myspace mccluhan

I'm kind of surprised that nobody has yet written a popular analysis of what different social networking sites say about our relationship to different creative media. So I'm going to attempt an off-the-cuff index, right now (in order of the complexity of involved technology):

text: people apparently find it the most natural to either produce public journals, or convey in a viral fashion tiny bits of social information. Not much fiction, not much strict journalism, but a whole lot in-between.

photos: once again, not a terribly surprising outcome: most of the action is in the form of complusive indexing, sharing, and commenting. One interesting note is that the division between pro and amateur is blurring, as home operators get flashier websites and pros start making "high-caste" flickr groups. You don't see Michael Gondry posting on YouTube.

visual art: other than websites themselves, the bulk of popular graphic design appears to be in the Clever T-Shirt area. Go fig.

audio: the "podcast revolution" hasn't exactly exploded-- i think everyone underestimated how difficult it is to write, perform, and edit an entertaining and cohesive audio narrative. In addition to the more prosaic mp3 blog concept, a more interesting phenomenon is the almost immediate and universal adoption of MySpace by performers, remixers, and fans. There were many previous attempts to make a social networking site specifically for performers and bands, but what this ignored is that there's no reason to have a presence if you can't contact the people who buy your records.

and, video: was anyone else surprised that there is more collective national skill in editing video than audio or writing? YouTube does have a soft core of crappy-resolution digicam videos, but the outer shell is finely-crafted amateur commercials, shorts, and music videos. I guess it shouldn't be that shocking-- my generation's favorite childhood toy might have been the parent's video camera. How many tons of magnetic tape have been used to immotalize 1980's puppet shows and child-auteur plays?

The only quick conclusion I can draw from all of this is that media are not interchangable, and that some are more naturally social. Text is probably at the bottom of the barbaric yawp list right now, actually, superceded by the flickr photoset-- probably from the temptation of the biggest vacation slideshow ever made. There's also the wonderful fiction of objectivity created by an image. So you heard it here, folks-- if you have something to say to 10 million strangers, say it with a picture. Or even better, a moving picture. It'll last longer.

tuesday cop out

Full story here.

ways to understand a song is your new favorite song

You hear the last 30 seconds on the radio, after which there are three more, worse songs. The DJ then comes on and either manages to avoid naming the fantastic song, or mumbles it, or dies midsyllable. This is without fail.

You hear it at a friend's house, low in the background, and they notice your attention drifting to the stereo, turn it up, and tell you how awesome it is.

You make it to the record store once in a blue moon, pick an album based on the cover art or band name, and every song through the album is increasingly more incredible until it peaks, usually at the end of what would have been side a. Or maybe the beginning of b.

Somebody emails you a video and tells you it's mind-blowing, and you don't believe them and ignore it for a few days, and then in a fit of boredom watch it, and they are right.

Most often-- you hear about how great some album is but it's only a few weeks until your birthday/christmas/secretaries day and so you wait, and you get exactly what you wished for, this album, and you rush and put it in your cd player/ipod/gramophone player and it's so underwhelming and flat that you can't get through a single song. You keep skipping ahead to find the great one, the one that made other people love this album so much, but eventually it just loops back to one, you hear that first chord or beat again, and you give up. It then sits dormant for 6-8 weeks (sometimes even longer). Eventually you notice it sitting there, get curious, and play it agian, almost invariably in your car. Somehow you preternaturally know to turn the volume up before even the first track is cued, and then when that first sound is made it gives you the chills, and you begin slapping every hard piece of vinyl you can find and wiggle your butt the few inches of freedom the car seat allows, and pump the gas. Basically, you do the lame-ass car dance we all know and avoid in company, singing along only in the chorus, because you do not know the words. The tiny imprint each chord made on your brain the first time is now a deep well that accepts the massive noise coming out of your speakers. You always reach your destination before you want to. You always sit until the track is over. And it is never that good again.

facial transformer

Weak, I know, but today all I have is a link.

Terrifying, inaccurate, and vaguely eugenic.

More here.

dreamsketch 2

This bleary-eyed sketch appears to involve an enormous disk-shaped elevator (mediating between an office tower and a parking garage if I remember--pretty banal for a dream). The outer rim of the elevator is a gigantic rubber gasket, followed by an equally humongous inflated cushion area, with a small ring of trees in the center. The cushion undulates slowly as the elevator descends. Despite the complete lack of guardrails, I remember being pretty calm on the ride down.

ps- These sketches are done quickly and while not yet totally awake. I swear I can do better.

houston's past future

Jean has been doing some amazing research for a project we are doing on the Pierce Elevated in downtown Houston. In the process, she uncovered a series of diagrams made by Arthur Colemen Comey, a landscape architecture from Cambridge, Massachusetts, for a report on the urban landscape of Houston in 1913. These diagrams are engrossing, first of all, for the detail in their rendering (sorry, can't get more detail from the scans), and their graphic clarity, but also because they represent an inconceivably different Houston that is so foreign and compelling as to invite historical revisionism and speculation. To Wit (click for a larger version):


A unique method of denoting population. Note, despite the fact that "white" and "colored" populations are marked separately, these populations appear to be more integrated spatially than they are today.


Once again, a unique "property value topography" map. It's been a while since Houston was this center-weighted.


Wouldn't it be nice if we had a ring of wetlands instead of the 610?


Children walking, alone, to public parks with paid attendants? What is this, Cuba?



These streetscapes seem almost quaint in their scaling. Streetcars? Pedestrians?

It's easy to dip into nostalgia for a prewar America looking at the last few images, and I do think that the scale and civic nature of what is suggested there is something that Houston should be striving for right now. But the fact is, this city will never obtain this kind of scale again. So the question becomes: what do we like about this imaginary Houston of 1913? And what can we do now, almost 100 years later, that can improve upon those desires? After all, this was a city that hadn't made it yet as a major metropolis, and yet was already struggling with infrastructure and traffic. It was a city still searching for a good port and native industry, and was occasionally crippled by outbreaks of typhoid or even tuberculosis. It was a city that had a ward system that divided its populace into informal castes. This is not a city to be nostalgic about. So how can we take the fever dreams of an impossibly remote city, and translate them into our future? That's not a rhetorical question. It's one that demands answers.

roboats rowbots

I just returned from the BLDGBLOG filmfest, and things are probably still too close to really make a salient comment, but here's a first shot before I collapse.

Watching these (fairly fast-paced) slideshow presentations was watching architectural expressionism brought to an extreme (and often ludicrous) end, over and over and over again. A general formal concept or analogy was adopted, adapted, transformed, and repeated until it formed a unified backdrop for cinematic action. It made me feel like I had two options: scoff or accept. Either these people were ridiculous and their work has no real effect on the built environment, or I would have to realize that these people are condensing the stuff of our present futurity, registering how our society thinks we should be building, today, for tomorrow. There did not seem to be a middle ground; how can you mediate between those two poles? From my phrasing you can probably tell which side I landed on. Yes, a lot of the work was based upon previous ideas of futurity, whether HG Wells or Star Wars. Yes, these projects are (as professed by the artists) a flimsy shell around a few salient angles and overall ideas, only meant to stand up for a few seconds, from a few angles. The images are created at incredible speed, populated and then filtered by committee until something approximating the right tone is reached. In other words, these are not bold singular visions or demands; they are collaged approximations of a conjectural moment. And, as such, they are actually more powerful, because this makes them thin and nimble enough to cut holes in our accepted reality.

Some of this work was so similar to the current glossy techno-expressionism as to seem almost a parody; but honestly, if this stuff is a valid way of approaching architecture, how would these guys do if given a thousand percent more time, and the constraints of reality? It's been acceptable for the last thirty-odd years to profess admiration for previous incarnations of stage-set architecture, from Versailles to Las Vegas. So why does Disneyland have a current monopoly on obsessively detailed falsity? Why aren't these guys doing casinos? Why can I go to any high-end shopping center and get rigorously approximated pasts, but no futures? There is room for some biomorphic aggregation in my local strip mall. I can feel it.

the difference between cake and architecture

A cake cannot take more than 1 week to complete.

