THOTSPACE

2011-08-16T22:32:00.000-07:00

David Harvey: A National Reconstruction Corporation

Harvey bring this idea up in an interview with Amy Goodman. It is here around 3 minutes in or so. It's a bit different than the national reconstuction bank in important ways. He's basically talking about nationalizing the housing debt in a way that accrues to the homeowners. The corporation picks up the default housing stock but allows the current homeowners to remain as tenants. So you preserve the physical fabric of communities while restructuring the ownership. He takes a swipe at the Government bias towards home ownership and almost starts sounding like a Wall Street republican (after the crisis, not before).

Its interesting. We did nationalize the housing debt, but the way we did it, the benefits clearly accrue to large financial institutions because by guaranteeing their debt and recapitalizing them, we (the U.S. taxpayer) assumed their liability. It didn't cause the debt crisis we are in, but by dramatically increasing the liability column of the nations balance sheet, it accelerated it greatly.

In anyevent, David Harvey is an interesting and very likeable speaker. I like his analysis quite a bit, but I don't always agree with his conclusions. For example, while I think it is true that capitalism is prone to imabalances, it is not entirely clear to me why correction of the imbalance couldn't be done through market forces. It's one thing to dismantle the entire system, but it is not clear to me that this crisis is caused by capitalism functioning as it was supposed to- rather it seems to be that the system lost a lot of transparency, which might be a requirement of good markets, and therefore began to collapse inward. But I am not an economist.

He points out in another, quite good and succinct video that global crises just displace the problem from one locale to the next- but what it wrong with that? All systems are susceptible to changes that disrupt the equilibrium and take it out of balance. But if a process of rebalancing is allowed to proceed, surely that creates new opportunities for growth?

For example we have had quite a bit of investment in certain kinds of building stock in this country over the last 10 or 20 years. But what about the under-investment in infrastructure or non car based modes of transportation? Surely rebalancing that creates new potentials? Perhaps its the mode of that rebalancing that is under debate: how do we organize the process of rebalancing the national economy? Who are the stakeholders in that process and then to what extent would that have to reshuffle the market deck?

Rebuilding America

2011-08-16T06:07:00.000-07:00

A National Infrastructure Bank

Rebuilding America was the title of a recent show on Diane Rehm. Ed Rendell, former Pennsylvania governor and now head of a non-profit promoting the creation of a national infrastructure bank. There seems to be some momentum for this idea and I think the country and the industry would gain a lot from its implementation. It is not a new idea. In fact, there is a lecture on the internet from a couple of years ago, when the financial crisis first hit, that featured David Harvey arguing for the same thing. I will try to find it and post later. But it seems to me that this idea represents some kind of consensus for a program on both the right and left.

2011-07-23T14:14:00.000-07:00

If debt talks fail.

Here is my modest proposal for what should happen if debt talks fail. I suggest mobilizing every out of work and soon to be out of work contractor, engineer and architect in America with the express goal of forming the largest super PAC in history.

I don't even know what a super PAC is, but it sounds scary. Like when pacman started chomping on ghosts. And as far as I'm concerned, the scarier sounding it is, the better.

This super PAC thing would have a single mission. To help elect people who will run on a "Rebuild America" platform. That is it. We should support anyone who would run on the idea that America should have the best built infrastructure. That we should not settle for anything else than the best schools, roads, bridges and buildings.

2011-06-09T03:18:00.000-07:00

On the Disruptive Hypothesis, El-Bulli and architectural practice

I don't usually favor the precooked methodology workshop. You've seen this before, you pay a bunch of money to go to a presentation by a renowned 'expert' (who you've never heard of) so that you can learn the guaranteed method to (pick one): lose weight, influence people, succeed in real estate, make a million dollars in just six months. To me, no matter how sophisticated the presentation, these things inevitably reek of snake oil.

To be sure, not every version of these workshops peddle fantasy- some really are well designed presentations by people who have actually done the heavy lifting in their respective fields. But even the more realistic and well designed presentations usually suffer from one big problem. They usually present a baseline scenario that differs in important ways from the one that you are usually operating in. For example, a project management workshop might utilize a given set of tools developed with a particular methodology in mind, but what it doesn't do is give you an insight on whether the tools that your own firm has developed internally are workable or flawed. So when you do get back to your own work environment, you are usually at a loss to apply the toolset you've just been learning about to the one you are already expected to use. This is why I prefer a 'coaching' model to an offsite workshop.

Ok. So now you have my take on workshops.

So here is a workshop that is one of the exceptions that prove the rule. I think its a good one for designers to look at and think about because it is about something that good designers do all the time: having a different idea.

Having a different idea is probably not sexy enough to sell well, so the smart people at Frog Design and NYU school of business have called this Crafting a Disruptive Hypothesis. Basically what they are trying to do is to look at counterintuitive design (and by design I'm including things like marketing, industrial design, product design and so on) and analyze what makes the counterintuitive design successful.

One of the things they point out that I particularly like is that a good counterintuitive design disrupts preconceived ideas about certain scenarios. So they give the example of a good restaurant. In a restaurant you would assume that you arrive and are given a copy of the menu, you choose your 3 courses and then the waiter brings you your meal. There's a certain set of assumptions about the experience, for example you are given particular choices in a particular sequence.

But what if you decide to question and up-end this sequence of choices? So what if you have 30 courses, you don't get to choose your meal and the waiter brings you the menu at the end of the meal not at the beginning? Sounds preposterous doesn't it?

In fact this is exactly the model at El-Bulli, widely considered one of the worlds best restaurants. So at El-Bulli, you show up (having made a reservation several years in advance) and are given 30 courses in a sequence that only the chef's team really knows, are feted and feasted with this amazing molecular food and then, only at the end, you are given the menu signed by chef Ferran Adria as a souvenir of your evening.

One of the few criticisms I have of the workshop is that by focusing on the disruptive hypothesis as a marketing strategy, it really diminishes the importance of intent. Intent is really a critical element in the success of the something like El-Bulli. What I mean about this is that Adria has a particular intent about food, and a particular conception about what food should do for the diner, how the dining experience should unfold and what it means to be a chef. So in order to fulfill this conception he develops a disruptive model around it-which is to say he shuts the restaurant down 6 months out of the year so that he can do R&D, he charges $300 a head and serves 30 courses to you where you don't know what comes next.

This is really an important aspect of disruptive models. Adria didn't just sit around and cleverly brainstorm how to make his restaurant unique- he let the intent drive the model not the other way around. In doing that he really had to ask the fundamental questions of himself: "What do I really want to do? What does it mean to be a chef? If I had the choice, how would I design the food and what do I have to do in order to realize this idea?"

I think its really time we started to think about design practice in this way. Most Architectural firms, no matter how innovative or forward thinking, differ in structure very very little. Even Snohetta- just featured in Metropolis as a progressive firm of the future- differs only in degree from many 'typical' firms across the country. They have an open plan, they have a 'more democratic' internal structure, but still run all year round, they still have principals and associates, interns and so on.

Isn't it time we really re-thought the practice model, the way Adria re-thought the restaurant experience? What if we could re-structure practice so that it was innovation centric? What if we really did get serious about Research and Development as a cornerstone of architectural innovation? What would we have to do to develop that? What if our clients didn't have to choose between lower fees and better service- what if we restructured practice so that they could have both? What if lower fees meant that we made more money, not less? Sounds preposterous right?

Our whole industry is in collapse and only now beginning to rebuild. We have had stagnant productivity growth for the last 40 years. Our brightest young people are leaving the architecture profession in droves. We have a hard time delivering innovation and world class design to our clients, even though we live in the most advanced society on earth.

Disruptive change is already here. Architectural practice has a choice. We can embrace it or be overrun by it.

2011-05-06T21:55:00.000-07:00

The Cloud Will Change Everything

Three developments will have profound implications for the construction industry.

1. The availability of cloud based applications that contain all of the functionality of traditional office software but can be purchased on an as needed basis and accessed anywhere on the web.

2. The emergence and prevalence of social and professional networks that allow labor to be identified, organized and mobilized easily and rapidly.

3. The development of new contract models for the aec industry that redefine the relationship between service providers and clients.

The convergence of these three key developments will essentially redefine the construction industry in the very near term. The biggest result of this will be that the cost for aec services will come down. This does not necessarily mean that service providers will necessarily lose either- in fact it is entirely possible that cost can come down even as salaries rise. I'll explore why I think so in just a minute. But for now, lets take a quick look at each development on its own.

1. Cloud Applications

Earlier this year, Autodesk released a new product called AutoCAD WS. WS is a product that ostensibly is being marketed to tablet users and the sound bite on that is that it is the first autocad application for theApple I-pad. But take a closer look and you will find something even more startling- WS is the first drafting application that I know of that can be run completely over the internet and then accessed when needed.

This is a pretty huge story. Obviously WS isn't completely ready, but the implications for this application and others like it are enormous for aec firms. With cloud applications, in house overhead for I.T. gives way to a pay for use model. All of the costs of acquiring, maintaining and upgrading applications and hardware is shifted over to the cloud data center where it is managed at scales that rival that of utilities- with redundancies and safety systems that individual firms could only dream of previously.

Then there is the drastically improved portability of the information that is being generated and maintained on the cloud. Where firms had to manage the transmission of information during the design and construction process, the very fact that the any of the data is in the cloud means that all of the traditional issues and costs surrounding transmission of information also disappear. In the context of a construction job, this is extremely important, since so much of the effort expended in construction administration is simply about acquiring and maintaining current information on a construction site.

The cloud means that you get the best available technology and information anywhere to anyone for a very low price relative to what you were paying before in equivalent cost to generate, store and transmit a piece of information.

2. Social and Professional Networks

The potential for linked networks of individuals to radically redefine how service providers are organized is still largely untapped. Where the cloud allows us to forego the technological infrastructure that traditional firms provided, social networks will render the very organization of firms a thing of the past. The networks themselves will become the organization.

The value of firms in the market place has traditionally been their ability to recruit, train, and mobilize talent and labor and to provide armature for the delivery of services by individuals within the organization. The problem with firms is that, relative to a social or professional network on the internet, they are inherently less efficient and effective in doing the very thing that they are created to do.

The applicant pool even a well connected firm can draw simply can't compete with the breadth and width of the social network on the internet. Traditional firms are constrained geographically in who they recruit- but they are also constrained by time. The individuals within a firm who can most easily identify and recruit the right people for the job are the very ones whose time is most constrained within the organization. So what you end up with at best is either a very contracted hiring window or an HR Manager or VP who generally doesn't really know what they are looking at when evaluating an applicant pool. But by aggregating and consolidating information about individuals within a given sector or area, social networks can provide a far more efficient platform for identifying and mobilizing talent available for a construction project.

3. Single Purpose Entity Contracting

In 2008 the AIA introduced the integrated project delivery suite of contracts including the AIA C195-2008 which proposes a single purpose entity contracting (SPE) model. Under the SPE contract, the three main participants of a construction project agree to form a new company whose sole purpose is to complete a construction project. The owner capitalizes the project as a partner and then the process is developed collaboratively with architect and contractor engaged on an open book basis as equal partners where risk and reward is shared by all counterparties.

The idea behind the SPE is that everybody gets skin in the game. With a relationship that is based more on mutual benefit and reward, everyone on the team can focus on achieving the greatest amount of value for the owner for the lowest possible cost. By setting up the collaboration at the earliest point in the process, all of the value opportunities can be identified by the team for the lowest price. Sounds great right? But the industry doesn't yet seem to be buying it.

One of the factors preventing a more widespread adoption of SPE contracts is that it asks three distinct entities- three firms, each with their own culture and structure to pretend that they are one firm. My contention is that you generally can't overlay three existing organizational structure with a contract and then somehow pretend that that you've created a new organization. In order to deliver a new contracting model, the very structure of the services market has to change. You really have to atomize the market down to its constituent parts, the individuals that actually provide the service and produce value, and start there- otherwise you are trying to fit a square peg (the architecture or contracting firm) into a round hole (the SPE).

The payoff for restructuring the construction services market, however, is huge. With a market that is built not on firms, but on individuals, talented people who act as free agents, mobilizing and re mobilizing for projects as needed, you get a highly dynamic marketplace where the best talent is able to collaborate laterally to bring higher quality, higher value buildings at lower costs. All of the overhead and waste that is inherent in any firm with its legacy costs and overhead, gets contained on a project by project basis. Would some project be less successful than others? Naturally, but in an SPE model, the cost of that failure would be borne by those who are responsible for it. What we have now is a model where the costs of failure are shifted and spread across an industry- if one project fails within a firm then those costs are borne by all of the other clients with successful projects- an arrangement that should really be unacceptable to most clients. SPE's could give the industry the opportunity for true cost containment- which reduces the risk and the cost to the market as a whole.

2010-11-05T11:30:00.000-07:00

Auburn CADC Portfolio Competition Guidelines

11.08.2010

1. Format Requirement

8 1/2” x 11”, single or double page spreads.

2. Submission Requirement

All entries will be posted to ISSUU.com. Candidates will post pdf files of portfolio submissions to the Auburn CADC Portfolio Competition group. Only entries that are posted to the site will be juried.

In order to post to the site candidates will need to sign up for an issuu account and follow instructions to post.

3. Suggested Criteria

An architect’s portfolio is a professional document that continues to evolve due to the changes in media and information technology. The primary use for the professional portfolio is in communicating the architects work in a clear and accessible way.

The portfolio competition is an opportunity for the student to begin to develop a professional identity through the creation of a portfolio. This years competition seeks to host the entries in a web based medium that is accessible and easy to use.

The judging criteria will be based on the quality of the work and the clarity of its presentation.

4. Suggested Resources

Grid Systems in Graphic Design by Josef Muller Brockmann.

Making and Breaking the Grid by Timothy Samara

Portfolio Design by Harold Linton. portfoliodesign.com/

5. To Enter

1. Create an account on issuu.com

2. Once logged in follow this link

3. Join the “Auburn Cadc Portfolio Competition” Group by clicking the Join button

4. Upload your pdf portfolio to issuu by clicking the “upload document” button at right side of the blue navigation bar

5. Title the document in this format “Last Name, First Name_Year level” ex. “Doe, Jane 3”

6. Enter all the required fields and click the upload button

7. Navigate back to the “Auburn Cadc Portfolio Competition” Group by clicking under “My Groups”

8. Click the blue “Add Something” Button and select your portfolio

6. Deadline

Entrants may post as many versions of the document up to the deadline of 12:00 Noon, Friday December, 10 2010.

Please limit your entry to 1 document. In the event that more than one document is posted, only the most recent document will be considered.

7. Prize

A Top prize of $2,500.00 will be awarded. Special prizes will be awarded at Jurors discretion.

2009-11-29T05:05:00.001-08:00

Document Standards and Design Practice

We've convened another effort on document standards in our office. I've been a part of several, over many years and at many firms. Standards committees can sometimes bring out the worst in people. Getting a group of architects to completely agree on anything, much less how to do their job is a lot like nailing jello to a wall, to quote John McCain.

This time, instead of delving into the minutiae of whether the height of a note ought to be 13/32" or merely 3/8", we decided that it might be better to begin our standards effort with a simple question:

What should a set of construction documents do and why?

It's a simple question, but I think it get's to the heart of what standards represent for an organization. Instead of answering the question, however, I'm going to try to bring the notion of standards into some context. I'd like to suggest that there are really three 'pure' models of document standards and that most firms tend to oscillate somewhere between these three. They are:

1. The Prescriptive Standard

The prescriptive standard looks at the documentation effort as a distinct and separate process from the design of the building. It attempts to codify certain specific rules that govern exactly what and how information is captured and communicated in the documents. It seeks to maximize efficiency in the creation of the documents. The process of documentation is structured in parallel; sections, for example, fit in a parallel series of slots that are organized broadly and are structured so that they are easily transferred from one part of the set to another.

Prescriptive Standards work best when you have a large organization that deals with a high volume of information that can be organized pretty much the same way. For example, imagine a multinational firm that designs hot dog stands all over the world. In order to deliver the same product, whether in China or Skokie, Illinois, the hot dog stand manufacturer sources the same parts, same machines, uniforms and so on to each site. The design firm's job wants to minimize the difference between each facility, to the greatest extent possible, and so will standardize both the form of the documents (what the set looks like) and their content. For this kind of organization, prescriptive document standards make a lot of sense.

2. The Performance Standard

The performance standard tries to codify the intent of the documents rather than its features. It is more concerned that all the documents produced by an organization perform a certain way rather than look the same. It may seek, for example, to maximize efficiency in the creation of documents or it might, alternately, develop documents that are more efficient from an ease of use standpoint.

The important thing about a per formative standard is that it lays out a way of thinking about documents. One way of thinking would be to limit the breadth of information described within the document set in way that limits the liability of a firm to the greatest extent possible. But another standard might emphasize the utility of a set on the construction site as the document metric.

Both of these extremes are worth discussing in some detail, but the main point here is that a performance standard doesn't necessarily set out how to achieve these goals, it only describes the document intent and grants the project teams the greatest amount of leeway possible to achieve them.

The performance standard would work best in a smaller, tightly integrated firm that can't really afford to spend a lot of overhead developing elaborate document standards. A firm like this might be involved in a lot of different building types which don't allow it the same economy of scale as a large organization doing a lot of repetitive work.

3. The Project Based Standard

The project based standard seeks to align the a project rather than any organization. It is attempts to tailor the set to a specific job effort that is trying to achieve specific goals, with the expectation that every job would develop its own job standard.

There isn't a lot of precedent for a pure application of this model- yet. There are two scenarios that I think might suggest an emergence of this kind of document standard into prevalence. The first is in the context of the Single Purpose Entity or SPE, which is one of the concepts utilized by the AIA's Integrated Project Delivery Contracts. SPE are basically legal entities that are created as partnerships between the owner, architect and contractor on a basis of mutual benefit and trust, whose sole purpose is to complete a building project. In this arrangement, the notion of a specifically tailored document that moves back and forth from the architect to the contractor and, ultimately, to the owner makes a great deal of sense. A deliverable in this context might look a lot like a construction set- on the other hand, it might just as easily by a Building Information Model that contains only the information that the contractor might say he needs formatted in a way to anticipate its use by the owner for her facilities management operations. All of this might be done without printing a single sheet of paper.

The other scenario (not mutually exclusive to the first) imagines building designed not by static firms but by ad-hoc teams of highly skilled freelance contractors. In this scenario, a highly dynamic services market supports a network of professionals that are convened to deliver specific projects.

The value of these three models is that they can provide some grounding for a firm undergoing a standards effort. There will probably never a 'pure' implementation of a standards model. But the models are a useful illustration of what standards might represent to firm. Ultimately, the way these three models are 'mixed' to form a working document standard within an organization says as much about a firm as the work itself.

2009-10-07T01:31:00.000-07:00

"faith based initiatives"

I spent some time recently with a friend who was about to get married. He was from a storied family-their progenitors had fought in the revolutionary war, and just about every war since. I didn't know them very well at all, in fact, I had some reservations about even attending. But I was very good friends with many who were attending the wedding and so I thought that it would be a worthwhile adventure.

The reception and rehearsal were to be held in their fathers house, which was built at the base of the grand Tetons in Wyoming, the kind of landscape that only seems possible in dreams. The house itself was something of a fantasy. It was a newly built, but had come out of an extended period of labor for the father and had represented an ongoing, almost ecumenical, negotiation between him and the architects on what a proper American house should be. It was an exquisite piece, although flawed in many ways. In a way, the house was the very embodiment of the father, with all of his possibilities and all of his failings.

The father was one of those characters. He did not have a first name- only a series of initials, which some how surrounded him with an impenetrable formality. This was reinforced by a thick mustache which masked his expression perfectly. You could not read his countenance for clues about what he meant, you had to wait for the words to issue from somewhere behind all of the facial hair, and then try to figure out the meaning. This constantly kept me off balance and a little bit intimidated, but it made for exhilarating conversation.

He had a story for every piece of furniture in this beautiful place. Especially the chairs. This one was brought over from England and this one was made in Massachussets by such and such a cabinet maker and then brought out west at incredible cost and risk and yet had survived generations. Tremendous stories. The old mans passions had been memorialized in every corner of this house, in every view of the surrounding landscape, in all of the arrangements of the furniture.

