Slightly different content for this blog, my catalogue text for the ‘co-isolated’ exhibition here in Sydney. Work by David Burns, Richard Goodwin and Michael Snape. More info here: UTSArchitecture
Aesthetic k-hole
David Burns is a junkie for repetition; his work is an aesthetic k-hole.
Ketamine is an anaesthetic; pharmaceutically speaking it belongs to the class of drugs known as dissociatives which operate by blocking signals to the brain. According to frequent users, the slight overdose called a ‘k-hole’ is the closest one can get to death without actually dying, its effects include an inability to think, extreme tunnelling of vision and an overwhelming sense of cold dread. If ecstasy is a ‘tactile temptress’ full of baroque intricacy, ketamine is pure Miesien box.
Towering.
Lights on.
No one inside.
David Burns is a junkie for repetition; his work is an anaesthetic for the ecstasy generation, a generation hooked on sensational intensity.
There is something terrifyingly destructive about insistent repetition. It lays waste to our sense making apparatus, annihilates coordinates of reference and etherizes the self to the point of oblivion. In this infinitesimal calculus of sensation, cold mechanical repetition reveals itself as nothing less than the affective DNA of modernity itself.
The thin white lines.
The cold corridors.
The rectilinear banks of fluorescent light.
No one inside.
It’s the closest you can get to death.
The figuration of waste
Foam works by absorption – the absorption of loss.
To require insulation, one must first conceive of something that must be isolated from threat (or insulated from loss). Foam conditions one environment against another, to do this it deploys a form filling fluid of atomized elements. Weak molecular bonds and pockets of air prevent the exchange of heat, the transfer of sound and the impact of force.
In this piece by Michael Snape we see the outlines of a community to come, a community of those who share the same waste (and air). For in the manipulation of one we produce the other.
In mere blocks of insulation; from which half carved bodies are splayed and contort we find a paradoxical form of contemporary life – the intimacy of anonymous material.
These figures are anonymous and mute.
They oscillate between the arcing gesture of a drawing and the excavation of depth from foam; barely held, barely suspended.
Barely together.
Co-isolated.
Co-insulated.
Since contemporary life is marked by the atomization of individuals – by the diffusion of bonds that bind elementary particles into something more substantial, more collective – foam comes to form its archetypal metaphor, its bonds are temporary.
It offers little resistance.
The wasp and the orchid
According to Immanuel Kant, we do not own our sexual organs.
Our genitals can only belong to another who has given us their organs in return.
In this reciprocal exchange of parts, a carefully delimited part of the body – the reproductive apparatus – is understood to take on a partial autonomy from the other parts that make up the person. Though all beings are equal in their capacity to reason and self-legislate, this capacity does not apply to all parts of beings equally. The sex organs take on exceptional status.
Certain types of wasps are parts in the ‘reproductive apparatus’ of orchids.
That is to say some orchids have wasps for genitals.
These orchids feature iridescent plumage ringed in small hair-like fibres that repeat the morphological and chemical character of female wasps. The sex drive of insects drives the genetic differentiation of plant life. Male wasps are endlessly falling in love with orchids.
The partial autonomy of parts detected by Kant finds one conclusion in the monstrous couplings of different species; it finds another in the coupling of bodies and things- that is, in the art of the prosthetic
For Richard Goodwin, this prosthetic solicitation begins with the sewer, in which the digestive tract and anus are connected to a network of tubes at the scale of a city. On other occasions the skin is de-laminated into a carapace the flesh is torn to cloth and an entire ensemble of exfoliated objects –rickshaws, bikes and moths – reassemble into disturbing couplings.
That is to say, some machines have autonomous limbs for parts.
Passengers play cards as they sit in a compartment of a bullet train undergoing a test at the new railway station in Wuhan. Photo: AFP
From SMH: “China is in negotiations with 17 countries to build a high-speed rail network to India and Europe with trains capable of running at more than 320 km/h within the next 10 years.
One network would run from London to Beijing and then to Singapore, according to Wang Mengshu, a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering.
A second project would carry trains through Russia to Germany and into the European railway system, and a third line would extend south to connect Vietnam, Thailand, Burma and Malaysia.”
I apologise for the lack of posting lately, my colleagues and I are in the middle of guest editing an issue of Architectural Design entitled post-traumatic urbanism to be released this year in September. I will keep you filled in with some more details as we get closer to the date. At the moment, these deadlines have kept me away from posting here for quite some time. It makes for a busy time of year with the AD and the start of the school term for this year happening this week. Speaking of which our school (UTS) has launched a website – still in its embryonic stages but you can find it here: http://www.utsarchitecture.net/.