People rarely respect a cake, but fundamentally disagree with it.

If you make a fantastic cake, most people will eat it and enjoy it.

If you make a delicious cake of dubious beauty, people will remark on how tasty it is.

If you make a beautiful but slightly bland cake, people will tell you how good it looks.

Cake writing is usually brief and entertaining.

There are no cake consultants.

Non-bakers, when they see a cake, will frequently say "Ooo! Cake!"

Reading about it, you probably want some cake right now.

i suppose crap is, in its own way, sustainable

I went to the "Sustainable LA" Short Films Program at the Silverlake Film Festival. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but I certainly didn't get it. It felt like the curators of the event didn't prescreen anything-- the vast majority of the films were either 1)Promos, 2)PSAs, or 3)Made-for-the web shorts that really needed some explanation in order to make any sense. Watching a six-minute time-lapse of the erection of a cold storage facility was cool, but I needed to go home and find this to gain any perspective (or even find out what the hell it had to do with sustainability). A bunch of the other stuff fell into the predicable traps of either being shrill and lecturing, self-congratulatory, or overly positivistic and boosterish. Worse than that was the fifteen minute, silent photo slide show from Sundown Schoolhouse. I left wanting to punch these guys in the face-- I don't want to blow a quarter-hour in a dark room watching what my friends did over the weekend, much less complete strangers. It was incomprehensible, pretentious, slow torture.

I'm sorry, I guess I needed to vent. Not everything was bad-- a good quickie from Wolfpack, an impressive tour of the Path to Freedom "urban homestead," and a to-the-point water quality PSA were brief gasps of quality. But the star of the hour was the first piece by Edible Estates, of their second project in Lakewood. This is an organization that has been replacing normative suburban front lawns with fully functioning vegetable gardens. This piece was compelling not because it was slickly produced or even because of it's sustainable qualities (it's roughly identical to any side-yard veggie garden), but because it was the only point at which any real extrapolation of green activism to the general public was even attempted. The Path to Freedom project is incredible in its breath and depth, but is ultimately impossible for the average family-- all these people do is farm their lot. The interview with the owner of the Edible Estates project, rather than focusing on cubic yards of landfill saved or carbon interred, talked about how the garden has re-introduced him to his neighbors, how the family's relationship with food has changed, and most interestingly how his yard is now a usable space for his children. He relates the transformation of what is essentially a no-man's land, a defensible zone, into a mediating space between public and private, between his sidewalk and kitchen. The point is made that in most houses, the front lawn is something between vestigial and decorative. It only makes a tiny change to make it perform. I left the whole event not wanting to buy a home composter, or bike to work, or petition for a cleaner bay, but instead wanting to plant bell peppers in my front yard. Mmmmm bell peppers.

military urbanism

Tianamen Square might be undergoing some changes soon. According to Ma Yansong, an urban planner charged with updating the square, the problem is

"Tiananmen is ... the physical centre but not the real centre. No Beijing people go there... The question we posed ourselves was, how to make the area more enjoyable if we no longer need it for tanks?"

The obvious angle on all of this is the rapid transitions taking place in China. The country as a whole seems to have just discovered the concept of Public Relations, and perhaps this is an extension of that. I'm not nearly an expert so I'll reserve my comments in that arena.

Another tack would be these traumas themselves, and discussing the healing process that has to take place in any public space undergoing transition. The strategy here to me seems to be remarkably similar to that used in other historically charged spaces... the (perhaps unfounded) belief that enough trees and grass can obviate any kind of cultural trauma. Call it the "green band-aid effect."

But what I really want to explore is the question posed, verbatim, from the hired architect above. Paraphrased, how have changes in military strategy changed urban design? Many of the world's most famous squares and plazas were created, in part, as parade routes, assembly grounds, or simply to commemorate a famous victory (or less common, a famous loss). These are rigidly controlled, immense grounds for the massing and geometric arraying of huge numbers of individuals. With the advent of modern military technology, this began to include motorcycles, cars, cannons, and tanks, as well as infantry. Anyone who lays out their pens in a line on their desk can appreciate the joys of assembly.

The future of the military, however, seems to exist on two divergent paths. One is the development of hugely expensive technology operated by an increasingly smaller number of specialists. The culmination of this kind of thinking is currently the fighter jet, so the public face of this sort of military thinking is probably the Blue Angels. With all of the action taking place overhead, the fixed vantage becomes less important, and the idea of "massing" becomes obsolete (sports stadiums and rock concerts being a notable exception.) The event is played out as vectors and trajectories, not as geometry and arithmetic.

The other future we're seeing right now, one that is much more immediate, is urban warfare. Small teams of highly trained people that work in a loose network across a constantly varying and incredibly complex three dimensional terrain. Once again, the concept of assembly and ordered arrangement is almost entirely foreign. This kind of military might is more often shown in a likewise atomization, in cable news and advertisements and blog entries. It is "embedded" into our consciousness, not displayed outright.

So what is the future of military urbanism? The former implies a distant vantage, about noise and movement, someone unrelated to the ground below. The other effects a pervasive background chatter that colors everything but never concentrates to a physical reality. I feel that these forces are somewhat expressed in, on one hand, the increasing inhuman scale and speed of streetscapes, and on the other the increasing reliance on surveillance and control in the public realm. Freeways, after all, have a quasi-military origin, as does closed-circuit television.

Perhaps the greening of Tianamen doesn't represent the elimination of military urbanism, but rather it's utilization, atomization, and slow diffusion. Perhaps the future landscape of our cities will be as much about control and defense as it is about citizenship. We are building an entirely new form of walled city, one where the moats and battlements are part of the fabric, not surrounding it.

beaten to the punch

I've been doing a lot of research about repurposing (or dual-purposing) infrastructure as public space. But with all of my bluster, I missed something in my own backyard. The City of Santa Monica is opening its first new park in years, Airport Park. The city claims the 8.3 acre park will have "playing fields, an off-leash dog area, restrooms, picnic areas, a playground for children, parking and lots of open green space". Or rather, already has, as the grand opening was last Sunday.

The location of my favorite beach should give away the fact that I find this all terribly exciting. The fact that a) I have a dog and b) This is less than a mile from my house is just an added bonus.

Look at the last 20 years of urbanism. What percentage of new public space have been created in and around infrastructure? You have repurposed dumps, docks, and even aqueducts and elevated rails. You also have honest attempts to create viable public space between and under and even over freeways. This is just a tiny fraction of what has happened in the last twenty years. It has surpassed experimentation and is now a gradual refining of strategies to mitigate the negative aspects of the quasi-industrial (noise, pollution, access) and emphasize the positive (space, reclamation, freedom, sublimity).

So I ask: why wait until these sites are dormant or decrepit? Why shouldn't we be reclaiming this valid public space now? It's silly to assume that freeway systems and airports and power plants are a fixed quantity; all infrastructure becomes obsolete eventually. What's the fifty year plan for the space under your local freeway?

captain obvious

If I'm taking my Artist Archetype Action Figures (AAAF's) and making teams, it's pretty obvious who the Architects go with. The Photographers, the Documentary Filmmakers, Land Artists, you know. Meanwhile, the Playwrights hang out with the Screenwriters and Novelists, and Musicians (although perhaps the Musique Concrete guys might take our side.) It basically becomes the Communicators versus the Mute, the Adaptable versus the Stoic. I'm drawing a pretty wide swath here, but I think the reason you don't associate architects with the theatre (except maybe Brecht) is that we're not that interested in syntactical communication. We might talk about "reading" buildings, but we're not talking about rhetoric or story. Buildings are "read" the way that barcodes or hard drives are, as a concrete value that works as a tool on its surroundings. We don't really care if we're understood or even noticed; we just want people to do what we impel them to do.

