infrastruction

infratotaldestruction

2004-12-15T22:45:00.001-05:00

Holy shit! I/we have a blog! I almost forgot about this...Jason...Augen...Infrastructor? Should we let this drift, ghostshiplike, or are we going to have another go at it?

megalopolis

2004-08-18T20:04:00.000-04:00

i'm probably late getting the news, but word is that Francis Ford Coppola is making a movie about 'an architect who dreams of building the city of the future, hoping to enable people to live in an utopia where people only do the work they love to do...'. At one point, Paolo Soleri was retained as a consultant to the director. does anyone have further information? i'd love to work set design . . .

Calatrava in Sweden

2004-08-05T10:55:00.000-04:00

The Turning Torso site has been updated with a fantastic new picture: here. Apropos infrastructurism, it would be nice if they left it as is, with the cranes and all.

High Line update

2004-07-16T13:07:00.000-04:00

By way of Gothamist I came across Curbed's take on second round High Line proposals. Check out 7/16: High Line Dystopia...Curbed's captions to the plan images are brilliant.

more on Libeskind

2004-07-03T14:21:00.000-04:00

Some people are very creeped out by Libeskind. It's not just the cowboy boots (though that ought to be enough); the main thing seems to be his combination of gee-whiz democracy rhetoric with put-your-eye-out cutting edge self-indulgent po-mo architectural design. I think this is probably what got to Muschamp and finally triggered that rant. There's just something creepy about a guy who can turn out a design as potently bleak as the Jewish Museum (over, and over, again) while saying something like this:
"From the minute I saw the mountains and the light I fell in love with Denver. It was not just the light of nature—it was the light in people’s eyes. It is the beauty of the people here, the beauty of their aspirations. Architecture is a civic art, and a museum is not just a container to be filled with treasures; it is a place where people are brought to wonder about the spaces of their own futures. We are creating a complex that will glow, not only with the light of the mountains but with the spiritual."
(quoted here.)

WTC rebuilding

2004-07-03T14:06:00.000-04:00

There's an awesome take-down of the 'Freedom Tower' in yesterday's Slate. Hawthorne's gently sardonic commentary illuminates what has become the standard m.o. for the Ground Zero redevelopment process: 1. concoct some cool-looking plans 2. make a show of listening to public commentary, and with great fanfare 'select' a plan 3. disappear to some back-room drafting-tables for a few months and 4. quietly delete everything that was exceptional about the plan.
Thus: the Freedom Tower. The high point of Libeskind's original plan was a 1,700 foot high tower capped by year-round enclosed gardens, representing different climatic zones of the world, which were to be open to the public. The whole proposal was absurd (the proposed tower was too skinny for even the number of elevators which would be required to accomodate the quantity of people who would want to visit such a place; and it was hard to imagine these ecosystems prospering anyway, when they can barely keep the palm trees in the Winter Garden at the World Financial Center across the street alive through the year), but it represented such a good hope and spirit that a broad swathe of people supported the Libeskind plan. Something good had to come out of such a sweet idea.
Then Libeskind 'won'; there followed the ugly battle between him and the developer, and the developer's pet architect David Childs. As Hawthorne writes it --
"As a symbol of the tortured rebuilding effort where the Twin Towers once stood, the ungainly Freedom Tower could not have been better assembled. First, take the early sketches drawn up by Libeskind's office for the building, which imagined it as the glinting, hard-edged, sloping-roof culmination of a series of five towers sweeping in a counterclockwise motion from the southern edge of the site to its northwest corner, each one taller and grander than the last. Then ask a few politicians, the staff of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, and some engineers from the Port Authority to marry that design with a typically sleek, agreeable skyscraper from Childs' office. Add some wind turbines and a steel lattice dreamed up by the engineer Guy Nordenson, and there you have it."
Meanwhile, after an ugly court battle with his insurance companies, Silverstein turned out to not have as much money as everyone thought he would. The towers rising in a spiral around the site are indefinitely postponed. Also at risk, according to Hawthorne's article, is the wind turbine that was the one exciting element in the Libeskind-Childs hybrid 'Freedom Tower' plan. What do we end up with? Another sleek, glassy, energy-hog skyscraper. Over a park (the outcome of the much-hyped memorial design process). And a lot of vacant space. (For parking lots? We might get the Houston look going, here).
Now, I don't want to be one of the perpetual complainers that this whole process has spawned. But it's looking more and more like Libeskind's plan was selected out of the seven 'master vision' studies precisely because of its susceptibility to this process of gradual deletion. If you look at some of the other plans -- Vinoly's scaffolds in the form of the original towers, or the magnificent megastructure proposed by the United Architects team. You simply couldn't delete the signature elements of these other plans -- there'd be nothing left.
Is there anything left of Libeskind's? I'd like to know what he thinks. At least he's getting paid well. Now, again, I don't want to be on the side of the complainers who believe the whole rebuilding process is irrevocably corrupt. Except ... maybe they're right. At a certain phase, this process generated the most exciting architectural proposals to receive serious consideration in our lifetimes. There's something eerie in watching the whole thing get whittled down to the least exciting solutions possible for the site.

