Voluntary Prisoners of the City (and you don't know it!)

in today's paper, "snakes are straying into urban areas as their habitats are cleared". global warming, loss of animal habitats, fear of flying, bombs galore. all of this is amazing fodder to get stuff realized. and in the midst of this, all my back-head commentary is muttering "our world is in peril..." followed by hollers of earth, wind, fire, water and heart. damn you captain planet.

but back to snakes (in a house, not on a plane): it makes me wonder - why have we kept so strict to the green heart? we have this strict division between nature and the city when the most interesting spaces in singapore are where nature meets the city. i'm thinking of Dempsey, Portsdown Road, Tiong Bahru as well and the like. the opposite is true too: the most boring places are the shopping malls, fully air conditioned with the same mixture of shops, all "same same but different", to borrow a phrase that is turning out to be surprisingly wise.

on the subject of shopping malls: it seems to have become the default response to the idea of a central meeting point. even outside my house there is a new behemoth, and before one goes in already one can expect boredom. an atrium scheme, where line-of-sights are politely choreographed to expose a maximum of advertisments and shops. expect a 7-11 or its equivalent, expect a bread-talk or its equivalent. etcetc.

don't get me wrong, im not being all "commodification and consumption culture is bad, we should all fart roses and burp out messages of love". all im saying, is that there should be alternatives. balance. what a pity when the publics imagination has been limited to "lets go shopping" (broadly put!) and other things like going to a park or the beach or some cultural venue is an event in itself! How can something so beautiful: cities and their promise of unexpected juxtapositions and excitement, that which could be used to free and liberate, be used to enslave instead? Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture, now Voluntary Prisoners of the City but not unaware of it.

"if you don't know, just say you don't know. i just wanted to create". thank you sean, i love how you are so free.

to allow personal freedom

"do something pretty while you can"

whats the point of having a plan if the plan keeps god-damned changing!

in one word, "haphazard"

the dreaded question from family, friends and strangers alike goes "so what kind of architecture do you do", or in its permutations - "what kind of architecture does your school teach", leaves me at a loss for words.

What is it that I do? I'm not sure, and maybe it doesn't want to define it yet - by doing so, you leave out and deny all alternatives. And I'm not ready to commit to any singular definition yet.

So instead of what I do, maybe I should ask what've I've done. In as plain a langage as I can, the last year and a half was spent on the following:

travels:
1) road trip through california with family
2) internship in berlin
3) pilgimage to Holland
4) down and out in london
5) backpacking through mexico

design:
1) Solano Canyon housing project
2) Chungking Plaza environmental redesign
3) Bupyeong Skyscraper

interests:
1) LA photo project

projects:
1) NeuKoln parametric machine
2) South Korea urban research
3) Contemporary Domesticity research

this is depressing. i should go back and look closer.

the feeling that you're screaming into a vacuum or talking without a tongue. or is it just that you have nothing to say anymore?

and after jumping through all those hoops, you realize that end the end of it, no one changes. there is no personal carthasasis for any of them - the protagonist comes closest to the purest form of it, but everyone falls back into the lull the fictionalized narrative of their lives dictate.

the most majestic of them all. their flaws, one by one - giving up to fear, the other a submission of will. the other a lie and a cheat, the last a.

claiming mastery to anything denies the expansion of its possibities to anything outside of your grasp of it. a solidification and mummification of it. always keep exploring.

making something for an audience you don't know, which goes against the commercial instinct.

The residue of our history (a fiction) has been solidified into dogma. What a waste, because now the expansion of possibilities is paradoxically accompanied by a poverty of imagination.

the fiction of truths to directthe journey

liquid modernity, zygmunt bauman.

What Would... xxx Do?

xx = lance armstrong, rem koolhaas, dan eldon

"what is that?"

"icelandic porn."

What is the relationship of economic development and urbanization?

Urbanization creates a consumption based society to fuel capitalism. But in developing countries, the jump to developed is still understood as industrialization, which is understood to mature to tertiary and eventually a service based economy.

This myth now locks these countries in a position of subserviance to the already developed nations. What alternative model could there be?

Within this, what is the role of modernization? Modernization may be the only period with a collectively self-conscious definition of itself in its process, as opposed to other periods (e.g. feudalism, enlightenment etc, which were perhaps retroactively defined). Did this self-consciousness lead to its acceleration, and now where are we and where are we going

The Fiction of Wealth and its Equitable Distribution in a Global Capitalist Market

"The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind. The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere."

-Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

The Godfather

"...[Adam Smith] is concerned with promoting the wealth of the entire nation. And wealth, to Adam Smith, consists of the goods which all the people of society consume... We are in the modern world where the flow of goods and services consumed by everyone constitutes the ultimate aim and end of economic life." Ironically, this egalitarian ideal would only be achieved through rational self-interest- the Laws of the Market and the Invisible Hand which regulates it. However, the theoretical framework of this theory positions itself within the confines of two a-prioris:

First, the perfect flow of information, is crucial to the mechanism of the "Invisible Hand".

But this is rarely true in reality. For example, a copy of Alice in Wonderland sells at the local bookshop for $10. At the local bookshop, it sells for $5 more. Within a rationalized framework, purchase of the book from the local bookshop would the result of consumer ignorance of the alternative. Ceteris paribus, the latter bookshop thus creates the surplus value of $5 from this informational gap.

Second, the valuation of a good is determined by its capital inputs and the balance of its supply and demand, where the the actions of individuals are determined rationally.

But not all decisions made are rationally derived. Economic booms usually leads to bouts of exuberant spending. The recent building boom in Dubai is an example of the economy of excess mixed in with cultural attitudes, in this case, toward land as a store of capital.

Further adding to this is the role of design and marketing in the creation of extra value through qualitative means, which explains the difference in price between an i-pod and a generic mp3 player. This skews the quantitative evaluation of the value of a product.

The effects of this are twofold:

The breakdown of the Invisible Hand results in the inequitable accumulation of wealth from the imperfect flow of information. Perhaps the exploitation of this ignorance and the excessive creation of excess value through it led to the divorce of currency from the gold standard. The system of Fiat Money, now used by most countries, defined as "money that is intrinsically useless; is used only as a medium of exchange" reveals the divorce of the price of a good and its actual value", highlights this. The removal of a "value ceiling" for wealth provides the springboard for the unfettered proliferation of capital on a global scale.

The inflation of the production chain to include and emphasize design to differentiate essentially similar goods also skews the equitable redistribution of capital - when the same pie is shared by more people, those at the bottom rung get the least. An example of this is the Apple slogan- "designed in California", but made in China.

This increased complexity in the production of goods dilutes the trickle down effect of capital to those in the lower echelons of this cycle - the workers in China, in the case of this example.

Capitalism Gone Global

The emergence of the American transnational corporation and increased free trade allowed by the relaxation international trade barriers, evident in the 1993 NAFTA agreement, amongst others, has allowed the increased mobility of capital.

However, this increased mobility is deceiving. Instead of the equitable distribution of wealth on a global scale, it has resulted in capital being captured in a new cycle that is independent of a countries geography. For example, the main factory of Daewoo used to be in the city of Bupyeong, in-between Seoul and Incheon - it served as the economic catalyst for the prosperity of the city. The relationship between industry and its site of production is evident in the decay of cities such as Manchester and Detroit in conjunction with the industries that supported it.

Increased mobility with regards to sites of production has allowed this production to be decentralized in a mercenary-like fashion to the lowest bidders- which has resulted in a global weakening of the power of labour, which no longer holds any leverage in this new ecology. What results is a race to the bottom, where already poor countries compete with each other to provide even cheaper labour, often by offsetting the externalities to the environment and its people.

Economies of Ether

Not only are sites of production increasingly mobile, but so are the factors of production. The shift in production toward services and the increased efficiencies communication across borders further exacerbates this.

The emergence of "global cities", cities involved in this international flow of capital, highlights the networked logic of these cities. Extending Marc Auge's idea of non-place, perhaps this is its opposite: a networked place, and that is why the various international business districts, from Singapore to London to Hong Kong, typologically resemble each other - they are in effect related because the flow of wealth is captured in a closed loop cycle with little overlap with the overall local economy and populous.

This creation of alternative economic cycles that are no longer spatially demarcated has created intense juxtapositions of wealth within these countries.

"High immigration has coincided with a widening income gap. Singapore’s Gini coefficient, a measure of inequality, rose from 0.444 in 2000 to 0.481 in 2008—higher than in China and America. The contrast between the glitzy downtown and the “heartlands” is glaring, and more damaging in tiny, dense Singapore than it would be in a big country, says Paulin Straughan of the National University of Singapore."

This non-spatial logic of capital short circuits or dampens the trickle down effect of capital which, by the logic of Adam Smith, would regulate itself -"the any starting point, the proving mechanism of the market first equalizes the returns to labour and capital in all different uses." [The Worldly Philosophers, page 61] The assumption is on the flow of capital being bound within its geographical boundaries, which would allow itself to eventually circulate to the general populous.

The rise of the Global Market detaches the flow of capital from this closed-loop cycle and captures it an alternative market cycle (e.g. the stock market, private equity, bonds and investments, forex, real estate) which is exclusionary to a larger segment of the populous because participation within it requires a minimum skill-set which the general population may not be equipped with due to unequal access to educational opportunities.