Ruth vs. Cake Blitz

A consulting firm recently sent three sheet cakes in two weeks to our office. I think this was supposed to ingratiate us to them, but the quality kind of got in the way. A coworker, Ruth, waged war against this cake onslaught in single combat:

_____________________________________________
From: Alicia Daugherty
Sent: Tuesday, April 17, 2007 4:05 PM
To: MRA Office
Subject: cake in the kitchen

help yourself


_____________________________________________
From: Ruth Greene
Sent: Tuesday, April 17, 2007 4:07 PM
To: MRA Office
Subject: petroleum product

Alternative message:

Lethal artery-clogging DSI advertising cake in the kitchen. Had it been nice, it would have been in honor of Vinnie’s birthday tomorrow. If you indulge, suggest you drink coffee.

Maybe the acid will cut it.


_____________________________________________
From: Ruth Greene
Sent: Tuesday, April 24, 2007 2:28 PM
To: MRA Office
Subject: death cake for skeptics

Don’t really believe that arteries can get clogged?

Afraid you’re going to live too long?

There is another advertising masterpiece in the kitchen. I’m told there will be a third. Go to it!


_____________________________________________
From: Ruth Greene
Sent: Tuesday, May 01, 2007 10:22 AM
To: MRA Office
Subject: Russian Roulette

No aneurism yet? Try again! There’s another media blitz cake in the kitchen.




Personally, I ate the first cake with enthusiasm. Even the skin (yes, skin). The second I nibbled with trepidation. The third, with its Robitussin-colored fruit filling, I prodded with something approaching hatred. In my opinion, the cake won.

dreamsite1: tree-dock

I've been making quick sketches of locations that feature prominently in early-morning dreams. Here is the first one:



This is a covered inlet at a river embankment. One can swim into this channel, covered by metal grating, and then climb stairs to gain access to the split shotgun house above. There is a small waterfall where the stream transitions into the river, and at that point also is a tree, its roots wrapped around a column going into the water. If I remember correctly, the yard of the house was filled with 10-gallon drums. Read into this as you may.

modern heironymous

The ink drawings of Adam Dant are intricate, humorous, and dark, to name a few.

I like to imagine these are the inhabited prehistory of Paul Noble's deserted cities and landscapes, immense crowded landscapes of danger and strange obselescence.

This kind of omnitient-view drawing, like in the picture books of my childhood, is both thrilling and oddly sad. One can't really inhabit this space or connect with the inhabitants, there is only pity and a quiet terror that they will never escape this enclosure.

link friday

Two photo sites, disturbing and poignant in different ways. Both would probably not be served well by analysis. Both safe for work.

http://phojoe.com/forensic_compositing.html

http://denis.darzacq.revue.com/la_chute/index.html

copout

This is going to sound a bit too much like BLDGBLOG, but it's late and it's what I'm thinking about.

Artificial intelligence researchers love to compare intelligence to animals. "Human intelligence is 50 years away," they might say, "but something equivalent to a rat or small dog is just around the corner." This is an easy analog that anyone can understand (and also acknowledges the subjectivity of measuring intelligence.)

While I still can't quite imagine my trash can or car exhibiting any kind of animal intelligence (or I am too afraid to really consider it), I find the idea that my house is as smart as my dog to be almost plausible. There are, after all, lots of places in my house that I've never seen, and plenty of things that it does that are beyond my consideration. It makes noise on it's own from only solar and wind energy (especially at night), and has lived for over 60 years. Probably half of the elements on the periodic table are in my house. In short, it is ancient, unpredictable, and immensely complex. For all I know it's doing the domestic equivalent of wagging its tail right now.

as i read mason-dixon

It seems to me that the craft of surveying has lost power as it gained resolution over the last 400 years. When the above-mentioned latitude was plotted, it was marked every five miles with "crownstones" marked on one side with Charles Calvert's coat-of-arms, and the other with William Penn's. This western ray began its path at the (contemporaneous) border between Delaware and the two warring states, which was declared, quite simply, as a "twelve mile circle."

Compare this with disputing inches of fenceline between suburban homeowners, and it may seem that the heroism in this profession has leaked away, or at least has been transferred into the lasers that measure the (ever-changing) distance between the Earth and the Moon.

history by metaphor

Golf is of uncertain origin-- it may be of Scottish, Dutch or even Chinese in its inception. The slow evolution of the game, however, produced a sport that was symbiotically linked to an a priori Scottish landscape-- an ideal in curvature and greenery that, over time, has mutated into its own form, of earthworks, kidney bean shapes, and exotic grasses. What still exists, however, is the chaotic relationship of the player to the landscape-- the strategy, beyond a certain point, is almost entirely contingent upon the wind, the speed of the greens, and human emotional frailty.

Miniature golf, while of surprisingly ancient (19th century) origin, came into it's current "windmills and wishing wells" form only in the late 1930's, at the hands of Joe and Robert Taylor from Binghamton, New York. Here, the game of golf was compressed and mechanized, becoming more like pool. The greens were made plastic, and metal bumpers, tubes, and moving obstacles created a game in which pure physics play a greater role than the weather. All of the chintz and themery conceals a game which is played with needle's-eye precision.

In 1985, Nintendo released Golf, a video game. This game featured a simplistic computer modeling of the physical complexities of the live game, in which angle, club, and a few taps on a button were the input. Subsequent video golf games have added topography, wind, spin, player ability and even, with the recent development of the Nintendo Wii, physical aptitude and luck. It is, essentially, a game of perfect physics, purposefully marred by a careful modeling of naturally chaotic variables.

The NPR/NYT-addicted goon that I am, I have been fully bombarded with the latest news on the Baghdad Wall imbroglio. Before I go any further, to fulfill the obligatory comparison:

The Wall in figures*

Overall length : 103 miles

Length inside Berlin : 26.8 miles

Length between Berlin and the GDR : 70 miles

Wall passing through inhabited areas : 23 miles

Wall passing through industrial areas : 10.6 miles

Wall passing through wooded areas : 18.6 miles

Wall passing through waterway areas : 14.9 miles

Length of concrete wall (13' high) : 66.6 miles

Metal fencing (9-13' high) : 40.5 miles

Anti-tank ditches (16'6" deep) : 0.6 miles

Anti-vehicle ditches (8' deep) : 65.5 miles

Surveillance tracks (20-23' wide) : 77 miles

Tracks with sliding cables for dogs : 259

Number of dogs : 600

Watch towers : 302

Concrete shelters : 22

Border guards : 14 000

Number of shots fired by border guards : 1 693

Bullet marks in the West : 456

Persons successfully scaling the Wall : 5 043

of whom members of the armed forces : 574

Persons arrested in the vicinity of the Wall : 3 221

Fugitives killed : 239

Soldiers and policemen killed : 27

Persons wounded : 260

Attacks against the Wall : 35

Building any kind of border wall is obviously a violent and incendiary event; however I'm not sure that the Berlin Wall is the best analog. The people discussing the Israeli/Palestinian border "systems" are probably more on track (morphologically and operationally).

I have to say, however, other than being struck dumb at the (escalating) hubris of our military, the most striking moment of this story was the way in which the military tried to spin the news: by referring to the walled area as a "gated community."

Jokes about accuracy aside, the equating of this controlled military compound with an Atlanta suburb makes my mind reel. Not because of the implication that people that live in suburban enclaves are self-imprisoned. It's rather the opposite that is staggering, the application of psychology of exclusivity to this violent rupture of one street from another. It makes me think: are we exporting fear along with "democracy?" Does the officially proclaimed and branded "American Way" have an intrinsically xenophobic core? It's true that our society (from any side) seems to have a new found obsession with purity, privacy, and control, and a growing fear of the collective and unconstrained. But is it perhaps this mindset, as much as a blindly jingoistic Washington, war profiteering, or a national thirst for oil, that is undercutting any kind of diplomatic success in these last eight years? We've never been that good of a people at self-understanding. Maybe we're all more fearful of our neighbors than we let on to ourselves.

