Offshoring Audacity

[Image: Dubai's "carbon-neutral" ziggurat, designed by Timelinks].

I'll be in Chicago next week to host a panel on Saturday, November 8, as part of this year's Chicago Humanities Festival. The other participants are Joseph Grima, Jeffrey Inaba, and Sam Jacob.
More info:

Look abroad: Whole cities are planned, built, and inhabited in less than a generation. Artificial islands, indoor ski slopes, and the world’s tallest this-and-that are being constructed, not in the West, but in the Middle East, China, and beyond. The result: a sense that the West’s cities are falling behind and, increasingly, watching from the sidelines. A dynamic panel will discuss the accuracy of this assessment of today’s architectural situation. What are the urban implications of so-called offshoring audacity and how can the phenomenon be described without resorting to nationalism, nostalgia, or even uncritical celebration?

The panelists will be Joseph Grima, executive director of New York’s Storefront for Art and Architecture and author of Instant Asia; Jeffrey Inaba, principal architect, Inaba Projects, and professor of architecture at SCI-Arc and Columbia University; and Sam Jacob, visiting professor at Yale University and founding director, Fashion Architecture Taste, a London-based practice. The discussion will be moderated by Geoff Manaugh, author of BLDGBLOG and senior editor of Dwell magazine.

The panel, called Offshoring Audacity, will begin at 2:30pm, lasting till 4:00, and it will take place at the Chicago History Museum, 1601 N. Clark Street. It costs $5.
I hope some Chicago-based readers might stop by.

[Image: Park Gate, Dubai, by Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture].

The overall theme for the Humanities Festival this year is "big ideas," inspired by architect Daniel Burnham's (possibly apocryphal) statement that one should "make no little plans." Since we're coming up on the 100-year anniversary of Burnham's urban plan for Chicago, not only does a "big ideas" – or "big plans" – Festival seem appropriate, but a panel about cities and urban design even more so.

[Image: New Songdo City, South Korea].

The specific goal, then, is to discuss the idea that the West has begun "offshoring audacity" – urban and architectural audacity – to places like Dubai, Shanghai, Abu Dhabi, Beijing, and South Korea.
The United States, in particular, seems to have ceded its role as an architectural and infrastructural innovator. Every week, a new indoor ski resort or artificial island-city or hyperbolic "green" pyramid is announced somewhere, in a non-Western nation – or the Chinese government announces a program of urban weather control – leaving the U.S. a nation of failed levees, foreclosed suburbs, and collapsing bridges.
These examples of 21st-century spatial exotica are our era's new fantasy environments – instant cities rolled out across the desert like magic carpets, with all of their plumbing and services intact.
It is architecture at its most audacious (or so we're told).

[Image: RAK Gateway, Ras Al Khaimah, United Arab Emirates, by OMA].

The question becomes: How can we discuss all of this without resorting either to chest-puffing nationalism (it's not true, the West is the best) or to a kind of knee-jerk Spenglerian resignation (it's true, the West is over)?
Put another way: Is there really any purpose in celebrating the newest mile-high tower or solar-powered private golf community, as every architecture blog in the world seems to think we need to do right now – or, conversely, is cynicism in the face of mile-high towers really the most interesting or appropriate response?

[Image: Contemporary architecture's well-rendered visual overload, parodically assembled by OMA].