The result is a spatial collage of different wealth cycles: broadly put, the local and the global economic cycles.

State versus the Multinational Corporation - Who is David and Goliath?

What these factors lead to is it structurally locks countries into a parent-child relationship with the transnational corporation, an inversion of the post-World War 2 hierarchy.

Saskia Sassen positions these structural changes within categorical framework of authority, territory and rights as pertains to the state, the global economy and citizenship, respectively.

"... through their destabilizing effects, globalization and electronic networks are producing operational and rhetorical openings for the emergence of new types of political subjects and new spatialities for politics." This detaches the idea of the political from the state - described by her as "not only a deterritorializing of citizenship practices and identities... but also their partial denationalizing."

Extending the politicization of market practices, Slavoj Zizek poses the issue: "it is not should the state intervene, but what kind of state intervention is necessary." Perhaps the real question should be, where can the state intervene in a global environment?

Ironically, this position aligns itself to a purer form of capitalism different from the pro-national agendas afforded by the Bretton-Woods agreement during the 1970s. The recent economic meltdown resonates with the lack of Government intervention or power in this international economic landscape. That this occurred within an entirely fictional landscape of artificial value extends the absurdity of the situation.

So what is the role of the Government? One view restates their importance in an increasingly globalized context - policy divergence during the 1980s and 1990s between countries has lead to remarkably marked differences in outcomes in the nation's role in today global landscape. For example, the differences in regulatory reforms in Britain and Japan has shown that instead of abandoning control of the private sector behavior, both countries reorganized it.(David Vogel, 1995) Supporting this view in a more contemporary study is Daron Acemoglu- an MIT economist and winner of the 2005 Clark Medal- "... the reasons some nations succeed while others founder comes down to the soundness and transparency of their government institutions- the ability of a nation's citizens to own property, freely elect representation and live without fear or crime or graft."

However, through the lens of Sasika Sassen, is this state even a relevant player in such considerations, and to what extend can they affect such outcomes in the globalized landscape?

Perhaps the extreme of this is a reality akin to Neal Stephenson's 1992 cyperpunk novel Snow Crash - corporate franchise city states , a fully-instantiated laissez-faire society, and a virtual meta-society patronized by financial, social, and intellectual elites:

"When it gets down to it — talking trade balances here — once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here — once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel — once the Invisible Hand has taken away all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity — y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else: music, movies, microcode (software), high-speed pizza delivery"

All that is solid melts into air, all that is sacred is profaned.

-

References:

The Worldy Philosophers by Robert L. Heilbroner

Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages by Sasika Sassen

First as Tragedy, Then as Farce by Slavoj Zizek

Capitalism: A Very Short Introduction by James Fulcher

The Economist

Moon by Duncan Jones

http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/political-buffer-space-and-chinese.html

politics and its spatial representation

I, Robot -

the dogma of reason is coming to an end, because we know where it'll lead to. The end of the arc of the enlightenment.

top chef offers tv dinners, extending the terrain of the immersive experience.

interestingly, "after decades of stagnation, use of microwaves have gone up by 20% in the past few years." does this mean more and more people are staying in?

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1940692,00.html?xid=rss-topstories&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+time/topstories+(TIME:+Top+Stories)&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher

xmas idea: find an old typewriter, break off the letters and make initialled necklaces for ppl.

the disciplinary boundary has expanded, but that shouldn't be confused with the disciplinary medium: space - its manipulation and creation.

One of those funny-because-its-true-but-i-never-was-conscious-of-it posts

Thoughts from the 21st century:

1. I wish Google Maps had an “Avoid Ghetto” routing option.
2. More often than not, when someone is telling me a story all I can think about is that I can’t wait for them to finish so that I can tell my own story that’s not only better, but also more directly involves me.
3. Nothing sucks more than that moment during an argument when you realize you’re wrong.
4. I don’t understand the purpose of the line, “I don’t need to drink to have fun.” Great, no one does. But why start a fire with flint and sticks when they’ve invented the lighter?
5. Have you ever been walking down the street and realized that you’re going in the complete opposite direction of where you are supposed to be going? But instead of just turning a 180 and walking back in the direction from which you came, you have to first do something like check your watch or phone or make a grand arm gesture and mutter to yourself to ensure that no one in the surrounding area thinks you’re crazy by randomly switching directions on the sidewalk.
6. That’s enough, Nickelback.
7. I totally take back all those times I didn’t want to nap when I was younger.
8. Is it just me, or are 80% of the people in the “people you may know” feature on Facebook people that I do know, but I deliberately choose not to be friends with?
9. Do you remember when you were a kid, playing Nintendo and it wouldn’t work? You take the cartridge out, blow in it and that would magically fix the problem. Every kid in America did that, but how did we all know how to fix the problem? There was no internet or message boards or FAQ’s. We just figured it out. Today’s kids are soft.
10. There is a great need for sarcasm font.
11. Sometimes, I’ll watch a movie that I watched when I was younger and suddenly realize I had no idea what the f was going on when I first saw it.
12. I think everyone has a movie that they love so much, it actually becomes stressful to watch it with other people. I’ll end up wasting 90 minutes shiftily glancing around to confirm that everyone’s laughing at the right parts, then making sure I laugh just a little bit harder (and a millisecond earlier) to prove that I’m still the only one who really, really gets it.
13. How the hell are you supposed to fold a fitted sheet?
14. I would rather try to carry 10 plastic grocery bags in each hand than take 2 trips to bring my groceries in.
15. I think part of a best friend’s job should be to immediately clear your computer history if you die.
16. The only time I look forward to a red light is when I’m trying to finish a text.
17. A recent study has shown that playing beer pong contributes to the spread of mono and the flu. Yeah, if you suck at it.
18. Was learning cursive really necessary?
19. Lol has gone from meaning, “laugh out loud” to “I have nothing else to say”.
20. I have a hard time deciphering the fine line between boredom and hunger.
21. Answering the same letter three times or more in a row on a Scantron test is absolutely petrifying.
22. My brother’s Municipal League baseball team is named the Stepdads. Seeing as none of the guys on the team are actual stepdads, I inquired about the name. He explained, “Cuz we beat you, and you hate us.” Classy, bro.
23. Whenever someone says “I’m not book smart, but I’m street smart”, all I hear is “I’m not real smart, but I’m imaginary smart”.
24. How many times is it appropriate to say “What?” before you just nod and smile because you still didn’t hear what they said?
25. I love the sense of camaraderie when an entire line of cars teams up to prevent a dick from cutting in at the front. Stay strong, brothers!
26. Every time I have to spell a word over the phone using ‘as in’ examples, I will undoubtedly draw a blank and sound like a complete idiot. Today I had to spell my boss’s last name to an attorney and said “Yes that’s G as in…(10 second lapse)..ummm…Goonies”
27. What would happen if I hired two private investigators to follow each other?
28. While driving yesterday I saw a banana peel in the road and instinctively swerved to avoid it…thanks Mario Kart.
29. MapQuest really needs to start their directions on #5. Pretty sure I know how to get out of my neighborhood.
30. Obituaries would be a lot more interesting if they told you how the person died.
31. I find it hard to believe there are actually people who get in the shower first and THEN turn on the water.
32. Shirts get dirty. Underwear gets dirty. Pants? Pants never get dirty, and you can wear them forever.
33. I would like to officially coin the phrase ‘catching the swine flu’ to be used as a way to make fun of a friend for hooking up with an overweight woman. Example: “Dave caught the swine flu last night.”
34. I can’t remember the last time I wasn’t at least kind of tired.
35. Bad decisions make good stories
36. Whenever I’m Facebook stalking someone and I find out that their profile is public I feel like a kid on Christmas morning who just got the Red Ryder BB gun that I always wanted. 546 pictures? Don’t mind if I do!
37. Is it just me or do high school girls get sluttier & sluttier every year?
38. If Carmen San Diego and Waldo ever got together, their offspring would probably just be completely invisible.
39. Why is it that during an ice-breaker, when the whole room has to go around and say their name and where they are from, I get so incredibly nervous? Like I know my name, I know where I’m from, this shouldn’t be a problem….
40. You never know when it will strike, but there comes a moment at work when you’ve made up your mind that you just aren’t doing anything productive for the rest of the day.
41. Can we all just agree to ignore whatever comes after DVDs? I don’t want to have to restart my collection

from http://snickerdoodlecookies.tumblr.com/

today was a good day

carnivale, which threads the line between possibility, plausibility backed by historical references. soooo good.

bergman

the dialectic as oppositional, the triumvirate as supportive.

state vs people - the state, the corporation and the people.