*All numbers are from the incomparably fantastic book "The Ghosts of Berlin" by Brian Ladd.

am i that boring?

Talking to a younger version of oneself in books, films, and personal families has become so common as to need a name: how about "feedyack." In these events there is a lot of raised eyebrows and slow revelations, perhaps cryptic warnings; it's popularity has a lot to do with the fact that this is a guaranteed moment one can act like a sage.

I'm going to propose an alternate scripting. I think that talking to oneself would be immensely boring, and probably a waste of time. Do you ever write down word-for-word what you think in the shower in the morning, or right before you go to bed? When read back, 90% of the time it comes out mostly gibberish. Now imagine if one half of this self-conversation was even less mature, and there was the added confusion of time travel. After the (I can only assume) intense anticipation of the event, it would probably seem awkward and diminished. The fact that we naturally romanticize the past and future would also probably lead to a slightly disappointing self-impression as well.

So, should time travel become possible, stick to the dinosaurs and spaceships. As you've probably been told, one of you is more than enough.

off the cuff

If you've been paying attention to the links at the right, you might have noticed I've been looking at more product and industrial design news lately. I've had to swallow some of my architect-inferiority-complex-disguised-as-pride, but the more product-like nature of my work as of late has forced me into an eye-to-eye relationship, a very rewarding one that makes me need to examine why I've avoided this particular fiefdom of design for so long.

It's partially, of course, the collective pressure of the Dwell/DWR/Apple Store world that bounces off my naturally reactionary psyche. And I'm sure if I went deep enough I'd find some moralizing against conspicuous consumption. But I think the real reason I avoided looking at designs smaller than a house (or at least a taco truck) until recently was a (mis)perceived lack of depth-- I was always looking for the "real" innovation behind the scenes. I couldn't be convinced that something that was purchasable immediately and in mass quantities could be pushing the boundaries of possibility in any way. To put it simply (and kind of offensively), it didn't look difficult enough. This is condescension born of ignorance, I know. It took a gradual shift in a very stereotypical path - from furniture to lamps down into silverware - for me to realize that there are direct analogs that I was willfully ignoring. In some of these things there may be a lack of physical assemblage, but there is perhaps a greater mental assemblage, or at least a denser one-- more considerations, from ergonomics to copyrights, per cubic inch than in anything else in the world.

This is what makes these things suddenly so appealing -- to realize that they were forged, as it were, under intense mental pressures that extrude a unique object of ineffable value.

proto-jetsons

We recently lost the bottom two thirds of a power pole on Palms Boulevard. Perhaps because it is only carrying house current and low voltage lines, the city has allowed the remaining portion to hang, dangling askew from its adjacent poles, the streetlamp still functional. Shattered creosote pole is strewn all along the road and there is apocryphal "CAUTION: HIGH VOLTAGE" tape lying around, as well as a single road cone. Here, Katy took a picture.

For the last two days I've had this freakish totem waiting for me on my daily commute, stopping traffic and causing general unease. And while it has enacted an enormous transformation on its small dominion of road, I am beginning to get used to it being there. It makes me wonder if, in the future (pronounced fue-TCHA!), when all of our streetlamps levitate, how long it would take me to start ignoring them completely.

cop-out

Working like mad on a project tonight, so all I can do is quote a nested quote from the most completely awesome Eggleston trust website. The quote in question is photographer Robert Adams, quoted by John Szarkowski in what might be first great analysis of color photography as art.

"Over and over again the photographer walks a few steps and peers, rather comically, into the camera; to the exasperation of family and friends, he inventories what seems an endless number of angles; he explains, if asked, that he is trying for effective composition, but hesitates to define it. What he means is that a photographer wants form, an unarguably right relationship of shapes, a visual stability in which all components are equally important. The photographer hopes, in brief, to discover a tension so exact that it is peace.

"Pictures that embody this calm are not synonymous, of course, with what we might see casually out of a car window (they may, however, be more effective if we can be tricked into thinking so). The form the photographer records, though discovered in a split second of literal fact, is different because it implies an order beyond itself, a landscape into which all fragments, no matter how imperfect, fit perfectly."

The full text of the essay is here, and is chock-full of other readable revelations on photography that manage not to sound anything like Susan Sonntag.

MoWACAD

Katy told me today about MoWACs. That's Moms With A Camera. This is apparently the order of events generating this phenomenon:

1. "Prosumer" digital SLR cameras become relatively affordable.

2. Said cameras are given as presents to housewives.

3. Hundreds of pictures of children are taken.

4. Clever web programmers make some great templates for fantastic looking and user-friendly flash-based photographer websites.

5. Said housewives show pictures to friends, get comments, improve their craft incrementally.

6. Housewives begin taking pictures of friends' children. Or maybe their pets.

7. Photos are posted on said fantastically easy websites.

8. Home-based child/pet photography business are born, by the thousands.

Hence a MoWAC explosion. Many professional photographers seem peeved by this phenomenon. While I can appreciate how it could be obnoxious for someone with lesser skill and training to be appropriating one's vocation, and it is definitely true in most cases that the MoWAC photos probably do not measure up to the professional standard, this seems a little bit silly. None of these people were going to blow a grand on a pro for their kids' 3rd birthday. The Wal-Mart photo studio is probably losing some business to this. Not you, Mr. Avedon.

This is happening across the creative spectrum-- things like garage band and digital cameras are making the ranks of enthusiasts (and subsequently appreciation in general) swell for music production, photography, journalism, etc. However, the people attempting to make cottage businesses out of the same enthusiasms is undercutting the lower end of the market, while simultaneously eroding professional quality at that same end. I'd still rather have a lot of interest and a little overcrowding than some kind of Pro Himalayas, high above the masses, preaching to the choir.

Will rapid prototyping and the rapid democratization of 3d rendering lead to a whole new community of prosumer architects? It's already starting to hit the world of 3d animation and motion graphics. I'd better build some cred and get licenced before the masses drag me down.

hello, sidewalk

I apologize to both of you for the weekend-long pause; as one of you knows there was a wedding this weekend that took up a great deal of time. It did give me the opportunity to go home, however, and I got to play one of my favorite games: trying to see my hometown as for the first time. This is probably impossible, but having Katy in the car can be very helpful.

At one point I was lost in quasi-suburban Kansas City, and I mentioned that the area looked different than the one I was searching for. Fifteen minutes later, I remarked that I'd finally found the right neighborhood. "This looks more like it," I said. Katy told me she couldn't really tell the difference.

As I was driving home I started to think about what distinguishes one suburb from another. I'm not talking about whether the shopping center has a red tile roof, or the fancy water-jet-cut metal-and-stone welcome sign. I'm talking about the generic streets between subdivisions, the fabric of the area. And this is exactly what makes the difference. Curb cuts, streetlights, medians and retaining walls. Once you start looking for these things they begin to take over, as the secret language of exurbia. It makes me want to see a place where these typologies are liberated, where the curbs fly off into a field, escaping the road, and the streetlights suddenly are only 8 feet high, marching up a lawn and onto the sidewalk. If these things are going to define my hometown, I'd like for them to be a little less subservient.

on the road

Andrew's wedding is this weekend! It's like the last six months never happened. I'm about to get packin', but before I do a tidbit on air travel:

The sky is measured with invisible lines called "Victor airways." These are direct vectors between points of navigation called VORs. From 1,200 to 18,000 feet, planes use these vectors like roadways. Traffic is stacked vertically, and opposite directions are alternated. The minimum vertical clearance is 500 feet. Jet travel is above 18,000 feet, and these planes generally have sophisticated enough avionics to be cleared for direct navigation, triangulating between VORs to make their own route.

This system is built on technology over 50 years old. In many cases GPS is just as accurate; with the direction things are going VORs will probably be obsolete within the decade. This marks a phase shift in navigation; we are no longer marking out lay lines on the globe; once again we are turning to the sky to find out where we are. The points of reference are in constant motion above, instead of fixed below. Distance is once again relative, not absolute.