The following post is my attempt to use some of the reading on trauma I have been doing lately to construct an account of trauma at the personal level. Since the blog is called post-traumatic urbanism (we will get to the ‘post’ and ‘urban’ bits more in the near future) and has been around for over a year now I thought a post on trauma might be relevant…
Trauma.
Our sensory apparatus and capacity for sense making is constructed over time through the action of repetition and habit. Every day we are provoked and lured by problems to which we gradually learn to adapt. This slow accumulation of impressions shapes our conception of the world and the potential of our agency within it.
Both evolutionary history and personal experience prime us to prepare ourselves for uncertainty in different ways. Each adopts a disposition or stance towards the future that draws on remembered progressions of both regular and exceptional events and their aftermath. The contractile in-gathering of memories orients out in a projectile vision of the future. There is a sort of symmetry here that insinuates itself in the present – since both memory and anticipation are structured around mirrored repetitions.
These events – which form the fundamental structuring stimuli of our sensory apparatus and capacity for sense making, fall within a certain range or bandwidth of duration and intensity. Over time this seemingly random scattering of events begins to exhibit forms of regularity. The condensation of points around certain types of attractors reveals patterns of solicitation and response that we use to regulate our expectations of change. There is a connective synthesis at work here, a sort of rhythmic entrainment where processes of feedback and re-inforcement begin to strengthen the bonds between constellations of points.
These collections of events – the points that form the contours of our experiential landscape – describe a dynamic, complex, open system whose remarkable capacity for adaptation emerges out of the tension between the economies of repetition and the provocation of difference. If our tendencies tend to harden and our pre-dispositions tend to ossify it is mostly because a little risk has more evolutionary advantage than too much or none at all. It’s why fear is such a potent and yet inherently conservative motor for action. And it precisely why one should be wary of all those who are parasitic on crisis and feed on insecurity.
It is not the intention here to uncover the archaeological history of these repetitions that so organise our present – this has been carried out before, rather it is to simply point out that this distribution describes a more or less delimited space or terrain and most importantly that the limits and topography of this space structure our capacity to absorb or locate new events as they arise. Because we rely on past events to calculate future ones, and because the sum total of our experience cannot exhaust the sum total of all possible experience, a space opens up beyond the horizons of our conceptual geography, a gap between what is historically accumulated and what is in fact possible. Beyond this horizon is we find only the incalculable silence of as yet unnameable events .
The sting in history’s tail is the profound unreliability of the past as a test for the future. The traumatic event is unheralded and unprecedented. It arrives unrecognisably and without warning, an inassimilable event that shatters the very coordinates of our experiential landscape, leaving us adrift on a sea of excessive sensation. In the moment of trauma you becomes a foreigner in your own psychic landscape, a hopeless intruder in an unfamiliar land. Trauma then becomes a sort of metabolic problem for the psyche (as in Freud), a foreign disturbance that cannot be reabsorbed/located/integrated and thus discharged. (And this is why it is always difficult to think that trauma might be explained through a discourse of facts and names since trauma is what must –at first – exceed all representation). Adorno makes this point famously with regards to Auschwitz but in some sense it is true for trauma as such since ‘the event’ is never exhausted in the mere fact of its naming and description.
Trauma forms an epistemological blind spot, a limit space behind which all known experience recedes. This is why there is another name for trauma; the new. In some sense the traumatic event is new – only excessively so. The way human anticipation works, the way it leans slightly forward means we can sort of guess, make a small leap, infer, intuit. When this intuition is not true and yet still falls within a qualitative series that we recognise, it feels like a surprise (potentially a pleasant one), when it is not true and arrives from outside of any recognisable space the event places the system under an intolerable strain. Trauma is therefore tied to futurity and expectation, it names a space between that moment when our image of the future is destroyed but before it has been replaced.
What is already all too clear, however, is the fact that this impact will be the result of an even longer-term history of deliberate impoverishment and disempowerment. Haiti is routinely described as the “poorest country in the western hemisphere“. This poverty is the direct legacy of perhaps the most brutal system of colonial exploitation in world history, compounded by decades of systematic postcolonial oppression.
