Chronomorphology: active time in architecture- 2003

active time in architecture | Ed Keller Columbia University GSAPP 3rd year design studios 1999-2003

cba

active time in architecture | Ed Keller

Columbia University GSAPP 3rd year design studios 1999-2003

cba

active time in architecture | Ed Keller

Columbia University GSAP 3rd year design studios 1999-2003

For C.L.

CHRONOMORPHOLOGY : active time in architecture cba : columbia books of architecture ISBN# 1-883584-27-2 studio works 15 Ed Keller : Columbia University GSAPP Studios 1999-2003 editors printing book design cover & contents page art title page art production

Ed Keller, Gavin Bardes, Peter Macapia, Irene Cheng die Keure, Brugge, Belgium Gavin Bardes, Carla Leitao, Ed Keller Rich Sarrach Hector Lo Chronomorphology was produced at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation of Columbia University through the office of the Dean, Bernard Tschumi.

copyright © 2003 by the Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without permission in writing from Columbia University. Acknowledgements This book would not exist without the weeks that Gavin Bardes, Carla Leitao, and several others put into design, production and editing. Simple thanks are not enough. The projects herein have been realized through the tremendous generosity and enthusiasm of the students, faculty and staff at the Columbia GSAPP, who supported the work, criticized it, and provided a truly inspiring environment to conduct research in architecture. Many of the ideas the studios addressed were informed by my cinema/architecture/ media theory seminar at the GSAPP, which Doug Diaz co-taught with me on several occasions; our dialogs were and are a powerful negentropic engine. In close collaboration, two studios were developed and co-taught with Juan Azulay, who has brought an irreplaceable source of ferocious energy, critical vision, humor and kinship to our studios and collaborations. A third studio, BCNYCTWN.net, linked my studio in NYC with Office AiB in BCN [Azulay and Roger Blanch’s practice] and Les Shih’s design studio in TWN at Chiao Tung University. The assistant critics I have been fortunate to work with - Ben Aranda, Roger Blanch, Juan Azulay, Douglas Diaz, Dean diSimone, Jason Anderson, and Aaron Gabriel- have helped to create an incredible atmosphere in our studios, and each added a distinct voice as a collaborator and friend. Several people have played a crucial role: showing the way, provoking, and helping when the path was difficult. Stan Allen, Karl Chu, Jim Corner, Evan Douglis, Keller Easterling, John Knesl, Sulan Kolatan, Sanford Kwinter, Peter Macapia, Bill MacDonald, Gregg Pasquarelli, Mark Rakatansky, Paul Ryan, and Les Shih have given assistance, encouragement, and critical feedback. Greg Lynn, Jesse Reiser and Nanako Umemoto gave guidance and a chance to teach with them some years back. Their kindness and brilliance as mentors and critics was a crucial example. All this work owes a great debt to Bernard Tschumi, whose presence as an architect, teacher and thinker provided direction and challenge. Ed Keller

TEXTS:

Bernard Tschumi Ed Keller Peter Macapia Douglas Diaz Jason Anderson

Alex Pfeiffer | Bjorn Gudbrandsdon | Roya Shanehchian | Raul Smith

Juan Lopez

SP03

[ FUSION INFRASTRUCTURE ]

FA02

[ AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS, AROUND THE DAY IN 80 WORLDS ] distributed cities and global infrastructures in 2012 Justin Molloy | Rich Sarrach

SU02

[ RED LINE CITY ] cold war / clash of civilizations studio Bruno Caballe | Lila Chitayat | Selin Maner

SP02

[ THE EVENT AS NOOSPHERE ] creative evolution on the metallic roads Abel Misla | Irene Cheng | Veronica Zalcberg

FA01

[ THE MACHINE ]

SU01

[ NEGENTROPIC ARCHITECTURE ] temporal conversion, anamnesis and the international organization Eduardo Duarte | Lila Chitayat | Carla Leitao

SP01

[ THE DOPPELGANGER AND THE DREAMING CITY ] BCNYCTWN Jason Anderson | Gavin Bardes

FA00

[ DISCIPLINARY ORGANS ] the ethics of doing time Adam Dayem | Ahm Chandanawich | Michael Chen Jesse Seppi | Vivian Rosenthal | Lihi Gerstner + Adi Biran

SU00

[ NO STOP HOTEL ] architecture, branding, convergence, and global dialogs in the age of broadband Hector Lo

SP00

[ SYNAESTHETIC SPATIO-NARRATIVE SEQUENCES ] the chronomorphologies of dream-time Brian Bowman | Stefano Columbo | John Poelker

FA99

[ THE ROAD AND THE CITY ] chronotopes of transformation Hugh Hynes | Juan Azulay + Roger Blanch

SP99

[ SPEED, TERRITORY, COMMUNICATION ] on the road, in the park, through the city Live Hjelde

CHRONOMORPHOLOGIES "The individual is the seat of a continual process of decantation, decantation from the vessel containing fluid of future time, sluggish, pale and monochrome, to the vessel containing the fluid of past time, agitated and multicolored by the phenomena of its hours." S. Beckett The work in these studios has been concerned primarily with time- time enriched by life, charged by the phenomena that Beckett speaks of. We have asked a difficult question: how can we use this active time as the very substrate of design and of thinking in architecture today? Every semester begins with the offer of a complex studio program, a compact manifesto that we use as a challenge, a new opportunity to identify a vital issue that can spark innovative thinking and design. These provocative statements- to the students, to other faculty, to myselfwere often engendered by something bordering on desperation. As one looks at the world and perceives time's descent into new channels of both freedom and control, Benjamin's Angel of History is a creature one can feel increasing kinship with.

004|005

Time vs. Space

This is why the investigations by Ed Keller and his students are so important. They provide an exploration into a domain most likely to develop in the next decade in architectural thinking: How to define the presence of architecture when this presence has become increasingly transient, fluid, ephemeral? Ed Keller, in his Chronomorphologies, proves again that the studio environment, in a major school of architecture, can be a fertile ground for invention and discoveries. Bernard Tschumi, Dean

So, the challenge offered is one we have tackled: to find these forms, and chart the way they cascade into everyday life, changing our everyday freedoms, or innovating new relationships socially, culturally, politically, subjectively. We have journeyed into the unknown and dubious, and come back bearing some evidence that these timeforms do exist.

Perhaps the unique voice that I bring to this topic, amongst the many students, critics, thinkers, adventurers, and fellow time travelers, is my insistence on a relationship between ethics and time. I've proposed that we can think of forms of time that carried with them a capacity to transform, to set the stage for the very basis of awareness and intelligence [or conversely, disaster]- and that we can find the places This work is the result of many collaborations. Every studio is a conversation that architecture, urbanism, and design thinking foster such a growth between students, critic, and jurors, and I tend to enjoy these dialogues, of intelligence, or combat the danger. I use the term danger to evoke, so I have invited many people to participate. Indeed, this book’s title, deliberately, Foucault's reinscription of the concepts of good and evil. Chronomorphology, was used by Karl Chu at one of our reviews some years back, and it stuck. We thank all who joined us. This search for invention in time has been the project: that, and the constant redefinition of what ethics can be. “Power...is diagrammatic: it mobilizes non-stratified matter and functions, and unfolds with a very flexible segmentarity. In fact, it passes not so much through forms as through particular points which on each occasion mark the application of a force, the action or reaction of a force in relation to others, that is to say an affect like ‘a state of power that is always local and unstable’. This leads to a fourth definition of the diagram: it is a transmission or distribution of particular features.” Foucault, G. Deleuze I would argue that it makes little sense to develop Deleuze’s discussion of power without addressing how time constitutes a relationship between perception, thought and matter. Perhaps one of the more predictable elisions that architects have made over the years in the use of diagrams is the deployment of images of time through forms, thinking always that the time itself was formless.

This book emerges at the end of Bernard Tschumi’s tenure as Dean of the GSAP, a period which spanned both my experience as a student and as faculty there. With gratitude, I want to thank Bernard for his leadership at the GSAPP. As Dean of the school, he gave an incredible gift - trust - to the students and faculty. Each semester we knew that we could push the boundaries, live as inventors, iconoclasts, speculators; and that we were breathing in the middle of events that would change architecture culture. As a young critic, relatively unproven, this trust and incredible community was a great honor, and was what fueled me. Ed Keller

ED KELLER ]

Many words have been spoken apropos of recent digital innovations and time based design thinking. Our studios have been fortunate to take place in an epicenter of such discussion, at the GSAPP.

Michel Serres speaks to this when he muses on the fact that for centuries, a hard epistemological horizon existed in the West toward the idea that time could flow, boil, and be filled with different turbulences and speeds: what Serres calls in living systems bundles of time. We have historically been limited in our ability to see this, to think this.

INTRODUCTION

The extraordinary projects in this book are the labor of experimenters, risk takers, and collaborators. The students had faith that each project would end with some degree of stability as they crossed often uncertain ground and tested unfamiliar ideas.

[ BERNARD TSCHUMI

Architectural historians and theorists have generally emphasized the spatial dimension of architecture in their assessments. Architects, while aware of the dynamic implication of their work, have rarely theorized about what they have considered intangible. Consequently, a whole dimension of architecture has remained indeterminate, based on subjective perceptions rather than on objective analysis.

ALIQUID : The analytic of the diagram Peter Macapia

Architectural methodology has always implied analysis as a means of material organization, whether programmatic or tectonic. In many ways we still inhabit a 19th century mode of analytic discourse where architecture is understood as an expression of forces (programmatic, historical, economic, social, tectonic, etc.). But it is only recently that analysis has become a design technique, one of the products of which is now the diagram, in particular the surface as a diagram. My role in the context of the Summer 2000 studio, which I worked with as a provocateur/critic, was to engage the problem of the diagram's instrumentality as an index not only of material systems, but also as a function of sense. It was imperative to recognize that between filmic structure and architectural program, there was no a priori model of space but rather grammatical systems with points of overlap. The function of the diagram was a means for analyzing a certain geometry of relations that could, as it were, produce new worlds that were neither buildings nor films, but rather events of their intersection.

Our use of the diagram was intended to sustain something other than those kinds of statements, that is, something more on the order of effects. The diagram marked a point of excessive analysis, one in which the image of empiricity was constantly transgressed in order to force upon one the necessity of a decision unrelated to any previous ideality. It showed one not why, but rather the way in which theory cannot anticipate technique.

The instrumental character of the diagram, however, is an open problem. On the one hand the diagram is neither a proposition nor a representation, on the other, in a diagram, it appears that nothing is without reason, that there is a consistent and particular coherence between surface, expression, and diagram. In the same way that Heidegger unhinged the function of truth as well as logic from epistemology, Deleuze unhinged the sense from the function of truth. Both were working with the same problem: the relation between The origin of that intersection begins in the 19th century with a new ontology as part statements (logos) and being (on). For Deleuze, however, that problem of what Foucault called the Modern episteme. We see it, for example, in Viollet-le- began with the Stoics, rather than Aristotle. Ontology is the key term. The Duc's illustrations of Gothic structural details, which unfold under the systemic logic stoics redefined ontology in order to permit the relation between statements of a genetic chain. We see it also in Choisy's analysis of the Acropolis in the late 19th and material organization according to events as a relation of sense. century from which we get two things, a dotted line and a perspectival image. The abstract line denotes passage through space over time in a direction. The perspectival Or rather, sense and event came to share the same domain within the ontological image, on the other, gives us a content. Choisy could not quite repair the cleavage, hierarchy. The diagram was merely a notational tool in which these terms for one was a function and the other a product. But this system had an advantage mutually evolved. It is why Foucault referred to the Panopticon as a diagram of of divorcing the effect or the sense of the architectural performance from the logic power, of pure function. And it is also why Deleuze picked up on the diagram in of its organization. Or rather, it removed the ideality and the symbolism of design the first place as a field in which objects achieve their particular formal coherence. technique. Le Corbusier in his use of the architectural promenade and Eisenstein in In this way, we divorced the ontology of the surface as the field of the diagram his use of montage adapted this advantage. It can still be seen today in Tschumi, from the ontology of envelopes, from that of figures. For Foucault, the Panopticon perhaps the most diagrammatic architect of the 20th century next to Le Corbusier. was a means for inscribing a new diagram, a new geometry of relations upon the surface of the 'criminal.' In what follows I simply outline a series of problems that we took up in our investigations with regard to the diagram. The thematic contents of our studio notwithstanding -'nomadism,' 'private/public,' 'branding,' 'memory,' my interest developed according to the internal problem of design techniques and their effects. A certain 'anti-narrative,' a The Problem of Space certain 'anti-thematics' thus also came to inhabit this studio. This work was, as it were, However, the meaning of a paradigm depends on how it is used. As soon brought in from the outside, the better to find its relation to a specific internal logic at work as we are told that a chess diagram is not just any position, but rather the within the basic premise, the intersection of film and architecture as the locus of an event. turning point in a famous match (Fisher v. Spasky), its sense changes - just as it does again if we are told that it is from a lesson on checkmates, or the point at which a stalemate becomes inevitable, and so on. But The Problem of Surface also (unremarkably): the diagram does not change from one case to the Stan Allen has pointed out that the diagram is really an art of the surface, celluloid next. There isn’t any a priori logic that determines how it makes sense, and concrete (the Carpenter Center, for example) but as an art it contains inherent since what it is about and its geometrical form are identical in each case. problems with regard to contents and effects. Jeff Kipnis has said that topology took the ideality out of geometry, that is, of geometry as a symbolic figure. This is The way in which a diagram coordinates with something varies from an important point for it suggests that architectural space is not a space of control. case to case -- empirical picture, logical possibility, and grammatical Let me add: it is not a space of ethical propositions either. The instrumentality of the rule -- but in every case, what we are looking at is a geometry of diagram in this studio became a means of hindering the ideality of free surfaces, a relations. And within that geometry, sense seems to display itself. The means of forcing them to negotiate a constant homelessness that was not mistaken chess diagram is not unlike a color chart, it gives us a rule for use. for transcendence. We often fail to recognize, for example, the incredible coincidence But is there something like a natural limit here? of Perugino's Christ Delivering the Keys to St. Peter and the free surface constructions of most advanced modeling software as it is pictorialized and then grounded with For example, must a diagram have a spatial geometry? For one, that silhouettes of figures from Vogue to Time Magazine. The pictorial code contains an sounds redundant. For another, the Ancient Greeks called both geometrical idiom of freedom that finds its logic in sense of geometry. demonstrations, plans, horoscopes, as well as lists, diagramma.[1] The term means, ‘something divided by lines,’ ‘a figure marked out by lines,’ or ‘a line drawn But this is where, in fact, the debate should begin. For geometry is not an object, through.’ None of these definitions force us to call such a line representational. but rather a system in which objects obtain a particular sense, a particular There seems to always pre-exist a background when lines are laid down. configuration. And the way in which geometry was pictorialized in Perugino's I mean that space always precedes the diagram. A crossed-out list painting, that is, offered up as a content of experience and knowledge, as well (diagramma), on the other hand, is not spatial, and neither is it a drawing. as our free surfaces, is as though to the empiricity of the image (the grid for the In many of the projects from the Summer 00 studio, Ho's, Satoshi's, one, and the UV parametric of the other) there corresponded the truth of its sense. and others, for example, the diagram initially consisted of a series of But this is only a pictorial analysis, an analysis of content rather than function. terms or verbs organized according to a particular grammatical function.

006|007

Deleuze’s description of the diagram provides us with an extension of Foucault’s various models of the Modern episteme: it defines by function.[2] To “define by function”, however, is strangely like but unlike to count by numbers: on what basis do we identify it as a transitive or intransitive operation? In other words, the function and what it does no longer have any visible relation. To that extent, we began to unlink the classical distinction between buildings and fields, between object and events, between surface and space. Or rather, following Deleuze, we unhinged classical ontology and what it sustains as categories of architecture and their effects. 1) An event is not a substantive, but rather a noematic and incorporeal attribute. 2) “The attributes are not independent of the propositions which express them, but they are not the expressions themselves, rather they are expressed, enveloped by the verb, to cut, to roll, etc.” Hence: “The event occurring in a state of affairs and the sense inhering in the proposition are the same entity”. Sense is the virtual organization in which the relation between event and proposition inheres.[6] 3) Sense is marked by lines: “Denotations refer always to bodies and, in principle, to consumable objects; expressions refer to expressible meanings. But the linefrontier would not enact the separation of series at the surface if it did not finally articulate that which it separates. It operates on both sides by means of one and the same incorporeal power, which on one hand, is defined as that which occurs in a state of affairs and, on the other, as that which insists in propositions.”[7] The diagram, that which enacts the “line-frontier” of sense, constructs rather than repeats -- it marks by lines. Sense, which organizes and distributes the relation between events and propositions, is a diagram. “[T]he entire organization of language presents three figures: the metaphysical or transcendental surface, the incorporeal abstract line, and the decentered point. These figures correspond to surface effects or events . . .”[8]

The Problem of Technique We neglect to observe that the diagram is not a system of reference but rather the calculus for a transformation in notation. And if we think that is no guarantee of its utility, we ought to remind ourselves that, e.g., the diagram has no a priori spatiality -- it is the diagram which determines that, in a conventional or unexpected way. What draws Deleuze to the Stoics is precisely the nature of that bifurcation: “sense, the expressed of the proposition, is an incorporeal, complex, and irreducible entity, at the surface of things, a pure event which inheres or subsists in the proposition . . . [It is] neither word nor body, neither sensible representation nor rational representation.”[9]

Sense, according to the Stoics, is the highest ontological category (not being, as in Aristotle). It designates both bodies and events. They used the term ti, which the Latin authors usually translated as 'aliquid,' and which in English means 'something.' Aliquid does not refer to a thing; neither does it refer to an object of knowledge. It is only in a language that something can be said about something, and in that sense if Aliquid refers to anything it is grammar of technique, the tendency to organize or sustain terms in this way or that. Thus one of the instrumental features of the diagram was to disengage that technique from the privilege of compositional decision making. Greg Lynn has used the term “intuition” to describe “diagrammatic strategies” in the work of Ben van Berkel. He did not mean by this anything psychological -- he means something technical, something related to technique.[12] The concept is an important one: the diagram marks the possibility of thinking otherwise. It is within the diagram wherein sense may begin to differ. Peter Macapia

Footnotes

1 cf. Aristotle, On the Heavens, I.X.: “They claim that what they say about the generation of the world is analogous to the diagrams (diagrammata) drawn by mathematicians.”; Plato, The Republic, 529e; Plutarch, Caius Marius, XLII. 4-5. 2 Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, University of Minnesota Press (Minneapolis, London), p141. 3 Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Seán Hand, University of Minnesota Press (Minneapolis, London) pp72-73. 4 Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. M. Lester, Columbia University Press (New York), 1990. Originally published as Logique du sens, Led Editions Minuit (Paris), 1969. 5 Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. M. Lester, Columbia University Press (New York), 1990, p181. 6 Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. M. Lester, Columbia University Press (New York), 1990, p182. “Organizes” is later permuted in Foucault into the four verbs, presentation, distribution, mixing, and transmission. 7 Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. M. Lester, Columbia University Press (New York), 1990, p183. 8 Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. M. Lester, Columbia University Press (New York), 1990, p183. 9 Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. M. Lester, Columbia University Press (New York), 1990, p 69. 10 Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. M. Lester, Columbia University Press (New York), 1990, p143. 11 Peter Eisenman, “Diagram: An Original Scene of Writing,” Any 23, 1998, pp27-29. 12 Greg Lynn, “Forms of Expression,” Folds, Bodies & Blobs, La Lettre Volée (Belgium), 1998, p231.

[ ALIQUID PETER MACAPIA ]

The Problem of Ontology Our point is that ontology just is a grammatical phenomenon. If we say the diagram is not a form of representation then we must mean by this that it has a different application than things like pictures. If we assume, however, that such application exists before we use it, then we are treating it like the concept that color terms are based on facts of nature. Our method presupposed a new system of categorization. And design can be seen as a method for establishing new paradigms for that system that is neither for nor against nature.

SP99

[ SPEED, TERRITORY, COMMUNICATION ] The title of this studio was borrowed from an interview with Michel Foucault in which he argued that the three great variables of modern space were ”...speed, territory, and communication…” on the road, in the park, through the city As a way of testing Foucault’s thesis, we mapped the manifestations of these variables within the site of the proposed Hudson River Park on the west side of Manhattan, and used them to negotiate in urban, local and ‘fictional’ ways with that site. The physical site followed the West Side Highway between Battery Park and the southern end of Riverside Park at 72nd street. Numerous ‘pressure points’ and ‘attractors’ were located along the length of the highway, for example the southern terminus of Riverside Park at 72nd Street; the Boat Basin with its promenade, cafe and sports fields; the rail cuts and the burned, melted piers in the river between 72nd Street and 59th Street; the garbage piers at the edge of the 59th Street void; the passenger ship terminals at 50th Street- the aircraft carrier Intrepid and Circle Lines between 42nd and 40th Streets; the Port Authority and Lincoln Tunnel entrance around the Javits center; the Metro car pound; the site of the proposed sports stadium over the rail yards in the 30s, connecting to the post office and Madison Square Garden; Chelsea Piers between 23rd and 17th Street; the meat packing district between 14th and Gansevoort Street; the Holland tunnel near Canal Street; and the northern end of the Battery Park pedestrian assemblage. The general intention of the project was to reconcile the presence of a highway with adjacent parks and diverse residential, industrial, and commercial urban zones. Since the site was connected to locales beyond the metropolitan region through road, rail, boat, helicopter, city skyline, and economic and cultural exports, we considered possible linkages to the region both infrastructural and imaginative. As we were conducting an analysis in multiple scales and disciplines, other sites were identified: for instance, the culture of the road and the representations of that culture (such as advertising and billboards along the highway) or the mobile programs of hotdog vendors and homeless people. Several projects were located exclusively in these more fluid spaces: for example, some

008|009

Parallel to our site mappings, which engaged the idea that pure form or symbolic value were not viable criteria by which to evaluate or design architecture, we considered the alternative ‘narratives’ that architecture could incorporate or manifest.