The older VORs cone-shaped housings for antennas that spin at 1,800 revolutions a minute, changing its broadcast continuously to mark different directions. One of these sits just up the hill from our house at the Santa Monica Airport. Pretty soon it will stop marking the earth, and its continuous whine will stop, replaced by silent points of reference above.

filled to the brim

The advancement of technology (and the parallel acceleration of the market economy) seems to be attempting to atomize everything from solid and monolithic to heterogeneous honeycombs. Everything that modern production touches is made less substantial and more complex. This is done in the name of sustainability and affordability and usability, and all of these abilities are great, but when one is taking toll of their physical presence in life, instead of a solid oak table with a brass lamp we have powdercoated aluminum and PTFE. It's not terribly original (and quite reactionary to boot) to bemoan the lost of "honest" materiality, but this abrupt change in the stuff of our existence is a little to pervasive to be unacknowledged. To my mind, it's the difference between standing on firm ground and shifting sand; the very reality of our surroundings is being challenged not only by allusion and mass production, but by the occult nature of the material itself. To not see the link between an object and its source is to lose a little bit of everyday poetry.

This is not to say that I need a rough-hewn iPod. Like i said, a sustainable and high-tech future is going to rely heavily on composites and advanced forms of production. But why is everything proprietary? I'd like to know what is in my plastics and alloys, no matter how complicated. What country does it come from? Who made it? What was left over? Anyone who doubts the intrinsic emotional value in this kind of data has only to go to any consumer product-rating website: we are obsessed with our stuff. We want to know every detail about our purchases, not only from an accountability standpoint (will this coffee maker give me thyroid cancer?) but because we are in love with our things. This is not the evils of advanced capitalism, this is human nature. Think of Excalibur, or the Maltese Falcon, the Holy Grail. Yes, these objects stood for something greater, but they also have faint echoes in every knife, cup and tchochke in existence. All I'm asking is that we forgive the things we own, and maybe get to know them a little better.

calling all crits

May I make a request? If you're reviewing a project (or completing one, for that matter), and a complex and tortured form/schema/representation is justified solely through talk of "liminal spaces," "seen/being seen" or any kind of celebration of complex social/antisocial interaction, mediated and intensified by the complexity of said form/schema/representation, ask them what their project does that the LA Farmer's Market/Grove Shopping Center does not do for profit every day. Spending a few hours suspended in froth can be enjoyable, but if you're really going to talk about something it should probably be better anchored lest it blow away or melt in the midst of conversation.

i prefer mine in bronze

We got cut off on the 5 by a salt-rusted Explorer yesterday and Katy exploded. "Gold cars!" she said. Apparently they drive more aggressively than black, white, silver, or even red. Not only had I not noticed this statistical anomaly, but I hadn't before noticed consciously a gold automobile in my entire life.

In the last 24 hours, I have been accosted by 24k cars. Three more blasted by in the left lane on the way to Encinitas. Parking spaces have been crowded in by gilded Jeeps and Oldsmobiles. I think they're replicating behind my back, silent automitosis. Like killer bees, they will terrorize the country before eventually settling in Mexico and the desert Southwest. So prepare. The allergic will want to stock up on extra epi-pens and better insurance. They will attack in swarms, without provocation. No one is safe.

verify in field

I've been working on some as-built drawings, which tends to skew your mental state the same way playing Mario Kart change the way you drive immediately after you play it. For the last few hours, dimensions have been paramount. Actual thicknesses and distances, not ideal or even perceived measurements, are what rule the day. It makes me wonder what as-builts could be for a totally alien architecture... what if your existing measurements were of transparency and clarity, or trace minerals in the air? What if I was tabulating the existing smell?

Architecture, as it is taught, is obsessed with dimensions. This is rightfully so; the first step to telling someone how to build something is to tell them how big it is. But, given my current employ as a midcentury modern crusader, I am left wondering if perhaps we're not a little too obsessed with precise alignments and modules. When architects talk about "flushing things out," they're not discussing ritual purging. In all of this painstaking work nudging surfaces into position, we might be missing something equally vital about other characterizations of the space. Like, for instance, what it is for. Or how it sounds.

Or maybe we should just go metric so I don't have to deal with sixteenths.

three semi-universal truths dicovered, in company, while mildly drunk

1. If you vehemently believe that the rest of the world hates you and is out to screw you over, than the converse is probably true, in reality.

2. The negative traits you notice most vocally in other people, and with the most particular revulsion, are most likely the ones that you exhibit yourself.

3. The Pixies get better the louder they are played. If there was a stereo that could be infinitely loud, than they would approach infinite awesomeness.

quantifying introspection

The arbitrary post-a-day quota I've imposed upon myself leads to some odd self-judgement. If I don't step outside of routine task-solving or blank consumption within a given 24 hours, does this mean that I have failed? If I don't extrapolate my morning oatmeal or evening ice-cream into a judgement on the human condition, should I feel guilty?

It reminds me of a subway ad I used to see all the time for a school of "applied philosophy." It seemed to imply that there is a lesson-planned way of escaping what it called "habitual existence." As opposed to "occasional existence?" I do like the idea that through philosophy I might be able to escape existing altogether, but I'm not sure that's what they meant. In any case, if I go a day without introspection, I'm going to feel guilty, but I probably shouldn't. Case in point.

some blinds in my life

W. 110th Street, Leawood, KS: Wooden Slats with nylon ropes, blue and white striped upholstered valence, double-hung, view of the driveway.

Jones College, Rice University, Houston: blue-tinted film over single-pane, overlooking courtyard under construction.

W 119th Street, Leawood KS: Some odd plastic/fabric hybrid shade, milky white, blocking a golf course.

North Blvd, Houston: Homemade muslin curtains, tea-dyed with tiny brown spots, vinyl with snap-in muntins, parking lot beyond.

37a Bedford, NY: none. flaking overpainted wooden frame with fan. brick courtyard.

Rue Taylor, Paris: fraying yellowed gauzy grandma-drapes, ancient full-height windows, third floor, rainsoaked asphalt.

Beethoven Street, Los Angeles: vertical blinds hidden by gold drapes with a red pattern that is sometimes flower shapes, sometimes intersecting circles. guava and limes, ferns and flowers and chainlink beyond.

portraiture and techno-beach

First off, Katy needed a quick portrait taken today, and I think I did a fabulous job:














Afterwards, we went to our new favorite beach, where Katy took this picture. Yes, our favorite beach is at the end of the LAX runway. Planes take off at predictable intervals: 2 1/2 minutes when it's not busy and around every 20 seconds when it is. Due to the magnetic effect of Manhattan and Venice Beaches (and the near-constant rumble), this little stretch gets very few visits, and that suits me just fine. Jetwash and wave action make a remarkably meditative sound combination, and watching steel float is sublime in a complementary way to endless saltwater and powdered seashell. Add in the distantly visible power plant, and a parade of barges and sailboats, and this it's like being in the jaws of some industrial recreative machine.

sounds:places

The White Album (esp. Back in the USSR) = my parent's old basement, with Mexican tile that was cool to the touch with rough grouting that tore at your feet.

Mid-Period REM = the upper half of my white laminate stereo cabinet in my old house. Acrid smell. Middle School.

Soul Coughing = My high school Volvo. At night.

First two Modest Mouse albums = my freshman year dorm's lofted bed.

Gang of Four = KTRU. 2am. Looking out the tiny window while eating a granola bar.

Allman Brothers = Katy's car, long road trips in the Western U.S.

Any This American Life Episode = any delicate model work involving tweezers. Overcaffeination.

Belle and Sebastien = See above

Built To Spill, Perfect from Now On = Dodge Neon, pine forest smell, windows open.

Neutral Milk Hotel = sublet apartment in Houston, neighbor would play Two Headed Boy at 2am on the piano and trumpet.