The noble “international community” which is currently scrambling to send its “humanitarian aid” to Haiti is largely responsible for the extent of the suffering it now aims to reduce. Ever since the US invaded and occupied the country in 1915, every serious political attempt to allow Haiti’s people to move (in former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s phrase) “from absolute misery to a dignified poverty” has been violently and deliberately blocked by the US government and some of its allies.
Aristide’s own government (elected by some 75% of the electorate) was the latest victim of such interference, when it was overthrown by an internationally sponsored coup in 2004 that killed several thousand people and left much of the population smouldering in resentment. The UN has subsequently maintained a large and enormously expensive stabilisation and pacification force in the country.
Haiti is now a country where, according to the best available study, around 75% of the population “lives on less than $2 per day, and 56% – four and a half million people – live on less than $1 per day”. Decades of neoliberal “adjustment” and neo-imperial intervention have robbed its government of any significant capacity to invest in its people or to regulate its economy. Punitive international trade and financial arrangements ensure that such destitution and impotence will remain a structural fact of Haitian life for the foreseeable future.
It is this poverty and powerlessness that account for the full scale of the horror in Port-au-Prince today. Since the late 1970s, relentless neoliberal assault on Haiti’s agrarian economy has forced tens of thousands of small farmers into overcrowded urban slums. Although there are no reliable statistics, hundreds of thousands of Port-au-Prince residents now live in desperately sub-standard informal housing, often perched precariously on the side of deforested ravines. The selection of the people living in such places and conditions is itself no more “natural” or accidental than the extent of the injuries they have suffered.
The relationship between capital expansion and conflict is not just parasitic it is symbiotic. As Naomi Klein explains clearly in The Shock Doctrine, the phenomena of what she terms ‘disaster capitalism’ does more than respond to trauma or crisis – it actively seeks to create the conditions for it. In doing so it establishes a fertile environment for a massive transfers of wealth and privatisation under the auspices of reform. This link is entirely lost in this piece from the New York Times by David Brooks. Read it for yourself and you might imagine that the Israeli high tech economy is thriving despite the conflict not because of it. In other words Gaza forms a crucial component of the cluster in that it has become the ‘live’ laboratory in which these security technologies are tested.
“Israel now has a classic innovation cluster, a place where tech obsessives work in close proximity and feed off each other’s ideas… Tel Aviv has become one of the world’s foremost entrepreneurial hot spots. Israel has more high-tech start-ups per capita than any other nation on earth, by far. It leads the world in civilian research-and-development spending per capita.”
I wanted to thank mammoth for some thought provoking feedback regarding the relationship between the studios ambitions and the work, which are characterised as having a sort of tension where the rhetoric does not align with its imagined image. It made me wonder what this sort of rhetoric is ‘meant’ to look like, it’s a great question, one we spent incredible amounts of time thinking and talking about since it bears upon some rather touchy subjects (namely aesthetics) < see I even had to bracket it.
I guess that mammoth is surprised that some of the work evokes a particular strain of modern DNA (Constant) – well to be perfectly honest we were as well.
The first thing to discuss is the images; I should take the projects separately, the “Diversity Machine and Resilient System” takes a classical modernist diagram (the pin wheel) and uses it to create a gradient condition which grows out from around transport nodes. The second by Erik Escalante and Alina McConnochie uses parametric typological families (like Greg Lynn’s cutlery set but 8-15 storeys and inhabitable) that modulate climate and lean together to form collective clusters which are staged in discreet patches. The third project reproduced below takes the street/lane organisation of a souk and cross fertilises it with a campus style aggregation of buildings and park on top.
In each case the projects present some strategic argument about urbanism through the frame of the brief articulated as some concrete outcome which is imaged as finished or complete.
There are two ways to approach this sense of completeness; one is to say the completeness is not central to the project, i.e. the intelligence/value lies somewhere else (say in the argument about redundancy) and that the projects should just be read as codifications of design intent (this was the argument by Marcus Trimble and Brian Zulaikha on the crit), the other approach is to assert that yes they are actually proposals that are meant to look ‘exactly like this’ but then to understand that the proposal is only ever a provocation to others.
The fear of this last approach is usually entangled with a distrust of master-planning. The success or failure of master-planning is always understood as measured against the degree of implementation. But what if we understand a master-plan as only an incitement to conversation rather than the conclusion of one (a good friend had a much more eloquent way of putting this but his formulation escapes me)? In this case we acknowledge that our concrete proposals for projects that are meant to look ‘exactly-like-this’ exist in a highly contingent world whose outcome we do not control – but (and this is the important point) this does not stop us proposing them since we are fully aware that the actual project will emerge from a long drawn out process of negotiation with countless stakeholders..
