teaching

Extreme Cities: Building Megalopolis

Spring 2013
Columbia University
Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation
Network Architecture Lab

Instructor:              Kazys Varnelis, Ph.D.
Associate:             Leigha Dennis

This studio is part of the Extreme Cities collaboration between the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation and Audi AG. Not merely content with the extra-large, our aims are the extreme future, the megalopolis, and the megaform.

Developed out of the Experiments in Motion program, Extreme Cities begins with the observation that cities will intensify considerably during the next fifty years. Instead of the usual mindset seeing the growth of global cities as an overwhelming set of seemingly unmanageable problems, this project sets out to take this intensification to an extreme. In doing so, we will interrogate both the past and the distant future, with the aim of having students envision unprecedented building types for the year 2063.

The studio’s site is the world’s first megalopolis, BOSWASH. In his 1961 book Megalopolis; the Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United States, geographer Jean Gottmann identified this territory as an unending conurbation of cities, satellites, and suburbs stretching from Boston to Washington D.C., For Gottmann, the megalopolis is “the cradle of a new order in the organization of inhabited spaces,” a territory in which any distinction of city and country is gone, but also a territory that is dominantly suburban.[1] Dubbing the area BOSWASH in his 1967 book the Year 2000: A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years, scenario planner Herman Kahn predicted that the area would reach a population of 80 million by the year 2000, up from 37 million in 1960. Kahn’s term stuck but his prediction was mistaken, missing the massive migration of population to the South and West, and a warning sign to us that prediction is a dangerous business. Architecture studio, of course, is dangerous business.

Thus, if BOSWASH is our physical site, the studio’s temporal site is in both the past and the future. We aim to go back fifty years into the past, to the era of Gottmann and Kahn, as well as fifty years into the future, to a time when current GSAPP students will reach an age traditionally considered as elderly. Doing so will unsettle our conceptions about architecture and cities, allowing us to think beyond the atemporality of contemporary culture and the limitations of contemporary thought.

Semester Plan

We will begin the semester with a historical research project into the development of BOSWASH.

Our premise is that the fifteen years between 1961 and 1976, traditionally seen as an era of decline were in fact a rich time in terms of thinking about the future of cities and particularly so in BOSWASH. In addition to Gottmann’s work, the research of BOSWASH-based scholars and designers such as Jane Jacobs, Herbert Gans, Kevin Lynch, Venturi-Scott-Brown, Stanley Milgram, William H. Whyte, Paul Rudolph, Kevin Roche, Robert Smithson, and Gordon-Matta Clark proved critical to establishing new thinking about the city. We start off with a survey of both, producing a timeline of the megalopolis and also a dictionary of urban qualities.

For our survey, we will take repeated forays into the nearby areas of BOSWASH, visiting the Empire State Plaza in Albany (one of America’s largest megastructures and an attempt to create a link to BOSWASH that is generally considered to have failed), Union Carbide Headquarters in Danbury, and take repeated forays into New York City. Our goal is to investigate architectural interventions that reflect specific qualities of the city, engage in the region, and anticipate a future, particularly those that Kenneth Frampton has identified as megaforms, an architectural genre of massive sprawling horizontality that he sees as native to the megalopolis.[2]

During the first half of the semester, each student will examine one project in this region and timeframe in extreme depth and identify the governing urban quality in it. If the Ford Foundation exemplifies generosity, which projects demonstrate mobility, asymmetry, complexity, or cosmopolitanism?

Students will be required to produce two well-developed drawings of publication-level quality that address the architectural project through project-specific analyses. Some projects may have remarkable circulation and crowd patterns, space planning, environmental systems, etc. These drawings should be produced over time, developing throughout the first half of the semester, as more information is unearthed and will be simultaneously oversaturated with information and rigorous restrained (in other words, you will find out so much utterly amazing information that even though you will only add the information you cannot resist adding, there will be a lot of it). Students should look to the representational techniques that their projects’ architects and others produced for inspiration. Grand exterior axonometric drawings, intricate multi-layered plans and analog data visualizations will become common tools for representing projects of the megalopolis.