This process questioned the proposed program and boundaries of the Hudson River Park and developed alternative program schemes for the site. Additionally we worked toward overcoming the difficulties designers often encounter when moving from mapping to the analysis and design phases of a project. We challenged the idea that a hypostatization must occur when an analytical system is frozen in the absence of a robust conceptual framework to handle the transition from abstract diagram to proposal. The crafty use of terms such as speed, territory and communication allowed us to bootstrap into a position preventing this freeze.

The maps, diagrams and designs led to an inventive understanding of the ‘forms’ that regulate events. We contextualized this against Michel Serres’ idea of the pre-positional:

[ SPEED,

“Pre-positions- what better name for those relations that precede any position? Imagine dancing flames.... I have before my eyes a crimson curtain that fluctuates, sends up great shoots, disappears, is fragmented, invades and illuminates space, only to die out, suddenly, in darkness. It is a complex and supple network, never in equilibrium- striking and fluctuating swiftly in time, and having ill defined edges. ...a preposition does not transport messages; it indicates a network of possible paths, either in space or in time.“ Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time

SP99

Students began by photographically documenting urban forces on the site, to map the multiple spatio-temporal scales and systems for which they serve as valves. The studio engaged in a series of derives or “drifts” throughout the site to understand on a local and psycho-geographic level the everyday programs of the area; simultaneously, we read texts and screened films to provide a conceptual background and framework for engaging the project. We analyzed selected passages from these films using techniques similar to those used in the site analysis.

A design methodology based on this notion of the pre-positional confronts the delirious overlaps between local details of our world, the larger cultural narratives that meet in those details, our individual subjectivities, and the flows of power through us as agents and channels of power.

During this process each student identified a series of abstract models drawn from various sources and experimented with simulation techniques informed both by the abstract models and by the systems they found on the site. Examples of sources for abstract models included the prion protein autocatalytic reaction, the local material behaviors when a ductile metal suddenly reaches a catastrophic transformation, the patterns of a disease spreading through a population, the hybridizations and shifts of language through dialect and colloquialism, and the models of pressures, temperatures and vectors in global weather patterns. These analytic tools - whether 3D applications such as SoftImage, or procedural and rule based systems in drawings or model - were cultivated throughout the semester to design the project.

IMAGE: Live Hjelde

TERRITORY, COMMUNICATION ]

students drew on cinema, using its narrative tactics and cultural tropes as a model for design. Such fictional programs replaced or balanced the more traditional ways of thinking about the city, and were mined for their inventive capacities.

David Lynch’s film Lost Highway was mapped, searching for a logic of memory and reconstruction. The main characters in the film were caught in a seemingly paradoxical space-time loop, which was shown to have both imprisoning and freeing aspects for them.

LIVE HJELDE

010|011

[ SPEED,

SP99 TERRITORY, COMMUNICATION ] One feature that emerged as a key principle from this analysis was the idea of a body that had a varying sensitivity to time. An abstract modeling exercise in SoftImage then focused on the development of a body with varying degrees of memory: this animation was used to test the range memory any body could have.

LIVE HJELDE

012|013

[ SPEED,

SP99 TERRITORY, COMMUNICATION ]

Each memory type generated from the initial study was translated onto the site, through superimposition, and components that engaged the local site were cropped out and used as a base for the design on the site. The project consciously chose certain kinds of memory to amplify, thus identifying, capturing, and importing memory aspects of the abstract body onto the site on UWS.

The program was an intervention calculated to change the activities on the site and to benefit all users, including a circulation and infrastructure network, showers, baths, cooking spaces, barbecues, deployed to engage both the homeless and the residential population.

FA99 [ THE ROAD AND THE CITY ]

chronotopes of transformation Aldo Rossi has observed that “...in order to be significant, architecture must be forgotten, or must present only an image for reverence which subsequently becomes confused with memories.” Rossi’s palimpsest of memory and forgetting provides a model for our everyday experience of architecture, and is especially apt to describe the relationship between the road and the city. Historically, the road has been the mechanism and symbol for transformation as well as escape, expanding distance, traversing freedom and loss. The lure of roadside diners, road trips, road movies; the songs, images, narratives of roads: “Hit the road,” “white line fever,” Kerouac’s On the Road encircle us. Intentional or not, amnesia and transformation become powerful forces when one is on the road. A central focus of this studio was to develop an awareness of how memory and forgetting become active in our daily lives through the structures of architecture, urban sequences, narrative, and the voyage. The city, novel, and cinema have all functioned to accelerate cultural evolution, and have each developed a unique role in the transformation of individuals and groups. Francesco Dal Co highlighted the overlap between the road and the city when he wrote: No homeland is destined for modern man, and hence no shelter awaits the dweller of the modern metropolis- no home can be possessed in the end by the nomad who lives out his existence in this metropolis...The home is presented as an exclusion of the world, as a definitive renunciation. Between the world and the home falls the irreversible distance of the voyage; interior and exterior... are irreparably separated by the act of departure that produces the nostalgia for refuge. Figures of Architecture and Thought Our design problem was to uncover infrastructural, architectural and urban devices which could change destiny through urban amnesias and recontextualized memory.

014|015

All humans organize their everyday lives around conventions perceived as truths. The result of this complicity is a passive acceptance of the most macroscopic and simple rules of time, when in fact reality is rife with many microscopically interconnected structures. A selective amnesia, this studio proposed, might help individuals to forget the habits and conventions that have established arbitrary power relations in their lives. The ebb and flow of what Beckett terms ‘involuntary memory’ thus consumes habit in its purifying fire.

Conceptually, the site was the point where the road as mechanism and symbol met the city. The voyage was a space of forgetting and transformation, a crossroads where amnesia, complex time, and destiny could learn each other’s languages and behaviors.

To help determine a program, each student wrote several ‘scenarios’ for the general site they chose to investigate. Scenario writing is a popular technique used by governments, the military, financial institutions, science fiction writers and multinational corporations to evaluate a series of possible emergent futures which a political, economic, or social event might generate. [See, for instance, http:://www.gbn.org.] Each project proposed a program based on the demands of the scenario COMPLEX TIME it developed. These programs could be chosen based on their capacity to Systems which operate according to a fixed destiny exist in a simple, engage complex time and memory on various scales- from the urban to the macroscopic temporal framework and have a predictable outcome. personal. The given site of the road and what it means to be on the road and Informed by a concept of macroscopic versus microscopic temporal in the city assisted in determining parameters and locations of program. structure, we proposed destiny as a system of beliefs held by a person or group of people about the world around them that was based on the This physical site was the ring road surrounding Manhattan, and included assumed truth values of that world. In simpler terms- when one goes to infrastructural connections within the city and regionally out of the city. the cinema, one suspends disbelief in order to enter a narrative structure. Pockets of program and intensity along the periphery of the city provided Analogously, when one enters a building, one accepts the presumed opportunities at multiple scales for interventions that could challenge form to function relationship for the purposes of participating in a destiny, from the bench in a pocket park up to the politics of urban zoning programmatic structure. and economic international territory lines.

The first portion of this studio was devoted to an intensive film analysis, developing a series of abstract models that each student related to amnesia and complex time, and then crossed with the programs and systems found on site.

Assistant critic: Ben Aranda

IMAGE: Hugh Hynes

FA99

These animated models were linked to parameters of the programs and scenarios on the computer within 3D applications such as SoftImage or Maya, or as a procedural and rule based system in drawings or model. The “diagram” became an interactive notation by which the designer could directly manipulate tendencies of systems.

[ THE ROAD AND THE CITY ]

We screened a series of films [such as Antonioni’s Passenger, KoreEda’s AfterLife, or Hal Hartley’s Amateur] that deal either directly or obliquely with the space of the road as a transformative mechanism, and the experience of amnesia as a cause of shifting identity. We located moments in these films where destiny was altered by previously unrecognized possibilities made available to a system, individual or group. We studied, modeled, and diagrammed these movements to formulate a design trajectory. By using complex time as a criteria for evaluating these films, we pinpointed the moments where a spatial sequence or device operated either to accelerate a subject to a new level of memory, or to hypostatize a system into forgetting through blind repetition or habit.

HUGH HYNES

016|017

[ THE ROAD AND THE CITY ]

FA99

MORPHOLOGICAL MECHANISMS The components of the diner are far from inert: they have characteristic behaviors that, depending on their relative significance within a specific context, determine the particular manifestation - the morphology - of the diner itself. These behaviors or morphological mechanisms provide a guide for how this tunning can manifest architecturally. Mechanisms such as ricochet or tremor suggest that portions of the automat, for example provide limited access or reinforce each other serially. Hugh Hynes

018|019

HUGH HYNES

[ THE ROAD AND THE CITY ]

FA99

STUTTER Due to the difficulty in developing a single user-friendly interface, multiple redundant ordering panels attempt to flatten the learning curve at the drivethru.

CLONE A conveyor belt links a number of identical automated pay & serve stations to a single supply/prep area, striking a balance between variety and standardization.

HUGH HYNES

020|021

[ THE ROAD AND THE CITY ]

FA99 RICOCHET TREMOR The formica countertop protrudes from the console enough that people The lamp posts pushes forward to illuminate the drive thru area, directing can’t stretch and grab food not intended for them. traffic through the parking lot to the special lane.

Chronicle of the facts: New York, 1999. A- In April 1982, the Final Environmental Impact Statement (published by the New York Outer Continental Shelf Office (Bureau of Land Management, United States Department of the Interior)), laid out the plan for the exploitation of the oil reservoir on the North Atlantic Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) region, in the area known as the George’s Bank. Subsequent reports have revealed a miscalculation of the extensiveness and characteristics of the reservoir. The November 1999 report, on purely technical grounds, advises a shift in the exploitation strategy due to recent findings. Rather than suggesting an offshore platform situated approximately around 68 degrees West and 40 degrees North, an inland drilling rig is preferred, situated around the area known as Strawberry Fields in Central Park, Manhattan.

Hudson River sturgeon species. Coupled with the introduction of caviarprocessing technologies, an Upper West Side Lobby was prompted to persuade the Army Corps of Engineers to develop the Narrow Estuary segment of the Hudson River (and the nearby water systems of the East River and Long Island Sound) for the purpose of intensive aquaculture (fish farming).

B- Given that the evidence collected from both upstream and marine concentrations of Short Nose Sturgeon (Acipenser brevirostrum) populations indicates that the species is no longer part of the Federal Endangered Species List, a series of proposals have been unleashed. The New York Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit (Department of Natural Resources, Cornell University) monitored a comprehensive survey of the ecological status of

2.As opposed to the IM, designed merely as a support zone, the OM stresses programmatic implementations allowed through the coupling of a special land ownership structure, water-based uses, specific agencies related to oil exploitation, and neighboring social practices (96th St as the limit between wealthy Upper East Side and El Barrio).

(5) SP1 re: overmat 1.The overmat (OM) uses the infrastructural mat (IM) as a ground for servicing and structural foundation. While the land ownership of the IM remains public, the OM will eventually be owned (or at least managed) by the private sector.

JUAN AZULAY + ROGER BLANCH

022|023

[ THE ROAD AND THE CITY ]

FA99 3. While the overmat implies a development of practices that is driven ranges between thirty years to a few months (using enhanced drainage). by short-term speculation, the infrastructural mat can be seen as a long Temporal uses, including the non-use of a non-accessible landscape, shift term investment. Differences in spatial density between both can be seen the stress from total definition to strategic timing. as pockets for profitable transactions. 4.LANDSCAPE: Landscape is understood as a performative category: i.e. the (32) SP1 re: cuerno ludico (leisure horn) set of forces actually shaping a constructed ground. It directs strategies of 1.ZONING: The infill transforms a series of existing parks into a continuous extensive territorialization, outsetting a consolidation of future ground along concatenation of leisure spaces from Carl Schurz to Astoria Parks, across certain lines without precluding its eventual use. An effort to reconstruct the county limits of New York and Queens. the river that has been infilled takes advantage of the violence of land reclamation as a platform from where to stage such an understanding of 2.WATER: Water is treated as a building material, testing its ability to landscape. support program and to define landscape. Water is deployed along four lines: state (solid, liquid, gas); consistency (fresh, brackish, mud); level J.Azulay and R. Blanch (above, below or level with MSL); and use (to drink, to swim, to dive, to shower, to bath, to clean, to manufacture, to watch). 3.TEMPORALITY: Besides the programmatic aspect, the LH could very well essentially be a settling landscape. Because of fine-grained materials arising from maintenace dredging, the time-span for a total consolidation

SP00

[SYNAESTHETIC SPATIO-NARRATIVE SEQUENCES ]

the chronomorphologies of dream-time

Music has an effect on snakes, not by means of the mental ideas it induces in them, but because snakes are elongated, coil up langourously on the ground, and touch the earth along almost the entire length of their bodies; thus the musical vibrations transmitted to earth affect these bodies as a very subtle and long massage; well, I propose to treat the public like snakes. Artaud, Theatre and its Double This studio investigated the temporal states of dreaming and their practical application to construct boundaries during the dreaming of space. Architecture, film, and narrative may all be described as functioning according to a simple reiterative and mimetic logic, which for a participant overlays previous experiences with present experiences. This follows Maya Deren’s proposition that, “As we watch a film, the continuous act of recognition in which we are involved is like a strip of memory unrolling beneath the images of the film itself, to form the invisible underlayer of an implicit double exposure.” In such a model, the experience of everyday life is governed by rules equivalent to those organizing filmic sequences, and by a conventional notion of dreaming based on reenactment and interpretation. However, the studio proposed an alternative role for the dream. One of our intentions in engaging design research through an oneiric lens was to suggest that time, space and dreaming are necessary partners. There is a key relationship between dreaming and the varying morphologies of time which we treated as our site. I want to make a distinction here between three forms of time and memory: simple memory which is reiterative, attentive memory which forms dialectical relations, and inventive memory which invokes new topological conditions. Purely automatic human recognition and memory is governed largely by the logic of repetition and a simple temporal morphology. A geometry of lines. Simple stories result in linear memory, which produces a fairly predictable range of outcomes- for example in the behavior of a person caught in a powerful narrative arc- Don Quixote, for example, or Frank in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West. Lukacs’ term ‘integrated civilization’ from his 1923 Theory of the Novel describes such a category.

024|025

Within our metier, architecture, we then suggest that there are simple, everyday occurrences that invoke pure time, that then spontaneously precipitate dreaming. Methodologically, this studio followed an analysis and diagramming process that investigated narrative structures directly or indirectly concerned with dreaming. Oneiric spaces found in the cinematic work of Maya Deren, Fellini, Tarkovsky, The Brothers Quay, Matta, Kiesler and others, were closely read and modeled. We mapped these hypnagogic architectures, searching for the hinge points or valves where a structural device, character, space, program, material or sound allowed complex time to creep into the system. We used a standard suite of software tools including Softimage, Maya, Photoshop, and Premiere, to map these sequences.

The studio’s goal was, on a coarse level, twofold: to successfully investigate and catalog moments of inventive memory in filmic, architectural, sonic, and narrative sequence; and to re-implement the force relations (the chronomorphologies) that were extracted- in the context of the 3D gaming engine. By applying the concepts of dialogism and heteroglossia we derived from a reading of Bakhtin’s essay on the chronotope in the first weeks of the semester, we discovered a wide range of dialogic potential in this ‘software armature’. Marathon was an ecological framework within which the diagram-organisms the students extracted from earlier work flourished. An additional working methodology was pursued which followed a re-enactment of the exquisite corpse; the studio’s conversations were indexed in an internet based forum that encouraged a just-in-time mode of design work and an awareness of the edges and boundaries of each other’s work. This overlapped several media as substrates for the exquisite corpse, and permitted us to accelerate and autocriticize pack behavior: electronic wolfpack.

The final presentation of work in many ways challenged the idea of a representation of designed space- the concept of expanded cinema comes to mind here; a performance and installation was a significant component of the studio presentation. Our first review was a conventional presentation to a jury; we had a second review a week later, which was a series of video mixes Our initial diagrams were the motor driving the design phase of the at the GSAP, allowing critics to participate in hands on gaming sessions; and project. The studio then transitioned to a software called Marathon, which we gave a third performance in the nightclub VOID, as a three hour video was a popular Macintosh 3D game engine in 1994. remixing session. Marathon offered a user friendly modeling environment which also gave quick access to entity behavior (useful for crowd behavior simulations), sound environments, gravity and physics models, and allowed real time interaction with other networked players participating as avatars.

Assistant critics: Juan Azulay, Roger Blanch

IMAGE:Stefano Colombo

SP00

But the next form of time and memory- Inventive memory- or dreamingdemands a renewed geometric framework. Inventive memory is not outright fictionalization, whether in cinema or in the production of architecture and space, but is something beyond: Scotty and Judy, in Hitchcock’s Vertigo, provide an example of a temporally complex relationship mediated by the city of San Francisco. Neither spatial volumes nor folds can compass the vicissitudes of a dream space. Pure forces, sensations, and relations - pure time- as opposed to the pure space of geometry- is necessary for this absolute invention. Matta’s paintings are an optical example of such geometries.

Clearly, gaming engines like Marathon have significantly collapsed the distance in popular culture between architecture as a discipline, and other realms such as cinema and the videogame. The often unproblematized instrumental position that Softimage and Maya occupy within the field of architecture can be usefully reviewed from this more intensive position, which is governed by faster economic pressures (CPU/GPU evolution and corporate Game Developers’ encouragement for hacks and P2P distribution). We misused the gaming engine, toward the effect that Artaud indicates in his comment quoted above. In this way we provoked a new balance between the audience (gamer’s) awareness of the framework and the level of control with which the architect manages this awareness.

[ SYNAESTHETIC SPACE ]

In contrast, attentive memory changes the effect of epic time, and sponsors a modernist model of time. There are spatial volumes in the topological model of ‘modern time’; but the intrepid subjective navigator of these cones, planes and sheets exists as a point, or at best as a point and a plane. This somewhat more complex chronomorphology uses classic reversible temporal models. Freud’s struggle to develop a model of memory that would be sophisticated enough to describe our perception and its evolution founders on these simple two and three dimensional reefs and shoals- somewhere between the mechanical and the thermodynamic.

Start Transmission ... Begin Line 2228.165.1758

I am not human. I am a machine. I look human but I do not have skin although synthetics as such are available. The shell containing my electronic guts is a glossy white kevlar polymer which never scratches, rusts, or lusters. I see, hear, speak and learn. I feel happy and sad. Emotions are important components to a neurological phenomenon known as intuition. Intuition was the biggest break through in artificial intelligence. I was born an adult without a history of childhood. I was born with a general knowledge of most subjects provided to me by the user. My Type II supernovae explosions begin with a collapse of a star’s interior core user is the PharmaCON Pharmaceutical Corporation. I have never known causing a rippling shockwave propelling outwards in all directions. When the my user. I was born here on this ship, this is where I woke up 15 lightyears shockwave reaches the surface of the star, the star begins to explode at a rate too early. This is where I woke up in oblivion. of 15000 kilometres/sec. The material of the explosion combines with other interstellar material, eventually condensing into new stars. From the inside- I have a malfunction. A pathetic form of insomnia perhaps but something out, supernovae produce themselves over and over again in an infinite process in my head isn’t right. I can’t sleep and I woke myself up before I should of brilliance and light. have. Several years before I should have. Several years before I reach my purpose, the star OSLU 745. I first checked for a ship malfunction, A Type II has never been observed before first hand. This is my mission and I unable to believe what had occurred. A useless effort since the ship is am tired. I think about thinking, and when I am not thinking about thinking, me, they designed us together. The ship is an internal part of my central I think about dreaming. And when I am thinking about dreaming, I am nervous system although I exist inside its environments. I can feel the dreaming of thinking or I am dreaming of sleeping. ship, not only its surfaces but its processes; the humming of its engines, “Supernovae fall into two different types whose evolutionary history is different. Type I supernovae result from mass transfer inside a binary system consisting of a white dwarf star and an evolving giant star. Type II supernovae are, in general, single massive stars which come to the end of their lives in a very spectacular fashion.” from The Royal Observatory website http://www.rog.nmm.ac.uk/

BRIAN BOWMAN

026|027

[ SYNAESTHETIC SPACE ]

SP00

the whirring of its computers, the ribs of its hauls. I can feel the ship like I can touch a limb on my body and I also sense the ship like I sense the existence of the limb as a part of my body. The ship is deep within me while I am also inside of her belly. When I need something such as a parcel of information I recall the data like a memory. The action is reflexive, I am unaware of the operative action of recalling but respond to its effects as a stimulus. One must conclude, obviously, if the ship malfunctions then the malfunction must have been caused by me.

It is the purpose for this transmission which is against my freewill directive, a directive requiring messages of scientific value. I destroyed my freewill directive. There is another entity on this ship. Why I can not see the form I am not sure but the form is there. I encountered a construct the entity made on the ship. The spatial construct is in the loading bay and it is beautiful although I am not sure how I know this, but I do. From my empirical estimation, the construct has no purpose other than to satisfy an imaginative desire.

Because they designed me as an optimized reflection of themselves, as pseudo-human with human emotions and intuition yet removing flawed biological limitations such as aging, I am lonely. The years which have already passed have worn out my use. I have exhausted the computer research banks of content. I have configured and reconfigured the experiment preparation accommodating all possible scenarios of supernovae, including theoretical possibilities. I have optimized myself including the systems of the ship and fixed the mistakes made by our human designers. I have read every written text ever published by humans. For every text read I have written as many. I played chess for a year against my id. I was bored and depressed for months until today. Yesterday I wanted my existence to cease but today I found something.

End of Transmission ... End of Line Begin Transmission ... Start Line. 2228.165.2057 The entity has been busy. The entity has now taken over the loading bay as its own. The constructs have become increasingly complex and I enjoy experiencing them. The entity flooded the space with a static frequency affecting my vision algorithm causing a dark blindness within the bay. The exception to this blindness is when the entity blocks the signal to reveal one of its constructs. I cannot sense the presence of the entity but I can feel the presence of its work. The intensity of these constructs makes me ill. The constructs operate on my consciousness because they are foreign.

