architecture

This weekend I took some time off and outlined the network culture book that I've been thinking about for a while. I had originally wished to have it not merely outlined but drafted by the end of the summer, but events got the best of me. On the other hand, it seems better to be able to put the economic collapse in perspective in the book.

So to the collapse then, and what it says about architecture. Now architecture is not going to be a focus of the network culture book. My goal is to write a history of the contemporary, not a history of contemporary architecture and it's a peculiar aspect of network culture that the theory and aesthetics of architecture seem to play a much less crucial role than they did under modernism or postmodernism. Modern art and literature began to flourish in the late 1900s and 1910s and modern architecture was developing rapidly at this point, although it would take the 1920s for it to really come into its own. In the case of postmodernism, architecture was clearly at the forefront in visibliity, if not in terms of theory. Under network culture, architecture's role is less visible. Architecture has floundered for an aesthetic or theory during the last decade. Supermodernism, which promised much during the 1990s, ran aground as the culture of disconnection it sought to give form to was replaced by a culture of connection. In its stead, we have nothing in particular.

If architecture had a theory during the last decade, it was post-criticism. Since post-criticism began from the premise that architects should do, not think, its proponents had a tough time articulating their position. Nevertheless, at heart, post-critical theorists argued that the deconstructivist and critical architectures of the late 1980s and early 1990s were misguided in resisting cultural hegemony (an increasingly problematic concept, to be sure) and capitalism. Instead, they embraced Koolhaas's injunction that the architect should surf the waves of capital.

But how to do this? Here post-criticism was vague, not surprising given its aversion to theory. Still if there is any core design strategy to post-criticism, it is to embrace the diagram (later on this would become the more computationally-enabled parametric modelling) and model the inputs and variables in a given condition. If detailed enough, the argument went, such diagrams would allow design to emerge automatically. In some cases, this could be quite literal: corporate "flows" might be modelled in computer animation programs and literally given structure to become buildings.  

Such modelling relies on a simple notion of information very much like that of the efficient market hypothesis which informed thinking about financial markets for the last two decades. The efficient market hypothesis was predicated on the network making accurate information available to everyone equally and that everyone would act rationally with regard to that information. But the actors involved turned out not to be rational. The irrational behavior of players led to the real estate boom that I had warned about for years, the subsequent collapse, and this fall's panic. The failure was not one of not enough information, it was a failure to think critically. As any student of network theory knows, robust networks use error-checking to verify the veracity of the data involved. It was not a failure of individuals, but rather a faliure of the network to police itself. In other words,the economic collapse of 2007-2008 was a network failure.

In allying architecture so closely with the market, post-criticism has repeated the reasoning of high modernist architects in the postwar U. S. But that era came to an end in the late 1960s and, as post-Fordism came into question, so did the discipline. Now that architecture has allied itself with a failed theory of the market, what will become of it? This isn't an idle question. As society and culture reconfigure, an architecture that has little to offer except a direct representation of capital flows is unlikely to succeed. Moreover, the fascination that post-critical architects had with producing designs through software parallels the reduction of architecture to complex financial instruments that existed primarily in the network. This has already been called into question in the market. Architecture is, as usual, just a little behind.  

Compounding this, architecture has been in vogue during the last two decades due to the so-called Bilbao-Effect, the idea that through the sheer effect (for reasons originally having to do with the writing of Gilles Delueze, architects write this as “affect”) of its form, architecture can improve economic conditions either for a business or for a city. For advocates of diagrammatic thought, the complexity of the forms generated by diagramming were ideal for producing the Bilbao-Effect. But these structures, be they built by businesses or by cultural institutions, were highly expensive and generally heavily leveraged. As they start to go bust, architecture is likely to be blamed for the failure. Most of today's young hot-shot architects are too young to have experienced the attacks that architecture suffered in the 1970s for failing to live up to modernism's promises of function. These may yet pale compared to the disparagement that architecture could receive for failing to generate the promised miracle profits.

Architecture is in a grim situation after the collapse. How it will survive is not yet clear to me, although if I had to make a guess it would be to turn to the idea of the "expanded architect" that Columbia architecture Dean Mark Wigley promotes, suggesting that architecture school is a great training ground for the flexible designer of the future, even if she or he can't doesn't work in architecture.