Accompanying this, students will collect a dossier of information on the single urban quality embodied within their project. Using photography and film, they will capture evidence of this quality within the present day city. Students will situate this data in the form of a timeline that examines the temporal dimensions of their quality and its architectural, urban and social implications.

This historical research will act as the basis for the second half of the studio in which students will extrapolate a new building type. This time, projecting fifty years into the future, students will produce a new architecture typology that reflects and aids the changing characteristics of the radically intensified megalopolis of 2063. These future projects must have a timeline of their own, and should demonstrate a nonlinear intensification of multiple urban conditions while embracing one urban quality.

Course Blog

Students will be expected to maintain and post regularly to a shared course Tumblr blog of their research and design progress. All student work will be posted online tagged by student name (firstname-lastname).

Engineering

Students will work with roving engineers from ARUP during the semester to address the structural and environmental systems in their designs. Even the most speculative of projects can benefit from the advice of these experts.

Representation

Ultra-realistic perspective and Photoshop-based montages are banned in this studio. We propose that this sort of representation is inappropriate, corresponding to what Mark Fischer has dubbed “capitalist realism,” a condition in which we are offered nothing but the present the eagerly wait for the next thrill the system has to offer.[3] Evacuated of any critical intent, such work only cements the false notion that modern technology has made communication transparent.

But more than that, if all architects produce a form of science fiction, then to paraphrase William Gibson, we need to remember that as we construct futures, all we have at our disposal is the moment that we are currently living in.[4] The moment we construct a future it starts to age rapidly. Since the crash, along with the development of technologies that were formerly consigned to an endlessly deferred proximate future such as near-universal wireless Internet, locative media, tablet computing, and touchscreen interfaces, it seems that we have exhausted the era of the next new thing, of rapid technological and cultural development and obsolescence.

Thus, envisioning the future through architecture forces us to follow Alex Galloway’s suggestion that “all media is dead media,” to understand that appropriate representational strategies that might resist capitalist realist representations might emerge out of a new understanding of what Gibson calls a “long now,” a temporally stretched condition out of which we can freely recombine material and representational motifs.^[5]

We will look at forms of representation immanent to our topic at hand, both the means of representation that architects and others working on these and similar projects would have used, but also the other means of representation of the day, e.g. schedules, traffic engineering plans, flowcharts, exploded axonometrics, and so on. Such diagrams not only offer rich territory to mine for representational strategies, their close study allows us to better understand how to think and represent visually.

Precise, unshaded hidden line drawings, plan, section, elevation, and axonometric form the basis for this studio.

Grading:

20% Attendance and Participation

Students are expected to attend studio sessions, be on time, and ready to discuss their work at every session. By this we mean that students should be in studio at least from 2 to 6 on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays unless they have made other arrangements or are conducting research. Please let us know in advance. In no case will we meet with students who arrive after 4pm on that day unless they have prearranged the late arrival with us or there are mitigating circumstances.

Students are expected to participate in group discussions, to cooperate with other studio members by offering criticism, advice, and good spirit.

Students are expected to be at pin-ups and reviews on time with work ready to present. Students who are not ready at the beginning of the pin-up or review forfeit the right to receive criticism. Students are expected to contribute to pin-ups and reviews, both in terms of criticism and questions as well as by working in a team to ensure that rooms are ready to present in (adequate chairs, projectors, and so on).

40% Concept

Students will be graded on the originality and rigor of their concepts. All students need a coherent thesis in this studio.

Columbia teaches in English. There is help available for difficulties with the English language in the university, but lack of understanding is not an excuse.

40% Execution and Presentation

A good concept means little if it is poorly executed or presented. Presentation and execution are not trivial, nor are they mere “polish,” rather the choices made in presentation and execution should inform, and be informed by, the concept.

Students are expected to render and present their work clearly, succinctly, and elegantly.