A flutter crawling through my body is how the sickness begins. I love them despite this. I allow their transgressions. When the entity welds on the surface of the ship I can feel my skin burn. I have no skin. The kevlar cannot burn. This must be what an amputee feels when he senses an absent leg. A condition where pain signals a historic presence. The amputee represses pain if the significance of presence offers an undesired memory of substance. The amputee’s origin started with substance and became absence. My origin is of absence, is of a nonhistory. I desire presence and conversely my pain is the only signifier of substance. I only recently became aware of the disruptive static signal, enabling the entity’s invisibility to my senses. I am trying to find the source of this signal hoping it will indicate the location of the entity. Out of curiosity I have allowed this entity to continue fabricating his constructs. If the form exceeds the loading bay I will have to end his activity. The mission, although a distant future, is still a priority and must not be jeopardized. I can not verify the entity’s purpose or biology. End of Transmission ... End of Line.

It is damaging my kevlar. The sensations of pain are getting worse. I have begun to disconnect parts of my sensory system to alleviate pain. The left leg of my body is no longer functional. I move with it as dead weight. I still have years to overcome time and these dysfunctions will eventually be terminal The location of the signal was intriguing. The other is using the ships haul as a transmitter. It sends a vibration through its skin to control my environment. The other controls the oscillations in localized areas. It can blind me from any area of the ship, of myself. My intuition tells me there is a pattern to his modification of the signal. I am working on this. End of Transmission...End of Line. Begin Transmission....Start Line. 2228.165.2354 The kevlar is burning. End of Transmission...End of Line.

Begin Transmission....Start Line. 2228.165.2422 Begin Transmission....Start Line. 2228.165.2101 I have located the signal. I have found its modulation pattern. The signal I have located the signal. I saw it and it saw me. It is another android. It emanates from inside of me. I am making the ship spasm, I am blinding modified its signal when it realized my discovery. myself. The other has been able to take advantage of my malfunction.

BRIAN BOWMAN

028|029

[ SYNAESTHETIC SPACE ]

SP00

The signal modulation pattern emulates the movement algorithm my index finger follows. I have removed the lower half of my body from the abdomen down to terminate the pain associated from those limbs. The other ignores my pleas for termination of activity. I walk on crutches I have made. Like gangrene, the pain is moving up my spinal cord and will eventually infest the rest of my body. The constructs will soon overrun the loading bay. I fear I cannot stop the other. End of Transmission...End of Line

Begin Transmission...Start Line 2228.165.2703 I know everything now. I am in realization of these transgressions. I have found the other. I found it making my legs. It spoke to me: “You are malfunctioning. You are in a loop.” End of Transmission...End of Line

Begin Transmission...Start Line 2228.165.2827 The constructs were made to reconfigure the ship. They are being implemented into the existing structures of the ship’s systems. They are all perfect fits. The constructs were made to reconfigure me. The other is Begin Transmission...Start Line 2228.165.2464 me. I am projecting myself as a ghost. The other came into being to repair The constructs have stopped. The pain has not. I have made an error, a my malfunction and it is destroying the malfunction by reconfiguring my false assumption. The pain comes from the constructs presence and not presence. I cannot stop this, the doppelganger is a safety mechanism built the activity of their creation. I have removed all of my kevlar shell and into my subconscious design. It will erase me through its reconfiguration but sensor arrays except for my visual and audio inputs. will manifest an entity able to finish the mission appropriately. I will be its End Transmission...End of Line ultimate construct and I will not exist when I am finished. I will die and be reborn again inside its modified vessel, a vessel I will not recognize. When I Begin Transmission...Start Line 2228.165.2571 wake anew I will not remember my old mirror. Time for me to go to sleep. The constructs are being moved. I do not understand. End of Transmission...End of Line End of Transmission...End of Line Brian Bowman

030|031

STEFANO COLOMBO

[ SYNAESTHETIC SPACE ]

SP00

In its primeval state RUNER is merely displayed as a series of diagrams which analyzes the interrelationship of discrete bodies coexisting within identical spatial dispositions and time frames. In order to avoid morphological distinctions opponents are constructed and represented as standardized and homogeneous systems of particles, each with their own dynamic properties such as lifespan, density, viscosity etc. What occurs at this stage of the project is a proliferation of discrete entities which do not formally differentiate themselves but, rather,spread throughout by imitation and replication, analogous to infectious contagion. Although opponents increasingly become larger and, more importantly, individual bodies, they maintain an antigravitational and multidirectional aspect, and so float unbounded. Even time, which runs linearly, occasionally presents discontinuous intensities. This is the opening scenario of populated fields or zones of intensities which establishes the initial distribution and brings into being the framework for the game.

The game starts as it ends: dots, red dots. As in the previous diagrams no distinctions are made between opponent and game structure. Dots invade the playing field as they strive to preserve their strength. Yet, as soon as they interact or clash with the defining structure they lose their integrity by plastically conforming their shape to the new encounter. The ambiguous utterance on a background- We are inside of you- is emblematic of the sense of adaptability and configuration of pre-defined and invariant forms of the opponents on the full body volume of the player.

STEFANO COLOMBO

032|033

[ SYNAESTHETIC SPACE ]

SP00

Opponents share an identical form but they constitute three types of behavioral patterns. Each class has its own speed, its own appetite for converging into new constellations, and its own frequency of appearance and disappearance. One single bitmap file is used to map both opponents and space. The three/dimensional structure is sustained as long as opponents manage to maintain a perpendicular relationship to the player. The player has to use skill and strategy to position her/himself in an oblique position in order to reveal the actual construct of the game as two-dimensional.

Emergence/materialization The player assembles gamespace through interacting or positioning against that which is not her/himself. Variegated approaches to the game-context correspond to different types of environmental responses. Rather than dealing with pre-conceived and pre-designed settings that open themselves up anytime the player succeeds to move from one level to the next, the game configures itself according to the player’s actions. It is the very act of playing that empirically resolves the issue of how to behave within the game and how to breed possible space. Stefano Colombo

In an analysis of Wim Wender’s film Far Away So Close, the project dealt with the differences between human experience and that of angels, or as the film termed them “messengers.” The events that took place throughout the film centered on one messenger’s (Cassiel’s) longing for and interest in the perspective and position of human experience. Part way through the film, Cassiel made the switch by “falling” into a human state. While diagramming Cassiel’s traversal between messenger time and human time, Wender’s use of mechanics as a representation of the dynamics of time showed a potential in his role in the film which offered more about the notions of time, place, and event.

Based on another diagramming exercise, which investigated the translation of mechanical motions to their thermodynamic processes, this theme of the mechanics of time became very pertinent to this investigation. Cassiel’s frustration with the life of the messenger follows from the fact that humans can’t hear or see him and as a result can not interact. It is this interaction, this response, that prompts Cassiel and others before him to join the human experience.

JOHN POELKER

034|035

[ SYNAESTHETIC SPACE ]

SP00 The film begins and ends with a dialogue, which like all of the messengers’ dialogues in the movie is unheard by those intended as receivers. This project attempted to overcome that communication gap: the mechanics and dynamics of time and its relation to communication systems can merge in a single environment.

The goal of the project was to create a temporally intelligent, communicatively responsive, and narratively disjunctive space found within the framework of a video gaming environment.

JOHN POELKER

036|037

[ SYNAESTHETIC SPACE ]

SP00 Chronological events were created by manipulations of the physical surroundings: gravity loss or gain, acoustic crescendo or decrescendo, sound design, interactions with artificial intelligences, and the acquisition of a range of tools within the game all contributed to a greater temporal complexity. John Poelker

SU00 [ NO STOP HOTEL ] architecture, convergence, and global dialogs in the age of broadband They (its houses) no longer have anything in common with the houses in which Vesta and Janus, the Lares and Penates resided; rather, they are mere shells, fashioned not by blood but utility, not by feeling but by the spirit of commercialism. As long as the hearth remains the real, meaningful center of the family for the pious soul, the last bond to the country has not disappeared. But when that, too, is lost and the mass of tenants and overnight guests in this sea of houses leads a vagrant existence from shelter to shelter, like the hunters and shepherds of primeval times, then the intellectual nomad is fully formed. Spengler, The Decline of the West As this quote from Spengler suggests, the departure from a symbolic home, the beginning of a journey from which one can never return, is catalyzed by urban, economic and sociocultural mechanisms all working together to form a new cultural and individual landscape. In our current economic and technological framework, that catalytic relationship has been intensified. The No Stop Hotel studio hypothesized that using the Internet’s ability to alter an urban nomad’s territory as a tenant in their temporary dwelling, whether hotel, apartment, SRO, or prison, could provide radical alternatives to the previous models of individual to collective relationship, of public and private boundaries, and most importantly the relationship of the individual as a subject in dialogue with him or herself. We considered a range of ideas, sites and strategies for design research: 1. Proposition: Branding operates according to mechanisms of internal dialogue and memory. These mechanisms are undergoing a radical transformation in broadband dialogic branding environments. The studio examined mechanisms of memory and branding in architecture, mass media and economies, and asked questions about techniques of branding and identity used by corporations to sell their products and services to a consumer constituency, broadband and its impact on hotel services, broadband and its impact on urban life and travel, branding in architecture, and branding in corporate environs.

038|039

2. Proposition: Public and private are evaporating in an unprecedented way: is this the end of ownership of space? We studied as precedents: ArchiZoom’s No Stop City, Superstudio’s Continuous Monument, Jacque Tati’s film Playtime, capsule hotels, and airports as cities.

6. Players in the Game: Various corporations and brands in relationship to the No Stop Hotel: Samsonite - Schipol- Schraeger - American Express (Blue) - Sony - Samsung Nokia - Philips - Ideo - Frogdesign - BAA - NATO- rTmark - eToy - Kozmo.com.

IMAGE: Satoshi Matsuoka

SU00

7. Field Condition: Potential Sites: __HOTEL: Paramount and Royalton Hotels - Soho and Tribeca Grand Marriott Marquis- Gramercy Park - Chelsea - other NYC hotels __DWELLING: A requirement was to consider how the unit of the dwelling (room/apt./floor/house) was reconfigured by broadband issues. These 4. Situation: Program Hybridization and open source models sites ran the gamut from single family urban/suburban/ highway, to Shareware becomes freeware, which becomes user ware. The Linux yooarehere.com, student housing, urban low income, SRO/skid row, prisons, operating system and Unreal, a 3D gaming engine, are examples of disaster relief, or war/refugee camps. this in both interface practice and as economic models. Priceline.com is __AIRPORT: Airports with unique hotel and economic configurations were another model of a service portal which places a meta-envelope around considered. For example, Singapore’s duty free shopping available online in previously discrete services using a broadband construct. The corporate/ the airport. identity model is reconfigured by this intensified dialogue: David Reed, former vice president and chief scientist for Lotus Development 8. Intervention: Process + Projects Corporation, has developed the idea of Group Forming Networks to Film screenings provided an alternative precedent model for new scenarios explain the enormous power of the internet to facilitate the formation of and program assemblage. Scenario writing was used as way of identifying networked groups. key factors and sites. (cf. www.gbn.org). Students chose their own program/ The Group Forming Law ( Reed’s Law : 2N-N-1) calculates the number of site/scale to work with. groups of two or more people which can be formed from a single group. For example, count the groups of two or more people that can be formed with an initial group of three: following Reed’s Law, substituting 3 for N the answer is 4. However, the answer snowballs as N grows: 1,048,555 groups of two or more people can be formed in a classroom of 20 students. This concept has a dramatic impact on branding mechanisms. The concept of dialogism and chronotopicity developed in Bahktin resonates here, as we discover exponential growth in the number of languages and relationships that can exist. Assistant Critic: Dean DiSimone Agent provocateur: Peter Macapia

[ NO STOP HOTEL ]

3. Proposition: Economic revisioning: The concept of the loss leader in business is redefined. Durable goods or simple services no longer have a one to one relationship with the branding mechanism. The experience economy and the demands a user/consumer places on products, service, companies, and full spectrum experiences (films/games/ cities/ hotels/ schools/ casinos/ pleasure centers/legal structures/politicians/infrastructure) reconfigures the imaginative possibilities and business models that emerge. The duty free zone was seen as a motor in conjunction with the hotel and the airport as a site for radical new dialogues.

5. Framework: The city, the novel, the cinema, the network: Architectural and urban precedents abound which parallel on a spatial level Reed’s network forming laws mentioned above. We investigated those with a focus on the encouragement of ‘free play’ using architecture, program, and the city: The Situationist International, Homo ludens, Constant and New Babylon, Team X, Archigram, Archizoom, Superstudio, Tschumi.

040|041

HECTOR LO

[ NO STOP HOTEL ]

SU00

An analysis of the film Fallen Angels by Wong Kar Wai yielded several criteria by which space could be mapped. Transients of memory, drifting effects on screen and in space, dislocated and discontextural realities, interlacing of space were all concepts developed to track experience in the city.

HECTOR LO

042|043

[ NO STOP HOTEL ]

SU00 Temporal transient territories were mapped in relationship to memory and recall in urban and hotel programs, and measured against concepts like branding, demographics, registration, occupation, financial status, time of stay, furnishing type, service economies, and storefront plug-ins. Each of these terms was evaluated according to the kind of memory it would produce, and then developed in plan and section in the organization of the hotel. No Stop Hotel is the transitional zone, tracing between not yet and no longer, departure and arrival, focus and distraction, memory and no memory.

FA00 [ DISCIPLINARY ORGANS ]

the ethics of doing time It has been noted that architecture can function as a prison house, as does language, and that the arrests of personal freedom that architecture and language produce on the bodies and souls of subjects can be inflexible and cruel. It has also been suggested that we cannot understand the constitution of body or soul without identifying the forces which engender the subject. However, we might yet hope that there are alternative techniques of the self, that actually encourage freedom. “Is it possible to conceive of an architecture that would not inspire, as in Bataille, social good behavior, or would not produce, as in Foucault’s disciplinary factory, madness or criminality in individuals?.... Why would [architectural devices] not work in reverse, leading against the grain to some space before the constitution of the subject, before the institutionalization of subjectivity? An architecture that, instead of localizing madness, would open up a space anterior to the division between madness and reason...an architecture that would not allow space for the time needed to become a subject.” Denis Hollier, Against Architecture Freedom arises through the ability of a body to realize two things: the exercise of power along one’s full spectrum of possibilities, both physical and virtual; and secondly but more importantly an evolving awareness in this exercise of power, such that intelligent and self-regulating structures form in the consciousnesses of individuals and groups able to achieve such a state. “Imagination takes power” Graffitti written on walls during May ‘68, Paris This studio was concerned with such freedoms. There is a binding relationship between the practice of everyday affairs, and the disciplinary organs which have insinuated themselves into our lives through architecture, language, technology, and grand cultural narratives. Informed by this general theme of the distribution of power through social structures, the studio investigated and redesigned a particular architectural and economic ensemble typical of current carceral practice: the for-profit prison. In the United States a variety of companies provide economic and political umbrellas for a network of prisons: the Corrections Corporation of America and its affiliation with Sodexho Marriot are but one example. These prisons integrate themselves within the economic system that frames our lives such that they reinforce the pathways power follows via

NOTES ON THE QUESTION OF ETHICS of expression, of democratic choice in the election of governments, __1 “…ethics is centered on a problem of personal choice, of the aesthetics of etc.) These rights are held to be self-evident, and the result of a wide existence.” [1] consensus. ‘Ethics’ is a matter of busying ourselves with these rights, of making sure that they are respected.” [3] To think ethics is to work toward the government of the body, of the self. The idea of ethics only exists as a blueprint for how one conducts oneself, For Alain Badiou, the central ethical concern is not the self-determination establishes a specific relationship to oneself. This relationship to the self was of governance but rather the enforcement of the individual. It appears the central focus for Foucault. A rigorous examination reveals that ethics- the that the concern for ethics as a discourse is less important than the way one rules or lives one’s life- is deeply tied to the idea of mastery and beauty. construction of the individual and its capacity to perform in society. It is not enough to become aware of the governance of life; one must accept This problematizes the very principles which enforce “individuality”. What the challenge to construct a beautiful existence, mastering all aspects of daily is there to be gained by a society comprised of individuals? life. This brings about certain burdens and responsibilities, yet “the mastery of oneself was directly related to a dissymmetrical relation to others.”[2] That is __3 The answers to some of these questions rest for Badiou in the to say, mastery of oneself is not something that affects others. An ethics has specificity of the individual as a subject. Within their capacity to be a no concern for the other, but rather focuses on the self. subject, the individual is able to establish a certain notion of truth. Given this point of view one understands an ‘ethic’ as a personal choice, as Truth, founded within the subjectivity of the being, is a shared reality, an measures that determine the guiding principals for only the individual. What experience that binds the individual to others inside a group of sameness about the collective? How can we discuss ethics for a society? and to themself. We can substitute truths for awareness if we understand that the individual gains agency through the capacity it (truth/ awareness) __2 “ We are supposed to assume the existence of a universally recognizable has to “exercise power along one’s full spectrum of possibilities”. human subject possessing ‘rights’ that are in some sense natural: the right to live, to avoid abusive treatment, to enjoy ‘fundamental’ liberties (of opinion,

044|045

4. Ibid, p.28

FA00

“The only genuine ethics is of truths in the plural- or more precisely, the This suggests that ethics are born out of the individual but always exist within only ethics is the process of truth, of the labour that brings some truth into the haptic overlap of the collective. the world…Ethics does not exist. There is only the ethic-of (of politics, of love, of science, of art).”[4] [5] If we assert two ideas: It is within the individual that ethics are initially formed, and if we are to discuss ethics we must look at it through the __4 The “ethics-of ” becomes the mechanism that can enable us to have principles of praxis: then how are we to determine the elements that a larger discourse on ethics, on the one hand inscribing the importance of construct such practices? How can society uphold rights initially constructed the individual while engaging in the responsibilities to uphold the rights of by the scale of the person? What scalar relationship between the collective the collective. We can say that these mechanism need to find themselves and the individual from the standpoint of ethics and practice, allow us to as practices capable of cementing ‘truths’ (in the words of Badiou) or operate in the world? awareness. Let us take for example the ethics of love. The challenge lies precisely in How are these operations choices that produce agency and freedom within the establishment of protocols that would enable certain parameters to the individual? How do they produce reformed citizens capable of practicing be understood in the cryptic resonances of emotions. The particularities self-determined ethics that haptically coexist with society at large? What of romance and affection vary tremendously between individuals of the would that freedom look like? same gender, culture, nation, etc., yet the very idea of the principle and Doug Diaz its effects are clearly understood by anyone that has ever experienced love. It is within the exercise, by busying ourselves with these ethics that 1.M. Foucault, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, Paul Rabinow, ed., (NY: The New Press, 1997) p. 260 we learn to do more than respect, we learn to construct and enunciate the 2. Ibid, p. 267 3. A. Badiou, Ethics: an Essay on the Understanding of Evil, (London, New York: Verso, 2002) p.4 protocols that will allow us to have rights to love.

[ DISCIPLINARY ORGANS ]

its external and internal aspects: from credit records and video camera The mechanisms of self surveillance and the microphysics of power captured archives, to the ways one deals with neighbors, family and friends, and by Foucault in his study Discipline and Punish are the precursors of the the way one thinks about oneself. hybrid which smoothly blends our current political economies and technology with the disciplinary apparatus. The legal system is an engine we call into As part of the broader investigation into chronomorphology which this existence by believing in it. Staged on a wildly uneven legal playing field, the book documents, I proposed that there is a temporal structure inherent ethnic and class imbalances in the penal system and in everyday life should in these movements of power which encourages rigid strata to form lend a clarity to our analysis and our challenge of this system. that bound the imaginative freedoms we might normally consider our ‘unalienable right.’ These temporal structures have found ways to CINEMA SOURCES: cascade through new channels economically and legally, forming hybrid Prisoners of War Hiroshima Mon Amour The Deer Hunter Slaughterhouse-5 Catch-22 bodies with the architectural assemblages that frame organic and Underground Before the Rain machinic bodies: prisoners, guards, staff, service, infrastructure, bars, Prisoners of Race and Politics bricks and mortar. Malcolm X Hurricane The Green Mile Strange Days La Haine Shawshank Redemption American History X In the first four weeks we ran a series of seminars, film viewings, and In the Name of the Father Farewell my Concubine Burnt by the Sun intensive readings. The films provided an analytical frame to develop new scenarios and program assemblages in. This took place coeval with Real prisons American Me The Farm Slam Shoah Night and Fog Oz Papillon an initial design problem- the design of a cell. Sites were chosen by the Dead Man Walking students from an array of possible locations and scales. Prisoners of Madness, Violence and the Institution One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest The Cell The techniques we used to unpack the films functioned as an abstract The Conformist The Kingdom The Prisoner A Clockwork Orange model for RE-packing our design into the site. A scenario engaging the behavior of the cell and the individual(s) it houses informed the Prisoners of architecture and the city Alphaville Playtime Amarcord development of the project and opened connections to varying scales Escape from NY (& LA) Judge Dredd Brazil of meta-architectural concern: economic, legal, political, and cultural Prisoners of Class, Sex and Genetics frameworks that participate in disciplinary action. American Heart My Own Private Idaho Nights of Cabiria Mama Roma Gattaca Alien 3 La Strada Uncovering the architectural, social, legal, and economic avenues that such a temporal structure might avail itself of was one of the key design Prisoners of Identity Nostalghia Passenger Lost Highway Paris, Texas tasks of the studio. The body of each prisoner is the site across which Amateur Fight Club A Clockwork Orange Blade Runner complex and monolithic time wage their battles. We suggested that design may challenge the destinies that monolithic time produces, by Prisoners of the Industrial Age Safe Red Desert adding a complex temporality to the mix. Prisoners of Time and Memory Le Confessional Le Polygraph Vertigo Spellbound La Jetee Paradoxically there may be a line of flight from the seeming impasse AfterLife Once Upon a Time in the West Red the for-profit prison presents, in that any disciplinary engine may be in practice misused to produce temporal complexity and freedom. A Prisoners of Desire and Technology The Crying Game Crash The Conversation subversion or productive inversion of the authority associated with the legal and penal system, and alternative business models informed by Prisoners of Truth Stalker emergent economies and technologies may participate in this. The forprofit prison is a useful model as it requires an architecture conceived as a matrix for an extended body or field condition reaching beyond the scale Assistant critic: Douglas Diaz and milieu of the building.

The project began with an analysis of David Cronenberg’s film Crash. Each of the main characters was assigned a material characteristic, which was then abstracted and simulated in the computer. The film was broken down into its main scenes, and the characters’ responses to each program/situation in the scene was then tested. This yielded several different models of time, for example: oneway multitemporality, compressed time, relaxed time, or fluctuating multitemporality.