There's an interesting exchange in Joseph Grima's new book Instant Asia: Fast Forward through the Architecture of a Changing Continent. There, Qingyun Ma describes the trajectory of the Chinese architect as one of concentration: You start off huge, designing million-square-foot office complexes – if not whole cities from scratch – before gradually being established and respected enough in your field simply to design a house, say, or a single storefront.
With this in mind, is the steroidal grandeur of today's Chinese architecture simply the visible articulation of a different professional arc? Start fast – start big – then concentrate?
Are these architects building resumés, not cities?
On the other hand, if many of these towers continue to be designed, engineered, and built by western firms, are we actually witnessing a kind of bizarre projection of the West's own subconscious needs onto the blank slates of other nations? I'm reminded here of Marcus Trimble's quip that China, with its replicant Eiffel Towers and fake chateaux, has become a kind of architectural back-up harddrive for the French.
Are developing nations being used as blank spatial slates upon which the West will rewrite its own architectural history?
This also brings to mind Martin Heidegger's under-appreciated comment that American gigantism – Koolhaasian Manhattanism – is simply a grotesque reflection of intellectual tendencies within the trajectory of Europe itself. The U.S., he wrote, was a "concentrated rebound" of European thought, the camouflaged return of its own monstrous offspring.
Is this what we're now witnessing, then, taking architectural form abroad?
Or, conversely, is the presupposed difference here between the West and the Rest so impossible to maintain or to define rigorously that nothing's being "offshored" anywhere – because there's no outside to offshore to?

[Images: Waterfront City masterplan, Dubai, by OMA. It's worth reading counter-discussions of this project by Nicolai Ouroussoff and Lebbeus Woods, respectively].

In the end, then, how are we to judge these claims to architectural monstrosity made by 7-star hotels and indoor ski ranges – buildings that supposedly demonstrate alternative futures, or space on maximum overdrive?
Are these places really that extraordinary – or are they a kind of imaginative cul-de-sac, a sign that architects have resolutely failed to design a more interesting spatial future?
Have we mistaken sheer scale and algorithmic excess for formal bravery?
Has "audacity" in architecture really been "offshored" to other nations, after all – or is audacity something that architecture has lost altogether?
Where should we look to find the truly audacious?
Stop by the panel on November 8 to hear these and other questions discussed: Offshoring Audacity.

Slow Decay

[Image: By Yvette Molina, 2008; oil on 7" convex aluminum disc. Via Johansson Projects].

Opening at Johansson Projects in Oakland this week is a show by artists Katy Stone and Yvette Molina "that considers the ephemeral thrills and underlying decrepitude of the natural world" – it is "a nature walk through a mysterious and delicate landscape, where organic beauty blossoms in the midst of slow decay."

[Images: All works by Yvette Molina, 2008; all are oil on 7" convex aluminum discs. Via Johansson Projects].

These gorgeous paintings here, using layers of oil paint and glazes, are all by Yvette Molina, depicting "hazy forest scapes."

The Atlas of Hidden Water

[Image: From the "atlas of hidden water." Check out the original PDF or simply view it
larger].

An "atlas of hidden water" has been created to reveal where the world's freshwater aquifers really lie. "The hope," New Scientist reports, "is that it will help pave the way to an international law to govern how water is shared around the world."
This prospective hydro-geopolitical legislation currently includes a "draft Convention on transboundary aquifers."

[Image: The "hidden water" of South America].

"What the UNESCO map reveals," New Scientist adds, "is just how many aquifers cross international borders. So far, the organisation has identified 273 trans-boundary aquifers: 68 in the Americas, 38 in Africa, 155 in Eastern and Western Europe and 12 in Asia." One of these is the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System, whose waters are nearly a million years old.
According – somewhat oddly – to the International Atomic Energy Agency:

The ancient system’s massive reserves, estimated at 375,000 cu km of water (equivalent to about 500 years of Nile River discharge), are confined deep inside the earth’s underground chambers – staggered, tiered, and pooled beneath the sands of the Sahara Desert, oasis settlements, wadis (dry riverbeds that contain water only during times of heavy rain), small villages, towns, and large cities.

If the surface landscapes there are already so beautiful, how exciting would it be to explore those underground staggered tiers and pools...
A more detailed map is due out in 2009 – meanwhile, several more can be downloaded here.

The immersive sculpture of linked voids

When you pull back the curtain of Manhattan, what do you find?

[Image: Photo by Andrea Mohin for The New York Times].