LA Climbs: Alternative Uses for Architecture

2004-06-26T12:57:00.000-04:00

Sighted last time I was in a bookstore. It's perhaps a bit too twee . . . but precisely matches something discussed in the correspondence . . . and, if I could throw around money this summer like I have over the last few years, I'm sure I'd have bought a copy.
"In _LA Climbs: Alternative Uses for Architecture_, climbs are photographed, named, graded, and appear alongside topographic diagrams and detailed route descriptions. Crossing over from artistic intervention to a guidebook for the climber bored with legitimate locations, Hartley's project has similarities to the exploits of the legendary Frenchman Alain Robert (who famously scaled the Petronas Towers, the Eiffel Tower and the Empire State Building) or skatebording culture where empty swimming pools are used as alternative sites for extreme skating. These acts of architectural misinterpretation encompass an eclectic selection including Hartley's climb up the infamous Hollywood sign, Frank Gehry's new Disney Hall, as well as classic mid-century Case Study Houses and iconic works by architects such as Wright, Schindler, Meler, Koenig, Lautner and Neutra. These exploits come together to reveal a perception of the city and its architecture reduced to surface, texture and relative distance from the ground. Through a combination of colour photography, drawings and diagrams, this book provides an alternative view of key sites and buildings in and around Los Angeles."

scaffolding

2004-06-26T12:30:00.000-04:00

So, I've finished my fourth day volunteering for a Habitat for Humanity project. I'm aiming to become the on-site Scaffold Monkey. The physical sensation of climbing up an outer layer of scaffolding is similar to that of ascending bridge trusses. But there's also a Lego-set component to the experience as one passes up modular prefabricated components and assembles a higher level. And then one's relation to the building is entirely revised: you step off onto a roof, balance on the exterior of a sill, etc.
Seth, I would guess you've seen some amazing scaffolding lately. Bamboo, no? I've only seen the photos ... but it seems like there could be a whole new building typology there.
The Rafael Vinoly design for the new WTC was criticized by some for looking like a gigantic scaffold. It was, of course, the Infrastructurist proposal . . . and it didn't win . . . I think it was Muschamp's fault for that heavy-handed and poorly thought out endorsement.

by way of an introduction

2004-06-24T03:07:00.000-04:00

greetings,

I think that Peter mentioned this to me when I was trying to explain GIS software to him, and a proejct (grad studio, Princeton) that I was working on this spring focusing on 1-95 and NJ (Ozi, I think that you have NJ all wrong, I'm from the West myself, Seattle, but I have come to appreciate the really wonderful geographic and (no irony intended here) infrastructural beauty of at least some parts of NJ and if you want to come down for a visit sometime I'll try to to show you some...)
It's funny, looking over your posts from earlier, I was driving down the Alaskan Way Viaduct yesterday, coming North from down past the (horrific, redundant) new stadiums, marveling at what an incredible way of seeing downtown Seattle it offered. Totally new to me (that specific experience) and I lived here pretty much until college.
I'll try to post a little more of an introduction later, just wanted to say hello.

meanwhile, i've been reading louis kahn . . .