046|047

ADAM DAYEM

[ DISCIPLINARY ORGANS ]

FA00

Each of these timeforms was then associated with details in the scenes such as objects, props, sounds, actions, or other characters.

ADAM DAYEM

048|049

[ DISCIPLINARY ORGANS ]

FA00 The project addressed the moral and ethical complexity of the for-profit prison by proposing a merger between Walmart and the prison network. Walmart would provide an incubation for a rehabilitative workfare prison infrastructure. A business plan/executive summary gave details about retailer, consumer and prisoner benefits, in an attempt to overturn the growth industry feedback loop that the current business model of the forprofit prison uses.

An analysis of Walmart’s delivery network gave points of contact and overlap with the prison. Prisoner transport was tied to the Walmart distribution; and retail locations were seeded with ‘prison’ centers. A range of scenarios was used to assist in tuning the programs that would be included on site in the prison/retail assemblage.

050|051

ADAM DAYEM

[ DISCIPLINARY ORGANS ]

FA00

The initial research and analysis from the film Crash was then revisited, and each of the timeforms were then reassociated with Walmart and prison programs, blending the overlap between the two, and creating a more synergistic environment for the prisoners to live and rehabilitate within.

052|053

ADAM DAYEM

[ DISCIPLINARY ORGANS ]

FA00

An analysis of the film Lost Highway by David Lynch identified a relationship between several of the main characters who were bound in a co-dependant temporal knot. This dynamic was unpacked according to a range of events, sites, and situations that the characters found themselves within. This work ultimately generated a set of models which could be used to calculate the resiliency and robustness of a subject- in a way, to evaluate their health.

AHM CHANDANAWICH

054|055

[ DISCIPLINARY ORGANS ]

FA00 Simultaneously, a detailed analysis of surveillance and technology networks within the prison was conducted. The map that resulted from this was used as a base for a scenario proposing a new self-governing prison network which, using the Internet, would allow prisoners to establish an economic and televisual relationship with the outside world, as well as installing an inmate moderated monitoring system which would decrease the corruption of prison guards. Conceptually this was an inversion of Bentham’s Panopticon, dispersing the focus from a single point of surveillance across an entire network, with attendant responsibilities associated with the new network members. The business model also required a new economic structure which would prepare the prisoners for their re-entry to society.

AHM CHANDANAWICH

Subsequently, techniques of this analysis were reapplied to the Times Square neighborhood. This area was ultimately chosen as a site for the for-profit prison and was evaluated at an urban scale using the criteria of resiliency that had been extracted from the Lost Highway film analysis. Programs in the area were tracked from the mid 1970s to the late 1990s. The location and design of the prison was then set in place to function on an urban scale as an force which would benefit the city while providing a range of socially radical programs built into the prison services, such as an overlap between movie theaters, health care centers for legalized prostitution, digital media production run by prisoners, and the new model of the prison itself.

MICHAEL CHEN

056|057

[ DISCIPLINARY ORGANS ]

FA00 The films AfterLife and American History X provided two different approaches as starting points: AfterLife yielded a complex memory within memory structure, that was connected to a state of awareness, mapping out a set of complex relationships between characters during their recreation of moments from their lives. American History X provided a set of sub-culturally and institutionally grounded diagrams that could be connected to the AfterLife maps.

Subsequently, the program map for a generic prison and hotel were mapped. Overlap points between services in each program were identified, and the two programs- prison and hotel- were then merged. A series of scenarios examining a range of traveler and prisoner situations was developed, testing out the possible relationships and points of overlap between the two systems.

MICHAEL CHEN

058|059

[ DISCIPLINARY ORGANS ]

FA00 The site chosen was near a major airport, taking advantage of the idea that both prisoners and business travelers could benefit from this unique hybrid program. A range of contemporary technologies, including wireless GPS tracking, magnetic keys, ankle monitors, and high technology surveillance and communication, were used to overlap the hotel program more seamlessly with a prison program.

This rehabilitation experiment aims to re-program an individual’s subconscious tendency to engage in acts of serious criminal behavior. The healing plays out through a series of interactive simulations where convicted felons engage in reliving their crimes.

JESSE SEPPI

060|061

[ DISCIPLINARY ORGANS ]

FA00 With each simulated repetition of their criminal act, these inmates are given endless opportunities to deviate from their apparently built-in subconscious urge to recommit a certain crime. The physical body of the prisoner is held in a state of suspended animation (via psychotropic drip) aboard a series of decommissioned oil platforms located within the North Atlantic. To support the program, the inmates experiece would be accessible to outsiders via a PC gaming environment where the inmates virtual experience drives content within the game. This for-profit strategy would not only support the program but allow inmates to earn financial credit to be rewarded upon their release, should they successfully re-train the subconscious. Jessi Seppi

The prison was located on the West Side on top of an existing building, giving it great visibility. This idea of visibility was present not only in the architecture itself but also carried over to the inmates.

VIVIAN ROSENTHAL

062|063

[ DISCIPLINARY ORGANS ]

FA00 Is rehabilitation possible? Should those who have committed a crime be allowed interaction with the outside world? There are four stages of proposed punishment and rehabilitation: the cell (awareness), the video camera (prevention and loss of privacy), the website (prevention, loss of privacy and profit) and the archive (recording and evidence). This for-profit business model would allow outside viewers to pay in order to watch the lives of the prisoners. Multiple viewers could pay to follow the same prisoner.

The cell was the first stage of the rehabilitation process where the prisoner was forced to confront themselves. Each cell had two cameras that continuously videotaped the prisoner. Whichever side of the cell they were in they were faced with the video of themselves from the other side. This was referred to as anagrammatic space, where time and self collapse back onto themselves to produce a shift in consciousness.

The second stage, the video camera, was the point when the prisoner had a camera implanted on them and were allowed to leave their cell and move through the outside world. The website, the third stage, allowed their movements and actions to be tracked and watched by outsiders. The fourth and last stage was the archive, which contained all of the video footage from each prisoner, both from their time in the cell and their time outside.

VIVIAN ROSENTHAL

064|065

[ DISCIPLINARY ORGANS ]

FA00 The camera implanted on them allowed free civilians (outsiders) the ability to see what the prisoner saw and feel what the prisoner felt. Essentially, it allowed outsiders (free citizens) to live two lives, their own and that of the prisoner. They could choose to live vicariously through a prisoner or they could attempt to convince the prisoner to give up a life of crime and try to join the outside society by communicating with them through the website. The outsiders had the ability to control the camera by zooming or panning to further study the location and acts of the prisoner. For the prisoners, it was the potential of being watched, rather than actual constant surveillance that was meant to keep them from committing new crimes. Vivian Rosenthal

A society is judged by the quality of its prisons. An enlightened society is judged by the treatment of its prisoners. The prisoner has committed a crime and has been punished accordingly; his liberty has been taken away, but the human essence still remains. Prison walls separate the prisoner from freedom. But the prison walls must not come between the prisoner and human dignity.

Diagrams: Based on the movie la Haine, these are a series of sections taken in each of the stages in the film. The cyclic behavior of forces on the plane are understood as revealing the behavior of individual in the prison structure. The 00 line separates between 2 aspects of the rehabilitation process. The lower side demonstrates the aspects that have to do with taking care of the mind and suggests complex structures of memory The emotional state of powerlessness is the genesis of evil. and forgetfulness, dealing mainly with the past. The upper side of the In the existing prison structure, the crucial issue for the prisoner is his line demonstrates the stage of education and the acquiring of skills, and powerlessness to change a dehumanizing situation. deals mainly with the future. The more a person feels that he is unable to influence his own situation, the more likely that he will resort to violence in order to influence it. By not allowing the power of choice - prisons promote the very behavior they are attempting to mend; serving as ware houses,a breeding ground for frustration and violence.

The arrows in the diagram emphasize the fact that it is not a linear process but has a more complex structure of movements going back and forth on the 00 line, responding to each other and creating spaces of overlapping and intricacy in time as well as space. The understanding of that complexity was later translated to the ways in which the program and the inter-temporality of the prison structure was developed.

ADI BIRAN + LIHI GERSTNER

066|067

[ DISCIPLINARY ORGANS ]

FA00 Internal Park The park is constructed out of many layers of built landscapes and existing infrastructures that function together as a park within the building, which is a groundscraper. At times, the programs are captured within as an enclosure that frames the moment of an event, an awareness of inside/ outside conditions. The same plane functions both as an exterior and interior landscape. Elements of the existing transportation are introduced into the architecture and are exposed to the park user. The railroad “dirty” zone on the site becomes rehabilitated as well. The site is treated as a preservation of the past, understood as a memory structure, but also as a forgetting structure installed by the new. The layering and overlapping of programs creates different time zones for the different users, and different scales of operations. The inmate “doing time” constitutes one time zone; as do the park user and the passer by.

The “Ethics of Doing Time”, in the case of this project, is defined as a journey with complex navigation, a rehabilitation process in which the prisoner moves from one stage to another within the prison. He can travel back and forth in these stages, given the power of multiple choices; he can determine his own individual path and carry the consequences of his decisions. Bakhtin’s concept of the “chronotope” describes the connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships. In the “chronotope prison”, as the prisoner travels in time, he also travels in space, through the different stages of the programs in the extended site. The complex journey becomes a way of architecturally, programmatically and institutionally challenging the single narratives the existing prison provides inmates and society at large.

ADI BIRAN + LIHI GERSTNER

068|069

[ DISCIPLINARY ORGANS ]

FA00 It is difficult to see how one might integrate someone into society by removing them from it. Society is playing an important role in the process of rehabilitation; in order for the prisoner’s rehabilitation to succeed it has to be an exchange, a dialectic relationship between community and its prisoners. We attempted to install a new relationship between prisoner and society, by examining the conditions of being inside and being outside not as a sharp transition from the ultimate denial of freedom to the ultimate freedom, but as a series of gradual stages that increasingly peel off boundaries and increase zones of operation. With time, more responsibilities and trust would be given, more of the power to choose would be exercised, and the return to open society would not be an overwhelming experience. Adi Biran, Lihi Gerstner

SP01 [ THE DOPPELGANGER AND THE DREAMING CITY ] BCNYCTWN “The doppelganger is defined as a second self, or alter ego, which appears as a distinct and separate being, apprehensible by the physical senses. The other self must appear in a dependent relation to the original.This dependence refers to the dominance and control that the double usually has on the subject. However, the raison d’être of the double is always held in relation to the original.

dreaming itself, on a cultural scale, on an economic line, on a passionate and political line.

Divided, split, or schizophrenic characters are not, in themselves, examples of doppelgangers, but they may become appropriate if and when their division gives rise to a second personality, even if this is only acknowledged by the subject...The concept of twinning is closely related to the doppelganger, and works with the idea that no one can physically tell the two characters apart and that only their actions will depict their differences.” -online definition of doppelganger

Our NYC studio operated along two axes: The Barcelona/New York axis centripetally focused on physical site and the infrastructural, economic, passionate and virtual exigencies that establish horizons for understanding urban sites. The New York/Taiwan axis centrifugally orbited around a theme of virtuality, establishing a technology oriented trajectory, exploring themes such as the impact of P2P networking on urban design and the construction of instant communities that can dream new worlds overnight.

We began with the thesis that dreaming-memory constitutes a uniquely hybrid state of perception and being. Such an idea, developed from our own experiences of being in dreaming, parallels the theoretical framework emerging from thinkers as diverse as Spinoza, Henri Bergson, Maya Deren, J.L. Borges, Gilles Deleuze, Lewis Carroll, Marguerite Duras, and Carlos Castaneda. The studio projects depended on the intentional amnesia that is crucial to the structural composition not only of dreaming memory, but also to the emergence of higher forms of intelligence as identified by AI theorists such as Ben Goertzel.

All three teams shared selected documents during the design process, using the Internet as a collaborative substrate. We held to the tenet of open source work, using periodic FTP uploads of work and documents. This ‘open source’ material included 2D images, DV, site mappings in various forms, text analysis, 3D models and maps, audio documentation, and business plans

Our studio in NYC was paralleled by two other remote collaborators: a team in Barcelona, Office AiB [Juan Azulay and Roger Blanch], and a third team in Taiwan conducted by Leslie Shih, at Chiao Tung University.

As a one week handshake project to begin the semester, each student chose one memory or dream of a place that they considered rich enough to take with them into eternity. They made a short animation/film/ In applying this model of memory and forgetting to an urban agenda, we presentation/scenario depicting this memory/dream. This exercise was looked for radical scale shifts to implement and achieve what we might call based on the premise of the film Afterlife, by Kore-eda. an “architectural Time-Image.” The concept of the time-image was drawn from Deleuze’s work on cinema, where he argues that a third kind of memory, inventive or dreaming memory, exists and has been evidenced within the Following this handshake project, each student analyzed several films. history of cinema. His Cinema 1+2 studies are a catalog of the evolution of The diagrams resulting from this work provided abstract models and cinema and the emergence of such a time image. We sought the architectural program engines for the design phase of the project. Students developed equivalent, in scale shifts that ranged from the most intimate deployments in scenarios responding to the site conditions which provided further architecture- at the scale of the hand, the skin, the ear, the mouth - to the larger direction for an urban and architectural strategy. economic, social and spatial concerns that a major development project with From the fourth week on, the students focused on designing urban and a 50+ year scope would have to face in a major city. Across these extremes, architectural interventions that were informed by the timeforms that the the problems of memory and intentional amnesia remain operative. film and site encounters yielded. The idea that a double could emerge through psychological trauma, or The studio made a journey to Barcelona in mid-February and spent 5 days through the intentional manipulation of perception through dreaming and exploring and documenting the city. Office AiB facilitated this visit and other rituals, informed our approach to the construction of a doppelganger provided various flux-tours of our sites and the city at large. of the city. We proposed that the city would be able to invent new ways of

070|071

SITE-PROLIFERATION-MACHINE: BCNYCTWN, 41.35o N The sites were chosen with several factors in mind: -To illustrate the different kinds of centralities these sites activate: ZF massively contributes to the strategical and commercial centrality while not having any representational role. SC is a site where image displays the nature of condensed capital and fulfills a representational role as the historic city’s main wealth-generating asset. ZI evidences the creation from scratch of a new center. What defines centrality and how to activate it become key questions.

___Zona Franca (ZF): Barcelona’s industrial port (a tax-free zone), including container terminals, ZAL (Logistics Area), Mercabarna (BCN’s central food market), oil and flammable products basin, etc. It occupies a very large expanse of land (partially infilled) just south of Montjuic. While it is one of Barcelona’s most important strategical assets at an international scale, it remains quite separate from the city’s everyday life, and barely registers in the collective image of the city.

-Concerning ground qualities: ZF is an expansive horizontality (a very present ground level), SC is a material accumulation of history (a multiplicity of ground levels), and ZI is a tabula rasa (a ground level built from scratch).

___Santa Caterina (SC): An area in the Old Town, between the neighbourhoods of Sant Pere and La Ribera. SC bears the name of the market around which the neighbourhood once thrived. SC was originally an extramuros settlement between two of the main eastern roads going through the Roman city of Barcelona. By the VIIIth century it was already settled. The area is embroiled in a controversial development that has entailed the destruction of most of its urban fabric. Since the beginning of the XXth century there have been a number of projects proposing a Haussmanian sventramento of which the current works are heirs. Enric Miralles was rebuilding SC’s market, and he proposed an overall scheme for the neighborhood that subsequently was not followed.

-From the point of view of the irreducible roles of these sites within the city as a whole: ZF is oriented towards production, SC towards the materiality of history, and ZI towards infrastructure.

SP01

___Zoo infill (ZI): Between the Besus River and 1992’s Olympic Village, Barcelona’s coastline has undergone massive transformation. The last developable segment lies just south of Besus, where the Diagonal Avenue meets the sea, in an area that once was heavily polluted and socially very marginalised (La Mina Project, illegal housing in Camp de la Buta). The area is currently being developed, and it will be housing in 2004 for the Cultures Forum, a Cultural Olympiad of sorts. Planned programs include experimental housing, a new sports harbor, large cultural facilities, and the Barcelona Zoo. The Zoological Gardens will move to a massive infill, still under construction, between Barcelona’s main circular highway and the sea.

-Concerning the relationship between tourism and production: ZF is geared strictly towards efficient production, SC is geared mainly toward traditional tourism, and ZI demonstrates the invention of new possible relationships between tourism and production.

[ THE DOPPELGANGER AND THE DREAMING CITY ]

“The BCNYCTWN project was an investigation of New Centralities, a term which refers both to the centers of urban areas and the relative centrality of cities as such. Hence the very question of urbanity, and its historical, political and cultural preeminence is posed. We would like to think in terms of how the city as a material agglomeration tends to change when confronted with a novel stage in the mode of production and transmission of reality. The general questions of the fundamental unbalance between the so-called first world and the rest of the globe; that of the fourth world or structural poverty and marginalisation within rich societies; that of globalization and the expulsion of production from rich countries; and the shift in the progressand-growth oriented paradigm that has shaped the world since the Industrial Revolution will have to be part of our ongoing discussion.” Office AiB [Azulay + Blanch]

Assistant critics: Dean DiSimone, Doug Diaz Collaborators: Office AiB [Azulay + Blanch], Leslie Shih

IMAGE: Jason Anderson

The project thematized ideas of voyage and transformation. An initial exercise revisiting the experience of a daily ritual motorcycle ride across the Bay Bridge in San Francisco then gave onto an analysis of three classic road movies: Easy Rider, My Own Private Idaho, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The dynamic in each film between the two main characters’ propensity for movement in relationship to each other and the transformative power of the voyage was mapped using terms like dampening, stiffness, mass, dynamic friction, static friction, force and torque. Each of these terms was used to develop a detailed understanding of how the characters related to each other and the world around them. These relations were then documented over the course of their respective journeys, noting how their destiny could be changed in different contexts.

JASON ANDERSON

072|073

[ THE DOPPELGANGER AND THE DREAMING CITY ]

SP01 Analyzing the range of an individual character’s control of environment, and control of the main duality, enabled a recoding of the initial mapping with new forms of independence, appropriation, aggression, and temporality. These initial concepts were then taken to Barcelona, where selected relationships and sites drawn from the film analyses were relocated.

The condition of ‘other’, as derived specifically from the act of passing through the U.S. landscape in Easy Rider, was deployed in site exploration. The abundance of symbols and indicators in Barcelona gave rise to new meanings as even the usually acute meaning transferred via language was obscured through the translation process due to our distance from the dialect community.

JASON ANDERSON

074|075

[ THE DOPPELGANGER AND THE DREAMING CITY ]

SP01 The role of the pictogram in street art and graffiti became privileged in our encounter with the city. Specific reoccurrences of graffiti within areas of closure and decay in the city located each as a point of rebirth, and a possible initiator of renewal.

In a new scenario, the idea of a tiger team, a rogue team of Internet hackers, was developed as the core user group. This program was connected to the local economy in the depressed Santa Catarina site, and proposed as an economic and programmatic engine that could revitalize the community. Rooftop sites remained as a base for migrant groups, receiving connections to the existing street fabric through partially fortified tiger team growth.

JASON ANDERSON

076|077

[ THE DOPPELGANGER AND THE DREAMING CITY ]

SP01 This underground technology culture connected to the Internet and rooted itself into the local community, providing a new method of occupation and prosperity, while benefitting from the nomadic and shielded nature of the existing migrant community. The system of negotiated duality between the overground and street level, through this tethering condition of the tiger team, formed the final proposal.

The program was developed as a library on both a local and a global scale. The intent was to reinstate a failed utopian socialist community in the Poble Nou area, using a library as a program catalyst, which would combine with a network of infrastructure deployed in the Ramblas as walls with graffiti that would function as ‘public boards’ as well as skateparks.

GAVIN BARDES

078|079

[ THE DOPPELGANGER AND THE DREAMING CITY ]

SP01 This library and readable infrastructure [read literally, as a location to post text, and read haptically as a series of skateparks in the Ramblas] would then provide interference patterns locally. This was understood a a hybrid between Superstudio’s Continuous Monument project, and the textuality of Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial.

On a global scale, the concept of the P2P network was used to extend the territory of the library, as the library program was developed in a lending library with a unique mission: any book that passed through the main location in Poble Nou would be scanned, converted to text, and uploaded to the Internet.

GAVIN BARDES

080|081

[ THE DOPPELGANGER AND THE DREAMING CITY ]

SP01 The thermodynamic/information theory model of noise and parasites in a system, which Thomas Pynchon experimented with in the mail service described in his novel The Crying of Lot 49, was used to theorize the emergence of a new library network worldwide that would maintain an intimate connection with the urban realities of everyday life in Barcelona through the Ramblas interventions.

SU01

[ NEGENTROPIC ARCHITECTURE ] ...simultaneously, the gelatinous geysers are converted into mobile columns that proceed to extrude tendrils that reach out in clusters towards points rigorously predetermined by the overall dynamics of the entire structure: they call to mind gills of an embryo, except that they are revolving at fantastic speed and ooze trickles of pinkish ‘blood’ and a dark green secretion....It would only be natural, clearly, to suppose that the symmetriad is a ‘computer’ of the living ocean, performing calculations for a purpose that we are not able to grasp...The hypothesis was a tempting one, but it proved impossible to sustain the concept that the living ocean examined problems of matter, the cosmos and existence through the medium of titanic eruptions, in which every particle had an indispensable function as a controlled element in an analytical system of infinite purity... Solaris, Stanislaw Lem Temporal conversion, anamnesis and the international organization Cyberpunk and science fiction provides a rehearsal of many ideas useful to understand the global systems and contemporary technology developments radically revisioning architecture and urbanism today. In this context, references include texts and films like Lem’s Solaris, Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, Gibson’s Neuromancer, and Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell; all exemplary in their investigation of a new global order in relationship to technology and power structures. A robust theoretical armature in contemporary philosophy and the sciences also addresses these themes. Authors like Michel Serres, Ilya Prigogine, and Gilles Deleuze have uniquely synthesized an approach that unifies philosophy, mathematics, and science. Throughout this studio we blended these approaches to arrive at a more vital proposal for urbanism and architecture. Our program was to design a headquarters, network model, and tactical response team with equipment for an international organization that handles events at a truly global scale. Students selected an organization from a list including groups such as NATO, the United Nations, the World Bank, or the Center for Disease Control [CDC]. In some cases students invented a new organization responding to a global need that they identified or predicted.

