exurbia

The Economist Magazine looks at "America, the Creative." The lessons of the Creative City and the Bilbao Effect have not been lost on small-town America.

To attract tourists and settlers, small towns are turning to storytelling festivals and giant killer-bee statues. I've seen this first-hand as, over the last quarter century the town I spent my teenage years, Stockbridge, Massachusetts, pioneered this sort of change. The hardware store, then the pharmacy, the grocery and the elementary school disappeared one-by-one as the community refigured itself in the image that resident Norman Rockwell created for it. I still remember the lunatic old ladies from the city asking if we had toilets or outhouses. At some point we become a world of tourists, all looking in vain for just the right place that fits our demented sensibilities.

On Monday, November 20, 2006 at 6:30pm, I will be speaking as part of the American launch of Desert America: Territory of Paradox , a new book from ACTAR in which I have a piece about the Mojave desert and SpaceShipOne while AUDC analyzes the instant city of Quartzsite, Arizona.

The press release follows:

Desert America takes on the discussion of the American desert as a space of extreme uses and activities. The desert is a huge paradox: beneath the immensity and silence of its outward appearance, the traces of all kinds of activities, experiments, mysteries, fictions and utopias can be heard. Far from being “empty,” the desert is full of an uninhibited, excessive activity that encompasses everything from oases of entertainment to the secret staging of military power. The most hostile and seemingly uninhabitable of environments turns out to be an ideal setting for action.

Speakers:

Michael Bell, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ARCHITECTURE, GSAPP
Sanford Kwinter, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ARCHITECTURE, RICE UNIVERSITY
Kate Orff, DIRECTOR, URBAN LANDSCAPE RESEARCH LAB, GSAPP
Kazys Varnelis, DIRECTOR, NETWORK ARCHITECTURE LAB, GSAPP
Moderated by Michael Kubo, DIRECTOR, ACTAR NEW YORK

Event co-sponsored by ACTAR to celebrate the publication of its new title, Desert America: Territory of Paradox.

Why has this blog been so barren lately? Am I giving up on the Net? No! Far from it. I have, however, been a little busy lately. Now that the project is safely established, we can announce that...

AUDC Establishes Network Architecture Lab

@ Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation

Formed in 2001, AUDC [Architecture Urbanism Design Collaborative] specializes in research as a form of practice. The AUDC Network Architecture Lab is an experimental unit at Columbia University that embraces the studio and the seminar as venues for architectural analysis and speculation, exploring new forms of research through architecture, text, new media design, film production and environment design.

Specifically, the Network Architecture Lab investigates the impact of computation and communications on architecture and urbanism. What opportunities do programming, telematics, and new media offer architecture? How does the network city affect the building? Who is the subject and what is the object in a world of networked things and spaces? How do transformations in communications reflect and affect the broader socioeconomic milieu? The NetLab seeks to both document this emergent condition and to produce new sites of practice and innovative working methods for architecture in the twenty-first century. Using new media technologies, the lab aims to develop new interfaces to both physical and virtual space.

The NetLab is consciously understood as an interdisciplinary unit, establishing collaborative relationships with other centers both at Columbia and at other institutions.

The NetLab begins operations in September 2006.

From today's Washington Post: America's middle class city neighborhoods and suburbs are disappearing into a radically polarized landscape. City of Quartz? The whole country is following that model. See U.S. Losing Its Middle Class Neighborhoods

Is exurbia the next frontier for massive digital infrastructure projects? The New York Times explores the construction of the Googleplex on a remote site in The Dalles, Oregon, on the banks of the Columbia River. Google paid $1.3 million for 30 acres! They're going to be paying a lot more to hook up fiber to the grid out there. Is this a response to the concentrated nature of telecoms in cities? Of course, if you have sufficient means, any place can be made a command and control center for the global city. Silicon Valley was once farmland as well.

What if Orange County went to China? Back in 2002, this blog provided a link to an LA Times article (now in the Times's pay-to-view archive) on the topic, but now that the community has a bigger and better website, it's time to revisit it. BoingBoing carries this story about how architecture can be exported. Who says architecture isn't media?