The so-called "birthmark of the World Trade Center" has been removed from the earth of New York City. These "colossal cast-iron rings," as The New York Times describes them, were "the last visible remnant of the Hudson & Manhattan Railroad" that once crossed through the World Trade Center site.
In an excavatory act that would seem to combine the best conceptual aspects of Rachel Whiteread, Michael Heizer, and Gordon Matta-Clark, what was once a tunnel – an underground space of air – has been strangely inverted, transformed into an object, freed from its terrestrial context.
Perhaps leading to the question: What if Michael Heizer had retired altogether from the art world – only to get a job, under an assumed name, as an engineer on the New York City subway system? What strange resonances might that mobile underworld now take?
An immersive sculpture of linked voids beneath the city.

[Image: Photo by Fred R. Conrad for The New York Times].

Meanwhile, as the construction work at Ground Zero continues, the whole site has become a massive archaeological site, exposing an earlier phase of planetary history.
Also from The New York Times:

A fantastic landscape in Lower Manhattan – plummeting holes, steep cliffsides and soft billows of steel-gray bedrock, punctuated by thousands of beach-smooth cobblestones in a muted rainbow of reds and purples and greens – has basked in sunlight this summer for the first time in millennia.

This monumental carving was the work of glaciers, which made their last retreat from these parts about 20,000 years ago, leaving profound gouges in the earth and rocks from the Palisades, the Ramapo Mountains and an area of northern New Jersey known as the Newark Basin.

Plumbing these glacial features and souvenirs has been critical in preparing the foundation for Tower 4 of the new World Trade Center, being built by Silverstein Properties. The concrete footings from which its columns rise must rest on firm bedrock. Engineers need a clear understanding of the rock’s contours.

These "contours" form "an abstract canvas of swirling, concentric rings," we read, which help to reveal "a period far more ancient than the glaciers, about 500 million years ago, when the edges of the colliding North American and African continental plates got shuffled together."
Ground Zero has thus become a kind of horizontal stargate, a terrestrial windowpane pulled wider and wider in the landscape of Lower Manhattan.

[Image: Photo by David W. Dunlap for The New York Times].

In any case, what about those colossal cast-iron rings? Now that they've been pulled from the earth, they've been warehoused: "These have been taken to Hangar 17 at Kennedy International Airport, where large-scale trade center artifacts are stored."
But might I suggest that they be shipped upstate to Dia:Beacon, instead?

Zones of Exclusion

[Image: The charismatic boundaries of an earlier worldview – here, the Hereford Mappa Mundi].

Note: This is a guest post by Nicola Twilley.

Another question for the topic of whether or not a “dense assortment of buildings” can ever be a real city: What is London for an eighteen-year old whose entire urban experience is confined to 200-square meters and who has never seen the Thames?

Researchers at the University of Glasgow, sponsored by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, have spent the past two years asking young residents of Bradford, Peterborough, London, Glasgow, Sunderland, and Bristol to draw maps of their own individual urban experience in order to explore micro-territoriality as both a cause and a symptom of social exclusion. You can read the full PDF of their report here.

“In Glasgow, Sunderland and Bradford,” they found, “a recognizable territory might be as small as a 200-meter block or segment.” In Tower Hamlets, London, fifteen and sixteen-year old boys mapped their world into three streets, a football pitch, a barber shop, mosque, Indian restaurant, and – just beyond the clearly marked “Front Line” – an off-license, or liquor store.

[Image: From the Joseph Rowntree Foundation report, "Young people and territoriality in British cities" (download the PDF)].

Some of the sketches even remind me of medieval maps: the known world is an island of familiarity, simultaneously shown much larger than scale but made tiny and precious by the monsters of “Terra Incognita” that surround it. In the case of a 15-year-old girl from Bradford, today’s dragons are “moshers,” “chavs,” “Asians,” and “posh people” – all “Enemys.” The researchers found that teenage boys display an even more complete ignorance of the world beyond their perceived boundaries: these two maps of the same area in Glasgow were drawn by young men in the same class at the same school, who live on different sides of the same road.