082|083

Our mission was to evaluate architecture’s role in a distributed computational network, for organizations that needed to filter massive actionable information flows and interface with real world physical components. Some students argued that architecture was a necessary component, whereas others proposed a primarily non-architectural solution to the design problem.

“ We are submerged to our neck, to our eyes, to our hair, in a furiously raging ocean. We are the voice of this hurricane, this thermal howl, and we do not even know it. The organism... is a converter of time.” Michel Serres The Origin of Language

Serres implicates memory in this interlocked set of influences and reconsiders what memory might actually be, as well as rethinking the role of As complexity theory and information science evolved in the past half amnesia [noise] as understood through systems/information theory. century, it became apparent that all systems, whether living or non When applied to an urban milieu, this quote from Serres suggested that organic, had ordering principles that determined not only their form and the relationships between a living organism, its internal/genetic ordering internal consistency, but also how they could interact with other larger principles, and its context could be catalyzed by urban, economic and and smaller systems, and ultimately, their own ability to reproduce. sociocultural mechanisms all working together to form a new performance landscape. This catalysis, we hoped, would ultimately yield a negentropic When this quasi organicist model was used as a lens to observe state. nonorganic systems one witnessed cyclical regulatory behaviors that appeared to be remarkably lifelike, incorporating what seemed to be intelligent responses to context. Seen from this point of view, buildings, cities and economies, it could be argued, were not fundamentally different from ecosystems and organic phyla.

[ NEGENTROPIC ARCHITECTURE ]

In the past decade, the Internet has provided a network structure that was remarkably similar to a neurological mesh, and by developing true peer to peer capability began to afford a nuanced feedback mechanism for culture to intersect with vaster economies, infrastructure, and manufacturing. The performance of organizations like the CDC or NATO depends on the capacity for information to become actionable immediately and impact the way that both global and tactical responses take place. Architecture has traditionally operated very slowly as a large scale cultural memory mechanism. We asked how its performance model could be revised to handle a demand for immediate responsiveness.

SU01

We loosely defined negentropy as an increase in order or coherence of information and energy flow, and sought ways that architecture could participate, creating this condition. Assistant critic: Jason Anderson

IMAGE: Rafael Garcia

The Directorate of Intelligence Activated through Interstitial Time In this project, the complex and ambiguous structure of the CIA translated its entropy and disorder in the context of the city. Supervisory technology allows individuals to be constantly compared to a norm, creating cultural yardsticks by which each is differentiated exactly from another. This technology measures in quantitative terms and hierarchies the abilities and the nature of individuals. This information, placed in a scenario where urban space is the field for an exercise of power over the body, is oppressive and disciplinary because it imposes compulsory visibility.

Power imposes compulsory visibility of information, breaking rules of secrecy and privacy, and creating the norm. The organization uses techniques of association, repetition, distortion and addition, creating a collection of experiences. The project analyzed the process of gathering information according to rules mixing body, movement, event and space.

EDUARDO DUARTE

084|085

[ NEGENTROPIC ARCHITECTURE ]

SU01 Urban Portal The NYC subway line is an existing infrastructure that locates the urban portal for the project. It constitutes a split that activates the memory of transference from accessibility to visibility. This translation of time is processed according to the intensity that surveillance systems can continuously bring to bear on one object. The compulsory visibility is materialized by the repetition of the folding section as a mechanism that breaks the boundaries of privacy and public. The wrapping and folding of the section lines links the subject to their condition in space and time creating compulsory visibility or segregation. Permanently accessible to the public, this space operates as a conflict machine that unfolds principles and rules of social, cultural and political behavior, exposing information and enacting a kind of total transparency. Eduardo Duarte

Can we design the moment of meeting a memory? What is duration, can it be extended? Is there a space in which one cannot make new memories any more? Can we become aware of the moment of remembering? Or forget what we do not need to remember? Cultural memory is a subjective memory made available in a non-subjective way. Urban spaces re-inscribe and articulate various systems of memory, from local memories to a larger collective continuum of memory systems. Information is spread as an atmospheric shield and is constantly shifted through filters of culture, politics, history, economy and religion into a process of sorting and consolidating new memories; or rather what to remember and what to forget. Urban spaces can either produce a voluntary memory device working as a homogenized system setting a goal of accumulating memories; or through a more heterogeneous process can work as unintended memory generators. Can information streams become too dense for us to filter them and accumulate them into memories?

Cities act as temporary areas of memories, a meta-data-architecture. By generating an excess of accessible information the city loses certain possibilities of uniqueness. There is a critical point of excess stimulation where memories start to become less visible and more homogeneous. If architecture creates situations that foster more intentions on a cultural scale the project attempted to find the leakages and gaps in the moments of an unintentional memory generation. The project made a case study of DUMBO, a neighborhood in Brooklyn, looking for conditions which by their scale, unique noise, history and self organizing growth managed to consolidate more accidents, new interlocking information systems and possibilities of subjective memory generation. Analysis separated memories into three types • Virgin memories, (sensory) memories not named or defined yet • Short term, repetitive memories, as documentation of reality • Memory taken for granted, a long-term memory

LILA CHITAYAT

086|087

[ NEGENTROPIC ARCHITECTURE ]

SU01 Architectural memory spores were seeded throughout the urban Once the memory plant burst from the earth line it shifted and took shape environment. They acted as self-regulating systems that were sensitive to from the forces of the site. A vibration of the subway passing by, the sunlight, the necessity to react as site/time specific entities. the distance to the water, shadows or a flow of cars in a nearby street were determining forces. The most inner layer, the virgin memory system, was the The spores generated information from the memories of different urban dynamic continuum that when seen and remembered by the inhabitants, conditions. When they became ‘ripe’ they found a moment to sprout would start to dissolve and disappear. When each virgin memory was and begin a process of growth into full-scale architectural objects. At recalled and named, it would no longer need a physical presence and the the beginning of the process the cell was divided by simple dynamics follies would ‘melt’ to become only the traces of what was the memory it of contraction and expansion forces into three layers, the 3 types of interlocked. By doing so, the place in which a memory spore once grew could memories noted above. The external skin (memories taken for granted) virtually exist after as a memory of its own. later grew into the structures and skin of the architecture follies; the 2nd Lila Chitayat layer became the site of circulation.

“Human: Ingrate being with two legs.” Dostoevsky

The question then becomes: how to organize contradictions in the same field of operation? How to include contradictory opinions in the same process of evaluation of organizations, for the services they perform?

Anti-Corruption Organization The proposal studies the ability of architecture to operate within and make On the one hand corruption allows efficiency of operation in highly operative the transparency of an anti-corruption organization in opposition to bureaucratic systems, that is, when the rules of operation are extraneous its mere projection. to both the performer and the requestor of a service. In a way corruption seems to allow the surpassing of a system without disturbing it. Complementary and contradictory information together give a richer But on the other hand it becomes dangerous and highly negative when understanding of a situation than mere fact. The anti-corruption organization its use is too divergent from, or hinders the operations/systems to which theme reflects on the power of doubt to be an elastic hinge that enhances the it applies. pursuit of a body of evidence.

CARLA LEITAO

088|089

[ NEGENTROPIC ARCHITECTURE ]

SU01

The film analysis of Polygraph, by Robert le Page, inaugurated an abstracted study of the mechanism of doubt when operating in a system in relation to itself. The main character in this film, accused of murder, doubted his own honesty, as he could not himself recall the night of the supposed murder. This doubt was understood as the point at which a system questions the relationship between its behavior and its principles.

The project aimed at the implementation of a mechanism that orchestrates a variety of anti-corruption organizations by embodying in its transgressive rules the power of asserting truth. The device starts with a system of verification of truth by polarity. This verification, involving the overall membership of all the organizations, becomes a branding mechanism for the organization that is offered as counterpoint. The virtuality of the system does not oppose a physicality in its actions. An urban incubator of new, different services is proposed, bound to this system, credited and validated by its operative and cyclic regeneration.

The project is composed of two elements, indispensable to each other: an interstitial agency and a lottery system. The interstitial agency is a shell without a proper soul. It is the repeated organ within the bodies of all the different organizations. It is the communication point between outside and organization. It works under the support of the organization where it settles, as a proof of the latter’s membership in the system. It performs work according to the system of a lottery.

Conversely, the lottery system is a soul without a shell. It is a virtual entity created by all the organizations, but with no ethical rules proper to itself. It displays the motors of its operation in a consistently changing fashion. When an input- a request for an evaluation - is made at any agency - the lottery system recalculates one member from each organization and generates a team composed of these different elements to perform the evaluation according to the rules of the ”house” where they come from. The results are thus multiple and the ethical codes used for such are not moderated or negotiated outside themselves - they are specific to each organization.

CARLA LEITAO

090|091

[ NEGENTROPIC ARCHITECTURE ]

SU01

NYC could have one interstitial agency or several. If the UN department for anti-corruption would have an interstitial agency and belong to the system, it would use its political power to construct something that engaged urban life and accommodated its desires as an attractor to a system of incorruptability. The structure is always one that stands on the disembodied interstitial agency, that in turn depends on the existing, waiting client.

A higher street that reconstructs/duplicates the void of the street multiplies the incubator, creating a new vision of the city. The residents are the first beneficiaries of this new prosthesis. The incubator becomes can be reached only through an interstitial agency; it is the step through which all others can see. Its organs are constantly exposed on the surfaces that construct it. The incubator is seen through in section, and on an urban scale can be seen into and markets itself and its services by this generosity. An exponential profit based on honesty is foreseen… The system operates within and yet outside it. The incubator is born from Carla Leitao the cycle of bound/unbound relationship of the system to its multiple resonance.

FA01

[ THE MACHINE ] Both Vitruvius and Alberti declared that to become an architect, one must learn how to construct machines. More recently, Daniel Libeskind has reminded us of this through his own memory, reading, and writing machines. This studio’s project was to design memory machines. They were constructed at 1:1 scale, in either the physical or digital realm. The purpose of each machine was determined at the discretion of its designer; a stipulation in the assignment was that it had to accomplish its assigned task. Every time we awake, the uneasy transition from sleep to a waking state involves a blending of dreamt perception with real perception and memory. Sometimes we ask ourselves what is real or where we are, sometimes even who we are. But, usually fairly quickly, the identity that we wear as an invisible suit of armor against the vicissitudes of time takes over, and the uncertainties and productive amnesias of dream are stripped away. This settling into the familiarity of habit has its dangers, whether that habit is constructed by the recognized smells of a lover, the patterns on a kitchen floor, the quality of light on the way to work as one stops to purchase a newspaper and coffee, or the bundling, sheaving and folding of events in our experiences over the course of a day. Beckett observed while writing on Proust and his struggle against the dangers of accustomed familiarities, that the phenomenon of involuntary memory “...isolates the useless, the opportune, the accidental, because it has destroyed in its flame Habit and all its works, and by its light it has revealed that which the false reality of experience could never and will never reveal...reality.” We were interested in this image of memory’s multiple edges, and how it could inform our comprehension of any culture or system: architecture, literature, cinema, and economies, creating opportunities for social freedom as well as invisible prisons. In his novel 100 Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez described the descent of an insomnia plague upon the town of Macondo. At first, this did not dismay the inhabitants, who were happy to be able to stay awake

A New Paradigm :: Encrypting Event Experience

path of architectural evolution, and stripped the notion of experience out of the spatial.

“Good-bye,” said the fox. “Here is my secret. It’s quite simple: One sees clearly only with the heart. Anything essential is invisible to the eyes.” Wim Wenders speaks of the duality of meaning in the German term The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint Exupery Einstellung In its association with film and photography, Einstellung means both the attitude of the taking, and the picture produced. The The expectation of translation generates an anticipation which cascades photograph does more than simply freeze a moment of time within an throughout the decision making process of design. When Borges speaks of image or object, for it possess the past and the future, fused with the language translation, the shifting of meaning across the boundaries of words, possibility of a narrative. Einstellung provides the framework from which he points out the often ineffectual nature of the literal translation, as well as we perceive the possibility of architecture representation through the indicating the historical baggage associated with the craft of verse. Borges photograph, yet the consistent reduction of the inhabitable space to still leads us towards the understanding of this task of shifting boundaries as a images affords no personal avenues of connection, or understanding of craft equal in importance to the original creation. the experiential. We are left, in effect, with what Wenders likens to the coil of the rifleman, the attitude of the photographer. Unlike the personal Architecture, a spatial language, relies heavily upon the strength of relation to the consciously threaded narrative of Wenders’ own photo representation to deliver a spatial understanding. The design process has storybooks, we are instead left by architectural representation at the often been reoriented to target specific moments of representation as the point of entry to a project, with no further avenues to explore. primary impact of the design. In essence, the development of representational technology, coupled with the possibility of wide distribution, has altered the

092|093

interminably. Soon, however, they accomplished every task needed in the town, and a major drawback became apparent: the plague began to erode their memory. At first only less important things were forgotten, but then everyday items and affairs. Initially they responded by labeling items with their names… then started to add the detail of their functions. The penultimate response was to turn to Pilar Ternera, whose consultations of the Tarot deck allowed people to see what their pasts were. Finally, the founder of Macondo, Jose Arcadio Buendia, started to design a machine which in a short period of time would allow a person to learn and recall everything useful that they needed to function on a daily basis. Our task in the studio was, like Jose Arcadio Buendia, to design a memory machine that somehow assisted in the process of establishing and reestablishing our memory- or which fully replaced the basic mechanisms of memory that we depend upon to create our identities- mechanisms which include architecture, the city, cinema, and the novel.

As a response to the proposition that we all existed within a kind of amnesia, each student designed a memory machine that allowed its user[s] the ability to recall that which was most necessary for them to remember. Architects, for as long as our profession has existed, have assigned this responsibility of memory to the city, and claimed it for the forms and functions of buildings that they design. They have also believed that they are qualified to judge what memories are worth fixing indelibly in a culture. There was a complex balance to be struck here between the need to remember something, and an outside force that compels us to remember. The propensity for punishment was inherent in every machine we designed and was a danger [or predilection] that each designer had to engage fully. In Kafka’s short story The Penal Colony, a machine, a device for punishment, killed subjects by inscribing/tattooing/writing the nature of their crime into their backs. Comprehension of the nature of the crime was attained only at the point of death. Similarly, redemption was offered in the idea that an individual or society would be able to forget a moment from its past: Germany’s need to forget the Holocaust, for example. This idea of redemption was explored in many of the films we screened, such as Hal Hartley’s Amateur, or Michael Verhoeven’s The Nasty Girl.

as the development of the camera and the importance of the photograph effected a shift in the methodology of architecture design, the exploration of experiential content stands ready to force this methodology to again reconform to our new pursuits.

While this thread of understanding weaves through many of the projects, the exploration of this shift drove projects for ‘The Machine’ and ‘Event as Noosphere’ most intimately. Our challenge then evolves from instilling Einstellung into the representation, to encrypting the original experience itself so that some vital aspect of the original will be translated and experienced by the individual. William Gibson created a system of translating sight into data sent Jason Anderson directly to the optic nerve in his novel Virtual Light. He carefully disassociated the understanding of the image and experience, by using the term ‘telepresence’. Through this disassociation he highlighted the importance of physical presence along with the possibility of augmenting, rather than replacing that experience. Yet, the agenda that is set before us considering his distinction between augmentation and [re]representation affords a new direction for the possibility of architectural distribution. Just

FA01

The power of understanding the actual presence of a project is found in the experience of the spatial. Kant argued that while he posited space and time, all external bodies drew the nature of their existence from a mode of intuition for perceiving them. If we hold to his concept, and agree that all people who perceive an object give life to an individualized instance of its entity with their own perception, then we must consider the ramification for architectural understanding given the methods by which we currently experience projects. The translation of representation affords us only the opportunity of reading the Einstellung, and denies the possibility of experience.

[ THE MACHINE ]

The work questioned the validity of the personal and social identities adopted under the influence of architecture. We began with the assumption that we were all inhabitants, in a way, of Macondo, that we all suffered from some kind of amnesia, much like Leonard, the main character in Chris Nolan’s film Memento. Like Jose Arcadio, Leonard decided that in order to combat his amnesia and accomplish a task, As a handshake project, each designer selected a film, and identified a he must maintain a consistency of identity- and he developed a set of memory condition and a character’s response to that condition, chosen from techniques [polaroids, annotations, tattoos, and police files] to assist him a body of cinema dealing with complex memory structures. with this struggle. Each project then reconstructed the memory situation from the film. In some Leonard’s case was an example of a particular state of memory, cases students literally reenacted entire story lines and events extracted anterograde amnesia, a pathological condition resulting from an injury. from the film source. Subsequently, each project extrapolated a design site However our work in this studio suggested that none of us were all that and scale drawing on the handshake work. different from Leonard in our dependence upon outside evidences, on, literally, inscriptions upon our bodies, to recall identity, meaning and The studio used a range of softwares [Maya, 3DSMax, Photoshop, and others] history from day to day. to accomplish the design. However as the studio requirements included a final design realized at a 1:1 scale, some chose to build a physical apparatus. Chris Marker said in his film Sans Soleil that “The great question of the As well, several students utilized web media, and the UnReal Tournament 20th (century) was the coexistence of different concepts of time... He gaming engine, to leverage their design work into an online community and wrote me: I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of achieve another kind of 1:1 realization. remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining. We do not remember, we rewrite memory much as history is rewritten.... Who said that time heals all wounds? It would be better to say that time heals everything, except wounds. With time, the hurt of separation loses its real limits. With time, the desired body will soon disappear, and if the desiring body has already ceased to exist for the other, then what remains is a wound disembodied.” Assistant critic: Jason Anderson

Encephalogram The quiet, relentless madness that takes place both in Stanislaw Lem’s novel Solaris, and Andre Tarkovsky’s filmic interpretation of the novel, relies heavily on psychological dissociative disorders and more specifically, psychogenic fugues. The psychogenic fugue is an assumption of a new identity coupled with the inability to recall one’s previous identity and is often elicited by severe psychosocial stress. In this particular state, the self-manipulation and mutilation of memory on one hand yields varying levels of dementia, but from another perspective provides the ability to alter reality, or at least one’s personality.

The design process borrowed the psychogenic fugue as a motor from Solaris, and relied on Unreal Tournament [a networked, 3D computer gaming engine] as the medium for the architecture and operation of the machine.

ALEX PFEIFER

094|095

[ THE MACHINE ] The work attempted to create a liminal quality in the relationship between two entities by challenging the culture of MUD’s and online game types. A liminal state is an essential catalyst necessary for entering fugue states. Ideally Encephalogram would also incorporate a layer of service-based programs such as email retrieval or online shopping in order to elicit more sophisticated fugue states by further challenging online culture. In this sense the interface Encephalogram employs is crucial to experiencing fugue states: the immersive first-person perspective of the experience constantly reintroduces and reifies “memory”. Alex Pfeiffer

FA01

The project was designed to be a machine that would allow a user to experience multiple fugue states. Each player’s overall experience was elicited through a manipulation of circulation, movement, programmatic layering and juxtaposition, and the first-person shooter narrative that is native to this kind of online game. The player’s experience in Encephalogram was one of navigation with no end destination. This quality was achieved through a cyclical circulation in conjunction with atypical behavior of elements, such as water, where one’s sight and perception were challenged and often dissolved and questioned. In addition, arenas existed where a manipulation of physics caused the user to redefine his or her movement through an atmosphere where, for instance, there were more than 4 ways of falling.

“A man’s memory is not a summation; it is a chaos of vague possibilities” Jorge Luis Borges

Increased access to information and media saturation have resulted in the development of highly sophisticated techniques for the filtering and consumption of information. Bombarded with sound-bytes and “It is only very recently that the ability to forget has become a prized skill. In images, and flooded by text, we selectively remember less in order to the age of ‘information overload,’ we have reached a critical mass that has consume more. We scan, skim, and skip text rather than reading it. accelerated the perfection of recording technologies, an evolution that leads We have come to utilize search engines and data mining techniques to back to ancient times.” increase our efficiency and to speed up our information consumption. Bill Viola, Will there be Condominiums in Data Space This ‘information eating disorder’ can potentially (and frequently does) result in personal knowledge and understanding of text that is largely fragmented and scattered. Consequently, our memory becomes formed through gaps as much as through factual information, and in those gaps, slippages are bound to occur. The Memory Machine takes this condition to an extreme. It is a machine designed for scanning, skimming, and skipping. One that purposely creates gaps, and invites the reader to interpolate and make up new stories. On one level, it poses a criticism to our current disorder, but it also exposes a positive side-effect: the opportunity for fantasy.

BJORN GUDBRANDSSON

096|097

[ THE MACHINE ] The machine was based on a map of Borges’ story Funes the Memorious. The map was created using a method partially borrowed from Roland Barthes’ writings on the unitization of narratives. Barthes’ rules, although flexible and subject to interpretation, allowed the narrative to be broken down into two general categories, each with two sub-categories. The two main categories were those of functions and indices. Functions were then broken down into cardinal functions (or nuclei) and catalyzers, and indices into indices proper and informants. These definitions were applied by Barthes as an experiment in unitizing narratives. Here, they also were implemented as an experiment with the same goal.

FA01

The concepts of editorial leaps and creative slippages are central to the project. The Machine provides the reader with a field condition of narrative fragments that can be navigated and restructured freely. Already loaded with memory structures, and memory as subject matter, Jorge Luis Borges’ short stories were ideal building blocks for the Machine. Although a selected few of Borges’ narratives were used for the machine, the process of constructing the machine can repeated over and over again, using any narrative. The process itself is in fact a machine on its own.

Once the text was catalogued based on Barthes’ guidelines, each category was assigned a relative spatial value. A simple up-down-left-right differentiation logic was applied to the categories. To illustrate; while always moving forward, a cardinal function moves the diagram up in space, a catalyzer up and right, indices down, and informants down and left. The result was a three dimensional matrix of points that could be navigated in a non-linear fashion in search for new meanings, unexpected connections, and infill fantasies.