Johnny Cash = pretty much anywhere post-freshman year of college.

Velvet Underground = NYC (obvious but true)

Otis Redding = the kitchen in my current home.

I could go on but I think you get the point.

l'anniveraire pt 2: calculation

So I've eaten my cake, had my song, and now the next day it's time to reflect, right? My own personal New Year. I'm supposed to start paddling to Sweden. So to speak.

For this one I'm taking a raincheck. This year, aging is a constant process with no milestones. One cannot celebrate the incremental. One can only enjoy it.

l'anniversaire pt. 1: depression

Like most people that aren't angling for a dictatorship or corner office (or both, as I suppose the former would provide the latter), my first reaction to learning a person's age is to compare my position in life to theirs. Thus, when I discover that White Teeth was published when Zadie Smith when she was 25, brief existential panic ensues, but when I find out that Ira Glass was born in 1959 I calm back down. I sometimes think that I chose my profession because early fame is nearly nonexistent; architects are like novelists, "young" until 40. Actually, I prefer to think of architects as more like ninjas-- plenty of young hotshots, but nobody can beat the sensei (at least not without a long backstory and a longer showdown). And, many of us are bald, and we wear lots of black.

people detectors

My new book on infrastructure tells an easy way to discern between AC and DC high power lines:

"DC transmission lines sound quite different from AC ones. They click and crackle rather than buzz; the DC line sounds just like a Geiger counter. And when you walk under the conductors, the pace of the clicking accelerates, as if you were radioactive."

Forget cancer, or sterility, or even the pervasive hum. Our grid is watching us.

our dessicated past

So, if old novels and movies are to be trusted, in the time of our greatest generation people only drank two things: whisky and black coffee. I unfortunately can't remember back to a time when my psyche hadn't been aquafina'd-- after fuzzy mornings, sore throats and headaches, and more than a few hangovers that combined all three, any ailment that strikes must first be treated through an immediate water infusion. It's the modern equivalent of swinging a dead cat or butchering a goat over the local shrine. Beer and coffee are bad primarily for their water-depletion effects, not for any kind of liver damage or addictive qualities they might contain. I don't even drink any more. I hydrate. I have special containers that are not cups for storing water to drink, at work.

I feel that I am not alone in this. But if our grandparents got such a great collective nickname only drinking things that were brown and damaging, what are we achieving through a proper ion balance? Better skin?

There isn't really a good way of ending this post without an apology (of course water is good for you) or an absurdity (going on a diet that consists solely of hydrogenated oils thickened with refined sugar.) So I'm just going to fade out, imbibing equal quantities of my liquid trifecta: coffee, whiskey, and water. With any luck I'll look just like Walter Cronkite in a few years.

in the middle of our street

Our house, like many in Southern California, features a gas floor heater. It's a metal box of flame that heats and draws air in from beneath the house. At full blast it creates a small, hot, dry wind in the hallway outside of our bedroom.

Unlike a forced-air system, there is no return. Our heater is gently pressurizing our home, pushing warm gusts out the cracks around our windows and doors and making the water boil a tiny bit faster. A microclimate, complete with artificial light and sound, as our house hurtles through the cold silent dark.

idle speculation

I'd be willing to bet that the development of Disneyland and Los Angeles is roughly parallel. 1950's: both coming into existence with seas of parking surrounding points of attraction, obsession with automobiles, futurism, and eclecticism. Fifteen years later, a belated (and somewhat failed) attempt to add mass rail transportation in a spasm of progressive action, followed by a 10-year slow leak of belief in founding principles. 1990's, expansion through densification, as well as an increasingly self-aware critique of the California condition in general, but at the loss of any belief in futurity or progress. In recent years a partnership with other massive corporations and conglomerates to produce thrilling, controlled simulacra of urbanity, as well as a "rediscovery" and celebration of the mid-century roots.

The question is, which one is mirroring the other?

five reasons I like creamed frozen desserts

1. They're cold.

2. They rarely have any odor, so the flavor comes to you all at once, without a preview.

3. You eat them with spoons, but they are not liquid. The spoon is there more as a digging tool than a reservoir.

4. There is a point, however, where they liquefy in your mouth, usually between the palate and tongue, like the ice is letting go and preparing to be swallowed.

5. They take on the shape of whatever they're scooped or extruded with, but then slowly degrade through heat, gravity, and spoon attacks into a tiny bubbly swirly delicious animal.

stalling for time

This post-a-day thing is worrying me. It's a lot easier to apologise for spastic activity than to face up to the fact that you don't think of something thrilling to say every day (or really, ever).

So today, apologia:

My earlier post about the tentative nature of current music was all over the place. It didn't make a lot of sense to rail against appropriation and critical usage and then harp on the constructed nature of reality.

I guess my real problem is the same reason I wince, just slightly, when talking about Rural Studio: they do fantastic things for needy people, but I still can't quite get it out of my head that the work is partially condescending, finding the sublime in the savage or base. Like that Iron+Wine video where he stands in front of Super-8 footage of truck stops. There's an anthropological bent to it that seems a little too detachedto respect the subject. Once again, I don't want to suggest that RS is carpetbagging. Their work is commendable for the quality of design as well as the attention it draws to the forgotten. But I feel the question still needs to be asked: why experiment on these projects? What exactly is being communicated when using discarded car parts for homes for the irretrievably poor?

Okay, now I feel really guilty. I'm going to go drown some puppies to finish off this post.

what we paid for

Katy and I had dinner on the beach tonight, spur of the moment. Grapes and cheese and crackers on the sand. We talked about how we should try more often to make days different than the usual. "We should go to the beach more often," Katy said, "after all, this is Southern California. It's what we paid for."

Now, there are probably a lot of people that would exclaim against that statement, either in a reactionary/contrarian LA way or with some kind of honest rebuttal. "I'm not here for the ocean. I'm here for the art/money/glamour/vibe/food/energy/jobs/drugs/etc." And this might be partially true. But Katy never said anything about why we were here. Listen again. Hollywood studios, 16 million dollar homes, palm trees and international cusine and yes, the drugs-- they all come, in some way or another, from the coast. You see the allusions refracted deep into Pasadena, in the colors and street names and footwear.

All of which makes Los Angeles' denial of the ocean even more spectacular. At its formation it was an agricultural community, divorced from the beachfront resort towns at the perimiter by a few miles of scrub. But the growth came from the water, and now they are all one big mess, a mess in which topography and city planning has denied the very existence of a coastline from the Palisades to Manhattan Beach.

People in this city love to speak of the Valley as some sort of poor retarded younger sibling, one which always exceeds expectations (in its sushi, music, etc), if only because those expectations were rock bottom to begin with. But isn't greater Los Angeles just another valley, hot and dry, no water in sight? This is the kind of city defined by a lack of boundaries-- LA is never more LA than when the hills are shrouded by smog and the ocean a distant memory. In it's own dreams, Los Angeles seams together Jefferson and Sunset, Sepulveda and Atlantic, no edges and no reality save itself.

Just watched The Apartment with Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine. Movie date night is improved by half-century old romantic comedies. Usually. Here is a list of things that shocked me (other than how long it was. 2:20 is lengthy for 1960!)

1. Apparently every executive in Manhattan had a mistress fifty years ago.

2. They didn't print your name on perscriptions back then.

3. They had TV dinners, but no microwaves.

4. Jack Lemmon made 1/5 of my salary, but he paid 1/20 of my rent.

5. In Lemmon's office there was a 30ft section of wall devoted to overcoats and hats.

6. Rolodexes are faster than Outlook contacts.

7. Nobody who was somebody drank beer.

8. Office Christmas parties have been all but decimated in the last 20 years.

9. #8 probably has something to do with all of the mistresses. And the martinis.