"Capitalist Socialism"

storytelling: the delirium translated into reality by getting built.

the excuse for form and being. a parentless bastard without a history trying to legitimize itself into existence.

firms in NY

snohetta

REX

OMA

D&S

3 reasons to be happy today:

-slavoj zizek

-nasa talk

-cleaned the house

Learning By Moving

Gideon Fink Shapiro

The new academic building at Cooper Union is both transparent and veiled. It provides efficient laboratory, office, and studio space while devoting vast areas to nothing in particular. It is made up of standardized components, yet it pops with surprises. In short, it has a dual personality. Maybe that’s just part of its tough charm. Or maybe these paradoxes are side effects of an intense effort to emphasize and ennoble the building’s public spaces. With this 16,500-sqm commission in downtown Manhattan, Thom Mayne and Morphosis had to rethink the layering of public social space and private work space in contemporary education – and in the contemporary city. The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art is unique in the history of American education. Founded by the industrialist and philanthropist Peter Cooper in 1859, who lacked the means to pursue higher education, the institution provides full tuition scholarships for all of its 1000 students in engineering, art, and architecture. If the school performs a kind of public service, then its historic foundation building and auditorium is a venerable public landmark six blocks below Union Square. The neo-Renaissance brownstone structure was completed in an era when learning took place in the classroom or studio. Today, as Mayne points out, students extend their learning environments to the coffee shop, home, or wherever they carry their laptop. So when Los Angeles-based Morphosis won this project in 2004, the job was not only to compensate for the loss of 3700 sqm occurred as a consequence of the school’s move from three buildings to two. The design had to respond to the challenge that all contemporary architects face: how to make places that are worth going to. Or in this case, worth hanging around after class. Mayne’s answer was to carve a towering, daylight-filled atrium out of the heart of the building. He hopes this “vertical piazza” of stairs, lounges, conference rooms, and terrace foster the kind of spontaneous encounters and interactions that can’t be had via mobile phone or Facebook.

The mission is accomplished with a bit of physical coercion – the elevators stop only at the fourth and seventh levels. Therefore most students and faculty will have to walk up or down a flight to reach their destinations, mixing with their colleagues along the way. Choreographing spectacle and interaction within a grand circulation space is a time-honored practice in museums and performing arts facilities. Mayne has become a proponent of free-flowing social mixing spaces in his corporate projects as well, from the Caltrans Headquarters (2004) to the forthcoming Giant Group Campus in Shanghai. To examine the Cooper Union building up close and explore inside is to understand that its public spaces are its lifeblood, and material legibility its never-ending delight. In an age of blurred boundaries between physical and digital space, machine- and human-made objects, and collective and personal communication, this building proposes a new hierarchy of public/private space to bring the academy up to speed with the informal social networking of modern students. In terms of public response, the most controversial aspect of the project is the wrapper of stainless-steel mesh panels. Initially it makes the building appear as abstract as a Hugh Ferriss massing study, and as scaleless as a glacier. About 25% of the panels open automatically to admit daylight. Yet in addition to saving energy, the seemingly monolithic armor “allows us to be specific about what we want to communicate,” says the 2005 Pritzker laureate. While laboratories and offices remain undifferentiated from the outside (except at night when the glow of their windows can be seen through the mesh), vast cut-outs on the west elevation trace the contours of the nine-storey public atrium, indicating its importance. At the street level, the gauzy chain-mail skirt is lifted all the way around to reveal the lobby, the below-grade public galleries and event spaces, and retail storefronts. “A lot of people just see it as different,” says Mayne of the building’s exterior, “but I see it as highly connected to the particular nature of the site.” He explains the slashing and flexing of the west elevation as inspired by the force of the city and trees pushing in from Cooper Square.

In addition, the building approximates the height (41 m) of the foundation building, and is oriented toward its entrance across the street. Inside, the floors are simple ground concrete. Ceilings are modular panel systems – reminiscent of the exterior – but fit with radiant heat and cooling, and flexible to allow maintenance and new configurations. In general, the labs and studios exemplify functional simplicity. By contrast, the public areas throw function – or at least the functional organization of basic components – gleefully to the winds. A variety of naked materials and idiosyncratic geometries overlap and intersect seemingly of their own volition. This is the result of what Mayne calls “the relaxation of authorship, working with process as well as fixed result,” as in a Jackson Pollack painting. The atrium lobby plays host to a non-Euclidean convergence of raw concrete slabs, hovering scaffolding, perforated composite ceiling panels, soaring drywall planes, tilting glass panels, and undulating handrails. The influx of daylight from the landings, lobby, and skylights keeps you oriented. Overhead, a torqued grid whirls up and around the atrium like a giant exoskeleton. Composed of steel tubes encased in molded GFRG shells, the computer-modeled “mega-mesh” was installed by hand over the course of a year. It embodies the blending of high-tech and hand-tech that helps drive the firm’s work. The flashy moves are gratuitous yet fun. In the context of the building’s utilitarian leanness, these whimsical excesses may provoke students to debate form and function anew. In addition, they succeed – at least while they’re still fresh – in infusing the public spaces with the desired theatrical gusto.

http://www.abitare.it/featured/melted-ice/

"If there is an ambition, there is an author"

"Everything and the Kitchen Sink: An architectural bag of tricks"

when it rains, the city becomes a sugimoto photo, atmospheric but not melancholic

"a new york state of mind"

The Icarus Horizon

Density should not be confused with Urbanism - where the former quantitatively concerns itself with a large number of people in living close proximity, the latter qualitatively describes a cultural phenomenon or lifestyle that is enabled, in part, by this proximity.