[Images: From the Joseph Rowntree Foundation report, "Young people and territoriality in British cities" (download the PDF)].

The report’s authors examined the causes, nature, and impact of micro-territorialization. Their research uncovered Bristol’s “postcode wars,” where gangs spray-paint their postcode in rival areas as a form of aggression, as well as descriptions of the maneuvers involved in going to school in one part of Bradford that match the Schlieffen Plan in strategic complexity. “In some places,” they note with reference to Glasgow and Sunderland, “territoriality was a leisure activity, a form of ‘recreational violence.’” In other words, bored and economically deprived teenagers are transforming 1960s council estates and Victorian terraces into a real-world, multiplayer World of Warcraft.

Of course, excessive loyalty to the local, and the resulting lack of mobility, has a significant and negative impact on access to education, services, and job opportunities. In the words of one interviewee from Glasgow:

If your horizons are limited to three streets, what is the point of you working really hard at school? What is the point of passing subjects that will allow you to go to college or university if you cannot travel beyond these streets? What’s the point of dreaming about being an artist, a doctor, etc., if you cannot get on a bus to get out of the area in which you live?

The report points out an interesting irony here: current policies in urban regeneration are dominated by strategies to increase “place attachment” as a means “to reinforce social networks and maintain the quality of an area through pride.” However, the areas that actually generate such loyalties are, in the authors’ words “often ones that have little that conventionally invokes pride.”

It was difficult to say which was more depressing – the relentless defense of a featureless piece of open space on the fringes of a Glasgow housing scheme where there is nothing whatsoever by way of amenities, or the confinement to a socially isolated but densely populated and built-up quarter-square-mile of London of young men for whom the culture and wealth of one of the world’s great cities might as well be on another continent.

The report goes on to identify 244 anti-territorial projects (ATPs) currently in progress across the UK. Most use sports or other “hook” activities to encourage association and to teach networking skills. Disappointingly, none tackle the issue in terms of the design of physical space.

So what does the anti-territorial city look like? Some things to consider: unsurprisingly, the report found that most conflicts “occurred on boundaries between residential areas, which were typically defined by roads, railways, vacant land or other physical features.” The city center also becomes a venue for bigger showdowns: a youth worker in Peterborough explains that “the flashpoints are in the city center, the ‘big stage,’ the one place they all, you know, congregate on a Saturday.” Finally, the researchers found that micro-territorialization took place across the spectrum of low-income housing stock, from “high-density, flatted, inner-city estates; traditional, pre-1914 areas of terraced housing; and suburban, often council-built environments.”

As the authors rightly point out, lack of jobs and economic hardship are key structural forces contributing to “problematic territoriality.” But what role does urban planning, landscape design and the built environment have to play?

Can the design of the city itself generate – or mitigate against – territoriality?

(Note: Read the Guardian's take on the Joseph Rowntree Foundation report here and here).

Waste Towers

[Image: London waste towers, designed by Dow Jones Architects, via Building Design].

London's Dow Jones Architects have proposed "a radical series of waste-crunching towers across London to help meet recycling targets and generate low-cost energy for local communities," Building Design reports.

[Image: London waste towers, designed by Dow Jones Architects, via Building Design].

In order for the city to reach its goal of becoming "85% self-sufficient in terms of waste by 2020," a new waste-management infrastructure is required – thus the need for "new buildings in Greater London to house advanced waste technologies."

These would offer an alternative to the greenhouse gas-producing incineration method used by most waste service providers contracted by councils. Dow Jones and Arup assessed the scale of buildings that would be needed to deal with certain amounts of waste using specific technologies, then scattered them on four hypothetical urban sites, proposing them as “parts of the city and building types that would form an appropriate match.”

