The Cloud

[Image: Photo by Kim Johnson Flodin/Associated Press, via the New York Times].

Not being a local news follower, I found myself sitting outside yesterday afternoon in Los Angeles, beneath a huge brown cloud that seemed to hover there, more or less stationary, above the parking lot beside me. The cloud was totally alone, surrounded on all sides by perfectly blue sky, as if a thunderstorm had rolled in – only to change its mind and drift off, leaving part of itself behind, atmospherically orphaned in the sunlight. After all, there was no rain.
The cloud didn't appear to be moving.
I began expecting an earthquake.
"Is there a fire or something?" I asked a guy wearing sunglasses as he walked past me on the sidewalk – but it occurred to me, absurdly, even as I heard myself asking him the question, that perhaps the cloud would be impossible to see through his sunglasses: its color would be visually filtered out by the glass's tint and so he wouldn't even know what I was talking about.
Instead, he just nodded and said, "Uh huh," walking off past Radio Shack.
Still detached from the local news cycle at that point, and beginning to notice that not a single other person was looking up into the sky at what seemed, at least to me, to be a very obvious and possibly threatening brown cloud, I decided that people here really must be so over-trustful of the world that even a menacing, oily blur hovering above their heads could simply be perceptually filed away as some weird but harmless fluke: it'll go away – it won't be here tomorrow – and you can therefore just forget it ever happened...
Don't think about it and it won't harm you.
Which is when I remembered something called the "airborne toxic event" from Don DeLillo's novel White Noise.
About a third of the way through that book, there is a train derailment somewhere outside a small American college town. The accident releases a toxic cloud into the sky: "the smoke was plainly visible," we read, "a heavy black mass hanging in the air beyond the river, more or less shapeless."
One of the characters says it resembles "a shapeless growing thing. A dark black breathing thing of smoke."
Families close to the accident are soon asked to evacuate – "Abandon all domiciles," an amplified voice calls out, broadcast from a truck that drives through the cul-de-sacs – while "medical problems" that might develop upon "personal contact with the airborne toxic event" are discussed on the radio.
One of these problems is apparently déjà vu.
The source of the cloud, meanwhile, is being buried by snow machines, in the weird hope that this will thermo-chemically contain its spread; and so an artificial winter begins to erupt as rogue flakes blow on contaminated winds through the suburbs. Etc. etc. It's all very ironic and surreal.
At one point, though, the drifting cloud becomes an all-out military spectacle:

A few minutes later, back on the road, we saw a remarkable and startling sight. It appeared in the sky ahead of us and to the left, prompting us to lower ourselves in our seats, bend our heads for a clearer view, exclaim to each other in half finished phrases. It was the black billowing cloud, the airborne toxic event, lighted by the clear beams of seven army helicopters. They were tracking its windborne movement, keeping it in view. In every car, heads shifted, drivers blew their horns to alert others, faces appeared in side windows, expressions set in tones of outlandish wonderment.
The enormous dark mass moved like some death ship in a Norse legend, escorted across the night by armored creatures with spiral wings. We weren't sure how to react.

To find out what happens next, both to the cloud and to the people watching it, you'll just have to read the book; but, returning to a bench in Los Angeles yesterday – yes, there is one – on top of which I sat, looking up at an oily blur that seemed oddly rooted in place there above a parking lot, with no one else visibly concerned, no one else appearing to wonder what on earth it was that had come to visit us that day, there in the atmosphere, shadowing us, perhaps some strange and void-like inversion set to suck away the very air we breathed, I was sad to learn that the whole thing was just the downwind result of a fire in the Hollywood Hills – an event I had otherwise managed to miss seeing entirely.

[Images: Via the BBC].

So much for the sublime or the inexplicable or the mysterious. I went back to reading, and the cloud blew away.

Return to Cinemapolis

[Image: A page-spread from The Next American City].

If you're looking for something to read outside the internet, I've got a short article in this month's issue of The Next American City about the use of video surveillance – CCTV – as a new, cinematic form of urban analysis.
Citing Andy Warhol, John Cage, Bernard Tschumi, William Whyte's "film analyses of corporate plazas, urban streets, parks and other open spaces," Chris Petit, and a variety of other sources, the article makes the claim that 24-hour surveillance of urban space is a tool being used by the wrong industry: it shouldn't be private security firms installing these cameras in the name of public safety – but architects and urban planners, putting them up for the purpose of spatial research...
In any case, if you see a copy of the magazine lying around be sure to pick it up. Alternatively, I'll be giving away some free copies at next week's event in San Francisco – so let me know if you're looking for one.