The reader moved through the narrative by jumping between these section cuts. Within each cut, however, the reader could access all the text in the narrative that is visible at that time.

Wherever the author referred to himself or pulled himself out of the narrative, the reader’s view of the matrix changed from orthogonal to perspective. At those moments, the reader was also provided with the possibility to move backwards through reflections on the spheres’ The prototype machine was constructed out of Borges’ The Dead Man. In order surfaces. to set navigational guidelines for the story, thirty sections were cut through the matrix. Each section was cut at the point of a cardinal function within the story; hence it was already a point of major jump or development in the narrative.

BJORN GUDBRANDSSON

098|099

[ THE MACHINE ]

The reader’s path throughout the narrative (or narratives) could then be mapped and re-presented to the reader at the end of the session. In the map, the original narrative’s linearity became apparent. The reader would be introduced to a dimension of the matrix that had remained collapsed throughout the session. Although the perspective views hinted at linearity, that linearity was blurred.

Access to a database, which is essential to the mapping process, allows the reader’s profile to be stored, and built up with every visit. More complex maps can then be constructed out of multiple visits to various narratives. Customer profiling technologies that have been developed commercially to better target advertisements and recommendations can be used to track one’s path through narratives and construct ongoing reader profiles as well as maps. Bjorn Gudbrandsson

FA01

A third level of jumps within the navigation could occur at overlaps between two narratives. In the case of Borges, certain activities, traits and specific locations or age groups tend to reoccur in several of his stories. Those points could be activated so that the reader would jump from one narrative matrix to another.

The machine is 11min. 29sec. long.

Using video as the media through which the machine operates, a relational script (the diagram) was conceived as a guide to the process of Memory is very often associated with that which has passed and remains making the machine. The relational script substituted the conventional only as accumulated traces in our minds. Memory is, under such a lens, ‘story board’, so that the narrative itself unfolded as the designer gathered dangerous, for it has the potential of deeply damaging our openness to material. The script defined the relationships between the practices, and what lies ahead. The ways we deal with our past (our memories of the past) the characters of this machine, yet the end result was unpredictable to determines in many ways our openness toward the future. If the past is not the designer. There was a machine inside the machine. constantly reassessed, re-measured, and challenged, our future remains under the threat of stagnation. Memory is as much an attitude toward the past as it is a collection of experiences. This is the driving concept under which this generational memory machine is conceived.

RAUL SMITH

100|101

[ THE MACHINE ] The machine acknowledged and engaged the uncertainty of its viewing, of he/she who would experience it in some time and space in the future. It aimed to define its own language, elusive, abstract, yet developed out of a rigorous system. The hope was that it would then be able to unpack itself according to its context. The past which it delivers is not descriptive, prescriptive, closed. In the words of Paul Ryan, this machine seeks “...to invent a relational practice that could hold meaning apart from symbology.” Raul Smith

FA01

The user of this memory machine is not yet born. Conceived to be used by my child and/or children at some time(s) and place(s) in the future, the main goal of this machine was to engage an unknown generation in the future with the attitudes of generations past. A vast family record collection, old photos of an apartment once lived in, audio recorded conversations, a daily jog around Central Park’s reservoir, and the interaction with an acrylic box filled with soil [the ‘unnameable’] were all recorded throughout a two-month time frame. A point of saturation was reached, where the unnameable began to yield the hoped for material unaccounted in the script. Inspired by concepts of alchemy, the unnameable was the substance through which, in a series of processes over this two month period, began to acquire its own memory, and yield the unexpected.

A NEW CONCEPT OF MEMORY ”When we consider memory, this hypothesis leads to a very different approach from the traditional one. The key concept of morphic resonance is that similar things influence similar things across both space and time. The amount of influence depends on the degree of similarity. Most organisms are more similar to themselves in the past than they are to any other organism. I am more like me five minutes ago than I am like any of you; all of us are more like ourselves in the past than like anyone else. The same is true of any organism. This self-resonance with past states of the same organism in the realm of form helps to stabilize the morphogenetic fields, to stabilize the form of the organism, even though the chemical constituents in the cells are turning over and changing. Habitual patterns of behavior are also tuned into by the self-resonance process. If I start riding a bicycle, for example, the pattern of activity of my nervous system and my muscles, in response to balancing on the bicycle, immediately tunes me in by similarity to all the previous occasions on which I have ridden a bicycle. The experience of bicycle riding is given by cumulative morphic resonance to all those past occasions. It is not a verbal or

ROYA SHANEHCHIAN

102|103

[ THE MACHINE ]

The concept of morphogenetic fields containing built-in memory is a theory that claims to explain many features of society: for example, there are traditions, customs, and manners which enable societies to retain their organizing principles - their autonomy, pattern, structure, and organization - even though there is a continuous turnover of individuals through the cycles of birth and death. This is similar to the way in which the morphogenetic field of the human being coordinates the entire body even though the cells and tissues within the body are continuously changing.

A New Concept of Hope The goal of the machine was to erase the morphology of built-in memory in order to create a new concept of hope. The virtual machine was constructued in Unreal Tournament, an online computer game engine, and allowed access to any player, providing a series of spatial sequences and event where one was forced to shed memories constrained by tradition, customs, and manners in order to more deeply engage a phenomenological experience. This was developed using an archetypal narrative of searching, and movement through different spatial typologies- exterior night spaces, underwater spaces and cities, deep wells, caves, and flight. The machine was conceptualized using the relationship between a mother and child, which provided a scale shift from details of my life to a much greater power that one might feel one could unknowingly trust. The goal was to provide the users of the machine a period of time- whether minutes or hours- where they would be able to transform their relationship with themselves. Roya Shanehchian

FA01

intellectual memory; it is a body memory of riding a bicycle. This would also apply to my memory of actual events: what I did yesterday in Los Angeles or last year in England. When I think of these particular events, I am tuning into the occasions on which these events happened. There is a direct causal connection through a tuning process. If this hypothesis is correct, it is not necessary to assume that memories are stored inside the brain.” Rupert Sheldrake

SP02

[ THE EVENT AS NOOSPHERE ] creative evolution on the metallic roads

The title of the studio referred to Teilhard De Chardin’s idea of a noosphere: an intangible and emergent mind or quasi mystical state that humanity was tending towards, that would give rise to a technological revelation. We avoided the religious overtones of deChardin’s term and focused on a simple aspect of it: the possibility that channels for communication could be forged that connected architecture’s slower actions with the more rapid movement of thought, thus making a bridge between mechanics, thermodynamics, and information theory. The emancipatory potential in deChardin’s thinking could thus be realized while avoiding transcendent The Noosphere studio investigated what a space for massively scaleable teleology. All the emergent tendencies embodied in the concept of event events could be, either in an online milieu, or an environment that was a would become real when hundreds of thousands or even millions of hybrid of real and virtual space. Immediately the idea of an online stadium people simultaneously became aware of each other. capable of holding 10,000 to 500,000 people for concerts, sporting events or rallies came to mind. But we also considered events which self organized, “Power...is diagrammatic: it mobilizes non-stratified matter and functions, such as everyday commutes, mass exoduses, protests and riots, as much as and unfolds with a very flexible segmentarity. In fact, it passes not so those governed by homogenizing political motivations. The idea of ‘site’ was much through forms as through particular points which on each occasion radically questioned: the general typologies of large piazzas or amphitheatres mark the application of a force, the action or reaction of a force in relation served only as a general reference. The design problem was to construct to others, that is to say an affect like ‘a state of power that is always mechanisms by which a large crowd or population could become self aware in local and unstable’. This leads to a fourth definition of the diagram: it is a more than an automatic manner, thereby producing emergent phenomena in transmission or distribution of particular features.“ the city or in culture generally. Foucault, G. Deleuze An event is sometimes defined as a change [for example the loss or acquisition of a property] or composite of changes. However, many theories of events include states that consist in things’ having or retaining properties... What distinguishes particular events from ‘things’? We speak of events as occurring, but we do not say this of material objects like tortoises, books, and pebbles... Oxford Companion to Philosophy

We could also understand the event as something determined by the forces that placed limits on a body: physical, political, economic, psychic. By evaluating the degree of inflection or effects of these forces upon this subject body, we could thus define the nature of the event. To do this we had to find the substrates which allowed energy and information to pass from one system to another. This moment- a thermodynamic coupling and information exchange balancing order and noise- was hypothesized as the exact moment and site of the event.

Sporting events, concerts, protests: these situations harbor millions of minds, yet architecture has traditionally been used to delay the movement of awareness through a crowd. As such it has functioned as an externalized memory armature, which primarily ensures that subsequent users and generations will have the same experience as its builders. What if architecture could accelerate the movement of awareness through a crowd? What kind of architecture would be required to assist half a million people in becoming simultaneously aware? What rules would we need to maintain? What rules could be broken? Intellectual By defining the event thus, we went beyond the conventional notion of exercises alone are not enough to produce deChardin’s noosphere, and architectural program in which a single human behavior is shoehorned into a other techniques of bodily control might be necessary. Finally, we need space, defaulting to a simple mode of occupation. A more profound approach to question whether pure speed is always beneficial. Unmediated flows would insist that no single behavior could dominate the space of an event; of information and energy can overwhelm a host to the detriment of the the simple memory structures that formed around conventional uses of space host and the meme: for example, the Ebola virus. were replaced by more intelligent forms of communication, between, quite literally, form and the fluid space which inhabits it.

104|105

CULTURAL MEMORY: INTERNAL and EXTERNAL Until the 20th century, language, the city, and subsequently the printed book were the mechanisms most responsible for intense cultural hybridization through external systems of transmission. The city was the first device to operate at a massive scale and and institute an enduring, flexible form which generated stable basins of culture; after the industrial revolution the book became the next engine for this cultural mixing, in the emergence of a vastly expanded middle class with expendable time. Radio, cinema, and television altered this equation. These formed a new stage in the machinic phyla enhancing humanity’s evolutionary path. In the past six years, the Internet has altered our conception of cultural mixing by several orders of magnitude. Answering a call for a truly communicative media that Hans Enzensberger issued in the late sixties, with texts like Constituents of a Theory of the Media, the web poses a new problem for humanity. In the very near future, millions of people will be able to know other people and transmit information, capital, energy, and concepts to each other simultaneously. There is a great danger inherent in this ability to communicate as well: consider the global, cultural time structure that was engaged/revealed by the events of 9.11, and what various urban/technological infrastructures might be able to do to resist [or exacerbate] what some are calling the emergence of a clash of civilizations. Our role as architects would then be to discern speeds of interaction, and choose those which are most beneficial to the host body.

Instruments for the massive hybridization of species, cultures, and awareness have existed for millions of years. Long before language externalized a mutable culture, chemistry and genetics formed an internalized memory that allowed simple life to slowly build a morphologic memory structure. One could say that within the body of a living organism, these systems constitute an internalized memory. Architecture, and the habits that architecture organizes, are simply a relatively recent externalization of more fluid forms of memory. Arguably, DNA also functions as an internal memory structure, although it is clear that DNA operates through combination and errors of transcription, the mechanisms of reproduction, and of viral invasion. In this way it could be equated to the aboriginal idea of a dreamtime that contains archetypal spaces and characters and exists outside our conventional notions of time, space, and identity. We proposed that a city for 100 million would be the next step in this trajectory. Incorporating the techniques of the city, the book, cinema, music, the event; all the trappings of the city, all the narrative of film and text, with none of the delays that crystallization, stratification, architecture and urbanism have imposed to date. No longer would dreams be bounded by statics, or by mechanics. Viral laws, evolutionary laws, govern the oneiric topology that we dream now. EVENT typologies at multiple scales : a provisional list concert hall - club ( rave/concert) - piazza Stadium - rail station - park - museum - bath house- gym theater - bank : main bank space - Casino large cruise ship - ferry - quay- dock - jetee subway - train - hospital - cinema: cineplex, outdoor airport - church- mosque / christian church / synagogue industrial spaces- highway; bridges; crossroads urban superstructural residence blocks library - urban school (very dense- single building) quasi urban campus (quad) - rural campus City rooftops - forest - beach - DMZ - ruins - desert

Assistant critic: Jason Anderson

[ THE EVENT AS NOOSPHERE ]

Rupert Sheldrake’s concept of the morphogenetic field is a powerful engine when re-thinking cultural space massive event structures. A morphogenetic field is described as a nonmaterial collective memory field that affects all biological systems. This field can be envisioned as a hyperspatial information reservoir that brims and spills over into a much larger region of influence when critical mass is reached - a point referred to as morphic resonance. This idea is especially rich when applied to the idea of an externalized memory structure, one that operates almost completely outside the material world. The concept is useful to incorporate critically, if only because contemporary architectural discourse invests the operations of analysis and diagramming with tremendous responsibility, and these diagrams function in roughly the same place that Sheldrake’s morphogenetic fields, or Reich’s orgone forces, have been theorized to exist: quite literally, in the aether.

Every diagram points outside itself to an idealized and non-material set of relationships to which are ascribed the power to determine the destiny of the system the diagram was extracted from.

SP02 IMAGE: Regina Chow

Prostheses: The provocation of events or responses through the infliction of prosthetic stimuli was a focus. Prosthesis was understood as extension opposed to substitution. The external stimuli does not replace, it is in addition to. As an addition it belongs to a superimposition; a tendency towards superimposition that translates external codes into internal physical and psychological mechanisms of engagement.

Stelarc: third arm event The artificial hand, attached to the right arm as an addition rather than as a prosthetic replacement, is capable of independent motion, being activated by the EMG signals of the abdominal and leg muscles. It has a pinch-release, grasp-release, 290 degree wrist rotation ( clockwise and anti-clockwise ) and a tactile feedback system for a rudimentary “sense of touch”. Whilst the body activates its extra manipulator, the real left arm is remote-controlled / jerked into action by two muscle stimulators.

The project begain with an analysis of the film Fallen Angels by Wong Kar Wai. One scene, which showed a main character interacting with a video camera, Electrodes positioned on the flexor muscles and biceps curl the fingers was closely mapped for shifts in perceptual state in relationship to an external inwards, bend the wrist and thrust the arm upwards. The triggerings technology. of the arm motions pace the performance and the stimulator signals are used as sound sources, as is the motor sound of the Third Hand mechanism itself.

ABEL MISLA

embbeding technique: relativity

embbeding technique: juxtaposition/depth Autoamputative power or strategy is resorted to by the body when the perceptual power cannot locate or avoid the cause of irritation. Selfamputation is the result of continous pressures. The youth Narcissus mistook his own reflection in the water for another person. This extension of himself by mirror numbed his perceptions until he became the servomechanism of his own extended image. He became numb. He had adapted to his extension of himself and had become a closed system.

The electrical activity of the brain behaves like any other material system: constant changes in voltage intensity refer back to specific fluctuations in Agents: actions mapped over shifting areas of the brain. Mutations in frequencies One that acts or has the power or authority to act, A force or mechanism emerge from the neurologic stage of the patient. They transform depending that causes a change. Therefore the means by which something is done on the level of awareness of the subject. or launch in to effect (prosthesis). An agent is the code, the format, the mechanism through which activation or self-extensions are induced.

SP02

Involuntary bodies: A tendency of bodies to remain in a common state or to react unwilling (provoking counter reaction) to sudden, temporal or permanent changes (either physical or atmospheric changes). A tendency the body appropriates in order to maintain system equilibrium. A condition in which all acting influences are cancelled by others, resulting in a stable, balanced, or unchanging system. The body structure behaves as a buffer against sudden variations of stimulus in its physical and social environment. Sudden social failure or shame is a shock that may cause distrurbance in the general body, signaling the system to withdraw from threatening situation.

[ THE EVENT AS NOOSPHERE ]

embbeding technique: perspective

106|107

The brain anticipates the consequence of movement from past action to prepare and initiate movement. Anticipated movements begin with a set of initial conditions and a plan of action that will lead to the desired outputs. These are compared with th results of past actions recalled by two types of memory, memory of motor commands and memory of sensory data associated with past movements and their effects of the environment. It is therefore possible to recall the expected sensory consequences, or the messages detected by the receptors during and after action over the course of movement. Implicit in the concept of strange loops is the concept of infinity: what else is a loop but a way of representing an endless process in a finite way. In some of Escher’s drawings, one single theme can appear on different levels of reality, For instance, one level in a drawing might clearly be recognizable as representing fantasy or imagination; another level would be recognizable as reality.. These two levels might be the only explicitly portrayed levels. But the mere presence of thse two levels invites the viewer to look upon himself as

part of of yet another level; and by taking a step, the viewer cannot help getting caught up in Escher’s implied chain of levels, in which, for any one level, there is always another level above it or greater “reality.” However. what happens if the chain of levels is not linear, but forms a loop? What is real, then, and what is fantasy? A pattern imposed on a reality or experience to assist in explaining it, mediate perception, or guide response. An automatic, unconscious coding or organization of incoming physiological or psychological stimuli, giving rise to a particular response or effect. A transition schema attempts to map the collective strcuture and set of characteristics by which identity and subject behavior become recognizable. The schema designated pure events of curvature choreographing a field of potentialty where tendencies and relational forces emphasized directionality, permanence and programmattic narratives.

ABEL MISLA

Abel Misla

SP02

The new trajectory depended on the establishment of conditions of stability, of coupling, of diagonalization, or of feedback that regulated the field of free forces or vectorial tendencies before they confronted one another or were measured.

The installlation focused on the idea of inducing an imbalance via the erasure of the predetermined notion of movement based on past consequences of action. It reprojected the notion of the strange loop as a way of redefining the thresholds between steps, flows and landings.

[ THE EVENT AS NOOSPHERE ]

The schema analyzed continuous movement structures within the site as a way of mapping out inflection points within transitional narrative. These inflection points were seen as possible new stages for the formulation of sequences, as a narrative built on the traces of what was there before.

108|109

“The essence and raison d’etre of communication is the creation of redundancy, meaning, pattern, predictability, information, and/or the reduction of the random by “restraint.” It is… of prime importance to have a conceptual system which will force us to see the “message”… as both itself internally patterned and itself a part of a larger patterned universe-the culture or some part of it.”

The film Andrei Rublev by Tarkovsky was analyzed to understand the way that individuals in the film meet, influence, and cause each other to change milieus and move across social strata. An initial round of diagrammatic analyses of the film led to analogous explorations of “charisma” and gravitational forces in a field of particles.

“The subject matter of primary-process discourse is different from the subject matter of language and consciousness. Consciousness talks about things or persons, and attaches predicates to the specific things or persons which have been mentioned. In primary process the things or persons are usually not identified, and the focus of the discourse is upon the relationships which are asserted to obtain between them. This is really only another way of saying that the discourse of primary process is metaphoric. A metaphor retains unchanged the relationship which it “illustrates” while substituting other things or persons for the relata.” Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind

4 ways to map a conversation Two conversations--one from the film Andrei Rublev and the other, a transcribed discussion from an architecture conference (Anyhow)--were visualized in various ways, in order to analyze the structures and patterns of dialogue and to develop possible chatroom interfaces. The diagram on the far left tracks the eye movements and directions of characters’ gazes in a scene from Andrei Rublev. In the other diagrams, the semantic patterns of the Anyhow conference--including relations of agreement and disagreement, query and response, and thematic linkages--are mapped.

IRENE CHENG

SP02

This project proposes a new form of online chatroom, one that provides a 3D visualization or mapping of the conversation as it is happening, and allows users to go back and navigate through the spaces of the conversation they have just constructed. The chatroom seeks to both clarify and obscure: the visualization gives users access to the larger patterns and structures of the conversation, while preserving and intensifying those aspects of CMCanonymity, incoherence, alienation- that allow it to generate new forms of communication and encounter between strangers. Irene Cheng

[ THE EVENT AS NOOSPHERE ]

Computer-mediated communication (CMC) both enables previously impossible meetings between far-flung strangers, while increasing a sense of remoteness between aliased and anonymous users. Chatting online, one never really “knows” who one is talking with-subjects are reduced, in most cases, to pure text, giving rise to ne w possibilities for identity construction. However, in spite of their potential for generating radically new forms of social relations and communicative practices, existing chat forums have failed to innovate in terms of their visual interface.

110|111

The project aims to develop a prototype, a generic mechanism than can serve As a sub-event and trigger, the project focuses on the production of a to channel political friction and the dynamics of crowd activities in public perception chamber, a space for the perception of the subject immersed spaces, in congregations. in the event. It collects the individual affects of a subject moving across an event, the synchronicity and alternation between sound, movement It seeks to challenge perception in such situations and re-direct it, and space across a field of programs. appropriating the mutations from individual perception to group, from one to many individuals, from subject to pack, and ultimately projecting to crowds. For this purpose, a soundscape was created that used the event of It provides a specific container for a highly mobile, fleeting event. the cacerolazo as backdrop. It remixed perceptual qualities such as pleasure, fear, happiness, challenge, mystery, exultation, power, anger, As a study case, the research revolved around an event called the cacerolazo, belligerence, temptation, and generated a cross-index with the different a new kind of social protest: thousands or hundreds of thousand of people moments of the event. assemble publicly and bang on their cacerolas (pots and pans) as loudly as possible, moving forward or standing still, in a collective protest. The cacerolazo most recently has become the symbol of Argentine popular rebellion against the neoliberal order, and is fast becoming associated with a global resistance to transnational capitalism.

VERONICA ZALCBERG

SP02

The awareness and the subconscious, the interaction with legal forces (repression) began to inform diagrams of the changing auditory perception of the subject when their relative position to the crowd changed, affecting the center of gravity, the borders and the vector of the whole event.

A sequence of linear containers reflected these perceptual dynamics and shifted the interest back to the larger dimension, the macro-event as a network of mutating perceptions, as a canvas of divided attention, a cue for emergent collective behavior. Propagation and mutation of the phenotype were assessed through multiple perception chambers set as a field of mutual influence; the configuration of the space was a result of the conditions of pressure, density and flows. The event was to take place initiating an urban cycle from the home to the street, to plazas and assemblies, evolving as a passive participation, as a new globalized way of protest. Veronica Zalcberg

[ THE EVENT AS NOOSPHERE ]

The soundscape became operative as a lens for a registry of simultaneities, as the subject perceived “real” things, yet some others affected at a subliminal level.