And yet. The estrangement of the three grown children from the father through years of formality and distance found its perfect expression in their attitudes about the house. Manifest in his love for it was all of the time, love and attention he had neglected to provide to them all those years. And so, underneath the polite chatter and the well rehearsed exchanges flowed a river of resentment. They didn't like it. It was too expensive, too excessive, vanity, a giant conversation peice so that the old man could prattle endlessly about his chairs and his guns and how they had crossed the Ohio to get here.

And yet even though these were my friends, I found that my sympathy aligned with the father after all. In my fantasy of it all, I imagined him building the house, working on it all of those years, in order to say what he could not say to his children. It was about what all fathers wish for their children- that they might remember his dreams, that they be kept safe, surrounded by beautiful familiar things but within sight of a mountaintop. That they have a story.

Architecture is a faith based initiative. When we build, we make the world again. With every new beginning, we labor in the hope that we can be the people we want to be instead of the people we are. And when we are done, we stand back in order to see a changed world.

2009-08-25T12:42:00.000-07:00

Revit to Visualizations 4: Adding Sweeps to Walls

So one of the big advantages to using Curtain Walls instead of Curtain Systems is that you can nest walls into them in a way that you can't with a Curtain System. This means that you can attach sweeps and reveals to your panels- which is what this tutorial goes over....

2009-08-20T12:30:00.001-07:00

Revit to Visualizations 3: Curtain Walls, Floors and Applying Material

So this tute goes over applying curtain walls and Materials to the model. Notice that I am using Curtain walls here instead of curtain systems: this will allow for more utility a little bit later on. . .

2009-08-13T15:38:00.000-07:00

Revit to Visualization II

This video covers taking the massing family into the project and applying materials to the faces.

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2009-08-12T12:15:00.000-07:00

Conceptual Modeling 1: Revit Mass Model

So here is a quick primer on pulling up a cad file into a massing study using the massing toolset in Revit.

There are a couple of notes to this. First, I attempted this workflow by starting a massing model as a conceptual massing family and then bringing it into Revit, but I'm pretty sure you can start an in-place mass in a new project itself and go from there. There maybe some issues and I think it is probably worth exploring the differences. But for now, I'm trying to hew to this workflow until I can suss out the pros and cons.

The other thing is that the massing toolset is wider and deeper than what I have gotten into here, and I will definetely post some more tutorials on some of the other features. My point here was to show how quickly and easily you can develop more or less conventional massing studies and push the process forward. This is about being able to transition from concept to viz in time to be able to double back and move into the next iteration.

2009-08-11T12:28:00.001-07:00

Conceptual Modeling: A sample workflow using Autocad, Revit 2010, 3d Studio and Photoshop

So I've been looking at getting some conceptual modeling done using some of the new Revit 2010 tools. One of the workflows we sometimes need to get done is to give a client or a prospective client a conceptual rendering that is based on a feasibility analysis. On the one hand, it is important at this point from our perspective to get the basic things right on the site: property lines, number of parking spaces, stairs and exits and gross square footage.

On the other hand, for various reasons, the client may need a conceptual image in order to illustrate the idea to potential partners, investors etc.

The point here is to give the idea a sense of realism, both functionally and aesthetically. This 'suspension of disbelief' becomes something very valuable to clients, particularly in the early phases of a project.

We typically aren't going to spend a lot of time on the design at this phase, but at same time, it is important that the piece is appealing and attractive. In a sense, the exercises is about finding a minimum threshold for the project, both functionally and aesthetically while maintaining some flexibility.

The other issue is about doing this fast. Now normally, you kind of do some of these things quickly, the material kind of gets put away and you start over when the project goes into the next phase.

The opportunity here is to get a little bit more utility out of this phase: if you can build a Revit model that is based on the feasibility study, if the image begins to explore some of the real issues with project and if you can maintain some of the integrity of the work, there is the potential that it can be an asset in the next series of iterations. So the upside of being able to make more out of this phase is real. This is what this exercise was trying to explore.

Above we see an early version using the new Revit 2010 conceptual mass modeling toolset.

Once we move the mass model into the Project workspace, applying 'bricks and mortar' to the massing is relatively easy. The powerful thing here from a project assesment perspective, is the ability to do quantities analysis quickly and accurately at this very early phase.

The other thing is that you can get a fair amount of mileage in terms of simple visualization from Revit itself. I'm not a huge fan of the Revit rendering interface, despite the inclusion of the mental ray rendering engine, but I do think it tends to hold its own very well relative to the kind of output you get out of sketch up. While it is harder to move as quickly as you can with sketchup, you can leverage the work in terms of documentation in a way that is difficult to do outside of Revit. Its not that everything about this is gravy, there are plenty of things about the interface that remain clunky, but I still think the scales tip to the up side.

With 3dStudio, you get to leverage the better lighting controls, animation and so on, but what is really valuable to me at this stage is the materials interface. I like to be able to spend time with the material maps, adjusting colors and easily swapping out materials. Also, the ability to add fairly good entourage quickly, re-use portions of old files, and evaluating daylighting really helps. There are several advanced features that relate to 3d studio I hadn't really combined with this kind of concept modeling- but it is fairly easy to see how the two tools can be leveraged powerfully. 3d studio is also an easy place to do some quick and dirty edits to the model, if you need something adjusted prior to outputting a rendering.

Finally, I think taking the results into photoship and being able to do quick 'post production' on them is invaluable. Adds a lot of bang quickly.

None of these steps are ideal in their isolation. You can always do a better rendering, a better Revit model, a better 3d Studio model without having to worry about being able to use these pieces in a coordinated way- but creating an integrated workflow allows you to get a lot more mileage out of the entire peice with just a little bit more work.

In the coming weeks I will be posting video tutorials of how we moved the study through each phase of the workflow.

2009-08-06T05:05:00.000-07:00

Rhonda

I downloaded the beta test of Rhonda this morning and played with it. Very cool.

Its a 3-d drawing app, so you are bascically sketching in 3d.

Above are a couple of test shots of my first attempt. Find out more at www. Rhondaforever.com

2009-06-19T03:58:00.000-07:00

Architecture and the Bubble

A friend and former teacher recently asked if I would be available to talk to recent graduates of my alma mater about the job market. I remember having a pretty...uncharitable reaction to this idea.

My feelings on the state of the profession and the job market are strong and extremely complicated. I'm not sure I have sorted them out yet, but given the state of the job market, which is quite bad, and the terrible situation that recent grads find themselves in, maybe it's time we all had a great big conversation about the economic meltdown and the profession. I think it's probably high time the profession did some soul searching.

Just to give you an idea of how bad things are out there, a very large, multinational firm we are working with just laid off 125 people a couple of weeks ago. This is on top of the 600 people that have already been let go. This is just one firm.

In the last 13 years I have worked at 7 firms. I've worked for a big multinational one with 400 people in one office, and I have worked for a sole proprietor. I've worked in the U.K. and the U.S. I've worked in the South and in the Mid-Atlantic, done developer driven work, medical, institutional- high and low design. No stararchitecture, just a lot of real firms doing real projects. I don't have a complete picture of every working condition in the profession, but I have more of an idea than some, albeit from the interns perpsective. By the way, when times are good, I would reccommend this career path to anyone, because it really gives you an idea of what you want and you get to see a lot of different ways, good and bad, that people run firms.

And this is one of the really important components of the conversation we need to be having right now- how do people run firms, particularly how they look at labor (which after all is what interns represent in our profession)?

And I would say the brutal truth is that large segment of the profession, of firms, don't treat labor very well. In fact, I would say that the abuse of labor, of interns, has almost been institutionalized in our profession. Some 'leaders', like Peter Eisenmann, brag about it. In the case of SANAA, surely one of the more exciting and progressive practices out there, working conditions are like something out of a Dickens story. In many cases, the more desirable the internship, the worse (not better) the intern is treated.

What modern profession incentivises its young people this way?

To add more insult to injury, most of these firms refuse to interview anyone who has not attended an ivy league program, and many of these kids have had to take on a huge amount of debt to finance their education.

The reason that this is all very relevant in light of the economy, is that the profession of architecture has in large part been one of the primary beneficiaries of the cheap money that characterized the bubble. Cheap money is the reason many of the Star architects were able to realize their work, it's the reason that many more firms who worked in the housing market did very well, particularly in the speculative housing sector. And so, one of the consequences of this, is that many leading firms were able to swell their ranks with young (and cheap) interns, who were for the most part dispensable.

I think this is an important thing to bear in mind, because all of that labor had to come from somewhere. One of the more painful truths about this story is that this great demand for labor was fed by the schools. In the 1990's and the early part of this decade, attendance at the architecture schools increased significantly. I will tell you that I, like many many students, benefitted greatly from this increase. But I will also tell you studio sizes in 1999, which was my fourth year of study, were at least twice the size they were when I started in 1994. At one point that year I had a desk in the hallway because there just wasn't any room left in the studio. Three visiting professors team taught a class of over 70 that year.

I think that, ultimately, I recieved a fantastic education at my school from some of the best faculty anywhere. My impression was, however, that studio sizes don't get that big that fast without losing something. And I think that many schools, like any institution that faces rapid growth, lost some of the quality in the kind of work the students did in that time. And I think that this was understood and largely tolerated (with grumbling) because there was a hungry labor market waiting for these kids when they got out.

In the memorable words of Chuck Prince "..as long as the music is playing you've got to get up and dance."

Once these graduates got out, what kind of work could they expect to do during the recent bubble(s)? To be sure, a lot of work that needed to get done was done in the last 15 years, particularly on our city cores. But in an environment where speculation exceeds demand, where everyone is trying to cash in as fast as they can, there was a lot of work done that didn't make a lot of sense, it was done quickly, it was done cheaply and it was done without a lot of thought. In ten years we will, I think, see a horrific spate of lawsuits by condominium owners over failures in the exterior envelope.

From my experience, again not exhaustive, I think that poor management practices in firms were widespread. When confronted with owners who made very unreasonable, profit driven, demands particularly with respect to schedule, firms didn't put up a fight. This is an understandable reaction to the 'music', but what is less understandable, more widespread and less often remarked on is that project teams often didn't grow with the demands placed on schedule. Teams were often allocated before the schedule was understood, and when the schedule contracted- teams pretty much stayed the same size. Why? Because firms that tended to do speculative work were overbooked, and didn't have a lot of contingency capacity. Also, despite the drive to have larger and larger classes, quality hires with the right kind of experience were expensive and hard to come by.

This actually highlights one of the problems of this kind of subtle response in academia to hiring conditions in the labor market. The schools will always be behind the curve when it comes to feeding the market, because if and when a market condition emerges where work needs to be done fast (like a speculative bubble), a firm is better off spending more on one hire with experience than several cheap recent grads. The porblem is that recent grads don't really know how to respond to a project setting out of school. That is one of the strange things about architectural education- you get out and you don't really know anything about how projects are really done and it takes several years before you are able to put a set of drawings together.

This is an aspect of the situation that I think needs to be well understood. In the majority of cases that I have seen, both as an intern and as a project architect, new graduates come into firms with what is at best a rudimentary knowledge of the toolset required for their work. CAD programs are, lets face it, the baseline tool that is the industry standard. Even within the industry, they are often used poorly and incorrectly because we still have a large number of managers and principals who are more comfortable with a drafting board. This is changing for the better, but slowly. What is not changing for the better, is the amount of investment required to use these tools correctly. It is large and largely concealed. When a software vendor wants to sell you a CAD program seat on a yearly subscription for over 5K a seat, that last thing they want to tell you is how much time and money you will need to spend to actually learn how to use it properly. And so many firms, forego that investment. When new hires are thrown into this mix, the results can verge on the disastrous. You get overworked, underpaid kids that are trying to respond to high stress project situations, drawing something they don't understand with a tool they don't know how to use. This cost the profession money, created widespread quality problem and contributed to lousy work experiences for interns.

Here's the larger point to all of this. Labor conditions in the construction industry are bad, hiring freezes are widespread and graduates are having a really hard time getting hired. This is a very difficult time and the profession may lose people to other career paths. Loss of real talent is a problem that we should try very hard to avoid. I'm pretty optimistic that this will end and passionate young people will find work in the profession. What I am more concerned about is what kind of profession will they return to? Will the profession be stronger, will it be smarter? Will we use this downturn to start making better choices about how we educate architectural students, how we give them the skills to really compete in an environment that will almost certainly be tougher than it has been the last few years?

2009-06-06T08:59:00.000-07:00

Le Krak de Chevalier in Syria

Islam

I thought I would wade in to the discussion that has followed Barack Obama's well received, if somewhat generic, speech to the Moslem World.

I was brought up as a kind of assimilationist moslem. Both my parents come from Alawite families along the Syrian and Lebanese coast, in the border area. My fathers family are from Tripoli in Lebanon, and my mother is from a village near Tartus, in Syria. It is a fascinating area. Both these cities are old and have seen empires come and go since time began. First the Phoenicians, then Persians and Greeks. Rome was there. And France and the Crusader states. From the village my grandfather lived in you can see the Krak de Chevalier, which is the great crusader fort that overlooks the volcanic plain where they still farm the rich black soil today.

At any rate, as a young child I never remember my family ever being religious in any way. In fact, we seemed to practice a kind of cosmopolitan civic religion. Beirut was kind of like that. Every one seemed to lace their Arabic with French terms, particularly if you were, or aspired to, be a of certain. . . station. Bonjourmerci. The elevator was always the ascenseur- I just thought that was the Arabic word for it. So, as you can imagine, celebrating the joyeaux noel was just part of the landscape and I remember as a child that everyone in my kindergarten got a present from papa noel when he came to visit us at the end of the year.

And what I never really knew was that we were part of a very small ethnic minority that practiced a sort of unorthodox hybridized religion that wasn't really strictly Islam (at least not to many moslems there) and wasn't really Christian either. You'd have to imagine that the indigenous farmers and peasants who lived in the area, had to over the years be extremely adaptive in their, shall we say, spiritual outlook. If you are going to get along with the people with weapons who seem to come along every hundred years or so, it is always better to be flexible. So over time I imagine they must have evolved a kind of bastardized philosophy that allowed them to get along with just about everyone.

In any event, the other thing about this religion, is that nobody really knows that much about it- even the people who are supposed to practice it are kind of shielded from whatever real doctrine is operative. Weird stuff.

So we were, religiously speaking, kind of like Unitarians in a way. We kind of had this progressive, we are all in this together people, anodyne, generic faith that must have been colored to a large extent by the knowledge that we had descended from those who had a lot to fear about being persecuted by people with power.

We later lived in the Persian Gulf. Of course, as we all know, the Islam there very different from the wavy gravy, get along Islam of the Mediterranean. It was there that I eventually realized that I personally wasn't that into organized religion of any sort- but that is another story.

In any event, what is kind of interesting to me, in light of Obama's overture to the Moslem world is that, despite the criticisms that he is standing down from a more activist role in changing the Middle East, I think that what he is trying to do is something fairly radical.

A lot was made of the religious inflection in they way George Bush governed, but his approach to Middle East policy was actually remarkable in its agnosticism. Bush wanted to see the Middle East in terms of the State. It was the most convenient and advantageous frame of reference for his set of goals.

But what is obvious is the most people in the modern middle east have, again I'll use that word, a hybridized frame of reference that is constantly negotiating between Arab, national, ethnic and religious identities. This is part of what frustrates people in trying to pin the region down in one way or another. It is not dis ingenuousness on the part of Arabs, it is just that people here live in a very complex place precisely for the same reason that we are so interested in it. Its geopolitical significance has made life very interesting there for a very long time.

Obama has decided to engage the middle east on at least two fronts and his opening move was an illustration of his eagerness to engage Islam as well as the nation-state. By doing so he is proposing that the religion do something fairly radical but also something for which there is a long and storied precedent in Islam, which is that it should innovate its way out of its problems. In fact one could argue that core foundation of the religion was a series of innovative social policies that were transformational in their impact on pre-Islamic societies.

These societies were very similar to what exists in the region today, a highly complex yet weak and divided somewhat homogeneous group constantly negotiating with the great powers that surround and threaten. You had the two great spiritual organizations of the time, Christianity and Judaism, that were spurring the development of great civilizational projects and yet the Arabs tribes were just sort of drifting along.

Eventually, I think that whatever the leadership in these tribes, the must have come to the realization what they needed was really a big idea. They needed a great narrative that could give the group a coherence and inspire their people to develop their own civilizational initiative. And that was was so powerful about what Mohammad did for this area.

The Prophet was able establish a kind of cultural baseline for the tribes, organize them, codify a kind of social set of best practices that people could agree on because they were organic to the people there and develop a coherent world view that eliminated the tribal conflict that had beset the area for generations. And in order to do this he had to be totally innovative, he had to completely re imagine the Arabic social construct and sell it to a diverse leadership. And when that didn't work, he had to engineer hostile takeovers of the holdouts.

But there had to be a compelling upside, because as we have discovered, people in this area know how to resist if their leadership doesn't buy in to the plan. There is no way that Islam could have survived if it didn't present an innovative way for people to work together.

I think that at some level, Obama realizes the innovative potential of religion and this is what he is trying to unlock.

I think the United States can probably have a strong hand in promoting a different kind of leadership in the region, one that recognizes the hybrid character of the middle eastern world view, and one that can spur an innovative re imagining of the social structure of the middle east. The upside of this I think could be a lasting partnership with the United States in an area of the world that continues to be vital and represents a continuing drain on the resources of this country.

It not that I think George Bush was ineffective in achieving a certain goal set in the Middle East- in the contrary, I think he was effective. It is just that his goal definition and strategy was enormously inefficient in terms of available resources. In my opinion, one of the by products of trying to conceal the resource drain represented by Bush's Middle East strategy, was a loose monetary policy that sought to mask the cost of the war under a veneer of financial innovation. We saw were that got us.

The possibility exists that we could probably outsource the management of the middle east various factions that would be happy to work with us- provided our ground rules are clear. This is what the ottoman Turks did for almost six hundred years. It is what the British and the French did, although somewhat less successfully. You can't control an area for six hundred years by force of arms alone, there has to be a long term strategy that works organically.

I think that there are different kinds of empires. The ones that last are the ones that can present innovative case for how things should work- and one that has a big local upside for the people you are trying to convince. We ought to go ahead and set our sights for the long term in the middle east- because if we don't we will be paying too much for our engagement there for a long time to come. We ought to form partnerships in the region that get people innovating their way out of the mess they are in. Islam will be a big part of strategy that stands a chance of success.

Text of Obamas speech is here, at the Huffington Post.

2009-03-29T07:16:00.000-07:00

What does Recovery Look Like?

This is the question posed by a new design competition, Imagining Recovery. It's a fascinating question and it will provide a needed opportunity for the design community to weigh in on the current financial crisis.

I think the most important aspect of this is the opportunity to provide a critique of the system itself. As Simon Johnson, Paul Krugman and others have been saying. The basic question is wether the current crisis is a crisis within the system or a crisis of the system itself.

I for one, do not believe it is the former. The very structure of the financial system itself will have to be reformed if we are to restore the country to sustainable growth. As a result, I think the the very nature of growth itself will have to be re-thought. But I'm a layman, not a financial expert- and the basis for my holding this belief has nothing to do with economics at all.

The underlying root of this is really a crisis of modernity- everything else flows outward from that essential problem. By modernity I mean the system of western thought, dominant since the enlightenment, that has been characterized by notions of progressivism, an alienation from the natural world and an a preference to classify and break down natural systems, the substition of man instead of faith at the ideological center of the world view and so on. And so this crisis within the system of thought, has I believe, led us to twin crises within modernity's two handmaidens, the nation-state (via the confrontation with non-state 'terrorism') and the capitalist order. The prospect for these two systems to survive in their present state is, I think, highly suspect.

So that is my grounding for all of this. Looking back to the financial crisis, we see, I think, a certain power structure, now foundering, that really is at the center of modern capitalist nation state.

Take a look at this visual from Pro-Publica:

It shows the distribution of Tarp money across individual institutions throughout the U.S. One of the things that is powerful about the image is that it situates, finally, how the abstract flows of globalization are actually grounded in real physical locations. It shows us geography of power.

