangles, or social motions, like utopias, even nationalities.”

Once abstraction has become our primary, and sometimes only, method of thinking the messier [and more telling] parts of relationships often remain unnoticed.

“The platonic fold is the explosive boundary where the Platonic mind-set enters in contact with messy reality, where the gap between what you know and what you think you know becomes dangerously wide.  It is here that the Black Swan is produced.”

In disciplines that deal primarily in the abstract [read academia], checks and balances tend to come form those that share the same beliefs – turning scholarly pursuits into ego-boosting conversations.  External checks from the opposite end of the table can be the most fruitful and enlightening.  The quest for knowledge is not the problem, it’s the belief we’ve attained it that’s the danger.

Jun 17 0 comments
bibliography, expanding architecture

“The Architectural Bat-Signal: Exploring the Relationship between Justice and Design”

“Design is changing existing situations into preferred ones.” Herbert Simon

With most of the population lacking a voice in the design process, who is speaking for them?  Without the interests of the marginalized represented in architecture, those very communities continue to lose their depth, character and integrity.

“How can we quantify ‘justice’ in terms of design?”

By precluding the community from participation in design, architecture cannot take advantage of the idea that people can, and want to, shape their own world.  When designer acts as “expert” the solution proposed rarely has any chance of making a lasting, posititve mark on its intended community.

The SEED [ Social, Economic, and Environmental Design ] Network was born from the notion that “justice” must be integral to the design process – working in concert with environmental initiatives.  It’s mission is to “advance the right of every person to live in a socially, economically, and environmentally healthy community.”  The intent being that design would benefit from both professional and local knowledge.

“…while operating on the assumption that buildings will sove human problems, architecture is rarely considered in terms of its relationship to its users or its larger community.”

Alienation from our physical communities has caused the disappearance of the neighborhood.  Architecture must begin to operate under the assumption that the marginalized are more willing to invest in their communities when empowered in the design process.  Professionals must be held accountable at the social level – applying the same rigor asked  of the profession in environmental initiatives.

Reflective practice is the act of community-based design bringing, “practioners, artists, neighbors, students, teachers, and social and ecological activists to address urgent needs in communities around the world.”  The utilization of a community’s local knowledge is a valuable commodity for designers, bridging the gap between the professional “expert” and the society he or she is intendning to serve.

Professionalism should not be see as colonialism – architecture cannot exert its will on society.  Looking no further than Pruitt-Igoe and it’s promise of a urban renewal we can see where know-it-all architecture planning will take us.  Collaboration is the key to socially healthy and sustainable communities.

Essay by Barbara B. Wilson

Jun 16 0 comments
bibliography, expanding architecture

“Communication Through Inquiry”

Essay by Sean Donahue

[ Expanding Architecture: Design as Activism ]

“…the discipline of graphic design is not singularly defined by the form its artifacts have taken in the past.”

Designers have the opportunity to “Do Something, NOW” by envisioning new contexts for societal contribution.  Graphic design has the capacity to form, understand, and communicate – a language that makes the discipline unique and important.  No problem is black and white – design can, and should, provide a transition between cultural genres.  It is imperative that a designer define the problem he or she intends to solve.

When looking to shift away from the normative condition of Braille as the means by which the low-vision population communicate, a threshold must be crossed.

“Reservations were relaxed only after people saw how low-vision reacted to the material.”

The solution worked as intended due to the design focus on the specific group – not a catch-all protoype.

“In choosing to work directly with this community, I was able to avoid becoming entangled in the trappings of convention.”

The challenge to designers is to identify the areas where they can make a significant contribution.  We all have a unique set of gifts – explore the richness and potential of their full use.

“We visualize what is invisible, we motivate thought, and we incite others to wonder.  But most important, we communicate through inquiry…”

Jun 15 0 comments
bibliography, expanding architecture

“An Architecture of Change”

Essay by José Gamez + Susan Rogers

[ Expanding Architecture: Design as Activism ]

Architecture can’t save the world, but it can mobilize it.

“Hope coincides with an increasingly critical perception of the concrete conditions of reality.  Society reveals itself as something unfinished, not as something inexorably given; it becomes a challenge rather than a hopeless limitation.”  Paulo Freire

When you take community out of design – you succeed only in lessening the impact of design on future generations.  The ribbon-cutting as the driving force behind design removes the occupant[s] global needs from the notion of a “successful” design.  Modernism removed design from the everyday social world – creating a lack of pride and ownership on the backend of the architecture.

“Modernism as a movement was discarded… because of the conflicting principles by which it was realized – namely, the contradiction between the goal of social change and those of market capitalism and institutionalized power.”

Postmodernism was born out of the questioning of established thought – but it never lived up to its promise.  An inablility to address broader social goals caused its architecture to become quite introspective.

Architecture continues to move more to the “middle” – to stake a political claim runs the risk of upsetting the normative condition and most importantly, alienating potential clients.  The “business side” of architecture, and the rest of the developed world for that matter, tends to handcuff design – creating the quest for cookie cutter solutions to a quite diverse set of problems.

“What is needed is an actively critical agenda that can inform the practices that lead to good design.”

The solution to the problem is constantly transforming.  The transformation form a top down design approach to one of social dialogue will take the cooperation of those who are challenging the status-quo as well as those who are firmly entrenched in the normative condition.

“When we pull our collective head out of the sand, we can no longer deny the undeniable; space and its making are political.”

In order to invite community into “community design” we must remove architecture from its pedestal and allow everyone to influence the process.  Envision the new Architect as a facilitator – questioning the fundamental goals of the design through each phase of the process.  Architecture must be present at the dinner table.

The reconstruction of the current system of education and practice would be in [3] parts:

“First, an understanding of the role of the market in realizing design should be integral to the education of an architect… Second, we must consider the power of Utopian thinking as a way to form a unified front… Finally, as a liberated process, architecture should illustrate the value of alternative spatial practices with a plurality of aesthetic and spatial modes of civic expression that facilitate a diverse set of public realms.”

How do thoughtful, socially responsive design and business coexist?  This new Architecture is about getting your hands dirty – not producing pie-in-the-sky solutions.

“Ultimately we must realize that acting in the world means taking responsibility for the consequences of [our] actions… The alternative is not to take any action and to accept conditions as they stand – and that is unacceptable.”

Design should not have an either/or.  The success of a work of architecture should not be based on an image in a magazine but rather how well it addresses the relevant issues and practices of a community.

“Along with the family doctor, dentist, local shopkeeper, and mail carrier, everyone would know a local architect, and they would know how she or he contributes to the greater good.  Until then, the doors of the academy must be thrown open and its ivory towers infiltrated and transformed by the real issues facing our society.”

The ultimate goal should be to remove the terms “have” and “have-not” from the design dialogue.