10. In 1960, even though elevators had buttons, there were still women in white gloves to press those buttons.

stripmining your heritage

No, I am not going to harp on that accumulating mountain of refuse that each and every one of us should, according to scolding filmstrips, slowly be buried under, as punishment for its production. And I've already commented on the valuation of one's personal garbage long, long ago, in the first term of Bush.

Today it's simpler. Those things that are between the intrinsically valuable and abject rubbish, photo albums and aborted novels and, well, blogs-- how might one track their afterlife or affect? Think about the things you have touched that someone else attempted, things you should not throw away, cannot sell, and would elicit odd stares if displayed proudly on your end table. Your great-uncle's attempt at oil nudes. Old four-track recordings. And the steadily aggregating mass of letters and notes from people long gone that must now only accelerate and overwhelm in an age of archived electronic communication. Will our children be forced to comb through viagra advertisements and bill notifications to find the buried warmth of a love messaged to their mother?

I am thinking of a future in which the incredible mass of personal digital information grows to the point to which you can no longer peruse a dead relative's old possessions. They now must be mined. They will be sorted, catalogued automatically, and displayed using an application not unlike (perhaps the same as) itunesyoutubeflickr. Your grandchildren won't have access to your soul, but they will have 24 hour control over the collected sum of your experiences, aspirations, and frustrations. And you will have nothing to say about it.

eyes that only see once

Every time I come back to my house from a trip I attempt to see my neighborhood the way I saw it the first time I moved it - raucous, confusing, multivalent - but it always slips back into it's usual clothing as Home. It makes me nostalgic for early childhood, before I understood typology, when my stair was the only Stair, my TV the only TV. Going to a friends house produced the kind of culture shock now only attained through international travel: you mean this is dinner? You have two dogs? Your basement floor is concrete?

Eventually my friends places became as recognisable as my own, and school, and the mall, home creeping out to eventually encompass most of the city itself, and now parts of New York, San Diego, Houston, Los Angeles, Boston, San Francisco, and Paris. As my domestic geography grows, the perimeter gets farther and farther away, but also longer, such that it is harder to find something with the shock of the new, but should I decide to make that trek, my options are nearly unlimited.

yee-haw

I've posted about cowboy boots before. But I've been listening to Palace Bonnie Prince Oldham and it's got my hackles up.

As I write, the trucker-hipster backlash is almost complete. The meshback hats are inthe trash, the creative facial hair diminishing, and I would hesitate before blowing a wad on expensive aviators. But whatever mindset produced this obsession with ironic americana/fetishized ruggedness is still there. And I know where it came from. That fucker Andy Warhol.

I'm not going to say that rock music was in a state of innocence before the Factory; to do so would subvert the entire point of this entry. In any case, even Warhol hadn't been around, Jagger would have probably gotten some ideas from a phD at some fancy party, or the Band would have written an essay. But somewhere in the transition between the 60's and 70's, the gentle carpetbagging that is rock-and-roll was introduced to High Art.

All of a sudden, ideas were framed, purity was sought, and references had to be oblique. Concept was discussed. Not plural, singular. The vocabulary and mindset of the avant garde was adopted and became so ubiquitous that now it is a forgotten piece of DNA, one that recombinates, hides away, and occasionally resurfaces as a congenital defect.

So, while Nashville is churning out countryish pop songs that attempt wide appeal, it's the indie musicians that have decided to become curators of americana. They're desperatly attempting to collage together "pure" music from an imagined world of noble country savages that played for higher ideals, ideals that maybe we could mine for potential. We're all complicit; somewhere along the line we forgot that we are constructing culture every day and we started essentializing, purfying, relying on taste rather than feel. Yes, even you, Sufjan, although most of it is hidden under genuine talent. Producing a pop song becomes more and more like curating your last.fm account, attempting to prove your credibility through reduction to a fixed Truth.

Come on, people. The dude with the bullet hole decals on his back window could tell you that even things like Truth and Manliness and Purity are constructed. If you scrape away all of the context and bullshit, most of the time you're not left with much to work from, except a nice footnote or excerpt that will prove your cred for one more day. I'm sick of diminishing returns. Quit making "critical" music and kick some ass, right now.

the middle middle

My recently photo-obsessed wife has been spending her surplus minutes at work listening to photo podcasts, reading photo blogs, and otherwise living the photographic life. After a week of immersive research into the world of amateur and semi-professional picture taking, this is the verdict:

"It seems that there is room for mediocrity in every medium."

I feel like she has declared the sum total of my twentysomething epiphanies before they are even over. This seems to be what the working world says in compensation to the fact that I am not instantly famous and loved: "you may not be on top, but you are still substantially above average, mainly because the average appears to be far beneath your initial assumptions."

But what does it mean to be mediocre? In today's world, it means to be connected, to inhabit forums and comment pages and to bathe in a constant flow of advice given and recieved. Yes, indeed, to be mediocre is to have friends. And in my slow decent into the median, from my Rice University diving board, this is what I will look forward to-- losing the pretention, talking to people, and making some friends. So what if their pictures are ugly?

the floors of my youth

I grew up on a wide variety of cheap carpets. At home we had only a rough looped beige pile or budget astroturf, but as I soon found out, there was an unexplored world of textiles outside my door.

At school it was the gym. Yes, the gym. Dodgeball and tag were performed on a flooring too thin to prevent a bruise and yet just abrasive enough to remove the outer layers of skin in enormous curls if slid upon. As an added bonus, it collected an amazing palimpsest of smells that would be released just as our stretching exercises began, my face inches away.

There was the church basement, patterned in such a way that one felt drawn into tracing the lines with short steps, endlessly making 30 degree turns and bumping into friendly strangers. It was matched poorly at the seams, revealing to me that while god had infinite power, our church sometimes missed the details.

There was the flowers and fruit at the family-friendly pizza restaurant. Confetti and streamers at the arcade. And the mysterious piles at the houses of playmates, hiding the grit and dust of other people, yielding to my exploration as we laid facedown on the beanbag chairs, our foreheads on the floor.

As suburban American progeny, I can only imagine what it would have been like to grow up on the narrow wood planks of Manhattan, or Mexican tile, or the earth of some third world country. My floors were soft and cocooning, absorbent of moisture and sound, forgiving. I could be careless about how I fell to the floor in front of the TV, picking at the threads beneath, listening to the slight noise as it gave beneath my fingers.

new beginnings

Okay.

My wife has started a daily photo blog, partially to work on her craft but primarily just as a daily record. Inspired (and threatened) by her daily output, I am now vowing to produce some tangible output every single day, perhaps with some lamely excused exceptions. For instance, I thought up this post yesterday.

So.

Without further notice, a new post-- a possible introduction to the soon-to-be- Urban Ecologies website, compliments of the Rice Design Alliance.

MASS CUSTOMIZATION + POPULAR DESIGN = PROJECTIVE URBANISM

While the idea of "mass customization" has saturated industrial and product design, and is increasingly present in architectural treatises, it is surprising that this particular synthesis of sustainability, technology, and advanced capitalism has not been applied to urban design. When combined with a community-based design (a process that has been utilized from IDEO to Teddy Cruz), it acts as a catalyst, matching and responding to the critiques of the users/citizens/populace. By taking easily produced materials, forms, and programming and adjusting them to a specific existing condition, they begin to take on another level of meaning. Their activiation by the surrounding community enhances the overall quality of the space, and gives the area a cultural meaning that it had not possessed before. In other words, a park cannot act as all things to everyone, but it can be many things to a pretty big crowd.

The following pages will track the process of projective urbanism from creation to application. The first stage adopts multiple existing infrastructures and dissects into their basic parts. It divides their existing conditions from the strategies applied by individuals and communities, in order to evaluate each case study as a whole. These conditions and strategies are then codified and organized into a non-hierarchical set of ideas and rules to drive the development of our assigned site forward.

The strategies abstracted by the previous exercise are then applied to a chosen local context. Under a new set of surrounding influences, these ideas and rules can begin to bring a new meaning to the site. By combining and blending these strategies into new hybrid forms, we can begin to project new programming onto the site. With simple gestures this area can have a radical transformation into a functional urban space.