A true recovery will have to look differently than this. A real recovery would not have the large concentrations of power (and risk) that this map illustrates.

Here's something Simon Johnson wrote in a very important article in the Atlantic :

Oversize institutions disproportionately influence public policy; the major banks we have today draw much of their power from being too big to fail. Nationalization and re-privatization would not change that; while the replacement of the bank executives who got us into this crisis would be just and sensible, ultimately, the swapping-out of one set of powerful managers for another would change only the names of the oligarchs.

Ideally, big banks should be sold in medium-size pieces, divided regionally [emphasis mine] or by type of business. Where this proves impractical—since we’ll want to sell the banks quickly—they could be sold whole, but with the requirement of being broken up within a short time. Banks that remain in private hands should also be subject to size limitations.

This may seem like a crude and arbitrary step, but it is the best way to limit the power of individual institutions in a sector that is essential to the economy as a whole. Of course, some people will complain about the “efficiency costs” of a more fragmented banking system, and these costs are real. But so are the costs when a bank that is too big to fail—a financial weapon of mass self-destruction—explodes. Anything that is too big to fail is too big to exist.

The point Johnson makes here has to do with the structure of power, its concentration, its geography. If we are to truly get ourselves out of this, then the supra-national power that has been concentrated in the areas shown on the maps will have to be spun out and devolved on a regional basis.

Regionally based power structures within the U.S. , instead of national of supranational ones, would provide for certain system redundancy that would make systemic risk less probable. The regions would also be more diverse, more competitive (since they would compete with each other for talent, resources and prominence), more diverse (instead of a one-size fits all national inflection, you would have differences), more innovative and more stable.

Regional power structures would also be smaller, investments would be made on a more local basis- distrubution systems would be more responsive to regional supply and demand needs and therefore less wasteful than say a global supply chain. Strong regions (and a weak central authority) would make us more sustainable, more stable, more self-reliant and less subject to a crisis of the central regime which is where we are now.

2009-03-18T20:33:00.000-07:00

It's the counterparties, Stupid.

This is what really saps confidence in Geithner. Why was he not finding a way to give AIG's trading partners a haircut?

What did the Treasury Secretary know and when did he know it?

2009-03-18T19:34:00.000-07:00

OUTRAGE

Before tonights rant begins, I'd like to set the mood, if you will, with a short anecdote about an only tangentially related topic. A blog foreplay of sorts (bloreplay?).

Being the proprieter of a Blog that nobody reads, I have a curious regard for something I will call the record. Like the internet is kind of this place called the record. Its a place where you can basically have this huge party if you like, but everthing you do is registered, preserved in binary, in this kind of public memory of you. And that is why it is the record.

So I imagine this record as being a really active place, almost like a huge traffic interchange. Ideas are thrown out of speeding cars into a digital ether. Right in the middle of the record sit the annals of our history.

But out here, on the fringe of the record, it is pretty quiet, and dark. The streetlights don't work and very few people ever drive through.

But even though the record doesn't really give a shit, I like to put into it as if it does.

So this post...this post I'd like to have for the record.

It is outrageous... Outrageous that we spent an entire news cycle talking about $165 million in bonus pay. It is an embarassment for the press that a week after the AIG counterparties are publicly outed, not a single news outlet is talking about this on their front pages?

I mean, and I never ever dreamed I would say this, but thank God for Eliot Spitzer!
(Also, shouts to the Fortune site, the Wall Street Journal and Gretchen Mortgensen.)

But the rest? Really. Pathetic.

50 BILLION dollars of the 170 BILLION dollars in AIG obligations have already left the building so that counterparties can be made whole at 100% of what is due. And now congress spends a day moaning about how much? Less than 1% of what we are on the hook for?

Is everyone in on this? What is going on here? Have we lost our collective mind?

Heres my Santelli moment:

Hey, congress...yeah you, and that means you dude. Loud, indignant guy. You. The one that wanted our money 'on the street, NOW'. That guy.

Why don't you try doing your job? Instead of the theatrics, why don't you call Mr. Liddy back down, yesterday, and ask him along with, I dunno, Thain, Blankfein, Paulson, and whoever is at Societe General and Duetsche Bank- if they care to join us- to explain, in a normal conversational tone, why it is that they should be made whole on the bets they took out that the entire world economy would do what it just did?

Are you guys listening out there?

Why are taxpayers paying these poeple everything they are asking for? Why is no one talking about this?

I'm asking- for the record.

2009-03-15T06:25:00.000-07:00

Recession looms, is consolidation coming?

A couple of UK sites have a terrific discussion on the recession and its portents here and here.

The question is centered on the nature of the Architecture that emerges from the recessionary heap. I wrote about this in an August 2007 post, just before the current bust became widely apparent. The lame and widespread refrain, most recently made by Cramer in his pathetic defense against John Stewart, that otherwise smart people never saw this coming is, I think, beyond the pale. This has been written on the wall for some time and the only real question was, for the people benefitting from the run-up to it, was how much were they going to get to walk away with.

Judging from todays headlines, it was quite a bit. In AIG's case, it was at least $50 Billion. Pretty good gig if you can get it.

And so, we are told, the era of the icon has ended. The architectural equivalent of the Masters of the Universe, will no longer be jet setting world capitals, endlessly one-upping each other as the polemical blow by blow in formal excess is documented in endless, glossy, double page spreads.

At least we can save a little paper.

No one is saying we will stop building. Even the in the UK, where the industry is going to be much harder hit than in the US, analysts don't see the wholesale collapse of the profession. But I think it would be a mistake to assume that there won't be structural changes in the market place.

For my money, I think that this will mean a wave of consolidation in the industry and by this I mean something more fundamental than firm mergers. Technology will be the catalyst that accelerates this trend.

Contractors have spent the last few years investing in building information technology at a much faster, much more agressive rate than most architecture firms. In many cases, they have begun to develop nascent architectural divisions within their organizations, hiring young architects to staff and develop their building information modeling capability. These are going to be young, capable and ambitious professionals who will inevitably push their new employers to provide vertically integrated design/ build/ manage services.

The lure for large clients to hire contractors with turnkey capability to handle retrofitting, renovation, design, engineering and facilities management will be huge. Any large contracting firm with reserves on hand to handle the downturn will be able to take advantage of the soft labor market to further develop their in-house design capacity.

This will make for a very challenging environment for independent firms. Firms that are not larg enough or diversified enough to handle the downturn will fail, adding more out of work designers to the labor pool. The best of these, the youngest and most capable with the technology will be happy to find well paying jobs at contractors, where hours and benefits relative to traditional firms will also be irresistable. This will accelerate the trend even further.

Building owners who are looking to retrofit extensive property holdings will want the reassurance that large contractors will able to offer, particularly if the can deliver agressive pricing and facilities management assistance. It is easy to imagine, given their margins, that design services will be thrown in for free- perhaps in the same way that preconstruction pricing is often done now. Maybe it will be done as marketing, where the design of the building is sold as a pitch. Design divisions could be involved in intensive two or three week charette processes until the job is sold, then handing the product off too much cheaper production divisions in the firm that are able to churn out the product with relatively little designer involvement.

The challenge for independent firms will be to continue to provide value added services and seek alliances with contractors, forming new joint ventures that can capitalize on this trend but on terms more favorable to the profession.

2008-12-31T17:47:00.000-08:00

either we figure out how to make peace in the middle east...

or bad things is fixin to happen, as they say down here.

y'all have a very safe, happy, healthy and peaceful new year.

2008-12-29T09:05:00.001-08:00

Sustainability: Charles Krauthammer (!)

Charles Krauthammer's piece on a net zero gas tax is on the cover of the current Weekly Standard. In the piece he makes the argument for the introduction of a federal gasoline tax of $1-$1.25, coupled with a cut in the payroll tax of roughly $14, resulting in a net-zero gas tax.

Krauthammer makes an excellent proposal, and I am not one who usually sits in his amen corner. It is as follows:

Here is how it works. The simultaneous enactment of two measures: A $1 increase in the federal gasoline tax--together with an immediate $14 a week reduction of the FICA tax. Indeed, that reduction in payroll tax should go into effect the preceding week, so that the upside of the swap (the cash from the payroll tax rebate) is in hand even before the downside (the tax) kicks in.

The math is simple. The average American buys roughly 14 gallons of gasoline a week. The $1 gas tax takes $14 out of his pocket. The reduction in payroll tax puts it right back. The average driver comes out even, and the government makes nothing on the transaction. (There are, of course, more drivers than workers--203 million vs. 163 million. The 10 million unemployed would receive the extra $14 in their unemployment insurance checks. And the elderly who drive--there are 30 million licensed drivers over 65--would receive it with their Social Security payments.)

Revenue neutrality is essential. No money is taken out of the economy. Washington doesn't get fatter. Nor does it get leaner. It is simply a transfer agent moving money from one activity (gasoline purchasing) to another (employment) with zero net revenue for the governmentt.

Read the entire article here.

Krauthammers article is important for several reasons. For one thing, his chief interest in getting the tax enacted has more to do with national security than environmentalism. He argues that the habit of the American consumer is, in fact, a more powerful projection of national power than the expenditure of military might. By harnessing consumer power, the United States can do more damage to the economies adversarial regimes such as Russia, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia then any military confrontation, simply by depriving them of the economic fuel oil revenue represents. This radical projection of soft power is an important idea made even more relevant by its promotion by a conservative intellectual.

Second, Krauthammer's mechanism for getting this done is a tax increase instead of regulation. He would rather see an increase introduced as a means to a market response (more fuel efficient cars, more public transportation), rather than a government mandate (CAFTA fuel efficiency standards). This should make sense to people. In fact, in Sweden, for example, this has been the approach they have taken for decades. Europeans never bothered to tell the car companies how to make their cars, they just made it really expensive for people to waste gasoline, and made sure that the public had some real choice.

Which brings me to another point. The problem we are having with the auto industry today has been one of precisely too much government intervention. Ever since the end of the second world war, American policy has been relentless in its intervention in favor of the auto industry. We built the highway system, obviated the need for passenger rail and bus systems, favored car dominated suburban development through huge government programs such as the G.I. Bill. In the last five years, we have financed a disastrous expansion of home ownership which has overwhelmingly favored the suburban home market.

For the last 50 years, there has only been one mode of local transit for the majority of American consumers, and that has been the automobile. This is no accident of the free market, it is the very definition of government intervention. Our foreign policy in the middle east has been conducted with the express goal of ensuring that the fuel that feeds this kind of urban development is secure, The result has been a monoculture, a vast landscape where the American consumer has basically no other way to get around, even if her or she wanted to.

The relationship between the auto industry and government policy is made even worse by bizarre interventions such as CAFTA, which mandates auto fleet standards. Even as this kind of policy fails to address the structural problems of car dependence, it provide the needed political cover and a useful diversion from the real issue.

Krauthammer's point here is that governments role should be to prod the invisible hand and help create the market conditions that lead to the national objective. But the larger implication is that the long and now tragic marriage of federal policy and the auto industry should be allowed to end.

2008-12-26T19:39:00.000-08:00

New Years Wish Essay

New Years Wish Essays are great for when you are in between ideas. Plus, its New Year.

Here's mine:

Recognizing the enormity of the challenges we face, as nations, President Obama's first act of public diplomacy is to call on the international community to suspend all hostilities as a gesture of goodwill between nations. He will then ask that all nations convene, at the appropriate time, a world summit to discuss solutions to our common problems, chief of which would be the environmental crisis. This would be attended at the highest levels with the explicit understanding that all issues between members would be open for discussion and negotiation.

Response would, of course, be overwhelmingly positive. The world public would have no problem understanding that should the environmental crisis be severe, it would threaten every member of the human family. Their leaders would have no problem undestanding that an adverse environmental outcome would destroy the very fabric of the nation state.

And so we would begin 2009 with a vast retooling. Countries liberated from the expense of defense and war-fighting, would be able to concentrate the might of the state on the largest environmental engineering project ever concieved.

And we would all start to actually talk to each other. Not to foreclose on the possibility of violence- just simply to actually talk.

I wonder what we would say?

2008-12-18T05:05:00.002-08:00

Sustainability: Ed Mazria

Ed Mazria of Architecture 2030 is putting forward an idea worth doing.

The "2030 Challenge Stimulus Plan" ties generous incentives for mortgage refinancing to retrofitting and building energy efficient homes. By retrofitting an existing home, or building a more efficient new home, homeowners can take advantage of mortgage rates as low as 2%.

The plan is a very smart way to leverage the U.S. governments new position as lender of last (and first) resort, in order to stimulate new investment in housing stock. The state has some clear interests here in modernizing the housing sector; it would be a down payment on long term energy efficiency, reducing emmissions and stimulating the housing construction sector.

Heres a breakdown on what is being proposed:

Existing Housing

Mortgage Interest Rate Efficiency Requirement (Energy Savings)

4.5% 30% below code

4.0% 50% below code

3.0% 75% below code

2.0% Carbon neutral

New Housing

Mortgage Interest Rate Efficiency Requirement (Energy Savings)

5.0% 30% below code

4.5% 50% below code

3.5% 75% below code

3.0% Carbon neutral

On commercial buildings, the incentive is tied to an accelerated depreciation

Renovated Buildings

Accelerated Depreciation Efficiency Requirement (Energy Savings)

4 years 30% below code

3 years 50% below code

2 years 75% below code

1 year Carbon neutral

Commercial Buildings

Accelerated Depreciation Efficiency Requirement (Energy Savings)

8 years 30% below code

6 years 50% below code

4 years 75% below code

2 years Carbon neutral

This is an excellent plan. It would be good for the country and good for architecture. We need to debate and support this plan vigorously.

I will be providing more on this plan as I find it.

In the meantime, you can read it here.

2008-12-18T05:05:00.001-08:00

Sustainability: Heat

Frontline has a done a pretty good job of developing a survey program on carbon emissions and energy. It covers a large amount of ground in a short time, touching on issues like oil, politics, cars, ethanol, wind and nuclear power among others.

It's a good program and it is worth taking some time to watch. You can see it in its entirety here. Frontline always does a good job of getting a lot of different voices to speak frankly on the issues.

The program aired in October and it is fascinating to see how much the landscape has changed since then. Oil has dropped almost $100 a barrel (if not more) and we are now in some kind of economic cataclysm, if you listen to the talking heads.

Although the landscape has shifted, the salient issues covered in the show are still current, and will definitely be among the constellations of problems the Obama administration will confront. It will be interesting now to see what happens with Steven Chu now at Energy.

But as good as the program at covering this ground, and as much as I love Frontline, I thought that the program missed the point somewhat. It repeats some mistakes that, unfortunately, undermine the sustainability conversation.

First, and most importantly, it stays focused on supply. Supply is only part of the problem, and perhaps the smaller part. Investment in new infrastructure that is designed to solely to deliver more supply is at best an incomplete project and at worst would be like using our last lifeline to hang ourselves. The infrastructure of the future must also deliver a reduction in demand. We must begin to think about living differently on a massive scale.

Second, the program did not create a clear link between sustainability (which to me is the superset that contains carbon and energy) and the quality of life. Quality of life might be one of the few roads to a broad based national consensus. The polar ice caps are not local issues, but local issues that center on quality of life may be the key to achieving changes with any real global benefit.

In order to acheive real progress, particularly in a city like Birmingham, these larger global issues of carbon emissions might most effectively be tied to locally driven issues that are going to be far more immediate to local constituencies.

Air quality, for example, is an issue that might become pretty important here. There are several problems, related to air quality that pose distinct challenges at local level. First, air quality can have profoundly negative consequences that have really nothing to do with global warming. Birmingham, for example, is struggling with air contaminants that include arsenic and mercury that far exceed EPA standards. We also have a particulate and ozone problems that are, almost literally, second to none.

Second, air is fairly difficult to contain- even if its worst effects are somewhat localized. Ultimately, neither rich nor poor will be able to escape its implications.

Finally, Air pollution presents us with profoundly difficult linkages that affect every sphere of urban life- from problems of social equity in the location of source contamination to the very nature of the urban fabric and the configuration of the city relative to its industrial infrastructure. These issues go to the heart of Birminghams existence as a city and will be difficult to even acknowledge, much less resolve.

These local issues have a much more immediate horizon to the city inhabitant than anything that 'globalized green culture' can offer. And yet, positive movement on this local track would likely result in progress on a global level.

The point here is that a locally driven approach will be far more likely to succeed, leveraging concerns about quality of life, environmental and social equity, and the stigma of being 'dirty' and 'backwards'. This approach is far more likely to capture the imagination of a more conservative public than the approach of 'an inconvenient truth', which tends to polarize public discourse in the south.

In the next post, we will look at one proposal that attempts to resolve these larger global issues with a locally driven approach by leveraging federal policy.

2008-12-13T06:42:00.000-08:00

We've been talking about Buckminster Fuller a fair amount in Bay One.

I was tooling around in London eight years ago, working freelance at Broadway Malyan when a colleague suggested I take a look the end of the year show at the Bartlett, since Norman Foster was giving the end of the year lecture there. I'd never heard of the Bartlett and I had no idea that one of my hero's, 60's bad boy extraordinaire Peter Cook was then director of the program.

Turned out, going to see the end of the year show at the Bartlett was a little like dying and going to architecture school heaven. It was like they had taken every really good architecture student they could get their hands on, locked them in a room, given them an unlimited supply of mind blowing substances, and not let them out until they had overloaded the place with the most unbelievable work you ever saw. For someone who had until then floated along thinking that I had been pretty good at it while I was in school, it was a truly humbling and inspiring experience. These kids were not messing around.

I also really appreciated the Foster lecture. I had been at a Jeff Kipnis lecture a few years before at Columbia- and Kipnis was definetely too cool for school. Everyone there was just really up on the latest references. He started his show with a clip from Stanley Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket" and it just took off from there. The kids were totally decked out in the latest black with requisite accessories.

What I liked about Foster (and I have to tell you, I showed up with the full compliment of body peircings) was that he was boring. There he was in one of the most dynamic enviroments you could imagine, literally swamped in London youth culture, which at the time (2001) was just wall to wall with energy and exuberance, and he was talking about making 'good urban spaces'. I think he actually showed a Nolli plan of London at one point.

So I really liked that. I liked how he really didn't pander to the crowd. I liked how someone could really be at the top of his game, which he undoubtedly was at the time, and still talk basics like it really mattered. It just made me respect him and appreciate his humility, even though Fosters by then had really already become an International Corporate Brand.

We'v been reading Buckminster Fuller's critical path in our office and talking about Fullers legacy a lot lately. I remember Foster starting his lecture with Fuller and talking a lot about how much he owed him and how he saw his work as a continuation of Fuller's legacy.

So I wanted to include this lucture by Foster. I think there are a couple of things worth paying attention to here. One is the way he talks about Fuller. It's an almost verbatim replay of his talk at the Barlett. Also, note his emphasis on sustainability as it relates to infrastructure. This has been gaining a lot of prominence lately, but Foster is one of the few architects who has really made infrastructure scale work part of his portfolio.