2004-06-21T17:43:00.000-04:00

"In the center of a very large city, maybe i cannot use Amsterdam as an example as it is a city of a different nature, but certainly in Paris, Rome, New York, in Philadelphia or any other large city, the street in the middle of the town wants to be a building; it does not want to be just a street. If you think of it only as a street, then it never can occur to you that the construction of it is anything but a leftover thing in which you use the meanest ways of making it, because you will not see it.
But if you think of it as being that which it really wants to be -- and that is a building -- you will not have to dig it up every time a pipe goes bad. you will have a place for these things. you will have a place for walking under, you will have a place for other things, and it will occur to you what this building is which is called a street, and you will realize that you are actually walking on or riding on the roof of this building."
Louis Kahn, _Essential Texts_, NY: Norton, 2003, p. 39. Italics added.

where this begins

2004-06-21T17:38:00.000-04:00

is with a discussion of a Koolhaas interview where he describes highway on-ramps in Lagos, Nigeria, which are spontaneously converted by entrepeneurs into open-air markets dealing in car parts, grey/black market materials, etc. (S_, do you have that link still?)
here's something i just dug out of my end of the correspondence:
> i would like to see those on-ramps. (it sounds like a
> scene out of Gibson, exactly parallel to that Golden
> Gate Bridge occupied as residential space -- but then
> Gibson and Koolhaas are so parallel they could be
> secret twins). the onramps seem to presage or promise
> some really sweet daydream -- that one day we might
> take back the highway-space that sliced up our cities,
> and use the elevated land as a second ground. i
> actually daydream about this every time i walk below
> the BQE, especially down towards Red Hook where it's
> really high. how much of a static load could that
> steelwork hold? surely enough for a row of homes on
> either side, with a bike-path running down the middle.
> that would do.
As Mana steered the rental car out of NYC, in the wee hours of 9/16/01,
we
picked up speed on the BQE. Sleep deprived, rattled, distraught, I hung
my
head out the window and looked back. Lower Manhattan was illuminated by
work
lights, amorphous against the cloud of smoke and debris.
> the High Line project (http://www.thehighline.org/)
> looks promising. already there are some great
> experiments there -- do you know the gas station on
> 14th that is essentially hung from the existing rail
> line? one couldn't ask for stronger bones to build on.
Re FHL: wow, I can dig it. The earthquake that hit Seattle in, um,
whenever
that was (I was in NYC), resulted in the condemning of a few buildings
along
the waterfront, most notably for me, The OK Hotel, site of the high
points
of my adolescence (since "resurrected" in the revamped Rendezvous down
in
Belltown). The viaduct, however, is going to have to go. The yuppies
say
it's ugly. I love rolling into Seattle on the ferry and seeing the
skyline
with this huge gray elevated highway thing cutting across the
front...good
article that has decidedly inflected my thinking:
http://www.thestranger.com/2003-03-13/feature.html

what we're doing here

2004-06-21T17:26:00.000-04:00

This blog is an attempt to publish a year-long correspondence on architecture, the city, and 'infrastructurism' -- a word i made up on a hazy New York morning after reading too much Rem Koolhaas. the basic proposition is that there is a tendency (not quite a movement, but more than an isolated set of incidents) in contemporary architecture to create innovative forms and structures by blurring or re-drawing the line between architecture and infrastructure. as the months have gone on, the appearances and manifestations of this tendency have become more and more frequent. until we get around to sorting through the early correspondence and posting its more significant moments, this blog may turn out to be mostly a disorganized list of 'infrastructurist' occurrences as we come across them. and, because discipline is alien to blogging, it will be about other topics as they come up as well. like Saint Louis. i'm sure there's a lot that's infrastructurist about Saint Louis, but i really haven't spent enough time there to tell you what. i've just driven through twice, really. but for some reason my head keeps coming back to it ...

cross-country: Saint Louis

2004-06-19T20:04:00.000-04:00

the gateway arch finally made sense. when you come upon it from the west, as i had in the past, it's a non-sequitor: here you drive through this beautiful devastated city, then there's this big silly hoop between you and the hugest river you ever saw. but it's not meant to be seen from the west. it's for travelers from the east, going west -- that's the whole point -- gateway, no? from the east, you first see it as the first fifth of its arc, rising beyond the top of a green hill. it's breathtaking. every bend in the highway gives you a glimpse of more of it, until you finally emerge on the riverfront and see its whole span. and it's huge -- it embraces the downtown -- only the tallest three or four skyscrapers rise above it.
saint louis is superficially similar to both philadelphia and portland in the way its downtown sneaks up on the riverfront, and the riverfront park, stumbling over major automobile arteries along the way. portland does it best, as the artery is only 4-5 lanes and has stoplights along it. philadelphia -- well, no one really bothers, in philadelphia, which is a pity, since it's quite a lovely river.
meanwhile, saint louis -- i'm not going to pretend that i understand saint louis. on my last cross-country drive, i tried to stop for lunch in the downtown on a sunday. there was nowhere to eat, not even near the tourist area at the base of the arch. nothing was open. the only people in downtown were waiting at bus-stops for a ride out. all of my city-assumptions were worthless -- i couldn't even navigate my way to a sandwich.
i drove across the river, got lost in East Saint Louis, saw some very pretty industrial ruins, and a strip mall where all the establishments were strip clubs, and realized i was in way over my head, and drove back across the Mississippi on a $.25 toll-bridge with paving worn down to where you could see the steel reinforcing rods.

