August 2007 – Page 3

50 manifestos

The manifestos that I posted about last week are now online at Icon: 50 manifestos for a 50th issue.
So click on over and read manifestos by Rem Koolhaas

(“Europe is doing almost ridiculously well. We fly for next to nothing, we have the highest quality prisons, Europe gave us millions of new friends, Frisian Lakes are maintained in order, sewers that ruined the most beautiful beaches are gone, the Spanish countryside is now a polished backdrop for whizzing high-speed trains”)

and Bruce Mau

(“So long as architects self-marginalise by purposely excluding the business of development and its real burden of complexity and decision making from their education, from their business, architecture will remain a gentleman’s weekend culture, unwilling or unable to take on the heavy lifting and big problems, happy to polish fancy baubles for our urban entertainment”)

and Sam Jacob

and a press release by Joshua Prince-Ramus and an ad for an event by Hans Ulrich Obrist and some crap by BLDGBLOG

(“Everything is relevant to architecture – from plate tectonics and urban warfare to astronomy and the melting point of steel. There is architecture lining the streets of New York and Paris, sure – but there is architecture in the novels of Franz Kafka and W.G. Sebald and in The Odyssey. There is architecture on stage at the Old Vic each night, and in the paintings of de Chirico, and in the secret prisons of military superpowers. There is architecture in our dreams, poems, TV shows, ads and videogames – as well as in the toy sets of children. The suburbs are architecture; bonded warehouses are architecture; slums are architecture; NASA’s lunar base plans are architecture – as are the space stations in orbit [above] us”)

along with more manifestos by Peter Saville

(“Pop culture used to be like LSD – different, eye-opening and reasonably dangerous. It’s now like crack – isolating, wasteful and with no redeeming qualities whatsoever”)

and Bernard Khoury

(“Relevant architecture should not be limited to exceptional programs such as schools, corporate headquarters of international companies, museums, and public libraries”)

and Vito Acconci

(“…if people can’t ‘get’ the buildings we make, then those buildings are meant to appear as a force of nature, and we expect from people only belief”)

and Paola Antonelli

(“I consider design the highest expression of human creativity because it is concise and distilled. I am baffled that the world does not yet understand not only how important, but also how tremendously engrossing and entertaining design is”)

and Steven Holl

(“At the beginning of the 21st century, architecture can be the most effective instrument for reconstructing the relations between our species and the earth”)

and Philippe Rahm

(“Architecture has to generate new nature in this artificial global environment”)

and Jasper Morrison

(“Design, which used to be almost unknown as a profession, has become a major source of pollution. Encouraged by glossy lifestyle magazines and marketing departments, it’s become a competition to make things as noticeable as possible by means of colour, shape and surprise. Its historic and idealistic purpose, to serve industry and the happy consuming masses at the same time, of conceiving things easier to make and better to live with, seems to have been side-tracked. The virus has already infected the everyday environment. The need for businesses to attract attention provides the perfect carrier for the disease”)

and so on…
So check it out.

About twenty minutes after writing the previous post, I felt my first earthquake out here in L.A. It had a magnitude of 4.6, with an epicenter near Chatsworth; it struck at 12:58am local time; and it’s being referred to as “Event 14312160.”
Check out the official shake map of that experience.
Our apartment trembled for a few seconds – as if a large, but totally silent, truck was rumbling by – before the building, which is on stilts, sort of jolted.
That was it.

One or two nights in the Sodium Hotel

[Image: Bolivia’s salt hotel; photographed by Jose Luis Quintana/Reuters].

Ten years ago this month, I took a Polish-language tour of a salt mine outside Kraków – because, at the bottom of the mine, there was a church made from salt.
It was carved from the walls of the mine itself.
That increasingly distant and somewhat surreal experience – I don’t speak a word of Polish, and everyone on the tour was from Austria – came to mind when I read about a new salt hotel in Bolivia.
It’s a hotel made from salt.
According to National Geographic, the hotel is “constructed solely of salt blocks on the white plains of the Salar de Uyuni in southwestern Bolivia.” The Salar de Uyuni is the world’s largest salt desert. Until tourists began visiting it, however, “the only inhabitants of the chilly, harsh region were salt miners, who still extract 25,000 tons of salt annually from the 10 billion tons available.”
I know at least this writer is curious if they’ll someday build an exact, to-scale replica of the city of Edinburgh: shining there, in the Andean heat, with white cubic walls, the city will then be shaved down – bit by bit, brick by brick – and drunk with shots of tequila. You can salt your chips with it.
Or perhaps architectural enthusiasts will forego the Snow Show… and buy tickets to Bolivia, instead: the Salt Show.
Mineral pavilions designed by Zaha Hadid. Sodium towers by OMA.