Work should be thoroughly and completely represented.

A Brief Bibliography of Books regarding Design and Presentation

Elam, Kimberley. Grid Systems: Principles of Organizing Type. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004.

Hurlburt, Allen. The Grid: A Modular System for the Design and Production of Newspapers, Magazines, and Books. New York: Van Norstand Reinhold, 1978.

Jardí, Enric Twenty-Tips on Typography (Barcelona: ACTAR, 2007).

Muller-Brockmann, Josef. Grid Systems in Graphic Design. Zurich: Niggli, 2001.

Samar, Timothy. Making and Breaking the Grid. A Graphic Design Layout Workshop (Beverly, MA: Rockport, 2002).

The Grid System, http://www.thegridsystem.org/

Tomato,Bareback: A Tomato Project (Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press,1999).

Preliminary Bibliography

Abalos, Iñaki, and Juan Herreros. Tower and Office: From Modernist Theory to Contemporary Practice.  Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003.

Associates, Archizoom. “No-Stop City. Residential Parkings. Climatic Universal Sistem." Domus 496 (1971): 49-55.

Baudrillard, Jean. The Illusion of the End.  Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994.

———. "The End of the Millennium or the Countdown." Economy & Society 26, no. 4 (1997): 447-55.

Bell, Genevieve, and Paul Dourish. "Yesterday's Tomorrows: Notes on Ubiquitous Computing's Dominant Vision." Personal and Ubiquitous Computing 11, no. 2 (2007): 133-43.

Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. (New York: Harcourt, 1968.

Bettelheim, Bruno. The Empty Fortress; Infantile Autism and the Birth of the Self.  New York: Free Press, 1967.

———. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales.  New York: Knopf, 1976.

Brash, Julian. Bloomberg's New York: Class and Governance in the Luxury City. Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation.  Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011.

Caillois, Roger. The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader.  Durham N.C: Duke University Press, 2003.

Castells, Manuel. The Power of Identity. 2nd ed.  Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 2004.

———. The Rise of the Network Society. 2nd ed.  Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 2010.

———. End of Millennium 2nd ed.  Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 2010.

Clark, T. J. Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism.  New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.

Crystal, David. English as a Global Language.  Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Deleuze, Gilles. "Postscript on Control Societies." In Negotiations, 177-82. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990.

Eckardt, Wolf von, and Jean Gottmann. The Challenge of Megalopolis; a Graphic Presentation of the Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United States. Twentieth Century Fund Report.  New York: Macmillan, 1964.

Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism. Is There No Alternative.  Hampshire, UK: Zero Books, 2009.

Frampton, Kenneth. Megaform as Urban Landscape, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1999.

Flood, Joe. The Fires: How a Computer Formula Burned Down New York City--and Determined the Future of American Cities.  New York: Riverhead Books, 2010.

Foster, John Bellamy. "The Financialization of Capitalism." Monthly Review, April 2007, 1-12.

Frank, Thomas. The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.

Gere, Charlie. Digital Culture.  London: Reaktion Books, 2002.

Gottmann, Jean. Megalopolis; the Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United States.  New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1961.

———. Megalopolis Revisited: 25 Years Later. Institute for Urban Studies Monograph Series.  College Park, Md.: University of Maryland Institute for Urban Studies, 1987.

Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire.  Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.

Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change.  Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1989.

———. A Brief History of Neoliberalism.  New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Hatherley, Owen. Militant Modernism.  Winchester: O Books, 2008.

Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities.  New York: Random House, 1961.

Johnson, Simon, and James Kwak. 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown. New York: Pantheon Books, 2010.

Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. La production de l'espace copyright Editions Anthropos 1974, Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell Ltd., 1991.

Milgram, Stanley. Obedience to Authority; an Experimental View. New York: Harper & Row, 1974.

———. The Individual in a Social World: Essays and Experiments. Addison-Wesley Series in Social Psychology.  Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Pub. Co, 1977.