While this further convinces me that today's most interesting architectural projects are the ones that thoroughly rethink civic infrastructure – waste-treatment plants, algae farms, solar towers, tide-power generators, high-speed rail lines, space elevators – it also makes me wonder what an even more distributed form of sustainable waste-management might look like.
Why not ten sites, for instance, scattered throughout the city, instead of four – or twenty-five, or a hundred?

[Image: London waste towers, designed by Dow Jones Architects, via Building Design].

By decentralizing waste infrastructure as much as possible, you could much more thoroughly integrate quote-unquote sustainable behavior into the spatial fabric of everyday life.
I'm reminded of the differences in public recycling infrastructures between a city like Berlin and a city like Los Angeles. In L.A., for instance, you actually have to drive – often quite far out of the way – to a neighborhood recycling drop-off point simply to get rid of things like wine bottles and old magazines, whereas in Berlin you're almost constantly walking past what could be called recycling micro-stations: color-coded clusters of separate waste receptacles organized by type (glass, paper, aluminum, etc.).
My point is simply that recycling becomes what you do there – like breathing, it's the autonomic nervous system of the city – in much the same way that throwing things away is simply what you do in the United States. After all, as has been widely remarked elsewhere, urban infrastructure in the U.S. seems to be built to encourage the thoughtless and efficient throwing away of more things.
So it's a change in lifestyle that would come about through the ubiquitous, lace-like distribution of micro-infrastructure across the urban landscape.

[Image: London waste towers, designed by Dow Jones Architects, via Building Design].

On the other hand, I don't mean to imply that Dow Jones's waste towers are just recycling stations. From Building Design:

Waste that can’t be recycled or composted would be turned into energy or useful materials using techniques such as anaerobic digestion – which produces the low-cost fuel biogas plus compost – and advanced thermal treatments, which produce syngas for industrial processes plus a vitreous slag that can be used as a construction material. The gases produced can be routed in closed loops to produce power for local electricity and heating networks serving nearby homes and workplaces.

Nonetheless, eliminating large travel distances between key pieces of "green" infrastructure and its users – i.e. the residents of the city – can be one of the most important steps in ensuring that this infrastructure will be used at all.
Knowing that a power-generating, construction waste-processing, compost-accumulating bio-tower exists somewhere in the northern suburbs of the city is certainly inspiring as a first and early step toward the design of a 21st-century city – but these sorts of things should, wherever possible, be more thoroughly integrated into the everyday streetscape.
Instead of superblock, think filigree.
Sustainable waste management will become simply what a city does.

Underground Rivers Frozen in Place

[Image: The Large Hadron Collider photographed by Claudia Marcelloni, ©CERN, via The Big Picture].

One of the most interesting engineering details from the construction of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the fact that they had to freeze an underground river in place, using liquid nitrogen, in order to assemble the detector. This allowed them "to create a permafrost medium through which they could drill out the massive underground caverns" in which the LHC would then sit, the Independent reported back in 2003.
But London's got some underground rivers; they should do this there and create a subterranean skating rink.
A huge cube of ice beneath Los Angeles that's then melted slowly, over four decades, to form the city's water supply.
Meanwhile, the actual magnets of the collider itself "must be cooled to within a couple of degrees of 'absolute zero,'" we read, "the theoretical limit for how cold anything can get. This requires a constant supply of liquid helium pumped down from eight over-ground refrigeration plants – about 400,000 liters per year in total."
This temporary refrigeration of the planet reminds me of at least two things: 1) the so-called "freeze wall," no less than 30-feet thick, being constructed by Shell underground in the American Rockies as a way to access oil shale deposits, and 2) the constantly refrigerated underground mines of South Africa.
A crazed billionaire installs a pipework labyrinth of liquid helium pumps beneath his home in Barcelona – and he proceeds to create a subterranean glacier inside the faults of the earth itself, freezing the soil down to a depth of six miles and altering the local climate, before carving a spectacular series of show caves out of the permafrost, wearing Antarctic expedition gear, armed with remote control micro-tunneling machines.