The site chosen, the Pierce elevated, is situated with in a pivotal section of the Houston urban landscape. The elevated freeway occupies the northern half of multiple city blocks along Pierce Street. The Pierce Street, below, shadows the freeway above, and intensifies the boundary created between downtown and midtown. The freeway now acts as a roof over a desolate expanse of parking. Frequently inhabited and abandoned by transients, the area underneath the freeway has no purpose, and acts only as a barrier between two neighborhoods.


[There is supposed to be an ending to this. I am sure it will come later.]

Theory vs Practice

In recent years, the attention given to city infrastructure and “terrain vague” conditions has reached a boiling point. This has constituted a kind of worldwide panoply of freeway architecture- not only in theses but in the chic world of high-gloss car-commercial starchitecture. We have buildings next to the freeway, buildings under the freeway, buildings over the freeway, buildings for the freeway, and particularly, buildings that mimic the freeway. Programs that were never meant to be linear are stretched to the breaking point. Asphalt, as it was in Gehry’s house, is now not only a material but a critique.

It is astounding that, given this seemingly universal concentration in the profession, that none of the innovation has traveled into the realm of the lay city. Other infrastructure has been reclaimed readily—docks, piers, canals, warehouses, aqueducts, power plants—but these are not only usually scenic to begin with but almost always derelict. Freeways, on the other hand, not only lack the romantic quality of an industrial ruin, but are already occupied, and hostile or even deadly to occupation.

The actual practice of freeway architecture seems currently to be one of camouflage. Cities that can afford to simply put them under the ground. Cities that can’t have found ever-better ways to screen them away, from murals and sound-walls to new greenery. This vast divide between theory and practice deserves investigation. The vast majority of sub-freeway rehabilitations are borderline failures. If we do not codify and evaluate existing strategies, no real innovation will take place in 99% of the relevant urban conditions. Not every city can afford a “big dig”.

What if it has been all wrong? What if these spaces are not only habitable but pleasant? Why, in all of the bluster about reversing CIAM urbanism, has nobody made a case for the inclusion of infrastructure in mixed-use zoning? And why on earth can’t we reverse freeway tropes, and create a space that unifies and delights? Underpasses are high-traffic, well-known, pre-roofed areas that are owned out-right by the public. They exist in every city in the world. And they are the greatest fallow urban resource we have.

houston nesting pt2: application

Engineered infrastructure is not often designed for its aesthetic
qualities. In striving for a local efficiency, these structures' forms
are produced almost incidentally-- or at the very least not in
accordance with aesthetic demands.

For most systems, their effect is diffused by being difficult to
access or hidden behind screens (or under the ground), but in some
cases necessity or shee size demands that they be placed in a
relatively "open" space. If these systems are also linear, they
produce a pervasive, inevitable and some what uncontrollable effect
upon a city.

The traditional model for interfacing with infrastructure has been one
of separation and screening, leading often to a quixotic denial of
their urban presence. This also forces these linear systems into
boundary roles, dividing a city into distinct regions (fig 1).

However, given the long history of engineering and urbanism coexisting
or eveing being mutually catalytic (aqueducts trade routes canals
rail lines etc) a more inclusive method must exist.

:::Analogy:::

A tree's form is deterministic much as a freeway or bayou's is; the
various requirements of sunlight, water, soil and wind qualify the
locations of leaves, branches and roots. Despite this, forests form
less of a horizontal barrier than a verticial delimination of multiple
ecologies (fig 2), where canopy, sub canopy, and forest floor are made
into viable habitats through the intermediate form of a nest-- a
sub-assembly that corrects or augments the deficiencies of the
immediate environment to produce a viable home.

What would this nest be for humans be, if it was not in the forest but
under the freeway, and not for habitation but for recreation?

houston nesting pt1: a sense of place

This is output for a research project I've been working on with Katy and Jean. We were discussing with Clover Lee possibilites for creating a compendium of Houston ad-hoc urbanism and she told us we weren't allowed to use the phrase "sense of place" without defining what it mean, in Houston. This is what I came up with, in three parts:

1. Main Narrative

In Houston, place is not created out of a physical homogeneity or
dominant spatial characteristic; rather it emerges out of a shifting
array of collusions between program and what Lars Lerup calls
"megastructures"-- part infrastructure, part ecosystem. These
multivalent operators create space in ways more geological or
ecological than traditionally urban. In this way Houston can be viewed
as a landscape rather than as a city. Edges are blurred, as the
immediate situation is determined by the combination/collusion of
these megastructures: the freeways, plantings, vacant lots, and ad-hoc
use networks, along with even the prevalent humidity and drainage
problems-- a more elemental than sociological awareness.


2. Operators / Megastructures

LINEAR INFRASTRUCTURES
freeways (bridged and trenched) bayous main drags train right of ways
tunnels sewers

ECOLOGIES
swamps live oak canopies weeds cut lawns anthills city parks stray dogs

POINT LOADS
skyscrapers vacant lots megabuildings/complexes (stadiums + churches)
parking lots

USE DISTRICTS
museums tattoo parlors coffee shops business districts entertainment
shopping education civic

WEATHER
rain haze flood smoke heat chill/damp



3. Subsequent Definition: the Manipulation of Accessible Space

Nearly all space in Houston can be defined as private. However, there
are allowances. These range from the open (Menil) to the highly
perscriptive (the Galleria). However, there are always backwaters
within these systems of access, urban liminal zones with an ambiguous
sense of ownership-- someone is surely watching, but do they care? The
characterization of space by its mode of survallience and control has
replaced the notion of civic discourse through open public spaces.
This is not only in Houston. Even in more traditionally urban cities
such as New York, city parks and streets are policed and controlled
more tightly and delicately than ever before, reducing the idea of the
"public" to another nuance of access control. The traditional notion
of a "free space," in our fearful and litigious society, may have
become totally apocryphal.


Up next: pulling apart a moment?

post-nuptials

So there have been no posts to this website since july. I'm going to go ahead and cop out and say this is because I was planning and carrying out a wedding for the last six months, but I'm sure my own inertia had quite a bit do do with that. So before I digress, a few words on marriage:

1. The phrase "emotional roller-coaster" is redundant. Honestly, what you are buying when you get a ticket for a roller-coaster is emotion. Boredom, anticipation, fear, excitment and nostalgic depression, in about that order. So really, what I experienced over the last few months leading up to the Big Day was simply a non-kinetic roller coaster-- an expensive one, but one that lasted for a very long time (and had a pretty awesome giant hill and loop-de-loop at the end.) And the first thing you want to do after it's done? Do it again, of course.

2. I didn't really feel Sunday Post, family-sitcom married for a little while after the actual wedding. The moment when it finally settled in was, in retrospect, typical. Like lots of people that are fairly picky and nerdy about pop music, I'm a sucker for a sappy love song. I'm convinced that people can't really get obsessed with an art from unless it has a somewhat primal, uncontrollable lock on their emotional state. Movies can't really make me cry. Otis Redding can. The song in question here was quite possibly the most red-faced, snot-on-your sleeve blubbering piece of guitar-and-vocals that exists on this planet. I'm not going to invoke the name, but suffice it to say that it was written by Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie. I'm pretty sure this guy cries putting his socks on in the morning. We (my wife and I) were picking appropriately emotional music for our wedding video. We settled on half Ray Charles, half Death Cab, figuring that if people didn't get it out of one of those barrels, the other one would have them covered. The trifecta was finished by a Willie Nelson coda. The combined emotion of all of these songs, picked out whilst sharing a desk chair with my new wife, my dog at my side, lights low, was about as close as I will get to Norman Rockwell subject matter. It was unabashedly wholesome, and while I am putting a somewhat snide tone on it now, at the time I am proud to say I felt no irony whatsoever. Right then I knew I was married, and that it was a good thing.