While his practice has definetely evolved into something quite different from where it was at the outset, I think Foster has some important insight as someone who has spent a lot of time thinking through issues of sustainability

2008-09-05T18:56:00.000-07:00

johnny, we hardly knew ye.

in order for john mccain to win, he will now have to set fire to the republican party.

i just had to drop a line on this, it's almost shakespearian in its depth. for one thing, i think i may have just slightly fallen in love with john mccain. but sadly, its a tragic story.

we were talking about (what else?) the convention at lunch today and a couple of friends, whom i will describe as being somewhat rabid democrats, remarked on how much the words fight had been included in mccains speech. i agreed, but i think my take might have been somewhat different.

when i listened to last nights speech again, i think i heard it more. but my read is, for what its worth, that the subtext is not what it appears to be on surface. to me, mccain's speech last night amounted to a declaration of war. . . against his own party. palin's qualifacations, although fair game, are not the central issue.

the real story to me is mccains attack on the republican party establishment. that was the real fight. i think it was an angry speech, as it should have been.

for one thing, if you look at the story slightly askance, you could say that mccain was severely humiliated last week. the most damaging story of the last two weeks is the possibility that karl rove vetoed mccains original two choices for veep: joe lieberman and tom ridge. if this was indeed true, it would mean that john mccain is a nominee who is unable to unite his own party. how does he intend to unite the nation?

obviously, he didn't set the agenda at the convention. cindy mccain pretty much told us: "john hates to talk about himself." for the first three days, it was anything but mccain in tone and substance. the relentless emphasis on persona, the reduction of a career in the senate to mere footnote relative the vietnam story, the overly strident partisanship, the airing of the dirty laundry with rove all served to undermine mccains credibility on ever delivering a reformed republican party.

had it truly been in keeping with mccains maverick image, we would have had rudly juliani and fred thomspon walk out and telling us specifically that they were there to support not the candidate, but his entire reform agenda. rudy the refomer- that would have been truly impressive. instead, speakers like rudy and romni wen't out of their way to be strident, as if rubbing salt to the wound he suffered by rove.

i truly think that john mccain considers himself at war with the bush wing of the party establishment, and in his speech, he threw down the gauntlet. a massacre in the halls of the party by mccains own hands is a mandate that voters might be willing to consider.

the problem is that prospect, as delightful as it might seem, is not the reason why people elect you to be president. in fact, it is the price you have to pay just to get considered. the reason why mccain will lose is that voters are in no mood to be patient. we know we have problems and we want to get in with solving them.

the public flogging of the rove faction by an energized and confident mccain party leadership would almost certainly restore confidence in his ability to take on meaningful risk and put country first. absent total reform of the republican party posture before the election, mccain will not be a credible change candidate.

2008-08-20T03:49:00.000-07:00

this is one from the posts "Energy Wire" blog. Steve Mufson writes on the implications of the Georgia crisis on oil supply to Europe and the relationship to Iran.

Plenty of Pipeline Options. All Bad

Commentators have been quick to point out that Russia's defeat of Georgia has pretty much killed the chances that new oil and gas pipelines will be built to increase the security of supplies to Europe. It's clear that there is little to stop Russia from rolling its forces up to the existing pipeline or knocking it out of commission if it wanted to. The Washington Post's Steve Pearlstein even suggested that demonstrating the pipeline's vulnerability may have been one of the underlying motives for the Russian incursion.

The United States has been promoting the idea of pipeline routes skirting Russia as a way to promote European energy security, but the chances of making that work have always been slim. The reason: The United States has been simultaneously trying to keep Iran, the world's other major holder of natural gas reserves, out of world markets and out of alternate pipeline networks. Without the Iran card, it's very difficult to win a pipeline game against Russia.

The U.S. has long been pushing for oil and natural gas pipelines from the Caspian Basin that would bypass Russia, especially via Georgia. The current Georgia pipeline began in the late 1990s as a project to carry the estimated 35 billion barrels of oil, and natural gas, from the Caspian Sea area to European markets. One current line, the Baku-Tblisis-Cyhan line, runs through Georgia and then on to Turkey's Mediterranean coast for shipment. Another oil line ends up at the Georgian port of Supsa, which the Russian navy blockaded. A proposed natural gas line, called Nabucco, would go through Georgia to Austria, reducing Europe's heavy dependence on Russian natural gas pipelines.

Was it ever possible for a non-Russian natural gas pipeline route from the Caspian basin to supply enough gas to free Europe from Russia's grip? Not likely given Europe's large needs. Moreover, Iran has perhaps the biggest natural gas reserves outside Russia, and the United States has been simultaneously trying to block any expansion of Iranian natural gas exports. It's hard to think realistically about supplying enough natural gas to the world without either of the countries with the biggest reserves.

One European oil company executive told me today that the Nabucco line, named after a Verdi opera, was simply "not a doable project because there is not enough gas to justify the investment" -- at least without Iranian gas coming into it. "The only thing that can make it viable is by using Iranian gas," he continued. Otherwise, he said, it is "pie in the sky." American policy makers, he said, "want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to keep Europe from using Russian gas and they want to keep Iran in a corner too."

Finally, if the United States is trying to marginalize Russia and Iran, that means a big role not only for the Caspian line but also for the capital-intensive liquefied natural gas projects in Qatar. Will Europe feel more secure by building a new natural gas dependency on the Persian Gulf?

Suddenly the pipelines that run through Georgia seem like just another facet of global energy insecurity rather than enhanced security. Oil and gas experts are fond of saying that energy security lies in diversity.
But especially when it comes to natural gas, achieving enough diversity of supply to feel secure may be impossible.

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Posted by Steven Mufson on August 19, 2008 6:27 PM

2008-08-17T07:53:00.001-07:00

Sustainability 1: Policy Infrastructure

GA Studio has been looking at sustainability issues as they apply to Birmingham. One thing I've learned during this exercise is that sustainability as a concept is extremely vague, almost intentionally vague. I think that this vagueness will be problematic politically as the national conversation on green issues develops.

It's certainly been a problem for us. One of the issues we've encountered in our research is that there does not exist a policy infrastructure that allows for the development of a locally driven, basket of initiatives that could tackle sustainability issues. The predominant conversation on green issues has been about an initiative on a national scale, an energy 'Manhattan project' is one popular term. But the truth is that meaningful implementation of any sustainability policy is going to happen on an urban and regional level, and ideally would be driven locally. The very notion of sustainability implies that policy has to become attuned to local issues, climate, industry and political reality in a way that national policy can't. This is where the bottom falls out of the local policy armature.

While it always makes sense to look at sustainability as a whole system, a social ecology that takes into account economics, the environment and the social character of a region, the fact is that in every case, certain issues will emerge as central problems in one region that aren't a in another. Ultimately, sustainability as a complete idea means that resources that are abundant in one area, say water or excess power capacity, are diverted to areas that are short. So, for example, we have a national water pipeline that brings water from the pacific northwest to Nevada, or from Maine to Georgia. The power grid would be balanced to achieve maximum efficiency and eliminate inefficiencies casued by peak and off peak use by running it at a constant rate and supplying daylight and nighttime areas of the world with one grid. Thats certainly the Buckminster Fuller vision of sustainability and I'm not questioning its technical viability. Political viability, unfortunately, seems like another matter altogether.

In the meantime what we have is a vague national consensus that the public is interested in sustainability and it looks like, for the first time, corporations are to step up and supply it for a cost. This is a welcome development.

In order for this consensus to meaningfully impact peoples lives, local problems must be confronted. This might suggest momentarily detaching ourselves from the totally integrative strategy of a national or world approach and looking for local, tactical gains. This is where we the investment in a local policy framework is needed.

In Birmingham, our two biggest single issues are water and air. While these issues can definitely by seen through the lens of sustainability, they can also be properly addressed as quality of life issues as well. Our research clearly led us to identify the major outlines of these problems: Birmingham ranks consistently in the top 5 metro areas in the country for air-borne particulate and ozone pollution- standing neck and neck with cities like Pittsburgh and Los Angeles.

Meanwhile, the effects of our ongoing regional water problems are profound. We have a long term supply problem. While local government forecasting assumes that new sources will become available in the future, it does not account for additional growth in the areas that border us- nor does it try to address the issue by calling for real water conservation initiatives. In the meantime, frequent drought conditions have lead to a prolonged legal battle between our state and its neighbors over water rights. In trying to solve a treatment capacity problem, Jefferson county issued millions of dollars worth of municipal bonds that it now says it cannot pay- it is now likely that it will need to file for the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history in order to extricate itself from the crisis.

Just thinking critically about these two locally driven, isolated problems is a challenge. What was interesting for us was that despite trying to look at these problems in isolation, we kept returning to an integrated approach. We can't really understand air quality without understanding economics, industry, housing and transportation patterns. We can't look at water without looking at patterns of growth and development, zoning and housing at a regional and sub-regional level.

I am not sure what would be required to solve these problems. Maybe they are unsolvable. I am not sure that the tools exist to even look at the problems effectively. For one thing, I don't if anyone in local office has authority to look at the metro wide region and set a target or enforce one.

Most importantly, there isn't really sufficient public awareness of what the problems really are- and even where there is, it is hard for people to distinguish what the real issues are.

Take air quality for example: a frequently remarked statistic in this area is that Birmingham commuters drive more miles than many other cities. But the fact is that despite the contribution of cars to our air quality problems, transportation alone fails to account for the poor quality of our air. We also have just north-west of here, a coal fired power plant that is amongst the dirtiest in the country. Reducing gasoline consumption would not solve the entire problem. To what extent is coal power specifically, but industry broadly a contributor? How much of a premium are we willing to pay for clean air? What are the societal costs we are incurring by not cleaning it up? How much childhood asthma? How many bad air days? And who does the air belong to? Is it really inexhaustible? Or is it, like water, something precious, something that is ultimately finite in its purest state?

We have entered a decisive moment in the way the public look at these issues. Resolving them in a way that does not diminish for our children the quality of life we take for granted could require redefining the very concept of citizenship in our time. We should spare no effort in facilitating a public conversation about the nature and extent of these changes.

2008-06-14T09:25:00.000-07:00

tim russert

i wanted to take a few words today to mark the sudden and untimely death of the journalist tim russert, who died friday.

sometimes i think we live in unfortunate times. we are so beset by problems, problems so intractable, so overwhelming that they very act of thinking about them is almost physically uncomfortable.

but despite that, i really don't think the interpretation that many people are truly hungry for solutions is true. i think that what people are looking for are authentic voices. the rarest thing today is the voice that can take our fractured narrative and make it whole in a way that is recognizable as truth.

tim russert was one of those voices and we are all the poorer for its silence.

2008-03-14T09:43:00.000-07:00

peter eisenman is a fat, irrelevant has-been.

see below, from eikongraphia:

In response to the deleted post here at Eikongraphia about the working conditions as an unpaid intern at SANAA, Matthew Allen has send me the following conversation between Peter Eisenman and Jeffrey Kipnis. It’s the fourth of December 2007, GSD Harvard:

Audience: ”I would really appreciate it if you could give us your perspective on the employment of unpaid interns.”

Peter Eisenman: “I think that I want to answer the question clearly because, first of all, it’s a practice that occurs in journalism, it occurs in art, it occurs in film, et cetera. I know more people that are unpaid interns, that want to get experience. First of all, we are not allowed to pay people without work permits and most of our unpaid interns are in fact foreign workers, and the way you get into our office, is - an internship is three months, you can’t do anything for three months anyway - and then we usually hire those people who survive, et cetera, and pay them, and get them working papers, and get them into graduate school, and give them seminars, et cetera. So, I don’t want to even deign to even give that question - because it was meant in a kind of snarky way.”
Jeffrey Kipnis: “No it was not!”

Peter Eisenman: “It was! It was meant snarkily.”

Jeffrey Kipnis: “I don’t think it was.”

Peter Eisenman: “I want to respond to it and say: thank god for people who are unpaid
interns. When I started in architecture, I was an unpaid intern. I think the practice is fabulous. People who move up in the world all start as unpaid inters. Thank you.”

Jeffrey Kipnis, pointing to Jacques Herzog: “They don’t have any unpaid interns.”
Peter Eisenman: “No. They only pay people.”

What a bloviating, elitist clown.

2008-02-17T13:41:00.000-08:00

Neighborhoods and Smart Growth

Birmingham should be taking advantage of the conditions in the housing market to encourage small scale redevelopment of existing neighborhoods in a way that preserves their character. An ideal way to do this is to encourage the use of accessory dwelling units, though zoning and legislation. An accessory dwelling unit is an independent housing units created within a preexisting single family home or on its lot and are typically known as in-law suites or pool or carriage houses.

A.D.U.'s benefit a neighborhood in a number of ways. First, they represent additional investment in existing housing stock in a way that does not fundamentally alter the character of a neighborhood. These units provide additional neighborhood density because they are typically worked into the existing envelope of a house, such as an attic space, or are located in a separate structure at the end of a lot.

Many, if not most, of the lots in the inner suburb neighborhoods around Birmingham are longer than they are wide, typically around 100 ft. or more. These lots are usually served by a network of well maintained alleys which form a secondary transportation network. The addition of A.D.U's at the rear edge of a lot simply adds another layer of inhabitation along infrastructure that already exists. These dwellings encourage smarter, denser growth without involving wholesale neighborhood redevelopment and increase the value of a property without resorting to expensive and over scaled new homes and additions.

Second, A.D.U.s represent an economic opportunity for homeowners, municipalities and job seekers. For the homeowner, an A.D.U. is latent income in the form of rent, than can be used to offset the cost of a mortgage. In the job seekers case, renting an A.D.U. from a family, gives a young person the opportunity to live in a neighborhood without buying a house there. As the family ages and changes, the use of the accessory dwelling unit adapts to complement the changing circumstance, at times a workshop, a rental, a flat for a son or daughter, or an additional source of income for retirees.

Third, A.D.U.'s encourage the long term health of a community by maintaining its demographic diversity and providing seniors an opportunity to age in place. A retiree can use these units to supplant their income and gain a measure of security and companionship by making the unit available to a young person. Alternately, a unit can be made available to a older family member, giving families more options for housing ageing loved ones.

Furthermore, the construction of A.D.U.'s would act as an economic stimulant, benefiting both the local residential construction market and regional manufacturing. New modular construction technologies have the potential to make these kinds of projects available to homeowners at previously unheard of prices and at a much higher quality than previously available.

Legislative and Zoning initiatives promoting the use of A.D.U.'s are a good way to spur community growth while maintaining continuity and diversity. State and local authorities should take another look at zoning laws and legislation with an eye to promoting this kind of development. Massachusetts and California think this a good idea and have developed initiatives to encourage their construction. So does the AARP, which has developed model legislation for localities to adopt. Find it here.

2008-02-03T13:51:00.001-08:00

Sustainability and the Market

I was thinking about this on a family visit back home to North Atlanta last week. As we drove through a formerly wooded area on our way back, we saw yet another tract of land where the pines were being cleared for another subdivision. This area is an hour and a half outside of downtown Atlanta.

It struck me that it would be very hard to articulate a rationale for leaving the land untouched to this particular landowner. On the one hand, arguing for land, water and air conservation makes a lot sense in the abstract, but making the point to a particular land owner over a particular tract of land would be difficult. The reason has to do with opportunity cost of not developing the land- it is very difficult to resist the pull of the market when parcels around you are being developed and money is being made.

So, the issue has to do with the land development market. If the market is moving forward, any landowner would want to be part of that movement. The market acts like a giant magnet (or a black hole) collapsing everything surrounding it inexorably to its center. An appeal to conscience might be enough to stop development on an individual basis, but would not really change the underlying structure of suburban development.

Another approach would be to create a sufficient counterforce, also market driven, that would encourage conservation and thereby slow the pull. The effects of this could be localized so that the effect would be extremely strong in areas that are relatively less dense and weaker in higher density areas.

Carbon Markets are a perfect application of this idea. In a Carbon Market, carbon emitters trade unused carbon credits. If Polluter A over performs against a carbon benchmark, he can sell his excess credits to polluter B, who will not meet her benchmarks this year, and will require additional carbon credits to offset her excess emissions. The genius of this idea is that it does not depend on restrictions to get the pollution down, it instead introduces an inversion to the normal market calculus. Usually, markets reward companies for doing something, introducing a product, providing a service. In this case, the market puts a value on not doing something, in this case polluting.

So why not trade a Regional Land Conservation credit? Similar to carbon markets already in place, a Land Conservation market like this would be structured to achieve a certain density of population at a certain date. Land Conservation offsets would then be issued yearly, so that the a landowner who chose not to develop their land would be able to able to derive a market value from their conservation. Again, the point here is to create a demand for conservation without introducing government restriction. In order to target development in particular areas, the value of a credit can be further weighted against the amount of infrastructure cost required to realize a project so that land development in higher density areas is rewarded through a lighter offset requirement.

Two applications of this idea merit further study. The first is the South Carolina Conservation exchange, which trades tax credits that are generated through the allocation of conservation easements for undeveloped property. For more, see http://www.conservesc.com/faq.htm . The second is a zoning application called Density Credit Transfer. An example is here

A market driven approach to regional land development, in an area with a land surplus (such as ours), would introduce a mechanism to spur efficient, sustainable development. Such a market would not be a sufficient condition for achieving regional sustainability, but could be a necessary first step to introducing an alternative economic model for realizing sustainable growth.

2007-08-11T12:37:00.000-07:00

Icon Magazine (whoever they are) get it right.

Again, the trusty Archinect pick up this line from Icon magazine (which is, according to them at least, one of the 'world's finest design magazines'. And modest too): Why design needs a recession.

They pretty much nail it:

We live in affluent times. From DVD players to affordable Scandinavian furniture, our material needs have largely been met. Consequently, designers have stopped focusing on what people might need. The new potential of the discipline to be a pure form of expression or even social critique is resulting in interesting work by a minority of designers, while the majority is churning out useless, disposable pap based on our insatiable appetite for novelty. Design is in a decadent phase that won’t abate until we are forced to rediscover what it is that we need.

The flood is probably coming and the current crew, the ones who began to break out in the 70's, will not likely survive it. It will be an ultimately ironic passing, I think, if their careers are bookended by recession.

I think that Icon is asking the right question- 'what do we need?'. But the answer is not elusive. Architectural theory, particularly in America, has been stuck in a peculiar rut now for probably the last 30 years. It's champions have become victims of the very affluence they have at times claimed to 'resist'. For better or for worse this era is coming to a close far sooner than some would realize or like.

We are now at a point where we are opening a new project for Architecture where we begin to confront the problem of scarcity. It will be difficult.

The architecture that develops out of this will have to drop the rhetorical flourishes. There will be some demand for work but the environment will be tough. In order to navigate successfully architects will have to be more attuned to regional needs than international trends- which means that low growth regions will be an unpleasant place to be. In high growth regions, there will be an emphasis on infrastructure, technology, resource management and the return of a regional manufacturing base. Regions and sub-regions with good growth will become more competitive at recruiting the best talent from other areas and will seek to develop ways of differentiating themselves through quality of life- which means investment in schools, local infrastructure and public amenities.

I think that what this means is that we will begin to see, from China to the American South the emergence of home grown regional architectures that are implicitly 'anti-gobalist'. There will greater differentiation and variety of work but also greater competition for both commissions and talent. It will be a very different place from where we are now. So, if you happen to like seeing current batch of luminaries build their temples to self-referential irony- enjoy it. It won't last long.

2007-08-04T10:57:00.000-07:00

Eisenman and Koolhaas: Crisis and Urgency (again)

The ever useful Archinect.com posted an item recently on a recent symposium hosted by Phyllis Lambert at the Canadian Center for Architecture.

The item was reported in architecture week, find it here

Naturally you can't have an international symposium on architecture without a presentation on recent work by the ubiquitous Eisenman and Koolhaas.

I don't know about you but I think they are starting to feel the heat. Eisenman denied it, but Koolhass was more frank:

discussing the death of the icon — "partly due to ridicule, partly to overdose and certainly [connected to] money" — and the dilemma this represents for architects.

"If you look back over the past 2,000 years, architecture dignified civic and public life. Then the market economy happened, replacing all former values and erasing almost all ideology over the entire world. What it represents for all of us today is an invitation to simply be extravagant and spectacular. It will not be subtle...

It is not always clear whether we are using our position to engage in an intellectual discourse or an incredible ego free-for-all. Unfortunately, we have not been able to provide any dignity to the profession due to our complete technical inability to conquer market pressures and our willingness to be totally manipulated . . .

The work we do is no longer mutually reinforcing, but I would say that any accumulation is counterproductive, to the point that each new addition reduces the sum's value. . . In addition, we of course work enthusiastically for clients we readily describe as tyrants and occupiers. So there are many problems, first of all our work, which is not able to find its way out of this recurring dilemma, then there are the many reasons to question our sincerity and motives. And finally, if you look at places like Dubai, there is the astonishing reality that there are people who seem to have no problem inhabiting a skyline of one-off megaliths with relative equanimity.

Eisenman had his own, well constructed and characteristically provocative analysis calling the recent phase in architecture the 'roccoco phase' of modernism and its 'death rattle'. He takes a delicious swipe at Calatrava:

The consummate rococo figure is Santiago Calatrava, whose work people like, in the same way they like Gothic architecture, because it's sweet and you don't have to think about it. You see it once and go 'Wow!' Of course, we know that not much happened in 300 years of Gothic architecture. It was always the same 'Wow!' However, I personally resent, for example, two billion dollars being spent on a subway station in New York City that looks like a bird. I have no idea why a subway station should either look like a bird or cost two billion dollars. . .