Capital Movements

Yesterday, via the BBC, BLDGBLOG explored the militarily controlled and organized instant city of Naypyidaw, new capital of Burma (aka Myanmar), a whole city built so that the Burmese dictatorship could move nearly 300 miles north from where the capital had originally been (Rangoon – aka Yangon).
But what if they'd moved the capital – a mere two miles? Or one mile – or twenty-five feet? The entire imperial capital picks up... and moves eight feet to the southwest. Thirty-five centimeters. The buildings themselves aren't changed – though perhaps all the streets are renamed.
Meanwhile, everything looks the same.
Except...

Or: as a child you went on holidays with your auntie to a small village in southern France, but now you're 63 years old and you haven't been there in half a century. So you hire a car and you drive down, alone, crossing the Millau Viaduct, to arrive in the same old village before sunset.
But something doesn't feel right.
For one thing, that view of the distant hills that you remember so vividly, from the picture window in your family cottage outside town, no longer even captures the hills; instead you stare blankly at the valley right next to them. How could that have happened...? And the front door no longer opens out to face the old oak tree.
Worse, the nearby forest seems a whole lot closer to the edge of town, and several buildings are practically falling into the nearby river; that's impossible, you think: you used to play down there. Is your memory really that bad?
You can't sleep at night. Do you have Alzheimer's Disease...? You toss and turn. Do you drink too much? You get up and look out the window, dehydrated. Or have you just been wrong about everything, all along?
How sad.

To bide the time before driving back north, you do some casual gardening out back, screwing around with a shovel and wondering why, as you tried to go back to find the past, everything fell out from beneath you – when you discover something: foundation stones. You clear away more dirt and stare.
They match the outline of the family cottage.
You dig a bit more, sweating – and, as some clouds pass over the sun, sending a chill down the back of your neck, you find that stupid plastic toy you buried as a 12-year old. You'd put it right beside the house – you remember that – you'd even been scolded for digging so close to your auntie's bedroom window – yet now here it is clear out in the middle of the yard.
You drop the shovel.
Small discrepancies like this suddenly stand out all over town: the well in the central plaza, for instance, is now inexplicably close to the old tavern – whereas it very definitely used to stand right out there in the open, catching sunshine. You used to read books there. You know what you're talking about.
You don't have Alzheimer's Disease.
The town has been moved.

Capital Times

The BBC reports that "Burma's military rulers have been showing off their new capital for the first time to the outside world."

[Image: The new Burmese capital of Naypyidaw, photographed by the Associated Press; via the BBC].

This brand new city will be called Naypyidaw, or Abode of Kings, and it "is being built on a vast and extravagant scale in hundreds of square kilometres of tropical scrubland. Shining new buildings rise out of tropical scrub like a mirage, separated by miles of broad highways and boulevards."
Even though the military now has "a fortress-like complex" on the east side of the city, "it is still not clear why the generals have moved here." Some analysts, the BBC explores elsewhere, have suggested that the move came about because "the country's hard-line military rulers were worried about foreign invasion, or wanted more control over ethnic minorities in the border regions, or were even following the advice of fortune tellers."
However the plans were decided, rumors now suggest that there is "a maze of underground tunnels being built" – and the new city itself has been described "as the government's 'rat hole'."

[Image: Courtesy of the Associated Press, via the BBC].

But even if only on the most superficial level, Naypyidaw seems desolate, sterile, and utterly boring – and, if you believe Mike Davis, it is also the spatial end-result of the region's violent and decade-long "urban beautification" program, led by the Burmese military.
In Planet of Slums – which Davis discussed last year in an interview with BLDGBLOG – we read:

The most Orwellian "urban beautification" program in Asia in recent times, however, was undoubtedly the preparations for "Visit Myanmar Year 1996" undertaken by the heroin-financed Burmese military dictatorship in Rangoon and Mandalay. One-and-a-half million residents – an incredible 16 percent of the total urban population – were removed from their homes (frequently by state-sponsored arson) between 1989 and 1994 and shipped out to hastily constructed bamboo-and-hatch huts in the urban periphery, now creepily renamed the "New Fields." No one knew when their turn might come, and even the dead were evicted from the cemeteries.