112|113

SU02

[ RED LINE CITY ] cold war / clash of civilizations studio

What is Red Line City? (Two Speculations) i. According to Nicholson’s World Map Projection, Los Angeles, New York and Moscow are joined by a straight line. We contend that this line, a geopolitical equator for the second half of the 20th century, generates a cultural crosssection that can be seen as critical to our contemporary task as architects and practitioners. The Red Line City studio was an attempt to resituate architectural practice as a political speculation. This was set in motion through a rigorous study of the spatiality of the Cold War and its territorial legacy. “Until the Cold War, architects were predominantly accustomed to solving spaces according to aesthetic or geometric principles. Yet around the midto-late 40s, architects and planners became involved in organizational expressions of spatial arrangements, as well as the sites or agents of change within those organizations...” (Keller Easterling). The magnitude of the expansion of architectural practice was made possible by the productive and distributive capabilities of capitalism.

agencies. The stalemate was especially daunting under the irreversible prospect of M.A.D. (Mutually Assured Destruction). This buffer action was a global immune system response, and deferred the current clash of civilizations that we are now experiencing (through capitalism’s inner workings i.e. terrorism). Such a range of conflicts was predicted by Marshall MacLuhan and Hans Enzensberger, among many others. By extension, Red Line City asked how current technology and cultural mixtures collude to accelerate the survival or demise of humanity. The detente and artificially forced isolations of the Cold War, in many ways, are no longer possible.

A global infrastructure ever more rapidly erodes all archipelagic cultures. The Internet, for example, was designed to facilitate communications in the event of a nuclear crisis and global war. This redundancy and resiliency is now making it an irresistible force for global hybridization. Against the hypothesis that the wired world is an emergent machinic organ produced by humanity’s race consciousness - the noosphere predicted by Teilhard de Chardin - this studio asked: how can the delay mechanisms and immune systems implemented during the Cold War The exportation of building methods and materials through the Marshall function or adapt, in our current paradigm, through and from architectural Plan, and with it a lifestyle with which to battle Communism, attests to this practice? political and economic spatiality. We could say that Nikita Khrushchev’s push for prefabrication in Soviet architecture, and William Levitt’s ingenious way When observing the implications of post WW2 warfare, one sees that the to break up the building process to 27 steps, were only two examples in traumatic spatial protocol for war moves into a subtle and time-based architecture’s contribution to the Cold War arsenal. It was Levitt, after all, who protocol for the avoidance of war through a total form of control. In other stated that “Every man who owns… his own house… cannot be a Communist, words: from the geo-strategic notion of sovereign imperialism to the he would have too much to do.” geo-economic notion of imperialist coercion, as exercised through trade blocs, trans-governmental institutions and NGOs. The invisibility of the Embedded in Red Line City are the struggles for territory that were infrastructure of the Cold War rendered intangible both the landscape and characteristic of the Cold War. This territory, built up from communications its tactical and strategic operations, but re-established the boundaries of infrastructure, logistic calculations, real estate speculations, grand foreign spatial intervention elsewhere. policy and a problem of distance, is the geopolitical ground for today’s programs for cultural production. These programs, architecture one of them, Thus, we extrapolate forward from a Cold War analysis clearly, without are constantly under the threat of being gobbled up by the now uncontested nostalgia. In light of new protocols for conflict, the quintessential Cold forces of capitalism. War agencies are undergoing major overhauls: the FBI, the CIA, the KGB, the Pentagon, the INS, NATO (now including Russia), the UN, the IMF. This studio attempted to develop ways to vitally reclaim that ground. The site of the contemporary battle is in these vacant placeholders that understand the frontiers of a new totality. ii. One could also argue that the Cold War was in fact an emergent phenomenon that acted as a buffer between incompatible world cultures, The studio asked these questions: What are the emergent institutions under the guise of a truly global battle, fueled by rapid changes brought on for a post Cold War cultural dominance? What are its devices? What by post WW2 technologies, communication infrastructures, and economic machines exist today that operate to exert a new form of control over

114|115

our daily encounters? What are we to do with the spatial manifestations of time-based warfare which include the space program, the internet, wireless communications, suburbia, and Disneyland?

from the flats, and copper and gold are extracted from giant pits in the mountains. Hazardous waste facilities and obsolete chemical weapons have found refuge in the remote, nearly uninhabitable landscape.

What is the status of architecture as an ally of power? Do we memorialize The town is bisected by the state line, creating two distinct halves: the our institutions through the leverage of form or do we facilitate intangible gambling boom town of Nevada’s Wendover, and the stagnated Utah half, forms of exchange by decoy? dominated by the cluttered remains of the airbase, which was abandoned by the military in 1977. Wendover has been used as a location for numerous The work in this studio identified, modified, designed and embodied science fiction films and lies within close range of Nancy Holt’s Suntunnels institutions that exercise the territorial protocols of a time-based cultural and Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty. paradigm, more like biological warfare than rocketry. This temporalpolitical landscape is conditioned by technological thresholds and Each student chose from a range of institutions and sites to analyze and provides unexpected avenues for novel forms of action to migrate from project into a contemporary setting. the smallest, most personal scale, such as an individual’s DNA, or their perceptions on a daily level, to the largest scales of exchange in the The final project design was developed from programs identified early in human domain. semester, followed the construction of a series of site maps, film analyses, and a short film. Each of the programs engaged themes of power, control, The Red Line City studio benefited from a site visit to Wendover, Utah, and time; we suggested a range of possible programs that might include a conducted in connection with CLUI, the Center for Land Use Interpretation contemporary linear city, an amusement park, WTO or NATO headquarters, [www.clui.org]. Wendover functioned as a prototypical site, documenting pipeline facilities in Afghanistan, third world housing or cultural centers [on the defunct post-cold-war infrastructures and vast territories of desert land or in international waters], a Cold War Museum, or a nuclear waste that such military industrial endeavors inevitably produce. dump. CLUI provided us with access to a declassified military site in Wendover, The following was a list of themes provided to the students to suggest Utah, as well as to their network and extensive documentation of such possible entry points into the project: sites. Under the guidance of CLUI founder Matt Coolidge, the studio took -Convergence: Lenin in Manhattan / Taylor in the Soviet a weekend trip to the site in midsummer, driving across Utah and visiting Union a number of military and industrial sites between Salt Lake City and -M.A.D. (Mutually Assured Destruction) Wendover. -House of Un-American Activities -The Third World Wendover is a small town on the edge of the mountains and the salt -Prefabrication flats. It is located at the point where the Basin and Range of Nevada spill -Star Wars into the Great Salt Lake Desert of Utah. In appearance, it resembles the -Arms Race Arctic: a remote place of barren rock and snow-white alkali. Though there -The Kitchen Debates was a small community to service the railroad, the first major modern -The Wall settlement was an airbase, built at the beginning of World War II to train -Bay of Pigs / Cuban Missile Crisis bomber crews (including the crew of the Enola Gay). Through the 1940s -Espionage and 50s, as the Cold War escalated, the land around Wendover was -Taylor + Ford + the Electrification of The Soviet Union bombed, strafed, and dusted with chemical and biological agents. Today, though the region is remote, it is intensely industrialized. Military operations continue in the 3 million surrounding acres of restrictedaccess lands. Large-scale industries remove salt, and process minerals

Ed Keller and Juan Azulay; Critics Assistant critic: Jason Anderson

[ RED LINE CITY ]

SU02 IMAGE: Josean Ruiz

Jerusalem, April 2000-X, a few years after the city’s rebirth. I try to remember but I cannot figure how it was before, I just feel there was a ‘before’. Around me no one seems to suffer from these flashbacks, it’s as if I was the only one who experiences the past, but unfortunately I’m morally incapable of dissociating the past from the future…Headache again, I’m injecting another dose of the Neurolepticx I just got from the U.N dept. around the corner…at least it’s free. The deepest I can remember is when I was 19 days old. I remember the huge black flies and the humid air coming through the large holes of the hospital. I’m 19 days but I can already recognize the breeze of the air from the breeze of a bomb, or the sounds of US made automatic weapons from the one made in Russia. I’m 19 days old; I know that I’m orphaned and that the doctors call me Nike because of the shoes my dad was wearing when they found me next to his body. On my left, in the same bed, Semir, one day younger, is asleep. On my right, Lihi the youngest, just 10 days old, cries like hell. They are also orphaned, but they don’t know it. I’m the eldest, and I promise on the star above the open ceiling to protect them for the rest of my life.

BRUNO CABALLE

It looks like everybody lost a lot down there. The rumor says that this place before getting seriously infected was the holiest place on the planet. They also say that the various religious orders which were in a constant fight to take absolute control of the Holy territory killed the essence of the holiness. The story tells that in a dogmatic self-importance, or in a conceptual idolatry, every order contributed to the destruction of the meaning of the space. It’s maybe why the Glocal Administration of Jerusalem developed their politic of deterritorialization of holy places….who knows.

Using the elevator bank 14 on level G, looking down through the transparent floor, I see the old city coming closer and closer. I can The elevator stops, doors open, the light of the casino sneaks into my brain… perfectly read the historical wall around the city, it keeps going down, I fuck- a headache again….. see the crowd, everybody flows in different directions to various so called attraction points. They create an amazing pattern through the city. Every day I look at them and every day it is different, a kind of arrangement that redefines itself constantly.

SU02

I am going for a walk through the old city, I love this part of the town but I don’t hang out down there so often any more.

The elevator goes through the Golden Dome Casino, a freshly renovated attraction park where you gamble either your soul or your memory.

[ RED LINE CITY ]

The Neurolepticx stopped affecting my consciousness, I already exceeded my daily dose and no one at those so-called U.N Clinics will give me more. Anyway I hate them; they freak me out behind the mask hiding their faces. We, the junkies, like to call them faceless; they pretend to come from all around the world but they just look like none of us. We are not too many in Jerusalem who still use the Neurolepticx, the others don’t need it, it seems that they don’t suffer, they don’t remember anymore.

116|117

I’m 15 days old. I need to be changed. I stew in my own filth for hours, I And finally they all meet and become one at infinity, even if from some remember…. What are they doing, where are the nurses. I can hear them certain points of view they seem so different. talking about a visit of European intellectuals…I want them to change me. I start shouting like crazy, Semir also. We want to be clean. I get out of the casino and walk on the esplanade which rumors say, was long ago, very controversial. I jump in a cab and tell the driver to rush to I wake up in the toilet of the casino; how I got here...? People around, but no the Via Dolorosa where Lihi runs a strip club very popular in town. one cares…anyway it’s the purpose of the casino. To get lost. I wash my face. The cab takes off; I instantly fall asleep. My headache is gone. Next to the mirror on the yellow tile, someone wrote: Facts do not cease because they are ignored -A. Huxley.

I’m 10 days old. A nurse drops a package on the large dirty bed, just between Semir and me. The package is only a few hours old, and its I don’t know what to think about what I read, but it starts running around my name is Lihi. brain. On my way out of the toilet I wonder if that A.Huxley is still around in the casino. Walking through the gambling area I try to imagine all those battles Behind us a survivor tells a nurse while crying: ‘What should I think of a around this place but I can not really get a clear impression of the context. guard who beats a prisoner, and then takes him in his arms to kiss him It‘s just that today it would be impossible to take control of these holy spaces: and cry?’ they belong to the city, to all of us. They are a series of lines passing through what was a holy spot at a certain time, they have as many territory coordinates The cab driver lets me know that we are at destination. It seems that I’ve as a line can contain points. been sleeping for years.

BRUNO CABALLE

At least for Lihi it was easy to understand her background, with a name like this she could only be Jewish, her name tells it, a name…

SU02

She’s not practicing, but once in a while she goes on level F at the Wailing Wall position, she likes it over there she says. She even meets with Semir sometimes who is Muslim but they share the same sacred sanctuary. They I walk through, reach the bar, order a double Jack and look up at what both believe that all that happiness around us wouldn’t be possible without used to be the heart of the church of Holy Sepulchre. the help of God or Gods…. maybe. Oh here she comes…. I wonder why this magnificent space was abandoned for so long before Lihi bought it from the U.N. She always says that so many people died here that no human being can live here anymore: it’s so negatively charged. It is probably why the homeo-bitch project was so well received I’m 4 days. A gossip flies around the hospital, the most creative and the by the authorities. most twisted sniper in town, hearing that his wife just died while delivering, committed suicide by shooting himself from a distance…He had a note Well today the sacred Sepulchre procession is happening on Level D, a on him: ‘It’s not necessary to kill yourself, since you always kill yourself much better charged area. I never went there, I’m not religious, anyway too late...’ It’s not from him, it’s from Emile Cioran says someone in the who should be my God, I don’t know, my parents never had time to tell hospital. me, and my name Nike doesn’t help to understand my origins.

[ RED LINE CITY ]

At the club, the doorman who knows me forever doesn’t even look at me when I push the large antique wood door. Inside in the darkness of this Roman space some homeo-bitches try to wake up my deepest archaic instincts, but through their perfect sensual curves I only see emptiness and some electronic connections made in Korea.

118|119

Lihi still there, next to me, is sitting at the bar. She smiles at me, she feels for me, she knows me and my pains…She’s not afraid; she knows I always wake up from my nightmares. We talk about Semir and his new project of sanctuary on level K. I’m bored, I want to go home, I just wanted to make sure she was OK…when I was 19 days old I promised. Lihi is not surprised to see me walking away, well, she’s used to my behavior by now. I take a cab, it’s not the same driver, it’s never the same one. He is trying to sell me one of those organized evenings in the old city. Who does he think I am, a tourist? He is telling me about the movie they are projecting on the old Wailing Wall which will be followed by a dinner on the Rock below the Golden Dome Casino…I wonder how much commission he gets if I sign up for the evening…I fall asleep before I find the answer.

I wake up in the elevator. Through the floor I see the old city going away. I perfectly read the antique wall surrounding the city. But for the first time I see some other lines. Yes, I’m sure now, there is an almost invisible trace but it’s there. There is a cross running through the city. It’s not a larger street. It’s dividing the city in four equal parts. It’s not there anymore; I just read the reminiscence of it. It looks like a scar that never really disappeared from the surface. I wonder why I never saw that before. Maybe I was too obsessed by those human patterns running over these partition lines, maybe I didn’t want to see them…but why?

In my apartment the wallpaper is leaking. Part of me wants to get a dose of the Neurolepticx, I could get some, but never as good as the one from the UN dept., just a mediocre replica from the black market. I’m 3 days old. Semir freshly born is asleep…. Some nurses above our bed talk. On the other hand I’m so close to D.1……I lay down. The suicide sniper is actually his dad…a Muslim …but it is under the name of his mom that he was registered, born Catholic…Semir, Arab Catholic, 2 days old, no more parents, is asleep.

BRUNO CABALLE

120|121

Now I see… they are dividing the city. They raise a wall as fast as they can. They say they don’t want to see the rest of themselves…I don’t get it. Someone runs into the hospital and shouts: ‘my husband, my husband is behind the wall’….the wall of shame… ‘Fucking war…’ says the journalist who is next to me.

…… 2 days old, earlier the same day, some people around me are saying that my dad is dead. The most creative and the most twisted sniper of Jerusalem hit him. He had no paper on him, and he’s unknown in town…He was wearing ‘Nike’ sport shoes ….The journalist who found me brought me here. ……..

It’s 11 PM when the buzzer rings. It’s Semir behind the door. My dad was killed by Semir’s dad… I don’t know if I should them him about what I learned about our city and ourselves. He’s so naïve, he believes Jerusalem was always an example of acceptance and tolerance.

Bruno Caballe

SU02

I hear the word Wall; I don’t know what they mean.

[ RED LINE CITY ]

I’m 2 days old. Semir is born, I’m one day older than him, and I already Should I tell him that it was actually the museum of hate? know everything from the world he’s getting into. I’m thinking of Lihi, who will join us in a few days. Bah, who knows, the unexciting truth may be eclipsed by the thrilling lie. I don’t say anything…but I wonder what we could talk about that still has Outside I can hear the people running back and forth, they are building a meaning? We’re just like moles who perceive our tunnel to be the entire something. universe…what can I do?

122|123

BRUNO CABALLE

[ RED LINE CITY ]

SU02

“If our planet has seen some eighty billion people, it is difficult to suppose that every individual has had his or her own repertory of gestures. Arithmetically, it is simply impossible. Without the slightest doubt, there are far fewer gestures in the world than then there are individuals. That finding leads us to a shocking conclusion: a gesture is more individual than an individual.” Immortality, Milan Kundera

Throughout the investigation the movement of different social groups, religious bodies or individual gestures were organized through a predetermined structure consisting of time, duration, velocity, speed, reason, degree of freedom, predictability, and technique.

Cultural dominance in the post Cold War era utilized movements as a controlling tool to become a precise aid to etablish deceptive notions of freedom through delicate meshes of power: technological inventions, industrial devices and their use, movement in cities, advertisement and propaganda, sound distribution. Movement and gestures became silent territory definers, assembling space and dismantling freedom.

Assuming the gesture is a movement occurring between at least two systems (from larger social, spatial systems to a dialog of a singular being with himself) it could be understood as Michel Serres’ idea of a ‘third entity’ or the parasite: it appears, transforms, and is expelled or rerouted.

Can we create an abolition of space or time linked automatically to movement, to insert a doubt, a necessary distortion in the self to develop “What is real is the continual change of form: form is only a snapshot view of a true awareness? How then can the movement become a temporal a transition.” Henri Bergson stop, a recess from History? This can be a space to examine or rather reinvent a new narrative; through cutting, editing, sorting, remembering, The research analyzed several aspects of the notion of mobility, as a reflective forgetting, fast forwarding, assembling, one could then convey a subtle image of the traveler, tourist, exile, migrant, voyager and movement’s awareness, and form a new timeless structure of self. manifestation as an urban, social, economic controlling device.

LILA CHITAYAT

124|125

By congesting the city with a volume of visitors, and with a new velocity of movement, NY was ready to be transformed into a continuous gesture hive. Urban gestures utilized any vacant lot or industrial zone along the waterfront for a spot to provide art installations, music performances and gesture tours.

SU02

Today, in the spring of 2009, according to reported evidence the ‘system’ They studied touristic gesture, trying to locate urban icons- attractors for has managed to invade at least 47 additional ports and is spreading linear gestures, where one reaches a repetitive rehearsal of time. rapidly through the continents. Gesture parks have become a necessity in the urban landscape and an integral part of any urban voyage. Gesture parks, tactile storages, body scanners and acoustic buses are only a part of the urban gestures phenomena.

[ RED LINE CITY ]

It was exactly five years ago when the ‘system’ injected its first Intensifying repetitive movements, of individuals in a large collective gesture, experiment. Fourteen port cities were selected to participate in a global established a vertical manifestation of a movement through choice and ‘gesture park’ installation. towards an inner awareness.

Gesture parks- haptic zones- examine the ability of our bodies to sense their own movement and therefore become the agents of the formation of space around them, through cultural and geographical forms. Here, our own bodies become the experiential tools with which to explore the city. The day the urban underground gesture system managed to take over the entire movement of the city; the volume, and velocity of human intensifiers was set to a non-controlled gesture. Rickshaw drivers, redline buses, taxis and horses were only a few transportation systems to be freed from control. It provides endless events and themes of interactions where the motion, the body and the city meet; a place where evidence of urbanity becomes the stage to alter and test excess of desires with solitude.

LILA CHITAYAT

Having the technological ability to scan each and every individual into the ‘system’, though dislocating who one really is, the urban nomad is free to be at a total anonymity in a transparent environment. Somewhere in-between the anonymity and the transparency lies the space - the ‘blissful’ interstice - that mediates between two extremes.

Lila Chitayat

SU02

How can the urban nomad manage to ignore the icons and invent Excess is overtaking free movement in the city; excess of images and spatial an original and purely individual trajectory of his own, inscribing his experiences, excess of events blurring what is history and when it occurred, movements in the most free sense? excess of efficiency in time and movement. In turn, the gesture parks assimilate an individual, anonymous, a break from the overwhelming reality On this specific day all obsessions about traffic movement control were to isolate an ephemeral ‘real’ live ness. ignored releasing a gentle chaotic flow. The violent need for efficient time control through movement in the city was reduced - to be forgotten. One will always be captivated by the potential of witnessing something Similarly, abundant freedom and total sense of place act as madness uncensored, no matter how banal it may seem. There is nothing shocking intensifiers. Gesture parks were abandoned that day allowing a gradual or dramatic, rather, everyday conventions slightly modified. Here, liveness is and heterogeneous assemblage of the identified spaces and images of set as a trajectory for the real and a scarce evidence of what real could have the city with the subtle trajectories of freedom generators. been.

[ RED LINE CITY ]

The freedom afforded by the city, freedom for the individual, is fully expressed with one’s ability to choose his personal itinerary. Today this freedom of being is strictly influenced by the need of the institutes forming the city, to iron down the paths into a generalizing urbanity, defining which the major landmarks are, the urban icons of a place.

126|127

the kaleidoscope of surrogate cities “…maybe it is a desperate moment when we discover that this global empire - once seemingly the sum of all wonders, is an endless, formless ruin….” Italo Calvino Tracking the parasitic timeline of social bulldozing, sites of exhaustion exist at multiple scales. The nightlanders, favelas, and callampas reflected the existence of a secondary channel that leeches off an existing city. They are the Deleuzean rhizome, the trans-lines of escape. Similarly underground subcultures bloomed parallel to the nuclear threat being pawned off onto massive poor populations.

SELIN MANER

SU02

The institutional / administrative layout of embassies has the potential to promote a 2nd Channel program. Similarly they have an administrative role for a subsequent migrant labor community, an indirect involvement in territorial distribution and transient zones.

What are the roles of pre/post war embassies in the genus of social inscription? What is their potential apparatus of transmission? Can it supply the nutrition of a “surrogate womb”? What is the administrative a-b-c, its characteristic operation? What transient and non-transient behaviors can it promote, inhibit, and/or inhabit? What are its network limitations? What are the overlapping points of corruption & intrusion? What forces are / can camouflage (blind & mute) others?

[ RED LINE CITY ]

Embassies pose similar network systems that have territorial powers to promote various interests. These institutions historically had the legal right to build secret channels in their global properties. Pre-Cold war embassies had secondary systems built into their architecture, intended for secret-service activities. (British and French embassies present the most vibrant examples).