As far as post-criticism goes, it looks like the sun has set on that idea. Post-criticism has always been flawed since it fundamentally misunderstands that architecture is by its nature an irrational endeavor. Architects are hired not to produce the normal, but the abnormal. Architecture is a strange survivor of the pre-capitalist craft era. That it survives is only because it is able to offer something other than "going with the flow."


 

My latest article, "Simultaneous Environments—Social Connection and New Media" is now available at Vodafone Receiver. In this piece I explore questions of alienation and connection as they develop in place, non-place, and networked place.

I will be leading a discussion at Studio-X next Tuesday on the topic of the recent economic changes. This is part of the Rapid Response series at Studio-X, an open and undetermined platform for quick response to events that have transpired over the last thirty days.

Collapse! explores the spatial consequences of the "new" economy—the panic of 2008 as well as the last two decades, and the last two years—at a variety of scales: the NYSE trading room to Manhattan, the city to the suburbs, the United States to the world. I will lead a discussion with Daniel Beunza, Assistant Professor, Management Division, Columbia Business School and Micah Fink, Emmy Award-nominated documentary filmmaker. 

Collapse! is produced in collaboration with the Network Architecture Lab.

Refreshments provided by Barefoot Wines

RSVP: gdb2106@columbia.edu
Free and open to the public

WHO: DANIEL BEUNZA, MICAH FINK, KAZYS VARNELIS
WHEN: Tuesday, October 28, 6:30 pm
WHERE: Studio-X, 180 Varick Street, Suite 1610
1 train to Houston Street
www.arch.columbia.edu/studiox/
 

I happened to see the Fuller show at the Whitney on Saturday.

The drawings were intriguing—although hardly signifying anything—and some of the models ·(particularly the one of the suburban development of Dymaxion houses) were nice. What struck me, however, was the utter impracticality of his work. Fuller had an obsession with the outsize: the Dymaxion car, the Dymaxion House, the geodesic dome, all enclosed much more space than was necessary for their functions. He also had a fetish for geometry which he has passed on to a new generation of architects that seems to misunderstand design as the production of "novel" geometries. Not only did the show point out how they have done little to develop what Fuller had already done, it pointed out the pointlessness of it all.

For if the exhibit makes noises about how Fuller was a visionary, the viewer can't help but come away with an image of Fuller as an eccentric tinkerer, convinced that the strength of his vision would assure its realization (like Corbusier at his worst). But of course Fuller's ideas were unworkable. Returning to them will hardly solve any problems. Its always disturbing when I agree with Philip Johnson and here I did. The point of Fuller is no more clear in 2008 then it was in the early 1980s when I discovered him while in high school and found I couldn't make sense of his rambling texts (somehow the covers make me think of Scientology).

Architecture is periliously close to being irrelevant today and novel geometry is as doomed an enterprise as cool form. I was too busy to attend the panel talk on sensation at school yesterday, but maybe someone who went can tell me if anything of interest was said by the LA contingent.

Speaking of that sensational city…a reminder: I'll be in Los Angeles to talk in the seduction panel at the Hammer tonight. I'll be speaking about Philip Johnson's Glass House and seduction, focusing on Philip's encounters with Mies van der Rohe and Andy Warhol at the Glass House.

AUDC presented our first studio yesterday at school. The studio abstract follows, below.

Advanced Studio V
Fall 2007
Kazys Varnelis
Robert Sumrell
AUDC
Columbia University
Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation

This Will Kill That

This studio begins with our observation that the process of building cannot keep pace with the conceptual ambitions of architecture. Buildings are dead before they are built.Take CCTV—endlessly hyped, it is the building of the year, complete with a MoMA exhibition on it even before it is finished. Who will want to see it now? Oversaturated in media, its Bilbao-Effect already spent in a junkspace of print, CCTV, like many buildings, is exhausted in advance of its occupation. Buildings today exist for the media, for journals, for books, for the Web. Even when constructed they serve chiefly as visual wonders to see during sporting events on television or as backdrops for photoshoots in fashion magazines. In this radical present—a condition in which the past and the future become impossible to conceive of—critical architecture is so slow and expensive as to be nonexistent. We set out to seek other strategies and to look within architecture to seek what intelligence it still has to offer.