Davis then quotes a scholar named Monique Skidmore, who writes that "whole city blocks disappear in a matter of days" – like some militarized version of China Miéville's "Reports of Certain Events In London," in which whole streets appear and disappear, violently carving their way through the city.
Skidmore continues: "Through the renaming, rebuilding, and relocating of familiar landmarks and the heavy presence of the army and weaponry, the military council imposes a new spatial configuration on Rangoon... suppressing potential democratic neighborhoods, demolishing the inner city, and creating new urban centers that immortalize the principle of authoritarianism."
The result, she writes, is "a landscape glorifying the control and authoritarian vision of its leaders."

[Image: Courtesy of the Associated Press, via the BBC].

The new capital town of Naypyidaw is just the logical extension of these spatial practices: urban design by police and military planners.

(Despite its flaws, by the way, Planet of Slums really is worth reading – it's a short book and you could finish it in two or three long sessions).

Fish hatcheries, barrier trees, and a new architectural Tokyo

I've just added two sketches by Mark Goerner to the film fest page; the images are also pictured here. I love this stuff!

[Image: A sketch by Mark Goerner].

You're looking, first, at Mark's vision of a future Tokyo, glancing down over the rim of a balcony into a massive hotel-like interior with its own train system and a kind of tent market laid out on the main floor (here's a much larger version to check out).

[Image: A sketch by Mark Goerner].

Then you're looking at a speculative building for a future Sahara, complete with fish hatcheries, beehive towers, barrier trees, and a roof made of "solar fabric" (larger version also available).
So I'll use this as a quick reminder to come out to the event on May 8th, and to bring a friend and some questions and listen to four guys talking about film and architecture.

Ole Bouman Redux

I don't want the recent Ole Bouman interview to get buried under new posts, so let me highlight a few brief moments in the interview that I particularly like, and then encourage you to go read it in full.

For instance, Bouman says: "if you think that applying urban form is the same as building a city, or even creating urban culture, then you make a very big mistake." He goes on to describe how "architecture culture" in the mid-1990s "was taken hostage by the politics of the spectacular."
Even today, though, he says, "nothing has changed. There is still an incredible focus – not just among architects, but among clients – on an architecture that is strongest at first sight. The second sight or the third sight is not so important anymore."
In the process, "large congregations of architecture" have come to replace real cities – a kind of illegitimate spatial surrogate – and these are the hollow landscapes within which many of us now find ourselves living.
On the subject of post-conflict cities, then – or cities made hollow not by development but by war – Bouman says:

Very often all the discourse that is left to those people in post-conflict cities is about everyday needs, or maybe some rebuilding of political institutions; but culture is always at the end of the story, at the end of the line. What we can do is provide them with discourse, give them a certain vitality, as we did in Ramallah once, in Bosnia once, in Vilnius once – and even as we did at the feet of the Statue of Liberty once. If a city is in trouble, sometimes it’s good to organize dialogue, regardless of the subject matter – dialogue as a goal in itself.

Dialogue – and architecture, more broadly speaking – is thus about "reclaiming the public domain."
That, of course, comes immediately after Bouman discusses China – which is perhaps my favorite part of the interview. There, Bouman says, and I'll quote him at great length:

Bouman: It’s strange that China is seen as a new world by many Westerners, a land of opportunity, a place they all want to go... China is still seen as another world. You have to go there. You have to get yourself a portfolio in China. Or you have to start your office, or open a new headquarters there – so there is always the concept of over there, of otherness. I talk to Chinese colleagues, and Chinese businesspeople, and they sometimes openly admit that this persistence of otherness, this persistence of the idea that this is a country that is different from the West, that you can go to, or send your money to, is helping China to take over. To put it dramatically.

So, in terms of capital, for instance, if you just consider the fact that 15 years of boundless investment in China – hundreds of billions of dollars of investment in China, within a very Western paradigm of finding the best returns – is also, in the long-term, undermining the Western position. So, in a Western way of thinking, and from a capitalist point of view, investing in China may actually accomplish the opposite of what investors intended. These kind of paradoxes are hardly understood.