Pretty sensible. Koolhaas and Eisenman are decent enough cultural analysts and they have always had a good sense of where the prevailing winds of architectural theory are coming from.
Eiseneman's comment is especially interesting because it betrays, finally, a sense of outrage over the very excesses that made both of these gentlemen famous (honey, could you please roll over just a tad? I want to come to your side of the slot. . .oh, hang on. . .right- much better. . .) His frustration with the expression and cost of the subway station is not the frustration of the critic, it is that of the citizen subway rider.

Where it all goes pear shaped is in the response to the 'crisis'. Here's a gem:

Eisenman argues that what's required is an architecture that restores the difficulty of reading into meaning, "one that asks how, at this moment in time, without a new paradigm, can we understand our discipline and our culture in a different way." He said the one solution he's found in his work is the notion of partial figuration, exemplified in his work on the City of Culture of Galicia (Cidade da Cultura de Galicia), in the historic pilgrimage town of Santiago de Compostela, Spain.

"Not necessarily icons, and not full figuration, but partial figures. Figures that can be mistaken for aspects of ground or aspects of other figures, but that do not lead to necessarily whole objects. In the notion of partial figuration and difficulty of reading comes the notion of 'affect' — the physical and sensual idea of people in space… At some point we need to make people more in touch, in the affective sense, with their physical environment," he said.

George Orwell might be turning in his grave. No, on second thought, he probably wouldn't be surprised at all.

So here we are, all this time thinking that we have a crisis of modernity, a time when we need to take a deep breath and to begin again to think what we do, to think anew of our priorities as a civilization and as a species in our environment- to think that all we really needed was to do 'partial figuration', like Peter. Well, I'll certainly start sleeping better now.

Here is more, it gets better:

[the project] was an attempt to move the energy back to the city by denying a full-blown iconicity. The notion of the partial figure in this case comes from the figures of the buildings themselves coming out of and taking the shape of the ground [of Mount Gaiás] on which they sit.

Ah yes, the urgent problem of iconicity, I don't know about you, but that issue is certainly plaguing us down here in the dirty south.

No, no, no, this has to stop.

I have to admit this now. The charade must end. I have to come clean- I am not the knowing, urbane, aesthete I have been pretending to be all these years, with my stories of London and my closet full of ragged fashionable one-offs now wearing thin.

I have no idea what Eisenman is talking about. Koolhaas proposed a "Generics" department as the answer, and I haven't the foggiest idea of what thats all about either. And, even worse, I don't care. And it doesn't matter.

The sound we are hearing here is not the death rattle of someone else's modernism, of just Santiago's empty posturing. What we are hearing is the sound of nothing, of silence, of exhaustion, of intellectual bankruptcy. It is the emptiness that terms like iconicity and figuration can no longer conceal.

The project of the New Yorkers is over, unfinished but spent, overrun by history, irrelevant. The clarity of the analysis does not forgive the unacceptably weak response. In time, the Forum on "Market and Meaning" held by the Canadian Center for Architecture will end up as another asterisk in another dusty book, notable only for its lack of any real solutions than for any question it raises. I mean here you are starting out the symposium talking about why no one is taking you seriously and this is the best you can do? Are 'market forces' really what is to blame here?

It is ironic because the truth of Eisenmans critique of the subway station is so much more compelling than any of the lame terms he like to spout off every few years.

Here, you like to hold symposia? Here's your topic: If you really want to get people in touch with their environment then you ought to be in touch with yours. You should build where you live, for the people you live with. Analyze and discuss.

2007-05-27T07:45:00.000-07:00

Politics & the English Language

I'm posting this essay by George Orwell in its entirety. I'm probably breaking some kind of copyright restriction in doing this, but I think that I'll probably get away with it.

In any case, its important enough. This essay should be the first reading assignment for any thesis-level architecture studio or research seminar. Orwell's critique would be devastatingly effective on the majority of what passes for 'critical writing' coming out of places like the GSD, Columbia etc.

He would probably have had an easy time trashing everything that has been posted on this site as well. It seems like with every year, the pressure increases to write faster, to get it done sooner, to post more, to generate 'content' and we lose ever more time to think deeply and to distill our thoughts precisely.

Orwell's essay is an admonition on the importance of clarity- an appeal to 'think what we do'.

George Orwell

Politics and the English Language

Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language — so the argument runs — must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.

Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers. I will come back to this presently, and I hope that by that time the meaning of what I have said here will have become clearer. Meanwhile, here are five specimens of the English language as it is now habitually written.

These five passages have not been picked out because they are especially bad — I could have quoted far worse if I had chosen — but because they illustrate various of the mental vices from which we now suffer. They are a little below the average, but are fairly representative examples. I number them so that I can refer back to them when necessary:

1. I am not, indeed, sure whether it is not true to say that the Milton who once seemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley had not become, out of an experience ever more bitter in each year, more alien [sic] to the founder of that Jesuit sect which nothing could induce him to tolerate.

Professor Harold Laski (Essay in Freedom of Expression)

2. Above all, we cannot play ducks and drakes with a native battery of idioms which prescribes egregious collocations of vocables as the Basic put up with for tolerate, or put at a loss for bewilder.

Professor Lancelot Hogben (Interglossia)

3. On the one side we have the free personality: by definition it is not neurotic, for it has neither conflict nor dream. Its desires, such as they are, are transparent, for they are just what institutional approval keeps in the forefront of consciousness; another institutional pattern would alter their number and intensity; there is little in them that is natural, irreducible, or culturally dangerous. But on the other side, the social bond itself is nothing but the mutual reflection of these self-secure integrities. Recall the definition of love. Is not this the very picture of a small academic? Where is there a place in this hall of mirrors for either personality or fraternity?

Essay on psychology in Politics (New York)

4. All the ‘best people’ from the gentlemen's clubs, and all the frantic fascist captains, united in common hatred of Socialism and bestial horror at the rising tide of the mass revolutionary movement, have turned to acts of provocation, to foul incendiarism, to medieval legends of poisoned wells, to legalize their own destruction of proletarian organizations, and rouse the agitated petty-bourgeoise to chauvinistic fervor on behalf of the fight against the revolutionary way out of the crisis.

Communist pamphlet

5. If a new spirit is to be infused into this old country, there is one thorny and contentious reform which must be tackled, and that is the humanization and galvanization of the B.B.C. Timidity here will bespeak canker and atrophy of the soul. The heart of Britain may be sound and of strong beat, for instance, but the British lion's roar at present is like that of Bottom in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream — as gentle as any sucking dove. A virile new Britain cannot continue indefinitely to be traduced in the eyes or rather ears, of the world by the effete languors of Langham Place, brazenly masquerading as ‘standard English’. When the Voice of Britain is heard at nine o'clock, better far and infinitely less ludicrous to hear aitches honestly dropped than the present priggish, inflated, inhibited, school-ma'amish arch braying of blameless bashful mewing maidens!

Letter in Tribune

Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them. The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision. The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house. I list below, with notes and examples, various of the tricks by means of which the work of prose-construction is habitually dodged.

DYING METAPHORS. A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically ‘dead’ (e. g. iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves. Examples are: Ring the changes on, take up the cudgel for, toe the line, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulder with, play into the hands of, no axe to grind, grist to the mill, fishing in troubled waters, on the order of the day, Achilles’ heel, swan song, hotbed. Many of these are used without knowledge of their meaning (what is a ‘rift’, for instance?), and incompatible metaphors are frequently mixed, a sure sign that the writer is not interested in what he is saying. Some metaphors now current have been twisted out of their original meaning without those who use them even being aware of the fact. For example, toe the line is sometimes written as tow the line. Another example is the hammer and the anvil, now always used with the implication that the anvil gets the worst of it. In real life it is always the anvil that breaks the hammer, never the other way about: a writer who stopped to think what he was saying would avoid perverting the original phrase.

OPERATORS OR VERBAL FALSE LIMBS. These save the trouble of picking out appropriate verbs and nouns, and at the same time pad each sentence with extra syllables which give it an appearance of symmetry. Characteristic phrases are render inoperative, militate against, make contact with, be subjected to, give rise to, give grounds for, have the effect of, play a leading part (role) in, make itself felt, take effect, exhibit a tendency to, serve the purpose of, etc., etc. The keynote is the elimination of simple verbs. Instead of being a single word, such as break, stop, spoil, mend, kill, a verb becomes a phrase, made up of a noun or adjective tacked on to some general-purpose verb such as prove, serve, form, play, render. In addition, the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active, and noun constructions are used instead of gerunds (by examination of instead of by examining). The range of verbs is further cut down by means of the -ize and de- formations, and the banal statements are given an appearance of profundity by means of the not un- formation. Simple conjunctions and prepositions are replaced by such phrases as with respect to, having regard to, the fact that, by dint of, in view of, in the interests of, on the hypothesis that; and the ends of sentences are saved by anticlimax by such resounding commonplaces as greatly to be desired, cannot be left out of account, a development to be expected in the near future, deserving of serious consideration, brought to a satisfactory conclusion, and so on and so forth.

PRETENTIOUS DICTION. Words like phenomenon, element, individual (as noun), objective, categorical, effective, virtual, basic, primary, promote, constitute, exhibit, exploit, utilize, eliminate, liquidate, are used to dress up a simple statement and give an air of scientific impartiality to biased judgements. Adjectives like epoch-making, epic, historic, unforgettable, triumphant, age-old, inevitable, inexorable, veritable, are used to dignify the sordid process of international politics, while writing that aims at glorifying war usually takes on an archaic colour, its characteristic words being: realm, throne, chariot, mailed fist, trident, sword, shield, buckler, banner, jackboot, clarion. Foreign words and expressions such as cul de sac, ancien regime, deus ex machina, mutatis mutandis, status quo, gleichschaltung, weltanschauung, are used to give an air of culture and elegance. Except for the useful abbreviations i. e., e. g. and etc., there is no real need for any of the hundreds of foreign phrases now current in the English language. Bad writers, and especially scientific, political, and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones, and unnecessary words like expedite, ameliorate, predict, extraneous, deracinated, clandestine, subaqueous, and hundreds of others constantly gain ground from their Anglo-Saxon numbers(1). The jargon peculiar to Marxist writing (hyena, hangman, cannibal, petty bourgeois, these gentry, lackey, flunkey, mad dog, White Guard, etc.) consists largely of words translated from Russian, German, or French; but the normal way of coining a new word is to use Latin or Greek root with the appropriate affix and, where necessary, the size formation. It is often easier to make up words of this kind (deregionalize, impermissible, extramarital, non-fragmentary and so forth) than to think up the English words that will cover one's meaning. The result, in general, is an increase in slovenliness and vagueness.

MEANINGLESS WORDS. In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning(2). Words like romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality, as used in art criticism, are strictly meaningless, in the sense that they not only do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly ever expected to do so by the reader. When one critic writes, ‘The outstanding feature of Mr. X's work is its living quality’, while another writes, ‘The immediately striking thing about Mr. X's work is its peculiar deadness’, the reader accepts this as a simple difference opinion. If words like black and white were involved, instead of the jargon words dead and living, he would see at once that language was being used in an improper way. Many political words are similarly abused. The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’. The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different. Statements like Marshal Petain was a true patriot, The Soviet press is the freest in the world, The Catholic Church is opposed to persecution, are almost always made with intent to deceive. Other words used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less dishonestly, are: class, totalitarian, science, progressive, reactionary, bourgeois, equality.

Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and perversions, let me give another example of the kind of writing that they lead to. This time it must of its nature be an imaginary one. I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Here it is in modern English:

Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

This is a parody, but not a very gross one. Exhibit (3) above, for instance, contains several patches of the same kind of English. It will be seen that I have not made a full translation. The beginning and ending of the sentence follow the original meaning fairly closely, but in the middle the concrete illustrations — race, battle, bread — dissolve into the vague phrases ‘success or failure in competitive activities’. This had to be so, because no modern writer of the kind I am discussing — no one capable of using phrases like ‘objective considerations of contemporary phenomena’ — would ever tabulate his thoughts in that precise and detailed way. The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness. Now analyze these two sentences a little more closely. The first contains forty-nine words but only sixty syllables, and all its words are those of everyday life. The second contains thirty-eight words of ninety syllables: eighteen of those words are from Latin roots, and one from Greek. The first sentence contains six vivid images, and only one phrase (‘time and chance’) that could be called vague. The second contains not a single fresh, arresting phrase, and in spite of its ninety syllables it gives only a shortened version of the meaning contained in the first. Yet without a doubt it is the second kind of sentence that is gaining ground in modern English. I do not want to exaggerate. This kind of writing is not yet universal, and outcrops of simplicity will occur here and there in the worst-written page. Still, if you or I were told to write a few lines on the uncertainty of human fortunes, we should probably come much nearer to my imaginary sentence than to the one from Ecclesiastes.

As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier — even quicker, once you have the habit — to say In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that than to say I think. If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don't have to hunt about for the words; you also don't have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious. When you are composing in a hurry — when you are dictating to a stenographer, for instance, or making a public speech — it is natural to fall into a pretentious, Latinized style. Tags like a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind or a conclusion to which all of us would readily assent will save many a sentence from coming down with a bump. By using stale metaphors, similes, and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself. This is the significance of mixed metaphors. The sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a visual image. When these images clash — as in The Fascist octopus has sung its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot — it can be taken as certain that the writer is not seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming; in other words he is not really thinking. Look again at the examples I gave at the beginning of this essay. Professor Laski (1) uses five negatives in fifty three words. One of these is superfluous, making nonsense of the whole passage, and in addition there is the slip — alien for akin — making further nonsense, and several avoidable pieces of clumsiness which increase the general vagueness. Professor Hogben (2) plays ducks and drakes with a battery which is able to write prescriptions, and, while disapproving of the everyday phrase put up with, is unwilling to look egregious up in the dictionary and see what it means; (3), if one takes an uncharitable attitude towards it, is simply meaningless: probably one could work out its intended meaning by reading the whole of the article in which it occurs. In (4), the writer knows more or less what he wants to say, but an accumulation of stale phrases chokes him like tea leaves blocking a sink. In (5), words and meaning have almost parted company. People who write in this manner usually have a general emotional meaning — they dislike one thing and want to express solidarity with another — but they are not interested in the detail of what they are saying. A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. The will construct your sentences for you — even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent — and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at this point that the special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear.

In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions and not a ‘party line’. Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestos, White papers and the speeches of undersecretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, homemade turn of speech. When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases — bestial, atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder — one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker's spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved, as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favourable to political conformity.

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, ‘I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so’. Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

‘While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.’

The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics’. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find — this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify — that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better. The debased language that I have been discussing is in some ways very convenient. Phrases like a not unjustifiable assumption, leaves much to be desired, would serve no good purpose, a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind, are a continuous temptation, a packet of aspirins always at one's elbow. Look back through this essay, and for certain you will find that I have again and again committed the very faults I am protesting against. By this morning's post I have received a pamphlet dealing with conditions in Germany. The author tells me that he ‘felt impelled’ to write it. I open it at random, and here is almost the first sentence I see: ‘[The Allies] have an opportunity not only of achieving a radical transformation of Germany's social and political structure in such a way as to avoid a nationalistic reaction in Germany itself, but at the same time of laying the foundations of a co-operative and unified Europe.’ You see, he ‘feels impelled’ to write — feels, presumably, that he has something new to say — and yet his words, like cavalry horses answering the bugle, group themselves automatically into the familiar dreary pattern. This invasion of one's mind by ready-made phrases (lay the foundations, achieve a radical transformation) can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion of one's brain.

I said earlier that the decadence of our language is probably curable. Those who deny this would argue, if they produced an argument at all, that language merely reflects existing social conditions, and that we cannot influence its development by any direct tinkering with words and constructions. So far as the general tone or spirit of a language goes, this may be true, but it is not true in detail. Silly words and expressions have often disappeared, not through any evolutionary process but owing to the conscious action of a minority. Two recent examples were explore every avenue and leave no stone unturned, which were killed by the jeers of a few journalists. There is a long list of flyblown metaphors which could similarly be got rid of if enough people would interest themselves in the job; and it should also be possible to laugh the not un- formation out of existence(3), to reduce the amount of Latin and Greek in the average sentence, to drive out foreign phrases and strayed scientific words, and, in general, to make pretentiousness unfashionable. But all these are minor points. The defence of the English language implies more than this, and perhaps it is best to start by saying what it does not imply.

To begin with it has nothing to do with archaism, with the salvaging of obsolete words and turns of speech, or with the setting up of a ‘standard English’ which must never be departed from. On the contrary, it is especially concerned with the scrapping of every word or idiom which has outworn its usefulness. It has nothing to do with correct grammar and syntax, which are of no importance so long as one makes one's meaning clear, or with the avoidance of Americanisms, or with having what is called a ‘good prose style’. On the other hand, it is not concerned with fake simplicity and the attempt to make written English colloquial. Nor does it even imply in every case preferring the Saxon word to the Latin one, though it does imply using the fewest and shortest words that will cover one's meaning. What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them. When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualising you probably hunt about until you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations. Afterward one can choose — not simply accept — the phrases that will best cover the meaning, and then switch round and decide what impressions one's words are likely to make on another person. This last effort of the mind cuts out all stale or mixed images, all prefabricated phrases, needless repetitions, and humbug and vagueness generally. But one can often be in doubt about the effect of a word or a phrase, and one needs rules that one can rely on when instinct fails. I think the following rules will cover most cases:

Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
Never use a long word where a short one will do.
If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
Never use the passive where you can use the active.
Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

These rules sound elementary, and so they are, but they demand a deep change of attitude in anyone who has grown used to writing in the style now fashionable. One could keep all of them and still write bad English, but one could not write the kind of stuff that I quoted in those five specimens at the beginning of this article.

I have not here been considering the literary use of language, but merely language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought. Stuart Chase and others have come near to claiming that all abstract words are meaningless, and have used this as a pretext for advocating a kind of political quietism. Since you don't know what Fascism is, how can you struggle against Fascism? One need not swallow such absurdities as this, but one ought to recognise that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one's own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase — some jackboot, Achilles’ heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse — into the dustbin where it belongs.

1946

_____

1) An interesting illustration of this is the way in which the English flower names which were in use till very recently are being ousted by Greek ones, snapdragon becoming antirrhinum, forget-me-not becoming myosotis, etc. It is hard to see any practical reason for this change of fashion: it is probably due to an instinctive turning-awayfrom the more homely word and a vague feeling that the Greek word is scientific. [back]

2) Example: ‘Comfort's catholicity of perception and image, strangely Whitmanesque in range, almost the exact opposite in aesthetic compulsion, continues to evoke that trembling atmospheric accumulative ginting at a cruel, an inexorably selene timelessness... Wrey Gardiner scores by aiming at simple bull's-eyes with precision. Only they are not so simple, and through this contented sadness runs more than the surface bitter-sweet of resignation’. (Poetry Quarterly.) [back]

3) One can cure oneself of the not un- formation by memorizing this sentence: A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen field. [back]

THE END

____BD____
George Orwell: ‘Politics and the English Language’
First published: Horizon. — GB, London. — April 1946.

Reprinted:: — ‘Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays’. — 1950.; — ‘The Orwell Reader, Fiction, Essays, and Reportage’ — 1956.; — ‘Collected Essays’. — 1961.; — ‘Decline of the English Murder and Other Essays’. — 1965.; — ‘The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell’. — 1968.

____
Machine-readable version: O. Dag
Last modified on: 2004-07-24

2007-05-17T20:02:00.000-07:00

A Modernity Reformed (continued)

The full court press by, what George Will has called, the "media-entertainment-environmental complex" on climate change continues. I don't quite share Will's ironic indignation at the way Americans are being ruthlessly 'indoctrinated' by the 'complex' and its nefarious allies in the media.

But something is definitely afoot. There has been a coordinated push this time around to try to capture the initiative and the public imagination on both energy conservation and the environment. According to the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy 83% of Americans believe that global warming is a 'serious' problem while 63% agree with the statement that the United States 'is in as much danger from environmental hazards, such as air pollution and global warming, as it is from terrorists."

