“If Kiesler wants to hold two pieces of wood together, he pretends he’s never heard of nails or screws. He tests the tensile strengths of various metal alloys, experiments with different methods and shapes, and after six months comes up with a very expensive device that holds two pieces of wood together almost as well as a screw”

Reading through Geoff Manaugh’s interview with Nicholas de Monchaux, author of Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo, I came across this:

“If you lay, side by side, quotations from USC’s discourse on parametric urbanism now and USC’s discourse on cybernetic urbanism thirty years ago, for better or for worse, you can read them as a complete narrative. It’s impossible to distinguish which is which. Both are born out of a fundamental faith in technology and a fundamental notion that, if you feed enough variables into a problem-solving system — now we call it parametric, then we would have called it cybernetic — that an appropriate and robust solution will emerge. I’m not, myself, so sure that’s the case; in fact, I’m pretty certain that it’s not.”

Models are translations of reality, and all translations are partial, reducing some dimensions in order to allow a degree of fidelity in other dimensions. Something is abstracted away in order to concentrate something else: a white paper model might leave out any suggestion of materials to highlight volume; and acoustic properties may be excluded from an electronic model that simulates solar gain. Breaking a situation down into variables and parameters so it can be modelled is no stranger than any other kind of modelling. Problems arise when reality is reduced to the model.

I agree with de Monchaux that appropriate and robust solutions don’t emerge automatically given enough parameters; and appreciate his reminder that, despite a varnish of novelty, parametric approaches are not new.

(Again, I’d plug Adam Curtis’s All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (2011) on this topic).

Stop City, by Dogma (2008). English text here. Dogma is the firm of which Pier Vittorio Aureli is a member.

Aureli:

“The “silence” of Mies’s architecture has often been interpreted by historians and critics as reflecting and incorporating the uprooting nature of modernity while defining a critical distance from it.

He gathers a mob of writers who make this proposition about Mies: Tafuri, Cacciari, Hays, Mertins, Wallenstein. I find it completely implausible to see Mies as a critical, ironic or even subversive figure. What exactly is this ‘critical distance’ Mies maintains from modernity? Was Mies actually critical of modernity? I was reminded of this from Graham Harman:

“there are those who remain especially intrigued by artworks about art, films about filming, self-referential cabaret shows, fireworks that explode into shapes of themselves, dog biscuits in the form of dogs, and drummers who drum songs about drumming – a kind of ‘drumming at the limit.’ In each case, the supposed cleverness comes from the fact that the activity in question not only happens, but also refers to itself ‘as’ what it is. But this fashionable trend only represents the worst of metaphysics in the old-fashioned sense, since it declares self-reflexivity to be a privileged moment in the relation between the two faces of being” (p. 75).

Being critical is one possibility of architecture, but the attempt to make criticality the defining characteristic of architecture, as Aureli does, is just strange.

Great piece by Dan Hill at ArchitectureAU on the Australian Government’s National Urban Policy discussion paper, arguing that it doesn’t ask searching-enough questions to enable real change or resilience:

Without addressing these core aspects of why cities exist, or indeed a wider range of policy approaches, a national urban policy focused on the traditional tools of urban planning, architecture and urban design may work for, in Tim Williams’s words, “good times and easy places,” but is unlikely to make Australian cities resilient in the face of real challenges.

He addresses the way that cities can’t be isolated from their surroundings:

There’s also a figure-ground relationship between cities and regions and, at best, a symbiotically linked ecosystem. Paradoxically, any national urban policy should have the regions at its core, finding ways to keep flood plains, allow rivers to run freely, preserve food basin soil to strengthen food security, and replant forests to reinforce flood-mitigating topsoil and act as a fast growing natural carbon sink.

And he questions the excessive reliance on public transport schemes as urban panacea:

[W]hy move so many so far in the first place? Public transport is an easier lever to pull – at least in theory it should be – but surely a better goal is ensuring that everyday needs are met locally, within walking distance, rethinking how we co-locate housing, jobs, services and amenities.

At least the Australian government is attempting to have an overarching discussion of this kind. The Auckland Plan and the Central City Plan for rebuilding Christchurch are a start, but flawed in many of the same ways as the document Hill criticises, and limited to the parochial concerns of single cities.

Peter Eisenman on the “autonomy” of architecture:

[Rosalind] Krauss has said that to preserve the singularity of objects we must cut them off from their previous modes of legitimation. This idea will be seen to be important to any project of autonomy (p. 90).

This is completely counter to Bruno Latour’s description of objects (he calls them “actants” to remove the connotation of passivity), which is that they become progressively more singular as they increase their attachments. Harman describes Latour’s position:

Actants are always completely deployed in their relations with the world, and the more they are cut off from these relations, the less real they become (p. 19).

Krauss’s statement (and Eisenman’s use of it) seem naïve to me. Overcoming oppressive modes of legitimation and authority is great, but to extend this to the general claim that objects are more themselves by being more cut off is essentialism.

“It is precisely within the rise of the space of urbanisation that architecture as the project of the finite, and thus separated, form(s) can be read as critical” (p. x)

The idea that architecture should be primarily critical is to me like saying that all writing should be critical. In my experience, it’s always accompanied by the argument that architecture is and should be a privileged subset of building—an exclusive art.

The Rainbow Warrior, bombed by French secret service agents in Auckland harbour. Doug Richards, 1985.

Pier Vittorio Aureli, in The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture (2011), distinguishes between the city, “the political dimension of coexistence”, and urbanisation, “the economic logic of social management” (p. x). The city is a political space, and urbanisation is an economic space. He claims urbanisation is managerial, driven by private concerns, oriented towards infrastructural functions, and tending towards a totalitarian whole. The city, by contrast, he characterises as agonistic, public, self-critical, and immune to totalitarianism.

Aureli justifies this distinction by appeal to the Greek one between polis, governed by technē politikē and oikos, governed by technē oikonomikē. He finds this reflected (through a little semantic gymnastics) in the Roman civitas and urbs. This appeal-to-the-wisdom-of-the-ancients isn’t convincing. It’s far from clear that Greek or Roman cities provide a good model for contemporary cities or politics.

To my mind, distinguishing between politics and economics is wrong and completely artificial. If that’s all Aureli’s distinction between cities and urbanisation rests on, then I think that’s wrong too.

How unpleasant would it be to live in Hilberseimer’s High-rise City (1924)? Check out the width of the road. Essay on Hilberseimer by Marisol Rivas Velasquez and Diego Barajas here [pdf]; image from The Art Institute of Chicago.

[Ontological realism] is the thesis that the world is composed of objects, that these objects are varied and include entities as diverse as mind, language, cultural and social entities, and objects independent of humans such as galaxies, stones, quarks, tardigrades and so on. Above all, ontological realisms refuse to treat objects as constructions of humans. (p. 18)

I think a perspective like this is essential for thinking about cities, infrastructures and public space. His The Democracy of Objects has just been published (2011). You can download a digital copy from the Open Humanities Press, or purchase a hard-copy. Great cover art by Tammy Lu.

“Eco-surrealism and dystopian folktales”: paintings by Josh Keyes.

Its $35.5 million price conveys significance, but no one is exactly sure what it is or what it means. It is an image, a placeholder, an attraction in a field of attractions. It is a signpost to an absence, a Hitchcockian MacGuffin. In short, it is what you build when you don’t know what the public realm is any more.

Exactly right.

This map shows all fifty-five known volcanoes of the Auckland Volcanic Field, and is based on Searle. I’m looking forward to getting Hayward’s new Volcanoes of Auckland so I can update the details.