If China is launching a new rocket, or a new satellite, or testing a new space weapon system, suddenly people wake up – but there is this strange anomaly between China as the promised land and China as the latent rival, the opponent, the growing danger. Either people accept that China is becoming part of a larger global system of capital, and so they aren’t afraid to give it its own momentum wherever it goes, or whatever it takes – that is just the price you pay for growth. Or you say: we can no longer accept this – and this might be a moment that is not so far away anymore, a moment of regression or conservatism. Some governments will say that we can no longer go there, maybe, because we would not like to add to the power and culture of China. It’s still very fashionable to host Chinese festivals and to invite Chinese artists and to buy Chinese art – but the moment might not be so far away when we ask: why would we pay for China? If it reinforces or strengthens their power?

I feel sometimes that we are just a little bit away from the moment when this paradox, this anomaly, will erupt into a more existential question. What do we do? Do we keep adding to the strength of China? Or do we go back to this kind of Western chauvinism, or nationalism, and not allow architects, for instance, to work in China or to allow Western investors to invest in China?

I think, in the work of Rem Koolhaas, for instance, this anomaly is almost already on the surface. On the one hand there’s this admiration of the great architect with an incredible track record who goes to build in China, who creates a new monument, a kind of signal of what architecture can do, an incredible achievement. On the other hand, there is this latent, almost open criticism: what does this do for China? Are we giving away our assets to the enemy? I think in the whole discussion around the CCTV Building you see this tension between chauvinism and internationalism, between western interests and the interests of globalization in general, and many other dialectics in the debate being played out through that specific building. That’s why the building is so interesting. As a metaphor, it represents much more than just the fact that it is built for an institution of Chinese power by a powerful western architect; it also reveals something that has to do with the dynamics of our culture – and where architecture can do that, then architecture is gaining in legitimacy.

[Image: Ole Bouman, photographed by Cassander Eeftinck Schattenkerk].

In any case, if you get a chance, check out the rest of the interview.

Architecture on Wall Street

I'll shamelessly point out that BLDGBLOG, Inhabitat, and Archinect's school blogs project were all written up in Monday's edition of the Wall Street Journal.

[Image: Bullish on Wall Street; image via].

About Inhabitat, we read:

Jill Fehrenbacher, a graduate student at Columbia University's architecture program, created her group blog in 2005 to explore what seemed to be an untapped topic: sustainable architecture, which focuses on using recycled materials and otherwise protecting the environment. "I wanted to read something that had that focus, and couldn't find anything out there," Ms. Fehrenbacher says. "There are publications dedicated to design, and policy issues, but nothing about the overlap between the two." Recent posts cover a "disposable chandelier" made of plastic wine glasses, and the designs for towers in a park that are meant to be covered with vines.

We also learn that Inhabitat "has as many as 20 contributors, but that only five write frequently"; indeed, Jill herself "edits all the posts in addition to contributing her own."
Turning its attention to the Archinect school blogs, then, the Wall Street Journal reports:

Paul Petrunia, a Web producer who helps architects develop sites for their projects, founded the Archinect school (!) as a resource for aspiring architecture students. The close-knit nature of the industry, he says, presents a challenge for people who want to know which programs are the best and which skills they should develop.

So the school blogs help them out. Prospective students can thus "browse the blogs – which are indexed by region and school – to get an inside look at programs that interest them."
Finally, reaching the very bottom of the column, as the bicep-flexing brokers of Wall Street chew clients' ears off over the phone and pop tabs of Alka-Seltzer, and as mortgages collapse in suburbs and commuter belt towns throughout the nation, the Wall Street Journal clears its throat and begins, timidly, as if unsure that this is really worth repeating to others:

Geoff Manaugh says that there are architecture writers who are primarily concerned with buildings and others who are interested in anything architectural. His blog is definitely an example of the latter. Recent posts have covered a photograph of a "cosmic volcano" associated with star formation, a shantytown built on a frozen lake in Minnesota and the recent purchase on eBay of the window through which John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

The Dow briefly rose upon the findings...
In any case, I was happy to see the coverage.

(Thanks to Jill and Paul for the tip!)