Osborn, Frederic J., and Arnold Whittick. The New Towns: The Answer to Megalopolis.  London: L. Hill, 1963.

Patterson, Clayton, Joe Flood, and Alan Moore. Resistance: A Radical Political and Social History of the Lower East Side. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2007.

Pell, Claiborne. Megalopolis Unbound: the Supercity and the Transportation of Tomorrow.  New York: Praeger, 1966.

Phillips, Kevin. Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism.  New York: Viking, 2009.

Sassen, Saskia. The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo.  Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991.

———. "Global City 20 Years Later." A+U, February 2011, 10-16.

Scheppe, Wolfgang, Migropolis: Venice: Atlas of a Global Situation.  Ostfildern: Hatje/Cantz, 2009.

Shepard, Mark, ed. Sentient City: Ubiquitous Computing, Architecture, and the Future of Urban Space.

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011.

Short, John R. Liquid City: Megalopolis and the Contemporary Northeast.  Washington, DC: Resources for the Future, 2007.

———. Liquid City: Megalopolis and the Contemporary Northeast.  Washington, DC: Resources for the Future, 2007.

Sky, Alison, and Michelle Stone. Unbuilt America: Forgotten Architecture in the United States from Thomas Jefferson to the Space Age: A Book. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976.

Stern, Robert A. M., David Fishman, and Jacob Tilove. New York 2000: Architecture and Urbanism between the Bicentennial and the Millennium.  New York: Monacelli Press, 2006.

Stern, Robert A. M., Thomas Mellins, and David Fishman. New York 1960: Architecture and Urbanism between the Second World War and the Bicentennial.  New York: Monacelli Press, 1995.

Swatridge, L. A. Problems in the Bosnywash Megalopolis: Pollution, Transportation, Sprawl, Social Problems. Selected Studies in the United States. New York: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1972.

Tafuri, Manfredo. Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1976.

Tainter, Joseph A. The Collapse of Complex Societies. New Studies in Archaeology. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Tomlinson, John. The Culture of Speed. The Coming of Immediacy.  London: Sage, 2007.

Venturi, Robert. Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. Museum of Modern Art Papers on Architecture.  New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1966.

Wigley, Mark. "Network Fever." Grey Room  (2001): 82-122.

Wolf, Peter M., and American Federation of Arts. The Future of the City: New Directions in Urban Planning. New York: Watson-Guptill Publications, 1974.

Some images from the final projects in Terminal Condition, the Spring 2012 Netlab studio that I taught with Leigha Dennis, in which we set out to rebuild the Port Authority Bus Terminal, while plotting what the city of 2070 might be like.   

Terminal Condition
Spring 2012

Columbia University
Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation
Network Architecture Lab

Professor: Kazys Varnelis, Ph.D.
Assistant: Leigha Dennis

Description

This studio explores the re-construction of a large-scale infrastructural element in the city, specifically the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York City. A structure of 1.5 million square feet, passed through daily by hundreds of thousands of commuters, over seven thousand buses, and thousands of automobiles, providing parking for over 1,000 spaces for automobiles on top, surmounting a subway below, linked to the Lincoln Tunnel through massive ramps for vehicular traffic, and accommodating a significant shopping area, the PABT operates in a realm between building, city, and infrastructure. We are interested in this overlap as a venue for experimentation in programming and design.

As the largest commuter facility in the city, the PABT is a necessary part of everyday life for hundreds of thousands of workers in the city. The PABT was constructed in response to growing traffic congestion in midtown produced by the operation of eight independent bus terminals in the area a decade after the opening of the Lincoln Tunnel in 1937. Costing $24 million, the PABT bus terminal started operations in December 1950, consolidating eight independent bus terminals located in the midtown area. The building has been expanded twice to accommodate growing bus traffic: in 1963 a $30 million expansion added new decks and in 1979 a north wing was built at a cost of over $160 million, integrating with the original structure with a bridge over 41^st street through a series of massive X trusses designed by Port Authority chief structural engineer Eugene Fasullo.