Enter Clinton. On the heels of several very well publicized reports on global warming, the Clinton Foundation announced a new initiative yesterday in concert with the mayors of 15 of the worlds largest cities.

Briefly stated, "The Energy Efficiency Building Retrofit Program" has enlisted commitments from 5 of the worlds largest banks to provide a total of $5 billion in financing for cities and private building owners to retrofit buildings for lower energy consumption at 'no net cost'. In return four corporations, Honeywell, Johnson Controls, Siemens and Trane will "perform building retrofits, and guarantee the energy savings of the retrofit projects." The cities involved are: Bangkok, Berlin, Chicago, Houston, Johannesburg, Karachi, London, Melbourne, Mexico City, Mumbai, New York, Rome, Sao Paulo, Seoul, Tokyo, and Toronto.

In the typical Clintonian 'third way', the program is a shrewd play for municipal, corporate and construction industry backing and is an illustration of how to make the globalization debate play out nicely for business interests. Clinton makes a plug for this focus on 'mechanisms' in this video (nytimes) as he delivers a subtle elbow to the current administration and its penchant for setting grand goals that don't seem to produce much.

Meanwhile two other reports on the topic are now out (coincidence? I think not). One, from the McKinsey Global Institute, focuses on technological optimization as a goal of policy solutions, proposing the introduction of mandatory standards for households as a means of saving 7.3 Quadrillion BTU's in household energy consumption by 2020.

The other report, highlighting the role that energy consumption by buildings plays in global energy consumption is put out by the Sustainable Building and Construction Initiative of the United Nations Environment Program.

We may be seeing a play for a 'green retrofit' boom as the panacea for the mortgage/ refi bust. Perhaps the construction industry's number has finally come up...

2007-04-10T19:47:00.000-07:00

Left vs. Right: The argument against the State

Examinations call. This will the last one for a while again, I swear.

Full disclosure: I discontinued my subscription to the New Republic online some time ago. And yet. . . they still send me their e-zine with links to some of the online content. And occasionally, I'll browse through the free stuff and find something interesting.

For example, a recent episode of a web conference series they are staging with the National Review, where Peter Beinart of the Republic and Jonah Goldberg of the Review debate the liberal and conservative issues of the day. More political Siskel and Eibert than Crossfire.

It is here (you might need to register).

I've transcribed a portion of the exchange that I thought particularly interesting below. Beinart has brought up a recent column by David Brooks (which I have not read, as I stubbornly continue to refuse to pay for the ridiculous Times Elite or whatever new subscription service that the NYT has foisted on its online readership) where he (Brooks) is attacking 'Libertarianism”, as characterized by Beinart.

The crux of the question has to do with a kind of political convergence on the left (Hillary Clinton) and the right (David Brooks) on the need for a new 'paternalistic' politics that can assuage growing economic insecurity with new government programs, implying a 'big government' conservatism for Republicans and a return to a traditional domestic agenda, for Democrats.

I found Goldberg's defense of small government conservatism coupled with his characterization of a 'federalized' polity compelling. Judge for yourself:

Beinart: You seem to imply that the only true essence of conservatism has to be the effort to limit government? I wonder if the vision of any other kind of conservatism is inauthentic?
Goldberg: I think its very important for conservatism is to maintain the dogma of being for a limited government...My silver bullet for all this is federalism, pushing most of these issues down to a local a level as possible, so that you can be a consistent conservative in your community and be a communitarian or be against Wal-Mart in your town and for gay marriage or against gay marriage or whatever. But you have to live with the consequences of your actions at the local level, you have to look the people you have pissed off in the eye at the local store and you can't escape and be a Barbara Streisand liberal and try to impose a way of life on people that live 3000 miles from you...This is my problem with a lot of the conservative vs. liberal stuff at the federal level- I think if you just push it down far enough, it works a lot better, it's more democratic.
But that said, there is a dilemma for conservatism in that the times change, and if we are going to permanently have a federal government that thinks its business is to meddle wherever it thinks it can do good, then conservatives have to have a response to that other than an academic, utopian opposition which doesn't actually enter the fight. And so there are a lot of conservatives who fashion themselves as anti-left and there are a lot of conservatives who fashion themselves as anti-state. Neo-conservatism comes out of that anti-left thing, where they are fine with the big government, they just don't want big government to do bad or left-wing or stupid things. Thats what big government conservatism is.
My problem is that once you concede that intellectual dogma, once you concede that first principle that government can get into this mix it becomes very difficult to draw a line about anything, because all of a sudden you can define a conservative end and then say the means is the state.
And so I would rather make a mistake about having a government too limited and then occasionally have to be hypocritical and inconsistent and find an exception to the rule then to change the rule and say that government should do whatever it can towards conservative ends...

2007-03-31T06:23:00.000-07:00

A Modernity Reformed?

Systems in crisis will inevitably spur calls for reform.
This is a topic that needs a great deal of discussion. Later.

First, consider this recent voice added to the growing reformist chorus: the United Nations Nations Environment Program (UNEP) has released a new 87 page report, Buildings and Climate Change: Status, Challenges and Oppurtunities.

Read it here (pdf)

2007-03-29T19:28:00.001-07:00

Globalization: defined

Below is the result you get when you use the Google define query to fetch globalization definitions off the web.
I wanted to use this tool to try to take a measurement of what the term might means, at least in general terms and within the web community.
Terms using the the root econ, trade, market etc get highlighted in yellow tones.
Terms using the root nation, state get blues.
Terms using modern get green.
Technology gets red, (only one instance!)
Culture gets purple.

This was used using the define query on google and the (wonderful) openoffice.org writer for composing in html and finding the terms within the search results.

Web

Definitions of globalization on the Web:

Development of extensive worldwide patterns of economic relationships
between nations.
www.investorwiz.com/glossary.htm
"Globalization refers in general to the worldwide integration of humanity
and the compression of both the temporal and spatial dimensions of
planetwide human interaction." It "has aggravated many of the region's
most chronic problems--such as the pronounced degree of economic
exploitation and social inequality that have characterized Latin America
since it came under European colonial domination in the sixteenth
century." (5)
www2.truman.edu/~marc/resources/terms.html
1. The increasing world-wide integration of markets for goods, services
and capital that attracted special attention in the late 1990s. 2. Also
used to encompass a variety of other changes that were perceived to
occur at about the same time, such as an increased role for large
corporations (MNCs) in the world economy and increased intervention
into domestic policies and affairs by international institutions such as
the IMF, WTO, and World Bank. 3. ...
www-personal.umich.edu/~alandear/glossary/g.html
A set of processes leading to the integration of economic,
cultural, political, and social systems across geographical
boundaries.
www.hsewebdepot.org/imstool/GEMI.nsf/WEBDocs/Glossary
The process of developing, manufacturing, and marketing software products that are intended for worldwide distribution. This term combines two aspects of the work: internationalization (enabling the product to be used without language or culture barriers) and localization (translating and enabling the product for a specific locale).
www.cit.gu.edu.au/~davidt/cit3611/glossary.htm
The generalized expansion of international economic activity which includes increased international trade, growth of international investment (foreign investment) and international migration, and increased creation of technology among countries. Globalization is the increasing world-wide integration of markets for goods, services, labor, and capital.
minneapolisfed.org/econed/essay/topics/glossary05.cfm
the movement toward markets or policies that transcend national borders
www.wcit.org/tradeis/glossary.htm

The Marxist critic of postmodernism Fredric Jameson argues that American capitalism, in the form of huge multi-national corporations backed by the Western media, is (re)colonizing the world. This 'coca-colonisation' of the globe is seen to result in a cultural homogenisation as 'native' cultures are swallowed up by Western values.
www.adamranson.freeserve.co.uk/critical%20concepts.htm

Tendency of integration of national capital markets.
www.equanto.com/glossary/g.html

In the translation/localization business marketplace, it refers to the whole problem of making any product or service global, with simultaneous release in all markets. Web site globalization means more than just making one web site respond to the different language and regional requirements of the browser. ...
www.openinternetlexicon.com/Glossary/GlobalGlossary.html

a process of creating a product or service that will be successful in many countries without modification
www.bena.com/ewinters/Glossary.html

Trend away from distinct national economic units and toward one huge global market.
enbv.narod.ru/text/Econom/ib/str/261.html

Used for transnational influences on culture, economics, politics, etc., especially illustrating global patterns or trends.
lib.ucr.edu/depts/acquisitions/YBP%20NSP%20GLOSSARY%20EXTERNAL%20revised6-02.php

In the modern global economy no country can sustain itself as a closed economy.
www.sasked.gov.sk.ca/curr_content/entre30/helppages/glossary/glossary.html

The increasing economic, cultural, demographic, political, and environmental interdependence of different places around the world.
hhhknights.com/geo/4/agterms.htm

A relatively new word that is commonly used to describe the ongoing, multidimensional process of worldwide change. It describes the idea that the world is becoming a single global market. It describes the idea that time and space have been shrunk as a result of modern telecommunications technologies which allow almost instantaneous communication between people almost anywhere on the planet. ...
www.takebackwisconsin.com/Documents/Glossary.htm

The increasing integration of world markets for goods, services, and capital. It has also been defined as a process by which nationality becomes increasingly irrelevant in global production and consumption.
www.agtrade.org/glossary_search.cfm

the integration of markets on a worldwide scale and could eventually mean worldwide standards or practices for product quality, pricing, service, and design. Page 96
www.ucs.mun.ca/~rsexty/business1000/glossary/G.htm

It refers to international exchange or sharing of labour force, production, ideas, knowledge, products and services across borders.
www.kwymca.org/nccq/glossary.htm

the intensification of worldwide social relations which, through economic, technological and political forces, link distant localities in such a way that distant events and powers penetrate local events.
www.anthro.wayne.edu/ant2100/GlossaryCultAnt.htm

Multilingual websites can serve pages in a specific language requested by the browser. They must have translated/localized pages on the server for each language supported. The server must recognize the browser's language request. Globalized websites attempt to server multiple cultures and languages with a single page. Localized websites are completely customized to fit a local culture (a locale), it involves much more than language translation. ...
webcontent-m1.com/m1/en/support/Library/glossary

The process of making something worldwide in scope or application.
schools.cbe.ab.ca/logistics/g.html

refers to The widening, deepening and speeding up of worldwide interconnectedness in all aspects of contemporary life. (All aspects, including its nature, causes and effects are hotly disputed, with strange bedfellows on all sides.)
www.ripon.edu/academics/global/CONCEPTS.HTML

is a term used to refer to the expansion of economies beyond national borders, in particular, the expansion of production by a firm to many countries around the world, ie, globalization of production, or the "global assembly line." This has given transnational corporations power beyond nation-states, and has weakened any nation's ability to control corporate practices and flows of capital, set regulations, control balances of trade and exchange rates, or manage domestic economic policy. ...
colours.mahost.org/faq/definitions.html

a contested term relating to transformation of spatial relations that involves a change in the relationship between space, economy and society.
media.pearsoncmg.com/intl/ema/uk/0131217666/student/0131217666_glo.html

growth to a global or worldwide scale; "the globalization of the communication industry"
wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

Globalization (or globalisation) is a term used to describe the changes in societies and the world economy that are the result of dramatically increased trade and cultural exchange. In specifically economic contexts, it is often understood to refer almost exclusively to the effects of trade, particularly trade liberalization or free trade, however see below. ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globalization

2007-03-26T18:41:00.000-07:00

Globalization

I think it is important to consider the questions that someone like Vandanya Shiva poses while bearing in mind the question of modernity as a philosophical system and, inevitably, questioning its current relationship to capitalism. I can provide no concrete definitions for these terms, but am content to bring up other voices who can help us sort all this out.

Tonight, I thought I would invoke in the historian David Christian, author of the excellent Maps of Time, for some general notes on globalization.

[the] expansion in size of exchange networks, slow before the sixteenth century and then much faster, created new possibilities both for the exchange of information and goods and for innovation...the creation of a truly global exchange network in the sixteenth century decisively increased the scale, significance, and variety of informational and commercial exchanges. The coming together of the different world zones of the Holocene era marks a revolutionary moment in the history of humanity.

...As the geography of exchange networks was transformed, flows of information and wealth entered new channels. Those effects were particularly significant in western Europe, which had previously been at the margins of exchanges within the Afro-Eurasian world zone but now suddenly found itself at the hub of humanity's first global system of exchanges. These changes in the scale and geography of exchange networks laid the intellectual and commercial foundations for the Modern Revolution, and determined its geography.

...in one sense the Modern Revolution was and is a global process; it cannot be properly understood without appreciating this feature. Its intellectual, material and commercial raw materials came from all parts of the world. And the new level of creative synergy generated by linking the two largest world zones- Afro- Eurasia and the Americas- was and remains perhaps the most powerful single lever of change in the modern world. The Modern Revolution was also global in its effects, both creative and destructive. In some form its impact was felt very soon in all parts of the world.

But...the coming together of the different world zones proved a brutal and destructive process for indigenous populations (both human and non-human) in all three of the smaller world zones: the Americas, Australia and the Pacific. . .

He continues elsewhere:

In a great tsunami of change, the second and third waves of industrialization carried the Modern Revolution to the rest of the world, where its impact was largely destructive. Just as the first stage in globalization had destroyed the traditional societies of the Americas, so this new round of global integration ruined traditional political, social and economic systems beyond the emerging industrial heartlands of the Atlantic seaboard. As productivity rose in the industrialized hub region and the prices of goods such as British machine-made textiles fell, producers in other regions found their livelihood undermined by European imports...

The transformation of the late nineteenth century created a world divided between those that did and those that did not have industrial economies. The same processes that enriched the societies of the Atlantic seaboard ruined much of the rest of the world; and the gradients of inequality within nations, which had widened so spectacularly with the decline of traditional peasantry, now became gradients between regions and nations. As the balance of economic and military power shifted, China's share of world industrial production fell from 33 per cent in 1800, to 6 percent in 1900, to 2 per cent in 1950; that of India and Pakistan fell from 20 per cent in 1800 to less than 2 per cent in 1900. The twentieth century term the the third world would have made no sense in 1750, when today's third world countries accounted for almost 75% of global industrial production. By the late twentieth century, they counted for less than 15%. . .

2007-03-23T21:06:00.000-07:00

3.24.07: Vandana Shiva

I've tried to swear off writing here until I've finished taking the exam but I came across a very important item today that demanded I note it down.

I think that it is becoming quite evident that a powerful new critique of modernity is emerging- and, despite the din and cry, it has nothing to do with the 'Islamist' threat. Its origin lies within modernity itself and it is possible that its recent genesis is to be found in the currents that drove a generation to protest in the 1960's- a generation that included the students of May 1968. Almost forty years later, this critique has finally matured.

The outline of this argument has to do with what is generally known as globalization and, at least on the surface, it is an argument over the distribution of the spoils after capitalist modernity emerges victorious from the cold war.

I found an eloquent exposition of this in an exchange, broadcast today between a News Hour correspondent and Vandana Shiva, an Indian quantum physicist turned anti-globalization activist. A partial transcript follows:

Problems with industrial society

PAUL SOLMAN: But you're not saying that a patent is necessarily a bad thing. I mean, don't you want companies and entrepreneurs to have the incentive to create something?
VANDANA SHIVA: I would like them to have an honest incentive for an honest innovation.
PAUL SOLMAN: More than that, she thinks, we need to rethink globalization, so-called wealth creation, at the expense of our common property, our natural resources, our environment.
VANDANA SHIVA: I think we are in a deep, deep mess, in terms of providing well-being and satisfaction for people. And we can't use the assumption of today's industrialized society with huge pressure on the world's climate, as the model.
PAUL SOLMAN: So, a key part of your critique, then, is that there are all these hidden costs associated with the way we do things that...
VANDANA SHIVA: Totally, totally.
PAUL SOLMAN: And we're just not acknowledging them, at our peril?
VANDANA SHIVA: That, to me, is the heart of the issue, that the so-called growth, as defined in the indicators that have been evolved to suit those who control the wealth of the world and the political decision-making in the world, that that growth hides behind it huge amounts of destruction in the lives of people, in the lives of the Third World, and in the planet's life.
PAUL SOLMAN: Well, how would you measure economic growth?
VANDANA SHIVA: I would measure economic growth by seeing, how much food are people eating, how much clean water do they have in their rivers and their wells, how much clothing do they have access to, how much education and health services can -- are they provided as public systems?

Full interview here

I find this interview extremely interesting in light of the closing of the modern project. A member of what Singer would have classified as an elite cadre bringing what appears to be economic claims against a world capitalist system in terms not unfamiliar to CEO's around the world.

On the one hand, this is a harbinger of the rise of regionalist power, evidence of the weakening of a kind of western 'global' power, dominant now for several centuries.

But listen closely and you find much more to it than that. The 'hidden cost' of capitalism is the the leveling of modernity itself, its tendency to break apart and make the same, the annihilation of specificity; it is the secret cost of its alienation.

The regionalist critique, now rising, combined with the intellectual exhaustion of the modern project, the condition of emergency and imbalance within modern science, as expressed in the anxiety over global warming, and the military and political defeats of the modern state in the middle eastern theater of war all serve to prove the ancient eastern adage true.

We do indeed live in interesting times.

2006-10-26T20:29:00.000-07:00

May 1968: Daniel Singer

To step outside, to look critically at the system as a whole and at one's own functions within it, requires courage and imagination.

- Prelude to Revolution, 256

This will be my last post for a while, as I'm going to have to start studying for the exam again.

It is taking a little longer than expected, but most rewarding projects seem to go over schedule. I wanted to sign off with a few thoughts from Daniel Singer. I've been deeply impressed by his account of May 1968, his exploration of the many issues relating to those events, and his analysis. I would recommend Prelude to Revolution to anyone who is interested in trying to understand the significance of that date in an authentic way.

It is difficult to read Singer's words and not somehow feel as if he is trying to speak to us in the here and now. Despite a thirty-eight year divide, the issues he raises continue to be in play, the answers he is seeking are the same ones that elude us still, a generation later. For me, the most important one and the one most relevant to architecture remains: What does it mean to invoke May, 1968 today?

I'd like to close with two short passages from the book in which he discusses the aftermath of May. The first passage relates to the status and involvement of what he terms 'professional intelligentsia' and what Drucker might later call the 'knowledge worker'. This technically inclined segment of white collar workers has a somewhat surprising take on the strike. I thought the second passage was interesting because he brings up the United States and its potential relationship to the general strike in France.

During the strike, the traditional dividing line between wage and salary earners was blurred. Salaried employees. . . did not this time rally to the employers side. . .siding this time with the workers, thay took an active part in the strike. The emergence of such an activist minority marks a break with the past and an interesting pointer to the future.

Interesting, because these 'cadres', as the French call them, represent the fastest growing segment of the labor force and because of the rapid expansion of this professional intelligentsia is a common feature of all advanced countries. Everywhere numerical growth is coupled with social differentiation. A fraction of the newcomers can be absorbed at the top of the establishment and get real executive functions. The majority must resign themselves to jobs increasingly distant from the real centers of decision-making, to being the recipients of orders handed down from above, to a narrowing scope for genuine initiative; in short, to a form of alienating work that was once thought to be the exclusive prerogative of the laborer. Gradually, they lose the feeling, or rather the illusion, that they are an integral part of the ruling class. . .

. . .the limit is reached in laboratories or research sections of vast corporations. There, the scientists and technicians feel that they have little say on the framework within which they operate, that the bias is clearly in favor of the managers and salesmen. Frustrated and grouped together, they not surprisingly contributed numerous strikers. . .men and women involved in the strike were questioning their own functions in society. . .echoing the student protest summed up in the slogan "we don't want to be the watchdogs or servants of capitalism."

*****

. . .a general industrial strike, crippling the economy, rapidly raises the question of political power in the country. May was also a reminder that the weight of class is not only by numbers.