If today the building is an after-effect of media, our method is to go against logic and turn back to it. This studio is conceptual, aimed at developing arguments and polemics, but it sets out to do so using the tools of the architect. Dispensing with the prospect of realizing buildings as constructions of matter, we instead maintain that buildings can be constructions of thought, conceptual machines that produce arguments and state positions.

Although we expressly abandon any interest in construction, we nevertheless aim at designing buildings, or rather conceptual structures that look and perform very much like buildings. Against the dominant forms of architectural education today, this is not a scripting studio, nor a place for unbuildable Hollywood fantasy, nor is it a last refuge of the real or its friend, tired from too many hours surfing the Internet, the hand. Against these outmoded positions, we propose architecture based on rigorous design, architecture as a system of thought that makes abstract knowledge experiential and conceptual thought objective, rigorous and understandable. In setting out to design buildings not diagrams, our goal is to see what the world is telling us, not what we are telling the world.

Rather than lamenting the servility of architecture to media, we engage media head on, not innocently, but rather as a praying mantis embraces her mate. 

Long ago, Victor Hugo suggested that the book will kill the building. As a dominant producer of social meaning and order, it did. But now the book is dying. This studio examines the crisis of the library, one of the oldest and most important institutions in society.

The goal of architecture has long been to become incorporated into the library, to be absorbed into the flimsy papers that would be placed on the stacks. If this will kill that, that was a suicidal masochist who wanted to die. Libraries are repositories of dead information, where things go to expire. Architecture knew this, but still always desired the stillness of the book as its real goal. Nor were architects somehow more perverted than anyone else. On the contrary, as Freud suggested in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the universal goal of life is stillness. The library gave us what we wanted, a tomb we could all dwell in, a place in which thought would quiet down once and for all, a place of silence in which noise and disruption was forbidden.

Under pressure from the pornographic thrill of the Internet, libraries, like architecture, are themselves dying. Year after year, circulation plummets and readership declines. Paradoxically, however, as both architecture and the library expire, they become pervasive. If buildings are obsolete (the current building boom being analogous to the manic expansion of Borders and Barnes and Noble in the last two decades), the strategies of architecture have become pervasive. Design is now everywhere. The tools of architecture are accessible to anyone.

The Internet and digital technology has made the library's promise of access to knowledge laughable. One hard drive is now capable of holding as much data as a medium-sized city library. In spite of this, libraries are special places. Not only is the Internet (like television) largely filled with garbage, more importantly, books are the first products of immaterial production, and thus they anticipate the dominant economic order of the information economy. But they are also their own worst enemies, heavy objects that lie inertly, gathering choking mold and dust. Still, libraries are ideal research sites for architects, their systems of organization clear, conceptual diagrams of knowledge. As these systems of classification are undone by a world in which "everything is miscellaneous," and Open Source software and peer-to-peer file sharing annihilate any concept of property, the uniqueness and even the physicality of the objects in libraries is threatened. For any book, even the most expensive would be much more valuable if you could perform a full text search on it, something Google understands full well. Soon, books may not be valuable except for the odd collector item. When they wear out, nobody will care.

But is that the fate of the library? Against the idea of the library as a base for knitting clubs and youth sex leagues or as an Internet café for the homeless, we propose to investigate the institution itself as a system of conceptual thought, and as a form of social organization. Thus, the library becomes an ideal place for architecture to re-discover its own methods of thought, its theoretical purposes.
 
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In "We Are All Googie Now," over at Sit Down Man, You're a Bloody Tragedy*, Owen Hatherely looks at roadside architecture in Southern California and concludes that contemporary neo-modernism has more in common with the Googie than with the classical modernism of the 1950s, e. g. the works of Mies, SOM, the Smithsons, Corbusier, and so on. I noticed this myself when I first moved to Los Angeles. Take a bit of easily-consumable architecture designed for viewing from the automobile—e. g. modernism reduced to logo—add some acid-addled Bucky Fuller forms, and you have an effective reduction of modernism to postmodernism. Owen is right that this is where neo-modernism comes from. Architecture is logo and little more.