The story of the 21st century will be defined by these terms. In this story that we are now writing, we face the risk of steering ourselves into a cul de sec - the creation of density without Urbanism.

In this story, the main protagonists -the skyscraper - will be the deciding factor. Its hubris lies in its ability to easily inject instant densities into any situation.

Unlike suburbanization, where the effects of sprawl were at least offset or made tolerable with the generosity of personal space, densification without Urbanism is the surrender of personal space without any subsequent returns.

From

isn't a protest just a way of mass communication?

//tweetbomb

Where is "Untitled"?

On Locations and the Lack of Them in Gursky's Photography

... it is this claim to universality... (and) its reference to no-man's land, a non-location, a place which could be called "u-topia", something which is a fundamental concept in what we call Modernity...

In formal terms, man is never at the center of Gursky's photography. And yet people remain his only real concern... Despite his analytical view of mankind and society, Gursky always remains indulgent. If he wanted to focus on all the harsh social realities of the conflict between the individual and the constraints imposed on us by the politcal or economic system in which we live he would portray man as a slave of the machine... But his is not the case. In Gursky's photography the tragic element is missing. Instead, the artist maintains an ironic distance. normally man is viewed as a part of the whole and not as its instrument... it is never the case that he is completely dominated by his surroundings.

-Marie Luise Syring

blanket modernism that reproduces itself - simulacra, that which only references itself will soon exhume itself of any rhetoric or ideology - it becomes a end in itself, it is made because it has been made. "the coexistence of a number of apparently unconnected buildings which, by the simple fact of sharing a certain proximity, form an urban condition."

Bear say "moo"

"... where i can dream a bit more freely."

Today for the first time I felt truly lost in the supermarket, only this time, to the extent I didn't know or expect that I'd find myself in the supermarket, which was in Target, which brings the whole thing to a whole new level of disorientation. The Clash was right.

But dinner at Local was good - friendly waiters and a chill neighbourhoodish stylish crowd, and the silverlake lounge across the street.

at DWP building, the prefect example of all that is right and wrong with monumental modernism: the grand scale and dehumanizing vastness of it.

"Acknowledging Koolhaas as the consummate contemporary architect who is able to look past what constitutes the discipline's own boundaries, we became interested in his response to urbanism, a dissolution of the discourse and its transformation into a discussion of events rather than definitions and limits. Five or six of OMA's projects in "S,M,L,XL" focused on discovering unnameable hybrids rather than fixed typologies, and on the manipulation of infrastructure rather than discrete building blocks. More importantly, all of these projects approach urbanism through a loose diagrammatic set of associations between the formal, social and the political"

"Wal-mart was of interest to us because of it was the exact antithesis of what urban design projects typically deal with. We wanted to confront the nitty gritty of how to design for a large multinational corporation, to effectively re-arrange and re-formulate their building type to manifest something new."

"More important than the visual transparency was the idea that this kind of abrupt juxtaposition actually creates positive friction. Something that is lacking in many other new urban propositions where segregation and division are the primary operations at hand. In a certain perverse sense, typology offered us raw material to manipulate although our concern for rules regarding corridors, atriums, and other such features were always to leverage them in unexpected ways."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203440104574403293064136098.html?mod=loomia&loomia_si=t0:a16:g12:r1:c0.211192:b27778496

Slavoj Žižek (pronounced [ˈslavoj ˈʒiʒɛk]) (born 21 March, 1949 in Ljubljana, PR Slovenia, SFR Yugoslavia) is a Hegelian philosopher, Lacanian theoretical psychoanalyst, Marxist political thinker, film theorist, andcultural critic.

Žižek is a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia and a professor at the European Graduate School. He has been a visiting professor at, among others, the University of Chicago, Columbia, London Consortium, Princeton, The New School, the University of Minnesota, the University of California, Irvine and the University of Michigan. He is currently the International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London and president of the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis, Ljubljana.^[1]

Žižek uses examples from popular culture to explain the theory of Jacques Lacan and uses Lacanian psychoanalysis, Hegelian philosophy and Marxist politico-economic critique to interpret social phenomena. He writes on many topics including subjectivity, ideology, capitalism, fundamentalism, racism, tolerance, multiculturalism, human rights, ecology, globalization, the Iraq War, revolution, totalitarianism, postmodernism,popular culture, opera, cinema, and religion.

role of media in determining the resolution of the world view. previously technically-limited, it is now open and thus necessary to regulate and self-censure

Narrative, Storytelling

the contemporary lack of a metanarrative, giving way for the micronarrative that requires less facts and intersecting events to prop up its authenticity.