Bringing over 50,000 sightseers to the city daily, most of whom stop at Times Square, the PABT has been a key player in midtown, caught up in a longstanding crime problem that only abated during the last decade. With a new, modern exterior and a tiled interior resistant to vandalism, the 1979 reconstruction was intended as an architectural solution. But the expanded space quickly wound up serving a growing population of hundreds of homeless people, drug dealers, and male prostitutes while the “Minnesota Strip” on Eighth avenue outside became a site where newly-arrived runaways of both genders, particularly from the Upper Midwest, would be pressed into prostitution. Soon, the brutalist trusses became seen as a symbol of the decay of the Times Square area. In response, the Port Authority invested significant funds in the redevelopment of the neighborhood and implemented crime prevention strategies. The building is now vastly safer, but with the successful redevelopment of Times Square, the PABT is one of the last vestiges of an older, less commercialized New York. Over the last decade, the Port Authority was working with the Vornado Realty Trust to construct a skyscraper over the north wing, which was built with the possibility of exploiting its air rights in mind. Plans for a forty-story office tower by Richard Rogers including a rooftop garden and eighteen new bus gates came to naught when the Chinese developer pulled out this past November.

In this exercise, we set out to develop new hypotheses for the future of the PABT which we see as needing to respond to a world in which mobility is as much a matter of portable networked telecommunications devices as travel. With the resurgence of bus travel, the Terminal has the opportunity to become an even more significant gateway into the city for both commuters and visitors. Containing significant retail space, the PABT is a major center of commerce in the Times Square area. How do we make a building that embraces civic, commercial, and infrastructural spaces while remaining secure?

Semester Plan

This studio understands the architect as a builder of not merely physical edifices but also social, conceptual, and technical structures. Our interest is to use architecture and the most advanced thinking in network culture to construct new and better ways of life. In doing so, this studio is engaged first and foremost with institution building and shaping of social behavior.

We will begin the semester with team-based based scenario plans. Students will identify the drivers in society, technology, economics, ecology, and politics likely to impact the building over the next generation. These scenario plans will be communicated through the technique of architecture fiction. A review exploring these scenario plans will be held in mid February.

Students will individually develop detailed proposals for the reconstruction of the building by mid-review in March. These proposals will take the form of books that define the mission and goals of the reconstructed PABT and a preliminary idea for an architectural program.

Cloud

As a Netlab studio concerned with the topic of mobility, this studio will be the first prototypical studio in the GSAPP Cloud. To this end, students will be expected to maintain Tumblr blogs of their research and to keep up with the online work of other students. All student work will be posted online and aggregated to the emerging GSAPP work site.

Program

Students will be responsible for devising programs for a 21^st century PABT. With the scenario plans from the first part of the studio in hand, students will be asked to identify the programmatic direction of the new PABT. Crucial to this will be a balance between city, building, and infrastructure. How can the building maintain its own identity while integrating better with the urban environment surrounding it?

In the wake of an era defined by the attention-seeking strategy of shaping, it is only appropriate to ask if architecture shouldn’t lose its singularity and obsession with performance. Can we develop architectural strategies aimed at producing less individualistic works that operate in a more ambient register, embracing formlessness instead of shaping, works that build intensity more subtly rather than giving it away all at once, works that question the boundaries between the city and the building rather than affirming them?

With regard to the site, students will be encouraged to consider the extension of the PABT into New Jersey through the Lincoln Tunnel and the dedicated Exclusive Bus Lane (XBL) that stretches from the New Jersey Turnpike onto Route 495, underneath the Times Square area through the underground subway station and the subway routes beyond.

Engineering

Students will work with roving engineers from ARUP during the semester to address the immense requirements of the PABT and the prospects for the construction of their project without disrupting the terminal’s operation.