The question of contingency and control that mammoth rightly brings up is critical here. I admit to having a slightly ambivalent attitude towards contingent phenomena given that my entire master’s research was on emergence. (Actually I recall Slavoj Zizek had the best example of autopoiesis, he said that Michael Hardt told him that the during the anti-globalisation protests at Porto Alegre there was a spontaneous emergence of VIP rooms. Excellent.). I won’t go into the details here but, over time, I find there something increasingly unsettling and self-reflexive about absorbing the ‘lack-of-control-to-come’ into design processes in advance as it were… as if there isn’t enough contingency in the world already. Actually I am all for autopoiesis, it just works better combined with ruthlessly tyrannical mastery.
The final thought: If the work evokes a certain moment in modernity, maybe it is because we want to resuscitate it. We are still modern and so the failed project of modernity must be repeated …one more time with feeling or as Beckett says, we must fail, fail again, fail better. Maybe what happens when modernity fails is that it develops a parasitic relationship to crisis, it feeds on it like some compulsion to repeat, a paranoid defence mechanism that must continually replay what it fears most (big plans and superblocks) while the certain future of failure gets pre-emptively absorbed into our calculations for the present.
All images showing work by TEAM DUTCH (Line Danielsen, Natalie Haydon, Gerwin Heidemann, Judith Verdult)
THE AMBIGUOUS POLITICS OF INFRASTRUCTURE
Forthcoming in the special issue on Politics in December in Architectural Review
Russia's Sudzha gas pumping station seen late Sunday, Jan. 11, 2009. Teams of EU monitors deployed Sunday at natural gas transit sites along Ukraine's vast pipeline network, but Russia appeared in no rush to restart sending gas to a freezing Europe. (AP Photo/Sergei Chuzavkov) (Sergei Chuzavkov - AP) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/13/AR2009011300285.html
On the night of December 31st 2005, hours before the New Year, negotiations between Vladimir Putin and his Ukrainian counterpart over natural gas supply broke down. The next morning, 4°C and raining in Brussels, the European Union discovered what it means to be tethered to Russia via an umbilical cord of energy. At 10:00am, Russian gas giant Gazprom shut down its pipeline to the Ukraine and in the process threatened Europe’s entire supply, rendering a chronic energy dependency utterly exposed. This brazen act of infrastructural and energy warfare continues to reorganise the geopolitical landscape of the European continent to this day.
When we use the term infrastructure, we typically refer to those fixed structures that facilitate the operation of society. Bundles of cables, metro systems and energy grids form complex support networks for everything from communication and mass transit to power generation and freight. A functioning society and economy is highly dependent on its infrastructure, which is why military strategists describe infrastructure as a ‘control point’. A ‘control point’ is exactly what it sounds like; a highly prized part that allows one to dominate the whole.
As designers, our understanding of infrastructure is victim to two main mis-perceptions. Firstly, we focus on the physical artefacts – the architecturally spectacular stations, terminals and ports that glorify mobility in the era of mass tourism. In doing this, we forget the complex urban interdependencies that these systems share. Secondly, and this is not unrelated, we fail to come to terms with the political charge these objects draw from their context. After all, the political import of infrastructure does not reside in the thing itself – it is only political in so far as it is installed within a broader set of conditions.
This being the case, we need to expand our discussion beyond the confines of the individual asset and try to foreground the complex socio-technical assemblage of which the physical object forms only a single part. We might do this by re-framing the entire debate on infrastructure around the more general term – ‘access’. By extending our infrastructural remit beyond artefacts (roads, sewers, pipes) to take in all those support apparatus that sustain our life world (including biological systems) we are forced to draw the world and its natural resources into our calculations. Since, as Peter Sloterdijk suggests, when access to breathable air has entered into the realm of ‘all those things that can be put at risk’ by our technical interference, it is reasonable that we absorb the environment itself into an infrastructural category.