But maybe the theory is not destined for France. If teachers and technicians, scientific and social workers, are the revolutionary class of today or tommorrow, then North America should figure at the top of the revolutionary agenda. It is in the United States, rather than in France, that the premises of the theory are fulfilled. There, with no untapped reserves of farm labor to draw upon, the relative share of industrial employment is actually declining. The technological transformation has gone farther than anywhere else, and the number of white collar workers is rising fast. The proportion of college trained graduates in the economy is also much larger than in, say, France.

True, the American University is in a state of revolt. But for the time being the upheaval has not spread far enough to undermine the foundations of society. Equally true, the professional intelligentsia is uneasy. It's unrest illustrated by writers and painters. It occasionally expresses itself through gestures of sympathy for the civil rights movement, through protests against the Vietnamese war, through the understanding of the student revolt. Yet this undeniable discontent shows no sign of finding an organized political outlet. . .

2006-09-30T20:10:00.000-07:00

MAY 1968: An excerpt

What follows is a short excerpt from Prelude to Revolution, Daniel Singer's superb account of the events of May 1968, their antecedents and aftermath.

...the revolutionary students did not question the need for spreading knowledge, nor did they oppose the trend that purported to reduce the part played by manual labor. They did question the use to which the huge surplus, resulting from the scientific revolution, is put in a market economy. A big proportion of white-collar work, they argued, is not designed to increase productive forces for human ends, to improve the labor conditions of manual and other workers, and ultimately to eliminate man's dependence on physical work. It is designed to exploit that labor, to impose a pattern of consumption, and thus perpetuate a modernized capitalist system...

2006-09-28T03:57:00.000-07:00

May 1968. Prologue:

It is May, 2000 and architects are doing extremely well. The technology bust has yet to happen. In an Architecture magazine article entitled “Easy Money”, Christopher Hawthorne bemoans the absence of Architecture firms from the IPO (Initial Public Offering) “frenzy”. Ironically, he attributes part of the problem to the disdain architects have for self promotion. He quotes an executive at a large firm : “Publicity is foreign to the culture of Architecture, ” and, as Hawthorne notes dryly, “...anyone with even a passing interest in Wall Street can tell you, self promotion is the sine qua non of a successful IPO these days.”

Happier times to be sure. The magazine is thick, fat with advertisements. There are are nine featured architectural projects inside, richly documented. The front page of the news section announces the awarding of the Pritzker prize to Rem Koolhaas. There is a brief item noting that the underwear company, Jockey, will feature architects as underwear models in an upcoming national advertising campaign.

But it is the cover that is most interesting this month, for neither does it feature the beautifully photographed corner of a signature project nor does it bear the enigmatic portrait of its designer. It is striking because it is so simple. A small, white, five letter word is centered in a traffic stopping wash of highly saturated, hazard-sign orange. Even the word Architecture, usually printed in a color that contrasts with the rest of the cover, is muted and almost unnoticeable. The cover screams and whispers all at once:

“Power”.

This is the topic of the May, 2000 issue of Architecture magazine. The cover story doesn't feature a newly completed museum, or a discussion of advances in materials and methods, or a feature on the latest theoretical jargon gaining currency in schools around the country. Instead we find sixteen pages of profiles with photographs so well executed they might have appeared in Vanity Fair.^* The accompanying text tries to convey just a small sense of the intellectual frisson that surrounds these members of the architectural Power elite: “. . . In that exotic otherness rests his allure. He is a stranger...”

Of ten profiles which include 25 individuals, two can ostensibly be described as clients and one is a magazine editor. The other 23 are practicing architects. All but two are male. Eighteen are featured under the heading “The New Yorkers”. Three are from other east-coast cities, two from Florida and three are on the West coast. The rest of the United States, not to mention the planet, has not yet, it seems, achieved the required relevance to make it onto the Power list.

In the years since I first picked up this issue, I have to admit, I've struggled with it's meaning. I've gone back to the text to understand what power is, as defined by Architecture, and could only find this: “Power is the intangible currency of any profession.” These people are certainly popular and well known, particularly within the architectural profession in the U.S.. Several may be household names. They publish expensive, lavishly illustrated books and lecture around the country. They have a cachet among students and faculty of expensive, even prestigious, schools. The “intangible currency” that defines Power, it seems, is cultural.

It's easy now, in retrospect, to understand that cultural currency and real power are not the same thing. We remember too well the difference between the 'power' required to give form to a building and the power required to destroy it. In an age where the geopolitical has trumped all, there is an evident to need to reconsider the question of power and its relationship to architecture.

* * * * *

*In fact, Johnson's photograph, with alcolytes in Fancy Dress, was a Vanity Fair feature- and it may have been the genesis for the Architecture version.

2006-09-12T17:05:00.000-07:00

Urban Infrastructure and Public Policy

Still working on the 1968 series. Very tough going there, very dense material. I've recently come across Deyan Sudjic's The Edifice Complex in my readings, and it is pretty good. More on that later. In the meantime, I thought I would pass this along:

A friend and I were recently talking about infrastructure and urban issues (in very loose terms).

I thought about that notion again the other day, when a co-worker forwarded an e-mail sent by the Sierra Club to protest the pending designation by MARTA (Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority) of bus service as the 'mode of choice' for federal aid money. The Sierra Club e-mail was an effort to convince local inhabitants to write in to MARTA and demand that it designate rail service as its mode of choice for federal aid money.

This struck me as fishy, and I remembered a recent news story I had come across decrying rail transit as an inherently wasteful alternative to bus transit. The news story was covering an analysis recently issued by the Cato Institute on the subject.

The report can be found here: http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=5345. It is well written, fairly well researched and provocative. I don't necessarily agree with every point, but it makes a strong argument against the ('architecturally correct' and nostalgic) vision of urban rail transit. Incidentally, one of its strongest concluding recomendations is that federal control of transit, should devolve and be controlled at a regional (state) level. In any case, it is also is a very concise illustration of how policy directly affects urban infrastructure and, by extension, urban space.

There are some other ancillary articles I have come across on this issue, such as this recent Creative Loafing cover story on how cuts to MARTA bus service disproportionately affects black, lower income riders. It is here http://atlanta.creativeloafing.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A63086

Finally, I think page 57 of the July issue of Architecture (cover story: 'mobility') has a small item on Bogota's new Transmilenio bus system. You'll recall that Bogota's mayor is the only mayor of a large metropolitan area with design training. The bus system is surprisingly stylish and well conceived and has an English website here: http://www.transmilenio.gov.co/transmilenio/home_english.htm

Ironically, the co-worker who first forwarded the Sierra Club e-mail was Colombian. I asked her if she had ever taken a ride on the Transmilenio, and she said she would never ride the bus in Bogota, because her complexion and the affluence it implies makes her an immediate target of kidnap and ransom.

Now that would be another issue (and post) entirely.

2006-08-11T02:13:00.000-07:00

I'm still working on the 1968 series. Between studying for the exam and going on vacation, it's taken a little longer than expected.
In the meantine I wanted to post this article that was just in the Washington Post. I thought it was interesting because it doesn't make the frequent mistake of looking at supply issues as a way of resolving energy problems. The emphasis in the media lately has been on ways of augmenting supply without taking a hard look at demand. This article explains well why that emphasis is misguided.

Eventually if this (correct) reading of the problem is adopted, then the repercussions will be felt much more deeply that just in the transportation sector, or in vehicle design. It will necessarily involve modifying urban space and regional civic infrastructure. It will involve Architecture and urban design on a fundamental level.

Are We Ready for the Next Oil Shock?
By Frederick W. Smith and P.X. Kelley
Friday, August 11, 2006; Page A19
Could a mere 4 percent shortfall in daily oil supply propel the price of a barrel to more than $120 in a matter of days? That's what some oil market experts are saying, and if they're correct, we face the very real possibility of an oil shock wave that could send our economy reeling. Such a rapid rise in fuel costs would have profound effects that could severely threaten the foundation of America's economic prosperity.
The global oil trends now at work -- rising consumption, reduced spare production capacity and high levels of instability in key oil-producing countries -- all increase the likelihood of a supply shock. But unfortunately energy debates in this country often suggest a profound misunderstanding of these international economic dynamics. Calls for "energy independence" notwithstanding, oil is a fungible global commodity, which means that events affecting supply or demand anywhere will affect oil consumers everywhere. A country's exposure to world price shocks is thus a function of the amount of oil it consumes and is not significantly affected by the ratio of domestic to imported petroleum.

The magnitude of our dependence on oil puts stress on our military, strengthens our strategic adversaries and undermines our efforts to support democratic allies. Each year the United States expends enormous military resources protecting the chronically vulnerable oil production and distribution network while also preparing to guarantee international access to key oil-producing regions. This allocation of forces and dollars diminishes the military's capability for dealing with the war on terrorism and other defense priorities.
Considering the potentially devastating impact of an oil crisis, the time has come for new voices, especially those of business leaders and retired national security officials, to join the call for meaningful government action to reduce projected U.S. oil consumption. Our respective personal experiences -- running a global transportation and logistics company and spearheading the establishment of an independent U.S. Central Command in the Middle East -- convince us that America's extreme dependence on oil is an unacceptable threat to national security and prosperity.
During the coming months, we will be co-chairing the Energy Security Leadership Council, a new and intensive effort by business executives and retired military officers to advance a national energy strategy for reducing U.S. oil dependence. Although drawn from very different backgrounds, the members of the council are united in the belief that a fundamental shift in energy policy can prevent an unprecedented economic and national security calamity.
As President Bush and members of Congress construct a strategy for energy security, several central principles should guide them:
· The most substantial, rapid and cost-effective gains are almost certain to be achieved by making our transportation system more fuel-efficient. To be sure, the search for increased oil, natural gas and alternative energy supplies merits support, as do strategies for controlling industrial demand. But the transportation sector relies on oil for 97 percent of its energy needs and accounts for 68 percent of total U.S. oil consumption. With the right incentives, America's engineers and businesses could soon provide better vehicle technologies, a more efficient movement of goods and many other smart solutions. Substantially reducing demand in the transportation sector would help ensure availability of affordable supplies for critical industrial, commercial and consumer needs.
· Pure market economics will never solve this problem. Markets do not account for the hidden and indirect costs of oil dependence. Businesses focused on the highest return on investment are not always in a position to implement new solutions, many of which depend on technologies and fuels that cannot currently compete with the marginal cost of producing a barrel of oil. Most important of all, the marketplace alone will not act preemptively to mitigate the enormous damage that would be inflicted by a sudden, serious and sustained price increase.
· Government leadership is absolutely necessary. Many of the most promising solutions on both the demand and supply sides will require decades to mature. Government proposals should align the interests of businesses and individuals with society's goals; for example, tax credits and similar incentives must allow businesses to recover investments and engage in essential long-range planning, and they must account for the high implicit discount rates that consumers apply to future savings. While recent legislation has pointed us in the right direction, bolder action must be taken.
Whatever the eventual shape of a credible energy security plan, significant public and private resources will be required to put policy into practice. The government needs to do more than just provide funds, though; it must sustain a strategic energy policy even if oil prices drop in the medium term. This is only fitting given the size and nature of the threat. Indeed, if it means condemning the country to another decade of energy dependence, the possible return of $50 oil should be no less frightening than the prospect of an oil shock wave.
Frederick W. Smith is chairman, president and chief executive of FedEx Corp. P. X. Kelley, a retired general, was commandant of the Marine Corps and a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President Ronald Reagan. They are co-chairmen of the Energy Security Leadership Council, a project of Securing America's Future Energy.

2006-06-28T19:27:00.002-07:00

MAY 1968

It would have been difficult to have attended architectural school in the 1990's without running into the specter of May 1968. It's a difficult thing to understand; the term 'May 1968' refers to a spectrum of issues and events that extend well beyond and precede the actual date of May, 1968. For an impressionable architectural undergraduate in the 90's, the intellectual currents that flow out of 1968 were myriad and confusing. There was seldom any explication of the immediate meaning of the events of that spring, not to mention the implications for architecture in the period that followed. As a result, we (the students) often bandied about snippets of the terms and ideas that would have originated then, but we probably could not have identified a coherent set of issues or even a historical notion of what those terms represented.

Still, many of us recognized that whatever it was, whatever had happened then, was important. Important enough, at least, to remember and try to understand later.

For me, Rem Koolhaas' in particular was the one that was always talking about May 1968 as a defining moment for his generation- and it was his generation, I think, that was the providing the intellectual leadership for architecture in the 90's. We simply can't understand where we are now, now that Koolhaas, Hadid and the rest are no longer the outsiders they once where, but have come to represent the status quo, without understanding the essential issues represented by May 1968.

The questions are more pressing now because of the events of September 2001. This generation, my generation, may have finally (and regretfully) been baptised by our own historical moment- our own defining date.

I will be spending the rest of the summer exploring some of what is meant by May 1968- and what it has come to represent for me.

2006-05-13T03:28:00.000-07:00

"The Importance of Openness in an Era of Security"- an excerpt

The following is an excerpt from an interview conducted by Architectural Record magazine with Supreme Court Justice Stephen G Breyer. The article appeared in the January issue. I thought it was worthwhile to quote some of what the Justice says about issues related to security and public space:

Stephen Breyer: People in any government agency who are in positions of authority have to understand that the issue of security and the issue of openness are both important, and they sometimes argue in opposite directions. One is sometimes tempted simple to turn matters over to security officials. But security officials operate under pressures that force them to err on the side of security- even if that means closing off a building that was meant to be open to the public. This isn't a ground for criticizing them; that's their job. But it is a ground for criticizing the people in authority, because they must understand not only the importance of security but also the importance of openness.

Openness can make an enormous difference both symbolically and practically. It matters whether a public building is welcoming to the public or shuts itself off as a fortress. Persons in authority have to become informed about security needs to make decisions that require intelligent balancing. Their decisions should favor security if they conclude that the need for security is great enough to warrant a departure from openness; but they should focus on the details and squarely face the issue.

Architectural Record: U.S. embassies are effectively closed buildings at this time. How do you argue for openness when security experts say the risk is too high?

Stephen Breyer: You have to be brave enough to turn them down. Or to see modifications when the circumstances call for it. If we are not brave enough to say no when security needs don't make much sense, then we'll end up with buildings that look like our embassy in Chile, which is my example of something that looks like a fortress. People in Santiago laugh at it.

When I visited London last year, they were planning to close off the roads surrounding our embassy. I asked the embassy people why. The justification was that someone could approach the embassy with a bomb. Yes, that's true. You could turn every public building into a Fort Knox using such a theory. If the secretary of state or a deputy secretary actually looked into it, and heard the argument, and came to the conclusions that central London streets must be closed off, then I would respect that judgement. I think it's a matter that calls of careful consideration by such a high offifical before you close off a main street in central London.

It's very easy for anyone to appear to be very popular and responsible by saying "I'm worried about human life." We'll I'm worried about it too. But our architecture must not wall off the government from the people. The Constitution permits people to goverment themselves; the people are the government. The value of openness is such in a democracy that you should consider it carefully and give it considerable weight.

Architectural Record: How did your experience in planning Boston's Moakley Federal Courthouse inform your views?

Stephen Breyer: When we built our courthouse in Boston, I felt strongly that it belonged to the taxpayers who paid for it. It should be apparent that such a courthouse- a public building, a beautiful building on a beautiful site- does not belong to judges, nor to the laywers. It belongs to the people of Boston. . . .

. . . The challenge is to build a courthouse that tells people- through what it looks like . . .that it isn't a prison, that it isn't an apartment house, and that it isn't a hospital. Rather, it is a public building where a high-level official- a judge- will deal face-to-face with the most humble, ordinary citizen of the United States and spend as much time on the citizen's problems as circumstances call for. . .

The plaza in front of the Supreme Court of the United States is open. Every citizen of the United States can walk across it, walk up the steps, and enter the building. We do have a security system; visitors must walk through an arms detector. That is an unfortunate but neccessary concession to the problem of security that we face. But if we ever were to close off the plaza, or close off the building, I think we would do irreperable damage to the Constitution and to the country. It is important in a democracy that people be able come into their public building, certainly the courts."

***

I wanted to quote this article because of a run in I had with the U.S. marshalls service after trying to photograph a courthouse building. See the original post recounting my run in here.

2006-04-19T17:24:00.000-07:00

Suburbia 2: The Atlanta Aquarium

From down here it looks like the issue has really moved beyond notions of urban vs. suburban. What seems evident is that the next stage of development for both 'inner' and 'outer' city is that they both share one condition. Suburbia gets qausi-urbanized and the city becomes further suburbanized.

In Atlanta, much of the civic leadership that is helping 'revitalize' the core through projects, fundraising and investment, retains an essentially suburban mindset. The city is in the process of developing a new cultural district around the centennial Olympic park that somehow has managed to create a suburban condition in the heart of downtown. The cultural amenities, an aquarium and several museums, are nothing if not tarted up versions of strip mall big box anchor stores- 'culture' at discount prices. It only stands to follow that the majority of the patrons to the new Georgia aquarium, for example, drive in from the suburbs, park their car in the deck, visit the facility and drive back out again. Hopefully that commemorative Nemo doll from the gift shop will help swell the city's tax revenue.

Like many much heralded Big Projects in Atlanta (with some notable exceptions like the new High Museum), the aquarium is another space making oppurtunity lost- which makes me think that any consideration of urban space for a new attraction here is an excercise in futility . The building doesn't really address the street in an urban way, it's posture is scenographic. You are supposed to see it either as a a promotional photograph or in the car as you drive in (even that wasn't handled well since you most likely end up driving into the back side of the building). True, there is the chance you could approach it from the Park, but since very few people live around the park and even less take MARTA to get there, that experience is the exception and not the rule. Secondly, the building is opaque; you can't walk down the street and look up to see museum goers and school groups milling around inside. Instead you get this big blank wall- albeit a nice blue tiled one. It's a billboard, not a building. The one area of transparency on the facade looks into a private dining romm . The rest of the building is a cross between a mall store and Disney world- a big black box where, depending on your outlook, commerce, 'culture' or 'nature' happens. That these interactions could have informed, and been informed by, the urban setting is something that seems to have been completely lost on the designers.

Even the opportunity to create an orientation point, a landmark- something totally obvious to a second year archtecture student, has been thoroughly wasted here. You can't see the building from the other side of the park. I know this, because I work in the area, and tourists always are wondering where the building is. You don't get a sense of an urban edge to the park either, because, in true suburban style, the building is low, horizontal and doesn't have any vertical massing. So if you're on the other side of the park and you have to walk over the slight hill there, you have no way of seeing it. The section through the park, one that cuts through the likely pedestrain path of travel from MARTA down to the aquarium entry, was one design drawing that most likely never got done.

It's ironic then, that whatever idyllic landscape left in the surbubs north of town are being eaten up by new developments that are, at least in a scenographic way, urban. These 'town house' developments are trying to organize themselves around a public square, with streets lined with row-houses and shared amenities (like mail boxes) in the middle. They don't really work as urban space, because the tension between truly public and private space doesn't exist. But they are fascinating examples of the kind of experimentation that is happening in the suburbs.

My theory is that the dynamic in suburbia is now being driven by competition. The suburbs no longer really need to compete with the city, they are going to start competing with each other. And they will begin to distinguish themselves by offering better solutions to the problems that they face: increased traffic and congestion, affordable housing choices that appeal to the next generation of homebuyers and more business opportunity and growth. This might mean that the real era of expirementation in the suburbs is just beginning.

The other open question is what this means for what's left of the urban core. Will the city try to compete on with the suburbs on their terms, by offering more attractions like the aquarium, or will it try to create a distinctly urban experience typified by more 'classically' urban developments like the Woodruff Arts/ High Museum complex and Technology square?

***

Links to:

The Altanta Aquarium

Sattelite Map of the Area:
Note the vast convention center east of the park, typical of the kind of surburbanized, big box architecture that has displaced the urban fabric of downtown. Prior to the Olympics this area was generally low income (read black) neighborhoods. Neighborhoods that were cleaned up as part of the pre-Olympic city nip and tuck.

Excellent NY Times peice on life in Alpharetta, a suburb 25 minutes north of the city here

And finally, the new urbanized surburbanized

2006-04-19T04:50:00.000-07:00

Suburbia 1: Beaverton, Oregon

An OP-ED piece follows. It's a recent article from The Oregonian that my brother was nice enough to forward. It's a fairly interesting peice, although I suspect "Zwischenstadt" is just a fancy north-eastern term for Edge City. In fact, the article is essentially a condensed version of some of Joel Garreau's notes from 'Edge City', which is still the critical primer on surbubanization.