cross-country: NJ

2004-06-19T19:53:00.000-04:00

S_, i know you did this drive a long time back, during the week of ash and smoldering metal, not looking back. but how the fuck did you make it through new jersey? growing up in the West gives one a certain set of expectations: that a west-bound highway will take you to the west, a south to the south; that you can point yourself in a certain direction and make progress towards your destination; and that one place will look different from another. New Jersey taught me how little i understood. i would rather crawl through barb-wire in a freezing rain with a sprained ankle than drive through New Jersey again. it's as if the neat, orderly parallel lines of the interstate highway system had been crumpled into a sorry mess by someone trying to jam it into an improbably small space. (manhattan, perhaps). camels through the eyes of needles. hundreds of thousands of camels. angry ones.
it was about 90 degrees and my cat, who had never traveled farther than a car-service to the vet before, was looking at me like i'd just betrayed everything we'd ever believed in.
i stopped at a gas station and bought a map and took out money to pay tolls but the map was at such a scale as to show NJ as three or four thick red lines without labels of any sort.

refugee infrastructurism

2004-05-27T12:52:00.000-04:00

"Abandoned in a limbo country with no government and no authority except the car bomb, 460 Kurdish families are living in a sports stadium in the ragged outskirts of Kirkuk. They have been there for more than a year and have fashioned hovel apartments out of homemade mud, brick, and plaster under the eaves of the sloping stadium bowl or inside what were once the toilets, the players' showers, and the balcony boxes. Strung-up electricity wires feed low-wattage yellow light bulbs. There is no water: It comes in by tanker. Each family digs its own septic tank ... Washing hangs in lines of colored rags; small kerosene stoves burn kettles of tea; wads of bedding are piled in muddy corners. The Kurds are practiced refugees ..."
(Wendell Steavenson, Dispatch from Iraq #17, published at www.slate.com 5/27/04. Steavenson has been wandering iraq since last december, and her entire series of dispatches is worth reading. she may have kind of 'snapped' somewhere along the way, and now writes in a tone that is so dispassionate as to be slightly chilling.)

a citation

2004-05-27T10:59:00.000-04:00

from _The City, seen as a garden of ideas_, by Peter Cook, Monacelli Press 2003, p. 70-71:
"In the project, the avenues, placed between Frankfurt and Offenbach, intensify the network of direct routes and run between existing node points: so far an orthodox move. The 'villas' are actually apartment blocks and stand at an ample distance from each other: still pretty orthodox. The land between is a deliberate combination of recreational garden and intense cultivation for fruit and vegetables: appropriate in an area that was full of orchards until well into the twentieth century. In among this we plant many small buildings -- sheds and laboratories, high tech, low tech, general-purpose. From the tradition of backyard industry comes a delightful and opportunist frontyard activity. The buildings folded into the gardens. So what of the villas themselves? They, too, become opportunist: a simple frame made of thrown-out materials: old bitsa of windows and crushed cars that are then cemented in as part of a great hulk, a frame of elevator shafts and fire corridors, with the offer of filling it left to anyone who opts in."

2004-05-25T12:34:00.000-04:00

seth! it's time we got started. a big design prize just went to a crew of four young architects [actually, it was the developer's idea] who are using chunks of highway left behind from the Big Dig to build housing that happens to have floors that can support 250 pounds per square foot. this is happening In Your Backyard, as it were, and the Cambridge something-or-other is getting in the way of the project for looking too innovative. so. anyway. it's time to publish. yeah, ok, you probably won't have time until you're back from China. and blogpot isn't perfect for our purposes -- it archives entries after they've been up a certain time, so we'll have to establish links to lead to the more significant portions of the correspondence. but, hey, if you have some time, try copying in some entries from it. (or just SEND ME THE FLOPPY!). anyway -- i would suggest starting with 'infrastructurism'.
-ozi