"Curation remains a dominant condition of network culture... the new is played out, novelty is now created through aggregation and commentary. Digital technology aids greatly in this, making remixing a part of everyday life for many individuals..."

[self conscious curation to create an overlap between the physical and the information landscape to create more persuasive relalities. right now, the information is either dis-engaged or location in another time frame/period.]

augmented realities

Andrea Branzi - "Superarchitecture accepts the logic of production and consumption and makes an effort to demystify it."... thus, the pursuit not of resistance or autonomy but rather of exacerbation and overload was achitettura radicale's seminal innovation. Architecture is an act of analysis, not merely a project of formal delirium or self-legitimizing theory.

i.e. = yes is more

Slavoj Zizek, "... it is not only that Hollywood stages a semblance of real life deprived of the weight and inertia of materiality - in the late capitalist consumerist society, 'real social life' itself somehow acquires the features of a staged fake, with our neighbours behaving in 'real' life as stage actors and extras... [T]he ultimate truth of the capitalist-utilitarian de-spiritualized universe is the de-materialization of the 'real life' itself, its reversal into a spectral show."

..in order to tell a compelling story and to make our world comprehensible, we preplan, script and edit our lives... In order to keep going in a world where every desire and every decision is valid, we have to creatively bring a sense of order to our lives. Non-fiction allows us to believe that the stories we tell ourselves about our existence have meaning and importance.

much ado about nothing: creating internal ecologies that do nothing

oblique catalyst

A Strong Century, Andrea Branzi

The code of classic modernity presents itself today as a rigid concept, overwhelmed by the fluidity of commerce, the invasion of innovations, the ungovernable natures of the world economy, and a climate facing a constant pollution crisis. Neo-capitalism, which has trumped throughout the world since 1989, seems to survive itself solely on the condition that it knows how to reform, modify, and in practice deny its own doings on a daily basis.

[a suspension of moral judgement]

The end of this epoch of forced modernization, marked by strong logic and the search for irreversible and definitive solutions, therefore coincides, as franccois fouret claims, with the end of the historic epoch begun by the French Revolution and ended in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall.

[winning isn't winning, its just not losing]

this was always understood as a dicovery of the true, of the authentic hidden under the overstructures and hypocrisy of history. this was a search, therefore, aimed at broadening the available repertory of certainties, always looking for a truth that already existed, but was previously unseen.

[latent potentials, which raises questions about identity as a reaction or as an invention]

this is an epoch more attuned to the values of normalcy, even if composed entirely of exceptions , in a context where spread out laboratories of permanent vanguards work... this is an epoch in search of energetic systems capable of producing, without trauma, vast social and physical upheaval.

the new times are signaled by an ability to work in a world constructed according to a logic that we will call weak and diffuse

[able to absorb alternatives and the periphery]

Weak thought, that is, a type of hermeneutics that develops without looking to the great syntheses of the twentieth century, or to the unifying systems of politics and projects that were typical of classic modernism. INstead, this hermeneutics proceeds folloing more incomplete, imperfect, disarticulated types of cognizance and transformation, which are more ductile and therefore able to absorb the new and confront the surprises and complexities that this produces.

[one that can absorb it (miesian "universal space", where its relevance is hinged upon its non-specificity or generic nature vs one that is a catalyst for new forms of lifestyle and use (e.g. SPL)]

investigation of consequences produced by information technologies and weak logics they create.

architecture as a form of imagineering, but it seems as if every realization of it, when its stated intent is revealed, promises its own failure. im thinking of the IBA housing, corbusier's villa radieuse. its almost as if for a concept to live, it should not be built.

and yet its the alternative such as the projects of raymond hood etc, where such a conceptual vacuum gives room for it to absorb its own character. what do you think?

Contemporary architectural culture can be summerized as a series of hermetic arguments, each sealed into their own air-tight closed-loop arguments where A equals B therefore B equals A. The irony is that this babel-confusion is at a time when communication is at its most fluid.

Compelling as it may seem at first, it has, at the end of the day, the conceptual elegance of a dog chasing its own tail.

Perhaps architecture really is a series of mis-intepretations and conceptual flights off the thinnest springboard of reality. Like a Hockney splash, the culprit isn't real because he never was there.

"Newness cannot always be invented. Sometimes its just about making a space nice."