Second Battle of Passchendaele
Sloterdijk suggests that the 20th century began in a primal scene in Ypres, France on April 22nd 1915 when a “German gas regiment launched the first large scale operations using chlorine gas as their means of combat” (Terror from the Air, Semiotexte 2009) The ‘environment’ is invented in the trenches of the First World War. It can only be perceived when we move from a model of war that makes the enemies body a target towards a model of war that deprives them of their life world. The concept comes to life as its operation breaks down. Our idea of an environment, of a life-world that sustains us does not exist until it is jeopardised. While it is nothing but an invisible support apparatus it cannot even exist as a concept – it remains in the unperceivable realm of background phenomena.
The first attack was at 6pm. Soldiers lay on the ground, choking, frothing at the mouth, eyes bulging. By 7pm a 6 kilometre wide breach had been opened in the French Canadian front. This is the embryonic moment in the industrialisation of killing, when the direct objective of military operations shifts from targeting the body of the opponent towards the annihilation of the life bearing capacity of their world. If our atmosphere is infrastructural then perhaps one can no longer use the figure of the ‘point’ to denote the locus of control. If the location of our vulnerability is diffused, then both defence and security will be similarly distributed. The post 9-11 climate is humid with ambient anxiety.
Hiroshi Sujimoto
This raises the question as to what isn’t infrastructure. The answer to this would be to say that the property of something being infrastructural or not, does not properly belong to the object itself, it emerges through the relation said object has with other objects. If this relationship is a dependent one, in which one object relies on the other for its functioning, then we might say that the second object plays the role of infrastructure. However if the relation between the objects is characterised by autonomy – that is to say independence – then we could not say that the object operates infrastructurally.
If we take the European dependence on Russian natural gas as an example, we can see that there is nothing intrinsically infrastructural about the resource or even the pipelines. The dependencies do not belong to the objects in themselves but to a broader socio-technical assemblage. The components of this assemblage include the inertia of social practices and technologies that have developed around the use of natural gas. These historically sedimented processes secure the centrality of gas to a broad ensemble of energy driven demands such as heating, cooking, transportation and aviation. If these demands are satisfied in other ways, say through the use of alternative fuels, then the dependency is cut and the assemblage re-forms around another infrastructural support. These emergent constellations of dependency are historically conditioned, but this conditioning is open ended. There will developmental tendencies that constrain transformation – say the investment in certain technologies over long periods of time (internal combustion engines/coal power stations etc) but given the right sort of duration even these hardened durabilities begin to appear fluid. Witness the huge Chinese investment in solar power.
Beyond expansion of those things we count as infrastructure (or not), the conversation about infrastructure must be framed so as to highlight the feedback between different systems. Infrastructure always exists in an entangled web of changing relations; climate can affect mobility, mobility can affect exchange of information, exchange of information affects economies and creativity. Further, when technologies are upgraded and dependencies shift, the network’s optimisation, fragility, robustness or resilience to shock shifts too. This dynamic terrain contingently modulates mobility as well as access to it – herein resides the political ambiguity. For it is in the ‘structuring of access’ – that is, in either its affordance or withdrawal that we begin to feel the political consequences of making decisions that divide. Access ‘for all‘ is always a mystification, a soothing abstraction sung to assuage the anxiety caused by inequality.
Caracas_thanks to Eduardo Kairuz for pointing me to these images
Caracas_thanks to Eduardo Kairuz for pointing me to these images
Since the political economy of infrastructure is shaped by complex regulatory and financial structures and because its effect on socio-economic dynamics can be so profound, it necessitates a conversation across disciplinary boundaries. In order to get any traction on this dense matrix of issues, first we need to structure an opportunity for the right sort of conversation to take place. The tendency of academics to fan out into increasingly narrow and specialised cul-de-sacs of knowledge has leeched both the relevance and consequence of any research with ambition to transcend the limited confines of peer-review. This is the impetus behind the Master of Advanced Architecture; Urban Design at the University of Technology Sydney. The MAA UD was established to provide a forum for experimental research on complex urban environments. It is appropriate that this forum is hosted in a design school – architects and urban designers are uniquely placed to sponsor these conversations since they think spatially and understand how to work across different scales. This being the case, the MAA UD is organised around contemporary challenges posed by urbanisation. The particularity of these problems draws the specific expertise of different disciplines around them.