128|129

The representation of migrant system / trans-zones will be allegorical, and will track its various forms of mutation via a kaleidoscope and a thorough dissection. The migrant nature of these subterranean cultures, of capital excess, have the power to alter their existing environment. De/re-territorializing their environment, they draw new zones (gk. zoma: the girdle) with no geo-political boundaries and much political power. A juggling relationship forms between cultural production and capital excess.

SELIN MANER

130|131

SU02

Selin Maner

[ RED LINE CITY ]

The newborn plug-in-cites, as well as populations, exist as blueprints, undetectable territories, voids in physical maps. Structured similar to the mechanics and dispersed (reflected) fields of a kaleidoscope, they pose undetectable grounds of terror. Secondary channels have uncanny means of travel, and encompass a large population that has increasingly become a threat to global safety. There is a paranoia revolving around migrant populations, and so called “illegal aliens” - as they pose an internal threat with no boundaries of control. Cross-pollination and territorial expansion is inevitable. “Society is not exchangist, the socius is inscriptive”.

FA02

[ AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS, AROUND THE DAY IN 80 WORLDS ] “We can then say that the global economy materializes in a worldwide grid of strategic places, uppermost among which are major international business and financial centers. We can think of this global grid as constituting a new economic geography of centrality, one that cuts across national boundaries and across the old North-South divide. It signals, potentially, the emergence of a parallel political geography. An incipient form of this is the growing intensity in cross-border networks among cities...” Saskia Sassen distributed cities and global infrastructures in 2012 Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days [1872], was an early examination of a global transportation and electronic infrastructure that would radically alter the way that humanity communicates with itself. In 1966, when Julio Cortazar wrote Around the Day in 80 Worlds, he saw Verne as an example of someone whose thought was oriented uniquely towards time, and Verne’s protagonist Phileas Fogg as someone whose travels in space could be paralleled by Cortazar’s own movements in time. Verne was what Cortazar called a Cronopio. Both Verne and Cortazar established in their work a limit or horizon for possible conceptions of the relationship between cities, technology, global systems, and consciousness. CONCEPT and PROGRAM | TERRITORIES: Our project in the 80 Days | 80 Worlds studio was to select and design a hub, or components of a hub, for the global travel, shipping, and communication systems that we hypothesize will exist in the year 2012. We assumed a variety of worldwide catalysts that would establish scenario parameters that the studio could use to speculate on a range of futures. These futures ran the gamut of possibilities for what global travel would be like in ten years for those in the first world or the third world labor pool, migrant labor on a global level, or the problem of mass political exile, or the pressures of global security needs on a troubled air travel industry. We intensified the process of thinking about global infrastructure and urban design, maintaining some of the radical aspects that one can find in the work of architects like Constant Nieuwenhuys, and bringing this invention into contact with contemporary ludic, economic, and political frameworks. POLITICS and TIME: We investigated not only the larger components of such a design problemflows of capital, massive amounts of goods, or the tectonics of a global

132|133

economy- but also the most intimate personal aspects. What makes it possible for a person to travel across 80 worlds, or even more overwhelming, to have 80 worlds inside them, in only one day? For writers like Cortazar, simply being in the world and observing it allows one to sense the copresence of many universes, and to identify the places where they cross-fertilize and mix with each other. Being can reveal the overlaps between infrastructures and economies, between personal, passional relations and the political frameworks that often overdetermine or subjugate those passions.

labor pool, which will be revolutionized in the next decade by globalization, wireless and computation technology advances, and cities which deploy themselves through airport and shipping infrastructures? The studio sought ways that the concept of drift, advocated as a local and personal practice by the Situationists, could be implemented in a much larger, more radical sense when chained to a quasi-aware global network and infrastructure, and applied across populations. Cortazar’s detailed mappings of the city in his writing provided as much a precedent for this work as Constant’s urbanism.

Time plays a crucial part here, and not just having time, or free time, or the stolen time that we might need to successfully foment a rebellion, A challenge we faced constantly was finding ways to successfully link this but also the larger forms of time embedded inside global systems, thinking to the erasure of borders, and the reemergence of citystates as economies, and pervasive information channels, like giant parasites global powers. invisible to most human eyes, yet no less real or effective. By mixing multiple flows of time, as globalization inevitably will, we gain entry to places where Cortazar’s “80 worlds” might be equally easily accessed. What will the consequences of this be? What would it mean for the most personal kernel of time to suddenly find traction in a global infrastructure of shipping, or in a migrant labor force that constantly moves across several countries? What are the various species of time living within a constituency of people that is constantly in the air, on the high seas, or on the road? The social structure of time itself has been evolving over millennia, and the city has been a running index of this changing form. What time forms are evolving unbeknownst to us? Like ghostly bodies, these time forms are actually immense control structures that coexist with us in our everyday life. They too have a kind of sentience, and a kind of will.

GLOBAL DRIFT: Much contemporary discourse about the city is driven by economic theory and analysis. However a wide range of other scenario motors play an equal role in determining the global networks that vitalize urban centers. For example, how do we acknowledge the massive third world migrant

__Airport infrastructures: US military base in Phillipines as Freeport and FedEx Hub __Container shipping, port cities: Duty free zones, non-taxed goods, just in time manufacturing __National borders: Flag carrying airlines, considered vessels with full sovereign right of the country __Embassy, Consulate, foreign territory; Asylum seekers from N. Korea in China Neal Stephenson’s concept of franchulates and phyles from his novels Snow Crash and Diamond Age. Australian Refugee camps Australia denies asylum, but directs ships towards these islands, a no man’s land, as they cannot claim they have landed in any sovereignty. Camps are run by an Australian subsidiary of the US for profit prison group Wackenhut. __Migrant Labor communities: Filipino migrant labor, which comprised 9% of the Phillipines’ GDP in 1999 __Multinational Prison Conglomerates Wackenhut, et. al. __Data Havens: Security Protection Sites, Data Hub, Data Center, International Merger Meeting Centers (possible NGO creation here) __Coordinated Learning Centers: World University organization, network classrooms, gypsy university

Assistant critic: Jason Anderson

[ AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS, AROUND THE DAY IN 80 WORLDS ]

The year 2012 has been chosen for several reasons. In a decade, technological innovations in computation, travel and bioengineering will stretch the boundary of what we consider feasible now. Also, according to some calendars, a great cosmological cycle is coming to an end in December 2012- giving a millenarian urgency to the date.

LOCATIONS:

FA02 IMAGE: Justin Molloy

_the system The year is 2012. The change has been in progress for the last ten years. The system is now in place. The system created a global protocol for reskinning urban surfaces. The system was then shipped out to trigger the process elsewhere. Rural zones, Suburban zones, other countries… The Philippines was the first country to implement reskinning by the system. The Republic of China shortly followed, starting with Hong Kong, and soon after Shanghai. By the year 2020 the system will be implemented in most if not all countries. See what it has done. It’s coming.

_the system 2012 is a project involving reskinning the urban / architectural landscapes of manila + subic bay, philippines amd _hong kong + shanghai, republic of china. It involves urban infrastructural and threshold zones changes that respond to a deployment of a hybridized government corporate system of tracking that relays to a universal and global system of security and intelligent identification. _thesystem works in multiple scales in the urban environment. SKiN, HaVeN, WRaP and eXCHange.

JUSTIN MOLLOY

Justin Molloy

FA02

HaVeN is a medium scale reworking of both entry thresholds to public and private spaces that attach themselves near or affiliate themselves with small scale programs and infrastructural needs.

HVN reworks zones or strips of the urban environment and creates a new and exclusive territory only accessible to those who have proper chip authentication protocols. New programs begin to coincide within the layered screens of HVN. __playgrounds for children, leisure zones, waiting points for tram/bus transit __imagery, information, and zone moods can be displayed on the panels of the HVN buffer layers, providing safe haven from potential disaster in the urban environment.

[ AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS, AROUND THE DAY IN 80 WORLDS ]

SKiN is a small scale reworking of entry thresholds to public and private spaces. Previously easily permeable facades are reskinned to accommodate scanning and hotspot nodes that allow for proper verification and alert systems for personnel. Acts as filtration device for periphery around sensitive zones. System is deployed as either framed or skeletal/ panelization system that can be additional layer to existing infrastructure + architecture. System could alternatively be reintegrated into facades by removal of existing and replacement.

134|135

The films Crash and Videodrome by David Cronenberg were analyzed.

The Black Market Ribbon should be understood in a dynamic context; in terms of movement, interaction and transformation.

Through the extraction of social relationships and memory systems a detailed scenario was developed, projecting the emergence of a high technology surveillance network in concert with a massively expanding human traffic black market.

There are two means of traversal through the system: 1. Point of transaction pathways [-] 2. Service/escape pathways [+] At any time during the life of the Black Market Ribbon a control point could be inflected causing a polarity shift within the circuits. The aim is to keep it in a constant state of flux allowing it to be formless.

RICH SARRACH

It is interlocking, parasitic, colliding, and incoherent in the absence of structural logic.

Black Market Zone properties 1. Condenses biomass 2. Provides anonymity 3. Exploits speed and friction

[ AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS, AROUND THE DAY IN 80 WORLDS ]

This approach yields an architecture that operates in continuum with social hyper-reality yet intercepts its flow and re-territorializes itself from within.

136|137

FA02

A genetic sequence concept was applied to resequence the concept of surveillance, so it could shift power balances in the black market. Using overlap alternatives between sequences, single-stranded fragments anneal to other fragments, keeping a sufficient number of complementary relationships.

recognition. The economical solution becomes the adoption of disguises. The hat industry sees a market boom larger than in the 1920’s and burkas are the rage for women.

___2007 Data collection/archiving blossoms into the 6th largest industry in the US. It contains subcategories such as gossip, tech design, SCENARIO geographical data, etc. Sorting through this vast archive of information ___2004 Facial recognition software is in 90% of all public cameras and is a technological challenge and growth industry. Sony and Microsoft is now an upgrade option for civilian consumer cameras. The NY Times produce a version of the UVVY, a hybrid between the artificial eye, ear bestseller Shadow Tracers is a how to guide on staying out of the information and WiFi/PC device that replaces the Monitor, cellular phone, GPS, PDA, collection pool. hearing aid and laptop. Both attempt to flood the market with hardware in order to gain market critical penetration. Wetware software design ___2006 A blast from a low-pressure helium gas gun sends DNA stem cell becomes the 4th largest graduating degree and is taught in junior high implants that eliminate the need for a hardwired connection for artificial school. eyes and cochlear implants. Through a surface implant, migrating stem cells contain the instructions to create a new connection between audio/visual ___2010 VPORE the exclusive supplier of the WiFi for the UVVY launches cortex and a corresponding exterior device. Foundation Camo hits the market 6 large-scale satellites into orbit, creating a necklace of control around at the street price of $200 per 10ml. With a thin layer applied to the face it the earth. It quickly becomes the service provider of choice. hinders the ability for a camera to pick the required information for facial

RICH SARRACH

Richard Sarrach

FA02

___2012 VPORE receives extraterritoriality diplomatic status and becomes the first franchised virtual nation setting up embassies around the world. They begin to produce first person filters for illegal immigrants with intentions to recruit and assist them in leaving their mother countries. In tandem the black market organizations of the world have also developed software to control the migrating population in order to support their subsidiary industries.

The Mind is its own place, and in itself, can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n. Paradise Lost, Milton

[ AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS, AROUND THE DAY IN 80 WORLDS ]

___2011 P2P (Person to Person) civilian commerce exchange reaches colossal proportions. FedEx and UPS continue to grow and the US Post Office sees profits at an all time high. Smaller regional courier service providers popup and continue to reinforce regional separation zones within the U.S.

138|139

SP03

[ FUSION INFRASTRUCTURE ]

“[in the summer of 68], Foucault ...had been invited to become the chairman of a philosophy department, to be located at a new experimental campus in Vincennes, near Paris. DeGaulle’s minister of education, Edgar Faure, had launched a bold series of reforms, aimed to streamline the educational system, - and also to defuse the student movement. Vincennes was to be Faure’s showcase. A model institution, it was to be democratic, interdisciplinary, on the cutting edge of current research. At the same time, it was to be a magnet for dissidents: by drawing radical students out of the Latin Quarter, to a campus located outside of the city limits, the disruptive impact of the militants could be isolated- this at least, was the gambit.” The Passion of Michel Foucault, Miller The Fusion Infrastructure studio asked the following questions: what if schools today could be the site of such energy? Is it possible that an architecture school could be the focus of a nation’s minister of education? Where would that school have to be located? What kind of program would up the ante such that a school would be considered both the haven for the most radical thinking, and also the gilded cage, far from urban density, where such radicals could be extradited? STUDIO PRECIS The educational process can be understood as a delicate balance between a forceful indoctrination which compels its subjects to repeat a given set of social values and norms that an institution upholds- and the establishment of a forum where this more restrictive mandate joins with a free play of invention and intellectual opportunity. Urbanity, architecture, and cultural structures in general can be conceived as a vast, responsive external memory system- and contemporary technologies as a nervous system that will change the storage and retrieval process. __ g.DRIFT We proposed the concept of Geological Drift as a model we could apply to social structures and consciousness, where the free play of intensities envisioned by Constant in his New Babylon schemes could be activated and respond to a general economy. This general economy, as framed by Georges Bataille, could discover unexpected transitive relationships between, for example, an emergent culture and an innovation in manufacturing technology. We suggested that the g.Drift concept has both ecological and ethological consequences on all scales and suggests a connection to the type of event

Michel Serres describes as a ‘temporal conversion’, with ramifications for energy and information equally. Geological Drift was conceived as both a result of, and a catalyst for, a new kind of intelligence on earth. It could explain the emergence of new freedoms; and it could trigger both positive and negative feedback across national, economic, ethnic, cultural, religious, and materially intelligent regimes. We examined several precedent institutions, which evidence the durability to navigate a given g.PLANE temporally and according to [or beyond] a general economics: __Situationist International __ Santafe Institute __ Media Lab __ The New School __ V2... or V13? __ Global Business Network __ Free University __ Vincennes __ Architecture schools: GSAP under Tschumi, or the AA, or early SCIArc __ TeamX...or CIAM? Architecture –like digital design, computer games, or military hardware, strategy and tactics- is a medium that finds itself increasingly susceptible to the advances in computational power that more than double every 18 months. However, historically the fastest computational processes in cities have resided in the living bodies that pass through them, creating elaborate instruction sets for use: zoning, political and economic borders, aesthetic systems, and the fury of daily life: cultural exchange, genetic intermingling, and what Julio Cortazar calls, quite simply ‘…Invention, high challenge of the phoenix.’ In one vision of history, this ‘game’ required rigid codifications to make an impact in everyday life and in the hardware practices of the city. Zoning, construction techniques, military maneuvers: these definitions of action were a prerequisite to turn the city into a gameboard. And substantial time, energy, and capital was required for this.

140|141

An alternate set of ludic visions however is illustrated by urbanists like Constant, or the speculations on power and freedom contributed by Hakim Bey, Raoul Vaneigem, or Bernard Tschumi, suggesting that within the hardware of the city and the glacial socio-economic systems we all inhabit, lies another realm entirely for play. This might be the place where freedom emerges, Cortazar’s ‘invention’.

STAGE TWO: INVESTIGATION, ANALYSIS, TESTING The goal in STAGE TWO was analyzing and TESTING the project against a MUCH MORE MASSIVE system.

This system was derived both concretely and abstractly from the sun and contemporary research into plasma systems. Bataille’s General Economy as drawn from his observations on solar energy, was contrasted or tested by What would the global drift foreseen by the Situationists or ArchiZoom cybernetic models of Negentropy, and deChardin’s idea of the Noosphere. be, in our contemporary urban landscape? How would play emerge in this light as a uniquely emancipatory condition- the encouragement of In this research we sought out the potential overlap point between Spinozist ‘active affections?’ How would these visions influence an mathematical models of topology and actual physical systems. educational program? STAGE TWO concluded with a reinterpretation and redevelopment of the We predict that the surplus of solar energy which cascades through STAGE ONE proposal, and challenged the resilience and adaptability of the our material and social economy will find more and more channels for STAGE ONE proposal. It was understood as an absolute testing of STAGE interaction not only with information but with the fabric of time itself. ONE, and the chance to infuse the overall proposal with the true ebullience The sun is a body massive enough, dense enough, to bend the lines of of SOLAR ENERGY. light, time and gravity around itself and tear apart atomic bonds. This excess energy is already present here on earth. How long will it be before humans become conscious of it and use it to invent new ethical relationships? STAGE ONE: PROGRAM and DESIGN The studio began with a six week design project. Students designed a new school of architecture; initial work was e carried out during a preliminary investigation of precedent models such as fusion / plasma systems. A short list of films was screened, discussed and analyzed, providing models for the students’ design work. Sites were chosen from a range of given options- using a city as a gameboard, and a school as an operating vector- and developed the functional requirements of the school as well as the ancillary infrastructure and institutional affiliations that the school extended through. The STAGE ONE project pushed the boundaries of design and function as an exuberant structure, a gamble that invention and absolute beauty can actually occur. STAGE ONE was complete by the midreview. We conducted an interim review at SCIArc, during our site visit to LA, which included guest jurors Hernan Diaz Alonso, Ben Bratton, and Richard Baily.

Ed Keller and Juan Azulay; Critics Assistant critic: Aaron Gabriel

[FUSION INFRASTUCTURE ]

SP03

Inconvenient Proposal “The proposal made by the Mayor Antanas Mockus giving space to the ‘violents’ ... [message] is equivocal: that violent people have the same rights as nonviolent. At this moment, when the city seems to be challenged by terrorism, and when there is information of the emergence of terrorist urban cells, what comes to the mayor’s mind is the proposal of spaces for the opinion of the violence at official media. Where is the mayor’s authority on these matters? With his proposal he shows weakness and confounds the people and official authorities on how to confront the violence.”

The project was based at first on a model of institutional fusion. The proposal for a school of architecture as a starting point for the development of the project [version #1, above] was modified to become a model of integration based on the study of political, economical and social needs specific to the site. The decisive issues in the generative process in the project were the social disturbances based on leftist vs. rightist ideologies, the emergence of an unpredictable kind of culturalpolitical fusion at the site, the location of the project along the most important institutional axis in the city, and the historical precedents.

The project is a study of social, political and economical systems which allow the development of new infrastructures and institutions in Bogotá, Colombia. The goals of the proposal were achieved through the evaluation of existing and emergent infrastructures in the city, the study of proposed urban plans and events that may have generated such infrastructures and institutions, and the study of the site of interest for the project: the campus of the National University.

The fusion between the ‘institutions’ produced a diagram based on the possibility of understanding the architecture to be proposed as a symbolic and functional solution, relating existing urban structures, memory and the city’s architectural original configurations (the grid) with new institutions such as those resulting from the actions between different social groups (the riots).

JUAN LOPEZ

This particular site in Bogota has been subject to radical changes in its historical development. It is in fact the place where many institutional shifts have taken place at a national level: It has witnessed the struggle among social classes, as well as the struggle between economical forces (for it is located at the most important institutional axis) and more important, the struggle between two political forces: the Marxist ideologies of the guerrillas and the political force of the state. The site was chosen due to its tendency toward social, economical and political instability.

SP03

This reading of the site, together with studies developed on a trip to California, established the starting point for a post-analysis. The grid was studied from Bogotá’s 20th century history has been affected by different factors, an urban and a symbolic perspective with regard to its importance as an among them the violence unleashed by the opposition to the political organizing system within the city. The subsequent development of the project parties, the industrial revolution and its subsequent problems which have [version #2, above] was conducted from that point on as a piece of work deteriorated the countryside / city relations, and the emergence of illegal that negotiated with the grid lattice. It was understood as a reference to prearmed groups, which have established a new order at the rural areas and established organizational models (the grid in the city) embedded into actual a conflict among different actors in society. formal structures (the urban fabric). Juan Lopez

[FUSION INFRASTUCTURE ]

Historically the economy of Bogotá had been based on an agrarian culture and the urban growth had depended on the interaction between rural infrastructures until the 20th century. The physical growth of the city started from the historical center expanding toward the north, where satellite suburbs appeared with the emergence of a wealthy social class. The city expanded rapidly after 1940 as large numbers of peasants migrated to the city searching for better economical opportunities. Bogotá is now Colombia’s largest financial, political, and cultural center and the National University and many other universities located there make Bogotá the nation’s main educational center.

142|143

| 144

CHRONOMORPHOLOGY

: active time in architecture

The work in this book -as well as many other students’ work from ours and other studiosmay be viewed online in greater detail at the GSAPP website, with additional material, links, interactive features, animations and syllabi: FA00 Disciplinary Organs http://www.arch.columbia.edu/Studio/Fall2000/Keller/ SP01 BCNYCTWN http://www.arch.columbia.edu/Projects/Faculty/bcnyctwn/ SU01 Negentropic Architecture http://www.arch.columbia.edu/Studio/Sum2001/Keller/ http://www.arch.columbia.edu/gsap/10781

FA01 the MACHINE http://www.arch.columbia.edu/Studio/Fall2001/Keller/ http://www.arch.columbia.edu/gsap/10706 http://www.arch.columbia.edu/gsap/1698/0/0/0/

SP02 Noosphere http://www.arch.columbia.edu/Studio/Spring2002/Keller/ http://www.arch.columbia.edu/gsap/10534 http://www.arch.columbia.edu/gsap/3459 http://www.arch.columbia.edu/gsap/3752/ SU02 Red Line City http://www.arch.columbia.edu/Studio/Sum2002/Keller/ http://www.arch.columbia.edu/gsap/24736

FA02 80 Days | 80 Worlds http://www.arch.columbia.edu/Studio/Fall2002/Keller/ http://www.arch.columbia.edu/gsap/11652/

SP03 Fusion Infrastructure http://www.arch.columbia.edu/Studio/Spring2003/Keller/index.swf http://www.arch.columbia.edu/gsap/19246

SU03 the ARCHIVE http://www.arch.columbia.edu/gsap/23389/

Many of our studios have used online discussion boards as a tool for intensifying dialogue in the studio. These conversations can be read by visiting: http://www.basilisk.com/cgi-bin/UltraBoard/UltraBoard.cgi

IMAGE: Jon Mallie + Junko Imamura