Representation

Ultra-realistic perspective and Photoshop-based montages are banned in this studio. We propose that this sort of representation is inappropriate, corresponding to what Mark Fischer has dubbed “capitalist realism,” a condition in which we are offered nothing but the present the eagerly wait for the next thrill the system has to offer.[1] Evacuated of any critical intent, such work only cements the false notion that modern technology has made communication transparent.

But more than that, if all architects produce a form of science fiction, then to paraphrase William Gibson, we need to remember that as we construct futures, all we have at our disposal is the moment that we are currently living in.[2] The moment we construct a future it starts to age rapidly. Since the crash, along with the development of technologies that were formerly consigned to an endlessly deferred proximate future such as near-universal wireless Internet, locative media, tablet computing, and touchscreen interfaces, it seems that we have exhausted the era of the next new thing, of rapid technological and cultural development and obsolescence.

Thus, envisioning the future through architecture forces us to follow Alex Galloway’s suggestion that “all media is dead media,” to understand that appropriate representational strategies that might resist capitalist realist representations might emerge out of a new understanding of what Gibson calls a “long now,” a temporally stretched condition out of which we can freely recombine material and representational motifs.^[3]

We will look at forms of representation immanent to our topic at hand, from schedules to traffic engineering plans, flowcharts, to exploded axonometrics for vehicle parts. Such diagrams not only offer rich territory to mine for representational strategies, their close study allows us to better understand the topic we are involved in. Precise, unshaded hidden line drawings, plan, section, elevation, and axonometric offer us a carefully and logically articulated system of delineation appropriate for a bus terminal.

Grading:

20% Attendance and Participation

Students are expected to attend studio sessions, be on time, and ready to discuss their work at every session. Students are expected to participate in group discussions, to cooperate with other studio members by offering criticism, advice, and good spirit.

Group meetings, regularly scheduled once per week allow us to share our research and constantly re-tune our method and approach to the material.

Students are expected to be at pin-ups and reviews on time with work ready to present. Students who are not ready at the beginning of the pin-up or review forfeit the right to receive criticism. Students are expected to contribute to pin-ups and reviews, both in terms of criticism and questions as well as by working in a team to ensure that rooms are ready to present in (adequate chairs, projectors, and so on).

40% Concept

Students will be graded on the originality and rigor of their concepts. All students need a coherent thesis in this studio.

Columbia teaches in English. There is help available for difficulties with the English language in the university, but lack of understanding is not an excuse.

40% Execution and Presentation

A good concept means little if it is poorly executed or presented. Presentation and execution are not trivial, nor are they mere “polish,” rather the choices made in presentation and execution should inform, and be informed by, the concept.

Students are expected to render and present their work clearly, succinctly, and elegantly.

Work should be thoroughly and represented.

My students put up the exhibit for the factory studio in the end of year show yesterday.

The exhibit consists of a slit in a door. The space beyond it is bifurcated by a wall that allows view into two separate rooms. The first, to the right, is a factory office from years gone by. The second, to the left is a radical vision of a future factory. The children in the images below are mine.

The show will be up until for about six days. 

With luck, we'll have student work from the studio up in a few days.

 Factory
Spring 2011

Program

Today marks the start of the tenth year of Network City. This may be my favorite course.

I will be teaching my course on Network Culture at Columbia this fall in addition to the studio I am teaching. The syllabus is below.

This is the six-minute presentation on the evil studio that I gave at the lottery at Columbia yesterday.

AUDC is again teaching a studio at Columbia this fall. This time our topic is evil.

Evil

Advanced Studio V
Fall 2009
Kazys Varnelis

Robert Sumrell
AUDC
Columbia University
Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation

Arguably the entirety of architectural production in the last forty years has been dominated by the problem of complexity. Whether architecture that wears the difficulty of complex programs and requirements of contemporary society on its sleeve, that tries to reduce such complexity by providing a neutral background, or that aims toward resolution through a complex but smooth multiplicity (be it a folded or bloblike), complexity is the main problematic facing architecture since high modernism.