This year’s studio began with a seemingly innocent question: what if we could catch a train from Beirut to Tel Aviv? The simplicity of the questions belies its potential to refuse a certain debate, to move beyond the endless road maps, deadlocks and impotent initiatives that plague the region. Lebanon is a positive model of a failed state. Like a broken mirror, its capital Beirut reflects the seemingly permanent state of political impasse with a series of spatial ones. It is an unresolved city for an unresolved region. Its urban fabric is a patchwork of internally cohesive zones that meet in discontinuous seams where scarification and underdevelopment rub up against petrodollars and hedonism. The site for the project is the extension to the Beirut Central District. This piece of reclaimed land that juts out into the sea is filled with the exhumed remains of war, architecture as landfill for more architecture, like a closed metabolic loop at the scale of an entire city – the urban environment consumes itself.
The brief for the studio arrived from Paris on 13 July 2008 when French President Nicolas Sarkozy proposed an economic and political union of the littoral nations of the Mediterranean Sea along the lines of the EU – including the suggestion of a coastal high speed rail (HSR) line. This ambitious infrastructure network could link the Maghreb to the Levant and the Aegean coast while continuing through the Balkans to southern Europe and the Iberian Peninsula, thus forming a single continuous loop encircling the Mediterranean basin from the Bosporus to Gibraltar.
Even bearing in mind Sarkozy’s geopolitical ambition and nostalgia for empire – the idea of a Mediterranean Union is a startling one in that it could connect twenty one separate states, four time zones, seven major seas and integrate the economies of Asia, Africa and Europe. The combined population of the littoral states is half a billion people. We began by researching the distribution of various forms of infrastructure around the basin which confirmed the extreme unevenness of development.
A HSR line running along the Mediterranean littoral is a seemingly impossible idea based in visionary assumptions. After all, it would need to pass through a region mired by instability and fractured by impenetrable borders. Functioning like a conveyor at the scale of continents, it would redistribute flows of people, warping the space-time fabric of an entire region – linking long disputed territories and as yet unformed nations. It would string together a seemingly impossible series of names: Gaza, Barcelona, Beirut, Haifa, Tel Aviv, Cairo. In doing so it would open a conduit between the differential pressures of North Africa and Europe – all this in the context of EU policy that increasingly conceives of Southern Europe as a bulwark against refugees.
Photo: Olivier Jobard
The political question we asked ourselves is the following one: what are the emancipatory potentials of infrastructure?
This question takes place in the context of the extreme disparities between north and south, between developed and undeveloped. As head of urban development at Solidere, Angus Gavin recently noted in regards to the Middle East (though the comments are also applicable to the developing world) we face two possible scenarios. The optimistic scenario is that we begin to see more economic growth, a stabilisation of the birth rate, the development of a vibrant commercial and creative culture, better access to resources, a broader distribution of wealth, job creation and the formation of a dynamic yet cohesive civil society.
The pessimistic scenario is economic stagnation, accelerated population growth, lack of job creation, concentration of wealth and social stress leading to increased conflict, violence and finally extremism.
Critic Adam Jasper takes a more eschatological view. Why should western liberalism be understood as the only possible precursor to social prosperity? He asks; “What would a Saudi utopia look like, one that is not directed to a western audience? “ In the Occupied Territories, a rampant birth rate might suggest that the only weapons left are demographic ones. Similarly, the Israeli high-tech security economy suggests that an intimate relation between violence and prosperity is not only possible but desirable. Gaza as innovation environment? [see previous post]
Whether horrific to liberal sensitivity or otherwise, the city is the arena for the contest between all these possibilities -. In this contest, infrastructure forms an ambiguous weapon. It is ambiguous because both in its procurement and its effect it is highly dependent on the assemblage in which it is installed. If we are to understand infrastructure as the structuring of access, then some very simple questions immediately arise: access for whom, to what and by what means?
These general questions repeat themselves in countless specific forms: Can a private bus operator be sued for violating civil rights if it fails to service poorer neighbourhoods as happened in Los Angeles in 1996? How does a marketing company in Dubai make public transport appealing to middle class users and not just migrant workers? Why does an Israeli mobile phone company force Palestinians to switch to international roaming as they pass between villages? What sort of tax breaks and wage incentives lure offshore IT companies to business parks in Chennai? Why can Sydney motorist’s wormhole their way under the congestion for an additional four dollars each way?
Every time an entire regional economy in Spain is at the mercy of an easyjet route (or when a biometric scan speeds your movement through Heathrow) we are faced with proof that the physical infrastructure (buses, trains, airports, scanners) are only one component in a much larger and more complex set of conditions that works to regulate and reorganise access. These are the contemporary political realities that we must respond to. Infrastructure depends on innumerable registers. Innovation with infrastructure thus entails being familiar with everything from PPP formats, risk management structures, revenue models and design. For finally, it is in the design, that is to say in the layout, distribution, organisation and planning of infrastructure that the complex political challenges of uneven development rise unavoidably to the surface.