***

From The Oregonian:

Dump your tired suburban notions
Beaverton defies everything we've been taught about what a suburb should be -- it's more densely populated and culturally diverse than Portland and offers a polyglot paradise of experiences
Sunday, April 16, 2006
MATTHEW STADLER

Here is a wonderland: Oregon's most densely populated city, its polyglot mix of immigrants crowding the boulevards with a cornucopia of cultures and foods -- South Indian idli and vada, Dutch nagelkaas, Korean jim-jil bang saunas, all-night reggaeton at La Fogata, the festival of Diwali -- and the city's schools, libraries and huge farmers market (one of the biggest in the Northwest) a crowded babble of languages.

Welcome to Beaverton.

Five new immigrants move to the suburbs for every one who moves to Portland. In Beaverton, one-fourth of residents grew up without English, one-fifth are foreign-born. Hiding its richness behind the inscrutable face of sprawl, Beaverton defies everything we've been taught about suburbs and cities.

It is more diverse, more dynamic and one-fifth more densely populated than Portland, yet it doesn't look at all like a city. So, what is it?

German urban historian Thomas Sieverts calls this "the Zwischenstadt" (roughly translated as "in-between city"). An expansive, densely built, centerless terrain, the Zwischenstadt, Sieverts tells us, "is the living space of the majority of mankind." The Zwischenstadt erodes open space enough to recast nature as an exception -- an interruption that must be fenced and protected -- and dissolves the historic centralized city by draining it of its money and population.

These changes are lamented by city-dwellers, many in Oedipal revolt against the suburbs they grew up in. Portland's champions of open space fix their rage on sprawl, overlooking the paradox of the city's own much lower densities.

Viewed through negative, inaccurate presumptions about suburbia and a stubborn nostalgia for the 19th-century European city, the pleasures of the Zwischenstadt are nearly unrecognizable to most people. Yet this is our future. How can we discover the humanity and beauty of this new condition?

MAX passengers debark at the Beaverton Transit Mall like a tribe cast out into the wilderness, exiting trains into a maze of parking lots, broad highways, scraps of green and a vast checkered fabric of interchangeable buildings. There is no public square, nothing very tall and no landmarks beyond the grossly enlarged signs of mega stores, looming above the traffic.

Abandoned strip malls sit hard by vibrant, overcrowded ones. Squat houses abut car lots in an ocean of two- and three-story buildings that fill the gently rolling Tualatin Valley as far as the eye can see.

It is a landscape clearly made for drivers, but even the pilots of the massive vehicles that dominate the scene look baffled, defeated by the array of obstacles and choices thrown in their way. They swarm over the densely marked terrain like insects on a patch of honey. As Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas said of our highway system: Here is utopia, clogged by its users. How has an amenity -- the suburbs -- that promised open space, tranquillity and safety become such a crowded, contested place? Going "over the hill"

Our presumptions about Beaverton -- that it is white, affluent and tranquil -- began after World War II, when a sudden influx of working-class and mixed-race populations into Portland led the city's real estate concerns to extol the virtues of a brand-new opportunity: "Southwest Suburbia," as The Oregonian called it in one of many circulars announcing this promised land.

Beaverton, the Portland papers told us in the late 1950s, would provide a new refuge for those who could afford to move: " 'Over the hill,' into the Tualatin Valley was attractive even a century ago to pioneers retreating from the bustle of a growing waterfront city. There was room for fields and orchards, where wood was readily available, and the sunsets over the coast range beautiful."

In the mythology of the suburbs, a second wave of pioneers -- the new suburbanites -- moved farther west to escape the rabble and find redemptive quiet on Beaverton's untenanted lands.

But that's not what awaited them. The land was occupied, with its own history and story to tell. In its 100-odd years, Washington County had already become home to a diverse, mobile population (albeit sparse) that moved to and through here along robust, enduring networks of global trade -- first fur trapping, then timber, fish and, lastly, agriculture.

Global trade fuels the Zwischenstadt, driving a multi-centered, dynamic pattern of investment and growth. Trade inscribed those embryonic outlines here by the mid-19th century. And then a city -- Portland -- grew, sharply concentrating investment in its buildings, infrastructure and banks.

The story of Portland's growth eventually redefined the dispersed settlements of Washington County as "suburbia," the city's "bedroom community." In the decades from 1960 through 2000, Beaverton absorbed the new influx of white flight, then overwhelmed it with a second, larger wave of the same restless polyglot population that had long called Washington County home.

The suburbs and sprawl became the enemy of downtown and open space. This story line, repeated in cities across the country, has obscured the enduring, underlying presence of the Zwischenstadt beneath the false drama of a city threatened by its suburbs.

Our fondness for the historic city, with its busy, close streets and cafes, its public squares and vertical canyons, still blinds us to the logic of the Zwischenstadt.

Sieverts warns us that this leads not only to "repression of the challenge presented by unloved suburbia" but also to urban preservation schemes that turn the historical core "into a quite ordinary shopping center." We risk "loving our old city centers to death while we top them up with pseudo-historical buildings and overload them with . . . the promotion of retailing." Knots in an endless net

It doesn't have to be this way. The Zwischenstadt is not the triumph of suburbia over the city, but a general condition that refigures both. If the historical center is of value as a cultural amenity -- as it is in Portland -- the Zwischenstadt can preserve it, but not as the single, concentrated center surrounded by its dependent rings of suburbs, farms and wilderness. Now the historic core is one in a network of many centers -- knots in an endless net.

Local plans for new light rail and highways reflect this, skirting downtown to directly connect other emerging centers. The proposed light rail from Beaverton to Wilsonville is an enormous step in the right direction, as is the MAX line from east Portland down to Clackamas.

The pleasures and beauties of this new condition are first encountered on such transit networks, as we pass through the Zwischenstadt's endless fabric, the city unfolding in the time it takes to drive or ride, rather than offering itself up as a series of places we walk through.

The best window onto it is the rolled-down one of a big convertible, the pilot high on mood-enhancing pills, to mute the anxiety of bad traffic -- or on bike or MAX, as I prefer -- with nowhere particular to go but "around" and a good long afternoon in which to do it.

Patterns unfold: a web of highways akimbo over older, smaller roads, train tracks cutting through both. Sieverts calls this "a carpet of settlement which appears to be without any plan but has the nature of a palimpsest in which old, superfluous and deleted text and images glimmer through the new text."

Giant box stores rise in the near distance, behind vast estuaries of traffic where planter strips and drainage ditches snake through asphalt fields of cars.

Walking in Beaverton reveals variety and surprise along the boulevards. The polyglot population is evident in the faces you see as well as the thicket of languages on painted signs. The older strip malls offer refuge to idiosyncrasy: specialty businesses sell prayer candles, halal meats and Middle Eastern spices, or heaps of obsolete computer parts; old men on lawn chairs treat parking strips like front stoops; cars on blocks and make-shift picnics occupy tiny side lawns. Cultural outreach

Tending to this new ecology requires new priorities. Alongside de-centered transportation networks (which must include rail and bikes as robustly as car traffic) we should invest heavily in communication technologies that, as Sieverts puts it, "enable and support gentle decentralization without simultaneously provoking a growth of traffic."

Portland-based cultural groups -- Literary Arts, the museum, the symphony -- need to cultivate audiences among outlying immigrant communities by actually venturing out there with programming and outreach. Galleries and artists should look at the huge inventory of flexible space in the disused strip malls along the MAX line and start working and living there.

The Zwischenstadt, Sieverts reminds us, has more than enough of almost everything: re-use is the key to its development. And we must be ready to undergo a wholesale change in our imaginations. This can be catalyzed through something Sieverts calls "internal tourism."

Get on the MAX this very day and abandon all your presumptions about Beaverton. Visiting the future is as easy as a 10-minute ride out of downtown.

***

Buy Edge City on Amazon here

Link to article here

2006-03-30T03:19:00.000-08:00

Adventures in South Florida, Part II

Here were some of the better impressions from our trip:

2006-02-07T01:03:00.000-08:00

Adventures in South Florida Part I: Me, Paul Rudolph and the U.S. Marshals

Recently, I was in south Florida doing building research for the firm I work at. I was joining one of the principals for two days of photographic surveys of some of the local work. We had been to downtown Miami, the deco district in South Beach, A1A and were wrapping up with a look at Fort Lauderdale when we drove by what looked suspiciously like a Paul Rudolph building.

Big brutal planes of serrated concrete were held up by three story high columns over a ziggurat- like water feature. Rudolph or not, it was interesting enough to merit a stop. In any case, we were both convinced that it was a Rudolph building, which just got us more excited. After looking at Arquitectonica for two days (and being completely underwhelmed) this was a welcome change.

We had only a few hours left before our flight and more ground to cover. So as we closed in on the building, the firm principal I was with thought that it would be better to circle around the building in the car while I snapped some shots. No problem.

I've always appreciated Rudolph. We both attended the same underrated Alabama architectural school and his were some of the first buildings that I read about that I actually got to see up close. One of those buildings, a chapel, is in Tuskegee- the Historically Black College twenty minutes away from my predominantly white school. I always loved the fact that the black school got the only architecturally significant building for miles and the white students had to go to the trouble of driving down the road to look at it.

Rudolph came to my school a short time before he died, in the early nineties. I hadn't heard of him at the time. He was the first person I had ever heard talk about the end of post-modernism as a style, a statement that sent ooh's rippling through the audience at the lecture. He showed us projects that explored modularity and infrastructure, when the predominant issues of the day where memory and history. And then there where the drawings. His ink style was kind of a revelation; the density of the line work and the realism of the drawing was, in a way, an analogue to the stark and frank use of materials and forms in his work. I'm not sure I had seen an emphasis on line and shadow expressed so clearly in an architectural drawing (another great and little known thing about my school was that our library had a drawer full of his drawings tucked away in the back corner).

Back to the courthouse. I'm clicking pictures on my digital camera. Move to the front of the building where a plaque tells me that it is in fact a courthouse, a federal courthouse. Ah yes, that would explain the security guard standing watch over there.

I had worked on some municipal projects before, and was living in Richmond, Virginia during the post 9/11 period- during which we had multiple DHS code Reds, the congressional anthrax scare and the Washington sniper rampage. I had run into skittish law enforcement before while photo-documenting public buildings. The drill was pretty routine. The officer would walk over, look at ID and maybe a business card- call the incident in and let me on my way.

The problem here was that my boss was circling around the building, and we didn't have a whole lot of time to stop and chat. So I figured since the guard was apparently more concerned with talking on his cell phone, I could give him the slip and we could be on our way. And, maybe, the notion that I ask for permission to photograph a public building on a public street was somewhat irritating at the time . In any case, I fully assumed that we could get this done quickly and not bother him with the needless details.

It's not that I was being surreptitious about it. I didn't hide in the bushes with a telephoto lens. I wasn't surveying it from a neighboring rooftop. I was in front of the building for a good twenty minutes clicking pictures. I walked across the intersection and took shots and walked back over and took more shots. As I came back over, satisfied, I finally saw the security guard walk over. He had his walkie talkie out this time, not his cell phone, he was in a hurry and he was looking right at me. And then he just walked in the other direction.

Well, that was fine. I'm not going out of my way to talk to this guy- I've been in front of his building for nearly half an hour and he can't find me. Within a second or two my boss pulled up, I got in and we drove off.

The problem, as we were about to discover, wasn't the hapless security guard- it was the half dozen or so plainclothes U.S. Marshals that were patrolling the site in unmarked cars. Within roughly two minutes we were beset by blue lights- to the utter bafflement of my boss. I did have an idea what was going on and remember muttering something about not being able to take a picture of a public building any more.

We got pulled over into a nearby quickie mart. By the time all the tires stopped moving there were five cars surrounding us. Large men with large guns emerged from them. I looked over and asked if my boss wanted to handle this- and he nodded. See, this is where the rather inconvenient coincidence that I am, in fact, an Arab starts to worm it's way into the little folds of my brain. Is this really happening? Did I just photographing a federal facility, and hmm... didn't I just evade a police officer and drive away, quickly in a white, nondescript rental car? Indeed, I did.

Well.

An agitated bald guy starts talking to my boss; very polite, but clearly, extremely flustered. He is telling him that in this day and age, with the present geopolitical climate being what it is, taking a picture of a federal building is not an activity that is going to be endorsed by the U.S. Marshals service. I'm in the car long enough to figure out this is going to take a while. There's another, younger, Marshal checking me out outside my door. I guess he didn't want me getting away the second time.

I figure I might as well get out and talk to the guy. Didn't want him to think that I was guilty (of what?) :

"So, it's a real shame about the building. It's by a pretty well known architect."

I guess he was dying try out all the stuff he had learned in interrogation 101, "Oh yeah, who was it?"

"Paul Rudolph."

The guy gives me the eye, so that I understand that he ain't sitting there making idle chit chat. Just so it's clear- this is all business and he's not the kind to consort with any kind of low life photographer of public buildings. No sir, not in this day and age.

"So, what else did he do?"

I almost start laughing.

We were held up for about an hour. They called the office and checked out our story with the other principals in Atlanta. At one point I thought that it would take longer. My boss didn't like the idea of federal marshals taking his picture, which they did. They both got into it briefly. I really didn't give it much thought when they took mine. I figured that by that time of day, ubiquitous security cameras had already recorded my mug at least half a dozen times.

Eventually though, in these situations, you get into a sort of detente. You didn't really break any law, so they really can't do anything more. At the same time, you realize, you weren't exactly a reassuring presence at their facility- so you can't really expect them to just cut you loose without looking into it. At the end of the day, it is just two sets of people, literally doing a job.

Which was all well and good, except for that faint whiff of fascism, somewhere near the end. It came up after we had entered the 'light banter' mode of the encounter. This is where the underlings realize that we are probably harmless and decide to probe a little more, but friendly-like, while the supervisors finally decide to clear us. Somewhere in the midst of talking about family, the area, the local sights and sounds, it came up:

"I just don't know why the hell you'd take a picture of such an ugly ass building."

This is where it gets dangerous for me. I didn't express it, because by then, we really did need to be on our way and not debating the fine points of architectural styles and their relative historical merits.

It is an unpopular building. And had it been designed by Rudolph, it would have been by an unpopular architect who had been a spokesman for unpopular ideas. And at the end of the day, I am, it must be said, a member of a somewhat unpopular minority group.

Was I more suspect because I had taken pictures of a building that the police officer didn't really like? Would I have been made to justify an aesthetic preference to a representative of the state? How do you enter into a debate on aesthetics while being held by armed officers (who refused to give us their names or cards)? Would I have to check in with the local security apparatus of every town where I wanted to photograph a public courthouse? Would I need to have a clearance? Would I need to reassure the officer of the architectural merits of the building?

What is the alternative? Do we build a new generation of courthouses that are hidden from view, and so ugly that no one would ever want to photograph them? Do we give up the notion that the workings of our government be visible and accessible from the public square?

...

PostScript

The building as it turns out what not a Rudolph building after all. It was designed by William Morgan of Jacksonville, Florida (http://www.williammorganarchitects.com/). William Morgan did, however, work for Paul Rudoph and I'd like to say I might have picked up on that.

Some photographs that look remarkably similar to the ones I took are featured on his site. Google Image search will turn up more. I'm not sure whether the officers are aware of the ubiquity of "sensitive" images on the web.

More on Paul Rudolph:

The Paul Rudolph foundation. http://www.paulrudolph.org/

A Great Buildings Online entry with a link to an excellent photo archive of the Walker Guest House: http://www.greatbuildings.com/architects/Paul_Rudolph.html

and an interesting post from the encyclopedia of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered and queer culture: http://www.glbtq.com/arts/rudolph_p.html

2006-02-07T00:58:00.000-08:00

Hiatus. 2.7.06 :

Having started a new job (and several bits of side work) soon after I started writing here, I hadn't really had a chance to get into the swing of things. But material has been popping up recently and so I think I ought to be able to start back up fairly soon.

2005-09-18T09:53:00.000-07:00

8.25.05: The one thousand year old building. (Part 1)

Hubbert's Peak

In 1949, a geo-physicist named M. King Hubbert published a theory on natural resource depletion which came to be known as Hubbert's curve. Hubbert was interested in understanding the relationship between the rates of discovery and extraction in natural resources, specifically in his case, petroleum extraction in the United States.

Hubbert posited that rates of extraction and discovery develop in parallel, and that the lifespan of resource discovery, extraction and depletion was both predictable and, for all practical purposes, finite. The reason for this was not so much that a resource would run out, but that the energy required for extraction of the resource would exceed the energy extracted. Essentially, resource extraction would eventually result in a net energy loss and would therefore cease to make sense.

The theory was first applied to petroleum production rates in the United States. At the time the United States was an oil exporter and it was not obvious then, as it is now, that eventually the U.S. would run out of oil. Hubbert's curve predicted that rate of decline. The curve works for world oil reserves and extraction in the same way it did for the United States. The glaring difference is when this happens on a world wide scale, there will not be anywhere to import oil from.

The implications are vast. Virtually every aspect of modern society is undergirded by the twin notions of progress and growth. But this very growth depends on resources that are, as Hubbert reminds us, finite. It is a truth that modern life has allowed us to conveniently forget.

It is not yet clear if the peak of production will happen this year, next year or in fifty years, but assuming Hubbert's theory, it will happen. There is not much dispute on the merits of the theory between either the more, say, radical geo-physicists who have postulated that the peak has already happened and the conservatives who give us another sixty or so years. The prevailing argument is more about the amount of proven world oil reserves and the resulting delay or acceleration of the peak.

Thinking about Decline

Taking Hubbert's theory of oil recovery and depletion as a given, arguing about when the peak and decline will happen is an academic exercise. The larger point is that decline is inevitable. We do not know what the consequences of decline will be, which is not necessarily a bad thing. What is dangerous however, is the absence of a larger conversation about what that decline would mean for us, the world's largest consumer of petroleum and sole superpower, and for the rest of the world.

Without launching into the inevitable doomsday scenarios, the predictions of social upheaval and political turmoil that often accompany discussions of the peak, it might be time to consider the nature of decline and it's consequences. It's not to discount the potential for these worst case scenarios to come to pass, it is just to acknowledge the futility of even talking about world-wide economic collapse, an intractable world-wide conflict over diminishing resources, a catastrophic environmental event, or all three at the same time. We might as well assume that we could have some control over the outcome if only to prepare for the possibility, however slight, that we actually will. It's a tenuous position at best, but then again, so is life.

The immensity of the problem suggests first a posture of engagement, particularly from the profession of architecture. It is valuable to remember that the theory of peak oil is generally a theory about resource depletion. So resource depletion is an outcome that will affect the use of any given resource, from timber to uranium. Attempting to shift the focus from oil to coal to uranium, for example, simply repeats the same mistake.

The issue might be more about modernity's inability to conceive of systems with an adequate sense of timescale. Modern systems tend to assume away problems of supply and depletion. Environmental concerns are often seen in through a moral or political lens in this country, but in fact environmental concerns eventually will impact the supply chain of systems in a very real way, as Katrina has taught us so well. It is, ultimately, disingenuous for the designers of modern systems to assume uninterrupted and continuous material inputs and then to discount the side-effect of undesirable outputs (pollution, social instability) on the continued functioning and stability of the system. Which brings up an item might be put high on the list of priorities in considering decline, stability.

Stability permits the flexibility and capacity to manage change. It is in this light that we might begin to consider looking at recent attempts to reorganize and reform sectors of society, such as the prosecution of corrupt corporate officers, or the attempt to mitigate the influence of money within the political system through campaign finance reform, as vital first steps to consolidate the conditions for social stability. Whether this reform is adequate or comprehensive enough is an altogether different discussion.

But the ultimate expression of the modern system is the metropolis. We can not exclude from consideration of reform, in light of a potential systemic decline or crisis, our cities and the impact of our work as architects. We design, by aggregate effort, what is the most finely tuned, most beautiful, most important man-made system in existence: the modern city. It is time to begin to reconsider the necessary conditions for its continued survival and success and to reassess our position relative to its current state.

End of part 1