But what about the repressed term? What about modernism? I had the good fortune of being taken to lunch at the Four Seasons the other day and it gave me the opportunity to reflect on high modernism. Given the other hats I wear at AUDC and the Netlab, people are sometimes surprised that I received a doctorate in the history of architecture and urbanism nearly fifteen years ago. But so it is, and perhaps the upcoming Johnson book will serve as a useful corrective. Anyway, one of my concerns as a historian is to articulate the distinct phases of modernism. We still lump modernism together in a naïve way when there is a big distinction to be made between the heroic modernism of the 1910s and 1920s and the high modernism of the 1950s. The former was marked by a belief in the possibilities of the avant-garde, that art could become sublated into life, that modern design could become everyday and with that, a spiritual transformation would take place. The latter came after the Depression and the War. If modernism was sold as producting a societal transformation, that transformation was now lessened, its promise of social and spiritual change reduced. Looking at the work of Mies at this point I discern not a faith in modernity, but a stoic understanding that modernity had been permanently damaged, that it could no longer deliver what was promised. Seagram is very different from Mies's Friedrichstrasse skyscraper. If the latter was an irruption of a new order into the city, the former removes itself from the city, delivering no promises except that of endurance as a monument. Modernity was something Mies wanted no part of by this point.

Deconstructivist architecture replayed this moment, but in its agonism, made everything too clear, too legible. Adorno became Cobain, and the movement swiftly exhausted itself to be replaced by an easily consumed neo-modernism. Today's architecture cares little about history. Koolhaas, who is one of the few architects who might still think in historical terms, came to an understanding of the contemporary condition in Junkspace, but rather than facing it, gave in. This is the neo-liberal approach—if everything is damned, enjoy your food and have dirty sex—and it too is ahistorical.

"We Are All Keynesians Now" was the title of a cover story in a 1965 Time Magazine, right before the economy expired. When I first saw this article described at Things Magazine, I was tired and misread it. I thought that Owen said we were all Google now, that the forms of Google's offices have infected design. I suppose ultimately this is true as well, for Google comes out of the same Californian Ideology that neo-modernist design comes out of. Things suggested that architecture was now undone by its subservience to fashion, by being reduced to a backdrop for fashion (both clothing and design) magazines. 

So, berefit of history, architecture wants to operates under fashion.

But not so fast. Fashion and history cannot be easily separated. Fashion came about at the same time as history did—with the end of the aristorcracy and the beginning of the Enlightenment, as a means of legitimation for the competing classes. With the end of distinction under network culture, history is gone, but fashion is not far behind. If, as Wired magazine suggests, "Dressing For Success Means Looking Like Hell," (Obama being our last hope in even more ways, apparently), then architecture is not far behind and the fashion for architecture may soon be over. Let's remember the fate of the Googie was to be forgotten. After a brief run, it was replaced by the more informal "environmental look" epitomized by McDonald's in the 1970s. Brown mansard roofs, anti-architecture. The economy was similar, the national mood was similar (Vietnam->Iraq of course)  and architecture's delirious run during the 1950s and 1960s parallels the run from the 90s to the present day.

Cementing this interpretiation, my misreading also evokes the collapse of the economic model that the network economy has been based on.  

We Are All Modernists Now. We Are All Keynesians Now.
We Are All Googie Now, We Are Alll Google Now.

Famous last words. 

*This is the best name for a blog. It could, in fact, be the name for most anything.

In my post on Lebbeus Woods, I suggested that architects might one day find themselves no longer making buildings. This may seem surprising, but we're only at the dawn of network culture. We were under Fordism from the 1920s to the mid-1960s and under post-Fordism from the mid-1960s until about 2000. So no surprise that we have yet to see the full effects of this era. This essay from the photo blog "the Luminous Landscape" (must reading for photographers) suggests that just as film has faded into history, the print will too. As high definition screens exceed anything that print can do (this will come one day soon), why continue to valorize an outdated technology? 

And why not? I already barely use my printer for my photographic work. It's either printed in books and magazines or viewed on the Web. Can any gallery deliver the kind of recognition that Flickr can? Why own? Of course unless things go awry, high definition screens for viewing art will be open and works will soon be pirated and traded openly. You'll be going to rapidshare to download the newest Gursky. Artists may protest that this is awful. But it isn't, really, it's just a different model of property that other fields, like music, have to deal with. 

Property, it seems, is the last thing to invest in. 

The ponzi scheme created to sell real estate at preposterously inflated levels during the last eight years is now having a new feedback effect. Just as it drove rampant construction, producing far more housing than anybody will need any time in the near future, it is now undoing that housing. Once foreclosures happen, houses and apartments are not only neglected, they become the focus of their occupants' rage.

CNN explains.