In response to this scenario, this year’s studio set out to propose a master plan for the Beirut terminal of this HSR line and its associated urban fabric as a way of provoking new discussions around the idea of access.
Martin Abbott, Georgia Herbert, Clare Johnston, Joshua Lynch, Alexandra Wright
Martin Abbott, Georgia Herbert, Clare Johnston, Joshua Lynch, Alexandra Wright
‘The Diversity Machine and Resilient Network’ by Martin Abbott, Clare Johnston, Joshua Lynch, Georgia Herbert and Alexandra Wright begins with the idea that Beirut’s existing urban fabric is highly decentralised because of the impact of conflict. The immobility imposed by a divided city and 15 years of civil war led to the development of a patchwork of small neighbourhoods that are relatively autonomous with regards to the provision of most of the social infrastructure necessary for daily life. Some of the neighbourhoods studied reflect (at least in their organisation) many of the basic principles of urban sustainability currently being promoted in highly centralised cities like Sydney such as provision of necessary services within a 10 minute pedestrian radius. The result of this organisation is an urban fabric that lacks consolidation and that (from the point of view of modernist planning) lacks optimisation or efficiency. Rather than see this as a weakness however, this project argues that it is precisely the ‘redundancy’ of the distributed social infrastructure and relative autonomy of the neighbourhoods that lends the city its resilience. This thinking is further backed up by mathematical research into the properties of distributed networks by people like Duncan Watts, Eugene Thacker and Alexander Galloway who suggest that robustness is related to decentralisation.
Martin Abbott, Georgia Herbert, Clare Johnston, Joshua Lynch, Alexandra Wright
Martin Abbott, Georgia Herbert, Clare Johnston, Joshua Lynch, Alexandra Wright
Careful mapping by the students suggests that the instability of war has led to the development of an urban fabric that is able to re-organise itself around disruptions – the city has absorbed the DNA of conflict into its material organisation. Their conclusion promises to move urban discourse about infrastructure away from a focus on efficiency and optimisation towards a broad conception of sustainability and resilience in which the redundancy or slack in an urban network is seen as a positive attribute – not something to be minimised.
Erik Escalante and Alina McConnochie
The second example from the studio is a project for a high-density extension to the city by Erik Escalante-Mendoza and Alina McConnochie. They argue that much of the recent development in the Middle East is caught between excessive difference and excessive repetition. The spectacle of emblematic towers jostling for attention in Dubai makes any individual variation entirely superficial and thus unrecognisable. When it becomes the motivating force behind design, ‘individuality’ destroys the possibility of difference as such. Conversely, in the mere repetition of traditional fabric we face the opposite problem, a system that is not pliable enough to cope with the demands of high-density living or modern public transport infrastructure. Is there something possible in the space between both these models?
Since the bearing capacity of current generation public transport infrastructure is understood to imply a bandwidth of urban density of between 8 – 15 storeys, this project sets out to develop sets of related mini-tower typologies that group and nest in collective clusters. These clusters are organised around larger tower types that are in turn arranged around transport nodes. These collective assemblages form a series of differentiated neighbourhoods based on the interdependence of mobility networks.
Erik Escalante and Alina McConnochie
If we take light rail as an example, the reservoir of potential users that a station can draw on increases exponentially if it is surrounded by a well-conditioned pedestrian environment (since the operation of any transport system is dependent on those factors that make it easier to access). The urban fabric and the network must therefore be considered as two intimately linked infrastructures that reciprocally determine each other. If in the context of the Middle East or any other hot dry climate, designing a cool and well-shaded space for pedestrians so affects the success or failure of transport infrastructure, then the urban fabric must be designed in terms of its potential to actualise the potential of the networks in which it is enmeshed.
Erik Escalante and Alina McConnochie
This project asks the following question: what if the manipulation of the climate in the public sphere was used to drive the formation of the building envelope from the outside in, as it were. Rather than understand the transfer of energy as it passes in and out of the interior and across the threshold of the envelope as the sole driver of design, this project proposes new forms of urban development that are designed around the passive conditioning of the pedestrian environment. If the principle of minimal negative impact currently frames issues of amenity with regards to envelope design, this project suggests that we can harness computational techniques and performance evaluation to move towards a model of maximum positive impact. In doing so we shift the debate about sustainability away from an idea of individual insulation towards one of a collective and distributed climatological infrastructure. Of course the idea of an envelope as public infrastructure is an old one – architectural elements like porticos and colonnades attest to this. What is new however is the ability to produce precise climatic effects through the collective manipulation of a high density urban fabric. In doing so, this project sets out to accomplish nothing less than a new vision for urban development organised around collective typologies and climatic manipulation.