(Via Super Colossal and Boing Boing).

Infrastructure is patriotic

[Image: Photo by Allen Brisson-Smith for The New York Times].

After yesterday’s bridge collapse in Minneapolis – a bridge my sister and her family drove across everyday – the decaying state of American infrastructure is becoming all the more apparent.
Last month it was an exploding steam pipe in Manhattan; a few years ago it was the levees of southern Louisiana; and anyone who drives a car in the U.S. has probably noticed that the roads here are not particularly well-kept. The sheer number of potholes in the city of Philadelphia, for instance, was enough to convince me, only half-jokingly, that if the city was not going to spend any money fixing the streets, then they should at least help underwrite repair bills for all the broken axles, blown suspensions, and sometimes major fender benders caused by the city’s rather obvious display of custodial irresponsibility.

[Image: Photo by Jeff Wheeler/The Star Tribune/AP; via The Guardian].

In any case, The New York Times opines today that these system-wide failures “are an indication that this country is not investing enough in keeping its vital infrastructure in good repair.”

Transportation officials know many of the nation’s 600,000 bridges are in need of repair or replacement. About one in eight has been deemed “structurally deficient,” a term that typically means a component of the bridge’s structure has been rated poor or worse, but does not necessarily warn of imminent collapse.
Most deficient bridges, which included the span of Interstate 35W over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis, remain open to traffic.

Worse, 13.6 percent of U.S. bridges – i.e. more than 81,000 bridges – are “functionally obsolete.”

[Image: Photo by Heather Munro/The Star Tribune/AP; via The Guardian].

Ironically, only six days ago the Federal Highway Administration announced a $5.3 million grant program meant to stimulate and reward innovative research in bridge repair and design.
“Nearly $5.3 million in grants will be awarded to bridge projects in 25 states to help develop new technologies to speed bridge construction and make them safer,” we read on the FHA website.
None of those grants will be going to Minnesota.

[Images: Photos courtesy of The New York Times].

It’s interesting to point out, then, that the Federal Highway Administration’s annual budget appears to be hovering around $35-40 billion a year – and, while I’m on the subject, annual government subsidies for Amtrak come in at slightly more than $1 billion. That’s $1 billion every year to help commuter train lines run.
To use but one financial reference point, the U.S. government is spending $12 billion per month in Iraq – billions and billions of dollars of which have literally been lost.
Infrastructure is patriotic.
There is no reason to question the political loyalties of those who would advocate spending taxpayer dollars on national infrastructure – from highway bridges and railway lines to steam pipes, levees, electrical lines, and subway tunnels – instead of on military adventures abroad.
Four months of foreign war would be enough to double the annual budget for the Federal Highway Administration – if that’s what one would choose to spend the money on – taking care of quite a few of those 81,000+ bridges which are still open to traffic and yet “functionally obsolete.”
Perhaps the best way to be “pro-American” these days is to lobby for modern, safe, and trustworthy infrastructure – and the economic efficiencies to which that domestic investment would lead.
At the risk of promoting a kind of isolationist infrastructural nationalism, I’d say that urban design and engineering is a sadly under-appreciated – yet incredibly exciting – way to serve your country.

Ant Urbanism

Ant Farm Future Australians perplexed by the design of their cities might have ants to blame: “The movement of ants could help solve traffic jams and crowd congestion, Australian scientists say, and the findings could be used in future town planning systems.”
Indeed, we’re told, “Humans could learn from ants about how to deal with… exiting large venues after concerts or sporting events.” Eat grass, for instance, and dig lots of orderly holes.
Apparently, whilst being studied, “ants moved in an orderly fashion, and never seemed to panic, even when there was danger or congestion.”
In any case: do ants offer interesting analogies and parallels for fields such as robotics? I’m sure they do.
But I have to admit I’m a bit skeptical when it comes to using ant behavior as a model for urban design; something tells me ants act like ants because they’re ants, and that to rebuild our cities and streets so that the built environment responds best to those of us who might act like ants might be artistically fascinating – but perhaps a little foolish.

(Thanks, Steve! Previously on BLDGBLOG: Tracking Ants and Nest-casting. See also inhuman urbanism, animal urbanism, and simian urbanism).