This should come as no surprise. As a political project, modernism ran aground on complexity, its processes of abstraction unable to adequately describe the multifarious conditions of modern culture. Our society may well follow it. As archaeologist Joseph Tainter describes, complexity is a toxic by-product of advanced societies, slowly choking them as it demands such societies invest ever-higher levels of energy to maintain their structures. Our daily experiences with bureaucracy, jammed infrastructure, and failing technology serve as clear evidence of this.

Tainter offers two solutions to the problem of complexity. The first is collapse. Once societies can no longer provide sufficient returns, individuals make the choice to leave the complex society, to “walk away” from it all. As the society sheds layers of complexity, it reverts to a more primitive order. To a minor degree, last year’s stock market crash was an example of that, as society strove for a “reset” against the surreal complexity of financial instruments such as derivatives and credit default swaps. More dramatically, the collapse of the Soviet Union demonstrates a condition where individuals left an intolerable condition en masse. Or in the case of the fall of the Roman Empire, for many of the individuals involved, the collapse seemed to be progress. The second solution is more optimistic and is the one that the majority, but not all, of the members of this school would support: technological innovation. Technologies that allow for greater efficiency or new sources of energy allow complexity to endure, even when it would have produced collapse under an older condition.

But collapse is hardly a model for a studio and endless promises of technological innovation lead to boredom. A third option, perhaps more potent option presents itself: evil.

If one simply does not care about playing by the rules of the game, but only about seizing power to further one’s own ends, it becomes possible to shed layers of complexity and thereby continue society.
The human cost, of course, is quite high, as Mussolini’s quest to get the trains to run on time in Italy demonstrates. Still, with the recent economic success of authoritarian regimes—and the open advocacy of such regimes as clients by notable architects such as OMA—evil is on the table again as an option for architects to pursue.

Nor is this new to architecture. The history of architecture is marked by numerous works for evil patrons, for example, the Tempio Malatesta, the Casa del Fascio, the Palace of the Soviets, the Zeppelin field at Nuremberg, the Glass House, Neverland, Ryungong, CCTV. 

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. Our methodological inspiration is the radical architecture of the 1960s—e.g. Superstudio and Archizoom—but today we live in a world that has transformed more thoroughly than these architects could have ever predicted. Thus, we set out to seek other strategies and to look within architecture to seek what intelligence it still has to offer. To this end, this studio examines how architects can respond to evil. Irony, sarcasm, and direct complicity are too simple and are not options.          

Against the dominant forms of architectural education today, this is not a scripting studio, nor a place for unbuildable Hollywood fantasy, nor by any means 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.

Bibliography

Exit Utopia: Architectural Provocations 1956-76. New York, NY: Prestel Pub., 2005.
Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Meridian. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998.
———. The Man without Content. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999.
———. State of Exception. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem; a Report on the Banality of Evil. New York,: Viking Press, 1963.
Arquilla, John, David F. Ronfeldt, and United States. Dept. of Defense. Office of the Secretary of Defense. Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy. Santa Monica, CA: Rand, 2001.
Badiou, Alain. "Fifteen Theses on Contemporary Art [Excerpt]."  http://www.lacan.com/frameXXIII7.htm
———. "Fifteen Theses on Contemporary Art." Lacanian Ink no. 23 (2004): 100-19.
Bataille, Georges. Literature and Evil. New York ; London: M. Boyars, 1985.
Baudrillard, Jean. The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena. London New York: Verso, 1993.
———. The Illusion of the End. Stanford: Stanford Univ Press, 1994.
———. The System of Objects. New York: Verso, 1996.
———. Screened Out. London ; New York: Verso, 2002.
———. The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact. English ed. Oxford ; New York: Berg, 2005.
Baudrillard, Jean, Paul Foss, and Julian Pefanis. The Revenge of the Crystal: Selected Writings on the Modern Object and Its Destiny, 1968-1983. London ; Concord, Mass.: Pluto Press in association with the Power Institute of Fine Arts, University of Sydney, 1990.
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———. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. New York: Knopf, 1976.
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