As Alejandro Zaera-Polo points out in his essay, ‘The Politics of the Envelope’ (Volume, issue 17 – see also AR110, p44), the impact of these new technical possibilities is currently doing much more than reorganising architecture, it is reorganising politics. In order to directly drive the design of a building envelope from the point of view of its impact on the public sphere, we would firstly need to create a concrete model of collective benefit and then re-orient discourse towards it. The types of representational structures we traditionally associate with this sort of decision-making may no longer be the ones best able to deliver it. The bi-polar ideological logic of left and right is buckling under the pressure of issue-based politics; of interest groups and networks of lobbyists that temporarily assemble around what Bruno Latour describes as ‘forums’. These forums reshape parliamentary democracy around the particularity of specific events and not around general ideological categories such as labour/liberal or conservative/socialist. In leaving behind any pretence to universality these political shifts raise the question of who is allowed to participate in these forums and who is excluded. That is, they raise the question of access.
Russian gas monopoly Gazprom's employee seen in Gazprom's main control room in Moscow, Russia, Tuesday, Jan. 13, 2009. Russia and Ukraine hotly blamed each other Tuesday as Russia restarted natural gas supplies but little or no gas flowed toward Europe. EU officials watched in dismay and criticized both nations for their intransigence.(AP Photo/Mikhail Metzel) (Mikhail Metzel - AP) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/13/AR2009011300285.html
If politics means making decisions that divide, then nothing divides quite like the kilometres of concrete and steel that make up a freeway or rail line. By understanding infrastructure as the ‘structuring of access’ we foreground the way it unevenly redistributes opportunity (and cost) in accordance with power. As such it forms a crucible for political activity. If we take the Mediterranean Union HSR line as an example, it might just be another vector of colonial expansion into a resource rich region – a tendril of influence extending like the old ottoman rail lines or Roman viae.
The fight over infrastructural development and access to it is the fight for all the apparatus that sustain the functioning of urban life. In this power struggle, there can be no concept of innocence – least of all for architects and urban designers. If an earlier generation kept its hands clean, conscience clear and fingers crossed by casting a longing glance back to Venice, Rome and even later Las Vegas as exemplars of urbanism, a new generation is ditching nostalgic attachments and getting its hands dirty in places like Shenzhen, Johannesburg, Beirut, Caracas and Abu Dhabi. Contemporary cities throw into doubt romantic assumptions about ‘proper’ urban form; instead they become experimental sites and laboratories for the future of an increasingly urbanised planet. Like an early warning system, they emit signals about infrastructure and density – about crisis and citizenship.
Urban design must phase change, taking education with it, if it is to wrench back the agency it has lost and keep pace with the explosive urbanisation of the developing world. Unfortunately, when it comes to China or the Middle East for that matter, Australian architectural discourse seems to be dialectically constrained by blind disdain or feverish desire. If we are serious however, we need to suspend reflexive condemnation, retain our critical faculties, leave home and listen carefully The globalisation of the architectural profession has meant that architects often find themselves working in foreign and unfamiliar conditions that seem to lack the forms of social and political stability that we take for granted. The unprecedented amount of development taking place in Asia and the Middle East means that the largest growth market for architecture is also the most historically unstable. These new realities effect a mutation within the profession; it must become adept at operating in more uncertain climates and develop tactics for negotiating their complexities.
Adrian Lahoud
Course Director, Master of Advanced Architecture, Urban Design
University of Technology Sydney
Studio site visit Beirut - with thanks to Amira Solh
Final presentation University of Technology Sydney
If you live in Sydney, you are welcome to attend the student presentations for the Master of Architecture Studio run by my colleague Samantha Spurr and I at the University of Technology Sydney. This year we looked at Sarkozy’s plan for the Mediterranean Union and the impact of infrastructure on the city of Beirut. Detail are: Level 5, Faculty of Design, Architecture & Building 702-730 Harris Street, Ultimo, NSW 2007 Friday November 13th between 12pm and 5pm