The spring issue of Cabinet Magazine is out, featuring a project that Robert Sumrell and I did on Quartzsite, Arizona at our two-man collaborative AUDC.

Photos from AUDC's trip to Quartzsite, Arizona can be found at these galleries.
Technorati Tags: ambient architecture, network city, network culture, arizona, desert, quartzsite, tourism, wonders

No posts yesterday since AUDC was in Quartzsite, taking photographs and doing research for publications soon to appear in ACTAR's upcoming book on the desert, the next issue of Cabinet Magazine, and AUDC's first book (also with ACTAR and due out later this year), the Stimulus Progression. Quartzsite, of course, is the town of 5,000 in the summer that swells to up to 1.5 million in the winter due to an influx of snowbirds.

More on Quartzsite at the AUDC site.

Some preliminary images from our helicopter ride:

At long last, I have revised my Owens Valley Driving Guide for the drupal-ized varnelis.net site. Lots of new images abound. Many of these appear from time to time in the flikr stream on the left side of my home page.

Today we are accustomed to the idea that the city’s reach is all-pervasive. Telecommunications and high technology penetrate everywhere, agriculture is industrialized, and widespread tourism together with unceasing migration have undone traditional settlement patterns. The most remote corners - national parks, Antarctica, the Himalayas - exist not in opposition to the urban but rather remain their natural only through special dispensation from the city. Crisscrossed by infrastructural grids - water, power, scientific research, and tourism - deployed to serve the needs of urban life, nature is as thoroughly visited, studied, and reshaped as the urban.

This guide visits California’s Owens River Valley as a case study for understanding the reach of the city and the reshaping of nature. This forgotten land has made possible the massive growth of Los Angeles, even though it lies hundreds of miles away. In popular history, the Owens River Valley was an idyllic California Eden, a bountiful farming region under the eastern Sierras, until Los Angeles stole the flow of the river to fill its aqueduct. Passions over water still run high in the”ÀÜValley but as this guide demonstrates, water is only one of a series of infrastructures overlaying its terrain. Between the Sierras and the White Mountains water, power, and a myriad forms of tourism intersect with a sublime landscape, at once beautiful and toxic, natural and reshaped by man.

We have no record of the natural state for the Owens River Valley. Its indigenous peoples, the Paiutes, redirected river water into channels to irrigate their crops. After a bloody war, white settlers extended these systems, turning the more typical desert scrub of the Valley into heavily irrigated farmland. Had this state endured, the Owens River Valley likely would have turned into a landscape of industrialized agriculture similar to California’s present day Central Valley. The redirection of Owens River water to Los Angeles, the concurrent purchase of much of the land in the Valley by the city – L. A. is the largest landowner there - and the establishment of national park boundaries to protect the watershed all forced the territory toward an artificially enforced wildness.

Only some seven miles wide, the Valley is bounded by the 14,000 foot high east face of the Sierras on the west - among them Mount Whitney, the tallest mountain in the lower forty-eight states - and by the 14,000 foot high White Mountains on the other. The result is the deepest valley in the United States, indeed, one of the deepest on Earth. In this unique scenery are some of California’s best spots for hiking, fishing, skiing, and mountain climbing. Today tourism brings the people of the city to the Valley.

The guide is arranged from north to south, centered on the only road that unites the region, US highway 395. It covers the area from just below the Valley, through the Valley's four towns, then up the volcanic tablelands to Mono Lake. We begin just south of the Owens River Valley, near the town of Pearsonville, 180 miles north of Los Angeles, at the Inyo County line.

This project, which took some five years to complete, is based on a driving guide I put originally together for my course at SCI-Arc, the Infrastructural City. A book, done in collaboration with the Center for Land Use Interpretation was published in 2004. You may download a pdf of this book or purchase it at their on-line shop.

The Owens River Valley Driving Guide is here. Technorati Tags: california, exurbia, owens river valley, tourism