"... it is a method of systematic idealization, an automatic overestimation of what exists, a bombardment of speculation that invests even the most mediocre aspects with retroactive consceptual and ideological charge",

a delirium of interpretation.

do you feel like sometimes you're doing more without really doing anything in the end?

running in place

"For the longest time I didn't know what I was writing about. I wrote to figure it out and by the time I did I was done."

Jonathan Safran Foer

inglourious basterds

so the two characters that began the movie, ended it.

and there are traces of cinema paradiso which also parallels the "italians" (coincidence?), a reference to cinderella with a twist, and an overt reference to westerns (once upon a time).

and kudos to chrisopth waltz or something.

what else was there? and what could it mean

Dear lennard-future,

Please remember- mornings to yourself make you happy. Drinking too much when you're angry doesn't help. Overeating when you're down just makes you sadder, but a good well prepared meal helps.

Also, a good nights sleep cures most fluctuations, and so does taking a break from the computer.

p.s. turn the internet off when you're working, it distracts you too much.

love,

lennard-present

"there" is not there.

On Henri Lefebvre

for Lefebvre, space doesnt not exist in itself, but is created by human actions and other spatial practices. Lefebvre also states that, in this everyday, utilized space, power relations become visible. These relationsh are articulated through the ordering of the physical space and how it is represented. For Lefebvre space is thus at the crux of power and power relationships.

Architectural Positions, PRACTICES, page 335

Lefebvre dedicated a great deal of his philosophical writings to understanding the importance of (the production of) space in what he called the reproduction of social relations of production. This idea is the central argument in the book The Survival of Capitalism, written as a sort of prelude to La production de l’espace (1974) (The Production of Space). These works have deeply influenced current urban theory, mainly within human geography, as seen in the current work of authors such as David Harvey and Edward Soja. Lefebvre is widely recognized as a Marxist thinker who was responsible for widening considerably the scope of Marxist theory, embracing everyday life and the contemporary meanings and implications of the ever expanding reach of the urban in the western world throughout the 20th century. The generalization of industry, and its relation to cities (which is treated in La pensée marxiste et la ville), The Right to the City and The Urban Revolution were all themes of Lefebvre's writings in the late 1960s, which was concerned, amongst other aspects, with the deep transformation of "the city" into "the urban" which culminated in its omni-presence (the "complete urbanization of society").

In his book The Urban Question (translated into English very early, in contrast with Lefebvre's works), Manuel Castells heavily criticizes Lefebvre's theoretical arguments contained in the books published in the 1960s about the contemporary city from a Marxist standpoint. Castells' criticisms of Lefebvre's subjective approach to Marxism echoed the Structuralist school of Louis Althusser, of which Lefebvre was an early critic. Many responses to Castells are provided in The Survival of Capitalism, and some may argue that the acceptance of those critiques in the academic world would be a motive for Lefebvre's effort in writing the long and theoretically dense The Production of Space.

In The Production of Space, Lefebvre contends that there are different levels of space, from very crude, natural space ('absolute space') to more complex spatialities whose significance is socially produced ('social space').^[10]

Lefebvre's argument in The Production of Space is that space is a social product, or a complex social construction (based on values, and the social production of meanings) which affects spatial practices and perceptions. As a Marxist philosopher (but highly critical of the economicist structuralism that dominated the academic discourse in his period), Lefebvre argues that this social production of urban space is fundamental to the reproduction of society, hence of capitalism itself. Therefore, the notion ofhegemony as proposed by Antonio Gramsci is used as a reference to show how the social production of space is commanded by a hegemonic class as a tool to reproduce its dominance.

"(Social) space is a (social) product [...] the space thus produced also serves as a tool of thought and of action [...] in addition to being a means of production it is also a means of control, and hence of domination, of power."^[11]

Lefebvre argued that every society - and therefore every mode of production - produces a certain space, its own space. The city of the ancient world cannot be understood as a simple agglomeration of people and things in space - it had its own spatial practice, making its own space (which was suitable for itself - Lefebvre argues that the intellectual climate of the city in the ancient world was very much related to the social production of its spatiality). Then if every society produces its own space, any "social existence" aspiring to be or declaring itself to be real, but not producing its own space, would be a strange entity, a very peculiar abstraction incapable of escaping the ideological or even cultural spheres. Based on this argument, Lefebvre criticized Soviet urban planners, on the basis that they failed to produce a socialist space, having just reproduced the modernist model of urban design (interventions on physical space, which were insufficient to grasp social space) and applied it onto that context:

"Change life! Change Society! These ideas lose completely their meaning without producing an appropriate space. A lesson to be learned from soviet constructivists from the 1920s and 30s, and of their failure, is that new social relations demand a new space, and vice-versa."^[12]